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1
Impens, Florence. "‘Help me please my hedge-school master’: Virgilian Presences in the Work of Seamus Heaney." Irish University Review 47, no. 2 (November 2017): 251–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/iur.2017.0279.
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This article traces Virgilian presences in Seamus Heaney's oeuvre, from Field Work (1979) to Human Chain (2010). Virgil appears under many guises in Heaney's poetry: in work published in the mid-1970s, he is a character from The Divine Comedy; by the turn of the millennium he had become the classical author of the Eclogues and certainly of the Aeneid. The article analyses this evolution, and suggests that, while Virgil remained a guide for the poet in troubled times, the transition from a Christian to a classical Virgil reflects a movement towards secularisation and globalisation in Heaney's oeuvre.
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Falconer, Rachel. "Wordsworth's Soundings in the Aeneid." Romanticism 26, no. 1 (April 2020): 23–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/rom.2020.0445.
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Wordsworth's translation of Virgil's Aeneid I–III has been largely neglected by Romanticists and classical reception scholars, in part because it is considered to be an unfinished, failed artistic project. Amongst a handful of scholars, Bruce Graver has convincingly demonstrated the originality of Wordsworth's Latin translation. This article goes further to suggest the artistic coherence of Wordsworth's translation of Virgil . Aeneid I–III trace the arc of Aeneas's fall and exile from Troy and discovery of a new home. In translating Aeneas's journey, Wordsworth enacts a quest for a new poetic voice, at a time when his creative powers as an English poet were at a low ebb. His engagement with Virgil's Latin can be compared to his encounters with Nature and the River Derwent in earlier poetry; in both cases, the poet plays host to an alienatingly other, divine maternal presence which eventually rejuvenates and confirms the poet's voice in English.
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Putnam, Michael C. J. "Virgil and Sannazaro's Ekphrastic Vision." Ramus 40, no. 1 (2011): 73–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00000205.
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If the Neapolitan humanist Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530) receives any recognition in scholarly circles these days, it is usually for his Arcadia, an elaborate pastoral in twelve books, each combining prose and verse, that forms one of the most important links between the work of Petrarch, its inspiration, and that of Sir Philip Sidney. The Arcadia, published first authoritatively in 1504, is written in Italian, as are the hundred or so surviving Rime (songs and sonnets), largely products of the last decade of the fifteenth century. But Sannazaro was also a prolific writer in Latin. It is a question worth asking why, after the success of his vernacular magnum opus, he opted to use primarily a classical language for the major poetry that occupied his attention for the opening decades of the subsequent century. Perhaps a confirmation of his allegiance to Christian humanism is one reason. Perhaps also it was his devotion to Virgil whose three great works provided him with the most telling impetus for his own achievements in the Augustan poet's tongue.
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O'Hogan, Cillian. "Thirty Years of the ‘Jeweled Style’." Journal of Roman Studies 109 (May 27, 2019): 305–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0075435819000480.
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In seventh-century Wiltshire, a scholar-monk began to write classicising Latin poetry. In bold terms he describes himself as the first of the Germanic peoples to write Latin poetry (‘neminem nostrae stirpis prosapia genitum et Germanicae gentis cunabulis confotum in huiuscemodi negotio [i.e. poetry] ante nostram mediocritatem tantopere desudasse’). His programmatic statements cite Virgil explicitly, and allude to Prudentius and Sedulius. His is a poetry that sets out a stall for the beginning of something new, but does so by making clear his predecessors. For Aldhelm, as for much of the Middle Ages, the canonical models of Latin poetry included classical Latin authors as well as the Christian Latin poets of Late Antiquity.
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Gacia, Tadeusz. "Topos "locus amoenus" w łacińskiej poezji chrześcijańskiego antyku." Vox Patrum 52, no. 1 (June 15, 2008): 187–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.31743/vp.8051.
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This paper deals with the topos of locus amoenus in Latin poetry of Christian antiquity. Descriptions of idealized landscape can be found in whole literary tradition from Homer on. In Latin epic poetry Virgil used this device to describe Elysium, which Aeneas enters in the Aeneid. In Virgil’s eclogues locus amoenus is a place of refuge for shepherds from calamities of fate and an alien world. For the farmer in his Georgics it is a reward for honest agricultural work. For Horace it was an escape from the noise of the city. For Christian poets, Prudentius in Cathemerinon, Sedulius in Carmen paschale, Avitus of Vienne, Dracontius, Venantius Fortunatus and other, locus amoenus becomes the biblical paradise in the eschatological sense, or morę generally, salvation. Use of the topos of locus amoenus shows the cultural continuity of antiquity. In Christian poetry this theme is filled with a new content, but the process of thinking and artistic creation remains they share with classical authors.
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Roberts, Michael. "The Description of Landscape in the Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus: The Moselle Poems." Traditio 49 (1994): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0362152900012976.
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Venantius Fortunatus is the last major Latin poet of late antiquity. Born near Treviso in northern Italy, he studied grammar and rhetoric in the still thriving schools of Ravenna before moving in 566 to Gaul, where he sought to employ his literary education and talents in the service of Merovingian and Gallo-Roman patrons. Fortunatus's poetry gives ample evidence of his early studies: he shows familiarity with classical poetry, especially Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius, and with the main Christian poets of late antiquity. In a passage at the beginning of his verse Life of St. Martin, Fortunatus lists Juvencus, Sedulius, Orientius, Prudentius, Paulinus, Arator, and Alcimus Avitus as preeminent in Christian poetry, thereby naming all of his most important Christian Latin predecessors.
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Krynicka, Tatiana. "Starożytny łaciński centon: próba przybliżenia na przykładzie „Centonu weselnego” Auzoniusza." Vox Patrum 57 (June 15, 2012): 359–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.31743/vp.4137.
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The term „cento” comes from the Latin cento, which means „a cloak made of patches,” „patchwork,” as the Greek does. Poems of Homer and Vergil were favorite sources for the ancient cento poets, who rearranged their fragments into totally different stories. The oldest preserved Latin cento is the tragedy „Medea” composed by Hosidius Geta from the fragments of Vergilian poetry circa 200 AD. We know, however, about other centos having been written before that date. Altogether, sixteen Virgilian and one Ovidian cento have been preserved. Thirteen of them, including the earliest and the latest of all extant Latin centos, are contained in the Codex called Salmasianus. Since the terminus ante quem for this manuscript is 534 AD, we assume that all preserved centos have been written between 200 AD, the broadly acknowledge date for Medea, and 534 AD. Ancient Virgilian centos mainly deal with well-known classical myths (8 of 13). Four of them have Christian themes, two treat trivial matters of everyday life, two are wedding-poems. The involvement of Decimus Ausonius Magnus (ca 310-394), a renowned teacher, rhetorician and poet, with the cento is not limited to being the author of a Virgilian cento, which he composed as a response to a similar poem by the Emperor Valentinian I (321-375). Ausonius is the only ancient author we know to have described cento in more detail and to have laid down the rules of the genre. In the introductory letter to the Cento nuptialis, addressed to his friend Axius Paulus, Ausonius maintains that verses of an original text, taken over to the cento, may be divided at any of the caesurae which occur in hexameter. No section longer than one line and a half should be taken over. The quotation may not be changed, although its meaning may change according to the new context. Ausonius compares activity of the cento poets to playing the game of stomachion. Doing so he emphasizes unity within cento and its playfulness as the particularly important traits of the genre. Ancient authors usually followed the technical rules put forth by Ausonius, although not all of them would have agreed with him about the similarity between writing a cento and playing a game. While some twentieth century scholars had treated cento with undeserved contempt, the research of the last decades has given it its honour back. Centos still require our attention, especially that, through their analysis, we may try to obtain a more faithful portrait of the well educated ancient reader. This reader knew his Virgil by heart, worshipped Virgil as the divinely inspired prince of Latin poetry, and preferred Virgil’s words to his own when he ventured to describe his world.
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Heck, Joel D. "The Liberal Arts, Antidote for Atheism." Linguaculture 2014, no. 2 (December 1, 2014): 67–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lincu-2015-0025.
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Abstract C. S. Lewis once stated that the decline of classical learning was a contributory cause of atheism. This article explores why he made this very unusual statement, describing how Lewis saw the Classics as a literature full of gods and goddesses, providing hints of truth, giving us things to write about, and preparing for the Christian faith. Using some remarkable quotations from Virgil and Plato, Lewis demonstrated how those writers anticipated both the birth and the death of Christ. Lewis’s concept of myth, powerfully present in the Classics, shows how the Gospel story itself is a “true myth,” one with a pattern that is similar to many of the pagan myths. The personal story of Lewis himself demonstrates how the Classics, and, more broadly, the liberal arts were a testimony to the truth of God and how the Greek plays of Euripides, the philosophy of Samuel Alexander, the imagination of writer William Morris, the poetry of George Herbert, and the historical sensibility of G. K. Chesterton combined (with many other similar influences) to convince Lewis that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were especially a “true myth,” one that happened in history, demonstrating him to be the Son of God.
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Calvert, Ian. "Augustan Allusion: Quotation and Self-Quotation in Pope’s Odyssey." Review of English Studies 70, no. 297 (January 9, 2019): 869–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy120.
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Abstract The status of Pope’s Homer as a text which engages with numerous seventeenth-century poems and translations of classical epics is well established. Much of the criticism on this topic has so far focused on Pope’s use of Paradise Lost and Dryden’s Works of Virgil. This article contends that Pope’s use of other writers in the translation, including Denham and Waller, has been under-appreciated. I examine some previously unacknowledged borrowings from Denham and Waller in Pope’s Odyssey and relate them to Pope’s use of Milton and Dryden. I suggest that, within the context of direct quotation of whole verse-lines, Pope was himself responsible for privileging the presence of certain seventeenth-century authors in his Homer translations over others. The quotations of complete lines from Milton and Dryden are designed as ‘outward-looking’, but those from Denham and Waller are more ‘inward-looking’ and represent moments where he is reflecting privately on the main characteristics of their allusive strategies. Pope acknowledges that where Denham’s primary intertextual relationship was with Waller, the key source for Waller himself was his own early poetry. Waller’s early poems had, in turn, frequently drawn on works by other poets, and I outline how, in his Homer translations, Pope too repeats certain quotations frequently enough that they begin to function as self-quotations. I subsequently connect this technique to Pope’s readiness to repeat lines across his Iliad and Odyssey that are (largely) of his own invention to suggest that, in general, Pope’s allusive poetics follow Waller’s intertextual practice more closely than those of his other antecedents.
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La Bua, Giuseppe. "LATE CICERONIAN SCHOLARSHIP AND VIRGILIAN EXEGESIS: SERVIUS AND PS.-ASCONIUS." Classical Quarterly 68, no. 2 (December 2018): 667–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838818000551.
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Late Antiquity witnessed intense scholarly activity on Virgil's poems. Aelius Donatus’ commentary, the twelve-bookInterpretationes Vergilianaecomposed by the fourth-century or fifth-century rhetorician Tiberius Claudius Donatus and other sets of scholia testify to the richness of late ‘Virgilian literature’. Servius’ full-scale commentary on Virgil's poetry (early fifth century) marked a watershed in the history of the reception of Virgil and in Latin criticism in general. Primarily ‘the instrument of a teacher’, Servius’ commentary was intended to teach students and readers to read and write good Latin through Virgil. Lauded by Macrobius for his ‘learning’ (doctrina) and ‘modesty’ (uerecundia), Servius attained supremacy as both a literary critic and an interpreter of Virgil, the master of Latin poetry. Hisauctoritashad a profound impact on later Virgilian erudition. As Cameron notes, Servius’ commentary ‘eclipsed all competition, even Donatus’. Significantly, it permeated non-Virgilian scholarship from the fifth century onwards. The earliest bodies of scholia on Lucan, the tenth-century or eleventh-centuryCommenta BernensiaandAdnotationes super Lucanumand thescholia uetustioraon Juvenal contain material that can be traced as far back as Servius’ scholarly masterpiece.
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Whitaker, Richard. "Did Gallus Write ‘Pastoral’ Elegies?" Classical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (December 1988): 454–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000983880003706x.
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It has long been noticed that Virgil's Eclogue 10, in which Gal I us plays so prominent a rôle, contains a combination of pastoral and elegiac elements. But this prompts the question: who was responsible for this combination? Was the fusion of pastoral and erotic-elegiac detail Virgil's own, or did Gallus himself write love-elegies with a strong pastoral colouring, a type of poetry which Virgil then echoed in Eclogue 10?
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Langlands, Rebecca. "Latin Literature." Greece and Rome 64, no. 2 (October 2017): 188–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383517000092.
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I still remember the thrill of reading for the first time, as an undergraduate, Frederick Ahl's seminal articles ‘The Art of Safe Criticism’ and the ‘Horse and the Rider’, and the ensuing sense that the doors of perception were opening to reveal for me the (alarming) secrets of Latin poetry. The collectionWordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetryis a tribute to Ahl, and all twenty-two articles take his scholarship as their inspiration. Fittingly, this book is often playful and great fun to read, and contains some beautiful writing from its contributors, but also reflects the darker side of Latin literature's entanglement with violence and oppression. For the latter, see especially Joy Connolly's sobering discussion of ‘A Theory of Violence’ in Lucan, which draws on Achille Mbembe's theory of the reiterative violence of everyday life that sustains postcolonial rule in Africa (273–97), which resonates bleakly beyond Classical scholarship to the present day. Elsewhere there is much emphasis (ha!) on the practice and effects of veiled speech, ambiguity, and hidden meanings. Pleasingly, Michael Fontaine identifies what he calls ‘Freudian Bullseyes’ in Virgil: a ‘correct word that hits the mark’ (141) that also reveals – simply and directly – the unspoken guilty preoccupations of the speaker: Dido's lust for Aeneas, Aeneas’ grief-stricken sense of responsibility for Pallas’ death. A citation from F. Scott Fitzgerald'sTender is the Nightprovides the chilling final line of Emily Gowers’ delicious article about what ripples out beyond the coincidence of sound of Dido/bubo. The volume explores subversive responses to power (for example, the articles of Erica Bexley and David Konstan), as well as the risk of powerful retaliation (Rhiannon Ash considers the political consequences of poetry as represented by Tacitus). There are also broader methodological reflections on interpretation, from musings on the reader's pleasure at decoding the hidden messages of wordplay such as puns, anagrams, and acrostics (as Fitch puts it, ‘the pleasure of wit, combined with the pleasure of active involvement’ [327]) to exploration of the anxiety of a reader who worries that they may be over-interpreting a text. Contributions variously address the ‘paranoia’ of literary criticism and the drive to try to ground meaning in the text and prove authorial intention: while John Fitch asks if the wordplay ‘really is there’ in the etymological names used by Seneca in his plays (314), Alex Dressler's article (37–68) helps frame the various modes of interpretation that we find in subsequent articles, by putting interpretation itself under scrutiny. His intriguing analysis introduces the helpful motif of espionage (interweaving Syme's possible post-war role in intelligence with Augustan conspiracy and conspiracy theories) and concludes that – like double agents – ‘secret meanings’ need a handler (53) and we readers need to take responsibility for our own partisan readings.
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Gross, Nicolas, and Charles R. Beye. "Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil." Classical World 88, no. 3 (1995): 218. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4351696.
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Gowers, Emily. "Vegetable Love: Virgil, Columella, and Garden Poetry." Ramus 29, no. 2 (2000): 127–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00001624.
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In 65 CE, a Spanish writer appointed himself Virgil's heir and stepped into a breach that did not really exist. L. Iunius Moderatus Columella chose to attach to his self-styled prose ‘monument’ of agricultural instruction an ornamental didactic poem on gardening, to fill the gap apparently left by Virgil at the start of Georgic 4. The result has been regarded for the most part as a misguided experiment, an uninspired pastiche of clippings and half-lines from a greater poet. Yet in recent years, as part of the wholescale rehabilitation of ‘second-rate’ Latin literature, it has begun to be considered in its own right. Why is this forgettable poem worth another look? Partly because it exists and is average: it tells us how Virgil himself was read in antiquity, and how one middling writer responded to a particular task with its own set of rules. But it is also a surprisingly ambitious poem, a showpiece in which Columella concentrates all his resources, to give his immediate readers Silvinus and Gallio a ‘taste’, in his own words, of his poetic gifts. He takes an unpromising subject and overcompensates by making something new and monstrous out of it. It is not often that artichokes and cucumbers are forced into such lurid focus.
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Lowe, Dunstan. "WOMEN SCORNED: A NEW STICHOMETRIC ALLUSION IN THE AENEID." Classical Quarterly 63, no. 1 (April 24, 2013): 442–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838812000742.
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Intense scrutiny can raise chimaeras, and Virgil is the most scrutinized of Roman poets, but he may have engineered coincidences in line number (‘stichometric allusions’) between certain of his verses and their Greek models. A handful of potential examples have now accumulated. Scholars have detected Virgilian citations of Homer, Callimachus and Aratus in this manner, as well as intratextual allusions by both Virgil and Ovid, and references to Virgil's works by later Roman poets using the same technique. (For present purposes I disregard the separate, though related, phenomenon of corresponding numbers of lines in parallel passages: G. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer (Göttingen, 1964) suggests several examples of such correspondences between Homer and Virgil, especially in speeches. Another purely formal mode of allusion faintly present in Roman poetry is homophonic translation (the technique which Louis Zukofsky's 1969 translations of Catullus pursue in extenso); thus Virgil's fagus, beech, corresponds with Theocritus' phagos, oak.) If genuine, the phenomenon lacks any consistent method or regular pattern (and the degree of plausibility varies); if genuine, it is very rare, even if accidents in textual transmission could have obscured some examples; if genuine, it probably originated in the Hellenistic period, although such a case has yet to be made. Virgil presently seems the earliest and most copious practitioner of stichometric allusion. A previously undetected example in the Aeneid is proposed below.
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Myers, K. Sara. "THE CULEX’S METAPOETIC FUNERARY GARDEN." Classical Quarterly 70, no. 2 (December 2020): 749–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838821000045.
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The Culex is now widely recognized as a piece of post-Ovidian, possibly Tiberian, pseudo-juvenilia written by an author impersonating the young Virgil, although it was attached to Virgil's name already in the first century c.e., being identified as Virgilian by Statius, Suetonius and Martial. Dedicated to the young Octavian (Octaui in line 1), the poem seems to fill a biographical gap in Virgil's career before his composition of the Eclogues. It is introduced as a ludus, which Irene Peirano suggests may openly refer to ‘the act of impersonating Virgil’, and, like many of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, it seems to have a parodic intent. The Culex has been interpreted as a parody of neoteric style and the epyllion, as mock-epic, as Virgil parody (John Henderson called it a ‘spoof Aeneid in bucolic drag’), as pointed Augustan satire, as mock Ovidian ‘Weltgedicht’ and as just very bad poetry (Housman's ‘stutterer’). Glenn Most has observed that the poem's three ‘acts’ structurally recapitulate Virgil's three major works in chronological succession. Little attention, however, has been paid to the Culex's final lines, which contain a catalogue of flowers the pastor places on the gnat's tomb. Recent scholarship has reintroduced an older interpretation of the gnat's tomb as a political allegory of Augustus’ Mausoleum; in this paper I suggest instead that the tomb and its flowers serve a closural and metapoetic function at the end of the poem.
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Spurr, M. S. "Agriculture and the Georgics." Greece and Rome 33, no. 2 (October 1986): 164–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383500030321.
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‘As writes our Virgil, concerned more with what made the best poetry than with complete accuracy, since his object was to delight his readers rather than to instruct farmers.’Seneca passed this judgement on the Georgics after witnessing certain agricultural practices where he was staying (at Liternum on the north-west coast of Campania), which appeared to disagree with a statement of Virgil's (G. 2.58). He then proceeded to mention another Virgilian agricultural error (G. 1.215–16), selected from ‘all the others’ (alia omnia) that he says he could have discussed, in order to drive his point home.
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Horsfall, Nicholas. "Virgil and The Poetry of Explanations." Greece and Rome 38, no. 2 (October 1991): 203–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383500023585.
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The indebtedness of theAeneidto Homer in terms of plot and structure has been analysed in minute detail, and the hunt is indeed by no means at an end. Here and there, notably but not exclusively inAeneid4, long narrative sequences have been followed back to Apollonius Rhodius. Isolated episodes have been identified as owing much to Greek tragedy. But the pursuit of Virgil's principal narrative sources, already undertaken with furious critical acerbity in antiquity, is perhaps too heavily committed to a limited quantity of likely literary models and to certain patterns of enquiry, though these last have changed a good deal in recent years. If I seem to grumble about a narrowness of outlook that becomes at times oppressive and about the danger of conclusions ever more forced and improbable if we continue barking up the same few trees, it is because (i) I have worked on and off for nearly twenty-five years onAeneid7, where Virgil's sources are as mixed, complex and anomalous as they ever become and because (ii) I published recently a study (Vergilius35 (1989), 8–27) of narrative sequences inAeneid, which seemed to point strongly towards Virgil's attentive reading of Greek colonization stories. This is not the place to continue my one-man pursuit of Herodotus and Pindar in theAeneid?but it is high time that we looked at certain large narrative structures in the epic and asked whether we have really been framing the right questions about them.
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Kearey, Talitha. "TWO ACROSTICS IN HORACE'S SATIRES (1.9.24–8, 2.1.7–10)." Classical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (December 2019): 734–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838819001009.
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Hunters of acrostics have had little luck with Horace. Despite his manifest love of complex wordplay, virtuoso metrical tricks and even alphabet games, acrostics seem largely absent from Horace's poetry. The few that have been sniffed out in recent years are, with one notable exception, either fractured and incomplete—the postulated PINN- in Carm. 4.2.1–4 (pinnis? Pindarus?)—or disappointingly low-stakes; suggestions of acrostics are largely confined to the Odes alone. Besides diverging from the long-standing Roman obsession with literary acrostics, Horace's apparent lack of interest is especially surprising given that Virgil, his contemporary, friend and ‘poetic pace-maker’, was at the time conducting what seems to be a systematic adaptation of Hellenistic acrostic-poetics into Latin poetry.
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Thompson, Rupert, and Nicholas Zair. "‘Irrational Lengthening’ in Virgil." Mnemosyne 73, no. 4 (February 28, 2020): 577–608. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1568525x-12342696.
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Abstract Word-final syllables consisting of a short vowel or a short vowel followed by a single consonant sometimes scan as heavy in Latin hexameter poetry, a feature known as ‘irrational lengthening’, lengthening in arsis, diastole etc. We examine the contexts in which this occurs in the poetry of Virgil. It is widely acknowledged that this phenomenon is based on a similar licence in earlier Greek and Roman models for Virgil, but it has also been argued that other, metrical or phonological, aspects may have been relevant to the use of lengthening. We examine these environments, and, where possible, carry out statistical analysis. We conclude that, while some of these are descriptively true, the position of lengthened words is primarily due to the constraints that Virgil applied to the construction of his hexameter rather than any other explanation.
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Colakis, Marianthe, Allusion, Rachel Jacoff, and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. "The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante's 'Commedia'." Classical World 86, no. 3 (1993): 246. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4351337.
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Harrison, S. J., and R. A. Smith. "Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil." Classical World 94, no. 2 (2001): 197. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4352538.
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Farrell, Joseph, and Alexander Dalzell. "The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid." Phoenix 53, no. 3/4 (1999): 367. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1089004.
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Gowers, Emily. "Lucan’s (G)natal Poem." Classical Antiquity 40, no. 1 (April 1, 2021): 45–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ca.2021.40.1.45.
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This paper explores the aesthetics of miniaturization in Statius’ Silvae 2.7, in relation to Statius’ unexpected decision to write a tribute to the dead epic poet Lucan in hendecasyllables. The choice of a meter associated with irreverence, ephemerality, speed, and fun has been variously justified as expressing the poet’s ambivalent mood—mourning and celebration combined—or encapsulating his subject’s brief life. This paper builds on these explanations from a different angle. The epitome of miniature, playful poetry in the Silvae is the pseudo-Virgilian Culex (Gnat), mentioned first in Statius’ opening preface as a model for his collection and then in the tribute to Lucan as a yardstick for the young poet’s precocity. This is no casual coincidence. Statius’ résumé of baby Lucan’s future career uses techniques of retrospective prophecy similar to those with which the Culex-poet anticipates and absorbs Virgil’s entire oeuvre. Other clues suggest that Statius is engaging with the faked juvenile work more than sporadically, writing the equivalent for Lucan in the smallest meter imaginable while aiming to surpass both Virgil and Lucan as a poet of speed and synoptic vision.
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Gross, Nicolas, and Wendell Clausen. "Virgil's Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry." Classical World 82, no. 4 (1989): 325. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4350404.
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Smith, Peter L., David O. Ross, Virgil, and Richard F. Thomas. "Virgil's Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics." Phoenix 44, no. 1 (1990): 104. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1088575.
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Jenkyns, Richard. "Virgil and Arcadia." Journal of Roman Studies 79 (November 1989): 26–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/301178.
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There is an obstacle to our natural appreciation of Virgil'sEclogueswhich looms as large in their case as in that of any poetry whatever. TheEcloguesform probably the most influential group of short poems ever written: though they themselves take Theocritus as a model, they were to become the fountainhead from which the vast and diverse tradition of pastoral in many European literatures was to spring. To use them as a model was in itself to distort their character: it is one of the greatest ironies of literary history that these elusive, various, eccentric poems should have become the pattern for hundreds of later writers. Moreover, the growth of the later pastoral tradition meant that many things were attributed to Virgil which are not in Virgil. Sometimes they were derived from interpretations which were put upon Virgil in late antiquity but which we now believe to be mistaken; sometimes they are misinterpretations of a much later date; sometimes they originated from new developments in pastoral literature which their inventors had not meant to seem Virgilian, but which in the course of time got foisted back on to Virgil nevertheless. It is hard, therefore, to approach theEcloguesopenly and without preconceptions about what they contain, and even scholars who have devoted much time and learning to them have sometimes continued to hold views about them for which there are upon a dispassionate observation no good grounds at all. No poems perhaps have become so encrusted by the barnacles of later tradition and interpretation as these, and we need to scrape these away if we are to see them in their true shape. My aim here is to do some of this scraping by examining the use of Arcadians and the name of Arcadia in Virgil's work.
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McGill, Scott C. "Poeta arte christianus: Pomponius's Cento Versus ad Gratiam Domini as an Early Example of Christian Bucolic." Traditio 56 (2001): 15–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0362152900002397.
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Critics have amply considered how Christian authors in late antiquity adapted the forms, language, and themes of classical poetry to create an ecclesiastical poetic tradition. Studies related to this topic have largely focused upon biblical epic and the carmina of well-known poets like Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola. In this paper, I wish to proceed into the less trodden area of Christian bucolic poetry, and specifically to one of the first examples of the form, Pornponius's Versus ad Gratiam Domini. This text, dating to the late fourth or early fifth century, is a 132-line Virgilian cento (with a concluding lacuna), or a work created out of unconnected verse units of varying length taken from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid that an author pieces together to compose a new narrative. These units can be up to three lines long, but usually consist of a segment of a hexameter line. Sixteen centos ranging in date from ca. 200–ca. 530 survive from antiquity, with four handling Christian topics. Because the ecclesiastical centonists reuse Virgilian verses directly, their texts serve as extreme examples of how Christian authors created poems by reworking the classical past. It is this transformative gesture that will concern me in this paper. I will investigate how Pomponius redeploys Virgil's language to compose his Christian Versus ad Gratiam Domini and, in the process, endows his text with specific features manifesting the continuity with and change of classical bucolic that is so fundamental to the development of the Christian pastoral form.
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Glauthier, Patrick. "BUGONIA AND THE AETIOLOGY OF DIDACTIC POETRY IN VIRGIL, GEORGICS 4." Classical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (December 2019): 745–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838820000038.
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Roughly half way through the fourth Georgic, Virgil confronts a sad reality: on occasion the entire population of a hive can perish without warning and leave the bee-keeping farmer bee-less. In response to such a devastating loss, the poet describes an Egyptian procedure, to which modern critics have given the name bugonia, whereby the farmer acquires a new swarm of bees from the putrefying carcass of a dead ox (4.281–314). After the account of bugonia, the poem takes a notoriously unexpected turn. Virgil asks the Muses about the origins of this practice and then recounts the exploits of Aristaeus, an inhabitant of the georgic world whose own bees once succumbed to famine and disease. In the narrative that follows, Aristaeus consults his mother Cyrene and the seer Proteus, who tells him about Orpheus’ descent to the underworld. The narrative ends when Aristaeus, thanks to the teaching of his mother, performs a series of activities that culminates in a new swarm of bees bursting forth from the putrefying carcass of a dead ox (4.315–558). The aetiological character of the Aristaeus narrative is clear—Virgil promises to trace the Egyptian procedure back to its first origo (4.286), and when he addresses the Muses, he specifically asks what god discovered the practice and whence it took its first beginnings (4.315–16). But for what activity does the story actually offer an aition?
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Giusti, Elena. "VIRGIL'S CARTHAGINIANS ATAEN. 1.430–6: CYCLOPES IN BEES’ CLOTHING." Cambridge Classical Journal 60 (April 30, 2014): 37–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1750270514000013.
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Virgil's poetry has long been recognised as delving into a poetics of comparison which employs sudden shifts from the miniature to the gigantic. So too have Virgilian similes long been singled out as a privileged locus where complex inter- and intra-textual allusions serve to highlight the primary role that these similes play in the narrative and poetic context of Virgil's work. Along these lines, this paper addresses one such simile atAene.d1.430–6, where the Tyrians building Carthage are compared to busy bees working at their hive. The paper explores the impact that the recognition of the simile's inter- and intra-textual connections may have on the interpretation of the scene of Aeneas’ arrival at Carthage, and on certain long-debated aspects of the poem as a whole.
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Defaux, Gérard. "(Re)visiting Délie: Maurice Scève and Marian Poetry*." Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2001): 685–740. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1261922.
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Si iracunda, aut avaritia, aut carnis illecebra naviculam concusserit mentis, respice ad Mariam.— Bernard, In laudibus Virginis MatrisFactat animam Vulcanus, vestes aptat Pallas, fucat Venus, & cesto cingit, ornant cteterte Den, docet pessimos mores Mercurius. Et quia omni genere rerum a Diis donata esset, Pandoram appellat.— Jean Olivier, PandoraCelle qui est la Vertu, et la Grace …Monstre, qu'en soy elle a plus, que de femme.— Délie, D354 and 284This study proposes a new reading of Delie and tries to shed a new light on the poet himself. Sceve appears here not only as the humanist we all know, but as a Christian poet, a poet as much interested in biblical and other religious sources as in Classical and Italian ones. In his canzoniere, Scève follows very closely, and even sometimes imitates, a corpus of fixed-form poems — rondeaux parfaits, ballades, and chants royaux — written by poets of the two previous generations for poetic contests known as Puys. And he constantly expresses his love and describes his idol in terms, images, and symbols directly borrowed from Marian poetry. To the Christian cult of the Virgin Mary corresponds for the Lover the pagan cult of Délie.
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Hardie, P. "The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid. A Dalzell." Classical Review 48, no. 2 (February 1, 1998): 297–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cr/48.2.297.
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Paniagua Blanc, Marina. "La poesía mexicana en la "Gazeta de México" a finales del siglo XVIII. Entre la herencia barroca y la Ilustración." Cuadernos de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, no. 28 (December 7, 2018): 131. http://dx.doi.org/10.17811/cesxviii.28.2018.131-156.
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RESUMENLa "Gazeta de México" no fue una revista literaria y solo en ciertas ocasiones publicó alguna poesía; sin embargo recogió mucha información sobre esa temática y actuó como propagandista de ediciones de obras, certámenes, censuras, etc. A través de esa información podemos acercarnos al panorama literario novohispano, en un momento de auge del Neoclasicismo. La publicación mostró un especial interés por la poesía laudatoria y épica relacionada con los acontecimientos de la monarquía; también por algunos autores clásicos como Virgilio y Horacio y sus traductores, así como por Tomas de Iriarte. Todo ello sin olvidar el importante papel de los jesuitas en el exilio. Los asuntos poéticos, por tanto, fueron más de información que de reproducción.PALABRAS CLAVE"Gazeta de México", Poesía, Fábulas, Tradición clásica, Nueva España, Siglo XVIII. TITLEThe classical tradition in the mexican poetry in the "Gazeta of Mexico" at the end of the 18th century. Between the Baroque heritage and the EnlightenmentABSTRACTThe "Gazeta de México" was not a literary magazine, nevertheless, it collected a lot of information on that subject, especially it announced publications of books, contests, censorships, etc. and only in certain occasions he published some poems. Through this information we can approach to the literary situation of New Spain, at a moment of Summit of neoclassicism. the publication showed a special interest in laudatory and epic poetry related to the events of the monarchy; also by some classic authors like Virgilio and Horacio and their translators, as well as by Tomas de Iriarte. All this without forgetting in important role of the exiled Jesuits. The poetical matters, therefore, were more information than reproduction.KEY WORDS"Gazeta de México", Poetry, Fables, Classical Tradition, New Spain, 18th century.
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Marinčič, Marko. "Classical past in Baudelaire's Le cygne: a reconsideration." Acta Neophilologica 42, no. 1-2 (December 30, 2009): 179–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.42.1-2.179-186.
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In the the third preface to Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire curiously refers to Virgil as the only 'source' for his Le Cygne. Ithas been seen that Horace's description of the living poet's metamorphosis into a swan (Carmina 2.20) is a much more obvious classical reference as far as the title character is concerned, and the mention of »l'homme d'Ovide« seems to point the reader to Ovid's narrative of the creation of man in the Metamorphoses (1.76-86) as a model e contrario for the degradation of the divine bird in Baudelaire's poem. Baudelaire's modem version of the classical symbol of the sublime at first seems to suggest an ironic response to Horace and Ovid. On a second reading, however, the basic 'negativism' orsaudelaire's swan myth reveais a hidden thread of continuity with the classical past: it reveals Ovid's experience as an exilee as the primary parallel to the situations of Andromache and the swan. Conversely, Horace's swan-metamorphosis, though essentially Platonic, provides, through its over-literal, grotesque realism, an ante litteram alternative to the Platonising aesthetics of the earlier Romantics.
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Langlands, Rebecca. "Latin Literature." Greece and Rome 63, no. 2 (September 16, 2016): 256–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383516000139.
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Mairéad McAuley frames her substantial study of the representation of motherhood in Latin literature in terms of highly relevant modern concerns, poignantly evoked by her opening citation of Eurydice's lament at her baby's funeral in Statius’ Thebaid 6: what really makes a mother? Biology? Care-giving? (Grief? Loss? Suffering?) How do the imprisoning stereotypes of patriarchy interact with lived experiences of mothers or with the rich metaphorical manifestations of maternity (as the focus of fear and awe, for instance, or of idealizing aesthetics, of extreme political rhetoric, or as creativity and the literary imagination?) How do individuals, texts, and societies negotiate maternity's paradoxical relationship to power? Conflicting issues of maternal power and disempowerment run through history, through Latin literature, and through the book. McAuley's focus is the representational work that mothers do in Latin literature, and she pursues this through close readings of works by Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, and Statius, by re-reading their writings in a way that privileges the theme, perspective, or voice of the mother. A lengthy introduction sets the parameters of the project and its aim (which I judge to be admirably realized) to establish a productive dialogue between modern theory (especially psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy) and ancient literature. Her study evokes a dialogue that speaks to theory – even contributes to it – but without stripping the Latin literature of its cultural specificity (and without befuddling interpretation of Latin culture with anachronism and jargon, which is often the challenge). The problem for a Latinist is that psychoanalysis is, as McAuley says, ‘not simply a body of theories about human development, it is also a mode of reading’ (23), and it is a mode of reading often at cross-purposes with the aims of literary criticism in Classical Studies: psychoanalytical notions of the universal and the foundational clash with aspirations to historical awareness and appreciation of the specifics of genre or historical moment. Acknowledging – and articulating with admirable clarity and honesty – the methodological challenges of her approach, McAuley practises what she describes as ‘reading-in-tension’ (25), holding on not only to the contradictions between patriarchal texts and their potentially subversive subtexts but also to the tense conversation between modern theory and ancient literary representation. As she puts it in her epilogue, one of her aims is to ‘release’ mothers’ voices from the pages of Latin literature in the service of modern feminism, while simultaneously preserving their alterity: ‘to pay attention to their specificity within the contexts of text, genre, and history, but not to reduce them to those contexts, in order that they speak to us within and outside them at the same time’ (392). Although McAuley presents her later sections on Seneca and Statius as the heart of the book, they are preceded by two equally weighty contributions, in the form of chapters on Virgil and Ovid, which she rightly sees as important prerequisites to understanding the significance of her later analyses. In these ‘preliminary’ chapters (which in another book might happily have been served as the main course), she sets out the paradigms that inform those discussions of Seneca and Statius’ writings. In her chapter on Virgil McAuley aims to transcend the binary notion that a feminist reading of epic entails either reflecting or resisting patriarchal values. As ‘breeders and mourners of warriors…mothers are readily incorporated into the generic code’ of epic (65), and represent an alternative source of symbolic meaning (66). Her reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses then shows how the poem brings these alternative subjects into the foreground of his own poetry, where the suffering and passion of mothers take centre-stage, allowing an exploration of imperial subjectivity itself. McAuley points out that even feminist readings can often contribute to the erasure of the mother's presence by their emphasis on the patriarchal structures that subjugate the female, and she uses a later anecdote about Octavia fainting at a reading of the Aeneid as a vivid illustration of a ‘reparative reading’ of Roman epic through the eyes of a mother (91–3). Later, in her discussion of mothers in Statian epic, McAuley writes: ‘mothers never stand free of martial epic nor are they fully constituted by it, and, as such, may be one of the most appropriate figures with which to explore issues of belatedness and authority in the genre’ (387). In short, the discourse of motherhood in Latin literature is always revealed to be powerfully implicated in the central issues of Roman literature and culture. A chapter is devoted to the themes of grief, virtue, and masculinity as explored in Seneca's consolation to his own mother, before McAuley turns her attention to the richly disturbing mothers of Senecan tragedy and Statius’ Thebaid. The book explores the metaphorical richness of motherhood in ancient Rome and beyond, but without losing sight of its corporeality, seeking indeed to complicate the long-developed binary distinction between physical reproduction (gendered as female) and abstract reproduction and creativity (gendered as male). This is a long book, but it repays careful reading, and then a return to the introduction via the epilogue, so as to reflect anew on McAuley's thoughtful articulation of her methodological choices. Her study deploys psychoanalytical approaches to reading Latin literature to excellent effect (not an easy task), always enhancing the insights of her reading of the ancient texts, and maintaining lucidity. Indeed, this is the best kind of gender study, which does not merely apply the modern framework of gender and contemporary theoretical approaches to ancient materials (though it does this very skilfully and convincingly), but in addition makes it clear why this is such a valuable endeavour for us now, and how rewarding it can be to place modern psychoanalytic theories into dialogue with the ancient Roman literature. The same tangle of issues surrounding maternity as emerges from these ancient works often persists into our modern era, and by probing those issues with close reading we risk learning much about ourselves; we learn as much when the ancient representations fail to chime with our expectations.
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Gross, Nicolas, Gian Biagio Conte, and Charles Segal. "The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets." Classical World 82, no. 1 (1988): 50. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4350270.
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Thomas, Richard F. "Prose into Poetry: Tradition and Meaning in Virgil's Georgics." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 91 (1987): 229. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/311407.
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Holzberg, Niklas. "FROM PRIAPUS TO CYTHEREA: A SEQUENTIAL READING OF THECATALEPTON." Classical Quarterly 68, no. 2 (October 22, 2018): 557–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000983881800037x.
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In an article published thirteen years ago, I tried to break new ground by showing that the texts transmitted under the titleCataleptonas the work of Virgil can be seen to form an elaborately arranged and highly allusive book of verse written by a single author. This latter, I argued, was identical with the anonymous poet who, in an epilogue, represents the preceding poems as the juvenilia of the author later known for hisBucolics,GeorgicsandAeneidand, consequently, is himself speaking in the alleged early works asVirgil impersonator. This anonymous poet, however, cannot rightly be labelled a literary forger, since he repeatedly and quite unmistakably recalls each of Virgil's threeoperaas well as other texts written after the year 19b.c. Evidently, then, he is inviting his readers to take part in a literarylusus, one in which they are expected to be familiar not only with the texts ofBucolics,GeorgicsandAeneidbut also with the life of the man who wrote them. The fiction of a young Virgil is created, one who wrote his first poems—the verses referred to in the epilogue aselementaandrudis Calliope(Catal.18[15])—primarily under the influence of Catullus, the said poems being, with the exception ofCatal.12(9) and 16(13), epigrams. My interpretation has borne fruit, with Irene Peirano and Markus Stachon each devoting, in 2012 and 2014 respectively, a monograph to this approach and offering what are often very thorough analytical readings of the poems as the creations of aVirgil impersonator. However, neither of these two Latinists has considered one particular interpretative aspect, which I myself had only been able to introduce very briefly into my paper: the recognition that, as many more recent studies have now further corroborated, Roman poetry books were designed for linear, sequential reading, that they have, as it were, a story to tell. Peirano, moreover, disregards in her study the threePriapeapositioned in editions before the other fifteen epigrams and shown there with their own separate numbering. In the manuscripts, however, the titleCataleptonrefers without exception to a unit comprising the threePriapeaand the fifteen epigrams. The titlePriapea, found in the catalogue of the Murbach manuscripts and in some codices (for example the Graz fragment), is always attached solely to the poemQuid hoc noui est?In theVita Suetoniana-Donatiana(VSD), the termsCatalepton,PriapeaandEpigrammatawere evidently used as three different titles; the author (or his source) may not have seen thatCataleptonis the title of all the poems. Furthermore, I should like to point out that, counted together, ‘Virgil's’Priapeaand epigrams come to a total of seventeen poems and so match precisely both the total of seventeen books in the real Virgil's three works and the total number of Horace's epodes, of the poems, that is, which the not-so-real Virgil quite conspicuously evokes in his own penultimate poem (Catal.16[13]). More significantly, however, a sequential reading of thePriapea et Epigrammatacan in fact build a watertight case for taking the texts to be, as it were, a composite whole, and that is what I intend to argue in the rest of the article.
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Galinsky, Karl, Wendell Clausen, David O. Ross, and R. O. A. M. Lyne. "Virgil's Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry." American Journal of Philology 110, no. 1 (1989): 171. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/294963.
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Schwitter, Raphael. "A “Roman” Wedding in Vandal Africa." Studies in Late Antiquity 4, no. 1 (2020): 114–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/sla.2020.4.1.114.
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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 intertextuality 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.
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Vetushko-Kalevich, Arsenii. "Nordic Gods in Classical Dress." Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures, no. 2 (November 13, 2019): 57–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/jolcel.v2i0.8303.
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The 19th century in Sweden, like in many other European countries, saw a large decline in the quantity of Neo-Latin literary production. However, a range of skillful Latin poets may be named from this period: Johan Lundblad, Johan Tranér, Emil Söderström, Johan Bergman and others, engaged as well in translating from Swedish into Latin as in composing poems of their own. It was also in the 19th century that the longest Latin poem ever written in Sweden came out – “De diis arctois libri VI” by Carl Georg Brunius (1792–1869), remarkably neglected by the scholars, although it was published twice during the lifetime of its author (1822 and 1857).
The subject of the poem fits perfectly in the intellectual movement of the period, namely national romantic interest in the Nordic antiquities. The six books represent a summary of Eddaic mythology from the creation of the Universe until the Ragnarök.
Brunius’ admiration for the Scandinavian Middle Ages is apparent; later it turned out to be productive in architecture, the field in which Brunius is most remembered nowadays. Brunius does not seek to turn Scandinavian gods into Greek ones. He accurately follows his sources (both the prosaic and, to a somewhat smaller extent, the poetic Edda) in content, sometimes even in wording. However, it should be born in mind that the writer was a classicist by his education. Although many compositional traits of ancient epos are lacking in the poem, it is full of the allusions to classical authors at the phrasal level. Some of them are formulaic verse elements, others deliberate and exquisite quotations. It is this elegant combination of close adherence to the sources with the use of the ancient authors (Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace) that the paper is mainly focused on.
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Hardie, P. R. "Virgil's "Aeneid" and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry. Wendell Clausen." Classical Philology 84, no. 4 (October 1989): 354–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/606080.
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Rutherford, R. B. "Virgil's Poetic Ambitions in Eclogue 6." Greece and Rome 36, no. 1 (April 1989): 42–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383500029326.
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The Eclogues, Virgil's earliest work, are also in some ways his most puzzling, and of these enigmatic poems the sixth is perhaps the most baffling. Since it clearly assumes a considerable knowledge of the contemporary literary scene, much that would have been clear at least to Virgil's fellow poets must remain opaque to us. But it would be over–pessimistic to suppose that we can make nothing of the poem; nor have modern scholars been slow to construct the most varied hypotheses. In this article I shall not be attempting a comprehensive survey of the most recent contributions even in English. Like Michael Winterbottom in his illuminating piece on Eclogues 1 and 9 (in G&R23 [1976], 55–59), I am trying to set down, as simply and concisely as possible, some considerations which, in the light of teaching and reflection, seem to me to contribute to the interpretation and enjoyment of the poem.
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INGLEHEART, JENNIFER. "PROPERTIUS 4.10 AND THE END OF THE AENEID: AUGUSTUS, THE SPOLIA OPIMA AND THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT." Greece and Rome 54, no. 1 (March 9, 2007): 61–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383507000046.
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The tenth poem of Propertius Book 4 is the most remarkable in a collection full of surprises for its readers, and appears to mark a significant departure from his previous work. If Propertius had never written his final book of poetry, we might characterize him on the basis of his earlier books as the quintessential Latin love elegist: he rejects not only a military career, but even the less demanding task of celebrating Augustus' victories, in favour of the love elegist's self-indulgent life of leisure: cf. e.g. Prop. 2.1.39–46. In the first poem of Book 4, however, Propertius announces what appears to be a wholly different poetic programme; in place of the erotic elegies of the previous books is a new ‘serious’ purpose: Propertius will sing about national, religious and antiquarian themes, as the ‘Roman Callimachus’ (Propertius 4.1a.63–4). However, as soon as the next poem, Propertius is commanded to return to his usual theme of obsessive elegiac love for one woman, a topic described as haec tua castra (‘this is your sphere of operations’, 4.1b.135). The poems which follow in Propertius 4 tend to strike a balance between antiquarian seriousness and elegiac frivolity. For example, in 4.4, Propertius relates the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia's betrayal of Rome, connecting several contemporary urban landmarks with the poem's heroine, but he remains true to his earlier colours by presenting Tarpeia as an elegiac lover who falls in love at first sight and betrays her city out of passion.
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Gale, Monica. "Poetry and the Backward Glance in Virgil's Georgics and Aeneid." Transactions of the American Philological Association 133, no. 2 (2003): 323–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/apa.2003.0016.
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Nash, Walter. "A college Olympian." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 7, no. 2 (May 1998): 159–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/096394709800700204.
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Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-1884), wit, parodist, classical scholar, translator, athlete, pipe-smoker, beer-drinker, enjoyed considerable popular fame in his own brief day. He had what might now be called 'star quality'. The fame has long since died- not many people have even heard of him - but Calverley's accomplishment stands: as a master of light verse, to the prosodic techniques of which he made important contributions, and as a gifted translator of the classical poets, notably Horace and Virgil. His work, as displayed in this article, suggests an affinity between the mimetics of parody and the stylistics of translation, a common factor being an insight into the relationship between phrasing and prosodic form. It raises, however, the question of whether linguistic/mimetic ability, however great, can ever be more than a component of creative power. For Calverley it was never quite enough; his friends and colleagues saw him as a man whose youthful promise was not to be wholly fulfilled, a college Olympian who never scaled the heights of poetic achievement.
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Galinsky, Karl, and Christine Perkell. "The Poet's Truth: A Study of the Poet in Virgil's Georgics." Classical World 84, no. 6 (1991): 478. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4350925.
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Houghton, L. B. T. "EARLY RESPONSES TO VIRGIL'S FOURTHECLOGUE." Greece and Rome 65, no. 2 (September 17, 2018): 189–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383518000141.
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The fourthEcloguepresents itself explicitly as a political poem, a loftier intervention in the humble world of pastoral poetry (4.1–3). This grander type of pastoral, moreover, is singled out as possessing a specifically Roman political significance: these ‘woods’ are to be ‘worthy of a consul’ (silvae sint consule dignae, 3), and the coming Golden Age is set within a precisely identifiable political context, the consulship of C. Asinius Pollio in 40bc(te consule, 4.11). Beyond that, however, the details of the relationship between the miraculous child, whose growth to maturity will be accompanied by the fabulous portents of the new era, and the contemporary political setting at Rome are left tantalizingly, perhaps prudently, vague. It was no doubt with a view to promoting his own political interests that Pollio's son, ‘the rash and ambitious Asinius Gallus’, claimed to have been the originalpuerof Virgil's poem. If so, he was very far from being the last public figure to appropriate the resounding cadences of the fourthEclogueto endorse his own position: it was not long before (in Harry Levin's words) ‘The Pollio eclogue had virtually created a minor genre, a means for the court poet to flatter his sovereign, as well as a device for balancing the moderns against the ancients.’ But even before the opportunistic assertions of Pollio's son, the poem's prophecies of a new age had already been re-appropriated to tie down the oracular generalities of the eclogue to a particular individual and a definite set of political circumstances, in a move that was to have significant repercussions for the later fortunes of Virgil's essay in pastoral panegyric.
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Edwall, Christy. "Clare's Poetic Binomials." Romanticism 26, no. 2 (July 2020): 116–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/rom.2020.0458.
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John Clare's confessed preference for the ‘vulgar’ names of flowers and his apparent dismissal of the sexual system as ‘darkness visible’ seems to keeps the taint of Linnaean influence at a distance. His enumeration of flowers in ‘The Wild Flower Nosgay’, however, looks very much like two eighteenth-century descriptive procedures: poetic diction and binomial nomenclature. Dryden's popular translation of Virgil's Georgics modified a classical inheritance of compound epithets into phrases later recognised as poetic diction. This inheritance finds an unexpected consonance in the binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus, who loved the Georgics and referred to them in his work. By comparing poetic diction and binomial nomenclature, this essay investigates the resources of compression or visibility which either procedure might offer to a bookish and keen-sighted poet like Clare. In doing so, it reiterates the case for Clare's immersion in eighteenth-century poetic procedure.
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Watson, Patricia. "Axelson Revisited: the Selection of Vocabulary in Latin Poetry." Classical Quarterly 35, no. 2 (December 1985): 430–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800040271.
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Although it is now fifteen years since G. Williams' thorough-going criticism of B. Axelson'sUnpoetische Wörter, his discussion has failed to elicit the adverse response which might have been expected in view of the widespread influence exerted by the earlier work.The reason for this may be that Axelson's theory is so widely accepted that any refutation thereof may be disregarded. Yet surely Williams was right to point to the dangers of total reliance on statistics and to the necessity of considering the contexts in which words occur in Latin poetry. In this respect, he was not so much rejecting Axelson's work as pointing to its inadequacies: whereas Axelson would be content to label a word that occurs only rarely in poetry as ‘unpoetisch’, it is necessary, as Williams demonstrates, to take the further step of determining the effect that such a word has in a given context. This approach will be particularly helpful, for example, in the case ofparvulusat Virg.Aen.4.328, where the heightened pathos achieved by Virgil's use of a diminutive is better appreciated by the reader who is aware of the scarcity of diminutive adjectives in poetry and in epic above all. To recogniseparvulusas an ‘unpoetic word’, with Axelson, is the essential first step, but we should proceed a stage further to inquire what effect was intended by the employment of a form not normally found in elevated poetry.Of greater importance is Williams' rejection of the ‘hierarchy of genres’ theory, taken for granted by Axelson, that is, that Latin poetry may be divided into a number of higher- or lower-ranking genres and that the more elevated a genre the less unpoetic vocabulary it is liable to employ.