The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the reception of Hellenistic poetry at Rome

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The Shadow of Callimachus

Through a series of critical readings this book builds a picture of the Roman reaction to, and adoption of, the Greek poetry of the last three pre-Christian centuries. Although the greatest figure of Greek poetry after Alexander, Callimachus of Cyrene, and his contemporaries, stand at the heart of the book, the individual studies embrace the full scope of what remains of Hellenistic poetry, both high literary productions and the more marginal poetry, such as that in honour of the great goddess Isis. The singularity of the poetry of Catullus and Virgil, of Horace and the elegists, emerges as more rich and complex than has hitherto been appreciated. Individual studies concern the poets’ declared attitudes to their own work, the figure of Dionysus/Bacchus and the poetry of world conquest, the creation of similes, and the conversion of Greek bucolic into Latin pastoral. R i c h a r d H u n t e r is Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He has published extensively in the fields of Greek and Latin literature; his most recent books include Theocritus: a selection (1999), Theocritus: Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus (2003), Plato’s Symposium (2004), and (with M. Fantuzzi) Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (2004).

RO M A N L I T E R AT U R E AND ITS CONTEXTS

The Shadow of Callimachus

RO M A N L I T E R AT U R E AND ITS CONTEXTS

Series editors

Denis Feeney and Stephen Hinds

This series promotes approaches to Roman literature which are open to dialogue with current work in other areas of the classics, and in the humanities at large. The pursuit of contacts with cognate fields such as social history, anthropology, history of thought, linguistics and literary theory is in the best traditions of classical scholarship: the study of Roman literature, no less than Greek, has much to gain from engaging with these other contexts and intellectual traditions. The series offers a forum in which readers of Latin texts can sharpen their readings by placing them in broader and better-defined contexts, and in which other classicists and humanists can explore the general or particular implications of their work for readers of Latin texts. The books all constitute original and innovative research and are envisaged as suggestive essays whose aim is to stimulate debate. Other books in the series James J. O’ Hara, Inconsistency in Roman epic: studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and Lucan Alain Gowing, Empire and memory: the representation of the Roman Republic in imperial culture Joseph Farrell, Latin language and Latin culture: from ancient to modern times A. M. Keith, Engendering Rome: women in Latin epic William Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman literary imagination Stephen Hinds, Allusion and intertext: dynamics of appropriation in Roman poetry Denis Feeney, Literature and religion at Rome: cultures, contexts, and beliefs Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: textual approaches to the city

Duncan F. Kennedy, The arts of love: five studies in the discourse of Roman love elegy Charles Martindale, Redeeming the text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception Philip Hardie, The epic successors of Virgil: a study in the dynamics of a tradition

The Shadow of Callimachus Studies in the reception of Hellenistic poetry at Rome Richard Hunter Regius Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521871181 © Richard Hunter 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2006 isbn-13 isbn-10

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Contents

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

page x xi

Introduction

1

1 In the grove

7

2 In the grip of the god

42

3 Nothing like this before

81

4 The shadows lengthen

115

Afterword

141

Bibliography Index of passages discussed General index

147 157 160

ix

Acknowledgements

I am very much in the debt of Stephen Hinds and Denis Feeney, the Editors of Roman Literature and its Contexts, both for the patience and persistence with which they encouraged me to write something, and for the very stimulating criticism which they offered when they finally saw a draft; they will know where I have failed, almost certainly unwisely, to heed their advice. The four main chapters were also read by Alessandro Barchiesi who, as always, understood better than I did where I was heading.

x

Abbreviations

Unless otherwise indicated, references to Callimachus are to Pfeiffer’s edition. Standard abbreviations for other collections and editions of texts and for works of reference are used, but the following may be noted: CA CEG CIG FGE GP HE OLD PMG SEG SH SSH

J. U. Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina, Oxford 1925 P. A. Hansen, Carmina Epigraphica Graeca, Berlin and New York 1983–9 A. Boeckh, Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, Berlin 1828–77 D. L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams, Cambridge 1981 A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip, Cambridge 1968 A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams, Cambridge 1965 Oxford Latin Dictionary, Oxford 1968 D. L. Page, Poetae Melici Graeci, Oxford 1962 Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, Leiden 1923– H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons, Supplementum Hellenisticum, Berlin and New York 1983 H. Lloyd-Jones, Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici, Berlin and New York 2005

xi

Introduction

This book offers four interrelated case studies of the reception at Rome of the Greek poetry of the last three centuries bc, most notably that of Callimachus; my principal concern is how Roman poets both imitated and distanced themselves from those Greek models, how as a result Roman poetry is both comfortingly familiar but also, upon closer inspection, unsettlingly ‘other’ for someone approaching it from the Greek background. Many of the ideas (e.g. Dionysus/Bacchus) and techniques (e.g. similes) which Roman poets used to reflect upon their relationship to Greek models precisely foreground issues of integration and separation, of sameness and difference, of the familiar and the foreign; I hope therefore that this book will be seen as a contribution to the very lively contemporary debate about the ‘Hellenisation’ of Rome and of Italy more generally.1 Although the focus will be the stimulus which Callimachus gave to Roman poets, I hope also that the book will convey some of the richness of Greek poetry of this period and some small sense of just how much we have lost. Callimachus has, very rightly, held a special position in modern discussion of the Roman imitation of Hellenistic poetry; in their different ways, and in some poetic modes though not in others, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, and Ovid all explicitly look to Callimachus as a principal model, to be imitated in both the letter and the spirit. Particularly since the publication in 1927 of Callimachus’ polemical ‘Reply to the Telchines’, which stood at the head of the Aitia, it has been recognised that Latin poets allude to a small number of ‘programmatic’ passages in Callimachus with remarkable 1

Wallace-Hadrill 1989, Barchiesi 2005, and Feeney 2005 offer helpful introductions to some of the aspects of the debate most relevant to this book.

1

t h e s h a d ow o f c a l l i m a c h u s

frequency – the ‘Reply’ itself (fr. 1 Pfeiffer–Massimilla),2 the close of the Hymn to Apollo, Epigram 28 (‘I hate the circling poem . . .’) – and it would probably not be unfair to suggest that for some Latinists ‘Callimachus’ is (essentially) those passages; certainly, despite the fact that the breadth and variety of Callimachean influence on Latin poetry continues to stimulate criticism of a very high order,3 Walter Wimmel’s Kallimachos in Rom (1960), a book increasingly cited rather than read, but one whose influence in some academic cultures is still (not unfairly) potent, entrenched that position in a way for which Wimmel himself should not be held solely responsible. That the ‘Callimachus’ whom many modern critics of Roman poetry have so fetishised is a much narrower poet than Callimachus from Cyrene is, of course, widely recognised, and sometimes explicitly so,4 but it was an easy ‘mistake’ to make. Particularly when the key question for critics of Latin poetry was the attitude of the poets to traditional Roman values and the poetry which enshrined them, and hence to the ‘regime’ and its values, Callimachus seemed to offer a code through which such matters could be discussed; nothing could apparently be more straightforward than the end of the Georgics in which ‘great Caesar thunders in war’ by the Euphrates (cf. Callimachus fr. 1.11–20), while Virgil enjoys the ignobile otium of a Greek-speaking town.5 Moreover, of course, the modern distortions, such as the idea that Callimachus repeatedly preached against the writing of hexameter epic, derive ultimately from Roman poetry itself: Roman poets were under no obligation to give an equal hearing to all parts of any model’s oeuvre, or indeed a fair one to any part.6 So too, much of the (happily now fading) modern critical dichotomy between a content-laden and socially engaged poetry of the archaic and classical periods, on the one hand, and Hellenistic poetry which is only concerned 2 3 4 5

6

Hopkinson 1988: 98–101 offers a still useful survey; the number of allusions continues to grow, cf. below p. 38. Thomas 1993 offers a helpful introduction to the subject; Zetzel 2002 raises important general considerations. Cf., e.g., Schiesaro 1998. The strictures scattered throughout Cameron 1995 are often well taken. Scodel–Thomas 1984 point out that this is one of three passages in Virgil where the Euphrates is named, on each occasion in the sixth line from the end of a book; it is hard to avoid their conclusion that Virgil was thinking of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, in which the ‘great’ but muck-filled ‘stream of the Assyrian river’, identified by the scholiast with the Euphrates, appears in the sixth verse from the end. On this passage cf. also below pp. 126–7. Cf. below p. 28 on ‘generic’ differences.

2

introduction

with an appropriately sophisticated style in which to express things of little importance, on the other, can be traced back not merely to the nineteenthcentury origins of the whole concept of Hellenismus, to ideas of a culture which has allowed traditional values to become diffused, but also to the remarks of ‘Longinus’ in On the Sublime 33 about the ‘flawless’ Apollonius, Eratosthenes, and Theocritus.7 Hellenistic poetry has always suffered from critical generalisation. The now traditional view of how Latin poetry exploited both Callimachus and the idea of Callimachus cannot be divorced from a view about the nature of Callimachean poetry itself. Callimachus and those Greek poets who imitated him or who shared in the same Zeitgeist were seen to mark a radical, and selfconscious, break with the past, a break as apparently clean as the difference between performance in the public spaces of the polis and the composition of poetry in and for the sheltered spaces of the Museum. The talismanic sign of such a break became, in Wilhelm Kroll’s phrase, ‘die Kreuzung der Gattungen’, ‘the crossing of the genres’, by which was indicated the alleged overturning of the classical order of genre by the inclusion of one generic kind (very broadly defined) within another, an overturning only possible when the context of composition was utterly removed from the traditional contexts of recitation and performance.8 Kroll pointed to real features of third-century poetry; increasingly, however, the study of Hellenistic poetry has come to emphasise both its continuity with the past and the self-consciousness of its bridge-building activity. Here, it is the forms, rhapsodic, elegiac, and lyric, and the contexts, ceremonial and sympotic, of archaic poetry, which exercised the most important influence upon third-century poetry; to put it very simplistically, much of what we have of Callimachus and Theocritus, and the Argonautica in its entire conception, may be seen as a re-creation, sometimes explicit (e.g Callimachus’ Iambi), in a modern idiom of archaic poetic forms.9 There is indeed a break with the past in the recognition of changed 7

8

9

Cf. Hunter 1993b: 3–5, 2003c: 220–5, below p. 93. The absence of the name of Callimachus from our text of On the Sublime is an interesting phenomenon; I hope to discuss this elsewhere. Kroll 1924: 202–24. For Kroll’s spiritual predecessor here, Plato, such ‘Kreuzung’ was rather the result of too much power in the hands of the public audience (Laws 3.700a– e), cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 17–19. It is relevant also that the last couple of decades have seen important work on the Greek categories of genre, which has to some extent undermined the old certainties; for a brief discussion and bibliography cf. Hunter 1999b. Cf. Hunter 1996, Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 1–41.

3

t h e s h a d ow o f c a l l i m a c h u s

circumstances of composition, but Hellenistic poetry attempts recuperation, at least as much as it glories in difference. Moreover, the circumstances of Hellenistic patronage and the production of poetry could be made, without too much imaginative effort, to resemble those of the archaic period; it was not absurd to find analogues, though not of course equals, for Philadelphus in the magnanimous patrons of the past.10 The lesson was not lost on Roman poets and their patrons. If the uneasy alliance of the old and the new in Hellenistic poetry was itself to be imitated by Roman poets and negotiated through ideas such as that of Dionysus, there is very little evidence that the Roman poets would have found in Greek tradition a Callimachus who was recognised as marking a radical and innovative break with the past. His greatness was, as far as we can tell, recognised relatively early, and he was both more widely read than has often been imagined and – to judge by the earliest papyri – read in traditional ways; it is not too misleading, nor too paradoxical, to think of the Callimachus of, say, 80 bc as a ‘classical’ poet.11 The idea that Alexander’s death had wrought a profound change in poetry seems to be a later critical product than similar reflections in the history of rhetoric.12 This is not the place to rehearse the selffashioning of the Roman ‘neoterics’,13 or indeed Wendell Clausen’s famous argument that it was Parthenius who (almost literally) brought knowledge of ‘the Alexandrian avant garde’, most notably Callimachus, to Rome,14 but it is clear that the rhetoric of Roman ‘Callimacheanism’ has (unsurprisingly) affected the modern critical view of Greek literary history. In another way, however, the paradoxes which haunt the Roman appropriation of Greek poetry do (knowingly) find their counterpart in features of the cultural and political life of Alexandria. Much in the social and cultural organisation of Alexander’s new city, now the Ptolemaic capital, proclaimed continuity with the traditional structures, or the manner in which they were imagined, of the Greek homelands. It was, however, precisely in that proclaimed continuity, not with any one set of cultural traditions, but with those of all Greek cities, that the real watershed 10 11 12 13 14

On Hellenistic poetic patronage see Hunter 2003a: 24–45, citing earlier bibliography. Cf. further below pp. 142–3. I have discussed some issues of periodisation in Hunter 2001c. Hinds 1998: 74–83 offers an excellent way-in and the relevant bibliography. Clausen 1964; for a brief survey cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 462–7.

4

introduction

of Alexandria lay; the Greek culture on display in the city and the way it was imagined, like the e´ lite Greeks of Alexandria themselves, were drawn from all over the Greek world. Alexandrian culture itself was thus, like the religious and political institutions which flourished within it, both old and new; we may think of Sarapis, the ‘new’ god who, like the always new Dionysus some of whose attributes he borrowed, also carried the weight of immemorial tradition,15 or the divinisation of members of the ruling house, a practice for which Theocritus and Callimachus have no difficulty in finding early precedents in Greek mythology and poetry.16 Whether it was the particularity of the local Greek traditions now transported to Alexandria or the pan-Hellenism of a unifying Ptolemaic rhetoric which was to be emphasised, everything depended upon the angle from which you looked.17 Moreover, the Ptolemies’ claim to be the true heirs to Alexander, and to the Greek heritage more generally, was bolstered not merely by their possession of Alexander’s body (cf. Strabo 17.1.8) but also by their equally displayed cultural patronage, most visible in the institutions of the Museum and Library; the possessions of the Library, no less than Alexander’s body, required ‘preservation’, and preservation soon became monumentalisation, in which a wish to make the past active and important in the present could be presented as a return to genuineness, rather than an open acknowledgement of on-going creative change; it is at this stage that past texts become ‘sources’. Callimachus’ Aitia is the key witness to these two related aspects of Alexandrian cultural rhetoric. Would the Roman succession to political control over Greece and then Egypt lead to a similarly appropriative monumentalisation of Alexandrian culture? The world which Callimachus’ poetry offers stretches, like the cults of his own Artemis, across the Greek world; like the goddess of the Callimachean hymn, it too is both very local and also extraordinarily ‘international’. The readership it implies and creates is one bound by loyalties not to one polis, but to a particular view of what was worth ‘preserving’ in Greek culture and language.18 Callimachus too united, rather than divided, the Roman poets who 15 16

17 18

Cf. Fraser 1972: i 246–76, esp. 254. For these Dionysiac paradoxes cf. below pp. 9–10. Some discussion in Hunter 1996: 131–8, 2003a: 50–3. Of particular interest in this connection is the description of Artemis’ divinisation of Iphimede (i.e. Iphigeneia) at Hesiod fr. 23a.21–4 Merkelbach–West. Selden 1998 is in part a thought-provoking discussion of this topic. Important considerations in Schmitz 1999 and Asper 2001. Once again, we may be reminded of the (real and implied) audience for much archaic lyric and elegiac poetry.

5

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accepted the challenge,19 but it was not easy; the equivocal position of Greek poetry in the world after Alexander travelled with it as it was ‘translated’ from its Alexandrian background to a new home in Italy. I hope that this book will display, rather than cover over, the tensions which this literary colonisation involved. 19

Cf. Feeney 2005: 240: ‘Even when the project of a hellenized literature in Latin had been underway for two centuries, engaging intimately with someone like Callimachus was clearly a massive challenge for a native Latin speaker.’

6

CHAPTER

1 In the grove

1 The priest of the Muses Callimachi Manes et Coi sacra Philitae, in uestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus. primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros. Shade of Callimachus and sacred rites of Coan Philitas, allow me, I pray, to pass into your grove. I enter first, as priest from an unsullied spring, to bring Italian mysteries in dances of Greece. Propertius 3.1.1–4 These critically tormented verses introduce a poem (and a book of poems) in which the poet rejects the writing of Roman imperial epic in favour of erotic elegy and which closes with a forecast of posthumous fame for himself parallel to that of Homer: 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. I too [i.e. as well as Homer] will be praised by the later generations of Rome; I myself forecast such a day after I am ashes. That the grave where the stone indicates my bones shall not be neglected has been decreed by the Lycian god, who accepts my prayer. Propertius 3.1.35–8 Apollo’s epithet ‘Lycian’, which Propertius uses nowhere else, picks up LÅkiov, the epithet given to the god by Callimachus as he recalled the god’s poetic instructions to him in the prologue to the Aitia, the elegiac poem which 7

in the grove

had secured Callimachus’ place among the greatest of Greek elegists (fr. 1.22). The ‘shade of Callimachus’ thus both opens and closes the poem; allusion is a powerful form of communion with the dead. Much in Propertius 3.1 – such as the motif of the fame which Homer conferred upon the subjects of his poetry (cf. Theocritus 16.48–57, 17.116–20) – is familiar from its Hellenistic background, but much too is new.1 The poet’s priestly guise we recognise as a familiar Roman appropriation of the sometimes faded metaphor of the poet as Mous†wn qer†pwn ‘attendant/worshipper of the Muses’; elsewhere poets are inspired uates or solemn Musarum sacerdotes.2 The sacral voice of Callimachus’ so-called ‘mimetic’ hymns to Apollo, Athena, and Demeter, which construct ceremonial performances to which the poems act as accompaniment, may well have contributed to particular manifestations of this idea (e.g. the Hymn to Apollo is reflected in the opening of Horace’s first ‘Roman ode’, 3.1), but the Roman cultural and religious heritage was the crucial factor. In this instance, the imagery of v. 4 is very striking: ‘Greek form, Italian subject matter’ may lie at the heart of the portentous claim,3 but Propertius seems here to have something more specific in mind, and this section will try to tease out some of the ‘thick’ background which gives the verses their particular resonance. The language of orgia takes us to the world of mystic divinities such as Demeter, Dionysus, and Isis;4 the word is in fact found not infrequently in connection with the Muses, though particularly in their association with Dionysus and mystery cults (cf., e.g., Aristophanes, Frogs 356, Propertius 3.3.29).5 In the Georgics Virgil carries the sacred objects (sacra) of the Muses, ‘struck (percussus) by a great love’ (2.475–6); percussus is there another Dionysiac word (cf. Lucretius 1.922–3 acri | percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor ‘great hope of praise has struck my heart with the sharp thyrsus’), recalling such declarations as that of Archilochus who could ‘lead off the dithyramb, the fair song of Dionysus when [his] mind was thunderstruck 1

2 3 4 5

Fedeli 1985: 38 speaks of the poem’s ‘singolare contaminazione’ of Roman and Greek motifs; cf. also Papanghelis 1994: 198–9. For some of the (often overlooked) humour of the poem cf. Lyne 1998: 143. For many passages and bibliography cf. Nisbet and Hubbard on Horace c. 1.1.35, 1.31.2, Nisbet and Rudd on Horace c. 3.1.3, P. Hardie 1986: 11–22. Cf., e.g., Sandbach 1938: 214, Fedeli 1985 ad loc. Cf. Dodds on Euripides, Bacchae 34. For this association cf. below p. 42. For orgia Musarum cf. Fedeli 1985: 50, A. Hardie 2004.

8

the priest of the muses

(sugkeraunwqe©v) with wine’ (fr. 120 West).6 The reference to ‘dances’ leads in this same Dionysiac direction. Propertius in fact presents himself as a ‘spreader of cult’, a priest bringing the rites of a distant place to a new homeland, and the closest analogue in surviving literature comes from a text to which we shall often recur. In Euripides’ Bacchae Dionysus comes to Thebes in the guise of the leader of a band of the god’s female worshippers (thiasos, v. 56), in order to introduce his rites (teletai) to the city which he sees as rejecting him. Thebes, as the god emphatically stresses (vv. 20, 23), is the first Greek city to which he has come in his triumphant movement from east to west;7 the introduction of the rites to Thebes is therefore also their introduction to Greece. Moreover, the god’s worshippers, the sacred instruments they use (‘the drums which are native to the city of the Phrygians’, vv. 58–9), and by clear implication the rites themselves are decidedly ‘barbarian’ (cf. esp. vv. 55–61); that the god himself, however, is in reality a child of Thebes and that the rites are both new and immemorially traditional are to become two of the paradoxes at the heart of the play. This pattern is highly suggestive not just for the opening of Propertius 3.1 but for the Roman adoption of Greek poetry as a whole, a poetry which is always foreign and always new, but also always the model for imitation, rooted in tradition and sanctioned by the great stretch of time. As a site of cultural contest, these paradoxes were not in fact new to the Romans. The cult of Bacchus had long been naturalised on Italian soil, but Livy tells a story of how scandal erupted around these rites in 186 bc: The senate decreed that both consuls should undertake an enquiry into secret conspiracies. A lowborn Greek came first to Etruria, a man with none of the many skills which that most learned of nations has introduced among us for the tending of mind and body, but a mere sacrificer and fortune-teller (sacrificulus et uates); nor was he even someone who fills minds with error by publicizing his religio and professing openly his business and teachings, but an overseer of secret and nocturnal rites. There were initiations which were at first imparted only to a few, but then began to spread widely among men and women. To religio were added the pleasures of wine and feasting, to entice more people in. When wine had inflamed them, at night with males mingled with females, young with old, and when 6 7

Cf. also Tibullus 1.2.3 with Maltby’s note, and below p. 69. Text and interpretation of vv. 20–3 have been much debated (cf. Dodds ad loc.), but the basic point is not affected.

9

in the grove

all sense of modesty was extinguished, all types of indecency began to occur, since each person had to hand the pleasure to satisfy the cravings to which he was naturally most inclined . . . The damaging effects of this evil spread from Etruria to Rome like a plague (ueluti contagione morbi). Livy 39.8.3–9.1 (trans. Beard–North–Price)8 Livy presents the coming of the rites and the scandal which erupted around them as part of the same narrative, whereas in fact the rites had come to Rome well before this;9 what is important here, however, is not the historicity, but rather the very shape of his narrative. What the first part of Livy’s account offers, in brief, is a ‘Bacchae narrative’ in which Greece, and then Etruria, which shared with Euripides’ Dionysus a Lydian heritage,10 take the rˆole of Asia and Rome takes the part of Thebes and Greece. The Graecus ignobilis who is presented as the ‘first inventor’, the Propertian primus sacerdos, of the rites is, like Dionysus, a x”nov (Ba. 233), and Livy’s charge that he was a sacrificulus et uates is strikingly reminiscent of Pentheus’ dismissal of the unknown promoter of Dionysiac rites as g»hv –pwid»v ‘a magician and chanter of spells’ (Ba. 234); the charges of alcohol-induced indecency under the cloak of night are, of course, the very stuff of Pentheus’ imagination (cf. Ba. 217–25, 237, 260–2, 469, 485–7).11 Bacchic rites put at stake the nature of both ‘Greek-ness’ and ‘Roman-ness’; when is a ‘foreign import’ so naturalised and domesticated, for example into the peaceful pleasures of the Greek symposium (cf. Ba. 379–85), that it is no longer ‘foreign’? The ambivalent relationship with traditional Roman values and with the epic poetry (itself of course imitative of the greatest of Greek poets) embodying those values which the Roman elegists cultivated thus found a ready pattern in the discourse of Bacchic cult. In telling of the coming of the pernicious rites, Livy himself must stress that Greece had been responsible for very many beneficial cultural improvements (39.8.3); novelty and change, the borrowing from abroad, were themselves Roman ‘traditions’. 8 9 10 11

Cf. Beard–North–Price 1998: 2.289. Cf., e.g., Beard–North–Price 1998: 1.93, with 1.92 n. 73, for some of the large bibliography on the affair of the bacchanalia; Gruen 1990: 34–78 is particularly helpful. That Etruria was settled from Lydia is a view found as early as Herodotus 1.94; for Dionysus’ Lydian origin in the Bacchae cf. vv. 13, 234, 464. Even Livy’s language of ‘contagion’ (39.9.1) finds a parallel in the Bacchae, cf. v. 344 with Dodds’ note.

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the priest of the muses

The Hellenistic world knew poets who were initiated into the Mysteries and/or who used mystic imagery in their poetry,12 but in setting himself as the priest of a Dionysiac mystery cult, Propertius is yet another witness to the powerful new importance as a god of poetry which Dionysus assumed in Rome.13 The Italo-Greek mixture of Propertius 3.1.4, however we wish to understand the verse in detail, reworks the division between ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ which is central to the Bacchae and which also finds powerful reflections in the soteriological cults of the Hellenistic age.14 Propertius continues the god’s progress from east to west, but the Romans’ consciousness of themselves as barbari here echoes (from the Bacchae) in a strikingly positive manner;15 it is indeed tempting to compare the very real difficulty which modern critics have in sorting out the ‘Italian orgia’ from the ‘Greek dancing’ in Propertius 3.1.4 to the cultural paradoxes of the Bacchae. Of all the traditional Greek religious forms, it was the worship of Dionysus, particularly in its Hellenistic manifestation, which most called into question easy distinctions between ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’. Propertius’ use of the familiar claim of primacy16 has embarrassed critics of this poem: surely he is not seriously claiming to be the first Latin elegist, or even the first ‘Callimachean’ Latin elegist,17 particularly in view of the last poem of our second book, in which he has listed the ‘learned’ predecessors whose equal he would wish to be counted (2.34.85–94)? Poets are perhaps not witnesses on oath, but Propertius’ claim is much less difficult if one does not, as many modern critics have done, disregard the religious language of the verses by glossing them simply as ‘I am the first Roman elegiac poet’. The inauguration of cult was, of course, standardly commemorated in inscriptions and song; primacy is in fact perhaps nowhere so important as in cultic observance (cf., e.g., Homeric Hymn to Apollo 80, Callimachus, Hymn to Delos 6, 283, 291, CEG 93, 457, etc.). Thus, for example, on the commemorative inscription of the fourth-century Epidaurian poet Isyllos we read the proud elegiac couplet: prätov MŽlov ›teuxen %p»llwnov Male†ta bwm¼n kaª qus©aiv  gl†isen t”menov. 12 15 17

13 Cf. below p. 42. 14 Cf. below pp. 58–9 on Tibullus 1.7. Cf. esp. Dickie 1998. 16 Cf. below p. 121 on Eclogue 1. Cf. below p. 129 on Eclogue 6.1. This, of course, is not to deny a Propertian narrative of increasing ‘Callimacheanism’, cf., e.g., Hubbard 1974: 68–81.

11

in the grove

Malos first established the altar to Apollo Maleatas and embellished the sacred space with sacrifices. Isyllos 27–8, CA p. 133 The motif assumes, of course, a particular importance in aetiological poetry concerned, as was Callimachus’ Aitia, with the foundation of cults and ritual practices. Propertius’ extension of Greek cult to Italy is, therefore, itself a dramatisation, or actualisation, of the subject of Callimachus’ most famous elegiac poem (as perhaps also of much Philitan poetry). It is in the nature of such accounts that a conclusion is always also a new beginning: a narrative closes and its commemoration and repetition in cult begins. If Propertius is a priest, to what cult does he belong? The standard answer has been that he is (again) ‘a priest of the Muses’; the Hellenistic world did indeed know cults of the Muses, often associated with artistic or philosophical groupings or with the heroised dead,18 and the Alexandrian Mouse±on itself was presided over by a priest of the Muses (Strabo 17.1.8). Nevertheless, most critics ‘desacralise’ Propertius’ verses and make them just a metaphor for the writing of poetry.19 In 3.17, for example, Propertius clearly does run together the ideas of being a priest of Bacchus and of writing poetry about the god and in the Bacchic manner (vv. 37–40).20 Nevertheless, it seems difficult (to say the least) not to feel that the natural sense of the opening of 3.1 is rather that the poet is ‘priest of Callimachus and Philitas’; whether or not one or both poets were in fact the object of cult honours as heroes (or had foreshadowed such glory in their poetry) we do not know, but it is not in fact improbable and indeed a reasonable case can be made, at least for Philitas.21 Cultic and heroic honours to poets of the more distant past were a familiar part of the Greek poetic and religious scene.22 The Life of Aeschylus reports that ‘those whose 18 19

20 21 22

Cf. Boyanc´e 1937: 231–327, Fraser 1972: i 312–14. Among critics who have, however, been prepared to give due weight to the sacral language are Shackleton Bailey 1956: 135–6 and Luck 1957, who sees Propertius consulting the dead poets as one would seek an oracle from a shrine. Harmon 1986: 1937–43 offers a helpful account of the matter. Cf. below pp. 68–9. Cf. Hollis 1996, A. Hardie 1997, Spanoudakis 2002: 37–40. For Virgil’s variation of such commemorations at the opening of Georgics 3 cf. Barchiesi 2005: 300. Cf. Clay 2004. Some poets were, however, best left undisturbed. A common motif of Hellenistic epigram was that only the foolhardy (or very virtuous) would go anywhere near the tomb of Hipponax, the notoriously harsh iambist of sixth-century Ephesus; no cult for him. In the opening poem of Callimachus’ Iambi, Hipponax returns from the dead, unsummoned and unannounced, to (in effect) advertise, and hence consent to, the

12

the priest of the muses

lives were devoted to tragedy’ performed sacrifices at the great poet’s tomb at Gela and put on his plays there; in 3.1 Propertius is paying the elegist’s equivalent homage to his great forebears. An inscription of the first century AD (CIG 3376 = Mimnermus T 13 Allen) reveals a gymnasium at Smyrna named ‘the Mimnermeion’, where (presumably) heroic honours were paid to the eponymous elegist by ‘the young’ (n”oi). Mimnermus’ importance for Propertius as a great name from the past is familiar (cf. 1.9.11), and the institution at Smyrna may well go back into Hellenistic times; Propertius too hopes to be the subject of honour by ‘the young’ (3.9.46, cf. below). More famously perhaps, Homer, whose posthumous fame functions in Propertius 3.1 as the analogue for Propertius’ own imagined future (vv. 21–4 ∼ 25–34), was the object of such honours in several parts of the Greek world.23 The preserved Contest of Homer and Hesiod describes cultic honours paid to him by the Argives in particular recognition of the praises of Argos in the Iliad (2.559–68):24 The Argive leaders were very pleased at the encomium of their race by the most distinguished of poets. They honoured him with expensive gifts, set up a bronze statue of him, and voted daily, monthly, and yearly sacrifices in Homer’s honour, and also voted to send another sacrifice every fifth year to Chios.25 Contest of Homer and Hesiod 17 So too, Ptolemy IV Philopator established a shrine of Homer in Alexandria, apparently in response to a dream vision (cf. SH 979). Even more striking perhaps is what we know of the cult of Archilochus on Paros.26 The great poet’s memory had been honoured on the island since at least classical times, but a long inscription of the first half of the third century (SEG 15.517) tells us that the Delphic oracle of Apollo told one Mnesiepes to establish a shrine (temenos) and altars for sacrifice to various gods, including Apollo himself, Dionysus, and the Nymphs, and to honour Archilochus; hence Mnesiepes called his shrine ‘the Archilocheion’ and there honoured both the

23 25 26

style and subject of Callimachus’ new Hipponacteanism; Callimachus has indeed acted against the advice of the epigrams and ‘woken the wasp’, but it is very much on his own terms. Cf. Leonidas, AP 7.408 (= HE 2325–30), Theocritus, AP 13.3 (= HE 3430–3 = Epigr. 19 Gow), Alcaeus, AP 7.536 (= HE 76–81), Philip, AP 7.405 (= GP 2861–6). 24 On the Contest see below p. 19. Cf. Brink 1972, Clay 2004: 136–43. There follows the text of an honorific poem for ‘divine Homer’ in elegiacs, allegedly inscribed on the statue. Cf. Clay 2004.

13

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gods and the poet with sacrifices. Such a shrine to a great poet of the past leaves us not far from the nemus of Callimachus and Philitas; the affinity that Propertius feels with the great elegists of the past thus translates into literary and generic terms the reverence of Mnesiepes for a great fellow Parian of the past, and in both cases it is Apollo who instructs the worshipper. No worshipper can, however, hope for success without the favour of the supernatural power invoked: the shades of Callimachus and Philitas must give their consent to Propertius’ commemorative act of writing (v. 2), to his transfer of their rites from their proper place in Cyrene, Cos, and Alexandria to a new home in Rome. Callimachus and Philitas, though themselves now the objects of worship, were also in their turn performers of ritual to whom the poet turns for instruction: dicite quo pariter carmen tenuastis in antro? quoue pede ingressi? quamue bibistis aquam? Tell me: in what cave did the two of you produce the slender body of your song? With what foot did you enter? What water did you drink? Propertius 3.1.5–6 Callimachus and Philitas had to approach ‘the grove’ as worshippers, before becoming themselves the object of cult. Callimachus certainly suggests in fr. 1 that Philitas and Mimnermus were admired predecessors whom he takes as, at least in certain respects, models;27 in that passage of the prologue to the Aitia Callimachus has, of course, nothing comparable to Propertius’ sacral language, though he does make clear that his manner of writing has, as does Propertius’, the approval of Apollo. More striking in this context is another passage of Callimachus which Propertius plainly has in mind at the opening of 3.1.28 At the end of the Hymn to Apollo the god himself compares the correct, i.e. Callimachus’, manner of poetry – and specifically the very hymn in his honour which we are engaged in hearing and reading – to offerings of pure water brought by ‘bees’ to Demeter: 27 28

Cf. below p. 39. It is obviously tempting to see, particularly in v. 3, a combination of echoes from Callimachus and Philitas or rather a ‘window allusion’ through Callimachus to Philitas, cf. further Pfeiffer 1968: 284, Spanoudakis 2002: 293. Such a ‘window allusion’ would preserve Callimachus’ own acknowledgement of Philitas as a model.

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Dho± d ì oÉk ˆp¼ pant¼v Ìdwr jor”ousi m”lissai, ˆll ì ¤tiv kaqarž te kaª ˆcr†antov ˆn”rpei p©dakov –x ¬er¦v ½l©gh lib‡v Škron Šwton. Not from every source do bees bring water to Demeter, but only from that which rises pure and unfouled from a holy spring, a small trickle, the very peak of offerings. Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo 110–12 M”lissai ‘bees’ was a name for priestesses of Demeter, as well as a common image of poets, and so here Callimachus is very close to precisely the same idea of poetry as a sacral offering which we find in Propertius. Callimachus’ Apollo wants no less honour than the august Demeter, although his ‘bees’ are metaphorical; such self-consciousness about status within the Olympian pantheon is a typical touch of Callimachean humour. Be that as it may, Callimachus is exploiting a traditional notion of hymns as offerings intended to delight the god, as were, for example, dedicatory statues (agalmata, lit. ‘things bringing delight and/or glory’, a noun which, for example, Pindar uses to describe his epinician odes).29 That, in the realm of poetry, the idea had much wider currency than just for hymns is plain from, say, Theocritus, Idyll 7, the ‘Thalysia’ or ‘harvest offering’ to Demeter, a poem which tells of a journey to join a rustic celebration of the goddess, but which itself is clearly a ‘harvest-offering’ to her. Propertius too offers what he can to his gods. The grove is full of (the memory of) shades and shadows, for the cult of individual poets is subsumed into a larger tradition of poetic succession in which the worshipper eventually becomes the worshipped, the pupil becomes in his own turn the master.30 Ennius had related how in a dream he met Homer, who told him that his soul had now passed into the Roman poet,31 as Callimachus had in his dreams relived Hesiodic experience. In 3.9, as in 3.1, Propertius declares his allegiance to the narrow paths of Callimachus and Philitas, rather than the broader expanses of epic: inter Callimachi sat erit placuisse libellos et cecinisse modis, Coe poeta, tuis. haec urant pueros, haec urant scripta puellas, meque deum clament et mihi sacra ferant. 29 31

30 Cf. below pp. 25–6. Cf., e.g., Depew 2000. Cf. Clausen 1964: 185–7, Skutsch 1985: 147–53.

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For me it will be enough to have found favour among Callimachus’ little books and, poet of Cos, to have sung in your strains. Let these writings of mine inflame young men and girls, let them proclaim me a god and make offerings to me. Propertius 3.9.43–6 Propertius here imagines himself treated as a god by the young readers of his poetry, because – in an idea familiar elsewhere – they are amazed at how uncannily accurate his description of their amatory experience is and because they find his poetry helpful and consoling; to them he wishes to be ‘a god’ (and modern popular culture has very similar expressions). These ‘worshippers’ may, of course, represent a situation less formal than the sacerdotal rˆole which Propertius gives himself at the head of 3.1 and we do not have to take this as a serious foreshadowing of ‘the same posthumous honours as the great Greek poets received in the grove of the Muses [on Helicon]’,32 but the cult of the poet is no idle fancy.

2 De monte sororum The grove of Callimachus and Philitas which Propertius wishes to enter may have a quite specific significance. It is very probable that Philitas’ Demeter, a very influential elegiac poem (cf. Callimachus fr. 1.10) which told the story of the goddess’ visit to Philitas’ own island of Cos while searching for her daughter and which was clearly replete with Coan legends and antiquities, contained an elaborate description of a locus amoenus, of which echoes may be found in the poetry of Theocritus and Callimachus himself (perhaps indeed in the grove (kal¼n Šlsov) of the Callimachean Hymn to Demeter, vv. 25– 30).33 If so, Propertius’ grove would belong to both Philitas and Callimachus (uestrum . . . nemus) in a special sense. Nevertheless, this is clearly not the only sacred space in play here. Roman poets were fond of the idea of an enclosed, often sacral, space, usually away from the city, which served as an image of poetry and its inspiration.34 Such an idea has deep roots in Roman religiosity and the sense of the numinous, while at the same time reflecting more recent sophisticated Roman taste in the landscaping of gardens and parks; there is clearly some debt to the Greek tradition of the locus amoenus, but unfortunately the Greek text 32 33 34

So Fedeli 1985: 326. On the Heliconian grove see below Section 2. Cf., e.g., Spanoudakis 2002: 293–9; Heyworth 2004: 146–53. Cf. below Section 3 and see Troxler-Keller 1964: 40–7.

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which might shed most light here is all but entirely lost. In the Aitia, Callimachus dreamed that he was young again and conversed with the Muses on Mt Helicon in Boeotia, Propertius’ ‘mountain of the sisters [i.e. the Muses]’ (3.1.17); the first two books of the Aitia (at least) are the record of that dream encounter. Callimachus apparently made explicit (cf. fr. 4 Massimilla) the fact that he was here replaying the experience of Hesiod, who was confronted by the Muses as he shepherded his lambs, though Callimachus chats with the goddesses in a most un-Hesiodic way.35 So too, in Callimachus’ Hymn to Athena it is on Helicon that Teiresias stumbles upon Athena bathing and is both blinded and given the gift of prophecy, an art which poetry very closely resembles;36 here too, a Hesiodic text was very probably a crucial model.37 In the opening of the Theogony we learn something of the geography of the ‘great and holy mountain’ (v. 2) of Helicon (the streams of Permessos (or Termessos), Hippocrene, and Olmeios and an altar of Zeus), but Hesiod is not very specific as to where he was when confronted by the Muses ‘under holy Helicon’ (v. 23). During the fourth and third centuries – clearly under the influence of the Hesiodic text – a sanctuary (Šlsov or t”menov) of the Muses was established or reorganised near Thespiai and Ascra in a fertile Boeotian valley, and this remained a prominent spot on tours of Greece for many centuries to come.38 The Thespian grove was also host to a cult of Eros, in whose honour musical, poetic, and athletic contests were held (the Erotideia), to match the Mouseia in honour of the Muses; the conjunction is at least suggestive for Roman erotic elegy. Of Callimachus’ description of Helicon we know very little but for the names of some of the streams which appeared in his verse (from frr. 3–4 Massimilla we learn that he placed Hesiod’s meeting with the Muses beside Hippocrene); it would be rash to think that he remained as topographically unspecific as Hesiod, particularly if the Heliconian grove was in his day a clearly identifiable sanctuary with a recognisable sacred geography. Be that as it may, we are at least fortunate to possess Pausanias’ account of Helicon from the middle of the second century ad; how much of Pausanias’ Helicon existed in the time of 35 36 37 38

On Callimachus and Hesiod see Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 51–60, with further bibliography. Cf. Hesiod, Theogony 32, with West’s note, Buxton 1980: 27–30. Cf. Hunter 2005a: 257–9, with further bibliography. On the Mouseion cf. Schachter 1986: 147–79, Hurst–Schachter 1996, Clay 2004: 136.

17

in the grove

Callimachus,39 or even of Propertius, we cannot tell (and we must always reckon with the possibility of the influence of post-Hesiodic, including Hellenistic, poetry on the actual arrangement of the shrine), but Pausanias remains our most suggestive guide to the imaginative world of both poets. As Pausanias moves from Ascra to the grove of the Muses, the first landmark he identifies is the spring Aganippe, ‘which is said to have been a daughter of the Termessos which flows around Helicon’ (9.29.5); it seems all but certain that Callimachus too mentioned this spring and this genealogy (fr. 3.6–8 Massimilla). Then we meet an image of Eupheme, nurse of the Muses, and then one of Linus ‘in a small rock which has been worked into the manner of a cave; each year they perform rites to Linus before the sacrifice to the Muses’ (9.29.6).40 Pausanias then records some of the statuary to be seen in the sanctuary, some of it believed to be by ‘old masters’: images of the Muses, of Apollo, and of Dionysus, and then of ‘poets and those distinguished for mousik¯e’ – Thamyris, Arion on his dolphin, Sakadas of Argos, Hesiod himself, and Orpheus, with Telete (‘Rite’) next to him as he enchants nature with his song. There is a deafening absence here – Homer – and it is an absence which Pausanias obliquely acknowledges. Immediately after describing (and criticising) the image of Hesiod, he inserts a darkly pregnant sentence: Although I have made very detailed investigations into the relative chronology of Hesiod and Homer, I did not care to write on the subject, as I know that the contemporary experts on epic poetry are particularly apt to find fault. Pausanias 9.30.3 It is as though Pausanias here anticipates his readers’ wonder (‘Why is there no Homer?’), a wonder based not just on Homer’s status, but specifically on the fact that in lists of the great hexameter poets of the past Homer regularly follows Hesiod (cf., e.g., Aristophanes, Frogs 1032–6, Hermesianax fr. 7 Powell).41 It is, however, Hesiod who is the great figure of (Pausanias’) Helicon, and it is about Hesiod that the locals have stories to tell and relics to show (9.31.3–6). The presence of Homer would spoil the party, for the tendency to see these as rival figures for supremacy in epos is familiar from 39

40

Pausanias records a statue on Helicon of Arsinoe, ‘who was married to her brother’ (9.31.1); this is, of course, very suggestive for the Aitia, though the identity of the figure has been disputed, cf. Cameron 1995: 142, Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 52. 41 Cf. further Graziosi 2002: 106–7. On Linus cf. below pp. 23–4.

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as early as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, parts of which derive from the classical period.42 That contest may in fact be very relevant here. The Contest of Homer and Hesiod tells of a poetic competition between the two great poets at Chalcis in Euboea, i.e. it takes off from the fact that Hesiod tells us in the Works and Days that the only time he has travelled in a ship was when he crossed from Aulis to Chalcis to take part in a poetic competition at the funeral games for Amphidamas, a local noble. Hesiod was victorious in the contest and subsequently dedicated the tripod he had won to the Muses on Helicon (WD 650–9); the tripod was still proudly on show for tourists in Pausanias’ day (9.31.3). In this contest, Homer in fact wins hands down, to judge by the repeated reactions of the crowd, but the actual judge, one of Amphidamas’ brothers, awards the contest to Hesiod, who has just selected WD 383–92 (‘When the Pleiades rise . . .’) as the finest passage of his own poetry. The judge reasons that ‘it is right that the poet who promotes agriculture and peace should be victorious, not the one whose poems concern wars and slaughter’ (chap. 13). Propertius would have heartily agreed. The strategy of the Contest is in fact to attempt to preserve Homer’s untouchable place as the premier poet of ‘the Greek people’, while telling a story in which he actually loses a contest and which celebrates Hesiod’s singular achievement; Homer’s poetry is not denigrated – very far from it – but it must give way before poetry whose subject matter has greater value in the community. Helicon, where Hesiod dedicated his prize, is therefore not just explicitly ‘Hesiod’s mountain’, it is also, importantly, not Homer’s.43 That Hesiod was in fact older than Homer may have been one of the ways in which his victory in the contest was explained;44 be that as it may, Pausanias’ reference, while describing Helicon, to the issue of their relative ages, and hence of their relative status in the poetic pantheon, can hardly fail to recall the story of the Contest, and when he subsequently notes that Hesiod’s tripod is the oldest (ˆrcai»tatov) such dedication on show (9.31.3), it is clear that the grove on Helicon is designed not just to celebrate Hesiod, but also to celebrate him in his relationship to the ever-present absentee, Homer. Moreover, it is important that Hesiod has this well-defined locality as his domain; Homer, 42 43

44

Cf. Graziosi 2002: 168–80, West 2003: 297–300, both with further bibliography. I leave out of account here the issue of whether in fact, as many have argued, Hesiod himself proudly situates his poetry against Homer’s through his reference to the Trojan expedition at WD 651–3; the debate comes down to what kind of a ‘constructive reading’ of Hesiod was necessary to create the story of ‘the Contest’. Cf. Graziosi 2002: 106–10.

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by contrast, is not to be confined within any one sanctuary – he belongs to the world. The Heliconian grove is therefore a place where poetry which sings of agriculture and peaceful pursuits (cf. Propertius 3.1.17) is celebrated and from which Homer is excluded, but without damage to his reputation and primacy.45 This is a suggestive picture for both Hellenistic and Roman poetry, particularly elegy. Ancient criticism naturally tended to find opposing virtues in Homer and Hesiod, and Hesiodic virtues, of both subject and style, lent themselves readily to elegiac appropriation. Thus, for example, Velleius Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, assigns Hesiod second place among epic poets and describes him as follows: uir perelegantis ingeni et mollissima dulcedine carminum memorabilis, oti quietisque cupidissimus a man of very elegant talent, noteworthy for the very soft sweetness of his poetry, an ardent lover of otium and peace. Velleius Paterculus 1.7.1 For Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the age of Augustus, Hesiod, Sappho, Anacreon, and Simonides are the poets who best exemplify the ‘polished’ (glajur†) style, which is characterised by a choice of words which are ‘very smooth and soft’ (lei»tata kaª malakÛtata), which aims at ‘pleasure’ (t¼ ¡dÅ), ‘grace’ (c†riv), and pure clarity (t¼ ligur»n), and which avoids figures marked by archaism, grandeur, or excessive weight.46 Here clearly we are not too far from Callimachus’ characterisation both of his own poetry and of Aratus’ use of Hesiod (Epigram 27), and very close indeed to how Roman elegists habitually represent their own verses; discussions of the exploitation and representation of Hesiodic verse in Hellenistic and Roman poetry often pay insufficient attention to ancient views of Hesiodic style.47

45

46 47

The possibility that Ennius had his dream encounter with Homer on Mt Helicon (cf. Lucretius 1.117–18, Propertius 3.3.6, Skutsch 1985: 149–50) and occasional placings of Homer upon that mountain (e.g. Lament for Bion 76–7) do not greatly alter the picture. Demosthenes 40, De comp. 23. Cf. also De imitatione 2.2 Aujac [ = fr. VI ii Usener– Radermacher], Quintilian 10.1.52. The harsh (and partly justified) criticisms in Cameron 1995: 362–3 need some revision in the light of these considerations.

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de monte sororum

To Callimachus’ Helicon Roman poets returned time and again, and they filled it with figures of their own, or (just perhaps) Callimachus’, imagination. One of the earliest such re-creations is among the themes of the song of Silenus in Eclogue 6: tum canit, errantem Permessi ad flumina Gallum Aonas in montis ut duxerit una sororum, utque uiro Phoebi chorus adsurrexerit omnis; ut Linus haec illi diuino carmine pastor floribus atque apio crinis ornatus amaro dixerit: ‘hos tibi dant calamos (en accipe) Musae, Ascraeo quos ante seni, quibus ille solebat cantando rigidas deducere montibus ornos. his tibi Grynei nemoris dicatur origo, ne quis sit lucus quo se plus iactet Apollo.’ Then he sings of how Gallus, as he wandered by the streams of Permessus, was led into the Aonian mountains by one of the sisters, and how Phoebus’ whole choir rose to honour the man; how Linus, the shepherd of divine song whose hair was decorated with flowers and bitter parsley, spoke to him as follows: ‘The Muses give you these reeds – come, take them – which previously they gave to the old man of Ascra, reeds with which he used by his singing to lead tough ash trees down from the mountains. With these reeds you are to tell of the origin of the Grynean wood, so that there should be no grove of which Apollo is more proud.’ Virgil, Eclogue 6.64–73 How closely this reworks a scene from Gallus’ own poetry has been very much discussed,48 but the gaps in our knowledge of the details of earlier poetic initiations are severe indeed. Hesiod’s experience, which is clearly fashioned by Callimachus as in some way parallel to Callimachus’ own, is described (perhaps not for the only time in the opening passages of the Aitia) as follows: poim”ni m¦la n”monti par ì ­cnion ½x”ov ¯ppou ë Hsi»dwi Mous”wn —sm¼v Ât ì  nt©asen 48

Chapter 2 of Ross 1975 remains one of the most suggestive discussions, if inevitably one of the most speculative; I am indebted to it.

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When the shepherd, Hesiod, as he grazed his flocks by the mark of the swift horse, was met by the crowd of Muses. Callimachus fr. 4.1–2 Massimilla In the second century ad the emperor Marcus Aurelius cited these verses as evidence that Hesiod was not asleep when the Muses spoke to him, because the Greek verb ˆntiŽn ‘to come upon, meet’ suggests that he was walking around (ambulanti) when they met him;49 Hesiod himself merely says that he was ‘shepherding his lambs’ (Theogony 23), which left the way open to later interpreters and poets to represent the experience as either a dream or an epiphany to a watchful shepherd. As for Callimachus, we know very little about the detailed narrative of his dream encounter; our two principal sources merely report that he ‘conversed with’ (summe©xav) the Muses and that his dream took him from Libya to Helicon and deposited him ‘in the midst of the Muses’.50 It is, nevertheless, tempting to believe that there is indeed a Callimachean idea behind the Virgilian (and Gallan?) scene of the poet wandering beside a river; Eclogue 6 would thus offer rewritings both of part of the ‘Reply to the Telchines’ and of the dream which followed the ‘Reply’.51 Be that as it may, it remains intriguing to find images of both Linus and Orpheus in Pausanias’ Heliconian grove, to find Linus and echoes of Orpheus in this passage of Eclogue 6, and to find these same two poets combined again in a Propertian version of his own place ‘in the grove’: non tot Achaemeniis armatur †etrusca† sagittis, spicula quot nostro pectore fixit Amor. hic me tam gracilis uetuit contemnere Musas, iussit et Ascraeum sic habitare nemus, non ut Pieriae quercus mea uerba sequantur, 49 50 51

Fronto, Epist. 1.4.6 (p. 8 Van den Hout). Respectively, the Florentine scholia (Pfeiffer 1949–53: i 11, Massimilla 1996: 71), and AP 7.42. Clauss 2004: 76–7 sees rather the capturing of Silenus in vv. 13–30 as the equivalent of Callimachus’ dream. Commentators on Eclogue 6 regularly interpret Gallus’ ‘wandering’ (in fact a common dream-experience) as that of a shepherd with his flocks; I see no compelling reason for this, though the matter should be considered together with the interpretation of boukol”onta at Theocritus 7.92 as ‘wandering’ (so Giangrande 1980: 137–9). Ovid’s spatior at Amores 3.1.5 is a typically Ovidian slant on the motif: not for Ovid aimless wandering, rather a leisurely stroll. Cf. further below pp. 29–30.

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aut possim Ismaria ducere ualle feras, sed magis ut nostro stupefiat Cynthia uersu: tunc ego sim Inachio notior arte Lino. [. . .] is not armed with so many Persian arrows as the shafts which Love has fixed in my breast. Love prevented me from scorning the very slender Muses, and ordered me to dwell thus in the grove of Ascra; not so that Pierian oaks should follow my words, or that I might lead wild beasts in the valley of Ismarus, but rather so that Cynthia might be held spellbound by my verse – then would I be more famous for my skill than Inachian Linus. Propertius 2.13.1–8 Is this combination Callimachean, Gallan,52 or both? Speculation is (unfortunately) idle, as too in the case of other motifs in this passage which may be suspected of being Callimachean. It is, however, at least remarkable that another Linus, though one whose story is often ‘confused’ with that of the mythical poet, appeared in Aitia 1. The aition of ‘Linus and Coroebus’ is used by Callimachus to explain the Argive ‘Festival of the Lambs’ and why dogs are killed during this festival. The king’s daughter bore to Apollo a child, Linus, whom she gave to a shepherd; the shepherd brought the child up among the lambs (cf. Eclogue 6.67 Linus . . . pastor), but it was killed by his dogs, and only after various vicissitudes and much suffering was Apollo’s anger appeased by the hero Coroebus. In one fragment, which all but certainly belongs to this episode, the narrator, presumably the Muse telling the story rather than the poet himself, addresses the child with an emotional apostrophe of a kind which Hellenistic and Roman poets inherited from Homer but of which they are particularly fond: Šrnev toi, j©le koÓre, sunžlikev, Šrnev —ta±roi ›skon, –niauqmoª d ì aÉl©a kaª bot†nai Lambs, dear lad, were your playmates, lambs your comrades, the pens and the pastures were where you slept. Callimachus fr. 28 Massimilla Could the speaker in fact be the Muse Ourania, mother of the other Linus, the poet of Helicon, in one ancient version (and one to which Hesiod subscribed in an unknown poem, fr. 305 Merkelbach–West)? If that Linus was also present 52

So Ross 1975: 34–6.

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to hear the story of ‘Linus and Coroebus’, then Callimachus will have played a very pointed game with mythological traditions; Pausanias too knows that there was more than one Linus (9.29.9). On Helicon Virgil’s Linus, acting on behalf of the Muses, offers Gallus the pipes upon which Hesiod used to play and enchant nature as Orpheus had done;53 with these pipes Gallus is to compose a poem on the origins of Apollo’s ‘Grynean grove’ on the Asiatic coast near Cyme, another k†lliston Šlsov ‘very beautiful grove’ (Pausanias 1.21.7). Servius at least, unlike some modern critics, believed that Gallus did indeed write on this subject, in a poem much indebted to Callimachus’ imitator Euphorion (note on Eclogue 6.72), and Virgil’s Linus certainly speaks in a ‘Callimachean’ manner;54 as commentators note, v. 73 looks like a variation on Delos’ proud speech at the birth of Apollo in Callimachus’ hymn to the island: dusžrotov, ˆll ì ˆp ì –me±o Džliov %p»llwn keklžsetai, oÉd” tiv Šllh gai†wn toss»nde qeäi pejilžsetai Šllwi, oÉ Kercnªv kre©onti Poseid†wni Leca©wi, oÉ p†gov ë Erme©hi Kullžniov, oÉ Diª Kržth, Þv –gÜ %p»llwniá ‘I am hard to plough, but from me will Apollo be called Delian, and no land shall be so dear to another god – not Kerchnis to lord Poseidon Lechaios, not the Kyllenian hill to Hermes, not Crete to Zeus – as I to Apollo . . .’ Callimachus, Hymn to Delos 268–73 If the heart of the Virgilian Linus’ speech is poetic succession, then the echo of the Callimachean Hymn to Delos itself acts out that potent idea, because the Callimachean verses are themselves a reworking of Leto’s oath to the island in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo: § mŸn Fo©bou t¦ide quÛdhv ›ssetai a«e© bwm¼v kaª t”menov, t©sei d” se g ì ›xoca p†ntwn. 53

54

Ross 1975: 23 insists that the primary reference of ille in v. 70 is in fact Orpheus ‘that famous poet’, thus making explicit (rather than implicit) the succession Orpheus – Hesiod – Gallus; this does not seem to me the natural way to take the Latin. Cf., however, Cameron 1995: 458–9, who stresses the importance of the fact that the ‘Grynean Grove’ also occurred in a poem of Parthenius, the Delos (SH 620–2 = frr. 10–12 Lightfoot); further discussion in Clausen 1964: 192, Lightfoot 1999: 149– 51.

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The fragrant altar and precinct of Phoebus will indeed be here for ever, and he will honour you above all others. Homeric Hymn to Apollo 87–8 Alongside the sequence Linus and Orpheus – Hesiod – (perhaps) Callimachus – (perhaps) Euphorion – Gallus, there is the sequence Homer (as the author of the Hymn) – Callimachus – Virgil. Despite appearances, Homer is always present on Helicon: the language of Callimachus and his imitators (Greek and Roman) is, of course, saturated in echoes and memories of the poems ascribed to Homer. Moreover, in the importance of the Homeric Hymns for Hellenistic and Roman poetry55 we can trace an attempt, perhaps conscious, to find in Homer the same trends towards shorter and more experimental poems that the age, for a complex combination of reasons, favoured. Callimachus himself reworked the Homeric Hymn to Apollo no less than three times in his hymns to Apollo, Artemis, and Delos. As always, everything ‘begins from Zeus’; for the Homer of the Hymns, at least, a place on Helicon was found. With succession (and the ‘initiation’ which often dramatises it), however, inevitably comes competition:56 Hesiod’s poetry did not just succeed Orpheus’, it also took over its magical qualities (Eclogue 6.70–1). Nowhere are the twin ideas of succession and competition more potent than in bucolic– pastoral poetry, which is where Linus clearly establishes the poetry of both Hesiod and Gallus; one of the most productive paradoxes of such poetry is that every pastoral singer strives to be a Daphnis, but the Theocritean Daphnis himself had rejected the notion of succession, by returning his pipes to Pan (Theocritus 1.123–30).57 Contest is at the heart of bucolic poetry, as Virgil inherited it from Theocritus and his successors:58 in the poems themselves herdsmen and (occasionally) ‘professional poets’ (Simichidas in Idyll 7) compete with each other in friendly and not-so-friendly exchanges or contests of song (cf. Id. 6.5 –r©zein), and for the composers of those poems the vehicle for their own eris with the past was imitation and allusion.59 ‘Longinus’ describes Plato’s imitation of Homer in ways which might well remind us of the bucolic tradition (and perhaps of Theocritus, Idyll 7 in particular):

55 56 57 59

For the Homeric Hymns and Roman poetry cf. Hinds 1987, Barchiesi 1999. See the suggestive pages of P. Hardie 1993: 98–119; there is much of interest on this subject in Ricks 2002. 58 Cf. Hunter 1999a: 6–9. For bucolic succession cf. below pp. 131, 139. For an analysis of the pastoral tradition in terms of ‘Bloomian anxiety’ cf. Hubbard 1998.

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Plato competed wholeheartedly for the prize (perª prwte©wn) against Homer, like a young aspirant challenging an admired master (Þv ˆntagwnistŸv n”ov pr¼v ¢dh teqaumasm”non).60 To break a lance in this way may well have been a brash and contentious thing to do, but the competition proved anything but valueless. As Hesiod says, ‘this strife (eris) is good for men’ [Works and Days 24]. Truly it is a noble contest and prize of honour, and one well worth winning, in which to be defeated by one’s elders is itself no disgrace. ‘Longinus’, On the Sublime 13.4 (trans. Russell, adapted) The Virgilian Linus’ verses do not merely inscribe competitive succession into a poetic programme – Hesiod and Orpheus, Euphorion and Callimachus, Gallus and the Greek tradition – they also overtly refer to it: Apollo will take pleasure in no grove more than in Gallus’ Grynean grove, just as the Delos of the Homeric Hymn will be honoured by the god ‘above all others’ and the Callimachean island will be dearer to Apollo than any other god holds his birthplace. It needs little argument to see that the competition between localities is also a competition between the poets and poems which celebrate them. We may compare how in his Hymn to Demeter Callimachus challenges the Homeric Hymn through the localities where the respective narratives are set:61 qe‡ d ì –pema©neto cÛrwi Âsson ì Eleus±ni, Tri»pai q ì Âson ¾kk»son ï Ennai The goddess was as crazy about the place [i.e. the grove threatened by Erysichthon] as about Eleusis, about Triopas as much as Enna. Callimachus, Hymn to Demeter 29–30 Linus’ final words echo the conclusion to the proem of Eclogue 6 to make clear that poetic succession is also poetic competition: nec Phoebo gratior ulla est quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen. To Phoebus is no page more welcome than that which is inscribed on its front with the name of Varus. Virgil, Eclogue 6.11–12 60

61

For the rˆole of thauma in the urge to mimetic rivalry cf. Dion. Hal. De imitatione fr. 2 Aujac [= 3 Usener–Radermacher] ‘emulation (z¯elos ) is an activity of the soul roused to admiration (thauma) of what seems beautiful’. Cf. Hunter 1992a: 10–11.

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There can be little doubt that we would understand Gallus’ initiation in Eclogue 6 better, had more of Callimachus’ dream survived. Linus’ words, like those of Apollo to Tityrus in the proem of the same poem,62 prescribe both a subject and a style for poetry. The hallmark of that style is, as we have seen, an allusive mimetic practice, and it is obviously tempting to push harder at these verses. The description of Hesiod’s Orphic powers seems to owe something to Apollonius’ account of Orpheus at the head of the ‘Catalogue of Argonauts’, immediately after the proem of the Argonautica: aÉt‡r t»n g ì –n”pousin ˆteir”av oÎresi p”trav q”lxai ˆoid†wn –nop¦i potamän te ç”eqra. jhgoª d ì ˆgri†dev, ke©nhv ›ti sžmata molp¦v, ˆkt¦i Qrhik©hi ZÛnhv ›pi thleq»wsai –xe©hv stic»wsan –pžtrimoi, v  g ì –pipr» qelgom”nav j»rmiggi katžgage Pier©hqen. Men say that the sound of his songs bewitched the hard rocks on the mountains and streams of rivers. As signs of his music, the wild oak trees which flourish on the Thracian coast at Zone stand to this day in close-set ranks; he brought them all the way down from Pieria by the bewitching music of his lyre. Apollonius, Argonautica 1.26–31 Virgil’s rigidos may pick up ˆteir”av (‘hard’) of the rocks which Orpheus enchanted;63 montibus ornos was to become a repeated Virgilian verse end, but here may be patterned on Apollonius’ oÎresi p”trav, and deducere repeats the Apollonian katžgage. Was Apollonius in his turn echoing a poetic predecessor? The ‘Alexandrian footnote’ –n”pousin ‘men say’ (v. 26) provokes the thought,64 and, if there is anything in this, there is one obvious candidate for the identity of that predecessor. Hesiod’s music was, according to the Virgilian Linus, the music of the panpipes, i.e. he was a ‘pastoral poet’, as befits someone who was ‘shepherding his lambs’ when the Muses met him; moreover, his poetry – like that of Orpheus before him – enchanted nature, and nature is the first audience of pastoral verse (cf., e.g., Virgil, Eclogue 1.4–5, Lament for Bion 46–9). Gallus is to use the same pipes to sing of a grove, which is here a site of both Apolline 62 63 64

Cf. below p. 142. Of itself, of course, rigidus is perfectly appropriate for the mountain-ash. Note too jat©zetai immediately before (v. 24); for the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ cf. Hinds 1998: 1–5.

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and pastoral (cf. v. 11) significance. In singing of the origo of that grove, however, he is obviously to set himself within the tradition of Callimachean aetiology, and much has been written about whether we are to understand this Virgilian scene as reflecting a transition from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ genres in the subjects of Gallus’ verse. Rather, what is important is the tradition in which aetiological verse and Virgilian pastoral here set themselves. The great poets of the past were all ‘didactic’ poets, whose verses improved the lot of man (cf. esp. Aristophanes, Frogs 1030–6). On Helicon, Pausanias still saw a statue of Telete (‘Rite’) next to that of Orpheus, and it was ‘rites’ (teleta©) that the Aristophanic Aeschylus says Orpheus taught us (Frogs 1032). Callimachean aetiology, which also teaches ‘rites’, is didactic, Hesiodic, and Orphic; rather than creating divisions between genres or sub-genres of non-narrative epos (e.g. pastoral v aetiological), as modern criticism has been too fond of doing, Virgil’s verses acknowledge the richness of the tradition. Divisions, after all, are not to be made within the ‘multi-generic’ output of Orpheus himself.65

3 Hard choices The opening poem of the third book of Ovid’s Amores 66 presents the poet wandering in search of inspiration in an ancient wood. In this locus amoenus the poet is approached by two very different women: stat uetus et multos incaedua silua per annos; credibile est illi numen inesse loco. fons sacer in medio speluncaque pumice pendens, et latere ex omni dulce queruntur aues. hic ego dum spatior tectus nemoralibus umbris (quod mea, quaerebam, Musa moueret, opus), uenit odoratos Elegia nexa capillos, et, puto, pes illi longior alter erat. forma decens, uestis tenuissima, uultus amantis, et pedibus uitium causa decoris erat. 65

66

Note how the Hellenistic poet Phanocles makes Orpheus sing of his love while ‘sitting in shady groves’ (fr. 1.3 Powell). In the same poem the Thracian women are said to have killed the poet because he first ‘revealed’ (›deixen) homosexual love; the verb suggests both actual practice and the didaxis of poetry (cf. again Aristophanes, Frogs 1032). On this poem see Wyke 1989 and Karakasis forthcoming. I have not catalogued each agreement with and/or debt to these discussions.

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uenit et ingenti uiolenta Tragoedia passu: fronte comae torua, palla iacebat humi; laeua manus sceptrum late regale mouebat, Lydius alta pedum uincla cothurnus erat. There stands an ancient wood, uncut for many years; you could believe that there was a religious power in that place. In the middle is a sacred spring, and a cave with overhanging rock, and on all sides the birds complain sweetly. While I was strolling here, covered by the shadow of the grove – I was wondering what work my Muse would stir – Elegy approached me, her hair was bound up and perfumed and, I think, one leg was longer than the other. Her shape was graceful, her clothing utterly thin, her face that of a lover, and the problem with her legs was a source of grace. Tragedy too approached me, with her large and brutal gait; her hair fell over her fierce brow and her robe trailed on the ground; with her left hand she waved a royal sceptre in a wide path, and her feet were bound up by the high Lydian buskin. Ovid, Amores 3.1.1–14 V. 2, credibile est illi numen inesse loco ‘you could believe that there was a religious power in that place’, does not merely play with a supposed etymological association between nemus and numen,67 but lends the setting the same mystical air as the Propertian grove of the opening poem of his third book. This opening scene, moreover, dramatises the process of poetic inuentio, that is the finding of suitable material for one’s poetry; the ‘ancient wood’ suggests the ‘(raw) material’, Ìlh or silua, from which poetry is fashioned.68 The nameless wood in which Ovid strolls is very much his own creation and reflects his preoccupations as an elegiac poet; it is in fact no less ‘the grove of [the elegiac poets] Callimachus and Philitas’ than the nemus at the opening of Propertius’ third book, which Ovid presumably has in mind. This is exactly the place to find his Muse, just as the opening scene of drowsy afternoon heat in Amores 1.5 (vv. 1–8) is designed to conjure an erotic epiphany of the poet’s mortal ‘Muse’.69 Ovid typically leaves nothing to chance. The birds which ‘complain sweetly’ (4) are indeed ‘elegiac’ birds: the word elegia was 67 68 69

Cf. Maltby 1991: s.v. nemus. Cf., e.g., Hinds 1998: 11–14, Hunter 2003a: 105, below p. 31. Note how the light in Ovid’s bedroom resembles that which is found in ‘woods’ (Amores 1.5.4). See further McKeown on Amores 1.5.1–8.

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connected by the Romans with complaint and lamentation,70 and the ‘complaining bird’ above all is the nightingale, to which Catullus compares himself in a poem that seems to introduce an elegiac collection (65.11–14). Greek and Roman poets played freely with the similarity of sound between the Greek word for nightingale ˆhdÛn and forms of ˆe©dw ‘I sing’, and the bird is specifically connected with elegoi ‘laments’ as early as Aristophanes (Birds 217). From Homer onwards (cf. Odyssey 19.520), nightingales in literature (as often in life) sing concealed in branches or thick bushes (cf. Theocritus 7.140, Catullus 65.13);71 in Ovid it is the poet himself who is tectus nemoralibus umbris, thus aligning himself not merely with a particular tradition of ‘Alexandrian’ composition (cf. Virgil, Eclogue 1.4), but specifically with the ‘sweetly complaining’ (elegiac) songsters. Ovid’s elegiac voice in this poem emerges, like the song of a nightingale, from the hidden spaces of a grove. The combination of sweetness and the nightingale may in fact evoke Callimachus’ assertions about poetry in the ‘Reply to the Telchines’: ˆh[don©dev] d ì åde melicr»terai ‘little nightingales [i.e. poems] are sweeter this way [i.e the way I write]’ (Callimachus fr. 1.16),72 as the ‘uncut wood’ perhaps also suggests the ‘untrodden paths’ which – with the adoption of a very likely supplement – Apollo advises the young Callimachus to follow in the same famous passage (fr. 1.27–8, cf. Propertius 3.3.26). So too in the Epistula Sapphus, Sappho, who has become a self-conscious elegiac poet (vv. 5–9), seeks solace in the caves, groves, and woods where she used to make love with Phaon (vv. 137–60); here all birds are silent (nullae dulce queruntur aues, v. 152) but for the nightingale, whose mournful song finds its counterpart in Sappho’s song of desolation (ales Ityn, Sappho desertos cantat amores, v. 155); the sacred spaces of cult, desire, and memory in Sappho’s poetry (cf. frr. 2, 94, 96 Voigt) have here combined with a poetic memory (whatever view we take of the authorship of the Epistula Sapphus) of the opening of Amores 3.1, a memory which also acknowledges the ‘programmatic’ strategy of the opening of that earlier poem.73 70 71

72 73

Cf., e.g., Hinds 1987: 103–4. Note Philostratus’ story about the sophist Scopelian who refused to open a school at Clazomenae because ‘the nightingale does not sing in a cage’, whereas he considered Smyrna ‘a grove (Šlsov) for his lovely voice’ (VS 516 = pp. 74–5 Wright). I do not know whether it is important that the only attested occurrence of ˆlsh©v (cf. Ovid’s nemoralibus ) is in a context of mourning for a young bride (Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.1066). Cf. also below p. 35 on Callimachus fr. 1.11–12. For further aspects of this memory cf. Rimell 1999: 123–5.

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With Ovid’s grove of love and inspiration we may also compare the opening of the second-century ad novel of Longus, Daphnis & Chloe. In this work the narrator chances upon the erotic material of his story –n L”sbwi qhrän –n Šlsei Numjän ‘while hunting on Lesbos in a grove of the Nymphs’; Ovid – typically – has by contrast deliberately placed himself in the magical space. The matched and rhyming phrases of the opening of Longus’ work both inhibit us from reading and challenge us to read these words as ‘on Lesbos, while hunting in a grove of the Nymphs’, and hunting, like Ovid’s ‘searching’ (v. 6), is a not uncommon image for the process of artistic creation, inuentio.74 The description of Longus’ ‘beautiful grove, full of trees’, a space sacred – like the novel itself (Proem 3) – to the Nymphs, Eros, and Pan, advertises the stylistic pleasures of the novel we are about to read and inspires both subject and style (‘a longing (pothos) seized me to write . . .’). Almost immediately after the proem we read a more detailed account of the cave of the Nymphs: There was a cave of the Nymphs, a large rock, hollow inside and with a circular front outside. The statues of the Nymphs themselves were made of stones: their feet were unshod, their arms bare to the shoulders, their hair untied over their necks, belts around their waists and smiles on their faces; the whole effect was of a dance. In the very centre of the large rocky cave, water bubbling up from a spring made a running stream, so that in front of the cave was stretched out a brilliant meadow of lush, soft grass, which was nourished by the moisture of the stream. There were pails and transverse flutes and pipes and reeds, the offerings of shepherds from the past. Longus, Daphnis & Chloe 1.4.1–3 Here it is hard not to recall the holy place on Helicon which Apollo points out to Propertius in 3.3 as his proper seat of inspiration: hic erat affixis uiridis spelunca lapillis, pendebantque cauis tympana pumicibus, orgia Musarum et Sileni patris imago fictilis et calami, Pan Tegeaee, tui; et Veneris dominae uolucres, mea turba, columbae tingunt Gorgoneo punica rostra lacu; 74

Cf., e.g., Macleod 1983: 181–2, Paschalis 2005: 58–9. Teiresias too was ‘hunting’ on Helicon when he had his fateful encounter, cf. below p. 46.

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diuerseque nouem sortitae iura puellae exercent teneras in sua dona manus: haec hederas legit in thyrsos, haec carmina neruis aptat, at illa manu texit utraque rosam. Here was a verdant grotto decorated with tiny stones [i.e. mosaics], and from the hollow rocks hang drums, the sacred instruments of the Muses, a clay image of father Silenus and your reed pipes, Tegean Pan; the swift doves of my mistress Venus, my own flock, dip their red bills in the Gorgon’s pool; in various places, the nine maidens who have been allotted their spheres busy their tender hands on their own gifts: one picks ivy for the thyrsus, one matches her song to the strings, and another weaves together roses with both hands. Propertius 3.3.27–36 Rather than speculate about possible common Hellenistic sources,75 it is more profitable to see how both authors (as also Ovid) use sacred spaces as images of their own work.76 As real ‘Nympholepts’ established in the countryside shrines of the divinities they venerated,77 so the author may create in his work a verbal icon of such a space in honour of the divinities who control and inspire him, whether they be the Nymphs as in Daphnis & Chloe or a combination of the Muses (here set in a remote rustic space), Dionysus, and the great Greek elegists of the past, as in Propertius’ case. More broadly, as we have seen, in Propertius’ oeuvre as a whole, as in Daphnis & Chloe, there lies a verbal space, parallel to Mnesiepes’ ‘Archilocheion’ (above p. 13), dedicated to the memory of the poet’s inspiring divinities; the elaborated ‘grove’ descriptions within the work are thus a microcosmically concentrated image of the whole. In the setting of Amores 3.1, then, it is no real surprise that Ovid’s ‘Muse’, Elegy herself, should appear; unlike Corinna in 1.5, however, Elegy’s sexy 75

76

77

It would be obvious to think of Philitas, particularly in view of Propertius 3.1.5 (above), cf. Bowie 1985: 84, Spanoudakis 2002: 264–7. On the Propertian description add Kambylis 1965: 162–76 and Papanghelis 1994: 199–200 to the standard commentaries. The bucolic–pastoral images in the Propertian cave, together with the apparent allusion – regardless of the text adopted in v. 31 – to Virgil, Eclogue 1.57, show that metre is not the most important criterion for the mode of poetry in which Propertius sites himself. Cf. Connor 1988. For these ideas in connection with literature cf. Hunter 1997: 26–7.

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body has a flaw (uitium 10, contrast 1.5.18 in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit ‘there was no flaw anywhere on her body’), but this is a flaw which only increases her attractiveness. Elegy has – or Ovid thinks she has – one leg (perhaps rather than ‘foot’, as most translators take it) shorter than the other, for the hexameter is paired with the shorter pentameter (cf. 1.1.3– 4, 27). The reason for Ovid’s conclusion may be that she limps, as Ovid elsewhere notes that elegiac verse does (Tristia 3.1.11 clauda . . . carmina); the contrast with Tragedy who bursts in unexpectedly ingenti . . . passu focuses attention on the gait of Elegy as well. As has long been recognised,78 Ovid’s meeting with the two poetic genres reworks the famous and very influential account of the late fifth-century sophist Prodicus, preserved for us by Xenophon (Memorabilia 2.1.21–33), of how the young Heracles pondered in a lonely place as to which life-path to follow and was approached by ‘two tall (meg†lav) women’ who turn out to be Virtue (‘Arete’) and Vice (‘Kakia’, though her friends know her as ‘Happiness’); the two women seek to win the hero over to their respective sides by both persuasion and attack of the other. Xenophon does not explicitly record which side Heracles chose, though the matter is hardly left in doubt. Ovid’s scene is, of course, of a rather different kind, for he has already long since ‘chosen’ love elegy (either because love chose him, Amores 1.1, or because when he did turn his hand to epic he lost his girlfriend’s sexual favours, Amores 2.1); his choice, unlike Heracles’, is one of whether to abandon current practice in favour of something new. Prodicus’ Vice has much in common with Ovid’s Elegy and with Ovid’s elegiac practice of cultus and ornatus: Two tall women approached him. One was a pleasing sight and such as befitted a free woman: her body was adorned with purity and her eyes with modesty, her appearance was chaste and her clothes white. The other had eaten so that she was fleshy and soft, her skin was made up so that it seemed whiter and redder than it actually was, and she carried herself in such a way as to seem more upright than she actually was. Her eyes were wide-open, her clothes allowed her physical charms to shine through, and she often looked at herself and glanced to see if anyone else was watching her; often she looked at her own shadow. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.22 78

Some discussion in Wyke 1989.

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Vice carries herself (t¼ sc¦ma) so as to seem ‘more upright than nature made her’, with a pun on the physical and moral senses of ½rq»v ‘upright’; it is tempting to think that Ovid’s charmingly limping (?) and revealingly clad Elegy betrays her ancestry in Prodicus’ loose woman. Gait here too is important: Vice ‘rushes up’ to Heracles (2.1.23) with what would be a distinct lack of female decorum, whereas Virtue walks at an even and unchanging pace. Whereas, however, Vice seeks, like a prostitute in comedy,79 to conceal what are thought to be the imperfections of nature, Elegy (and Ovid) revels in her uitium as a causa decoris. There is much else in the way of life which Vice offers to Heracles which may well make us think of the elegiac lifestyle and the themes of its poetry (e.g. the lack of interest in war and pr†gmata, the Greek equivalent of negotia, Mem. 2.1.24),80 but I wish here rather to pursue the particular slant that Ovid gives the Prodican pattern in Amores 3.1. What he has done, in brief, is to read Xenophon-Prodicus through a Callimachean lens, or perhaps rather to combine the Prodican fable with Callimachean stylistics; the various stylistic oppositions which Callimachus constructs in the ‘Reply to the Telchines’ are usually, and helpfully, traced back to the clash of Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs, but it is important to remember that the two tragedians are just one (albeit an important) manifestation of a wider pattern of dichotomies. Let us start with the two women. Elegy’s uestis tenuissima plainly looks to the ‘slender (leptal”h) Muse’ which Apollo urged the young Callimachus to cultivate (fr. 1.24); what ‘clothes’ Elegy is not merely diaphanous (as is Vice’s dress), but is in fact elegiac verse itself, which – like neoteric and Alexandrian verse in general – was notoriously regarded by Roman poets as stylistically tenuis.81 Unlike Callimachus’ Muse, however, Prodicus’ Vice eats well enough to show a lot of soft (and erotically arousing) flesh (teqramm”nhn e«v polusark©an te kaª ‰pal»thta), and she – like Virtue – is tall (meg†lh). Women in visions tend to be tall (cf. Aeschylus, Persians 184), and Ovid’s Tragedy, with her ingens passus, presumably fits the bill. The passage of Callimachus which has, however, most influenced Ovid comes somewhat earlier in the ‘Reply to the Telchines’: 79 80 81

Cf. Alexis fr. 103 Kassel–Austin. Cf., e.g., Ovid, Amores 1.15.1–6 (poetry opposed to military service and a career as a lawyer). Propertius’ use of ‘Coan’ to refer both to the transparent clothing of the elegiac woman and to the Philitan heritage of his poetry has often been remarked (cf. 1.2.2, 2.1.5–6).

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. . . . . .] . .rehn [½l]ig»sticová ˆll‡ kaq”lkei . . . .polÆ tŸn makrŸn Àmpnia Qesmoj»rov to±n d•] duo±n M©mnermov Âti glukÅv, a[82 ] ¡ meg†lh d ì oÉk –d©daxe gunž. . . . of few verses. But the nourishing Lawgiver [i.e. Demeter] far outweighs (?) the long . . . Of the two that Mimnermus is sweet . . . the tall lady did not teach. Callimachus fr. 1.9–12 This is one of the most debated passages in all of Greek poetry,83 but it is not improbable that in vv. 9–10 we have a comparison between two poems of Philitas of Cos (late third century bc), who was a founding figure of the scholarly style of poetry: of these one is, almost certainly, the Demeter (an epyllion on Coan legend and antiquities), but the identity of the other remains a matter for conjecture. Then, according to one scholarly interpretation, in vv. 11–12 Callimachus claims that one of the poems of Mimnermus (the seventh-century elegist from Colophon), which is here described as ‘the tall (meg†lh) woman’, demonstrated that poet’s sweetness (glukÅthv), whereas another did not; alternatively, the short poems of Mimnermus and Philitas are compared in this couplet to the longer poem or poems of a third poet (Antimachus’ Lyde being the favoured candidate). Ovid has clearly taken up the Callimachean oppositions, but we must wait for more of Callimachus’ text to be recovered before we can be sure just how he has exploited them.84 The Roman elegists, most notably Propertius, took up Callimachus’ flexible and shifting critical language about elegiac style and turned it into a generic contrast between their kind of elegiac love poetry on the one hand and (hexameter) epic and tragedy, epic’s next of kin, on the other; in this they were aided by and exploited, as we have seen, distinctions which the rhetorical tradition had constructed between the style of Homer and that of 82

83

84

Until ten years ago, the end of v. 11 was restored as a¬ kat‡ lept»n on the basis of a scholium on this passage preserved in a London papyrus, but it has now been pointed out that the papyrus cannot be held to read that (Bastianini 1996); the influence of the now discredited a¬ kat‡ lept»n on views of both Greek and Roman ‘Callimacheanism’ would itself make for a small book. For bibliographical surveys cf. Wimmel 1960: 87–92, Pretagostini 1984: 121–36, Allen 1993: 146–56, Massimilla 1996: 206–12. I have discussed some of the issues in greater detail in Hunter 2006b. For Ovidian engagement with these Callimachean verses elsewhere cf. Hinds 1999.

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Hesiod.85 Words which in Callimachus describe a particular style of elegy, such as glukÅ ‘sweet’, come to depict the elegiac project as a whole; the process was aided (and simplified) by the elegists’ concentration upon one subject (love) and the ‘lifestyle’ built around it, for which the nearest Greek models were in fact to be found in Hellenistic epigram. It is, of course, possible to trace the kind of ‘generic’ distinctions which the elegists drew far back into Greek literature. In the Thesmophoriazousai of Aristophanes, a song of the ‘avant-garde’ tragedian Agathon is described by a very down-to-earth listener as ‘sweet (¡dÅ) and effeminate and full of tongue and erotic kisses’ (vv. 131–2);86 this is obviously sexy stuff, and so is Agathon himself – ‘fair of face, pale, smooth-shaven, with a woman’s voice, soft (‰pal»v), pretty to look at’ (vv. 191–2). The link in the elegists between the life they lead and the critical language with which they describe their poetry is part of the fact that they make their (real or imagined) lives the subject of their first-person verse; though Agathon (whatever his real ‘lifestyle’) will not have been a character in his own tragedies, a comic poet could forge an indissoluble link between poetic style and ‘lifestyle’. The generic distinctions which the elegists make thus go back, through Callimachus, to much earlier debates about the moral and civic effects of different types of music and poetry. A famous fragment (fr. 1) of the late sixth-century philosopher and poet Xenophanes describes and prescribes the conduct of a proper symposium; a repeated stress in this passage on purity and piety seems to foreshadow important elements, not just of the persona of a later poet such as Callimachus, but also of the quality of diction (‘purity’ goes hand in hand with ‘clarity’) which such poets claimed for themselves; Xenophanes is not primarily thinking of qualities of diction when he urges the symposiasts to hymn the god eÉjžmoiv mÅqoiv kaª kaqaro±si l»goiv, ‘with reverent muthoi and pure logoi’, but the turning by later poets, both Greek and Roman, of moral and sacral language into the language of criticism and poetic self-identification is, as we have seen, a familiar phenomenon. Even Xenophanes’ requirement, as part of pious observance, of water which is ‘sweet and pure’ (v. 8) seems oddly to foreshadow the end of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (above pp. 14– 15), a description which Roman poets at least took as programmatic for Callimachus’ poetry. So too, at least from the perspective of later ages,87 85 87

86 I paraphrase, cf. Austin–Olson ad loc. Cf. above p. 20. For Xenophanes’ poem in its own context cf. Ford 2002: chapter 2, with earlier bibliography.

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Xenophanes could be seen to proscribe a certain type of poetry from the proper symposium: oÎ ti m†cav di”pein Titžnwn oÉd• Gig†ntwn oÉd• < > KentaÅrwn, pl†smata tän prot”rwn, £ st†siav sjedan†vá to±v oÉd•n crhst¼n ›nestiná [One must not] tell of the battles of the Titans or the Giants or the Centaurs, the fictions of men of the past, or of violent disputes; there is nothing of value in them. Xenophanes fr. 1.21–3 Xenophanes, who elsewhere attacked the immoral picture of the gods which Homer painted,88 outlaws strife-filled songs, such as the battles of Titans and Giants, ‘in which there is nothing of value’. What is at issue for Xenophanes is certainly not a generic opposition of elegy and epic, but it is also not difficult to see how, just as a creative ‘misreading’ of Callimachus (cf. fr. 1.35–6 ‘may I shed the burden which weighs on me as heavily as the three-cornered island upon dread Enceladus’) led to Gigantomachy as a standard example of grandiose poetry to be avoided (cf. Propertius 2.1.19–20, 39–40), so an emphasis upon peace both in the drinkers’ own lives and in the poetry to which they listen might evolve in the directions this chapter has been describing. Even Xenophanes’ dismissal of mythical battles as plasmata, ‘fictions’, finds a distant echo in the fact that the elegists write in the first person about their (supposed) lives. The Callimachean ‘Reply’ has been appropriated in Amores 3.1 in other ways as well. Three examples will suggest how thorough-going Ovid’s reworking is. First, Tragedy appeals, in an attempt to shame the poet, to his notoriety: nequitiam uinosa tuam conuiuia narrant, narrant in multas compita secta uias. saepe aliquis digito uatem designat euntem atque ait “hic, hic est, quem ferus urit Amor.” fabula, nec sentis, tota iactaris in urbe, dum tua praeterito facta pudore refers. Tipsy dinner-parties tell of your goings-on, the crossings where many roads meet tell of them. Often someone points with his finger to the bard 88

Cf. (briefly) Feeney 1991: 6–8.

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as he passes and says, ‘This, this is he whom wild Love has set aflame!’ You are talked of as common gossip all over the city, and you do not realise it – indeed you have abandoned all sense of shame and tell of your own deeds. Ovid, Amores 3.1.17–22 Ovid, of course, in fact revels in the notoriety he claims for himself;89 we may here compare another reworking of the Prodican ‘Choice of Heracles’. In the Dream of Lucian, the second-century ad sophist recalls a dream he had many years before in which two women, Sculpture and Education (‘Paideia’), sought to own his future. Where Tragedy seeks to shame Ovid with being a subject of public notoriety, Paideia holds out such notoriety, though for the right reasons, to the young Lucian as something to look forward to (and something which of course, by implication, the famous satirist now enjoys): If you ever travel abroad, not even in a foreign land will you be unknown or without distinction, for I shall make you so recognisable that everyone who sees you will nudge the man next to him and point you out with his finger and say ‘That’s the man.’ Lucian, Dream 11 As for Callimachus, his claim that the Telchines ‘mutter’ (–pitrÅzousin) against his poetry seems to contain – whatever the exact nuance of the verb – both a claim that his poetry is the subject of public notice and the suggestion that that notice takes the form of malicious whispering; the Pindaric theme of the envy to which both poet and patron are exposed is here not far away (cf. again the end of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, to which Ovid seems to allude in his own attack upon Liuor, Amores 1.15.35–6). Ovid turns Callimachus’ rather scholastic assertions into a proud claim of notoriety tota . . . in urbe; both poets claim to be the object of gossip because of what they write. It may in fact be that saepe at the head of v. 19 picks up the opening of v. 1 of the ‘Reply’, which seems all but certainly to have been poll†ki moi Telc±nev ‘often at me the Telchines . . .’.90 Secondly, the Telchines – or so Callimachus alleges – claim that Callimachus’ style of poetry and its subject are inappropriate to his advanced

89 90

Cf. the use of the same motif at Horace c. 4.3.21–4, in another poem for which Callimachus’ ‘Reply’ is an important intertext. Cf. Cameron 1995: 340, Pontani 1999.

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de monte sororum

years. So, of course, does Tragedy, as far as Ovid is concerned:91 elegy is a work of youth, and it is now time to move on. Callimachus’ lament for old age is a complex response to literary tradition,92 but in part it is the adoption of a specifically archaic voice. ‘The early Greek poets pull no punches when they talk about old age . . . but nobody denounces old age at such length and with such intensity as Mimnermus’.93 Callimachus’ lament for his old age may move forward into present time and the first person what remained in Mimnermus as generalised warnings about what lay ahead and wishes to avoid the ills of old age (cf. fr. 6 West–Allen); this must, of course, remain a speculation, but the idea that Callimachus’ voice is that of a Mimnermus now grown old, an elegist for whom the nightmare of old age has become a reality, would certainly fit with the rhetoric of the ‘Reply’. The Roman elegists of course could not repeat Callimachus’ lament for old age, because their occupation is love and love is young man’s business, aetas prima canat Veneres (Propertius 2.10.7). But this too is a recurrent Mimnerman theme: youth is short (cf. fr. 5 West–Allen) and love-making is the sweetest pleasure. Whereas, then, Callimachus had exploited Mimnermus’ condemnation of old age, the elegists pick up his celebration of youth and love as a principal, if not the principal, elegiac theme. In doing so, they did what they could, of course, to emphasise the erotic aspects of the Aitia: Cydippe comes to occupy the same place in elegy that Achilles occupies in epic (Ovid, Remedia amoris 381–2), as Acontius becomes a paradigmatic model of the elegiac lover.94 We do not know enough about Mimnermus’ poetry to be sure whether Callimachus’ first-person appropriation in the ‘Reply’ of the Mimnerman theme of old age, under the influence perhaps of first-person archaic laments for old age (poems such as Sappho fr. 58 Voigt95 and Alcman PMG 26), was then imitated in a Roman conversion into autobiography of what was essentially third-person and generalised poetry about er¯os in Mimnermus, but it is clear that the elegists’ typical operations upon the Callimachean model were an expanded 91 92 94

95

ingenium in v. 25 may form a contrast to Callimachus’ emphasis upon techn¯e, cf. 1.15.14 with McKeown’s note. 93 Allen 1993: 32. Cf. Hunter 2001a, Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 72–6. Cf., e.g., Kenney 1983, Barchiesi 1993: 353–63. Griffin 1985: 201 n. 22 observes: ‘Could they [i.e. Augustan poets] have gone on referring to Callimachus as a love poet, if they had really read much of his work?’; this ignores the processes by which poetic heritage is actually created. For the new text of this poem see Gronewald–Daniel 2004a and 2004b and West 2005.

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version of one way of understanding Callimachus’ own relationship to, and revisions of, his models. Finally, when it is Elegy’s turn to speak to Ovid, she smiles and glances flirtatiously: altera, si memini, limis surrisit ocellis The other lady, if I remember well, smiled and looked at me from an angle. Ovid, Amores 3.1.33 The smile we recognise as that of the goddess of love,96 the flirtatious glance as that of countless women who know the effect their looks have upon men; we might particularly remember Anacreon’s ‘Thracian filly . . . glancing sideways at me with her eyes’ (PMG 417.1). There is a ‘sideways glance’ too (or rather the absence of one) in the ‘Reply to the Telchines’: MoÓsai g‡r Âsouv ­don Àqmati pa±dav mŸ loxäi, polioÆv oÉk ˆp”qento j©louv. Those whom the Muses look upon as children with no sideways glance, these they do not put away from their love when their hair is white. Callimachus fr. 1.37–8 Elegy is, as we have seen, Ovid’s ‘Muse’ and, unlike Callimachus’ Muses, she does indeed look upon the poet Àqmati . . . loxäi ‘with sideways glance’, because that is what comes naturally. And Ovid would have it no other way. For Roman poets, then, the grove was a sacred space which marked the production of poetry as a separate area of experience, knowledge, and activity, but one with particular connections to the traditions of Greek poetry to which they proclaimed allegiance. Horace opens his lyric verse with a poem which considers the various occupations of men before turning to his own mode of life: me doctarum hederae praemia frontium dis miscent superis, me gelidum nemus nympharumque leues cum Satyris chori secernunt populo . . . 96

The Greek equivalent of subrideo, Ëpomeidi†w, is used of Aphrodite at Anacreontea 28.14.

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Me the ivy which learned brows win places amidst the gods above, me the cool grove and the playful choruses of nymphs and satyrs separate off from the common people . . . Horace, Odes 1.1.29–32 Here Callimachean reserve (secernunt populo . . .) combines with a Bacchic revelry (and Bacchic inspiration) for which no Callimachean model will readily be found; the Roman engagement with Callimachus is always part of a complex engagement with Greek literary and intellectual culture in a much wider sense. To this further Roman extension of the imagined space of Greek poetry we now turn.

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CHAPTER

2 In the grip of the god

Augustan poets turned Bacchus into a principal source of poetic inspiration.1 They had, of course, precedents in Greek culture, where Dionysus had always had close links with the Muses and with the ‘secret knowledge’ which poets possessed. Plato, with his own rationalist agenda, made his Socrates compare poets to possessed Corybants (a frenzied cult with strong links to Dionysus, cf. Propertius 3.17.35–6) and to bacchants (Ion 533e–4a); poets did not, on this scheme, compose ‘as a result of their skill’ (–k t”cnhv), but rather because they were possessed by higher forces. Greek poets themselves had, of course, never abandoned claims to sophia and techn¯e, whatever they might owe to the Muses, and Callimachus at least was to put techn¯e at the centre of his poetic claims (fr. 1.17), perhaps in direct confrontation with the assertions of Socrates in the Ion.2 Plato’s picture is, of course, an exaggerated development from traditional ideas, which exploits the polyvalence inherent in the standard notion of a poet as a ‘servant (qer†pwn) of the Muses’.3 Nevertheless, Plato’s amused picture of poets ‘with the god in them’ (›nqeoi) was to recur in Roman poetry as part of the new sacral language and context in which Augustan poets sited themselves and their work (with greater or lesser degrees of seriousness). Horace wrote two odes (2.19, 3.25) in which, like Plato’s poets, he presented himself as plenus deo, and in which it is the god’s power which is responsible 1

2

Helpful surveys in Kroll 1924: chapter 2, Troxler-Keller 1964: 56–64, Nisbet and Hubbard’s introduction to Horace c. 2.19 and Nisbet and Rudd’s to c. 3.25; for the politics of the discourse of inspiration cf. Fowler 2002. For the Greek background cf. A. Hardie 2004, and for the social context at Rome Griffin 1985: 65–87. 3 Cf. above p. 8. Cf. Hunter 1989b.

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for the poem and which in turn the poem celebrates.4 This chapter will explore certain other aspects of the Dionysiac inheritance, for it was under the sign of this god that Roman poets created some of their most provoking fusions of Greek and Roman, east and west; it is in the nature of the god that those fusions will seem to us as much ‘political’ as ‘religious’.

1 Dionysiac uncertainties Dionysus plays a perhaps surprisingly small rˆole in the high Greek poetry of Ptolemaic Alexandria.5 As always, our ignorance enjoins caution – we know, for example, nothing of Callimachus’ ‘Semele’, far too little of Eratosthenes’ ‘Erigone’,6 and virtually nothing of Alexandrian tragedy and satyr-play – but the fact, whatever conclusions we draw from it, remains. It is all the more striking in view of the religious and cultural importance of Dionysus at Alexandria and to the Ptolemaic dynasty, who included Dionysus among their divinised ancestors and whose spiritual founder, Alexander the Great, may himself have inaugurated the analogy between his ‘triumph’ and that of the god which was to be drawn so commonly after him.7 Athenaeus preserves an account of the extraordinarily lavish parade in the god’s honour which Ptolemy Philadelphus staged as part of his ‘Grand Procession’,8 and it is the Dionysus celebrated there, namely the god of wine, maenadism, and riotous progress, the god in fact of Catullus 64.251–64, whose appearances in Alexandrian poetry seem so few and far between. Dionysus as a god of poetry had, of course, a prominent public presence through the guilds of itinerant performers known as the ‘Artists of 4 5

6 7 8

On 2.19 see esp. Henrichs 1978. For a survey of references to Dionysus in Callimachus cf. Henrichs 1975: 143. The one reference to the ‘Dionysias’ of Neoptolemus of Parium attests to the god as the ‘inventor’ of fruit cultivation (Athenaeus 3.82d = fr. 1 Mette), exactly the theme of Tibullus 1.7.32 (cf. Diod. Sic. 1.20.3 (Osiris), 3.63.3 (Dionysus)), and one would like to know much more about Neoptolemus’ poem (and not just in connection with Tibullus 1.7, for which cf. below pp. 50–67); Neoptolemus is probably to be dated to the (? later) third century but, however ‘Alexandrian’ the work of this poet and critic may seem, we do not know whether he ever worked in the Ptolemaic capital. Cf. Mette 1980, Brink 1963: 47. Cf. Fraser 1972: ii 903–5, Rosokoki 1995. Cf. Fraser 1972: i 201–7, Hunter 2003a: 108. For Dionysus also identified with Osiris cf. below pp. 54–67. Cf. Rice 1983; bibliography at Hunter 2003a: 2 n. 5.

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Dionysus’, who enjoyed Ptolemaic support and patronage.9 Perhaps, in fact, we might speculate that the most obvious manifestations of the god were avoided by at least some of the poets of the Museum, including Callimachus, as being a subject too obvious and ‘popular’. Propertius at any rate, whose ‘Callimachean’ sensibilities were second to none, associates the celebration of Dionysus in poetry with the grand style (‘thundering’) of the Pindaric dithyramb (Propertius 3.17.39–40).10 The Callimachean stress upon t”cnh and ars, together with the pronounced e´ litism of the Callimachean persona, were elements in a tradition which regarded Callimachus and his imitators as ‘water-drinkers’, opposed to the Dionysiac ecstasy of high epic and lyric (cf. esp. Horace, Epistles 1.19.1–11);11 as Euripides’ Bacchae makes clear, a fundamental element in the way that Dionysiac worship was imagined was that it was open to all and broke down barriers between social and cultural classes – the persona of, say, Callimachus, Epigram 28 (‘I hate the circling poem . . .’) would hardly have approved.12 It may, of course, also be that a more nuanced chronology than we currently possess would show us that the heyday of Alexandrian Dionysus came just too late for Callimachus and Apollonius. Other writers in other contexts do not seem to have avoided the subject: Euphorion’s ‘Dionysos’ was clearly a poem of some size and scope, and it dealt with subjects from the god’s travels and cults – it seems to have been an important source for Nonnus –13 and Dionysus was also a prominent figure in some third-century prose, such as the ‘euhemerising’ stories of Dionysius Scytobrachion.14 Dionysus was Alexander’s particular god and will have had a prominent place in the historiography of his world conquest.15 The traditional Dionysus makes only two appearances of any significance in Apollonius’ Argonautica. At 2.904–10 a place in Paphlagonia sacred to Dionysus and his mysteries, a stopping-place on his return from India, is a marker on the Argonauts’ outward journey; the scholia note that the name of the place occurs also in Callimachus (fr. 600), but – for what it is worth – they cite only prose authors for the story of the god’s Indian

9

10 12 14

Cf. Theocritus 17.112–14, Le Guen 2001: ii 7–9, Hunter 2003a: 182–3 with further bibliography. The god almost certainly appears in the dream of Herodas 8, where again it will be his connection with drama which is important. 11 Discussion and bibliography in Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 448–9. Cf. below p. 72. 13 Cf. Barigazzi 1963, Hollis 1976, Cl´ Cf. below p. 111. ua 1991. 15 Cf. below p. 61. Cf. Rusten 1982, esp. 76–80, 109–12.

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expedition.16 Secondly, Dionysus’ relations with the abandoned Ariadne are explicitly recalled through the cloak which is one of the gifts which Jason and Medea use to lure Medea’s brother Apsyrtus to his death: t¼n m”n ça DiwnÅswi k†mon aÉta© D©hi –n ˆmji†lwi C†ritev qea©, aÉt‡r ¾ paid© däke Q»anti metaÓtiv, ¾ d ì aÔ l©pen ë ϒyipule©hi, ¡ d ì ›por ì A«son©dhi pol”sin met‡ kaª t¼ j”resqai glžnesin eÉerg•v xeinžion. oÎ min ˆj†sswn oÎte ken e«sor»wn glukÆn ¯meron –mplžseiavá toÓ d• kaª ˆmbros©h ½dmŸ m”nen –x”ti ke©nou –x oÕ Šnax aÉt¼v Nusžiov –gkat”lekto ˆkroc†lix o­nwi kaª n”ktari, kal‡ memarpÛv stžqea parqenik¦v Minw©dov, ¤n pote QhseÅv Knwss»qen —spom”nhn D©hi –nª k†llipe nžswi. The divine Graces themselves had woven this cloak for Dionysus on seagirt Dia; he gave it to his son Thoas who in turn left it for Hypsipyle who offered it to the son of Aison to take away as a splendid friendship gift, together with many other wonderful things. You could never satisfy your sweet desire either by touching or gazing upon it. An ambrosial scent hovered over it ever since the time when the Nysaian lord himself, tipsy with wine and nectar, lay upon it as he pressed against himself the lovely breasts of the maiden daughter of Minos, whom Theseus once abandoned on the island of Dia after she had followed him from Knossos. Apollonius, Argonautica 4.424–34 The scholia on this passage cite a hexameter of Callimachus on how Naxos used to be called Dia (fr. 601), a type of subject (the names of islands) dear to Callimachus, but that verse may in fact have nothing to do with Dionysus and Ariadne,17 and we cannot assume a Callimachean background here. Apollonius’ seductive, synaesthetic description (touch 428, sight 429, smell 430) is far from the riotous procession of Dionysus and his followers in Catullus 64, where the emphasis (paradoxical on a silent tapestry) is on the loud, barbarian sounds of the thiasos;18 the difference is in part due to 16 17 18

–n”pousi (‘they say’) in v. 905 might refer to a specific account; Pfeiffer suggests Callimachus, but nothing is certain. Pfeiffer notes the possibility that it comes from the ‘Graces’ aition of Aitia 1. Cf. Fitzgerald 1995: 155–6.

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Catullus’ quest for tonal variety in his poem, but it may also reflect the way in which standard images of the god had developed in poetry since the middle of the third century. One Dionysiac text refuses, however, to be overlooked. Echoes of Pentheus’ fate in Euripides’ Bacchae resound through the tale of Teiresias’ punishment by Athena in Callimachus’ hymn to the goddess;19 in both texts the fate of Actaeon, who was torn apart by his hunting dogs for having seen Artemis bathing, acts as a terrible analogy for the central narrative. There is, of course, a complex textual game in play here. The blinding of the young Teiresias is played out through echoes of a text in which the old and blind Teiresias fulfills the rˆole which Athena grants him in compensation for the sight he has lost, and in which it is another young Theban who plays the rˆole that Callimachus assigns to the future prophet; the reference to Teiresias’ ‘prophecies for Cadmus’ (vv. 125–6) is perhaps an explicit evocation of this couple’s closeness in Euripides’ tragedy. We see here one form of the familiar Hellenistic (and Roman) interest in writing ‘the youth’ of famous literary figures, a writing which both engages with, and constructs an imaginative priority to, famous texts of the past.20 Our knowledge of Euripides’ tragedy, with the pathos and emotional ambivalence of its conclusion,21 allows us to contrast the Callimachean Athena’s anger and its results with the Euripidean Dionysus’ more sterile insistence on his rights. It is again the Bacchae which is the most important source for the mysterious telling of the story of Pentheus in Theocritus, Idyll 26, a poem which may in fact have nothing to do with Alexandria.22 This puzzling narrative, which owes much to hymnic traditions, evokes Dionysiac ritual not just through the piety of the speaking voice and the actual story it tells, but also through its concern with ritual correctness (v. 9) and detail (the numbers of vv. 2 and 6, probably the antiphonal response of vv. 18–19);23 the poem extends 19 20 21

22 23

Cf. Hunter 1992a: 23–4. For echoes of the Bacchae in Catullus 63 cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 479–80. Theocritus, Idyll 11 (‘the Cyclops’) is the standard and perhaps easiest example. Cf. in general Barchiesi 1993. It is tempting to see in Agaue’s closing wish to go somewhere where ‘hateful Kithairon will not see me nor I Kithairon with my eyes’ (Bacchae 1383–5) the seed from which the Callimachean mother’s complaint against Helicon who ‘keeps [Teiresias’] eyes’ (v. 92) grew. On this poem cf. Cairns 1992, Henrichs 1999: 237–40. We may also suspect that v. 26 turns the ‘Pentheus’ motif into a ‘sacred etymology’.

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the traditional hymnic exploitation of the audience’s prior knowledge of (e.g.) myth to the creation of a text ‘for those who know’, one which acts as a boundary between the initiated and the profane (b”baloi, v. 14). Here too, however, it is our textual memory of the Bacchae which complicates the picture. The death of Pentheus, described in particularly bloody terms (vv. 20–6), is said to be an act ‘without fault’ which should disturb no pious person (v. 38, the closing verse of the poem); the speaking voice, however, turns away from the narrative which he or she has just constructed and challenges us (not) to ‘read’ it in one of the very ways which that narrative might be thought to have invited: oÉk ˆl”gwá mhd ì Šllov ˆpecqom”nw DionÅswi jront©zoi I do not care, and let no one else give a thought to one who is hated by Dionysus. Theocritus 26.27–8 Social groups must, of course, read their myths in particular ways, or those myths lose – for them – the authority which is the purpose of their telling; rarely, however, can textual tellings of myth conceal the fact that such stories are open-ended constructions to which more than one response is possible, and very many spectators and readers over the centuries have felt that in the Bacchae Euripides has crafted precisely such an ending to his play. Something which in fact contributes to this sense is that it is clear – despite the large lacuna in the text – that the ending of the tragedy shows an attempt by the god to close down ‘interpretation’, through his insistence on his status (as though that explained everything) and his appeal to the authority of Zeus (vv. 1345–9); the gap between, on the one hand, the divine demand for honour and, on the other, human motivation and emotion is, of course, one of the oldest tragic ideas, but here it is given special thematic importance. So too, in Theocritus, Idyll 26, the speaking voice – this time the worshipper, rather than the god himself – seeks to close down our response to the emotionally complex narrative which that voice has just delivered. We may wonder whether the closing verses do not merely (and, of course, knowingly) open up the possibilities of divergent interpretation, in the very act of apparently trying to close down such possibilities, but also allow us to sense that the ‘meaning’ of the story of Pentheus, and perhaps too of Euripides’ Bacchae, had indeed been the subject of critical debate; as such, Theocritus, Idyll 26 becomes a strong example of the familiar truth that the exploitation of prior 47

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texts is always an act of interpretation. Readers always make choices, and readers who align themselves with cultic groups must make very clear choices indeed. Greek religion is, notoriously, not a ‘religion of the book’, but it may be worth wondering whether, in the Hellenistic period, the Bacchae took on, for some readers, some of the features which we associate with sacred texts. Dionysus was always unlikely to yield to a single view. Many of these same issues, and the influence of the Bacchae, recur in Horace’s poem on the death of Cleopatra (Odes 1.37), who, as a Ptolemy, was herself very closely associated with both Dionysus and Isiac cult – she was in fact the ‘new Isis’, as her partner Antony was the ‘new Dionysus’.24 The ode begins (nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero | pulsanda tellus ‘now we must drink, now beat the earth with free foot’)25 with an allusion to the opening of a drinking song of Alcaeus, Horace’s most important archaic Greek model, in celebration of the death of the tyrant of Mytilene, Myrsilos:26 nÓn cr¦ meqÅsqhn ka© tina p•r b©an pÛnhn, –peª dŸ k†tqane MÅrsilov Now is the time to get drunk; everyone should be constrained to drink, since Myrsilus is dead . . . Alcaeus fr. 332 Voigt Horace has replaced one very familiar Dionysiac motif (‘hard drinking’) with another (liberation, ‘with unfettered foot’ as Nisbet and Hubbard translate pede libero); we may recall the bacchants escaping from Thebes in the Bacchae: v d ì aÔ sÆ b†kcav e²rxav, v sunžrpasav kŠdhsav –n desmo±si pandžmou st”ghv, jroÓda© g ì –ke±nai lelum”nai pr¼v ½rg†dav skirtäsi Br»mion ˆnakaloÅmenai qe»ná aÉt»mata d ì aÉta±v desm‡ dielÅqh podän kl¦id”v t ì ˆn¦kan qÅretr ì Šneu qnht¦v cer»v. 24

25 26

Cf., e.g., Plutarch, Antony 24.4 (with Pelling’s note), 54.9. On Octavian/Augustus’ exploitation of Antony’s association with Dionysus see esp. Zanker 1988: 57–65. Some of the Dionysiac motifs of Odes 1.37 were first pointed out by A. Hardie 1976; I do not record my every debt to and disagreement with this article. There is perhaps a suggestion of etymological play between Saliaribus and salio. On Horace’s adaptation of Alcaeus here cf. Cavarzere 1996: 194–7.

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The bacchants whom you confined, whom you gathered together and bound in chains in the public prison, have been released and have gone off dancing towards the sacred meadows, calling upon Bromios as their god. All by themselves, the chains came off their feet and the bolts released the doors with no help from a human hand. Euripides, Bacchae 443–8 Both the echo of Alcaeus and pede libero cast Cleopatra in the rˆole of opponent of Dionysus, but Horace’s poem then goes on to suggest a more complex relationship with Dionysus; Antony is not mentioned in the ode, but his god is never far away. According to Horace, Cleopatra sought to bring dementis ruinas (‘crazed collapse’) upon the Capitol – the words evoke both Dionysiac ma©nesqai ‘madness’ and the ‘falling down’ (ruere) which Dionysus inflicts upon Pentheus’ palace in the course of the Bacchae (cf. esp. Ba. 585–92, Horace c. 2.19.14– 15) – but she was forced instead, like Pentheus, to see her own palace in ruins (v. 25).27 The transition from enemy of the god to (deluded) Dionysus and back to defeated Pentheus is most powerfully marked by the fact that she looks upon the ruins of her palace uoltu sereno, an expression typical not of Pentheus (far from it, cf. Ba. 214) but rather of Dionysus (cf. Ba. 439, 636). So too, ebria, furorem (12), and lymphatam (14) all mark the condition of both follower and enemy of the god (cf. esp. Ba. 977–81). Cleopatra is depicted as a maenad (note the snake-handling of vv. 26–7) who (paradoxically) refused to be led in a triumph, the Roman procession which was recognised as the equivalent of Greek processions in honour of Dionysus. Nor is the debt to the Bacchae just one-sided. Caesar ‘hunted’ Cleopatra down in order to ‘bind’ her in chains; both images are very prominent in the tragedy to describe Pentheus’ pursuit of the stranger and the Theban women, but the epic similes of vv. 15–20 mark Octavian as a very different kind of pursuer.28 When Caesar brings the queen back in ueros timores, we may be reminded of 27 28

The note of Nisbet and Hubbard on v. 25 needs revision here. For the language of hunting in the Bacchae cf. vv. 226, 434–7, 451, 732, 1204–7, 1233– 43. Whether or not Dionysus and his followers can be ‘bound’ is a crucial issue in the play, cf. vv. 504–5, 616, 634, 643, 648, 792. A. Hardie 1976: 127 takes vv. 20–1 as evoking Heracles’ capture of Cerberus (in line with his general view of the relation between c. 1.37 and Pindar, Dithyramb 2) and notes that ‘it is inconceivable that Horace should imply any failure on the part of Octavian’. The strategy of shared Dionysiac imagery does not ‘imply any failure’ in such terms; nevertheless, vv. 20–1 do clearly suggest that Octavian would have led Cleopatra in his triumph (cf. Nisbet and Hubbard ad loc.) and that he did not, in the end, do so (vv. 30–2).

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how Agaue is returned ‘to her right mind’ after the killing of Pentheus (note esp. Ba. 1287 – Cadmus’ address to ‘wretched truth’); the scale of the defeat at Actium, like the sight of Pentheus’ head, makes the crazed woman realise the reality of her situation. Many modern readers have attested to the strange sympathy which Horace’s Cleopatra evokes;29 be that as it may, we are certainly confronted with another Dionysiac myth where, at the very least, tonal ambiguity must be allowed, and here echoes of the Bacchae function again to complicate rather than simplify. Cleopatra embodied more than one side of Dionysus and his female followers, and our horror must be mixed with a strange and strangely unsettling admiration. The Dionysiac enemy proves hard to characterise, and this has obvious consequences for Octavian/Augustus and any poem which celebrates his victory over this enemy. In the post-Actium order he has now become the Liberator, the one under whose dispensation drinking is possible, but it was he who, more than anyone else, sought to impose a closed interpretation upon the Dionysiac myth of Antony and Cleopatra, as some modern critics have similarly sought to close down Horace’s poem. The history of interpretation suggests that, once again, the Dionysiac has proved impossible to confine; Odes 1.37, no less than Theocritus, Idyll 26, continues to cause critics the kind of uncertainty which the smiling god of the Bacchae would certainly have enjoyed. As for Cleopatra, she – so Odes 1.37 in fact suggests – escaped from the emperor’s clutches and the cold hand of interpretation into the world of the imagination, where she has reigned evermore.

2 The boundaries of power Tibullus 1.730 celebrates the birthday (cf. v. 49 Genium, v. 63 Natalis) of the poet’s patron, M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus, by linking it to Messalla’s triumph for his campaign in Aquitania, which the surviving Fasti tell us was held on 25 September 27 bc: 29

30

For a sober reality-check see Newman 1967: 31–5, pp. 410–11 of Nisbet and Hubbard’s introduction to the poem and Wyke 2002: 195–243 (esp. 221, 242–3). Wyke notes how, to some extent, Augustan poetic accounts of Cleopatra offer a more nuanced view of her than do representations in other media. To the commentaries add (inter alios) Klingner 1951, Gaisser 1971, Bright 1978, Ball 1983, Moore 1988–9, Knox 2005 (an important reconsideration of the poem’s date).

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hunc cecinere diem Parcae, fatalia nentes stamina non ulli dissoluenda deo, hunc fore Aquitanas posset qui fundere gentes, quem tremeret forti milite uictus Atur. euenere: nouos pubes Romana triumphos uidit et euinctos bracchia capta duces; at te uictrices lauros, Messalla, gerentem portabat nitidis currus eburnus equis. The Parcae sang of this day as they spun the threads of fate which no god may undo; they sang that this would be the day which would rout the tribes of Aquitania, the day at which the Atur, conquered by brave soldiers, would tremble. It has come to pass. The young men of Rome have seen new triumphs and leaders with their captured arms in chains; you, Messalla, wore the victor’s laurels and an ivory chariot drawn by white horses bore you. Tibullus 1.7.1–8 Scholars have been much exercised about the relation between birthday and triumph. Did Messalla celebrate his triumph shortly after his birthday, or did the two celebrations fall on the same day, an arrangement for which parallels can be found both earlier and later?31 In either case, at Messalla’s birth the Fates prophesied his future glory (vv. 1–4), a prophecy proved true by Messalla’s triumph (euenere, cf. 2.5.11); no close chronological relationship is in fact necessary between birthday and triumph because ‘the victory is linked with Messalla’s birthday because it brought the victor into the world’32 – the birth of Messalla (and hence every subsequent celebration of that birth) thus spelled doom for the Aquitanians. We might, however, wish to push this prophecy a little further back in time than Messalla’s birth. The opening couplet echoes the prophecy about Achilles made by the Parcae at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis in Catullus 64 (esp. vv. 321–2, 382–3): there the Parcae prophesy both the hero’s birth (338 nascetur uobis expers terroris Achilles ‘you will have a son, Achilles, who will not know fear’) and his subsequent deeds (348 egregias uirtutes claraque facta). Messalla will have enjoyed the implied comparison.33 If the echo of Catullus 64 is 31 33

32 Cairns 1979: 171 n. 22. Cf. Weinstock 1971: 209. It may or may not be relevant that, in his prescription for ‘birthday speeches’ (geneqliakoª l»goi), pseudo-Dionysius recommends comparing ‘the birthday boy’ to Achilles, if

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also used to suggest that the Fates’ prophecy took place at the wedding of Messalla’s parents (or at least before Messalla’s birth), then the sequence of thought seems clear: before his birth, the Fates prophesied the birth of a child who would conquer Aquitania. To compare less with somewhat greater, we may be reminded of Jupiter’s prophecy to Venus, many centuries before it was to be fulfilled: nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar, imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris, Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo. hunc tu olim caelo spoliis Orientis onustum accipies secura: uocabitur hic quoque uotis. From such a fair line will be born a Trojan Caesar – the boundary of his empire will be Ocean and of his fame the stars – Julius, a name descended from great Iulus. One day you, your worries over, will receive him in heaven, laden down with spoils from the East; he will also be invoked in prayers. Virgil, Aeneid 1.286–90 Whatever the precise reference of these much discussed verses, v. 289 evokes (inter alia)34 a Roman triumph, not unlike the prophecy of the Parcae for Messalla. We shall, however, see other ways in which Messalla and Virgil’s Caesar are very different. It was Hellenistic kings, above all the Ptolemies, who made their (real or official) birthdays into important public occasions: Philadelphus seems to have combined his birthday celebration (gen”qlia) with the Basileia in honour of Zeus (and hence, of course, of Zeus’ representative here on earth) and with the celebration of his own accession, and similar examples may also be cited.35 In evoking this pattern, Tibullus directs our attention to patterns of Ptolemaic poetry where birth is a prominent theme; the birth of Philadelphus on Cos in Theocritus, Idyll 17 is perhaps the most obvious example.36

34 35

36

he is ‘handsome and brave’ (Dion. Hal. ii 268.19–20 Usener–Radermacher). Gaisser 1971: 223 notes that the prowess of both Achilles (Catullus 64.357) and Messalla is acknowledged within their respective poems by rivers. Cf. below p. 61. Cf. Koenen 1977: 53–5, 66–7 and, more generally, Schmidt 1908: 12–16. Koenen argued that Theocritus, Idyll 24 was in fact written for this combined celebration of Philadelphus, cf. further Stephens 2003: 123–46. There may, of course, be Pharaonic motifs at work in the Ptolemaic poetry, cf., e.g., Stephens 2003: 56–8.

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Callimachus’ longest hymn, the Hymn to Delos, reworks the archaic Homeric Hymn to Apollo to tell the story of the god’s birth on Delos, in the course of which the foetal god himself prophesies the coming (countless centuries later) of ‘another god [whose birth] is owed by the Moirai [cf. Parcae] to Cos’, who will achieve world dominion (vv. 162–70), and who will join with Apollo in a ‘common’ and ultimately successful struggle against Gaulish invaders. This passage must have made a major contribution to Jupiter’s prophecy at Aeneid 1.286–90,37 but it is tempting to think that Tibullus also was not unaware of this hymn, in composing a poem which contains an unusually large number of Callimachean echoes.38 Mineur suggested that Callimachus’ hymn was in fact performed as a ‘birthday poem’ (genethliakon) at a celebration of Philadelphus’ birthday in the Museum, but there is unfortunately no real evidence with which to support this hypothesis. Be that as it may, in the Callimachean hymn it is the god who provides the poetic framing of the praise of a ‘mortal’ patron very closely associated with that god,39 whereas in Tibullus the human celebration frames a hymn to a god with whom the patron is also clearly being compared. In both poems, as we shall see, the boundary between frame and included encomium is very permeable. Although Tibullus keeps broadly to the public life of his honorand in 1.7, it is not always so in encomiastic poetry; Roman poets generally concerned themselves as much with the ‘private’ occasions of great men as with the public and the ceremonial.40 The difference from, say, Callimachus’ encomiastic poetry is here very striking. Although Philadelphus clearly cultivated an image of approachability and traditional Greek male values,41 it is only in very ‘low’ genres such as mime and chreia that this ‘easy-goingness’ emerges; otherwise it is very much the public face which is on show. The situation for Roman poets, particularly under Augustus, was of course very different: between poet and ruler stood the great patron and amicus, a Maecenas or a 37

38 39 40

 d ì e­setai ¢qea patr»v ‘he will know his father’s character’ in v. 170 would resonate meaningfully in Virgil’s prophecy of (?) Julius Caesar and Augustus, or at the very least of the Julian family; so too, the Callimachean Apollo prophesies the defeat of the Gallic invaders in war, whereas Virgil’s Jupiter prophesies the end of all war (as in the Greek epigram in praise of Octavian, SH 982). On this passage in Callimachus cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 355–60. Cf. Pfeiffer on Callimachus fr. 383.16, Luck 1969: 88–92, Bulloch 1973, Foulon 1979, Cameron 1995: 477–8, below p. 57. For other possible examples cf. Barbantani 1998: 277. 41 Cf. Hunter 2003a: 32–8. Cf., e.g., White 1993: 4–5.

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Messalla, and this added layer allowed poets a greater tonal range. Rather, however, than ‘tonal range’, it might be more helpful to think here in terms of the interplay of more public and more private themes. As we have seen, Messalla’s birthday falls, in a sense, into both camps, but there is absolutely nothing in the Greek tradition to match the constructed relationship in the poet’s claim non sine me est tibi partus honos ‘your honour was not won without me’ (v. 9).42 Traditionally, of course, the poet speaks both for himself and for the community, and it is in the former rˆole that private concerns will most naturally emerge: a poem such as Horace, Odes 3.14 (Herculis ritu . . .) shows very clearly how arrestingly this double voice could be employed. Archaic Greek poetry, with its ‘private’ settings and ‘public’ themes, was obviously crucial here, as both Horace’s open debt to Alcaeus and much of what survives of Archilochus and Theognis make clear. Nevertheless, we might also see here one aspect of a Roman development of a doubleness inherent in the Greek hymnal voice, for hymns are composed primarily for public, communal ends, but at all periods the poet’s own concerns, needs, and preferences may emerge.43 The hymnal poet, whether it be an archaic rhapsode or Tibullus in 1.7, speaks both for himself and on behalf of the community. Tibullus’ hymnal voice is very clear in the parallelism he constructs between Messalla and Osiris, who is in fact (as would have been very familiar to Tibullus’ audience) Osiris-Dionysus, particularly in the latter’s manifestation as ‘culture hero’, probably most familiar to us from the accounts of the god in the first book of Diodorus Siculus’ Universal History. This is a figure who, in some Hellenistic versions which Albert Henrichs has traced back to the fifth-century sophist Prodicus,44 was regarded as or became a god because of his civilising benefactions to mankind (Diod. Sic. 1.18.5, 1.20.6, etc.); Messalla will have understood. These ideas, transmitted through writers such as Hecataeus of Abdera and Euhemerus, were extremely influential in developing notions of Hellenistic kingship and of the kind of encomium appropriate to kings (and great men, such as Messalla).45 Thus, for example, Tibullus’ description of Osiris’ blessings (vv. 29–36) suggests the wise ‘inventor’ who tames nature by introducing agriculture and by showing men how to use and cultivate the fruit trees and vines which already grew but 42 43 45

In his revision of the Loeb edition (1988), Goold adopts Baehrens’ non sine Marte ibi partus honos, but this seems a singularly banal thing to say. 44 Henrichs 1984. Cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 362–3. Cf. Murray 1970, Henrichs 1984, 1999: 240–8, below p. 61.

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were not exploited by man (cf. Diod. Sic. 3.62.3–4, 63.3 on Dionysus).46 So too, the final verses of Tibullus 1.7 before the ultimate prayer praise Messalla for his rebuilding of the Via Latina: Messalla has left monumenta (v. 57) behind him, as all great men and poets wished to do.47 As Isis and Osiris built cities and introduced agriculture for the benefit of farmers, so Messalla has extended the benefits of civilisation to those who need it. The parallel is pointed by te canit of the Nile-Osiris (v. 27), picked up at the end by te canat of Messalla (v. 61).48 It is often noted that Osiris, and Egyptian religion generally, play – as does Dionysus – very little explicit part in the high Greek poetry of Alexandria.49 We must, of course, always remember how much we have lost. The survival of poems such as Callimachus’ ‘Arrival of Io’ and ‘Ibis’, or Apollonius’ ‘Kanobos’,50 might have altered the picture dramatically. A citation of the myth of Osiris from ‘Callimachus the Egyptian historian’ may or may not have something to do with ‘our’ Callimachus (fr. 811); there is an allusion to the ritual mourning for the Apis-bull (SH 254.16),51 and an area sacred to Anubis occurs in a hexametric fragment (fr. 715), probably from a epigram,52 but this remains a rather small haul. Nevertheless, in two important studies of Tibullus 1.7, Pierre Grimal and Ludwig Koenen have shown how Tibullus’ Osiris (or Osiris-Sarapis-Dionysus) has firm roots in Hellenistic religious conceptions and cult, and they have traced the ‘syncretism’ which Tibullus has exploited in the poem between Greek, Roman, and Egyptian ideas.53 Despite this body of work, recent students of 1.7 have not really engaged with the relevant Isiac texts which may illuminate Tibullus’ strategies and which best illustrate the ideas of beneficent kingship in a post-Alexander world, ideas which have been so influential on the rhetoric of encomium in Augustan poetry. Moreover, in a poem which offers many close parallels to Tibullus 1.7, namely the prayer and hymn to Bacchus of Propertius 46

47 48 49 50 52 53

In connection with Tibullus 1.7, and for other reasons, it would be nice to know more of SH 276.8–9, which seems to refer to Dionysus’ cultural gifts, cf. Henrichs 1975; the passage all but certainly comes from Callimachus’ Aitia. For the connection of monumentum with memoria cf. Maltby 1991 s.v. monumentum. The form of the verb which is read in v. 61 does not affect the point. I omit here the whole subject of possible ‘double cultural consciousness’ in Greek poetry (Selden 1998, Stephens 2003, etc.). 51 Cf. below p. 59. Cf. Hunter 1989a: 9–10, Krevans 2000: 76–8. Cf. also Pfeiffer on fr. 755. Grimal 1969 (not cited in Maltby’s commentary), Koenen 1976.

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3.17,54 the poet presents himself as (at least potentially) uirtutis . . . tuae, Bacche, poeta (v. 20), i.e., to use the slightly unhappy modern term, an ‘aretalogist’ of the god, a celebrant of the god’s power and miraculous doings, and this too directs us to the same body of texts we should consider in connection with Tibullus 1.7.55 When Propertius describes what he will do as a grateful follower of the god, we realise that – like all pious devotees – he is in fact imitating the original actions of the (now) divine benefactor of mankind (cf. Tibullus 1.7.33–6): ipse seram uitis pangamque ex ordine collis, quos carpant nullae me uigilante ferae, dum modo purpureo tumeant mihi dolia musto et noua pressantis inquinet uua pedes. I myself will sow vines and plant out the hills in due order; no wild beasts will eat them as I watch over them. May my vats swell with dark new wine and the young grapes stain the feet which tread them down. Propertius 3.17.15–18 Planting and harvesting vines and making wine is in fact the ‘ritual’ reenactment of the original blessings of which myth tells; it is, if you like, the Bacchic equivalent of the self-castration of the galli. Ovid too uses a similar strategy in reminding the god of his past ‘re-enactments’. In Tristia 5.3 he reminds Bacchus that, like a pious follower, he has re-enacted the myth: the god, like Ovid, endured the rulings of the Parcae (vv. 14, 25–6), he, like Ovid, had suffered from ‘Jupiter’s thunderbolt’ (vv. 29–32), he, like Ovid, had to leave his patria (vv. 11, 21), and in his travels he, like Ovid,56 reached adusque niuosum | Strymona . . . Marticolamque Geten ‘all the way to snowy Strymon . . . and the Gete who worships Mars’, though the god then continued on to Persia and India (vv. 21–4). There may be a number of reasons for the relative neglect by Tibullan scholars of the Greek background to 1.7: perhaps the feeling that the job 54 55 56

Cf. below pp. 68–9. For the term ‘aretalogy’ etc. cf. Grandjean 1975: 1–5, Henrichs 1978, 1984: 153–4, Winkler 1985: 235–8. Cf. Pont. 4.5.5 where Ovid’s book will pass through gelidam Thracen et opertum nubibus Haemum ‘icy Thrace and Haemus covered in clouds’ on its way to Rome, as by implication had Ovid on his way to the Black Sea. The Haemus range, like the river Strymon, runs through modern Bulgaria.

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has been done (although in fact neither Grimal nor Koenen were primarily interested in the poem itself), or perhaps the feeling that Tibullus is largely dealing in familiar commonplaces; after all, many of the achievements here credited to Osiris appear elsewhere in Tibullus as markers of the regrettable disappearance of the Saturnian golden age (1.3.35–46) or, alternatively, as the welcome gifts of the gods of the countryside (2.1.37–56). We may also suspect here the scholarly sense that Tibullus – despite what he tells us about Delia’s attachment to Isis (1.3.23–32 etc.) and despite the prominence of the cult and images of Isis and Osiris in the Italy of the late Republic and early empire57 – cannot really have known anything ‘serious’ about Isiac ideas, and – perhaps most potently – the sense that this, like all Roman elegy, is ‘learned’ poetry and one must therefore leap back to Callimachus and his kind in order to understand it. It is, of course, difficult not to agree with Robert Maltby (2002: 60) that ‘the high frequency of literary reminiscences in this poem [1.7] is intended as a tribute to the learning and poetic interests of [the] patron’, and Callimachus has indeed contributed much to this poem.58 Nevertheless, although the cults of Isis and Osiris were fundamental to the religious projections of the Ptolemies, they are on the whole, like the traditional Dionysus, absent from the high poetry of third-century Alexandria, and it is clear that Callimachus alone will not explain Tibullus 1.7 to us. Scholars of Latin poetry privilege the high poetry of third-century Alexandria, and in some ways are right to do so,59 but Tibullus knew much more than we do. He may, for example, have known Greek poetry resembling a hexameter hymn to Isis from Andros (Totti 1985: Text 2),60 a poem of very probably the first century bc which turns the traditional claims of Isiac cult into linguistically extraordinary poetry.61 The following broken verses from

57

58 60 61

Cf. Cumont 1929: 127–34, Beard–North–Price 1998: Index s.v. Isis, Maltby on Tibullus 1.3.23–32, Witt 1971: 70–88, 222–3. Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.77–8 includes temples of Isis among places in Rome which are good for picking up girls. 59 Cf. further below pp. 144–5. Cf. n. 38 above. Cf. Peek 1930. For the dating cf. Peek 1930: 100–1. A striking parallel between this hymn’s description of the Nereids’ reaction to the first ship (vv. 152–7) and the opening verses of Catullus 64 is usually ascribed, where it is noted (Kroll on Cat. 64.15, Wilamowitz 1924: ii 300, Peek 1930: 68–9), to a common early Hellenistic model. It is indicative of some trends in scholarship that this passage has disappeared from more recent commentaries on Catullus; it is also absent from Thomas 1982 and Nuzzo 2003.

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this hymn might well make us think of Tibullus 1.7.29–40 and wish we had more:62 aÎlak ì –kÅman ì e[ ˆmhtÆn drep†naisi Šmpelon –kpet†sa[isa ˆmer©w kam†tw ›rga kasignžtav –ri[ e«k”siov, bru†qwn pŽsa d” moi tanao±si k»[maiv drÓv ›ti thleq»wsa Swelled the furrow . . . the harvest with sickles . . . spreading out the vine . . . of daily labour . . . the deeds of his (?) sister . . . willingly, teeming . . . every with long hair . . . tree still flourishing . . . ‘Hymn to Isis’, Totti 1985: Text 2, 84–91 The ideas are indeed commonplace (Euripides had already spoken of the paus©lupov Šmpelov ‘the vine which puts an end to grief’, Ba. 772), but both Tibullus and the poet of the Andrian hymn were turning these commonplace ideas into high-style poetry, and we will hardly begin to understand 1.7 if we do not consider to what kind of texts Tibullus’ verses directed his readers. Isiac texts can shed light over many aspects of Tibullus’ poem and nothing like a full account can be given here. Two examples may suffice before considering the larger strategy of the poem. First, there is the exotic couplet describing Egyptian worship of the Nile: te canit atque suum pubes miratur Osirim barbara, Memphitem plangere docta bouem. Barbarian youth sing of you and wonder at their own Osiris, youth learned in the art of lamenting the bull of Memphis. Tibullus 1.7.27–8 That the Egyptians celebrated the Nile with hymns (some of which survive) had long been known to the Greeks (cf. Aeschylus, Supplices 1024–5) and Romans, and the identification of the Nile with Osiris was a commonplace. Nor is the rhetorical point difficult to grasp: in Maltby’s words, pubes . . . barbara ‘looks back to pubes Romana (5) and draws a parallel between Osiris 62

Peek 1930: 54 attempts an exempli gratia reconstruction of these verses; the text given above omits standard epigraphical marks.

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and Messalla’. That parallel also structures the world into a Roman and a ‘barbarian’ part, reflecting and reinforcing the framed structure of the poem as a whole. It is generally agreed that v. 28 alludes to a verse from the proem of a very prominent section of Callimachus’ Aitia, the epinician for Berenice II which opened Book 3;63 Callimachus is here apparently describing the women of Egypt (the Nile has appeared two verses earlier): e«du±ai jali¼n taÓron «hlem©sai [Women who] know how to cry laments for the white-marked bull. Callimachus, SH 254.16 (= fr. 383.16 Pfeiffer) The use of the epinician ‘Victoria Berenices’, which celebrates the Ptolemaic royal house, has obvious meaning within this celebration of the poet’s patron, but barbara also deserves more attention than it has received. This is a word generally avoided in high Alexandrian poetry,64 and it is not complimentary when Tibullus uses it elsewhere at 2.3.60. Here it presumably reinforces the almost outlandish exoticness of the Egyptian rite, but the division of the world into Greek and barbarian seems to have been an important element in Dionysiac ideas from an early date (cf. esp. Eur. Ba. 13–25), and it is a division, precisely with regard to language, that is a recurrent feature of the preserved ‘Praises of Isis’: ‘I drew up the languages (dial”ktouv) for Greeks and barbarians’, proclaims the goddess (Totti 1985: Text 1 §31, cf. Text 2 v. 112, 19.26–7). In Tibullus 1.7, the division of the world inherent in the poem is itself an expression of the power of the religious force celebrated at its centre, but the fact that ‘Romans’ have replaced ‘Greeks’, while barbara remains by its very nature a Greek classification, shows again how productively disturbing the Roman appropriation of Greek literary and religious culture could be;65 in the final chapter we will see how Virgil harnessed these ideas to the absorption of a whole literary genre.66 Secondly, we may consider Tibullus’ wish for Messalla’s offspring: at tibi succrescat proles quae facta parentis augeat et circum stet ueneranda senem. May offspring to increase their parent’s deeds grow up in turn and, objects of respect, may they stand around their aged father. Tibullus 1.7.55–6 63 64 65

To the standard commentaries add Thomas 1983: 110. Cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 357–8. Cf. above pp. 7–10 on the opening of Propertius 3.1.

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Cf. below pp. 121–2.

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Tibullus is here apparently praying for Messalla’s existing children to ‘grow up to succeed him’ (succrescere), but it is difficult not to agree with Murgatroyd that Tibullus ‘may be wishing that Messalla will have more children’ as well as a long life (senem, cf. 2.2.19–20). A wish for children, as we see from 2.2.21–2, is entirely at home in a birthday poem, but it also has a particular resonance in an Isiac context. Consider the conclusion of one of the early first-century bc hymns of Isidorus, which were publicly inscribed on the temple of Isis-Hermouthis at Medinet Madi in the southern Fayum;67 that this hymn is in elegiacs is clearly not without wider interest for Tibullus 1.7: sän dÛrwn kˆmoª met†dov, ë ErmoÓqi Šnassa, säi ¬k”thi Àlbon kaª Œma eÉtekn©hn. ì Is©dwrov ›graye. eÉcän  d ì Ëmnän te qeoª klÅontev –me±o, ˆntap”dwkan –moª eÉqum©an c†rita. To me also, Queen Hermouthis, grant a share of your gifts: I am your suppliant – grant me prosperity and the happiness of children. Isidorus wrote this. The gods heard my prayers and hymns and in return they granted me happy delight. Isidorus 2.29–34 Isidorus’ prayer for children exemplifies, of course, one of the most common reasons why mortals visit shrines, and it is a prayer which – to judge by the subscription to the hymn – may have been granted; vv. 15–16 of the same poem had already stressed that the granting of children is one of Isis’ particular functions. In the great first-person Isiac declaration preserved in various copies from the Greek world and partially quoted by Diodorus Siculus (= Totti 1985: Text 1), respect and affection (jilostorge±sqai) by children for their parents is one of the nomoi introduced by Isis (§19); this text was certainly in circulation in Tibullus’ time. Even more strikingly, the ‘Praise of Isis’ from Maroneia (Totti 1985: Text 19), a text of the late second or early first century bc, tells the god ‘you made parents honoured by their children, considering them not just as ancestors but even as 67

Recent discussion and bibliography in Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 350–63.

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gods’.68 Here again, a detail of Tibullus’ poem, and this time from outside what is usually regarded as the hymn proper, has a place within the principal religious idea of the poem. The intersection of the ‘religious’ and the ‘political’ is perhaps nowhere more potent than in Tibullus’ catalogue of parts of the world where Messalla has progressed (or intends to do so), vv. 9–22. One of the most familiar stories of Osiris-Dionysus are the god’s travels across the world from which he returned in triumph. This motif gained new importance and shape in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, and it is repeatedly evoked in Roman encomiastic poetry (though certainly not there alone); it resonates, for example, in Jupiter’s prophecy that Venus will receive her descendant spoliis Orientis onustum (Aeneid 1.289, above p. 52) and is explicit in Anchises’ prophecy of the future glory of Augustus (Aeneid 6.804–5). In the declaration by Osiris quoted at Diodorus Siculus 1.27.5 (= Totti 1985: Text 1b) the matter is expressed thus: ‘I am Osiris the king, who campaigned (strateÅsav) to every country, as far as the uninhabited regions of the Indians and those which lie in the far north (toÆv pr¼v Šrkton keklim”nouv), as far as the sources of the River Ister [the Danube], and back to the other areas as far as Ocean . . . There is no region of the inhabited world which I did not reach, and I distributed among all men the gifts I had discovered.’ From the pharaohs and the Ptolemies and their poets (cf. Theocritus 17.86, Catullus 66.12), Roman leaders inherited a language of the extension of boundaries as a fundamental kingly duty and a guarantee of the safety of the land.69 There were, of course, also Roman aristocratic precedents, but this was certainly a rhetoric which Augustus imitated in the Res gestae: omnium prouinciarum populi Romani quibus finitimae fuerunt gentes quae non parerent imperio nostro fines auxi. Gallias et Hispanias prouincias, item, Germaniam, qua includit Oceanus a Gadibus ad ostium Albis fluminis pacaui . . . classis mea per Oceanum ab ostio Rheni ad solis orientis 68

69

For discussion and other relevant passages cf. Grandjean 1975: 88–9. In the light of these texts and also of the direction of the poem, we might wonder about ueneranda in v. 56. Tibullus 2.5 shows us that Messalla’s son was indeed to become (or was already?) uenerandus, but Lenz considered M¨uller’s uenerande worth a place in the apparatus, and although the variant uenerata looks like a conjecture, the transmitted text (unless ueneranda is active in sense) still requires explanation. Cf. Canfora 1989: 167–74, Hunter 2003a: 160–1 with further bibliography.

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regionem usque ad fines Cimbrorum nauigauit . . . in Aethiopiam usque ad oppidum Nabata peruentum est, cui proxima est Meroe; in Arabiam usque in fines Sabaeorum processit exercitus ad oppidum Mariba. I extended the boundaries of all the provinces of the Roman people where there were neighbouring peoples who were not subject to our rule. I pacified the provinces of Gaul and Spain, as well as Germany, the region bounded by Ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the river Elbe . . . My fleet sailed eastwards through Ocean from the mouth of the Rhine all the way to the boundaries of the Cimbri . . . My armies entered Ethiopia all the way to the town of Nabata, which is next to Meroe, and Arabia all the way to the boundaries of the Sabaeans at the town of Mariba. Augustus, Res gestae 26 The rhetoric of the repeated usque ad ‘all the way to’ is not unlike the claims of Ptolemy Euergetes to have extended his control over the land ‘of Mesopotamia and Babylon and Sousa and Persia and Media and all the rest of the land as far as Bactria’ (OGIS 54.18–20), or indeed the Osiran rhetoric cited above from Diodorus, for, like the god, Augustus too operated beside Ocean (RG 26.2–3). Propertius expresses himself confident that Rome will be able to emulate Euergetes’ boast: multi, Roma, tuas laudes annalibus addent, qui finem imperii Bactra futura canent. Many, Rome, will add praise of you to the annals, and will sing that Bactra will be the boundary of the empire. Propertius 3.1.15–16 The pharaonic and Ptolemaic rhetoric of boundaries is also, of course, picked up in Anchises’ prophecy in Aeneid 6: like a Ptolemy, Augustus will ‘extend the empire’ (proferet imperium, v. 795) to the furthest limits of each direction of the compass (vv. 794–800), a conquest which will include ‘the trembling mouths of the sevenfold Nile’.70 The ‘limit’ of this rhetoric of boundaries is then Jupiter’s promise that there shall be no boundary – his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: | imperium sine fine dedi (Aeneid 1.278–9) – except that of Ocean (1.287).71 Nowhere perhaps does this imperial rhetoric surface more memorably than when, in Eclogue 1, Meliboeus contrasts the limits of 70

Cf. Norden 1899.

71

Cf. above p. 52.

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the known Roman world to which he will be exiled with the very local patrii fines, which (with bitter paradox) constitute Meliboeus’ regna and which he may never see again: at nos hinc alii sitientis ibimus Afros, pars Scythiam et rapidum cretae ueniemus Oaxen et penitus toto diuisos orbe Britannos. en umquam patrios longo post tempore finis pauperis et tuguri congestum caespite culmen, post aliquot, mea regna, uidens mirabor aristas? But some of us will go from here to the thirsty Africans, some will reach Scythia and the Oaxes, which swirls chalk along, and the Britons, completely cut off from the whole world. Ah, shall I ever again, after long lapse of time, look with wonder on my ancestral land, on the turfed roof of my humble cottage, and on the ears of corn which form my kingdom? Virgil, Eclogue 1.64–9 Here then is another example where a particular Roman rhetoric has been nourished both by high Ptolemaic poetry and by the standard language of Hellenistic religion. Other examples may be cited. In Tibullus’ poem for Messalla’s son, Messalinus, the sibyl prophesies to Aeneas the extent of the empire which will arise from his achievements: Roma, tuum nomen terris fatale regendis qua sua de caelo prospicit arua Ceres, quaque patent ortus et qua fluitantibus undis solis anhelantes abluit amnis equos. Rome, your name is destined by fate to rule the earth, wherever Ceres looks from heaven upon her fields, where the gates of the rising sun open and where the river bathes the sun’s panting horses in its flowing waters. Tibullus 2.5.57–60 Here Tibullus has in mind the unborn Apollo’s prophecy to his mother of the empire of the future Ptolemy Philadelphus (cf. above p. 53): ˆll† o¬ –k Moir”wn tiv ½jeil»menov qe¼v Šllov –st©, Sawtžrwn Ìpaton g”nov. æi Ëp¼ m©trhn ¯xetai oÉk ˆ”kousa Makhd»ni koiran”esqai

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ˆmjot”rh mes»geia kaª a° pel†gessi k†qhntai, m”criv Âpou per†th te kaª Âpp»qen Ýk”ev ¯ppoi ì H”lion jor”ousiná ¾ d ì e­setai ¢qea patr»v. But to her is due from the fates another god, highest offspring of the Saviours. Under his power, quite willing to be governed by a Macedonian, shall come both land masses and the islands in the sea, as far as the western horizon and from where the swift horses bear the sun. And he shall know the ways of his father. Callimachus, Hymn to Delos 165–70 The passage bristles with (Apolline) difficulties,72 but Tibullus shares with Callimachus not just the rhetoric of universal domination but also the Apolline context (Apollo and prophecy being central to 2.5). That the final words of the Tibullan sibyl, aeternum sit mihi uirginitas ‘may virginity be mine forever’ (v. 64), look like an allusion to Artemis’ wish at the opening of Callimachus’ hymn to her (d»v moi parqen©hn a«Ûnion, Šppa, jul†ssein ‘grant, daddy, that I can keep my virginity forever’ v. 6) would seem to reinforce the earlier allusion to the Callimachean Hymn to Delos, which forms a clear pair with the Hymn to Artemis. The echo of Callimachus within this profoundly Augustan poem here exposes the empty Ptolemaic boast for what it had proved to be. It is against this background that Tibullus’ catalogue of Messalla’s world (1.7.9–22) should be considered, but we may first glance at the two other surviving encomia of the poet’s patron. In Catalepton 9 Messalla is first uictor qua terrae quaque patent maria ‘victorious as far as land and sea stretch’ (v. 4), and later the poet becomes rather more specific: nunc celeris Afros, periurae milia gentis, aurea nunc rapidi flumina adire Tagi? nunc aliam ex alia bellando quaerere gentem, uincere et Oceani finibus ulterius? [Why should I tell] of how you approach now the swift Africans, the numberless and perjured tribes, and now the waters of the rapid-flowing Tagus? How you seek in warfare nation after nation and are victorious beyond the boundaries of Ocean? [Virgil], Catalepton 9.51–4 72

Cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 358–9. The importance of this passage for Augustan rhetoric has been recognised, e.g., by Barchiesi 1994: 441–2.

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Africa and the far west are followed by victory ‘beyond the boundaries of Ocean’; such rhetoric is now very familiar. At the end of the poem the poet expresses the hope of being a Roman Callimachus (vv. 61–4); this may simply be a general reference to the writing of encomiastic elegiacs (cf. Propertius 4.6.4),73 but we are perhaps justified in thinking that the unknown poet may have had something more specific in mind (perhaps Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos?). Secondly, in the Panegyric of Messalla74 the poet knows that his subject is not as other world conquerors are (non idem tibi sint aliisque triumphi ‘you are not to have triumphs such as others have’, v. 136), and he catalogues the parts of the world which will not detain Messalla long (vv. 137–48); there are serious textual difficulties, but the poet seems to move from Gaul in a broad (and occasionally erratic) anti-clockwise sweep through Spain, North Africa, Parthia, Armenia, India, and finally the cold north. This empire, then, already emulates that of Osiris-Dionysus in reaching from the far west to the far east,75 but the poet has up his sleeve a brilliant conceit which will allow Messalla to ‘extend the boundaries’ of empire beyond Ocean: both Britain (‘the last place on earth’, Horace c. 1.35.29–30)76 and the Antipodes, a place of the imagination (which many still regard as the last place on earth), await Messalla: te manet inuictus Romano Marte Britannus teque interiecto mundi pars altera sole. Reserved for you is the Briton, unconquered by Roman arms; for you too the other part of the world, divided from us by the sun. Panegyric of Messalla 149–50 The poet then proceeds to set out (vv. 151–74) the already standard theory of the five global zones – two frozen, two temperate (characterised by the marks of civilisation ascribed in 1.7 to Osiris), and one roastingly hot – in order to conclude: 73 75

76

74 Cf. White 1993: 161–3. Cf. Cameron 1995: 479–80. The cannibal Indian tribe of Padaei is taken from Herodotus 3.99; in 3.98 Herodotus had explained how the Indians are the easternmost of all peoples, and then 3.99 suggests that the Padaei are eastern Indians: i.e. you cannot really get much further east than them. Horace indeed was to use exactly this rhetoric of the extension of empire: praesens diuus habebitur | Augustus adiectis Britannis | imperio grauibusque Persis ‘Augustus will be regarded as a god present on earth, having added the Britons and the grim Persians to the empire’ (c. 3.5.2–4).

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ergo ubi praeclaros poscent tua facta triumphos, solus utroque idem diceris magnus in orbe. Thus when your deeds shall call for glorious triumphs, you alone will be called ‘Great’ (magnus) in both worlds. Panegyric of Messalla 175–6 Given that one of the temperate zones was a purely scholarly construction for the sake of geographical balance, Messalla will clearly be doing pretty well. In Tibullus 1.7, the first witnesses to Messalla’s success are the rivers of the areas where he has been campaigning or stationed, just as rivers featured very prominently in the account of the empire in the Panegyric to Messalla.77 In subject, the catalogue of rivers might evoke Callimachus’ prose work on rivers (frr. 457–9) and, in style, we are reminded of the Callimachean poetic manner;78 the catalogue leads by a kind of priamel structure to ‘father Nile’, who may be regarded as the source of all rivers (cf. Diod. Sic. 1.12.5–6)79 and whose particular divinity (Isis) controlled all rivers (cf. Totti 1985: Text 20 vv. 224–6, Isidorus 2.12, 4.12). The catalogue has moved from the far west and Gaul to Cilicia, then round the eastern end of the Mediterranean to Syria and then continues round to Egypt; it may be true that this is ‘a tour of the newly established frontier, from Gaul to Asia and Africa’,80 but a comparison with the other passages we have considered allows Tibullus’ tact and strategy to emerge. There are indeed suggestions here of the ‘Osiran’ language of universal conquest, but they remain muted hints: there is a bit of the western Ocean (v. 10), there is the east, but only the eastern Mediterranean, there are the Taurus mountains whose cold (v. 16) suggests the northern wastes, though the range itself is in south central Turkey, and there is burning Egypt to suggest the south, although a much deeper south could in fact be imagined (cf. Theocritus 7.113–14, Virgil, Aeneid 6.794–7). There was, after all, room for only one living Osiris-Dionysus, and that was not (or was no longer) Messalla. 77

78 79 80

Representations of conquered rivers were part of the procession of a Roman triumph. Knox 2005: 212–14 sees Tibullus as here forecasting a future campaign, rather than celebrating one now completed. If this were correct, we would be reminded yet again of the forecasts of the foetal Apollo in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos. Cf. Bulloch 1973: 73. In a late hexameter ‘Hymn to the Nile’, but one which is probably very traditional in its language and ideas, the Nile is described as ‘father of rivers’ (Cribiore 1995). Konstan 1978: 174.

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Moreover, Tibullus presents himself accompanying Messalla (v. 9),81 as poets accompanied Alexander, but he is not (or not primarily) a poet of encomium or a panegyrist, but rather an observer (and collector for use in subsequent poetry) of physical and cultural marvels, an interested tourist rather than (explicitly) an apologist for the occupying power; from another perspective we might in many ways be reminded of Herodotus, often seen as a Hellenistic spirit avant la lettre.82 The mild fascination expressed by the touristic voice is in fact a strategy by which this poem’s otherwise quite remarkable combination of the very conventionally Roman and the markedly ‘eastern’ is here naturalised; Tibullus 1.7 stands as a striking document of the Romans’ negotiation of their own position in a world where other powers, spiritual and temporal, had travelled before. Dionysus’ obvious familiarity and equally obvious ‘foreignness’ again proved a powerful framework with which to stake one’s claim.

3 The power of the name An important element of the praise of Bacchus-Osiris in Tibullus 1.7 is the ‘fusion’ of the god with the wine for which he is responsible. In vv. 35ff. the culture-hero gives way, almost imperceptibly, to his chief gift to mankind: illi iucundos primum matura sapores expressa incultis uua dedit pedibus. ille liquor docuit uoces inflectere cantu, mouit et ad certos nescia membra modos. Bacchus et agricolae magno confecta labore pectora tristitiae dissoluenda dedit. Bacchus et afflictis requiem mortalibus affert, crura licet dura compede pulsa sonent. For him [i.e. Osiris] the ripe grapes, pressed by rustic feet, first gave their sweet flavours; that moisture taught men to steer their voices in song and roused their ignorant limbs in the fixed measures of the dance. Bacchus allows the heart of the farmer, crushed by his wearisome labours, to be released from sadness; Bacchus brings rest to mortals who are cast down, though hard shackles clink on their legs. Tibullus 1.7.35–42 81

Cf. above n. 42.

82

Cf. Murray 1972.

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Such semantic fusion, a form of what is called ‘metonymy’, is very common, and metonymy was one of the standard linguistic ‘tropes’ discussed by ancient grammarians.83 It is normally explained as the transferred use of a word to designate something which is semantically close to the word actually used or which shares some relationship with it. Thus, the use of the name of the inventor for the thing invented (e.g. Bacchus used for ‘wine’, Ceres for ‘grain’) is one of the most familiar types of metonymy. In this section we shall explore how metonymy is also a powerful tool for exploring religious and poetic ideas; when transferred from the Greek cultural system in which it was embedded, the trope could become a site where the fault lines between different cultures could be both hidden and openly displayed. Propertius 3.17 is one of the most extensive poetic explorations of metonymy.84 The poem is a prayer to Bacchus to grant the poet sleep through the power of his gift to mankind, namely wine: nunc, o Bacche, tuis humiles aduoluimur aris: da mihi pacato uela secunda, pater. tu potes insanae Veneris compescere fastus, curarumque tuo fit medicina mero. per te iunguntur, per te soluuntur amantes: tu uitium ex animo dilue, Bacche, meo. Now, Bacchus, I prostrate myself on the ground before your altar: grant me, Father, a peaceful and prosperous voyage. You can constrain the proud scorn of crazed Venus, and through your wine the anxieties of love are cured. Through you are lovers brought together, through you are they parted; you, Bacchus, wash the stain from my heart. Propertius 3.17.1–6 The motif is a familiar one, but Propertius’ opening seems specifically indebted to the opening of Tibullus 1.2: adde merum uinoque nouos compesce dolores, occupet ut fessi lumina uicta sopor; 83 84

Cf. Lausberg 1960: 292–5, West 1965. For simple metonymy in poetry cf. Pease on Cicero, ND 2.60, Clausen on Virgil, Eclogues 10.5, Maltby on Tibullus 1.2.3. On this poem see the commentators, Littlewood 1975: 664–9 and Miller 1991. Boyanc´e 1956: 199–200 imagines the poem recited at a celebratory Bacchic dinner in Rome (cf. Ovid, Tristia 5.3.1–4).

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neu quisquam multo percussum tempora Baccho excitet, infelix dum requiescit amor. Give me strong drink and constrain my new sorrows with wine, so that in my weariness my eyes may be conquered by sleep. When my head has been knocked out by Bacchus in full flow, let no one rouse me while unhappy love is quiet. Tibullus 1.2.1–4 Tibullus here uses the simple metonymy multo . . . Baccho (though pointed by the ‘Bacchic’ percussum),85 while Propertius’ whole poem is shaped as a prayer and hymn to the god, but one in which the possibility – laid open at the start of the poem – of a more ‘secular’ reading gives the poem a sharp edge of knowing literariness; we may perhaps compare (and contrast) the way in which the young lover Phaedromus and his beloved’s bibulous guardian, whom he is bribing with drink, play with the god’s name Liber in Plautus’ Curculio (vv. 96–120), in a scene in which both they and the watching audience know precisely what kind of linguistic game they are playing. The effect of Propertius’ address to the god is not dissimilar, but a text which is read, rather than acted out, has a greater power to create uncertainty, and it is that uncertainty which gives the poem its edge: when the poet grovels before the god’s altar (vv. 1–2), is he just reaching for another drink? When he asks Bacchus to ‘wash away (dilue) the stain from my heart’, the slide between the god and his liquid gift is clear. Propertius retains throughout the poem a formal distinction between the god and his gift (tuo . . . mero v. 4, tua uina v. 10, tuis . . . donis v. 13, tuum . . . merum v. 28), but this makes the semantic uncertainty all the more effective. Our very familiarity with the trope of metonymy threatens to collapse the formal shape of this hymn. A related, though in some ways opposite, strategy is adopted by Horace in Odes 3.21, which is a hymn to a wine-jar, ascribing to the jar many of the powers that one would normally ascribe to the god of the wine-jar. The second couplet of Propertius’ poem uses a familiar motif, which may be seen as an eroticisation of Teiresias’ assertion in Euripides’ Bacchae that wine brings sleep and that ‘there is no other pharmakon against troubles’ 85

Cf. above p. 8. When Propertius uses the same metonymic phrase at 1.3.9, there is a very marked point: ebria cum multo traherem uestigia Baccho ‘when I was dragging home footsteps made tipsy by much wine’. The poet is in fact playing the rˆole of the divine Bacchus ‘sneaking up on’ the sleeping Ariadne or a bacchant. Metonymy is thus again here a site for problematising the nature of the god: with ‘the god inside him’, the poet has momentarily become the god.

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(vv. 278–83). Nevertheless, Propertius’ specific use is shaped as a response to the assertion with which Theocritus, Idyll 11 opens: oÉd•n pott¼n ›rwta pejÅkei j†rmakon Šllo, Nik©a, oÎt ì ›gcriston, –mªn doke±, oÎt ì –p©paston, £ taª Pier©devá There is no drug against love, Nicias, not for smearing or sprinkling, other than the Pierian maidens. Theocritus 11.1–3 The medical language, addressed by Theocritus to the doctor Nicias, is picked up by medicina in v. 4,86 but Propertius may also be exploiting Theocritus’ metonymic use of ‘the Pierian maidens’ in v. 3, a use then pointed by ‘the nine Muses’ used non-metonymically three verses later. The pharmakon against desire is, in fact, something which the Muses give, rather than the Muses themselves, as – in Propertius’ view – erotic distress can be cured by tuo . . . mero ‘your [i.e. Bacchus’ gift of] wine’; the pharmakon which the Cyclops found was song (v. 18) and mous©zein (v. 81), literally ‘acting under the power of the Muse’. If, however, the Cyclops found relief (of whatever kind) through song, we can be less sure about Propertius’ fate, and not merely because the poem is a prayer to the god, rather than – as is Theocritus, Idyll 11 – a narrative of a past event. The poet claims that the god can ‘hold in check/fetter the disdain87 of crazed Venus’; this may be true, but the language reverses the standard motif of Dionysus as ‘the Looser’, the god who removes the chains of imprisonment (cf. soluuntur in v. 5, above pp. 48–9).88 So too, in this context we can hardly fail to recall that ‘madness’ is the particular preserve of Bacchus; Bacchus and Venus are in fact familiar allies (Venus in uinis ignis in igne fuit, Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.244), and every quotation that can be adduced about wine as the answer to love’s troubles can be matched 86 87 88

Note too that the Cyclops loved Galateia ‘with outright madness’ (v. 11), which may resonate in insanae Veneris (for which cf. further below). In v. 3 Camps adopts the conjecture flatus for the transmitted fastus; cf. also Shackleton Bailey 1956: 190. The reading does not, I think, affect the point being made here. Cf. Ovid, Heroides 16.231–2 (Paris to Helen), saepe mero uolui flammam compescere, at illa | creuit, ‘often I tried to check the flame [of desire] with strong wine, but the flame grew’. dilue Baccho in v. 6 perhaps contains a bilingual ‘pun’ on the god as Lua±ov/Lyaeus. Stephen Hinds points out that the connection of Venus with uincire may be relevant (cf. Varro LL 5.61–2).

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by another in which wine merely adds to desire. To ask Bacchus, of all gods, to put chains on another god who causes madness is simply self-defeating. Moreover, however common insanus is as an epithet for amor,89 its unusual application to Venus here may derive from a borrowing from Bacchus himself. At the first of Dionysus’ only two appearances in the Iliad the young god is called ‘crazed’ (main»menov, 6.132); one of the explanations of the scholia on that passage is that this really means that the god ‘induces madness’, and this Homeric phrase became a standard example of yet another type of metonymy, in which the effects of a noun are used to describe the noun itself (‘pale fear’, ‘war full of tears’, etc.).90 It is thus clear that Propertius’ state is not as crushed as might at first appear. The suggestion of an ironically self-knowing poet is confirmed in the quid pro quo which the poet offers: in return for being allowed to fall into a drunken sleep, the poet will, for the rest of his life (vv. 19–20), hymn the god and act out the god’s gifts to mankind (vv. 15–18, above p. 56). In 3.17 Propertius has made the relationship between the god and his gift a touchstone of poetic style, an extravagant marker of what distinguishes the poetic mode of description (he is, after all, just ‘drinking to forget’). The poem has, as we have seen, models in both Greek91 and Roman poetry – it may be inspired by, even parodic of, Horace’s two poems to the god of poetic inspiration (Odes 2.19, 3.25) – but perhaps no other surviving poem before Nonnus’ Dionysiaca brings us so close to the riotous and wine-filled atmosphere of the Dionysiac procession in third-century Alexandria (above p. 43).92 In vv. 21–36 Propertius demonstrates to the god what kind of an ‘aretalogist’ he will make by listing the themes of his promised Bacchic songs. Exotic Greek words and names, compound adjectives, and the conjuring of the sound of eastern tambourines and cymbals (vv. 33–6) create a form of 89 90 91

92

Cf., e.g., Nisbet and Rudd on Horace c. 3.21.3. Cf. Cocondrius iii 234 Spengel, ‘Heraclitus’, Hom. Probl. 35, Lausberg 1960: 294. Maltby 1995 discusses the debt of Propertius’ model, Tibullus 1.2.1–4, to an epigram of Meleager (AP 12.49 = HE 4598–4601) which at least gestures towards metonymy (‘Bromios’ for wine). Propertius’ ex animo . . . meo could then be an allusion to Tibullus’ source, ›kkrouson stuger‡n –k krad©av ½dÅnan ‘push the bitter grief out of your heart’. Cf. further Fedeli 1985: 514 for the idea that parallels between 3.17 and the Dionysiac descriptions of Longus’ Daphnis & Chloe suggest common Hellenistic sources. Griffin 1985: 43 links the ‘surprising prominence’ of Bacchus in Propertius to Antony’s identification of himself with the god.

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poetry quite different from the ‘Callimachean’ elegiac style with which we are familiar;93 thus does Propertius offer the god a real change in his life, an apparent abandonment of his deepest stylistic affiliations for the high reaches of Pindaric thundering (vv. 39–40), if only he can fall asleep now. Neither poet nor god were likely to be fooled. Metonymy of divine names is in Greek poetry a feature of high epic and lyric style and parodies of this style, such as Matro’s ‘Attic Dinner’;94 by and large, however, the form is less common in Hellenistic poetry of the high period than commentaries often lead one to believe.95 There are, of course, uncertain cases,96 but only ‘Ares’ for war seems a standard usage.97 Even Aphrodite/Kypris for ‘love/passion’ is not very common (cf. perhaps Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.1233), and sometimes it is hard in such cases to decide whether we are really dealing with metonymy. This is in fact not surprising; what is at stake in distinguishing between the goddess Aphrodite, on the one hand, and ‘love’ or ‘desire’, on the other, had been the subject of poetic and philosophical interest at least since the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite in which the ‘goddess of desire’ herself feels desire. In that poem Zeus ‘cast sweet desire for Anchises into her heart’ (v. 53) and it is then love at first sight: t¼n dŸ ›peita «doÓsa jilommeidŸv %jrod©th  rasat ì, –kp†glwv d• kat‡ jr”nav ¯merov e³len. When she saw him, smile-loving Aphrodite fell in love and desire completely seized control of her mind. Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 56–7 93 94

95 96 97

Cairns 1972: 97, ‘[there is] little doubt that Propertius thought he was writing a dithyramb’, points to a real truth in rather unfortunate terms. Cf. Olson–Sens 1999: 133 (Hephaistos), 137 (Dionysus/Bromios). Good examples are the ‘dithyrambic’ Timotheus PMG 780, together with the parody of such style at Menander, Dyskolos 946. For a survey of the older material cf. Reichenberger 1891: 90–112. Cf. SH 1139 t¦mov Ât ì a«zhoª Dhmžtera kwlotomeÓsin ‘at the time when mortals harvest Demeter’, of uncertain authorship. It is not rare in the epic Argonautica (cf. Feeney 1991: 76) and cf. Call. h. 4.173 (with Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 357–8), frr. 194.49, 621. ‘Muse/Muses’ for ‘poetry’ (cf. Theocr. 11.3 etc.) is perhaps in a slightly different category; note how Apollo’s command to Callimachus to keep his Muse ‘slender’ (fr. 1.24) still depends on the Muse as a female body, not just a metonymy for ‘poetry’. So too, Callimachus’ apparent use of ‘Calliope’ for ‘poetry’ (fr. 75.77, cf. Posidippus, HE 3141 = 121.8 Austin–Bastianini) might be revealed as more than a simple metonymy, were we more certain of the organisation of Book 3 of the Aitia.

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Whether we think of the hymn as an exploration of metonymic structures or rather of the basis and consequences of an anthropomorphic divine system, the power of this provocative problem is clear from its persistence in subsequent literature and thought, whether that be Plato’s enquiry into the nature of er¯os in the Symposium or Apuleius’ tale of ‘falling in love with Love’ in ‘Cupid and Psyche’. Similarly, we may view Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter as, in part, a meditation upon how the functioning of ordinary society depends upon managing the relationship between the compulsions of hunger and the availability of resources (Demeter as ‘grain’); as such, the structure which lies behind ‘metonymy’ is crucial to this hymn to the goddess’ power.98 The grammatical category of metonymy, at least as far as concerns divine names, is in fact one, inherently problematical, reflection of an attempt to impose neat distinctions upon complex ways of ordering the world; these are ways which changed over time, and the traces of some of these changes are still visible. The simple metonymic use of B†kcov or ‘Bacchus’, as we have seen it in Tibullus 1.2, is hard to find in Hellenistic poetry before the Roman period, and an isolated case or two will not lessen the striking difference between Hellenistic and Roman poetry in this regard.99 We might, however, think that when poets refer to ‘the drink of Bacchus’ they are conscious of the metonymic use of the god’s name, even if such usages are not in fact metonymic. A telling case, however, is Asclepiades, AP 12.50.5 = HE 884 where ‘the strong drink of Bacchus’ echoes Alcaeus’ assertion to his codrinkers that ‘the son of Zeus and Semele gave wine to men as a way of forgetting their cares’ (Alcaeus 346.3–4 Voigt); thus, for the Hellenistic poet and his readers, the genitive relation between the god and the drink remains potent. The quantity of material is such that it is hard to trace change over time, but old habits do seem very persistent. In AP 7.303 (= HE 356–61) Antipater of Sidon (second century bc) describes the tomb of a bibulous lady on which is engraved a wine cup; the lady’s one regret is that ‘Bacchus’ implement is not full of Bacchus’. Here the word play suggests a lingering self-consciousness about the poetic trope. So too, Philodemus, writing in a Graeco-Roman milieu in the mid-first century bc, expresses a wish to 98 99

Cf. Reichenberger 1891: 90–4, Hunter 1992a: 30–3. The relation between Di»nusov and B†kcov remains disputed, but that they were readily identified in (and before) the Hellenistic period seems clear. The preference for the latter in metonymic contexts is noteworthy.

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‘drench [his] lungs with the Bacchus of Mytilene’ (AP 11.34.7 = GP 3294 = 6.7 Sider); the phrase is an obvious and explicitly pointed allusion to a famous poetic opening of the great poet of Mytilene, Alcaeus, ‘drench your lungs with wine’ (Alcaeus 347 Voigt). Here, knowledge of the model allows us (as it were) to gloss ‘Bacchus’ by ‘wine’. This is, of course, not a question of Philodemus’ phrase being in any way difficult to understand, but rather a sign that the kind of metonymic use we have been tracing remains explicitly marked in Greek poetry until a relatively late date. The identity of Dionysus and wine was deep-seated in Greek religious thought, but – together with metonymy, in the sense we have been following here – it acquired a newly charged significance from the ideas of the fifthcentury sophist Prodicus, whose influence in the Hellenistic world has been plotted by Albert Henrichs.100 In the Prodican scheme of what we would call the ‘history of religion’, divinity had been ascribed, before the granting of divine status to human benefactors, to the things which make life possible: Prodicus of Ceos says: ‘Primitive mankind regarded as gods the sun and moon and rivers and springs and in general all the things that are of benefit for our life, because of the benefit derived from them, just as the Egyptians do the Nile.’ And he says that it was for this reason that bread was accorded divine stature as (nomisq¦nai) Demeter, and wine as Dionysus, and water as Poseidon, and fire as Hephaestus, and so on with each of the things that are good for use. Prodicus fr. 5 Diels–Kranz, trans. D. Obbink101 It is perhaps no coincidence that it is two Euripidean texts from the end of the fifth century, both reflecting contemporary intellectual speculation, in which the relationship between Dionysus and wine is made a subject of special interest; at the heart of this interest lies the question of what is at stake in ‘metonymy’. One text is Teiresias’ (paradoxical) lecture to Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae (vv. 272–85), in which the prophet explains that there are two basic states in the world, from which everything is composed, the dry (Demeter, Earth) and the wet (Dionysus, wine). Teiresias moves from praise of Dionysus as ‘inventor’ of the wine, which brings relief and happiness to mortals, to a kind of ‘metonymy’: oÕtov qeo±si sp”ndetai qe¼v gegÛv, ãste di‡ toÓton tˆg†q ì ˆnqrÛpouv ›cein. 100

101

Cf. Henrichs 1984, 1999, above p. 54.

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Born a god, he is poured out in libation to the gods, so that it is through him that men have good things. Euripides, Bacchae 284–5 We have already seen the same movement in Tibullus 1.7 (vv. 29–42). In the probably only slightly earlier Cyclops, Odysseus puts a series of questions to Silenos which establish that the Cyclops lives beyond the bounds of all the markers of ordinary civilisation: ì OdusseÅv. Silhn»v. ì OdusseÅv. Silhn»v. ì OdusseÅv. Silhn»v. ì OduseÅv. Silhn»v. ì OdusseÅv. Silhn»v.

t©nev d ì ›cousi ga±an; § qhrän g”nov; KÅklwpev, Šntr ì ›contev, oÉ st”gav d»mwn. t©nov klÅontev; £ dedžmeutai kr†tov; mon†devá ˆkoÅei d ì oÉd•n oÉdeªv oÉd”nov. spe©rousi d ì − £ täi zäsi; – Džmhtrov st†cun; g†lakti kaª turo±si kaª mžlwn borŽi. Brom©ou d• päm ì ›cousin, ˆmp”lou ço†v; ¤kistaá toig‡r Šcoron o«koÓsi cq»na. jil»xenoi d• cßsioi perª x”nouv; glukÅtat† jasi t‡ kr”a toÆv x”nouv jore±n.

Odysseus. Silenos.

Who lives in the land? A race of wild animals? The Cyclopes, who dwell in caves, not in the protection of houses. Whom do they obey? Is power vested in the people? They are solitary: no one gives the slightest heed to another. Do they sow Demeter’s grain, or on what do they live? On milk, cheeses, and food from the flocks. Do they have the drink of Bromios, the streams of the vine? Not at all; for this reason their homeland knows not dancing. Are they hospitable and respectful to strangers? They say that the flesh of strangers tastes sweetest. Euripides, Cyclops 117–26

Odysseus. Silenos. Odysseus. Silenos. Odysseus. Silenos. Odysseus. Silenos.

The identification of crops as ‘the grain of Demeter’ and of wine as ‘the draught of Bromios’ does not merely serve Odysseus’ grand, mock-tragic style and help to establish the impiety of the Cyclops, but it also marks agriculture and viticulture as stages in the progression of civilisation, with their respective gods as benefactors of mankind; we are here very close both 75

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to Prodicus and to the intellectual structure which underpins one form of metonymy. Later in this same play another ‘religious expert’, though this time one whose field is limited to Dionysus (vv. 519–20), instructs the Cyclops in the nature of the god: KÅklwy. ì OdusseÅv. KÅklwy. ì OdusseÅv. KÅklwy. ì OdusseÅv.

¾ B†kciov d• t©v; qe¼v nom©zetai; m”gistov ˆnqrÛpwn –v t”ryin b©ou. –rugg†nw goÓn aÉt¼n ¡d”wv –gÛ. toi»sd ì ¾ da©mwná oÉd”na bl†ptei brotän. qe¼v d ì –n ˆskäi päv g”ghq ì o­kouv ›cwn; Âpou tiq¦i tiv, –nq†d ì –stªn eÉpetžv.

Cyclops. Odysseus. Cyclops. Odysseus. Cyclops. Odysseus.

Who is the Bacchic one? Is he considered a god? The most powerful god for giving men delight in life. I certainly enjoy vomiting him up. That’s what the god is like: he harms no mortal. If he’s a god, how can he enjoy living in a skin? Wherever you put him, there he feels at home. Euripides, Cyclops 521–6

‘Sophistic’ ideas are very important to this satyric play, which may be seen in part as a set of readings of the story of Odyssey 9 from different latefifth century perspectives – intellectual trends, social practice, interstate relations.102 It would be easy enough to see the Bacchae and the Cyclops as the spoudaion and the geloion versions of a dramatisation of the confrontation with Dionysus; from a modern perspective, it is tempting also to see here a religious and a ‘secular’ dramatisation.103 As Pentheus is made to become a ‘perverted’ worshipper of the ‘religious’ or mystic Dionysus, a male bacchant who watches the rites on his own from a distance rather than ‘joining his psych¯e to the thiasos’ (Bacchae 75), so – as a prelude to his punishment – the Cyclops is made to perform a quite imperfect imitation of the rites of the socialised god, by drinking alone rather than in the communal fellowship of the k¯omos.104 Both situations require knowledge of ‘the god’s rites’ (cf. Bacchae 73) and in both cases the victim must be educated to perform his (distorted) Bacchic rˆole (cf. Cyclops 492–3, Bacchae 928–44). 102 103 104

Cf. Hunter 2004: 244–5 with further bibliography. For some similarities between the two plays, but from a rather different Dionysiac perspective, cf. Seaford 1981: 272–4. Cf. Rossi 1971.

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It is of course clear, particularly from the Bacchae, that we cannot make distinctions between a ‘religious’ and a ‘secular’ Dionysus along these lines, even if such a category distinction had meaning in the late fifth century; the Dionysus of that play is as much the god of festivity and the symposium as of ecstatic rites. What came later to be classed as metonymic structures were embedded in Greek religious thought and cultural practice long before and long after Prodicus.105 The Roman situation, for which less evidence exists, offers a rather different picture, and poems such as Tibullus 1.7 and Propertius 3.17 involve a vivid re-imagining (rather than a historical reconstruction) of the Greek religious and poetic world. We may speculate that it was (in part) the very identification of the linguistic trope of metonymy, presumably as a creation of Hellenistic grammar,106 rather than features inherent in Roman modes of religious thought,107 which promoted its very frequent use in Roman poetry as a marker of the ‘otherness’ of poetic language and of the GraecoRoman world depicted in that poetry; a ‘trope’ (tr»pov) was precisely a mode of style or discourse which had been ‘turned’ from the ‘straight path’ of ordinary language, and ‘tropes’ as a whole were particularly associated with poetry and its exegesis.108 Together with the conscious adoption of such grammatical systems came the freedom to exploit and explore the cultural systems which underlay them. At the start of Poem 64 Catullus precisely creates a distant and exotically ‘other’ world of story-telling, and yet one with claims to the attention of Roman readers. Metonymy is part of that world – Amphitrite (the wife of Poseidon) is used to mean ‘the sea’ in v. 11 – and it is introduced early: Peliaco quondam prognatae uertice pinus dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas Phasidos ad fluctus et fines Aeeteos . . . 105

106

107 108

Lucretius 2.655–60, perhaps with one eye on the Stoics (cf. Cicero ND 2.60), regards divine metonymy as harmless, provided that one does not invest religious belief in the trope. Plutarch discusses how such metonymy (though he does not use the word) can be used to explain away potentially problematic uses of divine names in poetry (Mor. 22f–23c); this is, for Plutarch, one example of a necessarily flexible approach to the meanings of words ‘as the grammarians teach us’ (22f). Cf., e.g., Gross 1911: 312–13. Cf. the various definitions at Spengel (1853–6) iii 207 and 230. For the importance of tropes to the Callimachean ‘project’ more generally cf. Selden 1998: 303–7.

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Pine trees, the product of the peak of Pelion, are said once to have swum through the flowing waters of Neptune to the waves of the Phasis and the territory of Aietes . . . Catullus 64.1–3 ‘The flowing waters of Neptune’ in v. 2 is a ‘quasi-metonymy’, one using a Latin name in contrast to the Greek name and (probably) Greek caseending in v. 11;109 we may compare how in the elaborately spondaic v. 3 two Latin nouns, bound together by alliteration, are surrounded by two Grecising names.110 Since the metonymic use of Amphitrite by Catullus is paralleled in Greek hexameter poetry of the imperial age, it has long been conjectured that this usage goes back to the Hellenistic period (‘no doubt Catullus found it in hellenistic poetry’, observes Fordyce). Its earliest surviving occurrence is indeed Hellenistic, namely the first-century hymn to Isis from Andros (Totti 1985: Text 2, above pp. 57–8), which in a short space (vv. 145–8) uses both Amphitrite and Tethys metonymically to refer to the sea. The linguistic style of that poem, which for example makes heavy use of compound adjectives, circumlocution, and (apparently rather forced) metaphors to denaturalise and ‘emotionalise’ the language, is very far from that of, say, Callimachus and Apollonius.111 The metonymic usages are, as in Catullus 64, part of a deliberate strategy for the creation of a heightened language quite removed from ordinary discourse. Callimachus and Apollonius, of course, also had such a strategy, but their means to achieve the end were rather different. Metonymy of divine names is not an important weapon in Callimachus’ armoury. A metonymic use of Tethys may perhaps have occurred in the ‘Coma Berenices’ (fr. 110.70, cf. Catullus 66.70);112 if so, we can see Callimachus’, as well as Catullus’, newly catasterised lock taking a certain pleasure in pronouncing the names of the gods whose company it has just joined. Callimachus does also seem to have an example of ‘Nereus’ used for the 109 110 111

112

The text of v. 11 remains a difficult problem, cf. Nuzzo 2003: 59–60. Note how the ending -os is in this verse first a Greek genitive singular (with short vowel) and then a Latin accusative plural (with long vowel). Cf. Peek 1930: 92–8 for a helpful survey of the poem’s style, Witt 1971: 107–8. Peek (p. 35) interestingly sees in the style of this poem a linguistic expression of how Greeks found Isis not just powerful but also ‘unapproachable and other (fremd)’. There may be an earlier example of the metonymic use of Amphitrite in a second-century hymn to Aphrodite, SSH 1192.2, but the text is too broken to allow certainty. The letters visible on the papyrus suit this suggestion.

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sea (Hymn to Zeus 40),113 and a similar use of Tethys would hardly surprise. Nevertheless, it is to be noted that it is in Lycophron’s linguistically extraordinary Alexandra that a certain metonymic use of ‘Tethys’ first occurs;114 Cassandra’s riddling language (paradoxically) stands outside the mainstream of Greek poetic language through its remarkable concentration of the usually sparingly used devices of that language. An earlier occurrence of ‘Amphitrite’ in a scene which seems to gesture towards but avoid metonymy will illustrate the resistance of the language of Alexandrian hexameter poetry to this trope, a resistance which finds no real counterpart in Latin poetry. In the fourth book of Apollonius’ Argonautica the goddesses of the Libyan desert tell the distraught Jason that the Argonauts should ‘repay their debt to their mother, as soon as Amphitrite releases the swift chariot of Poseidon’ (4.1325–6); subsequently they see a great horse rush out of the sea and take off over the land (4.1365–8). Peleus immediately gets the point: ‘I say that Poseidon’s chariot has now been released by the hands of his dear wife’, and he goes on to explain that the Argonauts’ ‘mother’ is none other than the Argo herself. Particularly as ‘mother’ has to be interpreted riddlingly, it would have been very easy here to interpret ‘Amphitrite’ as ‘the sea’, so that Amphitrite releasing the chariot would indeed be seen in a horse rushing ‘from the sea’ (–x ‰l»v, 4.1365); Peleus does not, however, go down that interpretative route. Would a Latin poet (or hero) have been so reticent? 113

114

It is perhaps noteworthy that that passage of the Hymn to Zeus seems to hint at an exploration of metonymic strategies: Rhea gives the baby Zeus to Neda, ‘most honoured of the Nymphs attending her’, after she has washed it in the Arcadian river she has created, and she calls the river Neda to honour the nymph. We are bound to wonder – and Callimachus pushes us in this direction – whether this myth was created to explain the name Neda; the explanation depends crucially on the metonymic use of ‘nymph’ for water. Callimachus is interested not just in the claims of competing mythic versions, but in how myths are created. An interesting forerunner of both later metonymies and rationalist interpretation of myth is Iliad 14.391–2, in which the sea surges towards the Greek camp as Poseidon leads the Greeks into battle; the bT-scholia explain that the sea surged because ‘it felt anger along with Poseidon’. Cf. v. 1069; Lycophron also has ‘Thetis’ for the sea (v. 22, cf. Homer, Iliad 16.34 with Most 1993), and even an example of what might be called ‘reverse metonymy’ – Tethys is called íAlv ‘Salt Sea’ (v. 145). Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo 20 perhaps gestures towards Q”tiv = ‘the sea’, though too great a critical weight has been placed upon this.

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Dionysus, then, was for Roman poets not just a source of inspiration, but a multi-faceted idea with which to explore both their own similarity to and difference from the Greek poets whom they professed to follow, and also the uneasy relationship of imitation and superiority that Roman power and the Roman e´ lite constructed with the Greek world which preceded them and which never went away. The next two chapters will explore two case studies of sameness and difference as a central, and thematised, motif of the writing of Roman poetry ‘in the Greek manner’; first, we will consider a poetic figure taken over from Greek, the simile, and then a whole genre, pastoral.

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CHAPTER

3 Nothing like this before

1 The art of the simile In Plautus’ Pseudolus, the crafty slave who gives his name to the play soliloquises as to how he is going to trick his master’s old father out of the money which the son needs to buy back his girlfriend. He begins by recognising that he badly needs a plan: neque parata est gutta certi consili neque exordiri primum unde occipias habes neque ad detexundam telam certos terminos. sed quasi poeta, tabulas quom cepit sibi, quaerit quod nusquam gentium est, reperit tamen, facit illud ueri simile quod mendacium est, nunc ego poeta fiam: uiginti minas, quae nunc nusquam sunt gentium, inueniam tamen. You don’t have a drop of a fixed plan nor any starting point for your weaving nor any end in view for completing your task to the last thread. But like a poet, when he takes up his tablets, seeks for what is nowhere on earth, and finds it and makes what is a lie to be like truth, so I will now become a poet: I shall find the twenty minae which are now nowhere on earth. Plautus, Pseudolus 397–4051 In comparing himself to a poet, Pseudolus exploits a particularly explicit version of a powerful metatheatrical analogy which runs through much of Plautus, namely the analogy between the crafty slave who ‘plots’ the events 1

In common with most recent critics, I omit the verse transmitted as v. 398.

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on stage and the dramatist who creates the ‘plots’.2 The simile of the poet is introduced by a developed metaphor from weaving (exordiri . . . ad detexundam telam), which is a semantic field regularly associated with both ‘plotting’ and the writing of poetry, and quaerit ‘seeks’ evokes the language of inuentio (cf. inueniam 405), the ‘discovery’ of material suitable to include in a poetic or rhetorical composition;3 rhetorical theorists defined inuentio as excogitatio rerum uerarum aut ueri similium quae causam probabilem reddant ‘the thinking out of things which are true or like truth which can make the case probable’,4 and the similarity of the definition to Pseudolus’ words helps to confirm that behind the comic passage lies allusion to serious ideas about literature. The slave’s distinction between the ‘probable’ or, better, the ‘like truth’ and the ‘false’ in fact evokes the fundamental concern of Hellenistic and later criticism to distinguish subject matter into the categories of the ‘true’, the ‘like truth’, and the ‘false’; terminology and categorisation were always somewhat fluid,5 but it is important that the standard critical example for material which was ueri simile was the plots of comedies. Pseudolus is thinking of dramatists, and of one dramatist in particular – he will become not just ‘a poet’ but ‘the poet’, i.e. Plautus. It is Pseudolus-Plautus who will make the cash appear.6 The language of the ‘like truth’ had, of course, a very long history: Odysseus’ lies (yeÅdea) to Penelope were ‘like true things’ (Odyssey 19.203), and Hesiod’s Muses claimed to be able to tell such fictions (Theogony 27). Callimachus himself plays with these ideas in a famous passage of the Hymn to Zeus in which he rejects the Homeric account (Iliad 15.187–93) of how Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drew lots for control of each of the three cosmic realms: dhnaioª d ì oÉ p†mpan ˆlhq”ev §san ˆoido©á j†nto p†lon Kron©dhisi di†trica dÛmata ne±maiá t©v d” k ì –p ì OÉlÅmpwi te kaª *idi kl¦ron –rÅssai, Áv m†la mŸ nen©hlov; –p ì «sa©hi g‡r ›oike pžlasqaiá t‡ d• t»sson Âson di‡ ple±ston ›cousi. yeudo©mhn ˆ©ontov Œ ken pep©qoien ˆkoužn. 2 3 4 5 6

Cf., e.g., Slater 1985, esp. 127. Cf., e.g., Propertius 1.7.6, above p. 29 on Ovid, Amores 3.1.6. Rhet. ad Herennium 1.3, Cicero, De inuentione 1.9; eÌresiv is first found in Plato, Phaedrus 236a4. Cf. Hunter 2005b with earlier bibliography. Farrell 1991: 298 suggests that the Plautine passage parodies Callimachus fr. 1; the idea has obvious attractions, but other considerations suggest we should look elsewhere.

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Poets of old were not in every way truthful. They said that the sons of Kronos divided their homes three ways by lot, but who would draw lots over Olympus and Hades, except a complete fool? It’s sensible to draw lots for equal prizes, but these differ as much as it is possible to do. If I tell lies, may they be such as to persuade my hearer. Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus 60–5 Callimachus adopts the amusingly scornful tone of the scholar invoking the criterion of the ‘plausible’ (e«k»v), and it is in keeping with this scholiastic voice that the argument is informed by the threefold division into the ‘true’ (v. 60), the ‘false’, and the ‘persuasive but fictional’ (v. 65).7 There is another way in which Pseudolus’ words enact their own claim to poetic status, and that is through the very form of the simile, for similes were essentially ‘poetic’, as Aristotle classed them (Rhetoric 3.1406b20–6). The (probably) late Hellenistic treatise On Style ascribed to ‘Demetrius’ distinguishes (chap. 89) between a short comparison (e«kas©a), which may be used in prose and which is essentially just a metaphor with ‘like’ added in front of it, and an extended ‘poetic simile’ (parabolŸ poihtikž), and this distinction was also an important element of Homeric criticism. The simile was a touchstone of poetic craft. Thus the scholia suggest that bees are chosen for the first extended simile of the Iliad (2.87–90) because there is an affinity between bees and poetry, and the fact that the great accumulation of similes before the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ (Iliad 2.455–83) precedes the invocation for the Muses’ help may well have reinforced the feeling that similes were a particular site for the display of poetic techn¯e, independent of the information provided by the Muse. One of the most interesting preserved discussions of Homeric simile, by Eustathius, the twelfth-century bishop of Thessaloniki, which draws on Hellenistic and later scholastic material,8 calls similes one of the many ‘spices’ or ‘seasonings’ (¡dÅsmata) with which Homer ‘flavours’ his poems (Hom. 176.20–1 Van der 7

8

On this passage see further Goldhill 1986: 28–9, Hunter–Fuhrer 2002: 173–4, Floridi 2004 (citing earlier bibliography); for its resonances in Roman poetry cf. Thomas 1993: 209–15. It is noteworthy how close Callimachus’ tone is to that of ‘Heraclitus’, Hom. Probl. 41.5, who dismisses the possibility of taking such a ‘strange/uneven’ (ˆnÛmalov) distribution literally. Both the Homeric scholia and the discussion of similes at Quintilian 8.3.72–82 indicate how far back some of Eustathius’ material goes. For ancient discussion of Homeric similes cf., e.g., Clausing 1913, Richardson 1980: 279–81, Snipes 1988, Heath 1989: 103–8.

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Valk).9 For an extreme case of such richness we may look to Catullus 68b,10 where ‘similes, and the wider system of analogy-making of which they are the most overt example, saturate [the] poem’.11 Whatever other considerations may have determined Catullus’ strategy, he has put similes and analogies at the heart of a demonstration of poetic skill; he offers Allius quod potui (v. 149), a phrase which combines self-deprecation with an assertive announcement of display. With the rather more restrained strategy of the Plautine slave, and with Eustathius’ image in mind, we may compare Lucretius’ famous explanation of how poetry is to his argument as the honey on the lip of the cup is to the health-giving, but unpleasantly tasting, medicine inside (Lucr. 1.933– 50). The substance of the simile may well be ‘traditional’ (so Bailey), but in this whole passage (vv. 921–50) Lucretius pulls out all the poetic stops – including the use of simile – to make a point about how poetry works.12 The first simile of the Aeneid, describing Neptune’s calming of the storm, announces Virgil too as acknowledging the particular importance of this poetic form: ac ueluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est seditio saeuitque animis ignobile uulgus iamque faces et saxa uolant, furor arma ministrat; tum, pietate grauem ac meritis si forte uirum quem conspexere, silent arrectisque auribus astant; ille regit dictis animos et pectora mulcet: sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor . . . As when unrest often arises among a great people and the common crowd’s minds turn violent and torches and rocks are hurled as their rage finds weapons; then, if they chance to see a man whose sense of duty and whose deeds carry weight, they fall silent and stand by with ready ears, and his words govern their minds and soothe their hearts. So did all the roar of the sea fall . . . Virgil, Aeneid 1.148–54 9 10 11 12

Similarly, Julian notes that Archilochus used myths and fables as a ¤dusma in his poetry (7.207b = Archilochus T90 Tarditi). For the poet as cook cf. Gowers 1993: 78–107. I use the standard designations of 68a and 68b for convenience; they are not to be taken as implying a view about the unity of the whole text. Cf. further below pp. 102–8. Feeney 1992: 33. On the similes in this poem cf. Williams 1980: 50–61 and esp. Feeney 1992. For another instance where simile form itself is important (Virgil, Eclogue 9.11–13) cf. below pp. 122–3.

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Here Virgil uses the simile form to reflect both upon the relation between a simile and the narrative which surrounds it, and upon his own relation to Homer.13 As was already recognised in antiquity,14 this simile reverses the second extended simile of the Iliad (2.144–9), in which the reaction of the assembled Achaean troops to Agamemnon’s (deluded) suggestion that they should abandon the campaign is compared to a storm at sea; whereas in Homer the assembly in the narrative becomes riotous, in Virgil a riotous assembly within the simile is calmed. Virgil has however extended the semantic reach of his simile to embrace the whole Homeric scene which he is echoing. In Homer the expedition is only rescued by Odysseus, acting at the impulse of Athena, who restrains the leaders (basileis) by persuading them to wait to see how events turn out, and the ordinary troops (the d¯emos) by a combination of abuse and violence. Virgil has recalled this distinction by his use of the phrase ignobile uulgus, and the ‘statesman’s’ calming words (v. 153) echo the ‘gentle words’ (ˆgan‡ ›pea) with which Odysseus restrains the basileis from precipitate action (Iliad 2.164, 180, 189). The ‘statesman’ himself, for whom more than one Roman analogue may of course also be found, recalls Odysseus, a man (perhaps indeed the ˆnžr or uir par excellence) pietate grauem ac meritis, whose principal skill is oratory.15 Here then, as elsewhere, a simile, which, as we have seen, is a marked poetic form and which by its very nature foregrounds issues of similarity and difference, is a very powerful tool of intertextual allusion and variation, one of the principal modes in which poetic techn¯e is displayed. Virgil and Homer are ‘similar’, not identical, and ‘the statesman’ is like Odysseus in his effect, but unlike Odysseus in the peaceful methods which he uses towards everyone. In an earlier passage of Virgil we also see likeness and difference within similes used to focus issues of literary borrowing and imitation. In Eclogue 5, Mopsus’ song (vv. 20–44) is a reworking of Thyrsis’ song of the death of Daphnis in Theocritus, Idyll 1; when Mopsus has finished, Menalcas praises him with a set of suitably pastoral analogies:

13 14 15

On Virgil’s similes in general Lyne 1989: 63–99 offers suggestive guidance. Cf. Servius auctus on Aeneid 1.148. Our thoughts may indeed be already directed to Aeneas’ Homeric model by arma uirum in v. 119, and by arma and uirum in successive verses in the simile. For silence (v. 152) as the appropriate response to Odysseus cf. Odyssey 11.333–4. I have wondered whether uirum quem suggests the (oÎ)tiv with which Odysseus is forever associated.

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tale tuum carmen nobis, diuine poeta, quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per aestum dulcis aquae saliente sitim restinguere riuo. nec calamis solum aequiperas, sed uoce magistrum: fortunate puer, tu nunc eris alter ab illo. Divine poet, your song was for me as sleep in the grass is to the weary, as is quenching one’s thirst from a bubbling stream of sweet water in the heat of the day. You rival the master not just with the pipes, but with your voice. Happy boy, you now will be second after him. Virgil, Eclogue 5.45–9 After Menalcas’ song of the now apotheosised Daphnis, Mopsus returns the compliment: quae tibi, quae tali reddam pro carmine dona? nam neque me tantum uenientis sibilus Austri nec percussa iuuant fluctu tam litora, nec quae saxosas inter decurrunt flumina uallis. What gifts, what shall I give you in return for such a song? For neither the whistling of the rising south wind nor the sound of waves beating on the shores nor rivers which flow down through rocky valleys give me such pleasure. Virgil, Eclogue 5.81–4 As is appropriate to the subject matter, these matched passages pick up the themes of the opening exchange of compliments in Idyll 1 (coming second to Pan, the song like cool water), but in both passages Virgil has also borrowed touches from a famously problematic simile from Catullus 68:16 qualis in aerii perlucens uertice montis riuus muscoso prosilit e lapide, qui cum de prona praeceps est ualle uolutus, per medium densi transit iter populi, dulce uiatori lasso in sudore leuamen, cum grauis exustos aestus hiulcat agros, ac, uelut in nigro iactatis turbine nautis lenius aspirans aura secunda uenit iam prece Pollucis, iam Castoris implorata, tale fuit nobis Allius auxilium. 16

Cf. below pp. 103–6.

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As on the peak of a towering mountain a crystal-clear stream gushes forth from a mossy rock and rolls headlong down the steep valley across the middle of a busily crowded path – a sweet relief for a tired and sweating traveller, when fierce heat causes the burned fields to gape; and as a favouring breeze with its gentle breath comes to sailors who have been tossed in a black storm after they have appealed to both Pollux and Castor, so came Allius’ help to me. Catullus 68.57–66 Thus at a point of self-conscious reflection upon his own relationship to the Greek tradition (who exactly is the diuinus poeta and who the magister?)17 Virgil enacts similarity and difference not merely by reworking Theocritus’ own analogies, but by recalling the most extended previous meditation in Latin poetry on ‘likeness’, one very probably itself indebted to Theocritus and one certainly deeply concerned with its relation to Greek poetry. In being alter ab illo ‘second to the master’, Mopsus (like Virgil) is also ‘different from the master’: rivalry, imitation, and difference – these are the themes which glitter in the prism of the simile and analogous structures. The recognition that the simile was in fact a specially charged poetic mode seems to have set in early in the Greek poetic tradition; so too did the recognition that Homer particularly associated similes with battle narrative. Thus, the Hesiodic Aspis (‘Shield of Heracles’) bursts into a succession of similes as soon as Heracles and his opponent Cycnus actually join battle, cf. vv. 374–9, 386–92, 402–12, 421–3, 426–32, 436–40. Such a sequence points to an audience familiar with generic markers. The nearest parallel to such a profusion of similes might be the description of Jason’s battle with the Earthborn at the conclusion of Book 3 of Apollonius’ Argonautica, where again a concentration of similes almost suggests epic pastiche.18 Pastiche is perhaps not an unfair term also for this section of the Aspis in which an extended ‘idyllic’ time description of marked Hesiodic flavour (vv. 393–401) is sandwiched between a boar simile and a lion simile. The poet of the Aspis has deconstructed epic narrative into its principal constituent parts (ecphrasis, simile, time description, divine epiphany, etc.) in a manner which may be thought to foreshadow developments in Hellenistic and Roman poetry. 17 18

Cf. below p. 132. On ideas of teaching and succession in pastoral poetry cf. below pp. 119–21. Cf. Hunter on vv. 1278–407.

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2 Callimachean and Catullan similes sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Hortale, mitto haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae, ne tua dicta uagis nequiquam credita uentis effluxisse meo forte putes animo, ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum procurrit casto uirginis e gremio, quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum, dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur, atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu, huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor. But nevertheless, Hortalus, in the midst of such sorrows, I send you these translated poems of the son of Battus, so that you do not perchance think that your words, vainly entrusted to the fickle breezes, have slipped from my mind, as an apple, which has been sent as a secret gift to a young girl by her betrothed, slips from her chaste lap; she had placed it in her soft clothes and, poor girl, forgotten about it, but when she jumps up at her mother’s arrival it falls out and rolls quickly along the floor, while a guilty blush comes over the girl’s sad face. Catullus 65.15–24 Catullus introduces his translation of Callimachus’ ‘Lock of Berenice’ (the last ‘poem’ of the Aitia) with an extended simile which both recalls – without, apparently, closely reworking – a famous episode from Book 3 of the Aitia (how Acontius won Cydippe by tricking her with an apple inscribed ‘I promise to marry Acontius’)19 and also picks up a metaphor (expromere fetus) from the opening of the poem,20 in a manner which exploits (inter alia) the fact that critical discussion of similes was in antiquity part of a broader consideration of metaphor.21 Here again is simile as a site of poetic ars, for Catullus is offering Hortalus a translation because he is, so he says, unable to write poetry, a claim which is, of course, not to be taken too literally;22 ‘translation’ in fact, almost 19 20 21 22

Cf., e.g., Clausen 1970: 93, Hunter 1993a, Barchiesi 1993: 363–5, below pp. 101–2. Cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 474–5. Cf. McCall 1969. Note how the metaphor of Catullus 68a.3–4 becomes a simile at 68b.63–5. Bibliography in Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 474 n. 127. There is here an analogy, if not in fact a parallel, with 68a–b to the extent that 68a claims an inability to write poetry and 68b then offers an extraordinary display of poetic techn¯e.

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above any other poetic form, has at its heart critical problems of sameness and difference. In this section we will consider Catullus’ Greek heritage of simile-making, for Catullus, more pehaps than any other Roman poet, seems to have seized the opportunities for self-conscious experimentation which the simile form offered. There is a network of similarities and analogies, and an exploration of what is at stake in this network, which run through Catullus’ ‘longer elegies’ (Poems 65–8) or, perhaps, through all of Poems 61–8;23 the closing simile of Poem 65 does not stand alone. Against this background, it may seem surprising that Poem 66 has no extended similes, particularly as the poem has ‘likeness’ at its heart: the lock’s separation from the queen is ‘like’ the queen’s separation from her husband, as the queen’s longing for her absent husband/brother is ‘like’ (and unlike) Catullus’ longing for his brother. The language of the poem, of course, suggests amusing analogies and contrasts, as in Euergetes’ two types of battle (vv. 11–14), qua rex tempestate nouo auctus hymenaeo uastatum finis iuerat Assyrios, dulcia nocturnae portans uestigia rixae, quam de uirgineis gesserat exuuiis at the time when the king, increased in his new marriage, had gone to lay waste Assyrian territory, bearing the sweet marks of the nocturnal struggle which he had waged to win the virgin’s spoils, but the poem as a whole avoids formally constituted similes. It might be tempting to put this down to the identity of the speaker, but we will have to set that temptation against the fact that similes are surprisingly rare in what survives of Callimachus.24 In the elegiac mode of the Aitia they are very rare indeed. There are, of course, brief expressions of likeness: Berenice’s horses run ‘like winds’ (SH 254.10), the gods do not bite ‘like dogs’ (SH 239.5 = fr. 99.5 Massimilla), the effect of aid¯os (‘shame’) on the face is like that of rouge (fr. 80.10), pretty girls may resemble the dawn (fr. 67.13), and, most famously, the poet unrolls (?) his poem little by little ‘like a child’ (fr. 1.6), though old age weighs as heavy on him as Sicily upon the monstrous Enceladus (fr. 1.36); the ‘Reply to the Telchines’ is replete with metaphors and 23

Cf., e.g., Most 1981.

24

Cf. Lapp 1965: 88–91.

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suggestive images (the poet as cicada etc.), but Callimachus there resolutely avoids the traditional simile mode. In the great poem which opened the third book of the Aitia, however, we find a simile with traditional subject matter used in a very untraditional way: ˆstŸr d ì eÔt ì] Šr ì ›melle boän Špo m”ssaba [lÅsein aÎliov], Áv duqmŸn e²sin Ìp ì  el©ou ]Þv ke±nov ì Ojion©dhisi jae©n[ei ]qeän to±si palaiot”roiv ]thri qÅrhná ¾ d ì Ât ì ›kluen  c[žn, Þv ¾p»t ì ½kn]hr¦v ­ac ì –p ì oÔv –l†jou sk]Åmnov ktl. [When the star] was about to release the yoke-straps from the oxen, [the evening star] which comes as the sun sets . . . when he shines upon the descendants of Ophion25 . . . oldest of the gods . . . the door. When he heard the sound, [as when] a lioncub’s cry reaches the ear of a trembling fawn . . . Callimachus, SH 259.5–11 = fr. 177.5–11 Pfeiffer Heracles, on his way to fight the Nemean lion, is being entertained by Molorchos, a humble peasant. As evening approaches, Molorchos resumes what appears to be a habitual struggle against mice, and the whole passage, which describes Molorchos’ struggle as an ‘epic’ battle (though one fought with Odyssean cunning) on a par with that of Heracles against the Nemean lion, is introduced by an ‘epic’ time description,26 which acts as a pointer to a new and major episode; here, however, the description is marked by Callimachean linguistic (e.g. m”ssaba ‘yoke-straps’, a Hesiodic hapax, but in a non-Hesiodic form) and theological (‘the sons of Ophion’) learning, which takes the verses very far from the their homely, rural subject matter. Molorchos hears the mice ‘as when a lioncub cries into the ear of a frightened fawn’; the ‘lion simile’ connects the passage (after a fashion) with the surrounding context of Heracles and the Nemean lion, but the connection with the narrative is in fact far from straightforward. The mice will destroy what little Molorchos has to offer his guest, but they hardly pose to him the threat that a hungry lioncub (and its mother) pose to a fawn; the traditional subject matter can only force us to wonder how similes actually do work. 25 26

I.e. pre-Olympian deities now dwelling in Hades. Cf. Pfeiffer ad loc., Fantuzzi 1988: 121–63.

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Heracles is also at the heart of another Callimachean experiment with analogy in the first book of the Aitia.27 The hero’s reaction to the curses of the Lindian peasant whose ox Heracles has killed and eaten reveals again the self-conscious display of poetic voice: â]v ¾ m•n ›nq ì  rŽto, sÆ d ì Þv ‰l¼v §con ˆkoÅei S]ell¼v –nª Tmar©oiv oÎresin ì Ikar©hv,  i]q”wn Þv m†cla jilžtorov åta penicroÓ. Þv Šdikoi pat”rwn u¬”ev, Þv sÆ lÅrhv, –ssª g‡r oÉ m†l ì –lajr»v,  kaª L©nov oÎ s ì ›ce l”xai, lu]grän âv –p”wn oÉd•n [½pi]z»m[en]ov ktl. So he cursed you there, but you heard as the ‘Sellos’ priest on the mountains of Tmaros hears the Icarian sea, as the proud ears of young men hear an impoverished lover, as naughty sons hear their fathers, as you listen to the lyre – for you are not easy to handle, something which not even Linus would say of you – so you, taking no notice of the grim words . . . Callimachus fr. 25.2–7 Massimilla The very overt striving after variation in length and tone in the comparisons,28 like the Homeric and geographical learning (v. 3), are markers of the poet, as is (almost explicitly) the very Callimachean theme of the impoverished paederast. As the persona of the poet intrudes into the series of analogies, so the narrative suddenly breaks the formal structures of comparison, as the last instance apostrophises and concerns Heracles himself; here, as elsewhere in Hellenistic and Roman poetry, there is persistent experimentation at the boundaries between narrative and modes of comparison. Moreover, it is all but certain that this passage is spoken not in fact by the poet, but by the poet recalling the Muse Kalliope’s words (cf. fr. 9.22 Massimilla). In making his Muse speak ‘like a (Callimachean) poet’29 – whether in apostrophising Apollo (fr. 20.9 Massimilla) or displaying her learning – Callimachus pushes the archaic convention of ‘inspiration by the Muse’ to one ‘logical extreme’; after all, Homer too had begun with an ‘aetiological’ question to the Muse about origins, which she answered immediately (‘Which god then brought them together to battle in strife? The son of Zeus and Leto’, Iliad 1.8–9). 27 28 29

Stephen Hinds suggests that this is no accident: Heracles is a ‘larger-than-life’ figure who ‘triggers Callimachus to bend his own rules’. Cf., e.g., Hutchinson 1988: 47. On this passage see also Pretagostini 2006. As too does Apollo in fr. 75, cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 63.

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It is a fundamental tenet of ancient discussions of simile, and of discussion of Homer’s similes in particular, that they aid clarity and envisionment by assimilating the grand and poetic to phenomena within the experience of the audience; the ‘vehicle’ (i.e. the subject matter of the simile) will be an ordinary event and must be more familiar than the ‘tenor’ (i.e. the narrative which the simile illustrates).30 A reaction to such teaching may be seen in the similes and comparisons which survive from Callimachus’ hexameter poems. Thus, in the Hymn to Demeter Erysichthon’s reaction to the disguised goddess’ attempt to prevent him from committing a terrible crime is a fierce one: t‡n d ì Šr ì Ëpobl”yav calepÛteron  • kunag¼n ßresin –n Tmar©oisin Ëpobl”pei Šndra l”aina Ýmot»kov, tŽv jantª p”lein blosurÛtaton Àmma, c†zeu, ›ja, mž toi p”lekun m”gan –n croª p†xw. He looked at her more grimly than a lioness looks at a huntsman in the mountains of Tmarus when she has just given birth – the time when people say her look is most terrible; ‘Give ground’, he said, ‘lest I stick my great axe in your flesh’. Callimachus, Hymn to Demeter 50–3 The geographical specificity (lacking from the Homeric model – Iliad 17.133– 7 – which appears to have been a disputed passage in contemporary Homeric scholarship), the ‘gratuitous’ zoological learning (introduced by the insouciant, if Homerically inspired, ‘they say’), the gloss blosur»v, the neologism Ýmot»kov, and the verb of speech placed un-Homerically within the direct speech all mark this passage as very far from a traditional lion simile; moreover, Erysichthon threatens to plant a sharp weapon in the goddess’ flesh, whereas in the simile it is the lion who is threatened by the hunters with such a fate. The principal point of contact between simile and narrative is, of course, the fierceness of Erysichthon’s look, but Callimachean technique explores, as both ancient and modern critics have done, the inability of any reading strategy to contain the simile within any simple pattern of ‘likeness’. In noting that the ‘vehicle’ of a simile must be more familiar than the ‘tenor’, Eustathius (cf. above p. 83) observes that ‘the unknown and unaccustomed makes for bad similes, for which reason the similes of Choirilos are censured, because such similes are not instructive’ (Hom. 176.35–6 Van der 30

Cf., e.g., Eustathius, Hom. 176.32–6 Van der Valk and below pp. 93–8.

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Valk = Choirilos of Samos T11 Radici Colace). The identity of this Choirilos has been disputed: Choirilos of Samos was an epic poet of the late fifth–early fourth century who wrote, inter alia, a poem on the Persian wars, whereas Choirilos of Iasos celebrated the campaigns of Alexander and became a byword for bad poetry. Eustathius’ sentiment is, however, also found in Aristotle, in a passage where he is explaining the technique of dialectical argument: ‘Examples (parade©gmata) and comparisons (parabola©) should be used to aid clarity, the examples being familiar (o«ke±a) and drawn from what we know, as happens with Homer, not as happens with Choirilos’ (Topics 8.157a14–16). As Aristotle elsewhere cites the Samian poet, it seems very likely that the reference here too is to him, and not to Alexander’s encomiast. Choirilos of Samos, whose most famous fragment (SH 317) – to which Callimachus perhaps alludes in the ‘Reply to the Telchines’ – is a lament for the position of the modern poet in the face of what has already been achieved, has often been seen, both in antiquity and modern criticism, as a ‘modern’ poet who in some ways foreshadowed Hellenistic trends. Of particular interest is a passage in the commentary of the neo-Platonist Hermeias (fifth century ad) on Plato’s Phaedrus (p. 98 Couvreur).31 In commenting upon the passage (245a5–8) where Plato distinguishes between poets inspired by man©a and those whose poetry is rooted solely in t”cnh, Hermias approves the distinction: ‘For what does the poetry of Choirilos and Callimachus have in common with that of Homer or Pindar?’ It is clear that Hermias’ observation stands in the same line of criticism as a famous passage of ‘Longinus’, On the Sublime (33.4–5) which unfavourably contrasts poets of flawless technique (Apollonius, Theocritus, Eratosthenes, Bacchylides, Ion of Chios) with truly sublime and great poets whose ambition sometimes leads to poetic ‘errors’ (Homer, Archilochus, Pindar, Sophocles); from ‘Longinus’ descend critical views about Hellenistic poetry which are still powerfully influential today. The criticism of Choirilos’ similes and his grouping by Hermeias with Callimachus perhaps allow us to see the earlier roots of the latter’s technique in the handling of similes, a technique which sought to break out of the Homeric mould, both as it was observed in the epic poems themselves and as enshrined in critical discussion of Homer. A particular instance where the ‘vehicle’ is something other than an event drawn from everyday experience is where characters are compared to gods. Quintilian (8.3.73) cites Virgil’s comparison of Aeneas coming to join Dido’s 31

For discussion and bibliography cf. Lombardi 1997: 101–2, Hollis 2000.

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hunt to Apollo on Delos (Aeneid 4.143–50) as an instance of the kind of licence which may be permitted to a poet, but which should be avoided by an orator because the ‘vehicle’ is here not clearer than the ‘tenor’. In Homer, brief comparisons of a hero to a god are not uncommon, but such extended similes are distinctly uncommon. Virgil’s most immediate model is here in fact a Hellenistic simile, Apollonius’ comparison of Jason leaving his house to join the Argonauts to Apollo going to one of his shrines: o³ov d ì –k nho±o quÛdeov e²sin %p»llwn ¦lon ˆn ì  gaq”hn  • Kl†ron £  ge PuqÜ £ Luk©hn eÉre±an –pª X†nqoio ço¦isiá to±ov ˆn‡ plhqÆn džmou k©en, årto d ì ˆutŸ keklom”nwn Šmudiv. As Apollo proceeds from his fragrant shrine and travels through holy Delos or Klaros or Pytho or broad Lycia beside the streams of the Xanthos; just so did [Jason] pass through the great crowd of the people and a loud shout arose as they all urged him on. Apollonius, Argonautica 1.307–11 The Virgilian simile forms a matching pair with another simile in the Aeneid, 1.498–504, in which Dido is compared to Apollo’s sister, Diana. That simile descends from Homer’s famous simile in which Nausicaa among her handmaids is compared to Artemis among the nymphs (Odyssey 6.102–9), a highly unusual and very influential passage. Apollonius too had rewritten that Homeric simile in describing Medea on her way to the temple to meet Jason (Arg. 3.876–86), and Virgil has creatively constructed a symmetry between the two Apollonian passages, perhaps influenced by the fact that immediately after being compared to Apollo Jason is met by a priestess of Artemis (Arg. 1.311–16).32 Callimachus goes beyond even these breaches of the normal practice of similes in comparing not mortals to gods, but gods to other gods: here neither ‘tenor’ nor ‘vehicle’ fall within the bounds of the familiar. In vv. 141–7 of the Hymn to Delos the clashing of Ares’ shield is compared to the roar and clatter as Etna erupts when the buried giant turns over and Hephaestus’ furnaces are 32

For further discussion cf. Clausen 1987: 18–23, Nelis 2001: 133–5. Both Apollonian similes seem to have contributed touches to Virgil’s Diana simile: Dido moves per medios as Jason passed ˆn‡ plhqÆn džmou (1.310), and Aen. 1.500 seems to reflect Arg. 3.881 (Oreades and ˆmorb†dev in the same position before the bucolic caesura (so Clausen 1987: 21)).

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working at fever pitch; here ‘the explanation of one mythic sound in terms of another draws attention to both as purely poetic constructs’.33 We might have seen the smoke of Etna and heard its roar, but Hephaestus and the giant belong to the same thought-world as Ares and his shield. So too, in vv. 228–32 of the same poem Iris sits beside Hera’s throne like one of Artemis’ hunting dogs sitting to attention beside its mistress. The comparison of the movement of an Olympian to an animal falls within a very familiar (Homeric) pattern, but the comparison of an Olympian to another Olympian’s animal is quite another thing. Moreover, here Callimachus blurs the boundary between simile and narrative by moving after the simile, not back to the narrative, but rather to a disquisition on Iris’ habitual practice: ke©nh d ì oÉd” pote sjet”rhv –pilžqetai ™drhv, oÉd ì Âte o¬ lhqa±on –pª pter¼n Ìpnov –re©sei, ˆll ì aÉtoÓ meg†loio potª glwc±na qr»noio tutq¼n ˆpokl©nasa karžata l”criov eÌdei. oÉd” pote zÛnhn ˆnalÅetai oÉd• tace©av –ndrom©dav, mž o¯ ti kaª a«jn©dion ›pov e­phi desp»tiv. She never forgets her seat, not even when sleep presses the wing of forgetfulness upon her, but there beside the edge of the great throne she sleeps bent over, her head a little to one side. She never undoes her girdle or her swift running boots, lest her mistress give her a sudden command. Callimachus, Hymn to Delos 233–9 If the simile explicitly compared Iris to Artemis’ hunting dog, the poet’s gloss upon the simile in these verses compares her to another divine animal, but this time through allusion; the famous opening of Pindar’s First Pythian describes how the eagle of Zeus is lulled by Apollo’s music and sleeps on its master’s sceptre ‘relaxing its swift wings on both sides’ (v. 7); sleep’s wing in Callimachus varies the wings of the Pindaric eagle. This same Callimachean simile from the Hymn to Delos of Hephaestus’ forge at work has also contributed to another Virgilian exploration of the bounds of the possible in simile technique. In the only extended simile of the ‘bee ethnography’ in Georgics 4, the frenzied activity of the hive is compared to the Cyclopes forging Zeus’ weapons beneath Etna: 33

Hunter 1993b: 131. Cf. also Feeney 1991: 79–80.

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ac ueluti lentis Cyclopes fulmina massis cum properant, alii taurinis follibus auras accipiunt redduntque, alii stridentia tingunt aera lacu; gemit impositis incudibus Aetna; illi inter sese magna ui bracchia tollunt in numerum, uersantque tenaci forcipe ferrum: non aliter, si parua licet componere magnis, Cecropias innatus apes amor urget habendi munere quamque suo. As when the Cyclopes hurry to forge thunderbolts from malleable ore, and some create alternating blasts with oxhide bellows, while others dip the bronze in the lake so that it screeches, and Etna groans beneath the weight of the anvils; with great power the Cyclopes rhythmically raise their great arms and turn the iron with the grasping forceps. In no other way, if one may compare small with great, an innnate love of gain urges on the Attic bees, each in their own duty. Virgil, Georgics 4.170–8 Virgil’s principal model here is Callimachus’ description of the Cyclopes at work in the Hymn to Artemis (vv. 46–61), but he has added touches both from the simile of the Hymn to Delos (e.g. the forceps) and from the simile with which Homer describes the blinding of the other Cyclops: Þv d ì Ât ì ˆnŸr calkeÆv p”lekun m”gan  • sk”parnon e«n Ìdati yucräi b†pthi meg†la «†conta jarm†sswná t¼ g‡r aÔte sidžrou ge kr†tov –st©ná âv toÓ s©z ì ½jqalm¼v –lain”wi perª mocläi. As when a blacksmith dips a great axe or adze into cold water, tempering it as it screeches loudly – for this is how iron is made strong – so did his eye sizzle on the olive-wood stake. Homer, Odyssey 9.391–4 The principal focus of the simile is the division of labour among both bees and Cyclopes, but there is a strange disjunction in the simile, whether we explain that, in keeping with the paradoxical project of the whole account of bee life (cf. vv. 3–4), Virgil has reversed the normal order of things – bees should be the ‘vehicle’, not the ‘tenor’, of an epic simile – or that, for Virgil’s readers, the Callimachean world of the Cyclopes, a world familiar from the visualising phantasia which reading engenders, is indeed more familiar than the detailed activity of bees, and so Virgil has, again paradoxically, 96

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in fact followed the ancient prescriptions for how to write a simile.34 What is clear is that the semi-proverbial si parua licet componere magnis, following immediately upon the assertive non aliter, draws self-conscious attention to Virgilian experimentation and asks us to consider whether the analogy is indeed valid and how precisely it works. When Virgil’s Tityrus uses the same phrase at Eclogue 1.23, it introduces a suitably pastoral comparison for Rome: sic canibus catulos similis, sic matribus haedos noram, sic paruis componere magna solebam. uerum haec tantum alias inter caput extulit urbes quantum lenta solent inter uiburna cupressi. Thus I used to think puppies were like dogs and kids like their mothers, thus I used to compare great things to small; but this city raises its head above others as far as cypresses rise above pliant osiers. Virgil, Eclogue 1.22–5 In the disjunction between Rome and Tityrus’ local ‘city’ lies the gap between the world which pastoral depicts and the formal poetic structures and culture in which it locates itself; the putting together of the ‘small’ and the ‘great’ lies at the heart of Virgilian pastoral. In keeping with its epic genre, the Hecale may have been the Callimachean poem richest in similes, though only a few survive.35 Of particular interest is a description (fr. 18 Hollis) of the coming of the storm which forced Theseus into Hecale’s hut, for here it would appear (the text is sadly fragmentary) that the storm is described partly through a simile of a storm in another part of the Greek world. If so, a ‘mythical’ storm is likened to one from the contemporary world, thus obeying some of the critical principles we have been tracing, but doing so (again) in a very novel way. The effect would be particularly striking for any Athenian audience (or one that knew Attica) of the Hecale. The passage of the ‘mythical’ storm is described through a detailed and very familiar geography (Parnes, ‘thyme-bearing Aigaleus’, Hymettus), whereas the ‘real’ storm appears to be set in a remote and generalised seascape. For such adoption and realignment of Homeric patterns within Callimachean epic we may compare the extended time description which introduces the storm: 34

Cf. above p. 92.

35

Cf. Hollis 1990: 14–15.

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mht”ri d ì ¾pp[»te deiel¼n a«t©zousin, Šgousi d• ce±rav ˆp ì ›rgou t¦mov . . . When to the mother . . . they ask for the evening meal and lift their hands from their work, at that time . . . Callimachus, Hecale fr. 18.5–7 Hollis Such epic descriptions of time have many features in common with similes. Here the pattern is again Homeric, but the male woodcutter of the Homeric model (Iliad 11.86–9) has given way, with what may seem a typically Hellenistic taste, to girls whose labour is indoors under a mother’s watchful eye; it may not be wrong here to be reminded of the simile of the embarrassed uirgo which closes Catullus 65.36 Catullus 64 explores likeness and similitude in many ways: how are Peleus and Thetis like (and unlike) Theseus and Ariadne, how is this poem like (and unlike) the poems – particularly the Argonautica of Apollonius – to which it alludes, how are emotional ‘waves’ like (and unlike) the waves of the sea? At one point, however, we may particularly recall Callimachus’ Hecale.37 Theseus’ victory over the Minotaur is described through simile: quanto saepe magis fulgore expalluit auri, cum saeuum cupiens contra contendere monstrum aut mortem appeteret Theseus aut praemia laudis. non ingrata tamen frustra munuscula diuis promittens tacito succendit uota labello. nam uelut in summo quatientem brachia Tauro quercum aut conigeram sudanti cortice pinum indomitus turbo contorquens flamine robur eruit (illa procul radicitus exturbata prona cadit, late quaeuis cunque obuia frangens), sic domito saeuum prostrauit corpore Theseus nequiquam uanis iactantem cornua uentis. How much paler than the gleam of gold she often turned, when Theseus, longing to match himself with the savage monster, sought death or the reward of glory. Not, however, fruitless or unwelcome to the gods were the gifts she promised as she made her vow with silent lips. For as on the peak of Taurus an oak or a cone-bearing sweaty-barked pine, its arms 36

Cf. below p. 101.

37

Cf. further Hollis 1990: 32.

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waving, is overturned by an unconquerable whirlwind which twists the trunk with its blast – torn up by its roots, the tree lies prone at a distance, having broken everything in its path – so did Theseus lay low the monster, its body conquered, its horns tossing vainly in the empty breezes. Catullus 64.100–11 The final verse looks like an adaptation of a preserved Greek hexameter of unknown authorship: poll‡ m†thn ker†essin –v  ”ra qumžnanta Often vainly with its horns angry against the air. Callimachus fr. 732 = Hecale fr. 165 Hollis That this verse comes from Callimachus’ Hecale and describes the bull of Marathon has often been conjectured; if so, Catullus has used one victory of Theseus over a bull to describe another (similarity and difference at a point of intertextual allusion again). We do not know whether Callimachus used a simile at the corresponding place of the Hecale,38 nor whether he himself alluded to Theseus’ Cretan bull-adventure while telling of his Attic one, but it is likely that the narrative of Theseus’ struggle with the bull was not extensive in Callimachus’ poem. Nevertheless, it may not have been quite as brief as Catullus’ narration by means of a single simile, which seems to take Callimachean rebalancing of narrative priorities, seen most famously in the story of Molorchos in the ‘Victoria Berenices’ and in the Hecale itself, to new extremes.39 The frame of the simile is also noteworthy: ‘Ariadne’s prayers found a favourable response [as is shown by the fact that] as on Taurus . . . so did Theseus conquer the Minotaur’; here too Catullus is seen to stand in a direct line from Alexandrian experimentation with the simile form. The closing nequiquam (111) picks up and varies the opening frustra (103), but the synonyms,40 though confirming a causal connection, refer to quite different events, and one is in fact negatived – similarity and difference again. 38 39 40

There is no simile at [Theocritus] 25.142–9, which may also be indebted to the Hecale; cf. Gow’s note on v. 145. Cf. Williams 1980: 49 (though he does not consider the matter in relation to Callimachean technique). For synonyms, rather than the same words, framing a simile cf. Callimachus, Hymn to Delos 228, 232 (–d”qlion, qr»non).

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The simile itself points in this direction as well. The anthropomorphic tree (brachia, sudanti) suggests the mixed creature which was the Minotaur (usually represented as a man with a bull’s head); conigeram ‘cone-bearing’ suggests cornigeram ‘horn-bearing’, which all the manuscripts in fact read,41 and robur ‘trunk’ suggests robur ‘strength’, which the Minotaur had in abundance. The Minotaur rages against the ‘empty winds’ with its horns, as though it had read the simile of which it was a part. The beast (saeuum . . . monstrum 101) cannot adequately be described in language, and so finishes up as simply the linguistically extraordinary saeuum used as a noun (110), a use as rare as the creature it describes. That the simile is set in summo . . . Tauro (i.e. high up in the great mountains of south central Turkey) suits the fantastic creature, the Minotaur which makes demands upon our imagination, but it also challenges us not to be disturbed by reference to ‘Bull’ in this context; it is almost as if Catullus provocatively gestures towards a rationalising reading of the myth – the ‘Minotaur’ was in fact a misunderstanding of something which happened in the Taurus mountains.42 Such an effect, which overturns the possibility of a tonally consistent reading of the simile, seems much closer to Callimachus than to Homer.43 This sense of the simile as a touchstone of poetic technique could be illustrated at great length from Hellenistic poetry.44 In Theocritus’ Idyll 13, the story of Hylas, the boy’s fall into the Nymphs’ pool is compared to that of a shooting star: katžripe d ì –v m”lan Ìdwr ˆqr»ov, Þv Âte purs¼v ˆp ì oÉranoÓ ¢ripen ˆstžr ˆqr»ov –n p»ntwi, naÅtav d” tiv e²pen —ta©roiv “kouj»ter ì, å pa±dev, poie±sq ì Âplaá pleustik¼v oÔrov”. He fell into the dark water headlong, as when a fiery star falls from heaven headlong into the sea, and a sailor says to his mates: ‘Make the tackle lighter, lads; there’s a breeze for sailing’. Theocritus 13.49–52 The Argonautic context clearly suggests that there is here some semantic drift between simile and narrative, even if we do not go so far as to see 41 42 43 44

Cf. Salat 1993, who however offers a misleading account of the matter. Cf. also Statius, Ach. 1.191–2, with P. Hardie in Hinds 1998: 127 n.2. A fuller discussion would have to take account also of Catullus’ debt to the simile describing the fall of Talos at Ap. Rhod. Arg. 4.1682–8. For the Argonautica of Apollonius cf. Hunter 1993b: 129–38.

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the simile as actually explanatory of the Argonauts’ subsequent nocturnal departure.45 Behind the Theocritean simile seems to lie Iliad 4.75–84, where Athena’s movement from Olympus to earth is compared to a shooting star which is ‘a marvel for sailors or a large army’. Theocritus has, with typical brevity and liveliness, dramatised the first part of that disjunction, whereas Homer himself had elaborated the second half through a description of the effect of the portent upon the Trojans and Achaeans. The only developed simile in Theocritus’ Hymn to the Dioscuri is the comparison of Amycus’ muscles to rocks smoothed by a winter torrent (Idyll 22.48–50), a comparison which has a clear Homeric model in the description of Hector’s onslaught at Iliad 13.136–42 compared to a boulder crashing down from a mountain. Amycus disturbs the idyllic calm of the locus amoenus at the spring, as the simile form itself represents an irruption of the epic into a rather different poetic mode.46 The description of Amycus is in fact immediately followed by another ‘intrusion’ but of a quite different kind, that of stichomythia into a narrative poem: here then Theocritus, like Catullus after him, puts on an epideixis of poetic craft. Wendell Clausen observed of the concluding simile of Catullus 65 that ‘it was meant to suggest the style of a Callimachean simile’,47 but we have seen that, for a number of reasons, it is not easy to establish what that style might be. The substance of the simile does suggest, without reproducing, Callimachus’ influential story of how Acontius won Cydippe’s hand through the gift of an apple; the focus on the young girl complements Callimachus’ apparent concentration on the emotions of Acontius. We might indeed consider the passage as a kind of thought-experiment: ‘What would a fully-fledged simile in the Aitia look like?’ The breach of social propriety in the young girl’s acceptance of her lover’s gift may suggest the breach of traditional literary proprieties that one would expect from Callimachus, and to end a poem with such an extended simile is itself an experiment with boundaries worthy of the Greek poet, even if that ending is itself negotiable, as Poem 65 serves in fact as an introduction to another

45 46

47

So Bernsdorff 1994; cf. further Hunter on v. 52. The possible relation of the verses with Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.1273–5 may be left out of account here. Cf. Sens 1997: 16–17, whose account is, however, somewhat different. The absence of similes from the Castor narrative of Idyll 22 might be thought particularly noteworthy. Clausen 1970: 93.

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poem.48 At another level, both ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ are drawn from very ordinary experience, whether we regard the simile as illustrative of Catullus’ sending of the poem to Hortalus (i.e. with vv. 17–18 as a kind of (Callimachean) parenthesis) or of his forgetfulness of his friend’s dicta, or – with another nod to Callimachean experimentalism – of both.49 The simile in fact, appropriately enough, resembles Callimachean verse, but does not (attempt to) reproduce it. It makes us wonder, as does the following translation, about the implications of the phrase carmina Battiadae: do verses ‘of Callimachus’ differ from ‘Callimachean’ verses, and if so, how? Just where is ‘translation’ to fall in the intertextual continuum, if indeed it is to be afforded its own space? How close can one go? Can similes help to express the unnarratable nature of the relationship between Greek and Latin poetry?

3 Catullus 68 If Catullus’ exploration of the limits of likeness was set in motion by Callimachus, it acquired a momentum all its own, which flourishes away from imitation of specific Callimachean models, though never far from the spirit of Callimachean enquiry. The idea of likeness is, as we have seen, intimately tied to the idea of the poetic tradition and poetic imitation, and perhaps no poem is as concerned with these themes as is Poem 68b.50 Poets both inherit from and pass on to other poets. Catullus asks the Muses to make his book ‘a garrulous old woman’ (v. 46),51 the very embodiment of a figure who picks things up from others and then passes them on. Here, however, that image has a particular point: the poet himself is a gossip – non possum reticere ‘I can’t keep quiet’ (v. 41) – and Allius’ officia (v. 42) and studium (v. 44), of which the world will now know, are intimately connected with an adulterous affair, the very stuff of gossip. That poetry is in fact gossip (or vice versa) had, of course, been the lesson of Poem 67, which again concerned sexual goings-on within a house,52 but here gossip is also used as an image of 48

49 51

52

The closural boundary of Poem 66 also seems to have been negotiable, cf. Fantuzzi– Hunter 2004: 476. Shorter similes at the ends of Catullan poems are a familiar technique; 11.22–4 is the most notable example, cf. Bernsdorff 2005: 5–6. 50 For the division of Poem 68 cf. above p. 84 n.10. Cf. Fitzgerald 1995: 193–4. Godwin 1995: 213. Both Theocritus (Idyll 15) and Herodas (Poem 1) use images of old women to ‘represent’ their poetry, and gossip itself is dramatised by both poets, cf. Herodas 6, esp. vv. 18–27, and Theocritus 2.145–54. For Poem 67’s Callimachean affiliations cf., e.g., Macleod 1983: 187–95.

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the poetic tradition and poetic fame. Echoes of still living Greek poetry show how Allius’ name will be preserved from oblivion by poetry (vv. 43–4 ∼ Theocritus 17.118–20, vv. 50–1 ∼ Theocritus 16.94–100),53 and introduce a glittering display of poetic techn¯e with which Allius could feel that Catullus had indeed repaid his debt. Verses 51–66 pose a famous problem of simile technique; the poet is explaining to the Muses why he wishes them to spread Allius’ name far and wide: nam, mihi quam dederit duplex Amathusia curam, scitis, et in quo me torruerit genere, cum tantum arderem quantum Trinacria rupes lymphaque in Oetaeis Malia Thermopylis, maesta neque assiduo tabescere lumina fletu cessarent tristique imbre madere genae. qualis in aerii perlucens uertice montis riuus muscoso prosilit e lapide, qui cum de prona praeceps est ualle uolutus, per medium densi transit iter populi, dulce uiatori lasso in sudore leuamen, cum grauis exustos aestus hiulcat agros, ac, uelut in nigro iactatis turbine nautis lenius aspirans aura secunda uenit iam prece Pollucis, iam Castoris implorata, tale fuit nobis Allius auxilium. For you know what grief the treacherous Amathusian goddess [i.e. Venus] gave me, and how she burned me, when I was on fire no less than the Trinacrian rock and the Malian water at the ‘Hot Gates’ of Oeta and my sad eyes never ceased from wasting with constant weeping and my cheeks from dripping with grim rain. As on the peak of a towering mountain a crystal-clear stream gushes forth from a mossy rock and rolls headlong 53

For this technique cf. Hunter 2003a: 185. The use of Theocritus, Idyll 16 can be no more than a suggestion, but it would certainly suit the encomiastic nature of the poem, however different Allius’ services were from those of Hieron. Theocritus’ repeated Ëy»qi (16.95) and Ëyhl»n (16.98) might lie behind Catullus’ sublimis (v. 49), for which Nisbet (1978: 107–8) proposed subtilis; lept† (16.97) might be picked up by tenuem (v. 49), and Ànoma (16.97) by nomine (v. 50), with the Latin wish for the perpetuation of the name reversing the Greek wish for its disappearance.

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down the steep valley across the middle of a busily crowded path – a sweet relief for a tired and sweating traveller, when fierce heat causes the burned fields to gape; and as a favouring breeze with its gentle breath comes to sailors who have been tossed in a black storm after they have appealed to both Pollux and Castor, so came Allius’ help to me. Catullus 68.51–66 A mountain stream might naturally seem to pick up the poet’s weeping of vv. 55–6, but in fact we subsequently learn that the ‘tenor’ of the simile is the help which Allius offered to the poet. There are quasi-parallels for this technique, i.e. for the ‘tenor’ after the simile being quite different from what it apparently was at the start, already in Homer (cf. further below), but the description of the poet’s weeping itself demands attention (vv. 55–8). Commentators rightly cite Iliad 9.14–15 (of Agamemnon) and the slight variation at Iliad 16.3–4 of Patroclus: d†krua qerm‡ c”wn ãv te kržnh mel†nudrov, ¤ te kat ì a«g©lipov p”trhv dnojer¼n c”ei Ìdwr. . . . pouring out warm tears like a dark-watered spring, which pours out gloomy water down a steep rock. Homer, Iliad 16.3–4 The familiarity of the Homeric verses in fact works to anchor our (initial) reading of the simile to what precedes: Catullus’ ‘clear spring’ varies Homer’s ‘dark-watered spring’ with its ‘gloomy water’, where both epithets reflect the mood of the personal subject to whom the simile refers, whereas aerii . . . uertice . . . montis picks up Homer’s a«g©lipov, as that word is explained by the scholia (‘too steep even for goats’ etc.). On the other hand, the transformation of Homer’s threateningly dark stream into an inviting idyll disconcerts the understanding which we bring from the Homeric model and prepares for the transition which is to come. Catullus’ simile is, as we have perhaps now come to expect, both like and unlike the Homeric model, thus drawing striking attention to the double focus of similes in general, on both similarity and dissimilarity.54 Moreover, this appears to be not the only Homeric simile in Catullus’ mind at this point. In a famous passage of Odyssey 19 Homer compares Penelope’s weeping at Odysseus’ ‘false but like true’ tale to the melting snow ‘on the tops of high mountains’ which fills the rivers: 54

Cf. Feeney 1992: 36–7. Feeney’s discussion is fundamental for my own.

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t¦v d ì Šr ì ˆkouoÅshv ç”e d†krua, tžketo d• crÛv. Þv d• ciÜn katatžket ì –n ˆkrop»loisin Àressin, ¤n t ì eÔrov kat”thxen, –pŸn z”jurov kataceÅhi, thkom”nhv d ì Šra t¦v potamoª plžqousi ç”ontevá âv t¦v tžketo kal‡ paržia d†kru ceoÅshv, klaioÅshv —¼n Šndra paržmenon. As she listened her tears flowed and her flesh melted. As snow melts on the tops of mountains, which has been brought by the west wind and melted by the east, and as it melts the rivers fill to flooding, so did her fair cheeks melt as she poured out her tears and wept for her husband, who was sitting beside her. Homer, Odyssey 19.204–9 Forms of the verb tžkesqai ‘melt/waste away’ appear here in each of five successive verses, and Catullus’ assiduo tabescere lumina fletu . . . genae very likely reflects this Homeric pattern; Catullus thus positions himself as a Penelope, both the Penelope of this moment in Odyssey 19 and of all the years of weeping leading up to it (assiduo . . . fletu). This suggestion within the simile prepares for the later development of the poem in which Catullus loses someone very dear to himself at Troy, as Penelope thought she had done (cf. further below). Penelope is in fact an important figure in the history of simile. Most notable of all is Odyssey 23.207–40, in which she explains why it was that she withheld recognition from Odysseus, and she compares her position to that of Helen, who would never have slept with Paris, had she known that the Greeks would pursue her to Troy. The passage, which proposes a remarkable ‘likeness’ (and one which still puzzles modern critics), is framed by Penelope’s weeping (vv. 207–8, 231) and followed by a remarkable simile: âv j†to, täi d ì ›ti mŽllon Ëj ì ¯meron årse g»oioá kla±e d ì ›cwn Šlocon qumar”a, kedn‡ «du±an. Þv d ì Ât ì ‹n ˆsp†siov g¦ nhcom”noisi janžhi, æn te Poseid†wn eÉerg”a n¦ ì –nª p»ntwi ça©shi, –peigom”nhn ˆn”mwi kaª kÅmati phgäiá paÓroi d ì –x”jugon poli¦v ‰l¼v ¢peir»nde nhc»menoi, pollŸ d• perª croª t”trojen Œlmh, ˆsp†sioi d ì –p”ban ga©hv, kak»thta jug»ntevá âv Šra t¦i ˆspast¼v ›hn p»siv e«soroÛshi, deir¦v d ì oÎpw p†mpan ˆj©eto pžcee leukÛ. 105

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So she spoke, and her words stirred further in him the desire to lament; he wept as he held his dear and trustworthy wife. As when land is a welcome sight to swimmers whose well-built ship has been destroyed by Poseidon on the open sea, as it was hurried along by wind and strong waves – a few survive the grey sea by swimming to land and gratefully they step out on to dry land, their bodies covered in salt brine, but they have escaped disaster; so was her husband a welcome sight to her as she looked at him, and she could not at all take her white arms from around his neck. Homer, Odyssey 23.231–40 We imagine that the point of the simile will be that the sight of Penelope was as welcome to Odysseus as is land to the shipwrecked – and the subject matter of the simile (the arrival of the bedraggled remnant of a crew destroyed by Poseidon) fits that situation perfectly – but in fact the poet explains that it was her sight of Odysseus which is at issue. The direction of the simile thus changes in its course, and we might well think that this technique emphasises the mutuality of the pleasure which the couple take in their reunion.55 The combination of the extraordinary analogy between Penelope and Helen and the shifting direction of the Homeric simile makes this a key passage for any ancient discussion of ‘likeness’, and it will be here that we may wish to seek some of the significance of the memory of Penelope for Catullus. Like Poem 66 (but also very unlike it), Poem 68 explores how relationships – between husband and wife, brother and brother, man and lover, Greek and Latin poetry – resemble each other and do not, and Penelope proves a crucial figure in this regard. This passage of Odyssey 23 may be relevant again to Catullus’ later description of Laodamia’s plight: quam ieiuna pium desideret ara cruorem, docta est amisso Laudamia uiro, coniugis ante coacta noui dimittere collum, quam ueniens una atque altera rursus hiems noctibus in longis auidum saturasset amorem, posset ut abrupto uiuere coniugio, quod scibant Parcae non longo tempore abesse, si miles muros isset ad Iliacos. 55

Cf., e.g., Winkler 1990: 161. We must, of course, not forget that in performance the structuring of breaks and pauses could guide an audience in its interpretation, but it is very difficult to take account of such matters.

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How much the hungry altar craves pious blood, Laodamia learned when she lost her husband; she was forced to release the neck of her new spouse, before the passage of one and then a second winter could sate her passionate desire during the long nights, so that she might be able to live after her marriage was broken, something which the Fates knew would not be long delayed once he had gone as a soldier to the walls of Troy. Catullus 68.79–86 V. 81 may rework the repeated reference to Penelope’s embracing of her husband’s neck (Odyssey 23.207–8, 240), as vv. 82–4 are a physically franker expression of Penelope’s regret that the gods did not allow her and her husband ‘remaining with each other to enjoy their youth’ (Odyssey 23.211–12). We must, of course, always remember how many more sources for the story of Laodamia Catullus had than we do, but the suggested debt to Homer helps to tie the poet’s situation to that of Protesilaos and Laodamia: both Catullus and Laodamia are ‘like’ Penelope. Conversely, the poet’s laments for his brother killed at Troy (vv. 92–6) can be ‘heard’ as Laodamia’s laments for her husband: domus in v. 94 refers to the poet’s domus, but picks up also the (much discussed in antiquity) d»mov ¡mitelžv of Protesilaos and Laodamia (Iliad 2.701), just as vv. 95–6 omnia tecum una perierunt gaudia nostra, | quae tuus in uita dulcis alebat amor ‘All my joys have perished along with you; while you lived, they depended on your sweet love’ could as easily, if not indeed more naturally, be taken ‘out of context’ to be the lament of a woman for the man she loves, with gaudia being both general and specifically sexual. If we replace the poet’s references to his brother by ‘husband’, we could certainly be hearing Laodamia’s voice. It is clear from various sources56 that both Protesilaos and Laodamia were paradigmatic examples of excessive, transgressive desire and devotion. That Laodamia came as a bride to Protesilaos’ house flagrans . . . amore (v. 73)57 distinguishes her from the normal presentation of a bride in high literature, but is of a piece with some accounts of how she reacted to her husband’s death; in one version recorded by Eustathius (Hom. 325.26–32 Van der Valk) 56 57

Cf. esp. Hyginus Fab. 103–4, Eustathius Hom. 325.23–35 Van der Valk. Eros at the end of v. 76 is perhaps a bilingual pun, marked by amore in v. 73; particular attention is called to the word by the repetition eris at the end of v. 78. A related example might be v. 116 where Hebe nec longa uirginitate fuit activates ¤bh in the sense of ‘bloom of youth’ – the time at which girls normally lose their virginity. Such ‘punning’ fits well with the element of display in this poem.

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her continued ‘burning passion’ (›rwti –kka©esqai) after his death was such that she preferred to sleep with his corpse than with a new husband. Catullus’ continued devotion to his dead brother, uita . . . amabilior (65.10, cf. 68.106–7 uita dulcius atque anima | coniugium ‘a husband sweeter than life and soul’ of Protesilaos), is like Laodamia’s crazed devotion (furor, v. 129) and is thus ‘sexualised’, as it had been already by implication in Poem 66, which celebrated the sexual desire of a ‘sibling’ couple. The figure of Laodamia in Poem 68 allows us to understand afresh Catullus’ promise in Poem 65, certe semper amabo ‘certainly, I will always love [you]’ (v. 11). If, however, Laodamia’s desire for and devotion to Protesilaos (and Catullus’ for his brother) knew no bounds, the same can hardly be said for the feelings of the candida diua for the poet; this is one analogy that works on practically no level at all. Catullus casts himself as a faithful Penelope and a passionate Laodamia and then, with another remarkable shift of tone, as a Juno who has to put up with her husband’s sexual peccadilloes. The humour, of course, works on several levels: Catullus himself is, for his girlfriend, an adulterous pleasure, a furtum (cf. vv. 145–6), but he gives himself a rather grander status (cf., e.g., Ovid, Amores 1.4), and the absurd comparison with Juno is knowingly self-deluding.58 If the ‘goddess’’ entry at vv. 70–2 does indeed echo Delphis’ arrival at Simaitha’s house at Theocritus 2.102–4,59 then here is another deluded Greek female after whom the Roman poet has fashioned himself.

4 Something like a simile A particular instance of the Hellenistic concern to experiment with the simile form are paratactic similes, i.e. passages in which ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ are simply juxtaposed without the linking ‘as . . . so . . .’, or in which at least the ‘as’ word is omitted.60 Two passages from Theocritus will illustrate two of the possible forms: ï Idan –v polÅdendron ˆnŸr Ëlat»mov –lqÛn papta©nei, pare»ntov Šdhn, p»qen Šrxetai ›rgouá t© präton katal”xw; –peª p†ra mur©a e«pe±n o³si qeoª t¼n Šriston –t©mhsan basilžwn. 58 60

59 Cf. Perutelli 2003: 319–21. Kroll rightly cites Terence, Eunuchus 584–91. Cf. Bernsdorff 1996, Hunter 2003a: 93–4. Such forms have roots not just in certain Homeric passages, but also in lyric structures, notably those of Pindar.

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When he goes to richly-forested Ida, the woodcutter gazes around to see where he should start his task in the midst of such plenty; what shall I first set down, for countless to record are the honours which the gods have bestowed upon the best of kings? Theocritus 17.9–12 nebroÓ jqegxam”nav tiv –n oÎresin Ýmoj†gov l©v –x eÉnŽv ›speusen —toimot†tan –pª da±taá ë Hrakl”hv toioÓtov –n ˆtr©ptoisin ˆk†nqaiv pa±da poqän ded»nhto, polÆn d ì –pel†mbane cäron. When a fawn cries on the mountains, a savage lion rushes from its lair to find the waiting meal; so did Heracles storm through the untrodden thorns in his desire for the boy, and he covered much territory. Theocritus 13.62–5 A well-known epigram of Callimachus may be seen as an extension of the first of these forms:61 Þgreutžv, ì Ep©kudev, –n oÎresi p†nta lagw»n dijŽi kaª p†shv ­cnia dorkal©dov st©bhi kaª nijetäi kecrhm”nová £n d” tiv e­phi ‘t¦, t»de b”blhtai qhr©on’, oÉk ›laben. coÉm¼v ›rwv toi»sdeá t‡ m•n jeÅgonta diÛkein o²de, t‡ d ì –n m”sswi ke©mena parp”tatai. On the mountains, Epikydes, the hunter pursues every hare and the tracks of each deer, enduring frost and snow; but if someone says ‘Look! This animal’s been hit’, he does not take it. This is how my love is: it knows how to pursue what flees, but it flies past anything which lies ready and waiting. Callimachus, AP 12.102 = Epigram 31 Pfeiffer It is all but certain that we are to imagine a sympotic setting for this poem – the poet explains to a fellow symposiast his attitude to love; perhaps indeed the poet is explaining why he is not taking up sexual services on offer at the party. Riddles and ‘likenesses’, in which guests compared each other to improbable things or people (cf. Aristophanes, Wasps 1308–13, Plato, Symposium 215a– 16e), were among the most common games played at symposia. 61

The echo of this epigram at Ovid, Amores 2.9.9–10 gives colour to Walsh’s suggestion that we should print ï Erwv in Callimachus’ poem (Walsh 1990: 12–13). Martial seems to have the final couplet of this Callimachean poem in mind at 5.83.

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Horace translates part of this epigram while arguing in favour of using readily available prostitutes, rather than running the risks that adultery with grand ladies brings:62 altera, nil obstat: Cois tibi paene uidere est ut nudam, ne crure malo, ne sit pede turpi; metiri possis oculo latus. an tibi mauis insidias fieri pretiumque auellier ante quam mercem ostendi? leporem uenator ut alta in niue sectetur, positum sic tangere nolit, cantat et adponit ‘meus est amor huic similis; nam transuolat in medio posita et fugientia captat.’ hiscine uersiculis speras tibi posse dolores atque aestus curasque grauis e pectore pelli? As for the other [i.e. the prostitute], there is no obstacle. You can almost see her naked in her Coan silk, lest she have a bad leg or misshapen foot; you can measure her thigh with your eyes. Or do you prefer to be tricked and have the money extracted from you before the merchandise is displayed? How the hunter pursues the hare through the deep snow and does not want to touch what lies ready is the subject of the lover’s song, and he adds ‘My love is like this, for it flies past what lies ready and waiting and goes after what flees’. Do you hope that with these little verses you will be able to drive grief and passions and deep anxieties from your heart? Horace, Satires 1.2.101–10 Although the ut clause of vv. 105–6 is an indirect question dependent upon cantat (‘he sings how . . .’), the word order, with cantat postponed as a surprise, gestures towards simile form, as if we were being tempted (despite the subjunctive verbs) to understand ‘as the hunter pursues . . .’; Horace too is reading the Callimachean epigram as a form of simile.63 The verb with which the direct quotation of the ‘song’ is introduced, adponit, precisely points to 62

63

A different view is attributed to the emperor Vitellius by Vespasian in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana 5.29.3, ‘he copulates with married women, claiming that danger adds pleasure to love affairs’. For another approach to this passage of Horace cf. Freudenburg 1993: 195–8. Through Horace’s translation, the Callimachean epigram was to have a rich Nachleben in European literature and it seems always to have been presented as a simile; I am indebted to an unpublished paper of Io Manolessou for this information.

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the structure of Callimachus’ poem, in which the ‘message’ is contained in the final couplet. Once again, a simile (or simile-like structure) is the site of intertextual exploration and, once again, it is at the boundaries of Greek and Latin. Horace, however, is here exploiting not just this one epigram, but rather Callimachus’ whole persona of discriminating e´ litism: nothing could be further from the poet who rejected everything dhm»sion than the parabilis . . . Venus facilisque; cantat carries some of the pejorative resonances that we find also in Satires 1.10.18–19, simius iste | nil praeter Caluum et doctus cantare Catullum ‘that ape, skilled in nothing but singing Calvus and Catullus’, and in Cicero’s reference to cantores Euphorionis (Tusculan Disputations 3.45).64 Callimachus’ most famous expression of that e´ litism (and one in which he himself mocks its pretensions) is Epigram 28, a poem which itself is built on a series of likenesses: –cqa©rw t¼ po©hma t¼ kuklik»n, oÉd• keleÅqwi ca©rw, t©v polloÆv æde kaª æde j”reiá mis”w kaª per©joiton –rÛmenon, oÉd ì ˆp¼ kržnhv p©nwá sikca©nw p†nta t‡ dhm»sia. Lusan©h, sÆ d• na©ci kal¼v kal»v – ˆll‡ prªn e«pe±n toÓto sajäv, ì HcÛ jhs© tivá ëŠllov ›cei.ì I loathe the circling poem, and I take no pleasure in the path which carries many people this way and that. I hate too a loved boy who likes to roam, and I do not drink from the public fountain; I detest everything which is common. But you, Lysanies, are fair indeed – but before I can say this clearly, the Echo comes ‘Another has him.’65 Callimachus, AP 12.43 = Epigram 28 Pfeiffer Horace perhaps alludes to this poem in vv. 109–110 (above), if dolores . . . pelli suggests (and throws in the face of the discriminating poseur) the name of the beloved, Lysanies ‘Pain Releasing’; the disappointed Callimachus had, of course, himself already exploited the potential irony of the name. Be that 64 65

For the complexity of Horace’s attitude to ‘Callimacheanism’ in Satires 1 cf. Zetzel 2002. The translation makes no attempt to capture the (still disputed) sound-play between naikhi kalos and allos ekhei. For echoes of this poem elsewhere in Horace cf. Bramble 1974: 59–62.

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as it may, what follows does indeed seem to pick up Callimachus’ famous poem: num, tibi cum faucis urit sitis, aurea quaeris pocula? num esuriens fastidis omnia praeter pauonem rhombumque? tument tibi cum inguina, num, si ancilla aut uerna est praesto puer, impetus in quem continuo fiat, malis tentigine rumpi? non ego; namque parabilem amo uenerem facilemque. When thirst parches your throat, surely you don’t seek cups made of gold? When you’re hungry, you don’t reject everything except peacock and turbot, do you? When your genitals swell, do you prefer to be stiff to bursting, though you have a slave-girl or boy available for immediate invasion? Not me! I desire a sexual pleasure which is ready and easy. Horace, Satires 1.2.114–19 Fastidis omnia ‘do you reject everything?’ suggests Callimachus’ sikca©nw p†nta (t‡ dhm»sia). Callimachus’ verb is a very rare one – it appears nowhere else certainly in poetry – and thus enacts the e´ litism of which he speaks. The sikc»v is the ‘fastidious’ eater, opposed to the cheerfully omnivorous pamj†gov (Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1234a6–8),66 and Horace has picked up the link between the Greek verb and food, although Callimachus did not explicitly use taste in food as one of the analogies to his own erotic behaviour; variation from the model text is here (as often) commentary upon it. Horace’s theme of the advantage of cheap prostitutes over risky and expensive adulteries had a rich background in Greek comic, satirical, and ethical texts.67 Thus, for example, the Cynic poet Cercidas of Megalopolis (late third century bc) describes the pleasures of cheaply bought sex in verses which are very close in ideas and spirit to those of Horace: ‰ d ì –x ˆgorŽv %jrod©ta kaª t¼ mhden¼v m”lein, ¾pan©ka l¦iv, Âka cržizhiv, oÉ j»bov oÉ tarac†á taÅtan ½bolä katakl©nav Tundar”oio d»kei gambr¼v t»t ì §men.

66

Cf. also Polybius 38.5.7.

67

Cf. Hunter 1983b: 153–4, Livrea 1986: 65–7.

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But the Aphrodite of the marketplace, no worries at all, whenever you want, when you feel the need, no fears, no disturbance: pay an obol, put her on her back, and imagine yourself Tyndareos’ son-in-law. Cercidas 2.27–30 Livrea–Lomiento illam ‘post paulo’ ‘sed pluris’ ‘si exierit uir’ Gallis, hanc Philodemus ait sibi, quae neque magno stet pretio neque cunctetur cum est iussa uenire. candida rectaque sit, munda hactenus, ut neque longa nec magis alba uelit quam dat natura uideri. haec ubi supposuit dextro corpus mihi laeuom, Ilia et Egeria est; do nomen quodlibet illi. nec uereor ne, dum futuo, uir rure recurrat . . . The lady who says ‘in a little while’, ‘it will cost more’, ‘if my husband goes out’ is for the Galli;68 Philodemus says he wants a woman who does not charge much and who comes at once when she is summoned. She should be pretty and straight, and only so made-up as not to wish to seem taller or whiter than nature made her.69 As soon as she has placed her body under mine, she is Ilia and Egeria; I give her any name at all. Moreover, I have no fear that, while I’m fucking, her husband will rush back from the country . . . Horace, Satires 1.2.120–7 Within this rich background, as these verses make clear, Greek epigram was particularly important to Horace.70 Thus vv. 92–3 (o crus, o bracchia . . .) probably exploit Philodemus’ ecstatic catalogue of a girl’s body (AP 5.132 = 12 Sider), and vv. 120–2 (above) seem to refer to a now lost epigram of the same poet.71 The poetry of an Epicurean such as Philodemus, who sought ataraxia ‘freedom from disturbance’ in matters of sex as in everything else, was an obvious choice to set against the emotional angst and nervous stress which the discriminating adulterer and the Callimachean poet inflicted upon themselves; we may be reminded of Lucretius’ famous satire on lovers in the fourth book of the De rerum natura. One effect of naming Philodemus is to allow an ‘etymology’ of his name – ‘Lover of common people’ – to reinforce 68 69 70 71

Castrated priests of the Great Mother, Cybebe; cf. Catullus 63. For this theme cf. above p. 34. Gigante 1993 is a lively account of (inter alia) this aspect of the poem. Cf. Sider 1997: 139.

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the message. Finally, that message, and particularly the farcical conclusion of the poem, seems to be anticipated in another epigram of Philodemus:72 p”nte d©dwsin —n¼v t¦i de±na ¾ de±na t†lanta kaª bine± jr©sswn ka©, m‡ t»n, oÉd• kalžná p”nte d ì –gÜ dracm‡v tän dÛdeka Lusian†sshi kaª binä pr¼v täi kre©ssona kaª janeräv. p†ntwv ¢toi –gÜ jr”nav oÉk ›cw £ t» ge loip¼n toÆv ke©nou pel”kei de± didÅmouv ˆjele±n. Mr X gives Mrs Y five talents for one go and he fucks shivering with fear, and – by god – she’s not even pretty! I give Lysianassa five drachmas for twelve goes, and moreover I fuck a lovelier woman and quite openly. Either, then, I’m utterly stupid or, for the future, someone should take a sharp knife to his balls. Philodemus, AP 5.126 = Epigram 22 Sider Horace’s carefree ‘fuck’ (nec uereor ne, dum futuo, uir rure recurrat, v. 127) is opposed, as is Philodemus’, to the fearful and hurried copulation of the adulterer, who risks castration if caught (cf. already vv. 44–6 of the same Horatian satire). It would be nice to think that the name of Philodemus’ reliefgiving lady, Lysianassa, set Horace on the trail of Callimachus’ Lysanies. Callimachus’ ‘paratactic’ simile to describe the nature of his love also functions as justification and explanation for it; by finding analogues in the world around us similes carry an authorising power, which can of course, if a poet so wishes, be utterly subverted by too striking a mismatch between ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’. In the pedestrian verse of his Satires Horace explodes both the style of the Callimachean poem and the absurdity of the argument in the face of the universal need for sexual relief. Similes, paratactic and otherwise, belong to a marked world of poetic discourse, a discourse as remote – so Horace here implies – from ordinary discourse as are the Callimachean lover’s attitudes from common sense. As with the Plautine scene with which we began, from another ‘pedestrian’ genre with close links to satire, ‘poetry’ and the simile travel together, and the latter is very often the site of reflection upon the former. 72

Cf. Gigante 1993: 82–3.

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CHAPTER

4 The shadows lengthen

1 Passing on the pipe The opening of Eclogue 1 is one of the most famous surprises in ancient literature:1 Meliboeus. Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena; nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua. nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas. Meliboeus. Tityrus, lying under the protection of a spreading beech you practise the woodland Muse on a slender reed; I am abandoning my ancestral territory and its sweet fields. I am leaving my ancestral home; you, Tityrus, at ease in the shade teach the woods to resound lovely Amaryllis. Virgil, Eclogue 1.1–5 Virgil and his readers will have known Idyll 1 as the first poem in whatever collection of Theocritus’ poetry was familiar to them, and will have seen it as both introductory and programmatic:2 Thyrsis. ‰dÅ ti t¼ yiqÅrisma kaª ‰ p©tuv, a«p»le, tžna, ‰ potª ta±v paga±si, mel©sdetai, ‰dÆ d• kaª tÆ sur©sdevá 1

2

The following discussion of Eclogue 1 is an expanded and revised version of Hunter 2006a. Beyond the standard commentaries, I am conscious that my views of Eclogue 1 have been most shaped by Du Quesnay 1981 and Wright 1983. Cf. Gutzwiller 1996a, Hunter 1999a: 60–1.

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Thyrsis. Sweet, goatherd, is the whispered singing of that pine tree by the springs, and sweet too is your piping. Theocritus 1.1–3 Virgil alludes to the opening of Idyll 1 in the sound of v. 1, which ‘mimics’ both the sound of the panpipes and the sound of Idyll 1.1 (Tityre tu ∼ ‰dÅ ti t»), but replaces the Theocritean exchange of compliments, in which Thyrsis and the nameless goatherd speak only of the other’s accomplishments (tÅ . . . tÅ . . . t”; te»n . . . tÅ . . . tÅ), with a speech in which Meliboeus contrasts Tityrus’ happy situation with his own (tu . . . nos . . . nos . . . tu), followed by a response in which Tityrus is entirely concerned with his own situation (nobis . . . mihi . . . nostris . . . meas). The very sound of Virgilian ‘bucolic’ is thus both familiar and radically different, and not just because we are now hearing Latin rather than Greek. Difference amidst the suspicion of sameness is the hallmark of Virgil’s engagement with Theocritus. Thus, for example, the first speaker in Theocritus is, as we learn from his interlocutor’s first verse (1.7), a shepherd; Tityrus, however, has sheep and cows. The other speaker in Theocritus is a goatherd (v. 1); so is Meliboeus (v. 12). It is, however, a striking change that the opening Theocritean vocatives of occupation, a«p»le . . . å poimžn ‘goatherd . . . shepherd’ (vv. 1, 7), are replaced by the characters’ names at the head of the first exchange, Tityre . . . o Meliboee (vv. 1, 6).3 Both modes function to create a world, but the nature of that world is subtly different. Put very baldly, Theocritus’ fiction is of a new world of musical herdsmen, Virgil’s of a now familiar, textual ‘genre’; one might say that at the opening of Idyll 1 we enter a world of bucolic mim¯esis, whereas at the opening of Eclogue 1 we enter a world of bucolic–pastoral poetry where all characters are given familiar or familiar-sounding names.4 The point is well known, but deserves repetition. t©turov can mean ‘reed, pipe’ (Hesychius s.v.), and the name thus forms a ring with auena around the opening couplet;5 as Theocritus had established the syrinx as the symbol of and metonymic for ‘bucolic poetry’, so Virgil goes one stage further and creates an almost eponymous figure who embodies his Musa siluestris, a figure of the contemporary world to match the legendary Komatas of Idyll 7 (note Id. 7.88–9 ∼ Ecl. 1.1–2). 3 4 5

On names as markers at the head of poems cf. Clausen on 1.1. With the exception of the poetic voice of Poems 4, 6, and 8, there are no anonymous characters in the Eclogues. Cf. Hunter 1999a: 111, Cairns 1999.

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We have already noted the centrality of the ideas of contest and competition for bucolic and pastoral poetry;6 boukoli†zesqai itself, lit. ‘to play the cowherd’, probably originally implied the exchange of songs, rather than a solo performance.7 Idyll 1 makes clear that the principal poetic contest which Theocritus created for his new style of poetry was with Homer: the shield of war is replaced by the rustic bowl celebrating love and poetry.8 This constructive dichotomy was to persist throughout the tradition. Nowhere is this clearer than in the anonymous first-century Lament for Bion, which uses the lament for Daphnis from Theocritus’ Idyll 1 and Bion’s own Lament for Adonis to praise the dead bucolic poet as the equal of Homer, though in a very different sphere: cà m•n Tundar”oio kal‡n Šeise qÅgatra kaª Q”tidov m”gan u³a kaª %tre©dan Men”laon, ke±nov d ì oÉ pol”mouv, oÉ d†krua, PŽna d ì ›melpe kaª boÅtav –l©gaine kaª ˆe©dwn –n»meue kaª sÅriggav ›teuce kaª ‰d”a p»rtin Šmelge kaª pa©dwn –d©daske jilžmata kaª t¼n ï Erwta ›trejen –n k»lpoisi kaª ¢reqe t‡n %jrod©tan. The one [i.e. Homer] sang of the lovely daughter of Tyndareos, the mighty son of Thetis, and the Atreid Menelaos. But the other [i.e. Bion] sang not of wars, not of tears, but of Pan; as a cowherd he played clear tunes, he sang as he herded, he fashioned pipes, milked a tender young cow, taught about boys’ kisses, nourished Eros on his lap, and caused Aphrodite to be provoked. Lament for Bion 78–849 This traditional, we might well say ‘generic’, opposition was picked up by Virgil at the head of Eclogue 6 – no reges et proelia or tristia bella for Tityrus –10 and in the simile with which Moeris expresses bitter resignation in Eclogue 9: 6 8 9 10

7 Cf. Hunter 1999a: 5–9. Cf. above pp. 25–6. Halperin 1983 remains fundamental for the defining opposition between ‘martial epic’ and ‘bucolic’. On this passage cf. Paschalis 1995. Cf. further below p. 129. For tristia bella as a ‘generic’ marker cf. esp. Horace, AP 73–4; Cameron 1995: 466 notes that the opening of Eclogue 6 suggests ‘an encomium [of Varus] rather than a multi-book narrative’, but this does not greatly affect the point.

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sed carmina tantum nostra ualent, Lycida, tela inter Martia quantum Chaonias dicunt aquila ueniente columbas. ‘But our songs, Lycidas, carry as much weight in the midst of war’s weapons as they say do the doves of Chaonia when the eagle comes.’ Virgil, Eclogue 9.11–13 Pastoral poetry is no match for epic, as peasant farmers must give way to the realities of war.11 The difference in the ‘contests’ with which Theocritus and Virgil were faced is clear in the texture of their opening verses. The opening of Idyll 1 is strikingly free of close verbal allusion to earlier poetry: it is the Doric linguistic texture and the ‘simple’ subject matter which are most important. Virgil’s opening, on the other hand, combines (at least) Theocritus, Callimachus,12 Meleager (cf. AP 7.196 = HE 4066–73),13 and Lucretius14 to emphasise the (partly) familiar textual world we are entering. Tityrus is a name we know from Theocritus, Meliboeus is not, but is of a familiar kind (and may, of course, have appeared in post-Theocritean Greek bucolic).15 Whereas Theocritus writes a paradoxical sense of timeless oral tradition into what is in fact our first encounter with a quite new form (the first Idyll),16 Virgil makes explicit the pre-existing and complex poetic tradition within which he places himself. Virgil’s dense use of the bucolic tradition gives a particularly bitter power to the language of Meliboeus, who is leaving the ‘pleasance’ and who thus embodies the first Idyll’s end (lžgein from the lament for Daphnis) of bucolic song (carmina nulla canam), as Tityrus embodies its beginning (Šrcein from the same lament). Shades of the Theocritean Daphnis’ death hover over the Roman goatherd’s exile (Eclogue 1.75–8 ∼ Idyll 1.116–17),17 but the whole 11 13 14 15

16 17

12 Cf. below p. 146. On this passage cf. below pp. 122–3. For Meleagrian echoes in the opening verses of Eclogue 1 cf. Gutzwiller 1996b. For Lucretian echoes in the opening verses of Eclogue 1 cf. Breed 2000, Lipka 2001: 66–8, P. Hardie 2006. Its appropriately boukolik»n nature is brought out particularly at Eclogue 3.1–2, where pecus . . . Meliboei . . . Aegonis allude to the three principal pastoral animals (sheep, cattle, goats). Cf. Hunter 1999a: 61. Eclogue 5.43–4 is in fact the Virgilian rewriting of Daphnis’ self-composed epitaph at Idyll 1.120.

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of Meliboeus’ farewell is coloured by the sense of an ending. Meliboeus’ use of the ‘clich´es’ of the world, with which we are familiar but which he will know no more, shockingly brings the fantasies of pastoral into the real world and real time of the land confiscations. Thus, nos patriae finis . . . nos patriam fugimus mimics the ‘repetitive’, echoing style of bucolic, but in an entirely new, ‘non-bucolic’, context, as ipsae te, Tityre, pinus, | ipsi te fontes, ipsa haec arbusta uocabant ‘you the very pines, you the very springs, these very bushes were calling’ (vv. 38–9) offers a ‘pathetic fallacy’, in a situation hardly calling for pathos.18 So too, Meliboeus’ description of the locus amoenus which Tityrus has secured (vv. 51–8) draws on the famous locus amoenus description in the mouth of Simichidas at the end of Idyll 7, a description which, more than any other in Theocritus, revels in the fact that ‘nature’ is in fact a construct of art; what Tityrus has secured, so Meliboeus reminds Tityrus and ourselves, is an imaginary construct with little purchase in reality and made out of already (over-)used language (non insueta . . . pabula ‘the usual-pastures’, inter flumina nota ‘the rivers you know’). That this description contains the poem’s only example of the parenthetic word order which was to become a kind of pastoral ‘signature’, raucae, tua cura, palumbes (v. 57),19 is a further sign of how Meliboeus freights his description with the marks of pastoral art. Virgil has made social status and secure rights in land an image for the making of pastoral verse (cf. esp. vv. 9–10, 70–8, etc.); a man such as Meliboeus who does not enjoy these privileges will not make poetry (carmina nulla canam). This is clearly a more complex situation than in Theocritus, where herding is the principal ‘sign’ of song-making, whether the animals are one’s own or another’s (cf. Idyll 5.72–5); Virgil has superimposed agriculture – itself a mark of t”cnh and cultus – upon the simpler Greek social pattern, but this is also one further mark of the ‘second-order’ nature of Virgilian pastoral, an order characterised by a very self-conscious awareness of the countryside as a poetic ‘trope’. Meliboeus is dispossessed of his land, which is also his ‘poetic inheritance’; behind Virgil’s conception may lie the idea of the Greek kl¦rov, a word which covers ‘land’ and ‘farm’, but also ‘inheritance’ and 18

19

On the ‘pathetic fallacy’ see Hunter 1999a: 89, where it is noted that the trope ‘is ironised . . . by Meliboeus as a generic marker’. Behind Meliboeus’ verses may lie Lament for Bion 88 P©ndaron oÉ poq”onti t»son Boiwt©dev Õlai ‘not so much did the Boeotian woods long for Pindar’; commentators normally cite Theocritus 4.12. Cf. Clausen ad loc., Solodow 1986, below p. 132.

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‘allotment’. Meliboeus’ land (his kl¦rov) would have been distributed to the veterans, as all of Virgil’s readers will have known, by ‘lot’ (kl¦rov). Perhaps then we should see in Meliboeus’ fate the passage of pastoral verse-making from Greece to Rome (i.e. from Theocritus to Virgil) troped as ‘dispossession’, as loss of the traditional land (kl¦rov); rights over that land are now very clearly controlled from Rome, and it is ‘others’ who will now exploit the products of Meliboeus’ planting and agricultural labour (vv. 72–3).20 Two considerations might be thought to lend some colour to this suggestion. First, as the Lament for Bion enacts the idea of bucolic succession by performing a lament for the poet in the style of Bion’s own Lament for Adonis, which was in turn both modelled on and a kind of response to the ‘Lament for Daphnis’ in Theocritus’ first Idyll,21 so the poet forges a particular link between himself and the now dead master: –n d• Surakos©oisi Qe»kritová aÉt‡r –gÛ toi AÉsonikŽv ½dÅnav m”lpw m”lov, oÉ x”nov ÝidŽv boukolikŽv, ˆll ì Œnte did†xao se±o maqht†v klaron»mov mo©sav tŽv Dwr©dov, i me gera©rwn Šlloiv m•n te¼n Àlbon –moª d ì ˆp”leipev ˆoid†n. . . . among the Syracusans Theocritus.22 But I sing a song of Ausonian grief; I am no stranger to bucolic song, but heir to the Dorian muse which you taught your pupils and with which you honoured me, leaving your wealth to others, but to me your song. Lament for Bion 93–7 In the verses immediately preceding, the poet has claimed that, just as Bion is the new Homer (vv. 70–84), so all the cities of Greece mourn for Bion more than each of them grieves for their own famous poet (Lesbos for Alcaeus, Paros for Archilochus, etc.), as Homer too was famously claimed by many cities.23 The poet now apparently identifies himself as an Italian, i.e. – so 20 21 22

23

John Henderson’s discussion of the intertextual implications of the opening question of Eclogue 3 ‘Whose flock is this?’ (Henderson 1998b: 227–8) is relevant here. Aphrodite who caused Daphnis’ death must now herself weep for the loss of a loved one. There is almost certainly a lacuna immediately before this verse; the poet is contrasting the universal grief for Bion with the particular grief felt by each locality for its own poet, cf. further below. Ptolemy Philopator had built a shrine of Homer, in which his image was encircled by all the cities which claimed him (Aelian, VH 13.22). Cf. further above p. 13.

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v. 94 implies – a x”nov in one sense, though no ‘stranger’ to bucolic song. He is, on the most natural reading of v. 95, Bion’s pupil and heir (klaron»mov), to whom Bion has left his song, whereas to others he left his wealth; the idea of the ‘poor poet’ was by now a very familiar one (and one to which Theocritus had made a major contribution in Idyll 16), but we should probably resist the temptation to see a resigned irony here (‘all I got was poetry . . .’). Textual problems and a probable lacuna prevent anything like certainty,24 but the whole passage seems to create a broad division into a Greek world (including Syracuse), on the one hand, and Italy, on the other; the point may be made that, unlike the cities of Greece, Italy has no great poets it is already mourning. The Greek poetic world teems with famous names, even if Bion outshines them all; Italy, however, is a void which must be filled, and this passage of the Lament runs together two ways of imaging that process of ‘filling’, namely the teacher–pupil relationship (v. 95) and the ‘inheritance’ of Greek traditions (v. 96). This is of course, not quite, Virgilian ‘dispossession’, but a similar set of ideas seems to be in play. Secondly, there is Meliboeus’ description of the new owner of the land: impius haec tam culta noualia miles habebit, barbarus has segetes. en quo discordia ciuis produxit miseros: his nos conseuimus agros. A godless soldier will have my well-tilled fields, a barbarian these crops of mine. See to what point civil strife has brought the wretched citizens: it is for these men we have planted our land. Virgil, Eclogue 1.70–2 Critics have concerned themselves with whether barbarus implies that the new owner was not an Italian citizen,25 or is simply a term of abuse (‘uncultured’, ‘cruel’) for someone who has earned his livelihood through killing people in civil war; barbarus in any case certainly plays off against culta to suggest incultus. Be that as it may, barbarus is a very striking word to find here. b†rbarov does not occur in Greek bucolic, and is extremely rare in Hellenistic poetry,26 but Plautus regularly has his (Greek) characters apply barbarus to things and people Roman. As he contemplates the takeover of his world, then, Meliboeus may echo a knowingly comic way of figuring the 24 25 26

Cf. Gallavotti 1993: 369–71. Cf. Keppie 1981, Brunt 1971: 490, who point out that all the evidence is for the settlement of Italians. Cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 357, above p. 59.

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new rulers who know nothing of the artes of the countryside (and hence, as we have seen, nothing of the ars of poetry). The contrast between Roman military power (cf. miles) and the refined arts of Greece was to become a commonplace (cf. Aeneid 6.847–53), but of particular interest are Horace’s famous verses in the Epistle to Augustus: Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio. sic horridus ille defluxit numerus Saturnius et graue uirus munditiae pepulere; sed in longum tamen aeuum manserunt hodieque manent uestigia ruris. Captured Greece took captive her savage conqueror and introduced the arts to rustic Latium. Thus the flow of that rough Saturnian rhythm disappeared and smart taste drove out the nasty poison; yet traces of the countryside remained for many a year and still remain today. Horace, Epistles 2.1.156–60 Rome is here the ferus uictor, characterised by rusticitas and the absence of artes; not explicitly barbarus perhaps, but not far from it. Here again in Eclogue 1, then, Rome’s paradoxical status as both non-Greek and the recipient, heir, and continuator of Greek culture is at the heart of literary production.27 The same set of ideas also informs the resigned verses of Eclogue 9 at which we have already glanced: sed carmina tantum nostra ualent, Lycida, tela inter Martia quantum Chaonias dicunt aquila ueniente columbas. But our songs, Lycidas, carry as much weight in the midst of war’s weapons as they say do the doves of Chaonia when the eagle comes. Virgil, Eclogue 9.11–13 The powerlessness of (pastoral) poetry is here expressed through a form of comparison which evokes the epic simile, a touchstone – as we have seen – of 27

Cf. above pp. 9–10. When the Romans wanted to, of course, they could cast themselves as ‘the Greeks’ in the Greek/barbarian dichotomy, cf., e.g., Dench 1995: 11–12, 72–80, Feeney 2005.

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poetic art,28 but one trapped in a world where art has no ‘muscle’; dicunt marks not so much the proverbial content of the comparison as its affiliations to earlier poetry. The eagle, which replaces the hawk of most ‘dove similes’, suggests the eagle of the Roman legions, here swooping down on specifically Greek doves; the point is reinforced by the opposition between the Roman god Mars and the ‘Greek’ epithet Chaonias. Chaonia was an area of northern Epirus, and the doves of the famous oracle at Dodona, which was in Epirus (though south of Chaonia), uttered prophecies of Zeus; as many critics have noted, these Greek doves thus have a particular association with carmina. The only extant Greek example of ‘Chaonian’ from which Virgil might have borrowed is in a verse of Euphorion which is quoted precisely for the epithet: Zhn¼v Caon©oio prom†ntiev hÉd†xanto ‘the prophets of Chaonian Zeus spoke’. Euphorion fr. 48 Powell-SH 427.3 The context is unknown, but ‘Chaonian’ is here used, as in Virgil, with geographically rather inaccurate reference to Dodona,29 and perhaps indeed to the doves of Dodona; the verse is an excellent example of Euphorion’s art – a Homeric genitive attached to a modern and ‘arcane’ epithet, a Doric verb form, and a spondaic fifth foot30 – and might well have attracted Virgil’s attention. If Meliboeus in Eclogue 1 sees Roman pastoral as a takeover by ‘the barbarians’, a ‘barbarian translation’ (uortere barbare as Plautus puts it) in two significant senses, Moeris in Eclogue 9 acknowledges that barbarian victory in fact means the end of song.31 Behind this structure in the Eclogues lies a long tradition of Roman reflection on the relationships between town and country and between Greece and Rome. Meliboeus is in some senses the spiritual heir of Grumio, the rustic slave who appears in the opening scene of Plautus’ Mostellaria to remonstrate (very unsuccessfully) with Tranio, the cultured ‘city slicker’ whose influence, in Grumio’s view, is ruining their young master while his father is away. Whereas Grumio is associated with the countryside, its devotion to work and duty, and its pigsty smells, Tranio is the witty man about 28 29 30

Cf. chapter 3 above. Zanker 1985 associates these verses with the hawk and the nightingale of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Cf. Clausen’s note on Eclogue 9.13 for this stylistic ‘synecdoche’. 31 On Eclogue 9 cf. further below pp. 130–40. Cf. Magnelli 2002: 64–70.

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town (urbanus scurra 15), devoted to parties, cooking, girls, and ‘playing the Greek’ (pergraecari 22, 64). The play is in fact set in Athens and its view of the countryside is very far from that of the Eclogues, but as Grumio is driven out of the ‘natural setting’ for comedy (an Athenian house where parties take place), so Meliboeus is driven away from the ‘natural setting’ for the kind of text in which he finds himself. Grumio in fact is a comic descendant of Homer’s Eumaeus, the faithful swineherd waiting for his master to return, while others eat their way through that master’s property; Tityrus is far from the violently sarcastic Tranio, but both are the beneficiaries of ‘Greek ars’ and the moral ambivalence which comes with it.

2 The origins of pastoral Idyll 1 offers both a cultural and a mythic aition for bucolic poetry, the former in a ritualised ‘goat song’ of rustics,32 the latter in the ‘sufferings of Daphnis’, both the first bucolic singer and the subject of all bucolic song.33 In Eclogue 1 the beginnings of bucolic are, so the Lucretian echoes suggest, to be sought primarily in early man’s imitation of nature, although the motif, associated with Orpheus, of the great poet who ‘teaches’ nature stresses that this is an art of which nature itself is a creation.34 What, however, is given greater emphasis by Virgil is not the original beginning of bucolic so much as its surprising survival and/or revival (pascite ut ante boues). Eclogue 1 responds to the aetiology of Idyll 1 with an aetiology for the ‘second birth’ of Theocritean poetry in an Italian setting and in the Latin language; or rather, it responds with two contrasting aetiologies. As we have seen, Meliboeus sees Roman pastoral as a takeover by the ‘barbarians’, whereas Tityrus sees it as a miracle worked by a benefactor. That miracle is, however, a complex one, and Tityrus’ aetiology may be analysed into the categories applicable to the aetiology of Idyll 1. The ‘cultural’ aition of Roman pastoral lies no longer in the artistic re-creation of primitive song, but rather in its literary counterpart – the allusive imitation of sophisticated Greek poetry; 32 33 34

Cf. Hunter 1999a: 61–2. Virgil transmutes the ‘sufferings of Daphnis’ into sollicitos Galli . . . amores (Eclogue 10.6). Cf. esp. Lament for Bion 45–9, where Bion’s teaching has turned the birds into amoebean singers, as Tityrus turns the woods into encomiasts of Amaryllis; on Eclogue 1.5 see esp. Breed 2000: 14–16. Eclogue 10.8 offers another version of the motif.

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the ‘mythic’ aition is to be found in the oracular response of the Apolline iuuenis.35 Tityrus’ benefactor, the iuuenis of the centre of the poem, and the manner of Tityrus’ thanks to him are in part modelled upon the Ptolemy Philadelphus of Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy.36 The production of bucolic–pastoral requires peaceful occupation and utilisation of the land, such as the iuuenis grants Tityrus; in contrast to Theocritus’ south Italian rustics who seem ‘completely immune from the ravages of war which affected the area in the third century’,37 for Meliboeus undique totis | usque adeo turbatur agris ‘there is such uproar everywhere through the fields’ (vv. 11–12), the land is occupied by ‘impious’ and barbarian soldiers (vv. 70–1), and all of this means the impossibility of poetry. Here again it is Theocritus’ Ptolemy who offers the positive model paradigm: laoª d ì ›rga perist”llousin ™khloiá oÉ g†r tiv dh©wn polukžtea Ne±lon Ëperb†v pez¼v –n ˆllotr©aisi bo‡n –st†sato kÛmaiv, oÉd” tiv a«gial»nde qoŽv –xžlato na»v qwrhcqeªv –pª bousªn ˆn†rsiov A«gupt©hisiná to±ov ˆnŸr plat”essin –n©drutai ped©oisi xanqok»mav Ptolema±ov, –pist†menov d»ru p†llein . . . Undisturbed, his people tend their fields, for no foe crosses the swarming Nile to raise by land the cry of battle in villages that do not belong to him, and no enemy in armour leaps to the shore from a swift ship to harm the cattle of Egypt. So great a man is settled in the broad fields, fair-haired Ptolemy, skilled with the spear . . . Theocritus 17.97–103 Virgil reads historical time and ‘the political’ back into Theocritus 1 by suggesting that Ptolemaic peace was necessary for the production of (bucolic) poetry; indeed, the whole of Theocritus, Idyll 17 implicitly, and vv. 113–16 explicitly, do suggest that the pax Ptolemaica and Ptolemaic euergesia were both the necessary conditions for, and a direct cause of, poetic production. Tityrus has been blessed with the Roman equivalent of these ideal conditions. 35 36

It may or may not be relevant that both the iuuenis of Eclogue 1 and the diuinus poeta of Eclogue 5 (cf. above pp. 86–7) appear in the central verses of their respective poems. 37 DuQuesnay 1981: 36; cf. Hunter 1999a: 131. Cf. Hunter 2001b.

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Horace’s later encomia of Augustus in Odes 4, which make important use of Theocritus, Idylls 16 and 17,38 can then be seen to resonate against the Eclogues as well. The rural peace of the pax Augusta resembles that of the pax Ptolemaica, as described by Theocritus: condit quisque diem collibus in suis et uitem uiduas ducit ad arbores; hinc ad uina redit laetus et alteris te mensis adhibet deum. Each man spends the day on his own hills and weds the vine to trees that lack a mate; from here he returns happy to his wine and invokes you as a god at the second course. Horace, Odes 4.5.29–32 The verses could almost describe Tityrus, whereas Meliboeus, cast out from ‘his own hills’ and his own vines, could only dream of such good fortune; the wrong done to Virgil’s goatherd by the land redistributions in the wake of impious civil war has been miraculously righted by the bountiful and pious peace of the emperor Augustus. The freedom which allows Tityrus to make pastoral music has a name, otium (v. 6), both ‘peace’ through the land and the ‘leisure’ in which to enjoy it. This resonant condition is picked up again as the end of the Georgics echoes and refers to the opening of the Eclogues: illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti, carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuuenta, Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi. At that time sweet Parthenope nursed me, Virgil, as I luxuriated in the pursuits of leisure which brings no glory; I am he who played the songs of shepherds and who, when reckless with youth, sang you, Tityrus, under the protection of the beech tree. Virgil, Georgics 4.563–6 In one of the most familiar tropes for creativity (cf. again Lament for Bion 58–63), the final couplet depicts the Virgil of the Eclogues as ‘a pastoral poet’ in both senses, i.e. both a poet whose characters are musical shepherds and one who is himself a musical shepherd (for ludere cf. Eclogue 1.10, 6.1); the syntax of the final verse leaves open whether it was Tityrus or Virgil who was 38

Cf. Barchiesi 1996: 14–15.

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patulae . . . sub tegmine fagi. This passage, moreover, seems to play with an identification, one apparently made very early in Virgilian criticism, between Virgil and his character ‘Tityrus’: the passage both gestures towards that identification – Virgil and Tityrus both enjoy an otium which depends upon the actions of a quasi-divine figure – and teasingly rejects it, Vergilium me . . . Tityre te, words which may themselves recall the interplay of first- and secondperson pronouns at the head of Eclogue 1 (cf. above). Virgil had, of course, at least encouraged the identification as early as the opening of Eclogue 6, where, as a result of the instructions of Apollo, he makes a kind of music which ornately echoes that of Tityrus (6.8 ∼ 1.2). Apollo speaks in Eclogue 6 in the same riddling language of animal husbandry as does the iuuenis of Eclogue 1; the two ‘patronage/initiation’ narratives of Eclogues 1 and 6, indeed, tell the same story, though in different conventional and/or allusive modes. Tityrus’ journey to Rome may be seen as the ‘Theocritean’ aition, one modelled on the journey of the Syracusan women to the royal palace in Idyll 15,39 whereas the opening of Eclogue 6 offers the ‘Callimachean’ aition for the same literary innovation. The oracular response of Eclogue 1 and Apollo’s intervention at the head of the second half of the book of Eclogues are thus parallel ‘mythic aitia’ for Roman pastoral, explaining why the Eclogues are the first Theocritean verse in Latin.40 In an important study of Eclogue 5, Ian DuQuesnay seeks to distinguish between ‘an allegory in the crude sense that Daphnis [in Eclogue 5] “really is” the historical person C. Julius Caesar’ and a mode in which a figure of myth (such as Daphnis) can be presented in such a way as to suggest or hint at (in Greek a«n©ttesqai) a contemporary figure, as, for example, Philoxenus’ Cyclops was read as ‘hinting at’ Dionysius of Syracuse.41 This might seem to be merely a question of definition, though for DuQuesnay clearly more is at stake: ‘The concept of pastoral allegory or masquerade, so familiar to the modern reader, does not appear to have been available as a concept to Virgil’. Whatever we may think of this apparent prescription for what Virgil could 39 40

41

Cf. Hunter 2006c: 120–1, where Tityrus’ story is also placed within the context of other Hellenistic ‘patronage narratives’. For this conventional claim of primacy cf. Kroll 1924: 12–13, Clausen ad loc., Nisbet and Hubbard on Hor. c. 1.26.10. Others (e.g. Coleman ad loc.) understand the opening of Eclogue 6 to mean ‘My Muse first . . .’, i.e. the Eclogues (particularly Eclogues 1–5) were Virgil’s first poetry. It may well be that such a sense resonates, but the claim to primacy suits both the pattern I have been tracing and the rhetoric of 6.1–12. DuQuesnay 1976–7: 30.

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and could not do, there is at least no reason to think that the predominant view of ancient scholarship (and of the author of the Syrinx) that the speaker of Idyll 7 is Theocritus, there called Simichidas for some reason (which was indeed the object of dispute), was not known to, and perhaps shared by, Virgil;42 the Roman poet was thus all but certainly familiar with a tradition of bucolic interpretation in which the poet referred to himself by other names and put his ‘real life’ experiences into his poetry. So, at the end of Eclogue 5 he ‘identifies’ himself with the Menalcas of that poem (vv. 85–7), just as certain things about Tityrus in Poem 1 suggest the historical Virgil (as certain things also do not). The surprise of Eclogue 1 in fact marks a fundamental step beyond Theocritus in the nature of how the pastoral poet sites himself through his characters, though one which takes its start from the Greek poet and from developments in Greek bucolic after Theocritus;43 biographical interpretation is thus put at the heart of the Eclogues. DuQuesnay’s stress on the mythic nature of the characters who hint at contemporaries is, however, an important one. Virgil’s pastoral characters themselves have something like mythic depth because of his exploitation of a previously known poetic world, in contrast to Theocritus’ creative mim¯esis (cf. above). Just as the world of myth can be used, as for example in Attic tragedy, to reflect (upon) contemporary events, so Virgil’s inherited pastoral space–time can, when the poet wishes, be shaped in ‘modern’ and suggestive ways. Eclogue 10 is a witness to these developments of a very special kind. Whatever Gallan poetry lies behind this poem, Gallus is here made to suggest the Daphnis of Idyll 1, rather than – as in the more normal mode – the mythical character being shaped to suggest a historical one; thus the two halves of the book of Eclogues are closed, as they are also opened, by poems which offer different kinds of ‘biographical reading’, and make this mode absolutely central to the project of the Eclogues. This may well not be ‘allegory’, but it would be a serious mistake not to see in it a very distinctive step beyond the modes which Virgil inherited; hindsight, of course, allows us to see just how important this step was for the subsequent pastoral tradition. 42

43

We may on the other hand prefer to place the identification of the goatherd of Idyll 3 as Theocritus (Hypothesis and scholia to vv. 8–9A.) in a period later than Virgil; cf. further Fantuzzi 2006. On competing modes of reading Theocritus in the imperial age cf., e.g., Gutzwiller 1991: 179–81. Cf., e.g., Gutzwiller 1991: 177–9, Alpers 1996: 153–61. For the influence of Servius on subsequent consideration of this difference cf., e.g., Patterson 1987: 32–4.

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Richard Thomas has interestingly argued that we should understand that the whole of Eclogue 6, including vv.1–12, is spoken not by ‘the poet’ (whom I shall continue to call Virgil), but rather by (the Virgilian character) Tityrus.44 The argument is suggestive, but it may be that we do not have to make the choice in those terms. We should not overstate the difference between the address of the Virgilian Apollo to pastor Tityrus and that of his Callimachean model, who addresses the poet as ˆoid”. If Callimachus’ verses recall his first writing lesson at school (so, e.g., Massimilla 1996: 217), then his Apollo’s riddling admonition gives the young boy both his future profession, poetry (ˆoidž), and the style in which he is to practise that profession (‘the slender Muse’). The speaker of Eclogue 6, however, was about to write epic, i.e. was already an ˆoid»v, when Apollo intervened, like his Callimachean predecessor, to produce both the subject matter and the style of the early compositions referred to in vv. 1–2 (presumably (?) Eclogues 1–5, with 6.2 varying the siluestris Musa of 1.2).45 We do not in fact expect the oracular and riddling god to address someone by their real name, and so we are perhaps to understand that ‘Tityrus’ is a (typically bucolic) name given to the poet by the god, as the god imposes a change of direction from epic to pastoral; in this fiction, the name was then adopted by the poet for one of the characters in Eclogue 1 – unsurprisingly, the character who is most easily taken for the poet himself.46 If there is anything in this suggestion, Virgil may, as so often, have here picked up a hint from Theocritus. In Idyll 7, ‘Simichidas’ is the first word spoken by the quasi-divine Lycidas (v. 21) and the first we hear of the narrator’s name; the name also closes a ring around Lycidas’ opening speech (v. 50). The only other occurrence of the name is then as the first word of the narrator’s song (v. 96). The name is a notorious puzzle to both ancient and modern scholars, but Virgil may have ‘read’ it as a name given to the poet (Theocritus) by an ‘initiating god’; both poets then wisely adopt the divine 44 45 46

Thomas 1998. This seems a more plausible reading than to assume that the early bucolic phase (vv. 1–2) preceded the intention to write epic and Apollo’s intervention. In Propertius’ imitation (3.3) of Callimachus fr. 1 and Virgil, Eclogue 6, Apollo addresses the poet as Properti (v. 17): this makes the same generic point as Virgil’s Apollo, as ‘Propertius’ there implies ‘Propertius, famous for love poetry’. It is thus tempting to see in Propertius another early reader who glossed ‘Tityrus’ in Eclogue 6 as ‘Virgil’. It is also worth recalling that T©turov is a name for a Silenus-like figure in the retinue of Dionysus (Strabo 10.3.7, 15, Aelian VH 3.40, Schol. Theocr. 3.2), and is thus quite appropriate to the song of Silenus which he proceeds to sing.

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nomenclature.47 Both the name and the procedure are thus potently appropriate Theocritean elements at the heart of Virgil’s reworking of Callimachus. Be that as it may, there is a further way in which Virgil links Tityrus and Simichidas, this time by difference. Tityrus’ otium, which can be filled with poetry, places him within a familiar Roman discourse of poetic production. Otium may in some cases be bestowed by a patron, but it is ideologically a form of positive freedom in which the poet is directed by his own desires and his own choices;48 Horace’s Epistles are key texts for the understanding of these ideas. The poet who enjoys otium writes not at the beck and call of an imperious patron; he makes (so he claims) his own generic choices.49 We may think of Horace’s self-presentation in Satires 1.9 as a man who can wander as he pleases and think whatever (nugatory) thoughts he likes, contrasted with the fawning ‘bore’, who is ever in a hurry (accurrit, v. 3) and ever has his eye on the main chance. Virgil’s readers may well have contrasted his leisured ‘Tityrus’ with Theocritus’ parodic portrait of the ‘professional poet’ Simichidas in Idyll 7, hurrying off, or so Lycidas teases him, to a free meal.50 Eclogue 1 ends with Tityrus offering Meliboeus simple, rustic hospitality; Idyll 7 ends with Simichidas and his friends enjoying a rather more elaborate, though still very rustic, version of someone else’s hospitality.

3 The song fades Every bucolic singer, every pastoral poet is in various ways a ‘Daphnis’. The paradigm of the first bucolic poet and the original subject of bucolic song, particularly as established by Theocritus in Idyll 1, haunts the subsequent tradition. Thus, in the Lament for Bion, the dead poet, B©wn ¾ bouk»lov, ‘desirable’ and ‘fair’ (vv. 2, 7) like Daphnis himself (and like Adonis), is mourned like Theocritus’ tragic hero. So too is another poet, Gallus in Eclogue 10, who – like Daphnis – ‘was dying of love’ (v. 10, cf. Theocritus 1.130). The 47

48 49

50

Simichidas claims, of course, that he ‘wrote’ the song before meeting Lycidas, but that would at least not stop Virgil from appropriating and sharpening this pattern. Some aspects of Williams 1992 are relevant here. For these ideas more generally cf. Toner 1995: 17 and passim. There is a link here to the Greek philosophical conception of scolž: in Plato’s Theaetetus it is philosophers who have the freedom to follow wherever the arguments may lead, cf. Tht. 172c–d. Cf. Hunter 2003c.

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paradigm is most powerful as a mark of both closure and renewal. The death of Daphnis is the end (t¼ lžgein) of song: the poet returns his pipe to the mastersinger Pan (Theocritus 1.128–9).51 As the original subject of bucolic song, the death of Daphnis is also, of course, the beginning of a new tradition of poetry. These motifs remain in creative tension throughout the tradition, and are particularly visible in two important ideas of bucolic–pastoral: the centrality of the singer/poet, rather than of the song, and the idea of poetic succession. When the poet of the Lament for Bion laments that ‘poetry and Doric song died with Bion’ (vv. 11–12), but subsequently presents himself as Bion’s heir in ‘the Doric Muse’ (v. 96),52 critics complain of incompetent inconsistency or worse; in fact, this is a stark manifestation of a creative paradox at the heart of the bucolic construction.53 In Idyll 1 the goatherd persuades Thyrsis to sing his song with, inter alia, the argument that ‘you will not preserve your song in Hades that brings forgetfulness’ (vv. 62–3). Although it is his own pleasure in listening which is his primary motive, the goatherd appeals to Thyrsis’ own pleasure in performing his song (he will forget it in Hades), and his verses also fashion a likeness between Thyrsis and Daphnis, for whom death is also the end of song.54 The ‘sufferings of Daphnis’ is (so we are to understand) a traditional theme of song, but Thyrsis’ version of it is supreme of its kind, and the singer proudly places his ‘seal’ upon the performance (v. 65), as both Lycidas and Simichidas name themselves in their songs in Idyll 7. Bucolic–pastoral poetry does not, on the whole, know the motif of ‘the poet may die, but the poems live on’55 because the poems only have an existence with the singer; even where post-Theocritean poets introduce the notion of writing (cf. below pp. 136–7), the bucolic fiction is essentially of (non-literate) song, and the creation of this ‘oral song-culture’ by Theocritus and his successors is (only apparently paradoxically) one of the most striking Hellenistic reflections of a consciousness of how the now literate world, in which poetry circulates in books, has changed. 51 52 53 54

55

Cf. above p. 25. There is a neat variation at Lament for Bion 55–6: Pan would not wish to play Bion’s pipe, lest he come off second best (cf. Theocritus 1.3). On this passage cf. further above pp. 120–1. For a rather different view of this ‘inconsistency’ cf. Hubbard 1998: 43–4. Partly under the influence of the paradigm of Orpheus, the subsequent tradition can represent the poet ‘preserving’ his song in the Underworld (cf. Lament for Bion 115– 26), though it is lost for those on earth. Cf. below on Callimachus’ epigram for Heraclitus.

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The most extraordinary utilisation of the pastoral idea of the preservation of the song being dependent upon the existence of the singer is Eclogue 9, which offers ‘the end of pastoral’ as a replay of the devastating effects of the land confiscations of Eclogue 1 and, in its journey in urbem (where Tityrus had gone with notable success) rather than –k p»liov, as an inversion of the inaugurating journey into the countryside of Theocritus, Idyll 7.56 In this poem Lycidas and Moeris struggle with the consequences of the absence of a great singer, the local favourite, Menalcas, as they also struggle to remember his verses. Why is he absent? He was apparently threatened with death, but survived (v. 14–16) – or did he? The final carmina tum melius, cum uenerit ipse, canemus ‘we will better sing our songs when [Menalcas] himself turns up’57 has more than a touch of ‘Waiting for Godot’ about it. This uncertainty about the status of the singer is matched by that of his songs: they are caught in the act of ‘wasting away’ as was Daphnis in Idyll 1, reduced to fragments and/or snippets from the poet’s ‘workship’ ([carmina] . . . necdum perfecta, v. 26).58 The songs are fading from memory: they will not live on after the singer has gone. The songs have failed to preserve (seruasse, v. 10) the countryside which is their creation (usque ad aquam et ueteres, iam fracta cacumina, fagos, v. 9),59 and which will therefore fade as surely as the songs themselves; the poet’s fama, usually his greatest glory and reward, is here bitterly false (v. 11). The point is made by the appropriation of Callimachus’ famous epitaph for the poet Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, a poem which does conversely hold out the hope that poetry outlives the poet: Moeris. omnia fert aetas, animum quoque. saepe ego longos cantando puerum memini me condere soles. nunc oblita mihi tot carmina . . . Moeris. Age takes everything, memory too.60 Often I recall as a boy passing long sunny days in song. Now I have forgotten so many songs . . . Virgil, Eclogue 9.51–3

56 57 58 59 60

Cf., e.g., Hubbard 1998: 118–19. For a very different (and more ‘optimistic’) view of Eclogue 9 cf., e.g., Alpers 1996: 170–1. ipse, like the Greek aÉt»v, suggests ‘the master, the great one’. The phrase seems to pick up Lycidas’ claim to have ‘perfected’ (–xep»nasa) his song on the mountain (Theocritus 7.51); cf. further below p. 137. For this ‘pastoral’ word order cf. above p. 119. For this translation cf. below p. 133.

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e²p” tiv, ë Hr†kleite, te¼n m»ron, –v d” me d†kru ¢gagená –mnžsqhn d ì ¾ss†kiv ˆmj»teroi  ”lion l”schi61 katedÅsamen. ˆll‡ sÆ m”n pou, xe±n ì &likarnhseÓ, tetr†palai spodiž, a¬ d• teaª zÛousin ˆhd»nev, ¨isin ¾ p†ntwn ‰rpaktŸv %©dhv oÉk –pª ce±ra bale±. Someone, Heraclitus, mentioned your fate, and it brought me to tears. I remembered how often the two of us brought down the sun with our talking. But you, my Halicarnassian friend, are, I guess, ashes four ages old. But your nightingales are alive: Hades which snatches everything will not place his hand upon them. Callimachus, Epigram 2 In Callimachus, the poet is long gone, but the poems are immortal; in the world of pastoral, however, there is no life for poetry without the poet. As Virgil had given Callimachus a place at the beginning of pastoral (Ecl. 6.3–5, cf. above p. 129), so he gives him a place at its demise.62 To ‘pass the days in song’ (condere soles) is indeed what pastoral singers do, most famously perhaps Tityrus and Meliboeus whose exchange in Eclogue 1 ends as the shadows lengthen; as for Virgil himself (Georgics 4.565), this had been an activity of Moeris’ youth, but it remains unclear whether these songs had been Moeris’ own.63 In declaring that he has ‘forgotten so many songs’, Moeris of course displays exquisite poetic technique. The memory of Callimachus’ poem about memory and time is apparently fused with an echo of a two-line epigram about time and change which is ascribed (improbably) to Plato: a«Ün p†nta j”reiá dolic¼v cr»nov o²den ˆme©bein oÎnoma kaª morjŸn kaª jÅsin  d• tÅchn. The ages bring everything. The long passage of time can change names, shapes, natures, and fortunes. AP 9.51 = ‘Plato’, Epigram 15 Page Whether or not this really is ‘a dismal distich’ as Denys Page called it,64 Virgil has made it important to Moeris, for we now sense it also somewhere 61 62 63 64

 ”lion l”schi Bentley, for the transmitted ¤lion –n l”schi. On Callimachus’ poem see Hunter 1992b. For the subsequent history of this Callimachean poem and its Virgilian echo in Latin literature cf. Williams 1991, Heyworth 1994: 76–9, Merli 1997. Page 1981: 174.

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behind his earlier declaration that fors omnia uersat ‘chance turns everything over’ (v. 5). Virgil’s reworking allows dolic»v ‘long’ to infiltrate the memory of Callimachus (longos . . . soles), and fert both translates and complicates j”rei, for the primary meaning in Virgil must be not ‘brings’ but ‘takes away’ (note referet in v. 55).65 This pointed difference in sameness encapsulates the difficulty and the challenge of any allusive poetry, one felt particularly sharply in ‘translation’, and is of a piece with the whole poem’s explicit concern with the nature of mimetic practice (cf. further below). We may compare the bilingual ‘pun’ in et me fecere poetam | Pierides ‘the Pierian Muses have made me also a poet’ (vv. 32–3), which exploits poihtžv as a noun from poie±n (= facere).66 Such a ‘pun’, within a passage which ‘translates’ a passage of Greek poetry (cf. Theocritus 7.37–8), enacts the very nature of modern poetry – an engagement with another poetry and another language. So too, Lycidas’ reference to the numeri of poetry (v. 45) foregrounds the fact that the rustics are ‘speaking’ in hexameters; such a reference is not exactly paralleled in Theocritus,67 though we find a similar metapoetic technique in, for example, the mimiambs of Herodas (1.71). All of these are signs of the paraded secondariness of Eclogue 9. Eclogue 9 is in fact Virgil’s most extended meditation on pastoral imitation and mim¯esis. The fading of the pastoral voice is marked by a move towards ‘translation’ and ‘imitation’, and towards the revelation of poetry ‘in composition’.68 We may perhaps compare Virgil’s creation and erasure of a pastoral world to Lucretius’ picture of human history in Book 5 of the De rerum natura. Just as Virgil’s rustic singers owe an important, and often acknowledged, debt to Lucretius’ picture of early man, so the land confiscations replay the wars and greed which led to change in human society; Eclogue 9 marks the end of another golden age. The structure of the final part of Lucretius 5 is notoriously 65

66 67

68

Cf., however, Henderson 1998a: 160–1. Wilamowitz’s view (note on Euripides HF 669) that Virgil ‘misunderstood’ the Greek poem is as plausible as the belief that Eclogue 8.58 shows that he ‘misunderstood’ Theocritus 1.134. Cf. Putnam 1970: 312. Virgil has a forerunner here in Catullus 50.16, cf. Wray 2001: 98–9. Closest perhaps are Theocritus 1.35, 10.39 and (in the mouth of the poet) 8.31–2, where both the elegiacs and the explicit reference to them (if that is what ˆmoiba©an . . . ˆoid†n is) may be a sign of post-Theocritean developments. We may, however, compare Theocritus’ foregrounding of dialect in Idyll 15. Cf. Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 469–70.

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problematic,69 but it is noteworthy that Lucretius includes the nature of poetry as one marker of change. Just as one element of the ‘springtime of man’ was the flourishing of the agrestis musa (5.1398), marked by the music of reed pipes and happy singing in the ‘shade of a tall tree’ (5.1393), a time when, as it were, everyone was a Tityrus in the enjoyment of otia dia (5.1389), so social progress – if that is what it was – involves a time carminibus cum res gestas coepere poetae tradere; nec multo prius sunt elementa reperta. propterea quid sit prius actum respicere aetas nostra nequit, nisi qua ratio uestigia monstrat. . . . when poets began to pass down men’s deeds in song, and indeed letters had been invented not long before that. For this reason our age is unable to look back to what happened before that, except to the extent that reasoning points out the traces. Lucretius 5.1444–7 For Lucretius, then, the world of the agrestis musa was a preliterate world to which we can only gain access through the imaginative reconstructions of ratio. The coming of writing led to the coming of (professional) ‘poets’ – before this everyone was a song-maker – and to a concern with the preservation of one’s poetry among posterity (tradere); the subject matter of poetry was now ‘what had been done’, ‘history’, and it is difficult here not to think that what is meant is ‘epic poetry’, Homer and the epic cycle.70 In other words, one of the dichotomies which structures Lucretius’ scheme is the same opposition between bucolic–pastoral and epic as we have seen bucolic poets themselves construct.71 So too, in placing their fate in the hands of a mastersinger rather than in the power of their own songs, Lycidas and Moeris act out one version of the transition away from the agrestis musa which Lucretius has also plotted. Lucretius’ contrast between what we can know about different periods of human history was, of course, traditional. Thus, for example, in his universal history written in the last decades of the first century bc Diodorus Siculus makes a very similar transition: 69 71

Cf., e.g., Farrell 1994. Cf. above pp. 122–3.

70

Cf. esp. Horace AP 73–4, with Brink’s note.

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Concerning the first origin of men and the most ancient manner of life, we shall be content with what has been said, in keeping with a sense of proportion. But concerning deeds (pr†xewn, cf. res gestae) which have been handed down to memory (paradedom”nwn e«v mnžmhn, cf. tradere) and which took place in known regions of the inhabited world, we shall attempt to give a full account. Diodorus Siculus 1.8.10–9.1 Writing is, of course, the key – concerning periods which have left no written records we must fall back on reason and imagination. The fiction of an oral world within the intensely textual weave of the Eclogues, a fiction which takes some of its colour from the meeting of Lycidas and Simichidas in Theocritus, Idyll 7,72 thus assumes particular importance.73 Writing is indeed used by Virgil as one of the aspects of that more explicit concern with the nature of poetry which marks his pastoral as secondary, as engaged in a conversation with the past.74 Consider the following extract from the introduction to the exchange of songs in Eclogue 5: Menalcas. incipe, Mopse, prior si quos aut Phyllidis ignis aut Alconis habes laudes aut iurgia Codri. incipe: pascentis seruabit Tityrus haedos. Mopsus. immo haec, in uiridi nuper quae cortice fagi carmina descripsi et modulans alterna notaui, experiar: tu deinde iubeto ut certet Amyntas. Menalcas. Begin first, Mopsus, if you can sing of fiery love for Phyllis or praise Alcon or quarrel with Codrus. Begin: Tityrus will look after your kids while they graze. Mopsus. No, I’ll try these verses which I recently wrote out on the green bark of a beech, and I marked the musical pattern; you can tell Amyntas to try to rival me! Virgil, Eclogue 5.10–15 72 73 74

On this aspect of Idyll 7 cf. Hunter 2003c. On this general subject the contributions of Breed and Papanghelis to Fantuzzi– Papanghelis 2006 have much of interest. nec Phoebo gratior ulla est | quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen ‘no page is more welcome to Phoebus than that which is inscribed in front with the name of Varus’ at Eclogue 6.11–12 goes back to the explicit reference to writing in the prologue of Callimachus’ Aitia.

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Menalcas’ urging of Mopsus in vv. 10–11 (derived in part from Theocritus 9.1–2) might be thought not merely to list ‘almost all the personal themes of pastoral singers in the conventional genre’ (so Coleman), but itself to constitute a generic repertoire of love poetry, encomium,75 and invective (cf., e.g., Idyll 5), which then leads into the explicit reference to writing in vv. 13– 15 (cf. the similar pattern of Eclogue 10.50–4 about Gallus, who really did ‘write’ poetry). In Theocritus’ bucolics, however, there is no writing. The tree inscription of Idyll 18.47–8 is set in the world of a Bronze Age e´ lite, where it is in fact less obviously out of place than it would be in the world of rustic herdsmen; we may perhaps compare the way in which Attic tragedy depicts writing in the Bronze Age.76 So too, Callimachus’ Akontios, who inscribes a message on an apple and his beloved Kydippe’s name on trees (Callimachus fr. 73), belongs to the educated e´ lite of a distant, imagined past. We cannot, of course, exclude the possibility that post-Theocritean bucolic gave writing a larger place than our extant remains suggest; thus Daphnis carves a message for Pan on a tree in an epigram of Glaukos (AP 9.341 = HE 1819–24). Nevertheless, it seems very likely that the idea of a long poem ‘written out’ on a tree is Virgil’s own variation on the ironic fiction which lies at the heart of bucolic and pastoral. Theocritus’ most significant exploration of that fiction is Idyll 7, and it is thus appropriate that the formal model for vv. 13–15 is Lycidas’ introduction to his song in that poem: Ârh, j©lov, e­ toi ˆr”skei toÓq ì Âti prŽn –n Àrei t¼ melÅdrion –xep»nasa. See, my friend, whether this little song which I recently fashioned on the mountain takes your fancy. Theocritus 7.50–1 The Theocritean verses rely upon a creative tension between rustic improvisation and laboured craftsmanship, and Virgil may be drawing out the implications of that tension by a specific reference to writing.77 describere perhaps suggests (nicely) that the young Mopsus has been practising 75 76 77

There are, of course, passages of laus in both Theocritus and Virgil, but we might think rather of Idylls 16 and 17. Cf. Easterling 1985: 3–6. Stephen Hinds calls my attention to the echo of tegmine fagi (1.1) in cortice fagi (5.4) as an important element in the Virgilian version of the tension.

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his writing, as well as his musical notation;78 he is certainly not yet a Lycidas. Theocritus bequeathed to the tradition songs within framing narratives and dialogues; where one began and the other stopped might sometimes be debated (as in Idyll 5),79 but the distinction between the two was normally clear. In Eclogue 9, however, the issue of where ‘quotation’ begins and ends assumes a new urgency,80 one pointed by the replacement of ‘talking’ in Callimachus’ epigram for Heraclitus by ‘singing’ in Virgil’s imitation. Are vv. 32b–6 (cf. Theocritus 7.37–41) to be understood as a ‘quotation’ (as, e.g., vv. 39–43) or as part of the dialogue? Lycidas. incipe, si quid habes. et me fecere poetam Pierides, sunt et mihi carmina, me quoque dicunt uatem pastores; sed non ego credulus illis. nam neque adhuc Vario uideor nec dicere Cinna digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores. Moeris. id quidem ago et tacitus, Lycida, mecum ipse uoluto, si ualeam meminisse; neque est ignobile carmen. ‘huc ades, o Galatea; quis est nam ludus in undis? hic uer purpureum, uarios hic flumina circum fundit humus flores, hic candida populus antro imminet et lentae texunt umbracula uites. huc ades. insani feriant sine litora fluctus.’ Lycidas. Begin, if you have something to sing. Me too the Pierian Muses have made a poet, I too have songs, me also the shepherds call an inspired singer, but I do not give them credence. For not yet do I think that I utter things worthy of Varius or Cinna, but I cackle like a goose among swans. Moeris. I am indeed busy with this, Lycidas, and silently I am turning things over in my mind to see whether I have the strength to remember – the song is no mean one. ‘Come hither, Galatea! What sport can there be 78

79 80

The meaning of modulans alterna notaui is disputed; is it relevant that çuqmograj©a appears in a list of different kinds of school exercise in CIG 3088 (Teos, second century bc)? In Virgil’s principal imitation of Idyll 5, Eclogue 3, the distinction between song contest and framing dialogue is very clear. Cf. Henderson 1998a.

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in the waves? Here is bright springtime, here the ground scatters flowers of many colours around the streams, here the white poplar hangs over the cave and the clinging vines weave shady bowers. Come hither! Let the mad waves dash against the shore!’ Virgil, Eclogue 9.32–43 The same question could be asked of, for example, Moeris’ echo of Callimachus (pointed by memini as a marker of poetic allusion) in vv. 51–2, or Lycidas’ observation of the sleep of nature (vv. 57–8, cf. Theocritus 2.38), where the improbability – noted already in antiquity – that the rustics could see the sea similarly places the verses in an unsettling indeterminacy. Moeris chooses a place for them to sing (v. 61), but they have in fact been ‘singing’ throughout. Everything in fact is ‘quotation’, whether of Theocritus or of Virgil himself (cf., e.g., v. 50 ∼ Eclogue 1.73). The fading of pastoral is thus marked by the dissipation of its formal structures, and their replacement by a fragmented world of chance overhearings (vv. 21–2, 44–5) and repetitions in which the singers are no longer in control of the song. The mim¯esis of ‘preliterate song’ is here depicted in a rustic/comic way: sublegi tacitus ‘I picked up without being noticed’ (v. 21), which conjures up the world of comedy where overhearing is a dominant dramatic device, might well also remind us of the subripere of the (real or alleged) plagiarist.81 ‘Succession’, so crucial a notion for pastoral, has now been replaced by a far more random process. Moeris and Lycidas struggle vainly to remember and perhaps even match the absent master, but their tragicomic efforts signal the failure of the project. If Menalcas has an heir, it is indeed Lycidas, but again the whole pastoral pattern is strangely disrupted. In Eclogue 2, Corydon claims that the dying Damoetas had presented him with his pipe – te nunc habet ista secundum – thus marking him (rather than Amyntas) as his rightful heir in pastoral song.82 Here the closural gesture of the Theocritean Daphnis in returning his pipe to Pan is transformed into a guarantee of the future of song.83 In Eclogue 9, however, there is no succession, no hope of proper instruction. Lycidas’ final attempt to revive pastoral song (vv. 64–5) meets with a generically startling rejection: desine plura, puer, et quod nunc instat agamus ‘that’s enough, lad – let’s get on with the business in hand’ 81 82 83

Cf. OLD s.v. subripio 1b. This verse may in fact gesture towards the legal language of inheritance; for secundus heres cf. OLD s.v. secundus B8. For ‘teaching’ as a mode of poetic succession cf. above pp. 120–1 on Lament for Bion 93–7.

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(v. 66) replaces the poetic permission granted by the oracular response of the iuuenis in Eclogue 1 (v. 45) with an instruction to abandon song for the business of the real world. That that instruction itself should both echo an earlier Eclogue (cf. 5.19) and evoke the closing refrain of the ‘Lament for Daphnis’ of Theocritus, Idyll 1, lžgete boukolikŽv, Mo±sai, ­te lžget ì ˆoidŽv ‘cease, Muses, come cease from bucolic song’, should not now come as a surprise.

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Afterword

This book has been shamelessly traditional in many ways, but perhaps most significantly in its basic shape: Roman poetry of the late Republic and early empire has been set against the work of the great figures of Greek poetry of the third century bc, whom the Roman poets clearly, and often explicitly, imitated. Along the way, however, the scanty remains of Greek poetry of the later third, second, and first centuries have come into view from time to time: post-Theocritean bucolic (the Lament for Bion is a poem into which students of Latin poetry (should) bump interestingly often), the mythological poetry of Euphorion, one of Callimachus’ closest Greek imitators, the religious poetry of Isidorus and others in praise of the great goddess Isis, the outpouring of epigram, known to the Romans through the anthologising (and hence canonising) activities of Meleager and through the poems of Philodemus and men like Philodemus which were all but contemporary with, and often produced alongside, their own work in Latin. Greek poetry was a living thing, not (or not just) an exhibit in the Museum. If monumentalisation is one aspect both of the Ptolemaic appropriation of the Greek past and of the Roman appropriation of Greek culture,1 we must also recognise that, for the Romans, Greek poetry was being productively created all over the Mediterranean and was thus changing before their eyes; we have seen one small example of this in the metonymic use of divine names.2 Did chronology matter to the Roman sense, and exploitation, of Greek literary history? We may pose at least two relevant questions. First, did it matter that Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius followed at some distance the great period of what we call archaic and classical poetry, or was it just what 1

Cf. above p. 5.

2

Cf. above pp. 77–9.

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they wrote and what they said about what they wrote that mattered? In the post-classical poetry which they imitated, Roman poets would have found both what seemed to be clear acknowledgements of a rupture from the past, such as Hipponax’s return from the Underworld in Callimachus, Iambus 1,3 together with some indications of a sense of what constituted modernity in poetry,4 and many cases where chronology did not seem to matter. As far as a broken text allows us to judge,5 Callimachus seems to have juxtaposed Philitas and Mimnermus as his models in elegy, without any allusion to the fact that they flourished more than three centuries apart. In the introductory poem to Meleager’s ‘Garland’, a very important vehicle for the transmission of Greek epigram to Rome, archaic and Hellenistic poets are woven together in a pattern which owes nothing to chronology. There is a great deal about the Roman sense of such matters that we would like to know. Catullus translated poems of both Sappho and Callimachus: did he distinguish between them as great poets from different ‘periods’, or just as different ‘classical Greek’ poets? Did he regard Theocritus’ Aeolic poems in imitation of Sappho and Alcaeus (Idylls 28–30) as the same kind of exercise as his own ‘Sapphic’ wedding song in hexameters (Poem 62), or did he not in fact view the Theocritean poems, as modern scholarship has tended to do, as self-conscious revivals of a past and essentially ‘dead’ poetic form? When Virgil combined echoes and allusions to Theocritus, Callimachus and Hesiod at the head of Eclogue 6 to suggest a literary paternity of his poetry, are we to say that he is (rightly) finding in Hesiod (significantly called Ascraeo . . . seni in v. 70) the source for the ‘poetic initiations’ in the two later poets (by the familiar device of ‘window reference’), or is relative chronology a matter of no interest here? Secondly, did it matter that, for the Roman poets with whom we have been concerned, these Greek poets were figures of more than two centuries before, hallowed masters who had long since spawned their own schools of imitators? To turn ‘Callimachus’ into the standard-bearer for a radical modernity would have required (at least) a leap of faith. Apollonius’ picture of Medea’s erotic suffering is already an important ‘classical’ model for Moschus’ Europa (mid-second century), to be placed alongside Homer’s Nausicaa, as it is nearly a century later for Catullus’ 3 4

Bing 1988 remains a fundamental discussion here. Cf. also Hunter 2001a, Fantuzzi– Hunter 2004: 73–6 on ‘old poets’. 5 Cf. above p. 35. Cf., e.g., Hunter 2003c on Theocritus, Idyll 7.

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Ariadne.6 Theocritus’ ‘Lament for Daphnis’ in Idyll 1 had been reworked in Greek at least twice, in Bion’s Lament for Adonis and the anonymous Lament for Bion, before Virgil reworked it (twice) in Eclogues 5 and 10. That Propertius wishes to worship at the shrine of Callimachus and Philitas seems indeed to suggest a sense of their ‘pastness’,7 but such issues also arise in a number of less obvious ways. When, for example, Horace opposes Philodemus’ down-to-earth common sense in matters of sex to the self-inflicted suffering of the Callimachean e´ litist,8 it is obviously important that Callimachus is a canonised figure of authority from the past who can be cited in justification by anyone who prefers the thrill of the chase to physical relief; that he is available for citation is indeed a mark of his ‘ancient’ authority. Is, however, Philodemus cited in part because he is a near contemporary, and as such a suitable weapon for verse satire which presents itself as concerned with present reality and as utterly different from the unrealities of the ‘high poetry’ of the past (cf. Satires 1.4.56–62)?9 More urgently, perhaps, the writing of the present of the land confiscations into the fabric of the Eclogues emphasises that the freedom to imitate Theocritus which Tityrus is granted is in fact the pursuit of the storied past; ut ante (Eclogue 1.45) carries a multiple charge.10 Theocritus’ herdsmen place the golden age of ‘bucolic’ in the distant past of Daphnis and Komatas (cf. 7.83–9); in the Eclogues it is Theocritus who is that distant past.11 Moreover, in the last years of the Republic and the early years of the empire there was an important political dimension to the ‘pastness’ of Callimachus and his contemporaries. The turn to the poets of the first three Ptolemies was a turn to the ‘glory days’ of Alexandria, when the city was believed to have flourished politically, militarily, and artistically under powerful and virtuous rulers, and before corruption and vice brought the dynasty and country low in a way that the Romans knew only too vividly. One of our most 6

7 9

10 11

How much we do not know about the influence (or perhaps the sources) of Apollonius’ famous depiction of Medea is shown by the very similar verses about her suffering preserved in POxy 4712. 8 Cf. above pp. 110–12. Cf. above pp. 7–16. This Horatian use of Callimachus is dictated by the rhetorical demands of the situation; from other perspectives, of course, Callimachus, particularly the Iambi, made a very important contribution to the Satires. Cf. above pp. 115–16. Cf. above p. 87 on diuine poeta at Eclogue 5.45, which should be set alongside qe±e KomŽta at Theocritus 7.89.

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important witnesses to this narrative, the Augustan geographer Strabo, considers all Ptolemies after Euergetes to have been bad rulers because they were ‘corrupted by luxurious living’; things had gone from bad to worse, but after the fall of Cleopatra the Romans have ‘set most things [in Alexandria] upright again’ (Strabo 17.1.11–12). The first three Ptolemies and their poets could, then, be imagined to belong to a world quite different from the decadence which had threatened to infect Rome. The Alexandria of the third century was a golden age which only now was being surpassed, not a hotbed of corrosively foreign influence. Egypt under Ptolemy II offered a paradigm for the flourishing of Italy under the great ruler,12 and Greek poetry written under this patronage became particularly important. If the rhetoric of the situation demanded, the Ptolemaic model could, of course, be used to confirm the present by difference, rather than by analogy;13 the gap between ‘now’ and the ‘Alexandrian past’ could be narrowed or extended at will. On Aeneas’ shield, the Nile grieves and calls the defeated to take refuge in its streams: contra autem magno maerentem corpore Nilum pandentemque sinus et tota ueste uocantem caeruleum in gremium latebrosaque flumina uictos. Nearby [i.e. to Cleopatra] was the Nile, its great body in mourning; it opened its folds and with its whole robe was calling the defeated into its blue lap and hidden streams. Virgil, Aeneid 8.711–1314 In happier days, the river had welcomed back the victorious Sosibios in Callimachus’ epinician for the Ptolemaic official (fr. 384.27ff.), but recent events lent Egypt anything but an epinician mood; we can see a similarly pointed reversal of the Ptolemaic motif in a contemporary Greek epigram on Octavian’s triumphant arrival in Egypt, in which the Nile and his wife (the land of Egypt) ‘receive’ their new Roman master (SH 982).15 As for the critical (re)turn to Callimachus, this is, of course, a way of seeking shelter in the at least partially known from the disconcerting storm of the unknown which is the Greek poetry of the later Hellenistic period; it is also a way of overcoming, by avoiding, the yawning gap which separates, 12 14

15

13 Cf. above p. 64 on the claims to world domination. Cf. above p. 125, Hunter 2001b. Most commentators follow Servius in taking latebrosa in v. 713 as a reference to the problem of the sources of the Nile; the sense ‘full of hiding places’ must, however, also resonate here, cf. Horace c. 1.37.24. Cf. further Barbantani 1998: 292–3.

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say, Catullus from Callimachus. We might try conjecture rather than outright avoidance. In both metre (galliambics) and style, Catullus 63, the story of Attis, suggests, as does a powerfully theatrical poem like Bion’s Lament for Adonis, the emotionality of contemporary performance culture rather than the controlled and allusive ‘classical’ world of Callimachean poetry; the many similarities to Poem 64 suggest that we should see these poems as a pair, and it is tempting also to read literary and cultural history into the juxtaposition. The controlled interlocking structures of Poem 64, which allude constantly to the great texts of high Alexandrian culture, are set against the freer and less allusive description of a move away from the familiarity of ‘classical Greece’ towards a wilder, eastern culture.16 This would be both one more facet of the Catullan exploration of sameness and difference which haunts the ‘long’ poems17 – we may, in this spirit, compare and contrast the treatment of ‘incest’ in Poems 66 and 67 or the wedding songs of Poems 61 and 62 – and a recognition that the attentions of a ‘Hellenising’ poet were sought by more than one alluring mode as he loitered at the crossroads;18 there was more than one kind of Greek poetry which clamoured for ‘translation’. The turn to Callimachus has also been for many critics a comforting turn because of a sense that Callimachus and Theocritus, even Apollonius and Aratus, were worth imitating, whereas the scraps of later Hellenistic poetry have, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Moschus’ Europa), consistently disappointed; Roman poets will have shared the aesthetic judgements of discriminating modern critics and will certainly not have wasted their time on the second-rate. This account of modern reactions is, of course, semiparodic, ignores some important exceptions, and like all such accounts is already somewhat out-of-date, but there is a basic truth here which, I think, many Latinists will recognise. Moreover, the recent revolution in the study of Hellenistic poetry has probably not (yet) done much to change such attitudes, in part because it is the ‘big names’ of the third century who have been precisely the beneficiaries of most of that work. It is, moreover, easier to deal with a reasonably homogeneous body of material, and homogenisation, with all its necessary elisions, is also part of the critical agenda here. At crucial moments of the Eclogues, including the opening of 16 17

These sentences summarise the argument of Fantuzzi–Hunter 2004: 482–5. On Catullus 63 see also Nauta–Harder 2005. 18 For such images cf. above pp. 33–40. Cf. above p. 89.

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Eclogue 1,19 Virgil cites or alludes to Callimachean verse in the midst of his reworking of Theocritus, and Apollonius’ Argonautica attracts the attention of the same Latin poets as do Callimachus, Theocritus, and Aratus. Modern critics and Latin poets have both had major rˆoles in the creation of ‘Hellenistic poetry’;20 the modern uncertainty as to whether ‘Alexandrian’ or ‘Hellenistic’ is the correct designation may in fact be traced back to the implicit history of Greek poetry which Latin poetry constructs and assumes, and which for much of the last century was adopted wholesale by literary scholarship. There have been (usually unspoken) disciplinary, as well as perfectly good philological, reasons for the drive to find Callimachean aesthetics behind the riddling utterances of Theocritus’ Lycidas (esp. 7.45–51). Whole literary histories have been spun from Callimachus’ praise for Aratus’ Phainomena and his acknowledgement of the acrostic leptž which lies concealed within that poem (Callimachus, Epigram 27, cf. Aratus, Phain. 783–7). The dangers of misunderstanding how Roman poets exploited both the past and present of Greek poetry have probably been exacerbated, rather than eased, by this book, which has been yet another critical turn to Callimachus. If Roman poets actively sought the shelter of his shadow, other Greek poets have found their light obscured by his intrusive presence. Perhaps it would have been better to proceed genre by genre in considering what we know of the Greek poetry of the last three centuries bc and how this might have been reflected at Rome; or perhaps not. Callimachus’ name has always been made to stand, almost by metonymy, for things beyond his own poetry; if it is made to stand here for that complex and very far from clearly understood appropriation, then the damage is unlikely to be fatal. In the state of the evidence, fragmentary glimpses of partial truths are probably the best for which we can hope. 19 20

The juxtaposition tenui Musam inevitably suggests the Callimachean MoÓsa leptal”h (fr. 1.24). For the rˆole of ‘Longinus’ cf. above p. 93.

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156

Index of passages discussed

Antipater of Sidon AP 7.303 (= HE 356–61) 73 Apollonius, Argonautica 1.26–31 27 2.904–10 44–5 3.1278–1407 87 4.424–34 45–6 4.1365–79 79 Asclepiades AP 12.50.5 (= HE 884) 73 Augustus, Res Gestae 26 61–2 Callimachus fr. 1 1–2, 7–8, 14, 30, 34–6, 38–40, 89, 129, 142 frr. 3–4 Massimilla 17, 21–3 fr. 25.2–7 Massimilla 91 fr. 28 Massimilla 23–4 fr. 73 137 fr. 75.77 72 n. 97 fr. 110.70 78 fr. 601 45 SH 254.16 59 SH 259.5–11 90 H. Apollo 105–13 2, 2 n. 5, 14–15, 36 H. Delos 141–7 94–6 165–70 63–4 228–39 95 268–73 24–5, 26

H. Demeter 25–30 16, 26 50–3 92 H. Zeus 32–41 78 60–5 82–3 Hecale fr. 18 Hollis 97–8 fr. 165 Hollis 99 Epigrams 2 132–4 27 20, 142, 146 28 2, 111–12 31 109–14 Iambus 1 12–13 n. 22, 142 Catullus 64.1–15 57 n. 61, 77–8 64.100–11 98–100 64.251–64 45–6 65.9–14 30, 108 65.15–24 88, 98, 101–2 68.41–50 102–3 68.51–66 86, 103–6 68.70–2 108 68.76 107 n. 57 68.79–86 106–7 68.92–6 107 68.116 107 n. 57 68.149 84 Diodorus Siculus 1.8.10–9.1 135–6 Euphorion fr. 48 Powell 123

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index of passages discussed Homer Iliad 2.87–90 83 2.455–83 83 6.132 71 14.391–2 79 n. 113 Odyssey 19.204–9 104–5 23.207–40 105–7 Horace Odes 1.1.29–32 40–1 1.37 48–50 3.5.2–4 65 n. 76 3.21 69 4.5.29–32 126 Satires 1.2.101–27 110–14, 143 1.9 130 Epistles 2.1.156–60 122 Hymn to Isis (Andros) 57–8, 78 Lament for Bion 78–84 117 93–7 120–1 Livy 39.8–9 9–10 Longus, Daphnis & Chloe Proem 31 1.4 31–2 Lucretius 1.933–50 84 5.1444–7 135 Ovid Amores 1.5 29, 32 1.15.35–6 38 3.1 22 n. 51, 28–40 Tristia 5.3 56 Epist. Sapphus vv. 137–60 30 Panegyric of Messalla 136–76 65–6 Pausanias 9.26–31 17–19 Phanocles fr. 1 Powell 28 n. 65 Philodemus AP 5.126 (= GP 3314–19 ) 114, 143

AP 11.34.7 (= GP 3294) 73–4, 143 ‘Plato’ AP 9.51 133–4 Plautus Curculio 96–120 69 Mostellaria 1–83 123–4 Pseudolus 397–405 81–3 Propertius 1.3.9 69 n. 85 2.13.1–8 22–3 3.1 7–16, 29, 62, 143 3.3 31–2, 129 n. 46 3.9 15–16 3.17 12, 44, 55–6, 68–72, 77 SH 982 144 Theocritus 1.1–11 86–7, 118 1.62–3 131 7.45–51 146 7.50–1 137–8 7.92 22 n. 51 7.132–46 119 8.31–2 134 n. 67 11.1–3 70 13.49–5 100–1 13.62–5 108–9 17.9–12 108–9 17.97–103 125 18.47–8 137 22.48–50 101 Tibullus 1.2 68–9, 71 n. 91 1.7 50–68, 77 2.5 63–4 Velleius Paterculus 1.7.1 20 Virgil Eclogues 1.1–5 115–16, 118, 119 1.22–5 97 1.38–9 119

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index of passages discussed 1.40–5 127 1.45 143 1.51–8 119 1.64–9 62–3 1.70–2 121–2, 123 1.75–8 118 2.36–9 139 5.10–15 136–8 6.1–12 127, 129–30, 142 6.3 117 6.64–73 21–8 9.11–13 117–18, 122–3 9.21 139 9.32–3 134 9.45 134 9.51–3 132–4, 139 9.57–8 139 9.64–7 139–40

Georgics 2.475–6 8–9 4.170–8 95–7 4.559–66 2, 126–7 Aeneid 1.148–54 84–5 1.278–9 62 1.286–90 52, 53, 61 1.498–504 94 4.143–50 93–4 6.791–80 62 6.804–5 61 8.711–13 144 Appendix Virgiliana Catalepton 9 64–5 Xenophanes fr. 1 36–7 Xenophon Memorabilia 2.1 33–4

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General index

Achilles 39 Acontius 39, 88, 101 Actaeon 46 Aeschylus 12 aetiology 12, 28, 91, 124–5, 127 Aganippe, spring 18 Agathon 36 Alcaeus 48–9, 54, 74 Alexander the Great 4, 5, 43, 61, 67 Alexandria 4–5, 43–4, 71, 143–4 Anacreon 20 Antimachus 35 Antony, Mark 48, 49 Aphrodite 70–1, 72–3 Apollo 7, 13–15, 23, 24, 30, 63–4, 95, 125, 129 Apollonius, Argonautica 3, 78, 94, 98, 142–3, 146; Kanobos 55 apostrophe, poetic 23 Apuleius 73 Aratus, Phainomena 146 Archilochus 8, 54; cults of 13–14, 32 aretalogy 56, 71 Ariadne 45 Aristophanes, Frogs 34; Thesmophoriazousai 36 Arsinoe 18 n. 39 ‘Artists of Dionysus’ 43 Augustus 50, 53, 61–2, 126

Bacchus, see Dionysus barbaroi, Romans as 11, 59, 121–3, 124 biographical interpretation 127–8 Bion, Lament for Adonis 117, 120, 143, 145 birth, birthdays 50–3 boundaries, duty to extend 61–4 bucolic poetry 25, 27–8, 115–40 Callimachus passim; modern reception of 4; Egyptian material in 55; work on rivers 66; similes in 89–98, 101–2; Aitia 5, 7–8, 12, 17, 88, 89–90, 101; Iambi 3; ‘mimetic’ hymns 8; Hymn to Artemis 5; Hymn to Athena 17, 46; Hymn to Delos 53; Hymn to Demeter 73; Hecale 97–9. See also Index of passages discussed Catullus 88–9, 102–8, 142, 145; Poem 63: 145; Poem 64: 98–100, 145; Poem 66: 89; Poem 67: 102; Poem 68 84, 102–8. See also Index of passages discussed Cercidas 112–13 Choirilos of Iasos 93 Choirilos of Samos 92–3 Cleopatra 48–50, 144 Contest of Homer and Hesiod 19–20 cults of poets 12–16 Cydippe 39, 88, 101

160

general index Isidorus, hymns of 60, 141 Isis 8, 48, 55, 57–61, 66, 141

Daphnis 25, 117, 118, 127, 130–1, 132 Demeter 8, 14–15 ‘Demetrius’, On Style 83 didactic poetry 28 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 20 Dionysius Scytobrachion 44 Dionysus 1, 4, 5, 8–12, 32, 41, 42–80

Lament for Bion 117, 120–1, 130, 131, 141, 143 Laodamia 106–8 Library, Alexandrian 5 Linus 18, 22–7 ‘Longinus’, On the Sublime 3, 25–6, 93 Longus, Daphnis & Chloe 31–2 Lucian, Dream 38 Lucretius 113, 118, 124, 134–5 Lycophron, Alexandra 79

elegy as lament 29–30 Ennius 15, 20 n. 45 Eratosthenes, Erigone 43 Eros, cult of 17 Euhemerus 54 Eumaeus 124 Euphorion 24, 25, 26, 44, 123, 141 Euripides, Bacchae 9–11, 44, 46–50, 69, 74–5, 76–7; Cyclops 75–6 Eustathius, discussion of similes 83, 92–3 fallacy, pathetic 119 Gallus 21–8, 128, 130 genres, ‘crossing’ of 3–4 Gigantomachy 37 groves, poetic 7–41 Hecataeus of Abdera 54 Helen 105–6 Helicon, Mt 17–25, 31 Hellenisation 1 Heracles 33–4, 90–1 Hermeias, neo-Platonist 93 Herodas 134 Herodotus 67 Hesiod 17–22, 24, 25–8, 36, 82, 142; Aspis 87 Hipponax 12–13 n. 22 Homer 7, 8–16, 18–20, 25, 35, 37, 85, 92, 93, 97–8, 104–7, 117, 120; cults of 13, 120 n. 23. See also Index of passages discussed Homeric Hymns 25; Hymn to Aphrodite 72–3 Horace 42, 54, 71, 114, 126, 130. See also Index of passages discussed

Maecenas 53 Matro, ‘Attic Dinner’ 72–3 Medea 142, 146 Meleager 118, 141, 142 Meliboeus 118–20, 121, 123–4, 126 Messalla 50–68 metonymy 68–79, 141 Mimnermus 13, 35, 39, 142 Molorkos 90, 99 Moschus, Europa 142, 145 Muses, the 8, 12, 24, 32, 40, 42, 70–1 Museum, Alexandrian 3, 5, 12, 44, 141 Mysteries, imagery of 11 Neoptolemus of Parium 43 n. 5 nightingales 30 Nile, the 58, 66 Nonnus, Dionysiaca 44, 71 Nymphs, the 31, 32 Octavian, see Augustus Odysseus 85, 104–6 old age as poetic theme 39 Orpheus 18, 22, 24–6, 27–8, 124 Osiris 54–9, 61–2, 65, 66 otium 126, 130 Parthenius 4, 24 n. 54 pastoral poetry, see bucolic poetry patronage, patrons 4, 53, 127, 130

161

general index Pausanias 17–19 Penelope 104–8 Philitas 12, 14–15, 16, 32 n. 75, 35, 142, 143 Philodemus 113–14, 141 Philoxenus, Cyclops 127 Pindar 38, 72, 93, 95 Plato 3 n. 8, 25, 42, 73, 93, 133 Plautus 121, 123; Mostellaria 123–4. See also Index of passages discussed priests, poets as 7, 8–16 Prodicus 33–4, 38, 54, 74–6, 77 Propertius 19, 35. See also Index of passages discussed Protesilaos 107–8 Ptolemy Euergetes 62 Ptolemy Philadelphus 4, 43, 52, 53, 125, 144 riddles 109 Sappho 20, 30, 142 Sarapis 5 Simichidas 129–30 similes 1, 81–114 Simonides 20 Strabo 144

succession, poetic 24–6, 131, 139 Teiresias 46, 74 Telchines 38 Theocritus 3, 5, 16, 25, 115–40, 143, 146; Idyll 1: 124, 130–1, 143; Idyll 7: 15, 25, 128, 129–30, 137; Idyll 11: 70; Idyll 16: 121; Idyll 17: 52, 125; Idyll 22: 101; Idyll 24: 52 n. 35; Idyll 26: 46–8, 50; Idylls 28–30: 142 See also Index of passages discussed Theognis 54 Theseus 98–9 Tibullus 50–68. See also Index of passages discussed Tityrus 116–30; meaning of name 116, 129 n. 46 translation 88, 102, 134 Venus, see Aphrodite Virgil 85–7, 115–30, 140, 143; Eclogue 1: 115–30, 133; Eclogue 5: 85–7, 127–8; 9: 132–40; Eclogue 10: 128. See also Index of passages discussed ‘water-drinkers’ 44 writing, in bucolic poetry 136–8

162