Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature [Illustrated] 0521620880, 9780521620888

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Rumour and Renown Representations of Fama in Western Literature PHILIP

CAMBRIDGE

HARDIE

Rumour and Renown

The Latin word fama means ‘rumour’, ‘report’, ‘tradition, as well as modern English ‘fame’ or ‘renown’ This magisterial and groundbreaking study in the literary and cultural history of rumour and renown, by one of the most influential living critics of Latin poetry, examines the intricate dynamics of their representations from Homer to Alexander Pope, with a focus on the power struggles played out within attempts to control the word, both spoken and written. Central are the personifications of Fama in Virgil and Ovid and the rich progeny spawned by them, but the book focuses on a wide range of genres other than epic, and on a variety of modes of narrating, dramatizing, critiquing and illustrating fama. Authors given detailed readings include Livy, Tacitus, Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Milton. PHILIP HARDIE isa Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Cambridge. He is one of the leading critics of Latin literature, with strong interests in the reception of classical literature, and is the author of VirgiPs Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (1986), The Epic Successors of Virgil (1993), Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (2002) and Lucretian Receptions (2009), the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (2002) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (2007). He is

currently co-editing the Renaissance volume of The Oxford History of

Classical Reception in English Literature. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

CAMBRIDGE

General editors R. G. OSBORNE,

R. L. HUNTER, D.

N.

SEDLEY,

CLASSICAL

G.

C.

W.

HORROCKS,

M.

BEARD

STUDIES

M. S.

MILLETT, P.

OAKLEY,

Rumour

and Renown

Representations of Fama in Western Literature

PHILIP

HARDIE

Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature, University of Cambridge

ata) CAMBRIDGE E?»

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,

Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521620888 © Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Hardie, Philip R.

Rumour and renown : representations of Fara in western literature / Philip Hardie. P. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-62088-8 1. Fame in literature. 2. Rumor in literature. I. Title. PN56.r297H37 2011 809'.93353 — dc23 2011027491 ISBN 978-0-521-62088-8 Hardback

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

Contents

List of illustrations [page vi] Preface and acknowledgements — [x]

—

List of abbreviations | [xii]

Introduction

[1]

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings Virgil’s Fama

[48]

[78]

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid: the Council of Latins Fama in Ovid's Metamorphoses Later imperial epic

[126]

[150]

[178]

Fama and the historians i. Livy

[226]

Fama and the historians 1. Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and

Martial

[273]

The love of fame and the fame of love

[330]

Fame and blame, fame and envy: Spenserian personifications of the word [384] Christian conversions of Fama

[411]

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

[439]

Fama in early modern England: Shakespeare and Jonson Fama in Milton: Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes

[542]

Chaucer's House of Fame and Pope's Temple of Fame

[570]

Visual representations of Fama Bibliography [640] Index of passages discussed General index

[686]

[677]

[603]

[485]

Illustrations

Fig. 1 Ambitio, from J. Sambucus Emblemata (Antwerp 1566) 102. By permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge. page 27 Fig.2 Conscientia mille testes, from Otto van Veen Horatii emblemata (Amsterdam 1684) 53. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 35 (Hhh.798). Fig. 3 Hendrik Goltzius, engraving of Fame and History. 227 Courtesy of the British Museum. Fig. 4 Omnis amor surdis auribus esse solet, from Otto van Veen Amorum emblemata (Antwerp 1608) 67. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (SSS.26.3).

Fig. 5 Triumph of Fame, Petrarch I Trionfi. Sixteenth-century illumination, Biblioth. Nat. MS Frang. 12423, fol. 51. By permission of the Bibliothéque nationale de France. Fig. 6 Nugigerula lingua, from J. Drexel Orbis Phaethon, hoc est, De universis vitiis linguae (Cologne 1634). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University

332

413

Library (F.163.e.1.2).

Fig. 7 Emblem of the ‘Evill Tongue’, from George Wither A Collection of Emblemes (London 1634-5). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (SSS.40.20).

Fig. 8 Engraving at head of An Essay on Criticism, in The Works of Mr Alexander Pope (London 1717). By permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge. Fig. 9 Fama, Jupiter and Mercury in Aeneid 4. Late fifteenth-century manuscript from the Aragonese court of Naples. Escorial Bibl. s. 11. 19, fol. 98v © PATRIMONIO NACIONAL. Fig. 10 Fama in Aeneid 4, woodcut in Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, ed. Sebastian Brant (Strassburg 1502). By permission of the vi

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

600

604

605

Fig. Fig.

Fig.

— —

List of illustrations

Seraph, apse of Sta Eulàlia d'Estaon. Twelfth century. © MNAC - Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. Barcelona. After drawing of Franz Cleyn, engraving of Dido and Aeneas entering the cave and Fama, in Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, ed. John Ogilby (London 1658). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (x.7.3). Dido and Aeneas in the cave. Title page to Aeneid 4, in German translation of the Aeneid (Worms Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München

Fig.

607

608

1543).

(Res/A.lat.a. 2312).

609

Giovanni Stradano (?), Dido and Aeneas: fresco, Palazzo

Spada, Rome. Reproduced from L. Neppi Palazzo Spada (Rome 1975). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (5578.a.97.20). Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, Dido and Aeneas: tapestry cartoon. Reproduced from R. Rubenstein ‘Giovanni

610

Francesco Romanelli's Dido and Aeneas tapestry cartoons,

Fig.

Fig.

Art at Auction (1968—9) 107—19, courtesy of Sotheby's. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (T400.b.171). Woodcut illustrating Hans Sachs 'Das gerücht mit seiner wunderlichen Eygenschaft / nach beschreibung Virgilii des Poeten’, published c. 1546 by Hans Weigel the Elder. Reproduced from Hans Sachs im Gewande seiner Zeit (Gotha 1821) xvii. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (LA.8.55). The Petrarca-Meister, woodcut, 'Von hoffnung guts lobs nach dem Tod’. Reproduced from W. Scheidig Die

610

612

Holzschnitte des Petrarca- Meisters, zu Petrarcas Werk Von

der Artzney bayder Glueck des guten und widerwaertigen (Berlin 1955) 181. Courtesy of Seemann Henschel Verlag. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (S404.8.b.9.21). Fig.

613

The Petrarca-Meister, woodcut, ‘Von eigenem ungeriicht’.

Reproduced from W. Scheidig Die Holzschnitte des Petrarca-Meisters, zu Petrarcas Werk Von der Artzney bayder Glueck des guten und widerwaertigen (Berlin 1955) 219. Courtesy of Seemann Henschel Verlag. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (S404.8.b.9.21).

614

vii

List of illustrations

Fig. 19 Georg Pencz (?), woodcut illustrating Hans Sachs, ‘Nachred das grewlich laster, sampt seynen zwölf eygenschafften' (Nuremberg 1535). Reproduced from Hans Sachs im Gewande seiner Zeit (Gotha 1821) xviii.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (LA.8.55). Fig. 20 Giulio Bonasone, engraving ‘Socrates and Pheme, from Achille Bocchi Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere quas serio ludebat libri quinque (Bologna 1555). By

614

permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College,

Fig. 2

—

vill

Cambridge. Altichiero, Gloria riding in a chariot, frontispiece to

616

Petrarch De uiris illustribus, c. 1380. Biblioth. Nat. MS Lat.

60691, fol. 1. By permission of the Bibliothéque nationale de France. Fig. 22 Christoph Jamnitzer, ewer, with Triumph of Fame. Reproduced from E. Kris Goldschmiedearbeiten des

617

Mittelalters, der Renaissance und des Barock, part 1. Arbeiten

in Gold und Silber: Beschreibender Katalog (Vienna 1932) Pl. 63d. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (S406.b.93.26). Fig. 23 Fama, from Vincenzo Cartari Imagines deorum, qui ab antiquis colebantur (Lyons 1581) 264. By permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge. Fig. 24 Fama Chiara nella Medaglia di Antinoo, from Cesare Ripa Iconologia (Venice 1645) 193. By permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge. Fig. 5 Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481-1536), Myth of Perseus and the

618

62]

623

Gorgon, fresco (c. 1511), Loggia of Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome. Courtesy of Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives,

Florence. Fig. 26 Simon Thomassin, engraving of statue by Antoine Coysevox of Mercury on Pegasus, Recüeil de cinquante des plus belles figures antiques et modernes de celles qui sont placées dans les appartements et Parc de Versailles (Paris

623

1703) Pl. 27. By permission of the Master and Fellows,

Trinity College, Cambridge. Fig. 27 Simon Thomassin, engraving of statue by Antoine Coysevox of Renommee on Pegasus, Recüeil de cinquante des plus belles figures antiques et modernes de celles qui sont

625

List of illustrations

placées dans les appartements et Parc de Versailles (Paris 1703) Pl. 26. By permission of the Master and Fellows,

Trinity College, Cambridge. Fig. 28 Bernardo Strozzi, Personification of Fama. © The National Gallery, London. Fig. Giorgio Vasari Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Florence 1568), verso of title page. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (Rel. c.56.3).

626 627

628

Fig. 30 Pennae gloria perennis, emblem in Geffrey Whitney A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden 1586) 196-7. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (Peterborough H.6.15).

629

Fig. 3

Fig. 3

e

Jean Stratius, printer's mark, from L.-C. Silvestre Marques typographiques (Paris 1853—67) no. 905. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (860.c.27). Fig. 32 Sigmund Feyerabend, printer's device, from A. F. Butsch Die Bücher-Ornamentik der Hoch- und Spätrenaissance, vol. 11 (Leipzig and Munich 1881) Tafel 75. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

630

(860.a.2).

631

Bronze medal of Andrea Barbazza. Reproduced from G. F. Hill Corpus of Italian Medals (British Museum 1930), p. 98 no. 384. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (S492.a.93.2). Courtesy of the British Museum.

632 634

Ut

Fig. 34 Domenico Guidi La Renommée du Roy, Versailles. Réunion des Musées Nationaux. Fig. 3 Johann Sadeler, engraving after Friedrich Sustris, of the Choice of Hercules. Courtesy of the British Museum. Fig. 3 Jacques Callot, engraving of Mount Parnassus, from A. Salvadori Guerra di Bellezza: festa a cavallo fatta in Firenze [ey]

635

(Florence 1616). Reproduced by kind permission of the

Syndics of Cambridge University Library (Acton

b.128.156). Fig. 37 Walter Raleigh The History of the World (London 1614), frontispiece. By permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge.

636

638

Preface and acknowledgements

On one of the Roman writing tablets from Vindolanda, a fort on Hadrian’s Wall, can be read the words INTEREA PAVIDAM VOLITANS PINNATA...,

a writing exercise, it may be, that took for its text Aeneid 9.473—4 Interea pauidam uolitans pennata per urbem | nuntia Fama ruit... ‘Meanwhile the messenger winged Rumour rushed in flight through the panic-stricken city." Virgil’s Fama has winged her way from the centre of Rome to the remote northern borders of the Empire, in keeping with Fama's unstoppable power of spreading and proliferating. As the subject of scholarly study she is also impossible to pin down and delimit, and this book, long though it is, offers only a sample of what

could be said about Fama’s manifestations

and mutations. My own starting point, many years ago, was the major personification of Fama in Book 4 of the Aeneid, and the Virgilian and Ovidian tradition has remained central amidst the ramifications into genres other than epic. Virgil's - and Ovid's — Fama is encyclopaedic in her pretensions, like the genre of epic itself, of which in one of her guises Fama may be considered a personification, and the workings of Fama in epic offer ready vantage points on to the structures and dynamics of rumour and renown, report and tradition, across a wide range of literary and non-literary contexts in antiquity and later. This is a book about a network of themes and images in classical antiquity, and the reception thereof, and it has little to say about Fama's more recent and explosive transmutation into fame-ascelebrity. Modern celebrity has clear continuities with older forms of fame and renown, but ‘the celebrity’ is largely a creation of the technologies of mass circulation that have grown at an increasing rate of acceleration over the last two centuries, although even in this true to the propensity for monstrous growth and bewildering speed that Virgil identified in his Fama." The long gestation of this book has meant that I have repeatedly been able to profit from the work of those quicker to publish than myself. Of the many works that touch on fama either centrally or in the course of other matters, I would single out the remarkable Lille thesis by Séverine 1 Bowman and Thomas 1994: no. 118. 2 On the earlier history of modern celebrity culture see e.g. Mole 2007 and 2009; for more recent developments e.g. Rojek 2001. For an attempt to draw links between antiquity and modern celebrity see Payne 2009.

Preface and acknowledgements

Clément-Tarantino (2006), which for the first time reveals the full scale of

the intertextualities woven into the Virgilian Fama, and in so doing provides a detailed anatomy of important aspects of fama in the Greco-Roman tradition. Drafts of various parts of the book have benefited from the comments of audiences in many parts of the world. A full list of those who have offered me leads and insights would include most of my friends and colleagues in classics and other disciplines, and to all of them I am grateful. Those to whom I remember particular debts include Bill Allan, Alessandro

Barchiesi, Katerina Carvounis, Helen Cooney, Martin Dinter, Denis Feeney, William Fitzgerald, Mary Flannery, Don Fowler, Peta Fowler, Simon Goldhill, Emily Gowers, Judith Hallett, Stephen Harrison, John Henderson, Luke

Houghton, Richard Hunter, Maggie Kilgour, Helen Lovatt, Caro] Magner, Jay MacPherson, Peter Mack, Simon Malloch, Victoria Moul, Stephen Oakley, David Quint, Michael Reeve, Alessandro Schiesaro, Rob Shorrock, Joe

Trapp, Tony Woodman; where fama is failed by memory I hope that I shall not incur inuidia. | am also grateful to the two readers for Cambridge University Press, and to my editor Michael Sharp for his forbearance in allowing the book to expand to a length far greater than that for which it was originally contracted. Iveta Adams, my exceptionally sharp-sighted copy-editor, has saved me from many errors and infelicities. The Classics Faculty of Cambridge University kindly invited me to publish the book in the relaunched series ‘Cambridge Classical Studies. Over the last four years I have enjoyed the luxury of uninterrupted reading and writing as a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, a beacon of enlightened generosity in a turbulent world. A preliminary sketch of some ofthe major areas of the book was published as "Why is Rumour here? Tracking Virgilian and Ovidian Fama’, Ordia Prima 1 (2002) 67-81. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as 'Fame and defamation in the Aeneid: the Council of Latins (Aen. 11.225—467)', in H.-P.

Stahl (ed.) Vergil's Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context (London and Swansea 1998) 243-70. Some material in the section on Lucan in Chapter 6 is based on 'Lucan's song of the earth’, in E. Cingano and L. Milano (eds.) Papers on Ancient Literatures: Greece, Rome and the Near East (Padua 2008)

305—30; the section on Nonnus in Chapter 6 is a lightly revised version of ‘Nonnus’ Typhon: the musical giant’, in M. Paschalis (ed.) Roman and Greek Imperial Epic (Heraklion 2005) 117-30. Parts of Chapter 10 develop material published in ‘The word personified: Virgil, Ovid, Spenser’, Materiali e Discussioni61 (2009) 101-15.

I am grateful to Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. and to Tony Woodman for permission to use the latter's translation of Tacitus' Annals.

xi

Abbreviations

Anth. Pal.

Anthologia Palatina.

Baehrens, PLM

E. Baehrens (ed.) Poetae Latini Minores, 5 vols. (Leipzig,

CIL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1863-).

1879-83).

DK

H. Diels and W. Kranz (eds.) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edn (Berlin, 1951—2).

Ldft

F. Jacoby Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin, 1923-). Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos (Góttingen, 1955—).

L-S

C. T. Lewis and C. Short A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879).

LSJ

H. G. Liddell and R. Scott

FGrH

A Greek—English Lexicon, 9th edn,

rev. H. Stuart-Jones (Oxford, 1940), with a revised supplement, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1996).

Nauck, TGF?

A. Nauck Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1889).

OED OLD

RE TLL

xil

Oxford English Dictionary. P. G. W. Glare Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1968-82). A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, W. Kroll Paulys Realencyclopádie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1893—1978). Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Leipzig, 1900—).

1

Introduction

At a critical moment for Aeneas' career in Virgil's Aeneid, when the hero is

in danger of being blown off course in his journey towards the far-distant fame and fate of his Roman descendants, a demonic creature bursts in on the narrative of the human actors to broadcast a tendentious account of the union

of Dido

and Aeneas in the cave (Aen. 4.173—97). Fama is the

embodiment of the rumours and gossip that swirl around the glamorous royal couple, but this monster is far more than just that, containing in her expansive person distortions and refractions of other aspects of *what is said, as it affects the individual's relationship to the group, whether that be his or her own society or the society of the future. Virgil's Fama, the most elaborate example of personification allegory in the Aeneid, has sometimes been seen as an excrescence, a self-indulgent ornament interrupting the proper business of the epic poet. Closer acquaintance reveals that she is central to that business, and that her power is closely related to the power of the poet's own words, and to the power of other kinds of words that are the subject of the poet's words. My own repeated reflection on Virgil's Fama, and on her antecedents and descendants, has over the years expanded into the present book. This is a primarily literary study of an area where texts have a particularly heavy investment in the extratextual world, an area where the words that

constitute texts describe and comment on the production and circulation of words outside texts, and where the boundary between the textual and extratextual is particularly porous. My subject, very broadly defined, is a cluster of aspects ofthe ordering (or disordering) of words as a meansto exert control, or to impose a particular view of reality, or to construct a hierarchy of values. The (dis)order of words is a subject that especially concerns texts, which are themselves nothing but words in a certain ordering. An author's claim to authority in the world outside can only be staked on his or her power over words. Through those words the individual author seeks to regulate his or her reputation among a group, namely the readership, whether defined more or less narrowly in terms of spatial or temporal extent. More broadly, the relationship between an individual and society is an important part of what might be labelled the ‘politics of the word’. Words are produced by

Introduction

individuals, but they are the chief means by which individual human beings construct and regulate the multiplicity of groupings that make up human society. To descend somewhat from these large generalities, the range of phenomena subjected to scrutiny in this book largely coincides with the range of meanings of the Latin word fama, literally ‘what is said’, one of several nouns derived from the verb fari ‘speak’, and including fatum ‘fate’ and fabula ‘story, tale’ (both words which interact in various ways with fama).' The meanings of fama include ‘fame’, ‘glory’, ‘reputation’, good but also bad, ‘infamy’; ‘public opinion’, ‘rumour’, ‘gossip’, ‘tradition’. The modern English ‘fame’ (derived from the Latin word via French) has become restricted in

sense to a small part of the meanings of fama. The range of meanings in Middle English and the early modern period remained wider; this is important for an understanding of Chaucer’s House of Fame, probably the single most important work for the history of fama in English literature (see Ch. 15). I repeatedly use the Latin fama as a shorthand for the cluster of concepts that is the subject of the book, although the thesis that there is a complex dynamic of relationships between these concepts is not dependent on the linguistic accident whereby Latin uses one word to cover what in other languages is spread over a number of terms. My study begins with early Greek literature, although the Greek prjun (derived from pnui ‘I say’) covers a narrower range of meanings than its Latin cognate fama." Equally, the distribution of terms for aspects of fama in modern European languages does not coincide with the situation in Latin, although the reception of fama after antiquity is undoubtedly to some extent guided by awareness of the range of meanings contained in the single Latin word." In particular, in literature and the visual arts, the two major personifications of Fama, in

N

Book 4 of Virgil's Aeneid and Book 12 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, helped to keep attention focussed on this network of relationships. In her incoherent Bettini 2008 argues that in Latin fari and fama denote a particularly powerful form of utterance, and develops an interesting thesis therefrom on the ambivalence concerning the credibility and authority of fama. Whether or not the etymological argument holds, that ambivalence, on which this book has much to say, is reinforced, if not determined, by a host of extralinguistic factors. For an analysis of a range of Greek words in the area of ‘fame, glory, honour’ see Greindl 1938. I have not seen Steinkopf 1937. For a classification of Greek, Latin and Hebrew terms in the field we

of fama

see Boitani 1984: 24-31.

Boitani 1984: 23 emphasizes the complexity of the also Fenster and Smail 2003: 1-2 on the wide range retained and incorporated meanings that had been point to some intersections of fama with terms not witnessing.

notions covered by Chaucerian ‘fame’. See of meanings preserved by medieval fama: ‘It active in Latin-speaking cultures.' They also discussed in this book, including status and

The duplicities of fama

coherence the Virgilian and Ovidian Fama provides a commentary on the loose but essential connections that bind the various functions and qualities of the word which are included in the different senses of fama. Chapters 3 and 5 offer detailed analyses of the Virgilian and Ovidian Fama and her operations.

The duplicities of fama* Through all of its complexities I perceive a constant tendency of fama to structure itself according to a series of contrasts or oppositions. But these oppositions are open to erosion or deconstruction, partly because at the end of the day the stuff of fama is always one and the same - (just) words. Some of these oppositions emerge clearly through consideration of the range of dictionary meanings of fama. There is an evaluative contrast between good and bad kinds of fama, in modern English ‘fame’ and ‘infamy’ There is a contrast in temporal duration between proliferating but transient uses of the word — ‘rumour’, ‘hearsay’, ‘gossip’, Latin rumor, sermones (TLL s.v. fama

1.4), and also the potentially more reliable ‘report’, ‘news’ (OLD s.v. fama la) — and the word as that which fixes and preserves, tradition, the word as the repository of cultural memory, with the power to preserve and replicate ideologies and beliefs over generations (TLL 1.3.i),° and also the word as preserving the immortal fame of individual great men. The contrast between rumour and tradition, or between rumour and fame, may be formulated

as a contrast between process and product: rumour and gossip tend to be thought of as words in circulation, a series of exchanges,’ whereas tradition

implies a fixed corpus of words, whether written or spoken, and the literary monument is one of the safest ways to secure lasting fame (or so writers assure their laudandi).

ES

But that contrast is unstable in various ways. The presentation of fame as a free-standing and lasting monument is a mystification of the fact that praise of outstanding men is itself part of a system of exchange." What is The phrase duplex fama occurs in a prominent and programmatic position at the beginning of

e

=

nw

Livy's History, 1.1.6 (see Ch. 7 p. 244); also at 8.20.6, 29.21.1.

For a wide-ranging and insightful literary and cultural history of rumour see Neubauer 1999. fama is used to refer to particular reports or traditions, the sum of which may be thought of as what we call ‘tradition’. See Spacks 1986: 20-1 on gossip as exchange, dialogue. On ‘positional trust, in gossip, between gossipers, see Gambetta 199.1: 216. On gossip as ‘a series of more or less calculated prestations or gifts’ see Stewart and Strathern 200.1: 37. For an economic model for the ‘traffic in praise’ in the Pindaric epinician see Kurke 1991.

Introduction

perceived as a fixed tradition may crystallize out of a more fluid circulation of words. Folklorists see no sharp distinction between rumour and legend: legend may be defined as a rumour that has become ‘part of the verbal heritage of a people.” On the other hand, the preservation of a tradition depends on the repeated reuse of words within a social group, whether in new instances of production, written or spoken, or of consumption on the part of audiences or readers, with the consequent possibility of the alteration of the material substance of the words of the tradition or text,

and the certainty of the shifting reception of the same. As (just) verbal constructs, traditions are also contestable at the level of their truth-content,

open to challenge from other orders of words. fama‘a report’ may accurately preserve facta ‘deeds’, or it may be no more than a fabula ‘fictional tale’. fama may be the clear expression of realities, or the cloudy distortion of the truth, or even a report or opinion completely detached from reality. The link between fama and opinion is more immediate in Greek than in Latin, since one of the chief words in Greek for fame or reputation is 86a, which often means ‘opinion’ as opposed to “truth!” The Renaissance personification of Opinion is closely related to Fame.'' Locutions of the kind ut fama est ‘as report, tradition has it’, ut perhibentas they relate’, fertur ‘it is said’, the so-called ‘Alexandrian footnote’, are notoriously self-conscious of their equivocation between being a claim to the (very possibly unreliable) authority of previous tradition, and a licence for the poet to invent his own

‘tradition’."”

II

Words, and the opinions that they convey, circulate and solidify among large and unaccountable groups of people: fama can mean ‘public opinion’ (opinio, existimatio), which in an aristocratic or oligarchic society may be belittled as worthless and fickle. At the same time the applause and praise, laus, of the many is sought as proof of the successful individual's standing and worth (based on substantial and praiseworthy achievements), Mullen

1972: 96—7; Allport and Postman

19-17: 162 on legend as ‘solidified rumour’; 163 n. 2 in

Chinese chuan = both ‘rumour’ and ‘legend’; Gambetta 1994: 211 (citing Stanislav Lec) ‘myth is gossip grown old. See also Spacks 1986: 77 ‘The analogy between published letters and gossip may remind us of gossip’s value as an agent of preservation, even of glorification

(turning lives into stories declares their importance) as well as of reification.’ Dio Chrysostom’s three orations Tlepi 8ó&ns (66-8) address both ‘reputation’ and ‘opinion’;

the sixty-seventh starts with a philosophical distinction between 56€a and GAn@e1a and proceeds to the philosopher’s rejection of popular opinion in the form of honour and dishonour, praise and blame. !! See Ure 1951. On Virgil’s use of these locutions see Horsfall 1991: Ch. 8 ‘E stato detto’; on the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ in general see Hinds 1998: 1-5; Clément-Tarantino 2006: Part 1 ‘La Muse et le on-dit, a massive study of ut fama est and similar locutions.

The duplicities of fama

the ‘fame’ that is experienced as a solid and hopefully lasting possession, fama in the sense close to honos ‘honour’ or gloria 'glory ^ (TLL s.v. fama 111.B.i). This is also a double bind that traps the élite poet, dismissive of all but a fit and few readers, but greedy for the fame bestowed by a mass readership."" Pascal anatomizes the contradiction in the human desire for glory: ‘Those who most despise men and put them on a level with the beasts, still wish to be admired and believed by them, and contradict them-

selves through their own feelings, since their nature, which is stronger than anything, convinces them of the greatness of mankind more strongly than their reason convinces them of its lowliness.'"" A good or bad reputation (fama as either ‘fame’ or ‘infamy’) is felt as an important item of personal property,'^ J or even as a core part of an individual's identity.'’ The opinion of the crowd is conveyed largely through the oral use of words,

and

through

other

transient

forms

of expression,

but the great

man hopes for the immortalization of fame in more permanent media, not least written memorials. Etymologically fama means the spoken word, but the written (and later printed) word is no less important a vehicle for fama. The instabilities and tensions within the various manifestations of fama thus produce a constant tendency to self-division. Fama, it might be said, speaks with a forked tongue. In what is perhaps the earliest theorization of fama in Hesiod's Works and Days we find an implicit duality (good and bad, useful and detrimental reports) that is reflected in the structural

3

On gloria see Lida de Malkiel 1968; Drexler 1962; Hellegouarc'h Leeman

M

!5

19-19; Mazzoli 2004; Thomas 2002; Vermeulen

1972: 369-83; Joukovsky

1969;

1956.

See below p. 31 on Hor. Ep. 1.20; Gunn 1995: 37 (talking of France in the 1630s) ‘The literary man's familiar paradox that he was at once contemptuous of the public's taste and eager for readers.’ For Gunn this is relevant for contemporary politics also, and for the king’s dependence on the opinion of the masses, ‘the voices off-stage’. Sellier 1991: 504, no. 707.

On a ‘good name’ as symbolic property (with reference to Bourdieu) see Rigney 1994: 55. TLL 111.4, fama often conjoined with words relating to an individual's biological or social identity and security, res, patrimonium, caput, salus. Lendon 2001: 272-9 articulates ‘The Latin

and Greek Lexicon of Honour’ (a field with significant overlap with the semantic field of fama) according to denotations of (1) the possession or accomplishment of honour, and (ii) the processes or sources of honour. Tacitean examples of fama and uita closely conjoined: Tac. Hist. 1.42.3 huc potius eius uita famaque inclinat, ut conscius sceleris fuerit cuius causa erat; 3.28; 4.7.1; Ann. 6.51.3 egregium uita famaque quoad priuatus uel in imperiis sub Augusto fuif; 15.50.3. In other contexts fama and ipse ‘oneself are opposed: Livy 28.24.1 Scipio ipse graui morbo implicitus, grauiore tamen fama cum ad id quisque quod audierat insita hominibus libidine alendi de industria rumores adiceret aliquid; Tac. Ann. 6.44 Tiridates simul fama atque

ipso Artabano perculsus. On Morpheus' ironic contrast between uagi rumores and ipse at Ov. Met. 11.666-8 see Hardie 20024: 238, 278. For Shakespearean identifications of honour or reputation and self see Ch. 3 n. 24.

Introduction

correspondence in the poem between the personifications of Pheme and of the two Erides 'Strifes, one good and one bad, which open the main body of the Hesiodic text (see Ch. 2 pp. 54-7). At a much later stage in the tradition, Erasmus begins his treatise on the abuses of the tongue, Lingua,

with a moral dichotomy, the power of speech to produce both great benefit and great harm." The fact that Fame is caught up in the agonistic culture typical particularly of ancient Greece may have contributed to the pervasive tendency in the classical tradition (and it is perhaps a universal tendency) for fama to operate between the poles of a Pythagorean table of opposites. I here tabulate what seem to me to be the major duplicities and dichotomies that characterize the structures and dynamics of fama: * Fame versus blame. The opposition of praise and slander is deeply rooted in ancient culture, as is also the related opposition of glory or fame and envy. The values of the Homeric world (as of later periods) also point to the opposition of: * Fame versus shame. Accordingly the fear of shame is a powerful stimulus to the preservation of a good name. * Fixity versus flux. Words attempt to give shape to the flux of reality, and literary traditions in particular attempt to memorialize transient events, real or fictitious, in fixed texts. But the word is notoriously winged and evasive. This opposition also operates at the level of the reception of fixed orders of words: an author may ensure the accuracy of publication, but cannot predetermine the reception thereafter of his text. Other ways of formulating this dichotomy are: 9 Order versus chaos, sometimes with cosmological and cosmogonic overtones, even outside the Biblical traditions concerning the Word of

=

See Fantham

Ss

God, Logos: the stormy opening of the Aeneid reflects the poet's attempt to construct his own order of words in the face of the threat of chaos (see Ch. 2 pp. 70-3). © Atlantean versus protean, immutable versus mutable. This is implied in the role of Atlas in the Virgilian Fama scene (see Ch. 3 p. 94).!”

For the Atlantean/protean contrast see Hardie 1999, Drexel 163.1 reaches for the image of Proteus in his catalogue of vices of the tongue (Ad lectorem): Vitiosam linguam instar Protei innumeras sibi formas aptare. In the Roman historians fama-as-rumour and fama-as-report can be multiplex (Livy 5.18.9; cf. 4.5.6 ferte sermonibus et multiplicate fama bella) and uaria (Livy 25.17.4 funeris quoque Gracchi uarta est fama; Tac. Ann. 14.20.1 uaria fama, ut cuncta ferme noua; 1.4.2 pars multo maxima imminentis dominos uariis rumoribus differebant, 3.19.2 Germanici morte... uario rumore iactata; 11.23.1 multus ea super re uariusque rumor). Fulke Greville identifies another protean aspect of fama in An Inquisition upon Fame, and Honor

1989; van Houdt

1999; Parker 1989: 446.

The duplicities of fama

Fate versus fama. The shared derivation of Latin fama and fatum from fari points to an opposition between, on the one hand, an ideal fit between authoritative words and events unfolding in obedience to those words,

and, on the other the unpredictability and indefinite proliferation of words, which may either distort the record of past events or stimulate the diversion of future events from a (verbally) preordained course. In the

Latin epic tradition this opposition is classically presented in the Virgilian conflict between the word of Jupiter and the word of Juno. In so far as Juno

draws on the powers of the underworld, this is also an opposition of: 9» Heaven versus hell. Virgil's Fama is a chthonic, hellish monster. Christian texts stage a more consistent opposition between divine and devilish uses of the word (see Chs. 11, 13 pp. 525-6). Male versus female words. The Jupiter v. Juno opposition is also an instance of a gendered opposition of wide currency. Men speak to the point in accordance with reason; women’s speech is uncontrolled and expressive of emotion. Men speak the truth; old wives’ tales are for women (see Ch. 10 p. 387).

One versus many. The Virgilian Jupiter v. Juno opposition is furthermore a political opposition between the supreme ruler and his (many) subjects. Fate is the authoritative word of the Father, of the King, but is constantly threatened by the mutterings of the many-headed beast." The hero, the king, the poet all strive to assert their own unique, individual fame, which, however, is always dependent for its propagation on the multiple tongues of the crowd, whose obedience cannot be guaranteed; so this may also be phrased as: Individual (or the few) versus collective.

In psychological terms, crucial for the dynamics of the love of fame, where desire for the applause and approbation of others is at the same time a form of narcissism (see Ch. 9), this is also a dichotomy of

53-5 (a passage starting with reference to the Virgilian Fama, ‘if Fame a monster be, | As Virgil doth describe her’), on the monstrous birth of Fame

from ‘peoples lust’; 54 ‘For what indeed

more monstrouse, or more base, | Than these Chimeras of distempered mindes, | Born of opinion, not of vertues race...” 55‘... As Polypus with stones, so they with praise, | Change

colours, and like Proteus their forme, | Followinge the peoples lust, who, like their cloths, | Still shifte conceit of truth and goodnesse both.’ The many-headed beast is a famous Platonic image for the disorderly desiring part of the tripartite soul, Rep. 588c (TroAUKképaAov 8npíov), and later commonly used as a political image: early surviving examples are Ariston (probably of Chios) (Gnomologium Vaticanum Sternbach no. 121) rroAukéQaAov Onpiov erre rrávra öninov; Hor. Ep. 1.1.76 (see below p. 30). The many-headed beast's many voices make it a monster of fama; for Shakespearean examples see Ch. 13 p. 511.

Introduction

* Self versus other.

In terms of class this is a dichotomy between the © Elite and the many. This leads to the opposition of: * fama-as-fame versus fama-as-rumour or -gossip. The former is focussed on the pre-eminent individual who is the recipient of fame, the latter on the nameless multitude who endlessly circulate words; the dichotomy tends to overlap with the fame v. blame dichotomy. Some genres place this opposition at their heart: e.g. Latin love elegy (see Ch. 9 pp. 361-71), and Martial's epigrams (see Ch. 8 pp. 321-9). In terms of the content of what is said, this also maps on to an © Official versus unofficial knowledge dichotomy. Authority versus unreliability and uncertainty. The word makes claims to authority, but, short of the guarantee of a transcendental source of

the word (as in the Christian belief of a divinely originated Logos), that authority is always open to question. The difficulty of locating a sure criterion for the authoritativeness of a source is central to Maurizio Bettini's argument that, although the root of ‘fari represents a way of speaking that far surpasses other normal utterances in terms of its authority, efficacy, and credibility, nevertheless 'fari also, rather paradoxically, always risks losing its trustworthiness and credibility’. For Bettini

this is because the ultimate and authoritative source for the utterance is transmitted through a less reliable vehicle. The god’s prophet may be a charlatan.*- The fact that rumour is shared and public lends it authenticity, but the absence of a source, in the form of an individual who can

personally assume responsibility, discredits rumour.” An example in the literary sphere of authority flipping into uncertainty is the tradition of the poetic ‘Alexandrian footnote’, expressions of the type ut fama est (see above p. 4)."' Fact versus fiction. Tradition, fama, is the authority for what happened in the past, but traditions are notoriously liable to invention. fama may represent the claim of words faithfully to record the past, but equally it stands for the power of words to create a world that has no extratextual reality. This results in a shifting relationship in Latin between the alliterating pair of:

?! Bettini 2008: 314. 3 ^^

?? Bettini 2008: 361-3.

Bettini 2008: 355; see also 363-8 ‘The ambiguities of fabula* Discussed at length by Clément-Tarantino 2006: 560-88.

The duplicities of fama

factaand fama. Because famais such a volatile, windy, fickle thing, there is an urgent need to match fama to reality, facta dictis exaequare, in Sallust’s words (Catil. 3.2). The ideal may be exemplified from the words of Jupiter to his son Hercules, that most famous man

of action (and at the same

time the locus of fabulous fictions)," at Aen. 10.468—9 sed famam

extendere

factis;^ | hoc uirtutis opus ‘but to extend the reach of one’s fame through deeds, that is the job of virtue' (echoing another father's words to his son at 6.806 (Anchises to Aeneas) et dubitamus adhuc uirtutem extendere

factis 'And do we still hesitate to extend the reach of virtue through deeds?")."" Here Fama's inherent expansiveness will be coextensive with actual deeds. At a closural moment Horace asserts the equivalence of word and actuality with reference to Augustus' refoundation of Roman power: Odes 4.15.12-16

ueteres reuocauit artes,

| per quas Latinum

nomen

et

Italae | creuere uires, famaque et imperi | porrecta maiestas ad ortus | solis ab Hesperio cubili ‘he called back the ancient arts by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy grew great, and by which the fame and majesty of empire was extended to the rising of the sun from his bed in the west.’ ‘Name’ and ‘power’ grow together, the ‘greatness’ of empire reaches to the ends of the earth together with fama."" The Tacitean Tiberius attempts to weld fama to facta in his request to the Romans that (Ann. 4.38.3) 'they may attend my actions and the reputation of my name with praise and benign recollections' (cum laude et bonis recordationibus facta atque famam nominis mei prosequantur); the historian ensures that he will not succeed (see Ch. 8 pp. 303-5).”

In a Renaissance mythological treatise, Coluccio Salutati's De laboribus Herculis, Hercules, whose name is etymologized ‘ab eris, cleos, id est litis gloria, is the emblem

of the symbiotic

relationship of virtue and glory, essence and name: see Ascoli 1987: 63-8. famam extendere factis is a much quoted and imitated tag: for Pliny's use of it in Ep. 5.8 see Ch. 8 p. 319. Cf. Aen. 9.194-5 nam mihi facti | fama sat est. The pairing of fama and uires (uis) is more usually disjunctive, e.g. Livy 33.8.5 fama stetisse, non uiribus Macedoniae regnum; Tac. Hist. 3.1.2 Germanicarum legionum uim famamque extollebant, 2.83.1 Mucianus. . . gliscere famam ipso spatio sinebat, gnarus modicas uiris sibi et maiora credi de absentibus; 5.1.1 maiore tum ui famaque agebat; Ann. 6.30.4 reputante Tiberio... magisque fama quam ui stare res suas, 13.19.1 nihil rerum tam instabile ac fluxum est quam fama potentiae non sua ui nixae. fama and res is another pair that can be used to express a greater or lesser fit between words and reality. Some examples from the historians: Livy 10.33.8 quarum rerum fama, tumultuosior etiam quam res erant (cf. 25.30.12); 21.29.7 Alpesque, rem fama utique inexpertis horrendam, 22.30.7 ut est perlata fama rei gestae (cf. 26.3.10); 21.53.8 ingenium, fama prius, deinde re cognitum; 25.38.8 uiuunt uigentque fama rerum gestarum; 37.58.7 erant qui fama id maius bellum quam difficultate rei fuisse interpretarentur, Tac. Hist. 3.8.1 coloniam copiis ualidam auferre Vitellio in rem famamque uidebatur.

Introduction

Immediacy versus indirectness, seeing versus hearing. Words are just representations of things that happen elsewhere, but words have the power of enargeia to bring things and events, real or fictitious, vividly before the eyes of the mind. Ovid in particular delights in the resultant paradoxes."" Life versus death. Glory confers a kind of immortality." Literary traditions attempt to immortalize, to create the illusion of continued life, even of physical presence, but they speak from the grave. By a common con-

vention literary underworlds are the repositories of fame and tradition." This opposition relates to the paradoxes of desire and fame (see p. 7 above). The opposition of life and death is further related to: Presence versus absence. fama is a powerful generator of absent presences."* Fullness versus emptiness. Rumours

‘fill’ cities, words ‘fill’ ears," but

fame is nothing but thin air, honour is but a word. The ambitious man

measures success by the fulfilment of his (desire for) fame, but glory is vain. Ovid contrasts the ashes of Achilles, nescioquid, paruam quod non bene compleat urnam ‘something that would not fill a small urn to the top’, with the continuing life of a glory that fills the whole world, at uiuit totum quae gloria compleat orbem (Met. 12.616-17).** Abraham Cowley exposes the hollowness of such boasts: ‘Life and fame’ 18-21 ‘Some... by the Proofs of death pretend to Live. | Here lies the Great — False Marble, where? | Nothing but small and sordid Dust lies there'; and, speaking of Caesar, (32-9) 'He since that Toy his Death, | Does fill all Mouths, and

breathes in all mens Breath. | 'Tis true, the two Immortal Syllables remain, | But, Oh ye learned men, explain, | What Essence, what Existence this, | What Substance, what Subsistence, what Hypostasis | In Six poor Letters

is? | In those alone does the Great Casar live.' In the world of the living fama can be almost consubstantial with caput as one's civic and social personality (see above p. 5);^ one relative, and near homonym, of Fama is Fames 'Hunger' (see Ch. 5 pp. 172-3). Active versus passive. One final, but important, opposition is that between the passive function of fama, coming after events to report and For Ovidian examples of the power of f/Fama to conjure up visions see Hardie 20022: 236-8, 311-14. See also Laird 1999: 237-8, on the working of Fama at Petron. Sat. 123.210—16. Hellegouarc'h 1972: 377-80. See Most

1992; Hardie 1993a: 60—5; 2004. In Book 8 of Basinio da Parma's mid-fifteenth

century epic Hesperis the hero, Sigismondo Malatesta, visits a Temple of Fama which is also the entrance to the underworld. See Hardie 20022: index s.v. fama. we e

10

9

See Joukovsky

1969: Section II, Ch.

1 'L'expansion*

See Hardie 20023: 85-6. Although in Roman law infamia stops short of deminutio capitis. see Greenidge 1894: Ch. 1.

Fama and the self

record, and its active function in arousing emotions and stimulating to action.” This is true of fama-as-fame as well as of fama-as-rumour, -asreport or -as-news. Again this is an unsurprising reflection of the fact that words are present in all areas of human life. One particular consequence of the active/passive dichotomy is to ease fama’s ability to cross the boundary between texts and the extratextual world. There is no single term in general use to designate the field that is the subject of this book. The term ‘talk studies’ has been coined to denote what has been identified as an emerging branch of scholarship,** and it usefully covers much of the same terrain as that which comes under the umbrella of the Latin word fama. But it seems not (yet at least) to enjoy wide currency, and for my purposes it has the disadvantage that it places undue emphasis on the oral uses of the word. The study of fama however overlaps with a number of other fields and topics which have become well-defined areas of research, and any investigation of the messier structures and dynamics of fama needs to draw on the insights of these more circumscribed fields within anthropology, sociology, cultural psychology, politics, law and literary scholarship: the study of honour and shame; of reputation and opinion; of rumour and gossip; of envy and calumny; of defamation and libel; of fiction and fictionality. In the following sections I touch fleetingly on some of these areas, each of which has an extensive literature of its own.

fama and the self The contrastive structuring of fama is mirrored in the shape taken by studies on related concepts. Honour, both in the sense of a person’s good standing in a society of equals, corresponding to fama as ‘(good) reputation’ and in the sense of a singular esteem that is the reward for outstanding achievements, fama as ‘fame’,”” is the product of a relation between the individual and the

?? See esp. Gibson 1998, On the contrast between a view of rumours as ex post facto comment on events, and as a causal factor in the development of sedition, in Francis Bacon's musings on

seditious libel see Dzelzainis 2006. Fenster and Smail 2003: 8.

3

See Stewart 1994: ch. 4. This distinction can be formulated as one between horizontal honour

v»

3

(the honour that pertains between equals, good reputation, in Latin existimatio based on

unimpaired dignitas) and vertical honour (honour due to those recognized as superior, the usual domain of Latin honor); an important type of vertical honour is competitive honour, the fame acquired by great achievements (the ‘horizontal’/‘vertical’ distinction is taken from

Introduction

group of which he or she is a part." Anthropologists have mostly concerned themselves with the first kind of honour, personal honour. According to an influential formulation by J. Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honour is the value of a person in

his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society. It is his estimation of his own worth, his claim to pride, but it is also the acknowledgement of that claim,

his excellence recognised by society, his rightto pride.’*' A ‘bipartite theory’ of honour is common in anthropological, historical and literary accounts of honour, with a distinction between inward honour, or honourableness, and outward honour, or reputation (for honourableness)." Historical accounts

of honour are often concerned to calibrate the balance between the internal and external weighting of honour in a particular culture, or to trace a development from an emphasis on one aspect to the other, usually in the form of a movement from an external reputation or prestige to an internalized sense of honour based on a consciousness of a virtuous inner disposition (see further below).** In what is often referred to as an honour/shame model or code, the positive experience of honour is regulated by the negative fear of shame, the individual's sense of the disapprobation of others." This complementary pairing of positive and negative aspects is matched by the pair of good and bad fama, or fama and infamia. Linguistic accident rhymes ‘shame’ with

o

4

Correa 1958). Stewart 199-1 also refers to the analogous dichotomy between ‘negative’ honour (a ‘good name, which can only be lost) and ‘positive’ honour (‘glory’ to be won), used by Barber 1957 and 1985. A seminal account of Roman gloria starts out by making a similar point about the relational nature of this extreme form of honour: Knoche 1967: 420 ‘gloria kann es... nur dort geben, wo zwei Faktoren vorhanden sind: ein Anerkannter und ein Anerkennendes.' Knoche's relational definition of gloria is criticized by Philipp 1955, who favours an existential model of

=

gloria, inseparable from

uirtus, and detachable from rumores.

Pitt-Rivers 1966: 22. The relationship between self and other is already succinctly expressed by Aristotle: EN 1159a23-5 ‘Those who want honour from decent people with knowledge are seeking to confirm their own view of themselves, and so they are pleased because the judgment of those who say they are good makes them confident that they are good’ (trans. T. Irwin). Pascal’s cynical eye places all the emphasis on just one side, Sellier 1991: 504 (on the desire for reputation) ‘la plus grande marque de son [l'homme] excellence; car, quelque possession qu’il ait sur la terre. . . il n'est pas satisfait s'il n'est dans l'estime des hommes. In another formulation Pascal describes glory as a kind of hybrid existence, projecting one's self into the selves of others, Sellier 1991: 447 ‘Nous voulons vivre dans l'idée des autres d'une vie

w

42

43 ES =

12

imaginaire. See Stewart 199.4: 18-19, with a far-reaching critique of the bipartite theory which yet does not seek to abolish the underlying duality in the concept of honour. Stewart’s book is commendable for its inclusion of anthropological, historical, literary and juristic treatments of honour. For some examples see Stewart 199.1: Ch. 3. Anthropological and historical studies of honour invariably talk in terms ofan honour/shame system: e.g. Peristiany 1966; Herzfeld 1980; Cairns 1993. On shame as a regulatory emotion in Roman culture see Kaster 2005: Chs. | and 2.

Fama and the self

‘fame’, and the close conceptual link between the two is responsible for many instances of the rhyme in English poetry. In discussions of shame the tension between internal and external has tended to focus on a distinction between shame, viewed as an external sanction, how others view

or talk about one’s behaviour, and guilt, viewed as an internally generated control on behaviour, one’s inner conscience. Recent discussions of shame, with particular reference to ancient Greek culture, have demonstrated that the internalization of what others think of oneself makes impossible any simple distinction between external and internal: the dichotomy of shame (as something determined by the external view) and guilt (as something generated within the individual's self) is untenable." Honour and shame are complementary sites where the intense scrutiny, visual or verbal, of the outside world intersects with, or helps to produce, the individual’s keenest

sense of himself or herself. But despite the inseparability of internal and external in the structures of honour, the existence of these two, analytically separable, moments offers scope for reflection and critique, through the awareness that what may be felt as an intensely personal emotional and psychological value is nothing more than the valuation of others. Internal and external may be separated, for example through a sharp division between virtue and honour.'“ In asociety that places great importance on honour, the individual’s sense of his or her honour as good name may be the focus of intense desire (and something for which a man is prepared to fight, even to the death). This is equally true in the case of fame, the public recognition of high honour: the desire for fame (amor, cupiditas famae/gloriae) may become acutely narcissistic,’ as the man (usually it is a man) hungry for fame contemplates himself in the mirror of the gaze of society, both during his lifetime and prospectively in posterity. The desire for fame is generated out of the self, and is a classic example of the Lacanian Desire of the Other, which is the wish to be recognized by the other, to be the desire of the other. Realization that the desire for fame is self-directed raises the paradox of a desire for the maximization of self-esteem through an undying future fame that cannot be of any concern to the dead individual himself, if one holds that the dead

are without sensation. This inconcinnity is reflected in Cicero's equivocation in Tusculans 1 between two views of the motivation for the pursuit of

45 46

E.g. Cairns 1993: 14-26 ‘Shame and guilt’; 27-47 'Shame-culture and guilt-culture’; Williams 1993: Ch. 4 ‘Shame and autonomy’. See McKendrick 1984: 313 on ‘the honour = virtue versus honour = reputation debate.

?7 See Ch. 9 p. 336.

13

14

Introduction

immortal glory. Early in the book (1.32—5) the argument is offered for the likelihood of the immortality of the soul that great men would not strive for the immortality of glory did they not have a presentiment that an awareness of their glory would survive death. Later in the book Cicero allows that the soul may be mortal, and he removes the illogicality of desiring something that one cannot experience by shifting ground and claiming that the desire is not for gloria, but for uirtus, which is its own reward and sufficient unto itself, but which glory attends as its inevitable shadow (on this proverbial cliché see below p. 25), Tusc. 1.109: But assuredly death is met with most equanimity when the failing life can console itself with the praise it has won. No-one has lived too short a life who has discharged the perfect work of a perfected virtue... And so if logic on its own fails to make us able to despise death, nevertheless a life completed would make it seem that we had lived sufficiently and more. For although we will have no sensation, yet the dead are not without (carent) the personal possession of the goods (suis et propriis bonis) of praise and glory, even though they feel nothing. For even if there is nothing in glory itself that we should seek, yet it follows virtue as its shadow (uirtutem tamquam umbra sequitur).

Cicero is pulled between, on the one hand, a wish to say that a life of virtue is complete in itself, and that the prospect of this is enough to satisfy mortal desires, and, on the other hand, an inability to abandon totally an insatiable desire for something more in the future, after death, that more

being ‘praise and glory. That tension is seen in the words suis et propriis, for properly speaking the insensate dead can have nothing that is ‘their own property. That reluctance to abjure the desire for fame is also sensed in the equivocation between the two meanings of careo, ‘to be without’ and ‘to feel the want of (something desirable)’. Cicero’s contorted language reveals the final impossibility of detaching fame or glory, as something located outside the individual, from the individual's own desire for fame.

Fame, name and self in Shakespeare's Coriolanus? Il y

ale nom et la chose. Montaigne, Essais 2.16 'De la gloire

To exemplify further some of the points made about fama in its relationship to the self I take a closer look at one Renaissance text, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a powerful statement about the dissatisfactions of fame and the 48 Shakespeare is cited from Shakespeare 2007.

Fama and the self

vacuity of a name that is dependent for its validation on a social group despised by the holder of fame. The play exposes the tensions that arise between fame as the individual’s sense of his own worth and identity, and fame as the product of the individual’s relationship with his society." The first scene of the play sets the stage for the drama of fame and honour that is to follow, with the entrance of a crowd of mutinous citizens. The first words are (FIRST CITIZEN)

'Before

we proceed any further, hear me speak.' Interrupting, and determining, the citizens' further actions, come words, and words about Caius Martius (Coriolanus) and his actions." The First Citizen (20-1) ‘could be content

to give him good report for [his services to his country], but that he pays himself with being proud.' The exchange system whereby the community gives fame in return for deeds performed on its behalf is short-circuited when the great man pays himself out of the coin of his own pride. In his next sentence the First Citizen criticizes Martius for a purely self-centred attitude to fame: ‘what he hath done famously, he did it to that end’, but

then complicates his motivation: ‘he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud, which he is, even to the altitude of his virtue”. Leaving aside, for the moment, his mother, the reference to (martial) virtue points to the

common pairing of fame and virtue: his pride is in a fame rooted in his own essential qualities. Martius has a very strong sense of his own identity, and of the need to be true to that identity, which emerges in his initial refusal to appease the tribunes in his candidacy for the consulship: 111.11.15-17 “Would you have me | False to my nature? Rather say I play | The man I am.’ With reluctance he is persuaded by his mother Volumnia to address the people (111.1.66—70) *No[t] by th'matter | Which your heart prompts you, but with

such words | That are but roted in your tongue, though | Bastards and syllables of no allowance | To your bosom's truth.' As Coriolanus himself puts it, (111.11.118-19) “Must I with my base tongue give to my noble heart | A lie that it must bear?' It is tongues, in great numbers, that cause the problem: Coriolanus has nothing but contempt for the tongues of the ‘many-headed multitude’ (11.iii.10-11), on whom he is dependent both for the praise of his famous deeds in battle, and for the votes in the election for consulship."!

c

19 Fora treatment of the play from this point of view see Rabkin 1966, focussing on the contrasting meanings of honour for Cominius and the army (something conferred by society, a good name and reputation) and for Coriolanus (the deed as its own reward: ‘honor is a quality of action, not of action's effects"). 5 On the opposition between words and deeds in the play see Dean 1955. 5

The crowd, from Coriolanus’ point of view, embodies fickle Opinion, rather than stable Fame:

on the crowd as Opinion see Rosen 1960: 167-71.

16

Introduction

As the (nameless and only numbered) Third Citizen puts it, (11.111.29-30)

‘every one of us has a single honour in giving him our own voices [i.e. votes] with our own tongues’. Coriolanus rhetorically multiplies those voices in an indistinguishable (and undistinguished) heap when he wearily bows to necessity, 101-7: Here come more voices. Your voices! For your voices I have fought, Watched for your voices; for your voices bear Of wounds two dozen odd: battles thrice six I have seen and heard of; for your voices have Done many things, some less, some more: your voices! Indeed, I would be consul.

But there is another kind of tongue that speaks more directly of Coriolanus’ fame, because these are tongues created directly by the deeds of which they speak, rr.iii.1—6: FIRST CITIZEN Once, if he do require our voices, we ought not to deny him. SECOND CITIZEN We may, sir, if we will. THIRD CITIZEN We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do: for if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put

our tongues into those wounds and speak for them: so, if he tell us his noble deeds, we must also tell him our noble acceptance of them.

The people are forced to ventriloquize (or should that be cicatricoloquize?) through the ‘mouths’ carved on to the body of Coriolanus himself.** Earlier Martius had referred to his wounds in expressing his disgust at the fame and honours offered him for his deeds in battle at Corioles, 1.1x.28-32: COMINIUS

Therefore, I beseech you

In sign of what you are, not to reward What you have done, before our army hear me. MARTIUS

I have some wounds upon me, and they smart

To hear themselves remembered. 3; Shakespeare alludes to the ancient Roman display of wounds as direct proof of martial valour, fame inscribed on the body: see Leigh 1997: 221-33. Cf. also Coriol. 11.1.106-7 (VOLUMNIA) ‘There will be large cicatrices to show the people, when he shall stand for his place’; 129 (MENENIUS) ‘Every gash was an enemy's grave.’ The conceit of wounds as mouths which can speak, or which need tongues to give them voice, is a Shakespearean favourite: see Ch. 13 n. 49.

Coriolanus contrasts the real deeds commemorated in his scars with the insubstantial voices of the people at Coriol. 11.11.144-6 (CORIOLANUS) ‘Show them th’unaching scars which I should hide, | As if I had received them for the hire | Of their breath only!’

Fama and the self

The wounds are the real thing, a part of what Martius physically ‘is, after the battle. Wounds can function as ears, as well as mouths, both of which

kinds of orifice are to be found on the body of the Virgilian Fama. In the above I have used two names to refer to one individual, Martius and Coriolanus. Act 1 scene ix is the scene in which the latter name is added to the former, 67—70 (Cominius): and from this time, For what he did before Corioles, call him, With all th'applause and clamour of the host, Martius Caius Coriolanus. Bear th’addition nobly ever! ‘Addition’ is standard for a style of address (OED s.v. 4), a ‘handle’, but it

also marks the cognomen (one of the most signal marks of fama in Roman society: see Ch. 7 pp. 249, 251) as something extraneous to the man himself. It is bestowed by the group consisting of the army, the ‘host’, and confirmed by the still larger group of the people of Rome on Coriolanus' return from war, 11.1.117—22: HERALD Know, Rome, that all alone Martius did fight Within Corioles' gates: where he hath won, With fame, a name to ‘Martius Caius’: These in honour follows ‘Coriolanus’. Welcome to Rome, renowned Coriolanus! ALL Welcome to Rome, renownéd Coriolanus!

But near the end of the play Volumnia bitterly complains that the ‘addition’ has become a part of her son's solipsistic pride, closed off even from the group closest to him, his nuclear family, v.iii.181—2 ‘To his surname “Coriolanus” longs more pride | Than pity to our prayers.’”' Earlier the exiled Coriolanus, ‘whooped out of Rome’, and shorn of his civic existence, tells his old enemy Aufidius that (1v.v.64-9) ‘The painful service, | The extreme

dangers, and the drops of blood | Shed | But with that surname... only that little is stripped away, in Cominius' Coriolanus: v.i.12-16 "Coriolanus" cc

for my thankless country are requited name remains.’ A little later even that report of his attempt to plead with | He would not answer to: forbad all

names: | He was a kind of nothing, titleless, | Till he had forged himself a

name o'th'fire | Of burning Rome.’ Without names there is no identity. 5 54

Coriolanus' real tongue has a direct connection with the inner man, according to Menenius: 111.1.302-3 ‘His heart's his mouth: | What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent.” She also hints at what she makes explicit a few lines later, that he has gone over to the enemy,

has become a citizen of Corioles, as his surname indicates.

17

18

Introduction

There are other problems with Coriolanus’ sense of himself and of his identity, not least in the narcissistic quality of his love of fame," perhaps to be connected with an infantilist attachment to his mother, for whom a displaced love of honour is more enjoyable than sexual satisfaction, r.i11.1—11: VOLUMNIA I pray you, daughter, sing; or express yourself sort: if my son were my husband, I should freelier wherein he won honour than in the embracements of show most love. When yet he was but tender-bodied

in a more comfortable rejoice in that absence his bed where he would and the only son of my

womb, when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way, when for a day of kings' entreaties a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding, 1, considering how honour would become such a person, that it was no better than picture-like, to hang by th' wall if renown made it not stir, was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame.

In the heat of the battle at Corioles Martius has a vivid image of himselfas an action-picture, as he asks for volunteers to join him in the attack: 1.vi.80—3

‘If any such be here. . . that love this painting | Wherein you see me smeared, if any fear | Lesser his person than an ill report...’ The juxtaposition of the two conditional clauses suggests that the ‘painting’ of blood is a first sketch of Martius’ fame (the opposite of ‘ill report’), which will find a more lasting representation in the wounds from which the blood issues (and finally the scars into which the wounds will heal)."^ 56 As he presents his bodily image to his soldiers, Martius contemplates the picture of himself, lovingly. Coriolanus' psychopathology is extreme, if not indeed abnormal, but it responds to structural tensions in the nature and experience of fame that are widespread, and perhaps universal. D. J. Gordon skilfully anatomizes these structural tensions, and also locates the play in the context of a wider Shakespearean, and Renaissance, critique of honour, in which

Coriolanus

is to be grouped with Troilus and Cressida and Henry the Fourth Part 1 (on which see Ch. 13).°’ Two of these three plays are on classical subjects, and one may surmise that Shakespeare found classical antiquity congenial ground on which to conduct an analysis of fame and honour with very

55 See Mitchell 1965. 56 The painting image is used of fame at the end of the play (if Edwards' conjecture is accepted) by Menenius: v.ii.17—23 ‘I tell thee, fellow, | The general is my lover: I have been | The book of his good acts, whence men have read | His fame unparalleled, haply amplified: | For I have ever varnishéd [conj. Edwards, verified F] my friends, | Of whom he's chief, with all the size that verity | Would without lapsing suffer.’ 3! Gordon 1975: 205; see also Bliss 2000: 52-4.

Order and disorder

clear resonances for his own age." The title of the play Coriolanus is, as one would expect, the name of its eponymous hero, but as a triumphal cognomen the title very precisely encapsulates the play’s central themes of names and fame, with reference to a practice of Roman nomenclature that

is all about fame. Of the two classical plays Coriolanus is also based on an ancient text, North’s translation (via Amyot’s French) of Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus. However, it bears emphasizing that Plutarch does not develop

the themes of fame and honour as Shakespeare does.” It is Shakespeare who makes out of his classical model a complex and far-reaching 'plot of fame’ (for this notion see below pp. 36-43).

Order and disorder A contrast central to this book is that between order and disorder. The word is the source of both order and disorder, which may be no more than to say that words, what is said, are the inevitable accompaniment of most kinds

of human activity. However, in many of the areas into which fama enters may be discerned a characteristic tension between cohesive and disruptive effects of the production and circulation of words. In the field of honour the warrior or aristocrat acts to achieve honour or praise, an individualist striving which is dependent on recognition by the community. But a self-regarding and individualistic competitiveness is constantly in danger of running to excess, and so of upsetting the social equilibrium, sometimes with disastrous results. James Redfield's analysis of the workings of the heroic code of the Iliad shows how the hero's striving to win time ‘honour, esteem’ and, the verbal expression of esteem, kleos ‘fame’

may result in a hypertrophic individualism that works against the interests of the group that had sought to harness to its own purposes the superior strength and courage of the hero.” 60 The Athenian democracy found ways of accommodating and redefining élite piAoTipia ‘love of honour’ within its egalitarian structures." ol Roman historians saw in the contest for glory, the certamen gloriae, between members of the Republican élite both the motivation for the energetic action that led to the greatness of Rome, and

58

Bliss 2000: 33-40, on Essex and the aristocratic ‘honour culture’ of the Elizabethan period (see

also below p. 44). More generally, since Burckhardt the pursuit of fame and the cult of the individual have been thought of as markers of the Renaissance as a European phenomenon, developing through a renewed engagement with classical antiquity. 5? As noted by Gordon 1975: 204. 60 Redfield 1994. $! See Whitehead 1983,

20

Introduction

the disruptive potential that led to the collapse of the Republican structures

into civil war.’ Shame and blame are the negation of fame, but the fear of shame and blame affords, ideally, an internal self-regulatory mechanism within the psychology of the seeker after fame and glory. In his cultural-psychological study of Roman emotions Robert Kaster examines the ways in which feelings of shame, disgust and envy serve to reinforce the cultural norms of Roman society. pudor ‘(sense of) shame’ serves to check, in Kaster’s terms, both the discreditable ‘extension’ (or ‘expansion’) of the self, the desire to be too self-

assertive at the expense of the wider group, and the discreditable ‘retraction’ (or ‘contraction’) of the self, the inclination to be insufficiently active in a

way that will also attract the disapprobation of the group. These correspond to two different kinds of fama: in the first instance the good reputation that consists in not being talked about too much for the wrong reasons, in the second the being on the tongues of all that is the result of outstanding deeds (corresponding to ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ honour, or ‘horizontal’ and (vertically) ‘competitive’: see above p. 11). In the first instance pudor and fama may be virtually synonymous, for example Cicero on his decision to follow Pompey to civil war: Fam. 7.3.1 pudori tamen malui famaeque cedere quam salutis meae rationem ducere ‘| preferred to give way to my sense of shame and reputation rather than take thought for my safety.' fama as 'fame, glory' is inherently expansive, boundless in its ambition, but famaas-pudor is as often characterized more by an acute sense of the need for limits, particularly in the case of behaviour appropriate for a woman (on the gendering of fama see Ch. 9 pp. 357-62). It is when the balance between these different kinds of fama is unsettled that social cohesion is threatened, the individual's fama

self-destructs,

and

fame

turns

into blame.

Kaster

notes an example of this potential imbalance in one particular Roman, Cicero, ‘the tension between... Cicero's desire to commend

and embody

the pudor of decent restraint... and his contrasting, notorious penchant for self-praise. In Spenser's House of Alma, Arthur and Guyon, who embody two aspects of the ideal knight, take as their ladies respectively Prays-desire and Shamefastnesse (FQ 11.1x.36-43). Spenser draws on the tradition of the

education of the prince: these are two qualities that Thomas Elyot identifies 62 See Rosenstein 1990: Introduction ‘The problem of limits on aristocratic competition’. 63 The two kinds of fama may work together: see Kaster 2005: 47 on the ‘script’ of 'discreditable “retraction” of the self" as ‘spur[ring] the competition for glory, with 168 n. 72, including Ov. Fasti 3.65-6 (Romulus and Remus) ut genus audierunt, animos pater editus auget, | et pudet in

paucis nomen habere casis, Met. 9.31-2 puduit modo magna locutum | cedere.

Order and disorder

as ‘the most necessary things to be observed by a master in his disciples or scholars’: ‘By shamefastness, as it were with a bridle, they rule as well their deeds as their appetites. And desire of praise addeth too a sharp spur to their disposition toward learning and virtue’ (The Book Named the Governor 1.ix). The eroticism of the encounters between the two knights and their ladies reveals the narcissistic element in the self-regard that is the psychological motivation of both fama and pudor. Anticipating Kaster, Spenser here focuses on the psychology of fame and shame, in terms of the perceptions, evaluations and responses that are involved in the emotional ‘scripts. Tensions relating to order and disorder also characterize the workings of gossip and rumour. This emerges from a survey of the different anthropological and sociological approaches to gossip and rumour. Max Gluckman, one of the first to direct serious attention to the sociology of gossip, put forward a functionalist approach that claimed that the circulation of gossip maintains the unity, morals and values of social groups.“' R. Paine countered with an instrumental approach that sees in gossip purposive behaviour that furthers the self-interest of a group." Gossip may be viewed as communication that provides a pleasurable way of passing time between members of a mutually trusting group,“ or it may be seen as scandalous talk directed at those regarded as outsiders with intent to wound. Gossip may be a vehicle of expression both for those empowered in a society (for example directed at a marginal and demonized group), and for the disempowered (for example the mutterings of a people under an autocratic regime). Rumours may either unsettle by spreading undue alarm, or produce a settling effect by helping people to survive.^" The truth is that gossip and rumour can be all of these things, and this should cause no surprise in the case of what is perhaps the most protean of all categories of uses of the word. However, that differences arise as to the description and evaluation of gossip and rumour is itself a sign that these are uses of language that matter, that have political and ideological impacts, leading to a polarization of views on the

o=

O5

Gluckman 1963. Du Boulay 1974 emphasizes gossip’s role in enforcing conformity in the community of a Greek mountain village. Such work as has been undertaken on gossip in ancient Greece has tended to stress its function as social control: see Ch. 7 pp. 238-9.

S

ec

a v

> Paine 1967. For a recent account that stresses the purposeful instrumentality of gossip see Bergmann 1993, esp. Ch. 5 ‘Towards a theory of gossiping’. 6 See Gambetta 1994: 212-16. 6 On the role of gossip and rumour in expressing the wishes and resistance of subordinate groups see Scott 1990: 142-8. 6 So Stewart and Strathern 200.1: 30.

21

Introduction

matter. *? The marginalization of gossip and rumour, seen most strikingly in the gendering of gossip as a predominantly female activity, is itself the token of a wish on the part of those with power to relegate this uncontrolled use of language to the status of the politically insignificant, just women’s talk, old wives’ tales.”

Critiques of fama The unstable and protean nature of fama, and the fact that contro] of the word is an all-consuming interest of human beings living within social groups, lead to sharp debates about the value of fama in the sense of the word that is felt to relate most keenly to an individual’s sense of his or her identity and worth, fama-as-fame. This results in a series of dichotomizations between good and bad forms of fame, or between fame and an alternative

ES] 2

a »

source of value. These debates are further fuelled by the intensity of desire that is stimulated by fame (see Ch. 9), and in general one might compare the long history of attempts to distinguish between good and bad kinds of love. In the case of fama these debates come to constitute a kind of meta-fama, a competition to use words to impose a particular judgement on fame. The critique of fama, and the relationship of this critique to movements of spiritual interiorization, are most familiar from the Christian tradition, but in this Christianity treads in the path of ancient philosophy.’' The Stoics in particular drew distinctions; Zeno distinguished between just(ified) kleos and empty doxa; his pupil Ariston of Chios wrote UTouvnuata UTEP

Spacks 1986: 26-38 setting out negative and positive images of gossip; 260-2 summing up the dualities of gossip as both destructive and life-enhancing, both idle, speculative and formative. Note 262 ‘One explanation for gossip's two faces [my emphasis], and for its importance as literary subject, is its liminal position between public and private.' So Fenster and Smail 2003: 9-10, arguing that the professionalization of the social and legal functions of talk from the later Middle Ages onwards gave the new professionals a vested interest in talking down (!) the importance of less formal kinds of talk. On old wives’ tales see further Ch. 10 p. 387. On gossip in late medieval England see Phillips 2007, focussing on the

“I

22

interactions between gossip, pastoral practice and literary production. Boitani 1984: 31—9 'Pagan philosophy: For a survey of the treatment of glory (kleos) in Greek philosophy see Leeman 1949 (but subject to pan-Posidonian tendencies). On philosophical critiques of 56€a see Alexiou 1995: 26. Testimonia on Stoic views on 56€a: Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, vol. 111, pp. 24, 37-8. xevoßoßia is embedded in the historian Polybius’ value system, particularly with regard to generals who stumble through vainglory.

Critiques of fama

xevoSo€ias ‘Notes on kenodoxia’, an early document in the long tradition of attacks on uana gloria ‘vain glory’. Cicero, who has already put in more than one appearance in this chapter, is an important source for, and conduit to later centuries of, ancient philo-

sophical critiques of fame. The subject was no doubt of particular interest to a man who has become famous, or infamous, for his obsession with fame and glory;’* who, as Dryden puts it, ‘by his insatiable thirst for fame... has lessened his character with succeeding ages’.’”’ But that insatiability itself could be a provocation to self-reflection. This is Plutarch’s version, in his

Life of Cicero (6.4—5), of Cicero's disappointment on discovering that Rome had not been filled with the fame of his achievements as quaestor in Sicily: ‘At that time he was altogether disheartened, seeing that the story of his doings had sunk into the city as into a bottomless sea, without any visible effect upon his reputation (86€av); but afterwards he reasoned with himself and abated much of his ambition (piAotipias), convinced that the

fame (56§av) towards which he was emulously struggling was a thing that knew no bounds (&ópic Tov) and had no tangible limit. However, his exces-

sive delight in the praise of others and his too passionate desire for fame remained with him until the very end, and very often confounded his saner reasonings’ (trans. Perrin, Loeb). Plutarch adapts Cicero's own version of

the story at Pro Plancio 65-6, where Cicero does not take the opportunity to express an insight into his own weakness."" Yet Plutarch's version can claim a more general historical truth, for elsewhere Cicero's familiarity with the Greek philosophical tradition,’“ and the experience of his own disappointments, led him to formulate influential statements on the distinctions and relativisms within the concept of fame.’’ Even in the Pro Archia, a central text for the ideology of fame and amor gloriae (26-30), Cicero wryly introduces a reference to the philosophical tradition critical of the pursuit of glory: 26 ‘Those very philosophers themselves inscribe their own name,

Braudy 1997: 71-80 on Cicero (whence the following two references). Dedication to Aureng-Zebe. > Moles 1988: 156; see Moles’ longer discussion of the Plutarchan passage at 42—3. The theme is aired in the previous chapter of Plutarch’s Life, 5.1 ‘When Cicero asked the god at Delphi how he might achieve very great fame (tv80&6TaTos yévoito), the Pythian priestess bade him to take

so

7 7

as his guide in life his own nature, and not the opinion of the many (thv TOv TOAAdv 8óEav).* Cf. Fin. 3.57 on differing Stoic views on bona fama (eudoxia). See Sullivan 1941 on Cicero's developing thoughts on gloria, making a sharp distinction between ficta and uera gloria; see also Drexler 1962: 9-10; Hellegouarc'h

1972: 380-2; von

Müller 1977: 28-38 ‘Der römische Ruhmesgedanke und seine kritische Würdigung durch Cicero‘. On the problematization of glory see also Tipping 2010: 26-32, on gloria in Cicero and Silius Italicus, and Index s.vv. ‘glory; ‘Scipio’

23

Introduction

even in the books that they write on the subject of despising glory (de contemnenda gloria); in the very act of despising praise and renown, they want to be praised and renowned (praedicari de se ac nominari uolunt).^" A common solution to the problem of the insatiable desire for fame is to distinguish between good and bad forms of fame or glory. A key passage in Cicero's late philosophica is Tusc. 3.3—4, distinguishing between gloria solida and fama popularis? When to all this is added the people as a sort of highest master, with all the mob combining in a general tendency to error — then obviously we are tainted with perverse opinions, and our revolt from nature is so complete that we come to think that the clearest insight into the meaning of nature has been gained by those who have judged that there is no better or greater goal for a human being, nothing more outstanding, than civil office, military command and popular glory (populari gloria); it is to this that all the noblest are attracted, and in their quest for the true honour (ueram honestatem), which alone is the object of nature's strenuous search,

they find themselves where all is vanity (in summa tnanitate), and they pursue no lofty image of virtue, but a shadowy phantom of glory (consectaturque nullam eminentem effigiem uirtutis, sed adumbratam imaginem gloriae). For true glory is a thing of real substance and clearly manifested," no shadowy phantom: it is the agreed praise given by good men (consentiens laus bonorum), the uncorrupted voice of those who judge correctly of outstanding virtue, it is as it were the echo of virtue (ea uirtuti resonat tamquam imago). As it is generally the companion of upright deeds, it is not to be rejected by good men. The other kind of glory, however, which claims to be a copy (imitatricem) of the true, is headstrong and thoughtless, and generally praising of faults and errors, popular fame (fama popularis), which by counterfeiting honour mars its fair beauty. The distinction is between sound, substantial, genuine (solida) fame as

gloria, and the inferior imitation. The chief criterion is the nature of the source of what is thought and said about the man who aspires to glory, the worthless multitude as opposed to the boni, the select group who can judge truly."! That of which the boni judge is virtue, the source of glory internal

M E

24

The barb is repeated by Augustine: Conf. 10.38.63 et saepe de ipso uanae gloriae contemptu uanius gloriatur, ideoque non iam de ipso contemptu gloriae gloriatur: non enim eam contemnit, cum gloriatur. This passage is discussed at length by Gildenhard 2007: 177-85, reading it as an argument for a radical redefinition of Roman pedagogy, and emphasizing its Platonism. The manuscripts read est enim gloria solida quaedam res et expressa, non adumbrata: to distinguish this gloria from popularis gloria an epithet such as uera seems to be needed. Cf. Ammonius, De differentia s.v. bó£a: 66£a kai kAtos Siagéper. Bó£a uv ég riv 6 Tapa TOv TOÀÀGy Etraivos, KAéos BE 6 Tapa Twv oTrovbaiwv (of Stoic derivation?). The distinction

between glory among the best and among the multitude is also Isocratean (Leeman 19-19: 178).

Critiques of fama

rather than external to the individual. The possession of virtue ensures that glory is not merely empty (inanitate), and that it is based on true honestas rather than a pretence (simulatio) of honestas." Contrasts between full and

empty, between true and false, structure the discourse of fama in some of its other meanings — rumour, report, tradition (see above pp. 8, 10). popularis gloria is deceptive also in that it is a sketchy likeness of true gloria, an imitation (imitatrix, simulatio). Other kinds of fama, rumours, reports,

may also deceive through their likeness to true events in the world out there. True gloria however is also trapped in the terminology of imitation: the contrast between eminens ‘conspicuous, in relief, expressa ‘clear-cut’, on the one hand, and adumbrata ‘sketched out in outline’, is a contrast between two kinds of imitation." In a Platonizing hierarchy of being glory has only the reality of a visual image (effigies) or aural echo (resonat tamquam imago)

of that which order reality, the emphasis inseparability

truly exists, i.e. uirtus. gloria or good fama is always of secondalthough the quality of the shadowiness of fame is variable: may be either on the insubstantiality of the shadow, or on the of the shadow from the substance of virtue, as in the cliché

that ‘glory is the shadow of virtue?

#2 The hypocrisy (simulatione... inani ostentatione. . . ficto non modo sermone sed etiam uoltu) involved in the pursuit of false glory, as opposed to stabilis, uera gloria is emphasized at Cic. Off. 2.43, introduced by Socrates’ statement that the short cut to glory is st quis id ageret, ut qualis haberi uellet, talis esset (based on Xen. Mem. 2.6.39, where the subject is how to win

friends, not glory). For another Ciceronian formulation of the difference between false and true glory, in the context of a rebuttal of a more extreme Epicurean critique of fame, see Pis. 57 nam ut leuitatis est inanem aucupari rumorem et omnis umbras etiam falsae gloriae consectari, sic est animi lucem splendoremque fugientis iustam gloriam, qui est fructus uerae uirtutis honestissimus, repudiare: see Griffin 2001.

Very similar is the language used by Cotta in his criticism of the Epicurean gods at Cic. Nat. deor. 1.74-5. Philippson 1940: 29 suggests that Cotta may transfer features of the imagines to the gods themselves. E.g. Cic. Tusc. 1.109 etsi enim nihil habet in se gloria cur expetatur, tamen uirtutem tamquam umbra sequitur; Sen. Ep. 79.13 gloria umbra uirtutis est: etiam inuitam comitabitur, Otto 1890 s.v. gloria 1. Leeman 1949: 181 suggests that the phrase umbra uirtutis, typically used to denote a legitimate possession of glory, may derive from a polemical Middle Stoic description of glory as Oxia àperris; Cynics and popular Stoicism criticize glory as a mere semblance (skia, skiagraphia, eidolon, doxa) of virtue. For another use of the shadow image cf. Dio Chrys. Or. 67 TTepi 8ó£as 3-6: Bó£a ‘popular opinion’ is a shadow, whose variability in size at different times of day is detached from the substantial size of its owner (so inseparable from, but also unrelated to, the true virtue of the individual). Echo is a rarer image than shadow: Fulke Greville

combines images of mirror, echo, and shadow in a predominantly negative view of fame, in An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour. at 28.2 Fame is allowed to be 'An outward mirror of the inward minde' (cf. 26.1-2 *if fame we overthrowe, | We lose mans echo both of wronge and right’), but only faute de mieux in a fallen world, where a philosophical, Stoic, alternative that condemns the pride of fame, in its own proud way (21.2) 'With pride of thought deprave[s] the

pride of deeds’ In the last stanza, 86, Greville reformulates the image of echo: ‘Who worship

25

Introduction

This passage from the Tusculans also places fama firmly within the structure of a class-system: vain fama is bestowed by the populus, solid gloria by the boni." This is an uneasy balance, since inherent in the notion of gloria is the idea of a wide audience, as in the school definition at Inv. 2.166 gloria

est frequens de aliquo fama cum laude. In other contexts Cicero shows no embarrassment in trumpeting glory's wide reach." It is perhaps to avoid this association of a positively valued gloria with a wide audience that in Tusc. 3.3—4 popularis gloria is relabelled fama popularis the second time round.* The contrast between the vain glory bestowed by the worthless crowd and true praise approved by the discerning few is illustrated in an emblem by Sambucus on Ambitio, in which the smartly dressed young aspirant for distinction has to choose between the allurements of the beast-man and the advice of the wise elder (Fig. 1):** Quos leuis ambitio inflauit, populique fauorem muneribus captant, gloria uana subest. hosque utri pleno assimiles, uentoque tumenti, nam arbitrium uulgi semper inane sonat. qui tribui ueram sibi laudem quaerit, ineptos contemnat plausus, iudicioque regat.

uirtus aeternum celebrat, pietasque tuetur: laus et laudatis est placuisse uiris. Those whom fickle ambition has puffed up, and who angle with gifts for the people’s favour, have vain glory; these you might liken to a full bladder swollen with wind; Fame, commit Idolatrie, | Make men their God, fortune and time their worth, | Forme, but reforme not; meere hypocrisie, | By shaddowes, onely shaddowes bringing forth, | Which must, as blossomes, fade ere true fruict springs, | Like voyce, and Echo, joynd, yet diverse

2 e

26

thinges.' Echo and shadow in the context of something that may be the object of intense self-love, cupiditas gloriae, suggests the Ovidian myth of Narcissus and Echo (see Ch. 9 p. 336). At Cic. Sest. 139 the bona fama bonorum, quae sola uere gloria nominari potest, is located in virtuous effort on behalf of the res publica and an avoidance of inciting populi animos ad seditionem, of acting as a popularis politician. Here it is the populus as political constituency, not as vehicle of praise, that implicitly distinguishes mala fama from bona fama. Cf. Marc. 26 gloria est inlustris ac peruagata magnorum uel in suos uel in patriam uel in omne genus hominum fama meritorum; Phil. 1.29 est autern gloria laus recte factorum magnorumque in rem publicam meritorum, quae cum optimi cuiusque, tum etiam multitudinis testimonio

comprobatur, Off. 2.31 summa igitur et perfecta gloria constat ex tribus his: si diligit multitudo, si fidem habet, si cum admiratione quadam honore dignos putat. This is not however the distinction between gloria as praise and fama as dispraise, ill fame, as found at Enn. Achilles 10-12 Jocelyn (Phoenix) summam tu tibi pro mala uita famam extolles | et pro bona paratam gloriam. | male uolentes famam tollunt, bene uolentes gloriam (cited by Isid. De diff. uerb. 218, p. 29 ‘gloria’... uirtutum est, ‘fama’ uero uitiorum). 88 Henkel and Schöne 1996: 955.

Critiques of fama

Ambitio,

|^

' — p.

Q

vos leuis ambitio inflauit, populig, fauorem M uneribus captant, gloria vana fubeft. ' Hosá, vtri pleno aßimiles, ventog, tumenti, Nam arbitrium vulgi (emper inane fonat. Q ui tribui veram (ibilaudem querit ineptos

C ontemhat plau(us iudiciog, regat.

V irtus aterinum celebrat, pietasq, tuetur: L eus Cr laudatis eft placuiffe viris. Fig.

1 Ambitio, from J. Sambucus Emblemata (Antwerp

1566)

for the mob’s judgement always has a hollow ring. He who seeks to be accorded true praise, would despise foolish applause, and would rule with judgement. Virtue brings eternal renown, and is protected by piety; it is praise to win the approval of praiseworthy men.

Inherent in the idea of fama is size and extent. Diminutives applied to fama are paradoxical: Cicero uses diminutives on the subject of his own fame, in ironic self-deprecation at Fam. 5.12.9 (asking Lucceius to write a

history about himself) ut... nosmet ipsi uiui gloriola nostra perfruamur ‘so that during my own lifetime I may enjoy my little glory’, or, ofthe wrong kind of fama contrasted with his standing in future books of history, dismissively but also apotropaically, in the awareness that rumour is not easy to limit,

27

28

Introduction

at Att. 2.5.1 [historias] ego multo magis uereor quam eorum hominum qui hodie uiuunt rumusculos ‘I stand in much more awe of histories than of the little rumours of men alive today.’ Cicero is aware of the dangers of an infinitely expansive cupiditas gloriae ‘desire for glory’ (about which there are frequent warnings in Tusculans 1), knowing, as Plutarch puts it, ‘that the fame towards which he was emulously struggling was a thing that knew no bounds (&ópic ov)"

and had no tangible limit’ (see above; on cupiditas

gloriae see Ch. 9 pp. 333-8). Personified Fama is imperialistically expansive in her person. A good antidote is therefore to deflate fame, by showing that in the wider spatial or temporal scheme of things she is insignificant in size and reach, as Cicero memorably does in one of the best-known critiques of fame, the passage de contemnenda gloria in the Somnium Scipionis, Rep. 6.24—9, where from his celestial viewpoint Scipio Aemilianus learns to see things in perspective: Rep. 6.26 “Who will hear of your name in the other furthest reaches of the rising or setting sun, or of the north or south winds? If you cut off these parts of the world, then assuredly you see in what a narrow space your glory is going to spread itself. Even those who speak about us, for how long will they do so?' This Ciceronian lesson on the relative insignificance of the spatial and temporal reaches of mortal fame was to be very widely influential on the later tradition.” Cicero's adherence to philosophical traditions which internalize the values on which fama bases its claims is always qualified by his own attachment to the values of a virtuous life conducted pro re publica: Scipio is not to deduce from the insignificance of fama that a life of public service is of no value. Even when appealing to the founder of philosophical interiority on the subject of true glory, Socrates, Cicero has an eye on Roman public fame: Off. 2.43 "This was an excellent saying of Socrates, that the nearest path to glory, and as it were a short-cut, is if a man were to see to it that, as he wanted to be regarded, so he should really be (ut qualis haberi uellet, talis esset)’, followed by the example of the elder Tiberius Gracchus, who will receive

praise as long as Roman history is remembered (tam diu memoria rerum Romanarum manebit) for carrying out the while his sons received approval neither in their life nor in Traces of a philosophical critique of fame are also found of all Augustan poets takes the most personal interest in

laudabitur, dum offices of justice, their death. in Horace, who the sources and

5? Cicero uses immensa of cupiditas gloriae at Inv. 1.91, Fin. 1.59. ?° On Virgil's implicit appeal to a Platonic and Ciceronian belittling of the pursuit of fame and glory in public life in the Parade of Heroes in Aeneid 6 see Feeney 19862.

Critiques of fama

authority of his voice. In his characteristic merging of autobiographical construction with poetic self-definition, Horace negotiates his own relationship to fama both as it pertains to the poet, and in its operations in the non-literary world.?' The Roman Callimachean poet works with an opposition between his own skilled and knowledgeable voice, which may also claim the social authority of proximity to an Augustus or Maecenas, and the misguided tastes and views of the ignorant many. This opposition is the subject of extended treatment in Sat. 1.6, in which the sincerity and truthfulness of the poet's relationship with the great man Maecenas is contrasted with the crowd's ignorant worship of the externals of noble ancestry and of the trappings of office. fama is not allowed the dignity of epic immortalization, but is rather the tyrant over the stupid mob, in a satire on the desire for glory: here the only triumph is the Triumph of Vainglory, and those who seek glory are cast in the role not of triumphator, but of the captives in a triumph: 23-4 sed fulgente trahit constrictos Gloria curru | non minus ignotos generosis ‘but Glory drags chained to her glittering chariot those of low birth as well as those of high‘ 92 " The play on ignotus hints that the desire of the man of obscure birth (ignotus in the sense of ignobilis) for fame, to become notus 'known' is folly. For a freedman's son pursuit of fama inevitably leads to inuidia 'envy' (26), and also compromises personal integrity (22 quoniam in propria non pelle quiessem 'since I had not stayed quiet in my own skin"). Rather than distinguish between proper and improper uses of words, leading respectively to a good or a bad fama, Horace attempts to strip away, as far as possible, the veil of words to arrive at an immediate and true assessment

On Horace's complicated dealings with celebrity see McNeill 2001: Ch. 2 ‘In the public eye’, and Feeney 2009: 31.

9»

cf Ep. 2.1.177 quem tulit ad scaenam uentoso Gloria curru; Servius on Aen. 11.708 iam nosces

M

?!

uentosa ferat cui gloria fraudem: uentosa autem gloria est quam Graeci xevoßo&iav uocant. For a positive image of a chariot of glory see Anth. Pal. 6.213 (Simonides) tocodx: 8’ ipepócevra BiSa€apevos xopóv avEpdov, | evBd§ou Níkas &yAaóv &pu' Err&ßnis. For a sarcastic representation of an Epicurean critique of the triumph (L. Piso had refused to celebrate a triumph) see Cic. Pis. 60 quid tandem habet iste currus, quid uincti ante currum duces, quid simulacra oppidorum, quid aurum, quid argentum, quid legati in equis et tribuni, quid clamor

militum, quid tota illa pompa? inania sunt ista, mihi crede, delectamenta paene puerorum, captare plausus, uehi per urbem, conspici uelle. quibus ex rebus nihil est quod solidum tenere, nihil quod referre ad uoluptatem corporis possis: see Griffin 2001: 91-2; Beard 2007: 214-18. For a redefinition of triumph within a normative Roman ideology see Sil. Pun. 6.545-7 (Regulus) absiste, o iuuenis, lacrimis. patientia cunctos | haec superat currus. longo reuirescet in aeuo | gloria; 7.396—8 sit gloria multis | et placeat, quippe egregium, prosternere ferro | hostem, sed Fabio sit uos seruasse triumphus.

29

30

Introduction

of a man’s worth. The first interview with Maecenas is marked by a near absence of words, 56-61: ut ueni coram, singultim pauca locutus (infans namque pudor prohibebat plura profari),

non ego me claro natum patre, non ego circum me Satureiano uectari rura caballo, sed quod eram narro. respondes, ut tuus est mos,

pauca. When I came into your presence, speaking a few halting words — for a speechless sense of shame prevented me from saying more — I did not say that I was the son of a famous father, or that I rode around my estates on an Apulian nag, but I said what I was. You replied, as is your way, with few words.

This is a pudor that operates not in accordance with what other people might say (fama) about Horace," but to check what he might say about himself (using two words with the root of fa-ma: infans, profari), were he to try and construct a lofty and misleading reputation. In this philosophical revaluation of a Callimachean recusatio Horace reveals the truth that the Fame and Glory of the outstanding individual is totally dependent on and validated by the uninformed opinion of the crowd: tituli and imagines have no value unless they elicit the awed respect of the masses. This is of course a convenient ‘fact’ for one who has no claim to inherited fame or to the fame of political or military achievement. The first book of the Epistles is introduced with a similar rejection of the opinion of the crowd," but this time with less than perfect understanding between Horace and Maecenas on the matter. It is Maecenas who isreluctant to pension off Horace from his dependence on the judgements of the people, and to allow him to retire from writing poetry. Horace's comparison of himself to an aging race-horse alludes to an Ennian image which may come from a passage in which the epic poet said that he would go on writing epic despite his advancing age." By contrast Horace wishes to listen only to the least epic-like of voices, a Socratic inner daemon

(Ep. 1.1.6-9). The

opposition between true reason and the opinion of the mob is presented most starkly at 1.1.70—6. It is not just that the uulgus gets it wrong, but that it is impossibly inconsistent as a guide to right living. It is a belua multorum . . . capitum (76), the beast with many heads — and many voices." °3 On the pairing of pudor and fama see above p. 20. 9 See Oltramare 1926: Index s.vv. ‘Opinion de la foule'; Bramble 1974: 154-5 ‘Structural techniques: the condemnation of the crowd’ 35 Skutsch 1983: 673-4. %6 On the Platonic image of the many-headed beast see n. 20 above.

Critiques of fama

Horace asks, (90) quo

teneam

uultus mutantem

Protea nodo? ‘With what

knot could I hold down this shape-shifting Proteus?' The philosophical poet's task is to impose the one right ratio on the endlessly proliferating claims of the unenlightened as to how to behave. Yet already in this first poem there is a complication in Horace's own assumption of something like a protean multiformity, when he asserts that he will pursue an Aristippan versatility (13-19), and that (15) quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes ‘wherever the storm snatches me, I will be welcomed on shore’. Does

this hint at an epic beginning, the hero now quite content to be blown off course to a Phaeacia or a Carthage? The defiant refusal of Ep. 1.1 to be dependent on what people say is subverted by the concluding poem, in which the book's desire for freedom will actually lead it into a slavish dependence on the favour of a mass audience, even one of uninformed children."* Ironically, in the poet's instructions to

his fama-seeking book to deliver a sphragis he falls back into the proud assertions of moral independence of Sat. 1.6. fama is inevitably a tricky issue in the genres of sermo (literally ‘conversation’) and epistle, both of which presuppose, or presuppose the fiction of, a limited circulation of words between two, or very few, persons. The different genre of Odes 2.2 allows Horace to combine the philosophical rejection of the uox populi as to what constitutes happiness (17-21 redditum Cyri solio Phraaten | dissidens plebi numero beatorum | eximit Virtus, populumque falsis | dedocet uti | uoctbus ‘Virtue, dissenting from the crowd, excludes Phraates, restored to the throne of Cyrus, from the roll of the happy, and she teaches the people not to use false words')"* with an apparently untroubled beliefin the power of Fame

to immortalize virtue (7-8 illum [sc. Proculeius]

aget penna metuente solui | Fama superstes 'his Fame will survive and drive him on with wings that disdain to stoop’). But one may doubt that the fama that is Proculeius’ own (philosophically guaranteed) reputation can

be sharply distinguished from winged Rumour,” and if it is correct that the poem is in fact a cunning move in the game of patronage and benefactions, then the great man Sallustius to whom it is addressed may well need the assurance of popular fame in the future.

Ss

9

=

9

E

9

For the association between posthumous poetic fama and use as a school-text cf. Stat. Theb. 12.812-15 iam certe praesens tibi Fama benignum | strauit iter... | Itala iam studio discit memoratque iuuentus. On the ironies of Hor. Ep. 1.20 see Hardie 2009; 56. The falsity of the popular beliefin the eudaimonia of the Persian Great King is a philosophical topos: see Nisbet and Hubbard 1978 ad loc. As Nisbet and Hubbard 1978 on v. 8 assert. On this ode see further Hardie 20092: 123-4.

31

32

Introduction

The younger Seneca goes further than Cicero in defining a good kind of

fama that has very little to do with the larger society of Rome." In Ep. 102, defending the proposition that ‘renown (claritatem) that falls to a man’s lot after his death is a good’, Seneca introduces a distinction between claritas,

which ‘can be satisfied with the judgement of one good man’, and fama and gloria, for which ‘the opinion of one man is not enough’. Seneca even tries to get beyond a definition of claritas as (8) ‘the favourable opinion of good men’, by reducing the judges of claritas to a single good man (since all good men will have the same opinion). He counters the charge that laus ‘praise’ is nothing more substantial than uox ‘a word’ with the claim that it is rather a sententia ‘idea’ (14), which may be the object of a judgement even in silence, concluding, (17) fama uocem utique desiderat, claritas potest etiam citra uocem contingere contenta iudicio ‘fama at any rate calls for vocal utterance, claritas can be content with a judgement that stops short of utterance’. Thus the insubstantiality and untrustworthiness that always bedevils the word let forth into the world is eliminated.'”' claritas, as laus bono a bonis reddita ‘praise rendered to a good man by good men; is a bonum of both the praiser and the praised." In Ep. 113.32 Seneca makes a more radical disjunction between uirtus and gloria. Here there is no easy concession to a lingering desire for fame through an appeal to the cliché that glory inevitably attends virtue as its shadow, but an exhortation even to embrace infamia if that is the world's

response to your just actions:? Fix in your mind also what I said a little earlier, that it is irrelevant how many people recognize your justice. He who wishes his virtue to be broadcast strives not for virtue but for glory. Do you not want to be just without glory? But, by heaven, you will often have to be just at the price of a bad reputation (cum infamia), and

100

On Seneca on fame and glory see Habinek 2000; Roller 2001: Ch. 2; and below Ch. 8 p. 314.

The Senecan take on fame is picked up by Lipsius, as he balances a concern for his literary fame with a Stoic care of the self: van Houdt and Papy 1999: 214. 191 Cf Sen. Thy. 209-10 (the satelles correcting Atreus’ views on fama populi) at qui fauoris gloriam ueri petit, | animo magis quam uoce laudari uolet. Thyestes feebly attempts his own philosophical redefinition of gloria at 539-40. 102 Cf. the identification of honour as inhering in both its recipient and those who grant it (above pp. 11-12). In his critique of fame Fulke Greville locates the essence of fame solely in those who bestow it: An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour 47 ‘Besides, the essence of this glorious

name, | Is not in him that hath, but him that giues it: | If people onely then distribute Fame, | In them that vnderstand it not, yet liues it: | And what can their applause within vs raise, |

Who are not conscious of that worth they praise?" 103

Compare the New Testament beatitude of those who are reviled (maledicere), Matth. 5:11: see

Ch. 11 p. 423.

Critiques of fama

then, if you have any sense, take pleasure in a bad opinion virtuously earned (mala opinio bene parta).

All that matters is the internal censor, not what other people say: De ira 3.41.1 conscientiae satis fiat, nil in famam laboremus; sequatur uel mala, dum bene merentis ‘let the conscience be satisfied, and let us not strive for a good

reputation; let a bad reputation attend us, so long as we deserve well”. This is a position that Cicero had already reached in a late letter to Atticus, Att. 12.28.2 (April 45 nc) ‘in this matter I do not think that I should care about what others think; my conscience is worth more to me than what everyone

else says’ (mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo). The pagan philosophical critiques of fame and glory provide materials for the two Christian writers who largely determine medieval views on fame and vain glory, Augustine and Boethius, both profoundly versed in pagan philosophy." 105 Boethius' Lady Philosophy, in her lesson (Consol. 2.7 pros.) on the true insignificance of those temptations for outstanding minds, ‘the desire for glory and the reputation of having deserved well of the state’ (gloriae...cupido et optimorum in rem publicam fama meritorum), closely follows Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, showing that fame is necessarily restricted to a very small point in space and time. Thus fama's tendency to expand and to fill is thwarted: cf. 2.7 metr. 5-6 breuem replere non ualentis ambitum | pudebitaucti nominis'he will be ashamed that his magnified name cannot fill even his little ambition: The ability of Virgil's Fama to expand from the small scale to reach the skies is transferred to the personification of Philosophy herself, the source of true and lasting greatness: 1.1 pros. 8-13 ‘For at one time she seemed to confine herself to the ordinary measure of man,

at another to strike the heavens with the top of her lofty head

(pulsare caelum summi uerticis cacumine);^ when she had raised her head !

For other examples of the contrast or pairing of fama and conscientia see TLL 4.366.30 ff.: Tac. Ann. 6.26.1 fateri postremo graue conscientiae, graue famae suae, si proximus amicorum nullis moriendi rationibus uitam fugeret; Plin. Ep. 3.20.9 multi famam, conscientiam pauci uerentur, 1.8.14 (see Ch. 8 p. 316); 5.1.11. Otto

1890: 90 further cites Ov. Fasti 4.311 conscia mens recti

famae mendacia ridet; Jerome, Ep. 123.15 nec paratum habeas illud e triuio: sufficit mihi conscientia mea; non curo, quid de me loquantur homines, Cic. Tusc. 2.64 on the largeness of soul that despises popular applause, ending sed nullum theatrum uirtuti conscientia maius est. The opposition is central in Christian moralizing, thanks to Paul and Augustine (see below). a

10:

For a useful overview see Boitani 1984: 45-8 'Vainglory, Fame, and Conscience: Boethius and Augustine’; see also Koonce

1966: 23-32 ‘The tradition of Boethius’; Lida de Malkiel

1968:

89-107; Lendon 2001: 92-5. A lurid picture of kevo8d€ia ‘vain glory’ is presented by John Chrysostom's De inani gloria et de educandis liberis, an attack on the pagan pursuit of fame by the piAdétivos through the tradition of theatrical euergetism. In general on medieval views on fame see Lida de Malkiel

106

1968; von Müller 1977.

[ike Horace ambitious for literary fame, (Odes 1.1.36) sublimi feriam sidera uertice.

33

34

Introduction

still higher, she penetrated the heavens themselves and was lost to the sight of men’

(cf. Aen. 4.176—7 (Fama) parua metu primo, mox sese attollit in auras

| ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubila condit'She is small and timorous to begin with, but soon she lifts herself into the air, striding on the ground and her head hidden in the clouds’). Conscience and virtue (or consciousness

of one's virtue) are the touchstones, not the windy and empty things that people say: 2.7 pros. 63-5 ‘But you do not know how to act rightly without reference to the winds of popularity and empty rumour (populares auras inanesque rumores), and ignoring the excellence of your own conscience and virtue, you seek rewards from the chatter (sermunculis) of others.’'" For the

Christian a key text in the privileging of conscience over external sources of glory is Paul 2 Cor. 1:12 gloria nostra est haec testimonium conscientiae nostrae our glory is this, the witness of our conscience...’ For a much later

visual image of the superiority of conscience to fama see Fig. 2. Earlier, Augustine had set the amor laudis ‘love of praise’ and cupiditas gloriae'desire for glory’ of the earthly city in the context of the transcendental values of the City of God, CD5.13—20. Earthly cupiditas gloriaeis not rejected out of hand (it is preferable to the love of money or the lust for power, if inferior to the love of justice),'”* but is used as an a fortiori argument for the greater love owed to our celestial home: 5.16 ‘let them consider how great a love is owed to our fatherland above on account of eternal life, if the

earthly fatherland is so loved by its citizens on account of the glory of men’. Pagan cupiditas gloriae has an instrumental use as a stepping-stone in the service of Christian devotion to the glory of God.'” In Confessions, 10.36—9 (58-65), Augustine wrestles with his own temptation to vain glory, amor laudis, and exhorts himself, as he addresses God, (10.36.59) gloria nostra tu

esto ‘do you be our glory’. In Christian texts the notion of ‘glory’ itself is transformed following the use in Latin translations of the Bible of gloria for 56§a, the Septuagint's translation of the Hebrew kabod, ‘splendour, might of God’, while gloria in the sense ‘(earthly) renown’ comes to be applied to specifically Christian areas of achievement and fame: Christ's glory through his resurrection

1?

Cf Macrob. Comm. Somn. Scip. 2.10.2 (commenting on Cic. Rep. 6.27) uirtutis fructum sapiens in conscientia ponit, minus perfectus in gloria; Cic. Rep. 6.29. Cf. also Boeth. Consol. 3.6 pros. 9-11 quid tamen sapientis adiecerit conscientiae [sc. praise from the many] qui bonum suum non populari rumore, sed conscientiae ueritate metitur? 108 See Ch. 9 pp. 371-6 on fame and justice in Dante. 199 For a particular case of Christianity confronting worldly fame see Feingold 2007 on the problems confronting Jesuit scholars torn between the cupiditas gloriae aroused by their desire for recognition and the order's ideology of self-abnegation in the service of the glory of God.

Critiques of fama

Fig.

2 Conscientia mille testes, from Otto van Veen Horatit emblemata

(Amsterdam

1684)

and victory over Satan, man’s glory through his struggle against the Devil

and the World? The late-antique Latin epics of the New Testament are obvious places to look for a revaluation of traditional epic fama. Juvencus applies the Virgilian tag tantarum gloria rerum (of future Roman history: Aen. 4.272) to the glorious subject of the history of salvation (Euangeliorum libri 1.400), while Arator contrasts the true triumphi of Christ to the old

laudes of the exploits of the Trojan War (Historia apostolica 2.753—4).!!! A transcendental relocation of the source of fame is a final solution to the problems and anxieties that beset the pursuit of fame on earth. So Milton draws a sharp distinction between earthly and heavenly fame in Lycidas (see Ch. 14 pp. 565-6). The contrast is expressed visually in a pair of goblets made 110 For these developments see Vermeulen 1956; Knoche 1967: 443-5. Ill

See Green 2006: 63, 326-7.

36

Introduction

by Christoph Jamnitzer (1632), one with a terrestrial globe surmounted by a figure of Fama, and one with a celestial globe surmounted by Minerva (see Ch. 16 p. 618).'* Fulke Greville puts it thus in his An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour: 32.5-6 ‘So as if Fame

be vnto goodnesse

due; | It onely can in God, be

great and true.’ Worldly fame is hopelessly fallen: 72.1—44 ‘Like Relatiues, thus stand the World and Fame, | Twinnes of one wombe, that lose, or win together; | With Vulcan’s nets they catch each others shame, | Diuide with God, and so are losers ever.’''* Greville's critique of fame is driven

by experience of life at court and by Calvinist convictions. The sceptic Montaigne comes from a very different direction in one of the best-known Renaissance critiques of fame and glory, his essay (2.16) ‘De la gloire; which proceeds largely through a series of the binary oppositions to which fama so

readily lends itself.''" In the early modern period religious and philosophical doctrines continue to interact with social and political situations and events in the constant, and constantly shifting, evaluation and testing of fama, of those who seek to win fame or to lend authority to their words, and of those who collectively constitute the audiences and echo chambers for the public circulation of fama. A range of early modern literary manifestations of this ongoing process of critiquing and of making discriminations is discussed in this book.

Plots of fama The oppositions that structure critiques of fame may also play themselves out in narratives. In this section I look at the narrativity of fama taken in the totality of the meanings of the word. The connection between fama and narrative is at one level too obvious to need pointing out: words are the substance of fama as they are of narratives, and fama may take the shape of a story — (ut) fama est ‘there is a story, ‘as they say’ are ways of introducing narratives.

112 On Lycidas and Jamnitzer’s goblets see Fowler 1996: 121-7. 113

On Greville’s Inquisition see Council

1973: 29-31; Norbrook 2002: 148, characterizing the

Inquisition as an assault on the aristocratic cult

of honour and magnificence, 'Greville came to

see external social roles as hollow facades, alienation of the essential inner self’.

!

On ‘De la gloire' see Supple 2000: Chs. 1, 2. Fowler 1996: 108-21 discusses critiques of glory and honour by Montaigne and others, including Shakespeare. For other radical sixteenth-century critiques of honour see Council 1973: 25-31.

Plots of fama

But there is more to be said on the subject of fama and narratives. fama, in its widest set of meanings, is characterized by a complex set of relationships between the various contexts, uses and valuations of the word,

and also by its inseparability from the passage of time. Words are spoken, written, heard, read, contested, remembered and forgotten over time. The

structural complexity of fama together with its inevitable temporality makes it a suitable subject for narrative plots. The earliest large-scale narrative form in Western literature, the heroic epic, takes as its subject the ‘famous deeds

of heroes’.''* A poem like fame (kleos) of its heroes, (and reception) of that perform deeds worthy of

the Iliad is not just a monument that preserves the but is in important respects about the production fame, both through the motivation of heroes to commemoration, and through the control over the

words in which those deeds are commemorated, a project shared between

the characters and the poet. Two separate timescales spans of time within epic narratives, during which for and the control of the word is contested, and time that separates epic poets and readers from the

are involved: firstly the reputations are fought secondly the span of (often) remote date of

the actions fixed, as tradition, in the words of the poems. Both timescales

provide canvases for stories about the word, about fama. Within their overall character as poems of fame, epics also contain more local ‘plots of fama’, as I shall call them. In Chapter 2 I examine examples in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. In the later European tradition of long narrative poems the working out of plots of fame comes to be especially insistent in the Italian Trecento. Possibly the strongest narrative of fame, in the sense of a story brought down to a definitive and ungainsayable conclusion, at least within the terms of its own belief system, is Dante’s Commedia, described by Piero Boitani

as, in its entirety, ‘a recipient and demiurge of fame'!^ The Commedia is the provocation to later Trecento writers less confident of the possibilities of raising their sights above the world of mortality and change, Boccaccio (in particular in Amorosa visione) and Petrarch, whose writing career could be described as a life-long quest to construct the author’s fame within literary and cultural tradition, perpetually beset by anxiety about both the value and the permanence of fame. The obsession with fame on the part of Italy’s ‘three crowns’ is the impulse for Chaucer’s House of Fame, a long narrative dream-poem dedicated to the subject of fame, in the full range of senses

15. See West 2007: Ch. 10 ‘Mortality and fame’ for the possible Indo-European precedents to the Homeric dealings with fame. 116 Boitani 1984: 90.

37

38

Introduction

of the Latin fama, still active in the English word ‘fame’ in the time of Chaucer. ‘Plots of fama’ may be found in many other kinds of text, and one upshot of working on the subject has been the discovery that, once fama gets going in a text, it tends to gather itself, curdle, into a complex and more or less coherent ‘plot’. fama lends itself to both opening and closural moves in a plot: a report, a piece of news, may be the stimulus to a sequence of actions, while the conclusion of a tale of outstanding deeds may be crowned with the fame won by a character or characters, and the end of a work is also the

place where the author may assert (hopes for) his own undying fame.’'’ The instabilities inherent to fama, however, often render closure provisional and open-ended. In some cases the plot extends over the whole of a text whose centre of gravity may appear to lie elsewhere: this is true, for example, of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, a work whose investment in the themes of report and fame is not easy to explain (see Ch. 14). It is also true of some Shakespearean plays, Coriolanus (see above pp. 14-19) and Troilus and Cressida, and, on a massive scale, of the tetralogy consisting of Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and

2, and Henry V (see Ch. 13). In other cases the 'plots of fama' emerge as local sequences within a larger work, as for example in the historical works of Livy and Tacitus (see Chs. 7, 8).

As a sample of a ‘plot of fama’ localized within a larger text I take the secondand third cantos, plus the first three stanzas of the fourth canto, of Book 3 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The sequence weaves a pattern of fame, envy, blame, shame, and the dissimulation, revelation and glorification of

famous men and women.''* It is an interlude in the main action, during which, as Britomart rides along with the Red Cross Knight, the two discuss

the unacknowledged object of Britomart's desire, Artegall, and the narrator then reveals to his readers the back story of how Britomart fell in love with the image of Artegall that appeared to her in the magic mirror made by Merlin and given to her father, King Ryence, how her nurse Glauce forces from her ward the secret of her love-pangs, and how the two women travel to Merlin, who delivers a prophecy of the ‘famous Progenie' (ir1.iii.22, 5)

"17 On fama and beginnings and endings see Hardie 2009c: 564-71. To the material discussed there may be added the use of a personified Orjna ‘report’ of a victory to open two of

Bacchylides' victory odes, fast-travelling and transient news which is then made permanent, given closure, in the poems themselves, as the enduring fame of the victory (Bacchyl. 2.1-5;

10.1-14). On reports of victory, pais vikrgópos, as cues to the poet in later Greek encomiastic poetry see Barbantani 2001. 118 On this episode see briefly also Ch. 9 p. 343.

Plots of fama

and line of ‘Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours.... Braue Captaines, and most mighty warriours' (111.iii.23, 1-3) that will in time issue from the

union of Britomart and Artegall, in a rewriting of the Virgilian Parade of Heroes, the pageant of the gloria (Aen. 6.757) and fama (889) of the descen-

dants of Aeneas.''” The climax of the prophecy is the revelation of the latest descendant, the ‘royall Virgin’ Queen Elizabeth, whose Faerie Land alter ego is Gloriana, glory personified. It is through a reminder of the many other famous female warriors among the ancestors of Britomart that Glauce then inspires Britomart to take up arms herself, 111.111.54: And sooth, it ought your courage much inflame, To heare so often, in that royall hous, From whence to none inferior ye came,

Bards tell of many women valorous Which have full many feats adventurous Performd, in paragone of proudest men.

Where Anchises uses the forward reach of fame in order to fire his son Aeneas to great deeds," Glauce turns from prophecy to the memory of past fame. Merlin's and Glauce's open proclamation of the famous deeds of martial women is a rebuke to the envious male writers of Spenser's own day, whom

in the first two stanzas of Canto 2 the poet blames for belittling the ‘brave gestes and prowesse martiall’ of warrior women, and whose refutation is to be found in the ‘record of antique times’, a piece of fama-as-tradition that is in large part the construction of Spenser himself; and whom Spenser also accuses of envying the ‘artes and pollicy’ in which women of the present day, having laid away warlike arms, can yet still excel. As Britomart is the subject of Spenser's praise of female ‘warlike puissance’ (111.ii.3, 1), so Elizabeth is the subject of his praise of female wisdom. In a modesty topos the poet expresses the fear that his own ‘rude and rugged rimes' may not do justice to Elizabeth (111.11.3). Rather, he bids her, ‘Thy selfe thy prayses tell, and make them knowen farre.' In sharp contrast to the self-proclaiming Elizabeth, the next stanza has the Red Cross Knight"! ask Britomart ‘what inquest | Made her dissemble her disguised kind: | Faire Lady she him seemd, like Lady drest. | But fairest knight aliue, when armed was her brest.' In answer Britomart spins a tale that (like the utterances of the Virgilian and Ovidian Fama) is part truth and part fiction, and whose !? 12!

See Hardie 200-1: 147-8. UO Aen. 6.889 incenditque animum famae uenientis amore. [na notorious slip the text has Britomart 'trauelling with Guyon by the way, not with Red Cross (111.11.4): coincidentally a textual dis-gui-se in a stanza about dissembling?

39

40

Introduction

subject is fame. She reports of herself that from infancy she has been trained up in warlike pursuits, and that she has come into these parts (stanzas 7-8) ‘to seek for prayse and fame. | Fame blazed hath that, that here in Faery lond | Do many famous Knightes and Ladies wonne.’ She dissimulates the particular reason for her ‘inquest’ by giving a false account of its true object, Artegall, who thus makes his entrance in a verbal disguise, while Britomart is physically disguised. From the search for fama-as-fame she turns to a request for fama-as-report, the immediate inquiry within the narrative for news of a hero that will clarify itself and solidify hereafter as the enduring (poetic) fame of the hero (on the interaction between the two meanings

of kleos, ‘report’ and ‘fame’, in the Odyssey see Ch. 2 pp. 63-7): 111.11.8 ‘But mote I weet of you, right curteous knight, | Tydings of one, that hath vnto me donne | Late foule dishonour and reprochfull spight, | The which I seeke

to wreake, and Arthegall he hight.’'~”

Britomart dare not announce the true

reason for her desire for ‘tidings’ — fama-as-report — of Artegall, although she immediately repents of ‘missaying’ the defamatory word that she cannot now call back (111.ii.9, 1-2). Red Cross is stung into a defence of Artegall

against the imputation of ‘blame’ and ‘shame’, which, together with that other rhyme of ‘fame’, ‘name’, rhyme in the last lines of stanza 9 and first

lines of stanza 10. In order to keep Red Cross talking, Britomart continues outwardly to defame Artegall, accusing him of (stanza 12) ‘beguil[ing] | A simple mayd, and work[ing] so heinous tort, | In shame of knighthood, as | largely can report’. Her ‘report’ is typical of the distortions worked on the truth by Fama, for it is true that she has been beguiled by Artegall, but untrue that this was Artegall’s ‘work’, since it was without his intention or knowledge that she chanced to view his image in the magic mirror. Red Cross satisfies Britomart’s thirst for tidings with an account of Artegall’s deeds of justice, as he (11.11.14, 4-5) ‘restlesse walketh all the world around,

| Ay doing things, that to his fame redound* ‘Justice not tyed to one place’

is the gloss of an early reader, John Dixon (1597);'** in his unresting walk round the world Artegall also comes close to being an embodiment of Fama itself, and at the same time fills the vertical as well as horizontal axis of

fame: 9 ‘So is his soueraine honour raisde to heauens hight’. Red Cross adds to his defence of the virtue and fame of Artegall a detailed account of his physical appearance: 111.ii.16, 8-9 ‘All which the Redcrosse knight to point The quest Fame: see (HF 1872) other this 123 [n Hough

for tidings ofan erotic kind is the motivation of the plot of Chaucer's House of Ch. 15; cf. Geffrey's statement that he has not come to Chaucer's House of Fame ‘to han fame’, but rather (1886-9) ‘Somme new tydynges for to lere... Tydynges, or that, | Of love or suche thynges glade’. 1964. Book 5 of The Faerie Queene is the Legend of Artegall or of Justice.

Plots of fama

ared, | And him in euery part before her fashioned.’ Tidings, fama, are now made visible: not the least of Fama’s powers is her ability to see everything, and in turn to make the word visible, through rhetorical enargeia. Equally characteristic of Fama is her repetitive nature, as report is relayed from one sender to another. We learn instantly that Red Cross is painting a picture already well known to Britomart, in this case from a convergent source: 11.11.17, 1—4 “Yet him in euery part before she knew, | How euer list her now her knowledge faine, | Sith him whilome in Britaine she did vew, | To her

reuealed in a mirrhour plaine.' Merlin's mirror is an alternative, magic, source of tidings: Merlin gave it to Britomart's father Ryence (111.ii.21, 3-5) "That neuer foes his kingdome might inuade, | But he it knew at home before he hard | Tydings thereof, and so them still debar’d. The mirror performs the function frequently ascribed to fama in historiography, that of bringing news of the advance of an enemy. The mirror also has the grander quality of the Virgilian and Ovidian Fama, that of being a universal repository of information (although in this case tailored to the individual interest of each viewer): rir.ii.19, 1—

4 '[t vertue had, to shew in perfect sight, | What euer thing was in the world contaynd,

| Betwixt the lowest earth and heauens hight, | So that

it to the looker appertaynd.' It is ‘a world of glas: Merlin is a master of fama, both through the looking glass that he has made (itself a famous object, (11.1.18, 9) “Whose vertues through the wyde world soone were solemniz'd'), and through the vision of the Parade of Heroes that he grants to Britomart. When

Britomart utters her ‘missaid’ account of Artegall, she, like the

Virgilian Fama, distorts in a matter of love. Inwardly, however, fama and love are in an undistorted relationship, as we have been told in 111.ii.11: The royall Maid woxe inly wondrous glad, To hear her Loue so highly magnifide; And ioyd that euer she affixed had,

Her hart on knight so goodly glorifide, How ever finely she it faind to hide: The louing mother, that nine monethes did beare, In the deare closet of her painefull side,

Her tender babe, it seeing safe appeare, Doth not so much reioice as she reioyced theare.

The glory of Artegall is as dear to Britomart as a newborn child to its mother. Her love of his glory is inseparable from her erotic desire for the man himself. The words ‘woxe inly’ suggest a figurative pregnancy, and

4l

42

Introduction

foreshadow the literal child that she will bear to Artegall, as prophesied by Merlin (111.iii-28—9), the first in the long line of their famous descendants.

Figurative and physical are bound together in a different way in the first four stanzas of Canto 3, the first three of which are an address to a celestial

Love, the allegorical partner of Virtue, ‘Whence spring all noble deeds and neuer dying fame’, a love who ‘stirredst vp th’ Heroes high intents, | Which the late world admyres for wondrous moniments: In the third stanza the spiritual effects of celestial Love blend seamlessly into Britomart’s physical love for Artegall, ‘From whose two loynes, thou afterwards did rayse | Most famous fruits of matrimoniall bowre, | Which through the earth have spred their liuing prayse, | That fame in trompe of gold eternally displayes”. The fourth stanza invokes the poet’s own divinity of fame, the Muse Clio (KAgiw from KAe(i)oo ‘celebrate’, ‘give xA&os to’), the product of another allegorical

coupling, of Phoebus and Memory. The Muse of fame has 'ennoble[d] with immortall name | The warlike Worthies, from antiquitie, | In thy great volume of Eternitie, and she is now called on to ‘recount from hence | My

glorious Soueraines goodly auncestrie’. This web of fama is rounded off by the first three stanzas of Canto 4, in

which the poet reverts to the anxiety about female fame expressed at the beginning of Canto 2. Here the threat is not male envy, but the possibility that ‘the Antique glory ...| That whilome wont in women to appeare' may be dead or asleep. The only ‘envy’ now is the "longing" with which the poet burns to hear of the warlike feats of Penthesilea

(‘For all too long

I burne with enuy sore, | To heare...’). In a synkrisis (‘comparison’), a standard rhetorical figure for the calibration of fame, Penthesilea, and her biblical and classical sisters, are found inferior to noble Britomart, in the

matters of ‘glory of great valiaunce' and ‘pure chastitie and vertue rare’, with another concluding reference to Britomart as the stock from which derives the lineage of the living Queen, ‘the matter of my song. Spenser ventures the power of his poetry to confer fame on Elizabeth, against the anxiety about transience and oblivion aired in the ubi sunt? formula!" in the opening line of the canto, “Where is the Antique glory now become...? The glorification of Gloriana is the The Faerie Queene’s express aim. In a manner typical of the workings of fama in literary texts, the poet's own quest to memorialize and praise, to fix words and their reception, is mirrored in the words and actions of characters within the narrative. The construction of fama-as-fame is revealed as a product to be achieved via more transient processes of the word, report, rumour, and in the face of 74^

OED s.v. envy 5.

125 On the ‘ubi sunt’ formula see Gilson 1932: 9-38.

Plotting fama

the destructive verbal forces of envy, detraction, defamation. This episode is also an example of the affective energy that powers the workings of fama in the world, in this case above all the emotions of love and desire (the subject

of extended analysis in Chapter 9).

Plotting fama Fame,

and fame

in its relationship to other senses of fama, reputation,

rumour, gossip, public opinion, are issues of pressing concern for all Western societies, and perhaps for any conceivable human society. This book’s predominant focus on the workings of fama within a classical, literary, tradition spanning more than 2,000 years may produce an impression of a greater continuity than might histories of other kinds, for example ones whose main focus was political, sociological or technological. It is not my purpose to propose a grand narrative of fama, in the way, for example, that Leo Braudy in his The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History attempts ‘a cultural history of the urge to recognition over the last twenty-five hundred years'"^^ (a history that focuses on one part of the complex of meanings of fama, namely ‘fame’). Grand narratives by their nature open themselves to counter-example, and the sampling of nearly 2,000 years of the history of critiques of fama in this section has thrown up as many continuities as discontinuities. The greatest break in the history of fama, and of attitudes to the word, undoubtedly comes with Christianity, yet Christianity’s rejection of the values associated with earthly fame, and their replacement with a divinely authorized Logos, have antecedents in the pagan philosophical tradition, and one of the most important texts for the Christian vanitytradition was written by a man at the centre of Roman politics (here it is important to remember that Cicero’s De re publica is not one of the late philosophical works, written when he had despaired of meaningful involvement in Roman politics). Burckhardt’s characterization of the Renaissance as a period marked by a renewed pursuit of fame and interest in the individual, after the Christian Middle Ages, needs to be qualified by studies that

show that fame and glory never ceased to be a vital, and valid, concern to the Middle Ages (e.g. Lida de Malkiel 1968).

Doubtless structural differences between societies and periods are reflected in differing attitudes to fama, yet these can be overplayed in the pursuit of satisfying narratives and contrasts. The dynamics of different aspects 126

Braudy 1997: 599,

43

Introduction

of fama may remain largely constant, varying only in the contexts in which they operate, and in the balance between different individuals and groups, and in the valuation placed on different aspects of fama. Fame, envy, rumour

and gossip will vary in their interrelationships depending on whether the context is the aristocratic competitiveness of the Pindaric epinician, or the avoidance of undue eminence in democratic Athens. In democratic Athens rumour, the voice of the people, could be positively valued.'’’ By contrast, and on a much larger canvas, it has been suggested that there has been a marked deterioration in the standing of ‘talk’ between the medieval and modern periods, as a result of the social and legal professionalization of the functions of talk.'** In anthropological literature the claim is sometimes made that the whole of the Mediterranean world, over very long periods of time, is distinguished by a (non-aristocratic) ‘Mediterranean honour code’;

equally, this claim is disputed by other anthropologists and historians.'"? A ‘cult of reputation’ has been identified as an obsession of the upper class in early modern England. Two recent studies by Jon Lendon and Carlin Barton, very different in their scope and methods, develop the claim that honour was a dominant value for the ancient Romans." But views differ as to whether there are significant shifts in Roman attitudes to honour, fame and glory as we move from the Republic to the principate. In Chapters 7 and 8] look at the roles played by fama in Roman historiography; that there are significant differences between Livy, writing the history of the Republic, and Tacitus, writing imperial history, may be as much a function of the differing agendas of the two historians as it is a reflection of substantial and deep-seated changes in Roman society. In Chapter 8 pp. 314-15 I survey a number of modern scholars who give conflicting accounts of the degree of real change between Republic and principate in the matter of the ideology of fama and the behaviours associated with it. Finally, close readings of the kind that occupies much of this book tend to work against schematic distinctions between places and periods. For example my reading in Chapter 15 of two texts that stand at the beginning and end of the stretch of English literary history covered in this book, Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame and Alexander Pope’s Temple of Fame, does not support the case for the sharply defined contrast between late

S

12

p

12

*

12

See Ch. 7 pp. 238-9 on fama in democratic Athens. Fenster and Smail 2003: 9-10, pointing to the degeneration in meaning of OE godsibb ‘relative in God’ into modern ‘gossip’ See Horden and Purcell 2000: Ch. 12 for a critical review of the literature, concluding that the ‘Mediterraneanists’ have a case.

a

44

130

Stone 1965: 42.

13!

Lendon 2001

(first publ. 1997); Barton 2001.

Plotting fama

medieval and early eighteenth-century mindsets in the matter of fama that has sometimes been claimed. The remaining chapters in this book are organized through a combination of the chronological, generic and thematic. fama-as-fame is associated above all with the earliest surviving genre of the Greco-Roman tradition, epic. Much has been written about kleos ‘fame’ as it relates to the value-system of the Homeric world, and to the poetics of Homeric epos. In Chapter 21 examine certain aspects of kleosas they relate to the larger dynamic of words, fama in senses other than ‘fame’, in the Iliad and Odyssey, and extend the

analysis beyond the scope of heroic epos to the power of words, and power over words, in the very unheroic world of Hesiod’s

Works and Days. The

chapter ends with Virgil’s response in Book 1 of the Aeneid to the ‘plot of fama’ that unfolds in Book 2 of the Iliad. Chapter 3 turns to what will remain the central emblem of fama in the Western tradition, the personification of Fama in Book 4 of the Aeneid, and reads the poem for the concentric rings that spread out from that great rupture in the mimetic realism of the narrative, to extend over the text as a whole.'** An appendix looks at the workings of fama in a number of ancient novels, a genre closely related to epic, with an extended analysis of fama in Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche, a narrative much indebted to the Aeneid. Virgilian fama operates both inside and outside the text; in Chapter 4 a reading of the Council of Latins in Aeneid 11 shows that the use of rhetoric within the fictional narrative is not to be separated from the epic poet’s construction of fama through his fictions. Chapter 5 looks at the first major contribution to the tradition of Virgilian Fama in Ovid’s House of Fama in Book 12 of the Metamorphoses. This episode enacts fama through its repetition with variation of the Virgilian personification, at the same time as it comments on the narrative poetics of the last four books of Ovid's ‘epic’, and on the epic tradition as a whole. The House of Fama is the last of the four major personifications in the Metamorphoses, after Inuidia ‘Envy’, Fames ‘Hunger’, and the Cave of Sleep and the god of dreams, Morpheus, and is intricately related to all three of these. Ovid thereby comments on the way in which Virgil's Fama is already related to arange of other, mostly divine or demonic, characters in the Aeneid: both

Virgil and Ovid illustrate the protean nature of fama, interacting with and

132

| choose my image with care: the concentric rings started by a stone thrown in water, a standard ancient and medieval illustration for the movement of sound, are used by the eagle in Chaucer's House of Fame to explain how every speech, noise or sound is multiplied and comes to the House of Fame

(782-822).

45

46

Introduction

mutating into various social and psychological phenomena of other kinds (on this protean quality of fama see above p. 6). Chapter 6 examines the workings of fama in later ancient epic: Virgil's f/Fama makes appearances of various kinds in Lucan and the Flavian epicists, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus, Lucan in particular pushing at the boundaries of what can be done within a Virgilian tradition. In the late Greek Dionysiaca of Nonnus the contest between Zeus and Typhoeus (the monster who is already one of the mythological models for Virgil’s Fama) takes us back to the beginnings of the struggle for control of the word in the Iliad, and throws up intriguing parallels with Virgilian patterns. Chapters 7 and 8 turn to the prose genre of historiography. After some observations on the workings of fama in Greek and Roman political life, and some discussion of the historian and fama, | offer detailed readings of

the ‘plots of fama’ in Livy and Tacitus, showing how each historian narrates the interweavings of fama, in its various meanings, through the events that they record. There are continuities, but a clear distinction emerges between fama’s operations, at least as represented by the two historians, within the respective power structures of the Republic and principate. Tacitus’ Agricola is read for its thematization of a contrast between a ‘good’ Republican variety of fama and a ‘bad’ imperial variety. In a coda to the Tacitus chapter I look at fama in the works of two of Tacitus’ contemporaries writing in very different genres, Pliny the Younger’s Letters and Martial’s Epigrams, in which the politics and values of fama have a very different feel from the impression given by the Histories and Annals of Tacitus, militating against any simple characterization of ‘imperial fama’. The next two chapters are organized thematically, considering fama in its relation firstly to love and desire, and secondly to blame and envy. Chapter 9 explores the erotics of fama across a wide range of texts and periods, looking at both the often quasi-sexual desire for fame, and the variously conflicting or mutually reinforcing relationship between the pursuit of fame and honour and the pursuit of an erotic goal. Chapter 10 discusses the dark doubles that dog shining fame, blame and envy, as preface to a reading of the contest between praise and glory, on the one hand, and, on the other,

envy and detraction that is played out in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, with recurrent allusion to Virgilian and Ovidian models. Chapters 11 and 12 focus on authors whose subject matter provokes a direct engagement with the Christian critique of fama. Chapter 11 centres on three Renaissance Neolatin poets who narrate events from the New Testament (Sannazaro on the birth of Christ, and Vida on the life, death and

resurrection of Christ) or, in the case of Milton’s poem on the Gunpowder

Plotting fama

Plot, a Christian providentialist version of a national history. Heroic and poetic fama-as-fame are revalued, and the politics of fama-as-report, -asrumour, are also made

new. Renewal is an obsession of Petrarch, as also

is fame, and in Chapter

12 I focus on two works from Petrarch’s life-long

obsession with fame. In the Trionfi Fame triumphs over Death, and is in turn triumphed over by Time, but fame runs as a theme through all six Triumphs, from the Triumph of Love to the Triumph of Eternity. In this last, a poetic version of a Christian apocalypse, Fame and Love are renewed in a conclusion of dubious orthodoxy. In his unfinished Latin epic the Africa, Petrarch uses the epic and historiographical tradition to test both the power and the fragility of fame, and attempts to write himself into an epic succession of fama in a struggle with the forces of envy and time. Chapter 13 looks at the politics and ideology of fama in early modern England, with particular reference to the legitimation of the monarch. The entrance of ‘Rumour painted full of tongues’ in the Induction to Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2 is at the centre of a web of themes and images of fama that reaches over the entirety of the tetralogy of Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. Shakespeare, like other late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English poets, uses the civil wars of medieval England as a mirror for the concerns of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Ben Jonson turns more to the classical models in the dramatization of fama in

his plays and masques. He also has a keen nose for the mutations undergone by fama in the incipient news industry of the early seventeenth century. Chapter 14 returns to texts on biblical subjects. Milton's major epic, Paradise Lost, presents

a number of ‘houses of fama’, places of verbal chaos and

disorder, in clear contrast to the straightforward and orderly dispositions of the Word of God. In the more agonistic genre of drama, the battles over the control of fama that rage throughout Samson Agonistes reach much less clear-cut conclusions. Chapter 15 takes one of the richest of all fama texts, Chaucer's House of Fame, together with an early eighteenth-century act of homage to Chaucer, Pope's Temple of Fame, in order to construct an epilogue wherein to reflect on a number of the themes that have run through the book. Finally in Chapter 161 essay a survey and sampling of visual images of f/Fama, looking for continuities and discontinuities with the textual material.

47

2

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

For audiences and readers both ancient and modern the tradition of Western classical literature opens with what was already a traditional form of praise poetry, the hexameter epos of Homer, whose function is to make famous (KA&w) the deeds of heroes and gods, and so memorialize them in poetic tradition as famous deeds (xAéa). An enormous amount has been written

on «Atos in the Homeric poems in particular.' Never a simple given, epic fame is always caught up in complex negotiations within the value-system of a competitive and hierarchical society, in which the desire of the individual hero for a lasting fame that will compensate for the brevity of his biological life may either work with or strain against the interests of the group of which he is a member, that group whose continued existence through the generations is a precondition for the lasting survival of the individual's fame: fame vanishes if there are no mouths to speak, ears to hear, or eyes to see. KAéos ‘fame’ is cognate with KAUw ‘hear’; fame is etymologically a report, something spoken that is heard. Particularly important for fame in the epic tradition are the mouths of succeeding generations of epic poets, the ears of their audiences, and, later, the eyes of readers. The survival of

the fame of epic heroes depends on the survival of the poems that celebrate, and constitute, that fame, poems that themselves are famous by virtue of repeated listenings or readings. There is a long and complex history of the relationship, often rivalrous, between the poet and his hero(es), and a

self-consciousness about the poet's own pretensions to KAéos can be traced back to Homer himself." Poets also interrogate the models of fame that they inherit from their predecessors, in an intertextuality that engages with changing paradigms for the role of outstanding individuals within a society

On the Indo-European tradition of fame within which early Greek poetry is to be situated see West 2007: 396-410 ‘Transcending mortality through fame: A sample from the vast literature

tQ

on kAéos in Homer: Redfield 1994: 30-9 ‘The fames of men’; Nagy

48

1979: Chs. 2 and 3 on the

complementary conceptions of kAéos in the Iliad and Odyssey, Goldhill 1991: Ch. 2 (with 72 n. 12 for further bibliography); Olson 1995: 1-23; Graziosi and Haubold 2005: Ch. 5. On the range of meanings of Homeric kAéos see Mackie 1996: 85-90. Recently by de Jong 2006.

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

caught up in historical process." In matters of fame, textuality and history are always inseparable. This history of fame begins with the Odyssey’s interrogation and correction of the Iliad, and the replacement of the Achillean model of a fame won through brilliant deeds on the battlefield, but at the cost of a homecoming (vöoTos), with the career of a hero, Odysseus, whose fame is that of a hero who succeeds in returning home, largely through the exercise of skills of concealment and trickery.' In this chapter I look at «Atos ‘fame’ in Homer and Hesiod (whose hexameter didactic poems, also classed as epos in antiquity, are closely related to Homer's narrative hexameter poems) in its relationship to a variety of uses of the spoken word (and to which is applied a variety of Greek terms), as those uses are either made the subject of discussion by the hexameter

poet (in the case of Hesiod's

Works and Days), or shown

in operation within the world of the epic heroes (in the case of the Iliad and Odyssey). The focus is not so much on the kinds of behaviour that are granted the privilege of lasting fame, but on the ways in which lasting report establishes itselfin collaboration or contest with other kinds of verbal performance. At the beginning of the classical tradition Homer and Hesiod offer complex treatments of the power struggles operative in the workings of the word in the world, struggles that reveal the poet seeking to establish his place within the structures of divine and human society. These power struggles are often bound up with differences of social class: in so far as the history of fama is the history of the word within social structures, these Homeric and Hesiodic episodes anticipate much that will occupy us later in this book. However, one difference between the early Greek texts I discuss

in this chapter and the bulk of the material covered in the book, which is in Latin or in a Latinate tradition, is that for Homer

and Hesiod there is

no single Greek word whose semantic range covers the nexus of meanings within the Latin word fama. In the Introduction I drew attention to the ways in which fama may structure narratives both as an opening gambit and as a closural move (Ch. 1 pp. 36-8). Here I look at larger-scale structures near the beginning of the Homeric epics, in which messages, reports and other kinds of verbal

performance appear in episodes that look ahead to the final monumentalization of fama in the completed narrative of the epic poem. Before that I

> On the changing profile of «Atos in post-Homeric elegiac and lyric poets in Greece, working with and against Homeric patterns, see Goldhill 1991: 108-66. 4 On the complexities and ironies of Odyssean «Atos read against the lliadic model see Segal 1996.

49

50

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

look at a passage on priun ‘talk, gossip’ that comes at the end of the main section of Hesiod's Works and Days, but whose full significance emerges only through considering its interaction with passages at the beginning of the poem.

Hesiod Hesiod defines himself as a poet of KAéos at the beginning of both the Theogony and the Works and Days. In the former he tells how the Muses breathed into him a divine voice, (32) iva xAeioını TA T’ Eooöueva Trpó T éovta ‘so that

I might make

famous what will be and what was before’,

and, in the next line, how the Muses also ordered him to celebrate, hymn (Wuveiv), the race of the gods. These two verbs also occur in the first two

lines of the Works and Days, in an invocation to the Muses that leads into a hymn to Zeus: MoUoat T'hepín8ev, &oiSfjoi kAeioucat, | SeUte, Ai’ EvvérrETE, ogétepov rra ép" üuveloucat ‘Muses from Pieria who confer fame in songs, come hither and tell of Zeus, hymning your father’. The ‘Works’ section of the poem, to which the ‘Days’ is a 64-line appendage, ends not with «Atos but with another term for verbal report, onun ‘talk’, ‘report’ or ‘rumour’, here personified and divinized (an uncontrovertible example, it would appear, of Herodotus’ assertion (2.53) that Homer and Hesiod gave the gods their names and operations), Op. 760-4: GS’ EpSeiv: BeAr 56 Bpotwv UtraAeveo prjunv' nun Yap re xar) TEAET, koügr uev óeipaa pela aA, ápyaAEn BE pépeiv, Kader 8 &rro8éc8a. 9fjun & ob Tis Tráurrav &mróAA vat,

fjvriva roAAoi

Aaoi enuí&oucr Beds vu Tis &cTi kal au).

Act this way. Avoid the wretched talk of mortals. For talk is evil: it is light and very easy to raise up, but it is difficult to bear and hard to put down. No talk ever entirely perishes, once many people talk it abroad; it too is some god.

This is a use of words that seems to have nothing to do with the poet, being the voice of the ‘many people’, not the voice of the individual Hesiod. Yet, as well as being a last word of the poet (if we regard the "Works' section as separable from the ‘Days’ that follow), pqun shares with later examples of closural poetic fama the property of immortality, and for the same reason, that her words will be perpetuated by the many (in later poets either through successive readings or revoicings of the words of a text). phun & ov Tis

Hesiod

Traumav &móAAvTai

echoes the Homeric formula KAtos oU trot’ dAcital

‘fame will never perish’ (Il. 2.325, 7.91; Od. 24.196).° o6... rráumrav may mean either ‘not at all’ (the normal Homeric meaning), or ‘not altogether’,

yielding a statement comparable to Horace’s claim to immortality in fame in Odes 3.30.6, non omnis moriar‘I shall not altogether die’.° That immortality is one of Prjun’s qualifications for divinity; another is her great power. prun is introduced as a principle of social regulation, summing up a rather heterogeneous section of ‘social and religious precepts’ (West’s heading for 695—764). But for a complete picture of the place of phn in Hesiod’s overall scheme of things we need to go back to the beginning of the Works and Days, and take into account the ring-composition that links the end of the ‘Works’ both to the opening of the ‘Works’ proper, the passage on the two Strifes at 11-26, and also to the opening invocation to the Muses and hymn to Zeus (1-10): Moücaı Thepindev, coidijo1 KAelovoaı, Seute, Ai’ Evvétrete cpérepov Tratép’ Uuveioucal, 6v TE Bia Bpotoi dvbpes Suds Gqatoi te patoi TE, pntol T’ &pprtoi te Aids ueyóáAoio Ext. péa u£v yap Bpiael, pea 56 Bpiáovra yaAérTel, pela 8’ &piZnAov uuvüßeı kai &6nAov ài, peia Bé 1' i&Uver oOKOALOV Kai áyfivopa Kkäpgeı

5

Zeus üyıßpenetns, os UTréeptata 5onara vaiel. KATO: ibcov &ícov Te, Sikn 5’ tuve Gépiotas

TUvry Eye BE ke TTépom &érrjruua uußnoaiurv.

10

oUx ápa mouvov Env Epidwv yévos, GAA’ &ri yaiav tici Suc

TTV pév Kev ETTAIVTIGEIE vorjcas,

fj 8° &rmipcounry Sia 8 áv8rya Gupov Exouciv.

Tj MEV yàp TrOAeuóOv TE Kkakov Kai ÖTjpv óg£AAe!, oxeTAin: ob Tis Tfjv ye qiAei Bporós, GAA’ UT? áváyxns &8avárov BouAT|civ "Epiv Tıuwcı Bapeiav. Tfjv 8' étépny mrporépnv uiv éyeivaro NUE Epeßevvri,

15

Onke de uiv Kpovidns Uyiduyos, aldepı vaicov,

yains 7 év Gia nai xai áàv8páci TroAAÓv Aneiva' f| Te kai &rráAagóv Trep ÖH@S ETT! Epyov Eyeipev' eis Erepov yap Tis TE idov Epyolo xaríGov

20

TAOUGIOV, 6s oTreUBEI u£v Apwpevanı NSE PUTELEIV

> Bakker 2002: 141 ‘ironic citation of the. . . [Homeric] expression’. 6

West 1978 on 763 of... TapTrav: ‘the normal meaning in Homer is "not at all”, though in

IL 12.406, Od. 18.346 = 20.284, "not altogether" may be meant: Clément-Tarantino 2006: 245-6 points out that Aen. 4.195 haec passim dea foeda uirum diffudit in ora combines Hesiod's bad 9jun, who is a ‘god, with the Ennian claim to the poet's immortality as he flies per ora uirum.

5]

52

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

olkóv T’ eU Htodaı, GrjAot 8€ TE yeitova yeitwv

tls ápevos oTrevSovt” ayadr 8 “Epis ide Bporoiow. Kai KEPONEUS Keparuel KOTEEI Kal TEKTOVI TEKTWV,

Kai TTWXOS TWX

25

q8ovéei Kai do1Sds coisa.

Muses from Pieria, who make famous in songs, come hither and tell of Zeus, hymn-

ing your father, through whom mortal men are unfamed and famed alike, and named and unnamed, by the will of great Zeus. For easily he strengthens, and easily he crushes the strong, easily he diminishes the conspicuous and increases the inconspicuous, and easily he straightens the crooked and withers the manly — high-thundering Zeus, who dwells in the highest mansions. Give ear to me, watching and listening, and straighten the verdicts with justice yourself; as for me, I will proclaim truths to

Perses. So there was not just one birth of Strifes after all, but upon the earth there are two Strifes. One of these

a man

would

praise once he got to know

it, but the other is

blameworthy; and they have two different spirits. For the one fosters evil war and conflict — cruel one, no mortal loves that one, but it is by necessity that they honour the oppressive Strife, by the plans of the immortals. But the other one gloomy Night bore first; and Cronus’ high-throned son, who dwells in the aether, set it in the roots

of the earth, and it is much better for men. It rouses even the helpless man to work. For a man who is without work but who looks at some other man, a rich one who is

eager to plough and plant and set his house in order, he envies him, one neighbour envying his neighbour who is eager for wealth: and this Strife is good for mortals. And potter is angry with potter, and builder with builder, and beggar begrudges beggar, and poet poet.

®run and the Muses’ praise of Zeus In the section of ‘social and religious precepts’ men are also advised to beware of the vengeance of the gods (706 et 8 órriv á&avárov nakápov T£pUAary uévos

eivai), but, as we have seen, what men say, prjun, becomes a

god herself in the end.’ The anaphora and balanced oppositions of 760-4, and the use of fia, echo the style of the opening invocation, whose subject is largely the relation between gods and speech. The Muses are called to praise Zeus, and KAeiovoai is the last word of the first line, but, in a dichotomy

relating to the power of speech, it is Zeus himself who determines whether men are spoken of or not, Zeus who, controlling fame, ‘easily diminishes 7 Gods and men are kept separate at Theognis 1296-7 8v 8” &romíZeo uiv | Bá£iw T’ &vOpcomro, fra voooáuevos.

Hesiod

the conspicuous, famous, man, and increases the inconspicuous, obscure,

man’. The justice of Zeus will become the final guarantee of the social regulatory force of prjun, as it is already implicit in lines 9-10 that the poet's admonitory use of human words, ‘I should like to tell true things to Perses’, is in step with Zeus’s ‘making straight of judgements'? If we read lines 760—4 with the Proem in mind, alliances are forged firstly between what the poet says and the power wielded over report by Zeus and his daughters the Muses; secondly between what the many say and what the supreme god Zeus determines; thirdly between the words of the poet and what the people say. The first of these is the expected legitimation of the voice of the poet through its divine sources; the second and third adumbrate

theological, social and

political relationships that will be central to the whole history of Fama. But what Hesiod attempts to define as unproblematical structures of power and report are more usually the sites of bitter contest: Fama sometimes works with the supreme god, but as often she is a rebel. The poet may wish to see himself as the mouthpiece of a compliant people, but as often he is in competition with the many in his attempt to control the propagation of verbal report. Jenny Strauss Clay comments on the contrast between the kAéos to which the participle kAeíoucat in the first line of the poem points (specifically the fame of the supreme god Zeus) and the closing erjun: “The substitution of pheme for kleos.. . reminds us that Hesiod is depicting a decidedly postheroic world’,’ a world far removed from that of the gods and heroes of the

Theogony and the Catalogue of Women. Yet there are continuities: pfjun too turns out to be a god, to be added to the list of those in the Theogony, and

Hesiod offers her a kind of mini-hymn in the concluding lines of the ‘Works’. And human report or gossip at the end is a sanction for the justice of Zeus. In line 760 the instruction to avoid ‘evil report’ follows the injunction 8’ teSeiv ‘act [or “work”], in this way, which could be taken as summing up the content of the whole of the ‘Works’.'° The final deification of grjun is the conclusion to a series of precepts that point to the importance of maintaining a good name through proper application to ‘works’: for example, in the lines

8 This is another facet of the equivalence of poet and king suggested at Theog. 80-103.

? Clay 2003: 148. 10 West 1978 ad loc. seems arbitrary: ‘The phrase sums up the preceding advice (695 ff.) rather than the whole poem...' That &8’ £pBev may summon up the Epya of the poem’s title is suggested by the context of its use at 382, @8’ &pbeiv, kai Epyov et’ Epyw Epyaßeodaı. The title "Epya xai fjuépai is found in all the manuscripts; ancient authors sometimes refer to the work just as’Epya (RE vıı.i.1178).

53

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

shortly preceding the prun passage, at 701 the sanction against taking a bad wife is the risk of becoming a laughing-stock among your neighbours; at 714 Hesiod warns his audience not to let their mental disposition disgrace their outward appearance, at 715-16 to avoid being called bad names, and in the following lines to avoid the escalation of mutual insults.!

OAun

is

the culminating regulatory force for all of the *works' that man must submit himself to in the age of Zeus.

One ®run, twoEpides?

It has often been observed that the new goddess ®rjun at the end of the ‘Works’ balances the new goddess at the beginning of the poem, the second, good, "Epis added at 11-26 to the single, bad, "Epis of Theog. 225-6. For example, Hans Diller observes: ‘Just as Hesiod creates a new divine power at the beginning, in the good Eris, so at the end, in Pheme. Nevertheless,

she is not split into two beings, like Eris.’’- 12 Diller's qualification must be questioned: although Hesiod only mentions one prjun, he implies two, good report or reputation, and bad (bad at least from the point of view of the person talked about) — bona fama and mala fama. For the ordinary man in the world of the Works and Days the positive counterpart to qrjun Kakrı will not be KAéos, the fame enjoyed by outstanding individuals, but orjun

&yaßr, a ‘good reputation’ among one's neighbours."

!!

Bona Quaglia

M

In fact pfiun enters into more than one dichotomy. We have already looked at the opposition between qrjun and KAéos, between humble and transient gossip and shining and lasting praise, an opposition that Hesiod paradoxically undermines by attributing undying divinity to ®run.'" This is not the only place where a sharp distinction between rumour, report, on the one hand, and fame on the other cannot be maintained. Another dichotomy is suggested by the last specific injunction that relates to the use of speech, shortly before the concluding prjun lines, 755-6 und’ iepotoiv Et’

Diller 1962: 273. See Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1928: 129; Walcot

1973: 218; Arrighetti

1985: xxvii-xxvili. 1966: 82-3; Hamilton

1989:

74; Clay 2003: 148. vo

54

West 1978 on line 760, supporting the reading BeıArjv: ‘reputation may be good or bad, and the adjective specifies which. On the general tendency in Hesiod for the doubling of moral concepts see Martinazzoli 1946. Hesiod’s farmers do not inhabit the same elevated sphere as the Homeric heroines Penelope and Clytaemnestra, whose lasting reputations in song according to the ghost of Agamemnon will be, respectively, imperishable xA£os for virtue, and xakern onus (Od. 24.194-202). On orn

as the negative counterpart of KAtos see Bakker 2002: 140-2.

Hesiod

ai&ouévoici kupricas | uooueutiv &iBnAa “do not carp destructively at burning sacrifices when you encounter them’.'” Here the opposition is between unfounded Móuos ‘blame, criticism’ (Theog. 214) and well-founded (bad)

reputation.'“ The connection between Onun and the two”Epi&es is drawn more closely

by the fact that Hesiod’s description of ®rjun is calqued on the Homeric personification of Eris, with the contrast of small beginnings and subsequent sky-reaching growth translated into the contrast of ‘easy to pick up, difficult to carry, and hard to put down’ (Il. 4.440—5, in a list of the divine forces arousing the Trojans and Greeks to battle):'” Atiuós 1' 16€ Dópos kai "Epis áporov uenavia, Apeos áv5pogóvoio kactyvntn Érápn Te, 47’ OAlyT u£v rrpósra Kopvoceta, autäp ETrerTa ovpaves EoTrpige KapT Kat &rri x8ovi Baivel: fj ow

kai TOTE velkos ópoíiov EuBaAe uécoco

£pyonévr Kad’

Sui

ov, ópéAAouca a1óvov &vbpóv.

and Panic and Fear and Strife raging insatiably, the sister and companion of manslaying Ares; she rears up small at first, but then fixes her head in the heavens and

walks upon the earth: she it was who then also cast battle in common in their midst, going through the throng and multiplying the groans of men.

u“

More than highlighting a shared propensity to sudden growth, the parallelism between ®rjun and “Epis hints at an essentially agonistic quality of Fama, important above all in the epic tradition, in which the struggle between competing reports and reputations mirrors the physical contests of the epic battlefield, a struggle in which the epic poet himself is engaged in an effort to be the best. That kind of competition is recognized by Hesiod at the end of the section on the two Strifes (Op. 24-6), when the beneficial effect of the good Strife is exemplified in the anger felt by potter against potter, builder against builder, and the envy felt by beggar against beggar, and, last in the list, &oi5ós ‘poet’ against &o1dös.!* Immediately before the qfjun lines if West is right in transposing 757-9 to follow 736. Móuos is the daughter of Night, the second birth after Mópos ‘Doom, Krip ‘Fate, Qavatos "Death," Y vos

‘Sleep’ and the tribe of Dreams.

Scholia vetera ad Op. 760-4 gloss the Hesiodic description of D'iun in a way that makes her more similar both to Homeric Eris and to the Virgilian and Ovidian Fama: 'for men are in the habit of multiplying whatever rumours (qfjuos) they receive and of making small ones into big ones. See Most 2003 on the implicit Hesiodic splitting of envy into the contrasting pair of (good) ‘emulation’ and (bad) ‘envy’

55

56

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

Hesiod introduces the two Strifes themselves within a framework of verbal judgement: 12-13 ‘the one might be praised by a man who saw her at work, the other found fault with’ — étraivos and udyos (or yöyos),

praise and blame, good fama and bad fama. Already at Theog. 226-32 the progeny of the fertile (bad) Eris includes creatures of strife both physical and verbal: 228-9 ‘Youivas Te Mayas Te Dovous 1' Av6pokraocías Te | Neíkeó TE YevSea te Adyous 1' AugiAAoyías Te ‘Fights and Battles and Murders and

Manslayings and Quarrels and Lies and Words and Disputes’ It is the job of the aoidos Hesiod to persuade us that this is the correct allocation of praise and blame between the two Strifes, in the face of the competing view of the world ascribed to the misguided Perses, tempted into taking pleasure in the bad Strife manifested in judicial disputes (Op. 27-41). A recurrent theme of this book is the tendency of fama to structure itself in dichotomies, while at the same time the sharp division between

the terms on either side of the resulting table of opposites is constantly in danger of breaking down. The ‘problem of dichotomization’, if one can put it like that, is already apparent in an archaic and polarizing poet like Hesiod, who yet finds it difficult to distinguish clearly between things praiseworthy and things blameworthy. As Hesiod proceeds with the account of his new goddess, the good Strife, the language seems more and more to align her with the bad Strife.'” ‘Jealous emulation’ (ZnAoi) of a neighbour is a spur to hard work. The ‘anger’ or ‘grudge’ (koréei) felt by potter against potter or builder against builder is a more violent emotion, and the envy (p@ovée1) of beggar against beggar or poet against poet is a more negative version of neighbourly GfjAos. pBdvos ‘envy’, inuidia, is the hostile criticism which poets most fear and revile, from Pindar onwards (see Ch. 10 pp. 384-7). In the epilogue to the Hymn to Apollo the Hellenistic poet Callimachus boots out both ®8övos and

Mónpos

(105-13).

In so far as Hesiod’s good Strife is productive

of

q9óvos she risks falling into the category of "Epis érmipcounfi 'blameworthy Strife’ (Op. 13). Complexity also attends the Onun of 760-4: the adjectives applied to her are all negative, and the parallels with Homer's description of (a bad) “Epis and with Hesiod's own description of opis 'insolence, outrageousness""" reinforce the negative impression. At the same time she

On the ambiguity of pis and other moral terms see Gagarin 1990, who sees such things as programmatic for Hesiod's vision of the ambiguity and arbitrariness of the hurnan world in the Works and Days, a pointed correction of the simpler, black-and-white, world of the gods in the Theogony. Gagarin is influenced by Pietro Pucci's deconstructive readings of Hesiod and Homer. Op. 213-16 W Tépon, ov 8’ &xoutc Aixns und’ UBpiv ógeAAc | ÜBpis yap Te Kart) BeÀo Bpota, oU8€ piv EoBAds | 6niBícos oepéuev SUvaTan, Bapudeı 5€ 0' UT’ auTtis | EyKUpoas áTnoiv.

Hesiod

is the final and perhaps most powerful weapon in the poet’s armoury of persuasion against his brother’s, and the wider audience’s, disinclination

to conform to the behaviour required in the present age of Zeus. With this positive regulatory function of an agent characterized as ‘bad’ may be compared the paradoxical effects within the Aeneid of the goddess Fama, introduced as a malum (Aen. 4.174) and even an enemy of Jupiter, but whose

action in Aeneid 4 has the effect of furthering Jupiter's plans and Aeneas' destined fate (see Ch. 3 pp. 104—5). A final opposition deconstructed in the person of Hesiod's ®rjun is one that structures the whole of the Hesiodic (and Homeric)

world outlook,

the opposition between mortals and immortals. orjurj is introduced as specifically the report of mortals (Ppot@v), but at the end she is said to be a goddess. In the later tradition of fama ephemerality and permanence coexist in a tension never finally resolved. In terms of the Greek lexicon, Hesiod's

deification of prjun may have been eased by the frequent use of the word to denote an ‘utterance prompted by the gods, significant or prophetic saying’ (LSJ s.v. 1.1), as well as the equally common meaning of ‘report, rumour’

(LSJ 1.2)" run is not the poet's voice, save to the extent that he enlists her support at a climactic point in his didactic poem. The duality and ambiguity contained in her person may however be compared, in a general way, to the opposition between two kinds of knowledge and utterance announced by the Muses in the scene of Hesiod’s poetic initiation at the beginning of the Theogony: 27-8 iSpev yevSea TOAAG Atyeıv Erüpoicw 6uola, | Syev 8' e071’ EBEAWHEV é&An86a ynpucac$ai ‘we know how to say many false things similar to genuine ones, but we know, when we wish, how to proclaim true things: The exact nature of the contrast is much debated, but it seems likely that the

contrast is between two types of utterance with which Hesiod is empowered by the Muses, rather than between an untruthful poetry practised by other poets, and a truthful poetry practised by Hesiod." A contrast between truths and lies, fact and fiction, is at the heart of the later construction of fama, poetic and otherwise. Virgil's Fama sings indifferently of things done and things not done, pariter facta atque infecta (Aen. 4.190). The ancestors of Virgil's Fama include both Hesiod's ®rjun and the Hesiodic Muses (see Ch. 3 pp. 107-8).

?!

On the two senses of 9rjun (divine revelation, and popular rumour) Laws, see Detienne

??

1981: 172-6; Brisson

in Plato, especially in the

1982: 39. See also n. 42 below. For an argument that

in Latin fama and fari have connotations of a divinely authorized voice see Bettini 2008. For a recent discussion with reference to earlier literature see Clay 2003: 58-64.

57

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

Homer

Hesiod’s Works and Days concludes with the paradoxical immortality of the transient words of human gossip, the monumentalization of the ephemeral. It forms the climax of a poem that deals with a world in which heroic KAéos

is not the chief force motivating mortals. I turn back now to the Homeric epics, with their fully developed ideology of kAéos. Here too we shall see that ‘fame’ is not a self-subsistent entity, but is evolved out of, and defines itself

by contrast with, other kinds of report and verbal usage, from which it can

never entirely detach itself." Human and divine politics of the word in Iliad 2.1-335 The plot of the Iliad is launched in Book 1 with the narrative of the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon and the consequent dispositions on the human and divine levels that will determine the action of the poem up until the death of Patroclus. The forward impetus of the plot is then delayed by an episode that takes up the first 330 lines of Book 2, the apparently pointless testing of the Greek army by Agamemnon in an assembly. Among other things the episode, the only large-scale non-military crowd scene in the Iliad, is an extensive exploration, near the beginning of the epic, of the power of the word, of the channels of communication both between gods

and men and between men, and of the social hierarchy within which speech operates." Different vehicles of the word are characterized by different degrees of truthfulness and authority. At the end of the sequence a proper and successful use of words within the action of the poem has the effect of restoring the plot to its predetermined course, with a forward look to the undying «Atos, fama, that will memorialize the achievement of that plot. The chain of words is initiated on Olympus, with the descent from heaven of a ‘destructive dream’ (oUAos "Oveipos) sent by Zeus to Agamemnon. The message of the Dream is false, and the dream appears to Agamemnon in the false guise of Nestor, but as ‘messenger of Zeus’ (26, 63 Aids GyyeAos) the Dream

Nw =

58

is an accurate purveyor

of Zeus’s word,

in obedience

to the

This duality is built into the Greek term KAéos (as it is also built into the Latin fara: see Ch. I P. 2: the first two senses of «Atos in LdfE are 1. ‘Ruhm, Lob; 2. ‘Kunde’ (3. ‘“Märe”, ruhmreiche Taten’).

As noted by Reinhardt 1961: 112 (on the agore in Il. 2) ‘die einzige große Massenszene in der ganzen Ilias... Während in der Heeresversammlung des ersten Buches die Masse des Heeres nur Kulisse war um das Spiel der Fürsten untereinander, ist es jetzt umgekehrt.’

Homer

god’s command

(10 rrávra par’ &rpekécos ayopevevev as ETITEAAW). The

word of Zeus is accurately relayed not once, but twice, the second time on the human level, yielding a threefold repetition of the message within the words of the Iliad: (i) 8-15 Zeus to the Dream; to Agamemnon;

(iii) 60-70

Agamemnon

(ii) 23-33 the Dream

to the Boule

(11-15

=

28-32

(with one change of person) = 65-9; 23-33 = 60-70). This threefold repetition is the most extensive and most exact repetition of its kind in the Homeric poems. For the poet such repeated and exact transmission of a message may reflect on the ideal functioning of the oral epic tradition itself." The Dream leaves Agamemnon, who wakes up but still has 'the divine

voice poured around him’, (41) dein Sé uiv &ug£xuT óugri." The connection between dreams and fama will have a long history (see e.g. Ch. 6 pp. 173-4). On earth the king also attempts to control events by lending his authority to words designed to deceive: 73 Tpa@ta 8’ Eywv Érreow Treiptjooual, f| Benis &cví ‘first I will test them with words, as is my right: The symbol of his authority is his staff, oxfjitttpov, which has descended from Olympus, before passing through the bloodline of the house of Pelops (101-8 made by Hephaistos, given to Zeus, to Hermes, to Pelops, to Atreus, to Thyestes,

to Agamemnon), like authoritative words faithfully transmitted along a chain of communication. The king also has his own reliable conveyors of the verbal expression of his will, the heralds (krjpukes 50),^* who

act also

to check the confused voices (&UT1]) of the people (97-8) that threaten to

drown out the At this point that authorize that the word

word of the kings, ‘fostered by Zeus.” there is a breakdown of the distinction between the sources utterances of king and of common people. Nestor claims of the king is guarantee that the Dream is not a wetSos

'falsehood' (81), and he and we are attentive to Agamemnon's

claim that

the dream was the messenger of Zeus. But the crowd too is guided by, and is perhaps itself almost an embodiment of, another messenger of Zeus: 93-4

tS» un

uerà dt cgiciv “Oooa dedneı | 6tPUVOUG"

o

26

27 2

»

2

Doe

iévai Aids &yyeAos ‘among them

On repeated messenger-speeches see de Jong 19374: 180-5. So Laird 1999: 260 ‘this poetic convention [of the divine messenger] [is] a mise en abyme for verbal communication and for narratival representation’, 305 ‘messenger scenes. . . recall the ways in which epic poems are composed and transmitted: In Homer dug? is always a ‘voice’ of the gods: see LdfE s.v. Heralds are themselves labelled Aids &yyeAoi Hde kai Gvbpdv (Il. 1.334, 7.274), so further

aligning them with the divine order of things. The crowd is often the propagator of fama, and is itself characterized by attributes and images shared with fama, such as a propensity to sudden growth, images of fire, sea, wind: see Canetti 1962: 16-17, 28-30.

59

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

blazed out rumour, the messenger of Zeus, speeding them on their way." At this point a crowd-generated voice works in collaboration with the relay of words initiated by Zeus in the dream of Agamemnon and continued in the reports and proposal of the kings. But once assembled, the crowd, in reaction to the Test of Agamemnon, are stirred like the sea or a cornfield by winds; their roar (153 &UT1) soars to the heavens, obliterating the authority

of the king and potentially preventing the sky-reaching fame of the ultimate Greek victory at Troy. Order is then restored through another descent of the word from Olympus, this time working through Odysseus, who takes up the staff of Agamemnon (186). The relay goes from Hera to Athene

(156-65), and then from

Athene to Odysseus (173-81), again with some exact verbal repetition of the message (164-5 = 180-1). Both Athene and Odysseus speak &yavois étréeoov ‘with gentle words’. The odd redirection to Odysseus by Athene of Hera's instructions to herself*' perhaps works to suggest a close association between Odysseus and Athene, and between the words of Odysseus and those of Athene. Odysseus' words, gentle to individual chiefs, threatening to individual members of the demos and assisted with the coercive physical force of the staff, restore order, and the Achaeans return from the ships to

the agore, with a roar again compared to the crashing sea. The social conflict of the word is now focussed in the confrontation between Odysseus, the prudent speaker, and Thersites, (212) &uerpoerrfis ‘unmeasured

in words,

(246)

àkprróuu80os

‘confused

in utterance’, who

(213) Een... &ákocu& TE TOAAG TE fjön ‘knew many disorderly words’. Thersites has been seen as the embodiment of the institution of blame poetry, yöyos, the opposite of the praise poetry that is epic." That opposition is not absolute, and epic can host blame when directed at an appropriate target, as happens in this episode when Odysseus turns the tables and makes Thersites the recipient of blame (246-64).”' We may feel that Thersites is

not wholly unjustified in his quarrel with Agamemnon; the real threat he poses is that by his unruly words he may sabotage the epic plot and so Ford 1992: 175-6 'Ossa [in Homer and Hesiod] .. . is a superhuman or unearthly sound that may be marvelous or beautiful in the songs of the gods but is terrible and uncontrollable on earth.’ The voices of the crowd are figuratively identified with a force of nature, fire (Beörjeı ‘blazed’), and denoted as a divine agent (Atos &yyeAos): this anticipates the similar combination in the person of Virgil’s Fama of figurative force of nature (she is a fiery thunderbolt) and of divinity (Aen. 4.195 dea): see Ch. 3 pp. 83, 85. 3

nn SS

60

3 3

For a parallel see Il. 16.454-7 = 671-5: Zeus redirects Hera's command to himselfto Apollo. Nagy 1979: Chs. 12-14. For more recent bibliography on Thersites see Rosen 2007: 72 n. 11. See Rosen 2007: Ch. 3, revising Nagy.

Homer

prevent the performance of the heroic actions that will be immortalized in fame by the Iliad and by the following epic narratives of the conclusion of the Trojan War and the sack of Troy." Odysseus follows his harsh words of blame to Thersites with physical violence, striking him with the staff. The voice of the many now expresses its approval of Odysseus’ restraint of Thersites’ unbridled words: 271 @5e Bé tis eitreoxev i&cov és mrAncíov GAAov ‘thus one man said, looking to his

neighbour’.** The result is an image of the well-ordered agore: Odysseus holding the staff, Athene at his side in the likeness of a herald, the assembled Achaeans listening attentively, 278-82: "Ws pdaav fj Ans

avd 8 6 TTOAITIOpBos

OBucctus

Eon OKTTTpoV Exwv’ rapa 8£ yAaukömıs Adrıun eidonevn) KTIPUKI 0IWTTÄV Aaóv ávoyyti, ws Gua 9' oi TTp@Toi Te Kai Gotatoı ules Ayaiav

uü8ov ákoüuctiav Kai Erippaccaíaro BouATyv: Thus spoke the crowd. The citysacker Odysseus stood up holding the staff; by his side Athene of the gleaming eyes, in the likeness of a herald, ordered the people to be silent, so that the first and last of the sons of the Achaeans might together hear his words and take note of his counsel.

At the end the &uüTf, ‘roar’ of the people now bursts out in confirmation of Odysseus' speech (334). The overall result of this great ebullition of words divine and human is to restore the epic to its proper track. What Odysseus conveys in his speech to the assembled Achaeans is a reminder of the divinely sanctioned words of the seer Calchas, when he interpreted the omen of the serpent and the sparrows at Aulis, translating into words the meaning of a non-verbal message from Zeus. Calchas looked to the ‘late-fulfilled’ but undying KAtos of the sack of Troy: 324-5

fjuiv uiv T68' Epnve Tépas

uéya

unTíera

Zeus,

| öyınov,

ÓwyrrÉAeo Tov, dou KAgos oU trot’ dAeitat ‘All-wise Zeus revealed this great sign to us, late coming, late in fulfilment, whose fame will never perish.’

u

w =

On this Odysseus comments: 330 keivos tas &yópeue: Ta 87) VOV mrávra TeAeitai ‘So he spoke; all these things are now coming to fulfilment.’ Kirk comments: ‘Odysseus recalls Kalchas’ exact words, which will themselves Virgil comments on the complexities of Thersites and of his relation to fara in the figure of Drances in Aeneid 11: see Ch. 4 pp. 145-6. This formula for *what people say' can be used of the propagation of a rumour, as in the carefully fostered rumour of a wedding in the house of Odysseus at Od. 23.148: see below p. 65. On

tis-speeches in the Iliad see de Jong 1987b.

61

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

repeat where possible the terms of Odysseus’ previous narration of events; thus 326 ~ 317, 327 = 313. This is oral economy, or artifice based thereon."

But in the context of the episode as a whole this repetition serves to guarantee the straight course of the epic from its divinely authorized preordination to its fulfilment as monumentalized KAéos.

The resolution to the contest of words imposed by Odysseus thus ensures the future fulfilment of the memorialization of the war at Troy in the words of Atos, i.e. the Iliad itself.” The verbal monument that is the poem contains within itself, and so controls, all the conflicting, disordered and deviant

utterances that threatened to blow the plot off course. The sequence begins with a communication from Zeus, deceptive but designed to further the immediate plan of Zeus (in answer to Thetis’ plea that he honour Achilles), in other words the narrower epic plot of the Iliad itself, and ends with a reaffirmation of the sign from Zeus, vouchsafed at the beginning of the expedition to Troy and nine years before the narrative of the Iliad, and which had guaranteed that the ultimate goal of the expedition, the destruction of Troy, would come to pass in ten years’ time.

Odysseus’ reminder of the omen at Aulis and the KAéos that it portends is one conclusion to the disorder of the first part of Iliad 2. There is a further conclusion which takes us to the end of the book. Odysseus’ speech is not the end of the scene, which continues with speeches by Nestor and Agamemnon. Nestor proposes that the men should be marshalled by tribes and phratries, and after dinner and sacrifice the heralds summon the troops to assemble. They do so in the Catalogue of Ships, the great ‘performance of order’ that corrects the disorderly flight to the ships earlier in the book.** The Catalogue is also a performance of poetic memory and fame, the proud demonstration by the poet that, with the help of the Muses, he can summon up the exact details of the vast Achaean host that came to Troy so many years ago. The invocation to the Muses that prefaces the Catalogue (2.484—93) is one of the major sources for the Virgilian and Ovidian personifications of Fama (see Chs. 3 p. 107; 5 p. 159)."

a

36 Kirk 1985 on lines 323-32. 3 Some see 2.325 as referring to the poet’s own claim for the kAéos of his poem: de Jong 2006: 198 n. 28.

38

‘Performance of order’ is the phrase of Easton 2011: 354, in an account of the expulsion of envy, in the person of Thersites, frorn the praise poetry of the Iliad, an analysis that runs partly parallel to my own account of the first 335 lines of Iliad 2. 39 [n the invocation KAéos is used of the ‘hearsay’ which is all that is available to mortals until it is energized by the full memory brought by the Muses, who know everything because they are present everywhere. For the seeing/hearing dichotomy of fama see Ch. 1 p. 10. e

62

Homer

Odyssey 2, 23, 24 The assembly in Iliad 2, which dramatizes the dependence of events on the variable, unpredictable and contested use of words, but sets all this within the frame of an achieved plot that both in prophetic foresight and poetic hindsight constitutes the fixed «Atos of epic tradition, is, together with the assembly in Iliad 1, the primary model for the assembly at the beginning of Book 2 of the Odyssey, in which Telemachus

rebukes

(86 udpos)

the

suitors and announces his plan of going in search of news of his father. This assembly in turn is a structural counterpart to the one in 24.412-62, in which the relatives of the slain suitors discuss vengeance. Both assemblies are occasions on which competing words are produced in answer to prior messages and reports, and both are staging posts towards conclusions of which the poet already has knowledge with the privilege of hindsight. In Odyssey 2 one Aigyptios, ignorant both of the reason for the unaccustomed summoning of the &yopryv troAv@nuov ‘assembly with its many voices’ (150) and of the identity of the person who has summoned it," speculates (wrongly) that whoever it is may ‘have heard a report of the coming of an army’ (30 HE xiv! &yyeAinv oTparoü EkAuev Epyouévoro)."! He praises the unknown convener, and wishes him a prosperous outcome, TéAos: 33—4 eie

ol ad TO | Zeus &ya8óv reA£cttEV, Ó TI gpeciv foi uevoiva ‘may Zeus bring to pass for him the good that he desires in his heart’. Telemachus rejoices in this onun, a ‘saying’ which has the quality of a good 'omen5" a casual human utterance which has something of the divine about it (a combination which we have seen, in a different context, in the Hesiodic pnun). These words 10 Aigyptios is also ignorant of the fact that his son Antiphos has been killed by a Cyclops named ‘Polyphemos’: see Bakker 2002: 137. ^! [tis unclear whether this refers to ‘news of an invading army’ or ‘a message from the returning army. In context the former is perhaps more likely; the latter would form a neat symmetry with Telemachus' announcement at the end of the agore that he is going in search of news of his father. 42

Or kAenBeov: see Heubeck, West, Hainsworth

1988 ad loc. tun

occurs elsewhere in the

Odyssey at 20.100, 105, of a chance saying accepted as an omen, uttered immediately after Zeus sends the sign of a thunderbolt. Bakker 2002: 139 n. 6 comments: ‘The supreme god acts... as Zeus Diuios.' As distinct from pun, pfinis in Homer means the speech of the demos: Bakker 2002: 140; see also Bergren

1983b: 49, 69 n. 27. On kledonomancy (divination on the basis of

chance utterances: LSJ s.v. kArj5oov 1) see also schol. Il. 2.94 mavougaíos yap 6 Zeus Atyetat (8.250), 6x1 Ta a&Tou&Tox yivouEva eis avTOV àávagéperai, with reference to the widespread ancient belief that chance or unattributed utterances are divine omens, óugaí; cf. also Eustathius, In Od. p. 1885, 8-9 Stallbaum. In a Roman context cf. the story of Aius Locutius,

the voice heard by the plebeian M. Caedicius, but propter auctoris humilitatem spretum (Livy 5.32.6-7), until proved true by events and subsequently given a temple (Livy 5.50.5); Plut. Cam. 30 translates it as Drum Kai KAndav.

63

64

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

lightly thrown off also predict the TéAos of the whole epic, the xAéos of the victory of Telemachus and his father over the suitors. As in the assembly in Iliad 2 that final outcome

is predicted by an animal omen, here one that

occurs during the assembly itself, two eagles that swoop down and behave in strange ways. The omen is interpreted by Halitherses as confirmation of what he had foretold twenty years before, the return of Odysseus after many sufferings and after losing his companions. Halitherses’ repetition of his earlier prophecy twenty years ago corresponds to Odysseus’ repetition, in the assembly of Iliad 2, of Calchas’ interpretation, nine years earlier, of the

omen at Aulis. Halitherses’ last words replicate words spoken by Odysseus when he asserted that Calchas’ prophecy was coming true: Od. 2.176 ~ Il. 2.330 1à S€ St) vüv mrávra TeAet tat ‘all these things are now coming to fulfilment’. Halitherses’ words are true, but Telemachus does not sit back to wait for

them to be realized. His own first step towards the eventual reunion with his father is to set off in search of a report (KAéos) of Odysseus (as Athene had instructed him, 2.215-17 ^ 1.281-3), 214-17: eiui yàp és Zrráprnv Te kai ég [TUAov huabdevta, vooTov TTEUGÖHEVOS TTATPOS Tv OIXONEVOLO, Tiv Tis yo! erre: Bpotwv, Tj Gocav aKxovow x Aids, fj Te

UGAIO ra Pepe KAEOS ávOpo»rroiciv.

For I will go to Sparta and sandy Pylos in order to learn of the homecoming of my father who has been long gone, in case any mortal might tell me of it, or I might hear from Zeus a rumour, which especially brings news to men.

Here the human and divine are alternatives (word of mortals/report from Zeus), rather than wrapped up into one, as in the case of the prjun of line

35." In Odyssey 24 ócoa ‘rumour’ prompts the calling of an assembly, rather than being the object of a decision announced during the assembly: 41314 "Ooca 8 áp' ayyedos Oka Kata WAI Oyeto TTAVTN, | uvno pov otuyepov 8ávarov xai Kijp’ &vérrouca ‘Rumour went swiftly as messenger through the city in all directions, telling of the hateful death and fate of the suitors.' Thisisthe rumour whose premature disclosure Odysseus cunningly suppresses in the previous book through the device of making the bard Phemius (whose name, from qfiuis, means ‘the man who spreads reports")! 43

West (Heubeck, West, Hainsworth

1988) on 1.282-3 compares Soph. OT 43-4 cite Tov 8ev

priunv dkoucas eft ar’ áv5pós ofo8á trou.

44 So Bakker 2002: 142 n. 12.

|

Homer

lead dancing to the accompaniment of the lyre in order to start a counterrumour, that the wedding of Penelope to one of the suitors is taking place in the palace," in order to pre-empt dissemination of the news that the suitors have been slain inside, 23.129—52: a àp ctos do1Sds Éxcov qópuryya Aiyeiav Univ Hyeiodw TroAUTraiynovos ópyn8noio, @S Kev Tis pain

y ápov Eunevan EKTOS GkoUwV,

fj av’ 6B6v c rel yov f] of Trepivaieráouct ur) TpdoGe xAéos EUPU póvou kar& Gotu yévjTal a&vbpav uvnotipov, Tpiv y’ Tjpéas EABELEV EEw

ay pov és 'juérepov TroAUSEVSpEOv.’ 133-9 (Odysseus’ instructions)

“But let the divine bard with his clear-toned lyre lead you off in sportive dancing, so that someone hearing from outside, either a person going along the road, or the neighbours, would say there was a wedding; let not news of the slaughter of the suitors go widely through the city until we have arrived outside in our well-wooded fields.’ abe BE TIS eirreoxe Bóuo

ExtooOev akovav:

“A uda Er tis Ey que rroAuuvrjorny BacíAetav: oxetAin, OVS ETAN Trócios oU koupibíoro

&puc8ai uéya Saya Siaytrepés, fjos fkorro.' cos apa tis eitteoke, rà 8’ OUK Íoav ds ETETUKTO. 148-52 (the reaction of those outside the

palace to the sound of dancing and singing) Those who heard outside spoke as follows: “To be sure someone has married the much-wooed queen; wretched woman, who did not have the courage to protect her lawful husband's great house right through until his return.’ So they spoke, but they did not know what had happened.

Here the term for ‘rumour’ is kAéos, with the epithet evou ‘wide’. By the end of the Odyssey the report of the slaying of the suitors will have spread through Ithaca, launched on its course to become the *wide fame' of Odysseus' achievement in taking revenge on the suitors, the famous subject of the song that is the Odyssey."^ The full measure of Odysseus’ success, and hence

15 Clément-Tarantino 2006: 164-7 draws out the importance of this scene for the role of Fama in Aeneid 4 in spreading a report of the wedding that is no wedding, that of Dido and Aeneas. 16 For «Atos eupt in the sense ‘wide fame’ cf. Od. 1.344 (of Odysseus); 3.203-4 kai of Ayatoi | olcouct KAtos eüpU Kai tcconutvorciv dolStv (Orestes); 4.816; 19.333.

65

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

his lasting KA€os-as-fame, is dependent on this manipulation of KAéos-asrumour; had the report got out too soon, the suitors' relatives might have mobilized themselves in time to kill Odysseus in revenge."” The duplicity in the word «A&os, the central term attached to epic's authoritative immortalization of its aristocratic heroes, has been well discussed by Douglas Olson," who stresses the continuities between epic KA&os-as-poetic glory and kAtos-as-rumour, functioning within the epic narrative both as a propagator of information and as a social regulator (much in the manner of Hesiod's prjun)."” ‘The culmination of this process of local gossip growing gradually into widespread, even universally known, rumour and reputation

is song." ? Pietro Pucci goes further, in a radical deconstruction of the distinction between the two senses of kAéos, so endangering the poet's claim to control the propagation of proper poetic fame: ' Kleos intimates simultaneously and contradictorily the truthful and imperishable renown (aphthiton kleos) and the irresponsible, occasional rumour."'

Simon

Goldhill has objected

to

this attempt radically to destabilize the truth-value of Homeric epic on the grounds that in Homer kAtos never seems to refer to a false report." Yet KA£os

retains the potential to refer to a false report," and the Homeric narrator occludes this fact, perhaps uneasily, in restricting instances in his narratives to reports that happen to be true. The distinction in the invocation to the Muses at Iliad 2.486 between «Atos (reports of the past available to mortals)

On the ironies of Odysseus’ achievement of xAéos through the manipulation and dissimulation of «A£os see Goldhill 1991: 94-5; Segal 1996: 219 (on Od. 23.133 ff.) ‘Thus even when Odysseus

accomplishes his great exploit, the usual terms of heroic kleos are inverted.’ =

48

Olson

1995: Ch.

1. Bakker 2002 develops an ingenious analysis of the interaction of kleos and

phemis ‘talk of the town’ in the Polyphemus episode. Olson thus subscribes to an integrative, socially reinforcing, view of rumour and gossip (see

e

5i

5

Ch. 1 p. 21): ‘the Achaians are unmistakeably a single community and... what binds them together is an elaborate network of gossip, rumour and reputation’ (Olson 1995: 2). Olson 1995; 14. The point is also made by Ford 1992: 107, on the tales and reports gathered by Telemachus on his travels, which eventually turn into ‘kleos, the hardened and lasting form of report which passes through the wide world and through time’; 109 ‘What were the "fames of men" for Homer's audience were fresh rumour and recent news for the heroes.’ Compare the role of Grfjun in two of Bacchylides’ epinician odes, a ‘report’ of a victory which is crystallized into the undying fame of the victory by the poem itself: see Ch. 1 n. 117. Pucci

1988: 146; cf. Pucci

1980: 183 ‘the text... intimates that both modes of kleos, that is to

say kleos (rumor-ignorance) and kleos (voice-mneme), resound and echo together at each

5 en

66

5

moment, while the whole rhetoric of the poet tries to separate this combined echo in order to isolate and exalt the note of a pure, living voice’. Goldhill 1991: 69 n. 2. For the possibility of a kleos ‘report’ without foundation cf. Aesch. Ag. 486-7 GAAG ray vuuopov | yvvaixoytiputov 5AAuTaı KAtos (a pointed use of the verb used by Homer of ‘imperishable kleos-fame’?).

Ruly and unruly words in the Aeneid

and certain knowledge

(accessible to the Muses)

(see Ch. 3 p. 107) allows

for the possibility of a KAéos that does not correspond to the truth. In conclusion, the Homeric epics show an awareness of the ways in which

the monumental KAéos of outstanding heroes — undying, unquenchable, ever-flowing 'fame' — is not separable from more transient uses of the word, often operating through the mouths of the nameless crowd. In a still more striking convergence of the extremes of a hierarchy, the voice of the anonymous crowd may be ascribed to the agency of the supreme god Zeus, who is also guarantee for the authority of the poet's plot.”' "Doca ‘rumour’

is Aiós &yyedos

‘the messenger

of Zeus.

Hesiod

too, in his

own way, forges an alliance between what the many say and the rule of Zeus. But just as frequently, if not more so, the achievement of epic KAtos through outstanding deeds translated into the undying words of the poet is threatened by words disobedient to the dictate of the divine or human ruler. The control of words is a central theme of epic plots.

Ruly and unruly words in the Aeneid: Virgilian beginnings The next chapter offers a full-scale analysis of the Fama episode in Aeneid 4, the major intertextual ingathering in the poem of the prior traditions of fama (including the Hesiodic and Homeric passages examined above), and an episode whose ramifications extend intratextually over the Aeneid as a whole. As a preliminary, in this section I look at the reflexes in the Aeneid of the ‘plot of fama’ contained in the Iliadic testing of the army and its aftermath in Iliad 2, with particular attention to Virgil’s deployment of a sequence that comes near the start of the Iliad in opening episodes of his own. But before that a look at echoes of the Iliadic testing of the army in other scenes of fama in the Aeneid. The main Fama episode in Aeneid 4, like the testing of the army, sets in opposition the irresponsible voices of the multitude (embodied in the person of Fama) and the word of Jupiter,

conveyed to Aeneas by Jupiter’s messenger, Mercury (see Ch. 3 pp. 91-2). In this story there is no wise Odysseus figure to bring about an immediate 594 The Iliad is the narrative of the fulfilment of the Aids BouAt (JI. 1.5), while in the council of the gods at the beginning of the Odyssey Zeus decrees the return of Odysseus, and the poem ends with the dispatch by Zeus of a thunderbolt to prevent further violence between the family of Odysseus and the families of the suitors (Od. 24.539-40).

55 At [1 2.450- 1 Athene plays a role similar to that of "Oooa, as she urges on the Achaeans to go to war, supporting the role of the heralds in the call to arms, as at 2.93-4"Ocoa replicates the job of the heralds at 50-2 in summoning the people to the assembly.

67

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

restoration of the epic’s main plot to its true course, ‘the glory of the great deeds’ (272 tantarum gloria rerum) in which will consist the future fame of Rome, and Mercury has to appear a second time to Aeneas, this time in a dream, with verbal echoes of the ‘destructive dream’, the ‘messenger of Zeus’

(Il. 2.26), who appears with a rebuke for the sleeping Agamemnon at the beginning of Iliad 2.” There is also a pointed example of contrast-imitation. Mercury tells Aeneas to flee in his ships, to get back on course for Rome. Agamemnon tests the Achaeans by telling them to flee in their ships, but this would be to divert the Iliad utterly from its preordained end. In Iliad 2 Aids &yyeros ‘messenger of Zeus’ is the label both for the Dream sent directly by Zeus, and for "Occo, the collective voicing of the Achaean people. Virgil’s genealogy for his Fama, the last-born child of an angry Earth, sets her in opposition to Olympian Jupiter. Yet she plays an indispensable role in the furtherance of Aeneas' Jovian destiny, for it is only through her that are set in train the events that lead to Jupiter's dispatch of Mercury and so to the Trojans' departure from Carthage: unwittingly she too is a messenger of Jupiter (unless we are to suppose that it is really Jupiter who pulls the strings all along).*’ Another allusion to the Iliadic testing of the army comes near the beginning of the final book of the Aeneid, a book which traces the outline of the greater part of the narrative of the Iliad, from the truce and its breaking in Books 3 and 4 to the death of Hector in Book 22. Allusion to Book 2 should thus be included as part of the recapitulation of Iliadic beginnings in the early part of Aeneid 12. At the point when Turnus' Rutulian army is being tempted to stray from the solemn decision of Latinus and Aeneas that the outcome ofthe war should be decided by single combat between Aeneas and Turnus, the spirits of the crowd, already wavering because of their anxiety and pity on Turnus' behalf, are further impelled towards insubordination by Juturna in the disguise of a famous Italian warrior, Camers. Her argument that the Italians are almost twice as numerous as the Trojans and their allies alludes to the statement by Agamemnon in the speech in which he tests the army that the Achaeans are more than ten times as numerous as the Trojans (11. 2.123—30). Juturna/Camers' calculation is nested in a sequence full of the

language of fama in the senses of both ‘rumour’ and ‘fame’, 12.222-40 (with the fama language annotated, drawing largely on Tarrant forthcoming):

56 With Aen. 4.558 omnia Mercurio similis cf. Il. 2.20 NnAnto vh éoikcos (in itself a formulation not unique to this passage); and with 560 nate dea, potes hoc sub casu ducere somnos cf. Il. 2.23 &Btis, Atptos vie... ES

68

57

See Clément-Tarantino 2006: 124-5.

Ruly and unruly words in the Aeneid

quem simul ac [uturna soror crebrescere uidit sermonem et uulgi uariare labantia corda, in medias acies formam adsimulata Camerti,

cui genus a proauis ingens clarumque paternae

225

nomen erat uirtutis," et ipse acerrimus armis,

in medias dat sese acies haud nescia rerum rumoresque serit" 59 uartos ac talia fatur: ‘non pudet, o Rutuli, pro cunctis talibus unam

obiectare animam? numerone an uiribus aequi non

sumus?

en, omnes

et Troes et Arcades

230

hi sunt,

fatalisque manus, infensa Etruria Turno:

uix hostem, alterni si congrediamur, habemus. ille quidem ad superos, quorum se deuouet aris, succedet fama uiuusque per ora feretur;"

235

nos patria amissa dominis parere superbis cogemur, qui nunc lenti consedimus aruis.’ Talibus incensa est iuuenum sententia dictis iam magis atque magis, serpitque per agmina murmur: ipsi Laurentes mutati ipsique Latini. As soon as his sister Juturna saw that such talk was growing and that the crowd's hearts were wavering and slipping, she disguised herself in the shape of Camers, who had a great ancestry, and whose father had a name famous for courage, and who himself was very brave in war. She entered the midst of the troops, fully aware of what was going on, and sowing a variety of rumours she spoke thus, “Rutulians, are you not ashamed to sacrifice one life for all of us stout warriors? Are we not

their equals in numbers and strength? Look, that is the sum total of them, Trojans, Arcadians and Etruscans, that army guided by fate and hostile to Turnus. They are hardly enough for an enemy, even if only every other man of us were to confront them. As for Turnus,

he shall be raised

in fame

to the gods, at whose

altars he

devotes himself, and he shall be carried living on the lips of men. We shall lose our fatherland and be compelled to obey proud masters, we who now sit idly in our

55 Cf. 5.621, Iris disguised as Beroe, cui genus et quondam nomen natique fuissent, also stirring up discord that leads to the despoliation of altars, 5.661, 12.283. 'Camers' uses his aristocratic

name and distinction to work on the feelings of the mass (at the corresponding place, Il. 4.87, Laodocus is simply called a ‘powerful spearman’). 5° According to Macrob. Sat. 6.1.33, Virgil borrows the phrase from 'Furius, rumoresque serunt uarios et multa requirunt. Tarrant forthcoming suspects a specific reference to 7.339 sere crimina belli, ‘given the similarity of context’; for Allecto as a close relative of Fara see Ch. 3

pp. 101-2. 99 Cf. Ennius' epigram on himself, Epigr. 10 Warmington uolito uiuus per ora uirum, imitated at Virg. Geo. 3.9; Cic. Cat. 3.1.2 illum qui hanc urbem condidit ad deos immortales beneuolentia famaque sustulimus, Virg. Geo. 4.226-7 uiua uolare | sideris in numerum atque alto succedere caelo.

69

70

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

fields.” With such words she inflamed the young men’s thoughts more and more, and a muttering crept along the lines; even the Laurentines and the Latins changed their minds.

Here (pretended) fame of birth and military achievement are used to rein-

force rather than counter spreading disorder, fuelled by the irresponsible rumours of the crowd. The female divinity Juturna, furthering the disruptive effects of fama-as-rumour, puts on the masculine disguise of fama-as-glory. Turnus' prospective fame is also perversely used as an argument for disobedience to superiors. In the sequel the power of rumour is reinforced by a bird omen, sent by Juturna not Jupiter (244—50), which misleads the augur

Tolumnius into an interpretation that does not correspond with the telos of the Aeneid, in contrast to Calchas' correct interpretation of the omen at Aulis. It is a mark of how serious the disorder is at this point in the narrative that the language of clear-shining fame can only magnify the effects of rumour. À little later Aeneas attempts to use words to check the discordia that has now enveloped the Trojan as well as the Italian army (311—17), but without the success of Odysseus in calling the mutinous Achaean assembly to order. Aeneas' failure here is a failure to live up to the model of the statesman who calms an angry mob by his appearance and words, in the famous simile applied to Neptune calming the storm in Aeneid 1 (148—53). I turn now to a detailed analysis of the first narrative sequence of the Aeneid, the storm and its aftermath in Book 1, and read it as a counterpart to the sequence in Iliad 2 analysed above.^! The Aeneid opens with a speech by Juno, words in which she voices her wish to divert Aeneas from his fated course to Italy, and gives vent to her jealousy of Pallas Minerva's ability to use Jupiter's thunderbolt against her human enemy, the lesser Ajax.^ Juno must act more deviously to lay her hands on the thunderbolt; in order to unleash the storm she goes to the Cave

of the Winds, a place of unruly noises that need to be kept in check by the ruler of the winds appointed by Jupiter, Aeolus: 53 tempestatesque sonoras ‘resounding storms’; 55-6 illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis | circum claustra fremunt *with loud rumblings they roar indignantly round the prison-house of the mountain* That the noise of the winds relates specifically to unruly human noises is suggested by a number of considerations: (i) allusion to the assembly scene in Iliad 2; (ii) the parallelism with Allecto; (iii) allusion to Aeolus' winds 5! 62

For other connections between the Virgilian storm scene and fama see Ch. 3 pp. 100-1. For Juno's alternative plot see Clément-Tarantino 2006: 434 ff. ‘Le poéme de Junon et Allecto*

Ruly and unruly words in the Aeneid

in later epic versions of fama, and, more generally, the association between fama and winds.

(i)

Servius Danielis on 1.148 already makes the point that the first simile in the Aeneid, comparing Neptune calming the storm to a Roman statesman calming an angry mob (Aen. 1.148—53), reverses the terms of the second simile in the Iliad, comparing the turbulent assembly to a storm." Marion Lausberg nicely makes the further point that the first simile of the Iliad (2.87-90), comparing

the Achaeans swarm-

ing to the assembly to bees, corresponds to the second simile in the Aeneid (1.430—6), comparing the busy builders of Carthage to bees, an image of a harmonious polity in the newly founded Carthage in contrast to the stormy sedition in the recognizably Roman setting of the statesman simile.“' Neptune has less time for words than Odysseus, breaking off in the aposiopesis at 135 quos ego —, but this may be compared to Odysseus' use of physical violence to restrain Thersites from further intervention in the talkshop of the assembly. Alternatively, Neptune's peremptory address to the winds corresponds to Odysseus' rough words to members of the demos (II. 2.198—206), while the milder

words of the statesman to the mob in the simile (Aen. 1.153 ille regit dictis animos et pectora mulcet) correspond to Odysseus' gentle words, a&yavots &rréecow (Il. 2.189), to the individual chiefs.

(ii)

Allecto. Several motifs connect the storm-winds both with the personification of Fama in Aeneid 4, and with the Fury Allecto in Aeneid 7,5

whose eruption from hell mirrors the eruption of the winds from their subterranean prison, the bursts of energy that start the second and first halves of the epic respectively. Aeolus' winds disrupt the order of a natural world viewed partly in the image of human society; Allecto works directly on the world of humans, with storm imagery used of the resultant outbreak of war. One of Allecto's modes of operation is through rumour: Aen. 7.549—50 finitimas in bella feram rumoribus urbes, | accendamque animos insani Martis amore ‘] shall spread rumours to draw the neighbouring cities into war, and I shall fire their hearts with a lust for mad warfare."^ (iii) Ovid draws out the connection between the Virgilian Cave of the Winds and Fama when he models his own House of Fama in part on the Cave of the Winds (see Ch. 5 pp. 160-1). Lucan's major scene of

63

64

ita et Homerus seditioni tempestatem xivijrj 8 ayopr) s konara paxpa 9aAácon; (Il. 2.144). Lausberg 1983: 219-20. $5 See Ch. 3 pp. 101-2. $6 See Clément-Tarantino 2006: 670.

71

72

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

rumour and panic in Rome at the advance of Caesar builds to a storm simile (Bell-Civ. 1.498—503: see Ch. 6 p. 183), and Statius applies an extended storm to a description of the workings of Mars and Fama (Theb. 3.432—9: see Ch. 6 p. 207).°’ Chaucer's Fame sends a messenger to summon ‘Eolus the god of wynde' (House of Fame 1571), to bring the two trumpets with which he broadcasts “Clear Laud’ and ‘Slander’ (see Ch. 15 p. 591).

The connection between storms and political uproar is a cliché in Latin. I give one example where stormy sedition is provoked by a rumour, Livy

28.24.1-2:° Scipio ipse graui morbo implicitus, grauiore tamen fama cum ad id quisque quod audierat

insita hominibus

prouinciam omnem

libidine alendi

de industria

rumores

adiceret aliquid,

ac maxime longinqua eius turbauit; apparuitque quantam

excitatura molem uera fuisset clades cum uanus rumor tantas procellas exciuisset

[cf. 28.27.11]. Scipio himself was in the grip of a serious illness, but more seriously afflicted by rumour, since, through a desire innate in humans deliberately to fuel gossip, everyone added something to what he had heard. This state of affairs threw into confusion the whole province, and especially its remote parts. It became clear how much troublea real misfortune would have aroused, when such had been the storms aroused by an empty rumour.

The storm in Aeneid | is the first part of a longer sequence, which continues with, firstly, a scene on earth, the Trojans’ landing on the shore of Carthage and Aeneas’ provident care for the physical and mental well-being of his men, and, secondly, the interview on Olympus between Venus and

Jupiter. The first scene contains a specific allusion to the speech of Odysseus after he has restored order in the agore in Iliad 2, while the second exhibits a broader structural parallelism. (i) Aeneas’ words of encouragement to his men at Aeneid 1.206—7 illic fas regna resurgere Troiae. | durate, et uosmet rebus seruate secundis ‘There it is fated that the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Endure, and save yourselves for better days; echo Odysseus' words at Il. 2.299, 331-2: ‘Endure my friends (1Afj1€ 9íAo1) .. . But come, remain here all you well-greaved Achaeans, until we take the great city of Priam.'^? *' On wind imagery of fama see Boitani 1984: 5, 166. 68 For further discussion of this episode see Ch. 7 pp. 256-7. 69 The parallels are noted by Lausberg 1983: 223-4. More commonly attention is drawn to the Odyssean parallels for Aeneas' exhortation to his companions to cheer up (Od. 10.174-5,

Sinon and fate

Aeneas reminds his men of their destination in Italy, whence Juno had

attempted to divert them, and his use of fas resonates with the fata that promise the rebirth of Troy, inverting Odysseus’ exhortation to the Achaeans to hold out for the destined capture of Troy. (ii) A fully informed exposition of the Trojans’ Fate, the remoter end of the plot of the Aeneid, is put in the mouth of Jupiter himself, a more authoritative mouthpiece than the Iliadic Odysseus who can only report Calchas’ interpretation of the omen sent by Zeus as a guarantee of the ultimate success of the Greek expedition (Il. 2.324—5). The Virgilian Jupiter's account of fata reaches a telos with a fama that trumps any other kind of fama: 286—7 ‘Caesar, who will set Ocean as the bounds of his empire, and the stars as the bounds of his fame (famam qui terminet astris). The supreme god, who is introduced in this scene as wearing the expression (255) *with which he calms the heaven and storms; finally

looks forward in time to the shutting up of a Furor whose inarticulate roaring (296 fremet) replicates that of the winds of Aeolus. 70 To conclude, among the many other programmatic functions of the storm-plus-sequel in Aeneid 1 is that of introducing the power struggle between

different uses of words, between

Fatum

and Fama,

or between

Fama-as-kleos and Fama-as-rumour, that extends through the rest of the Aeneid.

Sinon and fate The containment of the slippery and contested words of report and rumour within a narrative whose culmination in the fama of lasting epic achievement is guaranteed by the fulfilment of fate is also exemplified in what is, in the ordo naturalis, the first episode in the Aeneid, Aeneas' report of the debate over whether to bring the Wooden Horse within the walls of Troy, and of the

fatal decision to do so following the omen of the death of Laocoon and his sons (Aen. 2.13-249). The greater part of this episode is taken up with the

12.209-12), but Lausberg points out that these do not look to the future, as Odysseus does in Iliad 2. 79 The themes of this opening sequence in Aeneid 1 are taken up in the Council of Gods at the beginning of Book 10, where incipient verbal uproar among the gods, provoked by the angry rhetoric of Venus and Juno, and compared in a simile to a rising storm (97-9), is calmed by Jupiter, who ends his speech by asserting the inevitability of Fate.

73

74

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

tissue of truths, half-truths and lies spun by Sinon, the creature of Ulysses (57-198).'' The episode starts at a point where the Greeks have done what they are narrowly dissuaded from doing in the testing of the army in Iliad 2, namely, sail back home - or at least so report, rumour has it: 17 uotum pro reditu simulant; ea fama uagatur 'they pretended that [the Horse] was a votive offering for their return; that report spreads about’. It is now the Trojans’ turn, in a kind of informal assembly, to decide what to do with a large structure that could be thought of as a ‘land-ship’, freighted with soldiers, the Wooden Horse: should they bring it into the city or not? The first major section of Sinon's speech (77-104) is drenched in fama language, as he uses the vocabulary of truth-telling and clear fame to weave a tissue of truths and lies, facta atque infecta (Aen. 4.190). He manipulates the dichotomies of truth and fiction, voicing and silence, fame and rumour,

praise and envy in a battering-ram of words against the Trojan resistance to the idea of bringing the Horse within the city, 77-100 (fama-related words in italics): *Cuncta equidem tibi, rex, fuerit quodcumque, fatebor uera, inquit; ‘neque me Argolica de gente negabo. hoc primum; nec, si miserum Fortuna Sinonem finxit, uanum etiam mendacemque improba finget. fando aliquod si forte tuas peruenit ad auris

80

Belidae nomen Palamedis et incluta fama gloria, quem falsa sub proditione Pelasgi insontem infando indicio, quia bella uetabat,

demisere neci, nunc cassum lumine lugent: illi me comitem et consanguinitate propinquum pauper in arma pater primis huc misit ab annis. dum stabat regno incolumis regumque uigebat conciliis, et nos aliquod nomenque decusque gessimus. inuidia postquam pellacis Vlixi (haud ignota loquor) superis concessit ab oris, adflictus uitam in tenebris luctuque trahebam et casum insontis mecum indignabar amici.

85

90

nec tacui demens et me, fors si qua tulisset,

7!

Hexter 1990: 109 reads the Sinon scene as 'the primal scene of narration and misinterpretation in the Aeneid’; Clément-Tarantino

2006: 614-17 locates the inaugural function of the scene in

its anticipation of the essential features of the person and operation of Fama in Aen. 4. My attention was first drawn to the importance of the Sinon episode for the theme of fama by Clément-Tarantino 2006.

Sinon and fate

si patrios umquam remeassem uictor ad Argos, promisi ultorem et uerbis odia aspera moui. hinc mihi prima mali labes, hinc semper Vlixes criminibus terrere nouis, hinc spargere uoces in uulgum ambiguas et quaerere conscius arma. nec requieuit enim, donec Calchante ministro —

95

100

*Come what may, I will tell you the whole truth, o king, he said, ‘and I will not deny that I am of the Greek race. That is the first thing. And if Fortune has made Sinon wretched, the malicious creature will not also make him a false liar. If report ever brought to your ears the name of Palamedes, son of Belus, and his glory renowned in fame, that innocent man whom, because he tried to stop the war, the Greeks put

to death on a false charge of treason on the basis of a wicked act of informing, and now that he no longer sees the light of day they mourn him - my impoverished father made me, a close relative, his companion and sent me here to fight when I was a boy. While Palamedes was safe on his throne and held sway in the councils of kings, I too had something of a name and honour. But after he left the world of the living through the hostility of plausible Ulysses (my story is a well-known one), cast down I dragged out my life in the shadows of grief, and nursed my resentment at the downfall of my innocent friend. Fool that I was, I did not keep quiet, and I promised that, if I had the chance, if I ever returned in victory to my native Argos, I would

avenge him, and my words stirred up bitter hatred. That was the first step in my downfall, from that time Ulysses was always scaremongering with new accusations, from that time he spread vague remarks among the people, and deliberately looked for weapons against me. And he did not rest, until with his agent Calchas —'

Sinon reaches a first climax with an account of the deliberate propagation of slander and rumour by Ulysses, fandi fictor (Aen. 9.602) as he is labelled by Numanus Remulus, himself another near relative of Fama in his boastful distortions (see Ch. 4 p. 144). Sinon breaks off on the name

of Calchas,

whom we know from the Iliad to be the source of a kind of words opposed to the misconceptions and half-truths that circulate among ordinary men. In the next section of his speech Sinon proceeds in Ulyssean manner (2.107 ficto pectore fatur) to enlist the prophetic authority of Calchas for his own persuasive purpose, as Odysseus in Iliad 2 halted the rush to the ships by recalling Calchas' interpretation, nine years before, of the omen of the serpent and the sparrow chicks. Sinon also reaches back to the time at Aulis, but to the other incident of child-killing that took place there, the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. He claims that an oracle had announced that another Greek life must be taken to procure fair winds, this time for the return to Greece. Calchas, prompted by Ulysses, puts the finger on Sinon as the Greek life to be sacrificed, whereupon, he says, Sinon escaped and went into hiding.

75

76

Hesiod and Homer: Virgilian beginnings

Calchas is also the authority in the last part of Sinon’s speech, in which he spins his fictions about the Wooden Horse. According to Sinon, Calchas’ final instruction was to build the Horse too large to fit in the gates of Troy, and Sinon ends with the reported prophecies of Calchas, 189-94: ‘nam si uestra manus uiolasset dona Mineruae,

tum magnum exitium (quod di prius omen in ipsum conuertant!) Priami imperio Phrygibusque futurum; sin manibus uestris uestram ascendisset in urbem,

ultro Asiam magno Pelopea ad moenia bello uenturam, et nostros ea fata manere nepotes."*

*For if your hands had violated this gift for Minerva, then great destruction would come on the empire of Priam and the Trojans (may the gods first turn this ill omen on his own head); but if by your hands it had climbed into your city, then Asia itself would reach the walls of Pelops in a great war, and that would be the fate in store for our descendants.'

This is the point at which Sinon's distorted use of words is finally overtaken by the truth. The Horse will be taken up into the city, and, in the fullness

of time, the descendants of the Trojans will conquer the descendants of the Greeks, as Jupiter had told Venus at 1.283—5. Jupiter's prophecy in Book 1 outlines the whole story of Trojan-Roman fate, which in hindsight constitutes the epic story, the glorious fama, of the Roman people. That fate is sealed in Aeneid 2, in the immediate sequel to the Sinon episode, with a repetition ofthe event at Aulis which Calchas had correctly interpreted as an omen ofthe destruction of Troy. On the shore at Aulis a snake had devoured a mother and her chicks; now on the shore of Troy two monstrous serpents devour a father, Laocoon, and his sons. The Trojans read this as confirmation

of the guilt of Laocoon in attempting to violate the Horse, and are persuaded to take the Horse into Troy. In so doing they ensure that of which the death of Laocoon and his sons is more truly a sign, if we press the analogy with the omen at Aulis, and if we believe that Calchas interpreted that omen aright: the destruction of Troy. The difference between the Iliad and the Aeneid lies in the timescale: with the destruction of Troy the larger Homeric plot of the Greek expedition to Troy is complete; but the larger Virgilian plot of Troy is not complete until the latest conquests of the Romans. The furthest consequences of the event, the sack of Troy, of which the death of Laocoon 7?

What Calchas/Sinon unwittingly predicts emerges from verbal parallels at Aen. 1.257-8 (Jupiter to Venus) manent immota tuorum | fata tibi, 6.757—9 (Anchises) qui maneant Itala de gente nepotes... te tua fata docebo; 8.731 (summing up contents of the Shield of Aeneas) famamque et fata nepotum.

Sinon and fate

is a sign, will not be fully realized until ‘Asia comes in war to the walls of Pelops [Mycenae]. T& 81) vov rrávra TeAeitau. By Virgil’s day these things had indeed all come to pass. Séverine Clément-Tarantino has drawn attention to the close relationship between Sinon and Fama in Aeneid 4;”* this extends to the irony whereby both creatures of the distorted word, for all their destructive effects in the immediate context, in fact collude with the wider design of the plot, the fulfilment of Trojan fate and the realization of Roman glory, the fama of the story of Rome taken as a whole. 75

See n. 66 above.

77

3

Virgil’s Fama

The central text for the history of fama in the Western literary tradition is Virgil’s personification of Fama in Book 4 of the Aeneid.' In a passage of breathtaking complexity and vertiginous self-awareness Virgil sums up much of the previous history of fama — fama-as-fame, fama-as-rumour, fama-as-tradition — and creates an image that determines much of the future course of the representation, both verbal and visual, of fama. In this

chapter I anatomize the person of Fama at Aen. 4.173—97, and explore the role ofthe monster within widening contexts in the Aeneid, starting with the rest of Book 4, and extending to structures and homologues that spread out over the poem as a whole, in an expansive intratextuality that performs the unceasing self-magnification and self-propagation that are attributes of the personification itself. The summative and exemplary nature of Virgil's Fama will also provide the occasion to draw out some of the general structural features of fama and associated imagery in the classical tradition. Extemplo Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes, Fama, malum qua non aliud uelocius ullum: mobilitate uiget uirisque adquirit eundo, parua metu primo, mox sese attollit in auras ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubila condit. illam Terra parens ira inritata deorum extremam, ut perhibent, Coeo Enceladoque sororem progenuit pedibus celerem et pernicibus alis,

175

180

monstrum horrendum, ingens, cui quot sunt corpore plumae, tot uigiles oculi subter (mirabile dictu), tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit auris.

nocte uolat caeli medio terraeque per umbram stridens, nec dulci declinat lumina somno;

185

luce sedet custos aut summi culmine tecti turribus aut altis, et magnas territat urbes,

tam ficti prauique tenax quam nuntia ueri. haec tum multiplici populos sermone replebat

! For my first thoughts on Fama see Hardie 1986: 273-80; for an extended treatment of Fama and the sublime see Hardie 2009a: Ch. 3.

Virgil's Fama

gaudens, et pariter facta atque infecta canebat:

190

uenisse Aenean Troiano sanguine cretum, cui se pulchra uiro dignetur iungere Dido; nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fouere

regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos. haec passim dea foeda uirum diffundit in ora. protinus ad regem cursus detorquet Iarban

195

incenditque animum dictis atque aggerat iras. Aen. 4.173-97 At once Fama went through the great cities of Africa, Fama, swifter than any other

evil: she thrives through motion and gains strength as she goes. She is small and timorous

to begin

with,

but soon

she

lifts herself into

the air, striding

on

the

ground and her head hidden in the clouds. The story is that Earth, incited by her anger at the gods, bore her as her last daughter, a sister for Coeus and Enceladus, swift-footed and speedy-winged, a terrifying, huge monster. She has as many eyes underneath (wondrous to tell) as she has feathers on her body, and as many tongues and sounding mouths, and as many are the ears that she pricks up. At night she flies shrieking through the shadows between earth and sky, and does not let her eyes droop in sweet sleep. By day she sits watching on rooftops or high towers, and terrifies great cities. She clings to fictions and distortions as much as she brings

news of the truth. This was the creature that then delighted in filling the peoples with all kinds of talk, chanting things that had happened and things that had not indiscriminately: that Aeneas, born of Trojan blood, had come, and that fair Dido

saw fit to unite herself to him as her husband; now they were spending the whole winter long snug in their wantonness, oblivious of their royal duties, the slaves of base lust. Such were the things that the loathsome goddess spread all around through men's mouths. Straightaway she turned her steps to king larbas, inflaming his mind with what she said and heaping up his anger.

The description of the person and operation of Fama is one of the most striking and bizarre passages in the Aeneid. Within Virgil's Homeric-style narrative of human, divine and demonic actors she appears to be matter out of place, as being a palpable personification allegory with no reality other than that of an abstraction temporarily clothed with a body, of sorts, and equipped with an ad hoc genealogy to domicile her within the HomericHesiodic family of divine beings." A body of sorts: it is very difficult to form a distinct mental image of her physical shape, subject to rapid and 2 The only other extended personification allegory in the Aeneid is Somnus, who overcomes Palinurus at 5.838-61; but Sleep already acts in the Iliad as a full member of the society of gods, and his mode of operation in Aeneid 5, a god appearing in the disguise of a mortal, is in keeping with the normal behaviour of epic divinities.

79

Virgil's Fama

extreme change in size (176—7), walking and flying, apparently at the same time (180), and given more specific form through an indefinite multiplication of body parts which normally occur singly or in groups of two to give a recognizable Gestalt to a body." Fama has an indefinite number of eyes, tongues, mouths and ears (181—3), and we are told only that they are

as numerous as her feathers, the latter being body parts which, like hairs, we usually perceive in massed shapes and patterns, not as distinct items. No more than her body does her mode of action conform to the prior norms of epic narrative. Personification allegory goes back to Homer and Hesiod,’ but in pre-Virgilian narratives the intervention of personifications is mostly limited, and where it is of any extent, the personification acts in the manner of the fully divine Olympian gods.^ The only possible precedent in the remains of ancient epic for the scale and importance of Fama and of what she does within the plot of Aeneid 4, and also for the sheer

oddity of the creature, is the demon Discordia who opened the gates of war in Book 7 of Ennius' Annals. We cannot know for certain how extensive were her description and narrative intervention, but there are grounds for thinking that Ennius' Discordia and Virgil's Fama are indeed very closely related.“

? On the difficulty of visualizing Fama see Laird 1999: 303-4. I am not persuaded by Dyer 1989 that the eyes, tongues, mouths and ears belong not to the body of Fama but to human beings on earth below (subter): mirabile dictu tells against this, as also the long visual tradition of representing Farna's body with a multiplicity of these organs. A way to capitalize on Dyer’s argument is to suggest that the Virgilian text is in fact ambiguous between the two interpretations, an ambiguity that itself adds to the chaotic amorphousness of her body, on which see Hardie 20092: 95-6. For later examples in ancient hexameter of Virgil’s multi-organed monster cf. Nonn. Dion. 18.1—4"H6n Bé 1TTepdeooa ToAUoTOpOs fra o Orjun | Acoupins oTixa rracav ürrorpoyóxwca TTOATIWV, | o0voua xnpugcouca Kopunßopöpov Aiovucov | xai 6pacuv 1v5óv Apna xai dyAaóBorpuv órcopnv; Papyri russischer und georgischer Sammlungen 1.11 ('Hymn to Dionysos’), line 34 roAuyAcaaou

Bià puns

(a reference ] owe to Katerina

Carvounis). For echoes of Virgil's Fama scene in later Latin poets see Courcelle 1984a: 309—14. wok

80

On Greek personifications see Stafford 2000; Stafford and Herrin 2005.

Surviving pre-Virgilian large-scale allegories are free-standing compositions, not part of a larger narrative, for example Prodicus’ Choice of Herakles. The effect of Fama's intervention in the

Aeneid is to present Aeneas with a version of the Choice of Hercules, between continuing a life of love and luxury with Dido, and reverting to the path of virtuous struggle towards the foundation of Rome. In Renaissance depictions of the Choice of Hercules Fame is present in the form of Pegasus on top of the mountain of Virtue: see Ch. 16 p. 635. For another Herculean connection see Nelis 2001: 157-8, noting that Mercury's rebuke of Aeneas mirrors Herakles’

rebuke of the Argonauts for their attachment to the women of Lemnos, Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.865-74; they will not become evxAeteis by this means; Herakles ends sarcastically by telling the Argonauts to leave Jason in Hypsipyle's bed, until he has repopulated Lemnos with male children, peyaAn TE & BáEis tkrjrai.

$ See Hardie 20092: 99-104.

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

While adequate precedents for Virgil’s Fama may be largely lacking, through her offspring in the personifications in Ovid and the early imperial epic tradition, she is foundational for the later Western tradition of personification allegory. One thing, however, that the Virgilian Fama signally lacks, when we look to the later tradition, is a house, a dwelling-place. This may be felt to be only proper: it is in the nature of Fama to be always on the move, and to be domiciled in a house would negate that nature. Ovid first constructs a House of Fame, at the beginning of Metamorphoses 12. There Ovid perhaps corrects an ‘error’ in Virgil’s depiction of Fama: we see the house of the Ovidian Fama, but the mistress herself is invisible. That is only as it should be, since the spoken word is invisible. But perhaps the difficulty that the reader experiences in forming a distinct image of the shape of the Virgilian Fama’s body is already an acknowledgement of the non-visual nature of what she personifies. And perhaps Fama has no need of a local dwelling-place, for, looking backwards rather than forwards in literary history, it will turn out that this sudden monster is always already thoroughly at home within the GrecoRoman epic tradition as a whole. Further, to the extent that epic is a genre central to the wider literary and cultural traditions of antiquity (and of no epic poem is this truer than of the Aeneid), Virgil’s Fama has a lot to tell us about her operations within society and history more generally. There is indeed a lot to say about Fama, and that too is as it should be with an embodiment of the word. One of the meanings of the Latin word fama is ‘tradition’, and by Virgil’s time Greco-Roman tradition was vast and complicated: like Virgil’s Fama.’

The place of Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4 This great baroque excrescence within the otherwise mostly verisimilar narrative of Aeneid 4 is also, despite first appearances, thoroughly at home within the plot of the Dido and Aeneas story, and within the story-line of the Aeneid more generally. It is to the plotting of Fama within that larger story that I now turn." In my 1986 discussion of the Fama scene in Aeneid 4 | said, à propos of certain features of the Virgilian personification, that ‘these passages are 7 Tradition is the focal point of the remarkable, and massive, treatment of Virgil's Fama by Clément-Tarantino 2006. ® On the thematization of fama in Aeneid 4 see also Smith 2002: 55-62.

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Virgil's Fama

closely modelled on Homeric descriptions of kleos but where in Homer such things are isolated expressions, in Virgil this vertical exaggeration [i.e. the hyperbolical sky-reaching of fama] is attached to larger thematic structures." I would now be less hasty in dismissing the presence of thematic structures in Homer, and in Chapter 2 I traced some of these larger Homeric ‘plots of fame’. Within the Aeneid I would now push still further an analysis of the ways in which Fama and her operations are woven into the larger structural and thematic fabric of the poem. The Fama episode in the narrower sense of the intervention of the fully personified creature occupies Aen. 4.173—97 (quoted above), opening and closing with verbs of which she is the subject (magnas it Fama per urbes; incenditque animos dictis atque aggerat iras). But this episode forms part of a longer sequence of over a hundred lines, an intricate network that stretches from lines 160 to 278. The whole sequence can be read as constituting a mini-plot within the larger plot of Aeneid 4; furthermore, a mini-plot that functions as a mise en abyme of the larger story told in the Aeneid as a whole. Fama appears following the scene of the storm during the hunt, which brings Dido and Aeneas together in the cave, Aen. 4.160—72. That scene is put together out of a combination

and human of Fama.'' (160 interea affects both force on the

of elemental, divine

(or demonic),

activity, a combination replicated in the person and actions The storm is introduced with reference to noises in the sky magno misceri murmure caelum).'* Fama, who like the storm earth and sky, is modelled more specifically in her speed'* and most powerful manifestation of the storm, the thunderbolt.'*

vo

m

? Hardie 1986: 275. The next reference to the agency of fama is 203 rumore accensus amaro, where there is little temptation to read Rumore with a capital R. Wassermann 1920: 7 notes that already the Homeric Ossa combines personal and non-personal, elemental (Il. 2.93 Se57e1 ‘blazed up") aspects. Ossa is at once personification of human activity and a divine agent: see Ch. 2 pp. 59-60. Cf. magno... murmure of the personified storm-winds and their effect on the sea at 1.55, 124: on the further connections between the Fama sequence and the storm in Book 1 see Ch. 2 pp. 71-2, and below pp. 100-1. The speed of fama is a frequent topos, for example institutionalized by the Gauls as a means of speedy dispatch of news, according to Caesar Bell. Gall. 7.3.2-3 celeriter ad omnes Galliae ciuitates fama perfertur. nam ubicumque maior atque illustrior incidit res, clamore per agros regionesque significant; hanc alii deinceps excipiunt et proximis tradunt, ut tum accidit. nam quae

=

82

Cenabi oriente sole gesta essent, ante primam confectam uigiliam in finibus Aruernorum audita sunt, quod spatium est milium passuum circiter centum LX. Sergio Casali and Fiachra Mac Góráin independently suggest to me that in being punished by thunderbolt- Fara Dido suffers what she had called upon herself, should she break her oath of

fidelity to Sychaeus, at 4.25 uel pater omnipotens adigat me fulmine ad umbras.

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

175 mobilitate uiget uirisque adquirit eundo is based closely on a Lucretian description of the speed of the thunderbolt, 6.340—2: denique quod longo uenit impete, sumere debet mobilitatem etiam atque etiam, quae crescit eundo et ualidas auget uiris et roborat ictum. Then too as it advances with a long-continued moving power, it must again and again receive new velocity which ever increases as it goes on and augments its powerful might and gives vigour to its stroke. Like the thunderbolt, Fama is incendiary in her effects, setting fire to the

animus ‘mind’ of Iarbas (197), with perhaps a hint of an etymological play on &veuos "wind. ^ The connection between fama and storm and winds is a

common one, as is also the image of rumour as wild-fire.'^

le

Iarbas is puffed

up and windy in his pride.'’ What follows in Virgil’s description of the storm during the hunt already goes some way towards shifting the action from the verisimilar towards the allegorical, with a set of divine or demonic witnesses made up largely of personified forces of nature (166-8 Tellus, Iuno, ignes, aether, Nymphae).'* The elements have already given a sign (167 dant signum), both a signal for the ‘wedding’ to proceed, and a son-et-lumiére broadcast to the outside world that something is going on in the secret space of the cave, ending with the wild vocals of the Nymphs (168 summoque ulularunt uertice Nymphae). '5 Fora more certain example of the pun see 1.56-7 Aeolus. . . mollitque animos et temperat iras, of the winds (cf. 1.149, 153, the raging and calming of the animi of the mob compared to the winds in the statesman simile): see O'Hara

1996: 54-5, 116; ‘Index of words glossed’ s.v.

e

animus.

In Aeschylus' Agamemnon literal fire, in the form of the relay of beacons, brings the news of the capture of Troy to Argos: the messenger-fire is the source of rumour in the city (475-7 Trupös 8° tr’ evayyéAou | rróAiv Biter doc | Báfis), the occasion for the Chorus to muse on the unreliability of rumour (475-87). Aaurr fip, the word used by the Aeschylean Watchman to hail the beacon (Ag. 22), is used by Euripides in an image of the wildfire spread of rumour, (fr. 411 Nauck)

uikpoü yàp &x Aauıttnpos

Saiov A&rras | rprjottev &v Tis, Kai Trpds áv8p' eimrov

Eva | TUBoIVT’ Gv datei TravTes & KPUTTTEIV Xpewv. In the Christian tradition an influential text is James 3:5-6 oUTws kai | yA@ooa pikpov utÀos kotiv kai peyáAa auyti. 1500 T|Aikov Up fiAiknv GAnv avarrteı Kai fj yA@ooa Tp, 6 Köonos Tis Adıkias, Tj yA@ooa kabioTaTal tv TOTS uéAeciv TIM@v, | oTr'AoUca ÓAÀov TO oca qAoyZouévr] Urrd Tris yetvvns (see Koonce Pentecost (Acts 2:3). Drexel

Kal pAoyiZovoa Tov TPOXOV THis yevéoews Kal 1966: 260-1); cf. also the tongues of fire at

163-1 explains his title, Orbis Phaethon, thus: ‘Lectori, ad fin. En

uerissimam... fabulam, non Phaethontis sed Linguae, quae uelut igneus sed imperitissimus auriga Orbem terrarum suis incendiis jam dudum pessumdat. In this like Numanus Remulus in Aeneid 9, a close relative

of both Fama and Iarbas: see Hardie

199.1 on Aen. 9.595-7 nn. Turnus uses uentosus of Drances’ boastful tongue at 11.390; cf. 11.708 uentosa Gloria. 18 See Hardie 1986: 318.

83

Virgil's Fama

84

Fama too screeches (185 stridens) and perches on high places (186 summi culmine tecti), like a screech-owl (strix, or ulula).'” The three lines that conclude the storm scene, 170-2, bring us down to

earth and back to a realistic world of human actions and responses: neque enim specie famaue mouetur | nec iam furtiuum Dido meditatur amorem: | coniugium uocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam 'From now on Dido gave no thought to appearance or reputation and no longer kept her love a secret in her heart; she calls it marriage, using the word to cover her guilt.' Dido's relation to fama here is twofold. On the one hand she is not moved, affected,

by how she appears to the outside world (specie) or by what people say about her (fama), unmoved by both face and fame." On the other hand Dido herself is the source of words, giving a version of what has gone on between herself and Aeneas: ‘she calls it marriage, this is the name with which she cloaks her guilt’*' Readers are perhaps inclined to overlook these three lines, and to see the eruption of the monster Fama as somehow an unmediated continuation of the elemental and supernatural machinery of the scene in the cave. But Fama's small beginnings are always to be located at the level of individual human beings, and Dido's own gloss on events is itself a seed of the subsequent large-scale propagation of Fama. That Fama picks up on, and gives a different spin to, what Dido herself says is suggested by line 192 cui se pulchra uiro dignetur iungere Dido 'beautiful Dido sees fit to join herself to him as her husband; echoing 172 con-iugium. Dido's words, rather than

the wild and inarticulate ‘signals’ of a personified nature, are the trigger for the circulation of rumour within the cities of men

(173 per urbes).

But the close parallels between the description of the storm and the workings and imagery of Fama point to an experience of rumour as something beyond human

control, either an inhuman force of nature, or a divine or

demonic being. ‘Pheme (“Rumour”) too is a goddess’ (Hesiod Op. 764: see

19 Or like the bubo on the rooftops at 4.462, contributing to a chorus of unnerving voices: 460-5 hinc [from the templum of Sychaeus, i.e. ex-templo] exaudiri uoces et uerba uocantis | uisa uiri, nox cum terras obscura teneret, | solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo | saepe queri et longas in fletum ducere uoces; | multaque praeterea uatum praedicta priorum | terribili monitu horrificant. On Famaas strix see Clément-Tarantino 2006: 214-18, referring to Tupet between Aen. 4.184—5 and the screech-owls at Ov. Fasti 6.131—43,

1981 on the parallel

135 nocte uolant, 140

horrendum stridere nocte solent; see also Ch. 16 p. 610. o

2

2)

As Juno had foreseen at 4.91 nec famam obstare furori. The contest over the naming of things is a philosophical and historiographical topos that is also a part of the domain of fama, occurring particularly at times of social and political breakdown, as Thucydides and Tacitus observe. In an excellent discussion of Virgil’s Fama

De}

?

Whitman 1987 notes that she appears at a ‘moment of moral and linguistic breakdown’ (53). One might ask whether the demonic display during the liaison in the cave could in itself have functioned as a trigger for talk in the human world.

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

Ch. 2 pp. 50-1), and Fama too is labelled a dea foeda ‘foul goddess’ (Aen. 4.195).”' The shift from the individual Dido’s self-regarding attempt to control her own reputation to the uncontrollable proliferation of words within large social groups (magnas... per urbes) makes another point, about the inevitable symbiosis of individual and collective in the working of fama-asreputation, -fame, -renown. In the first of her accusing speeches to Aeneas Dido comes close to identifying her essential personhood with her reputation, Aen. 4.321-3: te propter eundem exstinctus pudor et, qua sola sidera adibam,

fama prior. Again, because of you my sense of shame has been destroyed and my former good name, my only hope of reaching the stars.

*Dido's words... give a new twist to the cliché [of sky-reaching fame] by, in effect, identifying ... herself with her fama.’”' But that sense of her own worth, her own identity even, is entirely dependent on what others say about her. Loss of reputation leads inexorably to self-destruction. As she prepares the stage for her suicide, Dido tells her sister to include among the items to be placed on the pyre (496—7) lectumque iugalem, | quo perii ‘the marriage bed by which I perished’: Servius comments on the last two words, propter extinctum pudorem ‘because of the destruction of her sense of shame’. Other important points both for the larger story of Dido in Aeneid 1 and 4, and for the history of fama, emerge from lines 170-2. Dido's lack of concern for her fama points to a kind of reputation that is particularly, although not exclusively, associated with women (see Ch. 9 pp. 357-8). This is the reputation that comes from not being talked about in discreditable ways, as opposed to the reputation, or fame, that is the high visibility conferred when one's great deeds are on the tongues of all men. This kind of fama is endangered through what Robert Kaster discusses under the heading of * Pudor and discreditable “extension” of the self^^? In the case of women the M ary

" Sergio Casali points out to me that the repetition of

prjun. .. priun at Hes. Op. 761, 763 is

replicated in the epanalepsis at Aen. 4.173-4 Fama... Fama, a repetition itself iconic of the

spreading of rumour. ^^

Hardie

1986: 279. Tatum

1984: 448-51

sees a close parallel between Dido's and the Sophoclean

Ajax' identification with their fama/time (see below). Cf. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 111.1v.22-3 ‘If T lose mine honour, | I lose myself’; Othello 11.11.248—9 (Cassio) ‘Reputation,

reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.’ wu ui

>

Kaster 2005: 42-5.

85

Virgil’s Fama

pudor that restrains an individual from damaging this kind of passive fama tends to be identified specifically with a sexual restraint, pudicitia.*° In line 171 amor is named as the subject of what Dido thinks and talks about, and amor is the subject of what Fama puts about, sexual scandal.

There is a profound and many-sided set of connections between fama and erotic desire, which will be the subject of Chapter 9. Here I only make the obvious point that rumour and gossip are never so active as when the subject is sex, and that the itch to talk about other people’s sex-lives (and to read talk about the same) is itself a prurience of an almost sexual kind.^' This is one reason why Fama is very much at home in this book of the Aeneid. A final comment on lines 170—2: the phrase furtiuum amorem (171) is a reminder that fama is structured by differences of genre as well as of gender. furtum 'theft' is an almost technical term for the love affair of the Roman elegist.”“ What results when the secret elegiac (or iambic, lyric) liaison gets out is fabula, another noun derived from the verb fari, 'talk of

the town’ (cf. Aen. 4.187 [Fama] magnas territat urbes).”” nec iam furtiuum Dido meditatur amorem (171): Dido herself is responsible for making the affair public, but at the same time she is attempting to shift it from one register to another, from the irregular liaison of the elegist to the dynastic marriage proper to a historical epic. That may help to explain something of a contradiction in lines 170—2: in cloaking her 'crime' in the fair name of *marriage' Dido does, after all, reveal a concern for how the world sees

her and talks about her, her species and fama. That is to say, Dido the epic queen turns out not to be like the elegiac puella Sulpicia, proud to flaunt her love affair before the world in a deliberate challenge to the sexual mores expected of an upper-class girl (see Ch. 9 pp. 369-70). The verb meditatur perhaps has a touch of the metapoetic: Dido is ‘rehearsing’ a different kind of plot, one that will be subverted by Fama's counterplot."" Dido is unable to propagate another fama, and one that would indeed be consonant with a positive Odyssean and Apollonian linkage of fama with weddings."'

M 3

86

See Kaster 2005: 167 n. 62. On pudicitia in Latin literature in general see Langlands 2006, esp. Ch. 4 ‘Subversive genres: testing the limits of pudicitia* Spacks 1986: 11 ‘Gossip, even when it avoids the sexual, bears about it a faint flavour of the erotic.”

?* See Pichon 1966: 158.

?!

See Clément-Tarantino 2006: 152-61 on elegiac fama in the Dido episode; note esp. the discussion of Aen. 4.221 oblitos famae melioris amantis. For meditari in a poetic context cf. Ecl. 1.2 siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena. On the Odyssean and Apollonian models see Clément-Tarantino 2006: 163-81. At Od. 6.273-85 Nausicaa expresses her fear of pfiuıs &deuktjs, what people will say about her, the stranger, and marriage; at Od. 23.129-51 Odysseus orchestrates a rumour of Penelope's

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

At the level both of the politics of Carthage and of the generic play of the text there is a struggle for control of fama between Dido and Fama: but there is no contest when one of the contenders is the personification of fama. Nevertheless the eristics of Fama, unequal or otherwise, are a defining feature of her operations, unsurprisingly given that fame and honour are often the goals of intensively competitive behaviour. Virgil’s Fama, as is well known, is a direct descendant of the Homeric personification of Eris. With Aen. 4.176—7: parua metu primo, mox sese attollit in auras ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubila condit:

compare Il. 4.440-3: ... Epis AuoTov nenavia,

Apeos àv5pogóvoio kactyvr|rn érápn TE, fj T’ OAiyT u£v TPOTA Koploceraı, autäp Erreita oUpavó Eotripige k&pn kai erri x8ovi Baivel. ... Strife raging insatiably, the sister and companion of man-slaying Ares; she rears up small at first, but then fixes her head in the heavens and walks upon the earth.

Virgil follows Hesiod in the association of"Epis and ®run in the Works and Days (see Ch. 2 p. 55). wedding to one of the suitors as a screen for the slaughter of the suitors, the seal on the reunion

of Odysseus and Penelope as man and wife, the 'famous' ending of the story of the Odyssey (see Ch. 2 pp. 64-5). At Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.865-74, Herakles uses the language of fame and report to rebuke the Argonauts for their liaisons with the women of Lemnos (see n. 5), disgraceful because they take the place of the marriages that they should be contracting with the women of their own cities: on the connection with Aeneas' situation in Aeneid 4 see Ogle 192.1: 98; Nelis 2001: 157-8; Clément-Tarantino 2006: 172-5. Herakles’ rebuke is a model for the words of

both Fama and of Mercury in Aeneid 4, in itself an indication of the close relationship between the two Virgilian characters (see below pp. 92-3). The wedding of Jason and Medea in Argon. 4 is associated with a more positive kind of report: after a secret union at night the locals come to celebrate next morning (1184-5) étrei vnueptea Qá£i |" Hpn Errrmpoénkev. Nelis 2001: 154, 323-4 shows that the appearances of Fama in Aeneid 4; 7 (104, 392); 8 (554) all rework the Apollonian narrative of the wedding of Jason and Medea on Drepane, and, further, that all

these Virgilian instances of Fama are associated with weddings (Dido, Lavinia, Amata's mock wedding; Pallas and Euryalus cut down before their wedding days). For an earlier example of the report of a wedding cf. Sappho fr. 44.12 (news of the wedding of Hector and Andromache) 9áua 5’ HAGE Kata TTOAIY EUPUYopoV oíAots. Sergio Casali points out to me further parallels between Eris and Fama: both have a family, Erts being the sister of Ares, Fama of giants (Aen. 4.179 sororem); Eris travels through the crowd, multiplying human utterances, groans (II. 4.445 épyouévn Kad’ óuiAov óp£AAouca cTóvov &v6pav). Immediately before the appearance of Erisin Iliad 4 we have heard of the noisy multiplicity of tongues of the Trojan army as it marches out to battle (433-8): cf. the multiplex sermo (albeit of a different kind) with which Fama fills the peoples, Aen. 4.189. At 1]. 11.73 a

87

Virgil’s Fama

extemplo (173) ‘forthwith, immediately’ — the adverb is used by Virgil of sudden but motivated reactions, and the irruption of this bizarre monster into the epic narrative is almost inevitable in the light of what precedes. Fama is, as it were, generated out of the procedures of the text itself, the first of a series of self-reflexive moments. Even her suddenness might be said to be expected, since the surprising coup de foudre is a typically Virgilian way of introducing a new section of the narrative, starting with the in medias res opening to the whole poem, the storm, which is the last thing expected by the Trojans as they cheerfully (Aen. 1.35 laeti) set sail from Sicily on course for Italy. And it is characteristic of the Virgilian in medias res beginning that it is both sudden and shocking, and at the same time profoundly motivated within the thematic and imagistic structures of the poem. The aftershocks of Fama and reactions to her intervention, the ‘plot of fama’, continue in what follows. Iarbas’ taunting prayer to Jupiter further complicates the discourse of fama. The effect of the rumour which he has heard (and which, as the alert reader will have spotted, works in ways like the thunderbolt) is to make him wonder if Jupiter’s control of the literal

thunderbolt is anything more than idle talk, what people say: 208-10 ‘an te, genitor, cum fulmina torques | nequiquam horremus, caecique in nubibus ignes | terrificant animos

et inania murmura miscent?" ‘Is it in vain that we shudder,

father, when you hurl your thunderbolts? Are they blind, those flames in the clouds that make our hearts quake, and are they empty rumblings that they stir up?" Thunderbolts, so far from striking the guilty, may be just inania murmura ‘empty rumbles’, leading to ‘baseless rumours’ (another possible translation of inania murmura) about a supreme and provident divinity. Iarbas concludes that worship of Jupiter may indeed be based on empty report: 217-18 ‘nos munera templis | quippe tuis ferimus famamque fouemus inanem’ ‘we bring gifts to temples we think are yours and minister to an empty name’. As Servius already saw," the speech that Virgil puts in Iarbas' mouth is a sustained exercise in an Epicurean, Lucretian critique of superstition, and there is specific allusion to Lucretius' praise of Epicurus at 1.68-9 quem neque fama deum nec fulmina nec minitanti | murmure compressit caelum 'him neither stories about the gods nor thunderbolts

vocal (rroÀuorovos) Eris rejoices (xaipe) to watch the battle; Fama also rejoices in her work, Aen. 4.190 gaudens. ?* There are detailed parallels between Fama and Iarbas’ description of the thunderbolt: with caecique in nubibus ignes cf. 177 caput inter nubila condit, with terrificant cf. 187 territat, cf. also murmura miscent with 160 misceri murmure. 34 ad 4.210 terrificant animos et reliqua. latenter secundum Epicureos locutus est.

c

88

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

checked, nor the sky with its threatening roar.’ Iarbas cannot know that

the narrator has just described Famain terms taken from a Lucretian account of the physics of the fulmen (Aen. 4.175: on the theological implications of this see below p. 105). If we turn the Lucretian critique contained in Iarbas' words back on the narrator, we might conclude that the poet has been irrationally swayed by the terrifying power of rumour into believing that a phenomenon explicable in natural terms, fama, is in fact a supernatural being, Fama.*° There is a further irony in that Iarbas' last words, famamque fouemus inanem, might be referred by the reader not to what people say about Jupiter, but to what Iarbas has just said about Dido and Aeneas, in particular (215-17) et nunc ille Paris cum semiuiro comitatu, | Maeonia mentum mitra

crinemque madentem | subnexus, rapto potitur 'and now that Paris with his emasculated companions, his chin and perfumed hair tied up in a Lydian turban, enjoys what he has stolen’. This goes even further in defamation than do the words of Fama herself at 193—4."" foueo had been used by Fama of Dido and Aeneas' self-indulgent winter of luxury, (192) nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fouere: Iarbas’ slanders about Dido and Aeneas are his comfort blanket. The primary narrative gives no grounds for believing any of the lurid details in these words of Iarbas — just ‘empty rumour’ Iarbas, distracted by his lust and anger, is unaware that he is himself an important link in the chain of fama, not least as an extreme example of the power of love, here erotic jealousy, to fuel rumour and slander.

35 See Clément-Tarantino 2006: 194-6. For further discussion of the presence of Epicurean/Lucretian elements in the Fama passage and for the implications of the Lucretian allusions for a Virgilio- Lucretian poetics of the sublime see Hardie 2009a: Ch. 3. Summers 1995: 54-5 notes the similarity between Lucretius’ Religio and Virgil's Fara, and suggests that Religio may also be indebted to the Homeric Eris. *6 David Quint points out per litteras that Iarbas’ Epicureanizing doubts about what people say about the gods are reflected in Dido’s bitter words to Aeneas at 365 ff.: Aeneas is not the son of a goddess, and she doubts that the gods bother themselves by sending down messengers, as Aeneas claims: Aen. 4.379-80 scilicet is superis labor est, ea cura quietos | sollicitat. Quint also suggests that the two descents of Mercury in Aeneid 4, once to the waking and once to the sleeping Aeneas, parallel Lucretius' account of the origin of religious beliefin the appearance of simulacra of the gods to humans both when awake and when asleep (Lucr. 5.1169-71). These simulacra are outstanding in appearance (1170 egregias. . . facies, 1174 facie praeclara): Aeneas' sleeping vision of Mercury has membra decora iuuenta (Aen. 4.559). Aen. 4.558 omnia Mercurio similis hints at a simulacrum. S

3

We might distinguish three stages in the evolution of fama: (i) 191-2 a more or less uncontroversial account of the ‘facts, agreeing with the primary narrative; (ii) 193-4 an (arguably) distorted description of the couple’s behaviour; (iii) 211-17 an increasingly fictitious and slanderous version of events.

89

90

Virgil's Fama

It turns out that fama is not inanis, in either of the two senses identified above. In the obvious sense of 'empty reports' about the gods, it is immediately belied (at least within the fiction of the poem) by the presence of a listening and reacting Jupiter. In the sense of 'empty rumours' about Dido and Aeneas, these words, however lacking in a solid foundation in reality, turn out to have an all too solid impact on the rest of the story, through the effects of Jupiter's intervention in response to what he hears. There is another way in which Iarbas is caught up in the workings of fama, and that is a way that is quite inaccessible to him, as being himself the subject of poetic report and tradition: 203-4 isque amens animi et rumore accensus amaro | dicitur . . . ‘They say that he, driven out of his senses and inflamed by the bitter rumour..."* The ‘Alexandrian footnote’ in dicitur might seem otiose until we reflect on the ways in which Iarbas, as well as manipulating fama ‘rumour’, is himself caught up in fama ‘poetic tradition’ (or invented tradition). Iarbas has been introduced as the offspring of a typical poetic fiction: 198 hic Hammone satus rapta Garamantide nympha ‘Iarbas was the son of Jupiter (Ammon) who had raped an African nymph.’ Iarbas no doubt proudly lays claim to the fame (fama) of being the son of Jupiter; famamque fouemus inanem may thus also be read as a sarcastic comment that this is not true: for if it were how could his father not intervene to uphold his honour? Within the limits of Iarbas’ own knowledge of the facts in his world the possibility presumably exists that not Jupiter, but some mortal, is his real father: people say that he is the son of Jupiter, but they could be wrong. Virgil's readers however know that (within the poetic fiction) Jupiter is Iarbas' father, since the omniscient narrator has told us that this is the case, by constructing (probably out of nothing) a poetic tradition, or fama. It is as well for Iarbas that his suspicion that Jupiter may be no more than fama inanis is immediately proved wrong, for, with a non-existent divine father, or at least a god who does not intervene in human affairs, the poetic report that he is Jupiter's son would invalidate itself (a truly inanis fama),

and Iarbas would vanish in a puff of smoke. Via Iarbas, the eyes, ears and mouths of Fama have their effect on the ears,

eyes and mouth of Jupiter." First he hears, and then directs his gaze in the direction of the subject of the report: 220-1 audiit Omnipotens, oculosque ad moenia torsit | regia et oblitos famae melioris amantis ‘The all-powerful 38

Foranother example ofan obtrusive 'Alexandrian footnote' cf. Aen. 9.591 dicitur, followed by

the conjuring up of a person, Numanus Remulus, who has much in common with larbas: see Hardie 1994 ad loc. 9» fama ‘fame’ is conventionally sky-reaching. For a report that travels up to the supreme god himself cf. Theocr. 7.93 kai Znvös &rri 9póvov &yayt paua.

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

god heard, and turned his eyes to the royal city and the lovers forgetful of their better reputation.” torsit, a verb used of ‘hurling’ the thunderbolt, as

in Iarbas’ speech at 208, is the first sign that Jupiter is reasserting a control

that the thunderbolt-like Fama might have appeared to usurp.” As a result of what happened in the cave, the epic plot appears to have been derailed, and narrative disorder has resulted in a chaotic eruption of fama (rumour)

within the poetic fiction. To this Jupiter now responds. Jupiter opens his own mouth to initiate a further relay of words: we know that the word for what he utters is fatum, both opposed to, but within the Aeneid also often associated with, the etymologically cognate fama (see below pp. 103-6). In his instructions to Mercury, Jupiter phrases Aeneas’ dereliction of his mission as a failure of desire to achieve fama, or gloria, laus: 232-3 si nulla accendit tantarum gloria rerum | nec super ipse sua molitur laude laborem ‘if the glory of such a destiny does not fire him and if he does not strive to win fame for himself. With light variation Mercury repeats Jupiter’s words to Aeneas at 272 si te nulla mouet tantarum gloria rerum ‘if the glory of such a destiny does not move you”. What tantarum gloria rerum consists in has been spelled out in the rebuke earlier in Mercury’s speech: 267 regni rerumque oblite tuarum ‘forgetful of your own kingdom and destiny’. oblite picks up the narrator’s description of Dido and Aeneas as they are seen by Jupiter at 221 oblitos famae melioris amantis. There famae melioris had meant in the first instance something like ‘better reputation, their good name as responsible and conscientious rulers of their peoples; this is the sphere in which Hesiod's kakrı orjum operates as a policeman to ensure conformity to social norms. In the wider temporal perspective what Aeneas has forgotten is the greatest and best kind of fama, the future glory ofa Rome that rules the world. In the immediate context ofthis sequence within Aeneid 4 we might say that this kind of fama, which it is the chief business of this epic poem to construct, and which will result from the fulfilment of the plot of fatum, has been crowded out by the kind of words that it is the business of Fama to put about. Jupiter goes so far as to suggest that Aeneas is not merely forgetful of the proper kind of fama, or gloria, but motivated by the envy that is aroused by the fame and success of another: 234 Ascanione pater Romanas inuidet arces? 'Does his father begrudge Ascanius the citadel of Rome?" inuidia, the emotion if not the word, has already entered this plot o

4

On torsit here see Estevez 1982, who also sees a connotation of distorting anger in Jupiter's reaction to what he hears; if so, then a further erosion of any sharp polarity between Fara and Jupiter.

1!

See Kaster 2005: 88-9. Kaster points out that later in the book Aeneas, unaware of Jupiter's

words, uses the same charge against Dido, (349-50) quae tandem Ausonia Teucros considere

91

Virgil's Fama

of fama, for the effect of the news brought by Fama to Iarbas is to arouse in him an intense sexual jealousy at the thought of the erotic satisfaction, by right his as he thinks, that is now enjoyed by Aeneas (217 rapto potitur). Jupiter’s imputation suggests that Aeneas’ motivations are no better than those of Iarbas.’ There seems no basis for the suspicion that Aeneas might feel any distress at the prospective success of his son, and another reason for Aeneas’ casual attitude might be the, in itself praiseworthy, fact that he does not appear to be motivated by an intense desire for personal fame. This is in keeping with Virgil’s revaluation of Homeric heroism, prompted by an awareness of how much damage had been done to the fabric of the Roman state through the individualistic pursuit of gloria by the great men of the

late Republic." Let us turn our attention to the agent employed by Jupiter to correct this state of affairs, Mercury, the Olympian

messenger, who now sets off

in the opposite direction to the words of the chthonic Fama, which had been wafted skywards in the prayer of Iarbas. Within Aeneid 4 the description of Fama and her effects (160—218 (59 lines), including the storm and

scene in the cave) forms one wing of a diptych, the other wing being the description of the descent of Mercury and his message to Aeneas (219—78 (59 lines, if 273

is excised)). There

are extensive parallels and contrasts

between Fama and Mercury, and between Fama and Mount Atlas, Mercury's staging post on his descent to Carthage." Firstly, the parallels with Mercury. As messenger of Jupiter, Mercury plays the same role as the Homeric personification of popular report, 'Occa, ‘messenger of Zeus’ (see Ch. 2 pp. 59-60). Fama and Mercury are both feathered creatures of the air, both are compared, through allusion or simile, to birds: Fama is like

terra | inuidia est?, in terms of the discourse of fama an indication that Aeneas is now on message, and that there is now deep division between himself and Dido in the plot of fama. For another example of the possibility of inuidia in a contest for fame cf. Aen. 9.654-5 primam hanc tibi magnus Apollo | concedit laudem et paribus non inuidet armis, in a context however where continued military success by Ascanius might render his father's return to the Trojan camp redundant. Or even worse: Iarbas’ inuidia, unless we take his words as hypocritical, falls under Kaster's

inuidia-script 3, distress felt ‘because you use/enjoy a good that is rightfully mine, whereas Aeneas’ inuidia falls under script 1 (‘because it is a good"), or script 2 ("because it is your good") 2. m

(see the chart at Kaster 2005: 87).

ES w

92

See Earl 1967: 65-9 on the treatment of uirtus, gloria, nobilitasin the Aeneid; on gloria in the

Aeneid see also Lida de Malkiel 1968: 26-34; Parvulescu 1973. On the response of the Flavian epic poets to Virgil’s downplaying of the love of glory see Ripoll 1998: 194-255. I summarize the discussion in Hardie 1986: 276-9, with some additions. See also Laird 1999: 272. For Pindar AyyeAía is the daughter of Hermes (Ol. 8.81-4).

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

a screech-owl (184-7); Mercury is like a sea-bird (254-5). Both range in

space from high to low, Mercury's descent to earth answering Fama's ascent from lowly beginnings to the throne of Jupiter (via the prayer of Iarbas, which, rightly seen, is but a further, particular stage in the propagation of fama). Both have connections with what lies beneath the earth: Fama is a daughter of Earth, the sister of the Giants now imprisoned in Tartarus, and now alone of her siblings free to move along the full vertical axis of the world; Mercury is psychopompos with the power to send souls to or from the underworld. Now the contrasts: Mercury (Hermes) is the son of the supreme skygod Jupiter. Fama is the daughter of Earth. Fama is the embodiment of crooked and half-true words, Mercury is often allegorized in antiquity as Logos, Ratio, the unperverted word of reason. Opposition between Fama and Mercury is hinted at mythologically through Fama's literary descent from Argus, the never-sleeping monster with a multitude of eyes slain by Hermes Apytigóvtns, a Homeric epithet of the god often understood to mean ‘slayer of Argus*'^ Another opposition operates at the level of speech mode: the words of Fama are given in indirect speech, appropriately for a kind of speech which exists through renewed reportings, and whose original source is typically untraceable.'" By contrast Mercury's source, the words of Jupiter, are given to the reader in direct speech (Aen. 4.223-37), and there

can (within the fiction of the poem) be no more authoritative, original, source of words than Jupiter. Mercury's relay of the word of Jupiter is itself presented in direct speech (271 ~ 235; 272-4 ~ 232-4), by the Homeric convention for the representation of the conveyance of instructions through messengers: the mediator preserves the immediacy of the original words. Yet, unlike the exact relays of Zeus's words at the beginning of Iliad 2 (see Ch. 2 p. 59), Mercury does not reproduce Jupiter's words entirely faithfully, as the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati noted: De laboribus Herculis 1.2.77? ‘For after Jupiter had instructed Mercury that he should admonish

Aeneas, namely in these words "Quid struit? aut qua spe inimica in gente moratur?" [^What is he about? What does he hope to achieve by dallying among a hostile people?"], when Mercury later carries out his order, Virgil has him change these words, as follows: "Quid struis? aut qua spe Libicis teris otia terris?" [^What are you about? What do you hope to achieve by

46 See LdfE s.v. ^ The observation is made by Laird 1999: 101, 237-8, further pointing out (272) that in this Virgil is followed by most later Roman poets. 18 The reference to Salutati is from Laird 1999: 271.

93

Virgil’s Fama

wasting time in the land of Africa?”]. Homer did this almost nowhere, but

he would everywhere repeat the terms of a commission in the same words.’ Salutati takes this as a sign of the greater refinement of the Latin poet. But, as the simple contrast between the crooked speech of Fama and the straight talking of Mercury begins to break down, we might also note that even the messenger of Jupiter is not above giving his own twist or elaboration to the word of the supreme god." His first words to Aeneas already contain a tendentious gloss, in the manner of Fama or Iarbas, on Aeneas’ behaviour:

266-7 pulchramque uxorius urbem | exstruis? ‘are you building a fine city to please your wife?’ with the contemptuous uxorius. At his second appearance to Aeneas, Mercury concludes his speech with words that might seem more appropriate coming from a slanderous Fama: 4.569—70 uarium et mutabile semper | femina ‘woman is always a fickle and changeable thing’. uaria et mutabilis semper femina would indeed be a good description of Fama herself. The striking description of the mountain Atlas, on which Mercury alights before launching himself towards Carthage (Aen. 4.246—51), offers further similarities and contrasts with Fama. Both Fama and Atlas are giants, reaching from earth to heaven, their heads wrapped in cloud. But Fama is constantly on the move, a personification of uncontrollable metamorphosis, a chthonic thunderbolt rebellious against the proper wielder of the thunderbolt, Jupiter. Atlas is a giant immobilized, holding up the heavens on his head, a stable prop of the established cosmic order, metamorphosed once and for all into a personification” of endurance in the face of the forces of the storm.?' Fama, in Virgil and elsewhere, as we have seen, has strong associations with storm and wind; within the imagistic patterns of Aeneid

4 the winds that blast Atlas are aligned with other kinds of unruly words, Anna's relay to Aeneas of Dido's tearful pleas, against which Aeneas is as unmoved as the storm-beaten oak in the mountains (437-49).

FS *

At the end of his visit to Aeneas Mercury disappears as suddenly as Fama had appeared (at line 173): 277-8 mortalis uisus medio sermone reliquit | et procul in tenuem ex oculis euanuit auram 'in the middle of their conversation he disappeared from mortal view and vanished far from sight into

59

eo

94

5!

Note that Jupiter's own words, while they refer to (4.225) fatis. . . datas... urbes, an ordinance

originating in Jupiter himself, also engage with the reported words of another divinity, Venus (227-31). Atlas isa personification twice over: the mountain is described in the image of a human being (imagery reflecting the prior metamorphosis of a person into a mountain), and the personified mountain is then enlisted, through allegorical allusion, as a personification of endurance: see Hardie 1980: 280-2. See Hardie 1983. For an analysis of the contrast between protean Fama and monumentally fixed Atlas, in the context of a discussion of allegory, see Hardie 1999: 97-100.

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

the thin air. This is not a time for gods or mortals to stand on ceremony, but medio sermone is perhaps also a comment on the artificiality of trying to circumscribe one of fama’s ‘plots’: talking never stops, words are ceaselessly generated and circulated, with consequences for what humans think and do; it is only literary plots and political ideologies that pretend otherwise. But from this latter perspective a kind of closure has been achieved, one that allows a transition to the next stage of the plot. At the end of the sequence that reaches from lines 160 to 278 we are of course very far from the fated end of the story told in the Aeneid, but Aeneas has been

shocked out of his complaisant participation in the building of the city which will become Rome’s greatest enemy, into an eagerness to continue on the path that will lead to Rome: 281-2 ardet abire fuga... attonitus tanto monitu ‘he burns to depart in flight... thunderstruck by so weighty a warning': Mercury's words have had effects on Aeneas similar to those of Fama, flying with the momentum of the Lucretian thunderbolt, on Iarbas: cf. 197 incenditque animum dictis, 203 rumore accensus amaro. In the asso-

nance of attonitus tanto monitu do we hear the fading rumbles of the thunderbolt? Ovid will compare the muted murmurings that fill his House of Fama to such a sound as cum luppiter atras | increpuit nubes, extrema tonitrua reddunt ‘when Jupiter has made the black rain-clouds sound out, they give a last rumble of thunder’ (Met. 12.51-2: see Ch. 5 pp. 160-1).

I now widen the perspective to consider the ways in which Fama is embedded in larger segments and patterns of the Aeneid. Firstly, note the prominence of fama in the Carthaginian episode as a whole, stretching from the Trojans' arrival in Book 1 to the death of Dido at the end of Book 4. "Concatenation of fama’ is the pertinent phrase used by James Tatum in a discussion of the Dido

episode, for the whole

of which Tatum

sees as

determinative the model of the Sophoclean Ajax, who identifies with his Tint ‘honour’ to the point of dying for it," as the extinction of Dido's pudor leads inevitably to her self-extinction in suicide. Tatum also stresses Dido's hunger for narratives about Aeneas, in other words his epic fama, and her infatuation with that fama (although the word fama itself is not used in this context); just as Dido identifies the core of her being with her fama as pudor, so the person of Aeneas and the epic fame of Aeneas merge into one as the object of her erotic desire, another aspect of the deep connections between fama and amor. Virgil may also hint at a theory of the erotics of

>? Tatum 1984: 446-51. On Sophocles’ Ajax and fama see Clément-Tarantino 2006; 111-12; note the semi-personification of ‘rumour’ at Ajax 173-4 © peydAa partis, & | uaTep aloxuvas éuas,

with Stanford 1963 ad loc.

95

96

Virgil’s Fama

narrating; Ovid alludes to Dido

as obsessive audience for Aeneas

in the

description at Ars 2.127—44 of Calypso insatiable in her desire for repeated retellings by Ulysses of the history of Troy, a passage that has in recent years often been taken as an Ovidian reflection on the workings of narrative more generally." It is near the shore of Carthage that Aeneas announces his sky-reaching fame to his disguised mother: 1.378—9 sum pius Aeneas... fama super aethera notus ‘I am

pious Aeneas,

whose

fame

is known

above

the heavens’,

a

boast which looks backwards to its close Homeric model in Odysseus' selfidentification at Od. 9.19-20 (‘I am Odysseus, son of Laertes... and my fame [kleos] reaches the heavens’), but which, for the reader, already looks

forward to the tradition of Aeneas' fame as Roman ancestor. Five lines later, focussing on his present plight, Aeneas contradicts himself when he describes himself as (Aen. 1.384) ipse ignotus ‘myself unknown’ (in this land): but it will turn out that Carthage is in fact full of the fame of Aeneas’ Trojans, in the scenes of the Trojan War in the Temple of Juno,?'

(1.457)

bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per orbem *wars already broadcast in fame through the whole world’, and in Dido’s own proclamation of the universal fame of the people, the city, and the war, (565-6) quis genus Aeneadum, quis Troiae nesciat urbem | uirtutesque uirosque aut tanti incendia belli? “Who does not know the race of Aeneas, who does not know the city of Troy, the brave deeds, the heroes, and the flames of so great a war?’ Yet this fullness of

fama is also an emptiness — Achates' confident statement to Aeneas of the solid benefits of Trojan fame is gainsaid by the narrator: 460—4 'quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? |... feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem." | sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani ‘““What region in the world is not full of our suffering? . This fame will bring some salvation." So he spoke and fed his mind on the empty images.’ This is inanis fama, not least because it will bring no salvation to the Trojans from the direction of Carthage. Equally empty, but also equally full, is the protestation of Aeneas to Dido, (609-10) semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt, | quae me cumque uocant terrae ‘your honour, name and praises will endure for ever, whichever lands call me’. This looks to a future that will not happen: Aeneas will not be the bearer to distant countries of the fama of a queen who saved his people, while at the same time it is true that, whatever happens

53 E.g. Barchiesi 2002: 197-9. 9* Chaucer begins his House of Fame with the viewing of epic scenes (from the Aeneid) in a Temple of Venus modelled on the ecphrastic Virgilian Temple of Juno - a recognition on Chaucer's part of the role played by the Temple of Juno in the larger plot of fama that unrolls in Virgil's Carthaginian episode. See Ch. 15 p. 575.

Fama within the narrative context in Aeneid 4

hereafter to the Trojans, Dido’s name will survive: the matter of honos and

laudes will be the subject of contention between different versions of the story of Dido and between different readers of Virgil’s version of that story (uarium et mutabile semper). Aeneid 4 contains no fewer than ten instances of fama." Fama personified resurfaces twice after her first and major appearance, the first time to announce to Dido the Trojan preparations for departure, the consequence of Aeneas’ response to Mercury's descent (298—9). The second appearance is at the climax of the action, attendant on Dido's suicide: 665-8 it clamor

u EI

w e

o o

ad alta | atria: concussam bacchatur Fama per urbem. | lamentis gemituque et femineo ululatu | tecta fremunt, resonat magnis plangoribus aether ‘A cry rises to the heights of the palace; the city is shaken as Fama riots through it like a maenad.” The buildings resound with weeping and moans and women's wailing, the sky echoes to the loud laments.' Dido's death is a kind of antimarriage: she stabs herself on the bed on which she has placed the clothes and an effigy of Aeneas (507-8). Fama emerges as she had previously after a wedding of Dido and Aeneas that was no wedding; the ululatus echoes the weird shrieks of the Nymphs on the mountain-top at 168 summoque ulularunt uertice Nymphae." fama associated with a wedding modulates into fama associated with the panic and chaos at the sack of a city, another frequent linkage," in the simile comparing the lamentation at the death of Dido to the sack of Carthage or Tyre (669—71). fama of love and fama of war, in neither case attached to a reality, for this is no wedding, and this is no sack. But fama associated with the image, here a simile, of a sacked city takes us back to the fama embodied in the ecphrastic images - empty pictures, no more — of the Trojan War in the Temple of Juno in Aeneid 1. There enduring fama followed on a war and a sack, whereas here Virgil conjures up the chaotic and transient fama that erupts at the time of the sacking of a city. But at the same time the story of the living Dido is sealed

Exceeded only by Aeneid 7 (eleven). Tilg 2010: 269 compares the account of the rumours that raced through the city of Rome on the death of Julius Caesar, apparently the only example of Rumour rushing through a city on the death of a person or persons between Od. 24.413-16 (Ossa) and this Virgilian passage, in Nicolaus of Damascus, Life of Augustus, (FGrH 90F 130, p. 198) tay 8’ 1 phn Kai rois &&co BifyyyseAAe kai ava rrácav Egoita thy TTöAıv Tákpifés uev oU BHAovoa, Sti ufvroi KaKév TI uéya ein rpoorremroxós. One might compare the flames that light up the walls of Carthage as the Trojans sail away at the beginning of Aeneid 5, a fire-signal of something unknown but suspected to be something terrible. On fire-beacons and fama see above n. 16. For the connection see Nelis 2001: 171-2, 323 ‘a bizarre perversion of a wedding night,

[n] =

referring to Moorton

1990: 159, 163.

Cf. Clément-Tarantino 2006: 221-6 on rumour and the urbs capta topos, looking forward to the importance of rumour in Livian and Silian narratives of the Second Punic War.

97

Virgil’s Fama

98

with reference to historical tradition, fama,

that records the destruction of

Carthage's mother-city Tyre, and of Carthage itself." If that is the end to which is headed the fama of Carthage, the fama of the legendary actors has a less stable afterlife. Dido in her fury had looked forward to the time after her own death when news of Aeneas’ just punishment will reach her in the underworld: 4.387 audiam et haec Manis ueniet mihi fama sub imos.“' What that punishment might be is spelled out in Dido's curse at 615-20, foreseeing one of the competing traditions on the death of Aeneas. Within the Aeneid what comes to Dido in the underworld is not the report of his death, but the living man

himself, to

find confirmation of a report that he had heard in the world above: 6.456-7 infelix Dido, uerus mihi nuntius ergo | uenerat exstinctam ferroque extrema secutam? 'So the news they brought me was true, unhappy Dido, that you were dead and had ended your life with the sword ?^! The underworld, here through a very personal connection, is the repository of true fama, but only within the fiction of the Aeneid: there are of course other versions of what happened to Dido. Virgil's version is now for ever domiciled in the epic underworld, which from the time of the Odyssey had been a storehouse of poetic tradition, fama." The boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead is a permeable one when it comes to fama: the fame of a great individual lives on after death; the tradition that preserves the famous deeds of the great dead can be imagined in spatial terms as a place of the dead whose ghosts can be revived through new texts and new readings.

Relatives of Fama*? The self-contained personification allegory of Fama at Aen. 4.173—97 thus reaches out to connect with a much more extensive 'plot of fama' woven into 9 60

For ways in which the scenes of the Trojan War in Aeneid 1 already foreshadow other sackings, and in particular the historical destruction of Carthage, see Barchiesi 19994. At Pind. Ol. 8.81-4 AyyeAia daughter of Hermes (the first example of a genealogy of an abstraction of fame) brings news of his son's success to [phion in the underworld; see Wassermann 1920: 15, with other examples of fama penetrating the underworld: Pind. Ol. 14.20-4 ueAavrtix£éa viv &óuov | Deooepdvas fO, Ayol, rrarpi kAUTaV pépoic' ayyeAiay, | KAtóBauov dep’ iSoic, vióv elrrms STI oi véav | K6ATIONS Trap’ EUESEOIS Tlicas | totepavece KuBiuwv àt8Acv rr Tepoloi yaitay; at Lucian Pisc. 14 9rjuat reach Plato in the underworld.

$! n

6

w

6

Cf. 3.310 uerus mihi nuntius adfers, Andromache in a figurative afterlife, the counterpart to 294 incredibilis rerum fama that reaches Aeneas. See Ch. 1 p. 10. For a discussion of the ‘Relatives of Fama’ from the point of view of the Virgilian sublime see Hardie 2009a: 75-81, 88-93.

Relatives of Fama

the story of Dido and Aeneas from its start in Book 1 to its eschatological conclusion in Book 6. The person of Fama and her workings also leak out into parts of the text where her presence is not superficially apparent: the immediately preceding storm scene, the following speech of Iarbas (and person of Iarbas), the person and operation of Mercury. That she is so pervasive is in itself a sign that Fama can be read as little less than an embodiment of the epic tradition itself. But before I explore that claim in more detail, I turn to examine the ways in which the person of Fama and her operations in the central episode in Aeneid 4 are related to other persons and phenomena in the poem, beyond the Dido and Aeneas episode.^' The opposition between the chthonic Fama and the Olympian Jupiter and Mercury inserts her within the recurrent Gigantomachic imagery of the poem.” As daughter of Earth she is the sister not only of the giants Coeus and Enceladus, but also of the more dangerous Typhoeus, on whose Hesiodic genealogy Virgil directly models that of Fama.^^ Her gigantic stature makes her like various mythological giants in the Aeneid. 4.177 ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubila conditis a line shared with Orion at 10.767, to whom Mezentiusis compared in a simile. There may be a further point in that the constellation Orion is associated with stormy weather, and storm imagery is commonly applied to Fama. As a monstrum horrendum, ingens (4.181) she is paired with Polyphemus (3.658), and this introduces us to a more wide-reaching set of connections with the monsters in the Sicilian episode at the end of Book 3.* Polyphemus’ name itself contains the root of prjun, fama, and etymologizes as ‘(the source or subject of) many reports'^" Another noisy giant, named asa brother of Fama at 4.179, is Enceladus, whose name comes from KéAados, KeAadéw ‘sound,

shout aloud’, used of ‘sounding the praises of’ especially in Pindar. Enceladus is first introduced at 3.578 with the words fama est Enceladi..., suggesting

e o

=

6

a

6

ES

6

a

6

Fama, related to a multiplicity of other creatures in the Aeneid, is already a bricolage of mythological beings in the Greco-Roman tradition: see Dangel 2002: 95 ‘ce travail rhapsodique de couture en fragments mythiques composites. Later poets, starting with Ovid, respond creatively to Fama’s family of relatives: for example the Forge of Vulcan in Marino’s Adone, 1.70, is the place of making for the trumpets of Fame, the shackles of Aeolus’ winds, the chains of Furor and Discordia, and the keys with which Janus opens and closes his temple. Clément-Tarantino 2006: 208-11, 585-6 on Enceladus.

Hardie 1986: 274; for further details see Ch. 6 pp. 216-17. Nelis 2001: 153 points out that 4.178-80 also allude to the comparison at Ap. Rhod. Argon. 2.38-40 of the monstrous Amycus to a son of Typhoeus or of Earth herself, ola trapoıdev xcoouévn Aii TIKTev, a passage itself alluding to Hes. Theog. 820-2. For further discussion of these connections with reference to the Virgilian sublime see Hardie 2009: 92-3, 96-7. See Louden

1995: 41-3; Bakker 2002.

99

Virgil's Fama

through juxtaposition with fama an etymology of the name. The context is the ‘commonplace found in all the poets’ (Sen. Ep. 79.5) of the description of Aetna, a locus conclamatus of poetic fama; furthermore the poets differ as to which giant is pinned under Etna (Typhoeus more commonly), and as an ‘Alexandrian footnote’ fama est here, as often, draws attention to the disputed, and possibly unfounded, nature of a particular tradition. Enceladus is the physical cause of the eruptions of Aetna, and Polyphemus is figuratively assimilated to the volcano that dominates the landscape he inhabits.”

This noisiest and most

unruly of natural phenomena,

which

reaches from the world of the dead below to the heavens above, is another

potential figure for Fama.'! Fama is a giantess, and is opposed to Jupiter not just as chthonic to Olympian

creature, but as female to male. The narrative of the Aeneid is

kept going for twelve books by the repeatedly thwarted attempts of the female Juno to substitute her plot for the plot of the male Jupiter. As a mise en abyme of the underlying plot of the whole poem the Fama episode in Book 4 refers us back to the very first episode in the poem, the Storm in Book 1.” In that opening sequence disorder is unleashed through the eruption from an underground prison of storm-winds, at the behest of a female divinity intent on derailing the plot of Fate. Fama is a demonic embodiment

of Jupiter’s thunderbolt; Juno contrasts her own

impotence

with the power of another goddess, Minerva, who was able to wield her

father Jupiter’s thunderbolt against a human enemy (1.42—5). Juno exploits her role as goddess of marriage prior to both the storm in Book 1 and the storm plus Fama sequence in Book 4. In the former she promises the hand of a nymph as a bribe to Aeolus to unleash the winds: 1.73 coniugio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo ‘I shall join you in lawful wedlock and make her yours’; in the latter she uses the identical line (4.126) in a promise to Venus

that she will unite Dido and Aeneas in wedlock. In Book 4 the promise of a wedding is not needed to motivate a storm (Juno engineers this one without outside help), rather it is the solemnized (after a fashion) wedding that

e >

triggers the stormy outburst of Fama. Earthborn Fama shoots up to the sky;

Ss

100

See Horsfall 2006 on 3.570-87.

7° Hardie 1986: 274-5.

See esp. Hardie 1986: 276 n. 120 on the possible volcanic quality of Epicurean/Empedoclean gloria (fama) at Lucr. 6.7-8. For other connections between the storm in Aeneid 1 and the themes of fama see Ch. 2 pp. 70-2. With 4.160 interea magno misceri murmure caelum, the first line of what I have identified as the ‘Fama episode’ in Aeneid 4 in its wider extent, cf. 1.55 magno cum murmure, misceri murmure pontum.

124 interea magno

Relatives of Fama

the storm, with its noisy sound effects (1.87 insequitur clamorque uirum stridorque rudentum ‘there ensues the shouting of men and the screaming of ropes’) opens up the full span of the vertical axis, from the earth revealed beneath the yawning waves, to the stars, 103 fluctusque ad sidera tollit. There is a twofold response by supreme male gods to the disorder caused by the storm in Book 1. Firstly Neptune, aware of the hubbub, intervenes to send the storm-winds packing back to their prison. Secondly a rather nonchalant Jupiter is stirred to response by a character disturbed by what is happening on earth, Venus;”' Jupiter’s response is not an intervention in the immediate action, but a speech act that unrolls the whole of the plot of Fate, sketching out the famous history of Rome that reaches a climax at 1.287 imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris' [Caesar] will set Ocean as the limit to his empire, the stars as the limit to his fame’, closure at the

maximum point of fama's expansion. Juno's most powerful accomplice in her attempt to rewrite history is the Fury, or Dira, Allecto, whose intervention to restart the epic action in

Book 7 duplicates the inaugural function of the storm-winds in Book 1. Allecto has much in common with the Fama of Aeneid 4. Fama was borne by a Mother Earth (4.178) ira inritata deorum 'aroused by her anger against [or the anger of] the gods; hinting perhaps at the etymology Dira from dei ira ‘anger of god’.’° 76 Like Allecto the ‘unceasing’, the untiring Fama is a distorter and a shape-shifter, whose twistings and perversions have the effect of transforming the narrative of the human actions of the poem.’’ At the end of Allecto's series of interventions Virgil adds a kind of footnote that indicates her affiliation with Fama.'" Allecto announces

to Juno, (7.545)

E] u

N =

‘en, perfecta tibi bello discordia tristi! ‘See, discord is made perfect in the horror of war': she has completed her re-enactment of the role of Discordia

With Venus’ address to Jupiter at 1.229-30 ‘o qui res hominumque deumque | aeternis regis imperiis et fulmine terres’ cf. larbas’ prayer at 4.206-10 ‘Iuppiter omnipotens. . . an te, genitor, cum fulmina torques | nequiquam horremus, caecique in nubibus ignes | terrificant animos? Lucretian intertextuality is also present in this scene in Book 1, as it is in the larbas scene in Book 4: the Virgilian Venus pointedly does not behave in the manner of her namesake in the Hymn to Venus, a goddess who has appropriated the thunderbolt of the Stoic Zeus: cf. Cleanthes, Hymn to Zeus 10-11 &upnen rupóevT' aleiCaovra kepauvóv: | ToU yap UTrS mÀnyfis places TravT’ tpya Tekeitan. See further Ch. 2 p. 73. 76 Maltby 1991 s.v. dirus.

M =

With the description of the monstrum Allecto at 7.328—9 tot sese uertit in ora, | tam saeuae

facies, tot tot uigiles Noted by and Fama

pullulat atra colubris cf. the listing of the features of the monstrum Fama at 4.182-3 oculi subter.., | tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit auris. Clément-Tarantino 2006: 670; for further discussion of Allecto's links with Discordia see Hardie 20092: 99-101.

101

Virgil's Fama

in Book 7 of Ennius’ Annals, and now has leisure to try out another part: 7.548—50 hoc etiam his addam, tua si mihi certa uoluntas: | finitimas in bella feram rumoribus urbes, | accendamque animos" insani Martis amore ‘I shall

perform this further service, if it be your fixed wish: I will use rumours to sweep the neighbouring cities into war and I shall inflame their minds with a lust for mad warfare.' She will go round the cities of Italy (as Fama had gone round the cities of Africa, 4.173), inflaming their inhabitants with a heady mix of war and love, love of war. Juno, however, declines this further

service. Allecto has done enough already. Valerius Flaccus will notice how closely Fama and Allecto are related when he models Venus' use of Fama at

Argon. 2.115 ff. on Juno's use of Allecto in Aeneid7 (see Ch. 6 pp. 197—201). At her last appearance in Aeneid 4, at the death of Dido, (666) bacchatur Fama per urbem ‘Fama raves through the city like a Bacchant’, and her wild words are associated with the sounds of female grief. As a Bacchant Fama is like those human women who lose control and rush raving through cities, more particularly like Dido herselfin immediate response to news brought to her, furenti, by (298) impia Fama. On an earlier occasion Dido's words

had triggered the explosion of fiery Fama through the cities of Africa; now Fama inflames Dido's maenadic wandering through the city of Carthage, 300-1 totamque incensa per urbem | bacchatur. Bacchic wandering and fama are linked again in Book 7, here in a sequence motivated by Fama's close relative Allecto, after whose assault Amata

(7.377) ‘rages maddened

through the city’, before flying out (387 euolat) into the wilds (385) ‘feigning possession by Bacchus’. One wild woman is multiplied once fama sets off on her flight: 392-3 fama uolat, furiisque accensas pectore matres | idem omnis simul ardor agit noua quaerere tecta ‘fama takes flight, and the same passion kindled in the hearts of all the mothers drives them to seek new homes.’*! Another wild and talkative woman related to Fama is the Virgilian Sibyl, who at Aen. 6.625—7 uses the epic hundred-tongues cliché, to which the many tongues of Fama (4.183) gesture (see p. 109 below), and who herself

M ©

Cf. 4.197 incenditque animum dictis, Fama’s effect on Iarbas.

> S

has a hundred voices given vent by the hundred doors in her cave which fly open when she prophesies: 6.43—4 ostia centum, | unde ruunt totidem uoces, responsa Sibyllae." The Sibyl's own voice is a source of unerring, if obscure and riddling, prophecy. More difficult for mortals to control is the written form of her oracles, 3.443—52: the fates that she sings she writes down on

For a medieval example of the collaboration of Fama and Fury cf. Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus

e

102

8.305-16, where Fara announces the conspiracy of the underworld against heaven, redoubling the furor of the Furiae, ueris falsa maritans. On Fama and maenads see Bocciolini-Palagi 2007: 65-6, 188-9, 92? See Gowers 2005.

Fama and fatum

leaves, which are carefully arranged and stored in her cave. 447 illa manent immota" locis neque ordine cedunt ‘they remain unmoved in their place and stay in order’, until the door is opened, whereupon

the wind blows them

into a disorder that cannot be untangled by those who come to consult the Sibyl.

fama and fatum?* Unlike the wind that blows the Sibyl’s leaves, fama-as-rumour disorders not just the record of future events, but the shape of those events themselves through the active effect of her words on what men do. fama-asrumour stands for a chaotic, distorting, metamorphic, unfixed proliferation of words, largely on the lips of women, and for the power of words to disrupt a settled order or to divert action on to a new track. fatum is the term for the utterance or word that brings order into the world and directs events to a fixed goal. Both fama and fatum are nouns derived from fari, but while the former more often than not is the product of female speech, fatum is above all the word of the male god Jupiter, an association stamped on the narrative of the Aeneid by the etymological puns on fari and fatum in the

Speech of Jupiter at Aen. 1.256-62." On a number of occasions the Aeneid exploits the assonance between fama and fatum in an attempt to forge an indissoluble bond between the two words."^

RG

The Speech of Jupiter in Aeneid 1, as we have seen, reveals the

whole plot of fatum which culminates with the star-reaching fama of Caesar. In the two major episodes of prophecy, the Parade of Heroes at the end of Book 6 and the Shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8, Virgil attempts to weld together fama and fatum indissolubly. The shade of Anchises prefaces his selective revelation to his son of the fame of the heroes of Roman history with the words (6.759) te tua fata docebo. At the end of the Parade the word fama is used to sum up what we have been shown in the Parade of Heroes: Cf. 1.257-8 (Jupiter to Venus) manent immota tuorum | fata tibi.

Hejduk 2009 argues that, despite his profession to be the mouthpiece of Fatum, the Virgilian Jupiter is really concerned with power (imperium) and adulation (fama). 85 See O'Hara 1996: 121. On the divine connotations of fari see Bettini 2008. 7.79-80 (prophecies of Lavinia's destiny) namque fore inlustrem fama fatisque canebant | ipsam, sed populo magnum portendere bellum; 7.231-4 (Ilioneus to Latinus) non erimus regno indecores, nec uestra feretur | fama leuis tantique abolescet gratia facti, |... | fata per Aeneas iuro; 8.131—3 (Aeneas to Evander) sed mea me uirtus et sancta oracula diuum | cognatique patres, tua terris didita fama, | coniunxere tibi et fatis egere uolentem. See Barchiesi 2001: 130-2 ‘Fate and fame.

103

Virgil's Fama

6.889 incenditque animum famae uenientis amore ‘he kindles his spirit with love for the fame to come’. This is a very different use of the incendiary effects of fama from Fama's working on Iarbas at 4.197 incenditque animum dictis atque aggerat iras 'she inflamed his mind with what she said and heaped up his anger’. Love has replaced anger, although it is a love for the famous deeds of Roman

violence in war (and we remember

that Iarbas’

anger was fuelled by love)." fama and fatum are bound even more tightly at the end of the second major prophecy of Roman history in the middle of the poem, the Shield of Aeneas, an ecphrasis that pulls off an Empedoclean fusion of love and strife in its construction of a monument of fama. Aeneid 8 ends with the line attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum ‘lifting on his shoulder the fame and fate of his descendants; summing up the message of the Shield, itself a microcosmic icon of the Roman

epic tradition, and

bringing together hero, Jovian fate, and the epic glory of the Romans, the

subject of the epic poet's plot." But the lesson taught by the personification

ce e

e ES]

of Fama is that this is to force the word into a straitjacket from which it always threatens to escape. This power struggle is one in which the (male) poet is himself caught up; both the Parade of Heroes and the Shield of Aeneas are transparent figures for the containment of plots of fama within a literary, epic order of words.” In the reception of the Aeneid this struggle between competing versions of a story, between good and bad fama, has been most visible and persistent in the unresolved debate over the respective reputations of Dido and Aeneas as a result of what happened, or what is said to have happened, in Book 4 of the Aeneid, the book of fama. The impossibility of a surgical separation of good and bad fama also emerges from closer reflection on the apparently contrasting operations of Fama and Mercury in Aeneid 4. For the truth is that Fama actually furthers the plans of Jupiter, of Fatum, whose fulfilment will produce the fama 'fame' of Aeneas and his descendants down to Augustus. This gigantic creature's assault on the heavens does not threaten the divine order; instead the message that finally reaches the ears of Jupiter recalls him to an awareness of the need to further his own plan for the future of Aeneas and his people. One might even ask whether the operation of Fama had not all along been a part ofthe plan of Jupiter; that he had been fully aware of what was going on

LÀ ©

104

On fama and desire see Hardie 2004. Or in other words to make fama coextensive with the epic facta recorded by the poet: for the pair fama/facta in the Aeneid cf. 7.232, 9.194-5, 10.468-9; Ch. 1 p. 9. For fuller discussion of the Parade of Heroes and the Shield of Aeneas see Ch. 9 pp. 355-7. On the ways in which Virgil hints at a philosophical, Platonic and Ciceronian, critique of the values of fama and gloria in the Parade of Heroes see Feeney 19864.

Fama and fatum

in Carthage well before Iarbas’ complaints reached him may be suggested by the presence among the elemental deities in attendance at the ‘wedding’ in the cave of (4.167) conscius aether, hinting at the allegorical identification of Zeus/Jupiter with the fiery upper air, aither. ”' The collusion, witting or unwitting, between Jupiter and Fama will appear less surprising when we have read to the end of the poem to find that Jupiter’s last action is to employ not Mercury, or even Iris, as his emissary to earth, but a Dira. A verbal parallel reinforces the point: Jupiter uses the Dira when he plans disasters for mankind, ‘or terrifies the cities with war’, aut bello territat urbes (12.852)

~ 4.187 (Fama) et magnas territat urbes. From this point of view the affinity of Fama with the thunderbolt is not a sign of rebellion but of collusion. In line 178 ira... deorum can be taken as either an objective genitive (Earth's anger against the gods) or a subjective genitive (the anger of the gods, whose manifestation aroused Earth to produce Fama): the grammatical ambiguity mirrors Earth's parodic doubling of Jupiter's activity. Fama is the product of anger; the epic plot typically consists of the narrative consequences of an anger human or divine. Ovid comments on the association of sky-god and chthonic demon in his own rewriting of the Virgilian Fama: what you hear in the House of Fama are (Met. 12.49—52) ‘the mutterings of a low voice, like the noise that comes from the waves of the sea, if you listen at a distance, or

like the sound produced by the last rolls of thunder when Jupiter has made the black clouds rattle."! Finally we have already seen that Jupiter’s agent Mercury is as guilty of distortion and misrepresentation as is Fama, and that the effect of Mercury's words on Aeneas is an emotional turmoil as violent as the effect of Fama's words on larbas. Iarbas himself is a participant in the construction and propagation of fama, but larbas shares with Mercury the claim to be the son of Jupiter. The usefulness of slander for Jupiter's ends may also be read as a comment on the historical uses ofbadmouthing by the opposing parties in the struggle for power in Rome in the 40s and 30s sc. In epic poetry Zeus/Jupiter figures the power both of the omniscient poet, whose plot is coextensive with the ‘plan of Zeus’, and of the ruler in the real world. Correspondingly, in Aeneid

%

See Hardie 1986: 318 on the ‘universal expression’ here. Smith 2002: 67-8 makes the ingenious suggestion that the allusion to Aen. 4.193-4 luxu... turpique cupidine captos at Val. Flacc. Argon. 2.131

turpique cupidine captos, part of the rumours that Venus orders Fara to put

about in the story of the women of Lemnos, an event that predates the events of Aeneid 4 in mythical time, hints at a Valerian reading of Aeneid 4 in which it is Venus, remembering her

?!

old tricks on Lemnos, who gets Fama going in order to further her (and Jupiter’s) purposes. On the Valerian episode see Ch. 6 pp. 197-201. See further Ch. 5 pp. 160-1.

105

106

Virgil's Fama

4 there is a homology between the manipulation of fama by those who hold power, or struggle to hold power, in Rome, and by the poet as he constructs his version of events for the reader. Virgil's Fama has proved particularly relevant to later periods when slander and defamation have been prominent in political culture. Lindsay Kaplan in her study of 'the culture of slander in early modern England'" claims that there was a dramatic rise in the incidence of defamation in sixteenth-century England, and of the literary texts that she argues reflect contemporary reality, two, Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Jonson's Poetaster, contain major reworkings of the Virgilian Fama (see below Chs. 10 pp. 398-403, 13 pp. 523-5). The defamation of Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid 4 reflects the negative image of Antony and Cleopatra put about by Octavian in the propaganda war of the 30s Bc.

Poetics and metapoetics of Fama? The preceding discussions have flirted intermittently with the selfreferentiality of Virgil’s dealings with fama, the central term for the subject matter and goal of the epic poet, who applies his poetic powers to immortalize the great deeds of his heroes. If the personification of Fama in Aeneid 4 ends up colluding with the supreme divinity, she also colludes with the male poet. The plot of the epic poet converges with the plan of Zeus, and Fama works with both. The range of Fama is not limited to her easy and swift movement over the horizontal and vertical axes of space. She can also enter other dimensions,

free to cross the boundary that separates what lies inside and outside the text, and in so doing free also to travel through time, at home both in the

legendary age of Aeneas and in the age of Virgil. As tradition she is indeed at home in all ages of recorded history, and she holds out the promise of an indefinite futurity to those whom she takes under her wing. In her cameo appearances Fama displays the same abilities: Nicholas Horsfall notes the way in which passing notices on fama slip between inside and outside the text, for example Aen. 3.121 fama uolat: announcing to the wandering Trojans that Idomeneus has abandoned Crete, but also flagging a story of 92 Kaplan 1997. 53 See above all the massive demonstration of Clément-Tarantino 2006. Tilg 2010 argues that Onn plays an important metaliterary role in Chariton's Callirhoe: see below pp. 114-15. A medieval sensitivity for the metaliterary quality of Virgil's Fara is suggested by a comparison of Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus 8.305 Nuncia Fama uolat et ueris falsa maritans with 1.142-3 Virgilii musa mendacia multa colorat | et facie ueri contexit pallia falso: see Fyler 1979: 30-1.

Poetics and metapoetics of Fama

traditional legend."' With regard to the epic tradition, Séverine ClémentTarantino analyses in great detail the vertiginous encyclopaedic nature of Virgil's Fama," both as an encapsulation of previous figurations of fama, and as a reworking of a large number of individual narrative sequences in earlier poems. fama with a small f represents a human mode of communication subject to the limitations of mortal experience, as in the invocation to the Muses that precedes the Catalogue of Italians at Aen. 7.641—6 Pandite nunc Helicona, deae, cantusque mouete, | qui bello exciti reges. . . | et meministis enim, diuae,

et memorare potestis; | ad nos uix tenuis famae perlabitur aura 'Now open up Helicon, goddesses, and start my song, telling which kings were roused to war... For you both remember, goddesses, and can recount what you remember; scarcely does report's (fama) slender breeze waft down to us."^ Virgil imitates an archetypal Homeric invocation, that preceding the Catalogue of Ships at Il. 2.484-93, where the knowledge of the Muses, deriving from their presence at all events, is contrasted with the second-hand KAtos

‘report’ available to the human poet: 485-6 Wyeis yap Beai tote rrápeoTÉ T€ ioTÉ Te TrávTa, | fiueis SE KAEOS olov &koUOouEV OUSE TI jönev ‘for you are

goddesses and are present and know all things, but we hear only a report and know nothing. With a capital F the divine Fama becomes more like the Muses themselves, even in her mixture of truth and lies, Aen. 4.188 tam ficti prauique tenax quam nuntia ueri ‘clinging to distorted fiction as much as she reports the truth’, which makes her like the Hesiodic Muses, Theog. 27-8: Tuev yesSea TOAAG Aéyeiv ETULOICTIV ópota, 15 ev 8' et” &£BQ4Aconev áAn8éa ynpucao9on." “We know how to say many false things similar to genuine ones, but we know, when WT we wish, how to utter true things.

The mixture of truth and falsehood will be echoed in a part of Horace’s advice on how to be a good epic poet: Ars poetica 151-2 atque ita mentitur, sic ueris falsa remiscet, | primo ne medium, medio ne discrepet imum ‘His

=

9.

u“

9

c

9

On small-scale expressions of the type fama est see Horsfall 1991: 117-33. Clément-Tarantino 2006; 255-8 ‘Fama ingens: vertiges encyclopédiques’; 257 ‘ce supréme hybride’. With the tenuis famae... aura contrast the fair wind of glory at Pind. Nem. 6.28-9 evOuv’ eri ToUTov, aye, Moica, oUpov Err&ov | EUxAéa.

“I

97

See Ch. 2 p. 57.

107

Virgil's Fama

fictions, his mixture of truth and falsehood, are such that the middle is not

at variance with the beginning, nor the middle with the end.’”* In keeping with her tendency to ignore boundaries that other terms in the discourse of poetry and the power of the word strive to maintain, Fama may be read as a figure not only of poetic tradition, or of the Muses, but also ofthe ambitions and power of the individual epic poet himself." As a figurative thunderer she stands for the Callimachean epic poet. Her birth is the result of anger (178 ira): the epic plot is typically motivated by the anger of a god (Poseidon's in the Odyssey, Juno’s in the Aeneid) or a human (Achilles in the

Iliad). Fama’s own action leads to further anger, which in turn motivates the next twist in the epic plot, as she turns her steps 1 to Iarbas: 197 incenditque animum dictis atque aggerat iras ‘her words inflame his mind and build up his anger. iras is the last word in the description of Fama’s operations. Her expansionism and sky-reaching match the hyperbolical epic narrative that imperialistically sets out to spread to the ends of the earth and to heaven itself the fame of Aeneas and his Roman descendants. As a monstrous bird she parodies a conventional image of the poet's flight of fame, for example in the archaic Greek poet Theognis' gift to the boy Cyrnus, whom he makes famous, of wings with which to fly over sea and land (237-54 Edmonds); or in Horace's

description

in Odes 2.20

of his own,

rather monstrous,

N v

* E

metamorphosis into the swan whose feathers (12 plumae) will carry his poetic fame to the ends of the earth. Fama spreads what she has to say through the mouths of men, 4.195 haec passim dea foeda uirum diffundit in ora 'the foul goddess spreads these rumours all around on the lips of men’. The medium for the propagation of rumour coincides with that for the successful poet's perpetuation of his fame: Ennius' in his epitaph for himself, uolito uiuus per ora uirum ‘living I fly over the lips of men’, or Virgil's in his Ennian ambition in the Proem to Georgics 3, (9) uictorque uirum uolitare per ora ‘to fly victorious over the lips of men*!?! Fama does

o o

108

The parallel is noted by Laird 1999: 273. The line ends a section beginning at 119 aut famam sequere aut sibi conuenientia finge. See esp. Laird 1999: 273-4 ‘Fama has much in common with the poet of the Aeneid’ I noted some of the points in common between poet and Fama in Hardie 1986: 275 n. 118. 196 cursus detorquet: the verb 1s appropriate for a character who distorts and misrepresents. Cf. e.g. Hor. Sat. 2.2.55 si te alio prauum detorseris (Aen. 4.188 praui); TLL v 820.39 ff., e.g. Livy 42.42.5 calumniando omnia detorquendoque suspecta et inuisa efficeret; Tac. Ann. 6.5 uerba praue detorta. The simple verb torqueo is used at 220 audiit ommipotens, oculosque ad moenia torsit; torsit contains an allusion to Jupiter's thunderbolt (see above, n. 40); might it also hint

that Jupiter’s gaze is ‘distorted’, like the oblique gaze of Envy (Ov. Met. 2.776 nusquam recta 10

actes)?

Cf. also Aen. 12.234-5 (on Turnus) ille quidem ad superos, quorum se deuouet aris, | succedet fama uiuusque per ora feretur (on which see Ch. 2 p. 69).

Poetics and metapoetics of Fama

not close her eyes in sleep at night, thus practising the Alexandrian poet's agrupnie, wakeful burning of the midnight oil. In her multiplicity of eyes, tongues and ears Fama supernaturally realizes the multiplicity of tongues for which the epic poet conventionally wishes.'"Not simply the voice of any epic poet, Fama mimics the voice of this epic poet, Virgil, in the four lines introduced by words in the direct speech of the poet, (190) pariter facta atque infecta canebat(a not inaccurate summing up of what it is that any epic poet does), 191-4: uenisse Aenean Troiano sanguine cretum, cui se pulchra uiro dignetur iungere Dido; nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fouere regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos. [saying] that Aeneas, born of Trojan blood, had come, and that fair Dido saw fit to unite herself to him as her husband; now they were spending the whole winter long snug in their wantonness, oblivious of their royal duties, the slaves of base lust.

Fama here tells a version ofthe story told by the primary narrator. These four lines are distinguished from Virgil's narrative by being in indirect speech, and so are contained within and subordinated to the primary narrator's voice. It is however only appropriate that a personification of rumour and tradition, words that enter a relay of transmission, should be represented as

using reported speech. Further, the subordination of Fama to the primary narrator is an illusion, in that the words of the epic poet themselves depend on Fama-as-tradition. The poet's own direct speech creates the appearance of an originary authority (justified through the fiction of the poet as direct mouthpiece for what the Muses know), cloaking the truth that the poet retails reports derived from elsewhere. That this figure for the poet's voice should be introduced as an ‘evil’ is not a sign merely of paradox or perversity. Fama is a dark double of the poet, twinned in rivalry with the epic poet's own expansionist ambitions.'"' There is a suspicion that she is not simply the negative Other by which the poet defines his own, positively evaluated, verbal powers, but that she represents another side of the poet's own self. Out of all the cases where Virgil moulds his inherited material, attempting to assert his sovereign control over events, it may well be that the story of Dido and Aeneas 102

See Hinds

1998: 35-46; Clément-Tarantino

2006: 191-280 ‘Les cent bouches de Fama:

rumeur, tradition et la voix épique.' 10% For other examples of demonic females functioning as doubles of the poet’s voice see Ch. 10 pP. 388-90.

109

110

Virgil’s Fama

is his most daring invention. Even if the story of a love affair between Dido and Aeneas does go back to Naevius, the issue of Dido’s chastity or lack of it, and of whether Virgil had slandered Dido, early became a

matter of hot dispute, and continued to be so down to the Renaissance.'"" And if the on Naevius’ Fama in the the manner rather than

responsibility is Naevius, Virgil’s Fama could be a comment fiction-makings. Whether the invention is Naevius’ or Virgil’s, immediate narrative context of Aeneid 4 obviously operates in of Fama-as-unfounded-rumour spreading a malicious fiction, in the manner of Fama-as-tradition, the character to which the

reader is (mis)directed by the numerous the construction

traditional features that go into

of the person of Fama, in contrast to the untraditional

nature of what it is that she says. In that case the person of Fama is the content of her words only to the extent that both are bricolages of existing materials (the numerous allusions in the description of Fama; separate stories of Dido and Aeneas) put together to make something never was (the monster Fama as a composite whole; the story of Dido's

like prethe that love

for Aeneas).

Such ambivalences in the poetic uses of fama are of course familiar: the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ (expressions like ut fama est) as often conceals the

licence of a poetic invention as it footnotes a pre-existing tradition.'"” Virgil comments slily on the inseparability of what Fama does from what he as poet is doing when he tucks in to his (presumably invented) genealogy of Fama the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ ut perhibent (4.179), the self-referentiality

of which did not escape Servius: mire ergo modo, cum de ipsa fama loqueretur, ait ‘ut perhibent' ‘in a remarkable way, when he is talking about fama itself,

he says “as they relate”. A little later the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ is used to reference the role of rumour within the fiction: 203-4 rumore accensus amaro | dicitur [Iarbas], which could be rephrased as fama accensus amara, ut fama est." ^ One of the effects of this is to suggest a continuity between the operations of the word inside and outside the text: what is said, rumour,

incites the character Iarbas to action, and what is said about the effects on

101

On the tradition of the chaste Dido see Pease 1935: 65-7. The debate over whether Virgil slandered Dido through the invention of this love story has a long history: cf. Macrob. Sat. 5.17.5... fabula lasciuientis Didonis, quam falsam nouit uniuersitas, per tot tamen saecula speciem ueritatis obtineat et ita pro uero per ora omnium wolitet. . . (the last four words cited allude to the terms of Ennius' epitaph on his own fame: see Lundstróm 1976: 187-8); on the post-antique continuation of the debate see Kallendorf 1989: Ch. 3 'Boccaccio's two Didos* 105 See Ch. 1 p. 4. 106 See also the brief remarks at Feeney 1991: 186-7.

Poetics and metapoetics of Fama

him of what is said is the vehicle for our, the readers, knowledge of this

incident. The most notorious example of the misleading ‘Alexandrian footnote’ in Virgil is Ecl. 6.74—7, where fama is invoked to vouch for the impossible merging into one of the two mythological Scyllas, the daughter of Nisus, punished for her betrayal of her father and city through metamorphosis into a bird, and the Scylla metamorphosed into the Odyssean sea-monster: Quid loquar aut Scyllam Nisi, quam fama secuta est candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris Dulichias uexasse rates, et gurgite in alto,

a! timidos nautas canibus lacerasse marinis. Why should I tell of Scylla daughter of Nisus, who is pursued by the report that her fair loins were girt with barking monsters and that she harassed the Greek ships, and in the deep gulf, ah!, she mangled fearful sailors with her dogs of the sea.

Interestingly, it might be as difficult to visualize the resultant hybrid forced together out of the two Scyllas of myth, part woman, part bird, part dogs, as it is to visualize the body of Fama in Aeneid 4. Scylla is another very vocal monster

(latrantibus can be used of human

as well as canine utterances);

both uexasseand lacerasse may be used of verbal harassment.'"* In conflating the two Scyllas Virgil has arguably defamed both: the daughter of Nisus by turning her into the vicious sea-monster rather than the ciris-bird, and the other Scylla by attributing to her the treachery of the daughter of Nisus. The duality of Scylla perhaps also anticipates the duality in Virgil's version of the legend of Dido, either chaste heroine faithful to her first husband, or fallen woman.!”” 107 Clément-Tarantino 2006: 596 n. 253. See further Hardie 2009b. ‘Impossible merging, but already a faithfully transmitted piece of fama if there was Hellenistic, possibly Callimachean, precedent (see Hardie 2009b:

121).

108

lacero: TLL vi1.2 827.52 ff. ‘vituperando, detrectando, e.g. Cic. Brut. 156 ab obtrectatione

1?

inuidiaque, quae solet lacerare plerosque; Sall. Jug. 85.26 meque uosque male dictis lacerent, Ov. Pont. 4.16.1-3 Inuide, quid laceras Nasonis carmina rapti? | non solet ingeniis summa nocere dies | famaque post cineres maior uenit; Tac. Ann. 15.73 lacerabatur crebro uulgi rumore. uexo: examples in L-S s.v. B, e.g. Cic. Flacc. 48 probris omnibus maledictisque uexat, Sest. 60 Pisonem uerbis. . . uexauit. The similarities with Dido could be pursued: Scylla the daughter of Nisus and Dido both fall in love with a foreign prince, with disastrous effects; the sea- monster Scylla attacks the ship of Odysseus, and Dido threatens to attack the ships of the departing Aeneas (Aen. 4.592-4); the sea-monster was once a beautiful maiden, and pulcherrima Dido will figuratively metamorphose into a raging Fury. Ovid models his version of the story of Scylla Nisi in Metamorphoses 8 extensively on Virgil's Dido.

111

112

Virgil's Fama

In the case of Dido, Virgil as epic narrator is unequivocal on the matter of fact, that the affair took place, but the history of criticism ofthe Dido episode has been that ofa conflict between two interpretations of the facts, which lay

blame respectively on Dido or Aeneas, a contest in defamation. One could say that a difference over the historical fact (did Dido and Aeneas meet and have an affair?) has been displaced to a difference over the interpretation of the fact (granted that they did, which was the more guilty party?). In both respects there is a parallelism with the case of Helen of Troy, fama concerning whom is divided both on the point of fact (did she go to Troy or not?), and on the interpretation of the fact, if it is allowed that she did go to Troy (was it Helen's fault or not?).!!"

A final question relating to the issue of fictionality is whether the Virgilian personification of Fama is herself largely an invention of the poet. Her paradoxical person establishes a tradition that will be followed for the next 2,000 years. The numerous attributes, qualities and associations that go to make up the mix from which she emerges can all be traced to earlier traditions.''' But is the messy sum of these parts, the gestaltlos Gestalt, something that has not been seen before?!" In that case Virgil does not so much invent a tradition, as invent a figure that sums up within herself the scattered traces of the previous tradition's dealings with fame and tradition. Alternatively one may speculate on lost Hellenistic models. The baroque fantasy of Fama is soon followed by the equally elaborate and baroque description of Mercury and the man-mountain Atlas, sometimes taken as a sign of lack of revision. As we have seen, the Mercury and Atlas scene is in fact carefully integrated within the thematic and symbolic structures of the narrative, but in both the Fama and the Atlas passages we seem to be dealing with a particular aesthetic, perhaps something elaborately Alexandrian, suitable for an African court that foreshadows late Ptolemaic Alexandria, heady and not quite Roman.!

110 Clément-Tarantino 2006: 119-20 suggests that the role of prjun in Euripides’ Helen may have been influential for the role of Fama in connections between Helen and fama see Ch. 9 pp. 348-53. Clément-Tarantino 2006: 90 ‘un gigantesque collage de fragments passé: 112 Quint. Inst. or. 9.2.36 sed formas quoque fingimus saepe, ut Famam

motivating the plot of Aeneid 4. For further empruntés aux ceuvres du Vergilius, ut Voluptatem ac

Virtutem, quem ad modum a Xenophonte traditur, Prodicus, ut Mortem ac Vitam, quas

113

contendentes in satura tradit Ennius. This need not be taken to mean that Virgil ‘invented’ Fama; fingo refers to fictiones personarum, rpocomoroiíat, without prejudging the question of whether Virgil was absolutely the first to make up the personification. One would like to know what was in Rhianus’ Pun, of which one line survives, KAU8í uoi evxawv Apaxuvéias eutratépeia.

Virgilian Fama and the novel

Virgilian Fama and the novel: Chariton, Achilles Tatius, Apuleius Fama threads her way through the whole of the love story of Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid, and emerges as a major player at critical moments in the plot in Book 4. Here I pause in my survey of Fama in epic to look at a genre closely related to epic, the ancient novel, and in particular at three texts where the Virgilian model is either a certain, a probable, or possible, presence. To start at the beginning, the fame of the (almost divine) beauty of the heroine of an erotic novel is a recurrent device to get a plot started." The first love story that starts in this way is the story of Helen and her many suitors, and I shall trace the longer history of Helen and fama in Ch. 9 pp. 348-53. The fame of Callirhoe’s beauty draws suitors at the beginning of Chariton’s novel (between c. 25 Bc and c. aD 50): 1.1.2 ‘For her beauty was not human but divine, not that of a Nereid or a mountain

nymph, but of Aphrodite herself. The report of this amazing sight spread everywhere (qrjun 86 Tot mapadögou becuatos rravraxoU Biérpeys), and suitors poured into Syracuse.' In the novel-within-a-novel of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’ Golden Ass (mid second century ap) the extraordinary beauty of Psyche attracts sightseers from far and wide (see below). At the beginning of Longus' Daphnis and Chloe (late second/early third century AD) it is the fame not of the heroine, but of a painting in a grove of the Nymphs that represents the ‘history of love’ narrated in the novel that attracts visitors: Proem 1 ‘But the painting was still more charming [than the grove], both for its outstanding artistry and for its tale of love; as a result many foreigners were drawn by the report of it (kaT& priunv fiecav), both to supplicate the Nymphs and to gaze at the picture.' The lure of the painting consists both in its outstanding craftsmanship and in its erotic subject matter: the latter includes the sexual attractiveness of the heroine, and the former is an advertisement for the craftsmanship of Longus' text, which aims to exercise a similar fascination over its readers. The decisive text for the stunning effect of the beauty of the heroine at the beginning of a love story may well have been Callimachus' Acontius and Cydippe. Fame and desire also enter into the opening moments of the story of Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid, and one may speculate on the range of models available to Virgil other than the obvious epic ones. Aeneas encounters three outstandingly beautiful women: Venus disguised 114 On fama as an inaugural motif

see Ch. 1 p. 38.

113

114

Virgil’s Fama

as a follower of Diana, Penthesilea as the last of the scenes in the ecphrasis of the Temple of Juno, and Dido. Dido appears in flesh-and-blood reality and as herself, but, through Aeneas’ eyes, overlaid with the visual memory

of the previous two apparitions of female beauty, and compared in a simile which may also be focalized through Aeneas with the goddess Diana herself. To readers familiar with a tradition of love at the first sighting of a beautiful maiden in a temple or at a religious festival, Aeneas’ emotional reaction to what he sees might go unspoken (as it notoriously does). The image of Penthesilea is part of a work of art, images of the Trojan War in the Carthaginian Temple of Juno, interpreted by Aeneas as evidence of the worldwide fama of the subject matter (although as a Trojan Aeneas has also had previous experience of the beauty of Penthesilea by autopsy). Dido also knows about Aeneas through the fame of the Trojan War (Aen. 1.565-8),

and the fame of Aeneas, made more vividly present to her through Aeneas' own narrative of his history, serves to fuel her sexual desire for the hero. In Virgil it is not fame of beauty which motivates an erotic story, but fame which itself lends sexual allure (as the modern brand of celebrity is often said to do).

Whether or not fama played a part in Hellenistic erotic tales in prose before the Aeneid, there are grounds for thinking that the Aeneid was an influence on the Greek novel, as well as the Latin novel. Stefan Tilg draws attention to the important role played by Rumour, (fun, in Chariton, and

argues that she hasa metaliterary function asan allegory for the author's own voice, sharing with the author a liking for novelty, narrative and paradox. ^ Tilg further makes the case, plausible if falling short of final proof, that the Aeneid is the model for the unusually extensive role of ®rjun in Chariton:

particularly suggestive is the parallel between the outburst of Rumour on the apparent death of Callirhoe at 1.5.1, running through the city and arousing lamentation, as if at the sack ofa city, and the bacchic revel of Fama through Carthage at the death of Dido, accompanied by uncontrollable lamentation as if Carthage or Tyre were being sacked (Aen. 4.666-71).''“ Tilg also points out that prior to Virgil marked personification of Rumour is unusual in Greek. One such is found at Chariton 3.2.7 (in the mouth of a character):

‘Rumour is the swiftest of all things (rrávrow yàp TTpayuaTwv ót&uraTóv éotiv fj Pun). She travels through the air and no paths are barred to her. Because of her nothing surprising (rrapáSoE&ov) can escape notice. Already

15

Tilg 2010: Ch. 7. On the general question of whether Chariton is likely to have had access to the Aeneid see Tilg 2010: 285-91. On Fama and novelty see also Hardie 20092: 107-9.

11° Tilg 2010: 267-9.

Virgilian Fama and the novel

she is hot-foot carrying the news (16 kaivóv... Sityynua) to Sicily that “Callirhoe is alive; tomb-robbers opened the tomb and stole her, and she has been sold in Miletus”.” The form of the first sentence of this passage bears a general resemblance to Virgil’s introduction of Famaas (Aen. 4.174) Fama,

malum qua non aliud uelocius ullum ‘Fama, swifter than any other

evil! Finally Tilg suggests that Virgil may also lie behind the longest extant description of ®rjun in Greek literature, at Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon

(? late second century Ap) 6.10.3-6

her husband Thersander, whom

(Melite defends herself to

she believed drowned at sea, against the

rumour that she has had an affair with Clitophon): This rumour got abroad because of the care that I took of the young man, since most people did not know the reason for our association. And you too were dead,

according to rumour. Rumour and Slander are related evils (Onun dt kai AiaPoan 600 ouyyevfi kaxá). Rumour is the daughter of Slander. Slander is sharper than a dagger, more violent than fire, more persuasive than the Sirens; Rumour is more smooth-flowing than water, faster than the wind, quicker than wings. When Slander shoots forth a report (To&eVon tov Aóyov), 18 it flies like an arrow and wounds its target even if he is not present. The listener is quick to believe, and the fire of his anger is kindled, and he rages against the victim of the shot. Rumour is given birth by the arrow-shot, and at once she pours forth in force and floods the ears of all she meets, blows over great distances carried as a storm on the gale of words, and

flies borne up by the wings of the tongue. These two wage war on me; they have captured your soul and by their words have shut the doors of your ears against me.

There are several intriguing parallels with the workings of Fama in the Aeneid. ®rjun too is given a genealogy, but in terms of personification allegory rather than mythology. A wife who has, so she believes, lost her previous husband is slandered for a relationship with a foreigner (from Tyre, Dido's home city) who has lost his cargo at sea, and to whom she has offered hospitality out of pity. Swift-flying Rumour is made vivid through images of fire and storm, the former an explicit image in Virgil, the latter the subject of a far-reaching network of correspondences between fama and storm in the Aeneid. I turn now to a more detailed look at the operations of fama in a text whose indebtedness to the Aeneid is beyond doubt and extensive, Apuleius'

97 Tilg2010: 263. 115 Cf. also 2.29.3 for the image of Aóyos as an archer shooting the arrows of shame, grief and anger.

115

116

Virgil's Fama

Cupid and Psyche. Allusions to fama-related details in the Aeneid are woven into a web of fama that reaches from beginning to end of the story, with repercussions also in the framing narrative. Cupid and Psyche begins and ends with the divinization of Psyche. At the beginning the extraordinary beauty of Psyche exceeds the measure of human praise. This excess of praiseworthiness triggers a correspondingly hyperbolic outbreak of fama-as-rumour, (4.28.3) eximii spectaculi rumor ‘rumours about the outstanding sight’, which travels far and wide,'^ drawing people to journey to see the saeculi specimen gloriosum 'glorious ornament of the age' (4.29.2), and to worship Psyche asa second Venus. With this creation ofa ‘divinity’ by fama may be compared the role of fama in Lucretius in fostering belief in false divinities.'*! Lucretius (1.68) associates fama deum with the stormy terror of an oppressive divinity, but introduces his poem with a seductive vision of Venus, itself an important model for the first appearance of (an angry) Venus in Cupid and Psyche (4.29—30), introduced as uera Venus ‘the true Venus, provocatively in a context of Lucretian allusion. At the end of the story Psyche is made immortal by Jupiter with a cup of ambrosia, in order that her wedding to Cupid may be one between equals. This wedding puts an end to a discreditable kind of fama: Jupiter says of Cupid, (6.23.2) sat est cotidianis eum fabulis ob adulteria cunctasque corruptelas infamatum *he has been defamed for long enough in everyday tittle-tattle because of his adulteries and all kinds of wantonness', and his good name must be restored through the bonds of marriage. Between these two instances of divinization, the one based on a misapprehension, the other literally true (within the fiction), the story is led by famathrough various twists and turns. Psyche is a second Helen in the effect of the fame of her incomparable beauty in drawing crowds to turn hearsay into direct gaze (see Ch. 9 pp. 348-9). The model of Helen is glanced at indirectly in Venus' complaint (4.30.3) that it was in vain that Paris preferred her to the other two goddesses; Psyche outdoes the model of Helen in that her beauty is so marvellous that no-one dares to present himself as a suitor (4.32.1). Venus’ complaint that she is neglected in favour of the new 'goddess' is the point at which the plot takes a decisively Virgilian turn, as Venus'

!?

On the Virgilian intertexts see Harrison 1998, with references to earlier discussions.

120

With 4.29.1 sic immensum procedit in dies opinio, sic insulas tam proxumas et terrae plusculum

121

prouinciasque plurimas fama porrecta peruagatur Kenney 1990 compares 'the remarkable parallel’ at Tac. Ann. 12.36.2 unde fama eius [Caratacus] euecta insulas et proximas prouincias peruagata per Italiam quoque celebrabatur, auebantque uisere, quis ille tot per annos opes nostras spreuisset. See Hardie 2009a: 73-5.

Virgilian Fama and the novel

opening speech of indignation is modelled on Juno’s opening speech at Aeneid 1.37-49, ending with the word honorem." Apuleius’ Venus is equally concerned with her own divine honours, and, going beyond the Virgilian Juno, with her reputation, her nomen:'** 4.30.1 ‘So much for me,

the ancient mother of nature... who am forced to share with a mortal girl the honour due to my divinity, while my name, established in heaven, is profaned with earthly filth.”'*' The fama puellae has led to infamia deae. The tale of Cupid and Psyche alternates between high and low registers, between lofty epic fama and the scandalous fabulae of sexual misdemeanours that are at home in comedy and elegy.'** There is a corresponding confusion of the loftiness of the Olympian gods with the everyday realities of human institutions. Venus is alerted to the stories circulating about her son by a virtual embodiment of fama-as-rumour, the uerbosa et satis curiosa auis 'garrulous and meddlesome bird' (5.28.6), the tern which plunges down to the sea-bed to tell Venus that (5.28.4) per cunctorum ora populorum rumoribus conuiciisque uariis omnem Veneris familiam male audire, quod ille quidem montano scortatu tu uero marino natatu secesseritis...‘on the lips of all the peoples of the world Venus' whole family is given a bad name through all kinds of rumour and slander, saying that Cupid has withdrawn to whoring in the mountains, and you to swimming in the sea... ''^ The loquacious tern is modelled on the informer-birds in Ovid, Metamorphoses 2,* which appear in a sequence of tales intricately intertextual with the Fama and Mercury sequence in Aeneid 4 (see Ch. 5 pp. 169-71). “Whoring in the mountains' would be one way of describing what Dido and Aeneas get up to when they shelter from the storm. The bird's words 'tear apart the reputation' of her son, lacerans existimationem, the Roman language of

See Harrison 1998: 65. while Virgil’s Juno speaks of her numer: Aen. 1.48-9 et quisquam numen Iunonis adorat | praeterea . . . ? Editors are divided between reading numinis and nominis in the next sentence of the Apuleian Venus' speech. 124 The Judgement of Paris is also a cause for indignation to Virgil’s Juno (Aen. 1.26-7), but for a different reason. 125 On fabula in elegy see Ch. 9 pp. 361-8. On fabula = ‘comedy’ see May 2006: 124-6, arguing, that the use of the term fabula in Cupid and Psyche points to comic models. fabula is a privileged and multivalent term in the Metamorphoses, from its first use in the first sentence of the prologue, At ego tibi sermone isto Milesio uarias fabulas conseram: on the ambiguities of fabula in the novel see Zimmerman et al. 200-1: 65; Kahane 1996: 78. 126 Keulen 1998 argues that the tern's report contains both poetic entertainment and philosophical truth, and (188) that in this sense the bird is tam ficti prauique tenax quam ©

122 7

nuntia ueri (Aen. 4.188, of Fama).

127° See Kenney 1990 on 5.28.2, 5.28.6; Keulen 1998: 167-8.

117

118

Virgil's Fama

reputation and attacks on reputation.'? Later Venus complains to Ceres and Juno about the domus meae famosa fabula et non dicendi filii mei facta ‘the infamous talk about my house and the doings of one who should not be called my son' (5.31.2), her indignant alliteration exploiting words often linked with fama — fabula, facta. non dicendihere has several layers of meaning, one of which is ‘who should not be talked about’, i.e. about whom it were better that fabulae (from fari ‘speak’) were not aired. There may also be a legal meaning:'*” Venus rejects Cupid as her son, by saying ‘non filius meus [est] When she had first heard about the threat posed to her by the peerlessly beautiful Psyche, Venus had descended from a god's concern for divine honores to the language and procedures of human law in her bid to restore her reputation."" She lays before her son Cupid the whole tale of Psyche's rivalry with her in beauty (this ascription to Psyche of an intention of which she is innocent is itself an example of the distortions of fama) as if it were a charge or statement in court, (4.31.1) tota illa prolata!"' de formonsitatis aemulatione fabula. Divinity is again brought down to earth when Venus presses the messenger of the gods into service as a town-crier,'** 6.8.1—3: Mercury duly obeyed her. Running everywhere over the lips of all the peoples of the world (per omnium ora populorum passim discurrens), he carried out his assignment to make proclamation as ordered: ‘If anyone can capture or reveal the hiding-place of the runaway king’s daughter, the servant of Venus, Psyche by name, let him meet Mercury the crier behind the turning point of the Circus, and as reward for his information he will receive from Venus herself seven sweet kisses and one deeply honeyed with the sweetness of her thrusting tongue.’

Epic divine machinery, the everyday phenomenon of the town-crier, Roman law, and philosophical speculation are blended in a weird mix. Apuleius plays on the Stoic identification of Mercury with divine logos (see p. 93), and on Varronian etymological speculation, Varro, Antiqu. rer. div. fr. 250 Cardauns Mercurius quasi medius currens dicitur appellatus, quod sermo currat inter homines medius ‘Mercury is said to be so called as if “running 128

Cf Suet. Jul. 75.5 (Julius Caesar) Aulique Caecinae criminosissimo libro et Pitholai carminibus

maledicentissimis laceratam existimationem suam ciuili animo tulit. As suggested by Zimmerman et al. 200-1 ad loc. 19

On Venus' legalistic turn of mind see Summers

1967: 177-80 (on Met. 4.29-31).

The reading preferred by Kenney 1990. Kenney 1990 ad loc.: ‘profero is the appropriate word for a recital of grievances amounting to a criminal charge (OLD s.v. 5c).' 133

Aiding the search for a runaway slave, in accordance with the lex Fabia: see Summers 1967: 211-14.

Virgilian Fama and the novel

in the middle", since conversation runs in the middle between men.’!** The echo in per omnium ora populorum of 5.28.4 (the tern’s report) per cunctorum ora populorum draws attention to the similarity between the descent of the tern to bring a message to Venus and the descent in Aeneid 4 of Mercury, to convey Jupiter’s command to Aeneas, compared in a simile to a sea-bird (Aen. 4.254—5). ^ Apuleius blurs the distinction between common rumour and divine logos that had already been blurred in Aeneid 4. The disorder triggered by the involvement of the gods in the world of comic-elegiac fabula is restored at the end of the story by Jupiter’s deployment of the power of Roman law.'*° Jupiter complains to Cupid that his cosmic majesty has been impaired by an assault on a very human kind of reputation, 6.22.34: “You have wounded this breast of mine, by which the laws of the elements and the movements of the stars are regulated, with your constant darts, defiling it repeatedly with lustful adventures on earth, injuring my reputation and good name (existimationem famamque meam laeseris) with shameful adulteries in contravention of the laws, the lex Iulia included, by changing my serene features into the base forms of snakes, fire, wild beasts, birds and farmyard beasts.’

famam, existimationem laedere are phrases at home in the language of Roman politics and law." The infamia to which Cupid has laid himself open will be brought to an end through the regularization of his liaison with Psyche through the most formal kind of marriage (confarreatio), 6.23.2: ‘T have decided that the hot-blooded impulses of his first youth should be reined in and checked; he has been defamed for long enough in everyday tittle-tattle because of his adulteries and all kinds of wantonness. Every opportunity must be removed, and his youthful excess must be chained in the fetters of marriage.’

Jupiter finally reassures Venus, (6.23.4) ‘Daughter, do not be sad or fear for your great lineage and status because of a marriage to a mortal. I will see to it that the wedding

is not unequal, but lawful and in accordance

with civil law.’ This final interview echoes the opening interview between Jupiter and Venus in Aeneid 1, where Jupiter had reassured his daughter that her son Aeneas would be raised to heaven as a god, prophesying the 13.

n

=

For detailed discussion see Marangoni 1985, starting from the division among previous critics as to whether per omnium ora populorum means ‘through the mouths’ or ‘in front of the faces, before the eyes’: the implicit allegory of Mercury as sermo is decisive in favour of the former. 135 See Keulen 1998: 169-70 on the parallel between the tern and the simile in Aeneid4 (and the Odyssean model for the simile). 136 Summers 1967: 222-39. 17 TLL v.2 1516.65 ff.; v1.1 214.8ff. (with Ciceronian examples for both).

119

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Virgil's Fama

sky-reaching fame of his distant descendant (Aen. 1.287 famam qui terminet astris). Apuleius’ Jupiter puts things right for Venus by making her son's partner a god, and by removing the infamia that has attached to Cupid."^? The decisive momentum in the story of Cupid and Psyche had been delivered by a close relative of Fama, Inuidia, in the persons of Psyche's two sisters. Their more limited beauty had not been broadcast (diffamarant) " by fama (4.32.3), and the wide fama (5.4.6) of their sister leads them to visit

their parents to find out what magical palace provokes their personifications: 5.9.] sorores inuidiae felle fraglantes multa these worthy sisters returned poison of their growing envy, Like the Ovidian

has happened to Psyche. Their visit to her envy (5.8.2), of which they become virtual egregiae domum redeuntes iamque gliscentis secum sermonibus mutuis perstrepebant ‘as home and were already burning with the they began to exchange noisy complaints’.

Inuidia (see Ch. 5 p. 168), they are also versions of the

Furies: 5.12.3 pestes illae taeterrimaeque Furiae anhelantes uipereum uirus ‘those plagues, foulest Furies, breathing out their viperish venom’. After their initial outburst of noisy chatter among themselves, they plant what amounts to a false rumour about the real nature of her husband in Psyche's mind,!' against which she defends herself with equally false, if less horrific, accounts of who he is. These competing false voices deafen Psyche to the sound of the disembodied divine voices who had first received her in Cupid’s palace, telling her true, if mysterious, things, famulae ‘servants’ who voice an innocent kind of fama

(5.2.3-4.5). The effect of her sisters’ deceitful

words on Psyche is similar to the incendiary effect of Virgilian Fama (Aen. 4.197): 5.21.1 tali uerborum incendio flammata uiscera sororis iam prorsus ardentis ‘Their sister had long been on fire; these words kindled her heart

to a fierce flame.’ This leads Psyche to test verbal report by vision. At the beginning of the tale reports of Psyche had drawn crowds to gaze on a beauty that could not adequately be expressed in words, leading to a further fama that the human maiden was another Venus. For Psyche herself the

'38 For another example of elegiac fama-as-fabula converted by legitimate marriage to good fama cf. Stat. Silv. 1.2.24-30 ergo dies aderat Parcarum conditus albo | uellere, quo Stellae Violentillaeque professus | clamaretur hymen. cedant curaeque metusque, | cessent mendaces obliqui carminis astus; | Fama,

tace. subiit leges et frena momordit | ille solutus amor, consumpta

est fabula uulgi | et narrata diu uiderunt oscula ciues, discussed by Clément-Tarantino 2006: 156-7. 19 This is the earliest example given by TLL s.v. in the neutral sense ‘publish, broadcast’, as opposed to the earlier sense ‘defame’. 140 The sisters exploit the riddling oracle about Psyche's husband-to-be at 4.33. 1-2, forcing a single, literal meaning on the ambiguous terms of the divinity, making a malicious fama ‘rumour’ out of a divine fun that calls for interpretation.

Virgilian Fama and the novel

mismatch between verbal reports and object of gaze is now more extreme: when she succumbs to the irresistible urge to look at her husband, instead of a monster she gazes on the beautiful body of a real god, Cupid. The investment of Cupid and Psyche in the language and themes of fama, and the intermingling of different registers of fama, may be a comment on the kind of story that it is, or rather on the difficulty experienced by the reader in deciding what kind of story it is, and at what level of seriousness to read it. Notoriously what is taken by many readers as a philosophical fable, a fairy tale veiling profound truths, is announced by its internal narrator, the old woman who housekeeps in the robbers’ cave, as just ‘old wives’ tales’, to entertain the distraught Charite: 4.27 ‘sed ego te narrationibus lepidis anilibusque fabulis protinus auocabo’ ‘But I will distract you with charming stories and old wives' tales.' Its internal audience, Lucius the ass held captive

with Charite, also takes it as just a bella fabella (6.25).''' The old woman's description of her tale echoes the narrator's opening announcement of the Metamorphoses as a whole (1.1 uarias fabulas conseram auresque tuas beniuolas lepido susurro permulceam ‘I will string together a variety of tales and stroke your ears into willingness with my charming whispering’). Cupid and Psyche asks to be read in various ways as a mise en abyme of the novel as a whole. Although the theme of fama is not so pervasive in the whole novel as it is in this inset story,"^ nevertheless it does raise issues of interpretation that are relevant for the whole work. The conversion of what has degenerated into comic-elegiac fabula into a famous marriage, which raises a human to the divine, and which is given the legitimation of Roman law, mirrors the conclusion of the sensationalist and sexy Milesian tales that occupy much of the first ten books with the return of Lucius to human form and his solemn and lasting commitment to the goddess Isis. Lucius finances his initiations into the mysteries of Osiris by working as an advocate — one reason perhaps for the combination of Olympian divine machinery with allusion to Roman law in the resolution of the story of Cupid and Psyche. Fama spills out from Cupid and Psyche into the framing narrative in a more dramatic way. Cupid and Psyche offers to its primary (and intended) V!

An ass is proverbially an undiscerning audience: cf. Hor. Ep. 2.1.199-200 scriptores autem narrare putaret asello | fabellam surdo.

122

But note Panayotakis 1998: 162 ‘Slander, lies, and deception are recurrent themes in Apuleius’

novel, and contribute to the representation of a violent and disorderly world, in which Lucius the narrator and other characters experience physical abuse and mistreatment.' Near the end of Lucius’ story a positively valued Fara appears as a narrator to tell the true story of his good fortune: 11.18 nec tamen Fama uolucris pigra pinnarum tarditate cessauerat, sed protinus in patria deae prouidentis adorabile beneficium meamque ipsius fortunam memorabilem narrauerat passim.

121

122

Virgil's Fama

audience, Charite, the model for a happy ending that she will not experience in her own life. Initially salvation does come when her fiancé Tlepolemus rescues

her from

the robbers,

and

they are married.

But

in the sequel

Tlepolemus is murdered during a hunt by Thrasyllus, who is in love with Charite. Charite is then doomed to re-enact the unhappy story of Dido: after the death of her first husband, Charite pretends to consent to a second marriage with Thrasyllus, but this is a deception, a wedding that is no wedding but rather a funeral, in which, after blinding Thrasyllus, Charite

kills herself with the sword of Tlepolemus. Charite's path to this tragic ending is inaugurated with an outburst of the Fama of Aeneid 4 to report the death of Tlepolemus, Met. 8.6.4—5: necdum satis scelere transacto Fama dilabitur et cursus primos ad domum Tlepolemi detorquet et aures infelicis nuptae percutit. quae quidem simul percepit tale nuntium quale non audiet aliud, amens et uecordia percita cursuque bacchata furibundo per plateas populosas et arua rurestria fertur, insana uoce casum mariti quiritans. confluunt ciuium

maestae cateruae, sequuntur obuii dolore sociato,

ciuitas cuncta uacuatur studio uisionis.

Barely had the crime been committed when Fama spread abroad and first turned her steps to the house of Tlepolemus, and struck the ears of his unfortunate wife. As soon as she heard the news — whose like she will not hear again — out of her mind and driven by madness, she rushed in her frenzy like a maenad through the crowded

streets and

country

fields, bewailing her husband's

fate in a demented

voice. Mournful bands of citizens flocked together, people she met followed her sharing her grief, the whole city was emptied by its desire to see.

As in the Aeneid, Fama gets going following a hunt.'** The sequence of the loss, or imminent loss, of a husband, or a man regarded as a husband, fol-

lowed by the maenadic raving of an injured woman replicates a further stage in the narrative of Aeneid 4, (298-301) eadem impia Fama furenti | detulit armari classem cursumque parari. | saeuit inops animi totamque incensa per urbem | bacchatur "That same wicked Fama announced to the raving woman that the Trojans were fitting out their fleet and preparing to depart. Driven out of her mind, ablaze, Dido raved like a maenad through the whole city.' 143 Thrasyllus pretends that Tlepolemus was killed by a boar, (8.6) at ille quamquam perfecto uoto prostrato inimico laetus ageret, uultu tamen gaudium tegit et frontem asseuerat et dolorem

simulat et cadauer, quod ipse fecerat, auide circumplexus omnia quidem lugentium officia sollerter affinxit: with this, initially successful, attempt to control the interpretation of events cf. Dido's attempt to gloss what happened on the hunt, (Aen. 4.172) coniugium uocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam. 144 See Harrison 1997: 63-4.

Appendix: Fama and Mercury

Psyche is a Dido with a happy ending, Charite a Dido with a tragic ending like that of Dido herself. In Cupid and Psyche unruly and disruptive fama is finally contained within the hierarchical structures of Olympus and Roman law. In the framing story of Charite and Tlepolemus the unleashing of fama is the first stage in a story of tragic and self-destructive frenzy, as in Aeneid 4.

Appendix: Fama and Mercury In Aeneid 4 Fama and Mercury are in a complex relationship of specularity, both like and unlike each other, and they rather surprisingly end up as collaborators in the plot of Fate. In two sixteenth-century national epics Fama and Mercury collaborate in a more straightforward way. In Book 1 of Ronsard's Franciade (1572) Jupiter sends down Mercury to bestir to action

the hero

Francus

(Astyanax with a new name),

who

is wasting time in Buthrotum (1.287-392). Ronsard follows the Virgilian model closely, narrating Jupiter’s command to Mercury, Mercury's clothingscene and descent, his address to Helenin (Helenus), relaying Jupiter's exact words as to what Francus must do, and telling Helenin to send him off with

a fleet: 381-2 ‘Aux lieux promis, ot son destin le meine. | Un grand honneur vient d'une grande peine' "To the promised land for which destiny intends him. Great honour comes from great labour.' Mercury disappears. At 453— 92 Renommée ‘Renown’, described with the physical attributes of Virgil's Fama and renamed with the Latinate la Fame at 479, spreads the news of

Mercury's descent and message to Helenin, rebuking the latter since he was aware of (460—3) 'L'arrest de fer que le destin avoit | Escrit au ciel pour cet enfant qu'on nomme | Astyanax, qui paresseux consomme | Son age en vain sur le bord estranger' 'the iron decree which destiny had written in the heavens for this child called Astyanax, who consumes his life in idleness on

the foreign shore. Renommée/la Fame ends by announcing the line of kings that Francus will establish on French soil, (478) ‘Pour y regner d'eternelle durée’ ‘To reign there for ever’. Fama is here straightforwardly a mouthpiece for Jupiter's Fatum. Later in thebookHelenin reports Mercury's commission to his council, including this time a reworking of Aen. 4.232-4 (~ 272-6): Franciade 1.737—42, ‘Si tu n'as soing, dit-il, de ta lignée, | Sila vertu de l'heur

accompagnée | N'esmeut ton cueur à voyager plus loing, | Au moins congois en l'esprit quelque soing | De ton nepveu, et n'estoufes perdué | Sa jeune gloire à qui la Gaule est deué’ ‘if you have no concern for your line, if virtue accompanied by good fortune does not move your spirit to journey further,

123

124

Virgil’s Fama

at least feel in your heart some care for your nephew, and do not smother and destroy his youthful glory, to which is owed Gaul’; Helenin’s report of Mercury’s speech ends with the destiny of Francus to build a new Troy, (751) ‘Dont le renom ira jusques aux Cieux’ ‘whose renown will reach the

skies’. In this careful reworking of the Virgilian model Fama’s uncomplicated positive role goes together with the elimination of the erotic from Ronsard’s narrative. That aspect of Aeneid 4 is reserved for Ronsard’s own Book 4, in which Hyante, daughter of the king of Crete, who has fallen in love with Francus, muses anxiously on the likely consequences of following her love for him, 484-91: *Desja mon cueur son malheur apercoit. Par les citez ira ma renommée,

De bouche en bouche en vergongne semée. Je n'oseray par les danses baler. Honte et despit retiendront mon parler, Et par les cieux oü sera l'assemblée Des jouvenceaux, j'auray l'ame troublée, Fable de tous, des tables le propos.' ‘Already my heart feels its misfortune. A report of me will go through the cities, sown in shame from mouth to mouth. I will not dare to dance at the balls. Shame and contempt will prevent me from speaking, and in those climes where young people gather, my soul will be troubled, the talk of all, the subject of dinner tables.’

Hyante is worried that her good reputation will turn to shame, and that she will become an erotic fabula (see Ch. 9 pp. 361—5). In Book

2 of Camóes'

The Lusiads (1572)

Jupiter delivers to Venus,

anxious about the dangers faced at Mombasa by her beloved Portuguese, a prophecy of the glorious successes of the Portuguese maritime empire, in a reworking of the interview between Jupiter and Venus in Aeneid 1. Virgil's Jupiter then sends down Mercury to predispose the Carthaginians to give a kindly welcome to the Trojans. Camóes' Jupiter sends down Mercury, firstly to arrange that Malindi, Vasco da Gama's next port of call, will give him a warm welcome, and from there to appear in a dream to da Gama to tell him to fly from treacherous Mombasa, in a repetition of the Virgilian Mercury's command to Aeneas to flee from Carthage. Mercury is accompanied to Malindi by Fame: With him he carries Fame, that she may tell The Lusitanian prowess, and rare parts: For an illustrious Name is a strange Spell To attract Love, and good Report hath darts.

Appendix: Fama and Mercury

Thus he prepares their way with a sweet smell, And takes up lodgings in the Peoples hearts. Now all Melinde is on fire, to see

What kind of men these valiant souls should bee. The Lustad 2.58, trans. Sir Richard Fanshawe

Where in Aeneid 4 love leads to an explosion of a negative fama, which inflames the jealous Iarbas, here a positive fama kindles the flame of a friendly desire to see in the flesh persons whose famous name goes ahead of them. This erotically charged fama is an unproblematic accomplice of Mercury.'** '45 For another example of the collaboration of love and fame in Camóes see Ch. 9 pp. 345-6.

125

4

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid: the Council of Latins

My discussion of Virgil’s personification of Fama revealed the impossibility of neatly separating shining fame from dark rumour, praise from blame, and the objectivity of the epic narrator from the subjectivity of his characters. In this chapter I explore these issues further from the perspective of a kind of speech performance that at first sight might appear diametrically opposed to that of the epic narrator, rhetoric: a prose form opposed to the verse of epic, and predicated on partiality, as opposed to the supposed impartiality of the epic narrator. A further aim is to question a still-lingering prejudice about the difference between Virgilian (and Homeric) epic and post-Virgilian Roman epic in the matter of rhetoric. It is well known that antiquity already saw in the speeches of the characters in the Homeric epics fully formed specimens of the orator’s art. For Virgil imitation of Homer will have entailed the challenge to place showpieces of artful oratory in the mouths of his own characters, and Virgil’s rhetorical skills were already well recognized by his earliest critics. Whether he was more an orator or a poet was a grammarian's question.' Modern readers are no less alive to Virgil's ability to turn a rhetorically effective speech in the mouth

of a Sinon, a Dido, a Drances. Yet among

those who hold that rhetoric is the insidious rot in imperial literature, there is a consensus that in Virgil rhetoric knows its place, and that it is not until the next generation of poets that rhetoric spreads its tentacles into every corner of the poet's art. The aesthetic prejudice that Virgil, as opposed to an Ovid or Lucan, obeys a classical restraint in these matters finds support in the belief that the Aeneid tells of a heroism that transcends the political feuding of the later Republic, and so is immune to the conditions that nourish the orator's art, an art that could best be left to its Greek inventors by a Roman people newly recalled to their Romanitas (Aen. 6.849 (alii) orabunt causas

melius 'others will be better at pleading cases'). Here I attempt to the place of rhetoric within the Aeneid, with special reference to elaborate and most formal rhetorical exchange between human the poem. The focus of my discussion is not so much on the formal 126

! See Highet 1972: 3-5.

resituate the most actors in markers

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

of a rhetorical manner, as on the relationship between the truth-functions of rhetoric and of a supposedly authoritative epic voice. The Council of Latins in Aeneid 11 is the single example in the poem of an extended scene of human political debate, balancing the Council of the Gods at the beginning of Book 10. A council called by King Latinus to consider future action in the light of Diomedes’ negative response to a request for military aid turns into a slanging match between Turnus and an envious Latin, Drances, a character who appears only in this book of the poem. In terms of plot, the function of the exchange between Drances and Turnus is so to exacerbate the furious uiolentia of Turnus that, in a moment of bravado,

and oblivious to Latinus’ earlier proposals of a peaceful accommodation between Italian and Trojan, he declares himself ready to fight a duel with Aeneas. This is the duel which Aeneas earlier in Book 11, in a rhetorical and

hypothetical four lines (115-18) tacked on to his agreement to allow a truce for the burial of the dead, had suggested would have been a better way of resolving the quarrel than the mass slaughter that has actually taken place in the previous two books." A little later (218-21) we are told that the Latin womenfolk and orphans, egged on by Drances, also call for Turnus to fight it out single-handed. But in the formal Council the suggestion seems to exist for Turnus, as earlier for Aeneas, in the realm of rhetoric and hypothesis, for

his reaction to the news of the approach of the Trojan army is the same as his reaction to the news at the beginning of Aeneid 9 of the temporary absence of Aeneas, namely to effect a full-scale mobilization of his army.’ Not until the beginning of the next and final book will Turnus once more declare himself ready to fight the duel, only once more for the final resolution of the plot to be deferred by many more hundreds of lines of all-out warfare. Indirectly, then, this scene of deliberative rhetoric does issue in a positive

-

nM

proposal that will, eventually, yield closure for the whole poem. But within the context of Book 11 Virgil goes out of his way to make it appear that

Contrast the relatively straightforward way in which Homeric duels are set up: at Il. 3.58 ff. Paris' offer to fight a duel with Menelaus, prompted by Hector's abuse, is immediately taken up by Hector; at 7.33 ff., on the prompting of Apollo and Athene, Helenus persuades Hector to issue a challenge. The absence of a direct challenge by Aeneas is the enabling condition for Drances' accusation that Turnus is a coward (since we cannot imagine that Turnus would really have turned down a direct challenge). The parallelism between the two Virgilian passages is reinforced by their shared use of a single Iliadic model: one of the models for the descent of Iris at 9.1 ff. is the descent of Iris at Il. 2.786-806 (immediately after the Catalogue of Ships) to urge Priam to break off the agore and instead to marshal his troops to meet the Achaean advance. This is the main model for the arrival of the human messenger at Aen. 11.447 ff. which breaks off the Latin concilium. In both cases Turnus is quick to ‘seize the moment’

(see Hardie

1994 on 9.12).

127

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

the whole Council is so much hot air: 11.445-6 illi haec inter se dubiis de rebus agebant| certantes‘so they disputed among themselves on contentious matters’ — just so much wasted rhetoric. The actors are snatched from these wandering mazes of charge and counter-charge by the sudden irruption of other words, those of the messenger announcing the Trojan advance, whereupon the ritualized verbal combat of the Council collapses into a Babel of discord (454-5 hic undique clamor | dissensu uario magnus‘on every side there was a great clamour of dissenting voices’), as the male citizenry is divided between the young men screaming for war and the elders muttering their disapproval.’ Turnus cuts through the knot by turning words to action, with a sarcastic repetition of Latinus' opening complaint that debate comes too late, now that the enemy are at the gate;’ nec plura locutus ‘without further words’, Turnus rushes out, turning from rhetoric to the clipped commands of the general (463—7).

m

>

Modern critics have used two types of approach in order to make sense of this great verbal interlude in the action scenes of the last four books. The first approach has been to ask what the Council tells us about Turnus' character, highlighting features of his personality and motivation through the deployment of the Kontrastfigur Drances. Thus Peter Schenk analyses the debate for what it can tell him in answer to his question of whether Turnus is a tragic hero or a Staatsfeind, a stubborn representative of an older world of heroes, responsible for his own downfall.^ A rhetorical debate within the text is made to serve an ongoing critical debate about the overall meaning of the text. Schenk himself is unambiguous in his conclusion that Turnus does not deserve the reader's sympathy, but that has not deterred other critics from further disagreement on the matter - illi haec inter se dubiis de rebus agebant. P. F. Burke, for one, took the opposite view, arguing that the debate serves to bring out the ‘tragedy of Turnus' position’, a tragedy located in the irreconcilable ‘incompatibility of his political actions with his heroic inner nature.’ Burke subtly derives this complexity of character from Virgil's use ofa variety of Iliadic intertexts, which Burke suggests are ‘designed to create in the mind of the audience a number of simultaneous and quite different possible interpretations of the Drances-Turnus quarrel’. Drances is both a detestable Thersites and a prudent Antenor or Polydamas; Turnus is both

The division of opinions mirrors that at 11.215-24; cf. the scene of Discordia at 12.583-92 when

Aeneas attacks the city. 11.459-61 arrepto tempore Turnus, | 'cogite concilium et pacem laudate sedentes; | illi armis in regna ruunt; cf. 302-4 (Latinus)

‘ante equidem summa de re statuisse, Latini, | et uellem et fuerat

melius, non tempore tali | cogere concilium, cum muros adsidet hostis’, e

128

Schenk

1984.

7

Burke

1978.

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

a selfish Paris and a brave Hector or the good counsellor Odysseus. It is certainly tempting to see some kind of mirror of the contradictions within Turnus in the contradictory Drances, who, to put it crudely, says the right things for the wrong reasons. Burke, in sum, puts his finger on ambivalences that have their origin in textual (or intertextual) phenomena, but makes of them merely the vehicle for contradiction in the ‘real’ characters of the actors represented in the text. The second approach to the Council looks beyond the legendary action of the Aeneid to the recent and contemporary historical context of Virgil’s Rome. This is Drances as Cicero,"

or, in the more

nuanced

and persua-

sive formulation of Antonio La Penna,’ Drances as the type of the demagogic popularis, more a Catiline than a Cicero, the kind of politician whose specious championship of popular grievances caused so much trouble in the later Republic. The debate then makes an ideological point about the undesirability of political ambition; this is the kind of thing that ruined the Republic, demonstrating the necessity of an Augustus to keep in check the re-emergence of the seditio ‘civil discord’ that is calmed by the statesman in the first simile of the poem (1.148—53). La Penna offers usa contrast between the disparagement of ambition as pursued through rhetorical skills in this passage, and the encouragement of ambition as pursued through military excellence in the episode of Nisus and Euryalus in Book 9, the two young Trojans whom La Penna compares to the type of the as yet unsung young warrior who seeks to distinguish himself in the eyes of his superiors, like a Caesarian centurion in the eyes of Caesar. The effect of both approaches is to bracket the rhetoric of the episode: in the Schenk/Burke approach by making of the rhetoric’s twisty nature a way of bringing out something essential in human character, or in La Penna’s approach by establishing an opposition between rhetoric and plain dealing, between hypocrisy and political honesty. My aim is to question the validity of this bracketing of rhetoric and of its effects within the text. Is it, in fact,

so easy to separate out the versions of reality presented by a Drances or a Turnus in the heat of debate from the true story to which the epic narrator gives us access? Is the fame that the epic poet offers his characters to be located in a verbal world completely separate from the defamation dealt out in political invective? To put it another way, what are the limits of rhetoric within the Aeneid? Or, how compromised is the fama that the poet of the Aeneid offers Rome and her heroes?

8

McDermott

1980; Alessio

1993: 83-5.

?

La Penna

1979.

129

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

One answer to that question was given by Denis Feeney in his article “The taciturnity of Aeneas’, in many ways the best treatment of the topic of rhetoric in the Aeneid." He argues that the relative taciturnity of Aeneas,

seen for example in his unwillingness to engage in debate with Dido, is the narrative expression of Virgil's conviction that (in Highet's formulation, endorsed by Feeney, 185) *powerful oratory was incompatible with pure truth’; or, in his own words, (186) ‘powerful language distorts reality, or the truth, in its single-minded pursuit of its particular aim; and it exploits ungovernably the emotions of speaker and audience’. Virgil is enlisted in the line of criticism of rhetoric that goes back to Plato. So convinced is Feeney, in 1983, of this reading that he fails to notice the irony when he suggests (188— 9) that the closest analogue for the repressed Aeneas is not Augustus, but Tiberius — the arch-dissimulator.'! This model of a simple contrast between an honest, to-the-point, use of language and a devious long-winded use also underlies an article by J. P. Lynch on the speeches of Laocoon and Sinon in Aeneid 2, read respectively as models of Catonian straight-speaking (rem tene, uerba sequentur 'hold fast to the subject matter, the words will follow")

anda

sophisticated and sophistic rhetoric that follows the rules of the Greek

handbooks.!* Feeney in 1991 might have thought somewhat differently, to judge from his discussion in The Gods in Epic of the role of Jupiter and his words, where he concludes that Fatum, the word of Jupiter, cannot be taken as an objective

o

criterion of truth external to the text.'* Jupiter's most impressive definition of Fatum occurs in the speech which concludes the Council of the Gods at the beginning of Book 10, a scene of seditio on Olympus that demands to be read in close conjunction with the Council of Latins in Book 11. On the surface the words of Jupiter oppose the fixities of Fate to the windy distortions of the rhetoric of Venus and Juno; but whether Jupiter himself speaks crooked words, whether his own appeal to the immutable sanctions Feeney 1990 (first published 1983). Feeney tries to minimize the importance of the debate in Aeneid 11: 184 ‘The set-piece debate in the Latin Senate in Book 11 is a mere shouting match;

Latinus' proposals for peace are buried in the exchange of words between Drances and Turnus (225-461). The bedlam is shown for what it is by an interruption: "illi haec inter se dubiis de

un

130

rebus agebant | certantes: castra Aeneas aciemque mouebat" (445f.). As they tussle away Aeneas acts.” Per litteras Denis Feeney tells me that at the time of writing the article he was ‘particularly exercised’ by Aen. 4.283-4 heu quid agat? quo nunc reginam ambire furentem | audeat adfatu? quae prima exordia sumat? Austin's (1955) notes ad loc., taking issue with Page, reveal the awkwardness of a critic desperate to absolve the hero from the imputation of the possibility of a calculated rhetoric in ambire and exordia. Lynch 1990, Feeney 1991: 144-5 on the Council of the Gods; 151-5 on the absence of an Archimedean point of objective ‘Fate’.

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

of Fate merely conceals a wordy vacuum, has been the subject of intense critical debate. In Chapter 2 I drew a contrast between the devious words of Sinon, manipulating the language of fama, and the fata that will in the end determine the course of Roman history, celebrated in anticipation in the words of the epic poet. That contrast is open to deconstruction, given both the question mark that hangs over the straight-speaking word, Fatum, of Jupiter, and the similarity between Sinon, creative manipulator of truths and lies, and Fama,

double

of the poet in his tendentious

reworking

of

poetic tradition. In his 1983 article Feeney identifies a coincidence between the hero's version of events and narratorial actuality in Aeneas’ statement at the beginning of his reply to Dido at 4.337 pro re pauca loquar ‘let me speak a few words to meet the case, in accordance with the facts’.'' But Aeneas’ opening gambit, implying a simple distinction between facts and words, is of course itself a rhetorical ploy; as Pease (1935) notes ad loc., ‘Most orators... begin by announcing their intended brevity.’ No commentator doubts the rhetorical weight of Drances’ opening words at 11.343—4: rem nulli obscuram nostrae nec uocis egentem consulis. You consult us on a matter clear to all and in no need of my words.

The res/uerba opposition comes into play at various key points in the Council of Latins. The topos of proper times for action and for speaking, which goes back to the Homeric models for the debate,'* introduces Latinus' speech at 302-4: ante equidem summa

de re statuisse, Latini,

et uellem et fuerat melius, non tempore tali

cogere concilium, cum muros adsidet hostis. Indeed, men of Latium, I would have wished, and it would have been better so, to

have decided this great issue earlier, and not be summoning a council at a time like this when the enemy is besieging our walls.

^

Feeney 1990 [1983]: 170. There is a model in Jason’s opening gambit to Medea at Ap. Rhod. Argon. 3.976-7 ot Tol yi

oloi te Bucauyxées AAAcı Eacıv | avépes, followed by a less-than-

straightforward speech. The precise meaning of Sucauyées is disputed, but one may compare a

II. 8.230 keveauyfis, used of those whose deeds do not match their words. Jl. 2.342-3 (Nestor) ‘In vain do we strive in words, and can find no device, although we have been here for a long time’; 16.630-1

(Patroclus) ‘The telos of war lies in hands, of words in

council. Therefore we should not multiply words, but fight (for the antithesis between valour and wisdom, good at fighting/good in council see Janko 1992 on Il. 13.726-9). On the relationship of words and deeds in Homer see Parry 1981: 21-7; Barck 1976.

131

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

summa de re may mean either ‘in matters of state’ (the res publica), or ‘about the critical situation’;'° in either case there is an implied opposition between words and action: the summa res requires immediate action in accordance with verbal decisions previously taken. Turnus' reply to Drances begins with a scornful contrast between Drances’ copious supplies of words, larga... copia fandi," and the physical action, manus, required by war. The taunt echoes two remarks in Iliad 2, a book which more than any other explores the proper limits of public words (see Ch. 2 pp. 58-62): firstly, Odysseus’ castigation of Thersites as ‘irresponsible with words, for all that you are a ready talker’ (II. 2.246, followed by eighteen more lines of Odysseus' ready speech), and secondly the disguised Iris' gentler rebuke to Priam, 'you are always ready with endless words, as formerly in peace; but now unavoidable war has broken out' (2.796—7). One of the

ironies of Turnus' reply is that he himself displays a great copia fandi; his reply is twice as long as Drances' speech (sixty-seven to thirty-three lines), andis a powerfully composed piece of rhetoric, of which Heyne commented, ‘I think that nothing could be found in Greek authors, let alone Homer, that comes closer to the art of declamation.’'* Heinze remarks, ‘it is only

in Turnus' speech that one finds anything like a rhetorical emphasis on its arrangement: this is intended to make a clear-cut division between the wellconsidered oratio deliberativa [11.410ff.] and the heated invectiva of the first

part of the speech"! Very different is the reply given by Ascanius to another of the Aeneid's rhetoricians, Numanus, a character who in certain respects is a double of Drances — and of Fama." Ascanius' first response is verbal, but instead of countering his human opponent’s distortions he addresses a five-line prayer to Jupiter, before he kills Numanus with a single arrow-shot,

an

larga quidem semper, Drance, tibi copia fandi (11.378) echoes the opening description of

woo o €

See Austin 1964 on the interpretative crux at 2.322 quo res summa loco... ?

E"

accompanied by the five-word taunt (9.634) i, uerbis uirtutem inlude superbis ‘go and mock bravery with proud words’.*' Turnus by contrast strings out the opposition between uerba and uirtus over the first fourteen lines of his speech (11.380 uerbis; 386 uirtus). He responds in imagined, rather than

Drances as (388) largus opum et lingua melior: largitiones and oratory are two of the major instruments for the distortion of the political process in the Republic. Heyne 1830 41 on 11.376. 19 Heinze 1993: 327. Like Drances he is puffed up by a high-class relationship, his recent marriage to Turnus' younger sister, which elevates him to regnum (of his own antecedents we are told nothing); with 9.621

talia iactantem dictis ac dira canentem cf. 11.399 (Turnus to Drances) cane talia,

demens. But Numanus N

132

pretensions to be. See Hardie 199.1 ad loc.

is fortis (9.592); he presents himself as a warrior, which Drances has no

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

actual, deeds (389-91 ‘let’s go into battle together, and then see who is the braver’); and uses his battle-tested right hand in the service of his rhetorical actio: 408-9 numquam animam talem dextra hac (absiste moueri) | amittes ‘you will never lose your cowardly life by this right hand (don’t flinch!)' — playing Drances’ own game (see 348). Not until a critical moment near the end of the poem does Turnus finally translate the rhetorical antithesis between words and deeds into an immediate determination to act: 12.643— 4 exscindine domos (id rebus defuit unum) | perpetiar, dextra nec Drancis dicta refellam?" ‘shall I suffer our homes destroyed (that was the only thing wanting to my fortunes), and shall I not refute Drances’ words with my right hand?’ The participants in the debate use traditional Homeric contrasts between words and deeds, in respect both ofthe proper occasion for saying and doing, and of the difference between the good speaker and the good fighter. One of the most serious criticisms of rhetoric, however, is that it confuses the boundary between words and deeds, appearance and reality. Feeney spotlights this issue in discussing Aeneas’ injunction to Dido at 4.338 ne finge ‘don’t pretend’, a verb found also in the debate in Book 11, once in the mouth of Turnus: 406—7 uel cum se pauidum contra mea iurgia fingit, | artificis scelus 'or when he pretends to be terrified when I rebuke him, a rogue's trick. Feeney states that the word 'pinpoints with some precision the moulding and misrepresentation which is part of the orator's stockin-trade';" he cites two other passages in which fingo is used in relation to speech. The first occurs in the sleeping Turnus' rebuke of the disguised Allecto, (7.438) ne tantos mihi finge metus ‘do not invent such fears for me’. This is a dangerous thing to say to a Fury who has the supernatural power to work real changes on the human psyche: her response to Turnus' charge of being a silly old woman of whom ‘old age is making a fool with false fears, amidst the wars of kings’ (7.452—3, repeating, mostly verbatim, 440-2) is to plunge a hallucinatory torch into Turnus’ breast;”" as a result,

a

wu

2? Turnus’ self-reproach at 12.645 Turnum fugientem haec terra uidebit? admits Drances’ charge at 11.351 fugae fidens. Turnus’ monologue in 12 is immediately followed by the arrival of Saces, whose desperate plea to Turnus unwittingly reproduces fragments of the debate in 11; note esp. miserere tuorum (12.653 = 11.365). Drancis dicta refellam (12.644) picks up Turnus’ earlier (thwarted) statement at 12.16 et solus ferro crimen commune refellam. 2 Feeney 1990 [1983]: 173. 2 Allecto's ‘imaginary’ fax (of course it is ‘just a dream’) is followed by the cauldron simile at 462-86, an instance of the epic poet's power to conjure up simulacra. There is an analogy between poetic fictionalizing and the supernatural manipulation of (dreaming) reality by a Fury. Note also that the sequence closely anticipates the Ascanius and Numanus scene: like Numanus Turnus ends his rant with advice to the old priestess to leave war to the men (Aen.

133

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

(458) sleep, of the shares

olli somnum ingens rumpit pauor ‘a great terror burst in upon his with consequences in the real world. By poetic justice fear is the first emotions to afflict the scornful Turnus. The Council in Book 11 with the Allecto scene in Book 7 both the motif of the fabrication

of fear (11.406), and the motif of the incendiary effect of taunting words:

Turnus' reaction to Drances' speech at 11.376, talibus exarsit dictis uiolentia Turni "Turnus' violent anger blazed out at these words, reproduces Allecto's reaction to Turnus' dismissal of her first speech at 7.445, talibus Allecto dictis exarsit in iras 'Allecto blazed out in anger at these words’, and in retaliation

she inflicts a fiery anger on Turnus (7.462). Feeney's last example of fingo with relation to speech is the description of Fama (a creature related in many ways to Allecto: see Ch. 3 pp. 101-2) at 4.188 as tam ficti prauique tenax quam nuntia ueri 'as tenacious of her lies and distortions as she is a messenger of the truth”. Here we move from the sphere of rhetoric into a making of fictions that is hardly to be distinguished from the work of the poet. This line ascribes to a personification with a Hesiodic ancestress in the Works and Days (see Ch. 2 pp. 50-7) that power to deal equally in falsehood and truth which the Muses claim for themselves at the beginning of the Theogony (27—8).

The verbal arousal of the pathos of shares with the tragedian, and a point alence between the emotional effects the rhetorician."" Horace describes the

fear is also a goal that the epic poet at which Heinze identifies an equivstriven for by the tragedian and by psychological effects of drama at Ep.

2.1.210—13: ille per extentum funem mihi posse uidetur ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit, irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet, ut magus, et modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis."^

I would believe that the poet could walk on a tightrope, who on the basis of nothing pains, angers, and soothes my heart, and fills me with false fears, like a magician, and transports me now to Thebes, now to Athens.

won au

134

7.444; 9.620); both men are quickly penetrated by a violent blow. Ascanius' shooting of Numanus lies behind Cupid's peremptory response to the amatory rhetoric of the poet Ovid at Am. 1.1.21-4 and to Apollo's put-down of Cupid in the parallel passage at Met. 1.463-73, passages given as examples of Ovid's ironic treatment of the power of rhetoric by Tarrant 1995. Heinze 1993: 371. See Brink 1982 ad loc., in particular on the Gorgianic precedents. It is also one of the powers of

Fama to effect translocation within the narrative, as for example with her transporting of the reader from Carthage to the kingdom of larbas in Aeneid 4, or from Aulis to Troy at the beginning of Metamorphoses 12.

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

Virgil’s Fama is no tragedian (although she plays a major role in the ‘tragedy’ of Dido, and her intervention has sometimes been compared to a tragic chorus), but she too spreads unfounded or partly founded fear (4.187 magnas territat urbes'she terrifies great cities’). But her slander of the lifestyle of Dido and Aeneas has something of the orator about it; the moral invective is more pointed in the charges against Aeneas of her collaborator Iarbas at 4.215-17, and more pointed still in the contrastive characterization of Italian and Trojan national characters by another double of Fama, Numanus Remulus, at 9.603—20 (see below p. 144).°’ Drances' rhetoric is introduced with the line (11.342) surgit et his onerat

dictis atque aggerat iras 'He rose and with these words loaded and heaped up their anger.' The last four words reproduce the second half of the line that describes the effects of Fama on Iarbas at 4.197, incenditque animum

dictis atque aggerat iras "With her words she fired his spirit and heaped up his anger.’ The image of fire in the first half of that line is paralleled in the description of the effects of Drances' speech on Turnus at 11.376, talibus exarsit dictis uiolentia Turni. Feeney points to Aeneas' use of the verb incendere in his plea to Dido at 4.360, desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis 'Stop inflaming me and yourself with your complaints and he produces examples of the semi-technical application of incendo and related words to the emotional effect aimed at by the orator." But again this is only part of the story. incendo is indeed used in the Aeneid of the disruptively inflammatory effects of speech, above all female speech, as here, and at 9.500

(the mother of Euryalus)

illam incendentem

luctus ‘as

she inflamed their grief’, 11.147 (the mothers in Evander’s city) maestam

incendunt clamoribus urbem ‘they inflame the grief-stricken city with their cries’ and 12.238 (Juturna in disguise) talibus incensa est iuuenum sententia

dictis ‘with such words the young men's minds were inflamed""" But the verb is also used of the positive excitement of male courage and virtue, as at 9.788 talibus accensi 'inflamed by these words'

(Mnestheus'

rebuke), or 10.368

(Pallas) nunc prece, nunc dictis uirtutem accendit amaris now with prayers, now with harsh words he inflamed their courage, and most importantly at S

2

co

2

v

2

On the parallels between Numanus’ and the Roman orator's invective see Hardie 199-1: 194. For a reading of Fama in Aeneid4 as an ‘emblem of a perverted rhetoric’ see Dangel 2002. On the reworking of the Virgilian connections between Allecto, Fama, panic and the power to create convincing fictions in Flavian epic see Ch. 6 pp. 197-201, 207-14. Feeney 1990 [1983]: 175-6. 12.238 concludes the account of the nurturing of rumores, among the Latin spectators of the duel, by Juturna in the disguise of Camers at 12.222-39, and is part of a larger sequence (216-65) which examines the interrelationship of several aspects of verbal report and fame: see

Ch. 2 pp. 68-70.

135

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

6.889, the line that rounds off the Parade of Heroes, incenditque animum

famae uenientis amore‘he inflamed his spirit with a love for the fame that was to come’."” incenditque animum is the first half of that same line describing the deleterious effects of Fama at 4.197, whose second halfis repeated in the

line introducing Drances’ speech (11.342). The Speech of Anchises both in overall outline and in allusive detail is an encapsulation of Ennius’ Annales, and Anchises’ historical protreptic has the effect on Aeneas which Ennius presumably meant his epic to have on the Roman reader. incendo is also the carefully chosen verb that Fronto uses to describe the effect of reading Ennius (p. 212 van den Hout): mox, ut te studium legendi incessisset, aut te Plauto expolires aut Accio expleres aut Lucretio delenires aut Ennio incenderes. Then, when the desire to read had come over you, you would either polish yourself with

Plautus, or glut yourself with Accius,

or soothe yourself with

Lucretius, or

inflame yourself with Ennius.

In the extended description of Drances that introduces his speech in the Council, his driving motive is identified as envy, inuidia, aroused by the gloria of Turnus (11.336—7 quem gloria Turni | obliqua inuidia stimulisque agitabat amaris 'he was tormented by the bitter stings of side-glancing envy at the thought of Turnus' glory’). Drances comes close to being a personification of Inuidia, a sibling of the personification of Fama, as Ovid recognizes when he models his Inuidia on the Virgilian Fama (see Ch. 5 pp. 168-71).”' Envy is aroused by Fame, and is in competition with Fame; envy is an inevitable product of the certamen gloriae ‘competition for glory’ that fuels Republican politics." Inuidia and Fama (or Gloria) go together 9!

[mitated at Luc. Bell. Civ. 9.406-7 sic ille [Cato] pauentis | incendit uirtute animos et amore

laborum. accendo is also found in the Aeneid in both positive and negative contexts with relation to speech and reputation. Negative: 4.203 isque amens animi et rumore accensus amaro;

we

7.549—50 finitimas in bella feram rumoribus urbes, | accendamque animos insani Martis amore.

w pn

136

Positive: 4.232 si nulla accendit tantarum gloria rerum; 6.165 aere ciere uiros Martemque accendere cantu (a figure for the poet?); 12.425-6 ‘arma citi properate uiro! quid statis?’ Iapyx | conclamat primusque animos accendit in hostem. How are we to judge 7.496 eximiae laudis succensus amore? Note also 4.54 his dictis incensum (var. lect.] animum inflammauit amore. See Keith 1992: 130-1. Drances’ frigida bello dextera (Aen. 11.338-9) may be compared with the ignauum frigus of the house of Ovidian Inuidia (Met. 2.763): see Dickie 1975; with the obliqua inuidia that drives Turnus cf. the sideways glance of Inuidia at Met. 2.787 obliquo. . . lumine. gloria Turni introduces the exchange between Drances and Turnus (11.336), which concludes with Turnus' claim for himself of gloria (444); Drances taunts Turnus with his desire for fama at 368; Turnus raises the issue of gloria at 421 and 431. On Turnus' old-fashioned, and destructive, love of glory see Earl 1967: 66-7. The inextricable link between envy and glory (or praise) is clear in Roman

historians and orators (see Ch. 10 p. 385); in Virgil cf. Ecl. 7.25-8

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

as the negative and positive aspects of the power of the word to establish a reputation. At his earlier appearance in Aeneid 11 (122-32) Drances had already been introduced as motivated by hatred of Turnus," but his first words were ones of praise rather than blame. His very first words, indeed,

are o fama ‘O in fame...’ The first two lines of his address to Aeneas are an encapsulation of the subject of the Aeneid viewed as praise poetry: 11.124—5 o fama ingens, ingentior armis, | uir Troiane, quibus caelo te laudibus aequem? *Great in fame, greater in warfare, hero of Troy, with what praises shall I

bring you level with the sky?" The use of the degrees of the adjective ingens suggests epic's hyperbolical urge to magnify, to identify a greatest hero: the comparative ingentior is found only here in the classical period; the

superlative ingentissimusis never found until late," but is implied if it is true that no greatness can exceed equivalence with the heavens. Furthermore, the first two words of the poem

are repeated, in different cases, over the

line-ending of 124-5 armis, | uir." The two lines also engage with the opposition of res and uerba: the first five words chiastically highlight the superiority of deeds, arma, over words, fama.*’ But in the third part of

ker)

9?

pastores, hedera crescentem ornate poetam, | Arcades, inuidia rumpantur ut ilia Codro; | aut, si ultra placitum laudarit, baccare frontem | cingite, ne ati noceat mala lingua futuro: on the threat posed by envy to the poet see Ch. 10 pp. 392-410. On envy and praise in Greece see Walcot 1978. And also as senior, perhaps lending him a certain authority. senior is otherwise used of Anchises, Acestes, (the risible) Menoetes, Nautes, Latinus, Galaesus, Tiberinus, Evander,

=

44

Thymbris, the father of Halaesus, Acoetes, lapyx: for the most part august company. On seniores and the proper order see Ov. Fasti 5.1 ff. C£ also 11.508-9 (Turnus to Camilla) o decus Italiae uirgo, quas dicere grates | quasue referre parem? Drances’ doubt about his ability adequately to praise his subject may be compared with Lucretius’ exaltation of Epicurus over the greatest epic hero, Hercules, at 5.1-8: quis potis est dignum pollenti pectore carmen | condere pro rerum maiestate hisque repertis? | quisque ualet uerbis tantum qui

fingere laudes | pro meritis eius possit.

. nemo,

ut opinor, erit mortali

corpore cretus. | nam si, ut ipsa petit maiestas cognita rerum, | dicendum est, deus ille fuit, deus,

inclute Memmi... Macrobius (Sat. 6.2.33) provides a parallel in Cicero's praise of the elder Cato, in a lost treatise: contingebat in eo, quod plerisque contra solet, ut maiora omnia re quam fama uiderentur; id quod non saepe euenit, ut expectatio cognitione, aures ab oculis uincerentur [= fr. philos. 6.14 Müller], commenting nec [ Vergilius] Tullio compilando, dummodo undique

wu

ornamenta sibi conferret, abstinuit: ammunition, perhaps, for those who would see in Drances 3

a figure of Cicero. TLL s.v. Cf. the play with the three degrees of magnus (mator, maximus) at Ov. Fasti 1.603-6 (all outdone by Augustus); with two degrees at Virg. Geo. 2.169—70 extulit, haec Decios Marios

3

to Aeneas) ‘magna petis’ dixit, 'uir factis maxime, cuius | dextera per ferrum, pietas spectata per ignes.' Hardie 199.1 on 9.57. For the pairing cf. 7.745 Vfens, insignem fama et felicibus armis, perhaps to be taken as a hendiadyoin, ‘renowned for the fame of his successful arms.

uoc

magnosque Camillos,

3

| Scipiadas duros bello et te, maxime Caesar, Ov. Met. 14.108—9 (the Sibyl

137

138

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

this auxesis Drances undoes the words/deeds opposition by his implication that the superlative of ingens will be conferred by his, Drances’, own verbal skills. Gransden (1976) notes ad loc., ‘Aeneas was, of course, subsequently

deified’, so that even in the use of the phrase caelo te.... aequem there is an equivocation between a purely verbal magnification and a literal elevation to the skies, an equivocation that may be paralleled in other instances of the poem's central image of the journey to heaven.** If we are tempted to feel that Drances’ dishonourable motives push him over the top in his praise of Aeneas, we should remember that these are the terms that Aeneas had used at 1.378—9 in defining to Venus his own heroic status within the Homeric tradition: sum pius Aeneas... fama super aethera notus ‘I am pious Aeneas... known through fame above the skies, an elevation echoed in Jupiter’s final authorization of Roman greatness at 12.838-9, hinc genus Ausonio mixtum quod sanguine surget, | supra homines, supra ire deos pietate uidebis ‘thence you will see the race that will arise with the mixture of Italian blood soar over men and gods in piety’. In the rhetorical dubitatio in the next line, 11.126 iustitiaene prius mirer, belline laborum? ‘Shall I first admire

your justice or your labours in war? Drances again mouths panegyrical formulae already familiar from Ilioneus’ praise of Aeneas at 1.544—5, rex

erat Aeneas nobis, quo iustior alter | nec pietate fuit, nec bello maior et armis “Our king was Aeneas, than whom none was superior in justice and piety, and none greater in war and fighting.’ There are other similarities between the scene where Ilioneus speaks at the court of Carthage and this scene: Ilioneus is described as maximus (1.521), Drances as senior (11.122), and

the reaction to both of their speeches is described in the same way: 1.559—60 talibus Ilioneus; cuncti simul ore fremebant | Dardanidae ‘So spoke Ilioneus,

and all the Trojans murmured in agreement’; 11.132 dixerat haec unoque omnes eadem ore fremebant "These were his words, and they all murmured the same things with one voice.' Ilioneus, the Trojan spokesman at Dido's court, finds himself in a situation

where

it is essential to persuade

the

audience of the character of the petitioners; but the rhetoric in his use of the conventional panegyrical division of the king's virtues into those of peace and war was sufficiently veiled for Francis Cairns to take it as the epic's normative image of Aeneas as the ‘good king"? Gransden, by contrast, feels uneasy with the distasteful mouthpiece of praise in Book 11: ‘It is a donnée 38 See Hardie 1986: Index s.vv. ‘heavens, ascent to” The ‘purely verbal’ kind of ascent to the skies is given the authority of the mouthpiece of Fatum in Jupiter’s climactic words on fama at Aen. 1.287-8 famam qui terminet astris | Iulius. ?9 Cairns 1989: 29-30.

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

of Aeneas’ character as a good king that he excelled both in moral virtue (pietas) and in military prowess: cf. 291-2, and 1.544... Here the intention is to flatter: Drances is thinking of himself, not of Aeneas, and the emphasis of his words falls on the two first-person singular verbs, aequem, mirer, “how am I to match your praises, where shall I start?" etc." This is a desperate shift; Drances may have his reasons, but he is too good an orator to betray self-centredness in this way."! Drances' praise of Aeneas is soon echoed in the reported words of Diomedes at 11.291—2 (referring to Hector and Aeneas), ambo animis, ambo

insignes praestantibus armis, | hic pietate prior 'both distinguished in their courage, distinguished in their excellence in arms, but Aeneas the greater in piety’. This reproduces the dichotomy between virtues of war and peace, but is closer in verbal formulation to Ilioneus’ words at 1.544—5." In Diomedes have we at last found an impartial witness? He too is making a case, under the pressure of the need to justify to Latinus his refusal to send military aid. The division of virtues between military ability and pietas serves an immediate function in its context: Aeneas' military ability is a reason for not fighting him (293 ast armis concurrant arma cauete ‘make sure that your weapons do not clash with his’), while his outstanding pietas is a reason for extending right hands in a religiously sanctioned treaty (292 coeant in foedera dextrae ‘let your right hands come together in a treaty"). There are other features of Diomedes' speech that suggest that he is slanting his account. He claims that the reason for the ten years' delay in taking Troy was the combined strength of Hector and Aeneas. Now while there are passages in the Iliad where Hector and Aeneas are jointly said to be the best Trojan warriors," traditionally Hector alone is the belli mora (9.154—5 Danais... decimum quos distulit Hector in annum ‘the Greeks... whom Hector put off until the tenth year').^ Diomedes’ recollection of Aeneas’ awesome presence in battle (282-4) hardly matches our recollection of the encounter between the

40 Gransden 1976 on 11.124-6. Presumably Gransden would not say the same of Horace, Odes 1.12.13-14 quid prius dicam solitis parentis | laudibus...? See Gow 1952 on Theocr. 17.11. Cf. also the praise of Marcellus at 6.878-80 heu pietas, heu prisca fides inuictaque bello | dextera! non illi se quisquam impune tulisset | obuius armato. piusis used of Aeneas both at the beginning of the foedus scene in Aeneid 12 and at the point of its disruption, 12.175 tum pius Aeneas stricto sic ense precatur, and 12.311 at pius Aeneas dextram tendebat inermem.

“4 677-9; 17.513. See Tarrant 1976 on Sen. Ag. 211: the phrase belli mora seems to originate with Albucius Silo. Turnus of course has his own reasons for choosing the traditional version.

139

140

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

two men in the Iliad (5.297-317).'° Nor are the Trojans the only object of Diomedes' tinted gaze; he opens his speech with a characterization of the Latins that bears at best a partial correspondence to the reality, 11.252—4: o fortunatae gentes, Saturnia regna, antiqui Ausonii, quae uos fortuna quietos sollicitat suadetque ignota lacessere bella? O blessed peoples, Saturn's kingdom, the ancient Ausonians, what chance disturbs your peace, and persuades you to provoke unknown wars?

Conington (Conington and Nettleship 2008) comments: ‘Virgil wavers, as we have seen, between two views of the past of Italy, a legendary and a semihistorical one: here he adopts the former, as if the Italian nations still lived in

the halo of the golden age and knew nothing of war.' This is Italy as we see it at the end of the second Georgic. Of course it is not the narrator Virgil who here adopts this view of Italy, but a character Diomedes, in whose mouth it is a powerful opening rebuke to the Latins' desire for war, and also prepares the ground for an analogy between the Greeks' violation of a sacred people protected by the gods (255 uiolauimus, 277 uiolaui) and the Latins’ mad rush to violate the peace of their own Golden Age existence." Yet Diomedes is the man in whom we are asked to put our trust — experto credite (283). This tag forms part of a network of appeals to evidential certainty, as well as verbal exactness, which stretches over the whole of the Council scene, and which provides an ironic foil to the rhetoric of the several

speakers. Latinus is careful to provide the optimal conditions for a faithful account by the envoys of Diomedes' reply, 11.239—42: atque hic legatos Aetola ex urbe remissos quae referant fari iubet, et responsa reposcit ordine cuncta suo. tum facta silentia linguis,

et Venulus dicto parens ita farier infit. And then he ordered the envoys who had been sent back from the Aetolian city to tell what reply they brought, and demanded to hear all the responses in due order.

^6 Stahl 1981: 173-4 comments on Aen. 11.283-4 that ‘Diomedes. . . modifies Homer's picture of Augustus’ ancestor very favorably; and identifies Diomedes' reassessment as part of the poet's own project. This may be so; my aim is to show that the text reveals the ‘rhetorical’ nature of what Virgil is about. 17 For the Golden Age implication of 254 ignota lacessere bella cf. 8.112-13 quae causa subegit | ignotas temptare uias? (hinting at the topos of the first ship).

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

The assembly was called to silence. Venulus obeyed the command

and began to

speak thus.'* Venulus' first word is uidimus, *we've seen [Diomedes and Argyripa]’, followed two lines later, at the beginning of the verse, by contigimus *we've touched [the hand by which Troy fell]’ (although already in that last description interpretation begins to creep in: they may have touched the hand, but was that really the hand by which Troy fell?). Sight and touch offer the straightest highway to belief according to Lucretius;'” they are also the two senses on which Latinus will ask the Council to base its decisions at 310-11: cetera qua rerum iaceant

perculsa ruina, | ante oculos interque manus sunt

omnia uestras" The rest of your fortunes, how they lie shattered in ruins, you

can see with your own eyes and grasp it with your own hands.' Ocular and physical contact are also, as we have seen, the evidence on which Diomedes

claims to base his assessment of the folly of fighting with Aeneas (with 245 contigimusque manus compare the shape of 283 contulimusque manus). Drances and Turnus will also appeal to the evidence of direct sensory experience: 349—50 (Drances) totamque uidemus | consedisse urbem luctu ‘we see

the whole city slumped in grief’; 366-7 sat funera fusi | uidimus we've seen enough funerals after being routed’. And Turnus at 392-5: aut quisquam merito, foedissime, pulsum,

arguet, Iliaco tumidum qui crescere Thybrim sanguine et Euandri totam cum stirpe uidebit procubuisse domum atque exutos Arcadas armis? Vile creature, can any one with justice accuse me of being defeated, when he sees the Tiber rising, swollen with Trojan blood, the house of Evander destroyed root

and branch and the Arcadians stripped of their arms?! And at 396 haud ita me experti Bitias et Pandarus ingens ‘That wasn't Bitias’ and giant Pandarus' experience of me." Note also Turnus’ 'thoughtexperiment' at 386—8, possit quid uiuida uirtus | experiare licet, nec longe scilicet hostes | quaerendi nobis ‘now is our chance to test what living valour ES c

Reinforced by Venulus' closing remarks at 294—5 et responsa simul quae sint, rex optime, regis | audisti et quae sit magno sententia bello. 5.101—3 nec tamen hanc possis oculorum subdere uisu | nec iacere indu manus, uia qua munita fidei | proxima fert humanum in pectus templaque mentis, closely following Empedocles DK 8133. A PHI search reveals that the sequence -musque manu- occurs only in these two places in Virgil. See the commentators ad loc. on the exaggerations contained in these claims of what can be ‘seen’; the Tiber swelling with blood is the kind of vision that a Sibyl has (6.87). 9? Cf. 11.283 experto credite.

141

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

can achieve; the enemies aren't far to seek’. As the basis for their propositiones Drances and Turnus offer two versions of the reality of what has happened on the battlefield. Latinus has given a third, which is the basis for his own

propositio (314—34); in his case it is clear that a depressive fit consequent on the failure of the mission to Diomedes leads him to an unduly pessimistic assessment of the situation after the battle in the previous book." And in justification of his decision Diomedes, too, has given the envoys a version of the Trojan War and its aftermath that bears clear marks of being a partial view. Highet adduces the speech of Diomedes in support of his claim that in Virgil the dichotomy between poetry and oratory is false: 'Diomedes' account of the fates of his comrades is oratorical in purpose and even in structure: the rapid summary of many different episodes is a percursio, and the passage contains two praeteritiones. . . Yet, since it summarizes an entire epic poem, the Nostoi, it is also a feat of poetic skill...”™' Highet is concerned chiefly with stylistic and formal features, and stops short of asking how this rhetoricization of poetic traditions may affect the authority of the epic voice. As a summary of a part of the epic cycle, Diomedes' speech has a precedent in the scenes in the Temple of Juno in Book 1, whose visual ‘rhetoric’ has been the subject of much discussion: do

the scenes function as the pictorial equivalent of epic praemia laudi (1.461) that Aeneas reads into them, or do they celebrate Juno's extermination of

her foes? Alessandro Barchiesi points to a pun in 1.457 bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per orbem 'wars already broadcast in fame throughout the whole world’: these are wars that have become tediously familiar through their rehearsal in the Epic Cycle, Kuklos (orbis), within whose circuit Virgil must define an area for his own, new, epic." The same pun may operate

in Diomedes' description of the subject of his Nostoi catalogue (after the praeteritio of the matter of the Iliad in 11.256-7) as (257-8) infanda'^ per orbem | supplicia et scelerum poenas ‘[we suffer] unspeakable punishments and penalties for our crimes throughout the world/in the Epic Cycle’. The rhetorical distortion in the speeches of Diomedes, Drances and Turnus, this second and even third narrating of events already told, is not an

u =

11.231-3 deficit ingenti luctu rex ipse Latinus: | fatalem Aenean manifesto numine ferri | admonet ira deum tumulique ante ora recentes, where it is uncertain whether the object of admonet is focalized through Latinus or the narrator. 34 Highet 1972: 56-7, referring to Kroll 192.1: 240 n. 28 for similar ‘Katalog-, Epitomegedichte’ in Cat. 64.338—70, Culex 304-21, Ov. Met. 14.441-51, 566-80. Barchiesi 19992: 334; see also below Ch. 5 pp. 154-6.

wo a u

142

With infanda cf. Aeneas’ introduction of his narrative of the Iliupersis, infandum, regina, iubes renouare dolorem (2.3), another internal narrative of a part of the cycle.

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

isolated feature within the poem. Internal narrators are of course a defining feature of the genre of epic, and their narratives are rarely disinterested. Phoenix’ use of the example of Meleager in his speech to Achilles in Iliad 9 already shows the use of a slanted version of a story to what in a later age would be called rhetorical effect. In the Odyssey Odysseus is the masterful and effective narrator of a number of narratives both straight and crooked; the fictional autobiographies that he spins in the second half of the Odyssey may be described as retellings of a tale already told, to the extent that they offer other versions of what has happened within the time-span of the poem. On a smaller scale, Richard Martin comments on the speech of Achilles to Thetis at I]. 1.365—412 that ‘it recaps in a miniature narrative the first episode in the poem with Achilles’ slight reshaping’.”’ But it appears that the Aeneid, to an unprecedented extent, invests in internal retellings or redescriptions of epic narrative, whether through flashback or prophecy. In Book 1 Jupiter outlines for Venus’ benefit the whole of the ‘epic cycle’ of future Roman history (and O’Hara has shown how the apparently objective unrolling of Fate in this and other prophecies conceals a degree of what might be called rhetorical selection and slanting);** later in Book 1 Aeneas gives his reading of the ecphrasis of parts of the Epic Cycle as represented in the Temple of Juno. Within Books 2 and 3, Aeneas’ own, Odysseus-style, narrative of events

first told in the Ilias parua and Iliupersis, we have the story told by Sinon, whose tissue of truth, half-truths and lies superimposes on the Odyssean models of tale-telling the influences of both tragedy and rhetoric. Turnus will describe Drances in words that echo Sinon's ironic invective against Ulysses, whose double in truth he, Sinon, is. With 11.406—7 uel cum se pauidum contra mea iurgia fingit, | artificis scelus, et formidine crimen acerbat 'or when he pretends to be terrified when I rebuke him — a rogue's trick! The fear is a pretence to add sting to his charges against me’, compare 2.124-5 et mihi iam multi crudele canebant | artificis scelus ‘Now many began to predict that the rogue's cruel trick would fall on my head."? In Book 4 the emergence of competing versions of events is allegorized in the personification of Fama. The major ecphrastic prophecies at the ends of Books 6 and 8, the Parade of Heroes and the Shield of Aeneas, are both summary rewritings of Ennius'

77 Martin 1989: 141. A programmatic internal reperformance near the beginning of the poem? See also Martin 1989: 142-3 arguing that Achilles’ notorious silence on the subject of the embassy episode at 16.72-3 is a deliberate manipulation of the ‘rhetoric’ of recollection. 55 O'Hara 1990: 132-63 on Jupiter's consolatio. 5? Sinon as double of Ulysses: with 9.602 fandi factor Vlixes cf. 2.107 (Sinon) prosequitur pauitans et ficto pectore fatur. Sinon feigns pauor like Drances, according to Turnus, (11.406) se pauidum... fingi.

143

144

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

Roman epic cycle; we have already seen how Anchises turns his preview of Roman history into a rhetorical protreptic for his son. In each case Virgil diverges from his primary Homeric model, the catalogue of heroines in the Nekyia and the Shield of Achilles, by taking as his subject a chunk of central epic narrative that is retold in ecphrastic form. In the last four books, the

speeches of Venus and Juno in the Council of Gods present sharply divergent versions of events on earth; another great rhetorical manipulator of reality in these last books is Numanus Remulus, who gives us his version not of events but of the national characters of the two peoples at war. Within the text Ascanius’

answer

is swift and final; the issues that Numanus

however, continue to exercise modern

raises,

critics. Numanus, as we have seen,

has several points in common with Drances; furthermore, Numanus is a close relative of Fama: the narrator’s description of the content of his speech, (9.595) digna atque indigna relatu ‘things worthy and unworthy to relate’, in shape recalls 4.190 ‘[ Fara] facta atque infecta canebat ‘she sang of facts and fictions’. ingentem sese clamore ferebat ‘[Numanus] made himself great with his shouting' (9.597) could equally be said of the self-inflating power of Fama; and Numanus' charges of Trojan luxurious decadence overlap with the accusations of decadence made by Fama and her human mouthpiece Iarbas. David West has analysed the Sinon-like economies practised on the

truth by Juno in her final speech in Book 12.°° This obsessive and tendentious re-presenting of parts of the narrative within the narrative might still leave intact the authority of the primary narrator, as occupying a position outside and apart from the biased perspectives of his characters. I have already hinted that it is not possible to disassociate cleanly the overheated deployment of praise and blame by Drances from the poet's own use of words. This raises the general issue of the extent to which the performance of the epic narrator is mirrored in the verbal performances of characters within the narrative. The connection is obvious enough when the character is a bard or poet performing an epic-type song, a Demodocus or an Iopas. Closely related is the phenomenon of the epic hero, Odysseus or Aeneas, who narrates a part of the main narrative through first-person flashback. But how many other kinds of verbal — and indeed non-verbal — performances within the narrative mimic the work of the primary narrator? Within the Aeneid two extended passages of praise speech or praise ecphrasis that clearly shadow the epic poet's work are the Speech of Anchises and the Shield of Aeneas. I have pointed to the Ennian nature of these passages, but one can go further and say that the characters Anchises and Vulcan, the 60 West 1998,

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

latter (8.627) haud uatum ignarus ‘not unaware of what the prophets/poets had said’ are surrogates for Virgil and the tradition of Greco-Roman epic that he subsumes and continues in his own poem. The inflammatory effect of Anchises’ speech on his son, the effect that in purely affective terms is inseparable from the effect of ‘bad’ rhetoric, is therefore also the effect that the poem we are reading intends to have on us. The personification of Fama in Book 4 is, as we have seen, a demonic double of the epic voice and of the epic tradition itself. It is impossible to separate surgically the slander of Fama from the praise poetry that is epic; we have seen how the one person Drances is a mouthpiece both for epic fama and for inuidia. This reflection of the poet’s work within his text might be thought to be the product of the late stages ofa tradition that has become overly self-conscious, a development that will reach its logical conclusion in the plethora of figures of the poet that inhabit the pages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Yet it may be that we are dealing with a fundamental feature of the genre itself. Richard Martin has argued that the conditions of oral performance of early Greek epic tend to foster an identification between the performance of the narrator and that of his characters, whose speech acts, as narrator, he acts out himself.^' Mar-

tin shows that the main categories of muthos, defined as the 'expressive use of language in dispute settings' (the categories of commands, boast and insult contests, and the recitation of remembered events), operate in an agonistic context that is analogous to the agonistic culture in which the poet himself must strive for success. An early example in the Iliad of verbal contest for authority is the agore at which Thersites attempts to blacken the character of Agamemnon. As has often been noted, Thersites’ arguments are a parodic repetition of those of Achilles in Iliad 1.°° There is, then, a danger that Ther-

sites’ excellence in the art of invective may assume too successful a role in the epic of praise. Nagy suggests that the ignominious worsting of Thersites at the hands of Odysseus is intended to draw a line around epic poetry, institutionalizing it as a kind of praise poetry in opposition to blame poetry.” In the Aeneid this silencing of a voice of invective is paralleled in Iulus’ swift killing of Numanus. However, it is Drances who has the role closest to that of the 6

62

Martin 1989, Note in particular Whitman 1958: 161 ‘Few things are more subtle in the Iliad than the way in which this "good-for-nothing^ the social and physical antitype of Achilles, reiterates the resentment of the hero: the theme of the entire second book is Delusion, and truth can appear

only in the mouth of a Thersites.' From this point of view the ‘plot of fama’ that I read into the testing of the army and its sequel in Ch. 2 pp. 58-62, with its resolution in the reaffirmation of the destined telos and resultant kleos of the war, underestimates the power of the voices of the repressed to continue to make themselves heard. vw

63

Nagy 1979: 253-64.

145

146

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

Homeric Thersites, and Virgil signally fails to write him out of the continuing verbal texture of his epic. As we have seen, in this Council there is no resolution to this endless dispute dubtis de rebus, in strong contrast to Odysseus’ swift and masterful resolution of the verbal disorder in the Achaean agore. Drances is not summarily expelled from Virgil’s epic. Invective and its effects on an audience are not to be radically disassociated from the narrator’s own use of language and from the effects of that language on his audience. We might rest content with an explanation of the convergence between the performances of narrator and his characters in terms of the generic conditioning of the Homeric tradition. But we might also inquire into the historical determinants that in Virgil’s own day reinforced the genre’s tendency to identify the poet's verbal performance with that of his hero(es) — and even villain(s). In other words, what kinds of performance in the culture of later first-century Bc Rome

does the Aeneid represent, and how

might these be mirrored in the poet's own performance? It would be easy to see parallels between Virgil's epic and the commemorative and panegyrical displays of the visual arts and of pageantry and ceremony: Anchises and Vulcan are figures both for the epic poet and for the artists of the great public monuments of Augustan Rome, as well as for the impresarios of triumphs and patrician funerals. The analogy between an epic and a visual iconographic cycle is anticipated by Virgil himself in the Temple of Poetry at the beginning of Georgics 3. In Aeneid 8 Evander enters as the aetiological expert guiding Aeneas and the reader through the prehistory of Rome, and Evander is also the narrator of an archetypal myth of the victory over a demonized enemy of a hero with Olympian pretensions.” The poet of the Aeneid too is an expert in Callimachean aetiology and Varronian antiquarianism, as also in the aretalogy of saviour-heroes. In these ways the Aeneid represents in localized characters and episodes its own functions as the kind of epic poem that it is. How then will this totalizing poem negotiate its relationship with the discourse that had become the prime vehicle of verbal power in the late Republic, namely oratory? The poem is hospitable enough to epideictic rhetoric: Ilioneus’ outline of a basilikos logos to Dido at 1.544—9 fits easily into the poem's own project,” as in another way does Anchises' apparent prescripting of Augustus’ own epitaphios logos for his nephew Marcellus at 6.868—86.^^ Here, through the figure of Anchises, the poet ventriloquizes

64 See Drew 1927: 31-41 ‘Evander and Virgil’ $5 Tiberius Donatus ascribed the whole poem to the genus laudatiuum of rhetoric. $6 See Norden 1957 on 6.868 ff.

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

for his ‘hero’, Augustus. And what of deliberative rhetoric? My whole argument has tended to the conclusion that in the debates in the divine and human councils of Books 10 and 11 Virgil lets us see how the verbal power struggles of late Republican rhetoric cannot definitively be separated from the ‘rhetorical’ effects at which his own poem aims. One major difference between the Homeric poems and the Aeneid is obviously the fact that the Aeneid is concerned with contemporary politics in a way that the Iliad and Odyssey are not. Politics is a dirty business; in this poem invective cannot be expunged with the nonchalance with which Odysseus pitchforks Thersites out of the Iliad. Political demonization is too useful a tool for the new regime. Like Drances, the poet of the Aeneid is equally adept at sketching saints and monsters. Drances is not a nice person; Virgil goes out of his way to reveal the baseness of his motives, so that he and we may feel a healthy superiority in our own humanity and fair-mindedness. Yet it is disconcerting that Drances’ policy is the one that the Latins should be following, and that his farfrom-disinterested insistence that Turnus actually fight the duel that Aeneas had mentioned

in unreal past tenses (11.115-18)

does indeed eventually

provide the resolution to the plot of the poem."^ This monster of defamation turns out to collude with the designs of Fate — and the same is true, even more paradoxically, of the earthborn monstrosity Fama in Book 4. But beyond this, the rhetoric deployed by Drances, and by Turnus in response, cannot tidily be ring-fenced from the uses of words elsewhere in the poem. Drances is no simple allegory of Cicero or Catiline, but we will probably not err in hearing in the debate in the Council of Latins echoes of the contests of oratory of the later Republic, which issued in no solution to the political problems of the time. This endless squabbling dubiis de rebus could be resolved only by the intervention of the man who claimed to be the descendant of Aeneas. And yet, once a military solution had been achieved, this man too depended on words to consolidate and make palatable the results of his actions. One example of such words is the epic poem the Aeneid; the constant bubbling to the surface, in this narrative of unchange-

able Fate, of different versions of epic Fame, and the attempt of a series of

*? The words used by Drances at 11.220-1 in his vicious aggravation of popular hostility against Turnus, solumque uocari | testatur, solum posci in certamina Turnum, turn out to be prophetic of the actions of Aeneas at 12.466—7 solum densa in caligine Turnum | uestigat lustrans, solum in certamina poscit (both also echo 10.442—3 solus ego in Pallanta feror, soli mihi Pallas | debetur). The passage in Book 11 traps Turnus' past and future actions in a contest of blame and fame: the accusations of the grieving womenfolk and children are counterbalanced by the sheltering magnum

reginae nomen (223) and the support of Turnus' own military fama (224).

147

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

characters to impose their own rhetorical interpretation of events, serve to remind the reader that although conditions had changed, the princeps could not escape the necessity of conducting the old Republican certamen gloriae by other means.^* Turnus presents himself as the man of action in opposition to Drances, the man of words. The most famous debate of this kind in the Epic Cycle was the debate between Ajax and Odysseus over the arms of Achilles, and it is possible that one or more versions of this debate are among the models used by Virgil in the Council scene. *" Puccioni sees in the sarcasm, uukTnpicuós, of Drances at 11.383—9] a reflection of the proverbial Aidvteios

yéAws,’” as exemplified in Accius’ treatment of the Armorum 115-17 Warmington:

iudicium,

uidi te, Vlixes, saxo sternentem Hectora,

uidi tegentem clipeo classem Doricam; ego tunc pudendam trepidus hortabar fugam. So it was you, Ulysses, that I saw fell Hector with a stone; it was you I saw shelter the

Dorian fleet behind your shield. Then I, all trembling, called for shameful flight.

Accius is certainly one of the models used by Ovid in his Armorum iudicium at the beginning of Metamorphoses 13; Turnus' sneering suggestion to Drances that they both go into battle, and then see who's a real man

(Aen.

11.389), may also lie behind Ajax' challenge to Ulysses to recreate an earlier scene on the battlefield (Met. 13.77—9).

Ovid introduces the Iliadic section of the Metamorphoses with his own rewriting of the Virgilian personification of Fama at the beginning of Metamorphoses 12, signalling in no uncertain way the thoroughgoing relativization of epic authority in what is to follow." Ovid's strategy in his ‘little Iliad' is to narrate obliquely and through intermediaries: in Book 12 the For examples of the certamen gloriae (honoris, dignitatis, famae, laudis) see TLL 11 879.52—70; see also Ch. 7 pp. 244-5. In this contest the poet is yoked with the princeps the pairing of statesman and poet is expressed most economically in Virgil's image of Inuidia infelix at Geo. 3.37 (hinting at a Pindaric genealogy for the contest between «Atos and q66vo;), notoriously ambiguous between the threat to the poet and the threat to the princeps. For the suggestion that the debate between Drances and Turnus is modelled on that between Odysseus and Ajax see Anderson 1969: Ch. 7, n. 3. Puccioni 1985: 147, referring to Zenobius paroemiographus 1.43, and to the story of Pleisthenes reciting Carcinus' Aias, But Zenobius refers to Aias’ mad laughter as he kills the cattle (cf. Soph. Ai. 303); the proper reference should be to Nauck, TGF

797: Carcinus, Aias,

Prov. Milleri Mél. de litt. Gr. p. 355 Aiavteios yéAc — Atyovaı BE Sti TTAeiaOévrs 6 UTroKpITts

Tov Kapkívou Alavra Utroxpivopevos eVKaipws EytAace. ToU yap OBucctws rirróvros STI Ta Bikaia ypr) Troeiv, peta elpoovelas ó Alas TH yéAwTi Exprioato. S

148

See Zumwalt 1978. For a full discussion of Ovid’s Fama see Ch. 5.

Fame and defamation in the Aeneid

place of a central Iliadic war narrative is taken by the internal narrator Nestor’s lengthy account of the earlier battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs. Because of his age and wisdom Nestor might be thought to embody as close an approximation as possible to an objective epic narrator, so it is disconcerting when at the end, in answer to Tlepolemus’ amazement that Nestor has said nothing about Hercules’ part in the battle, Nestor replies that he has deliberately avoided praising Hercules’ deeds because of his grief for his brother Periclymenus, killed by Hercules:’* ‘For who would praise an enemy?’ Zumwalt comments: “What constitutes material for praise... and what is included in or excluded from the epic tradition depends, in part, on

personal bias." ? When in Book 13 Ovid turns to the subject matter proper of the Iliad he chooses not to narrate, but to orate, through the mouths of Ajax and Ulixes.^' The truth about the Trojan War, whatever that might be, disappears into the rival versions of the two speakers motivated by selfinterest and contempt or hatred for the rival. Words completely occlude deeds, and at the end words win out over deeds, Met. 13.3823: mota manus procerum est, et quid facundia posset, re patuit, fortisque uiri tulit arma disertus. The company of chiefs was moved, and the event showed the power of eloquence, and the clever speaker bore off the arms of a brave man.

The narrator's summing-up provides a comment on Ajax' opening attempt to establish the proper boundaries between words and deeds, 13.9-12: tutius est igitur fictis contendere uerbis, quam pugnare manu. sed nec mihi dicere promptum nec facere est isti, quantumque ego Marte feroci inque acie ualeo, tantum ualet iste loquendo. So it is safer to contend with feigned words than to fight in battle. But I have no gift for speaking, nor he for action; my strength lies in fierce warfare and the front line, his strength in words.

Ulixes' successful use of rhetoric to reshape the Trojan narrative may also be understood as a reflection on tendencies that Ovid will have observed in the Aeneid. nN

7

w

7^

Met. 12.542-3 ‘quid me meminisse malorum | cogis reminiscent of the opening of Aerieid 2; Aeneas, by infanda, but we are reminded that strong emotion Zumwalt 1978: 216-17. ™ Fora fuller analysis

et obductos annis restringere luctus?’ is contrast, does steel himself to speak of may colour the content of his narrative. see Hardie 20072.

149

5

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12! Why is Rumour here? Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2, Induction 22

Orbe locus medio est inter terrasque fretumque caelestesque plagas, triplicis confinia mundi;

40

unde quod est usquam, quamuis regionibus absit, inspicitur, penetratque cauas uox omnis ad aures. Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce, innumerosque aditus ac mille foramina tectis

addidit et nullis inclusit limina portis;

45

nocte dieque patet. tota est ex aere sonanti, tota fremit uocesque refert iteratque quod audit. nulla quies intus nullaque silentia parte, nec tamen est clamor, sed paruae murmura uocis,

qualia de pelagi, siquis procul audiat, undis

50

esse solent, qualemue sonum, cum Iuppiter atras

increpuit nubes, extrema tonitrua reddunt. atria turba tenet; ueniunt, leue uulgus, euntque

mixtaque cum ueris passim commenta uagantur milia rumorum confusaque uerba uolutant. e quibus hi uacuas implent sermonibus aures, hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti

55

! This section draws on material first published in Hardie 2002b. Gladhill forthcoming, which brilliantly opens new approaches to Ovidian Farna, discusses a number of the issues examined in this chapter. On the House of Fama see also Braun

1991; Tissol 1997: 85-8, 2002: 307-10;

Williams 2009: 162—3; Reed forthcoming on Met. 12.39-63. For a strong characterization

of the House of Fama as an image of the Metamorphoses itself see Rosati 2002: 299 ‘The Metamorphoses too is a place in which a polyphony of autonomous, biased, and distorted voices

M

resounds, and in which the external narrator — in his omniscience — refuses to make distinctions

and impose order.' nullis portis goes further than the ever-open door of the underworld at Aen. 6.127, and translates @dupos, dßupwTos used of the mouth or tongue, Simon. 541.2 PMG, Ar. Ran. 838; cf.

150

Theogn. 421. &dupöyAwooos: Eur. Or. 903; of personified C'jun, Niketes Chonietes, Xpovikr Bifynois 2.3.

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

crescit, et auditis aliquid nouus adicit auctor.

illic Credulitas, illic temerarius Error uanaque Laetitia est consternatique Timores Seditioque repens dubioque auctore Susurri.

60

ipsa quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur et tellure uidet totumque inquirit in orbem. Fecerat haec notum Graias cum milite forti aduentare rates, neque inexspectatus in armis hostis adest.

65

Ov. Met. 12.39-66

There is a place in the middle of the world between earth, sea and the regions of the sky, at the borders of the threefold universe. From here can be seen everything everywhere, however distant in space it is, and every sound reaches these hollow ears. This is the domain of Fama, and she has chosen a dwelling at the top of the citadel, and made numberless entrances and a thousand openings in the building, with no doors to shut off the entries; it lies open day and night. The house is made all of echoing bronze, the whole thing sounds out, and repeats voices and doubles what it hears. There is no peace inside, nowhere silence, but there is no shouting aloud, rather the murmuring of a low voice, like the noise of waves of the

sea if heard from afar, or like the sound returned by the last rolls of thunder when Jupiter has made

the dark clouds crash out. Crowds

fill the hall; the fickle mob

comes and goes, and thousands of made-up rumours mingling with true wander about, sending a babble of words rolling around. Some of these fill empty ears with talk, others bear tales to other places, and the fiction grows in scale, and each new

authority adds something to what has been heard. There are to be found Credulity and reckless Error, empty Joy and anxious Fear, sudden Sedition and Whispers of doubtful author. The mistress herself sees what is done in the sky, at sea, and on earth, and searches through the whole world. She had made it known that the Greek

ships were arriving with a strong army, and the armed enemy's presence was not unexpected.

Virgil's Fama has a well-defined role within the plot of Aeneid 4, although the sudden explosion within the narrative of the bizarre monster prompts the reader to look for further explanations of her presence in the text. On turning to Ovid's Metamorphoses the reader who has recognized in the Virgilian creature an unexpected embodiment of the epic tradition and of the epic poet's own aims will look for a similar figure in a text that has ambitions to be another universalizing verbal construct, and one in direct

competition with the Aereid. Such a reader will further expect to find in the set-piece personification of Fama at the beginning of Metamorphoses 12 engagement with and comment on its Virgilian predecessor. Yet at first

151

152

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

sight she seems to be very different. She dwells in a house (12.43 domum)? located at a central point in the universe between

earth, sea and heaven

(39-40). In contrast Virgil’s Fama has no fixed abode, but is constantly on the move

on a course ‘midway between

heaven

and earth’ (Aen. 4.184).

There is much noise and agitation among the subsidiary personifications in the Ovidian House of Fama, but Fama herself seems to do nothing but sit in her citadel (43 arce), directing her gaze over the whole universe, as impassive it might be as the Epicurean gods, whose tranquil remoteness from human affairs had been decisively disproved by the consequences of Fama's intervention in Aeneid 4. In fact Ovid's Fama does not practise total non-intervention in the human world, but compared with the Virgilian Fama's demonic inflammation of passions her effects are pale indeed. All she does is to ensure that the Greek arrival at Troy is not unexpected (656), of which it can only be said that as a sequel to the build-up in the lengthy description of the House of Fama it is unexpectedly anti-climactic, prompting the question of why is the ecphrasis here, or at least, why so elaborate an ecphrasis. Fama's comparative unimportance in the plot also emerges by contrast with the action of other personifications in the Metamorphoses. Fama is the last of the four major personifications in the poem, preceded by Inuidia ‘Envy’, Fames ‘Hunger’ and Somnus ‘Sleep’ together with his agent Morpheus, the god of dreams, all of whose presence is well motivated within the stories of, respectively, Aglauros, Erysichthon, and Ceyx and Alcyone, and all of whom intervene actively in their plots, leaving their Houses to infect or arouse human

actors (with the exception of Somnus, who is too

somnolent to leave his couch, and instead arouses (11.634 excitat) one of his

thousand sons, Morpheus, to set off to the house of Alcyone). In one way or other Fama is closely related to the other three personifications (see below pp. 168-74), and as the last in the series of four might be thought of as a climax. At the same time she is a reversion to the beginning, in that all of the four Ovidian personifications are to a greater or lesser degree generated out of the originary Virgilian Fama. What Ovidian Fama does not share with the other three personifications is a close affinity with Virgil's Fury Allecto, of whom Virgil’s Fama is herself a close relative (see Ch. 3 pp. 101-2). One might say that Ovid has extracted the pure essence of Fama, leaving the contamination of the Fury to one side.

* A House, domus, is a feature she shares with two of the other major Ovidian personifications: Met. 2.761 (Inuidia); 11.593 (Somnus). Fames does not have a house, but a dwelling-place:

8.788—91 est locus... illic habitant Pallorque Tremorque | et ieiuna Fames.

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

Looking more closely we will find further determinants, indeed an overdetermination, for the apparently incidental presence of Fama at this point in the poem. To begin with, Fama has an obvious function as a prologue, or induction, to the epic matter of the last four books of the Metamorphoses, including Ovid’s ‘little Iliad’ and ‘little Aeneid’. And like Shakespeare's Rumour in the Induction to Henry ıv Part 2 (see Ch. 15 pp. 487—96), she appears at a point of spatial transition, from Aulis where the beginning of the epic war has been held up by adverse winds, to the battlefield of Troy. As often, fama has the job of scene-changer. Of course this is not the first appearance of major epic themes in the poem: indeed much of the previous book is taken up with the Ceyx and Alcyone episode, with at its centre Ovid's hyperbolical version of that most epic set-piece, the epic storm. But, as an imitation of Aeneid 1, that had turned out to

be an epic false start. So far from being the expression of an angry and interfering Juno, this naturally occurring storm and its consequence, the death of Ceyx, have the effect of provoking Juno, fed up with Alcyone's tedious vows on behalf of a dead man, to send a dream to inform Alcyone

of the true fate of her husband.

This is followed by a miraculous,

and rather novelistic, conclusion which, by effecting the immediate return and reanimation of Ceyx' corpse, short-circuits the Odyssean plot of the reunion of man and wife only after lengthy wanderings. So it is only with Book 12 that we enter properly on the sequence of, firstly, Homeric and, secondly, Virgilian epic subject matter that will, through every distortion and digression, occupy the reader for the rest of the poem. Nancy Zumwalt argues that the programmatic function of Fama at this point is to alert the reader to the unreliability of ‘personal glory’ and ‘tradition’ at the very moment when the narrative reaches the borderline between legend and history.” This is very persuasive, but I would also stress the generic role of a creature with the name Fama in introducing an epic sequence, for fama, KA£os, is after all the chief subject and product of epic. What kind of epic fama? Fama-as-rumour is all-receptive and allpervasive; fama-as-epic report also has universal pretensions, and the epic 4 Zumwalt 1978: 212. It may be questioned whether the move to ‘history’ is really marked at this point; for an alternative location of that transition see Barchiesi 1997: 187-8, on the appearance of the (only) invocation to the Muses at 15.622—5, precisely at the moment

when

it would seem

that we are moving from the shadows of legend to the documentary certainties of history. Since Ovid's Fama performs some of the functions of the Homeric Muses (see below p. 159), the House of Fama and the invocation to the Muses in Metamorphoses 15 are complementary (both alluding specifically to the invocation to the Muses at Il. 2.484-7: see Hardie 2002: 4), two epic embodiments of tradition and authority introduced in order to throw into question epic tradition and authority.

153

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

narrator lays claim to a narrative omniscience. But the universality of this Fama provokes a sense of an indiscriminating surfeit: there is too much information (and misinformation) buzzing around in her House.”

One of the many dichotomies of epic Fama is that she can be both the passive recorder of heroic deeds in the past, and also the active instigator of new developments within a heroic narrative (as Fama obviously furthers the plot in Aeneid 4; Shakespeare’s Rumour is both the recorder of the momentous events of the preceding play, the first part of Henry IV, and also the trigger to words and actions in the play that is now beginning, the second part). fecerat haec notum Graias cum milite forti | aduentare rates, neque inexspectatus in armis | hostis adest (Met. 12.64—6). So the Trojans are not taken by surprise, and can make preparations - this is fama as agent within the narrative — but neither is the reader — this is fama as the passive record of the past.^ fama-as-epic tradition long ago ensured that the Greek expedition to Troy was something that we all know; fecerat hints at the etymology of poeta from troieiv ‘to make’. The present tense in hostis adest equivocates between character-awareness and reader-awareness: focalized through the characters in the narrative of events in the past, the tense is the historic present, while for the reader the present tense enacts the poet's power of creating the impression of presence through enargeia.’ My next move builds on an observation by Alessandro Barchiesi concerning the summary description of the scenes in the Temple of Juno at Carthage in Aeneid 1 as (1.457) bellaque iam fama totum uolgata per orbem *wars already published by fame throughout the whole world' (see Ch. 4 p. 142). Virgil, through the eyes of his hero, surveys the epic tradition out of which he must carve a space for his own new poem, and in so doing avoid > This is always a problem with fama when considered in the widest temporal and spatial perspective: for a discussion of the impossibility of mastering fama, and the mathematical sublime, see Hardie 2009a: 109, 116, 118-19.

$ There is also a contrast with another surprise beginning, the second arrival of the Greeks and renewed outbreak of the Trojan War at the very beginning of the temporal span of the Aeneid at the moment when the Trojans were convinced that it was over: Aen. 2.17 uotum pro reditu simulant; ea fama uagatur ‘they pretend that it is a votive offering for their return; that was the rumour that went abroad’; at 182 Sinon's fiction contains the all-too-true statement improuisi aderunt ‘they will be here when you don't expect them’ Met. 12.66 hostis adest repeats the words of the Trojan lookout Caicus at Aen. 9.38, at the beginning of the main Iliadic action of the Aeneid, where the Italian advance is similarly unexpected (9.33 subitam... nubem; 47-9

Turnus... improuisus adest). Cf. also Sil. Pun. 6.558-9 (the effects of Fama and Pauor after Trasimene) uox horrida fertur | ‘hostis adest"; Val. Fl. 5.271-3 Perses... omnemque quatit rumoribus Arcton. | iamque aderat... With Met. 12.67 primus cf. Aen. 9.51 (Turnus) 'ecquis erit mecum, “I

154

iuuenes,

qui primus

in hostem?

Cf. the orator/narrator Ulysses’ use of enargeia in the present tenses at 13.82 Hector adest, 91 ecce ferunt Troes ferrumque ignesque louemque.

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

the risk of falling into the hackneyed longueurs sees in orbem a pun on the epic küxAos, which to Horace's warning to avoid the faults of the after the advice not to waste time going round

of the Epic Cycle. Barchiesi he reinforces with reference scriptor cyclicus, a few lines the broad common circuit,

orbem (Ars poetica 132-6).? It is the orbis that Ovid's Fama ransacks at the

end of the ecphrasis, (Met. 12.63) totumque inquirit in orbem. The last word, orbem ‘world’, circles back in a ring-composition to the first word of the ecphrasis, 39 orbe, but also puns in the Horatian manner on the epic ‘cycle’.” The opening of the narrative at 12.64-6 is then Ovid's version of a cyclical ridiculus mus, Hor. Ars poetica 136-9: nec sic incipies ut scriptor cyclicus olim: "fortunam Priami cantabo et nobile bellum.’ quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu? parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Nor will you begin in this way, as the cyclical writer once did: ‘I shall sing of the fortune of Priam and the famous war.' What will he produce to make good his bombastic promise? The mountains will labour, and give birth to a laughable mouse.

The sense of anti-climax generated by the ludicrous mismatch between the evident power of Fama and what it is that she actually does in the narrative is an example of the broken promises of which Horace accuses the cyclic poet. For Horace the skilful — let us say Virgilian — epic narrator sweeps his listener into the middle of the action as if it was already familiar,

(Ars poetica 148—9) in medias res | non secus ac notas auditorem rapit. What he does not do is tell them something that they already know too well (Met. 12.64 notum). As we have seen, Ovid has already deprived himself of the

opportunity ofa Virgilian opening by using up the topos of the epic storm in the previous book, and the absence of this opening is also commented on in the successful mollification of Diana at Aulis: Met. 12.36 et pariter Phoebes,

pariter maris ira recessit 'the anger of the sea disappeared together with the anger of Diana’. This is an epic that seems to have run out of the anger and elemental violence needed to fuel the epic plot before it has properly got started. Structurally the ecphrasis of Fama takes the place of the Virgilian storm, and we shall see below that imagistically it echoes the storm. This Fama, then, stands at the threshold not of an Iliad or an Aeneid, but of an ® Barchiesi 1999a: 334-5. ? Is the round shape, orbis, of the Shield of Aeneas also a visual pun on the Roman epic cycle that is portrayed on it?

155

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

epic cycle, and one of a far greater extent than the Greek original, stretching from the beginning of the Trojan War down to the poet’s own day. In a perpetuum carmen one would not expect otherwise. Ovid thus keeps a certain distance from the Fama who at the same time is a personification of the poet’s own verbal makings. This distancing, bad faith even, is also sensed in another defining duplicity of Fama: she is both the unattributable, unreliable word of hoi polloi, but also the word of the poet asserting his uniqueness and authority within a poetic tradition. I shall come back to the politics of this contradiction, but firstly I shall allegorize the Ovidian Fama, at first sight just a personification of rumour, as a personification of the poetic tradition, ‘a condensation of ancient attitudes towards the plasticity of tradition and the variable nature of poetic truth’ as Denis Feeney puts it.'” ‘Filling empty ears’ with sermones ‘talk’ (Met. 12.56) is what one of the Minyeids sets out to do in an episode redolent with programmatics at Met. 4.3941

utile opus manuum

uario sermone leuemus

| perque uices aliquid, quod tempora longa uideri | non sinat, in medium uacuas referamus ad aures ‘let us lighten our useful handiwork with variety of conversation, and take it in turns to contribute something for empty ears that will stop the time from seeming long’;'' after running through possible subjects she settles on a non uulgaris fabula ‘no common story’ (53), reworking the opening of the third Georgic, 3—4 cetera, quae uacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, | omnia iam uulgata ‘other subjects for song that might have occupied empty minds have all now become common’, followed by a catalogue of hackneyed themes.'* By contrast Ovid is about to give us the most well known of all stories. hi narrata ferunt alio (Met.

12.57). Poets transfer narratives from one

o

place to another, from one time to another. ferunt alio may hint at more radical dislocations, such as the typically Ovidian displacement of narrative patterns from one myth to another, or allegorical reinterpretations of earlier narratives. ferunt alio is another way of saying transferunt, which is one of Ovid's words for ‘metamorphose’;'* it is a cliché to say that metamorphosis

!!

-

156

Feeney 1991: 248. In both passages sermo(nes) is used, but what is at stake is, at least at some level, poetry. Note also 12.159 noctem sermone trahunt ‘they pass the night in conversation’ (from Aen. 1.748), when the subject matter is in fact that of epic. uacuas auris is first found in a programmatic passage at Lucr. 1.50-1 quod superest, uacuas auris «animumque sagacem> | semotum a curis adhibe ueram ad rationem; then of ears receptive to panegyric at Hor. Ep. 1.16.25-6 si quis bella tibi terra pugnata marique | dicat et his uerbis uacuas permulceat auris (followed by lines ascribed by ps.-Acro to Varius Rufus); Einsiedeln Eclogues 1.2 da uacuam pueris certantibus aurem. OLD s.v. 8. Note 12.25 bellaque non transfert. what kind of ‘translation’ of Homer are we about to encounter when epic wars are finally shipped to Troy?

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

is not only the subject but also the poetic principle of Ovid’s poem. mensuraque ficti | crescit (57-8). Narrative inflation is one way, if not the most creditable, in which the poet may seek to outdo his predecessor. In these three words we might read a still tenacious view of where post-Virgilian epic went wrong, using hyperbole and exaggeration in ever larger doses for effect. Growth is also a special case of metamorphosis, it might be noted: Atlas and Rome are the two instances in the Metamorphoses (4.660—1; 15.434

haec igitur formam crescendo mutat). auditis aliquid nouus adicit auctor (58) scarcely needs comment, standing as an unveiled definition of the dynamic of a literary tradition — for example Ovid's rewriting and supplementation of Virgil's description of Fama. I nouus auctor means ‘the latest, most recent authority’ (with the etymology of auctor from augeo ‘make greater’ activated by crescit at the beginning of the line). News is not news when it ceases to be new. nouus auctor could also mean ‘new-fangled, innovatory author’, such as the poet who begins his poem in noua fert animus (Met. 1.1).!° The subsidiary personifications in lines 59-61 move away from fama-aspoetic tradition towards a more univocal fama-as-rumour, but the first in the series, Credulitas, had been acknowledged by Ovid as an indispensable element in the contract between poet and reader in the famous lines at Am. 3.12.41-4 exit in immensum fecunda licentia uatum, | obligat historica nec sua uerba fide: | et mea debuerat falso laudata uideri | femina; credulitas nunc mihi uestra nocet" The fertile licence of the bards is boundless, and does not tie its words to historical truth. The praise of my woman should also have struck you as false; now your credulity is my undoing.''^ 216 Consideration of fama leads straight into the whole issue of fictionality and poetic authority, on which I shall here say relatively little: it is the central topic in Zumwalt's

!! Thomas Scot notes this self-reflexive moment in his account of the history of the House of

a

Fame in his own work of that name (in Philomythie 1622), 39-46 ‘Fame that in Homers time a

vagrant was, | Without a house and home, did after passe | In stately structures all the mixed race | Of Semideities, and euery place | Built her a Court, assisted by the Rages | Of sundry Poets in succeeding ages. | For euery one did something adde, to frame | More space and roome for their friends narrow fame.’ CF. Tilg 2010: 240-54 for a metaliterary reading of Prjun in Chariton as an ‘allegory of the author's voice’; she is also a news-bringer who tells the reader about the novelty of the work we are reading: 3.2.7 jum. . . rpéx& otpouca To kaivóv. . . Eırjyniua; see Ch. 3 p. 114-15. credulitas is also central to another key passage in Ovid's exploration of Fama, 9.134-44 on the nature and effects on Deianira of loquax fama. The question of the reliability of Herculean fama is also raised by Tlepolemus at 12.539-41. Plin. NH 35.138 Aristophon [laudatur] .

. numerosaque tabula, in qua sunt Priamus, Helena, Credulitas,

Ulixes, Deiphobus,

Dolus: was this a painting in which Credulitas and Dolus figured as means to the capture of Troy?

157

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

discussion of the house of Fama, and has received more general treatment by, for example, Denis Feeney and Sara Myers." Ovid's juxtaposition in line 56 of uacuas implentactivates a pun in uacuus: the ears are both ‘unoccupied’, but also literally ‘empty’ vessels that must be filled. The verbs implere, replere are used frequently of Fama (e.g. Aen. 4.189 populos sermone replebat), but this is another of her duplicities, since she can never, literally, fill anything (see Ch. 1 p. 10). Fame is the greatest thing, men die for Farne, but in the end Fame is nothing but empty air, in

danger of being blown to the winds.'* The poet must struggle to give at least the appearance ofa solid reality to this airy nothing: ad nos uix tenuis famae perlabitur aura 'scarcely does fame's faint breeze waft down to us' (Aen. 7.646). The opposition of empty/full overlaps with that between heard/seen (seeing is believing). As Braun and Dippel point out, in contrast to Virgil's Fama (and to Ovid's other three personifications), we do not actually see

Ovid's creature, but rather her House, and no doubt the point is that as a personification of things said Fama is properly heard but not seen. But Ovid does not forget that Virgil's Fama has eyes as well as ears all over her body. In Ovid's more naturalistic terms Fame's dwelling is one (Met. 12.41—2) unde,

quod est usquam, quamuis regionibus absit, | inspicitur, penetratque cauas uox omnis ad aures. Her 20/20 cosmic vision is also the last thing that Ovid chooses to emphasize about her, at 62-3.

Lines 41-2 are overtly about the sources of Fama, but they also make a point about her effects on her audience. The relationship between fama and vision can be played in two ways. Sometimes fama is set in opposition to seeing, as a poor substitute for looking at the real thing, for example in the account of the origin of the poetic fountain Hippocrene (a very significant aition, for this is the origin of poetry itself, and so of poetic tradition, fama) at Met. 5.250—63. The very first word addressed by Pallas to the Muses is fama: 256 fama noui fontis nostras peruenit ad aures ‘a story about a new spring has reached my ears’.'” She now wants to verify what she has heard by autopsy: 258-9 uolui mirabile factum | cernere. Uranie assures her (262-3) uera tamen fama est; est Pegasus huius origo | fontis ‘yet the report/rumour is true: Pegasus is the origin of this fountain’, and then proceeds to show her Hippocrene itself. Of course the only way that Pallas, or anyone, can Feeney 1991: Index s.v. ‘fiction’; Myers 1994: Index s.v. 'fictionality* The empty/full contrast structures the epitaph on Achilles at Met. 12.615-19, which functions as a particular example of the generalizations about Farna at the beginning of the book (see Hardie 20022: 86). fama thus opens and closes the book: on inaugural and closural fama see Ch. 1 pp. 36-8. 19 This discussion of Pallas and the Muses is based on Hardie 2002a: 237-8.

E]

158

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

ever ‘see’ this miraculous spring is through fama, in the sense of ‘literary tradition.~” Rumour and report are opposed to true apparition both by Morpheus in his address to Alcyone at 11.666—8 (ironically enough, from a creature who is virtually a personification of the poem in which he appears), and by Iphis in his last reproach to Anaxarete at 14.726—8. But for ancient poets and critics one of the most impressive powers of the spoken word was its ability to conjure up visual images, or enargeia. In the exile poetry Fama is one of the tricks that Ovid has up his sleeve to console himself with the illusion that he can still, somehow, be present in Rome. The most

extended example is in Ex Ponto 4.4," where the goddess Fama, whom Ovid is careful to say he can hear but not see, comes to the poet to announce the consulship of Sextus Pompeius. Her departure is followed by the poet's vision of his friend's inauguration (27 cernere iam uideor 'now I seem to see"). The text of Ex Ponto 4.4 itself is to be sure the means by which Ovid attempts to arouse these mental visions. The poem concludes with one of Ovid's frequent flirtations with absent presences (45 quod licet, absentem qua possum mente uidebo ‘| shall see my absent friend in the only way that I can, in my mind's eye’); this is also the trick worked by Fama at Met. 12.41—2

quamuis regionibus absit, | inspicitur. At the beginning of the ancient poetic tradition it is the Muses who provide the guarantee of presence and direct vision to the poet's report. In the invocation to the Catalogue of Ships Homer asks the Muses to tell him who were the leaders of the Greeks, (Il. 2.484—7) ‘for you are goddesses, and are present, and know all things, but we only hear (&kowouev) a report (kAEos) and know

(föuev) nothing’ The contrast with &kououev points to

the literal meaning of the root of ofa, to ‘see’ (wid-). Fama takes the place

of the Muses at the beginning of Ovid's Trojan epic; in this late age the omnipresent Muses are no longer credible, and instead we have a goddess who creates the illusion of presence, although she is really absent." I hope that by now the question ‘Why is Rumour here?’ no longer needs to be asked of Ovid's Fama. Let us now look more closely at where she is, In the later mythographic tradition Pegasus is allegorized as fama (Fulgentius, Mythologiae 1.20); in Ripa's Iconologia, Fama Chiara is represented by a nude Mercury with caduceus, holding the reins of Pegasus: see Ch. 16 p. 622. Sod. ^N

!

Discussed in Hardie 2002a: 313-15; ibid. 311 on Pont. 3.4.

For another example where powerful words lead to a mental vision cf. Lucr. 3.14-30 nam simul ac ratio tua coepit uociferari. . . apparet diuum numen. The clear vision of the gods, the void and the atoms at the beginning of De rerum natura 3 wipes out the murky apparition of Religio which benighted man conjures up for himselfat the beginning of Book 1, a misplaced belief in (68) fama deum; see Hardie 20093; 95.

uw

2?

See Hardie 20022: 4.

159

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

in order to raise the topic of the power-games played by Fama. orbe locus medio est (Met. 12.39). Thisisa position of power, particularly in ecphrases — in

medio

mihi

— Caesar

erit (Virg.

Geo.

3.16).

From

the

centre

her

power extends, Alexander-the-Great-like, to the outmost margins: totumque inquirit in orbem. But not only is she in the middle, she also occupies that other position of supreme power, the top: 43 Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce, the place of rulers human and divine. This is, appropriately, where we first come across Jupiter in the Metamorphoses, at 1.163 quae pater ut summa uidit Saturnius arce,^ a line that alludes to the first appearance of Jupiter in the Aeneid at 1.223—6: Et iam finis erat, cum Iuppiter aethere summo despiciens mare ueliuolum terrasque iacentis litoraque et latos populos, sic uertice caeli constitit, et Libyae defixit lumina regnis. And now it was the end, when Jupiter looking down from heaven's height on the scudding-sailed sea and the low-lying earth, the shores and the widespread peoples, then took up his stand at the summit of the sky and fixed his eyes on the kingdoms of Africa.

aethere summo ‘on heaven’s height, the position from which he surveys the world and hands down the words of Fate to his daughter Venus, sketching out the plot as providential history. It is also the place of King Aeolus enthroned on high over his unruly winds at Aen. 1.56 celsa sedet Aeolus arce. If in terms of structural correspondence Ovid's Fama occupies the place of the storm in Aeneid 1 (see above p. 153), there is a more than casual

similarity between the Virgilian Cave of the Winds, where Aeolus presides over the prison-house of his refractory subjects, and the Ovidian House of 24 On ecphrastic centrepieces see Thomas 1983. Braun 1991 refers to Xen. Anab. 1.8.22, describing the Persian general's place at the centre of the battle-formation, in order to maximize speed of

communications in both directions, kai Tavtes 8 oi Tàv BapBápov &pxovres uécov Exovres 16 avTaVv fyyoUvrai, vopiZovtes MS p

160

ol TW kai Ev áícoaAso áo

elvan, Tv fj fj loxos ac TOv

Exacrépo»Oev, xai ef r1 TapayyeiAa xpfiGotev, tice àv ypovw aloBavecbai TO oTp&rteupa. It is also the viewing point of Jupiter at the beginning of the Fasti, (1.85) luppiter arce sua totum cum spectat in orbem. The closest verbal parallel to Met. 12.43 summaque domum sibi legit in arceis in Ovid's cosmogony, (1.26-7) ignea conuexi uis et sine pondere caeli | emicuit summaque locum sibi fecit in arce; a hint perhaps at the fiery associations of Fama (see Ch. 3 p. 83), or an indication of her larger cosmological associations, on which see Gladhill forthcoming comparing 15.55 confusaque uerba with 2.298—9 si freta, si terrae, pereunt, si regia caeli, | in Chaos antiquum confundimur. Gladhill argues that ‘Fama replaces Chaos in the cosmology of the Metamorphoses. There is further structural correspondence between Chaos, at the very beginning of the Metamorphoses, and the storm which opens the Aeneid and which threatens a reversion to elemental chaos.

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

Fama, where the goddess is placed aloft over her unruly and windy minions, whose mutterings are compared in similes to the sounds of the storm, and in particular to ‘the sound returned by the last rolls of thunder when Jupiter has made the dark clouds crash out’ (Met. 12.50-2).°° This is also an echo

of the allusive identification of the Virgilian Fama with the thunderbolt (see

Ch. 3 p. 95)7* From her position on high Fama sees and hears everything, like Homer's sun: Od. 11.109 (= 12.323, Il. 3.277) 'HeAiou, às TrávT' épopa kai TavT’ &rrakouti. There is a link going back to Homer between the sun and rumour or report: at Od. 23.362 q&ris gets going with sunrise. It is the sun who brings to light one of the earliest examples of sexual scandal, the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite: Od. 8.302 'Helios kept watch for Hephaestus, and told him the story (u@o0v)’. The ui90s that the Sun tells Hephaestus will become

a famous instance of gossip about the gods, in toto notissima fabula caelo (Met. 4.189; see Ch. 9 p. 362).^^ A couple of details lend the power relationships figured in the House of Famaa specifically Roman colouring. atria turba tenet; ueniunt, leue uulgus, euntque 'crowds fill the hall, the fickle mob

comes and goes' (53), as if in

the atrium of the great Roman's house." Seditio (61), one of the subsidiary

personifications in the House, is the word used by Virgil in the statesman simile, applied to Neptune calming the winds unleashed by Aeolus, at Aeneid 1.148—9 ac ueluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est | seditio saeuitque animis ignobile uulgus ‘just as when disorder rises among a great people, and the common mob rages in spirit’. This is perhaps the most famous example of Virgil's contamination of his legendary narrative with Roman historical reality, an effect that Ovid equally notoriously mimics in his description of the house of Jupiter as Palatia caeli 'Palatine of the sky' at Met. 1.168—76,a place where we also find atria (172) and a rigid class-structure that is recalled

in the sharp division in the House of Fama between the ruler and her leue

At Luc. Bell. Civ. 6.692 the last in the catalogue of Erictho's Typhoeus-like plurality of voices is fractaeque tonitrua nubis. For Erictho as an embodiment of Fama see Dinter 2005: 19-26; 23-4 for the echo in these words of Ov. Met. 12.52. For rumour disappearing into the 'sea' of the common

people see Plut. Aemil. Paul. 25.6 Cntoupévou Bé ToU TTPWTOU ppdcavTos, ws ovseis

Tv, GAA’ 6 Adyos els GAAOv EE GAAOu Bimköuevos dvégevye, Kai TEAS karaBUs dorrep els

t2 c

w S

TréAayos ayaves TOV &rreipov SyAov Epavn undeniav apy

?

Exwv Beßauov, autn uev f) efjun

Tax Tis TOAEWS EEeppuT). Compare also 12.47 fremit, 49 murmura with Aen. 1.55 murmure, 56 fremunt. At Od. 8.302-5 Helios gives the news about Aphrodite and Ares to Hephaestus, who in his anger then complains to Zeus and the other gods; at Aen. 4.189-218 Fama spreads the news about Dido and Aeneas to (among others) Iarbas, who in his anger complains to Jupiter. On the Roman colouring of atria see Zumwalt 1978: 211.

161

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

uulgus. The ecphrasis of the House of Fama thus inserts itself in a series of Virgilian and Ovidian tableaux of mythological power structures that are also thinly veiled allusions to the realities of political power in Rome." But viewed in this context, what is odd about Fama is the fact that she

seems to exercise no control over her people. The recurrent Virgilian scheme is one of a rigid hierarchy, and of absolute political control imposed after rebellion, the statesman simile being programmatic in this as in so many other ways. Particularly important for the present discussion is the fact that Virgil's ‘statesman’ imposes order through the power of the word (153 ille regit dictis animos), after making the ignobile uulgus shut up by the sheer force of his presence (152 silent), a human analogue for Jupiter's power to direct the course of history through his words, Fata. The way things operate on the divine plane is revealed in the Council of Gods in Aeneid 10, where Jupiter calms the discordia of the gods and silences their muttering (96 fremebant, 99 murmura), which is compared to the sounds of storm,

in an inversion of the statesman simile in Book 1. Again Jupiter's authority derives solely from his words, which conclude with an impressive, if slippery, assertion of the supremacy of Fate: 10.104 haec mea figite dicta 'fix these words [in your hearts]* Jupiter's words should be fixed, immovable, like decrees fixed in public places." By contrast with all these passages, Ovid's Fama sits summa in arce, but below there is a honeycomb of chambers always open to the free passage of

her subjects. No Aeolian prison-house here." The leue uulgus come and go through the atria (nobilium) as they please (53); the scene is the very reverse of order (54-5 mixtaque... passim... uagantur... confusaque). When we return finally to Fama herself at 62 any expectation that the word ipsa ‘the

30 Cf. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus 11.1.133-4 "The emperor's court is like the house of Fame | The palace full of tongues, of eyes, and ears'; Addison, Spectator no. 439 sees in Ovid's 'Palace

w

162

of Fame’ an image of the eyes and ears planted by rulers to spy on their subjects. Christoph Ransmayr converts the anarchic House of Fame into an image of an ever-watchful imperial bureaucracy, Ransmayr 1990: 39 'the open-eared, many-voiced, and infinitely fine-tuned apparatus of state. OLD s.v. figo 3c; see Austin 1977 on Aen. 6.622 fixit leges. There is perhaps an echo of the strange arrangements in the Cave of the Sibyl at Aer. 6.42-4 excisum Euboicae latus ingens rupis in antrum, | quo lati ducunt aditus centum, ostia centum, | unde ruunt totidem uoces, responsa Sibyllae, 81-2 ostia lamque domus patuere ingentia centum | sponte sua uatisque ferunt responsa per auras, these architectural features correspond to the hundred tongues and mouths which the Sibyl contemplates in her use of the topos at Aer. 6.625-7. See Gowers 2005, with much suggestive discussion of the ways in which Virgil’s Sibyl functions as a figure for tradition, the dense and unsurveyable fama about the underworld (referring to Most 1992 on catabasis as tradition). The Sibyl's Cave might be viewed as a kind of House of Fama: see Gowers 2005: 180 n. 51 on ‘the metonymic relationship of Sibyl and cave’.

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

mistress’ (OLD s.v. ipse 12) will finally introduce a statement about the rule of Fama is immediately disappointed. We might in the end ask ourselves whether Fama has any reality other than as the collective embodiment of the rumours that fill her House. As a monarchy this seems a highly egalitarian set-up, one that completely sidesteps the issues of political control and hierarchy which dominate the Virgilian narrative, but which are inscribed into his own narrative by Ovid elsewhere. We have already glanced at the authoritarian set-up on Olympus in Metamorphoses 1. Jupiter’s absolutist assertion of his power operates largely through the control of fama and of the spoken word. Jupiter is the first internal narrator in the poem, and as such a model for the Homeric-Virgilian narrator in his Olympian pretension to omniscience and objectivity.’ He knows stories even before they have entered the relay of fama,

1.163—5: Quae pater ut summa uidit Saturnius arce, ingemit et facto nondum uulgata recenti foeda Lycaoniae referens conuiuia mensae...

When the Saturnian father on his high citadel saw these things, he groaned, and recalling the loathsome banquet at Lycaon's table, a deed too recent to have been made widely known...

At this stage he is recalling the events to his own mind (OLD s.v. refero 17); he will soon begin the history of narrative by relating (OLD s.v. refero 18) what he has himself seen to the company of the other gods. To secure a receptive audience he must first quell the disruptive clamour of the gods in their shocked reaction to his initial statement that he has been the object of an attempted assault by Lycaon, 199—208; Confremuere omnes...

... postquam uoce manuque murmura compressit, tenuere silentia cuncti. substitit ut clamor pressus grauitate regentis, Iuppiter hoc iterum sermone silentia rupit... All broke into uproar... After his gesture and voice had checked their mutterings, they all fell silent. Once their shouting had ceased, suppressed by the ruler's grave majesty, Jupiter again broke the silence with these words...

3? On the thematization of fama in the Jupiter and Lycaon episode see also Gladhill forthcoming.

163

164

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

This alludes to two interrelated Virgilian scenes, the calming of the mob in the statesman simile in Book 1, and Jupiter’s calming of the hubbub among the gods in the Council in Book 10 (100-3). pressus grauitate suggests social hierarchy as cosmological order, with the elements in their proper places: cf. 1.30 [tellus] pressa est grauitate sua ‘the earth sank through its own weight‘, so ending the chaotic state in which ‘things without weight and things with weight’ (20) are mixed up. But we may wonder just how calm and orderly Jupiter’s grauitas is, when we have already been told that as he speaks he has ‘conceived an anger worthy of Jupiter’ (166).”! As he begins to tell his story in detail, it turns out that fama, or rather infamia, already has a history in

this new world," 1.211-15: contigerat nostras infamia temporis aures; quam cupiens falsam summo delabor Olympo et deus humana lustro sub imagine terras. longa mora est, quantum noxae sit ubique repertum,

enumerare: minor fuit ipsa infamia uero.

A

tale of the infamy of the times had reached my ears; hoping that it was false, I

flew down from high Olympus and, a god, I wandered the earth in human

form. It

would be a long tale to recount how much crime I found everywhere; the infamy was less than the truth.

Judging Fama is always a matter of gauging the actual mixture of true and false in her reports, and Jupiter assures his audience that careful autopsy has revealed the full scale of human wickedness; that he is an impartial observer is also suggested by his claim that he would have wished to find the reports untrue. But in the single example of human criminality narrated in detail only one man, Lycaon, is to be counted (cf. 215 enumerare) as an example of infamia temporis, while the uulgus are paragons of piety. It is hard to resist the suspicion that an angry Jupiter is controlling fama for his own vengeful

34

Barchiesi 2005 on 1.199 confremuere omnes notes that frementi is used of Jupiter at 244, so annulling the difference between the majesty of the superior god and the emotional agitation of the subordinate gods. In Ovid’s poetic world fama in fact is always already there: even before the universe is brought into being, Chaos is dependent on fama in the form of the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ at 1.7 quem dixere Chaos. see Barchiesi 2005 ad loc. The two instances of infamia at 1.211 and 215 are the first appearances of fama words in the poem; fama appears first (and for the only time in book 1) at 1.445 neue operis famam posset delere uetustas, Apollo’s desire for fama in terms closely paralleled in the poet’s own Epilogue: Hardie 2002a: 50.

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

ends, and a negative form of fama, infamia, at that. Augustus too found moral condemnation of his age a useful ideological tool." The dealings with fama on the part of princeps and poet come into sharp focus again as we move towards the end of the Metamorphoses. A prime concern of the Aeneid had been to forge a unity out of Fama and Fatum such that the strong directing hand of Jupiter/the human ruler of Rome disciplines the unruly tendencies of Fama (see Ch. 3 pp. 103-6). Fama and Fatum both attend Pythagoras' birth-announcement for Rome at 15.431— 52: nunc quoque Dardaniam fama est consurgere Romam, Appenninigenae quae proxima Thybridis undis mole sub ingenti rerum fundamina ponit. haec igitur formam crescendo mutat et olim inmensi caput orbis erit. sic dicere uates faticinasque ferunt sortes, quantumque recordor,

435

dixerat Aeneae, cum res Troiana labaret

Priamides Helenus flenti dubioque salutis haec Helenum cecinisse penatigero Aeneae

450

mente memor refero...

Now too report has it that Trojan Rome is rising, and is laying the vast mass of the foundations for her power beside the waters of the Tiber that rises in the Apennines. By growing she changes her shape, and in time she will be the head of the boundless earth. This they say is what the seers and prophetic oracles foretell, and, as I recall, Helenus, son of Priam, had told Aeneas, weeping and despairing of salvation, when Trojan fortunes were tottering... This is what I clearly remember that Helenus prophesied to Aeneas.

What Pythagoras hears by present report confirms and is confirmed by a multiplicity of mouthpieces of fate, reinforced by Pythagoras’ own extraordinary powers of memory. One is put in mind of the dense crowd of prophetic sources that populate the Virgilian narrative of Roman destiny in the Aeneid, and also reminded that Pythagoras’ memory is largely of poetic texts, Ennius and Virgil, fama as literary tradition; it is a memory open to variant (Virgil's Helenus prophesies to Aeneas at Buthrotum, not at Troy). The unchanging geographical features of line 432, mountain and river, and the vast foundations laid by human hands in the next line, give an air of ** See Wallace-Hadrill 19822: 27-8 on the Ovidian story of Lycaon as an allegory for the political usefulness to Augustus of the depravity of the age. 37 For these points see Hardie 1997: 188.

165

166

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

fixity to the new city. Within the Metamorphoses Rome shares quantitative metamorphosis with the mountain-giant Atlas (4.661), an emblem of cos-

mic finality. Ovid’s narrative of the metamorphosis of Atlas is an aition for the anthropomorphic Atlas in Aeneid 4, where the mountain is a pendant to another monster of quantitative metamorphosis, Fama, whose changeability can never be pinned down."? Pythagoras’ account of Roman fatum does not altogether succeed in the aim of containing unruly fama. The House of Fama at the beginning of Ovid's ‘epic cycle’ finds a pendant in the House of the Parcae, ‘Fates’, or rather Record Office of Fatum into

which Jupiter invites Venus in the supreme god’s final intervention in the poem (15.808-15). The records (tabularia) share the material of brass with the House of Fama (15.810 ex aere — 12.46), but there the similarity ends:

the sounding brass of Fama stands for the oral fluidity of language in her dwelling, while the brass of the Parcae, like the iron and adamant, represents

the fixed and immovable inscriptions of Fate. However, Fama asserts herself against the power of the Jupiter on earth, Augustus, in nearly the last verbs of the main narrative at 15.852—4: hic sua praeferri quamquam

uetat acta paternis,

libera fama tamen nullisque obnoxia iussis inuitum praefert unaque in parte repugnat.

Although he forbids that his deeds should be held superior to his father's, fama however, free and obedient to no commands, gives him first place against his will, and in this alone resists him.

We have moved from the historic presents of 848—51, narrating the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, to true presents describing the condition of the poet's own day, mea tempora, which the poem's vast trajectory has finally reached. It is a back-handed compliment to praise Augustus through an anarchic y fama," albeit any whiff of real rebellion is quickly smothered through recourse to the certainties of tradition (fama by another name): Augustus surpasses Julius as Agamemnon surpassed Atreus, Theseus Aegeus, Achilles 38 See Ch. 3 p. 94, and Hardie 20092: 80-1. 39 Gladhill forthcoming convincingly argues that the libertas of Ovid's fama is a specifically Republican freedom, and that the domus Farnae is modelled on the forum Romanum as an alternative centre of power to the Palatine. Gladhill points to some very telling parallels with the Commentariolum petitionis; 17 deinde ut quisque est intimus ac maxime domesticus, ut is amet et quam amplissimum esse te cupiat ualde elaborandum est, tum ut tribules, ut uicini, ut clientes, ut denique liberti, postremo etiam serui tui; nam fere omnis sermo ad forensem famam

a domesticis emanat auctoribus; 44 est etiam in opera, quam peruulga et communica, curaque ut aditus ad te diurni nocturnique pateant, neque solum foribus aedium tuarum sed etiam uultu ac fronte, quae est animi ianua.

The House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12

Peleus — and Jupiter Saturn. luppiter arces | temperat aetherias... terra sub Augusto est; pater est et rector uterque ‘Jupiter governs the citadels of heaven .. . earth is under Augustus; each is father and ruler’ (858—60). These

are the very last verbs of the main body of the poem, before the closing prayer and Epilogue. God's in his heaven (and earth), all’s right with the world but a resistant fama has not been put in chains. In this stand-off between Fama and Fatum, Fama will finally have the upper hand. In the Epilogue Ovid predicts his own eternallife in the medium of a fama which now appropriates to itself both the spatial superiority of a Jovian Fate (15.875-6 super alta... astra ferar ‘I shall be carried above the high stars’), and the fixity of the engraved or inscribed word, 876 nomenque erit indelebile" nostrum ‘my name will be inerasable’. Sky-reaching and perennial monumentality, however, are also both traditional attributes of

fama: Ovid here combines allusion to Horace, Odes 1.1 (but going still higher than Horace who comes up short when he bumps his head against the stars) with allusion to the indestructible monument of Odes 3.30. The

verb ferar itself is a ‘fame’ word.!! The world reached by Ovid's poetry is a far more democratic place than the world controlled from the Record Office of Jupiter: 878 ore legar populi ‘I shall be read on the lips of the people, circulation in a mass market. Jupiter tells Venus that she is allowed to enter the hall of the Fates and inspect the records, described in terms uncannily reminiscent of Horace's poetic monument in Odes 3.30 (cf. Met. 15.808-14), but he prevents her from taking up the offer when he gives her his own recital of what (he says) is to be found there, 814-15 legi ipse, animoque notaui | et referam," ne sis etiamnum ignara futuri ‘I myself have read it and noted it in my mind, and I will tell you, so that you are not even now ignorant of the future’. Jupiter is the sole reader of this text. In entrusting his eternal fame to the mouths of the populus Ovid gives himself up to the leue uulgus who come and go in the House of Fama. Here finally we realize why fama as singular fame and fama as unattributable rumour cannot be separated: the pre-eminent poet, like the pre-eminent hero, is condemned to oblivion without the support of the nameless and unaccountable mass. This is the last of the paradoxes of Ovid's paradoxical

*!

OLD s.v. deleo 1a ‘To remove (written characters...) by wiping or scratching out.” Literally ‘carried’, but also ‘borne in report, spoken of, as pointed out by Feeney 1991: 249, ina rich and compressed discussion of the links between the House of Fama and the Epilogue; see also Hardie 2002: 95 n. 77. The verb used of Jupiter's private recollection before he narrates the story of Lycaon, 1.165 referens (see above p. 163).

167

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

poem, at once an exercise in Callimachean cultural elitism and a poem

aiming at the widest popularity."

Fama and the family of Ovidian personifications Virgil’s Fama is closely related to a wide range of other creatures in the Aeneid, and has a particular affinity above all with the Fury Allecto (see Ch. 3 pp. 101-2). While Allecto has independent status as a mythological being, she comes close to being a personification of furor, and in her mode of intervention in the world of human beings she is a modelfor the way in which Ovidian personifications interact with human beings. This is especially true of the first two in the series of four major personifications in the Metamorphoses, Inuidia 'Envy' (2.760—805) and Fames 'Hunger' (8.796—

822),"' followed by Somnus and Morpheus (11.592-673) and Fama (12.39— 63). All four of the Ovidian personifications are also related, more or less

closely, to Allecto's Virgilian relative, Fama. The result is a tight web of intertextuality between the Ovidian foursome and Virgil's Famaand Allecto, and, asa further consequence, a tight web of intratextuality between the four Ovidian personifications themselves, which further reflects the intratextual

reach of Virgil's Fama within the Aeneid." That intratextual reach gave the reader quite a lot of extra information about Fama and her functions. In this section I follow the connections within the Metamorphoses between Fama, in both her Virgilian and Ovidian manifestations, and Inuidia, Fames, and

Somnus plus Morpheus. The connections are particularly close between Inuidia and Fama, the first and last in the series.'^ This is not surprising, given the constant pairing of Fame and Envy as the positive and negative responses to the outstanding achievements of both the man of action and the man of letters. Inuidia, as

= =

> [m

the etymology of her name reveals (in-uideo), is in the first instance the result of things seen, while Fama is a creature of the spoken word. But for For discussion of Ovid's revisionist Callimacheanism with reference to the episode of the Lycian Farmers in Metamorphoses 6 and related episodes see Clauss 1989. See Hardie 20022: 233-4. Lucan comments implicitly on the interconnectedness of the four Ovidian personifications when he includes allusions to all four in constructing the figure of the witch Erictho in Bellum civile 6, who is also a reincarnation of the Virgilian Fara and Allecto: see Dinter 2002: 8-20. 4

e

168

Keith 1992: 130 ‘It has often been noted that the literary inspiration for the Ovidian personification of Invidia is Virgil’s description of personified Fama.’ The following discussion is based on Hardie 20022: 236-8. On Ovid's Inuidia see also Dickie 1975; Feeney

Barchiesi 2005 on Met. 2.760-4.

1991: 243-7;

Fama and the family of Ovidian personifications

both seeing and saying are closely bound up together. Envy expresses itselfin malicious words." fama-as-report is associated with rhetorical and poetic enargeia, while fama-as-reputation is a matter both of what is said about a person, and of how they present themselves to the gaze of other people. Ovid goes beyond a dramatization of the psychological and affective aspects of envy, to explore the ways in which as a creator of fictions Inuidia is a double of Fama in her role as a personification of what it is that the poet does. Alison Keith notes that ‘it is typical of Ovid's literary sophistication to consider the specifically literary nature of “Envy” in a passage that explores the risks and rewards of story-telling.'* The Aglauros episode in Metamorphoses 2 is inserted in a context of stories about tale-telling and the delivery of words, in other words the business of Fama, that extends from 2.531 to 2.835.'” The result is that the Inuidia episode narrowly defined — Minerva's visit to the House of Inuidia, prompted by her chagrin at Aglauros' demand to Mercury for a reward for assisting him in his suit for her sister Herse, and Inuidia's subsequent assault on Aglauros — forms part of a longer sequence of interconnected themes that may be compared with the extended reach of the Fama episode in Aeneid 4, in a series of episodes to which the Ovidian sequence is related in various ways. The Aglauros story is immediately preceded by the story of Mercury's punishment by petrifaction of Battus for telling tales on Mercury's own theft of the cattle of Apollo, when Battus had sworn not to. The episode concludes with the eternal perpetuation of the infamia that he has drawn on himself through his perjured use of words: 707 inque nihil merito uetus est infamia saxo ‘the guiltless stone preserves the old infamy’. To this day the memory of the tale is preserved in the report (fama) attached to the stone, (706) qui nunc quoque dicitur index ‘which even now is called informer’. The narrative of Battus and Mercury also contains distorted echoes of the Dido and Aeneas story. The disguised Mercury tempts Battus to perjure himself by not keeping silent about his theft of the cattle of Apollo, and bids him, (700) furtoque silentia deme ‘lift the veil of silence from the theft’. This is what Dido does at Aeneid 4.170—2, when she abandons any thought of her (good) fama ‘reputation’, and turns a furtiuus amor ‘secretive love" >50 into an open claim to be lawfully wedded to Aeneas, so triggering the large-scale explosion of

Meskill 2009: 66 ‘The eye and the tongue were both aspects of envy.” 48 Keith 1992: 131. Cf. also Barchiesi 2005: 302 ‘la... Invidia [di Ovidio] non é solo la tradizionale nemica dei poeti: é anche vicina alla ispirazione poetica perché ha un'intensa sensibilità visiva e una capacità di elaborare le immagini tutta particolare* 49 See Barchiesi 2005: 279-81. 30 furtum is almost a technical term of sermo amatorius for a secret liaison: Pichon 1966 s.v. furta.

169

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

(bad) Fama. Mercury’s laughing taunt to Battus, (704-5) ‘me mihi, perfide, prodis?| me mihi prodis?’ ‘So you betray me to myself, you traitor, you betray me to myself?, echoes Dido's repeated use of perfide to accuse Aeneas (Aen. 4.305, 366, a repetition that alludes to the Catullan Ariadne's gemination

of perfide in successive lines, Cat. 64.132-3), and displaces the gemination from the word perfide on to the repeated me mihi prodis?”' More insistent echoes of the Virgilian Fama + Mercury sequence follow. Mercury descends to the city of Athens, and is compared in a simile to a bird (Met. 2.716—19; cf. Aen. 4.254—5, Mercury en route for Carthage). But so far from descending at Jupiter's behest to warn off a mortal from an erotic entanglement, Mercury pursues his own erotic gratification with a royal maiden, Herse, and he asserts his authority as the messenger of Jupiter for his own ends when he asks Aglauros for her complicity: 743—5 ego sum, qui iussa per auras | uerba patris porto; pater est mihi Iuppiter ipse. | nec fingam causas ‘I am he who carries my father’s words through the air at his command; my father is Jupiter himself. I won't invent a pretext.' The Virgilian model is further distorted in a simile comparing Mercury to a sling-shot catching fire as it flies: 727—9 non secus exarsit quam cum Balearica plumbum | funda iacit; uolat illud et incandescit eundo, | et quos non habuit sub nubibus inuenit ignes ‘he caught fire just as when a Balearic sling hurls a lead shot; as it flies it heats up through its motion, and under the clouds gathers a fire that it did not have before" Lucretius had used this as an analogy for the heating of the thunderbolt through rapid motion, 6.177—9, 306—8. The first half of 6.177, mobilitate sua feruescit, is one of the Lucretian models for Virgil's allusive comparison of Fama to a thunderbolt, (Aen. 4.175) mobilitate uiget, while the second half of the Virgilian line, uirisque adquirit eundo, alludes to

wn n

u

another Lucretian description of the speed of the thunderbolt, 6.341 mobilitatem... quae crescit eundo," the sound of which is echoed in Met. 2.728 incandescit eundo." Mercury seems to have merged with his negative Virgilian double Fama. The primary point of reference for the incandescence of the sling-shot in the Ovidian simile is not the speed of Mercury's flight (although that is also implied), but the ardour of Mercury’s love at first sight. See Wills 1996: 26-7, 134 n. 27. uolat illud et incandescit eundo is the motto for an emblem

of fame in Covarrubias, Emblemas

morales (1610), with a picture of a cannon-ball being fired, ‘simbolo muy proprio de la fama’: Henkel and Schöne 1996: 1522-3.

win 20

170

See Ch. 3 p. 83.

The sound of this phrase is echoed in words applied to Inuidia at Met. 2.780 intabescitque uidendo, the verb intabesco is used of the effect of heat on a lead shot at Met.

14.826 missa solet

medio glans intabescere caelo (cf. 3.487-8 ut intabescere flauae | igne leui cerae, in a comparison for the effect of love on Narcissus).

Fama and the family of Ovidian personifications

The primary point of reference for the allusive comparison of Virgil’s Fama to the thunderbolt is her speed, but she will also turn out to be fiery in her incendiary effect on Iarbas. The emotion that she arouses in him is anger,

but anger fuelled by jealousy arising out of erotic heat (Dido had rejected Iarbas’ suit), and it is this which impels Iarbas further to embroider the slander of Aeneas, so turning him into another mouthpiece of Fama. The inuidia which Ovid’s Minerva inflicts on Aglauros via the personification of Inuidia is also a sexual jealousy, based on envy at the good fortune of her sister in marrying a god, an envy fuelling and fuelled by erotic desire for Mercury himself: 803-4 [Inuidia] germanam ante oculos fortunatumque sororis | coniugium pulchraque deum sub imagine ponit 'Envy set before her eyes her sister's face and her fortunate marriage and the image of the beautiful god’. This kind of jealousy expresses itself in a chilling, not a heating, of the vital organs. In other respects Inuidia, who occupies a narrative slot closely related to that occupied by Famain Aeneid4, replicates features of the person and work of both Virgilian and Ovidian Fama. Like Fama she does not sleep: Met. 2.779 nec fruitur somno, uigilacibus excita curis ‘she never enjoys sleep, needled by her wakeful cares’ (cf. Aen. 4.182 uigiles oculi, 185 nec dulci declinat lumina somno). Her first response to Minerva’s command takes the form of (788) murmura parua ‘small mutterings’, but her subsequent effects on the natural and human worlds alike will be devastatingly great, and she makes everything big (805), in line with the inflationary tendencies of Virgil's Fama; note also the paruae murmura uocis to be heard in Ovid's own House of Fama, Met. 12.49. Inuidia goes wrapped in dark clouds (Met. 2.790 adopertaque nubibus atris); Virgil’s Fama hides her head in the clouds (Aen. 4.177). Like Virgil's Fama, Inuidia personifies the power of the poet to give substance and lend credence to his feignings." She has the power of enargeia (Met. 2.803—4 ante oculos... ponit), and her power of magnification (805 cunctaque magna facit) corresponds to the expansion of fictions in the House of Fama (12.57-8 mensuraque ficti | crescit). Bellaria in Robert Greene's Pandosto puts it thus: ‘envy oftentimes soundeth Fame's trumpet"? Echoes of Aeneid 4 continue in the transition from the narrative block of stories about tale-telling to the story of Europa at the end of Metamorphoses 2. Lines 836—42 contain the most direct allusion to Jupiter's dispatch of Mercury in Aeneid4: 837-8 ‘Fide minister’ ait ‘iussorum, nate, meorum, | pelle

moram solitoque celer delabere cursu’ ‘Faithful conveyor of my commands, 55

See Tissol 1997: 67.

56

[n Pafford 1963: 192.

171

172

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

my son, cast off delay and glide swiftly down on your usual course.”*’ But no more this time is it Mercury’s mission to put an erring mortal back on the straight and narrow, but rather to round up another herd of cattle,

and drive them to the beach where Europa is playing with her maidens. Now the thief is not Mercury, but Jupiter, who will disguise himself as a bull to further his own erotic furtum, the rape of Europa. Jupiter conceals his motive even from his son, 836 nec causam fassus amoris. Dissimulation turns out to be a more successful strategy than Dido’s open confession of her love. The contrast between the actions of Jupiter and Mercury here and in Aeneid4 is made more pointed by the fact that Jupiter’s object of desire is located in Phoenicia, (839—40) tellus Sidonis, while it is Sidonia Dido who is

destroyed by Jupiter's command to Aeneas to leave Carthage. The contrast between Virgilian and Ovidian Jupiters is perhaps not so great after all: just how much influence did Iarbas wield over Jupiter as the son of the supreme god by another of his rape victims, the Garamantian nymph (Aen. 4.198)? Fames ‘Hunger’ seems the Ovidian personification least closely related to Fama, although the similarity of name could lend itself to punning play? The only one of Ovid's major personifications to embody a desire, Hunger qua Hunger can never be satisfied (for if she ceased to be hungry, she would cease to be herself), and in this she is like the immoderate

and insatiable

cupiditas gloriae. Fames inspires her Allecto-like poison into the sleeping Erysichthon, whose first experience of hunger is in a dream, in which the appetite has the power to conjure up the illusion, but no more, of food, anticipating the illusory powers of the next in the series of personifications, Somnus and his agent Morpheus: Met. 8.826-7 exercetque cibo delusum guttur inani | proque epulis tenues nequiquam deuorat auras ‘he busied his cheated gullet on food without substance, and instead of a feast he vainly guzzled thin air^^" He is like Aeneas eagerly ‘feeding on the empty images’ (Aen. 1.464 animum pictura pascit inani) that represent the fama of the Trojan War in the Temple of Juno at Carthage. The demonic nature of this hunger is shown in the transition from dreaming to waking, when boundless quantities of real food are powerless to assuage Erysichthon's hunger. This is the insatiability of the Lucretian lover (Lucr. 4.1097-1104), or of the laudum immensa cupido 'boundless desire for praise' that afflicts Virgil's Brutus (Aen. 6.823), 3

amor famae

(on which see Ch. 9 pp. 333-8).

Cf. Aen. 4.223 (Jupiter to Mercury) 'uade age, nate... labere pennis", 226 "celeris defer mea dicta per auras’. Both Ovid's Fama and Fames are models for Lucan's Erictho (Dinter 2002). ^5 TLL vi.i 227.50; Cic. Att. 1.16.5 XXXI [iudices] fuerunt, quos fames magis quam fama commouerit. 5° Cf perhaps Aen. 7.646 ad nos uix tenuis famae perlabitur aura.

Fama and the family of Ovidian personifications

Erysichthon’s fate is similar to that of Narcissus, who perishes of a sexual desire that is particularly futile since its object is not even a solid body.“ The paradox that constant filling with food leaves Erysichthon empty (842 semperque locus fit inanis edendo), is a paradox that also attaches to fama, which constantly fills places and people's ears, but is in the end nothing but empty air. In its vain search to fill itself, Erysichthon's hunger expands to fill the world, like Fama: 8.830-1 quod pontus, quod terra, quod educat aer | poscit ‘he demands the produce of sea, land, and air’. In Ovid, Ex Ponto

4.4 there is a curious 'anti-Narcissus' effect when the exiled poet is brought to an awareness of the vacuity of a vivid vision of a consular inauguration back in Rome conjured up by the goddess Fama, at the moment when he realizes that he himself is not to be seen in the crowd. Narcissus had been brought to his senses when he realized that he himself was the object of his futile gaze.^' More straightforwardly, the narcissistic quality of the desire for personal fame will be recognized in the post-classical tradition (see

Ch. 9 p. 336). Finally, the House of Somnus and Morpheus in the Ceyx and Alcyone story in Metamorphoses 11 shares with the House of Famain Metamorphoses 12 the quality of being a place where the functions and power of the poet are explored at length." They are further connected through their various relationships to those Virgilian reservoirs of fama-related energy, the Cave of the Winds and Storm in Aeneid 1. It is as a result of the death of Ceyx in a rerun of the Virgilian Storm that Juno sends Iris to the House of Somnus, a cave which in its stillness is the very opposite of the Cave of the Winds (11.600 non moti flamine rami). The House of Fama in the next book both occupies the structural position of the Virgilian Storm at the start of a long ‘epic’, and is like the Cave of the Winds as a container of unruly and boisterous energy. Very different in this respect, the two Houses are however similar to each other in that both are versions of the underworld. This is obvious in the case of the House of Somnus (traditionally Death's brother), a dark subterranean place located near the Cimmerians

(Met. 11.592), to

whose land Odysseus travelled to make contact with the dead. The House of Fama, like the Virgilian underworld, lies open day and night (Met. 12.46 nocte dieque patet: cf. Aen. 6.127), and its numberless entrances, thousand openings and lack of doors (44—5) point back to Ovid's own description With Met. 8.838-9 (Erysichthon's hunger compared to the insatiability of fire) quo copia maior | est data, plura petit turbaque uoracior ipsa est compare 3.466 (Narcissus) 'inopem me copia fecit". Erysichthon's desire for food is finally turned on himself, and because this body is real, self-consumption brings the closure that is denied to Narcissus’ eternal gaze on his reflection.

$!

Hardie 2002a: 313-15.

o

6

62

See Hardie 20022: 89.

173

174

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

of the City of Dis at Met. 4.439—40 mille capax aditus et apertas undique portas | urbs habet ‘the capacious city has a thousand entrances and doors that always stand open’. The underworld and the House of Fama are equally capacious and insatiable, the former for human souls, the latter for news. The inert Somnus is as it were the matter within which Morpheus impresses the manifold forms of dreams. He is as much a master of the spoken word as of visual illusion, and this god of formae mouths the duplicities of Fama" when he addresses the sleeping Alcyone in the guise of her

husband at Met. 11.666—8:^' non haec tibi nuntiat auctor ambiguus, non ista uagis rumoribus audis;

ipse ego fata tibi praesens mea naufragus edo. You have this message from no uncertain authority, no wandering rumours bring this to your ears; I myself, shipwrecked, am present to announce my fate to you.

This denial of any connection with the agents Fama only serves to draw attention to the close delusive and distorting operations of dreams and closer relationship between Morpheus and Fama

at work in the House of relationship between the rumours, and to the even as figures for the poet.

Appendix: manifestations of Fama and her House in the Roman world The Virgilian and Ovidian Fama is a mythological monster who embodies truths about the behaviour of words and their speakers in the real human world. Unstoppable in her spatial reach she shadows more particularly the worldwide reach claimed for the Roman Empire in panegyric and propaganda. Fama and her house materialize fleetingly in two post-Ovidian texts that play with the idea of the worldwide Roman Empire.

Statius, Siluae 5.1.75—107

In his epicedion for Priscilla Statius praises the dead woman for her successful efforts to win the divine Domitian's favour and secure the important 93

For the forma/fama jingle cf. Rhet. ad Herenn. 4.28 perditissima ratio est amorem petere, pudorem fugere, diligere formam, neglegere famam. 95 See Hardie 2002a: 277-8. 65 Met. 12.55 rumorum, 58 nouus. . . auctor.

Appendix: manifestations of Fama and her House

imperial office of ab epistulis 'Secretary for Correspondence '^6 for her husband Abascantus. The young man's sterling qualifications for the job are transparent to the vision of Domitian, who knows everything about those close to him, and no wonder, since (81—3)

uidet ille ortus obitusque, quid

Auster | quid Boreas hibernus agat, ferrique togaeque | consilia atque ipsam mentem probat ‘he sees east and west, what the South Wind and what the wintry North Wind are about, and inspects counsels of war and peace and men's minds themselves’. This is the universal vision of Jupiter or of Fama,

with the additional ability of being able to see into men's motives and minds. Abascantus, not found wanting by these piercing eyes, is loaded with a burden of office described in terms elsewhere applied to the Atlantean burden borne by the emperor himself: 84-5 molem immensam umeris... imposuit ‘he placed an enormous load on his shoulders!^' For Abascantus' job is also one of worldwide reach, sending out the emperor’s commands all over

the great world (86 magnum late... in orbem) and dealing by hand(writing) with the power and modes of empire (87-8). As well as dispatching messages, Abascantus is at the centre of a web of information-gathering, receiving news of Roman victories from the ends of the earth (88—91). He sends out notices

of military appointments, and he is the man to have advance notice of major weather events in Egypt and Africa. In the concluding lines of the passage Statius, as often, glamourizes Roman reality with the trappings of myth, 101-7: cuncta ego si numerem, non plura interprete uirga nuntiat ex celsis ales Tegeaticus astris,

quaeque cadit liquidas Iunonia uirgo per et picturato pluuium ligat aera gyro, quaeque tuas laurus uolucri, Germanice, Fama uehit'? praegressa diem tardumque Arcada et in medio linquit Thaumantida

auras cursu sub astris caelo.

If I were to enumerate everything, not more messages does the winged Tegean [Mercury] bring from the lofty stars with his go-between rod, or Juno's maiden [Iris] who falls through the liquid breezes and binds the rainy air with her coloured arc, or she who bears your laurels, Germanicus [Domitian], outstripping the day in her rapid flight, leaving the sluggish Arcadian [Mercury] beneath the stars and Thaumas' daughter [Iris] in mid-heaven.

66 On imperial correspondence see Millar 1977: 213-28.

* Cf. Hor. Ep. 2.1.1; Sen. Dial. 11.7.1. 68

Fama brings news of Domitian's victories before the arrival of the laurels themselves; cf. Martial’s inveterate newsmonger (9.35), who

(6) wictricem laurum quam

uenit ante uides.

175

176

Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The flow of letters to and from Abascantus is more numerous and speedy than the messages controlled by the three major divinities of news and report, Mercury, Iris and, speedier than either, Fama. Virgil tells us that

there is no evil thing speedier than Fama (Aen. 4.174); here she is reformed and at his majesty’s service. Before this we have seen Abascantus at work in a House of Fama cleaned up for the smooth running of the Roman Empire.

Juvenal's Lady Fama: Satire 6.398412 sed cantet potius quam totam peruolet urbem audax et coetus possit quae ferre uirorum cumque paludatis ducibus praesente marito ipsa loqui recta facie siccisque marnillis.

400

haec eadem nouit quid toto fiat in orbe,

quid Seres, quid Thraces agant, secreta nouercae et pueri, quis amet, quis diripiatur adulter; dicet quis uiduam praegnatem fecerit et quo

405

mense, quibus uerbis concumbat quaeque, modis quot. instantem regi Armenio Parthoque cometen prima uidet, famam rumoresque illa recentis excipit ad portas, quosdam facit; isse Niphaten in populos magnoque illic cuncta arua teneri

410

diluuio, nutare urbes, subsidere terras,

quocumque in triuio, cuicumque est obuia, narrat. But let us have a singing wife rather than one who flies through the length and breadth of the city, brazen and with the face to brave companies of men and, in the

presence of her husband, with unflinching face and dry breasts, to converse with uniformed generals. She also knows what is going on all over the world, what the Chinese, what the Thracians are doing, the secrets of stepmother and stepson, who is

inlove, which adulterer is mobbed by the girls; she will tell you who made the widow pregnant and in which month, what words each woman mouths while she has sex, and in how many positions. She is the first to see the comet threatening Armenian and Parthian kings, she is at the city gates to receive fresh news and rumours, and some of them she makes up herself; that the river Niphates has overflowed whole peoples and that all the fields there are under a great flood, that cities are tottering, lands subsiding — these are the things she tells at every crossroads, to anyone she

can buttonhole.*" 9? For other portraits of gossips cf. Semonides 7.12-20 (see Ch. 10 p. 387); Plaut. Trin. 199-22 (labelled as scurrae and famigeratores), Martial 9.35.

Appendix: manifestations of Fama and her House

Like Fama this woman both flies through the city (398 totam peruolet urbem; cf. e.g. Aen. 9.473—4 uolitans pennata per urbem | nuntia Fama ‘winged Fama flying through the city with her news’), and is privy to events all over the world (402 nouit quid toto fiat in orbe; cf. Ov. Met. 12.63 totumque inquirit in orbem ‘she searches through the whole world’). Her knowledge includes both great events in remote parts of the world, fit subject matter for epic and historiography, and gossip about the most intimate affairs of home and bedroom (cf. the Virgilian Fama’s bedroom gossip about Dido and Aeneas). She is both recipient and producer of verbal report (409-10). She gets Niphates wrong, mistaking the Armenian mountain for a river; but then so do the poets (e.g. Luc. Bell. Civ. 3.245),”° raising the question as to whether this female purveyor of gossip is very different from the masculine mouthpieces of fama. She too is a narrator (412 narrat). What particularly offends is that she is a woman in a man's world, and that is an important part of the scandal of Virgil's Fama. Juvenal's Lady Fama is one in a climactic sequence of awful women, many of whom meddle in the world of poetry and words: she is worse than the woman who goes after singers and who herself sings (379—97), and the climax in the sequence is the bluestocking who assumes the role of grammaticus and rhetor (434—56).

70

See Nisbet and Hubbard

1978: 149.

177

6

Later imperial epic

Following Virgil and Ovid Fama becomes an expected character in Latin epic. In this chapter I look at the appearances of a fully personified Fama in the Flavian epics of Valerius Flaccus and Statius. I start with the Neronian epic poet Lucan, whose response to the Virgilian Fama is profound at the same time as it pointedly defeats the expectations of readers coming from Virgil and Ovid. I conclude with a late-antique Greek epic, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, and with a mythological character, Typhoeus, distinct from Fama, but whose behaviour within the narrative brings him close to being a double of the Virgilian Fama.

fama in Lucan! In keeping with Lucan's radical elimination ofthe traditional divine machinery of epic, no full-scale personification of Fama appears in the Bellum ciuile. For all that, the complex plotting of fama is as fundamental to the Bellum ciuile as to any Latin epic. The disordered and chaotic body of the Virgilian and Ovidian Fama is to be found scattered over a variety of narrative events and embodied in a number of actors in the poem (persons, who thus substitute for the Virgilio-Ovidian personification). Scattering and multiple embodiment are themselves characteristics of the Virgilian Fama in particular. Virgilian in origin too is an opposition between two kinds of sky-reaching giants, ceaselessly mobile, metamorphic varieties of Fama and firmly-rooted, enduring varieties of Fama. The contrast between mobility and fixity is that between the shape-shifting and expansive Fama of Aeneid 4 and the terminally metamorphosed

man-mountain

Atlas, a

contrast between Fama and Fatum if we look forward from the time of

! This section is in part a reworking of material published in Hardie 2008. For a brilliant discussion of the role of Fama in Lucan, on which the present chapter draws at points, see Dinter 2005: Ch. 1 ‘Fama in Lucan's Bellum ciuile. Easton 2011 for the most part touches on aspects of fama in Lucan other than those that concern me here.

178

Fama in Lucan

the legendary narrative; but if we look backward from the perspective of Virgil's contemporary reader, the fixedness of Atlas is that of the achieved destiny of Rome, the fama of her history. When Aeneas, Atlas-like, lifts the cosmic shield on to his shoulders at the end of Aeneid 8, what he bears up is

famamque et fata nepotum, fame and fate welded into an indissoluble unity (see Ch. 3 pp. 103—6). Virgilian too in origin is the contest in Lucan between different claims to control fama. The Virgilian Atlas inscribes on the landscape a myth, the story ofthe giant Atlas, and, symbolically, future Roman history. Atlas is the most striking example within the Aeneid of an embodied landscape, a speaking topography. Lucan develops further a symbolic landscape of memory and tradition, in which the earth is made to utter its secrets, at least to those who are in

a position to listen to them. The Virgilian Fama, we will remember, is the daughter of Earth. These secrets may be those of the poetic tradition: dark spaces beneath the earth are repositories of fama, on the grandest scale in the form of the underworld, the epic's storehouse of tradition from the time of Homer (see Introduction p. 10).

In this chapter I first look at Lucan's construction of an opposition between Pompey and Caesar as a reflection of the Virgilian opposition between different kinds of fama. This opposition is then played out in the contest between Caesar and Pompey. Pompey's failure is finally turned into success of a kind through the posthumous transformation of Pompey's fame. The contest between Pompey and Caesar is played out over a series of symbolic landscapes, topographies of fama. One of these landscapes contains the memory of one of the closest relatives in the Bellum ciuile of the Virgilian Fama, Antaeus a monstrous freak from a mythological past. Another monstrous incarnation of Fama, the witch Erictho, who

like Fama mediates between the worlds above and below, inhabits the Thessaly of the poem's main action; Martin Dinter has skilfully unmasked this doppelganger, whom I discuss briefly in Chapter 10.

The tree and the thunderbolt

The importance for the human action of landscape and geography is established in a series of similes at the beginning of the Bellum ciuile. The first simile of the Bellum ciuile (1.72-80) compares the collapse of Rome to the dissolution into chaos of the universe itself, and so establishes the poem's ? Dinter 2005: 19-26.

179

Later imperial epic

master analogy between the body politic and the cosmos. The second simile (1.100—3) narrows the focus from cosmography to geography, and sets up a correspondence between human bodies and more local topographical features: Crassus, the third member

of the triumvirate, is figured as the

Corinthian Isthmus, the body of land that holds apart two warring seas, Caesar and Pompey. The body geographic will manifest itself again at the beginning of the narrative proper, now with geographical place figured as human

body, when

the personification

of the patria, Rome,

appears

to

Caesar at that most momentous of geographical boundaries, the Rubicon. Before that point we have the famous synkrisis of the two main actors, with

similes comparing Pompey to a towering, but dead, sacred tree, and Caesar to a ceaselessly mobile thunderbolt that leaves its traces as scars on a sacral landscape (1.129—57). The contrast repeats that between Virgil’s Fama, who blasts her way with the irresistible force of the thunderbolt, and the fixed

Atlas.‘ Like Atlas, Pompey is large (large indeed by name, 135 m/Magni nominis), and, like Atlas, the tree to which he is compared towers skywards

(136 sublimis). But there the resemblance stops. Pompey's oak no longer has solid roots, unlike the storm-beaten oak firmly rooted on the Alps to which

Aeneas is compared in a simile (Aen. 4.441—6) that firmly links him with the earlier description of Atlas.! Were it not supported by a surrounding forest of sound trees, Pompey's oak would topple at the first breeze. The tree is old, like Pompey, but length of years alone need not diminish a tree's strength: in this respect Pompey's tree is unlike the oak-tree at Geo. 2.291—7, a near relative of both Atlas and the Alpine oak in Aeneid 4, a tree whose top reaches to the sky and whose roots reach down to Tartarus, and which stands immovable for many ages of men, casting its huge shadow (Geo. 2. 297 huc illuc media ipsa ingentem sustinet umbram): a symbol of the strength and longevity of the Roman race." Pompey's real weakness is his inordinate love of fame, (Bell. Civ. 1.131)

uw

>

w

famae petitor (the first occurrence of fama in the poem).^ As long as his

a

180

CE. also the synkrisis contained in the two similes at Aen. 12.684-90 and 701-3 comparing Turnus and Aeneas respectively to a boulder crashing down a mountain and to fixed and towering mountains: in this case failure is associated with rapid motion and success with fixity. Dinter 2005: 30 notes that at Bell. Civ. 1.131 ff. ‘Lucan employs [Fara] to measure up the two contestants against each other. With Aen. 4.445 ipsa haeret scopulis contrast Luc. Bell. Civ. 1.138 nec iam ualidis radicibus haerens. See Morwood 1985: 58 on the imagistic continuity between Atlas and the Alpine oak and Apennine similes of Aeneas. See Hardie 2009a : 127-8. petitor has a technical sense of 'candidate' for political office; Pompey is interested in, woos (OLD s.v. petitor 2c ‘suitor’), the shadow, not the substance, of office. He is a lover of fame.

Fama in Lucan

sails are filled by the breezes of popular applause (132-3 totus popularibus auris | impelli), as if he were some great ship,’ he feels no need to keep his roots strong by renewing his political strength, (134) nec reparare nouas uires, in contrast to Caesar's thunderbolt which (157) sparsosque recolligit ignes 'regroups its scattered fires; and in contrast also to Virgil's Fama who (Aen. 4.175) uiris adquirit eundo ‘gathers strength as she goes’, like the Lucretian thunderbolt.? As a result the Pompey-oak, unlike the oaks of Georgics2 or Aeneid4, will be unable to withstand the storm-blast. Pompey's oak comes close to being an allegory of a certain kind of fama: where the sturdy branches of the oak in Georgics 2 support a flourishing canopy that casts a huge shadow (ingentem sustinet umbram), Pompey stands as the ‘shadow of a great name, a shadow without substance, stat magni nominis umbra.

By contrast

(Bell. Civ.

1.143—5)

non

in Caesare

tantum

| nomen

RT

erat nec fama ducis, sed nescia uirtus | stare loco ‘Caesar did not have just the name and fame of a general, but a vigour that could never stand still in one place. His fama is inseparable from his uirtus. This is not uirtus in the sense of the cliché that ‘glory is the shadow of virtue’ (1.135 gloria umbra uirtutis), but we are perhaps to reflect on how fame shadows Caesar in a way different from Pompey's shadow-name. The only way in which fama affects Caesar's behaviour is through the loss of face that would result if he were not constantly successful in battle: 1.145 solusque pudor non uincere bello ‘the one thing that could shame him was not to conquer in war. When Caesar descends into [taly from the Alps (no obstacle to his Hannibal-like progress), his irresistible onward rush is both that of his physical forces and of the fama that goes ahead of him, and with which he is virtually identified." To lose no momentum he calls up (1.394) sparsas per Gallica rura cohortes ‘the cohorts scattered through the countryside of Gaul, as the thunderbolt to which Caesar is compared (157) sparsosque recolligit ignes 'regathers its scattered fires. With these gathered forces he ‘scatters’ himself through Italy, ‘filling’ the towns (both verbs used of fama), CF. e.g. Ov. Met. 15.697 impulerat leuis aura ratem. By contrast Caesar is the source of his own drive, (Bell. Civ. 1.149) impellens. Cf. Bell. Civ. 9.90-2 (Magnus' message for his sons) uel sceptra uel urbes | libertate sua ualidas impellite fama | nominis. Cf. also Bell. Civ. 1.466 Caesar, ut inmensae conlecto robore uires, at the beginning of a passage that forges a close link between Caesar and Fama (see below): robore perhaps hints at a contrast with the enfeebled 'tree' of Pompey, kept upright only by the forest of the lesser but sound trees

v

that surround him, (1.142) tot circum siluae firmo

se robore tollant.

See Ch. In. 84. The following two paragraphs draw on Dinter 2003: 31-3, 45-6. On the effects of the fama of Caesar's approach see also Murgatroyd 2007: 119-22.

181

182

Later imperial epic

and then as it were projects himselfin the shape of fama, in a passage which

demythologizes the Virgilian personification, 466-85:'' Caesar, ut inmensae conlecto robore uires audendi maiora fidem fecere, per omnem spargitur Italiam uicinaque moenia conplet. uana quoque ad ueros accessit fama timores inrupitque animos populi clademque futuram

470

intulit et uelox properantis nuntia belli

innumeras soluit falsa in praeconia linguas. nec qualem meminere uident: maiorque ferusque mentibus occurrit uictoque inmanior hoste.

480

sic quisque pauendo dat uires famae, nulloque auctore malorum

485

quae finxere timent. When Caesar had gathered his strength and his vast forces gave him the confidence to dare greater things, he spread all over Italy and filled the neighbouring towns. Empty rumour was added to true fears and burst into men’s minds with a tale of disaster to come, and, a swift messenger of imminent war, loosed countless tongues to make false announcements... Their vision of him is not as they remember him: they think of him as larger, fierce, more savage than the enemy he has defeated... Each man's terror adds strength to the rumour, and in the absence of authority they fear ills that they have invented.

The several features of Virgilian Fama — her capacity to fill, her combination of facta atque infecta, her countless tongues, her alarming expansiveness, her monstrosity — are divided between the persons of Caesar and of the unnamed multitude who spread the word. The power of this fama is increased the more in that her subjects are not restricted to the populus, the uulgus (the medium for Pompey's narcissistic cultivation of his fame, 132), but include (487-8) curia et ipsi... patres ‘the Senate and the Fathers themselves: Fama is attended by Credulitas, as the reader is drawn to assent

to her fictions at 493—4 credas. . . tecta nefandas | corripuisse faces‘you would believe that impious firebrands had set the houses [of Rome] alight. Lucan here combines

echoes of the bacchic

raving of Dido,

infected by Fama,

!! The points of contact with the Virgilian personification are brought out by Clément-Tarantino 2006: 646—7, 662, 666. On Petronius' combination of Virgilian and Lucanian elements in the

Fama scene in his Bellum ciuile (Sat. 123) see Hardie 20092: 227-8.

Fama tn Lucan

through the city of Carthage at Aen. 4.298-301,'- and of the simile of the destruction of Tyre and Carthage at Aen. 4.669-71,'* following immediately after Fama's last bacchic riot through the city, (666) concussam bacchatur

Fama per urbem. In a simile at Bell. Civ. 1.498—503 the effects of fama are compared to those of a violent storm which makes helmsman and crew abandon ship before the physical shipwreck. The 'as if' of the simile is compounded by the power of fama to conjure up something that has not (yet) happened, and so provoke the action that would occur if that something had already happened: the power of fama to instigate narrative. Caesar's power to mobilize, virtually to embody, fama continues, as he dislodges Pompey from his associations with Italian and Roman topographies. In Book 2 Pompey makes a stand in his retreat from Rome at Capua, and disposes his troops (396—7) umbrosis mediam qua collibus Appenninus | erigit Italiam ‘where the Apennine range raises up Italy’s central region with shady hills.'* The effect is to associate Pompey and his troops with the Apennines, the backbone of Italy. Lucan has in mind the simile in Aeneid 12 (702-3) in which Aeneas ‘is as great as pater Appenninus himself when his quivering holm-oaks roar and he rejoices to lift his snowy head up into the breezes’, a crucial moment

in the Italianization of the Trojan hero,"

MN

and a transfer to an Italian geography of the imagery of Mount Atlas and the Alpine oak in Aeneid 4. But, step by step, Pompey is uprooted by Caesar's unstoppable progress, constant movement that effaces topographical memory. Pompey is whistling in the wind when he asks his troops, (Bell. Civ. 2.5734) an uanae tumuere minae, quod fama furoris | expulit armatam patriis e sedibus urbem? 'Have his empty threats been puffed up because the report of his fury has driven the city in arms from its ancestral seat?' The answer is soon given: 2.600 iam uictum fama non uisi Caesaris agmen 'an army already beaten by the rumours of a Caesar on whom they had not set eyes. Martin Dinter shows how Pompey attempts to revive his own fama by drawing on the strength of his power-base in the east, (2.633—4) quo nominis usque | nostri fama uenit ‘where the fame of my name has penetrated’, but With Bell. Civ. 1.495-8 sic turba per urbem | praecipiti lymphata gradu... ruit cf. Aen. 4.300-1 saeuit inops animi totamque incensa per urbem | bacchatur, which repeats the effects of Fara on Iarbas earlier, (203) isque amens animi et rumore accensus amaro.

a

=

Lucan's introduction of the allusion to the Virgilian simile with the formula credas, extending

the power of fama to induce credulity from the characters to the reader, suggests a reading of the simile at Aen. 4.669-71 focalized through the Carthaginians: that is, the effect of Fama is to make them believe that their city is now being sacked. Martin Dinter points out to me that Caesarian forces of destruction are already present in this landscape: 2.409-10 Eridanus fractas deuoluit in aequora siluas | Hesperiamque exhaurit aquis. Cairns 1989: 109,

183

184

Later imperial epic

in the end this will prove inadequate to face down the irresistible Caesar. Fama’s collaboration with Caesar continues when he flies over the Alps in the opposite direction: 3. 298—300 ille ubi deseruit trepidantis moenia Romae | agmine nubiferam rapto super euolat Alpem; | cumque alii famae populi terrore pauerent... 'when he had abandoned the walls of a quaking Rome, he hurries his army and flies over the cloud-capped Alps; though other peoples quivered in terror at the reports...’ (only Massilia is steadfast). In this contest of fama Pompey can only win through a posthumous separation of fama from embodied persons and individual places.'^ This transformation is achieved between the beginning and end of Book 8. As he flees from a Thessaly that will never shake off the memory of Pharsalia, Pompey tries to detach his person from his fame through random flight into obscurity: 4-5 Magnus agens incerta fugae uestigia turbat | implicitasque errore uias 'Magnus jumbles in uncertainty the traces of his flight and intertwines his pathsby wandering. His wish isto escape from the worldwide fama that, Atlas-like, weighs him down: 21-3 Fortuna... quae tanto pondere famae | res premit aduersas fatisque prioribus urguet 'Fortune that weighs down his defeat with the burden of his great fame and crushes him with his former [successful] fate’. It is as if Pompey, as the defeated representative of a legitimate Roman tradition, were trying to shake off the burden of fame and destiny that Aeneas, Atlas-like, takes up at the end of Aeneid 8,

in the shape of the Shield of Roman history, 731 attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum... Eventually fama will guide Caesar to the place where Pompey died, and to the physical presence of his severed head; as Caesar himself says, (10.184) fama quidem generi Pharias me duxit ad urbes ‘for sure I was brought to Pharos’ cities by report about my son-in-law’. But there is another sense in which fama cannot guide Caesar to find Pompey in one fixed location. Pompey’s end is to find for his resting place one small patch of soil at the edge of a foreign land. But the long complaint on the death of Pompey at the end of Book 8 shatters the link between memory and place that inheres in the tomb, so freeing the fame of the world-conqueror Pompey from attachment to any particular locality, just as his soul flies free of its earthly ties at the beginning of Book 9.'’ Through his death

16 For the trajectory of Pompey's fama from the moment of his defeat at Pharsalia see above all Feeney 1986b. 17 And just as Horace's fame is more durable than that of costly monuments in Odes 3.30: cf. Bell. Civ. 8.865-6 proderit hoc olim, quod non mansura futuris | ardua marmoreo surrexit pondere

moles, On the escape-route for Pompey's fama see Murgatroyd 2007: 237-42, citing Sen. HO 1826-7 (Alcmene of Hercules) quae tibi sepulcra, nate, quis tumulus sat est? | hic totus orbis: fama erit titulus tibi.

Fama tn Lucan

Pompey achieves a new kind of dispersal;'* no single spot on the earth can call itself the tomb of Pompey: 8.797—9 situs est qua terra extrema refuso | pendet in Oceano; Romanum nomen et omne | imperium Magno tumuli est modus ‘he is buried where

furthest earth floats on Ocean

flowing back;

the name of Rome and all its empire is the limit of his grave for Magnus’. The living Pompey has now, through death, been metamorphosed into a universal fame, fama, located everywhere and nowhere in particular. Unlike

in the case of Thessaly whose crime of being the location for the battle of Pharsalus probably no passage of time can erase from infamy (7.849—50 quod sufficit aeuum | immemor ut donet belli tibi damna uetustas?), a happier time will come when no-one will believe that the insignificant stone on the Egyptian shore marks the grave of Pompey (8.869-72). That fama will find no credence at all, accompanied by incredulitas not credulitas.

The Pompey-oak is finally felled, to end up as a truncus ‘headless body/tree-trunk' (8.698) tossed by the waves on the shore of Egypt. The living Pompey becomes an umbra, a ghost (9.2). But this is the point at which the shadow of his name is restored to its true greatness, what Pompey was before his decline. The fullness of that fama is registered in the list of tituli at 8.806—15, too great for the humble headstone. This restoration of past greatness is reinforced by Pompey's dying conversion from an addiction to the transient applause of the people to a concern for the futurity of his fame, his aeterna fama (8.617) with posterity. ‘saecula Romanos numquam tacitura labores | attendunt, aeuumque sequens speculatur ab omni | orbe ratem Phariamque fidem: nunc consule famae" ‘Ages that will never be mute about Rome's troubles are looking on, and from all corners of the world time to come is watching this boat and Egyptian treachery; now think of fame’ (622-4). This Ciceronian obsession with distant posterity is combined with an almost philosophical concern to maintain a Stoic endurance in the face of death: ‘almost philosophical, since Pompey is still thinking of what people will say: 626—7 'ignorant populi, si non in morte probaris, | an scieris aduersa pati’ ‘if you are not tested in death, people do not know if you were able to endure adversity’. This resolve to be firm is certainly different from being at the mercy of the winds of public applause (1.132-3), but it does not amount to the tota] revaluation of fama as undertaken by a Seneca (see Ch. 1 pp. 32—3).'" Many see in Pompey's death only the parody of the Stoic '8 In contrast to the physical scattering to which he declares himself indifferent at 8.62930 spargant lacerentque licebit, | sum tamen, o superi, felix. 1? Pompey's positive fama is set in relief against the infamia of his assassin Septimius: 8.605-6 dedecus et numquam superum caritura pudore | fabula; 608-9 qua posteritas in saecula mittet | Septimium fama?

185

186

Later imperial epic

good death, for which the motto would better have been consule uirtuti, not

consule famae. In the Bellum ciuile the exemplum of a radical redefinition of fama is to be found in Cato, 9.593-600: si ueris magna paratur fama bonis et si successu nuda remoto inspicitur uirtus, quidquid laudamus in ullo maiorum, fortuna fuit. quis Marte secundo,

quis tantum meruit populorum sanguine nomen? hunc ego per Syrtes Libyaeque extrema triumphum

ducere maluerim, quam ter Capitolia curru scandere Pompei, quam frangere colla Iugurthae. If great fame is won by truly good deeds, and if naked virtue is considered without regard to success, all that we praise in any of our ancestors was Fortune's gift. Who ever deserved so great a name through success in war or by shedding the blood of nations? Rather than climb the Capitol thrice in Pompey's chariot, rather than break Jugurtha's neck, this is the triumphal procession that I would prefer, through the Syrtes and the remotest parts of Libya.

Pompey is perhaps little changed from his dreaming self on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, when he saw himself back in the Theatre of Pompey, the

Roman people cheering his name to the stars as on the occasion of his first triumph (7.9-19). At his death his imagined public is the larger theatrum mundi of posterity. The living Caesar continues to be impelled by a hunt after fama that is to be located in discrete parts of the world. By the end of Book 9 reports of Pompey will have led him (9.953 fama duce) to the remaining body part of the man, his head, and in Egypt he will be drawn, like a moth to a candle, to

visit the tomb and body of antiquity's most famous individual, Alexander the Great (10.14—52). Like the thunderbolt, Caesar has great penetrative power," but not always. Lucan develops a twofold strategy with regard to Caesar's exploration of the landscape of civil war. On the one hand he is unstoppably ruthless in opening up secret places;'' on the other hand he ranges over the surface of a landscape to whose historical memory he is oblivious. On two occasions Caesar makes an entry that is like the opening up of a cave, a hidden place in the earth. In Book 3 the forcible entry of 20 On the Lucretian penetrative thunderbolt see Hardie 20092: 176-7. ?! [n this Caesar is a double of Erictho, whose ability to bend the powers of the deepest underworld to her will is matched by Caesar's successful invocation of mersos nocte furores at 7.168—71: see Nicolai 1989: 133.

Fama in Lucan

the Temple of Saturn (the state treasury of Rome) is like the opening of an Aladdin’s cave, 154-8:

tunc rupes Tarpeia sonat magnoque reclusas testatur stridore fores; tum conditus imo

eruitur templo multis non tactus ab annis Romani census populi... Then the Tarpeian rock resounds and with loud rumbling witnesses the doors unclosed; then hidden many a year, the wealth of the Roman people is unearthed...

The Tarpeian rock, i.e. the Capitol, the most symbolically loaded place on the Roman map, resounds as if it itself were being opened up," and the ‘buried’ treasure is ‘dug up’ from deep in the temple, as if it were gold torn out of the bowels of the earth." Cicero on several occasions refers to the public treasury as the uiscera, ‘entrails’, of the state; Caesar's action is an exemplification of the poem's opening image of civil war as the Roman right hand directed against its own entrails. The treasures in the Temple of Saturn are then enumerated as a catalogue of booty, tribute and savings that is at the same time a catalogue of Roman history, wealth from Punic wars, from Perseus, from conquered Philip's booty... (Bell. Civ. 3.157-8 quem Punica bella, | quem dederat Perses, quem uicti praeda Philippi... ), history stamped as it were on the wealth stored in the Temple of Saturn, an unearthing of historical tradition, fama, that is effaced and cancelled

through its appropriation by Caesar, just as a few lines earlier Caesar had in his own single person replaced all the magistrates of Rome, (3.108) omnia Caesar erat. As Vincent Hunink puts it in his commentary (on 3.154-68),

‘He is not merely robbing a temple, but ravaging the history of Rome’ - the history, in geographical terms, of orbis in urbe. Elaine Fantham points to Lucan's allusion in this episode to significant places and events in the Aeneid, to the opening of the Gates of War in Aeneid 7, and to the description of the Capitol in Aeneid 8, a key passage for the Virgilian sense of the numinosity

of place." nN

2

Hunink 1992 ad loc.: ‘the sound can only be the echo against the slopes of the Capitoline’: literally so, but the Latin suggests that it is the sound of the rock itself being opened up. Hunink also thinks of a supernatural Türöffnung.

For the frequent image cf. Ov. Met. 1.138-40 itum est in uiscera terrae, | quasque recondiderat Stygiisque admouerat umbris, | effodiuntur opes, inritamenta malorum. Lee 1953 ad loc. notes Cic. Dom. 124 (cf. also 23) cur ille gurges. . ad caelum... exstruxit uillam in Tusculano uisceribus aerarii, Q. F. 1.3.7 cum de uisceribus tuis et filii tui satisfacturus sis quibus debes; cf. also Pis. 28 si pecuniam ereptam ex rei publicae uisceribus dedisset.

^^

Fantham

w

2

1997; with 3.117 nondum

reseratae... aedis cf. Aen. 7.613 insignis reserat stridentia

limina consul. Saturn (Bell. Civ. 3.115 Saturnia templa) himselfis a god closely connected with

Later imperial epic

At the beginning of Book 10 Caesar enters Egypt, a land now stained by the blood of the murdered Pompey: 2 diras calcauit Caesar harenas ‘Caesar tramples on the cursed sands/the sands that house the Furies of Pompey-^ This is a matter of indifference to Caesar, who can scarcely be aware that it is

the ghost of Pompey that saves him from being murdered by the Egyptians (6-8). Caesar's interest is in another Magnus whose body is kept in Egypt, Alexander the Great. Alexander’s tomb, like the Temple of Saturn in Rome, is an architectural feature presented as if it were a feature of the natural world: 17-19 nulla captus dulcedine rerum, | non auro cultuque deum, non moenibus

urbis, | effossum tumulis cupide descendit in antrum ‘charmed by no delights, not by gold or by ornaments of the gods, not by city walls, he eagerly descends into the cavern hollowed out for a burial-place”. What is preserved in this subterranean place in Alexandria is the Alexander-tradition, the continuing inspiration for Caesar’s own behaviour in this book. Like Caesar (and like Virgil's Fama) Alexander is also an evil thunderbolt (34—5 terrarum fatale malum fulmenque quod omnis | percuteret pariter populos).”“ Caesar's successful desire to penetrate the secrets of Alexander's tomb is in contrast with his progressive inability to see beneath the surface of the decayed ruins of Troy during his sightseeing visit at 9.950—79, in spite of his hunger for fama — perhaps because the traces of a Trojan-Roman landscape are being obliterated by Caesar's journey in the footsteps of Alexander.”’ Caesar in fact is afflicted with a twofold inability to read fama. The stated aim of the journey that brings him to Troy is the pursuit of Pompey, guided by fama, (952—3) cuius uestigia frustra | terris sparsa legens fama duce tendit in undas ‘following his traces scattered uselessly on land, with rumour as his guide"? For once Caesar's ability to collect things scattered, or to scatter his

the soil of Italy and what lies buried in it, seeds (Varro, Ling. Lat. 5.64 ab satu est dictus

Saturnus); Saturnia Iuno perverts the fertility of Saturnian Italy when she brings up from

N e

to ^

beneath the earth the Fury Allecto, whom

[o E]

188

Juno addresses as (7.331)

Virgo sata Nocte, and on

whom at the end of her speech she calls to propagate her own hellish perversion of fertility: 338-9 fecundum concute pectus, . . . sere crimina belli. Cf. 8.804—5 erremus populi cinerumque tuorum, | Magne, metu nullas Nili calcemus harenas. On the link between Caesar and Alexander as ‘thunderbolts’ see Berti 2000 on Bell. Civ. 10.34—5; Fantham 2003: 248-9. Alexander-fulmen blasts omnis populos, Caesar-fulmen (1.153-4) populosque pauentes | terruit: Virgil's Fama terrifies great cities, and fills peoples with talk (Aen. 4.187-9). See Seng 2003: 127-8. On Caesar at Troy, one of the most discussed episodes in the poem, see Zwierlein

1982 and

1986; Schrijvers 1990; Gagliardi

1990; Rossi 2001; Wick 2004 ad loc.; Eigler

2005; Tesoriero 2005.

Note the pun on lego. Petrarch picks up on Lucan's language in describing his own frustrating pursuit of the traces of the fame of antiquity: Africa 9.133-5 uestigia Fame | rara sequens, quantum licuit per secula retro | omnia peruigili studio uagus ipse cucurri, 404-6 ipse ego ter

Fama in Lucan

own power in an irresistible way, deserts him. 29 The difficulty of tracking Pompey, at the literal level, results from his random flight into obscurity as described at the beginning of Book 8. Eventually fama will guide Caesar to the place where Pompey died, and to the physical presence of his severed head; as Caesar himself says, (10.184) fama quidem generi Pharias me duxit ad urbes ‘for sure I was brought to Pharos’ cities by report about my sonin-law’. But, as we have seen, there are strong reasons why fama cannot any longer guide Caesar to find Pompey in one fixed location, since the living Pompey has now, through death, been metamorphosed into a universal fame, broadcast as widely through the world as the Roman conquests of Pompey’s triumphal career. Caesar is temporarily distracted from his tracking of the fama of Pompey by the attraction of the fama of Troy: 9.961—3 Sigeasque petit famae mirator’” harenas | et Simoentis aquas et Graio

nobile busto | Rhoetion

et multum

debentis uatibus umbras ‘and, admirer of fame, he seeks Sigeum’s sands, Simois’ waters, Rhoeteum renowned for its Greek tomb and the ghosts that owe so much to bards’. The reader follows Caesar on his tour of the wellknown sights of Troy, but as we do so the landscape dissolves into illegibility, the traces of man’s hand having slipped back into a state of nature. The local tour-guide, Phryx incola (976), does preserve the traditions, but Caesar unknowingly violates the sacred places, 974-9: inscius in sicco serpentem puluere riuum transierat, qui Xanthus erat. securus in alto

975

gramine ponebat gressus: Phryx incola manes Hectoreos calcare uetat. discussa iacebant saxa nec ullius faciem seruantia sacri:

‘Herceas’ monstrator”! ait ‘non respicis aras?" Unwittingly, he had crossed a stream creeping in dry dust - this was Xanthus... Oblivious, he placed his footsteps in the deep grass: the Phrygian local tells him not to tread upon the shade of Hector. Scattered stones were lying there, preserving no appearance of anything sacred: the guide says: ‘Have you no respect

=

we

6

u v

for the Hercean altars?'

centum labentibus ordine lustris | dumosam tentare uiam et uestigia rara | uiribus imparibus fidens utcumque peregi: see Ch. 12 pp. 478-82. Cf. 1.157 sparsosque recolligit ignes, 1.467-8 per omnem | spargitur Italiam. The poet regrets that Alexander, model for both Caesar and Pompey, had not been scattered in a different way: 10.22—3 sacratis totum spargenda per orbem | membra uiri posuere adytis. Cf. 1.131 (Pompey) famaeque petitor. Cf. 8.869-70 (the grave of Pompey) ueniet felicior aetas | qua sit nulla fides saxum monstrantibus illud: incredulity rather than ignorance is here at issue.

189

Later imperial epic

Caesar’s last violations are of the tomb of Hector, and of the altar of Jupiter

Herceus at the centre of the palace of Priam, where the Trojan king was slaughtered by Achilles’ son. Earlier in the poem Pompey had come increasingly to play the role of the doomed Hector, and in his death he had re-enacted the death of Priam.** Caesar's lack of regard for the Hercean altar is both an ironic reminder that he does not yet know of Pompey’s death, but also more broadly an indicator of his total disregard for the traditions of Rome, going back to the Trojan origins (despite his hypocritical prayer to (990) ‘di cinerum Phrygias colitis quicumque ruinas’ ‘gods of the ashes, whoever you are that dwell in the ruins of Troy’). In yet another twist Caesar’s failure to take note of the place of Priam’s death duplicates the difficulty, according to Lucan, of recognizing the humble tomb of Pompey: 8.820—2 haud procul est ima Pompei nomen harena | depressum tumulo, quod non legat aduena rectus, | quod nisi monstratum Romanus transeat hospes Pompey's name is not far from the lowest sand, placed so low upon the grave that a stranger may not read it standing upright, that a Roman visitor would pass it by if it were not pointed out’. It is well understood that the scene of Caesar at Troy replays the Virgilian visit of Aeneas to the future site of Rome, a place already at that time marked with divine and legendary presences, and, through prolepsis, a bearer of the memories of the whole of Roman history. Lucan's Caesar is a destroyer of historical memory, no respecter of places and traditions. The decayed site of Troy, the place where Rome began, is an image of what Caesar is doing to Rome and Italy in this epic on the end of Republican Roman history." The present state of Troy, where ‘even the ruins have perished’ (9.969), is a reflection of the state of Italy after the battle of Pharsalus, as described in

"n

Books 1 and 7. In Book 9 the description of Caesar's visit to the site of Troy, with its reminder of what the ghosts of that place owe to Homer (963 multum debentis uatibus umbras), triggers Lucan's apostrophe to the power of poets to lend immortality, specifically Lucan's own power to ensure that Caesar's achievements will never be forgotten. Pharsalia nostra | uiuet ‘our Pharsalia willlive' (985—6). That immortality is expressed through substantial allusion

See Austin on Aen. 2.513. Alexander had sacrificed at this altar as a descendant of

ue -

Neoptolemus, to mollify the shade of Priam: Arr. Anab. Alex. 1.11.8.

we =

190

Pompey as both Hector and Priam: Seng 2003: 136-41. On the crossing of the Xanthus (9.974—5) as a repetition of the crossing of the Rubicon see Seng 2003: 141-2. Caesar is condemned to repeat the present in the past, because he does not remember Trojan- Roman history. See Narducci 1979: 77-9.

Fama in Lucan

to Ovid’s reworking, at the end of the Metamorphoses, of the topics of immortality in Horace, Odes 3.30. Why does Lucan refer to his and Caesar’s joint effort as ‘Pharsalia’ if, as I think is correct, this is not the actual title

of the poem? Attention to the importance of landscape and memory in the poem suggests that we are to think of the geographical specificity of Pharsalia (the name of the town near which the battle was fought, or the

name of the district round the town). In Lucan’s epic Pharsalia replaces Troy, Rome and Italy as the landscape that will truly live on in memory. And in the contrast between Caesar's failure to read the fama buried in the ruins of Troy, and Lucan's own control in his poem of the fama (or infamia) stamped on the soil of Thessaly, Lucan marks his own victory over Caesar in the matter of fama. Lucan (and Caesar, whether he wishes it or not) are abetted in their bid

for immortality by the continuing vitality of Thessaly as a landscape of memory. Homer's poetry has the power to survive when the monuments have vanished, and when the memories in the landscape itself of Troy have faded to the point where at least one visitor, Caesar, is oblivious to

them. Pharsalia will long continue to bear the physical traces of the crime committed

there, the battle whose

effect has been

to reduce

Rome

and

Italy to unrecognizable shadows of their former selves. Civil war has had on those places the effect that Horatian time has on physical monuments in Odes 3.30:*° 7.397-9 non aetas haec carpsit edax monimentaque rerum | putria destituit: crimen ciuile uidemus | tot uacuas urbes ‘it is not devouring time which has eroded and abandoned in decay these memorials of the past: it is the crime of civil war we see, so many empty cities”. Pharsalia tanti | causa mali 'Pharsalia is the cause of such an evil' (7.407—8). Pharsalia (or

Pharsalus) had been the first in the catalogue of Thessalian cities in the lengthy symbolic topography in the Thessalian excursus in Book 6 (350 Emathis aequorei regnum Pharsalos Achillis ‘Emathian Pharsalus, kingdom of the sea-nymph's son Achilles'). Where the physical Italy has suffered a premature fall into oblivion, it seems that the memories of the blood and bones buried in the soil of Thessaly can never be destroyed: 7.849—51 quod

?5 On the question of the exact reference of the toponym see Postgate 1917: lxxxix-xcviii (the district); Bruére 1951 (the town, taking issue with Postgate). Schrijvers 1990: 35 points to the reason for the use of Pharsalia here: ‘la référence à son propre poéme par le mot Pliarsalia découle sans doute chez Lucain du contexte géographique (la visite à Troia homerica): In support of the claim that at 9.985 Pharsalia refers to the geographical place, not the title of the epic, Schrijvers cites the epigram attributed to Nero: Baehrens, PLM 4.43.110 Mantua, da ueniam, fama sacrata perenni: | sit fas Thessaliam |var. lect. Pharsaliam] post Simoenta legi. 36 Note the importance in Odes 3.30 of the Italian landscape for Horace's literary immortality.

191

Later imperial epic

sufficit aeuum | immemor ut donet belli tibi damna uetustas? | quae seges infecta surget non decolor herba? ‘What length of time will be enough for distant ages to forget and to forgive you for the losses of the war? Every crop will rise discoloured with tainted growth.’ Year in year out the blood hidden below will reveal itself above in crop marks, as the unnatural manure pushes up crops of unusual richness or strange colour. This is a landscape that hardly needs the immortalizing power of the poet, of the kind promised by Virgil to Nisus and Euryalus at Aeneid 9.446—7 si quid mea carmina possunt, | nulla dies umquam memori uos eximet aeuo ‘if my songs have any power, no day will ever remove you from the memory of time’.*” Besides Troy, the other great foreign landmark of Roman historical and poetic memory is Carthage, the object of a sightseeing tour by the Caesarian Curio in Book 4 (581-660)."* Carthage is now a place of ruins, like Troy in Book

9, and like Italy after the civil war,"

39

and a place of memories.

We are given notice that we are treading a familiar path when we read that Curio, retracing the journey of Aeneas in Aeneid 1, travels from Sicily to Carthage (585, the first African place-name). Curio then makes for the desert landscape of a place called Antaei regna ‘the kingdom of Antaeus’. His desire to learn the reason for the name is satisfied by a rudis incola, the

indwelling guardian in that place of the traditions of his forefathers (592; cf. 9.976 Phryx incola, the guide at Troy), who proceeds to tell the story of Hercules' fight with the giant Antaeus. Well known are the models in Aeneid 8 for a hero's encounter with a source of local knowledge (Evander) and for a fight between Hercules and a chthonic monster (Cacus). But the

implications of another substantial Virgilian intertext do not seem to have been drawn out. Antaeus is a close relative of a monster that haunts the Virgilian Carthage, Fama. Fama and Antaeus are both late births of Mother Earth, siblings of

w »

w =

w Er]

Titans and Giants. Lucan plays with the relationship of Antaeus to Fama: 4.595—6 nec tam iusta fuit terrarum" gloria Typhon | aut Tityos Briareusque ferox 'and not so justly was Typhon the glory of the earth or Tityos or fierce

4°

o

192

For uefustas in a context of a poetic promise of immortality see Aen. 10.792. Significantly a Book 4? On other allusions to Aeneid 4 in Bellum civile 4 see Casali 1999. On the episode of Curio at Carthage see Thompson and Bruere 1970; Saylor 1982; Grimal 1949; Ahl 1976: Ch. 3 ‘Sangre y arena’; Martindale 1981; Keith 2000: 52-5; Esposito 2000. On the parallels between Curio at Carthage and Caesar at Troy, including the parallel between Lucan’s promises of fame to both Curio and Caesar, see Narducci 2002: Ch. 9 ‘Il tempo e la memoria’ With 4.585 semirutas magnae Carthaginis arces cf. 1.24-5 at nunc semirutis pendent quod moenia tectis | urbibus Italiae. But the emendation genetricis for terrarum may be right: see Esposito 2009: 277.

Fama

in Lucan

Briareus”. Antaeus is, one could put it, Fama Telluris."' It is the spreading rumours of Antaeus' fearful strength that brings Hercules to Libya: 609— 11 tandem uolgata cruenti | fama mali terras monstris aequorque leuantem | magnanimum Alciden Libycas exciuit in oras ‘at last the rumour of the blood-stained evil spread and summoned to the shores of Libya greathearted Alcides, who was ridding land and sea of monsters’. The first three

syllables of line 610 reproduce the opening of the second line of Virgil's description of Fama, Aen. 4.174 Fama, malum qua non aliud uelocius ullum

‘Fama, than whom there is no swifter evil. Rumour brings Hercules to confront a double of the Virgilian Fama." Antaeus was conceived in the hidden places under the surface of the earth, (Bell. Civ. 4.594) in antris, and he derives his renewable strength from close contact with his mother. The Virgilian Fama (Aen. 4.175) mobilitate

uiget uirisque adquirit eundo ‘thrives through motion and gains strength as she goes'; Antaeus by contrast restores his uires through lying down on the ground." This oppositio in imitando signals Lucan's interest in this passage in the kind of Fama that is rooted in a particular place, rather than the kind of Fama that moves swiftly from place to place. In a reversal of the normal

direction in which

spilt blood flows, when

the exhausted

Antaeus is thrown for the first time by Hercules (Bell. Civ. 4.62931), rapit arida tellus | sudorem; calido complentur sanguine uenae, | intumuere tori,

=

totosque induruit artus 'the dry earth drinks his sweat; his veins are filled with warm blood, his muscles bulged, his entire frame grew tough*!! Fresh blood wells up from the earth to invigorate the creature who is the glory of the earth. Grimal 19-19 emphasizes Antaeus’ close connection with the land of Libya, 60 ‘Antée est le Libyen par excellence; il est la Libye.’ For a powerful reading of another Lucanian monster,

> 'N

Erictho, as virtually a personification of Fama see Dinter 2005: 19-26.

One of the contingents in Hannibal's army in Silius Italicus is led by an Antaeus, the name of the monster who was gloria terrae now transferred to an African who proudly bears it as Herculea fama, and who, like Fama, lifts his head high: Pun. 3.262-4 ducit tot populos, ingens et

corpore et armis, | Herculeam factis seruans ac nomine famam, | Antaeus celsumque caput super agmina tollit. Silius has in mind the Lucanian conversion of Scipionic fama into civil-war infamia: the last in the list of places commanded by Antaeus are (261) et Zama et uberior Rutulo nunc sanguine Thapsus. Antaeus' renewable vigour (4.600 iam defecta uigent renouato robore membra) is also in contrast to Pompey's inability to (1.134) reparare nouas uires, Antaeus draws strength from the earth, whereas the Pompey-oak of 1.136—43 is no longer firmly rooted in the earth that would lend it sustenance and stability. The ‘oak’ pun in 4.600 robore may be heard. The language has sexual overtones, as if there were some exchange of procreative fluids between Antaeus and Tellus. With rapit. . . sudorem cf. Lucr. 4.1127-8 uestis. . . Veneris sudorem exercita potat.

193

194

Later imperial epic

Hercules kills the monster by the ruse of holding him up, away from the earth and crushing him. The physical relationship of the living Antaeus to his mother is replaced by the linguistic relationship of name to place preserved in tradition, fama: 4.654—5 hinc, aeui ueteris custos, famosa uetustas, |

miratrixque sui," signauit nomine terras'that is how antiquity — the guardian of ancient time, the giver of renown and admirer of herself — marked the land with his name’. The Libyan guide then announces to Curio that the place is stamped with another and greater name, preserving the memory of the landfall made on the Libyan land (658 Libyca tellure potito) by Scipio Africanus, the traces of whose ancient ramparts are still visible in the place. As on the Virgilian site of Rome — and as in Lucan’s Thessaly — the stories imprinted on the land themselves predetermine the future history of that land. Scipio assumes a Herculean role in destroying the Libyan Hannibal. That Herculean role had already been played by a Roman hero from the First Punic War, Marcus Atilius Regulus, of whom we are reminded by another feature in the opening description of the Libyan landscape. Curio plants his first camp (Bell. Civ. 4.587—8) qua se | Bagrada lentus agit siccae sulcator harenae ‘where leisurely Bagrada proceeds, the furrower of the dry sand’,

the setting for Regulus’ Herculean struggle with a monstrous serpent.'^ Curio thinks to draw strength himself from the land and its traditions,

forging his own fate out of the famous successes of earlier generals in that place: 4.661-2 Curio laetatus, tamquam fortuna locorum | bella gerat seruetque ducum sibi fata priorum 'Curio was delighted, as if the fortune of the place would wage his wars and maintain for him the destiny of former leaders’. But for Curio the fama of the place does not ensure the continuation of Roman fata. The Libyan earth has its revenge, and the mindful ghosts of Carthage drink their fill of Roman blood (4.788-90)."’ The implication is

perhaps that civil war breaks the logic of Roman repetition of the successes of their past: the shame of Roman defeat on Libyan soil is the greater because it is not the outcome of a bellum externum: 4.791-2 Romanam, superi, Libyca tellure ruinam | Pompeio prodesse nefas uotisque senatus! ‘ye gods, what a crime that

a Roman

downfall on African soil should benefit

45 Cf. 9.961 (Caesar) famae mirator; Sen. Phaedra 742 fama miratrix senioris aeui. 16

Sil. Pun. 6.140-293; Silius signals his debt to Lucan in the first line, 140 turbidus arentes lento

pede sulcat harenas. 47 We might also think of the defeat as a fulfilment of Dido's curse: Aen. 4.625 exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. Curio too fulfils the imprecation against Aeneas, (620) sed cadat ante diem mediaque inhumatus harena: cf. Bell. Civ. 4.803-4 ante iaces... ; 809-10 Libycas, en,

nobile corpus, | pascit aues nullo contectus Curio busto.

Fama tn Lucan

Pompey and the prayers of the Senate!’ Contrast 656-9 sed maiora dedit cognomina collibus istis | Poenum qui Latiis reuocauit ab arcibus hostem | Scipio; nam sedes Libyca tellure potito | haec fuit ‘but a greater name was given to those hills by Scipio, who brought back the Carthaginian enemy from the citadels of Latium; for this was his base when he reached the land of Libya’. Rather than re-enacting the part of Hercules, master of the Libyan soil, Curio and his troops play the role of Antaeus, defeated once he loses contact with the earth: in the notorious paradox of 4.787 conpressum turba stetit omne cadauer ‘every corpse stood erect, crushed in a mass’, Curio’s Romans suffer the fate of Antaeus: cf. 646-9 'standum

[Hercules addresses Antaeus]

est tibi...et ultra | non credere solo, sternique uetabere terra. |

haerebis pressis intra mea pectora membris: | huc, Antaee, cades' 'You must

stand, no more will I entrust you to the soil, or allow you to lie prostrate upon the earth. Here you will stay, with limbs crushed within my embrace: on me, Antaeus, shall you fall.' Iuba, on the other hand, knows how to exploit the strengths of his native soil, and (723) ipse caua regni uires in ualle retentat ‘himself keeps back his kingdom's strength in a hollow valley well hidden in the bosom of the land." Iuba, unlike Curio, is a cunning tactician when it comes to fama, concealing the kind of passing fama, ‘rumour’, that might betray his army's presence to the enemy (718 obscuratque suam per iussa silentia famam ‘commanding silence he hides reports of himself’), in pursuit of a more lasting kind of fama, (716—17) laetus quod gloria belli | sit rebus seruata suis ‘rejoicing that the glory of the war was reserved for his forces: Curio mistakenly puts his trust in the fama of earlier legend and Roman history, blinded to the fama of his destroyer."" The struggle between Curio and Iuba for control of fama in Africa is part of a larger 'plot of fama' that extends beyond the segment of text just analysed. This larger plot takes the form of a diptych: the episode of Curio immediately follows the intervention of Fama at 4.573—4 to spread throughout the world the report of the mass suicide, to avoid falling into enemy hands, of the Caesarians on the raft of Vulteius. Just one raft, in an

action which Vulteius characterizes as insufficiently great to demonstrate their love for their general (500-1 namque suis pro te gladiis incumbere,

48 On the struggle between Curio and luba to derive strength from the earth see Ahl 1976: Ch. 3 and (esp.) Saylor 1982. 49 Lucan may have worked up the thematization of fama in his Curio episode partly on the basis of hints in Caesar's narrative of Curio's disastrous African expedition at Bell. Civ. 2.23-44, in which an important role is played by messages, information and misinformation of various kinds, misplaced belief (fides: 2.27, 37-8), rumours (2.29), and puffed-up claims to gloria and laudes (2.39).

195

196

Later imperial epic

Caesar, | esse parum scimus ‘for we know that it is too little for your men to fall on their own swords for you, Caesar’), but magnified to great fame.

Vulteius’ wish for a maximum of fama, (509) o utinam, quo plus habeat mors unica famae...‘so that our unprecedented death might win more fame, would that [the Pompeians had offered pardon, so that our suicide might not seem to proceed from despair] is realized at 573-4 nullam maiore locuta est | ore ratem totum discurrens Fama per orbem ‘Fama that runs abroad through the whole world never spoke with louder voice of any vessel’. But Vulteius will be cheated of his hope for one of the traditional functions of fama. At 496—7 he anticipates the future exemplarity of his famous deed: nescio quod nostris magnum et memorabile fatis | exemplum, Fortuna, paras'Fortune, itissome great and memorable exemplary deed that you plan through our deaths.' But, despite Fame's worldwide trek, (575-9) non...ignauae post haec exempla uirorum | percipient gentes quam sit non ardua uirtus | seruitium fugisse manu ‘the cowardly peoples will not learn from these examples of heroism that it is no difficult feat of virtue to escape slavery by death’. Curio, by contrast, does try to live up to the exempla of Hercules and Scipio at Carthage; but so far from emulating the Herculean defeat of the Libyan son of the soil, Curio succeeds only in offering ‘sacrificial’ Roman inferiae to the soil of Libya. Finally however Curio himself does enter the chain of fame, abetted, with whatever degree of sarcasm, by the poet, 811-13: at tibi nos, quando non proderit ista silere a quibus omne aeui senium sua fama repellit, digna damus, iuuenis, meritae praeconia uitae.

But since there is no use in keeping silent about deeds the fame of which fends off all decay of time, to you, young man, I give a celebrity worthy of the life that earned

it.”

Valerius Flaccus and Statius The fully fledged personification of Fama returns to Latin epic after Lucan’s experiment in demythologization. Valerius Flaccus and Statius show an 5°

For this admission that fama may operate independently of the epic poet's ambition to control it cf. 7.208-10 siue sua tantum uenient in saecula fama | siue aliquid magnis nostri quoque cura laboris | nominibus prodesse potest. Sklenár 2003: 42-4 characterizes Curio as an anti-Aeneas in the matter of fama (44) ‘The proto-Tacitean recitation of a dead scoundrel's vices perverts and displaces the kleos of epic commemoration, just as Curio, audax and uenalis, displaces the insignis pietate uir, with whom one cannot avoid comparing him.’

Valerius Flaccus and Stattus

acute awareness of the wider reach of the set-piece Virgilian and Ovidian personifications within the themes and imagery of the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses, and also provide further evidence for a pre-twentieth century self-reflexive reading of the Virgilian Fama.*' Furthermore Statius is a persuasive witness to the reception of Virgilian themes in the civil war epic of Lucan, in a way that may tell us something about Statius' post-Lucanian

reading of the Aeneid." Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 2.101—34?? quocirca struit illa nefas Lemnoque merenti exitium furiale mouet. neque enim alma uideri tantum: eadem tereti crinem subnectitur auro sidereos diffusa sinus, eadem effera et ingens

et maculis suffecta genas pinumque sonantem uirginibus Stygiis nigramque simillima pallam. Iamque dies aderat. Thracas qui fuderat armis dux Lemni, puppes tenui contexere canna

105

ausus et inducto cratem defendere tergo,

laeta mari tum signa refert plenasque mouebant

110

armentis nuribusque rates (et barbara uestis

et torques insigne loci). sonat aequore clamor ‘o patria, o uariis coniunx nunc anxia curis,

has agimus longi famulas tibi praemia belli’, cum dea se piceo per sudum turbida nimbo praecipitat Famamque uagam uestigat in umbra, quam pater omnipotens digna atque indigna canentem" spargentemque metus placidis regionibus arcet aetheris. illa fremens"? habitat sub nubibus imis,

non Erebi, non diua poli, terrasque fatigat

115

120

quas datur. audentem primi spernuntque fouentque, ^ mox omnes agit et motis quatit oppida"' linguis. talem diua sibi scelerisque dolique ministram quaerit auens. uidet illa prior iamque aduolat ultro 5 52

o

>?

=

5

u

5

ES]

5

See Clément-Tarantino (2006): 688-94 ‘Fama et la "fiction" de l'épopée' (on the Flavian epics). Fama also operates extensively in Silius Italicus! Punica: for some discussion see Ch. 7 pp. 270-2. The following discussion coincides at points with that of Clément-Tarantino (2006): 695-708. Smith 2002: 65-9 makes good points on Valerius' engagement with, and development of, features of the Virgilian Fama. I have not seen Elm von der Osten 2007. Aen. 9.595-6 (Numanus) digna atque indigna relatu | uociferans. Aen. 1.56 circum claustra fremunt. 56 Aen. 4.218 famamque fouemus inanem. Aen. 9.608 quatit oppida bello (as Fama provokes war). With Argon. 2.120 terrasque fatigat cf. Aen. 9.605 siluasque fatigat (also from the windy speech of the Fama-like Numanus).

197

198

Later imperial epic

impatiens, iamque ora parat, iam suscitat aures.

125

hanc super incendit Venus atque his uocibus implet: *uade age et aequoream, uirgo, delabere Lemnon et cunctas mihi uerte domos, praecurrere qualis bella soles, cum mille tubas armataque campis agmina et innumerum flatus cum fingis equorum.

130

adfore iam luxu turpique cupidine captos fare uiros carasque toris inducere Thressas. haec tibi principia, hinc rabidas dolor undique matres instimulet. mox ipsa adero ducamque paratas.’ Therefore [because Lemnos neglects to worship Venus] Venus schemes evil and like a Fury plots destruction for guilty Lemnos. She does not only have a nurturing face: sometimes she binds up her hair with smooth gold, her star-bright robes flowing free, sometimes she is fierce and huge, her cheeks stained with blotches, just like

the hellish maidens with her crackling torch and her black cloak. Now the day had come. After routing the Thracians in battle the Lemnian general had boldly woven ships out of slender reeds and covered the wickerwork with layers of hide; happily he carries his standards over the sea and they rowed ships filled with flocks and

women,

with

their barbarian

clothes and

necklace, the local ornament.

The

sea rang with their shouts: ‘My fatherland, my wife now troubled by many cares, here are the maidservants we bring you, the prizes of the long war.’ The turbulent goddess swooped down through the clear sky in a pitch-black cloud and tracked down wandering Fama in the shadows. She sings things fitting and unfitting and spreads fear; the almighty Father has banned her from the quiet spaces of the upper air. Roaring, she dwells in the lowest clouds, goddess neither of hell nor of heaven, and troubles the earth, which is permitted to her. At first men spurn but also cherish her bold words, but soon she drives on everyone and shakes towns with her wagging tongues. This was the creature that the goddess eagerly sought as her agent in crime and trickery. Fama saw her first, and already flies to her, unsummoned and impatient, already she gets ready to speak and pricks up her ears. Venus

inflames her further and inspires her with these words:

‘Go maiden,

glide down to sea-girt Lemnos and throw every home into turmoil, in the form in which you run before battles when you tell stories of a thousand trumpets and armed hosts on the field and the snorting of numberless horses. Say that their husbands will soon arrive, slaves to luxury and base lust, bringing their darling Thracian women for their beds. Make this beginning, let this goad all the women far and wide into maddened grief. When they are ready I shall come myself and lead them.’

In Hardie 1993a: 43-4 1 discussed this episode with reference to the power of the epic Fury to embody herself in an indefinite chain of other characters, and to the unsettling similarity in the Aeneid between the actions of

Valerius Flaccus and Statius

Venus (in inspiring Dido with a destructive erotic passion) and of Allecto (in infuriating Amata), a similarity on which Valerius comments through

‘combinatorial imitation’ Here I will place the emphasis on the transformations, disguises, of Fama in this hall of mirrors. Venus’ own Fury-like role

is signalled by 102 exitium furiale, referring to her revenge on the women of Lemnos for their neglect of her cult, and by the subsequent description of Venus’ split personality, both heavenly goddess and spitting image of the hellish virgins, the Furies. Somewhat unusually (since Fama is usually self-motivating, reflecting the difficulty of tracing the origin of a rumour), Venus approaches Fama in the way that the Ovidian Inuidia, Fames and Morpheus (but not Fama) are prompted into action by other gods, and in the way that the Virgilian Aeolus and Allecto are prompted by Juno. Fama is thus structurally placed in the position of Allecto, already suggesting an equivalence between Venus and Fama, as both playing a Fury role.”* Statius may allude to this use of Fama as a subordinate agent when he makes of her the servant of Mars and Pauor at Theb. 3.425-31 (see below pp. 205-6); if so, he recognizes that in the Valerian episode the goddess of love incites a peculiarly horrible kind of war. Venus uses Fama as an agent in her own sphere, to spread rumours of erotic enslavement: Argon. 2.131—2 adfore iam luxu turpique cupidine captos | fare uiros, with heavy allusion to Aen. 4.193—4 (the reported words of Fama) nunc hiemem inter se luxu... fouere |... turpique cupidine captos. In Aeneid 4, too, a rumour about an erotic attachment leads to military violence in the longer perspective (the Punic Wars, called down by Dido as vengeance for her abandonment in her curse on the Trojans). The personifications that hurry at the climax of the Valerian narrative to the summons of the Allecto-like call to action of Venus (identified as Mauortia coniunx, Argon. 2.208) — Pauor, Discordia, Irae, Dolus, Rabies, Letum (2.204—

6) - largely overlap with the personifications that accompany the Statian Mars at Theb. 3.424—5 and 7.47-53. Venus

flies down,

(2.115)

'a stormy goddess

(dea

turbida)

in a black

cloud’, to track a creature who lives in the clouds and roars like the winds of Virgil's Aeolus (119): like meets like, and Valerius footnotes the relation-

ship between Fama and storm in Virgil and Ovid (see Chs. 3 pp. 100-1, 5 pp. 160-1). Statius registers the mirror-relationship between Venus and Fama in Valerius when he uses the phrase dea turbida of Famaat Theb. 2.208. Venus uses Fama's own methods on Fama at Argon. 2.126 super incendit, uocibus implet, superheating an already incendiary creature. In what follows

58

The affinities between Fama and both Venus and Allecto undermine the theological

demarcations of 120 non Erebi, non diua poli.

199

Later imperial epic

Fama and Venus take turns to disguise themselves as one of the Lemnian women to incite their fellows. The fact that the goddess Venus is easily interchangeable with the personification (or emotion) of love makes the two goddesses’ mode of operation closely comparable. Fama disguises herself as the Lemnian Neaera and self-reflexively puts it about that (158-9) me quoque pulsam | fama uiro ‘the rumour is that I too have been rejected by my husband’. These rumours once sown propagate themselves naturally from one woman to the next: 166-7 obuia quaeque eadem traditque auditque,” neque ulli | uana fides. tum uoce deos, tum questibus implent'each hears from the next and passes on the same message, and each is given full credence; then they fill the ears of the gods with cries and complaints’. Venus disguises herself as the Lemnian Dryope and self-reflexively suggests that while their husbands are sleeping with their new concubines (184) magnum aliquid spirabit amor ‘love will inspire some great deed.’ The fury of love scorned then spreads like wildfire through the Lemnian women. At 134 Venus had told Fama, ‘mox ipsa adero ducamque paratas'. This is fulfilled at 196-8 when ipsa Venus leaps down to Lemnos, but this is a staggering instance of what I have labelled 'epic ipse, the emphatic use of ipse in contexts where identity is fluid; a particularly outrageous example is the use of ipse to declare himself by the Ovidian Morpheus disguised as Ceyx at Met. 11.668.^' Here Venus appears with the torch of a Fury,” ready not for love but for the business of her husband Mars, pugnaeque accincta 'girt for battle, and still performing the job of Fama: Argon. 2.200— 1 inde nouam pauidas uocem furibunda per auras | congeminat ‘in her fury she redoubles a fresh [or previously unheard] cry through the terrified breezes'.^ Venus also has the power of mimicry, imitating the groans and cries of the dying (2.210 gemitus fingit uocesque cadentum), an imitation that soon turns into reality when she bursts into houses carrying a freshly severed head. This power of imitation she shares with Fama, according to

M

e$

59 Cf Ov. Met. 12.47 (House of Fama) tota fremit uocesque refert iteratque quod audit. 6 The language also suggests the inspiration of a great epic narrative. 6 "ipse Morpheus: Hardie 20022: 278. See ibid. Index s.v. ipse. 6 With 196 quassans undantem turbine pinum cf. Luc. Bell. Civ. 1.572-3 Erinys | excutiens pronam flagranti uertice pinum, Virg. Aen. 7.397-8 (Amata) ipsa inter medias flagrantem feruida pinum | sustinet; 9.72 (Turnus, like Amata, infuriated by Allecto) atque manum pinu flagranti feruidus

9

w

200

implet. The terrifying effect of this cry on the land and sea of Thrace, on mothers and their babes (201-3), repeats the effect of Allecto’s Tartarea uox on the landscape and people of Italy at Aen. 7.516-18; Venus’ uox is then noua in the sense that it is new, strange, for the goddess of love to

speak with the voice of a Fury.

Valerius Flaccus and Statius

Venus herself: 128-30 praecurrere...| bella soles, cum mille tubas armataque campis | agmina et innumerum flatus cum fingis equorum. Venus’ own exercise in the art of fiction has the effect of triggering an unusual outburst on the part of the epic poet himself, 216-19: unde ego tot scelerum facies, tot fata iacentum exsequar? heu uatem monstris quibus intulit ordo! quae se aperit series! o qui me uera canentem sistat et hac nostras exsoluat imagine noctes! How shall I describe so many faces of crime, the deaths of so many corpses? Alas, to what horrors has this story brought the poet! What a tale unfolds itself! O, would that someone might stop me as [ sing of the truth, and release my nights from this vision!

"The poet, claiming disingenuously to be the mouthpiece of a true epic fama (as opposed to the indiscriminate utterances of mythological Fama, “singing things both fit and unfit”, 117), confuses the night of the Lemnian slaughter with the nights of his poetic labour filled with the theatre of his imagination (imagine)."^" Venus’ intervention is all the invention of the poet, but he displaces his own creation of fictions on to his character.”

Statius, Thebaid Thebaid 2.201-13 ergo alacres Argi, fuso rumore per urbem aduenisse duci generos primisque hymenaeis egregiam Argian nec formae laude secundam Deipylen tumida iam uirginitate iugari, gaudia mente parant. socias it Fama per urbes finitimisque agitatur agris procul usque Lycaeos Partheniosque super saltus Ephyraeaque rura, nec minus Ogygias eadem dea turbida Thebas insilit: haec totis perfundit moenia pennis Labdaciumque ducem praemissae consona nocti territat; hospitia et thalamos et foedera regni permixtumque genus (quae tanta licentia monstro,

205

210

quis furor?) et iam bella canit.

64 Hardie 1993a: 44. 65 An argument, perhaps, for retaining the MSS reading at 215 [Venus] cunctantibus inuenit enses ingerit Heinsius, inserit Hill (uide Stat. Theb. 5.230).

201

Later imperial epic

A rumour spreads through the city that sons-in-law for the ruler have arrived, and that the fair Argia and Deipyle her peer in beauty, virgins now swelling in ripeness, are to be wed in first nuptials; Argos eagerly looks forward to the joyful event. Fama goes through the allied cities and is busy far in the neighbouring countryside, reaching to the glens of Lycaeus and Parthenius and beyond, and the fields of Corinth. Nor less does the same turbulent goddess swoop on Ogygian Thebes; she smothers the walls with her wings, and chiming with the vision of the previous night she terrifies the Labdacian ruler [Eteocles]; she sings of hospitality, weddings, royal alliance, the mingling of races (such licence, such madness does the monster

have), and now her song is of war.°° At Theb. 2.134 the scene switches back from Thebes to Argos, where

Adrastus had spent the night brooding on the meaning of the simultaneous arrival of Polynices and Tydeus: 147-8 quae sint generis adscita repertis | fata mouet ‘he ponders what Fate he is adopting with the discovery of sonsin-law.’ The next day he formally announces to the two that marriage to his daughters is promised to them (169) longo... ordine fati ‘by the long thread of Fate. At 2.201 Fama begins to work within the designs of a Fate of whose larger schemes Adrastus cannot know. As in Aeneid 4 a rumour about an arrival leading to marriage" (in this case prospective and real) is spread abroad, per urbem as is Fama's way,” initially through the city of Argos. This joyful, and true, rumour travels through other Greek cities (205 per urbes), to mutate into the fully personified Virgilian goddess (208 dea turbida: cf. Aen. 4.195 dea foeda) of a discordant Fama at the point when she takes the reader back to Thebes, where the book had started. She smothers the walls of Thebes with her feathers,” inducing terror like the Virgilian Fama (211 territat; Aen. 4.187 magnas territat urbes), and like Fama in Aeneid 4 she now conveys a tale of a wedding that will lead to conflict. iam bella canit ‘now she sings of war’ (213): fama amoris has turned into fama belli. Within the fiction she sets tongues talking of war, and in so doing she provokes war (Fama’s role as instigator of action), but what she sings’! coincides with the subject of this poem

(Fama’s role as recorder of action) (for this dual

=

66 On this passage see Clément-Tarantino 2006: 679-80. 6 Modelled on Aen. 11.471-2 multaque se incusat qui non acceperit ultro | Dardanium Aenean generumque asciuerit urbi. 68

ee

202

With 202 aduenisse... generos cf. Aen. 4.191

uenisse Aenean; Statius also looks to Aeneas’ fated

arrival as a gener in Latium in the second half of the Aeneid: 7.69 aduentare uirum; 7.98 externi uenient generi. 69

per urbem,

urbes of fama: Aen. 4.173, 666; 7.104; 8.554; 9.473; 12.608; Theb. 2.201, 205; 3.10;

Achill. 2.66; Silv. 1.2.197 (epithalamium) Asteris et uatis totam cantata per urbem. 70 7

With 209 totis perfundit moenia pinnis cf. Silv. 5.4.16 (Somnus) totas infundere pennas. Aen. 4.190 pariter facta atque infecta canebat.

Valerius Flaccus and Statius

role of fama see Ch. 1 pp. 10-11). Between her report of the permixtum genus (echoing the forbidden mingling of Trojan and Carthaginian, (Aen. 4.112) misceri... populos, whose abortive beginning is the union of Dido and Aeneas broadcast by Fama)’* and her song of the wars to come, the narrator interjects a close echo of Lucan's programmatic question to the citizens of Rome at Bellum ciuile 1.8, quis furor, o ciues, quae tanta licentia ferri? ‘What madness is this, citizens, what this great licence to kill?'^* In neither context can the furor and licentia of the actors in Lucan's and Statius' civil wars be separated from the inspirational furor and poetic licentia of the epic narrator. The line-ending in 212 licentia monstro replicates Bellum ciuile 6.436, where we are told that the furor of Erictho, herself a perverted

figure of the poet and, as Martin Dinter has shown, an embodiment of Fama herself, is reinforced by her proximity to the witches of Thessaly, (436—7) ficti quas nulla licentia monstri | transierit, quarum quidquid non creditur ars est ‘who could not be outdone by the licence of any fictitious monster, and who practise whatever is incredible. As in the description of

Caesar's massive siege-walls earlier in the book which outdo the Trojan walls of poetic fable (6.48—9 nunc uetus Iliacos attollat fabula muros | ascribatque deis), Lucan here implies that his ‘historical’ subject matter outbids the hyperbole of poetic licence." We are to believe that his ‘real’ witches can surpass any product of poetic fantasy. Credulitas, we remember, dwells in Ovid's House of Fama (Met. 12.59).

Moo woe

Ss N

For Eteocles the report of Fama is doubly terrifying in that what she says is 'consonant with the night just passed, when the ghost of Laius, disguised as Tiresias, had incited Eteocles to battle-lust against his brother by reporting events in Argos. Laius appealed to the authority both of Fama ( Theb. 2.108— 9 iamque ille nouis — scit Fama — superbit | conubiis 'and now he glories in his new marriage, as Rumour knows’) and of Fate (2.111 socer augurio fatalis Adrastus 'Adrastus fated by prophecy to be his father-in-law’). The

And further hinting at the monstrous through allusion to the Virgilian description of the Minotaur, (Aen. 6.25) mixtumque genus proles biformis. quis furor? recurs in the mouth of Jocasta addressing Eteocles before the climatic duel, Theb. 11.329: there the immediate model is the quis furor? (Bell. Civ. 1.681) of the Roman matrona who has a vision of the forthcoming civil war, herself a figure for the poet of the Bellum civile; with Theb. 11.329-30 unde iterum regni integrata resurgit | Eumenis? cf. the complaint of Lucan's matrona, (Bell Civ. 1.692) consurgunt partes iterum. Dinter 2002: 14-20.

Statius makes this move at Silv. 1.1.8-9 nunc age Fama prior notum per saecula nomen | Dardanii miretur equi (Domitian’s equestrian statue is greater than the Trojan Horse) and 1.3.27-8 (the river running through Vopiscus’ villa is superior to the Fama of the Hellespont and Leander’s swim).

203

204

Later imperial epic

operation of Fama is fully in accordance with the plan of Jupiter, who in Book 1 had dispatched Mercury to bring the ghost of Laius to Eteocles, and who had ordained that Polynices should continue to keep his brother out of Thebes: 1.302 hinc causae irarum, certo reliqua ordine ducam ‘that is the

cause of anger; what follows I shall guide in fated order’. The epic engine of anger will proceed on the undeviating tracks of Jupiter's ‘fixed order’ of Fate. Famasings in harmony with the ghost of Laius, who is the tool of Mercury in a scene modelled on Mercury's descents in Aeneid 4 to urge Aeneas to leave Carthage. Laius mimics Virgil's Mercury when he tells the sleeping Eteocles that he has been sent by Jupiter.’“ But in disguising himself as Tiresias he plays the same trick as Allecto when she dressed up as the priestess Calybe to approach the sleeping Turnus in Aeneid 7. The narrative structure of Aeneid 4 suggests a symmetrical opposition between the descent of Mercury, the ‘good word’ of Father Jupiter, and the ascent of Fama, the ‘bad word’ of

Mother Earth, and a close relative of Allecto (see Ch. 3 pp. 101-2). Within the Aeneid this opposition is in fact impossible to maintain. The Statian narrative does not even keep up the pretence of a separation of celestial and chthonic powers.

Thebaid 3.420—39 et iam noctiuagas inter deus armifer umbras desuper Arcadiae fines Nemeaeaque rura Taenariumque cacumen Apollineasque Therapnas armorum tonitru ferit et trepidantia corda

420

implet amore sui. comunt Furor Iraque cristas,

frena ministrat equis Pauor armiger. at uigil omni

425

Fama sono uanos rerum succincta tumultus

anteuolat currum flatuque impulsa gementum alipedum trepidas denso cum murmure plumas excutit: urguet enim stimulis auriga cruentis facta, infecta loqui, curruque infestus ab alto

430

terga comasque deae Scythica pater increpat hasta. qualis ubi Aeolio dimissos carcere Ventos dux prae se Neptunus agit magnoque uolentes incitat Aegaeo; tristis comitatus eunti circum lora fremunt Nimbique Hiemesque profundae

435

Nubilaque et uulso terrarum sordida fundo 76

Theb.2.115-16 ipse deum genitor tibi me miseratus ab alto | mittit: cf. Aen. 4.268-9 ipse deum tibi me claro demittit Olympo | regnator.

Valerius Flaccus and Statius

Tempestas: dubiae motis radicibus obstant Cyclades, ipsa tua Mycono Gyaroque reuelli, Dele, times magnique fidem testaris alumni. And now the god of arms descending among the wandering shades of night strikes with the thunder of weapons the land of Arcadia, the Nemean countryside, Taenarus'

peak and Apollo’s Therapne, and fills men’s quivering hearts with love of himself. Madness and Anger comb his crest, and his squire Panic handles his horses’ reins. Fama, awake to every sound and equipped with false news of tumults, flies before his chariot and driven by the breath of his neighing horses shakes out her trembling feathers with thick rustles; with bloody goads the charioteer urges her to speak of things done and not done, and threatening from his lofty chariot Father Mars slaps his spear on her back and hair. Just as when King Neptune drives before him the winds released from Aeolus’ prison, and urges the willing blasts over the great Aegean; as he goes a gloomy cortege roars round the reins, Squalls and deep Tempests,

Clouds

and

Storm

with

dirt torn

from

the earth’s

foundations.

The

Cyclades stand their ground uncertainly, shaken to the roots, and you yourself, Delos, fear that you will be torn from your neighbours Myconos and Gyaros, and you appeal to the good faith of your great foster son [Apollo].

In Statius’ most elaborate staging of Fama she appears as one of several personifications in the train of Mars.’’ During the night after Tydeus’ return to Argos from his abortive embassy to Thebes and the ambush, Mars wanders around the Peloponnese inspiring battle-lust, in a manner not unlike Fama at 2.206—9. Mars’ disruptive mission, like that of Mercury in Books 1 and 2, is on the orders of Jupiter, and in furtherance of the eternal decrees of Fate

(3.229—52). Mars’ particular charge from Jupiter is to lend fides, ‘credibility’, to Tydeus’ account of Theban treachery (239 adde fidem); this role the wargod has already faithfully performed as the human actor Tydeus repeatedly retells his story on his way from Thebes to Argos: 343-4 prona fides populis; deus omnia credere suadet | Armipotens, geminatque acceptos Fama pauores ‘the people are quick to trust him; the god, the Lord of Arms, persuades them to believe everything, and Rumour doubles the terror that afflicts them"? The actions of Mars and Fama are hard to distinguish. Line 344 begins with Armipotens and closes with Fama pauores. At 3.424— 31 the relationship between Mars, Pauor and Fama is given a pictorial 7^ Snijder 1968 on Theb. 3.425 points to the comparable comitatus of Bacchus at 4.661-2 Ira Furorque | et Metus et Virtus et numquam sobrius Ardor. 78 geminatque acceptos. . . pauores. (i) ‘receives and makes copies of (in other people)’; (11) ‘doubles (in intensity); i.e the hyperbolical power of Fama: cf. Ov. Met. 12.57-8 mensuraque ficti | crescit. At Theb. 3.336-8 Tydeus functions as a personification of Fama, weaving his repeatedly told tale of hatred on a journey from city to city.

205

Later imperial epic

expression that was to find its way into Renaissance iconographies (see Fig. 23). Fama flies before the chariot of Mars, goaded on by Pauor, who

is both armiger and auriga of Mars; Fama is given extra impetus both by the breath of the horses of Mars and by the spear of Mars himself. The breath of the horses suggests the breath of the voices by which Fama is spread, and Fama's feathers at the end of line 428 answer alipedum at the beginning of the line, perhaps here to be taken literally of divine horses with winged feet.” As often Fama's uncontrollable nature seerns to express itself in a tendency to spill over into other characters in the allegorical complex, muddying the precise conceptual articulation of the composite picture. Statius' tableau of Mars and his attendant personifications has Iliadic models, including Il. 4.439—45 where the two armies are roused to war by Ares, Athene, Panic (Deimos) and Fear (Phobos), and Eris.*' Statius has no direct equivalent of Eris (Discordia), but the introduction of Fama

here in the train of Mars comments on Virgil's use of the Homeric Eris as a model for his personification of Fama (see Ch. 3 p. 87). Statius' picture also owes much to Virgil's previous reworking of the Iliadic personifications of war in the simile at Aen. 12.331—6, where the horses of Mars fly faster

than the winds. At Theb. 3.423—9 Statius applies to his own picture of Mars a simile of Neptune driving on the storm-winds; the connection between raising a storm and arousing war is one that Statius found in Il. 4.422—45, where the description of Ares and his attendant personifications is preceded by a storm-simile of the Greeks moving to war, a connection reinforced by the fact that the description at 442-3 of Eris’ sudden growth is calqued on the description of the mounting sea at 424—5. Statius' picture of Mars and Fama traces a genealogy of epic war-storms reaching from the first outbreak of full-scale battle in the Iliad down to the latest and greatest battle in the Aeneid. The chief models for the contents of the Statian simile at 3.432-9 are Virgilian, a combinatorial imitation of elements of the storm in Book 1 and of the battle of Actium in Book 8 of the Aeneid, drawing attention to the tight imagistic connection within the 7? For the combination of the two roles cf. Aen. 2.476-7; 9.330. Mozley 1928 ad loc. is wrong to separate the two and introduce Bellona as the auriga (although Bellona does have this role at

7.72-4). $9

e

206

8

Although these are not found in the visual arts: see Barchiesi 2005 on Ov. Met. 2.48. Fama and winged horses will come together by another route in the frequent Renaissance use of Pegasus as an image of Fame (based on a passage in Fulgentius! Mythologiae): see Ch. 16 pp. 622-4. Cf. also Il. 5.518 Ares and Eris, 13.298-300 Ares and his son Phobos, in a simile; 15.119-20

Ares orders Deimos and Phobos to yoke his horses (taken by Antimachus to be the names of his horses, followed perhaps by Aen. 9.719); 18.535 Eris, Kudoimos, Ker; 20.48-53 Eris, Athene,

Ares among the gods at war.

Valerius Flaccus and Statius

Aeneid between these two episodes. With the Virgilian storm-sequence in mind, it comes as a shock to find that here Neptune is driving on the winds released from the prison-house of Aeolus, rather than shutting them up again; this is in line with the Statian tendency not to prevaricate about the role of the Olympian gods in abetting strife and disorder; Neptune is only doing what his brother Jupiter does. One should not perhaps seek a precise correspondence between the several attendants of Mars and the attendants of Neptune. Neptune drives the winds before him, as Mars drives his horses,

perhaps; but if we picture Neptune driving a team of marine horses (as at Aen. 5.817—19), then the winds will correspond to Fama. In that case Statius activates a long-standing connection between Fame and winds." Virgil's (as also Ovid's) Fama is closely linked to the forces of the storm (see above

pp. 100-1), and the storm in Aeneid 1 is an image of unruly words (see

Ch. 2 pp. 70-2). Thebaid 7.105—44 iam pronis Gradiuus equis Ephyraea premebat litora, qua summas caput Acrocorinthos in auras tollit et alterna geminum mare protegit umbra. inde unum dira comitum de plebe Pauorem quadripedes anteire iubet: non alter anhelos insinuare metus animumque auertere ueris aptior. innumerae monstro uocesque manusque et facies quamcumque uelit; bonus omnia credi auctor et horrificis lymphare incursibus urbes.

105

110

si geminos soles ruituraque suadeat astra, aut nutare solum aut ueteres descendere siluas,

115

a! miseri uidisse putant. tunc acre nouabat ingenium: falso Nemeaeum puluere campum erigit; attoniti tenebrosam a uertice nubem respexere duces; falso clamore tumultum

auget, et arma uirum pulsusque imitatur equorum, terribilemque uagas ululatum spargit in auras. exiluere animi, dubiumque

in murmure

120

uulgus

pendet: ‘ubi iste fragor? ni fallimur aure. sed unde puluereo stant astra globo? num Ismenius ultro miles? ita est: ueniunt. tanta autem audacia Thebis?

9? Cf also Hor. Ep. 2.1.177 quem tulit ad scaenam uentoso Gloria curru, imitated at Stat. Silv. 4.4.50-1 uentosaque gaudia Famae | quaerimus.

125

207

208

Later imperial epic

an dubitent, age, dum inferias et busta colamus?'

haec Pauor attonitis; uariosque per agmina uultus induitur: nunc Pisaeis e milibus unus,

nunc Pylius, nunc ore Lacon, hostesque propinquos adiurat turmasque metu consternat inani. nil falsum trepidis. ut uero amentibus ipse incidit et sacrae circum fastigia uallis turbine praeuectus rapido ter sustulit hastam, ter concussit equos, clipeum ter pectore plausit: arma, arma insani sua quisque ignotaque nullo more rapit, mutant galeas alienaque cogunt ad iuga cornipedes; ferus omni in pectore saeuit mortis amor caedisque, nihil flagrantibus obstat: praecipitant redimuntque moras. sic litora uento incipiente fremunt, fugitur cum portus; ubique

130

135

140

uela fluunt, laxi iactantur ubique rudentes;

iamque natant remi, natat omnis in aequore summo ancora, iam dulcis medii de gurgite ponti respicitur tellus comitesque a puppe relicti. Now with headlong horses Mars pressed on the shores of Corinth, where Acrocorinth raises his head into the lofty breezes and covers the two seas with his alternating shadow. Then he bids one of his dread band of companions, Panic, to

go in front of his horses; none other is better at implanting gasping terror and in distracting the mind from the truth. The monster has countless voices and hands,

and puts on whatever face he likes; on his authority all things are easily believed, and he drives cities mad with his terrifying onslaughts. Should he try to persuade people that the sun was double and that the stars were falling, or that the earth was rocking or that ancient woods were coming down the mountains, the wretches

would think that they saw these things. Then he put his keen talent to a new fiction: he raises a false dust cloud on the Nemean plain: the stunned leaders look at the dark cloud overhead; he magnifies the noise of war with false shouting, and imitates men at arms and galloping horses, and broadcasts fearsome screams through the wandering breezes. Their hearts leapt, and the muttering crowd hung in doubt: ‘Where is the noise? — unless our ears deceive us. But why does a cloud of dust hide the stars? Are the Theban soldiers coming to meet us? That's it: they are on their way. Can Thebes be so bold? Are they to waver, tell me, while we busy ourselves with

funerals and tombs?' Such were the words that Panic fed the astounded troops. He puts on different faces as he goes through the ranks: now one of the thousands from Pisa, now a Pylian, now a Spartan in appearance, and he swears that the enemy are at hand, and he dismays the troops with idle fears; to the frightened men it is all true. But when he fell on the crazed army in his own person, and, after riding around the heights of the sacred valley in a whirling rush, thrice raised his spear, thrice struck

Valerius Flaccus and Statius

his horses, thrice clapped his shield against his breast, arms, arms, maddened, each man snatched up, his own or a stranger’s in confusion, they swap helmets and force horses into yokes not their own. Fierce love of death and slaughter rages in every breast, nothing gets in the way of their burning passion; they plunge into action and make up for the delay. Just so the shores resound as the wind gets up, when a fleet leaves harbour; everywhere sails flow, everywhere loose ropes are tossed. Now the oars are dipped, and every anchor dips in the surface of the sea, now they look back from the middle of the ocean at the sweet land and the companions they have left astern.

At the beginning of Book 7 Jupiter restarts the epic motor after the Nemean delay by sending Mercury on another mission, this time to the House of the war-god Mars. Without further delay (81 nec longa moratus) Mars sets off: his agent for the task of stirring the becalmed Argive army is the personification of Pauor ‘Panic’, a densely written example of what Hans Smolenaars calls ‘multiple imitation"? The dominant model is Virgil’s Fama: the reader is cued when at 109 we are told that Mars orders Pauor to go before his horse, where in 3.425—9 it was Fama who flew before the

chariot and horses of Mars." Pointedly, perhaps, the word fama itself does not appear in the passage, but her presence is felt throughout. There is a multiplicity of further models, Virgilian and otherwise, which activates connections firstly between several passages in the Aeneid, and secondly between those Virgilian passages and passages in post-Virgilian epic, so delineating an anatomy of the Virgilian Fama and tracing the proliferation of Virgilian Fama in those later epics." The sheer density of the intertextuality is itself a performance ofthe multiple echoings to be heard in the House of Fama. Furthermore, the figure of Pauor recapitulates and comments on the Thebaid's own dealings with Fama and related beings; and it is here that Statius most fully reveals the community of purpose between his fictional personification of Fama and the epic poet himself. To start with the complex of Virgilian allusions. 106—7 qua summas caput Acrocorinthos in auras | tollit alludes to Virgil's descriptions of both Fama (Aen. 4.176 mox sese attollit in auras) and the man-mountain Atlas

(Aen. 4.248—9). Even before we read that Pauor takes the place of Fama in front of the chariot of Mars, our attention is drawn

to the foundational

Virgilian model. The combination of the two Virgilian giants, Fama and

83

Smolenaars

9

Smolenaars 1994 on 7.109: ‘Statius’ transposition of the traditional roles and functions of

1994: xxvi-xxxi.

e

Pavor and Fama’. 2

Statius' models are listed by Smolenaars 1994: 56.

209

Later imperial epic

Atlas, comments on the parallelism in Aeneid 4 between these two,” and at

the same time collapses the distinction that the Virgilian text attempts to maintain between the uncontrollable and ever-shifting monster Fama and the stable and immovable mountain, the product of an irreversible, terminal

metamorphosis. Acrocorinth marks a stage in the journey of Mars with his messenger Pauor, as Atlas marks a stage in the descent of the Virgilian messenger Mercury (in both cases the time of arrival is marked by iam: Aen. 4.246; Theb. 7.105); again Statius collapses the symmetrical opposition between Mercury and Fama in Aeneid 4.*’ The language at 108 inde unum dira comitum de plebe Pauorem echoes Jupiter's choice of an agent of panic at Aen. 12.853 harum unam celerem demisitab aethere summo ‘he sent one of these swift Furies down from heaven's height" This Jovian agent isa Dira; Pauor is another to add to the list of the Fury-like companions of Mars, the personifications, including Discordia and Furor, to be found in the House of

Mars at 7.40—63, yet another allegorical House represented as a version of the underworld." However, it is not Jupiter's Fury, but Juno's Fury, Allecto,

who is most fully re-embodied in the Statian Pauor. Both Pauor and Allecto have a multiplicity of masks: with Theb. 7.112 et facies quamcumque uelit cf. Aen. 7.328—9 tot sese uertit in ora, | tam saeuae facies ‘so many are the faces into which she transforms herself, so fierce her appearances: The mad clamour for weapons and raging emotions at Theb. 7.135-8 replicate the effects of Allecto on Turnus, at the point where agency passes from the mythical Fury to the human emotion — or is it a personification? — of pauor, Aen. 7.458-62: olli somnum ingens rumpit pauor, ossaque et artus perfundit toto proruptus corpore sudor. arma amens fremit, arma toro tectisque requirit; saeuit amor ferri et scelerata insania belli,

ira super. A great terror burst in upon his sleep, and sweat broke out all over his body, soaking his limbs. Maddened

he roars for his armour, he searches for his armour in his bed

and in the palace. Love of weapons rages in him, and the criminal madness of war, and to crown all, anger.

Li

B

S

8

8

=

210

Hardie 1986: 278, and above Ch. 3 p. 94. Hardie 1986: 276-8. At Silu. 5.1.106-7 the Fama that brings news of Domitian’s laurels outstrips the sun, Mercury, and Iris (see Ch. 5 pp. 175-6). The ending of the previous line, 852 territat urbes, is repeated from 4.187, in the description of Fama, who is thus related to this Dira, as well as to her sister Allecto.

5

Smolenaars 1994: 55 notes that Pauor is first personified at Ov. Met. 4.485 as a companion of Tisiphone.

Valerius Flaccus and Statius

Statius adverts to the close connection that exists in the Aeneid between Fama and Allecto; Pauor’s role in kick-starting an epic plot that seems to have run out of steam, at the beginning of the second half of the poem, is also the role of Allecto in Aeneid 7. Lines 108-11 describing Mars’ choice of Pauor as his agent allude not just to the Virgilian Jupiter’s selection of one of his Dirae, but also to the Ovidian personification Sleep’s selection of the dream-spirit Morpheus to carry out Juno's command to send a deceptive dream to Alcyone at Met. 11.646-8 cunctisque e fratribus unum | Morphea... |, eligit ‘he singles out Morpheus from all his brothers. The description of Pauor as non alter... aptior looks to Ovid's preceding description of Morpheus at Met. 11.635-6 non illo quisquam sollertius alter | exprimit incessus uultumque sonumque loquendi ‘he has no equal in the skilful imitation ofa person's gait, his appearance, and the sound of his voice’. Morpheus, who shares with the Virgilian Fama and

Allecto (and the Statian Pauor) the power of shape-shifting, may succeed in hoodwinking Alcyone, but his protestation at Met. 11.666—70 that he is no auctor ambiguus 'deceptive authority, that he does not deal in wandering rumours, does not blind the reader to the fact that he and his home, the

House of Somnus, are closely related to the House of Fama described at the beginning of the next book of the Metamorphoses (see Ch. 5 pp. 173— 4). In Ovid's Fama we discern a (peculiarly Ovidian) picture of epic, and, more widely, of poetic, tradition itself; Morpheus is himself a figure for

the shifty and delusive operations of the text of the Metamorphoses." At Theb. 2.213 we were told that Fama bella canit; the authorial powers of Pauor, on whose authority everything is credible (112-13 bonus omnia credi

| auctor),

are described

in more

detail at 7.116-20.

7.120

arma

uirum... imitatur identifies Pauor as an epic successor of Virgil.’” Statius also alludes to Valerius Flaccus' account of the working of Fama at Argon. 2.128—30, where she functions as a Fury-like agent of Venus and at the same time mimics the epic poet's power of creating martial fictions (see above

pp. 197-201). In this cross-section through the history of Fama Statius does not overlook Lucan's naturalistic account of the propagation of rumour and panic at Bellum civile 1.466ff. (see above pp. 181—3), a process in which (484—5)

o

9 9

n

9

=

9

See Hardie 20024: 277-8. Credulitas is one of the subsidiary personifications in Ovid’s House of Fama. Clément-Tarantino 2006: 673. With Val. Flacc. Argon. 2.130 innumerum flatus cum fingis equorum cf. Theb. 3.427, where Fama is driven on by, rather than imitating, the breath of horses. On Statius’ imitations of Valerius Flaccus see the items cited by Zissos 2006: 166.

211

212

Later imperial epic

sic quisque pauendo | dat uires famae ‘each man's terror fuels rumour'?! The description of Pauor's monstrous body at Theb. 7.111 innumerae monstro uocesque manusque remythologizes Bell. Civ. 1.472 innumeras soluit falsa in praeconia linguas ' [fama] looses countless tongues to spread lying tales; producing a creature with the terrifying multiplicity of hands and voices of a Typhoeus (see Ch. 3 p. 99, and below p. 216). The description of the workings of fama here in Lucan is the start of a larger sequence that reaches to the end of the book, in a gathering crescendo of fama, panic, prodigies and prophecies." That whole sequence is recapitulated in miniature in Statius' account of the reactions at Thebes to reports of Argive warpreparations at Theb. 4.369—405, a passage launched with a great heap of Fama's potent fabrications, (369) accumulat crebros turbatrix Fama pauores

‘Rumour, disturber of the peace, piles panic on panic?" Rumours of the enemy's unstoppable progress are followed by a brief catalogue of prodigies reported in a manner that suggests that we are still in the realm of questionable fama rather than objective epic narration: 376—7 cui non et scire licentia passim | et uidisse fuit? ‘who, wherever he was, did not have licence to know about and see [terrifying portents]?' This is the poetic licence of Fama, as at Theb. 2.212-13

quae tanta licentia monstro... ? (see above

p. 203). The final source of unspeakable knowledge in Book 1 of Lucan is the matrona, inspired by Apollo but compared in a simile to a maenad, who at the end of Bellum civile 1 rushes, in the manner of a bacchic Fama,

through the city of Rome to deliver herself of a prophetic vision of the course of civil war that doubles for the inspiration and subject matter of the epic poet himself. Statius brings down from the mountains into Thebes a literal Bacchant (appropriately for the birthplace of Bacchus) to fill the city with her cries, again like Fama. Her prophetic vision of the war between the brothers carries the added authority of Virgilian imitation, through allusion to civil war moments in the Aeneid (Aeneas and Turnus as warring bulls in the simile at Aen. 12.715—22; Anchises' plea to the unborn Julius Caesar not to raise his hand in civil war at 6.834—5). The sequence as a whole, like its

model in Lucan, shows that the utterances of Fama, of visionary prophecy and of the inspired poet are points along a spectrum. There is more to say about the slipperiness of Fama and her relatives in the Pauor episode in Thebaid 7. At 131—2, after the appearance of Pauorthrough the army in various of his disguises, amentibus ipse | incidit. ipse — but

94

For the echoes of Lucan see Smolenaars

1994 on 7.118£., 122, 122f., 123-6, 130.

55 On the links between fama and prodigies in historiography see Ch. 7 pp. 296, 299. %© The line-ending Fama pauores is also at 3.344 (see above p. 205).

Valerius Flaccus and Statius

who

is ‘himself’? Smolenaars

(1994 ad loc.) registers the commentators’

disagreement: the account of Pauors multiplicity of disguises at 127-9 suggests that ipseis Pauor himself, but the arousing of the horses and striking of the shield at 134 are more proper to Mars. At 3.343-4 it was difficult to distinguish the roles of Mars and Fama in spreading the words of Tydeus (see above p. 205). The reference of ipse may be undecidable, an example of ‘epic ipse (see above p. 205). The shiftiness of Pauor/Fama, the difficulty of locating exactly what or where he, she, or it, is, has already been signalled

in the Statian passage in the phrase (7.122) dubiumque in murmure uulgus, on which Smolenaars

(1994) comments:

'it is difficult to decide whether

in murmure refers to the roaring sound produced by Pavor...or to the confused noise produced by the crowd . . . On the former interpretation the questions contained in the sentence immediately following the line are to be taken as an elaboration of dubium; on the latter these same questions

particularize in murmure." But the difficulty of deciding is precisely the point (it is dubium). Personifications in Latin epic constantly equivocate on their status: fully independent agents, or just a facon de parler by which to refer to the actions of human beings? Whichever way we take in murmure,

the speakers of the questions at 7.123—6 are most naturally taken as the members of the uulgus; but at the end of the direct speech we read (127)

haec Pauor attonitis'these are the words that Panic feeds them* Furthermore, the ambiguity enacts the process of rumour, which spreads because it cannot be pinned down and verified: the uulgus doubtful comments on what they think they hear are themselves further examples of the dubious rumours that fuel the inexorable

march

of Pauor/Fama

towards

all-out war, the

arma, arma of line 135. Other instances of arma, arma juxtaposed all occur

in direct speech,’ and some editors put them in direct speech here, the cry of the soldiers, or perhaps of Pauor. The run of the sentence makes it more natural to take them as the words of the narrator, the object of rapit, but an initial hesitation on the part of the reader as to who voices arma, arma breaks down the boundary between poet and his characters. The resultant merging of poet with a personification of a spirit of war, or with those visited by such a personification, is further marked in the

verb incidit at 131—2 ut uero amentibus ipse | incidit (the subject is either Pauor or Mars). The verb is used by Virgil of Mars inspiring battle-lust at Aen. 9.721 bellatorque animo deus incidit, and by Statius of his own poetic

97

Theb. 3.348; Ov. Met. 12.241. See Smolenaars 199.1 on Theb. 7.135 f. Statius also has in mind Aen. 7.460 (Turnus) arma amens fremit, arma toro tectisque requirit, but the anaphora of arma there creates a different effect from the gemination arma, arma,

213

Later imperial epic

inspiration at Theb. 1.3 Pierius menti calor incidit" Compare the common device whereby the poet is said to do what he describes being done, and with this particular merging of the action of epic poet with the action of epic warriors compare Hor Ep. 1.19.7—8, on the father of Roman epic: Ennius ipse pater numquam nisi potus ad arma | prosiluit dicenda ‘Father Ennius himself never jumped forward to sing of arms except when drunk’, on which Mayer 1994 comments: ‘the poet performs the action he describes... dicenda, coming last, undeceives.”” More generally, and in conclusion, it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Fama that she lightly runs across the boundary that separates the inside and outside of texts.

Nonnus' Typhoeus: the musical giant Eis Nóvvov tév trointty (Anth. Pal. 9.198) Nóvvos éycx ITavós uev eur) TrÓAs, ev Dapin de

Eyyxel govrievri" yoväs fjunca l'ryávrov. To the poet Nonnus Nonnus am I: Panopolis is my city, but in Alexandria I mowed down the children of the Giants with the sword of my voice.

In a pioneering study of the poetology of the late-antique epic by Nonnus, the Dionysiaca (fifth century AD), Robert Shorrock, developing suggestions by Gordon Braden, sees in the monstrous Typhoeus (or Typh(a)on), whose assault on Zeus and the world order occupies much of the first two books of the poem after the opening episode of the rape of Europa, a figure for a failed

attempt at writing a monstrous epic.'?! Typhoeus steals the thunderbolt of Zeus, and he himself will describe it as a musical instrument,

(1.432)

* ©

© oe

ópyavov autoßontov OAUurrtov ‘self-sounding instrument of Olympus,

10

e

214

10

With 7.131—2 amentibus ipse | incidit cf. 10.830 maior ab Aoniis poscenda amentia lucis (noted by McGuire 1997: 238). The disruptive and transgressive operations of Fama in the passages discussed above yield a very different impression from the best-known appearance of Fama in the Thebaid, in the envoi to the poem at 12.812, an (apparently) well-behaved being, detached from the action of the poem itself, who paves a road on which the Thebaid may make its orderly way into posterity, following behind the greater Fama of the Aeneid. For the complication of this anodyne image at Silv. 4.7.25-8 see Hinds 1998: 93-4. For a further Lucanian complication of Statius’ closural Fama see Malamud

1995: 22-7.

The phrase is an adaptation of Dion. 30.46 Eyyei poivtjevti: see Vian 1976: p. lvii, n. 2. Shorrock 2001: 121-5; see Braden 1974.

Nonnus’ Typhoeus: the musical giant

when he talks of matching it in a song-contest against the pan-pipes of Cadmus disguised as a shepherd. But when he attempts to wield the supreme god’s weapon in his assault on the universe, he produces only a dull booming, and the dim lightning gleams with just a AerrraAéov trUp ‘slender flame’ (1.304). For Shorrock Typhoeus’ attempt to usurp the thunderbolt of Zeus marks his self-deluded inability to learn from the Callimachean dictum that ‘thundering is for Zeus, not for me’ (Aitia fr. 1.20 Pfeiffer). The epic will go on to find other ways of constructing a successful Dionysiac kind of epic poetry, Shorrock argues. There is however a problem in simply translating Callimachus’ polemical Poetics into a poem as big and unruly as the many thousands of lines of the Dionysiaca. And while Typhoeus may not be able to handle the thunderbolt, his own native resources of violence fall little if anything short of the fully deployed power of Zeus. At the point where the contest between Typhoeus and Zeus is finally resolved in favour of the latter, it is described as an ioötumos u&yn ‘battle of equal stamp’ (2.553; cf. 475 icópporros Evuw ‘equally balanced war’). isétutros corresponds to Latin anceps (pugna), but the word, which is a favourite of Nonnus, often denotes a more far-reaching match of form or shape; not just an ‘equally balanced’ fight, but a fight characterized by a near-equivalence between the two opponents. A second consideration that complicates any simple dismissal of Typhoeus as one maladroit in the arts of the poet is the manner of the deception employed by Zeus to trick Typhoeus out of the stolen thunderbolt, prior to the use of a properly epic force to defeat his enemy. Zeus disguises Cadmus as a shepherd, who so beguiles Typhoeus with his piping that Zeus is able to sneak into his cave and recover the thunderbolt (1.362-

2.19). It is an excessive susceptibility to the power of music and poetry, more than his inability to play on the ópyavov avToBdntov (1.432), that is the undoing of Typhoeus. These complications in the relationship of Typhoeus both to the supreme godandto the poem in which he appears echo aspects ofthe Virgilian Fama's relationship to Jupiter and to the Aeneid. And indeed a number of features identify the Nonnan Typhoeus as an avatar of that virtual personification of the epic tradition that I wish to see in the Virgilian Fama, and it is via Virgil that I will now approach Nonnus' Typhoeus. At this stage I do not wish to raise the question of Nonnus' possible use of Latin models, although at the end I shall point to some intriguing comparisons. The monster

Fama

in Book 4 (173—97)

of the Aeneid is, in terms of

literary and mythological genealogy, a hybrid, appropriately enough given her polymorphic tendencies and her status as a composite of tradition.

215

216

Later imperial epic

Last-born (179 extremam) daughter of a Mother Earth angry at the gods, and sister of the giants Coeus and Enceladus, she is also a close relative of Typhoeus. In Hesiod’s Theogony (820-80) Typhoeus is the youngest (821) of Gaia’s children, born after Zeus expelled the Titans from heaven. Typhoeus has strong hands and unwearying feet (Theog. 823-4); Fama is swift-footed (Aen. 4.180 pedibus celerem).

Particularly close to the Virgilian Fama is the description of Typhon (Typhoeus) in ps.-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.6.3:'^" When the gods had overcome the Giants, Earth, still more enraged, had intercourse with Tartarus and brought forth Typhon in Cilicia, a hybrid between man and beast. In size and strength he surpassed all the offspring of Earth. As far as the thighs he was of human shape and of such prodigious bulk that he out-topped all the mountains, and his head often brushed the stars. One of his hands reached out to the west, and

the other to the east, and from them projected a hundred dragons' heads. From the thighs downward he had huge coils of vipers, which when drawn out, reached to his very head and emitted a loud hissing. His body was all winged: unkempt hair streamed

on the wind

from

his head and

cheeks; and

fire flashed from

his eyes.

(trans. Frazer)

Both ps.-Apollodorus and Virgil make explicit Earth's anger as her motive for procreation (Aen. 4.178 Terra parens ira inritata deorum). Typhon's head touches the stars: Fama hides her head in the clouds (Aen. 4.177 caput inter

nubila condit). Both Typhon and Fama have feathered or winged bodies (Aen. 4.181 cui quot sunt corpore plumae). Another detail is not directly paralleled in Virgil, but suggests another connection between Typhon and fame: Typhon's hands reach to both west and east, the limits of the reach of fame since Athena spoke of the fame of Ithaca at Od. 13.238—41 oVö£ T1 Ainv | oU To vovuuós Ec Tiv: Toacı 86 uiv udAa TroAAoi, | yu£v 6001 valoucı

Tpós fj T' HEAIdv Te, | HS 60001 netömiode TroTi Zöpov Tepdevta ‘It is not entirely without a name. Many men know of it, both all those who live towards the dawn and sun and all those who live towards the misty darkness."'* Hesiod lays especial emphasis on the din of voices from the heads voices of gods, bull, lion, puppies — transferring to the auditory level the 102 Apollodorus as source for Virgil's Fama is suggested by Corssen 1886: 245-6, 103 See McKeown 1989 on Ov. Am. 1.15.29 Gallus et Hesperiis et Gallus notus Eois. With the passage from Odyssey 13 cf. Dido's assertion at Aer. 1.565-8 that all men know of Troy, including the Carthaginians, (568) nec tam auersus equos Tyria Sol iungit ab urbe. Carthage is a place abuzz with versions of Fama both positive and negative: Henry 1873: 761-5 adduces the Homeric parallel for the Virgilian line, as well as later Latin imitations which make explicit the reference to Fama.

Nonnus’ Typhoeus: the musical giant

polymorphous nature of the beast.!"* Zeus's first response is also sonic, as he crashes out the sound of his own thunderbolt ( Theog. 839).'°° In his book on the representation of poetry and singing in archaic Greek poetry Andrew Ford suggests that ‘[the] idea of poetry as a sublime voicing is matched by a counterimage in the description of... Hesiod's... Typho [sic]; ‘the opa this beast utters is a superhuman but infernal counterpart to the *immortal”... ossathat the Muses “send forth"! ^ The monster's plurality of voices may be compared with Homer’s wish for ten tongues and ten mouths, which even so would be inadequate to catalogue the leaders of the Greeks were the Muses not to remind the poet of their numbers. Yun Lee Too has further developed the notion that Typhon in archaic and classical Greek texts, from Hesiod to Aristophanes, may be read as a figure for a multiplicity of skilfully imitative voices engaged in a struggle for ideological supremacy with the supreme god, Zeus, and his earthly representatives — the king, the judge, the poet who speaks with Olympian authority. Too further notes that "Typhon's defeats also demonstrate the arbitrariness and specificities of the staging and performance of the discrimination and categorization of discourse as variously positive or negative"'"* We shall see that question marks over the justice of Zeus linger on into the Dionysiaca. Nonnus retells the conflict between Zeus and Typhoeus in the first book of the Dionysiaca in a way that suggests that the monster's assault on the supreme god is also a figure for a challenge to the authority of the epic poet

in his role of panegyrist of the Olympian gods.'"* Martin West notes that the vocality of the Hesiodic Typhoeus is particularly stressed by Nonnus: "The variety of noises [my emphasis] emitted by [Hesiod's] T. is mentioned... above all in Nonnus, where the noises correspond to the different animal

shapes that T. combines (1.157—62, 2.250—7, 367-70). " When Typhoeus

=

10.

105

Detienne and Vernant 1978: 117. There is a matching of fires in line 845, which may have been taken by later authors (Aesch. PV 370-2, Septem 493; Apollod. 1.6.3) as meaning that Typhoeus exhaled fire by nature (see West 1966 ad loc.). Ford

10

Too 1998: 50. Typhon forms the subject of her Chapter 1 ‘Krisis and Agon: the etymology of criticism. Goslin 2010 further extends this kind of reading, pointing out that Hesiod’s narrative of succession is framed by the opening hymn of the Muses and the Typhonomachy, and arguing that Zeus's defeat of the disordered sound world of Typhon is necessary for the reordering of the sonic world of the Theogony with the birth of the Muses, so allowing the proper structures of communication between gods and men in the order of Zeus. Braden (197.1) 878-9 comments on the way that Typhon tends to usurp the role of the poet: ‘It is as if the story were not being told from Zeus’ side at all, but... from Typhon's.. . He [T.] is almost a persona for the poet himself." West 1966 on Theog. 831-5.

u

ow

10:

$e

108

*

109

1992: 190-1.

217

Later imperial epic

steals the arms of Zeus, the first characteristic to which Nonnus draws our

attention is the monster’s manifold voices (1.156—7 tret&oas 8€ Bapucwapayov otixa Aeiuóv | Tavtoinv dAdAadev óuogBóoyycv Stra 8npov ‘spreading his row of deep-rumbling throats, he shouted out the cry

of beasts sounding together’),''” as he yells with the voices of serpents, lions, bulls, boars. The difficulty of effecting any neat separation between the voices of Typhoeus and the poet’s voice emerges from the fact that the first two and the fourth of these animals correspond to transformations

of the ToAuUTporros TTpwtevs

“Proteus

of many

turns,

invoked

by the epic poet Nonnus, in the prologue to his poem (1.13-33), as a fitting partner for the troixiAia ‘variety’ of the poet himself. Proteus is

an ‘emblem for Nonnian poetics’, as Neil Hopkinson puts it.!!! Nonnus goes further than Hesiod in developing the hybrid quality of Typhoeus, matching the variety of voices with a variety of physical forms: Typhoeus presents simultaneously a number of the shapes seen in Proteus’ successive metamorphoses. Shorrock emphasizes the passage later in Book 1 (294-320) where Typhoeus, labelled a Zeus vó8os ‘counterfeit Zeus’

(295), fails to operate

the thunderbolt.!'" However, with his own voices Typhoeus is able to produce a more powerful counterfeit: his throats are (156) Papuonapdywv, a variant on the Hesiodic (Theog. 388 etc.) BapuKtutros, an epithet of 'deepthundering’ Zeus. The verb ouapaytw is used of Zeus's thunder, as well as

of other loud and disordered sounds." The only one of the four animal shapes listed on Typhoeus' first appearance that is not matched in the opening catalogue of Proteus' shape-shiftings is the bull. The bull is reserved for another master of disguise, Zeus, who

appears at the beginning of the narrative of the rape of Europa (Dion. 1.46ff.) already in the shape of a bull; and immediately we are given the detail of the noise that he produces from his throat (47 Aoiuóc). At 2.364—9

Zeus and Typhoeus square up against each other with matching lowings and trumpetings: 110

[s there possibly a pun on the meaning ‘line of verse’ in a vía?

mt

Hopkinson

112

Shorrock 2001: 121-2. Typhoeus is a more successful and more dangerous counterfeiter than

1994: 10; Fauth

1981: 32-8 ‘Proteisches Prooemium"; Shorrock 2001: 20-2.

the Virgilian Salmoneus (Aen. 6.585—94), who tries to imitate (586 flammas louis et sonitus

11

w

218

imitatur Olympi) the non imitabile fulmen (590), and is peremptorily blasted by Jupiter with the real thing. On the metapoetic aspect of Salmoneus see Clément-Tarantino 2006: 271-2 n. 550, 692. Thunder: Il. 21.199; 2.210 ouapayel 5€ Te mövTos, in a simile applied to the crowd of the demos pouring back into the agore, 2.463 of birds by the Cayster; Hes. Theog. 679, 693 (tonapayıde), the earth during the Titanomachy.

Nonnus’ Typhoeus: the musical giant

Zeus EV iyaccoutvo vepewv Bpovraiov dpaccwy aibépiov puna

uéAos oGATriGev Evvoüs,

Kai vepéAas EAixn Sov Erri o Tépvoio kaBuas elxe Fıyavreiwv BeAécov akémrasg: oUbE Tupweus &yogos fv: kepaAai 5E Boddy puKnOpov leicaı avTouato odATiyyes Errecuapáynoav OAUumo... Lashing the clouds Zeus beat a thunderous lowing in the sky and trumpeted the wargod's tune, and fitted whirls of clouds on his breast as a defence against the Giant's missiles. Nor was Typhoeus silent: his bull-heads emitted a lowing, self-sounding trumpets which resounded against Olympus.

To introduce the first of a number of Ovidian notes, compare the way in which Metamorphoses 3, a book very much under the influence of Bacchus,

begins with the deceptive shape of a bull: the bull-form with which Jupiter has deceived Europa, but also a deception of the reader who does not yet realize that in this book it will be Bacchus rather than Jupiter who is the master of deceptive shape-shiftings.''' The first occurrence of vd8os ‘bastard, counterfeit’ is in the second line

of the narrative proper, applied to Zeus’s animal impression: 1.47 inepöev uuxnua vó&o uiufjicaro Aaiud

‘he imitated an amorous

lowing with his

counterfeit throat’. vé80s and nın&onaı are keywords in Nonnus. ^ Typhoeus may be a poor imitation

when,

as Zeus vößos, he attempts to wield the

thunderbolt, but in other respects he is a master of mimicry. He uses his army of snakes to mimic his celestial opponents: 1.193—4 6 8 yAwyivi Kepains | icorürrou Tavpoıo Spakav kukAoUTo Kepcotns ‘another [of Typhoeus’ snakes] was a horned serpent entwining itself around the tip of the horn of the Bull of shape like himself’, horned snake matching horned bull. Another snake leaps forward (199) ‘seeing another snake’, the constellation of the Serpent. At 1.215 he hurls a (real) bull as iooguts pipnua... ZeArjvns ‘likenatured imitation of the Moon’ At 1.287 TpióBovros Exwv uiunna ‘wielding

an imitation of the trident’, Typhoeus shows himself an effective enough Poseidon when he breaks off an island as a missile, although this is shortly followed by his ineffective attempt as Zeus vó8os to wield the thunderbolt.

At 1.444 ff. Typhoeus promises Cadmus as reward for his song a translation of his pastoral world of goats, cattle and manger into an ‘isotypic’ (448 !^

See Hardie 2002a:

167; note also Fauth

1981: 160 ‘Zeus... in die Gestalt eines Tieres

überwechselt . . . - jenes Tieres übrigens, dessen Phänotyp sein Sohn Dionysos annehmen wird.’ 115 [t will be seen that I disagree with Shorrock 2001: 123 n. 42 ‘Only Zeus can successfully exploit bastard forms, as his bull-backed deception of Europa has shown.’

219

220

Later imperial epic

iootUTrou, 458 pé&rvns Érépns TEeAtow TUTToV) replica of the constellations

of Capricorn, Taurus, Manger, etc. This astronomical mimesis is itself in competition with Zeus’s suggestion of a homology between the terrestrial shepherding of the disguised Cadmus and his own role as cosmic shepherd: 1.389 Aveo Troipevin oéo rnKridi Troivéva kÓcpou ‘with your shepherd’s pipes save the shepherd of the universe"! ^ At 2.42 ff. Typhoeus' assimilative attempt to master the world expresses itself through a digestive mimicry, as he eats his way through the beasts of the earth, his bear-heads eating bears, his lion-heads eating lions, and his snake-heads eating snakes. To return to the protean beginnings of the Dionysiaca, Proteus’ shapeshiftings are marked by the vocabulary of isotypy and imitation: 1.26 ei Stuas iodZorto TUTTO». ouös ‘if he made his body like the shape of a boar’; 29 ei S€ téAo1

piunaAdv 060p

‘if he were

to become

an imita-

tion of water’. Isotypy and mimicry are constitutive principles of Nonnian poetics. We might be tempted to say that Typhoeus’ isotypic mimicry is of a kind that reduces the world to chaos, while the mimicry employed by Zeus, and subsequently by his son Dionysus, is of a kind that will eventually contribute to the cosmic soteriology to which the poem’s forty-eight books are tending. But in this first book there is at least as much reason to see Zeus and Typhoeus as two of a kind, rather than polar opposites. Once unleashed by his mother Earth, Typhoeus sets about confounding the divisions of the world: but the Achaean sailor who watches and comments on the marvel of the (91) piunAny...vija ‘imitation ship’ that is the sea-faring Zeus-bull, embarked on his (97) vó8ov TrAdov ‘counterfeit sailing’, notes the confusion

of land and sea, as Zeus sets about the kind of boundary transgression usually associated with the sinfulness of mankind’s first ship. The then talks about the confusion in terms of a reversal of the roles gods, Demeter ploughing the sea and Neptune sailing through the

more sailor of the fields

(1.104-9).!'* That what is at stake is as much a verbal or textual order as a physical order is revealed when Zeus expresses his fear that a victory by Typhoeus will lead to a revision of the myths of Greece, a reallocation of divine kleos, 1.385-7:

116 The mirroring extends to a parallelism between the ‘music-making’ of Typhoeus and Cadmus: with 1.157 mavtoinv dAddalev ónog8óyycv Stra 6npóv (Typhoeus’ animal imitations) compare

1.409-10 ó&U bé reivoov | Kady0s dpopboy yw

Bovákov ATTattAlov

yo. Typhoeus and Cadmus ‘sound the same’, up to a point. 117° Cf the confusion of the spheres of the Olympian gods that introduces the topsy-turvy world of Ovid's Amores, 1.1.7-12.

Nonnus’ Typhoeus: the musical giant

‘Seidia uuGoTÓkov TrAéov EAAGBa, ur) Tıs Ayaidy

vetiov Tug@va xai Uyıntdovrakaktocn fj Utratov, xpaívov éyóv oóvona.'

‘I fear even more Greece, mother of myths, in case an Achaean should call Typhon ‘god of rain, ‘ruling on high’ or ‘highest’, defiling my name.’ When Zeus asks Cadmus to rescue the ‘Shepherd of the Universe’, (390) uf

vepeAnyepttao Tuooxos fixov &koUow ‘so that I should not hear the sound of cloud-gathering Typhoeus; he is both asking to be spared the sound of Typhoeus literally controlling the weather, and to be spared the sound of a revised epic tradition, in which formulaic epithets are allocated to different subjects. This is a serious matter at the beginning of a poem which aims to be a kind of encyclopaedia of the myths of Greece. To prevent such a rewriting of the Greek poetic tradition Zeus resorts to a poetic stratagem. In order to get back his thunderbolts Zeus disguises Cadmus

as a shepherd

(373 einacı uiumAoici vó8ov xAaívoct voutja “he

clothed the counterfeit shepherd in imitation clothes’), in order to bewitch Typhoeus with his bucolic music. On hearing his piping Typhoeus challenges Cadmus toa contest of music, between Cadmus’ pipes and the crashing of his own usurped thunderbolt. Apparently forgetting this proposal, Typhoeus then asks Cadmus to strike up an 'epinician hymn’ (1.488; cf. 478-80) on the victory of Typhoeus that will legitimate his claim to be the 'genuine' (yvficiov) ruler of Olympus. In response Cadmus tells a deceptive and false

story about his own poetic rivalry with Phoebus, which led to the loss of his lyre-strings; to win back the stolen sinews of Zeus Cadmus pretends that only with them can he string a lyre with which to accompany a suitable hymn in praise of Typhoeus as the new, genuine, sceptre-bearer of Olympus. Yet this does not prevent Cadmus from sounding out on his bucolic pipes a victory song of a kind difficult to imagine, (522-3) áGavá&rov ate puav en ovplyy! Aıyaivwv, | kai Aids &cooutvny &pgeAiLero yeitova vikny ‘as if sounding out the rout of the immortals on his pipes, in fact he was singing the near-in-time victory of Zeus’.''* The reference to an epinikios humnos 118 Cadmus’ song thus combines in one the two versions of the Typhonomachy opposed to each other in the Muse's account of the song-contest in Ov. Met. 5 between the Pierides, who tell of Typhoeus' routing of the Olympian gods, who conceal themselves in ‘pretend shapes’ (326 mentitis... figuris) of animals, and Calliope, whose narrative of the rape of Proserpina starts from the successful imprisonment of Typhoeus under Etna. Nicander has been thought to lie behind the Ovidian combination of song-contest of Muses and Pierides with narratives of Typhonomachy, on the basis of testimonia that the episodes of the Emathides (Pierides) and of Typhon were both found in Book 4 of Nicander's Heteroioumena: Papathomopoulos 1968: 87; Bethe 1904: 8-14 argued that Nicander's song-contest included versions of Typhonomachy.

221

222

Later imperial epic

may trigger allusion to a Pindaric intertext, Pythian 1, where Typhon is invoked as ‘an awe-inspiring noise contrasted with the “golden lyre” of the

Olympians’, as Andrew Ford puts it.''” The difference is that in Pythian 1 those whom Zeus does not love, including Typhon, are terrified at the cry of the Muses, whereas Nonnus’ Typhoeus falls in love with a music directed by an Olympian control. But perhaps the experience of being buried under

Etna will have been an effective aversion therapy.'~° There is another way in which Zeus and Typhon are mirrors of one another, rather than opposites, namely in their shared susceptibility to

erotic pleasure.'*' This is an epic which begins with the action of Eros lifting up Europa on to the back of the amorous bull, an episode that ends with the highly sensuous description of Zeus, now in the shape of a young man, touching up and then deflowering the girl, 1.344—51: Kpoviöns de Avrroov Taupwmıda uopgriv £ikeAos TI0EW TTEPIBEBPOHEV &Guya Koupnv' Kai MEAEWV Éyauoev, ATTO OTEPVOIO BE vuugns HITPNV TTPWTOV EAUGE TTEPITPOXOV, ds GEKWV 6E oidaAénv EBAıyev Gkautréos Gvtuya uato0,

Kai KÜGE yeiAcos pov, &ávarrrü&as SE aicorrfi &yvóv GVUU@EUTOU TTEPUAAYMEVOV Gua Kopeins óugaxa KurrpiBicov ébpéyarro kapmóv Eprwrwv. The son of Kronos put off his bull-faced form and ran round the unwed girl in the shape of a young man. He touched her limbs, and first undid the bodice that ran around the maiden's breast, and as if unwittingly he pressed the swelling circle of her firm breast, and kissed the tip of her lip, and silently loosened the sacred and well-guarded girdle of her unwedded maidenhead, and plucked the unripe fruit of Aphrodite's Loves.

Typhoeus steals the thunderbolts of Zeus while the god is in bed with another girl, Plouto, the mother of Tantalos (awkwardly interposed in the middle of the Europa story). In order to recover that which he lost through his own erotic distraction," Zeus will use the weapon of another god, the bow of Eros, more powerful even than the thunderbolt because it operates through erotic distraction. The parallelism between the two instances of !I? Ford 1992: 191 n. 62. Nonnus refers to Pindar by name at Dion. 25.18-21; see also Vian 1976: xlv. See Fauth 1981: 160 on the parallelism between the infatuations of Zeus for Europa and of Typhoeus for music. Shorrock 2001: 37 notes that the theft of S1rAq is structurally parallel to Zeus's castration of Kronos.

Nonnus’ Typhoeus: the musical giant

infatuation is spelled out by Zeus at 406—7 Kaöueins 8' £x£rco ppevobeA yéos olotpov &oi8fis, | óocov &yc Tró8ov Éoyov és Euüpwrrns Uuevaious ‘may he feel the sting of Cadmus’ mind-bewitching song, as much as] felt desire for Europa’s embrace’. The erotic distraction worked on Typhoeus is not love for a physical body, but love for song: he is a (1.415) Tiyas gıAdoı6os ‘song-loving giant’. Appropriately as revenge against a creature who seeks to win power through mimicry, Typhoeus is trapped by a second-order kind of desire. Book 1 ends as it began with an erotic scene, in a long simile comparing Typhoeus' response to Cadmus' song to a young man's insatiable gaze wandering over the physical beauties of a young girl, 525-34: Kai Gs véos Tidtı kévrpo óf pos tpcouavécov Eri EA yerad HAIKI koUpn, xai Trj HEV yapievtos és ápyuga KUkAa mpoocorrou, Tfj 66 BaGucufipry yos &Arjuova Bórpuv eeipns Bépkerai, KAAOTE xElpa poddypoov, GAAoTE HITPN) c9ryyouévnv pobdevtos ituv naßolo bokeuti auyeva Tramtaivev yuuvouyuevov, augi BE uopofi OEAyeTal GAAOTIPOGaAAOV Gywv akdpntov ÖTTWITTTV oude Arrreiv eGeAci TTOTE rrapBévov: as 6 ye Kaduw OgAyouévnv peAéeociv ÖANV ppeva Saxe Tugwets. And as a dainty young man madly in love feels the girl of his own age, and glances now at the shining watches now a straying lock of her thick hair, and round of her blushing breast bound in her bodice, enchanted as he leads his insatiable gaze from one to leave the maiden; just so Typhoeus surrendered by the songs of Cadmus.

sweet spur and is bewitched bya circle of her charming face, and now her rosy hand, and now the looking at her bare neck, and is part to another, and never wants his whole mind to be enchanted

&Kkdpntos étrwtr1) (532), as opposed to the full harvest of Zeus’s seduction of Europa (351), insatiable because the pleasure of song will never lead to a literally physical consummation.'^? Typhoeus is a creature for whom physical pleasure is converted into the pleasure of the text. The passage from the world of action to the world of song is replicated in the trick whereby Cadmus recovers the sinews of Zeus which, we learn abruptly (1.512), he had lost in the battle with Typhoeus. Cadmus spins a tale of how he had defeated Apollo in a music contest, only for Zeus to blast the strings of his lyre to avenge his son's defeat (489-92). 73

On Nonnan insatiability see Braden 197.1: 873-4.

223

224

Later imperial epic

In response to Cadmus’ wish for a new set of strings with which to practise an Orphic music, Typhoeus brings out from his cave the sinews of Zeus: the physical might of the supreme god is thus offered up as the instrument for a music of universal power — an Éyyos poovijev ‘a voiced sword’, as the anonymous author of the epigram 'To Nonnus the poet' (Anth. Pal. 9.198) puts it. As often, Nonnus' poetic games strike the Ovidian with a beguiling sense of familiarity. The similarity between the story of the fake shepherd's musical enchantment of Typhoeus and the story in Metamorphoses 1 of the bewitchment of Argus by Mercury disguised as a pastoral musician has been noted by others.'^* A reference by Hera in her goading speech, at Dion. 1.341—3, to Argus as potential herdsman for her tauriform husband perhaps cues the reader to allusion to the Argus story in the following Cadmus and Typhoeus episode, as may also the statements that Cadmus brings death to Typhoeus (1.375, 524). I note two aspects in which Nonnus seems to come particularly close to Ovidian practice. Firstly, the erotics of the text: Nonnus' very explicit image of Typhoeus' sexual attraction to the song of Cadmus is matched by the more nuanced suggestions in the Ovidian narrative of the seductive power of Mercury's song of Syrinx, by which Eros leads to Thanatos; this has been well discussed by Betty Rose Nagle.'** Secondly, there are the intricate connections between framing and framed narratives, which in the case of Ovid's Syrinx have been discussed by Paul Murgatroyd."^ Cadmus first tells Typhoeus his tall story of the music contest (£pißw 489, 502) with Apollo that results in Zeus's blasting of Cadmus’ strings; Typhoeus has challenged Cadmus to a friendly contest (439 piAinv &piv) in thundering music, whose final result will be Zeus's blasting of Typhoeus. Then there is Cadmus' song itself, as if telling of the rout of the gods, but in fact celebrating Zeus's forthcoming victory. We might think of two ways of making sense of this bizarre performance: firstly, that when a (521) vó80os rroiufv sings to a vó8os Zeus it is appropriate that a song should be understood in a sense opposite to its true sense; or, that a song on the rout of the gods that distracts Typhoeus while Zeus creeps in to recover his thunderbolt is in a very immediate sense the 'singing of the death of Typhoeus’. Neither of these two similarities is of course of a kind specific enough to be used as conclusive evidence that Nonnus had read Ovid. The cunning of the framing intratextuality in both Ovid and Nonnus could be paralleled 124 Vian 1976; 27, referring to Seippel 1939: 64 n. 5. 126 Murgatroyd 2001.

125

Nagle 1988,

Nonnus’ Typhoeus: the musical giant

easily enough in surviving Hellenistic poetry, the Barthesian jouissance that overpowers the Ovidian Argus and the Nonnian Typhoeus perhaps not so easily. But I am not myself as convinced as is Alan Cameron that Peter Knox’s discussion of parallels between Nonnus and Ovid has once and for all ‘put paid to the notion’ that Nonnus had read Ovid.” Returning finally to Virgil, the formal parallels between Fama and Typhoeus can easily be explained on the hypothesis that Virgil, or some lost, possibly Hellenistic, source for the Virgilian personification, saw in the noisy and chaotic figure of Typhoeus a suitable template for developing a figure of rumour, report and tradition. Less easy to explain in this way is the tendency in both Virgil and Nonnus for the monstrous noise-maker to become a double both of the thundering supreme god and of the epic poet. Were this to be explained on the assumption that Nonnus had read the Aeneid, he would emerge as a subtle reader of Virgil indeed. Alternatively the similarities between the Fama and Typhoeus episodes might be seen as the converging effects of the long epic tradition working through two poets each conscious of attempting to impose a sovereign control over the unmanageable complexity and diversity of previous texts, both Greek and Latin in the case of Virgil, Greek and possibly Latin in the case of Nonnus. 17

Knox

1988; Cameron

2004: 258.

225

7

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

In ‘Of fame, a fragment’ Francis Bacon notes both the power of fama to determine events and the fact that insufficient attention is paid to its importance, making of this a practical lesson in politics.! Bacon starts from ‘the poets’ (i.e. Virgil) before turning to the historians: The poets make Fame a monster. They describe her in part finely and elegantly, and in part gravely and sententiously. They say, look how many feathers she hath, so many eyes she hath underneath; so many tongues; so many voices; she pricks up so many ears. This is a flourish. There follow excellent parables; as that, she gathereth strength in going; that she goeth upon the ground, and yet hideth her head in the clouds; that in the daytime she sitteth in a watch tower, and flieth most by night; that she mingleth things done, with things not done; and that she is a terror to great cities. But that which passeth all the rest is: they do recount that the Earth, mother of the giants that made war against Jupiter, and were by him destroyed, thereupon in an anger brought forth Fame. For certain it is, that rebels, figured by the giants, and seditious fames and libels, are but brothers and sisters, masculine But now, if a man

and feminine.

can tame this monster, and bring her to feed at the hand, and

govern her, and with her fly other ravening fowl and kill them, it is somewhat worth.

But we are infected with the style of the poets. To speak now in a sad and serious manner: there is not, in all the politics, a place less handled and more worthy to be handled, than this of fame. We will therefore speak of these points: what are false fames; and what are true fames; and how they may be best discerned; how fames may be sown, and raised; how they may be spread, and multiplied; and how they may be checked, and laid dead. And other things concerning the nature of fame. Fame is of that force, as there is scarcely any great action, wherein it hath nota great

! Bacon wrote three essays on other aspects of fama, Essays 53-5 ‘Of praise’, ‘Of vain-glory, ‘Of honour and reputation’ Bacon returned repeatedly to the Virgilian Fama in a preoccupation with sedition and libel that stretches over most of his career: Dzelzainis 2006 traces ‘a major shift in the Baconian poetics of rebellion’, from a view of fame or rumour as an ex post facto

226

phenomenon, elaborating on events in the past, to a view of rumour as a causal factor, a ‘prelude to sedition’ and links this to a shift towards a modern understanding of the power of ideology. But a contrast between passive and active is built into the functions of fama from the start: see Ch. 1 pp. 10-11. On ‘Of fame, a fragment’ see also Neubauer 1999: 75-80.

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

“Vita hominem fos oP alle

Zu

F ullus ceu feuis vmbra.

Soul te Celie: ace CEffftts

eta 2 fimt,

cineres, fummus, ct aura, mil.

i t fuck peters Fema “Wade apne et nocte latere vetet.

ERR

Fig. 3 Hendrik Goltzius, engraving of Fame and History

part; especially in the war.” Mucianus undid Vitellius, by a fame that he scattered, that Vitellius had in purpose to remove the legions of Syria into Germany, and the legions of Germany into Syria; whereupon the legions of Syria were infinitely inflamed. Julius Caesar took Pompey unprovided, and laid asleep his industry and preparations, by a fame that he cunningly gave out: how Caesar's own soldiers loved

* Bacon might have found support for this view also in Cicero, Phil. 5.26 minimis momentis, patres conscripti, maximae inclinationes temporum fiunt cum in omni casu rei publicae, tum in bello, et maxime ciuili, quod opinione plerumque et fama gubernatur.

227

228

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

him not, and being wearied with the wars, and laden with the spoils of Gaul, would

forsake him, as soon as he came into Italy. Livia settled all things for the succession of her son Tiberius, by continual giving out, that her husband Augustus was upon recovery and amendment. And it is an usual thing with the pashas, to conceal the death of the Great Turk from

the janizaries and

men

of war, to save the sacking

of Constantinople and other towns, as their manner is. Themistocles made Xerxes, king of Persia, post apace out of Grecia, by giving out, that the Grecians had a purpose to break his bridge of ships, which he had made athwart Hellespont. There be a thousand such like examples; and the more they are, the less they need to be repeated; because a man meeteth with them everywhere. Therefore let all wise governors have as great a watch and care over fames, as they have of the actions and designs themselves.

Taking ‘fame’ in the sense of ‘rumour’, ‘report’, Bacon draws two of his examples from Tacitus (Hist. 2.80, Ann. 1.5); the first three examples relate

to the winning of imperial power. Bacon turns from the Virgilian Fama to speak in ‘a sad and serious manner’ of history and politics, but at the same time acknowledges a community of meaning between the poet and the historians, seeing in the Virgilian personification an allegory of the very real power of ‘seditious fames and libels. That is not how Fama works in the immediate context of Aeneid 4, but she nevertheless has a potent effect on the royal power of one ruler, Dido, and a less immediate effect, through

her dissevering of Aeneas and Dido, on the future accession to power of a distant descendant of Aeneas. The Roman historians are fully alert, as Bacon saw, to the crucial role played by fama, opinion and talk, in the res gestae that are their subject matter. In Livy and Tacitus, on whom this chapter and the next will focus,

the workings of fama are often concentrated locally within self-contained ‘fama episodes’, sometimes in the form of miniature narrative plots, of a kind comparable to what we have observed in epic. This seems to be more a feature of Roman

than

Greek historiography;

between Scipio and Fabius Maximus

in one

case, the debate

on the African command

in Livy

28, comparison with a Thucydidean model, the debate between Alcibiades

and Nicias over the Sicilian expedition, shows that the Roman historian has developed an ‘episode of fama’ considerably beyond his Greek predecessor." 3

One kind of fama at least, the use of rumours and reports as narrative devices, seems to be

particularly a feature of Roman historiography: Ries 1969: 7 n. 9 notes that rumours, so common a feature in Tacitus, are relatively frequent in Livy (Ries notes the set-piece descriptions of the spread of rumour at Livy 22.7; 28.24 ff.), but rare in Thucydides and Sallust. Tilg 2010: 260-1 notes the relative infrequency of pfjun in Herodotus and Thucydides.

The historian and fama

The historian and fama fama has an inescapable importance for any historian, ancient or modern, in its sense of ‘tradition’, since it is the historian’s job to sort through the often conflicting reports that come down to him and to select that which is most likely to be true, or at least most useful for his purpose (whether that purpose be the truth or something else). Historians often pause to reflect on the difficulty of their task, for example Livy on the variety of famae on the death of Marcellus, 27.27.12-14: I should be very circuitous on a single topic if I wanted to go through the various reports on the death of Marcellus (quae de Marcelli morte uariant auctores). Not to mention the others, Coelius gives a threefold account of what happened, one handed down by tradition (unam traditam fama), another written down in the funeral eulogy by his son, who

was present at the event, and

a third which

he offers as the result of his own inquiry and verification. But the author of the varying reports (ita fama uariat ut tamen...) mostly agree that he had left the camp

to reconnoitre, and all report (tradant)

that he was surrounded

by an

ambush.

In this passage fama occurs twice, the first time as 'verbal and unverifiable report, as opposed to a written account and to the version that the historian Coelius himself has checked, but the second time to refer to accounts of whatever kind (fama uariat repeats uariant auctores). As a report or reports handed down from the past, fama may be either established tradition about what happened in the past, or unverifiable story, at times virtually synonymous with its cognate fabula. The undecidability and unreliability which so frequently cling to fama, and which make the historian's task of establishing his narrative so difficult,

are at times reflected in the vagaries of fama as it operates within the narrative. An example of this crossing of the boundary between inside and outside the text is to be found in Stephen Oakley's comment on a recurrent narrative cliché in Livy, the fama or report that travels from an arena of war to Rome, and which prompts a reaction and very often a response in the form of new actions; Oakley (1997a on 6.21.9) notes that 'L. records

many famae, but since it is uncertain from where his information came and whether he meant "rumour" or "report" by them, it is hard to assess

the reliability of his notices: Oakley attempts to distinguish between those famae which relate to hostilities that actually did break out, and famae which turned out to be unfounded. 'It is always difficult to know what authority

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Fama and the historians 1. Livy

lies behind a Livian fama." This formulation is itself ambivalent between the authority inside a narrative for a rumour and the authority claimed by the historian outside the narrative for the stories that he tells. The student of Livy is put in the same position as the actors in the Livian narrative, in trying to decide whether what is reported rests on a firm foundation or not. But the ancient historian (here unlike most of his modern counterparts)

is complicit in the business of fama in ways that reach far beyond the need to confront the uncertainty of tradition. From its beginnings historiography shares with epic as one of its main functions the production and regulation of fame, «Mos, fama." According to some ancient models for the relationship between the epicist or historian and his subject matter, the production of fame is a simple business. So the epic poet claims to be the mouthpiece of the Muses, whose universal presence in time and space guarantees the trustworthiness of the poet’s narrative. Towards the end of the De historia conscribenda Lucian compares the ideal historian to Zeus, enthroned above

and casting his sovereign gaze impartially now on the Romans and now on the Parthians; in a second approach to the definition of his ideal Lucian says that the historian should bring to his task ‘a mind like a mirror, clear,

gleaming-bright, accurately centred, displaying the shape of things just as he receives them, free from distortion, false colouring and misrepresentation*^ Few

scholars

in modern

times

(if ever)

have been

taken

in by such

claims to impartiality in the ancient historians. Recently there has developed a fashion for a more radical dethronement of the Zeus-like historian: the historian is detected in a conscious or half-conscious complicity in the fabrication of the narrative of events of which he claims to be merely the unbiassed recorder. The historian himself is inextricably implicated in the workings of fama not just as a researcher or inquirer who must sift through the competing traditions of what happened in the past. Firstly, he himself apportions praise or blame to his subjects, in line with the exemplary — that is to say rhetorical, persuasive — function of historiography. Secondly, as a writer the historian himself experiences the temptations of fame, a literary renown to rival the renown won through deeds by the great men of the past whose actions he chronicles. Fame is a spur for the historian as well as his subjects.’ On all counts, the work of the ancient historian, and

especially the Roman historian, is an integral part of the circulation of fama

^ Oakley 19972: 356. $

> For the inextricable links between the two genres see e.g. Moles 1993a.

Hist. conscr. 49 (Zeus, alluding to Il. 13.4-5); 50 (mirror, quoted by Moles

1993a: 89).

? See Marincola 1997: 57-62 ‘Glory and renown’; Moles 1993a: 163 n. 19 for professions of fama as a goal in historians.

The historian and fama

within the wider society. The historian himself is caught up in the struggle for control of fama between the great men of Rome, as he struggles to sift and control fama, at the same time as he strives to establish his own fame within his own

society, and, more

narrowly, within the society of fellow

historians. The apparently impermeable membrane separating the act of narrating from the actions narrated turns out to be an extremely leaky one. On the one hand, historians, like epic poets," construct themselves as versions of their heroes (or villains): John Moles describes the Herodotean persona as

‘a complex amalgam of epic poet, epic hero in general and Odysseus in particular, hence both “outside” and “inside” the narrative.” Christina Kraus comments of Livy’s project as ‘the gradual, often experimental construction of a written Rome... As such... the historian’s project parallels/rivals

Augustus’ own building of a new Rome via (re)construction of its past." John Moles has also shown how in the Praefatio Livy's historiographical project shadows the historical events that are its subject,'' not just, one might say, as, according to a common

proverb, gloria is the shadow of uir-

tus, but in the way that a person's shadow might seem to be endowed with the same power of intentional action as the flesh-and-blood individual. On the other hand, historians often reveal that the characters in their

narratives are equally as involved in the business of manipulating and establishing fame as they themselves are. Achilles had long ago been found singing of KAéa avöpwv ‘the famous deeds of heroes’ (Il. 9.189). A very direct link between the historian's struggle to establish the truth and to write up the fama rerum gestarum, and the struggle amongst the great families of Rome to establish their reputation, is found in Livy's account of the injurious effect on historical authority of funerary laudations, at the very end of Book 8 (thus an example of a closural fama passage), 8.40.2—5:

=

It is not disputed that A. Cornelius was dictator in that year... what is in doubt is whether he was appointed to conduct the war... or so that there should be someone

Most readily as versions of singers or narrators who perform within the narrative world, who,

o

c

in the case of Homer, include the major heroes Achilles and Odysseus as well as professional

bards like Demodocus; on the ‘poet in the text’ in Homer see the bibliography in Goldhill 1991: 57 n. 98; on lopas in Aeneid 1 as a figure for Virgil see Hardie 1986: 52-66; on Aeneas as a figure for Virgil see Kofler 2003; figures of the poet in Lucan: O'Higgins 1988, Masters 1992. Any number of the internal narrators in the Metamorphoses have been identified as figures of Ovid. Moles 199 3a: 97; see Hartog 1988: 260-309 for the analogy between Herodotus’ travels through life and through his book. Kraus 199a: 8; see also Index s.vv. ‘Livy: physical object/city: !! Moles 1993b.

231

232

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

to give the signal to the chariots at the Roman games...

It is not easy to choose

between accounts or between authors. In my opinion the record has been vitiated by funeral eulogies and by false titles under portrait-busts, as each family uses misleading lies to appropriate for itself the renown of deeds and honours ( uitiatam memoriam funebribus laudibus" reor falsisque imaginum titulis, dum familiae ad se quaeque famam rerum gestarum honorumque fallente mendacio trahunt). This has certainlyled to confusion about the deeds of individuals and in the public memorials of events. Nor is there extant any writer contemporary with that period, on whose authority we might safely take our stand (nec quisquam aequalis temporibus illis scriptor exstat quo satis certo auctore stetur). ""

Noble families, in their eagerness to construct traditions that will lead to being preferred to others in esteem, make it impossible for the historian to establish due ranking between his authorities. Here the historian comes after the contests of the past to control fama, and must adjudicate in the calm of his study between the competing claims of the historical actors. The historian's own procedures are projected back into the exciting events of a distant past in the narrative of the seditio Manliana in Book 6 (a major fama episode discussed in more detail at pp. 250—3 below). Christina Kraus shows how M. Manlius Capitolinus 'set(s] himselfup as a rival historian . . . The narrative itselfis preoccupied with the same issues as the story it tells: power, deception, and above all authority.’

In his attempt to rewrite the official version of the Gallic sack of Rome, and the respective parts played by himself and Camillus, Manlius slips into the topics of ancient historians — the contrast between surface and reality,

the need for an objective viewpoint (6.11.4 si quis uere aestimare uelit ‘if one wanted to make a true reckoning’). At 6.20.8 Camillus’ rhetorical ploy of matching words to (the physical evidence of) deeds, facta dictis exaequando, echoes Sallust’s definition of the historian’s task in res gestas scribere: Catil. 3.2 facta dictis exaequanda sunt ‘words must match the deeds narrated’. At the end of the story Kraus notes of the inseparability of the struggles to control fama inside and outside the text: ‘The status quo of the historiographical tradition, as well as that of patrician authority, is

reaffirmed. Like the plebeian discontent, however, the narrative uneasiness remains.

>15

12 Cf. 27.27.13 for the contribution of a laudatio to a threefold fama. P Cf. Cic. Brut. 62 quamquam his laudationibus historia rerum nostrarum est facta mendosior. multa enim scripta sunt in eis quae facta non sunt, falsi triumphi, plures consulatus, genera etiam falsa et ad plebem transitiones.. . See Ridley 1983; Oakley 1997a: 30-3 ‘The reliability of the family records: 14 Kraus 1994a: 147. 15 Kraus 1994a: 198.

The historian and fama

Woodman

and Martin (1996) note on Ann. 3.47.1, where Tiberius sends

the Senate a written report on the Gallic revolt, that Tacitus ‘presents the emperor himselfas a historian of the war... , whose version of events invites

comparison with T.’s’.'° Tacitus’ digression on imperial historiography at the centre of Annals 4, 32-3, is part of a longer sequence exploring issues of historiography and memorialization: it is followed firstly by the trial of Cremutius Cordus and the burning of his books, and secondly by the speech of Tiberius refusing a temple in Baetica and asking instead for a more lasting monument in the memories of men, ending with the prayer that when he is dead men should (4.38.3) cum laude et bonis recordationibus facta atque famam nominis mei prosequantur ‘honour my deeds and the reputation of my name with praise and favourable memory’ (for fuller discussion of this sequence see below Ch. 8 pp. 303—5).!" In the business of facta atque fama the emperor and the historian are rivals. Ellen O'Gorman shows how within the Annals Livia and the younger Agrippina manipulate fama in a way that provides material for the historian’s own

narrative, at the same

time as

ghosting the historian's own plotting of his narrative.'* This tendency of ancient historians to blur the boundary between inside and outside may be related to the nature and functions of historiography within ancient culture and politics. It is a fact that ‘many historians of the ancient world had the opportunity to be both participant and rememberer”.'” This both places an extra pressure on the historian to protest his impartiality, and an additional temptation to colour his record of events. Furthermore, there is a convergence between the uses of fama inside and outside a historical narrative: within a narrative fama is as often an active stimulus to further actions as it is a passive report, whether true or false, of actions (as Bruce Gibson demonstrates in the case of Tacitean narratives); ^

the fama that is a work of history may be composed with a view to furthering the interests of a party or policy, but the most common practical utility

Woodman and Martin 1996: 352. Syme 1958: 429 famously comments on Ann. 13.3.2 (Tiberius) tum ualidis sensibus aut consulto ambiguus. ‘Tacitus approves the eloquence of the Emperor in terms that fit his own style’; cf. Kraus and Woodman 1997: 116 n. 84, citing M. de Unamuno ‘the tyrants depicted by Tacitus were all himself’. Luce 1991 discerns a climactic sequence reaching from the end of Annals 3 and culminating in the trial of Cremutius, concerned with fame and memory. See also Sailor 2008; Ch. 5. O'Gorman 2000: Ch. 6 ‘The empress's plot’; cf. also O'Gorman 1995, tracing parallels between imperial and literary successions. Marincola

1997: 175; Ch. 4 ‘The historian's deeds’ is devoted to the topic of how historians

who were participants presented their own part in their histories. Gibson

1998; see also Gibson 2010: 37-40 on fame and rumour as narrative causes in

post-Augustan epic.

233

234

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

claimed by Roman (at least) historiography is that of altering the behaviour of its readers by supplying exempla of virtue and vice.^' Within narratives characters are often shown seeking to direct their own or others’ actions according to historical exempla, but fama within a narrative has a greater importance, in establishing the prestige of the actors on the historical stage, and so determining the limits of their powers of action and influence. fama as fame or glory may attain a more or less self-subsistent status, as in the case of those modern

media personalities who are famous, well, because they

are famous, but at least in antiquity a man’s personal and political his fama, is in large part the product of the stories that are told previous actions, the fama rerum gestarum, which may be a true, a partly true and partly false, account of what actually was done. I conclude this section with a closer look at the ways in which

standing, about his a false, or the three

major Roman historians, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, position their own claims

to fame as historians within the wider social and political arena. For Sallust the pursuit of glory, or fame, through writing history, bene dicere ‘speaking well, is a substitute for the honoris cupido ‘desire for honour’ that motivates actions in public life, bene facere rei publicae ‘acting well for the state’ (Catil. 2.9-4.2). Sallust goes as far as he can to assert an equivalence between the fame of doers and writers; writers indeed are superior in that they can rise above the inuidia ‘envy’ that distorts the satisfaction of honoris cupido in the world of action (Catil. 3). Feeney notes: 'Another twist is provided by the idea that the historian becomes memorable himself through the act of writing. The lust for glory is one of the subjects of the monograph; it is also its openly acknowledged motivation." Livy, who was not himself a key player in the res populi Romani, nevertheless also suggests the analogy between his own motives as a historian and the certamen gloriae ‘contest of glory’ that spurs the great men of the Republic; he is involved in a literary certamen, in which new historians seek to distinguish themselves in writing about old subject matters either by contributing more accurate (certius) reports, or by surpassing the verbal sophistication of their predecessors, Praef. 3: utcumque erit, iuuabit tamen rerum gestarum memoriae principis terrarum populi pro uirili parte et ipsum consuluisse; et si in tanta scriptorum turba mea fama

?! 22

exempla: see e.g. Woodman and Martin 1996: Index s.v. exempla. Feeney 1994: 142 n. 9. Cf. Morgan 2000: 58 (speaking of Asinius Pollio's turn from public life to writing history after the civil wars) ‘historiography could constitute an alternative, semi-public form of élite self-assertion’, Morgan sees the recitation hall as an alternative,

contained theatre of politics.

The historian and fama

in obscuro sit, nobilitate ac magnitudine eorum consoler.^

me qui nomini officient meo

3%

However that may be, it will be a satisfaction that I myself, to the best of my abilities, have taken thought for the memory of the history of the leading nation on earth. If in such a throng of writers my own reputation is obscure, I shall console myself with the renown and greatness of those who overshadow my name.

This, the first occurrence of fama in Livy, is applied not to the subjects of history but to the writers of history themselves. It appears in a context of social hierarchy, with a contrast between the obscure because ignoble status of Livy as historian"! and the nobility of those who eclipse his name. The Struggle of the Orders, as will be seen, is one of the chief triggers for Livy's fama episodes. The language used by Livy is more than metaphorical, since some of his rivals were indeed of much higher social status than he was. Later in Book 1 the same language is used in the discussion of a duplex fama ‘double report? but in a way that is quite natural given the close links between fama and social distinction (the conflicting accounts of the end of Romulus), 1.16.4: I believe that there were also some at the time who secretly asserted that the king had been torn apart by the hands of the senators. That rumour also got abroad, although very obscurely; the other version was given high profile by men's admiration for the hero and by the immediacy of their panic ( manauit enim haec quoque sed perobscura fama; illam alteram admiratio uiri et pauor praesens nobilitauit).

Here too the class-distinction between a ‘very obscure, humble’ fama and a ‘noble, celebrated’ fama is not purely metaphorical, since it was in part the perceived greatness of the man Romulus (admiratio uiri) that gave weight to this fama (the other contributory factor being fear, very often a potent magnifier of fama). In the Praefatio then Livy both involves himself in a central part of the business of his History, the competition for fame, and

t» =

23 Echoing and giving an extra spin to Sall. Hist. 1 fr. 3* Reynolds nos in tanta doctissumorum hominum copia. OLD s.v. obscurus 5a; L-S s.v. B ‘Esp. of rank and station’ There is a slippage between social distinction and visibility and epistemological clarity at Aen. 11.340-5 (Drances) (genus huic materna superbum | nobilitas dabat, incertum de patre ferebat), | surgit et his onerat dictis atque aggerat iras: | ‘rem nulli obscuram nostrae nec uocis egentem | consulis, o bone rex: cuncti se scire

fatentur | quid fortuna ferat populi, sed dicere mussant.' Protesting too much and overcompensating for his less than secure social status, Drances claims to drag into the light a self-evident truth that the nameless mass is too afraid to utter openly. On Drances and fama see Ch. 4. 25 The phrase duplex fama itselfis used at 1.1.6 of rival traditions (see below p. 244).

235

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

excuses himself from it, finding consolation rather than fuel for inuidia in

the ‘nobility and greatness’ of those who overshadow him. A simultaneous commitment to and detachment from the man of action's pursuit of fama also characterizes a statement of Livy from much later on in his career, as reported by Pliny the Elder in the preface to the Natural History. In this case the recusatio itself imitates the gesture of a great man of action, NH Praef. 16: I admit that I wonder at Livy, that very famous author (auctorem

celeberrimum),

when he begins one of the volumes of his History of Rome from its Foundation with the following statement: ‘I have already achieved enough glory (tam sibi satis gloriae quaesitum), and

| could have settled into retirement, were

it not that my

restless spirit took sustenance from work (ni animus inquies" pasceretur opere).^ For surely he should have written his history for the glory of the world-conquering people and of the Roman name, not for his own glory. It would have been a greater merit to have persevered for love of the work, not for his own peace of mind, and

to have performed this service for the Roman people, not for himself.

Livy here mouths a sentiment that had previously been on the lips of two of the greatest men of his own youth, Julius Caesar and Cicero: Cic. Marc. 25 (Caesar) satis diu uel naturae uixi uel gloriae ‘] have lived long enough to satisfy either nature or glory’; Phil. 1.38 (Cicero) ‘I am satisfied with my length of life, whether I think of my age or of glory (mihi fere satis est, quod uixi, uel ad aetatem uel ad gloriam); any addition will be not so much in my interest as in yours and that of the state’; Fam. 10.1.1 (to Plancus, after the

Ides of March, and a few weeks after Philippic 1) ‘my greatest concern is not for my own life, in which I have achieved enough whether in the number of years, or through my deeds, or, if this has any bearing, in glory (non de mea

quidem uita, cui satisfeci uel aetate uel factis uel, si quid etiam hoc ad rem pertinet, gloria), but it is my fatherland that worries me’. Livy had already put versions of the sentiment in the mouths of a number of his historical characters, starting with Medullinus' comment

on Camillus at 6.23.7 (see

below p. 254).°* Oakley notes that some of these passages ‘less certainly echo 26

inguiesis a choice word, found in the fragments of Sallust and picked up by Tacitus (Ann. 16.14.1 inquies animo); note in particular its use by Sallust in a context of the human spirit's irresistible struggle for power and glory (or freedom): Sall. Hist. 1 fr. 7 Reynolds nobis primae dissensiones uitio humani ingeni euenere, quod inquies atque indomitum semper in certamine libertatis aut gloriae aut dominationis agit.

3

2

Livy fr. 58, from an unknown book.

2

Cf. also Livy 28.40.9 (Fabius to Scipio); 36.40.8 (Scipio Nasica); 37.34.53 P. Scipionem... et magnitudo animi et satietas gloriae placabilem eum maxime faciebat, noted by Oakley 1997 on 6.23.7, who also observes that the last passage has no counterpart at Polybius 21.13.9.

o

236

Fama-as-rumour in Greek and Roman political life

329

the sentiment of Caesar and suggest that the idea goes back beyond him. But even if that is so, it is hard to believe that Livy and his readers would

not have thought in the first instance of the most famous use of the idea,

by Julius Caesar, especially if Cicero was already self-consciously imitating Caesar in his own statements following the Ides of March. Pliny's criticism of Livy, that he should have thought rather of the glory of the Roman people than of his own glory, mimics Cicero's retort to Caesar's statement, patriae certe parum." Tacitus enjoyed greater success in public life than either Sallust or Livy, but is involved in a far more bitter certamen gloriae with the subjects of his Julio-Claudian and Flavian histories, through which he attempts to assert

an absolute superiority of the historian, on his own ground, over the one man who has power in Rome, the emperor, but only from the safe distance

of posterity. The key texts, the Agricola and the historiographical excursus in Annals 4, will be examined in detail in the next chapter."!

fama-as-rumour in Greek and Roman political life

nN

wt T E:

It is a chief function of the ancient Greek or Roman historian to memorialize the famous and infamous deeds of men and nations in the past. The historian preserves for posterity the achievements of the past, and through his narratives traces the contests for and negotiations of fame on the part of the actors in events that he records. What the historian writes is both comment on and continuation of the processes by which, in the lived experience of the past, reputations are made and lost. In those processes is involved the full range of meanings of the Latin word fama. fama is both the glory of the individual hero of legend or history, the shining crown of his preeminent deeds, and also the unattributable and creeping rumours that spread like wildfire among the common people. As we have seen repeatedly, these two very different kinds of fama are inseparable. In Roman society reputation and honour are largely dependent on social status, which further confers legal privilege." But the fame of the great man is also to an extent at the Oakley 1997a on Livy 6.23.7. 9) See also p. 254 below. For a subtle argument that the pose of alienation adopted by Tacitus in his historical writings serves to assert autonomy, authenticity and sincerity, and so to reclaim élite prestige from the smothering auctoritas of the princeps, see Sailor 2008. In general see Garnsey 1970. See Lewis 1996: 85-9 on class as a criterion for the evaluation of unofficial news. Roman law gives juristic status to the condition of infamia (or ignominia), the loss of existimatio or dignitas pronounced by an authority of the state and leading to certain

237

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

mercy of the opinions of the nameless masses as they emerge through what is expressed in public gatherings or through the talk that circulates in the streets of the city. The bulk of this and the next chapters will be taken up with an examination of the workings of fama in the Roman historians Livy, writing on Republican history, and Tacitus, writing on the principate. I preface this with some brief remarks on the importance in ancient political life of fama as rumour and gossip, with reference both to primary texts written by players in political life, in particular orators, and to modern scholarship on the role of unofficial or informal kinds of talk in Athens and Rome. Sociological and anthropological insights have been applied to the 'politics of reputation’ in fifth- and fourth-century Bc Athens, with a focus firstly on the face-to-face nature of interactions among the citizen body of Athens (or at least among subgroups of the citizen body), and secondly on the democratic ideology of Athenian politics." The chief evidence comes from the orators, who exploit gossip about private life and conduct in order to blacken the character of their opponents as a major form of argument, as the rules of the polis extend their reach into the privacy of the oikos. The emphasis has been on the regulatory effects of gossip in enforcing social norms and cohesiveness. The democratic institutions of Athens, such things as the jurycourts and the dokimasia, provide platforms for the public airing of what circulates as gossip. And democratic ideology makes something positive out of what is otherwise grounds for belittling gossip and rumour, the fact that it is mouthed by a large number of people and is usually unattributable to an individual source." In his speech ‘Against Timarchus' Aeschines argues, against Demosthenes, that when it comes to a man's life and actions (127)

‘An unerring report (&wewöns prjun) wanders through the city of its own accord and reports on a man's personal affairs to the many, and also makes many prophecies about things that will happen in the future.' Proof of the truth of Aeschines! own words (128 ‘so self-evident is what I say, and no

fiction’) is the fact that the Athenians set up an altar to ®rjun as a very great god." The scholion on Aeschines says that the cult was founded to disqualifications (actors were particularly exposed to infamia): see Greenidge 189-1; Edwards I

1993: 123-6; Edwards See Ober

1989: 148-51

1998. ‘Rumor (Pheme)’; Dover

1989; Cohen

1991: Index s.v. ‘gossip’; Hunter

1994: Ch. 4 'The politics of reputation: gossip as a social construct'; Lewis 1996: Ch. 1; wrs

Gotteland 1997; Millett 2007: 65-6.

e

238

Theophrastus takes a more jaundiced view of the propagation of malicious rumours about family origins and female sexual behaviour by the kaxdAoyos 'slanderer; who himself gives the label to his badmouthing of ‘free speech’ (rrappnoía), ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ (Characters 28.6). See Parker 1996; 233-5.

Fama-as-rumour in Greek and Roman political life

commemorate the supernaturally speedy griun that brought news of Cimon’s victory at Eurymedon to Athens ‘on the same day’. This is more like the kind of supernatural utterance denoted by oyun in Homer (see Ch. 2 p. 63); Aeschines makes a divine power out of the naturalistic spread of gossip among the people of Athens. He further backs up his defence of the power and authority of prjun with quotations from the poets, with the chief witness in Hesiod's lines on the immortal and divine prjun that is uttered by the many (see Ch. 2 p. 57). Before turning to the details of the gossip directed against Timarchus, Aeschines ties the role of rumour and gossip in the politics of reputation into a wider framework of praise and fame: 129 ‘you will discover that those who have lived respectable lives applaud these poems; for all those with an ambition for honour in public life (önuocia piAdTipio1) think that fame

(566a) is produced by good

rumour (priun). qiAoTiuía is the word that corresponds to Latin cupido gloriae or laudis, the ambition for distinction and esteem that motivates the élite in public life. Demosthenes in his reply to Aeschines uses his opponent’s weapon against him: if (on good democratic principles) the number of voices is what counts, then the report known to all Greeks and foreigners that Aeschines had taken bribes from Philip far outweighs the charges that rumour brings against Timarchus, who is known to few (Demosth. De falsa legatione 244). To this Aeschines in turn replies by another appeal to right-thinking democratic ideology (De falsa legatione 145): Be assured, Athenians,

that there

is a great difference

between

rumour

(oun)

and sycophancy (calumnious accusation). For rumour has no share in slander, but sycophancy is brother to slander. I will distinguish between them more clearly: rumour

occurs

when

the

mass

of citizens

spontaneously,

and

with

no

pretext,

says that a certain action has taken place. Sycophancy is when one man brings an accusation before the many, and when he slanders someone in every Assembly and before the Council. And we sacrifice in public to Rumour as to a god, but we make public presentations of sycophants as wrongdoers.

The sycophant is an individual who perverts the democratic system to his own private profit. How to use rumour and gossip as an argument becomes a topic in the rhetorical handbooks. The Rhetorica ad Herennium (2.12) gives specimens of arguments to use for rumours (a rumour does not come to be without some basis; if rumours are usually false, this one is not, etc.), and against rumours

(rumours

are the invention

of our

enemies,

or of those

who

by nature wish or speak ill; a rumour should not be believed, since any individual can spread a disgraceful rumour or fiction about anyone, etc.).

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Fama and the historians 1. Livy

Likewise Quintilian recognizes rumour as a variety of proof, to be exploited or rejected, evaluated positively or negatively, according to expediency: Inst. or. 5.3 ‘Rumour and gossip (famam atque rumores) are called by some “the consensus of the city" and as it were “testimony of the public",^ by others "scattered talk with no certain origin" (sermonem sine ullo certo auctore dispersum), started by malice and magnified by credulity, something that can happen to the most innocent of men through the fraud of enemies who broadcast false tales. There will be no lack of examples on either side." Malicious rumours may be started by one's enemies, but Quintilian’s emphasis in the argument against trusting in rumour is not on the selfseeking individual as against the right-thinking commonalty, but on the irresponsibility and credulity of the nameless masses. This perhaps reflects a more typically Roman attitude to the common people, but Roman politicians in the Republic were nevertheless acutely aware of the importance of public opinion, existimatio, and of the need to angle for popular favour.** The author of the Commentariolum petitionis (purporting to be an electioneering manual advice by Quintus Cicero for his brother Marcus campaigning for the consulship of 63 Bc) notes the importance of ensuring the affection of the closest members of one's family circle, down to freedmen and slaves, (17) nam fere omnis sermo ad forensem famam a domesticis emanat auctoribus 'for in general all talk about a man flows from sources at home into his reputation in the forum’. When it comes to dealing with the people, benignitas ‘generosity’ is important in nurturing popularis fama ‘good reputation with the people’: the candidate should fill his house with supporters, and hold out the hope of protection to many, ut quam plurimorum aures optimo sermone compleantur ‘so that the ears of as many people as possible should be filled with the most favourable talk’ (49).

36 On the admissibility of fama talk as testimony in medieval law-courts: Fenster and Smail 2003: Part 1 ‘Fara and the law: 7 Cf. also Rhet. ad Herenn. 2.5 sin (defensor] uehementer hominis turpitudine impedietur et infamia, prius dabit operam ut falsos rumores dissipatos esse dicat de innocente, et utetur loco communi rumoribus credi non oportere; Cic. Inv. 2.46—7; Quint. Inst. or. 5.1.2 (probationes

3

©

240

&rtyvoi include praeiudicia, rumores, tormenta, tabulae, iusiurandum, testes). The power of public opinion in ancient Rome, and the importance in public affairs of the

channels for the propagation of news and other forms of report and communication, official and unofficial, have been relatively understudied, although they have been the subject of important discussions by Yavetz 197-1, Laurence 199-4 and O'Neill 2003; see also Achard 1991: 227-38; Neraudau 1993. On the importance of ‘célébrité’ for the Roman élite political career see Hellegouarc'h

1972: 362-88, passing in review the terms existimatio, fama, laus. Dufallo

2007; 16-30 is an important analysis of Cicero's strategies for the control of gossip and rumour in the Pro Caelio. For a study of the importance of public opinion in maintaining royal power in a later period see Gunn

1995 (on raison d'état).

Fama-as-rumour in Greek and Roman political life

A whole heading is dedicated to rumor (translated as ‘publicity’ by Shackleton Bailey): it is not just a matter of acquiring the good will of the higher classes in society, whence a positive fama will trickle down to the people, but of making sure (51) ‘that the people itself shares this devotion to you’. Correspondingly one should, if possible, encourage the badmouthing (infamia) of one’s competitors, with plausible and in-character (53 accommodata ad eorum mores) gossip about their crimes, lusts or bribery. Cicero is inevitably an important figure in any discussion of fama at Rome. He is notorious for his own greed for glory, and for his attempts to ensure, both through his own writings and those of others, a lasting monument to his fame. This obsession also led him to reflect on the nature of true glory, working within the critiques of fame developed in the philosophical schools (see Ch. 1 pp. 23-6). Here I touch on Cicero's no less acute sensitivity to the more transient and less élite aspects of fama. In an anti-popularis mood he exploits the entirely negative stereotype of the stormy rumours that blow through the people, ever ready to feel inuidia 'hostility' to their political and social superiors, as in Pro Cluentio 77 ‘When Oppianicus had been condemned, at once L. Quinctius, a leading member of the people's party and who made a habit of gathering up all the winds of rumour and of public meetings, thought that he had an opportunity of increasing his power through the hostility to the Senate, since he considered that the Senate's judgements now found less favour with the people.' These are the colours in which Livy will paint the seditious Manlius (see pp. 251-2 below). The common storm image is developed at greater length in the Pro Murena, 35—6: For what strait, what channel do you think has so many currents, such variety of disturbances

and

changes

in the waves,

as the commotions

and

surges

that

accompany the working of elections? Everything is often thrown into confusion by breaking off for a day or the interval of a night, and sometimes public opinion (opinionem) is totally changed by a slight breath of rumour (aura rumoris) . . There is nothing more fickle than the mob, nothing murkier than what men want, nothing more deceptive than the whole way in which elections work.

These are the choppy waters Cicero also knows that the successful politician must negotiate at the time of the consular elections, Mil. 42: At this time — for I know how fearful ambition is, how great and anxious the desire

for the consulship — we are afraid of everything, not just things that can be caught in the open, but also things that we can darkly imagine: we shudder at rumour, false, fabricated, fickle tittle-tattle (rumorem,

fabulam falsam, fictam,

leuem), we

scrutinize the faces and eyes of everyone. For there is nothing so infirm, so sensitive, so fragile or pliable, as the citizens' wishes and feelings as regards us.

241

242

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

This is the same people who, later in the speech (96-7), will be constant in its undying praise of the glory of the virtuous Roman statesman. Elsewhere Cicero defends a client against a bad reputation on the grounds of the unreliability of rumour in a city that feeds on unfounded slander. There is no hard evidence that Caelius departed from the straight and narrow, just a rumour (fama). But how many can escape fama, in tam maledica ciuitate ‘in a city so given to badmouthing’ (Cael. 38)? At the heart of the Pro Caelio is a struggle on the part of Cicero to discredit the gossip about Caelius, and to validate the gossip about Clodia by summoning up her ancestor Appius Claudius Caecus to shame her with a contrast between her own disreputable behaviour, the subject of fama-as-rumour, and the fame and glory of her male ancestors and of her husband Q. Metellus (Cael.

33-4). Appius also throws in Clodia's teeth her failure to live up to the gloria muliebris of her famous relative Quinta Claudia. The Pro Caelio is a virtuoso performance of the manipulation of rumour advocated in the rhetorical handbooks; in addition the speech exploits the moral contrast between the kinds of behaviour that are commonly the subject of fama-asrumour and gossip, and the shining deeds, male but also female, that are

celebrated and fixed in fama-as-fame and glory." Cicero gives a detailed anatomy of rumour in the Pro Plancio, 56-7: One thing 1 do most earnestly beg of you, men of the jury, in view of the danger that threatens not only the defendant but all of us, that you should not think it right that the fate of the innocent should be put at the mercy of fictitious rumours and talk that has been scattered and spread abroad (ne fictis auditionibus, ne disseminato dispersoque sermoni fortunas innocentium subiciendas putetis). Many friends of the accuser, some of my ill-wishers, many who make it their business to backbite and

be hostile to everyone have invented many fictions. There is nothing so volatile as slander ( maledictum), nothing is more easily uttered, nothing more quickly picked up, more widely spread. If you can find the source of the slander, I will never ask

you to ignore its author or cover him up. But if something trickles out without a headwater

(sine capite), or if it is the kind of thing for which

no author is to be

seen, or if the person who heard it seems to you so careless that he has forgotten where he heard it, or if he thinks its author so insignificant as to be not worth remembering, then I beg you not to allow that common phrase ‘I heard it said’ to harm the innocent defendant.

The letters of Cicero and his correspondents are a natural vehicle for conveying and requesting news and rumours, what people are saying in Rome and elsewhere; this predominantly private medium may also be used 3° This paragraph is based largely on Dufallo 2007: 16-30.

Fama-as-rumour in Greek and Roman political life

to launch a bid for a more public fame. A particularly gossipy letter is one written by Caelius to Cicero, out of Rome as he journeys to take up the governorship of Cilicia (Fam. 8.1, May 51 Bc). Caelius has taken care to collect all the news:

‘the Senate’s

decrees, the edicts, the gossip, the

rumours (fabulae, rumores). Caelius has a connoisseur's eye for varieties of gossip: rumours about setbacks suffered by Caesar campaigning in Gaul are 'frequent and not pretty, but only of the whispering sort' (crebri et non belli de eo rumores, sed susurratores dumtaxat). neque adhuc certi quidquam est, neque haec incerta tamen uulgo iactantur, sed inter paucos, quos tu nosti, palam secreto narrantur ‘but nothing is certain yet, and even these uncertain reports are not bandied about in public, but are retailed among a small group (you know who I mean) as an open secret’. Caelius goes on to report a rumour that Cicero has been murdered by Pompey, put about by the subrostrani, a hapax meaning those who hang around the Rostra in the Forum, the place in Rome for the exchange of gossip. A typical example of a letter entangled in a wider web of fama is Cicero writing from Rome to Atticus in Greece, on the appointment of his brother Quintus to the governorship of Asia (Att. 1.15, 15 March 61 Bc): 'You have heard that Asia has fallen to the lot of Quintus, the dearest of my brothers. For I don't doubt that rumour has brought you this news more quickly than a letter written by any of us. Now, since we have always been very greedy for praise (laudis auidissimi), and are, and are held to be, outstanding philhellenes, and in the

public interest have incurred much hatred and hostility, remember what you are made of, and do your best to ensure that we are lauded and loved by all. I will write more to you about this in a letter which I will send by Quintus himself.’ This letter, and others, are to be interventions in the manipulation

of fama, to further the political interests of Cicero and his brother. The letter runs behind (or perhaps before) the oral report, fama-as-rumour, of the appointment, and Cicero uses it to pump-prime his and his brother's desire for fama-as-fame. The Roman élite, who invested large amounts of time and money in developing the verbal skills of rhetoric as a means to persuade and to exercise influence, felt contempt and anxiety about the uneducated and uncontrolled sermo of the informal circles, circuli, of the people, ?" although in times of oppression the libertas still available to such occasions for talking could be welcomed — so Cicero to Atticus in June 59: Att. 2.18.2 ‘the whole situation

has reached such a point that there is no hope that even magistrates, let alone 10 This is the subject of O'Neill 2003: circuli are often paired with conuiuia as places for irresponsible and unaccountable talk, in circulis conwiniisque.

243

244

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

private individuals, will be free again. Yet in this state of oppression, talk, at least in circles and at dinner parties is freer than it was (hac tamen in oppressione sermo in circulis dumtaxat et in conuiuiis est liberior quam fuit).’ In the dark days of Domitian, according to Tacitus, the right-thinking people who gave vent to their feelings for Agricola, per fora et circulos locuti sunt 'spoke in public places and social gatherings' (Agric. 43.1; see below p. 282). Ovid, doubtless fully aware of late Republican positive valuations of the talk of the people in times of oppression, slyly incorporates into his praise of Augustus the fact that, on the one issue of the emperor’s ban on rating his own achievements above those of his father Julius, (Met. 15.853) libera fama... nullisque obnoxia

iussis ‘talk,

free

and

not

submissive

to

orders’

is disobedient

(see Ch. 5 pp. 166-7).*'

famain Livy For the extant parts of Livy's History, fama

has a particular importance

that it might not have for historians of other periods and places. Firstly, the surviving text breaks off, with Book 45, in 167 Bc, almost a century and a half before the time of writing. Whatever the case may have been as Livy brought his story towards his own day, inquiry into events in the distant past is beset with uncertainty as to the reliability of sources, often requiring judgement as between competing accounts — in other words, the need to negotiate the unreliable matter of fama as ‘tradition, report, hearsay’. The first occurrence

of the word fama after the Praefatio is in a context of the uncertainties and rivalries of tradition:

1.1.6 (on the history of Aeneas and Latinus) duplex

inde fama est, introducing division where the very first words of the book had been Jam primum omnium satis constat ‘first of all it is generally agreed

that..." Secondly, the bulk of what survives narrates the history of the early and middle Republic, a period of ever intensifying political competition and rivalry." fama is bound up with the power structures of the Roman

^!

Gladhill forthcoming argues convincingly that Ovid's description of the House of Fama is ‘a cosmological forum, modelled on the forum Romanum, which is a seditious force from the

point of view of Jupiter and Palatia caeli; see Ch. 5 pp. 160 n. 25, 166 n. 39. For an argument that the duplex fama at 1.1.6 opens up central authorial issues for Livy see Miles 1995: 20-1, 30-1.

One can only speculate on how Livy may have handled the contests for fama between the dynasts of the later Republic. Traces may be discernible in later authors drawing on the Livian narrative, for example Lucan on the fama of Pompey. Feeney 1986b: 243 n. 15 considers the

Fama in Livy

Republic. In particular, fama is generated, disputed, negotiated through various kinds of competitive activity: competition for honour and glory between rival members of the élite, above all between consuls or other col-

leagues in a position of supreme power, the certamen gloriae; competition between the élite and the political supporters of the people, the Struggle of the Orders. fama is also at stake in a competition between successive generations of Romans, above all members of the same family." fama can be both divisive and cohesive in its effects on the Rornans as a group, when

what was at stake was the honour and glory of individual politicians and generals. In the earlier part ofthe period the contest for fama is often associated with the Struggle of the Orders, and the dynamics of fama operate now to magnify and now to heal the rift between the orders, leading respectively to discordia and concordia. Throughout the period there is also, Livy would have it, the danger that one man may succeed in establishing too exclusive a pre-eminence for himself. Livy's interest in the unus homo"^ of earlier Republican history is sharpened by the realities of his own day, the unique pre-eminence of, firstly, Julius Caesar, and secondly, and as it turned out

more lastingly, of Augustus. Livy repeatedly glances forward to Caesar and his adopted son in his dramatizations of Republican contests for fame and glory (see above pp. 234—7). Does he reveal what he thinks the consequences of an established principate may be for the traditional competitive pursuit offame among the plurality of an élite? This isa question that will preoccupy Tacitus in his history of imperial Rome. While fama vocabularyis to be found throughout Livy, there are also localized concentrations, what I label ‘fama episodes" sometimes in the form

possibility that Lucan got at least the germ of the idea for his treatment of this from his uncle Seneca; or did both Lucan and Seneca get it from Livy?

The locus classicus is Sall. Catil. 7.3-6 sed ciuitas incredibile memoratu est adepta libertate quantum breui creuerit: tanta cupido gloriae incesserat... gloriae maxumum certamen inter ipsos erat, before the rise of ambitio and auaritia after the defeat of Carthage. For less positive

Sallustian takes on the certamen gloriae see Jug. 41.2; Hist. 1 fr. 7. On the importance of laus and gloria in the Republican ideology of warfare see Harris 1979: 17-41. See Woodman and Martin 1996 on Tac. Ann. 3.55.5 in maiores certamina; the ethos is famously expressed in one of the Scipionic elogia, (CIL ı? 2.10) facile facteis superases gloriam maiorum. degenero can also be used of failing to live up to one's own previous standards: e.g. Ov. Met. 7.542-3 acer equus quondam magnoque in puluere famae | degenerat palmas ueterumque oblitus honorum...; Pont. 3.1.44-6 coniugis exemplum diceris esse bonae. | hanc caue degeneres, ut sint praeconia nostra | uera: uide famae quod tuearis opus. 46 On which see Santoro L'hoir 1990: 230-41; Kraus 19942: Index s.vv. ‘one and only’. 4? Cf. the concluding remarks in Moore 1989: 153-7, on the distribution of his chosen fifty ‘virtue’ words: there is a marked decrease in words for soldierly virtues after the end of the third decade, reflecting the passing of the heroic years for the testing of Roman military virtue. Similarly the great contests of fama occur in the first and third decades. With my identification

245

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of small-scale narratives, with distinct beginnings and endings, although the endings are often provisional, and subject to subsequent reopening. This narratological observation points to the dual nature of fama as both process and product. The individual in pursuit of fame or glory hopes to achieve something lasting, a permanent product arising out of the process, a monumentum. But history has a way of proving the transience or at least the mutability of fama, as the products of fama re-enter the processes of contestation and negotiation from which they arose. Some of these ‘episodes of fama’ are found at the ends of books, with a closural function

(on fama and beginnings and endings see Ch. 1 pp. 36-8): for example 8.40, on family traditions in the matter of fama rerum gestarum (see above pp. 231-2); 30.45, the bestowal on Scipio of the cognomen ‘Africanus’, here concluding a decade; 38.54—60, the death of Africanus, the occasion

for

extended discussion of the gloria and inuidia of the Scipiones. As we have seen, fama is supposed to crown a career, but in these closural episodes Livy tends to raise questions about the reliability of fama, and in so doing suggests a connection between the strivings of the characters in his narrative to achieve lasting fame and glory, and the historian's own attempts to establish a reliable fama, ‘report’, of what happened in the past, to write finis to his own work." There is, as we have seen, a close connection between fama as

the subject of Livy's History and fama as the materials from which the historian himself constructs his own account, his own fama, of what happened. As in the case of the major epic representations of Fama, there is no sharp boundary between the workings of fama inside and outside the text. To bring out some of the recurrent features of Livian dealings with fama,I start with a small-scale example ofa ‘fama episode’ from Book 10, in which a plot is motivated by the pressure of reports and reputations (10.13.2-13). In 298 Bc a fama, rumour (10.13.2), about an external threat, the amassing of

armies by the Etruscans and Samnites, exercises irresistible pressure on the consular elections. A reluctant Fabius Rullianus pleads that he has achieved enough gloria for himself, and that he does not want to overshadow the gloria and honores of other brave men. His protests are ignored, and he is unanimously elected. He accepts, bowing to the unanimity of the state (consensu ciuitatis), and proceeds to voice his support for P. Decius as of localized ‘fama episodes’ compare Moore's observation of ‘clusters’ of individual virtue terms, for example uirtus in the Alexander digression in Livy 9, or patientia in the war against Veil. On the impossibility of establishing a sharp dichotomy between fabula, as an unreliable report or fama, and clear and undisputable monumenta in Livy's historiography see Miles 1995: Ch. 1; see also Feldherr 1998: 6-7.

Fama in Livy

his colleague, a man of whom he has previous experience in harmonious colleagueship (concordi collegio). The remaining centuries all vote for Fabius and Decius as consuls. The episode begins with the announcement of the imminent elections, and concludes with the completion

of the elections;

closure is reinforced by the (re)assertion of consensus among the orders at Rome and of concordia between the consuls. Here the elements of a fama episode are present in muted and apparently disconnected form. Fabius increases his standing with the people by not seeking to increase his own honour and glory, on the ground that he has achieved a sufficient greatness, whether viewed from his own perspective, or that of the potential inuidia of the gods at the excessive good fortune of a human individual." Furthermore there might appear to be no connection between the fama, rumour, of enemy activity that determines what happens in the elections, and the struggle between Fabius and the people of Rome over the fresh accession to his gloria (or fama). But it is Fabius’ previous reputation for military achievement that marks him out as the one man who can adequately meet the terror induced by the rumour (in contrast to the other distinguished men who were actively seeking the consulship).? What

is said about Fabius — the reputation that attaches to him, in this

case focussed in a name, his cognomen Maximus - is viewed as sufficient answer to the fama, what is said about the raising of huge enemy armies. The absence in this instance ofa certamen gloriae (or famae) at Rome results from the fear ofan unequal certamen with the enemy (10.13.4 haudquaquam pari defungendum esse certamine); in other words metus hostilis puts a lid on tensions within the city, and the fame of Fabius precipitates a consensus among the Romans. At 10.24 it will turn out that this closure is only provisional, when consular concordia breaks down in the year of Sentinum (295 sc). The chapter runs

10.13 backwards, starting with consular concord, and ending with a report from the front. The new consular year starts with Fabius and Decius, nec gloria magis rerum, quae ingens erat, quam concordia inter se clari 'famous

u

49 10.13.6 nimia fortuna: coupled with inuidia in a parallel passage at 5.21.15 (Camillus). 59 Although the cognomen Maximus had not been granted in the first place for military ‘greatness, at 10.3.7 Livy recognizes that Fabius deserves it just as much for his achievements in war: (Fabius) si qua alia arte cognomen suum aequauit, tum maxime bellicis laudibus. The original granting of the cognomen is recorded at 9.46.15 adeoque eam rem acceptam gratis animis ferunt ut Maximi cognomen, quod tot uictoriis non pepererat hac ordinum temperatione pareret. This penultimate sentence of the book functions as a light example of closural fama, here combined with closural concordia. Cf. Sall. Jug. 41.2 ante Carthaginem deletam... neque gloriae neque dominationis certamen inter ciuis erat: metus hostilis in bonis artibus ciuitatem retinebat.

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not so much for the glory, great though it was, of their achievements, as for their mutual harmony’ Fabius had originally been given the cognomen Maximus

in 304 sc for reconciling the orders (9.46.15). Now a certamen

between the ordines breaks out over a move on the part of the patricians to assign Etruria to Fabius as his province extra ordinem. This prompts the two consuls to square offin the Senate in an argument over gloria and contumelia. At 10.13.7 Fabius had used a tree image to express his contentment with the scale of his glory: et se gloriae seniorum succreuisse et ad suam gloriam consurgentes alios laetum adspicere ‘he himself had grown to the measure of his elders’ glory, and now was happy to watch others growing to match his own glory.”” He now uses a tree image to convey his unwillingness to see his colleague's glory grow at the expense of his own: 10.24.5 ‘he said that it was unworthy that another should gather the fruit under a tree that he had sown’.* Decius finally appeals (10.24.17) ad famam populi Romani 'to the reputation of the Roman people, which will be strengthened if it is seen that Rome has two consuls each of whom is capable of waging the Etruscan war. [n response Fabius asks only that, before the election,

the Romans should hear read out the letters sent by Ap. Claudius from Etruria. Their contents, previously reported by Livy (10.21.11—12 crebrae litterae), constitute a yet more threatening version of the fama of enemy military preparations at 10.13.3. Etruria is then assigned to Fabius extra sortem, (10.24.18) nec minore populi consensu quam senatus ‘with as much unanimity on the part of the people as of the Senate. Once again metus hostilis has, for the time being at least, put an end to friction between the orders, and stifled the divisive consequences of a certamen gloriae.

To sum up the points arising out of these two linked episodes: * fama enters into self-contained narratives or ‘plots’. * These plots often form themselves into longer sequences; the plots of fama are rarely if ever brought to a final conclusion. fama keeps on the move, is inherently restless and unstable. * fama grows and keeps on growing; attempts to set a limit to her growth tend to be frustrated. 9

Oakley 2005 ad loc. ‘the image is of young trees growing up beneath mature specimens: Cf. Lucan's famous image of Pompey the Great's magni nominis umbra as a vast but moribund tree, Bell. Civ. 1.135—43; Caesar by contrast has more than just nomen... [et] fama ducis, 144: see Ch. 6 pp. 180-1. 53 Decius uses a fire image (10.24.13), of finally putting out the smouldering fire of the war in Etruria that repeatedly flares up. Does he hint that Fabius deliberately avoids total extinction of the fire, in order to allow further occasions for his own glory to blaze up? On fire imagery applied to fama see Ch. 3 p. 83.

Fama in Livy

* fama may be determinative in the selection or appointment of an individual for office. * fama is implicated in class hierarchies and in the Struggle of the Orders. What I have called 'fama episodes' are placed at a number of significant points in the first and third decades. The first comes shortly after the establishment of Republican libertas in 2.7-8. After the death in battle of his fellow consul Brutus, the sole surviving consul, P. Valerius, comes under

suspicion of aiming at kingship, a suspicion prompted by two kinds of what is perceived as an unacceptable pre-eminence: he has not moved to appoint a replacement partner in office, and is building himself a house high on the Velia.”' fauor changes to inuidia, and fama gets to work, putting it about that Valerius was aspiring to kingship (2.7.6 regnum eum adfectare fama ferebat). Valerius deferentially addresses the people, and states what is almost a law," that gloria mutates into inuidia (see Ch. 10 pp. 384—6), 2.7.8—10: The consul praised his colleague's good fortune, seeing that he had met his death after liberating his country, holding the highest office, fighting for the Republic, at the peak of a glory that had not yet turned into envy (matura gloria necdum se uertente in inuidiam); whereas

he had

outlived

his glory and survived

to face

accusations and ill-will (se superstitem'^ gloriae suae ad crimen atque inuidiam superesse)

... Does my reputation (fama) with you depend on so trivial a cause?

The episode begins with metamorphosis, a change in reputation with the fickle crowd (2.7.5 ut sunt mutabiles uolgi animi), and is brought to a close with a reverse metamorphosis: 2.8.1 “Laws were then proposed that not only cleared the consul from the suspicion of seeking kingship, but took such an opposite turn that they made him popular (quae adeo in contrarium uerterent ut popularem etiam facerent) (on the mutability of fama see Ch. 1 p. 6). This change of political perception is sealed with a change of name: ‘and so the cognomen

of Publicola (“People’s Friend") was created

for him, the founding example in the Roman Republic of the granting of a cognomen for service to the state. 5!

For the oppressive fortified house of the king or tyrant on a citadel cf. Sen. Thy. 641-5; Ogilvie 1970 notes the parallel, and suggests a Hellenistic topos. 55 Or at least ‘a rhetorical commonplace; Ogilvie 1970 on 2.7.8, comparing Sall. Jug. 55.3; Nepos, Chabr. 3.3. But coming so early in the history of the Republic, the cliché has the force of a foundational moment. 56

More usually it is fame that survives the death of the individual, Hor. Odes 2.2.8 Fama superstes

(see Ch. | p. 31; on Tacitus’ Agricola see Ch. 8 pp. 283-4); to ‘survive one’s glory’ is a pointed way of saying that envy attacks the living. For the idea that fama has a life cycle, is born, grows old (senescere) and dies out see p. 258. In a different context cf. Petrarch on the obliteration of

fama as a second death: Ch. 12 p. 465.

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Fama and the historians 1. Livy

The workings of fama and inuidia are established right at the beginning of the Republic. The competitive contexts of fama are also staked out: firstly the contest between the two consuls, here in the particular form of the death

of one of the pair which leaves the survivor in an indisputable position of sole power, while at the same time the dead consul is superior in the matter

of gloria, by virtue of his timely death (matura gloria); and secondly the contest between the noble consul and the people (and their supporters), an early episode in the Struggle of the Orders. Valerius proves that he is not tempted by the pursuit of fame to set himself above the institutions of the Republic, as he takes measures of a very physical kind to disable a vertical expansiveness characteristic both of political ambition and of fama, and in so doing removes the two grounds for the suspicion of royal ambitions: first he dips the consular fasces, and then he transports the sticks and stones of his house down from the Velia. However, Livy’s history of the Republic will contain a series of famous men who are tempted to aim for a unique pre-eminence, until a time will come when the balance of the Republic is fatally overthrown. Finally the story of Publicola highlights the mutability and fickleness of fame. The next major fama episode comes shortly after the refoundation of Rome following its destruction by the Gauls, the seditio of Manlius Capitolinus. In her commentary Christina Kraus brings out very well the episode's dealings with ‘power, deception, and above all authority; Another way of putting this is to say that this is a story about fama: the struggle between Capitolinus and Camillus for the fama of being a great Roman, to achieve which Capitolinus exploits both popularis fama,** the ‘talk of the people’, and the power of oratory to create fama. This story of a struggle for prestige and power between two leading Romans, a confrontation of gloria and its inescapable shadow inuidia, is also an episode in the history of the struggle between patricians and plebeians. The episode also reflects intensively on the historian’s struggle to master fama, as Kraus well brings out (see above

p. 232). The seditio Manliana is given prominence by its position near the beginning of the second pentad, and it also enters into significant relationships with other episodes. Within Book 6 this episode of plebeian unrest balances the Licinio-Sextian rogations at the end of the book.” It also balances the ES]

3!

*

5

5

*

250

Kraus 199-la: 147. For a discussion of the disgracing of Manlius in the context of Roman memory sanctions see Flower 2006: Ch. 3. On which see Seager 1972: 330, citing Cic. Tusc. 1.110, 3.4, 5.46; Fin. 2.48 ff.; De or. 3.117 optimi cuiusque/popularis laus. Oakley 19972: 477.

Fama in Livy

narratives of friction between patrician and plebeian, including the fama episode ofthe consuls Fabius and Decius, in the last book, 10, of the pentad.""

There are further points of contact with the story of Valerius Publicola at the very beginning of Republican history, but through inversion: Valerius is wrongly suspected of aiming at kingship, whereas Manlius, according to the tradition from which Livy worked (6.18.16), did aim at kingship. Valerius voluntarily moves his house down

from the Velia; Manlius' house on the

Capitoline, it is implied, was torn down. Valerius received his cognomen in recognition of his moderation; Manlius' cognomen, mark of his fame and

source of his excessive pride, will also mark the place of his execution, and one of the notae imposed on the dead man is the removal of a name, the ban

on the use of his praenomen Marcus by future members of the gens Manlia. Manliusis introduced as a man (6.11.2) 'of patrician family and renowned

fame (inclitae famae), whose name Capitolinus ‘saved for the end...is a pointed reminder of his achievement' (Kraus 1994a ad loc.); his name is his

symbolic capital. In the beginning of the story is its end: it will be from the Capitol that Manlius is thrown to his death, with a final note on the place that is the reminder of his fame: 6.20.12 'the tribunes hurled him down from the Tarpeian Rock, and for one and the same man that place was memorial both of his outstanding glory and of the ultimate punishment (eximiae gloriae monumentum et poenae ultimae). Manlius is driven by inuidia against Camillus, paired with Manlius as one of the two heroes who saved Rome from the Gauls (and, to Manlius' way of thinking, second to himself in his contribution to that success), but now singled out for high office. Manlius is puffed up, inflated by his own internally generated version of fama (6.11.6 his opinionibus inflato animo). Honour is 'the value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society.’ The internal hot air is soon matched by the gusts of popular opinion, puffing up Manlius' fama to a great size: 6.11.7 iam aura non consilio ferri famaeque magnae malle quam bonae esse ‘now he was swept along by the breath of popularity, not by good counsel, and he preferred a great fame to the fame of being good.’ Kraus (1994a ad loc.) notes the ‘connection between political/mental turbulence

60 On some of the structural connections between narratives of the Struggle of the Orders in the first decade see Nathan 2003. 6

The classic formulation of Pitt-Rivers

62

The formulation is different from the Sallustian epigram on Cato, which however it probably echoes, (Catil. 54.6) esse quam uideri bonus malebat: ita quo minus petebat gloriam eo magis illum sequebatur, intertextuality hints at a contrast between reality and appearance. Kraus also cites Tac. Agric. 5.3 nec minus periculum ex magna fama quam ex mala. See Oakley 1997a on 6.11.7, citing the important passage on bona fama at Cic. Sest. 139.

1966: 21: see Ch.

1 p. 12.

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Fama and the historians 1. Livy

and winds or storms’; equally relevant is the frequent negative association of fama-as-rumour with winds or storms, the fickleness of popularis aura, and the windy vanity of uentosa gloria. The wind is both uncontrollably boisterous and nothing but empty air. In 6.12-13 we turn to affairs abroad, whose clarity contrasts with the murky affairs at home. As Kraus notes, ‘military traitors are clearly recognizable whereas political identities and purposes are dangerously confused’. This contrast between the relative ease of determining the fama of foreign affairs and the murky dealings of fama in domestic affairs will be central to the narrative strategy of Tacitus’ Agricola." 65 But even in foreign affairs there is room for divergent accounts. The digression at 6.12.2-6 on the historian’s own authority in establishing the truth about the military resources of the Volsci and Aequi reflects on the struggle inside the narrative for control of fama: ‘Manlius’ bid for narrative control... [is] reflected in L.’s attempt to find a reliable narrative among his sources'^^ In the end the historian may have to rely on his own opinion: 6.12.3 “What authority can I adduce in this matter other than my own opinion, such as anyone can conjecture for himself?'* The relationship of fama to facta is always an unstable one (see Ch. 1 p. 9). Ideally a man acquires fama in proportion to his res gestae. Virgil's Jupiter, laying down the law of Fate to his son Hercules, defines the job of uirtus as famam extendere factis (Aen. 10.468), a matching and coextensive expansion of both deeds and words.” At 6.14 Manlius resorts to facta to reinforce his words, orationes, seizing on and displaying to the crowd a centurion arrested for debt: this action-as-display is used to redefine Manlius’ past actions, facta, in saving the Capitol - futile, without substance, in the light of what you now see. In the sequel Manlius is finally shown to lose touch with the distinction between fact and fiction (omisso discrimine

uera an uana iaceret), with his story about Gallic gold concealed from the

w

6

x

6

ao

6

On the connections between fama and the storm in Aeneid 1, an analogue in the natural world to seditio in the human, see Ch. ? pp. 70-2. Kraus 199-la: 156. Note however that popular seditio fomented by a popularis politician is part and parcel of the Republican historiography to which the imperial historian Tacitus looks back with nostalgia: cf. Ann. 4.32.1 (on which see Ch. 8 p. 303), and also Ann. 1.72.2, talking of better times when

a

6

67

=

6 6

P

252

the lex maiestatis was applied to, inter alios, qui... plebem seditionibus. . . minuisset. Kraus 199/a: 158. Cf. Livy's comment on the difficulty of arriving at a true fama rerum gestarum in 8.40 (see above pp. 231-2). Cf. Hor. Odes 3.3.44-6 Roma... horrenda late nomen in ultimas | extendat oras. For the alliterative combination of uerus and uanus (common in Livy) see Harrison 1991 on Aen. 10.630-1.

Fama in Livy

people by the senators (6.14.11). Manlius is now behaving like the Virgilian Fama, who (Aen. 4.190) et pariter facta atque infecta canebat ‘sang of things done

and not done

alike’;’” or like that relative of Fama, the puffed-up

boaster Numanus, Aen. 9.595—7 (see Ch. 4 p. 132).

In his climactic speech of self-defence against the backdrop of the Capitol Manlius attempts to exonerate himself through a parade of his fama, firstly through the verbal enumeration of his facta: 6.20.8 et cum ea quoque quae bello gesta essent pro fastigio rerum oratione etiam magnifica, facta dictis aequando, memorasset'after he had also related his exploits in war, in a speech whose magnificence matched the height of his achievements, equalling deeds with words: The echo of Sallust's definition of the historian's task, (Catil. 3.2) facta dictisexaequanda sunt, endorses the solidity of this aspect of his fama; the elevation of his speech, oratio, is proportionate to the elevation

of his deeds, rerum, although magnifica could all too easily be taken in the sense of ‘boastful’! But a divorce between past res gestae and the potency of present fama is effected through the business of Capitolinus' visual display of his physical scars against the backdrop of the Capitol. How detachable from reality these tokens ofa past identification with the salus populi Romani (6.20.9) really are,’ is demonstrated when the tribunes reconvene the trial

in a different location, where Capitolinus is swiftly condemned and then executed, the fama of his cognomen converted into censorial infamia, notae (condemnatory marks) that blot his great nomen. A little later, at Livy 6.22.5-25.6, an example of the correct relationship between service to the res publica and personal fame is provided in the behaviour of the wise old Camillus towards the rash young commander L. Furius Medullinus, in an episode that looks forward to the fame of both

Fabius Cunctator and of Julius Caesar." The repetition in ring-composition of gloria (6.22.5-25.6) marks this as a typical fama episode, which begins thus, 6.22.6: From the tribunes L. Furius was assigned to him by lot as assistant, not so much in the interest of the state as that he might be the source of all praise for his colleague, both publicly, because he had set upright again what had fallen through the other

e

7

7

Cf. Livy 35.232 (expectatio belli cum Antiochi) etsi per legatos identidem omnia explorabantur, tamen rumores temere sine ullis auctoribus orti multa falsa ueris miscebant. For another story about hidden gold that unleashes a whirlwind of rumour see Tac. Ann. 16.1-3 (see Ch. 8 pp. 307-13). Kraus 19942 ad loc. ‘Like inflatus... , magnifica refers both to Manlius’ style (OLD 1d) and his manner (OLD 4 “Boastful, bragging, proud”).

72 wu

7

On the increasing insubstantiality of Manlius’ rhetorical use of evidentia see Kraus 199.4a: 212. The parallels are fully discussed by Kraus 199-1a and Oakley 19972 ad loc.

253

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man’s rashness, and

in private, because

he had

used Lucius’ mistake to earn his

gratitude, rather than glory for himself.

The apparent conflict between what is in the interest of the state (e re publica) and what redounds to the glory of Camillus (materia ad omnem

laudem)

is resolved through Camillus’ own attitude to fame and glory: glory is not the chief goal by which he directs his actions. Again the Sallustian Cato is relevant: Catil. 54.6 esse quam uideri bonus malebat: ita, quo minus petebat gloriam, eo magis illum sequebatur ‘he would rather be good than seem good; and so, the less he sought out glory, the more it followed him’. The

issue of the fama of the one man who saves the state is implicitly set within an imperial agenda: Medullinus uses dismissive language about the aging Camillus, Livy 6.23.7: sed Camillo cum uitae satis tum gloriae esse; quid attinere cum mortali corpore uno ciuitatis quam immortalem esse deceat pati consenescere uires? But Camillus had had enough oflife and of glory; what point was there in allowing the state, which should be immortal, to sink into senility with the mortal body of one man?

This mimics the terms in which Cicero handles the uneasy pre-eminence of Caesar in the Pro Marcello, alluding both to the words of Caesar as reported by Cicero at Marc. 25 ‘satis diu uel naturae uixi uel gloriae," and to Cicero's own flattering words at Marc. 22 doleo... cum res publica immortalis esse debeat, eam in unius mortalis anima consistere '| grieve that

the state, which ought to be immortal, depends on the life of one mortal man’. Oakley (1997a on 6.23.7) says that the purpose of the allusion to Cic. Marc. 25 is unclear, while noting, ‘In one sense L. Furius was right: Camillus did not strive to enhance his own gloriaby triumphing over Furius folly.’ Therein surely lies the answer to the question: L. Furius unwittingly acknowledges in Camillus an attitude to fame that is entirely consonant with the good of the state, whereas the same could not so easily be said of Julius Caesar.’ Taught a hard lesson by the military consequences of his temerity, Medullinus will recognize the true nature of the one man Camillus’ services to the res publica: Livy 6.24.9 ‘Despite the refusal and prohibition of my colleague, I sided with the recklessness of all rather than with the 74 See above pp. 236-7. 75 Camillus can either be a touchstone for the difference between a Republican pre-eminent individual and the monarchical princeps, or appropriated as a model for the leadership of one man rather than the Republican collective: see Masters 1992: 98-106.

Fama in Livy

prudence of one man. Whatever the outcome [of the present battle], Camillus sees his glory secure. As for me, if the battle is not restored, I shall share

the disaster with everyone, but the infamy only will endure (infamiam solus sentiam).' Back in Rome reconciliation and harmony are accompanied by unanimity of public opinion and the magnification of Camillus' personal fame: 6.25.4 ‘both in the army and at Rome everyone was saying the same thing (constans omnium fama erat), that, although the Volscian campaign had been conducted with varying fortunes, the blame for defeat and flight lay with L. Furius, but the glory of the victory (secundae [pugnae] decus) was entirely M. Furius: Harmony between the two commanders is matched by consensus among the people of Rome. constans may mean either 'firm, fixed’, as it often does with fama or rumor’® (here in contrast to uaria fortuna), or ‘consistent, harmonious’, between different groups of people, as

the juxtaposition with omnium would suggest — or both. This fama episode concludes, then, with a stable consensus of fama, the fulfilment of Camillus' promise on being elected dictator at 6.6.9 ‘and so, if it were possible to add to his exertions and his vigilance, he should vie with himself in his efforts to make the very high opinion which the city unanimously held of him an abiding one (ciuitatis opinionem, quae maxima sit, etiam constantem efficiat). Given the mutability of fama this is quite an achievement." In a final twist Camillus reinforces collegiate concord when he chooses Medullinus as his unus, ‘unique’, adiutorin the proposed war against Tusculum: 6.25.6 qua moderatione animi cum collegae leuauit infamiam tum sibi gloriam ingentem peperit 'by this moderation he both lightened his colleague's disgrace and won great glory for himself’. moderatio is the virtue best suited to counter fama's inherent vice, its expansiveness, its inability to recognize a modus,

but over the course of the history of the Roman Republic this may prove to be a losing battle. Livy reinforces the lessons taught by Camillus in the matter of the management of fama in the death notice at 7.1.9—10: For he was truly a man of singular excellence ( uir unicus) in all his fortunes, a leader in peace and war before he went into exile, and even more famous in exile (clarior

in exsilio), whether with regard to the yearning of the city which when captured begged for his help in his absence, or with regard to the success with which when 76

constans Cic. Fam. sine auctore, Fam.

12.9.1

rumores de oppresso Dolabella, satis illos quidem constantes, sed adhuc

10.20.1; Livy 10.37.13 constans parum memoria huius anni; Tac. Agric. 43.2

constans rumor ueneno interceptum; Hist. 1.66.2 sed fama constans fuit ipsum Valentem magna M RU

pecunia emptum (with Heubner (1963

82) ad loc.); Suet. Jul. 6 fama.

Kraus 199-42 ad loc. compares Cic. Mur. 35 totam opinionem parua non numquam commmutat aura rumoris, she also notes that the conjunction of constans and consensus is Ciceronian.

255

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Fama and the historians 1. Livy

restored

to his fatherland

he restored

the fatherland

at the same

time

(restitutus

in patriam secum patriam ipsam restituit); and then for the remaining twenty-five years of his life he lived up to the title of his great glory (par... titulo tantae gloriae fuit), and was deemed worthy of being called (quem... ferrent) the second founder of the city after Romulus.

As a uir unicus he embraces but is superior to the unus homo whose preeminence is displayed solely through a position of power. Again there is no conflict between the interests of the res publica, which he restored, and his

glory, which rested on his salvation of the state, and which he never sought to magnify at the expense of the common interest. In patriam restituit is to be heard an echo of the Ennian line (Ann. 363 Skutsch)

unus homo nobis

cunctando restituit rem; in the idea of a correctly managed glory is perhaps to be heard an echo of the third line of the same fragment, ergo postque magisque uiri nunc gloria claret (see below p. 259).

Livy's third decade Livy's third decade contains a number of self-contained set-pieces of fama. Rumour and disturbance within a community feed each other, in scenes of panic and seditio (whether within the city or an army). For example at 22.7 panic (terror ac tumultus) in Rome is triggered by the first report of the disaster at Trasimene (ad primum

nuntium cladis); in the absence of more

certain news, the city is filled with rumours, and crowds flock to the gates

desperate to interrogate any messenger. The women are especially forward in their hunger for news and in their emotional reaction to what they hear, in keeping with a frequent gendering of rumour and gossip as a female activity (see Ch. 10 pp. 387-91). A much longer and richly imagistic fama episode at 28.24—5 intertwines the history of a rumour, that Scipio was gravely ill," and later that he had died, with the history of a mutiny,

seditio, at Sucro

that had been

brewing already, itself fomented by the circulation of tendentious talk among the soldiers: 28.24.7 ac primo sermones tantum occulti serebantur 'at first 78 For another example of a set-piece of combined panic and rumour see Luc. Bell. Civ. 1.466 ff., fama and the approach of Caesar, esp. 484-6 sic quisque pauendo | dat uires famae, nulloque auctore malorum,

| quae

finxere timent.

79 The implication that the rumour is itself a worse kind of disease is echoed in the reaction of the tribunes at the end of the mutiny, (28.25.7) laetari quod nihil tristius nec insanabilius esset; cf. 28.27.7 (Scipio on the mutiny) "inuitus ea tamquam uolnera attingo; sed nisi tacta tractataque sanari non possunt; 28.29.3.

Fama in Livy

they only engaged in secret conversations." Livy opens the episode with a general comment on the growth of rumour: 28.24.1 Scipio ipse graui morbo implicitus, grauiore tamen fama cum ad id quisque quod audierat insita hominibus libidine alendi de industria rumores adiceret aliquid'Scipio himself was afflicted with a serious illness, but the report was more serious still, since

everyone added something to what he had heard, through the innate human passion for deliberately feeding rumours’: this perhaps echoes an Ovidian formulation of rumour's expansiveness. *! Rumour confuses the distinction between

uerus and

uanus (28.24.2,

25.2: cf. 6.14.11,

Manlius'

disregard

for the distinction), and the unruly words unleash a storm: 28.24.2 cum

uanus rumor tantas procellas exciuisset 'since an empty rumour had stirred up such storms." The death of the rumour and of the seditio is multiply determined. Once the mutiny has fully broken out (28.24.12 erupit deinde seditio), the continued non-arrival of reliable news of the death of Scipio

leads to the fading away of the rumour (28.25.1 euanesceretque temere ortus rumor), and the soldiers anxiously disassociate themselves from any part in the fabrication of the rumour (28.25.2 ut credidisse potius temere quam finxisse rem talem uideri posset ‘so that each might be thought rather to have rashly believed such a thing than to have invented it). Oil is then poured on the waters by the calming words of the tribunes sent by Scipio, and order is finally imposed by the harsher words and measures of Scipio himself, in his first test in such a situation (28.25.8 ad seditionum procellas rudem

o o

‘unacquainted with the gusts of mutinies’). A third brief but densely packed fama episode is inserted at the end of the narrative for 209 sc (27.20.9—21.5), providing an overview of the Echoed towards the end of the episode, (28.25.5) sermones inter se serentium circulos. sermonem/-es serere is a common figura etymologica (e.g. Plaut. Curc. 193; Virg. Aen. 6.160); for the etymology see Varro, Ling. Lat. 6.64 sermo enim non potest in uno homine esse solo, sed ubi oratio cum altero coniuncta (i.e. from sero ‘join’). Sometimes sero ‘sow’ may be sensed to be in play, with the image of ‘sowing rumours’ (see Ch. 2 p. 69): see Oakley 1997b on Livy 7.39.6. On circuli and gossip see O'Neill 2003. On seditio and crowd psychology see Hardie

o w

» N

o

2010. Ov. Met. 12.57-8 (in the House of Fama)

hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti | crescit, et

auditis aliquid nouus adicit auctor. Scipio picks up on the storm image, combining it with that of disease, in his speech to the mutineers: 28.27.11 sed multitudo omnis sicut natura maris per se immobilis est, uenti et aurae cient; ita aut tranquillum aut procellae in uobis sunt; et causa atque origo omnis furoris penes auctores est, uos contagione insanistis. For discussion of this passage in relation to the storm in Aeneid 1 see Ch. ? p. 72; Conway 1935 uses this Livian episode to illustrate the comparison of the multitude to the storm-tossed sea that is inverted in the Virgilian statesman simile at Aen. 1.148-53. For fingere et credere in Tacitean rumour-machines see Ch. 8 pp. 285 n. 45, 292-3.

257

258

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

workings of fama as it circulates between the conduct of wars and affairs in the city. This is business as usual in the fully functional Republican system in a state of war on several fronts. The dynamic of the waxing and waning reputations of commanders in the field is fuelled by class tensions in Rome; the proliferating circulation of rumour and slander is controlled by the formal institutions of oratory and elections, 27.20.9-10: Romae fama Scipionis in dies crescere, Fabio Tarentum captum astu magis quam uirtute gloriae tamen esse, Fului senescere" fama, Marcellus etiam aduerso rumore

esse, superquam quod primo male pugnauerat... At Rome Scipio's fame grew day by day; although Fabius had captured Tarentum through guile rather than bravery, it redounded to his glory; Fulvius' reputation was on the wane, and Marcellus was even the target of hostile rumours, not only

because he had first been defeated...

Dissentient fama is further fuelled by hostility between the orders, in the person of a tribune, C. Publicius Bibulus, who, (27.20.11) ‘starting with the

first battle that had gone badly, through continuous speeches had brought Marcellus into disrepute and ill-favour with the people (adsiduis contionibus infamem inuisumque plebei Claudium fecerat). Marcellus returns to Rome ad deprecandam ignominiam ‘to clear himself of the disgrace’; he counters the tribune's accusation of himself and the whole nobility with commemoratio rerum suarum, his own version of his fama, in consequence of which he is elected consul ingenti consensu, providing at least a temporary resolution to the tendency of fama to multiply and divide through political discord (see on 10.13 above pp. 246-7). In Livy'sthird decade fame's plots circle above all around the two towering figures of Q. Fabius Maximus Cunctator, in his dealings with other Romans who contravene the moderation and prudence for which he is famous, and Scipo Africanus, who achieves an unprecedented measure of military glory. I will first trace separately the plots of fama of the two men, before looking at the episode in which these two outstanding generals of the war against Hannibal go head to head in the debate over Scipio's African command at 28.40—4. There

Fabius'

arguments

on the matter

of fama

have force,

but he loses the debate, and events prove him wrong on the wisdom

of

allowing Scipio to take the command. Arguably this is the point at which 5! Cf. Livy 29.3.15; Tac. Hist. 2.24.1; Ann. 2.77.2; cf. also Lucan 4.812 a quibus omne aeui senium sua fama repellit (whence Stat. Theb. 9.318 senium depellere famae). 55

Fabius as mirrored in Camillus in Livy 6: Kraus 199.13 on 6.22.5-26, 22.6.

Fama in Livy

the Republican paragon of a virtuous and moderate attitude to fama is superseded by the model of a hero whose insatiable desire for fama will sweep him to a height of unprecedented and unequalled glory, anticipating that of the great men of the end of the Republic. In making Fabius Cunctator a pivotal figure for the fama episodes of the third decade, Livy repeatedly echoes Ennius' lines on Fabius, Ann. 363—5 Skutsch:*° unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem. noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem. ergo postque magisque uiri nunc gloria claret. By delaying one man national safety. And out.

restored the state for us; he did not put rumours before so, growing with the years, the hero's glory now

shines

Several explicit or implicit contrasts are operative here: between rumoresand salus, between rumores and gloria, insubstantial and solid variants of fama;

between salus and gloria (indifference to which is entailed in indifference to rumores); and between res and rumores: the gloria of Fabius is the fama rerum gestarum; what is said of Fabius now, dicta, is precisely equivalent to his facta." By not caring about what people say, Fabius achieves true glory, which follows him the more the less he seeks it, like Sallust's Cato (Catil. 54.6: see above p. 254).** The restorative power of Fabius is chosen by Virgil, through the mouthpiece of Anchises, as the climax to the catalogue of the gloria and fata of the Romans in Aeneid 6; lines 364—5, which Virgil does not imitate, are perhaps an unspoken intertext making a claim for the substantiality of the phantoms of Roman gloria (Aen. 6.757) and fama (6.889) revealed to Aeneas by Anchises. Virgil's placing of Fabius at the #6 In the light of his stepson's later entanglement with rumours, it is ironic that Augustus is said to have adapted the first line of the Ennian passage in a letter to Tiberius (Suet. Tib. 21), replacing cunctando with uigilando. In Livy Fabius is used as an exemplum (as he already is in the unknown context of the Ennian lines) by L. Aemilius at 44.22.10 ‘neque enim omnes tam firmi et constantis animi contra aduersum rumorem esse possunt quam Q. Fabius fuit, qui suum imperium minui per uanitatem populi maluit quam secunda fama male rem publicam gerere." On Livy's intensive allusions to the first line of the Ennian fragment, unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem, see Elliott 2009, en

8 8

Cf. Sall. Catil. 3.2 facta dictis exaequanda sunt (on which see above p. 232). Ann. 363-5 is also quoted at Cic. Off. 1.84 in a warning about the dangers of putting personal reputation above the safety of the

res publica; the section concludes sunt enim qui, quod

sentiunt, etsi optimum sit, tamen inuidiae metu non audeant dicere, with which may be

compared the complaints of Tacitus about the dangers facing the historian at the beginning of the Agricola.

259

260

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

climax of the Parade of Heroes is in part determined by his impeccably Republican credentials as a model for the one man who restores the state in Virgil's own day, the princeps Augustus." In showing a Fabius who, in his management of fama, is first seen, in Book 22, to be unquestionably the saviour of the state, both in his deeds and words, but in Book 28 to

be at odds with what Roman success requires, Livy opens a debate for his contemporary readers about the kind of unus homo that Rome does or does not need in the present day; or, rather than a debate, it might be truer to say

a set of reflections on a fait accompli. The story of Fabius and his magister equitum Minucius, told in Livy 22.2330, provides an almost too neat illustration of the Ennian message about ‘Fabius’

cunning

delaying

tactics’

(22.23.1

sollers cunctatio Fabi), which

at the start is despised and beset by inuidia (22.23.3—4), and ends being praised to the skies (22.30.8). This is achieved by Fabius' studious deafness

to other kinds of fama (22.24.14—25.1), the fama uana 'baseless report' and uaniores litterae 'even more baseless dispatches’ of a famous victory over Hannibal by Minucius, magister equitum. At 22.25-6 the motion of the tribune M. Metilius that the magister equitum should be given equal powers with the dictator is supported by the humbly born C. Terentius Varro, who (22.26.4) auram fauoris popularis ex dictatoria inuidia petit 'courted the breath of popular favour through hostility towards the dictator’. Fabius alone does not feel the contumelia of this (22.26.5). Minucius' puffed-up gloriari (22.27.2) is destined for a very short life indeed. Saved from his own rashness by Fabius, Minucius acknowledges Fabius as his ‘father’, to whom he owes his salvation (salus: cf. Enn. Ann. 364), and recognizes that the plebiscite is more of a burden

(oneratus) than an honour (honoratus)

(22.30.4). The news is brought to Rome by a report of the event (fama rei gestae) followed by letters from both generals and soldiery: 22.30.7 pro se quisque Maximum laudibus ad caelum ferre ‘they all joined in praising Maximus to the skies’. Fabius enjoys equal glory in the eyes of Hannibal, who now has confirmation of the terribilis fama of the Romans passed down to him by his fathers. As if a Livian fama episode must spin itself out as far as possible, the sequence ends with a footnote to Hannibal's reflections on the glory of Fabius and the ancestral reputation of the Romans, which is itself presented as a report, a fama, by the narrator: 22.30.10 Hannibalem quoque ex acie redeuntem dixisse ferunt tandem eam nubem, quae sedere in iugis montium solita sit, cum procella imbrem dedisse 'they say that Hannibal too, as he returned from the battle, said that at last the cloud, which had 9?

Hardie

1993a: 4-5.

Fama in Livy

long rested on the mountain-ridges, had burst out in a rainstorm’.”” No storms of public opinion and windy rumour blowing through the forum, but a single targeted cloudburst issuing from the mountain-top — as if sent by Jupiter, perhaps. Later in Book 22 (38.6—40) Fabius continues to show his skill in fame-

management in his speech to the consul L. Aemilius Paulus, before he and his colleague C. Terentius Varro set off for Cannae, although this time his advice will be in vain. Fabius attempts to intervene in a certamen, contest (22.39.4), fuelled by the inuidia ofthe nouus homo Terentius, in an example

of class-based competition for fama between a plebeius consul (22.40.4) and a patrician. [n this case fear of the greatest external threat to Rome, Hannibal, is insufficient to enforce consular concordia and consensus of the orders. But events prove Fabius right, and he asserts his authority when he takes the initiative in the Senate meeting convened in the panic following on the news of the disaster (22.55).

The terms of the advice given by Fabius to Aemilius are a translation of the Ennian lines into deliberative oratory. He states his own successful conduct

the est, sed one but

of war not for self-glorification, but because of a conviction of

realities of the situation: 22.39.9 nec gloriandi tempus aduersus unum et ego contemnendo potius quam appetendo gloriam modum excesserim; ita res se habet... ‘this is not the time to boast when speaking against man, and | would rather go too far in despising than in seeking glory; this is how the matter stands..." The Ennian contrasts form the

(unproblematic) climax of the Livian speech, 22.39.18—22: ‘One man, you will have to resist (resistas)”” two generals. And you will resist, if you stand sufficiently firm against the reports and rumours of men, if you are unmoved by your colleague's vain glory and by your false infamy (aduersus famam rumoresque hominum si satis firmus steteris, si te neque collegae uana gloria neque tua falsa infamia mouerit). They say that truth is all too often eclipsed, but never extinguished. He who despises glory will find true glory. Let them call you fearful rather than cautious, unwarlike rather than skilled in war... Everything will be clear and certain for one who does not hurry; haste is improvident and blind.’

9?

?! N

??

Picking up 22.29.3 Fabiana se acies repente uelut caelo demissa ad auxilium ostendit. caelo missus is proverbial for sudden providential appearance: Otto 1890 s.v. caelum 8; as he devotes himself Decius appears (Livy 8.9.10) aliquanto augustior humano uisu, sicut caelo missus. see Oakley 1997b ad loc. and on 7.12.13; Maltby 2002 on Tib. 1.3.89-90 tunc ueniam subito, nec quisquam nuntiet ante, | sed uidear caelo missus adesse tibi. For the implied contrast between res and uerba cf. 22.39.7: when it comes to the battlefield, Varro, full of stormy words, will find that res uerba sequitur. Perhaps echoing in sound the Ennian restituo.

261

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Fama and the historians 1. Livy

Through an inversion of the normal sequence whereby fama depends on res gestae, correct discrimination between uana gloria and falsa infamia will eventuate in clear and sure, as opposed to blind, actions. We have already looked at one episode in which Scipio is at the mercy of fama-as-rumour. But it is the love affair with fama-as-fame that shapes the whole of his career. Scipio’s dealings with fama are flagged by the historian on his first appearance at the beginning of the third decade, when he saves his father’s life in the battle at the Ticinus: 21.46.8 hic erit iuuenis penes quem perfecti huiusce belli laus est, Africanus ob egregiam uictoriam de Hannibale Poenisque appellatus ‘this is the young man who will have the glory of finishing this war, and who will be called Africanus for his famous victory over Hannibal and the Carthaginians’ Livy looks forward to the bestowal of the cognomen Africanus in the last chapter of the decade (30.45.6—7). The unusual features of Scipio’s engagement with famaare highlighted in passages that frame his Spanish expedition. After his precocious appointment to the command, Livy reflects on his exploitation of public opinion through the marvellous stories about his divine birth, 26.19.6—8: [His habit of going each day into the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter] made some give credence to the belief that had circulated, whether deliberately or by chance, that he was a man of divine race, and it revived the story previously broadcast about Alexander the Great, equalling it as an empty tale (rettulitque famam in Alexandro magno prius uolgatam, et uanitate et fabula parem), that he had been conceived through intercourse with a giant snake, and that the form of the monster had often been seen in his mother's bedroom, suddenly gliding away and vanishing from sight if people came in. He himself never made light of men’s belief in these marvels, but rather increased it through the studied art of neither denying such a thing nor openly confirming it (quin potius aucta arte quadam nec abnuendi tale quicquam nec palam adfirmandi).

The language echoes that of the historian in the Praefatio, refraining from judgement on the miraculous stories told of the period before Rome was founded, Praef. 6-7: Such traditions as belong to the time before the city was founded, or was about to be founded, and are rather adorned with poetic fables than based on the undistorted records of events, [ intend

neither to affirm

nor to refute (ea nec adfirmare nec

refellere in animo est). Antiquity can be excused for mingling divine things with human to add dignity to the beginnings of cities. And if any people should be allowed to consecrate their origins and refer them to founding gods, so great is the military glory of the Roman people that when they say that the father of themselves

Fama in Livy

and of their founder

was none

other than Mars, the nations of the earth should

accept this with as good grace as they accept Rome’s empire.

Awareness of the parallel might suggest to the reader that Scipio is his own historian: the gloria on which he has set his sights marks the summit of the belli gloria enjoyed by the populus Romanus, and the man who achieves it deserves to be accredited with a divine parent. Of course no allowance can be made for antiquitas in the case of Scipio; Livy the historian has already made his own comment in famam... et uanitate et fabula parem. Statecraft (ars), not a historian’s suspension of disbelief, is Scipio’s motive for neither

denying nor affirming. Scipio’s extraordinary desire for glory is brought out in a twist on the unus homo topos at the point of his return to Rome at the end of the campaign, 28.17.1-3: L. Scipio was sent to Rome with many noble prisoners to announce the conquest of Spain. And while everyone else was broadcasting the fact with great rejoicing and praise, the one man who had achieved it, insatiable in his desire for virtue and

true glory (et cum ceteri laetitia gloriaque ingenti eam rem uolgo ferrent, unus qui gesserat, inexplebilis uirtutis ueraeque laudis), considered the conquest of Spain to be a small thing in comparison to his great-spirited ambitions. He already had his eye on Africa, and the great city of Carthage, and on the glory of that war as if piled up for his own honour and name (in suum decus nomenque uelut consummatam eius belli gloriam).

There is a contrast between the great glory that is propagated by the mass of the people (uolgo ferrent here identifies gloria with fama as what the generality say), and the expanding horizons of the one man whose res gestae to date form the subject of that glory. Words of size sketch out a plot: the small scale (paruum instar) of what Scipio thinks he has achieved so far is inadequate to his ‘greatness of spirit’, which perceives in ‘great Carthage’ suitable material for his ambition, a war which will perfectly crown his glory (consummatam . . . gloriam). (Here incidently is perhaps another reason why Virgil locates his personification of Fama in Africa, (Aen. 4.173) extemplo Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes, proleptic of the great military fame that will come out of this land in wars of which this Fama is also ultimately the cause.) But the possibility of a completion of glory is belied by the adjectival phrase inexplebilis uirtutis ueraeque laudis. Fame fills minds and cities, but the desire for fame can never be filled, although the hint of an

adverse moralizing comment is balanced by the approving pairing of uirtutis ueraeque laudis. The meaning of this phrase is not entirely beyond doubt. Is it a hendiadys, ‘true praise for virtuous deeds’, or is uirtusa goal independent

263

264

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

of the desire for praise? And is uerae focalized through the narrator, or through Scipio — this is what he would consider to be true praise? There are other views on what constitutes 'true praise, Fabius Cunctator's for

example, gloriam qui spreuerit, ueram habebit ‘he who despises glory will have true glory' (22.39.20: see above p. 261). Mention of the 'name' (in suum decus nomenque)

looks forward to the

conclusion of the story at the very end of Book 30, the consummatio of the decade, in the report on the granting of the cognomen Africanus. Typically the closural force of the (undisputed) statement that Scipio was the first general to stamp his fame (nobilitatus) with the name of a conquered people is diluted with the historian's own uncertainty as to the origin of the cognomen: popularity with the soldiers (militaris fauor), the people's favour (popularis aura), or the flattery of his intimates (assentatio familiaris). Three different sources of Scipionic fama, about which the historian

has to choose between three different reports (famae). 93 The certainty and clarity of Scipio's famous name is based on an uncertain and unattributable act of name-giving. This (open) ending to the account of the fame of Scipio is not the end. The events leading up to his death, and his posthumous reputation, are the subject of an extended episode of fama and inuidia in the closing section of Book 38 (see below pp. 268-70). The debate between Fabius Cunctator and Scipio at 28.40—4"' is yet another example of the conventional contrast between a rash young commander anda wise old one," and in particular is modelled on the speeches of Nicias and Alcibiades before the Sicilian expedition in Thucydides 6.9—24."^ Both Thucydidean speakers have things to say about their own honour and renown. Nicias, to avert any charge of envy, says that he gains honour from the proposed expedition (6.9.2 rıudpaı), but that he has never allowed honour to divert him from advising what he thinks best. He accuses Alcibiades of seeking personal gain from the command, and private glory (€AAautpuveoGa1) at the expense of the safety of the city (6.12.2). The historian himself comments that Alcibiades sought to gain in wealth and reputation 92 Cf. the historian’s quandary on the adjudication between the rival claims of different gentes as to fama rerum gestarum at the end of Book 8 (see above pp. 231-2). 94 One of three pairs of opposing speeches in oratio recta in the third decade, the others being 22.59-60 (the leader of the Roman captives and Torquatus' reply, also touching on issues of gloria and fama), and 30.30-1 (Hannibal and Scipio). Thomas 2002: 115-17 analyses the debate between Fabius and Scipio in terms of two opposing conceptions of glory, community-minded versus individualistic. ?5 Kraus 1994a: 223 on Camillus and L. Furius (see above pp. 253-5). %© See Rodgers 1986, with the qualifications and further discussion at Levene 2010: 111-17.

Fama in Livy

(86€a) from the expedition. Alcibiades counters that his Olympic successes bring both fame (86§a) to himself and his ancestors and material benefit to

the city (6.16.1), through the impression made on foreigners, although his glory (Aaumpüvonaı) arouses envy in his fellow citizens, but that men who achieve AaumrpóTns of this kind are admired after their death (6.16.3-5).

Livy follows Thucydides closely in most of these points." But he goes far beyond Thucydides in developing the theme of a contest for fame and glory between the two most famous Roman generals of the Second Punic War. Furthermore, this debate is part of the larger narrative about the fama of Africanus, sketched out above, that reaches from his victory in Spain in 206 Bc to his triumph after Zama in book 30, and beyond to the notice of his death and the events preceding it in Book 38. The potential for Scipio to achieve the African glory on which he had set his sights on his return to Rome from Spain depends on the outcome of his confrontation with Fabius in the Senate. A debate which centres largely on the question of true discriminations in the matter of fama is itself motivated by a twofold fama (40.1), picking up the dichotomy at 28.17.2-3 between what the mass of Romans say about Scipio and his own desire: on the one hand the fama of the indistinct mass of Romans which, in an example of the topos that fama anticipates or even determines an appointment, already has it that Africa is marked out (destinari) as Scipio's province extra

sortem," and on the other hand Scipio's own unlimited ambition for glory (ipse nulla iam modica gloria contentus). The two speakers seek to establish their own authority and credibility through a verbal debate on the subject of aemulatio, rivalry, for glory. For Fabius success in this is necessary in order to anticipate the danger that the allocation of the African province has already become a fait accompli, a res acta, through the agency of fama before ever the decision can be taken — he begins: 28.40.3 ‘I know, senators,

NSs

See Rodgers

* c

that many of you think that our business today is with something already decided, and that whoever expresses an opinion on Africa as a province as if it were an open question will be speaking to no purpose.' Fabius seeks to counter a twofold negative opinio about himself, firstly his reputation from his past deeds of insita ingenio meo cunctatio ‘my innate habit of delaying’;””

The same trigger as for the dispute between the consuls Fabius and Decius at 10.24 (see above

1986: 340-1, 344-6.

p. 248). Fabius Cunctator is doomed to relive a dispute in which his ancestor (cf. 30.26.8)

*

99

Fabius Rullus had been involved, but with variation: the patricians had urged that Rullus himself be appointed a province extra ordinem, Cunctator opposes plebeian pressure for Scipio's appointment extra ordinem. Debated by Livy himselfat 30.26.9.

265

266

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

and secondly the suspicion that he is motivated by inuidia at the growing gloria of the young consul. To this he answers by reference (i) to his uita acta (he has achieved so much); (ii) to the fact that in the past he preferred to

prove his superiority over a potential rival rebus quam uerbis; and (iii) to the fact that at his advanced age he is past competition and rivalry (certamina atque aemulatio) with a younger man - like the unbiased historian, writing sine ira et studio. And for this reason his own fama has no need of further growth. Fabius then turns (28.41.1) to insinuate that Scipio places his own gloria over the bonum publicum, in contrast to his own track record of never preferring fama hominum to the res publica (the opposition is repeated at

28.42.20)."^ Fabius is well received by the senators both for his well-targeted speech, and because of his auctoritasand (28.43.1) inueterata prudentiae fama ‘longestablished reputation for foresight. Scipio begins by taking the attack to Fabius: somehow he cannot shake off the suspicion that Fabius is motivated by an envious wish to detract (obtrectatio), 28.43.4: For his words have extolled his offices and the fame of his achievements in order to refute the charge of envy (sic enim honores suos et famam rerum gestarum extulit uerbis ad exstinguendum inuidiae crimen) as if the danger for me was that someone of the lowest station should seek to rival me, rather than

a man

who, because he

stands out above all others, a height for which I do not pretend that I do not also strive, does not wish that I should be compared with him.

Fabius had stated (28.40.13) that, now an old man, he has to live and die

content with the glory that he has already achieved. Scipio, who knows about the limitless desire for fame, questions the Ennian certainty that Fabius always puts country above fame. Great men's cupiditas gloriae is not limited by their lifetime, but (28.43.5—6) ‘is projected mostly at the memory of posterity. I am certain that it is true of the greatest minds that they compare themselves not just with the living, but with the famous men of every age.' The superlative cognomen Maximus will not set a limit to Fabius’ desire to be greater still.'"! Scipio finally rests his case on Fabius’ opening opposition between deeds and reputation, 28.44.17-18: It would be along speech and one of no concern to you, if I wanted to mock Fabius' glory and extol mine in the same way that he has made light of my deeds in Spain.

100 Cf. Thuc. 6.9.2 (Nicias places the public good above his own honour), 6.12.2 (Alcibiades does not).

0!

Scipio's frank admission (equidem haud dissimulo) in the next sentence that he wants to outdo Fabius’ laudes hints at dissimulatio of a desire for fame on Fabius’ part.

Fama in Livy

I will do neither, senators, and in modesty and control of my tongue, at least, I the

young man will win over the old man. My life and achievements are such that I am happy silently to accept the opinion which you have formed in your minds of your own accord (ita et uixi et gessi res ut tacitus ea opinione quam uestra sponte conceptam animis haberetis facile contentus essem).

That closing expression of contentment is given the lie both by the historian's following statement (28.45.1) that it had been rumoured (uolgatum erat, in

other words fama erat) that Scipio would immediately refer the matter to the people if the Senate refused him Africa, and by Livy's statement prefatory to the speeches (28.40.1) that Scipio was nulla iam modica gloria contentus ‘no longer content with moderate glory’. In this dispute over fama the verdict to which the reader is directed by the text is far less clear than in the case of Fabius Cunctator's attack on Aemilius Paulus before Cannae. In the end Scipio did mount an African expedition, and was triumphantly vindicated; very different had been the consequences of the Thucydidean debate on which Livy models his, that between Nicias and Alcibiades over the Sicilian expedition. Fabius' cunctatio would have prevented Scipio's victory at Zama. Rodgers writes that 'despite Fabius’ comparison [28.41.16-17], it would be impossible for the Romans’ angel of victory to resemble the Athenians' evil angel in anything more than his splendor. Scipio could not be an Alcibiades." Perhaps not, but men with Scipio's cupiditas famae later in the Republic came closer to wrecking Rome, and could more justly be accused of behaving 'in the manner of a

king’ (28.42.22 regio more). ? The Minucius episode in Book 22 (examined above) is a close doublet

of the story of Camillus and L. Furius Medullinus at 6.22.5—25.6 (see above pp. 253-5). This episode functions as almost a comic postlude to the tragic story of Manlius that shortly precedes it. Medullinus is a second Manlius, resentful of the glory of his colleague, the now aged and, he claims, dilatory

(6.23.5 cunctatorem) Camillus. The self-effacing Camillus saves the day when Medullinus' rashness leads the army to near-destruction. So far from 102 Rodgers 1980: 352. 10% At Thuc. 6.15.4 the people think that Alcibiades desires tyranny. For an analysis of Livy 28.40-5 from the point of view of exemplarity see Chaplin 2000: 92-7, viewing the episode as (95) 'a competition between two men's knowledge and interpretation of history: Chaplin notes that Fabius has the better of the debate in terms of audience reaction (but this is the Senate), while Scipio represents the direction Rome is taking, towards the dynasts of the first

century Bc (97 n. 56). Tipping 2007; 225, 232-41 discusses Silius Italicus' presentation of Scipio as an example of the individualism that destroyed the Republic, and the association in Silius of Scipio with kingship.

267

268

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

using the occasion to increase his own glory, Camillus goes out of his way to cancel the infamia (6.24.9, 25.6) attaching to Furius by choosing him as his colleague for the next war, and, precisely through not seeking his own further glorification, adds to his reputation. This uia negatiua offers a model for an ideal accumulation of fame within the collegiate Roman system of government, though it should be noted that Camillus’ glory is parasitic on the certamen gloriae entered on by his rash colleague. But in narrative terms the result is a neatly self-enclosed and end-stopped fama narrative.'”' Insofar as the Camillus and Medullinus story is an example of ‘the contrast of a rash young commander with a wise old one? it also foreshadows the debate between Fabius Cunctator and Scipio in Book 28. There we find ourselves in a different world, where the young commander's ambitions will lead to great success, and where the model of self-denying moderatio proves inadequate to the requirements of a plot of the expansion of Roman power. Livy uses the death notice for Fabius Cunctator at 30.26.7—9 as the occasion for some sifting of historians' reports and judgements, his own business in the matter of fama: some auctores vouch for the 62-year term of his augurate (but some do not). In assessing Fabius' claim to the cognomen Maximus, Livy stages a diachronic certamen gloriae through a synkrisis of Fabius' honores and victories with those of Fabius' ancestors. And what of his other handle, Cunctator, the memorial of his famous cunctatio? There too there is room for some doubt as to his motivation, but no doubt as to the substance of his achievement, 30.26.9: He has been considered a man more cautious than prompt one might question whether he was a delayer by nature, or ularly suitable to the war then being waged,"^ nevertheless than that by delaying one man restored the state for us

to action; and although because that was particnothing is more certain (unum hominem nobis

cunctando rem restituisse), as Ennius says.

The justified fame of his restoration of Roman fortunes is sealed with the authority of Ennius. Far more tangled is the contestation of fama that develops in an extended closural episode of fama at the end of Book 38 (50.4—60), the narrative of the last days of Scipio, his death, and the continuing post-mortem attacks on 104

Oakley 19974: 581 notes the ring-composition; see also Kraus 1994a on 6.22.6 errore. . . gloriam. 105 Kraus 19942: 223. 106 At 28.40.6 Fabius himself speaks of insitae ingenio meo cunctationis, in a context that does not seem to be focalized through the audience, or determined by Fabius' own rhetorical ends.

Fama in Livy

him. Here as elsewhere narratives of the certamen gloriae and observations by the historian on the fama of historical characters tend to spill over into reflections on the historian’s own control of fama. Scipio’s accusation by the tribunes opens up a tale of fame and glory attacked by inuidia, in a debate on the accountability at law of a pre-eminent unus homo that transparently speaks to concerns of Livy's own time, the 20s sc.'"” Before the day of the trial itself talk in Rome, sermones, is divided as to whether the summons is justified or not, and divided on the evaluation of Scipio (38.50.5-9 id prout cuiusque ingenium erat interpretabantur. alii... alii... ). Some thought it gross ingratitude on Rome's part to put on trial its hero Africanus. Some thought that no one citizen should be beyond the reach of the law. The final peak of Scipio's celebrity comes when, summoned to trial on the anniversary of Zama, he announces that he will go up from the Forum to the Capitol to give thanks to the Capitoline gods, and is accompanied by almost all present, leaving behind only the tribunes and their slaves. In what is 'clearly Livy's own addition’,'"* (38.51.14) ‘men’s support and a true reckoning of his greatness made that a day of almost greater celebration than the day on which he rode in triumph over Syphax and the Carthaginians’. Thereafter it is a tale of inuidia. These assaults on the fama of the Scipiones run parallel with an unusual degree of authorial uncertainty about the fama on which the historical narrative is based, starting at 38.56.1 ‘Many other details especially about the end of Scipio's life, his impeachment, his death, funeral and burial, are at variance, so that I do not know which tradition (famae),

which written accounts, to follow.’'"” The last sentence of the book provides a final turning point in the saga, (38.6.10) uerteratque Scipionum inuidia in praetorem et consilium eius et accusatores 'envy towards the Scipiones had turned against the praetor and his policy and the accusers, by implication restoring the brilliance of Africanus' fama, a turn of events paralleled in the transformation of public opinion about Valerius Publicola in Livy 2.8 (see above p. 249). Yet the first sentence of Book 39 casts doubt on the fixed place of all of this within an annalistic history: Dum haec, si modo hoc anno acta sunt, Romae aguntur, consules ambo in Liguribus gerebant bellum "While these events happened in Rome, if indeed they did happen in this year, both consuls were at war in Liguria.' Consular dating is secure in military history abroad (the chief actors, the consuls, themselves anchor those events to a

107 So Walsh 1993 on 38.50.6ff. 108 Walsh 1993 ad loc. 109 [ivy casts doubt on the version of Antias, largely through consultation of Quadrigarius. Other points of historiographical aporia in this section: 30.56.8 alia tota serenda fabula est Gracchi orationi conueniens, et illi auctores sequendi sunt qui... , 57.3 illud parum constat.

269

270

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

date), but offers no firm point of reference for murky events in Rome. As in the case of events at home and abroad during the seditio Manliana in Book 6, and as in the narratives in Tacitus’ Agricola, to which we turn in the next chapter, there is a differential between the clarity and certainty of fama in Rome itself and in a theatre of war outside Rome.

Silian postscript: Punica 7.217-750 (Livy 22.23-30) Silius Italicus works up the Minucius episode with the full apparatus of the Virgilian epic nexus of fama, storm and Discordia, at Punica 7.217—750. The

episode opens with an appeal to the Muses to enrol Fabius in the Hall of Fame, and concludes with the Roman Fabius: 217-18

Da famae,

da, Musa,

troops' triumphant celebration of uirum, cui uincere bina | concessum

castra et geminos domitare furores 'Muse, grant fame to the man to whom it was given to conquer two armies and to tame a twofold madness’; 732-5 ecce autem e media iam morte renata iuuentus | clamorem tollens ad sidera et ordine longo | ibat ouans Fabiumque decus Fabiumque salutem | certatim et magna memorabant uoce parentem 'see, the soldiers, now reborn from the

pit of death, marched triumphant in a long line raising a shout to the stars, and eagerly in a loud voice called Fabius their glory, Fabius their salvation’. Fabius is accorded quasi-divine honours: honorem is the last word of the book. Within this frame there plays outa contest of fame and rumour. Fabius is initially successful in restraining the Roman troops' misguided eagerness to attack Hannibal, reminding them of how much has already been worn away from the fama of the Carthaginians, and modestly breaking off a reference to the fame that Fabius might claim for himself: 245—9 iam copia quanto | artior et nullo Tyriis certamine quantum | detritum est famae! quin inter cetera nostra | haud laude afuerit, modo qui — sed parcere dictis | sit melius "Without any battle how much reduced are their forces, how much

has rubbed off their reputation! Indeed my claims to fame may include the fact that he who just now — but it might be better to say no more.' Atthe end of this speech Fabius is compared to the Neptune who calms the storm in Aeneid 1: Fabius is the good statesman who quells the mutterings of seditio. Fabius warns Minucius with a statement ofthe redefinition of military gloria that is implied in the Ennian unus homo nobis lines: Pun. 7.396—8 sit gloria multis | et placeat, quippe egregium, prosternere ferro | hostem, sed Fabio sit uos seruasse triumphus ‘let many find glory and pleasure in cutting down the enemy by the sword — and it is a famous thing - but let Fabius' triumph be to have saved you’. But later fama-as-rumour rages out of control, and as a result Minucius is given his head, 7.504-15:

Fama in Livy

Fama furit uersos hostis, Poenumque salutem inuenisse fuga: liceat si uincere, finem promitti cladum, sed enim dicione carere uirtutem, et poenas uincentibus esse repostas.

505

clausurum iam castra ducem rursusque referri uaginae iussurum enses, reddatur in armis ut ratio, et purget miles cur uicerit hostem.

510

haec uulgus. necnon patrum Saturnia mentes inuidiae stimulo fodit et popularibus auris. tunc indigna fide censent optandaque Poeno, quae mox haud paruo luerent damnata periclo.

Diuiditur miles...

>15

Wild rumour told that the enemy had been routed and that Hannibal had sought safety in flight; if the Romans were only allowed to conquer, an end to disasters was promised; but bravery had no authority and punishments were stored up for the victorious. The general would soon close the camp and order swords to be resheathed, so that military action

should

be called to account

and

the soldiers

should clear themselves of the crime of conquering. So the people murmured, and Juno goaded the senators’ minds with the prick of envy and the desire for the breezes of popular favour. Then they passed a decree hard to believe, and one that the Carthaginians might have prayed for, for which they would soon pay at the cost of great danger. The army was divided... Juno, the goddess who sows the seeds of dissension in Aeneid 7, promotes

discord by exploiting inuidia and conflict between the dictator and the people, now supported by the Senate (cf. Livy 22.26.4): political dissension leads to a dividing of the command that is introduced with a phrase, diuiditur miles, suggestive of seditio or civil war. Fabius restores the situation by a directed application of the means used by the forces of disorder, bursting open the gates of war and erupting like the discordant winds of a storm, Pun. 7.567—79: Primus claustra manu portae dictator et altos disiecit postis rupitque in proelia cursum. non grauiore mouent uenti certamina mole Odrysius Boreas et Syrtirn tollere pollens

570

Africus, obnixi cum bella furentia torquent:

distraxere fretum ac diuersa ad litora uoluunt aequor quisque suum; sequitur stridente procella nunc huc, nunc illuc raptum mare et intonat undis. haud prorsus daret ullus honos tellusque subacta Phoenicum et Carthago ruens, iniuria quantum

575

271

272

Fama and the historians 1. Livy

orta ex inuidia decoris tulit. omnia namque dura simul deuicta uiro, metus, Hannibal, irae, inuidia, atque una fama et fortuna subactae. The dictator was the first to burst apart the bars and tall posts of the gate, and to break out into battle. Not mightier is the force of the winds when they go to war, the Thracian North Wind and the South Wind powerful to lift the Syrtes, when they rage in stubborn conflict; they tear the sea apart, and each wind rolls its part of the waters to opposing shores. As the storm howls, the sea is swept now in this direction and now in that, and the waves thunder. No famous achievement, not the conquest

of Africa and the destruction of Carthage, could give Fabius such glory as he won from the wrong that sprang from envy. For at the same time the hero conquered all obstacles — fear, Hannibal, anger, envy, and all in one he defeated ill-fame and

fortune. Fabius’ action at 567-8 repeats that of Virgil’s Juno when, in the manner of Ennius' Discordia (Ann. 225-6 Skutsch), and in another seventh book of

an epic, she breaks open the Gates of War: Aen. 7.621-2 impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine uerso | Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postis 'she herself gave a violent thrust to the doors, and turning them on their hinge burst open the iron Gates of War’. Now fighting fire with fire, Fabius will emerge from this exercise in all-out fighting completely superior to inuidia and fama, having decisively silenced the noisy winds of discordia. '? 110 Silius also adds to his celebration of Fabius’ fara the mythological strand of Herculean strength and fama, foregrounding the Herculean ancestry of the gens Fabia (Pun. 6.627—40); at 7.591—7 Hercules rejuvenates Fabius’ strength on the battlefield and makes him appear greater in size (matoremque dedit cerni, as Hercules appears greater as he turns into a god on the pyre, (Ov. Met. 9.269-70) maiorque uideri | coepit), leading to a string of killings that work as an exemplum laudis to fire the soldiery (Pun. 7.617).

8

Fama and the historians rr. Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

Republican and imperial fama in Tacitus' Agricola fama is already a major player in Tacitus' first published work, the Agricola (Ap 98). The conditions for and the possibilities of fama are a central topic of the framing preface and epilogue of the work, and the life itself stages a contest in the matter of fama between Domitian and Agricola, not one of the latter's choosing but which his faithful son-in-law, Tacitus, makes sure

that he wins.' A constant theme of Tacitus is the difference between the tasks of the Republican and imperial historian, which can be understood as a difference in the conditions for the production and memorialization of fama.’ Already in the Agricola Tacitus gives a prolusion of his later extended analysis of the decline of Republican fama under the principate. In this early work historian and subject face similar dangers. The joint project of the creation and memorialization of fama is laid out at the start of the work, in the Catonian

N

! This section was written before I read Smith 2002, who offers a fuller analysis of fara in the Agricola that runs substantially in parallel with my own, and which makes many fine detailed points. Smith also brings out well the poetic intertexts (Aeneid 4, Ov. Met. 12, Lucan) for fama in the work. For an account of Agricola's fama that locates more ambiguity than I here allow in our reading of Agricola, and of Domitian as ‘reader’ of Agricola, see Whitmarsh 2006: 320-4. Sailor 2008: Ch. 2 conducts an analysis of the Agricola that overlaps at many points with mine, but using as master-term ‘representation’ rather than fama; e.g. 103 ‘the biography becomes an act of direct competition with the representational strategies characteristic of Domitian’. See the beginnings of Histories and Annals, and above all Ann. 4.32-3 (and the wider context of the digression: see below pp. 303—5). A key text for the difference between Republican and imperial history is Dio 53.19 (cited at length below pp. 287-8, and on which see Gibson 1998: 124, with n. 22, referring to Syme

1958: 365-6); see also Marincola

1997: 86-95 *Closed

societies and privileged access, esp. 93-5 on the procedure of Tacitus: 93 “The demonstration of his inquiry, his search for the truth, took on a different form in three independent but mutually assisting motifs: the recognition of and commentary on the complexity of disentangling various strands in the tradition; the use of alternative explanations; and the suggestion of a truth

beneath what was visible to appearances, and 93-4 on the first of these headings, chiefly the perversions and untrustworthiness of fama. Cf. also the periodization at Dial. 41.5 nunc, quoniam nemo eodem tempore assequi potest magnamfe

et

mag

quietem, bono saeculi

sui quisque citra obtrectationem alterius utatur. On the importance of the Agricola as a model for Pliny's Panegyric, not least for the issue of fama, see Durry

2002: 38-43.

1938 passim; Bruére

195-1; Smith

273

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

project of Clarorum uirorum facta moresque posteris tradere ‘to hand down to posterity the deeds and morality of famous men”. clarorum uirorum is ‘an archaic and solemn form of words in a context of national praise old words

for an old culture of fama, but the Catonian undertaking is not forgotten even in the present day, whenever great uirtus has transcended a common fault, ignorantiam recti et inuidiam ‘ignorance of what is right and envy’,’ obstacles of at least as much importance for the historian as for his subject. This first sentence is framed by clarorum uirorum facta, the matter of fama as fame or gloria, and inuidiam.

The tussle between the two, as Tacitus

ES

w

knows (not least from a reading of Sallust and Livy) is a constant already in the Republic, and Tacitus' wording in uitium paruis magnisque ciuitatibus commune ‘a vice common to states small and large’ suggests that he may have a specific model for the commonplace, Nepos, Chabr. 3.3 est enim hoc commune uitium magnis liberisque ciuitatibus ut inuidia gloriae comes sit'for it is a vice common to great and free states that envy is the companion of glory’. If so, the omission of liberisis pointed: this biography will dramatize the intensification and perversion under the conditions of the Domitianic principate of this constant opposition, in a Manichaean struggle between fama and inuidia, or between bona fama and mala fama. In the next sentence (Agric. 1.2) the symbiosis of historian and subject is laid out programmatically: ‘For men of the past, just as doing deeds worthy of memorial (ut agere digna memoratu) was easy and had a freer field, so all those most celebrated for their talent (celeberrimus quisque ingenio) were induced to publish records of virtuous action without partiality or self-seeking (sine gratia aut ambitione), rewarded only by the consciousness of well-doing.' celeberrimus, gratia, ambitio might all have a more immediate application to the subject, the man active in public life, rather than to the historian. It is as difficult for the historian to tread the straight and narrow path of truth, as it is for his subjects to find the path that leads to greatness (magnos uiros esse).^ In the next sentence Tacitus says that, in the Republic, 'for a Rutilius or a Scaurus it [writing honest autobiography] was not without credibility or the source of detraction' (nec id Rutilio et Scauro citra fidem aut obtrectationi fuit). There is an important point

au

274

Brink 1982 on Hor. Ep. 2.1.250, cited by Kraus and Woodman forthcoming ad loc. Whitton 2008: 29-31 notes that clarorum. .. tradere is old-fashioned language (antiquitus usitatum), while incuriosa . . . omisit is ‘strikingly modern language’. ignorantia recti refers to (just) moral knowledge; nevertheless it implies a correlation between correct knowledge and (proper) farra, the adequation of fama and facta. Ludolph 1997: 86 draws attention to the framing. Agric. 42.5; cf. the path imagery there in eo laudis excedere, per abrupta.

Tacitus’ Agricola

here about the readership of history; however scrupulous the historian, his work is at the mercy of his readers, who will decide not only whether to applaud or not (obtrectationi), but even whether to lend credence to what the historian writes (citra fidem).’

Men

of action like Rutilius and

Scaurus open themselves to negative interpretations both in their public careers and in their own written accounts of their careers. Agricola, dependent on another for posthumous literary memorialization, was in his life exposed to misinterpretation of the motives of his actions: 5.3 ‘his spirit was inspired with a desire for military glory (militaris gloriae cupido), unpopular at a time when people put a baleful construction on men of distinction (sinistra erga eminentis interpretatio), and great fame brought no less danger than evil fame’;* 40.4 ‘most people, whose habit is to judge of great men by their display, on watching and observing Agricola asked about his celebrity (famam), and few interpreted (interpretarentur) his behaviour correctly’. interpretor and interpretatio are words used by Tacitus in various contexts associated with the twisting of information and the propagation of rumour,” sometimes with particular reference to the conditions of the principate (the psychology of the emperor (Ann. 13.47.1, Nero; Hist. 4.86.2, Domitian)); or to the role of delatores (Ann. 3.25.1); at Ann. 14.22.2 inter-

ES

pretatio occurs in the context of an extended fama episode relating to the promotion of Rubellius Plautus as imperial successor; and in some cases the words have consequences for the job of the historian as he tries to arrive at an unbiased account of what happened. In the third and last occurrence of interpretari/-tatio in the Agricola, at 40.4, the reader is confronted with problems of interpretation: ‘ask about a reputation’ is an unusual sense of quaerere famam, which normally means ‘to seek fame’; and commentators are divided about what object to supply with interpretarentur (famam or eum?). The normal uses and understandings of language are breaking down in Domitianic Rome. The Agricola however will give us a key to the correct interpretation of Agricola’s fama, and ultimately place it in the hands of The point about obtrectatio is repeated in the historiographical digression at Ann. 4.33. Cf. Livy 2.40.11 (in the past) sine obtrectatione gloriae alienae uiuebatur, for invidious obtrectatio

*

o

attacking the great man cf. Livy 28.40.8 (Fabius); 28.43.2 (Scipio).

Kraus and Woodman forthcoming ad loc.: 'T. is thought to be alluding in particular to the famously successful general Corbulo’; cf. Ann. 11.19.3 apud quosdam sinistra fama... formidolosum paci uirum insignem et ignauo principi praegrauem. See Malloch 2005 ad loc. for more extended discussion. The only other use of interpretari, interpretatio in the Agricola is at 15.1 namque absentia legati remoto metu Britanni agitare inter se mala seruitutis, conferre iniurias et interpretando accendere. See Ash 2007 on Hist. 2.91.1. 1? See Kraus and Woodman forthcoming ad loc.

275

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

an audience superior to the misinterpretation of the common reader, in a reception that will require no mediation, no inter-pres, no internuntius. fama itself is not Agricola's goal:'' like certain Republican heroes such as Fabius Cunctator!* or the younger Cato, he is a paragon of moderatio, pursuing uirtusfor its own sake, and thereby winning the glory that proverbially attends virtue as its shadow:'* 8.3 ‘He never boasted of his exploits to increase his own reputation (in suam famam)... Thus by his virtuous actions as he obeyed orders, and by his modesty in self-advertisement, he avoided envy but did not fail to win glory (extra inuidiam nec extra gloriam erat)’; 9.4 ‘He did not seek fame, in which even good men often indulge themselves, by a display of virtue or through cunning; rivalry with his colleagues was far from him.' His reward is selection for the office of governor of Britain by an inerrant fama: 9.5 ‘He was recalled to the prospect of a consulship, and public opinion (opinione) also had it that he would be given Britain as his province, not because of any talk on his part to this end (nullis in hoc ipsius sermonibus), but because he seemed up to the job. Rumour does not always get it wrong; sometimes it even chooses the right man (haud semper errat fama; aliquando et eligit). This anticipates the importance in the Annals and Histories of fama in spotting (or not) the imperial successor, and not only in spotting but in playing an active role in the determination of the events leading to succession (see below pp. 288-95). In his reluctance to pursue the bubble Fame, Agricola through a positively evaluated dissimulatio paradoxically wins more fama than he otherwise would have: 18.6 ‘he did not follow up his achievements by sending laurel-wreathed letters, but in the very act of dissimulating his fame, he increased his fame (ipsa dissimulatione famae famam auxit), in the eyes of those who measured his hopes for the future by the greatness of the deeds about which he kept silent’. cum tacet clamat: keeping quiet allows fama to speak out, fari, all the more." This behaviour in itself might not be out of place in the Republic, but the

Kraus and Woodman forthcoming on 4-9 ‘The consistent picture is that of an individual who represses his naturally ambitious instincts but, because of his sense of responsibility and determination to do his best, concludes each stage of his career with the gloria and fama which

we

he desires but has tried to avoid’; on 42.3 ‘A. maintains to the end of his career the avoidance of

-

276

fama which has characterized his whole life.’ Kraus and Woodman forthcoming on 4.3 retinuitque... modum: ‘it is possible that T. recalls the words of Fabius Maximus at Liv. 22.39.9 conternnendo potius quam adpetendo gloriam modum excesserim (see Ch. 7 p. 261). Kraus and Woodman forthcoming on 8.3 compare (inter alia) Sall. Catil. 54.5 ita quo minus petebat gloriam, eo magis eum sequebatur, Sen. Ben. 5.1.4 gloria fugientes magis sequitur. gloria umbra uirtutis. see Ch. 1 n. 84. Cf. 41.2 rei publicae tempora, quae sileri Agricolam non sinerent.

Tacitus’ Agricola

word dissimulatio in the last passage hints at the changed conditions of the principate,'” and anticipates the dark narrative of events after Agricola's return to Rome from his successes in Britain, where his own dissimulation

is the only defence against a dissimulating emperor. In this light the Agricola can be read as an experiment in the juxtaposition of an old-style Republican history, the narrative of the famous deeds of a great general on campaign in a distant territory, with a new-style secret history of the emperor at the centre in Rome.'^ The substantial fama of Agricola runs foul of the false fama nurtured by the emperor's inuidia; Agricola returns from the bright glare of the historical spotlight directed at his res gestae in Britain to the murky and shady atmosphere of rumour and terror in Rome. Perhaps Rome is as misty and crepuscular a place as Britain (12.3 caelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum); ^ and the difficulties of getting at the truth in Rome may be greater than the uncertainties of the geographer and ethnographer describing far-off peoples and places: with 11.1 'little has been discovered (parum compertum), as is the way among barbarians’, introducing the ethnographical section of the digression on Britain, compare Tacitus’ comment on the rumours that Agricola was poisoned, 43.2 nobis nihil comperti affirmare ausim ‘I would not dare to affirm that anything is known to us'.!? But at least in this remotest part of the Roman world vigorous military exploration is able to replace incorrect report (fama) with clear geographical knowledge. At 10.3 there is a contrast between the previously prevailing report (fama) on the shape of Britain, and the truth discovered

E

15

dissimulatio in the Agricola: 6.2; 18.6; 39.2 (Domitian's thoughts) cetera

utcumque

facilius

dissimulari, ducis boni imperatoriam uirtutem esse; 43.3 (Domitian) qui facilius dissimularet gaudium quam metum. My analysis coincides largely with that of Ludolph 1997: 82-8 ‘Tacitus, Agricola’; 88 ‘Tacitus stellt in den Protagonisten zwei klar umrissene Typen gegenüber: in Agricola den Mann der alteren res publica, in Domitian den Reprásentanten aller Übel des Prinzipats an sich.’ Cf. also Lausberg 1930: 422 n. 21 ‘In dem Militardienst des Agricola lebt die Art des Militardienstes wieder auf, wie sie Sallust in diesem Zusammenhang der rómischen Jugend der frühen Republik zuschreibt'; Smith 2002: 73 n. 57 notes Ann.

14.37.2 (Suetonius’ defeat of Boudicca)

on

clara et antiquis uictoriis par ea die laus parta. See also Habinek 2000: 273-4 on the rivalry between Agricola’s gloria and claritas and the emperor. Comparable is Tacitus’ presentation in the Annals of Germanicus as a general from an older world: see Pelling 1993. Malloch 2005: 67-9 notes the ‘strong Republican flavour to Tacitus’ characterization of Corbulo, and the contrasts between Corbulo's old-style military activity and the diplomatic moves of Claudius, and between Corbulo and the civilian enterprise of Curtius Rufus. For foedus of conditions in Domitianic Rome see Plin. Pan. 50.3, 82.3.

At Dio 53.19.4-5 the size of the Empire and the multitude of things going on is another reason for the difficulty of writing imperial history, together with the problem of secrecy at the centre (Marincola 1997: 89 n. 123 refers to Appian, IIlyrica 16 for ‘a frank confession of ignorance on this score’; see also below pp. 287-8).

277

278

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

by those who have penetrated (transgressis) into Caledonia." Calgacus claims that 'the very remoteness of this land of rumour (30.3 recessus ipse ac sinus famae) has protected the Caledonians from invasion. By contrast Agricola tells his men,

(33.3)

‘our hold on the boundaries

of Britain

is

not based on report and rumour (non fama nec rumore), but on armed occupation; Britain has been discovered and subdued (inuenta Britannia et

subactay." In Agricola 39 there is a pointed contrast between the fake triumph of Domitian and the truly great victory of Agrippa, trumpeted by fama (39.1 at nunc ueram magnamque uictoriam. . . ingenti fama celebrari). Domitian's

cognomen Germanicus, it is hinted, is no more than an empty name.^! Even in the Republic such success almost inevitably leads to inuidia 'envy but now it is potentially fatal since it may elevate a priuatus above the princeps. However hard Agricola might work to dissimulate his true qualities (39.2 cetera utcumque facilius dissimulari), there can be no concealing the fact that ducis boni imperatoriam uirtutem esse. This is a slippery statement: it can be read as a tautology, 'the excellence of a good commander was [the excellence]

of a general. But what Domitian

(presumably) means is that

‘the excellence of a good commander was that of an emperor; or, as Kraus

and Woodman point out, the other way round, ‘the prowess of a general belonged to the Dux’, with a capital D." Either way, there is an opposition between the reality of being a good general, dux, imperator, and the name of Dux (a title revived by Domitian and Trajan) or Imperator. The danger under the principate is that militaris gloria may propel the good general into the position, or perceived position, of being a rival for the imperial throne. It is safe only for the emperor to be a ‘good’ i.e. successful, imperator, and for

others it is particularly dangerous when the princeps is a malus princeps." How easily Agricola might slot into the role of emperor is demonstrated by Pliny the Younger's use in the Panegyric of the contrasts in the Agricola to point up the difference between the bad emperor Domitian and the good

emperor Trajan."'

See Kraus and Woodman forthcoming ad loc. Smith 2002: Ch. 3 discusses the close connection between war and knowledge in Roman thought.

?! So Smith 2002: 85. ?? 22.0

2 2

Kraus and Woodman

forthcoming ad loc. ‘however the matter was looked at, military

distinction was the exclusive possession of the emperor: For the phrase cf. Agric. 43.4 malum principem; Plin. Pan. 53.2. See Mesk

1911: 90-4; Durry 1938: 60-1.

Tacitus’ Agricola

At Rome Agricola is caught with, he is loaded with the ornamenta...et quidquid pro with many verbal expressions lata)’ (40.1). From

in a web trappings triumpho of honour

of rumour and report: to begin of military fama (triumphalia datur), and a statue, all ‘topped (multo uerborum honore cumu-

the previous chapter, however, we know

that this is

all hollow praise from Domitian, who has merely deferred the expression of his hatred

(39.3) ‘until the impetus

of his fame

and the army’s

good will (impetus famae et fauor exercitus) should die down’. Domitian (40.1) ‘also put about the belief (opinionem)

that Syria was marked

out

(destinari)^^ as Agricola's province’. But this cloudy and unfulfilled rumour, the attempt of Domitian to manipulate the channels of unofficial fama, as well as the marks of distinction bestowed by senatorial decree and imperial oratory, is very different from the unerring opinio or fama at 9.5 that has already singled out Agricola as the next governor of Britain. There then follows the curious story about the freedman who was told to deliver the letter of appointment to Agricola if he was still in Britain, a story framed by (40.2) credidere plerique ‘many people believed’ and siue uerum istud, siue ex ingenio principis fictum ac compositum est ‘whether that was true or fabricated and made up in accordance with the emperor’s temperament’, one of the many places in Tacitus where contests over fama within the narrated events spill over into the historian’s difficulty in deciding between competing reports, or famae. Agricola returns to Rome, and enters the palace by night to avoid the spotlight of fama, (40.3) ‘so that attention should not be drawn to his entry by the thronging crowds coming to meet him (notabilis celebritate et frequentia occurrentium) ; thereafter he uses ‘a lifestyle of calm and leisure (tranquillitas et otium)’-°

320

as a screen for his military renown

(40.4 militare nomen), with the result that ‘many, who are used to judging great men by their ostentatious display (ambitionem), on seeing and observing Agricola asked about his fama, but few interpreted (interpretarentur) it correctly’.

Rumour is often said destinare aliquem: cf. Livy 35.20.1 Romae destinabant quidem sermonibus hostem Antiochum; 39.32.9; Tac. Hist. 1.12.3 (Galba’s choice for adoption) hunc uel illum ambitiosis rumoribus destinabant, 1.13.2; Ann.

14.22.2 (Rubellius Plautus marked out to

succeed Nero); Ov. Met. 15.3-4 (successor to Romulus) destinat imperio clarum praenuntia ueri | fama Numam, with Hardie forthcoming ad loc. See also below pp. 288-95. ?6 For Agricola's preference for quies et otium cf. also 6.3 (under Nero), 42.1, and see the programmatic statement at Dial. 41.5 (Maternus conclusion) nunc, quoniam nemo eodem tempore adsequi potest magnam famam et magnam quietem, bono saeculi sut quisque citra obtrectationem alterius utatur.

279

280

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

Agricola’s fame is constantly assailed by (unsuccessful) accusations in his absence before Domitian. Against these unnamed informers and the malicious panegyrists of Agricola is arrayed the power of the voice of the people, in this drama of fama the voice of the many-headed beast positively characterized by contrast with the bad emperor: after the series of military disasters the uulgus will not allow Agricola not to be spoken of. fama tries once more to exercise the power of appointment to high office, 41.3 poscebatur ore uulgi dux Agricola: the people call for Agricola to be appointed as general in the midst of military disaster, but does this too play on the ambiguity of dux, hinting at the acclamation of an emperor? The groundswell of (unanimous) popular opinion is swept up to the heights of the palace: 41.4 ‘It is quite clear (satis constat) that this gossip (sermonibus) also struck on the ears of Domitian, as the best of the freedmen

through love and loyalty, the worse through malice and envy, tried to spur on an emperor inclined to the worse. Thus Agricola was driven headlong to glory itself (in ipsam gloriam praeceps agebatur) both by his own virtues and by the faults of others.’ satis constat is the historian’s observation on the kind of fama in which he deals; the effects of popular opinion are easier to report and judge than is what goes on in the mind of the emperor. But the fama of Agricola is subjected to the distorting influence of the imperial freedmen, labourers at the rumour-mill on the Palatine, even before it reaches the malicious ears of Domitian himself. For all his moderatio Agricola is heading for the same precipice as those self-advertising opponents of Domitian who wilfully throw themselves over the edge (42.4) ambitiosa morte ‘in a vainglorious death’. in ipsam gloriam has been variously emended; Kraus and Woodman, following Courtney, read in ipsa gloria, arguing that the paradosis makes no sense, since Agricola has been endangered by the presence of glory for some time, and it is true that gloria at the end of Chapter 41 looks back to the already existing gloria uiri at the beginning. Glory is normally the pinnacle from which a man may be cast down by envy," but a defence of the very striking phrase offered by the paradosis might be made on the basis of a parallel between Agricola’s unwilling propulsion towards a glory that is simultaneously his downfall, and the willing rush to the precipice consisting in an ambitiosa mors of the

2? Cf. Lucr. 5.1123-8 quoniam ad summum succedere honorem | certantes iter infestum fecere uiai, | et tamen e summo, quasi fulmen,

deicit ictos | inuidia interdum contemptim in Tartara taetra; |

inuidia quoniam ceu fulmine summa uaporant | plerumque et quae sunt aliis magis edita cumque, Livy 8.31.7 (with Oakley 1997b ad loc.); Nisbet and Hubbard 1978 on Hor. Odes 2.10.9 (Agricola might be held up as one who practised an aurea mediocritas); Ov. Rem. 369.

Tacitus’ Agricola

plerique? criticized at the end of Chapter 42: 4 ‘Let those whose way it is to admire only what is forbidden know that great men can survive even under bad emperors, and that compliance and modesty, if accompanied by hard work and energy, reach the same peak of praise as many men reach by precipitous paths (per abrupta); but the latter achieved renown through a vainglorious death (ambitiosa morte inclaruerunt) that was of no service

to the state.” abruptus ‘steep’, ‘precipitous’ is close in meaning to praeceps. These plerique deliberately travel per abrupta, ‘by precipitous paths, and they achieve fame, glory by their death (but nothing else). Agricola by contrast is driven towards the precipice, which is at once death and glory (for substantial achievements).”” By contrast with these seekers after the precipice offame Agricola manages to pull up just short of the edge, despite those pushing him. In the final, contorted, confrontation with Domitian Agricola survives: 42.3 'Domitian

was mollified by Agricola's moderation and prudence, since he did not court fame and death through obstinacy and an empty display of freedom (non contumacia neque inani iactatione libertatis famam fatumque prouocabat)’. famam fatumquesums up the self-destructiveness of Republican fama under the principate, by an almost Lucanian formulation. In Domitian's Rome the pursuit of fama is a one-way street to fatum in the sense of ‘death’, a pairing pointedly different from the glorious future that is opened up by the Virgilian summary of the scenes on the Shield of Aeneas as famamque et fata nepotum (Aen. 8.731: see Ch. 3 p. 104)." Agricola, it seems, has managed to stop just short of the plunge into the abyss, by contrast with the seekers after the precipice of fame chastised at the end of the chapter. But doubt is cast on this by the account of the death of Agricola, with the lengthily explored rumour that he was poisoned by Domitian: 43.2 'sympathy was increased by a persistent rumour that he had been carried off by poison; I would not dare to affirm that anything is known to us. We have already been predisposed to believe the uulgus as against sources of

o

28 plerique is usually taken to refer to Stoics, although Kraus and Woodman are doubtful. But note Hist. 4.6.1 (Helvidius Priscus) erant quibus adpetentior famae uideretur, quando etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae nouissima exuitur. Is that a comment on Helvidius’ courting danger through his desire for glory? 29 For an example of gloria in something like hendiadys with a term denoting disaster cf. Hist. 4.4.3 (Helvidius Priscus) isque praecipuus illi dies magnae offensae initium et magnae gloriae fuit, with which Sailor 2008: 19 compares Agric. 42.3 famam fatumque (see next paragraph). 9? Cf also Aen. 7.79 namque fore inlustrem fama fatisque canebant, for the idea, Ann. 15.23.4 unde gloria egregiis uiris et pericula gliscebant. In one of the earlier scenes on the Shield of Aeneas nascent Republican freedom is defended through a productive rush to arms: Aen. 8.648 Aeneadae in ferrum pro libertate ruebant.

281

282

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

information higher up; these rumours circulate (43.1) per fora et circulos ‘in public spaces and social gatherings." The sympathy (miseratio) is also required of us the readers, drawn into solidarity with Agricola’s friends and the uulgus. Despite the historian’s confession that (43.2) ‘I would not dare to affirm that anything is known to us’, (satis) constabat is used twice in this chapter of facts that are sufficiently ‘established’ by the historian. The suspicion of Domitian’s involvement is all but proved by the description of his dissimulation of grief; but this image of a Domitian in malevolent control is then undercut by his unguarded joy at being included in Agricola’s will: 43.4 ‘his mind had been so blinded and corrupted by continuous flattery (adulationibus), that he was unaware

that only a bad emperor would be

written into his will by a good father‘. The corruption of adulatio, corrosive of the distinction between bona and mala fama, has destroyed Domitian's power of discrimination between fair and foul reports, and has made of him a bad reader: he cannot arrive at a correct interpretatio of what Agricola has written (43.4 scripsit) in his will." This is in contrast to the ideal and implied readers of the final chapter, those who knew Agricola in his life, his family and immediate circle, but

also those who will come to a knowledge as of the live Agricola through reading the Agricola, and who have the living icon of Agricola in their/our minds as an eternal and unfalsifiable touchstone for the real man. It is fama as controlled by Tacitus that has the last, and enduring, word. Tacitus offers us a fama that corresponds perfectly to the real Agricola." The great man is finally detached"! from his social and political context to become a meditational icon, an Andachtsbild, of fama, 46.1—5: nosque domum tuam... ad contemplationem uirtutum tuarum uoces. . . quidquid . . . à . , We "M ex Agricola amauimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque est " in animis

3

>

?

? &

3

[I

3

See O'Neill 2003: 145-6. Smith 2002: 95-7 suggests that 43.1 uulgus. . . et... populus... uentitauere alludes to the free passage of the leue uulgusin Ovid's House of Fama (Met. 12.53). Cf. Luce 1991: 2924-6 on Tacitus’ one-upmanship over Tiberius in the control of fame. With the distorting effects of adulatio on fama good and bad cf. Lucian's discussion of koAaxeía ‘flattery’ in On Not Being Quick to Put Faith in Slander (81aBoAq): 10, slander is rife in the courts of rulers, fuelled by envy and flattery; 19, flattery and slander work on Alexander the Great; 20, koAaxtía is the sister of SiaPoaAt}. On the coincidence of Agricola the man and Agricola the book in Chapter 46, and on the closural working of fama here, see Harrison 2007. Cf. Hor. Odes 3.30 for another kind of detachment from the biological self in fama. Cf. Vell. Pat. 2.66.5 (Cicero) uiuit uiuetque per omnem saeculorum memoriam; Sen. Cons. Marc. 1.3 (Cremutius Cordus) cuius uiget uigebitque memoria; on repetition of a verb in the present and future see Wills 1996: 302-4; 302 n. 21 as a pattern especially common with maneo.

Tacitus’ Agricola

hominum;”

in aeternitate temporum

fama rerum:

nam

multos

ueterum

uelut

inglorios et ignobilis" obliuio obruit? Agricola posteritati narratus et traditus superstes" erit. May you call usand your household to a contemplation of your virtues... Whatever we loved, whatever we admired

in Agricola endures and will endure in the hearts

of men; the fame of his deeds will endure in the eternity of time. For many men of old have been overwhelmed by oblivion, as if they were inglorious and unknown; Agricola will be handed down to posterity in my story, and he will survive.

The iunctura of fama rerum forces together report with reality in an indissoluble union. The last sentences of Chapter 46 are saturated in allusions to earlier fama texts (registered in the footnotes), performing a commemoration of fama in the Republican tradition. Glory, not Domitian, is the true heir of Agricola; his life is his lasting testament, not the legal document in which he made a bad emperor his co-heir (43.4).'' Tacitus also nods to

the poets, as well as Cicero and the historians: the point that many men of old are buried in ignoble oblivion is made by Horace, Odes 4.9.25-8 uixere fortes ante Agamemnona | multi, sed omnes inlacrimabiles | urgentur ignotique longa | nocte, carent quia uate sacro ‘many brave men lived before 36

Cf Cic. Car. 3.26 quibus pro tantis rebus, Quirites, nullum ego a uobis praemium

uirtutis, nullum

insigne honoris, nullum monumentum laudis postulo praeterquam huius diei memoriam sempiternam. in animis ego uestris omnes triumphos meos, omnia ornamenta honoris, monumenta gloriae, laudis insignia condi et collocari uolo. . . memoria

uestra, Quirites, nostrae

res alentur, sermonibus crescent, litterarum monumentts inueterascent et corroborabuntur, for the

S

7?

=

3

FS o

v

3

contrast between memorialization in memory and in monuments cf. Tac. Ann. 4.38.1-2 (Tiberius) qui satis superque memoriae meae tribuent, ut maioribus meis dignum, rerum uestrarum prouidum, constantem in periculis, offensionum pro utilitate publica non pauidum credant. haec mihi in animis uestris templa, hae pulcherrimae effigies et mansurae. nam quae saxo struuntur, si iudicium posterorum in odium uertit, pro sepulchris spernuntur (see below p. 304). Tiberius will not succeed in his ambition, laudable in itself; by contrast Pliny will apply to the 'good emperor' Trajan the contrast between the bona fama preserved in the favourable memories of men and statues of precious materials: with Agric. 46.3 cf. Plin. Pan. 55.10-11 non ergo perpetua principi fama, quae inuitum manet, sed bona concupiscenda est; ea porro non imaginibus et statuis, sed uirtute ac meritis prorogatur. quin etiam leuiora haec, formam principis figuramque, non aurum melius uel argentum quam fauor hominum exprimat teneatque. Livy 25.38.8 (on the Scipiones) uos quoque uelim, milites, non lamentis lacrimisque tamquam exstinctos prosequi — uiuunt iigentque fama rerum gestarum - sed, quotienscumque occurret memoria illorum, uelut si adhortantes signumque dantes uideatis eos, ita proelia inire. The wider context of the Livian passage is also relevant. Cic. Tusc. 3.57 quod inglorius sit atque ignobilis ad supremum diem peruenturus. Cic. Brut. 60 et id [Cethegus' skill as orator] ipsum nisi unius esset Enni testimoni cognitum, hunc uetustas, ut alios multos, obliuione obruisset, Fin. 1.57, 2.105. Cf. Hor. Odes 2.2.8 Farna superstes, on which Nisbet and Hubbard

1978 note: ‘the adjective is

semi-legal: posthumous glory is a substitute for heirs: Cf. Livy 2.7.8 (Valerius) se superstitem gloriae suae ad crimen atque inuidiam superesse. ^! But testamentum is not used thus figuratively in classical Latin.

283

284

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

Agamemnon, but all are weighed down in long-lasting darkness, unwept and unknown, because they had no sacred bard to sing of them’. superstes in the final sentence glances at Hor. Odes 2.2.5-8 uiuet extento Proculeius aeuo | notus in fratres animi paterni; | illum aget penna metuente solui | Fama superstes ‘Proculeius will live through long ages, known because of his fatherly spirit towards his brothers; Fame, his surviving heir, will drive him forward with wings that disdain to droop’. That passage is imitated by Ovid at Trist. 3.7.47—50: ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque: Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil. quilibet hanc saeuo uitam mihi finiat ense,

me tamen extincto fama superstes erit. But my own genius is my companion and delight; Caesar could have no power over that. Whoever puts an end to my life with cruel sword, yet when ] am dead my fame will survive me.

If Tacitus has Ovid also in mind, the allusion is pointed. Agricola and his fame thus escape from the control of the emperor, just as, mutatis mutandis, do Ovid and his fame at the end of the Metamorphoses, in both cases the

text enacts the survival of fama by concluding with a verb in the future -

uiuam (Met. 15.879), erit (Agric. 46.5).-

fama in Tacitus' Histories and Annals The varied workings of fama in its several meanings run like a thread through the whole of the Agricola, and gather in more concentrated form in the narrative of Agricola's return to Rome and death in Chapters 39—43, all to be capped in the final chapter, 46, in which the historian seeks to enshrine his subject in his own monumental version of fama. When we turn to Tacitus' large-scale historical works, the Histories and Annals, we find a similar pattern: arecurrent and pervasive thematization of fama, combined with the emergence from time to time of full-blown fama episodes." Much has been written on Tacitean fama in the sense of ‘rumour’, focussing in particular ^! 13

Smith 2002: 36-8 makes this point also; she also draws attention (29-38) to further Ovidian allusions in Agric. 46. | discuss most of what I identify as fama episodes in greater or less detail below: in addition note Hist. 1.34-5 (rumour of the death of Otho); Ann. 12.36-7 (fame of Caratacus, and his

speech on his and the Romans' gloria).

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

on the use of rumour as a historiographical technique by Tacitus, and on the circulation of rumour in an atmosphere of fearful suspicion as a means of characterizing the experience of living in imperial Rome: unverifiable reports, enemy of the historian’s pursuit of accuracy and certitude from one point of view, from another contribute to a true representation of events." As is often the case with fama, the boundary between inside and outside the text is permeable: the experience of the author and reader in trying to uncover the truth that lies behind the screen of murky and conflicting reports duplicates that of the historical actors trying to orient themselves in a dangerous world where to have incorrect information may lead to destruction." interpretatio presents a challenge to both actors and author. There is collusion or competition between the historian and some of his imperial subjects in their outlooks on the world and in their attempts to control the historical record: the affinity, as well as the antipathy, between Tacitus and Tiberius has often been noted (see above p. 233 n. 16).

The focus on rumour and innuendo has tended to divert attention from other aspects of fama in Tacitus. One important feature that has, however, received some attention is the role of fama, in what the historian offers as

historical reality, not just through the description of the circulation of report and rumour on events happening (or not happening) elsewhere, nor just as a means to psychological characterization or the creation of atmosphere, but as an agent in the narrative, motivating events." 46 In some cases rumour is actively manipulated by a human actor, usually a general, to produce some end," but more often fama acts independently of human agents,

44

On Tacitean rumours see Shatzman

1971, still the standard article; Ryberg

1942; Gibson

1998;

Giua 1998 (on the historian's recourse to the unofficial (mis)information conveyed by rumour when the emperor controls the channels of official information); Pelling 2009: 160-4. Ries 1969 rightly emphasizes the 'Begriffskomplex' involved in his subject, and the need to look not so much at individual lexical items but at the interaction of the language of rumour, talk, opinion within wider contexts. On Tacitean innuendo see Sullivan [n

^5

1975-6; Whitehead

1979;

Develin 1983. This coincidence between experiences of reader and actor is the major thesis of Haynes 2003; (3) ‘Tacitus unifies the style and content of his historiography in order to produce in the reader the experience of believing and understanding as the actors in the text do. History for Tacitus is what the agents and patients of past events believed it to be.’ fama itselfis not central to Haynes' discussion, but what she identifies as a key Tacitean iunctura,

fingere et credere (Hist.

2.8.1; Ann. 5.10.2, both in narratives of imperial impostors; also at Hist. 1.51.5, rumours ina

a

4

E

4

military camp) expresses an essential combination of operations in the person of fama: cf. Ov. Met. 12.57-8 (the House of Fama) mensuraque ficti | crescit; 59 illic Credulitas. This is the subject of Gibson 1998, developing Shatzman 197.1: 550; see also Ries 1969: 8 ‘sehr oft lósen [Gerüchte] ihrerseits Ereignisse aus* Hist. 2.20.2; 2.58.2; 2.83.1 (Mucianus); Ann. 12.40.1; 13.8.3; 13.37.1 (all as part of military

strategy).

285

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

suggesting a world where rational choices on the part of individuals are overwhelmed by a supra-personal and often quasi-personified force: just as in Aeneid 4 Dido’s attempt to manage her own reputation is overwhelmed by the demonic force of Fama. A recurrent Tacitean topos is the impossibility of controlling rumour: to attempt to check idle talk is only to add fuel to the fire." The rumour-mill works at full strength in times of war and particularly civil war, when the normal functioning of the body politic is threatened or suspended, as what survives of the Histories demonstrates

abundantly; that it also grinds out ceaselessly in the peacetime conditions of the principate in the Annals is a Tacitean comment on the permanent breakdown of the Republican system of government." In this connection attention needs to be drawn to the wider range of meanings of fama in Tacitus, and those passages where Tacitus asserts or insinuates a contrast between good old Republican ways of managing fama and the corrupt or specious uses of reputation or rumour under the principate.

fama in the principate But first a sketch of the ways in which fama functions in the Tacitean principate. The urge to distinguish between appearance and reality is as strong in Tacitus as it is in Livy, if not stronger, but whereas for the narrator of Republican history there is a real contest, the certamen gloriae 'competition for glory, which, if conducted properly, may lead to the emergence of a true relative assessment of the participants, under the principate that competition between leading members of the senatorial class to claim the (temporary) status of the unus homo ‘one man’ has been robbed of much

48

Hist. 1.17.2 male coercitam famam supprimentes augebant, 2.96.2 id praecipuum alimentum famae erat, 3.54.1 prohibiti per ciuitatem sermones, eoque plures ac, si liceret, uere narraturi, quia uetabantur, atrociora uulgauerant, this last in an extended fama episode that begins with Vitellius" stulta dissimulatio of the disaster at Cremona, and ends with the centurion Agrestis’

attempt to give a proof, documentum, of the veracity of his eyewitness report by taking his own life. But even that is not a certain fact: moving from fama inside to fama outside the text, the historian concludes the episode with the note that ‘some’ report that Agrestis was killed on the orders of Vitellius. See Shatzman 1974: 555. This is the darker side of the paradox at Agric. 18.6 dissimulatione famae famam auxit. The positive side of this impossibility of stamping out the circulation of words is the futility of imperial censorship through book-burning, the lesson of the burning of Cremutius Cordus' books at Ann. 4.35.5 quo magis socordiam eorum inridere libet qui praesenti potentia credunt extingui posse etiam sequentis aeui memoriam: see Luce 1991: 2919-20, with reference to Cremutius, Fabricius Veiento (Ann. 14.50.2); cf. the futile

P P

286

non-display of the imagines of Cassius and Brutus at Ann. 3.76.2. Keitel 1984 argues that Tacitus presents conditions in Rome of the early principate as in essence a continuation of the civil strife of the late Republic.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

of its point by the pre-existing presence of an unassailable unus homo, the princeps." The pursuit of true glory and honour is made impossible by the cancer of adulatio, which also distorts the presentation and perception of reality?! There are further consequences: the disempowerment of the senatorial class creates a vacuum, in which the energies of famaare redirected to the relationship between the princeps and the, by definition, irresponsible plebsor uulgus." If the origin and circulation of famaamong the anonymous mass of the people is unattributable, largely invisible, and uncertifiable, there

is an analogous destabilization of fama at the top of the political hierarchy, as power and words, the power of words, move from the curia and the forum into the secret recesses of the palace. The manipulation of rumour, with its accompanying atmosphere of suspicion and fear, is one of the emperor’s main instruments of power. All of this is very Tacitean, and the modern historian may question its accuracy as a representation of how things actually were, or were actually perceived, in the Roman world at the time. But Tacitus is not the only ancient historian to comment on the greater role played by rumour in the principate, and on the consequent difficulties for the historian of the principate: Cassius Dio, more sanguine in general about the change in the system of government, gives a programmatic statement on the subject under the year 27 Bc, 53.19: In this way the government was changed at that time for the better and in the interest of greater security; for it was no doubt quite impossible for the people to be saved under a Republic. Nevertheless, the events occurring after this time cannot be recorded in the same manner as those of previous times. Formerly, as we know, all matters were reported to the Senate and to the people, even if they happened at a distance; hence all learned of them and many recorded them, and consequently the truth regarding them, no matter to what extent fear or favour, friendship or

5° The block on Republican claritudo is spelled out at Ann. 14.47.1 Memmius Regulus, auctoritate constantia fama, in quantum praeumbrante imperatoris fastigio datur, clarus. .. But note that at Ann. 4.6.2 Tacitus grants that until AD 23 the traditional sources of fama were the criteria by

zn ew

which Tiberius assessed candidates for high office (reserving for himself, however, ultimate

control over appointment): nobilitatem maiorum, claritudinem militiae, inlustres domi artes. see Martin and Woodman 1989 ad loc. See Vielberg 1937: 80-113 on adulatio; 93-7 ‘Das Wahrheitsproblem: The fact that Tiberius has a reputation for holding aloof from popular rumours is itself an indication of the nexus that joins imperial power and rumour: cf. Ann. 3.10.2-3 [Piso ratus] contra Tiberium spernendis rumoribus ualidum et conscientiae matris innexum esse; ueraque aut in deterius credita iudice ab uno

facilius discerni, odium et inuidiam apud multos ualere.

haud fallebat Tiberium moles cognitionis quaque ipse fama distraheretur. igitur paucis familiarium adhibitis minas accusantium et hinc preces audit integramque causam ad senatum remittit.

287

288

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

enmity, coloured the reports of certain writers, was always to a certain extent to be

found in the works of the other writers who wrote of the same events and in the public records. and concealed, distrusted just said and done

But after this time most things that happened began to be kept secret and even though some things are perchance made public, they are because they cannot be verified; for it is suspected that everything is with reference to the wishes of the men in power at the time and of

their associates. As a result, much

that never occurs is noised abroad

(@puAcitat),

and much that happens beyond a doubt is unknown, and in the case of nearly every event a version gains currency (d1a8poeiton) that is different from the way it really happened. Furthermore, the very magnitude of the Empire and the multitude of things that occur render accuracy in regard to them most difficult... Hence in my own narrative of later events, so far as they need to be mentioned, everything that I shall say will be in accordance with the reports that have been given out, whether it be really the truth or otherwise. In addition to these reports, however,

my own opinion will be given, as far as possible, whenever I have been able, from the abundant evidence which I have gathered from my reading, from hearsay, and from what

I have seen, to form a judgement

that differs from

the common

report.”

fama and the imperial succession fama often has inaugural (as well as closural) functions.”' Livy's first use of the word fama in his historical narrative is qualified by the adjective duplex ‘twofold’, referring to a fairly minor detail in distant — and hence unverifiable — pre-Roman legend, but making a programmatic and general point about the duplicities of fama (see Ch. 7 p. 244). At the beginning of the Annals Tacitus substitutes for a death notice or laudatio on Augustus in the historian’s own voice a section beginning (1.9) multus hinc ipso de Augusto sermo ‘there was much conversation about Augustus himself’. There follows what might be called a duplex fama, in the form of the report of competing accounts, one favourable, one unfavourable, of the first princeps’ career.”’ The considered content of these two versions suggests the formal structures of rhetoric, exercises in praise and blame, as the language of 1.9.3 hints: uita eius uarie extollebatur arguebaturue ‘his life was variously extolled or criticized’. But this is pointedly not an example of the historiographical w

5

For the applicability of this passage to Tacitus’ own practice see Woodman and Martin 1996 on Ann. 3.19.2.

&

5

Il

5

See Ch. 1 pp. 36-8; Hardie 200%. See Ferrero

19:16; Giua

1998; 57-9. On the inaugural role of rumours in the Histories and

Annals see Shatzman 1974: 556 n. 25, with reference to Ries 1969 (on Hist. 1.4-49).

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

device of a pair of formally opposed speeches, but a specimen of the uaria fama or uarius rumor that will proliferate in the further narrative of imperial Rome,*^ E] and also a token of the frequent inseparability of the historian Tacitus' words from the words of the actors in his narrative. Annals 1.9—10 is not fama's first appearance in the text. In 1.5 we are told of the rumor that Livia had a hand in the death of Augustus, introducing a miniature fama episode that progresses through rumour's report of the transmission of words within the imperial circle, and its speculation on another death, that of Fabius Maximus. We emerge from the murky domain of rumour to hear from the narrator of Livia's firm management of news (laetique interdum nuntii uulgabantur ‘from time to time favourable news was published"), culminating in the first appearance on the stage of the Annals of the word fama: 'a single report (fama) carried the simultaneous announcement that Augustus had passed away and that Tiberius was in control of affairs In this brief chapter the various manifestations of fama are involved in the death of one emperor and the accession of another, in both cases programmatically. The lightly sketched rumour about the death of Augustus anticipates two of the most developed narratives of rumour in the Annals, the deaths of Germanicus and Drusus, both accompanied by the historian's

reflections on the nature and operation of rumour (3.19.2; 4.11), including an observation on its power in an imperial history, (4.11.2) 'report (fama) being always more frightful in relation to one's departed masters: The unequivocal rejection of the rumour concerning the death of Drusus is

55

varius applied to rumor, fama: Hist. 2.8.1 (with Heubner

1963-82 ad loc.); Ann. 1.4.2; 3.14.5;

3.19.2; 11.23.1 multus ea super re uariusque rumor, 14.20.1. My opposition of rhetoric and rumour can also be collapsed, to view them as more or less formal instantiations of the irresoluble duplicity of the word. For another kind of connection between rumour and

u“ M

rhetoric see Martin and Woodman

1989 on Ann. 4.10-11, claiming that the excursus on the

rumour about the death of Drusus panders to the readers' taste for declamations on poisoning and parricide. Note also that the programmatic use of uarius sermo in Ann. 1.9-10 is qualified by the distinction between the talk of the prudentes (the educated ‘chattering classes’) and that of plerisque uana mirantibus. but the less thoughtful majority here talk about things that are unambiguous, if trivial, Guinness Book of Records facts and figures. Is this because Tacitus is torn between the wish to introduce imperial history as a scene of rumours and speculations, and the wish to present some serious analysis of Augustus' rule, which could implausibly be done through a report of the sermo of the plerique or uulgus? For a reading of this passage as lending power to a woman’s voice as a source of historical narrative see O'Gorman 2000: Ch. 6 "The empress's plot’, esp. 129-31. Feldherr 2009 argues that the famous passage on the rumour attending the death of Drusus at Ann. 4.10-11 presents rumour as one of several alternative historiographies competing to narrate the death, and relates this to the ‘historiographical excursus' at 4.32-3.

289

290

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

unique in Tacitus’ handling of rumours,” ? and has not always been taken at face value. After all, Tacitus himself tells us that to try stamping out a rumour is to lend it wings. The irrepressible nature of rumour is the subject of Tacitus’ final comment on the death of Germanicus and its aftermath: 3.19.2 "That was the end to the avenging, though Germanicus' death was bandied about in various rumours (uario rumore iactata) not only among

those men who lived then but also in following times. So it is the case that all the greatest matters are ambiguous, inasmuch as some people hold any form of hearsay as confirmed, others turn truth into its converse, and each

swells amongst posterity (adeo maxima quaeque ambigua sunt, dum alii quoquo modo audita pro compertis habent, alii uera in contrarium uertunt, et gliscit utrumque posteritate). Here there is an end, marked by the closural formula is finis ‘that was the end’, very often marking a death, but here signalling the end to the story of the vengeance taken for a death. The death itself ‘is mentioned separately, in terms which confuse the closural signals’, as Woodman

and Martin (1996) note. Germanicus' death is final, but not

so the rumours about it that continued to swirl and grow. The allusions here to Thucydides' programmatic statement of the difficulty of the historian’s task“ seem to privilege rumour as something peculiarly important for Tacitus' own practice of the historian's art, and it is Tacitus himself who

appears to have made of the return and trial of Piso a tale of proliferating rumours and innuendos, as emerges sharply from the intertextuality with the monumental certainties inscribed on the bronze of the Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre^' That the rumours continue to have a posterity, centuries after the events, is now solely due to Tacitus' own version. The language used of the continued expansiveness of fama-as-rumour coincides with that used of the poet's fame: with gliscit utrumque posteritate Woodman and Martin (1996) compare Prop. 3.1.33—4 Homerus | posteritate suum crescere sensit opus ‘Homer felt his work grow with posterity. Propertius in turn alludes to Horace's boast of fame, Odes 3.30.7-8 usque ego postera | crescam laude recens 'ever fresh I shall go on growing in the praise of after-ages’. It is only through the chances of archaeology, and the discovery

5? See Shatzman 1974: 558. 99 With alii quoquo modo audita pro compertis habent cf. Thuc. 1.20.1 of yap áv8pcorroi Tas dxods Thay mrpoyeytevnuévo . . . óuoíaxs 4Bacaviotws tap’ AAATAmv Styovtai; with alii uera in contrarium uertunt cf. Thuc. 1.20.3 oU1c$

&raAaírr opos Tois rroAAol; f| Gr Trois THs

cAnGeias, kai Erri Ta EToina UGAAOV Tpkırovran. 6

See the fine discussion in Woodman and Martin 1996; 114-18. On the symbolism of Roman bronze inscriptions, grandiloquent statements of imperial rule and the majesty of the law, see Williamson 1987.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

of the Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre, that it turned out that Tacitus’

narrative of the episode could not claim to be a monument immune to the passage of time, aere perennius." Even before fama had announced the accession of Tiberius at Ann. 1.5, it had got to work on the contenders for the throne: 1.4.2 ‘by far the greatest number of people spread various rumours of (uariis rumoribus differebant) the masters looming over them’. This is the first instance of the word rumor in the text, and it is also the reader's first introduction to the character of

Tiberius." That will be programmatic for the intensive part which will be played by rumours in the subsequent narrative of the reign of Tiberius:^' in that sense rumour fashions an emperor. Tiberius' successful accession to the throne is however assured not by these rumours, but by Livia's management of fama. That is prophetic of the dangerous upswelling of fama at the time of the appointment of later emperors, knowledge of which might remind Tacitus' reader of Livia's need to control the potential power of fama in order to impose her own choice. The topos of the selection of the next ruler by fama had been anticipated by Ovid in an account of the succession, in the distant past, of the second king of Rome, in terms that clearly look to

the choice facing the Romans in the last years of Augustus: Met. 15.3-4 destinat imperio clarum praenuntia ueri | fama Numam 'fama, harbinger of the truth, marked out renowned Numa for power*^ The first half of Histories 1, relating the accessions of Galba and Otho, and the adoption of Piso, is permeated by rumours in a way that the parallel narratives of Plutarch and Suetonius are not.^^ At the beginning of Histories 2, 1.12, fama is agog to appoint Titus as the adopted successor to Galba: "The mob, hungry for fictions (uulgus fingendi auidum), had spread it about

[e

6

w

63

=

6

The Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre announces that it is set up quo facilius totius actae rei ordo posterorum memoriae tradi posset. The instructions for the erection of the inscription, in urbis ipsius celeberrimo loco in aere incisum figeretur, suggest that this will be the official, fixed, version of events. Ries 1969: 143 points out that the simultaneous reporting of rumour and introduction of a main character is unique in Tacitus. Ryberg 19-12 notes that the technique of innuendo is used constantly in the treatment of Tiberius, but only occasionally of the later emperors in the Annals, see also Shatzman 1974: 569-70, who further speculates, on the basis of the end of the Agricola, that a similar use of

o

6

e

$6

rumour might have characterized Tacitus’ picture of Domitian in the final books of the Histories, for speculation on the role of fama in the downfall of Nero see below pp. 310-13. See Hardie 1997: 182-3. Tacitus’ account of the accession of Tiberius is indebted in at least one detail to the beginning of Metamorphoses 15: with Ann. 1.11.1 solam diui Augusti mentem tantae molis capacem cf. Met. 15.1-2 quaeritur interea quis tantae pondera molis | sustineat tantoque queat succedere regt. see Bruére 1958. See Ries 1969: Ch, 2, with the remarks of Shatzman 1974; 556 n. 25.

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

that he had been summoned in order to be adopted... The rumour was increased (augebat famam) by Titus’ own abilities, capable of any station however great.’ Here fama is, in Ovid’s phrase, praenuntia ueri at least to the extent of correctly predicting the ultimate success of the Flavian dynasty.^^ At the beginning of Nero’s reign Agrippina eliminates Iunius Silanus because fama marks him out as an alternative successor to the throne: Ann. 13.1.1 ‘the frequent reports from the public (crebra uulgi fama) that [Silanus] should be preferred to Nero who had scarcely yet left boyhood’. The crime, stated as a fact, bears traces of the rumoured

murders

of Augustus

and

Fabius Maximus, arising out of rumours relating to the succession in AD 14 (Ann. 1.5: see above).°* At Hist. 4.11.2 the hapless Calpurnius Galerianus pays the price of a hyperactive fama: ‘he hadn’t ventured anything, but his illustrious name and his own youthful good looks were the subject of popular gossip (rumore uulgi celebrabantur) and in a city that was still in turmoil and delighted in new topics of conversation (nouis sermonibus laeta) there were those who cloaked him with the empty rumour of the throne (principatus inanem ei famam). He is promptly done away with on the orders of Vespasian's right-hand man Mucianus. But fama sometimes misses her aim completely, as in the case of Claudius: Ann. 3.18.4 "The more | reconsider recent or past events, the more I am confronted with the mockeries made of mortal affairs in every activity: for in terms of reputation, hope and veneration, everyone was marked out for command (fama spe ueneratione potius omnes destinabantur imperio) rather than the future princeps whom fortune was keeping in hiding.'^ fama's ability to make up history is seen in its purest form in the stories of imperial impostors. Three tales of such pretenders survive in the remaining books of the Historiesand Annals: the slave Clemens' imposture of his master Agrippa Postumus (Ann. 2.39—40); the false Drusus (Ann. 5.10); and a false Nero (Hist. 2.8—9). In each case Tacitus anatomizes the growth of a rumour.

The phrase fingere et credere 'fabricate and believe' is used in the stories of the false Drusus and Nero, capturing the self-sustaining power of rumour in a formulation that could also be applied to the contract between producer

97

Levick 1999: 44 suggests that this was a rumour invented later to flatter the Flavians, but that

will not presumably be Tacitus’ motive in retailing it. Vespasian's cause is favoured by fama at Hist. 2.73 nam etsi uagis adhuc et incertis auctoribus erat tamen in ore famaque Vespasianus. See Ash 2007: 96 "The Flavians will be particularly adept at harnessing the power of rumours as their challenge comes to fruition (e.g. 2.80.3). 6 For further parallels between the ‘plotting’ of Livia and the younger Agrippina see O'Gorman 2000: 127-32. 69 [n contrast to Agric. 9.5 haud semper errat fama; aliquando et eligit (see above p. 276). *

292

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

and consumer of fictions. Those who foster rumour are simultaneously producers (fingere) and consumers (credere); the poet creates fictions which call on the willing suspension of disbelief from his readers. Ovid is the most savvy analyst of this relationship between poet and reader, whom he teases as to the reality or otherwise of Corinna. Perhaps the first example of an impostor in imperial literature is the woman who goes around claiming to be Corinna in Am. 2.17.”" The most elaborate of these three episodes is the imposture of Agrippa Postumus by Clemens,"

71

a master in the manipulation of fama,

of which

somewhat unusually he is the single, identifiable, author, and who choreographs his fleeting appearances in the towns of Italy in a pas de deux with the creature who normally determines her own movements: Ann. 2.39.4 ‘he was always abandoning the reports of himself or anticipating them (relinquebat famam aut praeueniebat). But he meets his match in Tiberius, who reasserts his control of the situation through trickery of his own. A typical shape for a fama episode is that of a movement from equilibrium to disorder, followed by the restoration of order. In this case the threatened disorder, according to Tacitus, is nothing less than 'discord and civil war.^

Disruptive fama may be dealt with through varying mixtures of persuasion and force. Here Tiberius makes his opening move by adopting the arts of pretence at which Clemens himself has proved so successful (Tiberius' agents pretended complicity in the scheme, (2.40.2) simulata conscientia), before violently cutting off the source of fama, wrapping up the act in the secrecy (in secreta Palatii parte) from which Clemens had first emerged (we hear of ‘the partners in Clemens’ secret’, (2.39.3) secreti sui socios).

It would be too simple to read the episode just as the victory over a wily impostor of an even more wily emperor. Ries in his analysis of the episode

70 fingo + credo: Cic. Div. 2.58, on prodigia (often associated with rumours) atque haec in bello plura et maiora uidentur timentibus, eadem non tam animaduertuntur in pace; accedit illud etiam, quod in metu et periculo cum creduntur

facilius, tum finguntur tmpunius, Livy 28.25

(authors of the rumour of Scipio's death that led to a mutiny: see Ch. 7 pp. 256-7); Tac. Hist. 2.54.1-2 (Coenus’ false report that Otho lives) fingendi... credentibus. The rumours of the false Drusus and Nero are both nurtured in the soil of the Greek East, and, in the case of the false Drusus, Tacitus characterizes the credulity as typically Greek: Ann. 5.10.1 promptis Graecorum animis ad noua et mira; Clemens however operates on Italian and Roman

credulity. 7

Ries 1969: Ch. 4; Shatzman

1974: 575-6. The following discussion is based in part on Hardie

2009c. nN

7

The potential of rumour to sow catastrophic discord in a polity is already a theme in Virgil (see Ch. 3 pp. 101-2). discordia and rumores are linked at Hist. 3.45.1 ea discordia et crebris belli ciuilis rumoribus Britanni sustulere animos, where pre-existing discord promotes rumour. But discord and rumour are mutually reinforcing agents.

293

294

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

fittingly describes Clemens and Tiberius as 'Gegenspieler';^73 Clemens himself implies that he and Tiberius are doubles in the only direct speech put into his mouth: 2.40.3 'To Tiberius' inquiry about the way in which he had become Agrippa he is said (fertur) to have replied "The way in which you became Caesar." Goodyear 1981 comments ad loc.: 'Clemens does not mean he too had been adopted, but that they had both usurped places to which they had no right.’ There is rather more to it, for in his own narrative of the accession of Tiberius at the beginning of the Annals Tacitus had highlighted the role of fama, in particular in the form of Livia's newsmanagement. That fama about the shady means by which Tiberius came to power cannot be smuggled out of the palace as easily as the body of Clemens. Note finally how fama as it were leaks out of the main story about Clemens into other details of the closing sentences of Tacitus' narrative. Clemens' retort is introduced with fertur: it too is the subject of fama, appropriately enough since the historian can have at best indirect access to what is said in Tiberius' secret places on the Palatine. By contrast, in the parallel account in Dio (57.16.4) the words of the characters are introduced with verbs of

speaking in the authorial voice.^' In Tacitus the whole episode ends with another report of something said and left unverified: many were said to have supported Clemens' plans, but no inquiry was made. Ries is of the view that Tacitus adds this detail in order to reinforce the notion that the imposture really was a serious threat to Roman stability, and that in omitting to make further inquiries, Tiberius was avoiding the possibility of stirring up further trouble. Shatzman (1974: 576 n. 86) dissents: ‘This was a rumour..., as

-

Ries 1969: 162.

74

‘He asked him, "How did you come to be Agrippa?" And he answered, “In the same way that you came to be Caesar.” Ries 1969: 16.

>

7

uw

Ries admits... ; hence the danger may not have existed at all. It might be that Tiberius did not make investigations because he was sure the rumour was false, and not because he felt the situation was dangerous.' It might be: but the point is also made that it is historians who make the last moves in this episode of fama: Tiberius has successfully dealt with the immediate threat, but he cannot control the subsequent adventures of this narrative about a plot against his person — as the disagreement between modern scholars bears witness. Tiberius' own understanding of the importance of what people say for the maintenance of imperial power is the subject of comment at the beginning and end of his reign. In the sequel to the accession itself Tacitus gives

75

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

as one of the reasons why Tiberius was hesitant about speaking in the Senate the following: Ann. 1.7.7 ‘He was also conceding to public opinion (dabat et famae)'^

that he should be seen to have been summoned

and

chosen by the state rather than to have crept in through wifely intrigue and an elderly adoption.' He is concerned for a good public opinion (fama) about the means by which he came to the throne to counter less favourable reports of machinations within the family (which, according to Tacitus, proceeded by the manipulation of fama, as we have seen). Tiberius is still aware of the importance of public opinion in AD 34, according to Tacitus' discussion of the persistent report, fama constans, that Lentulus Gaetulicus, commander in Upper Germany and a former associate of Sejanus, had succeeded in persuading Tiberius to allow him to stay at his post: Ann. 6.30.4 'These matters, a source of wonder though they were, drew credibility from the fact that, alone of all Sejanus' relations, he remained unharmed

and in considerable favour — Tiberius reflecting on his own hatred by the public, his extreme age, and that it was more on report than reality that his circumstances depended (magisque fama quam ui stare res suas). fama here is ‘reputation, public opinion’, but Tiberius’ reputation is vulnerable to fama as chit-chat and rumour. The power of rumour to build up a pretender to the throne is a specifically imperial function of fama, an addition to, or perversion of, the ways in which in the Republic fama intervenes in contests for power." And in this peculiarly imperial context fama-as-rumour claims an importance for itself at the expense of fama-as-renown, -reputation. The Agricola had programmatically made explicit the contrast between Republican and imperial workings of fama, and that contrast is pointed up in a number of episodes in the Histories and Annals.

Vitellius' alien capital: Histories 2.89-91’’

E E

Ss an

M o

Vitellius enters Rome with the full splendour and might of the Roman army, the source of Republican military fama, but already perverted by the

On the need for the princeps to make concessions to public opinion cf. Sen. Clem. 1.15.5 quilibet nostrum debuisset aduersus opiniones malignas satis fiduciae habere in bona conscientia, principes multa debent etiam famae dare. On the opposition of fama and conscientia see Ch. 1 pp- 33-4. Cf. Livy 33.8.5 fama stetisse non uiribus Macedoniae regnum. On fama as public opinion see Yavetz 1971, including discussion of the importance of fama forensis in the Commentariolum petitionis (on which see Ch. 5 p. 166 n. 39). With apologies to Woodman 1998.

295

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

fact that this is an entry of the army into the city of Rome itself, led by a general who puts on the civilian purple-bordered toga of a magistrate to avoid the inuidia of being perceived to enter Rome as a captured city. The next day Vitellius speaks (2.90.1) ‘as if before the Senate and people of another state’, treating Romans as if they were foreigners, and he were a tyrant, with a boastful (magnifica) speech praising his virtues. This is a travesty not just because the gap between appearance and reality is all too well known both to those present and to all of Italy, through which he had made his slothful progress, but because excessive self-praise is inadmissible by the code of Roman fame and reputation." But Vitellius is able to establish a rapport with the common people of Rome, (2.90.2) uulgus... sine falsi uerique discrimine ‘the crowd who cannot distinguish between falsehood and truth’, the natural constituency for Virgil’s Fama, (Aen. 4.188) tam ficti

prauique tenax quam nuntia ueri ‘holding fast to her lies and distortions as often as she tells the truth”. The people compel him to assume the nomen Augusti, the outward mark — only - of distinction. Vitellius then displays his utter lack of awareness of the significance of Roman history, fama as tradition, by issuing an edict concerning public rituals on the anniversary of the disasters at the Allia and Cremera

(18 July), a day which

in the

past had been considered ill-omened, a mistake which (2.91.1) *was taken

as an omen of disaster by a city given to finding a meaning in everything (apud ciuitatem cuncta interpretantem)'. Omensare often contributory to the production and propagation of rumour (see n. 91 below), and interpretari is

a word often used by Tacitus in contexts of fama.*' Vitellius pays lip-service

e o

to Republican institutions in canvassing at the consular elections with his candidates, although the adverb ciuiliter 'in a manner befitting a citizen' reveals that he is doing this in the role of a ciuilis princeps, the emperor condescending to the level of the citizens, rather than of a magistrate in a properly functioning Republic." He continues to curry favour with the mob: 2.91.2 'he courted all the talk of the dregs of the people (omnem infimae plebis rumorem. . . adfectauit), as a spectator in the theatre, in the circus as a supporter; such behaviour would truly have been welcome and popular, if it had proceeded from virtuous impulses, but was regarded as

See Ash 2007 ad loc.; Gibson 2002. On ‘Praise and self-praise' in general see Marincola

1997:

ce

175-82, with particular reference to the historian's deeds.

See above p. 275. Ash 2007 on 2.91.1 interpretantem comments: 'Both groups (1.52.2, 2.39.1, 5.13.2) and individuals (1.27.1, 4.82.2, 4.86.2) make a habit of this. During a civil war (or any

e N

296

crisis), when first impressions count, popular interpretation of events is often more important than the “truth”. See Wallace-Hadrill 1932b.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

unbecoming and worthless when people remembered his previous life’. Tacitus seems to admit that the political use of the plebs in this way is not in itself completely objectionable, and bases his condemnation of Vitellius on a disjunction between reputation, rumor or fama, and uirtutes: fama (what the plebs might be induced to say) and memoria (of his true nature) are at odds. The scene shifts to the Senate, where Vitellius is opposed by Helvidius Priscus, introduced with inversion of his names as Priscus Helvidius. The inversion here perhaps serves to draw the reader's attention to the ‘oldfashioned’ (priscus) virtues of Helvidius.** Vitellius is restrained from acting

angrily by his friends, and smooths over the embarrassment by appealing to the Republican norm: 2.91.3 ‘he replied that there was nothing unusual in two senators disagreeing in a matter concerning the state; he himself even used to speak against Thrasea. Once more this is shown up as a sham, as ‘most laughed at his shameless claim to be such a man's rival (impudentia aemulationis), a perversion of the Republican aemulatio between leading statesmen. Some however take pleasure in Vitellius! choice of Thrasea ad exemplar uerae gloriae 'as a model of true glory, which offers an absolute foil to the several images of falsa gloria that have run through the whole sequence. The Stoic martyrs Helvidius and Thrasea are of course not simply examples of a Republican virtue as it used to be, but a demonstration of the transformation forced upon senatorial independence under the principate. ‘True glory’ now means something different — very different, for example, from the old-style Republican triumphal glory that is parodied in Vitellius" entry into Rome. Hist. 3.37—40 offers the reader further examples of the degeneracy of political oratory in Rome, on the part of Vitellius," and of military comportment outside Rome, on the part of Valens." These frame the narrative of the *well-known

w

8

and notorious death (3.38.1

nota... mors et famosa)

On inversion of names, in which Tacitus follows no clearly recognizable principle, see Ash 2007 on Hist. 2.53.1. For a similar play on the name Priscus see Woodman and Martin 1996 on Ann. 3.69.6. In the formal character sketch of Helvidius at Hist. 4.5-6 Tacitus credits him with a truly philosophical indifference to external goods such as power and fame, but at 4.6.1 reports the view that erant quibus adpetentior famae

uideretur, quando etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae

nouissima exuitur, a view to which the indicative exuitur tends to commit Tacitus himself. In

the context, however, there is a stark contrast between the (true) magna gloria won by Helvidius and the adulatio accorded to Mucianus. 84 3.37.1 mox senatum composita in magnificentiam oratione adlocutus, exquisitis patrum adulationibus attollitur. U

8

3.40.1 Fabius interim Valens multo ac molli concubinarum spadonumque agmine segnius quam ad bellum incedens. . .

297

298

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

of Iunius Blaesus, who falls victim to L. Vitellius’ plotting in a perverted version of the Republican certamen gloriae: 3.38.2 ‘his hostility to Blaesus arose from a perverted rivalry, since the latter rose superior to his own disgraceful ill-repute through an outstanding renown (eum omni dedecore maculosum egregia fama anteibat). Lucius incites his brother to poison Blaesus by imputing to the latter a dangerous ambition for fame and power: 3.38.3 ‘measures should be taken against an enemy in the bosom of the city who boasted of Junii and Antonii as his ancestors, and who

flaunted his

affability and nobility to the soldiers, as coming from a line of generals’. Quite how hollow this contest for fame was is revealed in the historian’s

death notice, which absolves Blaesus of any temptation to a certamen gloriae: 3.39.2 ‘despite having no ambition for any sudden high office, let alone the principate, he barely escaped being thought worthy of it’.

Neronian contestations of fama Annals 14.19-23 In the Annals the end of the year 59 and the beginning of 60 is spanned by a sequence that explores fama, imperial and Republican, from a variety of angles (14.19-23). The year-end is marked by a couple of ‘deaths of illustrious men’, those of Domitius Afer and M. Servilius, (14.19) ‘who had

thrived in the highest offices and by considerable eloquence'; Servilius won his reputation first in the forum and subsequently as a historian, tradendis rebus Romanis — a model for Tacitus himself perhaps. At the beginning of 60 Nero institutes the Neronia, games at Rome

in the Greek fashion, in

striking contrast to the very Roman obituary notices that have just preceded. Tacitus does not simply juxtapose the old and the new, but makes the new games the occasion for an extended discussion of the Hellenization of Rome, presenting two points of view as they were put forward at the time: 14.20.1 ‘the quinquennial games were instituted at Rome after the fashion of a Greek competition — to variable report, as is the case with almost all new things (uaria fama, ut cuncta ferme noua).*’ On the one side were the traditionalists, who remembered that even Pompey the Great had been criticized by his elders for erecting a permanent theatre, and who plotted the corruption of ancestral custom against the growth of Greek-style entertainments. On the other side were those who traced the introduction of 86 87

Cf. the report of the two opposing views on Augustus at Ann. 1.9-10 (see above pp. 288-9). For the effect of the novelty of ‘news’ in stimulating talk and rumour cf. Hist. 1.19.2 crebrioribus in dies Germanicae defectionis nuntiis et facili ciuitate ad accipienda credendaque omnia noua cum tristia sunt, 4.11.2 erantque in ciuitate adhuc turbida et nouis sermonibus laeta qui principatus inanem ei famam circumdarent.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

foreign entertainments back to the remote ancestors, citing the introduction of actors from Etruria, and of horse-racing from Thurii, and the triumphal

games of L. Mummius. Two ways of writing history, each of which can select respectable types of evidence." The way in which this second point of view is introduced certainly makes this a loaded pair of alternatives: 14.21.1 ‘with the majority the licence itself found favour, and yet they screened it with honourable names (honesta nomina praetendebant).*’ Yet

at the end the historian admits, (14.21.4) ‘at any rate the spectacle passed without any significant disreputableness (nullo insigni dehonestamento)'"" and the traditionalists' anxiety about the progressive Hellenization of Rome is undermined by Tacitus' statement that the widespread wearing of Greek clothes during the games then went out of fashion. During the Neronia, as once during a previous set of Roman games, a comet appeared (14.22.1), a phenomenon *on which the opinion of the public (uulgi opinio) is that it portends a change for kingdoms’. Omens need interpretation, and lend themselves readily to the interpretatio of the crowd in the form of rumour: the conjunction of omen and rumour is a favourite of Tacitus." Rumour does not wait for the actual deposition of Nero before setting to her old business of appointing (destinare) a new ruler. The candidate is Rubellius Plautus, pushed into the limelight both by his hereditary nobilitas and by his own shunning of the limelight: 14.22.1 ‘the more he concealed himself through dread, the more reputation he acquired (tanto plus famae adeptus)?" This fama is immediately reinforced by another celestial omen, a thunderbolt that nearly struck Nero in Rubellius' home territory of Tibur: 14.22.2 'the rumour was reinforced by an

8

The anti-traditionalists coincide with the authoritative Livy (7.2) on the matter of Etruscan actors, but diverge (a piece of Tacitean self-consciousness?) on the origin of horse-racing in Rome

»

89

S

9

9

(contrast Livy 1.35.10).

Cf. Aen. 4.172 (Dido) hoc praetexit nomine culpam. dehonestamentum is Sallustian, coined ‘for the republican general Sertorius! scars and gouged-out eye, a badge of honour for his bravery... Tacitus revived it, in places displaying a decline from the original Sallustian context’ (Ash 2007 on Hist. 2.87.2). The history of the word contains in itself a comment on the difference between Republican and imperial fama. For the involvement of prophecy and omens in the generation and propagation of fama cf. Hist. 1.22.2; 1.86.1 prodigia insuper terrebant diuersis auctoribus uulgata, after a set-piece scene of rumour and suspicion; 2.1.2 inclinatis ad credendum animis loco ominum etiam fortuita (here the credulity of the crowd creates omens); 2.78.4; Ann. 4.58-9. This kind of connection

of omen and fara is very different from the use of pfjun to denote a supernatural source of information (see Ch. 2 p. 57), or from the divine and authoritative connotations of fari as discussed by Bettini 2008 (see Ch.

92

| p. 8).

For other examples of the topos that suppressing fama serves only to fuel it see n. 48 above. Cf. also Hist. 1.88.2 quanto magis occultare et abdere pauorem nitebantur, manifestius pauidi: panic and rumour are closely allied.

299

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

interpretation — which sprang up from an equally groundless base — of a flash of lightning (auxit rumorem pari uanitate orta interpretatio fulguris).' The crowd's itch for novelty once more fuels the fevered atmosphere, antic-

ipating an imperial appointment, 'and his cause was fostered by the many whose greedy — and usually deluded — ambition is to be first in cultivating the novel and the equivocal (noua etancipitia praecolere auida?* . Nero responds by telling Plautus to place himself beyond the influence of (14.22.3) 'those who were spreading prevarications' (praua diffamantibus), and to withdraw from the city, the traditional stage for the Roman

certamen famae, to the

un-Roman life of leisure (otium) of Asia."' But, in the immediate sequel (14.22.4), it is Nero in Rome who incurs infamia, *Nero's excessive desire

for luxuriousness brought him of the aqua Marcia. The urban deorum reported as historical health confirmed the anger of 14.23 we travel from domestic Asian retreat, Armenia,

infamy and danger’, by bathing in the waters sequence is rounded off with an interpretatio fact by Tacitus: ‘his subsequent ambiguous the gods’. It is as if to clear the palate that at affairs to a place far to the east of Plautus

in order to witness the Romanae artes of a great

military commander, in full control of the positive uses of fama, Corbulo: 'As for Corbulo, deeming that after the destruction of Artaxata he should

capitalize on this fresh terror to occupy Tigranocerta, by the extirpation of which he might intensify the enemies' dread or, if he spared it, acquire a 95 YO reputation for clemency (clementiae famam" adipisceretur) . .

Tacitus and Tiberius: the struggle to control fama In the Agricola historian and his test with the emperor Domitian Tiberius has often been thought feelings towards Domitian. But tian's performance

subject, Agricola, together win out in a confor the control of fama. Tacitus' portrayal of to be in some measure a retrojection of his where Tacitus is contemptuous of Domi-

in the contest for fama, his attitude towards Tiberius

x uw

2=

» =

is a more ambivalent mixture of dislike and grudging admiration. One sign of what is at times almost an identification with the Tiberius that he has created is a recurrent testing of his own ambitions in the matter of Cf. Lucr. 4.592-4 ideo iactant miracula dictis | aut aliqua ratione alia ducuntur, ut omne | humanum genus est auidum nimis auricularum. For the further, and terminal, adventures of Rubellius and a farna insistent on marking him out for the succession see Ann. 14.58. Not an imperial clementia, since this is a foreign war. fama clementiae of emperor: Hist. 1.75.2 Vitellius uictor clementiae gloriam tulit; 2.63.2; Ann. 4.31.2. » e

300

On Tacitus' portrayal of Corbulo as an old-style Republican general see above n. 16.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

fama against the performance and aspirations of the emperor. This is concentrated in a sequence reaching from the middle of Annals 3 to the middle of Book 4,”’ which includes three statements by the historian on the nature

and ambitions of his own work. The first of these comes at the end of the digression at 3.55 in which Tacitus explores the causes of changing patterns in Roman luxus from the battle of Actium down to Tacitus' own times, following the account of a letter from Tiberius to the Senate in response to a move on the part of the aediles to crack down on luxury. This proposal in itself touches closely on matters of reputation and renown: one ofthe reasons for Tiberius' hesitation to act is an anxiety that successful action would entail (3.52.3) ‘ignominy and infamy for illustrious men’.”* In finally rejecting the proposal Tiberius makes the point that the aediles would win the gloria of attacking vice, leaving the princeps with the odium of having offended people. For the aediles the attack on luxury is a means to political credit. In the excursus on the history of luxury however conspicuous display is an instrument in the certamen gloriae, a means by which noble or famous families (familiae nobilium aut claritudine insignes) could become more famous in respect of their name and clientships.”” But luxus as a means to fama is morally dubious, and Tacitus prides his age on a return to the more parsimonious ways of a stricter age; the idea that the present is not always worse than the (immediate) past then leads to a claim to the superiority of contemporary literature, including the work that we are reading, over the productions of

the past: 3.55.5 sed nostra quoque aetas multa laudis et artium imitanda posteris tulit. uerum haec nobis in maiores certamina ex honesto maneant'but our age too has produced many an instance of excellence in the arts which deserves to be imitated by posterity. Whether or not this happens, however, may these be the contests of ours with our ancestors which will enjoy an honourable survival.’ Woodman and Martin (1996) note the dense intertextuality with famous texts of the ancestors in these two sentences, which thus

E]

9

What follows builds on the excellent discussion of Luce

1991: 2922-6 ‘Tiberius and fame’,

identifying a climactic sequence on fame and memory, culminating in the tria] and speech of Cremutius Cordus. Luce concludes: 2926 'History hangs like Damocles' sword over the autocrat, for it is the one thing he is unable to control. As the historian Cremutius Cordus is

*

9

e

100

made to say: suum cuique decus posteritas rependit." On the terms ignominia and infamia see Woodman and Martin 1996 on Ann. 3.18.1. The implication is perhaps that under the Julio-Claudians (if Woodman is right to refer postquam caedibus saeuitum et magnitudo famae exitio erat to the civil wars of 68/9) the Republican certamen gloriae continued, but that, in the absence of political libertas, a display of luxus was the only way that the great families could compete with each other. This reading of the passage follows Woodman and Martin 1996, following Syme.

301

302

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

perform in maiores certamina: the Res Gestae of Augustus, Virgil’s Georgics, perhaps Horace’s Odes; and, in their endorsement of Syme’s suggestion that nostra aetas contains a ‘veiled and personal claim! perhaps the basis for a comparison with Ovid’s direction of the whole fama of the Metamorphoses to mea tempora ‘my times’, triumphantly vindicated in Ovid’s epilogue. The last word maneant takes us back to the end of the Agricola (manet mansu-

rumque est), a passage which may also contain Ovidian allusion (see above p. 284). The historian's is the only lasting and honourable kind of fama. In the next chapter

(3.56) Tacitus ironically resumes the main

narrative

with a reference to the very transient fama of Tiberius: "Tiberius, having won a reputation (fama) for restraint because he had checked the swooping accusers...' This is immediately followed by a discussion of the 'designation for the highest exaltedness' of tribunicia potestas 'tribunician power’, the request of which for Drusus triggers 'a sickening display of sycophantic proposals' (Woodman and Martin 1996 ad loc.) from the senators. Q. Haterius, for his proposal to immortalize that day's senatus consulta in an inscription in gold in the Senate-house, is instead immortalized by Tacitus as (3.57.2) senex foedissimae adulationis tantum infamia usurus ‘an old man

destined to enjoy only the infamy of his foulest sycophancy’. The second of the historian's statements on the aims of his work is at 3.65.1, in which Tacitus justifies his decision to report only those senatorial motions ‘distinguished by honourableness or of noteworthy discredit’ (insignes per honestum aut notabili dedecore), so that virtues should not be buried in silence, and so that the fear of infamy among posterity should be a deterrent to crooked words and deeds. But this restatement of history's traditional function of providing exempla of both good and bad kinds of behaviour is followed by a general criticism of the time, tempora illa, as thoroughly infected by adulatio, so that the leading senators were paradoxically forced to 'shield their brilliance/distinction with the filth of subservience' (claritudo sua obsequiis protegenda erat). Thus does the principate pervert the workings of fama and infamia of the free Republic, and the final word in thissection isgiven to Tiberius himself, who is said to have muttered in Greek whenever he left the Senate-house 'Ah! Men primed for slavery, on which

Tacitus comments that even Tiberius, who opposed libertas publica 'the freedom of the Roman people’, could not stomach such cringing servility.|” 101 Syme 1958: 624 n. 3. 19

For Tiberius’ conflicted attitude, inseparable from his failed relationship with fama, cf. also

Ann. 2.87 qui libertatem metuebat, adulationem oderat. His own attraction to a Republican ideology of fama is thwarted by his timorous inability to allow the full and proper working of the Republican political system. This is the more ironic in that before his accession Tiberius had won famous military victories, triumphs to add to those of the great Republican generals.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

The third and longest statement of the historian’s aims is the digression at 4.32-3, a synkrisis of the glorious subject matter of Republican historians, and the inglorius labor of the imperial historian’s tedious catalogue of cruel orders, ceaseless accusations, false friendships, and the destruction of the

innocent. The digression is followed by two episodes which bring on stage two historians, each of whom has points in common with Tacitus himself.'^ The first is Cremutius Cordus, arraigned on the charge of praising Brutus and calling Cassius ‘the last of the Romans. Cremutius’ subject was the death of the Republic; his own self-imposed death marks the death of the historian of Republican libertas. But this attempt to suppress the praise of Republican heroes leads only to the greater auctoritas and gloria of the martyred historian: Cremutius is an early example of the new style of fama, untainted by adulatio, that is available under the principate. Tacitus’ closing comment on the death of Cremutius and the burning of his books is: 4.35.5 ‘On the contrary, the influence (auctoritas) of punished talents swells (gliscit), nor have foreign kings, or those who have resorted to the same savagery, accomplished anything except disrepute for themselves and for their victims glory.’ In the case of Cremutius the glory of martyrdom is inseparable from the power of his written works to survive, ensuring the author’s enduring auctoritas. The verb used with that noun, glisco, is often

used with fama and related words." The second historian is Tiberius himself, in a speech to the Senate refus-

ing the offer of a temple to himselfby an embassy from Spain. The emperor is introduced as one with a strong grip on the management of fama in both its positive and negative aspects: he ‘was generally firm in spurning honours and deemed that he should reply to the rumours in which he was criticized for deviating toward self-aggrandizement' (4.37.1). In his speech he looks both to the past reputation of Augustus, and to his own future fame as emperor. To accept more temples himself would be to dilute 10% On the close connections between the three episodes in this sequence see Cancik-Lindemaier and Cancik

104

1986: 22-4; Luce

1991; Moles

1998; Sailor 2008: Ch. 5 ‘Tacitus and Cremutius‘

Hist. 2.8.2 gliscentem in dies famam (with Ash 2007 ad loc.); 2.83.1; programmatically of adulatio, like fama-rumour a perversion of speech, at Ann. 1.1.2 temporibusque Augusti dicendis non defuere decora ingenia, donec gliscente adulatione deterrerentur, Ann. 3.19.2; 14.15.3; 15.23.4; 15.64.1. For examples in other authors with inuidia, fama,

gloria see TLL s.v.

glisco: note esp. the examples in Silius Italicus with fama, Pun. 4.6, 6.63, 10.578. Oakley 1997a on Livy 6.14.1 notes that in Livy glisco is particularly commonly used of sedition, which itself is often linked to fama. 105 For Tiberius’ concern with his fame Luce 1991: 2923-4 compares Ann. 6.46.2 illi non perinde curae gratia praesentium quam in posteros ambitio; 4.31.2 (immediately before the excursus on historiography) gnarum meliorum, et quam fama clementiam sequeretur, 2.88.1 (Tiberius' imitation of the refusal to poison Pyrrhus) qua gloria aequabat se Tiberius priscis imperatoribus.

303

304

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

the honour paid to Augustus by the Temple of Augustus and the City of Rome at Pergamum: 4.37.3 uanescet Augusti honor si promiscis adulationibus uulgatur ‘honour for Augustus will vanish if it is vulgarized by indiscriminate sycophancies.' Fame is normally magnified through wider propagation (uulgare); when that propagation is the work of adulatio it becomes merely inanis fama ‘empty report’, uana gloria ‘vain glory’. Tiberius’ own ambition is not for temples of stone, but for the kind that lasts, temples and beautiful statues in the minds of the Romans

(4.38.2 haec mihi in animis

uestris templa, hae pulcherrimae effigies et mansurae). The language here comes very close to Tacitus' living monumentalization of Agricola, and also echoes poets' claims for the superior endurance of their kind of monument. Tiberius' speech ends with a prayer to his human subjects in Rome and the provinces that densely concentrates fama words, (4.38.3) ut... cum laude et bonis recordationibus facta atque famam nominis mei prosequantur “that...they may attend my actions and the reputation of my name with praise and benign recollections’. facta and fama are forced together in an attempt to base a sound reputation on the factual record, as Tacitus (so he insinuates) brings fama and res (gestae) into equivalence at the end of the Agricola. When Tiberius contrasts temples in the mind with those built of stone, we expect him to go on to say that the latter are subject to physical decay.''^ Instead he says that ‘if the judgement of posterity turns into hatred, stone temples are spurned as tombs. The monument, memory, is threatened not with oblivion, but with transformation into something unintended by its maker. The Tacitean text immediately exemplifies the vulnerability to its reception of Tiberius’ attempt to control fama, as we leave the senatorial stage of public oratory for the shadow world of rumour. The fact that Tiberius himself continues to reject worship of his person in private conversation (secretis sermonibus), so far from lending credence to his public

statement on the matter of fama, is the occasion for a return to the rumours that had prompted his speech in the Senate in the first place (4.37.1 quorum rumore arguebatur...): 4.38.4 ‘some interpreted (interpretabantur) this as modestness, many that he was diffident, others as the sign of a degenerate

spirit’. This last group, who seem now to hold as a genuine belief what might seem adulatio, criticize the emperor for not aspiring to divinity: their gloss on his behaviour ends up as a complete reversal of Tiberius’ closing attempt to link fama and facta, (4.38.5) ‘Contempt for fame meant contempt for

106

See Nisbet and Rudd 2004 on Hor. Odes 3.30.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

virtues’ (nam contemptu famae contemni uirtutes): Tiberius prayed for a glorious reputation based on his solid achievements; these critics argue from a disregard for a glorious reputation to a disregard for the virtues of which those deeds would be the expression. The historians Cremutius and Tacitus

are left as clear winners in the contest to master fama."

maiestas and fama Cremutius Cordus was tried on a charge of maiestas. Tiberius’ attempt at the end of this sequence on fame and memory to reassert what we may call an old-style Republican equivalence between facta and fama is doomed in advance by the perversion of the relationship between deeds and words that has resulted from the extension and growth of trials for maiestas ‘treason’, identified by Tacitus as ‘the greatest single evil of Tiberius’ reign.^ Cremutius opens his defence with a disjunction of things said and actions: Ann. 4.34.2 ‘It is my words

(uerba), conscript fathers, that are criticized,

so completely am I innocent of deeds (factorum)’, words that echo Tacitus’ account of the original, pre-imperial, functioning of the lex maiestatis at 1.72.2 '[Tiberius] had brought back the law of treason. This had the same name in the time of the ancients but different matters came to court, such as

the impairment of an army by betrayal or of the plebs by sedition, or, in fine, ofthe sovereignty of the Roman people by maladministration of the government. Actions were prosecuted, talk had impunity (facta arguebantur, dicta impune erant). Tacitus contrasts this token of autocratic repression with Tiberius' rejection of adulatory attempts to mark his own name and acts as those of an autocrat — the people's offer of the name of pater patriae and the Senate's proposal ofan oath to uphold the acta of the princeps (Ann. 1.72.1). At this early stage in his reign Tiberius is seen to be torn between a reluctance to accept specifically imperial ways of processing his name and deeds, and the willing reintroduction of a law in a form that is untrue to the meaning of its name

and which, in this specious new form, confounds a

proper Republican discrimination between acts and (mere) words. Previously maiestas had denoted the real and substantial greatness of the Roman 197 Sailor 2008: 302 ‘The princeps attempt to suppress Cremutius’ history and his refusal of divine honours outline a contest between himself and Tacitus over what posterity will remember.’ For a penetrating reading of Ann. 4.37-8 which sets Tiberius’ attempt to control fama and memory within the context of his critics’ (mis)evaluation of his words, and of Tacitus’

challenge to the reader properly to evaluate both Tiberius and his critics, see Pelling 2010. 108 See Martin and Woodman 1989 on Ann. 4.6.2, with further bibliography on the question of whether the historian gives a fair picture of the workings of maiestas under Tiberius.

305

306

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

people, !? which might be infringed through the betrayal of an army or the fomenting of civil discord among the people (areas that are identified as the territory of the Republican historian at Ann. 4.32.1). Now maiestas is extended

to things said, detached

from

actions — inanis fama, we

could say. The change is dated to Augustus, who first admitted a case de famosis libellis ‘defamatory documents’, provoked by the shameless writings of Cassius Severus, who

(Ann.

1.72.3) ‘had defamed illustrious men

and

ladies in provocative writings, a case which anticipates that of Cremutius Cordus. At this point maiestas leaves a context in which it is facta that count, to be reflected by fama, and enters the murky world of the principate where fama detached from actions takes on an increasingly independent agency. Augustus had been provoked by the libelli of a prominent and well-known writer, Cassius Severus; when Tiberius reintroduces the mates-

tas law, it is because he has been enraged by anonymous libels directed against himself,

texts that have

more

the character

of rumours

(1.72.4

carmina incertis auctoribus uulgata ‘the publication of poems of uncertain authorship').' ^ In Ann. 1.73 Tacitus gives the examples of the trials of Falanius and Rubrius as a foretaste of the history of the treason-trials, ‘in order [for the

reader] to become acquainted with the initial stages from which, given the degree of Tiberius' skill, a form of extermination ofthe utmost severity crept in, was then suppressed, and finally flared up and gripped everything’. The pathology of maiestas trials is like that of the Virgilian Fama, starting small but, like the thunderbolt in her destructive violence, eventually developing into a full-scale conflagration. The term maiestas itself has undergone a distortion similar to those effected by Fama. But the historian is also - how consciously? — implicated in the manipulation of words and facts: that the nomen of the lex maiestatis was the same in the old days, but that other cases

came to court is what Tacitus tries to persuade us, but Tacitus' presentation of the 'facts' about the Tiberian treason-trials is greatly disputed by modern historians, as a glance at Goodyear's ten-page essay on the topic in his

commentary reveals.!’'

V?

Fora collocation of fama and maiestas where (arguably) reputation matches reality cf. Livy 42.5.6 seu fama et maiestate Macedonum regum praeoccupati, although in the case of Macedonia real and reported greatness may not coincide (cf. Livy 33.8.5: above n. 77). 110 Suetonius gives a very different account of Tiberius’ attitude to such things in the early years of his rule: Tib. 28 aduersus conuicia malosque rumores et famosa de se ac suis carmina firmus ac patiens. I Goodyear 1981: 141-50.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

Nero and Trojan fama: Annals 16.1—3 When it comes to the management of fama Tiberius (or at least the Tiberius presented to the reader by Tacitus) finds his match in the ironical and suspicious historian Tacitus. In the Agricola Tacitus had played a similar game with Domitian, and emerged the easy winner. Nero is a less skilful operator, and so a less worthy opponent for Tacitus. Nero's concern is not so much for his status as Roman princeps but for his own literary reputation. When he comes out as a performer in Naples, it is with the plan of then going to Greece to win crowns and so (Ann. 15.33.2) 'by a greater reputation elicit the enthusiasm of his citizens (ut...

maiore fama studia ciuium eliceret).' A

competition for poetic fame is a determinant in the Pisonian conspiracy: 15.49.3 “Lucan had his own reasons inflaming him, since Nero, in a vain

attempt at assimilation, was trying to suppress the fame of his poems and had prevented him from showing them off, uanus adsimulatione ‘vainglorious in his comparison

[of himself to Lucan]; and another of the conspirators,

Afranius Quintianus, has been defamed by one of the princeps own poetic productions: he *was infamous for physical softness and, defamed by Nero in an abusive poem, was proceeding to avenge the insult’.'' The rumour of another act of poetic comparing had worked to Nero's disadvantage at the time of the great fire at Rome: 15.39.3 'a rumour had spread that at the very time of the City's blaze he had actually mounted his domestic stage and sung of the destruction of Troy, assimilating present calamities to olden disasters. To counter this rumour Nero accuses the Christians of starting the fire, with a strong hint in the manner of Tacitus' report that this was a fiction of the princeps: 15.44.2 ‘But despite the human help, despite the princeps lavishments and the appeasements of the gods, there was no getting away from the infamous belief that the conflagration had been ordered. Therefore,

to dispel the rumour, Nero supplied defendants, the Christians." Comparing latter-day disasters with the sack of Troy is something that Romans other than Nero also do, not least historians such as Livy''' and Tacitus, who in Histories 3 hints that the sacks of Cremona and of the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter are repetitions of the sack of Troy." The Trojan origins of Rome are brought into more immediate contact with the Tacitean narrative in the curious story of Caesellius Bassus that opens '12

Usually it is the princeps who is the target of probrosa carmina; Ann. 4.31.1; 1448.1; cf. 2.50.1 (probrosi sermones). Nero's is a topsy-turvy Rome. 113 For a lengthy account of the operations of a mendacious Virgilian Fama in charging Christians with the crimes of cannibalism and incest see Tertullian, Apologeticus 7.8-13. 14 See Kraus 199.1b. U5 See Baxter 1971.

307

308

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

Book 16 of the Annals. I shall read this as yet another Tacitean fama episode, and one which may hint at the ultimate power of fama, that of bringing down an emperor. My reading will also lean on a parallelism between the allusive mining of the Virgilian Aeneas legend by Tacitus and by Lucan, who makes the site of Carthage the place for a complex interweaving of legendary and historical narratives in one of the most extended fama episodes in the Bellum ciuile (see Ch. 6 pp. 192-5). The soil of Carthage is a rich repository of objects and ghosts stamped on the Roman historical consciousness. In the Virgilian tradition the city of Carthage is a doppelganger and antithesis of both Troy and Rome (Aen. 1.13 Karthago, Italiam contra ‘Carthage, lying opposite Italy’), a staging post on the journey from Trojan origins to Roman completions. The foundation legends of both Carthage and Rome tell of the excavation of objects portending the future greatness of each city. Carthage was founded in the place where the head of a horse was dug out of the ground (Aen. 1.443 effodere loco signum), an omen of military success and prosperity. lle '° The foundations of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol yielded to its excavators the head of a man, a clear omen that the place would be caput rerum." Dido's own story in the Aeneid begins and ends with revealings and concealings of things in the earth. The secret of her husband Sychaeus' murder by Pygmalion is uncovered by the ghost of her husband (Aen. 1.356), who at the same time reveals the location of a buried treasure that Dido takes with her to her new city (358-9 auxiliumque uiae ueteres tellure recludit | thesauros, ignotum argenti pondus et auri 'he showed her where to find an ancient treasure buried in the earth, an incalculable weight of silver and gold, supply for the journey’). At her death Dido goes under ground: Aen. 4.654 et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago 'and now a glorious ghost of what I am shall go beneath the earth. From her bones in the earth will arise her avenger (625), a scene realized at Silius Italicus, Pun. 1.81ff. in a grove that conflates the two Virgilian sites of chthonic numinosity, the grove in the middle of Carthage where the horse's head was dug up (1.81 urbe 116

Justin 18.5.15-17 (the excavation of the horse's head triggers the spread of fama (opinionem)) in primis fundamentis caput bubulum inuentum est, quod auspicium fructuosae quidem, sed

laboriosae perpetuoque seruae urbis fuit; propter quod in alium locum urbs translata, ibi quoque equi caput repertum, bellicosum potentemque populum futurum significans, urbi auspicatam sedem dedit. tunc ad opinionem nouae urbis concurrentibus gentibus breui et populus et ciuitas magna facta; Servius ad Aen. 1.443; Eustathius ad Dionys. Perieget. 195; Sil. Pun. 2.410-11

ostentant caput effossa tellure repertum | bellatoris equi atque omen clamore salutant, see Bayet 1941; Kraggerud 1963. In the Aeneid this equine omen is matched by the omen of the white horses in Italy, 3.537-43.

17° Livy 1.55.5; Plin. NH 28.4.15; Varro, Ling. Lar. 5.41.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

fuit media: cf. Aen. 1.441 lucus in urbe fuit media), and the shrine in Dido’s palace dedicated to the memory of her first husband Sychaeus (Aen. 4.457 ff.). Silius Italicus’ interest in necromancy and dark memories buried in the earth may in part be a hangover from formative years in the time of Nero: born in ap 26, Silius had been consul in 68, the year of Nero's death. With these traditions of Carthaginian and Roman interments and disinterments in mind, I turn to the curious story that opens the sixteenth book of Tacitus’ Annals, the book in which the transmission of the Annals

breaks off. This is a tale of buried treasure, Carthaginian origins, and wildly expanding rumour, that culminates in rhetorical ‘songs of the earth"! A man of Carthaginian origin, Caesellius Bassus, comes to Rome to tell Nero of a dream that has revealed to him a cave on his land, of immense depth, containing a huge store of gold ingots, hidden there, Caesellius conjectures, by Dido when she founded Carthage. Nero's uanitas'silliness' (a weakness associated by Tacitus with a propensity to believe in and propagate rumours)!" makes him a sucker for the story, and he does not stop to check the veracity of this report emanating from the soil of Carthage (Ann. 16.2.1 ‘without sending inspectors to ascertain whether the news was true’), although from his reading of Virgil he should know that Fama, who has haunted Carthage for ages past, is (Aen. 4.188) tam ficti prauique tenax quam nuntia ueri ‘as much attached to the false and crooked as she is a messenger ofthe truth’. Rather Nero himself contributes to the uncontrolled expansion of cloudy rumour, auget ultro rumorem. The chain of reports proliferates through the credulitas! ^ of the populus, unchecked by the ‘reporting of a different kind’ (diuersa fama) of the ‘perspicacious’ (prudentes),""' to come to full flower in the bards' and orators' praise of the princeps, with their song of an earth that bears fruit with a ‘new fecundity’ (noua ubertas), in a new

115 The story is also reported by Suet. Nero 31.4. Braund 1983 notes that the episode is an illustration of the claim at 15.42.2 that Nero was incredibilium cupitor (also in a context of excavations, effodere proxima Auerno iuga conisus est: cf. 16.3.2 effosso agro), and suggests that Nero may have been tempted to believe the story because in this way he could draw on the prestige of the Aeneas legend. For the discovery of treasure as a sign of Fortune's favour Braund refers to Hill 1933: 261—2. For a similar story cf. Plut. Pomp. 11.3 on Pompey's army digging for buried treasure at Utica (near Carthage): the trpäyua yeAoiov of treasure, a find encouraging soldiers to think that there is lots of buried Carthaginian treasure; Pompey laughs at their folly, until they give up and come to their senses. 119 See Bartera 2008 on Ann. 16.2.1. 120 Credulitas dwells in the House of Fama at Ov. Met. 12.59. '21 Cf the division between the ignorant mob and the intelligent at Ann. 1.9.1-3 (at the point when the Julio-Claudian dynasty is inaugurated with the accession of Tiberius) multus hinc ipso de Augusto sermo, plerisque uana mirantibus... at apud prudentis uita eius uarie extollebatur arguebaturue; at Hist. 3.58.3 consilia prudentium are contrasted with uulgi rumor.

309

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

Golden Age,'** together with (16.2.2) ‘all the other servilities which, with the utmost fluency and no less sycophancy, they fabricated, confident in the complaisance of their believer’ (quaeque alia summa facundia nec minore adulatione seruilia fingebant, securi de facilitate credentis). At Rome extravagant spending (luxuria) grows (the verb is gliscebat, elsewhere used of fama)'~" as rapidly as the rumour had grown, in expectation of the imminent realization of the newly-found treasure.'** But when teams of diggers in Carthage fail to unearth the treasure, Caesellius is forced to admit that his dream played him false, and he takes his own life. The story is usually taken, with Syme, as ‘a light interlude after the Pisonian conspiracy, before the next murders begin*'"^ Its position at the beginning of the book should give us pause. This may have been the last book of the Annals,'*’

in which

case this tale of wild rumour

will have

made a ring with the narrative of rumours and messages that are likely to have constituted the last part of the Tacitean account of the reign of Nero, if Tacitus' own one-line summary of those events at Hist. 1.89.2 is any guide: Nero nuntiis magis et rumoribus quam armis depulsus ‘Nero, deposed more by messages and rumours than by force of arms’.'** If, on the other hand, the reign of Nero comprised a hexad of books, like the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula-plus-Claudius, 16.1-3 will have made a ring with the

7?

123

V4 u

12

Treasure trove and Golden Age: Calp. Sic. 4.117-21 iam neque damnatos metuit iactare ligones | fossor et inuento, si fors dedit, utitur auro; | nec timet, ut nuper, dum iugera uersat arator, | ne sonet offenso contraria uomere massa, | iamque palam presso magis et magis instat aratro. On problems with treasure trove and the imperial authorities cf. Juv. 4.37 ff. (Domitian and the great fish). credentis establishes a bond between princeps and the credulitas of his people. See above n. 104.

The conjunction of fama and luxuria echoes, in a very different register, that in Tacitus’ analysis of the causes of the decline of luxus at Arn. 3.55.2, where the certamen gloriae and the desire to plebem socios regna colere et coli had led to conspicuous display, ut quisque opibus

a

12

12

3

310

domo paratu speciosus per nomen et clientelas inlustrior habebatur. There luxus is the cause of fama, bad or good; here fama provokes luxus. This seems almost a parody of Bourdieu on symbolic capital: Bourdieu 1977: 179 ‘symbolic capital... in the form of the prestige and renown attached to a family and a name is readily convertible back into economic capital” In this case the growth of fama-as-rumour converts into the growing consumption and waste of economic capital. Syme 1958: 310 (see 473 n. 2). On the number of books in the Annals see Syme 1931: 162-3; Hendry

12

1958: 686-7; Goodyear

1970: 17-18; Martin

1996.

See Bessone 1980. Bartera 2008 on Ann. 16.2.1 notes: ‘The gold of Bassus is another of the rumores which contributed to Nero's ruin . . . Ironically, false rumours affected the emperor

also after his death (cf. H. 2.8.1)' (see above p. 292). With the formulation of Hist. 1.89.2 cf. 3.53.3 (Primus criticizing Mucianus) non se nuntiis neque epistulis, sed manu et armis imperatori suo militare.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

end of the eighteenth book. The apparently trivial sport of Fortune at the beginning of Book 16 may have been as significant a beginning as Fortune’s games at the start of the second half of the Tiberian hexad: with Ann. 16.1.1 ‘sport was next made of Nero by Fortune owing to his own foolishness and the promises of Caesellius Bassus, compare 4.1.1, introducing the rise of Sejanus: ‘suddenly fortune started to turn disruptive and the man himself savage — or to present control to savages'^? Furthermore, within the overall structure of the Annals the end of the

Julio-Claudian line as a result of rumour would be a fitting conclusion to a story that, for Tacitus, begins with the succession at the beginning of Book 1 of Tiberius through the agency of fama, manipulated in this case by Livia (see above p. 289). fama would thus engineer the beginning and end of Tacitus’ narrative Ab excessu diui Augusti." And the pronounced agency of fama in the downfall of Nero would not just mirror the beginning of the whole narrative, but provide an ironic conclusion to a reign which started with a death (13.1.1 prima nouo principatu mors...), procured 'through Agrippina's guile' in order to forestall the power of fama to impose an alternative emperor, Iunius Silanus: 13.1.1 'Agrippina, having engineered the execution of his brother L. Silanus, dreaded an avenger, given the frequent reports from the public (crebra uulgi fama) that in preference to Nero, who had scarcely yet left boyhood and had acquired his command through crime, there should be someone of settled years, guiltless, noble, and (something

for which there was regard at the time (quod tunc spectaretur)) belonging to the posterity of the Caesars.' The episode of Caesellius Bassus comes a mere three pages after Tacitus' account of the death of Lucan after the Pisonian conspiracy. In homage to the dead poet, let me subject the story to an obsessive and suspicious reading worthy of Lucan himself. We will understand that the story is inspired by the tale of Dido's buried gold (Aen. 1.353-9), when the ghost of Sychaeus reveals

125 See Walker 1952: 43 for the parallel between Ann. 4.1 and 16.1, suggesting that 16.1 ‘may point to a change in Nero's general position, leading to his overthrow. If the opening of Book 16 does look to the end of the reign, then the last sentence of the previous book, 15, acquires

eo

13

an ironic overtone: 15.74.3 nam deum honor principi non ante habetur quam agere inter homines desierit. A further anticipation of the end of Nero is found in the anecdote about Vespasian at 16.5.3 mox imminentem perniciem maiore fato effugisse. For another perspective on fama and ring-composition in the Annals see O'Gorman 2000: 130-1 ‘By naming Tiberius here [Ann. 1.5] as “Nero”, her fama potentially refers to the final Julio-Claudian accession as well as the first. The application of the term eadern, "the same’, thus shifts: fama eadem embraces two events (the death and the accession), two narratives (Livia's and Tacitus’) and two emperors (Tiberius "Nero" and "Domitius" Nero).

311

312

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

the hiding-place of the buried treasure to Dido in her dreams.'*' fama is already at work in another version of the story, Justin 18.4.6-8 (epitomizing Pompeius Trogus) 'Acherbas had great but concealed riches, having laid up his gold, for fear of the king, not in his house, but in the earth; a fact of

which, though people had no certain knowledge of it, report (fama) was not silent. Pygmalion, excited by the account, and forgetful of the laws of humanity, murdered his uncle, who was also his brother-in-law, without the least regard to natural affection.’ If Tacitus' story looks to the end of the Julian line, there is an ironic

dissonance between Nero's temptation to exploit a treasure supposedly dating back to the time of the founding myth of the family and of the dynasty, and the narrator’s awareness that in this return to origins is foreshadowed the end of the line. The narrative machine is gathering itself for the end of a story one source of whose momentum may be traced back to a superiority in fecunditas and fama enjoyed by the elder Agrippina, grandmother of Nero: Ann. 2.43.6 ‘Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus, outdid Livia, the wife of Drusus, in fertility and renown (fecunditate ac fama). »132 "^" The orators’ praise (fabrication of fama) of the noua ubertas of Mother Earth, manifested in the

discovery of the subterranean wealth, is blind to the imminent extinction of the one-time fecunditas ac fama of the Julian house, of which signs were to be seen in the natural world itself, according to Dio 63.29.3 ‘of the descendants of Aeneas and of Augustus he was the last, as was plainly indicated by the fact that the laurels planted by Livia and the breed of white chickens perished shortly before his death’. The Caesellius story does not mark a continuation of Roman traditions, renewing the present through a return to the source of foundational stories. It tells of a fama that comes out of the earth of Carthage, but a fama without foundation, without root. The noua ubertas of Mother Earth is an empty fantasy. Furthermore Nero’s Romans are muddling their archetypal roles. Nero’s new Golden Age is based on Carthaginian, not Trojan, sources. Indeed Rome is even more corrupt than the luxurious Carthaginians of Aeneid 1: Dido, so Caesellius speculates, had buried the treasure to remove the temptation of greed from her new city (16.1.2 ne nouus populus nimia pecunia lasciuiret),

131

With Ann. 16.1.1 magna uis auri. . . rudi et antiquo pondere cf. Aen. 1.359 argenti pondus et auri (for other occurrences of the phrase see Woodman and Martin 1996 on Ann. 3.53.4). On the Virgilian allusions in the episode see Murgatroyd 2002. Bartera 2008 on Ann. 16.1-3 suggests that the '(almost baroque) clustering [of allusions to Virgil in this episode] may be T.’s ironic way of criticizing the court poets who celebrated this event in an unprecedented way, a Tacitean satire on the unbridled rampage of poetic fama. 132 See O'Gorman 2000: 131-2.

Tacitus’ Histories and Annals

whereas Roman luxuria trades on the mere report of this buried treasure. The dream of Sychaeus spoke truly to Dido; Caesellius' dream deludes Nero with an empty phantom. The myths that Nero will end up playing for real will be the sack of Troy and the death of Turnus (according to Suet. Nero 54 Nero had vowed that, in the event of his defeating his opponents, he would have performed a mime of Virgil's Turnus at the victory games, as if in defiance of what he correctly feared would be the case, that he would die

as an enemy of Rome).!? To end with more uana somnia: what further details of Tacitus' lost narrative ofthe death of Nero might we conjecture on the basis ofa presumed connection

with

the story of Caesellius

(who,

remember,

(Ann.

16.3.2)

‘escaped shame and fear through a self-imposed death’, as Nero would, though botching the job)? The surviving narratives of Suetonius and Dio place a curious emphasis on the subterranean aspect of Nero’s last hours. His freedman Phaon leads him out of the city to his suburban villa. On arrival Phaon first urges Nero to hide in a pit dug out of the sand (Suet. Nero 48.3 in specum egestae harenae). Nero says that he will not ‘go under the earth alive’. A little later Nero does submit to entering the villa through a secretly dug passage, like an animal in a narrow burrow (ita quadripes per angustias effossae cauernae).'*' Fortune's first sport with Nero, Tacitus says, was to delude him with phantoms of ancient treasure buried deep in a cave; was her last trick on the emperor who remodelled the landscape of Rome with his Golden House, and who on its completion said that he had at last begun to live like a human being," to make him end his life as a hunted beast going to earth, the history of the Julian gens brought to an end in a subterranean cavern?

133 O'Gorman 2000: 162-75 ‘The Game of Troy’, on Tacitus’ use in his Nero narrative of paradigms from the legendary concatenation of the histories of the three cities, Troy, Carthage, Rome, noting the placing at the beginning of the second half of Annals 15 (39) of the rumor that during the fire of Rome Nero cecinisse Trotanum excidium, praesentia mala uetustiis cladibus adsimulantem. O' Gorman sees a connection with the story of Scipio Minor remembering the sack of Troy as he watched the sack of Carthage. 134 Cf. Dio 63.28.5. At Suet. Nero 49 Nero oversees another excavation: tunc uno quoque hinc inde instante ut quam primum se impendentibus contumeliis eriperet, scrobem coram fieri imperauit

Uu

13

dimensus ad corporis sui modulum, componique simul, si qua invenirentur, frusta marmoris et aquam simul ac ligna conferri curando mox cadaueri, flens ad singula atque identidem dictitans: "qualis artifex pereo!" Did Tacitus write Nero's death as a pendant to the death of Subrius Flavus at Ann. 15.67.4 is proximo in agro scrobem effodi iussit, quam Flauus ut humilem et angustam increpans, circumstantibus militibus, ‘ne hoc quidem, inquit, ‘ex disciplina: admonitusque fortiter protendere ceruicem, "utinam; ait ‘tu tam fortiter ferias! Suet. Nero 31.2; at 31.4 Suetonius says that the promise of the Carthaginian buried treasure had encouraged Nero in this and other building extravagances.

313

314

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

Pliny the Younger and Martial Tacitus has a very clear agenda on the difference made by the principate to the forms and workings of fama. Modern historians have also tested the proposition that with the new political structures of the principate comes radical change in the ways in which the élite think and act with regard to the Republican

values of fame, glory and honour.

Thomas

Habinek,

Dylan Sailor and Matthew Roller develop versions of an argument that the frustration of the traditional path to renown via the competitive achievements of the Republican aristocracy, the certamen gloriae, shifts the arena to fields other than the political and the military. For Habinek this is ‘a more inclusive model of honor... based... on mastery of an array of cultural practices"^ and realized to perfection in the younger Seneca. Sailor presents a sophisticated argument that, in his oppositional historiography, Tacitus follows an alternative route to the Republican cursus honorum, leading towards an assertion of autonomy and the winning of prestige in the face of the emperor's attempt to manage the economy of repute.!*’ Roller (2001), like Habinek making the younger Seneca a prime witness, argues that the rejection of traditional Roman views of fame in favour of an internalized ideology of philosophical virtue serves the interests of an aristocracy disempowered in the conditions of the principate, and so able to reclaim, on different territory, privileges and powers monopolized by the emperor. From a very different perspective Greg Woolf suggests that the perception of rapid change in the early Empire and an anxiety about the fluidity of social roles fostered an ambition to cheat oblivion and the threatened loss of the self through inscribed monuments that fixed one's fame for future ages, a

turn outward to publicity rather than a turn inward.'** This is in contrast to a strand of moralizing analysis in antiquity itself which saw as one of the consequences of the decline of letters a neglect of posterity. Lamenting the decline of oratory in his day the elder Seneca asks, (Contr. 1 praef. 10) quis est qui memoriae studet? ‘Who takes any thought for the memory of posterity?’ Ps.-Longinus concludes a similar analysis thus: Sublim. 44.8 ‘this must necessarily be the case, and men will no longer lift up their eyes or have any regard for what posterity says (Uo Tepoonuías). Some modern scholars, on the other hand, point to continuities rather

than discontinuities. Jon Lendon sketches a picture of a Roman world in which honour permeates, motivates and lubricates society and government 136

Habinek 2000: 265-6. See also above Ch. 1 pp. 32-3.

93 Woolf 1996,

1?

Sailor 2008.

Pliny the Younger and Martial

in the Empire as much as in the Republic, and is prepared to answer criticism that Rome emerges as a time-free zone in the matter of honour.'*” Robert Kaster in his meticulous analysis of the ‘scripts’ for those emotions that reinforce cultural norms

in ancient Rome,

and which include emotions,

such as pudor and inuidia, that are central to the psychology of fama, finds that the basic conceptual and affectual structures remain the same from the late Republic into the early Empire. “The “Roman revolution” did not entail a revolution in affect." The variety of these accounts suggests that the reality is not a simple one, and that we are dealing with differences in emphasis rather than the wholesale replacement of one model by another. When it comes to fama there is a spectrum of practices and attitudes, dependent on different contexts, different genres, and differences between individual Romans. As a coda to my analysis of the historians I touch briefly on the dealings with fama on the part of two of Tacitus' contemporaries, Pliny the Younger and Martial.

Pliny the Younger Pliny's surviving writings begin just after the 'dawn' of the new era of Trajan, and one might therefore be tempted to see in the Letters and Panegyric the effects on the discourse of fama of the revival of liberty after the death of the tyrannical Domitian, the revival to which Tacitus looks forward with something less than full confidence at the beginning of the Agricola.''' Yet one has the impression of what is an established habitus already by the time of the letters in the first book, dating from ap 99. In his obsession with fama Pliny is matched perhaps only by Cicero, and he reveals 'a thorough-going commitment to the old-fashioned republican standard of the sovereign evaluation of the community!" But no more than Cicero's is this an unreflecting appetite for glory, but one aware, or aware of the need to be seen to be aware, both of the dangers of the pursuit, and of the need to align it with a programme of virtue. Both are apparent, perhaps programmatically, in the first extended discussion of fama in the collection, Ep. 1.8, a letter which raises, albeit 12% Lendon2001:vi. Ml

— "? Kaster 2005: 11.

On Pliny and fama and gloria see Ludolph 1997: 60-88 (with references to earlier literature); Mayer 2003; Gibson 2002; Anderson 2003: Ch. 5; there is much of relevance in Riggsby 1998,

contrasting Pliny's old-fashioned, Ciceronian, mode of self-fashioning with Seneca's inner, self-directed, system of values; 92 ‘Pliny does not cultivate his character so much as his standing.’ 142 Gibson 2002: 254 (his conclusion).

316

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

obliquely, many of the important topics for a consideration of Pliny’s handling of fama.'"* To a request from Pompeius Saturninus to be sent one of his writings, Pliny replies that he had already decided to do just that, namely a speech given on the occasion of Pliny’s benefactions to his native Comum of a library and alimenta (an annual benefaction for the maintenance of freeborn children). Saturninus is invited to assist Pliny in the editing, emendatio, of the speech with a view to possible publication. Talking about talk is typical of the Letters:'4" this is a puff for one of the speeches with which Pliny hoped to make a lasting name as an author, and this letter itself is a captatio beneuolentiae to predispose both its addressee, Pompeius Saturninus, and the wider readership, contemporary and future, to a favourable

reception of Pliny’s fama, his reputation as a generous benefactor community as memorialized in a carefully composed and revised of Pliny’s oratorical skills. We have already seen an example of the a private communication, a letter, as a move in the manipulation

to the sample use of of the

writer's public face, his fama, in Cicero's Ad Atticum, 1.15 (see Ch. 7 p. 243);

the boundary between the private and the public is naturally more fluid in the case of letters, such as those of Pliny, that were themselves penned with

a view to future publication. Pliny is aware of the danger that praise, especially self-praise, may attract inuidia (1.8.6). There is no reason to take this to refer to a heightened danger under the principate rather than to the exposure of praise to envy that had been a constant in the Republic, and indeed in any age. Pliny is also careful to place fama in a correct relationship to virtue, as too had been Cicero (see Ch. 1 pp. 24-5): 14 ‘Furthermore I am mindful of how much more greatspirited it is to locate the reward of virtue in consciousness of it (conscientia) than in fame (fama). Glory should be a consequence, not the goal (sequi enim gloria, non appeti debet).' »|45^" This is a variant on the cliché that fame, or glory, is the shadow of virtue (see Ch. | p. 25 n. 84). The particular topic of the priority of conscientia over fama has precedents in Cicero, and a long afterlife, particularly in the Christian discourse on fama.'^ Another

143

On Ep. 1.8 see Ludolph

1997: 67-71, 179-93. For Ludolph this letter has a particular

importance as the last in the ‘Paradebriefe’ that open the collection.

144 On the metadiscursivity of the Letters, discussing discussions of people and their discussions of people, see Henderson 2002: 48. On the Letters as a device to secure interest in (the fame of) Pliny the orator see Mayer 2003. > Cf. esp. Sall. Catil. 54.6 quo minus petebat gloriam, eo magis illum sequebatur. conscientia versus fama: see Ch. | p. 33 n. 104. In Pliny cf. also Ep. 1.12 (Corellius) quamquam plurimas di causas habent. m, optimam conscientiam optimam famam...; 3.20.9 (on the drawbacks of the secret ballot) multi famam, conscientiam pauci uerentur, 5.1.11 (on honourable handling of a legacy) tuli fructum non conscientiae modo uerum etiam famae.

Pliny the Younger and Martial

Ciceronian theme may be alluded to in Pliny’s final modesty topos in the letter. The actual speech was delivered not before the people of Comum in the open, but in the town’s Senate-house before the local councillors

(16-17). Pliny is anxious that he might seem inconsistent in seeking a wider audience through publication, when on the occasion of the speech itself he had shunned adsentationem uulgi adclamationemque ‘the adulation and applause of the crowd’. This may put us in mind of Cicero's distinction between popularis gloria 'glory awarded by the people' and gloria solida ‘substantial glory, the praise awarded by the boni, those capable of judging outstanding virtue ( Tusc. 3.3—4; see Ch. 1 p. 24). Nor perhaps is the nature of the benefactions accidental for the purposes of the letter. A library isa building for the preservation and wider circulation of literary products, a repository for the kind of fama that Pliny himself angles for, and also, as a building, a substantial monument

of a kind that

is a common metaphor for the fame of the literary artist. There is perhaps a further point too in the word alimentum, lit. ‘nourishment’. Pliny states that a (self-)commendatory speech has some justification in the case of an alimenta scheme whose attractiveness to people at large is not as great as its utility (the opposition of populareand utilissimum): honeyed words to make people swallow the scheme, but also words that will provide nourishment for Pliny's fame as an orator in the future. For the metaphor of ‘nourishing’ fama, in this case fama-as-rumour, compare Tac. Hist. 2.96.2 id praecipuum alimentum famae erat." For Valerius Maximus the renown conferred with the honour of a crown ‘nourishes’ virtue (2.6.5, on the Athenian practice of giving olive crowns to good citizens, uirtutis uberrimum alimentum est honos).

Pliny's letter is full of expressions of modesty and diffidence, but the urgency of the desire that drives Pliny slips through in the proverbial phrase with which he glosses the coincidence of Saturninus' request with his own intention to send him something, (Ep. 1.8.1) addidisti ergo calcaria sponte currenti ‘you have spurred on a horse already running. ? That the ambition extends further than merely posting a copy of a speech is suggested by two parallels for the phrase, one in Horace and one in Pliny. The more usual verb with calcar is subdo; addo is used by Horace in the image of stimulating poets to seek the heights of Helicon: Ep. 2.1.217-18 uatibus addere calcar, | ut studio

'47 Ash 2007 ad loc. compares Livy 35.23.10 addidit alimenta rumoribus aduentus Attali; Quint. Decl. mai. 18.13 iterum dantur malignis alimenta sermonibus. 148

Combining two related proverbs (Otto

1890: 102-3): (1) aliquem currentem incitare, etc.; (11)

admisso subdere calcar equo (Ov. Pont. 2.6.38), etc.

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maiore petant Helicona uirentem ‘to give spur to the poets, so that they seek the green heights of Helicon with greater eagerness’.'*” It is in the context of literary fame that Pliny uses the image of spurring a willing horse in one of his most impassioned statements on the subject of fame, in the letter on the death of Silius Italicus, 3.7, which ends with an exhortation to Caninius Rufus, like Pliny a wealthy littérateur, to strive to compensate for the brevity of life with a bid for literary immortality: ‘I know that you need no goading; but my love for you stirs me to spur you on even though you are already running, as you also do to me. It is a "good strife" when friends incite each other with mutual encouragement to a love for immortality (ad amorem immortalitatis). Farewell.’ Pliny alludes to the Hesiodic good strife (Op. 24 &ya81 8 Epis) that makes poet vie with poet, here in an explicit connection with fama that in Hesiod is present but indirect (see Ch. 2 pp. 54-6). In Ep. 1.8 we see a Pliny fired by a desire for fame or glory that finds outlets both in the world of public actions and in the world of letters. The political stage of Rome offers scope, albeit limited,'*’ for the satisfaction of this desire: Pliny tells of the support given to him by Corellius Rufus in his pursuit of public office, going back to the time of Domitian, I! and of Corellius’ concern to build the fama of his protégé (Ep. 4.17). Pliny enjoins on one Maximus a kind of certamen gloriae with himselfin his governorship of Achaea: Ep. 8.24.8 'in addition you are in competition with yourself ( tibi certamen est tecum); you carry the burden of the fame of your quaestorship’. As in the Republic success as an orator is a route to influence and fame: Pliny remembers a case that he pleaded as a young man, possibly in the early years of Domitian, that ‘opened the door of fama’ to him (Ep. 1.18.4 ianuam famae patefecit). But the relative lack of scope in the principate for achieving outstanding fame in the political arena leads to displacements of several kinds. From Rome to Comum: in his home town Pliny can more easily play the great

149

See Brink 1982 ad loc. addo is also used with calcar at Varro Men. 48; Sen. Ep. 68.12.

159 The most explicit acknowledgement of the limitations of the contemporary world in this respect is in the letter on the death of Silius Italicus, 3.7 (14) sed tanto magis hoc, quidquid est temporis futilis et caduci, si non datur factis - nam horum materia in aliena manu — certe studiis proferamus, et quatenus nobis denegatur diu uiuere, relinquamus aliquid, quo nos uixisse testemur. 151 Pliny's most vivid picture of the reign of Domitian as a time hostile to fame and virtue is in Ep. 9.13, on Pliny's part in the ultio Helvidii, as he remembers his own acquaintance with the younger Helvidius: 3 fuerat alioqui mihi cum Heluidio amicitia, quanta potuerat esse cum eo, qui metu temporum nomen ingens paresque uirtutes secessu tegebat. But the context demands a blanket condemnation of conditions under Domitian, comparable to the picture at the end of Tacitus' Agricola.

Pliny the Younger and Martial

man than he can in the imperial capital, as appears from Ep. 1.8. From political performance to published monumentality: Pliny is proud to tell his correspondents about the high points of his career as an orator in Rome, but the insurance policy for his fame as an orator is the publication of his edited and polished speeches.'” From the political world of facta to the literary world of studia. One of Pliny’s most impassioned moments is his reply to Titinius Capito's attempt to persuade him to write history: 5.8.1—2 ‘Many have often urged me to this, and I am willing, not because I am confident that I will do a good job (that would be a rash belief except for one who had already tried his hand), but because I think it one of the finest things not to allow those who deserve immortality (aeternitas) to perish, and to increase the fame of others together with one's own (aliorumque famam cum sua extendere). Nothing stimulates me so much as the love and desire of lasting fame (diuturnitatis amor et cupido).’ If you cannot perform famous deeds yourself, you can piggyback as a writer on those who have." ‘To prolong the fame of others with one's own' pointedly rewrites the Virgilian model, Aen. 10.468—9 (Jupiter on the task of the epic hero) famam extendere factis, | hoc uirtutis opus 'to increase fame through deeds, that is the task of virtue!" A scion of a famous family lives up to his ancestors, and is fired

by the ancestral imagines (cf. Sall. Jug. 4.5—6), not in the sphere of military or political achievement, but in that of reciting his learned elegies on the subject of catasterisms (Ep. 5.17). His brother wins pietatis gloriam by the pleasure he takes in his brother's performance. The letter concludes, (5.17.6) "My hope for this age is that it should not prove sterile and barren, and it is my burning desire that our noble families should not have no ornament in their homes other than family portraits (imagines). As it is these seem to me silently to praise and encourage these two young men, and to recognize them, a great mark of glory for both of them (quod amborum gloriae satis magnum est).

>155

See above all Mayer 2003. Cf. Ep. 6.16.3 (in the context of his uncle Pliny the Elder’s undying fame): happy are those to whom it is given aut facere scribenda aut scribere legenda (his uncle was granted both). Smith 2002: 45-8 discusses the Virgilian parallel, pointing out that for Virgil too the immortality of the hero’s facta is inseparable from the fama controlled by the poet (Aen. 9.446-9, 10.791-3). Pliny's praise scandalizes Syme 1958: 577-8. Anderson 2003: 203 points out that Calpurnius Piso's recitation is described in a manner similar to a report (Ep. 6.11) of the performance of two young men in the Centumviral Court. For a more conventional linkage of imagines and family renown see 8.10.3, to his wife's grandfather on her miscarriage: neque enim ardentius tu pronepotes quam ego liberos cupio, quibus uideor a meo tuoque latere pronum ad honores iter et audita latius nomina et non subitas imagines relicturus.

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Finally, literary fame comes to taste sweeter even than such fame as can be realized in the spaces of public life in Rome, in the priamel of Ep. 9.23.1-3: It has often happened to me when | was pleading a case that after the centumviral court has retained its judicial dignity and gravity for a time, they have all suddenly risen to their feet to praise me, as if overcome by some compulsion. It has often been the case that I have won from the Senate the greatest applause (famam) that I could wish for. But I have never derived greater pleasure than from something Cornelius Tacitus told me recently. He said that at the last races in the circusa Roman knight sat next to him. After a varied and learned discussion this man asked, ‘Are you Italian, or from the provinces?’ He said that he answered, “You know who I am, from your

reading (studiis).'"^ To which he said ‘Are you Tacitus or Pliny?’ I can't tell you how pleased I am that our names are assigned to literature, as if they belonged there and not to individuals, and that each of us is known by our writing even to those to whom we would otherwise be unknown.

Rumour and gossip, the talk of the town, do not occupy a large space in Pliny's Letters, but when they do appear they do not seriously threaten the social and political fabric of the city, and Pliny presents himself as one of superior knowledge and judgement who can see things in their correct light. The only report that approaches what might be called the Tacitean 'terrorism of rumour' is the account of the panic during the natural disaster of the eruption of Vesuvius, 6.20.15: Many people raised their hands to the gods, more took it as a sign ( interpretabantur) that there were no longer any gods and that this was the world's last and eternal night. There were some who exaggerated the real danger with fictitious and false fears (qui fictis mentitisque terroribus uera pericula augerent). Some present reported, falsely but to a credulous audience (falso sed credentibus), that one part of Misenum had collapsed, and another was on fire.

Elsewhere Pliny reports the chatter (sermones) about an edict of the praetor Nepos which excited variously praise and criticism (multi... alii contra...). The final judgement of people will depend on the success or failure of his attempt to enforce a limit on fees for counsel, (5.9.7) ‘hence it often happens that the same actions are given the name now of earnestness, now of conceit, now of independence, now of folly. The relativity of names, one

156

Pliny uses studia both of oratory in the political sphere, and of the full range of other literary activities: the word itself thus provides a point of transition between political and other stages for the pursuit of fame and glory (so Anderson 2003: Ch. 5).

Pliny the Younger and Martial

of the great themes of civil war literature, is here handled with a detach-

ment that suggests at most a tired cynicism at the state of the morality of public life. Humour and a didactic tone mark Pliny’s long report to Fadius Rufinus of the talk that fills the town about the unexpected will of Domitius Tullus,

who after stringing along the captatores had left as his heir his niece and adopted daughter (the grandmother of Marcus Aurelius): Ep. 8.18.11 ‘there you have all the talk of the town (fabulas urbis); for all the talk is of Tullus (nam sunt omnes fabulae Tullus).’ The letter opens with a clear rejection of popular belief: ‘the popular belief that a will is the mirror of a man’s character is clearly false, since Domitius Tullus has made

a much

better

show in death than in life‘. Pliny has already given his own judgement when he goes on to detail (8.18.3) ‘the conflicting opinions expressed all over the city’ (uarii tota ciuitate sermones: alii... alii...). He closes by asking Rufinus for his own local news, from which he expects both entertainment and instruction: ‘For men’s ears delight in novelty, and at the same time by examples we are taught how to lead our lives. Farewell.’

Martial

Should we read Pliny’s occasional gossipy letter as a reflection of life in a Rome revolutionized by the restoration of libertas after the death of Domitian, or as essentially a continuation of things as they had always been? For a snapshot of the ‘normality’ of the circulation of gossip and rumour in Domitianic Rome we can turn to Martial, whose epigrams are full of gossip of a more private kind, as well as of public praise of the emperor.'*’ There is little hint of anxiety about the kind of rumours that poison political and social life in the pages of Tacitus, although if that were the background to Martial’s own experience one might not expect that to pass through the generic and performative filters of the epigram. There are anxieties and tensions of another kind, however, that relate to the differing kinds of fama with which the epigrams engage. Crudely put this is the tension between fama in orbe, the lasting and monumental fame which Martial proudly claims for himself, even in his own lifetime, introducing himself as (1.1.2) toto notus in orbe Martialis ‘Martial known

the world over’, and fama

in urbe,

the circulation in Rome of ephemeral talk of the town, of whose texture Martial’s epigrams themselves are a part. The division between these two '57 On gossip in Martial see Greenwood 1998; Williams 200-1: Index s.vv. ‘gossip and rumors’. On Martial and fame see Garthwaite

1998; Williams 2002; Rimell 2008: Index s.v. fama.

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types of fama is another version of a dichotomization that has gained some currency in recent criticism of Martial. Luke Roman speaks of ‘the existence of polarized and irreconcilable aesthetic standards in Martial’s work’!"5 a contrast between the ephemeral and useful on the one hand, and, on the

other, an élite, neoteric, aesthetic of refinement and enduring value. Victoria Rimell traces similar tensions between epigrams as corruptible and ephemeral bodies, and as hard unshiftable inscriptions; between unstoppable babbling and sober, written documents.'? This tension reaches even to the grandest and most imperial of themes, praise of the Colosseum, whose circular form mirrors that of the orbs over which the emperor rules. This monument surpasses the fame of all previous architectural monuments, including the pyramids, the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Mausoleum: Spect. 1.7-8 omnis Caesareo cedit labor amphitheatro, | unum pro cunctis fama loquetur opus ‘all labour yields to Caesar’s amphitheatre; fame will speak of one work in place of all’. But the arena that will claim a monopoly on the tongue of fama in the future is also the setting for the spectacle of a passing day. Martial pulls out all the stops in an epigram on a beast-fighter dressed as Hercules, who has been tossed by a bull, Spect. 19: Vexerat Europen fraterna per aequora taurus: at nunc Alciden taurus in astra tulit. Caesaris atque Iouis confer nunc, Fama, iuuencos:

par onus ut tulerint, altius iste tulit. A bull had carried Europa over his brother Neptune’s waters; but now a bull has raised Hercules to the stars. Compare now, Fame, the steers of Caesar and of Jupiter;

although they carried an equal load, this one raised it higher.

Rimell comments on this: ‘this “fame” is cheap entertainment and lasts but a second. So many gored bodies are “tossed to the stars” that even the spectacular thrill gets downgraded to the trivial.’'“’ But at the same time the trivial is given lasting fame in Martial’s text, that day in the amphitheatre will be remembered as long as there are readers of the epigram. Martial’s own book will be tossed to the stars, but in ridicule, once it has left the poet's study for the book-stalls of Rome: 1.3.7-8 audieris cum grande sophos, dum basia iactas, | ibis ab excusso missus in astra sago ‘when you have heard a great “bravo”, as you throw kisses, a shaken blanket will 155 Roman 2001: 144.

!5? Rimell 2008, esp. Ch. 2.

160 Rimell 2008: 62, Fitzgerald 2007: 48-57 also comments on the use of myth in the De spectaculis, and the emperor's power to turn ancient glory into present play, in a 'dialectic between glorification and banalızation.

Pliny the Younger and Martial

send you flying to the stars’.'*' In the opening sequence of four epigrams in Book 1 Martial exploits Horatian ironies: as the poet both asserts his worldwide fame and dirties his hands with the materialities of distribution and readership, Martial displaces his own desire and anxiety about a fame which is also exposure to the whim of the nameless mass readership — the same crowd who propagate rumour and gossip in the city — on to the book, personified as a slave-boy eager to leave the poet's book-boxes and launch on a spacious flight, 1.3.11 aetherias. . . uolitare per auras. Ennian and Virgilian allusion betrays the fact that it is not through the heavens that the book will fly, but over something much more down to earth, and less pure, the mouths of the human readers. Already in the previous poem the Martial toto notus in orbe has had to give instructions to his potential purchaser, wandering aimlessly through the city like rumour, on where to find a copy of the book in Rome: 1.2.5-6 ne tamen ignores ubi sim uenalis et erres | urbe uagus tota, me duce certus eris'in case you don't know where I'm on sale and

wander aimlessly throughout the city, you will be sure where to go under my guidance’. But once bought, by multiple purchasers, the book itself will wander the streets of Rome, and beyond, disseminated as uncontrollably as

gossip. The combination of the desire to win an everlastingly famous name as a poet with unease at the knowledge that such fame must be dependent on the continuing circulation of one's text and name through as large as possible a number of unnamed readers is one that Martial shares with other Roman poets, notably Horace and Ovid. Awareness that fama-as-fame is created and maintained by the same mass of people who nourish fama-as-rumour is heightened when the poetry that constitutes the bid for fame itself is full of gossip. A number of epigrams are introduced with reference to a rumour, what people say (and so function as a further relay for that piece of

'61

An ironic echo of Hor. Odes 1.1.36 sublimi feriam sidera uertice (noted by Roman 2001: 128), itself a line full of irony: see Hardie 2009a: 200-2. 162 Enn. Epigr. 10 Warmington uolito uiuus per ora uirum, imitated at Virg. Geo. 3.9 uictorque uirum uolitare per ora. Smith 2002: 53 points out that in both passages literary farne operates like rumour. 16%? Commentaries on 1.2.6 cite Aen. 4.68-9 totaque uagatur | urbe furens; Dido, like Fama later in the book, (4.666) concussam bacchatur Fama per urbem. Fitzgerald 2007: 99 contrasts 1.1.2 toto notus in orbe with the next poem, 1.2, where 'Martial' is brought back, compressed, as an imported slave: ‘The worldwide fame bestowed by an expanded readership is but the other side of the commodification of literature implied by the metaphor of the book as slave’ i.e. the

paradox of fama as both imperial-type extension of authorial power, and as loss of control to the unknown and unnumbered mass of readers - as Ovid points out in the Epilogue to Met. 15: see Hardie 2002a: 94-7.

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information or misinformation).!^' One of these reports a rumour about the avid readership for Martial's books in the provinces, a fama about the fama enjoyed by the poet, 7.88.1—4: Fertur habere meos, si uera est fama, libellos

inter delicias pulchra Vienna suas. me legit omnis ibi senior iuuenisque puerque, et coram tetrico casta puella uiro. It is said, if the report is true, that fair Vienne is in love with my little books. There

I am read by everyone, old man, youth and boy, and the chaste young woman in front of her stern husband.

si uera est fama in the first line means ‘if the report, rumour, is true’, but in the context could also mean ‘if this is a true fame! The combination of transient gossip with words aiming at lasting fame is nothing new. Gossip in poetry, poetry as gossip, is no surprise in a culture where poetry is as embedded in social practice as it was in antiquity. Iambos and satire use gossip to attack, and, in the case of satire, to instruct. The

elegist aspires to construct a poetic monument partly through reporting what is said about him and his mistress by tongues wagging in the town, fabula (see Ch. 9 pp. 361-8). Particularly important as a model for Martial in this, as in other respects, is Catullus. !^' Poem 80 is an example of a Catullan epigram implicated in the propagation of rumour on the topic of sexual scandal: Quid dicam, Gelli, quare rosea ista labella hiberna fiant candidiora niue,

mane domo cum exis et cum te octaua quiete e molli longo suscitat hora die? nescio quid certe est: an uere fama susurrat

grandia te medii tenta uorare uiri? sic certe est: clamant Victoris rupta miselli ilia, et emulso labra notata sero.

What should I say is the reason, Gellius, that those rosy lips are whiter than winter snow, when you leave your house in the morning and when the eighth hour of the 164 See Siedschlag 1977: 35 n. 1. 165 Martial perhaps has in mind the Epilogue to Ov. Met. 15, 875-9 super alta perennis | astra ferar [‘a "fame" word, Feeney 1991: 249] .. . | quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris [the provinces], | ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, | si quid habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam, 166 On Catullus and gossip see Wray 2001: 132-42, using an anthropological model to analyse the Catullan ‘poetics of aggression:

Pliny the Younger and Martial

long day rouses you from soft sleep? There must be something to explain it: does rumour whisper truly that you’re gobbling the big erections of a man’s loins? Yes, that’s it: poor Victor’s ruptured groin shouts it out, and your lips stained with the cum you've milked from him.

The poem itself is complicit in the magnification of fama's whispers into a shout of shaming, and beyond that into the textual memorialization of a piece of ephemeral gossip. !^' The poetic immortalization of gossip is spelled out loudly in Catullus 78b. The (by the hazards of transmission, now unnamed) man is promised the immortality normally held out to the doer of great deeds, or hoped for by the poet himself:

sed nunc id doleo, quod purae pura puellae suauia comminxit spurca saliua tua. uerum id non impune feres: nam te omnia saecla noscent et, qui sis, fama loquetur anus. But now I am upset that your dirty spittle has defiled the pure kisses of a pure girl. But you will not get off scot-free: for you will be known to all ages, and old-woman gossip will say who you are.

fama anus is a phrase that combines the notion of the temporal endurance in fame of great deeds of old, authenticated by virtue of their antiquity (fama perennis), with the idea of old wives’ tales, female gossip.'“* Catullus writes gossip, still on sexual subjects, on a larger scale in poem 67, where a speaking door reveals the scandalous goings on inside the house, to which it is privy because the adulterous wife inside talks furtively but freely to her maids about sexual secrets, not expecting a door to have a tongue or ears (67.43-4 nomine dicentem quos diximus, ut pote quae mi | speret nec linguam esse nec auriculam 'speaking by name of those I've spoken of, since she does not expect me to have ears or a tongue’). This door, fully supplied with both, and apparently endowed with sight as well, might be a forerunner of Virgil's monstrous Fama. The following poem, 68, tells of the poet's own illicit sexual liaison behind the door of a house provided by a friend, Allius, whose services Catullus praises with hyperbolical application of the topoi 197 fama occurs four times in Catullus: 61.61—3 nil potest sine te Venus, | fama quod bona comprobet, | commodi capere, 61.230 (see Ch. 9 p. 360); 78b.4 (below); 80.5. 168

anilisof ‘old wives’ tales’, fabulae, fabellae: e.g. Cic. Nat. deor. 3.12 (with Pease 1935 ad loc.); Hor. Sat. 2.6.77; Quint. Inst. or. 1.8.19; Apul. Met. 4.27. anus can be used adjectivally,

occasionally with little or no sense of personification, but with a verb of saying it is difficult to exclude the personification, as also at Cat. 68.46 (there particularly since books are often personified).

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of poetic immortality (41-50), including an instruction to the Muses to propagate fame in a manner indistinguishable from the proliferation of gossip, personifying the poet’s page as a garrulous old woman: 45-6 sed dicam uobis, uos porro dicite multis | milibus et facite haec charta loquatur anus ‘but I will tell you [Muses], and you tell it to many thousands, and see

to it that this old-woman page speaks of it? Martial uses the Catullan phrases fama anus and charta anus in contexts from which any hint of malicious or disapproving gossip has been stripped away: 1.39.1—2 (of Decianus, author and friend of the poet) Si quis erit raros inter numerandus amicos, | quales prisca fides famaque nouit anus ‘if anyone is to be counted among rare friends such as old-time faith and ancient fame know of’; 12.3.1—4 (Terentius Priscus, Spanish friend and patron of Martial) Quod Flacco Varioque fuit summoque Maroni | Maecenas, atauis regibus ortus eques, | gentibus et populis hoc te mihi, Prisce Terenti, | fama fuisse loquax chartaque dicet anus 'What Maecenas, the knight descended from kings as ancestors, was to Horace, Varius, and the supreme Virgil, talkative fame and

paper grown old will tell the peoples of the world that you were to me.' This sanitizing of the Catullan gossipy old women may be a compensation for an anxiety on Martial's part that he is too enmired in the business of gossip, and that he will not be able to assert authorial control over the circulation and reception of his words. This anxiety manifests itself in two ways: firstly in a concern not to be labelled as a poet of backbiting inuidia, expressed through formal 'disavowals of inuidia;"" and secondly in a concern that his words may escape from his ownership in a way analogous to rumour's evasion of authorship. Rumour is unattributable to any author: Martial’s worry is that words are attached to the wrong authors, either that another

will plagiarize his own verses, or that verses not his own will circulate under the name of Martial. Rumour and plagiarism come together in another of the epigrams introduced by reference to a report, 1.29:

169

Reversing the topos of ‘Muse, tell me, and I will tell it to others) at Callim. Hy. 3.186; Theocr.

22.116-17. Hunter 2006: 102-3 discusses the way in which gossip is here used as ‘an image of the poetic tradition and poetic fame, pointing to further learned, i.e. ‘non-gossipy; allusions to Hellenistic poetry in these lines, and also to the use by Theocritus (15) and Herodas (1) of

170

o

326

old women to represent their poetry, and the dramatization of gossip by both (Theocr. 2.145-54; Herodas 6.18-27). Smith 2002: 51-2 also notes the approximation of literary fama and fama-as-rumour at Cat. 68.45-6. See Mart. 5.15.2-4 et queritur laesus carmine nemo meo, | gaudet honorato sed multus nomine lector, | cui uictura meo munere fama datur, 7.12.3-4 ut mea nec iuste quos odit pagina laesit | et mihi de nullo fama rubore placet, 9-12 ludimus innocui: scis hoc bene: iuro potentis | per genium Famae Castaliumque gregem | perque tuas aures, magni mihi numinis instar,| lector inhumana liber ab inuidia. On the disavowal of inuidia see also Ch. 10 pp. 388 n. 16, 390.

Pliny the Younger and Martial

Fama refert nostros te, Fidentine, libellos

non aliter populo quam recitare tuos. si mea uis dici, gratis tibi carmina mittam: si dici tua uis, hoc eme, ne mea sint.

Rumour reports, Fidentinus, that you recite my little books to the public just as if they were your own. If you want them to be called mine, I will send you my poems for nothing; if you want them to be called yours, buy out my ownership.

Here free-ranging rumour performs the service of informing on a misappropriation of words. Martial sets things straight by using a verb of speech in a quasi-legal register, ‘saying’ that the poems are ‘mine’ or ‘yours’ in accordance with codes of gift-giving or monetary exchange."! In 10.3 Martial is threatened not by theft but by a poet who passes off his own scabrous verses as those of Martial. This foists on Martial a bad fama that undermines the proud claim to poetic control and future fame in the previous epigram, 10.2, packed with allusion to Horatian and Ovidian assertions of fame:!’” 10.2

Festinata prius, decimi mihi cura libelli elapsum manibus nunc reuocauit opus. nota leges quaedam, sed lima rasa recenti;

pars noua maior erit: lector, utrique faue, lector, opes nostrae: quem cum mihi Roma dedisset, ‘nil tibi quod demus maius habemus’ ait. 'pigra per hunc fugies ingratae flumina Lethes et meliore tui parte superstes eris.

5

marmora Messallae findit caprificus, et audax

dimidios Crispi mulio ridet equos:

10

at chartis nec furta nocent et saecula prosunt,

solaque non norunt haec monumenta mori.' 10.3 Vernaculorum dicta, sordidum dentem,

et foeda linguae probra circulatricis, quae sulphurato nolit empta ramento Vatiniorum proxeneta fractorum,

poeta quidam clancularius spargit

5

V! Cf Virg, Ecl. 9.3-4 ut possessor agelli | diceret: 'haec mea sunt...’ 172

Fora reading of 10.2 and 10.3 as a pair see Rimell 2008: 68-72; 71 ‘[In 10.3] the poet faces the

flipside of fame, and of an orally perpetuated reputation.'

327

328

Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Martial

et uult uideri nostra. credis hoc, Prisce? uoce ut loquatur psittacus coturnicis et concupiscat esse Canus ascaules? procul a libellis nigra sit meis fama, quos rumor alba gemmeus uehit pinna: cur ego laborem notus esse tam praue, constare gratis cum silentium possit?

10

10.2

My labour over my tenth book, previously issued in a rush, has now recalled the work that slipped out of my hands. Some of what you read you will recognize, but polished with a fresh file, the greater part will be new: reader, look favourably on both, reader,

who are my wealth. When Rome gave you to me, she said, ‘I have no greater gift to give you. Through him you will escape the sluggish stream of ungrateful Lethe, and the better part of you will survive. The wild fig splits Messalla’s marble and the bold mule-driver laughs at Crispus’ halved horses; thefts do not harm paper, and the ages do it good. These monuments alone cannot die.’ 10.3 Witticisms

of home-bred

slaves, vulgar abuse, and the foul taunts of a peddler’s

tongue, such as a dealer in broken Vatinian beakers would not want to buy for a sulphur match, these are scattered around by a certain sneaking poet, who wants them to be thought mine. Do you believe it, Priscus? That a parrot should speak with the voice of a quail, and that Canus should wish to be a bagpiper? May black fame be far from my little books, which jewelled report bears on its white wing: why should I strive for such twisted celebrity, when silence can be had for free?

In 10.2 the poet has full control over his book, able to call it back even after it has gone out into the world, so proving wrong Horace’s (Ars poetica 390) nescit uox missa reuerti ‘the word once uttered cannot be recalled’. Confidence in the undying monumentality of the poet’s works is grounded on trust in the lector, the singular referring to the mass of nameless Romans whose maiestas works to fulfil the poet’s ambitions for fame. In 10.3 Martial confronts a single individual, but a poet who operates in the manner of crowd-driven

rumour

(clancularius, spargit), and who retails the bad-

mouthings of a very different selection of the inhabitants of Rome from the discriminating

lectores of 10.2, home-bred slaves and a mountebank,

low-class and scurrilous characters and natural conduits for gossip and rumour.'’* Martial appeals to a named reader of old-fashioned (priscus) probity'” 174 not to lend credulitas to such stories. The poet wishes no fame U5

circulator and uernaculi are paired as examples of low company at Sen. Ben. 6.11.2 apud proximum circulatorem resedit et, dum

U^

Fora

uagus atque erroneus uernaculis congregatur et ludit. . .

similar pun on the name Priscus see above p. 297.

Pliny the Younger and Martial

(11 notus) at this price. Fear that he may be dragged down into this underworld of tainted words provokes Martial to lay down a black-and-white distinction between two kinds of fama (9-10). nigra fama is both ‘a black reputation’, as a result of what the poeta clancularius spreads about, and ‘a

reputation for black [i.e. malicious] words!^^ Line 10 speaks the language of enduring and elevated fame; the white wing might be that of the swan of Horace's fame in Odes 2.20; gemmeus conveys both the bright glitter and the lasting hardness of gem-stones. But rumor is slightly unexpected in the context, the phrase rumor gemmeus something of an oxymoron, suggesting an attempt to channel the chatter on the streets of Rome into a perennial stream of unchanging fame. ^ There is perhaps something else going on beneath the surface of 10.23. Book 10 was revised after the death of Domitian (the standard interpretation of 10.2), and Martial will have expunged many epigrams praising the discredited emperor, adding poems in praise of Nerva and Trajan. The reference to the decay of monuments in 10.2 might remind the contemporary reader of the destruction of Domitian's statues following his damnatio memoriae."^ Martial's control of his own fama is in part dependent on the dissociation of his reputation from that of the emperor now consigned to infamia. Could we see in 10.3 the poet's guilty conscience about his previous implication in elevating the fama of Domitian, and in the ‘witticisms of home-bred slaves' and 'foul taunts of a peddler's tongue' Martial's own

abjected attempt to exorcise his past through self-abuse?'"* The skulking poet may be Martial himself. The low-class badmouthing is perhaps a retrospective reflection of the malicious and dangerous talk that circulated through the court of Domitian,

or at least as Domitian's court was rep-

resented in the black-and-white contrasts between then and now that are peddled in Pliny's Letters and Panegyric, and Tacitus' Agricola. 17

m

For niger in this sense cf. Hor. Sat. 1.4.100-3 hic nigrae sucus lolliginis, haec est | aerugo mera: quod uitium procul afore chartis | atque animo... promitto. 176 [t is hard to find close parallels for the use of rumor here; secundo rumore is ‘a stereotyped phrase denoting the murmur of approval from a crowd' (Woodman and Martin 1996 on Tac. Ann. 3.29.4, citing Skutsch); Tac. Ann. 15.48.2 (C. Piso) claro apud uulgum rumore erat per uirtutem aut species uirtutibus similis is ironic. S

17

See Fitzgerald 2007: 158; Rimell 2008: 71-2. Smith 2002: 25-9 sees in Tacitus’ statement of the

fragility of statues as a form of memorial at Agric. 46.3 an implicit allusion to the destruction of Domitian’s statues. 178 For a more straightforward statement of the difference between praise poetry under Domitian and under Trajan see 10.72.

329

9

The love of fame and the fame of love

Altro non mi vaglia che amor e fama Let nothing matter to me except love and fame!

From her first stirrings in the epics of Homer, Fama wings her way through the centuries of the classical tradition as the enduring reputation won by male warriors striving to be the best in the violent world of warfare. Yet, as Piero Boitani points out in Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, ‘war, or heroic enterprises, are not the only ways of achieving the fame that can conquer death. Love, as the medieval tradition in particular emphasizes, is another. The fame — or infamy — of Dido is a Virgilian invention that finds its echo in Chaucer, but the love of Tristan and Isolde is for Gottfried von Strassburg "the bread of the living" by which "thus live they still, and yet are dead”. Fama, as we have seen, is a notoriously protean character. In her first (sur-

viving) major personification, in Book 4 of the Aeneid, where she appears — famously — in the context ofa love story in order to sow the seeds of strife, she is constructed as a bricolage of other divine and personified beings, and in her later appearances she has a constant tendency to melt into other imaginary beings. Among much else, she is closely linked to two divinities or personifications, whose Greek names are near homonyms, Eris and Eros,

Strife and Love.‘ The Virgilian personification of Fama is modelled immediately on the Homeric Eris (see Ch. 3 p. 87). Within the Aeneid she is closely Motto at the top of ‘Portrait of a man of the Delves family’ (1577), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (British school, no. 3809). With his right hand the man holds the hand of a woman

whose face is

w

[n

covered with a branch of myrtle; to his left is a branch of laurel, and a pile of armour at his feet.

Boitani 198-1: 3. Boitani continues: ‘Thus, man sublimates through fame two of the values [war and love] that society imposes on him and on which the survival itself of a human group or of the entire human race depends.’ The connection between love and strife in Aeneid 4 has Apollonian precedent: at 4.445-9 Eros is apostrophized as a great bane, and the source of strife (EpiSes) and woe. The wedding later in the book of Jason and Medea echoes the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, an occasion of erotic fulfilment at which Strife, Eris, made a momentous appearance, an episode which may also

330

echo in the intervention of Fama to sow discord immediately after the ‘wedding’ of Dido and Aeneas: see Clément-Tarantino 2006: 170 n. 267. In each case the consequence is a worldshaking war, the Trojan War and the war with Hannibal. On the Apollonian background for the

The love of fame and the fame of love

related to Allecto (herself an avatar of the Ennian demon Discordia ‘Strife’),

who inspires in her victims a furor that cannot be sharply distinguished from the erotic furor with which Venus infects Dido, another example of

the closeness of eris and eros. In Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica it is an angry Venus who avenges herself on the Lemnian women by taking on the form of Fama to foment strife (see Ch. 6 pp. 199—201). The triangulation of Fame, Strife and Love can be seen in the visual arts

too: the ancient sculptural type of Aphrodite looking at her reflection in the shield of her paramour Ares, god of war, was recycled as Victory holding a shield on which she inscribes a famous victory.' The connection is perhaps more than one of a formal borrowing, since the desire for fame has the

attraction of a narcissism that consists in contemplating one’s image in the mirror of others’ perceptions of oneself. In a more benign, and strifefree, image Fama in Petrarch’s Trionfo della Fama is compared at her first appearance to ‘un’amorosa stella’ (1.10) which rises in the east to announce the sun, Lucifer or the planet Venus. In a frontispiece of about 1400 for Petrarch’s De uiris illustribus, representing a triumph of Gloria based on Boccaccio's Amorosa visione (see Ch. 16 p. 616), Gloria holds a figurine of Cupid in her left hand.” Chaucer's House of Fame takes the dreaming Jeffrey first to a Temple of Venus, which is itself a repository of Fame (see Ch. 15 pp. 574-5). As there is an eristics of Fama, so there is an erotics of Fama. The con-

nection is not merely an accident of literary history, although the Virgilian model is an important one, but also reflects deep-level structural connections between Fama, sexual desire and procreation. In this chapter I trace some aspects of the relationship between fame and love. In particular I focus attention on the difficulties inherent in the relationship, and the stratagems that authors adopt in order to try to resolve these difficulties. The relationship need not always be problematic: fame may celebrate a great and happy love or a dynastic marriage, although the most famous love affairs and weddings are perhaps those that end in disaster if they are not crossed from the outset. Often the love of fame and the fame of love are at cross-purposes. The pursuit of fame, and hence of great achievement, may be fired by a

desire of erotic intensity. On the other hand the pursuit of erotic desire directed at a human individual may be in conflict with one's reputation amongst the wider social group, and may distract from the pursuit of solid

interweaving of love and war in the Aeneid, and the Empedoclean pairing of Love and Strife that lies behind both texts, see Nelis 2001: 332-4. i

Hólscher 200.1: 61.

5

Shorr

1938; Charney

1990: 226.

33]

332

The love of fame and the fame of love

Fig.

4 Omnis amor surdis auribus esse solet, from Otto van Veen, Amorum emblemata

(Antwerp 1608)

and lasting achievements in the public world. In one of Otto van Veen's Amorum

emblemata (1608: no. 66) Amor stops his ears to Fama (Fig. 4).

Fame is the spur, but the spur of sexual desire may send one racing on a path away from fame, and towards shame and infamy. In the first case a certain reputation is actively sought through the promptings of a desire for that end, amor famae. In the second case desire pursues an end unconnected with reputation, but has the effect of creating fama amoris, or rather an amor infamis, for which in Latin love poetry the technical term is fabula, a word cognate with fama: ‘talk of the town’. As Goethe, in classicizing mode, puts it, (Rómische Elegien 19.1—2) 'Schwer erhalten wir uns den guten Namen, denn Fama

| Steht mit Amorn, ich weiss, meinem

Gebieter, in Streit' *we

preserve our good name with difficulty, since Fama, I know, is at odds with my master, Love' The love of fama-as-glory itself becomes problematic, if it overleaps virtuous achievement to aim at an excessive extension of the $ Introducing an aetiology of the feud in the form of a fable about the contest between Fama and Amor for supremacy over Hercules, in which the worsted Farna's shame and embarrassment is

said to far exceed that of Vulcan at the sight of Venus in the arms of Mars.

Themes

self that is destructive of social cohesion and security. Then there is that other kind of amor famae,

the itch for fama-as-rumour, what Ariosto calls

(Orlando furioso 2.36.1—2) ‘Questo disir, ch'a tutti sta nel core, | de’ fatti altrui sempre cercar novella’ ‘that desire which all men have in their heart,

of constantly seeking news of what other people do’. This perhaps always has a disreputable quality about it, although its effects can in fact be as often socially cohesive as they are disruptive.’ In the first part of this chapter I briefly sketch out a number of the ways in which love and fame are related to each other. In each case | offer a handful of examples that could be multiplied many times, and I leap between centuries in a way that largely ignores the cultural specificity of the phenomena within their historical contexts. In the second part I offer more

extended,

and

contextualized,

readings

of a number

of texts which thematize the relationship of love and fame in various ways.

Themes Cupiditas gloriae Fame or glory is the object of a desire frequently represented as of an erotic intensity, in Latin cupido or cupiditas gloriae, or amor laudis" cupido and cupiditas can be used without qualification to mean ‘greed for honour or glory, ambition"? For the ancient moralists only the love of money or of power is capable of arousing so irresistible an itch. Cicero, notorious for his own love of glory, was himself aware both of the social utility of the appetite for fame and glory, and of its potential to corrupt.'" In his chapter ” On gossip and sexuality see Spacks 1986: 122-3, 135-7. 8

See TLL s.vv. cupiditas, cupido, 1v 1413.76 ff., 1421.82 ff.; s.v. gloria, v1.2 2063.67 ff., 2074.32 ff.;

?

On the desire for honour and glory see Drexler

Kraus and Woodman forthcoming on Tac. Agric. 5.4. 1962: 30-3; Harris 1979: 10-41; Lendon

2001:

35 n. 21 (references for ‘rampant desire for honour’); Barton 2001: 37; Thomas 2002: 99-102. On Cicero and glory see Sullivan

1941; Braudy 1997: 71-80; on Cicero's own critique of fame

see above Ch. 1 pp. 23-6. Examples of Cicero manipulating positive and negative views of cupido gloriae for rhetorical ends: Cic. Pis. 59 (a sarcastic comparison of Caesar and Piso, making fun of the latter's Epicurean belittling of a proper Roman pursuit of glory) fertur ille uir, mihi crede, gloria; flagrat, ardet cupiditate iusti et magni triumphi. non didicit eadem ista quae tu. mitte ad eum libellum et, si iam ipse coram congredi poteris, meditare quibus uerbis incensam illius cupiditatem comprimas atque restinguas. ualebis apud hominem uolitantem gloriae cupiditate uir moderatus et constans, apud indoctum eruditus, apud generum socer. Contrast Cic. Sest. 134 (Clodius) hac exspectatione elatus homo flagrans cupiditate gloriae tenere se non potuit quin eos gladiatores induceret.

333

334

The love of fame and the fame of love

(8.14) De cupiditate gloriae Valerius Maximus hints that the intensity of the desire for glory may not entirely be in keeping with Roman moderation when he gives foreign examples that are even more extreme than the home ones, culminating with Herostratus who burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus so that his name might be famous for his egregious crime. Valerius’ first foreigner is Themistocles (ext. 1), who is stimulis uirtutum agitatum ‘agitated by the pricks of great achievements’ and spends restless nights, like a lover. The second is Alexandri pectus insatiabile laudis ‘Alexander whose breast was insatiable of praise’. Alexander is the most surpassingly famous of all ancients, and the man whose longing (pothos) for discovery

and achievement could be seen as a desire for fame.!! Dio Chrysostom (Or. 4.4) says that he was a man most ambitious (piAorıuwTtaros, lit. ‘a lover of Tiufj “honour”’) and a great lover of glory (5ó£ns &paotns).'" Alexander the Great is in Seneca's mind when he talks of Pompey the Great's insanus amor magnitudinis falsae 'mad love of false greatness' and his infinita cupido crescendi ‘boundless desire to become greater’, in the same breath as Julius Caesar's gloria et ambitio et nullus supra ceteros eminendi modus 'glory, ambition, and a pre-eminence over others that knew no limit’ (Ep. 94.64— 5). But the love of fame was also a spur to socially useful achievement. In a much cited passage Sallust talks of the effect of imagines in firing the noble Roman's love of glory: Jug. 4.5-6 ‘For I have often heard that Q. Maximus, P. Scipio and other famous men of our city used to say that, when they looked at the portrait busts of their ancestors (maiorum

imagines), their

spirit was intensely fired to virtuous action (uehementissime sibi animum ad uirtutem accendi). It was not the wax or the shape of the busts that had such power, but the memory of the deeds of others kindles a flame in the breasts of outstanding men that does not subside until their own virtuous actions have equalled their fame and glory (uirtus eorum famam atque gloriam adaequauerit).' This is the effect that Anchises produces on his son, the proto-Roman Aeneas, with the imagines of the Parade of Heroes: Aen.

6.889 incenditque animum famae uenientis amore ‘he kindles his spirit with love for the fame to come’. Here the love of fame is safely channelled to the

!! Alexander and fame: Braudy 1997: 32-51. V

Cf Xen. Cyrop. 1.5.12 tous 5’ Erraivov tpaotas &váykn did TOUTO rrávra piv mróvov, TavTa BE

xivBuvov tBéws ümroButo9a:; Plut. Cam. 25 &5Ens 5E kai Tips tpaotts; Brut. 18.5; Themist. 3.4 AéyeTal yap oTw rrapágopos Trpós Bó£av elvai kai rrpá£eov ueydAcv Ur grAoTinias épaotns... John Chrysostom, De inani

gloria makes explicit the sexual image in 86€n5

tpaotns; (2) «evoBo&ía 'vainglory' is like a demon in the disguise of a fair courtesan who will reveal his true self as black, fiery and savage.

Themes

greatness of Rome; elsewhere in the Aeneid it is not so securely controlled

(see further below pp. 353—7).'* Virgilian amor slips particularly easily between sexual and other objects of

desire.'' In Georgics 3 the dulcis amor that carries the poet over the deserted heights of Parnassus

(291-2) seems to be an extension, displacement, or

sublimation, of the frenzy of sexual love that has been the subject of the previous section, 242-83, and from which the poet breaks away, complaining of the passage of time, (285) singula dum capti circumuectamur amore ‘while we go through each detail, in thrall to love’. His task is now to sing of the care of sheep and goats, from which the brave heroes of the farmstead (288 fortes... coloni) may hope for praise. The poet is aware of the difficulty of lending lustre to these humble topics (290 angustis hunc addere rebus honorem); the love of poetry that urges him on is also a desire for his own poetic honour or glory, as the Lucretian intertext makes clear, the passage on the didactic poet's ambitions that begins, (1.922—5) sed acri | percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor | et simul incussit suauem mi in pectus amorem |

Musarum...‘but a great hope has smitten my heart with the sharp spur of fame, and at the same time has struck into my breast the sweet love of the Muses’:'” laudis spes and amor Musarum go together. Georgics 3.291—2 sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis | raptat amor ‘but sweet love carries me away over the deserted heights of Parnassus’ are the words with which Petrarch opened his speech on the occasion of his laureation on the Capitol in Rome. Petrarch’s love of fame is closely connected with his love for the woman

Laura; his love for Gloria herself,

personified as ‘Una donna piv bella assai che ’] sole. . . con famosa beltade' ‘a lady far more beautiful than the sun... with her famous beauty, is the subject of the ‘canzone della Gloria’, Rime sparse 119.'* In Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica Gloria is a beautiful woman calling to her lovers: 1.76-8 tu sola animos mentemque peruris, | Gloria; te uiridem uidet immunemque senectae | Phasidis in ripa stantem iuuenesque uocantem ‘you alone, Glory, inflame minds and spirit; [Jason] sees you in green youth and free from old age

'3 Cf. the disastrous consequences of the shooting of Sylvia's stag by Ascanius, Aen. 7.496 eximiae laudis succensus amore, Anchises dubs Brutus infelix for having executed his sons, filial love

outweighed by (Aen. 6.823) amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido. '4 See Hardie 199-1: 108. 15 See Hardie 1986: 166. 16 Which tells of Petrarch’s switch of affection from Gloria to the even more beautiful Virti. For a reading of Raphael's La Fornarina as a Petrarchan allegory of painting, fame and desire see Craven 1994.

335

The love of fame and the fame of love

standing on the shore of the Phasis and calling the young men’.'’ Fulke Greville has a more jaundiced view of the pleasure of wooing Lady Fame, in An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour 69 ‘Yet when this brittle Glory thus is gotten, | The keeping is as painefull, more confuse: | Fame liues by doing, is with rest forgotten, | Shee those that would enjoy her doth refuse: | Wooed (like a Lais) will be and obseru’d; | Euer ill kept, since neuer well

deseru’d.’'* Dio Chrysostom attacks the insatiable appetite of 5o&okoría ‘thirst for fame’ in Oration 66 Tlepi 86§ns5 patos. In a section (66.7) reminiscent of

Lucretius’ discussion of the insatiability of the sexual appetite, by contrast with hunger and thirst, which may be satisfied by the ingestion of food or drink (Lucr. 4.1086-1104), Dio contrasts the impossibility of ever sating the thirst for fame with the ease of satisfying desires for food, drink, and

even sex.'” The Lucretian passage is the source for some of the paradoxes of the Ovidian Narcissus’ insatiable and hopeless love for himself.°° The love of fame is itself a narcissistic love, one which gazes on its own

reflection

in the mirror of the recognition and approbation of others. In the Middle Ages Narcissus’ love for himself was allegorized as the love of one’s own fame, vain glory, a shadow seen in the unstable water of the delights of this world. The flower into which Narcissus is transformed is the transient fame or glory of this world. In some versions of the allegorization Echo is fama positively viewed, ‘bone renommée’”!

E

Ovid's version of the myth of Apollo and Daphne, in which the god's love for a flesh-and-blood woman is thwarted and displaced on to possession of the laurel, emblem of fame, already contains a moment of narcissism in

Discussed by Ripoll 1998: 201-6, in the context of a wider assessment (194—255) of the

Ss

o

rehabilitation of cupido laudis, when directed to success in wars against external enemies, in Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus, in contrast to the Virgilian distrust of the pursuit of glory.

MOM = o0

336

At Ov. Fasti 1.303 perfusaque gloria fuco is perhaps to be seen as a heavily rouged prostitute; cf.

Sil. Pun. 6.614 blando popularis gloria fuco. For later formulations of similar ideas see Joseph Addison, Spectator no. 256 ‘Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition’; the ambition for Fame is an insatiable appetite, ‘still reaching after an empty imaginary Good, that has not in it the Power to abate or satisfy it. Benjamin Disraeli, The Young Duke 11.7 ‘Fame has eagle wings, and yet she mounts not so high as man’s desires.’ See Hardie 2002a: 160-2. Narcissus as vain glory: Boitani 1984: 67 (John of Salisbury), 97-100 (John of Salisbury, Alexander Neckam, Giovanni del Virgilio, Boccaccio, De genealogia deorum 7.59), 134 (Ovide

moralisé), 146 (Robert Holcot). Echo as fara: Bocc. Geneal. 7.59, where the gaze on sua gloria leads, oddly perhaps, to contempt for fama; Ovide moralisé 3.1465 Echo as ‘bone renome. See Vinge 1967: 73-6, 102-4. On the narcissism of Petrarch's love for Laura see Braden 1986: 144-7; below p. 380.

Themes

Apollo's address to the laurel, the plant of Apollo.” The story of Apollo and Daphne is contaminated with that of Narcissus in medieval mythography, a contamination that has been seen as implicit in Petrarch’s mythological framing of his own desire for fame." In Lycidas another poet much concerned with his fame, John Milton, presents the pursuit of the ‘blaze’ of fame as an alternative to erotic dalliance ‘in the shade’ (Lycidas 67—84).^' However, the language used of fame itself contains a barely contained sexual urgency and excitement: ^? 70 ‘Fame is the spur';^ 73-4 ‘But the fair Guerdon*’ when we hope to find, | And

think to burst out into sudden blaze...’ Milton’s Latin pastoral lament for his close friend Charles Diodati, the Epitaphium Damonis, finds other ways of suggesting a near equivalence between erotic desire and the desire for fame. In talking about his epic ambitions towards the end of the Epitaphium, Milton averts envy with the apology (159-60) dubito quoque ne sim | turgidulus? ‘I fear that I may be a little swollen [in my ambition]* In a letter of 23 September 1637 to Diodati Milton hesitatingly broaches his literary ambitions: Audi, Theodote, uerum in aurem ut ne rubeam, et sinito paulisper apud te grandia loquar; quid cogitem quaeris? Ita me bonus Deus, immortalitatem. Quid agam

22 Hardie 20023: 48. Braden

1986: 146; 156 n. 7 for evidence of the medieval contamination of the two myths;

Knoespel 1985: 64-5 on the replacement of Echo with Dané in the Norman Lai de Narcisus. 24 Milton's desire for fame emerges strongly in the 1645 Poems, see Ch. 14 p. 542. ?5 Following the reading of Evans 1983: 45-9, concluding, ‘The barely submerged sexuality of Milton's language thus turns the pursuit of fame into an act of love.’ The image of the poet spurred on is a classical one: cf. Hor. Ep. 2.1.216-18 si munus Apolline dignum | uis complere libris et uatibus addere calcar, | ut studio maiore petant Helicona uirentem, on which Rudd 1989 ad loc. comments: ‘The idea of the poet as a steed continues from calcar. . . The figure of Pegasus may be in the back of H.'s mind’ (on Pegasus as figure of Fama Chiara in Renaissance iconologies see Ch. 16 p. 622); Ov. Pont. 4.2.35—6 excitat auditor studium laudataque uirtus | crescit et immensum gloria calcar habet. Spurs or goads may also be erotic: cf. Lucr. 5.1074-5 inter equas ubi equus florenti aetate iuuencus | pinnigeri saeuit calcaribus ictus amoris, Virg. Geo. 3.210 Venerem et caeci stimulos auertere amoris. For Lycidas 71 "That last

?

infirmity of noble mind’ the closest ancient parallel is Tac. Hist. 4.6 (Helvidius Priscus) erant quibus adpetentior famae uideretur, quando etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae nouissima exuitur. With ‘guerdon’ cf. Milton's Canzone in which ladies and youths rib the poet for writing in Italian, since on other (English) banks there is growing for him (11) ‘L’immortal guiderdon d'eterne frondi’ (the evergreen leaves of the laurel); cf. Shakespeare, Much Ado v.iii.3-8 ‘Done

-

?8.

to death by slanderous tongues | Was the Hero that here | Giues her fame which neuer dies. | So the life that died glorious fame.' If Milton has this passage in mind, 'Done interacts with the ‘hideous roar’ of the 'rout' (Lycidas 61) turgidulusis a rare diminutive, found at Cat. 3.18 flendo

lies: | Death in guerdon of her wrongs with shame | Lives in death with to death by slanderous tongues' of the Bacchants who killed Orpheus. turgiduli rubent ocelli. It is perhaps

coincidence that Milton uses the verb rubeo in the letter to Diodati.

337

338

The love of fame and the fame of love

uero? Tepogpuß), et uolare meditor; sed tenellis ad modum ad huc pennis euehit se noster Pegasus, humile sapiamus. Hear, Theodotus, but let it be in your private ear, little to speak grandly with you. You ask, what am immortality. And what am I doing? Growing wings our Pegasus raises himself on very tender pinions.

lest I blush; and allow me for a I thinking of. By the good God, and meditating flight; but as yet Let us be humbly wise.

T'TepoQUO is a Platonic coinage, used in the Phaedrus of the sprouting of wings in the soul inspired with an erotic mania at the sight of beauty, teething pains accompanied by itching and swelling." Knowledge of this private text exchanged between Milton and Diodati allows us to make a link between the 'swelling' of Milton's British epic ambitions and the elevation of Damon (Diodati, now dead) on the wings of love as scripted in Giovanni Battista Manso's Neoplatonic dialogues, to which allusion is made in the ecphrasis in the Epitaphium of the Celestial Cupid on one of the cups which

Mansus

(Manso)

has given to Thyrsis (Milton)

(191—

7). The Epitaphium also comments allusively on the connections between fama and love in Virgil's fifth and (especially) tenth Eclogues, in the latter of which Virgil's love for the person Gallus is hardly to be distinguished from his love for Gallus’ poetry, and in which Virgil links the fame of his own poetry with the fame of his beloved Gallus. The ending of the Epitaphium Damonis points to a rapprochement between erotic desire and the love of (poetic) fame: the eternal and immortal mystic marriage, the fulfilment of Damon/Diodati's ascent in a Christianized Neoplatonic love (217 aeternum perages immortales hymenaeos ‘you will solemnize for ever your immortal nuptials’), is accompanied by a Dionysiac frenzy of music, song and dance: 218-19 cantus ubi, choreisque furit lyra mista beatis, | festa Sionaeo bacchantur et orgia thyrso ‘where rage song and the lyre in the midst of the blessed dancing, and the festal rites rave with the thyrsus of Sion.”

Fame and procreation Sexual desire and the desire for fame are linked in that they are (or may be) both directed towards the perpetuation of the short-lived individual, in the former case through the generational continuity that is the biological purpose of procreation, and in the latter through the memory of posterity. These connections are classically laid bare in Diotima’s speech in 29

Phaedrus 251c4, 255d2.

39

For fuller discussion of the Epitaphium Damonis see Hardie 2007b.

Themes

Plato’s Symposium.*' Diotima defines the object of eros as the good, and the perpetual possession of the good. Those who conceive in the body attain a measure of immortality and lasting memorialization through their biological offspring. Those who conceive in the soul attain immortality through the creations of virtue and wisdom. Diotima begins her account of the different kinds of immortal offspring with reference to what in Greek culture was the most striking example of a future-directed desire, the love of fame or honour, piAotipia: 208c4—6 EvOupunbeis cos Servers SidKeivtai EpwTi TOU övonaoTtoi yeveoBal “Kai KAkos Es TOV del x póvov á&ávarov katadtodaı”

‘considering how terribly they are affected by the desire to win a name “and »> to establish undying fame for all time”. The description of the intolerable itch is framed in language close to an earlier description of the effects of sexual desire on the animal kingdom: 207a8—b1 ‘all wild animals are terribly affected (Seivdos Siatideran) when they desire to procreate, beasts of both

land and air, all afflicted with the disease and affected by love (épcorikós SıaTrıd&ueva). Diotima then goes on to give as examples of those pregnant in the soul poets, 'inventive' craftsmen, and statesmen and lawgivers. Finally she gives named examples of such men and their offspring, poets and lawgivers. Poets come first, not just, one suspects, to allow the lawgivers the place of honour at the climax of this section, but because the language of immortality and the metaphor of children come more naturally when applied to poets:** 209c7—d4 ‘everyone would be happy to have produced children of this kind rather than of the human variety, looking up to Homer and envying Hesiod and the other poets for the offspring that they have left behind, of a kind to bring them eternal fame and memory (á8&vacrov kAtos xai uvriunv)In the Renaissance the connection between procreation and fame can be worked both ways. Spenser's Red Cross Knight is in labour with the glory of future virtuous deeds; in mid-stanza the image shifts from that of a woman in childbirth to that of a lover tossing and turning all night long, The Faerie Queene 1.v.1: The noble hart, that harbours virtuous thought, And is with child of glorious great intent, Can neuer rest, vntill it forth haue brought Th'eternall brood of glorie excellent: Such restlesse passion did all night torment

3! So Freccero 1991: 68-9. 32 Hunter 2004: 92 describes Diotima’s discourse as ‘an ingenious elaboration upon more or less familiar metaphors for intellectual activities:

339

340

The love of fame and the fame of love

The flaming corage of that Faery knight, Deuizing, how that doughtie turnament With greatest honour he atchieuen might; Still did he wake, and still did watch for dawning light.

The promise ‘throughe encrease of issue, to make the whole kinde immortall’ is one of the arguments for marriage deployed by Erasmus in his ‘Epistle to persuade a young man to marriage? an important source for the first seventeen of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; later in the sequence Shakespeare tests the chances that poetry may be an alternative means of perpetuating the beauty of the young man." In an Epithalamion Ben Jonson reverses the equation, and makes literal

biological reproduction the source of continuing fame, Underwood 75.14556: Haste, haste, officious sun, and send them night Some hours before it should, that these may know

All that their fathers and their mothers might Of nuptial sweets, at such a season, owe, To propagate their names,

And keep their fames Alive, which else would die,

For fame keeps virtue up, and it posterity. The ignoble never lived, they were awhile

Like swine or other cattle here on earth: Their names are not recorded on the file Oflife, that fall so...

In Paradise Lost the Fall breaks the link between Adam's posterity and his glorious future, and the injunction to ‘increase and multiply’ now provides only for the unlimited propagation of his infamy, 10.720-37: O miserable of happy! Is this the end Of this new glorious world, and me so late The glory of that glory, who now become

720

Accurst of blessed, hide me from the face

Of God, whom to behold was then my highth Of happiness: yet well, if here would end

725

The misery, I deserved it, and would bear My own deservings; but this will not serve; All that I eat or drink, or shall beget,

?

In Wilson

1982: 109.

34

Burrow 2002: 115; see also Kerrigan and Braden

1989: 173.

Themes

Is propagated curse. O voice once heard Delightfully, Increase and multiply,

730

Now death to hear! For what can I increase

Or multiply, but curses on my head? Who of all Ages to succeed, but feeling The evil on him brought by me, will curse My head, Ill fare our Ancestor impure,

735

For this we may thank Adam; but his thanks

Shall be the execration. This poisoning of Adam's dynastic fame can only be redeemed by Christian hope, whereby “The Edenic fusion of sexuality, marriage, and fame has now been converted to Christianity... , and joined to the glory of Christ, which

is joined to the glory of the Father.”

Honour/fame and love The values of fame (or honour) and love are often formally associated, either in opposition to one another, or as mutually reinforcing each other. The life of love in Roman comedy and Latin love elegy is an obstacle to the proper masculine pursuit of public recognition through honourable pursuits. Lesbonicus in Plautus' Trinummus agrees to Lysiteles’ charge that he has put amor before uirtus (648); a prisoner of Venus, he has sullied his ancestral estate and gloria maiorum ‘glory of his ancestors’ (656-8); Lysiteles warns him that, unless he follows his advice, (663—4) tute pone te latebis facile, ne inueniat te Honor, | in occulto iacebis quom te maxume clarum voles ‘yowll quickly find that you're hiding behind yourself where Honour can't find you; you'll lie concealed, just when you want to stand out’. Venus and Honour are opposing divinities. Or as Propertius puts it in a programmatic statement on the lifestyle of the elegiac lover, (1.6.27-9) multi longacuo periere in amore libenter, | in quorum numero me quoque terra tegat. | non ego sum laudi, non natus idoneus armis 'Many have perished willingly in a long-lasting love; may ] too be in their number when the earth covers me. ] was not born suited for praise, or for warfare.' In comedy the conflict of private and public pressures is typically resolved through the turns of the plot, whereas the elegist represents himself as trapped in an unchanging condition. 1 examine fara in the elegists at greater length below.

5 Kerrigan and Braden 1989: 218, whose analysis I here follow. For a comic decoupling of fame and progeny cf. J. M. Barrie, Dear Brutus Act 11 ‘Fame is rot; daughters are the thing.’

341

342

The love of fame and the fame of love

The competing claims of honour and love are a central concern of much Renaissance literature. Philip Sidney follows the model of the Latin elegist in choosing love over fame, in his case a pointed self-detachment from the fame that in real life he enjoyed as a heroic knight, but a fame not entirely integrated within the politics of the Elizabethan court:*© Astrophil and Stella 28.4-8 ‘I list not dig so deep for brazen fame. | When I say Stella 1 do mean the same | Princess of beauty for whose only sake | The reins of Love I love, though never slake, | And joy therein, though nations count it shame." In Renaissance epic love and honour often pull in opposite directions, although characters may try to reconcile the two. For example in Tasso’s

Gerusalemme liberata the champions who come forward to fight for Armida use desire for honour merely as a cover for erotic desire: 5.7.5-8 ‘Cosi conclude, e con si adorno inganno | cerca di ricoprir la mente accesa | sotto altro zelo; e gli altri anco d'onore | fingon desio quel ch’é desio d'amore' ‘So he concludes; and with such ornamented fabling seeks to hide under a different zeal his mind inflamed; and theothers too pretend desire of honour

in that which is desire oflove.””® But Gernando, whose fatal flaw is his pride, is swayed more by desire for honour than by love: 5.15.6—8 'bench'Armida in lui saetti, | men puó nel cor superbo amor di donna | ch'avidità d'onor

che se n'indonna' ‘though Armida shoots her arrows at him, in his proud heart the love of woman has less effect than the greedy desire for honour that is his mistress’. In the next canto there isa set-piece debate between ‘duo

potenti nemici, Onore and Amore' in the heart of Erminia as she ponders whether to follow her urgent desire to go and heal the wounded Tancredi (6.70—7). Love wins by using Honour's own arguments, 6.77: Parte ancor poi ne le sue lodi avresti, e ne l’opre ch'ei fesse alte e famose, ond'egli te d'abbracciamenti onesti

faria lieta, e di nozze aventurose. Poi mostra a dito ed onorata andresti fra le madri latine e fra le spose là ne la bella Italia, ov’e la sede del valor vero e de la vera fede.

* Braudy 1997: 308-9. 37 Sidney goes so far as to deny the value not only of his good name in the outside world, but of the fame that his verses on Stella may win for themselves in the outside world: with 15.12-14 ‘But if (both for your love and skill) your name | You seek to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame, |

Stella behold, and then begin t'indite; contrast 90.1—4 ‘Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame, | Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee; | Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my

history; | If thou praise not, all other praise is shame.’ 9 Translations of Tasso are from Nash 1987.

Themes

Then you too would have your part in his praises, and in the noble and famous deeds he achieved, when he would have made you happy with his lawful embraces and blessed nuptials. Then honoured and pointed out you would walk among the Latin matrons and wives there in lovely Italy, where is the seat of true valour and of the true faith.

Tancredi himself is torn between the two conflicting impulses at 7.50.1—2 *Cosi d'amor, d'onor cura mordace | quinci e quindi al guerrier l'animo rode' 'So this side and that the biting care of Love and of Honour gnaws at the warrior's soul.’ Colin Burrow has traced at length the interactions of love and honour in the early modern English epic, starting with the 'correction' of Ariosto in Spenser's dynastic epic, as the digressive force of love is redirected towards images of virtuous nobility, leading to the ‘synthetic motive “love of fame"? As a girl the virgin warrior Britomart falls hopelessly in love with a vision in a magic mirror of the ‘shade and semblant of a knight’ (111.ii.38, 3). Britomart goes with her nurse to consult Merlin, the maker of the mirror, who assures Britomart that Arthegall, the knight in the mirror, is destined to be her husband; Merlin then prophesies the line of descendants that will spring from their union, ‘a famous Progenie... out of the auncient Troian blood’ (111.iii. 22, 5-6), a line of ‘Renowmed kings and sacred Emperours'

(11.11. 23, 1). Thus love, fame and biological progeny are all brought into line. By the end of the canto Britomart's introverted love has been redirected to a ‘great desire | Of warlike armes' (111.iii. 57, 2-3)."" Burrow follows the

fortunes of Spenser's concern with love and honour in the English epics of the 1590s and the seventeenth century, in many of which the two are decoupled. William Davenant's Gondibert presents a contrast between the amorous sympathies of loyal Gondibert and the honour-conscious malign faction of Oswald. Desire is redirected towards scientific, not civic, goals.

"Spenser's unstable, synthetic, and civic ethos of love and the search for Glory split apart in the early seventeenth century." Yet the two are still working together in the motivation of David in Cowley's Davideis. As he contemplates the threat posed by Goliath, (Davideis 3.457-60) 'Much the

??

Burrow 1993: 180; 103 ‘concern for honour would melt into love’; 120 ‘The main exemplars of European erotic narrative [Orlando furioso, Metamorphoses, Ciris] are rewritten as dynastic romance in the timeless spaces of The Faerie Queene.’ On the dynastic epic in the Renaissance see Fichter 1982; Watkins 1993 traces at length the interaction of love and fame in The Faerie Queene. See also Wilson-Okamura

2010: 227-47 on the role of (positive and fruitful) love in

the plots of Renaissance epic. 40

On Britomart and Artegall see Burrow

1993: 103-6; Hardie 2004: 147-8; for a fuller discussion

of the twists and turns of fama in this episode see above Ch. | pp. 38-42. 41

Burrow

1993: 242.

343

344

The love of fame and the fame of love rewards propos'd his spirit enflame, | Saul's Daughter much, and much the voyce of fame. | These to their just intentions strongly move, | But chiefly God, and his dear Countreys love.’ Later the two motives combine in Saul's

condition for giving the hand of his daughter Michol, namely that David should take a hundred Philistian foreskins, (3.906) ‘In this joynt cause of Honor and of Love’; (933-5) ‘And bright prophetique forms enlarge his heart; | Vict'ory and Fame; and that more quick delight | Of the rich prize for which he was to fight.’ Earlier Saul has denied that any negative fame (elegiac fabula) might attach to David's love for Michol: 883—6 ‘Blush not, my Son, that Michols love I name, | Nor need she blush to hear it; 'tis no shame | Nor secret now; Fame does it loudly tell, | And all men but thy

Rivals like it well.’ One of the most unembarrassed depictions of an eroticized desire for

fame comes at the end of The Lusiads, where Camóes reconciles Fame with Love painted in the most sensuous and alluring colours, planting a Hall of Fame in a Bower of Bliss. Venus prepares for the Portuguese an Isle of Venus, a place of repose where they can restore their tired humanity after their labours, and where they will be given the seductive company of beautiful Ocean nymphs. In order to make the nymphs more willing to please the sailors she enlists the help of her son Cupid (9.23), as she once used him to make Dido give Aeneas a friendly reception in Carthage. Cupid agrees, but says that he needs a go-between (9.44), who, although she had opposed him a thousand times, had often helped him," ‘a giant-goddess, rash, boastful, purveyor of lies and truths, who goes with a hundred eyes, and, wherever she goes, broadcasts what she sees. Fame, with her clear trumpet, goes spreading the praises of the Portuguese sailors; Credulity her companion ensures that the truths she carries are believed. As a result the breasts of the nymphs and Tethys are inflamed with love, and they willingly give themselves to the sailors when they land on the Isle of Venus. In the Aeneid the effect of Cupid's intervention in Carthage is to divert Aeneas from his mission, leading to Mercury's descent to remind the hero of the need to think of the future glory of Rome (see Ch. 3 p. 91). Camóes 'corrects' the Virgilian plot, so that fame and a highly eroticized stop-over are brought into perfect harmony. This is achieved in several ways. Fame is the spur that incites the nymphs to erotic infatuation with the Portuguese. Tethys and the nymphs bind themselves in marriage to da Gama and his

#2 This statement of love's varying relationship to fame picks up the introduction of Cupid at 9.20 as one who can make gods stoop to the base earth, and humans ascend to the bright sky;

this now becomes an ascent on the wings of Fame.

Themes

sailors. This is not a straightforward example of love working in a dynastic epic to prepare the way for the future glories of a family or nation, but Venus does speak of ‘a brave and fair progeny’ that will issue from these unions (9.42), making some kind of a statement about Portugal’s historical union with the sea. The song sung at the wedding feast of the nymphs and sailors (10.10-73) looks forward to the famous achievements of da Gama’s

successors in the Indies (who will themselves be rewarded with the delights of the Isle of Venus), so inserting in the place of Aeneas’ narrative of past events a version of the Virgilian Parade of Heroes, the pageant of the future

fame of Rome. This is followed by what, in Virgilian terms, is a version of the first, natural-philosophical, part of the Speech of Anchises, the ascent of da Gama and his men, led by Tethys in order to add ‘yet higher glory’ to the day’s festivities, to a mountain-top not of this earth where the secrets of the

universe are revealed, followed by a survey of the geography of the far-flung parts of the world discovered by Portugal. In the miniature cosmic globe in which are to be read the secrets of the universe the humans see where

they are going and will go, and the end of their desire, the divine glory in which love will finally come to its resting place, as at the end of Dante's Paradiso.

If all this were not enough to accommodate the sensuous delights of the Isle of Venus within an epic of Portuguese glory, at the end of Canto 9 Camóes attempts to convert erotic pleasure into fame, without residue, pulling the allegorical veil from his fiction, 9.88-9 (in Richard Fanshawe’s translation):

Thus, the fair Bevy, thus the Valiant Crew, Divide the How'rs by innocent, by chast Delights, and such as Mortals never knew,

In recompence of so long labours past. And thus the meed, to such high Actions due Of noble Prowess; ev'n the World at last Pays (in despight of Envy) with the sound Of a great Name; which Time, nor Place shall bound. For these fair Daughters of the Ocean, Thetys, and the Angellick pensil'd Isle, Are nothing, but sweet Honour, which These wan; With whatsoever makes a life not vile. The priviledges of the Martial Man, The Palm, the Lawrell'd Triumph, the rich spoile; The Admiration purchac't by his sword; These are the joys, this Island doth afford.

345

346

The love of fame and the fame of love

The reader may however feel that this sanitizing allegorization hardly contains the erotic surcharge of the surface narrative. In Paradise Lost Milton changes the terms of the equation by a revaluation of both love and honour. In response to the Son’s offer of himself in atonement for the sin of Adam and Eve, the Father observes that (3.311-12)

‘in thee | Love hath abounded more than glory abounds’. The Son’s selfhumiliation will exalt both Him and mankind, and the Father looks forward to the Last Judgement (323-4) “When thou attended gloriously from heaven | Shalt in the sky appear.’ In the new heaven and earth the just shall (337-8) ‘See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds, | With joy and love triumphing, and fair truth’ This is a new Golden Age, one not of idleness, but rather of

shining deeds, for which the recognition of earthly fame would however be otiose, replaced by a triumph of heavenly love. The conflict between love and honour is an obvious source of dramatic interest. Dryden’s version of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, All for Love, or, the World Well Lost stages the choice of love over fame in the world of public actions. In the anonymous The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, OR Caesars Reuenge (printed 1607) Cleopatra bewitches both Caesar and Antony; Caesar is prepared to sacrifice fame to love, while Antony is called to himselfby his bonus Genius, like Mercury appearing to recall Aeneas from his attachment to Dido. But there is also a tradition of a Cleopatra fiercely attached to her honour, as in Thomas May’s The Tragedy of Cleopatra (acted 1626). She expresses her love of fame at 1v.1.78—81 ‘My race of life and glory is not runne, | Nor Cleopatraes Fortunes yet arriv'd | At that great height that must eternize her, | And fixe her glorious name

above the stars’. The

relationship with Julius Caesar offers an ideal union of love and honour: 1v.1.174-5 ‘What more than Caesar's love could I have wish'd | On which all power, all state, and gloryes waite?’ and she rues her fall through her love

for Antony: 1v.iv.33—6 'for whose deare sake | A Queene so highly borne asI preferr'd | Love before fame, and fondly did neglect | All names of honour’. In his final address to the dead queen Octavian acknowledges: v.v.99-101 "Though thou art dead, yett live renown'd for ever. | And lett this action speake thee to the world, | A foe not shaming Caesar's victory.' Cleopatra is even more decided in her attachment to fame and honour in Katherine Philips' Pompey: A Tragedy (printed 1663), a translation, with the addition of songs, of Corneille's La Mort de Pompée. She tells Charmion that (11.1.26) ‘The love I cherish [for Caesar] no dishonour knows’; (31-2) ‘Know

that a Princess by her glory mov'd | No Love confesses till she be belov’d.’ Of her ambition she says, (11.1.81-2) “But yet with Glory I would it enflame, | Nor would buy greatness with the loss of Fame.' Cleopatra unfolds her

Themes

calculus of Honour and Love to Caesar at 1v.iii.41—70. The songs added by Philips to Corneille’s original between acts further develop the theme of love and honour: in the Song after the fourth act Honour and Love are reconciled, ending (59-63) ‘Though Love does all the heart subdue, | With

gentle, but resistless sway | Yet Honour must that govern too: | And when thus Honour wins the Day, | Love overcomes the bravest way.’ The Song after the fifth act commends Cleopatra as (62-4) ‘One who ambition could withstand,

| Subdue

revenge, and Love command,

| On

Honours

single

score.” Cleopatra’s pride in a love that is itself a source of honour is in keeping with Corneille’s views on ‘la gloire’, the three main

aspects of which

are

laid out in Clitandre: (i) pride in a good erotic choice, to be displayed to the world (cf. 1389 “De notre amour naissant la douceur et la gloire’); (ii) opinion’s admiration for a noble risk; (iii) honour as a visible sign of the

nobly born soul, mindful of its duties. In general masculine gloire is that derived from the great exploit, while feminine gloire is the glory that comes from a great love." ‘Love and Honour’ plays are a cliché of the heroic drama of the English Restoration stage, in which love is usually triumphant over honour." To glance forward beyond the strict chronological limit of this book, the nineteenth century finds newly intimate ways of figuring the relationship between love and fame. For Byron, in a poem that prefers the glory of being young to the laurels that come with age, fame is desirable for the effect it has on the beloved, Stanzas Written on the Road Between Florence and Pisa 9-12: O Fame! - if I e'er took delight in thy praises, "Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases, Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover She thought that I was not unworthy to love her.

Thackeray looks for a longer posthumous survival in the love of the nearest and dearest than in the promises of fame, Henry Esmond Ch. 6: To be rich, to be famous? What

do these profit a year hence, when

other names

sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under the ground, along with idle titles engraven on your coffin? But only true love lives after you — follows your memory with secret blessing — or precedes you, and intercedes for you. Non omnis moriar — if dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me. 15 Stegmann 1968: 480-98 “Nature et limites de la gloire cornélienne*

44

Barber 1957: 13-14.

347

348

The love of fame and the fame of love In Wagner's Tristan und Isolde the annihilation of self in love for another

results in the total eclipse of renown and honour in the night of Liebeswonne ‘love’s bliss’ In Act it Scene 2, the night spent together by the lovers, Tristan

remembers how in the past the glitter of honour and the power of renown (‘der Ehre Glanz, des Ruhmes Macht’) that shimmered round Isolde penetrated into his heart arousing an erotic madness. At that time the jealous resentment that already began to make honour and fame a burden to him did not prevent him from praising Isolde before all the people, and from upholding honour and glory in pressing on with his mission. But in the night of love Tristan mocks the envious day for its vain glory and boastful display (‘seine eitle Pracht, seinen prahlenden Schein’). For the lover of

death’s night, day's lies, its Ruhm und Ehr, Macht und Gewinn’ ‘fame and honour, power and profit’ are as dust caught in the sunlight.

Readings The fame of Helen

Heroic and erotic fame are linked at the very beginning of the ancient epic tradition. Not only do the Homeric poems tell of a war fought for the love of a woman (as Ovid never tires of reminding his readers), but the fame of the martial exploits at Troy exists only through the prior existence of

the fame of the woman, Helen, over whom the war was fought. According to the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women one of Helen's suitors (fr. 199.2-3 Merkelbach-West) ‘longs to be the husband of Helen of the lovely hair, never having seen her, but hearing the story from others (el&os oU r1 l6v, GAN’ GÀ cv uU8ov a&xovov)’. In the late-antique Rape of Helen by Collouthos Paris (193) ‘yearns for love in quest of a woman he had never seen: The © Love for an unseen person has a long history. Love at a distance, ‘amor de lonh; for a lady known only by fame, is a feature of Provengal poetry, e.g. the love of Jaufre Rudel for

Melisenda di Tripoli. This is the background for Virgil's declaration of affection for Statius at Dante, Purg. 22.16-17 ‘Mia benevoglienza inverso te fu quale | Pid strinse mai di non vista

persona.’ Italian lyric stresses rather the sensible, ocular, origin of love; but cf. e.g. Petrarch, RS 53.102-3 'Digli: Un che no ti vide anchor da presso, | se non come per fama huom

s'innamora...': Santagata 1996 ad loc. compares Rudel, Lanquan li jorn son loncen mai; Petrarch, TC 2.22-4; Cic. Amic. 8.28; August. De Trinitate 10.1.1 cum autem uirum bonum amamus, cuius facieri non uidimus, ex notitia uirtutum » quas i in ipsa ueritate,

cf. Boccaccio, Decam. 4.4.3; Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI ın.iii.62—4, Warwick tells the French princess that Edward, Duke of York, has told him ‘To tell the passion of my sovereign's heart, | Where fame, late ent'ring at his heedful ears, | Hath placed thy beauty's image and thy virtue.’ On the far-reaching fame of the beauty of the ancient novelistic heroine see Ch. 3 p. 113. See

also Mead 1925: Index s.vv. ‘loving unseen’

Readings

momentous events at Troy in turn ensure that the fame of Helen endures

for future generations who will never be able to see her, as Helen herself complains when she speaks to Hector in Iliad 6 of the trouble that besets him: 355-8 ‘since trouble has enveloped your heart especially because of me, the bitch, and because of the folly of Paris. Zeus dealt us an evil fate, so that even hereafter we should be the subject of song for men to come (c Kal étrigow | &VOpatroin TreA@pEO’ &oíbipioi Eccoptvoict).' Helen's reputation is double: both the immortal fame ofa divinely radiant perfection of beauty, and the fallen adulteress, the object of shame and opprobrium.*6 The fame of Helen, what one says about Helen, already a concern for the Homeric Helen, is a recurrent and central theme of later literary handlings of her story. What Stesichorus said about her, and what he suffered as a result, is

the cause of his Palinode, whereby the two reputations of Helen are given two formally separate verbal expressions. Praise and blame of Helen enter the prose tradition of rhetoric with Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, an exercise in correcting (2) fj ve TeV TTOINT@vV éxovo&vrov triotis fj Te ToU óvóparos

@tun ‘the belief of those who have listened to the poets [or ‘of the poets who have heard (and judged only on the basis of what they have heard)'] and the

message of her name’. The first phrase relates to the fides, reliability, of the poets and to the credulitas, willingness to believe, of their audiences, and

the second phrase uses ofiun in the sense of the ‘significant message’ of her name, ominous because of the punning etymologies to which it lends itself as at Aeschylus Agamemnon 687-90 (tXe-, 'ship-destroying, man-destroying, town-destroying’).* I note just two further points. The miraculous beauty

of Helen hasan effect on her lovers not unlike the part that persuasive speech may have played in seducing Helen herself: with Encomium 4 (Helen) && dt cóyam TOAAG awpara auvriyayev óv6póv ‘with one body she brought together the bodies of many men,’ compare 8 Aóyos Buvaotns u£yas totiv, &ccyuikpor&ro acum € xol &keavearéáTo tiórara Epya érrorsAd ‘speech is a powerful ruler, which with a very small and invisible body achieves

46 Bergren 1983a discusses Helen's roles as both subject of poetry and counterpart of the mimetic poet. Worman 1997: 166 ‘Homeric tradition establishes Helen as the paradigmatic figure for

praise and blame, as a character whose persona is formulated around the ambiguous resources of erotic desire and the frustration of the male desire to control its objects.’ Suzuki 1989

discusses the doubleness of Helen and her association with words and fame in Virgil's Aeneid and Spenser’s The Facrie Queene. The doubleness of Helen's fame foreshadows the more extreme dichotomization of good and bad fame in figures of female beauty and monstrosity: see Hardie 2009b on the fair and foul Scylla. 4 On efiun as ‘utterance prompted by the gods, prophetic utterance’ see Ch. 2 p. 57. * MacDowell 1982 ad loc.: ‘Greeks sometimes talk about speech as if it were a physical object, so small that it cannot be seen... (rea trrepdevta).’

349

350

The love of fame and the fame of love

the most godlike deeds. The respective effects of these two very different kinds of body come closer if we remember that, according to Hesiod, it was a muthos about the body of Helen that brought the bodies of men to Sparta. The second point is Gorgias' connection of overpowering erotic desire with a desire for power and recognition in the more public sphere. Helen’s suitors prided themselves some on wealth, some on nobility, some on strength, some

on wisdom,

but (4) xai Tikov &rravres Um Epwtds TE

eiAovíkou guAorıpias te &vikxrjrou ‘they all came because of a love that wished to conquer and a wish for honour that was unconquered’. Gorgias

anticipates Plato’s identification oflove of honour, eiAomuía, as a powerfully erotic kind of love. Honour, or fame, and love are in symbiosis, but in a self- regarding, narcissistic, manner: the fame of Helen engenders a desire to possess a beauty that will add to the reputation and prestige — the fame — of men who already have a high opinion of themselves. Helen is the first trophy wife. The division between the good and bad fame of Helen is dramatized in

Euripides’ Helen, in which the real — and unjustly denigrated — Helen has been whisked off to Egypt, and a phantom Helen has accompanied Paris to Troy, incurring ill fame and causing all the death and destruction of the Trojan War. The play largely revolves around the issues of renown and tradition, and the different meanings of KAéos, both ‘fame’ and ‘rumour,

report? The detachability of fama from reality is an intrinsic part of the play's thematization of quasi-philosophical issues of knowledge and reality, appearance and reality.” In the Prologue Helen introduces herself with reference to the fame of her country Sparta (16 ot« &vovuuos ‘not without a name") and of her father, and to the story or tradition that she is the

daughter of Leda by Jupiter in the shape of the swan (18-21 tov dt 84 | Adyos Tis... el capris oUTOS Aóyos ‘there is indeed a story... if this story is true’): fama-as-fame and farna-as-tradition. The plot is framed by false rumours of the death of Menelaus, once in the mouth of Teukros, who believes it to be true, and once as a deliberate falsehood propagated by Helen in order to engineer her and Menelaus' escape. An Odyssean-style plot in which the wily manipulation of information by the female Helen leads to a famous success that could not have been won by her husband's

49 In general on the importance of fama in the Helen see Clément-Tarantino 2006: 118-20. On Euripides’ exploitation of the contradictions in Homeric witos see Meltzer 1994 (drawing on Pucci 1980). Foley 1992 discusses the splitting of the Euripidean Helen into chaste (virginal) and adulterous (serual) roles, and reads the play as a contest between Iliadic (military) and

Odyssean (intelligence and survival) types of kleos 9? On which see Wright 2005: 278-337; Allan 2008: 47-9.

Readings

Iliadic quest for kleos through force of arms does eventually enable Menelaus to display his martial prowess — just as Odysseus eventually plays the part of a warrior in his own house — as he clears the escape boat of its Egyptian crew to sail back home with his real wife. The Messenger (reporting nothing but the truth, of course) tells how Helen urged on the Greek men from the stern: 1602-4 ‘Helen exhorted them from the stern: “Where is your Trojan glory (16 Tpwikdv Atos)? Reveal it to the barbarians."" This is military display with a purpose, unlike the futile slaughter at Troy that won phantom kleos over a phantom Helen. There is an amusing echo of the Hesiodic contrast between seeing and hearing about Helen in (the real) Helen’s question to Teukros as to whether he himself saw Menelaus reclaim his wife at the capture of Troy, dragging her off by the hair, or whether he just reports it from hearsay: 118 ‘I saw it with my own eyes, as clearly as I see you’, says Teukros. The success of the escape plan depends on the silence of the Egyptian king’s sister Theonoe, a prophetess with twenty-twenty vision of present and future. Helen and Menelaus will be safe only if she is not the source of a report of Menelaus’ presence in Egypt, 815—23: EA. uf' Eorıv éAtris fj nóvm coxüeluev &v. Me. aovntos Tj TOAUTTOS 7) Aóy cv Utro;

EA. ei ut) tupavvds EKırVdoıt’ Äpıyuevov. Me. o0 yvmoetai u’ ós eiu, Ey ad”: Epei BE Tis; EA. tot’ Ev6ov atTH EUuuayos Beois ion. Me. orjun Tis ofko Ev uuxois ibpuuévn;

EA. odx, GAA’ &6eA oy Otovónv kaAoUcí viv. Me. xpnoTfipiov utv roUvou": óri 56 8p& ppdoov. EA. rrávt! 018) épet Te ovy yóvoo rrapóvta ot. Hel. There is only one hope for our salvation. Men. By bribery, daring, or persuasion? Hel. If the king does not learn of your arrival. Men. He won't recognize me, I'm sure: who will tell him? Hel. He has an ally inside, the equal of the gods. Men. Is there some oracle seated in the inner house? Hel. No, his sister. Her name is Theonoe. Men. An oracular-sounding name. Tell me what she does. Hel. She knows everything, and she will tell her brother that you are here. 5!

Cf Menelaus’ own despairing question when he is washed up in Egypt: 453 aiat T& «Acıva ToU "oti uot oTparteunarra; Virgil's Aeneas thinks that the fama of the Trojan War, and his own part in it, will bring the Trojans salvation in Carthage (Aen. 1.463: see Ch. 3 p. 96); Menelaus' Trojan fame cuts no ice in Egypt. [n a futile display of bravado Menelaus imagines fighting to the death at the tomb of Proteus (842-54): 845-6 TO Tpwikov yap oU kataloxuvi kAtos | o0" EAAGB’ £A8cov ATyouat rroAUv yóyov.

The love of fame and the fame of love By tun Menelaus seems to mean a ‘divine voice’, or oracle,?? in the house, which in a way is exactly what Theonoe is. As such she could be the origin of a (true) report (another meaning of pun) counter to the false rumour of the death of Menelaus, which is essential to the escape plan. It is crucial that this grjum does not circulate outside the inmost recesses of the house,

that this House of Fama remains firmly shut.”? The Homeric and Hesiodic handling of Helen’s fame offers Dio Chrysostom starting points for criticism of Homer in the Trojan Oration: 11.14 ‘Furthermore, the position of Helen, in my judgement, should not be ignored either; for she, the reputed daughter of Zeus, has become through unjust report a byword for disgrace, and yet has been held as a deity among the Greeks on account of her might (fj ToO Aids Acyouévn Guyatnp Sie uiv Tflv &Eikov ofiumv trepiPdntos En’ alax ovp y éyove, Ste BE rfjv atrrijs loyov Beds tvopio6n tape rois EAAnoiv).’ Dio reports the true history of the Trojan war as related by an Egyptian priest, who begins his criticism of the story told by the Greeks thus: 11.54 ‘Consider the silliness of the opposite story:

does it seem possible that anyone should have become enamoured of a woman whom he had never seen?' An epistolary drama of fame and reputation is played out in the first of Ovid's double Heroides, the letters exchanged between Paris and Helen.” It may be possible to add Heroides 16-17 to the tally of Ovidian texts that retrospectively create a genealogy of the genre, or genres, of which the Ovidian poems are belated representatives, in the way that Alessandro Barchiesi argues that the last pair of the double Heroides, the Acontius and Cydippe letters, creates a myth of origins of Latin love elegy. As one of the Hesiodic suitors Paris remembers his first experience of Helen's beauty: Her. 16.37-8 ante tuos animo uidi quam lumine uultus; | prima tulit uulnus nuntia fama tui ‘before I saw your face with my own eyes, I saw it in my mind; fame bringing report of you first inflicted the wound’. Of how much 32 See n. 47. c

352

The double entendre is noted by Clément-Tarantino 2006: 119, picking up a suggestion in Wassermann 1920: 28-9 that line 820 could be read as the first reference to a ‘House of Fara. The news must not be allowed to travel abroad like the story about Helen: 223-5 &ià Bi rälıas tpyeten | Báfis & oe BapPdpoia, | rórvia, rapgabiBoo Atxeoıv.

The importance of fama in these letters is noted by Barchiesi 1995: 327 ‘A promising theme in Helen's epistle is the recurring idea of "fame": actions and choices are viewed in terms of “creating a new fame". The Ovidian Helen is aware that many different, future Helens - already variously refracted in her status as an Ovidian character — depend on her decision. When she admits “I would not so ignore men's published words that I would let them fly over the earth announcing my shame to all" (17.209-10...; cf. Goethe, Faust 8513-15) the reader is forced to glance across to an incident in Stesichorus' career.' 5 Barchiesi 2001: 123-6. On Her. 16-17 see Barchiesi 1999b: 59-62.

Readings

was that prima fama the beginning? The first wound of love, but also in due course the literal wounds of the Trojan War, of which, and hence of whose immortal life in poetry, this love at first sight — or rather at first mental envisioning — is the cause. The wound inflicted by this prima fama also foreshadows the figurative wound turned literal which marks the beginning and end of the Virgilian story of Dido, whose death wound flows directly from the action of Fama earlier in the book.^^ 56 The start, too, of a contest between good and bad varieties of fama: Paris in his letter offers to magnify the gloria of her beauty (fama formae) into divine honours (333-40); Helen fears the destruction of her fama clara ‘bright fame’ (17.17), the essentially negative fame that a woman enjoys for not acting in certain ways, through the mala murmura

uulgi 'evil mutterings of the crowd' (149), the kind of

rumours about Dido and Aeneas that the Fama of Aeneid 4 puts about, and which create the fabula of erotic lyric or elegy (see below pp. 360—8). At the end of Heroides 16 Paris envisages the creation of universal literary fama: 375-6 tu quoque, si de te totus contenderit orbis, | nomen ab aeterna posteritate feres ‘you too will win a name eternally from posterity, if the whole world goes to war over you; a couplet that alludes to fame of both the epic and the elegiac variety. Paris offers as an attraction what Helen will come to regard as a curse when she tells Hector of the evil fate which Zeus laid on Paris and herself, so that they should be the subject of song in after time, Il. 6.355-8 (quoted above). But what Paris offers had already been offered by Ovid to his elegiac puella: Am. 1.3.25-6 nos quoque per totum pariter cantabimur orbem | iunctaque semper erunt nomina nostra tuis ‘we too will be sung of together throughout the world, and my name will always be joined to yours?" The moment of epistolary exchange between Paris and Helen is a moment at the origin of much of the history of fama in both epic and elegy.

fama and amorin the Aeneid I return now to the Aeneid, in order to draw out further the connections

between fama and amor in the Virgilian plot. Firstly back to Aeneid 4, where a Trojan hero'slove for a beautiful woman who is already married has historical consequences as momentous as Paris' love for Helen. The rumour that

56. CF. Aen. 4.2-4 uulnus alit uenis. . . haerent infixi pectore uultus. 57 Kenney 1996 on line 375 also notes that ‘his language ironically prefigures the terms in which the Trojan War will go down to posterity’: Aen. 1.456-8 bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per

orbem; 7.222-7.

353

354

The love of fame and the fame of love Fama puts about in Aeneid 4 both has as its object a woman of great beauty,

and is turbocharged by the unrealizable desire for that woman of one of the individuals involved in the propagation of fama, Iarbas, in whom Farna

inflames a sexual jealousy. Aeneas' proper pursuit of epic fame through heroic action is blocked by a negative Fama who propagates a version of his unheroic?? dealings with Dido, rumours that convert the epic hero and queen into the subject of an elegiac fabula (see further below pp. 360-1). Above I touched on the connection between fama and generational continuity. Dido presents a potential threat to Aeneas' destined line of famous descendants (fama nepotum) through her desire to establish an alternative line through her own body, her desperate hope that before Aeneas flees

she might have conceived a paruulus Aeneas (4.327-9).?? Jupiter's rebuke, relayed to Aeneas by Mercury, after Fama's slanders have been conveyed up to Olympus, draws arguments both from Aeneas' concern for his own fame (or glory) and from the claims of his male line: 232-4 si nulla accendit

tantarum gloria rerum | nec super ipse sua molitur laude laborem, | Ascanione pater Romanos inuidet arces? ‘If the glory of such a destiny does not fire him, if he does not strive to win fame for himself, does he begrudge his son Ascanius the citadel of Rome?' Later Aeneas claims to Dido that his true love must be Italy, the stage for his own glory and that of his descendants:

347 hic amor, haec patria est.9! At this stage this is perhaps wishful thinking; the end of the speech reveals that what ‘fires’ Aeneas is not his desire for glory, as Jupiter had urged (232 si nulla accendit tantarum gloria rerum), but

Dido's love-complaints: 360 desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis'stop inflaming me and yourself with your complaints: Fire imagery is almost as commonly used of fama as it is of love. 53! *Unheroic in the sense of delaying or diverting from the heroic telos of the epic. But these erotic interruptions are of course at home in the genre of epic from the Odyssey onwards. 9 Cf. Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.865-74, Herakles’ rebuke to the Argonauts on Lemnos, ending with the sarcastic statement that giving up the quest for the Golden Fleece to make babies with Hypsipyle will bring great fame to Jason: 872-4 16v 5' tvi Adxrpots | " YyrrróAns eláce Travipepoy, eloóxe Afiuvov | raiciv trravbpoon, psy dan EE Bá£is Export, see Nelis 2001:

157-8. Nelis Aeneas away modelled in and Medea.

2001: 155—7 also notes that the descent of Mercury in Aeneid 4, in order to steer from erotic involvement with Dido and back on to the right path of fartia, is part on the descent of Eros in Ap. Rhod. Argon. 3 in order to bring together Jason In Proclus’ summary of the Aithiopis Achilles killed Thersites when the latter

blamed him for his reported love of Penthesilea; for a version of Thersites' rebuke cf. Quintus

Smyrnacus, Posthomerica 1.72347, ending (739-40) é&v&pl yap dxunTfi vikns Atos lpya T’ Apno; | teptrvd, quyorrroAÉuc & yuvanndy eabev evi; see Rosen 2007: 94-6. 6

Note also 4.230-1 genus alto a sanguine Teucri | proderet. See Reed 2007: 43 for ‘Aeneas’ Roman mission as a kind of love or desire, and the 'equat[ion of] Italy with amor, a substitute for - or sublimation of- his love affair with Dido’. Reed also

points to the well-known Roma—amor anagram.

Readings

In Aeneid 4, then, amor and fama enter into relationships that threaten the onward progress of the national epic. It is left for the eschatological order of the Virgilian underworld to arrange things in a way that will enable the smooth working of the epic machine. In that world those who died for love, including Dido, are corralled in the Lugentes Campi (6.440—76), adjacent to but separate from those who died heroically in war (6.477—534; 478 quae bello clari secreta frequentant). The sight of Dido confirms for Aeneas the truth of a report or rumour

that he had heard, and which

seals the

end of his affair with Dido: 6.456—7 'infelix Dido, uerus mihi nuntius ergo | uenerat exstinctam ferroque extrema secutam? ‘Unhappy Dido, so it was a true report that reached me, that you were dead and had ended your life with the sword?' — in some sense a continuation of the Fama that rampaged through Carthage at the moment of Dido's fatal self-wounding (Aen. 4.666). Aeneas' true love is spelt out at the end of the Parade of Heroes: 6.888—9 quae postquam Anchises natum per singula duxit | incenditque animum famae uenientis amore 'after Anchises had shown his son each and every

92

These are the fourth and fifth classes of the untimely dead, both located in a secluded space:

6.442-4 hic quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit | secreti celant calles et myrtea circum | silua tegit; 477-8 iamque arua tenebant | ultima, quae bello clari secreta frequentant. Further parallels suggest a closer connection, extending to the theme of fara, between the major characters in each locale, Dido and Deiphobus: both are difficult to identify (452-3 agnouitque per umbras | obscuram; 498 uix adeo agnouit (although they are not the only shades of whom this is true: cf. 340 (Palinurus) hunc ubi uix multa maestum cognouit in umbra)); in both cases Aeneas checks

the truth of a report previously received of their deaths (456 uerus mihi nuntius ergo... ; 502 mihi fama suprema. . .); both have a conspicuous wound (450 recens a uulnere Dido; 497 truncas inhonesto uulnere naris); Aeneas has regretfully left both shores (460 inuitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi; 507-8 te, amice, nequiui | conspicere et patria decedens ponere terra); Dido comes

to grief because of a second ‘marriage’, Deiphobus is destroyed by Helen, who married him after the death of Paris, in an attempt to restore her fama, (526—7) scilicet id magnum sperans fore munus amanti, | et famam exstingui ueterum sic posse malorum: the verb extinguo is used at 6.457 (the message that Dido herself was exstinctam ‘had died’), and at 4.322-3 of the ‘quenching’ of Dido's good fara (where Helen hopes for the quenching of her bad fama), exstinctus pudor et, qua sola sidera adibam, | fama prior - the application of the same verb both to Dido and to her fama is perhaps a sign of the near-identity between Dido and her fama: see Ch. 3 p. 85. Some of the parallels between the dead Dido and Deiphobus are noted by Henry 1989: 37. One answer to the question of who or what the uerus nuntius was that brought news of Dido's death is the conflagration at which the Trojans look back as they sail from Carthage at the beginning of Aeneid 5, (4-5) quae tantum accenderit ignem | causa latet, as it were a concrete manifestation of fiery Fama. In his accounts of the reports and rumours that attend Dido's death Virgil alludes to the reports of the death of Arsinoe in Callimachus' Ektheosis Arsinoes (see Hardie 2006: 33): cf. Callim. fr. 228.39-40 Pfeiffer Tpwtii uev 5’ érüuot katayo[vto pänan. | sandvrpıav à Be tupas Evora’ i[wav; 69 GAAa ué Tis OOK &ya[à

paTis

oad’ fikei; lines 13-16 of fr. 228 may refer to the chain of fires that were lit from the Pharos to Thebes at the death of the queen (cf. the fiery relay of the report of the sack of Troy in the form of the chain of beacons at the beginning of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon).

355

356

The love of fame and the fame of love sight, and inflamed his mind with love for the fame to come‘ Here the connection between fama and generational continuity is clear: the father has just shown the son a pageant of his nepotes (6.757). Aeneas has gone to the

underworld prompted by the desire to see his father, a love with similarities to Aeneas’ feelings for Dido. Anchises then rechannels the son’s love for the father into a desire for the fame of future Roman heroes.“ The connection between erotic desire and famais made in a more striking, and even shocking, way in the making and ecphrasis of the Shield of Aeneas at the end of Aeneid 8, the pendant to the Parade of Heroes. The Shield, another showpiece of the Roman future, whose images are summed up as (8.731) famamque et fata nepotum ‘fame and destiny of the descendants, is brought to Aeneas not by his father, but by his mother, the goddess of love. Venus has enlisted the arts of her lawful husband, Vulcan, the god of fire (8.628 ignipotens), for the making of the shield of Roman Fama, through her own seductive, and fiery, arts of love. The figurative liquid flames of love (389—90) fuse with the rivers of liquid metal that run into the armour

(402, 445—6), whose main piece is the Shield The Lucretian Venus, Aeneadum genetrix, nation-building, a task to be achieved by the (Aen. 8.629 pugnataque in ordine bella): the

of Aeneas, the Shield of Fame. is put to work to the ends of wars represented on the Shield goddess of love works through

the arts of her paramour Mars. Allusion in the Virgilian scene of Venus' seduction of Vulcan to the tableau of Mars powerless in the lap of Venus at the beginning of Lucretius’ De rerum natura takes us back to Lucretius’ own model, the erotic fara of the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite, propagated by the Homeric Song of Demodocus, the fabula... toto notissima caelo ‘the tale notorious throughout heaven' (Ov. Ars 2.561: see Ch. 5 p. 161), which is a shared point of reference for the Fama episode in Aeneid 4. There the erotic liaison of Dido and Aeneas concealed in a cave is broadcast by an all-seeing and all-hearing agent, Fama; in Homer the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite is broadcast by the Sun.°° In Aeneid 8 Homeric adultery is replayed as married

sex within the privacy of the thalamus, the energies that explode in Aeneid 4 in the form of the monster Fara are channelled into the creation of a

9! On the connections with the imagery of Fama in Aencid 4 see Ch. 4 pp. 135-6. Cf. also 7.496 (Ascanius in a literal deer hunt) ipse etiam eximiae laudis succensus amore, mirroring the shepherd huntsman (a figure for Aeneas, arguably in erotic pursuit of Dido) in the wounded stag simile at 4.69—73. In the humanist discourse of

plarity,

pla often ‘inflame’,

‘incite’, ‘animate’ the reader to imitation: Hampton 1990: 4-5. For fuller discussion see Hardie 2004: 144-7. See also Reed 2007: 166 ‘It is finally desire, amor... , with which Anchises fires Aeneas with enthusiasm for his mission.’ 6 On the connection between Fama and the sun see Ch. 5 p. 161.

Readings

work of art that celebrates — pre-scripts the fama of - a Roman empire on which the sun never sets: in the last image on the Shield Augustus surveys the conquered peoples of the world from his seat on the threshold of the Temple of Apollo, the sun-god.

Male and female fama; the elegiac fabula When Dido succumbs in the cave to her love for Aeneas she abandons her role as a great ruler winning glory for herself and her new city, and becomes the subject of sexual tittle-tattle. Instead of the active pursuit of fama of a kind that can be acquired and expanded through deeds in the wider world, 'making a name

for oneself, she is now doomed

to lose the good name,

reputation, fama, that she had enjoyed as a respectable woman expected to behave in certain ways and not in others, and in particular to preserve her pudicitia 'chastity. She is not inhibited by how people see her or what they say about her (Aen. 4.170 neque enim specie famaue mouetur) from broadcasting her secret love, and giving it the name of a marriage. This kind of fama, ‘reputation’, is closely connected with the sense of shame, pudor, that

holds a person back from behaving in a discreditable way, in this instance through a 'discreditable "extension" of the self“ through a woman's giving free rein to sexual appetite. pudor and fama are often linked, and in her tirade against Aeneas Dido equates her abandonment of self-regulation in accordance with pudor with her loss of fama in this sense: Aen. 4.321-3 te propter eundem | exstinctus pudor et... fama prior ‘it is also because of you that I have lost my sense of shame and my previous reputation."^ Dido's experience has implications both for the gendering ofthe Virgilian plot and for the play of genres in Aeneid 4. In terms of gender the reader is reminded that under the normal conditions of ancient society (and most societies in history) a woman's fama is of that passive kind which is the avoidance of talk out of place about inappropriate behaviour, and in particular of sexual behaviour discreditably extended beyond the marital bed.“ It is one of the signs of the instability of Dido's role as a woman trying to play a 66 The phrase comes from Kaster 2005: 42-5, in his analysis of the ‘scripts’ of pudor that arise from discreditable behaviour that is up to the subject him- or herself. 67 Cf. Ov. Met. 7.146-5 (Medea playing a Dido role; there are textual problems) obstitit incepto pudor... tenuit reuerentia famae. 6 Sen. Contr. 2.7.9 (the wife propositioned by a foreign trader, who died and left her his fortune in a will containing the elogium, pudicam reperi', and accused by her husband on his return on suspicion of adultery) unus pudicitiae fructus est pudicam credi, et aduersus omnes inlecebras atque omnia delenimenta muliebribus ingeniis est ueluti solum ac firmamentum in nullam incidisse fabulam.

357

358

The love of fame and the fame of love

man’s part in the world that she is destroyed by this loss of pudor and fama. Men of course, or at least right-thinking men, are also constantly aware of a sense of pudor that calls them to an urgent awareness of their fama-asreputation,’ but this is just one side of the typical masculine relationship with fama, the other side of which is the pursuit of fama-as-fame. Rome is founded through the famous deeds of Romulus

(which include and are

not discredited by the sexual aggression of the Rape of the Sabine Women), and refounded through Lucretia’s vindication through suicide of her pudicitia and fama in the sense of ‘good name''? At the end of the Odyssey the shade of Agamemnon distinguishes between the good and bad reputations of Penelope and Clytaemnestra on the grounds of their sexual behaviour, fidelity and infidelity towards their respective husbands, 24.194—202: “ws &y aai pptves Hoav &uuuovi [TnveAotrein, xoüpn Tkapíov, as eU ueuvnT’ OSuorjos,

195

&v5pós koupiBíou. TG oi KAéos oU TroT” ÓAeiTad

fis dpetis, eG £ouci 8’ &rix8ovíoisiw &oiSTv “davaToı xapítocav exégpovi [InveAortein, ovy cs TuvBap£ou koupn Kakd urjcaro Epya, Koupidlov KTelvaca Tróciv, oTuyept dE T’ &oiB1] tcoet Er &vepaotrous, akerttv 8€ TE grjuv STrdooE! OnAuTepnot yuvani, Kal fk evepyds Énciv."

200

‘How good was the heart of blameless Penelope, daughter of Icarius, how well she remembered Odysseus her lawful husband. Therefore the fame of her excellence will never perish, and the gods will fashion a pleasing song among men who live on the earth in honour of the constancy of Penelope; not like the daughter of Tyndareus who plotted evil deeds, killing her lawful husband, and who will be the subject ofa hateful song among men, and give women a bad reputation, even those who behave well.’

Unusually, in the light of the standard division between male and female roles in antiquity, Penelope’s active part in devising ways of putting off the 9? Examples of pudor (pudicitia) and fama in Cicero: Cael. 11 de eius fama et pudicitia, cum is iam se corroborauisset ac uir inter uiros esset, nemo loquebatur, Phil. 2.3

melius famae, melius

pudicitiae tuae consuluisses, Fam. 6.6.6 itaque uel officio uel fama bonorum uel pudore uictus, ut in fabulis Amphiaraus, sic ego prudens et sciens ad pestem ante oculos positam sum profectus, 7.3.1 pudori tamen malui famaeque cedere quam salutis meae rationem ducere (the last two both of Cicero's decision to join Pompey; cited by Kaster 2005: 49-50). For other examples, with discussion, of fama in the context of female pudicitia see Langlands 2006: Index s.v. fama. The

story of Claudia Quinta (Livy 29.14; Ov. Fasti 4.305—48) is a classic tale of fama and pudicitia vindicated (see Langlands 2006: 65—9).

Lucretia succumbs to Tarquin when he threatens to destroy her fama by pretending that she has committed adultery with a slave: Ov. Fasti 2.810 succubuit famae uicta puella metu. For Silius Italicus Lucretia is (Pun. 13.821) pudicitiae Latium decus.

Readings

suitors goes some way to placing her in the role of the male hero who wins kleos through his active arete ‘virtue’; her part in the plot is indispensable to her husband Odysseus’ success in winning the undying kleos of his successful nostos. An episode from Roman Republican history reveals the structural parallelism between female pudicitia and male gloria, in which a matrona asserts her claim to respect as a pudica in a version of the male certamen gloriae, Livy 10.23.3-8. The patrician Verginia, married to a plebeian consul, is excluded from the shrine of Pudicitia Patricia ‘Patrician Chastity’ by the other patrician matrons, leading to a dispute, certamen, blazing up in a female version of the epic emotion of anger (ex iracundia muliebri).’' Verginia defiantly boasts (gloriaretur) that she is both patricia and pudica, that she has only been married to the one husband, and that she finds no fault with her hus-

band’s offices and deeds (honorum...ac rerum gestarum). Practising the expansiveness of Fama, ‘she caps her lofty words with an outstanding deed’ (facto deinde egregio magnifica uerba adauxit), by establishing a shrine and altar in her own house, to which she summons the plebeian matrons and announces: ‘I dedicate this altar to Pudicitia Plebeia "Plebeian Chastity”, and

I urge you to stage a contest in pudicitia between matrons, corresponding to the contest in virtue held by the men in this city (quod certamen uirtutis uiros in hac ciuitate tenet, hoc pudicitiae inter matronas sit), and to see to it that,

if possible, the worship of this altar is holier and offered by women more chaste than is the case with the other altar.' Female pudicitia corresponds to male uirtus, superiority in which brings men success in the certamen gloriae. The fame won by Verginia for her championing of Pudicitia Plebeia is of a more active and assertive kind than the good name, reputation, normally

associated with the female virtue of pudicitia. The context within which she struggles to assert, and extend, her self and her good name is that of the Struggle of the Orders, a recurrent arena for Livian episodes of fama in male Roman society (see Ch. 7 pp. 244-8). More generally a woman's loss of chastity will reflect adversely on the reputation of her menfolk, and hence impair their ability to flourish in the competitive struggle for honour and fame in the world of men. In the Mediterranean honour code of more recent times there isa close association between honour and shame, and sex (female chastity).’* The feminine kind of fama, the kind of reputation that really consists in notbeing talked about,

as the object of sexual gossip, has a crucial connection with the louder kind 7! On the aspect of certamen see Langlands 2006: 50-1. 72 See Horden and Purcell 2000: 506-7.

359

360

The love of fame and the fame of love

of fama that the successful male aspires to, for the reputation of the male line of descent, the fama of the family, depends on the perceived inviolability of the wife’s chastity. The inextricable connection between feminine fama and the more active, masculine, fama of the family, and beyond that the fama of epic heroes, is made very clear in a Catullan epithalamium, 61.209-23: Torquatus uolo paruulus matris e gremio suae

210

porrigens teneras manus dulce rideat ad patrem semihiante labello. sit suo similis patri Manlio et facile insciis noscitetur ab omnibus, et pudicitiam suae

215

matris indicet ore.

talis illius a bona matre laus genus approbet, qualis unica ab optima matre Telemacho manet

220

fama Penelopeo." I wish that a little Torquatus will stretch forth his tender hands from his mother's lap and smile sweetly at his father with lips half open. May he resemble his father Manlius and be easily recognized by all strangers, and may his face be a sign of his mother's chastity. May he have a good name inherited from a good mother to establish his descent, like the matchless reputation derived from his mother that rests on Penelope's son Telemachus.

These lines are the model for Aen. 4.328-9... si quis mihi paruulus aula | luderet Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret... '(I would not be desolate] if I

had a little Aeneas to play with me at court, who yet might recall you in looks, where Dido dreams of a son like his father to console her in her fallen ‘elegiac’ world, a few lines after she acknowledges that her own fama has been completely destroyed. When it comes to feminine fama Dido is an anti-Penelope."' In terms of generic play Dido becomes the subject of sexual gossip at the point when she descends from her epic throne to the world of the elegiac

7? For discussion see Bettini 1999: 189-98. 7^ Although there are ways in which she models the role of Penelope more positively: Kopff 1977.

Readings

lover.^? Her loss of pudor and fama is the famae iactura pudicae ‘loss of your chaste name' of which Propertius accuses the wayward Cynthia (2.32.21). From being a pretender to epic fama Dido becomes the topic of elegiac fabula, albeit on an epic scale since this gossip is not restricted to one city, but travels through a plurality of 'great cities' (Aen. 4.173). fabula 1s an almost technical term in elegy for the ‘talk of the town’ that dogs the elegiac lover."^ 76 It is the elegist's loss of his good name because of his inability to control his sexual desire, and it is a loss of fama that he shares with the

woman unable to maintain her pudicitia. Within the genre of elegy it is one

of the marks of the effeminization of the lover.'/ The elegiac fabula that clings to a lover behaving shamefully and in a less than properly masculine way is well characterized in a non-elegiac text, but one closely related to elegy’® (perhaps Gallus), Horace, Epode 11.7-10: heu me, per urbem (nam pudet tanti mali) fabula quanta fui! conuiuiorum et paenitet, in quis amantem languor et silentium arguit et latere petitus imo spiritus." Alas, I was the talk of all the city — such a shaming disgrace — and I regret the parties where my apathy and silence, and deep-drawn sighs, betrayed the lover.

The slip from the pursuit of epic fama into the world of elegy is enacted in the Apollo and Daphne episode in Ovid, Metamorphoses 1. Before he sees

75

a

7

In general see Cairns

1989: Ch. 6 ‘Dido and the elegiac tradition’; Cairns is silent however on

the subject of fama, for which see the penetrating comments of Clément-Tarantino 2006: 155-61 ‘La Fama-malum d'Énéide iv et la fama peior de l'élégie* Erotic fabula per urbem is a special case of the common motif of Fama’s travels through a city, as at Aen. 4.298-301 Fama... totamque incensa per urbem | bacchatur; 666 concussam bacchatur Fama per urbem. See the comparable ‘talk of the world’ or ‘talk of the town’ in Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy, mostly on sexual subjects: see Spacks 1986: Ch. 6 (with other sexual imagery of fertile gossip). On fabula in love poetry see Langlands 2006: 193 n. 7. At Stat. Achill. 1.945-8 Deidamia fears that when he goes to Troy Achilles will be tempted by Helen, incesta nimium laudata rapina, fama (albeit of a negative kind) in an epic world, while he will at best tell his slaves about his affair with Deidamia, primae puerilis fabula culpae, a story that happened in a pre-epic, quasi-elegiac world.

3

7

7 79

With the difference that in the case of a man the association with effeminacy means that ‘violation of pudicitia tends to be figured. . . as a discreditable “retraction” of the self... rather than discreditable "extension" [as in the case of a woman]' (Kaster 2005: 168); see also Kaster 2005: 47 ‘Because this pudor-script casts me in the forceful role of an adult free male... the pudor expressed by Cicero at the prospect of being a "slave" under Caesar is no different, in the structure of its thought, from... the pudor enacted by elegy's "slave" of love.’ Watson 2003: 360-2. Of earlier texts note esp. Cat. 5.2-3 rumoresque senum seueriorum | omnes unius aestimemus assis.

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The love of fame and the fame of love

Daphne the Ovidian Apollo is fixated on fame: at the end of the hyperepic episode that precedes his fall into the world of love poetry through the agency of Cupid, he had established the Pythian games to commemorate his killing of the Python, (Met. 1.445) neue operis famam posset delere uetustas ‘so that antiquity should not obliterate the fame of the deed’, a line whose last five words are all repeated in Ovid’s assertion of his own fame in the Epilogue at 15.871—9 (delere in the adjective indelebile). Cupid’s use of his bow to make good his assertion that his own gloria (Met. 1.465) is superior to the laudes (462) of which Apollo boasts rewrites Cupid's use of his bow to transform the would-be epic poet Ovid into a love elegist in Am. 1.1." But Cupid's dart does not effect a complete transformation of Apollo's desires. In laying hands on the laurel into which Daphne has been metamorphosed Apollo claims for himself the perpetuos honores 'everlasting honour' (565) of the plant of fame:*' the fame of Apollo's poetry, of Roman triumph and Augustan rule, of Daphne herself and of the story that we are even now reading of Apollo's less than dignified pursuit of a girl, and hence the fame of love elegy of which the story of Apollo and Daphne is an allusive aetiology. Epic achievement and public fame, and erotic pursuit and the more private fama/infamia/fabula of the love poet and his puella are tightly woven together. One of Ovid's prime exhibits in his repeated claim that epic poets are obsessed with the erotic, that epic and elegy are not so far apart from each other, is the Song of Demodocus in Odyssey 8. fabula narratur toto notissima caelo ‘a tale is told that is notorious throughout

heaven’

(Ars 2.561): the

adultery of Ares and Aphrodite is a prize specimen of the art of the epic bard that is at the same time the original elegiac fabula." The propagation of the fabula is ultimately the doing of Helios the sun, who spies the secret (Od. 8.269 A&Bpn) love-making: Od. 8.270-1 ‘at once the Sun came to Hephaestus, as the messenger who had seen them mingling in love’. Helios, the god who ‘watches everything and listens to everything’ (Il. 3.277, Od. 11.109), is like the Ovidian personification of Fama in Metamorphoses 12, from whose House (41-2) quod est usquam, quamuis regionibus absit | inspicitur, penetratque cauas uox omnis ad aures 'everything everywhere, however far distant, is seen, and every word reaches her hollow ears' (see

Ch. 5 p. 161). The subject of Fama’s tale-telling in Metamorphoses 12 is 80

The seminal demonstration is Nicoll 1980; see also Hardie

200 2a: 45-50, 129-30.

The standard ancient etymology of laurus was from laus (Maltby 1991: 331). Even before Ovid Venus... corrupta libidine Martis is an example for the fama of the puella (together with Helen) at Prop. 2.32.31-4. 9* Cf. 62-3 ipsa quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur | et tellure uidet.

Readings

not erotic, but the subject of her Virgilian equivalent in Aeneid 4 is just such a fabula. Ovid’s contamination of epic and elegiac species of fama, the reputable and the disreputable, perhaps reflects the instability that already characterizes the love elegist’s dealings in fama. The elegist both abases himself as the passive subject of fabula and exalts himself in his claim to poetic power and fame.“' When a poet like the Horace of Epodes 11 laments the shameful fabula that he has become, the pretence is that people all over town have noticed the symptoms of love in the person of the lover, and are talking about it; but equally, if not even more so, tittle-tattle results from the poet’s own

exhibitionism in making public his love affair in his poetry. Propertius gives the game away when he puts words into the mouth of an irrisorin 2.24.1-10: ‘sic loqueris, cum sis iam noto fabula libro

et tua sit toto Cynthia lecta foro?’ cui non his uerbis aspergat tempora sudor? aut pudor ingenuis aut retinendus amor. quod si tam facilis spiraret Cynthia nobis,

5

non ego nequitiae dicerer esse caput, nec sic per totam infamis traducerer urbem, ureret et quamuis, non mihi uerba darem.

quare ne tibi sit mirum me quaerere uiles: parcius infamant: num tibi causa leuis?

10

Fedeli’s text; Heyworth in line 8 ‘Do you speak so, although you are the talk of the town since your book became known, and your Cynthia is read all over the forum?’ Whose forehead would not be sprinkled with sweat at these words? Freeborn men have a choice between keeping their sense of shame or holding on to their love. But if Cynthia were blowing so obligingly for us, I would not be called the wellhead of iniquity, nor would I be paraded as infamous throughout the city like this, and although she burned me, I would not give myself words [or deceive myself]. So do not be surprised that I look for prostitutes; they bring infamy more sparingly — does that seem to you a reason of little weight? (trans. Heyworth adapted)

fabula, what people say, is juxtaposed with what people read, libro, and in the next line the scripta puella becomes a lecta puella.** The poet may 84

See Clément-Tarantino 2006:152-5 ‘Amor "renommée" dans/de l'élégie' (drawing on points on the ambivalence of elegiac fama 55 On whether Cynthia here should be taken 10-13 (Fedeli thinks not).

infamis, fama perennis: ambivalence de la an unpublished thesis by C. Cyr-Fréchet); similar are also made by Langlands 2006: 199. as the title of Propertius" love poetry see Fedeli 1980:

363

364

The love of fame and the fame of love pretend that his poems are wrung out of him by his erotic torture, and that he has a stark choice between the dictates of pudor (which would uphold his

good name, fama) and amor But the elegiac poet, like all poets, is hungry

for fame. He confesses that he has become infamous, infantis, per totam urbem; but this conceals the aspiration to literary fame per orbem: per totum pariter cantabimur orbern ‘we will be sung of together through all the world’, as Ovid promises his as yet unnamed girlfriend at Am. 1.3.25. In his more boastful moments the elegist lays claim to a poetic fama that rivals that of the epic poet: Propertius, addressing Ponticus, writer of an epic Thebaid, asserts his own ambition for recognition: 1.7.9-10 hic mihi conteritur uitae

modus, haec mea fama est, | hinc cupio nomen carminis ire mei ‘this is the way of life I tread, this is my fame, from this I desire the name of my poetry to come’, a cupiditas farnae to be achieved by recording the effects on the poet of Cupido. The shame, pudor, incurred by the lover's enslavement to his passion, is inseparable from the fame to which the poetry about the passion aspires.®® Prop. 2.5 begins with the complaint that Cynthia's life of

shame, riequitia (almost a technical term for the elegiac lifestyle) is the talk of the town: 1-2 Hoc uerum est tota te ferri, Cynthia, Roma | et non ignota uiuere nequitia? ‘Is this true that you are talked about [or wander about] all over Rome, and are living with your iniquity well known?’ This is fabula represented as beyond the control of the poet, who will take his revenge by finding another, more compliant, girl, on whom he will bestow fame, of a positive kind, by his poetry: 5-6 inueniam tandem e multis fallacibus

unam | quae fieri nostro carmine nota uelit ‘in the end out of many faithless women I will find one who wants to become known in my poetry. At the end of the poem Propertius envisages turning his pen against Cynthia in the mode of iambic slander rather than elegiac praise: 27—30 scribam igitur quod non umquam tua deleat aetas: | ‘Cynthia forma potens, Cynthia, uerna *6 The text of line 4 is vexed, but the opposition of pudor (fama) and amor is clear. 8? Cf. Prop. 2.7.15-20 for the clegist's claim to a greater than triumphal gloria, marching in step with an amor of greater worth than being the father of sons. Contrast 2.16.39-42 where the infamis Amor that told Antony to flee at Actium is opposed to gloria Caesaris (if 41-2 are not an interpolation: see Heyworth 2007: 183). At 2.13.37-8 Propertius claims that the farsa of the humble elegist's tomb will be as widely known as that of Achilles. 95 Prop. 1.9 adjusts the opposition in 1.6 between active and idle lifestyles, between, in effect, fama and fabula: 1.6.29 non ego sum laudi . . . natus, 34 accepti pars eris imperii (alluding to Gallus fr. 2.3 (addressing Caesar) maxima Romani pars eris historiae). There may be a further

pun on the poct's part in constructing his own clegiac fama at Prop. 2.24.8 ureret et quamuis, non mihi uerba darem (Heyworth's text): 'although she would burn me [if she were more favourable towards me], | would not deceive myself [in imagining that she returned my love]' or'| would not give myself words

[in the sense “I would not be writing this kind of poetry and

making myself a fabula, talk of the town"]*

Readings

leuis.’® | crede mihi, quamuis contemnas murmura famae, | hic tibi pallori, Cynthia, uersuserit ‘So I will write something that your life could never erase: “Cynthia, powerful beauty, Cynthia, fickle slave." Believe me, however much you despise the mutterings of rumour, this verse will make you blanch.’ The power of the poet's words is now collusive with, and even more potent than, the mutterings of rumour or gossip (fama). Part of that additional power

derives from the inerasability of the poet's words (as opposed to transient rumour). Conventionally the fame bestowed by the poet is immune to the ravages of time (actas); Propertius gives a twist to this when he says that

his words cannot be wiped out in (or by) Cynthia's lifetime; however she behaves subsequently, the poetry of blame will stick to her. At the beginning of Ovid's last book of Amores the personification of Tragedy, indignant that the poet has not yet moved on to higher things, casts his shame in his face, 3.1.15-22:?! et prior ‘ecquis erit dixit, 'tibi finis amandi, o argumenti lente poeta tui? nequitiam uinosa tuam conuiuia narrant, narrant in multas compita secta uias.

saepe aliquis digito uatem designat euntem atque ait "hic, hic est, quem ferus urit Amor!" fabula, nec sentis, tota iactaris in Vrbe, dum tua praeterito facta pudore refers.’

20

Speaking first she said "What end will there be to your loving, poet who cling to your subject matter? Boozy parties tell of your iniquity, the branching crossroads tell of it. Often someone points with his finger as the poet goes by and says, "This, this is the man burned by fierce Love!" You are the talk of the whole city, although you do not realize it, while you boast of your exploits without shame.’ Ovid here alludes to moments of both shame and fame in Horace: the conuiuia, the loss of pudor, and the indignity of being a fabula all over town,

repeat the situation of the lover in Epode 11.?? But when people point to the uates in the street Ovid remembers one of Horace's proudest moments in Odes4, as people point out the poet of the Carmen saeculare in the streets of 99 Fedeli 2005 ad loc. thinks that these words will be written on the girl's door to shame her; even if that is so, the words are also inscribed in the poet's book, and so given a wider circulation

and permanence. Hence the various emendations along the lines of non ulla umquam deleat aetas see Heyworth 2007: 134. sc

9 9.

Discussed briefly at Hardie 20022: 240. With Arr. 3.1.18 cf. Prop. 2.20.21—2 septima iam plenac deducitur orbita lunae | cum de me et de te compita nulla tacent.

365

366

The love of fame and the fame of love Rome: Odes 4.3.22-3 monstror digito praetereuntium | Romanae fidicen lyrae ‘passers-by point at me with their fingers, as the player of the Roman lyre’? Ovid's pride is pitched even higher if we recognize in the geminated hic, hic

allusion to the moment when the shade of Anchises points out to Aeneas the unborn soul of Augustus, at the climax of the display of the fame of future Roman heroes: Aen. 6.791—2 hic uir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius

audis, | Augustus Caesar 'this, this is the man, of whom you have often heard promises, Augustus Caesar’. The lines that follow Tragedy's opening question in Arn. 3.1.15 'ecquis erit... tibi finis amandi' may help us to understand the placing of 3.14, the last poem in Book 3, and so the last poem in the Amores as a whole, before the sphragis and formal farewell to love elegy in 3.15. In what way might 3.14 prepare the reader for a finis amand;? In the poem the poet pleads with the girl, not that she be faithful to him and preserve her pudicitia, but rather that she should take steps to ensure that he knows nothing of her affairs with other men. quae facis, haec facito: tantum fecisse negato ‘do what you do, but just say that you haven't done it' (15). This is not the most obvious way to mark closure in a collection of love elegies; indeed the poet urges the girl to continue with her inventive love life, nor does he renounce his own love for her. But Arr. 3.14 can be read as closural if we understand that it is not a renuntiatio amoris, but an attempt to renounce, to cancel, the fama or fabula that is the elegiac text. The poet asks for an end to the stories about

the girl, or at least an end to stories that might reach his own ears. With the 9! Cf. also Odes 4.3.13-15 Romac principis urbium | dignatur suboles inter amabilis | uatum ponere me choros.

4 Wills 1996: 76—7 ‘If Ovid's passage is allusive, the notoriety of the poet. . . is being characterized in the same way as Augustus’ public presence, with the sort of revelatory syntax of the deus, deus ille tradition." Issues of elegiac fama/fabula, of the girl's peccata, and of seeing and hearing, are handled in Prop. 2.32: 1-2 qui uidet, is peccat: qui te non uiderit ergo, | non cupiet: facti lumina crimen habent, 21-8 famae iactura pudicae | tanta tibi miserae, quanta merctur, erit. | nuper enim de te nostras manauit ad aures | rumor, et in tota non bonus urbe fuit. | sed tu non debes inimicac

eredere linguae: | semper formosis fabula poena fuit. | non tua deprenso damnata est fama ueneno: | testis eris puras, Phoebe, uidere manus, 51—2 (it is impossible) ut nostrae nolint peccare puellae: | híc mos Saturno regna tenente fuit. Luck 1959: 110 'Propertius 2.32 served as a model to Ovid's superbly constructed poem Amores 3.14’: but the two poems are not so similar if we emend credere at Prop. 2.32.25 (artendere Heyworth), as seems inevitable. 96 The terms of the script of Art. 3.14 find parallels in the Roman de la rose pudor and fama correspond to Shame and her shield Fear-of-a-Bad-Reputation, on the borders of which are portrayed many tongues (15461 ff.). Fear-of-a-Bad-Reputation is closely related to Foul Mouth, a general embodiment of slander, who quickly spreads reports in a hundred places (3033 fÉ.), and who finds fault with all women. But pudor and fama can be disabled by Skilful Concealment, whose quiet sword is ‘like a tongue cut out’; at 15502 ff. Skilful Concealment tells Shame, ‘Now that Foul Mouth is killed, you are captured.’

Readings

end of the fabula will come a finis amandi, in the sense that was meant by Tragedy in Am. 3.1, that is an end to writing about loving. The poet pleads with the girl to restore her pudor, but only in the sense of a reputation for pudicitia, not the real thing: 13 saltemue imitare pudicas ‘at least imitate chaste girls: He repeatedly asks her to look to her fama: 6 solaque famosam culpa professa facit ‘it’s only a crime confessed that brings infamy';" 11 tu tua prostitues famae peccata sinistrae? ‘Will you expose your misdeeds to evil repute as if they were prostitutes?';^ 36 si dubitas famae parcere, parce mihi ‘if you shrink from sparing your reputation, at least spare me’. Confession of love to the beloved is a standard topos of sermo amatorius; here the girl is asked not to make the kind of erotic confession that creates fama sinistra." What the poet asks is that the girl should stop being a fabula, and with the end of the fabula comes the end of love elegy. The girl should avoid negative fama, by definition words that circulate among the people as a whole, in order that the individual, the poet, should not find out about her promiscuity. At line 29 the wider community and the individual are lumped together: da populo, da uerba mihi ‘deceive the people, deceive me’. At line 36 they are disjoined,? si dubitas famae parcere, parce mihi: the illogicality of the poet remaining blissfully ignorant if all around him are talking is then compounded in the poem's final absurdity, that if the poet were to catch the girl in flagrante, and if she were to deny what he had seen with his own eyes, he would believe her (46 concedent uerbis lumina nostra tuis).

To persuade someone against the evidence of their eyes marks a ne plus ultra of the power of words. In Am. 3.14 the poet cedes to the girl the origination of words about love that normally have their source in the poet. She, not the poet, is now the sole subject of fabula; she, not the poet, is asked to

exercise the management of fama that is usually the job of the poet's elegies.

Does famosam echo 1 formosa? Cf. Her. 16.146 famaque de forma paene maligna tua est. Cf. the image of book publication as prostitution in Hor. Ep. 1.20: see below p. 381. 7 quis furor est, quae nocte latent, in luce fateri?; 28 et pudor obscenum diffiteatur opus. For the contrast between the judgement of the people and of the poet cf. Prop. 2.13.13-14 haec ubi contigerint, populi confusa ualeto | fabula: nam domina iudice tutus ero: cf. Am. 3.14.49-50 cum tibi contingat uerbis superare duobus, | etsi non causa, iudice uince tuo. Statius manipulates the contrast between hearing about and seeing erotic acts in a different way to mark the end of elegy, when love becomes marital at Silv. 1.2.26-30 cedant curaeque metusque, | cessent mendaces obliqui carminis astus; | Fama tace. subiit leges et frena momordit | ille solutus amor: consumpta est fabula uulgi | et narrata diu uiderunt oscula ciues. With Fama tace cf. [Tib.] 3.20 Rumor ait crebro nostram peccare puellam: | nunc ego me surdis auribus esse uelim.| crimina non haec sunt nostro sine facta [var. iacta] dolore: | quid miserum torques, rumor acerbe? tace. This looks like an allusion to Am. 3.14. On Stat. Silv. 1.2.26-30 as marking the turn from Stella's earlier career as a love elegist, writing elegies to his future wife Violentilla, to the legitimate love of marriage see Clément-Tarantino 2006: 156-7.

367

The love of fame and the fame of love There is a pun at 29-30 da populo, da uerba mihi: sine nescius errem | et liceat stulta credulitate frui ‘deceive the people, deceive me; allow me my mistaken ignorance, and leave me to enjoy my foolish credulity’. dare uerba (‘deceive’) literally means ‘supply words, which will create an illusion of reality for their

audience.? The girl is here given the power that the poet regrets that he himself has in 3.12, where the poet's uerba about his girl have the power to produce credulitas in the minds of his readers. Credulitas is one of the subsidiary personifications in the House of Fara in Metamorphoses 12.

In Am. 3.12 the fame bestowed on the girl by the words of the poet has made of her a common prostitute available to all: 3.12.8 ingenio prostitit illa meo. In 3.14 it is the girl who prostitutes herself (in the form of her sexual peccadilloes), 11 tu tua prostitues famae peccata sinistrae. For the poet to cede authority in the sphere of elegiac fara to the puella is in itself a sign that the elegiac project is at an end. Yet there are hints in the poem that ultimately it is the poet who maintains control, and not just in the sense that he plays the role of a rather bizarre praeceptor amoris. Giving words the power to determine what you see or do not see has been the project of the elegiac poet all along, and just two poems earlier Am.

3.12 comes close to blowing the gaff on the reality effect of Ovid's affair with Corinna. When in 3.14 the poet asserts that he will believe the girl if she just says ‘non feci', those two words may hint that nothing that she is supposed to have done in the three books of Amores actually happened: fecit poeta Publius Ouidius Naso.? It was always and only a question of stories, fabulae, fama, about amor, motivated by the poet's desire not for a girl but for his own immortal fama. Ovid closes a collection of elegies by shutting up fama. Another poetry sequence, that of Sulpicia, opens with an exuberant embrace of farma:!™ Tandem uenit amor, qualem texisse pudori quam nudasse alicui sit mihi fama magis.!® exorata meis illum Cytherea Camenis

There is a similar pun at Her. 17.167—70 forma quoque est oneri; nam quo constantius ore |

laudamur uestro, iustius ille timet. | quae iuuat, ut nunc est, eadem mihi gloria damno est, | et melius famae uerba dedisse fuit: the glory of her beauty is to her detriment, and Helen thinks that it would be better ‘to deceive public opinion’ by secretly giving in to Paris’ advances; but

in so doing she will in fact ensure an endless supply of uerba about her fama 10.

u-

368

So Hardie 2002a: 240.

10% On Sulpicia 1 and its dealings with fama see Santirocco 1979; Hinds 1987; Lowe 1988; Hallett 1989; Flaschenriem 1999; Hallett 2006; Lyne 2007: 348-54.

Tránkle 1990 on lines 1—2 takes fama as either (i) the subject of the relative clause, with pudori sit the predicate of the sentence, or (ii) as the predicate, in the sense mala fama, with texisse and nudasse as subject infinitives, with a preference for the latter.

Readings

attulit in nostrum deposuitque sinum. exsoluit promissa Venus: mea gaudia narret,

369

5

dicetur si quis non habuisse sua. non ego signatis quicquam mandare tabellis,

ne legat id nemo quam meus ante, uelim, sed peccasse iuuat, uultus componere famae taedet: cum digno digna fuisse ferar.

10

Sulpicia 1 ([Tib.] 3.13)

At last love has arrived, and the rumour that ] have concealed it would shame me

more than would the report that 1 have revealed it to someone. Won over by my Muses' prayers, Venus has brought and placed him in my arms. Venus has fulfilled her promise; let my joys be told of by any of whom it will be said that he has not

had his own joys. I would not choose to entrust my messages to sealed tablets, in order that no-one should read them before my lover. Rather | am pleased with my fault, and loathe to put on a front for rumour; may it be said of me that ] have met a worthy match.

Where Ovid ends his Arores by urging the girl to throw a veil of pudor over her indiscretions in order to preserve her fama, Sulpicia opens her opus by revealing all, wishing that it may be said of her that concealment would have been more shameful than revelation, so shattering the normal relationship between pudor and amor.!% Alison Keith (1997) makes the attractive suggestion that Sulpicia models her affair on the experience of

Dido in Aeneid 4, but makes a virtue of what had been Dido's downfall: where Dido had lamented her loss of pudorand fama, Sulpicia will be shamed if Fama does not broadcast her love. Keith points especially to the parallels with the words of Fama at Aen. 4.191—2 uenisse Aenean Troiano sanguine cretum, | cui se pulchra uiro dignetur iungere Dido 'that Aeneas had arrived, born of Trojan blood, to whom fair Dido sees fit to unite herself as her man’. What Matthew Santirocco (1979: 235) refers to as the 'gratuitous indirect

discourse' in Sulpicia's poem is cleverly in keeping with the reported speech in which Virgil conveys what Fara said: Fama after all is reported speech.

The last line ends with a fama word, ferar," governing more indirect speech, cum digno digna fuisse. The poem goes from the beginning of Sulpicia's love affair (tandem

uenit) to its final memorialization in a way that looks

forward to a harmonious reconciliation of fama and amor, as if inscribed on

105 Cf Ov. Am. 1.2.32 et Pudor et castris quidquid Amoris obest.

10 Cf eg. Met. 15.875-6 super alta perennis | astra ferar; see Lyne 2007: 350, whose further parallels support taking ferar as a confident future rather than a subjunctive.

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The love of fame and the fame of love

a tombstone.'"* Curiously it is only the female writer Sulpicia who is able to envisage, if not perhaps realize, a completely liberated and unanxious reconciliation of amor and fama. Different again is the strategy of Propertius, who in 4.11 takes his farewell of elegy by putting words into the mouth of a female speaker who subscribes whole-heartedly to the values of an active masculine, public, world in which fama is the crown for great deeds that match an inherited nobility. In her opening reprimand to her grieving husband Cornelia links her own fama to the greatness of Paullus Aemilius Lepidus and of her own ancestors: 11-12 quid mihi coniugium Paulli, quid currus auorum | profuit aut famae pignora tanta meae? ‘What use to me has been my marriage to Paullus, what the triumphal chariot of my forefathers, or the great pledges of my good name?’ The resemblance of Cornelia’s children to their father is the guarantee of her own good name as a woman, i.e. her reputation for chastity, and also

promises the replication of masculine fama through the achievements of the next generation. In her self-defence before the judges of the underworld Cornelia appeals to the fama and tituli of her male ancestors, appropriating

to herself the topics of the laudatio funebris," 29-32: si cui fama fuit per auita tropaea decori, aera Numantinos nostra loquuntur auos;

altera materni hos exaequat turba Libones, et domus est titulis utraque fulta suis. If the fame won through the trophies of ancestors has brought anyone distinction, our bronzes name our ancestors Numantian; another crowd, the Libones on my mother's side, equals these, and each of the two houses is supported by its own special honours.

Cornelia herself is a link in the chain of exemplarity which encourages the perpetuation of the good fama of past generations in the deeds of future generations: 44 quin et erat magnae pars imitanda domus [Cornelia] 'nay, even in a great house [Cornelia] was a part worthy of imitation’. The matrona Cornelia is untouched by the kind of stain that generates the bad fama of the elegiac puella and her poet-lover (41—2, 45—6); rather she has earned the generosi honores ‘noble honours’ (61) that come with the production of three children. She enjoins her daughter to imitate herself in taking only one husband, a route to a female version of the triumph: 71-2 haec est 108 See Flaschenriem 1999 for the points in this sentence, comparing Prop. 4.11.36 ut lapide hoc uni nupta fuisse legar. 109 See Hutchinson 2006 on 29-32.

Readings

feminei merces extrema triumphi, | laudat ubi emeritum libera fama torum ‘this is the ultimate reward of a woman's triumph, when gossip freely praises her conjugal service as duly completed*!!? The uncontrollable tongues of gossip that in another context produce the fabula, talk about town, of elegiac shame, now contribute to the praise of the kind of militia amoris (an image triggered by the word emeritum) that is practised in the conception and painful parturition of children. Fame conventionally reaches the skies; in the last couplet of 4.11 Cornelia concludes her apology, and also brings an end to Propertian love elegy, by claiming for her soul a more literal ascent to the heavens to join her famous ancestors: 101-2 (reading Heinsius' auis in line 102) moribus et caelum patuit; sum digna merendo | cuius honoratis ossa

uehantur auis 'to those of good character even the heaven is open: through my merits I deserve that my bones be borne to my honoured ancestors’.

Dante: fame and generational continuity, fame and love I turn now to a text that is as much concerned with fame, the fame both of its subject matter and of its author, as is the Aeneid, and which is even

more severe than the Aeneid when it comes to putting fame in its proper place.''' Dante's Commedia provides many settings for an exploration of the relationships between fame, love and generational continuity. Ricardo Quinones discusses the several scenes in the Inferno where ‘like the reliance on fame, the total dependency on children within the earthly city is dramatized as a source of self-disappointment’.''* But in two cases a striving for achievement that in itself might be praiseworthy is vitiated by a failure to give due regard to the importance of generational continuity. Firstly, Ulysses’ irrepressible search of ‘virtute e conoscenza' (Inf. 26.120). At the beginning of his speech in Inferno 26 Ulysses identifies himselfas 'not-Aeneas' in terms of concern for the demands of self-perpetuation through family. When he left Circe, who had detained him at the place that would only be named Gaeta by the later hero Aeneas (who in so doing would record the aeterna fama of his nurse, as Virgil puts it, Aen. 7.2), Ulysses says that his burning

desire to experience the world could be overcome by (Inf. 26.94—6) ‘né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta | del vecchio padre, né '| debito amore | lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta’ ‘neither sweet feelings for my son, nor pity for my

! N

On the phrase libera fama at Ov. Met. 15.853 see Ch. 5 p. 166. [n general on the Commedia as a poem of fame see Boitani 2007: 140-5.

112

Quinones

1999: 47.

198.1: 73-90; Scaetta

1896; Fyler

372

The love of fame and the fame of love old father, nor the love owed to Penelope to make her happy’. ‘Dolcezza di figlio’ and ‘pieta del vecchio padre’ remind us by contrast of Aeneas’ deeply affective attachment to his son and father,’ and to the fama that will be realized through his blood-line. The biological father-son relationship is mirrored in the teacher-pupil relationship between Brunetto Latini and Dante in Inferno 15. Dante’s mind is imprinted with (83) ‘la cara e buona imagine paterna’ ‘the dear and good

image of his father’, the image of his former teacher, a phrase which echoes that used by Aeneas when he tells the shade of his real father, Anchises, that

it was the repeated appearances of tua tristis imago ‘your grieving image’ that drove him to visit the underworld ( Aer. 6.695-6). Latini is one of those ‘clerics and men of letters, great and of great fame (grandi e di gran fama’), all soiled sodomy. humanist common

with the same sin while in the world’ (Inf. 15.107-8), the sin of John Freccero suggests that there is a deeper connection between fame and sodomy, in that 'the humanist and pederast have in the evasion of their own temporality in the pursuit of an eternal

ideal! 4 Dante tells Latini that, while he was on earth, (15.85) 'm'insegnavate come l'uom s'etterna' ‘you taught me how man makes himself eternal’; in his parting words Latini reveals what kind of eternity this is: 119-20 ‘Sieti

raccomandato il mio Tesoro, | nel qual io vivo ancora, e piü non cheggio' ‘let me commend

my Tesoro to you, in which I still live, and that is all I

ask’.''5 Freccero argues that ‘the seal of Sodom stands for the refusal to be bound by limitations of age or family or gender... these are sinners who refused progeny of the body (without however refusing the body itself) and

sought instead a purely individual immortality. Aeneas' meeting in the underworld with Anchises is played out again, in positive mode, in another fifteenth canto, in Dante's meeting with his greatgreat-grandfather Cacciaguida in Paradiso 15. Here the biological ancestor replaces Dante's literary ‘ancestor’, Virgil, and redefines his descendant's mission of fame as one of theologico-moral exemplarity (Par. 17.124— 42). The Parade of Heroes - and Sinners — that processes through the Commedia is of course not a parade of the descendants of the pilgrim Dante, but the poet does have a role in their future, in that the future life promised to his poem will also preserve the fame of the exemplary saints

113 The point is made by Quinones 1999: 32.

1!

Freccero 1991: 67.

115 This is a bookish version of the fame that according to Brunetto, Tesoro volgarizzato 11.vii.72, is the reward for good works (cited by Leonardi, 1991-8 on Inf. 15.85): ‘gloria dona al prode uomo una seconda vita, cioe a dire, che dopo la sua morte, la nominanza che rimane di sue buone opere, mostra ch'egli sia ancora in vita’. 116 Freccero 1991: 70.

Readings

and sinners.! From a theological perspective futurity is guaranteed not through a terrestrial bloodline, but, as Jeffrey Schnapp puts it, a natural genealogy is transcended through a supernatural genealogy, as blood kin-

ship is transumed into brotherhood in Christ.''* The blood link has already been stretched out for three generations, from father-son to great-greatgrandfather-great-great-grandson, so attenuating the emotional impact of the Virgilian reunion of father and son;!? looking forward the biological bloodline is ofno relevance at all. Dante’s shouting abroad of the fame of sinners and saints, like a wind

that strikes hardest on the highest peaks (Par. 17.1334), is to be propagated in this world. To see what happens to fame in Paradise itself we need to go back to the sphere of Mercury in Cantos 5—7. Mercury is the place for those good spirits who were active in their lives in order to achieve ‘onore e fama’

(Par. 6.113—14). Justinian contrasts the desire for fame with the

love of God: 6.115-17 ‘e quando li disiri poggian quivi, | si disviando, pur convien che i raggi | del vero amore in sü poggin men vivi’ ‘and when desires deviate in this direction, the rays of true love must rise upward with less living force’. Justinian’s account of the history of the Roman Eagle is a transvaluation of the Parade of Roman Heroes in Aeneid 6,'-° a pageant of Fame continued into a history of divine justice in God’s vengeance on human sin through the Crucifixion, to be followed by the paradoxical, but just, divine vengeance on Jerusalem for the Crucifixion. The values of pagan Fama are replaced by Justice, whose understanding requires intellectual clarity; in the sphere of Mercury both Justice and Knowledge are closely bound up with divine Love, connections that underpin much else in the Commedia. Diligite iustitiam ‘love justice’ is the text spelled out by the souls

in the sphere of Jupiter, the sphere of Justice (Par. 18.91);'"' the Commedia's

u

o

E

Dante's (poem's) future life (on earth): Par. 17.97-9 (Cacciaguida to Dante) ‘Non vo’ peró ch’a’ tuoi vicini invidie, | poscia che s'infutura la tua vita | vie pid là che’ punir di lor perfidie’; Dante's role in the future fame of the Commedia’s parade of souls: 136-8 ‘Pero ti son mostrate in queste rote, | nel monte e nella valle dolorosa | pur l'anime che son di fama note.’ !!5 On the Christian appropriation of the Virgilian scene see Schnapp 1991; 280 n. 7 on ‘Dante’s lifelong effort to repudiate the genetic theory of nobility'; Hollander 1989 (misunderstanding the Virgilian text). On the transumption of Virgilian pietas into Christian pietà see Ball 1991. 119 See Schnapp 1991: 150. 120 But the values of the Virgilian Parade are not entirely effaced: Par. 6.46-8 ‘onde Torquato e Quinzio, che dal cirro | negletto fu nomato, i Deci e' Fabi | ebber la farra che volontier mirro. 12!

There is much on the connection between Justice and Love in Kirkpatrick 1995: 39-51 'Dante

and Chaucer: The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales’; 42 ‘In the full perspective of the Commedia the implications of the interplay between Justice and Love are reflected in a variety of formal features.' Cf. Dante, De monarchia 1.11.13-14 praeterea, quemadmodum cupiditas

373

374

The love of fame and the fame of love

journey to God proceeds equally through the heat of an affective theology, and the light of an intellectual theology, represented in the sphere of the Sun by Saints Francis and Dominic respectively: Par. 11.37—9 'L'un fu tutto serafico in ardore, | l'altro per sapienza in terra fue | di cherubica luce uno splendore' ‘The one was all seraphic in his ardour, the other through his

wisdom on earth was brilliant with cherubic light." In the sphere of Mercury Justinian, within the same terzina, both uses

his own speaking name to make the point about the replacement of pagan Fama by Justice, and makes the connection between Justice and Love: Par.

6.10-12 “Cesare fui e son Justiniano, | che, per voler del primo amor ch’? sento, | d'entro le leggi trassi il troppo e ’] vano' ‘Caesar I was and Justinian I am, who through the will of the first love [i.e. the Holy Spirit] that I feel, removed from the laws what was excessive and empty.' In the next canto Beatrice stresses the necessity of love for understanding, as she sets out to explain to Dante the paradox that the just vengeance of the Crucifixion was itself justly avenged by the sack of Jerusalem: 7.58—60 ‘Questo decreto, frate, sta sepulto | a li occhi di ciascuno il cui ingegno | ne la fiamma d'amor non é adulto' ‘My brother, this decree is hidden from the eyes of anyone

whose intelligence did not grow up in the flame of love.'?^ The brightness of fama is transmuted into the flames of love, which are in turn inseparable from the brightness of knowledge and revelation; in these cantos chiaro and cognates are used in senses that slide between the brilliance of Glory, the clarity of Knowledge, and the brightness of Love. Justinian ends his speech with a terzina, given double emphasis by its position at the beginning of a new canto, and by the switch from Italian to Latin, containing a hymn of praise to the glory, or fama, of God, in which it is impossible narrowly to

habitualem iustitiam quodammodo, quantumcumque pauca, obnubilat, sic karitas seu recta dilectio illam acuit atque dilucidat... karitas maxime iustitiam uigorabit, et potior potius. 122 Intellect and affect are both implicated in the realization of how the fama of Rome's earthly kingdom is put in the shade by the history of Redemption: Par. 6.82-90 ‘Ma ció che '| segno che parlar mi face | fatto avea prima a poi era fatturo | per lo regno mortal ch'a lui soggiace, | diventa in apparenza poco e scuro, | se in mano al terzo Cesare si mira | con occhio chiaro e con affetto puro; | che la viva giustizia che mi spira, | li concedette, in mano a quel ch'i dico, | gloria di far vendetta alla sua ira.” 123 Beatrice has already stressed the connection between the flames of love and the brightness of knowledge and revelation, programmatically at Par. 5.1-12 'S'jo ti fiammeggio nel caldo d'amore | di là dal modo che "n terra si vede, | si che del viso tuo vinco il valore, | non ti maravigliar, ché ció procede | da perfetto veder, che, come apprende, | cosi nel bene appreso move il piede. | Io veggio ben si come già resplende | ne l’intelletto tuo l'etterna luce, | che, vista, sola e sempre amore accende; | e s'altra cosa vostro amor seduce, | non é se non di quella alcun vestigio, | mal conosciuto, che quivi traluce’: this will be true of the earthly amor gloriae of those in the sphere of Mercury.

Readings

pin down the senses of the divine light and of the fire in the souls of the blessed: 7.1—3 “Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaoth, | superillustrans claritate tua | felices ignes horum malacoth! ‘Hosanna, Holy God of hosts, who from on

high illuminates the blessed fires of these kingdoms.’

In the sphere of Mercury the dynamics of earthly fama are negated.'** Fama is inherently expansive and aggrandizing, her devotees strive to be first and best, to be known throughout the world. But, as Justinian says, Mercury is a ‘picciola stella’ ‘little star’ (Par. 6.112). Those who pursued fame on earth are content with their little home, through an understanding of the commensurability between it and the true measure of their earthly pursuit for fame; the justice of this works positively on their desires, to make them content with their lot — Justice and Love once again (6.118-23; 121—3

*Quindi addolcisce la viva giustizia | in noi l'affetto si, che non si puote | torcer già mai ad alcuna nequizia' “Then living justice so sweetens our own affections, that they can never be twisted to any wickedness.’'*” Dante already knows that Mercury is (5.128—9) ‘la spera | che si vela a’ mortai con altrui raggi" ‘the sphere that veils itself from mortals with another's rays’,'~° obscured by the greater light of the sun. At this point he is addressing the soul of Justinian: he does not yet know who he is, but he sees clearly how the soul is ‘nested within its own light’ (5.124—5); in its joy at Dante's desire to be enlightened about the souls of Mercury (5.119-20 ‘se disii | di noi chiarirti, a tuo piacer ti sazia’), the soul grows brighter still, hiding itself through its own excessive light, like the sun. It is as if the radiance of the fama of a person could paradoxically subsist independently of knowledge of the identity of that person; but of course this is the radiance not of fama, but of love.'*” In the sphere of Mercury love has taken over the expansiveness of

A

12

e

12

This too is perhaps a correction of Virgil, for in Aeneid 4 Mercury is closely Fama, and his message to Aeneas is of the need to think of the future glory Cf. Par. 3.70-2 (Piccarda Donati on the grounds for the contentment of the sphere of the Moon) ‘Frate, la nostra volontà quieta | virtü di carità, che fa

associated with of Rome. spirits in the volerne | sol quel

ch’avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta. Leonardi notes on 6.121-3: ‘la donna parla in nome della

carità, l'imperatore in nome della giustizia": this is only partially true, since love is inextricable from justice in Justinian's account of the contentment of the souls of Mercury. 126 Cf. Convivio 2.13.11, Mercury, the planet which ‘pid va velata de li raggi del sole che null'altra stella: 77 In this the spirits of Mercury behave in the same way as the soul of Beatrice. The close interdependence is signalled at the moment of the ascent to Mercury: Par. 5.94-6 'Quivi la donna mia vid’io si lieta, | come nel lume di quel ciel si mise, | che pit lucente se ne fe ’l

pianeta Canto 5 is framed by two parallel descriptions of the dazzling effects on Dante of the love-filled appearances of Beatrice and Justinian: at 136—7 the bright soul of Justinian ‘per piu letizia si mi nascose | dentro al suo raggio la figura santa’; cf. Beatrice’s brightness at the beginning of the canto: 3 ‘si che dell'occhi tuoi vinco il valore:

375

The love of fame and the fame oflove

fama. At the moment that Dante first enters the sphere of Mercury, he sees moving towards Beatrice and himself ‘more than a thousand splendours’, compared in a simile to fish in a fish-pond flocking towards food (5.100—4). This is an image of undifferentiated community, in strongest contrast to the individualism of the devotees of fama. Each one of these bright souls sings out (but each one as part of the collectivity), (5.105) ‘Ecco chi crescera

li nostri amor? ‘See the man who will make our loves grow.’ The words echo Virgil’s tenth Eclogue: Gallus will carve his ‘loves’ on trees, and (54) crescent illae, crescetis, amores ‘the trees will grow, and you, loves, will grow’; his words are picked up by Virgil in the envoi to the poem (72-4): the Muses will make Virgil's songs 'very great, maxima, for Gallus, cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas | quantum uere nouo uiridis se subicit alnus ‘my love for whom hour by hour grows as fast as the green alder shoots up in early spring’. Gallus’ love for Lycoris, and Virgil's love for Gallus, are both tangled up with the two poets' love of literary fame; in Dante's allusion that is stripped away, at least as regards the inhabitants of Mercury; Dante may be another matter.'** In Dante's Paradise the desire for earthly fame is transformed without residue

into a divine

love; in Virgil's earthly paradise, the new

Golden

Age of Augustus, the divine personification of human sexual desire, Venus,

channels her erotic power into the making of the ultimate symbol of earthly glory, the Shield of Aeneas. Two very different, totalizing, strategies for containing the excessive desire whether for fame or for erotic fulfilment.

Petrarch's De secreto conflictu curarum mearum? The history of the relationship between Fama and Amor after Dante is largely the history of the failure to realize Dante's sovereign mastery over the two in the Commedia. The roles of Fiammetta and Laura in, respectively,

Boccaccio's Amorosa visione and Petrarch's Trionfi cannot be understood without reference to the role of Beatrice in Dante's Commedia, as the object of desire that mediates between the questing poet and the ultimate fulfilment 128 The inhabitants of Dante's Mercury realize in the context of humanity what God the Father praises in his own Son at Milton, Paradise Lost 3.311—14 ‘because in thee | Love hath

abounded more than Glory abounds, | Therefore thy Humiliation shall exalt | With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne’ The difference when it comes to divine glory is that the valuing of love above glory will lead only to the greater glory of the Son, and to the glorification of mankind in God. 12

*

376

I cite the Secretum with reference to the chapter and section numbers of Dotti

page numbers of Carrara 1955).

1993 (and the

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of desire in the vision of the mystic rose, a closure that sublimates the poet's desire to complete a great and famous text through the assimilation of personal volition to the divine love that governs the world: Par. 33.143—5 ‘ma già volgeva il mio disio e '| velle, | si come rota ch'igualmente é mossa, | l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle' 'but now my desire and my will were turned like a wheel that is moved evenly, by the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Both Amorosa visione and the Trionfi, long dream visions in terza rima, attempt to carve out a space for their own authors' fama within a field dominated by the presence of the Commedia; in both the desire for fame is pursued through a plot in which the transcendence of a

purely earthly love for a woman is at best dubiously achieved." In turn the Italians prompt the Englishman Chaucer's exploration of the same terrain in The House of Fame (see Ch. 15).'"! In Petrarch the connection between fama and amor is developed to the point where the two become completely inextricable, in the person of Laura. In terms of the Ovidian model Laura is both Daphne and the laurel into which Daphne is transformed. The temporal sequence of Ovid's aetiological tale is collapsed, so that Laura, whether in life or death, is simultaneously the human object of desire and the vegetable symbol of the poet's desire for fame. The Apollo and Daphne story in the Metamorphosesis the foundation myth as it were for Petrarch and Laura, but Latin love elegy is also an important model, not least in the ways in which it deals with fama. In Rime sparse | Petrarch uses one of elegy's central terms: 9—11 ‘Ma ben veggio or si come al popol tutto | favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente | di me medesmo meco mi vergogno’ ‘But now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of all the people, so that I am often ashamed of myself.’ Favola translates the technical term for the fame and shame of the Roman poet-lover, fabula ‘talk of the town’. 132

N

130 On the attempt in the Trionfi to reach a final resting place for desire see Ch. 12 pp. 457-60. '31 David Wallace observes of Amorosa visione and The House of Fame that Boccaccio and Chaucer were at this stage in their careers ‘grappling with remarkably similar problems, and that both were striving ‘to accommodate the influence of Dante within a French-derived dream poem format’ (Wallace 1985: 6). 13 On Petrarch’s knowledge of the elegists see Ullmann 1973. Augustinus uses fabula as part of the remedia amoris at Secr. 3.12.6 (pp. 182-4) pudeat ergo senem amatorem dici; pudeat esse tam diu uulgi fabula; et, si te nec uerum glorie decus allicit nec deterret ignominia, alieno

tamen pudori uite tue mutatio succurrat. est enim fame consulendum proprie, ni fallor, etsi ob aliud nichil, at saltem ut amici liberentur ab infamia mentiendi. quod, cum omnibus

prouidendum sit, tibi aliquanto diligentius, cui tantus de te loquentium populus absoluendus est: 'magnus enim labor est magne custodia fame.' [ Afr. 7.292] hoc si Scipioni tuo truculentissimum hostem consulentem facis in Africe tue libris, patere nunc ex ore pii patris idem

377

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The love of fame and the fame of love

Both the Canzoniere and the Trionfi emplot large-scale narratives of love and fame.!** I discuss the Trionfi in Chapter 12; here I turn my attention to the analysis of the relationship between love and fame in the dialogue in the third book of the Secretum between Franciscus, the Petrarch figure, and Augustinus. The full title of the dialogue is De secreto conflictu curarum mearum ‘On the secret conflict of my cares’. My focus willbe on the conflicted and unresolved nature of Petrarch's attempt to ‘psychoanalyse’ his attachments to love and fame. At the end of the Secretum Franciscus sets himself the future task of the integration of his self, sparsa anime fragmenta!" recolligam ‘I will gather together the scattered fragments of my soul’, but then admits sed desiderium frenare non ualeo ‘but I cannot rein in my desire’ (Secr. 3.18.5, 7 (p. 214)). His last words are a prayer to God for psychic

wholeness, but whether the prayer will be answered is left open. In Secretum 3 Petrarch’s Augustinian inner voice tells him that he is still held down by two adamantine chains or golden manacles, amor and gloria (3.2.1 (p. 132); gloria is later identified with fama). In order to concentrate

the force of his spiritual remedies Augustinus separates the two, applying his healing touch first to amor and then to gloria. But discussion of amor quickly leads back to fama. Franciscus begins by distinguishing bad and good objects of love, the former defined as lust for a disreputable and shameful woman

(3.2.5 (p. 132) si infamem turpemque mulierem ardeo). Laura, by contrast, is “a rare specimen of virtue’, and as such the spur to Franciscus’ desire for fama. The key passage is 3.4.5-8 (p. 144): There is one thing I cannot be silent on, whether that is to be attributed to gratitude or silliness. Whatever I am, I owe to her; and I should never have attained the modest name and reputation I have (ad hoc, siquid est, nominis aut glorie), if she had not

fostered, through the power of my noble feelings for her, the feeble seeds of virtue that nature has placed in my heart. It was she who beckoned my youthful soul away from everything base and dragged me back with a hook, as they say, and forced me to have higher expectations. Why should I not have been transformed into the character of the one that I loved? (Quidni enim

in amatos

mores

transformarer?)

But not one sharp-tongued reviler (tam mordax conuitiator) has been found, to fix his canines on her good name (qui huius famam canino dente contingeret). There

tibi consilium prodesse. This is the other side of the coin to the claim that Laura a uulgi consortio te segregauit. !? On love and fame in the Trionfi see Ch. 12 pp. 444-8. 14 Offen seen as an allusion to the Rime sparse. 75. On the presence here of features of Provencal lyric tradition see Rico 1974: 262-9; 268-9 on the opposition of ‘fals’ amors; love for a courtesan, and ‘fin’ amors:

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is no-one who would dare say he had ever seen anything reprehensible, I will not say in her conduct, but even in a word or gesture. And even those who had left no reputation untouched spared her out of admiration and respect. It is not at all strange, then, that her celebrated reputation also inspired me with a desire for

greater reputation (si hec tam celebris fama michi quoque desiderium fame clarioris attulit), and softened the hard toil by which I might get what I hoped for. What else did I desire as a young man but that I should please her alone, who alone had pleased me? And you know how many cares and labours I subjected myselfto before it was time, scorning a thousand allurements of pleasure. And now you bid me to forget or lessen my love of one who set me apart from mingling with the common crowd, who has been my guide in all things, has spurred on my lethargic mind and aroused my drowsy spirit.

The connection between Laura and Petrarch's fame is first made via the idea of virtue, the natural seed of which in Petrarch's breast is tended by

the noble feelings of the supremely virtuous lady. Implied is the Ciceronian maxim, very frequently appealed to by Petrarch, that 'glory follows virtue like a shadow’ ( Tusc. 1.109).^^ Through the erotic cliché of the transformation of the lover into the character of the beloved,"

virtuous Franciscus

becomes virtuous Laura. But in the following development we find that the shadow has become the source of light: tam celebris fama michi quoque desiderium fame clarioris attulit. It is the brightness of the fame that the poet wishes for himself with which he identifies in the person of Laura. This narcissistic identification seems to introduce a confusion between the male and female varieties of fama, for the kind of high profile to which the fame-hungry poet aspires is different from the woman's reputation for selfcontained virtue, the reputation of not being infamis, of not being spoken about for the wrong reasons."? There is also the confusion of the husteron proteron of Petrarch and the fame of Laura, since the widespread fame of Laura is the effect, not the

cause, of the fame of Petrarch's poetry, as Laura states in her posthumous conversation with the poet at Triumphus Mortis 2.127-32: S'al mondo tu piacesti agli occhi miei, questo mi taccio; pur quel dolce nodo mi piacque assai che intorno al cor avei;

136

See Dotti 1993 on 17.1, referring to Petrarch, Fam.

1.2.25; 15.1.8; 15.14.27; 23.11.1; Rem.

1.92;

RVF 119.99; see also Ch. I p. 25. 1? On the topos see Orcibal 1959. 138 On the troubadour motifof lauzengiers or malparlieri, who spread malicious gossip about the poet and his lady, see Fenzi 1992: 366 n. 72.

379

380

The love of fame and the fame of love

e piacemi il bel nome, se vero odo,

che lunge e presso col tuo dir m'acquisti; né mai in tuo amor richiesi altro che ’l modo.

If in the world you pleased my eyes, of this I keep silent; but that sweet knot which bound your heart pleased me much; and the fair name which your words won for

me far and near, if what I hear is true, pleases me; the only thing in your love that I found wanting was a limit to it. A further confusion concerns the poet's relationship to his public. Petrarch, imitating models in Propertius, Ovid and Dante,'?? claims that his sole desire was that he and Laura should be united in the mutual and exclusive love of each for the other, ut illi uel soli placerem, que michi uel sola placuerat.

Laura led him apart from the company of the uulgus. Yet, as Petrarch and Augustinus are both well aware, the greatness of the poet's fame is in direct proportion to the number of his readers, now and in future centuries. fama is, as Franciscus agrees with Augustinus, (3.14.4 (p. 190)) richil... aliud quam sermonem de aliquo uulgatum ac sparsum per ora multorum ‘nothing other than talk about someone that has been broadcast and scattered over the lips of many’.!4° The coexistence of the desire for a relationship with

Laura sealed off from the world and the desire for fame is explained once we see that there is a strong element of narcissism in both. In the mystification of his self-transformation into Laura, Petrarch necessarily converts love for

the other into love of self - which is perhaps what it always was. fata is the love of self realized through the approbation of others; the self sees itself magnified in the reported image of others, in proportion to the number of those who praise. Yet this is also a scattering and fragmentation of the self through the multiplicity of reflections. The self recoils in disgust in order to protect its integrity, but at the same time cannot free itself from its love of fame — because that is a love of self. Gordon Braden offers a penetrating analysis of ‘the narcissistic convolutions of [Petrarch’s] involvement with his public, noting that 'by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction, and that ‘the isolation within which Petrarch locates himself with his scorn for those on whom he makes his impression manifests something 19 Prop. 2.7.17-20 hinc etenim tantum meruit mea gloria nomen, | gloria ad hibernos lata Borysthenidas. | tu niihi sola places; placeam tibi, Cynthia, solus: | hic erit et patrio nomine pluris amor (note that the shared solitude of the self-absorbed couple occurs in the context of thoughts of gloria reaching the end of the earth); Ov. Ars 1.42 elige cui dicas ‘tu mihi sola places’, Dante, Inf. 2.103-5 ‘Disse: “Beatrice, loda di Dio vera, | ché non soccorri quei che t'amó tanto, | ch'usci per te de la volgare schiera?" 19 Augustinus goes on to gloss his definition of gloria/fama at 3.14.5 (p. 190) est igitur flatus quidam atque aura uolubilis et, quod egrius feras, flatus est hominum plurimorum.

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inescapably narcissistic in the career of writing itself: an intersection, if you will, of the myth of Apollo and Daphne with that of Narcissus and

Echo’.'"! Augustinus spells out the double bind: 3.14.5 (p. 190) ‘Consider how perverse are your judgements: you take delight in the gossip of those whose deeds you condemn (quorum enim facta condemnas, eorum sermunculis delectaris)’; cf. 3.18.1 (p. 212) populorum uoces, quas odisse simul et secutum

esse te stupeo ‘I am amazed that at one and the same time you hate and pursue the words of the people’. odi et amo. This self-division, loathing and loving, resurrects an experience of ancient writers that predates the Christian psychotherapy of Augustinus. This had been the dilemma experienced by Horace in the last two poems of Epistles 1, in his negotiation of a Callimachean exclusiveness, verging on a narcissism that yet longs for the recognition of a worldwide public. "Iouis auribus ista | seruas: fidis enim manare poetica mella | te solum, tibi pulcher’ ‘You store up these things for the ears of Jupiter, confident that you alone drip poetic honey, beautiful in your own eyes' (Ep. 1.19, 43—5). This is the sneer of the hostile critic responding to Horace's own contempt for the uentosa plebs ‘windy people’ (37); Jupiter (or Augustus) is the ultimately exclusive audience of one, but

tibi pulcher goes still further: this is the self-judgement of Narcissus, who has eyes only for himself.'^* Horace breaks off the discussion in disgust. But the final poem, Ep. 1.20, reveals a deeper unease, as Horace replays the Platonic love affair between poet and fame in satirical mode. The desire for fame is ironically presented in the figure of the book of Epistles as a slave-boy desirous of prostituting himself in order to reach a larger audience. The slave-boy/book is both the child of the bachelor poet, who has no heir born of his own body, and also the deliciae, the toyboy, object of sexual desire

for Horace himself — a sibling of Ligurinus, the boy whose fleeing form Horace pursues in his dreams in the opening poem of the fourth book of Odes. The slave-boy is both object and projection of the poet's own desire, both a homoerotic equivalent of the elegiac puella and embodiment of the fame that is angled for by the publication of the shameful affair with the puella.

^!

Braden 1986: 146. See also above pp. 336-7.

nal

Mayer

^5

1994 on fidis compares Cat. 22.17 tam gaudet in se tamque se ipse miratur, Cic. Tusc.

5.63 neminem cognoui poetam... qui sibi non optimus uideretur. Cf. also Hor. Ep. 2.2.106-8 ridentur mala qui componunt carmina; uerum | gaudent scribentes et se uenerantur et ultro, | si taceas, laudant quicquid scripsere beati. See Hardie 20024: 297-8, making the point about the ring with the allusion to the Socratic daemon in Ep. 1.1, a philosophically acceptable form of solipsism.

381

382

The love of fame and the fame of love

Horace’s relationship to his personified book reveals a commonality between the autobiographical project of the Episties and the adventures of the ego of the Latin love elegist. Horace’s dilemma is also that of Ovid, who both wishes to broadcast his puella’s name to the world, ostensibly as a bribe to the girl to satisfy his physical desire, but perhaps in truth to satisfy his own desire for fame, and at the same time, in Am. 3.12,

professes horror at the thought that he has to share her with hoi polloi. The interchangeability of the biological and the literary is very marked in

lines 7-10:! fallimur, an nostris innotuit illa libellis? sic erit — ingenio prostitit illa meo.

et merito: quid enim formae praeconia feci? uendibilis culpa facta puella mea est. Am I mistaken, or was it through my books that she became well known? That will be it - my genius prostituted her. And serve me right! Why did I advertise her beauty? It's my own fault that my girl has been put on sale. Fame through textual existence is equated with prostitution of the body. Line 8 alludes to Hor. Ep. 1.20.2, addressed to the slave-boy/book who wants to be set out for sale, made smooth and neat by the booksellers' pumice-stone ( scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus); correspondingly

uendibilis can refer to the sale of the book as well as to the sale of her body by the girl (as Hor. Ep. 1.20 opens by giving the addresses of the booksellers in Rome). In alluding to Ep. 1.20 Ovid exploits paradoxes of love and fame indwelling in love elegy from at least the time of Propertius'

Monobiblos.!4° I will end with a passage of Petrarch that sums up much of what I have been discussing. The suspicion raised by Ovid in Am. 3.12, and entertained by many of his readers, that Corinna has no more than a verbal existence is one to which Petrarch, doubtless conscious of the Ovidian precedent, opens himself in regard to Laura. In Epistolae familiares 2.9.18 Petrarch denies Giacomo Colonna’s suspicion that ‘I invented for myself the fair name of Laura (speciosum Lauree nomen), so that I should have a woman about whom I could talk, and on whose account many might talk about me; and that in truth the Laura in my mind was nothing, unless perhaps the laurels of !4 On which see also above p. 368. 16. Am, 3.12.9 formae praeconia hints at the forma/fama jingle: to act as the public crier of forma is to broadcast its fara (7 innotuit); cf. Her. 17.207 uolucris praeconia famae, beautiful Helen

on the subject of her own fara.

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poetry to which my long and unwearying studies bear witness that I aspire’. Colonna believes that Laura is merely an invented name, the pretext for the generation of words, the poet’s words which in turn trigger the words of others. propter quam de me multi loquerentur is general enough to cover, in the terms of Latin love elegy, both fabula, gossip about Petrarch’s affair with Laura, and fama, praise of Petrarch’s poetry, to which, as to the true goal of Petrarch’s desires, we are referred in the next sentence.

383

10 | Fame and blame, fame and envy: Spenserian personifications of the word

In a continuing exploration of the dichotomies of Fama, this chapter attends both to the attempt to police the boundaries between positively valued fame and negative kinds of report or valuation, and to the breakdown in the clearly articulated structures of Fama. I begin by briefly touching on some of the oppositions outlined in the Introduction (see Ch. | pp. 6-11). Fame, in the sense of the modern English word, bona fama, is antithetical to infamy, mala fama: both however are the product of the same processes of noising abroad, publishing. In English ‘fame’ is repeatedly rhymed with other words from the broader semantic field of fama: good fame is perpetuated in a ‘name’, but contrasted with ‘shame’ and ‘blame’. Public shame realized is the opposite of fame, but the fear of shame, or an internalized sense of shame

(merg-

ing into guilt and conscience), inhibits the kind of behaviour that could damage a person's good name, or fame. Fame and blame are more straightforwardly opposed, but as mirroring opposites also inextricably linked. Praise poetry and blame poetry form one of the oldest and most constant pairing of oppositions in Greek literature, and one which is carried over into the division of epideictic rhetoric into praise and blame, laudatio and uituperatio. There is a mirroring symmetry between the topics for praise or blame.' Blame is the typical mode in which envy gives expression to its hostility to another person." The perception of a person's elevation above the common crowd may provoke positive and negative reactions, admiration and emulation, on the one hand, envy and detraction on the other. In Pindar

M

the subject of the epinician poet's praise is also constantly the potential target of envy and blame, phthonos and momos (the open voice of envy). The praise poet must both attack the forces of envy and attempt to keep

See Fitzgerald 2007: 110-12 ‘Praise and blame’, on the complex cohabitation of the two in Martial's epigrams; on good and bad kinds of fama in Martial see above Ch. 8 pp. 327-9. Matthew Dickie has written a series of articles on envy in literary texts. He documents an important generic distinction between the relationship of praise and phthonos in epinician (where phthonos is a foil for praise) and in Roman satire, iamb and epigram (where phthonos is

w

disavowed).

384

Kóhnken 1981: 420-1.

Fame and blame, fame and envy

his own praise within safe limits, to avoid provoking an outburst of envy." Envy is likely to be a particular concern in the public life of any society where the political arena is marked by a high degree of competitiveness.” In the competitive political culture of the Roman Republic fame, or glory, was proverbially attended by envy:^ praise and envy are complementary reactions to the same achievements, or claims to achievement. The interconvertibility of the two is exploited even in situations where hostility might seem on the surface to be justified, and to be based on a correct assessment of an action.’ Thus for Cicero the ill-will, inuidia, that might arise as a result

of the execution of Roman citizens involved in the Catilinarian conspiracy should more truly be seen as a title to glory: Cat. 1.29 ‘I was always of the opinion that ill-will generated by virtuous deeds (inuidiam uirtute partam) should be regarded as glory, not ill-will. Envy, grudging ill-will, may be provoked by the perception of another's possession of any number of kinds of good, but it is particularly closely twinned with the good of fame, which envy is prompted to counter with fame's opposite, blame or detraction." Agricola's famous achievements in Britain serve only to stimulate the envy of Domitian (see Ch. 8 pp. 277-8). In the fairy-tale mode of Apuleius' Cupid and Psyche the quasi-divine fame of the beauty and good fortune of Psyche provokes the witchlike envy of her sisters (see Ch. 3 p. 120). Because of fame's inevitable exposure to envy, the poet is particularly obsessed with envy, since the only good securely possessed by the poet is the fame of his poetry, his words, whose power to endure may be invalidated if envy takes a hold. The poet himself also runs the risk of being accused of envy in his writings, of ill-founded and malicious backbiting or defamation, as opposed to constructive criticism. Envy touches the poet in another way, when an object of his praise becomes the target of envy. Fame and Envy are in competition with each other, a particular aspect of the eristic nature of Fama. This

^ On envy in Pindar see Goldhill 1991: 138-9, with further bibliography at 138 n. 228; Bulman

e

w

1992; Most 2003, with further bibliography at 133 n. 25.

See Walcot 1978: 16-18 on the close connection between the love of honour and envy in Greek culture in general. Otto 1890: 176; Kaster 2005: 88. Cf. e.g. Sall. Jug. 10.2 quod difficilimum inter mortalis est, gloria inuidiam uicisti, Vell. Pat. 1.9.6 quam sit adsidua eminentis fortunae comes inuidia altissimisque

RI

adhaereat, Demosth.

Olynth. 3.24; Hdt. 7.236; see also Ch. 7 p. 234.

For the different kinds of inuidia, (i) with reference to a principle of ‘right’, righteous anger, in

o

Greek nemesis, the justified indignatio of the satirist; (ii) not with reference to a principle of

‘right, but envy aroused simply by what is perceived as (another's) good, see the chart at Kaster 2005: 87. On good and bad kinds of envy in Greek culture see Walcot 1978: Ch. 2. Arist. Rhet. 1388a1-3 ‘The deeds or possessions which arouse the love of reputation and honour and the desire for fame, and the various gifts of fortune, are almost all subject to envy.' On the coupling of fame and detraction see Kiefer 1999: 21, with examples from early modern England.

385

386

Fame and blame, fame and envy

contest is not given formal expression in the series of Petrarchan Trionfi, but in the Africa Ennius foresees the triumph of Scipio’s fama, gloria over Inuidia (9.24—45): 34-6 mortalia Liuor | carpit enim; at Mors Inuidiam consumit et

arcet | ac procul a bustis abigit ‘for Envy gnaws on mortal things; but Death devours Envy, warding it off and driving it far from the tomb’. This is in line with Ovid’s programmatic assertion of the immortality of fame against envy's hold on the living in Am. 1.15: 7-8 (addressing Liuor edax) mortale est, quod quaeris opus; mihi fama perennis | quaeritur, in toto semper ut orbe canar ‘mortal is the work that you target; my goal is fame everlasting, to be sung of always over all the world’; 39—40 pascitur in uiuis Liuor; post fata quiescit, | cum suus ex merito quemue tuetur honos ‘Envy feeds on the living; after death she rests, and each man's work is accorded his due recognition. In Poetaster Ben Jonson dramatizes Ovid's contest between Envy and Fame,

and applies it to his own situation as a poet (see Ch. 13 pp. 523-5).” As we saw in the previous chapter, the lover, as well as the poet, is particularly vulnerable to blame and envy. The erotic is the sphere for the operation of both Virgil's Fama in Aeneid 4, and Ovid's Inuidia in Metamorphoses2. In Aeneid 4 the intervention of Famais part of an elaborate contest between fame, glory, good reputation, on the one side, and on the other shame, blame, and envy in the form of sexual jealousy. Similar dangers lie in wait for the good name of both men and women in the Roman de la rose. Envy is one of the vices portrayed on the outer wall of the garden: 26778 Langlois 'Envy finishes no hour without imputing some evil to blameless men. I believe that if she knew the noblest gentleman here or beyond the sea, she would want to defame him; and if he were so well trained that she

could neither entirely ruin his reputation nor bring him into low esteem, then she would want at least to deprecate his ability and, through her gossip, to minimize his honor' (transl. Dahlberg). Later, Foul Mouth is a general embodiment of slander, who quickly spreads reports in a hundred places (3033—6 Langlois), and who finds fault with all

women

(3903-10 Langlois).

The close connection between envy and fame is manifested in the similarities between personifications of the two. The first and last in the series of four major personifications in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Inuidia and Fama,

are the most closely related of all in that tightly interconnected family (see Ch. 5 pp. 168-74). Ovid's Fama, like Virgil’s, is an inseparable bundle of features of both 'good' and 'bad' fame. In Renaissance iconologies and emblem books a Fama covered with eyes is often unequivocally ‘good’ Fama (see Ch. 16 pp. 624—33); less reputable creatures such as Gelosia and ?

See Kaplan

1997: Ch. 3; Meskill 2009 is a study of Jonson and envy.

Fame and blame, fame and envy

Ragione di Stato are also identified through a multiplicity of eyes on their

clothing.'° In this chapter I am concerned with texts in which the author’s control over his words is threatened by other embodiments of verbal power. This may take the form of a squaring-off between the author and an opponent; more insidiously it may take the form of a threat to the clear separation of identities between an author and the other, between fame and its opposites. The opposition, or merging, is often gendered. The demonic creatures who embody or personify ‘bad’ uses of the word, negative aspects of fama, are more often than not female, not just because personifications are usually female, a result of the fact that abstract nouns in Latin tend to be feminine, but reflecting a wide-spread tendency in traditional patriarchal societies to project on to the female anxieties about hostile or uncontrolled speech. Gossip is frequently thought of as something that women in particular get up to; '' worthless and unfounded stories are old wives’ tales." An early predecessor of the Virgilian Fama, and perhaps even a source, is the dogwoman in Semonides’ misogynistic iambics, fr. 7.12—20: Tfjv 8' &k Kuvds, Arropyóv avtouttopa, f| rávt' Gkotoa, rrávra 8’ eidevaı Hekeı,

TrávTm Bé Tramrraívouca Kai TAavwuEvN AtAnkev, fjv kai undev’ áv6pcorrov dpa. mauceıe 8 &v uiv ott” &meiMioas Avrip,

ot’ ci xoActis £&apá&Seiev Albeo Sovtas, ous’ àv ut Lycos UIeduEvos, ov8’ ei Tapa &eivoiciv fju£vn TUXm,

GAN’ EprréBoos &rrpnicrov avoviy Eyer. Another woman the god made from a bitch, ill-tempered and just like her mother, who wants to hear everything and know everything, peering and roaming in all directions she barks, even if she sees no one.

A man couldn’t stop her with threats,

nor if in anger he knocked out her teeth with a stone, nor if he spoke gently to her, not even if she happened to be sitting with guests, but she continuously keeps up her unmanageable yapping.

'0 Deonna 1965: 134, with reference to Ripa. Cf. Sidney's description of the body parts of erotic jealousy: Astrophil and Stella 78.10-13 ‘So piercing pawes as spoyle when they embrace; | So nimble feet as stirre still, though on thornes; | So many eyes, ay seeking their owne woe; | So

ample eares as neuer good newes know.’ to

!! See Lewis 1996: 11-12. See Ziolkowski 2002 for discussion of texts from Plato to Chaucer in which old wives' tales,

aniles fabulae, are a threat to a patriarchal world of literacy and logic; in Christian culture this can take the form of an opposition between old wives’ tales and the Word of God; Parker 1989 on the gendering of excesses of the tongue.

387

Fame and blame, fame and envy

I turn to a Latin iambic poetry book, Horace’s Epodes, where demonic female figures threaten the integrity and identity of a blame poet, who purports to criticize and attack in support of moral and social norms. The male poet’s attempt to police the boundaries of decorum and morality is threatened by the dark double of a female voice in the form of the witch Canidia.'’ Ellen Oliensis, noting the etymological connections between Canidia’s name and canere ‘sing’ and canis ‘dog’, observes that ‘Canidia embodies an indecorous poetics against which Horace tries to define his own practice’; but that ‘the misogyny of Horace’s early poetry is revealed as a gesture of self-defense, a cover story veiling an inadmissible subtext’. ‘Two kinds of dogs [in Epode 6], two kinds of poetry: Canidia’s venomous music provides a foil for Horace’s socially useful art. But there are difficulties with this...“authorized” version of the story. The excoriated “other” tends to bear an uncanny resemblance to Horace himself.’ ‘As a kind of anti-Muse...Canidia is a dark double of the goddess who refuses to let Horace alone in... Carm. 4.1.'' Her conclusion is: Although the prescription of the Ars Poetica would have us maintain decorum by subordinating female to male and erotics to politics, we are closer to the matter of the Epodes when we recognize the breakdown of such hierarchies. Impotentia, in its double aspect of violence and weakness, infects all spheres of life — including the sphere in which the poet composes his poems. While this manifold impotentia is often hard to take, it is good

to be reminded

of the monstrous and discordant

elements within the Horatian corpus." These elements may be brought under tighter control in later works, but they do not disappear.'^

inuidia is the unacceptable side of the iambic poet's 'socially useful' criticism; we may think back to the implied duality of pheme in Hesiod (the unexpressed pheme, corresponding to the bad Strife, will tend to disrupt the justice of Zeus: see Ch. 2 pp. 54—7), as well as to views of archaic iambos itself. Where Oliensis conducts her analysis in terms of the politics of gender and decorum, Alessandro Barchiesi approaches the same issues from the perspectives of genre and poetics. He points to the similarity of Horace's performative Epodes to the magic spells of the witch; and to the

m

388

The following is based on the excellent discussions of Oliensis 1991 and Barchiesi also Gowers

1994; see

1993: 299-310.

^ Oliensis 1991: 110, 118, 119. On the close relations between Fama and Discordia see Hardie 20093: 99-107.

16 Oliensis 1991: 134-5. Oliensis’ ‘breakdown of hierarchies’ threatens what Dickie 1981: 195-203 analyses as Horace’s ‘disavowal of inuidia' in Epode 6, playing the noble iambic poet off against the ‘ignoble dog’ motivated by envy and distinguished by the ‘black tooth’ of blame.

Fame and blame, fame and envy

link between Canidia's entrance, (5.15—16) breuibus implicata uiperis | crinis et incomptum caput ‘her hair on her unkempt head wreathed with small snakes, and the 5yi8vafco x6Aw ‘viperish anger’ of Archilochus’ Muse (Anth. Pal. 7.71.2).18 ‘The poet and his maleficent creature are too much alike, and iambic poetry can be revoked only by the poet's placing himself outside it (as Horace will do in the Odes).'? Barchiesi points to archaic iam-

bos connection with grotesque female figures like lambe, Baubo, Lamia, and especially the Gorgon. In this light Epode 17 can be read as a recre-

ation of origins, a retrospective myth of the foundation of the genre of iambos. Barchiesi makes a brilliant point about Horace's crime of mocking the Cotyttia, a festival of transvestite males — hinting that Canidia is the poet in drag - before concluding with the suggestion that Canidia is the iambic poet's equivalent of the puella-as-Muse in Catullus and the elegists, a Canidia-Lesbia destined to turn into the Lesbia-Scylla of Catullus 11.2 Epode 17, the last in the book, is a poem of closure as well as of origins. Under pressure the male poet knows when to bring his book to an end, and begs Canidia to call a halt as well: 1 Jar iam... ‘now at last’; 19 dedi satis superque poenarum tibi ‘| have paid you a penalty that is more than

enough’; 30 quid amplius uis?'What more do you want?’ 36 quae finis. . . me manet... ?'What end will there be?’ But this is in bad faith, if Canidia is to be believed: 59 ... impune ut Vrbem nomine impleris meo? ‘Will you get off scot-free after filling the City with my name?’ The male iambist can stop,

since he has finished his job of filling up Rome with defamatory fama on the subject of Canidia, in an iambic reappropriation of the fabula of love elegy

(see Ch. 9 pp. 360-8).?! The female witch's desire for revenge is insatiable (64 nouis ut usque suppetas laboribus'so that you may constantly be available for fresh sufferings'): unending torture will paradoxically be the 'exitus' (81, the last word of the poem and book) of her ars noui labores hints perhaps at ‘new(-fangled) poetic toils. Yet this female monster of non-completion

V. A fury-like creature, not dissimilar to the Virgilian Allecto, a close relative of Fama see Ch. 3 pp- 101-2, and below pp. 398—400. 18° Hinting at the etymology of iambos from lóv BáZnv ‘utter poison’ (cf. Callim. fr. 380). 19 Barchiesi 1994: 213. 20 Catullus" fair Lesbia herself morphs into the monstrous, possibly Scylla- like, Lesbia of poem 11: on Scylla and Lesbia see Hardie 2009b, in which I trace other connections between the hybrid monster Scylla, Inuidia and a divided Fama.

21 Cf. Epode 11.7-8 (an ‘elegy’ within the iambic book) heu me, per urbem. . . fabula quanta fuil; Serm. 2.1.45—6 qui me commorit. . . flebit et insignis tota cantabitur orbe; Archil fr. 172.3—4 West; Cat. 40.1—5 (possibly imitating Archilochus) Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Rauide, | agit praecipitem in meos iambos?. . . an ut peruenias in ora uulgi

(Le. becoming the subject of

popular fama: cf. the definition of fama at Ov. Met. 15.878 ore legar populi).

389

Fame and blame, fame and envy

claims for her inexorability the law of the supreme male god, Jupiter: 69 sed uetant leges Iouis. Horace's anxieties in the Epodes also appear in his Satires, in particular in the contest in Satires 1.8 between Canidia, with her fellow witch Sagana, and

the hypermasculine Priapus. The ‘disavowal of inuidia"? is an occupational necessity for the Roman satirist, as it will be for the epigrammatist Martial." In another personal genre of Latin poetry, love elegy, there is to be found a monstrous female double of, and rival to, the poet, in the shape of the lena

*procuress'^? In a curious passage Ovid seems to hint that part of the power of his lena, Dipsas, derives from a near-identification with the Virgilian Fama, Am.

1.8.13-16:

hanc ego nocturnas uersam uolitare per umbras suspicor et pluma corpus anile tegi. suspicor, et fama est; oculis quoque pupula duplex fulminat et gemino lumen ab orbe micat. Isuspect that she transforms herselfto fly through the shadows of the night, covering her old woman's body with feathers. So I suspect, and that is what people say. Also her double pupils flash lightning and a gleam darts from dual eyes.

The first four words of line 15 could also be taken as 'So I suspect, and she is Fama'^^ Virgil's Fama (Aen. 4.184) uolat... per umbram ‘flies through the shadow, and is allusively compared to a screech-owl (see Ch. 16 P. 611). Dipsas further shares with Virgil's Fama a quality of duplicity (duplex, gemino) and an affinity with the thunderbolt.”’ I turn now from genres of blame (iambos and satire), and of shame alternating with fame (elegy), to the genre par excellence of praise, epic. The Aeneid contains a number of voices alternative to that of the male epic poet, 2

nN

Contrast the appeal of the boy in Epode 5 against Canidia’s wicked arts, 8 per improbaturum haec Iouem. The appeal to Jupiter to guarantee unending punishment in the next world is perhaps to be read against the ending of the previous poem, where Jupiter has set aside the Blessed Isles as a refuge for the pia gens, Oliensis 1991: 130-3 reads Epodes 16 and 17 as pendants, without making the point about the ‘justice of Zeus’. 2? The phrase used by Dickie 1981, See also Gowers 2011 on Sat. 1.8.19, 24. On the difficulty faced by Ben Jonson in establishing a clear demarcation between satire and slander see Kaplan 1997: Ch. 3. 2

=

390

26 27

See Ch. 8 p. 326. ?5 On the lena as threatening double of the elegist see Myers 1996. The ambiguity is pointed out by Clément-Tarantino 2006: 215-17. In a context of ‘thundering’ eyes cf. also the hint of a thunderbolt in Jupiter's turning of his eyes to Carthage at Aen. 4.220 oculosque ad moenia torsit: see Estevez 1982. For a reading of Am. 1.8.13-16 in terms ofan Ovidian poetics of duplicity see Hardie 2002a: 2-3.

Fame and blame, fame and envy

and variously collaborative with or oppositional to the voice of the poet. Here I briefly summarize points made elsewhere in this book. The Fury Allecto has epic (Ennius’ Discordia) and tragic (the personification of Madness,

Lyssa, in Euripides’

gruesome monstrosity she poetry. One of the ancient ‘speak poison’; Allecto is a infecta uenenis), who hurls | conicit, with which might

Herakles) ancestors, but in her

also comes close to the female demons of iambic etymologies derives iauBos from ióv BaZery, lit. poisonous creature (Aen. 7.341 Gorgoneis Allecto poisonous snakes at her victims, (346-7) anguem be compared an alternative etymology of iaußos

from {nui ‘shoot’-* Conversely, Canidia and Sagana, Horace’s venomous witches and embodiments of iambic poison, are themselves called Furiae at Sat. 1.8.45. Allecto is a close relative of Fama, and is called off by Juno at

the point that she offers to add further fuel to the war breaking out in Italy by doing the work of Fama in spreading rumours: Aen. 7.549 finitimas in bella feram rumoribus urbes ‘I will use rumours to bring the neighbouring cities into the war? As well as being a powerful source of fama-as-rumour, Allecto is also summoned by Juno as an agent of fama-as-fame, reputation: 7.332—3 ne noster honos infractaue cedat | fama loco '[see to it that] my honour and reputation are not damaged and undermined'."" In order to achieve this, Juno and Allecto will present themselves as rivals of the epic

poet, attempting to script their own epic, one which will trumpet the fame of Juno's defeat of the Trojans. Fama herself in Aeneid 4 is a demonic double of the epic poet, strongly gendered as an uncontrollable female who runs on at the mouth. She is opposed in various ways to the supreme male god Jupiter, whose word, Fatum, is equivalent to the providential plot of the Aeneid, but viewed from other angles she is a double of the epic poet himself (see Ch. 3 pp. 106-11). Finally, the inseparability of the kind of fama that is the business of the epic poet from more devious and less fixed kinds of word emerges from

a consideration

of the Council

of Latins in Aeneid

11

(see Ch. 4).

The reader is left with an uneasy question as to whether, with regard both to the enemies of the Trojans in the Aeneid, and to the enemies of Octavian/Augustus in the wider historical perspective, the epic poet may not be guilty of the same 'iambic' venom that he ascribes to a Fama or an Allecto, whether he is not as much in the business of defamation as of fame.

?8 See West 197.1: 23 n. 4. ?9 See Ch. 3 p. 102 and Hardie 20093: 100-1. 9) Parallel to Juno's calling up of the storm in Aeneid 1 to ensure that she continues to be honoured by mortals: honorem is the last word of her monologue there (1.49).

Fame and blame, fame and envy

In this respect Lucan’s Bellum ciuile represents a heightening of features already found in the Aeneid, rather than a complete inversion of Virgilian ideology. One of the most powerful figures for an alternative source of supernatural power to that of the supreme male epic god, Jupiter, and of verbal power to that of the male epic poet, is the witch Erictho in Book 6 of the Bellum ciuile, in whom recent critics have seen a figure for the civil-war poet himself.*! She is also closely related to a number of figures of the poet

and relatives of Fama in Lucan's poetic predecessors: Horace's Canidia," Ovid's Inuidia, as well as Virgil's Allecto, and, not least, Virgil's and Ovid's

Fama." Assumming up a swathe of figures in the earlier tradition, Erictho, like the Virgilian and Ovidian versions of Fama, is herself an embodiment

of a developing epic tradition. In her own own poem of criminal and successful civil without opposition or rivals. In a world female has no difficulty in impersonating

Thessalian landscape, and in her war, Erictho exercises her powers turned upside down a demonic the male epic poet.

Spenserian personifications of the word Ovid's personifications make a systernatic practice of the tendency of Virgil's demonic characters, above all Fama and Allecto, to mutate and bleed into

w

each other. Spenser follows Ovidian and Virgilian precedent in developing the relationships between his various personifications and demonic creatures. In another respect Spenser follows a more specifically Ovidian model, in The Faerie Queene's unfolding plot of a contest between the pursuit of praise and glory, and the gathering forces of envy and detraction. There are in fact two orderings of the relationship between envy and fame in Ovid. The series of four major personifications of the Metamorphoses begins with Inuidia and ends with Fama (and this might be viewed as an inversion of the Virgilian sequence of Fama, in Aeneid 4, followed by Allecto in Aeneid 7). The second Ovidian sequence is one that unfolds as a plot in the life of the poet himself, as mapped in the sequence of pre- and post-exilic works.

O'Higgins

w MS

392

Another Horatian model for a female Lucanian embodiment of the epic poet's voice is the Roman

1988: 217-25; Masters

1992: 205-15.

matrona who foresees the course of the civil war at the end of Book 1, in her frenzied

rush through the city of Rome compared to a Thracian (Edonis) maenad, alluding to the maenad to whom

the inspired Horace compares himselfin Odes 3.25 (where (9) Edonis is

Bentley's emendation). For full details see Dinter 2002: 8-20, ticking off Erictho's relationship to the four major Ovidian personifications, Inuidia, Fames, Somnus, Fama; Dinter 2005: 18-26.

Spenserian personifications of the word

At the end of his first poetry book, Amores 1, Ovid stages an unequal contest between Liuor and his own confident quest for fama perennis (Am. 1.15.7: see above p. 386). By the end of the third and last book of the Amores the poet proudly predicts that (3.15.8) Paelignae dicar gloria gentis ego ‘I shall be spoken of as the glory of the Paelignian race’."’ At the end of the Metamorphoses Ovid envisages a more universal scope for his everlasting fame. Exile changes all that, and both the physical security of the poet’s works and the permanence of his fame are thrown into doubt. We cannot know the circumstances in which Ovid finally broke off his writing career, but the last poem of Ex Ponto, 4.16, readily offers itself as an epilogue to the book and to the career," an address to an inuidus who is tearing to pieces (1 laceras) his carmina. Ovid, feebly now, repeats the commonplace that fama grows after death, and remembers the name that he had even when he was ‘alive’,

i.e. before his exile. The poem ends with an address to a personified Liuor, and a futile request to stop the defamatory lashing (proscindere)'^ of the (embodied) poet and scattering of his (figurative) ashes. The central quest of The Faerie Queene is for glory, and more specifically Arthur's quest for Gloriana, the Faery Queen, in whom

Spenser tells us,

in the Letter to Raleigh, ‘I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land’."’ This is a quest continually deferred, and, in the existing six books of the poem, never fulfilled. Nor is the relationship between Britain and Faery Land, between Queen Elizabeth I

and Gloriana, ever completely defined. Faery Land is both an antique land of exemplary moral accomplishment, and a land infected by the vices of the present day; conversely the mythical monsters of Faery Land are able to leap over the boundary into the real world of the poet and his readers. The

1590 Faerie Queene (Books

1-111) is optimistic about the chances

for success in the heroic quest, and about the ultimate achievement of glory. In the dedication Spenser ‘doth in all humilitie dedicate, present and consecrate these his labours to live with the eternitie of her [Elizabeth’s] fame’. The Proem to Book 1 defines the subject of the epic as the ills suffered

Juxtaposing two fama words, dicar and gloria: dicar alludes to Horace's closing assertion of his own fame, with reference to his own Italian homeland, at Odes 3.30.10. See Theodorakopoulos 1999: 160-1. For a unitarian reading of Ex Porto 4 see Wulfram 2008: 259-79. 36 OLD s.v. proscindere 3 ‘To flay with words, castigate, lash’, e.g. Suet. Aug. 13 hunc foedissimo conuicio... prosciderunt, Plin. NH 36.48 Mamurra

Catulli Veronensis carminibus proscissus.

7? On Spenser’s handling of glory, and the perversions of glory in the pride and vain glory of the courts of Lucifera and Philotime, see Nohrnberg 1976: Index s.vv. ‘glory, glorification’.

393

394

Fame and blame, fame and envy

by the Briton Prince in his quest for Tanaquil or Gloriana, love for whom has kindled (3.4) ‘glorious fire... in his hart’. Glory (or fame) and love exist

in productive symbiosis (see Ch. 9 pp. 343-6). In the next stanza it is the poet, not his hero, who asks for illumination, rather than fire, from the same source, or, rather, asks for the real-life equivalent of Gloriana, Queen

Elizabeth, through her ‘faire beames' to raise his thoughts “To thinke of that true glorious type of thine’. Book 1 sets out the normative, unperverted, plot of fame. The goals of the hero, Red Cross Knight, are clearly defined: he has been sent on an adventure by Gloriana, (1.1.3, 4) ‘To winne him worship, and her grace to

haue.' Success in his mission is equally clearly linked to the love of a lady, Una. The deviation from the goal of glory (or fame) that follows deviation from the object of desire is laid out at r.iv.1 with a range of the rhymes that are typically evoked in English by ‘fame’; the inclusion in the series of the less standard 'dame' alerts us to the importance in this context of the close relationship between love and fame: Young knight, what euer that dost armes professe, And through long labours huntest after fame, Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse, In choice, and change of thy deare loued Dame,

Least thou of her beleeue too lightly blame, And rash misweening doe thy hart remoue: For vnto knight there is no greater shame, Then lightnesse and inconstancie in loue; That doth this Redcrosse knights ensample plainly proue.

In contrast the first stanza of the next canto identifies the pursuit of glory as an erotic desire, as the Red Cross Knight experiences the sleepless night of the lover (see Ch. 9 pp. 339-40), r.v.1: The noble hart, that harbours vertuous thought,

And is with child of glorious great intent, Can neuer rest, vntill it forth haue brought

Th'eternall brood of glorie excellent: Such restlesse passion did all night torment The flaming corage of that Faery knight, Deuizing, how that doughtie turnament With greatest honour he atchieuen might; Still did he wake, and still did watch for dawning light.

The Red Cross Knight has more adventures to undergo before he can be reunited with Una, and (re-)educated in his knightly mission. In 1.vii he

Spenserian personifications of the word is seduced by Duessa: 1.vii.7, 2-3 ‘Pourd out in loosenesse on the grassy

grownd, | Both carelesse of his health and of his fame’, a negligence that provokes the sudden appearance of a monster full of sound and fury, Orgoglio

‘Pride’, who among other things is a close relative of Fara, being the son of

an angry Earth and ‘blustring Aeolus, his boasted sire’ (1.vii.9, 2).*8 Pride is related to Braggadochio, the embodiment of vain glory, and is a condition into which the Red Cross Knight falls once he has forgotten the proper pursuit of fame. He is finally betrothed to the lady, although the wedding will be deferred for six years (1.xii.18-19). By this point he, and the reader, have been informed about the correct relationship between earthly and heavenly glory (i.e. the Christian transumption of pagan glory: see Chs. 1 pp. 33-6, 11),? between Cleopolis, ‘fame city’, the seat of the Faery Queen, and the

Heavenly Jerusalem,*° although the Red Cross Knight is also told that his final glorious journey to the latter (1.x.62, 2 ‘How dare I thinke such glory to attaine?’), as St George, is reserved for a future date. But in prospect Book 1 sketches out a perfected journey to a transcendent fame or glory,

which it will be the job of the following books of the poem to complicate. Compare, in structural terms, the speech of Jupiter in the first book of the Aeneid, 1.257—96, which lays out for Venus’ benefit the whole future trajectory of the history of Aeneas and his descendants, culminating in a fame that

reaches the heavens (287 famam qui terminet astris), with the final chaining of the beast Furor that has rampaged through the previous story of the race (294-6). But this simple plot-line is inadequate to the complications and

backslidings of the story told in the rest of the Aeneid, which ends with fury very much on the rampage. In the first canto (1.i.14-26) the Red Cross Knight has enjoyed an easy and seemingly conclusive success against the first of The Faerie Queente’s monstrous personifications. Error, half-serpent and half-woman, is the embodiment of a specifically textual kind of error: when the Knight throttles her, (1.1.20) ‘she spewd out of her filthy maw | A floud of poison horrible and 9! On the character of Orgoglio and his other associations see Nohrnberg 1976: 265-70, who, while not noting a connection with Fama, sees allusions to Typhon and Polyphemus, both figures of Fama in other contexts (see above Chs. 3 pp. 99-100, 6 pp. 214-25). On the

connection between Fama and the Virgilian Aeolus see Ch. 2 pp. 70-2; Aeolus and Chaucer's Fame: Ch. 15 p. 591.

Queen Elizabeth's glory is presented through biblical allusion at FQ i1 Proem iv—v: with "wrap[ped] in shadowes light, | That feeble eyes your glory may behold’ cf. 11 Cor. 3:11-18, the allegory of the veil over Moses’ face as a shield from the brightness of God’s glory (this is also the veil of Spenser's allegory). Armbrust 1990 discusses Spenser's humanist models for a positive revaluation of the scholastic negative treatment of (human) glory as vain glory. 40 The ratio (1.1.58) is expressed through allusion to the different kinds of city, Rome and the

local market town, in Virgil, Eclogue 1.

395

396

Fame and blame, fame and envy

blacke... Her vomit full of bookes and papers was’. Her prompt despatch is in fact only the beginning of the wanderings, deceptions, and defamations on which is imposed a provisional closure at the end of the Legend of Holiness, and which will proliferate further in later books. Mihoko Suzuki notes that 'Spenser consistently figures linguistic duplicity through female monsters, who seduce by concealing their hideous deformity under an attractive appearance... Spenser, unlike Virgil, finally accepts the monstrous Other as part of the self, in his creation of the male Blatant Beast, the final monster

of language... The rest of The Faerie Queene... is animated by monsters of language that appear to issue from Errour's dead body. "I My only correction to this would be that Virgil too accepts the monstrous Other as part of his poetic self, a self that is deeply implicated in the workings of the monster Fama in Aeneid 4. It isin the 1596 Faerie Queene that Book r's plot of fame is put under most pressure. The six books taken together are framed by glory (1 Proem) and detraction (the end of v1). Books ıv-vı as a unit tell a story of heroic deeds

increasingly threatened by verbal forces that detract from fame." Book Iv ends with the reunion of Florimell and Marinell; Book v with the triumph of Artegall over Grantorto, but the last twenty-seven stanzas introduce the

figures of Envy and Detraction, accompanied by the Blatant Beast (alluding to the criticism of Lord Grey after his departure from Ireland). Thus is unleashed a monster who will rampage through Book vi, until he is put in chains by Calidore. Closure is reached, only to be reopened in the last four lines of vı.xii.38, as the Blatant Beast breaks his chain to burst out again

into the world, and to cross the boundary from the land of Faery into the present-day world: 40, 1 ‘So now he raungeth through the world againe’, attacking ‘gentle Poets rime’, including Spenser’s own ‘homely verse’ (41, 1). Self-reference on the part of the poet forms a ring with the Proem to Book

iv, which opens with reference to the blame

(‘wite’) of his ‘looser

rimes’ by William Cecil, an example of those who judge ill of the true relationship between love and virtue, (1v Proem

2, 6-7) ‘For it of honor

and all vertue is | The roote, and brings forth glorious flowres of praise’. In making a leap from the fictional to the real world, the last two stanzas

of Book v1 also form a ring with the Proem to Book 1, a perspective that ^! Suzuki 1989: 195-206 ‘Monsters of language: from Errour to the Blatant Beast’ at 196 and 198. 4? See Cain 1978: 184 on the way in which the 1596 books undermine the Renaissance idealism that informs the encomium

of Una/Elizabeth as one who unites earthly and heavenly roles,

with a consequent retreat from the claim that Jerusalem can be found in England, and a return to the Augustinian opposition of the Cities of God and of this world.

Spenserian personifications of the word

yields the harshest contrast between the figures of Gloriana and the Blatant Beast, between glory and biting slander. The apparently endless ranging abroad of the Blatant Beast is comparable to the endless attacks of Liuor on Ovid in Pont. 4.16, vulnerable because of the displeasure of the emperor that originally cast him into exile." Spenser complains of ‘a mighty Peres displeasure’ (v1.xii.41, 6), usually taken as a reference to Lord Burleigh, in

part perhaps in order to avoid a direct complaint about the hostility of the monarch to Lord Grey's and his own policies on Ireland."' The Virgilian Fama is both a monster of slander and defamation, and a figure for the poet’s own dealings with words. Spenserian figures of envy, detraction and perverted speech also enter into uneasily close relationships with the poet’s own use of words. The phenomenon of doubling has long been the object of critical interest in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; Northrop Frye identified the ‘symbolic parody’ as a central feature of the imagery of the poem," and in many cases what is parodied is a vehicle for the correct use and propagation of the word, that is to say a parody of the poet’s own function. Isabel MacCaffrey identifies an interest in the good use of human words and in the dire threat posed to human community by slander as a central theme of the last half of The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser comes

increasingly to comment self-reflexively on the operations of his own text;"° the monsters of perverted speech appear as distorted reflections of the poet's own verbal practice. The first of these negative images of the poet's verbal power, Ate, stands at the threshold of the second half, at the beginning of Book iv (1v.i.18-30). Ate ‘may be said to generate all the negative characters and scenes in the second half of The Faerie Queene':" Clarinda, Envy and Detraction, Malengin, Corflambo, Sclaunder, Occasion, the poet Malfont, and climactically the

Blatant Beast. Ate appears after a preliminary episode in which the threat of dishonour andstrife between knights and ladies has been averted: Britomart,

in male guise ‘Marching in louely wise’ with Amoret, ‘could deserue | No

Ps vi

> w

So Pugh 2005: Ch. 6 ‘Sors mea rupit opus. exile and the 1596 Faerie Queene’, see also 240-3 ‘Bating the Beast: the social engagement of the victimized artist in Faerie Queene v1’; Pugh, following Burrow 2001: 233, also compares Ovid’s premature termination of the Fasti with FQ vias a premature conclusion to the poem. That Spenser expects the attacks of the Blatant Beast to be directed at his own Irish policy is the argument of Kaplan 1997: 60-3. > Frye 1963: 86; cf. also Steadman 1967: 53-6 on the presentation of true and false values in similar but antithetical figures; Greenblatt

1980: 76, 81-2 on the ‘demonic Other: Further on

doubling in Spenser: Giamatti 1975; Wofford 1992: 286-9. ^$

MacCaffrey

1976: 314.

47

JH. Blythe, art. ‘Ate, in Hamilton

1990: 76.

397

398

Fame and blame, fame and envy

spot of blame, though spite did oft assay | To blot her with dishonor of so faire a pray’ (1v.i.4, 7-9). Amoret for her part is afflicted with (1v.i.8, 6) ‘dread of shame, and doubt of fowle dishonor’. This uneasy but innocent

state of affairs faces another threat when the pair comes to a castle whose custom it is that any knight without a love should either win one or lie outside. Britomart defeats a knight who lays claim to Amoret, and then, to save the knight from being locked out, offers herself to him as his lady, unmasking herself in the most erotic of her appearances in the poem. The thankful knight (1v.i.15, 4-5) ‘her ador'd: | So did they all their former strife accord. Any danger that might arise from this surcharge of eroticism as regards the ‘iolly knight’ (how far will this relationship go, the reader might wonder) is deflected when Britomart and Amoret spend the night together in bed, exchanging girls’ talk about their loves (1v.i.16). We might feel that all this is a rather fragile example to hold up to the grave critic of his ‘looser rimes... praising love, to whom the poet addresses himself in the Proem to the book; we will not be entirely surprised when in the sequel a dangerous figure of discord makes an appearance. Ate appears in the company of Duessa, each riding by the side of a knight (respectively Blandamour and Paridell). Ate has been raised from the underworld by Duessa as a companion to her own duplicity, and like Duessa she appears in the disguise of beauty, another example of the ‘fair is foul, foul is fair’ illusion. Ate as a personification of Discord is the negative principle in the Legend of Friendship (or Concord, by another name).'* Her literary ancestry and affiliations are complex; I shall focus on those aspects of her being that relate to the operations of fama. In Virgilian terms she is a conflation of the Fury Allecto, summoned from hell at the beginning of the second half of the Aeneid (a significant structural parallelism) to disrupt harmonious relationships between the Trojans and the Italians, and of Fama in Aeneid 4; that conflation is also a comment on the close relationship in the Aeneid between Allecto and Fama. ‘Her name

was Ate, mother

of debate’ (1v.i.19, 1): ‘debate’ is strife in

general, but we may also hear the narrower sense of ‘contention in argument; verbal strife. She is used as a weapon by Duessa against the central chivalrous pursuit of fame as honour: 19, 5-7 ‘Her false Duessa... well did know | To

8

The verbal aspect of Discord has a long history: on the relationship between Empedoclean-Ennian Discordia and Virgil's Fama see Hardie 2009a: Ch. 3. Another close relative of Fama is the appearance of Discord at Paradise Lost 2.967 ‘And Discord with a thousand various mouths; the last in a list of personifications in the underworld, as too is Discordia at Aen. 6.280-1

et Discordia demens,

| uipereum crinem uittis innexa cruentis (a

double of snaky Allecto, who plays the role in the Aeneid of Ennius' Discordia).

Spenserian personifications of the word

be most fit to trouble noble knights, | Which hunt for honor’. Ate’s House,

(20, 1) ‘Hard by the gates of hell" is a place of poetic memory (as the underworld often is), its walls hung (21, 2-3) ‘With ragged monuments of times forepast, | All which the sad effects of discord sung. ‘Discord sung’ is a mild oxymoron, since song and discord are usually opposed to each other. But it is the job of epic poems, such as The Faerie Queene, to make song out of tales of discord. The three stanzas (21-3) devoted to her

effects on ‘publike states’ (as opposed to the one stanza on her effects on private persons) are largely a catalogue of epic subjects: Babylon, Thebes, Rome, Salem, Ilion; Nimrod, Alexander; the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs (conflated with

Hercules’

fight with

the Centaurs);

and

the Argonauts.

The Argonauts are an example of discord resolved only through the words of the poet Orpheus; the power of this ‘godlike man’ is celebrated at the beginning of the next canto, together with ‘the celestiall Psalmist’ and ‘the prudent Romane’ Menenius Agrippa, examples of concord or harmony in the verbal realm.”! This is a fama not of amor, but of strife and war, leaving

abiding monuments of the ‘broken bandes' of friends, brethren and lovers (1v.i.24), the three kinds of love, of which friendship, adjudged the highest, is celebrated later in the book for its aspirations to fame: ıv.ix.2, 3-5 ‘But

faithfull friendship doth them both suppresse, | And them with maystring discipline doth tame, | Through thoughts aspyring to eternall fame.’ These monuments of strife are ‘all within’; ‘all without’ Ate’s House is surrounded by (1v.1.25, 2-5) ‘wicked weedes, | Which she her selfe had sowen all about, | Now growen great, at first of little seedes, | The seedes of euill wordes, and factious deedes’; this propensity to ‘infinite increase’ from small seeds aligns her both with the Homeric Eris, ‘Strife’ (Il. 4.440—3),

and with her close relative, Virgilian Fama. Virgil’s Allecto is a monster of perverted fertility, on whom Juno calls (Aen. 7.339) sere crimina belli, where sere can mean either 'sow' or 'string together, contrive. The opposition between the monuments within and the seeds and weeds without corresponds to the passive and active aspects of fama, ‘fame’ and ‘rumour’, both recorder and instigator of epic deeds (the seeds ‘without’ are seeds both of words and of deeds). The anatomy of Ate's body (1v.1.27-9) draws atten-

tion to her distorted seeing, speaking and hearing (‘squinted eyes contrarie wayes intended’, ‘loathly mouth’, ‘lying tongue...in two parts divided’,

19 Like the Virgilian Discordia demens: Aen. 6.279 aduerso in limine. 9? See Hardie 200-1: 151 n. 8. 5! As the manipulator of a social allegory Menenius Agrippa is a forerunner of the allegorist Spenser.

399

400

Fame and blame, fame and envy

‘matchlesse eares deformed and monstrous eyes, mouth, tongue multiple organs of Virgil's Fama tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, venom-filled mouth make her a

distort’): this sequential attention to her and ears parallels the enumeration of the at Aen. 4.182-3 tot uigiles oculi subter... | tot subrigit auris. Her squinting eyes and close relative of Spenserian descendants of

Ovid's Inuidia: Sclaunder ( ıv.viii.23-6), Envy and Detraction (v.xii.28—36).

Her ‘matchlesse eares' are ‘Fild with false rumors and seditious trouble, | Bred in assemblies of the vulgar sort’ (1v.i.28, 2-4): this last detail betrays the politics of the class struggle, and also points us in the direction of the Ovidian House of Fama.’ Her doublespeak makes her uncomfortably like the allegorical poet himself. MacCaffrey comments that ‘Ate is not a figure for the poet, but she is his constant bugbear and shadow, because he must practise the art of words in a world partly created by her The monuments in the House of Ate include memorials of strife that broke out over women: the golden apple, cause of the Trojan War, relics of the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs at the wedding of Peirithous and Hippodameia, and the despoiled bowers of lovers. Ate’s first intervention in the narrative is to stir up hostility in Scudamour against Britomart with a false story about Britomart sleeping with Amoret, to which Ate claims to have been an eye-witness (1v.i.49 ‘I saw... I] saw...] saw...I saw...’),

working discord through sexual jealousy in the way that Virgil’s many-eyed Fama works on Iarbas in Aeneid 4. Ate opens the second half of the 1596 Faerie Queene; a still more energetic embodiment of perverted language closes each of the last two books, the Blatant Beast.*' He is introduced at the end of Book v as the hellish hound which accompanies Envy and Detraction, who all three attack Artegall after he has rescued Irena and killed Grantorto, clouding the glory that Artegall wins thereby (v.xii.24, 9 ‘And eke her champions glorie sounded over all’). The possibility that the encounter between these monsters and Artegall and Talus will open a new episode of heroic struggle here, at the end of the twelfth canto, is averted when Artegall restrains Talus from retaliating: v.xi1.43, 7-8 ‘yet he for nought would swerue | From his right course’, returning to Faerie Court. The quest against the Blatant Beast is reserved for the hero of the

52

The last of her anatomic self-divisions also has an Ovidian parallel: 1v.i.28, 6-9 'And as her eares so eke her feet were odde, | And much unlike, th'one long, the other short, | And both

misplast; that when th'one forward yode, | The other backe retired, and contrarie trode.” Unlike Ovid's limping Elegy, this monster will not step to pleasing poetic rhythms. ?! MacCaffrey 1976: 314. 55

On the Blatant Beast see R. B. Bond art. ‘Blatant Beast’ in Hamilton 1976: 688-97; Hotson

1958; Gross

1999; Aptekar

1969: 201-14.

1990: 96-8; Nohrnberg

Spenserian personifications of the word

next book, Sir Calidore, who crosses paths with the returning Artegall in the first canto, v1.1.5—7:

‘Now happy man’ (sayd then Sir Calidore) ‘Which haue so goodly, as ye can deuize, Atchieu’d so hard a quest, as few before;

That shall you most renowmed make for euermore. ‘But where ye ended haue, now I begin To tread an endlesse trace, withouten guyde, Or good direction, how to enter in, Or how to issue forth in waies vntryde,

In perils strange, in labours long and wide, In which although good Fortune me befall, Yet shall it not by none be testifyde." "What is that quest' (quoth then Sir Artegall) ‘That you into such perils presently doth call?’ ‘The Blattant Beast’ (quoth he) ‘I doe pursew, And through the world incessantly doe chase, Till I him ouertake, or else subdew.'

Artegall has achieved a quest that results in everlasting renown; Calidore faces the prospect of an ‘endless trace," in quest of the Blatant Beast, the creature that destroys renown. The Blatant Beast is Malory’s Questing Beast (or Glatysaunte ‘yelping’) Beast, in whose body ‘there was such a noyse as hit had bene twenty couple of houndys questynge... And thys beste evermore sir Palomydes followed, for hit was called hys queste." ^ The verb ‘quest’ means originally ‘to bark, to yelp’, of hounds at the sight of game, and secondarily ‘to go in search of something" Malory's Palomydes' quest is to pursue the Questing Beast. Furthermore, the Questing Beast and Blatant Beast themselves wander over the romance landscape in ‘a parody of the [knightly] quest itself.^? But whereas Spenser's knights quest in search of fame to be registered in the poet's words, the Blatant Beast wanders to a soundtrack of defamation: this dog's bark is an allegory for

For the contrast between an epic journey completed and another quest whose completion is endlessly deferred cf. Aen. 3.493-7 ‘uiuite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta | iam sua: nos alia ex aliis in fata uocamur. | uobis parta quies: nullum maris aequor arandum, | arua neque Ausoniae semper cedentia retro | quaerenda.' 55 Quoted from Vinaver 1967: 484. 3 OED s.v. ‘quest’ v.! 1, 3. 55 Nohrnberg 1976: 693.

401

Fame and blame, fame and envy

the fully articulate speech of the ‘wicked tongues’ (v1.xii.41, 5) from whose

backbiting the poet suffers." The Blatant Beast first appears as a companion of Envy, herself a close relative of the Virgilian and Ovidian Fama, and prominent among his literary forebears is Fama herself. He is also related to other monsters associated with the word. According to the genealogy given by Calidore (v1.i.8) the Blatant Beast is the offspring of the Chimaera and Cerberus: in standard Renaissance mythographic handbooks the Chimaera is an allegory of rhetoric, while Cerberus is a figure for verbal detraction. According to the alternative genealogy given by the Hermit (vı.vi.9-12) he is the child of Echidna and and Typhaon.^" The Hesiodic Echidna is the original fairand-foul monster; although the Blatant Beast's outpourings are uniformly malicious, defaming and shaming, destructive of name and fame.^! Typhaon is one of the ancestors of Virgil's Fama, and Nonnus stages a contest for control of the epic voice between Zeus and Typhoeus (see Ch. 6 pp. 21425). The

multitude

of animal noises that issue from

the Blatant Beast's

thousand tongues at v1.xii.27 echoes the animal noises uttered by the hundred snake-heads of Hesiod's Typhoeus ( Theog. 824—35). Calidore's struggle with the Blatant Beast is compared to that of Hercules with the Hydra (vı.xii.32), a creature allegorized in Renaissance mythography as the endless verbosity of the sophists or as the proliferating and poisonous voices of envy.” The Blatant Beast comes closer to the poet, and the heroes with whose goals the poet identifies, in his destruction of the monastery and church at vi.xii.23—5, an iconoclastic violence which parodies that recorded with

approval, it seems, by the poet in the destruction of the Bower of Bliss and of the House of Busyrane.“

63

His hundred tongues (v.xii.41, 7; v1.xii.33, 2)

Cain 1978: 180 ‘The Beast is thus not only the enemy of the poet and his ordered words, but also an Antilogos set against the creating, redeeming, and recreating Word itself.’ On the undying Blatant Beast's threat to the epic poet's task of celebrating heroic fame see also

9

Gross 1999: 106—7 suggests that these conflicting genealogies are only appropriate for a figure

*

5

e

McCabe

1993: 78-9.

of rumour. Note also the Alexandrian footnote at vı.vi.9, 9 'Begot of foule Echidna, as in

6

bookes is taught.’

On the relationship between Spenser's Error and the Hesiodic Echidna see Hardie 2009b: 132-3, with discussion of a variety of Spenser's fair-and-foul monsters. For a ‘defame’, ‘name’,

nN

6

6

D^

402

‘shame’ stanza on the Blatant Beast see vı.vi.12. Bond in Hamilton 1990: 97 "Whenever Spenser rhymes name or fame with blame or shame, the dis-gracing Beast is implicit.’ Hydra and sophists (the allegory goes back to Plato's Sophist): Aptekar 1969: 207-8, referring to Salutati and Alciati; and envy: Nohrnberg 1976: 690, referring to Erasmus' Adagia, Herculei labores. For this reading of the parodic quest see Gross 1999: 109-13. At tv.1.24, 7 the ‘bowres despoyled' of lovers are among the monuments in the House of Ate.

Spenserian personifications of the word

match the hundred tongues for which the poet traditionally wishes.“' ‘Oft interlacing many a forged lie’ (v1.xii.33, 5) is an activity that he shares with the poet, and one that also brings him (and the poet) close to the feignings of Archimago. The threats to truth encountered at the beginning of the first book are still potent here at the end of the last. Error herself is half-serpent, half-woman, like the Blatant Beast’s mother (in the Hermit's version), and she is the source of the erroneous word in its printed form (1.1.20, 6 ‘Her vomit full of bookes and papers was’), as the Blatant Beast

is the inexhaustible source of spoken error. At the end of vı.xii Calidore briefly enchains him and removes his liberty, but two stanzas later ‘long after... he broke his yron chaine, | And got into the world at liberty againe’. To think in Ovidian terms, this is both the unending attacks of Liuor of the last poem of Ex Ponto (4.16: see above p. 393), but also the liberty of fama in which Ovid exults at the end of the Metamorphoses.” “Of all the fiends, monsters, and dragons in The Faerie Queene, the Blatant Beast alone terrorizes the poet.'^' 07 The Blatant Beast has the power to roam freely across the boundaries that separate antiquity from the present day, and Faery Land from the England of the sixteenth century. This also is a characteristic of Virgilian and Ovidian Fama, that as a person(ification) within

a narrative she should also embody features that relate to the production and reception of the text in which she appears. That boundary has already been overstepped in the episode of Sclaunder (a close relation of Envy and the Blatant Beast) in ıv.viii, to whose cottage Arthur makes his way with Aemylia and Amoret. The fictional characters endure her abuse (iv.viii.28, 6) ‘with patience milde‘, and when they depart the next day, Sclaunder is reduced to railing against the lifeless stones and trees (1v.viii.36). But the poet is concerned that his own reader may misread and be led into a slanderous misinterpretation of the behaviour of the characters, and, by extension, of the poet, Iv.viii.29, 1—6: Here well I weene, when as these rimes be red With misregard, that some rash witted wight,

Whose looser thought will lightly be misled, These gentle Ladies will misdeeme too light, For thus conuersing with this noble Knight; Sith now of dayes such temperance is rare.

64 Hinds 1998: 34-47. $5 See Nohrnberg 1976: 694 on the parallels with 1.1. 9* Aptekar 1969: 212 compares Rev. 20: 1-3, the angel shuts up the dragon that is the Devil, ‘till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season’ In Virgilian terms it is as if the Furor who is chained up at the end of Jupiter's speech in Aeneid 1 were unleashed at the end of Book 12 (which in a sense he is). 6? Bond in Hamilton 1990: 98.

403

404

Fame and blame, fame and envy

There may be an implicit rebuke to ‘the rugged forehead’ (perhaps Lord Burleigh) who criticizes the poet in the Proem to the book: his charge of ‘looser rimes’ is turned back into a charge of the ‘looser thought’ that leads the reader astray. The misreading, Spenser tells us, arises from the contrast

between the ‘antique age’ of his narrative, and the sinfulness and lustful abuse of beauty that characterizes the modern age, in which the unsullied flower of beauty perhaps survives only at the court of Elizabeth (1v.viii.33). Spenser sounds less than confident about this. The final unrestrained liberty of the Blatant Beast registers a deeper pessimism about the possibility that an England under Queen Elizabeth can live up to the ensample of the antique world which directed itselfby the ideal of the court of Gloriana. Ate makes her last appearance in the poem at the trial of Duessa (Mary Queen of Scots) at the court of Mercilla (Elizabeth I) in v.ix, where she is

brought in as a witness for the prosecution. As Lindsay Kaplan points out, slander and defamation are here used in the service of the state, apparently with the full approval of the poet, if we are to judge by his lavish praise of Mercilla and her court, a lavishness that may paper over an anxiety about the legitimacy and desirability of the execution of Mary." Zeal accuses Duessa of (v.ix.43, 2) ‘many... crimes of foule defame’, an infamy that, we

are to believe, is deserved: but that belief may be imposed by the persuasive violence of the state structures that stage the trial.“” When Zeal sees that opposing advocates, Pity, Nobility of Birth, Grief, etc., begin to undermine his case, he brings on Ate, v.x.47: He gan t’efforce the euidence anew,

And new accusements to produce in place: He brought forth that old hag of hellish hew, The cursed Ate, brought her face to face,

Who priuie was, and partie in the case: She, glad of spoyle and ruinous decay, Did her appeach, and to her more disgrace,

The plot of all her practise did display, And all her traynes, and all her treasons forth did lay. Ate is called to witness as an accomplice, but, in so far as she is unable to

escape her essence as a personification, her revelation of the truth is also a further instance of her malicious use of words. If we remember the details 68 Kaplan 1997: 40-2. $9 Kaplan 1997: 13 notes that in early modern English slander may be both ‘malicious misrepresentation, calumny’ (OED s.v. 1) and ‘discredit, disgrace... on account

of some

transgression of the moral law, evil name’ (OED 3, ‘In some cases not clearly separable from sense 1’).

Spenserian personifications of the word

of her first appearance in 1v.1, we might uneasily ask whether she is still speaking double, feeding her audience with (1v.i.28, 3) ‘false rumors and seditious trouble’. As a creature of turbulent words, Ate is not out of place in the palace of

Mercilla, for it shares features with Chaucer’s House of Fame.” Both places house a majestic queen seated on high, who dispenses judgements to a crowd of people.’! Chaucer's House is riven with dualities and duplicities; Spenser strives to exclude all but the good

but with doubtful of Fama, (v.ix.22, we are immediately ‘keepe[s] out guyle,

kind of fame

from

Mercilla’s palace,

success.’? The porch of the palace, like Ovid's House 4) ‘Stood open wyde to all men day and night: But told that it is not open to all, for the giant porter, Awe, and malice, and despight’, i.e. those people who embody

these vices. These are such as 'vnder shew oftimes of fayned semblance, |

Are wont in Princes courts to worke great scath and hindrance’: Mercilla's palace is a place, we are told, where appearance and reality will not be at odds, and where words will tell only the truth, where the fair and foul Duessa

will be finally unmasked and destroyed.^' Entering in we find (v.ix.23, 25) ‘a large wyde roome, | All full of people making troublous din, | And 7? On Spenser's acquaintance with Chaucer's House of Fame see Bennett 1968: Ch. 5; J. Burrow art. 'Chaucer, Geoffrey, in Hamilton

7

1990: 144-8; Bellamy 2004: 227-34; Fumo

2007: 103.

Note esp. the parallels between Chaucer's court of Fame and the court of Philotime, '(excessive) love of honour’, at FQ I1.vii.40—4. When Geffrey enters the House of Fame he comes across many a one praising their Lady, and a crowd of heralds coming out of the House, HF 1307-19. When he first enters the main hall itself, he finds a pointed absence of the ‘thickest preasse' of FQ v.ix.23, 6: HF 1356-65 ‘But in this riche lusty place, | That Fames halle called was, | Ful moche prees of folk ther nas, | Ne

crouding, for to mochil prees. | But al on hye, above a dees, | Sitte in a see imperial... I saugh, perpetually y-stalled, | A feminyne creature.’ Only at 1526 ff. does there come trooping in (1528—32) 'A right gret company with-alle, | And that of sondry regiouns, | Of alleskinnes condiciouns, | That dwelle in erthe under the mone, | Pore and ryche, who make their requests

uw

to Fame. The architectural description of the exterior of Mercilla’s palace at FQ v.ix.21 bears a general resemblance to the House of Fame; with 'Of pompous show, much more than she had told’ cf. HF 1165-80 on the impossibility of describing the building; with ‘All their tops bright glistering with gold' cf. HF 1306, the gold of the gate. 7? Forother examples of sanitizing imitations of Chaucer's House of Fame see Ch. 15 pp. 582-7. 7 Also like the gates of the underworld: Ovid's House of Fama is already a version of the Virgilian underworld: see Ch. 5 p. 173. There is also a more positive biblical intertext, the gates of Jerusalem which, (Isaiah 60:11) ‘shall be open continually: neither day nor night shall they be shut’; Rev. 21:25 corrects this with reference to the celestial Jerusalem: ‘And the gates of it shall

not be shut by day, for there shall be no night there‘, adding, (27) ‘And there shall enter into it none unclean thing, neither whatsoever worketh abomination or lies, but they which are

74

written in the Lamb’s book of life.’ In the dispensation of the Christian God Fama is strictly policed (lies are out, the book of life is in); the possibility of reading either pagan or biblical intertexts in Spenser's description of Mercilla's palace undermines the biblical certainty. Duessa: v.ix.38, 2-3 ‘A Ladie of great countenance and place, | But that she it with foule abuse did marre"; 40, 1-2 ‘First gan he [sc. Zele] tell, how this that seern'd so faire | And royally arayd,

Duessa hight.’

405

406

Fame and blame, fame and envy

wondrous noyse, as if that there were some, | Which vnto them was dealing righteous doome* A hubbub as in the Ovidian or Chaucerian houses of fame, immediately silenced at the appearance

of the marshal, Order. We

are led ultimately into the transcendent presence of the Queen herself, the surpassing object of the poet's own praise at the beginning of the next canto (after her reluctant consent to the execution of Duessa) in terms reminiscent

of the glorification of Gloriana," v.x.3: Who then can thee, Mercilla, throughly prayse, That herein doest all earthly Princes pas? What heauenly Muse shall thy great honour rayse Vp to the skies, whence first deriu'd it was, And now on earth it selfe enlarged has,

From th'vtmost brinke of the Armericke shore, Vnto the margent of the Molucas? Those Nations farre thy iustice doe adore: But thine owne people do thy mercy prayse much more.

Praises of Mercilla's justice and mercy fill both the vertical and horizontal axes of fame, and the reach to the skies is validated theologically by the information that the queen's honour has a celestial origin. This queen's careful administration of justice against Duessa, resisting even the swerve from justice that would result from her own inclination to mercy, is very different from the arbitrary judgements with which Chaucer's Fame distributes good or bad fame. But the reader will not forget a liminary complication of the relationship between the queen and fama. To enter the royal presence we have had to pass the screen with its disturbing exhibition of the punished poet, v.ix.25-6: There as they entred at the Scriene, they saw Some one, whose tongue was for his trespasse vyle Nayld to a post, adiudged so by law: For that therewith he falsely did reuyle, And foule blaspheme that Queene for forged guyle, Both with bold speaches, which he blazed had,

And with lewd poems, which he did compyle; For the bold title of a Poet bad He on himselfe had ta'en, and rayling rymes had sprad. Thus there he stood, whylest high ouer his head,

There written was the purport of his sin, 75 E.g. 1 Proem 4; v1.x.28.

Spenserian personifications of the word

In cyphers strange, that few could rightly read, BON FONT: but bon that once had written bin, Was raced out, and Mal was now put in.

So now Malfont was plainely to be red; Eyther for th’euill, which he did therein,

Or that he likened was to a welhed Of euill words, and wicked sclaunders by him shed.

Positive and negative images of the poet are combined in the person of Malfont at the entrance to the judgement-chamber of Mercilla. Malfont is a figure for the dangers faced both by producer and consumer of poetry, and for the difficulty of distinguishing between right and wrong when dealing with words. The ciphers are strange, such as few could rightly read, yet with the substitution Malfont is ‘plainely’ to be read.^^ Since the strange ciphers write out the purport of his sin, i.e. whatever crime is contained in the name *Malfont, the words ‘that few could rightly read’ must apply to 'Malfont; not just to the now hard to make out BON FONT, with the consequence that what is plainly read is not necessarily rightly read. Might there be a fit audience though few, whose reading is the right one? ‘There written was the purport of his sin’: but all that is written, or at least all we are told about, is the name, in two versions. If that is so, then it is up to us to understand the

‘purport’ of his sin (and his punishment) from the traces of his name(s); what the narrator tells his reader in stanza 25 is not accessible to those whose only information is what they see when they visit the palace of Mercilla. The implication of the first three and a half lines of stanza 26 is that BON FONT is still to be read, but with difficulty; line 5 ‘raced out’ suggests total erasure, but, taken with what precedes, is perhaps more rightly read to imply partial obliteration, so that the inscription is a palimpsest, the earlier inscription still faintly visible. Even for the reader of the plainly visible inscription there is room for doubt as to its interpretation, a doubt that equivocates between

deeds and words: ‘Eyther for th’evill which he did therein’ (reading ‘font’ as French, as ‘bon’ and ‘mal’ seem to require, and possibly with a pun on poet as ‘maker’); ‘Or that he likened was to a welhed | Of euill words’ ‘font’ as

source of poetry. The phrase ‘a welhed | Of euill words’ allows the previous inscription (‘bon font’) to show through, a pun which makes a well-head of evil words a contradiction in terms. “That he likened was’ suggests that he may not really be ‘a welhed | Of euill words’; if so here is an example 76 The only other instance in The Faerie Queene of ‘purport’ also occurs in a context of concealment and pretence: 111.1.52, 7-8 ‘For she her sexe vnder that straunge purport | Did vse to hide, and plaine apparaunce shonne.'

407

408

Fame and blame, fame and envy

of the ‘fayned semblance’ that we had been told was kept out of Mercilla’s palace (v.ix.22, 8). At the threshold (the screen) of the queen’s presence the

poet inscribes his — or is it her? - own judgement on good and bad poetry. The judgement is made in words, but as if the meaning of words might run away with itself the tongue must also be physically nailed down. The difficulty that Spenser's reader has in making sense of stanza 26 seems proof of the impossibility of nailing down tongues, or rather of nailing down an audience's or readership's understanding of the words uttered by the tongue. The single, fixed, tongue turns out to speak with the many tongues that are the mark of the Virgilian Fama. Malfont is a human embodiment of Sclaunder and the Blatant Beast (vi.xii.33, 2-5 ‘he gan his hundred tongues apply, | And sharpely at him to reuile and raile, | With bitter terms of shameful infamy; | Oft interlacing many a forged lie'), but as a Malfont who was previously a Bonfont he combines in one person both good and bad Fama, fame and defamation. Malfont's position at the screen of the hall of judgement vividly locates the policing of words within the ambit of absolute political power. Bartlett Giamatti calls the figure of Malfont ‘Spenser’s most chilling version of the “double sense" in language, and of poets’, and he properly locates the source of this doubleness in the power struggle in which both epic poet and his characters are involved: 'He is finally meant to remind us, monarchs and

mere men, that whoever would properly govern, either himself or a nation, must first establish control over the dark and turbulent empire of words.’”’ The concern that the Malfont stanzas reveal for the difficulty of interpreting and adjudicating on sources of fama contains curious echoes of a passage where Spenser laments a different kind of degeneration in the stuff of fama, the loss, as Spenser believed, of the ending of Chaucer's Squire's Tale FQ, 1v.ii.32—4: Whylome as antique stories tellen vs,

Those two were foes the fellonest on ground, And battell made the dreddest daungerous, That euer shrilling trumpet did resound; Though now their acts be no where to be found,

As that renowmed Poet them compyled, With warlike numbers and Heroicke sound, Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled,

On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled. But wicked Time that all good thoughts doth waste, And workes of noblest wits to nought out weare, 7^ Giamatti 1975: 116-17.

Spenserian personifications of the word

That famous moniment hath quite defaste, And robd the world of threasure endlesse deare, The which mote haue enriched all vs heare.

O cursed Eld the cankerworme of writs, How may these rimes, so rude as doth appeare, Hope to endure, sith workes of heauenly wits Are quite deuourd, and brought to nought by little bits? Then pardon, O most sacred happie spirit, That I thy labours lost may thus reuiue, And steale from thee the meede of thy due merit, That none durst euer whilest thou wast aliue, And being dead in vaine yet many striue:

Ne dare I like, but through infusion sweete Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me surviue, I follow here the footing of thy feete, That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete. Here is another ‘well(head)’ of poetry," a ‘renowmed Poet’ whose ‘famous moniment' has been defaced, his pure springs of poesy defiled, not by deliberate human agency, but by the malice of Time. Spenser seeks to recover the lost ‘meaning’ of Chaucer through the fiction of metempsychosis, the passage of the dead Chaucer's spirit into the body of the living Spenser, a traditional way of claiming literary-historical aftiliation.’”? This passage itself reveals the reality underlying the fiction of poetic metempsy-

chosis, an infusion not of soul but of texts, in a dense intertextuality with a number of Chaucerian texts, the Canterbury Tales, Anelida and Arcite and the House of Farne.®° These stanzas themselves thus constitute a mini-House

of Chaucerian Fame. Spenser finds rich materials in the literature of classical antiquity from which to forge his personifications of bad fara. These monsters also have a very immediate relevance to the social climate and the political historyin the 78 The fuller ‘wellhead’ is used of Chaucer in The Mutabilitie Cantos vi1.vii.9 (on Dame Nature) ‘So hard it is for any liuing wight, | All her array and vestiments to tell, | That old Dan Geffrey (in whose gentle spright | The pure well head of Poesie did dwell) | [n his Foules parley durst not with it mel, | But it transferd to Alane, who he thought | Had in his Plaint of kindes describ'd it well: | Which who will read set forth so as it ought, | Go seek he out that Alane where he may be sought.’ ‘Pure well head’ triggers further puns in ‘Foules parley’ and 'describ'd it well:

79 See Gillespie 2010. % With iv.ii.32, 1 cf. the first line of the Canterbury Tales, Whilom, as olde stories tellen us’; with 33 cf. House of Fame 1144-7 (on the rock of ice) ‘of the lettres oon or two | Was every name, | So unfamous was woxe hir fame. | But men seyn “What may ever 33, 6-9 cf. Anelida and Arcite 10-14 ‘This olde storie, in Latyn which I fynde, | . which that al can frete and bite, | As hit hath freten mony a noble storie, | Hath

out of oure memorie.’

molte away of laste?”’; with . . That elde, nygh devoured

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Fame and blame, fame and envy

England of his own day, an age which cultural historians have characterized as one particularly obsessed with honour and reputation, with a corresponding anxiety about defamation and slander, matched by a great increase in litigation over defamation from the mid sixteenth century onwards.*' In Spenser’s case yet another potent source of unease about the possibility of establishing clear boundaries between good and bad uses of words, between praise and detraction, is his involvement in the Irish policies of the Elizabethan government. As Richard McCabe points out, both in A View of the Present State of Ireland, and in the allegories of The Faerie Queene, Spenser is repeatedly forced to confront the instability of his attempts to establish sharp distinctions between the ‘salvage’ nature of the native Irish and the civility of the English colonizers. The savage violence to which Artegall/Lord Grey has to resort in his imposition of a colonial version of justice is hardly distinguishable from the bloodletting practised by the heroes praised by the Irish bards, whose poetry Spenser parodies in A View. The accusations of cruelty and slaughter of the innocent launched by Detraction and Envy against Artegall at the end of Book v (x11.38—40) come uncomfortably close to mirroring Spenser’s slanderous parody of the Celtic bards, reducing the heroic subjects of their praise to the level of outlaws and thieves." Spenser confronts a particularly acute version of the problem inherent in all martial epic of distinguishing between self and other, between just and unjustified violence. This tussle between fame and detraction is one that had already been explored at length in Virgil’s Aeneid. &

&

»

410

Sharpe 1980: 3; Kaplan 1997: Ch. 1. Slander is also a major concern of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanists: Van Houdt and Papy 1999: 189—90. McCabe 2001: 67-71, drawing on McCabe

ego of the civil English poet.

1993: 78-9, on the Celtic bard as a demonic alter

l1

Christian conversions of Fama

From the beginning of the Western literary tradition, in the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, fama is the subject of contestation and critique. But the valuation of fama is subjected to particular pressure when an existing order of things is exposed to the criticism of a new philosophy or a new religion (see Ch. 1 pp. 22-36). The greatest shift in the ideology of fama comes about with the development of Christian views on the subject of fame and glory, with a displacement of the location of true glory from the earthly city to the city of god, with the corresponding nullification or inversion of the values of fame in this world. In this chapter I look at what happens when fama in the classical epic tradition runs up against a biblical narrative or other story about the Christian providential deity. In the next chapter I turn to the more complicated dealings with fama in some of the works of Petrarch, the figure often seen, with some simplification, as pulled between a medieval, Christian, world-view and a nascent humanist attitude towards the value of fame and memory in this world. Chapter 14 explores some of Milton's engagements with issues related to fama, with particular attention to Milton's biblical tragedy, Samson Agonistes. My focus in this chapter is on three Renaissance, neoclassical, epic narratives, but as a prologue I take an example of the Christian revaluation of pagan fame from an early Christian epic, the Praefatio to the early fourthcentury Euangeliorum libri rv, a versified narrative of the events of the Gospels, by Juvencus.' Juvencus acknowledges the power of the poems of Homer and Virgil to bestow both on the heroes they celebrate and on the poets themselves a lasting fame and glory, to which however a term will be set by the end of the world. Juvencus may have in mind Ovid's praise of Lucretius' poem at Am. 1.15.23-4 carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti, | exitio terras cum dabit una dies ‘the poetry of sublime Lucretius will perish [only] when a single day will see the destruction of the world’. Juvencus' own poem is superior to the epics ofthe pagan past in two respects: where the latter weave falsehoods, mendacia, into the deeds of men of old ! On the Praefatio see Green 2006: 15-23, with further bibliography.

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Christian conversions of fama

(Praef. 15-16 carmina... quae ueterum gestis hominum mendacia nectunt), Juvencus deals in the pure truths of the life of Christ (19—20 Christi uitalia gesta, | diuinum populis falsi sine crimine donum). Secondly, Juvencus' poem may outlast even the end of the world. This is because Juvencus deals in a

kind of word that is truly eternal, the word of God, as we read in Matthew 24:35 Caelum et terra transibunt, uerba autem mea non praeteribunt'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." It is also a word that has the potential to save the poet from destruction, in an inversion of the classical topos that it is the poet who confers immortality on his poem and its subject matter. Juvencus’ faith, the subject of his poem, will save him from hell-fire. I turn now to two Neolatin epics from the High Renaissance, Jacopo Sannazaro's De partu Virginisand Girolamo Vida's Christiad, both of which

recast the Gospels in highly classicizing, and in particular Virgilian, language and structure.

Jacopo Sannazaro's De partu Virginis By way ofa preliminary contrast with Sannazaro's Christianizing reworking of the classical topics of fama, I look at what he does with the classical machinery in a secular context, a farsa, Il triunfo de la Fama, a courtly pageant performed on 6 March 1492 in Don Federigo's palace in Naples, and celebrating Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Moors.’ Sannazaro's own description, together with the text of the speeches delivered by the allegorical figures, survives in a report to Don Federigo's wife, Donna Isabella. From a triumphal arch emerged firstly Pallas, the goddess who inspires to great deeds of warfare as well as of letters, and who announces herself (13—14) ‘amica | di quei che con fatica cercan fama’ ‘friend to those who laboriously seek fame’. Pallas was followed by Fama herself, on a char-

wu

nw

iot pulled by two elephants, as often in the Petrarchan trionfi tradition (see Fig. 5),! who in turn are led by two giants; Fama broadcasts the great deeds

2

412

Paraphrased at Euangel. libri iv 4.159-62 praeteriet neque enim praesens generatio saecli,

| donec

cuncta sequens claudat sibi debita finis. | haec tellus caelumque super soluentur in ignes, | sed mea non umquam soluentur ab ordine dicta. Text in Mauro 1961: 286—91; for some discussion see Kidwell 1993: 39-41. See Trapp unpublished: ‘The Trionfo della Fama’ 22 * .. . from about the time of the earlier of the Florentine engravings, elephants began to replace horses. The reasons can only be guessed at. It was known that elephants had been used in Roman triumphs; and from Pliny through the Bestiary, elephants were famous for long life and long memory, as well as sexual continence.’

Jacopo Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis

Fig. 5 Triumph of Fame, Petrarch I Trionfi. Sixteenth-century illumination

of heroes of antiquity and the present day. Finally there appeared Apollo, whose bright light keeps glorious deeds from sinking into oblivion, through the ink, pen and paper of historians and poets. Fama appears in Virgilian form, her golden wings painted with eyes, ears and tongues, visible only

413

Christian conversions of fama when she raises her wings, as she did at the end of her speech when, after

announcing that the name of the House of Aragon will soar aloft like a dove, she concluded, (132-5) ‘Perö ciascun meco lode e ringrazie | il ciel che ne

mostró tant’ardimento, | che di parlarne mai non seran sazie | queste mee cento bocche e lingue cento' "Therefore let everyone join me in praising and giving thanks to the heavens, which showed us such bold deeds that these hundred mouths and hundred tongues of mine will never have their fill of speaking of them.' Additional twists to the Virgilian model are her claims to understand all languages,° and to be both old and young: 75-7 ‘Di tempo e d'anni son vecchia et antica, | ma sempre ingiovenesco a le novelle | e di mutazion son sempre amica' 'In length of time and years I am old and ancient, but am constantly rejuvenated by news, and | am a constant

friend to change.’ Here is yet another dichotomy of Fama; viewed both as long-lasting fame or renown, and as ever new news and rumour (Fig. 6). This is a domesticated Fama, whose only fault is that she is given to mobility and to the latest news, and is hence in need of Apollo to ensure that her antiquity is guaranteed by the fixing agency of writing. Sannazaro's three-book epic on the birth of Christ, De partu Virginis (1526), begins with elaborate scenes of the transmission of messages. The main narrative opens with the Christian God looking down from a Jovian vantage point on an earth whose inhabitants are the unchallenged prey of the forces of hell. Mankind fell through a woman's sin, and now is to be redeemed through a woman, Mary. God instructs the (unnamed) angel Gabriel to descend and tell Mary that she is to be the Mother of God (1.3381). The instruction, the angel's descent, and his message to Mary (the Annunciation), are all based on Jupiter's dispatch of Mercury to Carthage in Aeneid 4, following the eruption of Fama after the ‘wedding’ of Dido and Aeneas. In the De partu the Annunciation is followed by a journey of Fama, down into hell, to announce the forthcoming liberation of the souls of the just, 1.225-33:

w

Interea Manes descendit Fama sub imos, pallentesque domos ueris rumoribus implet: optatum aduentare diem, quo tristia linquant For other multilingual examples of Fama cf. Rabelais, Cinquiesme livre 30, where in the Land of Satin Pantagruel comes across Hearsay (‘Ouy-dire’), his body covered in ears, but blind, with

a

414

seven tongues each split into seven parts, speaking on different subjects and in different tongues with all seven at the same time; Rumour in the Induction to Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 pronounces ‘continual slanders’ ‘in every language’ (see Ch. 13 p. 500); in Milton’s Paradise Lost the punishment for the building of the Tower of Babel is a nightmarish version of a House of Fama (see Ch. 14 pp. 545-6). Perhaps related to the puer seriex topos: see Curtius 1953: 98-101.

Jacopo Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis

Fig. 6 Nugigerula lingua, from J. Drexel Orbis Phaethon, hoc est, De universis vitiis linguae (Cologne 1634)

Tartara, et euictis fugiant Acheronta tenebris,

immanemque ululatum, et non laetabile murmur tergemini canis, aduerso qui carceris antro excubat insomnis semper, rictuque trifauci horrendum, stimulante fame, sub nocte profunda personat et morsu uenientes adpetit umbras.

230

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Christian conversions of fama

Meanwhile Fama descended to the depths of the underworld, and filled its pale abodes with true rumours: that the longed-for day was at hand, when they would leave gloomy Hades and conquer the darkness and escape from Acheron and the monstrous barking and joyless roaring of the three-headed dog, who keeps watch, ever unsleeping, at the mouth of their prison-cave, and, goaded by hunger, lets forth a terrifying cry from his three throats through the dark night, and tries to bite the shades as they arrive.

=

E]

The souls of the pious rejoice at the news, and David is inspired to a long and animated prophecy of the life of Christ, from his birth to his return to heaven in triumph after the Harrowing of Hell (1.245-452). Andrew Laird reads the combination of Angel of the Annunciation plus intervention of Fama as a rewriting of the Fama-Jupiter-Mercury sequence in Aeneid 4.’ Sannazaro has transferred the ability to cross from the world above to the world below from Mercury to Fama (cf. especially 227-8 tristia linquant | Tartara with Aen. 4.242—3 hac animas ille euocat Orco | pallentis, alias sub Tartara tristia mittit ‘with this rod [Mercury] calls up the pale souls from Hades, and sends others down to gloomy Tartarus"), although we should remember that Virgil's Fama is herself of chthonic origin (see Ch. 3 p. 99), and report or rumour is able to travel to the underworld since at least the time of Pindar (see Ch. 3 p. 98 n. 60)." Virgil's Mercury leads souls either to or from the underworld; Sannazaro's Fama announces a one-way passage out of hell. This is a Fama who tells nothing but the truth, unlike the mixture of fact and fiction propagated by the Virgilian creature. Laird sees in Sannazaro's Fama a figure for the poet himself, who claims to tell the reader the Gospel truth, and who within the De partu is anticipated by the prophetic narrative of the biblical poet David. The Gospel truth — but not quite always, for Sannazaro includes a fair amount of classical mythology in the poem,” for example when, immediately following the descent of the true Fama, the poet lingers on a description of one of the standard fables of the pagan underworld, Cerberus. There is a contrast between the true and joyful sounds (rumores) with which Fama fills hell, and the non laetabile murmur of the three-headed dog which has hitherto rung through the place, and the implication is perhaps that direct Christian truth will now crowd out the babble of pagan falsehood. Yet Cerberus is still there as a fiction within Sannazaro's own poem. Laird also draws out the associations of the

»

416

Laird 1999: 274-81. There is an example in Vida, Christiad 6.248-51 (the blessed souls to Christ) sed quibus exhaustum erumnis, quantisque procellis | iactatum accipimus? (nigras ea fama sub oras | detulit) indigno quis sanctum uulnere corpus | foedauit? See Greene

1963: 153; 162-3 on Sannazaro's stated policy on his classical allusions, that of

fingere senza scandalo.

Jacopo Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis

verb implet, used of what Fama does at line 226. fama conventionally ‘fills’, but at the same time is often just ‘empty’ talk (see Ch. | p. 10). In the Gospel story something intangible, the Holy Spirit, will ‘fill’ the Virgin in a very physical way, as the Angel of the Annunciation tells the Virgin at 1.163—5 ‘immo istas (quod tu minime iam rere) per aures’ | excipit interpres foecundam spiritus aluum | influet implebitqe potenti uiscera partu’ ‘Indeed’, the messenger replied, ‘through your ears (the last thing you would expect) the spirit will flow into your fertile belly and fill your womb with a powerful offspring.' What goes in through the ears is normally the spoken word, and in his instructions to the angel God had said, (1.78—9)

"castas haec iussus

ad aures | effare et pulcris cunctantem hortatibus imple ‘At my bidding carry this message to her chaste ears and, though she hesitates, fill her with these

fair exhortations.' The angel brings true words to the Virgin; immediately after he finishes speaking, the word is made present to her in a far more physical way, 1.188—93: at uenter ( mirabile dictu! non ignota cano) sine ui, sine labe pudoris,

arcano intumuit uerbo: uigor actus ab alto irradians, uigor omnipotens, uigor omnia complens descendit - deus ille, deus! — totosque per artus dat sese, miscetque utero. Wondrous to relate (I sing of things well known) her belly swelled up with the hidden word, without sexual violence, with no stain on her chastity. An illuminating force

driven from on high, an all-powerful force, a force filling all things, came down to earth — a god he is, a god! - and imparted itself through all her limbs and mingled in her womb.

In a world made new by the incarnation of the Word, fama has a more direct hold on reality. The poet’s words tell the truth about the Word made flesh. The connection between the fullness of truth in the words of the heavenly messenger and their fulfilment in the filling of the Virgin’s womb is brought out in Elizabeth's makarismos of Mary at 2.45-8: ‘felix, uirgo, animi, felix, cui tanta mereri credulitas dedit una: in te nam plena uidebis omnia, quae magni uerax tibi dixit Olympi aliger, arcano delapsus ab aethere cursu.’ ‘Blessed in spirit, Virgin, blessed, to whom faith alone granted such high desert; for in yourself you will see all things fulfilled [lit. ‘full’], which the winged messenger of high heaven told you truly, gliding down from the sky on his secret path.’

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Christian conversions of fama

sine labe pudoris at 1.189 points to another ‘correction’ of the Virgilian model: in Aeneid 4 Fama gets going once Dido has abandoned her determination to remain loyal to her first husband, and ceases to think of her

own fama and pudor (see Ch. 3 pp. 85-6); Mercury's intervention follows thereafter. Sannazaro's Mercury equivalent, the angel, descends to inform Mary that she will be impregnated by another than her husband, but with no stain on her good reputation, her concern for which is emphasized in her last words to the departing angel: 1.220 ‘4, precor, i, rostrum testis defende pudorem! ‘Go, I pray you, go and bear witness in defence of my chastity.’ The first occurrence of fama in the poem is in the sense of (a woman's) ‘good reputation, in the invocation to the Muses, (1.11-12) wos | uirginitas sanctaeque iuuat reuerentia famae ‘you take pleasure in virginity and in respect for a sacred good name. The more active, masculine, kind of fama of Christ is foreseen in the prophecies of David, (1.252-3) tua late | jussa per immensum fama uulgauimus orbem ‘we have broadcast the fame of your commands far and wide over the boundless earth; and of Proteus, as recalled by the river-god Jordan (3.338—44). Virgil's Mercury descends to ensure that Aeneas does not lose the plot of gloria rerum (Romanarum) (Aen. 4.272); the message of Sannazaro's angel, and the report, Fara, that reaches down to hell, will culminate in the worldwide fama of the Christian alternative to, and transformation of, the pagan Roman Empire. The Virgin too will share in the glory of God, and that conversion of a female kind of fama into universal 'fame' is foreshadowed in the striking phrase in the simile that compares Mary's astonishment at the words of the angel to that of a girl gathering shells by the sea, who suddenly sees a rich merchant-ship put into shore, 1.125-34: 127 nuda pedem uirgo, laetae noua gloria matris ‘barefoot virgin, her happy mother's fresh glory.

Girolamo Vida's Christiad Girolamo Vida's Christiad (1535), a six-book epic on the life of Christ, is a highly Virgilian epic, but it does not follow the Aeneid in containing a setpiece personification of Fama. However, fama is very much at the centre of the action and values of the poem, partly through direct appropriation of the

10 As with the allusions to the Virgilian story of Dido and Aeneas, there is here a hint of a sexual

threat to the Virgin from a stranger arriving by sca; the girl absorbed in gathering shells is also like Ovid's Proserpina intent on gathering flowers when she is raped by Pluto, Mer. 5.391-4. Once again the classical model is given a happy ending.

Girolamo Vida’s Christiad

classical pagan fama-as-fame, but more importantly through a revaluation of fama-as-rumour. What might appear a slavish devotion to Vida’s poetic ‘god’, Virgil, is combined with a making new of the antique model, in keeping with Vida’s own prescriptions in his didactic De arte poetica. In the Christiad this poetic making new is a fitting vehicle for the subject of Christ’s making

new of religion and humanity.'' As an epic the Christiad is in the business of praising its hero, Christ (repeatedly designated as heros). His victory and fame are expressed through the vocabulary of Virgil's Roman imperialism, whose military conquests will be outstripped by the spiritual conquests of Christianity. During the Transfiguration, the climax of Book 1, God the Father, combining the prophecies

of the Virgilian Jupiter and Anchises, looks to the future worldwide expansion of his Son's fame, 1.905-8: succedent aliis alii, sacrique nepotes uictores tua signa ferent trans ultima claustra Oceani latas undis cohibentia terras, clarescetque tuum passim per secula nomen. Others, and yet others, shall succeed these men, and holy generations in the future will bear your standards victoriously across Ocean's furthest barriers that close in broad lands with the waves, and your name will be famous everywhere, for ever.

Similarly Virgilian are the terms in which the Angel of the Annunciation (a biblical version of the pagan messenger-god, as in Sannazaro) tells Mary of Jesus’ future reign, 3.344—9: supra homines, supra aspicies se tollere et ipsos coelicolas fama insignem, ac praestantibus ausis. nam pater omnipotens atauorum in sceptra reponet

pristina regnantem late, regumque sedebit in solio, neque enim metas, neque tempora regni accipiet. toto aeternum dominabitur orbe.'? You will see him rise above men and above even the inhabitants of heaven, glorious

in fame and through his outstanding deeds. For the almighty Father will restore

See Hardie 1993b: 310 on the repeated use of longe alius in various contexts in the Christiad. On the Christiad the best introduction is still Di Cesare

1964; on Vida's use of Virgil see also

the review article ofDi Cesare by Bruére 1966. Parallel text editions of the Christiad: Drake and Forbes

1973; Gardner 2009.

Combining elements from the first and last prophetic speeches of the Virgilian Jupiter: Aen. 12.839 supra homines, supra ire deos pietate uidebis, 1.278 his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono.

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him, wide-ruling, to the ancient sceptre of your ancestors, and he will sit on the throne of kings, and he will have no limits in space or time to his kingdom. He will rule over the whole earth for ever.

In the Council of Devils at the beginning of the poem Satan, correctly foreseeing the Harrowing of Hell and Christ's rescue of the souls of the blessed, suggests that Christ might also lead Satan and his crew in chains to heaven in triumph (1.191—2 uinctosque inducet Olympo | uictor, ouans). That is not quite right, but Christ's return to heaven at the Ascension is compared in a simile to a victorious consul returning in triumph, in the heyday of Rome's power, 6.701—7: 706—7 consul uictor, ouans pugnatis undique bellis, | intrabat rediens. The poet too is given the epic poet's conventional role of praise: in the final interview between Father and Son, the Father looks fifteen hundred years into the future to prophesy the poem that we are even now reading, 6.880—96: quin etiam mox tempus erit, cum scilicet olim ter centum prope lustra peregerit aethereus Sol, tum ueri Graium obliti mendacia uates funera per gentes referent tua carmine uerso, atque tuis omnes resonabunt laudibus urbes,

praesertim laetam Italiae felicis ad oram

885

qua rex fluuiorum Eridanus se turbidus infert

888

moenia turrigerae stringens male tuta Cremonae... Indeed there will also come a time, when

the sun in heaven shall have completed

almost fifteen hundred years, and then true bards, forgetting the falsehoods of the

Greeks, shall tell of your death through the peoples of the earth, in song transformed, and all cities shall ring with your praises, especially on fertile Italy's happy shores... where

the

Po, king of rivers, channels

its violent

stream,

skirting the

precarious walls of towered Cremona.

Cremona is the home of Vida. On the banks of the rivers of Italy boys and unwed girls willlearn to compete in praises of God from their earliest youth; (896) haec tibi certa manent, haec uis mouet ordine nulla ‘these promises are

assured for you, no power can move them from their ordained course’. God the Father repeats the certainty vouchsafed by Father Jupiter to Venus at Aen. 1.257-8 manent immota tuorum | fata tibi ‘the fate of your descendants remains unmoved’, at the beginning of the speech which reaches a climax with a prophecy of the star-reaching fama of Julius Caesar (1.287 famam qui terminet astris).

Vida's Virgilian praise epic and his Horatian boys and girls share a mission with other vehicles for the praise of Christ. At the beginning of the final

Girolamo Vida’s Christiad

interview in heaven Christ asks his Father to strengthen his disciples against fear, reminding Him of His promise that they would spread the Gospel, 6.830—3: tu tamen hos olim fore, qui praestantibus ausis per gentes canerent nostrum indelebile nomen,"

quacunque oceano terrarum clauditur orbis, et populos noua conuersos ad sacra uocarent. But you promised that one day these would be the men who would nobly dare to sing our indestructible name throughout the world, wherever the earth is bounded by the ocean, and who would convert the peoples and call them to new rites.

In response the Father, looking forward to Pentecost, confirms that the disciples will be made fearless, 6.860—4: uerum ultra Gangen auditi, Bactra ultima supra,

Ismara, Bistoniasque plagas, Serasque remotos Gadibus, et uirides penetrabunt uoce Britannos. implebunt terras monitis, et cuncta nouantes

templa pererrato statuent tibi maxima mundo. ' But they shall be heard beyond the Ganges, beyond furthest Bactria and Ismarus, the Bistonian lands and China far distant from Cadiz, and their voice shall reach the

woad-coloured Britons. They shall fill the earth with your teaching, and making all things new they shall build great temples to you after they have wandered through the world.

The poem ends not with a homecoming, but with the journeying of the disciples and their voice to the ends of the earth (leading, in the final seven lines, to the institution ofthe new religion and the new people of Christians), 6.973—9: ergo abeunt uarias longe, lateque per oras diuersi, laudesque canunt, atque inclyta uulgo facta ducis, iamque (ut uates cecinere futurum

antiqui) illorum uox fines exit in omnes. audiit et siquem medio ardens aethere iniquo sidere desertis plaga diuidit inuia terris, quique orbem extremo circunsonat aequore pontus. And so they went their different ways, far and wide in various countries, and sang the praises and famous deeds of their leader to all and sundry, and now, as the ancient

'3 Cf. Ovid's closing boast at Met. 15.876 nomenque erit indelebile nostrum. ^ This is realized in the narrative of the speaking in all the voices of the world at Pentecost, 6.938-52, with another catalogue of peoples of the world.

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prophets had foretold, their voice went out into all lands. They were heard even by

those who are separated by the pathless region of the desert, burning beneath the cruel equatorial sun, or those separated by the sea whose remote waters thunder round the world.

The ends-of-the-earth language of Roman imperialism is applied to the propagation of the Gospel by the disciples, who however are not a social and military élite, but of lowly origin. This is stressed in John’s narrative of the choosing of the disciples at 4.245—50: sed ne forte putes multis e millibus illi

nos ideo placuisse, dolis quod et arte magistra spectatos longe ante alios deprenderit omnes aut opibus claraque domus a stirpe potentes, omnibus obscurum genus, et sine luce penates,

atque humilis fortuna, nec astu praedita uita. But lest you should think that he chose us out of many thousands because through

long trial he found us to be outstanding in cunning or supreme art, or in wealth, or powerful through famous ancestry, we are all of lowly birth, our homes are obscure, our fortunes humble, and we are not endowed with cleverness. John is self-deprecating, but the humbleness of the disciples is in keeping

with the biblical inversion of an élite view of rank and fame. The glory of God is to be celebrated and exalted, but for mortals the pursuit of fame and glory is not a positive value, as Christ repeatedly stresses in the account of his preaching given by John in Book 4: tum subito ostendens puerum, cui mollibus annis laudis adhuc erat et tumidi mens nescia flatus, *nulli fas, inquit, 'superum aspirare beatis conciliis, si non fastus dediscat inanes, et penitus famae exuerit contemptor amorem, ceu puer hic nullam suspirat pectore laudem.' Then he suddenly pointed to a boy of tender years, whose mind was still innocent

of praise and swollen pride, and said, ‘No man can aspire to the councils of heaven, unless he unlearns empty arrogance, and despises and casts off entirely the love of fame, just as this boy has no longing for praise in his breast.’ (4.73843) usque deum premere elatos longeque superbos auerti, quos famae agitat, laudumque cupido. God always humbles the haughty, and keeps far from the proud, those who are driven by the desire for fame and praise. (4.757—8)

Girolamo Vida’s Christiad

placidam super omnia mites pacem optate uiri, tumidosque remittite flatus, demissique animis nil uanae laudis egentes mortales contemnite opes, contemnite honores.

Above all, men, be gentle and choose calm peace, and put off swollen pride, and, with humble spirit that has no need of empty praise, spurn mortal wealth, spurn honours. (4.882—5)

pacemque inglorius hostibus opta, nec tibi uentosae sint tanti murmura famae. Rejecting glory wish peace upon your enemies, and do not value the murmurs of windy fame. (4.909-10)

As a man, Christ practises what he preaches, usually telling those whom he heals that they should not reveal his deeds (4.765 ne factum proderet usquam). Not only is windy glory to be avoided, its opposite, ignominy, is to be embraced, as Christ instructs Peter at 1.84—7: et cum mortales linguas in iurgia soluent uos contra, falsis onerantes nomina uestra criminibus, gaudete, ac firmo pectore ferte, indignamque ignominiam contemnite laeti. And when men loose their tongues to revile you, heaping false accusations on your names, rejoice and endure with steadfast breast, and cheerfully scorn undeserved slander.

*Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake' (Matt. 5:11). Christ submits to infamy when he mounts the Cross, but by his death infamy is turned into glory, 5.411-17 (the Cross): tum neque honos erat, infami neque gloria trunco. at nunc numen habet sanctum,"

et uenerabile lignum

suppliciter cuncti colimus... et laetum ex illo memores celebramus honorem. illa etiam coelo fulgebit lampadis instar aethereae, et totum lustrabit lumine mundum.

15 Lines 411-12 allude to Anchises! prophecy of the future fame of places in Italy that now have no name: Aen. 6.776 haec tum nomina erunt, nunc sunt sine nomine terrae. The Cross now has

more than a nomen, it has numen.

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At that time the shameful tree-trunk was accorded no honour or glory, but now it has sacred divinity. We all humbly worship the venerable wood...and since then, remembering, we joyfully celebrate and honour it. Further, it will shine in the heavens like a celestial torch and illuminate the whole world with its light.

Christ also teaches that we should spurn the wandering gossip of the crowd (4.902 rumoresque uagos contemnite uulgi). But rumores uulgi play a large and positive part in the poem. The final worldwide propagation of the voice of the apostles is the conclusion of a narrative of fama-as-rumour, or as popular report, that starts at the beginning of the poem, and which involves a struggle for the control of fama between the forces of good and evil. When Christ first appears he is accompanied by a great crowd of young and old, drawn together from all quarters by reports of his doings: 1.18-20 illum ingens comitum numerus iuuenesque senesque | sponte sequebantur, rerum quos fama trahebat | undique collectos. The Virgilian model for the sentence is the description of the great crowd that Aeneas finds has gathered, at the end of Aeneid 2, ready to be led by him to any land overseas.'^ Christ too will lead his flock to a new celestial homeland, in a journey of 'exile' from the false home

of this world (Christ.

1.54—5

'domus non haec data,

non hae | sunt uobis propriae sedes' ‘this is not the home given to you, this is not your true dwelling’). rerum quos fama trahebat ‘drawn by reports of his doings' is an addition to the Virgilian model, the phrase rerum fama suggesting that this is a report of things that actually happened (however miraculous)." fama and rumor will draw more crowds to marvel at and to follow Christ, at the Raising of Lazarus (1.260—4), and at the entry into Jerusalem (1.424-38).

At 4.155-63 John the Baptist has been sent as a prophet of the coming of Jesus, a praenuntius (4.162). To begin with he speaks to wild nature, but this voice in the wilderness soon turns into socialized fama, 4.171-7: 16 Aen. 2.796-9 atque hic ingentem comitum adfluxisse nouorum | inuenio admirans numerum, matresque uirosque, | collectam exsilio pubem, miserabile uulgus. | undique conuenere... !7 The unbelievability of the (mere) report of Christ's miracles is a recurrent theme: 1.260-1 (report of Christ's promise to resurrect Lazarus) diditur haec totam confestim fama per urbem, | quae cunctis incredibilisque et mira uideri (cf. Aen. 3.294—5 hic incredibilis rerum fama occupat auris, | Priamtden Helenum Graias regnare per urbes); 4.236-40 (after the baptism of Christ) ex illo uates nemora, et loca sola relinquens | urbes per medias ibat, populisque canebat | aduenisse deum...| credita res paucis, donec se ostendere coram | supra hominem coepit deus ipse ingentibus orsis. The theme comes to a climax in the story of Doubting Thomas, 6.441-591. By contrast the Roman Pilate is persuaded of the truth by the flashback narratives of Joseph and John: 5.94-5 (Pilate to the elders) nil dignum morte repertum, | sed potius factis fama illum ingentibus effert (on the pairing of fama and facta see Ch. 1 p. 9).

Girolamo Vida’s Christiad

tantum laetificas gaudebat spargere uoces, affatus nemora et montis ac littora ponti. tanta sed haud latuit uirtus tamen; ilicet ingens fama uiri circunfusas penetrauit ad urbes. iamque illum coelo demissum credere gentes, qui, tot ueridicae ut quondam cecinere Sibyllae,

humanum genus horrificis educeret umbris. He rejoiced just in spreading the glad tidings, speaking to the woods and mountains and seashores. But such excellence did not remain hidden; straightway the man's great fame reached the cities round about, and now the peoples believed that he had been sent down from heaven, as so many true-speaking Sibyls had sung of old, in order to lead the human race out of the terrifying shadows.

The result is a great concourse of people who come to see the Baptist. Here fama ‘rumour, report’, works to reinforce prophetic messages, that of the Baptist himself and also of earlier prophets, the ueridicae Sibyllae." Divine and human voices work together elsewhere. An angelic voice bids the Virgin's parents to marry off their daughter (3.155-8), and immediately the news spreads (159 continuo paruam uulgatur fama per urbem), leading to the gathering of another crowd, the suitors for Mary's hand. The fama that brings the crowds to follow Jesus during his ministry, to witness miracles such as the Raising of Lazarus, is the first stirring of the universal fame of Christ dead and risen that is the Gospel, spread far

and wide by the apostles after Pentecost. The rerum fama that draws large crowds at the very beginning of the narrative is continuous with the laudes atque inclyta facta ducis ‘praises and famous deeds of the leader’ (6.974—5) proclaimed at the end. The universal empire of the fama of Christ might also be seen as the inevitable end of the expression in the world of the Word of God, with whom the Son is synonymous, in the inspired words of John (paraphrasing the Gospel of John) at the beginning of John's narrative of the life of Christ: 4.33—5 arcanoque latens in pectore VERBVM, | quod nondum in uolucres uox edita protulit auras, | omnipotens uerbum finisque et originis expers'[the Son was conceived by the Father as] the word hidden in his secret heart, which his spoken word had not yet brought forth into the fleeting breezes, the almighty word, without end or beginning: The history of the Incarnation is that of the Word made flesh, of the sublimity and glory of God housed within the humble body of man. It is fitting that rumour, '8 In this case human fama has not (yet) got it quite right, since it leads to the false belief that the Baptist himselfis the saviour.

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report, the lowly words of the common people, should play a decisive part in the propagation of the word of God in the Christian message.'” The success of the Christian message is opposed by Satan, who tries to use a bad version of fama against the true fama rerum of Christ. The Council of Devils at 1.121-235 takes place in a hell that is full of unruly noises: 164-5 fremitu uario sonat intus opaca | regia ‘the dark palace resounded within with all kinds of noise‘. The evil spirits convened include those with power over wind and storm (160-2), perhaps an allusion to the hellish Cave of the Winds at the beginning of the Aeneid."" Satan urges his fellows to infuriate and poison the people of Jerusalem against Christ: their task is that of the Virgilian Allecto, to poison with envy and hatred, but their means are largely those of the Virgilian Fama, an association already invited by the Virgilian text (see Ch. 3 pp. 101-2), of which Vida was such an obsessive and expert reader, 1.212-15: hic opibus uestris opus. en nunc confieri rem tempus adest. in eum cuncti maioribus illos

inflammate odiis et uera et praua canentes," pestiferumque animis furtim inspirate uenenum. Here your help is needed. Now is the time for the thing to be done. Inflame them, all of you, with greater hatred for him, and chanting things both true and false, secretly breathe deadly poison into their hearts. The devils immediately swarm out of hell to do their worst, but the account

of their assault on the elders and priests of Jerusalem is deferred until the beginning of Book 2. The elders are already predisposed to devilish interference by their terror and anxiety at the sight of Christ as he entered the city, and by the unstoppable growth of his fame, which is in line with the ancient prophecies of a heavenly king at whose coming the Temple and Jerusalem would be destroyed, 2.5-14; 5-8: omnibus ante oculos urbem ingredientis imago laeta dei, festique manus impubis honores,

19 On the humility of Christ's Incarnation and of the apostles, and on the revaluation by late-antique Christian writers of the sermo humilis with which the Bible cloaks its sublime mysteries, see the classic discussion of Auerbach 1965. Vida’s own style is of course at the opposite extrerne from sermo humilis. 20 With Christ. 1.160 necnon uentorum tempestatumque potentes cf. Aen. 1.53 luctantis uentos tempestatesque sonoras. On the links between the Virgilian Cave of the Winds and fama see Ch. 2 pp. 70-2. ?!

Cf. Aen. 4.188 (Fama)

tam ficti prauique tenax quam nuntia ueri.

Girolamo Vida’s Christiad

illiusque uident late increbescere nomen.

Fama uolat" passimque canit miracula rerum. Before everyone's eyes was the happy image of God entering the city, with festal honours paid by a band of young men, and they saw his name winning a wide celebrity. Fama took wing, and sang the wonders of his deeds everywhere.

In a counter-attack the ministers of the great slanderer flock through the city, settling on rooftops and towers like birds of ill omen (like Virgil's Fama perhaps: see Ch. 16 pp. 609-11),°* before carrying out their combined impersonation of Allecto and Fama: 2.35-8 uipereamque uiris animam, caecumque furorem | inspirant...etomnem| protinus incendunt uariis rumoribus urbem 'they breathe into them a viperous spirit and blind fury; immediately they inflame the whole city with various rumours’. Christ's growing fame as he entered Jerusalem was the product of things seen and things heard. The devils practise ocular as well as aural deception, appearing in dreams as falsa simulacra, so instantiating a recurrent association of fama with dreams, 2.40—6: somnia dira ferunt uaria sub imagine rerum, atque hominum falsis simulacris pectora ludunt. iamque huius subeunt, iamque illius alta potentum limina et attonitos dictis hortantur in hostem, terrificantque animos facta atque infecta canentes. Christum inferre faces, arisque instare bipenni armatum aerata, atque adytis extrema minari.

They bring terrible dreams with images of various things and with these false phantoms they mock men's hearts. And now they enter the lofty portals of this man of power and that, amazing them and urging them against their enemy, and they terrify their minds chanting both fact and fiction: that Christ is attacking with

2?

Fama also has an inaugural role at the beginnings of Book 1 (see above), Book 3 (1 Fama uolans spreads news of the taking of Christ), and Book 5 (Pilate, desirous of releasing Christ,

D"

2

contemplates (3-4) fama uiri... nec iam obscurum genus esse Deorum). 2.28 caetera perque uias legio; does the choice of the word legio suggest a connection with the Babel of evil demons in the story of the Gadarene swine, the centrepiece in John's accounts of the miracles of Christ, 4.439-531? The host of demons that possesses the young man is called (464) Erebi legio acta latebris, Vida details at length the variety of terrifying noises that they make, 494-507, sounds that might be heard in a particularly unruly and evil House of Fama;

cf. Mark 5:9 et interrogabat eum: ‘quod tibi nomen est?’ et dicit ei: "legio nomen mihi est, quia multi sumus! (cf. Luke 8:30). At the end of Vida's narrative of the Gadarene swine a great roar of the crowd rises to the heavens, harmonious and expressive of truth: 530-1 it uulgi clamor super aurea sidera ouantis, | supremique patris sobolemque, deumque fatentur.

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firebrands, and, armed with a bronze axe, is approaching the altars and threatening the shrines with destruction.

As at Aen. 4.190—4 facta atque infecta canentes/-ebat is followed by a report in indirect speech of the content of the distorted rumours. The elders rush confusedly to the Temple, (2.54) non aliter captam si rumor nuntiet urbem ‘just as if a rumour announced the capture of the city.“ Rumour is frequently attached to the theme of the sack or capture of a city, for example at the end of Aeneid 4 where Fama's maenadic dance through the city of Carthage as she announces Dido's self-wounding is followed by a simile comparing the lamentation to that at the sack of Carthage or Tyre (see further Ch. 3 p. 114). Vida's rumour is specifically of urbs capta, and is not entirely false, since Jerusalem and the Temple are doomed to destruction in the future in revenge for the persecution of the prophets and Christ, as Christ prophesies at 1.564-81. Vida's rumour, like Virgil’s simile, is proleptic of an actual city-sacking in time to come, a good example of the half-truths typical of Fama. By the end of the story the rumours of the risen Christ become unstoppable, despite the continued attempts of the priests to stamp them out, 6.392404: Fama Palaestinas subito haec impleuerat urbes. iamque sacerdotes trepidare et quaerere, siqua multiplici uulgi sermoni occurrere possint rumoremque astu premere atque extinguere famam.

395

custodes busti in primis, qui cuncta canebant, muneribus superant subiguntque haud uera profari, sublatum furto intempesta nocte cadauer. sed non ulla datur uerum exsuperare facultas," quoque magis tendunt serpentem sistere famam,

400

amplius hoc uolat illa omnemque exsuscitat oram. sunt etiam qui se ore canant uidisse patentes sponte sua tumulos multosque exisse sepulcris, quorum iampridem tellus acceperat ossa.”“

7^ Cf. 4.782-4 uniusque petunt caput omnes. scis quibus illum, | huc furiis traxere, quibus clamoribus omnem | implerunt trepidi captam uelut hostibus urbem. ?5 Cf. Aen. 7.591-2 uerum ubi nulla datur caecum exsuperare potestas | consilium et saeuae nutu lunonis eunt res. in Vida good not evil prevails. ?* Cf. Lucr. 1.134-5 (immediately after the correction of Ennius’ false doctrine on the afterlife) cernere uti uideamur eos audireque coram, | morte obita quorum tellus amplectitur ossa, a delusion now become true.

Milton’s In quintum Nouembris

These tidings had instantly filled the cities of Palestine. Now the priests were alarmed and tried to find a way to counter the proliferating talk of the people, to check the rumour by guile and extinguish the report. First they used bribes to win over the guards of the tomb, who were telling of all that had happened, and forced them to say things that were not true, that the body had secretly been removed at the dead of night. But there was no way of overcoming the truth, and the more they tried to stop the spreading rumour, the more widely it flew and aroused all the land. There were even those who said that they had seen the tombs opened of their own accord, and that many whose bones had long ago been buried in the earth had issued forth.

The language here is emphatically that of fama-as-rumour, not fama-asfame, the multiplex uulgi sermo," the irrepressible babbling of the manyheaded beast, a humilis sermo that the élite priests try to control, unruly words that have now been revalued as Gospel truth, in an inversion of the

class-structure normative in pagan epic."

Milton's In quintum Nouembris Milton knew and admired Vida's Christiad, to which he refers in an early poem, ‘The Passion’, hailing the poet from Cremona as supreme in writing of the ‘Godlike acts’ and ‘temptations fierce’ of Christ: 26 ‘Loud ore the rest Cremona’s Trump doth sound.” Milton’s own exercise in Virgilian narrative in Latin is one of his juvenilia, the In quintum Nouembris, written in 1625

or 1626 while Milton was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and possibly composed for an annual celebration at Christ’s College of the deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot." The poem is a late example of a sub-genre of English Neolatin epic, which Estelle Haan has labelled the 'Anglo-Latin gunpowder epic' Milton uses the plot devices of Virgil's providentialist epic in order to set in opposition two competing imperialisms, on one side the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland under the protestant king

27 -

2

? e

3

Cf. Aen. 4.189 haec [sc. Fama] tum multiplici populos sermone replebat. Vida has a basis for his handling of rumour and report in the fama language of the Gospels: Luke 4:14-15 et regressus est lesus in uirtute Spiritus in Galilaeam et fama exiit per uniuersam regionem de illo et ipse docebat in synagogis eorum et magnificabatur ab omnibus, 5:15 perambulabat autem magis sermo de illo et conueniebant turbae multae ut audirent et curarentur ab infirmitatibus suis. On the role of rumour in the New Testament see Boitani 198-1: 30-1. On Milton's use of the Christiad in Paradise Lost see Haan 1993. Bibliography: Cheek

1957; Demaray

1984; Haan

1992-3; Hale 2005:

163-84; Quint

1991;

Sutton 1998; Tung 1975. A hypertext critical edition is available at: http://www.philological. bham.ac.uk/milton/.

429

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James VI of Scotland/I of England, and on the other the Church of Rome

trying to recover its former dominion over Britain. The plot-line is essentially that of Book 7 of the Aeneid: the pious James,

after journeying from the remote north, has established himself as the peaceful ruler of the English, who are labelled in line 2 as Teucrigenas ‘of Trojan descent’, in allusion to the story of the foundation of Britain by the Trojan Brut, and in this context a signal of the parallelism between the narratives of Virgil’s Trojans and their British descendants. Just as the peaceful arrival of the Trojans in Latium and prospective union with the native Latins are disrupted in Aeneid 7 by the intervention of Juno and her hellish agent Allecto, so when Satan, the exile from heaven who wanders

the earth as a kind of anti-Aeneas (anticipating the presentation of Satan as an epic wanderer in Paradise Lost), catches sight of the prosperous kingdom he is stimulated to an indignant outburst, followed by swift flight to Italy where he appears in a dream to the Pope to incite him to action, as Allecto appears to Turnus. Satan’s address to the sleeping Pope also alludes to the two appearances in Aeneid 4 of Mercury to the waking and sleeping Aeneas, in order to urge him to leave Carthage and get back on course towards the future glory of Roman Empire.”! The Pope's task is to restore a lost empire over the Protestant English, in a return to a previous ‘Golden Age’, the age of the Roman Catholic queen Mary (127 saecula sic illic tandem Mariana redibunt)." Going back one step in the Virgilian sequence, it is now the Pope who plays the part of Juno as he summons up infernal agents to blow up the British king and his Parliament with ‘the powder of hell; 161 Tartareo... puluere: these agents are the personifications of Murder (Phonos) and Treachery (Prodotes, lit. ‘betrayer’), (142) effera quos uno peperit Discordia partu ‘born of savage Discord at one birth’, allusively relating them both to the Dirae who sit at the throne of Jupiter at Aen. 12.845—52, (846—7) quas et Tartaream Nox intempesta Megaeram | uno eodemque tulit partu ‘whom unseasonable Night bore together with hellish Megaera, at one and the same birth’, and to Allecto, fomenter of discordia in Latium (Aen. 7.545) and direct descendant of Ennius' Discordia. The House of Phonos and Prodotes is a dark cave, in what were once the vast

?!

With Quint. Nov. 92 'dormis nate? etiamne tuos sopor opprimit artus?' cf. Aen. potes hoc sub casu ducere somnos?’; with line 93 immemor o fidei, pecorumque Aen. 4.267 'heu, regni rerumque oblite tuarum! 9? Cf Virg, Ecl. 4.6 iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna: Mariana perhaps Maria, as well as referring to the reign of Queen Mary (of course not a virgin sister and successor the Protestant Elizabeth).

33 See Fernandelli 1999.

4.560 ‘nate dea, oblite tuorum! cf. hints at Virgo queen, unlike her

Milton's In quintum Nouembris

foundations of a now ruinous building (the Roman Catholic Church?), described in a lengthy ecphrasis (139-50), with subsidiary personifications. The dark plot is rapidly thwarted. God is watching from on high, and

laughs at the vain plot.*4 His agent is Fama, whom God orders to spread newsofthe Gunpowder Plot, which is soon detected. The 226-line mini-epic is rapidly concluded with the punishment of the plotters and thanksgiving and rejoicing. Farma too is placed in a House, a soaring (and unruined) Tower, described in an ecphrasis that balances that of the Cave of Phonos and Prodotes (170-80). I give the whole Fama passage and the conclusion of the poem, 170—226: esse ferunt spatium, qua distat ab Aside terra fertilis Europe, et spectat Mareotidas undas. hic turris posita est Titanidos ardua Famae aerea, lata, sonans, rutilis uicinior astris quam superimpositum uel Athos uel Pelion Ossae. mille fores aditusque patent, totidemque fenestrae, amplaque per tenues translucent atria muros. excitat hic uarios plebs agglomerata susurros,

170

175

qualiter instrepitant circum mulctralia bombis agmina muscarum, aut texto per ouilia iunco,

dum Canis aestiuum coeli petit ardua culmen.

180

ipsa quidem summa sedet ultrix matris in arce,

auribus innumeris cinctum caput eminet olli, queis sonitum exiguum trahit, atque leuissima captat murmura, ab extremis patuli confinibus orbis. nec tot Arestoride seruator inique iuuencae

185

Isidos, immiti uoluebas lumina uultu, lumina non unquam tacito nutantia somno,

lumina subiectas late spectantia terras. istis illa solet loca luce carentia saepe perlustrare, etiam radianti imperuia soli.

190

millenisque loquax auditaque uisaque linguis

cuilibet effundit temeraria ueraque mendax nunc minuit, modo confictis sermonibus auget. sed tamen a nostro meruisti carmine laudes, Fama, bonum quo non aliud ueracius ullum, nobis digna cani, nec te memorasse pigebit carmine tam longo; seruati scilicet Angli

195

4 168 uanaque peruersae ridet conamina turbae, alluding to Psalm 2:4 ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision’: see Hale 2005: 176. On the role of laughter see King 2000: Ch. 6.

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officiis, uaga diua, tuis, tibi reddimus aequa.

te deus aeternos motu qui temperat ignes, fulmine praemisso alloquitur, terraque tremente:

200

‘Fama, siles? an te latet impia Papistarum

coniurata cohors in meque meosque Britannos, et noua sceptrigero caedes meditata lacobo?’ nec plura, illa statim sensit mandata Tonantis,

et satis ante fugax stridentes induit alas, induit et uariis exilia corpora plumis, dextra tubam gestat Temesaeo ex aere sonoram. nec mora: iam pennis cedentes remigat auras, atque parum est cursu celeres praeuertere nubes, iam uentos, iam solis equos post terga reliquit, et primo Angliacas solito de more per urbes ambiguas uoces incertaque murmura spargit, mox arguta dolos et detestabile uulgat

205

210

proditionis opus, nec non facta horrida dictu,

addidit authores sceleris, nec garrula caecis insidiis loca structa silet. stupuere relatis, et pariter iuuenes, pariter tremuere puellae, effetique senes pariter, tantaeque ruinae

215

sensus ad aetatem subito penetrauerat omnem.

attamen interea populi miserescit ab alto

220

aethereus pater, et crudelibus obstitit ausis Papicolum, capti poenas raptantur ad acres. at pia thura deo et grati soluuntur honores,

compita laeta focis genialibus omnia fumant, turba choros iuuenilis agit: quintoque Nouembris nulla dies toto occurrit celebratior anno.

225

They say that there is a place, where fertile Europe is separated from the lands of Asia, and facing Lake Mareotis; here is placed the lofty Tower of Fama, daughter of the Titaness, of bronze, broad, resounding, closer to the shining stars than Athos

or Pelion piled upon Ossa. A thousand doors and entrances lie open, and as many windows, and the spacious halls shine through the thin walls. The crowd gathered here sends up mingled murmurs, like swarms of flies buzzing and humming around milk-pails or through the wattled sheepfolds, while the Dogstar is climbing the steeps of heaven to its summer height. Fama herself, her mother's avenger, is seated at the

top of the citadel; her head towers up, surrounded by countless ears, with which she takes in small sounds and catches the faintest whispers from the furthest borders of the wide world. You, Arestor's son, unjust guardian of the heifer Isis, did not have so many eyes rolling in your cruel face as she, eyes that never wink in silent sleep, eyes that gaze widely over the lands beneath. With them she often scans places

Milton’s In quintum Nouembris

devoid of light, impervious even to the rays of the sun. With her thousand talkative tongues she indiscreetly pours out to anyone what she has heard and seen, and the liar sometimes speaks less than the truth, and sometimes adds to it with invented words.

Nevertheless you have earned praise in my song, Fama, most truthful of all the good things there are, worthy subject of my song, and I shall not regret telling of you in so long a poem. We English, clearly saved by your good offices, wandering goddess, pay you your just dues. God who governs the eternal fires in their orbit, first hurled a thunderbolt and then spoke to you, as the earth trembled: ‘Fama, are you silent?

Are you unaware of the wicked band of Papists who conspire against me and my Britons, unaware of the new kind of murder planned for sceptre-bearing James?' He said no more, and she instantly understood the Thunderer's command, and, though

swift of flight before, she put on creaking wings, and put multi-coloured feathers on her thin body. In her right hand she carried a blaring trumpet of Temesaean brass. Without delay she sails through the breezes that yield to her wings, and not content to outstrip

the swift clouds, she soon leaves the winds and the horses of

the sun behind her. At first, in her usual way, she spreads contradictory rumours

and vague murmurings through the cities of England, and then in a clear voice she makes public the plots and the loathsome work of treason, deeds horrible to speak of, and adds the authors of the crime, and as she chatters she is not silent about the

places that have been prepared for the secret attack. Her reports caused amazement, and youths, girls and feeble old men all shuddered, and a sense of so great a disaster at once struck home in people of all ages. But meanwhile the heavenly father looked down with pity on his people, and puta stop to the Papists' cruel venture. They were captured and led off to harsh punishments. Pious incense and grateful honours are paid to God, and every crossroads smokes with festive bonfires. Crowds of young people dance, and in all the year there is no day more celebrated than the fifth of November.

This abrupt and artificial way of concluding an epic narrative which seems hardly to have got started reveals Milton as a virtuoso performer in the traditions and dynamics of fama. The House and person of Fama combine the two major models in the Latin tradition, Virgil's personification of Fama in Aeneid 4 and Ovid's personification and House in Metamorphoses 12. Milton is also alert to the relationships between Fama and other beings and personifications in Virgil and Ovid. The balanced ecphrases of the Houses of the Fury-like Phonosand Prodotes, and of Fama, activate the close connection

between the Virgilian Fama and the Furies. Elements of perverted speech appear in the first of the Miltonic Houses: Prodotes himself is bilinguis ‘two-tongued’ (141),"* and the subsidiary personifications include (146)

55 Cf. Samson Agonistes 971 ‘Fame if not double-fac't is double-mouth’d’: see Ch. 1-1 p. 559.

433

434

Christian conversions of fama

Iurgia ‘Quarrels’ and Calummnia.*® Fama thwarts the plans of Satan, who is inspired by envy at the prosperity of Britain. Fama and Inuidia are closely related (see Ch. 5 pp. 168-71), and Milton alludes verbally to the action

of Ovid's Inuidia in Metamorphoses 2: with In quintum Nouembris 31-2 at simul hanc opibusque et festa pace beatam | aspicit 'as soon as he sees Britain blessed with wealth and joyful peace’, and 40-1 ‘pererrato solum hoc lacrymabile mundo | inueni... ' ‘in my wanderings through the world this is the only cause for tears I have found’, compare Met. 2.794—6 (Inuidia) tandem Tritonida conspicit arcem | ingeniis opibusque et festa pace uirentern | uixque tenet lacrimas, quia nil lacrimabile cernit ‘at last Envy caught sight of Minerva's citadel flourishing in arts and wealth and joyful peace, and scarcely held back her tears, because she saw nothing to shed tears for? The sulphurous sighs to which Satan then gives vent are compared in a simile to the exhalations of Typhoeus penned under Etna by Jupiter: the gigantomachic allusion aligns Satan with the Virgilian genealogy of Fanta, to which Milton alludes when he introduces Farna as Titanis ‘daughter of the Titaness [Earth]' at 172. The allusions in Satan's approach to the Pope to Mercury's approaches to Aeneas in Aeneid4 put the reader in mind of the larger sequence of messages triggered by the action of Fara in that book. There Fara has an inaugural

function, setting in train a series of events that will last until the end of the book (and, in a longer perspective, until the last of the wars between Carthage and Rome). In In quintum Nouembris, Fama has an emphatically closural role. This is engineered by reversing the appearances in Aeneid 4 of Fama and Jupiter. Here the supreme sky-god needs no prompt to turn his attention to earth, since he is always watching from his Jovian vantage

point.?® It is God who directs Fama, not the other way round. Virgil’s Fama paradoxically furthers the plans of Jupiter, despite being introduced as an ‘evil’. Milton's God issues a direct command to Fara to assist his chosen 38 Ovid's House of Fama may itself be Milton's model for the division of the inhabitants of an allegorical house between major and minor personifications. 37 This is another of the anticipations of Paradise Lost that have been seen in Quint. Nov: cf. Satan's envious speech on catching sight of Adam and Eve in Paradise at PL 4.358-92. At the beginning of a predecessor of the Anglo-Latin gunpowder epic, and a possible model for Quint. Nov., the Parcus (probably by George Peele), Satan feels envy at the sight of Britain flourishing amidst general religious war, before delivering himself of a version of the speech of Juno at Aen. 1.3749: Pareus 14-17 hic nam uirginis altae | imperium, et laetos pacem florere per agros. | tum uero inuidia mentem suffusus amara | sic secum... For a text of the Pareus with

Introduction and notes see: www.philological.bham.ac.uk/peele/appendix.html. 167 despicit aetherea dominus qui fulgurat arce: cf. Aen. 1223-4 Iuppiter aethere summo | despiciens

Milton’s In quintum Nouembris

people, the English," and in so doing effects little less than a conversion of Fama to His cause. The turning point comes at 194 sed tamen... Before that Fama has been painted in the largely negative colours of the Virgilian and Ovidian personifications.”" Her House is modelled on the Ovidian House (Virgil’s Fama being unhoused). Like Ovid’s, Milton’s House occupies a central geographical position, but this Tower reaches higher than the Ovidian house: the association of Fama with the children of the Earth in 172 Titanidos is continued in the statement that her Tower is closer to the stars than Athos or Pelion piled on Ossa by the Giants, suggesting a gigantomachic insubordination against the divinity, reinforced by her designation as (181) ultrix matris ‘avenger of her mother [Earth]: Her subjects are an undiscriminated plebs agglomerata (177: cf. Met. 12.53 leue uulgus ‘the fickle crowd’), whose mixed whisperings are compared to the buzzing of flies in a simile

(178-80)

based

on

two

Homeric

similes

(Il. 2.469—71,

the

Achaeans as numerous as swarms of flies; 16.641—3, the warriors fighting round the body of Sarpedon like flies), making them even more unattractive than their Ovidian model, at the same time as completing Fama’s epic genealogy with a Homeric element.!! The description of the body of Fama herself is Virgilian with its innumerable ears, eyes and tongues. The description concludes with her, Virgilian and Ovidian, mixture of fact and fiction. At this point the poet turns to address Fama directly, offering her the laudes ‘praises’ that are performed in this poem itself. The words laudes and Fama are juxtaposed over a line-break (194—5), pointing to the synonymity of laus and one of the meanings of fama. The poem thus comes to be fama Famae ‘the fame of Fama’. The action of fama is also responsible for the famous uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot, and hence the aition for the annual celebration of the fifth of November, the most famous day in

EN

w »

the calendar (226 nulla dies toto occurrit celebratior anno). The working of fama-as-rumour leads to a lasting fama-as-fame. But this fame is perpetuated by the crowd: celebratior ‘celebrated’ or ‘frequented’ by, among others, the crowd of dancing youths (225 turba... iuuenilis), undifferentiated like the plebs in the Ovidian House of Fama. Bonfires smoke at the crossroads Hale 2005: 175—7 suggests that Milton places the English in the role of the Children of Israel, God's people (169 sui. . . populi). See Harding 19-16: 50-3 for the borrowings from Virgil and Ovid. Milton's flies swarm in the dog-days, making for an even more oppressive feel than the spring-time swarms of Homer.

435

Christian conversions of fama

(compita), which are also meeting-places where people gossip;'- here the talk will only confirm the solidarity of the English people. Line 195 Fama,

bonum

quo non aliud ueracius ullum pointedly, heavy-

handedly even, reverses Aen. 4.174 Fama,

malum

qua non aliud uelocius

ullum ‘Fama, than whom there is no swifter evil. Fama becomes the worthy subject of Milton's song, (196) nobis digna cani, unlike the mixture of (Aen.

9.595) digna atque indigna relatu ‘things worthy and unworthy to relate’ that are shouted out by a close relative of Fama, the Italian Numanus Remulus."

God prefaces his command with a thunderbolt (200 fulmine praemisso), so taking firmly back into his own hands the weapon figuratively embodied in Virgil's Fama. Opening his remarks with the humorous question (201) ‘Fama

siles?' (for to be silent Fama

would

have to cease to be herself),

God dispatches Fama as Jupiter dispatches Mercury, a kind of ‘anti-Fama’, in Aeneid 4. The 'conversion' of Fama is recapitulated in the account of her action on earth at 211-16. At first solito de more, in the way that we are familiar with from her previous appearances in the epic tradition, she spreads ambiguous and dubious rumours,'' but then what she broadcasts solidifies as fact and (true) revelation: 213-16 uulgat... opus, nec non facta horrida dictu [just facta, not facta atque infecta] . . . nec garrula caecis | insidiis loca structa silet, shedding light on the barrels of gunpowder concealed in a cellar under the House of Lords, and as it were opening up the Cave of Phonos and Prodotes (140 uasta ruinosi quondam fundamina tecti 'once the vast foundations of a now ruinous building' could be a description of the scene at Westminster if the gunpowder had been ignited). As in Sannazaro and Vida, Fama is enlisted as an irresistible agent of the truth in a providentialist narrative, not now in the original story of the Gospel, but in a struggle between right and wrong forms of Christian religion. In Vida's Christiad the irresistible uox populi overcomes an oppressive Jewish hierarchy, but sufficiently far in the past not to have alarming implications for the power structures in the Rome of Vida's own time. Milton's near-contemporary subject has immediate political, as well as religious, implications. If readers of Virgil and Ovid may have been surprised by the conversion of Milton's Fama to a good cause, readers of earlier examples of the Anglo-Latin gunpowder epic will have been surprised by the very small

EN [p

436

Cf. e.g. Hor. Serm. 2.6.50 frigidus a Rostris manat per compita rumor. Val. Flacc. Argon. 2.117 describes Fama as digna atque indigna canentem, combining the words applied to Numanus with Aen. 4.190 facta atque infecta canebat; see Ch. 6 p. 197. The language echoes Sinon's (fictional) account of Ulysses’ rumour-campaign against himself: Aen. 2.98—9 spargere uoces | in uulgum ambiguas. see Ch. 2 p. 75.

Milton’s In quintum Nouembris

role played by James I in Milton’s version of the story. In the official propaganda the crucial turning point is the discovery of an enigmatic letter, which James | alone correctly interprets as revealing a conspiracy. In In quintum

Nouembris Rumour is rehabilitated because she is the embodiment of the multiple voices of the people, and it is they who emerge finally as the focus

of the poem, the Children of Israel delivered by their Lord God, not by their king. This at a time of friction between the Commons and the new king, Charles I, with his Roman Catholic bride. Milton’s positive re-evaluation of Fama as a voicing by the people anticipates the valorization of ‘opinion’ in the Areopagitica, in line with the growth of a ‘public sphere’ in the 1620s, whose formation was contested by the Stuarts.'

By way of brief coda I look at another poem that explores the paradox of what might usually be viewed as a bad kind of fama serving the purposes of national salvation and cohesion, by a poet who, unlike Milton in In quintum Noueribris, places James I at the very centre of a mini-plot of fama. Ben Jonson's epigram ‘To King James. Vpon the happie false rumour of his death, the two and twentieth day of March, 1607' makes panegyric out of

the public unease that continued after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, and the panic occasioned by a rumour that the king had been stabbed while

out hunting. The year in fact was 1606, not 1607, and James had to restore public calm by a Proclamation of his safety.*é That we thy losse might know, and thou our love, Great heav'n did well, to give ill fame free wing; Which though it did but panick terror prove, And farre beneath least pause of such a King, Yet give thy jealous subjects leave to doubt: Who this thy scape from rumour gratulate, No lesse than if from perill; and devout, Doe beg thy care unto thy after-state. For we, that have our eyes still in our eares,

Looke not upon thy dangers, but our feares.

© Lowe the observations in this sentence to David Norbrook. The prominent role of Fama in Quint. Nov. also emerges by contrast with some other examples of the Anglo- Latin gunpowder epic: in Francis Herring's Pietas pontificia (1606: edited by Haan 1992-3: 251-95) God summons a winged messenger at 292 ff.; afterthe capture of the conspirators Fama flies through the city to universal rejoicing, 388—91; in Phineas Fletcher's Locustae (published 1627; edited by Haan 1996) at 707-38 God sends as his messenger an eagle (alluding to Lord Monteagle) who delivers a cryptic letter to a lord, to be interpreted by the king. *6 See Kamholtz 1983: 92-3; Brady 1985: 392.

437

438

Christian conversions of fama

Here the rumour is of something that did not happen, but this false information leads to true knowledge, the subjects’ of what the loss of their king would mean, and the king’s of his subjects’ love. The relationship between reality and fama will continue to regulate the subjects’ enduring devotion to the king in the future; his actual well-being (“after-state’) will be the constant

object of fears prompted not by dangers proven by eyewitness testimony, but by unsubstantiated hearsay (‘we, that have our eyes still in our eares’). Popular rumour serves the monarch’s interest, for all that it flies freely and beyond the king’s control (‘free wing’). The possibility that this free agent might be a real threat is discounted with the dismissive ‘farre beneath least pause of such a King’. The paradox of a free fama that works with an autocracy is paralleled in Ovid's reference to a libera fama... nullisque obnoxia iussis ‘free report and subject to no commands’ that disobeys Augustus’ modest deprecation of the people's praise (Met. 15.852-4: see Ch. 5 p. 166). What Jonson’s epigram does share with In quintum Nouembris is heaven's conversion of a bad kind of fama to a providential purpose, here that of preserving a divinely appointed king rather than the Children of Israel (*Great heav'n did well, to give ill fame free wing’). ‘Ill fame’ means ‘rumour of an

evil, but the phrase also suggests a morally evil fame, mala fama, the malum that is the Virgilian Fama (Aen. 4.174), turned to heaven's good purposes.

12 | Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

Perhaps no author in the Western tradition writes so obsessively about fame and glory as does Petrarch.' Petrarch’s desire for fame is inseparable from the desire to revive the glories of Greek and Roman culture and literature. In a projection on to the past of Petrarch’s own practice, the character Ennius in the Africa, journeying in the footsteps of Fama back into the shadows of the distant past, puts it thus: Africa 9.139—41 hic quisquis merito fulgens fuit obuius, illum | amplexu tenuisse animi michi gloria summa est | inque locum cari semper coluisse parentis ‘my highest glory is to embrace in my mind any person of shining merit whom I came across, and to give him eternal honour in the place of a beloved father”. The vehicles for and embodiments of Petrarch's own hopes for a lasting fame with posterity are themselves derived from classical precedent: the crowning with laurel, ancient emblem of poetry, on the Capitol, the centre of ancient Rome; the celebration of one of the most famous of Roman heroes, Scipio Africanus, both in prose

(De uiris illustribus), and in an ambitious

Latin epic, the

Africa. The two recurring human figures in Petrarch's discourse of fame are, firstly, Scipio, male, antique, a warrior and statesman immersed in the world of action; and, secondly, Laura, female, contemporary, a model of

chastity living apart from the public world, and object of the poet's desire." However, the historical Laura tends to disappear behind a character from classical antiquity, the Ovidian Daphne. The human being Laura is at times almost indistinguishable from the plant contained in her (and Daphne's) name, the laurel, the ancient symbol of fame both poetic and military. When

it comes to Petrarchan fame, the spheres of Scipio and Laura frequently coalesce." On Petrarch and fame, glory see Burckhardt

w

125-9; Bolgar

1990: 105-6 (in a section on ‘Glory’); Voigt 1888:

1993 argues that Petrarch's letter on his ascent of Mont

Ventoux performs a claim to visibility in fame. Scipio and Laura form the two subjects of Aldo Bernardo’s diptych of books on Petrarch (Bernardo

w

1954: 245-8. Asher

1962, 197-1).

For passages where Scipio and Laura are closely associated, one another, see Bernardo 1974: 67-8 (suggesting a parallel and Dante's two guides, Virgil and Beatrice), 99; cf. Ariani anche l'amato Cicerone tende a condividere con l'amata un

at times between 1988 on imagery

to the point of merging into Petrarch's pair of lodestars, TF 3.18: ‘Come Scipione, affine.’ The Ovidian

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

As well as the confident ambition, there is also in Petrarch a deep anxiety as to the value of fame and its power to outlast the corroding effects of time. It might be tempting to see this as the medieval, Christian, Petrarch, in conflict

with the proto-Renaissance, humanist, Petrarch. There is certainly a strong element of the medieval uanitas mundi tradition in Petrarch’s questioning of his desire for fame, and the Augustinian critique of the pagan pursuit of fame is developed above all in the third book of the Secretum (see Ch. 9 pp. 378-81). But Christian critiques of fame merely apply a different ideology to what was already in pagan antiquity a well-established tradition of questioning the value of fame (see Ch. | pp. 22-33), and for Petrarch Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis is as important an impulse to self-examination as are Boethius and Augustine. The tendency of fama (and of the valuations of fama) to structure itself through dichotomies becomes in Petrarch an acute source of psychological and spiritual unease, a part of his notorious 'dissidio: One might even suspect that one of the attractions of fama for Petrarch was the scope that it allowed him to explore the contradictions of a divided soul. The same could be said of that other life-long Petrarchan obsession, love, and indeed the always close links between love and fame

are twisted together in particularly close and intricate fashion in the case of Petrarch." To give anything like a full account of Petrarch and fame would involve a survey of most of his auvre." In this chapter I focus on two large-scale and complex works which have fame at their centre, and which articulate more or less coherent plots of fame (with the proviso that for Petrarch to think about fame always brings the risk of incoherence): the vernacular Trionfi and the Latin Africa. The Trionfi, a sequence of six triumphs (of Love, Triumphus Cupidinis (TC), of Chastity, Triumphus Pudicitie (TP), of Death, Triumphus Mortis (TM), of Fame, Triumphus Fame (TF), of Time,

von

Triumphus Temporis (TT), of Eternity, Triumphus Eternitatis (TE)) in terza rima, divided into twelve capitoli (perhaps not coincidentally the number of books in the Aeneid), has sometimes been thought of as approaching the form of an epic.^ The Trionfi also stand in a close relationship to the Rime sparse, and have been seen as an attempt to impose a more coherent plot on

^

440

Daphne is already a symbol for Apollo's desire for fame, as well as the object of the god's sexual desire: see Hardie 2002: 45-50. See Braden 1986, ‘Love and fame: the Petrarchan career. For a wider survey of the role of fame in Petrarch see Boitani 1984: 103-24. E.g. Baránski 1990; 73 ‘Petrarch was trying to write a vernacular epic poem which could match the refinement of his classical forebears by following their example in a rhetorically appropriate manner.'

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

such elements of linearity as are to be found in the latter.’ As a vision poem leading eventually to a vision of eternity, the Trionfi ask to be compared with Dante's Commedia

(to which there are many individual allusions)."

*

=

Like the Commedia, the Trionfi have a strongly encyclopaedic drive: the lists of individuals in the triumphs particularly of Love and Fame are a cultural, and more specifically literary, storehouse: in that sense the poem as a whole can be thought of as a repository of fama-as-tradition, in this anticipating Chaucer’s House of Fame.” In keeping with their close affinities with both the Commediaand the Rime sparse, the Trionfi also chart the experience of the individual ‘Petrarch’. This is clear on any reading, but a psychological or spiritual reading was more strongly imposed by the early commentary tradition on the poem, whose direction was set by Bernardo da Pietro Lapini da Montalcino (Bernardo Ilicino), and which reads the Trionfi as a coherent allegory of the growth and progress of the soul." Turning to the Africa, we find that the poet Petrarch is a far more insistent presence than is usual in ancient Latin epic. Licence for this was given by the Annals of Ennius, who is a character in Petrarch's epic; Francesca Galligan has argued that another important model for the presence of Petrarch as poet-hero in his own work is Dante in the Commedia.'' More recently still J. C. Warner has done for the Africa something similar to what Ilicino did for the Trionfi, arguing that the epic is to be read allegorically as a spiritual autobiography, and that Hannibal and Africa in the poem are symbols of sexual desire to which the continent Scipio rises superior." It is difficult to read the handling of fame in the last book of the Africa consistently within such a framework (and even more difficult to see there an answer to Augustinus' criticism of Franciscus' love

M

N

See Sturm-Maddox 1990; Baranski 1990 also speaks of the absorption of the fragmented lyric themes of the Rime sparse into a unitary structure. On the presence of the Commedia in the Trionfi see Giunta 1993. It is disputed whether Chaucer actually knew the Trionfi: see Carnicelli 1971: 26; Rossiter 2010: 47, 58-9, 186 n. 74. For a convenient overview of the Renaissance commentary tradition see Carnicelli 1971: 28-37; for more recent bibliography on the early commentators see Tateo 1999; on [licino see also Haywood 1997. Galligan 2004. Warner 2005: 11 ‘The Africa... is Petrarch’s other Secretum, his Confessions by way of allegorical epic.' As regards fame, Warner argues that the Africa shows (19) 'that such devotion as Petrarch's to the byways of pagan literature and the acquisition of literary fame can provide real testimony to his devotion to God’ But the Christian God plays very little part in Books 1, 2, and 9, which are the books most concerned with issues relating to fame. Seung 1976: 155 suggests that the Africa is to be read as ‘the Psychomachia. .. of his tormented soul of the Secretum, but does not develop this in detail.

441

442

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

of fame in the Secretum). Nevertheless, to the extent that the tradition of

moral and spiritual allegorization of the Aeneid, exemplified by Petrarch himself in Epistolae seniles 4.5, exercises some pressure on the Africa, a tone

of confessional self-examination colours the poem's dealings with fama. Both the Trionfi and the Africa have been read against Petrarch's formally confessional handling of fame and love in the third book of the Secretum,

which I discuss in detail in Chapter 9 pp. 378-81). Like many of Petrarch's works, the texts of the Africa and the Trionfi are the product of lengthy, intermittent and incomplete processes of revision. They are in important respects fragmentary, but these are fragments from a mind obsessively searching over time for sense and order in complex and often contradictory concatenations of ideas, emotions and intertexts. Much effort and ingenuity has gone into the attempt to date different parts of these long and evolving poems, with reference both to the external events of Petrarch's life (the laureation, his brother's entry into a monastery, the death of King Robert, the death of Laura), and to other Petrarchan works; in other

words to search for a ‘plot’ running chronologically through Petrarch’s life." Doubtless there were shifts in his attitude to fame, and other goals and values,

but rather than seeking for a consistent and linear development, it makes more sense to think of an oscillation between conflicting evaluations of fame, operating largely within inherited and traditional forms of thought. It is therefore legitimate to read these works as wholes, looking for meaningful connections between the parts that make them up, that is to say, to read them for 'plots of fama. The incoherences may be as significant as the coherences, signs not simply of a failure to make connections, or of a long and incomplete process of composition, but of stumbling blocks in the search for order and consistency. In both the Africa and the Trionfi fame is consciously thematized as a perhaps the — major subject of a long poem. In both, arguably, fame is the telos of the work. In this respect they go beyond the works of classical antiquity that I have read for ‘plots of fama’. This self-consciousness about fama is partly encouraged by the structure of the medieval vision poem, in which the dreaming poetic consciousness traverses a landscape populated by personifications, or figures otherwise representative of concepts, on a journey directed to a goal. Largely determinative for the Italian tradition is, naturally, Dante's Commedia, a work whose

telos is a divine glory that

transcends the kinds of fame which preoccupy humans in their earthly and post-mortem existences alike, and which are extensively registered and 1? Rico 1974: 398-400 discerns the sequence of all six Trionfi patterning Secretum 3. M A particularly impressive example of this kind of exercise is Fenzi 2003.

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

interrogated in the course of Dante’s journey through the three realms of the afterlife. Piero Boitani describes ‘the whole Divine Comedy [as] a recipient and demiurge of fame’.'> An important link between Dante and Petrarch's

Trionfi is Boccaccio's Amorosa visione, which includes, in the course of the dreamer's progress towards the meeting with his Lady Fiammetta and the celebration of Love, a Triumph of Worldly Glory. Likewise, in Petrarch's

Trionfi a Triumph of Fame is but one in a series of triumphs, although, as we will shortly see, fame pervades the other capitoli in this vision poem, from beginning to end. The Africa is Petrarch's exercise in the classical Latin epic form, but it retains important elements of the medieval vision poem." The first two books are taken up with Scipio's dream vision of his father, the chief classical models for which are the Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis and Aeneas' quasidream encounter with his father Anchises in Aeneid 6 (thus a dream vision

translated from respectively the end and the middle of an earlier text to the beginning of an epic poem). The Petrarchan Scipio's dream builds to a climax in the form of a lengthy homilyon the vanityof farna (Afr. 2.407-509). Scipio's dream in the first two books is answered by the dream of Homer reported to Scipio by Ennius in the last book (9.158-289). This dream also has venerable classical precedent in the Dream of Homer in the prologue to Ennius' Annals, fragments and testimonia relating to which were known to

Petrarch;'® the Ennian dream was in turn an important model for the scene between Aeneas and his father Anchises in the underworld in Aeneid 6, a scene to which the Petrarchan Dream of Ennius also alludes.? The Parade of Heroes in Aeneid 6 combines the triumphal and the funerary (two major contexts for the discourse of fame): the triumph of Scipio that concludes the

narrative proper of Africa 9 provides the climax of Petrarch's revivification of the world of ancient Rome, but a final epic book whose narrative consists substantially of a dream and a procession is something highly unclassical.??

15 Boitani 1984: 90. On the influence of Amorosa visione on the Trionfi see Branca 1994: 365-72. 17 For parallels between the Africa and the Trionft see Bernardo 1974: 149-51; Bernardo 1962:

64—71; Scung 1976: 161. Galligan 2004 argucs that the Africa is essentially a medieval poem, akin to the Commedia and the Teseida, focussing on the close connection between hero and

poet. Galligan notes that Petrarch's own two brief appearances in the Africa both occur in dreams, but she does not discuss the motif of the dream vision per se. Murphy 1991 focuses on the structural importance of the dreams in Books 1, 2 and 9. 18 On Petrarch and Ennius see Suerbaum 1972a and 1972b; on the extent of Petrarch's knowledge of the Ennian Dream of Homer sce Suerbaum 19722: 329-32.

19 See Hardie 2004: 154. 20 Fate, in the form of the unexpected death of King Robert, allowed Petrarch to follow the triumphal conclusion to the narrative with funerary material. Robert will not now be the future subject of Petrarch’s epic muse (as forecast at Afr. 1.40—70), cheated of his chance to

443

444

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

fama in the Trionfi The Triumph of Fame is the fourth in the series of six Trionfi. Fame triumphs over Death. Fame is thus the ending after the end that is death, performing (albeit only provisionally) the closural role that ancient poets boast for their own literary instantiation of fama. But Fame is present throughout the whole series. This is not surprising, since the triumph itself is an institution that broadcasts fame. In particular fame occupies a prominent position both at the very beginning of the sequence, in the Triumphus Cupidinis, and at the very end, returning in the Triumphus Eternitatis after Time has invalidated Fame's bid to take men from the tomb and keep them in life (TF 1.9). But within this framing structure, there is also a repetitive drive

underlying the superficial sequentiality of the series of Trionfi, and what keeps returning is fame, in different guises and with different emphases. And, as we have seen, the Trionfi cumulatively constitute a catalogue of famous

men

and women,

a temple

of fame

as a cultural storehouse, in

this rivalling Dante's Commedia as a repository of fame, and anticipating Chaucer’s House of Fame. This aspect of the Trionfi functions selfreflexively within the context of Petrarch's literary and scholarly career as a whole: as Zygmunt Baránski puts it, ‘The triumph is... the intrinsic component of Petrarch’s summative and categorizing ambitions."' The encyclopaedic ambitions of fama go back as far as the Virgilian Fama (see Ch. 3

p. 107). The Triumphus Cupidinis opens with a vision of the triumph and glory of Cupid, 1.13-15: vidi un vittorioso

e sommo

duce,

pur com’un di color che 'n Campidoglio triunfal carro a gran gloria conduce. I saw a victorious and supreme leader, just like one of those whom the triumphal chariot on the Capitol guides to great glory.

The fame and glory of Cupid is largely a function of the fame of those whom he has conquered, a catalogue that begins with Julius Caesar and Augustus

?!

become a second Scipio triumphans. The death of Robert thus forms a funereal coda to a narrative of triumph, comparable to the lament for the prematurely dead Marcellus that concludes the Virgilian Parade of Heroes. The death of Marcellus casts doubt on the possibility of a smooth imperial succession within the house of Augustus; Petrarch's concluding fears in the Africa are for the future of literary studies. Baränski 1990: 70.

Fama in the Trionfi

(TC 1.88—96). The relationship of Amor and Fama is an ambiguous one: characters from myth and history are known for their famous loves, but love also involves great men and women in dishonour and infamy, as in the case of David and Solomon, TC 3.40-5: Poi vedi come Amor crudele e pravo vince Davit, e sforzalo a far l'opra

onde poi pianga in loco oscuro e cavo. Simile nebbia par ch'oscuri e copra del pit saggio figliuol la chiara fama, e '] parta in tutto dal Signor di sopra. Then I saw how cruel and perverse Love conquered David, and forced him to do the deed for which he then wept in a dark hollow place. It seemed that a similar cloud overshadowed and hid the clear fame of his most famous son [Solomon], separating him utterly from the Lord above.

The island of Venus to which the triumphant Cupid finally leads all his captives is both a version of the Elysian Fields and a prison-house or cage (‘gabbia’) for famous people, TC 4.163-6: Rimirando, er'io fatto al sol di neve,

tanti spirti e si chiari in carcer tetro, quasi lunga pittura in tempo breve, che '| pie va inanzi, e l'occhio torna a dietro.

I became like snow melting in the sun, as I gazed at so many famous souls in this foul prison, like one looking at a long picture in a short space of time, so that one's foot goes forwards and one's eye turns back.

On the island of Venus the bright glory of Cupid's triumph that initially dazzled the eyes of a Petrarch enchanted by the vision of an antique age is replaced by a darker view of Love's relation to Fame. The personifications that inhabit Cupid's triumphal arch and palace (TC 4.139—48) allude to the personifications in the triumph of Cupid in Ov. Am. 1.2.31-6, one of the chief points of departure for Petrarch's own Triumphus Cupidinis, but also to those at the entrance to the underworld

in Aeneid 6, and to

those in the House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12. The company kept by 'errori' — dreams, pale phantasms, false opinions — makes them closer to the epistemological Error in the House of Fama at Met. 12.59 than to the erotic derailment of Am. 1.2.35 (where Error is paired with Furor). The catalogue ?? The classical allusions are overlaid on Augustinian sources: see Ariani 1988 ad locc.

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of personifications then modulates into the oxymora typical of Petrarchan eroticism, including paradoxical representatives of fame (TC 4.146 ‘chiaro disnore e gloria oscura e nigra’ ‘far-seen dishonour and a dark and black glory’), bringing to breaking point the tensions between Fama and Amor that run through the Triumphus Cupidinis. From the start the narrator Petrarch has a close personal involvement in the fame of love, prompted by desire of various kinds. The explication of the triumph of Cupid is motivated by his desire for ‘news’ (TC 1.31 “Vago d'udir novelle'),? which leads in turn to the appearance of his interlocutor and guide, (40) ‘un’ ombra alquanto men che l'altre trista’ ‘a shade somewhat less gloomy than the others’. An itch for ‘news’ assorts oddly with the immediately preceding epiphany of Cupid in the image of a famous triumphator of antiquity, but there is an easy slide from kleos-as-report to kleos-as-fame since the time of Homer (see Ch. 2 pp. 63-7), and Chaucer’s House of Fame accommodates both news, ‘tidings, and more monumental kinds of fama. Petrarch's presentation of himself as it were as a man on the street eager for the latest news has the effect of eliding the enormous gap between antiquity and the poet's own day. In his desire for a report of Cupid's triumph, the narrator is just one individual in the crowd of people whose interest in love magnifies Cupid's fame and that of his victims (cf. TC 4.136 ‘triunfar volse que’ che '| vulgo adora' ‘he whom the common crowd adores wished to hold his triumph there’).”! But Petrarch has a special interest in the first lovers encountered in the second capitolo, Masinissa and Sophonisba. Masinissa, surprised at being addressed by name, asks Petrarch who he is, to which the latter replies, TC 2.19—24: ‘L’esser mio’ gli risposi ‘non sostene tanto conoscitor, ché cosi lunge di poca fiamma gran luce non véne; ma tua fama real per tutto aggiunge, e tal che mai non ti vedra né vide,

con bel nodo d’amor teco congiunge.’

2? Ariani 1988 compares Dante, Purg. 2.70-1 'E come a messagger che porta ulivo | tragge la gente per udir novelle.’ 24 A longer redaction of the last lines of the Triumphus Cupidinis returns to the opening desire for information: ‘E solo un rimedio ebbi in quello stato: | gran cose e memorabili mirando | volgea la vista vaga in ciascun lato, | che 'l disir di saper fea pronta e leve | per conoscer chi e quanto avesse arnato': ms. Palat. 195 (Appel 1901: 222). Compare the thirst for ‘love-tydynges’ in Chaucer, House of Fame 3.2143 (although Chaucer is unlikely to have known of this alternative ending).

Fama in the Trionfi

‘My person, I answered him, ‘is not worthy the knowledge of one so great, since from my small flame great light does not reach this far; but your royal fame extends through the whole world, and binds to you with the fair knot of love those who have never seen you and never shall.’

The allusion to Dante's response to Castelvetro in Purgatorio 14^ is given ironic depth through Petrarch’s prior dealings with Masinissa in the Africa: it is Petrarch who ensures (or aspires to ensure) the wider fame of Masinissa through his epic. Petrarch here plays with the necromantic desire that fuels his obsession with fama: it is not just that his own flame of fame is too faint to reach as far as Masinissa, but that, outside dreams, such contact

between present and past, the world of the living and the world of the dead, is impossible. On the other hand Petrarch’s own experience of fama, and the desire invested in it, is able to overcome the distance in time, and the meeting of the two men in this text is the proof of that.^^ One of the most elaborate Petrarchan exercises of this kind is found in the last book of the Africa, the text from which Masinissa has ‘escaped’ into the Trionf. Petrarch's personal connections with the Triumphus Cupidinisreach a climax in the fourth and last capitolo. After the account of his own enslavement by Love, through the vision of Laura, at the end of the third capitolo, Petrarch

looks around to see if he can spot (TC 4.11—12) ‘someone of bright fame (“chiara fama”) in the pages of either ancient or modern authors’, introduc-

ing a catalogue of poets who sang of their loves, starting with Orpheus and concluding with Petrarch. Since the narrator can hardly include himself in a catalogue of characters of which he himself is the observer, he tells how he saw two of his close friends; his love for them impels him to celebrate them

tS u

Purg. 14.20-1

wv o

by including them in this parade of famous writers," 4 and he remembers that it was in their company that he himself picked the branch of glory, at his laureation in 1341, so incorporating his own claim to literary fame. Petrarch's fame is the first climax of the last capitolo of the Triumphus Cupidinis, his own ascent of the Capitol matching the comparison of Cupid 5

With TC 2.23 'e tal che mai non ti vedrà né vide’ cf. Cic. Amic. 28 nihil est enim uirtute amabilius, mhil quod magis adliciat ad diligendum, quippe cum propter uirtutem et probitatem etiam eos, quos numquam uidimus, quodam modo diligamus. For another example of Petrarch's use of the De amicitia in his conjuring of a ‘virtual community’ with great men of the distant past see Hinds 2004: 174. The connection between love and friendship is drawn close in the image in TC 4.73-4 ‘Con questi duo cercai monti diversi, | andando tutti tre sempre ad un giogo’: 'giogo' puns between ‘mountain-top’ and ‘yoke’ in which sense in the Rime sparse it is always used of erotic slavery (Ariani 1988 ad loc.). A model perhaps for Milton, Lycidas 25-7 ‘Together both, ere the high Lawns appear'd... We drove afield...’

RN]

27

'dirvi ch’i’ sia, saria parlare indarno, | ché '| nome mio ancor molto non suona*

447

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Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

triumphant at the beginning to a Roman general triumphing on the Capitol; the second climax is the conclusion proper, Cupid’s procession to the island of Venus, where a murkier kind of fame, as we have seen, is to be found in a version of the underworld, not at the summit of a mountain. The untainted quality of Petrarch’s glory in April 1341 might be said to be due to his failure to realize the full measure of his desire, TC 4.79—84: Con costor colsi '| glorioso ramo onde forse anzi tempo ornai le tempie in memoria di quella ch'io tanto amo. Ma pur dilei che 'l cor di pensier m'empie, non potei coglier mai ramo né foglia, si fur le sue radici acerbe et empie. Together with these men I plucked the glorious branch with which, perhaps too soon, I decked my temples in memory of her whom I love so much. But I could never pluck branch or leaf of her, thoughts of whom fill my heart, so harsh and pitiless were her roots.

He has plucked the branch of the laurel, so realizing his desire for glory as a poet, but he has not been able to pluck Laura, and is thus frustrated of his physical erotic desire. And even before Cupid leads the masses of his subjects captive to the island of Venus, the god of love has been conquered by Laura (TC 4.89—90), a victory whose fame will be celebrated at length in the following Triumphus Pudicitie. There Petrarch develops at length the close ties that bind pudor/pudicitia to fama (see Ch. 9 pp. 357-61). The triumph of Chastity is the triumph of the fama of Laura, and the purification of the 'chiaro disnore' 'famous dishonour' of the island of Venus. It is also the reconciliation of elegiac and epic brands of fama, sharply at variance in Petrarch's classical models." In her titanic struggle with Cupid, Laura is accompanied by a 'glorious troop’ of (TP 77) 'chiare Virtuti’ ‘famous Virtues’, whose number includes individual

embodiments

of fama,

(84) '"Perseveranza e Gloria, and

(87)

"Timor d'infamia e Desio sol d'onore' ‘Fear of infamy and Desire only for honour’. Laura’s victory over Cupid reverses the Ovidian Cupid's victory over Apollo in Metamorphoses 1. At the start of the Triumphus Pudicitie Apollo the god has been struck down by Cupid together with the mortal Leander (7-8); it is left to Laura, as re-embodiment of the Ovidian Daphne, to conquer Cupid, and consequently to exercise that control over fama 28 See Monti 1990.

Fama in the Trionfi

which in the Ovidian story Apollo claims by his attempted appropriation of

the laurel/Daphne at the end of the Ovidian narrative," but only as some kind of compensation for the frustration of his attempt to possess her body. Laura achieves a fully active control of fama as she dashes the tokens of fame and glory from Cupid's grasp, TP 94-6: Mille e mille famose e care salme

torre gli vidi, e scuotergli di mano mille vittoriose e chiare palme. I saw her take from him thousands of famous and dear victims, and knock from his

hands a thousand palms of victory and fame.

The ‘purification’ of fama is made explicit in the figure of Tuccia, one of the band of chaste women who accompany Laura's triumph, TP 145—51: Con queste e con certe altre anime chiare triunfar vidi di colui che pria veduto avea del mondo triunfare. Fra l'altre la vestal vergine pia che baldanzosamente corse al Tibro, e per purgarsi d'ogni fama ria portó del fiume al tempio acqua col cribro. With these famous souls and certain others I saw her triumph over him whom before I had seen triumph over the world. Among the rest, the pious vestal virgin who boldly ran to the Tiber and, to purge herselfof every trace of evil fame, carried water in a sieve from the river to the temple.

The fama celebrated in the Triumphus Pudicitieis one purged of the taint of the voice ofthe common people, free of the suspicion of error or misprision, and one that is guaranteed by scholarly and literary discrimination. All this is achieved through Petrarch's handling of that archetypal victim of Fama, Virgil's Dido. Dido's reputation is vindicated twice in this Triumphus. She appears first in the company of the prisoners of Cupid, TP 10-12: e veggio ad un lacciuol Giunone e Dido, ch'amor pio del suo sposo a morte spinse, non quel d'Enea, com’? '] publico grido...

?

On the Ovidian Apollo's obsession with fama both before and at the end of the Daphne episode see Ch. 9 pp. 361-2 and Hardie 2002a: 49-50.

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[If] I see caught in one snare Juno and Dido, driven to her death by pious love for her husband, not love for Aeneas, as public rumour has it... Dido is the victim of love, but a pious, purified, love. The rejection of the

‘publico grido; that is the Fama of Aeneid 4, restores the pudor that the Virgilian Dido had abandoned, and prepares for her second appearance in

the train of the victorious Laura/ Pudicitia at TP 154-9: poi vidi, fra le donne pellegrine, quella che per lo suo diletto e fido sposo, non per Enea, volse ire al fine: taccia il vulgo ignorante! io dico Dido,

cui studio d’onestate a morte spinse, non vano amor com’? il publico grido. Then I saw among the foreign ladies she who was willing to die for her beloved and

faithful husband, not for Aeneas. Let the ignorant crowd hold its tongue! I speak of Dido, drivento death by concern for honour, not by idlelove, as public rumour has it. Laura's triumph travels from Cyprus to land in Campania at Baiae, and thence to the villa of Scipio at Literno, in one of Petrarch's most dramatic pairings of his two heroes, Laura and Scipio. Scipio at the end matches Dido at the beginning of the Triumphus as one falsely slandered: for Scipio had retired to Literno when the fame of his African triumph had been obscured by the inuidia of accusations of embezzlement laid against the Scipiones (see Ch. 7 pp. 268-70). But as the paths of Laura and Scipio cross, fama is kept truthful and unsullied, TP 172-7: Qui de l'ostile onor l'alta novella,

non scemato cogli occhi, a tutti piacque, e la piü casta v'era la pit bella. Né "I trionfo non suo seguire spiacque a lui che, se credenza non é vana, sol per trionfi e per imperi nacque.

Here the lofty tidings, not lessened by her visible presence, of the honour gained by her defeat of her enemy, found favour with all, and the fairest there was the most chaste. Nor was he who, if we are to believe it, was born only for triumphs and commands, loath to follow a triumph not his own. 9 Petrarch might have edited out the double appearance of Dido at a later revision: in a note of 1 September 1369, reported by the biographer Ludovico Beccadelli, he writes, Sed attende quia supra est de Didone aliter (Frasso 1983: 76). However, the illogical transfer of Dido from the train of Cupid to the train of Chastity makes an effective point about Petrarch's 'correction' of fara.

Fama in the Trionfi

Scipio, unlike his enemies, is not prone to inuidia, and line 176 implies that the belief, the report or fama, that Scipio was born only to triumph and rule is not the product of unfounded credulity, a frequent partner of fara. In the previous tercet fama and reality are also matched in the case of Laura's onore. the news that has run ahead is not diminished by her presence ante oculos, despite the tendency of fama to magnify the truth. The procession ends in Rome not on the Capitol but in a temple which houses the divine embodiment of female farra, and which in Livy is the subject of a certamen pudicitiae equivalent to the male certamen uirtutis (see Ch. 9 p. 359). Where Livy tells of the dedication of a shrine to Pudicitia Plebeia through the justified pride of Verginia, a patrician woman married toa plebeian consul, Petrarch, in keeping with his rejection in the Triumphus Pudicitie of the ‘volgo’ and the ‘publico grido; directs Laura to the temple of Pudicitia Patricia, TP 181-6: passammo al tempio poi di Pudicizia, ch'accende in cor gentile oneste voglie,

non di gente plebeia, ma di patrizia. lvi spiegó le gloriose spoglie la bella vincitrice, ivi depose le sue vittoriose e sacre foglie. Then we passed to the Temple of Chastity, who kindles honourable desires in the noble heart, not of plebeian, but of patrician folk. There the fair conqueror displayed her glorious spoils, and there she laid down her victorious and sacred leaves. The Triumphus Mortis brings to an end the glorious lady, but anticipates the following the start. We see the answer to death already her select companions returning from their

mortal life of 'that graceful and Triumplius Fame almost from in the description of Laura and triumph, TM 1.16-18:

poche eran, perche rara e vera gloria,

ma ciascuna per sé parea ben degna di poema chiarissimo e d'istoria. Few they were, since true glory is rare, but each lady in herself seemed well worthy of a famous poem and a history.

In her post-mortem conversation with Petrarch in the second capitolo Laura adverts repeatedly to the subject of fama.*! Her coy response to the poet's advances was a ploy to preserve (TM 2.92) ‘la nostra giovinetta fama’ ‘the 3! For further discussion of TM 2 see Ch. 9 pp. 379-80.

451

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Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

reputation of us two young people’, threatened by the (90) 'hamma' of the poet’s love. Their good name was not the kind of active fama that blazes out, but a fragile reputation vulnerable to the wildfire of the prurient talk of the town. Laura enjoys (130) ‘il bel nome’ ‘the fair name’ that the poet's words have won for her, ‘se vero odo’ ‘if what I hear is true’: that caveat marks the distance between the world of the living and the world of the dead, but also transports into the other world a concern for the need to verify report (cf. TP 177, in another nodal fama passage, ‘se credenza non é vana’, discussed above). Laura is glad that, although born far from Florence, her own

home

(Avignon) was (TM 2.168) ‘bel paese’ ‘fair land’ enough,

since there Petrarch was able to meet her, so preventing the alternative, (TM 2.169-71) ‘ché potea ’l cor, del qual sol io mi fido, | volgersi altrove, a te essendo ignota, | ond'io fora men chiara e di men grido' 'for if I had been unknown to you, that heart in which alone I put my trust could have turned elsewhere, and I would have had less fame and renown’. She then warns Petrarch that time is fleeing, and the hour of separation is near, TM 2.177-81: tu non t'accorgi del fuggir de l'ore; vedi l'Aurora de l'aurato letto rimenar a i mortali il giorno, e 1 sole

già fuor de l'oceano infin al petto: questa vien per partirne, onde mi dole. You do not notice the fleeting hours: see Dawn from her golden bed bringing back day to mortals, and the sun already lifting his breast out of the ocean. Dawn comes to part us, for which I grieve.

These echo the words of the Sibyl to Aeneas in another underworld setting, (Aen. 6.539) nox ruit, Aenea; nos flendo ducimus horas ‘night is rushing, Aeneas, and we waste the hours with tears'; but also the complaint of Ovid in Am. 1.13 that Dawn, Aurora, is approaching to separate the lovers. But Petrarch's familiar puns qualify the Ovidian model: Laura will not totally disappear with the coming of ‘l’Aurora de l'aurato letto’. Inthe Triumphus Fameanother day dawns after the night that followed the terrible catastrophe of Laura's death, ushering in the long lists of exempla of famous men and women that constitute ‘il trionfo delle humanae litterae." "Suns can set and rise again, but when once our brief light is out, we must sleep an everlasting night' (Catullus 5.4—5), but the return of the sun here is also in some sense a return of the mortal Laura, (TF 1.3) ‘del nostro mondo 32 Ariani 1988: 283.

Fama in the Trionfi

453

il suo sol’ ‘the sun of our world’, removed by death." Fama is compared in a simile (TF 1.10—12) to ‘un’ amorosa stella’, Lucifer or Venus, harbinger

of the sun. In the Petrarchan imaginary there is an easy transition from love for Laura to the burning desire (TF 1.17 ‘il desir ch'ardea nel core’) felt by Petrarch for the crowd of famous people in the train of Fama. This opening is also a repetition of the first Triumph, of Cupid, the first name in the triumphal processions of both Cupid and Fame being that of Caesar: indeed Petrarch says that he noticed many of those whom he had seen bound by Love (TF 1.20-1). As there the procession is compared to an ancient Roman triumph on the Capitol (TF 1.29; TC 1.14-15).

At the end of the Triumphus Mortis Laura had expressed satisfaction at the fame granted her in Petrarch's poetry; she is already approaching the ranks of those made famous by the poets and historians of antiquity. The first capitolo of the Triumphus Fame is dedicated to the great men of ancient Rome; the textual basis for this vision of a Parade of Heroes is summed up at the beginning of the next capitolo, TF 2.4—6: giungea la vista con l'antiche carte ove son gli alti nomi e' sommi pregi, e sentiv' al mio dir mancar gran parte. What I saw matched the ancient texts, which preserve lofty names and the highest praises, and I perceived that my words fell far short.

That modesty topos had appeared right at the beginning of the first capitolo, TF 1.13-15: Ed, oh! di quali scole verrà "| maestro che descriva a pieno quel ch'io vo' dire in semplici parole? And

oh, from what schools will come

the master to describe in full that which

I

shall only tell in simple words? The 'schools' that Petrarch has in mind are probably not those of rhetoric,

but the schools of the ancient writers. The modesty topos veils Petrarch's ambition to be received among their number, as in Inferno 4.94-102 ‘la bella scuola' of the ancient Roman poets receives Dante as the sixth of their company. The textual and visual aspects of the parade of Roman heroes, the power of writing to conjure up the illusion of sight, are combined in 9?» Cf. TM2.1-2 ‘I’ orribil caso | che spense il sol, anzi ‘I ripose in cielo’

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

the image of sculpting or reading fame and name on their foreheads, TF

1.19-20, 32-3: scolpito per le fronti era il valore de l'onorata gente... e leggeasi a ciascuno intorno al ciglio

il nome al mondo piü di gloria amico. Carved on their foreheads was the worth of that honourable people... And on their brows was to be read the name [i.e. ‘Roman’] which is glory's closest friend.

The commentators' uncertainty as to whether to take these images literally or metaphorically itself exemplifies the uncertain boundary between the merely verbal and the visual. The celebration of fame, and the implicit claim for the power of poetic and historical texts to preserve memory over long stretches of time, are swept away with the dawn of another day and the rising of another sun in the Triumphus Temporis. The sun is both the shining glory of the heavens, and hence a figure for fame,*> and also the measurer of time, which sweeps away all human ambition and achievement. The sun is quite open that he

is motivated by inuidia against mortals, lest through fame they cheat the celestial law that all men must die.’ His envy expresses itself not in the way usual among mortals, through the denigration of outstanding achievement, but simply through the acceleration of the passage of time, and his greatest indignation is reserved for those who have been immortalized by poets and historians. In this Triumphus are concentrated the topics of the lability and insubstantiality of fara, in an apocalyptic vision that combines > Contrast the inner, secret, writing on the book of the lover's heart (see Jager 2000: Ch. 4), as at RS 155.9-11 ‘Quel dolce pianto mi depinse Amore, | anzi scolpio, et que’ detti soavi | mi scrisse entro un diamante in mezzo '| core.’ Castelvetro compares Cic. Cat. 1.32 sit denique inscriptum in fronte unius cuiusque quid de re publica sentiat, at the end of a speech whose purpose has been to drag out into the light the dark plots of the Catilinarian conspirators. The visuality of Petrarchan exempla emerges clearly from the comparison of exernpla of virtue to statues in Fam. 6.4 (cited by Ariani 1988: 282-3), summed up thus: nec improprie michi uideor dicturus statuas corporum imagines, exempla uirtutum.

KS

454

For another connection between the sun and fame sec Ch. 5 p. 161. His complaint that thereby his own 'eccellenzia' is brought to an end perhaps hints at the contrast between solar perpetuity and mortal caducity at Cat. 5.4—6 soles occidere et redire possunt; | nobis cum semel occidit breuis lux, | nox est perpetua una dormienda. On Petrarch's knowledge of Catullus see Ullmann 1973. The envious sun's rising is preceded by dawn (TT 1-2): Petrarch may allude again to Ov. Arn. 1.13, in which the lover-poet chides the hastening dawn, (31) inuida, quo properas?

Fama in the Trionfi

the medieval contemptus mundi with an ancient pessimism, manifested in Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, Macrobius and Boethius about the value and

endurance of fama." The most concentrated passage, hurtling at speed through the vanity topics, is TT 100-35 (a celestial voice more powerful than any of the human voices of fama, but whose words, by a kind of reflex action, the poet commits to the material that preserves fama as best it may): Ud? dir, non so a chi, ma ’l detto scrissi:

100

‘In questi umani, a dir proprio, ligustri, di cieca oblivion che 'scuri abissi! Volgerà il sol, non pure anni ma lustri e secoli, vittor d'ogni cerebro,

e vedrà i vaneggiar di questi illustri.

105

Quanti fur chiari fra Peneo et Ebro,

che son venuti e verran tosto meno! quanti sul Xanto, e quant’ in val di Tebro! Un dubbio, iberno, instabile sereno

é vostra fama, e poca nebbia il rompe,

110

e ’] gran tempo a’ gran nomi é gran veneno. Passan vostre grandezze e vostre pompe,

passan le signorie, passano i regni: ogni cosa mortal Tempo interrompe, e, ritolta a’ men buon, non dà a’ pit: degni;

115

non pur quel di fuori il Tempo solve, ma le vostre eloquenzie e' vostri ingegni. Cosi fuggendo il mondo

seco volve,

né mai si posa, né s'arresta o torna,

finché v’ ha ricondotti in poca polve.

120

Or, perché umana gloria ha tante corna,

non é mirabil cosa s’a fiaccarle alquanto oltra l'usanza si soggiorna. Ma quantunque si pensi il vulgo o parle, se "| viver vostro non fusse si breve,

125

tosto vedresti in fumo ritornarle.' Udito questo, perché al ver si deve non contrastar, ma dar perfetta fede, vidi ogni nostra gloria, al sol, di neve;

e vidi il Tempo rimenar tal prede de' nostri nomi ch'io gli ebbi per nulla,

37

For details see the excellent introduction of Ariani 1988 to the Triumphus Temporis.

130

455

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Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

benché la gente cid non sa né crede: cieca, che sempre al vento si trastulla, pur di false opinion si pasce,

lodando pit il morir vecchio che ’n culla.

135

I heard spoken these words, I know not to whom, but I wrote them down: ‘What dark abysses of blind oblivion await these human flowers, to tell the truth. The sun will roll round not just for years, but for decades and centuries, conqueror of

every mind, and will see the fading of these illustrious people. How many famous men between the rivers Peneus and Ebrus have disappeared and will disappear, how many by the Xanthus and in Tiber’s valley! Your fame is a doubtful, unstable patch of sunlight in winter, destroyed by a little mist, and great length of time is a great poison to great names. Your grandeur and your pageantry pass, your lordships and kingdoms pass. Time breaks off every mortal thing, and what it takes from the less good, it does not give to those more worthy. Nor does Time destroy just externals, but your eloquence and genius. As it flies Time rolls the world round with it, and never rests or stops or turns back, until it has reduced you to a little dust. Many are the proud horns of human glory, and it is no wonder if Time takes rather longer

than usual to weaken them. But whatever the crowd thinks or says, if your lifespan was not so short, you would soon see them turn into smoke.’ When I had heard this, since one must not oppose the truth but place complete trust in it, I saw all our glory melt like snow in the sun; and I saw Time make such ravages on our famous names that I held them for nought, although the common folk do not know or believe that; blind folk who always sport with the wind, and feed on false opinions, thinking it better to die old than in the cradle. Yet even at the moment of his rising the envious sun cannot efface the phonic memory of Laura: TT 1-2 ‘De l'aureo albergo co l'aurora inanzi | si ratto usciva il sol cinto di raggi’ ‘from his golden lodging, preceded by the dawn, the sun came forth so swiftly begirt with his rays. That is perhaps an unstated cause of his envy, a rival whose splendour and beauty outshines

his own, a topos of the Rime sparse and of the Africa.” Eternity alone can triumph over Time, but Petrarch’s version of eternity allows for the return of three of the previous triumphators, Love, Chastity and Fame. The Triumphus Eternitatis is dated in the autograph 1374, dominico ante cenam. 15 Januarii, ultimus cantus, and is perhaps Petrarch's very last poetic composition, before his death on 18/19 July 1374. In the codex Ambrosianus Petrarch noted against the last line of the Aeneid 9! RS 37.81-2 ‘Le treccie d'ór che devrien fare il sole | d'invidia molta ir pieno’; 156.5—6 ‘que’ duo bei lumi, | ch’an fatto mille volte invidia al sole’; Afr. 5.25-7 (Sophonisba) Fulgentior auro |

quolibet, et solis radiis factura pudorem, | cesaries.

Fama in the Trionfi

(uitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras): ‘You were too sure a prophet of your own fate; for as you sang these words life deserted you too, likewise fleeing indignantly, unless I am mistaken.” The Triumphus Eternitatis forestalls a sudden intervention of death with the anticipation of an eschatological vision in which the other two triumphators, Death and Time, are both discomfited. They now have power only over each other, and thereby cancel each other out: 78 ‘morto il tempo’, and without time death is also powerless. The Renaissance commentator Castelvetro (1582: 350), reading for the plot, finds closure in the final satisfaction, in the Triumphus Eternitatis,

of the two desires that gave no rest to Petrarch: ‘Through the triumph of eternity Petrarch wishes to signify the satisfaction of both of the desires that so troubled him, of his love for Laura and his wish for fame, since

eternity brings an end to the principal causes of harm to the objects of desire, namely the wasting of Laura’s beauty through death, and the wasting of fame through time: in eternity both death and time cease to be.’ 'Guastamento' ‘wasting’ refers to TE 91-9: Tanti volti, che Morte e '| Tempo ha guasti, torneranno al suo piü fiorito stato, e vedrassi ove, Amor, tu mi legasti,

ond’ io a dito ne saró mostrato: "Ecco chi pianse sempre, e nel suo pianto

95

sovra 'l riso d'ogni altro fu beato! E quella di ch' ancor piangendo canto avrà gran maraviglia di se stessa, vedendosi fra tutte dar il vanto. So many faces wasted by Death and Time will return to their most flourishing condition, and the bond to which you bound me, Love, will be seen, so that fingers

will point me out, ‘Here is he who always wept, and in his weeping was more blessed than all others in their laughter.’ And she of whom I sing, still weeping, will be amazed to see herself take first place among all women.

During his life fingers pointed at Petrarch as an example of one shamed by his enslavement to love, the fama ofan erotic fabula; now ‘beato’ includes him in the company of the blessed spirits whose name is for ever famous in memory at TE 43—5: 9?

For examples see Ariani

1988 ad loc.; Santagata

1996 on RS 105.83-4; see above Ch. 9 pp.

361-8. Cf. also Hor. Carm. 4.3.22-3 quod monstror digito praetereuntium | Romanae fidicen lyrae.

457

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

Beat’ i spirti che nel sommo coro si troveranno, o trovano, in tal grado che sia in memoria eterna il nome loro! Blessed be the spirits who will find or do find themselves in the supreme choir, in such a state that their names are in everlasting memory. The language picks up Rime sparse 327, where Laura has awoken to new life

among ‘li spirti electi; while on earth the poet's rhymes ensure that (13-14) 'consecrata fra i nobili intellecti | fia del tuo nome qui memoria eterna' ‘everlasting memory of your name is consecrated among noble minds’. In the Triumphus Eternitatis Laura's fame has been translated to heaven: 99

"vedendosi fra tutte dar il vanto* Petrarch is insistent on the place of fame in eternity, TE 79-81: e non avranno in man li anni '| governo de le fame mortali; anzi chi fia chiaro una volta, fia chiaro in eterno.”

The years shall not rule over the fame of mortal men, but he who will be famous one time will be famous for ever.

Guido Bezzola glosses this ‘chi sarà glorioso una volta lo sarà in eterno (ma per altri motivi, cioe acquistando gloria presso Dio)’.*! But this is not what the repetition of ‘chiaro’ implies, but rather an equivalence of renown in

the world of time and in the world of eternity. For this apocalyptic ‘new world’ ( TE20-1 ‘mondo novo’) is also a place of return.” This is emphasized in the final, dense, Summationsschema at 121—

45, in which those who deserved ‘chiara Fama’ together with the pretty faces wasted by Time and Death will return, to enjoy (134) 'con immortal bellezza eterna fama’ ‘eternal fame with eternal beauty’. This is the cue for Cf. Squarotti 1999: 62: 'Il trionfo della Fama, in modo molto sottilmente allusivo, si conclude qui [79-81].

*! Bezzola 1984 ad lox. 42 The statement at TE 110-12 that every man's conscience, whether clear ("chiaro") or dark, will be visible to all, points to the Augustinian dichotomy between fame (what the outside world says about a person) and conscience (what the person knows in himselfto be the truth) (see Ch. 1 pp. 33-4); ‘fia... dinanzi a tutto '| mondo aperta e nuda’ indicates that in eternity the outside world will have direct access to what lies within the soul. This should render superfluous farra, but it does not. 4 Finotti 2009 reads the recurrent returns of love and fame in the Trionfi as the returns of memory, seeing in the Triumphus Fame ‘the founding act of a memory religion’ (75). Ariani 1988: 381—2 ‘lestrema insorgenza di una laudatio laurana enunciata per formule fisse, in una sorte di assoluto Summationsschema che inscrive definitivamente Madonna risorta nel'immota durata dell’Eternita’. te

458

Fama in the Trionfi

the final return to one famous pretty face, that of Laura, and a return to

the opening of the Trionfi, the landscape of Vaucluse: TE 139-41: ‘A riva un fiume che nasce in Gebenna | Amor mi dié per lei si lunga guerra | che la memoria ancora il cor accenna' 'on the banks of a river that rises in the Alps Love for her sake declared war on me for so long that my heart still bears the memory of it. Here the word ‘memoria’ is a memory of the same word in the first lines of the Triumphus Cupidinis 1.1-3:"° A] tempo che rinova i miei sospiri per la dolce memoria di quel giorno che fu principio a si lunghi martiri... At the time that renews my sighs for the sweet memory of that day which was the beginning of such long torments... That was also a scene of return, the return of sighs with the return of the

season of spring. The Triumphus Eternitatis ends with a return, in prospect, to gaze in eternity on that which the poet previously saw on earth, in the world of time (‘Al tempo... '), TE 144-5: se fu beato chi la vide in terra,

or che fia dunque a rivederla in cielo? Ifhe was blest who saw her on earth, what then will it be to see her again in heaven?

The past and future tenses in these two closing lines of the Triumphus Eternitatis deny the closure that could be achieved only through an (impossible) text that did not unfold in time. But there is a further question left hanging, whether the beauty and fame of Petrarch's vision of eternity are different from or the same as those of this world."^ Perhaps the only difference is that in eternity the absent presences that are inseparable from both erotic desire and the desire for fame in a world subject to time are replaced by pure presence. The beauty and fame of Laura will be present in a re-vision (rivederla’) that is a revision of the conditions of a time-bound world, in

which textuality gives way to pure vision of the whole person, TE 135-8: 45 Noted by Bertolani 2001: 125. ^6 Sturm-Maddox 1990: 130 claims that ‘in the Trionfi. . . Petrarch eliminates the ambiguities, resolves the doubts, and rewrites the story [of the Rime]... a movement towards the union of love-lyric with edifying moral vision’. This is arguably too simple a reading. Bertolani 2001: Ch. 5 argues that the endurance in eternity of beauty and fame is in keeping with Augustinian orthodoxy, pointing out (137-8) that the Triumphus Eternitatis has the same number of verses,

145, as Dante, Paradiso 33.

459

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

Ma inanzia

tutte ch’a rifar si vanno,

é quella che piangendo il mondo chiama con la mia lingua e con la stanca pena; ma !] ciel pur di vederla intera brama. But before all the women

who

go to be remade

is she for whom

the world

calls,

weeping, with my tongue and with my tired pen; but heaven also longs to see her whole. This desire, we assume,

will be fulfilled, at least in Petrarch's dreaming

fantasy of that final, eternally waking, vision. Fama has as good a claim as anything else to be the subject of the Trionfi. Petrarch's recurrent obsessions appear in the focus on a subset of the issues that I examine in this book: the relationship between fama and love; the distinction between male and female kinds of fama; the solidity

and insolidity of fama; fama as the reward for the great achievements of men of action, and fama as the product of the writer; fama as verbal and fama as visual; fama as tradition." From this last perspective the Trionfi are an encyclopaedia of historical and literary tradition, part of Petrarch's larger project of reviving the fama of the antique past, of linking that classical past to the famous individuals of his own time, including himself. In the Trionfi Petrarch ventures finally to anchor worldly fama in a transcendental vision of eternity. The Trionfi have little to say on the social and political aspects of fama, touching only in passing on Scipio's struggle to maintain his reputation and fame in the competitive world of the Roman Republic. Fama-as-report, as news, is used as a narrative trigger at the beginning in the form of the narrator's curiosity to learn more about the people he sees in his vision. The predations of Fama-as-rumour are kept firmly in their place with Petrarch’s vindication of Dido from the slanders of Virgil."*

fama in the Africa?

a [7]

ES E]

Petrarch opens his Latin epic by placing his own hopes for poetic immortality under the aegis of the glory of King Robert, addressed as (1.20) The aspect emphasized by Baránski 1990. However, the fifteenth-century commentary tradition on the Trionfi is much concerned with the ambiguous status of fama, and with the contest between military and intellectual claims to fame; Ilicino distinguishes between 'confabulazione populare; 'ragionamento volgare; on the one hand, and ‘vera gloria’ on the other: see Tateo FS *

460

1999,

For further bibliography on the Africa see Visser 2005 and Marchesi 2009.

Fama in the Africa

Hesperieque decus atque eui gloria nostri ‘ornament of Hesperia and glory of our age, as Petrarch looks back to the king's previous support in his laureation on the Roman Capitol. The king's fame will further Petrarch's own ambition, and paradoxically lying low in the shade of Robert's great name Petrarch's own name will be immune to envy and the teeth of time, 1.337:

quantum tua clara fauori fama meo conferre potest! modo mitis in umbra nominis ista tui dirum spretura uenenum inuidie latuisse uelis, ubi nulla uetustas interea et nulli rodent mea nomina uermes. How much your bright fame can add to my favourable reception! Just allow my verses to shelter in the shadow of your kindly name, immune to envy's dread poison, where no passage of time and no worms will gnaw at my name.

In a recusatio Petrarch then looks forward to a later and greater epic to be written on the exploits of Robert himself, and which will earn Petrarch a second Roman

laureation

(1.62-4). That plot of fama was never to be

realized, finally thwarted by the death of Robert, lamented at the end of Book 9 of the Africa. The projected epic was perhaps never a serious possibility, although it would have offered Petrarch the perfect convergence of royal and literary fama, as the man who on an earlier occasion had merely facilitated the poet's crowning became himself the glorious subject of another epic for which Petrarch would be crowned for a second time. Petrarch has classical models in mind, Statius' promise to Domitian ofa later

and greater, historical, epic at the beginning of the Thebaid, and, behind that, Virgil's fantasy at the beginning of the third Georgic of a triumph of poetry to rival the literal triumph of Octavian in 29 sc.” Even had Robert not died, this was perhaps destined to remain no more than a dream of fame, legitimated as an impersonation of the deferred celebrations of their respective imperial patrons by the ancient masters of epic, Virgil and Statius. Virgil never did write an epic in the form projected at the beginning of the third Georgic, and Statius’ epic on Domitian did not survive to be read by Petrarch. And it is hard to see how an epic on Robert could have functioned so powerfully as a realization of Petrarch's ideal of an ancient symbiosis of 50

The Statian parallels are obvious; with 42 mors modo me paulum expectet cf. Virg. Geo. 3.10

modo uita supersit; with 63 redeuntem (from Rome to Naples after the laureation) cf. Geo. 3.10-11 in patriam... | Aonio rediens. . . uertice (the latter parallel is not noted in ter Haar's excellent and copious 1999 commentary on Books 1 and 2).

461

462

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

poetic and royal fama as does the Africa itself, in which, as we shall see, Petrarch projects his own ambitions back into a dream of antiquity. It was perhaps only in the world of dream and imagination that Petrarch could enjoy a fame which in his own historical existence he could never fully

realize. In hindsight even the laureatio of 1341 failed to satisfy, as Petrarch came to feel that his bid for such a mark of fame was premature ( TC 4.79—80

colsi '| glorioso ramo, | onde forse anzi tempo ornai le tempie ‘I plucked the glorious branch, with which perhaps too early I bedecked my temples’).>! This is only one of the ways in which time and fame are out of joint for Petrarch. In the Trionfi Time triumphs over Fame. Petrarch's project in the Africa, and elsewhere, is one of attempting to counter the effects of time, which has almost but not quite yet effaced the famous works of antiquity, always in the awareness that this can be only a holding operation, and that the longer reach of time will obliterate all the monuments of men, including those of antiquity, and those of antiquity as revived by Petrarch. The laureatio comes too early in Petrarch's career, but in the wider perspectiveitis Petrarch who comes too late in time to do more than partially and dimly bridge the gap between a decayed modernity and the glory of the ancient world. The hero of the Africa, Scipio Africanus, is one of the most famous ancient Romans, and one whose desire for and achievement of fame is the subject of one of the most extended examinations of fama in Petrarch's beloved Livy

(see Ch. 7 pp. 262-70). The narrative proper of the Africa begins at 1.115, with Scipio at the Pillars of Hercules, a limit that is also a beginning. Scipio has driven the Carthaginians out of Spain, but is unsatisfied with the glory that he has won to date, 1.134-6: uicisse parum; iam blandior egrum non mulcet Fortuna animum; Carthagine recta

gloria gestarum sordebat fulgida rerum. To have conquered is not enough. Now smiling Fortune does not soothe his sick

spirit. The brilliant glory of his deeds was dimmed while Carthage stil! stood. This is the point at which Petrarch's source, Livy, had paused to give a fuller account of Scipio's insatiable desire for fame: 28.17.2-3 “While everyone else was broadcasting the fact with great rejoicing and praise, the one man who had achieved it, insatiable in his desire for virtue and true glory, considered the conquest of Spain to be a small thing in comparison with his highminded ambitions. He already had his eye on Africa, and the great city of 5! A self-criticism to which Petrarch returns repeatedly in his letters: see Ariani 1988 ad loc.

Fama in the Africa

Carthage, and on the glory of that war as if piled up for his own honour and name.” Petrarch chooses this starting point not just because it functions well as a launch in medias res, or because it suggests a synkrisis of Scipio and Hercules," but also because it introduces the theme of cupiditas gloriae, a

passion to which Scipio is exposed no less than is the poet Petrarch, but against whose excesses the virtuous Scipio of the Africa is proof." The poem will ‘correct’ any adverse judgement of Scipio on this score. The introduction of the theme of fama-as-glory is immediately followed by the appearance of fama-as-rumour or report. Both kinds of fama collaborate to set in motion the action of the epic, in a good example of fama’s role in opening a narrative. Scipio’s dissatisfaction with what he has achieved to date is further fuelled by reports of warfare in Italy, 1.139—44: turbida quin etiam rumoribus omnia miscens Fama procul nostro ueniens crescebat ab orbe arcibus instantem Ausoniis uolitare’* sub armis Hanibalem, patrieque faces sub menia ferri; illustres cecidisse duces, ardere nefandis

ignibus Hesperiam, atque undantia cedibus arua. Furthermore unruly Fama, stirring up everything with rumours, grew as she came from far off in our world, reporting that Hannibal was flying around under arms,

threatening the Italian citadels, and bringing up torches against the walls of the fatherland; that famous generals had fallen, that Italy was ablaze with criminal flames, the fields deluged in slaughter.

Christopher Warner argues interestingly that this first mobilization of Famaas-rumour in the Africa, conveying news of the military threat to Italy posed by the Virgilian Dido's avenger Hannibal, is in pointed contrast to the effects of Fama in inflaming Iarbas with sexual jealousy in Aeneid 4.°“ This is in support of Warner's claim, based on Petrarch's own Augustinian moral allegorization of the Aeneid in Seniles 4.5, that the Africa is informed by a spiritual allegory whereby Carthage and Hannibal's flames of war stand

-

3$ See Ch. 7 p. 263; cf. also Livy 28.40.1 ipse nulla iam modica gloria contentus non ad gerendum modo bellum sed ad finiendum diceret se consulem declaratum. 5 On Scipio as a better example of uirtus than Hercules see Bernardo 1962: 59-61. 54 On Petrarch’s love affair with glory and fame see Ch. 9 pp. 376-83; the history of that affair and

vi u

of the poet's even more ardent desire for Virtue is the subject of RS 119, the ‘canzone di Gloria’.

e

56

Cf. Livy 28.44.10 (Scipio speaks) quod tu, Q. Fabi, cum uictor tota uolitaret Italia Hannibal potuisti praestare. . . ; Hannibal also moves like Fama herself: cf. Aen. 7.104—5 sed circum late uolitans iam Fama per urbes | Ausonias tulerat, adduced by ter Haar 1999, citing Seagraves 1976 (non uidi). Warner 2005: 40-1.

463

464

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

for passion and lust, to which Scipio as Virtue is immune. Be that as it may, at the very least it can be said that there emerges from Afr. 1.136—53 a direct and unproblematic relationship between the workings of Fama-asrumour and the glorious goals of Scipio, in contrast to the more devious paths by which in Aeneid 4 rumour works eventually to steer Aeneas back on to the road to epic glory (see Ch. 3 pp. 103—5). In general Fama-asrumour plays a less prominent and complex role in the Africa than in the Aeneid, even in the case of the major reworking of the Fama of Aeneid 4 in the story of Sophonisba (see below pp. 471-4). As with the Trionfi this reflects the predominant bias of Petrarch's interests in fama, directed

more to ethics, poetic immortality, and the revival of classical tradition, and less to issues relating on the one hand to fictionality, and on the other to struggles for the control of renown and rumour within a political and social context.

In read good Itala

the closing lines of the introduction of Scipio and his motives we (1.145-53) that Scipio's duty to the community, that of restoring the name (i.e. fama) of Italy by wiping the shame from her face (148 detergi fronte pudorem), combines with the familial pietas that calls for

vengeance for his dead father and uncle, to create a desire (149 amor) for

achievement that makes the sparks fly from his own face. The whole section concludes with an epiphonema whose last word (and last word of the verse paragraph) is uirtus; 153 tanta indomito sub pectore uirtus ‘such great virtue in his indomitable breast’. Petrarch’s Scipio properly subordinates his desire for glory to his uirtus, in accordance with the dictum often repeated by Petrarch, that glory is the shadow of virtue (umbra uirtutis).* The greater part of the first two books of the Africa is taken up with a dream

in which Scipio's father tells his son of his own

death, and about

other heroes of the war with Hannibal, followed by a parade of Roman kings, leading into a prophecy of the history of Rome from the downfall of Hannibal, through Republic and Empire, to the later decline and fall of Rome. This is followed by a discourse on the vanity of fame, its spatial and temporal limitations, and on the proper relationship between glory and virtue (2.337-509),* into which is inserted a prophecy of Petrarch’s Africa, capped by commendation of the friendship of Laelius, and Scipio's advice to his son on his forthcoming exile. The immediate classical model is the Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis, combined with the Virgilian Parade of

57

See Ch. | p. 25. For examples and parallels in Petrarch and other authors, pagan and Christian, see Santagata 1996 on RS 119.99; ter Haar 1999 on Afr. 2.487-90. 58 On these lines see Visser 2005: 118-31.

Fama in the Africa

Heroes in Aeneid 6, with touches of other Virgilian dreams and prophecies, notably Aeneas’ dream of the mutilated Hector in Aeneid 2, and Jupiter’s

prophecy of Roman history in Aeneid 1. The dream is thus in large measure an extended display of Roman fama, set off, in the manner of the Somnium Scipionis, against a lesson on the vanity of fame. ^ The pagan sources are extended through biblical, patristic and Boethian additions.^' Memorable is the notion of the secunda mors ‘second death’ (2.432) of the individual

that comes with decay of the gravestone (titulus in marmore sectus), and the tertia mors ‘third death’ (465) that comes with the decay of books.”

The elder Scipio’s opening address to his son immediately establishes him as a fitting audience for a speech de fama et de uanitate gloriae, in words that echo Petrarch’s own opening address to King Robert, in what is yet another example of Petrarch’s elision of the gap between the fame of heroes ancient and modern: with 1.168—9 ‘o decus eternum generisque amplissima nostri | gloria’ ‘immortal ornament and most splendid glory of our race’ cf. 1.20 (Robert) 'Hesperieque decus atque eui gloria nostri’ ‘ornament of Italy and glory of our age'^ Into this pessimistic moralizing is introduced what is generally seen as a surprising interruption in the vanity topics (2.438— 54), the promise of the superlatively famous achievements of Scipio, and the prophecy of an Ennius alter, Petrarch,” to sing of his deeds. From contraction of fama we pass to expansion through adjectival degrees: 438—9 magna geris, maiora geres, immensaque uictor | conficies tu bella manu et dignissima fama 'you achieve great things, and will achieve greater still, and you will triumphantly bring to an end immense wars most worthy of fame." >65 The implication is perhaps that it is Petrarch who intervenes to

5? See Kallendorf 1989: 31-2 on Petrarch’s heavy annotation of the Parade of Heroes in the Ambrosian Virgil. 60

See Giannarelli

6

On the chronological relation to similar material in Secretum 3 see Fenzi 2003. Sources for second and third deaths: Boeth. Consol. 2.7.47-9 (Loeb numbering) quamquam quid ipsa scripta proficiant, quae cum suis auctoribus premit longior atque obscura uetustas?, 2.7 metr. 23-6 quodsi putatis longius uitam trahi | mortalis aura nominis, | cum sera uobis rapiet hoc

[9

62

1987.

etiam dies, | iam uos secunda mors manet, Ambrose, De bono mortis 2.3 (CSEL 32, 1, p. 704) sed

v

mortis tria sunt genera. una mors peccati est, de qua scriptum [Ezech. 18:4]: anima quae peccat

ipsa morietur. alia mors mystica, quando quis peccato moritur et deo uiuit, de qua ait item apostolus (Rom. 6:4]: consepulti enim sumus cum illo per baptismum in mortem. tertia mors, qua cursum uitae huius et munus explemus, id est animae corporisque secessio. ter Haar 1999 ad locc. compares for both passages Ov. Her. 15.94 o decus atque aeui gloria magna tui. He also points out the contrast between the elder Scipio's words here, and his description of his son at Cic. Rep. 6.15 as paene miles (but only to point up by contrast the great name and fame that he will have won within a short two years).

$^

Cf. Hor. Ep. 2.1.50 Ennius as alter Homerus, Lucilius fr. 1189 Marx.

6

$5 An Ovidian trick: cf. the adjectival degrees at Ov. Fasti 1.603-8, on which see Hardie 1993a: 5.

465

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

reverse (however provisionally) the destructive effects of time. The Africa (temporarily) fulfils the function of Eternity in the Trionfi of negating the deadly effects of Time on Fame. The elder Scipio’s interest is in the shining fame that attends great deeds of virtue. In the perspective of the longer stretch of time, and compared to the solidity of virtue itself, this fame is ultimately perishable and empty, vain glory (the lesson of the Triumphus Temporis). But the critique of fame does not extend to the relativization of fama in terms of sources and truth contents that we have seen in Virgil and Ovid. As in the Trionfi, a fama awarded to and judged by an élite is, for the most part, kept separate from the variable opinions and accolades of the uulgus. The elder Scipio confronts and unequivocally rejects the undiscriminating praises awarded by the common people in their judgement of military achievement, after referring to the meeting at Ephesus between Hannibal and Scipio when Hannibal gave Scipio his rank ordering of great generals (based on Livy 35.14.5-12),°° 2.92-104:

colloquio festiua dies uideatur amico,

tantorum felix Ephesus sermone uirorum. Fama quidem mendax“ falsa cum lance®* nefandos equat iniqua bonis. facinus dum grande, tremendum,

95

horrendum *? dictu inuenit, canit orba' per orbem, nec dirimit causas. patriam iuuat ille cadentem,

laudatur; multaque alius cum strage cruentas captat opes regnumque sibi iaciturus in auro, hic quoque laudatur. laudabitur Hanibal atque Scipio: posteritas mirabitur omnis utrumque.

100

heu par dissimile et diuerso sidere terris! illatum! at uulgus discernere quanta sit inter magnificum ac tetrum facinus distantia, nescit.

a E

Livy follows Claudius Quadrigarius for this (apocryphal) tradition; it is reworked in Scipio's own rank order of Hannibal, Alexander, Pyrrhus at Afr. 8.102-13. Cf. Prop. 4.2.19 mendax Fama; Ov. Met. 9.137-9 Fama loquax... e minimo sua per mendacia crescit. 68 lance, laude VNA!. $9? Cf perhaps Aen. 4.181 monstrum horrendum, ingens. ter Haar 1999 ad loc. compares Apul. Met. 5.9.2 en orba et saeua et iniqua Fortuna. Cf. Aen. 12.708 (Aeneas and Turnus) genitos diuersis partibus orbis. If lanceis the correct reading in line 94, Petrarch may have in rnind the passage that follows shortly in Virgil, Jupiter's weighing of the fates of Aeneas and Turnus: Aen. 12.725-6 Iuppiter ipse duas aequato examine lances | sustinet et fata imponit diuersa duorum. For Petrarch the merits of Aeneas and

ou =. 9

466

Turnus are easily distinguishable; some modern

readers are not so certain.

Fama in the Africa

Let that festive day dawn with its friendly interview, when Ephesus rejoices in the conversation of such great men. But lying Fama unjustly balances the wicked with the good in her false scales. So long as she finds some great and fearful crime, terrible to speak of, she blindly sings it throughout the world, and does not distinguish between the causes of deeds. That man comes to the aid of his collapsing fatherland; he is praised. Another man slaughters his way to bloodstained riches and a kingdom, so that he can lie on gold; he too is praised. Hannibal and Scipio will be praised; all posterity will marvel at each man. What an unlike pair, arriving on earth under different stars! But the common crowd cannot tell what a difference there is between a splendid and a foul deed.

Scipio’s own perspective is an ethical one: victories may be equal in terms of the magnitude and success of the military action involved, but incommensurable in moral evaluation. In his discussion of this passage Fenzi argues that Petrarch also has his eye on the comparison of the military ability (regardless of the cause being fought) in the Livian version of this story, which, according to Fenzi, grants too much parity of esteem to Hannibal and Scipio." Livy gives as his source Claudius Quadrigarius, secutus Graecos Acilianos libros, for Fenzi the lost works to which Livy refers purvey the false and mendacious

talk, fama, of the crowd.

Fama

mendax is in contrast

to the motivation that the elder Scipio tells his son will guide Petrarch's account of his deeds in the Africa: 2.453—4 magnarum sed sola quidem admiratio rerum, | solus amor ueri 'only admiration for great deeds alone, only love of the truth”. With this Fenzi compares Petrarch's criticism of Walter of Chátillon's assertion in the Alexandreis of the potential superiority of Alexander the Great over all Roman generals: De Alexandro Macedone 50 *this is like the behaviour of certain very unreliable Frenchmen, motivated not by a desire for the truth, or by credibility (non ueri studium non fides rerum), not even by a love for Alexander, but hostility and hatred for the

Romans (Romanorum inuidia atque odium). If Fenzi's analysis is correct, fama mendax is a comment not just on the errors of the common people, but on literary tradition as well, swayed by false opinions and false reports. The Africa, in its judicious use of tradition, 7? ?3

Fenzi 1971: 497-503. Note however the conclusion of the Livian anecdote: et perplexum Punico astu responsum et improuisum adsentationis genus Scipionem mouisse, quod e grege se imperatorum uelut inaestimabilem secreuisset: this in fact raises Scipio above the normal certamen gloriae, so that

there is no contest - as Afr. 2.105-8 acknowledges. For Petrarch's own synkrisis of Scipio and Hannibal see Scipio 1.4-5. ^^ Cf. Walter, Alexandreis 1.5-8 qui si senio non fractus inani | pollice fatorum iustos uixisset in annos, | Caesareos numquam loqueretur fama triumphos, | totaque Romuleae squaleret gloria gentis.

467

468

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

will be immune to fama in the bad sense, and will award glory solely on the basis of virtuous achievement. Books 3 and 4 are largely taken up with further expositions of tradition and fame at the banquet of Syphax (the histories of Africa and Rome), and Laelius’ praise of Scipio in 4. On his meeting with Laelius, Syphax expresses his intense desire to meet Scipio himself, prompted by his knowledge of his uirtus and fama (3.341—52), 345-8: tangimur et meritis et nomine tangimur ipso; optamusque ducis congressum: dextera dextre hereat atque oculis oculi, permixtaque uerbis uerba sonent faciatque fidem presentia fame.’* His good deeds and his name itself touch us, and we long to meet the general; let my right hand meet his, my eyes meet his, let my words mingle with his, and let his presence give credibility to report.

The desire to turn fama into ocular presence is very much Petrarch's own desire. The narrative context is based on Dido's reception of the Trojans in Aeneid 1, where we know from the scenes in the Temple of Juno that the

fama of the Trojans has preceded their physical presence (and where we may suspect that Dido's prior knowledge about Aeneas fuels her response to his sudden presence). The language of desire also echoes the young Evander's wish to meet Anchises at Aer. 8.163—4 mihi mens iuuenali ardebat amore | compellare uirum et dextrae coniungere dextram ‘with a young man’s ardour I longed to speak to the hero and join my right hand with his.” The interplay of fama and presence is continued in Book 4, when Syphax asks Laelius for a full account of Scipio, hitherto the especially frequent object of fama's reports to Syphax (21-2 namque unum nobis huc crebrior illum | fama tulit). Laelius has had the privilege not only of being an eyewitness to Scipio's great deeds, but also of being party to the inner vision of a man that is granted by friendship, 24-6: omnia si presens spectasti, et cernere soli cor licet archanum, quoniam nil protinus ardens celat amicitia.

75

For the opposite cf. e.g. Claudian, De bello Gildonico 385 minuit praesentia famam.

76

For the Ovidian erotic topos of ‘touching names’ see Ars 2.633; Met. 11.707; Hardie 20022: 239,

279. For the Petrarchan erotics of fame cf. also Afr. 2.482-3 quod si dulcedine fame | tangeris et stimulis etiam nunc pungeris istis, Bucolicum carmen 1.19 fame dulcedine tactus inani: cf. Val. Max. 8.14.5 nulla est ergo tanta humilitas quae dulcedine gloriae non tangatur.

Fama in the Africa

If you have seen all these things in person, and if you alone can look on the secrets of his heart, since ardent friendship is quick to reveal everything.

fama may be greater than or inferior to reality (see Ch. 1 p. 9); the latter, Laelius asserts, is true of Scipio, 71—5: uultus fortasse serenos ipse suos cernes, uerisque minora locutum me dices; datur hec illi nam gloria soli,

nominibus quia cum noceat presentia magnis, hunc superattollit.' Perhaps you yourself will look on his calm features, and you will say that I have spoken less than the truth. For he alone is granted this glory, that although presence diminishes great names, him it elevates still higher.

The friend with access to the secrets of Scipio's soul asserts his adherence to gloria uera, as opposed to populi uentosi honores ‘windy honours of the people’ (4.87—8). Scipio's subordination of glory to superior moral goals, his control of his own cupiditas gloriae," is repeatedly stressed in the following books, both by Scipio himself and by the narrator. Giving moral advice to the lovelorn Masinissa, Scipio states that his own highest glory is to hold pleasure on a tight rein (5.395-8), and that it is a greater glory to subdue disturbances in the soul than to have defeated Syphax (5.418—20).”” Addressing his troops Scipio claims he is motivated not by gloria or imperii libido ‘lust for power’, but by patrie pregrandis amor ‘huge love for his

country’ (6.103—5).*° The narrator tells us that Scipio aspires to the stars through virtue, rather than through ‘windy Fame’, in a context that gives added point to the cliché: Fame can rise no higher than the lower air, the

place of winds and storms, to which Scipio is as immune as was Aeneas to the blasts of Dido’s tears and pleas (Aen. 4.437—49): Afr. 8.628-31 at minime ingentes animos fixumque mouebant | Scipiade ingenium uentose nomina Fame. | altius aspirans celum spectabat et astra | Virtutisque decus nudum 'But the titles of windy Fame in no way moved Scipio's great soul Cf. Petr. Scipio 3.9 quod de paucissimis lectum auditumue est, quem absentem fama mirabilem fecerat mirabiliorem presentia faciebat, TP 172-3 (Laura triumphant at Liternum) ‘Qui de l'ostile onor l'alta novella, | non scemato cogli occhi; one of the convergences between Laura and Scipio. On Scipio's cupiditas gloriae (quam cupiditatem nec ipse dissimulat...) see Petr. Scipio 11.10-12.

? Cf Cic. Mare. 7-8. Scipio separates two motivations that are combined in an unsettling incident in Roman history, Brutus' execution of his sons: Aen. 6.823 uincet amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido.

469

470

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

and fixed spirit. Aspiring higher, he looked to the heavens and stars, and Virtue’s naked glory.’ At his triumph Scipio admits his attachment to a famous name, ‘Africanus’, but only to highlight his disinterest in profiting financially from the war, and with regard to the name his desire for glory is satisfied: 9.391—2 sibi sed cognomine solo | contentus nichil hic proprias inuexit in edes ‘but content for himself with the name alone, he brought not treasure into his own house.""! Scipio's high-minded attitude to the relative values of glory and virtue is set in relief through contrast with Hannibal's fixation on fame. As he leaves Italy Hannibal delivers a kind of epitaph on his achievements, 6.550—5: ‘satis ampla relatu gessimus: Ausoniis annalibus Hanibal ingens nomen erit, Latiis numquam delebile fastis Hanibal. exiguo restabat summa labore fama; sed inuidit patrie dux maximus Hanno; inuidere dei sontes." ‘I have achieved sufficiently great things to tell of: Hannibal will be a great name in the annals of Italy, Hannibal can never be erased from the records of Latium. It required a small labour to reach the summit of fame, but my country's supreme commander Hanno and the culpable gods begrudged this to me.'

The language of fama thwarted by inuidia is not in itself exceptionable, and differs little from the poet Petrarch's own concern that his labours in pursuit of fama should not be attacked by envy. Lacking however is any claim that the struggle for fama was guided by uirtus. Back in Carthage after defeat at Zama Hannibal confesses his own excessive desire for glory, 8.277-81: crimenque fatebor ipse meum: pridem tacitus me prelia sensi auersis tentare deis, sed pulcra per omnes gloria precipitem casus fameque libido ceca tulit. I myself will confess my fault: for along time I silently realized that the gods opposed me going into battle, but fair glory and blind desire for fame swept me headlong through all disasters. 3! Cf. Val. Max. 3.7.1e (De fiducia sui), P. Scipio defending his brother L. before the Senate on charge of appropriating money from Antiochus: nam cum Africam totam potestati uestrae subiecerim, nihil ex ea quod meum diceretur praeter cognomen rettuli. non me igitur Punicae, non fratrem meum Asiaticae gazae auarum reddiderunt, sed uterque nostrum inuidia magis quam pecunia locupletior est.

Fama in the Africa

In the matter of the desire for glory there is as clear a line between Hannibal and Scipio, as there is between Turnus and Aeneas in the Aeneid (see Ch. 3 p. )9?

The virtue of Scipio is also cleanly detached from the contaminating effects of fama in Petrarch's major reworking of the Fama episode in

Aeneid 4.9 This follows the doomed wedding of Masinissa and Sophonisba, corresponding to the ‘wedding’ in the cave of Dido and Aeneas (Afr. 5.273-92), 273-84: publica finitimas subito perlabitur urbes Fama gradu, uicte uictorem sponte secutum

coniugia, et bello indomitum seruire puelle. uulgus adulterii signabat nomine factum, quod neque legitimis arsissent ignibus inter

275

armorum strepitus, alioque superstite rege

coniuge; captiue uictori forma quod uno uisa die et dilecta prius, subitoque recepta

280

federe, non inter patrios ex more penates,

iudicio ne quid, sed cunta libidine sanas precipitante moras fierent. sic omnia uulgus in peius torquere loquax. Popular rumour's swift step glided through the neighbouring cities, telling that the conqueror had of his own volition sought marriage with the conquered queen, and that unbeaten in war he was the slave of a girl. The common people gave the deed the name of adultery, because amidst the clashing of weapons they had burned with an illicit flame, while another king and husband was still alive. In a single day the conqueror had seen and fallen in love with the prisoner's beauty, and had taken her to himself in a sudden wedding, not in his ancestral home as customary, so that everything was done without judgement, by a passion that swept away reasonable delay. So the gossiping crowd distorted everything for the worse.

92 A similar lesson on the pernicious effects of the love of glory is drawn by the narrator from the behaviour of Claudius and Cornelius Lentulus, in an excursus at 8.567—611 on the obstades to the pursuit of achievement at Rome (based on Livy 9.18, the comparison of Alexander and Rome), beginning (567—8) heu pestis damnosa honrini et funesta libido | nominis, imperio nocuisti sepe Latino, (594-600) gloriaque in preceps tulit et celerare coegit. | nec michi nunc quisquam referat de nomine litem | uirtutis, uanisque illam setungat ab umbris, | aut externa sibi ceu non sua premia tollat. | credite, cuntarum longe blandissima rerum est | gloria, nec leuibus stimulis agit insita fortes | egregiosque animos generosaque pectora pulsat. See also the digression on the Roman weakness of cupiditas gloriae at Scipio 10.44-5, in the context of a comparison of the deeds of kings with the glory of Roman generals, with reference to Val. Max. 8.14.5 and

Cic. Off. 1.65, 74.

® See Visser 2005: 208-10, 218-22.

471

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

Petrarch’s publica Fama is a much watered-down version of her Virgilian model, only lightly personified and with no apparent metapoetic content. Her spin on the wedding reverses Dido’s attempt to control her own fama: with Afr. 5.276 uulgus adulterii signabat nomine factum compare Aen. 4.171— 2 nec iam furtiuum Dido meditatur amorem: | coniugium uocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam 'Dido no longer practised a secret love: she calls it marriage, cloaking her guilt with this name.’ Fama distorts in the manner of the Virgilian monster (283-4), but what Petrarch's uulgus says in fact goes little beyond the negative reporting of the wedding by the Livian narrator (Livy

30.12.17-20)."' Masinissa himself had hoped, liked Dido, to be able to put a good front on the wedding in the eyes of Scipio: 5.240 [Scipio] coniugium fortasse sacrum, non furta uocabit ‘perhaps he [Scipio] will call it holy matrimony, not stolen love’. The surges of Fama feruens reach the ears of Scipio, whose immediate reaction, unlike that of the Virgilian Iarbas, is pity, not

indignation (286 cari facinus miseratus amici). Anger follows in his loathing of his friend’s untimely love, and in a simile Scipio is compared to a father rebuking an absent son in a flood of epistolary thunderbolts: 291 calamis irarum fulmina fundit ‘he pours out angry thunderbolts from his pen’. But unlike the accelerating ‘thunderbolts’ of Virgil’s Fama, the father/Scipio’s anger is soon turned to sweet reason: 292 mox uultu placido et dulci sermone mouendus ‘soon swayed by calm looks and sweet words’ If the thunderbolts of an angry father in the simile also remind us of the Virgilian Jupiter, the audience for Iarbas’ angry complaint in Aeneid 4, the dulcis sermo suggests for Scipio the role of a Mercury who is more truly the personification of reason than is the peremptory Virgilian Mercury in Aeneid 4.*° The hostile publica Fama of the wedding is immediately followed by a second (altera) fama that fills the fickle peoples (leues populos) with the rumour of the approach of Syphax in chains, 5.293-312. This second fama is of the kind that goes before an arrival in person, and, as fama often does, it prompts the desire to see the physical presence of the person spoken of: 295-6 ruit obuius omnis | uisendique auidus positis exercitus armis ‘the whole army lays down its arms and rushes to meet him, greedy to see him’."° The arrival of Syphax is followed by comment in indirect speech on his amazing reversal of fortune, as the rumour running ahead of his arrival modulates into the chatter of the spectators, 297—300:*” Visser 2005: 220-1 notes that Fama’s charge of adulterium goes beyond, in peius, the report of the Petrarchan narrator. 85 e

B

8

ES]

472

See Kallendorf 1989: 48-9, referring to Petrarch’s allegorization of Aeneid 4 in Fam. 4.5. Cf. Aen. 2.63-4 (arrival of Sinon) undique uisendi studio Troiana iuuentus | circumfusa ruit. Petrarch's account of Syphax in chains is closely modelled on Livy 30.13 (the chapter following the account of the wedding of Masinissa and Sophonisba), beginning Syphacem in castra

Fama in the Africa

illum admirari, atque illum celebrare frequentes, hunc illum bello ingentem regnisque superbum, Romanum Penumque ducem qui uiderit uno tempore sub laribus. They marvelled at him, pressing round him in crowds — this was the man great in war and proud on his throne, who had seen the Roman and Carthaginian leaders under his roofat the same time.

In a reversal of the power of fama to command credulitas, this crowd can hardly believe what it sees (306—7 uix credula tante | corda rei), incredulity compared in a simile to the disbelief at the sight of great mountains disappearing into the sea: 308-12: 311—12 non credat satis ipse sibi, sed somnia uanis | plena putet monstris 'one would not believe one's own senses, but

think it a dream filled with empty prodigies’.™* As at the death of Dido

(Aen. 4.666), Fama runs riot on the death of

Sophonisba, but any potentially disruptive effects are swiftly converted into a restoration of the good reputation of the queen, Afr. 6.74—80: postquam Fama fere uolitans prenuntia mortis in uulgus effusa ruit, tunc una per omnes it pietas: tote lacrimis maduere cohortes. hunc sors regine, movet hunc iniuria regis,

qui scelera accumulans maiori crimine crimen diluit; hunc ingens duro constantia leto

feminea et nulli non admiranda uirorum.*” When crowd, by the atones

flying Fama, bringing news of her cruel death, had rushed forth into the then all felt a shared pity; the cohorts all dissolved in tears. One is moved queen's fate, another by the injustice done by the king, who piling up crimes for one wrong with a greater; another is moved by the woman's great firmness

in the face of harsh death, the admiration of any man.

adduci cum esset nuntiatum, omnis uelut ad spectaculum triumphi multitudo effusa est. Petrarch in fact takes some of the fama out of the Livian account: where the spectators in the Africa muse incredulously on the turn of Fortune's wheel, presented as a fact that lies outside them,

88

Livy's Roman spectators magnify the fama of Syphax in order to add to the fame of their own victory: Livy 30.13.2 tum quantum quisque plurimum poterat magnitudini Syphacis famaeque gentis uictoriam suam augendo addebat. The simile interacts with the symbolic dream of Sophonisba, immediately preceding the fama sections, in which she sees two mountains clashing (Scipio and Masinissa), the one giving way to the other: 5.266-7 monstrumque repente | concurrisse alium maiori corpore montem. This passage alludes to Aen. 8.692, within the Aeneid in imagistic synergy with the mountains simile

8?

Cf Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris 70 Sophonisba quidem, posito splendens Numidarum

of Aeneas at 12.701-3, to which Afr. 5.308-10 alludes.

incesserit, austeritate mortis intrepide a se sumpte longe luculentior facta est.

regina

473

474

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

When Faria riots through cities she finds impressionable material particularly in female subjects; the rumours of the death of Dido provoke femineus ululatus (Aen. 4.667). Here

a woman's constancy finds universal admiration

with an audience of men, feminea and uirorum framing the last line of the verse paragraph. This is a far simpler settling of the accounts of fama than in the case of the Virgilian Dido.”

Africa 9 The last book ofthe Africa brings Scipio and his poet Ennius on a night journey over calm seas from Africa to Rome, where general and poet together process in triumph. Taken as a whole the book is an instantiation and exploration of fama. The night-time discussion on board of poetry focusses largely on the fame bestowed by poetry, and on the power of poetry and fame to endure through time. The triumph is a poetic evocation and memorialization of Scipio's greatest moment of fame. Through the presence of Ennius at the general's side, Scipio's triumph is paired with what is explicitly labelled a triumph of poetry, 400-2: Ennius ad dextram uictoris, tempora fronde substringens parili, studiorum almeque Poesis egit honoratum sub tanto auctore triumphum. At the conqueror's right hand and binding his temples with the same foliage, Ennius rode in an honourable triumph of letters and of bountiful Poetry, authorized by the great genera].?! The sequence of discussion of poetry between a ruler and poet, followed by triumphal ascent to the Roman Capitol, quite brazenly repeats the events of April 1341, when Petrarch submitted himself to a viva voce examination by King Robert on the subject of poetry, before climbing the Capitol to his own

laureatio. At this point the Africa's plot of fame becomes one of a peculiarly personal relevance to the epic poet, as Petrarch seeks to anchor his own aspirations in one of antiquity's greatest narratives of fame. Through fictional vision and narratorial retrospect, Petrarch calls on the resources of fama to conjure up the presence of things absent. As the reader is swept backward and forward in time, Petrarch also engages in a 99 But in keeping with the version of Dido's story favoured by Petrarch: Afr. 4.2-6, where Dido is paired with Lucretia as a femina pudica, see Kallendorf 1989: 45. ?! With the idea of poetic glory under the protection of a famous man of action cf. 1.33-7, Petrarch's fame safe in the shade of Robert's fame (see above p. 461).

Fama in the Africa

varied meditation on the relationship between fame and time, which can be compared with the sequence of the last three Trionfi, of Fame, Time, and

Eternity. The relationship between fame and time in the last book of the Africa is vividly articulated through the relationship between the two poets, Ennius and Petrarch. Scipio’s opening words to the silent Ennius, seated and meditative (9.10 meditansque sedebat), (130) ‘nunquamne silentia rumpes?’ ‘Will

you never break your silence?, serve the immediate purpose of opening a conversation within the fiction of the poem. They also remind the reader at the beginning of this, the last, book in the poem that Ennius’ voice has not intruded previously on our reading. They may also be felt as a question from the modern poet to his ancient counterpart, who must in reality remain largely silent, given the exiguous remains of his works." That silence can only be filled through the ventriloquistic words that Petrarch puts in the mouth of Ennius within his own poem the Africa, as it were awakening him from the dead: 13 excitat, the verb used of Scipio’s arousing of Ennius from his silent meditation, can also be used of a literal

‘awakening’. The Petrarchan reanimation of Ennius at the beginning of his conversation with Scipio is matched by the attempt of Ennius to connect with Petrarch recounted at the end of the conversation. The possibility of that meeting is engineered through Petrarch’s reconstruction of another impossible meeting between a living and a dead poet, one realized through the conjuring tricks of poetry, the fragmentary dream of Homer in the prologue to Ennius’ Annals." Petrarch superimposes that communication between poets in a distant and fantastic past on his, Petrarch’s, own communication with his Maecenas, King Robert, himself divided by death from Petrarch

by the time of the epilogue to Book 9. With 9.183-4 gentisque ingens o gloria...| Argolice summumque decus‘o great glory and supreme ornament of the Greek race’ compare 1.20 (King Robert) Hesperieque decus atque eui gloria. But for Petrarch, who did not have sufficient Greek to read Homer

n

9

The tension between the presence and absence of Ennius may be compared with what Stephen Hinds refers to as ‘the terms used simultaneously to acknowledge and to elide the huge gulf between

Petrarch and Cicero, one alive and one dead, one present in body and voice, and one

achieving presence and audibility solely through the medium of his books, and even then only through the books which have survived without loss of major mutilation’ (Hinds 2004: 159). On the Petrarchan dream of Ennius see Hinds 200-1: 171-2. Marchesi 2009: 126-8 contrasts the difficulties

94

in the Africa with ‘the simultaneous conversation of texts and authors’ enjoyed by Dante in ‘la bella scuola' of the ancient poets in Inf. 4, and speaks of a ‘philological discontinuity. On Petrarch's knowledge of the Ennian scene see above n. 18.

=

-

9%

of communication between Petrarch and Ennius

475

476

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

properly in the original, Homer’s glory is as faded and diminished as is Ennius, of whom Petrarch could read only scattered fragments. The Petrarchan Ennius’ dream of Homer concludes with the appearance of another poet, Franciscus, whose future career is foretold to Ennius at length by the shade of Homer, and whom the dreaming Ennius catches sight of as sitting (216 sedentem) in poetic meditation (219 rieditantem),

a repetition of Ennius’ own posture on the ship of Scipio at the beginning of the book. But in this case awakening leads not to communication, but to the thwarting of a conversation that is on the point of starting,

284-95 "uix auditaque salute? sustulerat grauis ille oculos?" et dicta parabat, cum matutino litui clangore repente excutior uisis, somnusque recessit inanis,

teque aciem uideo mediis educere campis sublimem hortantemque uiros et signa mouentem.’® *Barely hearing my greeting he lifted his heavy eyes and made ready to speak, when the blast of the morning trumpet suddenly shook me from my dream, and empty

sleep receded, and I saw you leading out the battle-line in the middle of the field, aloft and urging on your men and advancing the standards." 35 Hinds 2004: 164 "The imaginative association . . . between just-missed meetings and not-quite-legible books will turn out to be a favourite of Petrarch’s, with ref. to Far. 24.4.14; 24.122 (distant glimpses of Homer from his eyebrow or hair). There are traces of Ennius account of Ilia’s awakening from her dream of rape by Mars and of her father Aencas’ prophetic address, Ann. 34-50 Skutsch (preserved in Cic. Div. 1.40-1): 35 exterrita somno,

46-7 haec ecfatus pater, germana, repente recessit | nec sese dedit in conspectum corde cupitus. The Ennian Ilia's dream of a Roman genealogy is echoed in the Petrarchan Ennius’ dream of a

poetic genealogy. Hinds 2004: 173 nicely points out that salute is 'quasi-epistolary| linking this scene in Petrarch's epic to the manifold conjurings of literary community in his letters. The language suggests one being roused from sleep or somnolence: c£. Aen. 5.847 (Palinurus and Slecp) cui uix attollens Palinurus lumina fatur. Hinds 2004: 171 n. 19 notes that the location of Franciscus clausa sub ualle (Afr. 9.216) ‘folds Vaucluse into the Underworld vale at Aen. 6, 703—704 in ualle reducta. . .", so adding another hint of a world of dreams and the dead to the surroundings of the unborn Franciscus. That a poet long dead should see a poet as yet unborn in a version of the Virgilian underworld is itself homage to Virgil's inversions of temporal sequentiality in the underworld of Aeneid 6. 98 This is a dream from which Ennius (/Petrarch) might no more wish to awake than does Pompey from his dream, on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, of scenes of fame in his earlier

life, applause from the people in his own theatre, and his first triumph: Lucan apostrophizes the guards in Pompey's camp thus: Bell. Civ. 7.24—5 ne rumpite somnos, | castrorum uigiles, nullas tuba uerberct aures. The immediately preceding lines 23—4 seu uetito patrias ultra tibi cernere sedes | sic Romam Fortuna dedit are perhaps remembered at Afr. 9.60 me solum Fortuna dedir (Ennius as poet of Scipio).

Fama in the Africa

That meeting of eyes and exchange of words to which Syphax had looked forward with Scipio at 3.345—8 (see above p. 468) is here rudely interrupted, to be replaced by Ennius’ vision of the physically present Scipio; that everyday vision which Petrarch and his readers can experience only through the mediation of texts like the Africa. The frustration by time’s destructiveness (the death of individuals, the

disappearance of books) of communication between poets living a millennium and a half apart casts an ironic shadow over Ennius’ celebration of the undying fame of Scipio's virtue, in a tissue of allusions to boasts of fame in the classical poets (9.33-45):”” fame is greater after death, and no longer open to the attacks of envy. tempore crescet honos perque ultima secula mundi | clarus eris ‘your honour will grow with time and you will be famous until the world's final ages' (43—4). As for his own poetry of praise, Ennius fears not that it may not survive through the ages, but only that coming as he does in the infancy of Latin poetry he will leave Scipio feeling the lack of a true Homer as much as did Alexander the Great at the tomb of Achilles.'"° Petrarch does however take his ventriloquistic opportunity to put in Ennius' mouth the surmise that in coming years there may be born one who can praise Scipio in a poem worthy of him, a wink in the direction of Petrarch himself,'"' and a suggestion that allows Scipio gracefully to reply that he would prefer no poet, not even Homer, to Ennius to sing his praises. The compliment to Ennius is also another correction of the Livian image of a Scipio flawed by a boundless desire for fame. Ennius ' failure to foretell the vicissitudes of fama is not restricted by his inability to predict time's threat to his poetry in the long term, but is seen in his confident assertion that Scipio's glory has already conquered inuidia (9.36—7). At the end of Book 9 Petrarch himself will, through a refusal to

narrate, allude to the inuidia that famously dogged Scipio's last days (410—

20: cf. Livy 38.50—7, on which see Ch. 7 pp. 268—70).' For Ennius Scipio's glory has already fled (fugit humum)

beyond the reach of envy (36-8);

?9 33-6 fama greater after death, when immune to envy's tooth: cf. Ov. Am. 1.15.39-40; Pont. 4.16.2-3. 36-8 tua gloria... iamque altas tuta per auras | fugit humum: Hor. Odes 3.2.21-4 Virtus, recludens immeritis mori | caelum, negata temptat iter uia | coetusque uulgaris et udam | spernit humum fugiente penna. 43 tempore crescet honos: Hor. Odes 3.30.7-8 usque ego postera | crescam laude recens. The anecdote is related in Cic. Arch. 24, a text that Petrarch himself rescued from oblivion,

101

and itself a central text of the Ciceronian discourse of fama. The anecdote is also told in Walter of Chatillon’s Alexandreis, 1.478-92. Although the hesitant tone (nascetur forsan) is not totally consistent with Ennius’ later

102

On this episode and the evil of inuidia see Petr. Scipio 12.9-17.

r=)

100

Nn

account of his dream of Franciscus.

477

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

Petrarch and the Muses will flee from the historical subject of envy's attack on Scipio (412-13 quin potius longe fugite atque auertite uultus. | certe ego

uobiscum fugiam . . . ). ^ Ennius' insouciant attitude to the hazards attendant on fame also appears in his answer to Scipio's question as to the meaning of the laurel. Alone of plants Jupiter spares the laurel from the thunderbolt, which being interpreted means that fame is immune to the destructive effects of time, 9.120-3: iam fame quod fulmen erit, nisi sola uetustas omnia prosternens? hunc gloria nostra pauorem non habet, atque ideo spernentis fulmina frondis serta gerit sanctoque legit de stipite ramos. But now what will be the thunderbolt that blasts fame, if not old age alone, which

casts down everything? But our glory is immune from that fear, and for that reason it wears garlands of the foliage that scorns the thunderbolt, and picks branches from the sacred trunk.

The confidence is Horatian and Ovidian,'”! but contradicted both by what Scipio is told by his father in the dream

in Book

2 (422ff.) and by the

Triumphus Temporis. Yet in the next part of his speech Ennius does recognize the vulnerability of fame to time, and the need for the energetic retracing of the footsteps of Fama, if the path she herself has taken is not to be erased, 9.133—43: uestigia Fame rara sequens, quantum licuit per secula retro

omnia peruigili studio uagus ipse cucurri, donec ad extremas animo rapiente tenebras

135

peruentum primosque uiros, quos Fama perenni fessa uia longe ignotos 106 "^ post terga reliquit.

iv

10.

In the light of Petrarch's decision to close his poem at the moment of Scipio's triumph, (419) hic metam posuisse operi, Ennius’ admission at 45-6 sed nostra peritia fandi | nondum propositam ualuit contingere metam hints at his misjudgement of another kind of meta, the

end of Scipio's career. Hor, Odes 3.30.1-5 Exegi monumentum aere perennius | quod non...| possit diruere. . . innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum; Ov. Met. 15.871—2 iamque opus exegi quod nec... | . . poterit... edax abolere uetustas. > Modern readers have suspected that Horace's aere perennius (see previous note) conceals a pun on the name of Ennius, perhaps in the footsteps of Ennius' own play on his name, to which Lucr. 1.117-18 Ennius ut noster. . . detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam may also allude. 10 Cf. Hor. Odes 4.9.25-8 uixere fortes ante Agamemnona | multi; sed omnes illacrimabiles | urgentur ignotique longa | nocte, carent quia wate sacro. 1^

ES

478

Fama in the Africa

hic quisquis merito fulgens fuit obuius, illum amplexu tenuisse animi michi gloria summa est

140

inque locum cari semper coluisse parentis.

precipue illustres calamo florente poetas admisi atque ima cordis sub parte locaui. Following Fame's sparse footprints, in my wanderings I have coursed backwards through all the ages, so far as I could, in my wakeful studies, until my spirit transported me to the furthest shadows and the first men, whom Fame, tired by her perpetual journeying, had left in oblivion far behind her back. Whichever man of shining merit met me there, him it is my highest glory to have held in the embrace of my mind, and to have worshipped him always in the place ofa dear father. Especially I welcomed poets famous for their flourishing pen, and I have housed them in the

depths of my heart. For a poet to retrace the steps of Fama is to reconstitute her in his own poetry: Ennius' peruigil studium compensates for the exhaustion of Fama, and this coincidence of the paths of Ennius and Fama might suggest a knowing pun in per-enni (137). The lines themselves trace out paths of fama as literary tradition: 133-4 call to mind Statius' envoi to his Thebaid, (12.816-17) uiue, precor; nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta, | sed longe sequere et uestigia semper adora 'Live on, I pray. But do not make an attempt on the Aeneid, but follow at a distance, and always worship its footsteps.'!?? Statius’ poem follows at a respectful distance, as if obedient to the hero of its idol, Aeneas, instructions to his wife Creusa at Aen. 2.711 longe seruet uestigia coniunx ‘let my wife follow my footsteps at a distance: Ennius' pursuit of Fama's footsteps back into the past, however, repeats Aeneas' own attempt

to retrace his wife's footsteps when she disappears: Aen. 2.753-4 uestigia retro | obseruata sequor per noctem et lumine lustro ‘| retraced and followed my footsteps through the night, scanning them with my eyes: Behind the Creusa episode glimmers the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in Georgics 4. Orpheus cannot follow his wife back into the shadows once he has lost her for a second time; for a successful journey to the underworld to connect with the past the reader looks to Aeneid 6, where the shade of Anchises welcomes his son, who has succeeded in a difficult journey: 688 uicit iter durum pietas ‘your piety has conquered the hard journey’; 692-3 quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora uectum | accipio! ‘How many lands you have travelled

107 Galligan 2004 discusses the imitation of the Statian passage by Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus 9.410—12, and Petrarch's imitation of both Statius and Alan.

479

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

and what great seas you have crossed that I welcome you here!'* Ennius enjoys a mental embrace of the famous individuals whom he finds on his journey back into the past (140 amplexu tenuisse animi), so avoiding the frustration of Aeneas' attempt physically to embrace Anchises: Aen. 6.698 teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro ‘do not remove yourself from my embrace’; 701 ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago ‘thrice the phantom fled from his hands’ vain grasp’. Ennius worships the subjects of such encounters in the place of a dear father (141 inque locum cari semper coluisse parentis);? Aeneas asks of the Sibyl that he be allowed (Aen. 6.108) ire ad conspectum cari genitoris 'to go to see my dear father. The Virgilian meeting of Aeneas and Anchises is modelled on the dream encounter of Ennius and Homer in the proem to the Annals, and the passage quoted above, Afr. 9.133—43, is the prelude to Ennius' account of the constant presence to him of Homer, whom he, Ennius, has brought back to life.''” For Petrarch Fama is associated with the underworld as a figure for the storehouse of famous men and deeds of the past (see Ch. I p. 10).!!! The first word of this part of Ennius' speech, uestigia, is one of Petrarch's favourites, and we have not done yet with uncovering its literary traces. Closer perhaps than anything we have looked at so far to the first four words, (133—4) uestigia Fame | rara sequens, is Lucan's description of Julius

Caesar searching for Pompey after the battle of Pharsalus, (Bell. Civ. 9.9523) cuius uestigia frustra | terris sparsa legens fama duce tendit in undas ‘vainly tracing his footsteps scattered across the lands of the earth, taking fama as his guide he set out to sea’. The innocent-looking and apparently incidental

10

Ir

10

110

o

480

Within the plot of the Aeneid Anchises means that he sees his son again after much Odyssean journeying on sea and land, journeying not directed immediately to the goal of seeing Anchises; but the Catullan intertext, Cat. 101 (Multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus, the poet's journey to Troy to the tomb of his brother) has the effect of making it appear that Aeneas' journeying has all been towards the goal of his father. Cf. Ov. Tr. 4.10.41-2 (Ovid's autobiographical poem) temporis illius colui fouique poetas, | quotque aderant uates, rebar adesse deos. With Ennius' practice here of conjuring the presence of the dead (cf. esp. 151 presentemque animo ficta sub ymagine feci [Homer]) cf. Vitruv. Archit. 9 praefatio 16 itaque, qui litterarum iucunditatibus instinctas habent mentes, non possunt non in suis pectoribus dedicatum habere, sicuti deorum, sic Enni poetae simulacrum; Acci autem carminibus qui studiose delectantur, non modo uerborum uirtutes sed etiam figuram eius uidentur secum habere praesentem esse. Ennius’ account of the most recent visitation of the shade of Homer alludes to the Virgilian apparition of Hector: with Afr. 9.175 aspice qualis erat quondam dum uixit Homerus cf. Aen. 2.274 ei mihi, qualis erat! Servius ad loc. notes ‘Ennii uersus: The pictorialism of the

Petrarchan line is heightened by its use of a formula found in the legends of Renaissance portraits such as that of Bishop Richard Fox (Corpus Christi College, Oxford) Talis erat forma, talis dum uixit amictu | qualem spectanti picta tabella refert. Il

On Petrarch's necromantic desires see Greene

1982: Ch. 5.

Fama in the Africa

use of fama to effect a transition from one scene of action to another is part of a much more extensive ‘plot of fame’ within the Bellum ciuile, and contributes to the larger Lucanian theme of the fame of Pompey the Great; if Caesar has difficulty in tracking Pompey, that is not simply because he is now dead, but because his posthumous fama is not to be located in any one spot of earth, certainly not in his humble tomb in Egypt, but is coextensive with the Roman Empire (8.798—9; cf. 8.858—9 nil ista nocebunt | famae busta

tuae ‘that tomb will Ennius' journey interview with the present day through

do no harm to your fame’) (see Ch. 6 pp. 184—5).''* back in time in the steps of Fama, his meeting and shade of a Homer whom Ennius has restored to the his own mental powers (Afr. 9.150 hoc in tempus mente

reduxi), and the location of his own claim to fame in the restoration of the

fame of the great men of the past (139-40 hic quisquis merito fulgens fuit obuius, illum | amplexu tenuisse animi michi gloria summa est 'my highest glory is to embrace in my mind any person of shining merit whom I came across') — all this constitutes a dense tissue of what Stephen Hinds has labelled ‘protoPetrarchan moments," that is moments in ancient texts which Petrarch embraces for their anticipation of his own obsession with literary community, succession and revival. Here, given the fragmentary nature of the Ennian texts, the ‘protoPetrarchan’ moments are themselves largely Petrarchan constructions (although with moments that seem to show Petrarch anticipating the reconstructions of more recent scholars). At the end of Book 9 the ‘protoPetrarchan’ moments turn into fully Petrarchan moments. The triumph of Scipio, which has paved the way for other future Roman triumphs and opened up world-empire to the city (394—5 orbis patefecerit urbi | imperium), is the first in a longer sequence of triumphs, which, in keeping with the dual function of the laurel as crown of both generals and poets (9.73), turns from politico-military to poetic competition, from the imitation of exempla by men of the active life to literary imitatio, 398—409: ipse coronatus lauro frondente per urbem letus iit totam Tarpeia rupe reuersus. Ennius ad dextram uictoris, tempora fronde

400

substringens parili, studiorum almeque Poesis !12

Earlier Petrarch's own hero had undertaken a

literal, physical, journey in the footsteps of

fama: Afr. 4.275-6 (journey to Nova Carthago) huc Fame signantis iter uestigia seruans | Scipio contendit. Petrarch may have in mind Curio's journey to Carthage, a place of fama, in Bellum ciuile 4, and whither it is specifically Fara that summons Hercules to deal with Antaeus (Bell. Civ. 4.60911): see Ch. 6 pp. 192-5.

113 Hinds 2001.

481

482

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

egit honoratum sub tanto auctore triumphum. post alii atque alii studio certante secuti. ipse ego ter centum labentibus ordine lustris dumosam tentare uiam et uestigia rara uiribus imparibus fidens utcumque peregi, frondibus atque loco simul et cognomine claro

405

heroum ueterum tantos imitatus honores,

irrita ne Grai fierent presagia uatis.''* Scipio himself crowned with green laurel went joyfully through the whole city, returning from the Tarpeian Rock. At the conqueror's right hand and binding his temples with the same foliage, Ennius rode in an honourable triumph of letters and of bountiful Poetry, authorized by the great general. Later many others followed in zealous emulation. I myself, as fifteen hundred years slipped past in order, trusting in my unequal strength to attempt the thorny path and sparse footprints, have somehow succeeded, imitating the great honours achieved by the heroes of old, both in the foliage of the crown, and in the place, and in the famous name [prob. of ‘poet’], so that the prophecy of the Greek bard should not be void.

The series of triumphs culminates in Petrarch's own journey to the Capitol, following in the footsteps of the fame of all his predecessors, going back to Scipio.''* uestigia rara (405) takes us back to the opening words of Ennius at 133-4 uestigia Fame | rara sequens. Here too the uestigia are also literary traces, as Petrarch's journey to the Capitol is superimposed on the first visit to the place by the ancestor of the Romans, Aeneas, at a time when the Capitol was no more than a scrubby hill: Aen. 8.347-8 hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit | aurea nunc, olim siluestribus horrida dumis 'from

here [Evander] led him to the Tarpeian seat of the Capitol, golden now, but once shaggy with wild thorn-bushes* Time has almost erased the tracks that lead from the present day to the fame of the past, and Petrarch, like Ennius,

must painfully retrace them in order to revive the past. Looking the other way, the Africa's journey into the future will soon be put into doubt by the untimely death of Petrarch's patron, King Robert (421-4). A harsher age may trample on the poem’s hopes of fame: 441-2 heu heu quam uereor ne quid tibi durior etas | obstrepat et titulis insultet ceca decoris ‘alas, how fear that a harsher age may cry out against you and blindly 114 This is the last line of the main narrative of the poem, the meta operi[s] imposed in order to avoid singing of the sad tale of inuidia against Scipio that was to follow. As a closing line (if not the last line of the poem), it challenges comparison with Ovid’s boast of undying fame in the last two lines of the Metamorphoses, (15.878—9) perque omnia saecula fama, | siquid habent

ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam, 115 For the succession see also Bucolicum carmen 3.152-63.

Fama in the Africa

trample on the titles of your glory’ (Petrarch perhaps thinks in particular of triumphal tituli). For his final sketch of an optimal plot of fama, Petrarch develops the last two lines of Statius' Thebaid, (12.818—19) mox, tibi si quis adhuc praetendit nubila liuor, | occidet, et meriti post me referentur honores

'soon, if any envy still spreads clouds before you, it will perish, and after me you will be paid the honours you deserve’: cf. Afr. 9.453—65: at tibi fortassis, si - quod mens sperat et optat — es post me uictura diu, meliora supersunt secula: non omnes ueniet Letheus in annos

455

iste sopor! poterunt discussis forte tenebris ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes. tunc Elicona noua reuirentem stirpe uidebis, tunc lauros frondere sacras; tunc alta resurgent ingenia atque animi dociles, quibus ardor honesti Pyeridum studii ueterem geminabit amorem. tu nomen renouare meum studiosa memento: qua potes, hac redeat saltem sua fama sepulto et cineri reddatur honos. michi dulcior illo

460

uita erit in populo et contemptrix gloria busti.' '^

465

But perhaps better ages lie in store for you, if you are to live long after me — as my mind hopes and wishes. That Lethean sleep will not afflict all the years. Our descendants will perhaps be able to dispel the shadows and return to the pure light of old. Then you will see Helicon sprout again with fresh growth, and sacred laurels come into leaf; then lofty spirits will rise again, and minds ready to learn, in whom a passion for virtue will redouble the ancient love for the pursuits of the Muses. Remember zealously to make new my name: so far as you can, let this be the path for fame to return to the buried dead, and for honour to be paid to the ashes. Among that people I shall enjoy a sweeter life and a glory that scorns the tomb.

The mission of a studious preservation and renewal of the past is handed over from the poet (Ennius, Petrarch) to the poem, in a new age. In Aldo Bernardo's integrative and homogenizing reading the Trionfi and the Africa move to similar conclusions, the triumphs respectively of Laura and Scipio.''’ ‘At the end of the Africa Scipio is assured of an enduring human glory in and beyond time as he stands atop the Capitoline united with Poetry as the savior of Rome, the eternal city that the Christian God 116 There are echoes of Ennius! account of his journey back over the footsteps of Fama: with 456 discussis. . . tenebris cf. 136 ad extremas animo rapiente tenebras, with 461 Pyeridum studii cf.

135 peruigili studio. 117

Bernardo

1962: 64-71; 1974: 149-51. Quotation from 1962: 64.

483

484

Fama in Petrarch: Trionfi and Africa

Himself, as mysteriously revealed in Book 7, intends someday to make his official abode on earth. At the end of the Triumphs there is a vision of the earthly Laura confidently heading a triumph beyond death, fame, and time to a “new world” recalling the Christian Paradise, but in human terms.’ But

there is no hint of the Christian in Book 9 of the Africa, nor can we be assured, even before Petrarch’s turn to pessimism after the death of King Robert, of the eternity of Scipio’s glory. He has learned otherwise on the authority of his dead father in Book 2. The unprecedentedly beautiful dawn of the day of Scipio’s triumph (Afr. 9.324-6) may be compared to the dawns at the beginning of the Trionfi of Cupid, Fame and Time; in Eternity the sun will cease to run his course, when there will be no past or future, only an

unchanging present. The renewal for which Petrarch hopes in an age after his death at Afr. 9.456-65 will not lead to the apocalyptic ‘novo mondo’ of the Triumphus Eternitatis. Fame is best enjoyed in experiences that stand outside the relentless passage of time, in dreams or imagination. The Triumphus Eternitatis starts as a continuation of the dream experience that begins in the Triumphus Cupidinis, but moves to an anticipation of the future vision of eternity, in which Fama will enjoy her last, and timeless, triumph. In the last book of the Africa it is also in a dream that Petrarch, through his character Ennius, attempts to summon up the lost glory of ancient literature, Homer. Petrarch’s attempt to insert himself into the full glory of the ancient poets is however frustrated at the point when the dreaming Ennius is about to enter into conversation with his dream vision of Franciscus, whereupon the morning trumpet in Scipio’s camp rings out to awaken him, and dream vision is replaced by the waking vision of Scipio. At the end of the book Petrarch’s acute experience of the threats to his fame and to that of his poem is sandwiched between the renovation through scholarship and imagination of the glorious triumph of Scipio, and Petrarch’s hopes for a revival of letters in a better future age, in which the Africa is urged to renew its author’s name and fame

(9.462

tu nomen

renouare

meum

studiosa

memento).

But this

revival of fame in a new age of letters will be very different in quality from the repristination of fame in the ‘mondo novo’ of the Triumphus Eternitatis.

13 | Fama in early modern England: Shakespeare and Jonson

Fama is the reward for the man

(or woman)

who succeeds in public life,

as ruler or general. Fama may also play an important role in facilitating or impeding the success of one who aspires to a position of power: reputation and rumour, public opinion, how a person is perceived and what is said about them, may make or unmake.! The Virgilian Dido’s position as a ruler is destroyed by Fama, when Dido abandons her sense of what is appropriate to her good name as a ruler and gives herself over to her passion for Aeneas. She herself laments that as a result of the perception by the outside world of her relationship with Aeneas, she has lost her (good) fama and with it any possibility of good relations, as a ruler, with her own people and neighbouring peoples: Aen. 4.320—3 te propter Libycae gentes Nomadumque tyranni | odere, infensi Tyrii; te propter eundem | exstinctus pudor et qua sola sidera adibam, | fama prior ‘on your account the peoples of Africa, the Numidian kings hate me, my own Tyrians are hostile; again, on your account my sense of shame has been destroyed and the good name I once enjoyed, my only route to the stars. Her conviction that she now has no existence outside her doomed relationship with Aeneas, love for whom

has turned

to hatred, leads her to destroy herself. To her personal sense of despair is added the realization that, if she were to continue to live, her position as ruler would have been rendered untenable by her loss of face.” With regard to the real world in which the Aeneid was written, one of the functions of an

epic that constructs the fama of a nation and of a family is to legitimate and reinforce the power of Augustus. (Subversive readers of the Aeneid will of course see a diminution in the fama of Aeneas as a consequence of what he ! On the importance of public opinion in early modern French thinking about the authority of the king see Gunn 1995. ? The central role of pudor and fama in the tragedy of Dido can also be read as a negative reflection of the tragedy of Lucretia. The Roman Republic is founded on the suicide of a woman who kills herselfin order to vindicate her pudor and uphold her good name as a chaste wife; Dido loses her pudor and fama as a result of betraying her chaste fidelity to her dead husband, and is driven to suicide, an act foundational both for the historical enmity between Carthage and Rome, and, as a consequence, for the ultimate destruction of Carthage. See Flannery 20072:

101 n. 36 on the role of Fama in retellings of the story of Lucrece. Fame and infamy are central themes in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece.

485

486

Fama in early modern England

does to Dido, and consequently an indirect attack on the fama, and hence political position, of his descendant Augustus.) My analyses of the workings of fama in the Roman historians have also shown how political success is dependent on the circulation and conflicts of what people say in Rome. Tacitus’ lesson is that the power of fama does not diminish with the coming of autocracy in the principate, but rather that, with the marginalization of the political structures of the Roman Republic, and with a persisting doubt as to the legitimacy of de facto rule by one man, fama as the unattributable and irresponsible circulation of rumour and gossip within the Roman people becomes even more powerful. In this chapter I examine texts which thematize the role of fama in the political and social spheres in early modern England. The Tudor and Stuart reigns are sandwiched between two periods of civil war, the Wars of the Roses of the fifteenth century between the rival houses of Lancaster and York, and the Civil War of the seventeenth century that led to the deposition and execution of a king. The legitimation of the monarch, and the possible, and then actual, threat of renewed civil war, are central concerns of the writers

of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and fama plays a big role in either reinforcing or in undermining the position of the queen or king.” Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both make use of the classical tradition of personifying Fama, with more or less direct reference to the central Virgilian and Ovidian passages. In the tetralogy, sometimes referred to as the ‘Henriad’, consisting

of Richard II, Henry IV Parts

1 and

2, and

Henry V, Shakespeare dramatizes the problems that confront the English monarchy when the anointed king is deposed, with lessons of a complex kind for the situation of the Elizabethan monarchy in the last decade of

? See McAlindon 2001: 39-40 ‘Rumour’s tongues’ on the (perceived) danger of rumours to the stability of the monarchy in the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. Cf. e.g. a 1538 ‘charge’ to inferior courts, cited in Elton 1972: 46: ‘Ye shall also enquire of tale-tellers and counterfeiters of news, that impart any hurt or damage to the King’s person... . as the prophet witnesseth, fearing whose tongues be full of lying and slandering; their feet be swift to do mischief, kill and slay.’ In a welcome for Elizabeth at Bristol in 1574 personified Dissension spoke: ‘A pestlens peall of rumour strang that flies through many a land, | The plain report whearof remains in me Dissenshons hand’ (cited in Kiefer 1999: 21). See also Kaplan 1997: 20-4. Samuel Daniel comments on the role of fama in the downfall of Richard II, (Civil Wars 2.98) ‘libels, inuectives, rayling rimes, were sow’d | Among the vulgar, to prepare his fall: For a case of fama as the uncontrolled voices of the people paradoxically bringing salvation to the monarch see Ch. 11 pp. 431-7 on Milton's In quintum Nouembris.

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad"

the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson goes back to ancient Rome in Poetaster to explore the relationship of the writer — Ben Jonson himself — to the monarchical centre of power. In this play Virgilian and Ovidian versions of fama, Virgilian and Ovidian conceptions of poetry and its relationship to human and divine power structures, are set in opposition to one another. In several of his masques (Masque of Queens, Time Vindicated, News from the New World, Chloridia) Jonson puts on stage figures of good and bad fama in transparent and schematic allegories of support for the Jacobean monarchy. Jonson opposes élite and non-élite embodiments of fama, and betrays an anxiety about the growth of the new marketplace for the sale and circulation of (mis)information in the form of the emergent news industry, marking the beginning of important shifts in the control of opinion and ideology.

Fama in Shakespeare's ‘Henriad”* Open your ears, for which of you will stop The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold The acts commenced on this ball of earth. Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,” The which in every language 1 pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with false reports. I speak of peace, while covert enmity Under the smile of safety wounds the world.

10

And who but Rumour, who but only I,

Make fearful musters and prepared defence Whiles the big year, swoll'n with some other griefs,

Is thought with child by the stern tyrant war, And no such matter? Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures And of so easy and so plain a stop

15

That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude,

Can play upon it. But what need I thus

4 Text of Shakespeare as in Shakespeare 2007. > Cf. Cymbeline ı1.iv.33-5 *[Slander's] breath | Rides on the posting winds and doth belie | All corners of the world.'

20

487

488

Fama in early modern England

My well-known body to anatomize Among my household? Why is Rumour here? I run before King Harry's victory, Who in a bloody field by Shrewsbury Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops, Quenching the flame of bold rebellion Even with the rebels' blood. But what meanI To speak so true at first? My office is To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell Under the wrath of noble Hotspur's sword, And that the king before the DougJas' rage Stooped his anointed head as low as death. This have I rumoured through the peasant towns Between that royal field of Shrewsbury And this worm-eaten hold of ragged stone,

25

30

35

Where Hotspur's father, old Northumberland,

Lies crafty-sick. The posts come tiring on, And not a man of them brings other news Than they have learn'd of me. From Rumour's tongues They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs.

40

Henry the Fourth Part Two Induction

The Second Part of Henry the Fourth opens with the entry of 'Rumour painted full of tongues' to deliver an Induction, or Prologue, to the play. Shakespeare's Rumour is one of the most extensively developed in the line of figures of Fama that descends from the Virgilian and Ovidian personifications of Fama. She is also thoroughly at home in the tradition of personifications of Fama in the productions of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stage and pageant.^

$ Extensively documented by Kiefer 1999, who also attends to the iconography of Fara and her relatives in printed material; Bergeron 1971: 281—5. Some examples: Craik 1958: Like Will to Like (1587) Fame (of unspecified gender); Three Ladies of London (1581) Fame appears at the beginning as a presenter, sounding her golden trumpet; Horestes (1567) winged Fame with the iron trumpet of denunciation; Feuillerat 1914: 142, a Revels Office 1553 payment for ‘payntinge of a cote and a capp with Ies tonges and eares for fame’; in a 1518 court disguising, Report 'appareled in Crymosyn satyn full of tongues'; Humphreys 1960: 146 refers to the introduction in Dekker's King's Entertainment 1604 of Fame as ‘A Woman in a Watchet Roabe, thickly set with open Eyes, and Tongues: The young Thomas More devised in his father's house in London 'a goodly hanging of fine paynted clothe, with nyne pageauntes, and verses over of every of those pageauntes’ (Childhood - Manhood - Venus and Cupid - Age — Death - Fame - Time Eternity — The Poet). More's text for Fame triumphant over Death was ‘Fame | am called, marvayle you nothing, | Though 1 with tonges am compassed all rounde. | For in voice of people is my chief living...’ (Edwards, Rodgers, Miller 1997: 5).

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad'

Tradition alone, however, will not take us far in explaining the presence of Rumour at this point in the play. “Why is Rumour here?’ is a question posed by Rumour himself (I use the masculine for convenience, although the creature's gender is another of the uncertainties that characterize him or her),’ after he has delivered the first half of his speech (a precise twenty lines out of forty), in which he has given a general description of his nature and operation, and as he now turns to his particular role at the beginning of this play. But the question has a wider import, as if Rumour anticipated the kind of answer given by Samuel Johnson: “This speech of Rumour is not inelegant or unpoetical, but is wholly useless, since we are told nothing which the first scene does not clearly and naturally discover. The only end of such prologues is to inform the audience of some facts previous to the action, of which they can have no knowledge from the persons of the drama.'5 The Rumour Induction is sometimes omitted from productions of the play, as otiose, and may be particularly difficult for modern audiences unused to the personifications of Renaissance pageant and masque. But we have seen that at first glance the Virgilian and Ovidian personifications of Fama, the ultimate sources for Shakespeare's Rumour, can seem obtrusive, excessive,

E]

The question of gender is raised by Berger 198-1: 63-4; Kiefer 1999: 3-4. The Elizabethan audience, used to pageant figures of Fame, might most naturally think of the *well-known body' as female; Craik 1958: 65 on the consistent reference to Fame as fernale in Tudor interludes. Wiegandt 2007: 5-6 suggests that the sexual indeterminacy reflects the combination in Shakespeare's Rumour of the female Fama Chiara and the male Rumour, as represented in Ripa's Iconologia.

e

in their contexts. "Why is Rumour here?' is a question that tends to arise. His or her appearance in a text of otherwise mimetic realism signals a moment of daemonic energy, when the uses of words inside and outside a text start to spark with each other, a surplus of activity that creates a digression from the immediate narrative or dramatic action, a space in which the authorfigure reflects on the ways in which the present text is related to and is generated out of the larger order of words. As often, this instantiation of fama straddles the divide between outside and inside the text. At the end of the Induction, Rumour announces the part he will play as bearer of a false report within the drama itself; but his first words, ‘Open your ears’, ask for a hearing from the audience, and more specifically constitute a literal overture to this play. 3-5 ‘I... still unfold | The acts commencéd on this ball of earth’ equivocates between actions in the real world and the acts of the play, staged within the ‘wooden O' (H5 Prol. 13) of the theatre, the stage as world, an image physically realized in the Globe Theatre, built a year or two

Johnson

1968: 490.

489

Fama in early modern England

after Shakespeare's Henry IV plays. ‘Still unfold the acts commencéd' may be heard specifically as referring to the continuation of the sequence of acts in Shakespeare's previous play. Rumour is the Presenter of the play, or even a figure for the playwright himself." The traditional function ofa prologue is to give the audience information to prepare them for what they are about to watch (as Johnson protested), often a sketch of the story so far, and sometimes an indication of the main direction of the plot to come. Rumour devotes just four and a half lines (23-7) to a summary of the Battle of Shrewsbury. As well as providing the information, Rumour as the embodiment of words that travel from place to place is also on the move in his own person, having travelled from the field of Shrewsbury, where we had been left at the end of 1 Henry IV, after the victory of the king and Prince Hal over the rebels, to the setting of the first scene of 2 Henry IV, the castle of Hotspur's father Northumberland at Warkworth.

Scene-shifting is a standard role of Fama. The fact that Shakespeare had himself previously written a play that concluded with a dramatization of the Battle of Shrewsbury here complicates Rumour's relation to events before the start of the play. We may also say that Rumour has travelled from the one play to the other, and even that he is a partial embodiment of the words previously penned by the playwright and acted out by his company. After his brief report

of the actual outcome

at Shrewsbury,

Rumour

continues to explain why he is here, with an account of the use to which he will put himself in directing the action in the play that we are about to see (‘My office is to noise abroad...’).

But this extends no further than

the first part of the first scene of the play, and the 'action' is nothing more than the temporary stalling of the plot through the creation of a false belief on the part of the rebels that Harry Hotspur is victorious, and has killed Harry Monmouth and seriously wounded his father the king." Were that indeed true, Rumour would have brought about an immediate end to the action; there could be no 'second part' of Henry IV. As it is, a true report of Hotspur's death is then conveyed to Northumberland, and this is also a part of the operation of Rumour, who conveys both true and false reports (see further below).'' This allows the plot to continue on its course, but this

*

490

For a metatheatrical reading see e.g. Blanpied 1983: 179 ‘[Rumour] sets the play in motion precisely as a mischievous playwright.’ Rumour’s action seems even more unmotivated when we reflect that Holinshed has nothing to say about false rumours of the king's death at Shrewsbury. The order of first false, and second true, reports in the first scene inverts the sequence in the Induction, where Rumour first speaks true, before telling of the false report: the inversion reflects the ironic gap in knowledge between the audience (who would know the historical

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad"

minimal facilitation is very different from the role played by Virgil's Fama in the development of the plot of Aeneid 4, and comparable rather to the anticlimactic intervention of Ovid's Fama in the progress of the Trojan War (see Ch. 5 pp. 154-5). This practical function of Rumour, as propagator of essential information, is picked up again at the end of the first scene in Northumberland's exit lines, (1.1.224—5) “Get posts and letters, and make friends with speed. | Never so few, and never yet more need’ (cf. Induction 37 ‘the posts come tiring on’). Rumour, or Report, will continue to run on his

way in the play." Nor should one underestimate the dramatic impact of the arrival of conflicting reports of the battle, and in particular the psychological effect on the Earl of Northumberland, torn between hope and despair as he receives reports first that his son Hotspur is victorious and then that he is dead. Rumour, like Virgil's Fama, operates powerfully through the emotion of love, here of a father for a son, and Northumberland's griefstricken rage at the true report of Hotspur's death energizes his determination to pursue the rebellion (1.1.147 ff.), whose further working out will take up much of

the play. The integration of Rumour with what immediately follows is further reinforced by what one might call his de-personification.'* What the personification announces that he will do, ‘noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell’, is enacted in the real person of Lord Bardolph (1.1.19-21 “The King is

almost wounded to the death: | And... Prince Harry slain outright").

=

w

N

Rumour's figurative post-horse is made real in the horses of the messengers who ride from Shrewsbury. This is not the only example in a prologue of a free-standing presenter who then merges into the action of the play: for truth even without the help of Rumour) and the rebels within the play. It is important to note that Rumour deals in both truths and falsehood: there is therefore no reason to invoke the Cretan Liar paradox, as does Moseley 1988: 183 n. 6. Hapgood 1967 notes the abundance of news and messengers in 2 Henry IV, a play whose main linguistic mode, Hapgood claims, is that of true and false report. Abrams 1986: 468 comments on the inverse ‘readiness of personifications to stand in for actual characters’ ın 2 Henry IV. For this merging of Rumour into other personages in the play compare the sequence of entrances in John Phillip, The Comedy of Patient and Meek Grissill, in Gildenhuys 1996: 138-9 ‘Enter Rumor blowing and puffing to announce the fact of the casting down of Lady Grissill ‘from the top of honor, followed by the entrance of Vulgus, saying, ‘What tumult throughout Salutia is spread! | A wonderful rumor among the commons is risen of late, | A sudden report throughout the town is fled, | Which forceth us all to bewail Grissill's state.' In other words

Vulgus (‘the commons’) reports on the rumour that it itself has propagated. Differently from Shakespeare, Vulgus is itself a personification; and this Rumour works only on actual fact (What thing soever is attempted, | Or through the world frequente, | From Rumor cannot concealed be, | For I spread it through the whole country.’).

49]

Fama in early modern England

example the figures of Tantalus and the Fury in the Prologue to Seneca’s Thyestes will be very present in the characters and psychology of the actors in the main part of the play. There is perhaps something like relief when we realize that the weird personification of Rumour melts into the words and actions of the ordinary human beings who populate the play itself. Rumour had forced our attention to a detailed examination of his bodily person. “But what need I thus | My well-known body to anatomize | Among my household?’ (20-2) ‘Wellknown’ indeed, since Rumour and Fame exist only through making things well known, and ‘well-known’ from the earlier tradition, which is chiefly the line of embodiments of Fame that descend from the Virgilian Fama. Transient and enduring aspects of fama, the ephemeral word of gossip and the lasting traditions of a culture, touch each other not for the first or last

time. But the shape of Rumour’s body and its functioning are difficult to envisage, to anatomize.'" We see him on stage in some kind of robe painted with tongues, but what he says about himself calls up other images in our mind's eye. He rides, or perhaps sends forth, the wind as his post-horse; at

the same time slanders ride on his own body parts, his tongues. He later tells us that he ‘is a pipe’, played upon by another ‘monster with uncounted heads, and therefore with uncounted tongues as well. It might be difficult to distinguish between Rumour and the discordant multitude whose tongues propagate rumour. This is an anatomy lesson which ends not in orderly dissection, but in the cutting up of Rumour into disorderly and ill-fitting fragments — but then that is what rumour is like. "Why is Rumour here?’ For all that has been said so far, a sense of disproportion persists. À start to an answer may be made through reflection firstly on structural features, and secondly on wider thematic connections within

the two parts of Henry IV, and within the tetralogy that includes Richard II and Henry V, sometimes known as the 'Henriad*!^ The Rumour Induction

is placed at the central point of the two Henry IV plays, and hence of the tetralogy as a whole. It is thus a ‘proem in the middle," a point where classical precedent might lead us to look for some wider reflection both on the themes of the work as a whole, and on the writer's own aims and u“

On the impossibility of fully envisaging the body of Fama see Hardie 2009a: 95-6. That the four plays may usefully be considered together as Shakespeare's second history tetralogy (the first being the three parts of Henry VI plus Richard III) is orthodoxy; at issue is the exact extent and detail of the planning of the tetralogy. On the history of criticism on this point see McAlindon 2001: Ch. 1; for a recent exercise in reading the two tetralogies as unified wholes see Grene 2002. ‘Henriad’ is the term of Kernan 1969, 17 On which see Conte 1992.

ES

492

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad"

practices. James Nohrnberg suggests a parallel with the structure of The Faerie Queene:'“ following Tillyard, he sees the two parts of Henry IV as falling into (i) chivalric and personal virtues, (ii) civil virtues," with the

midpoint marked by the appearance of Rumour, just as Ate inaugurates the second half of The Faerie Queene. Behind Spenser's Ate stands Virgil's Allecto, whose

interventions motivate the second half of the Aeneid (see

Ch. 10 pp. 397-400). The detail of Shakespeare's Rumour does not point directly to the model of Allecto, but he is a creature who flourishes in the chaos of civil war, and at the start of the second half of the Aeneid Allecto

foments strife within the family and between two peoples destined to form a united nation. At the thematic level, recent attention to the theme and functions of language within the 'Henriad' has produced readings that place Rumour very much at the centre of the tetralogy."? These extend earlier organicist readings of the four plays as a cycle that tracks a progression at the historical or political level (evolution from feudalism to absolute monarchy; reconciliation and restoration of cosmic order after descent into civil war), and look for

|

an overarching plot in the changing uses of speech and words.”' Two early exercises in this kind of analysis by Knowles and Hapgood" were followed in 1979 by two book-length studies that drew on more recent critical tools, speech act theory and metadrama." Hapgood visibly transfers a Tillyardian approach to the sphere of language: 'The dialogue of these successive plays — like their politics - moves from initial disorder through virtual chaos to a final restoration of order." ! It is the linguistic 'antimodes' used by Harry Monmouth, according to Hapgood, that offer an alternative to the modes of speech that promote division and disorder, from the gulf between word and deed that opens up for Richard II to the extreme nominalism of Falstaff's

Nohrnberg 1976: 7. Tillyard 1944: 265 compares Hal as the mean between Hotspur and Falstaff to the

t. o

embodiment, for Guyon's instruction, of the Aristotelian Excess, Balance and Deficit in Perissa,

Medina and Elissa. Contrast with Samuel Johnson's judgement on the uselessness of Rumour, Calderwood 1979:

M =

tS w

t2 n

t

121 'Rumour... asks "Why is Rumour here?" The answer is gross as

a mountain, open,

palpable: because expectation, lies, misconstructions, and bad faith govern not only the England of 2 Henry IV but 2 Henry IV also.’ According to Abrams 1986, Rossiter 1961: 55-7 first commented on Rumour's ubiquity in the tetralogy. For a historical survey of criticism of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 see McAlindon 2001: Ch. 1. Knowles 1906, concluding, (139) ‘The silent Bolingbroke has brought England to unquiet; now the riotous Hal will restore it to civil peace and harmony'; Hapgood 1967. Respectively Porter 1979 and Calderwood 1979. For a similar approach see Moseley 1988, esp. 183-9 ‘A confusion of tongues’ exploring the implications of the figure of Rumour. Hapgood 1967: 47.

493

494

Fama in early modern England

catechism on honour. Porter, adopting a more theoretical approach to language use in the plays, finds a very similar plot over the tetralogy as a whole, from the decline and fall of Richard II's linguistic world, as names become detached from their referents, with a descent into a linguistic Babel, a world

of language misused, misunderstood, or just not heard, to be redeemed by Henry V's restoration of properly functioning speech modes in Henry V.^ Calderwood's ‘metadramatic plot’ is very similar to Porter's speech-act plot, a trajectory from the collapse of a sacramental language associated with an ideology of the divine right of kings, followed by the corrupt secular language that is the currency of the Henry IV plays, to be restored in Henry V by the pragmatic, goal-directed and unifying rhetoric of Henry V, aredemption that operates within a totally demystified use of language (just rhetoric, that is). As if slightly embarrassed by what ends up in effect as yet another Tillyardian reading, Calderwood ends by suggesting a metadramatic point in the Epilogue to Henry V, when the Chorus look beyond 'the full course of... glory’ (Epil. 4; glory, in other words fama in its grandest and most complete epic manifestation), presented however imperfectly in the play we have just seen, to the losses suffered under Henry VI: Shakespeare hints at the impermanence of his own achievement in the new dramatic medium forged in Henry V. Abrams, focussing mostly on Rumour's ‘family resemblance' to all the major figures just in 2 Henry IV, sees in Falstaff a kind of scapegoat in whom ‘all the dissident elements of “unquiet” or rebellion are gathered under one head and jointly dispatched’.”” Unsurprisingly more recent critics of post-modernist or poststructuralist stripe have resisted triumphalist readings of this kind, and looked for instability and indeterminacy at both the linguistic and the historical levels. Kiernan Ryan, confining his attention to the two Henry IV plays, looks for signs of a repeated sabotaging of a teleological view of history, and finds in Rumour the momentary airing of an alternative message to that of the official version: ‘History... is not simply what happened, but what gets made, misconstrued, disputed and remodeled."" For Ryan the sudden entrance of Rumour is not a discrete and contextually conditioned stage in a plot with a beginning, middle and end, but a universal comment on the contingency of words that purport to record events in history. He speaks of ‘backtracking devices... flushing act and incident with the indeterminacy denied them by the Medusa-gaze of providential narrative"

?5 Porter organizes his discussion of 2 Henry IV under segments of the opening lines of Rumour's Induction.

26 Abrams 1986:492.

— 7 Ryan 1995:113.

2° Ryan 1995: 114.

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad'

Ryan builds on Catherine Belsey’s post-modernist reading of the tetralogy, not as a grand narrative, but as a struggle to fix meaning that issues only in instability. For Belsey, as for other critics, the night scene before Agincourt

in Henry V, and the jarring encounter between Williams and the king after the battle, leave unanswered questions about what it is to have the name

of king. Belsey takes Pistol’s parting farewell to honour as he announces that he will return to a life of thievery and fraud in England as a sign that the Falstaffian resistance to the dominant symbolic order will start all over again (H5 v.i.62-7) — perhaps a rather slender counterpoise to the Chorus’

vision of Henry's triumphant return to England in the Prologue to the act.”” In these history plays Rumour has been read not just as a figure for the playwright, but as an embodiment of the contested processes by which history is constructed and written, a comment on the role played by imagination

in the creation of history." We have seen fama play a similar role in the questioning of the processes by which the narratives of ancient epic and historiography are produced. What all these readings of the 'Henriad' show is that Rumour, as a species of fama, tends to enter into relationships that suggest the outline of larger plots, the tendency that we have observed in the ancient epic and historical texts. Rather than being ‘useless’, as Samuel Johnson complained, the presence of Rumour in the Induction to 2 Henry IVis overdetermined. Within the circles that expand outwards from the central point of the tetralogy, Rumour, as the bearer of reports, words that determine both how things appear and how men act, is enmeshed with other manifestations of the word, what people

say and how the world appears as a result of what is said. In what follows the convergence of my approach with the linguistic turn represented by the literature surveyed above will be clear. My emphasis will be on the wider family of concepts that clusters round fama viewed as the word active in the social and political world, with a particular focus on the ways in which rumour and his (or her) relatives are involved in the making and unmaking of kings. Prominent in the tetralogy among the terms related to ‘rumour’ are ‘name’, ‘fame’, ‘honour’, ‘reputation’, ‘opinion’, ‘slander’ and, not least,

the body part most actively involved in the circulation of fama, ‘tongue’.”' Firstly I look at some further examples of the pattern-making into which these terms enter over the course of the four plays. Secondly I focus more 29 Belsey 1991. 30 3!

Blinde 2008, emphasizing the indeterminacy of history; Bergeron 1991 sees a more straightforward tale of competing histories in 2 Henry IV. Kiefer 1999 offers a particularly capacious view of the relatives of Rumour in 2 Henry IV.

495

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Fama in early modern England

closely on the relationship to royal power of the force fields defined by these terms. With regard to the first, once one attends at a formal level to the patterns of fama terms, it is difficult to resist the sense of a plotting that goes from disorder to order (the basic plot of Virgilian epic), a pressure that Calderwood,

at least, seems to have found uncomfortable

at a time

when ways had been found of otherwise dismantling the Tillyardian view of Shakespeare's adherence to the ‘Tudor myth’ Generically this may have to do with the frequently discerned striving of this dramatic tetralogy to achieve the status of an epic. How far this is to be perceived as ‘surface ideology’, the ironic construction of another version of a royal myth, will be up to individual members of the audience or readers. Thirdly, I turn from the Induction to 2 Henry IV to a close reading of the final act of the preceding play, 1 Henry V, to tease out a web of fama-related themes and images that both reflects back on the preceding four acts and anticipates things in the play to follow. I Henry IV Act v and the Induction to 2 Henry IV together form a fama block that pivots around the central division of the tetralogy.

Patterns of fama This section makes no pretence to being a complete account of the richly proliferating networks that present themselves to successive re-readings of the plays. I start by shifting the gaze from the appearance of Rumour at the central point of the tetralogy to the occurrence of the language of fama, in the wider sense, that joins beginning and end of the tetralogy. The opening scenes of Richard II stage a contest of honour between Bullingbrook and Mowbray, in which Bullingbrook’s accusation of treachery is hurled back by Mowbray as slander. Mowbray is desperate to defend his ‘fair name’ and his ‘spotless reputation’ (1.1.167, 179). On his entrance Mowbray greets the king with the hope that in the fullness of time the heavens will ‘Add an immortal title to your crown’ (1.1.24). But the king himselfis implicated in the death of Gloucester, of which Bullingbrook accuses Mowbray. The events triggered by the exile of Bullingbrook and Mowbray will lead to the culmination of the process whereby the king’s name is emptied of all significance, and Richard, so far from winning an immortal title, ends up, in his own words, with no title, not even the name bestowed on him at the beginning of his mortal life: 1v.1.250—2 ‘I have no name, no title; | No, not that name was given me

at the font, | But 'tis usurped.'" Richard's part in this process is signalled ?? On ‘names’ in Richard II see e.g. Porter 1979: Ch. 1.

Fama in Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’

partly through his own inattention to weighty kinds of fama, as indicated in York's reply to the dying Gaunt at ı1.1.15-26: GaunT Though Richard my life’s counsel would not hear, My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear. YorRK No, it is stopped with other flatt’ring sounds, As praises, of his state: then there are found

Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound The open ear of youth doth always listen, Report of fashions in proud Italy, Whose manners still our tardy apish nation Limps after in base imitation. Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity — So it be new there's no respect how vile — That is not quickly buzzed into his ears?

20

The language in this passage anticipates Rumour’s opening words in the Induction to 2 Henry IV, ‘Open your ears; for which of you will stop | The vent of hearing... ?' Richard's ears are open only to seductive sounds and voices, with the emphasis on the latest reports of fashions and other vanities. York betrays a prejudice against ‘news’ as unsettling of moral and political order; at the end of 1 Henry IV Henry IV will accuse Worcester of advertising rebellion to a fickle populace with (v.i.78-9) ‘the news | Of hurly-burly innovation’ (see below p. 513). Gaunt tells Richard, (11.1.95—6) "Thy deathbed is no lesser than the land,

| Wherein thou liest in reputation sick.' This is all in contrast to Gaunt's rose-tinted view of England as she was before Richard leased her out, in a time when fame and reputation were in a correct relationship to reality: 11.1.51—4 ‘this teeming womb of royal kings | Feared by their breed and famous for their birth, | Renownéd for their deeds as far from home | For Christian service ...°; 57-8 ‘this dear, dear land, | Dear for her reputation through the world’. King and country are involved alike in this degeneration. By the end of Henry V the discourse of fame and renown has been healed, and divided

voices have been reunited. Before Agincourt Henry promises fame to those English soldiers who die in the battle (1v.iii.101—4); after the battle the king orders the singing of Psalm 115 (‘Give praise not unto us, O God’), and the 33 On the perceived threat to the person of Henry VIII of ‘tale-tellers and counterfeiters of news’ see above p. 486 n. 3. On the theme of news in Ben Jonson see below p. 533-7. By Shakespeare's day ‘news’ was increasingly circulating in printed form: for an attack on the role of the printing press in fostering civil discord by the rapid and widespread publication of 'Impious Contention and proud Discontents’ see Daniel, Civil Wars 6.37-8.

497

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Fama in early modern England

Te Deum (“We praise Thee, O God") (1v.viii.108). The problems of glory as it operates in the fallen world of human society are transcended by linking national success with the glory of God. Praise of the, now properly selfeffacing, king"! himself is reserved for the Chorus at the beginning of the next act, as it conjures up before our eyes an image of the united voices of the English people, united also with the usually refractory noises of nature: v.0.9-13 ‘Behold, the English beach | Pales in the flood, with men, wives and boys, | Whose shouts and claps out-voice the deep-mouthed sea, | Which like a mighty whiffler 'fore the King | Seems to prepare his way.' The stormy sea as an image of the uncontrolled and rebellious voices of the mob is an old one (see Ch. 2 pp. 70-2); here the multitude and the personified sea merge in a kind of hybrid ‘multitudinous sea’. As rumour, fama, conventionally does, the sound of the sea goes ahead of events and

persons, but here as an obedient attendant clearing the way for the royal procession." The image of the people of England forming a fence next to the sea, and, together with the sea, crying out in joy at the victorious king's return, takes us back to Gaunt's vision of (R2 11.1.61—3) ‘England, bound in

with the triumphant sea | Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege | Of watery Neptune’, which he ruefully contrasts with the shame to which Richard has now reduced his country. In Henry V sounds on the beach strike up a prelude to Henry's triumphant procession through the city of London, national harmony guaranteed by the fact that Henry himself is (20) 'free from vainness and self-glorious pride’, vices to which Richard II above all is prone. Contrasts with the opening scenes of Richard II continue in the final scene of Henry V. Richard's disastrous infatuation with the fashion news from Italy (which is also a narcissistic love with his own appearance), and deafness to the needs of his own country, are balanced by Henry's lovemaking, in a mixture of tongues, to the French Catherine, the prelude to the union not just of a divided people, but of two peoples, as the foreign war which has helped to heal the wounds of civil war is itself brought to a peaceful conclusion. Honour is now associated not with division and strife, but love,

4 35

Kiefer 1999: 14-15 overstates the Shakespearean Henry V's obsession with his personal fame, as it is reported in Edward Hall. OED s.v. 'whiffler!* Taylor 1982 ad loc. suggests that here ‘whiffler’ means both ‘richly apparelled officer’ and ‘blower of sounding wind; thus uniting in one word the human and natural worlds. The scene also picks up the entry of Bullingbrook into London at R2 v.ii.12 "While all tongues cried "God save thee, Bullingbrook!", but in painful contrast to the deposed King Richard, on whose appearance after Bullingbrook (29-30) ‘No man cried "God save him’, | No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home.’

Fama in Shakespeare's ‘Henriad’

in a reconciliation of fama and amor: the very last mention of honour in the tetralogy is in the seemingly innocent and trivial protestation of Henry to Catherine, (v.ii.183-6) “By mine honour, in true English, I love thee Kate: by

which honour I dare not swear thou lovest me, yet my blood begins to flatter me that thou dost, notwithstanding the poor and untempering effect of my visage.” The easy and unforced use of a conventional manner of speaking puts in perspective the obsession with honour earlier in the tetralogy;'^ in the second appeal to his honour, Henry, it might be said, replaces honour

with honesty, not seeking to use his own sense of his self-importance to impose on the freedom of another person (although in the sequel it is abundantly clear that the woman's consent to marriage does not lie in her own power). Henry's self-effacing appeal to his own honour is answered by a kind of flattery very different from that which was the undoing of Richard II, and whose sincerity is vouched for by Henry's own lifeblood (for another example of praise and renown founded on the mystique of blood see below p. 502). This domestication of honour within the space of what will soon turn into the private chamber of husband and wife is in the sharpest contrast with King Henry’s most extreme statement of the love of martial honour, at the beginning of the Feast of Crispian speech before Agincourt, Iv.iii.26—31: By Jove, I am not covetous for gold, Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost,

It yearns me not if men my garments wear; Such outward things dwell not in my desires. But if it bea sin to covet honour,

I am the most offending soul alive. But if this sounds too much

like Hotspur's flawed desire for honour, we

should remember that it is in the rhetorical context of an adhortatio, and

that Henry's claim that he is too jealous of honour to wish to share it with others is designed to fire his nobles, anxious that they are outnumbered by

Ee]

36 That 1 Henry IV in particular is a play about honour, variously read in terms of Hal's need to find an Aristotelian mean between the extremes of Hotspur and Falstaff, or of the replacement of Hotspur's outmoded chivalric honour by Hal's new-style courtesy, is a commonplace. See Pinciss 1978. In general on honour in Shakespeare see Watson 1960; Fowler 1996: Ch. |, on Montaigne and Shakespeare on fame and honour. Council 1973: Ch. 2 sees in Hotspur the perfect mirror of honour, in Hal a man concerned with honour only as a means to other ends. 3 Henry’s lack of concern as to who wears ‘my garments’ is in ironic contrast to his father who, so far from wanting to minimize the number of competitors for honour and glory, multiplies them by dressing up counterfeits of himself: 1H4 v.ii.128-31 Hotspur ‘The King hath many marching in his coats.’ Douglas ‘Now, by my sword, I will kill all his coats. | I'll murder all his wardrobe, piece by piece, | Until I meet the King.’

499

500

Fama in early modern England

the French. If one thinks of epic models, one might say that in the matter of honour Henry moves effortlessly from Iliadic to Odyssean environments, the journey from the plain of Troy to his bedchamber in Ithaca that costs Odysseus such difficulty. Finally, in the last scene of Henry V may be heard an after-echo of the Rumour Induction to 2 Henry IV, in Henry’s comment on the divided tongues, English and French, in which he and Catherine speak, each dividing their own attempts at communication between their native and nonnative tongues: 162-3 “But thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly-falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one.’ Rumour speaks both truth and falsehood, and often in such a way that the two cannot be

distinguished, but always to disruptive effect. Here 'truly-falsely' combines formal incorrectness with sincerity of meaning. 'Much at one' may mean that each speaks the other's language with much the same degree of ineptness (in answer to Catherine's (160-1) 'Sauf votre honneur, le frangais que

vous parlez, il est meilleur que l'anglais lequel je parle.’) It could also mean ‘in harmony? Before this reconciliation of languages, the self-consuming vanities of Richard II have been diverted on to the French, and in particular the insuf-

ferable Dauphin who showers praise on his horse, H5 ı11.vii.23-8: Nay, the man hath no wit that cannot, from the rising of the lark to the lodging of the lamb, vary deserved praise on my palfrey. It is a theme as fluent as the sea: turn the sands into eloquent tongues, and my horse is argument for them all. Tis a subject for a sovereign to reason on, and for a sovereign's sovereign to ride on, and for the world, familiar to us and unknown, to lay apart their particular functions and wonder at him. I once writ a sonnet in his praise and began thus: “Wonder of nature,

»

—

His horse is a Pegasus (10), not only the subject of poetry, but himself a musical beast: 11—12 ‘the earth sings when he touches it, the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes: Praise, fama, has become

detached from anything like reality; this horse and its rider will win no battles. This is in contrast to another example of hyperbolical praise, one that Hotspur, in whose presence it is uttered, finds unpalatable (117 ‘This praise doth nourish agues’), but which will find some correspondence in the reality of the battle of Shrewsbury, 1H4 1v.1.109—15 (Sir Richard Vernon on Prince Hal): 38 On the importance of polyglottism and different languages in the tetralogy see Porter 1979: Index s.vv. ‘Variety of languages’. Porter (93) lays stress on Rumour's words at 2H4 Induct. 6-7 "Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, | The which in every language I pronounce.’

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad"

I saw young Harry, with his beaver on, His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly armed Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury, And vaulted with such ease into his seat,

As if an angel dropped down from the clouds, To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus

And witch the world with noble horsemanship."" Pegasus is the horse whose hoof struck out the poetic fountain of Hipof fame. 4° Rumour is not the only embodiment of fama in the tetralogy; appropriately for his pocrene, but in the Renaissance he is also an emblem

low-class status Rumour uses a post-horse for his business (2H4 Induct. 4),

no ‘prince of palfreys, as the Dauphin styles his mount (H5 ı11.vii.19). An angel is the Christian version of the pagan god of messengers, Mercury. Well might Hotspur, who lives for honour and praise, find this irksome. Another example of the movement from irresponsible Rumour to more accountable kinds of fama may be located in the contrast between the Induction and first scene of 2 Henry IV and the Prologue and opening scenes of Henry V. The Chorus, which introduces and punctuates with narrative

bridges the dramatic acts of Henry V, is often seen as one of the marks of the epic quality of the play.''! The Chorus’ first words are a kind of invocation to the Muse (‘O for a muse of fire...’). The plea in the Prologue to Act v (3-6) for 'th'excuse | Of time, of numbers, and due course of things, | Which

w *

cannot in their huge and proper life | Be here presented’ comes close to the epic topos of the wish for ten (or a hundred) tongues to adequately narrate or describe. This and the invocation to the Muse are two of the ways in which an epic poet seeks to authenticate the fama of what he tells. The Chorus urge the audience to a full vision of the event imperfectly represented on stage, a dramatic realization of Fama’s power to create enargeia ‘vividness’, but itself stands outside both the historical events and their staging in this play. In the Prologue to Act 1v the Chorus use Rumour-language, but in a way that confirms its superiority to rumour: 1-3 *Now entertain conjecture of a time | When creeping murmur and the poring dark | Fills the wide vessel of the universe.' 'Creeping murmur' suggests the progress of rumours."

40 41 N

4

On Shakespeare's use of myth here see Bate 1993: 124-5 with n. 7 (puzzled by the allusion). Kiefer 1999: 15 suggests that Shakespeare has in mind Ripa's image of Fama Chiara, Mercury holding Pegasus by the bridle. For examples of Pegasus-Fame in sixteenth-century royal Pageant see Kiefer 1999: 4 with n. 12. On Pegasus as Fame see Ch. 16 pp. 622-4. For an overview of some of the issues see Taylor 1982: 52-8. serpo is often used of rumour in Latin.

501

502

Fama in early modern England

‘Conjectures’ in the sense of ‘suspicions’, ‘guesses’ blow through Rumour's pipe at 2H4 Induct. 16; here it comes close to ‘imagination; but a creation of images authoritatively directed by the Chorus.*? This Prologue ends with the instruction ‘Yet sit and see, | Minding true things by what their mock'ries be.’ This establishes a hierarchy of truth and fiction, in Horace's formulation (Ars poetica 338) ficta. . . proxima ueris, whereas Rumour operates through the confusion of truth and falsehood.“ Where rumour and counter-rumour blow through the first scene of 2 Henry IV, the main action of Henry V, the French war, is founded massively

on fixed traditions in the first part of the second scene. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s very long interpretation of the Salic Law presents itself as a scrupulous interpretation of the history of Frankish and French kings, preceded by Henry’s careful warning to the Archbishop not to bend the truth: 1.11.15-19 And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord, | That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading, | Or nicely charge your understanding soul | With opening titles miscreate, whose right | Suits not in native colours with the truth.” Contrast the anxiety of Worcester at I Henry 4 v.ii.14 ‘Interpretation will misquote our looks; in the course of a major sequence of false suppositions and distorted truths (see below pp. 513—19). To a French tradition correctly interpreted is added the power of the native English tradition, remembrance of the valiant dead who defeated the French at Crécy, and Henry's 'claim' to the English throne through his great-grandfather Edward 111 (H5 1.11.106; the word is also used of his claim to the French throne at

14). Continuity of fame is identified with continuity of bloodline at H5 1.ii.120-1 ‘The blood and courage that renownéd them [Runs in your veins.’ This is of course one of those points that present an opening for those who wish to question the construction of solid structures of farna in Henry V: what was the true 'Salic land’ in the distant past is as murky as is disputable Henry V's claim to be the legitimate heir to Edward III. Be that as it may, these two ‘claims’ to tradition are the basis on which Henry founds his own

bid for future fame, r.i1.225—36: Now are we well resolved, and, by God's help, And yours, the noble sinews of our power, France being ours, we'll bend it to our awe,

Or break it all to pieces. Or there we'll sit, 9 This passage is included under OED s.v. conjecture, n. 3 “The supposing or putting of an imaginary case; supposition.’ 44 It may be worth remembering that the Virgilian Fara has sometimes been thought of as a kind of dramatic chorus: Pease 1935: 51, 213.

Fama in Shakespeare's ‘Henriad’

Ruling in large and ample empery O'er France and all her almost kingly dukedoms, Or lay these bones in an unworthy urn,

230

Tombless, with no remembrance over them:

Either our history shall with full mouth Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave, Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,

Not worshipped with a waxen epitaph.

Tongues Tongues play a major role throughout the tetralogy.’ The conversation between Henry and Catherine in the last scene of Henry Vis full of tongues (seven of the ten occurrences of the word in the play), tongues moving towards harmony, both between languages and between two persons, in a dialogue of love. These tongues are in the strongest contrast with the divisive and seditious tongues of Rumour in the Induction to 2 Henry IV. The tetralogy’s discourse of tongues ends in a French kiss. The scene in the tetralogy that has the second highest count of ‘tongues’ is, not surprisingly, 2H4 1.i, the scene of rumours and reports after the battle of Shrewsbury that turns into realist drama the personified body of Rumour. But Rumour’s appearance, painted full of tongues, is also in a sense a materialization of the tetralogy itself, which from the start has been full of tongues, with the densest concentration in Richard II.'° At the beginning of that play Bullingbrook and Mowbray assert their desire to settle their dispute with the sword, r.1.43—50: BULL. Once more, the more to aggravate the note,

With a foul traitor's name stuff I thy throat; And wish, so please my sovereign, ere I move, What my tongue speaks my right drawn sword may prove. MOWBRAY Let not my cold words here accuse my zeal: "Tis not the trial of a woman's war,

The bitter clamour of two eager tongues, Can arbitrate this cause betwixt us twain.

15

Fora survey of examples of the detachable and independently acting tongue see below pp. 519-23.

46

R2 thirty-two; 1H4: fourteen; 2H4: thirteen; H5: ten. After Richard II the Shakespearean play

with the second highest tongue count is Titus Andronicus, where the tongue is gruesomely detachable; Coriolanus, a play much concerned with fame, names, and what the people say, has twenty-one.

503

504

Fama in early modern England

The failure to realize this clean decision through force inaugurates a sequence of plays in which tongues play decisive roles, and tongues often detached from realities or from a speaker’s will. The detachability of the tongue is given violent expression in the first scene of Richard II when Bullingbrook rejects Richard’s request to give up his dispute with Mowbray, 1.1.190-5: Ere my tongue Shall wound my honour with such feeble wrong, Or sound so base a parle, my teeth shall tear The slavish motive of recanting fear,

And spit it bleeding in his high disgrace, Where shame doth harbour, even in Mowbray's face."

In Richard II a provisional conclusion to the theme of tongues is reached when (v.ii.12) ‘all tongues cried “God save thee, Bullingbrook”’ (see above

p. 498 n. 35). But this is followed by a scene in which there is a fierce struggle over tongues, the Duchess of York's attempt, against her husband's wish, to

persuade the new king to pardon her son Aumerle, v.iii.118-30: bucu. Say ‘pardon,’ king, let pity teach thee how. The word is short, but not so short as sweet:

No word like ‘pardon’ for kings’ mouths so meet.

120

DUKE Speak it in French, king; say, 'pardonnez moi.’ pucu. Dost thou teach pardon pardon to destroy? Ah, my sour husband, my hard-hearted lord, That set'st the word itself against the word! — Speak 'pardon' as 'tis current in our land.

125

The chopping French we do not understand. Thine eye begins to speak; set thy tongue there; Or in thy piteous heart plant thou thine ear, That hearing how our plaints and prayers do pierce, Pity may move thee 'pardon' to rehearse.

130

Bullingbrook grants the pardon, but the discord between husband and wife is scarcely healed. This scene anticipates in negative mode the final scene of Henry V, in which a prospective man and wife overcome a difference in language (likewise between English and French) to speak the language of love. ^? Gurr 1984 ad loc.: ‘Stories about a philosopher who bit off his tongue and spat it in a tyrant's face can be found in Thomas Elyot, The Governor, Lyly's Euphues and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.’ For classical examples see TLL s.v. lingua, v1.2 1444.46 ff.

Fama in Shakespeare's ‘Henriad’

The play on tongues continues in 1 Henry IV. There is an unsettling displaced embodiment of the tongue in the angry response of Hotspur (whom

the king himself has earlier described

as (1.1.80) ‘A son who

is

the theme of honour's tongue’) to the king’s refusal to ransom Mortimer, 1.111.91-113: KING For I shall never hold that man my friend Whose tongue shall ask me for one penny cost To ransom home revolted Mortimer. HOTSPUR Revolted Mortimer? He never did fall off, my sovereign liege, But by the chance of war. To prove that true

95

Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds, Those mouthed wounds, which valiantly he took

When on the gentle Severn’s sedgy bank, In single opposition, hand to hand, He did confound the best part of an hour In changing hardiment with great Glendower. Three times they breathed and three times did they drink, Upon agreement, of swift Severn’s flood; Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks, Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,

100

105

And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,

Bloodstainéd with these valiant combatants. Never did base and rotten policy Colour her working with such deadly wounds; Nor could the noble Mortimer Receive so many, and all willingly. Then let not him be slandered with revolt.

110

The multitude of ‘mouthéd wounds’ of which Mortimer’s body is full after his fight with Glendower needs only one tongue to bear true witness to his valour and loyalty, countering the slander that is the many-tongued Rumour’s speciality (2H4 Induct. 6). These ‘mouths’ do not indulge in the ‘colours’ (see line 110, and see below on 1H4 v)" that are the sign of

specious speech; the colour of blood does not speak false." 49$ 2H4 v.v.85-6 (FALSTAFF) ‘Sir, I will be as good as my word. This that you heard was but a colour.’ (SHALLOW) ‘A colour that I fear you will die in, Sir John.” 49 For the conceit of wounds as mouths that need tongues to give utterance cf. JC 111.1.278-80 (ANTONY) ‘Over thy wounds now do I prophesy - | Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips | To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue’; 111.11.221-6 ‘Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths, | And bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus, | And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony | Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue | In every

505

Fama in early modern England

But the most substantial embodiment of fama in the tetralogy is Falstaff.” Around him clusters a host of issues to do with the false or slanted use of words, with honour and fame, and with counterfeit kings. Falstaff comes out, as it were, as Rumour or Fame almost at the end of his career, in the Forest of Gaultre, in a concentrated fama episode, 2H4 1v.i.364ff. In an inversion of his dismissal of honour as empty air on the field of Shrewsbury as he devised means to save his skin, he now presents his body as full of tongues, and aspires to the height of fame. On encountering the knight Coleville of the Dale, who gives an immediate and straight answer to the question "What's your name, sir?’, Falstaff at first equivocates in identifying himself (‘Are you not Sir John Falstaff?’ ‘As good a man as he, sir, whoe’er

I am’), and then overcompensates by giving a many-tongued

answer,

2H4 1v.1.374-7: I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name. An I had buta belly of any indifferency, I were simply the most active fellow in Europe. My womb, my womb, my womb, undoes me.

The size of his belly is guarantee both of the multitude of tongues and of his inability to match words with deeds.”' Deeds he can only claim in feigned words, when, as fortuitously as the arrival on the scene of Lancaster

after Falstaff's stabbing of the body of Hotspur at Shrewsbury (1H4 v iii), Lancaster and others now arrive after Coleville has peacefully surrendered to Falstaff, 2H4 1v.i.392-9:

wound of Caesar that should move | The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.” Cor. 11.111.4-5 (see Ch. 1 p. 16). Cf. also Drayton, Barons Warres 2.39.6-8 ‘So that their wounds, like mouths, by gaping wide, | Made as they meant to call for present death, | Had they but tongues, their deepness gives them breath’; A Warning for Fair Women (Cannon 1975) 1995-8 ‘I gave him fifteen wounds, | Which now be fifteen mouths that do accuse me; | In ev'ry wound there is a

bloody tongue, | Which will all speak.’ The simile of a wound as an accusing mouth is common. Suggested tentatively by Porter 1979: 100, on ‘the possibility that [Falstaff] is the main action’s embodiment of the presenter, Rumour, and unhesitatingly by Calderwood 1979: 124 ‘Falstaff... with his belly full of tongues pronouncing his own name, has become the embodiment within the play of the prologue Rumor [“painted full of tongues”]’; see also Abrams

u

506

1986: 475-7; Bergeron

1991: 240-2; Blinde 2008: 45-9; Knowles

1966 in his discussion

of noise and news in 2 Henry IV already notes how the comic scenes mirror the main-plot scenes. As father of hes, Falstaffis equated with the Devil; at the same time he appeals to the audience's sympathy as the embodiment of the unlicensed and unstoppable voice of the common man. Lucan's Caesar is another example of a character who becomes almost a personification of Fama (see Ch. 6 pp. 181-4). Falstaff's reference to his belly as a ‘womb’ picks up on the imagery of sexuality and maternity in Rumour's speech, 2H4 Induct. 11-15.

Fama in Shakespeare's ‘Henriad’

LANCASTER It was more of his courtesy than your deserving. FALSTAFF I know not. Here he is, and here I yield him. And I beseech your grace, let it be booked with the rest of this day’s deeds; or, I swear, I will have it in a particular ballad, with mine own picture on the top of it, Coleville kissing my foot: to the which course if I be enforced, if you do not all show like gilt two-pences to me, and I in the clear sky of fame o'ershine you as much as the full moon doth the cinders of the element — which show like pins’ heads to her — believe not the word of the noble: therefore let me have right, and let desert mount.

Equivocations on fama continue to the end of this section of the scene: 407— 8 (LANCASTER)

‘A famous rebel art thou, Coleville.' (FALSTAFF) ‘And a

famous true subject took him.’ Coleville is famous in the sense ‘infamous’. Fals-staff may be a true, ‘loyal’, subject, but he speaks anything but the truth; he is famous partly because he is an embodiment of fama. There are also moments when he comes close to being a double for the inventive comic poet. Later in the same scene he delivers himself of a parody of the bacchic inspiration of the poet, in which invention and fantasy come to birth in the world on the utterances of the tongue: ıv.iii.94-100 ‘A good sherry-sack hath a two-fold operation in it: it ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy vapours which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth,

becomes excellent wit."

Kingship and the management of fama Ultimately at issue throughout the tetralogy's play with the various instantiations of fama — names, reputation, honour, fame, rumour, tongues, etc. — is the status and stability of the man who occupies the throne. Shakespeare's dramatization of the role of rumour and gossip in the deposition of Richard ILand in the struggle of the Lancastrians to legitimize themselves in the eyes and on the lips of their subjects reflects what seems to have been the historical reality at the time of a heightened role for rumour and gossip and of a 52 Shakespeare's portrait of a cowardly Falstaff prompted other writers to defend the memory of Sir John Oldcastle, on whom

of Martyrs, or Lord Cobham: untrustworthy Nearing 19.15:

Falstaff was based; amongst them was John Weever, in The Mirror

The Life and Death of that Thrice Valiant Capitaine... Sir John Oldcastle, Knight, here Oldcastle, so far from being the bloated embodiment of an anarchic and fama, is the victim of‘A wynd-swolne monster, many headed Rumour (cited in 38).

507

508

Fama in early modern England

keenly felt need to mobilize the power of report and reputation in support of the usurping dynasty." Shakespeare's interest in counterfeits or doubles of the king (on which see below) may also usefully be set in the context of Henry IV’s need to deal with a series of look-alikes and impostors of the deposed Richard. The Lancastrians’ need to control fama is also reflected in the writing of the poet often regarded as the chief propagandist for the Lancastrians, John Lydgate.” Richard II's fall from power involves the loss of reputation and the disempowerment of his name, and finally the detachment of his person from name and title. Bullingbrook returns to England at first, so he says, to restore

his private honour and status as a nobleman, accusing Bushy and Green as he sends them to execution that they have (R2 r11.i.24—7) ‘From my own windows torn my household coat, | Razed out my imprese, leaving me no sign | Save men's opinions and my living blood | To show the world I am a gentleman.” Looking back on his path to the throne, as he rebukes his wayward son for a lifestyle that Hal claims is exaggerated by (1 H4 ı11.11.23— 5) ‘many tales devis’d... By smiling pick-thanks, and base news-mongers, Henry IV contrasts his own and Richard IT's skills in the management of fame and of public opinion," 1H4 111.ii.39-45: Had I so lavish of my presence been, So common-hackneyed

in the eyes of men,

So stale and cheap to vulgar company, Opinion, that did help me to the crown,

Had still kept loyal to possession And left me in reputeless banishment,

A fellow of no mark nor likelihood. Richard by contrast, 63—9: Mingled his royalty with carping fools, Had his great name profanéd with their scorns And gave his countenance, against his name,

To laugh at gibing boys and stand the push Of every beardless vain comparative; Grew a companion to the common streets, Enfeoffed himself to popularity...

55 See Strohm 1998: 19-25, 106-8; Flannery 20072: 43 n. 1 for further bibliography. 34 See Flannery 2007a and 2007b.

5 On the importance of opinion for kings in the tetralogy see Watson 1960: 380-4,

Fama in Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’

— and so made people sick of his presence. But Henry’s version of his own appearance to the world is not undisputed: the rebel Hotspur has

a very

different

view,

1H4

1.iii.172-84

(addressing

Worcester

and

Northumberland): Shall it for shame be spoken in these days, Or fill up chronicles in time to come, That men of your nobility and power Did gage them both in an unjust behalf,

175

As both of you — God pardon it! — have done,

To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, And plant this thorn, this canker, Bullingbrook? And shall it in more shame be further spoken,

That you are fooled, discarded and shook off

180

By him for whom these shames ye underwent? No. Yet time serves wherein you may redeem Your banished honours and restore yourselves Into the good thoughts of the world again.

The king is talking about his reputation with the commons, while Hotspur thinks only of the self-regarding honour and shame that obsess the nobility (and Hotspur second to none). The reputation of the king differs according to the audience, and, in the case of the nobility, is shaped by the nobility’s concern for its own reputation. There is a doubling of the fama of the king, with direct consequences for his chances of retaining power. There are also two Hals, the wastrel and the prince (although how literally we are to take Hal’s own account of the double game that he plays in his monologue at 1H4 r.ii.132—54 is of course much debated), a doubling that is extended into the existence of two Harrys, Harry Hotspur and Harry Monmouth,

doubles who

come

face to face at the battle of Shrewsbury

(see below). That encounter will end a rivalry which is also potentially that of two pretenders to the throne. At the beginning of 1 Henry IV the king envies that Northumberland (1.1.79—80) 'Should be the father to so blest a son; | A son who is the theme of honour's tongue’, while (84—5) ‘riot and

dishonour stain the brow | Of my young Harry’. He wishes that some fairy had exchanged the babies in their cradles, so that Harry Percy was really his own son, and so heir to the throne. Later, in the rebel camp at Shrewsbury, Douglas will praise Hotspur as (1v.i.10) ‘the king of honour’; this is a loaded expression in a tetralogy where honour and dishonour have a lot to do with who is king, and who has the power to retain kingship. The doublings of the two Harrys ramify in strange ways: a father's rumour-fuelled doubt as to

509

510

Fama in early modern England

whether his son (Harry Hotspur) lives or is dead will be echoed in another father’s doubt as to whether his son (Harry Monmouth)

is a lost cause or

not, a doubt that is only resolved when a mistake is made as to whether that father, Henry IV, is alive or dead (2H4 ıv.ii).

John Kerrigan has brilliantly explored the ramifications of the motif of doubling in the tetralogy.^ Doubling is a disease that is triggered once the single line of succession to the throne is ruptured; one consequence of this is to unleash a storm of conflicting words that will come to a head in the person of Rumour in the Induction to 2 Henry IV. The doublings of Rumour, the duplicities of fama, are closely connected to the doublings of persons endemic in a kingdom where the mon-arch's legitimacy is disputed. *Rumour doth double'

(2H4 111.1.95—6, in full 'Rumour doth double, like

the voice and echo, | The numbers of the feared’). The connection between

the doublings of the person of the king and the doublings of fama manifests itself in bizarre ways, for example in comic mode in Henry V’s visit in disguise to his men on the night before Agincourt, H5 1v.i.37—52: PISTOL Che vous la? HENRY À friend. PISTOL Discuss unto me: art thou officer? HENRY PISTOL HENRY PISTOL HENRY PISTOL

Or art thou base, common and popular? I am a gentleman of a company. Trail'st thou the puissant pike? Even so. What are you? Ás good a gentleman as the emperor. Then you are a better than the king. The king's a bawcock, and a heart of gold, A

lad of life, an imp of fame,

Of parents good, of fist most valiant. ] kiss his dirty shoe, and from heartstring l love the lovely bully. What is thy name? HENRY Harry Le Roy. PISTOL Le Roy? a Cornish name: art thou of Cornish crew? HENRY No, | am a Welshman.

The king, after listening to his own fame sung, protects his double self by doubling language, substituting French for English, successfully erecting a barrier to understanding that will be dismantled in the play's final scene between English king and French princess (see above). Not without some 56 Kerrigan 1990.

Fama in Shakespeare's ‘Henriad’

irony, given Pistol's own affectation of French floscules, including his own

definition of the king as a bawcock (beau coq).*’ Rumour appears at the beginning of 2 Henry IV to confuse and dismay the king's defeated enemy; Harry Monmouth's dangerous double is now dead. Yet this Rumour is no docile supporter of the monarchy, but rather collusive with the many-headed beast, the people typically viewed as a threat to monarchical and aristocratic order, ? Induct. 15-22: Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude,

Can play upon it. But what need I thus My well-known body to anatomize Among my household?

For comment on this we may look to Coriolanus' attitude to the 'many-headed multitude’ (Cor. ı1.iii.10-11) and the political danger that he sees it as posing, and his solution is radical: 111.i.181—2 ‘at once pluck out | The multitudinous tongue, an image that in effect identifies the multitude with Rumour."" Roman history offered vivid examples of the power and danger of the uncontrolled mob, as well as of the dignified power of the Roman ruler, and the Chorus of Henry V turns easily to a Roman parallel to picture the image of national unity at the beginning of the last act, following a passage that has tamed the unruly tongues of Rumour (see above): v.0.25-8 "The Mayor and all his brethren, in best sort, | Like to the

senators of th'antique Rome | With the plebeians swarming at their heels, | Go forth and fetch their conqu'ring Caesar in’, to be followed by a second comparison that looks forward hopefully, but as it turned out in vain, to the triumphant return of the Earl of Essex after suppressing the rebellion in Ireland (29—34).*" >”

By a further irony Pistol had previously addressed Henry V as ‘most royal imp of fame’ on his coronation day, on the occasion that the king claims that he does not know, recognize, Falstaff

w v

2 c

(2H4 v.v. 41). For other Elizabethan examples see Humphreys 1966 ad loc., and Anders 1904: 275-6; e.g. Cor. 11.11.10-11 ‘the many-headed multitude’; ıv.i.1-2 ‘the beast | With many heads: On the Victorians' fascination with Shakespeare's images of rebellious and murderous multitudes see the riveting discussion in Poole 2004: 198-201 'Multitudinous powers, with reference to Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus (but not to our Rumour

Prologue).

60 The second Earl of Essex was at the centre of the Elizabethan cult of honour. After his execution for treason in 1601 Robert Pricket wrote a poem attempting to vindicate Essex's honour and

Fama in early modern England

Shakespeare’s, and our, attitude to the many-headed beast is, however,

complex. In the metatheatrical move

in the lines of the Induction to

2 Henry IV, Rumour’s household turns out to be the audience, groundlings

and all^' — and are we among the groundlings? — but the disrespectful innuendo that they/we are the *wav'ring multitude’ is tempered by a recognition that they/we also have a certain skill in recognizing and interpreting a personification such as himself, a skill that comes of their/our experience of other theatrical events and pageants. One thing that the audience will know well is that such personifications of fama are more often than not enlisted in the service of representations of political order. There are official and unofficial versions of fama, and this one is definitely to be set on the unofficial side. The world is his stage, ‘from the Orient to the drooping West’, a form of locution more usually associated with the official fama of worldwide fame, or with the worldwide reach of empire. Rumour’s path to Northumberland’s castle from the ‘royal field of Shrewsbury’ lies through (33) ‘the peasant towns, ‘rustic (and credulous); as Humphreys 1966 glosses it. Yet these class distinctions are put in question when the workings of rumour are shown in the real world of the first scene. In answer to Northumberland’s query as to how Lord Bardolph came by his information about the rebels’ victory at Shrewsbury, Bardolph replies, (1.1.31—3) ‘I spake with one, my lord, that came from thence, | A gentleman well bred, and of good name, | That freely render'd me these news for true.' Bardolph is dismissive of Northumberland's servant Travers, and of the 'gentleman' who, according to Travers, had given him the news of Hotspur's defeat, but who, in Bardolph's uninformed and baseless judgement, is (66-8) ‘some hilding fellow that had stolen

| The horse he rode on, and, upon

my life, | Spoke

at a

venture’. This attempt to discredit a report is itself a perfect example of the way in which rumours start through unsubstantiated assertion. If virtuous and successful kingship prides itself on control of the unbridled passions and irresponsible words of the many-headed beast, the representation of Rumour in the Induction to 2 Henry IV and the dramatization in the following scene of the workings of report and rumour in the real world both serve to unsettle any easy hierarchization of fama.

fame, Honors Fame in Triumph Riding, or, The Life and Death of the Late Honourable Earle of Essex (1604), celebrating his ‘triumph in the gates of death’ (507), and calling on those who mourn for Essex to ‘let sorrows tide | Make honors fame in triumph ride’ (559-60). a

512

Groundlings: Hamlet 1.11.8. Poole 200-1: 202-5 goes on to discuss Victorian anxieties about the theatre as a ‘multitudinous place’ in which authority might be threatened or seek to assert itself,

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad"

Fama, doubles, and the Battle of Shrewsbury:

1 Henry IV Act v

The tentacles of fama reach out to the beginning and end of the tetralogy. But the first scene of 2 Henry IV is a particularly dense, and pure, example of the workings of fama: when the personification of Rumour exits after the Induction, he as it were leaves himself in the persons of the historical actors who make their entrances in the first scene of the play. Looking backwards, Rumour does not simply report on what happened at the end of the previous play for the benefit of an audience that may not come straight from having seen it, but materializes, so to speak, out of an equally dense, if more varied, play with fama in the last act of 1 Henry IV, the events on the field of Shrewsbury. The way in which a personification is generated by the previous workings of a realist text may be compared in general with the appearance of Fama in Aeneid 4, suddenly but on closer inspection almost inevitably. In conclusion I will subject the final act of 1 Henry IV to a close reading for the workings of fama. In the first scene of 1 Henry IV Act v, Worcester and the king exchange charge and counter-charge: Worcester claims that one of the 'fair advantages' that allowed Bullingbrook to seize the throne was the rumour that Richard, so long absent in Ireland, was dead (v.1.55 “all in England did repute him dead’). The king retorts that the rebels have manipulated the news by publishing their own (biased) version of his rise to power, (75-9) “To face the garment of rebellion | With some fine colour that may please the eye | Of fickle changelings and poor discontents, | Which gape and rub the elbow at the news | Of hurly-burly innovation’ — abject parts of the ‘monster with uncounted heads’. The difference between report and reality is expressed through the image of a deceptive piece of clothing; this will recur. Hal then evokes the opposite extreme of fama in his offer to decide the matter in single combat with Hotspur, as he lends his own voice to praise of Hotspur: 86-8 ‘Tell your nephew, | The Prince of Wales doth join with all the world | In praise of Henry Percy.’ Hal will recover himself from the ‘shame’ of being ‘a truant...to chivalry’, and takes it for granted that Hotspur will (98-9) ‘take the odds | Of his great name and estimation’. In counterpoint to Hal’s own attempt to realize a great name for himself, at the same time as he substantiates Hotspur’s name, comes Falstaff's ‘catechism’ on the subject of honour, draining it of all substance:

132-3

“What is honour? A word.

What is in that word “honour”? Air.’ Praise can fill the world, names can *? A variant of the common topos of the vanity of fame and glory. Close is Drayton, Barons Warres 3.57 (Isabel) ‘Thou idol, Honour, which we fools adore... which only is a name...

real comforts thou does leave us poor.”

| Of

513

Fama in early modern England

be great, but honour is — just hot air, a stark presentation of one of the duplicities of fama. Worcester has been charged with taking the message to Hotspur of Hal’s offer of single combat (seconded by the king), but fails to do so. His false report to Hotspur that the king (v.ii.32) ‘will bid you battle presently’ is based on a calculation about what the king’s offer of friendship will really mean hereafter: v.ii.9-10 'Supposition all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes; | For treason is but trusted like the fox’; 14 ‘Interpretation will misquote our looks’. 'Supposition . . . full of eyes’, a version of inuidia, is a near relative of

Rumour in equal tongues but he

painted full of tongues (Virgil's Fama has eyes, mouths and ears numbers).^ Supposition's eyes will look as crookedly as Rumour’s have the power to distort. This at least is Worcester’s interpretation, seems to admit that traitors can never completely change their

spots when he says that (10—12) ‘treason is but trusted like the fox, | Who,

ne’er so tame, so cherished and locked up, | Will have a wild trick of his ancestors. From the king's point of view Supposition's eyes are rather the legitimate surveillance of a prudent monarch, who proverbially has many eyes and ears in the form of the spies in his intelligence network.“' These are the eyes and ears of Fama controlled from the top; Ripa's personification of Ragione di stato is a figure covered with eyes and ears," 6» an image glossed by Henry Peacham as follows: the king must ‘Be serv'd with eies, and listening eares of those, | Who from all partes can give intelligence | To gall his foe, or timely to prevent | At home his malice and intendiment'^? Once Douglas has provoked battle by hurling defiance at the king, in response to Worcester's false report, the latter tells Hotspur that Hal had

a w

e =

challenged him

6

a

514

to single combat,

and Vernon

continues

with a

true, if

The traitors will always be taken for something that they are not (or that they claim not to be); in a play about the consequences of usurpation OED s.v. supposition 4 'Fraudulent substitution of another thing or person in place of the genuine one' perhaps hovers in the background. Kiefer 1999: 24-5, on which this paragraph is based. Kiefer also suggests that Henry V's visit to his troops in disguise on the eve of Agincourt is related to the figure of a spy in Jean Baudoin’s 1644 French translation of Ripa’s Iconologia, a man with winged feet, holding a lantern, and wearing a cloak covered with eyes and ears, signifying that ‘his business is to see all and hear all, not only by day but also by night‘. Ripa 1603: 427. Peacham 1612: 22. Contrast Ovid’s House of Fama, which is constructed as if it were the seat of a human or divine monarch, but in which anarchy rules: see Ch. 5 pp. 159-63. The need for the ruler to manage his good name, and to know, and so regulate, what his subjects are saying about him, is a topic of the literature of advice to rulers in the tradition of the Secretum secretorum: Flannery 2007a: 44-9, with particular reference to Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes, addressed to Henry V shortly before his accession.

Fama in Shakespeare's ‘Henriad’

somewhat embellished, report of Hal’s praise of Hotspur. In mixing true with false reports Worcester, abetted by Vernon, plays the part of the ancient Fama who mixes truth with falsehood, facta atque infecta (as Rumour in the Induction to 2 Henry IV announces that he will bring ‘smooth comforts false’ before allowing the truth about Hotspur’s death to become public). Vernon also picks up on Worcester’s anxiety about misinterpretation, and turns it in a positive direction in his announcement to ‘the world’ that (v.ii.68—70) ‘If [Harry Monmouth] outlive the envy of this day, | England did never owe so sweet a hope | So much misconstrued in his wantonness’. Vernon is convinced that he now sees through to the reality of Hal, who should therefore be immune to the misconstructions of a hostile public. The only kind of ‘envy’, or ill-will, that can now strike him down is the figurative envy of the day of the battle. If he can survive that, he will enjoy an unassailable good fame. The battle itself is narrated as a series of suppositions (in the senses both of mistaken beliefs and of substitutions), misinterpretations, true and false

claims to honour. At stake is the survival and victory of the king and of his heir, which ideally should lead to the re-establishment of the legitimacy of succession through a bloodline, and an escape from a play of doubles. This is a duplicity intimately connected to the duplicity of fama, and one that both protects the physical body of the king, but also calls into doubt the substance of his person. The king protects himself by putting a number of doubles, counterfeits, of himself on to the field as decoys, and Shakespeare grasps the easy opportunity to equivocate on the legitimacy of the king. In the first of the battle scenes (v.ii) Douglas confronts one of these, Sir Walter

Blunt.“ Their exchange contrasts the undoubted identity of Douglas, the equivalence of his name with his person, with the identity of the king, disputed in more ways than one, v.1i.103-9: BLUNT What is thy name that in the battle thus Thou crossest me? What honour dost thou seek Upon my head? DOUGLAS Know then my name is Douglas, And I do haunt thee in the battle thus Because some tell me that thou art a king. BLUNT They tell thee true.

The same equivocation surfaces when Douglas meets the ‘real’ king, v.iii.24— 8: 9? There may bea

joke on the fact that there were also two Blunts killed in the battle, 2H4 1.i.21-2.

515

516

Fama in early modern England

DoucLAs Another king? They grow like Hydra's heads. ] am the Douglas, fatal to all those That wear those colours on them. What art thou

That counterfeit'st the person of a king? k1NG The King himself... *The King himself, but uncomfortably close in appearance to a figure of Fama: ‘colour(s)’ had been applied to the external garments of fama at v.i.76, 81, and the Hydra could be a figure of the verbal proliferation of

envy and slander. Reading back from the Induction to 2 Henry IV, the monarch paradoxically coincides with ‘the blunt monster with uncounted heads' (and one of the king's hydra-heads at the battle of Shrewsbury goes by the name of Blunt). The king is no Hercules, but one of his mon-

strous opponents. The counterfeit is played out in comic mode later in the battle when Falstaff saves his skin not by the use of a double of himself, but by counterfeiting his own death when attacked by Douglas. In so doing Falstaff will, in a sense, himself become a double of the king,

for the final, and unwitting (or is it another of his impersonations?), deception to be played by Henry IV is to appear, like Falstaff to Hal, to be dead in the crown scene in 2H4 ıv.ii. The immediate result of Falstaff's counterfeiting of his own death is to trap Hal into the falsehoods of Rumour, 1 H4 v.iv.126-33: LANCASTER But. Soft! Who have we here? Did you not tell me this fat man was dead? PRINCE I did. I saw him dead,

Breathless and bleeding on the ground. Art thou alive? Or is it fantasy That plays upon our eyesight? I prithee speak, We will not trust our eyes without our ears. Thou art not what thou seems't. FALSTAEP No, that's certain. I am not a double man...

$^ Nohrnberg 1976: 690 (Erasmus, Adages); see also above Ch. 10 p. 402. The fact that Douglas has killed several counterfeits wearing the ‘wardrobe’ of the king makes of Rumour’s misreporting at 2H4 Induct. 31-2 ‘the king before the Douglas’ rage | Stooped his anointed head as low as death’ something less than a totally unfounded lie. © Hercules as a model for heroic activity elsewhere in the tetralogy: there is perhaps an allusion to Hercules Gallicus (see Nohrnberg 1976: 376-8) at 1H-41.iii.242-4 (NORTHUMBERLAND to Hotspur) "Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool | Art thou to break into this woman's mood, | Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!’ — this after Hotspur's outburst in Ercles’ vein at 205-11; c£ also 11.iv.201-2 (FALSTAFF) ‘Why, thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules.’

Fama in Shakespeare's ‘Henriad’

Rumour in the Induction to the second part will report both the survival and the death of Hotspur (whose body Falstaff is carrying on his back at this moment).

In 2H4

1.1 Morton

forces belief in his son's death

on

Northumberland by assuring him that (118) ‘these mine eyes saw him in bloody state’, while Bardolph had not been in a position to answer ‘yes’ to Northumberland’s question (30) ‘Saw you the field?’

There is another pair of doubles on the field at Shrewsbury, the two Harrys, engaged in a certamen gloriae ‘contest for glory’ that must end with the elimination of one of them. Here is an accounting of fama that ends in a clear result, a disambiguation of report and repute, 1H4 v 111.59—75: HoT. If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth.

PRINCE Thou speaks't as if I would deny my name."

60

HoT. My name is Harry Percy. PRINCE Why, then I see A very valiant rebel of that name. I am the Prince of Wales; and think not, Percy, To share with me in glory any more: Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, Nor can one England brook a double reign, Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.

65

HoT. Nor shall it, Harry, for the hour is come

To end the one of us; and would to heaven Thy name in arms were now as great as mine! PRINCE I'll make it greater ere I part from thee, And all the budding honours on thy crest I'll crop, to make a garland for my head. HoT. I can no longer brook thy vanities.

70

75

Unlike his father, Hal has no desire to separate his person from his name. Instead of putting doubles of himself on to the field, he encounters another of the same name with an equal claim to a glory based on solid deeds in battle. For the sake of England these two glorious ‘stars’ must be reduced to one.’! Hal will crown himself, and confirm his position as heir to the throne, with a victory garland woven from the pullulating shoots of honour on Hotspur's crest (both ‘head’ and ‘heraldic device’), a crop like that of the heads of the Hydra. In defeating Hotspur Hal makes good his earlier

70 [s the point of this that Hal does not do counterfeits? 7! With the cosmic imagery of 66-7 cf. the king’s rebuke to the rebel Worcester at v.i.16-22.

517

518

Fama in early modern England

promise to appropriate Hotspur’s glory to himself, in the financial imagery

of 111.i1.148-53:"~ Percy is but my factor, good my lord, To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf, And I will call him to so strict account That he shall render every glory up, Yea, even the slightest worship of his time, Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

The king has already told his son, (v.iv.48) ‘Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion’, urging him to rest from the battle, but Hal’s ambition is for the

greater redemption of the full sum of his glory from Hotspur. For Henry, Hotspur, (1.1.80) ‘A son who is the theme of honour’s tongue’, has been a

kind of good twin to his disreputable son since the beginning of the play, when he had wished in fantasy that Hal were a changeling, and Hotspur the true son of his blood (1.1.85-8). Hal's encounter in single combat with

Hotspur is the final proof that he is the ‘king of honour’, the title flatteringly bestowed on Hotspur by Douglas (tv.i.10).

The king uses his doubles to protect his own life; as they fall one by one, the greater grows the danger to his life, until Douglas finally comes face to face with the real king. At this point he is saved not by another double, but by his son, his successor, who boasts to Douglas that he draws

strength, not imperilment, from the death of his father's doubles: v.iv.40-1 "The spirits | Of valiant Shirley, Stafford, Blunt, are in my arms.’’* The conceit is similar to Spenser's story of the brothers Priamond, Diamond and Triamond

(FQ ıv.iii), the first two of whom

are killed successively

by Cambell, Priamond's soul entering Diamond, and then Diamond-plusPriamond's souls entering the third brother Triamond. But it is the spirits of his father's counterfeits, not of his father himself, that enter Hal, rendering

somewhat unclear the identity of the person who Hal claims to be. There is almost a touch of humour when in the next line, 42, Hal says to Douglas,

‘It is the Prince of Wales that threatens thee.’ But we might see in this a sign of the superiority of the prince to his father the king: the future king is solid with his subjects, whereas the present king scatters himself into doubles,

reliant on his subjects’ willingness to sacrifice themselves for their ruler. If we remember Douglas’ complaint that the kings ‘grow like Hydra’s heads’, in re-embodying three of the doubles, Hal himself becomes something like an 7? On the analogy between the circulation and exchange of money and language see Spencer 2003; see below pp. 534-7 on Jonson's The Staple of News. 73 Although it is not explicitly stated that Shirley was a double for the king.

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad"

inversion of a Hydra, absorbing multiple persons into his one body, rather than producing multiple heads out of one body. This absorption of plurality into unity is also manifested in the meeting on the battlefield between Hal and his younger brother, John of Lancaster. Applauding Lancaster's display of courage, Hal says, v.iv.17-20: By heaven, thou hast deceived me, Lancaster.

I did not think thee lord of such a spirit: Before, I loved thee as a brother, John,

But now I do respect thee as my soul. conceit of a shared soul, or two souls in one, ^ expresses an ideal harmony between brothers, two acting as one to root out civil war (while civil war is often represented as fraternal strife). Hotspur is a figurative twin brother of Hal, but one unrelated by blood, and his elimination will help to restore unity in the kingdom. The redemption of glory and the elimination of the deceptions caused by doubling at the end of 1 Henry IV are not the end of the story. The king’s last speech, which closes the play, is ‘a conclusion in which nothing is

The

concluded? and begins, "Then this remains, that we divide our power...’

(to meet the various bands of rebels). Hal still has a long way to go before he becomes Henry V. The unifying forces that prevail on the field of Shrewsbury will be blown apart by the entry of Rumour painted full of tongues at the beginning of the next play.

Excursus: the detachable tongue In Shakespeare's ‘Henriad’ tongues sometimes become detached or are given individual agency. This is in keeping with a wider tendency for the highly mobile and seemingly uncontrollable member lodged in our mouths to take on a life of its own, to become personified. I here briefly survey some other examples of this. The surreal tendency of tongues to act independently of their owners has more of a history in the post-classical world than in antiquity. The most famous detached tongue in classical literature is that of Philomela, which

is physically detached from her body and which continues to live for a short time after its violent separation: Ov. Met. 6.557—60 radix micat ultima linguae, | ipsa iacet terraeque tremens immurmurat atrae. | utque salire solet 7^

See Hardie 2002a: Index s.vv. ‘two souls in one/one soul in two bodies’

3

Coleridge 1851: 11.156.

519

520

Fama in early modern England

mutilatae cauda colubrae, | palpitat et moriens dominae uestigia quaerit ‘The end of the root of her tongue quivers, the tongue itself lies on the ground and trembles as it murmurs into the black soil. Just as the tail cut off a snake leaps up, it jerks and as it dies it seeks its mistress’ footsteps.’’° Ovid is imitated by Lucan, describing the dismemberment of a victim of the Sullan proscription: Bell. Civ. 2.181—2 exsectaque lingua | palpitatet muto uacuum ferit aera motu 'the cut-out tongue quivers and beats the empty air with its dumb motion* The greater independence of the medieval and early modern tongue while still attached to its owner owes something to the Hebrew tradition of the Old Testament. The tongue is lightly personified at Proverbs 18:21 mors et uita in manu linguae qui diligunt eam comedent fructus eius ‘death and life are in the power [lit. ‘hand’] of the tongue, and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof, alluded to by Augustine, Conf. 5.1.1 accipe sacrificium confessionum mearum de manu linguae meae 'receive the sacrifice of my confessions from the hand of my tongue’. A key text for the Christian tradition is the demonization of the tongue in the Epistle of James 3. The Epistle is written in a Hellenistic diatribe tradition (whence the images of horse-riding and steering ships), but the emphasis on the tongue derives from the Hebrew tradition: (1) My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation. (2) For in many things we sin all. If any man sin not in word, he is a perfect man, and able to bridle all the body. (3) Behold, we put bits into the horses'

mouths, that they should obey us, and we turn about all their body. (4) Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small rudder, whithersoever the governor listeth. (5) Even

so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth of great things; behold, how great a thing a little fire kindleth. (6) And the tongue is fire, yea, a world of wickedness; so

is the tongue set among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell. (7) For the whole nature

of beasts, and of birds, and of creeping things, and things of the sea is tamed, and hath been tamed of the nature of man. (8) But the tongue can no man

tame. It is

an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. (9) Therewith bless we God even the Father, and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. (Epistle of James 3:1—9 (Geneva Bible))

Here the tongue shares (unwittingly no doubt) features with the Virgilian Fama:

the contrast between

small

and

large; the metaphor

of fire; the

76 The simile is taken from Lucretius' description of a snake's tail continuing to move after it has been cut off, 3.657-9.

Fama in Shakespeare's 'Henriad"

association with hell. Verses 9—12 develop the duality of the tongue, its capacity to utter both blessings and curses, like a fountain that can bring forth both sweet and bitter water." The unruly and ungovernable tongue is the subject of a 'tongue

literature"^ that goes back to the medieval genre of ‘Sins of the tongue and into which Erasmus’ Lingua (1525) pours a flood of humanist learning," and which continues in treatises and sermons of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."' In Thomas Tomkis’ play Lingua: Or The Combatof the Tongue, and the Five Senses For Superiority (first printed 1607), "Tongue; dressed in purple and white, is brought into line by the five senses, who force her to serve "Taste?" The unruliness of the tongue, in particular the female tongue, was associated with sexual looseness, and the tongue itself could be thought of as phallic, for example in The Duchess of Malfi1.ii.251-3 (FERDINAND)

‘And women like that part, which, like the lamprey | Hath

ne'er a bone in't.' (DUCHESS) ‘Fie, sir!’ (FERDINAND)

‘Nay, | I mean the

tongue. Samuel Daniel sees sprouting tongues as responsible for largescale public disorder: Civil Wars 6.36 (Nemesis instructs Pandora) ‘Opinion Arme against Opinion growne: | Make new-borne Contradiction still to rise; | As if Thebes-founder, Cadmus, tongues had sowne, | Instead of teeth,

for greater mutinies.' The detached and unruly tongue is also given striking visual expression in emblem books, such as the 'Evill Tongue' in George

M “I

Wither's A Collection of Emblemes (London 1634-5) (Fig. 7).

Dibelius 1976 adduces classical parallels for some details: (189) Plut. De garrulitate 10, where Plutarch adduces Eur. fr. 411 Nauck on the wildfire spread of rumour (see Ch. 3 n. 16); (201) Plut. De recta ratione audiendi 2, when asked to select the part of the sacrificial victim that was

at the same time the best and the worst, the sage Bias sent the tongue, as responsible for both the greatest benefits and the greatest harm brought by speaking (cos kai BAGBas kai copeAcias M =

TOU Atyeıv Exovtos ueyiotas) (for another version of the anecdote see Plut. De garrul. 8). For a rich selection of textual and visual material, to which this section is much indebted, see

os 3 —

Mazzio 1997, See Craun Mazzio

1997 and 2007.

80

See Fantham

1989; Parker 1989.

1997 refers to John Abernethy's The Poysonous Tongue (1622); William Gearing’s A

Bridle for the Tongue (1663); Richard Allestree's The Government of the Tongue (1674). Thomas

Adams’ The Taming of the Tongue, in The Workes of Tho. Adams (London 1629): 146 ‘It [the tongue] is paruum, but prauum, little in quantitie, but Great in iniquitie... [It] hath not straiter limites, then the whole world to walke through’;

152 ‘The hand reacheth but a small

o c BN

compasse, the tongue goes through the world.’ Boose

1991: 203-5; Parker 1989: 454-8.

Cited in Spacks 1986: 122, with other examples of the tongue as phallus. See Mazzio 1997: 58-60 on the homology between the two ‘unruly members, the tongue and the penis (and clitoris). At Phaedrus 4.15.1 (fragmentary) Prometheus seems to fashion the woman’s tongue after (or from?) the penis; see Adams 1982: 35 on the similarity observed in antiquity between penis and tongue.

521

522

Fama in early modern England

4%

No Heart can thinkesto what [range ends; The Tong ues unruely Motion tends.

Fig. 7 Emblem of the 'Evill Tongue’, from George Wither A Collection of Emblemes (London

1634-5)

I take a final example from Phineas Fletcher’s exercise in a Spenserian personification of body parts in The Purple Island, 5.56—8: 56

With Gustus Lingua dwells, his pratling wife, Indu'd with strange and adverse qualities;

The nurse of hate and love, of peace and strife, Mother of fairest truth, and foulest lies: Or best, or worst; no mean: made all of fire, Which sometimes hell, & sometimes heav'ns inspire; By whom oft Truth self speaks, oft that first murth'ring liar. 57 The idle Sunne stood still at her command,

Breathing his firie steeds in Gibeon: And pale-fac'd Cynthia at her word made stand,

Resting her coach in vales of Aialon. Her voice oft open breaks the stubborn skies,

And holds th' Almighties hands with suppliant cries: Her voice tears open hell with horrid blasphemies.

Ben Jonson and fama

58

Therefore that great Creatour, well foreseeing To what a monster she would soon be changing, (Though lovely once, perfect and glorious being) Curb’d her with iron bit, and held from ranging; And with strong bonds her looser steps enchaining, Bridled her course, too many words refraining,

And doubled all his guards, bold libertie restraining.

Fletcher’s ‘Tongue’ embodies a number of the dichotomies of fama: she is the nurse of both strife and love, the mother of both truth and lies. Like Virgil’s

Fama and Mercury she is able to cross the boundaries of both heaven and hell. In her present form she produces words both fair and foul; in terms of her personal history, which coincides with the Fall of Man, she has changed from fair to foul, from a ‘perfect and glorious being’ to a ‘monster’ (in this a precursor of Milton’s Sin). The bold liberty of the once free tongue (cf. Ovid's libera fama, Ch. 5 p. 166) has been chained (her prison guarded by the teeth and the two lips), like the winds of Aeolus or Furor in Virgil’s Aeneid. More immediately, “Tongue’ is a version of Spenser’s Blatant Beast (see Ch. 10 pp. 400-4), whose mouth Calidore finally succeeds in shutting up with an iron muzzle,

(FQ vı.xii.34, 4) ‘And therein shut up his blasphemous

tongue’, although subsequently, by Spenser’s day, the monster has ‘got into the world at liberty againe’ (v1.xii.38, 9), ‘ranging’ at will. Fletcher's Lingua, too, has used her ‘enchanting art’ to make helpmates of her warders (stanza 60).

Ben Jonson and fama Ben Jonson combines a classicizing interest in the details of the ancient sources for fama, particularly Virgil and Ovid, with a keen sense for the contemporary politics of fama.“' He stages the struggle to control and contain fama in a number of plays and masques, relating the poet's concern for his own reputation and control over his texts both to the fame of his royal patrons and to the circulation of fame and rumour in the developing public sphere of early seventeenth-century England. The classical models are most immediately present in the early play Poetaster (1601). Jonson here stages a defence of satire against the charge of slander, and attempts to draw a clear line between the satirist's attacks

9

For a checklist of Jonson's references to classical fama see Wheeler 1938: 93-4.

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Fama in early modern England

on vice and the defamations of the slanderer.** Jonson embodies his own

anxiety to be recognized as a satirist working to the same socially regulatory ends as the law and the monarch in the character of Horace, the target of

various attacks in the play. 56 The two ancient Roman authors who largely determine the outlines of fama for the Western tradition, Virgil and Ovid,

are also characters in the play, and within the play they deliver translations of central statements of their own on the subject of fama." In the first scene Ovid enters composing the first major statement of his own confident ambition for fame, defying the attacks of Envy, Am. 1.15, which he reads out

in toto at the end of the scene. In the last act a demonstration is given of the efficacy of the sortes Vergilianaein matching canonical text to present reality, when Caesar Augustus selects at random, and Virgil recites, the narrative of the ‘wedding’ of Dido and Aeneas and the subsequent outbreak of Famaas-rumour/slander

(Poetaster v.ii.56-97 = Aen. 4.160—88). Ironically the

assertion of good fama-as-fame is given to the poet who falls foul of Caesar, Ovid, through an illicit sexual liaison with Julia (identified with Corinna) that is as ill-starred as the union of Aeneas and Dido, while the delineation

of bad fama-as-rumour is given to the poet who is of one mind with Caesar, and whose verse has the power to immortalize Rome and her monuments, Virgil. But this should not cause surprise. While Ovid’s control of his fame against the onslaught of envy is not totally secure, at least in his own lifetime, Virgil is fully able, in his own world of Rome, to control the monster Fama.™* He is interrupted in his recital by the entry (right on cue, just as Virgil starts a new sentence of the translation with ‘This monster —’) of the informer

Lupus, bearing a false accusation of libel against Horace, whose good name is successfully defended by his friend Virgil. The startling slide from a poetic world of personified abstractions to the real world of Virgil's Rome" is matched by the play’s transparent mirroring of contemporary events in the

un

B.

=

&

3

8

o

8

8

*»

524

So Kaplan 1997: Ch. 3. On the cultural authority of Horace for Jonson in Poetaster see Moul 2010: Ch. 4. For a discussion of Poetaster that touches on issues relating to fama see Hardie 2002a: 97-105, on which part of the present discussion is based. On envy in Poetaster see Meskill 2009: 94-109. For Meskill the play speaks directly to Jonson's own authorial anxieties, as (100) ‘a battle within the poetic imagination between the act of creation and the necessity to submit and expose this creation to the eyes and ears of the reader: The last full clause which Virgil is able to get out before Lupus' entry, 'As covetous she is of tales and lies, | As prodigal of truth‘, perhaps also functions as a parodic travesty of Jonson's own mixture of fact and fiction in Poetaster. one of Jonson's favourite Horatian tags is Ars poetica 338 ficta uoluptatis causa sint proxima ueris, applied to his own tempering of fiction with verisimilitude: it is quoted for example at The Staple of News ‘To the Readers’ (between Acts 11 and rir), and paraphrased ibid.: "The Prologue for the Court’ 9-14 ‘Wherein, although our title, sir, be News, | We yet adventure here to tell you none, | But show you common follies, and

Ben Jonson and fama

fictitious tale of ancient Rome: in the poetaster Crispinus and the ‘playdresser’ Demetrius are satirized John Marston and Thomas Dekker, in a salvo in Jonson’s ‘War of the Theatres.” Virgil is idealized as a prince of poets, hailed by Caesar himself as an alter ego, v.ii.1—5: See, here comes Virgil; we will rise and greet him. Welcome to Caesar, Virgil. Caesar and Virgil

Shall differ but in sound; to Caesar, Virgil Of his expressed greatness shall be made A second surname, and to Virgil, Caesar.

Political and poetic greatness, the fame of the ruler and the fame of the poet, are solidly united, in a way that Jonson could hardly dare to claim for himself. Horace, the figure for Jonson himself, is more exposed to the hazards of the world outside Caesar's court. He is preserved from detraction by Virgil, and graced with the company of Virgil and Caesar, and Horace himself claims, if not that he aspires to the greatness of Caesar, that his soul (v.i.90) ‘is as free as Caesar's, in its freedom from envy. Jonson here reveals his own wish to ally his poetic achievement and fame with the political and social élite of his own day. Yet the dichotomies of the play do not work in a rigidly exclusionist manner. If Poctaster is an important document in the history of a polarized reading of Virgil and Ovid,?! yet Ovid's opening assertion of his undying fame is not negated by his expulsion in the play from the circle of Caesar, since the fame of Ovid's poetry is a long-established and indelible fact by the time of Poetaster. Ovid's long-term victory over Envy is as secure as is Virgil’s judgement, within the confines of the play, on Horace’s behalf through the arraignment of Crispinus and Demetrius. Outside the confines of the play Jonson’s own attempt to defend his own poetic reputation, and sharply to distinguish between constructive and reformatory satire and defamatory slander, was less successful, and Jonson was impelled

to write an ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ to defend himself against attacks on Poetaster.?? A more radical dichotomization of Fama is at home in the binary structure of the Jonsonian antimasque and masque, of which Margaret TudeauClayton writes, in a study on the uses of Virgil in Jonson and Shakespeare:

so known, | That though they are not truths, th'innocent Muse | Hath made so like, as fant'sy could them state | Or poetry, without scandal, imitate.”

90 See Cain 1995: 30-6. 91 See Hardie 2002a: 104-5; Hardie 2007. — ?? Kaplan 1997: 84-91.

525

Fama in early modern England ‘the universe of the anti-masque is a universe of multiple, particular heterogeneous voices . . . opposite and opposed to the total, closed and monovocal world of the main masque, the world of truth and unity which the anti-

masque figures threaten to disturb and profane.” This is especially clear in an early masque, in which Jonson first used the term 'antimasque, and which set the pattern for the masque for some years. The Masque of Queenes (1609) stages the triumph of good fame, born of virtue and represented by eleven famous queens of legend and history, capped by the living Bel-Anna (Anne of Denmark), over the ‘opposites to good Fame’ (19),9* in the shape of twelve witches embodying twelve vices. The witches and their hell suddenly vanish at a blast of music, to be replaced by the House of Fame.” The text is accompanied by Jonson's own dense scholarly annotation, situating his own treatment of fama within classical (and post-classical, largely Latinate) tradition, and making a bid to establish the occasional script as a monument within that tradition, as if it too were an edition of a classical text with extensive commentary.?5 With regard to Fame herself, Jonson traces a path through the history of fama, alluding to the Virgilian personification,”

the Ovidian House of Fama,” and the Renaissance visual codification of

% Tudeau-Clayton 1998: 111. On images of Fame in Jonson's masques see Gilbert 1948: 99-103 s.vv. ‘Fame, Fama Bona, Euclia, Rumor. Moul forthcoming shows that Jonson's celebration in the masques of the glory and fame of the ruler and the poet, and the defeat of envy, is also shaped by Pindaric models. Meskill 2009: 153-77 reads The Masque of Quecnes as an exercise in Jonsonian monument-building.

£

Line numbers of the masques are as in Jonson 1925-52: vil. The idea of a House of Fame is probably indebted to the Palace of Fame in Giulio Parigi's intermedio for a staging of Buonarotti's ‘Giudizio di Paride' in the Florentine celebration of the wedding of Cosimo de’ Medici and Maria Archduchess of Austria the year before (1608): see Welsford 1927: 186-8. Inigo Jones copied Parigi's design more closely in the Palace of Fame in Bri Triumphans (1638, produced with Davenant): Welsford 1927: 233-5. On the design for the House of Fame in The Masque of Queenes see Orgel and Strong 1973: 1.130. % On Jonson's use of his authorities in The Masque of Queenes see Smialkowska 2002. On Jonson's provision of his published masques with learned references as supplement to and completion of the performance see Loewenstein 2002: 167-70; 183 n. 102 on the classicizing page effects of Jonson's published plays. In his learned iconography Jonson will have found a fit

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audience in James I, who as a young man had produced his own version of Virgilian Fara in

his poem ‘The Lepanto': 321-8 (Craigie 1955: 218) ‘The featherd fame of wondrous speed | That doth delite to flee | On tops of houses prattling all | That she can heare or see, | Part true, part false: this monster strange | Among the Turkes did tell, | that diuers Christian Princes joined, | Resolved with them to mell.'

9? 453-4 ‘for her state, it was as Virgil describes her, at the full, her feete on the Ground, and her head in the Cloudes. 384-5 ‘whose glorious house you see | Built all of sounding brass’: cf. Met. 12.46 tota est ex aere sonantia 391-3 ‘And hath, about her vaulted Palace, hurled | All rumours, and reports, or true

or vain, | What utmost lands or deepest seas contain’: cf. Met. 12.54-5 mixtaque cum ueris

Ben Jonson and fama

‘Fama bona, as she is describ'd in Iconolog. di Cesare Ripa.” The vernacular tradition is also incorporated: Jonson tells the reader that in his design for

the House of Fame Inigo Jones (692-3) 'profest to follow that noble description, made by Chaucer, of the like place’. As in Chaucer's House of Fame the poets are present: 683-6 ‘For the lower columns, he [Inigo Jones] chose the statues of the most excellent poets, as Homer, Virgil, Lucan, &c. as being the substantial supporters of Fame.’ In the verses uttered by Perseus, the embodiment of Heroic Virtue, these supporters are described as (386-9) ‘Men-making poets, and those well made men, | Whose strife it was, to have

the happiest pen | Renown them to an after-life, and not | With pride to scorn the Muse, and die, forgot’. In this introduction of a note of ‘strife’ into the House

of a Fame

whose

function is through

(435) ‘her loudest

trumpet [to] blaze your [James’] peace’, after the rout of the witches who (144) ‘hate to see these fruits of a soft peace’, and desire to (147-8) “Mix

hell with heaven; and make nature fight | Within her self; Jonson perhaps remembers the close relationship between Virgil’s Fama and Homer’s Eris (see Ch. 3 p. 87), and perhaps even the Hesiodic good Eris that impels poet to compete with poet (see Ch. 2 p. 56). Jonson brings the tradition bang up to date in a moment of humour, when Perseus/Heroic Virtue explains how Bel-Anna comes to sit at the top of the pyramid of queens in the House of Fame, 410-18: These, in their lives, as fortunes, crowned the choice

410

Of womankind, and ’gainst all opposite voice Made good to time, had, after death, the claim

To live eternized in the House of Fame. Where hourly hearing (as what there is old?) The glories of Bel-Anna so well told,

415

Queen of the Ocean; how that she alone Possessed all virtues, for which one by one

They were so famed...

The House of Fame is the locus for eternal memorialization, but it is also the receiving-house for ‘news’ (‘what there is old?’). But the potentially dangerous volatility and transience of news is here safely anchored in the instant absorption of the living queen into the fabric of the House of Fame, or rather in her own Oceanic ability to sum up the virtues eternally made famous in the House. Bel-Anna reflects the glory of her husband the king; passim commenta uagantur | milia Rumorum, 62-3 ipsa, quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur | et tellure, uidet totumque inquirit in orbem. ?9 448: on Ripa's Fama B(u)ona see Ch. 16 p. 622.

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Fama in early modern England in her summative role within the House of Fame she also reflects Jonson's own pretensions to sum up and make newly contemporary the traditions of Fame. The persons of the witches are modelled on a variety of ancient and early modern sources. Lucan’s Erictho is the dominant ancient source, with repeated references to Horace’s witches, Canidia and Sagana. Although on

their first appearance they seem close sisters of the witches of Macbeth, Jonson's choice of witches as opposites to Fame and Glory is perhaps in part determined by the close affinities between Canidia and Erictho and the Virgilian Fama (see Ch. 10 pp. 388, 392). The Horatian and Lucanian witches are also versions of Furies, and Virgil’s Fury Allecto is herself closely related to Fama (see Ch. 3 pp. 101-2). As authority for the hellish catalogue of personifications embodied by the witches Jonson appeals to the person-

ifications of evil assembled by Allecto, ‘envious of the times, in the Council of Furies in Claudian’s In Rufinum 1.28-38.' But three of Jonson's twelve, Credulity, Falsehood and Murmur, find exact or close equivalents in the

Ovidian House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12.9! Many of the dichotomies that structure Virgil's Fama are replicated by Jonson. The witches are set in a flaming and smoking hell (24—6), which vanishes suddenly to be replaced by the heavenly House of Fame, (363) 'circled with all store of light; and from which descends a son of Jupiter, Perseus, (365) ‘expressing heroicall, and masculine Virtue: This masculine

virtue is opposed to the hellish femininity of the witches, and the female personification of Fame acknowledges her place within a patriarchal hierarchy through her dependence on (458-9) 'Virtue, my father and my honour; thou | That mad'st me good as great: However, the gendering of male virtue

opposed to female vice is complicated by the fact that the representatives of Fame, the twelve masquers, are twelve queens (362-3) ‘sitting upon a throne triumphal, erected in form of a Pyramid, at whose head sits BelAnna, James' Queen Anne of Denmark. The list of the other eleven opens

with (399) 'Penthesilea, the brave Amazon, and includes a number of other Amazonian, warlike queens, such as Virgil's Camilla and Boadicea, women

10 The full list of the chain of personifications brought on by the chief witch, the ‘Dame’, each of which is generated by the one before, is: Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, Falschood, Murmur, Malice, Impudence, Slander, Execration, Bitterness, Rage, Mischief. Claudian's list is Discordia, Fames, Senectus, Morbus, Liuor, Luctus, Timor, Audacia, Luxus, Egestas, Auaritia,

Curae. The allusion to Claudian's In Rufinum hints at the vestigial presence of an epic plot within the masque, the ultimately Virgilian plot of the unleashing of disorder followed by the reimposition of order. V0 12.49 paruae murmura uocis, 59 Credulitas, temerarius Error, 61 dubioque auctore Susurri.

Ben Jonson and fama

of distinctly Fame is the but reflected his policy of

masculine qualities.!?? This jars slightly, since, just as female obedient daughter of male Virtue, the glory of Bel-Anna is light from the famous virtues of the king, here praised for peace (425-35). The politics and gendering of The Masque of

Queenes have consequently been the subject of debate, centring on the question of the degree of Anne of Denmark’s independence from her husband in determining the agenda of the court masques.!?? Other dichotomies are more clear-cut. The witches deal in Ignorance and Falsehood (two of the vices which they embody). The truthfulness of Fame is asserted through a correction of the Ovidian model for the House of Fame: while, as in Ovid's House, in Jonson's (392) ‘All rumours and reports, or true or vain’ are hurled about, Fame (394) ‘only hangs great actions on her file’, preserving true reports of actual deeds worthy of commemoration. The witches are characterized by mutability and multiplicity, while Fame is characterized by constancy and singleness. Jonson describes the antimasque of witches as (20-1) ‘a spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicity of

gesture’. At the climax of their incantations (344-6) ‘they fell into a magical dance, full of preposterous change and gesticulation. Whereupon, (354-6) ‘on the sudden was heard a sound of loud music, as if many instruments had made one blast’, at which the witches suddenly disappear: ‘many’ sounding as ‘one’, the cue for the appearance of the House of Fame, where immutability reigns: Perseus announces, (380-3) ‘I was her [Fame's| parent, and I am her strength, | Heroic virtue sinks not under length | Of years or ages; but is still the same | While he preserves as when he got good fame. In his House of Fame Jonson even negates one of the constant features of good, as well as bad, Fama, her propensity to grow and increase in size: 433-5 ‘Of [James] Fame's house in every part doth ring | For every virtue, but can give no increase, | Not, though her loudest trumpet blaze your peace.’ There is an inherent tension in the institution of the masque between the ephemerality of the performance and the permanence invoked for the objects of praise in the triumphal spectacle. Through publication Jonson sought both to give permanence to the text, at least, of a masque, if not to

102 See McDermott 2007: 45-6. 10 For a summary of the issues see McDermott 2007: 15-17. For an attempt to reconcile the

warlikeness of the queens in the House of Fame with James’ ideology of peace see Holbrook 1998.

1! Qn Jonson's investment in sameness see Fish 1984. A contrast between the changing news of the day and the poet's own constancy is central to ‘An epistle answering to one that asked to be sealed of the tribe of Ben’: Muggli 1992: 329.

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Inigo Jones’ visual props (except through the poet’s own verbal description

of these), and to defend it against misinterpretation. The text of The Masque of Queenesends with the cast-list of the twelve royal and noble lady masquers,

for ‘To conclude which, I know no worthier way of epilogue, than the celebration of who were the celebrators. Publication is also Jonson’s bid for his own lasting fame. Jonson opens his comments on The Masque of Blacknesse with the statement that ‘the honour and splendour of these spectacles was such in the performance, as could those hours have lasted, this of mine, now, had been a most unprofitable work. He claims that it is in duty to the king that ‘I add this later hand, to redeem them as well from ignorance, as envy, two common evils, the one of censure, the other

of oblivion’! But in so doing Jonson also attempts to redeem himself from censure and oblivion, and to protect himself from the onslaught of the witches of The Masque of Queenes, the first of whom is (117) ‘stupid Ignorance’, and who collectively wish to ‘Show ourselves truly envious’

(135),106 In an ode ‘To himself ("Where dost thou careless lie?’) Jonson exploits an Ovidian opposition to define his own pursuit of poetic fame against hostile

counter-voices, 7-12:'” Are all the Aonian springs Dried up? Lyes Thespia waste? Doth Clarius’ harp want strings, That not a nymph now sings? Or droop they as disgraced

To see their seats and bowers by chattering pies defaced? The haunts of the Muses, which is where Jonson should be active, are detaced by chattering magpies, an allusion to the Ovidian contest between the Muses and the Pierides, ‘counter-Muses, in Metarnorphoses 5. That contest is told by the Muses to Minerva when the latter comes to Mount Helicon to visit the newly opened fount of Hippocrene, the source of poetic fama.!9 The victory ina song-contest of the Muses over the Pierides is a foundational

act in the history of the regulation of poetic fama, an act that has theological and political, as well as aesthetic, implications (the Pierides sing of 105 Meskill 2009: 159 stresses the shared struggle of poet and king against the forces of envy, the flipside of the Virgilian pursuit of fame and glory shared by poeta and princeps. 105 Fame appears in the final scene of Chloridia, Jonson's last masque, accompanied by the persons of Poesy, History, Architecture and Sculpture. Graziani 1958 suggests that this perhaps functions as Jonson's valedictory celebration of the art-form of the masque. 17 Discussed briefly at Meskill 2009: 79. ' See Hardie 2002a: 237-8.

Ben Jonson and fama

the worsting of the Olympian gods by the earthborn Giants; gigantomachy with its more usual victory of the gods is a common political allegory). As punishment for their unwillingness to accept their defeat gracefully, the Pierides are transformed into magpies, chattering gossips, the facundia of whose dehumanized voices no longer presents a serious threat to the Muses as guardians of fama: Met. 5.677-8 nunc quoque in alitibus facundia prisca

remansit | raucaque garrulitas studiumque immane loquendi ‘to this day the birds retain their former fluency, their harsh garrulity, and their boundless love of talking’. Fame appears in two other masques in which Jonson sorts out good and bad producers of information, good and bad poets, and in which good fame is firmly associated with the virtue and perfection of the court. In Time Vindicated to Himselfe and to his Honors (1623) Fame enters followed by ‘the Curious, the covering label for Ears, Eyes and Nose, the body parts of the Fama of Virgilian tradition (minus the tongues and mouths of Virgil’s monster, and plus a nose) now fully detachable from the body of Fama herself.!® Fame’s first words are ‘Give ear, the worthy, hear what Time proclaims.’ To which the reply from her threefold audience is, ‘Is’t worth our ears/eyes/ noses?’ (1-2). Fame and her body parts have different standards of worth: that by which the latter judge the worth of a piece of news makes them less than worthy recipients of what Fame has to tell. Just before the Curious are driven away in the second antimasque, Ears admit, (259) "We only hunt

for novelty, not truth’, avid seekers after news and retailers of gossip. They long to hear of things unlawful, unreasonable, impossible, uncivil (244-6), (233) ‘A Babel of wild humours, and in fact they can never agree among themselves what they want to listen to. The grotesque reports which they crave are (251) ‘mere Monsters, says Fame, so distancing her own person

from Virgil's denotation of Faria as a monstrum (Aen. 4.181). After they disappear, Fame comments, (266—7) ‘The curious are ill-natur'd, and like flies, | Seek Time's corrupted parts to blow upon.'!!? Not only do they look for corrupted things to lay their eggs on (‘blow’), they spawn misshapen

offspring in the form of distortion and misunderstanding: at the beginning

19 The components for the allegorical body of Virgilian Fama are also visible in the masque Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611): 226-33 ‘But he [King James] the wonder is of tongues, of ears, of eyes. | Who hath not heard, who hath not seen, | Who hath not sung his name? | The soul who hath not, hath not been; | But is the very same | With buried sloth, and knows not 110

fame, | Which doth him best comprise: | For he the wonder is of tongues, of ears, of eyes.’ Cf. Plaut. Stich. 208 nam curiosus nemo est quin sit maliuolus. On the early modern history of curiosity see Kenny 2004, with Index s.vv. ‘gossip and gossips, ‘novelty. For (bad) fame as like flies cf. Milton, Quint. Nov. 178-9: see Ch. 11 p. 435.

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Fame tells Nose that they smell out (13) ‘More than you understand, and Eyes admit, (18) “We may spy out that which you never meant.’ They are an unworthy audience, both for Fame and for the poet of the masque, and they are explicitly compared to (264) ‘spectators’. Before we discover what the true news is that Fame brings from Time (or Saturn), there enters a character who is in a false relation to both Time

and Fame, Chrono-Mastix, ‘Scourge of Time [or of the Time]; the satirist George Wither, characterized as a self-serving courtier of Fame through his rhymes. Chrono-Mastix himself confesses that (92-5) ‘I revel so in rhyme, |... not for hope I have the Time | Will grow the better by it. To serve Fame | Is all my end, and get my self a name.’ He is hypocritical in his profession to be the scourge of vices, and is rejected by Fame as more truly a servant of Infamy (99-100). After the antimasque, Fame proceeds on her way to find her, and the poet’s, worthy audience in the person of the king, to whom she proclaims that Time/Saturn, at the suit of Venus, has promised to free (281) ‘certain glories of the Time obscured’, young men whom Hecate/Diana has kept in the darkness away from the revels of court, in the more serious business of hunting. They will be released into the light ‘as being fitter to adorn the age, | By you restored on earth, most like his own’

(285-6).

Fame is the

mouthpiece which announces the timely coming into light of glories fitting for James’ new Golden Age of Saturn, making of this time a worthy subject of the panegyric of Jonsonian masque rather than of the lash of Wither’s insincere satire. In a final adjustment of the relations between Fame and Time, Diana and her follower Hippolytus correct Venus’ misapprehension of Diana’s purpose in calling the young men to her service as hunters, denying that (487-90) ‘she had purpose to defraud | The Time of any glories that were his; | To do Time honour rather, and applaud | His worth, hath been her study’. Fame herself has been beforehand in announcing that

Hecate/Diana has kept obscured certain glories of the Time, as Hippolytus puts it, (470-3) ‘The injury it self will right, | Which only Fame hath made a crime. | For Time is wise, | And hath his ears as perfect as his eyes.’ Time will tell, and tell it right, because his hearing and vision are even better than the ears and eyes of (good) Fame. The king himself is (375) 'the Lord of

Time; and it is the royal prerogative to get things right about both Time and Fame, to be the source of true Fame through his virtue. At the end Saturn and Venus - and the poet - fully understand the purpose of Diana, and allow the young men to return to being hunters, but in a form of hunting which serves the king's policy of peace, and which consists in killing vices, to ‘make the Gods true feasts, a pious hunting down of vice in contrast to

Ben Jonson and fama

Chrono-Mastix’ self-serving practice of censure in the pursuit of a personal

fame.!!! This purification of Fame is also enacted in the earlier Newes from the New World Discover'd in the Moone (1620). This masque too is framed by two contrasting kinds of information, news and fame. At the beginning two 'Heralds of the Muses' announce 'News, news, news.' 'Bold and brave news!’ ‘New as the night they are born in.’ ‘Or the fant'sy that begot em.’ [n a Lucianic fantasy the news they bring has been brought down from the moon by a poet restless after his journey on foot to Edinburgh (a reference to Jonson's 1618 walking trip to Scotland) and who has now flown up to the moon on the wings of the Muse. The masque ends with the song of "bright Fame' (one ofthe masquers, the others being Truth ( Prince Charles), Knowledge and Harmony): 367-71 'Got up into the sky, | thus high, | Upon my better wing, | to sing | The knowing King. The Heralds provide the transition between the world of fantastic news brought down to earth, and the unchanging and truthful fame of the king ascending to heaven, and (372-3) ‘mak[ing] the music here, | With yours on earth the same’. Before the final songs and dances of the main masque the Heralds turn to the king and tell him that hitherto they have (299-303) ‘adventured to tell your

Majesty no news; for hitherto we have moved rather to your delight than your belief. But now be pleased to expect a more noble discovery worthy of your ear, as the object will be of your eye; announcing the descent of

the four masquers, to celebrate the unchanging and true reality of the royal presence. What they reported previously was newsworthy only as conducive to delight, not as worthy of belief as being real, true news. In terms of one of Jonson's favourite Horatian lines (Ars poetica 338), these things are ficta uoluptatis causa, but not proxima ueris.

But this is less than the whole truth. News from the moon in

itself is

moonshine, but much of the content of this news overlaps with what may be found on earth, so foreshadowing, imperfectly, the way in which at the end Fame makes the music of earth and of heaven the same (without residue). The moon is found to be a world that is a fantastic double of our world, with (among other things) variety of nations, cities, fairs and markets, places of meeting like Hyde Park in London, spas, and so on - in other words, the locales for the generation of ephemeral news. The Heralds’ opening cry of ‘News, news’ is eagerly received by representatives of the news trade in Jonson's own society, a Printer, a Chronicler, and a Factor (one who collects news and writes and distributes newsletters). Jonson satirizes the IN See Furniss 1958: 111-13.

533

534

Fama in early modern England

casual relationship with the truth entertained by these men: the Printer cares only for good copy that will sell, regardless of whether it be true or false; the Factor at first tries to distinguish his reports from unbelievable stories about monstrous serpents and witches, but quickly assents to the Printer’s retort that the gossipy news exchanged in St Paul’s is no more reliable than the lies fabricated by the Printer for the pleasure of the common people. Only the Chronicler is a stickler for the precise truth of things, but admits that he is constantly cheated with false relations, and finds it (77-8) ‘a far harder

thing to correct my book, than collect it. Through his Heralds, the poet as inventor of fantasies plays with the agents of the news trade, revealing a commonality of interest in the invention and propagation of entertaining stories. But unlike the Printer, Chronicler and Factor, trapped in a sublunary world of unreliable and untrue, or at best partly true, jangling, and shifting news, where information is exchanged for money through the sale of news, the poet, with his Heralds, is able to enter the presence of the king and reascend to a sky where Truth and Knowledge are harmoniously expressed in the song of Fame.'!* The Factor in News from the New Worlde (45-7) ‘hope[s] to erect a Staple for news ere long, whither all shall be brought, and thence again vented under the name of Staple-news’. This is the germ of The Staple of News (1626), with which Jonson returned to the public stage after an absence of

nine years, and a play that places at its centre the topic of news, which had

been a recurrent concern of Jonson in a variety of works." Outside the closed circle of the court the fantasies of controlling an absolute and pure truth that are given verbal and visual expression in the masque are powerless, in the face of a marketplace driven by the popular demand for ‘news’ and by the power of money. The Staple is a complex and prescient exploration of the emergent news trade of the 1620s (stimulated largely by the public hunger for reportage of the Thirty Years War which broke out in 1618),'""

at a time of the emergence of a more fully developed public sphere." The Staple combines the manner of Jonson's realist comedy, rooted in the streets of London, with the allegory of morality play and masque, but the latter is not strong enough to contain the unruly and disobedient forces of the

112

113

!^

See Marcus 2000: 38-9 on these contrasts, and in general on the contrast in the later masques

between ‘a petty, commercialized, fragmented, and frequently war-mongering mini-culture in the antimasques with vast and peaceful evocations of royal power in the main masque. See Muggli 1992. Other discussions of The Staple of News relevant to my themes include Levin 1965; Shargel 2005; Meskill 2009: 190 n. 1 for further bibliography on The Staple of News and the seventeenth-century news trade. See Muggli 1992: 330-9; Sanders 1998; Wayne 1999, 115 See Norbrook 199-1.

Ben Jonson and fama

former. The main plot is that of a prodigal play, the wooing of Lady Pecunia by Pennyboy Junior, who has just come into his majority and (as he thinks) his inheritance, in competition with the attempt of Cymbal (‘sounding brass’) to draw Pecunia into the Staple of News, a vivid dramatization of

the commodification of news as an item for sale. At the point that Pecunia is rescued from the Staple, so depriving the office of its monetary lifeblood, the Staple shatters into pieces, and its ‘emissaries’ (reporters) and officers turn into the ‘vapour’ and ‘air’ that in a sense they always were (v.i.39—50), a disappearing trick like that which makes the witches and their hell vanish in The Masque of Queenes. But the Staple is not replaced with some embodiment of Truth and Good Fame. The resolution of the play works at the level of the morality, as through the offices of Pennyboy Junior’s father, who was not dead but had been watching all along in disguise, the prodigal, Pennyboy Junior, and the miserly usurer, Pennyboy Senior, are taught the error of their ways, and are shown how to enjoy Pecunia according to a golden mean. Junior himself is redeemed, one assumes, from being the object of ill-report, mala fama, after he realizes his folly and recognizes that he has ‘fall’n under the ears and eyes | And tongues of all, the fable o' the time,'!* | Matter of scorn and mark of reprehension’ (v.i.11—13). But the poet hardly wins the contest to assert the worth of his verbal art, his own fame, against the non-élite circulation and sale of news. That unresolved contest is dramatized in the Intermeans after each of the first three acts, in which the action of the play is criticized and maliciously misinterpreted by four female gossips, whose line of business is closely akin to that of the Staple of News, Mirth, Tattle, Expectation and Censure.''” In these gossips Jonson satirizes his own anxiety about the reception of his play. In the printed text Jonson unusually places a notice ‘To the Readers’ between Acts 11 and 111, and after the second of the three intermeans, in which he protests that in the following act ‘the allegory and purpose of the author hath hitherto been wholly mistaken, and so sinister an interpretation been made, as if the souls of most of the spectators had lived in the eyes and ears of these ridiculous gossips that tattle between the Acts.’ But the gossips will continue to tattle in the third intermean,

116

Pecunia herselfis called ‘The talk o' the time’ by Pennyboy Canter (1.vi.63). Earlier Junior had been seduced with the promise that to snatch Pecunia from her other suitors would be (1.v1.86-7) ‘A work of fame -' ‘Of honour -' ‘Celebration —’ “Worthy your name’; and he himself professes an itch (1.vi.93) "To do some work, and worthy of a chronicle: He now

realizes that this was a delusive promise of fame and honour. 117 On the homologies between gossip and the circulation of printed pamphlets in early modern England see Halasz 1997: 145-54.

535

536

Fama in early modern England

and in subsequent performances and readings of the play. The poet cannot decisively separate his own good fame from the power of rumour and gossip, as he does in the masques. The Staple of News is the very newest thing in the history of fame (1.11.24 ‘a brave young office’), but Jonson takes care to insert it within the longer history. In the major ‘news’ scene (111.ii), in which customers come to buy pieces of news from the Staple, the Register of the Office tells Pennyboy Junior that (115-19) "Tis the house of fame, sir, | Where both the curious and the negligent, | The scrupulous and careless, wild and staid, | The idle

and laborious: all do meet | To taste the cornucopiae of her rumours...’ "House of fame' signals that this place is in the line of descent from the

Chaucerian and Ovidian Houses of Fame." Like the Ovidian

House, the Staple's stocks combine

mixta cum

ueris

commenta (worryingly close, perhaps, to the Horatian—Jonsonian ideal for poetry). It is not so much untruth as the pretension to power and currency, together with the ambition to harness the power of money, that makes the Staple a dangerous place from the point of view of a poet concerned for his position as an authority for his society." The consumers who flock to sample the titbits that pour from the Staple's horns of plenty may be indifferently ‘curious and negligent...scrupulous and careless, etc., but the Staple itself, unlike the Ovidian

House

of Fame

(see Ch. 5

pp. 159—63), has an authoritarian and hierarchical structure. The name ‘Staple’ implies a privileged monopoly of news, on the model of a town appointed to be the exclusive market for a class of goods. News coming into the Staple will be examined and registered, and ‘issued under the seal of 118 For a later example of the updating of traditional images of fama in line with a modern news culture cf. Samuel Butler’s version of Fama, in Hudibras Part 11 (1664) 1.45—80: ‘There is a tall long-sided Dame, | (But wondrous light) ycleped Fame, | That like a thin Camelion Bourds | Her selfon Air, and eats her words: | Upon her shoulders wings she wears, | Like Hanging-sleeves, lin'd through with Ears, | And Eies, and Tongues, as Poets list, | Made good by deep Mythologist. | With these, she through the Welkin flies, | And sometimes carries Truth, oft Lies; | With Letters hung like Eastern Pidgeons; | And Mercuries of farthest Regions;

| Diurnals writ for Regulation | Of Lying, to inform the Nation: | And by their publick use to bring down | The rate of Whetstones in the Kingdom. | About her neck a Pacquet-Male, | Fraught with Advice, some fresh, some stale, | Of Men that walk'd when they were dead, | And Cows of Monsters brought to bed: | Of Hailstones big as Pullets Eggs, | And Puppies whelp'd with twice two legs: | A Blazing-Star seen in the West, | By six or seven Men at least. | Two Trumpets she does sound at once, | But both of clean contrary tones. | But whether both with

the same Wind, | Or one before, and one behind, | We know not; only this can tell, | Th' one sounds vilely, th' other well. | And therefore vulgar Authors name | Th' one good, th' other

Evil Fame. | This tatling Gossip knew too well, | What mischief Hudibras the spightful tidings bears, | Of all, to th' unkind Widows Ears." 119 See in particular McKenzie 1973, a seminal discussion.

befel; | And straight

George Chapman and the refining of fama

the Office, | As Staple News, no other news being current’ (1.1.35—6). The Staple has a Master, Cymbal, with an Examiner, Register, and two clerks, all

in-house. The reporting staff consists of four 'emissaries' (itself a ‘fine new word, 1.11.48), who cover the four cardinal quarters, an orbis in urbe, the four

quarters being the principal places in London for the gathering and exchange of gossip and news: the Court, St Paul's Cathedral, the Royal Exchange and Westminster Hall. The Staple itself is the product of Jonson's comic fantasy, and what the poet has made he can unmake through its sudden explosion and dissolution. But outside the world of the play itself this is wishful thinking, for the social and economic realities out of which the Staple has been concocted cannot be consigned to non-existence with a wave of the poet's wand.

George Chapman and the refining of fama? An extreme example of an anxious author's attempt to sift the good aspects of fama from the bad is found in the House of Fame that George Chapman constructs as the setting for Eugenia, or True Nobilities Trance for [sic] Death of the Most Religiously Noble William Lord Russell (1614), a funeral poem which was written to angle for the patronage of the deceased Lord Russell's son, Francis. Eugenia, the personification of the true nobility of families ennobled (22-3) ‘for effects of Pietie, | Vertue and valour’, as opposed to those who have ‘purchased name’ (presumably an allusion to the sale of titles under James I), has fled, like Justice at the end of the Golden Age, from the base earth to her sister Fame, ‘Of whose most auncient house, the brasen frame | In middst of all the vniuerse doth shine, | Twixt Earth, the Seas, and all those tracts diuine, | That are the Confines of the triple world’ (6-9). This

is a near-translation of the opening lines of Ovid’s House of Fama (Met. 12.39—40). This too is a place of perfect hearing and seeing: all sounds on earth are received in the House, and from it all men's acts are seen. Unlike the Ovidian House

of Fama, this House

is a records office, as well as an

echo-chamber and panopticon (in Ovidian terms it is a cross between the House

of Fama and the House

Office (tabularia) in Met.

of the Parcae, ‘Fates’, or Jupiter's Records

15.808—15: see Ch. 5 p. 166). Only the names

of truly noble families are inscribed in Chapman's House of Fame; those of no true worth (27-8) ‘vanish like the seas inflated waues, | Each chase

out other, and their fome's their graues. Eugenia picks out an inscription 120 Chapman is cited from Chapman 1962.

537

538

Fama in early modern England

in gold, recording the ‘Russelides’ (‘sons of Russell’). At this point Eugenia is followed by the flight from earth of the Muses (‘The Heraulds, and the Registers of fame’), the Graces, the Virtues and Religion, all of whom

take up

residence in the House of Fame. Following a huge storm, the news reaches the House of the death of Lord Russell, and Eugenia falls into a trance. The rest of the poem consists of three ‘Vigils’ on the life and death of its subject, in which a recurrent theme is the contrast between the peaceful and contemplative nights spent by the residents in the House of Fame, and the unruly sounds of the daytime world below, (454) ‘Mens rude Din’, ‘the

Babell of confused sounds, | (The clamorous game-giuen world)’ with their inflamed ‘mouthlike wounds’ (832—3).'*! An apocalyptic vision of the noisy turmoil of the world below concludes the first Vigil, 435-50: As Fame addrest to this; The morning came

435

And burn’d vp all things sacred, with her flame. When now some Night-birds of the day began To call, and crie, and gibber, Man to Man;

Swolne fordges puft abroad their windie Ire, Aire, Earth, and water turnd, and all to Fire;

440

And in their strife for Chymicall euents Made transmutation of the Elements. They blew, and Hammers beat, and euery noise Was emptying tumult, out of men, and boies. Bursting the aire with it; and deafning Th’ Eare:

445

The black fumes of whose breaths did all besmeare And choake the Muses, and such rude Clouds reare, As all the World, a Dyers furnace were.

Gainst which, Fames Guests, their dores & windows closde; As their poore labours were in earth opposde.

450

Fame has a place of light that transcends the alternation of day and night on earth, 492-8: And now was Fame, aduanc’t past sight vpon A hill of brasse, that farre the sunne outshone;

Day, and night shining; neuer going downe: Her browes encompast, with a triple crowne: Each chac’t with Iewels, vallewd past mens liues. Her trumpet then she sounded, that reuiues

Men long since buried...

121

For wounds as mouths see above p. 505.

George Chapman and the refining of fama

The poem concludes with a hymn in honour of the deceased man: ‘which to the Trumpe of Fame, | Poore Poesie sung; Her euery other (Th’ ingenuous Muses) ringing out, the Chore; | Fame sounded; sung the part before’. At the end Eugenia, followed by the Muses,

1050-3 dame | Poesie, Virtues

and Graces, descends to earth to dwell with Lord Russell's son, (11747) 'being assur'd with al | That no effect did memorably fall, | From his

Renown'd Example, but was found | In his true Sonne, and would in him resound’ The eugenic principle is realized in the son, and Eugenia's sojourn with Fame leads to the renewal of a Golden Age. For a plot based on a refinement of Fame followed by the return of a Golden Age one might compare Ben Jonsons masque Time Vindicated. There is a masque-like quality in the schematic oppositions and personifications of Chapman's Eugenia, and the poem was written the year after

Chapman's first masque, The Merorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, with a philosophical allegory involving Honour, Law and Fame, and the staging included a Temple of Honour designed by Inigo Jones. The contrasts of Eugenia are also found in another work of 1614 by Chapman, Andromeda liberata, written to celebrate the wedding of the Earl of Somerset and Frances Howard, previously the wife of the Earl of Essex. The

sea-monster

that comes

for Andromeda

is an allegory of (80)

‘the

rauenous Multitude’. But Chapman's attempt to align himself with a Perseus, the Earl of Somerset, triumphant over the monstrous mob backfired when the allegorical meaning of the poem was misunderstood or deliberately misread. The rock to which Andromeda is bound was misconstrued by hostile readers as an allusion to Essex. Chapman defends himself in a prose Justification, in which he inveighs further against, 64-94: the base, ignoble, barbarous, giddie multitude; The Monster with many heads. . . cui lumen ademptum; without an Eye; or, at most, seeing all by one sight . .. giuing vp their vnderstandings to their affections, and taking vp their affections on other men’s credits... but (like curres) alwaies barking at all they know not... Euermore baying lowdest at the most eminent Reputations, and with whom (as in the kingdom of Frogges) the most lowd Crier, is the loftiest Ruler... And then how may my poore endeauours, in dutieto Truth, and my most deare Conscience (for Reputation, since

it stands, for the most part on beasts feete, and Deserts hand is nothing to warrant it, let it goe with the beastly) reforme or escape their vnrelenting detractions? The Loues of the right vertuous and truly noble, | have euer as much esteemed, as despised the rest. The poet himself has now become the target ofthe envious detraction of the vulgar crowd, manifested in the particularly virulent form of a perverted

539

540

Fama in early modern England

reception of the poet's own words, whereby (127-30) “a malicious reader by straining the Allegorie past his intentionall limits, may make it giue blood, where it yeeldes naturally milke, and ouercurious wits may discouer a sting in a flie’. The Justification is followed by a verse Dialogus, in which Chapman conducts apologia and literary criticism through a dialogue between Pheme, ‘Rumour’, and Theodines, the divinely inspired poet Chapman himself, in yet another attempt to put down the monster.

Thomas Scot’s ‘House of Fame’! Another example of political and epistemological disorder in a House of Fame set to rights by virtuous endeavour is found in Thomas Scot's “House of Fame’. This is a House, or Court, of Fame very aware of its place in a tradition, 39—54: Fame that in Homers time a vagrant was, Without a house and home, did after passe

40

In stately structures all the mixed race Of Semideities, and euery place Built her a Court, assisted by the Rages Of sundry Poets in succeeding ages. For euery one did something adde, to frame

45

More space and roome for their friends narrow fame. Which as they purchast, still to her they gaue And that's the cause, themselues so little haue. This Fame hath now her house glazde all with eies,

The rafts, beames, balkes, nerues, sinewes, arteries;

50

The dores wide open, eares; hangd round about With nimble tongues, and couerd so without.

All things are seene and heard the wide world ore Which touch that place, and farthest off the more.

The House of Fame has undergone that same addition of novelty to the received tradition that Ovid describes as the mode of operation of Fama in the world of words at large: Met. 12.58 auditis aliquid nouus adicit auctor ‘each new authority adds something to what he has heard’. A particular novelty is the transference to the House of Fame of the eyes, ears and tongues that are normally parts of the body of Fama. Scot carefully distinguishes 122

In The Second Part of Philomythie, or Philomythologies, Containing Certaine Tales of True Libertie, False Friendship, Power United, Faction and Ambition (London

1622).

Thomas Scot's ‘House of Fame’

between the two pairs of sisters who live in the House: the elder pair are True Fame and Good Fame, the younger False and Bad Fame, the latter dwelling in the lowest and darkest rooms: 63-5 “There keepe they court, where Scandals, Libels, Lies, | Rumors, Reports, Suspicions, Calumnies, | Are favourites and governors of state.’ A Knight arrives at the Court and on enquiring (78-9) ‘Whose Court it was, could no waies find it out. | For contradictions crosse each other so’. It turns out that the younger sisters have usurped the rule of the older, (87-8) “Being eldest borne, to Titan

and the Earth, | Before the Gyants war’, and so innocent of the war on the gods, in another innovation on the Virgilian tradition. In order to repair the broken-down ‘stayres of fame’, the Knight goes to a wood to cut timber to make (162-3) ‘a straight clowd climing stayer | To mount Fames house’. Using this as a scaling ladder, he attacks the House and kills False Fame and Bad Fame. Given back (217) ‘the freedome of their tongues’, True Fame and Good Fame

thank the Knight, (219-23) ‘and him they crowne

| The

Soueraigne of glory and renowne. | Which stile, Fames trumpetters the foure winds blow | Through th’earths foure quarters, that the world may know | Th’extent of vertuous actions.’

541

14

Fama in Milton: Paradise Lost and

Samson Agonistes

For Milton fame is a highly energized substance.' The energy derives both from a particularly acute form of the Renaissance poet’s desire for literary immortality, and from the need felt to demarcate a transcendental Christian brand of fame and glory from its earthly shadows; further fuel is added by an inability or unwillingness to keep entirely separate what might be labelled the literary and the theological kinds of fame. The 1645 Poems, Milton’s first

major exercise in poetic self-advertisement, include two pastoral laments, Lycidas and the Epitaphium Damonis, concluding respectively the English and the Latin halves of the volume, each of which interweaves reflections

on Milton’s own ambitions for poetic fame with the heavenly glorification of the dead man who is lamented.” Lycidas is the source of two of the most famous English quotations on ‘fame’: ‘Fame is the spur’ (70), and “That last infirmity of noble mind’ (71).* The 1645 volume parades a series of ‘de

Authore testimonia’, including Antonio Francini’s Italian Ode on Milton’s fame, which are prefaced by a notice attempting to avert the danger of envy, dum enim nimiae laudis inuidiam totis ab se uiribus amolitur...iudicium interim hominum cordatorum atque illustrium quin summo sibi honori ducat, negare non potest ‘For while with all his strength he averts the envy arising from excessive praise, he cannot deny that he holds the judgement of wise and famous men as the greatest honour to himself.’ The frontispiece contains a motto from Virgil Ecl. 7.27-8 on the same topic, baccare frontem | cingite, ne uati noceat mala lingua futuro ‘Garland the poet’s head with baccar [an unidentifiable plant], so that the evil tongue does not harm the bard to be’, made more pointed by recollection of the full quotation.’ Paradise Lost In his two biblical epics Milton repeatedly distinguishes between false earthly glory and true heavenly glory. The longest discrimination is placed

2

wn

!

542

Treatments of Milton on fame and glory: Samuel

1947: 86-95; Hughes

19-19; Steadman

1967:

14, 142-4, 195-200; Jenkins 1973; Blessington 1979: 82-5; Rumrich 1987. On the Epitaphium see Ch. 9 pp. 337-8 and below pp. 566-9. On the ancient sources for the second see Wendland

1916; Coolidge

1963; and Ch. 9 n. 26.

Ecl. 7.25-8 Pastores, hedera crescentem ornate poetam, | Arcades, inuidia rumpantur ut ilia Codro;

| aut, si ultra placitum laudarit, baccare frontem...

Paradise Lost

prominently at the beginning of the third book of Paradise Regained (1— 149), in Satan’s temptation of Christ to pursue fame and glory. In his narrative of the war in heaven in Book 6 of Paradise Lost Raphael contrasts the unfallen angels, ‘contented with their fame in heaven’, who ‘Seek not the praise of men’ (6.375-6), with (376-9) ‘the other sort... Nor of renown less

eager, yet by doom, | Cancelled from heaven and sacred memory’. Raphael teaches Adam that (381-4) ‘strength from truth divided and from just... to glory aspires | Vain glorious, and through infamy seeks fame’. Paradise Lostis punctuated with a number of versions of an unruly house of fame or fama, which mark by contrast upright and orderly uses of the word. The first of these ‘houses of fama’ is the court of the Anarch Chaos, where Satan arrives after his journey through the elemental storm of chaos, PL 2.951-67: At length a universal hubbub wild Of stunning sounds and voices all confused, Borne through the hollow dark assaults his ear With loudest vehemence: thither he plies, Undaunted to meet there whatever power

955

Or spirit of the nethermost abyss Might in that noise reside, of whom to ask Which way the nearest coast of darkness lies Bordering on light; when straight behold the throne Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread

960

Wide on the wasteful deep; with him enthroned

Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things, The consort of his reign; and by them stood Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name Of Demogorgon; Rumour next, and Chance,

965

And Tumult, and Confusion all embroiled, And Discord with a thousand various mouths.

The personifications that attend Chaos and Night are modelled in part on those

at the entrance

to the Virgilian

underworld

(Aen. 6.273-81).°

Virgil’s Discordia becomes a monster of a specifically verbal disharmony (‘a

Er

e

^

thousand various mouths’),’ the source of the ‘voices all confused’ heard

Samuel 1947: 92 ‘Paradise Regained repeats every element of the doctrine in Lycidas, but more fully and with a more complete opposition of heavenly to earthly glory.' On the chthonic connections of Virgil's Fama see Ch. 3 p. 99; on the affinities between the Ovidian House of Fama and the underworld see Ch. 5 pp. 173-4. Fowler 1968 ad loc. compares the divided tongue of Spenser’s hellish monster of discord, Ate, FQ 1v.1.27: see above Ch. 10 pp. 398-400.

543

544

Fama in Milton

at the start (952), and which are also heard in the Ovidian House of Fama

(Met. 12.55 confusaque uerba). This is a place to which Satan resorts for news or tidings, in the form of a request for directions in a universe that has been newly configured since the war in heaven. Paradise Lost 3 switches scene from Satan’s upward journey to heaven, where the interview between Father and Son is followed by the angels’ praises of the full glory of the Father and the Son (3.372415). This is juxtaposed with the next stage of Satan's journey, as he alights on the outer surface of the newly created world, the ‘windy sea of land’ (440) that will later become

the Limbo of Vanity, another ‘house of fame’, 444-54:* store hereafter from the earth Up hither like aerial vapours flew Of all things transitory and vain, when sin With vanity had filled the works of men: Both all things vain, and all who in vain things Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame, Or happiness in this or the other life; All who have their reward on earth, the fruits Of painful superstition and blind zeal, Nought seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, empty as their deeds.

The upward flight of the ‘aerial vapours’ is comparable to the rise of every sound and voice up to its natural place in the air, the House of Fame, in Chaucer’s poem. The first arrivals in the Limbo of Vanities will be the Giants, (465) ‘With many a vain exploit, though then renowned’ The false pursuit of human glory, fame and renown by these ‘men of renown’ (Genesis 6:4) through military conquest and slaughter is foretold by Michael to Adam at 11.688—99.

5 On the contrast between the angelic praise and the Limbo of Vanity see Rumrich 1987: Ch. 1, in the context of a discussion of the Hebrew word for divine glory, kabod, whose basic meaning is

‘weight, as opposed to something vain and empty, and whose secondary meanings include 'great reputation; 'the very being of a substantial entity' - a word that welds a concept of fame or glory to substantial being: see Ch. 1 p. 34. Milton's Limbo of Vanity is modelled on Astolfo's journey to the moon in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso 34-5, a major fama episode in the form of a satire on the value of poetic tradition and on the human desire for immortalization. In a manner comparable to Chaucer's House of Fame Ariosto writes a parody of a Dantean eschatological journey in which the poet rides in the chariot of Elijah with Saint John from Eden to the moon, arriving at a Temple of Immortality/Fame in which different kinds of fama, secular and sacred, are jumbled together: see Ascoli 1987: 264-304; Quint 1977. Where Ariosto folds together the writings of poets and theologians, Milton is concerned to separate out heavenly and earthly brands of praise.

Paradise Lost

After the Giants will come (3.466-8) ‘The builders next of Babel on the plain | Of Sennaar, and still with vain design, | New Babels, had they wherewithal, would build’. The full story of the Tower of Babel is told to Adam by Michael at 12.38-62. The purpose of Nimrod and his crew is (43-7) 'to build | A city and tower, whose top may reach to heaven; | And get themselves a name, lest far dispersed | In foreign lands their memory be

lost, | Regardless whether good or evil fame’ But their ambition to build a *tower of fame' is frustrated by God, who, 52-62: in derision sets Upon their tongues a various spirit to raze

Quite out their native language, and instead To sow a jangling noise of words unknown: Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud Among the builders; each to other calls Not understood, till hoarse, and all in rage,

As mocked they storm; great laughter was in heaven And looking down, to see the hubbub strange

9

And hear the din; thus was the building left

Ridiculous, and the work Confusion named. The result is like a nightrnare vision of an Ovidian or Chaucerian House of Fame in which the confusion and variety of voices has reached the point of mutual incomprehensibility. The proud attempt of the builders of the city and temple to prevent the dispersal of their names and to create a monument to their dominion has been reduced to something close to the confusion of the court of Chaos, with which there are verbal parallels (‘various, 'hubbub; ‘confusion’). The sky-reaching Tower is built with asphalt from the underworld: 41—4 ‘a black bituminous gurge | Boils out from

under ground, the mouth of hell; | Of brick, and of that stuff they cast to build | A city and tower, whose top may reach to heaven: The Tower of Babel has as its prototype 'the ascending pile' (1.722) of Pandaemonium, the architect Mulciber's replication in hell of the ‘towered structure[s] high’ (1.733) that he had formerly built in heaven. Pandaemonium, like the Tower

of Babel, is built with subterranean materials, gold rifled from the bowels of the earth." Nimrod and his crew are also prey to the same desire for 9 Psalm 2:4 ‘the Lord shall have them in derision’ to which Milton had alluded at Quint. Nov.

168 uanaque peruersae ridet conamina turbae, where in order to achieve his purposes God had paradoxically enlisted the services of a sky-reaching Tower of Fama: see Ch. 11 pp. 433-7. !? On the parallels between these two presumptuous and infernal works of architecture see

Labriola 1978: 12-13. Pope draws substantially on Milton's Pandaemonium for his Temple of Fame: see Ch. 15 p. 597.

545

546

Fama in Milton

vain glory that afflicts the fallen angels, whose pride prevents them from proper self-subordination to the glory of God. As punishment the names that once blazoned their dignity and power in heaven have been razed!!

from the books of life (1.358-63). Subsequently, with perverted uses of language, ‘falsities and lies, they corrupted the greater part of mankind also (1.368-71) ‘to forsake | God their creator, and the invisible | Glory of him,

that made them, to transform | Oft to the image of a brute'; but so far from restoring their own glorious and unique names, they induce their corrupted human worshippers to label them with (1.374—5) ‘various names, | And various idols through the heathen world" When Milton begins his epic catalogue of the fallen angels by stating that he will use the names by which they will be known in the future, he transforms a traditional epic vehicle for the preservation of famous names into a catalogue of infamy, a polytheistic babble: 1.376 ‘Say, Muse, their names then known, who first, who last...’ As a ‘house of fame’ the Tower of Babel is designed as a masterpiece of architectural order and as a monument of worldwide fame, but the lasting result is the babble of unruly verbal disorder and incomprehensible confusion. Order and disorder follow in temporal sequence; in the Ovidian and Chaucerian Houses of Fameboth moments are present at the same time as a dichotomy structural to fama.

Samson Agonistes Paradise Lost makes a strenuous effort to impose a proper hierarchy on the dichotomies of fama. Far more tangled are the workings of fama in one of Milton’s last poetic works, Samson Agonistes.? fama, in its various manifestations, pervades the play, and a judgement of how we are to assess the fame won by or ascribed to its hero Samson is not the least tricky aspect of this problematic work. An autobiographical element has often been detected in Samson, and links may be traced between the discourse of fame in the play and passages in Lycidas and the Epitaphium Damonis. the late work retreats from an almost hybristic ebullience on the subject of Milton's future poetic fame in the laments for Edward King and Charles Diodati, and

leaves open questions about the political and historical workings of fame and commemoration. !! On Milton’s puns on ‘raising’ and 'razing' see Labriola 1978: 14. 12 [assume a late date for the play: for a survey of the arguments over dating see Radzinowicz 1978: 387—407.

Samson Agonistes

For a tragedy Samson Agonistes is unusually concerned with business of fame. At the end of the play Samson’s father, Manoa, that he will commemorate his son with a monument, with words in both prose and verse, at a place of ritual or quasi-ritual resort for generation, of both sexes, 1708-44: Come, come, no time for lamentation now, Nor much more cause, Samson hath quit himself Like Samson, and heroicly hath finished A life heroic, on his Enemies Fully revenged, hath left them years of mourning,

the epic declares of praise the next

1710

And lamentation to the Sons of Caphtor

Through all Philistian bounds. To Israel Honour hath left, and freedom, let but them

1715

Find courage to lay hold on this occasion,

To himself and father's house eternal fame; And which is best and happiest yet, all this With God not parted from him, as was feared, But favouring and assisting to the end. Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble. Let us go find the body where it lies

1720

1725

Soaked in his enemies' blood, and from the stream

With lavers pure and cleansing herbs wash off The clotted gore. ] with what speed the while (Gaza is not in plight to say us nay) Will send for all my kindred, all my friends

1730

To fetch him hence and solemnly attend

With silent obsequy and funeral train Home to his father’s house: there will I build him A monument, and plant it round with shade Of laurel ever green, and branching palm, With all his trophies hung, and acts enrolled In copious legend, or sweet lyric song.’4

1735

Thither shall all the valiant youth resort,

And from his memory inflame their breasts 13 Todd 1809 compares Pind. [sthm. 7.29 éxrrw yeved ubyiotov Atos abEcov. Pindaric allusion is appropriate in the celebration of Samson agonistes 14 Todd 1809 compares Pind. Pytli. 1.92-4 &müóópBporov acy ria Sofas | olov érrroryontvov &v5oóv Elcarav pavuel | kal Aoyloıs kal doi Sots; cf. also Nem. 6.29—30.

547

548

Fama in Milton

To matchless valour, and adventures high: The virgins also shall on feastful days Visit his tomb with flowers, only bewailing His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice, From whence captivity and loss of eyes.

1740

A cultic aetiology, connecting legendary past with present-day institutions, is itself a frequent closural element in Attic tragedy, especially Euripides. Particularly close, and a possible model for Milton,'? is the speech of Artemis at the end of Euripides' Hippolytus, after another mangled body has been brought on stage,!6 prescribing the honours to be paid to Hippolytus by unwed maidens, 1423-30: ool 5, & TaAalırwp, &vrl THvEe TOV kaxàv nius peyloras ev ırökcı TpoZnvía

Baow: Kópai yàp Abuyes y duev rápos

1425

könas kepoüvral coi, bi' aldvos uakpoü

revön utyioTa Saxpvoov kaprrouptvo. del 86 poucotroids ts ot TrapBiveov

tora népipva, KOUK crvdvupos Treadv

Epo 6 DalBpas & ot ory nSrjcera.

1430

To you, wretched man, as recompense for these evils I will give the greatest honours in the city of Troezen. Unwed maidens will cut off locks of hair for you before their wedding, and through a long age you will enjoy the fruits of the greatest mourning of their tears. Always the maidens will be inspired to sing songs about you, and

Phaedra’s love for you will not fall away nameless and be kept silent. Similarities and differences are both instructive. Artemis will give her favourite ‘greatest honours’ in compensation for the honour of which Hippolytus had been stripped when Theseus had banished him from Troezen. The virginal hero, who at the beginning of the play had offered the goddess

flowers picked from a virgin meadow (picking flowers is a frequent image in the epithalamium), is the fitting recipient of locks of hair from unwed maidens, who will offer him the fruit not of sexual consummation and procreation, but of grief. It is also a kind of poetic justice that the love of which Hippolytus had bound himself by an oath not to speak will henceforth never be kept silent. 15 Note that Manoa's speech immediately precedes the closing Chorus, itself based closely on Euripidean models. !6 Manoa gives orders for the recovery of the body: in another Hippolytus tragedy the Senecan

Theseus gives orders for the recovery of the dismembered body of his son at Phaedra 1247—8.

Samson Agonistes

In some ways Samson is an anti-Hippolytus. He has destroyed himself not by keeping silent, but by being a blab (495). Excessive sexuality rather than a pathological virginity has brought him low. The flowers offered by the virgins at Samson's tomb are also an appropriate culmination to a strand

of flower imagery that runs through the play. The Chorus first find Samson (119) ‘With languished head unpropped, like a drooping flower^!" the man for whom the angel, according to Manoa, (362) ‘Ordained thy nurture

holy, as of a plant‘. But where the offerings for Hippolytus can be only a compensation for a death suffered through irresistible external violence, the flowers brought to Samson commemorate the 'reflourishing' (1704) of

Samson's fame through the heroic act by which he brings destruction on

his enemies, as well as on himself.' 17 Cf. Aen. 9.436-7 (flower simile of the dying Euryalus) languescit moriens, demisere caput, for the ‘propping’ of plants by the gardener cf. PL 9.210. With Samson's drooping head c£. the Chorus’ description of Dalila: 727-8 ‘with head declined | Like a fair flower surcharged with dew’; Todd 1809 suggests as a source for these lines Il. 8.306—7, which is also a model for Aen. 9.436-7. On flower imagery in Samson Agonistes see Carey 1967.

Cf. the memorial rituals that confer immortality on Adonis metamorphosed into a flower, the anemone at Ov. Met. 10.725-8, part of a more extensive Ovidian mythological network around Milton's Samson. At the end of Euripides’ Hippolytus the unnamed favourite of Aphrodite whom Artemis announces that she will destroy in revenge for Aphrodite's undoing of Hippolytus (1420-2) is probably to be identified as Adonis. Within the song of Orpheus in Met. 10 the fate of Adonis forms a ring with that of Hyacinthus, metamorphosed into the flower of that name; SA 620 ‘wounds immedicable' translates Ov. Met. 10.189 immedicabile uulnus (Hyacinthus). The hyacinth is an image for luxuriant hair at Od. 6.230-1 xà5 5i kápriros | obAas fie kóyas, Ua

vives &v6n Solas, imitated by Milton at PL 4.301—3 ‘hyacinthine locks |

Round from his parted forehead manly hung | Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad’, with which cf. SA 568—70 ‘these redundant locks | Robustious to no purpose clustering down, | Vain monument of strength: Hyacinthus is used as a mythological parallel in an attempt to confer some kind of posthumous glory in Milton’s juvenile On the Death of a Fair Infant 22-8 "Yet art thou not inglorious in thy fate; | For so Apollo, with unweeting hand | Whilom did slay his dearly-loved mate | Young Hyacinth born on Eurotas' strand, | Young Hyacinth the pride of Spartan land; | But then transformed him to a purple flower: | Alack that so to change thee

winter had no power.' The flower into which the dead Hyacinthus is metamorphosed will later be shared by the great epic hero Ajax (Ov. Met. 13.394-6), when the latter turns his heroic strength against himself, in so doing remaining true to himself, he claims, (13.390) ne quisquam Aiacem possit superare nisi Aiax, at the same time as he destroys himself, rendering himself as powerless as a boy. The (typically Ovidian: see Hardie 2002a: 251-5) nominal doubling in Aiacem. . . Aiax is paralleled in (SA 1709-10) ‘Samson hath quit himself | Like Samson. The only other example of the ‘like himself topos in English Renaissance literature given by Price 1940 that uscs a redoubled name rather than the reflexive pronoun is Jonson, Poctaster V.iii.130 ‘Caesar hath done like Caesar. The pun in SA 1709 ‘quit’ contains another Ovidianism: Samson has both ‘acquitted himself (squared the accounts of his reputation) and ‘left himself (in death) (Shoaf 1985: 181-2); the latter yielding a typically Ovidian Ichspaltung (e.g. Met. 6.385 Marsyas' cry ‘quid me mihi detrahis?’). For another possible echo of the Ovidian Ajax in Samson, Todd 1809 compares SA 53-4 ‘But what is strength without a double share | Of wisdom' with Ov. Met. 13.363 (Ulysses to Ajax) fu uires sine mente geris.

549

Fama in Milton

At this point Milton moves from tragic into epic register: the monument, with its associated words and rituals, is above all an emblem and renewable

resource of the fame of Samson’s heroic deeds. The fire that will inflame the breasts (1739) of the young men who visit the tomb will perpetuate through successive generations Samson’s own ‘fiery virtue roused | From under ashes into sudden flame’ (1690-1). Fire is another common image of

fame, and the triple simile of the Semichorus at 1692-1707, which takes its point of departure from (1690) ‘His fiery virtue roused’, concludes with the fiery phoenix as an emblem of fame, 1699—1707: Like that self-begotten bird In the Arabian woods embossed,

That no second knows nor third, And lay ere while a holocaust, From out her ashy womb

now teemed,

Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deemed, And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird, ages of lives.

The words of the Semichorus are the prompt for Manoa, who proclaims the restoration of Samson’s unique identity (1709-10 “Samson hath quit himself | Like fame’

(1717).

Samson’),

and

Identity and

asserts a few lines later his son's ‘eternal fame

are welded

together

in the image

of

self-regeneration (an equivalence that Shakespeare's Coriolanus found it impossible to maintain: see Ch. 1 pp. 14-19). Manoa's following speech shifts register from the mystical phoenix to the, truly secular, categories of, first, classical tragedy, and then classical epic: heroic praise instead of lamentation (kleos/penthos).”” At 179 the Chorus had described Samson as

Ei

"The glory late of Israel, now the grief.^! Now, at least in his father’s eyes, that has undergone a complete reversal, a welcome answer to his anxious question at 1578—9 'Yet ere I give the reins to grief, say first, | How died he? death to life is crown" or shame.’ The laurel and the palm with which Manoa will shade the monument are both pagan symbols of glory and victory (the further Christian symbolism of the palm, on which see below, is a meaning The word ‘fame’ itself occurs just four times in Samson Agonistes: 971, 1248, 1706, 1717;

M

to Ss

‘famous’: 528, 542, 982; ‘famed’: 1094; ‘infamous’: 417; ‘infamy’: 968; ‘defamed’: 977.

tv [v]

550

On the structural opposition of kleos ‘fame’ and penthos ‘grief in early Greek epic see Nagy 1979: Ch. 6 ‘Lamentation and the hero: ‘Grief’ is perhaps not the contrast that one would first expect: Todd 1809 compares Phineas Fletcher, Pisc. Eclogues (1633) p. 27 ‘his glory late, but now his shame’. Cf. 175 ‘Universally crowned with highest praises:

Samson Agonistes

unavailable to Manoa). The last two and a half lines of Manoa’s speech, ‘only bewailing | His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice, | From whence captivity and loss of eyes’, have been found anticlimactic, but they serve the purpose

of putting a final nail in the counter-claim of Dalila to be the fitting recipient of a famous monument

(980-94: see below). Rather, Dalila is to be vilified

as having been the cause of the two chief marks of his shame, his captivity and his blindness. Manoa’s memorialization of what he asserts to be his son's henceforth undying and unchanging fame provides the climax and finale to a sustained testing within the play of the fame and reputation of the hero.~* To the struggle of the human hero to reassert his famous virtue there is a parallel contest at a higher level, the contest for glory between the Hebrew God, championed by Samson, and the Philistine god Dagon. Further, these contests for fame need to be set in the wider context of the play’s obsession with report, rumour, renown. Samson is himself preoccupied with the loss of his former glory, the result of the complete reversal of his former fortune.~' Fortune's reversal (167-9) leads to shame."

Samson

comments himself, (36-8) ‘O glorious

strength | Put to the labour of a beast, debased | Lower than bond-slave’;

and admits to the 'shame' (196) he feels for having 'shipwrecked, | my vessel trusted to me from above | Gloriously rigged’ (198-200).” To use ancient generic categories, his epic glory, fama, has been reduced to elegiac

fabula (see Ch. 9 pp. 361-8); compare the way in which Aeneas’ ‘enslavement' to Dido temporarily pushes him from an epic to an elegiac world. Samson has become the risible talk of the town: 200—5 'and for a word, a

tear, | Fool, have divulged the secret gift of God | To a deceitful woman: tell me friends, | Am I not sung and proverbed for a fool | In every street, do they not say, how well | Are come upon him his deserts?’ For a verbal lapse of his own (488-501; 491 ‘Shameful garrulity‘, 495 ‘avoided as -

2

24

25

My focus on fame runs in parallel with Achinstein's 2002 reading of the play as an exercise in the construction of memory, in a (174) ‘Restoration contest over whose memories should survive’; 176 ‘... Samson Agonistes is a drama about the images by which heroes and antiheroes can be known and commemorated.’ Emphasized by the Chorus at 164-75 ‘O mirror of our fickle state... By how much from the top of wondrous glory, | Strongest of mortal men, | To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen... 5 who otherwise might have been (175) ‘Universally crowned with highest praises. ‘Shame’ and cognates punctuate the play: SA 196, 446, 457, 597, 841, 1579; ‘shameful’: 491,

1043; ‘shamefully’: 499; ‘shamed’: 563. Cf. 597 ‘My race of glory run, and race of shame.’ But also with biblical models: Job 30:9 ‘And now am I their song, yea, I am their byword’; Psalms 69:11-12 ‘I became a proverb unto them. They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.”

551

Fama in Milton

a blab’), the consequence of having himself been ‘vanquished with a peal of words (O weakness!)’ (235), Samson suffers catastrophic loss in verbal

reputation. He berates himself for having been a shameful slave to love (the elegiac seruitium amoris): 416-17 ‘my former servitude [to Dalila], ignoble, | Unmanly, ignominious, infamous’; and contrasts his current shame with the former epic pride that went before his fall: 522-32 ‘... Full of divine instinct, after some proof | Of acts indeed heroic, far beyond | The sons of Anak [giants], famous now and blazed,’* |Fearless of danger, like a petty god... Then swoll’n with pride into the snare I fell...’ The body of the play, as Samuel Johnson famously complained," does little to advance the action, being taken up with a series of visits from other characters to this ‘kind of tourist attraction*" Three of these visitors — the Chorus, Manoa, Harapha - reveal a deep interest in the question of what Samson is, what he has been, and whether report matches reality. The

fourth, Dalila, is all too well aware of what has become of her husband, but at the end of her scene, and close to the centre of the play, she delivers the

play's longest disquisition on the subject of fame. First comes the Chorus, 115-26: This, this is he; softly a while, Let us not break in upon him; O change beyond report, thought, or belief! Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he, That heroic, that renowned,

125

Irresistible Samson?

The most famous intertext for the expression of shock at the changed appearance of a hero is from epic, the sleeping Aeneas' reaction to the dream

vision of the mangled Hector, (Aen. 2.274—5)

ei mihi, qualis erat,

quantum mutatus ab illo | Hectore qui redit exuuias indutus Achilli ‘alas what an appearance he was, how much changed from the Hector who returned wearing the spoils of Achilles; which is one of the several points of contact between the openings of Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost, 1.84ff. (Satan to Beelzebub) ‘If thou beest he; but O how fallen! How changed | From him, Punning on the meanings ‘published, proclaimed (as with a trumpet)’ (OED s.v. ‘blaze’ v.?), and ‘set on fire’ (OED s.v. ‘blaze’ v.! ). Rambler 139 (Johnson 1969: 136) ‘the poem... has a beginning and an end... but it must be allowed to want a middle, since nothing passes between the first act and the last, that either hastens or delays the death of Samson’. ?9 Achinstein 2002: 177.

tQ *

552

Samson Agonistes

who in the happy realms of light...”*'! To the versions in the Aeneid and Paradise Lost is here added the theme of fame: the change is not just in the man, but in his renown, hitherto considered inseparable from the man. The

change goes beyond ‘report’, another translation of fama. The disbelieving question is repeated by Manoa at 340-1 ‘O miserable change! is this the man, | That invincible Samson, far renowned...’ Manoa’s first reference to his son as (334) ‘your once gloried friend’ has already revealed his obsession with Samson’s good name. The last visitor is Harapha, an invention of Milton’s, conjured up almost

as a personification of the word, a "Tongue-doughty giant’, as Samson styles him (1181). Harapha is obsessed both with his own fame, which he proudly proclaims in an epic-style genealogy, and with that of Samson, 1076-90:

I come not Samson, to condole thy chance,

As these perhaps, yet wish it had not been, Though for no friendly intent. I am of Gath, Men call me Harapha, of stock renowned As Og or Anak and the Emims old

1080

That Kiriathaim held, thou know’st me now If thou at all art known. Much I have heard Of thy prodigious might and feats performed Incredible to me, in this displeas'd,

That I was never present on the place

1085

Of those encounters, where we might have tried Each other’s force in camp or listed field: And now am come to see of whom such noise Hath walked about, and each limb to survey,

If thy appearance answer loud report."

3!

The refrain starts with Samson himself at 22 ‘what once I was, and what am now’ (cf. PL 4.24-6 ‘the bitter memory

N

3

1090

| Of what he was, what is, and what must be | Worse’). There is here

also a point of close contact with Francis Quarles’ Samson (a possible source for Samson Agonistes. Whiting 1939: Ch. 8): Quarles 1634: 376, Meditat. 22 ‘How is our story chang'd? O more than strange | Effects of so small time! O, sudden change; | Is this that holy Nazarite...?’ Sarcastically implying that his strength lies only in his tongue, like the Virgilian Numanus, a close relative of Fama (see Ch. 4 p. 144), whom

Ascanius dismisses with the taunt (Aen. 9.634)

i, uerbis uirtutem inlude superbis. By contrast Dalila's ‘tongue-batteries’ (404) succeed in -

3

storming Samson's defences.

A speech full of knowingness about Milton's own invention. Once we remember the giants Og, Anak, the Emims, we can add Harapha to the list, like Virgil’s Farna, last-born of Earth's giant

children. Harapha was ‘never present on the place) because he never existed. He himself has no more substance than ‘noise walking about’: cf. the Chorus’ announcement of his arrival at 1066-7 ‘a rougher tongue | Draws hitherward, I know him by his stride.”

553

Fama in Milton

His wish is: 1093-5 'O that fortune | Had brought me to the field where thou art fam’d | To have wrought such wonders with an ass’s jaw.’ For Harapha ‘glorious arms’ (1130) count for everything. But where Harapha is bewitched by the fame of Samson, Samson brusquely dismisses what fame has to say of Harapha 1247-9 ‘I dread him not, nor all his Giant-brood, | Though Fame divulge him Father of five Sons | All of Gigantic size, Goliah chief.’ In his survey of post-lapsarian history in Book 11 of Paradise Lost it is when the archangel Michael comes to the ‘giants, men of high renown’ (11.688) that he delivers an authoritative statement from the perspective of heaven on the futility of human glory and fame. Samson however has paid Harapha in his own coin, sending him packing as a ‘baffled coward’ (1237), using the language of Spenserian chivalrous romance." The testing of Samson's reputation continues into the last act, this time not through a visitation to Samson, but through the removal of the hero himself to a public place of testing: 1311-15 (OFFICER) ‘This day to Dagon isa solemn feast, | With sacrifices, triumph, pomp, and games; | Thy strength they know surpassing human rate, | And now some public proof thereof require | To honour this great feast, and great assembly.’ That talk of the town which had previously (200—5) propagated Samson's shame, now gets to work to maximize the audience for this public proof:

1598-1602 (MESSENGER) 'The morning trumpets festival proclaimed | Through each high street: little I had dispatched | When all abroad was rumoured that this day | Samson should be brought forth to shew the people | Proof of his mighty strength in feats and games.' This last testing of what Samson is in relation to his former renown is conveyed through the report of the Messenger, the character who in Greek tragedy typically offers an eyewitness account of events, and who asserts that he speaks the truth, and the whole truth." This Messenger enters to give a report of something uncertain, evidence of which has already reached the actors. The action of the play ends, as it began, with the business of relating things heard to a reality to be confirmed by autopsy; ^G6 as at the

34

wu e

554

OED s.v. ‘baffle’ v. 1 ‘To subject to public disgrace or infamy; spec. to disgrace a perjured knight with infamy’; thus Talus baffles Braggadocchio at Faerie Queene v.iii.37, and Arthur Turpine at vı.vii. 27. Satan in PL operates with a feudal notion of honour and ironic imagery of knight-errantry: see Grace 1968: 106-13 ‘Satan’s search for glory’ Eyewitness account (SA 1542-3 ‘The sight of this so horrid spectacle, | Which erst my eyes beheld, and yet behold’): Aesch. Persae 266; Soph. Ant. 1192; see also De Jong 1991: 9-12, 183-4 ‘The messenger as eyewitness. The truth: Aesch. Persae 513. The whole truth: Aesch. Ag. 582; Soph. Philoct. 620-1. For help with the conventions of the messenger speech, and with parallels for this scene in Samson Agonistes, | am grateful to Pat Easterling. Achinstein 200? focusses on moments that highlight the conditions of meaning-making, in her reading of Samson Agonistes as (185) ‘a performance of memory:

Samson Agonistes

beginning, both Chorus and Manoa have a painful desire to verify what they fear may be the worst. Two great sounds - ‘reports, of another kind — are heard from the theatre where Samson is displayed, a shout as of an

eager and excited crowd followed by a hideous groan, sounds that call for

explanation." The Messenger soon arrives with his eyewitness report of the reality that accounts for what has been heard, hitherto the object only of interpretative uncertainty. fama in the sense ‘news’, as in other senses, has the potential to be either good or bad: 1537-40 (CHORUS) 'Of good or bad so great, of bad the sooner; | For evil news rides post, while good news baits. | And to our wish I see one hither speeding, | A Hebrew, as I guess, and of our tribe.’ Here the duality in potentia of what may be said precedes the definitive elimination of one of the possibilities, through a proof, in the form of the Messenger’s veridical narrative, of what happened. The facts, if not the ultimate evaluation, of what has occurred are established without possible ambiguity. It is after listening to the Messenger Speech that Manoa is persuaded that reality once more matches report, that in his last act Samson has lived up to his reputation, and that the story is now concluded, 1708-11: Come, come, no time for lamentation now,

Nor much more cause, Samson hath quit himself Like Samson,” and heroicly hath finished A life heroic... Samson equals Samson, heroically equals heroic. 3 1552-4 (MANOA) ‘The accident was loud, and here before thee | With rucful cry, yet what it was we hear not, | No preface needs, thou seest we long to know.’ The closest parallel for a shout off-stage that prompts on-stage characters into speculation on its cause, followed by clarification from a Messenger, is Eur. El. 747 fl.; the Chorus use the language of evidence and appearance as they and Electra seek for certainty (747-8 A boxe» xevih | UmrfABe yf... ; 749 168 ok Gora treevperra; 754 iupavis, with 749 cf. Soph. Trach. 866-7 hysi tis oux Gonuov, &AAd Bucruyxfj | kxuróv soc, xod rı KonvlZa ottyn, which turn out to be the cries of the Nurse

who then enters to report Deianeira's death). At Aesch. Ag. 1343—5 two off-stage cries from Agamemnon prompt extended speculation on the part of the Chorus, until Clytaemnestra enters as her own news-bringer to report the death of Ag n and C dra. Cf. also the repeated claps of thunder heard by the characters on-stage at Soph. OC 1455-6, 1462-3, 1477-9.

On the ‘like himself topes see Price 1940. For an ironic example where self-equivalence is instantly diverted into figurative difference cf. Shakesp. H5 Prol. 5-6 ‘Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, | Assume the port of Mars’: Henry V is a hero with distinct identity problems. The word ‘quit’ contains multiple puns that reinforce the sense of closure: Samson

has ‘acquitted himself well’, played the part of Samson ( OED s.v. ‘quit’ v. Ba) and ‘taken leave of himself (OED 11a); he has also ‘freed, redeemed’ himself (OED 6a). ‘Quit’ is derived from quietare ‘to make quiet’; if Milton was aware of that, there is another meaning, ‘set himself to

rest’ (cf. 1724 ‘what may quiet us in a death so noble’; 1757 ‘peace and consolation’).

555

Fama in Milton

But what kind of a seal is stamped on the story of Samson by Manoa’s monument? One answer is that, narratologically, this provides a satisfying conclusion to the uncertainties and contests over the reputation of Samson that have run through the rest of the play, a final fixation and monumentalization of the unstable substance of fame and report in a manner analogous to other narratives of fame examined in this book. But the monument is notable as much by what it will fail to achieve as by what it will achieve. fama, as always, exists in the space between the monumental and the mutable.

Let us start with a contrast with the cultic aetiologies at the end of Euripidean tragedies. In the Hippolytus, as in other plays, Euripides gives the aition of a ritual that survives down to his own day (and could still be seen in the time of Pausanias many centuries later, Pausan. 2.32.14). Milton invents a monument and a cult which, even supposing that they ever existed, have long disappeared. The youths and virgins among Milton's readers could not visit Samson's tomb to take part in the celebrations at that place. The nature and efficacy of Samson's fame are limited in other ways. A national monument,

the tomb

is also a privatized industry. Manoa

dis-

tinguishes between what falls to Israel as a result of his son's heroic deed,

and what falls to Samson himself and his father: to Israel 'honour... and freedom'

(1715), but only if the nation seizes the occasion; and 'To him-

self and father's house eternal fame' (1717). This privatization of Samson's heroic fame is confirmed in Manoa's intention to bring the body ‘home to his father's house’, and to build there a monument." Granted, Manoa does envisage a future function for Samson's fame outside the house, since the monument will be an attraction for the young of both sexes." The male youth will experience fame's incendiary effects as the memory of Samson inspires them to future deeds of glory," even if (1740) ‘matchless valour, 9

Second best to having the living son himself back at the hearth, a breathing monument to his own former exploits: 1490-4: (MANOA) ‘It shall be my delight to tend his eyes, | And view him sitting in the house, ennobled | With all those high exploits by him achieved, | And on his shoulders waving down those locks, | That of a nation armed the strength contained’; a

prospect dismissed by Samson at 564-70: ‘To what can I be useful, wherein serve | My nation, and the work from heaven imposed, | But to sit idle on the houshold hearth, | A burdenous

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41

drone; to visitants a gaze, | Or pitied object, these redundant locks | Robustious to no purpose clustering down, | Vain monument of strength.” Manoa’s plan to bring his son home and there enshrine his fame is in strong contrast to the concluding lines of Paradise Regained where, after the angelic choirs have sung heavenly anthems of the Son’s victory over Satan, (4.638-9) ‘he unobserved | Home to his mother’s house private returned’. Alluding perhaps to the choirs of boys and girls who will praise Venus at Hor. Odes 4.1.25-8. Cf. Aen. 6.889 incenditque animum famae uenientis amore, here another father uses his son's fame in order to inspire the young.

Samson Agonistes

and adventures high’ perhaps suggests something more individualistic and romantic than the solid work of nation-building that is now required. Further questions arise from the contrast between secular kinds of fame and divine glory. Parallel to and dependent on the contest for the revival of

Samson’s fame in the play is the contest between the God of the Israelites and the god of the Philistines, Dagon. For Manoa, obsessed with his son’s loss of glory, the most shameful reproach (446) against Samson is the fact that his captivity and blindness allow the Philistines to magnify and praise Dagon, with (440-2) ‘God. .. Disglorified, blasphemed, and had in scorn’ (like Samson

scorned). Samson

agrees: 448—54 ‘Father,

| do acknowledge

and confess | That I this honour, I this pomp have brought | To Dagon, and advanced his praises high | Among the heathen round; to God have brought | Dishonour, obloquy, and oped the mouths Of | Idolists, and atheists; have brought scandal | To Israel... °; this, Samson says, (457) ‘is my chief affliction, shame and sorrow’. Nevertheless, God

(467) ‘will arise

and his great name assert; and Manoa agrees that (473-5) ‘God... will not long defer | To vindicate the glory of his name.’ In this enterprise Samson is the champion of God, according to the Chorus: 705-6 ‘So deal not with this once thy glorious champion, | The image of thy strength, and mighty minister.’ Samson will challenge Harapha in what will be a single combat by proxy between their two gods: 1151-2 '[I] challenge Dagon to the test, | Offering to combat thee his champion bold.’ As Samson departs for the Philistine theatre, the Chorus send him off with these words: 1427-30: ‘Go, and the Holy One | Of Israel be thy guide | To what may serve his glory best, and spread his name | Great among the heathen round.’ The title page of the 1671 volume of Milton’s works presents ‘PARADISE REGAIND...To which is added SAMSON AGONISTES: The handling

of fame and glory in Samson Agonistes asks to be read against Christ's rejection of the temptation to vain glory in Paradise Regained 3, with its

sharp distinction between earthly glory, the transient ‘blaze of fame’ (47), and the glory required by God.” Against that background, the characters 4 Todd 1809 on ‘adventures high’: ‘a term in chivalry and romance; citing ‘la alta aventura’ (Don Quixote); Hawes, Pastime of pleasure (1554) 4262 ‘Right high adventures unto you shall fall’; Quarles 1634: 291, sect. 6 ‘In his childhood he exprest True seeds of honour; and his youth was

crown d With high and brave adventures, which renown'd His honour'd name’ (one of a number of parallels between Quarles’ Samson and Samson Agonistes. see above n. 31). Todd also comments on ‘With all his trophies hung’: ‘chivalry was again in Milton’s mind’ It is now standard to read Samson Agonistes against PR (see the works cited in Kilgour 2008: 233 n. 78). For an extended intertextual analysis see Wittreich 1986: Ch. 7 ‘Samson Agonistes in context, esp. 356 on the contrast between the rejection of worldly fame in Paradise Regained 3 and Manoa's earthly monument for his son; 350 Samson as champion, image, of God, and

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in Samson Agonistes do not appear to have escaped the fascination exercised by the candle of fame. Manoa, once God’s honour has been restored, thinks

exclusively of the secular fame of his son. But Samson himself seems to have learned little as a result of his humiliation, still confined to the old

categories of fame and shame. At 522 ff. Samson sets a distance between his present self and his former heroic fame, when (529-30) ‘like a petty god | I walked about admired of all. Anthony Low suggests that one reason for the invention of the character of the miles gloriosus Harapha is to provide a parodic double for Samson, an example of what he once was, and might have remained in different circumstances.'' But Samson responds to Harapha as he might have in the past, offering what appears to be a serious challenge to single combat, and, when Harapha refuses, telling him to be off as a ‘baffled coward' (see above).

Has Samson changed then? Not according to his proud father, who picks up on the Chorus' image of the self-identity of the phoenix by asserting that his son has, in the end, fully lived up to his name, with the further adverbial resumption of the adjective ‘heroic’, 1708-10 (cited above). This

is the resolution of Samson's opening complaint of the gap between (22) ‘what once I was, and what am now. There he continues with reference to

his divinely foretold mission: 23-32 ‘O wherefore was my birth from heaven foretold | Twice by an angel, who at last in sight | Of both my parents all in flames ascended | From off the altar, where an offering burned, | Asin a fiery column charioting | His godlike presence, and from some great act | Or benefit reveal'd to Abraham's race? | Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed | As ofa person separate to God, | Designed for great exploits...’ Despairingly he asks, (44-5) ‘what if all foretold | Had been fulfilled but through mine own default...?' Before Manoa's celebration of the manner of his son's end, the Chorus have already commented on the fulfilment of this prophecy: 1660—3 'O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious! | Living or dying thou hast fulfilled | The work for which thou wast foretold | To Israel...’ Fulfilment of prophecy is realized in the action through which, according to the other human actors in the play, Samson finally fills the part of Samson, and so lives up to himself. But the fulfilment of what was foretold is to bring into existence a new reality, one that only existed in words previously, and one into which the person has to grow; whereas the completion of which Manoa speaks is the joining of a circle, whereby words

Jesus in Paradise Regained, in whose face are (1.93) ‘glimpses of his Father's glory’; 4.596 “True image of the Father’ (see below).

^^

Low 1974: 158. Kilgour 2008 sees a less clear divide between Samson and his double Harapha.

Samson Agonistes

spoken in the future about Samson’s in the past about his earlier deeds. Samson’s posthumous glory is not of fame in which he was entangled in from the fame that Dalila foresees Samson. Her interest is not in seeing

latest deed will match words spoken neatly detached from the earthly kinds his life. Nor can it be cleanly separated for herself at the end of her visit to whether report matches reality in the

person of Samson; rather her business is the rhetorical use of words in order

to impose a version of reality, in a typical example of the agon of Attic tragedy. Commentators point specifically to the agon between Helen and Menelaus in Euripides’ Troades, 895-1059, and the general model of Helen is perhaps one of the determinants for the scene's final turn from rhetoric to fame-discourse, for the Helen

tradition embodies

the (Janus-headed)

dichotomy of fame and infamy (see Ch. 9 pp. 348—53). Dalila makes her exit with one of the most powerful statements of the duality of fame in the classical tradition, and a personification of Fame that may be set beside the personification of Fama in In quintum Nouembris,'* 965-96: Why do I humble thus my self, and suing

965

For peace, reap nothing but repulse and hate? Bid go with evil omen and the brand Of infamy upon my name denounced? To mix with thy concernments I desist Henceforth, nor too much disapprove my own.

970

Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed,'^ And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds, On both his wings, one black, the other white,”

^5

Forother connections between In quintum Nouembris and Samson Agonistes, at the beginning and end of Milton's poetic career, see Quint 1993: 278-81. ^* Bennett 1968: 154 n. 1 compares Chaucer's ‘double-tongued’ (Canterbury Tales 1.570 $46); cf. Wyclif 1 Tim. 111.8. For the image of black and white wings commentators refer to Sil. Pun. 15.96-100 (Virtus to Voluptas) Ebrietas tibi foeda comes, tibi Luxus et atris | circa te semper uolitans Infamia pennis; | mecum Honor ac Laudes et laeto Gloria uultu | et Decus ac niueis Victoria concolor alis. | me cinctus lauro producit ad astra Triumphus, the two trumpets of Aeolus in Chaucer's House of Fame, one ‘Clere Laude; the other, coloured black, ‘Sklaundre. The passage in Silius Italicus comes from the Dream of Scipio, modelled on the Choice of Hercules; Samson is the biblical

Hercules; his succumbing to Dalila marks the victory of Pleasure over Virtue. Todd 1809 also compares the self-description of Fame in Jonson's Masque of Queenes as the *white-winged maid’ (450); and the uariis. . . plumis with which Fama covers her body at Milton, Quint. Nov.

206. With this last compare Epitaph. Dam. 188 (phoenix) caeruleum fulgens diuersicoloribus alis. Within Samson Agonistes the phoenix to which the Chorus compare the revived Samson at 1699-1707, whose ‘fame survives, is a double of (Dalila’s) Fame: two versions of a bird of fama (see below). Cf. also Mart. 10.3.9-10 procul a libellis nigra sit meis fama, | quos rumor alba gemmeus uehit pinna: an authorial attempt to separate good and bad varieties of fama (see

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Fama in Milton

Bears greatest names in his wild aery flight." My name perhaps among the circumcised

975

In Dan, in Judah, and the bordering tribes,

To all posterity may stand defamed, With malediction mentioned, and the blot

Of falsehood most unconjugal traduced. But in my country where I most desire,

980

In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath

I shall be nam'd among the famousest Of women, sung at solemn festivals, Living and dead recorded," who to save Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose Above the faith of wedlock-bands, my tomb With odours visited and annual flowers.

985

Not less renown'd than in Mount Ephraim,

Jael, who with inhospitable guile Smote Sisera sleeping through the temples nailed. Nor shall I count it heinous to enjoy The public marks of honour and reward Conferr'd upon me for the piety Which to my country I was judged to have shown. At this who ever envies or repines

990

995

Ileave him to hislot, and like my own.

The Chorus are quick to characterize the speech as the sting in Dalila's tail, discovering her to be a ‘manifest serpent’ (997—8), a creature as duplicitous as Fame herself — or as Sin in Paradise Lost, 2.650—3 ‘The one seemed woman

to the waist, and fair, | But ended foul in many a scaly fold | Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed | With mortal sting. 50 Most critics have taken their lead from the Chorus, and accused Dalila of finally betraying her true

>

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Ch. 8 pp. 327-9). Cf. also Fulke Greville, A Treatise of Monarchy stanza 129, on a fame that rewards unworthiness and perfection fittingly, ‘But on her winges alike beares either forth; | The one as good, the other nothing worth.’ With ‘wild’ Todd 1809 compares Shakesp. Oth. 11.1.67-9 (CASSIO) ‘he hath achieved a maid [to wife] | That paragons description and wild fame; | One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens’. Todd 1809 compares Eur. Heraklid. 597-9 (lolaus to Makaria) GAA, © uéyio Tov &xmrptrrouc' euyuxia, | Tacdy yuvankäv, fof, TIHIwTaTn | kai Gao’ Ug’ fjuáv kal avoUc' ton TroAU. On the parallel with Sin see Damico 1978: 98. Milton's Sin is a version of the monster Scylla: on the further connections between the hybrid Scylla and fama and envy see Hardie 2009b. The hell hounds that kennel in Sin's womb ring ‘a hideous peal’, PL 2.656; Samson uses ‘peal’ of Dalila's destructive words: SA 235 ‘vanquished with a peal of words’; 906 "Witness when I was worried with thy peals.

Samson Agonistes

motive, a vainglorious love of fame?! But she has herself been stung into self-defence of her reputation by Samson's sarcastic attempt to destroy her good name at 955-9, Dalila exculpates herself by reference to the honour and glory of her nation and its god, 849-62: It was not gold, as to my charge thou lay'st, That wrought with me: thou know'st the magistrates And princes of my country came in person, Sollicited, commanded, threatened, urged, Adjured by all the bonds of civil duty And of religion, pressed how just it was, How honourable, how glorious to entrap A common enemy, who had destroyed Such numbers of our nation: and the priest

850

855

Was not behind, but ever at my ear,

Preaching how meritorious with the gods It would be to ensnare an irreligious

860

Dishonourer of Dagon: what had I To oppose against such powerful arguments? Against her appeal to national duty Samson urges the greater claim of conjugal fidelity (873-95): in marrying him, ‘thy country’s foe professed’, she should have left her parents and country. He claims that he chose her ‘from among my enemies, for love: but this is gainsaid by his earlier statements as to his marriage choices, at 219-33: 222-5 [of his first wife] ‘1 knew | From intimate impulse, and therefore urged | The marriage on; that by occasion hence | I might begin Israel's deliverance’; 227-33 ‘the next I took to wife... Was... Dalila... I thought it lawful from my former act, | And the same end; still watching to oppress | Israel's oppressors.” What she anticipates for herself in her own land, Manoa will institute for his son: a tomb, song, flowers. Samson works hard to set himself apart

5

[*]

5

Most critics, with the notable, or notorious, exception of Empson 1965: Ch. 6 ‘Delilah’; 220-1 "Even [when she does speak up for herselfa little] she does it with such large- mindedness, such inability merely to call the kettle black, that she gives us no excuse for calling her earlier professions of love insincere’, with reference to SA 969-70 and the following speech on fame, ‘one of the noblest speeches in Milton’. Repeated by Manoa, 420-3: ‘I cannot praise thy marriage choices, son, | Rather approved them not; but thou didst plead | Divine impulsion prompting how thou might’st | Find some occasion to infest our foes." Although as Empson 1965: 223 points out, ‘The whole speech of course does carry a dramatic irony, because she will be remembered for a disaster to the Philistines and not as she now thinks for having saved them from one.”

561

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Fama in Milton

from Dalila as white from black. Dalila has made a good case for seeing herself and Samson as twinned in weakness and folly, 773-87: First granting, as I do, it was a weakness In me, but incident to all our sex, Curiosity, inquisitive, importune

Of secrets, then with like infirmity To publish them, both common female faults: Was it not weakness also to make known For importunity, that is for naught, Wherein consisted all thy strength and safety? To what I did thou showd’st me first the way. But I to enemies revealed, and should not. Nor shouldst thou have trusted that to woman’s frailty: Ere | to thee, thou to thy self wast cruel. Let weakness then with weakness come to parle So near related, or the same of kind, Thine forgive mine.

775

780

785

It might be only fitting that in anticipations, by Dalila and Manoa, of the honours that they may receive after their deaths they should continue to be paired in the honours paid to them in their respective countries. The Chorus assert that Samson’s fame is like the unica auis, the phoenix; Dalila may be more honest in acknowledging the, inescapable, doubleness

of the bird-creature Fame. ] return now to the issue of the relationship of the fame of Samson to the glory of God, from the perspective not of the contrast between the vanity of earthly fame and the fullness of divine glory, but of the possible erasure of the boundary between mortal fame and immortal glory. Samson is God's champion against Dagon; for a moment the Chorus hint he may be something more at 705—6 'So deal not with this once thy glorious champion, | The image of thy strength, and mighty minister.’ ‘Image of thy strength' suggests the relationship between God the Son and God the Father, before ‘minister’ reasserts the relationship of inferiority (minus,

minis-ter). Joseph Wittreich points to the parallels with descriptions of Christ in Paradise Regainedas revealing (1.93) ‘glimpses of his Father's glory’ 4 For readings of Dalila as Samson's double see Damico 1978: 98-100; Kilgour 2008: 214-15 with n. 51.

5 For the contrast with the phoenix see Shoaf 1985: 186-7. 56 In Italian campione can mean ‘specimen, pattern, exemplar’, as well as ‘champion’: is there a cross-lingual pun, hinting at an equivalence between ‘glorious champion’ and ‘image of thy strength’?

Samson Agonistes

and as (4.596) “True image of the Father’. Starting from (what he claims is)

Milton’s association of Samson’s tribe of Dan with idolatry, Wittreich further argues that in his institution of the tomb-monument and associated honours Manoa oversteps the boundary between human and divine, elevating his dead son to the object of cult. ‘In a touch worthy of Dante, the idolaters have themselves become the idols.’ This goes too far: the kinds of inspiration and commemoration that will take place at the tomb fall short of worship. More to the point is the contrast between the kind of honour and immortality enjoyed by the dead Samson in his father's house, and the honours experienced in the supra-terrestrial world. Wittreich observes that the ‘shade | Of laurel ever green, and branching palm’ (SA 1734-5) is but an

earthly shadow of the apocalyptic triumph of the Messiah at the end of Paradise Lost 6, 884—6 ‘as they went, | Shaded with branching palm, each order

bright | Sung triumph; in allusion to the palms in the hands of the peoples standing before the throne and the Lamb at Rev. 7:9. The honours offered in the earthly ‘father’s house"? foreshadow the truly everlasting glory in the heavenly Father's house. Similarly, William Kerrigan points up the contrast between the shadowy immortalization to which Manoa's horizon is limited,

ES

and the eternal light that will be introduced by the Sun of Righteousness at the end of time. ‘Then the nuptial choirs of the Lamb will one day replace our human legends and sweet songs of remembrance."" It may be legitimate to read Samson Agonistes in terms of a contrast between the demands on Samson from his earthly father, Manoa, and his heavenly Father,“ but living in the Age of the Law neither Samson nor his father has access to New Testament visions of an afterlife. This fact may even be thought ofas a safeguard against any temptation to equate Samson's earthly fame with the kind of glory that the Christian God bestows on his saints in heaven. This exclusion from the Christian view of the afterlife also sets a barrier between Milton's Samson and the play's author, although the many critics who see in Samson some kind of reflection of the historical Milton, in an ‘elusively autobiographical drama'^' have not been slow to

5

Wittreich 2002: 235. Damico 1978: 108 sees the honours at Dalila's tomb as a mark of Philistian idolatry.

5

The phrase occurs at SA 447, 1717, 1733.

c

5? Kerrigan 1974: 256. The kind of fame celebrated by F. Quarles, The Historie of Samson 140 (cited by Wittreich 1986: 259) is of a strictly earthly kind and duration: '[Samson's] name shall flourish, and be still in prime, | In spight of ruine, or the teeth of Time: | Whose fame shall last, till heaven shall please to free | This Earth from Sinne, and Time shall cease to be.’ 6 So Guillory 1987. Note that none of the fourteen occurrences of ‘father’ in the play refer to God, however.

$!

Coiro 1998: 143.

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Fama in Milton

find in Manoa’s final words an expression of the poet’s own concern for his posthumous reputation. The poet’s investment in the fame-discourse of the play may also emerge through reflection on another aspect of the doubling of fame: not just Dalila’s double-mouthed fame, but the twinned tomb-monuments of Dalila and Samson, his and hers, each honoured in its own land.” The universality and eternity of fame is restricted by the spatial, temporal and linguistic limits of the particular nation to which one owes allegiance, something of which Milton was acutely aware when he took the decision to write poetry in English, not Latin (Epitaph. Dam. 171-8), leaving him (174) externo penitus... inglorius orbi ‘completely without glory to the

outside world"^ Samson Agonistes looks forward to Milton's posthumous status, but in it the poet also reaches back to moments in his early works.“' I want finally to set the play's positioning of earthly fame vis-à-vis heavenly glory in the context of the two pastoral elegies, Lycidas and the Epitaphium Damonis, each of which weaves together thoughts about the afterlife of the dead person commemorated with expressions of the poet’s own ambition for literary fame. Both poems call for a halt to tears, through the thought of the eternal afterlife of the dead man, Lycidas 165-82:

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Weep no more, woeful shepherds weep no more, For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor, So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore,

e=

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165

170

The point is made by Damico 1978: 94. Coiro 1998: 142-3 sees a very specific Miltonic self-reference in double-mouthed fame: ‘Milton himself, even as he publishes Samson Agonistes, flies with the two wings: the infamy of a political reprobate and the fame of a great writer.' See Coiro

1998: 128-33; Kilgour 2008: 224. With SA 1574-7 cf. ‘On the death of a fair infant’ 1

‘O fairest flower no sooner blown but blasted’, 3-4 'Summer's chief honour

if thou hadst

outlasted | Bleak winter's force that made thy blossorn dry' (see Coiro 1998: 138; ibid. 126 on echoes of ‘On Shakespeare’). Lieb 199-1: 226-63 notes parallels between the violence in Samson Agonistes and Milton's early political pamphlets. Instructive too is the contrast between Samson Agonistesand Milton’s utterances on the afterlives of Manso and his poet-friends Tasso and Marino, and of Milton himself, in Mansus. Milton imagines a friend who will erect a marble statue of himself and garland it with myrtle or laurel: 93 at ego secura pace quiescam (cf. SA 1724 ‘And what may quiet us in a death so noble, RIP transferred to those who are left); in the last seven lines of Mansus Milton looks forward to his own translation to a classicizing version of a Christian heaven, whither his ‘fiery virtue’ (96 ignea uirtus) will take him.

Samson Agonistes

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walked the waves; Where other groves, and other streams along, With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, And hears the unexpressive nuptial song, [n the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.

175

There entertain him all the saints above, In solemn troops, and sweet societies

That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. Now Lycidas the shepherds weep no more.

180

Lycidas ‘sunk’ as Samson's virtue was ‘depressed’ (SA 1698), but ‘mounts high, redeemed to eternal life by Christ. The connection between the poem's eschatology and the young Milton's ambitions for an afterlife in fame is

made via an intertext for the simile of the day-star in Pindar, who sings of 'ancient fame' falling into sleep and then waking into fresh brightness, like the morning-star conspicuous among the other stars.” In the place where

Lycidas has gone, glory is of the transcendental variety proper to saints, but within the imagistic economy of the poem there is a parallelism with the transcendental revaluation of earthly fame at 70—84. There death cuts off the pursuit of the kind of fame that (70-1) ‘is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise | To scorn delights, and live laborious days, but death in turn is frustrated by Phoebus' promise of the survival of praise, in the form of a ‘Fame [that] is no plant that grows on mortal soil . . . But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes, | And perfect witness of all-judging Jove; | As he pronounces lastly on each deed, | Of so much fame in heaven expect thy

meed' (78-84). This is still fame for an individual human's achievement, but now free of the danger of contamination with the “broad rumour’ that circulates on the tongues of the world, and validated by the unerring

ml

$6 Contrast the ‘laving’ at SA 1725—8 ‘Let us go find his body where it lies | Soaked in his enemies’ blood, and from the stream: | With lavers pure, and cleansing herbs wash off | The clotted gore.’ 6

Isthin. 3 (4).40—2 &véryui ecuav TraAcaér | e éov lgycv- kv ürrvo yàp rrécsv: GAR’ &vey e poyutva xpärta Aáyma, | Aoogópos Ganirós ds Gotpois tv Gas. The parallel is noted

by Tyrrell 1895. At Lycidas 168 ‘day-star’ refers to the sun, but its earlier and more usual meaning is ‘morning star’ (OED s.v. 1). Cf. also Aen. 8.589—91 qualis ubi Oceani perfusus Lucifer unda, | quem Venus ante alios astrorum diligit ignis, | extulit os sacrum caelo tenebrasque resoluit, a simile applied to another young man who dies before his time, Pallas. But Lycidas is an aoros who will not be agamos 176 ‘And hears the unexpressive nuptial song. Samson has several points of contact with another Lucifer, Satan at the beginning of Paradise Lost.

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Fama in Milton

judgement of a supreme god who is both the pagan Jupiter and the Christian God who will draw up the final balance sheet at the Last Judgement." In the Epitaphium Damonis tears cease to flow for the dead Charles Diodati for the same reason, that the person lamented has gone to a better life: 202-3 nec tibi conueniunt lacrymae, nec flebimus ultra, | ite procul lacrymae, purum colit aethera Damon ‘tears are not fitting for you, and we will weep no longer. Away with you, tears, Damon dwells in the pure air of heaven.’ This final consolation for the death of Diodati is introduced through a transition from the preceding ecphrasis of two cups which, Milton says, had been given him by his Italian friend Giovanni Battista Manso, and which Milton had been keeping to give to Diodati. The cups in fact are a way of talking about literary works by Manso (see also Ch. 9 p. 338). The pastoral ecphrasis, allusively metapoetic since Theocritus’ first idyll, becomes a transparent allegory of other texts, two works by Manso: firstly the Poesie nomiche, which included an Italian translation of Claudian’s Phoenix, the mythical bird represented on one of the cups in an exotic Arabian landscape of eternal spring and balm-dropping trees; and secondly the Erocallia, twelve Platonic dialogues about love and beauty, represented

on the other cup by an image of the Celestial Cupid.°” Damon's death has the effect of turning text into transcendental reality," (198) tu quoque in his ‘you too are of this company, ’' as Milton moves into the final section of the Epitaphium, which reworks the apotheosis of Daphnis in Virgil's fifth Ecloguein Neoplatonic and Christian terms, as the dead Damon is translated to the virgin nuptials of the mystic marriage of Rev. 19:7." The final ecphrases and apotheosis are sometimes seen as an extraneous bolt-on to the body of the Epitaphium. In fact Milton explores continuities and discontinuities, both within versions of pastoral and between different

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poetic projects. The words tu quoque had appeared earlier at 127 et Thuscus tu quoque Damon 'and you too are Tuscan, where the living Damon's imagined presence was a part of the ‘reality’ of Thyrsis’ pastoral idyll by the Arno. That reality is now a thing of the past; for Damon the present (and everlasting future) is a celestial idyll. The pastoral image is not emphasized

M [v]

566

For a medieval allegorization of the Ovidian House of Fama as announcing the Last Judgement see Ch. 16 p. 622 n. 29. The crucial identification with Manso's works was made by De Filippis 1936. The line-ending at 184 caelauerat argumento — Ov. Met. 13.684, an ecphrasis of a crater engraved with the story of the daughters of Orion, scenes of death, grief, and rebirth, that reflect in various ways on the framing narrative of Aeneas and the Trojans; in Mansus likewise ecphrasis figures the framing reality. tu quoque has resonances of the literary epitaph: see Horsfall 2000 on Aen. 7.1. This and the following paragraphs are based on Hardie 2007b.

Samson Agonistes

in the closing description of the heavenly bacchanals, but had been flagged up in the anticipation of this ending near the beginning of the poem (23-5), where Mercury psychopompos will give Damon his rightful place when he separates the sheep from the goats with his uirga, his pastoral staff. The images on the two cups represent a world away from the pastoral landscape shared by Thyrsis with the living Damon; at the same time the distant shores of Arabia are pastoral transfigured: an oriental landscape of odoriferum uer, where useless herbs, listed in a pastoral catalogue at 150-2, are replaced by

(186) sudantes balsama siluae ‘woods sweating balsam’.”’ parte alia polus omnipatens, et magnus Olympus, | quis putet? hic quoque Amor, ‘in another part is depicted the boundless sky and great Olympus. Who would think it? Here too is Love’ (190-1): even on Olympus

in higher form the love between gloss on the ineluctability of love cedamus Amori ‘let me too yield new, Christological, meaning to rebirth into a new life.”

Thyrsis and at the end of to Love‘. The the phoenix,

there is love, continuing

Damon, and also offering a Virgil’s tenth Eclogue, et nos death of Diodati also gives now a symbol of Diodati’s

Furthermore there are contrasts, but also continuities, between the com-

pleted works of Manso and the projected epic of Milton, bearer of his hopes for future fame. Manso’s works transcend the pagan pastoral world, taking the reader to the remote orient and an even remoter Platonic heaven. These works are nevertheless rooted in an Italian context, where Manso receives

proper recognition (or fama): Epitaph. Dam. 182 Mansus Chalcidicae non ultima gloria ripae ‘Mansus, not the least glory of the Neapolitan shore’. Milton leaves a pastoral world in Italy for a British epic, nationalist and secular in contrast to Manso's religious works, and goes into an inglorious northern exile, but even so one that perhaps repeats a previous cultural migration from Greece to Italy, hinted at in the use of Chalcidicae to refer

to Naples."

M w

There is a further connection between Milton's epic ambitions and Manso’s lofty Platonizing in the echo in (160) turgidulus ‘swollen-headed’ ofthe reference in a letter to Diodati to the swelling of the sprouting wings of

"The heavenly completion of Diodatı’s fallible earthly art, Carey 1968 ad loc. Diodati had trained, and recently started to practise, as a doctor (on Diodati’s career see Dorian

1950).

Mou wo.

With 187 Phoenix diuina auts, unica terris cf. SA 1701 “That no second knows nor third’. 5 Referring to the foundation of Cumae on the Bay of Naples by colonists from Chalcis in Euboea. The praise of Manso at 183 mirum artis opus, mirandus et ipse ‘a marvellous work of

art, and by a marvellous artist’ anticipates Milton’s famous prescription for himself, Apology for Smectymnuus, (Milton 1931-8; 111.1 303) ‘he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem.

567

568

Fama in Milton

the soul inspired by love in the Platonic Phaedrus, so forging a link between the ‘swelling’ of Milton’s British epic ambitions and the elevation of Damon on the wings of love as scripted in Manso's Neoplatonic dialogues.’® Against this background of Milton's processing ofa desire for poetic fame through Neoplatonic and Christian forms of transcendental love in the two pastoral laments, the very limited motivation of Manoa’s rejection of tears

is striking, SA 17214: Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,

And what may quiet us in a death so noble. Manoa, living in the Age of the Law, can find a cure for tears only in the thought of the recovery of his son’s reputation through a ‘death so noble’. The vocabulary is predominantly that of fame and reputation: ‘contempt, ‘dispraise, ‘blame’, ‘noble’, terms which limit the application of the more general ‘well and fair. There is no room for grief, since Samson's glory has been fully restored, so reversing 179 ‘The glory late of Israel, now the grief". But this is a terrestrial glory. In the Epitaphium Damonis the phoenix of ecphrastic art is transformed into the transcendental reality of a Christian afterlife, following the death of Damon. In Samson Agonistes the exclusive possibility of an afterlife in fame is perhaps responsible for an illogicality in the Semichorus' application to Samson of the phoenix simile: the ‘self-begotten bird’ ‘revives, reflourishes, in the regeneration of her body from her 'ashy womb; yet at 1706 we read, ‘And though her body die, her fame survives. The phoenix-like revival applies in the first instance to the living Samson's recovery of his full physical force, ‘When most inactive deemed’. The Semichorus then turn to thoughts of the dead Samson, and in that context a personal immortality cannot be maintained, whence a switch to the idea of a bodiless immortality in fame. Living in the age before Christ, neither the Semichorus nor Manoa can have access to the Christian meaning of the phoenix as symbol of rebirth after death.” The diuina auis becomes ‘a secular bird’ (punning on two senses of ‘secular’: ‘living for ages, and ‘of this world’). The context of Milton’s two pastoral elegies may also shade Manoa’s last words, when he envisages the virgins who will visit Samson’s tomb (SA 1742-3) ‘only bewailing | His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice’. This is in contrast with the participation in the mystic nuptials of the Lamb, 76 For fuller discussion see Ch. 9 pp. 337-8.

7”. See van den Brock 1972.

Samson Agonistes

to be enjoyed by both Lycidas and Damon. Lycidas now (Lycidas 176) ‘hears the unexpressive nuptial song. The unmarried Damon, spotless in his chaste youth and innocent of the pleasures of the marriage couch,

will be rewarded with uirginei honores (Epitaph. Dam. 214), and will ‘for ever perform the immortal wedding [of the Lamb)’ (217 aeternum perages immortales hymenaeos). The dead Samson will be commemorated on earth

by virgins; as regards marriage, the best that can be said for Samson is that in the manner of his death he finally freed himself from the evil consequences

of his failure to resist a wife’s temptations. The rather bleak and, it might be said, unregenerate quality of Sarnson Agonistes’ dealings with topics of fame and afterlife might be seen as only

natural ina tragedy based on the life and death ofan Old Testament hero, for whom the hopes expressed in the pastoral elegies written for Miltons own contemporaries were simply unavailable. But this is to overlook another point of contact between Samson Agonistes, Lycidas and the Epitaphium Damonis, that each of the three poems reflects on the death and afterlife of a person other than Milton, but in ways that, in the case of the pastoral elegies, explicitly address Milton's own ambitions and hopes, and, in the case of Samson Agonistes, seem implicitly, to many, to contain autobiographical relevance. In this retrospective work Milton pulls back from the exuberant, and intellectually rather questionable, confections of pagan myth,” philosophy and Christian eschatology, in which he embeds the reflections

and hopes that relate to his own longing for literary fame. At the same time Samson Agonistes conveys a sombre of clarity attainable in the matter political stage, and an awareness of between competing constructions

and uncertain message about the degree of fame and glory on the national and the difficulty of adjudicating with finality of fara, different versions of historical

memory. ?® This contrast also appears in what Samson does not share with the pagan hero with whom he otherwise has much in common, Hercules, namely personal rebirth from the flames like the phoenix: see Revard 1995: 242. On Samson Agonistes and Hercules see also Kessner 1974.

569

15 | Chaucer’s House of Fame and Pope’s Temple of Fame

In this book] have repeatedly turned the spotlight on what I have called ‘plots of fama. texts or passages within texts in which what at first sight might seem to be a localized appearance of fama triggers a wider thematization and narrativization of the topics and dynamics of fama. This may spread out to include within its reach whole texts or even groups of texts (for example Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’). In this concluding chapter I look at two poems in which fama is the titular subject, fama episodes elevated explicitly to the status of independent texts: Chaucer’s House of Fame (probably written in 1379/80), and Alexander Pope’s imitation, Temple of Fame (published 1715, written in 1710 or 1711). The

House of Fame, which has made

an

appearance on various occasions in earlier chapters, has generated a very large bibliography. The Temple of Fame, a fairly early work by Pope, has been relatively little studied. I use a reading of these two poems as a way of summarizing and further commenting on the themes that have emerged over the preceding chapters." Both poems, and especially Chaucer's, engage with the constantly expanding tradition of fama, at whose heart lie the key texts of Virgil's Fama in Aeneid 4 and Ovid's House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12. In the first section of this chapter I look at what the House and Temple have to say about tradition, or,

to put itanother way, about the reception of fama, or, to put it in yet another way, about fama-as-reception. In the next section I look at the plotting of fama,

focussing

mostly on

the House, which

develops

a narrative

drive

largely eliminated in the Temple. Both poems, however, end at a point of irresolution or suspension, which may be felt as the only adequate response to the tensions and ambivalences of fama as copiously documented in this book. But this is not the only possible response, and by way of contrast I lookata number of late-medieval and early eighteenth-century English texts which strive towards the closure that neither House nor Temple is willing

570

! See Ch. 1 p. 36. ? Boitani 1984 works through an account of the ancient and medieval history of fama to readings of Chaucer's House of Fame, viewed as a kind of encyclopaedia of the previous tradition. My own readings of Chaucer's and Pope's poems locate both within a larger time-span that reaches to the early modern period, and my focus is on large-scale thematic structures.

Chaucer and Pope

or able to attain. The fissured substance of fama can be expressed through the table of dichotomies drawn up in Chapter 1: in the next section of this chapter I revisit some of these dichotomies with reference predominantly to the House of Fame. The instability of Fama and the difficulty of pinning her down is also seen in her tendency to merge into other personifications; Chaucer and Pope each offer the reader a range of the ‘relatives of Fama’. In the final section of this chapter I return to what these poems have to say about the relationship between fama, as the realm of words and opinions circulating in the world, and the self, concluding with some thoughts on the possibility of constructing large-scale narratives of the selfin the world on the basis of fama texts. A briefsummary of the two poems will set the scene. In the first book of the House of Fame, after a proem on the subject of dreams and an invocation to the god of sleep, the narrator ‘Geffrey’ tells how in a dream he found himself in a glass Temple of Venus containing inscriptions and engravings of the subject matter of the Aeneid. The narrator dwells on the sufferings of Dido, and digresses to list other betrayed women who feature in Ovid's Heroides. Exiting from the Temple, Geffrey finds himself in a desert; looking up he sees a golden eagle, which, in Book 2, descends to snatch him up and carry him up to the House of Fame, set (as in Ovid) in mid-air, between heaven,

earth and sea. The eagle tells Geffrey that Jupiter wishes to reward him for his services as a writer who praises love but who has no access to immediate ‘tidings’ of love, by bringing him to a place where he may hear such tidings. During the flight the eagle gives Geffrey instruction on the physics of sound and on astronomy. In Book 3 Geffrey arrives at the fantastically decorated House of Fame, set on a rock of ice. Inside the palace he finds the grotesque person of Fame, modelled on Virgil's Fama, and pillars bearing famous poets and historians. Fame in judgement then distributes fame and infamy in an arbitrary fashion to nine groups of petitioners. Geffrey has not found the tidings of love for which he has come, and an unnamed friend directs

him to a whirling house of twigs, modelled in part on the Ovidian House of Fama. This house is full of tidings and the bearers of tidings. Geffrey follows a mass scramble towards a corner of the hall where love-tidings are being told, and at last he sees what seems to be ‘A man of gret auctorite on which

words the poem breaks off. Pope's Temple of Fame is a rewriting of Book 3 of Chaucer's House of Fame, but incorporating some material from elsewhere, especially Book 2. The dreamer finds himself at once confronted with the Temple of Fame on its rock of ice. The four faces of the Temple are described with famous figures from ancient Greece, the East, Egypt and the barbarian North. Inside

571

Chaucer and Pope are heroes famous in war and for virtue, and, at the very centre, Homer and Virgil, Pindar and Horace, Aristotle and Cicero. Fame herself, her physical person ‘as the antient Bards have told’, distributes fame and slander to eight groups of petitioners. The scene changes to a spinning mansion of news and rumours, corresponding to Chaucer's house of twigs. Asked by a stranger about his own hopes for praise, the dreamer replies that although ambitious he would have nothing but an ‘honest fame’.

fama-as-tradition Both the House of Fame and the Temple of Fame comment on, and might even be thought of as having been generated by, their authors' sense of their own place within literary history. More particularly they mark key moments in the history of fama within vernacular English literature, standing at the beginning and end of the period in English literature on which I touch in this book. Chaucer represents the start of a serious and sustained engagement in the vernacular with the classical tradition, both through direct recourse to ancient Latin texts, and through the mediation of French and Italian authors. Alexander Pope stands, arguably, at the end, or beginning of the

end, of the time when imitation of the classical Greek and Latin authors

-

was central to English poets’ understanding of their task.” This was also a time when negotiations of farra could still be conducted largely within a framework established by the ancient tradition taken together with the contestation or reaffirmation of the pagan tradition by late-antique and medieval Christianity, and subsequently by Renaissance humanism, and before the changes in the condition of fama brought about by the growth of mass-circulation publication, feeding eventually into the development from the beginning of the nineteenth century of the modern cult of celebrity. Pope comments on the Temple of Fares debt to Chaucer's poem, and hence on his own poem’s relation to fara-as-tradition, when he acknowledges in the ‘Advertisement’ that ‘the hint of [the Terple of Fame] was taken The Temple of Fame can be read as an early intervention by Pope in the Battle of the Books, to be followed by his satirization of the moderns in the Dunciad (final version 1743) and Peri

bathous: Or, Martinus Scriblerus his Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry (March 1728). Poetry sinks when it does not feed on the famous works of the ancients; in the Temple of Fame, 53-60, Pope provides a striking example of the generation of the sublime through imitation of the ancients in a context that refers to new journeys of discovery: see below, and Bevis 1986; Hardie

P

572

2009a: Ch. 3 ‘Virgil's Rama and the sublime’. In the wider perspective the Battle of the Books marks a stage in the demotion of classical exemplars as the guarantee of literary excellence. In general see Patey 1997; Weinbrot 1993: 296-307 on Pope. On which see recently Mole 2007 and 2009.

Fama-as-tradition

from Chaucer’s House of Fame’, and goes on to deliver an implicit rebuke to those who fail to acknowledge their thefts from earlier writers.” The major representatives of fame in the Temple are the ancients, but through this open and avowed imitation Pope implicitly installs Chaucer (and his House of Fame) within the Temple. As well as enrolling Chaucer among famous poets (fama-as-fame), Pope’s poem also enacts fama-as-tradition, as an imitation of an earlier poem about fama, and so adds Chaucer as another and privileged member to the list of auctores registered in the encyclopaedic allusivity of Chaucer’s own House of Fame. Pope's ‘Advertisement; wittingly or otherwise, also prompts reflections on the malleability of Fama and the distortions to which she is subjected by her devotees: Pope will admit only to taking a ‘hint’ from Chaucer: “The Design is in a manner entirely alter'd, the Descriptions and most of the particular Thoughts my own.' While the Temple of Fame is very definitely Pope and not Chaucer, an unprejudiced reader might be surprised to discover how much Chaucer there is in what follows. Pope concludes by advising his 'Reader who would compare this with Chaucer [to] begin with his Third Book of Farne, there being nothing in the Two first Books that answers to their Title: That is a statement about the role of fame in the first two books of the House of Fame that only the most careless of Chaucer's readers could make, and that Pope was not among their number is evidenced by the number of detailed allusions to the first two books in the Temple of Fame.“ That said, Pope's single-book poem is modelled primarily on the third book of the House of Fame. Yet this fact in itself establishes a parallel with Chaucer's first book, which is largely taken up with distorted repetition and recital of the actions related in another text, Virgil's Aeneid. Pope's relation-

ship to Chaucer, mirroring Chaucer's relationship to Virgil, is another relay in the continuing work of fama-as-tradition. In the Temple of Fame itself poetic succession is imaged in the relationships of the four classical poets who stand on four of the six columns that 'Hold the chief Honours' in the centre of the 'Hallow'd Quire’ of the Temple of Fame, Homer and Virgil, and Pindar and Horace. Virgil ‘On Homer still... fix'd a reverend Eye’ (202), but corrects Homer’s ‘brave Neglect’ (195) with his own (199). Pindar flings (214) 'a careless Hand'

'unweary'd Art’

across the harp, and on the

reliefs on his column which figure the games of Greece, (221) ‘all appear'd Irregularly great’. In contrast (222-3) ‘happy’ Horace tun'd the Ausonian > Tillotson Yalden's mention $ As noted 7 Alluding

in Pope 1954: 242 thinks that ‘Pope probably has principally in mind the debts of Temple of Fame and the Steeleids [of John Lacy] to the Hous of Fame. Neither of them Chaucer.” by Fyler 1992: 150, and in the parallels in Tillotson's commentary. perhaps to Horace's curiosita felicitas (Petron. Sat. 118).

573

Chaucer and Pope

Lyre | To sweeter Sounds, and temper'd Pindar's Fire‘? So Pope applies his own art and polish to the rough poetry of Chaucer. The exordium to the Temple of Fame is a showpiece of fama-as-poetictradition. Pope draws attention to some of the layering of models in his

‘Note’: ‘This Poem is introduced in the manner of the Provencial? Poets, whose works were for the most part Visions... and constantly descriptive.

From these, Petrarch and Chaucer frequently borrow the idea of their poems. See the Trionfi of the former, and the Dream, Flower and the Leaf, &c. of the latter.’ Tillotson's notes allow the reader to excavate more of the poetic

history in these first ten lines, packed with allusion to Dryden's translations of classical and medieval poems, including a translation of the Flower and the Leaf, (falsely) attributed to Chaucer. Tillotson's statement that ‘the Temple of Fame, then, is a learned poem’! 0

might be rephrased as ‘the Teriple of Fame is a poem of fama-as-tradition.' In a similar vein, and with explicit reference to a notion of fama as tradition, Piero Boitani comments that ‘[Chaucer’s| House of Fame is the literary

universe of a fourteenth-century Englishman*!! The encyclopaedic quality of Chaucer's poem is anticipated in the densely allusive person of Virgil's monstrous Fara, herselfa kind of grotesque encyclopaedia of Greco-Roman literary tradition,!? although Chaucer, to all intents and purposes Greekless and without access to the crucial Lucretian models for Virgil's Fara, will scarcely have been aware of this. What is clear, however, is that Virgil, and the reception of Virgil, are at the centre of Chaucer's understanding of fama-as-tradition, and that Chaucer also understands well the connections between Fama’s immediate narrative function in Aencid 4, as the goddess of fama-as-rumour, and her larger roles as the personification of farna-as-fame and fama-as-tradition. Geffrey, the narrator of the House of Fame, does not encounter Fame in her Virgilian person until he reaches the House of Fame itself in Book 3. At the start of his dream vision in Book 1 he finds himself in a Temple of Venus, where he comes across the incipit of the Aeneid (142)

‘writen on a table of bras’: ‘I wol now synge, yif I kan, | The armes and also * Pope inserts himself into the chain of imitation, combining allusion to Horace's own imitation of Pindar in Odes 4.2 with allusion to Horace's account of his own place in the history of lyric in Ep. 1.19; Pope 'corrects' Horace by adding Pindar to the Greek iambic and lyric predecessors listed by Horace at Ep. 1.19.23-33 (with TF 223 ‘temper'd Pindar’s Fire’ cf. Ep. 1.19.28-9 temperat Archilochi Musam pede mascula Sappho, | temperat Alcaeus). Pope's last pair of ancients, Aristotle and Cicero, between whom there is no such close relationship of succession as between the pairs of poets, arc placed on an equal footing, 238 'With equal Rays immortal =.

574

Tully shone.’ By which he means Old French.

Boitani 1984:205.

10 Tillotson in Pope 1954: 228.

!'? See Ch. 3 p. 107.

Fama-as-tradition

the man...' Reading an inscription quickly turns into ecphrastic viewing (‘First sawgh I... ‘Ther sawgh I grave. ..') of scenes from the beginning to the end of the Aeneid. The whole episode is obviously modelled on Aeneas’ viewing of scenes from the Trojan War in the Temple of Juno in Carthage, in Book 1 of the Aeneid, and that temple is already a Temple of Fama. What Aeneas sees are (Aen. 1.457) bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per orbem,

and he tells Achates that this is a fama that will bring salvation, 463 feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem. Within the story of Aeneas and Dido in Aeneid 1-4 this 'moment' of fama is part of a much larger ‘plot’ of fama, which comes to a head in the materialization within the text of the person of Farna herself, in Aeneid 4." For the fama transmitted in Homer and the Epic Cycle that is the source of the scenes viewed by Aeneas in the Temple of Juno, Chaucer, in his Temple of

Venus, substitutes the farna that is embodied in the Aeneid itself, and that in two senses: Chaucer's House of Fameis a gloss both on the thematic network of fama within the plot of the Aeneid, and on the reception of the Aeneid in later Western literature, its centrality to that literary tradition viewed as fama. These two aspects, inside and outside the fiction, interpenetrate, as they already do in the Aeneid, and Chaucer is very much alert to the metapoetic and self-reflexive workings of fama within the Aeneid.'> This alertness is nothing new within the medieval reception of the Aeneid: for example Alan of Lille in the Anticlaudianus (a poem well known to Chaucer) characterizes

Fama as an actor within a narrative in language similar to that used in a

judgement on the fictionality of Virgil’s poetry: Anticlaud. 8.305 Nuncia Fama uolat et ueris falsa maritans... ‘The messenger Fanta flies on her way, and wedding falsehoods to truths. ..’; 1.142—3 Virgilii musa mendacia

multa colorat | et facie ueri contexit pallia falso ‘Virgil’s Muse lends colour to many lies, and with the appearance of truth weaves cloaks for falsehood’. At the centre of the summary of the Aeneid in the Temple of Venus, reading and viewing give way to direct speech in the mouth of Dido, who 13 Bennett 1968: Ch. 1; Baswell 1995: 224-6, in a comparison of Virgil's Aeneas and Chaucer's Geffrey as 'hermeneutic heroes’; Watkins 1993.

M. See Ch. 3 p. 95-8. 15 Sec Kruger 1993: 132 n. 3 for a list of critics who ‘have read the [sc. House of Fame] asa self-conscious exploration of poetry and language: Chaucer's ‘Geffrey’ is both a dreamer inside the text and a figure for the author Geoffrey Chaucer, compare the way that Aeneas in the Temple of Juno is both a character within the fiction, and, as a ‘reader-in-the-text, a figure for the reader outside the text. 16 Fyler 1979: 30-1 draws attention to the parallelism; 32, on Bernardus Silvestris' comment that

in the internal narrator Aeneas’ telling of the sack of Troy weritati historiae falsitas fabulae adimiscetur (it is true that the Greeks sacked Troy, but Aeneas’ moral worthiness is false, since

we know from Dares Phrygius that Aeneas betrayed the city).

575

576

Chaucer and Pope

ends with a complaint against Aeneas that culminates in a lament over the

loss of her good name, HF 345-60: *O, wel-awey that I was born!

345

For thorgh yow is my name lorn,

And alle myn actes red and songe Over al thys lond, on every tonge. O wikke Fame! - for ther nys

Nothing so swift, lo, as she is!

350

O, soth ys, every thing ys wyst,

Though hit be kevered with the myst. Eke, though I myghte duren ever, That [ have don, rekever I never, That I ne shal be seyd, allas,

355

Yshamed be thourgh Eneas, And that I shal thus juged be: *Loo, ryght as she hath don, now she

Wol doo eft-sones, hardely”Thus seyth the peple prively.’

360

Dido's last words (357-60) are a comment on the circulation of gossip;'® In the first part of the complaint she speaks of a fama that is on its way to achieving textuality (‘alle myn actes red and songe’), on its way to becoming part of the song that is the Aeneid (arma uirumque cano, HF 143 ‘I wol now

synge, yif [ kan’).!9 Chaucer's Dido anticipates her own reception, the fama that posterity, in the form of authors and readers, will grant her. The House of Fame's extended focus on Dido's complaints, digressing from the fate-driven plot

of the Aeneid, and the narrator's agreement with Dido's own judgement that Aeneas has betrayed her and fallen short in 'trouthe' (both 'faithfulness' and

‘truth’), constitute in themselves a part of that reception, a way of

7 Dido's plaint is a free development by Chaucer, as the narrator acknowledges, archly in a text about fama, (HF 313-14) ‘As me mette redely — | Non other auctour alegge I’; the lament about her loss of fame is based on Aen. 1.321—3 te propter cundem | exstinctus pudor et, qua sola sidera adibam, | fama prior. The idea ofan unjust judgement (357) through gossip anticipates the arbitrary judgements of Fame in Book 3. The gloss in Fairfax and Bodleian MSS on 358-9 quotes the second half of the couplet Rumor de ueteri faciet uentura timeri; cras poterunt fieri turpia sicut heri, lines alluding to Helen from the ‘Versus magistri Hildeberti, a short elegiac poem on Troy. The couplet was widely circulated, and the second line was a proverb (Fyler 1987: 980-1). On Helen as the archetypal female epic subject of fama see Ch. 9 pp. 348-53. But ‘red’ (347) here means ‘tell, give an account of (OED s.v. ‘read’ v. 19a), not ‘read’; cf. c.g. Chaucer Parl. Fowls 514-16 ‘But bet is that a wyghtes tonge reste | Than entermeten hym of such doinge, | Of which he neyther rede can ne synge.”

Fama-as-tradition

responding to the Virgilian narrative that is associated particularly with Ovid and Heroides 7. The narrator draws attention to the Ovidian swerve from an ‘Augustan’, pro-Aeneas, reading of the Aeneid, when

he tells the

reader who wants the full account of Dido’s actions and words, (378-9)

‘Rede Virgile in Eneydos | Or the Epistle of Ovide’*” The reference to Heroides 7 then pulls the narrative away completely from the Aeneid into a long catalogue of other false lovers, drawn from the Heroides, before the authority of the Aeneid, and the good character of Aeneas, are reasserted at 427-30 ‘But to excusen Eneas | Fullyche of al his grete trespas, | The book seyth Mercurie, sauns fayle, | Bad hym goo into Itayle...’ The narrator of the House of Fame does not raise the possibility, but Chaucer will have been very familiar with the issue, that the whole story of Dido and Aeneas is a Virgilian fabrication, a defamation of the chaste Carthaginian queen."! When Geffrey reaches the House of Fame itself he notices that there is a 'litil envye' between Virgil's Greek counterpart, Homer, and another purveyor of the matter of Troy, Dares Phrygius, who (1477-80) 'seyde that Omer made lyes, | Feyninge in hys poetries, | And was to Grekes favorable; | Therfor held he hyt but fable’.*” Christopher Baswell, reading the House of Fame as a response to the complex of commentary traditions on the Aeneid available to Chaucer, observes: *Not only was the Aeneid replete with the thematics of Fame, positive and negative, but its own burden of conflicting cultural

reception made Virgil's book itself a perfect emblem of Fame." Like Chaucer, Pope deftly weaves fragments of an allusive history of the poetic tradition within which he writes into the fabric of his Temple of Fame. He repeats the self-referential trick of Virgil's ut perhibent (Aen. 4.179), the fama about Fama, when he introduces his own version of the person of Fame: TF 266-9 ‘Such was her Form, as antient Bards have told,

| Wings raise her Arms, and Wings her Feet infold; | A Thousand busy Tongues the Goddess bears, | And Thousand open Eyes, and Thousand 20 On the dichotomy between Virgilian and Ovidian perspectives on Dido here see e.g. Delany 1970: 48-57. nu

2 2

See Kallendorf 1989: Ch. 3 'Boccaccio's two Didos’; Baswell

1995: 20-1.

The fifth- or sixth-century AD De excidio Troiae ascribed to Dares, supposedly a Trojan contemporary with the Trojan War, was believed to be a genuine authority in the Middle Ages. Dares’ attack on Homer’s truthfulness was known to Chaucer through Benoit de Ste Maure’s Roman de Troie, 45-70, 110-16, and Guido delle Colonne’s Latin redaction of Benoit, Historia destructionis Trotae 4.204, 276. See Fyler 1979: 31; Minnis

1995: 230-1; Baswell

1995: 18-20.

With Chaucer's comment on the ‘litil envye’ in the matter of Homer's veracity cf. Petr. Triumphus Fame (alternative version) 111.107-11 on Dares and Dictys ‘fra lor discordi e non é

chi 'l ver cribri; | cosi rimansi ancor l'antica lite | di questi e d'altri e li argomenti interi, | ché le certe notizie son fallite* 23 Baswell 1995: 229.

577

Chaucer and Pope

list'ning Ears.’ In the shrine of Fame Virgil fixes a reverend eye on Homer; Virgil’s appropriation of Homer through respectful and artful imitation is exemplified in Pope's description of Homer as (187) ‘In Years he seem'd, but not impair'd by Years’, an allusion to a Virgilian line as itself transformed by the imitation of Dryden’s Aeneid, 6.420-1 ‘He look'd in Years; yet in his Years were seen | A youthful Vigour, and Autumnal green’ (Virg. Aen. 6.304 [Charon] iam senior, sed cruda deo uiridisque senectus — a line that itself might stand as a description of Fama perennis). My final example is the simile of the bees applied by Pope to the assembly of the murmuring nations of the world at the summons of Fame’s trumpet at TF 282-7. This expands on the same moment in the House of Fame, 1520-5 ‘But while that y beheld thys syghte, | I herde a noyse aprochen blyve, | That ferde as been don in an hive | Ayen her tyme of out-fleynge; | Ryght such a maner murmurynge, | For al the world, hyt semed me.’ Pope uses the Chaucerian cue to inscribe a history of the epic simile of the bees,

alluding to the Virgilian examples at Aen. 1.430—6 (of the Carthaginians busy at work building their new city) and 6.707—9 (of the numberless races and peoples of souls on the shore of Lethe),”' as well as to the bees in (Dryden's translation of) Georgics 4, and perhaps also to the simile at Luc. Bell. Civ. 9.284-92,°° and certainly to Milton's simile comparing the fallen angels assembling in Pandaemonium to bees."^ Like the fallen angels, Pope's suppliant crowds are assembling in a royal hall, and that hall has been built in the likeness of Lucifer's palace (see below p. 597). The comparison to bees of a noisy crowd assembling takes us back to the first bees simile in European literary tradition, and the first extended simile in the Iliad, 2.87— 90,°’ occurring in the course of what I have analysed as the first major fama episode in Greco-Roman literature. The tenor for the vehicle of Pope's bee simile are the lines (TF 280-1) ‘Of various Tongues the mingled Sounds

were heard; | In various Garbs promiscuous Throngs appear’d’: the ‘low

t. =

Pope may also have in mind another Virgilian simile comparing the multitudinous dead to the numberless fallen leaves (Aen, 6.309, yet another simile with a long intertextual history), via Milton’s imitation at PL 1.301-4 ‘Thick as autumnal leaves’: cf. TF 282 ‘Thick as the bees. ?5 See Tillotson in Pope 1954 on 282 ff. For discussion of the many analogues to Milton’s simile see Whaler 1932: 545-52. Beginning tte &vea, picked up in 91 às rÀv &6vea TOAAG: cf. TF 278 ‘All the nations’. Pope in

to e

578

his ‘Observations on the second book of the Iliad notes that ‘this is the first simile in Homer,

and enters into dialogue with Scaliger and Macrobius over the comparison with the similes in Aeneid | and 6. A few lines later Pope turns the Homeric'Ooca into a regular image of Fame: 2.121-2 ‘Fame flies before, the messenger of Jove, | And shining soars, and claps her wings above’ (II. 2.93-4"Occa Bebra | órpóvouc' Ivan, Aids ayyedos.)

28 See Ch. 2 pp. 58-62.

Plots of fama

Murmur’

(287) of the crowds attendant on Fame is a part of the ceaseless

sounds to be heard in the Temple of Fame, from the time that it first bursts

on the dreamer's consciousness: 22-4 ‘Sudden I heard a wild promiscuous Sound, | Like broken Thunders that at distance roar, | Or Billows murm'ring on the hollow Shoar.

»29

Plots of fama fama episodes have a way of organizing themselves as plots, with opening and closural sequences. The House of Fame is a dream vision in which the main character is the dreamer himself, ‘Geffrey’, who is set on a quest for

fama. That he is on a quest is not known to him until his goal is defined for him by the eagle who carries him up to the House of Fame in Book 2. Nevertheless allusion at the start of the first book to Aeneas' arrival in Carthage, in Book 1 of the Aeneid, when Geffrey finds himselfin the Temple of Venus at the beginning of his dream, marks this out as an opening, the start of a partial reenactment of a Virgilian plot." By the end of the first book the plots of the Aeneid and of the House of Fame have parted ways, at least temporarily: the Aeneid has been summarily narrated to its close through the ecphrasis of the images in the Temple of Venus, while Geffrey goes out of the Temple to find himself in an uninhabited desert of sand (1.487—8) ‘As small as man may se yet lye | In the desert of Lybye’, back to square one, and back to the position in which Aeneas finds himself before he reaches Dido's new city, on the shores of an apparently uninhabited Libya (Aen. 1.306—9). Itis here that the eagle descends to snatch up Geffrey, and to inform him of his mission in search of fama-as-tidings (one of the models for the eagle is the Virgilian Mercury, the winged god who prompts Aeneas to leave Carthage in pursuit of the goal of Roman gloria, fama). The quest is defined specifically in terms of the fame of love, with reference to two meanings of ‘fame’. Jupiter, says the eagle, in recognition of Geffrey's service to Cupid and Venus in his constant writing on the subject of love ‘In honour of hym and in preysynges' (HF 635: fama-as-fame), means to reward him with that which he totally lacks, because of his constant immersion in his books, namely oral 'tydynges | Of Loves folk yf they be glade...' (644—5: 29 The first wave and storm similes of crowd behaviour and noise are also to be found in the first fama episode in the Iliad, 2.144-6, 209-10; Pope's immediate models are Ov. Met. 12.49-52,

and Chaucer's and Dryden's versions of those lines. 30

For various assessments of the extent to which Geffrey acts out the plot of the Aeneid, extending beyond Book 1, see Bennett

1968; Tisdale

1973; Joyner 1976; Baswell

1995; Ch. 6.

579

Chaucer and Pope

fama-as-report, -news). It is to gather tidings, reports of real-life experience, gossip about neighbours, rather than stories about love that can be found in books (fama-as-tradition), that the eagle will carry Geffrey to the House of Fame (the irony that the House itself is a very bookish construction needs no labouring). Another model for the eagle is the eagle in Dante's Purgatorio 9 (19-42) which, in a dream, descends like a thunderbolt to carry Dante up to the gate of Purgatory. This is the most obvious of the House of Fames allusions to the Commedia (whose action has itself been described as ‘a gigantic house of fame’).*!

Like Petrarch and Boccaccio

earlier in the fourteenth

century, Chaucer confronts the inimitable teleology of Dante’s journey to a transcendental goal. The nature and extent of the House of Fame’s debt to the Commedia have been variously assessed." Some older readings strove to find teleology and transcendence in the plot of the House of Fame," but Geffrey’s journey all too obviously falls short of the Dantean trajectory, both in terms of spatial reach and of intellectual and spiritual achievement."! The House of Fame, as the eagle instructs Geffrey, is placed not at the summit of the universe, but, on the Ovidian model, in a place midway between heaven, earth and sea (HF 843-7: cf. Ov. Met. 12.39—40). Even this lower place turns

out to fail as a goal for Geffrey’s quest, for he does not find there the ‘newe tydynges’ promised him by the eagle. An unnamed guide offers to lead him to where he will learn what he desires to hear (1910-15); this place is arrived at not through further ascent, but through descent into (1918-19) ‘a valeye,

| Under the castel’, the location of the whirling house of twigs. Nor is the unnamed friend a Beatrice to take over from a Virgil as the guide for the final stage of the journey, since Geffrey finds perching by the house of twigs his old friend the eagle, who now adjusts the terms of his commission from Jove: it is in the house of twigs, not the House of Fame, that Geffrey will find

3 pe

3

I

3

3

a

580

Boitani 1984: 76. HF and Commedia: Schless 1984: 29—76 for survey of earlier literature, and catalogue of parallels; Taylor 1989; Cooper 1999. For both HF and Boccaccio's Amorosa visione as attempts to contain Dante's vision within the framework of a French-style love vision see Wallace 1935: Ch. |. E.g. Koonce 1966; Tisdale 1973, arguing that the House of Fame takes the reader up the same ladder as does Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, the Consolation is an important intertext, but better read as a foil to the imperfect endings of the House of Fame. Doob 1990: 311 takes as the three major models for the House of Fame's story-line the Aeneid, the Consolation and the Commedia, but reads the House of Fame as a parodic losing of the ways that lead through those three ‘labyrinthine’ texts. For a survey of earlier proponents of both unity and disunity in the poem see Clemen 1963: 72 n. l. Fyler 1979: 49 ‘The House of Fame is in the air... ; and Chaucer, unlike his visionary

predecessors, never rises above the sublunary world.’

Plots of fama

what he desires: 2007-10 ‘sith that Joves, of his grace, | As I have seyd, wol

the solace | Fynally with these thinges, | Unkouthe syghtes and tydynges...’ This renewed promise of Jovian finality is thwarted by the famously abrupt ending of the House of Fame: after exploring the house of twigs, Geffrey’s attention is drawn to a great hubbub in the corner of a hall, ‘Ther [where]

men of love-tydynges tolde’, towards which the crowd rushes, until (2155-8) Atte last y saugh a man, Which that y

nat ne kan;

But he semed for to be

A man of gret auctorite.

— and at this point the text breaks off. Critics divide as to whether this is a deliberately unfinished ending or not, and theories as to who the man of great authority would have been are legion." It is hard not to feel that this is the only satisfactory ending to the poem, and that a resolution of the continuous deferrals thrown up by the plot hitherto would have been anticlimactic. It is also appropriate that this figure of greatness should remain nameless (and so denied fame) and unknown, perpetuating the cloud of unknowing in which Geffrey has moved for much of the poem. All that can be said is that he 'seemed' to be a man of great authority, giving a final example of an appearance/reality contrast that has surfaced intermittently in the poem's dealings in fame. There may be a question as to whether this is even a man, rather than a verbal report, given what the eagle had told Geffrey about the nature of the inhabitants of the House of Fame (1070-83), that every ‘speech’ that comes up to the palace ‘wexeth lyk the same wight | Which that the word in erthe spak, | Be hyt clothed red or blak; | And hath so verray hys lyknesse | That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse | That it the same body be.’ Is this the kind of ‘likeness’ behind the 'seeming' of the man of great authority? We have no reason to think that the inhabitants of the house of twigs have any greater reality. In his Temple of Fame Pope eliminates most of Chaucer's narrative drive by beginning his vision at a point corresponding to the beginning of Book 3 of the House of Fame. The transition from the Temple to the Mansion of News, or Rumours, the equivalent of Chaucer's house of twigs, is effected by an unmotivated scene change (TF 418-19 ‘some Pow'r unknown | Strait chang'd the Scene, and snatch'd me from the Throne’). The motif of the unknown interlocutor, who in Chaucer asks Geffrey, (HF 1872) 'Artow come

5

On the (non-)ending see e.g. Stevenson man); Fry 1975; Minnis

1978 (10 nn. 2-3 for a survey of identifications of the

1995: 239n.; Benson

1999,

581

582

Chaucer and Pope

hider to han fame?’ and then tells him where he can find the new tidings that Geffrey says are his actual goal, is deferred until after Pope has viewed the Mansion

of News and Rumour:

TF 498—500

‘One came, methought,

and whisper'd in my Ear; | What cou'd thus high thy rash Ambition raise? | Art thou, fond Youth, a Candidate for Praise?” This question opens the door to what might have been the late-starting but intense narrative thrust of a quest for personal fame, but Pope's tortured reply (on which see more below) concludes with the suspension of the poem’s last line (524) ‘Oh grant an honest Fame, or grant me none!’

Pope's Temple of Fame is a late revival of a Chaucerian text. The pressure to write a plot of fame through to a more definite conclusion is seen in a number of earlier poems that work within a direct Chaucerian tradition. Already in his 1483 edition of the House of Fame William Caxton had supplied a perfunctory twelve-line ending in which the dreamer tells how he awoke and began to write the poem we have just read."^ I look now at the plots of fame in three long poems by John Skelton, Gavin Douglas and Stephen Hawes. In The Garlande of Laurell (probably written about 1495, and published with some

additions in 1523),

Skelton

narrates his own

quest for the

laurel of poetic fame in the realm of a Queen of Fame who is as capricious as Chaucer's. In the opening debate between Fame and Pallas as to whether Skelton's name should be allowed to stand (Garlande 62-3) ‘regestred...

|

With laureate tryumphe in the courte of Fame’ in accordance with Pallas’ prior command, Pallas accuses Fame of distributing her favours by giving a name even to those of no substance, and of rewarding folly as often as wisdom (176-81). However, Fame will agree to Pallas’ advocacy of Skelton if (215-17) ‘good recorde | May be brought forth, such as can be founde, | With laureat tryumphe why Skelton sholde be crowned’. A review of poets ancient and modern is summoned by a blast on Eolus' trumpet, and Skelton's claim to the laurel is supported by the trio of English poets, Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate. Skelton is introduced to the elaborate and bejewelled Palace of Fame, whose transcendingly noble and rich queen and empress (482-8: cf. HF 1360-3) is taken up with the daily business of listening to all sorts of newsmongers and purveyors of tattle from all corners of Europe, the same ?6

Fyler 1987: 990, 1142. Caxton’s copy of the poem breaks offat line 2094.

37

The standard edition is Skelton

1990. For critical discussion see Spearing 1976: 211-18;

Loewenstein

1990; Whitehead 2003:184-8; Griffiths 2006. The poem may

1984; Scattergood

have been begun on the occasion of a celebration organized by Skelton's patron Elizabeth Howard, Countess of Surrey, at Sheriff Hutton Castle in honour of Skelton's laureation by the

universities of Oxford, Louvain and Cambridge.

Plots of fama kind of crowd as fills Chaucer's house of twigs ( Garlande 491-519). The three English poets entrust Skelton to the care of Fame's registrar, Occupation (i.e. the condition of being busy, the time the poet spends at his desk, and so an

answer to Fame's charge against Skelton of idleness, 228), who leads the poet firstly through a dystopian version of the life of public affairs and politics, life at the English court, and then to an idyllic garden of poetry. Steering clear of Envious Rancour, Occupation leads Skelton up a winding stair to the state chamber of the Countess of Surrey, whose gentlewomen weave a crown of laurel for the poet, who in exchange delivers poems in praise of the Countess and her ladies (so answering Fame’s opening complaint that Skelton (75-6) *wyll not endevour hymselfe to purchase | The favour of ladys with wordis electe’). Returning to the Palace of Fame, Skelton justifies his ‘laureate triumph’ to Fame by having Occupation read out a catalogue of Skelton's works (balancing the earlier parade of the greats of poetic history, and so locating Skelton's auvre as the continuation and climax of previous poetic tradition)” from a book of remembrance as richly and curiously adorned as the Palace of Fame itself. When Occupation comes to the work we are now reading, the Garlande, a thousand orators and poets cry out ‘Triumpha, triumpha’ the noise of trumpets carries as far as Rome, and

the heavens and earth shake (1503—9).? ‘The Quene of Fame commaundid shett fast the boke, | And therwith, sodenly, out of my dreme I woke’ (151011). Via the aristocratic patronage of the Countess of Surrey, Skelton has managed to ensure the full support of Fame. In the second, Latin, envoi to the book, written for the 1523 publication and dedicating it to Cardinal Wolsey (hitherto a constant object of Skelton's hostility),*" Skelton seeks to yoke his own fame with that of the court of Henry VIII, bidding it sound out the king's praises. All this has not been without a struggle; how much credence we, and Skelton, should place in it is perhaps called into doubt by the typically Chaucerian dubitatio that introduces the dream vision: 31-5 'And whether it were of ymagynacyon, | Or of humors superflue, that often wyll crepe | Into the brayne by drynkyng over depe, | Or it procedyd of fatall persuacyon, | I can not tell you what was the occasyon.’ 9 Like the House of Fame, Skelton's Garlande is a self-consciously learned poem. On Skelton's sense of himself within farna-as-tradition see Scattergood 1990: 126-8. » Skelton's own marginal note refers the reader to Dan. 7:10 ‘thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and

the books were opened’, one of a number of allusions in the Garlande to apocalypse and the Last Judgement, the precedent in the House of Fame for this kind of allusion suggests that Skelton has his tongue in his cheek. On the self-authoring strategy of Skelton's own glosses to his poem see Griffiths 2006: 117-28. Trony has naturally been suspected: Brownlow 1990: 89—90.

583

Chaucer and Pope

Gavin Douglas’ The Palis of Honour (1501),*' possibly directly indebted to Skelton’s Garlande," is a dream vision in which the poet journeys from the desert of Fortune to the Palace of Honour on a rock of shining marble (not ice), passing through a series of processional courts, of Sapience (Minerva), Diana, Venus, Rhetoric and Poetry, all heading towards the Palace of Honour. In the first ward of the palace Venus holds a mirror in front of the dreamer, in which he beholds scenes from universal history, in narratives old

and new, showing (1693—5) 'every famus douchty deid | That men in story may se or cornakyll reid. The point of the reappearance here of Venus is perhaps that the dreamer's previous enemy has now been contained within the Palace of Honour, her erotic energies securely channelled in the service of fame and honour. The palace is a storehouse of poetic resources, but it also converges with an idealized Scottish court, turning into a Regia Solis in which King James IV is identified with Apollo, and where earthly honour

A N

PS

is conflated with heavenly glory, through allusion to Revelation and the New Jerusalem. The poem, it has been suggested, 'provide[s] an ending for Chaucer's unfinished House of Fame." Stephen Hawes’ Pastime of Pleasures (c. 1506)" is a long narrative poem that begins and ends with fame. At the beginning La Grande Amoure (the poet), after choosing the path of worldly honour over the path of contemplation (repeating the choice of the hero of Boccaccio's Amorosa visione), meets Dame Fame, riding on the palfrey Pegasus, and accompanied by two greyhounds (Governance and Grace). She tells him the way to the Tower Perilous, where dwells La Bell Pucell. The fame of the absent object of desire"? spurs on the hero: 288-90 ‘Her swete reporte / so my harte set on fyre | With brennynge loue / moost hote and feruent | That her to se / I hadde grete desyre.’ After being educated in a series of knightly adventures through a succession of allegorical houses, Amoure is married to La Bell Pucell, and they live together until he dies of old age, but not before succumbing to avarice. Despite that, Dame Fame proclaims that she will spread abroad his name. This introduces a replay of the sequence in Petrarch's Trionfi: Time arrives to announce that he will destroy everything, including praise of Amoure, to be followed by Eternity. That Petrarchan relativization aside, Hawes' Fame is an unproblematic creature: her burning

^4 a uw

584

The standard edition is Douglas 1992. Critical discussions: Bawcutt 1976: Ch. 3; Spearing 1976: 202-11; Whitehead 2003: 193-200; Cairns 1984 discusses the Ovidianism of the poem, and Douglas' use of Regio's commentary on the Metamorphoses. Brownlow 1990: 85 thinks the influence certain. 55 Spearing 1976: 211. Standard edition: Hawes

1928. See Chew

On which see Ch. 9 p. 348 n. 45.

1962: 184; Whitehead 2003: 218-29.

Plots of fama

tongues tell the truth, and she commemorates appropriately the great acts of dead champions. By going back to the Chaucerian model in the Temple of Fame, Alexander Pope reintroduces complexity into a tradition of fame poems, of which there was a flurry in the early part of the eighteenth century, accompanied by essays in the Tatler and Spectator on fame and temples of fame, and by a fashion for Temples of Worthies in landscape gardens.'* To bring out by contrast the kind of plot that Pope does not develop in the Temple, I look at three of its immediate predecessors and followers. Thomas Yalden's Temple of Fame: A Poem, to the Memory of the Most Illustrious Prince William Duke of Gloucester (London 1700) is a pastoral elegy in the manner of Virgil's Eclogue 5. Nature's lament for the only child of Princess

(later Queen)

Anne

is followed by a song of Silvanus which

balances the description of a Mansion of Death set in a gloomy vale against the description of a Temple of Fame set in ‘Fields of Bliss, Realms of Etherial Day' (p. 12). It is barred to those who waste their days 'In false pursuits of Fame, and courting Praise’ It turns into a Temple of ‘the fam'd Worthies of our British Race’, with a Parade of royal British, into which William is

finally introduced to enjoy endless fame (p. 13). Of somewhat more interest is (the anonymous) The Temple of Fame: A Poem. Inscrib'd to Mr Congreve (1709), celebrating success in the war against Louis XIV. The poem works through some of the dichotomies of fama to reach a firm closure. Fame, previously a wanderer (like the Virgilian Fama), decides to ‘fix a standing Shrine’ (p. 4), creating a temple for herself (i.e. a house, like the Ovidian Fama’s), and decides to place it in Albion, whose

successful armies and navies give promise of future greatness. At her word (so potent are the utterances of Fame) the Temple rises. This is described as a version of the Ovidian House of Fama, multiplying echoes, boisterous uproar, lies gilded with truth, and a series of personifications in which “True Virtue... whom no report could move’ is isolated amidst ‘Fancy, Rumor, Calumny and Love' and the like (p. 8). The description then departs from the Ovidian template: p. 8 'Oppos'd to these were Fields of Battle spread; images of (English) triumphant conquest prophetic of things to come, (p. 9) 'All Copy'd from th' Eternal book of Fate, | T' adorn the Sacred Fane, as Beautiful as Great’. Fame and Fate are welded together. The person of Fame herself is a combination of the Virgilian creature, but with the multiplicity

^*

Fora survey see Tillotson in Pope 1954: 210-13. On the Temple of Honour, or British Worthies, at Stowe (1735, and almost certainly based on essays by Addison in the Tatler, 14 and 21 January 1710) see Robertson

1994: 87-91; on Pope and Stowe see Orestano 2005.

585

586

Chaucer and Pope

of mouths and ears more decorously placed on items of clothing rather than on her body, and the standard Renaissance image, two golden wings on her shoulders and a silver trumpet in her right hand. The oral propagation of fame is balanced by the written, in the ‘Book... With Acts of Godlike Chivalry enroll’d’ (p. 10) that she holds in her other hand. The action now

shifts to the human level with the entry of the famous naval officer Sir George Rooke, a ‘warlike knight’ (p. 10), on whose arrival at the shrine a trumpet blasts out, the lies fall from the walls of the Temple, and the four winds propagate the immortal fame of Rooke's ‘Virtue... upheld by power’ (p. 11). Fame then reveals to Rooke, in her book, a parade of British kings and heroes whose triumphant progress is qualified by the early death of the Duke of Gloucester, a Marcellus cheated of the fulfilment of his early martial promise. These are all examples for Rooke to copy; at the poem’s conclusion envy is neatly averted from Rooke himself at the point when he comes to his own name, and modesty forbids him to read further: the poem’s last line is (p. 15) “But clos'd the Sacred Page, and Modestly withdrew: However, the ‘Virgin Blush’ that covers his face replicates the 'Blushes of a yielding Maid’ (p. 4) attributed to Fame herself near the beginning of the poem (where the eroticism of fame is transferred from fame’s suitors to the person of Fame). More elaborate still is the plot unfolded in John Lacy’s The Steeleids, or, the Tryal of Wit:

A Poem,

in Three Cantos (London

1714), a satire on the

journalist and politician Richard Steele." The poem starts in the Temple of Eloquence (in which eloquence is firmly grounded in truth and prudence); the presiding deity, Oratoria, approves the petition of the newspaper The Examiner ‘to stand as England’s Guardian Orator’, against the claims of Steele with his false eloquence. Truth will guide The Examiner to the Poets’ Paradise, where Steele’s condemnation will be shown. Travelling in Truth’s

chariot, The Examiner and the poet Lacy stop off for the night near Cowper’s Hill (Denham's Cooper's Hill), where Steele has set up his ‘mock Parnassus’.

This is the setting for two contrasting Courts, or Houses, of Fame, false Whig-Fame and true (Tory) Fame, old and venerably good. In one of the ‘Notes truly Bentleian’ to his poem, Lacy comments ‘Various and Learned, among the Ancients, are their Description of Fame. She is distinguish’d into Good and Evil, and is either taken as a Goddess or a Fury.’ Whig-Fame is really Rumour, and her falsely gilt Court is a place of Lies and Sedition. This Fame is not entirely mendacious: she accurately describes Poets’ Paradise and its inhabitants

(Waller, Milton,

Cowley,

Dryden,

etc.), but wrongly

proposes to elevate thither Steele, whose lofty prose she characterizes as 47

Briefly on the background see Knight 2007: 242.

Dichotomies

being as powerful as verse. The Examiner flashes his laurel crown at WhigFame,

and she is unmasked

as malicious Rumour

with her Furies.

The

Examiner and the poet repair to the genuine Court of Fame. On the following day both Fames make their way to Poets’ Paradise, where a true distinction is made between the two by Milton with the spear given him by Ithuriel (cf. PL 4.810—13), an unerring and transcendental tool for making judgements in the matter of fama. After a verbal contest between Steele and the satirist Oldham, Milton gives final judgement, confining Steele for three years ‘Among the lowest Herd of Pamphleteers, and awarding The Examiner the seat of oratory. ‘Steele and his Writings were together hurl'd, | Down into Famous Grub-street’s Paper World, a version of the underworld into which

Lucifer and his usurping crew are hurled in Paradise Lost.

Dichotomies The failure to reach conclusions in Chaucer’s House of Fame and Pope’s Temple of Fame can be seen as a reflection of the perpetually riven nature of fama, suspended irresolubly between the series of binary oppositions or dichotomies that I tabulated in the Introduction. Asa text that revels in these irresolutions, the House of Fame has become a fashionable text, opening itselfto a large number of post-modern and deconstructive readings.'* The dichotomous tendency of the House of Fame is writ large in the presence of not one, but two, houses in Book 3, the House of Fame and the whirling

house of twigs, a House of (certain aspects of) Fame without the name (and sometimes labelled the House of Rumour to distinguish it from the House of Fame). But dichotomous tendencies reach far more widely than the two houses; Alistair Minnis refers to ‘Chaucer’s two invocations of the Muses [as] microcosms of the fissured texture of the House of Fame as a whole, wherein “amphibologies” run riot.'” I will now examine some of the dichotomies set out in the Introduction as they manifest themselves in Chaucer’s poem. 48 Eg. Jordan 1983; Gellrich 1985: Ch. 5 for a deconstructive reading of the narrativity of the House of Fame; for a survey of post-modern readings see Minnis 1995: 217-27. Doob 1990: Ch. 11 reads the House of Fame as a multicursal labyrinth from which there is no exit. Minnis 1995: 180; the formulation is anticipated in Bennett 1968: 116 ‘That “Fama” was fissile material Chaucer must have seen.’ Some of the dichotomies of Chaucer’s Fame are shared with those of her ‘sister’ Fortune: see Bennett 1968: 152 on the double-faced Fortune in Gower’s Mirour de Pomme, Whitehead 2003: 154 on the ‘binary images’ in the House of Fortune in Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, ibid. Ch. 9 for more binaries in Jean de Meun's translation of

Alan’s House of Fortune (Roman de la rose 5921-6174) and in other Houses of Fortune.

587

Chaucer and Pope

A key opposition in the Aeneid is that between fama and fatum, but the opposition is broken down both by the narrator’s attempt to align the fame of Roman history with Jovian fate, and by the impossibility of keeping separate fatum, as the word both of the supreme god and of the epic poet, from the shifting and ungrounded propagation of fama-as-rumour, or fama-as-(unreliable) tradition." Hints of the fate-driven plot of the Aeneid surface in the role shared by Virgil’s Mercury and Chaucer’s eagle as emissaries of a controlling Jupiter. But this supreme god guides Chaucer’s narrator neither to the glorious achievements of Roman history, as in the case of Aeneas, nor to a fulfilment of divine love, a telos in which earthly

longings for fame are transumed in the glory of God, as in the case of Dante, but merely towards the satisfaction of a desire to hear tidings of love, fama unrelated to personal or suprapersonal achievement — and Geffrey does not even reach that goal in the poem as we have it. Jupiter himself in the House of Fame has no more reality than that of a part of the traditional machinery of classical narratives, a pagan god subordinate to the higher reality of the Christian God. I have looked at various examples of the revaluation by Christian poets of unreliable pagan fama as the unerring word of God. Chaucer gestures to this possibility at several points, only to step back from a grounding of fame in Christian certainty. The eagle will remind us not just of Dante's eagle but also the Eagle ofSt John (already hovering behind Dante's eagle), but the Chaucerian eagle's revelations aim no higher than the truths of natural philosophy, and even those are presented in humorous and parodic mode.^' Geffrey raises only to deny a parallel between his flight and the biblical flights of Enoch and Elijah: 588-9 ‘I neyther am Ennok, ne Elye, | Ne Romulus, ne Ganymede’, even if the very denial raises the possibility of a rapprochement with biblical and classical forerunners, as is more certainly the case in the Dantean model for these lines, Inf. 2.32 ‘Io non Enea, io non Paolo sono’: in fact Dante will

outdo the models of both Aeneas and Paul in his journey through the other world. Geffrey alludes to the model of St Paul at 980-2 ‘Y wot wel y am here [in the sky], | But wher in body or in gost | I not, ywys, but God, thou wost."" 59 See Ch. 3 pp. 103-6. 3!

The comparison has been made with Astolfo's parodic flight in the chariot of Elijah with St John to the moon, a place where various kinds of fame are jumbled together, in Ariosto,

Orlando furioso 34—5; see also Ch. 14 p. 544 n. 8. 922 Cor. 12:2-4 ‘I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot

nN

588

tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the

third heaven. (3) And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth); (4) How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.'

Dichotomies

On to the Virgilian body of Fame herself are figuratively grafted the many eyes of the four beasts of the Apocalypse, representing the four evangelists (Rev. 4:6): 1381-5 ‘For as feele eyen hadde she | As fetheres upon foules be, | Or weren on the bestes foure | That Goddis trone gunne honoure, |

As John writ in th'Apocalips.' But Chaucer's Fame does not mutate into a version of the Gospels, as Fama does in Girolamo Vida’s Christiad, nor is her house allegorized as a container for Holy Scripture, as is the House of Renommee in the Ovide moralisé.”* Instead her judgement hall is the setting for a parodic version of the Last Judgement, in which good and bad fame are handed out with no consistent regard for merit or demerit.”' Fame is no more under the control of the Christian God than she is of the pagan Jupiter. ‘God’ and ‘authority’ are the first and last words of the House of Fame." Throughout her history Fama has been both a source of authority and a site of uncertainty and unreliability. ‘Authority’ has been the master-term of much recent discussion of the House of Fame.^^ The poem’s repeated failure to advance to a higher level of truth or to achieve closure is the index of a search for authority that never reaches its goal, and which is left with fictions and uncertainties, instead of facts and certainties. This failure is all the more

=

striking given that Chaucer’s larger concept of fame is more ambitious with regard to the kinds of knowledge that it seeks to embrace than is the case for most of the history of fama. This extends beyond the moral, political, literary and artistic spheres to include the grammatical, scientific, philosophical and theological.”’ Virgil’s Fama is in part generated out of an encounter with Lucretian imagery of the state of mankind before the revelation of the philosophical truth, but remains herself pre- or unphilosophical.** Chaucer’s decision to include these other areas of knowledge in a poem on fame is probably another sign of the pressure of the Commedia, a theological and philosophical summa, as well as ‘a gigantic house of fame'^" The vehicle for Geffrey’s ascent to the House of Fame, the golden eagle, in addition to his theological credentials as a relative of biblical and Dantean eagles, is also a vehicle for philosophico-scientific teachings imparted to his passenger in

5

See Ch. 16 p. 622 n. 29.

53

On Fame's ‘Last Judgement’ see Koonce

1966: Ch. 5; Fyler 1987: 987.

ui

5 Noted e.g. by Baswell 1995: 248; Cooper 1999: 52. 55 E.g. Minnis 1995: 227-51 'Chaucer's crisis of authority’; 248 ‘Chaucer remained more interested in the poet as factor (at once makere and liar) rather than as auctor.’ Simpson 1986: 1-2 also makes the point that 'questioning of authority' has been the major trend in recent criticism. 57 On the poem's engagement with contemporary philosophical issues see Eldredge 1970; Keiper 1995; Lynch 1995; on contemporary grammatical issues see Irvine 1985; Fyler 2007; Ch. 3.

58

See Ch. 3pp.88-9.

— *? Boitani 1934: 76.

589

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Chaucer and Pope

the course of their flight: the Aristotelian doctrine of the motion of elements to their natural places, and the theory of the propagation of sound. The eagle ‘demonstrates’ the existence of the House of Fame in mid-air as the ‘propre mansyon’ (754) of speech, which, as sound, is nothing but broken air. The movement of sound to the House of Fame is further explained by the analogy of the multiplication of concentric circles in water when a stone is

thrown into it, a physical correlative to the constant growth of fictions in the Ovidian House of Fama (Met. 12.57-8). However, the science is undercut by the fact that it is used to prove the reality of a self-evident poetic fiction,

the Ovidian House of Fama. The eagle also confuses poetic fiction and science in his astronomical teaching, first giving an account of the origin of the Milky Way in Phaethon’s disastrous chariot-ride, and then offering Geffrey a detailed and accurate description of the celestial map (which Gef-

frey declines). Boethius is the source of some of this philosophical teaching. Boethius' Lady Philosophy is, together with the son of Virgil’s Fama, the model for the person of to Geffrey at first to be less tall than a cubit, but "That with hir fet she erthe reighte, | And with hir

upwardly expansive perFame herself, who seems then stretches herself so hed she touched hevene'

(1374—5).5! Fame herself however turns out to have no pretensions to scien-

tific or philosophical learning. The poem's final failure to reveal the identity of the man of great authority is of a piece with the Proem's abandonment of any pretension to understand the causes of dreams. After the various types of dream have been catalogued at great length, drawing on quasi-scientific

classifications in Macrobius and the Roman de la rose, the narrator declares his own ignorance, content to return to the opening piety of 'God turne us every drem to goode!’ (1: cf. 57-8 ‘But oonly that the holy roode | Turne us every drem to goode!’).

Unlike the anarchic Ovidian House of Fama, Chaucer's Fame is an autocratic ruler within her House, (1360-1) ‘al on hye, above a dees, | Sitt[ing] in a see imperiall. This monarch is contrasted with the press of her petitioners, an unsorted crowd representative of all humanity, (1528-32) ‘A ryght gret companye withalle, | And that of sundry regiouns, | Of alleskynnes condiciouns | That dwelle in erthe under the mone, | Pore and ryche: Fame divides the nine companies of petitioners into sheep and goats, according to whether she grants them fame or slander (or lack of fame of any kind). © Clemen 1963: 98 ‘real factual observation is used to substantiate a castle in the air’. 61 Cf. Boeth. Consol. 1 pros. 1.8-13. Boethian rather than Virgilian is the focalization through the narrating and marvelling character, and the detail that her head touches heaven (pulsare caclum summi uerticis cacumine), while Virgil's Fara merely ‘buries her head among the clouds. On the relationship between Boethius' Philosophia and Virgil's Fara see Ch. 1 pp. 33-4.

Dichotomies

To implement her judgements through the spreading abroad of fame in the world she uses as her agent Eolus, the god of wind, whom she summons from Thrace with his two trumpets, the clarion of Clere Laude, and the clarion

of Sklaundre (1571-82), Fame and Infamy, Fame and Blame, buona fama and mala farna. In Virgil the winds of Aeolus are a figure for the muttering, unruly crowd, to be controlled by the word of the statesman, the latter

the earthly image of a supreme male divinity capable of imposing the order of Fate on the disorder of Fama.°? Sound is air broken, the eagle has taught us: the sound that issues from Aeolus’ trumpets is the airy power of wind, the force of the storm, directed by the command of a sovereign ruler.

There seems to be a clear class distinction between the House of Fame, with its imperial queen, and the whirling house of twigs, full of nonaristocratic purveyors of tidings — shipmen, pilgrims, pardoners, couriers, messengers.© That class distinction is reflected in the contrast in architecture, between the elaborate Gothic architecture of the castle in which Fame has her house, and the wicker construction of the house woven out

of the impermanent material of twigs. There is also a contrast between the motionless fixity of the House of Fame (though built on the ‘feble fundament’ of a rock of ice, 1129-33), and the ceaseless whirling of the house of twigs. Immutability (relative) and mutability also correspond to a contrast

between written and oral.“ One might also be tempted to see a contrast between a Virgilian hierarchy and an Ovidian negation of hierarchy. In the House of Fame we see the Virgilian person of Fama, with her variable size, and her multiplicity of eyes, ears and tongues. Unlike the ever-moving Virgilian Farna she is ‘perpetually ystalled’ on her imperial throne, and she keeps a tight control over Eolus, and, by implication, his mob of winds; in

Virgilian terms this is Fama playing a Jovian role. The house of twigs is like the Ovidian House of Fama with its multiplicity of sound-holes, open day and night, with no porters to police the passage of tidings (1945—55: cf. Met. 12.446). But the Virgilian/Ovidian contrast has been invalidated in

advance, since the House of Fame, in contrast to its ruler, is itself based on the Ovidian House (Virgil's Fara has no house), as Geffrey already knows € See Ch. 2 pp. 70-2. 6 Hanning 1986: 149 distinguishes the twig-house and the House of Fame as ‘lower-class and upper-class types of fama’; similarly Whitehead 2003: 182, who however also makes the point that upper-class fame is ‘utterly reliant upon popular word-of-mouth. ** Delany 1970 and Fyler 1979 contrast the Houses of Fame and Rumour as authority [writing] versus experience [oral].

55 Bennett 1968: 148 draws the pointed contrast between Jupiter's concern that Geffrey should receive just (665) ‘recompensacioun’ for his praises of love, and Fame's refusal to give (1557-8) 'recompensacioun | Of good werkes.

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from the eagle’s description of it at 713-24, as ‘thyn oune bok hyt tellith’ — the book of the Metamorphoses. Fame’s judgements in her House have the air of authority, but they are arbitrary: Fame gives no reasons for her decisions to award fame either in accordance with her petitioners’ merits or not. She exercises the whim of the autocrat. Geffrey identifies this as the unaccountability of Fame’s sister Fortune (1542-8); but this is also the unaccountability of fama as spoken by the many-headed beast. She distributes reputations which are both true and false to the characters of their subjects, combining truth and fiction in the manner of both Virgil's Fama and of the mingled companies of true and false rumour in the Ovidian House of Fama (Met. 12.54—5, the basis for the humorous vignette of the ‘lesyng and a sad soth sawe' both trying to exit through a window in the house of twigs too narrow to let both pass at the same time, and agreeing to travel compounded together as sworn brothers, HF 2088-2109). Fame has power, but no real authority. No more can there be real authority in the anarchic house of twigs: we might say that the text has to break off at the point where

the 'man of great authority' is about to appear. In her judgements Fame distributes fame (or blame). Geffrey has come in search not of fame, he tells his unnamed friend (1871—82), but of ‘tidings’,

and tidings are what the house of twigs contains. Accordingly, the two houses are sometimes labelled the House of Fame and the House of Rumour.

This division of labour breaks down when we learn that the House of Fame is a conduit for the tidings that emanate from the house of twigs, 2110-20: Thus out at holes gunne wringe

2110

Every tydinge streght to Fame;

And she gan yeven eche hys name, After hir disposicioun, And yaf hem eke duracioun, Somme to wexe and wane sone, As doth the faire white mone, And let hem goon. Ther myghte y seen Wynged wondres faste fleen,

2115

Twenty thousand in a route,

As Eolus hem blew aboute.

2120

Fame does not sort them according to criteria of truth or importance, limiting her intervention to the matter of names and duration, with the 66 ‘Tidings’ as what Geffrey fails to find in the House of Fame: 1886, 1888, 1894, 1907; ‘tidings’ in the house of twigs: 1957, 2010, 2025, 2045, 2066, 2072, 2076, 2109, 2111, 2124, 2134, 2143

‘love-tydynges’.

Dichotomies

emphasis on mutability rather than the enduring quality of fame. Lines 2117-20 seem to refer to the movement of the tidings after they have been processed by Fame, and Eolus appears to have been let off the leash, blowing them about with his winds in gay disorder.^" Order and disorder, order and chaos, is another of the dichotomies of fama. A number of critics read the House of Fame as moving from order to disorder, a movement that may owe something to the repeated return of cosmos to chaos in Ovid's Metamorphoses," and which is imaged in ecphrastic form in the revelation that the dispositions as if for the exercise of an imperial power in the Ovidian House of Fama in Book 12 are the setting for anarchy.” One of the operations that Fame may work on the tidings that rise up from the house of twigs is to convert oral into written." The house of twigs is a place exclusively, it would appear, of the oral; the House of Fame is a container for both the oral and the written, the latter monumentally in the

catalogue of famous authors standing on pillars of different metals (1419— 1519), a Hall of Poetic Fame. The House of Fame begins with inscription (of the Aeneid, written on a table of brass in the Temple of Venus) and ends with

oral tidings; the narrower compass of Book 3 also reaches from writing, of the names on the rock of ice on which stands the House of Fame, to the oral

oO o o

e o

e “I

tidings at the end. Chaucer's reprocessing of the story of Dido and Aeneas in Book 1 develops a counterpoint between fama as oral rumour or report and fama as written text and tradition, which is already present in the Virgilian model. Chaucer gives an added twist to the idea that the version of the story of Dido enshrined in the canonical text of the Aeneid may be an invention of Virgil's, with no more substance than a malicious rumour, when Geffrey presents his own dream as the sole authority (314 ‘Non other auctour alegge I’) for the extended complaint in the mouth of Dido that culminates in her accusation that Aeneas 1s the cause of the gossip that Fame spreads (348) “Over al thys lond, on every tonge’: further invention of tradition, focussing on an account of fama-as-rumour. The two-way traffic between the textual and the oral may even be detected in the house of twigs. The noises that circulate there, tidings propagated by shipmen, pilgrims, pardoners, etc.,

On the merging of fame and rumour in the House of Fame see e.g. Bellamy 2004. The Ovidian pattern: Fyler 1979: Ch. 2, 63 ‘the Ovidian trick of building structures that immediately fall apart’; Boitani 1984: Ch. 6 on the move from the order of Temple and Castle to the disorder of Desert and Labyrinth; Steinberg 2000: 25 ‘Chaucer in the House of Fame repeatedly builds systems only to undermine them, and his poem moves in a diastolic/systolic rhythm of expansion and collapse." See Ch. 3 pp. 159-63. On the relation between literary and oral traditions in the House of Fame see Erzgráber 1985.

593

594

Chaucer and Pope have often been seen as an anticipation of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's own exercise in elevating the oral into the literary"! Of course the Tales are themselves oral retellings by Chaucer's characters of stories embedded in

previous literary tradition. Chaucer also plays on another dichotomy central to fama, that between full and empty, in connection with a recurrent contrast between (real-life) experience and (bookish) tradition. The sixth company of Fame's petitioners ask for the fame of being great lovers, although they have been too idle ever to win a woman's love, 1758-62: For Goddes love, that sit above, Thogh we may not the body have

Of wymmen, yet, so God yow save, Leet men gliwe on us the name Sufficeth that we han the fame. Chaucer here alludes to a passage in the Ars amatoria, 2.6314, in which Ovid complains of certain people who pretend that they have slept with

lots of girls: 633—4 corpora si nequeunt, quae possunt, nomina tangunt, | famaque non tacto corpore crimen habet ‘if they cannot touch their bodies, they touch what is possible, their names, and, body untouched, reputation stands accused’.”? The theme of name and fame without body hasa particular resonance in the House of Fame, since at the end of his instruction on the physics of sound the eagle tells Geffrey that he is correct in surmising that the noises in the House of Fame are just sounds that rise from folk on earth: 1063-4 ‘And that there lives body nys | In al that hous that yonder ys’; but, further, that every ‘speech’ that comes up to Fame's palace, 1076-82: Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight Which that the word in erthe spak, Be hyt clothed red or blak; And hath so verray hys lyknesse

That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse That it the same body be, Man or woman, he or she.

7!

Boitani 1984: 206; Cooper 1999: 62. Bennett 1968: 183 points out that sixty miles, the length of

the house of twigs (1979), is the distance from London to Canterbury. Phillips 2007: Ch. 2 ‘Chaucerian small talk’ goes further and argues that The House of Fame presents a theory about the vital connection between idle talk (gossip) and formal narrative, put into practice in The Canterbury Tales, 69 * |Chaucer) takes idle talk not just as subject of his poetry but also as a method for it, a blurring of tidings and tales.

72 See Hardie 2002a: 239-40.

The relatives of Fame Various sources for this idea have been suggested, including the general resurrection of the bodies of the dead in the fullness of their earthly existence

at the Last Judgement. The bodies in the House of Fame (and, by a logical extension, if this is a world where logic applies, in the house of twigs) are empty likenesses without substance. They are perhaps only textual likenesses, if 'clothed red or blak' hints at the colours of the ink in which ‘speeches’ are fixed on the page."4 It is only in the text of Book 3 of the House of Fame that its strange populations are to be encountered. Jupiter, says the eagle, wants to reward Geffrey for his constant service, in his books, to Cupid and Venus, by taking him to a place where he will learn tidings of real-life people, transporting him from the lonely study, to which he returns at the end of each day's work, (656—9) 'And, also domb as any stoon, | Thou sittest at another book | Tyl fully daswed ys thy looke; | And lyvest thus as an heremyte?5 The irony is that the House of Fame is as empty of real living persons as is Geffrey's/Chaucer's study. Or, turning it round, Chaucer's books, those which he reads and those which he writes, are as

brimful of life and interest as are the House of Fame and the house of twigs.

The relatives of Fame

One aspect of Fama's protean polymorphousness is her tendency to merge into related creatures or personifications, a tendency that I have documented at length in my discussions of the relatives of Fama in Virgil and Ovid. The House of Fame is fully at home in this aspect of the reception of fama."6 After the Proem the narrator opens with an invocation to the god of sleep, with reference to his Cimmerian cave and his 'slepy thousand sones’, based on Ovid's description of the House of Somnus and Morpheus (Mer. 11.592ff.). A suspicion that in beginning a poem on the House of Fame with allusion to the House of Somnus Chaucer recognizes the close connections

between the Ovidian Houses of Somnus and of Fama"! is reinforced by the combination in the description of the house of twigs of elements of both the Ovidian House of Fara and the House of Somnus. The multiple orifices in 73 Eyler 1987: 985 for a range of suggestions; Koonce 1966: 158 ‘elaborate inversion of the Last Judgement.

74 Minnis 1995: 197-8.

75 Clemen 1963: 111 on the wish for tidings as a turn from books to real-life experience. ?6 Gellrich 1985: 187-8, Chaucer's Fame as ‘an unusual conflation of images from several old

books:

77 See Ch. 5 pp. 173-4; Hardie 20022: 277-8.

595

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Chaucer and Pope

the Chaucerian house come from the former; the simile (1946) ‘As fele as of leves ben in trees’ takes one of the three similes from Ovid’s description of the ‘idle Dreams’ in the House of Sormmus, (Met. 11.614-15) Somnia uana

iacent totidem, quot messis aristas, | silua gerit frondes, eiectas litus harenas.”® Pope practises double allusion, looking back to Ovid through Chaucer. The doors of the spinning Mansion of News are (424-5) ‘Not less in Number... |

Than Leaves on Trees, or Sands upon the Shores; adding to the Chaucerian model another of the Ovidian similes." The Ovidian landscape of Somnus is echoed elsewhere in the House of Fame: the desert into which Geffrey exits from the Temple of Venus at 482—91 is like the valley of Morpheus as described in the Book of the Duchess 155-9. Chaucer picks up on the Ovidian detail that a stream from Lethe runs through the House of Somnus! Chaucer's, like Ovid's, House of Fame

itself bears traces of an underworld, or afterlife, as does the house of twigs.*? The doors of the house of twigs open day and night (1951-3) are those of Ovid's House of Fama (Met. 12.46 nocte dieque patet), and behind both is

the door of the Virgilian underworld (Aer. 6.127 noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis). Allusions to Revelation, to the Last Judgement, and to Dante's journey through the other world, lend a biblical and Christian colouring to the eschatological associations. As well as a figurative underworld, the Ovidian House of Fama is also a version of the noisy Virgilian Cave of the

Winds;* Chaucer enlists Eolus as the agent of Fame herself.

The connections between the work of Chaucer's Fame and dreaming has often been noted: Gellrich 1985: 182 for dream as a metaphor of the poem; Boitani 1984: 4 on the traditional image of vain glory and fame as dreams; 66 on association of fame and dreams in adaptation of Aeneid 4 at Roman d'Eneas 1557-60; Delany 1970: 44 ‘The process of dreaming becomes nearly

synonymous with the creative act'; Miller 1982: 100 on the frequently noted connection between writing and dreaming; Spearing 1976: Ch. 1 on the poetic self-reflexivity of the medieval dream vision. 79 As Tillotson in Pope 1954 ad loc. notes Chaucer uses the grains of sand simile at HF689-91 ‘And moo berdys in two houres . .. then greynes be of sondes, and the ears of corn simile at 697-8 ‘And eke of loves moo eschaunges | Then ever cornes were in graunges' (in the eagle's ©

account of the contents of the House of Fame). Noted by Bennett 1968: 47; 176 on the contrastive parallels between the House of Rumour and

the Cave of Morpheus in both Ovid and Chaucer. Met. 11.602-3 saxo tarnen exit ab imo | riuus aquae Lethes, HF 71-2 ‘Upon a strem that cometh fro Lete, | That is a flood of helle unswete’; cf. also the retelling of the Ceyx and Alcyone story in the Book of the Duchess, with its Cave of Sleep (170-1) ‘as derk | As helle-pit overall aboute. X Boitani 1984: 170 ‘The world of Chaucer's Fame is suspended between life and death.’ ® The crowd of people in the house of twigs is so great (2038-40) ‘That, certys, in the world nys left | So many formed be Nature, | Ne ded so many a creature’: cf. Dante, Inf. 3.55-7 ‘e dietro le venia si lunga tratta | di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto | che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.' *4 See Ch. 5 pp. 160-1. Eolus lives in a ‘cave of ston’ (1584) as does the god of sleep (70). On the allegorization of

Acolus as glory, laus in Bernardus Sylvestris sec Boitani 1984: 165.

The relatives of Fame Pope further develops the otherworldly associations of his Temple of Fame, with Milton and Dryden as additional intermediaries in the expanding edifice of poetic tradition. For example, the Temple is set on top of the

Chaucerian rock of ice: 28 ‘Steep its Ascent, and slipp’ry was the Way’, echoing and inverting Dryden’s translation of Virgil's facilis descensus Auerno, ‘Smooth the Descent, and easie is the Way’ (Aen. 6.193). To Virgilian and Ovidian underworlds Pope adds the model of Milton’s palace of the fallen angels at the end of Book 1 of Paradise Lost, to which the whole description of the Temple is ‘greatly indebted’.** Pandaemonium is an obvious model for the description of a magnificent building, but an otherworldly architectural pile works well within a tradition that locates Fama in a place not entirely of this world. That this is not just otherworldly but Satanic perhaps hints at an anxiety about the presumption and pride that is inseparable from the

pursuit of fame.9 The pairing of fama and fortuna as lexical items goes back to Cicero. Chaucer sums up a long tradition of the association between Fame and

Fortune by making Fame the sister of Fortune ( HF 1547), apparently for the first time. The House of Fame also develops the close association between

the spheres of operation, if not the persons, of Fame and Love that is the subject of Chapter 9 of this book; Geffrey's quest is specifically one for tidings of love, although what he hears and sees when he arrives at his journey's end is a much wider range of Fame's sphere of operation. There is a close connection between the House of Fame and the Temple of Venus in Book 1, which could be described as a Temple of Virgilian and Ovidian Fara. The House of Fame is a major document in the history of fama and amor, a connection pointedly eschewed at the beginning of Pope's Temple of Fame, (6) ‘And Love it self was banish'd from my Breast’ (all the more pointed

for being presented in the form of a Chaucerian allusion, being modelled on Dryden's version of the Flower and the Leaf 24-5 ‘Cares had I none to keep me from my Rest, | For Love had never enter'd in my Breast').? Finally

[ note again the association of the figure of Fame with that of Boethius' Lady Philosophy through their shared sudden growth in size (see above

*6 Tillotson in Pope 1954 on 75 ff.; see also his notes on 63£, 91, 94, 138, 143f. ~

87

On links in Paradise Lost between Pandaemonium and versions of a house of fame sec Ch. 14 PP. 545-6.

TLL vii, s.v. fama 1114 ‘quasi in fortunis unius cuiusque ponitur": e.g. Cic. Quinct. 8 qui caput alterius, famamque fortunasque defendant, Rab. perd. 1 in hac defensione capitis, famae fortunarumque omnium. ® Fame and Fortune: Sypherd 1907: 117-28 ‘Influence of the fortune material’; Patch 1927: 110-12, and scc Index s.vv. ‘Fame, connection with Fortune’; Koonce 1966: 42-5; Bennett 1968: Ch. 4 ‘Fortune's Sister”. % Fame and Love: Sypherd 1907: 128-38 ‘Influence of love material.

597

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Chaucer and Pope

p. 590); Philosophy is not a relative of Fama in classical antiquity, but it is appropriate in a text that introduces philosophical and scientific material into the discourse of Fame.

Geffrey, Pope, fama and the care of the self On their visits to the realms of Fame the narrators of both the House of Fame and the Temple of Fame are faced with the need to assess their own

relationship to the windy world of words and reputations, and to ground a self that is at risk of being dissipated in what other people say. As poets, both at an early stage of their career, Chaucer and Pope have the particular task of establishing a modus vivendi with the hazardous pursuit of poetic

fame. When asked by the stranger in the House of Fame whether he has come in search of fame, Geffrey protests a sturdy independence: 1876-82 'Sufficeth me, as I were ded, | That no wight have my name in honde. | I wot myself best how y stonde; | For what I drye, or what I thynke, | I wil myselven al hyt drynke, | Certeyn, for the more part, | As fer forth as I kan myn art.’ This Boethian self-possession is one of the few certainties of which Geffrey does seem to be possessed.?! The other thing that he knows is that he is in search

of tidings of love, but this is not something that had occurred to him until the eagle had told him that Jupiter had decided that he should be rewarded for his services to love by being taken to a place where he might hear such tidings (641-99). But his notion of what kind of tidings these might be is hazy, as emerges from his reply to the stranger, (1886-9) 'Somme newe tydynges for to lere, | Somme newe thinges, y not what, | Tydynges, other this or that, | Of love or suche thynges glade’ ‘Desire’ is a word that the stranger, not Geffrey, uses of his wish to hear such things. In the house of twigs he does finally display some eagerness to hear a tiding, only to draw back from telling it (2137-8) ‘For hit no nede is redely; | Folk kan synge

hit bet than I.’ Nor is he forward in the final rush to hear love-tidings, as people tread on each other's heels and stamp, (2154) ‘as men doon aftir eles In Pope's Temple of Fame the handling of the dreamer's own relationship to fame is far more focussed, and it is placed in an emphatic closural position through the postponement of the appearance of Chaucer’s unnamed interlocutor until after the viewing of the Mansion of News, corresponding ?! On Geffrey's assertion of the integrity of his self in this passage see Watts 1973: 96-7.

Geffrey, Pope, fama and the care of the self to the house of twigs. Pope’s answer to the whispered question, (499-500) ‘What cou’d thus high thy rash Ambition raise? | Art thou, fond Youth, a Candidate for Praise?’ inverts the Chaucerian model, as pointedly as his opening statement that (6) ‘Love it self was banish'd from my Breast’ had excised the Chaucerian theme of love. Geffrey had answered the stranger, (1874-5) ‘I cam noght hyder, graunt mercy, | For no such cause, by my hed)’; Pope replies, (501-2) “Tis true, said I, not void of Hopes I came, | For who so fond as youthful Bards of Fame?’ Love has returned, in the form of amor famae, viewed in a negative light as (522) ‘that wretched Lust of Praise’, to inject an element of the quest, of plot, at the very end of the poem, with questions that relate most closely to the budding poet's sense of himself. The quest is left incomplete, the question of whether to pursue the hope and the fondness unresolved, with a firm deliberation that is absent from Geffrey's peremptory denial of a desire for fame and also from the latter's somewhat lukewarm pursuit even of tidings of love. Pope works through standard moral topics on the vanity of fame — its dependence on the whims

of Fortune, the fact that fame is (504) ‘So hard to gain, so easy to be lost’, the risk of courting envy, the need to avoid the taint of being a blame poet, and

the absolute priority of virtue over fame”? — all of this given greater weight and solemnity by the fact of being pronounced against the background of the preceding visions of Fame and her workings, only to end on suspensions: 513 ‘Nor Fame slight, nor for her Favours call’ (where ‘Favours’ has an erotic overtone); 523-4 'Unblemish'd let me live, or die unknown, | Oh grant an honest Fame, or grant me none!

Geffrey’s indifference to fame, and Pope's anxious distancing from all but an honest fame (a pose that he consistently adopted),” conceal a closer attachment to poetic fame than can comfortably be admitted, which in Pope's case surfaces in the headpiece to An Essay on Criticism in the 1717 Works, in which the gowned figure of Pope kneels before the busts of Homer and Virgil, with Fame, trumpet in hand, at his back, and Pegasus on twinpeaked Parnassus in the background (Fig. 8). In the respectful allusivity practised by Pope throughout the Temple of Fame, the young poet has already introduced himself into the company of the older inhabitants of the Temple. With regard to the House of Fame, it is sometimes claimed that Chaucer is not really concerned with the fame of the poet so much as he is with the fame that poets lend to their subjects, on the grounds that the figures of poets in the Hall of Fame bear up, Atlas-like, the fame of their subject

91 For the commonplace nature of the ideas see Fraser 1972: 288—90.—

*? Fraser 1972: 288-90.

599

Chaucer and Pope

600

Fig. 8 Engraving at head of An Essay on Criticism, in The Works of Mr Alexander Pope (London

1717)

matter on their shoulders.’ But this way of including the matter of the poets’ works differs little, in the amount of fame that it accords the authors, from Pope’s device of including scenes from the works of his famous authors as reliefs on the pillars on which they stand. Chaucer’s Queen Fame herself

bears on her shoulders the names and fames of Alexander and Hercules: the poets too are embodiments of fame. That Chaucer himself has ambitions to poetic fame is suggested by the fact that this is the one poem in which he certainly names himself, ‘Geffrey’ (so addressed by the eagle, 729).? James

Simpson’s persuasive case that Geffrey’s unwillingness to learn about the stars is the mark of a self-knowledge, a poetic discretion, which prevents Geffrey from aspiring to a flight of philosophy that would soar above the House of Fame, set ‘in myddes of the waye’, does not preclude an ambition for fame of the poetic variety.”° The combination in the House of Fame of a statement of lack of desire for fame with a programme which implies that same desire comes to the same thing as the modesty topos that conveys Chaucer’s very real poetic ambitions in the envoi to Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1789—92:

94

See Lewis 1954: 27, claiming the greater ‘literariness’ of the Temple of Fame, where poets are famous, whereas in Chaucer their subjects are famous.

35 Cooper 1999: 58-60 raises the intriguing possibility that Chaucer names himself twice, and that (1470) ‘Englyssh Gaufride’ is Geoffrey Chaucer, not (the Welsh) Geoffrey of Monmouth.

96 Simpson 1986.

Geffrey, Pope, fama and the care of the self

But litel book, no making thow n’envie,

But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovid, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.”

The idea that Chaucer is not really interested in personal fame in the House of Fame is of a piece with the attempt to detect a radical difference between late fourteenth- and early eighteenth-century attitudes to fame in Chaucer’s poem and Pope’s imitation.”* But the continuities are more marked than the discontinuities. This is not because Pope’s poem is merely an exercise in antiquarianism. The Temple of Fame is a homage to Chaucer, and Pope inserts himself at a later point in the same reception history to which the House of Fame was already a contribution; but as well as a manifesto for Pope’s own poetic ambitions, the poem is also a vehicle for sharp political and satirical comment on Pope’s own times."? The themes and methods of the Temple of Fame were not laid aside by the older Pope, and one of his last works, Book 4 of the Dunciad, has been read as an inversion of the Temple,

a ‘Temple of Infamy’.'”” In one of the few readings of the poem as a document of cultural history, David Wheeler (1993) places the Temple of Fame at a specific juncture in history when, he claims, the cultural and psychological parameters of fame were undergoing significant change: Pope wrote when a new economics of writing and publishing produced anxieties about the need to appeal to a larger market of readers, as the commodification of literature undermined the immutable Temple of Fame. Furthermore, post-Lockean anxieties about the integrity of the self led to the fear of a splitting of the selfin an independent and uncontrollable existence (TF 505) ‘in others’ Breath’. There may

have been new reasons for the insecurity of fame, but the tension between the immutability and mutability of fame is explored at great length in the House of Fame, and many other medieval and pre-medieval texts. The idea that fame is a life on the breath of others goes back at least to Ovid, and the

» e

N E

vanity of aiming for an immortality that has no more substantial existence

e

100

Modelled on Stat. Theb. 12.816-17 nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta, | sed longe sequere et uestigia semper adora, an envoi that also masks a more vaulting ambition. For a supposed contrast between a medieval Chaucerian and a Renaissance Popean attitude to fame see Lewis 1954: 27; Cawley 1962; Clemen 1963: 102—4. Fyler 1992 by contrast sees an 'apparent convergence of late medieval and eighteenth-century concerns with signification' (153). On the political content see Aden 1973, who concludes, (144) ‘The Temple of Fame is more than an episode in the annals of Pope's art; it is a chapter in his politics as well, and an early example of his fusing of the two.’ Sitter 1971: Ch. 3,

601

602

Chaucer and Pope

than to ‘fill all mouths, and breathe[s] in all men’s breath’ is the subject of Cowley’s Pindaric ode ‘Life and fame’ (stanza 3, line 4). A radical fear of the

dissipation of the self in the opinion and words of others is a central theme of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (see Ch. 1 pp. 14-19). Donald Fraser documents the highly traditional nature of the tissue of statements about fame in Pope’s closing speech (TF 501—24).'"' The cultural history of fame, as of fama in its wider range of meanings, is a difficult business. Throughout the two and a half thousand years that separate Homer from Alexander Pope Fama had always provoked conflicting responses, and differences in the relationship of individuals and groups to fama have always been determined as much by local situational and generic factors as by the sweeping movement of a grand narrative. 101

See above n. 92.

16 | Visual representations of Fama

There appear to be no certain surviving visual representations of Fama from before the fourteenth century, but since then images have proliferated and mutated in the manner of Fama herself.' This chapter makes no attempt to be comprehensive, and its purposes are, firstly, to give a sample of the range of different kinds of image, and, secondly, to offer some commentary on iconographical and thematic continuities and discontinuities between the visual material and the textual material that has been the subject of most of this book."

Illustrations in the Virgilian tradition

-

te

I start with the traditions of textual illustration. The two most influential texts in the Western history of Fama are Aeneid 4 and Petrarch’s Trionfi. While the latter has prompted a rich visual repertory, illustrations of the Virgilian Fama have not been numerous.” Virgil's Fama is not an easy subject to illustrate. This is partly because the action of this personification disrupts the realist illusion that is the norm in ancient epic narrative, and on which is based most of the tradition of illustrating the Aeneid, but also because, although in general personifications may serve the rhetorical purpose of enargeia, the vivid conjuring up of the visual illusion of somebody

There is no entry for 'Fama' in the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae; images of ‘Gloria’ there recorded are few and late. Verbal images of Gloria: TLL v1.2 2069.28 ff. a poetis ut femina aut dea depingitur; the earliest example is Hor. Sat. 1.6.23. For a very rich collection of material with further bibliography see Kauffmann 1973. For a list of baroque, and earlier, examples of ‘Die geflügelte Ruhmesgóttin mit Posaune’ see Pigler 1974: 11.503-4. Cheney 1998 is disappointing. A wide selection of attributes of Fama may be traced through de Tervarent 1958-9: Index s.v. Renommee. Some interesting material is collected in Chew 1962: 181-5 ‘Fame and Rumor’; Neubauer 1999 has a range of images of rumour. I owe many of my examples of images of Fame to the holdings of the Picture Library of the Warburg Institute. For illustrations of the Aeneidin general see Fagiolo editions Suerbaum

2008.

1981; Courcelle

1984; on illustrated

603

604

Visual representations of Fama

4

I

B

a

-

S

En

ae

,

; tregma dolof quif falI& poffir amantem y matte

iy

P

Zu

u dh na

Fig. 9 Fama, Jupiter and Mercury in Aeneid 4. Late fifteenth-century manuscript from the Aragonese court of Naples

or something that is not actually present, Virgil's Fama is not easy to visualize. Unlike the typical medieval personification allegory, she has no fixed abode, no ‘House’; furthermore she changes size, and her shape is also at best imprecise: the combination of swift feet and swift wings is an odd one; and the precise distribution of feathers, tongues, mouths and ears is not easy to imagine. This may have to do with the fact that she is the visual embodiment of the spoken word, and therefore perhaps a contradiction in terms. In fact Virgil’s Fama poses in acute, if peculiar, form the difficulty of translating into static images the temporal sequence of a verbal narrative; what is peculiar here is that Fama embodies a narrative about narratives. How does an artist depict the growth of a rumour? The most earnest attempt known to me to give detailed expression to the Virgilian narrative of Fama’s progress in Aeneid 4 is also the earliest, from a late fifteenth-century manuscript from the Aragonese court of Naples (Fig. 9).! The winged figure of Fama, her body and wings covered with feathers tipped with eyes, and with a grotesquely protruding tongue, appears three times: to the left emerging from the Earth, whose daughter she is, then

^ Discussed and reproduced in Courcelle 1984: 237, and in Raynaud 1993: 60-1.

Illustrations in the Virgilian tradition

audor,

]

Sefeattoli

auras.S. Oltendie t ilipamee. m Ingro

hüilíonb?:n«g maíonb?

Fig. 10

Avhi

,

CI Extemplo lybig magnas it fama per vibes: s Fama malum:quonon aliudvelomus vIlem

^

iu. Son

ip Ped,

Eau c ratio: ac fi dicerct:qr fonte areng. r Oculifübiet-

Fama in Aeneid 4, woodcut in Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, ed. Sebastian Brant

(Strassburg 1502)

full-length occupying the whole height of the picture space, and thirdly making her way through a city of Africa (Aen. 4.173 magnas it Fama per urbes). Further instalments of the extended episode are shown on the right: Jupiter gives his instructions to Mercury, who is seen below on earth approaching Aeneas. The illumination is inserted before Aen. 4.296 (At regina dolos...),

in acknowledgement that the interventions of Fama and of Mercury form part of an extended and unified episode (see Ch. 3 pp. 90-5). Perhaps the best-known illustration of Virgil's Fama is a woodcut in Sebastian Brant's 1502 Strassburg edition of Virgil (Fig. 10).” Her monstrous figure, occupying almost the full height of the picture space, takes its stand between, and so connects, through the spread of rumour, the city of Carthage > On Sebastian Brant's (very influential) Virgil see Suerbaum 2008: 131-57, with very full bibliography.

605

606

Visual representations of Fama

and larbas’ Temple of Jupiter, the wings on her shoulders overshadowing both places, and the wings on her feet spanning the ground that separates the two places, a static representation of the swiftness of her feet. On the

right-hand side of her three-quarters profile she has a series of three ears, and in addition to the two eyes in her face, she has another two on her waist. (H)iarbas prays to the paired statues of Jupiter and Mercury, a shorthand visual reference to the next stage in the narrative, when the real Jupiter, not his cult-statue, in response to Iarbas’ relaying of Farna’s message up to the heavens, sends down Mercury bearing his own words aimed at spurring Aeneas into leaving Carthage. Like the Neapolitan miniature, the woodcut captures the positioning of Farna as but a part of a whole relay of messages, which through Iarbas reach up to heaven, and then down again to earth via the messenger-god and vehicle of Jovian logos, Mercury. Fama’s winged feet are reminiscent of the winged sandals of Mercury, for whom she is a demonic double (see Ch. 3 pp. 92-3). We will later see Mercury figuring in an important image of Fame derived from a different source (below p. 622).

The demonology is as much Christian as pagan; this monstrous winged figure, with feathers covering her body, is an evil angel. This Fara is not in

fact covered in eyes, buta point of convergence between Virgil's Famaand the biblical tradition are the eyes that cover the bodies and wings of the cherubim (Ezek. 10:12 'And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about, even the wheels that they four had"), an iconography that is transferred to images of seraphim (Fig. 11).5 The theological loyalties of Brant's Fama are placed beyond doubt by her cloven hoofs. From her hands shoot forth flames, alluding to the wildfire rumour, and corresponding to the fiery, thunderbolt-like, nature of the Virgilian Fara. In John Ogilby's 1658 edition of Virgil, the eyes, ears and tongues of the Virgilian text dot the feathers of Fama’s body and wings as she makes her first appearance during the storm in Aeneid 4 (Fig. 12). True to the text, the top of her head is hidden in the clouds, but she is also equipped with the post-classical attribute of two trumpets (see below pp. 624—6), one of which she holds to her mouth. An isolated late example of illustration of Virgil's Fama is a lithograph after a design by A.-L. Girodet-Trioson, in which a winged Fara, with the sleeping and embracing couple Dido and Aeneas nestling under one of her wings, whispers in the ear of Iarbas.® 6 See Deonna 1965: 129. — 7 Suerbaum 2008: VP 16584 Pictura 51. ® Reproduced in Suerbaum 2008: 124, Bild 41.

b

a

p fg

m

Hlustratious in the Virgilian tradition

Y

4

vA g

J a

a

Fig. 11

Seraph, apse of Sta Eulalia d'Estaon. Twelfth century

Some illustrations of the scene of the hunt and of Dido and Aeneas in the cave seem to attempt a more naturalistic representation of the processes of Fama. In a woodcut in a German translation of the Aeneid published in 1543 a lone figure glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the open mouth of the cave containing Dido and Aeneas is seen between two bushes is this the spy who will start tongues wagging about what is going on (Fig. 13)? In a fresco in an Aeneid cycle in the Palazzo Spada, possibly by Giovanni Stradano, we observe Dido and Aeneas dallying under a clump of trees, and we also observe a naked male figure (a satyr, perhaps) in the background observing them. He holds a finger to his lips, but with the air of one who will not keep a secret, and perhaps a warning to us not to implicate ourselves in the consequences of becoming further links in the 9 Suerbaum 2008: VP 15432.

60

608

Visual representations of Fama

[ram

Duk,

hee a rama:

Dereaiust ——

Guiretme

Lum

po

Tuba da serio vota

mata, y

wer ade

vg,

ur

hate Pipe » esent again eam Bare ache print. wie tay lt ps avri

E EN

Swan Arsen .

N P

-Sag eren

,

AM. etat eater weft oret.

Fig. 12 After drawing of Franz Cleyn, engraving of Dido and Aeneas entering the cave and Fata, in Publii Virgilii Maronis opera, ed. John Ogilby (London 1658)

chain of narrators of thestory (Fig. 14). Heand we are, potentially, individual vehicles for the multiplex sermo (Aen. 4.189) of which the Virgilian Fama’s

bewilderingly multiform body is the personification. A more mythological approach is taken in one of the cartoons for a cycle of tapestries on the subject of Dido and Aeneas by Giovanni

Romanelli (1610-62) (Fig. 15).!°

Dido and Aeneas are about to enter the cave to take shelter, and are already sheltering themselves from the elements, but also from observation, under 10 See Rubenstein 1968-9.

Illustrations in the Virgilian tradition

Fa

ON

il

EN

Fig. 13 Dido and Aeneas in the cave. Title page to Aeneid 4, in German translation of the Aeneid (Worms

1543)

their riding cloaks, joined above their heads by their overlapping arms. The backs of the other human participants in the drama, the other members of the hunt, are turned to the couple and to the viewer; two hovering Cupids point to and gesture at the couple as they retreat into the privacy of the cave, motivating the irrevocable event that is soon to occur, and at the same time demonstrating to the viewer, if demonstration were necessary, the irresistible outcome of this apparently chance opportunity. On the branch of one of the trees shading the cave sits another winged figure, an owl whose malevolent and piercing gaze is directed at the retreating couple.

609

610

Visual representations of Fama

Fig. 15 Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, Dido and Aeneas: tapestry cartoon

Illustrations in the Virgilian tradition

We might take this to be simply a bird of ill omen, anticipating the bubo that pours out its lugubrious notes at Aen. 4.462-3, but might this owl in fact be Fara in one of her metamorphoses? fura uolat (Aen. 7.392; 8.554),

and Virgil's Fama has the characteristics of a number of birds or birdlike creatures. The multiplicity of eyes ‘under her feathers’ hints at the peacock (as well as the monster Argus). The phrase nocte uolat (Aen. 4.184) might

hint at an etymology for noctua ‘night-owl’; the phrase is reused by Ovid of screech-owls, striges, at Fasti 6.135, where their name is etymologized from the sound that they make, stridere (139-40), the verb that is used of

the sound of Virgil’s Fara at Aen. 4.185. It is into a screech-owl that a relative of Fara, Jupiter's Dira, transforms herself at Aen. 12.861-6 (note also 859 stridens).!! I have however found no reference to Fama as an owl in the Renaissance commentary tradition. But even this modest concession by Romanelli to the monstrous has disappeared in the tapestry itself, where the owl of rumour, if that is what it is, has flown from the branch. One of the most faithful illustrations of Virgil’s Fara is a woodcut published by Hans Weigel the Elder in about 1546 to accompany verses by Hans Sachs on 'Das gerücht mit seiner wunderlichen Eygenschaft | nach beschreibung Virgilii des Poeten' ‘Rumour and her strange nature, according to the description of Virgil the poet’ (Fig. 16)."? Hans Sachs’ verses

are an expansion of the Virgilian lines, followed by references to biblical passages on rumour and reputation. This more comely female figure has feathers all over her body, and feathers and wings alike are dotted with eyes. Her head is in the clouds, and her feet are not just on, but in a hole in, the ground, a visual reference to her mother, Earth. This 1546 woodcut is related to one of the illustrations by the Petrarca-Meister to a 1532 Augsburg edition of the German translation of Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae, a project involving the humanist Sebastian Brant, responsible also for the 1502 Strassburg illustrated Virgil (Fig. 17). As in the 1546 image, Fama is shown as a woman with long flowing hair, her body covered with feathers bearing eyes. She has no wings on her back, and her hands are in the form of webbed talons reaching out to her victim, possibly to suggest the wings of the bat that flies at night.'4 Fara here is a party to a Choice of

[n

!! The link between Aeneid 4 and Fasti 6.140 is made by Tupet 1981, followed by Clément-Tarantino 2006: 212-13.

Strauss 1974: 1137. — ? See Scheidig 1955. Cf. the bat-wings of the otherwise conventional Fama by Jan Gerritz van Bronckhorst of c. 1659 (in Jacob van Campens’ Rathaus in Amsterdam) (after Cartari Inıngini, Venice 1571, 396). [nuidia is represented with the ears and wings of a bat, a snake emerging from her

mouth: see below on Fama and Inuidia.

611

612

Visual representations of Fama

N

HR :ma —H

Fig. 16 Woodcut illustrating Hans Sachs 'Das gerücht mit seiner wunderlichen Eygenschaft / nach beschreibung Virgilii des Poeten' published c. 1546

Hercules kind of allegory; in the centre stands a respectable burgher, who has to choose between reputation and the unchanging value of the true god above the clouds, to whom the wise man at the right is pointing. As so often, Fama is engaged in a power struggle, here between appearance and reality, rather than between good and bad types of report or fame, as is more usual. A related woodcut from the same book shows a good man afflicted with

Illustrations in the Virgilian tradition

!

T

Ay [LA

RI

ne

Fig. 17 The Petrarca-Meister, woodcut, ‘Von hoffnung guts lobs nach dem Tod’

calumny and shame: a circle of mockers make faces and mimic asses' ears,

while from the clouds rains down a shower of tongues, detached fragments of the body of Fama (Fig. 18). The contest between good and bad reports is the subject of a woodcut,

possibly by Georg Pencz, illustrating a 1535 Nuremberg edition of a poem of 1531 by Hans Sachs, “Nachred das grewlich laster, sampt seynen zwölf eygenschafften' ‘Gossip the horrible vice, with her twelve characteristics’ (Fig. 19). The poet has a dream one morning under a lime-tree, in which a strange woman appears to him, crowned like a queen, with wings 'brilliant as the eye in a peacock's tail’. Her left breast has a bleeding wound, and in her left hand she holds a bloody dagger behind her back. She is blind, with a braid of snakes in her hair. She holds a gold cup, filled with poison mixed with honey. Behind her she drags a flaming ball (for she brings ‘Ein brinnende grimmige rach’), smeared with sulphur and pitch. She announces herself as Calumniatrix, whose power extends over all kingdoms and principalities; she asks the dreamer if he wishes to enter her service. Before he can answer, an aged herald (ehrenholdt) appears before him, whereupon the winged female figure flies off. The herald then expounds to the dreamer the twelve qualities of Nachrede ‘rumour’, ‘calumny’. This is a figure of Fama very close to Envy. Generally, without making a claim for direct dependence, one may compare the opposition in Aeneid 4 between the two figures of Fama and

613

Fig. 19 Georg Pencz (?), woodcut illustrating Hans Sachs, 'Nachred das grewlich laster, sampt seynen zwölf evgenschafften' (Nuremberg 1535)

Illustrations in the Petrarchan tradition

Mercury,

the one female, the other male, the one the embodiment

of a

malicious and irresponsible power, the other the messenger of the lawful ruler of the universe. My final example of an illustrated narrative or tableau with the Virgilian iconography of the figure of Fama is one of Giulio Bonasone’s illustrations to the Symbolicae quaestiones of Achille Bocchi (1555), where the contest in which Fama is engaged has already been won (Symb. 89: Fig. 20). Behind Socrates Pallas Athena leads in bonds a winged Fama (labelled in Greek DHMH), with eyes dotted on her robe. The accompanyng text reads fama... uirtutis est comes, ut sceleris infamia 'fame is the companion of virtue, as infamy of crime.' This is a version of the common Ciceronian and Senecan idea that Glory is the Shadow of Virtue (— Symb. 42: see Ch. 1 p. 25). To the reader's question 'Is there a shortcut to the acquisition of the greatest and fairest fame?’ Socrates replies ‘Only if you decide to make yourself such as you wish to be considered by all men.’'* By matching reality to desired appearance Socrates masters Fame’s free-flying irresponsibility, and she becomes the obedient slave of the good man. There is also an implicit contrast between Athena-Minerva

and Fama, between

wisdom and the unaccountable and fallible human report.'^

Illustrations in the Petrarchan tradition In contrast to the very intermittent illustration of Virgil’s Fama, illustration

“I

=

Uu

of the Trionfi of Petrarch is 'dauntingly abundant’, as J. B. Trapp puts it, andin a range of media: manuscripts, painting, metalwork, tapestries, even stained glass.'’ Petrarch does not describe the person of Fama in her Triumphus, and the visual tradition is very varied. A decisive impulse however was given by the scheme represented in three frontispieces to manuscripts of Petrarch’s De uiris illustribus that show a frontal image of Gloria riding in a chariot amidst a group of horsemen, the recipients of her favour. In two of the images two putti ride the two horses that pull her chariot, each

The source is Cic. Off. 2.43. See Watson 1993: 137-8. That opposition is perhaps also operative in the silver goblets made for Gustavus Adolphus by Christoph Jamnitzer (1632), one with a terrestrial globe surmounted by Fame, the other with a celestial globe and Minerva: see Fowler 1996: 122 n. 72. See Trapp unpublished: preliminary studies for this project include Trapp 1992-3, 1999, 2006. Older studies: D’Essling and Müntz 1902; Carandente 1963; Samek Ludovici 1978. Briefer essays: Charney 1990; Nyholm 1990. See also van Marle 1932: 111-35 ‘Les triomphes de Pétrarque’. Tapestries: e.g. Wingfield-Digby 1980: 35-8.

615

616

Visual representations of Fama

COMPENDIOSA FAMA QVAE, ET PVLCHERRIMA

TALIS, QVALIS SYMB.

HABERI AMABIS

ESTO.

LXXXIX.

Fig. 20 Giulio Bonasone, engraving ‘Socrates and Pheme’, from Achille Bocchi Symbolicarum quaestionum de untverso genere quas serio ludebat libri quinque (Bologna 1555)

blowing a trumpet (Fig. 21). In the manuscript now in Darmstadt Fama is placed within a circle, and she holds a sword in her right hand and a figurine in her left. In many later representations this is clearly a figurine of Amor (see Ch. 9 p. 331). The source of this type is not the text itself of the De uiris illustribus: it has been suggested that it derives from a lost fresco by Giotto of Gloria Mondana in the palace of Azzo Visconti in Milan. The Darmstadt variant is also related to the ecphrasis of the painting of ‘la gloria del popol mondano' in Boccaccio's Amorosa visione (Canto 6.47—75), seated

Illustrations in the Petrarchan tradition

Fig. 21 Altichiero, Gloria riding in a chariot, frontispiece to Petrarch De uiris illustribus, c. 1380

on a triumphal chariot drawn by two horses, adorned with laurel leaves, and holding a sword in her right hand, and in her left a golden apple. A circle moved round her from her feet to above her head, ‘and I do not believe that there is anything in the world, or in any town, or land in this country or

abroad that did not appear in that circle"! I shall restrict myself to a few comments on the various attributes of Fama in the Trionfi tradition. The circle round Gloria or Fama represents the worldwide reach of fame and glory. In the fresco by Lorenzo Costa of the Triumph of Fame in the Bentivoglio Chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna, a circle appears above the figure of Fame, containing images of the creation of man and of the history of the world, the temporal as well as the spatial reach of Fama.!” Fama is often shown seated on a terrestrial globe, to make the same point. Her chariot is sometimes drawn by elephants (see Fig. 5), the reasons for which ‘can only be guessed at. It was known

"5 Gilbert 1991 argues that Giotto's fresco in Milan was the source for both the De uiris frontispieces and Boccaccio's ecphrasis; Malke 1977 questions Boccaccio's dependence on the

fresco. Gilbert rejects the case made in Shorr 1938 that the image of the frontispieces derives from a fresco illustrating the De uiris in the Carrara palace in Padua. 19 See Marr 1991.

617

618

Visual representations of Fama

Fig. 22

Christoph Jamnitzer, ewer, with Triumph of Fame

that elephants had been used in Roman triumphs; and from Pliny through the Bestiary, elephants were famous for long life and long memory.’*” Fama often holds a sword and a book, to show that fame is won by both arms and arts, distributed to e cesari e poeti. In a late example on a splendid ewer by the goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer Fama blowing a trumpet rides in a chariot drawn by two elephants, with a group of warriors on the nearer side, and artists and writers on the other (Fig. 22). Flame shoots

from her head (in earlier examples Fama sometimes carries a flame in her left hand). A young man holds a banner on which are depicted two eyes, a mouth, an ear, and two crossed quill-pens. The body parts are an unsurprising contamination of the Petrarchan with the Virgilian tradition,

2° Trapp unpublished.

The non-illustrative tradition

seen elsewhere for example in the devices made by the young Thomas More in his father’s house in London, a ‘goodly hanging of fine paynted clothe, with nyne pageauntes, and verses over of every of those pageauntes’, which combined the Ages of Man

with Petrarchan Triumphs

(see Ch.

13 n. 6).

The verses accompanying the pageant of Fame, triumphant over death, read: ‘Fame I am calld, marvayle you nothing, | Though I with tonges am

compassed all rounde. | For in voice of people is my chief living... "! In a stained glass window dated 1502 at Ervy-le-Chatel Fame’s golden car is sustained by an eagle and a winged greyhound, crushing Death and Clotho; Fame herself has a blue crown and green wings, and white bodice with gold scales, ears, eyes, mouths and tongues. On her outstretched left hand is a

sailed ship, on her right a globe with a landscape and a sun in splendour above it.^

The non-illustrative tradition With Achille Bocchi we entered the repertory of emblem books"

and

iconologies, which is where Fama is most at home, as well as in the related

worlds of pageant and masque. The gigantic size ofthe Famain the Sebastian Brant Virgil is true to the text of Aeneid 4, in which from her small beginnings she rapidly expands so that (Aen. 4.177) 'she walks on the ground and hides her head amongst the clouds’. But her dominating stature, her

placing in the central position in an almost fully frontal pose, and the fact that, although her power to cross large distances is cleverly suggested, it is through a static image, all these combine to make it easy for the viewer to read her as a free-standing emblem of Fama, against a background of her sphere of operation, as in various examples where she is not shown as part of an illustration of a narrative. Most images of Fama are non-illustrative, emblematic or iconological figures, whether free-standing or forming part of complex allegorical ensembles. Here the Virgilian Fama of Aeneid 4 is only one of the iconographical sources. Two general features of this tradition deserve comment. Firstly, a certain fluidity in the ways of imaging Fama, and the ease with which she merges

?! 2?

Edwards, Rodgers, Miller 1997:5. — ?? D'Esslingand Mantz 1902: 201-6. For examples of Fama in emblem books use the indexes in Henkel and Schöne 1996, Bedeutungs-Register s.v. ‘Ruhm, and Daly et al. 1988-.

619

Visual representations of Fama

into related abstractions. In a loose sense this is true to the Virgilian personification, which is defined by its mutability, is a composite of earlier mythological and allegorical beings, and which within the Aeneid is related to a number of other creatures, anthropomorphic or otherwise (see Ch. 3 pp. 98-103). Fama merges easily into the figures of Victory, of History, and appears in the guises of messengers both ancient (Mercury) and Christian (the angel). Secondly, as in some of the examples already examined, Fame is more often than not engaged in a power struggle, whether with other kinds of forces (as in the Trionfi tradition of Boccaccio and Petrarch), or

with other versions of herself. This internal struggle usually presents itself as a conflict between good and bad fame, between (justified) praise and (unjustified) slander. Virgil’s Fama, at first glance an embodiment of mala

fama, contains elements that are shared with bona fama. The doubleness of Fama is schematized in Renaissance iconologies. In Vincenzo Cartari's L'imagini degli dei, first published in Venice in 1566," Fama is illustrated as a composite of Statian (Theb. 3.425-31: see Ch. 6 pp. 204-7) and Virgilian models: she goes before the chariot of Mars "because at the beginning of wars more is often said about them than what then ensues' (Fig. 23). Cartari tells us that the ancients depicted Fama

asa woman with her robe hitched up, running swiftly, with a trumpet to her mouth, her body covered with eyes, ears and tongues, 'as Virgil describes her. The trumpet is not Virgilian, and this, the most constant attribute of Fame, is sometimes traced to Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus 9.137—48 (cf. 7.83-90)," perhaps as a parallel to the tuba Fortunae 'trumpet of Fortune’~° Cartari then says that Fama is double: ‘it was said that Fama is not single, but twofold; and the Fama that announced good news was

wv

*4 Cf. already Giglio Gregorio Giraldi, De deis gentium uaria et multiplex historia (Basel 1548), 53-4, good and bad Farna, the latter with black wings, iuxta illud Claudiani contra Alaricum: ‘Famaque nigrantes. . . alas. 2 Anticlaudianus 9.139—40 (in a contest between Infamia and Fama) sed cornu quo Fama sue preconia laudis | intonat. 2 Fame's trumpet: de Tervarent 1958—9: col. 387; Kauffman 1973: cols. 1433-5. The metaphor of

e

620

Fame's trumpet occurs at Cic. Fam. 16.21.2 bucinatorem.. . existimationis meae; Juv. 14.152

foedae bucina famae. The bucina is the curved trumpet; Fame's trumpet is usually the straight tuba, and an impulse to the bestowal of this attribute may have been images of trumpeters in Roman triumphs, as on the Arch of Marcus Aurelius. Putti riding on the horses that pull the car of Gloria blow trumpets in two of the late fourteenth-century frontispieces to Petrarch's De uiris illustribus (see above). In a later variation on the visual representation of the Triumph of Fame, in which Death (or the Fate Atropos) collapses as Fame blows her trumpet at him, and

the dead rise from their graves, there is perhaps a conflation with the trumpet of the Last Judgement; according to Petrarch, Triumphus Fame 1.8-9 Fama is ‘quella | che trae l'uom del sepolcro e 'n vita il serba’.

The non-illustrative tradition

Fig. 23 Fama, from Vincenzo Cartari Imagines deorum, qui ab antiquis colebantur (Lyons 1581)

called "good", and that which brought ill news was called “bad”, and in

contrast to the former this one had black wings: hence Claudian writing against Alaric says that fama spread her black wings" and they sometimes give her the wings of a bat? The ambivalence of the Virgilian Fama prevents her use simply as the figure for bad Fame, and conve-

niently another ancient text provides an unequivocal type for the bad variety. In the most influential of the iconologies, that of Cesare Ripa (first edition Rome 1593; first illustrated edition 1603), four types of Fame are described

77 Claudian, De bell. Getico 201-4 Famaque nigrantes succincta pauoribus alas | secum cuncta

trahens a Gadibus usque Britannum | terruit Oceanum et nostro procul axe remotam | insolito belli tremefecit murmure Thylen?

621

Visual representations of Fama

622

(cited from a 1630 Italian edition): (i) Fama simple, a lady with girt-up robe, running, covered with eyes, mouths and ears, ‘as Virgil describes her’; (ii) Fama Buona, with trumpet in right hand, an olive branch in the left,

with round her neck a gold chain and pendant heart, and white wings. In the olive branch there is a syncretism of the Christian and pagan: quotations from the Song of Songs and Psalms”* reveal the olive to be a symbol of Christ, but Jupiter was also crowned with an olive wreath. This is not the

first or the last time that we will see an interference of Christian motifs with the pagan notion of Fame;

(iii) Fama Cattiva de Claudiano, with the black

wings, but also ‘with a robe painted with some black little images, such as little putti with black wings, and with a trumpet in her hand’; (iv) Fama Chiara nella Medaglia di Antinoo: this unequivocally pagan image is taken from a supposedly antique medallion of Antinous, showing Mercury with caduceus, winged helmet and winged sandals, leading Pegasus by the bridle

(Fig. 24). The herald of the gods Mercury thus enters the iconography of Fama by a route independent of the narrative association of Fama and Mercury in Aeneid 4; the impulse to the interpretation of this medallion type as Fame comes from the allegorization in Fulgentius, Mythologiae 1.21 (Helm p. 33) of Pegasus as the Fame that attends Virtue: ‘Pegasus, said to have been born from the blood of Medusa, is established as a figure of fame (in figura famae); for when virtue has cut off fear, it generates fame; hence Pegasus is also said to fly, since fame is winged.’”' This genealogy is the subject of a painting by Peruzzi in the vault-paintings of the Chigi horoscope in the Loggia di Galatea in the Villa Farnesina (Fig. 25). Fama

=

2

29

Ps. 51:10; Cant. 1:2 oleum effusum nomen tuum. In the Ovide moralise the Ovidian House of Fama in Metamorphoses 12 is allegorized as Scripture: Boer 1954: 309 ‘En parlant au seurplus de ce present chappitre morallement est a noter que par la maison de Renommée, qui tant jengle, peut on entendre l'Escripture, qui de toutes chose fetes et à faire fait mencion. C'est celle qui certainement fait assavoir l'advenement de Dieu à son Jugement General, afin que chacun se prepare à deffense contre les mauveses temptacions.' Ripa also refers to a medallion of Domitian with a figure of Pegasus, which he interprets as Fama, referring to Sebastiano Erizzo, Discorso sopra le medaglie degli antichi (1559, 1571), who

illustrates the medallion. For other examples of Pegasus as an emblem of fame see de Tervarent

-

1958-9: 92; Henkel and Schöne

19906: cols. 1666, 1668. On Pegasus/Fame in representations of

Hercules at the Crossroads see below p. 635. See also Boitani 198-1: Index s.v. ‘Pegasus. Probably unrelated is the association of fama with the new spring of Hippocrene at Ov. Met. 5.256 ff., where the play is on poetic fama rather than the fame of virtuous deeds (Hardie

nN

2002a: at 1H4 vaulted wind a 32

237-8). Shakespeare may have figures of fame in mind in the description of Prince Hal ıv.1.109-15 ‘I saw young Harry... Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury, | And with such ease into his seat | As if an angel dropped down from the clouds | To turn and fiery Pegasus | And witch the world with noble horsemanship’: see Ch. 13 pp. 500-1.

See Frommel 2003: 11.84—5.

The non-illustrative tradition

|

7

RM

a

y ACRES ^

7 Ge [i

b

AN N AN N XS

Fig. 24

Fama Chiara nella Medaglia di Antinoo, from Cesare Ripa Iconologia (Venice

Fig. 25

Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481-1536), Myth of Perseus and the Gorgon, fresco (c.

1511), Loggia of Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome

623

Visual representations of Fama

appears twice, firstly in the stone head of the horse Pegasus emerging from the earth at the far right," and secondly in the conventional winged and trumpet-blowing female figure floating over the scene amidst the stars. The chief visual opposition in the picture is thus between the serene white-robed Fama and the agitated dark-robed Medusa, close in appearance to the type of Envy. The textual doubling of the Virgilian figures of Fama and Mercury finds another parallel in the two sculptural groups by Coysevox of Renommée and Mercury, each riding the winged horse Pegasus, celebrating the immortal glory of Louis XIV (made for Marly, and now in the Louvre), and which draw on the Pegasus—Fame iconography (Figs. 26 and 27).*! Another route to the approximation of Fama and Mercury seems to have been traced in the bronze statue of Renommee by Pierre Biard, now in the Louvre, and

originally crowning the funerary monument of Jean-Louis de La Vallette, duc d'Épernon and his wife in the church of St-Blaise de Cadillac (Gironde).

The statue closely resembles Giambologna's statue of Mercury, of which Biard could have seen a copy while in Rome. The Virgilian Fama with her body or robe covered with eyes thus becomes a generalized image of Fame. So she appears in an engraving by Virgil Solis (1514—62), a winged female running through a landscape, blowing a

ww vn

trumpet from which pours a stream of fame, with the legend Voce oculis alis, toti sum cognita mundo ‘By my voice, my eyes, my wings, I am known to all the world."? Here she has one trumpet; more commonly Fame has two trumpets,"^ originally signifying that she can speak both well and ill, of great things and small, perhaps for the first time in Chaucer's House of Fame, where she has a golden trumpet of Clere Laude and a black trumpet of Sklaundre (see Ch. 15 p. 591); or in a late specimen of iconology, J. B. Boudard's Iconologie (Vienne 1766), described by Stephen Orgel as a ‘rococo

The figures other than Perseus, the Gorgon and winged Fama are all painted in stone colours, including the head of the horse at the far right, and bearing a resemblance to the head of the horse from the chariot of Selene in the angle of the east pediment of the Parthenon. The figures in the painting beneath the flying figure of Fama are composed as if they filled half a pediment. Peruzzi may have seen drawings of the Parthenon pediments by Ciriaco d'Ancona: see Günther 1988: 16-17, with Fig. 2 (copy of Ciriaco's drawing of the west pediment). Taken to be Ripa's Fama Buona and Fama Chiara by Wittkower 1975: 284 n. 59. O’Dell-Franke

1977: e111, based on a woodcut in Le sorti di Francesco Martolini da Forli,

intitolate Giardino di Pensieri (Venice 1540). m u

624

On Fame's two trumpets see Neubauer 1999: 55-63. On the possible sources of Fame's two trumpets see Bennett 1968: 151-5: possibly based on the two trumpets of Aeolus (first in Albricus Philosophus, the ‘third Vatican mythographer’); at John Gower, Mirour de l'omme 22141-56 Fortune has two handmaidens each with ‘un grant corn’ with which they bring either 'Renomé' or ‘misere et... hontage*

The non-illustrative tradition

Fig. 26 Simon Thomassin, engraving of statue by Antoine Coysevox of Mercury on Pegasus, Recüeil de cinquante des plus belles figures antiques et modernes de celles qui sont placées dans les appartements et Parc de Versailles (Paris 1703)

Ripa’, where Renommee’s two trumpets are said to be of silver and wood,

‘signifying that Fame publicizes great deeds and lesser indifferently’.* In a painting by Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644) a reclining Fame holds a golden trumpet and a wooden shawm, presumably also to signify the relative worth 38 Cf. also an engraving by Jan Vredeman de Vries in which Fame holds a trumpet with a white banner, from which smoke rises, to signify fame, and a trumpet with a black banner, from which smoke descends, to signify infamy (reproduced in Kiefer 1999: 20, Fig. 9).

625

626

Visual representations of Fama

Fig. 27 Simon Thomassin, engraving of statue by Antoine Coysevox of Renommee on Pegasus, Reciieil de cinquante des plus belles figures antiques et modernes de celles qui sont placées dans les appartements er Parc de Versailles (Paris 1703)

and value of what Fame broadcasts (Fig. 28). But in many cases the two trumpets cannot be differentiated in this way, and function rather as an emblem of the power of Fame to propagate herselfto both ends of the earth, particularly when she is shown standing on or hovering over a globe. The case is clearer when Fame is given a single trumpet with three mouths, as in the statue perched on a globe atop the catafalque of Michelangelo.?? Four 9 In Agostino Ciampelli’s painting, reproduced in Wittkower 1964: PI. 29.

The non-illustrative tradition

Fig. 28

Bernardo Strozzi, Personifrcation of Fama

years later the same three-mouthed trumpet is carried by Fame on the verso of the title page of the 1568 edition of Vasari's Le vite de’ pitt eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Fig. 29). In her other hand she carries a tlaming torch, and she tlies above a landscape of the resurrection of the dead. Fame with her trumpet merges into the angel of the Last Judgement. The eye-dotted body of Virgilian Farna is also used without embarrassment as an emblem of the fame of purveyors of the word (as opposed to the fame of the great men of action who are immortalized by purveyors of the word). This too is licensed by the Virgilian text, where Fama functions transparently as a comment on the fictionalizing power of the poet, as well as acting as a character within the poetic fiction. In one of Hadrianus Junius’ emblems a naked, apparently male, winged figure with eyes all over his body blows a trumpet as he flies through the clouds. Slung over his shoulder is a large quill-pen, the instrument of the poet's creation of his own fame. In terms of classical models, this is a combination of Virgil's monster (the eves, perhaps the clouds) and Horace's hope for literary canonization at the end of Odes 1.1, alluded to in the last line of the epigram accompanying the emblem, while the pyramids come from Odes 3.30. The picture is taken over by Geffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden 1586) (Fig. 30); the epigram relates the general concept to the specific case of the poet Sidney (whose pen, we read, was sent to him by Mercury, to become the attribute of Fame in the emblem). The invention of printing with the expanded possibilities for the circulation of texts gives to the Renaissance idea of fame a dimension lacking in

627

628

Visual representations of Fama

Fig. 29 Giorgio Vasari Le vite de’ piü eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Florence

1568)

antiquity. On the title pages of printed books figures of fame proclaim both the fame of the person or subject published in the book, and also the power of the printer to extend that fame.” In the printer's mark of Jean Stratius (Lyon 1578-85) Fama blows her trumpet, but in her other hand instead of a second trumpet she holds a book inscribed ac studio ‘and through study’, One of Sambucus’ emblems shows Fama flying through a printer's workshop, with the motto Vel leuia multitudine clarent, and a poem celebrating the power of the German invention of printing to immortalize: Henkel and Schöne 1996: 1079-80.

The non-illustrative tradition

Fig. 30. Pennac gloria perennis, emblem in Gettrey Whitney A Choice of Emlilemes (Leiden 1586)

pairing this source of fame with uirtute ‘through virtue, inscribed on the four-square block of stone beneath (Fig. 31). Her robe is sprinkled with eyes and ears and she stands ona globe inscribed per orbem, which might be taken as a reference to the global information-gathering of the Ovidian Fara, the description of whose House concludes, ( Mer. 12.63) totumque inquirit in orben ‘she makes inquiries through the whole world: Stratius’ mark also presents a schematically hierarchical image of the power struggle and power structure in which Fame is involved. Two serpents of envy or slander reach up from the bottom of the composition, but their attack is futile, since the hand of God reaches down from the clouds to lift up, as if bv the handle of a suitcase, the cartouche containing Fama, providing a theological guarantee tor the perpetuity of fame, symbolized by the evergreen laurel wreath in which the legend is intertwined. The clouds here represent the inscrutable

629

630

Visual representations of Fama

Fig. 31

Jean Stratius, printer's mark, from L.-C. Silvestre Marques typographiques

(Paris 1853—67) no. 905

source of divine wisdom and goodness, rather than the unverifiable and misty sources of rumour within which the Virgilian Farra hides her head. A very similar message is conveyed on the title page of Theodore Beza's Poemata inuenilia (1550), combining Christian and pagan motifs. At the top Jupiter emerges from the clouds, brandishing his three- pronged thunderbolt in order to ward off two serpents of envy who dart their tongues at Jupiter. Two flourishing laurel stems of fame, framing the name of the poet and the title of his poems, spring up from a crowned skull at the bottom to reach to the heavens. Fame's fieriness is here replaced by the fiery weapon of the supreme god, which protects fame as it rises away from the grave.

Without positing a direct connection, I note that Virgil's description of Faria is modelled in part on a Lucretian description of the thunderbolt (see Ch. 3 pp. 82-3). Farma is also, as a daughter of the Earth, a sister of the Giants defeated by the Olympians; the Jupiter of the Beza title page will hurl

The non-illustrative tradition

Fig. 32 Sigmund Feyerabend, printer's device, from A. F. Butsch Die Bücher-Ornamentik der Hoch- und Spátrenaissance, vol. 11 (Leipzig and Munich (1881) Tafel 75)

slanderers into the depths of the earth as he once did the Titans and Giants. Along the two framing laurel stems we read mirtentur in inferiora terrae qui maligna loquuntur super me (cf. Ps. 34:26) ‘they who speak spiteful things

of me shall be sent to the places beneath the earth. The richest repertory of images of Farnain printers’ marks are the numerous variations designed for the important sixteenth-century German printer Sigmund Feyerabend (1528-90) by Jost Amman and Tobias Stimmer, in which Fania appears with wings covered in eyes, one or two trumpets,

sometimes with a globe, and against a variety of backgrounds.*! In one example she runs towards us against a background of scenes of battle by sea and land, the world of action, specifically epic action where she first makes

4" O'Dell 1993: 258-312, catalogue of marks (‘Signete’). Some examples include a motto in Latin (Si cupis ut celebri stet tua fama loco | peruigiles habeas oculos animumque sagacem) or German

(‘Wer dugendt und ehr erlangen wil mus alle zeit thun wachen vil’).

631

632

Visual representations of Fama

Fig. 33 Bronze medal of Andrea Barbazza

her appearance in the Western tradition, to emerge from a frame that symbolizes the world of arts and crafts, with its bookish putti, the world of the bookseller and publisher (Fig. 32). In the Preface to a 1579 book on her-

aldry Feyerabend says that the art of printing has been given to the world as ‘ein helle Posaun’ ‘a clear-sounding trumpet''" The Renaissance medal is unsurprisingly a frequent vehicle for images of Fame;? a parallel for the interference of bookish with epic Fama is to be found in a medal said to have been made on the death of the lawyer Andrea Barbazza of Messina (d. 20 July 1479) (Fig. 33). On the reverse is a winged and feathered figure of Fame, standing on and holding books, with the legend fama super aethera

42 For other examples of Fara as a printer's device (De Gourmont) see Silvestre 1853-67: 51 n. 98; 305 n. 551. G. de Zerbis, Opus preclarum anathomie (Venice 1533) has a title page with Fama with fire shooting from her hand. 13 See Scher 1994: 341-2, medal of Cardinal Richelieu, Fame driving chariot of France over rocky ground, with winged Fortune chained to the rear of the chariot: tandem victa sequor. Other examples from the Warburg picture collection: medal of Innocent Xl, trumpet-blowing Fara pointing to inscription fecit enim mirabilia in uita sua (Ashmolean v11.48.61); Cosimo III,

Fama pointing to Medici stars, with globe below, with the legend famam extendere factis (Aen. 10.468) (Littra 67; Heiss p. 256.4); Vittoria della Rovere, Fama looking to stars, with the legend famam quae [sic] terminet astris (Aen. 1.287) (BM

534.112/24).

The non-illustrative tradition

notus, Aeneas’ self-defining Odyssean boast to his mother Venus of his own fame as an epic hero (Aen. 1.379).

Princes, as well as poets and printers, live off fame and good reputation; Calliope, as Hesiod tells us, attends both kings and poets (Theog. 80). The contest between Fama and Slander is given triumphalist expression in images produced for kings and dukes. In one of the many celebrations of the fame of Louis XIV the sculptor Domenico Guidi made a group of La Renommee du Roy, originally (1686) set up in the parterre of the Orangerie at Versailles (Fig. 34). Renommée appears in the form of a standard ancient type of Victory, a winged female figure holding a pen with which she inscribes the glorious deeds of the king on an imago clipeata supported by the figure of Time." She tramples underfoot Envy, with snaky locks and gnawing on a heart. Similar imagery is used in a stage in honour of the Archduke Matthias at an entry into Brussels of 1578." Dressed as Scipio,

that great example of the Roman triumphator, Matthias is led by the figures of Virtue and Knowledge (the same pairing as uirtute ac studio in Jean Stratius' printer's mark) to the pavilion of Fame, equipped with wings and trumpet, while they trample underfoot Time and Envy. The composition is given a Christian colouring by the dove of the Holy Spirit hovering above the head of Knowledge, a flying vehicle of pure truth to set against the bat perched on the head of Envy. Virgil's Fama is fashioned as an actor in a particular kind of epic contest, between monstrous beings of earthly origin and the Olympian gods. Epic fame is an intensively competitive phenomenon, and is the reward for success in power struggles both between individual epic heroes and between competing moral and political structures. Within epic, fame is another word for ideology; the extent to which epic narrative succeeds in persuading the reader of a straightforward and objective opposition between a generous, truthful fame and a denigratory, distorting envy or slander is the measure of its success in persuading us of the rightness of a particular ideology. I want to end by looking at three complex allegories of the power-games in which fame is involved. The power of Fama may be measured along a horizontal axis (to the ends of the earth), but the vertical axis is dominant. Typical is Odysseus' boast that (Od. 9.20) ‘my fame reaches the heavens’. From lowly and earthbound

beginnings Virgil's Fama shoots up to hide her head among the clouds. Fame is a mountain-climber and a sky-reacher, as too is the most famous of all

heroes, Hercules. The Renaissance iconography of the Choice of Hercules 1^

See Hautecoeur

1912; Wittkower

1938; Berger

1981: 234-6.

55

Landwehr

1971: no. 36.

633

634

Visual representations of Fama

Fig. 34

Domenico Guidi La Renommee du Roy, Versailles

incorporates an image of the fame that will attend the decision to climb the path of Virtue and shun the primrose path of Pleasure, in the form of the winged Pegasus prancing on top of the mountain of Virtue (which can also double as Mount Helicon, a symbol of the poetic fame that will reward Hercules’ virtuous career}. The engraving by Johann Sadeler, after Friedrich Sustris, of the Choice of Hercules in honour of Maximilian I, | January 1595, shows in the foreground a winged Fame blowing a trumpet

The non-illustrative tradition

Fig. 35 Johann Sadeler, engraving after Friedrich Sustris, of the Choice of Hercules

with a banner with the Bavarian arms, hovering over Hercules, and in the background Pegasus on the summit of the mountain of Virtue (Fig. 35).6 © See Panofsky 1930: 116-18; 124 ff. on Annibale Carracci's painting, in which a poet with a book at the foot of Virtue points to Pegasus on the summit of the mountain of Virtue; Wittkower 1975: 90-4.

635

Visual representations of Fama

Fig. 36 Jacques Callot, engraving of Mount Parnassus, from A. Salvadori Guerra di Bellezza: festa a cavallo fatta in Firenze (Florence 1616)

Allegorical figures of fame, report, rumour, abound in the early modern pageant and on the early modern stage. Fame trequently appears in the elaborate and themed Lord Mayor’s Shows in London in the seventeenth century." The figure of Rumour in the Induction to Part 2 of Shakespeare's Henry IV emerges from a tradition of similar figures on the English stage going back to the early sixteenth century.*® A particularly grandiose tableau of the power structures of the word isa float of Mount Parnassus designed for one of the Medici pageantson the Piazza Santa Croce, the Guerra di Bellezza, held in honour of the Duke of Urbino on 16 October 1616, illustrated in an etching by Jacques Callot (Fig. 36).? Fame is on her mountain-top, all's well with the world of princes. On the rocky summit is the oak-tree of the della Rovere family, under whose shade are Pallas and the Muses, with Pegasus striking Hippocrene from the rock with his hoofs. On a slightly lower outcrop is the standard figure of Fame (‘come si dipinge comunemente"), See Withington 1918-20: Index s.v. ‘Fame’ For example in Anthony Munday's 1605 Triumphes of Reunited Britannia Fame recounted the history of the Merchant Taylors Company to the mayor, a Merchant Taylor, Sir Leonard Holliday; Thomas Middleton's 1619 The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity had a sanctuary of Fame in which were enrolled the names of mayors and benefactors of London. 48 Scc Ch. 13 p. 488 n. 6. On Fanta in the Jonsonian masque sec Ch. 13 pp. 525-34. 5 Callot's etchings are published in Salvadori 1616; see also Nagler 1964: 129.

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636

The non-illustrative tradition

blowing two trumpets; on the lower slopes of Parnassus disport men of letters wearing oak garlands. On the foot of the mountain stands Truth, equipped with a mirror and a whip, with which she chastises 170 personified Lies (played by musicians), wearing double-faced masks and with black wings sprouting from their shoulders. At the beginning of the performance Fame announced the forthcoming tilt; at the end the Lies, now brought into line, struck up the music for a dance, and Fame vowed to promulgate through all the cities of Italy and Europe the perfection attained by the 'feste a cavallo del Serenissimo Gran’ Duca di Toscana’. Finally, another title page, that to Sir Walter Ralegh's The History of the World, published in 1614 (Fig. 37). Many ofthe components ofthe composition will now be familiar."' It is a complex statement of the power of history, of this history by this author, of this history published by this publisher, to establish and promulgate the true fame of past events. In the centre a map of the world is supported, Atlas-like, by the figure of History, identified by the Ciceronian tag magistra uitae. She tramples on Death and Oblivion, the agents of darkness, and her head is surrounded by a nimbus of rays of light. Thus History herself already has some of the features associated with Fama: the victory over death, extension over the whole world (doubly appropriate of course for a work with this title). This association is reinforced by the similarity of History to the figure of Bona Fama at the top left, in the shared features of the laurel wreath and of the burst of light, which now surrounds the entire body of Bona Fama. Bona Fama is paired, or rather twinned, with

Mala Fama, two winged and trumpet-blowing figures, exactly the same compositional type reversed. They are both versions of Virgilian Fama, but presented with accidentals that make of them a pair of opposites. Bona Fama has wings adorned with ears, eyes and tongues, but is otherwise of spotless body and dress. Fama Mala is set amidst dark clouds, rather than bright light, and her whole body and dress are covered in spots, which are obviously derived from the eyes that frequently cover the person of Fama, but which Corbett and Lightbown describe as ‘spots... signifying a spotted or blemished reputation’ In fact these two kinds of Fama are, unusually, not in

competition, but as their positioning suggests, two complementary aspects of the truth, since History records the good and bad reputations that men make for themselves. Ben Jonson’s sonnet “The Minde of the Front’ makes this clear: ‘From Death and darke Obliuion, (neere the same) | The Mistresse

5° Salvadori 1616 comments, ‘le Bugie seguaci della fama, alludendo al verso di Virgilio Tam ficti, prauique tenax quam nuntia ueri. 5! See Corbett and Lightbown 1979: 128-35.

637

638

Visual representations of Fama

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Fig. 37 Walter Raleigh The History of the World (London 1614), frontispiece of Mans Life, graue Historie, | Raising the World to good, or Evill fame, | Doth vindicate it to Aternitie.’ Eternity is represented in the enormous eye

of God, Prouidentia, appearing within a circle of billowing cloud, probably based on a hieroglyph of Divinity in sixteenth-century editions of Horapollo, the symbol of God because just as the eye sees all that is presented to it, so God knows and sees all things. Here is the final standard to which the Christian historian can refer his work, the one infallible eve that regulates the multitude of perspectives seen by the many eyes on the person of Fama.

The non-illustrative tradition

These visually sharp distinctions are put into relief by the history of Ralegh’s own entanglements with ill-founded slander, which led to his conviction in 1603 of involvement in a plot to kill the king. Dudley Carleton comments on the trial in a letter, ‘And so well he shifted all advantages that were taken against him, that were not fama malum gravius quam res, and an ill name, half-hanged in the opinion of men, he had been acquitted.’” Ralegh perhaps saw a chance for retaliation in his History of the World, which, according to John Chamberlain in a letter to Dudley Carleton, was recalled for being ‘too sawcie in censuring princes. In particular Ralegh hinted none too subtly at a parallel between James and King Ninias, who succeeded the famous Queen Semiramis, and who, in Ralegh’s words, ‘was

esteemed no man of warre at all, but altogether feminine, and subjected to ease and delicacie’.”* The world of Fama is a murkier place than the black and white images of the title page would have the reader believe.” *? Cited by Kaplan 1997:28.

— ?? Cited by Clare 1990: 154.

5! Other examples of visual works of art that merit exploration as complex statements of the workings of fama include (i) the ‘Temple of Fame’ from the ‘Los Honores' tapestries made for Charles V, an elaborate development of the Petrarchan Triumphs tradition. In the centre of the Temple is Fame on an elephant, blowing on two trumpets of good and bad fame, with banners with eyes, ears, tongues. On the left the illustrious climb to the Temple of Honour (represented in the next tapestry in the series), with Perseus on Pegasus (Bora Fama) flying above them; on the right is a flying figure of Mala Fama, with scaly wings, bare breasts, flames shooting from her hands, and cloven hoofs (possibly related to the Sebastian Brant Fama). The last in the

series of the nine tapestries represents Infamia. See Delmarcel 1999: 147-54; Tanner 1993: 60-6; (ii) The Renaissance tradition of realizing Lucian's description of the 'Calumny of Apelles) on which see Massing 1990. Particularly elaborate is the version by Federico Zuccari, on which see Massing 1990: Ch. 12; Acidini 2009 et al.: 94-105.

639

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Index of passages discussed

ACCIUS Tragica 115-17 Warmington: 148 ACHILLES TATIUS Leucippe and Clitophon AESCHINES Against Timarchus. 238-9 On the False Embassy: 239 ps.-APOLLODORUS Bibliotheca L6 (3): 216 APULEIUS Metamorphoses Li 121 427: 121 4.31 (1): 118-19

4.28 (4): LZ 6.22 (3-4): 119 6.23 (2-4): 119 &R.6: 122 ARIOSTO Orlando furioso 2.36 (1-2): 333 34-5: 544 n. AUGUSTINE Confessions 5.1 (1): 520

BYRON Stanzas Written on the Road between Florence and Pisa (9-12): 347

CAMOES The Lusiads 2.58: 124-5 9.44: 344 9.88-9: 345-6

CATULLUS 61 (209-23): 360

AZ: 325 68: 325-6 78b: 325 80: 324-5 CHAPMAN,

GEORGE

Andromeda liberata: 539—40 Eugenia: 537-9 CHARITON Callirhoe

L1 (2): 113 32 (7): 114-15 CHAUCER

House of Fame

(345-60): 576 (588-9): 588 (1070-83): 581 (1076-82): 594

BACON, FRANCIS “Of fame, a fragment’: 226-8 BIBLE Epistle of James 3 (1-9): 520 Matthew 5 (11): 423 24 (35): 412 Paul 2 Cor. 1 (12): 34 Proverbs 18 (21): 520 Psalms 34 (26): 631 BOETHIUS

Consolation of Philosophy L1 (pros. 8-13): 33-4 2.2: 33-4

BUTLER, SAMUEL Hudibras ILi (45-80): 536 n.

(1381-5): 589

(1758-62): 594 (1876-82): 598 (1886-9): 598 (2110-20): 592 (2155-8): 581

Troilus and Criseyde

5 (1789-92): 600-1 CICERO, MARCUS TULLIUS Ad Atticum 115: 243 2.18 (2): 243-4 Ad familiares 8.1: 243 De officiis 2.43: 28

678

Index of passages discussed

CICERO, MARCUS TULLIUS (cont.)

57.16 (4): 294

De re publica 6.24.9: 28 In Catilinam 1.29: 385 Philippics

63.29 (3): 312 DIO CHRYSOSTOM Orationes 44: 334 11.14: 352

138: 236

lL54: 352

Pro Archia 26-30: 23-4 Pro Caelio: 242.

66: 336 DOUGLAS, GAVIN The Palis of Honour. 384

Pro Cluentio

DRYDEN,

22:241 Pro Marcello 22: 254 25: 236, 254 Pro Milone 42: 241 Pro Murena

35-6: 241 Pro Plancio 56-7: 242 Tusculan Disputations 13-14

JOHN

Aeneid 6 (420-1): 578 ENNIUS Annals (363-5) Skutsch: 255-6, 259 EURIPIDES

Helen (815-23): 351-2 Hippolytus (1423-30): 548

1.109: 14

3.34: 24-6, 317 CICERO, QUINTUS TULLIUS Commentariolum petitionis: 240-1 CLAUDIAN In Rufinum 1 (28-38): 528 COWLEY, ABRAHAM Davideis 3 (457-60): 343-4

3 (883-6): 344 3 (906): 344 ‘Life and fame’: 10

FLETCHER, PHINEAS The Purple Island 5.56-8: 522-3 FRONTO P. 212 van den Hout: 136 GOETHE Rómische Elegien 19 (1-2): 332

GORGIAS Encomium of Helen: 349-50 GREVILLE, FULKE

Inquisition upon Fame and Honour. 36 DANIEL, SAMUEL

69: 336

Civil Wars 6.36: 521

DANTE Inferno 4 (94—102): 453

15: 372 26: 371-2

Paradiso 5-7: 373-6

11 (37-9): 374 15: 372-3 33 (143-5): 377 DEMOSTHENES On the False Embassy. 239 DIO, CASSIUS

53,19: 287-8

HAWES,

STEPHEN

Pastime of Pleasure: 584—5 HESIOD Catalogue of Women

fr. 199 (2-3) Merkelbach and West: 348

Theogony (27-8): 57, 116, 134

(32-3):50 (226-32): 56. Works and Days (1-2): 50 (1-26): 51-7 (755-6): 54-5

(760-4): 50-1

Index of passages discussed

HOMER Iliad 2 (1-335): 58-62 2 (484-7): 159 2 (484-93): 107

4 (422-45): 206 4 (440-5): 55, 87, 88-90, 206

6 (355-8): 349 9 (189): 231 Odyssey 2 (214-17): 64 8 (270-1): 362

9 (19-20): 96, 633 13 (238-41): 216

Time Vindicated to Himselfe and to his Honors. 531-3 ‘To Himself’ (‘Where dost thou careless lie?’): 530-1 ‘To King James. Vpon the happie false rumour of his death’: 437-8 Underwood 75 (145-56): 340 JUSTIN 18.4 (6-8): 312 JUVENAL 6 (398-412): 176-7 JUVENCUS Euangeliorum libri rv Praefatio: 411-12

23 (129-52): 65

LACY, JOHN The Steeleids. 586-7

24 (194—202): 358

LIVY

24 (413-14): 64

HORACE Ars poetica (136-9): 155 (151-2): 107-8 (338): 533 (390): 328 Epistles 1: 30-1 L19 (7-8): 214 1.19 (43-5): 381 L20: 381 21 (210-13): 134 2.1 (217-18): 317-18 Epodes 11 (7-10): 361 17: 389-90 Odes 22:31 2.2 (5-8): 284 2.20: 108 3.30: 167, 191, 627 3.30 (7-8): 290 4.3 (22-3): 366 4.9 (25-8): 283-4 4.15 (12-16): 9 Satires L6: 29-30

Praefatio (3): 234=5 Praefatio (6-7): 262-3 L1 (6): 244 1.16 (4): 235 2.7-8: 249-50

6.12 (2-6): 252

6.20 (8): 253 6.20 (12): 251

6.22 (5)-25 (6): 253-5, 267-8 6.23 (7): 236 Z1 (9-10): 255-6

8.40 (2-5): 231-2 10.13 (2-13): 246-8

10.23 (3-8): 359 21.46 (8): 262 22.2: 256 22.23-30: 260-1

22.38 (6) - 40: 261-2 26.19 (6-8): 262-3 27.20 (9)-21 (5); 257-8 27.27 (12-14): 229 28.17 (1-3): 263-4, 462-3

28.24 (1-2): 72 28.24—5: 256-7 28.40—4: 264-7 28.43 (4): 266

28.44 (17-18): 266-7 30.26 (7-9): 268

JONSON, BEN Masque of Queenes, The: 526-30

(410-18); 527 "Minde of the Front, The’: 637-8 Newes from the New World Discover'd in the Moone: 533-4

Poetaster. 523-5

v.ii (1-5): 525 Staple of News, The. 534-7

30.45 (6-7): 264 38.50 (4)-60: 268-9

39.1 (1): 269-70 ps.-LONGINUS On the Sublime 44 (8): 314

LUCAN Bellum ciuile 1 (8): 203

679

680

Index of passages discussed

LUCAN

(cont.)

MILTON, JOHN

1 (129-57): 180-1 1 (466-85): 182 1 (472): 212

1 (498-503): 183 2 (396-7): 183

Epitaphium Damonis. 337-8, 566-8 (174): 564 In quintum Nouembris

(170-226): 431-7 Letter to Charles Diodati (23 Sept. 1637):

3 (154—B): 187

3 (298-300): 184 4 (573-4): 196 4 (581-665):

337-8

Lycidas (67-84): 332 (165-82): 564-5

192-4

Paradise Lost

4 (716-18): 195

2 (650-3): 500

4 (787): 195 4 (791-2): 194-5 4 (811-13): 196

2 (951-67): 543 3 (311-12): 346 3 (337-8): 346

6 (48-9): 203

3 (444—54): 544

6 (436-7): 203

6 (375-84): 543

2 (397-9): 191

10 (720-37): 340-1

Z (849-51):

191-2

8 (21-3): 184 8 (622-4): 185

8 (626-7): 185

12 (52-62): 545

‘The Passion’ (26): 429

Samson Agonistes. 546-69

8 (797-9): 185

(23-32): 558

8 (820-2): 190

(115-26): (448-54): (773-87): (849-62):

9 (593-600): 1&6 9 (950-79): 188-90 9 (952-3): 480 9 (980-6): 190-1 10 (17-19): 188 10 (34-5): 188 10 (184): 189 LUCIAN De historia conscribenda

49: 230 LUCRETIUS

1 (68-9): 88-9 1 (922-5): 335 6 (340-2): 83 MARTIAL

L1 (2): 321 1.2 (5-6): 323 L3 (7-8): 322-3

13 (11); 23 12% 326-7

1.39 (1-2): 326 7.88 (1-4): 324 10.2-3: 327-9

123 (1-4): 326

552 557 562 561

(965-96): 559-60 (1076-90): 553 (1311-15): 554 (1598-1602): 554 (1699-1707): 550 (1707-11): 555 (1708-44): 517-8 (1721-4): 568 MONTAIGNE Essays 2.16: 36

NEPOS Chabrias 3 (3); 274 NONNUS Dionysiaca

1 (47): 219 1 1 1 1

(156-7): 218 (304): 215 (344-51): 222 (385-7): 220-1

De spectaculis

1 (406-7): 223

1 (7-8): 322 19:322 MAY, THOMAS The Tragedy of Cleopatra: 346

1 1 1 2

(432): 214 (522-3): 221 (525-34): 223 (364-9): 218-19

Index of passages discussed

OVID

15 (853): 244 15 (871-9): 167

Amores

13 (25-6): 353, 364 L8 (13-16): 390

Tristia

3.7 (47-50): 284

115 (7-8, 39-40): 386

115 (23-4): 411 3.1 (15-22): 365-6

3.12 (7-10): 382 3.12 (41-4): 157 3.14; 366-8 Ars amatoria

2 (127-44): 96

PETRARCH Africa 1 (33-7): 461 1 (134-6): 462

1 (139-44): 463 2 (92-104): 466-7 3 (345-8): 468 4 (24-6): 468-9

2 (561): 362

A (71-5): 469

2 (631-4): 594

5 (273-84): 471

5 (297-300): 472-3

Ex Ponto

6 (74-80): 473

4.4: 159, 173

6 (550-5): 470

4.16: 393, 397 Heroides 16-17: 352-3

8 (277-81): 470 8 (628-31): 469-70

16 (37-8): 352

9 (34-6): 386

16 (375-6): 353 Metamorphoses 1 (163); 160

1 (163-5): 163

1 (168-76): 161-2 1 (199-208):

163-4

1 (211-15): 164-5 1 2 2 2

2 (803-4): 121

9 (400-2): 474 9 (453-65): 483

2.9 (18): 382-3

4 (39-41): 156

5 (250-63): 158-9 6 (557-60): 519-20 8 (826-7): 122

11 (635-6): 211 11 (666-8): 174 11 (666-70): 211 12 (36): 155 12 (39-66): 150-65

(41-2): 362 (49-52): 105 (51-2): 95 (9-12): 149 (382-3): 149 (3-4): 291 (431-52): 165-6

15 (814-15): 167 15 (852-60):

9 (139-40): 439 9 (284-9): 476 9 (398—409): 481-2

9 (462): 484 De Alexandro Macedone 50: 467 Epistolae familiares

(445): 362 (727-9): 120 (743-5): 170 (794-6): 434

12 12 12 13 13 15 15

9 (120-3): 478

9 (133-43): 478-81

166-7

15 (852-4): 438

Epistolae seniles 4.5: 463-4 Rime sparse 1 (9-11): 377 119: 335 Secretum 3: 376-81

3.4 (5-8): 378-9 Triumphus Cupidinis 1 (1-3): 459 1 (10): 331 1 (13-15): 444 2 (19-24): 446-7

3 (40-5): 445

4 (79-84): 448 4 (163-6): 445 Triumphus Eternitatis

(43-5): 457-8 (79-81): 458

681

682

Index of passages discussed

PETRARCH

(cont.)

(91-9): 457 (135-8): 459-60

(139-41); 459 (144-5): 459 Triumphus Fame

1 (13-15): 453 1 (19-20, 32-3): 454 2 (4-6): 453 Triumphus Mortis

1 (16-18): 451

2 (127-32): 379-80 2 (177-81): 452 Triumphus Pudicitie (10-12): 449-50 (94-6): 449

(145-51): 449

POPE, ALEXANDER

Temple of Fame Advertisement: 572-3

(266-9): 577-8 (282-7): 578-9 (424-5): 596 (498-500): 582 (499-502): 599 (523-4): 599 PROPERTIUS

L6 (27-9): 341 1.2 (9-10): 364 2.5: 364-5

2.24 (1-10): 363-4 3.1 (33-4): 290 4.11: 370-1

4.11 (29-32): 370

(154-9): 450

(172-7): 450-1 (181-6): 451 Triumphus Temporis (100-35): 455-6 PHILIPS, KATHERINE Pompey:A Tragedy. 346-7 PINDAR Pythian 1: 222 PLATO Symposium 207a8-b1: 339 208c4-6: 339 209c7-d4: 339 PLAUTUS Trinummus

(663-4): 341 PLINY THE ELDER Natural History Praefatio (16): 236 PLINY THE YOUNGER Epistles LA: 315-18 1.18 (4): 318 3.7: 318 4.17: 318 S.B: 319

59 (7): 320-1 5.17: 319 6.20 (15): 320

QUINTILIAN Institutio oratoria 5.3: 240 Rhetorica ad Herennium

2.12: 239 RONSARD, PIERRE DE Franciade 1: 123-4

4 (484-91): 124 SALLUST Catiline 3 (2): 232,253

54 (6): 254, 259 Jugurtha 4 (5-6): 334 SALUTATI, COLUCCIO De laboribus Herculis; 93-4

SANNAZARO, JACOPO De partu Virginis 1 (78-9): 417

1 (125-34): 418 1 (163-5): 417 1 (188-93): 417

1 (225-33): 414-16 2 (45-8): 412 SCOT, THOMAS ‘House of Fame’: 540-1

SEMONIDES

Z (12-20): 382 PLUTARCH Life of Cicero 6 (4-5): 23

SENECA, THE ELDER Controuersiae

1 praef. (10): 314

Index of passages discussed

SENECA, THE YOUNGER

Epistles 94 (64-5): 334 102: 32 113 (32): 32-3 SHAKESPEARE,

WILLIAM

Coriolanus. 14-19 1 Henry IV Lii (91-113): 505 Lili (172-84); 509 uuu (39-45): 508

uni (148-53): 518 1V.1 (109-15): 500-1 v: 313-19 v.ii (103-9): 515 viii (24-8): 515-16 v.iii (59-75): 517 v.iii (126-33): 516 v.iv (17-20): 519

2 Henry IV Induction: 487-8 1v.i (374-7): 506

iv.iii (94-100): 507 v.i (392-9): 306=7 Henry V Lii (15-19): 502

Lii (225-36): 502-3 nLyii (23-8): 500 1v.0 (1-3): 501-2 ixi (37-52): 510-12 ıv.in (26-31): 499 v.0 (9-13): 498 v.0 (25-8): 511

v.ii (162-3): 500 v.ii (183-6): 499 Richard II 1.4 (43-50): 503 Li (190—5): 504

wi (15-26): 497 ri (250-2): 496 viii (118-30): 504 SIDNEY, PHILIP Astrophil and Stella 28 (4—8): 342 SILIUS ITALICUS

Punica

SPENSER, EDMUND The Faerie Queene Liv.]: 394

Ly.L: 339-40, 394 1Lii-iv: 38-43, 343 IY.L18—30: 397-400

Iv.iii: 518 “ix. 25-6: 406-7 vx

406

XLi.5-7: 401 STATIUS Siluae L2 (26-30): 367 n.

5.1 (75-107): 174-6 Thebaid 1 (3): 214 2 (201-13): 201-4 3 (229-52): 205 3 (420-39): 204-7

4 (369-405): 212 Z (40-63): 210

Z (105-44): 207-14 12 (812): 214 n. 12 (816-17): 479

12 (818-19): 483 SUETONIUS Life of Nero 48: 313 54: 313 SULPICIA 1 ([Tibullus] 3.13): 368-70 TACITUS Agricola 43 (1): 244 46: 282-4 Annals L4 (2): 291 L5: 289 LZ (7): 295 L.9-10: 288-9 LZ2-3: 305-6 2.39-40: 293-4 3.18 (4): 292

1 (81-139): 308-9

3.19 (2): 290

Z (217-750): 270-2 2 (504-15): 270-1

3.55-7: 301-2

2 (567-79): 271-2

SKELTON, JOHN The Garlande of Laurell: 582-3

3.65 (1): 302 4.11 (2): 289 4.32-8: 303-5 6.30 (4): 295 13.1: 311

683

Index of passages discussed

TACITUS (cont.) 13.1 (1): 292 14-19-23: 298-300 15.39 (3); 307 15.44 (2): 307 15.49 (3): 307 16.1-3: 307-13 Histories 1.89 (2): 310 2.1 (1-2): 291-2

4 4 5 & 6 & 6 6

(882-5): 423 (909-10): 423 (411-17): 423-4 (392-404): 428-9 (830-3): 421 (860—4): 421 (880-96): 420 (973-9): 421-2

VIRGIL Aeneid

2.B9-91: 295-7

1 (148-53): Z1

2.96 (2): 317

1 (148-9): 161

3.37-40: 297-8 4.11 (2): 292

TASSO, TORQUATO Gerusalemme liberata 5.2 (5-8): 342 5.15 (6-8): 342 6.77: 342-3

1 (206-7): 72-3 1 (223-6): 1&0 1 (358-9): 308

1 (378-9): 96, 138, 633

1 (430-6): Z1

1 (457): 142, 154, 575 2 (77-104): 74-5

7.50 (1-2): 343 Temple of Fame, A Poem. Inscrib'd to Mr. Congreve. 585-6 THACKERAY, WILLIAM M. Henry Esmond Ch. 6: 342 THUCYDIDES 6.9-24: 264-5

2 (189-94): 26

VALERIUS FLACCUS Argonautica 1 (76-8): 335-6 2 (101-34): 197-201 2 (196-8): 200 2 (216-19): 201 VALERIUS MAXIMUS 2.6 (5): 317 814: 334 VARRO Antiquitates rerum diuinarum fr. 250 Cardauns: 118-19 VIDA, GIROLAMO

4 (208-10): 88

2 (274-5): 552 2 (753-4): 479

4 (170-2): 84, 472 4 (173-97): 78-81 4 (182-3): 400

4 (188): 134 4 (191-2): 369 4 (197): 135, 136

Christiad 1 (84-7): 423

4 (215-17): 89 4 (220-1): 90-1 4 (232-4): 91, 354 4 (277-8): 94-5 4 (321-3): 85, 357 4 (328-9): 360 4 (337): 131 4 (441-6):

180

4 (457): 96

4 (569-70): 94 4 (654): 308 4 (665-8): 97

6 (108): 480 6 (456-7): 355

1 (212-15): 426

6 (679—702): 479-80

1 (905-8): 419

6 (791-2): 366

2 (5-8): 426-7

6 (845-6): 259-60

2 (40-6): 427-8

6 (889): 104, 136, 334,

3 (344-9): 419-20

355-6

4 (171-7): 424-5

Z (438): 133 2 (458-62): 210

4 (245-50): 422

Z (621-2): 272

4 (33-5): 425

4 (738-43): 422 4 (757-8): 422

Z (641-6): 107 2 (646): 158

Index of passages discussed

8 (74): 309 8 (163-4): 468 8 (347-8): 482 8 (731): 104, 184, 281 9 (446-7): 192 9 (595): 144 9 (721): 213 10 (468-9): 252, 319 11 (124-5): 136 n., 137-8 11 (239-42): 140-1 11 (252-4): 140 11 (257-8): 142 11 (291-2): 139 11 (302-4): 131-2 11 (342): 135 11 (343-4): 131 11 (406-7): 133 11 (408-9): 133

11 (445-6): 128 12 (222-40): 68-70 12 (643-4): 133 12 (702-3): 183 12 (853): 210 Eclogues 6 (74-7): 111 10 (54, 72-4): 326 Georgics 2 (291-7): 180 3 (284-93): 335 WEBSTER, JOHN The Duchess of Malfi Lii (375—9): 521 YALDEN, THOMAS The Temple of Fame. 585

685

General index

Abrams, R., 494

Belsey, C., 495

Achilles, 10

Bernardo, A. S., 483

adulatio ‘adulation’, 282, 287, 302

Bettini, M., 8

Aeolus, Z0, 72, 199, 591, 596

Beza, Theodore, Poemata iuuenilia, title page,

Aeschylus, 349

Agricola, 273-84 Agrippina, the elder, 312 Agrippina, the younger, 311 Ajax, 95 Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, 575, 620 Alcibiades, 264-5, 262 Alexander the Great, 136, 188, 262, 334

at the tomb of Achilles, 477

630-1

Bezzola, G., 458 Biard, Pierre, 624

blame, 384 Boccaccio, 37 Amorosa

vistone, 326, 443, G16

Bocchi, Achille, Symbolicae quaestiones, 615 Boethius, 33-4, 590, 597 Boitani, P., 37, 330, 443, 574

‘Alexandrian footnote’, 4, 8, 90, 100, 110-11

Bonasone, Giulio, 615

alimentum ‘nourishment, 317

Boudard, J. B., Iconologie, 624

ambition, 26-7

Braden, G., 214, 380

Amman, Jost, 631

Brant, Sebastian, 605, 611

Angel of the Annunciation, 414, 418,

Braudy, L., 43

419

Aphrodite with shield of Ares, 331 Apollonius of Rhodes and fama, 87 u. Apuleius, Cupid and Psyche, 115-21

Braun, L., 158 Burckhardt, J., 43 Burke, P. F., 128 Burrow, C., 343

Byron, George Gordon, 342

Arator, 35 Archilochus, 389

Cacciaguida, 372-3

Ares and Aphrodite (Song of Demodocus),

Cadmus, 221

161, 356, 362

Caelius Rufus, Marcus, 242, 243

Argus, 93 Ariosto, 333, 544 n. arms of Achilles, contest over, 148

Caesar, Julius, 10, 227-8, 236, 334, 346

Atlas, 6, 94, 152, 166, 178-9, 180, 184

Cairns, F., 138

auctor 'author(ity), 137

Calderwood, J. L., 494, 496

Augustine, 34

Callimachus, 56, 113, 215

Augustus, 288, 304, 366

see also Lucan, Bellum ciuile

Caesellius Bassus, 307-13

Callot, Jacques, 636

Calumny of Apelles, 639 n. Babel, 531, 538, 545-6

Cameron, A., 225

Bacon, Francis, 226-8

Camillus, 236, 253-6, 267-8

Baránski, Z., 444

Camées, Luis Vaz de, 124-5, 344-6

Barbazza, Andrea, 632

Canidia, 388-90, 528

Barchiesi, A., 142, 154—5, 352, 388—9

Capitol (Rome), 187, 251, 269, 308, 439

Barton, C. A., 44

Cartari, Vincenzo, L'imagini degli dei,

Baswell, C., 577

620-1

Battle of the Books, 572 n.

Carthage, 192, 308-10

bee similes, 578—9

Cassius Severus, 306

General index

Castelvetro, Lodovico, 457

cupiditas gloriae ‘desire for glory, 28, 34, 234,

266, 333-8, 463, 469

Cato, the elder, 273-4 Cato, the younger, 276 Catullus, 324-6

curiosity, 531

Caxton, William, 582

Cycle, Epic, 142, 155-6

narcissistic nature of, 336

celebrity, cult of, 572

Cerberus, 402, 416 certamen gloriae ‘competition for glory, 19, 136, 145, 244-5, 286, 298, 301, 314, 318, 359, 517

Dante,

37, 371-6

Commedia, 442-3

on justice and love, 373-5 Dares Phrygius, 572 Davenant, William, Gondtbert, 343.

see also Livy

Chapman, George, 537-40

David (prophet), 416, 418

Chaucer

Dido, Ch. 3 passim, 169, 308-9, 311, 357-8,

Canterbury Tales, 594

360-1, 485

House of Fame, Ch. 15 passim, 37, 331, 377,

405, 527 and authority, 589

chaste, 110, 449—50, 577 Diller, H., 54 Dinter, M., 179, 183

and Dante’s Commedia, 580

Diotima, 338-9

ending of, 581

Dippel, M., 158 Discord (Discordia), 80, 101—2, 222, 398, 430, 541 dissimulation, 276-7 Domitian, 273-84

and the plot of the Aeneid, 579

and scientific and philosophical knowledge, 589-90 cherubim, 606 Chimaera, 402 Cicero, 20, 23-6, 27-8,

236-7, 385

Douglas, Gavin, 584 dreams and fiction, 133 n.

and cupiditas gloriae, 333

Drusus Caesar, 289-90

on rumour, 241-4

Dryden, John, 23, 574, 597

Somnium Scipionis, 440, 443

All for Love, or, The World Well Lost, 346

circuli ‘social circles, 243-4 Claudian, 621, 622

Echidna, 402

Claudius, 292

echo, 25-26 n.

Clay, J. S., 53

Echo, 336

Clemens (imperial impostor), 293-4

elegiac fama, 86 elephants pulling chariot of Fama, 112,

Clément-Tarentino, S., x, 77, 107 Cleopatra, 346-7 Clio, 42 Clytaemnestra, 358

414-18,617-18

Elyot, Thomas, 20 emblem books, 619

cognomen, 17, 249, 262, 264, 268, 278, 470

enargeia ‘vividness, 9, 10, 41, 154, 159, 171

Collouthos, Rape of Helen, 348

Enceladus, 99-100

Colosseum, 322

Ennius, 102, 108, 136, 268, 272, 386

Conington, J., 140 conscience versus fame, 33, 34, 316 Corbett, M. and Lightbown, R., 637 Corbulo, 277 n., 300

Dream of Homer, 443, 475 envy (inuidia), passim, 56, 91-2, 120, 136-7, 249, 316, 384-7, 477-8, 542 epic and fame, 37

Cordus, Cremutius, 233, 303, 305

‘epic ipse, 200, 213

Corneille, Pierre, 346 on 'la gloire, 347 Cornelia, 370-1

Erasmus

Costa, Lorenzo, 617

‘Epistle to persuade a young man to marriage, 340 Lingua, 6, 521

Cowley, Abraham, 343-4, 602

erts ‘strife’, 54-7, 399

Coysevox, Antoine, 624

erotics, textual, 222—4 Ervy-le-Chatel, 619 Essex, Earl of, 511, 539

credulitas ‘credulity, 157, 182, 203, 309, 344, 368

687

688

General index

Euripides Helen, 350-2 Hippolytus, 548, 556 Troades, 559.

existimatio ‘public opinion’, 240

popularis, 250 and procreation, 338-41 and rhetoric, Ch. 4 passim and the sack of a city, 97, 428 as scene-shifter, 153, 490 as shadow, 181, 185

Fabius Maximus Cunctator, 258-62, 264-7, 268, 270-2, 276

see also glory, shadow of virtue simultaneously old and young, 414

Fabius Rullianus Maximus, 246-8

speed of, 82

fabula, 86, 87 n., 332

and storm, 70-3, 82-4, 94, 160-1, 183, 199,

elegiac, 361-8, 377, 551 Falstaff, 506-7 on honour, 513-14 fama 'fame/rumour/tradition' as absent presence,10

206, 207, 241, 251-2, 257

and strife (eris), 54-7, 527 and the sun, 161, 362, 454 as testimony, 240 and tradition, 81, 572-9

active role of, 11, 154, 202, 233, 285-6

tree imagery, 180, 248

black/white, 329, 559-560 n.

and the underworld, 10, 98, 173-4, 414-16, 480, 596

constans, 255

critiques of, 22-36

and vision, 158-9

determines an appointment, 249, 265, 276,

and weddings, 97, 202

279 n., 280, 299 and dreams, 427-8, 596 n. duplex ‘double’, 235, 244, 288 duplicities (dichotomies) of, 3-11, 510-11, 587-95

worldwide, 512 and wounds, 17, 505

Fama (personified), passim and Allecto, 101-2, 199, 211, 398, 427 and Antaeus, 192-4

emptiness of, 89-90, 96, 173, 594-5

and Atlas, 94, 209-10

and envy, see envy

and Bacchants, 102, 122,

and exchange, 3, 15

and Etna, 100

and facta ‘deeds, 9, 252-3

and Falstaff, 506-7

and fate, 7, 103-4, 203-4, 281, 585

and Fames ‘Hunger’, 172-3

as filling, 158, 416-17

and and and and

fire imagery, 83, 354, 550, G18

gendering of,7, 22, 357-60, 387-91, 528-9 generic differentiation of, 86

182-3, 212

Fortune, 592, 597 Giants, 99-100 History, 637 Inuidia ‘Envy’, 168-71

immortality of, 50-1

and Mars, 205-7, 620

inaugural role of, 38, 288

and Mercury, 92-3, 123-5, 210

and kingship, 507-12

and the Muses, 62, 66-7, 107, 159

and legend, 4

and Numanus

and love, Ch. 9 passim, 41-2, 95-6, 597

and owls, 84, 609-11

and the many-headed beast, 7, 15, 30,

and Pauor ‘Panic’, 207-14, 256

279 n., 280, 429, 492, 510-12, 539

meanings of the Latin word, 2-3 and narcissism, 18 and omens and prophecy, 212, 296, 299-300, 425

Remulus,

144

and Sibyl, 102-3, 162 n.

and Sinon, 77 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pageant, 488 n. and Somnus 'Sleep' and Morpheus,

173-4,

and opinion, 4 oral/written opposition, 593-4 and order and disorder, 19-22, 593

and thunderbolt, 82-3, 95, 170-1, 181, 436

and personal identity, the self, 5, 10, 11-19,

and Venus,

85 plots (episodes) of, 36-43, 228, 245-6, 579-87 poetics of, 106-12, 156-9, 200-1, 213-14

595-6 trumpet(s) of, 620, 624-7 199-201

Fantham, E., 187

Feeney, D., 130, 133, 135, 156, 158 Fenzi, E., 467 Feyerabend, Sigmund, 631-2

General index

fictions and fictionality, 133-4, 157-8, 293

Helvidius Priscus, 297

fingo ‘pretend, feign) 133-4, 292-3, 320

Hercules, 9, 272 n., 402, 516

Ford, A., 217, 222

and Antaeus, 193-4

Forum, Roman, 243

Choice of, 80 n., 611, 633-5

Fraser, D., 602

Herostratus, 334

Freccero, J., 372

Hesiod, 5-6, 239, 318, 388, 633

Frye, N., 397 Fulgentius, 622 Furius Medullinus, L., 253-5, 267-8

Heyne, C. G., 132

Highet, G., 130, 142 Hinds, S., 481 Hippocrene, 530

Galligan, F., 441

historians, fame of, 230-1, 234-7

Gallus, 376 Germanicus, 290

historiography exemplary function of, 230, 233-4, 302 and fame, 230

Giamatti, A. B., 408

Homer

Gelosia ‘Jealousy’, 386

Gibson, B., 233

assemblies in, 58-66 Iliad, Catalogue of Ships, 62

Giotto, 616 Girodet-Trioson, A.-L., 606

honour,

11-12, 19-20, 499

and love, 341-8

Globe Theatre, 489

‘Mediterranean honour code, 44, 359

Gloriana, 39 glory, 4-5, 12 n., 13, 24-6, 92, 136 n., 137-8,

Hopkinson, N., 218 Horace, 28-31, 51

393, 394 Christian revaluation of, 34—6, 422-4,

Horsfall, N., 106

Humphreys, A. R., 512

542-3, 557 shadow of virtue, 14, 25, 316, 379, 464,

Hunink, V., 187 Hydra, 402, 516, 517, 518—19

615 Gluckman, M., 21 Goethe, 332

iambos, 388-9

Golden Age, 310, 312, 430, 532 Goldhill, S., 66

larbas, 87, 88-90, 354, 606

Goodyear, F. R. D., 294, 306

Gordon, D. J., 18 Gorgias, 349-50 Gospel as fama, 125 gossip, 21-2

etymology of, 391 Ilicino, Bernardo, 441 imagines 'ancestra] portraits, 319, 334 impostors, imperial, 292—4 infamia, 119, 164, 169, 237-238 n., 301

inuidia (envy), disavowal of, 389-90

associated with women, 387

Inuidia ‘Envy’, 120, 168-71, 524

at cross-roads, 435-6

Iunius Blaesus, 298

as image of poetic fame, 326

Jamnitzer, Christoph, 36, 618

and sex, 86 Gransden, K. W., 138

jealousy, sexual, 171

Greene, Robert, Pandosto, 171

John the Baptist, 424

Greville, Fulke, 36

Johnson, Samuel, 489, 552

Guerra di Bellezza (Medici pageant), 636-7

Jonson, Ben, 523-37

Guidi, Domenico, 633

on news, 533-7 ‘War of the Theatres’, 525

Haan, E., 429

Junius, Hadrianus, Emblemata, 627

Habinek, T., 314

Juno, 100

Hannibal, 260-1

Jupiter

as aether, 105

Hapgood, R., 493 Hawes, Stephen, 584-5

and fate, 90-1, 101, 103, 130-1, 162, 166

Heinze, R., 132, 134

and Typhoeus, 214-25

Helen of Troy,

112,

116

object of both fame and blame, 349

Justinian, 373-5 Juvencus, 35, 411-12

689

690

General index

Kaplan, M. L., 106, 404 Kaster, R. A., 20, 85, 315

on sexual desire, 336

on thunderbolt, 170

Keith, A., 169, 369

Lydgate, John, 508

Kerrigan, J., 510

Lynch, J. P., 130

Kerrigan, W., 563 Kirk, G. S., G1

MacCaffrey, L G., 397, 400

kleos ‘fame’, Ch. 2 passim, 350-1

maiestas ‘treason’ and fama, 305-6

opposed to penthos ‘grief, 550 Knowles, R., 493

Manlius Capitolinus, M., 232, 250-3

Knox, P., 225

Martial, 321-9

Kraus, C. S., 231, 232, 250, 251 Kraus, C. S. and Woodman, A. ]., 278, 280

Manso, Giovanni Battista, 338, 566, 567-8 and Domitian, 329 and inuidia, 326 Martin, R. P., 143, 145

Lacan, ]., 13

Maximus (cognomen), 247, 248

Lacy, John, 586—7

May, Thomas, 346

Laird, A., 416

Mayer, R., 214

La Penna, A., 129

McCabe, R. A., 410

Latini, Brunetto, 372

medals, 632-3

laudatio funebris ‘funeral eulogy’, 320

Medusa, 622-4

Laura, 335, 377, 382-3, 439, 448-53

Mercury, 67-8, 92-4, 118-19, 170, 204, 373-6 416, 611, 622, 624

laurel, 439, 478, 550, 583

Lendon, J. E., 44, 314

messenger speeches, 554 metempsychosis as figure of literary inheritance, 409

Lesbia, 389

Michelangelo, 626

licence, poetic, 212 ‘like himself’ topos, 549 n., 555

Milton, John, Ch. 14 passim, 35, 38, 337-8, 587

Lausberg, M., 71 lena ‘procuress’, 390

Livia, 228, 289-90, 291, 311

Livy, Ch. Z passim and the certamen gloriae, 234-5 and fama, 244—70 Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, 113

Areopagitica, 437 In quintum Nouembris, 429 n., 437 House of Fama, 431, 435 Paradise Lost

"houses of fama' in, 543-6 Samson Agonistes, 546-69

Lord Mayor's shows, 636 ‘Los Honores' tapestries, 639 n.

Ovidianism of, 549 n. Minnis, A. J., 587

Louis XIV, 624, 633

Moles, J. L., 231

‘love and honour’ plays, 347 love aroused by fame of unseen person, 348 n.,

Montaigne, Michel de, 36

584

Momus

‘Blame’, 55, 56, 384

More, Thomas, 619

Low, A., 558

Murgatroyd, P., 224

Lucan,

Muses, see Fania

178-96, 307, 311

Bellum ciuile

Myers, K. S., 158

Antaeus, 192—4 Caesar, 180-4, 186-92

Naevius, 110

Cato, 186

Nagle, B. R., 224

Curio, 192-5, 196

Nagy, G., 136, 145

Erictho, 203, 392, 528

narcissism, 380-1

Pharsalia, 190—2

Narcissus, 173, 336

Pompey, 180-1, 183-6

nequitia ‘naughtiness’ (elegiac), 364

Troy, 188-91

Nero, 298-300, 307-13

Vulteius, 195—6

Lucretia, 358, 485 n. Lucretius on fama, 88-9, 116

death of, 313 news, 146, 497, 533-7 Nicias, 264-5

Nohrnberg, J., 493

General index

Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 214—25

Collatio laureattonis, 335

and Latin epic, 224—5

and Dante, 441, 442

mimicry, 219-20

and Ennius, 439, 474-82 laureation, 447-8, 462, 474, 4B1—2

Oakley, S. P., 229-30, 236, 254

and Scipio, 439

Ogilby, John, 606

Secretum, 376-81

O'Gorman, E., 233 O'Hara, J, ]., 143 old wives’ tales, 325, 387

Trionfi, 376, 440-1, 444—6D illustrations of, 615-19 De uiris illustribus, frontispiece, 331, 615-16 pheme, 50-7

Oliensis, E., 388

as omen, 63, 349, 352

Olson, S. D., 66 Orgel, S., 624

Pheme, worship of, 238

Orpheus, 399, 447, 479 Ovid

Phemius, 64 Philips, Katherine, 346-7

and Corinna, 293

philotimia ‘love of honour, 239, 339, 350

on envy and fame, 392-3

phoenix, 550, 568

Heroides 7, 522

Pindar, 384, 565

Metamorphoses Aglauros, 169-71

Pitt- Rivers, J., 12

Apollo and Daphne, 336-7, 361-2, 377 Battus, 169—70

Ceyx and Alcyone, 153

plagiarism, 326-7 Plato Phaedrus, 338

Symposium, 338—9

Fames ‘Hunger’, 172-3

Plautus, 341

House of Fama, Ch. 5 passim

Pliny the Younger, 315-21

Inuidia, see Inuidia

Panegyricus, 278

‘little Iliad’, 148-9

on rumour, 320-1

Morpheus,

173-4, 211

‘politics of reputation, 238

Muses and Pierides, 530-1

Polyphemus, 99

Pythagoras, 165-6

Pompey the Great, 334, 481

Somnus ‘Sleep, 173-4

see also Lucan, Bellum ciuile

Pope, Alexander Paine, R., 21

Dunciad, 601

Palazzo Spada, 607 panic (pauor), 209

Essay on Criticism, 599 Temple of Fame, Ch. 15 passim

Pascal, Blaise, 5

and Milton's Pandaemonium, 597

pathos ‘emotion’ as artistic goal, 134-5 Peacham, Henry, 514

proem in the middle, 492

Pegasus, 158, 501, 599, 622-4, 634, 636

Propertius, 363-5

Pencz, Georg, 413

Proteus, 6, 31, 218, 220, 418

Penelope, 358-9

Pucci, P., 66

Porter, J. A., 494

Pentecost, 421

Puccioni, G., 148

Perseus, 527, 528, 529, 539

pudicitia ‘chastity, 357, 358, 448-51

personification allegory, 80

Pudicitia Patricia, 451

Peruzzi, Baldassare, 622

Pudicitia Plebeia, 359

Petrarca-Meister, all

pudor ‘sense

Petrarch, 37

of shame; 20, 30, 85-6, 181, 357,

358, 418

Africa, 441-2, 460—84

Dream of Ennius, 443, 476

Questing Beast (Malory), 401

Dream of Scipio, 443, 464-6

Quinones, R. ]., 371

Hannibal, 470-1 Masinissa and Sophonisba, 446-7, 471-4

"Ragione di stato’ ‘raison d'état) 387, 514

Syphax, 472-3

Ralegh, Sir Walter, The History of the World, frontispiece, 637-8

codex Ambrosianus of Virgil, 456-7

691

692

General index

Redfield, J., 19

Regulus, M. Atilius, 194 ‘reputation, cult of, 44, 409-10

doubling in, 509-11, 515-19

and honour, 499 Sonnets, 340

Ries, W., 293

shame, 12 n,, 13

Rimell, V., 322

Shatzman, L, 294

Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia, 314, 527,

Shorrock, R., 214, 218

621-2

Robert of Anjou (King of Naples), 460-1, 482

Sidney, Philip, 342, 627 Silius Italicus, 308-9, 318 Simpson, J., 600

Rodgers, B. S., 267

sins of the tongue, 321

Roller, M. B., 314

Skelton, John, 582-3

Roman, L., 322

slander, 105-6

Roman de la rose, 366 n., 386

Smolenaars, J. J. L., 209, 212

Romanelli, Giovanni, 608

Socrates, 28, 615

Romulus, 235, 358

Spenser, Edmund, 20-1, 38-43, 343

Ronsard, Pierre de, 123-4

and Chaucer, 408-9

Rubellius Plautus, 299-300

Faerie Queene, The

rumour, passim, 21—2, 64—7

and Christ's mission, 424-6 in the Gospel, 429 11, 437 in Greek and Roman political life, 237-44

impossibility of controlling, 286 as wildfire, 83 Ryan, K., 494

Archimago, 403 Ate, 397-400, 404-5, 493 Blatant Beast, 396, 400-4, 523

Bonfont see Malfont Braggadochio, 395 Cleopolis, 395

Detraction, 396 doubling in, 397 Duessa, 395, 398, 404

Sachs, Hans, 611, 613

Envy, 396

Sadeler, Johann, 634

Error, 395-6

Sailor, D., 314

Gloriana, 393, 394

Sallust, 234, 334

Malfont, 406-8

Salmoneus, 218 n.

Mercilla, 404-6 Palace of, 405-6 Orgoglio, 395 plotting of struggle between fame and

Sambucus, Joannes, Emblemata, 25-26 n. Sannazaro, Jacopo De partu Virginis, 412, 111-18 Il triunfo de la Fama, 412-14 Santirocco, M. S., 369 Satan and fama, 426

detraction, 392-410 Sclaunder, 400, 403

and Ireland, 410

Schenk, P., 128

spur of fame, 317-18, 337, 542

Schnapp, J. T., 323

Statius, Thebaid, 201-14

Scipio Africanus, 194, 256-7, 258-9, 262-7, 268-9, 439, 633 Scot, Thomas, 540-1

and Lucan, 211-12

and Valerius Flaccus, 211 Stesichorus, Palinode, 349

Scylla, 111

Stimmer, Tobias, 631

seditio ‘civil strife, ‘mutiny’, 161, 256-7

Stoics, 22-3

self-praise, 296

Stradano, Giovanni, 607

Semonides, 387

Stratius, Jean, 628-30

Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre, 290,

Strozzi, Bernardo, 625

291 Seneca, the younger, 32-3

Struggle of the Orders, 245, 250, 359

seraphim, 606

Sulpicia, 368-70

Shakespeare, William, 38 "Henriad' (Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry

Sustris, Federico, 634

IV, Henry V), 486, 487-519

Suzuki, M., 396 Syme, R., 302, 310

General index

Tacitus, Ch. 8 passim, 228, 237, 320 Agricola, 273-84 on fama and the imperial succession, 288-95

vain glory, 23, 29, 304, 336

Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, 197-201 Valerius Maximus, 333-4 Valerius Publicola, P., 249-50, 251

on fama in the principate, 286-7

van Veen, Otto, Amorum emblemata, 332

interpretor, -tatio, use of, 275-6, 296

Vasari, Giorgio, 627

on republican versus imperial

Verginia, 359

on rumour, 284-5

Victory inscribing shield, 331 Vida, Girolamo, Christiad, 418-29

and Tiberius, 300-5

Villa Farnesina, 622

historiography, 273-4, 277, 303

‘talk studies’, 11

Vindolanda tablets, x

Tasso, Torquato, 342-3

Virgil

Tatum, J., 95

Aeneid

Temples of Worthies, 585 ten (hundred) tongues topos, 402-3, SOL

Allecto, 71, 133-4, 168, 391, 493

Terentius Varro, C., 260, 261

Diomedes,

Thackeray, William M., 347

Drances, Ch. 4 passim

Themistocles, 228, 334 Theognis, 103 Theophrastus, 238 u

Fama, 1,57

fama and amor, 353-7

Dido and Deiphobus in the Underworld, parallels between, 355 n. 139-40

illustrations of, 603-15

Thersites, 60—1,.132, 145-6

Numanus

Thrasea Paetus, 297

Parade of Heroes, 39

Thucydides, 290

and rhetoric, Ch. 4 passim

Tiberius, 9, 10, 228, 233, 291, 293—5, 300-6

Shield of Aeneas, 356-7

concern for own fame, 303-5

Remulus, 132, 135, 144, 436

Sinon, 73-7, 143

Tilg, S., 114

Speech of Jupiter (Aeneid 1), 23, Z6, 395,

Tillotson, G., 574 Tillyard, E. M. W., 493

Storm (Aeneid 1), 70-3

time and fame, 532-3

Tomkis, Thomas, Lingua, 521 tongues, 15-16, 408, 503-7 detachable, 519—23

and wounds, 505 Too, Y. L., 217 Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, The, 346 Trapp, J. B., 615 Tristan and Isolde, 330, 348 triumph, 29, 320, 420, 443 of poetry, 461, 474 Troy, sack of, 307 Tuccia, 449

Tudeau-Clayton, M., 525 two souls in one, 519 Typhoeus (Typhon, Typhaon), 99, 212, 214-25, 402, 434

as figure of the poet, 217-18

420 Venus and Vulcan, 356 and Gallus, 338 Virgil Solis, 624

vision poems, 442, 443 Vitellius, 227, 295-7 Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, 348 Walter of Chatillon, Alexandreis, 467 Warner, J. C., 441, 463

Weigel, Hans, the Elder, 611 West, D., 144 West, M. L., 217

Wheeler, D., GO1 Whitney, Geffrey,

A Choice of Emblemes, 627

Wither, George, 532 A Collection of Emblemes, 521 Wittreich, J., 562 Woodman, A. J. and Martin, R. HL, 233, 290, 301

uestigia ‘traces, 480, 482 Ulysses, 371—2

Woolf, G., 314 Word of God, 425-6

underworld as place of poetic memory, 399

Yalden, Thomas, 585

unus homo ‘the one man; 245, 256, 260,

Zeus, see Jupiter

286-7

Zumwalt, N., 149, 153

693