Latin Literature

Catullus’ poem 51, paradoxically, would be incomplete without its famous lacuna: the gap in 51.8 functions as an acoustic channel through which the sonorous presence of Sappho and her lyric poetry is evoked. This paper shows how this ‘epiphanic’ textual lack enables the readers to experience the past in its sublimity, or to feel themselves connected to a chain of voices and silences. Catullus’ lacuna, accordingly, is interpreted as an empty monument of the ‘absent presence’ of the Sapphic voice which is being simultaneously silenced and reanimated by the endlessly iterable events of reading. In that regard, Catullus’ ‘translation’ is a realization of Walter Benjamin’s imperative included in ‘The Translator’s Task’, awakening the ‘echo’ of the Sapphic original. At the same time, the lacuna – labelled here as Catullus’ ‘Black Square’ – is envisioned as an inherent part of the poetic play between Calvus and Catullus in poems 50 and 51, to be supplemented by Calvus’ textual or bodily presence. In this sense, the 30 or so conjectural supplements of 51.8 in the textual history of the poem – among others, the famous vocis in ore – do nothing more than take on the role of Calvus, and write a palimpsest of absences and presences.

[Final author's draft; please cite the published version: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/literature-and-culture-in-the-roman-empire-96235/CC37C3B6C3D754639EB26B2A57C76E64]. This chapter provides an examination of an ideal shared across languages and cultures in the second century: the ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech, and who draws attention to his words qua words. Articulate and educated speech becomes a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups in this period. By contrast, orators and authors in both Latin and Greek condemn their opponents as producing mere noise. The ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.

Augustus’ success in implementing monarchical rule at Rome is often attributed to innovations in the symbolic language of power, from the star marking Julius Caesar’s deification to buildings like the Palatine complex and Forum Augustum to rituals like triumphs and funerals. This book illumines Roman subjects’ vital role in creating and critiquing these images, in keeping with the Augustan poets’ sustained exploration of audiences’ role in constructing verbal and visual meaning. From Vergil to Ovid, these poets publicly interpret, debate, and disrupt Rome’s evolving political iconography, reclaiming it as the common property of an imagined republic of readers. In showing how these poets used reading as a metaphor for the mutual constitution of Augustan authority and a means of exercising interpretive libertas under the principate, this book offers a holistic new vision of Roman imperial power and its representation that will stimulate scholars and students alike. (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, spring 2018)

Imitation was central to Roman culture, and a staple of Roman poetry. But it was also fundamental to Roman prose. This book brings together two monuments of the ‘High Empire’, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (‘Training of the orator’) and Pliny’s Epistles, to reveal a spectacular project of textual and ethical imitation. As a young man Pliny had studied with Quintilian. In the Epistles he meticulously transforms and subsumes his teacher’s masterpiece. Tacitus’ Dialogus is drawn deep into the project, along with a wide range of poets and prose writers, making ‘Quintilian in Brief’ a case study with far-reaching implications for how we read Latin literature.

In teasing apart Pliny’s rich intertextual weave, this book reinterprets Quintilian through the eyes of one of his sharpest readers, radically reassesses the Epistles as a work of minute textual artistry, and makes a major intervention in scholarly debates on intertextuality and imitation in Roman prose and culture.

Although bees are a frequent motif in ancient literature, the people who work with bees are often left in the background. An exception is the motif of the older man on his – usually small – farm who lives from and with his bees. The article shows that this motif is a topos that appears in various texts of Greek and Latin literature of the imperial period. Depending on the intention behind these representations, different elements of the motif may be emphasised or omitted. These variations, and how the motif develops, are here shown through the example of different passages.

Literary patronage was a widespread social practice in Ostrogothic Italy, as the works of Ennodius, Boethius, Cassiodorus and Arator show. Ennodius sought for a long time a dives patronus who could help him winning fame, while Boethius, thanks to Symmachus' support, quickly gained a reputation so great that Theoderic tried to bring him to his court. Cassiodorus is the clearest example of Ostrogothic royal patronage, while Arator reveals that also clergymen could be important patrons. These authors allow us to understand both the reasons why sixth century Italian writers sought a patron and the main features of senatorial, royal and ecclesiastical patronage. They indicate as well the importance of studia litterarum in late antique Italy and the strategies adopted by Ostrogothic kings in order to be accepted by the Roman population.

Reviewed by Stephen Harrison in the Times Literary Supplement for Feb. 14, 2003, p. 11; by M. Deufert in Gnomon 78 (2006) 359–61; by R.Tomlin in Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005) 648–9; by P.A. Miller in Language 81 (2005) 521; by L. Unceta Gómez in Revista Española de Lingüística 35 (2005) 147–53; by H. Hine in Classical Review 54 (2004) 136–7; by D.J. Taylor in New England Classical Journal 31 (2004) 320–2; by J. Katz in JRS 93 (2003) 333–4; by D. E. Hill in Greece & Rome NS 50 (2003) 113; by P. Burton in BMCR 2003.02.17; by D. Ross in Classical Outlook 80 (2002–3) 128–9; by A. Borgo in Bollettino di studi latini 32 (2002) 706–7.

Published version available here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-quarterly/article/looking-edgeways-pursuing-acrostics-in-ovid-and-virgil/269DC39A17ADB2BBC6E7916EE8235D89/share/1912470be86a9432b51addd60c477fe5f3c254c0

The article available for download on Academia.edu is the prepublication version.

In the article I propose a reading practice whereby we actively seek out acrostics in the same way that we actively seek out allusions. I then apply this approach to the key moments in the Aeneid and Metamorphoses, and find it to be a productive one, revealing several new acrostics and telestics, and shedding light on some previously discovered ones. These include an Ovidian authorial signature NASO in telestic form at the moment that Amor is introduced in the Metamorphoses; the acrostic NITIDO in the middle of the Metamorphoses, picking up on the opening of Book 8 and continuing Ovid's competitive engagement in the Met with Horace's Ars Poetica; the acrostic AUSUM in a middle (there are several) of the Aeneid, looking back to the use of audeo and its cognates to describe Vergil's scholarly activity in the Georgics; Vergil's reproduction of Aratus' LEPTE acrostic (and an ARATEA anagram) in his own mini-cosmos, the Shield of Aeneas, at a moment of intense metapoetic self-reference; and two acrostic links between Dido, Lavinia and Ajax and their shared sense of shame.

In late ancient Christian literature, King David is ubiquitous. Not simply cited as the famous author of many psalms, he almost always appears as a model of penitence, a foreshadow of Christ, or a paradigm of Christian virtues and values. But not always. In one fourth-century Christian text, King David appears in a striking and distinctive relief. This Latin text, known as De excidio Hierosolymitano (On the Destruction of Jerusalem), sometimes called Pseudo-Hegesippus, presents King David as a figure familiar from Judaeo-Christian tradition, but in a way that resonates most strongly with classical Greco-Roman literary norms. This text rewrites Josephus's Jewish War from a Christian perspective, and mentions David at a dozen points. In each case, David appears as an exemplum associated with a particular biblical episode or theme. Often, the treatment of these episodes in Josephus or other early Christian literature helps explain why Pseudo-Hegesippus presents David in particular lights. However, taking all of the appearances of David in De Excidio into view, this article shows that Pseudo-Hegesippus is not only beholden to biblical, Josephan, or early Christian precedents, but creatively constructs his own portrait of David within his historiographical framework. This article then suggests that this David's rhetorical valence and distinctive character are best explained vis-à-vis the traditional (Greek and) Roman use of exempla inasmuch as Pseudo-Hegesippus's David conspicuously lacks any of the theological, doctrinal, or ethical features so characteristic of his portrayal in most of ancient Christian literature. Pseudo-Hegesippus portrays King David in terms resonant of both Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian traditions.

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine provides a remarkable account of his experience as a learner of ancient Greek. After an outline of Saint Augustine’s testimony in the context of the history of education, Saint Augustine’s statements will be investigated according to the Second Language Acquisition theory of the applied linguist Stephen D. Krashen.

Nelle Confessioni, sant’Agostino fornisce un celebre resoconto della sua esperienza di apprendente del greco antico. Dopo aver tratteggiato la testimonianza del vescovo nel contesto della storia dell’istruzione, le affermazioni di sant’Agostino vengono indagate alla luce della teoria dell’apprendimento di una lingua seconda, formulata dal linguista applicato americano Stephen D. Krashen.

A well-known tradition has it that after the victory of the Greeks over the Persian army at the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.E.) one of the Athenians ran forty kilometres from Marathon to Athens and died soon after his arrival in the city, after giving the good news. However, the story is more complicated than it seems, and several issues have claimed the attention of scholars, such as what the Marathon runner's name was, what form of greeting he used and whether the episode really happened or not. The first part of my paper offers a reconsideration of the extant sources in order to express my point of view on the abovementioned issues. The second part aims at showing a selection of parallel passages which could possibly prove useful in trying to illustrate how the legend of the Marathon runner evolved into the shape it assumed in the Lucianean account, which is still considered as the 'official' version of the story.

The myth of Medea – it is well known – constitutes one of the fundamental archetypes which classical culture bequeathed to the Western world with regard to the portrayal of women. Its literary treatment in the ancient world begins already in the archaic Greek literature, although the fundamental core of the mythical story that has had the greatest impact in modern times is that which was developed by Euripides, who presented his tragedy Medea at the festival of 431 B.C in Athens. The purpose of my paper is to illustrate, via a new interpretation, the Nachleben or ‘afterlife’ of the myth of Medea with special reference to an anonymous ecphrastic epigram of Late Antiquity: Anth. Lat. 102 R.2 (= 91 Sh. B. = 13 Zurli). The epigram refers to the famous painting by Timomachus of Byzantium which was brought by Julius Caesar to Rome for the inauguration of the Forum Iulium, and which depicted Medea’s cunctatio, that is, our heroine at the point when she hesitates and is divided in her mind between desire for revenge and feelings of piety toward her children. My intention is to relate this variation on the theme of Medea to the changes which were taking place in the field of the Latin epigram already from the third century A.D., and which not only broadened the themes of the literary genre to include topics of a learned nature but also contributed to the literary experimentation of poetry in Late Antiquity.

Parker Holt. - Crucially funny or Tranio on the couch. The servus callidus and jokes about torture. TAPhA 1989 CXIX : 233-246. • The threats of torture of slaves were amusing to a Roman audience because they mock the audience's fear of rebellion while at the same time reminding the audience of the absolute power of life and death it held over the slaves. The non-punishment of the slave was amusing because the audience sympathized with the clever slave and because the slave's rebellion is always in the service of his young master.

This paper presents a new manuscript of part of the Historia Augusta from Erlangen, which vindicates a more than century-old hypothesis by E. Patzig: that the 1489 Venice edition of the work is textually valuable. On this basis, and building on the recent work of R. Modonutti, I present five new passages that are not printed in modern editions of the HA, six lacunose passages restored, and propose that the lost Murbach manuscript is the source. Armed with this new evidence, I reexamine the question of the great lacuna between the Lives of Maximus and Balbinus and the Lives of the Two Valerians, showing that it is a codicological-and not authorial-feature.
Full-text freely available here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-studies/article/new-light-on-the-historia-augusta/64AEEEE391CD43723BA94F9FB3D3522B/share/ab55dabef5108188b65cd131b08f9cba89b92f73

This article examines the development of the anonymous Old English
homily for Martinmas throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. In
particular, the work focuses on how the homily was reshaped during
its transmission to conform to the differing thematic approaches
that individual Anglo-Saxon scribes took while “copying” the text.
After situating the context of the Sulpician Martiniana in early
England, the author explores the thematic patterns evident in the
anonymous Old English homily’s selective translation of Sulpicius’s
Vita S. Martini and Epistulae. It is demonstrated that the later Anglo-
Saxon copier’s removal of the diving waterfowl episode is explicable
as consistent with his thematic retelling of Martin’s life, which
excludes the saint’s exorcist activities. In addition to offering an
explanation for the episode’s omission, the article argues that
modern editors should treat the extant versions of the Martinmashomily
as two distinct textual traditions.

The one where Luc-ilius' name has elements of wolfishness in it (linking him to Lupus, the target in Book 1), and the sentence Lupus delivered in Book 26--and therefore, by extension, his own fate in Book 1--is reminiscent of the poena cullei, the 'punishment of the [wolfskin] sack'.

The Epithalamium Fridi is a sixth-century Virgilian cento that commemorates the marriage of the Vandal noble Fridus with his unnamed bride. Its author, the African poet Luxurius, engages in versatile poetic play fusing Virgil with multiple epithalamial models such as Statius, Claudian, and Ausonius. Through the dynamics of triangular intertextu-ality the centonist is able to strengthen the wedding poem's generic bonds and to connect himself and his work firmly to the classical Roman tradition. At the same time, echoes of distinctive African idiosyncrasies as prefigured by Dracontius highlight the hybrid character of sixth-century Romano-Vandal elite culture and its celebration of what appears to be a distinctive African Romanness.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.18, in which Scylla throws a tiny pebble against Megara’s famous sounding tower, contains an exact, unique but unnoticed verbal echo of Helenus’ description of the sea-monster Scylla’s lair at Aeneid 3.432: resonantia saxa. The allusion tropes its own intertextual status as an ‘echo’ and contributes to the ludic confusion of the two Scyllas in this episode and elsewhere. The collision of the ‘tiny pebble’ with the Virgilian rocks further tropes the episode’s elegiac and Callimachean recasting of epic material. The childishness of the game is also part of the self-conscious puerility of the Metamorphoses’ poetics.

After tricking Pelias’ daughters into killing their father, Ovid’s metamorphic Medea flies in her (future reflexive) Euripidean dragon chariot from Thessaly to Corinth by a very circuitous route.  In so doing, she performs a physical and narrative praeteritio, passing rapidly over both the landscape and its local myths, which remain unnarrated.  This article reflects on some of the metapoetic connotations of the praeteritio and its rhetoric of obscurity, and propose an identification for one of the most obscure of the figures over whom Medea passes. It also identifies a technique whereby Ovid plays with concepts of obscurity and doctrina to unmask and dramatize a common reading practice.

The fourth century of the Common Era was a period significant for witnessing the effective birth of Christian historiography and the (putatively) definitive separation of 'Jew' and 'Christian' as distinctive identities. A text emerged, known as Pseudo-Hegesippus or De Excidio Hierosolymitano (On the Destruction of Jerusalem). This text illustrates how Christian historiography and Christian anti-Jewish ideology at that time could engage with the traditions of classical antiquity. In particular, this article argues that Pseudo-Hegesippus deploys figures from the Hebrew Bible in the mode of classical exempla and that it does so within the largely classical conceptual framework of national decline. For Pseudo-Hegesippus, biblical figures presented as classical exempla serve to illustrate the historical decline of the Jews until their effective end in 70 CE (when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple). One passage, De Excidio 5.2.1, and its enlistment of five Hebrew heroes illustrates this point particularly well. The use of exemplarity and the theme of national decline employed there help us appreciate De Excidio as a distinctive contribution to early Christian historiography and anti-Jewish literature in late antiquity; this expands our ability to imagine the ways in which fourth-century Christian authors could conceive of and articulate Jewish history in classical terms.

At the sentence level Suetonius often appears to be neutral, but I argue here that the persuasive force in the arrangement of his material creates a portrait that is absolutely not neutral. As David Wardle put it in a 2016 review, ‘Anyone who reads Suetonius without regard to the careful structures within which the biographer places his material can produce almost any picture.’ Yet these ‘careful structures’ are a mystery known only to the initiated. This paper lays out the complex and varied ways in which Suetonius uses structure, specifically the ‘rubric system’ of arranging his material under subheadings and those subheadings in sequences, in the hope that with this knowledge we see more accurately what ‘picture’ the biographer creates.

The opening phrase of the Aeneid anticipates a pattern of relationship in the poem between outside and inside. Epic arms look outward to the gods, fate and society, inward to the man himself, his unique history, his inner life. At the same time alien and complementary to the warrior, arms elude his full control, with an uncanny power that frustrates intention. Analysis of five interrelated passages suggests that arms in the Aeneid are the leading edge of external forces that continually impinge upon the man’s inner will and purposes.

Twentieth-century readers have not always admired the elaborate literary artifice with which Alan of Lille, the twelfth-century theologian, poet, and philosopher, composed his prosimetrum Deplanctu naturae. 'Those who have read it to the end — a small company — and those only, can understand how speedily amused contempt turns into contempt without amusement, and how even contempt at last settles into something not far removed from a rankling personal hatred of the author', claims C. S. Lewis. During his own age, Alan was judged very differently. Both De planctu naturae and Anticlaudianus, his epic poem, were copied in hundreds of manuscripts during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and were studied and used by
vernacular authors such as Jean de Meun, Dante, and Chaucer. In his scholarly and lucid monograph, Jan Ziolkowski helps the modern reader to understand and share this appreciation of Alan's work by introducing him to an area of culture familiar to a medieval audience, but now obscure: the study of grammar. Many of the most apparently rebarbative passages in De planctu naturae turn out to be elegant wit once their relation to Alan's central grammatical conceit is grasped. Impropriety in grammar (and versification) stands for sexual impropriety. For homosexuality —which it is Alan's particular purpose to decry — there are a number of especially appropriate grammatical metaphors: in using 'Venus's grammar', some men 'embrace only the masculine gender'; the 'active sex' degenerates into the 'passive'; the same term 'is both subject and predicate'.

After a chapter devoted to a detailed examination of such metaphors in De planctu, Professor Ziolkowski broadens the scope of his survey. First, he shows that the figurative use of grammatical terms to describe sexual relationships was not an idiosyncrasy of Alan's: it is found in the writings of many places and periods, from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Islam and the medieval West, where it was particularly popular among Alan's near-contemporaries, such as the poet Walter of Chatiilon and the literary theorist Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Grammatical metaphors were common in those cultures because in all of them the study of grammar was an important part of education. So Ziolkowski goes on — in a wide-ranging survey — to describe the role of grammar in the school curriculum of Alan's time. Then, by considering the relations between grammar and twelfth-century theology, he brings his broader discussion back to Alan. Although theologians were highly trained in grammar, they were aware of its limitations within their subject: the Bible's Latin is sometimes faulty, but its authority is irrefragable; and, indeed, some mysteries of the faith (such as the Trinity, which is both one and many) seem to defy normal grammar. Alan shared this ambivalent attitude and, as Professor Ziolkowski illustrates, this made grammatical metaphors an important tool for him in describing divine things: just as he likens sexual aberrance from natural order to grammatical solecism, so be compares God's miraculous deviation from the rule of nature to grammatical novelty. When God becomes incarnate, 'a new trope is created . . . a new construction. A new rhetorical color appears in this compounding, a new metaphor'.

Professor Ziolkowski does more than merely illuminate an interesting but particular aspect of a talented and influential twelfth-century writer. He also provides an excellent, brief, general introduction to medieval ideas about grammar and to the work of Alan of Lille. Both subjects have often suffered in recent presentations from the narrowness of modern scholarly disciplines: grammar is viewed, for instance, exclusively in the context of medieval interest in the classics, or exclusively in the context of logical and semantic theories; Alan is seen either as a poet, or as a philosopher, or as a theologian. By contrast, Ziolkowski shows how the literary, logical, ethical, and theological implications of grammatical study were interrelated in the twelfth century, and how they were brought together in many of Alan's writings. Had C. S. Lewis lived to read this study, perhaps he would have found his attitude to Alan much altered and rancour replaced hy understanding and even admiration." --John Marenbon, Modern Language Review, 1988

This paper aims to reinterpret Ausonius’ Mosella as a complex and many-layered depiction of a sui generis epiphanic experience, ultimately triggered by an unmediated encounter with nature. This sudden “revelation”, be it real or merely an artful literary device, did not only provide Ausonius with a deeper insight into the world around him, but also raised many epistemological issues on the limits of human knowledge and the (in)ability of language to convey reality. Both aspects —the poetical rendering of a non-discursive quasi-mystical experience and the epistemological and philosophical reflections it brings about— pervade the whole of the poem and are absolutely central to an in-depth understanding of it very raison d’être. To this end, the paper carefully analyses the metaphorical implications of the subject of the river, simultaneously conceived as a problematic imago Imperii (i.e., in its political dimension) and as speculum mundi (i.e., in its epistemological one). At the same time, it explores the poem’s hyper- and inter-textual construction, based on a sustained and substantial dialogue with a wide range of texts: the sixth book of the Aeneid, Plato’s myth of the Cave, Plotinus’ Enneads, the stories of Er, Narcissus and Ulysses (as transmitted by Plato, Ovid and Homer), the Pythagorean symbola and even the Pauline Epistles.

Según muchos estudiosos, tres textos de la literatura
latina, Hor., Sat. I 10.1-8, Verg., Aen. II 567-588
y Ou., Am. III 5, no fueron compuestos por Horacio,
Virgilio y Ovidio respectivamente, pero todos
continúan editándose de hecho como si fueran auténticos,
salvo en casos excepcionales. En este trabajo
se analizan las razones de que se hayan juzgado
como pseudoepígrafos y ciertas circunstancias
no bien sopesadas que podrían llevar a confirmar
su autenticidad con mayor o menor certeza, sobre
todo el papel del autor como editor de sus obras.