Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry 9783110475876, 9783110472523

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Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry

Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes

Edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos Scientific Committee Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck Claude Calame · Philip R. Hardie · Stephen J. Harrison Stephen Hinds · Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus Giuseppe Mastromarco · Gregory Nagy Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone Kurt Raaflaub · Bernhard Zimmermann

Volume 36

Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry Edited by Phillip Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas

ISBN 978-3-11-047252-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-047587-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-047417-6 ISSN 1868-4785 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dn.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Logo: Christopher Schneider, Laufen Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Ioannis Ziogas Introduction: Power, Puns, and Politics From Horace to Silius Italicus

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Rhiannon Ash Tacitus and the Poets: In Nemora et Lucos … Secedendum est (Dialogus 9.6)? 13 Alex Dressler Nominal Intelligence: Conspiracy, Prosopography, and the Secret of Horace, Odes 2.10 37 Joshua T. Katz Another Vergilian Signature in the Georgics? Jay Reed Mora in the Aeneid Emily Gowers Dido and the Owl

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87

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Michael Fontaine Freudian Bullseyes in Classical Perspective: The Psycholinguistics of Guilt in Virgil’s Aeneid 131 Michael C. J. Putnam Virgil and the Achilles of Catullus

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Gregson Davis Violent Retribution and Pietas: The Closure of the Aeneid Revisited Peter J. Davis Freedom of Speech in Virgil and Ovid

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Mathias Hanses Love’s Letters: an Amor-Roma Telestich at Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.507 – 10 199

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Table of Contents

Ioannis Ziogas Love Elegy and Legal Language in Ovid

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Matthew M. McGowan Pythagoras and Numa in Ovid: Exile and Immortality at Rome Matthew Leigh Lucan’s Caesar and Laelius

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Joy Connolly A Theory of Violence in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile

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Michael Paschalis From Pastoral to Panegyric in Calpurnius Siculus John G. Fitch Speaking Names in Senecan Drama

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Michèle Lowrie Civil War, the Soul, and the Cosmos at Seneca, Thyestes 547 – 622: 333 A Tropology Erica Bexley Doubtful Certainties: The Politics of Reading in Seneca’s Oedipus David Konstan Doubting Domitian’s Divinity: Statius Achilleid 1.1 – 2 Martha Malamud As if: Reflections on an Exemplary Wife

387

Arthur J. Pomeroy Silius Italicus and Greek Epic: Imperial Culture Wars List of Contributors

437

Publications by Frederick Ahl

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Index of passages discussed

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General Index

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377

413

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Introduction: Power, Puns, and Politics From Horace to Silius Italicus Wordplay is intricately enmeshed with powerplay in Latin language and poetry. The meaning of the Latin uis ranges from political power and physical violence to the significance and etymology of words. Unpacking the latent potential of words is to activate the entire scope of their semantic force. Take, for instance, Ovid’s wordplay on uis in the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. In introducing her tale, Alcithoe, Ovid’s internal narrator, promises to explain the origins of Salmacis, the spring whose waters had an emasculating force: causa latet, uis est notissima fontis, Metamorphoses 4.287 (‘the cause is hidden, the power of the fountain is well- known’). ¹ The ability of the spring to incapacitate men is notorious and behind its debilitating power lies the significance of the infamous lake Salmacis, a byword for weak and effeminate persons (see Cicero, de Officiis 1.61.9, quoting Ennius 347 Jocelyn). We can translate the line as ‘the cause is hidden, the meaning of the fountain is well-known’. As is often the case, etiological narratives (causa) unfold vis-à-vis the origins and significance of words. And Alcithoe, whose name is semantically related to ἀλκή (‘strength’ ‘force’) and θοός (‘quick’ ‘nimble’), is a particularly appropriate narrator for explaining the verbal and physical force of Salmacis’ running waters.² Frederick Ahl has analyzed the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in his Metaformations, focusing on the ways in which changes in the shape of words or syllables coexist with changes in bodily shape (Ahl 1985: 239 – 44). The power of wordplay can shift from lexical to physical violence, depriving men of their virility. One needs to be aware of the power of words when swimming in the murky waters of Latin etymologizing. One of Ahl’s major contributions to classical scholarship is his study of wordplay not as mere poetic ornament or display of Alexandrian learning but as fundamental to the politics of Latin poetry.³ Instead of demarcating the limits of etymologizing, Ahl has opened new horizons  Similarly to Ovid’s causa latet, Strabo (..) notes the uncertainty about the origins of the spring’s reputation (ἡ Σαλμακὶς κρήνη, διαβεβλημένη οὐκ οἶδ’ ὁπόθεν ὡς μαλακίζουσα τοὺς πιόντας ἀπ’ αὐτῆς ‘the fountain Salmacis, slandered, I don’t know for what reason, because it supposedly makes effeminate those who drink from it’). While the geographer dismisses this superstitious belief, whatever its origin, Ovid is interested in revealing the mythological aition.  Ahl is a pioneer in arguing that internal narrators are significant for interpreting embedded narratives. See Ahl ()  – ; ().  See especially Ahl ()  –  and passim.

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in examining how wordplay’s inherent power for ambiguity and polysemy can destabilize the advertised certainties of authoritarian regimes. The use of puns for political purposes does not proclaim itself from the topmost levels of the narrative. It is rather, like so much of the art of Latin poetry, concealed. Not unlike a skilled sculptor, a poet versed in wordplay engraves (caelare) by concealing (celare) his art (cf. Ahl 1985: 64– 9). Etymological wordplay is related to what Ahl calls the art of veiled speech and safe criticism (Ahl 1984a), yet it is a fascinating paradox that etymologizing is simultaneously associated with unveiling the truth. Etymology (from ἔτυμος ‘true’) lays a claim to disclosing the true power of words by tracing their original meaning; it is the art of authoritative derivations and that is why etymological wordplay is a trope of authorial powerplay. The power of wordplay to undermine proclaimed certainties can be seen in the following lines from Ovid’s Fasti: assidet inde Ioui, Iouis est fidissima custos, et praestat sine ui sceptra timenda Ioui. Fasti 5.45 – 6 She (Maiestas) sits by Jove, is Jove’s most loyal guardian, preserves Jove’s dread scepter without violence.

The Muse Polyhymnia is the speaker of these lines, in an episode in which the Muses contest the etymology of May (Fasti 5.1– 110). For Polyhymnia, Maius derives from Maiestas, Ovid’s daring personification of a key term under Augustus.⁴ As a Muse that gives a Romanized version of Hesiod’s Theogony, starting from chaos and ending with Romulus, Polyhymnia can be seen as praising Augustus’ Jovian regime.⁵ Her name suggests her generic affiliations with hymns and by extoling Jupiter’s majesty she fulfils the role of her Hesiodic counterparts (Theogony 36 – 7).⁶ At the same time, her Roman universe is an improved version of Hesiod’s Theogony. Polyhymnia’s statement that Maiestas is seated next to Jupiter sine ui is a revision of Hesiod, who had Bie (‘Power’) and Kratos (‘Strength’) sit by Zeus (πὰρ Ζηνὶ βαρυκτύπῳ ἑδριόωντα, Theogony 388 ‘Bie and Kratos sit beside loud-thundering Zeus’). Maiestas is enough for Jupiter/Augustus, who does not have to rely on force or violence once he prevailed upon his enemies

 On Julius Caesar’s and Augustus’ redefinitions of the republican value of maiestas populi Romani as integral to this episode of the Fasti, see Mackie (). On Maiestas in this episode, see also Pasco-Pranger ()  – .  On Polyhymnia and Hesiod, see Fantham ()  – ; Boyd ()  – ; Labate ()  – .  On Polyhymnia’s affiliation with hymn, see Barchiesi () .

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and restored order. The hymnic polyptoton (Ioui, Iouis…Ioui) further adds to the solemnity of Polyhymnia’s panegyric. Yet in this laudatory passage, wordplay creeps in like a virus infecting imperial propaganda. The very august repetition of Ioui, Iouis, Ioui suggests that there is actually uis in Iouis; that it is paradoxical, almost absurd, to deprive Jove of his violence.⁷ While Polyhymnia declares that her Jove rules without violent guardians, wordplay tells an entirely different story.⁸ The gerundive timenda, tellingly yet unconvincingly emended by some to tenenda, further suggests that a scepter to be feared is barely a scepter wielded without violence. In fact, the issue of fear and freedom of speech is suggested by the very presence of Maiestas. Under Augustus, the law of maiestas extended to include libel and slander against the emperor.⁹ And the punishment and consequences for verbally injuring the princeps’ majesty were powerful and violent.¹⁰ The hymn to Maiestas can be read as a covert comment on imperial censorship since it raises the question of how sincere a hymn to the divine incarnation of repression could be. ¹¹ A poet whose freedom of speech is legally constrained can resort to wordplay, to the inherent power of words to defy imperial definitions, their playful potential for endless deferral. By punning on Iouis-uis, Ovid plays with the meaning of uis as physical violence and semantic force. In other words, uis as the basis of the wordplay draws attention to itself, to the semantic relation of uis with etymologizing. A Jove with guardians sine ui is an insignificant Jove, a Jove without meaning. Ovid’s ingeniously self-reflexive pun highlights the paradox of his Muse’s imperial declaration and undermines her authority. Wordplay exposes Polyhymnia’s laudatory meaning to a causality that remains external to the speaking voice and thus destabilizes it. As Paul Allen Miller (2004: 161) puts it, every pun in Ovid reveals not a hidden truth but another series of double meanings that reflects back on itself to create a depthless mise-en-abyme.

 My reading here is inspired by Ahl ()  – , who argues that the wordplay between uis and Iouis is key to interpreting the story of Io in the Metamorphoses, the nymph who suffers from Jupiter’s violence in a tale that forces us to interpret Iouis as a combination of Io and uis; Jove’s name signifies the violence done to Io. Cf. Hinds ()  –  on the etymological wordplay on Venus and uis.  As Hinds ()  puts it, “etymological word-plays can unfix poetic meaning just as effectively as they can fix it.”  Under Augustus’ lex Iulia maiestatis (Digest .; Suetonius, Augustus ; Tacitus, Annales .. – ) allegedly subversive works became an act of treason.  The works of Ovid, Titus Labienus, and Cassius Severus were banned under Augustus. Ovid and Cassius Severus were banished, while Labienus committed suicide.  On the issue of free speech under the principate as central to the Fasti, see Feeney ().

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In this volume, all the contributors have taken as their point of departure critical issues that have been at the center of Frederick Ahl’s scholarship, especially how Latin poets employ linguistic tropes, in order to shape, reshape, deconstruct, and reconstruct the Roman world.¹² The volume covers a representative number of poets, whose works are intricately engaged with the Roman sociopolitical milieu. From Horace to Silius Italicus, all the poets under discussion have been the focus of Ahl’s contributions to interpreting the deeply political nature of Latin poetry within the larger culture of imperial Rome. Critics point out that Latin poetry does not comment on politics from some distant vantage point, but is a political factor.¹³ This approach does justice to poetry’s power to form and not just comment on political realities, but still leaves open the question of whether poetic authority supports, undermines or competes with imperial power. In answering this question, the contributors to this volume do not follow a uniform line of inquiry, but examine issues of poetic authority from various angles and draw different conclusions. Adopting a one-sided reading of poetic works whose political allegiance or defiance is notoriously hard to pin down would do injustice both to the poets under discussion and to our honorandus. Against the background of Ahl’s pioneering work in interpreting the politics of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, aka Pharsalia (Ahl 1976), Joy Connolly reads Lucan’s epic not as a commentary on imperial politics but as a direct participant in constructions of political reality. Building of Mbembe’s analysis of reiterative violence in postcolonial politics (Mbembe 2001), Connolly argues that the corrupt Romans of Lucan’s iconoclastic epic are enamored with violent tyrants that wield dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, the obscene, the grotesque, and the absurd do not undermine totalitarian regimes but create a bond between tyrants and their subjects, between the sublime and the ridiculous. While acknowledging the farcical dimension of Lucan’s praise of Nero, Connolly argues that the grotesque supports oppressive rulers instead of undermining tyranny. The diversity of political interpretations in this volume is exemplified in the approaches of contributors who point out that Latin poets shift the onus of political interpretation from themselves to their readers. In his analysis of Horace’s Ode 2.10, for instance, Alex Dressler concludes that it is up to the reader to pick a side and make Horace a member of the opposition against Augustus. Similarly, double speak and ambiguity forces Ovid’s readers to choose whether the Ars Amatoria reforms or endorses Augustan legislation. Ovid can have it both ways, but

 See, for instance, Ahl (a); (b).  See, e. g., Kennedy (); cf. Feldherr ()  and passim.

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his readers can hardly escape from a partisan interpretation (see Ioannis Ziogas). In Statius’ Siluae 5.1, the poetics of imitation and representation dazzle the reader who is left to ponder the cognitive dissonance of excessive exemplarity (Martha Malamud). In a truly Ovidian fashion, Statius’ poetry appropriates the imperial power to reshape reality through spectacle. Yet the identification of poetry with the imperial projections of illusory reality still leaves a crucial question open for the reader to decide: Does Statius expose the artificiality of this imperial mechanism or does he contribute to the authentication of imperial fantasies? Along those lines, Erica Bexley examines the stakes involved in reading and interpreting poetry in Seneca’s Oedipus, who is cast both as a reader of poetry and a subject of interpretation. Bexley analyzes the tyrant’s futile attempts to monopolize meaning and his downfall as a result of poetic ambiguity that lies beyond his control. Seneca’s Oedipus can ultimately caution the readers or audience of the tragedy against interpretative bias. Poetic ambiguity and interpretative indeterminacy can put the reader in the position of a paranoid tyrant such as Oedipus (see Dressler, Bexley). Paranoia becomes the default, if not the ideal, way of interpreting poetry under authoritarian regimes that suppress the freedom of expression.¹⁴ Peter Davis examines the loss of libertas, this most valuable ideal of the Roman Republic, in the last years of Augustus’ rule. Imperial censorship and the dangers involved in potentially subversive works define the interpretative parameters of the works under discussion in this volume. The hermeneutics of suspicion spread from insecure tyrants to their subjects and still affect the way we interpret Latin imperial poetry. Joshua Katz wonders whether the acronym he traces at Vergil’s Georgics 2.475 (MVER-P) is an authorial signature (Publius Vergilius Maro reversed) or an over-interpretation. Similarly, we can read the Mantuan Ocnus (from ὄκνος ‘delay’ ‘hesitation’) at Aeneid 10.198 – 203 as a figure of Vergil, whose cognomen Maro is an anagram of mora (see Jay Reed). Hidden acronyms that cover the author’s identity in a self-referential gesture that waits to be decoded by attentive readers have always been the material of conspiracy theory, but the examples of authorial acronyms that Katz discusses provocatively suggest that the world of Latin poetry may not be entirely divorced from the world of political conspiracy (cf. Dressler). The authorial powerplay in etymologies, puns, anagrams, telestichs, and acronyms features prominently in this volume (see Jay Reed, Emily Gowers, Michael Fontaine, Mathias Hanses, John Fitch). Jay Reed examines the deep thematic, verbal, narrative, and political interconnections between Roma, amor, and mora in Vergil’s Aeneid. Far from being frivolous wordplay, this anagrammat-

 Cf. Hinds ().

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ic nexus is central to the Aeneid’s narrative and imperial dynamics, which revolve around a passion for the foundation of Rome that bypasses the ominous delays of amorous inertia. Following Ahl’s insightful connection of anagrammatic wordplay with semantic pluralism, Reed examines the polysemy of the moraamor-Roma complex, a nexus whose significance depends on how one defines the terms under discussion and how internal and external readers focalize the narrative of Vergil’s epic. Mathias Hanses traces a hitherto unnoticed telestich in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria 3.507– 10 that reflects the Amor-Roma palindromic wordplay of Roman graffiti. Similarly to Reed’s chapter on the Aeneid, Hanses examines the anagrammatic cluster of Amor-Roma-mora in the Ars Amatoria and the ways in which anagrams and telestichs revolve around the ways in which amor has conquered Roma, a tension that is set against a generic interaction between martial epic and love elegy. The issue of focalization, characterization, and the emotional state of internal and external narrators is the key to interpreting Vergilian wordplay according to Michael Fontaine. Arguing against the Freudian psychoanalytic model, Fontaine zooms in on Vergilian narrative, in order to interpret puns not as errors but as psycholinguistic instances of emotional self-consciousness. By focusing on puns’ associations with guilt, the self-conscious emotion par excellence, Fontaine finds the notions of the unconscious inadequate in interpreting the significance of puns in Vergil and other Latin poets. Freudian slips give way to “Fredian” slips that tie these linguistic features to the narrative of empire. Similarly to Reed and Fontaine, Emily Gowers further explores the potential of soundplay and wordplay to enrich Vergil’s narrative by containing one meaning within another in an almost infinite series. The metamorphic power of wordplay turns Dido into bubo (‘owl’), an ominous bird that forebodes death. The fantasies of avian transformations merge with Dido’s metamorphosis into an avenger, which is fulfilled in Roman history with Hannibal. Birdcalls are cast as foreign speech, an imperialistic and Romanocentric perception of Dido’s bird transformation. The unfulfilled potential of a narrative of desertion, exile, gender bending, and escape through avian transformation lurks behind Dido’s semantic and sonic similarities with the owl. In Reed’s, Gowers’, and Hanses’ papers, the poetics of Latin wordplay is inseparable from Roman politics. Just as wordplay is integral to Vergil’s narrative dynamics, etymologies of proper names are significant in Senecan drama. John Fitch examines instances of speaking names in Seneca in an attempt to interpret their function in the fabric of Seneca’s tragedies and further tackle the question of whether the playwright intended these etymological wordplays. Fitch’s systematic analysis of Seneca’s etymologizing of proper names is related to Bexley’s arguments about the powerplay and consequences involved in etymologizing Oedipus’

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name in Seneca’s tragedy. The question whether an etymology really is there may never be answered adequately (cf. Katz) but that is why the search for the significance of proper names is all the more fascinating. The discovery and interpretation of etymological wordplay implicates audience and characters in constructing meaning that has the potential of empowering or debilitating them. Far from simply referring without signifying, a proper name is highly significant in literature. By focusing on the name Laelius in Lucan, Matthew Leigh argues that the speech of Lucan’s centurion alludes to his namesake in Cicero’s De Amicitia. Leigh examines the narrative and political implications of Laelius’ speaking name (cf. Fitch). The Ciceronian intertext sharply contrasts with the value system of Lucan’s centurion, who is ready to put Caesar above any form of Roman pietas (cf. Connolly’s discussion on Laelius’ attraction to power and the reiterative violence that underpins it). The junior officer rebukes his superior in a striking twist of Republican libertas/parrhesia (cf. Peter Davis) and his speech succeeds in inspiring a perverted passion for action and thus putting an end to delay and hesitation (cf. Reed). While Martha Malamud sees imitation as a form of pietas, Leigh reads Lucan’s Laelius as the embodiment of impiety against the Ciceronian intertext. Leigh’s chapter shows how a speaking name can function as an intertextual marker, activating a dialogue with an important philosophical source. Far from being merely a literary game, intertextuality is an author’s way of claiming mastery and control over tradition. Intertextual allusions are meaningful as appeals to previous authority or as polemical subversions of established norms. While intertextual references are often a trope of authorial constructions, their allusive nature shifts once more the onus of interpreting them from authors to readers. Malamud examines the potentially subversive and multilayered nature of intertextual references in Statius, while Arthur Pomeroy argues that Silius’ references to Homer are culturally and politically charged since they are related to the classicism of the Flavian era. Peter Davis similarly examines the Roman concerns with freedom of speech against the Iliadic intertext. Similarly to Peter Davis, Martha Malamud, and Arthur Pomeroy, David Konstan shows how Greek myth can allude to Roman politics by interpreting the subversive potential of Domitian’s comparisons with Achilles in Statius’ Achilleid. The transvestite Achilles recalls Domitian’s similar disguise in the garb of a follower of Isis. Even though a comparison with Achilles should in principle be flattering for Domitian, Konstan argues that such a parallel may actually emphasize Domitian’s mortality and his forbidden deification. Achilles is also the focus of Michael Putnam’s chapter, which examines the ways in which Vergil’s allusions to Catullus 64 contribute to Aeneas’ characterization. The Catullan intertext opens a window to reading Dido as the abandoned Ariadne (cf. Gowers)

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and Aeneas as Theseus. The figure of Achilles from Catullus’ epyllion influences the representation of Aeneas at key moments in the Aeneid. In particular, the wrath and brutality of Catullus’ Achilles are transferred to Vergil’s Aeneas. The ferocious and pitiless Achilles from Catullus 64, who is responsible for the sacrifice of a helpless female victim (Polyxena), also colors not only Aeneas’ relationship to Dido, who in turn becomes a type of Polyxena, a victim of Aeneas’ Achillean journey toward Rome, but also the final act of the raging Aeneas, the sacrifice of Turnus. Just as Achilles is an alter ego of Domitian in Statius (Konstan), Aeneas and Achilles may reflect back on the emperor Augustus in Vergil. Such a comparison would bring to the fore the ambiguities in casting Achilles as a model warrior and ruler. The inherent tension in the figure of Achilles throughout the history of Greco-Roman literature to be both virtuous and cruel, a saver of comrades’ lives and responsible for countless deaths of his companions, an exemplary mortal of honest deeds and a semi-divine being of dangerous passions makes the best of the Achaeans a particularly useful figure for poets writing under the Roman Empire.¹⁵ Achilles is an excellent model for composing poetry that can be interpreted both as apparent praise and veiled criticism of Roman emperors.¹⁶ The plurality of political interpretations of Latin poetry in this volume is exemplified by reading Michael Putnam’s chapter vis-à-vis Gregson Davis’ contribution. Even though the raging Aeneas is modeled on Achilles’ vengeful wrath and cruelty when he kills the suppliant Turnus and thus the final episode of the Aeneid casts a dark shadow on the Augustan value of clementia, Gregson Davis argues that Aeneas’ angry outburst is consistent with the Roman value system and evokes concepts of ira in Epicurean thought. For Gregson Davis, Aeneas’ righteous anger contributes to his pietas. Vergil ultimately places his hero in the Augustan context of Mars Ultor. However such a pro-Augustan reading of the Aeneid may contrast with Ahl’s interpretation of the poem, Gregson Davis examines the influence of Epicurean philosophy on Vergil, an aspect of the Aeneid on which Ahl comments repeatedly in his richly annotated translation.¹⁷ Reading

 On this tension in the character of Achilles, see King (). Ovid may be picking up on this tension when he represents Augustus as another Achilles in Tristia . – , where the exiled poet becomes himself an abject Telephus in need of healing from the one who dealt the wound. Again, at Metamorphoses ., Augustus is brought into comparison with Achilles, perhaps in relation to their shared divine status, but also in view of the (divine) anger they partake in.  Cf. Ahl (a); (b).  Cf. in particular Ahl () , his comment on inclemency and impiety in Epicurean philosophy. See also Ahl () , , . Ahl’s commentary on the Aeneid is avidly anticipated.

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the different approaches to the final scene of the Aeneid in this volume demonstrates the kaleidoscopic nature of Vergil’s epic. Depending on the critical perspective, whether it is wordplay (Fontaine), intertext (Putnam) or philosophy (Gregson Davis), the death of Turnus is invested with different political resonances. Philosophy plays an important role in the politics of defining ideals and redefining the significance of words. Etymologizing, for instance, was closely associated with Stoic philosophy in Rome. While Gregson Davis examines Epicurean definitions of ira in Vergil’s Aeneid, Michèle Lowrie analyzes the Stoic background to civil war imagery in Seneca’s Thyestes, focusing on the choral ode in 547– 622. Lowrie’s analysis complements Leigh’s study of how the various forms of pietas problematize the politics of civil war and family conflict, which in turn relates to Gregson Davis’ philosophical examination of Aeneas’ pietas. For Lowrie, the political and philosophical dimension of civil war is not linked to the tumultuous era of Nero. Instead, Lowrie argues that the ode is a characteristic example of Roman political thought, which tends to project internal and familial conflict to a cosmic scale. By focusing on the politics of Senecan tragedy without limiting her research to Nero (see also Bexley), Lowrie traces obsessions and patterns of Roman political thought that exceed the immediate historical context (cf. Rhiannon Ash on Tacitus’ interest on the immediate political context of poetic composition and performance). To the externalization of inner conflict, we may add the blurring of the private and public spheres, which Ioannis Ziogas sees as fundamental in the clash between Augustan legislation and Ovidian elegy, but is also a source of tension in Roman politics overall. Philosophy and politics are the focus of Matthew McGowan’s chapter, which deals with the recurring motif of exile in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in particular in the tale of Pythagoras and Numa. Pythagoras, an exiled philosopher who advocated the continuous reincarnation of souls, is closely related not only to the poetics of transformation in the Metamorphoses but also to the realities of Ovid’s exile. The transmigration of the souls provides the exiled poet with the means of escape from the imperial constraints of his banishment. Such an approach complements Gowers’ reading of Dido’s avian transformation as a trope of exile and liberation from political, ethnic, and gendered restrictions. McGowan examines the legal background to the teachings of Pythagoras and Numa, Rome’s second king whose name was etymologized from νόμος (‘law’).¹⁸ Just as Pythagoras is the teacher of Numa in the Metamorphoses, Ovid instructs

 For the etymological connection between Numa and νόμος, see Maltby () s.v.

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the Romans about the recent legal reforms. McGowan’s chapter raises issues that Ziogas examines in his paper, which argues that the praeceptor amoris in the Ars Amatoria acts as a legal authority by teaching Romans about love, a topic legally prescribed by recent imperial legislation. Ovid is simultaneously a teacher of law and love. In an ineluctable collision between poet and emperor, Augustus intrudes into the bedrooms of Roman citizens, while the elegiac praeceptor attempts to regulate sex, thus stepping into imperial territory. Elegy attempts to establish transgressive desire as the superior law. The legal dimension of love examined in this chapter can be read vis-à-vis Connolly’s analysis of violence in the Pharsalia. Amatory passion in Ovid and violence in Lucan rename crime as law. Ziogas further traces Acontius’ expertise in law (Heroides 20) against the profile of love elegy as a discourse of instruction and seduction. Acontius’ letter legalizes elegiac love and ratifies literary tradition by casting sources as legal documents. This chapter reads allusion as a trope of authorization of previous texts and is thus related to the intertextual analyses of Michael Putnam, Peter Davis, Matthew Leigh, David Konstan, Martha Malamud, and Arthur Pomeroy. In a collection focusing on the fundamental confluence of poetics and politics, Michael Paschalis’ interpretation of Calpurnius Siculus’ Eclogues stands out as an attempt to distinguish the political from the pastoral. For Paschalis, the crucial difference between Vergil’s and Calpurnius’ Eclogues is that while Vergil’s bucolic poetry signals the conjunction of the pastoral and political world, Calpurnius organizes his collection on the basis of an antithesis between bucolic and panegyric. In contrast with Vergil, Calpurnius dissociates the lowly world of singing shepherds from the politics and poetics of imperial Rome. It is the premise of the volume that the context of composition and reception defines interpretation.¹⁹ In this respect, Rhiannon Ash’s chapter on how Tacitus represents poets in his work picks out some important features of this collection. Tacitus is not interested in poets that live and create in a political vacuum, but is fascinated with the contexts of composition, performance, and reception. The poets in Tacitus are actively involved in the powerplay of the Roman politics. The immediate sociopolitical dynamics and performative parameters play a crucial role in constructing poetic voices as dissenting or supportive of the status quo. The context of performance becomes an issue of life and death. In a principate notoriously shaped by display (see also Malamud), showing can be more significant than telling (see also Bexley). Tacitus provocatively suggests that the framework of reception is more important than the very contents of poetic texts.

 On the hermeneutics of reception in Latin poetry, see Martindale ().

Introduction: Power, Puns, and Politics From Horace to Silius Italicus

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The volume comes out of a conference titled “Ars Latet Arte Sua: Speaking to Power in Latin and Greek Literature”, which was organized in honor of Frederick Ahl at Cornell University in September 7– 8, 2013. While the conference at Cornell had a wider purview, for the sake of a unified volume we restricted the topic to Latin poetry and invited a range of scholars not necessarily identified with Ahl, but all influenced by his readings and all engaging with his scholarship. In our view, one of the best ways to honor Ahl is to disagree with him and we trust that our “Fredschrift” is far from being a typical Festschrift. We should acknowledge, however, that in a volume aiming to honor a scholar as influential and diverse as Frederick Ahl, there will be inevitable gaps. In our attempt to achieve thematic coherence, we did not invite contributions on Greek poetry and comparative literature, even though Ahl’s impact on these fields is well known. It is also well known that Ahl’s translations of Sophocles, Vergil, and Seneca are proof that he is not only a scholar but also a poet.²⁰ The contributors to this volume could not match his unique skill in translating, but it should be noted that several of them (e. g. Reed, Gowers, Fontaine, Bexley) point out that in Ahl’s translations lies a wealth of critical insights along with the beauty of poetry.

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY. — 1984a. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105: 174 – 208. — 1984b. “The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius”, ANRW II.32.1: 40 – 124. — 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. — 1986. Seneca: Three Tragedies: Trojan Women, Medea, Phaedra. Ithaca, NY. — 1989. “Homer, Vergil, and Complex Narrative Structures in Latin Epic: An Essay”, ICS 14:1 – 31. — 2007. Virgil: Aeneid. Oxford. — 2008. Two Faces of Oedipus: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Seneca’s Oedipus. Translated and with an Introduction. Ithaca, NY. Barchiesi, A. 1991. “Discordant Muses”, PCPhS 37:1 – 21. Boyd, B.W. 2000. “Celabitur Auctor: The Crisis of Authority and Narrative Patterning in Ovid, Fasti 5”, Phoenix 54: 64 – 98. Fantham, E. 1985. “Ovid, Germanicus, and the Composition of the Fasti”, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 5: 243 – 81.

 Ahl (); (); ().

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Feeney, D. 1992. “Si licet et fas est: Ovid’s Fasti and the Problem of Free Speech under the Principate”, in: A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. Bristol, 1 – 25. Feldherr, A. 2010. Playing Gods. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton, NJ. Hinds, S. 2006. “Venus, Varro and the vates: Towards the Limits of Etymologizing Interpretation”, Dictynna 3: 1 – 19. — 2007. “Ovid among the Conspiracy Theorists”, in: S.J. Heyworth, P.J. Fowler, and S.H. Harrison (eds.), Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean. Oxford, 194 – 220. Kennedy, D. 1992. “ ‘Augustan’ and ‘Anti-Augustan’: Reflections on Terms of Reference”, in: A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. Bristol, 26 – 58. King, K. 1987. Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages. Berkeley, CA. Labate, M. 2005. “Tempo delle origini e tempo della storia in Ovidio”, in: J.P. Schwindt (ed.), La représentation du temps dans la poésie augustéenne—Zur Poetik der Zeit in augusteischer Dichtung. Heidelberg, 177 – 201. Mackie, N. 1992. “Ovid and the Birth of Maiestas”, in: A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. Bristol, 63 – 96. Maltby, R. 1991. A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies. Leeds. Martindale, C. 1992. Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Cambridge. Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA. Miller, P.A. 2004. Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Princeton, NJ. Pasco-Pranger, M. 2006. Founding the Year: Ovid’s Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman Calendar. Leiden/Boston, MA.

Rhiannon Ash

Tacitus and the Poets: In Nemora et Lucos … Secedendum est (Dialogus 9.6)? Summary: Despite Tacitus’ poetic and allusive Latin, he is selective about the named poets actively appearing in his narratives. This article examines how Tacitus represents such figures. I argue that above all Tacitus is fascinated by living poets, who actively engage with the world of politics and power and refuse to live in an artistic vacuum. I first consider four relatively undistinguished Tiberian poets (Clutorius Priscus, Gaius Cominius, Mamercus Scaurus, Sextius Paconianus). Three end up dead, when they promptly cease to be interesting. The nature, genre, and quality of their poetry are almost incidental to their fates, which come about through a combination of formidable enemies, folly, and bad luck. Yet under Nero, the dynamics shift: poetry now conspicuously takes center-stage. In the last hexad of the Annals, we meet a more distinguished group of poets (Britannicus, Antistius Sosianus, Seneca, Lucan, Curtius Montanus, and Nero himself). A conspicuous strand of many of their individual stories involves the politicized performance of their work, either as a prelude to danger (Britannicus, Antistius Sosianus) or belated revenge (Lucan). Their representation demonstrates that Tacitus is engaged by the unique performative contexts of their poetry, which crucially impact on the ‘outside’ world of politics and power. Keywords: Tacitus; Tiberius; Nero; poetry; performance; power; politics

Introduction Distinctive footprints of the poets are visible throughout Tacitus’ surviving corpus. Whether in the form of specific phrasing and vocabulary borrowed from earlier poets for a range of purposes, or through whole scenes elegantly shaped so as to engage in dialogue with suggestive episodes from epic or tragedy, Tacitus works creatively and dynamically with poetic intertexts (both Latin and Greek) at every step to enrich his own distinctive brand of historiography.¹ Not only

 There is much discussion of Tacitus’ engagement with poetic texts, but see Baxter (), Baxter (), Miller (), Putnam (), Keitel (), Ash (), Joseph (). Mayer (b) explores an allusion to Homer.

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that, but figures of poets also regularly populate the landscape of his texts. Yet the paradox is that Tacitus himself, despite the obvious diversity of his generic choices, conspicuously chooses not to make poetry his own creative outlet. Does Tacitus’ consistent preference for the medium of prose reveal something telling about his assessment of those who do write poetry under the empire? Might he have considered poetry as having limitations, whether in terms of relevance, utility, or longevity? Or is it simply that Tacitus regarded the writing of history as being the best way to drive contemporaries to lead honorable lives and to hold up a mirror to present and future principes in a bid to moderate their conduct? Retrieving Tacitean opinions from his text is of course a notoriously tricky business, but it is still worth attempting.² In this paper, I will consider how Tacitus represents named poets in a bid to shed some light on his attitudes to poetry as an activity and a decisive force (or not) for triggering sociopolitical change under the empire. The act of writing poetry can never be decoupled from politics; or as Ahl puts it, Roman poetry always ‘has a political soul’.³ As we will see, Tacitus’ snapshots of those who write poetry show vividly both the strengths and the limitations of that activity in an imperial context.

Maternus, the Ur-Poet? Tacitus’ projection of poetry shifts and evolves as his corpus develops, so that cumulatively we get more and more poets to consider and compare. Yet the ‘grandfather’ of them all is arguably Curiatius Maternus in the Dialogus. He can be seen as the yardstick against which all subsequent poets in the corpus can be measured. We first meet Maternus sitting quietly in his room holding a book of his now notorious tragedy, Cato, from which he had given a reading the previous day. The play is contentious, having caused offence to the animi potentium (Dialogus 2.1), apparently because Maternus had thrown himself into the reading so wholeheartedly that his own identity had been totally subsumed by that of his subject, Cato. This is a crucial point: it is not so much that Maternus has written and recited a contentious praetexta which causes the problem, but the degree to which the living poet identifies with his dead historical subject, and the subsequent talk and notoriety that this fusion triggers. That collapsing of identities between author and subject is the heart of the trouble. Mayer proposes that this reflects how ancient audiences generally tend to react to litera-

 Luce () is sensibly cautious. See too Sailor ()  and Pelling ().  Ahl (a) .

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ture: “Where they were faced with a persona, an assumed character who was plainly not the writer, their inclination was to take the character’s words as representing the writer’s view, unless it was otherwise clear that the writer was indulging in ethopoeia”.⁴ Yet Maternus apparently takes this to a new level with his Cato. Quite why his lively ‘necromancy’ of Cato should have offended the potentes for this reason is an intriguing question. Gallia speculates that the offense may have been triggered by ‘the apparent similarity between Maternus’s behavior and his protagonist’s final act of principled self-destruction’.⁵ That reading may have some merit, but of course the difficulty is that Maternus, himself still alive, conspicuously has not (or not yet) reenacted Cato’s suicide in a Flavian setting. So at least at the dramatic date of the dialogue, the nature of the offense may be different. Strunk sees the key as being the Stoic dissident Helvidius Priscus, condemned to death in AD 74/75: “it is reasonable to speculate that Maternus’ Cato drew analogies between the resistance and suicide of Cato the Younger and the dissidence and execution of Helvidius Priscus”.⁶ This historically-anchored line seems more promising. Yet what is also striking is that although Secundus speculates that Maternus is perhaps judiciously working through the text to excise any material which could have given rise to praua interpretatio, “perverse interpretation” (Dialogus 3.2), it is still not clear that the play’s text alone is the problem. What is at issue is Maternus’ own visibility as a dissident public figure, who has actively turned his back on public life to become a writer, but who pointedly draws attention to that withdrawal by the extraordinary way in which he gives his recitation: even if the written artifact of the tragedy itself has some dissident elements, the implication is that it would not in itself necessarily have caused offense without the powerful ventriloquising presence of the living writer.⁷ In reciting the play, Maternus may forget himself (Dialogus 2.1, sui oblitus) and think only of Cato, but ironically his distinctive performance makes him (Maternus) the talk of the town (Dialogus 2, eaque de re per urbem frequens sermo haberetur) and the focal point for memory. It is, I suggest, important to think more carefully about the nature of Maternus’ offense, since it has crucial implications for the

 Mayer (a) .  Gallia () .  Strunk () .  Dressler ()  considers the ‘interpretative dilemma’ of the Dialogus and asks an interesting question about the precise nature of this praua interpretatio: “Is that a polite way of describing a reader, informer or Emperor, misconstruing Maternus’s Cato and willfully reading into it a subversive meaning? Or is prava interpretatio what a reader has to do in order to unpuzzle the hidden subversive meaning that Maternus knows full well is there?”.

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question of free speech in Rome and the status of poetry. One possibility emerging here is that Vespasian’s Rome in AD 74 or 75 may be cast as a more tolerant place than the dramatic scenario of the Dialogus might at first suggest and that active censorship of literature by the powerful was not at that stage ubiquitous.⁸ Indeed, despite the atmosphere of fear which hangs over the Dialogus, we do not actually know whether Maternus’ play proved deadly to its author. In addition, Gallia suggests that the potentes who take offense in the Dialogus do not necessarily include the emperor himself: he proposes instead that they are more likely to be a cabal of delatores with whom Maternus has a particularly hostile personal relationship (for whatever reason).⁹ For the moment, what I wish to emphasize is the phenomenon of Maternus’ identity fusing with that of his text. It is reminiscent of a wry comment by Seneca the Elder in his Suasoria involving the possible scenario of Cicero being granted his life by Antony, provided that he burns his own writings: omnes pro libris Ciceronis solliciti, nemo pro ipso, “everyone worried on behalf of the books of Cicero, not on behalf of Cicero himself” (Seneca, Suasoria 7.10). Apparently no declaimer was prepared to try to persuade Cicero to comply with Antony, because ‘Cicero’ (the author) subsumes Cicero (the man), whose identity has totally merged with that of ‘Cicero’ the author. What is also intriguing here is that this notion of fusion has direct implications for Tacitus’ own status as a historian. So, Sailor has explored the implications of distinguishing between narrative voice on the one hand (‘Tacitus’) and historical author on the other (Tacitus), suggesting that for a Roman audience the distinction was much less clear for historical texts than for some other genres of literature: “it is not clear that … readers of history were ready, or typically asked, to distinguish the voice that narrates the text from the voice of the person who produced it”.¹⁰ If so, then Maternus, despite seeming to write verse tragedy, is articulating it as if he were a prose historian. This may be an element of the problem for the unnamed potentes.

 Cf. Sailor () : “There were really only two sorts of response the regime might make: it might take repressive action or do nothing”. Cf. Annals .., Cremutius Cordus’ reference to the poems of Bibaculus and Catullus, pointedly ignored by Julius Caesar and Augustus: namque spreta exolescunt: si irascare, adgnita uidentur, “what is spurned tends to abate; but, if you become angry, you appear to have made an admission”.  Gallia () . Strunk ()  reminds us that one of Maternus’ unexpected guests, M. Aper, has “a number of affinities with the imperial delatores”.  Sailor () ; Pelling ()  n.  emphasizes the importance of a reader’s knowledge of the historian’s extratextual experience in responding to the narrative voice. Mayer (a)  argues that the concept of the authorial persona was demonstrably unavailable to the ancient reader and that this viewpoint should be extended more widely across ancient literature.

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Poetry on the Margins: A Quartet of Tiberian Poets This initial consideration of Maternus suggests that Tacitus’ particular interest lies above all in living poets (or at least, in poets who were alive in their historical context) and in what impact they have on their immediate social and cultural setting (and vice versa). The significant poets for Tacitus are the ones who do not exist in a vacuum. One of the important points for Aper is that, unlike Secundus’ close friend, the poet Saleius Bassus, Maternus is “born for manly eloquence and oratory” (Dialogus 5.4, natus ad eloquentiam uirilem et oratoriam), whereas Saleius has no aptitude for forensic activity and therefore his quiet life as a poet is essentially unproblematic. Yet even so, this notion that in order to write accomplished poetry, some poets have to withdraw from public life and, as Aper says, “retire into the solitude, as the poets themselves say, of the woods and the groves” (Dialogus 9.6, utque ipsi dicunt, in nemora et lucos, id est in solitudinem secedendum est)¹¹ can be deviously exploited by someone shrewd. Domitian, for example, upon seeing that he is being sidelined in the early days of Vespasian’s principate, decides to turn this marginalization to his own advantage by playing a role: studiumque litterarum et amorem carminum simulans, quo uelaret animum et fratris aemulationi subduceret, cuius disparem mitioremque naturam contra interpretabatur (Histories 4.86.2), “… pretending devotion to literature and love of poetry to conceal his real character and to withdraw before the rivalry of his brother, on whose milder nature, so unlike his own, he put a bad construction”.¹² As a politically shrewd creature, the dissembling Domitian is here represented in such a way that he artfully adopts the unthreatening mask of a solitary Saleius Bassus, when actually he does not even like literature. Whatever the reality, the stereotype of the reclusive poet was widely known.  At Dialogus ., Maternus quotes this phrase back at Aper. Pliny also alludes to the phrase in a letter to Tacitus (Epistle .., inter nemora et lucos), if that is the right ‘direction of travel’ and not vice versa.  Cf. Suet. Domitian . simulauit et ipse mire modestiam in primisque poeticae studium, tam insuetum antea sibi quam postea spretum et abiectum, recitauitque etiam publice, “he himself also made a wonderful pretence of modesty, and especially of an interest in poetry, an interest foreign to him previously and thrown aside with contempt later on, and he even gave readings publicly”. Domitian apparently wrote an epic poem on the battle between the Flavians and Vitellians on the Capitol in AD  (Martial ..) and another poem on the Jewish war (Valerius Flaccus .). That sounds like more than dabbling. See Quintilian .., Pliny, Historia Naturalis pref. , and Silius Italicus . for praise of Domitian’s talents as a poet.

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What about Tacitus’ later representations of named poets, all of whom cluster in the Annals? Our first poet is the intriguing case of a Roman knight, Clutorius Priscus (Annals 3.49.1), from AD 21:¹³ fine anni Clutorium Priscum equitem Romanum, post celebre carmen quo Germanici suprema defleuerat, pecunia donatum a Caesare, corripuit delator, obiectans aegro Druso composuisse quod, si extinctus foret, maiore praemio uulgaretur. id Clutorius in domo P. Petronii socru eius Vitellia coram multisque inlustribus feminis per uaniloquentiam legerat. At the end of the year Clutorius Priscus, a Roman equestrian who had been given money by Caesar after a celebrated poem in which he had lamented the final moments of Germanicus, was seized by a denouncer, casting at him the charge that during an illness of Drusus he had composed something which, if the man’s life were extinguished, would be published for an even greater reward. Clutorius Priscus as a foolish boast had read it at the house of P. Petronius in the presence of Vitellia, the latter’s mother-in-law, and of the many illustrious females.

There are several points of interest here. Firstly, the fact that Priscus is the beneficiary of a financial reward for his celebre carmen about the dead Germanicus suggests that Tiberius recognizes the potential for poetry to contribute something useful to his own standing in society. By retroactively paying Priscus for the poem, Tiberius implies that he approves of the subject matter and thus can try to counteract the negative comments about his own failure to mourn adequately after the popular Germanicus’ death. That composition was after the event (and indeed, may well have been spontaneous, rather than commissioned by the emperor), but Priscus’ peril comes in writing a similar poem about Drusus before he has died and in parading it for public consumption at a recitatio. ¹⁴ Priscus the poet does not emerge as an impressive figure. Tacitus refers to his uaniloquentia in reciting that poem before various women by way of boasting, which suggests an insecure peacock, rather than a serious threat or an outspoken critic of the regime.¹⁵ Nor does the description of the original poem about Germanicus as

 PIR . no.. All translations from the Annals, except where otherwise stated, are by Woodman ().  Cf. Seneca, Controuersiae  Pref.  on the self-censorship of the normally outspoken rhetorician Titus Labienus, who at a recitatio refused to read out to his friends parts of his history which he considered contentious. Perhaps this was just a deft way to generate interest in his work, but it also shows the power of public exposure at a recitatio before even a small audience.  uaniloquentia, “after appearing in Plautus, seems absent from almost all intervening verse and prose except Livy (..)” (Martin and Woodman () ). It is a rare word in Tacitus, featuring again only at Annals .. Dio .. likewise highlights how Priscus “took great pride in his poetic talents”. Pliny, Historia Naturalis . preserves a story which further suggests Priscus’ showiness, namely that he spent ,, buying a eunuch-slave called Pae-

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celebre necessarily suggest anything positive about its literary quality: it could be famous without being accomplished. Perhaps the most interesting point about the story, however, is that Priscus is put to death by an enthusiastic vote of the senators, without approval from Tiberius, who is conspicuously irritated by the penalty.¹⁶ This is an ill-judged preemptive strike, not a clear-cut case of an emperor’s paranoia. Our next poet, Gaius Cominius, also an equestrian, is the author of an apparently much more overtly political poem in AD 24 (Annals 4.31.1– 2): his tam adsiduis tamque maestis modica laetitia intericitur, quod C. Cominium equitem Romanum, probrosi in se carminis conuictum, Caesar precibus fratris qui senator erat concessit. quo magis mirum habebatur gnarum meliorum et quae fama clementiam sequeretur tristiora malle. neque enim socordia peccabat; nec occultum est, quando ex ueritate, quando adumbrata laetitia facta imperatorum celebrentur. Amid these events, so constant and so sorrowful, there was a limited but welcome interval whereby, when Gaius Cominius, a Roman equestrian, was convicted for an abusive poem against Caesar, Tiberius made a concession to the pleas of his brother, who was a senator. It was therefore considered all the more amazing that a man aware of the better course, and of the reputation which followed upon clemency, should nevertheless prefer the grimmer. It was not that he did wrong through insensibility, and there is no concealing when emperors’ deeds are celebrated genuinely and when with a merely spurious delight.¹⁷

This is an intriguing sequence. Previously, Tiberius had been stung by anonymous poems attacking his superbia and saeuitia (Annals 1.72.4), but he chose to ignore them. Yet Cominius was not so lucky, since his authorship of the insulting carmen was apparently not in doubt, and as a result he had been convicted (by whatever means). That conviction gave Tiberius the opportunity to show clementia, defusing the power of the poetry to do damage by generously sparing the poet. So the sequence of events could have been presented as a positive reflection of the emperor’s conduct. Yet this is not how Tacitus plays it. Instead, this single instance of clementia is used paradoxically to draw attention to how seldom Tiberius displays it.¹⁸ What is most striking here, however, is Tacitus’ appended authorial comment as ‘literary critic’, decisively proposing in a zon (if this is the same Priscus. Koestermann ()  thinks not, but Beagon ()  implies that he is our Priscus and indeed that he was able to afford Paezon precisely because of Tiberius’ lavish financial reward).  Knox ()  suggests that the case of Priscus “illustrated both the extreme sensitivities of Tiberius to literary activity and the degree to which his attitudes influenced the behavior of those who surrounded him”.  This translation includes some modifications of Woodman ().  Dowling ()  –  discusses Tiberius’ public commitment to a policy of clementia.

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generalized timeless present tense (nec occultum est) that it is easy to tell whether literary praise of an emperor is sincere or insincere. This is an extraordinary remark (which undercuts large swathes of modern scholarship), but one which has implications for the immediate context. It seems to suggest that (whatever the reality) Cominius’ poem may not even have been openly abusive, but those who convicted him read it in such a way that the surface praise veiled deeper insincerity.¹⁹ One can compare here the divergent critical opinions amongst modern scholars about the sincerity (or not) of Lucan’s celebration of Nero at Pharsalia 1.33 – 66. With Cominius, Tacitus’ comment implicitly recasts a straightforwardly offensive poem as an instance of doublespeak and suggests a literary tussle articulated at opposing ends of the spectrum of sincerity and insincerity. So, Cominius’ critics base their condemnation on the notion that Cominius in his poetry is being disingenuous, while his defender (his brother) counters by insisting on his brother’s essential sincerity as a poet. This recalls Ahl’s perceptive point while discussing Horace: “Even if the emperor catches the point, there is not a great deal he can do about it; because to admit that he has caught it is to acknowledge its accuracy”.²⁰ Of course this may not prevent later imperial vengeance further down the line, but it is one factor contributing significantly to the power of a poet’s voice. Our third poet is an intriguing figure, Mamercus Aemilius Scaurus.²¹ This man stands out because he comes from the distinguished family of the Aemilii Scauri and had a career as an orator.²² Seneca the Elder (Controuersiae 10 Pref. 2– 3) acknowledges that he had some good qualities as a speaker, but comments on his laziness and wasted talent. Tacitus is a little kinder, calling him oratorum ea aetate uberrimus “the most fertile of the orators at that time” (Annals 3.31.4). Despite having angered Tiberius (Tacitus, Annals 1.13.4), Scaurus became suffect consul in AD 21. Tacitus, however, characterizes him as a tarnished individual, calling him an opprobrium maiorum “a reproach to his ancestors” (Annals 3.66.2).²³ Tiberius’ resentment of Scaurus meant that he took a personal interest

 It is possible that the probrosum carmen was less ambivalent. For example, Mayer (a)  characterizes the offending poem as a “lampoon”.  Ahl (a) .  PIR  A .  Seneca, Suasoriae . says that with his death, the family became extinct.  Seneca, de Beneficiis . relays some choice stories about Scaurus (including one about him catching in his open mouth the menstrual flow from his slave-girls and another about him propositioning Annius Pollio for a bout of buggery). Unsurprisingly, he too compares Scaurus unfavourably with his famous ancestors.

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when he was prosecuted for treason (Annals 6.9.3 – 4), but the crunch finally comes in AD 34 (Annals 6.29.3 – 4): Mamercus dein Scaurus rursum postulatur, insignis nobilitate et orandis causis, uita probrosus. nihil hunc amicitia Seiani, sed labefecit haud minus ualidum ad exitia Macronis odium, qui easdem artes occultius exercebat detuleratque argumentum tragoediae a Scauro scriptae, additis uersibus qui in Tiberium flecterentur: uerum ab Seruilio et Cornelio accusatoribus adulterium Liuiae, magorum sacra obiectabantur. Scaurus, ut dignum ueteribus Aemiliis, damnationem antiit, hortante Sextia uxore, quae incitamentum mortis et particeps fuit. Next Mamercus Scaurus was arraigned again, distinguished for his nobility, and at pleading cases but in his life a scandal. He was undermined not by Sejanus’ friendship, but by the hatred (no less effective as regards extermination) of Macro, who operated the same practices more secretly and had denounced the plot of a tragedy written by Scaurus with additional verses which could be twisted against Tiberius. But the imputations cast at him by the accusers Servilius and Cornelius were of adultery with Livia and of magicians’ rites. Scaurus, as was worthy of the old Aemilii, forestalled condemnation at the urging of his wife, Sextia, whose incitement was as partner in his death.

It is striking here that we only find out that Scaurus is a poet at his very final appearance in the historical narrative, when we already have a deeply entrenched sense of his flawed morals. And far from Scaurus’ poetry having any beneficial impact on his contemporaries, his tragedy is opportunistically exploited by Macro as a weapon against its author. Tacitus seems to be deliberately vague about the details of the tragedy.²⁴ In contrast, Dio (58.24) says that Scaurus’ play was the Atreus and that Tiberius had taken offense at a line where a character had advised somebody to tolerate the selfishness of the ruler. Since Tiberius thought that Scaurus was aligning him with Atreus, he responded by making Scaurus an ‘Ajax’ and forcing him to commit suicide.²⁵ This version of the story is different from Tacitus’ account, whose formulation (additis uersibus, with the ablative absolute masking the agent) even allows for the possibility that a third party had interpolated the offending ambiguous lines of poetry into Scaurus’ harmless original play. If that was not the scenario, then Macro still does damage by denouncing the plot and then enumerating lines of verse susceptible to praua interpretatio. As Goldberg observes: “it is impossible to know whether the play was political by design or whether Scaurus merely fell

 Woodman ()  suggests that Tacitus thought it pedantic to give the title of the tragedy, but the omission perhaps also diminishes the status of the tragedy as a politically charged piece of writing.  Cf. Suetonius, Tiberius . for an unnamed poet (Scaurus?) who slandered Agamemnon in a tragedy. He was then put to death and his work was destroyed.

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victim to Macro’s malicious imaginings”.²⁶ Nonetheless, it seems a strong possibility that Tacitus is nudging readers towards the latter reading. Certainly, in Tacitus’ account, Scaurus’ status as a poet emerges very belatedly and is almost incidental to his characterization elsewhere. In the end, the contentious tragedy is not even included in the list of charges, effectively and expressively eviscerating it as a piece of charged political writing. Finally, we have the case of Sextius Paconianus. This man, who had served as praetor, was an associate of Sejanus and the audax maleficus who had helped him concoct a plot against Caligula to which Tacitus refers in the narrative of AD 32 (Annals 6.3.4). This apparently caused his imprisonment, and he languished in jail for several years until AD 35, when Tacitus explains (Annals 6.39.1): Paconianus in carcere ob carmina illic in principem factitata strangulatus est, “Paconianus was strangled in prison for poems devised there against the princeps”. So although Paconianus meets a brutal death by strangulation because of his steady stream of poems composed in prison against Tiberius, that belatedly aggressive poetry serves as the excuse for his removal, not the fundamental cause. The truth appears to be that although he survives initially because he cravenly turns informer, he eventually outlives his usefulness: the poetry is simply pulling the trigger of a gun which is already aimed against him. The composition of hostile poems comes when he has nothing to lose except his life. Indeed, the impression given is that he is almost trying to catch Tiberius’ attention by this poetry, so that he can be put out of his misery. Outside Tacitus, Paconianus is virtually invisible. The fourth-century AD grammarian Diomedes quotes four lines from him about the four cardinal winds (in a poem written presumably before his imprisonment), cited because of the contrived recurrence of nouns with vowel endings in –o. Rather like Clutorius Priscus, Paconianus seems to be an unlucky opportunist, who would probably have been put to death anyway because of his association with Sejanus, regardless of his poetry.²⁷ So, our four Tiberian poets (Clutorius Priscus, Gaius Cominius, Mamercus Scaurus, Sextius Paconianus) seem rather a grubby bunch. Three of them are virtually complete unknowns, whose poetry has almost completely sunk without trace, while the fourth (Mamercus Scaurus) is a morally dubious aristocrat who fails to live up to the standards set by his famous ancestors. As personalities, they appear to be weak figures, who follow the prevailing political wind as best they can, but who seem ill-equipped to cope. The equestrian Clutorius Pris-

 Goldberg () .  Courtney ()  –  calls Paconianus “an unsavoury follower of Sejanus” and with the fragments of his poetry he compares Ovid, Tristia .. – .

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cus tries preemptively to please Tiberius but gets it wrong; Gaius Cominius, another equestrian, has to be rescued by his more successful senatorial brother; Mamercus Scaurus, a friend of Sejanus, is an opportunistic prosecutor (Annals 3.66) with a morally dubious lifestyle, but he is no match for Macro; and Paconianus gambles that the power of Sejanus will prevail – and loses. Their poetry sparks the dangers that they face, but for better or worse, it fails to have much, if any, impact on their immediate social and cultural setting. They are not even pale imitations of Maternus from the Dialogus, and they seem to have been neither great poets nor great political operators. Of course, Tacitus’ snapshots of these little-known poets may simply reflect reality. As Knox observes, there were “no great names in the roll call, little to suggest that later generations of readers urgently reserved a portion of their libraries to the Tiberian poets”.²⁸ At least under Tiberius, dissenting voices of the poets seem for the most part to have been either silent or ineffectual, and Tacitus’ representation of these four poets underscores this point. Yet that impression may be artificially skewed by his notorious silence about Ovid, whose death is not even mentioned.²⁹ That may be because Tacitus essentially saw Ovid (and his fate) as a ‘relic’ of the Augustan principate, or perhaps because Ovid, who had actively turned his back on a public career, was therefore an isolated outsider like the poet Saleius Bassus. Or as Knox puts it: “Ovid’s misfortune, which was of no account in the historical record, held no interest for Tacitus in this context”.³⁰ That, however, may not quite capture the nuances of the situation. The fact that Tacitus in his Latin so readily and subtly redeploys Ovidian language at significant moments suggests to me that he is fundamentally sympathetic to the expressive power and subversive ideology of Ovid’s poetry.³¹ And Tacitus is certainly counter-suggestible: the fact that people might have expected to read an obituary of Ovid in his narrative may be precisely why he does not supply one.

 Knox () . Blänsdorf () includes fragments of hardly any Tiberian poets.  Syme () .  Knox () .  See for example Ash ()  on Tacitus borrowing from Ovid in nec quemquam saepius quam Verginium omnis seditio infestauit (Histories ..), where the verb (a hapax legomenon in the surviving Tacitean corpus) colorfully casts Verginius as being at the mercy of Scylla and Charybdis (i. e. the mutinous soldiers).

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Poetry in Motion: The Neronian Poets In Tacitus’ narrative, it is only during Nero’s principate that a more intriguing and varied range of named poets enters the scene and that the potential of poetry to serve as a political ‘weapon’ starts to become clear. The first case involves the young prince Britannicus during the celebration of the Saturnalia in December AD 55, when Nero spitefully tries to exploit the opportunity to humiliate him (Annals 13.15.2):³² ubi Britannico iussit exsurgeret progressusque in medium cantum aliquem inciperet, inrisum ex eo sperans pueri sobrios quoque conuictus, nedum temulentos ignorantis, ille constanter exorsus est carmen, quo euolutum eum sede patria rebusque summis significabatur. unde orta miseratio manifestior, quia dissimulationem nox et lasciuia exemerat. …but when he ordered Britannicus to rise, proceed into the middle, and begin a song (thereby hoping for ridicule of a boy ignorant of even sober, to say nothing of drunken gatherings), the other embarked on a poem in which it was indicated that he had been turned out of his paternal abode and the supremacy. Hence there arose a pity all the more evident because night and its recklessness had removed dissembling.

What is striking here is how Britannicus (only fourteen at the time) brilliantly turns the tables on Nero by exploiting the opportunity provided by the spontaneous (semi‐)public performance of his carmen: as in the case of Maternus, the recital of the poem by the living poet is just as important, if not more so, than any written artifact.³³ Moreover, in an intimidating situation, Britannicus deploys significatio, whereby aliud latens et auditori quasi inueniendum “something is hidden and has to be found, as it were, by the listener” (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.65).³⁴ He thereby calls Nero’s bluff and puts him in an impossible situation: either Nero acknowledges the figured speech and thus implicitly accepts the truth of the allegations, or he pretends not to see them and so risks looking naïve and isolated in a setting where everyone else clearly understands the figured speech. It is precisely because the audience for the performance consists of both Nero and a wider group that Britannicus’ gambit works – however briefly. As Dressler observes, “interpretability is at least as much a matter of externality

 Bartsch ()  –  discusses the passage.  Britannicus seems to have been quite good at snubbing Nero: cf. Suetonius, Nero . where he pointedly calls Nero ‘Ahenobarbus’ after his adoption, thereby tacitly denying the legitimacy of his new status.  See Ahl (b)  – . Schmitzer ()  discusses this scene well.

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as of internality—as much a matter of context as of intention”.³⁵ In terms of the poem itself, Narducci suggests that the mythological subject matter for Britannicus’ recital might have involved the conflict between Eteocles and Polynices for taking power after Oedipus’ death.³⁶ Schmitzer points specifically to the closing scene of Seneca’s Phoenissae as a relevant intertext, with Iocasta potentially to be read as an Agrippina figure, Eteocles as Nero, and Polynices as Britannicus.³⁷ Tacitus, however, omits the precise details of the play and of how the figured speech works, leaving us instead with the memorable image of Britannicus the performer using his poem on one specific occasion to undermine Nero’s authority. The poem itself matters much less than its politically engaged performer. Or to borrow Ahl’s assessment of Lucan’s Pharsalia, “It is a political act as well as a political poem”.³⁸ Our next Neronian poet, Antistius Sosianus, is rather less impressive than Britannicus. We first meet him briefly in AD 56 in his role of tribune of the plebs, intervening to secure the release of some actors’ supporters who had been arrested (Annals 13.28.1). Then he crops up at the center of a maiestas case in AD 62 (Annals 14.48.1): P. Mario L. Afinio consulibus Antistius praetor, quem in tribunatu plebis licenter egisse memoraui, probrosa aduersus principem carmina factitauit uulgauitque celebri conuiuio dum apud Ostorium Scapulam epulatur. exim a Cossutiano Capitone, qui nuper senatorium ordinem precibus Tigellini soceri sui receperat, maiestatis delatus est. With Publius Marius and Lucius Afinius as consuls, Antistius, a praetor whose licentious behavior during his tribunate I have recalled, scribbled slanderous poems against the princeps and publicized them at a populous party while he was dining at the house of Ostorius Scapula. Thereupon Cossutianus Capito, who had recently recovered his senatorial rank through the pleas of his father-in-law Tigellinus, denounced him for treason.

Scholars have commented helpfully here on the suggestive dialogue with our earlier case of Clutorius Priscus.³⁹ So, Antistius too gets himself into trouble for  Dressler () .  Narducci ().  Schmitzer ()  – , who resists imposing a direct allegorical reading on the Phoenissae, but allows for seeing the incomplete play as “a mythological commentary” on the conflict between Nero and Britannicus. Tarrant ()  –  follows Fitch () in suggesting that the Thyestes and Phoenissae were late plays of Seneca, approximately dateable to AD  – . Nisbet () agrees, but reaches this conclusion by a different route. Kohn () remains cautious about identifying Seneca the tragedian with Seneca the Younger. Even so, the Phoenissae at least demonstrates the potential for poetry on a mythical topic to be read in a figured way.  Ahl () .  Ginsburg () is invaluable.

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reading out his poetry, this time at a dinner-party hosted by Ostorius Scapula. Yet unlike Priscus’ ill-judged and ill-timed carmen of lamentation about Drusus, Antistius’ poetry seems to be straightforwardly hostile to the emperor. The most significant point about the prosecution prompted by his poetry, however, is the spirited response that it provokes from Thrasea Paetus, who intervenes vigorously to defend Antistius: libertas Thraseae seruitium aliorum rupit “The free-speaking of Thrasea exploded the servitude of the others” (Annals 14.49.1). Unlike Clutorius Priscus, who is executed, Antistius gets away with banishment as a result of Thrasea’s intervention. This is an intriguing sequence. The implication is that Antistius’ poems were relatively frivolous, even if they were slanderous, and that he had not expected his poetry to prompt a treason charge. All the same, the poems do prompt a significant and unexpected intervention from Thrasea Paetus, who agrees that Antistius is guilty, but who is not prepared to stand by and see the senate and the emperor ride roughshod over the imposition of appropriate legal penalties. Here we have an instance where the poetry is important because it inadvertently triggers a desirable and morally robust response from a vigilant senator. It is not the intrinsic quality of the poetry or the moral caliber of Antistius as a person which matters (both are dubious), but the forceful intervention it provokes from Thrasea Paetus which is important, since a matter of principle is at stake. This point is further underscored by two subsequent details. First, the fact that Antistius himself is cast as an unprincipled man, prepared to inform on others to secure himself a return from exile (Annals 16.14), but despite Antistius’ personality, Thrasea intervened anyway. Second the fact that Nero, still bearing a grudge that Thrasea Paetus secured the milder penalty of exile for Antistius, sees that as a persuasive reason to eliminate Thrasea Paetus (Annals 16.21.2). This reminds us of the high cost of Thrasea’s intervention. Antistius may be a flawed man and the author of some unremarkable poems, but he is still the catalyst for the intervention of Thrasea Paetus, one of the political giants of Nero’s principate – and so begins a chain of events which ultimately leads to his death. Hot on the heels of the Antistius case, in the same year (AD 62), we encounter our next poet, Seneca the Younger, now in trouble after the death of Burrus has broken his power and the sharks begin to circle (Annals 14.52.3): obiciebant etiam eloquentiae laudem uni sibi adsciscere et carmina crebrius factitare, postquam Neroni amor eorum uenisset. They cast against him [Seneca] too the charge that he was arrogating praise for eloquence to himself exclusively and was scribbling poems more frequently, now that Nero’s love of them had emerged.

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Here we see Seneca using poetry preemptively as a defensive weapon to engage in captatio beneuolentiae of his mercurial former pupil (as he did with the Apocolocyntosis), while the unnamed critics try in turn to undermine his gambit by unmasking the strategy. This is poetry which lies at the center of a complex web of power-struggles, as conflicting forces seek to exploit the poetry as a political weapon (whether defensive or offensive). Seneca’s writing is a dynamic force here whose status is up for grabs, rather in the way that Priscus’ carmen of lamentation about Drusus could potentially have triggered either positive or negative consequences for its author. Again, the relationship of the poetry with its immediate political context is for Tacitus really more significant than the poems themselves. That said, there has been some disagreement about which carmina are in the spotlight here. Syme takes this as a veiled reference to the tragedies.⁴⁰ Yet it is difficult to see how the late plays Thyestes and Phoenissae (given their subject matter and tone) could safely be used as a way to ensnare Nero’s affections. It seems much more likely that the carmina are some kind of lighter verses catering to the emperor’s tastes, as Ker suggests.⁴¹ We can think here too of the after dinner ‘poetry slam’ events, where Nero invites talented but unknown young men (including Lucan?) to bring along their own unfinished poems (or to make them up on the spot) so that the inspired participants can supply lines and verses for other poets’ unfinished compositions (Annals 14.16.1).⁴² The heady atmosphere of frenzied poetic creativity must have been like that memorably captured in Catullus 50, the poem to Licinius Calvus. Certainly, the setting sounds far more charged and exciting than the staid and settled occasion of the formal recitatio. ⁴³ Tacitus’ assessment of the poetry, as bearing the hallmarks of contributions from multiple, living, poetic voices (non impetu et instinctu nec ore uno fluens “flowing as they do with neither impulse nor inspiration nor a uniform movement”, Annals 14.16.1) is perceptive and vivid. No doubt the excitement stemmed not just from the aesthetic creativity, but also from the huge scope for spontaneous lines of poetry (uncensored by their creators in the heat of the moment) to provoke danger. In an instant, one badly judged line could brutally restore the status quo whereby Nero resumes his normal role as emperor and promptly drops his temporary liberating mem-

 Syme () .  Ker () , n. , citing Pliny, Epistle .. –  on Seneca as a famous author of uersiculi and the study of Dingel ().  See Sullivan ()  on such occasions.  For a lovely example where the stuffy and formal atmosphere of the recitatio hall causes the reciter (Claudius) to have an attack of irrepressible giggles when a fat man sits down and inadvertently breaks the bench at the start of the recitation, see Suetonius, Claudius ..

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bership of this explosively creative little band of poets. At any rate, the important point is that in the highly-charged setting of Nero’s household, poetry does not exist in a vacuum or on the margins. Instead, in a living performative context and during a principate notoriously shaped by display, it can serve, for Seneca and others, as a direct pathway to secure the emperor’s good will (or conversely, his resentment).⁴⁴ We are a long way now from Aper’s isolated “woods and groves” (Dialogus 9.6) as the locale for poetic composition. Of course, Nero himself wrote poetry, and Tacitus grudgingly praises his youthful efforts in this sphere (Annals 13.3.3 aliquando carminibus pangendis inesse sibi elementa doctrinae ostendebat “sometimes in the composing of poems he showed that he had elements of learning”). Yet if we only had Tacitus, we would know hardly anything substantive about the nature of Nero’s poetic output: as Champlin observes, Nero’s creative range as a writer was broad, “running from mordant satire to hymns to a proposed epic on Roman history, and almost certainly included the appropriate monologues, arias, and libretti for his performances on stage”.⁴⁵ One pointed comment from Tacitus (Annals 14.16.1 carminum quoque studium adfectauit “he adopted an enthusiasm for poetry too”) even makes Nero seem insincere about reading and writing poetry (cf. Domitian at Histories 4.86.2). Compared with our other sources, Tacitus really plays down Nero’s status as a creative writer of poetry in his own right, for example, by marginalizing poems which Nero unambiguously composed as author, rather than recited (cf. Annals 16.4.2, Nero … primo carmen in scaeno recitat, “Nero at first recites a poem on stage”). Tacitus accentuates instead Nero’s identity as an empty performer (whether through lyre playing, acting tragedies, or dancing pantomimes) and enacts a kind of damnatio memoriae on him as a writer.⁴⁶ The strong gravitational pull of Nero’s court on literary talents means that a blurring of boundaries in poetic compositions between the political and the private was almost inevitable. This ‘poetry in motion’ at the imperial centre, once unleashed, made it impossible for a poet to retreat again to the safety of the mar-

 The importance of the living, performative context for Tacitus may be suggested by the striking formulation factitare + carmina (five times in the Annals, all – apart from one – in a Neronian setting, and occurring nowhere else in extant Latin): it is the repeated frequentative activity of the poet that matters, almost more than the poems themselves.  Champlin () .  See Courtney ()  –  and Blänsdorf ()  –  for the testimonia and fragments. Suetonius, Nero  is kinder about Nero’s talents, clarifying that he has looked directly at Nero’s notebooks where the annotations on the lines of poetry in his own hand clearly mark it out as his own. On Nero’s poetry, see Baldwin ().

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gins. Lucan discovers this to his cost, when Nero’s efforts to censor his poetry drive him to join the Pisonian conspiracy (Annals 15.49.3): Lucanum propriae causae accendebant, quod famam carminum eius premebat Nero prohibueratque ostentare, uanus adsimulatione ⁴⁷ 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.

Here attempted censorship of poetry becomes a real political driving force and a potential trigger for historical change, pushing Lucan to adopt a course of action which, though ultimately unsuccessful, could have resulted in a political assassination and a new emperor. Granted, as a motivation for joining a conspiracy, Lucan’s anger at the attempted suppression of his poetry may perhaps seem self-centered and unedifying, but it is a real stimulus all the same – and one prompted by Nero’s own insecurities and associated actions, which had a real impact on Lucan’s ability to function as a poet. Nor is it an isolated instance of poetry having a part to play in the evolution of the conspiracy: another participant, Afranius Quintianus, is prompted to act by Nero’s own abusive poem casting aspersions on his masculinity (Annals 15.49.4).⁴⁸ This response might seem excessive, but the abusive poem plays a causal role in Quintianus joining the plot. After the conspiracy fails and one by one the participants meet their deaths, Tacitus finally puts the spotlight on Lucan (Annals 15.70): exim Annaei Lucani caedem imperat. is profluente sanguine ubi frigescere pedes manusque et paulatim ab extremis cedere spiritum feruido adhuc et compote mentis pectore intellegit, recordatus carmen a se compositum quo uulneratum militem per eius modi mortis imaginem obisse tradiderat, uersus ipsos rettulit eaque illi suprema uox fuit. Thereupon he commanded the slaughter of Annaeus Lucanus. As his blood poured forth and he realized that his feet and hands were chilling and that the pulse was gradually withdrawing from his extremities, yet his breast was still warm and in control of his mind, he recalled a poetic composition of his in which he had transmitted that a wounded soldier

 If Ahl ()  is right that Lucan, in his lost poem de Incendio Vrbis, held Nero responsible for the fire of Rome in AD  and that this lay behind Nero’s ban, then Tacitus’ choice of the metaphorical verb accendo seems a caustic dig at the poet by alluding to the basic cause of the feud with Nero. The formulation propriae causae may involve some wordplay too – ‘his own reasons’, yes, but also reasons which Lucan had himself provoked.  Nero seems to have enjoyed concocting insulting poetry. Suetonius, Nero . cites Nero’s poem which includes criticism of King Mithridates, while Domitian . mentions Nero’s poem Luscio (‘One-Eyed Man’) about Clodius Pollio.

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had met a form of death of the same sort; he repeated the actual verses, and they were his final utterance.

Turpin proposes that in the suicide, “Lucan to some extent redeems himself, after betraying his own mother, by dying as the proud author of a great poem”.⁴⁹ That may be so, but the implications of this scene are perhaps more complex. So, Lucan’s deliberate efforts to fuse his own identity with that of his poetic creation, the wounded soldier, recall the reason why the potentes are so irritated by Maternus in the Dialogus. That was because of the degree to which the (living) poet Maternus identified with his (dead) subject Cato, but here we have a twist, as the (soon to be dead) poet Lucan identifies with his (dying) subject, the soldier, in such a way as to immortalize them both. In this connection, it is striking that Suetonius in his short Vita Lucani hyperbolically calls Lucan paene signifer Pisonianae coniurationis “virtually the standard-bearer of the Pisonian conspiracy”. That military metaphor suggests that Lucan’s gambit to be identified as a soldier through his poetry had some impact. What is also powerful here is the performative element: once again, Tacitus focuses on the poet’s unique performance even more than the poetry – a point further underscored by the Suetonian Vita Lucani, where one of Lucan’s final acts before killing himself is to write a letter to his father containing corrections for some of his verses. Yet there is no performance. In Tacitus, Lucan’s ingenious fusion of identities (himself as civilian poet and his military subject) is meant to inspire and to serve as raw material with which future writers can produce their own critical narratives of Nero. Lucan’s poetry certainly has its own part to play in Tacitus’ construction of the bleak history of Nero’s principate. Yet it is crucial too that the actual lines of verse are conspicuously not quoted uerbatim. ⁵⁰ In excising them from the suicide scene, Tacitus is pointedly retaining authorial control and making it clear that as a historian, he is not following Lucan’s script uncritically. Our final named poet before the Annals breaks off is Curtius Montanus, who first crops up in AD 66 in an indignant outburst from Eprius Marcellus fulminating against Thrasea Paetus, but also berating Helvidius Priscus, Paconius Agrippinus, and Curtius Montanus, who was detestanda carmina factitantem “scribbling his execrable poems” (Annals 16.28.1). The implication here is that Montanus was some kind of satirist or writer of vitriolic epigrams, although it  Turpin () .  Various suggestions have been made about which part of Lucan’s Pharsalia is meant here (. – , the death of Lycidas, is often cited). Yet, as Ker ()  n.  correctly observes, “Tacitus’ wording may suggest a stand-alone poem”.

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is striking that there is no mention of him directly attacking the emperor, which one might have expected Marcellus to have made clear. No misdemeanor is mentioned apart from the poems. Eprius Marcellus’ fiery assault on Montanus stirs unease in the senators, who quietly reflect that it is unfounded (Annals 16.29.2): enimuero Montanum probae iuuentae neque famosi carminis, quia protulerit ingenium, extorrem agi “And as for Montanus, a young man of probity rather than of defamatory poetry, he was being banished as an outcast because he had proclaimed his talent”.⁵¹ Here we see another tussle over how to react to particular poems: Eprius Marcellus sees them as defamatory (without saying how), whereas the senators cast Curtius Montanus as a talented young poet who echoes Lucan in stirring Nero’s jealousy. In the event, Montanus is let off relatively lightly, being forgiven for his father’s sake, provided that he does not stay in politics (Annals 16.33.1). It would be intriguing to know whether Montanus the poet from the Annals is the same Montanus, the outspoken orator who crops up in the Histories. Early in Vespasian’s principate, Montanus proposes in the senate that Piso’s memory should be honored as well as Galba’s (Histories 4.40), but he is most conspicuous for a bitter and sarcastic speech attacking the Neronian prosecutor Aquilius Regulus (Histories 4.42).⁵² If he is the same man as our Montanus, then Tacitus’ readers would know that this attempt in AD66 to stifle Montanus’ political career failed, and that the young poet would evolve into an articulate and engaged politician in his own right. Thus he may be another illustration of Tacitus’ pervasive interests in living poets, who actively engage with the world of politics and power and refuse to live in an artistic vacuum.

Conclusions Quintilian famously describes the genre of history as proxima poetis “closest to the poets” (Institutio Oratoria 10.1.31). This is an intriguing formulation, since as

 This distinction between an upright life and grubby poetry implicitly triggers a defense used by the poets (Catullus . – ; Ovid, Tristia .; Martial ..).  See Martin () on this speech, conspicuous for its sustained deployment of Ciceronian rhythm (which Tacitus plays down elsewhere). Martin believes that the Histories Montanus is the same as the Annals one. The main reason why critics think that we might here have a father (Histories) and son (Annals) is that the son would be too young to speak so early in a debate in the senate (Koestermann () ; Chilver and Townend () ). Yet given the unusually turbulent backdrop to the debate in the Histories (including the young Domitian presiding, rather than his absent father), this does not seem a conclusive argument. Heubner ()  is similarly cautious. For more on Regulus, see Ash ().

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a yardstick for history, he introduces (human) poetae, “poets”, rather than (abstract) poiesis, “poetry”. So, how close is Tacitus to his poets? And where does this analysis of Tacitus’ portrayal of named poets leave us? Despite the undeniably poetic texture and allusive quality of Tacitus’ distinctive Latin, which is underpinned and enriched by allusions to poetic texts, he is still comparatively selective about which named practitioners of poetry appear as active figures in his narratives. We have followed the stories under Tiberius of four relatively undistinguished poets (Clutorius Priscus, Gaius Cominius, Mamercus Scaurus, Sextius Paconianus), three of whom end up dead, when they promptly cease to be interesting: certainly, their poetry does not bring them any posthumous fame. In a curious way, the nature, genre, and quality of our quartet’s poetry seem almost incidental to their individual fates, which (for the three dead poets) are brought about largely by a dangerous combination of formidable enemies, folly, and bad luck. The only poet to survive, Gaius Cominius, achieves this through the intervention of his influential brother, a senator. Under Nero, the dynamics have shifted, so that poetry now conspicuously takes center-stage in the imperial domus. In what survives of the last hexad of the Annals, we meet a rather more distinguished and varied group of poets (Britannicus, Antistius Sosianus, Seneca, Lucan, Curtius Montanus). They all come from a higher social stratum than most of the Tiberian poets, and a conspicuous strand which runs through many of their individual stories involves the politicized performance of their work, either as a prelude to danger (Britannicus, Antistius Sosianus) or as a belated form of revenge (Lucan). That may make us think back to the Ur-poet, Maternus. So, it seems that Tacitus is drawn above all to living poets in the landscape of his narrative and to the unique performative contexts in which they bring their poetry to life and have an impact on the ‘outside’ world of politics and power. The written artifacts of their poetic texts (and the inner world and fine-granulation of the poems) are less important to Tacitus, at least as an overt focal-point for his historical narrative, than the poets themselves. If the spheres of poetry and politics fail to intersect or clash, then Tacitus is happy to keep poets at arm’s length. A case in point is the brief appearance of the epic poet Silius Italicus, who is named as a witness for a meeting which took place between Vitellius and Vespasian’s brother Sabinus in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine (Histories 3.65.2). Even though Tacitus certainly uses Silian-flavored Latin when it suits him to do so, he says nothing about Silius’ status as an epic poet at this moment.⁵³ Why would he though? Tacitus’ interest lies in

 Ash ()  considers Tacitus’ expression lubrica ad mutandam fidem classe “since the fleet was ready at the least impulse to change its allegiance” (Histories ..) as an elegant

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the dynamic intersection between poets and those in power (whether emperors or figures lower down the hierarchy), not in ossified and static poetic texts for their own sake.⁵⁴

Bibliography Ahl, F.M. 1971. “Lucan’s de Incendio Vrbis, Epistulae ex Campania, and Nero’s Ban”, TAPhA 102: 1 – 27. — 1984a. “The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius”, ANRW II 32.1: 40 – 124. — 1984b. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105: 174 – 208. — 1993. “Form Empowered: Lucan’s Pharsalia”, in: A.J. Boyle (ed.), Roman Epic. London/New York. Ash, R. 2007. Tacitus Histories II. Cambridge. — 2010. “Rhoxolani Blues (Tacitus Histories 1.79): Virgil’s Scythian Ethnography Revisited”, in: A.J. Woodman and J.F. Miller (eds.), Proxima Poetis: Latin Historiography and Poetry in the Early Empire. Leiden, 141 – 54. — 2013. “Drip-feed Invective: Pliny, Self-fashioning, and the Regulus Letters”, in: A. Marmodoro (ed.), The Author’s Voice in Classical Antiquity. Oxford, 207 – 32. Baldwin, B. 2005. “Nero the Poet”, in: C. Deroux (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History XII, Collection Latomus 287: 307 – 18. Bartsch, S. 1994. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA/London. Baxter, R.T.S. 1971. “Virgil’s Influence on Tacitus Histories 3”, CPh 66: 93 – 107. — 1972. “Virgil’s Influence on Tacitus in Annals 1 and 2”, CPh 67: 246 – 69. Beagon, M. 2005. The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal. Oxford. Blänsdorf, J. 2011 (ed.). Fragmenta poetarum Latinorum epicorum et lyricorum. Berlin/New York. Champlin, E. 2003. Nero. Cambridge, MA/London. Chilver, G.E.F. and G.B. Townend. 1985. A Historical Commentary on Tacitus Histories IV and V. Oxford. Courtney, E. 1993. The Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford. Dingel, J. 2007. Senecas Epigramme und andere Gedichte aus der Anthologia Latina. Heidelberg.

allusion to Silius’ portrait of the lovestruck water nymph Agylle at Punica . – , flore capi iuuenem primaeuo lubrica mentem | nympha, “the nymph’s young mind was quick to be captivated by young beauty”.  I thank Chris Pelling for comments on an earlier draft. I offer this paper as a small token of gratitude to my formidable friend and colleague Fred Ahl. Nobody has done more than Fred to bring Latin poetry to life for contemporary audiences. At one of our earliest meetings in , Fred kindly gave to me a copy of his translation of Seneca’s Phaedra. Since then, the experience of hearing Fred read to audiences from his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid vividly reminds me that he is as much the poet as he is the Classicist.

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Dowling, M. 2006. Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World. Ann Arbor, MI. Dressler, A. 2013. “Poetics of Conspiracy and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus”, ClAnt 32: 1 – 34. Fitch, J.G. 1981. “Sense-pauses and Relative Dating in Seneca, Sophocles, and Shakespeare”, AJPh 102: 289 – 307. Gallia, A. 2009. “Potentes and Potentia in Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus”, TAPhA 139: 169 – 206. Ginsburg, J. 1986. “Speech and Allusion in Tacitus Annals 3.49 – 51 and 14.48 – 9”, AJPh 107: 525 – 41. Goldberg, S.M. 1996. “The Fall and Rise of Roman Tragedy”, TAPhA 126: 265 – 86. Heubner, H. 1976. P. Cornelius Tacitus die Historien Band IV. Heidelberg. Joseph, T. 2012. Tacitus the Epic Successor: Virgil, Lucan, and the Narrative of Civil War in the Histories. Leiden. Keitel, E. 2008. “The Virgilian Reminiscences at Tacitus Histories 3.84.4”, CQ 58: 705 – 8. Ker, J. 2009. The Deaths of Seneca. Oxford. Knox, P. 2004. “The Poet and the Second Prince: Ovid in the Age of Tiberius”, MAAR 49: 1 – 20. Koestermann, E. 1963. Cornelius Tacitus Annalen Band I. Buch 1 – 3. Heidelberg. — 1968. Cornelius Tacitus Annalen Band IV. Buch 14 – 16. Heidelberg. Kohn, T.D. 2003. “Who Wrote Seneca’s Plays?”, CW 96: 271 – 80. Luce, T.J. 1986. “Tacitus’ Conception of Historical Change: The Problem of Discovering the Historian’s Opinions”, in: I.S. Moxon, J.D. Smart and A.J. Woodman (eds.), Past Perspectives: Studies in Greek and Roman Historical Writing. Cambridge, 143 – 57. Martin, R.H. 1967. “The Speech of Curtius Montanus: Tacitus Histories 4.42”, JRS 57: 109 – 14. Martin, R.H. and A.J. Woodman 1989 (eds.). Tacitus Annals IV. Cambridge. — 1996. (eds.). The Annals of Tacitus Book 3. Cambridge. Mayer, R. 2003a. “Persona Problems: the Literary Persona in Antiquity Revisited”, MD 50: 55 – 80. — 2003b. “A Lost Allusion Recovered: Tacitus Histories 3.37.1 and Homer Iliad 19.301 – 2”, CQ 53: 313 – 15. Miller, N.P. 1986. “Virgil and Tacitus Again”, PVS 18: 87 – 106. Narducci, E. 1998. “Nerone, Britannico e le antiche discordie fraterne (nota a Tacito, ” Annales ”, XIII 15,3 e 17,2; con una osservazione su Erodiano III 13,3)”, Maia 50: 479 – 88. Nisbet, R.G.M. 2008. “The Dating of Seneca’s Tragedies, with Special Reference to Thyestes”, in: J.G. Fitch (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Seneca. Oxford, 348 – 71 (=R.G.M. Nisbet (1990), Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 6: 95 – 114). Pelling, C. 2010. “Tacitus’ Personal Voice”, in: A.J. Woodman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus. Cambridge, 147 – 67. Putnam, M.C.J. 1989. “Virgil and Tacitus Annals 1.10”, CQ 39: 563 – 4. Sailor, D. 2008. Writing and Empire in Tacitus. Cambridge. Schmitzer, U. 2005. “Der Tod auf offener Szene: Tacitus über Nero und die Ermordung des Britannicus”, Hermes 133: 337 – 57. Strunk, T. 2010. “Offending the Powerful: Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus and Safe Criticism”, Mnemosyne 63: 241 – 67.

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Sullivan, J.P. 1968. “Petronius, Seneca, and Lucan: A Neronian Literary Feud?”, TAPhA 99: 453 – 67. Syme, R. 1958. Tacitus. Oxford. Tarrant, R.J. 1985. Seneca’s Thyestes. Atlanta, GA. Turpin, W. 2008. “Tacitus, Stoic exempla, and the praecipuum munus annalium”, ClAnt 27: 359 – 404. Woodman, A.J. 2004. Tacitus The Annals. Indianapolis, IN. — 2006. “Tiberius and the Taste of Power: The Year 33 in Tacitus”, CQ 56: 175 – 89.

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Nominal Intelligence: Conspiracy, Prosopography, and the Secret of Horace, Odes 2.10 Summary: By triangulating Frederick Ahl’s contribution to the study of Roman poetry with earlier modern and later postmodern studies of Roman history and literature, this article explores the controversial scholarly suggestion that Horace’s poem of the “Golden Mean,” Odes 2.10, is implicated in a conspiracy to topple Augustus in 23 BCE. Detecting a prefiguration of Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” in Nisbet and Hubbard’s and Ronald Syme’s prosopographical treatments of the poem, the article exploits rumors that Syme was involved in intelligence and posits a model of the text as an active site of ongoing intrigue, comprising codes and aliases in the fashion of a ‘kerygma’ and demanding a tactical or ‘partisan’ approach to ancient literature. Keywords: Horace, Odes; Odes 2.10; decorum; hermeneutics of suspicion; Ronald Syme; prosopography; conspiracy; kerygma; Varro Murena; Augustan/anti-Augustan Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? – Mao Tse-tung 1966, 12

Introduction: Figured Speech, Prosopography, and the Partisan of the Truth “It is easier for a government to defeat a conspiracy than to prove its existence.”¹ So begins the few pages of trenchant prosopography that Ronald Syme devoted to the mystery of the addressee of Horace, Odes 2.10. In this poem, the poet coins the famous slogan of the Golden Mean (aurea mediocritas) in the midst of “a string of nine moral precepts,” which, David West continues, “it is no easy matter to make…into a poem.”² Does anything else distinguish this poem of mediocrity? Syme did not think so, and thus disagreed with Nisbet and Hubbard who uncharacteristically introduce the poem with a veritable epyllion of historical

 Syme () .  West () .

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intrigue.³ A manuscript superscription reads “To Licinius Murena, that the middle way of life is best”; Maecenas’ brother-in-law is identified in Velleius as ‘L. Murena’;⁴ Dio makes a mistake about the year, but recounts a conspiracy around the time of the second Augustan settlement, which involved a Likinios Mourêna. ⁵ Combining these and other prosopographical details, Nisbet and Hubbard follow the tradition and identify the addressee of Horace’s ode, a certain “Licinius,” as none other than Maecenas’s “polyonomous” affine, Terentius Varro Murena, who, as consul, conspired against Augustus in 23 BCE, was deposed, and executed.⁶ There is no way of knowing whether Horace’s ‘Licinius’ was that Murena, and Syme’s dictum applies as much to the procedure of the modern prosopographer as to ancient attempts to uncover conspiracies.⁷ In this paper, I argue that the ambivalence of Horace’s ode to moderation reflects the ambivalence of signification and interpretation in general: in other words, meaning in general, and certainly that “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree,” which Pound identified as “literature,” may only arise in the utterance whose full significance resists demonstration.⁸ Further, the possibility that Horace’s language is evasive in this way endows it with an air of conspiracy that historical context may or may not substantiate, raising the possibility that what Frederick Ahl first identified, following Quintilian, as “figured speech” (significatio) may appear earlier than thought, not only in the late Augustan period, when Stephen Hinds has suggested something like it is at work in Ovid’s exile poetry, but also at the heart of ‘Golden Age’ Augustanism.⁹ Ahl almost suggested as much in the piece that will be my touchstone throughout what follows, “The Horse and the Rider: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry.”¹⁰

 Nisbet and Hubbard ()  – , cf., e. g., Nisbet and Hubbard ()  on Sestius.  All translations throughout are mine; the text of Horace is Shackleton Bailey (), modified throughout in accordance with the specifications of De Gruyter.  Nisbet and Hubbard ()  f., with Vell. .. and Dio ... Verrall ()  –  makes Murena central to Odes  and thus Odes  – , but see Santirocco () .  OCD R: “to be distinguished from the consul designate of  BC… Brother-in-law of C. Maecenas, but not the recipient of Horace, Odes ..”  Cf. Pagán () ; Lowrie () , , ; Dressler ()  – .  Pound () , cf. Ahl (b)  f.  Ahl (a)  – , (b)  f., developed by Bartsch () . On Ovid as an object of conspiracy theory, see Hinds () , cf. Barchiesi ()  – , esp.  f., with Horace, and Feeney ()  – ; cf. Syme () . Note also the rather ‘post-Augustan’ charge leveled against the conspirators of , maiestas: Levick ()  f; cf. the intimations of Silver Age obsequiousness in Suetonius’ Vita: Lyne ()  n. ; cf. Dressler ()  f.  Ahl (b)  f., .

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Two consequences follow from this generally conspiratorial air of Latin literature, ancient and modern. As a first consequence, in antiquity, it is in the general dimension of possible conspiracy that indirect perlocutions of the kind Odes 2.10 represents achieve their capacity to change reality and become political.¹¹ Thus, for example, Horace will say that Apollo is sometimes merciful (Odes 2.10.19 f.). On the properly conspiratorial reading, this might be taken as an encouragement to Augustus, alias Apollo, Jupiter, etc., to show ‘Licinius,’ alias Murena, mercy.¹² On the other hand (and here we are still exploring the consequence for the ancients), by conferring such a central place to the explication of mediocritas, which, as Lowrie notes, always is what it is by reference to what it is not,¹³ Horace endows his poem with the very duality that makes the poetics of conspiracy efficacious. If Odes 2.10 exemplifies mediocritas, then it, too, is what it is by reference to what it is not. In other words, it is ‘merely’ a poetical play, the proliferation of anodyne aphorisms, and something like pure poetry of the kind that West, and Santirocco also, suggest.¹⁴ As a result, as Syme suspected, it proves nothing at all. If Santirocco is also right that the significance of Odes 2.10 is primarily structural (a poem about the golden mean, it occurs halfway through the second book, itself the halfway point of Odes 1– 3), then its vacuity may be deliberate: it is the empty center on which the collection turns.¹⁵ Alternatively, this very vacuity may be, so to speak, a beard: if Odes 2.10 proves nothing at all, then it may also suggest that this ‘Licinius,’ who may yet be Murena, may be innocent. Nothing to prove means nothing to disprove. The second consequence of the possibility of conspiracy affects the modern interpreter. In a statement that distills her contribution to Horatian scholarship, Ellen Oliensis wrote: “The concept of decorum is never innocent.”¹⁶ With this assumption of guilt, Oliensis exemplifies the temper of an age founded in the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’: dubbed thus by Paul Ricoeur, this approach to culture suggests that participation in most societies is tantamount to collusion in some kind of cover-up.¹⁷ In the case of Horace, the possibilities abound: on a global

 Ahl (b)  reserves this status for Lucan.  Nisbet and Hubbard () , cf. Miller ()  f.  Lowrie ()  f., cf. ; also Santirocco () .  Santirocco () .  Santirocco () , cf. Porter () . On the structure of Book , see below.  Oliensis () , cf. Geue ()  – . Ahl (b)  differs from Oliensis in the degree of consciousness that he accords the conspirator: “Horace and Vergil recognized Octavian beneath Augustus. But to profess that recognition openly was to flirt with danger. If they sought to criticize, they must fight the civil war of compliments.”  Dressler ()  – , on Ricoeur ()  – .

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scale,¹⁸ patriarchy and domination (so Oliensis); more locally, dissimulation of the basis of ‘Augustus’’ ‘Golden Age’ in the political violence of Octavian (so Ahl)¹⁹; more locally still, the conspiracy of Murena, or ‘Licinius’ (so Nisbet and Hubbard). Rather than merely nuancing Ahl’s influential invocation of ‘figured speech’ in “The Horse and the Rider,” in the present contribution I’ll use Syme’s intervention in the history of Odes 2.10, along with his rumored intervention in world history in wartime intelligence, to recover an Ahlian tendency of interpretation, which I call that of the partisan of the truth. This tendency does not entail believing in any assortment of particular truths, which constitute ‘the truth’ – that, for example, Horace really was aware of the conspiracy of Murena, that he wrote as he did when Maecenas fell from favor, etc. Rather, in the light of an experience of fundamental insight into an event (say, ‘The Roman Revolution’), the partisan of the truth reconfigures his or her approach to the evidence in such a way that she maintains fidelity to her singular insight, even when all other ‘evidence’ contradicts it and the results appear, compared to the quotidian truth of ‘common sense’ or positivism, paradoxical.²⁰ “Augustus is the creation of the supreme eiron, the supreme dissimulator,” writes Ahl, where irony requires a state of affairs from which the eiron can dissimulate, even if “[t]he ‘real’ Horace is as elusive as the ‘real’ Augustus.”²¹ Similarly, Ahl will recall Lucretius’ statement, “stolen is the mask, and the fact remains,” in the deployment of a rhetoric of demystification: “Caesar’s rhetorical mask was not complete.”²² From the critic’s fidelity to an event (again, e. g., the ‘Roman Revolution’), there arises a dimension of history that grounds his or her access to the reality behind the mask. As a result, one can say, panegyric after panegyric of Augustan literature notwithstanding: “Vergil and Horace may well have profited as much as did Octavian from this bizarre symbiosis, even if all parties sincerely loathed one another.”²³ That the expressions of masking and revelation, which facilitate such ostensibly paradoxical claims, occur in Syme also is an index of Ahl’s epistemic pedigree. Of Octavian, the historian writes: “As with Pompeius, face and mien might be honest and comely. What lay behind the mask?”²⁴ At the same time, by put-

      

Cf. Ricoeur () . Ahl (b)  – . Badiou () ,  – , cf. ()  – . Ahl (b) . .: eripitur persona, manet res; for the rest, see Ahl (b) , . Ahl (b) , , cf. Lyne () , ,  f.,  f., Putnam ()  – . Syme () .

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ting ‘reality’ in quotation marks as he does in discussing the “‘real’ Horace,” Ahl already raises questions about the validity of his claims by the normal, common sense criteria of positivist, empirical, or inductive interpretation. Can we reconcile the claims that he makes about reality with the questions that he raises about ‘reality?’ One exemplary (postmodern) solution to the dilemma posed by reality and ‘reality’ (i. e., appearance?) is to embrace the mask as the reality, and to insist that there is only ‘reality,’ as Oliensis does (1998: 2): Horace is present in his personae [N.B. ‘masks’], that is, not because these personae are authentic and accurate impressions of his true self, but because they effectively construct that self – for Horace’s contemporary readers, for us, and also for Horace himself. The reason I prefer the concept of face…to the new-critical concept of the persona is that it registers this de facto fusion of mask and self.

In this paper, consistent with Horace’s own apparent cultivation of moderatio, I advocate a third way of interpretation between the modern and postmodern. While I believe that this third way was effectively operative in Ahl from the beginning, I also think it took the programmatic postmodernity of an Oliensis to see beyond the ‘trutherism’ of its first articulation – that is, the belief that there is a reality, even if it only seems safe or prudent to call it ‘reality,’ behind the mask; this is the belief, which Stephen Hinds describes as the paranoid faith that grounds historicism, viz. “The truth is out there.”²⁵ In contrast with either modern or postmodern positions, however, the tendency of the partisan of the truth is the interpretation of the reader who ‘knows’ that the results of her approach cannot be ‘proven’ or ‘disproven’ in the traditional terms of positivism and empiricism but pursues them anyway. The partisan justifies this pursuit with a conviction more compelling than, or at any rate epistemologically prior to, simple positivism. The conviction is that there are stakes in the struggle, and one has to act. As a result, it is more accurate to think of the knowledge produced by literary scholarship not as knowledge per se but as knowledge as action – in other words, as ‘intelligence.’ The model for this is neither Ahl nor Sir Ronald but Ahl after Oliensis and Syme the spy.

 Hinds () . Ahl’s quotation marks obviate the diagnosis of paranoia (his is, then, ‘truth,’ not truth) but on such quotation marks, see Derrida ()  – . On the rejection of depth (of, e. g., reality for ‘reality’) in postmodernity, see Jameson ()  – ,  – . Fellow traveler Rudich () viii f. rejects the “absolutization of the reader,” which could describe the Oliensian approach (and mine), in the name of “the quest for truth”; cf. Dressler ()  n. ,  n.  where add Syme () .

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To demonstrate the continuities and ruptures between Syme, Nisbet and Hubbard, Ahl, the spies, and us, I explore the secret of Odes 2.10 in two stages. First, in the next section I situate the poem in the history of its interpretation, in the context of the cold war, with particular attention to Syme’s rumored involvement in intelligence work in the twentieth century. In the section after that, I survey the poem itself in its layered embedding in the Odes as a whole and the intra-poem dynamics that recapitulate the inter-poem or poetry book dynamics. It is here that I deploy the closest reading of Odes 2.10, and where readers who don’t completely recall the poem of mediocrity can find it quoted in full. In the course of my reading, I develop a model of the poem as workable code, which I borrow from Paul Ricoeur, and call a ‘kerygma.’ In the end, I will suggest that we can know the truth behind the illusion of Odes 2.10, not because Horace did or did not offer such a truth, not because there were, then, properly Augustan and anti-Augustan positions in the early Empire, and not even because, à la Duncan Kennedy, the Augustan presupposed the antiAugustan, and the anti-Augustan the Augustan, with the result that, because the resistance was everywhere, it was also nowhere.²⁶ On the contrary, precisely because of the last-mentioned consequence of deconstruction, the way to know the truth behind the illusion is to take a position (such is partisanship) and watch the rest of the pieces fall into place. From the perspective of criticism, the position that one takes will be arbitrary, but from the perspective of present history and the critic’s own place within it, one’s position is based on a field of conflict more pressing than the Augustan or anti-Augustan (Republican, etc.). It is based, as I’ll suggest in the final section, on a resistance to the aristocracy, the hoarders of property whom Augustus and Horace used in common.²⁷ But since neither poet nor princeps confronted the old guard directly or for ideologically pure reasons, it is necessary to play the part of the handler in espionage and, as the spies used to say, to turn the most vulnerable, plausibly conflicted of the two, the poet – to our ends. Finally, while the broad intertext that I adopt for this endeavor, the cold war, may be untimely, it is justified in part by the historical framework of the relevant players, and in part by the clarity of ideological boundaries that – at least rhetorically, that is, in deconstruction – it permits.²⁸

 Kennedy ()  – , Schiesaro () .  On the redistributionism of the ‘Roman Revolution,’ see Osgood ()  f.,  – ,  – , ,  – . I am pleased to find a similar, but not identical conclusion in Geue (), and for his piece, as well as for that of Schiesaro (), on which I also draw, I endeavor, through Ahl, Syme, and Oliensis, to provide a theoretical rationale.  Cf., e. g., Derrida ()  – .

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Prosopography and Cold War Classics: NH, AA, A.T.[erentius A. f… Var]ro Murena (and sometimes L.) “22 or 23?” In a formulation that earned the scorn of the social historian, and other knight, Sir M.I. Finley (a.k.a. Moses Finkelstein), appears the question on which the dating of Odes 2.10, the possibility of its implication in the ‘Murena Affair,’ part of the internal dynamics of the (second) ‘Augustan Settlement,’ and the date of the publication of Odes 1– 3 all turn.²⁹ On this question, Nisbet and Hubbard, in their famous commentary to Odes, Book 2 (hereafter NH), dedicate a long introductory note, rivaling Syme in the ratiocination of the method that he introduced in The Roman Revolution (hereafter RR) and would revisit, pace NH, in the chapter entitled “Nobiles in Horace” in The Augustan Aristocracy (hereafter AA). Even as he would contest NH, however, Syme himself entertained the possibility that date, conspiracy, and consul all converge in Horace’s ode in RR: “The tall trees fall in the tempest and the thunderbolt strikes the high peaks,” he writes in a chapter entitled “Crisis…”; then, in the footnote: “So Horace, ostensibly prophetic, in an Ode addressed to Licinius (2, 10, 9 ff.) – who is probably Murena.”³⁰ Why did Syme then change his mind? What does the possibility of such a change have to teach us about the relationship of representation and reality, of a Horatian text to its social context, and the way we bridge the gap in interpretation? NH base their conclusion that the poem at least refers to the Murena affair on a variety of evidence.³¹ As the pièce de résistance, they refer Horace’s coinage of the Peripatetic slogan “the Golden Mean” to the philosophical interests of the real Murena (Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 152 f.): Strabo records how the philosopher Athenaeus of Seleucia (in Cilicia) was involved in Murena’s fall (14.5.4)… The significant thing is that Athenaeus was one of the leading Peripatetics of the day… Horace’s ode is a commendation of the middle way, and the mediocritas

 Finley and Hopkins ( []) , with Jameson (); cf. Hölkeskamp ()  f., Wilkinson () . On the date, see Syme ()  n. , Raaflaub and Samons () , Levick ()  – , (), Wilkinson ()  f., and, Horatian, Henderson ()  – ,  –  and Geue ()  f.  Syme ()  n.  on , cf.  n.  and  n. . As late as the year Nisbet and Hubbard () was published, Syme ( [])  still wrote of the “ill-starred consul”; cf. Syme ()  n. , and note the omission, at Syme ()  n. , of Syme ().  Nisbet and Hubbard () , cf. , and Syme () .

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which he enjoins was a Peripatetic watchword… It would be a strange coincidence if the Licinius of the ode were somebody other than Athenaeus’s patron.

In view of this, NH conclude that the work as a whole was indeed published “in the second half of 23,” and that, as a result, “Murena’s downfall should be put in two distinct stages.”³² The length of time of his disgrace they partly attribute to the uncertainty that followed Augustus’s ongoing rearrangement of the constitution around himself (the ‘Augustan Settlement,’ Part 2, of the late 20s). In AA, Syme is sparer (387): M. Primus the proconsul of Macedonia stood trial for high treason… The advocate of Primus raised objection, to be countered by the Princeps… Licinius Murena, who defended the proconsul, was a man of violent tongue and temper. Conceiving annoyance, he went in with a conspiracy which Fannius Caepio promoted… Neither his brother Proculeius could save Murena, nor Maecenas, the husband of his sister.

Supplementing such bare ‘facts,’ NH wrote (155): Maecenas had early news of the discovery of the plot, and in his terrible dilemma betrayed the secret to his wife Terentia… predictably, she informed her brother, who may have gone into hiding at this point. Though Augustus was astute enough to foresee this outcome (he must have hoped for a tactful suicide rather than another state trial), he could not overlook the indiscretion of his increasingly embarrassing minister.

In AA, Syme objects not to the novelistic interiority of the account provided by NH,³³ but to the numerous lines that must be drawn to connect it from Varro Murena through the ‘Licinius’ of Odes 2.10 to the name-making consul ordinarius of 23. Among these are the multi-stage theory of decline, the ‘inadequacy’ of Horatian scholia as a rule, the irrelevance of the consular fasti in this particular instance, ³⁴ and Horace’s failure to capitalize, in addressing someone of so grand a lineage, on the “double opportunity, of prestige as well as nomenclature,” of the name Varro Murena.³⁵

 Nisbet and Hubbard ()  f., pace Syme ()  n. . Pace both, the poem could be addressed to Murena after he died: cf. Odes ., to ‘Vergil.’  How could he? See, e. g., Syme ()  – ; on the novelistic results of reconstructing Roman conspiracies, see Lowrie ()  f.   – , and N.B. Syme ()  n. . On the case of Crassus, see Syme ()  f., Galsterer ()  f.  While at Syme ()  Syme identifies the Peripatetic affiliation of Murena as a “valuable extraneous fact” in the discussion of Odes ., he credits not Nisbet and Hubbard () but Griffin ()  (who cites Nisbet and Hubbard ()!).

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The tactic that Syme employs in his treatment of the conspiracy, in AA at least, is instructively similar to that which he employs in the more famous matter of Ovid’s exile in History in Ovid: separating everything that can be derived from the poetry, the prosopographer comes to his conclusion, and only then proceeds to treat the poetry.³⁶ In the case of Horace, Odes 2.10, he similarly resolves the “amalgam” of three identities: (A) Murena=consul, (B) Murena=conspirator, (C) Murena=‘Licinius,’ where A and B are prosopographical questions of a properly political kind and C is a literary question, and where questions of type C always follow questions of type A and B. The class-constituting relations of individuals described by prosopography are, in other words, the base, from which poetry, philosophy, morality, the Roman constitution, and much else, are but superstructure.³⁷ When poetry, philosophy, morality, and the rest are the explicit subject of discussion in Syme, base determines superstructure.³⁸ Syme presents this principle of the political basis of cultural production as though it applied only to evidentiary value, and not to the original efficacy, of poetry. Nevertheless, the assumption, which he more or less shares with NH (“In his paraeneses Horace normally advised his patrons to do what they are doing already”³⁹), is that poems do not do anything, then as now (Syme (1986) 389 f., with my italics):

 Syme ()  – .  Cf. Syme ()  n. : “What is commonly called the ‘Rechtsfrage’, and interminably discussed, depends upon a ‘Machstfrage’”; cf. Marx ( []) : “Between equal rights force decides.” See further, e. g., Syme ()  (cf. ),  –  (cf.  – ), , ,  – , . For related examples of “realism,” see Syme () vii, , ,  f., ,  f.,  n. ,  f., , ,  with , ; further, Syme ()  n. , ,  – , , . On this matter, the old and new historicists are not so different: see, e. g., Habinek ()  f., cf. Finley ()  f.; on Syme’s innovation, Bowersock () , ; Galsterer () , with Dressler (b)  f.; Galinsky () . On ideology, Roman republicanism, and base and superstructure, see Wilkinson ()  – .  But see, on the Cleopatra Ode, Syme () : “Created belief turned the scale of history”; cf. : “poetry…could be…perhaps no less effective […] than the spoken or written word of the Roman statesmen.” But when, on his reading, was that ever effective? See, e. g., Syme () . Cf. Galsterer ()  f. In his very inconsistency, Syme anticipates recent dialectical approaches (such as Feeney () , Kennedy ()  – , Barchiesi ()  f., Lowrie ()  f., Geue ()  f.) at Syme () : “it is at least remarkable that certain Odes of Horace…should contain such vivid and exact anticipations of the reforms…for which Rome had to wait five years longer”; cf. Syme () ,  f.; contrast Syme ()  –  (“The Organization of Opinion”), and see White ()  – , Lyne () , Putnam ()  n. , Milnor ()  – ; cf. Syme () , .  Nisbet and Hubbard () , cf. Lyne () . For good reasons against this static approach to addressees, see Geue ()  – , cf. Schiesaro ()  f.

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No necessity therefore subsists for putting the catastrophe of Varro Murena in the second half of the year, or, for that matter even later, in 22. That is, unless one is prepared to invoke and exploit a Horatian ode… Wide divergences obtain among the interpreters of certain odes; and doubt arises when the character, pursuits, and social status of a recipient are either assumed to be known or to be inferred from the language. When it is a mere matter of convivial habits or a life passed in tranquility, disquiet need not be felt, or hesitation about the personal relevance for example to Sestius, or to Postumus…

But in a serious matter, not of private, but rather of political reality? In short, Syme’s subsequent rejection (in AA) of the conspiracy theory of NH (from RR) entails an a priori bracketing of the internal dynamics of poetry and thus of a whole subtle but distinct field of evidence and action. Yet it is not obvious that, from a purely tactical perspective, one need make this elimination, and the ironic fate of Syme’s famous method in the twentieth century proves this. In A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero Whose Spy Network…Changed the Course of History, the real, historical “hero” of the title, William Stephenson, credits Syme, by way of émigré classicist and army man Gilbert Highet, with the development of a “technique for synthesizing psychological-behavioral patterns from random information gathered about a subject…called…‘Proso-Profiles.’”⁴⁰ Here, “art” (historiography) actually proceeded life (history). In the case of the authors of the latter, the aim of “proso-profiling” is patently tactical, but is the former, at least in Syme, so different? “Though concealed by craft or convention, the arcana imperii of the nobilitas cannot evade detection.”⁴¹ This last claim is the key. Time and again throughout RR, Syme denigrates the attempt to establish the intentions of the individuals in favor of what can be established in spite of their attempts, or the attempts of history, to “baffle” us⁴²; better than the assessment of motives, he suggests, is the determination of what can be known (now) and what could be done (then), where the two are strangely equivalent in his treatment.⁴³ Who else would describe the “system

 Stevenson ()  f., cited in Bowersock () ; cf. Bowersock ().  Syme () , cf. ; the phrase arcana imperii is from Tacitus, e. g., Annals .., Histories ..; it also appears in Münzer ( []) , with Linderski () , with critique in Hölkeskamp ()  f.; cf. Galsterer ()  – ,  f.  The word “baffle” is ubiquitous in Syme: e. g., Syme () viii, , , , , , , , , ; in contrast, the relation of text to context rarely “baffles”: Syme () , . Cf. Le Carré ( []) : “He had put the tea-cosy over his one telephone and from the ceiling hung a baffler against electronic eavesdropping – a thing like an electric fan, which constantly varied its pitch.”  Syme ()  f., , , , , ; but see ; cf. Galsterer ()  f.

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of dependent kingdoms and of Roman provinces which [Antony] built up” with the bizarre zeugma “both intelligible and workable?”⁴⁴ Syme’s understanding of politics is the understanding of the field agent, who does not think, with the Marxist, for instance, in terms of the forces of history on a global scale, but in terms of the individual, his or her contribution to immediate situations, and tactical necessities.⁴⁵ Is it at all surprising, then, that Syme, a secretive, solitary international with a gift for languages and nearly photographic memory, later knighted, spent years after the war in Istanbul, the European capital of espionage?⁴⁶ In view of the reversal of art and life, or historiography (Syme) and history proper (the cold war), the words of George Smiley, the bookish spymaster of John le Carré’s legendary Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, are instructive (1991 [1974], 215, italics mine, cf. Hepburn (2005): 59): It is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel with the reality… I often thought that. I even put it to Control: we should take the opposition’s cover stories more seriously, I said. The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal…

In the case of Odes 2.10, the matter is more complex, but at root the same; we have not intercepted the transmission of the agent, but rather of his handler or a lower level counterintelligence officer – all of which only makes the cover story more significant. What if Horace not only knew what was going on, but was trying to communicate it to various parties, ‘Licinius’ included, only without appearing to do so? What if he was trying to alert Augustus, even after the fact, that he did in fact know what was going on, but was himself opposed to it? What if the very name ‘Licinius’ is a red herring, and just happens to recall the last individual whose ambition impinged upon the Princeps in the vicinity of the previous Augustan settlement of 27 BCE, Marcus Licinius Crassus who claimed the spolia opima, everywhere in Syme a “renegade,” and possibly also a proximate cause of the conspiracy of his maybe-namesake in Horace, ‘Licinius’ Murena?⁴⁷

 Syme () , with my italics.  Cf. Lowrie () : “the uncovering of conspiracy requires action”; cf. Hepburn ()  f. On the opposition of prosopography to Marxism, see James (); cf. Millar ()  f.  Bowersock ()  f.; ()  f.,  – , cf. Griffin () xii f. On Turkey during and after the war, see MacIntyre () ,  f., ; cf. Mitchell () .  See, e. g., Syme () ,  f. On Crassus’ proximity to Primus, see Levick ()  f. Similarly, at Odes ., a certain ‘Pompeius’ is not Pompey (I used to think I was the only person who thought this more than a coincidence, until I read Ahl (b) ); cf. Lowrie ()  f., also Schiesaro ()  (on the Cinnas of Ov. Ibis ).

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In this case, pace Syme, Horace is capitalizing “on the double opportunity of… nomenclature” of his addressee, only with the sense of economy of the field agent. The simple name Licinius is doing double duty, and therefore altogether more, than the double name, Varro Murena, could. Like Syme, Ahl exhibits a binary conception of art and life throughout his work, a sense of the tactical interplay, not between politics and politics, behind the scenes that poetry provides (so Syme), but rather between politics and poetry. In contrast with the theorizations implied by Syme and NH, in ANRW Ahl pits Horace and the other poets against Augustus and the other Caesars, describing both the interaction of representation and reality and its further representation (and possible reality: the cover story – which may be more real than we think) as subject to tactical manipulation: to intelligence, in other words, and politics.⁴⁸ Ahl is a partisan, just as Syme was, because he refuses to consign Horace to the losing side of history but speaks of Augustus as his “imperial opponent and rival.”⁴⁹ In contrast, Syme used the word “enemy” not of the poets but of the political classes from which Augustus rose: “The nobilitas and the consular, those were his enemies.”⁵⁰ In each case, the battle is on, even if it rages in secret: “Of resentment among the nobiles,” Syme writes, “the written record betrays no trace – and confirms its inadequacy.”⁵¹ As a result of such “inadequacies,” the historian attends to the play of names (nomina), while the critic attends to the play on words (nomina).⁵² But between the two, something like a reality, even if it is only the evidence of a tactical necessity that we constitute in our very interpretation, begins to emerge. To grasp it, it is necessary to take the cover story  For a veritable allegory of such tactics, see Ahl’s ()  –  Oedipus.  Ahl (b) . Lyne () , ,  f.,  f. is more moderate. Cf. Henderson ()  f.  Syme () , cf. . In a similar policing of the line between political base and poetic superstructure, Syme () ,  insists that Horace’s “real enemies” in the Epistle to Augustus are – Ovid and Ovidians. Contrast Ahl (b)  – , pace Syme () : “there is no call to put a high estimate on the ‘deprecatio’ of Horace.”  Syme () , cf. , ; cf. Syme () .  Cf. Galsterer ()  f., Linderski ()  f., and esp. Millar ()  f. with the almost Ahlian connection between names and literature: Ahl ()  – ,  – ,  – ,  – ,  – ; more generally, Putnam ()  f. Similar scope for ‘play’ is afforded Syme ()  f. by the poetic treatment of the names of cities; cf. Syme () , also (); cf. Lowrie ()  f. Syme ()  f. seems to suggest that Ovid’s Corinna, identified as “called by me by a name not true” (Tristia ..), was a historical person; compare Horace’s polynomial formulation of Odes .. f.: “Nor came Lydia after Chloe,/ Lydia of a lot of name [multi Lydia nominis],” with Nisbet and Rudd ()  for the proper translation. Horace’s interest in the alias is thus more complex than Syme ()  suggests: see Lowrie () , Nisbet and Rudd ()  f., cf. Schiesaro ()  – .

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of the opposition more seriously, to recognize in Horace a potential accomplice, and search the face of Augustanism for tells.

Odes 2.10 and Other Kerygmata In the story set “between the wars,” John Buchan’s cryptographer “Channell” tells his collaborator that all he needs to break the hardest code is “a mistake and a repetition.”⁵³ In RR, written about a decade later, Syme presents his most famous extant model, the historian Tacitus, as the Roman presents the Augustan settlement (324): The significance of the measure could be grossly exaggerated by the adulatory or the uncritical. Such was no doubt the opinion of the suspicious Tacitus, ever alert for the contrast of name and substance. At Rome, it did not mark an era in dating; in the provinces it passed almost unnoticed… Indeed, the precise formulation of the powers of the military leader in the res publica which he sought to ‘establish upon a lasting basis’ [Suet. Aug. 28.2] is not a matter of paramount importance.

In this formulation of the ideology of the new age, Syme sides with Tacitus and identifies the part played by “a mistake and a repetition,” not in the resolution of the code, but in its institution – the institution of Augustan culture. What “Channell” will call a “mistake,” however, inaugurates the code: it is calling the end of the Republic, along with Augustus and his contemporaries, pax et republica when, according to Tacitus, it was really pax et princeps, when, according to Syme, it was really pax et dominus. ⁵⁴ A mistake (for it is neither res publica nor merely princeps), followed by a repetition. So, e. g., res publica reddita+res publica restituta=Augustan ideology=Horace, Odes=Vergil, Aeneid=Livy, Ab urbe condita, etc.⁵⁵ If it is possible for it not always to work in lockstep with ideology, the function of poetry may be its reversal – not, then, mistake and repetition (e. g., repeat after me: “X is not potentia, but auctoritas,” “the Republic has been restored,” etc.), but rather: repetition and mistake, theme and variation, unmarked words and marked, repetition and difference.⁵⁶ If, as a result of its formal character, the function of poetry is to make the trivial profound,⁵⁷ then poetry counters     

Buchan ( []) ; cf. MacIntyre () . Syme ()  f. Cf. Hepburn ()  – ,  – . See Compagnon ()  – , cf. Lowrie ()  f.,  f. Cf. callida iunctura of Ars  f.

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the force of ideology, pace Syme, precisely when a “cool estimate” would find “not a matter of paramount importance.”⁵⁸ Formally, the beginning of Odes, Book 2, is a case in point: ‘Pollio’ is writing about the civil wars (stanzas 1– 4); imagine five stanzas of such a thing (stanzas 5 – 9); now never mind (stanza 10). A repetition (“cf. Pollio”=stanzas 1– 9) that was a mistake (stanza 10: “Be not so serious, indecent Muse…”) leads to a history of interpretations that seek to penetrate the mask of Horatian quietism.⁵⁹ Odes 2.10 is, in contrast, flawless, simplex et unum. If the ‘mistake’ on which it rests is considered a part of the poem (decorum, a.k.a. mediocritas for the rest of us=Augustanism=authoritarianism, imperialism, patriarchy), then, it is pure ideology; if one discounts that mistake, or counts it outside the poem, it is pure poetry. As a code, its metaphors and mythologies, the storm-tossed ship and angry god, may function, in the language of Syme and the spies, as perfect bafflers.⁶⁰ As a result, 2.10 looks monotonous and lacking in subtlety, the unnecessary distillation of the ethical and aesthetic policy of decorum artfully combined with different themes – wine and friendship, sex and self-control, politics and poetry – everywhere else in the Odes. Like the Augustan settlement, on Syme’s defusing reading in RR, Odes 2.10 is, relatively speaking, “not a [poem] of paramount importance.” Rectius uiues, Licini, neque altum semper urgendo neque, dum procellas cautus horrescis, nimium premendo litus iniquum. auream quisquis mediocritatem diligit, tutus caret obsoleti sordibus tecti, caret inuidenda sobrius aula. saepius uentis agitatur ingens pinus et celsae grauiore casu decidunt turres feriuntque summos fulgura montis. sperat infestis, metuit secundis alteram sortem bene praeparatum pectus. informis hiemes reducit

5

10

15

 So Syme’s (probably Horatian) Pollio, see Syme ()  f., ; () , ; cf. Millar () , Raaflaub and Samons ()  f., Altman ()  – .  Lowrie () : “displacement, like negation…brings…to the fore by relegating…to the background”; cf.  f.,  f. On the revocatio, see Sallmann ()  – , , Porter ()  f.  In ancient terms, allegoria: see Kalina ()  f.

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Iuppiter, idem summouet. non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit: quondam cithara tacentem suscitat Musam neque semper arcum tendit Apollo. rebus angustis animosus atque fortis appare; sapienter idem contrahes uento nimium secundo turgida uela. More in the right will you live, Licinius, in not always pressing the deep and in not, when you are shirking from blasts with worry, too much squeezing the unequal beach. Whosoever esteems the Golden Mean is, in his safety, free from the squalor of the worn-out house, is free in sobriety from the hall of jealousy. Oftener by the winds the enormous pine is harried and with a heavier fall the high towers tumble and lightning strikes the tallest mountains. Hoping in the worst and afraid in the positive for the opposite is the heart that is best readied; hideous winters Jupiter brings. He, the same, takes them away; bad now doesn’t mean it will be so someday; sometimes the Muse who’s quiet with her lyre Apollo excites; he’s not always the archer. In dire straits, you, spirited and brave appear. With wisdom, one and the same, you’ll draw, in wind too positive, your swollen sails.

20

5

10

15

20

Even its commanding theme appears with more complexity elsewhere in the collection (Odes 1.14): “O ship, new waves will carry you back to the sea” (O nauis, referent in mare te noui/ fluctus). With that over-determined ode to no one, the poet produces a poem that is ‘really’ about the poet, poetry, politics, prostitution…⁶¹ More complex too is the earlier appearance of the sinner in the hands of an angry god in Odes 1.34.12– 16:

 On the ship, see Lowrie ( [])  f., cf. Lyne ()  – .

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ualet ima summis mutare et insignem attenuat deus, obscura promens. hinc apicem rapax Fortuna cum stridore acuto sustulit, hic posuisse gaudet. the high and low the god can switch, diminish the distinguished, bringing the dark to light; where thieving Luck has snatched the hat with a whistling wind, she’ll laugh to have put it back.

This poem of philosophical recantation simply reverses the menacing tenor of Odes 2.10; it does so, however, (a) as part of a quarrel between rival philosophies, which as formal elements are thus in conflict and complexity (repetition and difference), and (b) as a form of self-address, therefore doubling the poet’s own subjectivity, while (c) filling out the poet’s autobiography. In Odes 2.10, by comparison with these, the ship only goes one way, means only life; the poem as a whole is devoted to only one philosophical message, addressed, moreover, to someone (‘Licinius’) who may be no one.⁶² But is this poem as unitary as all that? Taking inspiration from the figure of the double agent, in this section, I follow Ahl, flip Syme, and read Odes 2.10 for the tactical part that it plays in a struggle that, as the field agent assumes as an operational necessity, has yet to be determined or has, as Ahl suggested in ANRW, only gone underground since ‘Augustus’ ‘won.’ On this analysis, Odes 2.10, is not a unitary and cohesive poem, primarily just philosophical or poetic in orientation but precisely particular and political. It is, further, the centerpiece of Book 2, which, more than the tour de force of Book 1 or the grand finale of Book 3 with its front-facing firewall of ‘Roman Odes,’ is Horace’s most dangerous book, the book of conspiracy in which the poet attempts to strike a balance of powers amidst the second-tier of still ambitious elite.⁶³ Putting this background to the front in his typical pose of recusatio, Horace makes this plain with the opening imagery that all political readers of Odes 1– 3 remember, not least Ahl: “You take in hand a work full of dangerous chance/ and over the flames you advance,/ packed with treacherous ashes.”⁶⁴

 On the tradition of underwhelmed responses to Odes , see Griffin () .  Cf. Putnam ()  – .  Odes .. –  (periculosae plenum opus aleae,/ tractas, et incedis per ignis/ suppositos cineri doloso), with Ahl (b) : “This latent fire of civil war threatens both winner and loser”; cf. Sallmann ()  f., Lowrie ()  – ; Henderson ()  – ; cf. Levick () .

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What I will suggest here is not that Odes 2.10 has an absolutely knowable secret meaning. Rather, the possibility that it does, on the close reading of the formalist or the cryptographer, reveals the form that secret meanings in other poems will take, while these other poems in turn authorize the possibility of the secret meaning of Odes 2.10.⁶⁵ The reflexivity or cyclicality that all this entails – whether it is vicious, complicit, seditious, or simply generative – is just the mode of being, believing, or acting of the double agent. It is thus a mode that is not operational without a handler – in this case, us. A job for the partisan. Constituted by a stream of changing metaphors, Odes 2.10 falls into two parts; their unity lies in the development of the continuous substance. First, the vehicles of the tenor, or meaning born, are emphatically sublunary: the ship at sea (first stanza); the edifice (second); the storm and trees and towers (third). Then, the vehicles become ethereal, theological, ethical: fate and Jupiter (fourth stanza); Apollo, Muse, and war (fifth); wisdom and, by way of extra “spirit” (animosus, l. 21), wind and sail (sixth). As theme and variation, through synecdoche, the return of the ship in ring composition presents itself now thoroughly metaphorized, spiritual and not concrete, now art as opposed to life (and history and politics). Analyzed in its cyclical trajectory from concrete to abstract, the poem becomes a performance of art for art’s sake, “pure poetry,” West’s take⁶⁶; but it also anticipates the trajectory of Book 2 as a whole – a book that ends, after a series of balanced poems all “directed for the most part at significant personalities of the second rank,” with two odd poems, first about the poet meeting Bacchus (2.19), and then about becoming a swan and soaring (2.20).⁶⁷ In contrast with the first half of the book, which notably alternates between Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas for the first eleven poems (that is, up through one poem after Odes 2.10), the content of the last two poems (2.19 – 20) thus follows the form of the first middle poem (2.10): specifically, the last two poems end the book with a thorough metaphora, or translatio – of the poet himself, to the heavens – just as the trajectory of 2.10, in itself, was: first, sublunary, then ethereal;

 The hermeneutics of suspicion, which Sedgwick () seminally dubbed paranoid, is a “strong theory”: “the size and topology of the domain that it organizes” () is vast, while, as “an explanatory structure that a reader may see as tautological, in that it can’t help or can’t stop or can’t do anything other than prove the very same assumptions with which it began,” it “may be experienced by the practitioner as a triumphant advance towards truth and vindication” ().  Cf. Hadju () .  Nisbet and Hubbard () , cf. Syme () ; Lowrie ()  –  suggests that the cycle culminates with Odes ., where note, in .., animosus and recollection of sea and shore (ll.  – ); cf. Porter () , cf. Schiesaro ()  f., .

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first, more or less concrete (procellas, uentis), then, by synecdoche, metaphorical, even “spiritual” (animosus).⁶⁸ It is, in fact, just the thoroughness of the metaphorization at the end of Odes 2.10 that makes it a little sterile: the tenor and the vehicle (N.B. ship) have been reversed, as the poem leaves reference behind, soars in metaphor, and sails nowhere. Alternatively – and here the repetition is the mistake – the poem of mediocrity suggests that the heights are the goal. The structural properties of the text that allow such dilation of the metaphorical dimension of language – reference become pure poetry or poetry contradicting ostensible reference – can be, as Ricoeur has suggested, hypostatized. One can, in other words, “prolong and reinforce the suspension affecting the text’s reference to the environment of a world and the audience of speaking subjects,” and thus dilate the figurative dimension which will then occlude its referential function.⁶⁹ The same formal properties that one can dilate, however, allow, not just an explanation but also, again with Ricoeur, an interpretation, a hermeneutic act, which in the case of Odes 2.10 can also be historical and political in reference.⁷⁰ The last poem in the alternating Sapphic/Alcaic sequence of Odes 2.1– 11, addressed to a certain Quinctius – double-named, in distinction with ‘Licinius,’ also Hirpinus, and probably also Pollio’s brother-in-law⁷¹ – begins with the injunction to stop worrying about the wars (against foreigners), while the first poem in the sequence, the programmatic ode to Pollio himself (2.1: “The only political poem in the full sense”), worries about writing about Rome’s wars against itself.⁷² Odes 2.10 thus points back to 2.1, and forward to 2.11, by ‘formal’ queues. In 2.10, Horace writes: “hideous winters Jupiter brings./ He, the same,/ takes them away [idem/submouit]… With wisdom, one and the same,/ you’ll draw [idem/contrahes], in wind too positive, your/ swollen sails.” In 2.11, the poet next explicates his own structure when he writes (ll. 19 – 21):

 The very term aurea mediocritas synthesizes physical and spiritual: Santirocco ()  f. See, more generally, Oliensis ()  f., Lowrie (a)  – .  Ricoeur () , cf.  f., ()  f.; Lowrie (a),  – ,  – .  Ricoeur () : “we now need an instrument of thought for apprehending the connection between language and speaking, the conversion of system into event.”  Nisbet and Hubbard () ; Lyne ()  f.,  f., cf.  – ; Lowrie ()  f.  Nisbet and Hubbard ; on civil as foreign wars, see Lowrie ()  f. The last last poem of the Alcaic-Sapphic sequence is actually Odes ., in a new meter, and addressed to Maecenas: cf. Ludwig () ). For structural analyses of Odes , see Port ()  f., with Ludwig () ,  f., and Santirocco ()  – ; cf. Sallmann ()  f., Porter ()  – , Putnam ()  – . On ascriptions of cyclicality in general, see Anderson ()  f., with background in Santirocco ()  – .

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“Not always the same [idem] is the value of the springtime/ flowers, with not one [uno] face does the blushing moon/ shine…”⁷³ The purely formal explication of the repeated idem of 2.10 by the idem-uno complex of 2.11 bears notice for two reasons. First, it is another instance of “a repetition and a mistake” (idem…idem…idem…uno), which, like Heraclitus’ river and the sun (“different and still the same”) elsewhere in Horace, proffers a paradigm of aesthetic enactment in general (one can never perform the same poem twice).⁷⁴ Second, more locally, by being specifically self-referential, the idem-stream reverses the flow of the poems with comparison back. ⁷⁵ Now, the ‘last’ ‘same’ poem, on a purely structural basis, was, again, either Odes 2.1, the Pollio ode which stood in the first position in the first half, just as Odes 2.11 stands in the first position in the second half, or 2.2, which stands in the same relation to Odes 2.1 as 2.11 stands to its self-identifying (equally idem-employing) partner, Odes 2.10.⁷⁶ Can it be a coincidence that, in the second stanza of Odes 2.2, the second-place poem to which the Odes 2.10 – 11 complex refers us, the poet unnecessarily introduces, in addition to the poem’s actual dedicatee, in this book of second places, a certain Proculeius, the brother of Murena the conspirator, who is also described in relation to his brothers (2.2.5 – 8)? uiuet extento Proculeius aeuo notus in fratres animi paterni; illum aget penna metuente solui Fama superstes. With his age sustained, Proculeius will live well-known for his fatherly spirit towards his brothers; on a wing afraid to relax, Fame will convey him as his survivor.

That the language is language of both reputation and notoriety follows from the risks of eminence explored in Odes 2.10, where the lightning hits the mountains; note that, either before or after the revelation of the Proculeius’ brother Murena in the conspiracy, such language is significant. Before the conspiracy, it is appropriate; after the conspiracy, given Proculeius’ plausible abandonment of his im-

 non semper idem || floribus est honor/ uernis, neque uno || Luna rubens nitet/ uultu… Note the parallel positions of idem and uno, in analogous hyperbaton.  C. saec. : aliusque et idem, with Lowrie (a) , also () , cf. Manil. .; cf. Dressler (a)  – . At .. note also iterare, in the middle of fas…fas…tu…tu (ll. , ,  f.): cf. Lowrie ()  f. where note also idem of Bacchus, with medius, at .. f.  Cf. Lowrie ()  f.  All poems likewise emphasize moderatio: Ludwig () .

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petuous brother (Dio 54.35), it becomes downright misleading. It is, as such, another ‘mistake’ which may be, à la NH, a just avoided impropriety – or a clue (Roman ‘fathers’ sometimes abandoned truant sons). As a direct consequence of such ambivalence,⁷⁷ the final lines of the above stanza may describe both a positive and a negative condition: either that achieved by Horace, soaring in swan-form in Odes 2.20, or that against which ‘Licinius,’ with swollen sails, is cautioned in Odes 2.10.⁷⁸ Moreover, after 2.2.6, we may have seen this coming.⁷⁹ These are the political, precisely prosopographical possibilities to which the formal analysis, first of Odes 2.10 and then of Odes, Book 2, as a whole, can lead. From such possibilities would follow the analysis of the previous section. From them in turn follows a formal possibility, namely the possibility of understanding the form of reference to such political possibilities in the Odes as a whole. To express this possibility, I suggest, Horace resorts to that form of utterance which I will call the ‘kerygma,’ or code poem.⁸⁰ I borrow this concept, like that of the hermeneutics of suspicion discussed in §1, from Paul Ricoeur and use it denote the message that a poem, understood as a kind of code, discloses through its patterns of meaning (a repetition), especially when those patterns are broken (a mistake).⁸¹ To conceive of a poem in this way is to interpret the deployment of linguistic functions in the cybernetic (and likewise cold war) structuralist terms of transmitter, message, code, and receiver.⁸² What I will suggest in this and the next section is that analysis of the poem into these four aspects, once we accept that the last of them, the receiver, may be ourselves, allows us special access to the first: the transmitter, Horace. Before proceeding to that point, however, let’s note that, taken in itself, Odes 2.10 does not immediately justify such an analysis. Because 2.10 is flawless, its true message is indecipherable to anyone to whom its code is not already

 See Lowrie () , Fowler ()  – ; cf. Nisbet and Hubbard () : “Some see a reference to the melting wax of Icarus (.. ff.), but that illustration is too particular and too ill-omened.” One need not go as far as Odes ; see, e. g., .. f., : “Double in form, I am not born/ on a familiar or slender wing [tenui penna, cf. ..: penna metuente]…/ Already more renowned [notior, cf. ..: notus] than Daedalean Icarus.” On such caution in Nisbet and Hubbard (), see Lyne ()  f. n. , Fowler () .  So Lyne () .  The detection of this “mistake” I owe to Elena Giusti.  Cf. Sallmann () .  Ricoeur ()  f.; () .  Cf. Jakobson ()  through Pindar in Nagy () , cf. Lowrie ()  f.,  f., Bowditch ()  f. On allegoria sine translatione, that is, in effect, a code without a key, see Kalina () .

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known, which first requires that this receiver recognizes it as a code.⁸³ Correlatively, the transmitter (alias the poet) can be expected to conceal its kerygmatic character all the more, the more he has a secret to transmit. Odes 2.10 in fact begins by scrambling the usual signals of the kerygma, couching its injunction in the future indicative verb that memorably begins the ode (rectius uiues). Its counterpart in the last clause of the poem (idem contrahes, l.23), is also strangely remote, improbably prophetic: in the future tense, it is not really an injunction at all.⁸⁴ The vividness of the future has, paradoxically, an effect comparable to the enargeia of the civil wars from the past in the ode to Pollio: it powerfully emphasizes what is in fact not happening as we read.⁸⁵ Finally, more than any other comparable poem in the Odes, the apostrophe and imperative are as far from one another as possible: Licini (l. 1), appare, (l. 22 of 24). When it does finally appear, the imperative is comparatively weak (the usual imperative is “stop”: e. g., desine): such mildness, not to mention the injunction to diverge from reality in the cultivation of appearance, hardly diminishes suspicion.⁸⁶ While not immediately justified, then, the interpretation of the poem as a kerygma is occasioned by Odes 2.10 in view of its context: the immediately preceding and following Odes, 2.9 and 11, which Horace’s special sequencing of Alcaic and Sapphic poems, and termination of the sequence at 11, again throws in relief. In addition to this clue of sequence, Odes 2.10 elicits attention on behalf of Odes 2.9 and 11 because, like them, it consists of a sequence of metaphors, allusions, and mythological exempla; in contrast with Odes 2.10, however, Odes 2.9 and 11 conspicuously change their form or vary their code, make the necessary ‘mistake,’ and thus admit decoding. The first of the two poems, Odes 2.9, is addressed to Rufus Valgus in the enjambment between the first two stanzas: “nor, on the shores of Armenia,/ Valgus my friend, does ice stiff always stand.”⁸⁷ Beginning thus with two stanzas of var-

 Ricoeur () : “To understand, it is necessary to believe; to believe it is necessary to understand”; cf. Lowrie ()  – .  Cf. Lowrie ()  f., , .  For documentation and discussion, see Lowrie (a) .  Cf. Putnam ()  on Syme () . Ars  –  parallels the trajectory of Odes . with decipimur specie recti (: “we are deceived by the appearance of right”~ ..: rectius vives) and serpit humi tutus nimium timidusque procellae (: “too safe does he creep on the ground, afraid of the wind”), which continues ( f.): “who…puts the dolphins in the woods and the bees in the seas.” In the midst of the implicit injunction that Geue ()  reads as conformist, Horace actually uses comparable adunata (cf. Geue ()  on Ars : humano capiti) elsewhere of himself, and to opposite effect, viz. exemplification of eminence: Odes .. – , cf. Fowler ()  – , Schiesaro ()  f., .   f.: nec Armeniis in oris,/ amice Valgi, stat glacies iners.

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iously local meteorology, the third stanza introduces the elegies of Valgus (“You’re always pressing, in tearful [flebilibus] measures,/ Mystes deceased”)⁸⁸ and ends the first half of the poem before the second half (stanzas 4– 6), which begins with mythological exempla in just the same pattern (weather and gods) that we find in Odes 2.10 to ‘Licinius.’ In contrast with 2.10, 2.9 finally issues as an imperative the message of the poem, breaking the code.⁸⁹ With the same enjambment that Horace uses to fuse the first and second stanzas, between the third and fourth stanzas, he writes: “nor…/…did the Phrygian sisters/ always weep [semper fleuere]. || Cease from your soft/ laments at last.”⁹⁰ Continuing the six stanza, bipartite structure, which both Odes 2.9 and 11 share with Odes 2.10, the final poem in the Alcaic-Sapphic sequence (2.11), begins with one stanza about geography, in which the addressee is also identified: “What the militant Cantaberian and the Scythian,/ O Hirpinian Quinctius, are thinking…” It then proceeds almost immediately to an injunction (“…stop seeking [that]”), which is not, however, the main point of the poem. In fact, by the time we get to the second half (stanzas 3 ff.), the real point of the poem reveals itself in an effective injunction which also applies to the poet, again with the familiar enjambment (2.11.13 – 17): cur non sub alta uel platano uel hac pinu iacentes sic temere et rosa canos odorati capillos, dum licet, Assyriaque nardo potamus uncti? Why, under the tall plane tree, or this here pine, thus lying pellmell, with white hair made fragrant with the rose, while it’s possible, with perfume from Assyria also oiled, do we not drink?

The strained translation is meant to convey the delay that reveals the actual message of the poem, which is, as always, neither meteorological, theological, nor even strictly speaking apolitical (i. e., stop worrying about the wars), but rather, actually, an invitation to a party, a poem which is practically its own genre in Horace, but is here in 2.11 refashioned in the form of the kerygma. In the case of Odes 2.11, metrical features of the second half of this poem emphasize the    Cf.

 f.: tu semper urges flebilibus modis/ Mysten ademptum. Putnam () .  – : nec…/…Phrygiae sorores/ fleuere semper. desine mollium/ tandem querelarum. .. with Putnam ()  n. .

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‘mistake,’ countering the repetition that makes the code of the kerygma otherwise undecipherable. The first three stanzas of the poem consist of periodic sentences, which the fourth stanza, beginning the second half of the poem, and just quoted, carries on, except that with the primary injunction, which breaks the code, the syntax is also broken: potamus uncti? || dissipat Euhius/ curas edaces. || quis puer ocius… The marking of the caesura makes the breakage clear; additional signposts include the word of dispersal or loosening (in Latin theory prose is uerba soluta), dissipat; and if the internal ‘dissolutions’ were not enough, Horace punches the line breaks with the precise rhyme Euhius/ocius. There are other such kerygmata in the corpus of Odes, Books 1– 3. The most paradigmatic of them is probably Odes 1.7 where, again, Horace subjects a familiar genre to the same delay, same play of identification of addressee and injunction, in the famous priamel…eventually addressed to Munatius Plancus.⁹¹ As in Odes 2.9, the injunction begins exactly past one half of the 32-line poem: “Likewise, you remember in wisdom to draw a line [finire]/ on moodiness and toils of life,/ O Plancus, with soft wine…”⁹² Of poems such as this, whose halving he also notes, Lyne correctly writes that Horace “likes to set us a puzzle.”⁹³ Clearly. Exactly the same can be said, and Lyne says it, for Odes 1.4: a poem that can be broken into five units of four lines starts on the subject of spring, and only in the fourth of five stanzas do we learn the name of the addressee: “O flourishing Sestius,/ the little span of life prohibits one from laying a foundation for long hope.”⁹⁴ The word “long” is probably significant: had the poem been longer (six ‘stanzas’ instead of five), the identification of Sestius coming in the fifth stanza, would have come just after the first half, the usual placement for the revelatory volta of the kerygma. Here then, a kerygma interrupted: a repetition – and a mistake. Examples can be multiplied.⁹⁵ Odes 2.5, for instance, another well-known poem, is not addressed to anyone – and so perhaps, we hear, it is addressed to the speaker himself – but there, in another poem of six stanzas, the poet be Syme associates Plancus with the three addressees who open Odes : Pollio, Sallustius Crispus, Dellius (Syme () , ).  Odes .. – : sic tu sapiens finire memento/ tristitiam uitaeque labores/ molli, Plance, mero.  Lyne ()  f.; see Nisbet and Hubbard () , with Lowrie () ; Sallman () .   f.: o beate Sesti,/ uitae summa breuis spem nos uetat incohare longam.  See, e. g., Odes . to Maecenas, with Lyne ()  – ; cf. . with Lowrie ()  or . with Nisbet and Rudd () : “The ode begins with an arresting exemplum, whose full implications are not immediately apparent.” Similarly . to a woman (l. ), or a cup () or (in fact) Messalla (l. ): Nisbet and Rudd () .

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gins with a series of animals and plants that are not ready for human use; in the third stanza, after the now familiar enjambment and caesura, he writes, of the nubile heifer, that only to field and stream is she “rearing to go. || Get rid of desire for/ the unripe grape.”⁹⁶ The stanza that follows, the first stanza of the second half, finally introduces a possibly identifying pronoun (13): “now she’ll follow you [iam te sequetur].” By the end of that stanza we learn the identity, not of the addressee, but of the subject of the code: “Now with a wanton/ face Lalage will a partner seek.”⁹⁷ In this kerygma, the code is broken, the message is revealed, but the receiver remains a mystery.⁹⁸ This development in the “genre” of the kerygma is instructive. From the background of the conspiracy, which formal features of the poems somehow both throw into relief and refract into indeterminacy, a genre of determinate indeterminacy emerges. Consisting of discrete features – especially code and message, transmitter and receiver – and exhibiting distinctive patterns, repetition and mistake, the kerygma as I have identified it also allows for adjustments of the parts, such that, eventually, even something as distinctive as the receiver of the message can be encrypted. In addition to making, as it were, the unintelligibility of the addressee of Odes 2.10 (“Licinius”) intelligible as a function, the many permutations of the parts of the kerygma make it possible that a poem with no actual message – no actual injunction – may be just as much a kerygma, or a poem of secret message.⁹⁹ At this point, the suggestion of NH that Odes 2.10 is secretly addressed to Augustus becomes more plausible. As mentioned above (see §1), this was their interpretation of the middle section of the second half of the poem: “hideous winters Jupiter brings./ He, the same,/ takes them away…/ sometimes the Muse who’s quiet/ with her lyre Apollo excites; he’s not/ always the archer.” “The image of the taut bowstring normally occurs in exhortations to relax, and Horace may be hinting indirectly that this is the best course for everybody.”¹⁰⁰

  f.: praegestientis. tolle cupidinem/ immitis uuae. Cf. “Porphyrio”: transit in aliam allegoriam in Kalina () .   f.: iam proterua/ fronte petet Lalage maritum.  Porter ()  f.  According to the evidence of Kalina () , of the thirty-four references to “allegory” in the scholia of Horace’s Odes, “Porphyry” uses the word on average once or twice per poem; the exceptions are Odes ., where it occurs three times; . where it occurs three times (cf. Quint. Inst. .., with Lowrie ()  f.); and Odes . where it occurs four times. On allegoria as “puzzle” (Rätsel) “incomprehensible to the uninitiated,” see Kalina ()  f. Cf. Ricoeur ()  f.  Nisbet and Hubbard () , with my italics.

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But at this point, this is not the only implication of the possibility of permutations in the kerygma, and we come to a paradox that, in another venue, the sometime philosophically trained Horace may have appreciated: how many parts of the kerygma can one remove and still have a kerygma?¹⁰¹ If it does not need a receiver, does it need a message? Odes 1.15, for instance, is addressed to no one and merely describes a pastoral interlude combined with a troubling but, in context, effectively referenceless prophecy: is it an essay in epyllion or maybe the supreme kerygma?¹⁰² Similarly, if one does not need a message and a receiver, does one even need a transmitter – that is, a poet? Might not the best kerygma be the one for which the poet himself has the least responsibility, for which he was not the cause, and which he did not intend?¹⁰³ When, for instance, Horace addresses a poem, supposedly not to Murena, but to “Murena’s brother” (alias Murena!), and the poem begins with the indirect questions of this Murena’s symposiastic speculations (“How far from Inachus/ is Codrus?”),¹⁰⁴ who is responsible for this poem about family relations? In the very next line, the poem could prove a kerygma within a kerygma: this Murena, either the conspirator or his brother, notes that Codrus was “not afraid to die for his country [pro patria non timidus mori],” as he himself, or his brother, could, on an “anti-Augustan” reading, be construed to have done. Similarly, Nisbet speculates in Nisbet and Rudd, that the reference to Troy in the next lines may be a coded reference to the great-grandfather of both “Murenas,” the “original” Licinius, who “[w]hen Sulla rescued Ilium in 85…may have played a significant part.”¹⁰⁵ Why not then the previous lines about the rightness of dying for one’s country? Will the “right” Murena, conspirator, survivor, or any figure of their kind (“Murenas” as a class),¹⁰⁶ know that he did the right thing when he reads this poem about “his” ancestor – assuming he has not been executed and is not therefore also at this moment, conjured from the dead, a standing reproach to Augustus, at least to those in the know? We are already in the realm of figured speech,

 See, e. g., Hor. Ep. .. – , cf. Ep. .. – , also Pers. Sat. .,  –  with Cic. fr. . –  (cf. Lowrie ()  f.), Ac. ., . Similar “polynomials” occur in Horace’s amores: e. g., Odes .. – .  Lowrie ()  f.,  – ; cf. Odes ..  Cf. Odes ., with Oliensis ()  – , cf. .  Odes .. f.: Quantum distet ab Inacho/ Codrus?  Odes .. (et pugnata sacro bella sub Ilio), with Nisbet and Rudd () .  On this, “the political, apart from the particular,” see Geue ()  – ; cf. Schiesaro ()  n. .

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only here, in the midst of the collection authored by Horace, even the author is an enigma.¹⁰⁷ Who is responsible for such a poem? Is it Augustus, the general auctor of the ‘age’ he named while, more locally, the double agent is, not Horace, but the ‘Murena’ who opens such a poem of indirect interrogation? Alternatively, does Horace not even know what he’s doing, in the same way that Maecenas became the unwitting agent of the princeps when he leaked the leak of the conspiracy to Terentia? Should we follow the line of questioning to its logical conclusion and acknowledge, maybe predictably, that, as the agents of preservation of the poem in interpretation, we are the transmitters and ourselves unwitting agents of Augustus or, maybe more palatably, double agents– members of the underground and resistance, whether or not the “poet” realized that he was giving us so much material for our ends, just by virtue, à la Duncan Kennedy’s deconstruction, of being a poet?¹⁰⁸

Conclusion: Partisan Song When I presented the concept of the kerygma in structuralist terms, I was only telling half the story. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy, the element of meaning is not just structural, not just the result of an explanation of the form of an artifact (code or whatnot), nor even only interpretive, or the result of a hermeneutic process that seeks to integrate the explanation of the structure of the poem into larger structure – the poetry book or the society that produced it. The kerygma in the work of Ricoeur is also existential: it is, true to its origin in biblical hermeneutics, the call that an object of interpretation issues to me. The event is now, and the third-person mode of scholarship and conspiracy theory alike become first-person when we recognize that “you” is “us” and take a position in the opposition “us” and “them.”¹⁰⁹ The interpretive upshot of the previous section, then – the possibility that the transmutation of the kerygmatic or code ode – ultimately leads to no one, and therefore everyone (e. g., Augustus, patriarchy, imperialism), is likewise only part of the story. Reading the poem as addressed to “me” – in the way that reading it as addressed to “Licinius” allows – distinguishes the global application of the hermeneutics of suspicion as practiced by politically oriented

 Cf. ‘Maternus’ in Tac. Dial. ., with Bartsch () ,  f.  See n.  above; cf. Lowrie ()  f.; () .  Ricoeur () ,  f.,  f., Henderson ()  f.

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postmodern critics from the local application of the partisan of the truth.¹¹⁰ The partisan of the truth sees the poem as part of a living struggle in which, to be sure, all interpretation is relative, but for the partisan of the truth, the relationships, always of conflict, have yet to be played out, are subject to revision, change, defection.¹¹¹ This is not to say that “I” make of the text what “I” want to make of it, or that “who” “I” “am,” in some application of the principle of “the personal voice,” determines “my” interpretation. On the contrary, “I” am all the more alive to the constraints that history and the field of objects present and impose on “me” because all that is so much material for “my” ends.¹¹² I am eager to distinguish this formulation from the old, familiar claims of interpretive relativity¹¹³ because of the alternatives that emerge in light of the present discussion, which are three: first, the endless shift of interpretive ground described at the end of the previous section; second, more perniciously, the insistence that, e. g., the ugly political ‘realities’ that the texts in question exemplify are facts of a universe of possibilities and impossibilities that still obtain and are thus still the secret injunction of ‘realism,’ ‘common sense,’ etc. (Augustanism was ugly, so are we, that’s just the way life is, no sense in changing it). The third alternative to interpretive relativity is the quite untimely cold war hope, which probably few true cold warriors ever harbored, that the participants in the opposition to whom we have the best access, such as Horace, are not only double agents, but double agents who actually work for us. ¹¹⁴ But as any reader of spy stories knows, handlers have little use for the double agent whose allegiance is secure.¹¹⁵ In the end, it is up to the handler to turn the agent, to make him work for ‘us’ by manipulating the conditions of his operation and re-

 Cf. Schiesaro ()  f.  Similarly, Ahl ()  read Oedipus on the assumption that fate could be escaped; not so Lucan’s Cato: Ahl ()  – . For relevant readings of relational meaning, see Lowrie ()  f., Barchiesi ()  – ,  f.  How else to evince the secret positions that Feeney ()  f. suspects imperial ideology mediated? Cf. Syme () : “On all sides prevailed a conspiracy of decent reticence about the gap between fact and theory. It was evident: no profit but only danger from talking about it. The Principate baffles definition.” Note again the unlikely convergence of old and new historicisms.  See Galinsky ()  – .  See Galinsky ()  f.  Cf. MacIntyre ()  f.: “Philby was telling Moscow the truth and was disbelieved but allowed to go on thinking he was believed; he was deceiving the British in order to aid the Soviets, who suspected a deception and were in turn deceiving him. Moscow’s faith in Philby seemed to ebb and flow; sometimes he was considered suspect, sometimes genuine, and sometimes both simultaneously.” The best critical comportment towards Horace will be just this.

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vealing his consciousness of those conditions to be, not irrelevant in the ex cathedra assertion of the intentional fallacy of both formalists and historicists, but one more strategico-critical element in a system of relations along with others. Synthesizing and reversing both Syme and Ahl, let us make the author’s intention in Odes 2.10 this. A poem about the middle way, let us see it as a testament to a kind of middle class, which is neither exactly faithful to the nobilitas, whom ‘Murena’ represents, nor to Augustus per se, but rather to the interests of the poet, aligned with those of Augustus against the aristocracy. R.O.A.M. Lyne suggests that, when another poem in this same treacherous book, 2.18, is addressed to no one but ‘you,’ we should infer, through a series of techniques not altogether different from the cybernetics that I deploy in the previous section, that the poem is really addressed to Maecenas.¹¹⁶ This becomes interesting, and ripe for exploitation, when the addressee of 2.18 is advised to stop expropriating the land of the less well off. Could this be, in a strange and unexpected turn of Marxist reductionism actually the secret message of the Odes as a whole: Octavian, stop the aristocracy, the likes of Murena and Maecenas, from its endless exploitation, the crushing ambition of the old regime, because you are in a position to do so, whereas I am not?¹¹⁷ Only by believing in a reality behind the mask can such a message be the message of Horace’s poem, even if Horace didn’t know he meant it, and even if such a meaning would have been unmentionable in the circles in which he was moving. The point is Horace can be made a party to the conspiracy to stop the aristocracy, and he is ours to make. If we do so, the intelligence that we gain from him is this: there was not, as the (high modern) trutherism of

 Lyne () , cf.  – . In view of Schiesaro ()  f., Odes . – , first on property then on Bacchus, simply compresses the trajectory of .,  – ; note also, in .., dulce periculum est vis-à-vis pro patria non timidus mori (.. above) via the echo/ forecast of .., dulce et decorum est pro patria mori with decorum as a synonym for moderation (mediocritas).  Horace is thus the ‘enemy’ of a Maecenas qua elite and the ‘friend’ of Augustus via ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and the Schmittian (Schmitt  [],  f.) dictum that true friends and enemies are not personal. In the present instance, the form of contestation is thus pro-poetry=anti-Nobilitas, qua Augustan, pace, e. g., Finley ()  (there was no “Roman Revolution”), with Galsterer ()  n. ,  f., Raaflaub and Samons ()  f.,  – . All this slightly modifies Geue’s () recent contribution, which appears to restore the Augustanism of the author whom I read as ‘Augustan’ (e. g., ): “the Ars becomes a key text of social and political lobotomy, and a key act of Augustan reconstruction.” Even if Geue is ‘right,’ and Horace is an Augustan (rather than ‘Augustan’) collaborator in political lobotomy (which I take to be a bad thing), the argument here is that he need not be, so why let him?

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the anti-Augustan camps would suggest, but one dimension of conflict in 23 BCE, nor were there infinite dimensions in one global conspiracy of culture (postmodern). There were, rather, a few distinct dimensions of conflict: nobiles vs. Princeps (Syme), poet vs. Princeps (Ahl), Realpolitik vs. mystification/poetry (Augustus, e. g., Tacitus, Syme), and also poet vs. nobiles (Ahl+Syme≈Oliensis, or the critic of hegemonic discourse as such). What we find in Horace is thus, not only a conflict between poet and princeps, but also between poet and nobilitas (e. g., ‘Licinius,’ ‘Murena,’ ‘Maecenas’), a coded message to each about the defects of the other, and a coded message to us about the defects of the culture. But only if we pick a side.¹¹⁸

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY. — 1984a. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105: 174 – 208. — 1984b. “The Horse and the Rider: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius”, ANRW 2.32.1: 40 – 110. — 1991. Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction. Ithaca, NY. Altman, W. 2015. “Cicero and the Fourth Triumvirate: Gruen, Syme, and Strasburger”, in: W. Altman (ed.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero. Leiden, 215 – 46. Anderson, W.S. 1986. “The Theory and Practice of Poetic Arrangement from Vergil to Ovid”, in: N. Freistat (ed.), Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections. Chapel Hill, NC, 44 – 65. Badiou, A. 2003. St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA. — 2005. Being and Event. London. Barchiesi, A. 2001. Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets. London. Bartsch, S. 1994. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Double Speak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA. Bowditch, P.L. 2001. Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage. Berkeley, CA. Bowersock, G. 1991. “Ronald Syme (March 11, 1903-September 4, 1989)”, PAPhS 135: 118 – 22. — 1994. “Ronald Syme”, PBA 84: 539 – 63. Buchan, J. 1965 [1923]. “The Loathly Opposite”, in: E. Ambler (ed.), To Catch a Spy: An Anthology of Favorite Spy Stories. London, 21 – 35. Compagnon, A. 2004. Literature, Theory, and Common Sense. Princeton, NJ.

 Many thanks to Katherine Wasdin, Patricia Rosenmeyer, and especially Elena Giusti for comments on drafts of this paper, to Michèle Lowrie for her support and encouragement in general, and to the editors of the volume for their patience.

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Derrida, J. 1990. “Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-Logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms”, in: D. Carroll (ed.), The States of “Theory”. Stanford, CA, 63 – 94. — 1997. The Politics of Friendship. London. Dressler, A. 2012a. “‘You Must Change Your Life’: Theory and Practice, Metaphor and Exemplum, in Seneca’s Prose”, Helios 39: 145 – 92. Dressler, A. 2012b. “Oedipus on Oedipus: Sophocles, Seneca, Politics, and Therapy”, in: K. Ormand (ed.), Blackwell’s Companion to Sophocles. Malden, MA, 507 – 21. — 2013. “Poetics of Conspiracy and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Tacitus’s Dialogus de Oratoribus”, CA 32.1: 1 – 34. Feeney, D.C. 1994. “Si Licet et Fas est: Ovid’s Fasti and the Problem of Free Speech under the Principate”, in: A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. London, 1 – 25. Finley, M.I. 1965. “Myth, Memory, and History”, History and Theory. 4.3: 281 – 302. — 1986. “Revolution in Antiquity”, in: R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), Revolution in History. Cambridge, 47 – 60. Finley, M.I. and K. Hopkins. 2014. “Keith Hopkins Interviews Sir Moses Finley: October 1985 Transcript”, AJPh 135.2: 179 – 201. Fowler, D. 2009. “Horace and the Aesthetics of Politics”, in: M. Lowrie (ed.), Horace: Odes and Epodes. Oxford, 247 – 70. Galinsky, K. 1992. “Introduction: The Current State of the Interpretation of Roman Poetry and the Contemporary Critical Scene”, in: K. Galinsky (ed.), The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics. Frankfurt, 1 – 40. Galsterer, H. 2000. “A Man, a Book, and a Method: Sir Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution after Fifty Years”, in: K. Raaflaub and M. Toher (eds.), Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate. Berkeley, CA, 1 – 20. Geue, T. 2014. “Editing the Opposition: Horace’s Ars Politica”, MD 72, 143 – 72. Griffin, M. 1990. “Sir Ronald Syme”, JRS 80: xi-xiv. Habinek, T.N. 1998. The Politics of Latin Literature. Princeton, NJ. Hadju, P. 2014. “Horace’s Ars Poetica as Pure Poetry”, MD 72, 85 – 96. Henderson, J. 1998. Fighting for Rome. Cambridge. Hepburn, A. 2005. Intrigue: Espionage and Culture. New Haven, CT. Hinds, S. 2007. “Ovid among the Conspiracy Theorists”, in: S.J. Heyworth, P.J. Fowler, and S.H. Harrison (ed.), Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean. Oxford, 194 – 220. Hölkeskamp, K.-J. 2001. “Fact(ions) or Fiction? Friedrich Münzer and the Aristocracy of the Roman Republic: Then and Now”, IJCT 8.1: 92 – 105. Jakobson, R. 1960. “Linguistics and Poetics”, in: T. Sebeok (ed.) Style and Language. Cambridge, MA, 350 – 77. James, C. 2007. “Lewis Namier, the Historian as Poet”, Slate March 8. Accessed February 25, 2015. Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC. Jameson, S. 1969. “22 or 23?”, Historia 18: 204 – 39. Kalina, A. 2007. Der Horazkommentar des Pomponius Porphyrio. Stuttgart, Germany. Kennedy, D. 1994. “‘Augustan’ and ‘Anti-Augustan’: Reflections on Terms of Reference”, in: A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. London, 26 – 58.

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Raaflaub, K. and L.J. Samons. 2000. “Opposition to Augustus”, in: K. Raaflaub and M. Toher (eds.), Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate. Berkeley, CA, 417 – 54. Raaflaub, K. and M. Toher, (eds). 2000. Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate. Berkeley, CA. Ricoeur, P. 1970. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven, CT. — 1981. “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding”, in: J.B. Thompson (ed. and trans.) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, 145 – 64. — 1989. “Preface to Bultmann”, in: The Conflict of Interpretations. London, 377 – 97. Rudich, V. 1997. Dissidence and Literature under Nero: The Price of Rhetoricization. New York. Sallman, K. 1987. “Lyrischer Krieg. Die Verschiebung der Genera in der Pollio Ode, 2.1 des Horaz”, in: Filologia e forme letterarie. Studi Offerti a Francesco della Corte. Urbino, 69 – 87. Santirocco, M.S. 1986. Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes. Chapel Hill, NC. Schiesaro, A. 2009. “Horace’s Bacchic Poetics”, in: L. Houghton and M. Wyke (eds.), Perceptions of Horace. Cambridge, 61 – 79. — 2011. “Ibis redibis”, MD 67, 79 – 150. Schmitt, C. 1996 [1932]. The Concept of the Political. Chicago. Sedgwick, E.K. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC. Shackleton Bailey, D.R. 2008. Horatius: Opera. Berlin. Stevenson, W. 1976. A Man Called Intrepid. New York. Syme, R. 1942. The Roman Revolution. Oxford. — 1959. “Livy and Augustus”, HSPh 64: 27 – 87. — 1978. History in Ovid. Oxford. — 1986. The Augustan Aristocracy. Oxford. — 1987. “Exotic Names, Notably in Seneca”, AC 30: 49 – 64. Verrall, A. 1884. Studies, Literary and Historical, in the Odes of Horace. London. White, P. 1993. Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome. Cambridge, MA. Wilkinson, S. 2012. Republicanism during the Early Empire. London.

Joshua T. Katz

Another Vergilian Signature in the Georgics? Summary: Vergil’s name appears, unambiguously, only once in his œuvre, as Vergilium at G. 4.563. Nevertheless, scholars have spotted authorial signatures of a ludic sort throughout the Georgics (1.2, 1.429 – 33, and 2.321– 7), as well as in the Aeneid (12.587– 8); the most famous, not to say infamous, instance is the syllabic acrostic MA-VE-PV (G. 1.429, 431, and 433), which many believe to stand for the poet’s tria nomina, Publius Vergilius Maro – reversed. This paper provides a critical survey of the evidence and proposes one more example: the acronym M-VER-P spelled out by the first three words of a self-referential passage near the end of Book 2 of the Georgics, me uero primum (2.475). Keywords: acronym; acrostic; Aeneid; Aratus; Georgics; metapoetics; signature; tria nomina; Vergil; wordplay Vergil’s name appears, unambiguously, only once in his œuvre, in the sphragis at the very end of the fourth Georgic:¹ haec super aruorum cultu pecorumque canebam et super arboribus, Caesar dum magnus ad altum fulminat Euphraten bello uictorque uolentis per populos dat iura uiamque adfectat Olympo. illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti, carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuuenta, Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi.

560

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So much I sang in addition to the care of fields, of cattle, and of trees, while great Caesar thundered in war by deep Euphrates and bestowed a victor’s laws on willing nations, and essayed the path to Heaven. In those days I, Virgil, was nursed by sweet Parthenope, and rejoiced in the arts of inglorious ease—I who toyed with shepherds’ songs, and, in youth’s boldness, sang of you, Tityrus, under the canopy of a spreading beech.

 The translations from Vergil’s Georgics are by Fairclough [Goold] (); those from Vergil’s Aeneid, Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus are by Ahl (), Rouse [Smith] (), and Peterson [Winterbottom] () respectively. Footnotes are omitted.

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At least four other authorial signatures have, however, been detected, three of them elsewhere in the same poem.² The purpose of this note, dedicated to a leading scholar of Latin wordplay whose work has significantly influenced me and so many others, is to suggest one more. For a start, I have argued that the very beginning of the first Georgic, Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram uertere, Maecenas, …,

1

What makes the crops joyous, beneath what star, Maecenas, it is well to turn the soil, …

contains the names of both Vergil and Aratus hidden away in the phrase terram / uertere ‘to turn the soil’, a periphrasis of ‘to plow’ (arare, past participle aratus) that might be rendered instead as ‘to turn/translate/VERgilize terra’.³ It is, in other words, an invitation to read boustrophedon and take terra as ‘arret’, thereby alluding in the main Latin poem about the land to Aratus’ well-known ‘signature’ ἄρρητον,⁴ likewise enjambed in the second line of his hugely influential Greek poem about the sky, the Phaenomena. ⁵ In addition, the most infamous would-be signature of all – believed by increasingly many scholars, it would seem, though emphatically rejected by a

 For a couple of additional would-be Vergilian signatures that I do not discuss in this paper, see below, n. .  See Katz ().  The leading references on ἄρρητον are Levitan ()  n. , Kidd ()  and () , Hopkinson () , and especially Bing () and ()  – . For further references and discussion, especially in connection with Aratus’ most famous acrostic (on which see immediately below in the text), see Katz ()  –  (also  –  and  on three allusions to Aratus in Eclogue , including the punning use of arator at line ); see as well now Kubiak () and Nelis ().  For what it may be worth, the first three letters of terram backwards, namely ‘marret’, could be an overlapping allusion to Vergil’s cognomen, Maro (thus Eiríkur Kristjánsson apud Katz () ); also possible, I suppose, is that Vergil was conscious of the fact that his cognomen – which has a famous anagrammatic relationship to Amor and Roma, the sort of matter on which Ahl () is the greatest authority – shares its first two letters with Maecenas. If so, uertere is even more of a pivot between terram/‘marret’ and Maecenas, and the phrase “Maecenas = himself” in the following phrase taken from Katz ()  should rather read “Maecenas = Vergil and himself”: the start of the Georgics “present[s] a tightly meshed and really quite extraordinary genealogy: Quid faciat laetas segetes = Hesiod; quo sidere = both Hesiod and Aratus; terram / uertere = both Aratus and Vergil; and Maecenas = himself – who is receiving this poem from Vergil, who received it from Aratus, who received it in turn from Hesiod (and the latter two got their material from on high, be it from Zeus or the Muses)”.

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few – is the reversed, skipped-line syllabic acrostic MA-VE-PV in G. 1.429, 431, and 433, first pointed out by Edwin L. Brown:⁶ si uero solem ad rapidum lunasque sequentis ordine respicies, numquam te crastina fallet hora, neque insidiis noctis capiere serenae. luna reuertentis cum primum colligit ignis, si nigrum obscuro comprenderit aëra cornu, maximus agricolis pelagoque parabitur imber; at si uirgineum suffuderit ore ruborem, uentus erit: uento semper rubet aurea Phoebe. sin ortu quarto (namque is certissimus auctor) pura neque obtunsis per caelum cornibus ibit, totus et ille dies et qui nascentur ab illo exactum ad mensem pluuia uentisque carebunt, uotaque seruati soluent in litore nautae Glauco et Panopeae et Inoo Melicertae.

425

430

435

But if you pay heed to the swift sun and the moons, as they follow in order, never will tomorrow’s hour cheat you, nor will you be ensnared by a cloudless night. Soon as the moon gathers her returning fires, if she encloses a dark mist within dim horns, a heavy rain is awaiting farmers and seamen. But if over her face she spreads a maiden blush, there will be wind; as wind rises, golden Phoebe ever blushes. But if at her fourth rising—for that is our surest guide—she pass through the sky clear and with un-dimmed horns, then all that day, and the days born of it to the month’s end, shall be free from rain and wind; and the sailors, safe in port, shall pay their vows on the shore to Glaucus, and to Panopea, and to Melicerta, Ino’s son.

Could Publius Vergilius Maro really have meant MA(ximus) to stand for his cognomen, VE(ntus) for his nomen gentilicium, and PV(ra) for his praenomen? Yes, in my opinion. The best reason to believe that MA-VE-PV is a deliberate move by Vergil is that G. 1.424– 37, which is filled with metapoetic signals (e. g., sequentis / ordine respicies (424– 5)),⁷ evidently picks up on Arat. Phaen. 778 – 818 – a description of weather signs that happens to contain the most celebrated instance of alphabetic wordplay in antiquity, the ‘gamma-acrostic’ Λ(επτή)-Ε-Π-Τ-Η (783 – 7; the first word of 783 is itself λεπτή), which was rediscovered a bit over half a century ago by J.-M. Jacques.⁸ The secondary literature since Jacques and Brown on MA-VE-PV – as well as on Greek and Latin acrostics in general,  Brown ()  – , esp.  – . I should perhaps say that Brown is the first to have pointed out MA-VE-PV in modern times since it is at least possible (see Brown ()  – ) that the acrostic sequence MA-VER-P in Col. ., , and  is modeled on it.  See, e. g., Feeney and Nelis ().  Jacques ().

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acrostics specifically in Aratus, and other Aratus-inspired acrostics, including elsewhere in Vergil – is large and growing rapidly;⁹ of particular value to the present discussion is the excellent suggestion of Peter Bing that what Vergil may be doing with his acrostic signature MA-VE-PV is ‘conflating models’, alluding at one and the same time to Aratus’ acrostic Λ-Ε-Π-Τ-Η and to his signature ἄρρητον.¹⁰ It will be remembered that there is no small body of evidence in the Greco-Roman tradition for “literary acrostichs in which authors one way or another sign their works”.¹¹ It is not that I am hopelessly credulous. For example, after unveiling MA-VEPV, Brown considers at some length G. 2.315 – 42 and gives reasons to accept the intentionality of P-VER-MA in the identically spaced lines 321, 324, and 327¹² –

 See Katz (a)  –  and passim – my introduction to the volume The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry (Kwapisz, Petrain, and Szymański (eds.) ()), in which, besides proposing a new way to read Aen. . –  that involves an acrostic (A-B-EO(s)-O(stia)-S-O-S), I give a summary account of classical acrostics, especially Aratean and Latin ones, and provide up-to-date bibliography ( n. , as well as nn.  – ). To the references given there add already Danielewicz (c), who takes Λ-Ε-Π-Τ-Η and MA-VE-PV in a number of intriguing directions; Kersten (), on an acrostic in Lucan; Castelletti (), on Aratean acrostics in Valerius Flaccus; Fabiszewski (), on Aratean acrostics in Germanicus; Hanses (), who adduces a convincing example of further play on λεπτή in Aratus’ lines with the famous acrostic; Hawkins ()  –  and passim, on Catullus  (an acrostic-cumtelestich); Laurent (), who has much to say about Nicander’s two onomastic acrostics and places them in their wider intellectual context; Danielewicz (), who builds on Hanses (whose paper in this volume offers up a new telestich in Ovid); Giusti (forthcoming), on a further acrostic in Lucan, one that is palindromic besides; and Gowers (forthcoming), on an acrostic in Eclogue . (See also Danielewicz (b)  –  and passim, for the latest word on Hellenistic λεπτότηϛ; Nelis ()  – , with n. , on an anagram at G. .; and Smith (), who finds “acrostic features” – notably acronyms (see below, n. ) – in Ovid.) Perhaps the main contribution on MA-VE-PV from recent years comes from Somerville (), who makes a plausible, if complicated, suggestion for why Vergil would have reversed the tria nomina (–) but ignores a great deal of significant bibliography, above all Damschen (); Danielewicz (c) has ideas about the reason for the skipped lines as well as the reversed order. The most significant newly discovered Latin acrostic is surely Vergil’s V-N-D-I-S (Ecl. . – ), spotted by Grishin (). I have considered acrostics and related instances of elaborate wordplay in Latin poetry also in Katz (), (), and (), as well as in Katz (b)  –  and  – , (a), and (b).  See Bing ()  –  and ()  – ; for a quick summary, with further references, see Katz ()  – . Somerville ()  adds the attractive suggestion that the syllabic acrostic ΜΕ-ΣΗ (Phaen.  – ), pointed out by Haslam () , shows that “Vergil’s signature acrostic conflated not just two of Aratus’ metalinguistic games in the Phaenomena, but three”.  See Courtney (), with quotation at .  See Brown ()  – .

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but for reasons explained below, I am more skeptical of (though, yes, ultimately inclined to accept) this fourth Vergilian signature under consideration.¹³ Here is the central part of the passage in question: optima uinetis satio, cum uere rubenti candida uenit auis longis inuisa colubris, prima uel autumni sub frigora, cum rapidus Sol nondum hiemem contingit equis, iam praeterit aestas. uer adeo frondi nemorum, uer utile siluis, uere tument terrae et genitalia semina poscunt. tum pater omnipotens fecundis imbribus Aether coniugis in gremium laetae descendit, et omnis magnus alit magno commixtus corpore fetus. auia tum resonant auibus uirgulta canoris, et Venerem certis repetunt armenta diebus; parturit almus ager Zephyrique tepentibus auris laxant arua sinus; superat tener omnibus umor, inque nouos soles audent se gramina tuto credere, ….

320

325

330

The best planting season for vines is when in blushing spring the white bird, the foe of long snakes, is come, or close on autumn’s first cold, while the hot sun does not as yet touch winter with his car, and summer now is waning. Spring it is that clothes the glades and forests with leaves, in spring the soil swells and craves the vital seed. Then does Heaven, sovereign father, descend in fruitful showers into the womb of his joyful consort and, mightily mingling with her mighty frame, gives life to every embryo within. Then secluded thickets echo with melodious birdsong and at the trysting hour the herds renew their loves; the bounteous earth prepares to give birth, and the meadows ungirdle to the Zephyr’s balmy breeze; the tender moisture avails for all. The grass safely dares to face the nascent suns, …

True, P-VER-MA gives the names in the canonical order. True, too, the “tricolon abundans [uer … uer … / uere (323 – 4)], with anaphora of the key word, serves as an emphatic opening” to this section on the praises of spring (323 – 45) and

 Also skeptical would seem to be Richard F. Thomas, whose approval of MA-VE-PV (Thomas () .: “difficult to resist”) did much to establish Brown’s idea but who ignores P-VERMA, as do most other scholars, even Damschen (); it is striking that Erren () mentions P-VER-MA neutrally () but worries a bit about MA-VE-PV (). Note that Brown ()  points in passing also to MA-VE-P, symmetrically arranged, in Ecl. . – , though he appears to consider this to be a matter of chance, and – perhaps of greater importance – that Damschen ()  –  n.  believes in the significance of PV-MA-VE in Aen. . – , likewise symmetrically arranged, with seven-line gaps that he suggests are highlighted by the phrase numeris septem discrimina uocum (); I expressed doubt in Katz ()  n.  and I still feel it, though I would not find it easy to say exactly why. See also below, n. .

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could be said, along with uere at 319 and uer … uer at 338, to highlight Vergil’s name.¹⁴ And, for what it may be worth (not much, to my mind), it is not just PVER-MA but P-VER-MA plus PART (330) and CRE (333), with the last two standing, in Brown’s view, for Vergil’s “adopted city as well as his childhood home”: Publius Vergilius Maro Parthenopeius Cremonae.¹⁵ As for the fifth authorial name that is already in the literature (i. e., the fourth hidden one plus Vergilium at G. 4.563), Matthew A. S. Carter has suggested that there is a similar, but “extremely compact”, syllabic signature – similar to MAVE-PV, that is (he, like many others (see above, n. 13) ignores P-VER-MA) – in Aen. 12.587– 8: inclusas ut cum latebroso in pumice pastor uestigauit apes fumoque impleuit amaro, So, when a shepherd has tracked down bees in the porous, volcanic Rock where they hide and has filled its chambers with billows of acrid Smoke, …

which is to say, PVmice … / VEstigauit … aMARO.¹⁶ Carter bolsters the idea¹⁷ in a number of ways, including by pointing out that Vergil’s cognomen and nomen are placed emphatically at the ends of a single verse, while the [praenomen] is announced by inclusas and latebroso, which indicate that something is being encrypted. latebroso thus becomes metapoetical, since it is the word pumex itself that is ‘full of hiding places’. Vestigare ‘to track, search out’ [= follow the vestigia of] and implevit also participate in this network of signals.¹⁸

Now, the first three signatures in the Georgics that I have mentioned – 1.2, 1.429 – 33, and 4.563 – have a number of things in common:

 Thus Thomas () .. In the words of Brown () , “The appearance of ver  times in  lines establishes a record – for repetition of substantive – not apt to be equaled in the whole of the Georgics”; see also Erren () , , and passim on the “Klangfiguren: … eine lange Anaphernreihe (ver, ver, vere, tum, tum, non alios dies, ver, ver, cum primae), die in der Mitte durch eine vielgliedrige Reihe von Annominationen und Assonanzen musikalisch verstärkt wird, nie ohne innere Beziehung der Melodie zum Text der Wörter” (). Mynors (), who ignores Brown, has nothing to say about the repetition of uer in this “-line panegyric of spring” ().  Brown () .  See Carter (), with quotation at .  Now acknowledged by Tarrant () : “ingenious[]”.  Carter () .

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(1) the first and last form a ring, neatly asserting Vergil’s authorship from beginning to end;¹⁹ (2) there is in all three cases a thematic reason for Vergil to name himself in that place since besides the evident utility of a seal at the beginning and end of a work, the ludic signature in the second is a follow-up to – really, an example of one-upmanship of – Aratus’ ludic signature in the Phaenomena; (3) all three are metapoetic, with a pregnant use of uertere in the first, a large pile of signals in the second, and explicit self-reference in the third; (4) the first two are evidently inspired by Aratus; and (5) even aside from the ludic quality of these first two, all three passages show awareness of elaborate Hellenistic wordplay, with the last sporting a gamma telestich O-T-(ot)I or O-T-(ot)I-A (4.562– 4/5) – i. e., the final word of 4.564 is itself oti – that alludes to Vergil’s use of otia at the dawn of his career (Ecl. 1.6) as well as being signaled by the verb lusi (4.565).²⁰ Do the other two would-be signatures – G. 2.321– 7 and Aen. 12.587– 8 – fit as well? Maybe yes, maybe no. In short, both display metapoetic signals (point (3)) but neither has a direct and obvious thematic connection to Aratus (point (4)) or, then, to Aratean wordplay in particular (point (5)). Somewhat less briefly: as far as the passage in Georgics 2 is concerned, Brown has pointed to self-referentiality beyond the repetition of uer(e) (notably auctor (315) and prima (321 and 336, with the first letter of the former an onomastic cue)), and while there is evidently nothing about beginnings and endings in its placement in the poem (point (1)), it might be said that attention to the name Vergilius is particularly appropriate at the start of a section on the primaveral be-

 This ring is in addition to the even larger one formed by the near-repetition of the very first line of the Eclogues (.) as the very last line of the Georgics (.).  The telestich was first pointed out by Schmid ()  – ; for the metapoetic nature of lusi as well as the ring with Ecl. ., see Carter ()  n. . (It will be noted that ludus plays a significant role in the argument of Grishin () for V-N-D-I-S in Eclogue  (see above, n. ); that Ecl. . –  sports the ‘watery’ acrostic F-O-N-S (see in the first place Clauss ()); and that a Hellenistic, seemingly specifically Callimachean, game with water is found also in the placement of the river Euphrates at G. . (on which there has been a stream of secondary literature since the short note of Scodel and Thomas ().) Compare also the thematic ring in Ovid’s Metamorphoses between . and ., with “the amusing acrostic INCIP” in . –  (Barchiesi () ). For recent literature on telestichs (and acrostics-cum-telestichs and such other curiosities as reversed acrostics), see Castelletti (), Danielewicz (a)  –  and (c), Fabiszewski (), Hawkins ()  – , Laurent (), and Hanses (in this volume).

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ginning that is uer ‘spring’ (point (2)).²¹ However, the passage is Aratean only by virtue of the supposition that P-VER-MA would be a continuation of the game established in the first book by MA-VE-PV. The situation with the passage in Aeneid 12 is much the same. Beyond the general metapoetic potential of inclusas and latebroso, Carter points to the following specific verbal links with Vergil’s poetic career: “As in the other onomastic [i. e., G. 1.429 – 33], the interspersed words function as autobiographical details: we think of the poet of the Eclogues [pastor] and especially the Georgics [apes, cf. Pastor Aristaeus at 4.317]”.²² And he goes on immediately to say that “[t]he retrospective quality of these verses also suggests a link with the sphragis of G. 4.559 – 66”, which has the word pastorum at 565. While Carter’s passage is in the final book of the Aeneid, which might make one think of point (1), it is in the middle of that book, and the “subtler autograph”²³ here does not in fact seem to me to fit terribly well with either point (1) or point (2). While we might not expect specifically Aratean wordplay in the Aeneid, significant acrostics do not appear to be absent from the text,²⁴ and if Carter is right, then Aen. 12.587– 8, like G. 2.315 – 42, has verbal connections to better-positioned Aratus-inspired games elsewhere. On balance, then, I am weakly inclined to believe in Brown’s and Carter’s readings of these two passages and not to think (as Carter wryly writes in his closing sentence) that either is “follow[ing] in the footsteps of Nabokov’s deluded caricature of a commentator, Dr Charles Kinbote”.²⁵ It is high time for me to unveil my promised new Vergilian signature. Men in white coats, stand by! What is wanted, of course, is a passage that, if not at the beginning or the end (point (1)), is nonetheless one in which it is appropriate for the poet to be highlighting himself (point (2)); that has metapoetic features (point (3)); and that continues the tradition of Aratus (point (4)) and Hellenistic wordplay more generally (point (5)). As far as points (1) and (2) are concerned, it would be difficult to think of something more fitting than the middle section of

 See Brown ()  – . For similar play on Vergil’s name in Hor. Carm. .., see Reckford ()  –  +  and Belmont () ; Thomas ()  thinks this worthy of note while conceding that it “will not convince all”.  Carter () .  Carter () .  The celebrated instance is M-A-R-S (Aen. . – ), best known thanks to Fowler (), though he was not the first to think it significant (see the overview of secondary literature provided by Horsfall ()  and Katz ()  n. ). For other possible examples, some or all of which may be mirages, see Katz () on Aen. . – , Katz (a)  –  on Aen. . –  (see above, n. ), and Castelletti () on Aen. . –  (!; compare also Damschen ()  n. , who builds on an idea of A. Heil).  Carter () .

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“the famous conclusion to the Second Georgic, … [l]ong recognized as the core of the Georgics and of Vergil’s thought, … where the farmer, the poet, and the philosopher and the knowledge appropriate to each converge”.²⁶ To quote Leah J. Kronenberg’s words at the start of her article on G. 2.458 – 540,²⁷ a passage generally called the “Praise of Country Life” (or “Lob des Landlebens” or “Laudes ruris”), it “occurs at a programmatically important place in the work and forms part of what [P. R.] Hardie terms the ‘most extended self-referential discussion of the poet’s task in Virgil’s œuvre.’”²⁸ The core of Vergil’s recusatio begins at line 475 (whether it goes to 494 or 502 is a matter of dispute) and comes directly after what Jenny Strauss Clay in a classic article calls “a sudden break …; from the rustic life, Vergil turns to himself and a prayerful request to the Muses”.²⁹ “It is important”, she goes on, “to emphasize the abruptness of this break in thought” before the section, which includes some of the most famous lines in all of Vergil, repeatedly cited not only for their great beauty and resonance, but also for the insight they afford into Vergil’s spiritual and philosophical development. … The importance of these lines cannot be over-estimated, for they provide one of the very few utterances of Vergil about himself.

R. A. B. Mynors puts it similarly: Had 474 been the last line of the book, we should have been content. Unforeseeably, but with no breach of continuity, the poet for the first time reveals his own ambitions with a startling me uero, and repeats the idyllic picture of country life in more detail and with a new depth and brilliance, greatly strengthened by our sense that he is now himself deeply committed.³⁰

Here is this new beginning: me uero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore, accipiant caelique uias et sidera monstrent, defectus solis uarios lunaeque labores; unde tremor terris, qua ui maria alta tumescant

475

 Clay ()  (my quotation breaks up one of Clay’s sentences by placing a bit from the immediately following sentence in the middle).  On which see now Marchetta ().  Kronenberg () , with reference to P. R. Hardie () . (Note that Hardie, following Buchheit ()  –  and to some extent also W. Wimmel, considers G. . – . as a block, a view in which he is followed in turn by, e. g., Nelis ().)  Clay () .  Mynors () .

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obicibus ruptis rursusque in se ipsa residant, quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles hiberni, uel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.

480

But as for me—first may the Muses, sweet beyond compare, whose holy emblems, under the spell of a mighty love, I bear, take me to themselves, and show me heaven’s pathways, the stars, the sun’s many eclipses, the moon’s many labours; whence come tremblings of the earth, the force to make deep seas swell and burst their barriers, then sink back upon themselves; why winter suns hasten so fast to dip in Ocean, or what delays clog the laggard nights.

All must find the signature now. The opening lines are full of interwoven allusions to Lucretius and, as it happens, Aratus (point (4)).³¹ The comparison to Lucr. 1.922– 5, … sed acri percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor et simul incussit suauem mi in pectus amorem musarum, …,

925

… but the high hope of renown has struck my mind sharply with holy wand, and at the same time has struck into my heart sweet love of the Muses, …

seems clear enough, and the story with Aratus is much the same: With the departure of Iustitia from the earth (‘excedens terris’ [G. 2.474]) we are transported to the heavens and into a region of Aratean allusion; these cosmological and literary co-ordinates also locate the immediately following lines, 475 – 7 …. The address to the Muses is closely modelled on Aratus 16 – 18: χαίροιτε δὲ Μοῦσαι μειλίχιαι μάλα πᾶσαι· ἐμοί γε μὲν ἀστέραϛ εἰπεῖν ᾗ θέμιϛ εὐχομένῳ τεκμήρατε πᾶσαν ἀοιδήν. Hail Muses, most gentle every one of you: answer my prayer that I may rightly tell of the stars, and guide all my song.

Particularly close is the echo in ‘dulces ante omnia’ of μειλίχιαι μάλα πᾶσαι.³²

 See above all P. R. Hardie ()  –  (repr. in: Volk (ed.) ()  – ), esp.  – , as well as Gee ()  – . For Lucretius, see also, e. g., Schäfer ()  – , Gale ()  –  and  – , Kronenberg ()  – , and now Mistretta (), who pays particular attention to Hor. Epod. . – ; Buchheit ()  n.  lists and gives brief bibliography on Aratean echoes in the final hundred lines of Georgics  (see also Kidd ()  – ).  P.R. Hardie ()  (footnotes omitted).

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“[E]ven lines 475 and 477, which seem to be purely Aratean, conceal Lucretian allusion”, writes Philip R. Hardie,³³ but it will be noted straightaway that while the final four of the seven words in G. 2.475 – dulces ante omnia Musae ³⁴ – come from Vergil’s two literary models, in neither case does this influence extend to the first three words: me uero primum – “but as for me first”, that is to say, “but as for me, Vergil, first”.³⁵ And there is, I suggest, a good reason for this, namely that precisely these three words are not Aratean and not Lucretian (or Epicurean) but should instead be understood as Vergilian through and through: the acronym Me VERo Primum. ³⁶ Now, it would not be correct to say that nowhere else in Vergil’s corpus are there three words in a row that begin m, u, and p, in this or another order.³⁷ But the context here is very special: if there is one place in the Georgics aside from the beginning and the end where one positively expects ‘authorial rhetoric’ of a ludic kind, it is here, at the start of a passage that is at the same time Aratean and personal.³⁸ Note, too, how intensely metapoetic the phrase me uero primum is (point (3)), for all three words allude not just in sound but also in meaning to Vergil himself:³⁹

 P.R. Hardie () .  On the mystic significance of this phrase, see A. Hardie ()  –  and passim.  The reader’s first instinct is to take primum as an adjective agreeing with me (see below, with n. , on the ‘primus motif’), though in the end it is clear that it is instead a sentential adverb “answered by sin in ” (Mynors () ; note that the structure of Mynors’ lemma makes clear that he does see me uero primum as at some level a unit). Compare the well-known matter of the force of prima at the start of Eclogue  (see, e. g., Coleman ()  – ).  The foundational note on Latin acronyms is by Hendry (), who proposes that Vergil’s MA-R-S acrostic (see above, n. ) may be an allusion to an Ennian acronym (Ann.  Sk.); for a possible connection in turn between this and the acrostic I have now argued for in Aeneid  (see above, n. ), see Katz (a)  –  n. . See also my suggestion apud Colborn ()  n.  that there may be an intentional acronym S-E-R-O at Man. .: this would gloss spargo, as in the significant acrostic S-P-A-R-S-V that begins right there (. – ) and that is of real scholarly importance, as Colborn elegantly demonstrates, for it allows us to date Germanicus’ Aratea to before the first book of the Astronomica. Smith ()  –  and  –  suggests a number of politically charged acronyms in Ov. Pont. .. – .  From Georgics , for example, I note the following: m—u—p (), m—p—u ( and ), u —m—p (), u—p—m (), and p—m—u ( –  and  – ). None of these seems any more significant to me than the line made infamous by Nisbet ()  – PUlVERulenta coquat MAturis solibus aestas (G. .) – though the u of  is uerum and  (exactum ad mensem pluuia uentisque carebunt) falls in the MA-VE-PV passage.  Rutherford () considers “Authorial Rhetoric in Virgil’s Georgics” but with no mention of verbal games.  The line as a whole is heavily spondaic, which adds to its expressive character; compare now Tarrant ()  – .

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(i) me is obvious; (ii) uero is a signpost of veritable – i. e., etymological (uerus = ἔτυμοϛ) – truth⁴⁰ and specifically emphasizes the shift to the pronoun me,⁴¹ the referent of which is the author;⁴² and (iii) primum, besides priming the importance of the initial letters (as Jerzy Danielewicz points out to me), suggests the ‘primus motif’, the well-known convention by which a Roman stakes his claim to being the first to venture into some part of Greek literary territory.⁴³ Finally, is there elaborate wordplay in the passage (point (5)) aside from the signature itself? I believe that there may be and that the games involve further references to Vergil himself and also to Aratus. First of all, while uero is, to be sure, a common enough discourse particle, it is perhaps not fanciful to suggest that readers would recall the use of the same word at G. 1.424, likewise second in its section in the MA-VE-PV passage, which has established m—u—p as a possible nominal order in the poem (and, if the would-be signature in G. 2.321– 7 is dismissed, as the order of record). Be that as it may, there is in the passage from Georgics 2 under consideration a drumbeat of that most famous anagram in Latin poetry (compare above, n. 5): amore (476) and mora (482), plus (side)ra mo(nstrent) (477) and (tre)mor and mar(ia) (both 479) – and, if I am right, a hidden Maro in the signature me uero primum (475). Furthermore, while there are, for clear thematic reasons, many instances of the word for ‘sun’ in the Georgics, such that the appearance of solis (478) and soles (481) a few lines apart is hardly a matter of great notice, I propose that they remind the reader of Aratus’ Cilician hometown of Soli (Σόλοι) – just as Michael Haslam suggests for sol … solem in G.

 Compare Katz () on etymological and folk-etymological ‘truth’.  See Klingner () . For a discourse-pragmatic account of uero, see Kroon ()  –  and passim (no references to Vergil).  Wordplay of this kind is not necessarily sensitive to vowel length, so the fact that Vĕrgilium has a short first vowel while uēro has a long one (as does the word for ‘spring’, uēr; see above on G. . – ) is probably of no consequence. (Compare Carter ()  n.  on Mărō vs. amārō at Aen. ., though it is possible that he is mistaken when he writes that “the comparable syllable in the Georgics acrostic [i. e., MA(‐VE-PV)] … is long only by position”. The evidence is not conclusive, but there is some chance that the form is actually māximus: see, e. g., Weiss ()  n. . I am grateful to Benjamin Fortson for discussion of the matter.)  See, e. g., Volk () Index s.v. “primus motif”. Compare also prima at G. . (see above) and the further significant uses of prima/primum and πρῶτον discussed by Feeney and Nelis ().

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1.438 – 9, right after the MA-VE-PV passage⁴⁴ – though it presumably goes too far to think that the first two words of the line defectus solis uarios lunaeque labores (478) could be a sign that Vergil is improving on his Greek source.⁴⁵ If the present paragraph contains some stretches, this does not, I hope, detract from the rest of the arguments I have advanced for understanding me uero primum as being more than the sum of its elemental parts. In section 13.5 of his Dialogus de oratoribus, Tacitus quotes G. 2.475: ‘“me uero dulces” (ut Vergilius ait) “Musae”, remotum a sollicitudinibus et curis et necessitate cotidie aliquid contra animum faciendi, in illa sacra illosque fontis ferant, …’. [“]As for myself, may the ‘sweet Muses,’ as Virgil says, bear me away to their holy places where sacred streams do flow, beyond the reach of anxiety and care, and free from the obligation of performing each day some task that goes against the grain.[”]

Of course the historian – or, rather, the speaker in the dialogue, Curiatius Maternus – gets it slightly wrong. Whatever this may mean, the fact that he leaves primum out of me uero primum dulces ante omnia Musae shows that he did not see, or at least did not care about, Vergil’s signature.⁴⁶ Am I misguided to see it two millennia later? And even if I am not misguided, is it something worth caring about?⁴⁷ Such queries seem as good a way as any to end a contribution whose title contains that distancing punctuation device so frequent in papers on wordplay: the question mark.⁴⁸

 See Haslam ()  – , with n.  on the fact that “[t]he quantitative difference (Sōl, Sŏleus) does not inhibit” (compare above, n. ).  The line is modeled on Lucr. . (solis item quoque defectus lunaeque latebras); Vergil does not otherwise use the noun defectus, strikingly avoiding it at Aen. . (hic canit errantem lunam solisque labores). As Ovid puts it, cum sole et luna semper Aratus erit (Am. ..).  On the Tacitean passage, see now Thibodeau ()  –  + .  Ioannis Ziogas reminds me of Hinds (), on the “crisis between respectable and non-respectable interpretation” (). Hinds’ argument that “the extratextual and intratextual ambience of [Ovid’s] exile poetry requires us all to read not just ‘ultra-suspiciously’, as [S.] Casali suggests, but with the super-heated obsessiveness of conspiracy theorists” (; italics in original) applies also, perhaps, to signature-hunting in Vergil: “Literary critics are always abnormal readers. To be a literary critic is to spend six months, or six years, or sixty years poring over the meaning of a text … and this is an obsessive activity, not a normal one” (; italics in original).  On titular question marks in articles on Greco-Roman acrostics and other forms of wordplay, see Katz (a) , with n.  (add now Kersten () and Danielewicz ()); see also Laurent ()  n. . My thanks go to Jerzy Danielewicz, Elena Giusti, Emily Gowers, Mathias Hanses, Maxime Laurent, and Damien Nelis for allowing me to read and cite work in advance of publication.

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Bibliography Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. — 2007. Virgil, Aeneid. Oxford. Barchiesi, A. 1997. “Endgames: Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 and Fasti 6”, in: D.H. Roberts, F.M. Dunn, and D. Fowler (eds.), Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature. Princeton, NJ, 181 – 208. Belmont, D.E. 1980. “The Vergilius of Horace, Ode 4.12”, TAPhA 110: 1 – 20. Bing, P. 1990. “A Pun on Aratus’ Name in Verse 2 of the Phainomena?”, HSPh 93: 281 – 5. — 1993. “Aratus and His Audiences”, in: A. Schiesaro, P. Mitsis, and J.S. Clay (eds.), Mega nepios: Il destinatario nell’epos didascalico. Pisa, 99 – 109. Brown, E.L. 1963. Numeri Vergiliani: Studies in “Eclogues” and “Georgics”. Brussels. Buchheit, V. 1972. Der Anspruch des Dichters in Vergils Georgika: Dichtertum und Heilsweg. Darmstadt. Carter, M.A.S. 2002. “Vergilium uestigare: Aeneid 12.587 – 8”, CQ 52: 615 – 17. Castelletti, C. 2012. “Following Aratus’ Plow: Vergil’s Signature in the Aeneid”, MH 69: 83 – 95. — 2014. “Aratus and the Aratean Tradition in Valerius’ Argonautica”, in: A. Augoustakis (ed.), Flavian Poetry and Its Greek Past. Leiden, 49 – 72. Clauss, J.J. 1997. “An Acrostic in Vergil (Eclogues I 5 – 8): The Chance that Mimics Choice?”, Aevum(ant) 10: 267 – 87. Clay, J.S. 1976. “The Argument of the End of Vergil’s Second Georgic”, Philologus 120: 232 – 45. Colborn, R. 2013. “Solving Problems with Acrostics: Manilius Dates Germanicus”, CQ 63: 450 – 2. Coleman, R. 1977. Vergil, Eclogues. Cambridge. Courtney, E. 1990. “Greek and Latin Acrostichs”, Philologus 134: 3 – 13. Damschen, G. 2004. “Das lateinische Akrostichon: Neue Funde bei Ovid sowie Vergil, Grattius, Manilius und Silius Italicus”, Philologus 148: 88 – 115. Danielewicz, J. 2013a. “A Palindrome, an Acrostich and a Riddle: Three Solutions”, in: J. Kwapisz, D. Petrain, and M. Szymański (eds.), The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry. Berlin, 320 – 34. — 2013b. “The ‘Slender Muse’ of the Hellenistic Poets”, Przegląd Humanistyczny 2: 87 – 94. — 2013c. “Vergil’s certissima signa Reinterpreted: The Aratean lepte-Acrostic in Georgics I”, Eos 100: 287 – 95. — 2015. “One Sign after Another: The Fifth ΛΕΠΤΗ in Aratus’ Phaen. 783 – 4?”, CQ 65: 387 – 90. Erren, M. 2003. P. Vergilius Maro, Georgica, vol. 2: Kommentar. Heidelberg. Fabiszewski, M.J. 2014. “Acrostic Authority in Germanicus’ Phaenomena”, Sunoikisis = http://wp.chs.harvard.edu/surs/2014/08/14/acrostic-authority/. Fairclough, H.R. 1999. rev. G.P. Goold. Virgil, Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid I–VI. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, MA. Feeney, D. and D. Nelis. 2005. “Two Virgilian Acrostics: certissima signa?”, CQ 55: 644 – 6. Fowler, D.P. 1983. “An Acrostic in Vergil (Aeneid 7. 601 – 4)?”, CQ 33: 298.

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Gale, M.R. 2000. Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition. Cambridge. Gee, E. 2000. Ovid, Aratus and Augustus: Astronomy in Ovid’s Fasti. Cambridge. Giusti, E. (forthcoming) “Caesar Criss-crossing the Rubicon: A Palindromic Acrostic in Lucan (1.218 – 22)”, CQ. Gowers, E. (forthcoming) “Heron among Swans: Another Acrostic in Eclogue 9”. Grishin, A.A. 2008. “Ludus in undis: An Acrostic in Eclogue 9”, HSPh 104: 237 – 40. Hanses, M. 2014. “The Pun and the Moon in the Sky: Aratus’ ΛΕΠΤΗ Acrostic”, CQ 64: 609 – 14. Hardie, A. 2002. “The Georgics, the Mysteries and the Muses at Rome”, PCPhS 48: 175 – 208. Hardie, P.R. 1986. Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford. Haslam, M. 1992. “Hidden Signs: Aratus Diosemeiai 46 ff., Vergil Georgics 1.424 ff.”, HSPh 94: 199 – 204. Hawkins, S. 2014. “Catullus 60: Lesbia, Medea, Clodia, Scylla”, AJPh 135: 559 – 97. Hendry, M. 1994. “A Martial Acronym in Ennius?”, LCM 19: 108 – 9. Hinds, S. 2007. “Ovid among the Conspiracy Theorists”, in: S.J. Heyworth (ed.), Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean. Oxford, 194 – 220. Hopkinson, N. 1988. A Hellenistic Anthology. Cambridge. Horsfall, N. 2000. Virgil, Aeneid 7: A Commentary. Leiden. Jacques, J.-M. 1960. “Sur un acrostiche d’Aratos (Phén., 783 – 787)”, REA 62: 48 – 61. Katz, J.T. 2007. “An Acrostic Ant Road in Aeneid 4”, MD 59 [publ. 2008]: 77 – 86. — 2008. “Vergil Translates Aratus: Phaenomena 1 – 2 and Georgics 1.1 – 2”, MD 60: 105 – 23. — 2009. “Wordplay”, in: S.W. Jamison, H.C. Melchert, and B. Vine (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, October 31–November 1, 2008. Bremen, 79 – 114. — 2010. “Nonne lexica etymologica multiplicanda sunt?”, in: C. Stray (ed.), Classical Dictionaries: Past, Present and Future. London, 25 – 48. — 2013a. “The Muse at Play: An Introduction”, in: J. Kwapisz, D. Petrain, and M. Szymański (eds.), The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry. Berlin, 1 – 30. — 2013b. “Saussure’s anaphonie : Sounds Asunder”, in: S. Butler and A. Purves (eds.), Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses. Durham, 167 – 84. — 2014a. “Acrostic”, in: R.F. Thomas and J.M. Ziolkowski (eds.), The Virgil Encyclopedia. Malden, MA, (1.) 8. — 2014b. “Wordplay”, in: R.F. Thomas and J.M. Ziolkowski (eds.), The Virgil Encyclopedia. Malden, MA, (3.) 1396 – 7. Kersten, M. 2013. “Ein Akrostichon im zweiten Buch De bello civili? Lucan. 2,600 – 608”, RhM 156: 161 – 71. Kidd, D.A. 1981. “Note on Aratus, Phaenomena”, CQ 31: 355 – 62. — 1997. Aratus, Phaenomena. Cambridge. Klingner, F. 1931. “Über das Lob des Landlebens in Virgils Georgica”, Hermes 66: 159 – 89. [Reprinted in: F. Klingner, 1964. Studien zur griechischen und römischen Literatur. Zurich, 252 – 78.] Kronenberg, L.J. 2000. “The Poet’s Fiction: Virgil’s Praise of the Farmer, Philosopher, and Poet at the End of Georgics 2”, HSPh 100 [publ. 2001]: 341 – 60.

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Kroon, C. 1995. Discourse Particles in Latin: A Study of nam, enim, autem, vero and at. Amsterdam. Kubiak, D.P. 2009. “Scitus arator: Germanicus, Aratea 13”, SIFC 7: 248 – 55. Kwapisz, J., D. Petrain, and M. Szymański (eds.). 2013. The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry. Berlin. Laurent, M. 2014. “Nicandre, écrit-il (deux fois): de l’acrostiche à l’intexte sonore”, https://www.academia.edu/8745642/Nicandre_écrit-il_deux_fois_une_introduction_aux_intextes_sonores. Levitan, W. 1979. “Plexed Artistry: Aratean Acrostics”, Glyph 5: 55 – 68. Marchetta, A. 2013. Vita agreste e poesia agreste nel finale del II libro delle Georgiche di Virgilio. Tivoli (Rome). Mistretta, M.R. 2012. “Percussus amore: Un caso di intertestualità incrociata?”, MD 68: 191 – 201. Mynors, R.A.B. 1990. Virgil, Georgics. Oxford. Nelis, D. 2004. “From Didactic to Epic: Georgics 2.458 – 3.48”, in: M. Gale (ed.), Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry: Genre, Tradition and Individuality. Swansea, 73 – 107. — 2013. “Past, Present, and Future in Virgil’s Georgics”, in: J. Farrell and D.P. Nelis (eds.), Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic. Oxford, 244 – 62. — (2016) “Arise, Aratus”, Philologus 160: 177 – 9. Nisbet, R.G.M. 1990. “Review of Thomas (1988), Virgil, Georgics”, CR 40: 260 – 3. Peterson, W. 1970. rev. M. Winterbottom. Tacitus, Dialogus. Loeb Classical Library 35. Cambridge, MA. Reckford, K.J. 1969. Horace. New York. Rouse, W.H.D. 1975. rev. M.F. Smith. Lucretius, De rerum natura. Loeb Classical Library 181. Cambridge, MA. Rutherford, R. 1995. “Authorial Rhetoric in Virgil’s Georgics”, in: D. Innes, H. Hine, and C. Pelling (eds.), Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on His Seventy-fifth Birthday. Oxford, 19 – 29. [Reprinted in: K. Volk (ed.), 2008. Vergil’s Georgics. Oxford, 81 – 93.] Schäfer, S. 1996. Das Weltbild der vergilischen Georgika in seinem Verhältnis zu De rerum natura des Lukrez. Frankfurt am Main. Schmid, W. 1983. Vergil-Probleme. Göppingen. Scodel, R.S. and R.F. Thomas. 1984. “Virgil and the Euphrates”, AJPh 105: 339. [Reprinted in: P. Hardie (ed.), 1999. Virgil: Critical Assessments of Classical Authors, vol. 2: Georgics. London, 83; and also in: R.F. Thomas, (ed.), 1999. Reading Virgil and His Texts: Studies in Intertextuality. Ann Arbor, MI, 320.] Smith, A. 2013. “Nomen inest: A Declining Domicile and Caustic Acrostics in Ex Ponto III 3”, A&R 7: 45 – 64. Somerville, T. 2010. “Note on a Reversed Acrostic in Vergil Georgics 1.429 – 33”, CPh 105: 202 – 9. Tarrant, R. 2012. Virgil, Aeneid, Book XII. Cambridge. Thibodeau, P. 2011. Playing the Farmer: Representations of Rural Life in Vergil’s Georgics. Berkeley, CA. Thomas, R.F. 1988. Virgil, Georgics, 2 vols. Cambridge. — 2011. Horace, Odes, Book IV and Carmen saeculare. Cambridge. Volk, K. 2002. The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius. Oxford.

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— (ed.). 2008. Vergil’s Georgics. Oxford. Weiss, M. 2009. Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin. Ann Arbor, MI.

Jay Reed

Mora in the Aeneid

Summary: Through wordplay with amor and Roma, this paper explores places in Virgil’s poem where mora—charged variously with a sense of deferral, hesitation, or obstruction—meaningfully interacts with ideas of desire and national foundation. The poem hints at an unstable equation between the three ideas, by deferring Roman foundations beyond the limits of the poem and by troping that trajectory as desire, both in the various personal loves that may abet or frustrate the national goal and in the metaphorical “love” of it. Love is a convertible term in our triad; various narrative voices oppose it to either “Rome” or “delay.” Yet at a deeper level than those voices, amor is opposed to neither, and its involvement in this complex of signification underscores how, in the service of its teleology, the narrative employs the devices of desire, suspense and deferral. Like all seemingly inexorable processes in the Aeneid, this one, too, depends on the rhetoric of the poem and its speaking and focalizing personae. Keywords: Virgil; Aeneid; mora; delay; desire; love; Rome; foundation; ktisis; Aeneas; Dido; Turnus

Longitudes Wordplay with mora, “delay,” though it is obviously an anagram of amor and Roma, has not received as much interpretive attention in Aeneid criticism as that palindromic pair, whose association may go back at least to the time of Ennius.¹ The present discussion aims to explore places in Virgil’s poem where mora—charged variously with a sense of deferral, hesitation, or obstruction— meaningfully interacts with the poem’s themes of desire and national foundation. Often when the Aeneid raises one of these ideas the text seems instinct with the other two, either drawing equations or hinting, κατ’ ἀντίφρασιν, at alternative experiences that never stop haunting the narrative outcomes.² We see the wordplay subtended by ideas rooted deep in the poem (not always using

 In general see Stanley (); on Virgil’s possible use see Skulsky (). The variation in the quantity of the o (Rōma, amŏr or amōr-, mŏra) is immaterial for meaningful wordplay: Ahl ()  – .  On (etymological) wordplay that operates κατ’ ἀντίφρασιν, through opposite meanings, see O’Hara () .

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these particular words, and always semantically conditioned by context). By deferring Aeneas’ foundation—let alone the ultimate foundation of Rome—beyond the limits of the poem, and by troping that trajectory as desire, the language of the Aeneid suggests an unstable equation between the three ideas. Let us experimentally substitute amor or Roma for mora in significant passages and attend to the resulting play of repetition and divergence. Consider, for example, the word’s first appearance in the poem. Venus makes her son invisible so that no one in Carthage might moliriue moram aut ueniendi poscere causas (1.414 “cause them delay or interrogate them as to why they were coming”)³; the verb moliri helps make of this imminent mora a dire countermoles to Roma, the foundation that is her descendants’ destiny, as expressed in the more general statement at 1.33 tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem (“planting the Roman nation’s roots was a task of immense scale”). Not only does Venus’ strategy expedite her plans for the Roman future, but the phrasing anagrammatically anticipates her own contriving, on her next appearance (1.657– 94), the amor of Dido for Aeneas (675 magno Aeneae mecum teneatur amore, “bind her to me, then, with bonds of a mighty love for Aeneas”), when, confiding to Cupid that Dido is “delaying” Aeneas with “winning words,” she finds an opportunity to turn the tables and seize the advantage (670 – 1): nunc Phoenissa tenet Dido blandisque moratur / uocibus (“Now a Phoenician, Dido, controls him, and she with her smooth talk, / Makes him delay”). The antithesis between “Phoenician” and “(future) Roman” is implicit, as is seduction in blandis uocibus. In commandeering this amor to prevent any mora against Roma, she is “declining” the word in different forms—Ahl’s term for this move, borrowed from Varro’s usage in De lingua latina. ⁴ The more or less ad hoc love that Venus imposes on Dido eventually becomes a threat to the emergence of Rome and a more dire mora itself, and needs to be superseded for the sake of Roman destiny. An especially productive complex of the three ideas of delay, desire, and nationality occurs in Mercury’s second, urgent command to Aeneas at 4.566 – 70: “iam mare turbari trabibus saeuasque uidebis conlucere faces, iam feruere litora flammis, si te his attigerit terris Aurora morantem. heia age, rumpe moras! uarium et mutabile semper femina.”

 My longer translations of the Aeneid are from Ahl (). I follow Mynors’ Oxford text () for the Latin.  Ahl ()  – .

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“Soon you’ll see timber churn up waves, massed menacing firebrands Burst into flame, beaches leap with the fires of a blazing inferno, If, that is, dawn’s light catches you still hanging round in this country! Hang the delays! What you face is a complex and changeable constant: Woman.”

Whereas in Venus’ example the viewpoint tends to oppose mora to both its hidden reflections, Mercury’s control of the wordplay in 569 rumpe moras (a violent metaphor; literally, “break delays”) determines a different complex of synonymy and antonymy; he—that is, Jupiter, whose message he is carrying—equates Aeneas’ stay in Carthage with a laggardliness on his part.⁵ Aenas must convert mora/amor to Roma/amor. Mercury’s phrase—which picks up morantem at the end of 568 and is anticipated by the ant simile at 4.406 – 7 (pars agmina cogunt, / castigantque moras, “some enforce the formation, / Bullying idlers along”)— works straightforwardly in wordplay with amor ⁶: Aeneas, Mercury implies, is to break off his love affair with Dido, the cause of his lingering. But as an anagram for Roma the term works by antithesis: Aeneas is to replace his demoratio in Carthage with the quest that he will not see achieved, but that must become his new object of desire; as he himself says to Dido at 347 of his Italian destination, hic amor, haec patria est (“this is my love and my homeland”). Earlier, at 3.134, Aeneas had recounted that in settling his people on Crete he had exhorted them “all to feel love for their homes” (amare focos): foundation is a kind of love, but that love’s direction changes until he understands its true object.⁷ The metaphor, if not the sublimation, long precedes Rome and Latin wordplay: Aeneas’ expressions of a national desire at 3.134 and 4.347 are prefigured by that of a speaker in Sophocles’ Laocoön, where Trojan refugees following Aeneas desire the colony he is about to lead (οἳ τῆσδ’ ἐρῶσι τῆς ἀποικίας Φρυγῶν).⁸ Virgil’s usage will prove irrestistible to the revisions of such a reader as Lucan, whose preface uses it to invert and undo Augustan foundational tropes: “if you, o Rome, have such great love for unholy war, then turn your hand against yourself only when you have first subjected the world to the law of Latium” (Bellum Ciuile 1.21– 3 sed si tantus amor belli tibi, Roma, nefandi …). The Virgilian phrase tantus amor, which the Aeneid directs toward ktistic ends,⁹ is now directed toward self Reed () .  Cf. Malamud ()  – .  Fletcher ().  Soph. fr. . Radt = D.H. ... Cf. Fletcher () , ,  – . For the metaphor in Greek see also Thuc. .. τῆς πολέως … ἐραστὰς γιγνομένους, pointed out to me by Ricardo Apóstol.  Reed ()  – .

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destruction, one that the symmetry of the verse reinscribes into the very name of Rome. Mercury’s declension at 4.569 rumpe moras thus helps articulate Aeneas’ movement from hesitancy to zealous commitment against various obstacles to the national mission that the gods (ascribing it to fate) have prescribed—helps articulate, that is, the dynamic of the Aeneid’s ktistic narrative.¹⁰ His journey from Troy to Latium is punctuated by various morae, some initially of his own making, later mostly the work of his opponents. Jupiter prompts Mercury’s locution: instructing his messenger before his earlier epiphany, he wonders aloud, quid struit? aut qua spe inimica in gente moratur …? (4.235 “What does he hope he can build by delay in this enemy nation?”). Nor does Jupiter’s accusation fall far from the facts: Anna specifically encourages the lovesick Dido to detain Aeneas in Carthage: causasque innecte morandi (4.51, literally “weave together reasons for delaying”). Mercury, retailing the divine command to Aeneas at 271, had translated that complaint into quid struis? aut qua spe Libycis teris otia terris? (“What do you hope you can build, you deserter, in Libya’s deserts?”—Ahl’s rendering of the wordplay with ter‐), which perhaps, he later sees, requires the stronger emphasis of heia age, rumpe moras! with both its forceful catachresis and its insinuation of the ktistic substitute, Roma, for the amor being condemned. The wordplay becomes especially resonant during the most serious impediment to Aeneas’ mission: the Latin war, particularly the final combat with Turnus over Lavinia; and in the last book “hesitation,” like much of the poem’s burden of blame or failure, shifts decisively from Aeneas to Turnus. In Turnus’ first words in Book 12 (11 nulla mora in Turno) we are to read his own sense of antithesis between “delay, hesitation” (which he attributes to the ignaui, “cowardly, slothful, hesitant,” Trojans) and his driving passion for Lavinia, as well as a further ironic hint, in anagram, of his exclusion from the fated nationality. An amor most certainly dwells in him (indeed, “disturbs” him inwardly, as at 71 illum turbat amor, at his sight of Lavinia’s blush), but the Roman future does not: another highly contingent play of synonymy and antonymy. Iris had said to Turnus at 9.11– 12 quid dubitas? … rumpe moras omnis (“Why dither? … / Smash any force that delays you”), echoing the metaphor that Mercury used to Aeneas in Carthage, but reconfiguring its covert oppositions. As the motor of his action, Turnus’ desire for Lavinia is implicit under Iris’ words, as is more immediately

 Malamud () : “Τhe importance of mora is clear not only from its frequency, but from its presence as a structuring principle in the Aeneid.”

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the Roman destiny it is her mistress Juno’s wish to break. Turnus, with a decorous prayer to heaven, promptly obeys. Delay, indeed, is not in his style, as we see at 10.308 nec Turnum segnis retinet mora (literally, “and no sluggish hesitation holds Turnus back”). It is partly his alacrity—not to say hotheadedness (he is commonly described as audax, “bold,” or ardens, “blazing”)—that makes Juno’s protection of him in Aeneid 10.633 – 88 seem so wrong: to remove him from battle, she conjures up a decoy, phantom Aeneas to entice him onto a ship in pursuit and then cuts him adrift, sending him down the coast “to Ardea, ancient city of Daunus, his father.” This ploy—which Jupiter sardonically characterizes at 10.622 as a mora praesentis leti, “delay of his imminent death”—excites Turnus to frustrated speech, pleas to Jupiter alternating with attempts (thwarted by Juno) to throw himself overboard. He is more acquiescent in Book Twelve when Juturna, disguising herself as his charioteer, attempts to divert him from battle; but finally —again, as in Book Ten, motivated by the present danger to his Rutulians—he turns, telling her at 12.676 iam iam fata, soror, superant, absiste morari (“Fate has now taken decisive command, sister. Stop your delaying”). Amata’s desperate outcry during the dispute early in the book, which prompts Lavinia’s ominous tears and blush, elicits a fatalistic qualification of the meaning of the word on his part: neque enim Turno mora libera mortis (12.74 “Turnus, besides, isn’t free to delay death’s hour or defer it”).¹¹ By the hour of his single combat with Aeneas, however, his drive seems to have left him for good: 916 cunctaturque metu letumque instare tremescit (“[he] hesitates, frightened, and shakes at the sight of the menacing javelin”) and 919 cunctanti telum Aeneas fatale coruscat (“as he hesitates still, Aeneas with javelin brandished …”). Finally, Aeneas’ fierce opening question to Turnus at 889, quae nunc deinde mora est? (“Why dally now at the climax?”), is a consummational “ironic echo”¹² of 11 nulla mora in Turno. He, in the meantime, seems to have taken on Turnus’ impatience for the decisive moment: “he hates the delays” (431 oditque moras), with a piquantly marked antithesis to the love for Rome that seems finally to have fully possessed him.¹³ Mercury’s catachresis is pried open and augmented for Aeneas’ turn to single combat at 699 praecipitatque moras omnis, opera omnia rumpit (“[He h]urries all obstacles out of the way, ends all operations”).

 Tarrant () ad loc., noting that “[f]or T. to speak of his death as imminent seems logically inconsistent with his earlier boasts,” follows Servius in interpreting “… if my death is fated.”  Tarrant () ad loc.  Cf. the antithesis in Lucan . (Caesar) aeger … morae flagransque cupidine regni (“sick of delay and flaming with desire for tyrannical rule”).

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We get an inkling of this turnaround already in Aeneas’ impatience at 10.888 – 90 inde ubi tot traxisse moras, tot spicula taedet / uellere … iam tandem erumpit … (“Then, when he tires of extended delays and of pulling out countless / Javelins … he breaks from defense …”¹⁴): a subtle but unmistakable echo of Mercury’s rumpe moras, almost a concrete application of the phrase (in so far as “delays” here becomes metonymical for the enemy weapons that tiresomely, though momentarily, impede the hero). “It is, however, A[eneas],” Tarrant (2012: 4) notes, “who is responsible for the last and most significant delay in the book. For a long moment it appears that the inevitable conclusion will be not just deferred but cancelled. The final obstacle to A.’s destiny that must be removed is the promptings of his own better nature.” His old doubt recrudesces at Turnus’ final words—940 – 1 et iam iamque magis cunctantem flectere sermo / coeperat (“Slowly but surely the words take effect. He’s begun hesitating …”)—before the sight of Pallas’ sword-belt sweeps it away. One of the turning points in Aeneas’ ardor for his mission comes in the Underworld, and can be traced in Anchises’ responses to his son’s attitude; for example, in his hortatory query, after the sight of the future Augustus: et dubitamus adhuc uirtutem extendere factis (“do we still hesitate to extend our strength by our manhood?”). By 889 his protreptic has “kindled / Love for the glory to come as a flame in his [son’s] spirit” (incenditque animum famae uenientis amore). He is keen to squelch any proclivity toward mora. His welcome to Aeneas at 6.687– 8 includes a subtle, tendentious reproof of some real or imagined tarrying on his son’s part¹⁵: uenisti tandem, tuaque exspectata parenti / uicit iter durum pietas? (“Have you at last really come? Did righteous love for your father / Conquer the rough road here as I thought it would?”). But Anchises’ ghost most definitively busts all delays at 851– 3: “tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos” “You, who are Roman, recall how to govern mankind with your power. These will be your special ‘Arts’: the enforcement of peace as a habit, Mercy for those cast down and relentless war upon proud men.”

 Cf. Lucan . –  (Scaeva) ille moras ferri neruorum et uincula rumpit (“he breaks the impeding weapon together with the ligaments [of his stricken eyeball]”). For other instances of rumpere moras in Lucan see ., ., ., . – .  Cf. . (of Aeneas among the Trojan dead) iuuat usque morari.

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His addressee, Aeneas, seems made already Roman in the invocation Romane; the interminable morae toward the future city and its imperium seem precipitously broken off, as if the figures he sees in Elysium, and their history, were already long reality. And this being-Roman is most definitely the object of amor, one carefully managed and interpreted by the wily ghost, whose discourse somehow sublimates his son’s plaintive, almost appalled question about the dira cupido (“perilous desire”) of souls to forget their past lives and reascend into new bodies (721) into Aeneas’ own transformative famae uenientis amor (889).¹⁶ It will be noticed that the poem is more diffident there than Anchises’ manes, in insisting that the glorious object of that amor is, literally, “coming report”—perhaps aware of the deferrals and mediations that must accompany any desire. A sort of counter-exemplum to the sense of ktistic immediacy expressed by his address Romane has just arisen in the spirit of Fabius Maximus, whose “hesitation” refounds Rome in Anchises’ piquantly antiphrastic reproach and encomium at 6.845 – 6 quo fessum rapitis, Fabii? tu Maximus ille es / unus qui nobis cunctando restituis rem (“Fabii, where do you rush me? I’m tired. You’re Fabius the Greatest: / You alone slow action down to restore our republic”). A corrective variation on our anagram then emerges when Anchises exhorts Aeneas to remember that his special art is to add mos to pax in ruling the nations at line 852. It is as if the morem—the “habit” of Roman civilization that is to follow Roman peace—both completed the mere rem that Fabius’s delaying tactics had conserved and replaced the near-homonym moram, a version of Fabius’ cunctari. But it will take a mindful, remembering Roman—one who is memor—to achieve this state. “Rome” is a function of time and memory as well as of desire.

Prolongations Surely Virgil could have said, and does say, all of this without anagram. What does wordplay do? It insinuates the uneasy sense of postponement that, the poem whispers, lies within both amor and Roma. Other declensions may also be found significant¹⁷: oram (the shore ever elusive that marks out the itinerary’s goals, stages, and boundaries, as in 1.1– 2); armo (the act of arming that prepares

 Reed ().  Cf. Smith in Leonard and Smith () on Lucr. . – . See Ahl’s discussion ()  of George Herbert’s poem Lucus , which rings these various changes.

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for so much of the action)¹⁸; ramo (the bough by whose means Aeneas, dedicating it on the threshold of Persephone, passes safely through the Underworld and out with his spirit newly kindled to his mission). The three under scrutiny here, however, form a basic triad. The significance of our passages lies in their expression of a triform metonymy for the narrative dynamics of the Aeneid; the teleology of ktisis, aiming towards Rome, is supported in this poetics by desire, both in the various personal loves that may abet or frustrate the national goal and in the metaphorical “love” of it, and these trajectories in turn are ultimately those of narrative itself. The poem’s action ratchets forward against the innumerable little delays it posits. The characters’ alacrity or impatience emerge from phrases with mora amounting to “forthwith, immediately,” such as the expressions nec mora or haud mora, literally “and no delay” (3.207, 548; 5.140, 749; 6.177, 156; 10.153; 11.713). Some other examples: 3.472– 3 interea classem uelis aptare iubebat / Anchises, fieret uento mora ne qua ferenti (“Meanwhile, Anchises was issuing orders to get the fleet’s rigging / Ready for sail so there’d be no delay should a favoring wind rise”); 5.638 – 9 (the false Beroe) iam tempus agi res, / nec tantis mora prodigiis (“Now’s the time to take action, not dither! / Portents are so strong!”); 6.40 nec sacra morantur / iussa uiri (“No time’s lost. Men ready the offerings demanded”). At the same time, mora governs a whole series of military tropes that proliferate in the Italian war, and especially in Book 10, registering hindrances in the thick of combat—whether successful or momentary—to death, the telos of the larger narrative of life: Turnus at 9.143 fossarumque morae, leti discrimina parua (“trenches that may slow us down, the thin line between life and destruction”); 10.400 – 1 hoc spatium tantumque morae fuit Ilo (“and that’s how a reprieve was granted to Ilus”); 10.427– 8 primus Abantem / oppositum interimit, pugnae nodumque moramque (“he started by killing / Abas, a knot to frustrate any blade, who rose up to oppose him”); 10.485 loricaeque moras et pectus perforat ingens (“pierced the resistant breastplate and dug through the muscular ribcage”); 10.622– 3 (Jupiter to Juno) “si mora praesentis leti … oratur …” (“‘If what is asked is delay of his death …”); 12.541 nec misero clipei mora profuit aerei (“… found that his bronze-clad shield couldn’t dampen the impact of iron”). As often, the variety of the English equivalents Ahl finds for the word betrays the creeping spread of its semantics.

 Cf. Lansing ()  : “The first and last words [of the poem’s first sentence], arma and Romae, by sharing three letters, are virtual anagrams expressing the relationship between cause and effect: war leads to the building of Rome.”

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The Aeneid’s narrative arc is one great mora made up of smaller ones. The epic never reaches Aeneas’ settlement of Lavinium, let alone Rome; it throws out vague hints of Aeneas’ apotheosis (1.250, 259 – 60, 265 – 6; 6.764; 12.794– 5) and couches the achievements of Roman history in indirect speech or ecphrasis, sometimes mediating them doubly or triply.¹⁹ Its abrupt end has inspired controversy and supplements. Even after his arrival at his destination there is a permanent truth to Aeneas’ sad characterization, during his wanderings, of “Ausonian fields that are always receding” (3.496 arua … Ausoniae semper cedentia retro), echoed in his plea to Apollo at 6.61– 2, even as he stands on Italian shores: “Now Italy’s coastlands, ever receding, / Lie in our grasp. Let our Trojan luck pursue us no longer!” (iam tandem Italiae fugientis prendimus oras. / hac Troiana tenus fuerit fortuna secuta). For Anchises, Augustus—pointed out in the midst of the catalogue of heroes, out of chronological order (Virgil’s Roman readers could supply the correct teleology)—represents a consummation (6.789 – 805). But Marcellus—coming at the end of the catalogue of heroes as we hear it reported—reminds us of an ideal Romanness that the boy will never quite instantiate; his virtues recede into subjunctive conditions, climaxing in a baffled si clause (6.878 – 82). And his very status as Augustus’ heir complicates the consummatory power of the Augustan aurea saecula that Anchises predicts (6.792– 3); of that moment, too, the world may have no more than a glimpse. The poem knows that delay is crucial to narrative. Sinon, pausing in his tale at 2.102 quidue moror? (“Why delay now?”), keeps his audience on tenterhooks in aid of his deadly scheme, and simultaneously Aeneas keeps Dido and his audience in Carthage in suspense, as Virgil does us: a triple lesson in the power of narrative delay. A like figure lurks within Venus’ parallel between Dido’s life story as she retails it to Aeneas—pictured as a labyrinthine architectural work of which the goddess (apparently espousing a more direct narrative mode, even as she tantalizes with the suggestion of details left unsaid) will note only the fastigia, literally the “roofpeaks” or “gables” (1.341– 4 longa est iniuria, longae / ambages; sed summa sequar fastigia rerum, “It’s a long tale of wrong and injustice, a long tale: / Twists, turns, full of deceit. But I’ll summarize most of the main points”)—and her apprehension of Dido’s abode itself as a maze of entrapment for Aeneas, literally a “convoluted house” (1.661 quippe domum timet ambiguam Tyriosque bilinguis, “Moods at the palace, she feared, could shift; double-talk was a Tyrian / Art-form”).²⁰ Inanimate objects slow the action down just enough to engage our wonderment and worries. At 6.211 the Golden

 Reed ().  Hannah ()  – ,  – .

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Bough notoriously “hesitates” (cunctantem) against the eager (auidus) Aeneas’ grasp, whereas the Sibyl had predicted that it would break off readily or not at all. Juno, who in particular is wont to throw obstacles in Aeneas’ path, knowingly represents narrative protraction at 7.315 “at trahere atque moras tantis licet addere rebus” (“Yet … there is room to prolong and delay these momentous proceedings”), sparing us an unsatisfying wrapping-up of the story halfway through; and the Gates of War delay despite her pushing at 7.620 – 1, as if agreeable to her deeper diegetic urges, however resistant to her present plot: tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis / impulit ipsa manu portas (“Then the queen of the gods, slipping down from the heavens, / Pushed the reluctant gates with her own hand”). In his past work the poet had rebuked himself for delaying at Georgics 3.42– 3: en age segnis / rumpe moras (“But come, break these sluggish delays”) —what does that mean? The expansive opening, with its elaborately deferred and metaphorically expressed plans for a grand project on Caesar’s lineage and victories, suddenly repented of as dilatory? When he next uses this phrase, in the person of Mercury, he will correct its national import. Before beginning that encomium Virgil had invoked Apollo as memorande (Georgics 3.1), “you of whom I must tell, whom I am bound to commemorate”—as if the morae of the ensuing verses, however inimical to his immediate poetic imperative, were somehow built into it by soundplay. The Aeneid, too, inscribes the idea of delay even more plainly into its narrative. The passages under discussion here might be considered to expand anagrammatically on the overt opening of narrative at the beginning of the poem (1.1– 8): Arma uirumque cano Troiae … multa quoque et bello passus dum conderet urbem inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae. Musa, mihi causas memora …. Arms and the man I sing of Troy … … and he suffered profoundly in war to establish a city, Settle his gods into Latium, making this the land of the Latins Future home to the Elders of Alba and Rome’s mighty ramparts. Muse, let the memories spill through me ….

The first sentence of the poem follows a crooked itinerary from Troy, through stages in Lavinium and Alba Longa, to end in a Rome that the poem itself will never reach. Upon sighting this telos the poet immediately abandons his independent stance as singer (cano) to ask help of his muse, specifically for the causes, the etiology of the events, and does so in an alliterative complex solidary with

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the last phrase of the sentence that precedes (moenia Romae./ Musa, mihi … memora) and mirroring its climactic toponym.²¹ Actually, a principal “cause” has already entered in line 4: saeuae memorem Iunonis ob iram, “savage Juno’s anger” that actively “remembered” Aeneas and her own diverse grievances against the princes of Troy, even as she looked ahead fearfully to Rome (line 23). “Make me memor of something memor ….” The qualities required of the ktistic poet seem to accrue in dialogue with the manufacturer of morae to Rome. For the Aeneid’s very idea of Rome and Roman identity, it can be argued, never coheres except as a negative position against other national entities—a system of deferrals.²² Compare the poem’s love, on its surface as in its deep poetics, for a “sensibility of the near miss,”²³ images of intangibility and incommensurateness, as with Camilla at 7.808 – 11— illa uel intactae segetis per summa uolaret gramina nec teneras cursu laesisset aristas, uel mare per medium fluctu suspensa tumenti ferret iter celeris nec tingeret aequore plantas. She could fly over the tops of the highest stalks in a grainfield, Leaving the tender ears of the crop unharmed by her crossing. She could pass over the breadth of the sea, over waves, over sea-swell High up, speeding through air, never touching her feet to the surface—

or like Mercury on his way to Carthage, barely pausing on Mount Atlas before he perches on the roof of a shed to excoriate Aeneas, never touching the ground before he “vanishe[s] away in the thinness of air” (4.278 et procul in tenuem ex oculis euanuit auram).²⁴ These images are signs of poetic polycentrism, of anti-teleology. A similar asymptosis enters the poem’s treatment of finis, “end,” which presses and explores teleology itself. The odd phrase at 1.223 et iam finis erat (literally “and by now there was an end”)—most provocative, here at the beginning of the story—should be read alongside nearby uses of the word. It introduces Jupiter’s magisterial view from the heights of heaven after the storm and Neptune’s clean-up efforts. “Now that the crisis was past …”: so Ahl translates, correctly for the basic sense; but an excess of meaning still teases. Venus picks up the question with her own to Jupiter at 241, quem das finem, rex magne, laborum? (“What end will you set to their trouble, great ruler?”); Antenor’s Padua, now settled in placida pace, is her example of the sort of finis she hopes for. Jupiter’s response    

On mora and memorare see Ahl () . Reed (). Levitan (), speaking of near-complete acrostics in Aratus. Cf. Reed () .

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deals rather with the “endlessness” of Roman imperium (277– 8): he of course means that he has given the Romans eternal power, confined by neither spatial nor temporal boundaries (though his emphatic ego pono suggests the possibility that limits might come from elsewhere); and yet he has sidestepped the more basic teleological question, in a deep sense putting the lie to Aeneas’ statement to his followers at 1.199 dabit deus his quoque finem (“God will grant us an end to these sufferings also”). Establishing a Roman nation is indeed endless work. It comes as no surprise that the last instance of the word finis in this poem comes in Jupiter’s own question to Juno, never conclusively answered,²⁵ at 12.793: quae iam finis erit, coniunx? (“Wife, tell me: how will it come to an end?”). The immanence of mora in the Aeneid’s reflections on Rome and amor virtually both enacts and names the “potential for words to fall into endless patterns of deferral” that Hinds sees as one interpretive outcome of Roman etymological wordplay.²⁶ The ambages we have explored are more properly regarded as a symptom of the open-ended nature of Virgilian epic—perhaps even of poetic discourse in general—than of the dawdling, backtracking, never-finishing modus operandi itself of P. Vergilius Maro. In life, indeed, he is said to have completed parts of the Aeneid at a recitation by telling his freedman Eros to write his ex tempore supplements down “without delay” (statim): “love” serves only to expedite, not draw out, the progress of the Roman epic.²⁷ And yet it would not be excessively biographical on the part of a critic to scrutinize the origins that this Maro makes his ktistic poem ascribe to his home city of Mantua (10.198 – 203): ille etiam patriis agmen ciet Ocnus ab oris, fatidicae Mantus et Tusci filius amnis, qui muros matrisque dedit tibi, Mantua, nomen Mantua diues auis, sed non genus omnibus unum: gens illi triplex, populi sub gente quaterni, ipsa caput populis, Tusco de sanguine uires. There you see Ocnus as well, son of Manto, the seer, and of Tuscan Tiber, the river. He’s levied a force from the banks of his homeland. Mantua: Ocnus endowed you with walls, named you after his mother,

 Cf. Feeney ().  Hinds () . Focusing on Varro’s etymologies for “Venus” in de Lingua Latina , he prefers to read in this tradition a “movement towards plenitude and perfection in meaning”— one not inevitably inconsistent with the other interpretation nor inapplicable even to Virgil’s multivocal text, especially in Hinds’ emphasis on Augustan poetry’s use of wordplay as “on one level a way of explaining or seeking control over the world” (), as long as we allow for contestation of that explanation and that control.  Suet. Vita Vergili .

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Mantua, heir to an ancestry rich, but not all of one bloodline. Three distinct peoples are there, each people with four distinct cities. Mantua heads up their league. Her strength is her blood that’s Etruscan.

Whatever the relationship of this isolated myth to other attested ktiseis of Mantua, to the city’s putative ethnic composition, and to the mythological prophetess Manto,²⁸ Ocnus’ name is a Latinization of Greek ὄκνος, “delay, hesitation,” and thus the semantic equivalent of an anagram of Virgil’s cognomen, as is noted by Malamud (who connects the wordplay with that on amor and reads Ocnus as a symbolic poet-figure parallel to Virgil). Within his own ktistic mythology (and in dialogue, as usual, with Greek), Virgil himself comes ultimately from Delay, offspring of a love affair between the Tiber and Prophetic Poetry.

Longing In associating these sounds, ideas, and narrative dynamics Virgil may be building upon precedent. At Ennius, Annales 77 Skutsch, where Romulus and Remus separately await the foundational omen, the twin brothers certabant urbem Romam Remoramne vocarent (“were vying to see whether they would call the city Roma or Remora”). Mora is in a sense rejected from the name along with Remus’ authentication of the city, lending a sense of immediacy, legitimacy, and everlasting presence to Romulus’ claim. The name of the potential, ‘lost’ city Remora even more closely recalls the compound verb remorari, ‘wait, linger, delay.’²⁹ The Aeneid, whose action is set prior to Romulus and Remus, would seem to leave it to the Annales to resolve this question: despite the change in Aeneas’ resolve, the movement to expunge mora from the essence of Rome will not end until the actual foundation of the city. The defense against a “Remoran” identity may again arise intertextually in Aeneas’ decisive words to Turnus at 12.948 – 9 te … Pallas / immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit (“yes Pallas / Makes you the sacrifice, spills your criminal blood in atonement”), in so far as the wording suggests the model of Romulus at Ennius, Annales 95 Skutsch mi calido dabis sanguine poenas (“with hot blood you will give me atonement”—replacing “hot” with “criminal” and dropping “me,” because to Aeneas Pallas is

 Servius and Servius Auctus on Aeneid ., G. Garbugino in EV s.v. Ocno, Malamud ()  – , Vanotti (), Fletcher ()  – .  With heavy wordplay in this situation on remores aves, said by Festus  Lindsay to mandate that something ‘be delayed’: Linderski () ; Fisher ()  – , .

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paramount).³⁰ The would-be ktisis by Remus is otherwise quite suppressed by the Aeneid, elided or misrepresented by the speaking characters (Jupiter and Anchises) who have opportunities to look ahead to the twins’ activities (1.292– 3, 6.777– 80). And yet the Aeneid’s relentless wordplay also retrojects into the Annales the suggestion that mora does necessarily persist in Roma, through the more unstable and malleable significance of anagram. On the Aeneid’s terms, the victory of Romulus and his name for the city might nevertheless eternally suspend us—waiting, lingering—in that moment when the nation’s backwards twin image, its alter ego, might have superseded. Love has typically been the convertible term in our triad; the various voices that contest the meaning of history in the Aeneid’s narrative oppose it to either ‘Rome’ or ‘delay.’ Yet at a deeper level than those voices, amor is opposed to neither, and its involvement in this complex of signification underscores how, in the service of its national teleology, the narrative employs the signal ruses of desire, suspense and deferral³¹ (one thinks of the anagram mora-amor-Roma as Pucci reads it in Propertius’ Monobiblos, finding it expressive of an ineluctable liminality).³² It is precisely qua object of amor that Rome will never be reached in Virgil’s poem. But the Aeneid also permits the duality “love-delay” to operate apart from consideration of Rome. Dido’s love story exemplifies a hidden mora within amor in an alternative, parallel poetics to Virgilian ktistic narrative. Her love for Aeneas somehow becomes infused with an artificial, tendentious longueur that begins soon after Cupid’s contagion during the banquet in 1.748 – 9 nec non et uario noctem sermone trahebat / infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem (“Talking of this and that to extend night’s span ever further / Dido, unfulfilled, drank deeply of love’s heady vintage”) and ends with her death at 4.693 – 4 tum Iuno omnipotens longum miserata dolorem / difficilisque obitus … (“Juno Almighty pitied her difficult death with its painful / Anguish long drawn out …)”: the “long love” and “long anguish” are equivalent, and both together amount to her story. By the end of Book Four (the shortest, be it noted, in the poem), longus amor would seem to make at least some literal sense: part of the winter has elapsed. Yet we cannot fail to remember that her love was somehow always prolonged from the outset. We may even realize that we don’t know its precise beginning, in whatever predisposition Venus takes advantage of, either in Dido’s

 See Tarrant () .  Reed () .  Prop. .. –  sua quemque moretur / cura, neque assueto mutet amore locum (“let each lover’s love hold him fast, and not relocate him from a love grown familiar”). Pucci () finds the anagram meaningful at Prop. .., .., and elsewhere; he draws Roma into the complex on p.  and  n. . Cf. also Sissa ()  on amor ~ mora in Ovid’s Amores.

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own widowed state or in some effect of the “quiescent and welcoming attitude” that Jupiter has Mercury instill in her in preparation for her receiving the Trojans (1.303 – 4 regina quietum / accipit in Teucros animum mentemque benignum). At the feast where the Trojans and Tyrians, according to Dido, are to celebrate their coming together (1.732), the singer Iopas launches into a cosmological narrative (742– 9): hic canit errantem lunam solisque labores, unde hominum genus et pecudes, unde imber et ignes, Arcturum pluuiasque Hyadas geminosque Triones, quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles hiberni, uel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet; ingeminant plausu Tyrii, Troesque sequuntur. nec non et uario noctem sermone trahebat infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem …. [He s]ings of the unpredictable moon, of the sun and its labors, Origins human and animal, causes of fire and moisture, Stars (Lesser, Greater Bear, rainy Hyades, also Arcturus). Why in the winter the sun so hurries to dive in the Ocean, What slows winter’s lingering nights, what blocks and delays them. Tyrians encore, applaud. Thus cued, Troy’s men show approval. Talking of this and that to extend night’s span ever further Dido, unfulfilled, drank deeply of love’s heady vintage …

In 748 nec non et seems almost to assimilate Dido’s love to Iopas’ song, particularly the lingering nights of winter, delayed by whatever forces, with which the song apparently ends. Indeed, thus primed, Dido—who has characteristically been assimilating his experiences to her own³³—goes on to ask Aeneas about his own “settings and wanderings,” his casus and errores (754– 5; Virgil, too, asked about Aeneas’ casus and labores at 1.9 – 10), as well as the story of the fall of Troy “from its earliest planning” (a prima … origine), and on this winter night she draws out conversation as her love lengthens. The result of this transferal is two books of Aeneas’ narrative flashback, which interrupt the immediate story: his requital, so to speak, of her “long love,” as he himself cannily frames it after a brief show of reluctance (sed si tantus amor cognoscere nostros …, “Still, if you’re so much enamored with learning how ruin befell me”).³⁴ The same unsatisfiable desire will overtake her at 4.77– 9:

 Reed ()  – .  Cf. Reed ()  – .

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nunc eadem labente die conuiuia quaerit, Iliacosque iterum demens audire labores exposcit pendetque iterum narrantis ab ore. Now, day drooping to dusk, she’s the same. She repeats the same banquet: Crazily pleading to hear once more what the Trojans have suffered, Once more hanging in awe on his lips as he tells her the story.

Ahl’s translation of her epithet infelix as “unfulfilled” brings out various unmet desiderations to which she is subject. In this diegetic economy, mora yields more mora. When we finally reemerge from Aeneas’ reminiscences into the main narrative, Book Four begins on a peculiar note: 4.1 at regina graui iamdudum saucia cura (“Now though, the queen, long since pierced through by her terrible anguish …”). Does iamdudum have its normal force of “long since, already for a long time now”? Because it hasn’t really been all that long. We are still at a point when Dido has known Aeneas for less than twenty-four hours, and been in love with him for less than that (note especially 6 – 7 postera … Aurora, “next day’s Dawn”). Servius and the augmented version of his commentary ad loc. suggest the sense “excessively, vehemently” (“nimium et uehementer”) or, alternatively, void the term of any implication of length of time, and make it stand in neutrally for “ever since” in reference to some one of the various possible causes, during the previous day, of Dido’s passion: her sight of Aeneas, his story-telling, or the initial intervention of Love (“id est a quo tempore uidit Aeneam … aut ex quo narrare coepit Aeneas; aut ex quo interuenit Cupido”).³⁵ Neither explanation satisfies. Yet iamdudum reinforces the equally curious 1.749 longumque bibebat amorem and 4.693 longum miserata dolorem and the other devices by which Virgil “figuratively dilates the duration of the queen’s agony.”³⁶ The anomaly is similar to the prolepsis in 1.12 urbs antiqua, “ancient” Carthage as seen from Virgil’s time,³⁷ but is more insistent and less reducible to a standard trope; rather, this treatment of brief time as a long time temporally dislocates the reader within the narrative. One interpretation would see here a narrative viewpoint identifiable with Jupiter, Mercury, and “fate,” tendentiously and hyperbolically warning that the queen’s love is delaying Aeneas’ mission. For some readers, on the other hand, this prolongation would seem to depend on Dido’s own powerful viewpoint (which tends to accompany it) and to be a function of her amor. On 4.1 iam-

 The text found only in Servius Auctus is conventionally italicized.  Putnam () .  Reed ()  – .

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dudum Pease (1935) comments that “to a lover like Dido the time seems long, however short it may objectively be, and her infatuation had occupied a relatively large part of the brief period of her acquaintanceship with Aeneas.” At Dido’s sight of Aeneas’ appurtenances surmounting her pyre, the narrative even threatens, through her viewpoint, to withhold her death on its far horizon: 4.649 – 50 paulum lacrimis et mente morata / incubuitque toro dixitque nouissima uerba (“She for an instant delayed deadly purpose in tears and reflection, / Fell, ghostlike, on the bed where she uttered a few final phrases”).³⁸ It then lingers on her last words, somewhere amid which she stabs herself, so that when we emerge from them, the focalization has surreptitiously passed to others (her attendants, her sister Anna) and the queen is dying with the city mourning around her— though she is granted one last groan and look at the sky (692) before Juno pities her “long anguish” (693). Putnam (2014: 104) emphasizes the plural difficilis obitus that registers her demise at 694, as suggesting that its manifold, unfathomable causes since Book One were each a separate death: “if we have been witnessing her death over the length of four books of an epic, Dido’s actual moment of dying is itself also powerfully protracted in its exposition…. In the case of Dido, death is implicit in love and marks its beginning.” Along with amor Dido has imbibed not only mors but mora. Is this a temporal viewpoint that (whether for good or ill) resists Roman ktisis as long as possible—one that (as Anna recommends) “weaves together reasons for delaying” Aeneas’ divine mission, until the textual basis for that viewpoint unravels? In certain ways, rather, Dido’s love as we have traced it exceeds that relation; its mora, as mysterious and remote as that of the winter sun, follows for the duration of her strong consciousness an autonomous narrative course in which Rome is irrelevant even as a foil, and which helps give the Aeneid (especially this episode) its power apart from any national message. Elsewhere the poem seems to be steadily subsuming amor into Roma and dividing them both from mora, working inexorably through the stages of Aeneas’ journey to defeat all narrative delays and clear the way for Rome. Like all seemingly inexorable processes in the Aeneid, this one, too, manifestly depends on the rhetoric of the poem and its speaking and focalizing personae; the configuration of meaning is potentially reversible, and hinges on a sublimation, redirection, and fudging of the meaning of love. It is Ahl’s insight to identify anagrammatic play with semantic pluralism —“the plural, latent, paradoxical, or contradictory”—against monocentrism,

 Cf. the curious withholding of the death of Silvia’s deer (last heard of at .), whose survival—against the war begun nominally over its death—is too monstrous a disproportionality to entertain.

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against a need for simplicity and unity in the meaning of a text.³⁹ The Aeneid’s semantics of the complex mora-amor-Roma cannot be reduced to one message, to one winner. No doubt it was always true that omnia uincit Roma. But resistance in its various forms can also claim a stealthy victory.

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. — 2007. Virgil: Aeneid. Oxford. EV = Enciclopedia Virgiliana. 1984 – 91. Rome. Feeney, D.C. 1984. “The Reconciliations of Juno”, CQ 34: 179 – 84. Fisher, J. 2014. The Annals of Quintus Ennius and the Italic Tradition. Baltimore, MD. Fletcher, K.F.B. 2014. Finding Italy: Travel, Nation, and Colonization in Vergil’s Aeneid. Ann Arbor, MI. Hannah, B.G. 2007. Exegi Monumentum: Architecture in Latin Epic. (Dissertation). Ithaca, NY. Hinds, S. 2006. “Venus, Varro and the Vates: Toward the Limits of Etymologizing Interpretation”, Dictynna 3: 173 – 208. Lansing, R.H. 2008. “Vergil’s Homage to Homer in Aeneid 1.1 – 7”, Vergilius 54: 3 – 8. Leonard, W.E. and S.B. Smith. 1942. T. Lucreti Cari: De Rerum Natura Libri Sex. Madison, WI. Levitan, W. 1979. “Plexed Artistry: Aratean Acrostics”, Glyph 5: 55 – 68. Linderski, J. 2007. Roman Questions II: Selected Papers. Stuttgart. Malamud, M. 1998. “Gnawing at the End of the Rope: Poets on the Field in Two Vergilian Catalogues”, Ramus 27: 95 – 126. Mynors, R.A.B. 1969. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford. O’Hara, J.J. 1996. True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymological Wordplay. Ann Arbor, MI. Pease, A.S. 1935. Publi Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus. Cambridge, MA . Pucci, P. 1978. “Lingering on the Threshold”, Glyph 3: 52 – 73. Putnam, M.C.J. 2014. “Dido’s Long Dying”, Daedalus 143.1: 99 – 106. Reed, J.D. 2001. “Anchises Reading Aeneas Reading Marcellus”, SyllClass 12: 146 – 68. — 2007. Virgil’s Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the Aeneid. Cambridge. — 2010. “Vergil’s Roman”, in: J. Farrell and M.C.J. Putnam (eds.), Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and Its Tradition. Chichester, UK/Malden, MA. Sissa, G. 2010. “Amor Mora Metamorphosis Roma”, in: M. de Poli (ed.), Maschile e Femminile: Genere ed Eros nel Mondo Greco. Atti del Convegno Università degli Studi di Padova 22 – 23 ottobre 2009. Padua, 7 – 38. Skulsky, S. 1985. “Aeneas and the Love of Rome”, AJPh 106: 447 – 55. Stanley, K. 1963. “Rome, Ἔρως, and the Versus Romae”, GRBS 4: 237 – 49. Tarrant, R. 2012. Virgil: Aeneid Book XII. Cambridge.

 Ahl () .

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Vanotti, G. 2000. “Mantua dives avis. Sulle origini greche di Mantova”, in: L. Braccesi (ed.), Hesperìa, 10. Studi sulla grecità di Occidente. Rome, 139 – 45.

Emily Gowers

Dido and the Owl Summary: This paper considers the role of birds in the Aeneid, in relation to poetic sounds, flight, and exile. In the first half, connections are noted between the name of the Carthaginian queen Dido and the owl (bubo) that sings a dirge before her death in Aeneid 4, and discussed in the context of Virgil’s sensitivity to sound. Dido’s name, with its dying fall and outlandish ring, is usually placed at the ends of lines and appears to be used expressively, always in the nominative case. The second half of the paper argues for traces of a projected bird metamorphosis in Dido’s curse (Aeneid 4.383 – 4), picking up hints that she imagines Aeneas transformed into a seabird and endlessly calling the name of the woman he loves. This corresponds to connections in other mythical bird transformations with unhappy love, restless wandering, or settling in new lands. A coda considers the role of sound in some reappearances of Dido in 20th century American literature. Keywords: Dido; birds; sound; Aeneas; Virgil; wordplay The Aeneid, we know well, is filled with the rustle of alternative dramas. Its protagonists travel in their imaginations down roads not taken, and Dido is the ultimate wanderer of the poem. In her dreams, she becomes Pentheus and Orestes – or is it the Furies and Clytemnestra?¹ In the underworld, she and Aeneas act out Odysseus’ encounter with Ajax – or is it the lock of hair addressing Berenice?² The curses Dido rains on her parting lover include fantasies about Medea’s dismemberment of her brother Absyrtus and about Thyestes’ vengeful cannibalistic feast – or is it Procne’s?³ In this paper, I attempt to uncover a further subliminal drama, what might be called a crypto-myth of the Aeneid: another imaginary alternative fate for its hero, dreamt up by vengeful Dido. This is a paper largely about birds, by a non-expert. Flitting from Virgil to Homer, and Ovid to Apuleius, and touching on birdcalls, poetic sounds, nonsense words, etymologies, aetiologies, and metamorphosis, it asks its readers to put on a stout pair of wings and suspend themselves at all times over an ocean of disbelief.

 See e. g. Schiesaro ()  –  on the ambiguities here.  Lyne (), Wills ().  Schiesaro ()  notes that . abreptum ‘snatched away’ and . absumere ‘take away’ are “phonic reminders” of Absyrtus’ name.

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It starts with the owl in Aeneid 4. As Dido prepares to die, an owl hoots from the battlements, letting out a long, plaintive cry conveyed by the sound of the lines themselves: solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo saepe queri et longas in fletum ducere uoces (Aeneid 4.462– 3) High on a rooftop, a lone screech owl keened death in repeated Dirges, and wailed shrill cries drawn out into pulses of sobbing.

Not many commentators linger here, except to note that owls were commonly associated with death in ancient Rome.⁴ The creature here looks like classic background decoration, part of the gothic scenery of this climactic Liebestod and a lonely harbinger of Dido’s doomed descent to the Underworld. But Virgil takes care with the sound effects, making the owl’s cry a token querulous or even elegiac voice to match his own mournful song. The ō-sounds at the beginning and end of the first line suggest a long-drawn-out or echoing shriek; and in the second line saepe ‘often’) and longas … ducere uoces (‘draw out long sounds’) draw attention to the poet’s repetition of lugubrious syllables. So, too, does the sound of the owl’s name, būbō, with its internal repetition of the consonant and the long vowels. But it is not only the sound and placing of the word that might give us pause for thought. This bird has certain other unique properties as well. For a start, this is the only time Virgil uses the word bubo. It is just one of many words for ‘owl’ in many languages that are expressive of its cry: the hooting sound can be heard in Old High German ūwila, Hindi ullū, Hebrew oah, French hibou (and the verb boubouler) and Greek τυτώ (from which the modern genus Tyto takes its name).⁵ Virgil need not have used bubo: other owl-names available and indeed used by him elsewhere include noctua (Georgics 1.403) and ulula (Eclogues 8.55) – the second of which would have been appropriately mournful, echoed as it is twice by the feminine wails of ululare in this especially mournful book (4.168, 609). But Virgil did choose to use bubo here, and I want to start with the proposition that he had specific reasons, quite possibly subconscious ones, for using it, as well as for placing it at the end of the line. One scholar who does consider the owl is Alessandro Schiesaro, in his fullscale exploration of Dido’s metamorphosis into a second Medea.⁶ For him, the bird is a reincarnation of Dido’s dead husband Sychaeus, who has been calling his widow from beyond the grave (460 – 1 hinc exaudiri uoces et uerba uocantis |

 Pease () ad loc.  Cf. Modern Greek κουκουβάγια.  Schiesaro ().

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uisa uiri, “From it, she thought she could hear both the voice and the words of her husband”),⁷ and he points to the “disturbing contiguity between [Sychaeus’] uoces and those of the owl.” This is acute, but there is something else unusual to note about Virgil’s use of the word here. His owl is feminine (this we know from the adjective sola ‘lonely’ at the start of the line). In fact, according to Robert Renehan, in a remarkable paper on poetic gender-switching, this is the only time bubo is feminine in the whole of Latin poetry.⁸ Euphony, in his view, is the usual reason a poet alters a normal gender (here, sola with its open final vowel is more appropriately expressive than solus). But there may be a further reason for making this owl female. A line that starts with sola and follows it with rooftops and a mournful song might lead us to expect another ending: Dido. She, too, is a singer of magical chants (510 – 11; cf. 487 carminibus), which bring on her own death; she, too, is lonely (cf. 467 sola);⁹ she, too, appears high up on the battlements (410 arce e summa), to watch Aeneas’ preparations for departure.¹⁰ The owl may be feminine, then, not because she is Sychaeus but because she is some kind of mystic familiar of the queen herself. As Schiesaro notes, Ovid draws on his memory of this uniquely feminine Virgilian bubo when he describes the doleful wedding of Tereus and Procne in Metamorphoses 6 (431– 2 tectoque profanus | incubuit bubo thalamique in culmine sedit, “an ill-omened owl perched on the roof and settled on the rafters of the wedding-chamber”).¹¹ Humans transformed into owls in Greek mythology are often associated with family dysfunction – incest, bestiality or cannibalism – which makes them need to escape the light of day: Nyctimene, who slept with her own father; Polyphonte, who fell for a bear; Harpalyke, who served her son up to the father who had raped her.¹² But although this wedding takes

 Schiesaro () .  Renehan () . Serv. ad loc.: ‘sola’ contra genus posuit, “He uses ‘sola’ contrary to gender.” See also Corbeill (), esp.  – .  Cf. . sola fuga nautas comitabor ouantis?, “What? Be a runaway woman among jubilant sailors?”; . (Aeneas) o sola infandos Troiae miserata labores, “You, you alone, have shown pity for Troy’s inexpressible anguish”; Dido calls Anna sola at . See Bolton ()  –  on Dido’s implied loneliness in Heroides .  See Schroeder ()  on the detached, Epicurean quality of Dido’s bird’s-eye view.  Other bubones of ill omen in Ovid include: Amores .. – , Metamorphoses . (Ascalaphus transformed by Proserpina), Metamorphoses . –  (Myrrha’s incest), Metamorphoses . (Julius Caesar’s murder), Ibis .  Forbes Irving ()  – . Ioannis Ziogas reminds me that Myrrha uses the example of birds to justify human incest (Ov. Metamorphoses . – ). Might there even be a story of fraternal incest lurking behind Venus’ abbreviated Tyrian tale (. – ), which tells of the rupture between Dido’s husband Sychaeus and her brother Pygmalion, who remained securus amo-

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place under the auspices of another malign owl, cousin to the Furies, this time it sits mid-line and is normalized as masculine.

Dido on her lilo Dido and the owl are familiars in another way, too. Būbō turns out to be one of only two nouns in Latin with the nominative sequence consonant-vowel-same consonantō. The other noun is Dīdō. Could it be, then, that bubo is there in the first instance because Virgil is attuned to using the exotic-sounding name of the Carthaginian queen? Might the name Dido have a particular expressive quality, in a poem that gets much of its archaic character from the unusual sounds of names, from Arruns to Ufens? ¹³ Did Virgil perhaps find Dido especially eccentric, even a bit nonsensical, as a heroine’s name – as the words ‘dodo’ and ‘dado,’ say, are for us, or names like ‘Dada’ and ‘Ubu’? The name has continued to be played on throughout literary history, from Shakespeare, who gives us “Widow Dido” and “Dido a dowdy,”¹⁴ to cartoonist and parodist Osbert Lancaster, who in his modernist pastiche “Aeneas on the Saxophone” (Drayneflete Revealed, 1949) indulges in some very Sitwellian silliness: …Delenda est Carthago! (ses bains de mer, ses plages fleuries, And Dido on her lilo à sa proie attachée) And shall we stroll along the front Chatting of this and that and listening to the band? The plumed and tufted sea responds Obliquely to the trombone’s call

rum | germanae, “secure in his sister’s / Love for them both” ( – )? Shades of Medea’s killing of Absyrtus at . –  and the dangling half-line . germani minas, “Threats from your brother” open up unspoken possibilities. See Hardie () on Virgil’s suggestions of an incestuous relationship between Dido and Aeneas.  Cf. Tsur () on “light and dark” sounds that combine two shades: e. g. English miaow, heehaw, ding dong.  The Tempest, Act II, Scene : Adrian. Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to their queen. Gonzalo. Not since widow Dido’s time. Antonio. Widow! A pox o’ that! How came that widow in? widow Dido!; Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene : Mercutio. Now is he [Romeo] for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura to his lady was but a kitchen wench; marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her; Dido a dowdy; Cleopatra a gipsy; Helen and Hero hildings and harlots …

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The lecherous seaweed’s phallic fronds Gently postulate the Fall. But between the pebble and the beach rises the doubt, … Delenda Between the seaside and the sea the summons, … est Between the wagon and the lit the implication, … Carthago.

Less high-flown, folksier tongue-twisters include French “Didon dîna, dit-on, d’un os du dos dodu d’un dodu dindon”, “They say that Dido dined off the fat back of a fat turkey”) and English “Diddle diddle Dido, the cat’s swallowed Fido.” Once again, Virgil was perfectly free to avoid using the name. Phoenician in origin and usually thought to signify ‘wanderer, hobo,’ Dido could be replaced by the queen’s other name, Greek Elissa.¹⁵ Virgil has rules about when he uses either form. Unlike Ovid, for example, he never uses inflected forms of Dido, only the nominative; for other cases, he prefers Elissa.¹⁶ Nine out of ten occurrences of Dido in Book 4 come at the end of a line (as with bubo); so does the first mention of Dido in Book 1 (1.299), her first actual entry (1.496), and her two last appearances – when she looms through the Underworld mist (6.450) and when she is remembered at the moment of Pallas’ burial in (11.74). My sense is that the word is being used as some kind of mournful entity with its own self-contained existence and its own dying fall. Some further generalizations can be made about internally repetitive words. Bubo and Dido may be the only nouns, but they are not the only words in Latin to follow the sequence just described. Apart from the adverbs tuto ‘safely’ and toto ‘completely,’ one miscellaneous category is simply, of course, first-person verbforms: bibo, dedo, dido, coco (coquo), olo (oleo), oro, ouo, roro, ruro, uiuo. Of these there is a subsection of what we might call “childish” verbs, the group of reduplicated pairs involving basic consonants invented cross-culturally by parents to facilitate a child’s first responses to the people around it.¹⁷ In Latin these include caco ‘poop’ and lallo ‘sing a lullaby,’ which belong with other reduplicated words like mamma ‘breast, mommy,’ pappa ‘mush,’ and tata ‘daddy, grandfather,’ chosen to simulate the kind of uncontrolled effusion an infant is capable

 Hexter (). For Dido = ‘wanderer,’ see Pease () ad Aeneid ., O’Hara ()  – .  Mackail () ad ..  Jakobson ().

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of in its early attempts at speech (cf. in English mama, papa, gaga, nanny, baby, bubba, booboo, poopoo, doodoo).¹⁸ Expressions of glee, horror, surprise, and so on, in Latin are another category: oho and hahae, hahahae and the Plautine patter of babae tatae papae (Stichus 771); another such word, this time from the animal sphere, is coco or cucurru (‘cockadoodledoo’). There is a further category of insult words, like gugga (Plautus) or baba (Seneca). There are also borrowed foreign words like cici ‘castor-oil tree’ or cuci ‘doum-palm tree’; cf. English ‘nativespeak’ – ‘dodo,’ ‘voodoo,’ ‘mumbo jumbo’. Another subsection of verbs particularly relevant to this paper consists of onomatopoeic animal- or bird-sounds: bebo ‘bleat,’ pipo or pipio ‘chirp,’ titio ‘cheep (of a sparrow),’ zinzio, ‘twitter (specifically of a blackbird).’ Cuckoos, babies, ninnies, barbarians: there seems to be a consistent connection between reduplicating words and the languages and worlds of “Other People” – or other animals – those incapable of restrained speech or behavior.¹⁹ Dido is of course the most effusive speaker in the Aeneid. It has always been tempting to detect a Phoenician or Punic flavour to her speech. Many other Punic names end in -ō, from Matho, Mago, Mutgo (an alternative father to Belus for Dido), Hanno (both Livy’s and Plautus’), and Flaubert’s Salammbô. True, Dido’s speeches contain some reduplicated syllables, but no more than normal: iam iam (‘now, now,’ 371), te teneo (‘I hold you,’ 380).²⁰ The notoriously ambivalent Tyrios bilinguis, ‘two-tongued/double-talking Tyrians’ (1.661) may signal an interest in bilingualism on Virgil’s part. Beyond this, it is hard to tell. But no less an authority than J. N. Adams has confirmed some of these suspicions about the sound of Dido’s name in a paper on feminine forms of speech, where he singles out the word dĭda, a nurse’s word for ‘breast,’ as typical woman-to-woman-specific speech (like English ‘boob,’ perhaps); the word happens to be found first in Roman Africa.²¹

 Heraeus ().  An interesting forerunner of Dido as migrant barbarian princess is Aeschylus’ Cassandra, who “like a swallow speaks a barbarian tongue” (Agamemnon  – ) and sings her final prophecy “like a dying swan” (Agamemnon  – ). See Ahl ()  – .  For Herescu () , consecutive repeated syllables are “a peculiarly Latin vice.”  Adams (). NB Dido has no surviving nurse. Virgil bothers to tell us at . –  that she buried hers in Tyre but then adopted her dead husband Sychaeus’, proleptically named Barce after – or before – Hannibal’s dynasty (the Barcaei, an African tribe, are mentioned as a local threat to Carthage at .). Adams ()  finds three more local Punic or African terms (also with repeated consonants) in the two probably African medical translations in which is found: ginga ‘henbane,’ bob(b)a ‘mallow,’ and zenzur ‘knot-grass.’ He also cites an inscription that names an African fort called Tububuci.

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Back to the owl. What do we know about the sounds this or any other ancient bird made? As noted above, Latin is full of onomatopoeic verbs for pipping and squeaking, and plenty of Latin birds get their names from their sound. Varro at de Lingua Latina 5.28 lists a few: upupa, cuculus, coruus, hirundo, ulula, bubo; item haec: pauo, anser, gallina, columba. Here, ulula, bubo makes a fine hexameter ending to round off one section of the list, with -ina columba doing the same in the second section. Our bubo comes last, just as it comes last in the line in Aeneid 4. Repeated syllables abound – upupa ‘hoopoe,’ ulula ‘owl,’ cuculus ‘cuckoo’ – and words ending in final –o (hirundo ‘swallow’ and pauo ‘peacock’); bubo uniquely combines both effects. The list makes a good starting-point for noticing patterns of reduplication in bird-names and –sounds. Aficionados may be referred to the most fabulous catalogue of onomatopoeic animal- and birdsounds: a fragment preserved from Suetonius’ De Naturis Animantium. ²² Unsurprisingly, another good source for ancient bird names and sounds is Aristophanes’ Birds. Often, the sound here is just a simple τι or τυ or τιο, resolved into an intelligible human phrase: at Ar. Aves 314, τι x 8 turns into τίνα λόγον ‘what word?,’ while the call of the hoopoe, ἐποποποι, ποποποποῖ ποποῖ, resolves itself into ποῖ ‘whither?’ (227), followed by ἰτὼ x 4, which becomes ἴτω τις ὧδε ‘come here, someone’ (228 – 9). Behind these patterned squawks, we recognize a familiar tale: the tyrant Tereus and his wife Procne, transformed into a hoopoe and a nightingale respectively, call for their son, Itys, whom she has murdered and he has eaten.²³ Such resolutions of birdsong into known human words operate, indeed, in a similar way to a standard metamorphosis etiology, which ‘translates’ a bird’s unintelligible sound into the intelligible words of the human trapped inside it. Greek verbs for birdcalls include τιτίζω, πιππίζω, and τιττυβίζω, along with the onomatopoeic owl-name τυτώ.²⁴ In the Birds, an owl makes the rather different sound, κικκαβαῦ (261). But there is a parallel in Plautus’ Menaechmi (653 – 4) where one character, tired of being accused tu tu “You [did it],” asks sarcastically, uin adferri noctuam,/quae ‘tu tu’ usque dicat tibi?, “Do you want me to bring an owl in, to keep saying tutu to you?”. Another classic source for bird sounds is Virgil’s passage on weather signs in Georgics 1 (351– 423). As one might expect, Virgil is usually sensitive to the musicality of birdsong and how to convert it into poetry (just as the celebrated cooing sound of the elm-dwelling turtle-dove, turtur ab ulmo, adds to the soporific  Reifferscheid ()  – .  The nightingale is usually said to be Philomela, Procne’s sister and accomplice; see Thomas () ad Hor. Carmina .. for a similar confusion.  Tichy (), esp.  – , discusses reduplicated onomatopoeic words in Greek and Latin.

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hum of the pastoral world created in Eclogue 1).²⁵ He will often give a bird a deliberate place in the line, with directions to notice the sound when it comes. In the felicitous line he lifted wholesale from Varro of Atax (Georgics 1.377 = fr. 14 Courtney), aut arguta lacus circumuolitauit hirundo, “or shrilly the swallow wheels around the lakes,” hirundo ‘swallow’ is placed at the line-end to exploit the expressive potential of the final ōsound, while arguta ‘shrill’ at the beginning of the line cues us to look at the sound the swallow’s name makes when it finally appears; so at Georgics 4.307, garrula quam tignis nidum suspendit hirundo, “when, chattering, the swallow hangs its nest from beams,” garrula ‘chattering’ determines the sound while suspendit ‘hangs’ holds the bird precariously until it drops.²⁶ As for the owl here (noctua), the puzzling and slightly redundant adverb nequiquam ‘in vain’ (403) may incidentally suggest the bird’s screech. Likewise, the description of ravens – Georgics 1.410 – 11 tum liquidas corui presso ter gutture uoces | aut quater ingeminant, “then ravens repeat their shrill caw three or four times from their tight throats” – both defines the birds’ sound as throaty and reduplicated and voices it in the repetition of ter, the croaky, redoubled quater, and the final echo of reuisere nidos, “revisit their nests.”²⁷ Similarly, ouantes gutture corui, “ravens cheering from their throats” (423), may, besides conjuring up an exultant crowd, indicate a guttural “o-uo” sound in the birds’ caw. Virgil famously includes a metamorphic back-story in his brief allusion to Nisus and Scylla (404– 9). Meanwhile, his stately shore-pacing crow – Georgics 1.388 – 9 tum cornix plena pluuiam uocat improba uoce | et sola in sicca secum spatiatur harena, “Then the immoderate crow rails at the rain with croaking voice, and alone by herself paces the parched sand” – must wait for Ovid to provide her with an etiological precursor, a princess who survives a maritime rape-attempt (Metamorphoses 2.572– 3) to be transformed into a haughty bird.²⁸

 See Lutwack ()  –  on poets’ attempts to reproduce birdsong, especially the nightingale’s, from Aristophanes to D. H. Lawrence.  A similar line-end occurs in the simile comparing Juturna to a swallow at Aeneid .: peruolat et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo, “a swallow, who sweeps through his towering halls on her feathers.”  Cf. Stat. Silvae .. on repeated syllables (iterata uocabula) in the song of the partridge.  Barchiesi () ad loc. corrects Keith ()  in the matter of the tense of soleo at Metamorphoses . –  nam cum per litora lentis | passibus, ut soleo, summa spatiarer harena, “for I paced at the edge of the sand with slow steps, as I am [now] accustomed”: the allusion must refer specifically to the present gait of the (Virgilian) crow, not the past gait of the (Ovidian) princess – “as I am accustomed,” not “as I was accustomed.”

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Aeneas on the rocks Leaving the owl behind, I turn now to a different bird in Aeneid 4, an unknown bird – invisible, but not, I think, any less audible. It makes its voice heard halfway through Dido’s vehement speech to the departing Aeneas at 365 – 87, where in her wildest frenzy she conjures up hopes for a deadly storm and curses him with shipwreck.²⁹ In her fantasy, Aeneas will be dashed against the rocks and at the moment of death he will repeatedly call her name: i, sequere Italiam uentis, pete regna per undas. spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt, supplicia hausurum scopulis et nomine Dido saepe uocaturum. (Aeneid 4.381– 4) Go with the winds! Pursue Italy! Chase across seas for your kingdoms! My hope, if righteous forces prevail, is that, out on some mid-sea Reefs, you’ll drink retribution in deep draughts, often invoking Dido’s name.

What is the case of Dido here? Not nominative, though the form is identical to those other final Didos. Possibly an accusative, Greek-style (Austin (1955) ad loc.), but more likely a vocative.³⁰ As it happens, these lines and the ones about the owl have much in common. In both cases a line starts with saepe ‘often’ – saepe uocaturum; saepe queri – indicating that both Aeneas’ wail and the owl’s hoot are repeated sounds; Aeneas is imagined as calling not Dido, but Dido Dido. And in both cases saepe is preceded by our two favourite words with their own internal sound-repetition: Dido and bubo (nomine Dido heralds carmine bubo – while nomine adjusts the pitch of penultimate numina a line earlier). According to O’Hara (1996: 75 – 9), (cog)nomine ‘by name’ often acts as an etymological signpost in Latin poetry, alerting a reader to a significant name. As it happens, this line is not on his list of examples, but it looks strongly as though Dido is saying: listen to the sound of my name, repeated over and over as it is in this book. Small wonder that the Pléiade poet Étienne Jodelle, in his play Didon se sacrifiant, The Sacrifice of Dido, turns Virgil’s nomine Dido | saepe uocaturum into a glorious tongue-twister of repetitions:

 See Schiesaro ()  –  on storm/sea metaphors for Dido’s mental frenzy.  Cf. Virg. Eclogues . ut litus ‘Hyla Hyla’ omne sonaret, “so every shore will echo ‘Hylas, Hylas’,” and Prop. .. resonent mihi ‘Cynthia’ siluae,’ “the woods may echo ‘Cynthia’ back to me.”

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… et mesmes en mourant, Mon nom entre tes dents on t’orra murmurant, Nommant Didon, Didon … (935 – 7) And dying, you will be heard murmuring my name between your teeth, calling Dido, Dido …

One very plausible suggestion is that Dido, in Virgil’s Dido’s mouth, is a bilingual pun on the Greek verb δείδω ‘I am afraid.’ This was first proposed by Kowalski (1927), without further justification; it goes unmentioned by O’Hara. It happens, however, to fit well with a classic example of etymological play in Homer that O’Hara does discuss in his introduction to True Names: the lines from the Iliad where Idomeneus declares δείδια δ᾽ αἰνῶς | Αἰνείαν “I terribly fear Aeneas” (13.481– 2). There, it is Aeneas’ name that is etymologized from ‘fear,’ in the shape of αἰνῶς ‘terribly.’³¹ We might read these words from Dido as a response: by staking her own claim to fearsomeness and linking her own name with the other ‘fearing’ word in the Homeric line, δείδια/δείδω, she is retaliating in kind and alluding to the Iliadic past at the same time. This would all be perfectly sufficient as an explanation of the pointer in nomine. Why continue, then, to suggest that the name Dido has something to do with birds? If bubo is an onomatopoeic owl-name, could it be that Dido is used here as an expressive bird-sound, too? Remembering that τυτώ, ἰτώ, and τυτυ are all bird-sounds in Greek, might we here have the putative outline of another imagined fate for Aeneas? What if he had not left safely for Italy? What if he had instead been shipwrecked, dashed against the rocks – not drowned, according to the usual assumption, but transformed into a seabird with a haunting cry? Behind Aeneid 4 lies a web of Hellenistic love stories: Ariadne on the rocks, Medea brewing up her potions. In her later curse-speech, Dido draws on the myths of other destructive mythological women: scattering Aeneas’ limbs on the waves as Medea scattered Absyrtus’, serving up Ascanius to his father as Atreus served up his nephews to their father Thyestes, or as Procne (in league with her sister, just as Dido is) served up her son Itys to his father Tereus – a tale with bird metamorphoses aplenty?³² Can we see in Dido’s speech the outlines of another story of desertion, revenge, cruel rocks, and a bird that flies free from the wreckage, granted a respite from its fate but destined always to sing the name of the beloved it cruelly betrayed?³³  O’Hara () .  Aeneid . – .  There is no real inconsistency between this scenario and Dido’s elaboration of Aeneas’ fate that he remain ‘unburied on the sand’ after shipwreck: cadat ante diem mediaque inhumatus harena, “Let him lie dead, / Well before his due day, halfway up a beach and unburied”

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Many metamorphosis myths of humans transformed into birds – pre‐ and post-Virgilian – share elements of this scenario. Forbes Irving notes a persistent theme: a human polluted, then saved by divine mercy from death, but fated instead to wing his or her way through wild places as punishment for savage behavior.³⁴ The hideous narrative of rape, incest, tyranny, and cannibalism focused on Procne, Philomela, and Tereus, for example, combines pollution with an opposition between family order and wildness, though the bird-transformations – Procne to a swallow, Philomela to a nightingale, Tereus to a hoopoe – offer a relatively gentle and remote alternative to violence on the human level.³⁵ Seabirds, Forbes Irving notes, more commonly have the destiny of permanent grief because they are such “uncanny mysterious creatures.”³⁶ One story that fits this type well is that of Scylla, who, after betraying her father by cutting off his talismanic purple lock to help her enemy-beloved Minos, was condemned to lead a savage life as a sea-hawk, pursued by a seaeagle, haliaetos/haliaietos, her father Nisus. The post-Virgilian Ciris, longest extant version of the story, describes the bird haunting a coastal wilderness: 517– 19 infelix uirgo nequiquam a morte recepta | incultum solis in rupibus exigit aeuum, | rupibus et scopulis et litoribus desertis, “The unhappy maid, rescued in vain from death, lives out her wild life among the lonely rocks – rocks, cliffs, and deserted shores.”³⁷ Traces of the Scylla story can been seen in Dido’s subsequent curse on Aeneas, that she will pursue him with atris ignibus, ‘dark fire’ (384).³⁸ From being a love-struck pursuer like Scylla, she turns into the vengeful pursuer of a polluter, like Nisus chasing his unruly daughter in circles of repetitive language at Georgics 1.406 – 9: ³⁹ (). Forbes Irving ()  –  gives many examples of the ancient belief that the drowned and unburied continued to wander over the sea and were linked with gulls: e. g. AP ., ., Ach. Tat. Astronomus . (“They say that the spirits of the drowned do not descend to Hades but remain here wandering over the sea”). Dionys. De Avibus . (gulls were once fishermen). See Pollard ()  on Homeric gods who dive into the sea “like” or “as” birds: cf. Hom. Iliad . –  (Thetis), Iliad . –  (Iris).  Forbes Irving ()  – ; see especially , noting that transformation into a bird often “follows a crime of pollution and family murder”; , on the “opposition between the family order of the house and the wilds”; , for connections between eating one’s own family and incest.  Forbes Irving () .  Forbes Irving () .  With litoribus desertis, ‘deserted shores,’ Lyne ()  compares Aeneid . culminibus desertis (‘deserted heights’), describing the Dira’s haunts.  Similar is Canidia’s threat to the boy at Hor. Epodes . –  that she will pursue him like a nocturnal Fury with curved talons.  Cf. Dido’s nightmares about chasing and being chased by Aeneas (Aeneid . – ).

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quacumque illa leuem fugiens secat aethera pennis, ecce inimicus atrox magno stridore per auras insequitur Nisus; qua se fert Nisus ad auras, illa leuem fugiens raptim secat aethera pennis. Wherever she flees, clipping the insubstantial air with her wings, lo, her fierce enemy Nisus pursues her, screeching, through the breezes; where Nisus moves through the breezes, she flees, clipping the insubstantial air with her wings.

Other seabird stories include that of Sciron (Ciris 467), who throws his promiscuous daughter Alcyone into the sea, where she becomes a halcyon, Ovid’s lovers Ceyx and Alcyone (Metamorphoses 11), the Alkyoneides, and the daughters of Cinyras (from Greek κινυρός ‘mournful’; halcyons are known for their plaintive song). In an alternative version, Daedalus threw himself in remorse off a cliff and became a bird – an outcome bypassed by Ovid in his telling in Metamorphoses 8 but realized in the apprentice Perdix’s transformation into a partridge and hinted at twice in the Daedalus and Icarus story proper, in the simile of a fledgling wobbling on the edge of its parent’s nest (Metamorphoses 8.213 – 16) and in the father’s suggestive cry Icare … Icare … Icare (which I was told at school was a seagull’s squawk, though I cannot find it suggested in any commentary). Daedalus’ namesake in Metamorphoses 11, Daedalion, goes mad out of grief before jumping off a cliff and turning into a hawk, a bird-man whose transformation, in Forbes Irving’s words (1990: 110), is “already anticipated in the description of his inhuman emotional state” (Metamorphoses 11.330: “he heard these [words of comfort] no more than cliffs hear the murmuring of the sea”). Dido’s curse on Aeneas similarly stresses his savage origins from Caucasian rocks and Hyrcanian tigers (4.366 – 7) and his uncivilized infringement of the laws of hospitality. Yet another story from Metamorphoses 11 (751– 95) has Aesacus flinging himself off a rock to punish himself for causing a nymph’s death by chasing her until she steps on a snake and dies; then he turns into a gull. Often in these stories, a bird’s cry plays a central part, the point being to graft human myths or aetiologies onto natural sounds. Thus, as we have seen, the nightingale calls ἰτώ ‘come here’ because a trapped Philomela is calling to her nephew Itys; her brother-in-law the hoopoe Tereus, seeking his family, calls ποῦ ποῦ (“where are you?”).⁴⁰ Ceyx in Ovid’s account names his wife Alcyone in death (Metamorphoses 11.567 nominat Alcyonen), though rather surpris-

 Cf. Hor. Carmina .. Ityn flebiliter gemens, “tearfully moaning ‘Itys’”; Pound ()  (Canto IV, ): “Ityn! / Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!”. See also Lutwack ()  – . Paus. .. attributes the tale to the mournful sound of nightingales and swallows.

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ingly we have no answering cry of Ceyx spelled out (only 707 at nomen nomine tangam, “but I shall join name with name”) to pin the husband’s name specifically to the cry of the diver-bird (Greek kayax, kauax, or kēx).⁴¹ The bird’s sound is not mentioned in the story of Aesacus either, but there are moments of foreshadowing: e. g. Metamorphoses 11.783 – 4 dixit et e scopulo, quem rauca subederat unda | decidit in pontum, “He spoke and jumped from the rock, which the roaring waves had eroded, into the sea,” where rauca … unda, “roaring waves,” anticipates the future seagull’s squawk. Aesacus’ story ends up instead with an etymology of the name mergus ‘gull’ from the fact that the bird loves diving (mergere) into the sea: 795 aequora amat, nomenque tenet, quia mergitur, illo, “it loves the sea and has the name [diver] because it dives therein.”⁴² We have drifted a long way from Aeneas, but not as far as it might seem. Aesacus, hero of the last bird transformation in Metamorphoses 11, is a Trojan seer, brother of Hector. Ovid’s story of Aeneas’ lovesick kinsman is doing something very typical of the Metamorphoses – prioritizing an obscure “elegiac” episode in the post-Iliadic story and sending a relative down one of the paths Aeneas himself did not take. Is it an accident that the name of the nymph over whom Aesacus is so distraught is Hesperie – Ovid’s exclusive invention, it seems?⁴³ Aeneas’ heroic mission is rewritten in subversive elegiacs in Heroides 7, where Dido fixates on Aeneas’ motive for leaving: not to found a city but to pursue an alter amor, ‘another love.’ Can we look back at the Aeneid and see in Dido’s words a vision of Italia/Hesperia (Aeneid 4.381 i, sequere Italiam, “Go … pursue Italy!”; Aeneid 1.569 – 70 seu uos Hesperiam magnam … | … optatis, “or whether you choose great Hesperia”) as the ‘other woman’ for whom she was betrayed, the mirage who will cause her lover to founder on the rocks? There is no name-calling in Heroides 7 (Ovid only emphasizes the shipwreck element), but his Dido is introduced as singing her lament “just as the white swan (olor) sings its song” (Epistulae (Heroides) 1.7.4) – a more plaintive, elegiac substitute for the malign bubo or avenging sea-hawk. In any case, there is already a seabird in Aeneid 4 that paves the way for Dido’s crypto-metamorphic curse. Another source for the Aesacus myth is Servius, who tells it in some detail, confirming the Ovidian etymology of mergus

 Cf. Dion. De avibus .: “After their mates’ death, they grieve at length and waste away, abstaining from all food and drink; on the point of death, they more frequently repeat ceyx ceyx [ceyx ceyx saepius repetunt] and so they die.”  Cf. Var. de Lingua Latina ..  Bömer () vol. , : “anderweitig nicht bekannt” (“otherwise unknown”); see now Reed ()  – .

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from mergere in the process.⁴⁴ His narrative is part of a footnote to the simile at Aeneid 4.253 – 5 where Virgil compares winged Mercury to a seabird as he plummets down to the shores of Africa as Jupiter’s messenger, to tell Aeneas to leave for Italy: hinc toto praeceps se corpore ad undas misit aui similis, quae circum litora, circum piscosos scopulos humilis uolat aequora iuxta. From there, powered out by the weight of his body, Seaward he dived like a tern, who’s been circling shorelines and cliff pools Teeming with fish, skimming wave-tops.

Mercury is ‘like a bird’; or is Virgil speaking of a specific bird? Servius, like many modern editors, has the urge to identify it: “Some say the fulica” (ut quidam uolunt, fulicam), a type of coot. He himself favours the mergus ‘gull’ and sees Virgil as having deliberately suppressed this undignified word. To justify this, he compares a well-known passage in Georgics 2 (320), where Virgil prefers to leave out the word ciconia ‘stork’ and identify it only by its snake-eating habit – an evasion that Thomas (1988) has plausibly explained as a typically Alexandrian riddle. There seems in general to have been a long tradition of these unanswered bird riddles and deliberate confusions among bird types, a kind of running ‘a little bird told me’ joke: the bird is often just called an auis with certain qualities. At Aeneid 12.862 – 4, the Dira sent to flit around the faces of Turnus and Juturna is compared to a night bird that haunts tombs or deserted rooftops: alitis in paruae subitam collecta figuram, quae quondam in bustis aut culminibus desertis nocte sedens serum canit importuna per umbras she compresses Her full self, in a flash, to the size and the shape of a smallish Bird such as settles at night on a funeral site or abandoned Rooftop to sing a foreboding, late-watch dirge through the ghostly Shadows.

 Arnott () . Serv. ad Aen. .: “This is the story about the gull: a boy Aesacus, son of the nymph Alexirhoe, loved another nymph from the same spring … After the love-struck youth saw her, he threw himself into the sea; when his limbs were borne up on the waves, the gods took pity and changed him into a gull, because gulls love the waves” [in auem mergum mutatus est, quia semper mergi fluctibus gaudent].

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Here, the bird is some kind of owl – perhaps a noctua, hinted at in the words nocte, ‘at night,’ and serum, ‘late,’ or even a bubo, echoed or etymologized in the sound of bustis and umbras? ⁴⁵ In Mercury’s case, perhaps we are being given a puzzle whose solution is an etymology of Mercury from mergus (or vice versa) – just as Mercury’s descent over Mount Atlas, who happens to be his grandfather, gives him an understated family pedigree (cf. the pun at 254 on aui similis, ‘like a bird’/ ‘like his grandfather’).⁴⁶ This bogus bird-etymology is absent from Maltby (1991) but would make a good example of a phenomenon noted by O’Hara, where Virgil binds together one or two Homeric elements (here, Hermes and a seabird) with an etymological link that works only in Latin.⁴⁷ Once again, the harsh sound of the bird’s cry is suggested in the repeated croaking sounds of circum … circum … aequora. Hot on the heels of another pseudo-bird, winged Fama, Mercury provides an acrobatic display that contrasts with the nose-dives of human bird-men like Icarus: a teasing plunge (almost suicidally headlong), followed by a last-minute skid onto the surface by this boundary-skimming god.⁴⁸ The simile derives from the Odyssey, where Mercury’s Greek counterpart Hermes is similarly compared to a seagull when he flies down to Calypso’s island to extract Odysseus and send him off on his nostos (Odyssey 5.51). The intertext with the (comic) Odyssey encourages us to cast Aeneas as a brutal Odysseus and Dido as a tragic Calypso. It also reminds us that Odyssey 5 has something of an obsession with seabirds. It is not just Hermes who is compared to one: so, too, is Ino,⁴⁹ who swoops down ‘like an αἴθυια’ (the Greek word for ciris) to lend Odysseus a cloak for his voyage (Odyssey 5.337); on the two occasions her name – another falling disyllabic sound – appears in the Odyssey (5.333 and 5.461), it is placed at the line-end. Even the description of Calypso’s magical hut includes nooks for owls (σκῶπες) and other birds, including sea-loving shearwaters (66 – 7).

 Virgil most famously glosses an absent bird-name, ciris, in his sketch of Scylla and Nisus at Georgics . – , where secat … secat, ‘cuts … cuts,’ translates the Greek etymologizing word, κείρω ‘cut.’  Dyson (). Cf. Aeneid ., where Mantua is called diues auis, ‘rich in ancestors,’ but, assuming a Greek-style accusative of respect instead of the usual genitive or ablative (OLD s.v. ), one could also read: ‘rich in birds’; Ahl ()  n. , O’Hara () , Dyson ().  O’Hara ()  –  on dictamnum (Greek dicte + Latin amnis);  –  on hippomanes (Greek hippos + Latin manare). My thanks to Jim O’Hara for discussion of this point.  See Hardie ()  –  for competition between winged Fama and winged Mercury, and  –  for connections between Fama, who loves heights, screeches, and flies by night (Aeneid . – ), the screeching, nocturnal Dira at Aeneid . – , and birds, especially owls.  See Pollard ()  on Homeric gods who dive into the sea “like” or “as” birds: cf. Hom. Iliad . –  (Thetis), Iliad . –  (Iris).

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Homer pictures Odysseus twice as standing forlornly on the shore weeping and looking out to sea, as if he were the bird-to-be Alcyone – or the bird Cicero plays in his letter to Atticus about his longing for Pompey: nunc emergit amor, nunc desiderium ferre non possum, nunc mihi nihil libri, nihil litterae, nihil doctrina prodest. ita dies et noctes tamquam auis illa mare prospecto, euolare cupio, “Now my love comes to the surface, now I cannot bear my longing, now books, literature, learning all do me no good. Thus, day and night, like that well-known bird, I look out to sea and long to fly away” (Epistulae ad Atticum 9.10.2 = 177.2 Shackleton Bailey). It is generally accepted that Cicero alludes to the caged bird with which Plato identifies himself (at the court of the tyrant Dionysius) in Letter 7,⁵⁰ but there might alternatively be traces of an erotic tradition. Again, an etymological pun seems to be involved: emergit / mergus – with auis illa being a riddle as much as a literary allusion. Just as Odysseus is about to flee his enchantress for more important things, so Mercury holds out the prospect of opportune escape to Aeneas.⁵¹ How different this surfing god and absconding lover are from the bird-victims in another passage, from the other end of the Aeneid. In Book 11, the Latin ambassadors report on their meeting with Diomedes, who cannot be persuaded to come out of Southern Italian retirement to replay his aborted Iliadic showdown with Aeneas.⁵² The mournful diasporic adventures he recounts to them are remarkably similar to Aeneas’: Diomedes, too, escaped Troy, landed in Africa, fell in love with a princess, deserted her, and founded a city in Italy. Towards the end of his account, we learn that his companions never made it to their final resting place but were punished by Venus by being transformed into seabirds: et socii amissi petierunt aethera pennis fluminibusque uagantur aues (heu, dira meorum supplicia!) et scopulos lacrimosis uocibus implent.

(Aeneid 11.272– 4)

My comrades, Lost to me, soared to the sky upon wings or are river-birds drifting Aimlessly. Oh what a ghastly affliction has punished my people! Now they are filling the rocks by the coasts with their sorrowful screeching.

 Shackleton Bailey () vol. , .  Cf. Mercury to Aeneas at . (picking up  praeceps ‘headlong’: non fugis hinc praeceps, dum praecipitare potestas?, “Why aren’t you getting out fast while a fast getaway’s still an option?”  On the metapoetics of this self-consciously post-Homeric passage and its Ovidian counterpart, see Hinds ()  – , Papaoiannou ().

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A cluster of words here – supplicia, scopulos, and uocibus – strikingly echo the words in Dido’s curse.⁵³ I have now set myself the puzzle of identifying from its cry the kind of seabird Dido wants Aeneas to become. And I have to admit that I cannot do it with any ornithological precision. Dido Dido is admittedly more reminiscent of the wail of τυτώ or ἰτώ, owl or nightingale noises, than the usual seabird sound, the raucous kayax, ceyx, or Icare, and I cannot get much closer. In any case, I am reassured by the negative capability of two of the best-known ornithologically minded classicists. Arnott (1964) 249 cautions, “There is a touch of foolhardiness, in the attempts to establish a precise identification for the great majority of birds mentioned by the authors of classical antiquity.” In this view, he follows his great predecessor D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1918) 95, who pronounced: “[H]owever accurate we may find the poets now and then, I fancy that often enough they cared little, and possibly knew less, of the bird to which this or that name belonged; one bird was well-nigh as good as another and you need not ask too many questions.”⁵⁴ But there is a further strand in the Aeneid that does suggest a possible identification. If there are shades of a classic bird metamorphosis story, Scylla’s, in Dido’s curse, we might think of the ciris, the mythological bird Scylla becomes, a name derived from Greek κείρω ‘cut’ (from her removal of her father’s talismanic lock of hair). With this in mind, Dido’s death-wish for Aeneas might make one notorious intertextual scandal in the Aeneid just a little less strange: Aeneas’ famously incongruous echoing of Catullus’ lock of Berenice when he approaches Dido in the Underworld at 6.460 – where his inuitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi (“It was no choice of my will, good queen, to withdraw from your country”) unambiguously echoes Catullus 66.39 inuita, o regina, tuo de uertice cessi (“It was no choice of my will, good queen, to withdraw from your head”). Explanations of this jarring echo have often grasped at common features between Berenice’s story and Dido and Aeneas’: shared links with lucky homecoming,

 In Ovid’s longer adaptation, the birds are speechless (Metamorphoses .). See Myers () ad . –  on Ovid’s play with their identity (“if you want to know what birds they were suddenly transformed into, they were like white swans, but they were not swans”); suggestions include coots (Plin. Historia Naturalis .) or herons/shearwaters (Serv. ad Aen. . Graeci eas ἑρωδιούς dicunt). Thompson ()  –  agrees with Fowler () that they are shearwaters, alleging that their modern counterparts make the sound ‘owyah, owyah.’ At  he refers to “our little group of bird-names,” including ἐρωδιός, αἴθυια, ardea, and mergus, which are “constantly mixed up by the glossographers.”  Thompson (), pref. to nd ed., apologizes for having previously “ignored the Shearwaters” (see his expanded entry for αἴθυια).

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thank-offerings, and swearing by heads.⁵⁵ But if Dido’s curse had already changed Aeneas into something like a persecuted ciris, then Aeneas’ own borrowed metaphor transforms him rather defiantly back into a lock of hair, one that successfully flies free of female toils.⁵⁶ It is here, in these ideas of flight and escape, that the real argument lies for finding traces of a bird metamorphosis in Dido’s speech. Aeneas’ transformation is, of course, at most wishful thinking on Dido’s part. He will fly away, not just from Carthage but from the earth altogether, when he is raised to the stars as a god (predicted even in Book 1: 259 sublimemque feres ad sidera caeli | magnanimum Aenean, “you will raise great-souled Aeneas | Up to the stars of the skies”). Of the two possible ways out with which he taunts Turnus at Aeneid 12.892– 3, opta ardua pennis | astra sequi clausumque caua te condere terra, “then pray you can soar to the starry | Heights upon pinions or seal yourself off within earth’s hollow chasm,” he achieves the first, while Turnus is left with the second (although Ovid partly mitigates this by allowing Turnus’ city Ardea to fly away in heron-form in Metamorphoses 14).⁵⁷ Dido’s life force, on the other hand, is simply dispersed at the end of Book 4, when the rainbow-bird Iris (700 croceis … pennis, “upon crocus | Wings”) cuts her lock of hair (crinem) and releases her soul to the winds (704– 5).⁵⁸ There are two ways in which she will take wing again: long-term, once the Romans’ future enemy Hannibal, that Phoenician phoenix, rises from the ashes of her funeral pyre,⁵⁹ and short-term, when the flying thing, Dira, is sent by Jupiter to rattle

 See Lyne (). Hardie ()  –  sees in the allusion to Ptolemaic brother-sister marriage a further hint of ‘incestuous’ relations between Dido and Aeneas.  Lyne ()  – : “ [A]t . we find him [Aeneas] parroting lines from the intertextual Queen’s lock whose happy fate contrasts bitterly with Dido’s but which his own will in fact one day resemble.” Pelliccia ( – ) widens the intertextual net considerably to include many literary representations of unwilling separations, whether genuinely felt or not: for him, Ovid’s Ceyx and Alcyone are genuinely sad, while their joint transformation into birds is a happier version of Dido and Aeneas’ more diverse fates ( – ).  Henderson (). Both he (at ) and Casali ()  note Servius’ Freudian slip (ad Aen. .) in attributing the burning of Turnus’ Ardea to Hannibal.  Lyne () and Wills () discuss Virgil’s allusion to Catullus’/Callimachus’ Berenice and the similar passage at Iliad . –  where Peleus vows a lock of Achilles’ golden hair if he ever returns to his homeland. NB Wills ()  – : “Whether we juxtapose Achilles’ unrealized return … with Dido’s death in a foreign land or we contrast it with Aeneas’ successful one.” Ioannis Ziogas points out to me that Iris sounds like Ciris: Dido would thus play the betrayed male dux ‘leader’ here.  See Stocks () for a fascinating argument, independently conceived but complementary, that Hannibal, too, is related to the (usually masculine) ill-omened bubo, insofar as the adjec-

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Turnus and Juturna in Book 12, like an owl that flutters around their faces. Forget whether this is a noctua or a bubo: what is not in dispute is that this scene, with its dialogue between tragic hero and helpless sister, is packed with verbal reminiscences of Dido.⁶⁰ Her ghost goes on haunting the end of the poem in the shape of her familiar, the owl. A similar implied reincarnation occurs in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, when Psyche’s jealous, meddling sisters die by throwing themselves off a cliff in true bird-man fashion, and immediately a meddlesome seabird, a gannet (gauia, seemingly etymologized from garrire ‘chatter’), emerges and dives down to the ocean bed to spread gossip to Venus. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we are told that the swamp where Philemon and Baucis live is inhabited by gulls, mergi and fulicae (8.625); Hallett (2000) 555 – 6 has suggested that these are unlucky sinners transformed into birds after the gods’ destruction of the local Sodom and Gomorrah. What does it add to the Aeneid to fold in this buried myth? Above all, a bird’s state – suspended between heaven and earth, perpetually adrift, in a sort of limbo or purgatory – is analogous to human exile or wandering. A bird may lose its home and never find another; or it may be blessedly released from turbulent human suffering.⁶¹ After he has killed Hippolytus, Euripides’ Artemis asks Theseus, “Why don’t you hide under the ground in shame or change your life for that of a bird to escape this misery?”.⁶² Birds in the Aeneid are associated with successful or unsuccessful attempts at relocation. Souls waiting to cross the Styx in Book 6 are compared to birds migrating to sunnier lands (311– 12), and sea gulls happily sun themselves on a little rock off the coast of Sicily in Book 5 (128). In this poem of exile, migration, and new nesting, Aeneas will make landfall in Italy, as Daedalus had done. Indeed, he is identified with the ruthless eagle in the omen that appears to the Rutulians at 12.244– 50 (12.260 – 3 ferrum | corripite, o miseri, quos improbus aduena bello | territat inualidas ut auis, et litora uestra | ui populat, “Take up arms, poor folk, though this ruthless intruder’s aggression | Scares you as though you were strengthless birds, and the power of his violence | Devastates you and your coasts”). But Diomedes’ exiled friends will not be so lucky; nor will Aesacus, far from Troy. Turnus’ city Ardea is destined

tives often used to describe this owl, dirus ‘cursed’ and abominatus ‘abominated,’ are also those traditionally associated with the Carthaginian bogeyman.  Tarrant () .  Dido identifies with Aeneas’ similar experience of wandering and settling: . –  me quoque per multos similis fortuna labores | iactatam hac demum uoluit consistere terra, “Fortune has battered me too, with some similar twists, through so many / Trials, yet finally willed that I settle down here in this country.”  Eur. Hippolytus  – , cited by Forbes Irving () .

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for earthly obliteration; Dido will remain a wanderer still in the Underworld. That is why it helps to see unhappy bird-pairs – Scylla and Nisus, Procne and Tereus – flitting around her curse in Book 4. In another tale about shipwreck, birds, and mournful sounds, Ovid’s Alcyone envisages happy, twinned reunion, si non | ossibus ossa meis, at nomen nomine tangam, “if I do not touch his bones with my bones but his name with my name” (11.706 – 7) – in strong contrast to the violent polyptoton with which Dido describes the future enmity of Rome and Carthage: litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undas | imprecor, arma armis, “Menace of coast against coast and of waters hurled against waters, | Arms against arms, I invoke” (4.628 – 9). Mythical bird-stories often end in hatred: Scylla the ciris was notoriously hated not just by her father but by all other birds; the same story goes for the owl.⁶³ Owls and crows were traditional enemies, such that a proverb goes, “The owl says one thing, the crow another.”⁶⁴ A pitched battle of birds in Aeneid 4 suits a book about two people and, in future, two cities, at loggerheads.

Aftercries I end with a brief tour of four modern, transatlantic reincarnations of Dido, all of which persist in associating her name with sounds – jangling, nostalgic, or plaintive. Allen Tate’s “Aeneas at Washington” (1933) is a meditation on the theme of city-building, ancient and modern. Civilization has moved west from Troy to Rome to the United States, and Aeneas sees his own dogged experience as a colonist reflected in the work of recent pioneers: “the towers that men | Contrive I too contrived long, long ago.” At the end of the poem, he stands on a riverbank and listens to an owl hoot: I stood in the rain, far from home in the nightfall By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water, The city my blood had built I knew no more While the screech-owl whistled his new delight Consecutively dark. Stuck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

 Arist. Historia Animalium  a , Ael. de Natura Animalium ., ..  Suda C.

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Masculine this time, and four thousand leagues away from the origin, but could this whistling owl be a recreation of Virgil’s Dido?⁶⁵ In his poem “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid,” from The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), Robert Lowell chooses to remember Dido more actively in connection with birds. An old man falls asleep in his study in Concord while reading Virgil and dreams that he is Aeneas at Pallas’ funeral. In the dream, Aeneas’ sword, the one Dido had killed herself with, turns into a bird and starts chirping a Punic or Carthaginian word: I hold The sword that Dido used. It tries to speak, A bird with Dido’s sworded breast. Its beak Clangs and ejaculates the Punic word I hear the bird-priest chirping like a bird.

The Punic word would appear to be something sounding like ‘yuck-a yuck-a,’ the sound of the yellowhammers knocking against the old man’s window. However, Thomas (2006) has argued that the word must be that plus quam Punica ‘more than Punic’ concept, perfidia ‘perfidy.’⁶⁶ Later, the old man wakes up and realizes that he has been asleep in his study and the Aeneid is nothing but a museum exhibit whose birds have all long since gone quiet: “the dust / on the stuffed birds is breathless.” Yet we can hear those old stuffed birds come to life again in the memory of Virgil’s poetry. A different kind of Dido appears in Robert Penn Warren’s novel A Place to Come To (1977), when the narrator looks back on the central love affair of his life and turns Virgil’s Dido into trailer trash: When Aeneas came to Carthage, he moved, in a protecting cloud provided by Venus, toward Dido the Queen, whom he was to love, and then, in the fulfillment of his mission, leave her to the fate of the flames. Well, when I came to Nashville, my cloud was a ramshackle bar car, and if my progress was presided over by the Goddess of Love, she was embodied in the poor, drunken, courageous female with the clanging charm bracelet and the bum gam. But even if Nashville was scarcely Carthage – only a thriving middlesize commercial city of the Buttermilk Belt – I was to find a queen there. (Warren (1977) 125)

Here, the clanging charm bracelet of a Nashville Venus is the down-market version of Lowell’s clanging Punic word.

 Ziolkowski ()  suggests that it is the owl of Minerva.  Thomas ().

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Finally, a more oblique echo of Dido, in the context of marine birdsong, can be heard by a careful reader of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (2000 [1934]), his portrait of a marriage in free fall against the backdrop of the French Riviera. A nightingale even has a walk-on part one evening when the young starlet Rosemary is plagued by the singing of one “insistent bird,” but avian imagery goes far beyond the Keatsian title to inform the central action of the novel, the triangular love affair and rift between Rosemary and the aptly named Divers (Dick and Nicole).⁶⁷ “Birds in their little nests agree,” says a Swiss psychoanalyst sardonically about this dysfunctional knot of fragile characters; Nicole has already been destroyed by the sexual interference of her father, though she sang at the time and continues singing.⁶⁸ While Nicole is a “young bird with wings crushed,” her husband Dick is a “gruff red bird,” and at Dick and Rosemary’s first meeting “their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings.”⁶⁹ But it is towards the end of the novel that one really hears the birds crying, and even a fleeting echo of Dido’s name. For the damaged and volatile Nicole, a “perverse phoenix,” one “designed for change, for flight, with money for fins and wings,” a bird’s flight turns into a metaphor for escape from a broken marriage. Poised on the brink of her decision as if about to take to the air, “Nicole could feel the fresh breeze already – the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its coming.”⁷⁰ It is when she returns to the Riviera beach where they all once sunbathed happily that she hears a sound whose dying fall we may recall from Virgil:⁷¹ … simple little French girls climbing on the breakwaters crying ‘Dîtes donc! Dîtes donc!’ like birds.⁷²

 Fitzgerald ( []) . See Doherty () on the Keatsian hue of the novel.  Fitzgerald ( []) .  Fitzgerald ( []) , , .  Fitzgerald ( []) .  Fitzgerald ( []) .  It is a pleasure to offer this paper to Fred Ahl, intrepid pioneer in Latin wordplay, who heard it at Cornell in April . Much earlier versions were given to audiences at the Universities of Oxford and St Andrews and the Johnian Society of New York. All translations from the Aeneid are from Ahl (). My thanks to Joshua Katz, Jim O’Hara, and Ioannis Ziogas for their helpful comments.

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Bibliography Adams, J.N. 2003. Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge. — 2005. “Neglected Evidence for Female Speech in Latin”, CQ 55: 582 – 96. Ahl, F. 1984. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105: 174 – 208. — 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. — 2007. Virgil, Aeneid. Oxford. Arnott, G.W. 1964. “Notes on Gavia and Mergus in Latin Authors”, CQ 14: 249 – 62. Austin, R.G. 1955. P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus. Oxford. Barchiesi, A. 2005. Ovidio Metamorfosi vol. 1 (libri I-II). Milan. Bolton, M.C. 1980. “The Isolating Effect of Sola in Heroides 10”, Phoenix 48: 42 – 50. Bömer, F. 1969 – 86. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses: Kommentar. 7 vols. Heidelberg. Casali, S. 1995. “Altre voci nell’ di Ovidio”, MD 35: 59 – 76. Corbeill, A. 2014. Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Doherty, W.E. 1969. “ ‘Tender is the Night’ and the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ”, in: M.J. LaHood (ed.), Tender is the Night: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington, IN, 190 – 206. Dyson, J.T. 1997. “Birds, Grandfathers, and Neoteric Sorcery in Aeneid 4.254 and 7.412”, CQ 47: 314 – 15. Fitzgerald, F.S. 2000 [1934]. Tender is the Night. London. Forbes Irving, P.M.C. 1990. Metamorphosis in Greek Myths. Oxford. Fowler, W.W. 1918. “Two Virgilian Bird-Notes”, CR 32: 65 – 8. Hallett, J. 2000. “Mortal and Immortal: Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral: Equality and Change in Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon Episode (Met. 8.616 – 724)”, in: S.K. Dickison and J.P. Hallett (eds.), Rome and Her Monuments: Essays on the City and Literature of Rome in Honor of Katherine A. Geffcken. Wauconda, IL, 545 – 61. Hardie, P. 2006. “Virgil’s Ptolemaic Relations”, JRS 96: 25 – 41. — 2012. Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature. Cambridge. Henderson, J. 2000. “The Camillus Factory: Per Astra ad Ardeam”, Ramus 29: 1 – 26. Heraeus, W. 1903. “Die Sprache der römischen Kinderstube”, Archiv für lateinische Lexicographie 13: 149 – 72. Herescu, N.I. 1960. La poésie latine. Étude des structures phoniques. Paris. Hexter, R. 1992. “Sidonian Dido”, in: R. Hexter and D. Selden (eds.), Innovations of Antiquity. New York, 332 – 84. Hinds, S. 1998. Allusion and Intertext. Cambridge. Jakobson, R. 1960. “Why ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’?”, in: B. Kaplan and S. Wapner (eds.), Perspectives in Psychological Theory: Essays in Honor of Heinz Werner. New York, 124 – 34. Keith, A. 1992. The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 2. Ann Arbor, MI. Keulen, W.H. 1998. “A Bird’s Chatter: Form and Meaning in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses 5, 28”, in: M. Zimmerman et al. (eds.), Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden Ass. Vol. II. Groningen, 165 – 88. Kowalski, G. 1929. De Didone Graeca et Latina. Crakow. Lutwack, L. 1994. Birds in Literature. Gainesville, FL. Lyne, R.O.A.M. 1978. Ciris: A Poem Attributed to Vergil. Cambridge.

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— 1994. “Vergil’s Aeneid: Subversion by Intertextuality: Catullus 66.39 – 40 and Other Examples”, G&R 41: 187 – 204. Mackail, J.W. 1930. The Aeneid of Virgil. Oxford. Maltby, R. 1991. A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies. Leeds. Myers, K.S. 2009. Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV. Cambridge. O’Hara, J.J. 1996. True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymological Wordplay. Ann Arbor, MI. Papaioannou, S. 2000. “Vergilian Diomedes Revisited: The Re-Evaluation of the Iliad”, Mnemosyne 53: 193 – 217. Pease, A.S. 1935. P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus. Cambridge, MA. Pelliccia, H. 2010 – 11. “Unlocking Aeneid 6.460: Plautus’ Amphitryon, Euripides’ Protesilaus and the Referents of Callimachus’ Coma”, CJ 106: 149 – 221. Pollard, J. 1977. Birds in Greek Life and Myth. London. Pound, E. 1975. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York. Reed, J.D. 2013. Ovidio Metamorfosi vol. 5 (libri X-XII). Milan. Reifferscheid, A. 1860. C. Suetonii Tranquilli Praeter Caesarum Libros Reliquiae. Leipzig. Renehan, R. 1998. “On Gender Switching as a Literary Device in Latin Poetry”, in: P. Knox and C. Foss (eds.), Style and Tradition. Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen, 212 – 29. Stuttgart. Shackleton Bailey, D. 1965 – 71. Cicero’s Letters to Atticus. 7 vols. Cambridge. Schiesaro, A. 2008. “Furthest Voices in Virgil’s Dido” [1] and [2], SIFC 6: 60109 and 194 – 245. Schroeder, F. 2004. “Philodemus: Avocatio and the Pathos of Distance in Lucretius and Virgil”, in: D. Armstrong, J. Fish, P.A. Johnston, and M.B. Skinner (eds.), Virgil, Philodemus, and the Augustans. Austin, TX, 139 – 58. Stocks, C. (2016). “Monsters in the Night: Hannibal, prodigia, and the Parallel Worlds of Epode 16 and Ode 4.4”, in: P. Bather and C. Stocks (eds.), Horace’s Epodes: Contexts, Intertexts, and Reaction. Oxford, 153 – 74. Tarrant, R. 2012. Virgil, Aeneid XII. Cambridge. Thomas, R.F. 1988. “Vergil’s ‘White Bird’ and the Alexandrian Reference (G. 2.319 – 20)”, CPh 83: 214 – 17. — 2006. “Virgil, Robert Lowell, and ‘The Punic Word’”, MD 56: 215 – 18. — 2012. Horace, Odes IV. Cambridge. Thompson, D.W. 1918. “The Birds of Diomede”, CR 32: 92 – 6. — 1936. A Glossary of Greek Birds. (2nd edition). Oxford. Tichy, E. 1983. Onomatopoetische Verbalbildungen im Grieschischen. Vienna. Tsur, R. 1992. What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive: The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception. Durham, NC. Warren, R.P. 1977. A Place to Come To. New York. Wills, J. 1998. “Divided Allusion: Virgil and the Coma Berenices”, HSPh 98: 277 – 305. Ziolkowski, T. 1993. Virgil and the Moderns. Princeton, NJ.

Michael Fontaine

Freudian Bullseyes in Classical Perspective: The Psycholinguistics of Guilt in Virgil’s Aeneid Summary: Roman poets and readers seem to have taken it for granted that our preoccupations determine or affect the words we utter in moments of extreme emotion. By noticing how those words resemble other words, therefore, we can sometimes decode or glimpse an anguished speaker’s private thoughts. This is the conclusion suggested by several puns in the poetry of Virgil, Lucretius, and Catullus, puns that are better explained by a psycholinguistic than a psychoanalytic (Freudian) model. Since they appear in correct, ordinary speech—in contrast to Freudian slips, in which a pun results from a speech error—I call those puns ‘Freudian bullseyes.’ Keywords: Aeneid; Freud; Freudian slip; psycholinguistics; psychopathology; wordplay; guilt; pun; Virgil; Catullus; Lucretius; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life For Fred, MaXVMo honore Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)*

I The publication of Frederick Ahl’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in 2007 revealed more clearly than ever before just how shot through the epic is with wordplay. In so doing, Ahl has forced us to consider what it means. If the puns are not funny (and they often are not), if they are not ‘etymological glosses’ (and they often are

* Schopenhauer () : “Das Talent gleicht dem Schützen, der ein Ziel trifft, welches die Uebrigen nicht erreichen können; das Genie dem, der eines trifft, bis zu welchem sie nicht ein Mal zu sehn vermögen.” (Translator unknown)

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not), and if we don’t like the pseudo-explanations that psychoanalysis offers up (and I do not), then what are they doing in the text? To answer this question I take as my starting point three puns in the Aeneid—two as yet unnoticed in print—that involve the notion of guilt. Guilt is a compelling means of understanding Virgil’s puns. The emotion is rare in Homer but common in the Aeneid, where characters routinely blame themselves for thoughts or actions. What is more, in my three examples Virgil focalizes the puns in a way that invites us to reflect on the connections between guilt, thought, and language. Finally, since guilt is often the universal explanation of psychoanalysis, the examples will allow me to distinguish my views from that theory sharply, especially where my views seem to approach Freud’s most closely. Guilt is a social and self-conscious emotion. As the American psychiatrist and philosopher Ron Leifer (2013) explains, it involves a cognitive component and would not exist without the evolution of language. That Roman authors took its cognitive aspect for granted is reflected in the fact that the single word conscientia regularly means ‘a guilty conscience.’ And because guilt is cognitive, it means the emotion is liable to Whorfian linguistic analysis—that is, to analysis that considers whether and how language shapes thought. I shall come back to that matter below. What betrays a guilty conscience? Since Freud, many would automatically reply that a slip of the tongue does; or, when our speech does not betray us, that body language does. The former is a very old idea; several examples in Plautus’ Casina reveal that authors and audiences in ancient Rome shared our ‘Freudian’ view of slips of the tongue. We do not know whether they saw a relationship between guilt and unguarded body language, but there is not much evidence for it if they did.¹ Absent an error in speech, then, what else could betray feelings of guilt? The answer is puns. Virgil’s three examples seem to make this point clear. Let us have a look at them in the translation of Ahl (2007), occasionally modified. (1.) Book 4 begins with Dido in anguish. A recent widow, she finds herself obsessed with Aeneas. He haunts her thoughts and dreams and, Virgil seems to say, she is losing her mind—her “sanity is fading” (v. 8 male sana = insana, ‘insane’). At last she confides her feelings to her sister, Anna (9 – 23): “Anna soror, quae me suspensam insomnia terrent!

 Casina: Feldman (). The negative claim about body language rests on the evidence in Corbeill ().

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 quis nouus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes, quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis! credo equidem, nec uana fides, genus esse deorum. degeneres animos timor arguit. heu, quibus ille iactatus fatis! quae bella exhausta canebat!  si mihi non animo fixum immotumque sederet ne cui me uinclo uellem sociare iugali, postquam primus amor deceptam morte fefellit; si non pertaesum thalami taedaeque fuisset, huic uni forsan potui succumbere culpae.  Anna (fatebor enim) miseri post fata Sychaei coniugis et sparsos fraterna caede penatis solus hic inflexit sensus animumque labantem impulit. agnosco ueteris uestigia flammae.”

“Anna my sister, what sleepless dreams suspend me in terror!  Who is this newcomer guest who has set up his quarters in our home? Oh, what a grand look he has, how brave in his heart and in battle! Gods generated his line; I believe this, not simply on blind faith. Base-born, degenerate souls are exposed by their fear. What a beating Destiny gave him! What wearying wars sang out in his story!  Were it not rooted, immovably fixed in my mind, that I’d never So much as wish to ally myself with another in marriage, After my first great love deceived me and failed me by dying, Were I not weary of weddings, my thoughts about marriage so altered, I could, perhaps, succumb to (succumbere) this one point of censure.²  Anna, I have to confess: ever since my poor husband Sychaeus Died and my brother stained our household’s shrines with his slaughter, This is the one man who’s suppled my senses and pummeled my fainting Mind’s resolution. These embers of long-lost fires, I recall them.”

My interest is in the Latin of line 19, huic uni forsan potui succumbere (“succumb to’) culpae. If Dido pauses before culpae, her words generate a temporary ambiguity. In that case we would have to interpret huic uni as a reference to Aeneas (sc. uiro) and would have to take succumbere as equivalent to concumbere, ‘have sex with.’ In her preoccupation with Aeneas Dido seems to be thinking—but not saying— “Oh! I could, perhaps, have sex with this one man!” Yet the thought is as taboo as the words would be. The rhetorical trick the pun entails, known as

 Because he has already seen the pun and understands its implications, Ahl translates, “I, perhaps, could rest easily with this—one point of censure.” At the risk of impiety I have changed his translation to clarify my point.

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para prosdokian (surprise turn, switcheroo), is well established in comedy. But Dido is not joking. (2.) In book 10 Aeneas has accepted King Evander’s son, Pallas, as his ward and has taken responsibility for his safety. He seems to regard the young man as a surrogate son, though some scholars, such as Putnam (1985), detect hints of a pederastic relationship. In 10.479 – 89—the most momentous scene of the epic— the Rutulian prince Turnus kills Pallas and strips off the boy’s baldric as a prize. The killing enrages Aeneas and drives him on a murderous rampage of revenge. Seeking Turnus, he deals death indiscriminately—because, Virgil makes a point of saying, his thoughts are entirely on Pallas and Evander (515 – 16, Pallas, Evander, in ipsis / omnia sunt oculis, “It’s all there: Pallas, Evander, clear in his mind’s eye.”) Aeneas fails to meet Turnus but does at last reach Mezentius, the Etruscan king allied to Turnus, and does combat with him. Mezentius falters in the fight and when Aeneas goes to deliver the deathblow, Mezentius’ son, Lausus, moves to intercept it. Hoping to block it, the young warrior is struck and dies tragically in his father’s stead. Virgil pauses the narrative to describe the thoughts that occur to Aeneas as the boy bleeds out (821– 4):



At uero ut uultum uidit morientis et ora, ora modis Anchisiades pallentia miris, ingemuit miserans grauiter dextramque tetendit, et mentem patriae subiit pietatis imago.

Yet, when he sees the expression that spreads on the face of the dying Youth, on that face growing stunningly pallid, the son of Anchises pities him, utters a groan from his heart, reaches out with his right hand.  Here, mirrored sharp in his thoughts, is his own righteous love for his father.

It is important to realize that Lausus and Pallas are mirror images of one another. The two Italian princes are equal in age, physique, valor, and doom—each is killed in battle by his enemy’s greatest hero (10.433 – 6). My interest is therefore in the Latin of line 818, ora modis Anchisiades pallentia (pallid) miris. It contains a pun on the name Pallas (the genitive, Pallantis, generates the adjective Pallantius, a, um). In his preoccupation with failing to save Pallas, Aeneas seems to be thinking, “How could I, entrusted to look after Pallas, kill a boy just like him? How strangely like Pallas his face looks, his face so pallid in death…!” Remarkably, Virgil implicates the father-son relationship in these thoughts (Anchisiades; patriae pietatis imago). It seems that in killing Lausus, Aeneas has become responsible for Pallas being killed a second time.

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(3.) My third example returns to the death of Lausus from a different point of view. When, shortly after, Mezentius sees the lifeless body of his son being brought back to him, he is overcome with survivor guilt and resolves to end his life (10.846 – 56): “tantane me tenuit uiuendi, nate, uoluptas, ut pro me hostili paterer succedere dextrae, quem genui? tuane haec genitor per uulnera seruor morte tua uiuens? heu, nunc misero mihi demum  exitium infelix, nunc alte uulnus adactum! idem ego, nate, tuum maculaui crimine nomen, pulsus ob inuidiam solio sceptrisque paternis. debueram patriae poenas odiisque meorum: omnis per mortis animam sontem ipse dedissem!  nunc uiuo neque adhuc homines lucemque relinquo. sed linquam.”

“Son, was the pleasure of staying alive so great that it kept me Back, and that I allowed (paterer) you, my own child, to replace me in battle, Facing our enemy’s sword? Am I saved, I your father, by your wounds? Living because you died? My exile is now void of any  Sense of fulfillment in misery. This is the wound driven deeply! Son, I’m the very same man whose criminal actions have ruined Your good name: I was loathed, overthrown, I was stripped of my fathers’ Scepter. I should myself have exacted the judgment my soul’s guilt Owed my land and my people’s hate: some death in a thousand  Forms. And I’ve not yet left these regions of humans and daylight. I’m still alive. But I’ll leave.”

My interest is in the Latin of line 847, ut pro me hostili paterer succedere dextrae. It contains a pun on pater, “father.” Not blaming Aeneas and, as a man who scoffs at the gods (contemptor diuom, 7.648), unwilling or unable to blame them, the Etruscan warrior blames himself for Lausus’ death. It is a common reaction to bereavement. Yet in his preoccupation with failing to save Lausus (for whose death he is not really responsible), Mezentius is not blaming himself for his conduct on the battlefield. He is blaming himself at this moment for his failures as a father. He is expanding his sense of responsibility from a single event to the conduct of his life. Remarkably, as in my second example, Virgil once more implicates in the pun the father-son relationship and suicidal thoughts (or ‘ideation’). It may not be an accident that Virgil explores the relationship of bereavement to (self‐) blame by means of a character named Lausus, whose Etruscan

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name Aeneas associates with the Latin word laus (‘praise’) in the prequel to this passage (v. 825 laudibus). Be that as it may, H.C. Gotoff (1984: 201) surely missed the pun if he could read this passage and conclude, “Nor is paterer, in the sense required here, in the slightest applicable.” The unvoiced thoughts of succumbere/concumbere, Pallas, and pater conveyed by succumbere, pallentia, and paterer are not expressed but they are transparent. If we consider them together, Virgil seems to be implying, or at least taking for granted, something about the relationship of guilt to spontaneous utterance (or, in Aeneas’ case, the spontaneous upwelling of thought). At this point it is not clear whether we should also consider directly relevant certain interpersonal states or relationships implicit in them that, after Freud, might appear so—namely, the fresh sexual stirrings of a widow and the father-son relationship (or male homosexuality). Since recent years have been witnessing a resurrection of interest in psychoanalytic explanations of Latin authors³, I should explain why an alternative explanation of the phenomena is both possible and, therefore, preferable.

II The second chapter of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (2002 [1901]) is the most famous chapter in his famous book. Freud presents it as a case study in what he calls ‘psychopathology’—that is, in his belief that a lapse in speech, writing, memory, or action provides clues to, and evidence of, a repressed thought or diseased psyche. In it a young Austrian Jew who is unhappy with the political and social status of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire harangues Freud. He intends to cap his rant by quoting Dido’s curse in Aeneid 4.625, Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor, “Rise from my bones, my avenger—and there will be an avenger!” But his memory fails him at the crucial moment. He can recall only most of the line, and that imperfectly, as Exoriare ex nostris ossibus ultor, “Rise from my bones, my avenger!” He leaves out the word aliquis and reverses the order of nostris ex. After prompting and listening to his free associations (in reality, not so free!), Freud deduces the young man is worried about the outcome of a sexual encounter. The young man had, he reveals, slept with an Italian woman on a recent trip to Naples. Freud’s discussion does not say whether the encounter was casual or

 Oliensis () is a prominent example.

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not, but the young man is now anxiously expecting imminent confirmation of his worst fears. According to Freud, the young man ‘repressed’ aliquis because uttering it would have brought these worries to conscious thought. It is worth reviewing the associations and analysis that enable Freud to draw his conclusion. The young Jew—who, like Freud, speaks and thinks in German— begins by dividing the Latin words aliquis into a-liquis (he is not sure why), then finds his thoughts run on at random to the German words Reliquien (relics), Liquidation, Flüssigkeit (liquid), and Fluid; then to the relics of Saint Simon of Trent, whose death or murder in the Middle Ages was, yet again, now being attributed to Jews; then to Saint Augustine and his views on women; then to a meeting he recently had with a man named Benedikt, a truly ‘original’ sort of man; then to Saint Januarius, whose blood, kept in a phial in a church at Naples, miraculously liquefies on one holy day each year; then to a particular occasion on which the miracle was delayed and required human intervention to help bring it about; and then, at long last, the young man’s thoughts turn to his personal predicament: his Italian lady friend has missed her period, and it’s presumably his fault. If it seems strange that Freud does not seize immediately on the verbal connection between aliquis and Liquidation (the second, not first, association), which could link aliquis to menstrual blood, then we must not forget that his ‘patient’ spoke German. In that language Liquidation is largely a financial term, whereas Flüssigkeit (liquid) is only conceptually and not acoustically connected to it. In other words, Freud does not see a simple, one-to-one relationship between a word and the unvoiced thought that it puns on and hints at. Moreover, in two chapters of The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, the Italian classicist Sebastiano Timpanaro (1976) demonstrated on philological grounds the intellectual bankruptcy of Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of the mistake. Virgil’s line is unusual because it combines an indefinite third-person pronoun (aliquis) with a second-person verb (exoriare). As Timpanaro shows in detail, that is why Freud’s young man—like any medieval copyist—simply banalized its unfamiliar syntax. Virgil’s combination of second and third person referents is impossible in German (and English), so it was almost foreordained that a German speaker would accidentally smooth it out with a more familiar construction. These mistakes are so familiar to us philologists, of course, that no further explanation is necessary. Timparano also shows in painful detail how Freud’s technique of association turns out not to be so free after all—Freud regularly intervenes to help his ‘analysand,’ or patient, along. We can and should say more about that. I think (and Timpanaro implies) it is unlikely the young Jew was really ‘unconscious’ of his anxiety about having or aborting a child accidentally fathered on a woman, perhaps a stranger, in a foreign country. I assume it is obvious the

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young man was preoccupied with those thoughts and the feelings of self-blame that accompany them. To consider those thoughts and feelings ‘unconscious’ in the psychoanalytic sense of the word is ridiculous. As a doctor, Freud had surely seen how patients typically behave and speak when they must wait for the results of an important medical test—how they ruminate about the difficult choices they might have to make, and how the stress of thinking about it spills out. Freud would need no special insight into the human condition, much less medical training, to realize that for many a young man, the results of the only medical test that matters in life depend on the arrival of a young woman’s period. This is only one of many reasons a psychoanalytic analysis of the three puns above will lead us up a garden path and why it must be rejected. Let me give another. Ellen Oliensis has recently asked us to entertain the notion of a ‘textual unconscious’ and invokes it to explain the presence and purpose of puns in Latin texts. Since the existence of a human unconscious is not a proven fact, I hope readers sympathetic to her argument will forgive me for simply stating I cannot bring myself to believe in the existence of a textual unconscious either —and this is, to be sure, a question of belief. Let me quote the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz on this point (1976: 1– 2): One thus knows that he is a heretic when his friends and colleagues confront him with an incredulous and indignant: “You mean you’d believe that…?” What one does not believe might be that the Jews are the Chosen People; or that Jesus is the Son of God; or that Freud was a scientist. Each of these disbeliefs is a heresy for those who believe in them, but not for those who do not. When a psychoanalyst friend says to me, earnestly but contemptuously: “You mean you don’t believe in the unconscious?”—as if not believing in the unconscious were like not believing in the liver—it is because my disbelief offends his belief.

I agree with Szasz that the unconscious is unlike the liver, and I think that displacing and reattributing it to the text only compounds the metaphor in an unhelpful way. That is not to say that Freud was completely wrong, of course. He was quite right to zero in on certain phenomena and realize that they are, or at least can be, related. I agree with him that something connects accidental puns—which, within psychoanalysis, are the result of dreams or slips of the tongue, pen, or memory—with mental preoccupation, guilt, interpersonal relationships, and unrehearsed or emotional speech. I disagree with him on the justice of the symbolism and the many steps psychoanalysis typically requires to discover what a speaker is preoccupied with. There is nothing pathological (or ‘psychopathological’) about it. Most importantly and productively, I think we can look beyond verbal slips in Virgilian epic to verbal successes—that is, the correct or ordinary

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use of language—and still make valid inferences about what matters a speaker is preoccupied with. I would like to suggest there is a simple, direct, and transparent relationship between what a guilty-minded speaker says and what Virgil wants us to understand the guilty-minded speaker is thinking.

III A chicken-or-egg question undergirds the young academic fields of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. The question is whether language shapes thought or thought shapes language. The belief that language shapes thought is called Whorfianism. George Orwell gave it popular form in his novel 1984 when he asserted that politicians could limit our thoughts by limiting our vocabulary. The legitimacy of Whorfianism is a matter of fresh and ongoing controversy but people have taken its Orwellian form for granted for a very long time. Advertisers, comedians, poets, psychologists, textual critics, politicians, and rhetoricians have long known that they can prime, or control, our thoughts. They know, or think they know, that by making use of the power of suggestion—especially suggestive language—they can all but guarantee their audience will think of another word. Rhyme is one means of eliciting a target word. Another is to prepare a suggestive context rich in synonyms for a particular word before uttering a rarer word that looks much like that word. Virgil’s puns illustrate this practice only too well. Pallentia suggests Pallas (‐antis) or the adjective made from his name, Pallantia, because apart from palla and pallium, both garments neither of which is mentioned in the Aeneid, the Latin dictionary shows that nothing in common usage begins with palland nothing resembles the longer pallent-. Likewise, the only two words that paterer looks like are pater, which is ubiquitous and relevant in the context, and patera, a rare word for a libation bowl. Because of Latin’s impoverished vocabulary, Virgil knew he could make us think of Pallas and pater in these contexts: he, qua poet, uses language to shape our thoughts. Everything leading up to the puns prepares the way for them. That explanation works for Virgil, who carefully wrought his epic, but will it work for the spontaneous speech or thoughts of his characters Dido, Aeneas, and Mezentius? Are they unwittingly making puns because language is shaping their guilty thoughts, or is it the other way around, with guilty thoughts shaping their language? Here is where recent speculation in psycholinguistics can help.

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Psycholinguists, such as Griffin and Ferreira (2006), state that the first step in uttering a word is conceptualization (or message planning), the formal name for deciding what to express. It is distinguished from formulation, the step of determining how to express it, and articulation—expressing it. Conceptualization is a process of selecting semantic content. Before we utter a word, say psycholinguists, our mind seems to activate a number of words of similar meaning or sound, or both, before selecting its target—that is, the word we actually utter aloud. On this view, the belief that meaning precedes sound is a fundamental property of speech. Griffin and Ferreira base their argument on many of the same phenomena that interested Freud and that he took as evidence of ‘psychopathology.’ They investigate tip-of-the-tongue situations, inadvertent speech errors (slips) and, what is especially relevant in this context, malapropisms. A malapropism is a fascinating and special kind of slip of the tongue. It is the act of using a wrong word that sounds like the right one. According to Fay and Cutler (1977), Aitchison (2007: 249), and Erard (2007: 43, 208, 206), a malapropism is distinguished by four characteristics: the slip is a real word. the slip and target word are unrelated in meaning the slip and target word are of the same grammatical category the slip and target word sound similar; specifically: they usually have the same number of syllables, and they have the same stress pattern, they often share an initial sound or syllable, and/or they share a rhyming suffix.

For example, a speaker might say delusions when he means allusions, or punctuality for punctuation, or cuticle for cubicle. By definition the malapropism is an accidental pun on the target word. The pun is—again by definition—obvious to the audience, which never hesitates to interpret it according to its sympathies. That is why comedians love them but most of us fear them. Malapropisms come in two types. When they have no obvious Freudian potential, we suspect the speaker—say, George Bush—is ignorant. When they do, we tend to think he is distracted. Our sympathies with or against him dictate our interpretation of his mistake. The American journalist and linguist Michael Erard (2007: 265) points out how in recent years commentators across the American political spectrum were routinely saying Osama instead of Obama. When we sympathize with the speaker, we forgive him his innocent mistake. When we dislike

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him, we are outraged at his evil gaffe and have fresh reasons to hate him, since it proves he secretly believes the president is a terrorist.⁴ What explains malapropisms? Psycholinguists say they occur when we are tired or distracted—distracted by feeling nervous, flustered, bothered, or confused—and so we get confused at the level of conceptualization. It certainly does seems intuitive that mental distraction can interfere with, influence, or shape conceptualization, and hence the word we actually do utter. That does not of course mean the explanation is true. The theory seems to fall apart when we inquire what exactly psycholinguists mean by ‘conceptualization.’ They say we start off with the ‘idea’ or ‘concept’ of a word before fitting it to phonetic form. But how can we have ideas if not in words? Still, playwrights have long seemed to think that is the way they work. Plautus’ Truculentus of c. 184 BC features several of them, and Shakespeare’s Dogberry and Elbow, the bumbling constables in Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure, are famously prone to misusing words to comic effect. And the psycholinguistic literature never fails to point out the origin of our term malapropism itself—it comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Sheridan’s 1775 comedy The Rivals. I think Virgil, like these playwrights, shared the psycholinguistic interpretation of malapropisms. He had surely encountered and experienced them himself in real life. He would have taken it for granted that guilt (conscientia) is a conscious and cognitive emotion, and he must have assumed its disturbance could cause competition between two ideas in the psyche at the level of conceptualization. What makes his understanding of this psychic competition more interesting than Freud’s is that Virgil seems to think that guilt becomes manifest in language even when the result is not a malapropism—that is, Virgil writes as if correct language gives us unwitting access to unvoiced but transparent thoughts. Since the phenomenon I am about to describe does not have a name, I suggest we think about it as a ‘tropapropism.’ Unlike the malapropism, which is a Freudian slip, a tropapropism is a correct word that hits the mark all too appropriately, deliciously and suspiciously so. Although it is spot-on in its context, it is so close to a more familiar word that it tells your audience, inadvertently, too much about what is really on your mind. The only difference between it and a malapropism is that the latter is an error and the former is not. In every other respect, they are identical:

 Bercovici (). Incidentally, since the killing of Osama bin Laden in  the frequency of this error has fallen off sharply. Psychologists warn us that verbal primes are apt to weaken and disappear over time, leaving subsequent generations unsure of what the fuss was all about.

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the word uttered is a real word. the uttered and suggested words are unrelated in meaning. (Contrast semantic errors) the uttered and suggested words are (often) of the same grammatical category the uttered and suggested words are pronounced similarly, specifically they usually have the same number of syllables, and they have the same stress pattern, they often share an initial sound or syllable, and/or they share a rhyming suffix.

I suggest we call these inadvertent puns Freudian bullseyes, and it should be obvious that I consider Virgil’s three puns (succumbere ~ succumbere/concumbere; pallentia ~ Pallas; paterer ~ pater) examples of the phenomenon. It would be absurd to call them jokes or etymological glosses, and only Dido’s could be considered an accidental double entendre. They reveal a speaker’s all-too-understandable preoccupations, and in a direct way that anyone can interpret by relying on common sense and human feeling. On this view, nothing specific about the interpersonal relationships implicated in the puns—in Dido’s case sexual, and in the others, the father-son relationship—is directly or causally related to the puns, as psychoanalytic theory holds. The reason the puns appear in contexts involving sex and remorse, in my view, is not because anything directly connects those thoughts to words but because both sex and remorse distract and expose us: sex, to another; remorse, to ourselves. Freudian slips reveal the alleged unconscious. Freudian bullseyes reveal guilty preoccupations. Freud declared (1953 [1900]: 608): “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” Just so, I submit that the interpretation of Freudian bullseyes in the Aeneid is the royal road to a knowledge of the preoccupations of a guilty conscience.

IV Did Virgil invent the belief that Freudian bullseyes offer us access to a speaker’s anguish or is it something he merely took for granted? Or to rephrase the question, do Virgil’s three puns help us rediscover and appreciate an aspect of ancient poetry of potentially great application in Latin literature, an aspect that psychoanalytic and etymological interpretations have been hindering us from seeing? Like Virgil, Catullus and Lucretius were Roman poets of the last century BC of similar philosophical and poetic outlook. Virgil and Lucretius were Epicur-

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eans, and though we have no affirmative statement on the matter, Catullus probably was, too. If we find Freudian bullseyes in their poetry, we may also find that Virgil has simply taken their effect for granted—perhaps as a Roman poet, and perhaps as an Epicurean. At any rate, I believe we can find them in both. Since (in my view) the relationship between uttered word and guilty thought is a simple and direct one, my remarks will be brief. At the start of De Rerum Natura, just before his famed assault on Religion, Lucretius anticipates the blasphemous or sinful feelings he expects his materialist doctrine will stir in readers (1.80 – 2, trans. Humphries (1968)): 80

Illud in his rebus uereor, ne forte rearis impia te rationis inire elementa uiamque indugredi sceleris.

80

I fear that, in these matters, you may think You’re entering upon a path of crime, The A B C’s of godlessness.

Here the situation is a bit different, but overall it seems related. In this case, I suspect Lucretius chose the word rearis not to prime the thought in his reader’s mind, but because he suspects the notions of reus and reatus, ‘guilty’ and ‘guilt,’ are already on his reader’s mind. He knows or suspects that in reading his new heresies, we are having guilty thoughts about it, and by a kind of innuendo he chooses a word that conjures up and forces us to confront those thoughts fully. Catullus 63 is a veritable study in guilt, remorse, disillusionment, and fear. In it Attis, a young Greek, runs off to join Cybele’s cult in Phrygia. He castrates himself, joins a band of revelers, and ends the night in enthusiastic bliss. When morning dawns he awakens and takes stock of his situation. He realizes his foolhardiness and, in the Hellenistic tradition, utters a long woman’s lament. I quote its entirety in the text and translation of Stephen Harrison (2005) (63.50 – 73):  patria o mei creatrix, patria o mea genetrix, ego quam miser relinquens, dominos ut erifugae famuli solent, ad Idae tetuli nemora pedem, ut aput niuem et ferarum gelida stabula forem, et †earum omnia† adirem furibunda latibula,  ubinam aut quibus locis te positam, patria, reor? cupit ipsa pupula ad te sibi derigere aciem, rabie fera carens dum breue tempus animus est. egone a mea remota haec ferar in nemora domo? patria, bonis, amicis, genitoribus abero?  abero foro, palaestra, stadio et gyminasiis? miser a miser, querendum est etiam atque etiam, anime.

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quod enim genus figurae est, ego non quod obierim? ego iuuenis, ego adulescens, ego ephebus, ego puer, ego gymnasi prius flos, ego eram decus olei:  mihi ianuae frequentes, mihi limina tepida, mihi floridis corollis redimita domus erat, linquendum ubi esset orto mihi Sole cubiculum. ego nunc deum ministra et Cybeles famula ferar? ego Maenas, ego mei pars, ego uir sterilis ero?  ego uiridis algida Idae niue amicta loca colam? ego uitam agam sub altis Phrygiae columinibus, ubi cerua siluicultrix, ubi aper nemoriuagus? iam iam dolet quod egi, iam iamque paenitet.“

 “My country, who gave me birth, my country, mother to me, That I left in my misery, as slaves who flee their masters (erifugae) Leave their owners, and carried my step to the groves of Ida, To be amid the snow and the chilly haunts of beasts (ferarum), To visit the [?] lairs of [?] in my madness,  Where or in what location should I think (reor) of you lying, my country? My very eye yearns to direct its gaze towards you, While my mind is free from fierce madness for a space. Shall I be carried (ferar) far away from my home to these groves? Shall I be away (abero) from my homeland, my wealth, my friends, my parents?  Shall I be away (abero) from the forum, the wrestling-school, the stadium, the gymnasia? My poor, poor spirit, I must lament again and again. For what kind of shape is there which I have not passed through? I have been a young man, a youth, a stripling, a boy, I was the flower of the gymnasium before, the glory of the oil-bottle:  My doors were crowded, my thresholds were warm, My house was clad with flowery garlands, When I came to leave my bedchamber at sunrise. Shall I now be spoken of (ferar) as the servant of the gods, the handmaid of Cybele? Shall I be a Maenad, a mere part of myself, a sterile man (uir)?  Shall I haunt the chilly regions of green (uiridis algida) Ida, clothed with snow? Shall I spend my life under the lofty peaks of Phrygia, Where the hind lives in the woods (cerua siluicultrix), where the boar wanders the groves (nemoriuagus)? Now, now my deed gives me pain, now, now it gives me regret.” (paenitet)

Attis’ language makes his self-blame and unvoiced preoccupations crystal clear. The verbal connections cluster when he ruminates on his present condition and recede when he thinks back to his past (61– 7). Ferar signals his fear of living among wild animals (ferae). He blames himself for fleeing his country ‘as slaves

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who flee their masters’ (erifugae); the thought breaks out again in the word abero (i. e. ab ero, ‘away from my master’). The word reor evokes his feelings of responsibility (reus). The same interpretation accounts for his explicit pun on uir and uiridis—he regrets castrating himself. Manhood is foremost on his mind. His other thoughts are equally transparent. He is thinking of ἄλγος (‘pain’), as we learn from algida (‘chilly’), of the culter (‘knife’), as we learn from the neologism siluicultrix, of his self-enslavement (seruus), as we learn from cerua (‘hind’), and of his mixed-up status between man and woman, expressed in puns on uagina and penis evoked by the neologism nemoriuagus and the final word of the lament, paenitet. If the reader agrees with me these puns are real and intentional, I hope he will agree it would be ridiculous to call the thoughts they elicit ‘unconscious.’ In short, these examples suggest Virgil was not making any extraordinary innovation in language or poetry in making use of Freudian bullseyes in the Aeneid. They rather hint at a once-widespread understanding of the relationship between thought and language, a relationship that has in modern times been conceived of rather differently but that can become productive once more. With that in mind, let me finish with a final example from the Aeneid, a newly discovered pun that brings with it consequences for the interpretation of the poem as a whole.

V The Aeneid ends with Aeneas flaring up in anger and killing Turnus. Why he does is the chief question the epic raises. Virgil says Aeneas’ rage was triggered by the sight of Pallas’ baldric on Turnus (12.945 – 7):  ille, oculis postquam saeui monimenta doloris exuuiasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira terribilis:

 As his eyes drink in these mementoes of savage Pain, these so bitter spoils, Aeneas grows fearsome in anger, Burning with fire of furiis.

Again we find ourselves in a context in which Virgil seems to give us access to Aeneas’ thoughts and mind’s eye, but the poet presents them with an extraordinary ambiguity. Does furiis = furore, ‘madness,’ or Furiis, ‘Furies, Erinyes’? The Furies were the chthonic deities of justice and retribution, especially active in

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family disputes. To ask our question differently, therefore, is Aeneas’ killing of Turnus an instance of murder (furiis) or—as Gregson Davis does a fine job of showing in this very volume—vengeance (Furiis)? As a minute speck of sand stimulates the growth of the pearl, so can the split between optimistic and pessimistic readings of the poem be traced in good part to this single ambiguity.⁵ In his commentary Richard Tarrant (2012: 21 n. 81) summarizes the controversy while commenting in a footnote: “At 7.392 Virgil plays on the ambiguity furiis/Furiis, as also in 3.331 scelerum furiis agitatus Orestes…. I find it hard to see ambiguity of that kind here.” The reason why Tarrant finds it hard to see the ambiguity, I suggest, is because furiis is only half of it. An equal component is the word accensus. Everyone interprets it as ‘burning’ or ‘exploding,’—naturally enough, because accendere is a catchword of the poem (starting at 1.29 accensa, of Juno) and a leitmotif of book 12 (e. g. 12.9 accenso, of Turnus). The phrase furiis accensus evokes the earlier descriptions of Dido as furiis incensa in 4.376 and accensa furore in 4.697, and of the Laurentine mothers, who are under the spell of the fiery fury Allecto, as furiisque accensas pectora in 7.392. But that is all, I suggest, merely priming. Of those four -cens- phrases (and many more like them), only the last, accensus in 12.946, is genuinely ambiguous. That is because beside accensus the participle there is accensus the noun. Ultimately from accensere, ‘to add to, to reckon among the list of,’ it has two meanings in ordinary discourse. One is ‘supernumerary’ and is irrelevant here. The other, very relevant for my purposes, is ‘a state officer who attended one of the highest magistrates (consul, proconsul, praetor, etc.) at Rome or in the provinces, for the purpose of summoning parties to court, maintaining order and quiet during its sessions, and proclaiming the hours’ (Lewis and Short s.v. accenseo A). In practice, an accensus was a minister, deputy, state officer, apparitor, or herald, often of lictors, and it can take a dative of ‘the boss’ (e. g. qui tum accensus Neroni fuit, Cicero In Verrem 2.1.28). That is the meaning we must keep in mind here. On my view, Virgil is simultaneously saying that Aeneas is either (1) ‘burning with madness’ (furiis ablative) or (2) ‘the Furies’ apparitor’ or ‘orderly’ or ‘harbinger’ (Furiis dative). Inspired by the sight of Pallas’ baldric, Aeneas sees himself literally here as he does metaphorically in 2.337– 8, where he claimed that amid the Greeks’ destruction of Troy, he “whirled into flames, into combat wherever Erinys…directs me” (quo tristis Erinys…vocat). The ambiguity—which is insoluble—permits, legitimates, and encourages two entirely contradictory readings. On the one, Aeneas is a crazed victim of

 Horsfall ()  –  discusses the ambiguity and its implications succinctly.

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his passion, and unjust in killing Turnus; on the other, he is, or sees himself, as the righteous and divinely sanctioned avenger of Pallas—a fourth Fury. Because this example is complex, let me be as clear as I can about what I mean. I am not saying that accensus is an example of Virgil having guilty thoughts. I am saying that Virgil planted an irresolvable (and, therefore, plausibly deniable) ambiguity in accensus, an ambiguity that no one has noticed before. Once we realize that accensus really is ambiguous, it complicates our choices in a way that makes the split between optimistic and pessimistic readings of the end of the Aeneid even harder to resolve than it was before. To wit: because the noun accensus only makes sense with Furiis (capital F), the passage presents us with the following four choices: If accensus furiis means ‘burning with fire of Furies,’ then Virgil is (arguably) saying Aeneas is justified in killing Turnus. This is an old interpretation. If accensus furiis means ‘burning with madness,’ then Virgil is (arguably) saying Aeneas is unjustified in killing Turnus. This too is an old interpretation.

If accensus Furiis means ‘harbinger of the Furies,’ then either: Virgil, in his narratorial voice, is saying that Aeneas is justified in killing Turnus. This is a new interpretation. Aeneas, through whose thoughts the passage is focalized, sees himself that way. This too is a new interpretation, and it says in the strongest possible terms that the killing is unjust.

Why must the last option mean the killing is so unjust? Because in the real world there is no such thing as a human ‘angel of death’ or ‘harbinger of vengeance,’ but there is, and there probably always has been, the kind of man who calls himself that. We know the type from the daily news: it is your garden-variety mass murderer, who justifies his violence by saying that he is ‘doing God’s work.’ Plautus, reworking an older Greek play, has a nice example of the type in Menaechmi 831– 75.⁶ Colloquially we call such people crazy and psychiatrically we call them paranoid schizophrenics, but in either case we always condemn their murderous actions as unjustified. We recognize the claim is a rationalization of evil. How does this relate to puns and guilt? If you accept that Virgil intended the last interpretation (3B), then what makes it possible is the focalization of the ambiguity. Virgil wants us to understand that Aeneas’ thoughts shift at the critical moment. The process is: “I am burning up—I’m furious—I am an angel of venge-

 As I argue in Fontaine (forthcoming), Aeschylus presents another example of the type in the Orestes of his Libation Bearers, but his point is usually misunderstood.

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ance.” His first thoughts are the silent equivalent of Dido’s shout in 4.375, heu furiis incensa feror!, but in an instant, the linguistic accident that made accensus the participle sound identical to accensus the noun amplifies and maddens his thinking. I readily grant that I have never looked upon myself as a divine avenger, and there is no evidence that Virgil did either, but that is how I think it works (and how I think Virgil thought it worked).

VII It is easy to see how Freud, exploring phenomena similar to those I have considered here, was led to develop his technique of free association. I should therefore conclude by making it clear how my notion of Freudian bullseyes differs from classical psychoanalysis. Free association does sometimes incorporate puns, as several examples in Freud’s Psychopathology and Interpretation of Dreams show. But it is not limited to them, indeed is not limited much at all—an ‘analysand’ (patient) is allowed or asked to extend the chain of associations as long as the analyst deems necessary for him to discover the allegedly unconscious thought.⁷ Several recent works that apply psychoanalysis to Latin literature follow this unrestricted procedure. By contrast, I am suggesting a single transparent link between two words, the one uttered and the other not. The one is a virtual pun on the other. The virtual pun is close and intuitively obvious because the author has primed it appropriately. In using them the speaker is, an author means to show us, preoccupied with his or her guilty feelings and that preoccupation is spilling over into ordinary language. The guilty thought plays a role in determining word choice. Since guilt is the self-conscious emotion par excellence, there is no need to invoke psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious. Virgil did not devise the technique, and there is no obvious reason to think it is necessarily limited to guilt. It may well extend to all the anxious or cognitive emotions, or even to thoughts in general. Nor is there any reason to suppose that later Latin authors did not also make use of it. Did his successors—say, Ovid— also use language to hint at anxious thoughts? That is a question for another essay, but anyone inclined to take it up will find a perfect starting point in Frederick Ahl’s (1985) Metaformations.

 Timpanaro ().

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Bibliography Ahl, F.M. 1985. Metaformations. Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. — 2007. Virgil’s Aeneid. Oxford. Aitchison, J. 2007. The Articulate Mammal. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. (5th edition). London. Bercovici, J. 2007. “The Science behind ‘Obama/Osama’ Slips”, online at http://upstart.biz journals.com/companies/media/2007/12/27/the-science-behind-obamaosama-slips.html. (Accessed July 29, 2015) Corbeill, A. 2003. Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. Erard, M. 2007. Um… Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. New York. Fay, D. and A. Cutler. 1977. “Malapropisms and the Structure of the Mental Lexicon”, Linguistic Inquiry 8: 505 – 20. Feldman, A.B. 1962. “Lapsus Linguae in Latin Comedy”, CJ 57: 354 – 5. Fontaine, M. (forthcoming). “The Myth of Paranoid Schizophrenia in Classical Perspective: Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and the Legacy of Thomas Szasz”, in: J. A. Schaler, R. E. Vatz, and H. Z. Lothane (eds.), The Legacy of Thomas Szasz: Science, Medicine, Philosophy, Law, and Semiotics. Freud, S. 1953 [1900]. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. J. Strachey (Standard Edition 5). London. — 2002 [1901]. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Trans. A. Bell. New York. Gotoff, H.C. 1984. “The Transformation of Mezentius”, TAPhA 114: 191 – 218. Griffin, Z.M. and V.S. Ferreira. 2006. “Properties of Spoken Language Production”, in: M. Traxler and M.A. Gernsbacher (eds.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics. (2nd edition). London, 21 – 60. Harrison, S. 2005. “Catullus 63: Text and Translation”, in: R.R. Nauta and A. Harder (eds.), Catullus’ Poem on Attis: Texts and Contexts. Leiden, 2 – 7. Horsfall, N. 1995. A Companion to the Study of Virgil. Leiden. Humphries, R. 1968. Lucretius: The Way Things Are: The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus. Bloomington, IN. Leifer, R. 2013. Engagements with the World: Emotions and Human Nature. Bloomington, IN. Oliensis, E. 2009. Freud’s Rome. Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry. Cambridge. Putnam, M.C.J. 1985. “Possessiveness, Sexuality and Heroism in the Aeneid”, Vergilius 31: 1 – 21. Schopenhauer, A. 1844. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 2 (2nd edition). Leipzig. Szasz, T. 1976. Heresies. Garden City, NY. Tarrant, R. 2012. Virgil: Aeneid Book XII. Cambridge. Timpanaro, S. 1976. The Freudian Slip. Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism. Trans. K. Soper. London.

Michael C. J. Putnam

Virgil and the Achilles of Catullus Summary: My essay further explores the influence of Catullus 64 on Virgil’s Aeneid, especially of the earlier poet’s language depicting Achilles. I begin, as preface, by examining how three lines from 64 (349 – 51) exert their individual force on three diverse occasions. I then draw a parallel, with Catullus’s help, between Theseus deserting Ariadne and Aeneas absconding from Dido. Virgil’s portrayal of Dido figures prominently in my analysis as she becomes a second Ariadne. Finally, and at greatest length, I turn to the importance of Catullus’s Achilles in Virgil’s formulation of Aeneas. His brutality is my particular focus. I first survey examples of Achilles’s destructive presence in books 7 and 10 of the Aeneid. But my primary example takes us from Catullus’s description of the slaughter of Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles, “her knee bowed under her,” to Turnus, the suppliant, “his knee doubled under,” before he is killed by Aeneas. I conclude with observations on the reasons why Catullus’s Achilles is present as the epic ends and Aeneas performs his final human sacrifice. Keywords: Achilles; Aeneid; Aeneas; Catullus; Dido; Theseus; Virgil I will be dealing with two forms of power, each concerned with poetry. One is the vitality with which great authors can suffuse the characters that they create, a liveliness that affects all those within range. The other is the force which poetic tradition exerts as later authors both absorb, challenge, and renew the past. The line I will be following leads from Homer to Virgil which is to say from the high point of accomplishment in Greek epic to the equivalent in the Roman literary pantheon. And a third genius forms part of my argument, Catullus. He is usually understood and honored as a writer of shorter forms constructed from lyric, iambic or epigrammatic verse. Yet his masterful hexameter epyllion, poem 64, builds so eminently on aspects of the epic tradition as to extend the legacy of Homer and thus to serve also as a major influence on Virgil throughout his career but especially on the Aeneid. My primary focus will be on the figure of Achilles. The profound effect of Homer’s characterization of the Greek hero on Virgil’s portrayal of Aeneas, especially in the final triad of books of the Aeneid, is more and more appreciated.¹

 Of the many treatments of the subject I would single out Mackay (); Anderson (); Van Nortwick (); King (); Lyne (). I have examined aspects of the intertextual connections in Putnam (), see especially Chapters  and  as well as the Epilogue.

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What has not been sufficiently studied is the force on Virgil of the vivid description, in Catullus’s long third-person narrative, of the demigod offspring of Peleus and Thetis that forms part of the epithalamium sung by the Fates at their wedding.² The lines in question run from 338 to 370 of that great poem whose powerful presence in later Latin literature goes now without question. The figure of Theseus, as set forth earlier in the same poem, also exerted an important influence on Virgil’s epic. To demonstrate how Catullus’s Theseus also complements his Achilles in the formation of the later poet’s masterpiece is a parallel part of my project. By way of preface, first let me offer an illustration of how pervasive was the impact of the earlier poet’s 64th poem on the Aeneid as a whole. Let us start where the Fates are commenting on the results of Achilles’s prowess. Given the epithalamium’s larger context, their praise is touched with an irony that ultimately extends also into Virgil’s treatment of the Greek hero (348 – 51): illius egregias uirtutes claraque facta saepe fatebuntur gnatorum in funere matres, cum incultum cano soluent a uertice crinem, putridaque infirmis uariabunt pectora palmis. [Achilles’] outstanding abilities and notable deeds mothers will often acknowledge at the burial of their sons when they loose unkempt hair from their white head and bruise their withered breasts with feeble hands.³

I will return later to line 348 and in particular to the word uirtus. ⁴ I would like here to show how the final two feet of the three subsequent lines reappear at three different moments in the Aeneid and how they all draw the weight of their Catullan context with them. The first takes us to book 9 of the epic and to Euryalus’s mother voicing her grief at his death (486 – 7): …nec te tua funere mater produxi pressiue oculos aut uulnera laui,…

 Among recent studies devoted to the Catullan influence on Virgil see Putnam ( [/ ]), for bibliography see p. , n. ; and Nappa (), especially  – . Among earlier studies the most useful are still those of Westendorp Boerma (), in particular  – , and Ferguson ( – ), especially  – , with notes.  All translations are by the author.  On “Catullus’ damning assessment of Achilles” see most recently Farrell and Nelis () . Boës () senses no irony in Catullus’s treatment of the uirtutes of Achilles.

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…nor did I, your mother, lead you out in your funeral procession or close your eyes or bathe your wounds,…

Virgil’s impressive scene particularizes Catullus’s generality. We move from the sweep of the deaths, mourned by a series of mothers, which Achilles causes during his career, to a single, singular moment of pathos as the mother of the young Trojan warrior bemoans the loss of her son at the hands of Volcens.⁵ My second example, uertice crinem, concludes an hexameter in another depiction of death, also one of the most striking in the poem, namely that of Dido (Aeneid 4.696 – 9): nam quia nec fato merita nec morte peribat, sed misera ante diem subitoque accensa furore, nondum illi flauum Proserpina uertice crinem abstulerat Stygioque caput damnauerat Orco. But since she was dying not through fate nor by a death she deserved and pitifully before her day and set afire by a sudden madness, Proserpina had not taken a golden lock from her head or condemned her life as victim to Stygian Orcus.

This passage serves as an instance of what will be my main topic: Achilles as a latent figure behind the Carthaginian queen’s suffering and demise. Suffice it to point out here again the presence of this segment of Catullus’s masterpiece at a crucial moment in the Aeneid. The phrase pectora palmis ends the last of our trio of lines. This time Virgil’s allusion takes us to the episodes depicted on the temple Dido was building in honor of Juno. Half way through the ekphrasis we are watching the women of Troy pleading with Athena (1.479 – 82): interea ad templum non aequae Palladis ibant crinibus Iliades passis peplumque ferebant suppliciter, tristes et tunsae pectora palmis; diua solo fixos oculos auersa tenebat. Meanwhile the Ilian women were making their way to the temple of unkindly Pallas, their hair loosened, and like suppliants were carrying a peplos, sad, their breasts beaten by the palms of their hands. The goddess, turned away, was holding her eyes fixed on the ground.

 Forms of the word mater appear in the larger episode also at , ,  and .

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A different warrior, Diomedes, is now the source of the protagonists’ sorrow but much remains in common with our previous illustrations.⁶ Again women are mourning, this time those dwelling in a city whose fighters are falling victim to another of the Greek chiefs. And again, as in our second example, we watch the mourners’ hair as a locus for the expression of emotion. Death also is once more in the foreground. From a look at these three examples we can see how the imaginative energy that Virgil received from this central segment of Catullus’s epithalamium is distributed at crucial moments throughout his epic.⁷ We will shortly pursue other examples of its potency but first let us turn to book 4 of the Aeneid and a still more vivid instance of the influence of poem 64 on its unfolding. We open with Dido suffering love’s metaphoric flame and wound (4.1– 4): At regina graui iamdudum saucia cura uulnus alit uenis et caeco carpitur igni. multa uiri uirtus animo multusque recursat gentis honos;… But the queen, long stricken now by grievous sorrow, fosters the wound with her blood and is consumed by hidden fire. Often the man’s excellence and often the renown of his people rush back to her mind…

Utilizing all the force that an initial line can muster as it prepares its readers for what follows, Virgil leads us directly back to Catullus 64 and to Ariadne brooding on her pain (64.250): …multiplices animo uoluebat saucia curas. …stricken she mulls over her manifold sorrows in her mind.

At the start of the book that leads to her demise, Virgil would already have us imagine Dido as Ariadne not only enduring the pangs of love but about to suffer

 Virgil is referring to Iliad . –  where the appeal is in vain.  Of several further examples let me note four. First, the phrase morti…aggere bustum (. – ) recurs at Aeneid . – . Second, variations on the hexameter ending corpora ferro (.) occur at Aeneid . and .. Third, in his bow to . –  at Aeneid . – , Virgil adds the bodies of horses to Catullus’ already gruesome depiction of heaps of human corpses. (What is particularized in the earlier look at Achilles the warrior at work, is generalized in the Aeneid as the two warring sides battle each other.) Fourth, Virgil draws on the Fates’ description of the taking of Troy (moenia bello /…Pelopis [.  – ]) for Sinon’s mendacious prediction of a Trojan victory (Pelopea…moenia bello [Aeneid .]).

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desertion by Aeneas, Theseus redivivus. Virgil confirms the association by the next allusion to Catullus 64. This occurs in line 10 as Dido exclaims to her sister Anna: quis nouus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes,…! Who is this remarkable guest who has made his way into our dwelling…!

Virgil would have us think back to line 175 – 6 of the earlier poem where Ariadne vainly prays away the initial arrival of her faithless lover: …nec malus hic celans dulci crudelia forma consilia in nostris requiesset sedibus hospes! …[would that] this evil guest, veiling cruel intentions with a seductive appearance, had not found rest in our dwelling.⁸

The repetition of nostris…sedibus hospes serves to reinforce the parallel between Aeneas and Theseus, which is to say between the two deserting lovers and, in the case of Virgil, by means of allusion also to prejudice for the informed reader the characterization of Aeneas at the start of the episode as potentially another wicked dissembler. The reference to poem 64, with its implicit equation of Aeneas with Theseus, is confirmed, with a variation that offers further corroboration of their poetic intimacy, at 4.20 – 2. Dido is still addressing her sister: Anna (fatebor enim) miseri post fata Sychaei coniugis et sparsos fraterna caede penatis solus hic inflexit sensus… Anna (for I will admit it) after the death of my pitiable husband Sychaeus and after my household gods were spattered with my brother’s blood, this man alone has moved my feelings…

Here Virgil would have us drawn to consider an only slightly later moment in Ariadne’s soliloquy of lament, as she momentarily ponders the possibility of seeking help from her father Minos (180 – 1) an patris auxilium sperem? quemne ipsa reliqui respersum iuuenem fraterna caede secuta?

 Williams () , on Aeneid . , notes the Catullan source of the phrase sedibus hospes. Virgil has Dido herself repeat the word hospes with some irony at  (also at the conclusion of the hexameter).

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Or am I to expect help from my father, whom of my own accord I abandoned, as I pursued a youth splattered with the blood of my brother?

With Catullus’ support Virgil suggests that we should still expect the future story of Aeneas to complement that of Theseus, forsaking Ariadne for ambitions elsewhere.⁹ But the present allusion shifts the mythic parallel away from the male protagonists to suggest a similarity between Dido and Ariadne that only further strengthens the other association. Dido’s brother Pygmalion had killed his sister’s husband, just as Theseus had disposed of the Minotaur, here fully humanized into the role of frater. And Catullus 64 retains a prominent presence throughout the book as it evolves. Let me offer two examples. When we first meet the Cretan princess it is by means of simile, as she watches her beloved recede into the distance on his ship (60 – 2): quem procul ex alga maestis Minois ocellis, saxea ut effigies bacchantis, prospicit, eheu, prospicit et magnis curarum fluctuat undis,… The Minoan girl watches him, alas, afar, from the seaweed, like the stone figure of a maenad, watches him, and seethes on huge waves of distress.

Catullus’s words lead Virgil in two directions. First is the repetition of prospicit combined with the extraordinary exclamation eheu which can refer to Ariadne’s own suffering, to the narrator’s sympathy with her plight, or to both. Virgil adopts the verb at one of the most poignant moments in his text (4.408 – 10): quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus, quosue dabas gemitus, cum litora feruere late prospiceres arce ex summa,..! What then were your feelings, Dido, as you beheld such a sight, or what groans did you utter when from the top of the citadel you looked out on the shore swirling far and wide!

Both heroines are observing the withdrawal of their lovers. Catullus has his readers share in the event by having the exclamation eheu apply to Ariadne as she suffers, to the empathetic narrator, or even to us as we appreciate both her situation and its expression in poetry. Virgil absorbs and reproduces his predeces-

 The repetitions are also noted by O’Hara () , on .  –  and Nappa () .

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sor’s complex presentation of emotionality by directly addressing his character, in this case Dido, a type of figuration extremely rare in epic. Through Virgil’s genius, we are there on the fortress of Carthage sharing its ruler’s emotions.¹⁰ Likewise the phrase magnis curarum fluctuat undis reappears later in the saga of Dido as she ponders her destiny (4.531– 2): …ingeminant curae rursusque resurgens saeuit amor magnoque irarum fluctuat aestu. …her sufferings redouble and love rages, swelling up again, and she seethes on a mighty tide of anger.

Ariadne’s curae are both reiterated and mutated into irae as the forsaken, now enraged, lover prepares to bring about her own demise. Let me offer one final example of Ariadne’s metamorphosis into Dido. At 64.197, as she nears the finale of her lament, Ariadne calls herself inops, ardens, amenti caeca furore (helpless, burning, blind from insane madness). Virgil’s Juno uses similar language to describe love-sick Dido (Aeneid 4.101): ardet amans Dido traxitque per ossa furorem. Dido burns with love and conveyed the wildness through her bones.

Virgil saves inops to distinguish Dido at line 300 when, like Ariadne, she is assured of her lover’s departure. At this earlier stage of her denouement Virgil makes the small alteration from Catullus of amenti into amans as if to have us hear some equivalency between love and madness.¹¹ But a further set of allusions to Catullus 64 within these same lines complicates, and deepens, this straightforward connection of our present adventurer on the way to Rome and the mythic king of Athens. For, again through the intermediary of Catullus, Virgil adds a different hero, Achilles, to the parallels he addu-

 The phrase prospiceres arce ex summa also looks in two directions within Catullus’ poem. It serves as a reminder of l.  where Ariadne is “looking out from the wave-resounding shore of Dia” (fluentisono prospectans litore Diae). Prospectans, in turn, looks ahead to Catullus’ double use of prospicit and to Virgil’s prospiceres just as litore anticipates litora. Secondly the phrase arce ex summa is a bow to Catullus’ use of summa ex arce (.). There Aegeus is seen yearning for his son’s return as he looks out over the water. Like Dido, he becomes a suicide.  We might also note the reappearance of part of .: nullus amor tali coniunxit foedere amantes,…(no love joined lovers in such a pact) at Aeneid . when Dido speaks of lovers not equally allied (…non aequo foedere amantis). The first tells of the union of Peleus and Thetis, the second of her connection with Aeneas. Again Achilles is implicitly in the background of both passages.

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ces for Aeneas. We noted earlier how the appearance of the word uirtutes, applied to Achilles at 64.348, anticipates its reappearance in reference to Aeneas at 4.3 (uiri uirtus). It is time to see how Virgil bolsters the suggestion. At 64.338 – 41 the Fates sing of the marriage’s offspring as follows: nascetur uobis expers terroris Achilles hostibus haud tergo, sed forti pectore notus, qui persaepe uago uictor certamine cursus flammea praeuertet celeris uestigia ceruae. Achilles, immune from fear, will be born to you, known to his enemies not at all by his back but by his brave breast. Quite often, in the wide-ranging contest of the race, he will outstrip the fiery footsteps of the fleet deer.

We first meet Catullus’ Achilles at line 11 whose preceding hexameter I have already quoted. I will add it again as a further reminder of the earlier poet’s intense presence here in Virgil’s imagination (4.10 – 11): quis nouus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes, quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis! Who is this remarkable guest who has made his way into our dwelling? What distinction his features carry, how brave in heart and weaponry!

The fact that this is Virgil’s only use of the phrase forti pectore in the singular makes the bow to Catullus the more striking.¹² The new guest is like Theseus but his stalwart appearance is also similar to that of Catullus’ Achilles. Line 11 reaffirms the parallel in one of the Augustan poet’s most extraordinary acts of poetic homage.¹³ Twelve lines later, still in Dido’s speech to Anna, Virgil gives her a striking phrase as she realizes that her feelings for Aeneas are akin to the emotions she had felt for her late husband (4.23): …agnosco ueteris uestigia flammae.

 We find fortia…pectora at Aeneid . – .  At line  Dido observes that Aeneas’s mien demonstrates his divine background (genus esse deorum). Catullus uses a similar phrase (deum genus) at . to define the race of heroes in more general terms. Since he continues on to describe the initial meeting of Peleus and Thetis, Achilles is also vicariously at hand.

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…I sense again the traces of the former flame.¹⁴

Catullus’ phrase flammea uestigia is unique in preserved Latin letters. Virgil sensed its distinction and made it his own by turning the adjective flammea into its noun, flammae, and by humanizing the metaphor.¹⁵ What is fiery now is not an animal’s fleetness of foot but the warmth of emotion, the recollection of past sensation that now becomes an aspect of the fire (igni, 2) by which Dido is engulfed. But the very brilliance of Virgil’s adoption stresses all the more the influence of poem 64, which is to say the specter of Catullus’s Achilles behind Aeneas and his relationship with Dido.¹⁶ Virgil carefully complicates matters by adding another allusion from the epithalamium to the mix and another figure to his intellectual cast of characters. We have already met Achilles, the product of the marriage. Through Virgil’s variations on his predecessor’s art we also now take note of one of the strangest attendees at the ceremony itself, Prometheus. He figures in the myth of Peleus and Thetis for having warned Zeus against marrying the future bride because she was predicted to bear a son stronger than his father. What Catullus calls to our attention – and Virgil has us implicitly remember – is the punishment that he suffered for defying the gods and granting fire to mankind. He follows in a procession of guests (64.295) extenuata gerens ueteris uestigia poenae,… bearing the faded traces of his ancient penalty,…

Virgil’s salient change of Catullus’s poenae to flammae not only recalls the association of Prometheus with fire but makes a specific connection with the metaphoric “blind fire” in which Dido is caught at the opening of the book. It thus also suggests that the fire is both illicit and destructive, illicit because it violates the fidelity Dido acknowledges that she owes her dead husband, destructive because it will soon take its turn toward realism in the conflagration that is part of the queen’s death scene.

 For the intertextual force of agnosco here see Hinds () . I thank Ioannis Ziogas for calling this reference to my attention.  Catullus’s cerua also soon reappears in the simile that begins at Aeneid ..  The phrase uestigia flammae is equally unique. The literary afterlife of Virgil’s wording also deserves notice. At line 48 of canto 30 of the Purgatorio canticle of the Divina Commedia, Dante has his pilgrim announce “conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma.” He has just seen his new escort, and former beloved, Beatrice, and Virgil has vanished, as guide within the story but not as ancestor poet.

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Several other bows to Catullus also suggest the Greek hero’s presence in these initial lines.¹⁷ The first occurs at line 16 where Dido announces that it is a firm purpose “for me not to wish to ally myself with anyone in the bond of the marriage yoke” (…ne cui me uinclo uellem sociare iugali). Virgil would have us think back to Catullus’s narrator telling (64.302) how the goddess Diana “had no desire to share in honoring the wedding torches of Thetis” (nec Thetidis taedas uoluit celebrare iugalis). It is not only the repetition of the verb uolo in uoluit and uellem or the echoing line endings (…are iugalis becomes…are iugali) that suggest we hear the earlier passage in the later. Catullus’ is the first use in Latin of the adjective iugalis, the simple form where we might expect the compound coniugalis,¹⁸ in connection with the yoke of marriage. Virgil’s use, at Aeneid 4.16, is the second.¹⁹ For a moment Dido is still akin to the virginal Diana, as Virgil had presented her in simile at 1.498 – 502. But Aeneas as Theseus and Achilles is also already at hand in her life through the magic of words. Lines 65 – 7 present perhaps the most intensive borrowing of all: heu, uatum ignarae mentes! quid uota furentem, quid delubra iuuant? est mollis flamma medullas interea et tacitum uiuit sub pectore uulnus. Alas, ignorant minds of seers! What help are prayers, what help shrines to a raging woman? A flame gnaws at her vitals all the while and a silent wound lives beneath her breast.

Virgil would have us compare a parallel moment in the career of Ariadne (64.91– 5): …non prius ex illo flagrantia declinauit lumina quam cuncto concepit corpore flammam funditus atque imis exarsit tota medullis. heu, misere exagitans immiti corde furores sancte puer, curis hominum qui gaudia misces,…! …she did not turn her burning eyes away from him [Theseus] until she caught fire deep within her whole body and burned

 Achilles is already present inferentially by the several parallels in Aeneid  between the banquet Dido puts on for Aeneas and the preparations for the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis. Cf. in particular Catullus . –  and Aeneid . –  and . Several of the parallels, and their consequences, are discussed by Nappa (), especially  – .  The first preserved use of the compound is by Varro Reatinus (in Nonius M).  Virgil employs the same phrase again shortly later (uincla iugalia, .).

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throughout in her inmost vitals. Alas, godlike youth, to an extreme stirring up madness with your pitiless heart, who mingle men’s joys with cares…!

The echoes of flammam, medullis, and furores in flamma, medullas, and furentem ²⁰ sustain the recollection. But what gives this parallel particular force is the intensity of the authorial intervention. In both instances we have the same exclamation – heu! – at the opening of the hexameter, and in both we continue with the use of apostrophe. In Catullus the address is to Cupid, who brings madness to lovers. In Virgil the narrator exclaims at the thoughts of seers who imagine they can bring comfort to an affliction that, in Dido’s case, will know no cure. In each instance the correspondence reminds us that we are at the start of a love affair that will bring acute sorrow to both protagonists and in one case will lead to death. One further example links Dido’s faltering self-analysis with Catullus’s wedding-hymn of the Fates. As they near their conclusion the three singers command the marrying couple (64.372 – 3): quare, agite, optatos animi coniungite amores. accipiat coniunx felici foedere diuam,… Come, then, unite the loves which your mind has yearned for. Let the husband receive the goddess in happy compact…

Their command resonates with Dido’s own concluding reminiscence of Sychaeus and her own earlier marriage (4.28 – 9): …ille meos, primus qui me sibi iunxit, amores abstulit; ille habeat secum seruetque sepulcro. He who first joined me to himself has taken away my loves. Let him keep them with him and guard them in the grave.

Because of the Catullan parallel, as we read line 28 we first expect amores to be the subject of iunxit. It is only when we turn to the beginning of the next line and to the enjambed verb abstulit do we realize that Dido is claiming that Sychaeus took all her ability to love intensely – hence the poetic plural, amores – away with him in death. But the very disjointedness of the syntax from the start of line 28 suggests a form of disjuncture between her words and her thoughts, which is also to say between herself and her past. It will not be long before Virgil’s narrator defines the situation with open exactness (4.171– 2):

 Furentem is reiterated shortly in furens ().

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nec iam furtiuum Dido meditatur amorem: coniugium uocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam. Dido does not now contemplate a stealthy love. She calls it marriage. With this title she veils her fault.

The advent of Aeneas in his many guises has caused the disintegration of one coniugium – a loyalty belonging to the past – and the initiation of another, more destructively disrupting one. A further reminiscence, one which caught the attention of Macrobius,²¹ also involves brilliant figuration. In the first Ariadne is speaking (64.171– 2): Iuppiter omnipotens, utinam ne tempore primo Cnosia Cecropiae tetigissent litora puppes,… All-powerful Jupiter, would that in the first place the Attic ships had not touched the Cnosian shores…

In Virgil’s transformation Dido is uttering her last speech as her self-wounding with Aeneas’ sword takes effect (4.657– 8): …felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae. …happy, alas too happy, if only the Dardan vessels had never touched our shores.

Once again, as he describes her life ebbing away,²² Virgil, by allusion, has his heroine compare herself to grieving Ariadne and, therefore by implication, Aeneas to the departing Theseus. But Virgil changes Ariadne’s negative wish into Dido’s prayer that is also an act of distancing self-scrutiny. Apostrophe to a god is replaced by the words of a speaker capable of exclaiming in sorrow at her own too-happy past. Ariadne would will away what has already happened. Dido, through Virgil’s magic, can also intervene in her own final words to express a grief in which we all share. Given the immediacy of Catullus 64 especially in the opening lines of Aeneid 4, it is with some irony that Virgil allots the punning phrase uiri uirtus (3) to Dido as she ponders the quality of her Trojan guest. Let us look at Catullus’s uses of

 Macrobius Saturnalia ...  With typical tact Virgil chooses not to describe the actual moment where Dido stabs herself. At line 646 she unsheathes Aeneas’ sword. At 664– 5 it is frothing with blood.

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the second word. We first find it at line 51 as we begin the expansive ekphrasis describing the coverlet of the marriage bed: haec uestis priscis hominum uariata figuris heroum mira uirtutes indicat arte. This cloth, embroidered with the shapes of men of old, sets forth in astonishing artistry the excellences of heroes.

Since what follows is essentially the tale of Ariadne’s desertion by Theseus that features her extensive soliloquy of grief,²³ the high quality of his heroic behavior, which the introduction leads us to expect, consists largely of abandoning the woman who had helped him achieve his mission and who was now following him as lover. As the narrator puts it (64.57), desertam in sola miseram se cernat harena. she beholds herself, pitiable, forsaken on the lonely sand.

Catullus’s next example of heroic “virtues,” as we noted earlier, is to be found at line 348 where we are introduced to the prowess of Achilles, his “outstanding abilities and notable deeds” that mothers declare at the funeral ceremonies of their sons whom he has killed. The generality is confirmed at line 357 by a particularly gruesome detail: testis erit magnis uirtutibus unda Scamandri,… The wave of the Scamander will serve as witness to his great virtues…

The Trojan river has been “narrowed” by the results of his uirtutes, namely by the heaps of bodies he has slaughtered. And there is a further witness (testis, 362), perhaps the most ironic of all, to his prowess: the slaughter of Polyxena as sacrifice on his tomb.²⁴ Catullus’ repetitions of wording, sound and sense urge our imaginations to view the two occasions in common. Achilles, in life, (64.360):

 The influence of Ariadne’s speech on Dido’s addresses to Aeneas and their surrounding circumstances has often been remarked upon. For example, cf. . –  and Aeneid . – ,  –  and  – ,  –  and  – ,  –  and  – . The division of Ariadne’s double apostrophe perfide at 132– 3 between Aeneid 4.305 and 336 is discussed by Wills (1998), especially 278 – 9. See also Wills (1996) 15 – 33, especially 26 – 30; Kilroy (1969).  For Achilles’ relationship with Polyxena see most recently Fantuzzi ()  – . For Polyxena’s death the locus classicus is Euripides Hecuba 18 – 82. In Latin literature, apart from her appearance in Catullus 64, see Ovid Metamorphoses 13.439 – 80 and Seneca Troades

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…alta tepefaciet permixta flumina caede. …will make the deep streams warm with the mingled gore.²⁵

In death he claims the virgin’s blood (64.368): …alta Polyxenia madefient caede sepulcra,… …the lofty tomb will become dank with the blood of Polyxena.

Courageous Achilles impedes the natural with the unnatural and from the grave demands a helpless woman as victim. We will look again at Catullus’s depiction of the latter event in a moment. But first let us return to Catullus and the opening of Aeneid 4 by way of summary. Catullus 64 has us share in two separate delineations of heroic uirtutes, each rife with irony. Following the linearity of the poem we first watch the valor of Theseus, as illustrated on the bridal coverlet, when he deserts, while she sleeps, the woman who had helped him accomplish one of his most famous deeds and thereafter had followed him on his return home. We then listen to the epithalamium sung by the Fates as they tell of the bravery of Achilles while he plugs up a river’s channel with corpses and in death demands as offering a virgin slaughtered on his tomb. Allusions to Catullus’s two characterizations permeate and are intermeshed in the opening verses of Aeneid 4. From the references to Theseus we expect that the hero-lover will abandon the woman who had given him aid, and Virgil will not disappoint us, however complex his examination of the moral judgments of each of his protagonist. By means of the linkage between Aeneas and Catullus’s Achilles we expect bloodshed to follow, as in the case of Polyxena, bloodshed caused by a hero’s command, issued in absentia. Again our expectations are not thwarted as the initial metaphors of fire and wound become at the book’s conclusion the flames of the pyre that engulf the suicidal queen and the fatal

1118 – 64 (with the commentary of Boyle (1994) ad loc). See also Andromache’s reference to her sister-in-law’s death at Aeneid 3.321– 3 with Servius’s comment. The Ovidian passage and especially its references to Aeneid 12 deserve separate treatment.  With permixta flumina caede cf. also Aeneid . –  (…permixti caede uirorum / semianimes…equi). On these lines see Putnam (2011) 22. With 64.368– 9 cf. also Aeneid 5.328 – 30. These contain the only uses of the verb madefacio in each author.

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wound inflicted by Aeneas’ sword, once a present from lover to lover, now “frothing with [Dido’s] blood.”²⁶ Catullus concentrates the brutality of Achilles into some two dozen verses of his masterpiece.²⁷ Virgil has us watch the evolving violence of his hero as he comes to power over the last three books of his epic. In book 10 we study Aeneas’ merciless conduct against the background of the barbarous behavior of Achilles in book 21 of the Iliad. And book 12, and especially the poem’s ending, offer a masterful recasting of the chase and death of Hector at the hands of his Greek assailant as told in Iliad 22. Achilles offers his opponent Hector no mercy. Neither does Aeneas spare Turnus, his wounded, suppliant foe as his epic concludes. Particular examples of the presence of Catullus’s Achilles are to be found scattered through the poem’s second half. For example, 7.720 – 1: …cum sole nouo densae torrentur aristae aut Hermi campo aut Lyciae flauentibus aruis. – …when in the early sun crowded corn-ears are scorched either in the plain of Hermus or the golden fields of Lycia. –

is drawn in part from the image of Achilles as grim reaper of bodies at 64.353 – 5: namque uelut densas praecerpens messor aristas sole sub ardenti flauentia demetit arua Troiugenum infesto prosternet corpora ferro. …for as the reaper, cropping crowded corn-ears under the burning sun, mows down the golden fields he with his hostile weapon will lay low the bodies of Trojan-born.

Three books later, at 10.513 – 15, Virgil allots the same analogy to Aeneas himself: …proxima quaeque metit gladio latumque per agmen ardens limitem agit ferro, te, Turne, superbum caede nova quaerens. …With the sword he mows down whatever is nearby and afire drives a wide swath through the ranks with his weapon, tracking you, Turnus, proud from your fresh slaughter.

 Aeneid . –  (ensem…cruore / spumantem). Virgil mentions the metaphoric uulnus at lines  and , the real wound at , in the plural, and .  On Achilles’s barbaric conduct see Putnam () especially ; Daniels ( – ) in particular  – .

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Catullus’s future Achilles becomes Virgil’s present Aeneas as he pursues his way toward Turnus, his prideful foe.²⁸ It is only at the conclusion of the poem that the two meet in decisive combat. I will end by tracing one further allusion to Catullus’s Achilles. This will lead us back to a last look at Dido. We return to Polyxena, Achilles’s final victim, and extend our examination from a line that we looked at before (64.368 – 70): …alta Polyxenia madefient caede sepulcra; quae, uelut ancipiti succumbens uictima ferro, proiciet truncum summisso poplite corpus. …the lofty tomb will become dank with the blood of Polyxena. She, like a victim collapsing beneath the doublebladed sword, will throw forward her headless body with her knee bowed under her.

The intensely graphic nature of Catullus’s description fixes it in our mind. The parallel back and forth between the two participles succumbens and summisso at the same point in adjacent hexameters, by their joint use of the prefix subcalls attention to the lowered posture of the victim’s body, yet proiciet vivifies the corpse’s ability to thrust itself forward even in death. Line 369 looks ahead to Virgil’s use of the phrase ferro ancipiti at Aeneid 7.525 as the initial battle lines join. But it is to an extraordinary echo of line 370: proiciet truncum summisso poplite corpus –

at the end of his epic that the poet would have us particularly attend. Aeneas has hurled his spear, flying like a black whirlwind, which pierces the thigh of his opponent. Then (926 – 7): …incidit ictus ingens ad terram duplicato poplite Turnus. Stricken, huge Turnus fell to the ground, his knee doubled under.

The assonance with which the sentence begins, incidit ictus, leads us inexorably into the next line (ingens) while the rhyming, disyllabic hexameter endings (ictus, Turnus complemented by ingens) reinforce the tight mesh of words de-

 The connection is made by Philip Hardie in his illuminating essay on “Virgil’s Catullan Plots” () especially .

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scribing the hero’s collapse. But it is the echo of Catullus that lends Virgil’s language its particular moral force. The repetition of poplite, the sonic echoes of truncum in terram and of corpus in Turnus, each in the same position in their respective lines, ask us to draw Catullus’ context into Virgil’s and to serve as commentary on it. When we do so Aeneas becomes Achilles for the poem’s last time. But the absorption of one scenario into another produces a particularly horrendous result. Achilles’s fellow Greeks slay Polyxena as an offering to their dead companion at his orders from beyond the grave. His Roman counterpart is very much alive as he kills his victim, now a supplex (the word is a further expansion of Catullus’s summisso). And, four lines from the epic’s end, Virgil makes it clear that, in Aeneas’s own words, this is once again a human sacrifice (948 – 9):²⁹ ‘…Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit.’ “…Pallas, Pallas sacrifices you with this wound and exacts punishment from your criminal blood.”

The voice from outside in Catullus has now become the voice of Pallas speaking first from within the living Aeneas and then from outside to us. And that voice tells of a criminality of which Virgil’s text has hitherto offered no evidence and of a sacrifice based on vengeance extracted from a suppliant pleading for mercy. It is not as far as one might at first think from Polyxena to Turnus, the one slaughtered on a tomb of the dead, the other immolated in memory of the dead who in fact lives pointedly on (Pallas, Pallas) in the person of his surrogate. Aeneas performs the act of requital necessary, at least in his thoughts and words, to satisfy the demands of retaliation. This leads us back to Dido and to the ghost of Catullus’s Achilles hovering over Virgil’s presentation of Aeneas to the Carthaginian queen as she begins the tortuous journey from metaphor to reality, from love’s wound and flames to the immediacy of her self-slaughter on the pyre of her own manufacture. The irony that lies in the fact that she uses Aeneas’s gifted sword for her deed has not been lost on critics. That she precedes Turnus as a type of Polyxena, a victim of Aeneas’s Achillean journey toward Rome, on the one hand, and toward intense emotional loss, on the other, should be brought into the conversation.

 Virgil uses the word immolo twice in book  (lines  and ) to describe Aeneas’ killings.

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Bibliography Anderson, W.S. 1957. “Vergil’s second Iliad”, TAPhA 88: 17 – 30. Boës, J. 1986. “Le mythe d’Achille vu par Catulle. Importance de l’amour pour une morale de la gloire”, REL 64: 104 – 15. Boyle, A.J. (ed.). 1994 Seneca’s Troades. Leeds. Daniels, M. 1972 – 3. “The song of the Fates in Catullus 64: epithalamium or dirge”, CJ 68: 97 – 101. Fantuzzi, M. 2012. Achilles in Love: Intertextual Studies. Oxford. Farrell, J. and D. Nelis (eds.). 2013. Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic. Oxford. Ferguson, J. 1971 – 2. “Catullus and Virgil”, PV 11: 25 – 47. Hardie, P. 2012. “Virgil’s Catullan Plots”, in: I. Du Quesnay and T. Woodman (eds.), Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers. Cambridge, 212 – 38. Hinds, S. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Kilroy, J. 1969. “The Dido Episode and the Sixty-Fourth Poem of Catullus”, SO 44: 48 – 60. King, K. 1982. “Foil and Fusion: Homer’s Achilles in Vergil’s Aeneid”, MD 9: 31 – 57. Lyne, R.O.A.M. 1987. Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid. Oxford. Mackay, L.A. 1957. “Achilles as Model for Aeneas”, TAPhA 88: 11 – 16. Nappa, C. 2007. “Catullus and Vergil”, in: M. Skinner (ed.), A Companion to Catullus. Malden, MA/Oxford, 377 – 98. O’Hara, J. (ed.). 2011. Vergil: Aeneid 4. Newburyport, MA. Putnam, M.C.J. 1961. “The Art of Catullus 64”, HSPh 65: 165 – 205. — 2000 [1995/6]. “The Lyric Genius of the Aeneid”, in: S. Quinn (ed.), Why Vergil? A Collection of Interpretations. Wauconda, IL, 255 – 66. — 2011. The Humanness of Heroes. Amsterdam. Van Nortwick, T. 1980. “Aeneas, Turnus and Achilles”, TAPhA 110: 303 – 14. Westendorp Boerma, R.E.H. 1958. “Vergil’s Debt to Catullus”, AClass 1: 51 – 63. Williams, R.D. (ed.). 1972. Virgil: Aeneid: Books I-VI. London. Wills, J. 1996. Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion. Oxford. — 1998. “Divided Allusion: Virgil and the Coma Berenices”, HSPh 98: 277 – 305.

Gregson Davis

Violent Retribution and Pietas: The Closure of the Aeneid Revisited Summary: The final episode of Vergil’s Aeneid – the slaying of Turnus – has sparked extended controversy among many leading scholars in the past century regarding the portrayal of pius Aeneas. The hero’s succumbing to fierce and vengeful anger upon catching sight of the sword belt of Pallas decorating the body of the suppliant Turnus, and his outright rejection, after momentary hesitation, of the latter’s plea for mercy have seemed to many modern readers to be inconsistent with Julian values of clementia and to the imperial policy, embodied in Anchises’ speech in Aeneid 6, of “sparing the subjugated” (parcere subiectis). Several critics interpret Aeneas’ action and its motivation as a deplorable reversion to the notorious Achillean model of uncontrolled anger. This paper revisits the issue of the nature and scope of Aeneas’ angry outburst from both an ethnographic and philosophical perspective. The execution of Turnus is shown to be totally consistent with, even required by, Roman norms of pietas and its core obligations. In terms of the ethical implications of the episode, the violent ira displayed by Aeneas is fundamentally consonant with Epicurean thought on the subject of justified anger – a subject in which Vergil was demonstrably steeped. Keywords: Pius; pietas; ira; furor; clementia; modus; Epicurean thought; Philodemus; ethics In her introduction to Ahl’s robust English rendition of the Aeneid in the Oxford World’s Classics series, Elaine Fantham interrogates the controversial episode that closes the poem: the execution of Turnus: “Does anger at Pallas’ pathetic death, or shame at failing to protect him, justify him [Aeneas] in over-riding Anchises’ precept of sparing the humbled? Here most recent scholars, especially in North America, believe that Virgil withholds his approval from Aeneas’ act, and that the emphasis on his anger marks the poet’s disapproval of Aeneas’ action.” After this summary of what now verges on becoming the conventional wisdom on the subject, Fantham offers an alternate interpretation that is both succinct and persuasive: “There is another way of reading the act, however: remembering Hercules’ anger with Cacus, and Aeneas’ own rage at the innocent and honourable Lausus, I would suggest that Aeneas’ anger can be seen as psychologically necessary, if he is to kill his humbled opponent, and that it is even more necessary, politically, for Turnus to die.”[Emphases mine].¹

 Fantham () xliv. The most eloquent and sophisticated argument for interpreting the

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In this paper, I shall amplify Fantham’s recourse to psychological and political modes of explication by bringing into play equally significant philosophical and cultural perspectives on Aeneas’ consummate act. My discussion aims at synthesizing insights provided by these complementary vantage-points on the poem’s finale, and thereby at further undermining the anachronistic scholarly opinion regarding Vergil’s presumed “disapproval” of his hero’s action. The execution of Turnus is, I hope to sustain, fully consonant with Aeneas’ signature virtue of pietas, as well as with Greco-Roman cultural norms that selectively justify anger and violent acts of revenge that so many modern critics have found morally repugnant. I shall argue, somewhat against the grain, that the ethical subtext underpinning the narrative execution vindicates the hero’s momentarily deferred, but ultimately appropriate, action of killing his opponent. My revisit to the arena of the long-standing philological contestation builds upon the pathbreaking articles of Galinsky that pointed the way to a philosophically grounded understanding of Vergilian poetry.² Before unpacking the ethical dimension of the act, a brief reconsideration of the “ring-compositional” organization of Vergil’s epic is in order. The “relentless anger of savage Juno” (saeuae memorem Iunonis ob iram) is foregrounded at 1.4 as a root cause of Aeneas’ prolonged and perilous journey to his new home in Italy. After calling on the Muse to enunciate the multiple factors (causas) fueling the goddess’ anger, the poet asks first a specific, and then a general question (1.8 – 11):³ Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso quidue dolens, regina deum tot uoluere casus insignem pietate uirum, tot adire labores impulerit. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae? Muse, let the memories spill through me. What divine will was wounded, What deep hurt made the queen of the gods thrust a famously righteous Man into so many spirals of chance to face so many labours? Anger so great: can it really reside in the spirits of heaven?

The rhetorical question strikingly elevates the explanation of the multiple motives fueling the anger of a particular goddess, Juno, to a broad, ontological

slaying of Turnus as powered by irrational and unjustifiable rage is to be found in Putnam ()  – .  Galinsky (; ).  The text of the Aeneid is cited in the edition of Geymonat (). Accompanying English translations are from Ahl (), with occasional slight alterations duly noted. Emphases are mine.

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query into the nature of the divine mind in relation to anger. Especially salient in the formulation of the question is its overtly philosophical mold; more precisely stated, it is framed in transparently Epicurean terms. As articulated most clearly for Vergil’s generation by Lucretius, the gods in the ontological concepts of the Garden, are imagined as totally detached from the affairs of earth-bound humans; they dwell in the intermundia and, untouched by turbulent human emotions, such as anger, enjoy perfect ataraxia (De Rerum Natura 2. 646 – 651): ⁴ omnis enim per se diuum natura necessest immortali aeuo summa cum pace fruatur semota ab nostris rebus seiunctaque longe. nam priuata dolore omni, priuata periclis, ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri, nec bene promeritis capitur nec tangitur ira. for the whole nature of the gods necessarily enjoys immortal existence in perfect peace, far removed and set apart from our affairs; for relieved of all pain, relieved of all dangers, potent by virtue of its own resources, without need of us, it is neither affected by our devotions nor touched by anger.

By virtue of the generalizing scope of his interrogation, the poet of the Aeneid not only challenges the traditional Olympian apparatus that the epic genre inherited from Homer, but also places the problematic of anger in relation to eudaimonia at the ethical forefront of the narrative. In a striking coda of “ring-compositional” inversion, the poem culminates in the violent action of a “righteous” hero who, terribilis ira, gives vent to his aroused emotions by executing his defeated and supplicant opponent (12.946 – 7). Both in its divine and semi-divine embodiments (Juno and Aeneas), the problematic of anger constitutes thematic “bookends” that mirror a central preoccupation of the narrator. To what extent is Vergil’s portrayal of Aeneas’ anger in the latter half of the poem compatible with the Epicurean framework he foregrounds in the poem’s opening? Contrary to a widespread misperception that both Stoics and Epicureans condemned anger in absolute terms, there is ample documentation in our main sources to show that the Epicureans, at least, fully condoned the expression of human anger, provided it was limited in scope and duration. In this respect, their flexible doctrine on this matter does not depart substantially from the position of Aristotle and the Peripatetics, who went so far as to regard  De Rerum Natura is quoted in the text of Bailey’s OCT (). The English translation is mine.

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acts of angry vengeance as not only justifiable under the right circumstances but also commendable and in keeping with virtue. Leading scholars of Epicurean philosophy have, of course, long been aware that the founder’s teaching on the subject of anger (orge; thymos) is far more nuanced than might have been logically inferable from a value-system that sees mental serenity (ataraxia) as the highest good. Our knowledge of this complex Epicurean stance has been vastly increased in the last few decades, thanks to the renewed and proliferating scholarly attention being paid to the writings of Philodemus, whose treatise on anger (De Ira) has been magisterially edited by Indelli. In the introduction to his edition of the fragmentary text, Indelli summarizes these views in authoritative fashion: according to the precepts of the Garden, anger is a natural emotion and the sophos may give vent to it if it is rationally motivated and kept within appropriate bounds. Vergil’s extended sojourn in Campania (“Parthenope”), during which he studied philosophy under the guidance of resident émigré Greek philosophers (Siro and Philodemus), makes it virtually certain that he was intimately familiar with this view of the Epicurean school that bestowed approval of anger within certain limits.⁵ If the expression of anger on the part of the virtuous man (sophos) did not meet with disapproval in Epicurean doctrine, then our understanding of the angry action of the virtuous Aeneas at the closure of the epic needs to take this contemporary conversation seriously into account. Within these historical and philosophical parameters, what emerges as reprehensible in the expression of anger throughout the latter half of the Aeneid, in particular, is a lack of moderation (modus) on the part of leading characters who act out this powerful emotional impulse. The idea of justifiable anger in the ethical domain converges, on the sociocultural plane, with the imperative undergirding military arête, for success on the battlefield, in the Greco-Roman tradition, requires an angry disposition as a necessary part of the mental equipment of the warrior. Readers of the Homeric poems encounter this formulaic element repeatedly in the motif of heroic aristeia as performed by both Greek and Trojan combatants. It is no exaggeration to maintain that the deliberate arousal of anger is an endemic (even banal) prerequisite to soldierly prowess. Vergil is at pains to emphasize this association be-

 See Indelli ()  – . For a thorough-going analysis of the Epicurean outlook on anger, consult further Indelli (); Galinsky (); Asmis (). On the impact of Vergil’s Campanian studies on his early work, in particular, see Davis (). Janko ()  –  documents Vergil’s close association with the Epicurean circle of émigré Greek teachers of philosophy at Herculaneum. For a penetrating discussion of the intertextual linkage to the Homeric treatment of anger, see Barchiesi ().

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tween efficacious battlefield combat and its emotional stimulus at the precise moment in the epic when Aeneas is about to enter the fray, having freshly received the divine armor supplied by Vulcan and is getting ready to do battle with Turnus. While his unbridled opponent is portrayed as giving way to a species of anger that is compared to that of a ferocious bull on the rampage (12.100 – 6), the Trojan hero, by contrast, puts on an angry frame of mind, based on the self-arousal of the mental “equipment” that is the sine qua non of battlefield combat (12.107– 9): Nec minus interea maternis saeuus in armis Aeneas acuit Martem et se suscitat ira, oblato gaudens componi foedere bellum. Meanwhile Aeneas, who’s no less ferocious in armour his mother Gave him, is honing his own Martial edge, self-lashed in his anger. ⁶ Thrilled that the war’s being settled on terms that his treaty has offered.

This fulcral scene, which opens the curtain on the decisive phase of the confrontation between Turnus and Aeneas, leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about the intrinsic bond between military arete and the angry disposition that is essential to its successful realization. At the same time, it discriminates between the unbounded and irrational thymos of Turnus and the martial frame of mind that Aeneas deliberately assumes in preparation for the ensuing conflict. The latter’s subsequent performance on the battlefield against the formidable Rutulians evinces his timely recovery of his dormant capacity for martial ira that is a prerequisite for his eventual pacification of Italy and the fulfillment of his destined role as Rome’s founder. To resume our delineation of the ethical dimension of the conflict between the leaders of the two sides, let us briefly review the terms in which Vergil explicitly faults Turnus in the narration of the slaying of Pallas. After the conventional exchange of vaunts, the unequally matched contest proceeds to its predictable result. At this juncture in the action, the epic narrator pointedly editorializes, in philosophical tones, on the conduct of the victorious Turnus (10.501– 2): Nescia mens hominum fati sortisque future et seruare modum rebus sublata secundis!

 I have substituted the phrase “no less ferocious” for “no less a savage” in Ahl’s translation of the words nec minus…saeuus on the grounds that, whereas Vergil portrays the ferocity of both combatants as matched in intensity, the motivating force behind each warrior’s anger is qualitatively different.

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Witness the human mind, knowing nothing of fate or the future, Nothing about [observing] moderation when puffed with success and good fortune!⁷

The governing idea behind the narrator’s gnomic intervention is the importance of observing the mean (seruare modum) in relation to circumstances, whether these are adverse or, as in the case of Turnus, favorable (secundis).⁸ In Epicurean ethics the injunction to impose a limit (peras) on human drives figures prominently as a guide to prudential tempering of extreme emotions. Turnus’ immoderate conduct and accompanying words blatantly violate this ethical norm and the poet, in an undisguised foreshadowing of the end of the poem, expatiates on the eventual regret on the part of the impetuous Italian leader (10.503 – 5): Turno tempus erit magno cum optauerit emptum intactum Pallanta, et cum spolia ista diemque oderit Turnus will find there’s a time when he’ll wish he could purchase an unscathed Pallas, a time when he’ll hate these spoils and the day he won them

This unequivocal moral encoding of Turnus’ behavior sets the stage for his ultimate slaying at the hands of an incensed Aeneas – a slaying that dooms the immoderate adversary to justified retaliation. The notion that an act of violent retribution may be deemed praiseworthy under the right circumstances is fully in keeping with Greco-Roman cultural values relating to kinship responsibilities. In the case of archaic society – the presumptive dramatic setting for Aeneas’ transplantation to Italy – the obligation of the father to exact vengeance on behalf of crimes perpetrated against members of his close kin was widely accepted. To the extent that Vergil cast Aeneas as the designated protector – virtually a surrogate father –in relation to Evander’s son, Pallas, it became incumbent upon the Trojan hero to take ultimate vengeance on Turnus. Aeneas in his lament over Pallas’ death expresses his commitment to Evander in terms of promised fides (promissa: 11.45; magna fides: 11.55). In his call for blood-retribution, the “directives” (mandata) Evander sends to Aeneas

 I have added the word “observing” as an explanatory parenthesis to Ahl’s translation in order to bring out Vergil’s emphasis on the verb, seruare, which is crucial to his point about the observance of limit.  The emotional mean in relation to fortune is based on a rational calculus. The idea is already fully articulated in the archaic lyric of Archilochus (W) in a passage imitated by Horace (Carmina .,  – ). For discussion of the ethical prescription, see Davis ()  – .

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when he learns of the death of his beloved son are starkly peremptory (11.176 – 81): Sed infelix Teucros quid demoror armis? uadite et haec memores regi mandata referte: quod uitam moror inuisam Pallante perempto, dextera causa tuast, Turnum gnatoque patrique quam debere uides. Meritis uacat hic tibi solus fortunaeque locus; non uitae gaudia quaero, nec fas, sed gnato manis perferre sub imos. Why, though, do my ruined dreams of fulfillment keep Teucrians from battle? Go! And report these directives to your king: be sure you remember! “I delay death, in a life I hate now seeing Pallas is taken, Just to put your hand on trial. You are aware that it owes son and father Turnus as recompense due. And for proving its worth and good fortune There’s only one venue open. I am not suing you to bring my life Pleasure, that wouldn’t be right, but to please my son in the dead world.”

Evander explicitly clothes his injunction to Aeneas in the language of ritual appeasement owed to the shade (manes) of Pallas. Ethnographically, then, we are squarely in a world of reciprocal blood vengeance in which the obligation of pietas encompasses, even demands, ritual violence. After wavering in his resolution (and thereby coming close to dereliction of his acknowledged responsibilities to Evander and his son’s shade), Aeneas kills Turnus in the poem’s finale, while pronouncing sentiments that underscore the logic of sacral atonement (12.947– 9): Tune hinc spoliis indute meorum eripiare mihi? Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit. You, dressed in the spoils of my dearest Think that you could escape me? Pallas gives you this death-stroke, yes Pallas Makes you the sacrifice, spills your criminal blood in atonement!

The possessive meorum (Ahl’s “my dearest”) carries a connotation of virtual kinship with the despoiled Pallas, while the verb immolare (“sacrifice”), which defines the tenor of the act of slaying, draws on the lexicon of religious ritual in so far as it identifies Turnus “as a victim whose blood he has a right to demand.”⁹ The reader is undoubtedly meant to recall the human sacrifices of enemy soldiers that Aeneas performs at the funeral ceremony dedicated to the corpse of  Page () ad loc.

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Pallas. On that occasion, Aeneas’ intention was described as wishing to send an offering to the shades (11.81– 2: quos mitteret umbris/inferias) by sprinkling the blood of the sacrificed enemy victims on the flames of the pyre. Perhaps no other single gesture in the religious universe of the Aeneid emphasizes so clearly the need for modern philologists to “defamiliarize” Vergil’s moral compass and pay stricter attention to the cultural “otherness” of the values enshrined in the pre-Christian conception of pietas.¹⁰ Within the cadre of Roman religio, it is of paramount significance that the narrator invokes the traditional figure of the Furies in his characterization of Aeneas’ ira (12.945 – 7): Ille, oculis postquam saeui monimenta doloris exuuiasque hausit, Furiis accensus et ira terribilis.¹¹ As his eyes drink in these mementoes of savage Pain, these so bitter spoils, Aeneas grows fearsome in anger, Burning with the fire of the Furies.

The dramatic intervention of the Erinyes (Furies) at this climactic point in the narrative is more than a vivid trope signaling the scale of Aeneas’ rage; rather, it emphasizes his ineluctable obligation to exact retribution for blood-guilt – the very domain of influence under the control of these formidable chthonic numina. Their incitement to revenge gives the needed impetus to the reluctant executioner to fulfill the duty he owes to the shade of Pallas in the underworld. The conception of pietas that governs this closing scene of sacral violence is a far cry from the proto-Christian “piety” that often, despite routine disclaimers, seeps into modern, ethnographically myopic, opinions in respect to the moral premises of the Vergilian protagonist. The catalyst for Aeneas’ recuperation of his waning ira is his catching sight of the baldric of Pallas that Turnus has rashly stripped from the slain youth. Vergil’s brief but telling ecphrasis of the scene depicted on the baldric – the Danaids’ murder of their husbands on their wedding-night – has elicited a fair number of astute scholarly interpretations of its complex import in relation to the three players in the drama: Pallas, Turnus and Aeneas.¹² The context of

 The semantic field of pietas is well described in the monograph of Scheid () passim.  In this passage I deviate slightly from Geymonat’s text (and concur with Ahl’s English version) in capitalizing furiiis. On the question of the presumed ambiguity (Furiis/furiis), see the skeptical comment of Tarrant ()  n. .  See e. g. Spence (), Putnam ().

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the ecphrasis is the aftermath of Turnus’ exultant speech as he is about to snatch the baldric from the corpse (10.495 – 500): Et laeuo pressit pede talia fatus exanimem rapiens immania pondera baltei impressumque nefas: una sub nocte iugali caesa manus iuuenum foede thalamique cruenti, quae Clonus Eurytides multo caelauerat auro; quo nunc Turnus ouat spolio gaudetque potitus. ¹³ As he spoke, he was stamping his left foot Firm on the corpse as he stripped off its sword-belt, a work of quite monstrous Weight, stamped heavy with crime. For engraved in gold there by Clonus, Eurytus’s son, was a wedding of blood, where, in one night, so many Bridegrooms were foully murdered by brides in an orgy of slaughter. It’s now Turnus’ spoils. He’s happy to have it, triumphant

From the ethical vantage-point we have adopted here, it is essential to note the poet’s focus on the nefarious aspect of the bloody mass assassination (nefas; foede; cruenti). This aspect of the myth, as Vergil represents it, appears especially ironic in light of the thematic linkage between the iconographies engraved on the armor of both antagonists; for whereas Pallas’ baldric displays the awesome crime of the Danaids, the shield of Turnus exhibits on a grand thematic scale (argumentum ingens) a powerful image of their distant ancestor, Io (7.789 – 91): At leuem clipeum sublatis cornibus Io auro insignibat, iam saetis obsita, iam bos, argumentum ingens Decorating his smooth shield, Horns elevated, is Io, chased clearly in gold and already Covered all over with bristling hide and already a bovine, Arguing family claims

The complementarity of the two mythographic ecphrases subtly furthers Vergil’s ethical program, in so far as Turnus’ appropriation of Pallas’ baldric symbolically casts him in the ill-omened role of vindicator of the Danaid line of which he is a descendant. In this respect, his final punishment at the hands of Aeneas ac-

 The name, Clonus, that Vergil ascribes to the artist who chased the baldric contains a significant wordplay related to violence (see LSJ under klonos, defined as “any violent motion, especially in the press of battle”). On the widespread use of wordplay (and soundplay) in Vergil’s Aeneid, see the seminal contribution of Ahl ()  – .

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quires an added layer of significance, since the Trojan hero becomes an agent of retributive justice who moves to restore a moral order that has been transgressed by the immoderate actions of the Danaids.¹⁴ Like the Danaids, who desecrate their nuptials, Turnus is incited to violate a sacred foedus by trampling on the solemn pact between Latinus and Aeneas. The ancestral image that Turnus imagined would protect him in battle has proved to be an illusory talisman. If the righteous execution of Turnus is culturally and philosophically “overdetermined” in the manner we have been sketching, how does Aeneas’ notorious hesitation to perform the deed square with Vergil’s portrait of an imago pietatis who is conscientious in carrying out his obligations? To address this question adequately, a comparison with Aeneas’ amatory dalliance at the court of Dido is illuminating. When the Trojan hero endeavors to explain to a distraught Dido the reasons for his decision to abandon her, his apologia draws heavily on both his filial and paternal obligations to Anchises and to Ascanius/Iulius (4.354– 50): Me patris Anchisae, quotiens umentibus umbris nox operit terras, quotiens astra ignea surgunt, admonet in somnis et turbida terret imago; me puer Ascanius capitisque iniuria cari, quem regno Hesperiae fraudo et fatalibus aruis. Each time night cloaks earth with opaque, dank shadows of spectral Darkness, and fire-born stars rise upwards, my father, Anchises’ Angry face in my dreams chastises me, stalks me with terror, As does my son Ascanius. The damage I’ve done his dear person! Cheating him out of his destined Hesperian kingdom and croplands!

By his own anguished account, he has shamelessly abnegated his responsibilities towards his son, Ascanius, and, concurrently, lost sight of his destined mission to found a dynasty in Italy. This blatant neglect of pietas during his dalliance at Carthage is paralleled, at the end of the poem, by his momentary reluctance to execute his duty while considering the plea for clemency on the part of the abject Turnus. Pietas triumphs over amor in the fulcral Dido episode, just as it triumphs over clementia in the closing scene of the epic.¹⁵

 In Augustan propaganda in the visual medium the crime of the Danaids figures prominently, not least in the colonnade he erected adjacent to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, on which see Zanker ()  – ; Kellum ()  – .  The epic narrator metonymically interlinks the two episodes when he depicts a mournful Aeneas covering the corpse of Pallas on the funeral pyre with a hand-woven garment that was a gift of Dido to him (. – ).

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The view that clemency – seductive though it was to the pacific Aeneas – would have been ethically inappropriate as a reaction to Turnus’ desperate plea runs counter to a common opinion that sees Aeneas as disregarding, or even repudiating, the famous injunction of his father Anchises: “parcere subjectis et debellare superbos” (“mercy for those cast down and relentless war upon proud men” (6.853). This sedimented opinion, however, is based on a radical misconception regarding the rhetorical context of Anchises’ grandiose counsel.¹⁶ The epigrammatic precept intoned by Aeneas’s father comes as the cap to a priamel in which Greek achievements in the arts are presented as foil to the Roman genius in imperial statecraft. The very scale of the exhortation is crucial to a proper assessment of its (mis)applicability to the case of the execution of Turnus. The collective vocative singular “Romane,” which is directed to the Roman people as a whole, indicates clearly that Vergil’s persona is dispensing counsel at the level of hegemonic political relations. The sparing of Rome’s defeated national opponents is therefore not to be conflated with the moral imperative of punishing (debellare) individual leaders who embody an inordinate superbia, as exemplified by Turnus.¹⁷ When Augustus boasts in the Res Gestae of his clementia towards defeated opponents, he is certainly not including individual perpetrators of crimes in the likes of the assassins of Julius Caesar, to whom he is obligated to fulfill the terms of his pietas.¹⁸ On the contrary, his eventual construction of the grandiose temple to Mars Ultor in his forum is monumental testament to his righteous vengeance in retribution for the murder of his adoptive father. In sum, the vengeful execution of the overbearing Turnus is an ethically congruent ending to an heroic saga in which the issue of justified violence occupies a privileged position in the closure of the poem. The ethical subtext we have adumbrated in this account of Aeneas’ culminating act of immolation/execution may shed some light on the ongoing scholarly debate surrounding the nature and scope of the ideological affiliation between the political program of the princeps and the “national epic.” The analogy between the epic protagonist’s primary task of ending an internecine war on Italian soil and Augustus’ burden of establishing a lasting peace (the so-called pax Augusta) after the protracted hemorrhage of the Civil Wars is widely acknowledged by the majority of readers, ancient and modern. The investiga For a magisterial analysis of the rhetoric of Anchises’ speech, see Norden () ad loc.  On Turnus’ superbia and its fatal repercussions, see the detailed analysis of Traina ().  In the Res Gestae he famously lists clementia among four virtues by which he stakes his claim for immortal renown (Aug. Anc. ).

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tion of the ‘political’ aspect of the parallel, however, carries the risk of unfalsifiable trivialization of the poem if it is decoupled from the underlying philosophical substratum (and especially if the broad Aristotelian conception of ‘politics’ as part and parcel of ‘ethics’ is taken into account). The over-arching proposition – first broached in dogmatic form by Servius – to the effect that Vergil’s epic is fundamentally designed to laud Augustus serves as a useful point of reentry into the critical conversation surrounding the presumed propagandistic aspect of the narrative. It is not, prima facie, entirely reductive to read the portrayal of pius Aeneas as a prototype of the ideal ruler (to be embodied later in Augustus), provided that the ethical dimension of the narrative episodes is fully brought into the equation. The encomiastic premise is by no means incongruous with the terms of the antagonism between Aeneas and his ethical antitype, Turnus. As we have seen above, the narrator makes a critical intervention in respect to Turnus’ emotional attitude during his slaying and despoiling of Pallas when he expatiates on the ethical ramifications of the episode. But if Turnus represents a negative paradigm of the leader, his victorious adversary, Aeneas, does not conform to the caricature of a perfect role model – witness, inter alia, his infamous dereliction of responsibility at the court of Dido. What gives depth and complexity to the portrayal of Aeneas as laudandus is the observation that ethical paraenesis is a conventional rhetorical element in praise poetry, from Pindar to the Augustan poets and beyond. In that tradition the laudator typically goes beyond praise of a particular individual in offering counsel of a universal sort that focuses on the ethical limits to be placed on human ambition and outstanding achievement. Vergil’s friend and soul-mate, Horace, includes unabashed critique of materialism and the pursuit of riches for its own sake in the very midst of his praise of his super-wealthy patron, Maecenas. In short, the paraenetic element, which normally takes a philosophical cast, is crucial to the conventions of encomiastic discourse. If a wider ethical lens is brought to bear on the final episode of Vergil’s heroic saga, then the underlying ‘political’ aspect of Turnus’ execution becomes correspondingly clearer. As Turnus, who embodies superbia and immoderate thymos is struck down in the concluding gesture, so Aeneas is simultaneously elevated for his timely understanding of the limit of clementia and of the implementation of appropriate orge, and for his rededication, after a momentary lapse, to the re-

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cuperation of his defining trait of pietas.¹⁹ In so doing he symbolically takes his place within the sanctified space of Mars Ultor.

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY/London. — 2007. Virgil: Aeneid. Oxford. Asmis, E. 2011. “The Necessity of Anger in Philodemus’ On Anger”, in: J. Fish and K. Sanders (eds.), Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition. Cambridge, 152 – 82. Bailey, C. 1921 (ed.). Lucreti de rerum natura libri sex. (2nd edition). Oxford. Barchiesi, A. 2010. “La traccia del modello: effetti omerici nella narrazione virgiliana”, in: A. Barchiesi and W. Scheidel (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies. Oxford, 91 – 122. Davis, G. 2010. “Defining a Lyric Ethos: Archilochus Lyricus and Horatian Melos”, in: G. Davis (ed.), A Companion to Horace. Chichester. — 2012. Parthenope: the Interplay of Ideas in Vergilian Bucolic. Leiden/Boston, MA. Fantham, E. 2007. “Introduction”, in: F. Ahl, Virgil: Aeneid. Cambridge, xi-lii. Galinsky, K. 1988. “The Anger of Aeneas”, AJPh 109: 321 – 48. — 1994. “How To Be Philosophical About the End of the Aeneid”, ICS 19: 191 – 201. Geymonat, M. 2008 (ed.). P. Vergili Maronis Opera. Rome. Indelli, G. 1988 (ed.). Filodemo: L’Ira. Naples. — 2004. “The Vocabulary of Anger in Philodemus’ De ira”, in: D. Armstrong, J. Fish, P. Johnston, and M. Skinner (eds.), Vergil, Philodemus and the Augustans. Austin, TX, 103 – 110. Janko, R. 2000 (ed.). Philodemus: On Poems, Book One. Oxford. Kellum, B. 1985. “Sculptural Programs and Propaganda in Augustan Rome: The Temple of Apollo on the Palatine”, in: R. Winkes (ed.), The Age of Augustus. Leuven, 169 – 76. Norden, E. 1957 (ed.). P. Vergilius Maro Aeneis Buch VI. Darmstadt. Page, T.E. 1900 (ed.). The Aeneid of Virgil, Books VII-XII. London. Putnam, M. 1994. “Vergil’s Danaid Ekphrasis”, ICS 19: 171 – 89. — 2013. The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil’s Aeneid. Amsterdam. Scheid, J. 2003. An Introduction to Roman Religion. Trans. J. Lloyd. Bloomington, IN. Spence, S. 1991. “Cinching the Text: The Danaids and the End of the Aeneid”, Vergilius 37: 11 – 19. Tarrant, R. 2012 (ed.). Vergil: Aeneid XII. Cambridge. Traina, A. 1998. “Turno. Costruzione di un personaggio”, in: Poeti latini e (e neolatini). Bologna, 91 – 120. Tsouna, V. 2007. The Ethics of Philodemus. Oxford. Zanker, P. 1988. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Ann Arbor, MI.

 For a nuanced discussion of the Epicurean conversation about typologies of anger in relation to vengeance, see the chapter, “Anger and the desire for revenge” in Tsouna ()  – .

Peter J. Davis

Freedom of Speech in Virgil and Ovid Summary: This paper reflects on the changing nature of free speech in the Augustan period through an examination of episodes in its two most important epics. It focuses primarily on the council of the Latins in Aeneid 11 and a sequence of stories in Metamorphoses 2 and 3 in which outspokenness is punished. It is particularly striking that while Virgil’s Drances can demand freedom of speech in a public context, freedom of speech in Metamorphoses exists only in private. This reflects, I suggest, the altered political circumstances between the 20s BCE and the first decade CE. Keywords: freedom of speech; Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Drances graue putas eripi loquendi arbitrium regibus, quod humillimi habent. (Seneca, Mercy 1.8) You think it a serious matter to deprive kings of the right to speak, a right that the most lowly possess.

The concept of liberty is rarely invoked in Augustan epic, with libertas occurring only once in the Aeneid’s narrative¹ and only once in Metamorphoses. ² On both occasions it explicitly denotes freedom of speech, with Drances insisting on his right to speak frankly before Turnus (det libertatem fandi, 11.346), and Byblis assuming that she holds the right to speak freely (est mihi libertas tecum secreta loquendi, 9.559, “I have the freedom to speak to you in confidence”). But if verbal statistics suggest that Augustan epic poets are indifferent to one of the great republican freedoms,³ their narratives suggest otherwise. This chapter will focus

 Libertas is used twice outside the Aeneid’s narrative sections. It is used in Anchises’ speech (.) and in the description of the shield (.). In both cases it denotes republican institutions.  By contrast, libertas occurs thirty times in Lucan.  Cf. Syme () : “Freedom of speech was an essential part of the Republican virtue of libertas, to be regretted more than political freedom when both were abolished;” Brunt () : “Thus it is untrue that in the Republic freedom of speech was not associated with the Roman conception, or rather some Roman conceptions, of libertas, nor is it legitimate to argue e silentio that it was properly confined to men of rank.” Millar () ,  points to the operation of free speech in both public and private contexts: () “in a formal sense, contiones [non-decision-making meetings summoned by a magistrate] could begin with an invitation to whoever wishes to address the people to come forward and do so” and () “If we think in terms of freedom of speech, the Roman res publica had at any rate no means of checking

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primarily on the council of the Latins in Aeneid 11 and a sequence of stories in Metamorphoses 2. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the council in Aeneid 11. The episode merits examination, however, because, as Hardie points out,⁴ this is “the single example in the poem of an extended scene of human political debate.” The singularity of this scene is striking if we recall that there are several debates in the Iliad on both Achaean and Trojan sides. I would like to begin by comparing Aeneid 11’s council with its primary model, the debate in Iliad 2 over Agamemnon’s proposal that the Achaeans abandon the Trojan war. Highet noted the principal resemblances between the two meetings: both are prompted by a hero’s refusal of essential support (Achilles in the Iliad, Diomedes in the Aeneid), both begin with a king’s proposal to end the war, both include a provocative intervention by a quarrelsome speaker and both close with the war’s continuation.⁵ There are, however, important differences. Note, for example, that Iliad 2 contains not one but two debates. First Agamemnon summons a council of elders (βουλὴν … γερόντων, 2.53). Although only two participants are named, Agamemnon and Nestor, it is clear that the council consists of major Achaean princes, for the narrator tells us that when the council is complete the scepterbearing kings obeyed Agamemnon (πείθοντό τε ποιμένι λαῶν / σκηπτοῦχοι βασιλῆες, 2.86). This council, however, is merely a prelude to a much larger assembly of the whole army (ἀγορή),⁶ whose magnitude is underlined by an impressive simile, likening the Achaean soldiery to swarms of bees (2.87– 90). This, however, is not an assembly of the kind familiar from democratic Athens or even republican Rome. Indeed Odysseus uses the assembly as an opportunity to denounce the idea of popular sovereignty: οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη· εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω (“rule by the many is not a good thing; let there be one ruler,” 2.204). In Agamemnon’s assembly the function of ordinary soldiers is primarily to be manipulated by their commander-in-chief, for Agamemnon plans to inspire his men to attack Troy (somewhat perversely) by declaring that there is no hope of winning the war and by proposing immediate retreat. In this context it is hardly surprising that Thersites’ intervention in the assembly is particularly unwelcome. First of all there is his social status, for, as Kirk points out, “he is the only character in the Iliad to lack both patronymic on or repressing private speech.” See also Chrissanthos () esp.  – . Chrissanthos argues that freedom of speech obtained even in the army.  Hardie () .  Highet () .  Hom. Iliad ., , , , , .

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and place of origin.”⁷ Despite Thersites’ claim to be a warrior (231), the princes clearly consider him to be a person of no account. We see the importance of social status in the assembly in Odysseus’ different approaches to those who fail to understand Agamemnon’s intentions: he speaks gently to kings or men of outstanding quality (188 – 9), i. e. to the elders who were present at the council (194), but rebukes and strikes the ordinary troops with his staff (198 – 9). Second, Thersites fails to show his betters the deference that they expect: the narrator, Odysseus and even the common soldiery note his tendency to quarrel with the princes (214, 247, 277). Homer’s representation of Thersites is remarkable, for not only does he lack a home and a genealogy, but he also lacks the physical beauty typical of Homer’s humans (2.216 – 19).⁸ On the other hand, Thersites puts together an effective speech (225 – 42) and even Odysseus has to acknowledge his rhetorical skills (λιγύς περ ἐὼν ἀγορητής, “though you are a clear-voiced speaker,” 2.246).⁹ What is more, the content of his speech gains credibility from the fact that Thersites reworks some of the arguments advanced by Achilles in Iliad 1: both regard Agamemnon as greedy (1.122, 2.225 – 31), both favor withdrawal from Troy (1.169 – 70, 2.235 – 6) and both speak of Agamemnon’s present action as “his final outrage” (νῦν ὕστατα λωβήσαιο, 1.232, 2.242).¹⁰ In Aeneid 11, we find a superficially similar situation: first we have a preliminary meeting (this time an embassy of Latins to Aeneas [100 – 138]) which is then followed by a larger meeting involving Latins alone [225 – 447]). The embassy can hardly be said to resemble the meeting of Agamemnon’s council of elders and so it is not surprising that Knauer notes no allusions to Iliad 2.¹¹ What then of the second meeting, Latinus’ “grand council” (concilium magnum, 234)? What kind of meeting is this: a council of elders or an assembly of the people? If we turn for guidance to Horsfall’s commentary, we find a disappointing lack of precision: the

 Kirk () . This seems to be the common view. Thalmann ()  describes Thersites as “evidently a common soldier” and claims that this is “the usual interpretation.” See, however, Marks () , who views Thersites and Odysseus as social equals. It will be clear from my argument that I think that Marks is mistaken. Halliwell ()  seems to adopt a compromise position when he claims that “Thersites’ ancestry and social status are indeterminate.” “Indeterminate” suits Halliwell’s overall thesis concerning Thersites’ role as a creator of laughter. “Unknown,” however, is a more accurate description and a clear sign of non-aristocratic lineage.  Hephaestus is perhaps his divine analogue. For recent discussion of this parallel see Halliwell ()  – ,  – .  Kirk ()  suggests that Odysseus’ tone is sarcastic. It is not clear that this is so. Willcock () simply notes that λιγύς (“clear-voiced”) is “a complimentary term for an orator.”  This combination of words is used nowhere else in the Iliad.  Knauer () .

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grand council resembles both the “Trojan assembly” in Iliad 7 and “the council in Iliad 2,” while the adjective “suggests a general assembly of the Latin elders.”¹² To determine the nature of the meeting we need to turn, I suggest, to its location and to Virgil’s choice of language: ergo concilium magnum primosque suorum imperio accitos alta intra limina cogit. olli conuenere fluuntque ad regia plenis tecta uiis. (Verg. Aeneid 11.234– 7) Therefore he convenes the grand council and the leaders of his people, summoned by his authority, within the lofty threshold. They come together, fill the streets and flow towards the royal dwelling.

The meeting takes place within Latinus’ palace. This is clearly a larger meeting than Agamemnon’s council of elders, which takes place alongside Nestor’s ship (2.54), and smaller than the assembly of the Achaean army, an assembly so vast that the earth groans beneath it (2.95). We find further details in the description of Latinus’ palace in Book 7: hic sceptra accipere et primos attollere fascis regibus omen erat; hoc illis curia templum, hae sacris sedes epulis; hic ariete caeso perpetuis soliti patres considere mensis. (Verg. Aeneid 7.173 – 6) Here it was an omen for the kings to receive the scepter and raise the fasces for the first time; this temple was their meeting place, this was a site for sacred feasting; here, when a ram was slain, the fathers were accustomed to sit at continuous tables.

The fact that the debate takes place within the confines of Latinus’ dwelling, large though it may be, suggests that this meeting is very different from Agamemnon’s warrior assembly. As La Penna points out, it is in fact a meeting of the king’s council, the concilium regis. ¹³ But if this is a meeting of the king’s council, it is one with a peculiarly republican flavor. Note, for example, that the king himself addresses his councilors as

 Horsfall () . In particular it is not clear what Horsfall means by “the council in Iliad .” If he means Agamemnon’s council (the βουλή at . – ), then the resemblance to Latinus’ council is not obvious. In his comment on line  () Horsfall invokes the parallel of the Roman assembly. Gransden () offers no help.  La Penna () .

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“citizens” (ciues, 11.305), as do Venulus and Turnus (243, 459).¹⁴ Note too that, like a senior republican magistrate, Latinus summons the council by virtue of his imperium (11.235) and that cogere (235, 304, 460) is the appropriate constitutional term to use for convening a meeting of the Roman Senate.¹⁵ And the hall is labeled a curia (7.174, 11.380), the technically correct name for the Senate’s meeting place;¹⁶ is designated a templum (7.174), as religious ritual demanded; and is associated with the fasces (7.173), the insignia of imperium. ¹⁷ Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Latinus’ councilors are given the title patres (“fathers”), an honorific reserved for members of the senatorial order.¹⁸ Both the location and the choice of constitutional language suggest that this meeting of Latinus’ council is intended to remind us of the republican Senate.¹⁹ How does Drances, the new Thersites, fit into this altered context? Given that no man without family or place of origin could be a member of the Roman Senate (or, presumably, the concilium regis), it is not surprising to learn that Drances possesses an aristocratic, if flawed, lineage: genus huic materna superbum nobilitas dabat, incertum de patre ferebat.

(Verg. Aeneid 11.340 – 1)

His mother’s nobility made his ancestry proud, from his father he bore uncertain ancestry.

Although the precise meaning of the second clause is disputed,²⁰ it seems likely that Fantham²¹ and Horsfall²² are right when they argue that Virgil’s language

 Cf. . where Drances refers to the Latins as Turnus’ “wretched fellow citizens” (miseros … ciuis).  OLD s.v. cogo §; Lintott () .  OLD s.v. curia §; note also §.  See Lintott ()  on curia and templum and  on the fasces.  OLD s.v. pater §.  La Penna ()  reaches the same conclusion by a different route.  Commentators and translators are divided in their views. I cite only a selection. La Penna ()  sees Drances as a nouus homo, with aristocratic ancestry from only one side. Williams ()  seems to agree, offering as a translation “he had dubious ancestry on his father’s side.” Gransden ()  follows Servius and suggests “his paternal ancestry was not known.” Ahl ()  translates “he was vague when discussing his father,” taking ferebat in the sense of “say.” This is of course possible. Ahl’s version has the considerable merit of allowing for different interpretations.  Fantham () : “a bastard then.” Fantham has a good discussion of other possible interpretations in n. .  Horsfall () : “V. rather indicates his illegitimate origins.” His criticism of Fantham’s note  ignores her clear statement in the body of the text.

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implies that Drances is a bastard. As Servius comments, his paternal ancestry is “not ignoble, but completely unknown” (non ignobile, sed penitus ignoratum). Drances is both similar to and different from Thersites. Although both may be motivated by spite (2.211– 16, 220; 11.122, 337), Thersites is prone to quarrel with all the princes (2.214, 247), while Drances, though prone to faction (340), is hostile to Turnus alone (122– 3, 336 – 7). If Thersites, as a member of the Achaean army, can justifiably claim warrior status (2.231), Drances’ right hand is said to be “cold in war” (sed frigida bello / dextera, 11.338 – 9). Both Thersites and Drances are acknowledged to be effective speakers (2.246, 11.338, 339).²³ Still more importantly, both are presented as endorsing the views of the epic’s central character. As commentators have pointed out,²⁴ Thersites’ criticisms of Agamemnon’s greed echo those of Achilles in the previous book. Indeed Homer underlines the connection between Thersites and Achilles by having Thersites recycle sentiments that he cannot possibly have heard: a line from Achilles’ prayer to Thetis, which Thetis then repeats in her prayer to Zeus.²⁵ So too with Drances. In his encounter with the Latin ambassadors at the beginning of Book 11 Aeneas singles out for criticism Latinus’ abandonment of his offer of guest-friendship (hospitia, 113 – 14) and his decision to support Turnus (114). And these are the issues upon which Drances focuses in his confrontation with Turnus: either Lavinia should be handed over to Aeneas as first promised (11.352– 6; cf. 7.264 – 73) or Turnus, if bent on a royal wedding, should confront Aeneas alone (11.369 – 75). But even though Thersites and Drances have much in common, they are treated very differently by their fellows. Thersites’ speech is rewarded by abuse and a beating from Odysseus and the mockery of the multitude (2.244– 77). And of course his speech has no effect whatever: his arguments are overwhelmed by brute force. Drances, by contrast, speaks with impunity. In fact,

 Ahl ()  notes Drances’ diplomatic skills: “Despite Virgil’s preamble, Drances hurls no accusations here, ignore Aeneas’ charges, and, from a position of powerlessness, secures the desired truce through courtly flattery without making binding concessions. Can an ambassador do any better?”.  E. g. Kirk () : “Yet all the points raised by Thersites are valid in retrospect”; Thalmann ()  – : “Thersites is Achilles’ comic double. His scene repeats the assembly and quarrel of Book , in a debased but clearer form.” Willcock () : “Thersites puts himself forward as spokesman of the Greeks. In fact he speaks rather like a parody of Achilles in the quarrel in Book I.”  Iliad . = ., : ἠτίμησεν· ἑλὼν γὰρ ἔχει γέρας αὐτὸς ἀπούρας, “He dishonoured (me/him). Having taken away (my/his) prize, he keeps it, having robbed (me/him) himself.” Nestor adapts the first part of the line, when criticising Agamemnon to his face at .: ἠτίμησας, ἑλὼν γὰρ ἔχεις γέρας, “You have dishonoured him, for you have taken and keep his prize.”

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his arguments carry the day and lead to Turnus’ decision to fight a duel with Aeneas (11.440 – 4). Why this difference in treatment? One reason will be the varied character of the institutional settings in which these interventions take place. Thersites berates his superior in front of the Achaean army. Drances, by contrast, is addressing a Virgilian approximation of the Roman Senate. He demands the right to speak freely in the council (11.346) and that right is clearly granted, for Drances delivers an oration thirty-two lines long. In making this demand, Drances insists upon a cardinal senatorial value, for, as Brunt observes, “The authority of the senate was itself a nullity if it could not take decisions without fear of pressure. Every member should be able to voice his opinions with some chance of swaying the issue.”²⁶ In this respect, and perhaps in this respect alone, Drances resembles Cicero,²⁷ for Cicero insists constantly upon the right of members of the Senate to express their opinions freely.²⁸ When we turn to Ovid’s Metamorphoses we find an apparently similar claim to the right to free speech when Byblis writes to Caunus “I have the freedom to speak to you in confidence” (est mihi libertas tecum secreta loquendi, 9.559). The key difference between the claims of Drances and Byblis lies in their context. While Drances claims a political right in public, Byblis asserts a merely private prerogative: a girl may talk to her brother. That difference is underlined by Byblis’ use of the word secreta (“in confidence,” “in private”). It is not clear, however, that characters in Metamorphoses possess even that limited right. If we turn to Metamorphoses 2 we find a world in which speaking frankly incurs the risk of punishment (2.531– 835). Given that the stories of the crow and the raven, of Ocyroe and Battus have been thoroughly explored in recent years by Alison Keith and Alessandro Barchiesi,²⁹ I do not propose to examine each one in detail. Rather I would like to explore Keith’s suggestion that Ovid’s “interest in the ‘appropriate’ use of speech may reflect – and reflect upon – political developments under the institution of the principate.”³⁰ In particular I propose to examine the connections between some of these stories and the poet’s selfrepresentation elsewhere in Metamorphoses and in the exile poetry.

 Brunt () .  It was once common to argue that Cicero is a model for Drances. See, for example, La Penna ()  – , who rightly rejects this thesis.  For references see Brunt ()  – .  Keith (); Barchiesi ()  – .  Keith () ; see also her Epilogue  – .

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Let’s begin with the story of the raven and the crow.³¹ The concern of this complex of “nested”³² stories with speech and its perils is clear from the outset, when the narrator addresses his new character as “talkative raven” (corue loquax, 535) and announces the moral even before the bird tells its story: “its tongue was its ruin; because of its talkative tongue …” (lingua fuit damno; lingua faciente loquaci …, 540). Note too that the raven’s interlocutor, the crow, is described by the epithet “garrulous” long before its species is identified (garrula … / … cornix, 546 – 7). It is also important to note, as Keith does, that one feature of the crow’s narrative is its emphasis on story-telling.³³ She points to the recurrence of uox and uocare in the crow’s speech (559, 565, 578, 579) and the fact that the crow is punished precisely because it tells the story of Aglauros’ crime to Minerva (562– 4). I would like, however, to draw attention to the opening words of the crow’s speech: “‘non utile carpis’ / inquit ‘iter: ne sperne meae praesagia linguae!’” (549 – 50, “‘You press on with a pointless journey,’ it said, ‘do not reject my tongue’s forewarnings’”). As Anderson notes,³⁴ praesagium (“forewarning”) is an Ovidian coinage and this is the word’s first occurrence in Latin literature. While the word is employed in non-prophetic contexts,³⁵ it is overwhelmingly used by Ovid and subsequent poets of the utterances of one or more uates. It is used, for example, by Helenus the prophet (uates, 15.435), when he speaks to Aeneas at Metamorphoses 15.439 – 40: nate dea, si nota satis praesagia nostrae / mentis habes, non tota cadet te sospite Troia (“Goddess-born, if you hold on sufficiently to my mind’s well-known forewarnings, Troy will not wholly fall as long as you are safe”) and of unnamed uates in the poem’s last line (15.879): siquid habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam (“if the forewarnings of uates have any truth, I will live”). Who then are the uates of Metamorphoses’ final line? The word’s ambiguity is well-known, with OLD giving two meanings, first a prophet or seer, and second, beginning in the Augustan period, a poet or bard. That ambiguity is sustained in Metamorphoses’ mythological world, with Tiresias and Helenus, for example, as instances of the uates as prophet (3.348, 15.435) and Orpheus as representative of the uates as poet (10.89, 143, 11.2). While it is conceivable that Ovid is speaking of prophets or seers in the traditional sense at 15.879, it is far

 For Ovid’s verbal play in this episode see Ahl ()  – .  Keith ()  speaks of a “ ‘Chinese box’ pattern of nested stories.” Barchiesi ()  speaks similarly of “narrazioni a scatola cinese.”  Keith () .  Anderson ()  on line .  E. g. of Pandion’s forebodings at Metamorphoses ..

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more likely that he is referring to poets and more particularly to himself. After all the poem’s epilogue is written in the first person and concerns itself with the future of both poem and poet. Further, when Ovid employs the phrase praesagia uatum in Tristia and ex Ponto he does so in contexts which are plainly selfreferential.³⁶ What then are we to make of the crow’s “forewarnings”? That the crow is a uates in the pre-Augustan sense is established by its role in earlier literature³⁷ and by the fact that the crow is an oscen, a significant bird in Roman augural practice, “a bird,” as the OLD says, “that gives omens by its cry (rather than its flight).”³⁸ On the other hand, Ovid’s crow, unlike its predecessor in Callimachus’ Hecale, is not technically a prophet at all. Whereas the Callimachean crow predicts the raven’s transformation from white to black,³⁹ the Ovidian crow draws on its own experience with Minerva to warn the raven against bringing bad news to Apollo. But if the crow is not a prophet in the manner of Tiresias or Helenus, it is a poet in the style of the creator of Metamorphoses because it is the author of an intricately-worked narrative. Like Ovid, the crow is capable of virtuoso metrical effects like a four-word hexameter (561) and a golden line (575), and of telling the story of a god’s pursuit and its own transformation in the manner of Daphne or Callisto.⁴⁰ If we turn to the raven we find a more straightforward version of the crow’s story, told this time by the Ovidian narrator. The raven is “a relentless informer” (non exorabilis index, 546), “loquacious” (535) and a victim of its own loquacity (540). The raven too has Roman connections, for it too was an oscen. In this case, however, we are explicitly reminded of that Roman connection, for where Callimachus had likened the raven’s whiteness to that of swans, milk or the sea’s foam,⁴¹ Ovid compares it to three kinds of white bird. First place is given to spotless doves (537) and third to the river-loving swan (539). Second place is assigned

 Tristia .., Epistulae ex Ponto ... Bömer ()  speaks of “Ovids Selbstverständnis als vates.”  E. g. A.R. . – , Verg. Eclogues ., Prop. ...  OLD s.v. oscen. Festus . explains: Oscines aues Ap. Claudius ait, quae ore canentes faciant auspicium, ut coruus, cornix, noctua (“Appius Claudius says that the birds we call oscines are those which make omens by singing, like the raven, the crow, the owl.” Barchiesi ()  notes the connection with this story.  Call. Hecale fr. . –  Hollis ().  As with Daphne and Callisto the narrator gives us a precise account of the bodily transformation. In particular, . –  (tendebam bracchia caelo / bracchia coeperunt … “I stretched my arms to the sky, my arms began to …”) recalls . –  (tendebat bracchia supplex / bracchia coeperunt … “a suppliant she stretched her arms, her arms began to …”).  Call. Hecale fr. . –  Hollis ().

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to geese, but not just any geese: “nor would it yield to the geese destined to preserve the Capitol with their vigilant voice” (nec seruaturis uigili Capitolia uoce / cederet anseribus, 538 – 9). While this comparison marks a resemblance between geese and the primeval raven, their whiteness, it also suggests a significant difference, for although the geese used their voice to bring bad news (“The Gauls are coming!”), they were rewarded by being remembered as Rome’s saviors. The raven, by contrast, is punished by Apollo for revealing the truth about Coronis. For both raven and crow truthful speech is a source of danger. I would like to turn now to the next story in the sequence, the story of Ocyroe. Unlike the crow, Ocyroe is explicitly a uates, for her mind conceives “prophetsinging frenzy” (uaticinos … furores, 640). That Ocyroe is genuinely prophetic is clear from the fact that the narrator tells us that she sang of “fate’s secrets” (639). What then are these “secrets”? Ocyroe begins by addressing Aesculapius, predicting, first that mortals will owe their lives to him, second that it will be right for him to revive dead souls, third that he will defy the gods in one particular case, and finally that from being a god he will become a lifeless body, but become a god again. Next she speaks to Chiron, predicting that although he is immortal, he will one day long to die and that his wish will be granted. In one sense these are contrasting prophecies: Aesculapius is destined to be immortal, while Chiron is fated to die. There is, however, a common element: both stories present the barrier between mortality and divinity as permeable.⁴² At this point it is important to note that Aesculapius is a god who has important Roman connections. So important are they, that the story of the god’s translation from Epidaurus to Rome in 291 BCE is introduced by the poem’s first invocation of the Muses (15.622) and that the story constitutes the endpoint of Ovid’s account of Rome’s republican history. Equally important is the fact that in Book 15 Ovid emphasizes the links between the divine inhabitant of the Tiber island and Apollo’s activities in Book 2. First the god is called “Coronis’ son” (Coronides, 15.624)⁴³ and his descent from Apollo is marked, first when the Delphic oracle calls him “Apollo’s son” (Apolline nato, 15.639), and second when the narrator uses the extraordinary expression “Phoebean snake” (Phoebeius anguis, 15.742).⁴⁴ Note too that Ocyroe declares that the god will be “the world’s health-bringer” (salutifer orbi, 2.642) and that the narrator declares him to be “the City’s health-bringer” (salutifer Vrbi, 15.744), salutifer being anoth Barchiesi ()  makes the point like this: “Entrambe le storie riguardano violazioni del confine tra mortali e immortali e suscitano preoccupazione nel mondo divino.”  While the god’s Roman name was intractable in hexameters, his Greek name, Asclepius, presented little difficulty: Homer uses it four times in the Iliad.  Phoebeius may be yet another Ovidian coinage (Ars Amatoria .).

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er Ovidian coinage. And the verbal play that Barchiesi notes at 2.647 (exsangue means both “bloodless” and “from a snake”)⁴⁵ recurs at 15.627, just before the god really does become a snake. But if the question of the permeability of the barrier between divinity and mortality is important in the case of Aesculapius, it is even more important in the story that Ovid relates next: hic tamen accessit delubris aduena nostris: Caesar in urbe sua deus est. (Ov. Metamorphoses 15.746 – 7) But Aesculapius approached our shrines as a foreigner: Caesar is a god in his own city.

Note that the connection between Aesculapius and Caesar is analogical not chronological. There is after all a gap of several hundred years between the arrival of Aesculapius in Rome and the rise of the Caesars. Note too that while it is not clear in the lines quoted which Caesar is the focus of the narrator’s attention (it might be Julius, it might be Augustus), it quickly becomes clear that we are concerned with the apotheosis of Julius, an apotheosis not brought about by his great achievements, but effected by his son (746 – 50). But let’s return to Book 2 and to Ocyroe. We have seen that Chiron’s daughter sings of “fate’s secrets” (fatorum arcana, 639). This of course makes Ocyroe resemble the Virgilian Jupiter, for he too tells of “fate’s secrets,” when explaining Rome’s future to Venus at Aeneid 1.262 (fatorum arcana mouebo).⁴⁶ The connection between Jupiter and Ocyroe is clear, because apotheosis is important to the narratives of both, for while Jupiter bookends his prophecy with the apotheoses of Aeneas and Caesar (1.259 – 60, 289 – 90), Ocyroe tells of Chiron’s deificationin-reverse and of Aesculapius’ repeated crossings of the boundary between death and immortality. It is, however, precisely this revelation of “fate’s secrets” that leads to the silencing and metamorphosis of Ocyroe, for, as the narrator observes, “there were more fates to tell” (restabant fatis aliquid, 655). And that Ocyroe is silenced because of her prophetic ability could hardly be more explicit, for as her transformation from human to horse begins she declares: praeuertunt … me fata, uetorque plura loqui, uocisque meae praecluditur usus.

 Barchiesi () .  The phrase is also used in Aeneid  when Aeneas claims that Anchises left him fatorum arcana (.). The prophecy was actually given to him by Celaeno at . – .

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non fuerant artes tanti, quae numinis iram contraxere mihi: mallem nescisse futura!

(Ov. Metamorphoses 2.657– 60)

Fate forestalls me and I am forbidden to say more and use of my voice is prevented. Those arts were not worth so much, that brought a divinity’s anger upon me: I would prefer that I had not known the future.

Ocyroe’s choice of language here inevitably makes the reader think of Ovid’s own situation, for the phrase numinis ira (“a divinity’s anger”) is used five times in the exile poetry, four times in Tristia and ex Ponto, when describing the cause of Ovid’s own plight,⁴⁷ and once in Fasti when Carmentis explains the plight of Evander, Evander and his mother being figures for the poet.⁴⁸ And if we recall that Ovid refers to his most notorious poem as Artes in the exile poetry,⁴⁹ it is worth noting that Ocyroe recognizes that her “arts” are responsible for her punishment. When we reflect upon the political implications of Ocyroe’s prophecies, it is not difficult to see why those in power might wish to ensure her silence, for if the boundaries between mortality and immortality are so porous as to allow both Chiron and Aesculapius to move from one state to another, it follows that there is nothing particularly special about the deifications of the Caesars. In Ocyroe’s world, and indeed in the fictional world of the Metamorphoses, such transitions are not unusual. I would like to conclude this discussion of this sequence in Metamorphoses 2 with an examination of the story of Battus and Mercury. The only earlier account of Mercury’s theft of Apollo’s cattle occurs in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, as one of two interwoven stories.⁵⁰ Ovid’s story plainly owes much to the Greek version. The location is the same, with Pylos being named in both poems.⁵¹ In both works Hermes/Mercury steals Apollo’s cattle and in both an old man is sworn to secrecy but reveals what he has seen. There are, however, important differences. First, in the Hymn the old man remains anonymous, while in Ovid he is named. Second, in the Hymn the old man discloses what he has seen to Apollo, the owner of the cattle, while in Ovid he makes his revelation to Mercury in disguise.

 Tristia .., .., .., Epistulae ex Ponto ...  Fasti .. Boyle ()  explains the connection like this: “Evander’s and Carmentis’ exilic journey to Rome in Fasti  not only imitates and reverses Ovid’s own exilic journey, but imitates its causes too.”  E. g. Tristia ., .. – , Epistulae ex Ponto .., ...  The other story concerns Mercury’s invention and gift of Apollo’s lyre.  Hymnus ad Mercurem , ; Metamorphoses ..

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Third, in the Hymn the old man is not punished, whereas in Ovid he is transformed into a stone (705 – 6). Let’s examine these differences. The fact that the old man remains anonymous in the Hymn suggests that the author has no particular interest in him. The Hymn is nearly six hundred lines long and the old man is mentioned twice, first when Mercury demands his silence (87– 93) and second when Apollo extracts the truth (190 – 211). Ovid’s Battus, by contrast, is a key player. How do we account for his name? One possibility, favored by Bömer,⁵² is that the name means “chatterbox,” despite the fact that according to LSJ the word means “stammerer.” A second suggestion, favored by Barchiesi but rejected by Bömer, is that the name is intended to remind us of Battus, the royal ancestor of Callimachus, Battiades (“descendant of Battus”) being a common way of referring to the Alexandrian poet in Catullus and Ovid.⁵³ A third but less perhaps likely possibility derives from the fact that Apollo addresses him as βατοδρόπε (“bramble-puller”). The first two suggestions are in my view particularly persuasive and they have in common the idea of speech. This is perhaps confirmed by Ovid’s reference to Pylos and Neleus, Neleus being the father of the notoriously garrulous Nestor.⁵⁴ Let’s turn to the second major difference, to the fact that in the Hymn the old man reveals the truth to Apollo, while in Metamorphoses he speaks to Mercury. In both poems Hermes/Mercury offers the old man a reward for keeping silence, in the Hymn he offers a successful vintage (90 – 4), while in Ovid he promises a gleaming cow (694). The god makes his request in similar terms in both poems, for Hermes demands that the old man “be unseeing in seeing, deaf in hearing and silent” (καί τε ἰδὼν μὴ ἰδὼν εἶναι καὶ κωφὸς ἀκούσας, / καὶ σιγᾶν, 93 – 4), while Mercury insists that Battus “deny what he has seen” (uidisse nega, 693). In the Hymn the old man does not promise to obey and there is no second meeting with Hermes. Rather Apollo approaches him several days later, offers nothing and makes an innocent request: have you seen a man with my cattle? (200). In Metamorphoses, by contrast, Battus is subjected to a test. Mercury insists on silence and Battus agrees: “Go in safety; that stone will sooner speak of your thefts” (tutus eas; lapis iste prius tua furta loquitur, 696). Moreover, Mercury only pretends to leave, returns quickly, alters his shape and voice and then offers

 Bömer () .  E. g. Catul. ., ., Ov. Amores .., Tristia ., ...  Metamorphoses ., . Ovid calls Nestor Neleius (“Neleus’ son”) at Metamorphoses . and refers to antiqui Neleia Nestoris arua (“the Nelean fields of ancient Nestor”) at Epistulae (Heroides) ..

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a second bribe (697– 701). Ovid’s Mercury is more deceitful than his Greek ancestor. Still more important is the fact that in the Hymn the old man is not punished for failing to follow Hermes’ instructions. After all, Apollo has no reason to chastise him and the poem is more concerned with whether the infant Hermes should be punished as a thief. In Ovid, by contrast, Battus is transformed into the “hard flint” known as “informer” (index, 706). Battus is plainly punished for a crime of speech. The central theme of this story also finds its analogue in the exile poetry, in the roughly contemporary Fasti where birds are no longer immune to sacrifice because “their informer’s guts gave the gods pleasure” (iuueruntque deos indicis exta sui, 1.450) and where the people of Lampsacus sing, as they sacrifice an ass to Priapus: “as is fitting, we give the informer’s guts to the flames” (apta … flammis indicis exta damus, 6.346). I might also add that in Tristia 4.10 Ovid is well aware of the danger that informing poses to his own safety: causa meae cunctis nimium quoque nota ruinae indicio non est testificanda meo. (Tristia 4.10.99 – 100) And I must not bear witness to the cause of my ruin by informing, even though it is too well known to all.

It is not only in the mythical world that it is dangerous to be an informer. In their different ways each of these stories from Metamorphoses 2 reflects on the dangers inherent in the exercise of free speech. Moreover, Ovid’s use of allusion, whether intra- or intertextual, suggests that these are not innocent narratives, that they are connected with the poet’s conception of himself and of his position in Augustan Rome. In this of course they resemble Ovid’s accounts of artists like the daughters of Pierus in Book 5, of Arachne in Book 6 and of Orpheus in Books 10 and 11.⁵⁵ And we should not forget that Mercury punishes Herse’s thoughts and words (2.833) and that the narrator focuses upon the traumatic effects of the loss of the power of speech when describing the transformations of Io in Book 1 and Actaeon in Book 3. I began this essay by asserting that, despite the statistics, freedom of speech is important in Augustan epic. But if the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses share a common concern with the subject, their treatments are very different. In Aeneid 11 Drances, unlike his Homeric ancestor, can demand and receive the right to speak in a public context and use that right to oppose successfully the most powerful warrior on the Italian side. In Metamorphoses 2, by contrast, speech is per The literature on Ovid’s treatment of artists is very large. For a recent treatment see Johnson ().

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ilous, as the crow knows all too well (565), because offending the powerful in words leads to hideous punishment. Given the self-referential elements in these stories, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that one reason for the differences between the Virgilian and Ovidian treatments of this issue is the Augustan regime’s increasingly oppressive attempts to control communication, attempts which culminated in Ovid’s exile in 8 CE.⁵⁶

Bibliography Ahl, F.M. 1985. Metaformations. Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. — 2007. Virgil. Aeneid. Oxford. Anderson, W.S. (ed.). 1997. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 1 – 5. Norman, OK. Barchiesi, A. (ed.). 2005. Ovidio, Metamorfosi, Vol. I (Libri I-II). Milan. Bömer, F. 1969. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen: Kommentar Buch I-III. Heidelberg. — 1986. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen: Kommentar Buch XIV-XV. Heidelberg. Boyle, A.J. 1997. “Postscripts from the Edge: Exilic Fasti and Imperialised Rome”, Ramus 26: 7 – 28. Brunt, P.A. 1988. “Libertas in the Republic”, in: The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays. Oxford, 281 – 350. Chrissanthos, S.G. 2004. “Freedom of Speech and the Roman Republican Army”, in: I. Sluiter and R.M. Rosen (eds.), Free Speech in Classical Antiquity. Leiden, 341 – 67. Fantham, E. 1999. “Fighting Words: Turnus at Bay in the Latin Council (Aen. 11.234 – 446)”, AJPh 120: 259 – 80. Gransden, K.W. (ed.). 1991. Virgil, Aeneid, Book XI. Cambridge. Halliwell, S. 2008. Greek Laughter. A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity. Cambridge. Hardie, P.R. 1998. “Fame and Defamation in the Aeneid: The Council of Latins”, in: H.-P. Stahl (ed.), Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context. London, 243 – 70. Highet, G. 1972. The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid. Princeton, NJ. Hollis, A.S. (ed.). 1990. Callimachus: Hecale. Oxford. Horsfall, N. 2003. Virgil, Aeneid 11: A Commentary. Leiden. Johnson, P.J. 2008. Ovid Before Exile. Art and Punishment in the Metamorphoses. Madison, WI. Keith, A.M. 1992. The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 2. Ann Arbor, MI. Kirk, G.S. 1985. The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. 1: books 1 – 4. Cambridge. Knauer, G.N. 1964. Die Aeneis und Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils mit Listen der Homerzitate in der Aeneis. Göttingen.

 I am happy to acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council for my research on this subject.

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La Penna, A. 1971. “Spunti sociologici per l’interpretazione dell’ Eneide”, in: H. Bardon and R. Verdière (eds.), Vergiliana. Recherches sur Virgile. Leiden, 283 – 93. Lintott, A.W. 1999. The Constitution of the Roman Republic. Oxford. Marks, J. 2005. “The Ongoing Neikos: Thersites, Odysseus, and Achilleus”, AJPh 126: 1 – 31. Millar, F. 1998. The Crowd in the Late Roman Republic. Ann Arbor, MI. Syme, R. 1939. The Roman Revolution. Oxford. Thalmann, W.G. 1988. “Thersites: Comedy, Scapegoats, and Heroic Ideology in the Iliad”, TAPhA 118: 1 – 28. Willcock, M.M. 1978. The Iliad of Homer, Books I-XII. London. Williams, R.D. 1973. The Aeneid of Virgil Books 7 – 12. London.

Mathias Hanses

Love’s Letters: an Amor-Roma Telestich at Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.507 – 10 Summary: This paper argues that Ovid deliberately arranged lines 3.507– 10 of the Ars Amatoria to have the letters at line end spell out AMOR when read vertically. Together with the last word of the passage, which is itself Amor, this telestich produces a shape (û) that recalls a famous Γ-acrostic in Aratus. Since the relevant Ovidian lines discuss mirrors, they also constitute an invitation to read AMOR backwards as ROMA. The telestich thus emerges as engaging intertextually with a variety of plays on the city’s name, including the famous AMOR-ROMA word squares that are preserved in Imperial Roman graffiti. Within the mildly subversive genre of elegy, Ovid’s palindromic wordplay creates a contrast between traditional expressions of Roman military valor—familiar from works like the Aeneid, where an acrostic significantly spells out MARS—and his own world, where the city of ROMA has come to be dominated by AMOR. Keywords: telestich; acrostic; wordplay; Amor; Roma; mora; Ovid; Ars Amatoria; Virgil Ovid’s Ars Amatoria abounds in playful advice on the exchange of hidden messages: lovers should compose their notes in secretive handwriting or use milk as invisible ink; they should have trustworthy servants carry these letters back and forth; and they should encode hidden meanings in their missives that are discernible only to the knowing recipient.¹ This interest in clandestine communications makes the poem an obvious hunting ground for modern students of ancient wordplay, who have in recent years increasingly uncovered acrostics and similar ‘intexts’ in Greek and Latin poetry. In what follows, I will point out an instance of such playfulness at Ars amatoria 3.507– 10—where the letters at line end spell out the noun AMOR or, inversely, ROMA—and discuss this telestich’s relevance to the themes and poetics of the work. The poet’s fascination with covert correspondence is discernible throughout the Ars, but it is particularly apparent in Book Three. Here, the praeceptor Amoris revisits the advice he gave to male lovers in the first two books of his poem, but turns the tables to now instruct women in the corresponding ways of conducting

 For milk as a substitute for sympathetic ink, see Ov. Ars Amatoria . – . Ovid’s other letter-writing advice is adduced below.

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affairs. To this new endeavor he devotes only about half the space he allotted to his advice to men, so the treatment of each individual subject is necessarily more compressed. At Ars Amatoria 3.469 – 514, we read a condensed treatment of how lovers in general, and women in particular, should go about sending letters²: uerba uadum temptent abiegnis scripta tabellis; accipiat missas apta ministra notas. inspice, quodque leges, ex ipsis collige uerbis fingat an ex animo sollicitusque roget. postque breuem rescribe moram: mora semper amantes incitat, exiguum si modo tempus habet. […] munda sed e medio consuetaque uerba, puellae, scribite: sermonis publica forma placet. a, quotiens dubius scriptis exarsit amator et nocuit formae barbara lingua bonae! sed quoniam, quamuis uittae careatis honore, est uobis uestros fallere cura uiros, ancillae pueriue manu perarate tabellas, pignora nec puero credite uestra nouo. perfidus ille quidem, qui talia pignora seruat, sed tamen Aetnaei fulminis instar habent. uidi ego pallentes isto terrore puellas seruitium miseras tempus in omne pati. iudice me fraus est concessa repellere fraudem, armaque in armatos sumere iura sinunt. ducere consuescat multas manus una figuras, (a, pereant, per quos ista monenda mihi!), nec nisi deletis tutum rescribere ceris, ne teneat geminas una tabella manus. […] si licet a paruis animum ad maiora referre, plenaque curuato pandere uela sinu, pertinet ad faciem rabidos compescere mores: candida pax homines, trux decet ira feras. ora tument ira, nigrescunt sanguine uenae, lumina Gorgoneo saeuius igne micant. ‘i procul hinc,’ dixit ‘non es mihi, tibia, tanti’, ut uidit uultus Pallas in amne suos. uos quoque si media speculum spectetis in ira, cognoscat faciem uix satis ulla suam. nec minus in uultu damnosa superbia uestro: comibus est oculis alliciendus Amor. odimus immodicos (experto credite) fastus: saepe tacens odii semina uultus habet.

 The Latin text is based on Gibson (). All translations are my own.

470

480

485 486 489 490 487 488 491

495

500

505

510

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spectantem specta, ridenti mollia ride: innuet, acceptas tu quoque redde notas. Let words inscribed on wooden tablets test the waters, and let a loyal servant receive the signs that were sent. 470 Inspect them, and determine from what you will read, from the words themselves, whether he is faking it or writes from the heart and in a state of distress. And write back after a brief delay: delay always stirs up lovers if it lasts only for a short time. […] Write elegant words, girls, but common and customary ones: it is everyday parlance that pleases. 480 Ah, how often did letters inflame a doubtful lover and how often did unpolished speech harm a beautiful figure (formae)! But since, although you lack the honor of (marital) fillets, you care to deceive your men, inscribe (perarate) the tablets in the handwriting of a slave girl or boy, 485 nor trust a new servant with your pledges. 486 Treacherous indeed is he who holds on to such securities, 489 but they contain (a power) akin to a thunderbolt from Aetna. 490 I have personally seen girls, blanching at this terror, 487 miserably suffer eternal servitude. 488 To my mind, deceit is a valid defense against deceit, 491 and the laws allow us to take up arms against armed men. Let a single hand be accustomed to multiple scripts (figuras) (ah, may they perish on whose account I have to utter these warnings!), nor is it safe to write unless the wax has been completely erased 495 to make sure the same tablet does not contain two hands. […] If I may now turn my mind from small to greater matters, and fully extend my sails in a rounded curve: 500 it befits a (pretty) face to rein in rabid moods. Joyful peace suits human beings; savage wrath suits beasts. The face swells with anger; the veins grow black with blood; the eyes flash with fire more savagely than the Gorgon’s. “Away with you,” said Pallas, “you are not worth that much to me, flute,” 505 when she saw her face in the river. If you too should glance in mid-wrath at a mirror, with difficulty would any of you recognize her own face. No less does an expression of arrogance spell doom: it is with affable eyes that we must attract Love. 510 We hate excessive haughtiness (believe the expert): often even a silent look bears seeds of hatred. Glance back at him who glances, laugh back sweetly at him who laughs. If he nods to you, you too return the signs you have received.

Lines 3.473 – 4 contain an instance of what Frederick Ahl, following Varro, called ‘declension,’ the cycling through different inflections and spellings of a given

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noun to produce puns and other kinds of wordplay.³ Forms of the noun MORA (‘delay’), an anagram of AMOR, occur twice in line 473. That we are to think of the latter when we read the former is clarified by the occurrence of amantes in the same hexameter. Significantly, a playful look at the Latin yields the imperative rescribe moram, or “rewrite mora.” This reads like an encouragement to divide up the word MORA into its constituent letters and reassemble them into such variants as AMOR, ROMA, or MARO, all of which will indeed factor into my interpretation. It is appropriate, then, and in keeping with a common custom in ancient wordplay, that the rest of the passage is rife with oblique announcements of our AMOR telestich. The praeceptor’s advice is to scan any letters carefully for signs of love (!), paying close attention to the words themselves (ex ipsis … uerbis, 3.469 – 72, at 471). The lovers’ communications are to be elegant and use common words (3.479 – 80) to avoid doing damage to the ‘figure’ (formae, 3.482). They should cover up their true intentions by writing (perarate, 3.485)⁴ in disguised handwriting and by employing different figurae (3.493) to express their affection. In the same vein, they are to make sure that their love is not too plainly visible on their writing tablets (3.495 – 96). Finally, since Ovid told us at the outset that Love is better after Delay,⁵ it is appropriate that our AMOR telestich occurs only a bit later, after an ostensible change of subject. As announced, the careful reader of lines 3.507– 10 finds a secret message embedded in the very words of the text, encoded in the letters at line end. Fittingly, this hidden forma or figura literally spells out the writer’s ‘Love’ (or ‘Rome,’ when read backwards): uos quoque si media speculum spectetis in ira, cognoscat faciem uix satis ulla suam. nec minus in uultu damnosa superbia uestro: comibus est oculis alliciendus Amor. If you too should glance in mid-wrath at a mirror, with difficulty would any of you recognize her own face. No less does an expression of arrogance spell doom: it is with affable eyes that we must attract Love.

This ‘love letter’ is no accident of poetic composition. Studies of ancient wordplay generally assume that an acrostic is intentional if the relevant lines’ first  Ahl ()  – . See also Jay Reed’s chapter (in this volume).  perarate is Bentley’s restoration of manus ferat arte codd. The verb also occurs at Ov. Amores .., Ars Amatoria ., and Metamorphoses .; see Gibson () ad loc.  Ovid follows his own advice by delaying the description of actual love making until the very end of the Ars Amatoria (. – ). See also Ars Amatoria . –  and ..

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word is identical to the intext that is detectable along the left margin, that is, if first word and acrostic form a gamma (Γ). The archetype for gamma acrostics is in Aratus’s Phaenomena at lines 783 – 7,⁶ a passage that found many imitators in both Greek and Roman literature.⁷ Here, the relevant word is ΛΕΠΤΗ, an adjective that means ‘faint’ or ‘elegant.’ Within Hellenistic poetics, it also points to literary sophistication and tongue-in-cheek wordplay. Appropriately, several additional, hidden occurrences of the adjective have recently been uncovered in the Phaenomena passage.⁸ Ovid’s AMOR-ROMA telestich belongs in the same tradition—indeed, it constitutes a deliberate nod to the Hellenistic poet. After all, Ovid’s lines likewise call for elegant words (munda … uerba, 3.479). And what is more, the verb he uses in his advice to write in elusive scripts, perarate (3.485), if correct,⁹ is a pun on Aratus’s name.¹⁰ Finally, in combination with the intext, Ovid’s lines’ final word produces a shape (û) that recalls the Phaenomena’s gamma, thereby guaranteeing that the telestich is not fortuitous. However, while Ovid’s û does recall Aratus’s Γ, it significantly inverts its shape. This, too, is no coincidence. After all, the women addressed in the relevant lines of the Ars are glancing into a mirror. It only makes sense, then, for Ovid’s telestich to be the mirror image of Aratus’s acrostic. Perhaps the intext is even supposed to resemble a mirror, with the Amor of line 510 representing

 In modern classical scholarship, this acrostic was first noticed by J.-M. Jacques (). Aratus is himself imitating a (possibly fortuitous) acrostic at Hom. Iliad . – . For important discussions of the related passages, see the full bibliography assembled at Hanses (), as well as notes , , and  below. The term ‘gamma acrostic’ was pioneered by Morgan (). For other shapes, such as a lambda (Λ) or a delta (Δ), see Trzaskoma (forthcoming).  The best-known instance is Virgil’s encoding of his own name into lines . –  of the Georgics. For this and similar ‘Aratean’ acrostics in Greek and especially Roman literature, as well as telestichs and other intexts, see, e. g., Hilberg ( – ); Brown ()  – ; Vogt (); Fowler (); Courtney (); Bing () and (); Haslam (); Barchiesi () ; Clauss (); Carter (); Damschen (); Danielewicz (), (a), (b), and (c); Feeney and Nelis (); Bielsa i Mialet (); Hurka (); La Barbera (); Katz (), (), (), and (); Castelletti (), (a), (b), and (); Gore and Kershaw (); Grishin (); Luz (), esp.  –  and  – ; Somerville (); Colborn (); Kersten (); Smith (); Giusti (); and the relevant contributions in this volume. The reasons for Aratus’s popularity at Rome are discussed in Volk ().  For renewed discussions of Aratus’s ΛΕΠΤΗ acrostic, see Hanses (); Danielewicz (), and Trzaskoma (forthcoming).  See n. .  For similar punning allusions to Aratus’ name, both in the Phaenomena itself and in the poet’s later imitators, see esp. Levitan () , n. ; Kidd (); Springer ( – ); Bing () and (); Katz (); Kubiak (); and Van Noorden () , n. .

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the handle and the telestich itself forming the reflecting surface.¹¹ This effect would have been even more palpable if, as some wordplay scholars have suspected from hints in several pertinent passages, intexts were sometimes highlighted through rubrication.¹² If the letters of the telestich were indeed offset in red, they would also have provided an illustration of the kind of palimpsest that Ovid describes at 3.495 – 6, that is, a half-erased love letter shining through more recent writing on a wax tablet. Perhaps more importantly, the passage’s mirroring theme offers an invitation to read in alternating directions. And when glanced at in a reflection, each individual instance of AMOR turns into ROMA. Alternatively, we can string together all of the telestich’s seven relevant letters into just one continuous sequence and uncover the palindrome AMOR(R)OMA, which too (by definition) can be read backwards and forwards. The letters used in this palindrome are particularly appropriate to a play on mirrors: except for the R that forms the hinge where AMOR and ROMA connect—or the reflecting surface that turns AMOR into ROMA—all relevant letters are symmetrical (A, M, O) and look the same if mirrored along the Y-axis.¹³ The telestich thus emerges as an anagrammatic play on the city’s name. The AMOR-ROMA palindrome probably predates Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, and it seems to have been widely appreciated in the Imperial era. For example, a famous graffito discovered on a wall of the House of Menander in Pompeii has the relevant letters arranged into a word square (CIL 4.8297): R O M A

O I I M

M I I O

A M O R

 For discussions of technopaegnion poems, whose shape (e. g., an axe, an egg, a syrinx, or an altar) resembles their content, see esp. Levitan () ; Higgins (); and Luz ().  The use of visual effects in support of written wordplay was a common practice in later antiquity and the Middle Ages, but is not attested for the first century; see esp. Levitan ()  – ; Courtney () ; and Heil (). Studies that claim to have found hints at rubrication in texts from the Hellenistic and Roman eras include Damschen () , n. ; Habinek () ; and Hanses ()  – . Damschen’s suggestion that Ov. Ars Amatoria . –  (nec uos / excipite arcana uerba notata manu, “do not intercept words spelled out in a secret hand”) alludes to visually offset acrostics now strikes me as more plausible than it did when I wrote Hanses () , n. . At the same time, the objection that rubrication would defeat the purpose by revealing the secret remains legitimate.  I owe this observation about the letters’ symmetrical shape to Joshua Katz.

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In whichever direction the passersby chose to read along the edges of the square, they always arrived at either ROMA(A)MOR or AMOR(R)OMA. Together with similar examples from Rome,¹⁴ Ostia (Guarducci (1965) 262– 6 with fig. 8), and Spain (IRBaelo 00102),¹⁵ this Pompeian word square attests that visual plays on the city’s name were popular not just at the Empire’s geographical center or among its literary elite.¹⁶ While it is impossible to tell which came first, the word square—for which we only have the terminus ante quem of Mt. Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 CE—or Ovid’s palindromic telestich, they clearly both belong in the same tradition. After all, the graffito also has two instances of AMOR arranged in a û-shape: R O M A

O I I M

M I I O

A M O R

Ovid’s Ars Amatoria thus presents itself at its most ‘literary’—that is, most concerned with the actual, material litterae on the page—precisely at the point where it engages with supposedly sub-literary graffiti. Ironically, this kind of play more than most requires a literate recipient. As regards the wordplay’s interpretation, the ROMA-AMOR square has been understood as an expression of Roman Imperial self-confidence. We may consider it a portrayal of the entire cosmos as contained by Rome, by the love goddess from whom its founders descended, and by the ‘love’ the city spread in form of the pax Romana. ¹⁷ In Ovid’s elegiac contexts, however, other, more subversive readings also suggest themselves.  This particular version of the word square was discovered together with the palindrome ROMA SUMMUS AMOR under S. Maria Maggiore. See Castrén () and Wheeler (forthcoming), n. .  I reproduce here the version found in Pompeii. Its Roman, Ostian, and Spanish counterparts replace the Is at the center with the letter combination IL to produce additional palindromic plays on OLIM and MILO: R O M A

O L I M

M I L O

A M O R

 So also Benefiel () .  On the AMOR-ROMA anagram, including its use in a famous uersus recurrens (Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor), its role in word squares and graffiti, and its relation to the city’s Imperial ambitions (including the speculation that Amor was Rome’s secret name), see Focke ();

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The elegiac lover is commonly seen as the distorted mirror image of traditional Roman values. Instead of embracing a life of service to the state, the genre’s lovers reject careers in politics or the military to pass their time instead in a militia Amoris. ¹⁸ For those familiar with the AMOR-ROMA anagram, this lifestyle would quite literally constitute the opposite of militia Romana. ¹⁹ Such potentially subversive tendencies are apparent throughout the Ars, but especially in Book Three, where women are incited to dedicate their lives to erotic adventures.²⁰ It is appropriate, then, that Ovid’s amatory and anti-militaristic poem includes— in our telestich—an oblique reference to AMOR being the reverse of ROMA. Significantly, the Pompeian word square grants equal space to both ROMA and AMOR, but Ovid’s wordplay reproduces only the bottom-right corner, where ‘Love’ is much more immediately visible. This choice privileges AMOR over ROMA, even as the text’s palindromic arrangement highlights the connection between the two. Form here matches content, in that a telestich necessarily goes against the grain of the text and thereby disrupts its flow, inverts its sense, and subverts traditional meanings. By having AMOR dominate ROMA, then, both in our passage and throughout the Ars Amatoria, Ovid presents a counter-image of Rome as the City of Love, a martial metropolis taken over by Venus and Amor. As he himself puts it at the beginning of the work (1.59 – 60)²¹: quot caelum stellas, tot habet tua Roma puellas: / mater in Aeneae constitit urbe sui (“your Rome has as many girls as the sky has stars; the mother of Aeneas has established herself in her son’s city”).²² Our telestich passage’s preoccupation with mirrors befits this reading as well. In the Ars Amatoria, readers glance into a reflection of their true self that they may not Stanley (); Guarducci (); Pucci (); Ahl (), esp.  –  and ; Skulsky (); Nelis (); Cairns (); Sissa (); Benefiel (); and Wheeler (forthcoming).  In relatively close proximity to the telestich, and befitting its emphasis on mirrors and appearances, see, e. g., Ov. Ars Amatoria .: militiae species amor est (“love has the appearance of warfare”) or .: hoc quoque militia est (“this, too, is warfare”).  See e. g. Murgatroyd (), who traces the emergence of the militia Amoris concept, and Gale (), who explores its true complexity and ambiguity. For general introductions to (Ovidian) elegy, see Holzberg () and Volk ()  – . The elegiac poets’ awareness that their Amor is an anagram of Roma is at its most apparent in Prop. .., where the two nouns occur within the same line: per te nunc Romae quidlibet audet Amor, “it is on your account that Amor now dares to do whatever he wants at Rome.” For additional plays on AMOR, ROMA, and MORA in Roman elegy, see Pucci ().  The Ars Amatoria’s open advocacy for a supposedly immoral militia Amoris may in fact have been partially to blame for Ovid’s banishment from Rome to Tomis. See e. g. Gibson ()  –  for a nuanced discussion with bibliography.  I would like to thank Katharina Volk for reminding me of this reference.  See also the Propertian line quoted in n. .

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have anticipated. Where they expected to find the familiar and conventional ROMA, they end up observing a ROMA ruled by AMOR. Nevertheless, they should refrain from anger, as Ovid insists perhaps with a hint of anticipation of his upcoming punishment through exile. If we just glance with good will at the AMOR we see in the mirror, and take on its properties, we will come to like what we see; we will ourselves be more pleasant to look at; and we will reap the appropriate amatory benefits.²³ Finally, the contrast between Ovid’s devotion to AMOR and traditional ROMA’s more martial values suggests an intertextual connection to another famous acrostic. Within the Ars Amatoria, Virgil’s Aeneid commonly serves as a conformist foil to Ovid’s more pacifist poetry, as is apparent from passages like 1.59 – 60 just quoted above. AMOR, of course, is not just an emotion, but also a divinity. The corresponding personification of warfare would be MARS, and it is fitting that while Ovid encodes the one god in his text, Virgil did the same to the other. Note the MARS acrostic that marks the beginning of the Aeneid’s description of the Latin custom to open the Gates of War at the beginning of a conflict (7.601– 5)²⁴: mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quem protinus urbes Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum Roma colit, cum prima mouent in proelia Martem, siue Getis inferre manu lacrimabile bellum […] parant […] Martial custom there was in Hesperian Latium, which from the first the Alban cities held holy and which now the greatest in the world, Rome, adheres to when for the beginnings of battles they stir up Mars, be it that they prepare to force lamentable war on the Getans…

In this oft-noted passage, the MARS acrostic corresponds to the lines’ topic—warfare—and makes explicit how important this activity (prima mouent in proelia Martem (!), 603; inferre manu lacrimabile bellum, 604) is to Rome’s self-image. The AMOR telestich picks up on this instance of Virgilian wordplay, but lays a competing claim to ROMA (so prominently mentioned at Aeneid 7.603) in the

 For ancient perceptions of mirrors as revealing (at times inconvenient) truths, but at the same time providing exemplary models and calls for self-improvement, see Sen. De ira .. –  and McCarty ().  This acrostic was first noted by Hilberg ( – ) , who however considered it fortuitous. Fowler (); Feeney and Nelis (); and others consider it intentional and point to the additional occurrence of Martem at ., which can hardly be a coincidence. See also Horsfall () ad loc.

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name of AMOR. It is appropriate to this context of an Ovidian telestich implicitly subverting Virgil that the word AMOR also constitutes a jumbling and re-constitution of the letters that make up (Publius Vergilius) MARO, a poet who was himself no stranger to intexts punning on his name.²⁵ Ovid’s telestich thus emerges as an expression of the poet’s poetics in a variety of ways. He continues the tradition of Aratean λεπτότης; he plays on the spelling of AMOR and ROMA in the manner of Imperial Roman graffiti, which is appropriate to his preoccupation with the quotidian; and he presents in the right margin of his page a mirror image of what Virgil presented on the left. Here and elsewhere, the Ars’s dedication to militia Amoris provides an amatory counter-model to the Aeneid’s devotion to MARS. In a way, the AMOR telestich also delivers on a promise that Ovid made at the beginning of his poem. There, the praeceptor had said he would tame Love the way Tiphys steered the Argo, Automedon directed Achilles’ horses, and Chiron controlled Achilles himself (Ov. Ars Amatoria 1.1– 24). Ovid, in turn, has now quite directly ‘captured’ AMOR on the pages of the Ars. And finally, it is in keeping with the text’s demand to make Love, not War, that our passage insists on peaceful interactions. Rather than be angry or arrogant (much less banish each other to the edges of the known world), we should “Glance back at him who glances, laugh back sweetly at him who laughs. If he nods to you, you too return the signs you have received” (spectantem specta, ridenti mollia ride: / innuet, acceptas tu quoque redde notas, 3.513 – 14). How much more directly could Ovid have asked his male and, here especially, female readers to keep writing, and looking for, acrostics and telestichs?²⁶

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. Barchiesi, A. 1997. “Endgames: Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 and Fasti 6”, in: D.H. Roberts et al. (eds.), Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature. Princeton, NJ, 181 – 208.

 See n. .  I am very grateful to Phil Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas for including my essay in the present volume and for making many helpful suggestions. Additional thanks are due to Joshua Katz, Katharina Volk, and Stephen Wheeler for their careful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. They also all shared unpublished work relevant to my contribution, as did Stephen Trzaskoma, which I very much appreciated.

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Benefiel, R. 2013. “Magic Squares, Alphabet Jumbles, Riddles and More: The Culture of Word-Games among the Graffiti of Pompeii”, in: J. Kwapisz et al. (eds.), The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry. Berlin, 65 – 79. Bielsa i Mialet, P. 2006. De rerum carmine: Formes de composició poètica a la Roma del segle primer. Teoria universal de la composició cellular. Girona. Bing, P. 1990. “A Pun on Aratus’ Name in Verse 2 of the Phaenomena?”, HSPh 93: 281 – 5. — 1993. “Aratus and His Audiences”, MD 31: 99 – 109. Brown, E.L. 1963. Numeri Vergiliani: Studies in ‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics’. Brussels. Cairns, F. 2010. “Roma and Her Tutelary Deity: Names and Ancient Evidence”, in: C.S. Kraus et al. (eds.), Ancient Historiography and Its Contexts: Studies in Honour of A.J. Woodman. Oxford, 245 – 66. Carter, M.A.S. 2002. “Vergilium vestigare: Aeneid 12.587 – 8”, CQ 52: 615 – 17. Castelletti, C. 2008. “Riflessioni sugli acrostici di Valerio Flacco”, GIF 60: 219 – 34. — 2012a. “A ‘Greek’ Acrostic in Valerius Flaccus (3.430 – 4)”, Mnemosyne 65: 319 – 23. — 2012b. “Following Aratus’ Plow: Vergil’s Signature in the Aeneid”, MH 69: 83 – 95. — 2014. “Aratus and the Aratean Tradition in Valerius’ Argonautica”, in: A. Augoustakis (ed.), Flavian Poetry and Its Greek Past. Leiden, 49 – 72. Castrén, P. 1972. “Appendice sui graffiti del Vano XVI”, in: F. Magi (ed.), Il calendario dipinto sotto Santa Maria Maggiore. Città del Vaticano, 79, numbers 18 and 24. Clauss, J.J. 1997. “An Acrostic in Vergil (Eclogues I 5 – 8): The Chance that Mimics Choice?”, Aevum(ant) 10: 267 – 87. Colborn, R. 2013. “Solving Problems with Acrostics: Manilius Dates Germanicus”, CQ 63: 450 – 2. Courtney, E. 1990. “Greek and Latin Acrostichs”, Philologus 134: 3 – 13. Damschen, G. 2004. “Das lateinische Akrostichon: Neue Funde bei Ovid sowie Vergil, Grattius, Manilius und Silius Italicus”, Philologus 148: 88 – 115. Danielewicz, J. 2005. “Further Hellenistic Acrostics: Aratus and Others”, Mnemosyne 58: 321 – 34. — 2013a. “A Palindrome, an Acrostich and a Riddle: Three Solutions”, in: J. Kwapisz et al. (eds.), The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry. Berlin, 320 – 34. — 2013b. “The ‘Slender Muse’ of the Hellenistic Poets”, PHist 2: 87 – 94. — 2013c. “Vergil’s certissima signa Reinterpreted: The Aratean lepte-Acrostic in Georgics I”, Eos 100: 287 – 95. — 2015. “One Sign after Another: The Fifth ΛΕΠΤΗ in Aratus’ Phaen. 783 – 4?”, CQ 65: 387 – 90. Feeney, D. and D. Nelis. 2005. “Two Virgilian Acrostics: certissima signa?”, CQ 55: 644 – 6. Focke, F. 1948. “Sator arepo”, WJA 3: 366 – 401. Fowler, D.P. 1983. “An Acrostic in Vergil (Aeneid 7. 601 – 4)?”, CQ 33: 298. Gale, M. 1997. “Propertius 2.7: Militia amoris and the Ironies of Elegy”, JRS 87: 77 – 91. Gibson, R.K. 2003. Ovid: Ars Amatoria Book 3. Cambridge. Giusti, E. 2015. “Caesar Criss-Crossing the Rubicon: A Palindromic Acrostic in Lucan (1.218 – 22)”, CQ 65: 892 – 4. Gore, J. and A. Kershaw. 2008. “An Unnoticed Acrostic in Apuleius Metamorphoses and Cicero De divinatione 2.111 – 12”, CQ 58: 393 – 4. Grishin, A.A. 2008. “Ludus in undis: An Acrostic in Eclogue 9”, HSPh 104: 237 – 40.

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Guarducci, M. 1965. “Il misterioso quadrato magico: L’interpretazione di J. Carcopino e documenti nuovi”, ArchClass 17: 219 – 70. Habinek, T. 2009. “Situating Literacy at Rome”, in: W.A. Johnson and H.N. Parker (eds.), Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome. Oxford, 114 – 40. Hanses, M. 2014. “The Pun and the Moon in the Sky: Aratus’ ΛΕΠΤΗ Acrostic”, CQ 64: 609 – 14. Haslam, M. 1992. “Hidden Signs: Aratus Diosemeiai 46 ff., Vergil Georgics 1.424 ff.”, HSPh 94: 199 – 204. Heil, A. 2007. “Christliche Deutungen der Eklogen Vergils: Die Tityre-Initiale im Codex Klosterneuburg CCl 742”, A&A 53: 100 – 19. Higgins, D. 1987. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany, NY. Hilberg, I. 1899 – 1900. “Ist die Ilias Latina von einem Italicus verfasst oder einem Italicus gewidmet?”, WS 21: 264 – 305 and 22: 317 – 18. Holzberg, N. 2001. Die römische Liebeselegie: Eine Einführung. (2nd edition). Darmstadt. Horsfall, N. 2000. Virgil: Aeneid 7. Leiden. Hurka, F. 2006. “Ein Akrostikhon in Ciceros Aratea (vv. 317 – 320)”, WJA 30: 87 – 91. Jacques, J.-M. 1960. “Sur un acrostiche d’Aratos (Phén., 738 – 787)”, REA 62: 48 – 61. Katz, J.T. 2007. “An Acrostic Ant Road in Aeneid 4”, MD 59: 77 – 86. — 2008. “Vergil Translates Aratus: Phaenomena 1 – 2 and Georgics 1.1 – 2”, MD 60: 105 – 23. — 2009. “Wordplay”, in: S.W. Jamison et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, October 31-November 1, 2008. Bremen, Germany, 79 – 114. — 2013. “The Muse at Play: An Introduction”, in: J. Kwapisz et al. (eds.), The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry. Berlin, 1 – 30. Kersten, M. 2013. “Ein Akrostichon im zweiten Buch De Bello Civili? Lucan. 2,600 – 608”, RhM 156: 161 – 71. Kidd, D. 1981. “Notes on Aratus, Phaenomena”, CQ 31: 355 – 62. Kubiak, D.P. 2009. “Scitus arator: Germanicus, Aratea 13”, SIFC 7: 248 – 55. La Barbera, S. 2006. “Divinità occulte: Acrostici nei proemi di Ovidio e Claudiano”, MD 56: 181 – 4. Levitan, W. 1979. “Plexed Artistry: Aratean Acrostics”, Glyph 5: 55 – 68. — 1985. “Dancing at the End of the Rope: Optatian Porfyry and the Field of Roman Verse”, TAPhA 115: 245 – 69. Luz, C. 2010. Technopaignia: Formspiele in der griechischen Dichtung. Leiden. McCarty, W. 1989. “The Shape of the Mirror: Metaphorical Catoptrics in Classical Literature”, Arethusa 22: 161 – 95. Morgan, G. 1993. “Nullam, Vare … Chance or Choice in Odes 1.18?”, Philologus 137: 142 – 5. Murgatroyd, P. 1975. “Militia amoris and the Roman Elegists”, Latomus 34: 50 – 79. Nelis, D. 2006. “Wordplay in Vergil and Claudian”, Dictynna 3: 195 – 201. Pucci, P. 1978. “Lingering on the Threshold”, Glyph 3: 52 – 73. Sissa, G. 2010. “Amor Mora Metamorphosis Roma”, in: M. de Poli (ed.), Maschile e Femminile: Genere ed Eros nel Mondo Greco. Atti del Convegno Università degli Studi di Padova 22 – 23 ottobre 2009. Padua, 7 – 38. Skulsky, S. 1985. “ ‘Inuitus regina…’: Aeneas and the Love of Rome”, AJPh 106: 447 – 55.

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Smith, A. 2013. “Nomen inest: A Declining Domicile and Caustic Acrostics in Ex Ponto III 3”, A&R 7: 45 – 64. Somerville, T. 2010. “Note on a Reversed Acrostic in Vergil Georgics 1.429 – 33”, CPh 105: 202 – 9. Springer, C. 1983 – 4. “Aratus and the Cups of Menalcas: A Note on Eclogue 3.42”, CJ 79: 131 – 4. Stanley, K. 1963. “Rome, Ἔρως and the Versus Romae”, GRBS 4: 237 – 49. Trzaskoma, S. (forthcoming). “Further Possibilities Regarding the Acrostic at Aratus 783 – 7”, CQ. Van Noorden, H. 2015. Playing Hesiod: The ‘Myth of the Races’ in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge. Vogt, E. 1967. “Das Akrostichon in der griechischen Literatur”, A&A 13: 80 – 95. Volk, K. 2010. Ovid. Malden, MA. — 2015. “The World of the Latin Aratea”, in: L.T. Fuhrer and M. Erler (eds.), Cosmologies et cosmogonies dans la littérature antique/Cosmologies and Cosmogonies in Ancient Literature. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique de la Fondation Hardt 61. Vandœuvres, 253 – 89. Wheeler, S.M. (forthcoming). “The Emperor’s Love for Rome in Claudian’s Panegyric on the Sixth Consulate of Honorius”, in: S. McGill and J. Pucci (eds.), Tradition and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity. Heidelberg.

Ioannis Ziogas

Love Elegy and Legal Language in Ovid

Summary: Ovid’s engagement with legal discourse is a version of the elegiac recusatio, a simultaneous appropriation and denial of legalisms. Set against the background of Augustus’ adultery laws, Ovidian elegy aspires to dictate and reform the rules of amatory conduct. The Ars Amatoria exemplifies the profile of love elegy as legal discourse by attempting to regulate love affairs under a regime that institutionalized passion. The conflict and interaction between the world of elegiac seduction and that of Roman law feature prominently in Acontius’ letter to Cydippe (Heroides 20). In this letter, literary sources legitimize poetic imitations; fanciful innovations mirror established traditions; wedding contracts converge with amatory deception and witness-statements with love letters. By construing an intricate nexus between the fantasies of desire and the reality and materiality of legal documents, Ovid suggests that, in the end, Cupid is in charge of both the letter and the spirit of the law. Keywords: elegy; law; recusatio; adultery; marriage; love letter; materiality; witness-statements; magic; seduction

Elegiac Denial and Legal Commitment Latin love elegy is a literary genre that defines itself by denial. The so-called recusatio, the disavowal of epic war for the sake of love, shapes the profile and agenda of elegiac discourse. Yet this denial is simultaneously an appropriation.¹ Roman elegy may apparently refuse to engage with the world of wars and men, but actually enlists martial epic in the service of love poetry. Elegy’s strategy is more aggressive than it looks at first sight; the genre conquers by feigning a retreat and transforms epic narratives into elegiac metaphors.² From that perspective, elegy is more imperialistic than epic since it expands by dividing and conquering the martial and amatory aspects of epic poems. The denial of an active military and political life is a powerful political statement. By refusing actively to

 Hinds ()  –  discusses Latin poets’ simultaneous appropriation and denial in the rather different context of the so-called primus motif.  E. g., the motif of militia amoris. On this elegiac motif and its ironies, see Gale (); Drinkwater ().

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take part in Roman imperialism, the Roman elegists make a revolutionary poetic and political choice. Elegy’s action is its pretense of inaction. A similar combination of denial and appropriation applies to elegy’s stance towards Roman law. The elegiac motif of seruitium amoris is not only a reworking of epic imagery for elegiac purposes, but also a legal concept that is employed as poetic metaphor.³ In the manner of the traditional recusatio, Propertius reassures Cynthia that Roman laws and Jovian weapons are incapable of separating elegiac lovers (2.7.1– 6).⁴ Ovid’s decision to abandon a career in law for the sake of a career in poetry is another twist of the recusatio. ⁵ The exiled poet implies that courtroom rhetoric is reprocessed for poetic effects.⁶ Ovid’s autobiographical poem (Tristia 4.10), in which he contrasts his brother’s inclination for legal studies with his own poetic pursuits, is a case in point: frater ad eloquium uiridi tendebat ab aeuo, fortia uerbosi natus ad arma fori; at mihi iam puero caelestia sacra placebant, inque suum furtim Musa trahebat opus. Tristia 4.10.17– 20 My brother inclined towards oratory from his tender age, born for the strong weapons of the garrulous forum; but I even as a boy delighted in heavenly rites and stealthily the Muse was pulling me into her dear work.⁷

The forensic eloquence required for a legal career is cast in epic language; the strong weapons (fortia arma), an unmistakable symbol of martial epic, are enmeshed with the busy verbosity of the forum. Ovid denied this wordy and worldly career for the divine pleasures of poetry. His reference to his boyhood not only suggests his affinities with the puer Cupid, but also alludes to the boyish nature of Ovidian and Callimachean poetics with its schoolboy frivolity which pointedly punctures the manly grauitas of epic.⁸ By contrast, his brother’s green age subtly puns on his latent manhood (VIRidi…ab aeuo), ready to take up strong weapons. The juxtaposition of Ovid and his brother is a version of the elegiac recusatio. The

 See Kenney ()  – , for seruitium amoris; cf. Kenney () ; Gebhardt ()  – .  On recusatio in Propertius ., see Cairns () .  Ovid models his poetic career on Vergil and his literary aspirations replace the public cursus honorum; see Farrell (); (); Barchiesi and Hardie ()  – .  Recent scholarship has focused on legal diction in Ovid’s exile poetry; see Lowrie ()  – ; McGowan ()  – ; Gebhardt ()  – .  Translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.  On this topic, see Morgan ().

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priority of pleasure (placebant), the attraction to the female Muse, and the stealthy work (furtim) of the Muse’s divine seduction all point to main preoccupations of Roman love elegy. The lure of amatory poetry is more persuasive than the noisy rhetoric of forensic litigations. When his father admonishes him to try more profitable pursuits, Ovid attempts to abandon the realm of poetry and write prose. But whatever he tried to write would turn into verse on its own accord (Tristia 4.10.21– 6). This is the common interpretation of sponte sua carmen numeros ueniebat in aptos (‘of its own accord a poem would come upon suitable meter’, Tristia 4.10.25), a line which, in this context, draws attention to the poetic and legal meaning of carmen. While forsaking a public career for the sake of poetry, Ovid pointedly uses carmen, a word that not only refers to verse as opposed to prose, but is also closely associated with legal and authoritative statements.⁹ Ovid’s prosaic and futile attempts to engage with public administration end up in verse. Thus, the transformation of Ovid’s prose into poetry is simultaneously a denial and an appropriation of legal diction. Ovid did not simply refuse forensic speech; instead legal discourse magically and spontaneously morphed into poetry. The word carmen, which is equally applicable to legal and poetic diction, remains the same, but its form changes. True to the spirit of his Metamorphoses, Ovid’s carmen shifts shape while its nature continues to be essentially unchangeable.¹⁰ The poet manages both to disavow and highlight the legal nature of his poetry.

The Word of the Law Poetry builds its own imperial program and passes its own laws. The overlap between the politics of poetry and the poetics of empire that features so prominently in Augustan poetry¹¹ is partly enabled by the Latin language, which uses words and phrases that apply both to poetic and imperial authority. Recent scholarship, for instance, suggests that the verb cano has little, if anything, to

 See Putnam ()  – ; Lowrie ()  notes that carmen is used to refer both to poetry and law. The semantic range of the Greek νόμος (‘melody’ and ‘law’) corresponds to the Latin carmen (‘song’ and ‘law’). Svenbro ()  – ,  –  argues that in Greece the law was originally sung out by the law-chanter. More on carmen below.  Metamorphosis often highlights continuity rather than change. Feldherr ()  points out that human beings who undergo metamorphosis do not lose the enduring aspects of their being, rather they take on a form that reveals them; cf. Anderson ()  – .  See Hardie (); Lowrie (); Feldherr ().

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do with a distinction between singing and speaking. Instead, canere seems to describe a statement that carries authority independent of external ratification.¹² Similarly, carmen describes powerful language that can bring about a physical reaction that reifies the speaker’s wishes.¹³ Carmen can refer to law and by regularizing carmen as a word for a poem the Augustan poets claim a quasi-legal status for their poems. Augustan poetry appropriates legal discourse, and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is probably the best example of the rivalry between Augustus’ and Ovid’s carmina. Ovid composed his Ars Amatoria against the background of Augustus’ lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, which made adultery a criminal offense. In spite of or maybe because of Ovid’s conceited statements that his love lessons do not break the law (see, e. g., Ars Amatoria 1.31– 4, 2.599 – 600, 3.57– 8; Tristia 2.247– 50), the Ars Amatoria was presumably one of the reasons why the emperor relegated Ovid to Tomis. The accusation was that Ovid’s didactic poem teaches adultery, which is illegal under the lex Iulia. Some scholars, such as Mario Labate,¹⁴ argue that Ovid’s Ars does not really go against Augustus’ legislation, but this seems to be a minority view, especially in Anglophone scholarship. Most critics now focus on Ovid’s playfully subversive diction and some argue that his Ars Amatoria clearly breaks Augustus’ adultery laws.¹⁵ In my view, the Ars is a politically provocative work not only because it transgresses the boundaries of Roman law, but mainly because it presents itself as an authoritative document that sets the rules on a subject that is legally prescribed by the new regime. Poems and shows that involve obscenity and adultery may not be per se subversive. In his defense of the Ars, Ovid points out that marriageable girls and married women regularly watch obscene adultery mimes and there has never been any problem with it (Tristia 2.497– 506).¹⁶ Why would Augustus mind his Ars Amatoria? Alison Sharrock responds that obscenity is not politically sensitive: rather it is the undermining of authority which might be so.¹⁷ An adultery mime may show characters breaking the law but this is differ-

 See references in Lowrie ()  – ,  – .  Putnam () . See also Habinek ().  Labate ().  Davis (). On the Ars Amatoria and Augustus’ adultery laws, see Wallace-Hadrill (); Gibson ()  – ; Davis ()  – ; Lowrie ()  – . On the adultery laws, see Raditsa (); Treggiari ()  – ,  – ; McGinn ()  – .  Admittedly, this might be a subversive thing to say.  Sharrock () . She further argues that after Vergil politicized didactic poetry with his Georgics, it is impossible to read Ovid’s Ars Amatoria as apolitical, especially since it repeatedly subverts Vergil. In my view, didactic poetry has been deeply political since Hesiod.

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ent from challenging the validity of the law or defining legal boundaries. And Ovid’s Ars does undermine Augustus’ authority because the praeceptor assumes the pose of a legislator who dictates the legal code which should govern love affairs. Ovid and Augustus compete for control over the highly disputed and controversial area of extra-marital sex. The Ars opens with a couplet that seeks to establish the poet’s authority as the praeceptor addresses any Romans who may need instruction in love: Si quis in hoc artem populo non nouit amandi, hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet. Ars Amatoria 1.1– 2 If there is anyone in this nation who does not know the art of loving, let him read this poem and by reading it let him fall in love as a learned man.

Ovid’s diction suggests the beginning of a rhetorical speech and thus the poem begins with bringing together the art of loving and the art of speaking.¹⁸ The address to the Roman people is characteristic of rhetorical discourse and the praeceptor assumes right from the beginning a Ciceronian pose. The first words strongly suggest the opening of a Ciceronian speech.¹⁹ In the Pro Caelio, for instance, Cicero imagines a certain stranger who might be ignorant of Roman law: Si quis, iudices, forte nunc adsit ignarus legum…miretur profecto (‘If someone ignorant of our laws, jurors, were by chance now to be present…he would certainly be surprised’, Pro Caelio 1.1). The relevance of the Pro Caelio for the Ars Amatoria has not been studied, as far as I know, but it is certainly worth examining given that both works are preoccupied with the legal aspect of extra-marital affairs.²⁰ Cicero and Ovid start with the hypothesis of an ignorant man and proceed to instruct this imaginary person. Ignorance commonly compels poets to write didactic poetry, but rendering the jurors open to teaching is also a distinctive charac-

 Ovid’s didactic poem repeatedly draws a parallel between ars amandi and ars orandi, and its title, Ars Amatoria, puns on Ars Oratoria.  Several of Cicero’s speeches start with si quis: see Pro Caelio .; Diuinatio in Q. Caecilium .; Pro Sestio .; de Prouinciis Consularibus .; Pro Rabirio Postumo .; cf. the highly rhetorical opening of the prologue in Terence’s Eunuchus  – . Cicero opens his Pro Caelio like a Terentian prologue and it has been argued convincingly that comedy plays a crucial role in this speech; see Geffcken (); Leigh (). The comic plot of erotic deception is also central to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. Ovid opens his Remedia Amoris with an exordium of similar diction (see Remedia Amoris  – ).  Overall, the influence of Cicero on the Ars Amatoria has been by and large ignored. Gibson ()  – ,  – ,  – , a study of the importance of Cicero’s De officiis in the Ars Amatoria, is an exception.

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teristic of the rhetorical exordium.²¹ In Cicero, the hypothetical foreigner would be surprised at the peculiarity of a law which ordered that certain cases had to be tried even on public holidays²² and Plato employs a similar hypothesis in order to provide critique in the Laws. ²³ Thus, Ovid not only assumes the pose of an orator beginning his speech, but opens his work with a rhetorical exordium that implies instruction on legal issues. Advice on love affairs under Augustus is legally fraught and Ovid’s instructions are inevitably entangled with legal statements. The opening couplet evokes an authoritative declaration. A condition marked by si quis in the protasis and the imperative or the jussive subjunctive in the apodosis is a distinctive stylistic feature of legal tabulae. ²⁴ Thus, the jussive subjunctives (legat, amet) in the apodosis of the protasis si…non nouit suggest the authority of legal carmina. ²⁵ The opening couplet of the Ars performs a speech act structured like a legal statement; the participial resumption hoc legat et lecto carmine conveys the rapidity and efficiency with which reading and the practical application of what is read merge together. Ovid’s carmen defines the socio-political dynamics of love affairs, and its performative aspect –which breaks the boundaries between reading and doing– endows it with legal power.²⁶ This is the very nature of a carmen; a carmen is powerful language that changes the physical world and both carmen and legere are closely associated with legal discourse.²⁷ The etymological link between legere and lex in combination with the legal connotations of carmen

 Ignorance compels a poet to write didactic poetry: see Lucretius, De Rerum Natura . (ignoratur enim quae sit natura animai ‘for they ignore what the nature of the soul is’); Verg. Georgics . (ignaros…uiae…agrestis ‘ignorant of the rustic way’); Grattius, Cynegetica  (ignarum perfudit lumine uolgus ‘he enlightened the ignorant multitude’). The ploy is as old as Hesiod (see Opera et Dies  – ,  – ) and Empedocles (fr.  D-K). For the rhetorical doctrine that the exordium should render the jurors open to teaching (dociles), see Lausberg ()  – ; Dyck ()  – .  Cicero does not openly criticize the law but rather its application to Caelius’ case.  Noted in Dyck () .  See Meyer ()  – .  Cf. si defexit…ferito, Livy ..; si quis…faxit…esto, ILC = CIL .; si quis…fecerit… esto, Lex de imperio  – ,  – ; see Crawford () . – ; cf. si quis aduersum ea fecerit… iurent omnes socii, Cato, de Agri Cultura . ‘if someone has violated these rules…all the associates should take an oath’.  On the performativity of Ovid’s legal statements in Tristia , see Lowrie ()  – . Lowrie ()  notes that Ovid sets the poet and the lawmaker in contest as authors whose writings contradict each other. She further focuses on the dynamic interaction between Augustan poetry and Augustan law and examines the performative dynamics of literature and law; Lowrie ()  – .  See Lowrie ()  – ,  – .

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point to the oral reification of a law. Magdelain argues that lex is etymologically related to legere because the law was read aloud in the Senate before it was ratified by oath.²⁸ Along similar lines, Meyer (2004: 97– 101) examines the interaction between writing, reading, and posting the law as a ‘unitary act’ for the law’s ratification. Ovid’s first couplet performs all the procedures of senatorial ratification. The author (auctor) writes down a legal statement (carmen), which needs to be read by his readers in order to be sanctioned. Once this speech act is performed, Ovid’s carmen has the power to fulfil the authoritative statement that a law would carry within itself.²⁹ From the very beginning Ovid pits his poetic diction against legislative acts. Appropriation of legal acts for amatory purposes is not unknown before Ovid.³⁰ In Plautus’ Asinaria 746 – 809, a parasite draws up a contract between the young lover Diabolus, the courtesan Philaenium, and the procuress Cleareta.³¹ The terms of the contract are referred to as leges and the author as poeta (Asinaria 747– 9, 809), a telling conflation of legal and poetic authority. The etymological figure leges pellege (Asinaria 747) evokes the style of a carmen and suggests that a law is put into effect by being read aloud.³² The parasite’s contract contains conditional sentences typical of legal language: ‘If the girl has looked at another man, she should become blind on the spot’ (si quem alium aspexit, caeca continuo siet. Asinaria 770).³³ At this point, legal and magical language merge together.³⁴ Appropriately, the word carmen refers to laws and incantations since both legal and magical words are powerful speech acts with punitive force. The parasite’s curse is both a magic spell and a legal state-

 Magdelain ()  – . Svenbro ()  –  argues that a similar connection between reading and the law applies in Greek. For Svenbro, νόμος (‘law’) is etymologized from νέμω (‘I read’, not just ‘I distribute’) and Greek culture developed a conception of law inseparable from its conception of reading.  Cf. Lowrie () , citing Pierre ().  See Meyer ()  – , a discussion of parodies of legal language.  Meyer ()  points out the legal language and style of the parasite’s contract. See also Cynthia’s formula legis in Propertius .. – .  Etymological figures are a distinctive characteristic of legal style (cf. dedit dono, Asinaria , nomen nominet, Asinaria ). For figura etymologica as a stylistic element of carmina, see Meyer () , .  Cf. et si qua inutilis/ pictura sit, eam uendat, Asinaria  –  ‘if there is any useless picture, she should sell it’; si magis religiosa fuerit,/ tibi dicat, Asinaria  –  ‘if she is further obliged by religion, she should tell you’; si dixerit,/ haec multa ei esto, Asinaria  –  ‘if she has said, let this be her punishment’; si…dixerit,/…reddat,  –  ‘if she said… she should give’.  Magical spells were treated as an extension of or substitute for courtroom rhetorical efforts and legal punishment in Athens; see Allen ()  – .

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ment that binds Philaenium to a monogamous affair with Diabolus. The comic contract takes on added meaning if we take into account that prostitutes used their charms to seduce lovers and bawds routinely resorted to magic spells.³⁵ The parasite’s contract usurps this power from Philaenium and Cleareta and turns it against them. To some extent, the praeceptor of the Ars also usurps the magical power of the bawd and employs her erotodidactic discourse.³⁶ Ovid’s hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet (Ars Amatoria 1.2) combines the legal and magical power of reciting a carmen. Since the reading of Ovid’s poem will transform the readers and turn them into learned lovers, the ablative absolute (lecto carmine) functions as an ablative of means and thus Ovid’s students will fall in love by reading his fascinating poem. The Ars Amatoria is a charming poem and an authoritative law and the reading of such a work is a speech act that validates its contents and casts a spell on its readers.

The Letter of the Law: Acontius and Cydippe The motif of falling in love by reading features prominently in Latin poetry. Catullus, for instance, tells us that a certain girl was consumed by the fires of passion after reading Caecilius’ forthcoming epyllion, the Magna Mater (35.13 – 15). The myth of Acontius and Cydippe is also a case in point. Cydippe is bound to marry Acontius after she reads the hero’s message, which is inscribed on an apple, and inadvertently swears to marry none other than Acontius (see Callimachus, Aetia fr. 75.23 – 7 Pf.). But there is more to the myth than a cheeky trick. Cydippe virtually falls in love by reading Acontius’ words. Hardie argues that Ovid’s Acontius redirects his message with his elegiac epistle (Heroides 20); he further examines the magical power of the apple and its message and notes that the repetition of the inscription on the apple in the epistle lends to the latter something of the magical power of the oath to act at a distance, to produce effects in the physical world through the insubstantial tokens of words spoken or written, and ultimately to bring together the lovers in physical presence.³⁷

 The lena Dipsas, for instance, is an expert in magic spells; see illa magas artes Aeaeaque carmina nouit, Ov. Amores .. ‘She knows magical arts and Aeaean spells’. See McKeown () ad .. –  for further examples of lenae and prostitutes with magical powers.  See Gibson ()  – ,  – ,  – ; cf. Fear ().  Hardie () .

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Acontius’ message is a carmen, a magical speech act that causes Cydippe’s physical lovesickness. Interestingly, Acontius’ letter repeatedly employs the language of law.³⁸ For Acontius, Cydippe is legally bound to marry him after reading his message. The hero dresses up Cydippe’s involuntary oath in legal terms: she is his res (Heroides 20.150) in the legal meaning of ‘chattel’, and her reading resulted in a pactum (Heroides 20.151, 155).³⁹ In objectifying Cydippe, Acontius employs the legal language that describes a slave (res) and thus the elegiac poet gives another twist to the legalistic motif of seruitium amoris; the hero’s alluring inscription makes the heroine the slave of his desire. Magic spells become the basis of legal claims and the reading of love poetry is the cause of erotic passion. The recitation of charming verses is essentially a legal action.⁴⁰ Acontius’ expertise in law seems to be Ovid’s innovation.⁴¹ In Callimachus, Eros taught Acontius the art of winning over Cydippe, a variation of the motif of Eros as a teacher of love poetry:⁴² Αὐτὸς Ἔρως ἐδίδαξεν ᾿Aκόντιον, ὁππότε καλῇ ᾔθετο Κυδίππῃ παῖς ἐπὶ παρθενικῇ, τέχνην – οὐ γὰρ ὅγ’ ἔσκε πολύκροτος – ὄφρα λέγο..[ τοῦτο διὰ ζωῆς οὔνομα κουρίδιον. Callimachus, Aetia fr. 67.1– 4 Pf. Eros himself taught Acontius the art when the boy was burning for the beautiful maiden Cydippe – for he was not cunning – so that he might gain the name of husband for the rest of his life.

 See Kenney (); Videau (); Alekou ()  – .  See Kenney ()  – ; Alekou ()  – ,  – .  Acontius’ letter exemplifies Goodrich’s thesis, that the love letter is both more than law and in breach of law; see Goodrich (). For Goodrich, the love letter expresses the priority of desire over duty, of freedom of choice over marital subjection, of feminine autonomy over property interest. The political project of the love letter is aimed at nothing less than the subversion or transformation of institutions as spaces of relationship. Whether it supplements current legislation or violates it, the love letter is fundamentally a legal action– in fact, Goodrich argues, it is the original legal discourse that still survives in the affectivity of the legal subconscious.  See Kenney ()  – . Cydippe’s legal voice is also Ovid’s innovation. Stella Alekou (per litteras) points out that Ovid enriches Callimachus’ polypaideia on history, medicine etc. with legal nuances.  See ποιητὴν δ’ἄρα Ἔρως διδάσκει, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρὶν, Euripides, Stheneboea fr.  Nauck ‘but Eros instructs a poet then, even though he was songless before’; οἱ γὰρ Ἔρωτες ποιητὰς πολλοὺς ἐδίδαξαν τοὺς πρὶν ἀμούσους, Theocritus, SH  ‘for the Erotes taught many poets who were songless before’; see also Plato, Symposium d.

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Erotic desire turns inexperienced boys into resourceful lovers. Ovid’s Acontius is aware of this conceit when he writes to Cydippe that even though he is not naturally cunning, she makes him an expert.⁴³ Cydippe seems to have replaced the anthropomorphic Eros of the Aetia, but Ovid’s rational interpretation of erotic desire is followed by a distinctly anthropomorphic Amor, who gives Acontius legal advice:⁴⁴ te mihi conpositis (siquid tamen egimus) a se adstrinxit uerbis ingeniosus Amor. dictatis ab eo feci sponsalia uerbis, consultoque fui iuris Amore uafer. Heroides 20.27– 30 If indeed we played any part in the matter, ingenious Love joined you to me with words that he contrived. I made the betrothal with words he dictated and I became cunning in the law since Amor was my counselor.

Acontius takes legal advice from Amor, a counselor learned in the law who prepares his client for appearance in court.⁴⁵ The passage is rife with legal diction: adstringo refers to the language of a binding oath, the κατάδεσμος of Greek love charms,⁴⁶ but it can also mean ‘to bind by laws or promises’ (OLD s.v. 8); the prosaic and legalistic ab eo feci sponsalia conveys the formal tone of Amor’s dictation of the act of betrothal;⁴⁷ iuris ingeniously applies both to Acontius, who becomes cunning in law (iuris…uafer), and Amor, who is Acontius’ jurisconsult (consulto…iuris).⁴⁸ Ovid builds on Amor’s traditional role as a teacher of love and love poetry, and adds a legal dimension to this motif. In Heroides 20, Amor’s dictation of an elegiac message is indistinguishable from his legal instructions since elegiac discourse has the power of making and enacting a contract.⁴⁹ Cydippe is legally bound by what she reads, but also falls in love

 non ego natura nec sum tam callidus usu; /sollertem tu me, crede, puella, facis. Heroides . –  “I am that cunning neither by inclination nor by practice; you, trust me, girl, make me wily” alludes to and rationalizes Ἔρως ἐδίδαξεν ᾿Aκόντιον… τέχνην – οὐ γὰρ ὅγ’ ἔσκε πολύκροτος, Callimachus, Aetia fr. . –  Pf.  On Amor as both a god and desire or a god who is Desire, see Hardie ()  – .  “Ovid makes Acontius say that he has taken the best professional advice: the picture is that of a consultation, with Cupid as counsel learned in the law, sending his client away well primed for his appearance in court.” Kenney () .  See Barchiesi () ; Rosenmeyer () .  Acontius’ ‘I made a betrothal’ is provocative, given that two parties were necessary for a betrothal; see Kenney () ad loc.  See Kenney () ad loc.  On elegiac love as contract, see Gebhardt ()  – .

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by reading Acontius’ seductive message. Amor dictates the laws of erotic persuasion and the legal details of a nuptial contract.⁵⁰ Acontius’ amatory missive is reminiscent of a sponsio (an oral betrothal) or a stipulatio (an oral contract). The verb spondeo is used in the contractual formula of the stipulatio/ sponsio; it means ‘I give a pledge’ to do something in general or ‘I give a pledge to give in marriage’ in particular. According to traditional Roman law, the stipulatio was binding even if it was the result of a trick; it was a contract of strict law (the promisor was still bound even if he had entered the contract as a result of fraud or extortion). This was remedied by praetors around 80 BCE.⁵¹ Ovid’s Acontius takes part in a juristic dispute by claiming the validity of his oral contract, even though it was the product of dolus. The elegiac discourse of seduction merges with Roman property and family laws. Erotic desire acquires juridical authority and tricks are the justified means for winning over the beloved. Ovid manages to add a legal dimension to Callimachus’ Aetia by alluding to his source with the key word causa, the Latin translation of the Greek αἴτιον. A particularly perceptive student of Cupid’s lessons in law, Acontius mischievously complains that he is forced to plead his case in absentia: ⁵² nunc reus infelix absens agor et mea, cum sit optima, non ullo causa tuente perit. Heroides 20.91– 2 Now I am prosecuted in my absence as an unfortunate defendant and my case, though the best, is lost since I have no defense counsel.

Acontius’ causa is the best since it derives from Callimachus, an excellent model for poets like Ovid. At the same time, Acontius’ legal pose recontextualizes Ovid’s appeal to his source. The Aetia turns out to be more important than a literary model or a source for etiologies since it provides Acontius with authoritative evidence that offers invaluable support to his trial (causa). Acontius bases his case on a mythological version that comes straight out of Callimachus’ Aetia and thus expects his readers to consider his arguments truthful:

 The confluence of law and love has been the focus of recent studies in legal theory; see Bankowski (); Goodrich ().  See Watson () . From a different perspective, Videau (), ()  – , and Alekou ()  – ,  – , argue that Acontius refers to the legal concept of dolus bonus. Acontius asks Cydippe to summon him in order to defend himself in court (alluding to in ius uocatio), at Heroides . – .  Videau () and Alekou ()  –  point out that a procedure by default was not in iure.

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ei mihi, Cydippe, timeo tibi dicere uerum, ne uidear causa falsa monere mea; dicendum tamen est. Heroides 20.107– 9 Woe to me, Cydippe, I fear to tell you the truth, lest I seem to lie for my cause. However, I should speak.

Acontius shares with Callimachus a concern about the true cause (causa/αἴτιον) of Cydippe’s illness. The Alexandrian poet reveals that his source was Xenomedes, an old historian who was concerned with the truth of the tale of Acontius and Cydippe (πρέσβυς ἐτητυμίηι μεμελημένος, fr. 75.76 Pf.).⁵³ In the Aetia, the reason for Cydippe’s illness is given by Apollo (fr. 75.22– 37 Pf.), an oracle that solves the mystery and is a catalyst for the fulfillment of Acontius’ plan. Apollo is proverbially a god of truth (Pindar, Pythian Odes 3.29 – 30, 9.42; Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.789 – 90) and his oracle straightforwardly explains that Cydippe is bound with an oath to marry none other than Acontius. The reason which Ovid’s Acontius gives (Heroides 20.109 – 16) to explain the cause of Cydippe’s illness is a version of Callimachus’ Aetia (fr. 75.10 – 12, 16 – 37 Pf.) and that is why the hero’s claim to truth needs to be taken seriously. A number of authoritative voices resonate in Acontius’ statement: Apollo, the prophet of truth, Xenomedes, the truthful historian, and Callimachus, the poet of the Aetia and ultimate source of Acontius’ letter. Ovid’s Acontius does not invent excuses for his own benefit (causa… mea), but appeals to a long and authoritative tradition of history and etiology.⁵⁴ Acontius has indeed a strong case and that is what he says in his apostrophe to his rival: nam quod habes et tu gemini uerba altera pacti, non erit idcirco par tua causa meae. Heroides 20.155 – 6 even though you too have another agreement with identical words, your cause will not be for that reason equal to mine.

 Commenting on Callimachus’ citation of the historian Xenomedes, Rosenmeyer ()  notes: “By pointing to these historical origins, Callimachus subtly argues for the “truth” of his own writings. The direct reference to the historical source supports his claim to scholarly authenticity, as he builds his text on the foundation of yet another text.” Historical documents confirm mythological truths.  Rimell ()  notes that Ovid’s Cydippe is framed by the onus of canonical texts.

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Acontius imagines that he is settling a legal dispute with Cydippe’s fiancé.⁵⁵ They both have identical contracts that claim the same woman, but Acontius’ causa is superior since it originates in Callimachus’ Aetia. Ovid’s causa refers simultaneously to legal action and poetic tradition. Literary sources are recast as evidence in a legal dispute and intertext becomes the trope of law within the court of elegiac love. As he elaborates on his claim that his causa is superior to his rival’s, Acontius suggests a legal reform based on the laws of amatory passion. His contract, he argues, is based on love and that is why it is superior to any legal commitment that ignores the rules of desire. There are several levels of correspondence in Heroides 20 – 21. There is the correspondence between Acontius and Cydippe, the imaginary dispute between Acontius and Cydippe’s fiancé, the correspondence between love elegy and Roman law, between divine and human law, and between Ovid and his sources. Discussing the precedence of the love letter over legal codes, Goodrich (1997: 285) notes that the “[l]aw shares the lover’s concern with the structural significance of originals– with authenticity and the iconic status of written expression”. Acontius’ obsession with legal evidence intersects with Ovid’s love for literary texts. Not unlike Ovid’s intertextual authentication, law is a matter of originals because it is always bound to the inscription of prior forms. Legal writing is a correspondence, a writing that is always a rewriting of older sources, of precedents which repeat or customs which inscribe a prior, superior or divine law (see Goodrich 1997: 286). But the Roman law is an odd companion of elegiac persuasion. Acontius makes sure to stress that he is seeking lawful marriage, not an illegitimate affair: coniugium, pactamque fidem, non crimina, posco; debitus ut coniunx, non ut adulter, amo. Heroides 20.7– 8 I seek marriage, and a loyal contract, not adultery; I love you as your destined husband, not as a womanizer.

Despite his overall deceptive strategy, Acontius is sincere here; he actually wants to marry Cydippe, not simply have an illicit relationship with her, and his language creates a sharp distinction between marital bonds and extra-marital affairs. Legally fraught terms polarize the loyalty of a husband and the reprehensible behavior of an adulterer. On the one side of the couplet we have coniugium, pactamque fidem, debitus coniunx, while on the other crimina and adulter. The distinction is between following the law and breaking it, but also between ele Note the transactional tone of the prosaic idcirco.

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giac passion, typically extra-marital and often described as a crimen, and conjugal union. Ovid’s Acontius ostensibly denies playful loves and criminal adulteries for the serious commitment of wedlock. Yet his peculiar marriage contract is attempted adultery, given that Cydippe is already engaged with another man and bound with a betrothal that is legitimate, unlike Acontius’ shenanigans. We are dealing with a love triangle typical of Roman elegy: Acontius is the amator who tries to seduce a woman who belongs to another man.⁵⁶ Acontius’ language creates tensions and intersections between elegiac and legal discourse. His formal betrothal is at odds with his elegiac passion, while the law becomes a servant of elegiac deception. Ovid’s readers know that a lover’s oaths and pledges are proverbially void⁵⁷ and that Cydippe’s involuntary oath would have no value in Rome. Kenney (1970: 395) notes that it was a principle of Roman law that no claim founded on dolus could stand, but Acontius evokes the legal concept of dolus bonus ⁵⁸ and the stipulatio as a stricto iure contract. While the legitimacy of dolus is exceptional in the world of Roman law, treachery and deceit rule over elegiac seduction. In fact, the words Acontius sent to Cydippe literalize the common Latin idiom uerba dare (‘to deceive’); in some manuscripts, Heroides 20 opens with precisely this pun (Accipe, Cydippe, despecti nomen Aconti–/ illius in pomo qui tibi uerba dedit. Heroides 20.1a-2a ‘Receive, Cydippe, the name of scorned Acontius who deceived you/ sent you a message on his apple’)⁵⁹ and, in her response, Cydippe plays on the literal and transferred meaning of uerbum (uerba quid exultas tua si mihi uerba dederunt…? Heroides 21.121 ‘why do you rejoice in your words if they deceived me…?’). A message sent to be read aloud is a pledge exacted with deception and Acontius’ lawful fraud both brings together and polarizes legal and elegiac carmina. In Heroides 20, the law has become a rhetoric of seduction, a discourse manipulated by Amor for deceiving a beautiful woman. To some extent, Ovid employs legal language in order to stress the weakness of the law in the face of true passion. A rational interpretation of the myth would suggest that a beautiful woman would be more excited about the love of a passionate young man than the prospect of an arranged marriage. Cydippe’s sickness caused by her reading the apple is lovesickness; the young woman has fallen in love by reading Acontius’ message and suffers from the typical symptoms

 Acontius twists this and warns his rival that he is getting close to committing adultery (Heroides .).  See Callimachus, Epigram ; Meleager, AP .; Catullus ; Ovid, Ars Amatoria . – .  Videau (); ()  – ; Alekou ()  – ,  –  on the legality of dolus bonus.  Kenney ()  is sure that the couplet is spurious; see also Kirfel ()  – .

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of elegiac infatuation. The temptation of Acontius’ inscribed apple is far more powerful than an unemotional engagement and the language of desire trumps the technicalities of a wedding pact. Acontius’ legal claims are unconvincing, even ludicrous, but this is the point. Ovid casts Amor as an authority on legal issues, in order to stress that true passion is not only above the law, but also is the law. Cupid and Diana join forces in order to make the marriage of Acontius and Cydippe happen. The collaboration of these antithetical divine archers who enable Acontius to wound Cydippe with his love missile (see Heroides 20.229 – 39) is as striking as the collusion of Roman law and elegy. The hero ends his letter with a fantasy; he imagines the dedication of a golden apple to Diana in imitation of the original fruit, which helped him to possess Cydippe. An elegiac couplet will be inscribed on a votive offering, Acontius muses, acknowledging the authorization of the message on the original apple: aurea ponetur mali felicis imago causaque uersiculis scripta duobus erit: EFFIGIE POMI TESTATUR ACONTIVS HVIVS QUAE FVERINT IN EO SCRIPTA FVISSE RATA. Heroides 20.237– 40 A golden image of the fruitful apple will be set up and the reason will be written in two little verses: WITH THE LIKENESS OF THIS APPLE ACONTIUS SOLEMNLY DECLARES THAT WHAT WAS WRITTEN ON IT HAS BEEN CERTIFIED.

The language of prayer merges with the language of law. The votive apple attests that Acontius’ prayer to marry Cydippe or rather Cydippe’s involuntary oath to marry Acontius was granted fulfillment (rata). At the same time, the diction is distinctly legalistic. The phrase testatur Acontius evokes the language of a testatio, the written declaration of a witness that was commonly taken into account in court. Witnesses often wrote these statements in the third person and attested or declared (testantur) that this or that had occurred.⁶⁰ The statements commonly speak of obligations that have been discharged or contracts that have been fulfilled.⁶¹ Acontius’ couplet is exactly this sort of witness-statement. The phrase in eo scripta fuisse rata is a declaration that the message on the original apple has been rendered legally valid.⁶² In this context, testatur means that Acontius

 There are several examples from Pompeii and Herculaneum; see Meyer ()  – .  See Meyer ()  – .  Note the prosaic in eo that conveys the dry style of legal transactions.

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certifies the message on the apple as authentic (see OLD s.v. testor 2b). A deceptive oath inscribed on a piece of fruit is treated as a legal document and the golden likeness of this apple, the votive offering for the marriage’s fulfillment, authenticates the legitimacy of the original message. In a genuinely Ovidian manner, imitation validates deception. The medium of witness-statements played a crucial role in court and it was their physical form that made them authoritative. A testatio had to be written on a tabula or tabella, while other forms of documents, such as letters and testimonies on papyri, were an invitation to objections. As Meyer puts it, truth was embodied in tabulae; the other forms of documents were bitterly contested ground.⁶³ Given the importance of the physical form of legal statements, it is worth examining the material on which Acontius’ statement is inscribed. His first message is delivered via an apple, a potent symbol of enchantment and temptation, but a medium that could hardly be authorized in a Roman courtroom. Yet the source of Acontius’ apple is Callimachus’ Aetia. Ovid’s causa activates the reference to Callimachus’ Aetia and imago is a marker of an intertextual echo.⁶⁴ From an intertextual perspective, the story of Acontius and Cydippe is inscribed on and prescribed in the Aetia, a work in which the poet draws attention to the fact (or the fiction) that he is writing on a δέλτος (fr. 1.21– 2 Pf.), the Greek equivalent to the Latin tabula. Callimachus brings up the material medium of his poetry in the famous epiphany of Apollo in the prologue:⁶⁵ καὶ γὰρ ὅτ⌋ε πρ⌊ώ⌋τιστον ἐμοῖς ἐπὶ δέλτον ἔθηκα γούνασι⌋ν, ᾿A[πό]λλων εἶπεν ὅ μοι Λύκιος Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1.21– 2 Pf. And when I first put a writing-tablet on my knees, Lycian Apollo told me

Ovid reworks this passage in the epiphany of Janus at the beginning of the Fasti (haec ego cum sumptis agitare mente tabellis,/ lucidior uisa est, quam fuit ante, domus. Fasti 1.93 – 4 ‘While I was pondering these after taking up my tablets, the house looked brighter than it was before’). Ovid translates δέλτον as tabellis and

 Meyer () . On the importance of the physical form of the tabulae in legal statements, see Meyer ()  – . Other forms of letters were also cited by advocates (especially in the last century of the Republic), but their validity depended mostly on the authority of the sender.  See Barchiesi ()  for causa in Heroides . as alluding to the Aetia as Ovid’s model. For imago as intertextual echo, see Barchiesi ()  – ; cf. Hinds ()  – .  Callimachus mentions the writing-tablets of Xenomedes in the episode of Acontius and Cydippe. The authoritative mythographer chronicled the history of Ceos in his δέλτοι (γέρων ἐνεθήκατο δέλτοις, fr. . Pf. ‘old Xenomedes recorded in his writing-tablets’). Callimachus’ writing-tablets reproduce the work of Xenomedes of old.

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marks his allusion to Callimachus with a subtle wordplay on Λύκιος-lucidior. In the Fasti, a work whose very title is a legal term, Ovid becomes a scribe who writes down the words of Janus. The Roman poet programmatically blends divine inspiration with legal directions in a passage that replaces the Greek Apollo of the Aetia with the distinctly Roman Janus.⁶⁶ If we take into account the importance of the Aetia in Heroides 20 – 21, we realize that Acontius’ imaginary inscription works on two levels: within the fiction of the epistles, the hero refers to his original message on the apple, but outside the fictional world, Ovid has Acontius certify the authoritative text of Callimachus’ Aetia, a work written on a δέλτος/ tabula and thus carrying the significance of a legal statement. The cause that binds Cydippe to her oath is to be found in Callimachus and Ovid turns the literary authority of the Aetia into legal evidence. In the Heroides, fictional objects converge with intertextual realities. Yet the division between wishful thinking and wish fulfillment is also crucial within the framework of the mythological tale. Even within the fictional world the likeness of the apple is merely a fantasy, yet its realization depends on Acontius marrying Cydippe, a happy ending known to the reader, who can thus entertain the realization of the golden apple by indulging in Acontius’ fantasy. Ovid’s readers can venture to predict the mythological future because they are aware of the literary past. At the same time, the daydream of a votive offering is flimsy if we consider that it is a fanciful Ovidian innovation that has no basis in literary tradition. Ovid likes to draw attention to his belatedness by simultaneously alluding to literary traditions and inventing playful novelties. The future projection of another apple is an imitation of and an innovation on Callimachus’ original. What is more, the second apple is a comment on Ovid’s Heroides as texts composed after the Aetia. Ovid’s epistle both imitates and updates Callimachus. The materiality of messages inscribed on apples should be examined vis-àvis the writing-tablets of Callimachus and Ovid. Both poets mention the δέλτος/ tabella on which they are writing and Ovid mentions the tabellae of love letters several times.⁶⁷ And once we suspend our disbelief and give credit to the mythological realities of Acontius’ letter, we realize that the hero’s imaginary authorization of his original message is actually written on a tabella sealed with his signature. From that perspective, the medium and diction of his inscription look more like a testatio and less like a fanciful reverie. It is also important to bear in mind that witness-statements were ratified by being read aloud. The reader

 On law and etiology in the Fasti, see Gebhardt ()  – .  See Amores .., ,  – , .. – , .., , .., ..; Ars Amatoria ., ., ; Metamorphoses .,  – .

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embodied the voice of the witness and his or her recitation was a simultaneous validation of the witness’ statement. Acontius wants to make Cydippe play this role.⁶⁸ The hero has resorted to a similar trick in his apostrophe to Cydippe’s fiancé. Acontius demands that the words of the contract be read and encourages his rival to have Cydippe read them (recitetur formula pacti;/ neu falsam dicas esse, fac ipsa legat. Heroides 20.151– 2 ‘let us have the actual terms of the agreement read out; and lest you say it is false, make her read them’). Kenney notes that Acontius uses the language of an advocate in court demanding the production of documents.⁶⁹ By reading aloud his message, Cydippe would declare Acontius’ statement valid and she would once more fulfill his wishes. At the end of his letter, Acontius attempts to deceive the heroine again with an inscription, which would trick her into certifying his fantasies, and Ovid inventively replays and Romanizes the Callimachean scenario. The authorization of witness-statements depends both on textual materiality and oral delivery. The myth of Acontius and Cydippe revolves around the controversial idea that the heroine’s recitation validates the hero’s message and Ovid repeatedly resorts to the realities of the Roman legal system in order to legitimize his playful appropriation of a Greek myth. While reading is etymologically grafted into Roman law, the erotic aspect of the author/reader relationship is essential to understanding Acontius’ success. According to Greco-Roman perceptions of reception, the author penetrates the reader by means of a written message.⁷⁰ Reading aloud someone else’s words is how an author enters the body of a reader. This sexualization of recitation is the key to understanding how Acontius manages to possess Cydippe by means of written words read aloud. As Cydippe finishes the recitation of Acontius’ letter, she embodies the imaginary inscription on a golden apple and thus she embodies the imaginary apple. The heroine’s name puns on the Greek word for quince (Κυδώνιον μῆλον) and Aristaenetus attests that Acontius deceived Cydippe with a Cydonian apple (Aristaenetus 1.10.27 Vieillefond).⁷¹ Ovid relies on the Cydippe-κυδώνιον wordplay in order to show that Acontius’ message collapses Cydippe’s identity with that of the apple of temptation. In her epistle, the sick (or lovesick) heroine compares her bloodless complexion with the pale color of the fruit (concidimus macie, color est sine sanguine, qualem/ in pomo refero mente fuisse tuo, Heroides

 Cydippe tries to protect herself from the risk of reading Acontius’ words aloud and opens her epistle by saying that she read his letter silently (Heroides . – ). Ovid’s heroine does not want to repeat the mistake of her Callimachean counterpart.  Kenney () ad ..  See Svenbro ()  – ; Rosenmeyer () .  See Rosenmeyer ()  n. ; Trumpf ().

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21.215 – 16 ‘I am enfeebled with emaciation, my complexion is bloodless, just like the color that, as I recall, was in your fruit’).⁷² The pallor of the fruit subtly but clearly suggests that it is a pale quince, not a red apple.⁷³ The passionate message transforms the woman’s complexion into the color of a quince and the effect of Acontius’ trick is that it assimilates Cydippe to the Cydonian apple; the heroine turns into Acontius’ passion fruit.⁷⁴ While reading the projected inscription of Heroides 20.239 – 40, Cydippe becomes an imitation of the votive apple, a corporeal realization of a fictive image. The heroine’s delivery bears the fruit of Acontius’ fantasy and her body becomes the medium of a message that symbolizes Acontius’ possession of herself. This is a fine example of Ovid’s favorite interplay between the textual and sexual nature of love elegy’s object of desire.⁷⁵ An imaginary inscription on a Cydonian apple is materialized with the oral recitation of a Cydonian heroine, an addition to the interchangeability between the corpus of elegiac poetry and of elegiac puellae. Cydippe is the vocal embodiment of Acontius’ passion. The reception of Heroides 20 is further nuanced if we take into account that Ovid likes to draw attention to the language and materiality of the letters in order to highlight their fictionality. In Heroides 3.1– 4, for instance, Briseis apologizes for her broken Greek and the teary blots on her letter. We are invited to imagine Achilles reading a foreign woman’s clumsy Greek in a letter littered with misprints, but what Ovid’s readers actually face is the poet’s clear and fluent Latin.⁷⁶ The involvement of the reader in the text (Achilles in Heroides 3 or Cydippe in Heroides 20) should be distinguished from the experience of the reader of the text (Ovid’s readership). From our perspective, a formal ratification of  Cf. quam tibi nunc gracilem uix haec rescribere quamque/ pallida uix cubito membra leuare puta! Heroides . –  ‘how wasted away you must imagine her to be who can scarcely pen this answer to you, how sallow the limbs that she can scarcely raise on one arm’ (transl. Kenney). Ovid echoes Callimachus’ τὴν δ᾽ εἷλε κακὸς χλόος, fr. . Pf. ‘but evil pallor seized her’.  Cf. palluit, ut…/…quaeque suos curuant matura Cydonia ramos (Procris) Ovid, Ars Amatoria . –  ‘She grew pale, just as ripe quinces which bend their own branches’.  Cf. Cydippe’s forma noui talis marmoris esse solet, Heroides . ‘such as the usual appearance of a new marble’, on which Alekou ()  comments: “un appariement original est introduit qui dépasse celui esquissé par Acontius, lorsque la comparaison avec le marbre confirme la virtualité allégorique de la peinture. La mise en valeur du support d’épigrammes et du matériau à sculpter transforme la figure en œuvre d’art. Toutefois, de la pomme au marbre, l’objet iconique se transforme jusqu’à ce qu’il s’identifie à la lettre en soi. L’inversion concerne autant la figure que le texte, puisque le “ sujet ” syntaxique est en même temps l’objet iconique.” (My emphasis).  See Wyke (); ().  See Ziogas ()  – . Similarly, Cydippe refers to her poor handwriting in Heroides ..

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Acontius’ tabula is nothing more than part of Ovid’s insubstantial poetics. Instead of conflating Greek myth with Roman reality, the anachronistic application of the legal realities of the Romans to an ancient Greek myth ultimately stresses the irreconcilable gap between the fictional world of Ovid’s characters and the real world of his readers. Witness-statements, seals, and ratifications of authoritative documents belong to the Roman legal system, but become immaterial rhetoric at Ovid’s hands. Yet pure rhetoric is what matters above all in Latin love elegy and the technicalities of the law are useful only if they serve the purposes of elegiac persuasion and deception. In the end, hard evidence fades away and illusion reasserts its power in matters of desire.

Libertine Love and Legal Limitations Roman law and love elegy are brought together at the beginning of the Ars’ inuentio. The prologue of the Ars opens with an invitation to the reader to authorize the praeceptor’s instructions, as we have seen above, and the first couplet of the inuentio brings up issues of legal and amatory license: dum licet et loris passim potes ire solutis, elige cui dicas ‘tu mihi sola places.’ Ars Amatoria 1.41– 2 While it is permitted and you can go everywhere on a loose rein, pick a girl and tell her: ‘you alone please me.’

Ovid’s dum licet implies the legal restrictions to the carefree period of amatory pursuits. Emilio Pianezzola reads this couplet as drawing a distinction between the frivolous love affairs of youth and the serious commitments of a more mature age.⁷⁷ The license granted to young men’s playful affairs with prostitutes is counterbalanced by grown-up-men’s legal obligations to marriage; the leisure of youth gives way to the business of adult life. This transition from youthful playfulness to adult responsibilities is a defining characteristic of Roman comedy. In Terence’s Adelphoe, for instance, the lenient senex Micio says that young men should be allowed to have affairs with prostitutes (101– 10). The rationale is that this license should be given to youth, so that inappropriate love affairs do not occur at a more responsible age. Ideally, a young man will eventually get fed up with prostitutes and devote himself to the good old Roman values.  Pianezzola () XXIII and ad Ars Amatoria . – . For a similar approach, see Labate ()  – .

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Even the censor Cato approved of a young Roman whom he saw coming out of a brothel since sex with prostitutes protected Roman citizens from committing adultery (see Hor. Satires 1.2.31– 5). From that perspective, Ovid’s dum licet refers to youthful extra-marital affairs with prostitutes, that is, affairs which do not break adultery laws. As the slave Palinurus puts it: dum ted apstineas nupta, uidua, uirgine, / iuuentute et pueris liberis, ama quidlubet (‘So long as you stay away from the married woman, the widow, the maiden, the youth, and freeborn boys, love whatever you fancy’ Plautus, Curculio 37– 8). Young men should make sure to choose eligible women for their playful loves. In his Pro Caelio, Cicero employs similar rhetoric. Caelius is cast as an adolescens from Roman comedy and Cicero reminds the jurors that license to playful loves is traditionally granted to young men (Pro Caelio 48). Cicero appeals not only to the licentia of his age but also to the customs and consent of the ancestors (maiorum consuetudine atque concessis, Pro Caelio 48) when it comes to young men’s love affairs with meretrices and thus he makes sex with prostitutes part of the mos maiorum. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria often gives the impression that it is addressed to jurors⁷⁸ and at this point it echoes the rhetoric of the Pro Caelio. Cicero’s licentia corresponds to Ovid’s dum licet and Cicero’s concessis parallels Ovid’s concessaque furta (Ars Amatoria 1.33), the wittily subversive ‘legitimately illegitimate affairs’ that forms part of the legal language of the programmatic disclaimer.⁷⁹ Ovid seems to subscribe to a long tradition of Roman comedy and rhetoric according to which it is lawfully permitted to young men to indulge in affairs with prostitutes. Such frivolous liaisons ultimately protect the chastity of Roman women and buttress traditional Roman morality. This interpretation is certainly legitimate, but there is another way of reading Ars 1.41– 2, which renders the traditional concerns of Roman law and the Augustan legislation irrelevant. Ovid’s focus here is not necessarily on young age in general and its entitlement to playful love affairs in particular, but in a period when a man has not lost his freedom due to love’s constraints. Freedom does not follow the laws and customs of conventional Roman morality but is subject to the constrictions of amorous passion. Hollis (1977: 41) points out that dum licet implies that there might come a time when Ovid’s addressee is really in love and no longer a free agent. In the world of Roman love elegy, Cupid enslaves the lover and puts an end to his free will; freedom is something one enjoys before  The disclaimers are the most prominent examples (e. g., Ars Amatoria . – , . – ).  See also the legal language in Seneca, Controuersiae .. (concessis aetati uoluptatibus utor et iuuenali lege defungor; id facio quod pater meus fecit cum iuuenis esset. ‘I am enjoying the playfulness granted to my age and taking advantage of the law for young men. I am doing what my father did when he was young’).

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one falls in love. Within the generic framework of Roman love elegy, Hollis’ reading makes sense, especially if we take into account another Ovidian couplet that begins with dum licet: dum licet, et modici tangunt praecordia motus, si piget, in primo limine siste pedem. Remedia Amoris 79 – 80 While it is permitted and moderate emotions touch your heart, even if it is unpleasant, stop your step at the edge of the threshold.

Obviously, Ovid is not talking about the Roman legal system or the free rein given to youthful liaisons with prostitutes. Instead, the poet refers to the first symptoms of erotic desire. Not unlike a disease, love can be cured more easily and efficiently at the start, before the infection spreads throughout the body and the mind. Resist passion before it is too late and thus impossible to fight back, advises the poet of the Remedia Amoris. The message of Ars 1.41– 2 is similar. Rational selection (elige) is possible at this early stage of looking for the right woman. The first stage of a conscious and calculated choice of the appropriate object of desire will inevitably end once the lover is entangled in the nets of monogamous obsession. The commitment of tu mihi sola places signals the beginning of the end of a lover’s freedom. To be sure, such confession is conceited and the beloved’s uniqueness is undermined by the banality of the statement.⁸⁰ In the Ars, the echo of the conventional statement of elegiac devotion is part of a self-conscious strategy of seduction, not a sincere confession of true love.⁸¹ Yet while the praeceptor urges his students to parrot a common tag of Latin love elegy, there is always the danger that the man who plays the role of the lover will actually fall in love (see Ars Amatoria 1.615 – 16). Feigned love may become real and, as an antidote to true passion, Ovid recommends that men should have two or, if possible, more girlfriends (Remedia Amoris 441– 2). Similarly, Lucretius suggests that the festering obsession of a monogamous lover can be cured with the wandering pleasures of a wandering Venus (De Rerum Natura 4.1068 – 78). An exclusive desire for a single woman can be the source of suffering that leads to loss of freedom. Ars 1.41– 2 is appropriately framed by dum licet… ‘tu

 Ovid here quotes and encourages his students to repeat the elegiac lover’s conventional declaration of faith to his exclusive beloved (see Prop. ..; [Tib.] ..).  Ovid will later advise his students to seduce the maid before seducing the lady (Ars Amatoria . – ) and instruct them how to be successfully unfaithful to their girlfriends (Ars Amatoria . – ).

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mihi sola places’ since freedom of choice is lost once the lover devotes himself to a single woman. Ovid’s tu mihi sola places echoes a common elegiac dictum, but in a couplet that brings up issues of love and legislation it further activates a specific reference to Propertius’ tu mihi sola places (2.7.19), which concludes a poem that celebrates the triumph of elegiac love over marriage legislation.⁸² Propertius begins his poem by stating that Cynthia is happy because a law that threatened their affair is now repealed.⁸³ In a twist of the elegiac recusatio, Propertius declares that Caesar’s Jovian arms are mighty in war but have no power over love affairs (2.7.3 – 6). The nature of Propertius’ love is above the law of Rome and his Roman duty to father children. The confession of his exclusive love for Cynthia (tu mihi sola places) emphasizes that the uniqueness of his affair defies social norms and legal categorizations (e. g., marital, extra-marital, illicit, adulterous). Cynthia can rejoice in Augustus’ repeal of a marriage law, but Propertius reminds us that imperial legislation has no power over true love anyway. Cynthia alone pleases the poet and sola pits the elegiac puella not only against other women but also against the Augustan ideals of fighting battles and fathering children for Rome.⁸⁴ Ovid’s Propertian echo in Ars 1.42 reminds his readers that the love for a special woman matters more than anything else and that the shackles of elegiac passion are stronger than any legal constrictions. In sum, there are two ways of reading Ars 1.41– 2: one is concerned with Roman law, while the other refers to the laws of elegiac passion. Both of these readings deal with time and timing: the former refers to a transition from the frivolities of youth to the serious responsibilities of adulthood, while the latter refers to a transition from the playful affairs of a libertine to the dire constraints of monogamous passion. Both interpretations are valid and both should be taken into account, but it should be noted that they can hardly co-exist. In Freudian terms, this is a case of Kompromissbildung, a semiotic manifestation which makes room, simultaneously, for two opposite meanings, which stand in an ir-

 On Propertius’ stance at Augustus’ marriage law in this poem, see Cairns (); Stahl ()  – ; Gale ()  – .  We do not know much about the legislation and its contents, and reconstructing the law from Propertius’ elegy is an unreliable method. On this issue, see Cairns (); Stahl ()  – . Badian () argues that this was not Augustus’ law but an old law repealed by Octavian in  BCE along with other Triumviral measures. He speculates that the repealed law was about taxation of bachelors. Badian’s theory is not supported by Propertius’ text, or actually by any other evidence, and unsurprisingly did not find many followers; see Treggiari ()  – .  Cf. Rothstein () ad loc.; Stahl ()  – .

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reconcilable relationship to one another.⁸⁵ The reader needs to choose one and when Ovid makes readers choose, he prompts them to make a political decision. This is an example of what Frederick Ahl calls “the art of safe criticism”:⁸⁶ Ovid forces the reader to “find the points for himself and suppose the judgment he passes is his own, not one suggested by the writer.”⁸⁷ The poet tries to protect himself by remaining noncommittal, while triggering a disclosure of his readers’ biases and political affiliations. We can choose to interpret the couplet as Ovid’s subscribing to conventional morality and validating Augustus’ adultery laws, but we cannot ignore that an alternative reading trumps traditional Roman mores. Whatever we choose, our choice would probably reveal more about ourselves and less about Ovid’s intentions. Ovid’s text is a mirror that reflects our own prejudices. And this is precisely what objective critics fear the most. Scholars sometimes argue that a single interpretation is objectively the correct one or more often try to resist commitment to a single reading and have it both ways. It is part of the scholarly style to assume a detached and disinterested pose, but it is a characteristic of a passionate reader to commit to one reading. Admittedly, Ovid expects his readers to be both disinterested and passionate, but, like the elegiac lover’s sober reasoning, dispassionate judgment fades away once we dedicate ourselves to Ovid’s poetry and let his charm seduce us. Shedding all pretensions of critical impartiality, I confess that I prefer to read Ovid as undermining Augustan legislation. Passion has its own rules and its power exceeds moral and social norms. Once erotic desire incapacitates free choice and rational decision, there is little room for heeding legal restrictions. Overall, the Ars Amatoria replaces moral for aesthetic criteria⁸⁸ and makes desirability rather than eligibility the main characteristic of the beloved. It is legitimate to argue that in Ovid the law of love annuls the law of Rome.

Concluding Remarks Personal passion is the foundation of elegiac love, while family and public duty dictate the terms of marriage contracts. But the fantasies of Latin love elegy and the realities of Roman marriage laws can hardly be reconciled. We can attempt to  See Casali ()  for Kompromissbildung in the Aeneid.  Ahl ().  Ahl () . Ovid draws attention to the open-ended nature of reception in his letter to Augustus (Tristia ); see Gibson ().  See Gibson ()  – ,  – ,  – ; ().

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harmonize elegiac ideals with Roman legislation by positing a distinction between elegiac love as youthful, frivolous, and extra-marital but permitted on the one hand, and marriage as befitting a mature and responsible age aware of a man’s duty to his fatherland on the other. Yet elegy’s claims about Amor’s universal dominion seriously undermine neat categorizations that would buttress Roman morality. True passion knows no social, moral or legal limits and Amor’s agenda is as imperialistic and ambitious as Augustus’. The tension between elegiac love and marriage is only exacerbated with Augustus’ marriage legislations which break the boundaries between personal and public affairs.⁸⁹ As a pater patriae Augustus sees Rome as his own family and his rule leaves no space for unregulated affairs. By contrast, love elegy creates and validates a legal code that utterly confounds the branding of relationships as marital, extra-marital, and adulterous. In this generic framework, laws and legislations are subjected to the rules of erotic deception. Love conquers everything, the Roman law included.

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1984. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105: 174 – 208. Alekou, S. 2011. La représentation de la femme dans les Héroïdes d’Ovide. (Dissertation, Sorbonne). Paris. Allen, D. 2000. The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Ancient Athens. Princeton, NJ. Anderson, W.S. 1989. “Lycaon: Ovid’s Deceptive Paradigm in Metamorphoses 1”, ICS 14: 91 – 101. Badian, E. 1985. “A Phantom Marriage Law”, Philologus 129: 82 – 98. Bankowski, Z. 2001. Living Lawfully: Love in Law and Law in Love. Dordrecht/London. Barchiesi, A. 1993. “Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovid’s Heroides”, HSPh 95: 333 – 65. — 2001. Speaking Volumes. Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets. London. Barchiesi, A. and P. Hardie. 2010. “The Ovidian Career Model: Ovid, Gallus, Apuleius, Boccaccio”, in: P. Hardie and H. Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception. Cambridge, 59 – 88. Cairns, F. 1979. “Propertius on Augustus’ Marriage Law”, GB 8: 185 – 204. Casali, S. 2004. “Nisus and Euryalus: Exploiting the Contradictions in Virgil’s ‘Doloneia’”, HSPh 102: 319 – 54. Crawford, M.H. 1996. Roman Statutes. BICS, supplement 64. London. Davis, P. 2006. Ovid and Augustus. A Political Reading of Ovid’s Erotic Poems. London.

 On Augustus’ marriage laws and the obliteration of the distinction between private and public, see Raditsa ()  – ,  – ,  – .

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Drinkwater, M. 2013. “Militia amoris: Fighting in Love’s Army”, in: T. Thorsen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy. Cambridge, 194 – 206. Dyck, A. 2013. Cicero: Pro Marco Caelio. Cambridge. Farrell, J. 2002. “Greek Lives and Roman Careers in the Classical Vita Tradition”, in: P. Cheney and F.A. de Armas (eds.), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Toronto, 24 – 46. — 2004. “Ovid’s Virgilian Career”, MD 52: 41 – 55. Fear, T. 2000. “The Poet as Pimp: Elegiac Seduction in the Time of Augustus”, Arethusa 33: 217 – 40. Feldherr, A. 2002. “Metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses”, in: P. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Cambridge, 163 – 79. — 2010. Playing Gods. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton, NJ. Gale, M. 1997. “Propertius 2.7: Militia Amoris and the Ironies of Elegy”, JRS 87: 77 – 91. Gebhardt, U. 2009. Sermo Iuris: Rechtssprache und Recht in der augusteischen Dichtung. Leiden. Geffcken, K.A. 1973. Comedy in the Pro Caelio. Leiden. Gibson, B. 1999. “Ovid on Reading: Reading Ovid. Reception in Ovid Tristia II”, JRS 89: 19 – 37. Gibson, R. 2003. Ovid: Ars Amatoria Book 3. Edited with Introduction and Commentary. Cambridge. — 2006. “Ovid, Augustus, and the Politics of Moderation in Ars Amatoria 3”, in: R. Gibson, S. Green, and A. Sharrock (eds.), The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Oxford, 121 – 42. — 2007. Excess and Restraint. Propertius, Horace, and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. London. Goodrich, P. 1997. “Epistolary Justice: The Love Letter as Law”, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 9: 245 – 95. — 2006. The Laws of Love. A Brief Historical and Practical Manual. New York. Habinek, T. 2005. The World of Roman Song. Baltimore, MD. Hardie, P. 1997. “Questions of Authority: The Invention of Tradition in Ovid, Metamorphoses 15”, in: T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, 182 – 98. — 2002. Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge. Hinds, S. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Hollis, A.S. 1977. Ovid. Ars Amatoria Book I. Oxford. Kenney, E.J. 1969. “Ovid and the Law”, YClS 21: 241 – 63. — 1970. “Love and Legalism: Ovid, Heroides 20 and 21”, Arion 9: 388 – 414. — 1996. Ovid: Heroides XVI-XXI. Cambridge. Kirfel, E.-A. 1969. Untersuchungen zur Briefform der Heroides Ovids. Bern/Stuttgart. Labate, M. 1984. L’arte di farsi amare. Modelli culturali e progetto didascalico nell’elegia ovidiana. Pisa. Lausberg, H. 1998. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study (trans. M.T. Bliss and A. Jansen, ed. D.E. Orton and R.D. Anderson). Leiden. Leigh, M. 2004. “The Pro Caelio and Comedy”, CPh 99: 300 – 35. Littlewood, A.R. 1967. “The Symbolism of the Apple in Greek and Roman Literature”, HSPh 72: 147 – 81.

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Lowrie, M. 2009. Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome. Oxford. Magdelain, A. 1978. La loi à Rome: histoire d’un concept. Paris. McGinn, T. 1998. Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome. Oxford. McGowan, M. 2009. Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Leiden/Boston, MA. McKeown, J. 1989. Ovid: Amores. Volume II. A Commentary on Book One. Leeds. Meyer, E. 2004. Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World: Tabulae in Roman Belief and Practice. Oxford. Morgan, L. 2003. “Child’s Play. Ovid and his Critics”, JRS 93: 66 – 91. Pianezzola, E. 1991 (ed.). Ovidio, L’ Arte di Amare a cura di E. Pianezzola. Commento di G. Baldo, L. Cristante, E. Pianezzola. Milan. Pierre, M. 2008. La poétique du carmen: Étude d’une énonciation romaine des Douze Tables à l’époque d’Auguste. (Dissertation). Paris. Putnam, M. 2000. Horace’s Carmen Saeculare: Ritual Magic and the Poet’s Art. New Haven, CT/London. Raditsa, L.F. 1980. “Augustus’ Legislation Concerning Marriage, Procreation, Love Affairs and Adultery”, ANRW 2.13: 278 – 339. Rimell, V. 2006. Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination. Cambridge. Rosenmeyer, P. 1996. “Love Letters in Callimachus, Ovid and Aristaenetus or the Sad Fate of a Mailorder Bride”, MD 36: 9 – 31. Rothstein, M. 1966. Die Elegien des Sextus Propertius (3rd ed.) 2 vols. Dublin. Sharrock, A. 2006. “Ovid and the Politics of Reading”, in: P. Knox (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Ovid. Oxford, 238 – 61 (=MD 33 (1994): 97 – 122). Stahl, H.P. 1985. Propertius: ‘Love’ and ‘War’: Individual and State under Augustus. Berkeley, CA. Svenbro, J. 1993. Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (trans. J. Lloyd). Ithaca, NY (orig. publ. 1988). Treggiari, S. 1991. Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian. Oxford. Trumpf, J. 1960. “Kydonische Äpfel”, Hermes 88: 14 – 22. Videau, A. 2004. “L’écriture juridique d’Ovide des élégies amoureuses (Amours et Héroïdes) aux Tristes de l’exil”, Ars Scribendi 2 (Published online). — 2010. La poétique d’Ovide, de l’élégie à l’épopée des Métamorphoses: Essai sur un style dans l’Histoire. Paris. Wallace-Hadrill, A. 1985. “Propaganda and Dissent? Augustan Moral Legislation and the Love Poets”, Klio 67: 180 – 4. Watson, A. 1995. The Spirit of Roman Law. Athens, GA/London. Wyke, M. 2006. “Reading Female Flesh: Amores 3.1”, in: P. Knox (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Ovid. Oxford, 169 – 204 (= A. Cameron 1989 (ed.), History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History. London, 113 – 43). — 2002. The Roman Mistress. Oxford. Ziogas, I. 2011. “The Myth is Out There: Reality and Fiction at Tomis (David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life)”, in: J. Ingleheart (ed.), Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile after Ovid. Oxford, 289 – 305.

Matthew M. McGowan

Pythagoras and Numa in Ovid: Exile and Immortality at Rome Summary: This article sets out to consider the link between the exile poetry and the Metamorphoses by examining the representation of Pythagoras and Numa in both places. I aim to show that the role Pythagoras plays as the teacher of Numa in the Metamorphoses is similar to the didactic role Ovid assumes in his poems from exile: the exiled poet teaches the people of Rome about the recently reformed shape of religion and law in the early principate. In short, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto need to be read in light of Ovid’s epic poem on changing forms and belong, in the end, to the carmen perpetuum, or “continuous song,” that defines the poetic program of the Metamorphoses. Keywords: Ovid; Pythagoras; Numa; exile; Metamorphoses; Tristia; Epistulae ex Ponto; metempsychosis; carmen perpetuum; poetic immortality – There’s a word I wanted to ask you. She … began to search the text with the hairpin till she reached the word. – Met him what? he asked. – Here, she said. What does that mean? He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail. – Metempsychosis? – Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home? – Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. – O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words. James Joyce, Ulysses, 64

In the final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pythagoras of Samos, philosopher and political exile, gives a lesson in the history of Greek thought to Numa Pompilius, Rome’s second king and legendary founder of Roman religious practice and sacred law.¹ This lesson includes the central teaching of Pythagorean philosophy: the metempsychosis of souls—or theory of eternal reincarnation—and the admonition against meat- and bean-eating. The extent to which Ovid’s incorporation of Pythagorean doctrine is intended as a serious attempt at providing phil See Brill’s New Pauly, s.v. “Numa” (M. Haase) and Panitschek (); cf. Verg. Aeneid . – : quis procul ille autem ramis insignis oliuae / sacra ferens? nosco crinis incanaque menta / regis Romani primam qui legibus urbem / fundabit Curibus paruis et paupere terra, / missus in imperium magnum.

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osophical heft to his poem—instead of, say, a playfully learned veneer of diverting ideas introduced for rhetorical purposes—will occupy me later in this paper. To start, it is important to note the obvious: Pythagoras’ teaching fits conveniently into the thematic focus of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by promoting the inevitability of change and providing intellectual support from the Greek philosophical tradition for the poet’s claim to the immortality of his verse. Changing forms and poetic immortality are also central to understanding Ovid’s final body of work, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, which the poet composed in exile after he was banished from Rome to the Black Sea by the emperor Augustus in 8 CE. In these poems, Pythagoras and Numa reappear in significant passages that elucidate the recurring themes of metamorphosis and immortality. In what follows, I shall consider the link between the exile poetry and the Metamorphoses by examining the representation of Pythagoras and Numa in both places. I aim to show that the role Pythagoras plays as the teacher of Numa in the Metamorphoses ² is similar to the didactic role Ovid assumes in his poems from exile: the exiled poet teaches the people of Rome about the recently reformed shape of religion and law in the early principate.³ In short, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto need to be read in light of Ovid’s epic poem on changing forms and belong, in the end, to the carmen perpetuum, or “continuous song,” that defines the poetic program of the Metamorphoses. The speech of Pythagoras has always enjoyed a good deal of scholarly attention,⁴ perhaps more than any other single speech in the Metamorphoses (I say “speech” to distinguish it from the poem’s proemium and epilogue, without which there is no poetic program and thus which cannot be ignored by even the most desultory of critics). The Pythagoras-episode’s popularity among critics is not at all surprising given that it is the longest speech, occurs towards the end of the poem in its final book, and involves a famous philosopher who straddles the world of history and myth, a liminal figure between man and god, and thus an ideal subject for Ovid’s artistry. As scholars have noted,⁵ Pythagoras’ speech tells a tale of Greek learning imported to Italy, where it is linked to the founding of Roman religious practice and sacred law. It provides Ovid with a convenient

 On the technical aspects of this didactic passage, see Volk ()  – .  Galinsky ()  argues that Ovid reverses Lucretius’ technique in De Rerum Natura— teaching via myths by replacing them with uera ratio (i.e. framing lesson with Venus/plague) —by using “philosophical” episodes to frame his fundamentally mythological poem: the cosmogony and Pythagoras.  For example: Saint-Denis (); Swanson (); Segal (); Otis ()  – ; Segl (); Curran (); Hardie () and ()  – ; Galinsky ().  E. g., Hardie ().

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and compelling transition for moving the poem in its final, historical phase from Greece to Rome, from the world of ancient myth to contemporary events, from the beginning of time up to his own day, as the poet himself states at the start of the poem, Metamorphoses 1.3 – 4: primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen “spin out a song continuous from the origin of the universe up to my time.” Yet little has ever been said about Numa’s significance to the passage, and the debate surrounding Pythagoras’ status as an exile tends to fester over his adherence to Neo-Pythagorean doctrine, a moot point given the scarcity of evidence. Few have noted, for example, that of the eight clearly identifiable exiles in the Metamorphoses (by which I mean identified by the word exul or exilium), three appear in Book 15, all in succession: Pythagoras, Hippolytus and Cipus.⁶ It is hardly coincidence, then, that in his oft-cited article from 1913, “Die Abfassungszeit in Ovids Metamorphosen,” Max Pohlenz singled out as revised in exile the speech-within-the-Pythagoras-speech of Helenus to Aeneas on the future greatness of Rome.⁷ Moreover, Hermann Fränkel, in his Sather Classical Lectures from 1943, regarded the Hippolytus episode from book 15, as “perhaps … written under the cloud of impending exile, if not after the poet’s departure.” According to Fränkel, “Hippolytus’ mind was entirely taken up by the prospect of exile that he failed to register anything else (514– 15),” not unlike Ovid in his famous account of his own ruin, itself akin to the fall of Troy, in Tristia 1.3.⁸ Moreover, the episode involving Cipus, who refused to rule as king and preferred a voluntary exile, has been interpreted by Sven Lundström (1980: 67– 79) as a thinly veiled attack, ex inverso, on an emperor who would rather rule like a king and send others into exile. Indeed, the succession of exiles from Pythagoras to Cipus is curious, and the exilic recension (or revision) of the Metamorphoses continues to be a topic of some interest among contemporary critics of the Ovidian corpus such as E.J. Kenney and Peter

 The others are: Cadmus & Lycabas (an otherwise unknown sailor attacking Dionysus on the ship for which he paid with exile) (), Niobe (), Daedalus (), Amphiarus’ son Alcmaeon (), Hecabe (). Note that when Ulysses says in .: neque in his quisquam damnatus et exul “and no one among them (my ancestors) was condemned to exile,” his words are prophetic. Moreover, when Ajax links Ulysses’ treatment of Philoctetes, he assumes the latter was sent into exile by Ulysses, . f.: ergo aut exilio uires subduxit Achiuis / aut nece “either by exile or death he has drawn off the Greeks’ strength.” The murder refers to Palamedes. Consider, too, Nyctimene, whose metamorphosis into the owl is described thus by the crow, .: a cunctis expellitur aethere toto. And Aeneas, .: rursus … fugiens noua moenia (= exul).  Pohlenz () .  The lectures were published in  as Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds; both citations come from p. .

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Knox.⁹ Nevertheless, in what follows I focus on Pythagoras’ didactic relationship to Numa and show how this didactic set-piece relates to the figure of the poet— Ovid himself—in exile. As a reputed lover of peace and founder of ritual practice and sacred law at Rome, Numa stands diametrically opposed to his predecessor Romulus. In Dumézil’s famous formulation, Numa is the priest-king of religious foundation and legal formulation to Romulus’ warrior-king of martial prowess and urban defense.¹⁰ It is clear that both Julius Caesar and Augustus invoked Numa and not Romulus as a model of a pious and peaceful ruler when they seized power after an extended spate of civil wars.¹¹ To be sure, both cultivated the appearance that—like Numa—they stood for piety and peace, even if they were— after Romulus—Romans in name.¹² In the final book of the Metamorphoses, Ovid considers how the people of Italy eventually became Romans—a metamorphosis of an historical rather than mythical nature—by exploiting the popular legend of Pythagoras and Numa. According to tradition—and Ovid is one of our sources for this tradition— Numa had been a student of Pythagoras at Croton in southern Italy, Fasti 3.151– 54: primus oliuiferis Romam deductus ab aruis/ Pompilius menses sensit abesse duos,/ siue hoc a Samio doctus, qui posse renasci/ nos putat, Egeria siue monente sua. “(Numa) Pompilius, who was brought to Rome from the fields

 On stylistic grounds some have ascribed the “double letters” of Epistulae (Heroides) ( – ) to the exilic corpus, cf. Knox () , with bibliography; on possible post-exilic revisions of the Metamorphoses, see Richmond ()  – ; Kenney ()  n. ; Pohlenz (); on the Fasti as an “exile-poem,” see Boyle () ; Feeney ()  – .  Cf. Dumézil ()  – : “the reigns of Romulus and Numa were conceived as the two wings of a diptych, each of them demonstrating one of two types, the two equally necessary but antithetical provinces of sovereignty. Romulus is a young demigod, impetuous, creative, violent, unhampered by scruples, exposed to the temptations of tyranny; Numa is a completely human old man, moderate, an organizer, peaceful, mindful of order and legality.” Of course later (), Dumézil notes that “for many Romans Numa was still the pythagorean king, a valuable and ancient link between Greece and Rome between wisdom and politics.” For Livy’s treatment of the Romulus-Numa pair, cf. Levene ()  – , who cites (n. ) the more general discussion of the indo-european warrior-king and priest-king in Dumézil ()  – . For a judicious account of the pointed criticism that Dumézil’s model – the so-called “ideologie tripartite” – has received, see Belier ().  Littlewood ()  analyzes the Romulus-Numa antithesis to show how “Numa fits into the essential duality of Augustan iconography.” Cf. Ogilvie () .  Cf. Hinds ()  – : “Augustus’ aim is to be a Romulus, but a Romulus who has many of the features of a Numa: both a man of war and an architect of peace. But that, in terms of Ovid’s version of the Romulean prototype, is an impossibility. In the ideology of Fasti , to be a Romulus is by definition to fail to be a Numa.”

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where olives grow, was the first to realize that two months were missing from the year, whether he was taught by the Samian (Pythagoras), who believes that we can be reborn, or whether it was Egeria who told him.” A version of this story is alluded to later in the Epistulae ex Ponto, where in a catalogue of a familiar type in the exile poetry, Ovid adduces examples from myth of students who brought no harm to their teachers, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.3.43 – 4: praemia nec Chiron ab Achille talia cepit,/ Pythagoreaeque ferunt non nocuisse Numam. “But Chiron got no such payment from Achilles, and they say that Numa did no harm to Pythagoras.” It is difficult to say whether the Numa-Pythagoras, student-teacher legend stems from a Greek or Roman source,¹³ but the tradition was well established by the time of Cicero. Both he and Livy comment on the chronological impossibility of having Pythagoras teach Numa, who ruled about 150 years before the exiled philosopher ever landed on Italian shores in around 530 BC.¹⁴ Yet both authors acknowledge the extent to which the foundations of Roman culture were influenced by Pythagorean thought.¹⁵ Numa’s reputed interest in sacred law and social harmony seems to have reminded Italy’s educated class of Pythagoras and of the Pythagorean commitment to philosophy as a way of life. Pythagoras’ sect was viewed as a distinctly Italian phenomenon and thus spoke to a feeling of national pride at Rome, a city that became—on the model of Numa—

 After Ferrero () and Gabba () scholarly consensus posits a fourth-century Greek source, probably from Tarentum and perhaps Aristoxenus, a student of Pythagoreanism and Aristotle, music theorist, and the author of a lost life of Pythagoras, which is believed to be the source for Iamblichus’ De Vita Pythagorae. See Panitschek () for a balanced review of the problem and the possibility of a purely Roman source. Cf. Dench ()  on Pythagorean interest from the rd cent. BC in Numa as a figure of Sabine (rather than Roman) ethnicity.  E. g. Cic. de Republica ., where Scipio calls the story “entirely false, and not merely ‘made up’ but even ignorantly and absurdly so” (falsum est enim … id totum, neque solum fictum sed imperite absurdeque fictum). Feeney ()  –  notes that Ovid may be playing with Cicero’s idea of the story as fiction, also cited by Feldherr ()  n. .  Cic. Tusculanae Disputationes .: erat enim illis (sc. maioribus nostris) paene in conspectu praestanti sapientia et nobilitate Pythagoras, qui fuit in Italia temporibus iisdem quibus L. Brutus patriam liberauit “For almost within sight of our ancestors was Pythagoras who lived in Italy at the same time L. Brutus freed his country;” Tusculanae Disputationes .: et deorum puluinaribus et epulis magistratuum fides praecinunt quod proprium eius fuit de qua loquar disciplinae (sc. Pythagoreae) … multa etiam sunt in nostris institutis ducta ab illis (Pythagoreis), quae praetereo ne ea quae repperisse ipsi putamur aliunde didicisse uideamur. “Stringed instruments play before the staged seatings of the gods and feasts of the magistrates which was a special feature of that [Pythagorean] training I am talking about … and I’ll pass over the many things that have been taken over from the Pythagoreans in our own institutions lest we appear to have learned from elsewhere things we are thought to have discovered ourselves.”

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more interested in redressing its lack of philosophical sophistication. With the help of Pythagoras, Numa does double duty for an increasingly sophisticated class of Romans eager to acquire both the intellectual riches of Hellenic culture and to maintain what made them distinctly Roman. He also provides the foundation of Roman religious and legal practice with a direct link to Greece. Now, however, it is an identifiably Italian version of Greece. In this spirit Ovid introduces Numa into his Metamorphoses, 15.3 – 11: destinat imperio clarum praenuntia ueri fama Numam; non ille satis cognosse Sabinae gentis habet ritus, animo maiora capaci concipit et, quae sit rerum natura, requirit. huius amor curae patria Curibusque relictis fecit ut Herculei penetraret ad hospitis urbem. Graia quis Italicis auctor posuisset in oris moenia, quaerenti sic e senioribus unus rettulit indigenis, ueteris non inscius aeui. Fame, messenger of truth, designates the renowned Numa for rule [at Rome]. Not content with knowing the rites of the Sabine race, he hatches larger plans in his capacious intellect and seeks to know what the nature of the universe is. His love of this pursuit made him quit his native country and the Cures and go as far as the city that once paid host to Hercules. When he asked about the founder who had put up Greek walls on Italian shores, one of the elder locals, not ignorant of the past era, answered him thus.”¹⁶

Whether Numa was in fact a man of philosophical mettle like Pythagoras—or whether he existed at all!¹⁷—is beside the point. In Latin literature Numa becomes a sage and ethical reformer on the model of one of the greatest ethical reformers in the Greek (and Italian) tradition. Herein lies the appeal of figures like Numa and Pythagoras to Ovid in his Metamorphoses, where the poet recreates a chronological continuum via Greek myth and Roman history from the origins of the universe to contemporary Rome. The natural end to this mytho-historic epic is the apotheosis of Rome’s most recent leaders, Julius Caesar and his adoptive son Caesar Augustus Octavianus, an apotheosis explicable only by way of Rome’s extensive contact with the Greek east. In fact, Luigi Alfonsi (1958) has argued persuasively that the Pythagoras of Ovid’s poem channeled Greek thinkers such as Euhemerus and, especially, Posidonius who made it theoretically possible for men—great men, of the kind both Caesar and Augustus

 Galinsky () offers an unconvincing interpretation of this passage: Numa never heard the lecture despite being said at the end to have taken in Pythagoras’ teaching.  Cf. Ogilvie () .

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considered themselves to be—to bridge the gap between mortality and divinity, to pass over death and to become, at least in theory, gods. Alfonsi’s article, “L’inquadramento filosofico delle Metamorfosi ovidiane,” has been instrumental in shaping my own arguments here, but it suffers from the author’s earnest attempt to make Ovid into a Greek philosopher—and even outdo Lucretius in this regard. Alfonsi concludes from his exposition of what becomes a philosophical text that Pythagoras furnishes Numa with the proper instruction to create a completely new Roman ethos, one inherently opposed to the war-loving savagery of the fratricidal Romulus and thus consonant with Augustus’ claims to have brought pax Romana to the known world and a heightened sense of moral rectitude to the Romans themselves. The opposition to Romulus is not in doubt. Problematic, however, is that Alfonsi brings Ovid’s poem in line with Julio-Claudian propaganda to a degree that the text does not allow. For many of the Pythagorean precepts Ovid presents (and invents)—for example, against animal sacrifice—fly in the face of Augustan religious ritual. More plausible is that Pythagoras offers Numa a rational explanation—even if that explanation is more poetic than philosophical—for addressing what it means to be Roman in Ovid’s Rome. The very question of what it meant to be Roman, however, was newly and quite widely open to debate precisely because the very make-up of Rome—its laws, rituals, literature, architecture, monuments, and body politic—had been fundamentally reshaped by the first emperor Augustus Caesar. Part of that re-shaping, I submit, also entails that the emperor enjoys the possibility of being worshiped and, ultimately, becoming a god at the end of his life, a transformation seemingly in keeping with the precepts taught by Pythagoras in Metamorphoses 15. Indeed, that is exactly what happens at the end of Ovid’s poem: Augustus and his father are assured a place in heaven together with the traditional deities of Greek and Roman myth. Of course, Ovid’s Metamorphoses does not in fact end here with the divinization of Rome’s first emperor and his father. It ends rather with the poet’s own claim to be able to supersede death, a claim guaranteed by the immortality of his verse, Metamorphoses 15.871– 9: iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iouis ira nec ignes nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere uetustas. cum uolet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aeui: parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam.

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Now I have finished a work that neither the anger of Jupiter nor fire nor iron nor the devouring power of old age can destroy. When it will, let that day, which has no claim but to my mortal body, end the span of my life. Still my better part will be borne beyond the stars, I shall be immortal, and my name will be indelible. Wherever Rome’s power extends through the lands she has subdued, my words will be on people’s lips. And if the prophecies of bards have any truth to them, my fame will live through every age.

There is no better passage to underscore the close link between Ovid’s sprawling epic and his doleful elegies from exile than the close of his well-known and oftquoted autobiography there, Tristia 4.10.125 – 32: nam tulerint magnos cum saecula nostra poetas, non fuit ingenio fama maligna meo, cumque ego praeponam multos mihi, non minor illis dicor et in toto plurimus orbe legor. si quid habent igitur uatum praesagia ueri, protinus ut moriar, non ero, terra, tuus. siue fauore tuli, siue hanc ego carmine famam, iure tibi grates, candide lector, ago. For though this age of ours has produced great poets, fame has not begrudged my genius; and though I put many before myself, I am not said to be lesser than they, and in all the world I am the most read. If the predictions of sacred bards have any truth – even though I die forthwith – I shall not be yours, earth. But if through favor or by poetry I have won this fame, kind reader, rightly do I give you thanks.

The twentieth-century French social historian of Rome and Latin literary critic, Jerome Carcopino, has argued that at the heart of both these passages lies the “credo of the Neopythagoreans.”¹⁸ Carcopino’s article, it must be said, is curious: in it Ovid becomes a true believer and devout practitioner of Neopythagorean doctrine.¹⁹ Invoking belief or “credo” here, as Carcopino does, overstates the case, but it would be misguided to assume that Ovid was not familiar with Neopythagoreanism, a philosophical sect that had re-appeared at Rome in the time of Cicero and that was especially attractive to upper-class Romans—such as

 At Metamorphoses . to be exact, Carcopino (a) . Carcopino’s point has not found much scholarly support, although Simone Viarre’s important book, L’image et pensée dans les Metamorphoses d’Ovide (), with its focus on magic and divination and the figure of Pythagoras, owes a good deal to Carcopino, in particular to La Basilique pythagoricienne ().  The title of Carcopino’s next book is instructive here: De Pythagore aux apôtres (Paris b).

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Varro²⁰—as a kind of philosophical answer to Roman religion. Indeed, as scholars from Burkert to Barchiesi have pointed out, it is easy to imagine in Ovid a true affinity for Neo-Pythagorean thought.²¹ Ovid’s representation of Pythagoras’ inquiry into the nature of the universe at the start of this book (15.60 – 74) recalls the passage on Numa that we looked at above. For Rome’s second king, Sabine rites were apparently insufficient, and he was thus led by natural disposition to inquire into the nature of the universe (Metamorphoses 15.6: quae sit rerum natura, requirit, which is the technical language of Greek philosophy most easily recognizable in its Latin form in Lucretius, whose poem is titled De Rerum Natura). Indeed, the beginning of Pythagoras’ speech serves as a potted history of Greek philosophy from the legendary inventor of the very word “philosopher”.²² Much of what Ovid attributes to Pythagoras has been diligently traced back to particular sources in the history of ancient thought, for example, to Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Anaxagoras and especially Empedocles, all of which is filtered through the Stoics Chrysippus, Panaetius, and in particular Posidonius, as well as the Romans Lucretius, Varro, the Sextii, and Publius Nigidius Figulus. Perhaps the most important figure in this illustrious line-up, however, is the vegetarian philosopher and Neo-Pythagorean, Sotion, Seneca’s teacher whom Ovid may have known—so Segl in his Salzburger dissertation (1970: 102– 3)—and had heard lecture, of which we may even hear an echo in Pythagoras’ speech, Metamorphoses 15.66 – 7: in medium discenda dabat coetusque silentum/ dictaque mirantum magni primordia mundi/ et rerum causas et, quid natura, docebat “he was wont to hold public lessons and to teach the crowds of silent listeners wondering at his words about the beginnings of the universe and the causes of things.”²³ In the generation before Sotion, however, there was Nigidius Figulus, a shadowy figure of nebulous significance, but clearly a man of rank and intellectual vigor and important enough to have received the dedication of Cicero’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus, and who has been referred to by Elizabeth Raw-

 Varro is known to have synthesized Pythagorean thought and was buried modo pythagoreo, that is, in a clay coffin.  See Burkert () ; Barchiesi () . Perhaps the most persuasive and intelligent commentary on this question is to be found in Simone Viarre’s brilliant book on the Metamorphoses () passim.  On the attribution of the invention of the term φιλόσοφος to Pythagoras, see Burkert ().  Both Barchiesi ()  and Galinsky () take the coetus silentum here to be the dead, as elsewhere in Ovid, so that Pythagoras is meant to be holding his speech in the underworld. This is an intriguing idea that may indeed underscore an even greater affinity between Metamorphoses and the exile poetry via Pythagoras.

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son as the second-most learned man in late Republican Rome after Varro.²⁴ Despite the report in Suetonius²⁵ that he had predicted to Octavius, the future emperor’s biological father, that his son would rule the world, he was exiled by the young Octavian’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar, in the political purge that followed civil war in the mid-40s. Unlike most political exiles of the period, Nigidius was denied a return and died in exile c. 45 BC. I want to be very cautious about concluding that Caesar kept him from Rome because he was a Pythagorean, but this may in fact be what is implied in St. Jerome’s translation of Eusebius’ Chronicle, Hier. chron. a Abr. 45 a.Chr.: Nigidius Figulus Pythagoricus et magus in exilio moritur “Nigidius Figulus, a Pythagorean and sorcerer, dies in exile.” From a later passage in the Chronicle we meet the Greek philosopher Anaxilaus of Larissa, who taught about Neopythagoreanism in Rome during the late Republic and early Principate and was exiled by Augustus in 28 BC for what looks like the same reason: he too was a Pythagorean and a sorcerer.²⁶ It seems that Pythagoreanism had become connected with sorcery, that is, with a type of divination that had made itself dangerous to the emperor. I say dangerous because sorcerers were believed to have knowledge of the future—and Nigidius’ prediction of Augustus’ future domination of the world is a case in point— which was considered perilous for emperors: sorcerers could predict their death. Regardless of what we think of the notoriously fatuous Christian Chronicle and its reliability on this issue, it is nevertheless noteworthy that in the waning years of the Republic under Caesar and the early years of its re-founding under Octavian, two Neo-Pythagorean philosophers—one Roman, one Greek— were exiled from Rome. In light of this curious convergence consider that in the first line of his introduction to Pythagoras Ovid mentions the philosopher’s exile, Metamorphoses 15.60 – 2: uir fuit hic ortu Samius, sed fugerat una/ et Samon et dominos odioque tyrannidis exul/ sponte erat. “There was a man here, a Samian by birth, but he had fled Samos together with its rulers, and through hatred of tyranny was living in voluntary exile.” (“Fugerat” is the Latin translation of the Greek φυγεῖν “to be exiled.”) On this I shall elaborate no further; for in spite of these tantalizing tidbits, it is nevertheless impossible to prove, as Carcopino had tried and others since, that Ovid was a Neopythagorean and was exiled for his association with a group noted for dangerous divination. The answer, it seems, is less fantastic, though perhaps more in keeping with the spirit and outsized ambition of Ovid’s epic poem. Consider, for example, Py-

 Rawson ()  – .  Suet. Augustus .: P. Nigidium … affirmasse dominum terrarum orbi natum.  Jer. Chron. Ol. .: [Anaxilaus Larisaeus] Pythagoricus et magus Vrbe et Italia pellitur.

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thagoras’ teaching on the immortality of the soul and the inevitability of changing forms, Metamorphoses 15.153 – 75: O genus attonitum gelidae formidine mortis! quid Styga, quid tenebras et nomina uana timetis, materiem uatum, falsique pericula mundi? corpora, siue rogus flamma seu tabe uetustas abstulerit, mala posse pati non ulla putetis: morte carent animae semperque priore relicta sede nouis domibus uiuunt habitantque receptae. ipse ego (nam memini) Troiani tempore belli Panthoides Euphorbus eram, cui pectore quondam haesit in aduerso grauis hasta minoris Atridae. cognoui clipeum, laeuae gestamina nostrae, nuper Abanteis templo Iunonis in Argis. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit: errat et illinc huc uenit, hinc illuc et quoslibet occupet artus spiritus eque feris humana in corpora transit inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo, utque nouis facilis signatur cera figuris nec manet, ut fuerat, nec formas seruat easdem, sed tamen ipsa eadem est, animam sic semper eandem esse sed in uarias doceo migrare figuras. ergo, ne pietas sit uicta cupidine uentris, parcite, uaticinor, cognatas caede nefanda exturbare animas, nec sanguine sanguis alatur. A living race thunder-struck by the fear of an icy death! Why do you fear the Styx? why the underworld and mere names, the stuff of poets and dangers of an imaginary world? Do not think that our bodies, whether consumed by the flame of the funeral pyre or the wasting away of old age, are able to suffer any harm. Death does not touch our souls and when they leave their former seat, they continue to live, always received in new abodes. At the time of the Trojan War I myself (as I recall) was once Panthous’ son, Euphorbus, whom the heavy spear of the lesser son of Atreus once impaled in the heart. Recently I recognized the shield I used to bear on my left arm hanging on the temple of Juno at Abas in Argos. All things change; nothing dies: the soul wanders, going from here to there and from there to here, occupying whatever limbs it will, moving from beast to human and from human to beast and never dying. Even as impressionable wax is marked by new etchings, never staying as it was, never keeping the same form and yet it is the same, so do I say is the soul, always the same even as it changes shape. And so, let not piety be overcome by the belly’s craving. I warn you as a seer: stop banishing kindred souls by impious murder, and let not blood be nourished by blood.

The closing line refers to Pythagoras’ famous (though perhaps made-up) abstinence from eating meat, as Ovid joins a long line of Greek and Roman writers who single out the unconventional practices of the Pythagoreans. Indeed, herein

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lies a neat explanation—as Viarre and others have shown—for the presence of Pythagoras (and thus Numa) in the closing book of the Metamorphoses: he had become a literary topos, a figure that nearly all Roman poets from Ennius to Ovid had found a way to write about. In Ennius, for example, Pythagoras’ teaching on the transmigration of souls allows the poet to channel the spirit of classical antiquity’s paradigmatic poet, Homer, as Horace’s and Porphyry’s comments on the passage make clear.²⁷ There is no need to list all the others here, but I shall mention the well-known passages from Horace’s Satires and Propertius’ elegies where Pythagorean doctrine is held up for playful ribbing: the ban on bean-eating becomes the brunt of a joke.²⁸ We will also remember how Vergil in all of his works draws on the teachings of Pythagoras, as Plato did before him, to inject his poetic endeavor with philosophical heft, for example in Eclogue 4, the Messianic eclogue, or in the final book of the Georgics (4.221– 7), which posits the pervasive presence of the Pythagorean (or Posidonian) deus in all things, and finally, of course, Aeneid 6, with the transmigration of souls in the underworld. In this sense, the incorporation of Pythagoras into the final book of the Metamorphoses not only provides another philosophical layer to this multilayered poem, or rather an additional shape to this multi-formed work, it also engages with, indeed reforms, the immediate history of Greek and especially Roman literature. As Hardie (1995) and, more recently, Galinsky (1998) have shown, the Ennius passage quoted above (n. 27) about Homer and widely discussed in antiquity (by Cicero and Horace for example) is a particularly important intertext here. In a sense, in the passage we just read Ovid may be said to summon Homer too by allowing Pythagoras to recollect his exploits as Euphorbus in the Iliad and to be reminded of the role Pythagoras had in striking Patroclus and thus making it possible for Hector to kill Achilles’ friend in Book 16. In fact, Galinsky’s article (1998: 327) argues that Ovid’s whole poetic program in the Metamorphoses is to recreate and reunite the various literary forms—poetry, history, philosophy, and rhetoric—which originated with Homer. In this connection, it is crucial to recall that for Ovid’s contemporary, Strabo, Homer was the founder of the science of

 Enn. fr.  Skutsch: uisus Homerus adesse poeta “the poet Homer appeared to be present.” Cf. Hor. Epistulae .. – : Ennius, et sapiens et fortis et alter Homerus,/ ut critici dicunt “The critics call Ennius ‘another Homer’, both wise and accomplished in epic.” Porph. ad Hor. Epistulae ..: quod secundum Pythagorae dogma anima Homeri in suum corpus uenisset “because in accordance with Pythagoras’ teaching the soul of Homer had come into his body.”  Hor. Satires ..: faba Pythagoreae cognata. The famous th cent. Pythagorean strategos of Tarentum, Archytas, is also mentioned by Propertius ...

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geography and surpassed all men for his excellence in poetry and his experience in the life of the polis, Geog. 1.2: καὶ πρῶτον ὅτι ὀρθῶς ὑπειλήφαμεν … ἀρχηγέτην εἶναι τῆς γεωγραφικῆς ἐμπειρίας ῞Ομηρον· ὃς οὐ μόνον ἐν τῇ κατὰ τήν ποιήσιν ἀρετῇ πάντας ὑπερβέβληται τοὺς πάλαι καὶ τοὺς ὕστερον, ἀλλὰ σχεδόν τι καὶ τῇ κατὰ τόν βίον ἐμπειρίᾳ τὸν πολιτικόν. And first [let me say] that we are right to have regarded Homer as the founder of geography; for he surpasses all men past and future not only in his excellence in poetry but, I dare say, even in his experience of the polis.

A similar sentiment is voiced later in the first century CE by Quintilian, for whom Homer represents the consummate artist, Institutio Oratoria 12.11.21: ut de Homero taceam, in quo nullius non artis aut opera perfecta aut certe non dubia uestigia reperiuntur “I say nothing of Homer, in whose every art we find either works of perfection or, at any rate, no traces of weakness.” This notion had been developed in the Hellenistic period where the figure of Homer was viewed as “a fountain-head from which later poets, men of letters, philosophers had drunk.”²⁹ The poet of the Iliad and Odyssey was for Ovid and his contemporaries a paradigm for the learned man, a polymath, whose experience transcended poetry and was applied more generally to nearly every facet of life and culture.³⁰ Via Pythagoras Ovid invokes the spirit of Homer to underscore the mutability of things and their changing forms. Moreover, he serves as an ideal transitional figure in the translation of Greek learning to the Italian peninsula, in the poem’s final movement from east to west, from Greece to Rome, from myth to history. In the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, Pythagoras reappears—his soul transmigrates, if you will—even as the aforementioned geographical movement of the exile poetry tacks in the opposite direction: indeed, the poet is displaced from west to east, from Rome to Tomis, from the seat of empire to a former Greek colony on the Black Sea. In exile there, he constantly bemoans his dire condition alone among barbarians and at a far remove from Rome. Fittingly, the possibility that Pythagoras’ teaching on the soul may be true provides another occasion for

 So Brink () ; cf. Feeney () : “Certainly Homer, the master, was praised as containing all three levels of narrative (ἅπερ ἅπαντα παρὰ τῷ ποιητῇ ἐστι, AbT . – ). It was, in fact, conventional to regard epic as being a mixture of the actual and the invented, or false, and hence as containing elements of narrative style appropriate to more than one level: thus, Polybius defines Homer’s poetic licence as ‘a mixture of history, description, and myth’ (συνέστηκεν ἐξ ἱστορίας καὶ διαθέσεως καὶ μύθου, ..).”  Galinsky () , goes so far as to state the Ovid’s whole poetic program in the Metamorphoses is to recreate and reunite the various literary forms – poetry, history, philosophy, rhetoric – which originated with Homer. See also Galinsky () , for more on this point.

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lament, Tristia 3.3.59 – 64: atque utinam pereant animae cum corpore nostrae,/ effugiatque auidos pars mihi nulla rogos./ nam si morte carens uacua uolat altus in aura/ spiritus, et Samii sunt rata dicta senis,/ inter Sarmaticas Romana uagabitur umbras,/ perque feros Manes hospita semper erit. “And would that my soul could perish with my body and no part of me escape the greedy flames of the funeral pyre. For if the spirit, unable to die, flies high in the empty air and the sayings of the aged Samian (sc. Pythagoras) are true, my soul as a Roman will wander among Sarmatian souls and will always be a stranger in the midst of fierce spirits.” What had furnished literary allusion and philosophical argument for the immortality of his verse in the final book of the Metamorphoses now brings the poet to tears. But Ovid’s lament on the immortality of the soul must be read within the larger context of the exile poetry. In brief, lament consumes the poet of the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto and belongs to the rhetorical stance of existential resignation he adopts in exile. As part of this poetic posturing, Ovid often represents his exile as a living death, e. g. Tristia 5.1.47– 8: interea nostri quid agant, nisi triste, libelli?/ tibia funeribus conuenit ista meis “what meanwhile would my books bring if not sadness? The reed-pipe is appropriate to my funeral.”³¹ Thus, if Ovid is already “dead” in exile, Pythagoras’ teaching on the eternal nature of the soul allows him to continue pursuing what has become his sole source of meaning: writing verse. His poems from exile recreate his presence in the city, a paradoxical presence in absence, which allows him to be heard there even in death. It follows from this that these poems fulfill the poet’s claim from the end of the Metamorphoses to live on after death in the mouths of men. It is an irony worthy of Ovid that the fulfillment of death defeated does not depend upon the immortality of his verse but comes while he is yet alive. There is another way in which Ovid returns in exile to the problem of his Metamorphoses. There, metamorphosis in myth occupies the poet until the final book where the changing forms of Rome’s recent history, including turning

 Further, Tristia .. – : non sum ego quod fueram: quid inanem proteris umbram? / quid cinerem saxis bustaque nostra petis? Epistulae ex Ponto ..: et similis morti pectora torpor habet; .. – : uosque, quibus perii, tum cum mea fama sepulta est, / quoque de nostra morte tacere reor; .. – : nos satis est inter glaciem Scythicasque sagittas / uiuere, si uita est mortis habenda genus. Further, his departure for exile is like a funeral, Tristia ..; ..; .. – ; Epistulae ex Ponto ..; Tomis sits on the Styx, Tristia ..; Epistulae ex Ponto ..; ..; the poet writes his own epitaph, Tristia .. – . On the recurring theme of exile as equivalent to death, see McGowan ()  with n.  for bibliography. Cf. Cic. Epistulae ad Atticum ..; Epistulae ad Familiares ...

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men like Caesar and Augustus into gods by legal decree of the senate, dominate the climax of the poem. In this vein, the exiled Ovid refers to Augustus as the most powerful and pervasive divinity of the mythological framework of the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. The poet is still concerned here with changing shapes. Now, however, the shapes are historical in nature. He addresses, in particular, the refigured make-up of Roman religious and legal practice as he did at the end of the Metamorphoses. Ovid acknowledges the emperor’s desire to become divine via legal decree by turning him into a mythological deity in the exile poetry. But “Augustus the god” is now subject to the poet’s representation in verse. Though exiled and physically lost to his former life at Rome, Ovid lays claim to the power of poetry to determine how gods maintain a quintessential feature of their divinity: immortality.³² It should come as no surprise to readers of the Metamorphoses, where the ira deorum has nearly free rein, that Augustus is depicted here as a vengeful god whose anger knows no bounds. The emperor may have styled himself an ethical reformer of Roman religion and law on the model of Numa,³³ but in Ovid’s exilic verse he appears more like the capricious Olympians whose seemingly willful acts of vengeance fill the Metamorphoses. According to the poet’s professed claim to immortality there, this highly critical picture is destined to outlive the present historical circumstances that have made Augustus ruler of Rome. In the immediate sequence of events, the power of the princeps threatens to smother the voice of the poet by banishing him to the margins of empire, and Ovid himself becomes the first casualty of the new shape of religion and law introduced at Rome by the emperor. But his verse ultimately trumps the princeps’ punishment; for the poet always has the last word. Of course, Ovid’s immediate response to the oppressive burden of exile is to lament. Fittingly, he changes his tune from the lofty epic of the Metamorphoses to the doleful elegy, the meter traditionally associated in antiquity with lamentation for the dead. Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto offer themselves as an extended epitaph at Rome for his plight in exile. These poems erect a literary tombstone, as it were, bearing witness for posterity to the poet’s suffering at the hands of an autocrat. Such a metaphor implies existential resignation and immediate defeat. Yet there is something empowering about exile for the poet. As Philip Hardie has remarked in his sensitive reading of the exile poetry from his essential Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (2002: 308): “Ovid’s mind is as free [in  See Feeney () . It may be noted here that Feeney ()  – , has already argued that the apotheosis of Caesar at the end of the Metamorphoses is framed by the very recent Roman institution of legal transformation of humans into gods, esp. : “Caesar is a god because his adopted son made him one.”  Littlewood () , quoted above n. .

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exile] as that of the exiled Pythagoras … to roam where it will.” As it did for Pythagoras in flight from the tyranny of Polycrates on his native island of Samos, exile provides Ovid with a place of intellectual refuge from which to comment on religious and legal changes taking place in Augustan Rome. By professing to immortalize this commentary in verse, Ovid turns exile into an enduring source of poetic redress of the very circumstances that made his banishment possible. His exilic voice is the voice of poetry in se, the voice of the uates or sacred bard, the prophet calling out from the outermost extreme of the Roman Empire to re-create his presence in the city. The disembodied voice of the uates goes on singing in spite of exile. His song is immortal, as Pythagoras conceived of immortality. For Ovid it is the carmen perpetuum.

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations. Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY/London. Alfonsi, L. 1958. “L’inquadramento filosofico delle Metamorfosi ovidiane”, in: N.I. Herescu (ed.), Ovidiana. Paris, 265 – 72. Altheim, F. 1951. Römische Religionsgeschichte. (3rd edition). Baden-Baden. Barchiesi, A. 1989. “Voci e istanze narrative nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio”, MD 23: 55 – 97. Belier, W.W. 1991. Decayed Gods. Origin and Development of Georges Dumézil’s ‘Ideologie Tripartie’. Leiden. Boyle, A.J. 1997. “Postscripts from the Edge: Exilic Fasti and imperialised Rome”, Ramus 26.1: 7 – 28. Brink, C.O. 1982. Horace on Poetry. Vol. 2. Epistles Book II. Cambridge. Burkert, W. 1972. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Cambridge, MA. Carcopino, J. 1926. La basilique pythagoricienne de la Porte Majeure. Paris. — 1963a. Rencontres de l’histoire et de la littérature romaines. Paris. — 1963b. De Pythagore aux apôtres. Paris. Curran, L.C. 1972. “Transformation and Anti-Augustanism in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”, Arethusa 3: 71 – 91. Dench, E. 2005. Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian. Oxford. Dumézil, G. 1940. Mitra-Varuna: essai sur deux représentations indo-européenes de la souveraineté. Paris. — 1970. Archaic Roman Religion. Chicago. Feeney, D. 1991. The Gods in Epic. Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition. Oxford. — 1992. “Si licet et fas est: Ovid’s Fasti and the Problem of Free Speech under the Principate”, in: A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. London, 1 – 25. — 1998. Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs. Cambridge.

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— 1999. “Mea tempora: Patterning of Time in the Metamorphoses”, in: A. Barchiesi, P. Hardie, and S. Hinds (eds.), Ovidian Transformations. Cambridge Philosophical Society. Supplementary Vol. 23. Cambridge, 13 – 30. Feldherr, A. 2010. Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton, NJ. Ferrero, L. 1955. Storia del Pitagorismo nel mondo romano. Turin. Fränkel, H. 1945. Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds. Berkeley, CA. Gabba, E. 1967. “Considerazioni sulla traduzione letteraria sulle origini della Repubblica”, in: E. Gjerstad et al. (eds.), Les origines de la république romaine. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique de la Fondation Hardt 13. Vandoeuvres, 135 – 69. Galinsky, K. 1996. Augustan Culture. An Interpretive Introduction. Princeton, NJ. — 1998. “The Speech of Pythagoras at Ovid Metamorphoses 15, 75 – 478”, in: F. Cairns and M. Heath (eds.), Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 10 (ARCA vol. 38): 313 – 36. Hardie, P. 1995. “The Speech of Pythagoras in Ovid Metamorphoses 15: Empedoclean Epos”, CQ 45: 204 – 14. — 2002. Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge. — 2009. Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge. Cambridge. Hinds, S. E. 1992. “Arma in Ovid’s Fasti”, Arethusa 25: 81 – 153. Joyce, J. 1946. Ulysses. New York. Kenney, E.J. 1982. “Ovid”, in: W. Clausen and E.J. Kenney (eds.), Cambridge History of Classical Literature. Vol. 2. Cambridge, 420 – 57. Knox, P. 1995. Ovid Heroides. Select Epistles. Cambridge. Levene, D.S. 1993. Religion in Livy. Leiden/New York/Cologne. Littlewood, R.J. 2002. “Imperii pignora certa: The Role of Numa in Ovid’s Fasti”, in: G. Herbert-Brown (ed.), Ovid’s Fasti. Historical Readings at Its Bimillennium. Oxford, 175 – 97. Lundström, S. 1980. Ovids Metamorphosen und die Politik des Kaisers. Uppsala. McGowan, M.M. 2009. Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Boston, MA/Leiden. Ogilvie, R.M. 1965. A Commentary on Livy Books 1 – 5. Cambridge. Otis, B. 1970. Ovid as an Epic Poet. (2nd edition). Cambridge. Panitschek, P. 1990. “Numa Pompilius als Schüler des Pythagoras”, GB 17: 49 – 65. Pohlenz, M. 1913. “Die Abfassungszeit von Ovids Metamorphosen”, Hermes 48: 1 – 13. Rawson, E. 1985. Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic. Baltimore, MD. Richmond, J.A. 2002. “Manuscript Traditions and the Transmission of Ovid’s Works”, in: B. Weiden (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Ovid. Leiden/Boston, MA/Cologne, 443 – 83. Saint-Denis, E. 1940. “Le génie d’Ovide d’après le livre XV des Métamorphoses”, REL 18: 111 – 40. Segal, C. 1969. “Myth and Philosophy in the ‘Metamorphoses’: Ovid’s Augustanism and the Augustan Conclusion of Book XV”, AJPh 90: 257 – 92. Segl, R. 1970. Die Pythagorasrede im 15. Buch von Ovids Metamorphosen. (Dissertation). Salzburg. Swanson, R.A. 1958. “Ovid’s Pythagorean Essay”, CJ 54: 21 – 4. Viarre, S. 1964. L’image et la pensée dans les “Métamorphoses” d’Ovide. Paris. Volk, K. 2002. The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius. Oxford.

Matthew Leigh

Lucan’s Caesar and Laelius Summary: This paper examines the speech of the centurion Laelius in Book 1 of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile. It argues that the name of the centurion is a figure of allusion pointing back to the speaker of Cicero’s De Amicitia. In this work Laelius the wise considers whether or not one should follow a friend if he makes war against the state and argues that one should not. Lucan’s Laelius asserts his absolute loyalty to Caesar and his readiness to destroy any city, even Rome itself. Cicero’s Laelius discusses two Roman exempla: Blossius of Cumae and Coriolanus. Closer examination of the historians’ accounts of both figures is highly productive for analysis of the speech of Lucan’s Laelius. Keywords: Lucan; Cicero; Coriolanus; civil war; friendship Nearly forty years have now passed since the publication of Frederick Ahl’s Lucan: An Introduction and yet it remains an essential point of reference for any scholar getting to grips with the poet. When first I started to think about the role of spectacle in the Bellum Ciuile, Ahl’s chapter “Sangre y Arena” was there to point the way. As I grew more and more interested in the relationship between Caesar and his subalterns, I could again turn to Professor Ahl’s succinct and incisive discussion of the topic. It is to that very particular relationship that I return in this paper. Laelius the centurion makes his only appearance in Book 1 of the Bellum Ciuile. He is a primipilaris and wears the corona ciuica customarily awarded for the rescue in line of battle of a fellow Roman soldier.¹ His role, however, is to break through the moral qualms felt by Caesar’s troops at the invasion of Italy and to rouse a new unity of purpose amongst his peers. At the end of what is a startling profession of loyalty and devotion to his leader, the army cries out as one and the advance can proceed. Although there can be no doubt about what Laelius contributes to the action of Book 1, there are some unresolved questions about his presentation. On the one hand, it is clear that he belongs to a group of junior officers in the ranks of Caesar’s army, who give voice to and demonstrate an absolute dedication to

 For the significance of Laelius wearing the corona ciuica, see Ahl () ; Leigh ()  n. .

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their leader’s cause.² On the other, while Vulteius and his band of Opitergini in Book 4, Scaeva in Book 6, and Crastinus in Book 7 are all to be found either in Caesar’s Commentarii or in the Periochae of Livy, there is no reference anywhere else in the historical record to Laelius or to his speech.³ This has therefore encouraged most scholars to regard him as an invention of the poet.⁴ To this view, the traditional Roman resonances of the name given to the centurion are particularly piquant in the light of the disregard for all things Roman that he will go on to express.⁵ This paper presupposes the essential fictionality of the centurion. Its focus is rather on his name.⁶ When Lucan calls his character Laelius, he has a more specific point of reference than is customarily perceived. For the terms with which Laelius gives voice to his unflinching loyalty to Caesar as the latter launches his march on Rome stand in striking contrast to the reflections of another Laelius, the principal speaker of Cicero’s De Amicitia, as he questions whether one’s obligations to a friend extend as far as following him when he launches an assault on Rome itself.⁷ Moreover, two examples to which Laelius refers at length – the finally aborted assault on Rome of Coriolanus and the unabashed devotion of Blossius of Cumae to Tiberius Gracchus – feature in the broader historical tradition in ways that make them strikingly relevant to all that Lucan’s centurion professes to be ready to do for his general, and therefore call for further analysis. At Bellum Ciuile 1. 299 – 351, Caesar delivers an extended speech of exhortation to his troops. They are the veterans of his Gallic campaigns and the demonization of their general threatens to deny them the proper reward for their long

 Ahl () ; Leigh ()  – ; Radicke () , ; Galimberti-Biffino ( – ); Fucecchi ().  For the Opitergini, see Livy, Periochae . Vulteius is named at Flor. Epitome .. –  but in a passage that appears strikingly derivative of Lucan. For Scaeva, see Caes. Bellum Ciuile .. – ; ILLRP  and a. For Crastinus, see Caes. Bellum Ciuile . and ; Livy ap. Commenta Bernensia .; Plut. Caesar . – , Pompey . – ; App. Civil Wars .. – .  Grimal () ; Heyke ()  n. ; Lebek () ; Radicke () ; Gall () ; Roche () ; Fucecchi ()  – . For openness to the historicity of Laelius, see Getty () ; Fantham () .  Radicke () ; Dinter () .  The approach to be adopted is suggested in passing by Lebek ()  n.  but appears to have gone unnoticed by subsequent scholars.  Cic. De Amicitia  – .

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and bloody service.⁸ The senate here is embodied in the chattering Marcellus and the empty name that is Cato,⁹ but the true villain of the piece is Pompey. Caesar looks back to his rival’s sanguinary apprenticeship under Sulla,¹⁰ and represents his subsequent career as consistently unconstitutional: Pompey claimed the consulship before the proper age and now refuses to let his power go;¹¹ where Pompey now enjoys kingly power, Caesar disavows any such ambitions and seeks only to remove masters from a city complicit in its own enslavement.¹² This is a vigorous and effective vindication of Caesar’s position, but his audience reply only with uncertain mumbling: fear of the general and their terrible love of the sword pull them one way, duty and the household gods pull them in another.¹³ The key word here is pietas nor is this the only occasion in the poem when its call will restrain, if briefly, the blood-lust of the combatants.¹⁴ The pietas that holds back Caesar’s troops may be defined as a sense of duty towards the gods, the fatherland, parents and blood kin.¹⁵ Each and every one of these categories is referred to in the speech of Laelius and each is put second to the imperative of loyalty to Caesar:

 Luc. . –  and  –  refer to the Gallic campaign; . –  demands a home and land to farm for the troops; for a just cause now vindicated by arms, see . – : arma tenenti | omnia dat, qui iusta negat.  Luc. .: Marcellusque loquax et nomina uana Catones.  Luc. . for the triumph granted to Pompey by Sulla in  B.C.; . –  for Pompey trained in civil war by Sulla; . –  for Sulla and Pompey as kings.  Luc. .: ille semel raptos numquam dimittet honores?  Luc. . – : scilicet extremi Pompeium emptique clientes | continuo per tot satiabunt tempora regno?; . – : ex hoc iam te, inprobe, regno | ille tuus saltem doceat descendere Sulla; . – : nam neque praeda meis neque regnum quaeritur armis: | detrahimus dominos urbi seruire paratae.  Luc. . – , esp. : pietas patriique parentes,  – : diro ferri … amore | ductorisque metu.  Luc. ., .. Roller () is impressive on this topic.  Plaut. Asinaria , Pseudolus  – ; Ter. Hecyra , ,  show an early association between pietas and dutiful behavior towards parents. Wagenvoort ()  points to passages such as Cic. De Inuentione . and  as evidence that Cicero initially associates pietas with devotion to blood kin and the fatherland as opposed to religio, which concerns the gods. Yet whereas passages such as Cic. De Finibus . and De Natura Deorum ., . show that pietas erga deos is a major concern of Cicero’s late philosophical works, Wagenvoort’s attempts at pp.  –  to mark a strong break between this final stage of Cicero’s thought and earlier works is contradicted by the evidence of Cic. Pro Cluentio  delivered in  B.C. and Cic. De Domo Sua  and De Haruspicum Responsis  delivered in  B.C. Wagenvoort does not discuss passages such as Naev. fr.  Blänsdorf; Plaut. Casina  and Enn. Scaenica  Jocelyn.

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iussa sequi tam posse mihi quam uelle necesse est. nec ciuis meus est, in quem tua classica, Caesar, audiero. per signa decem felicia castris perque tuos iuro quocumque ex hoste triumphos, pectore si fratris gladium iuguloque parentis condere me iubeas plenaeque in uiscera partu coniugis, inuita peragam tamen omnia dextra; si spoliare deos ignemque inmittere templis, numina miscebit castrensis flamma monetae; castra super Tusci si ponere Thybridis undas, Hesperios audax ueniam metator in agros. tu quoscumque uoles in planum effundere muros, his aries actus disperget saxa lacertis, illa licet, penitus tolli quam iusseris urbem, Roma sit. To follow your orders I must have as much the capacity as the will. Nor is he my fellowcitizen against whom, Caesar, I shall have heard your war-trumpets blast. I swear by standards successful through ten campaigns and by your triumphs against every which foe, should you command me to bury the sword in my brother’s breast or a parent’s throat or into the guts of my wife great with child, though my hand shrinks back I shall still carry it all out. If you bid me to despoil the gods and set fire to the temples, the flame of our camp mint will melt down the divine powers; if you bid me set up camp above the waters of the Tuscan Tiber, I shall come, a bold planner, into Hesperian fields. Whatsoever walls you wish to raze to the ground, the ram will scatter the rocks driven on by these arms, even if the city that you order to be utterly destroyed should be Rome.¹⁶

The speech of Caesar to which Laelius responds is striking for its determination to cast the invasion of Italy as a just response to an unjust regime.¹⁷ Yet the centurion does almost nothing to develop this theme.¹⁸ His true audience are his fellow-soldiers held back from crime by thoughts of duty and the household gods. Nor is he entirely a stranger to such feelings: to ask, as he does, whether it is really so wretched to conquer in civil war is to acknowledge the conviction of others that this is indeed a crime;¹⁹ all the deeds that Caesar bids him to commit, he will perpetrate, but he will do so with a shrinking hand;²⁰ he will raze any city even if it be Rome.²¹ For all that the speech of Laelius is addressed to Caesar from first to last, its true target lies somewhere else. The complete success of this

     

Luc. . – . For discussion, see Menz () ; Heyke ()  – . Heyke () . Luc. . regnum … senatus is perhaps the closest that Laelius comes to political analysis. Luc. .: usque adeo miserum est ciuili uincere bello? Luc. .: inuita peragam tamen omnia dextra. Luc. . – : illa licet, penitus quam iusseris urbem, | Roma sit.

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strategy is underlined in Lucan’s description of the reaction of the soldiers, who promise their hands held high for whatsoever wars the general proclaims.²² I do not propose here to revisit what I have previously written about the vicious deeds that Laelius offers to perform or about the peculiarly intense relationship between the general and his troops that Lucan finds in the historical tradition and reimagines in his own distinctive terms.²³ I would, however, point to my previous analysis of vv. 367– 372 as a version of the military sacramentum and of the importance in this context of the prior adaptation of this oath in Roman personal poetry to express ’the devoted loyalty of friends … [and] of one lover … for another’.²⁴ For the conflicting demands of friendship and of duty to the state are the central issue addressed in the passage of the De Amicitia that has so much to bring to the analysis of this speech and to which Lucan may be said to allude through the name that he gives to his centurion. At De Amicitia 36, Laelius the wise considers how far love (amor) in friendship should go and whether any friends of Coriolanus, if he had any, would have been right to join him in bearing arms against the fatherland.²⁵ The phrasing is cautious and with reason: Coriolanus is a singularly lonely figure and the historical tradition offers scant reference to any fellow-citizens joining him in his exile amongst the Volscians and later march on Rome.²⁶ More recent experience does, however, offer an alternative example and 37 goes on to describe how Q. Tubero and others of his peers abandoned Tiberius Gracchus as he troubled the state, but Blossius of Cumae excused himself for staying true on the grounds that he esteemed his friend so highly that he felt that he should do whatever Gracchus desired.²⁷ Laelius then records himself as asking Blossius whether he would

 Luc. . – , esp.  – : elatasque alte, quaecumque ad bella uocaret, | promisere manus; Heyke () ,  – .  Leigh ()  – .  Leigh ()  citing Catul. . – ; Hor. Epodes . – ; Prop. .. – ; Verg. Eclogues . –  and  – . See now Roche ()  – .  Cic. De Amicitia : quamobrem id primum uideamus, si placet, quatenus amor in amicitia progredi debeat. numne si Coriolanus habuit amicos, ferre contra patriam arma illi cum Coriolano debuerunt? For the specific issue of ‘how far’ we should go in the name of friendship and the discussion of this issue in the works of Cicero and Theophrastus, see Gel. .. Note .. μέχρι πόσου, .. quonam usque, .. quousque, .. quatenus.  Cic. De Amicitia  says of Themistocles and Coriolanus: his adiutor contra patriam inuentus est nemo. Plut. Coriolanus . refers to three or four clients who leave Rome with Coriolanus, but at D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. he leaves alone.  Cic. De Amicitia : at C. Blossius … hanc ut sibi ignoscerem causam adferebat, quod tanti Tiberium Gracchum fecisset ut quidquid ille uellet sibi faciendum putaret.

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obey if Gracchus asked him to set fire to the Capitol. This, Blossius replies, Gracchus would never have desired of him, but, had he done so, then he would have obeyed.²⁸ Nor were these empty words. For Laelius describes Blossius as going beyond mere obedience to his rash associate; he took charge and presented himself not as the companion of his folly but as the leader.²⁹ Nor, adds Laelius, was he alone: C. Carbo and C. Cato both followed Tiberius and now his younger brother Gaius is most vigorous in his cause.³⁰ Cicero’s dialogue is firmly anchored in the Rome of 129 B.C. between the fall of Tiberius and his brother’s ascension to the tribunate. Laelius can see that Rome has departed somewhat from traditional practice and he is anxious for the future.³¹ His immediate anxiety is for the career of Gaius,³² but the prophetic tone that he adopts is that of one looking beyond the horizon and anticipating the sorrows of Cicero’s own time.³³ Towards the end of this section of the dialogue, Laelius returns to Coriolanus and sets him alongside his near-contemporary, Themistocles.³⁴ The most famous and powerful of the Greeks is said to have fallen victim to resentment (inuidia) and to have been driven into exile, but he was wrong not to put up with the wrong done to him by his ungrateful fatherland and did what, twenty years previously, Coriolanus had done to Rome. Neither found any supporters and both were driven to suicide.³⁵ Great though these men were, and sad their ends, Lae-

 Cic. De Amicitia : tum ego: “etiamne si te in Capitolium faces ferre uellet?” “numquam,” inquit, “uoluisset id quidem; sed si uoluisset, paruissem.”  Cic. De Amicitia : et hercule ita fecit, uel plus etiam quam dixit; non enim paruit ille Tiberii Gracchi temeritati, sed praefuit, nec se comitem illius furoris sed ducem praebuit.  Cic. De Amicitia .  Cic. De Amicitia : deflexit iam aliquantum de spatio curriculoque consuetudo maiorum; : serpit diem e die res quae procliuis ad perniciem, cum semel coepit, labitur.  Cic. De Amicitia : de Gai Gracchi autem tribunatu quid exspectem, non libet augurari.  Cic. De Amicitia : uidere iam uideor populum a senatu disiunctum, multitudinis arbitrio res maximas agi; plures enim discent quemadmodum haec fiant, quam quemadmodum his resistatur;  mihi autem non minori curae est qualis res publica post mortem meam futura, quam qualis hodie sit. Powell () : “The reader is of course meant to think of Sulla and especially Caesar”. For emphasis on the immediate aftermath of Caesar’s assassination as illustrated by the correspondence between Cicero and Matius, see Steinmetz ()  –  and note especially Matius at Cic. Ad Familiares ..: neque enim Caesarem in dissensione ciuili sum secutus, sed amicum; quamquam re offendebar tamen non deserui, neque bellum umquam ciuile aut etiam causam dissensionis probaui, quam etiam nascentem exstingui summe studui.  For this pairing of Coriolanus and Themistocles, see also Cic. Brutus  – ; Gel. .. – .  Cic. De Amicitia : quis clarior in Graecia Themistocle, quis potentior? qui cum imperator bello Persico seruitute Graeciam liberauisset, propterque inuidiam in exsilium expulsus esset, in-

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lius is quite sure that things turned out as they should have done. For anyone to have aided either man against the fatherland on grounds of friendship would have been a grievous wrong.³⁶ Such then are the convictions of Laelius Sapiens and it scarcely needs stating that they are in the starkest contrast to those espoused by Laelius the centurion. In Book 4 of Lucan, the Opitergian Vulteius represents collective suicide as the best possible pledge of love for Caesar,³⁷ while in Book 6 Scaeva claims that his opponents’ love for Pompey and the cause of the senate falls short of his own love of death.³⁸ Where the philosopher is concerned to set a proper limit on the demands of amor within amicitia, Caesar’s subalterns reveal through their crazed excesses just what amor for the general can produce. I have argued elsewhere that the manner in which Laelius the centurion addresses his leader has its own strongly erotic coloring and what he promises, just as much as what Scaeva and Vulteius actually do, reveals the very want of those limits that Cicero’s Laelius seeks to impose.³⁹ The significance for Lucan of De Amicitia 36 – 43 extends somewhat further than the contrasting attitudes of the two Laelii. Of particular interest are the two Roman historical exempla introduced by Laelius the philosopher: Blossius of Cumae and Coriolanus. It will be helpful to consider the significance of both and to probe a little further into the historical tradition surrounding them. The career of Blossius of Cumae is indeed striking. A Stoic philosopher and associate of Antipater of Tarsus, he appears to have been a persistent thorn in the side of the Roman aristocracy. Exiled from Rome after the fall of Tiberius Gracchus, he made his way to Asia Minor and joined the rebellion of Aristonicus and the self-styled Heliopolitae.⁴⁰ Yet what matters most in this context is the

gratae patriae iniuriam non tulit quam ferre debuit: fecit idem quod uiginti annis ante apud nos fecerat Coriolanus. his adiutor contra patriam inuentus est nemo; itaque mortem sibi uterque consciuit.  Cic. De Amicitia : quare talis improborum consensio non modo excusatione amicitiae tegenda non est, sed potius supplicio omni uindicanda est, ut ne quis concessum putet amicum uel bellum patriae inferentem sequi. For the impropriety of aiding a friend against the fatherland as axiomatic, see Gel. .. – : “contra patriam” inquit Cicero “arma pro amico sumenda non sunt.” hoc profecto nemo ignorauit, et “priusquam Theognis”, quod Lucilius ait, “nasceretur”.  Luc. . – : sed non maiora supersunt | obsessis tanti quae pignora demus amoris.  Luc. . – : Pompei uobis minor est causaeque senatus | quam mihi mortis amor. There is a para prosdokian effect here because we expect him to refer to his love for Caesar. For amor mortis in Lucan, see Rutz ().  For the erotic coloring of the interaction of Caesar and his troops, see also Fantham () .  Plut. Tiberius Gracchus .; Dudley ()  – .

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suggestion that he was not so much the companion as the leader of Tiberius’ folly and, in particular, his reported confession that he would have set fire to the Capitol had his leader bid him do so. Laelius claims here to have been assisting the consuls Laenas and Rupilius in an advisory capacity;⁴¹ Valerius Maximus tells the same story and in words that make clear his debt to Cicero, but also adds the detail that the consuls were mandated by the senate to decide on the appropriate punishment for the followers of Tiberius.⁴² This suggests that the story in the De Amicitia is no ad hoc invention but rather a compressed reference to an existing historical tradition. Plutarch’s life of Tiberius Gracchus confirms this suspicion. For he states that Blossius appeared before the consuls, but claims first Nasica, then many others put the crucial question to him, and gives an importantly different version of the philosopher’s reply: Gracchus would never have told him to fire the Capitol, but had he done so, it would have been proper to obey, because Gracchus would only have issued such an order had it been in the interests of the people.⁴³ Blossius of Cumae was clearly a man known to the historians of the fall of the Republic and what made him notorious was his readiness to set fire to the Capitol had his leader told him to. He is a significant model for the fealty to Caesar promised by Lucan’s Laelius. The career of Coriolanus also merits close attention.⁴⁴ The principal historical sources for his life describe his valiant and distinguished military service as a young man and, like Lucan’s Laelius, he is the recipient of the corona ciuica. ⁴⁵ Yet in political life the inflexible opposition of Coriolanus to popular interests results in his eventual trial and exile from Rome. Taking up residence amongst the Volsci, he leads them to great military success against Rome’s Latin allies and eventually marches against the city itself, setting up camp at the Fossae Cluiliae. At this point a succession of embassies are sent from the city in an attempt to persuade him to abandon his campaign: two made up of

 Cic. De Amicitia : cum ad me (quod aderam Laenati et Rupilio consulibus in consilio) deprecatum uenisset.  Val. Max. ..: nam cum senatus Rupilio et Laenati consulibus mandasset ut in eos qui cum Graccho consenserant more maiorum animaduerterent, et ad Laelium, cuius consilio praecipue consules utebantur, pro se Blossius deprecatum uenisset …  Plut. Tiberius Gracchus .: εἰπόντος δὲ τοῦ Νασικᾶ πρὸς αὐτόν· “τί οὖν εἴ σε Τιβέριος ἐκέλευσεν ἐμπρῆσαι τὸ Καπετώλιον;” τὸ μὲν πρῶτον ἀντέλεγεν, ὡς οὐκ ἂν τοῦτο Τιβερίου κελεύσαντος· πολλάκις δὲ καὶ πολλῶν τὸ αὐτὸ πυνθανομένων, “ἀλλ’ ἐκείνου γε προστάσσοντος” ἔφη “κἀμοὶ τοῦτο πρᾶξαι καλῶς εἶχεν· οὐ γὰρ ἂν Τιβέριος τοῦτο προσέταξεν, εἰ μὴ τῷ δήμῳ συνέφερεν.”  It is clear from Fabius Pictor fr.  FRHist = Livy .. –  that the Coriolanus story was established early in Roman tradition.  For the corona ciuica, see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae ..; Plut. Coriolanus ..

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groups of first five, then ten senators,⁴⁶ one of priests and augurs,⁴⁷ and finally one from the women of Rome led by his mother, Veturia, and wife, Volumnia, and accompanied by his two sons. Only the last is able to induce him to abandon the campaign.⁴⁸ Accounts of his subsequent fortunes are various.⁴⁹ The crucial element here is the significance of the four embassies to which all the principal sources refer. For taken as a whole the different appeals made to Coriolanus may be identified as invoking the different parts of pietas: the senators signify pietas to the fatherland, the priests pietas to the gods, and the final group pietas towards blood kin.⁵⁰ In what is by far the most extensive version of the story, that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the leader of the first senatorial embassy, Minucius, also appeals to Coriolanus in the name of friendship,⁵¹ and both he and Veturia make reference to all the different elements of pietas or eusebeia. ⁵² Much about Coriolanus encourages the belief of others in his pietas

 D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. – ..; Livy .. – ; Plut. Coriolanus . – .; App. Italika . – ; Zon. ..  D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .; Livy ..; Plut. Coriolanus . – ; App. Italika ..  D.H. Antiquitates Romanae . – .; Livy .. – ; Plut. Coriolanus . – .; App. Italika . – ; D.C. . – .  Fabius Pictor fr.  FRHist = Livy .. –  suggests that Coriolanus grew old in an unhappy exile. D.C. . also records the tradition of death in old age but with it that found at D.H. Antiquitates Romanae . –  and Plut. Coriolanus . –  according to which he falls victim to a conspiracy by his detractors amongst the Volscians.  It may be relevant here to consider the account at Cic. De Officiis . of the differing grades of affinity between humans of which the most compact is that which binds relative to relative. Note especially artior uero conligatio est societatis propinquorum; ab illa enim immensa societate humani generis in exiguum angustumque concluditur. See also Cic. De Amicitia : sic enim mihi perspicere uideor, ita natos esse nos, ut inter omnes esset societas quaedam, maior autem ut quisque proxime accederet; itaque ciues potiores quam peregrini, propinqui quam alieni; cum his enim amicitiam natura ipsa peperit.  D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. describes the ambassadors as οὓς μάλιστ’ ἐκεῖνος ἠσπάζετο while Minucius at .. claims that they are περὶ σὲ προθυμότατοι. See also .. – , where Coriolanus describes himself as a friend to the ambassadors if not to the state as a whole and .. and .. –  where he says of his treatment by the Romans and then the Volscians that those whom he regarded as friends have become his enemies and vice versa. Plut. Coriolanus . also stresses the good relations between Coriolanus and the members of the first embassy: οἱ δὲ πεμφθέντες ἀπὸ βουλῆς ἦσαν μὲν ἐπιτήδειοι τῶι Μαρκίωι, προσεδέχοντο δὲ πολλὴν περί γε τὰς πρώτας ἀπαντήσεις φιλοφροσύνην παρ’ ἀνδρὸς οἰκείου καὶ συνήθους.  At D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .., .. – , .., Minucius deplores Coriolanus’ violence against the sacred places of Rome while at .. – , .. (cf. .. – ) he and Coriolanus debate the attitude to the gods of his deeds. At D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. –  and . Minucius reminds Coriolanus of the suffering that he brings on his mother, wife, and children through his impiety. For references to piety toward the gods in the encounter with Veturia,

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even as he makes war on Rome,⁵³ but it is his final surrender to Veturia that puts the seal on his reputation: nearly five hundred years after his death, says Dionysius, he is still hymned and sung of at Rome as a man of justice and of duty.⁵⁴ Coriolanus is a necessarily ambiguous figure and this is apparent in many an ancient account of his career. Inasmuch as he resolves to march on Rome, he becomes a figure of impiety.⁵⁵ Inasmuch as he finally yields to his mother’s appeal he becomes the opposite.⁵⁶ At De Beneficiis 5.14.4– 5, Seneca indicts that ingratitude and perverse reasoning that mistakes violence against the fatherland for power and standing and that leads generals to urge troops to violence against wives, children, and the gods.⁵⁷ At 5.16 he then introduces a long catalogue of Roman ingrates who made war against their own city. The first of these is Coriolanus, ungrateful inasmuch as made war on Rome and pious only late on and after repenting of his crime and in the midst of parricide.⁵⁸ This formulation captures perfectly what makes Coriolanus so eloquent a moral example at Rome. In Book 1 of Lucan an implicit parallelism is established between the hesitation of Caesar’s troops before the decisive intervention of Laelius and the earlier confrontation between Caesar and the image of his grieving homeland.⁵⁹ The speech of Patria lasts no more than two lines and turns simply on the warning that the banks of the Rubicon, at which Caesar finds himself, are the legal limit to his army’s advance.⁶⁰ At this sight, horror strikes the limbs of the general, his hair grows stiff, and a languor holds back his steps on the very bank of the river. This moment of hesitation does not last. Soon Caesar prays for the favor of Rome and her cults and proclaims himself Rome’s soldier wherever he may be; the see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae  ., .., ... For appeals to pietas to the homeland, see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae. For further references to εὐσέβεια and ἀσέβεια in these exchanges, see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .., .., .., .., ... For εὐσέβεια translated as pietas, see CGL ii. .  D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .., .., ...  D.H. Antiquitates Romanae ...  Cic. Ad Atticum ..; Livy .. – .  Livy ..; Val. Max. ..; Cornell () .  Sen. De Beneficiis .. – : hoc iam amplius est: beneficia in scelera uersa sunt, et sanguini eorum non parcitur, pro quibus sanguis fundendus est; gladio ac uenenis beneficia sequimur. ipsi patriae manus adferre et fascibus illam suis premere potentia ac dignitas est; humili se ac depresso loco putat stare, quisquis non supra rem publicam stetit; accepti ab illa exercitus in ipsam convertuntur, et imperatoria contio est: “pugnate contra coniuges, pugnate contra liberos! aras, focos, penates armis incessite!”  Sen. De Beneficiis ..: ingratus est Coriolanus, sero et post sceleris paenitentiam pius; posuit arma, sed in medio parricidio posuit.  Menz () ; Lebek ()  – .  Luc. . – .

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guilty party will be the man to make him an enemy of the state.⁶¹ All delay is cut short and he hastens on to war.⁶² The personification of the Patria and the challenge to Caesar has been much studied and various models have been suggested as an inspiration for the scene.⁶³ The specific location of the challenge on the banks of the Rubicon and thus at the border between Gallia Cisalpina and Italy has been related to the account in Dio of the challenge to Drusus by the image of a barbarian woman of superhuman size as he stood on the banks of the Elbe.⁶⁴ The civil war context lends particular pertinence to the challenge to Catiline by the Patria in the first Catilinarian of Cicero.⁶⁵ The description of the head of the Patria as crowned with towers has encouraged comparison with descriptions of both Cybele and Tyche though analysis of coinage suggests that this is also a conventional way of representing the goddess Roma.⁶⁶ By letting her hair hang loose the Patria indicates the state of mourning into which she is thrown by the threat of invasion.⁶⁷ In the myth of Coriolanus, there is likewise repeated reference to the wretched garb adopted by the women who come to appeal to him.⁶⁸ Yet what is more striking is the description of the hair of the Patria as white. For the personified homeland is thus a singularly elderly figure and this aspect brings her ever more closely into relationship with Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus.⁶⁹ That the fatherland should more truly be a motherland relates intriguingly to the report in Plutarch that, on the eve of the crossing of the Rubicon, Caesar dreamt that he was having sex with his mother.⁷⁰

 Luc. . – .  For recent discussion of this passage, see Moretti ().  Peluzzi () offers a detailed account of prior scholarship and many new ideas. See also Narducci ()  – , which reworks elements of Narducci (); Moretti ().  D.C. . – , cf. Suet. Claudius . for a similar apparition meeting Drusus as he advances beyond the Rhine; Peluzzi () ; Narducci ()  – .  Cic. In Catilinam ., cf. Rhetorica ad Herennium .; Peluzzi ()  and n. ; Narducci ()  – .  Peluzzi ()  – .  For the Patria’s gestures of mourning, see Heyke ()  n. ; Roche () ad loc.  For the mourning garb of the women who come to Coriolanus, see, e. g., D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .., .., .., .., ..; Plut. Coriolanus ..  For the advanced years of Veturia, see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae ..; Livy .. and  magno natu mulier … longa uita et infelix senecta.  Plut. Caesar ; Moretti ()  – . For the slippage between mother and motherland in the speech of Veturia at Livy .. – , see Cornell () . The same pattern is evident at D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. as Minucius refers to the homeland that begat and raised Coriolanus.

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The drama of hesitation, speech, and onward movement is thus played out twice in the first book of the poem, first in Caesar’s encounter with the Patria, then again as the troops confront their feelings of pietas, only to be overwhelmed by the rhetoric of the centurion. If the figuration of Patria as an elderly woman in mourning lends her encounter with Caesar much of the external form of that between Coriolanus and Veturia,⁷¹ the second episode of the moral discomfort of the troops and the intervention of Laelius the centurion speaks even more clearly to the conflict of allegiances that makes Coriolanus so memorable a figure.⁷² To Roman writers in general and Lucan in particular, to make war against one’s fellow-citizens is a paradigmatic act of impiety.⁷³ What makes the speech of Laelius so shocking is the way that he lists all those entities that should properly inspire feelings of pietas – siblings, parents, wives, the unborn child, the gods, even the city of Rome – and promises to put each and every one second to loyalty to his general. He is not indifferent to the moral reprehensibility of the actions that he will undertake, but he is subject to an alternative imperative as urgent as it is morally dubious. What, though, is most alarming about Laelius is the instant success of his rhetoric. His speech opens with a form of parrhesia, in which the junior officer chides his superior for his hesitation and asks him whether he has lacked confidence in his men.⁷⁴ The true target of this question is not, in fact, Caesar himself, but those troops whose feelings of pietas have left them temporarily paralyzed and unable to respond to their general’s exhortation with the proper degree of ardor. There is, then, reason to question the army before Laelius speaks up; but by the end of his address they all cry out in agreement and promise their hands for whatever wars ensue. The starting point for this paper was the prevailing uncertainty about whether Lucan’s Laelius was or was not a historical figure and what his name might imply. My conclusion is that Laelius is a speaking name and that its purpose is to indicate the significance for this episode of Cicero, De Amicitia 36 – 43. There Laelius the wise considers whether or not feelings of friendship should in For Lucan’s Patria figured as a woman in mourning, see Heyke ()  n. . The description of Patria at Luc. . as turrigero canos effundens uertice crines is relevant inasmuch as she, like Veturia, is clearly an elderly woman.  For affinities between the encounter of Caesar and Patria and that between Coriolanus and Veturia, see Henderson ()  – ; Peluzzi ()  n. ; Ambühl () .  Verg. Georgics ., Aeneid ., . – , .; Hor. Epodes ., Odes .. – , .. – ; Sen. Phoenissae , , ; Luc. ., ., ., ., ., ., .; Stat. Thebaid ., ., ..  Quint. Institutio Oratoria ..: quod idem dictum sit de oratione libera, quam Cornificius licentiam uocat, Graeci παρρησίαν. quid enim minus figuratum quam uera libertas? sed frequenter sub hac latet adulatio. For such figured parrhesia, see Ahl ()  citing Plut. Moralia D.

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duce us to join an assault on the fatherland and considers the examples of Blossius of Cumae and of Coriolanus. The significance of the former lies in his famous assertion that he would have done for Tiberius Gracchus what Laelius the centurion here offers to do for Caesar and set fire to the city of Rome. The significance of the latter lies in his abortive march on the city and indifference to the call of pietas as represented by the embassy of friends and aristocrats sent by the senate, then by that made by the high priests of the state. Only when his mother, wife, and children come to him does Coriolanus relent. Lucan’s Laelius touches on each and every one of the relationships embodied in these three embassies and acknowledges the feelings of moral obligation that have overtaken those to whom his words are truly addressed. Yet whereas Veturia and Volumnia do finally persuade Coriolanus to abandon his campaign and allow him to emerge as a figure of great if not unambiguous pietas, nothing can hold back either Laelius or those whose scruples he combats. Loyalty to Caesar finally trumps all.⁷⁵

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY. — 1984. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105: 174 – 208. Ambühl, A. 2005. “Thebanos imitata rogos (BC 1, 552). Lucans Bellum civile und die Tragödien aus dem thebanischen Sagenkreis”, in: C. Walde (ed.), Lucan im 21. Jahrhundert. Leipzig, 261 – 94. Cornell, T. 2003. “Coriolanus: Myth, History and Performance”, in: D. Braund and C. Gill (eds.), Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome. Studies in Honour of T.P. Wiseman. Exeter, 73 – 97. Dinter, M. 2012. Anatomizing Civil War. Studies in Lucan’s Epic Technique. Ann Arbor, MI. Dudley, D.R. 1941. “Blossius of Cumae”, JRS 31: 94 – 9. Fantham, E. 1985. “Caesar and the Mutiny: Lucan’s Reshaping of the Historical Tradition in De Bello Civili 5. 237 – 373”, CPh 80: 119 – 31. — 2010. “Caesar’s Voice and Caesarian Voices”, in: N. Hömke and C. Reitz (eds.), Lucan’s Bellum Civile: Between Epic Tradition and Aesthetic Innovation. Berlin, 53 – 70. Fucecchi, M. 2011. “Partisans in Civil War”, in: P. Asso (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Lucan. Leiden, 237 – 56.

 I would like to thank the Department of Classics at Cornell University for inviting me to address the September  conference in honor of Professor Ahl and to put on record my great debt to and admiration for his work. Subsequent to the conference I was able to deliver versions of this paper at the universities of Hamburg, Rostock, Berlin (Freie Universität), Potsdam, Trento, and Oxford. I wish to thank all those who helped with these visits, not least Christiane Reitz and Markus Kersten.

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Galimberti-Biffino, G. 2006 – 8. “Scelerique nefando / nomen erit virtus (Phars. 1, 667b-668): l’antihéroïsme des personnages mineurs dans la Pharsale de Lucain”, StudClas 42 – 4: 113 – 25. Gall, D. 2005. “Masse, Heere und Feldherren in Lucans Pharsalia”, in: C. Walde (ed.), Lucan im 21. Jahrhundert. Leipzig, 89 – 110. Getty, R.J. 1940. Lucan: De Bello Civili I. Cambridge. Grimal, P. 1970. “Le poète et l’histoire”, in: Lucain. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique de la Fondation Hardt 15. Vandoeuvres, 51 – 116. Henderson, J. 1987. “Lucan/The Word at War”, Ramus 16: 122 – 64. Heyke, W. 1970. Zur Rolle der Pietas bei Lucan. (Dissertation). Heidelberg. Lebek, W. 1976. Lucans Pharsalia. Dichtungsstruktur und Zeitbezug. Göttingen. Leigh, M. 1997. Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement. Oxford. Menz, W. 1952. Caesar und Pompeius im Epos Lucans. Zur Stoffbehandlung und Charakterschilderung in Lucans Pharsalia. (Dissertation). Berlin. Moretti, G. 2007. “Patriae trepidantis imago. La personificazione di Roma nella Pharsalia fra ostentum e disseminazione allegorica”, Camenae 2: 1 – 18. Narducci, E. 1980. “Cesare e la Patria”, Maia 32: 175 – 8. — 2002. Lucano. Un’epica contro l’impero. Rome/Bari. Peluzzi, E. 1999. “Turrigero … vertice. La prosopopea della patria in Lucano”, in: P. Esposito and L. Nicastri (eds.), Interpretare Lucano. Miscellanea di studi. Naples, 127 – 55. Powell, J.G.F. 1990. Cicero On Friendship and The Dream of Scipio. Edited with an Introduction, Translation & Commentary. Warminster. Radicke, J. 2004. Lucans poetische Technik. Studien zum historischen Epos. Leiden. Roche, P. 2009. Lucan De Bello Civili Book I. Oxford. Roller, M. 1996. “Ethical Contradiction and the Fractured Community in Lucan’s Bellum Civile”, ClAnt 15: 319 – 47. Rutz, W. 1960. “Amor Mortis bei Lucan”, Hermes 88: 462 – 75. Steinmetz, R. 1967. Die Freundschaftlehre des Panaitios nach einer Analyse von Ciceros ‘Laelius de Amicitia’. Wiesbaden. Wagenvoort, H. 1980. Pietas. Selected Studies in Roman Religion. Leiden.

Joy Connolly

A Theory of Violence in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile Summary: Recent important and influential readings of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile have treated the extravagantly described scenes of violence in the epic as symptoms of the disintegration of the human subject. This paper argues instead that for Lucan, violence plays an integrating and unifying role in establishing the Roman state, both in its past identity as a republican empire and in its incarnation as an autocracy under the Julio-Claudians. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the African postcolony, the paper concludes that leaders and people alike share in a grotesque sublimity that is the figure of Roman power. Keywords: violence; Lucan; panegyric; style; sublime; grotesque The practice of violence binds men together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward.¹

The Stylistics of Excess At least ten major American films released in the summer of 2013, to take a representative example, featured the violent destruction of New York or another American city by the forces of war, environmental disaster, or alien invasion. People in these films died in a dizzying variety of ways: crushed, drowned, zapped by lasers, bombed to bits. The technological arts that are a proven element of these movies’ appeal make possible an extravagant style of representation so extreme that the violence takes on the tinge of farce. What is the meaning of Hollywood’s preoccupation with the devastation of America and by extension, the First World or the West? What fuels audiences’ appetite for watching the disintegration of American cities and civic institutions? Slavoj Zizek suggests that there is more to these movies than the expression of American guilt about the nation’s over-consumption and exploitation of global labor and environmental resources. He speculates that the excess of their digital artificiality reflects Americans’ embrace of civic artificiality. Having collectively

 Fanon () .

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chosen to cultivate a political discourse that suppresses awareness of suffering and patterns of domination, Americans require visions of near-total destruction in order to envision a plausible democratic present or future. Zizek adds an important methodological note: “Rather than interpreting films, and searching for keys to interpretation, we should view movies as direct participants in political reality.”² Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile is an epic poem of a special violence.³ It begins by indicting Rome for leaving itself vulnerable to invasion by choosing civil war instead of war on the borders (1.8 – 23). But in the event, this alleged act of selfabandonment hardly seems to matter. Even the poet’s wish that the Romans devote their energies to conquering foreign peoples leads ironically down a dead end, since in the history of the res publica, according to Lucan himself in the same passage, foreign expansion and civil war are tied together. Echoing Sallust and anticipating a line of critics leading up to Hannah Arendt, Lucan describes a Rome grown by imperial conquest too large to bear itself, falling victim to a lethal competition for dominance among its most powerful men (nec se Roma ferens, 72).⁴ Where Zizek sees the cinematic showcasing of extreme violence as a putative psychotherapy for the diseased postmodern state, Lucan presents violence as the constant of Roman experience, whether Romans direct it outward from their borders or inward towards their own guts (in sua…uiscera, 3).⁵ “You, Rome, were the cause of evils” (82). Since 1976, when Frederick Ahl brought Lucan back into focus for classicists and other literary scholars with his book Lucan: An Introduction, the poet’s political sympathies have been the focus of intensive debate. Much of it has revolved around the poem’s representations of violence, starting in book 1 with the centurion Laelius’ gruesome oath to murder his family at Caesar’s command (1.374– 86) and climaxing with the battle at Pharsalus, Pompey’s beheading in Egypt, and Cato’s journey through Libya. For most readers, there is an essential relation between style and politics, and episodes of extreme violence have help-

 Zizek (): “It’s important at the end of Independence Day that everyone pulls together: Jews, Arabs, blacks…Disaster films might be all that’s left of the utopian genre.” See further Zizek ()  – .  Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s opening remark on Francis Bacon ().  Arendt: “abundance of wealth may erode power, riches are particularly dangerous to the power and well-being of republics” ()  – . Extended translations are Braund’s; intext translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.  See Connolly ()  –  on the Roman republican confidence in violence as the best bulwark against tyranny.

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ed to ground the consensus view of Lucan as a poet devoted to republican libertas and deeply critical of Julius Caesar and his dynasty.⁶ The founding member of this group in modern criticism, Ahl called Lucan’s style “preposterous” in his analysis of one notorious episode where the younger Cato’s men die horrible deaths in the Libyan desert, poisoned by snakes. But Ahl also saw the elaborate mythological references punctuating the desert tale as evidence for interpreting it as Cato’s aristeia, a celebration of his republican uirtus and confirmation of the genuine heroism of his resistance to the tyrant Caesar.⁷ To Charles Martindale, Lucan uses paradox and hyperbole to convey his vision of a corrupt imperial world. He crafts an anti-Vergilian style of epic poetry, better suited than the elegant Aeneid to meet the task of representing the norm-destroying enormity of war.⁸ David Quint and John Henderson also see in Lucan’s disjointed style a diagnosis of the disunity of the state and a rewriting of official Roman history, as Lucan resists the “unifying historical fictions” of the Julio-Claudians.⁹ In an influential essay, Glenn Most suggests that the changing political and social atmosphere of the Neronian period, notably the Caesars’ disruption of the senatorial order’s traditional domination and the increasingly outré spectacles in the gladiatorial arena, drew writers’ attention to the moments at which experiences of physical and emotional extremity breach the integrity of the self.¹⁰ In her stimulating book on Lucan, Shadi Bartsch boldly develops Most’s argument. Citing work by John Henderson and Jamie Masters on Lucan’s persistent interest in boundaries and their violation, and linking the Bellum Ciuile to contemporary Stoic thinking about the care of the self, she reads Lucan’s representation of Caesar’s colossal power and the many mutilated bodies in his epic as close studies of violation at its most extreme. “Lucan’s description of the civil war, right down to the level of his syntax, renders the human being a thing, an unfeeling lump of matter that comes apart as its boundaries are violated, rob-

 For some, politics and style are only incidentally connected. Viewing Lucan’s choices as a matter of current fashion, they point to contextual influences like declamation, a form of practice or show oratory whose practitioners began to cultivate the achieving of heightened emotional effects under the Julio-Claudians, possibly because the imperial law-court was no longer a safe place to experiment with summoning up the passions. Lucan’s grand-uncle the elder Seneca is one of our most important sources for tracing the grand passions of semi-professional declaimers under Tiberius. Bonner ().  Ahl () ; on Cato,  – ,  – .  Martindale ()  – . See further Fantham () : hyperbole is “almost his natural mode of thought.”  Quint () .  Most ()  – .

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bed of agency and animation, linked to the undermining of the sense of self; all as a graphic illustration of how civil war and the tyranny that followed could strip humans of their humanity.”¹¹ Bartsch’s reading takes the individual human subject as Lucan’s central concern. In his literally blow-by-blow depictions of the massacres at Rome during the Sullan proscriptions (book 2), the naval battle near Massilia (book 3), the witch Erictho’s summoning of a zombie oracle (book 6), the battle at Pharsalus itself (book 7), the execution of Pompey (book 8), the snakes in the desert (book 9) and similar passages, she sees a sublime horror at work best understood through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, which “testifies to the precarious grasp of the subject upon its own identity…the subject may slide back into the impure chaos out of which it was formed.”¹² When the father of the Massilian soldier Argus recognizes his dying son, for instance, the young man is discovered not as a man, she says, but as a mess of “breathing limbs” (spirantes artus), bespeaking “the terrible interchangeability of the person qua person with his body parts.”¹³ The core problem with the erasure of boundaries is dehumanization and the numbness that it imposes on its observers, both the characters within the poem, like Argus’ father, and us as readers. By the end of Bartsch’s book, her focus has shifted from the disintegrating Roman subject in the text to embrace the subject reading the text, in whom the poem cultivates an attitude of both distanced skepticism from the fantasies created by politics and a willing, knowing engagement in sustaining them.¹⁴ I take Lucan’s dominant theme to be not the violated human subject but Rome, the violent community. The horror at the heart of the poem emerges from the fact that despite the spectacular line-up of disintegrated citizen bodies, a collective entity known and recognizable as Roma nonetheless survives. Lucan’s stylistics of excess strains to capture the awesome, gruesome acts of violence through which it does so.¹⁵ Lucan represents this new order as the artifact of collaboration between leaders and the “criminal people” (impia plebs, 7.760). Violence and the suffering it creates unify the collective, providing a certain consistency to experience for both the characters in the poem and its readers. In this sense, as Zizek suggests of recent disaster films, Bellum Ciuile is a direct partic-

 Bartsch () .  Bartsch () , quoting Grosz () .  Bartsch () .  Bartsch ()  – .  See Dinter (),  – : “the Bellum Civile is organized not by standard structural features such as linearity, teleology, or causality, but through imagery, in this case representations of the body, which unifies the work even as it mirrors and enacts fragmentation.”

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ipant in imperial reality. Reading Lucan’s poem, we see how sensible experience is organized such that the new ruling order and its violent actions, whether just or unjust, become the object of disgust and awe, resistance and enjoyment, alienation and an uncanny form of identification. The political significance of the Bellum Ciuile lies not in Lucan’s purported sympathy with Pompey against Caesar, or with Cato against all, or with nostalgia for the free republic as it was, but in his near-hallucinatory accounting of the violence men do to one another, which mirrors and at times even amplifies the voracious excesses of the victor. This violence extends in space to disrupt the whole cosmos (totaque discors / machina divolsi…mundi, 1.80) and future time: “By these swords,” Lucan says, referring to the weapons wielded by the soldiers at Pharsalus, “every age which will serve in slavery is conquered” (uincitur his gladiis omnis quae seruiet aetas, 7.641). We will see at the end how Lucan’s representation of the people’s and Caesar’s mutual implication in violence should affect our interpretation of his notorious dedication to Nero near the start of the first book.

A Theory of Violence In his essay Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin distinguished between several different types of violence: the violence that founds a state, which identifies the territory over which power is exercised, and establishes the government as the sole power by which it exerts authority and judges itself; the violence that preserves law, by converting founding violence into a legitimate, legitimizing authority; the mythical violence that, while operating outside the law, preserves law and the boundaries on which the law depends; and the divine violence that is unknowable, but functions as an “antidote” to mythical violence, because its law-destroying force lays open the path for a new world.¹⁶ Responding implicitly to Benjamin (whom she does not mention) and explicitly to Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt buttressed the essential difference Benjamin saw between power and violence. Power, she observed, is essential to politics and thus may be (and ideally is) legitimate. Violence is merely an instrument, which may be “justifiable, but it will never be legitimate.”¹⁷

 See Lowrie (), a brilliant discussion of the Critique of Violence and its implications for thinking through Vergil: she uses the word “antidote” to describe Benjamin’s theory of divine violence () .  Arendt () . See Benjamin () .

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In his analysis of modern African politics, Achille Mbembe adds to Benjamin’s and Arendt’s accounting another form of violence which is neither founding nor law-preserving but nonetheless ensures the spread and maintenance of the ruling authority in human life. Because it constitutes the central cultural imaginary of the state and society, it authenticates and “reiterates” the distribution of power by maintaining a peculiar kind of order, as we shall see.¹⁸ It also retains elements of mythic and divine violence. Colonial and later, postcolonial sovereignty exist in areas where founding violence, law-preserving violence, and Mbembe’s new form of violence – I will call it “reiterative” to capture its presence in everyday life – interact and reinforce one another.¹⁹ What makes this form of violence distinctive is the way it simultaneously reinforces and undermines order. Mbembe points out that western analyses of African politics and society tend to normalize disorder as the natural condition of the continent and its peoples. This stance, the product of centuries of racism, obscures the fact that postcolonial governments establish their power precisely on the promise of maintaining order, including the rule of law, security, political predictability, and decorum. But at the same time, the leaders and agents of these governments disrupt the law, violate citizens’ rights, destroy their visions for the state, and practice (and publicize) excessive, transgressive behaviors. If the postcolony’s discordant strategy does not contravene the philosophical core of Arendt’s claim about the essential illegitimacy of violence, it reveals the limits of what her argument can explain about the practice of politics, and more specifically, about the sensory experience of politics – how citizens think, feel, and live embodied lives in particular regimes. Mbembe argues that though the postcolonial government acts, and claims to act, as a source of both political and moral authority, it does so on the basis of aggressively eliminating distinctions between means and ends, justice and injustice, obedience and disloyalty, self-control and extravagance.²⁰ The ensuing reiterative violence occurs in different modes and on different sites. It is exercised on individual citizen bodies, through torture and execution, and on the economy.

 Mbembe () , and for the ideas discussed later in the paragraph,  – . He also addresses the reading of Benjamin in Derrida (), which probes the distinction between founding violence and divine violence that destroys law (especially  – ). Because he seeks to explain how postcolonial regimes sustain themselves in times of official peace, he says this new type of violence falls short of actual war. See further : “The violence insinuates itself into the economy, domestic life, language, consciousness. It does more than penetrate every space; it pursues the colonized even in sleep and dream. It produces a culture; it is a cultural praxis.”  Mbembe does not give this new form of violence a name.  Mbembe () .

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It is also wreaked in the realm of the aesthetic, in the cultural imaginary, through the destruction of citizens’ expectations and standards of propriety, predictability, and reason in political discourse and state action. In various forms – politicians’ grotesque rhetoric, their sometimes immense accumulations of wealth, indulgence in food, sex, and luxury possessions, and the ubiquitous, over-sized celebrations of the regime and its leaders on flags and posters – excess and obscenity become “an integral part of the stylistics of power.” The postcolony makes a virtue of crude and violent acts. Further, and importantly, a convivial intimacy develops between rulers and ruled out of which emerges the simulacrum of order. Out of mingled fear, identification, and desire, the citizens energetically imitate the grotesqueries of the governing authority. What kind of agency is this? The effect of these combined experiences of corporeal, infrastructural, and imaginary violence, Mbembe concludes, is to create a peculiar condition of “intrinsic unconditionality” by which the capacity to act, let alone to criticize authority or participate in democratic politics, is fatally damaged.²¹ Reiterative violence anchors the postcolony, preserves order and disorder at the same time, implicates leader and people alike in sustaining the ruling order, and thus helps keep political alternatives at bay.

Reiterative Violence: The Protagonists and the People When Lucan describes the contents of his epic as “wars on Emathian fields, more than civil, / and legality applied to criminal act” (1.1– 2), he describes violence that is not accounted for by Benjamin’s list or Arendt’s effort to cast violence out beyond the law. This violence does not found or preserve legitimate power; it renames crime as law. Nor does it clear the ground for a new order, since much of the traditional operations of the republican order persist. It is closer kin to what I am calling “reiterative violence,” the violence Mbembe sees at work in the African postcolony. In its representations of Roman leaders and people, the Bellum Ciuile illuminates the sensations of reiterative violence – especially the combination of horror and pleasure that helps ensure the persistence of tyranny against resistance, by inviting the people to fear and to enjoy the exercise of power.

 Mbembe ()  (“stylistics”),  (“simulacrum”),  and  (“conviviality”),  (“unconditionality”).

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On the one hand, throughout the poem, Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, and Cato present themselves as leaders acting in the name of preserving the traditional order and its laws. The practice of religion endures; temples are built; oaths are sworn. Caesar retains the name of consul and the loyalty of Roman citizens who cite the name of the office as their reason for joining his side. Notably, these supporters include men who had first fought for Pompey. After his murder in Egypt, some of his partisans desire a ruler, so long as he has the appearance of institutional legitimacy: they wish to “pass into the power of a citizen in toga,” they inform Cato (sub iura togati / ciuis eo, 9.238 – 9). When Caesar claims that his acts of violence are designed to preserve the law, Lucan shows, he does not speak for himself alone, but for men like these Pompeians. Their desire to make some kind of order out of chaos – which Lucan shares as the composer of an epic (as disordered as it is) – is an important driver of the poem’s action. But though the semblance of law is preserved, Lucan says at the start that it “is given over to crime” (iusque datum sceleri, 1.2). The violence he represents, which is swift, unpredictable, sometimes almost beyond human understanding, sweeping aside the traditional order, has the flavor of agency that is beyond human and the reach of human law. Caesar, in particular, wields violence like a force of nature or a god. After comparing Pompey to an ancient oak tree, Lucan famously introduces Caesar in the form of a Jovian thunderbolt: qualiter expressum uentis per nubila fulmen aetheris inpulsi sonitu mundique fragore emicuit rupitque diem populosque pauentes terruit obliqua praestringens lumina flamma: in sua templa furit, nullaque exire uetante materia magnamque cadens magnamque reuertens dat stragem late sparsosque recolligit ignes (1.151– 7). Just so flashes out the thunderbolt shot forth by the winds through clouds, accompanied by the crashing of the heavens and sound of shattered ether; it splits the sky and terrifies the panicked people, searing eyes with slanting flame; against its own precincts it rages, and, with nothing solid stopping its course, both as it falls and then returns, great is the devastation dealt far and wide before it gathers again its scattered fires.

Here and in similar passages Caesar appears as a sublime figure. As Ahl remarks, “Caesar is energy incarnate, a Zeus-like being whose attacks wither and destroy all in their way.”²² Later Lucan makes a general comment on the radical new

 Ahl () . Lucan indirectly suggests that Caesar possesses divine power with his de-

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scope of mortal power, and the newly divine status of mortal men, in the wake of civil war (7.454– 7): mortalia nulli sunt curata deo. cladis tamen huius habemus uindictam, quantam terris dare numina fas est: bella pares superis facient ciuilia diuos, fulminibus manes radiisque ornabit et astris inque deum templis iurabit Roma per umbras. Human affairs are cared for by no deity. Yet we have revenge for this disaster, as much as gods may give to mortals: the civil wars will create divinities equal to those above, with thunderbolts and rays and stars Rome will adorn the dead and in the temples of the gods will swear by ghosts. Civil war makes a world without gods, and makes gods out of men.

Lucan portrays civil war as having cosmic as well as human consequences, creating a massive upheaval in the natural order that inspires horror no less than awe. As Caesar embodies sublime power, he becomes grotesque, committing serious transgressions of propriety in speech and act. He dismisses the law in favor of fortune (1.225 – 27), destroys the sacred grove at Massilia (3.399 – 452), and commands his helmsman to steer into a storm, comparing himself to the gods: “If you refuse Italy because of divine authority, seek it because of mine” (Italiam si caelo auctore recusas, / me pete, 5.579 – 80).²³ He treads ignorantly and irreverently over the bones of Hector at the ancient site of Troy, causing the priest to exclaim in protestation, in a passage underlined by Lucan’s own awkward bid to share Caesar’s immortality through “our Pharsalia” (9.950 – 86: nostra Pharsalia uiuet, 985 – 6). For the quasi-divine Caesar, “the stretch of the Roman globe is not sufficient” (Romani spatium non sufficit orbis, 10.456). He transcends the limits of the material world and further, in the lightning simile, matter itself. His putative kingdom thus incorporates earthly matter and heavenly cosmos, and his affect as ruler is both divine and mortal. So the momentous final scenes of the epic as we have it suggest. Book 10 places Caesar in an Egyptian banquet scription of Pompey’s forces before the battle at Pharsalus, thrown into disarray by lightning and thunder (. – ). Day ()  –  offers insightful analysis of the simile and its appearances in Lucretius, Vergil, and Longinus.  Day () , with excellent discussion of the Lucretian intertexts and their meanings: “In reality this hubris proves spectacularly ill-founded but this in no way impinges on the quality of Caesar’s experience…the storm launches him into the sublime.” Dinter ()  shows how Caesar’s body successfully exercises authority over the cosmic one.

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where his lusts take on global scope (discit opes Caesar spoliati perdere mundi, 10.169) and where, though he is more than satiated with pleasure (lassata uoluptas, 10.172), he prolongs the evening with an extravagant promise to cease fighting if he can learn the secrets of nature (188 – 92). The scene shifts to Ptolemy’s courtiers, Pothinus and Achillas, who spur themselves on to assassinate Caesar by visualizing his excesses, including sex with Cleopatra, whose over-adornments are almost crushing her own body: he is “full with feasting, soaked with wine, and ready for love” (plenum epulis madidumque mero Venerique paratum, 10.360 ff.). In their excited vision Caesar is a body ready to be beheaded like Pompey, an image Lucan embellishes with a flurry of references to his throat being sliced open and his head falling in a welter of blood on the banquet table (iugulum, 387, 395, 409; see also 420, 424). Then, in a vivid simile, when the Egyptian troops attack, Caesar responds at once like a “noble wild animal” breaking its “rabid teeth” against its prison (fera nobilis…frangit rabidos praemorso carcere dentes, 445 – 6) and like the god Vulcan, were he trapped with no outlet inside the caves of Etna (447– 9). For the final two hundred lines of the poem Caesar wavers from fear and uncertainty (expauit, 453; incerto, 460), to decisiveness (tanta est constantia mentis, 490) and murderousness (instantly killing Pothinus at 514– 15) to fear and uncertainty once more, as he gazes at his supporter Scaeva, “doubtful whether to fear or to wish for death” (dubiusque timeret / optaretne mori, 542 – 3). The shift of registers in these four hundred lines of poetry defies categorization. Caesar appears repulsive and courageous, awesome and vulnerable. He bestrides the world, seeks to understand its rational workings, and reacts to danger like a beast. His sublimity is grotesque, his grotesqueness sublime. As he enters the realm of the grotesque sublime, Caesar is accompanied by a throng. Lucan noted in the opening lines of the poem that violence is not an instrument used exclusively by individual men fighting for domination. Armed violence on a massive scale created the republican empire, and it is embedded in Rome’s identity and heroic memory of itself. This is why Lucan dwells on the nature and disposition of the nations and peoples bordering Rome: watchful and aggressive, they stand ready to respond in kind to the violence done in past centuries in the neighboring territories now called Roman. Deeply inculcated in the habit of imperialistic war, the maddened Roman people have been primed to turn against themselves, in a distorted re-enactment of imperial expansion (in arma furentem…populum, 68 – 9). Some of the populus will resist the forces of Caesar and Pompey; others are as ready as Caesar to throw the dice at the Rubicon. Lucan dwells on the intimate relationship between the leader and his forces: their “immeasurable strength” make Caesar confident to dare greater things (inmensae…uires / audendi maiora

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fidem fecere, 1.467– 8). Martin Dinter notes the significance of Lucan’s frequent puns on the words manus and arma, which he uses to assimilate Caesar to his troops (e. g., 3.338 – 9, 5.519 – 20), as well as the pattern of individual soldiers standing in for the entire army or the camp, defending Caesar, who in turn figures Roman power.²⁴ Caesar’s (and to a lesser degree, Pompey’s) grotesque sublimity expresses itself in awesome, defiant transgressions of the cosmic order. The Roman people’s grotesque sublimity expresses itself through suffering and death. Further, the people crystallize as a community around the deaths of the community’s members. This is a motif of Roman history, and we shall see how Lucan’s death-communities are associated with both republican and post-republican Rome.

The Art of Dying Through ecphrasis, treating dying bodies as artworks, Lucan at once underscores the grotesque horrors of violent death and hoists the vision of the dying body into the realm of sublimity. In the bay of Massilia, the scene of a prolonged sea-battle at the end of book 3 (521– 762), the decks, prows, and rigging of the ships function like small stages for sculpture. One soldier, Catus, is pierced by weapons that lodge in his torso at precisely the same moment, so that “the blood stood uncertain from which wound to flow, until a large flow of blood drove out both spears at the same time, and cut his life-spirit in two” (et stetit incertus, flueret quo uolnere, sanguis, / donec utrasque simul largus cruor expulit hastas / diuisitque animam, 589 – 91). Another man, Gyareus, swings from the side of a ship, pinned by a lance (600 – 2). Yet another tries to grab his own right hand which has been chopped off but still clings to the rail of the enemy ship, only to lose his left as well before he throws himself bodily at his enemy, lacking any other weapon, and “his noble trunk shows great rage” (609 – 26). Another is very slowly torn in two (637– 40). And so on. As Lucan says: “that day on the sea provided many miraculous examples of different ways to die” (multaque ponto / praebuit ille dies uarii miracula fati, 634– 5). As these men stand or hang in a state of ghastly suspension, the fatal flow of blood delayed by the extremity of their wounds, their suffering transcends the corporeal; it becomes supernatural. Here and in other scenes, notably the mass suicide of the Caesarians (book 4), the battle at Pharsalus (book 7), and Cato’s trek across the desert (book 9), the spectacle of one disfigured individual

 Dinter ()  – .

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after another, battered, crushed, mangled, swollen, torn, pierced, pulverized, split, and zombified, composes a collective image of humans that is almost beyond human. Henry Day, acknowledging the presence of the grotesque in the sublime in passages like this, writes eloquently of the “ethical instabilities” inherent in sublimity, which give rise to the long critical tradition of seeing the sublime as the figure, and even the inevitable celebration, of tyranny.²⁵ For Edmund Burke, for instance, terror is “either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime,” and experience of the sublime requires yielding oneself to a “superior” power. From Burke to Dominick La Capra, Day cites a long tradition of scholars and critics who see the sublime as a fall into intoxication by tyrannical domination, leading to impotence or moral blindness.²⁶ Against this critique Day insightfully sets Longinus’ nuanced characterization of the sublime as the aesthetic amalgamation of domination and nobility. Longinus’ account is derived from the subjective experience of profound mobility or transport: that is, the artwork summons up powerful emotions in such a way that the listener cannot help but feel the sensations of movement and change within himself, and ultimately, he is taken out of himself (De Sub. 13, 15). When we experience “living passion” through ornate language and amazing speed of expression, it is impossible for us to remain unmoved. This, Longinus says, is how we feel the power of language, in the action of words and our reaction to them. We cannot experience the sublime without risk (34.2). At the same time, the sublime is the “echo of a noble mind” (9.2). For Day, Caesar and Pompey, and indeed the poem itself, are the central figures of Lucanian sublimity. But if I am right in saying that the realm of the grotesque sublime in the Bellum Ciuile belongs not only to the powerful (whether in politics or in poetry) but also to its many dead and dying men, how does this square with the sublime’s traditional association with tyranny? Reiterative violence provides a new frame through which to answer this question, and in doing so, to make sense of the scenes of men dying at Massilia, Pharsalus, Libya, and elsewhere in the empire. They do not simply symbolize the power of Caesar and the horrors of autocracy. Just as Caesar’s violence borders on the divine, and his tyrannical energies take on the flavor of the sublime, the people fighting and dying through the poem are described in similarly excessive terms, with similarly ambiguous effects.

 Day ()  – , esp.  – .  Day () : and see his useful citations, especially Hardie ()  –  on the grotesque and the sublime.

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Leader and people collude in violence. Mbembe remarks that the grotesqueries of postcolonial tyranny are fed not only by coercion and terror but “by a desire for majesty on the part of the people,” who see the ruler as the source of material resources and pleasure. This desire imbricates the people in an intimate relation with the ruler. The “real inversion” of legitimate (for Mbembe, democratic) authority occurs when the ruling power, in its “violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence,” and the people, in the desire for majesty, “join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power.”²⁷ In Lucan’s epic, the corruption of Rome goes just that deep. For all his talk of libertas, most of the characters in the Bellum Ciuile appear to want to be ruled. The people are in love with raw power, and love the men who wield violence. After Caesar reminds his legions of his complaints against Pompey, the centurion Laelius rebukes him for waiting so long: “Do you lack confidence in us?…/ Is victory in civil war so dismal?” (deratne tibi fiducia nostri?…usque adeo miserum est ciuili uincere bello? 1.362, 366). Tellingly citing “the lucky standards” of Caesar’s ten campaigns, and the triumphs he celebrated over the enemy, Laelius swears to obey whatever Caesar commands, from stabbing his brother, parent, or pregnant wife, setting temples on fire, or invading the city of Rome (374– 86). Laelius reveals his attraction to power and the reiterative violence that underpins it, which manifests in his desire to have a share in the transgressive cruelty that will inaugurate the new order. This order preserves the appearance of republican assent (“all the cohorts agreed in the same moment, hands held high,” his cunctae simul adsensere cohortes / elatasque alte… / promisere manus, 386 – 8). The familiar discipline of the soldiers’ gesture intensifies the obscenity of Laelius’ imagination: they offer up in allegiance multiple versions of his hands, which he has just committed to unspeakable crime. Pompey’s men similarly portray their fight as driven by loyalty (amor Pompei); they are not fighting for freedom or the republic. As we have already seen, some of his supporters express the wish after his death to “pass into the power of a citizen in toga” (sub iura togati / ciuis eo, 9.238 – 9). After Cato harangues them, they respond enthusiastically to the power of his authority, flying back like bees commanded to make honey, and “the shepherd rejoices” (9.292). At this point, Cato has been possessed by the spirit of Pompey (9.17– 18) and has taken “into his care his fatherland / when it lacked a guardian” (tutore carentem, 9.24– 5). Cato may be the defender of republican liberty, waging “a civil war without desiring power (regnum),” doing “nothing for himself: his party after Magnus’

 Mbembe ()  – .

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death was wholly that of freedom” (27– 30). In a further turn, Cato is the epitome of self-sacrifice: he risks death by refusing water in the desert more than once (9.500 ff., 590 – 2) and risks death by poison (9.611– 18). But like Caesar, he wields tyrannical power over his soldiers, a power the poet suggests they recognize and welcome. This power leads men to commit acts whose unspeakability Lucan figures with puns and inversions, many of them drawn from declamation, an emerging genre in Lucan’s lifetime. Crimine quo parui caedem potuere mereri? Sed satis est iam posse mori (2.108 – 9) For what crime could these little ones deserve to die? But now it is sufficient to be able to die Cinyphias inter pestes tibi palma nocendi est: Eripiunt omnes anima, tu sola cadauer (9.787– 8). Among Cinyphian plagues, the prize for injury is yours; they all remove life, but you alone the corpse.

Ralph Johnson invents a new word to describe passages like this: “comic-ugly.”²⁸ Comic-ugly is an apt word to describe the much-studied episode when some of Caesar’s forces, led by Vulteius, find themselves isolated at night on a raft off the Cilician coast, and decide to wait until daylight to commit mass suicide in the full view of soldiers on both sides (4.402– 581). Lucan depicts the ensuing slaughter with emphatic gestures that bring the passage into the realm of the absurd. The acts of killing and dying are identical (pariter), there is not a moment of hesitation or error, and duty or reverence (pietas) is redefined to signify an efficient kill: pariter sternuntque caduntque uolnere letali, nec quemquam dextra fefellit cum feriat moriente manu. nec uolnus adactis debetur gladiis: percussum est pectore ferrum et iuguli pressere manum. cum sorte cruenta fratribus incurrunt fratres natusque parenti, haud trepidante tamen toto cum pondere dextra exegere enses. pietas ferientibus una non repetisse fuit (4.558 – 66).

 Johnson () . See further Day () .

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Equally they kill and fall with fatal wound and though they strike with dying hand it never fails them, nor is the wound produced by the sword’s deep thrust but the weapon is struck by the breast and the hand attacked by throat. When with bloody destiny, brothers charge at brothers and son at father, they thrust their swords not with shaking hand but with all their weight. The single duty of those who strike was not to strike a second blow.

On display here is the obscene power of the tyrant and the role of the people in sustaining that power – even, as the obscene symmetry of the passage suggests, taking pleasure in it (as we readers may, despite or because of our groans of disgust or pained disbelief). Thanks to the extravagant style in which they are represented, exemplified by the paradoxical image of torsos and soft throats striking blows on sharp swords, and thanks to Lucan’s insistence on perfect murderous accord even in combat that pits father and brother, these deaths exceed the heroic economy of republican self-sacrifice. In fact they exceed any sense at all.²⁹ Vulteius and his men are dying, after all, in a war that one man has freely decided to wage, a man they love beyond reason.³⁰ namque suis pro te gladiis incumbere, Caesar, esse parum scimus; sed non maiora supersunt obsessis tanti quae pignora demus amoris (4.500 – 2). And of course we know that it is not enough for your men to fall on their own swords for you, Caesar, but as men besieged we have no greater pledge to give of our deep love.

The heroism of so extreme a form of love invites admiration and identification – an invitation both undercut and sustained by the elements of farcical horror in the scene. Compare the experience of Cato’s soldiers in the Libyan desert in book 9. After the Pompeians’ defeat at Pharsalus, the younger Cato leads his men through the deserts of Libya in a final attempt to resist Caesar and preserve the republic. The group encounters a desert filled with poisonous snakes whose bites wreak a hellish variety of tortures. When a soldier named Aules is bitten, neither the glory of the empire (decus imperii) nor the commands of

 Edwards ()  –  lucidly discusses the fundamentally theatrical nature of Vulteius’ act, which he orchestrates for Caesar as main spectator.  Nancy ()  – ; and further on love,  – .

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Cato (iura Catonis) can restrain him from seeking water, and he goes mad and tries to drink sand (9.741– 60). Sabellus is bitten by a snake whose flesh-eating venom lays his bones bare; his body melts into a boiled-down pool of poison including the bones: “all that makes a human being is uncovered” (775 – 88). One men swells to death; another freezes. What is the difference between what happens to Vulteius’ men and to Cato’s? Admiring Cato’s dying comrades allows readers vicariously to indulge themselves in the pleasure of the vision of republican resistance to the tyrannical power that brought about their deaths. It also revives the fantasy of heroic self-sacrifice that sustains Vulteius’ choice. Republican history is full of such “virtuous” examples. My point in comparing the two is that the grotesque elements of the images draw our attention and hold us at a distance: the vision of bodies tormented by snakebites or stabbed in crazed suicidal haste is portrayed with a dramatic extravagance that encompasses farce or irony. Lucan is simultaneously displaying the deep attractions of violence in the moment – the way it instills a kind of insanity in its practitioners and its viewers – and advising us not to fall too much in love with it. As a recent critic says of Kafka, “the pathos of the vision is continually undercut by the theatrics of the narrative.”³¹ Regarding twentieth century artists who create scenes of sublime violence, this same critic remarks that profound aesthetic satisfaction derives from the indisputable evidence these scenes furnish of our human finitude. Extremity can also convey the sense of “a peculiar vacillation” between the shock of a textual encounter with fleshy matter on the one hand, and a “spectral” sense of immateriality on the other. The intensity of the scene does more than alienate us; we may feel strangely oblivious to the agony before us.³² We may have been transported beyond the representable, and thus, in a sense, beyond ourselves. Georges Bataille might say that this is an experience of ecstatic self-loss whose goal is nothing but a zero-state consciousness. The effects of violence staged here create a sense of unrealness, a realm that exists at some remove from reality. Mbembe’s arguments on behalf of the grotesque re-locate the encounter with the unreal in the experience of reiterative violence. From his perspective, the extraordinary flashes of comedy or irony in passages like these evoke a form of crazed laughter that comes “from the bottom of the chest,” as he puts it, from the same place as suffering.³³ As the poem’s stylistic excess recreates the extremity of the experience of civil war and the post-war ruling order, the resulting com Buch () .  Buch () .  Mbembe () . Janz () describes the autocrat as “negation-in-excess” and draws attention to the link Mbembe draws between laughter and suffering.

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bination of alienation and curious attraction harbors a range of ways to feel life under domination. For these scenes also stupefy.³⁴ Like Vulteius and his men, like zombies, we readers recreate the horrified awe with which the original observers watched great changes occur – and helped set them in motion. Note that the poem avoids simply indicting the dead as slaves to tyranny, willing or forced. In key passages, the dead bodies are transfigured, forming a version of community that Lucan presents to us as the object of mingled disgust, disbelief, and wonder. These scenes of violence in the poem recall paintings by Francis Bacon where the human form is represented as a dense mass, distorted almost beyond recognition. Gilles Deleuze has observed that these paintings do not necessarily or only lament the loss of individuality: rather, Bacon’s bodies seem to be trying to escape from themselves, to assume a form that rejects or exceeds old limits.³⁵ Lucan certainly acknowledges the loss of individuality that violent collective death entails. In an anonymous Roman citizen’s recollection of the Sullan proscriptions at the beginning of Book 2, for example, the corpses piled in Rome, “melting with decay and blurred with time’s / long passage, have lost their features,” and frightened parents and the narrator himself anxiously comb through the mess to find body parts they recognize (160 – 73). These characters’ aim is to unite the fragments into a knowable, nameable entity. But Lucan also draws attention to the unifying effect of the collective experience of fragmenting violence, for example at Praeneste, where the victors can scarcely push through the crowds of bodies they are trying to destroy (201– 5). When the slaughter is over, the bodies are so thickly packed they cannot fall to earth, and some die by suffocation, as “weighty trunks crush living bodies” (uiua graues corpora trunci, 206). The people of Praeneste become a distorted version of the organic metaphor familiar from Livy, where the republic is a body made up of parts, each part leaning on the rest for support (2.32– 3). Never before have they been so united as in this common death. The dead carpeting the battlefield at Pharsalus enjoy a similar horrible unity. By giving us death in the plural in an intense sensory cascade, Lucan elevates his victims. Note that he does not mourn them as individuals but as an anonymous collective:

 This is a vision of men as flesh, non-human, animal, something governable. Mbembe notes that both colonial and postcolonial governments drew on the long tradition of identifying the native with the animal. Drawing on the Hegelian and Bergsonian traditions, the governing authority defined the native as alien to itself, as a bundle of drives but not capacities, where the only possible relationship is domination. Being simply a “body-thing,” the colonized native has no spirit.  Inspired by Buch () , who discusses Deleuze on Bacon.

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inpendisse pudet lacrimas in funere mundi mortibus innumeris, mors nulla querella digna sua est, nullosque hominum lugere uacamus (7.617– 18, 630 – 1). When the world is dying I feel shame to spend my tears On the innumerable deaths and to follow individuals’ destinies No death deserves Its own lament; we have no space to grieve for individuals.

At times, this perfect community of the dead even protects its own. In a striking image that opens Lucan’s account of the sea-battle at Massilia, the extraordinary number of dead bodies creates a momentary slow-down in the killing. The soldiers and sailors are fighting at close quarters, since “the sword has the most impact in a naval battle” (nauali plurima bello / ensis agit, 569 – 70). As men die, they fall, some of them drowning in a mixture of seawater and their own blood (577), crushed between ships, or battered by weapons dropped haphazardly from above (582). The rain of corpses into the water is so heavy that a floating island of crumpled flesh keeps the ships too far apart for hand-to-hand combat (prohibent, 575). The sheer pile-up of mutilated bodies may strike us as ridiculous or horrible, but it is worth considering the impact of accumulation more carefully. Hannah Arendt points the way with her remark on the “extreme loneliness of death” when it is faced alone or in a state of dependence on others. But faced “collectively and in action,” she notes, death “changes its countenance; now nothing seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity.” We become aware of something we normally suppress or are unconscious of, that our own death goes hand in hand with the “potential immortality” of our family, nation, or species. “It is as though life itself [were] nourished, as it were, by the sempiternal dying of its individual members.”³⁶ Here is Gratidianus, vengefully killed in public during the Sullan proscriptions: cum laceros artus aequataque uolnera membris uidimus et toto quamuis in corpore caeso nil animae letale datum, moremque nefandae dirum saeuitiae, pereuntis parcere morti. auolsae cecidere manus exsectaque lingua palpitat et muto uacuum ferit aera motu. hic aures, alius spiramina naris aduncae

 Arendt () .

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amputat, ille cauis euoluit sedibus orbes ultimaque effodit spectatis lumina membris (2.177– 85) …we saw mangled limbs, each with a wound, and no death-blow dealt although the entire body was gashed; we saw the dreadful practice of unutterable cruelty—to keep alive the dying man. Down fell the hands, torn off; the cut-out tongue quivered, beating empty air with noiseless movement. One cut off his ears, another the hooked nose’s nostrils; a third tears out the eyeballs from their hollow sockets and, compelling him to view his body, finally gouges out his eyes.

What has happened here? This is horror pushed to the extreme, illustrating what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “total absurdity, or disastrous puerility” of the death work, that is, death when it has come to be “the work of common life,” the project of the collective that no longer understands itself as a community except in a perverted mode, through the repeated commission of violence both in the name of and against the law.³⁷ From the beginning of the poem, when Lucan first invokes and addresses Nero, it is clear that the grotesque sublimity of these extreme depictions is part of what creates and sustains the current moment in Rome’s still-new autocratic regime. Leader and citizen, individually and collectively, summon up exaltation and repulsion. The scenes of violent death invite a certain convivial admiration even as they bespeak finitude and at times, a distorted exaltation, when bodies take on a new form. It is not enough to say with Bartsch and Day that these scenes that make us spectators of violence are at odds with themselves, at once energizing and alienating, morally horrifying and comically exaggerated.³⁸ We can move beyond claims for Lucan’s deep moral ambivalence. Through Lucan’s representations of violent death, we grasp a critical anatomy of imperial power, one where destructive, disintegrating violence paradoxically unifies the civic body.

Nero: Grotesque and Sublime But if the Fates could find no other way for Nero’s coming, if eternal kingdoms are purchased by the gods at great cost, if heaven could serve its Thunderer

 Nancy () .  On alienation, see Bartsch () .

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only after wars with the ferocious Giants, then we have no complaint, o gods; for this reward we accept even these crimes and guilt; though Pharsalia fill its dreadful plains, though the Carthaginian’s shade with blood be sated; though the final battle be joined at fatal Munda; though added to these horrors, Caesar, be the famine of Perusia… yet Rome owes much to citizens’ weapons, because it was for you that all was done. You, when your duty is fulfilled and finally you seek the stars, will be received in your chosen palace of heaven, with the sky rejoicing. Whether you choose to wield the sceptre or to mount the flaming chariot of Phoebus and to circle with moving fire the earth entirely unperturbed by the transference of the sun, every deity will yield to you, to your decision nature will leave which god you wish to be, where to set your kingdom of the universe. But choose your seat neither in the northern sphere nor where the torrid sky of opposing south sinks down; from these positions you would view your Rome with star aslant. If you press on either side of the boundless ether, the sky will feel the weight: maintain the mass of heaven poised in the sphere’s midpoint; let that part of the clear ether be wholly empty: let no clouds bar our view of Caesar. Then may humankind lay down its weapons and care for itself and every nation love one another; may Peace be sent throughout the world and close the iron temple-gates of warring Janus.

Does this passage praise Nero, or poke fun at him? The latter interpretation appears as early as the 10th century Adnotationes super Lucanum and the twelfthcentury notes by Arnulf of Orleans. Championed by Ahl, it has been dominant in Anglo-American scholarship over the past forty years. First, critics say, the ideas in the passage are simply too excessive to be taken seriously. To claim that Nero is worth civil war and then to list the corporeal horrors of war – blood soaking the ground, funeral pyres, hunger, laboring bodies – breaks the rules of propriety we know from Cicero and Quintilian. Second, there is the problem of the emperor’s body as Lucan represents it here, an obese bulk that weighs down the heavens, with a “sideways” glance that may refer to a deformity Nero had, a squint (obliquo).³⁹ Anchoring these claims is the assumption, drawn from Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, that the grotesque body, simply because it is grotesque, does not and cannot belong in a context of serious praise or even serious flattery, and further,  Dewar ()  has shown that there is no basis for believing Nero was fat or had a squint.

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that the presence of this body undermines the ruler’s claim to authority and legitimacy. Bakhtin claims in Rabelais and His World that the grotesque and the obscene, the lower half of the body, sex, the consumption of food, and “low” humor compose “the province of ordinary people.” He argues that as a means of resistance to the dominant order, and as a refuge from it, ordinary people employ obscenity to undermine the dominant order and gain back a sense of independence, even if only temporarily, through parody and ridicule. At the time when Bakhtin worked on Dostoevsky and Rabelais, the Soviet state had begun to enshrine a new political high culture that rigidly excluded the folkways and habits of ordinary people in favor of a remote, even sublime realm of rulership. In bodies, matter, and materialism Bakhtin saw a utopian force whose dynamism and hybridity could oppose the static ascetic sterility of Soviet thought and practice. It is this theory that Achille Mbembe criticizes and revises in his view of the grotesque as “intrinsic to systems of domination.”⁴⁰ In On the Postcolony Mbembe links his critique of Bakhtinian dualism to the question of why there is no serious resistance, as resistance is conventionally understood, to the dominant order in Cameroon. He concludes that instead of seeking to restrain or condemn gossip about their sex lives, feasts, and conspicuous consumption, postcolonial Cameroonian officialdom cultivates images and idioms of self-indulgence and hostility to continence that also have the effect of encompassing and foreclosing resistance to authority. Those who laugh at the ruler’s body or make fun of the ruler’s extravagant boasts about his power are not resisting power, then, but part of the dominant signifying order: they “bear witness” that the grotesque and the obscene are integral to rule – especially when the ruler claims that his body is sacred or superhuman. In their desire for “majesty,” Mbembe says in a passage from which I have already quoted, ordinary people “borrow the ideological repertoire of officialdom, along with its idioms and forms; conversely, the official world mimics popular vulgarity, inserting it at the core of the procedures by which it takes on grandeur.” From this perspective, popular laughter or obscenities, like farting at the name of the president’s party or joking about the number of girls he sleeps with per week, are not oppositional. Rather they constitute a logic of conviviality that unites dominant and dominated in the same networks of desires and pleasures.⁴¹ The state apparatus, including images of the ruler, finds its way into subjects’ intimate spaces, from pop songs to wallpaper to t-shirts. Ceremonies create opportunities for courtiers and ordinary people to “preach the fiction of [the state’s] perfection in dancing

 Mbembe () .  Mbembe () .

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and singing crowds.”⁴² Mbembe concludes that in order to understand power, we must replace the rationalizing binaries with which we are all familiar – order versus obscenity, mind versus body, dominance versus submission, law versus vice, discipline versus perversity – with an understanding of power where the grotesque inhabits, sustains, even constitutes the dominant order. Lucan’s proem, baffling to so many readers, expresses the loss of a sense of proportion and propriety. Viewed in light of the reiterative violence that I have sought to track in his epic, one where the ruler and the ruled partake of grotesque sublimity in the sustaining of empire, it is possible to see Nero’s over-sized body as a sign of a system of shared values where the grotesque sublime is precisely the sign of power. The violence he may wreak on the cosmos, as awesome as it first appears, signifies horrors that Roman imperial rule has made conventional. I am not simply suggesting that Bellum Ciuile is an especially potent unmasking of the horrors of war or tyranny: this thought exercise would scarcely have been necessary by the middle first century CE. Nor is it an attack on the JulioClaudian regime. When the Pompeians tell Cato they will follow Caesar, the “togate citizen,” they are not praising the emperor’s new clothes while the narrator ironically suggests to the reader that he has none. We have seen that Lucan’s Caesar is a more complex figure whose arrogant, egoistic excess is a form of destructive negation, attracting while it horrifies, and whose promises to uphold custom and law appeal partly because his actions violate both. The representation of Nero is strung together in a fantastic (but by the criteria of epic, plausible) manner, making the politically implausible fact – the success of dynastic autocracy at Rome – plausible.⁴³ It is important to remember that the senatorial class is also implicated in Lucan’s anatomy: Caesar becomes “everything” as many of them yield to him, and he in turn absorbs and transcends the power of the curia (omnia Caesar erat, 3.108).

Conclusion In an aesthetic tradition where the individual is a central object of concern, either as creator or protagonist, uncovering the dynamics of community in a literary work is not easy. Jean-Luc Nancy rightly criticizes the West’s failure to recog Mbembe () .  Mbembe () . This reading makes better sense of poems like Statius’ Siluae ., where the emperor’s imperial munificence is expressed in the soft, luxurious, effeminized terms of ripened fruits and rain showers and the paternal authority of Jupiter.

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nize the thinking art and literature and other “figures of ecstasy” have done and can do about community. He calls on readers to pay a different kind of attention to literary texts, examining them for new ways to understand and imagine politics rather than reducing them to explications of conventional categories like nation, class, fraternity, intersubjectivity, and the like. Rejecting nostalgic or transcendental illusions of community, whether Christian or totalitarian or something else, he suggests that we can better grasp what collective life has been and might be and what it has felt or might feel like through aesthetic experiences that are “entrenched in the ordeal of community, at grips with it.”⁴⁴ Among the effects reiterative violence can account for in Lucan is the formulaic feel of his most violent scenes. Horrible as his dying bodies are, they have a history, a recognizable model: they obey the pathos formula defined by Aby Warburg as “the primeval vocabulary of passionate gesticulation,” a formula that takes shape in Lucan’s era in the exercises and handbook collections of declamation.⁴⁵ When Lucan borrows a method of representing extreme violence from declamation, as he does with his ironic sententia, he turns the dying human beings into familiar objects of description and thus by implication accessible to our understanding. They make a certain aesthetic sense, not in tension with, but precisely out of the disgust or disbelief they inspire. As we sense the “type-ness” of scenes like Vulteius on the raft or the piles of dismembered limbs in the Forum, we sense that these are scenes with a history. In this moment we gain critical distance on their theatrical horrors: we may even be able to smile. Our smiles may protect us from the existential horror that the renditions of violent, painful death summon up. Alternatively, and finally, the type-ness of these scenes signals simply that their meaning is to be found here, even as the presence of extreme excess or irony serves to acknowledge the unspeakable. Remember, in closing, the spectacular deaths of characters in contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, punctured by bullets, blasted, crushed. The familiar type-ness of all these deaths is evidence that the violence that results from Caesarian or American wars is not chaotic. It is ordered; it has techniques; it has meaning. I have argued here for an understanding of the violence in the Bellum Ciuile as reiterative violence, and that this violence, practiced by protagonist and

 Nancy ()  – . See further : “Community, which is not a subject, and even less a subject (conscious or unconscious) greater than ‘myself,’ does not have or posses this consciousness: community is the ecstatic consciousness of the night of immanence, insofar as such a consciousness is the interruption of self-consciousness.”  Bonner ().

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populus together and made visible in Lucan’s grotesque sublime, forms and sustains the Roman Empire under the Caesars.⁴⁶

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY. Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence. New York. Bartsch, S. 1997. Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan’s Civil War. Cambridge, MA. Benjamin, W. 1921. “Critique of Violence”, reprinted in P. Demetz (ed.) 1986. Reflections. New York. Bonner, S.F. 1966. “Lucan and the Declamation Schools”, AJPh 87: 257 – 89. Braund, S. 1992. Lucan: Civil War. Oxford. Buch, R. 2010. The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore, MD. Connolly, J. 2010. “Figuring the Founder: Vergil and the Challenge of Autocracy”, in: J. Farrell and M. Putnam (eds.), A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and Its Traditions. London, 404 – 18. Day, H.J.M. 2012. Lucan and the Sublime: Power, Representation, and Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge. Deleuze, G. 2005. Francis Bacon. Minneapolis, MN. Derrida, J. 2002. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority”, in: G. Anidjar (ed.), Acts of Religion. New York/London, 228 – 98. Dewar, M. 1994. “Laying It On with a Trowel: The Proem to Lucan and Related Texts”, CQ 44.1: 199 – 211. Dinter, M. 2013. Anatomizing Civil War. Ann Arbor, MI. Edwards, C. 2007. Death in Ancient Rome. New Haven, CT. Fanon, F. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York. Fantham, E. 1992. Lucan: De Bello Civile Book II. Cambridge. Grosz, E. 1990. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London/New York. Guerlac, S. 1985. “Longinus and the subject of the sublime”, New Literary History 16.2: 275 – 89. Hardie, P. 2009. “Virgil’s Fama and the Sublime”, in: P. Hardie (ed.), Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge. Cambridge, 67 – 135. Henderson, J. 1988. “Lucan/The Word at War”, in A. Boyle (ed.), The Imperial Muse. Bentleigh. Janz, B. 2002. Review of Mbembe, On the Postcolony. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews, March 2002. Johnson, W.R. 1987. Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes. Ithaca, NY.

 I want to express my gratitude to Phillip Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas for the invitation and for their patience. I am also grateful to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for the generous fellowship in  that enabled me to start work on this topic in a research group convened by Ineke Sluiter of Leiden University. Warm thanks to her and my fellow group members Tazuko van Berkel and Saskia Peels, as well as Robert Hariman and Ralph Rosen, for helpful critique of a very early draft of this essay.

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Lowrie, M. 2005. “Vergil and Founding Violence”, Cardozo Law Review 27.2: 945 – 76. Martindale, C. 1976. “Paradox, Hyperbole, and Literary Novelty in Lucan’s De Bello Civili”, BICS 23: 45 – 54. — 1984. “The Politician Lucan”, G&R 31.1: 64 – 79. Masters, J. 1992. Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. Cambridge. Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA. Most, G. 1992. “Disiecti membra poetae: The Rhetoric of Dismemberment in Neronian Poetry”, in: D. Selden and R. Hexter (eds.), Innovations of Antiquity. New York, 391 – 419. Nancy, J-L. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN. Panagia, D. 2009. The Political Life of Sensation. Durham/London. Porter, J. 2012. “Is the Sublime an Aesthetic Value?”, in: R. Rosen and I. Sluiter (eds.), Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity. Leiden, 47 – 70. Quint, D. 1993. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Vergil to Milton. Princeton, NJ. Ranciere, J. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. London. Saylor, C. 1990. “Lux Extrema: Lucan, Pharsalia 4.402 – 581”, TAPhA 120: 291 – 300. Zizek, S. 2003. “Disaster Movies as the Last Remnant of Utopia”, Ha’aretz 15 January 2003. — 2013. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London.

Michael Paschalis

From Pastoral to Panegyric in Calpurnius Siculus Summary: In the Theocritean corpus there is a clear division between pastoral and panegyric. By contrast Virgil expanded the range of the pastoral song and elevated its status so as to create a context for incorporating the praise of the ruler and the political and intellectual elite. Calpurnius conceived the pastoral and the political Eclogue in contrast to each other and divided his seven Eclogues into political (1, 4, 7) and merae bucolicae (2, 3, 5, 6). The division of the poems implies a division between two political, social and aesthetic orders. Indeed in Eclogues 1 and 4 the world of the shepherd effaces itself before the world of the emperor and in a sense it exists solely for serving the latter. The “farewell to the pastoral genre” sometimes associated with Eclogue 7 is pronounced already in these two Eclogues. Keywords: Theocritus; Virgil’s Eclogues; Calpurnius Siculus; pastoral; panegyric In the Theocritean corpus there is a clear division between pastoral and panegyric. The encomia of Hieron II of Syracuse (Idyll 16) and Ptolemy II Philadelphus (Idyll 17) are not placed in the mouth of shepherds or goatherds. When eulogies of the ruler are embedded this happens in the urban mimes of the corpus (Idylls 14 and 15).¹ By contrast Virgil expanded the range of the pastoral song and elevated its status so as to create a context for incorporating the praise of the ruler and the political and intellectual elite. The establishment of a relationship between the pastoral world on the one hand and the world of history and power on the other is Virgil’s major contribution to the evolution of the genre and he succeeded in making it a dominant model for pastoral poetry through the ages. In the programmatic Eclogue 1 the pastoral utopia falls apart and is reestablished through the goodwill of the unnamed youth who dwells in Rome – in reality Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. Tityrus who had lost his land but retrieved it thanks to his favor sings his praises, recognizes a god in him and promises him divine honors. The blending of pastoral with panegyric is based precisely on the new pastoral myth of the ruler who reestablished the shattered pastoral world while his deified adoptive father is beneficial to shepherds and farmers (cf. Ly-

 Hunter (); Stephens ()  – .

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cidas about the sidus Iulium in Eclogues 9.46 – 50; Menalcas in Eclogues 5.56 – 80 about the deified Daphnis-Julius Caesar, an association proposed already in antiquity). While Theocritus opted for the disjunction (at least explicitly) of pastoral and panegyric and Virgil for their conjunction, Calpurnius organized his collection on the basis of an antithesis between pastoral and panegyric. His seven Eclogues are divided into political (1, 4, 7), which contain praises of the emperor in the form of a divine prophecy, a song exchange, and a narrative, and merae bucolicae (2, 3, 5, 6), which deal with pastoral and agricultural themes.² This arrangement of the Calpurnian book is not a mere imitation of the Virgilian precedent³ and can be misleading. One reason is because in Virgil encomia of various kind occur in most Eclogues (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9)⁴ and the interaction between the pastoral and the outer world pervades in one way or another the whole collection. In terms of substance the Calpurnian arrangement is intended to convey a strong contrast between the lowly world of the shepherd and the exalted world of the emperor and consequently between pastoral and panegyric in the generic hierarchy (not to be confused with poetic ambition within the bucolic genre, as in Eclogues 4.58 – 69), while Virgil did the exact opposite: he enhanced the thematic and ideological limits of pastoral poetry and elevated its status to the level of the world of power and beyond. To put it differently the division of the poems implies a division between two political, social, and aesthetic orders. One way to confirm this point would be to examine what happens within the political Eclogues themselves, where pastoral and panegyric are not just placed side by side, as it happens with individual Eclogues, but interact. In Eclogues 1 and 4 the world of the shepherd effaces itself before the world of the emperor and in a sense it exists solely for serving the latter.⁵ These two political Eclogues pave the way for the repudiation of the pastoral world in the third one, which is also the last Eclogue of the collection (see further the conclusion of this paper).

 For a brief but informed introduction to Calpurnius Siculus, see Mayer ()  – ; Karakasis ()  – .  Cf. Davis ().  Nauta ().  The political poems of the collection have been variously evaluated: see especially Leach () and (), Sullivan ()  – , Davis (), Newlands (), Vozza () and (), Vinchesi ()  – , Hubbard ()  – , Magnelli (), Mayer (), Karakasis ()  – ; and respective commentaries: Verdière (), Keene ( []), Korzeniewski (), Amat () on all the Eclogues; Schröder () on Eclogue , Di Salvo () on Eclogue .

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Below I will argue that in Calpurnius the distance that separates the world of the shepherd from the world of the emperor is so great that the shepherd cannot eulogize the emperor in the immediate and direct way this happens in Virgil, Eclogue 1. The Virgilian young god of Rome and the shepherd Tityrus share the same aesthetic values, in the sense that the former grants the latter the space and opportunity for pastoral otium and pastoral singing while in the Calpurnian Eclogues Corydon’s patron secures for him the basic necessity of food.⁶ Hence Virgil’s Tityrus can pass directly from singing of beautiful Amaryllis tο the eulogy of his benefactor (Eclogue 1.1– 10): M. Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena; nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua. nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas. T. O Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit. namque erit ille mihi semper deus, illius aram saepe tener nostris ab ouilibus imbuet agnus. ille meas errare boues, ut cernis, et ipsum ludere quae uellem calamo permisit agresti. ⁷ M. Tityrus, you lie beneath the spreading beech and practice country songs upon a slender pipe. I leave my father’s fields and my sweet ploughlands, an exile from my native soil. You sprawl in the shade and school the woods to sound with Amaryllis’s charms. T. O Meliboeus, it was a god who gave me this repose. He’ll always be a god to me. Often I’ll stain his altar with blood of a young lamb from my fold. He it was who allowed my cattle to graze like this and me to play the songs I choose upon my rustic flute.⁸

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By contrast in the Calpurnian Eclogues the distance between the shepherd and the emperor creates a gap between pastoral and panegyric which has to be bridged. Pastoral and panegyric are incompatible with each other and therefore the shepherd is obliged to renounce or change established pastoral conventions

 In reworking the Virgilian lines Corydon thanks his patron Meliboeus for saving himself and his brother from hunger and thus allowing them “to recline well-fed in the shade and enjoy the woodland of Amaryllis”: Eclogue . –  per te secura saturi recubamus in umbra / et fruimur siluis Amaryllidos.  The Latin text of the Aeneid is taken from Mynors ().  Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues are by Fowler ().

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and singing locations in order to compose a song or read a prophecy in praise of the emperor. Only formally does he continue to be an inhabitant of the pastoral world, because in substance he has already consciously attached himself to the world of imperial power and sings in order to acquire imperial patronage.⁹ Below I will explore the ways in which Calpurnius constructs the transition from pastoral to panegyric starting with Eclogue 1.1– 23: C. Nondum Solis equos declinis mitigat aestas, quamuis et madidis incumbant prela racemis et spument rauco feruentia musta susurro. cernis ut ecce pater quas tradidit, Ornyte, uaccae molle sub hirsuta latus explicuere genista? nos quoque uicinis cur non succedimus umbris? torrida cur solo defendimus ora galero? O. Hoc potius, frater Corydon, nemus, antra petamus ista patris Fauni, graciles ubi pinea denset silua comas rapidoque caput leuat obuia soli, bullantes ubi fagus aquas radice sub ipsa protegit et ramis errantibus implicat umbras. C. Quo me cumque uocas, sequor, Ornyte; nam mea Leuce, dum negat amplexus nocturnaque gaudia nobis, peruia cornigeri fecit sacraria Fauni. prome igitur calamos et si qua recondita seruas; nec tibi defuerit mea fistula, quam mihi nuper matura docilis compegit arundine Ladon. O. Et iam captatae pariter successimus umbrae. quam modo nescio quis properanti falce notauit? aspicis ut uirides etiam nunc littera rimas seruet et arenti nondum se laxet hiatu? ¹⁰ C. Not yet does the waning summer tame the sun’s horses, although the wine-presses are squeezing the juicy clusters and a hoarse whisper comes from the foaming must as it ferments. Look, Ornytus, do you see how comfortably the cattle our father trusted us to watch have lain down to rest in the shaggy broom? Why do not we also make for the neighboring shade? Why only a cap to protect our sunburnt faces? O. Rather let us seek this grove, brother Corydon, – the grottoes over there, the haunt of Father Faunus, where the pine forest thickly spreads its delicate foliage and rears its head to meet the sun’s fierce rays, where the beech shields the waters that bubble ’neath its very roots, and with its straying boughs casts a tangled shade. C. Whithersoever you call me, Ornytus, I follow. For by refusing my embraces and denying me nightly pleasures, my Leuce has left it lawful for me to enter the shrine of horned Fau-

 On aspects of pastoral alienation in Calpurnius but from a strictly generic view, see especially Karakasis ()  – .  All Calpurnian quotations are from Korzeniewski ().

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nus. Produce your reed-pipes then and any song you keep stored for use. My pipe, you will find, will not fail you – the pipe that Ladon’s skill fashioned for me lately out of a ripely seasoned reed. O. Now we have both come beneath the shade we sought. But what legend is this inscribed upon the hallowed beech, which someone of late has scored with hasty knife? Do you notice how the letters still preserve the fresh greenness of their cutting and do not as yet gape with sapless slit?¹¹

In the passage quoted above Corydon suggests to Ornytus that they should seek relief from the oppressive heat in a neighboring shaded place but the latter proposes instead that they go to the grove of the god Faunus. Once inside the grove they find inscribed on the god’s sacred beech a prophecy which is emphatically non-pastoral (29 nihil armentale resultat). It tells of the return of the Golden Age and the advent of a godlike young ruler of Julian descent, and announces a new era of peace, law and justice. The eulogy of the emperor is therefore cast in a form different from the conventional pastoral song and is located not under the conventional pastoral shade but in a pseudo-pastoral and essentially imperial ambience. The opening dialogue is intended to convey precisely this contrast between pastoral and panegyric. As a matter of fact Corydon’s initial suggestion to Ornytus that they should join the cattle, which have couched themselves in the grass under the shade, enhances the pastoral aspect of his proposal and highlights the antithesis with imperial panegyric which “has nothing reminiscent of the herd’s sound” (nihil armentale resultat).¹² As frequently noted the Calpurnian scene was inspired by Virgil, Eclogue 5.1– 15, where the issue of the appropriate place for singing is also raised and a choice is made: Me. Cur non, Mopse, boni quoniam conuenimus ambo, tu calamos inflare leuis, ego dicere uersus, hic corylis mixtas inter consedimus ulmos? Mo. Tu maior; tibi me est aequum parere, Menalca, siue sub incertas Zephyris motantibus umbras siue antro potius succedimus. aspice, ut antrum siluestris raris sparsit labrusca racemis. Me. Montibus in nostris solus tibi certat Amyntas. Mo. Quid, si idem certet Phoebum superare canendo?

 Translations of passages from Calpurnius’ Eclogues are derived from J.W. Duff and A.M. Duff ().  Cf. Hubbard (): “Once they have entered the grove of Faunus, the cattle are neglected and out of sight (it is a place of nihil armentale [Calp. .])”.

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Me. Incipe, Mopse, prior, si quos aut Phyllidis ignis aut Alconis habes laudes aut iurgia Codri. incipe: pascentis seruabit Tityrus haedos. Mo. Immo haec, in uiridi nuper quae cortice fagi carmina descripsi et modulans alterna notaui, experiar: tu deinde iubeto ut certet Amyntas. Me. Why do we not, Mopsus, since both of us are skilled, you at playing slender reeds, I at verse, sit down here among the mingled hazels and elms? Mo. You’re the elder. It’s right that I do what you say, Menalcas, whether beneath the flickering shadows that western breezes chase or in this grotto we take our rest. Look how the forest vine sprinkles the cave with sparing clusters. Me. Upon our hills Amyntas alone contends with you. Mo. What if he strives to surpass Phoebus himself in song? Me. Begin, Mopsus, be first, if any flame you have for Phyllis or compliments for Alcon or quarrels with Codrus. Begin. Tityrus will care for your pasturing goats. Mo. Rather these songs which recently I wrote upon the green bark of beech, marking the times of pipe and song. Then you order Amyntas next to compete.

In this passage Menalcas proposes to Mopsus that they sit down together among the hazels and elms and make music, while Mopsus expresses a preference for a cave nearby, overspread with clusters of wild grapes. Menalcas tacitly agrees and invites Mopsus to begin, suggesting three themes (love of Phyllis, praise of Alcon, abuse of Codrus); but Mopsus replies that he will try out a song he has recently carved on a beech tree. Menalcas concedes and they next exchange songs on the death of Daphnis (Mopsus) and his apotheosis (Menalcas). The choice between two locations for music-making is of Theocritean origin.¹³ In Virgil the more elaborate cave setting may reflect the elevated topic¹⁴ but the song is nonetheless pastoral going back in particular to the dirge for Daphnis in Theocritus’ Idyll 1 and the anonymous Lament for Bion. By contrast Calpurnius constructs a more elaborate setting, unparalleled in the pastoral tradition, in order to provide the space appropriate for imperial panegyric, which a divinity inscribes on the bark of a beech.¹⁵

 Clausen () ad loc., who cites Theocr. . – ,  – .  For its probable implications, cf. Putnam ()  – .  To be noted that the beech on which Virgil’s Mopsus inscribed the words and musical notation of his pastoral song has nothing to do with the cave where he and Menalcas perform.

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Together with conventional pastoral setting Corydon and Ornytus reject pastoral song as well first and foremost by turning themselves into mere readers of an imperial panegyric cast in the form of a divine prophecy. Furthermore on the way to the cave of Faunus Corydon suggests to Ornytus that they engage in a song contest and invites him to take out his pipe and any songs he may keep in store for use. However this pastoral song contest never occurs. We have seen that in Virgil Menalcas proposes three pastoral themes but next agrees to exchange songs with Mopsus on a different pastoral topic. What happens in Calpurnius is remarkable. Ornytus does not even reply to Corydon’s proposal but announces their arrival at the cave and the discovery of a text inscribed on the bark of a beech. Rather than assume that Ornytus and Corydon never have, in realistic terms, the chance to perform their own songs because in the meantime they reach the cave,¹⁶ I would suggest that Ornytus’ response implies that pastoral singing and music making do not even merit consideration and are to be totally ignored in the prospect of imperial panegyric. “For by refusing my embraces and denying me nightly pleasures, my Leuce has left it lawful for me to enter the shrine of horned Faunus,” says Corydon to Ornytus. The idea that sexual deprivation makes Corydon eligible to enter the sacred precinct of Faunus has puzzled scholars. In my opinion it should be viewed as another prerequisite for passing from pastoral to imperial panegyric, which consists in making oneself worthy of the task by abandoning the frivolous pastoral erotic life.¹⁷ Contrary to the passage from Virgil’s Eclogue 5 quoted above, in Calpurnius there is no mention of the themes of the pastoral songs to be exchanged between Corydon and Ornytus. This may be a further indication that pastoral song is downplayed vis-à-vis imperial panegyric. In addition if Corydon’s words fistula / compegit arundine Ladon (17– 18) allude to the myth of Pan and Syrinx and the invention of the syrinx or pan-pipes,¹⁸ I would be inclined to see in what Corydon and Ornytus leave behind a subtle rejection of an archetypal pastoral context involving love, music making and Pan, the god of herdsmen and their poetry. According to Ovid, Syrinx was a nymph of the river Ladon; Pan chased her

 A very different situation is Eclogue  where the discord between the singers makes the song impossible.  Cf. Leach () : “But here, I think, Corydon’s privation is meant to show his readiness for new occupations, for a change in the mode of his pastoral life. Leuce appears no more in the poems. The attention once given to love, or love-thoughts, will soon be dedicated to the contemplation of higher affairs.”  Korzeniewski () ad loc. comments on the choice of the name Ladon in relation to the transformation of Syrinx.

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but captured instead the reeds into which she was transformed; he waxed them together and made the pipes that bear the name of the beloved person (Metamorphoses 1.689 – 721). The possible allusion in Calpurnius to the god Pan, inventor of the syrinx in Virgil (Eclogues 2.32 – 33) and prominent in Virgilian pastoral, acquires significance in light of the fact that his place is next taken by Faunus whose imperial panegyric substitutes for pastoral music. As commonly noted, Calpurnius’ Faunus is the god who in Aeneid 7 predicts the advent of Aeneas and the establishment of the powerful dynasty to whom Nero belonged.¹⁹ The opening lines of Eclogue 4 introduce a variation of the passage from pastoral to panegyric outlined above. Since the issue is substantially the same I will only briefly treat some of its formal aspects. The major formal difference with Eclogue 1 is that the context for imperial panegyric in terms of location, mood and theme is already there when the Eclogue begins and the interlocutor, instead of proposing an alternative location or song, questions it from a pastoral viewpoint (1– 15):²⁰ M. Quid tacitus, Corydon, uultuque subinde minaci quidue sub hac platano, quam garrulus astrepit umor, insueta statione sedes? iuuat umida forsan ripa leuatque diem uicini spiritus amnis? C. Carmina iam dudum, non quae nemorale resultent, uoluimus, o Meliboee; sed haec, quibus aurea possint saecula cantari, quibus et deus ipse canatur, qui populos urbesque regit pacemque togatam. M. Dulce quidem resonas, nec te diuersus Apollo despicit, o iuuenis, sed magnae numina Romae non ita cantari debent, ut ouile Menalcae. C. Quidquid id est, siluestre licet uideatur acutis auribus et nostro tantum memorabile pago, nunc mea rusticitas, si non ualet arte polita carminis, at certe ualeat pietate probari. M. Corydon, why sit you silent with a visage that bodes something ever and anon? Why sit you in an unwonted place, beneath this plane-tree at whose roots brawl the prattling waters? Maybe you like the watery bank, where the breeze from the neighboring stream assuages the heat of day? C. For long, Meliboeus, have I been pondering verses, verses of no woodland ring but fit to celebrate the golden age, to praise even that very god who is sovereign over nations and cities and toga-clad peace.

 For a detailed discussion, see Esposito (). Faunus dominates the Calpurnian Eclogues as opposed to Pan who is mentioned only once; see Karakasis ()  n. .  For an elucidation of the opening lines of Eclogue  from different perspectives, see Vozza (), Karakasis ()  – .

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M. Sweet of sound are your lays and ’tis not with cold disdain that Apollo looks upon you, young Corydon: but the divinities of mighty Rome are not to be extolled in the same style as the sheepfold of Menalcas. C. Whate’er my song, though it seem boorish to a critic’s ears and worthy of record only in my own village, yet, as things are, my awkwardness, even if lacking in poetry’s polish and skill, must surely win approval for its loyalty.

The beech in Virgil’s Eclogue 1 provides abundant shade for both the pastoral song for Amaryllis and the encomium of the young god whom Tityrus met in Rome. Not so in Calpurnius. Meliboeus sees Corydon sitting silent and brooding not beneath a beech but in the shade of a plane-tree and beside a noisy stream. He is surprised and comments on the “unfamiliar spot” (insueta statione). He assumes that Corydon is seeking relief from the heat of the day in that cool spot but the latter replies that he has been composing a poem that will celebrate the Golden Age and will praise the godlike Roman ruler. Here as in Calpurnius’ Eclogue 1 ordinary pastoral umbra is not appropriate for imperial panegyric. In place of the cave of Faunus and the sacred beech with the godlike prophecy inscribed on it the present Eclogue introduces the rich and large shade of the plane-tree²¹ which is worthy of an emperor. To be noted that platanus comes from Greek πλάτανος, which was etymologized ἐκ τοῦ πλάτους, “from its large shade” (Isid. Origines 17.7.37); according to Pliny (Naturalis Historia 12.6), the plant was imported in Greece and Italy “merely for the sake of its shade.” The fact that the plane-tree is excluded from the Virgilian flora, is not mentioned anywhere else in Calpurnius and is in general a stranger to the pastoral landscape would account not only for the fact that Meliboeus considers the spot “unfamiliar” but also for the witty paradox of Corydon composing poetry “without woodland resonances” (non quae nemorale resultent) though sitting beneath a tree – I would assume because this is not a pastoral but an imperial tree. Corydon and Meliboeus draw a sharp distinction between pastoral and panegyric in terms of mood and style. The former replies to Meliboeus that his silent and pensive mood is required by the task of composing an imperial panegyric; and the latter agrees that singing the praises of the godlike ruler of Rome requires a style and tone different from the one used when referring to Menalcas’ sheepfold. Corydon proceeds to describe his poetry as being ‘sylvan’ (siluestre) and as smelling of ‘rusticity’ (rusticitas) and wishes that, if not his poetic skill, at least the ‘loyalty’ (pietas) of his song towards the emperor may be appreciated and recognized. Through these self-deprecatory remarks the highly appre-

 For detailed discussion of sub hac platano, see Vozza ()  – .

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ciated pastoral poetic skill utterly effaces itself in the face of imperial panegyric.²² A few lines below Meliboeus advises Corydon, just before the latter begins to sing, to avoid the “tinkling pipes” made of fragile boxwood and appropriate for the praise of Alexis and use instead the pipes “which sang of woods worthy of a consul” (4.73 – 7): M. Incipe, nam faueo; sed prospice, ne tibi forte tinnula tam fragili respiret fistula buxo, quam resonare solet, si quando laudat Alexin. hos potius, magis hos calamos sectare, canales et preme, qui dignas cecinerunt consule siluas. Begin, my favor is with you; but take heed lest perchance your tinkling pipe breathe from boxwood as frail as is its usual sound whene’er the praise of Alexis is the theme. Rather these reeds, these far more you must pursue: press the pipes which sang of woods worthy of a consul.

Meliboeus contrasts the style of Virgil, Eclogue 2 (the praise of Alexis) to the more elevated style of Eclogue 4 (the praise of a consul), proposing the latter as appropriate for imperial panegyric. Through his words Calpurnius retrospectively attributes to Virgil his own distinction between pastoral and panegyric. What sounds however like an imitation is actually a distortion of Virgil, in the sense that the Augustan poet distinguishes between levels of pastoral style while Calpurnius builds on the distance between the shepherd and the emperor, between pastoral and panegyric. Let us consider, for instance, Calpurnius 7.77 qui dignas cecinerunt consule siluas, which reproduces Virgil, Eclogue 4.3 si canimus siluas, siluae sint consule dignae. A few lines below Corydon’s brother Amyntas prays that Caesar “may not disdain” (88 neu dedignetur) to visit their hills. He thus disparages the ‘dignity’ of the pastoral world, while Virgil did the exact opposite: he elevated the ‘dignity’ of the ‘woods’ (a Virgilian metonymy for the pastoral song) to the level of a consul (siluae sint consule dignae). Furthermore Calpurnius’ woods fall silent at merely hearing Caesar’s name (97– 8 Aspicis, ut uirides audito Caesare siluae / conticeant?). What this amounts to is that pastoral poetry does not just regress but it utterly fades before panegyric. In strong contrast to the magnitude of Virgil’s pastoral vision famously rendered through paulo maiora canamus (Eclogue 4.1), Calpurnius extols the majesty of the emperor and places the entire pastoral world at his service.

 See further Karakasis ()  – .

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In the last Eclogue of the collection Calpurnius rewrites Virgil, Eclogue 1: Corydon goes to Rome and upon his return he recounts to Lycotas his fascination with Nero’s wooden amphitheater, the spectacle he watched and the godlike young emperor himself. Differently from Virgil’s Tityrus who enjoys the reestablished pastoral world, Calpurnius’ Corydon repudiates the pastoral world and completely espouses the values of the imperial world.²³ I quote lines 1– 6: L. Lentus ab urbe uenis, Corydon; uicesima certe nox fuit, ut nostrae cupiunt te cernere siluae, ut tua maerentes exspectant iubila tauri. C. O piger, o duro non mollior axe, Lycota, qui ueteres fagos noua quam spectacula mauis cernere, quae patula iuuenis deus edit harena. L. You are slow, Corydon, in coming back from Rome. For twenty nights past, of a truth, have our woods longed to see you, and the saddened bulls waited for your yodelings. C. O you slow-coach, no more unbending than a tough axle, Lycotas, you prefer to see old beech trees rather than the new sights exhibited by our youthful god in the spacious arena.

Calpurnius completely reverses the opening lines of Virgil, Eclogue 1 through conspicuous verbal repetition and calculated substitutions (note especially lentus, ueteres fagos, patula, iuuenis deus): the pastoral ease of singing beneath the broad beech shade, a gift to Tityrus by the young god of Rome (Virgil, Eclogue 1), is now exchanged for a prolonged visit to Rome and the spectacle sponsored by another young god and held in the spacious arena of the amphitheater (Calpurnius, Eclogue 7). As I have argued above the “farewell to the pastoral genre” sometimes associated with Eclogue 7 is pronounced already in the programmatic Eclogue 1 and repeated in Eclogue 4. In Eclogue 7 it is simply confirmed. The major reason why Eclogue 7 strikes the reader as being something substantially different is Corydon’s visit to Rome and especially the fact that Calpurnius transferred it to the last Eclogue of the collection while in Virgil it occurs in the first one. But in substance Corydon’s visit and the fascination with the imperial world is only a formal gesture of what has already been there from the very beginning and consists in alienation from the pastoral world. The imperial world has dominated pastoral life and vision all along and imperial panegyric had effaced and silenced the pastoral voice before Corydon went to Rome.

 See for instance Hubbard ()  – .

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Bibliography Amat, J. 1991. Calpurnius Siculus, Bucoliques. Pseudo-Calpurnius, Éloge de Pison. Texte établi et traduit par Jacqueline Amat. Paris. Clausen, W. 1994. A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues. Oxford. Davis, P.J. 1987. “Structure and Meaning in the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus”, in: A.J. Boyle (ed.), The Imperial Muse: Ramus Essays on Roman Literature of the Empire. Berwick, Australia, 32 – 54. (= Ramus 16) Di Salvo, L. 1990. T. Calpurnio Siculo, Ecloga VII. Introduzione, Edizione Critica, Traduzione e Commento. Bologna. Duff, J.W. and A.M. Duff. 1934. Minor Latin Poets. Loeb Classical Library. London/Cambridge, MA. Esposito, P. 2009. “La Profezia di Fauno nella I Ecloga di Calpurnio Siculo”, in: L. Landolfi and R. Oddo (eds.), Fer propius tua lumina: giochi intertestuali nella poesia di Calpurnio Siculo. Bologna, 13 – 39. Fowler, B.H. 1997. Vergil’s Eclogues. Chapel Hill, NC. Hubbard, T.K. 1998. The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton. Ann Arbor, MI. Hunter, R. 2003. Theocritus. Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles/London. Karakasis, E. 2011. Song Exchange in Roman Pastoral. Trends in Classics Supplementary Volume 5. Berlin/New York. Keene, C.H. 1969 [1887]. The Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus and M. Aurelius Olympius Nemesianus. Hildesheim. Korzeniewski, D. 1971. Hirtengedichte aus neronischer Zeit. Darmstadt. Leach, E.W. 1973. “Corydon Revisited: An Interpretation of the Political Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus”, Ramus 2: 53 – 97. — 1975. “Neronian Pastoral and the World of Power”, in: A.J. Boyle (ed.), Ancient Pastoral: Ramus Essays on Greek and Roman Pastoral Poetry. Berwick, 204 – 30. Magnelli, E. 2006. “Bucolic Tradition and Poetic Programme in Calpurnius Siculus”, in: M. Fantuzzi and T. Papanghelis (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral. Leiden, 467 – 77. Mayer, R. (2006). “Latin Pastoral after Virgil”, in: M. Fantuzzi and T. Papanghelis (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral. Leiden, 451 – 66. Mynors, R.A.B. 1972. P. Vergili Maronis opera. Oxford. Nauta, R.R. (2006). “Panegyric in Virgil’s Bucolics”, in: M. Fantuzzi and T. Papanghelis (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral. Leiden, 301 – 32. Newlands, C. 1987. “Urban Pastoral. The Seventh Eclogue of Calpurnius Siculus”, ClAnt 6: 218 – 31. Putnam, M.C.J. 1970. Virgil’s Pastoral Art. Princeton, NJ. Schröder, B. 1991. Carmina non quae nemorale resultent: Ein Kommentar zur 4. Ekloge des Calpurnius Siculus. Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Stephens, S.A. 2006. “Ptolemaic Pastoral”, in: M. Fantuzzi and T. Papanghelis (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral. Leiden, 91 – 117. Sullivan, J.P. 1985. Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero. Ithaca, NY.

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Verdière, R. 1954. T. Calpurnii Siculi De laude Pisonis et Bucolica et M. Annaei Lucani De laude Caesaris, Einsiedlensia quae dicuntur carmina. Édition, traduction et commentaire. Brussels. Vinchesi, M.A. 1996. Calpurnio Siculo. Egloghe. Milan. Vozza, P. 1993. “L’ars poetica di Calpurnio-Coridone ed il giudizio sull’età neroniana”, Bollettino di Studi Latini 23: 282 – 308. — 1994. “Un silenzio eloquente (Quid tacitus …? Calpurnio ecl. 4.1 – 4)”, Bollettino di Studi Latini 24: 71 – 92.

John G. Fitch

Speaking Names in Senecan Drama Summary: A study of wordplay and syllable‑play in Seneca’s dramas would assist substantially in our understanding of the dramas’ poetics. As a contribution to that goal, this article studies plays on names (almost all Greek, because of the mythological context of the dramas), both those of the dramatis personae and others including place‑names. It illustrates some of the many and varied functions of name‑plays within the fabric of the dramas. The article also tackles the question whether a word‑play ‘really is there’ in the text: examples where Seneca responds to plays on the same names in earlier authors, notably Vergil and Ovid, confirm the reality of the name‑plays both in Seneca himself and in his predecessors. Appended to the article is a Glossary of all etymological name‑plays noted in Seneca’s dramas by other readers and myself. Keywords: etymology; word‑play; names; wit; puns

Preamble There has been an increased awareness in recent years of the extent and importance of wordplay, including etymological play, in Roman poetry. The groundbreaking work was that of Fred Ahl on Ovid published in 1985, a book whose title had its own wordplay, Metaformations. A briefer but influential discussion of etymological plays, based like Ahl’s on Varronian principles, was that of Cairns.¹ These pioneers were followed by two books on Vergil which appeared almost simultaneously, one by James O’Hara in 1996 and the other by Michael Paschalis in 1997; Paschalis was liberal in recognizing wordplay and relating it to the themes of the Aeneid, whereas O’Hara was more cautious, and more concerned to establish criteria for judging whether or not wordplay is present in any instance. Study of etymological play was facilitated by Robert Maltby’s Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies, published in 1991. Ten years later Maltby’s student Andreas Michalopoulos produced a lexicon of Ancient Etymologies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, i. e. wordplays involving etymologies for which there is independent evidence in the grammarians or scholiasts or other sources. There have also been several articles, including one on Ovid by Alison Keith (2001), and one on Seneca’s dramas by John Stevens (2002).  Cairns ()  – .

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Play on the apparent meaning of names is just one element in the whole fabric of wordplay and syllable-play in Seneca’s dramas. I have chosen to focus on ‘speaking names’ as a manageable topic for the present context, but there is a larger study waiting to be made, which would contribute greatly to our understanding of Seneca’s poetics. Such a study would usefully shed light on Seneca’s plays on Latin words, whereas the plays studied here are inevitably on Greek names, given the Greek mythological context of the dramas.² A question that hovers over the issue of speaking names is the following: How can we be sure that a particular play on a proper name really is there in the text (to use objectivist terms)? Are we modern scholars being over-ingenious in finding it? O’Hara raises this issue squarely: “How can I distinguish between an etymological wordplay made by the poet, which I have discovered, and one that I myself have invented, or forced upon the poet?”³ We can be reasonably confident about an etymological connection if it is explicitly made elsewhere by a writer such as Varro or Servius or one of the scholiasts. O’Hara also lists various characteristics of Vergilian etymologizing, which can in themselves be used as criteria: does a particular instance fall into a recognizable category, for example the single-adjective gloss (of which examples later)? But it is his last criterion with which I am concerned here: “Later comment: poets after Vergil (especially Ovid) allude to his etymologizing”.⁴ He does indeed provide a generous list of places where Ovid appears to respond to Vergilian wordplays,⁵ but almost no examples from poets after Ovid. This is not a criticism of O’Hara’s book, which is immensely helpful on the whole etymologizing tradition up to Ovid, but it does indicate what remains to be done, and how the study of Seneca, for example, may shed light on Vergil and vice versa. One example will illustrate this point. In Troades Helen announces (falsely) that Polyxena is to be married to Pyrrhus. Andromache reacts with shock and outrage: flagrant strata passim Pergama: o coniugale tempus! (889 – 90), “the wreckage of Pergama is blazing all around: an apt time for a wedding!”⁶ Now

 Seneca almost completely avoids bilingual name-plays, i. e. those which play a Latin word off a Greek name. The reason is perhaps that such plays are clearly puns, with no claim to etymological status. Such puns are familiar in comedy (e. g. Epidamnus/damnum at Pl. Menaechmi  – ), and therefore threaten to carry the wrong associations for tragedy. The only possible examples I have noted are Argo/argutus and Cassandra/cassus (see Glossary). On the humorous use of verbal play in Plautus, see particularly Fontaine ().  O’Hara () .  O’Hara () .  O’Hara ()  – .  All translations are mine.

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the name Pergama can evoke the Greek γάμος ‘marriage’, and Andromache’s coniugale seems to resonate with that word. Vergil uses a similar wordplay, again with reference to Helen: Pergama cum peteret inconcessosque hymenaeos, “when she was heading for Pergama and an unlawful marriage” (Aeneid 1.651). O’Hara does not list this Vergilian play in his “Catalogue”, presumably because it had not been noticed by previous commentators⁷ and he himself is quite cautious. But the likelihood of the wordplay in Seneca strengthens its likelihood in Vergil, and vice versa; the two texts speak to each other. The present article aims simply to illustrate some of Seneca’s uses of nameplays, and to discuss some of the issues that arise from them. The Glossary at the end of the article is somewhat more comprehensive, in that it lists all the nameplays that I have noticed in the Senecan corpus. Before proceeding, I should make some caveats which are familiar yet worth repeating. First, the ancient criteria for etymology are quite different from those of modern linguistics. Consequently, when I suggest a certain derivation as the basis of a name-play, it is not proposed as the ‘real’ origin of the name, but what might have sounded like its origin to an ancient audience. Second, when a poet makes a play on the possible meaning of a name, he is not necessarily suggesting the actual origin of the name, even by ancient criteria; the play may be purely playful.⁸ Third, despite the ludic aspect of playing on names, a particular name-play may carry more weight of meaning and emotion than we moderns might expect, because of the belief encapsulated in the phrase nomen omen, i. e. the belief that a personal name may express or even somehow predetermine a person’s destiny.

Name-Plays and the Dramatis Personae Not surprisingly, many of the name-plays in Seneca’s dramas are associated with the dramatis personae. They are often found, for example, when a character first enters, or is first addressed. John Stevens (2002) discussed this pattern fully, so I will give just two examples. At the start of Act 2 of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra is addressed as inclitum Ledae genus, “glorious child of Leda” (125); the adjective inclitus/inclutus is related to the Greek κλυτός, and plays on the start of Clytem-

 It is, however, noted by Paschalis ()  with n. .  Fuller discussion of these issues at O’Hara ()  – .

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nestra’s name.⁹ A more complex example (not in Stevens) appears at the beginning of the Phoenissae, where Oedipus addresses his daughter Antigone: nata, quam tanti est mihi / genuisse uel sic, “daughter, it is worth the cost to have fathered you, even as it happened” (i. e. incestuously). This plays on what sound like the two elements in Antigone’s name, viz. the preposition ἀντί which can mean ‘in return, in recompense’ and γονή ‘birth, begetting’, which has the same root as genuisse, the word that Seneca uses here.¹⁰ I note in passing that neither character, neither Clytemnestra nor Antigone, is actually named in the text. These are examples of what O’Hara calls ‘suppression’, from Servius’ phrase supprimens nomen. ¹¹ (Suppression is not the ideal term in English, since it carries overtones of improper concealment of what should be made explicit, but I use it faute de mieux.) What does suppression of a name imply for Seneca’s audience, whether in stage performance or in recitation? They are being prompted to supply the name itself, simply by the dramatic situation, and in supplying the name they are also prompted to think about what the Greek name might mean, or might suggest. This sounds to us like an esoteric procedure, but not, I think, for an educated person in Seneca’s Rome; the names Clytemnestra and Antigone are hardly obscure, and an educated person would by definition be familiar with the Greek language, and with the literary tradition, and with the widespread practice in that tradition of reading meaning into names. So I prefer to say that a member of the audience who catches these name-plays would be an educated person, but not necessarily a learned one. It is also worth noting that catching these ‘suppressed’ name-plays involves active participation on the part of audience members in the construction of meaning. Of course this is true of any wordplay: the listener must make the mental connection between the word and the significance that is being suggested.¹² But it is doubly true when the listener has to supply the name itself as well as its significance. Name-play may happen not only at a character’s first appearance, but also when a character is first mentioned in the drama. When Juno starts to think bitterly about Hercules, she says gloriae feci locum, “I have given scope for his glory” (36), i. e. by imposing labors in which he has succeeded triumphantly.

 Stevens ()  –  suggests a play not only on κλυτός but also, in the second half of Clytemestra’s name, on the root μη- ‘cunning’ (seen in μήδομαι ‘plan cunningly’ and μήστωρ ‘counsellor’) at Agamemnon  euolue femineos dolos, “spin your female wiles.”  Sarah McCallum points out to me the partial homophony of ἀντί and tanti.  O’Hara ()  – .  “Poetic etymologising is thus revealed as a process demanding active involvement of the reader”, Cairns () .

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The phrase alludes to the well-known interpretation of the name Hercules (Herakles) from Ἥρα and κλέος, i. e. ‘the glory of Hera’. (There is a touch of paradox here, as the phrase ‘the glory of Hera’ would in itself more naturally suggest glory conferred on Hera, rather than glory conferred by her on Hercules.)¹³ In this case the name of Hercules is spoken by Juno, but not until five lines later (41), so we have at least temporary ‘suppression’ happening. I note in passing that the name Hercules is used some 95 times in the corpus without reference to this etymology, and only once with reference to it: similarly with other names there may be just one or two etymological plays among many usages. An example of name-play at the first mention of a figure outside the drama is Phaedra 94 audacis proci, ‘audacious suitor.’ This refers to Pirithous’ attempt to carry off Proserpine from the underworld, and glances at πειρ- ‘attempt’, which both as noun and verb can refer to attempts at seduction or rape (LSJ svv. πεῖρα, πειράζω, πείρασις, πειράω); more generally, audax can be used pejoratively, as here and e. g. Troades 349, Oedipus 908, and similarly πειρ-, e. g. Soph. El. 470 f. πικράν …πεῖραν τήνδε τολμήσειν. Here again the name itself is suppressed. Name-plays can be particularly powerful when one of the dramatis personae speaks his or her own name, with reference to its apparent meaning. I discussed this pattern in an article written with Siobhan McElduff (2002), on self-construction in Senecan tragedy, so here I will just give one example not cited there. In Troades Andromache in despair cries to her dead husband, seruire Graio pateris Andromachen uiro, / crudelis Hector? “Do you allow Andromache to be a slave to a Greek man, callous Hector?” (804 f.). This alludes to the apparent meaning of her name, from ‘man’ (ἀνδρ‐) and ‘fight’ (μάχη): she should be a woman who fights with a man, as she has attempted to do with Ulysses, not one who serves a man. Here and in the examples discussed in the earlier article the ‘speaking name’ contributes to characters’ self-construction, to their understanding of what their true identity is, embodied in their ‘true name’, their etymon. The etymology of Andromache’s name has a history in Latin literature which is of interest. Ennius in one of his tragedies had written the line Andromachae nomen qui indidit, recte indidit, “Whoever named Andromache named her rightly”, the implication being “because she fights with men, or with her man.” Varro criticized this line as obscure; the play on the name was clear in Euripides, he

 See Michalopoulos ()  –  for various derivations of the name. With Hercules Furens  compare Probus on Verg. Eclogues ., who says the name is derived from Hera quod eius imperiis opinionem famamque uirtutis sit consecutus, “because it was through her commands that he gained renown and a reputation for valour”.

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says, because he was writing in Greek, but it is not clear in Ennius, i. e. for a Roman audience.¹⁴ Does this mean that Seneca’s play on the name Andromache would also be obscure for a Roman audience? First we have to allow for Varro’s prejudice: he is writing about the Latin language, and is happy to explain all kind of Latin linguistic oddities in Accius and Ennius, but disapproves of this Greek name-play. Second, Seneca’s play on the name Andromache does not demand that the audience should grasp it, unlike Ennius’ challenging approach: the Senecan line makes sense without the name-play, but is given an extra dimension for those who do grasp it. Third, Latin literature has become more sophisticated since Varro’s day, and in particular the educated public has become sensitized to etymological plays, primarily through Vergil. In fact Vergil himself plays on the name Andromache at Aeneid 3.297 et patrio Andromachen iterum cessisse marito. The issue here, as in Seneca, is Andromache’s man/husband after Hector: in Seneca she is assigned to the Greek Pyrrhus, but in Vergil Aeneas learns that she has “passed once more to a husband of her own nationality.” The verb cedere has a legal sense here, ‘to pass as property’ (OLD s.v. cedo 15), but the root sense is of course ‘to yield’, which sets up a play e contrario with “she who fights with her man.” Here again the Senecan passage and the Vergilian passage speak to each other.¹⁵ Another kind of connection between a character and a speaking name is a thematic link. Seneca’s Phaedra contains such a link between Phaedra and her name, which means ‘the bright one,’ φαιδρά. The link is present in the opening words of her Nurse, Thesea coniunx, clara progenies Iouis, “Wife of Theseus, bright/illustrious progeny of Jove” (129). Her brightness or brilliance is related to the fact that, in addition to being a grandchild of Jove through her father, she is also a grandchild of the Sun through her mother; later she appeals to this ancestry, to the coruscum lucis aetheriae iubar, “gleaming rays of heavenly light” (889). But her passion for Hippolytus has displaced this heavenly brightness with another kind of fire, that of amor; hence, as the Nurse says, her eyes, which used to manifest Phoebus’ torch, no longer gleam with that ancestral brilliance: et qui ferebant signa Phoebeae facis / oculi nihil gentile nec patrium micant (379 f.).¹⁶ Similarly she discards the gleaming apparel which is part of her brilli-

 Ennius fr.  J = SRP fr.  R; Varro de Lingua Latina ..  The wordplay in Vergil is recognized by Morland () , followed by Paschalis ()  n. . The cautious O’Hara ()  judges it “perhaps unlikely”, but if he had been aware of the Senecan parallel, he might have judged differently.  There is an interplay here with φοῖβος ‘bright’ (see Glossary s.vv. Phoebe, Phoebus), further emphasizing Phaedra’s inheritance of brilliance.

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ance, the purple, the silk, the gold (386 – 403). As Stevens says, “to spurn these is to flee her very nature,” a nature which is embodied in her name.¹⁷ To what extent do speaking names influence the action of the plays? John Stevens took a strong line on this: he argued that “Seneca built his tragic plots around the meaning of the names displayed in his wordplay” (136). I do not believe that this case can be made. But there is one place where a speaking name has a close association with the action, and that is in the final act of the Phaedra. The body of Hippolytus, son of Theseus, has been torn apart as he was dragged behind his horses. In the final act of the play, his dismembered body is brought onstage, and his father Theseus sets the body in order, in a fruitless symbolical attempt to make it whole again. Now the name Theseus sounds as if it were connected to the root θη-, meaning ‘place, set’, found in the verb τίθημι. Vergil had played on this connection in the Georgics, in the phrase Thesidae posuere (2.383): the sons of Theseus ‘set out’ prizes for dramatic competitions. In Act 5 of Phaedra, Theseus speaks the verb ponere three times of his own actions: membra … in ordinem dispone, “set the limbs in order” (1256 f.); hic laeva … manus ponenda, “here the left hand is to be set” (1259 f.); hic hic repone, “here, set it here” (1268). It looks, then, as if the name Theseus may have suggested the dramaturgy of this scene, either to Seneca himself or to a source on which he is drawing.¹⁸

The World of Death Play on names is as varied as the dramas themselves, and any attempt to categorize all the examples would be Procrustean. Given this situation, one strategy is to take a cross-section, so to speak, through the dramas, and to study the variety of etymological references. The world of death looms large in Senecan tragedy: it is described at length in the Hercules; Theseus returns from that world in Phaedra; the ghosts of Thyestes and Tantalus and Laius emerge from there in other plays. The topic of the underworld therefore provides a kind of cross-section which may be useful. The regular name for the ruler of the underworld in Seneca is Dis, though he is occasionally called Pluto. Now dis is also the contracted form of diues ‘weal-

 Stevens () .  In view of the similarity of this scene to Euripides’ dramaturgy in a now lost passage of the Bacchae (Dodds on ), and Euripides’ liking for etymological references (O’Hara ()  – ), a possible source is Euripides’ first Hippolytus tragedy, the Kaluptomenos.

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thy’, and an association between Dis and wealth is paralleled by the fact that Pluto was etymologized from πλοῦτος ‘wealth’.¹⁹ In the tragedies Dis is twice called “greedy”, Hercules 782 auari Ditis, Agamemnon 752 auidi … Ditis. Billerbeck, who notes this etymological play at Hercules 782, regards it as “ein pointiertes Oxymoron.” Not necessarily so: the rich may be rich because they are greedy, and auarus can also mean ‘miserly’, again a characteristic of some wealthy individuals. In a further play on Dis as ‘wealthy’, Hercules’ abduction of Cerberus from the underworld is twice described as ‘despoiling’ Dis (Hercules Furens 51 spolia, 833 regem spoliare).²⁰ Another name for the lord of the underworld is Hades, which is sometimes etymologized from ἀϊδής ‘unseen.’²¹ At Hercules Furens 664 we find the phrase Ditis inuisi domus; while inuisus regularly means ‘hated’ in Seneca’s plays, the word in itself also means ‘unseen,’ and the possibility occurred to me that it might carry both meanings here, with a glance at ἀϊδής. This would be a complex wordplay, and I might have rejected the possibility if it had not occurred independently to my colleague Harry Edinger. Later I noticed that Philip Hardie had suggested the same double sense of inuisus, ‘hated’ and ‘unseen’ (in Hades), at Aeneid 9.495 – 6 aut tu, magne pater diuum, miserere, tuoque / inuisum hoc detrude caput sub Tartara telo (“or else you, great father of the gods, must pity me, and thrust my hated self down to Tartarus with your thunderbolt”).²² Another debatable instance from the underworld is Hercules Furens 581 flentes Eurydicen iuridici sedent, “the judges sit weeping for Eurydice.” There is a close resemblance of sound between Eurydicen and iuridici, which is parallelled by the echoing effect of flentes and sedent. Is there also an etymological play? A reference to δίκη ‘justice’ would fit the context of the judges seated at their bench, but it is not clear that ‘wide justice’ is relevant to Eurydice; she is not herself a judge, in the underworld or elsewhere. Here, then, the play may be primarily auditory.²³ Among the supernaturals associated with death are the Fates, who spin the life-threads and shear them off. One of their names is the Parcae, which invites association with parcere by contraries, i. e. because they spare no-one. This name-play seems to hover in all three places in the corpus where the name Par-

 Jocelyn on Enn. scenica  J; Paschalis () .  Noted by Billerbeck () ad .  Hom. Iliad ., cf. Pl. Gorgias b.  Hardie () ad loc., cited by O’Hara () .  Chris Trinacty, to whom I am grateful for discussion of this instance, suggests a play on εὖρυς ‘wide’ and dicere ‘speak’, etymologising Eurydice as ‘she who is widely spoken of.’ See n.  on the issue of bilingual name-plays.

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cae is used, Hercules Furens 188, 559, Hercules Oetaeus 1097– 8: the last runs nulli non auidi colus / Parcas stamina nectere, “there is no-one for whom the Parcae do not spin the greedy distaff’s threads.”²⁴ Other death-figures include the Furies, one of whose names is the Dirae, the dread ones; that name is not used in the tragedies, but it is perhaps alluded to in phrases such as Hercules Furens 1221 dira Furiarum loca, “dread haunts of the Furies.”²⁵ The rivers of the underworld are candidates for name-play because their names in several cases have clear meanings. Lethe, ‘forgetfulness’ (λήθη), is related to the belief that the dead, after drinking from this river, forget their former lives. The author of HO plays on this meaning with his phrase immemor Lethe, “Lethe of oblivion” (936); this is a standard type of etymological reference, which O’Hara calls “the single-adjective gloss.”²⁶ Seneca himself makes a more complex reference at Hercules Furens 681 demit curas, Lethe “takes away cares”; this not only refers to the meaning of the name Lethe but also alludes to Vergil’s Lethaei ad fluminis undam / securos latices et longa obliuia potant, “by the current of Lethe River they drink care-dispelling waters and long oblivion.”²⁷ Another transparent name is Cocytus, related to κωκύω ‘wail, lament’: again HO uses a single-adjective gloss, gementis stagna Cocyti, “the pools of wailing Cocytus” (1963), and again Seneca is more subtle: he refers to the swamps of the Cocytus, and then in the next line he has the ‘wailing’ of a foreboding owl, luctifer bubo gemit (Hercules Furens 686 – 7). A third transparent name is Phlegethon, the ‘burning’ river (from φλέγω), which yields one reference with suppression of the proper name (Phaedra 1180 per amnes igneos … sequar, “I shall follow you through fiery rivers”), as well as two references in which the

 There is also a further contrast here between ‘sparing’ and ‘greedy’; cf. Nisbet and Hubbard () on Hor. Carmina ...  Cf. Thyestes  dira Furiarum agmina, “dread troops of Furies,”  dira Furiarum cohors, “dread band of Furies,” ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus  sequitur dira lampade Erinys, “the Erinys pursues with her dread torch,”  –  dira … Megaera,  dira Tisiphone. At Octavia  –  dira cui genetrix facem accendit, referring to Agrippina, the adjective dira perhaps strengthens her characterization as Fury.  O’Hara ()  – . Cf. Paschalis (: ) “By far the most common form of etymological association from the time of Homer is the one in which a name is ‘glossed’ by a word or phrase of synonymous or opposite sense.” Both O’Hara and Paschalis cite the phrase pluuiasque Hyadas (Verg. Aeneid ., .), implying a derivation from ὕω ‘to rain’, echoed by Seneca at Medea .  Verg. Aeneid . f., taken up by Ov. Epistulae ex Ponto .. securae pocula Lethes, “drafts of care-freeing Lethe.”

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name is included;²⁸ again there is a precedent for this etymology in Aeneid 6.²⁹ Acheron is less self-evident in meaning, but it was etymologized either from ἄχος ‘grief’ or from α privative and χαίρω ‘rejoice’ (Paschalis 1997: 217– 18); hence Thyestes 17 maestus Acheron, “sad Acheron,” another single-adjective gloss. Finally, the most famous of these names, Styx, was associated not only with στυγερός ‘hated’ but also with στυγνός, which can mean ‘gloomy’: hence perhaps the reference to “gloomy Styx”, Styga tristem (Agamemnon 607), and to a “sombre branch from the Stygian stream,” tristis Stygia ramus ab unda (Medea 805).

The Choral Odes In the choral odes, speaking names again serve various functions; they are as varied as the odes themselves, and a commentator has to resist any temptation to corral them into neat categories. I want to concentrate here on just one function, namely helping to establish a particular atmosphere. In the first ode of Medea, the Corinthian chorus celebrates the impending marriage of Jason with the princess Creusa. But the celebratory atmosphere is subverted for the audience, who know the familiar story of Medea’s revenge, and have heard Medea plotting revenge in the prologue. The ode begins with invocation of the gods, and prescription of the animal sacrifices to win their favour for the marriage: Lucinam niuei femina corporis intemptata iugo placet. (61– 2) “Let a female of snow-white body, untried by the yoke, appease Lucina.”

The name Lucina suggests lux ‘light’, as the goddess of childbirth who brings children into the light; nivei plays on this derivation, and both words reflect the chorus’ desire to create a bright, well-omened, positive atmosphere.³⁰ But the rest of the language undercuts it: femina, overtly referring to a heifer, sug-

 Phaedra  Phlegethon nocentes igneo cingens uado, “Phlegethon encircling the guilty with its fiery stream”; Thyestes  –  alueo medius tuo, / Phlegethon, relinquar igneo cinctus vado, “let me be left amidst your channel, Phlegethon, encircled by your fiery stream.”  Verg. Aeneid . f. flammis … torrentibus amnis, / Tartareus Phlegethon, “the river with its burning flames, Tartarean Phlegethon.”  There is another play on Lucina and light at Agamemnon  –  tu maternam sistere Delon, / Lucina, iubes, “you bade your mother’s isle of Delos stand firm, Lucina”: see the Index below s.v. Delos. The context is again a celebratory ode.

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gests also a human female, a woman; niuei corporis hints at the amatory language applied to a young attractive woman; intemptata iugo suggests an unmarried woman, through the familiar metaphor of the yoke of marriage. As Hine rightly comments, the personification of this victim suggests that “the unmarried heifer is Creusa … So the Chorus’s prayers foreshadow their own futility.”³¹ By the third ode the atmosphere has darkened further, and the chorus have lost any optimism. No violence of fire or wind, they say, matches the potential violence of a spurned wife, i. e. Medea: Non ubi hibernos nebulosus imbres Auster aduexit, properatque torrens Hister et iunctos uetat esse pontes (583 – 5) “not when the cloudy south wind brings the rains of winter, and the river Hister rushes in spate and forbids bridges to remain joined.”

Hine points out that the name Hister can be etymologized as ‘stopper’, from ἵστημι ‘to make to stand or stop’, and he comments that Seneca “exploits the paradox of a swift river being so called.”³² I would suggest a similar paradox in the case of Auster. Tarrant notes that Auster is a “remarkably protean wind in Latin poetry:” at times it is hot and dry, at other times wet.³³ This reflects the climatic reality of winds from the south in Italy; blowing from the Sahara, they can be dry and sandy (as in the harmattan), or they can pick up moisture from the Mediterranean.³⁴ The drying aspect of Auster is underlined by an auditory association with αὖος ‘dry.’³⁵ So we have another paradox here, of a potentially drying wind bringing the rains of winter. The double paradox is underlined by the fact that Auster and Hister occupy the same position in the line, and by the similarity of sound. The effect, however, is not simply one of paradox, but also a suggestion of something disordered and chaotic in nature itself: what should be a ‘stopper’ is rushing, what should or could be a ‘dryer’ brings rainstorms. Yet nei-

 Hine () ad .  Hine () ad . Cf. (again e contrario) Thyestes  f. Hister fugam / praebens Alanis, “the Hister offering escape to the Alani”, and (not e contrario) Medea  f. Hister … compressit undas, “the Hister … constrained its waters”, noted by Hine () ad loc.; also Phaedra  et quae stanti ludit in Histro, “and the one that frolics on the still Hister”.  Tarrant () ad Agamemnon .  The sirocco is an “often dusty or rainy wind blowing from North Africa across the Mediterranean to southern Europe” (OED s.v. sirocco).  See O’Hara () , who records that W.F.J. Knight noticed a name-play e contrario in Verg. Georgics . umidus Auster; note the similar phrase pluuio … Austro Sen. Agamemnon , and the play at ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus  Austrum madentem siccat.

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ther of these ominous forces, according to the chorus, is as dangerous as Medea herself. After the references to the Auster and the river Hister, Seneca turns to Mt Haemus in Thrace: non … ubi in riuos niuibus solutis sole iam forti medioque uere tabuit Haemus (587– 90) “not … when, with its snows melted into streams, with the sun now strong in mid-spring, Haemus seeps.”

Harry Hine notices a play on αἷμα ‘blood’ and tabuit: “the corresponding noun tabes often refers to blood and other fluids oozing from wounds.³⁶ The imagery has connotations of death.” This play on Haemus recalls one of the best known of all name-plays in Latin, that at Vergil Georgics 1.491 f. nec fuit indignum superis bis sanguine nostro / Emathiam et latos Haemi pinguescere campos, “and the gods did not find it unworthy that Emathia and the broad fields of Haemus should twice grow rich with our blood.”³⁷ But notice how much further Seneca takes things: in Vergil the fields are enriched by blood, which is literally true even if magnified in extent; in Seneca the mountain becomes a living being oozing blood, a macabre and surreal and very Senecan moment.³⁸ These three etymological references – the drying wind bringing rain, the stopping river in spate, the mountain oozing blood – all underline the chaotic and destructive forces of nature, and therefore the even greater violent potential of Medea.³⁹ The discussion of the name Auster above requires a codicil. The double aspect of the south wind, at times drying and at times wet, casts light on a puzzling passage in Agamemnon, where the various winds contribute to the superstorm that wrecks the Greek fleet: Strymonius altas Aquilo contorquet niues Libycusque harenas Auster ac Syrtes agit;

 Hine () ad Medea , cf. .  O’Hara () , cf. Paschalis () .  Compare the surreal effect at Hercules Furens  f., where the thickets famous for Pentheus’ murder are reddened once more by the dawn light (see Fitch () ad loc.) – an image that undercuts the seemingly idyllic atmosphere of the opening ode (cf. my comments on Medea  above).  On Medea as aligned in this play with nature’s forces, see my brief comments at Fitch () . By contrast the Argonauts are at odds with nature, by breaking the limits built into the natural world, the foedera mundi (Medea , ).

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nec manet in Austro, fit grauis nimbis Notus, imbre auget undas. (479 – 82)

The north wind Aquilo brings snow, the south wind as Auster brings sand and then as Notus brings rain. Now the name Notus was etymologized from νοτίς, ‘moisture.’⁴⁰ It appears, then, that the passage contains a double etymological play: the south wind in its drying aspect is Auster, and in its wetting aspect is Notus. Line 481 therefore means, “and it does not remain in the form of Auster [the drying wind], it becomes Notus [the wetting wind] heavy with rainclouds.” (For in meaning ‘as, in the form of’ v. OLD s.v. in 43, citing, inter alia, Ov. Metamorphoses 2.362 nostrum laceratur in arbore corpus, Plin. Naturalis Historia 34.79 aquilam sentientem, quid rapiat in Ganymede.) Since this interpretation restores sense in 481, I would now retain the line rather than deleting it.⁴¹ The passage as a whole seems to constitute an etymological display: Aquilo contorquet niues (479) plays on aquilus ‘dark’ in contrast to snow, while the following Eurus … quatiens … Eoos sinus (482– 3) plays on the supposed derivation of Eurus from Ἠῷος ‘of the Dawn’ (see Glossary below).

Conclusion: The Question of Doctrina The use and variety of etymological name-play in Seneca’s dramas manifests a high level of linguistic skill and wit. The richness of such play in Seneca is a feature that has not been well appreciated until recently, and it needs to be taken into account as critics continue to reassess his poetics. Ideally, however, it would need to be studied within the broader issue of the presence of all kinds of wordplays in his work. How learned are Seneca’s name-plays? The term ‘learned’ in this context is loaded: it implies a deliberately recherché, Alexandrian kind of learnedness. Certainly Seneca can do the Alexandrian thing on occasion. One example will illustrate. At Troades 856 Seneca refers an island called Neritos near Ithaca, and describes it as parua breuior Zacyntho, “smaller than little Zacynthos.” Now the adjective νήριτος is rare, and its meaning was already obscure in antiquity,

 Gel. .. Graece Νότος nominatur, quoniam est nebulosus atque umectus; νοτίς enim Graece umor nominatur. See Michalopoulos ()  and O’Hara () .  Tarrant placed daggers around the words nec manet in austro fit in line . Other editors have deleted the whole line, followed (alas) by myself in the Loeb edition ( – ).

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but the scholiasts explained it as meaning ‘large, immense, countless’. Vergil is thought to glance at this meaning of the adjective when he describes Neritos as ardua saxis, “towering with its cliffs.”⁴² So Seneca is being playfully learned, in the Alexandrian fashion, in calling Neritos a teeny little island. But that example of arcane doctrina is exceptional; most name-plays in Seneca are more like Hercules as the glory of Hera, or Haemus as a place of blood, i. e. not particularly demanding for an audience culturally attuned to recognising such allusions. The more educated members of the audience would have had long passages of Greek and Latin poetry by heart; they would been trained from childhood in this literary tradition in which such name-plays are a familiar feature.⁴³ It is also relevant that Seneca’s name-plays are in general less overt than Vergil’s. Vergil not infrequently uses what O’Hara calls “naming constructions” (75 – 9) to call attention to a name-play, e. g. Aeneid 7.412 magnum manet Ardea nomen, “and now the mighty name of Ardea remains” (playing on arduus). Such signposts are less common in Seneca. (There are only five overt etymologies, signaled by use of the word nomen, four of them occurring in choral odes.)⁴⁴ In part this reflects a difference in genre: naming constructions are more appropriate to the omniscient voice of an epic narrator than to the voice of a particular dramatis persona. The infrequency of such naming constructions in Seneca, however, means that name-plays are less challenging for the audience than Vergil’s, in the sense that audience members are not required to perceive and understand any particular name-play. The question of the audience is clearly relevant here. After all, a poet may be as learned as he wishes, but if his learning is so obscure as to be exclusionary, to exclude the audience, he will not be read – the fate of Lycophron and Euphorion. But Seneca’s doctrina does not work in that way. Here I would invoke the notion of levels of meaning, and levels of audience appreciation. Presumably some members of Seneca’s original audiences would not have registered his nameplays at all. This is not necessarily a failure on the part of these listeners, or  Aeneid .. See O’Hara ()  – . In this context it is worth noting that Vergil’s doctrina extends as far as etymological plays with languages other than Latin and Greek (O’Hara ()  – ), not a feature of Senecan name-plays.  Roland Mayer in his paper ‘Doctus Seneca’ () argued that Seneca not infrequently displays doctrina by alluding to obscure versions of myths. But versions that seem arcane to us need not have appeared so to educated Romans, exposed as they were to countless visual representations of myth, as well as literary versions of which the great majority do not now survive. When Mayer calls a particular version of a myth the “only example in Latin literature” (), he means the only extant example, which is a different matter.  See the Glossary of Etymological Name-Plays under Baetica, Boeotia, Icarium mare, Myrtoan Sea, and Oedipus.

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of the poet: the great majority of examples in Seneca do not demand to be recognised, for the text makes perfectly good sense without, as we noted earlier in the case of Andromache.⁴⁵ But any particular wordplay would have been recognised by a portion of the audience, and for that portion of the audience there would have been the pleasure of wit, combined with the pleasure of active involvement, of creating or recreating the connection between the name and the punning phrase. Finally, some of these audience members would also perceive the relationship of a particular name-play to earlier plays on the same name in the literary tradition, to passages in Vergil or Ovid or Homer or Greek tragedy. These audience members would constitute the ideal audience, so to speak, for the dramas. They would be actively involved in constituting not only the name-play itself but also its relationship to the literary tradition, and this would contribute to their appreciation of the rich and complex texture of the dramas.

Glossary of Etymological Name-Plays Acheron. ἄχος ‘grief’, or ἀ- ‘not’ and χαίρω ‘rejoice’: Thyestes 17 maestus Acheron. Discussed in Section 3. Aethiopes. αἴθω ‘burn’ and ὤψ ‘face’: Hercules Furens 38 binos propinqua tinguit Aethiopas face. Noted by Fitch (1987) ad loc.; see Michalopoulos (2001) 21. Aetna. αἴθω ‘burn’: Hercules Furens 106 qui caminis ignis Aetnaeis furit, Medea 410 tantis Aetna feruebit minis, Phaedra 102, 190, Thyestes 583, ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 286, 1157. Alcides. ἀλκή ‘strength, courage’: Hercules Furens 186 – 87 nimium, Alcide, pectore forti / properas maestos uisere manes. Paschalis (1997) 289 n. 89. Amazon. μαζός ‘breast’: Hercules Furens 545 niuei uincula pectoris. Vergil plays on this etymology at Aeneid 1.492 aurea subnectens exsertae cingula mammae and 11.649 unum exserta latus pugnae: Paschalis (1997) 377. Andromache. ἀνδρ- ‘man’ and μάχη ‘fight’: Troades 804 seruire Graio pateris Andromachen uiro. Cf. Verg. Aeneid 3.297 et patrio Andromachen iterum cessisse marito. Discussed in Section 2. Antigone. ἀντί ‘in return, in recompense’ and γονή ‘birth, begetting’: Phoenissae 2– 3, quam tanti est mihi / genuisse, discussed in Section 2. Aquilo. Aquilus ‘dark’: Agamemnon 479 Aquilo contorquet niues, ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 778 niuosi … Aquilonis (both e contrario). Cf. Verg. Georgics 1.460 et claro siluas cernes Aquilone moueri (similarly e contrario), Aeneid 5.2 fluctusque atros Aquilone secabat: O’Hara (1996) 159, 265.

 The only instances that require the audience to make a connection are the overt etymologies listed in the previous footnote. Three of these have Ovidian precedents (details in the Glossary); of the others, the name Baetica is not difficult to supply from Baetis, and Oedipus ‘swollen-foot’ is one of the most familiar of ancient etymologies.

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Araxes. ἀράσσω ‘shatter’: Oedipus 428 frangit Araxen. Noted by Farnaby ad loc. and Boyle (2011) 215. For a different exploitation of this etymology note Verg. Aeneid 8.728 pontem indignatus Araxes: O’Hara (1996) 216 – 17. Arctophylax. Thyestes 873 custos plays on φύλαξ ‘guard’, the second half of the name. Noted by Tarrant (1976) ad loc. Argo. At Medea 349 ipsaque vocem perdidit Argo, the reference to the ship’s voice hints at a play on argutus ‘clear-voiced.’ For a Latin word played off a Greek, cf. Cassandra below. For etymologies of Argo see O’Hara (1996) 52. Astraea, from ἀστραῖος ‘starry’: ps-Sen. Octavia 424 Astraea uirgo, siderum magnum decus. Astyanax. ἄστυ ‘town’ and ἄναξ ‘lord’: Andromache in Troades 771– 82 laments that he will never play the role embodied in his name. The etymology goes back to Homer: O’Hara (1996) 10. Atlas. *τλάω ‘bear, endure’: ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 12 non poterit Atlas ferre cum caelo Herculem?, 1599 passus an pondus titubauit Atlas? For the etymology cf. Verg. Aeneid 4.247 Atlantis duri, Ov. Metamorphoses 2.296 – 7 Atlans en ipse laborat / uixque suis umeris candantem sustinet axem: Michalopoulos (2001) 38 – 39; Paschalis (1997) 158; O’Hara (1996) 64. The passages in Ovid and Hercules Oetaeus perhaps play on the initial α as privative, i. e. Atlas cannot ‘endure’. Atreus. ἄτρεστος ‘fearless’: Thyestes 486 Atrea timendum, 704 immotus Atreus. ⁴⁶ Fitch and McElduff (2002) 26 n. 24, Stevens (2002) 149. Auster. αὖος ‘dry’: Medea 583 f. non ubi hibernos nebulosus imbres / Auster aduexit (e contrario), Agamemnon 480 f. Libycusque harenas Auster ac Syrtes agit, / nec manet in Austro, fit grauis nimbis Notus. Discussed in Section 4. Baetica. Named for River Baetis: Medea 726 nomenque terris qui dedit Baetis suis, an overt etymology, but with suppression of the name Baetica. Boeotia. βοῦς and bos, ‘cow’: Oedipus 718 – 23, an overt etymology (but with suppression). The etymology is also explicit (or virtually so) at Ov. Metamorphoses 3.10 – 13: v. Michalopoulos (2001) 43. Bootes. βοώτης ‘ploughman’: Medea 314 f. flectitque … plaustra Bootes, Agamemnon 70 uersat plaustra Bootes, ps-Sen. Octavia 233 – 34 plaustra .. regit Bootes. Calchas. χαλάω ‘slacken’: Troades 353 Pelasgae uincla soluisti rati, noted by Stevens (2002) 135. Stevens notes also καλχαίνω ‘ponder,’ in reference to Troades 354– 7. Calliope. κάλλος ‘beauty’ and ὄψ ‘voice’: Medea 625 uocali … Camena, a single-adjective gloss with suppression of the name. Cassandra. Cassus ‘ineffectual’: Troades 37 uana uates ante Cassandram fui. Paschalis (1997) 84 notes Verg. Aeneid 2.405 of Cassandra ad caelum tendens ardentia lumina frustra. If correct, this would play a Latin word off a Greek, i. e. it would not suggest a Greek etymology. Charybdis. Cf. ἀναρροιβδέω (ἀναρρυβδέω) ‘swallow, suck down’: Medea 408 Charybdis … mare … sorbens, Thyestes 581 f. mare … quod rapax haustum reuomit Charybdis. Sorbere is similarly used of Charybdis at Verg. Aeneid 3.422: Paschalis (1997) 136. Clotho. κλώθω ‘spin’: ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 768 f. colos / Clotho manu proiecit, Octavia 15 mea rupisset stamina Clotho. Clytemnestra. κλυτός ‘famous’: Agamemnon 125 inclitum Ledae genus, discussed in Section 2. Stevens (2002) 139 – 41 suggests also a play on μη- ‘cunning’ at Agamemnon 116 evolve femineos dolos.

 Sarah McCallum points out that the play at Thyestes  is strengthened by the presence of other lexical items connoting ‘fear’ in lines  –  (times, timori, metuo, times).

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Cocytus. κωκύω ‘wail, lament’: Hercules Furens 686 – 7 luctifer bubo gemit, ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 1963 gementis stagna Cocyti. Discussed in Section 3. Creon. κρείων ‘ruler’: Medea 143 sceptro impotens, 178 tumidus imperio (cf. 177 regius cardo), 460 regius … gener. Perhaps also Oedipus 687– 8 solutus onere regio regni bonis / fruor. Cyclas. κυκλόω ‘move in circles’: Agamemnon 371 f. errantem / Cyclada (cf. Verg. Aeneid 3.76 errantem, also of Delos); Thyestes 595 Cyclades … motae with Tarrant (1976) ad loc. Cycnus. From κύκνος ‘swan’: Troades 183 cana nitentem … iuuenem coma (with suppression of name), Agamemnon 215 niuea proles Cycnus. Daedalus. δαιδάλλω ‘work cunningly’: Oedipus 899 f. callidus … Daedalus, a single-adjective gloss. Deianira. δηιόω ‘kill’ and ἀνήρ ‘man’: ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 440 perimes uirum. Delos. δῆλος ‘clearly seen’: Agamemnon 368 – 9 tu maternam sistere Delon, / Lucina, iubes, an interplay with Lucina. Callimachus too connects the island’s name with its becoming fixed and easily seen, no longer wandering and obscure (Hymn 4.51– 4). Verg. Aeneid 6.12 Delius inspirit uates aperitque futura hints at a connection between the name and ‘clear’ oracular responses: O’Hara (1996) 165 – 6, Paschalis (1997) 210. Dirae. Dirus ‘dread.’ Discussed in Section 3. Dis. Dis/diues ‘wealthy.’ Discussed in Section 3. Dryads. δρῦς ‘tree, oak’: Phaedra 783 nemorum deae, with suppression of the name; ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 1052 f. quercum fugiens suam … Dryas. Eurus. Ἠῷος ‘of the Dawn’: Agamemnon 482 f. Eurus … quatiens … Eoos sinus. Michalopoulos 77– 8 cites, inter alia, Verg. Aeneid 2.417 f. laetus Eois / Eurus equis, Stat. Thebaid 2.379 Eoos … Euros. Eurybates, cf. εὐρύς ‘wide’ and βαίνω ‘walk’: Agamemnon 388 uasto concitus miles gradu (with the name postponed to 391). Noted by Stevens (2002) 126. Eurydice. Perhaps playing on δίκη ‘justice.’ Discussed in Section 3. Fama. Fari ‘speak’: Hercules Furens 194 Fama … garrula, a single-adjective gloss. Haemus. αἷμα ‘blood’: Medea 590 tabuit Haemus. Discussed in Section 4. Hector. ἔχω ‘hold.’ In the sense ‘sustain,’ Troades 124– 29, cf. Hom. Iliad 5.473 φῆς που ἄτερ λαῶν πόλιν ἑξέμεν. In the sense ‘hold back’ (LSJ s.v. ἔχω A9 – 10), Troades 124 mora fatorum, Agamemnon 211. In the sense ‘have’, Troades 132 satis Hector habet. ⁴⁷ Helena. ἑλεῖν ‘take, destroy’: Troades 861– 63 quicumque hymen … lamenta caedes sanguinem gemitus habet / est auspice Helena dignus: the name Helen is itself an evil auspice. Cf. the explicit connection of her name with ἑλεῖν at Aesch. Agamemnon 681– 90. Hercules/Herakles. Ἥρα and κλέος, ‘glory of Hera’: Hercules Furens 36 gloriae feci locum. Discussed in Section 2. Hippolytus. ἵππος ‘horse’ and λύω ‘loose’: Phaedra 1055 Hippolytus … continet … equos (e contrario). On the other hand, Phaedra 1106 distractus Hippolytus is borrowed from Verg. Aeneid 7.767 distractus equis (a play on ‘loosened by horses’), and is part of an interpolated couplet: Fitch (2002) 312. Hister. ἵστημι ‘to make to stand or stop’: Medea 584 f., 763 f., Phaedra 59, Thyestes 629 f., discussed in Section 4.

 This last play (Troades ) was pointed out to me by Sarah McCallum.

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Hyades. ὕω ‘rain’: Medea 311 pluuias Hyadas, a single-adjective gloss found at Verg. Aeneid 1.744 = 3.516. See Nisbet & Hubbard (1978) on Hor. Carmina 1.3.14, Michalopoulos (2001) 94– 5, O’Hara (1996) 130 – 1. Icarium mare. From Icarus: Oedipus 898 nomen eripuit freto, ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 690 dedit ignoto nomina ponto; both overt etymologies, with suppression in Oedipus. Noted by Boyle (2011) 315. Precedents include Hor. Carmina 4.2.3 – 4 uitreo daturus nomina ponto, Ov. Metamorphoses 8.230 aqua quae nomen traxit ab illo: Töchterle (1994) 574. Ida. From ἰδεῖν ‘to see’: Troades 1049 celsa cum longe latitabit Ide, Agamemnon 457 et dubia parent montis Idaei iuga, both e contrario. Cf. Verg. Aeneid 2.801 iamque iugis summae surgebat Lucifer Idae: Paschalis (1997) 94– 95. From ἴδη ‘timber-tree’: Agamemnon 730 Idaea cerno nemora: Paschalis (1997) 94. Idmon. ἴδμων ‘knowing: Medea 652 Idmonem, quamuis sua fata nosset, noted by Hine (2000) ad loc. Lethe. λήθη ‘forgetfulness’: Hercules Furens 681 demit curas (cf. Verg. Aeneid 6.714 f., Ov. Epistulae ex Ponto 2.4.23), ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 936 immemor Lethe. Discussed in Section 3. Leucate. λευκός ‘white’: Phaedra 1014 cana … spuma Leucaten ferit (cf. ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 732 f. Leucas … spumat). For other references to Leucate and whiteness see O’Hara (1996) 141 on Verg. Aeneid 3.274 Leucatae nimbosa cacumina montis; O’Hara suggests the clouds here connote whiteness, whereas Paschalis (1997) 131 thinks they are dark e contrario. Lucina. Lux ‘light’: Medea 61 f. Lucinam niuei femina corporis / … placet, Agamemnon 368 f. tu maternam sistere Delon, / Lucina, iubes. Discussed in Section 4. Maenas. μαίνομαι ‘be mad’: Medea 383 recepto Maenas insanit deo, Troades 673 – 4 deo / percussa Maenas entheo … gradu. Manto. μάντις ‘prophet’: Agamemnon 319 praescia Manto, a single-adjective gloss. Medea. μήδομαι ‘plan cunningly,’ μῆτις ‘cunning intelligence’: Medea 910 Medea nunc sum: creuit ingenium malis. Fitch and McElduff (2002) 26; Stevens (2002) 148; O’Hara (1996) 29. Megara. μέγας ‘big’ (e contrario): Hercules Furens 203 Megara paruum comitata gregem, at stageentry. Noted by Stevens (2002) 135. At Hercules Furens 359 – 60 O clarum trahens / a stirpe nomen regia Lycus may mean simply that her name is distinguished as a result of her royal descent; however, the phrase has the ring of a ‘naming construction’ (cf. Ov. Metamorphoses 4.291, 8.230, 10.223) and may suggest that her name is derived from μέγας. Menelaus. μένω ‘await’: Troades 923 f. ista Menelaum manent / arbitria: a play on one half of the name only. Myrtoan Sea. From Myrtilus: Thyestes 140 – 42, an overt etymology. For this derivation Tarrant ad loc. cites ps-Apollod. Epitome 2.8, Ov. Epistulae (Heroides) 16.209 – 10. Neritos. νήριτος, apparently meaning ‘large’: Troades 856, discussed in Section 5. Oceano. ὠκύς ‘swift’: Hercules Furens 238 ruenti … Oceano. Paschalis 1997: 55 cites, inter alia, Verg. Aeneid 2.250 ruit Oceano nox. Oedipus, Oedipodes. From οἰδέω ‘swell’ and ποῦς ‘foot’: Oedipus 813 tumore nactus nomen ac uitio pedum, an overt etymology with suppression of name. From οἶδα ‘know’: Oedipus 216 ambigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur. Fitch and McElduff (2002) 26; Stevens (2002) 132; Töchterle (1994) 265; Boyle (2011) 169. Ophiuchus. ὄφις ‘serpent’ and ἔχω ‘hold’: Medea 698 pressas … soluat Ophiuchus manus. O’Hara (1996) 48 notes, in Cicero’s translation of Aratus, hic pressu duplici palmarum continet Anguem. Pallas. πάλλω ‘shake,’ especially a missile: Agamemnon 536 Pallas [fulmen] excussit manu, psSen. Hercules Oetaeus 1315 f. cuspidem … iaculare, Pallas. Paschalis (1997) 36 notes this etymol-

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ogy, and cites Verg. Aeneid 1.42 ipsa Iouis rapidum iaculata e nubibus ignem, again of Pallas’ attack on Ajax and the Greek fleet. Pallene. πάλλω ‘shake’: Hercules Furens 979 Pallene tremit. Parcae. Parcere ‘spare’ e contrario (they spare no-one): Hercules Furens 188 – 90, 559, ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 1097 f. nulli non auidi colus / Parcas stamina nectere. Discussed in Section 3. Pergama. γάμος ‘marriage.’ Troades 889 f. flagrant strata passim Pergama; / o coniugale tempus! Discussed in Section 1. Phaedra. φαιδρά ‘bright’: Phaedra 129, 379 – 80, discussed in Section 2. Phaethon. φαέθω ‘shine’: Medea 601– 02 quos polo sparsit furiosus ignes / ipse recepit (with suppression of name), 826 – 7 fulgura flammae / de … Phaethonte tuli. Phlegethon. φλέγω ‘burn’: Phaedra 1180, 1227, Thyestes 72– 73, cf. Verg. Aeneid 6.550 – 1. Discussed in Section 3. Phoebe. φοίβη ‘bright’: Agamemnon 818 candida Phoebe, a single-adjective gloss; Phaedra 309 dea clara, a single-adjective gloss with suppression of the name. Phoebus. φοῖβος ‘bright’: Medea 298 clarum priusquam Phoebus attollat diem, cf. e. g. Hercules Furens 940 f. Phoebus obscuro meat / … uultus (e contrario), Phaedra 800 Phoebo colla licet splendida compares, Agamemnon 463 nitidum cadentis inquinat Phoebi iubar. O’Hara (1996) 216 notes Verg. Aeneid 8.720 niueo candentis limine Phoebi. Phorbas. φορβάς (φέρβω) ‘feeding, pasturing’: Oedipus 839 f. arbitria sub quo regii fuerant gregis, / Phorbas. Noted by Boyle (2011) 303. Phryges, Phrygius. φρύγω ‘roast’: Troades 29 cineres … Phrygum, Agamemnon 189 amore Phrygiae uatis incensus, 705 f. tot illa regum mater et regimen Phrygum, / fecunda in ignes Hecuba. For the association of ‘Phrygian’ with ‘burning’ in Vergil, v. Paschalis (1997) 307 n. 12. Pirithous. πειρ- ‘attempt’: Phaedra 94 audacis proci (with suppression). Discussed in Section 2. Pleiades. πλείονες ‘more, a throng’: Medea 96 densi latitant Pleiadum greges. Maltby (1991) 480, Hine (2000) 127. Scylla. Cf. σκύλαξ ‘puppy’: Medea 350 f. uirgo … rabidos utero succincta canes, with suppression of her name. The play is familiar in Latin poetry, v. Michalopoulos (2001) 157– 58, O’Hara (1996) 248 – 9. Sigeon. σιγή ‘silence’: Agamemnon 436 relicti sola Sigei loca. For this etymology of Sigeon see Paschalis (1997) 197 n. 120. Spartoi. σπαρτός ‘sown’: Oedipus 588 dente Dircaeo satae, 739 dignaque iacto semine proles. Sphinx. σφίγγω ‘bind’: Oedipus 101 f. nodosa sortis uerba et implexos dolos … alitis ferae, with suppression; 641 magisque monstrum Sphinge perplexum sua. Noted by Stevens (2002) 142. Styx. στυγνός ‘gloomy’: Agamemnon 607 Styga tristem, Medea 805 tristis Stygia ramus ab unda. Discussed in Section 3. Syrtes. σύρω ‘sweep along’ (LSJ s.v. σύρω 2): Agamemnon 64 f. Syrtibus aequor / furit alternos uoluere fluctus. Tempe. τέμνειν ‘cut’: Hercules Furens 285 f. scissa … Tempe. Theseus. *θη-, meaning ‘place, set’ (τίθημι): discussed in Section 2. Thyestes. At Agamemnon 27 uiscera exedi mea Stevens (2002) 138 suggests a play on θύω ‘sacrifice’ and ἐσθίω ‘eat’; uiscera could suggest sacrificial entrails. Trachin. τραχύς ‘rough’: Troades 818 lapidosa Trachin, a single-adjective gloss; the play noted by Fantham (1982) ad loc. and Boyle (1994) ad loc. Virginia. uirgo ‘virgin’: ps-Sen. Octavia 296 uirgo dextra caesa parentis (with suppression of name).

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Bibliography Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. Billerbeck, M. 1999. Seneca: Hercules Furens. Leiden. Boyle, A.J. 1994. Seneca’s Troades. Leeds. — 2011. Seneca: Oedipus. New York. Cairns, F. 1979. Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet at Rome. Cambridge. — 1996. “Ancient Etymology and Tibullus: On the Classification of Etymologies and on Etymological Markers”, PCPhS 42: 24 – 59. Dodds, E.R. (ed.). 1960. Euripides: Bacchae. Oxford. Fantham, E. 1982. Seneca’s Troades. Princeton, NJ. Farnaby, T. (ed.). 1623. L. & M. Senecae Tragoediae. Leiden. Fitch, J.G. 1987. Seneca’s Hercules Furens. Ithaca, NY. — 2002. “Transpositions and Emendations in Seneca’s Tragedies”, Phoenix 56: 296 – 314. — 2002 – 4. Seneca: Tragedies. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA — 2004. Annaeana Tragica: Notes on the Text of Seneca’s Tragedies. Leiden. Fitch, J.G. and S. McElduff. 2002. “Construction of the Self in Senecan Drama”, Mnemosyne 55: 18 – 40. Fontaine, M. 2010. Funny Words in Plautine Comedy. Oxford. Hardie, P. (ed.). 1994. Virgil: Aeneid IX. Cambridge. Hine, H.M. 2000. Seneca: Medea. Warminster. Jocelyn, H.D. (ed.). 1967. The Tragedies of Ennius. Cambridge. Keith, A.M. 2001. “Etymological Wordplay in Ovid’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ (Met. 4.55 – 166)”, CQ 51: 309 – 13. Maltby, R. 1991. A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies. Leeds. — 1993. “Varro’s Attitude to Latin Derivations from Greek”, Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 7: 47 – 60. Mayer, R.G. 1990. “Doctus Seneca”, Mnemosyne 43: 395 – 407. Michalopoulos, A. 2001. Ancient Etymologies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A Commented Lexicon. Leeds. Morland, H. 1960. “Zu den Namen in der Aeneis”, SO 36: 21 – 9. Nisbet, R.G.M. and M. Hubbard. 1978. A Commentary on Horace Odes, Book II. Oxford. O’Hara, J.J. 1996. True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymologizing. Ann Arbor, MI. Paschalis, M. 1995. “Names and Death in Horace’s Odes”, CW 88: 181 – 90. — 1997. Virgil’s Aeneid: Semantic Relations and Proper Names. Oxford. Petrone, G. 1988. “Nomen/omen: poetica e funzione dei nomi (Plauto, Seneca, Petronio)”, MD 20 – 21: 33 – 70. Stevens, J.A. 2002. “Etymology and Plot in Senecan Tragedy,” Syllecta Classica 12: 126 – 53. Tarrant, R.J. 1976. Seneca: Agamemnon. Cambridge. — 1985. Seneca’s Thyestes. Atlanta, GA. Töchterle, K. 1994. Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Oedipus. Heidelberg, Germany. Woodhead, W.D. 1928. Etymologizing in Greek Literature from Homer to Philo Judaeus. Toronto.

Michèle Lowrie

Civil War, the Soul, and the Cosmos at Seneca, Thyestes 547 – 622: A Tropology Summary: When the chorus in the Thyestes calls the conflict between Atreus and Thyestes bellum ciuile (“civil war,” 562), Roman notes jar us into searching for local resonances. Instead of looking for pointed messages to Nero, I situate the ode within the developing field of Roman political thought. Seneca here folds civil war into a larger discursive progression: from disturbance within the soul on a micro level, through divisive conflict within the family and the state, to disturbance within the cosmos on a macro level. After this progression from sphere to sphere, the chorus depicts the hierarchy within the social and religious order that is meant to guarantee the peace and overlays it with a warning against a tranquility of spirit grounded in false hopes. This one choral ode offers a microcosm of overlapping tropes that inform Roman thinking about politics by presenting internal dissension as a threat to security at all levels. Civil war is a political category, but its integration into a larger discourse connecting inwards to psychology and outwards to the organization of the universe is representative of Roman political thought in both substance and form. Keywords: Seneca; Thyestes; civil war; soul; cosmos; trope; Roman political thought; metaphorology Even absolute metaphors therefore have a history. They have a history in a more radical sense than concepts, for the historical transformation of a metaphor brings to light the metakinetics of the historical horizons of meaning and ways of seeing within which concepts undergo their modifications. Through this implicative connection, the relationship of metaphorology to the history of concepts (in the narrower, terminological sense) is defined as an ancillary one: metaphorology seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the underground, the nutrient solution of systematic crystallizations; but it also aims to show with what ‘courage’ the mind preempts itself in its images, and how its history is projected in the courage of its conjectures. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology 5

When the chorus in the Thyestes calls the conflict between Atreus and Thyestes bellum ciuile (“civil war,” 562), Roman discord colors the Greek myth.¹ Shortly thereafter, their portrait of a generalized leader paints him

 Roman categories stand out all the more in the voice of ostensibly Argive citizens. On the

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in the guise of the Roman Emperor.² Such Roman notes jar us into searching for local resonances. Are they a hint to allegorize Seneca’s tragedy as a commentary on contemporary politics? An unanswered conundrum is how far to read this play as a pointed message to Nero. ³ I will make a different argument, less ambitious and historicizing with regard to any allegorical message about or to the emperor, but broader within the scope of the Roman political thought, which is developing as a distinct and historically grounded field within political theory and conceptual history.⁴ The choral ode as a whole folds civil war into a larger discursive progression of metaphorical homologies across spheres: from disturbance within the soul on a micro level, through divisive conflict within the family and the state, to disturbance within the cosmos on a macro level. ⁵ After this progression from sphere to sphere, the chorus depicts the hierarchy within the social and religious order that is meant to guarantee the peace and overlays it with a warning against a tranquility of spirit grounded in false hopes. This one choral ode brings together in dense compass, but with great clarity, Roman conceptions of how order and disorder stretch from soul to family, to city and empire, and on to the world.⁶ It offers a microcosm of overlapping chorus’ identity, see Davis () . Schiesaro ()  emphasizes their impersonality (other bibliography at n. ).  Tarrant ()  underscores the play’s “patently Roman context”; also at lines  – .  Tarrant ()  acknowledges Seneca’s “first-hand observation of absolute power” and suggests that his depiction of Caligula in the De ira in terms similar to Atreus here could serve as a negative exemplum to the young Nero, but warns that any allegory would have to be well concealed. Schiesaro ()  –  entertains how the play’s meaning would change according to various possible performance venues, but dismisses a political reading before the play’s more universal psychological power.  Hammer (). See also n.  below.  Ahl ()  begins his article on politics and power in Roman poetry by giving civil war pride of place: conflict over its meaning exercised poets long afterwards. I would add the choral ode in Seneca’s Thyestes to this claim, not in the sense of staking out an interpretation of the civil wars, but in thinking about civil war more abstractly. Ahl targets the struggle’s ideological nature: “Because the Roman civil war is a more than military struggle, and the attempt to control the way people think more intense than the effort to control their bodies, poets belong on the front lines with the soldiers and the generals” (). His comment could be extended to conflict within the structure of the psyche in a formal sense beyond any commitments to one side or another.  Rosenmeyer () x: “The disciplines of astronomy and of meteorology, like the study of statecraft and of the life of the soul, are part of the extended curriculum we associate with Stoic science.” Although Seneca’s intertwining of these topics here is surely Stoic, the extended parallels I pursue throughout this piece suggest a broader Roman approach independent of philosophical sect, even if, as Rosenmeyer claims, Vergil, and Ovid – whom he offers exempli gratia

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tropes that inform the Roman political imaginary by presenting internal dissension as a threat to security that extends to all levels. Civil war is one of Rome’s original contributions to the history of concepts, ⁷ but its integration into a larger discourse of interrelated figurations that connect inwards to psychology and outwards to the organization of the universe is representative of Roman political thought not only in substance but also in form. My close reading of this short passage offers it as a paradigmatic instance of the fundamentally non-conceptual procedures of Roman political thought and aims to demonstrate that to recover a better understanding of a tradition formative for the history of Western thought but lost to the majority of twentieth-century political theory, we need the resources of metaphorology.⁸ The impetus for the ode is the apparent resolution of the dispute between Atreus and Thyestes. Atreus has invited his previously estranged brother to share the governance of Mycenae and, after overcoming misgivings, Thyestes happily accepts.⁹ They go off together in harmony to seal the deal with a banquet where Atreus will exact his awful revenge: in return for Thyestes’ seduction of his wife, he cooks his brother’s children and feeds them to him. Incest and cannibalism – within the family no less! – represent the ultimate dissolution of social bonds. While celebrating the return from conflict to order, the choral ode retails with relief the strife that has been left behind. By recounting this strife, however, the chorus keeps it at the forefront of the text, ¹⁰ so that the ode, which sits at the turning point of

– are “in varying degrees indebted to Stoic ways of looking at the world” (xvi). Asmis ()  finds a homology between the rule of god, political rule, and self-governance in Seneca, but also shows that his conception of fortune as a force to be struggled against contains conventional Roman elements that do not quite accord with Stoic doctrine. The semantic field covered in this paper goes beyond the bounds of Stoicism.  Armitage (forthcoming).  Primary interventions in the competitive collaboration between conceptual history and metaphorology are Blumenberg (), Koselleck (), Blumenberg (); for a lucid introduction to metaphorology, see Savage’s postscript to Blumenberg (); for its apparent philosophical detour, see Haverkamp () ; for a political science approach to metaphor and its pragmatic effects, see Carver and Pikalo (). For metaphor and exemplum in Seneca, see Dressler ().  The chorus’ ignorance of Atreus’ intentions, declared in Act , is a challenge for performance (see Davis ()  – ), but well serves Seneca’s deployment of interconnected political tropes.  Rosenmeyer () ,  – ,  – , who calls this ode “one of most remarkable constructions in Latin Literature,” emphasizes the “movement between contraries” and “interdependence of opposites,” so that “peace and war, pleasure and pain, fortune and misfortune are no longer kept apart, but have come to imply one another.”

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the plot between apparent resolution and revealed horror, uneasily prepares for the horrific scenes where Atreus’ revenge is first narrated by a messenger and then the two protagonists respectively grovel in anguish or exult beyond measure. I read the ode less as devastating irony at the expense of a clueless dramatic character than a mood-heightening lyric interlude through which Seneca accomplishes two aims.¹¹ The tension between affect (dread) and apparent message (relief) prepares the audience for the difficulty Thyestes will face in reconciling his emotions with knowledge (or its lack) as he gradually learns what his brother has done to him. But furthermore – and this will be my main focus – at this play’s dramatic turning point, Seneca condenses all its concerns into one short poetic meditation and sets them under the sign of civil war. Although this concept is named only once in the play, it emerges here as its governing trope. The ode offers a textbook example of Roman discourses about civil war: civil war stands for the ne plus ultra in content and in structure its discourse revolves around a system of related tropes.¹² Each section of the ode is governed by a specific trope concerning internal order and disorder that furthermore links one realm to another: soul, family, city, cosmos, and empire. These tropes may rely on local metaphors, such as the storm for political upheaval, but they also establish larger analogic patterns that surpass any individual figuration. In addition to serving as a metaphor for the city’s troubles, the storm’s figurative reach extends to the soul and the cosmos and thereby knits all these realms together in a homological relationship. The ode furthermore deploys images with overlapping figurations. The unwilling sword is a personification as well as a metaphor for conflict within the will. Conventional metaphors (again the storm), allusion to earlier Latin literature, and homologies across spheres taken together add up to a single tropological system whose center is civil war.¹³ I will analyze the ode section by  Schiesaro ()  –  reads the ode along more dramatic concerns.  Lucan, of course, will step over the bounds of the ne plus ultra with the opening of De bello ciuili: Bella per Emathios plus quam ciuilia campos / … canimus (“Wars more than civil over the Emathian plains we sing,” . – ). The traditional interpretation that conflict within the family of Pompey and Caesar is worse than civil war ignores the function of familial strife as a figure for civil war. The resulting paradox that civil war is worse than civil war reenacts civil war within the concept through figuration. Further discussion of this passage below.  Bartsch ()  examines how Seneca conceives of metaphor as a crutch or prop in our progress toward becoming a Stoic sage. See also Dressler (). I submit that a tropology is such a crutch writ large. I fail to understand the objection to understanding Senecan tragedy as conveying a demonstration on a massive scale of the actions and emotions we should

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section to show that its organization depends on a coherent set of interrelated discourses with deep roots in Latin literature. ¹⁴ My larger claim is that this passage pulls together the Roman tradition of thinking about civil war as an intervention in conceptual history both in substance and in method. Instead of defining the concept, it enacts its metaphorological crystallization.

The City and the Soul (546 – 59) Ever since Plato’s analogy between the city and the soul in the Politeia, the soul’s condition has been an important issue for political theory.¹⁵ The persistence of this analogy might go some way to explaining how a Latin word for tranquility of soul, securitas (“a state of lacking concern”), which is first attested in Cicero’s philosophical works, expanded to encompass political security in the early Empire. For Cicero, the context of securitas remained psychological.¹⁶ In Velleius Paterculus, however, we find for the first time the phrase securitas applied to empire: (spem … perpetuae securitatis aeternitatisque Romani imperii, “hope for the perpetual security and eternity of the Roman Empire,” 2.103.4).¹⁷ Seneca’s progression in this choral ode from Atreus’ prior lack of internal self-control, to the condition of the city, and on to empire, maps similar ground, so that a psychological state evolves into the domain of politics. In each case what is represented is the return to tranquility after disturbance, that is, the re-establishment of security at all levels.

avoid, provided we also acknowledge its huge ability to entertain. Literature cannot be reduced to a didactic function, but may nevertheless include one. See the tug-of-war between Schiesaro (), who resists reducing the Thyestes’ psychological acuity to a doctrinaire Stoic message, and Gill ()  – , who argues for Seneca’s dramatization of passion as a kind of “sickness or madness” () in Stoic terms, specifically in the internal division of the title characters of Medea and Phaedra.  I follow the section divisions in Zwierlein (). Latin without line numbers can be found in the section being discussed.  Blössner () provides an introduction and overview.  De finibus .., .. – , ..; Tusculanae Disputationes ..; de Officibus ..; De natura deorum ... Hamilton ()  – .  Hamilton () . Lowrie (work in progress) addresses the extension in meaning with a special focus on Augustan literature as the transitional point; see also Lowrie (forthcoming). For a focus on the imperial semantics of securitas, see Instinsky ().

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Roman political thought characteristically uses tropes and implicit associations rather than concepts and explicit argumentation. Recent work on political thought and moral reasoning among the Romans has emphasized their use of affect, exempla, imagination, metaphor, narrative, and practical reasoning in education and deliberation. ¹⁸ Seneca’s choral ode fits this model. Although the language of security does not occur within it, the play frames this transition point in the play with references before and after to inner tranquility in related terms and leaves it to the reader or audience to fill in the blanks. Before the ode, Thyestes explains the advantages of a humble condition – ironically, he focuses on the ability to enjoy “feasts without care” (securas dapes, 450), a horrific signal to the audience in the know. Afterwards, the messenger’s description of young Tantalus as sui securus (“secure in himself,” 720) while facing death paints him with Stoic approbation (Busch 2009: 266 – 70), but security turns into its dark twin, lack of concern, when he describes Atreus as securus (“unperturbed,” 759) while butchering and cooking his nephews.¹⁹ Atreus taunts Thyestes with having reclined as a “carefree guest” (conuiua securo, 898) and Thyestes tries to banish his anguish once he understands what has happened by calling on his heart to lay down its “worried cares” (sollicitas … curas, 921). These usages of securus and its cognates all refer to states of soul, but elsewhere, Seneca turns tranquility toward the political and conceptualizes the reciprocal obligation between people and ruler with the term securitas:²⁰ errat enim, si quid existimat tutum esse ibi regem, ubi nihil a rege tutum est: securitas securitate mutua paciscenda est. De clementia 1.19.5 – 6

 For rhetoric, passion, and fantasy as constructive of identity and political belonging, see Connolly () and (). Hammer ()  calls Roman political thought “embarrassingly affective and tangible”; () especially  – . Langlands () and () focuses on the role of exempla in situation ethics. For Roman exemplarity in intellectual history, see introduction to Lowrie and Lüdemann (). Specifically for Seneca, see Rosenmeyer ()  – ; Bartsch (); Wray ()  – ; Roller (). Bartsch ()  notes Atreus’ perversion of exemplarity: he cooks children just like his ancestors and he tries to match their exempla at lines  – .  Hamilton ()  maps the paradoxes of care’s negation.  For the development of securitas as a political task, see Instinsky (), especially the section on the antithesis to civil war ( – ). Hamilton () . See also Star () , who analyzes Seneca’s king bee in the same treatise: “He is not to be feared; hence his safety is assured.”

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He errs if he thinks a king can in any way be safe in a situation where nothing is safe from the king: security may be contracted only at the price of mutual security.

This is exactly the compact, mutually assured security, that Atreus refuses in his exchange with the Satelles, who advocates stability of rule based on morality and the right kind of care (cura), the etymological root of security. Atreus embraces instead his own will. Sat. Vbi non est pudor nec cura iuris sanctitas pietas fides, instabile regnum est. At. Sanctitas pietas fides priuata bona sunt; qua iuuat reges eant. 215 – 18 Sat. Where there is no shame, nor care for right, holiness, duty, faith, the rule is unstable. At. Holiness, duty, faith are private goods. Kings may go where it pleases them.

One of the great ironies of the play is that Atreus, that seething cauldron of hatred, ends up exercising a cool self-mastery in a perverse enactment of Stoic wisdom. The chorus in an earlier ode defines as king one who controls himself and his emotions. He has set aside fear along with other diri mala pectoris (“evils of a dire heart,” 348) and is not subject to ambitio impotens (“uncontrolled ambition,” 349): rex est qui metuet nihil, / rex est qui cupiet nihil: / hoc regnum sibi quisque dat (“King is he who will fear nothing, king is he who will desire nothing: this rule each gives himself,” 388 – 90). Atreus is the horrific inversion of such a king – Stoic commonplaces appear as in a funhouse mirror (Davis 1989: 428 – 30). He controls all, most especially himself, not to tame, but rather to revel in his insatiable passion, namely the desire for revenge. Unlike the security pact outlined in the De clementia, which grounds political order on a stabilizing reciprocal freedom from anxiety, Atreus exemplifies the perversion of the soul and of the political order alike. He achieves security not through mutual respect and the banishment of fear all around, but by utterly crushing his enemy. ²¹ This is the security of the tyrant. In the choral ode, Seneca figures Atreus as a tyrant not merely through his savage cruelty (ferus et acer … truculentus), but also through his prior

 Accius’ Atreus conceptualizes destroying Thyestes in term of his heart, that is, as a question of affect: maior mihi moles, maius miscendumst malum, / qui illius acerbum cor contundam et comprimam (“A greater labor, a greater evil must be blended by me, by which I am pound and crush his bitter heart,” fr.  –  Ribbeck ( []) ).

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lack of internal mastery: nec potens mentis. ²² The illusory good news is that Atreus has returned to a state of virtue. A personified Pietas has prevailed over Mavors, so that instead of anger, agitation, and fury (ira, agitata, agitatus, furibundus), she has imposed peace. Beyond Atreus’ internal tranquility, the expectation is that peace will return as well to the city. The tranquility of the king leads to tranquility in the state. Already in this section, Seneca presents a homology between the soul, family relations, and the political order that the ode will develop further. The restoration to calm, in the chorus’ understanding, happens at the same time in Atreus’ soul and in his relations with Thyestes. It is the sight of his brother that stuns him (stupefactus) so that true pietas and love cause him to put down the sword and join hands. Love, pietas, and peace have broken out within Atreus, his family, and the city all at the same time. The final word of the section, negantes, however, sounds an ominous note: as a concessive, it reveals the brothers’ persistent hostility, which is even now, as the chorus speaks, breaking the peace as Atreus feeds Thyestes his children offstage (Tarrant 1985: line 559). It shows up the anxiety that persists under erasure in securitas. The unresolved turmoil within the brothers’ souls will rupture the familial bond and with it peace at the political and cosmic levels. Seneca moves the peace from an internal affair to one with a broader scope by contrasting love among family members with the regular hardening of disputes against those outside the group (externis). Such ‘strangers’ could be alien with respect to the family, but more usual would be to take them as enemies of state. The suggestion of external warfare sets up the turn to civil war by antithesis in the following section, where civil war mediates between familial and external warfare. It is not to be taken for granted that the dispute between these specific brothers should be couched as civil war, but a passage from Lucretius suggests that a link between disturbances in the soul, civil war, and the myth of the house of Pelops might go back in Latin to Accius’ Atreus, an important predecessor for Seneca’s play. sanguine ciuili rem conflant diuitiasque conduplicant auidi, caedem caede accumulantes, crudeles gaudent in tristi funere fratris et consanguineum mensas odere timentque. Lucretius, De rerum natura 3.70 – 3

 In Accius’ Atreus, the king is called a tyrant (fr.  Ribbeck ( []) ). Star ()  –  analyzes how Seneca defines the ruler as a tyrant or a good king on the basis of his soul.

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They amass property with civil blood and greedily double their wealth, piling slaughter on slaughter; they rejoice cruelly in the sad death of a brother and both hate and fear the tables of kin.

Lucretius frames this passage with a discussion of how false terrors and envy motivate this evil behavior: these are emotional disturbances arising from the fear of death. The phrase conjoining hatred and fear recalls Accius’ famous line, oderint dum metuant (“let them hate, provided they fear,” Atreus fr. 203 – 4 Ribbeck (1962 [1871]: 162), and the reference to “tables of kin” accords with the myth, so allusion is likely.²³ Although Lucretius does not specify civil war per se as the result of the fear of death on display here, “civil blood” and joy at a brother’s death evoke it in combination and E.J. Kenney suggests that Lucretius “had Rome’s present troubles in mind” (1971: 85). We cannot know the contemporary political resonances of Accius’ play when it was composed, but his emphasis on hatred and fear highlights the turmoil in the soul that underlies the myth.²⁴ In Seneca, civil war becomes more explicitly an affair of the soul – or rather, it becomes a trope for expressing disturbances in the soul. A leitmotif of the following sections is fear, with the result that although the chorus says it is relieved because peace has been restored, the emotional tenor of the ode prepares us for the revelation of the horror to come. Even while the ode proclaims security, its tone ratchets up the feeling of danger that is insecurity.

Civil War (560 – 72) Seneca reverses a common trope: in Latin literature, killing within the family often stands for civil war. Here the strife between the brothers is called civil war and it extends throughout the city: modo per Mycenas / arma ciuilis crepuere belli (“Just now through Mycenae the arms of civil war clattered”). The description in the following lines could pertain to any warfare: a mother clings to her children; a wife fears for her husband; all strive to shore up  I thank Mathias Hanses for calling my attention to this allusion in another context. Accius’ line was important for Seneca, who cites it several times (e. g., De clementia . – , De ira ..).  Jocelyn ()  thinks the Atreus might have been performed in  BCE on the basis of Cicero, Brutus , but this passage does not identify the play performed when Accius says he was thirty years old. Seneca attributes it to the time of Sulla, although he was probably mistaken (De ira ..). For the idea “that an utterance can reveal the political spirit of the age,” see Star () .

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the city’s defenses. The context of civil war, however, draws a contrast between Atreus and Thyestes and this list of family members who are so nicely concerned for one another. Brothers have held special resonance for civil war at Rome ever since Romulus slaughtered Remus – or at least since the origin of the myth (Bannon 1997: 158 – 73). In his seventh Epode, Horace explicitly derives the civil war that has led the city “to perish by her own right hand” (sua / Vrbs haec periret dextera? 9 – 10) back to the crime of Remus’ murder, whose bloodshed has been accursed for Romulus’ descendants. sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt scelusque fraternae necis, ut inmerentis fluxit in terram Remi sacer nepotibus cruor. (17– 20) So it is: harsh fates drive the Romans and the crime of a brother’s slaughter, ever since the blood of Remus, a curse on his grandchildren, flowed undeserved onto the land.

Although many of the Republican stories linking fratricide to civil war tell of unintended deaths, where pietas still prevails, ²⁵ authorial horror attends a joyful response to learning of a brother’s death, all the more so when perpetrated by his brother. Beyond Lucretius’ condemnation of such joy as “cruel”, Vergil laments in the Georgics “discord driving faithless brothers” (infidos agitans discordia fratres, 2.495) and those who “rejoice drenched in their brothers’ blood” (gaudent perfusi sanguine fratrum, 2.510). Especially scandalous is the horseman who, as Tacitus recounts in the Histories, “sought a prize from the leaders when he professed his brother had been slain by himself in the most recent conflict” (eques occisum a se proxima acie fratrem professus praemium a ducibus petierit, 3.51.1). In characterizing the dispute between Atreus and Thyestes as civil war, Seneca is operating at the border between myth and history. Allusion to Vergil’s first Eclogue takes the reader back to the civil wars through which Augustus ascended to power and that were finally exhausted with his victory. The phrasing otium … quis deus fecit? (“What god made peace?” 560 – 1) re-

 For stories of mourning over the unwanted death of a brother in civil war that results in the remaining brother’s suicide, whether or not he was responsible, see Sisenna fr.  Peter = fr.  Cornell (quoted by Tacitus, Histories ..), Livy Epitome , Valerius Maximus, ... Tacitus Histories . provides a story of mourning of an unintended parricide that stops short of suicide. See Bannon ()  – .

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calls O Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit (Vergil, Eclogues 1.6) and “makes explicit” the connection with civil war “that remains below the surface of Vergil’s poem.” ²⁶ The most famous historical civil war combatants, Pompey and Caesar, were not brothers, but much of Latin literature emphasizes that they were indeed related as father-in-law and son-in-law.²⁷ Furthermore, brothers did put each other on proscription lists.²⁸ In the stories cited in the previous paragraph, however, the anonymity of the brothers – besides Romulus and Remus – shows that their function as a trope for civil war takes precedence over the strictly factual record. Another element in Seneca’s ode, conflict internal to the will, becomes associated with civil war. Here, a personified sword resists orders: cum manum inuitus sequeretur ensis (“when the sword unwillingly followed the hand”). The personification externalizes what are really at odds, the soul and the hand, a pair that further externalizes a division in the will. In Lucan, the internal division of civil war is often figured with the hand. The right hand, picked up from Horace’s Epode, marks the city’s suicide at the opening of the poem.²⁹ Bella per Emathios plus quam ciuilia campos iusque datum sceleri canimus, populumque potentem in sua uictrici conuersum uiscera dextra cognatasque acies De bello ciuili 1.1– 4 Wars more than civil over the Emathian plains and right given to crime we sing, and a people turned against its own guts with victorious right hand and kindred battle-lines.

The Berne scholiast interprets “more than civil” as indicating that the war was a family affair, in accord with the trope of civil war as violence within

 Tarrant () ; also Trinacty ()  – .  E. g., gener and socer at Vergil, Aeneid . – ; Lucan compares Pompey and Caesar to the Sabines, ut generos soceris (“as sons-in-law to fathers-in-law,” ), before Julia’s death provided yet another cause for the deterioration of their relations.  See Velleius Paterculus .., who recounts the soldiers’ chant after Philippi: de Germanis non de Gallis duo triumphant consules (“Over brothers German, not the Gauls do the two consuls triumph”).  Ahl ()  n. : “The notion of the suicide of the state is thus established by Lucan at the very outset.” In work in progress, I interpret suicide as one further twist of the trope in a progression from civil war, to intra-familial violence, to suicide, to psychomachia.

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the family.³⁰ The adjective cognatus returns from the end of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, where the soldiers plundering the battlefield after Antonius defeated Catiline discovered dead friends, guests, relatives (cognatos), and personal enemies, all with a mix of contradictory emotions: laetitia, maeror, luctus atque gaudia (“happiness, grief, mourning, and joy,” 61.8 – 9). The right hand returns in Lucan with even greater internal emotional conflict. Laelius exhorts Caesar’s troops with an enthusiastic embrace of civil war. usque adeo miserum est ciuili uincere bello? … … per signa decem felicia castris perque tuos iuro quocumque ex hoste triumphos, pectore si fratris gladium iuguloque parentis condere me iubeas plenaeque in uiscera partu coniugis, inuita peragam tamen omnia dextra… De bello ciuili 1.366, 374– 8 Is it so miserable to vanquish in a civil war? … By the standards ten times happy for the camp, by your triumphs over whatever enemy, if you should order me to bury my sword in the neck of my brother or father and into the guts of my wife, full of child, I will still do it all, though my right hand be unwilling.

Surpassing the usual slaughter among family members, Laelius envisages a double murder of his wife and his unborn child at the same time. His hyperbole is accompanied by an expression of conflict in the will. He would order something his hand would be unwilling to do, like the unwilling sword that follows the hand nevertheless at Thyestes 565. Such parallels for paradoxical expression might be used to support the text at line 212, where Atreus, arguing for tyranny against the Satelles, says: quod nolunt uelint (“let them wish what they do not want”). David Kovacs (2007: 788) argues for a more logical quod nolunt uelit (“let the king demand what his subjects do not want”), but the conflict within the will expressed as a conflict between hand and sword should be enough to defend the transmitted text even without additional parallels from Lucan and elsewhere in Seneca.³¹ In civil war, the will is divided against itself, by analogy to the polity.  On the scholiast, see Ahl () , who also adds a reference to Seneca’s Phoenissae  – , where Oedipus – like Lucan – sets fratricide beyond civil war: non satis est adhuc ciuile bellum / frater in fratrem ruat (“Civil war is not yet enough: let a brother rush against a brother”).  According to Quintilian, who cites the line, Atreus is forced to commit deeds he himself characterizes as awful in Varius Rufus’ Thyestes: iam fero infandissima, / iam facere cogor (“Now I endure the most unspeakable things, now I am compelled to do the same,” fr.  Schauer () ; fr.  Hollis () , his translation). Even if it is Thyestes’ actions that force Atreus to seek revenge, his judgment and his will are in conflict. Compare Phaedra’s

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Throughout this section Seneca emphasizes emotional disturbance, specifically fear. Civil war is a threat to security. The mothers were “pale” (pallidae); the wife “feared” (timuit); the guard was “afraid” (pauidus) during an “anxious night” (anxiae noctis). In the final line, the statement that “the very fear of war is worse than war itself ” (peior est bello timor ipse belli) shows that it is less the actuality of danger than insecurity in the soul that is at issue. ³² Over against the healthy fear that arises from the love the citizens feel for their family in Mycenae, the perverted emotions between the brothers within the royal house stand out. Seneca did not have to choose to call the brothers’ conflict civil war: it would have been entirely possible to present the rivalry within the house of Atreus as an intra-familial palace intrigue. His choice to qualify the internal political disturbance as one between citizens, as bellum ciuile, colors the myth with a specifically Roman perspective informed by the events of the previous century. The figuration of fraternal strife as civil war sets the story within a framework that speaks to Roman concerns. Seneca invites contemporaries to see his version of the Greek myth as an exercise in political thought with relevance to their own history.

Cosmic Disturbance (573 – 95) If civil war takes the familial conflict into the realm of politics, in the next section Seneca expands into a yet larger sphere. By comparing the peace that has returned to the city (576) to the calm that follows a storm (577– 95), he deploys the imagery linking political to cosmic disorder that is so prevalent in Vergil’s Aeneid and becomes a major figuration in Lucan. ³³

oath: testor … hoc quod uolo – me nolle (“I swear, I do not will what I desire,” Phaedra  – ) – I thank David Wray for this reference. The unity of judgment and will in Seneca’s Atreus is distinctive by contrast. The change of mind attributed to him by the chorus turns out to be illusory.  Seneca elsewhere says, “nothing in [things] is terrible, except for fear itself” (nihil in istis terribile nisi ipsum timorem, Epistulae . – ); see Bartsch () . Franklin Delano Roosevelt may not have been reading Seneca (http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-his torian/; accessed November , ), but commonplaces travel.  The classic analysis of cosmology in Vergil is by Hardie (), who also traces the imagery forward to Lucan (). See also Marti () for the cosmic significance of civil war in Lucan. The imagery of chaos and cataclysm returns here at  – ,  – ,  – , see Park Poe () . Accius also graces his Atreus with a violent storm: sed quid tonitru turbida toruo / concussa repente aequora caeli / sensimus sonere? (“But what perturbed shoals of the sky, shaken with savage thunder, did we hear suddenly resound?” fr.  –  Ribbeck ( [] ).

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This is no ordinary storm, but one that crosses from the Straits of Messina all the way over to Ithaca, that threatens to mix the elements, and entails fear within the family. It is a storm in the mold of civil war that stretches from the soul to the cosmos.³⁴ Allusion to Vergilian moralizing hyperbole makes the cosmic point, as Seneca bases his version of Scylla and Charybdis on his predecessor and then moves on to the Cyclops, here the standard blacksmith.³⁵ In addition to the threatened violation of elemental mixing, Seneca adds the Cyclops’ fear of his own parent Poseidon:³⁶ et ferus Cyclops metuit parentem rupe feruentis residens in Aetnae, ne superfusis uioletur undis ignis aeternis resonans caminis 582– 5 And the fierce Cyclops, lingering on seething Aetna’s cliff, fears his parent, that the fire roaring in the eternal forge be violated by waves pouring in on it.

Disturbance among the elements and the family are indicative of civil war. These tropes point to the trouble stirred up within the soul and explain the fear that is felt by a whole string of increasingly impersonal agents: sailors, the Cyclops, Laertes, a ship, and even the landscape. The Cyclades, unmoored during a storm qualified by Vergil’s characteristic hyperbolic adjective ingens (“huge”), elevate the fear to a universal level. It is not mere souls, but the world in its geographic extension that has been implicated in the disturbance. Beyond Vergilian allusion, Seneca also looks back to Horace, specifically to poems with a political resonance that also speak to the questions of

 Park Poe () interprets the storm at  –  as an externalization of Atreus’ passion and makes the link to Stoicism, where “Every action has reverberations throughout the universe” (). Schiesaro ()  –  analyzes Thyestes’ psychology at lines  – , where he uses storm imagery to describe his ominous shift in mood.  Tarrant () ad loc. shows the specifically Vergilian background to Seneca’s description of the Sicilian locale. For “moralized hyperbole” in Vergil’s description of Charybdis at . –  and  – , see Hardie () .  Tarrant ()  comments on the “distortion of family ties,” however remote, and at  –  suggests that the expansion of the storm over to Ithaca might anticipate the “universal destruction envisaged in the final chorus.”

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governance, extreme emotion, and calm after civil tumult.³⁷ Given the verbal parallel between Seneca’s stagno pelagus recumbit (“the sea leans back on the calm waters”) and Horace’s ponto unda recumbit (“the wave leans back on the sea,” Odes 1.12.31– 2), both in a context of calming a storm (Tarrant 1985: lines 588 – 9), it is hard not to draw the contrast between Horace’s celebration of Augustus in his ode and Seneca’s graphic depiction of the tyrannical Atreus. Further elements from Odes 1.12 return in the next section of the chorus and are treated below. Moreover the nod to Horace draws our attention to his mention of the Cyclades in Odes 1.14, conventionally identified as an allegory of the Ship of State. There the ship has also been tossed in a storm, where the inference is that the Republic had been recently tossed in the turbulence of civil war.³⁸ Seneca’s extended simile comparing the calm after the storm to peace restored in a city torn by civil war frames Horace’s poem within such a context, whatever the earlier poem’s original conception. Horace closes his ode with a focus on the turbulent emotions felt by the poet who watches.³⁹ Again the security concern is not the mere safety of the ship, but how seeing it in danger affects the soul with cares (cura). nuper sollicitum quae mihi taedium, nunc desiderium curaque non leuis, interfusa nitentis uites aequora Cycladas. Odes 1.14.17– 20 You who were recently a source of worried weariness to me, now one of desire and a care not light, may you avoid the waters poured between the shining Cyclades.

The fear and anxiety elicited by the risk to the ship resonates again through allusion in the Thyestes and binds the condition of the soul to the political circumstances.

 Trinacty () ,  –  emphasizes the special role Horace played for Senecan choral odes, particularly ones using Horatian meters, like this ode, which uses Sapphic hendecasyllables.  Since Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria ..) takes the poem as an allegory of the ship of state, the interpretation is likely to have been known to Seneca. The actual historical context is disputed. See Nisbet and Hubbard ()  – . Other allegories have been proposed in the meantime, for which see bibliography at Lowrie () , but the question at issue here is Seneca’s understanding.  Blumenberg () ,  – ,  –  sets Horace’s ode within a larger history of the metaphor of shipwreck with spectator. Hamilton ()  –  analyzes the ambivalence of Horace’s cura toward the ship, source of both desire and disgust.

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Empire under God (596 – 615) Cosmic order conventionally rests on a hierarchy of rule, where Jupiter’s sway over mortal kings is analogous to theirs over their people. This topos is the classical equivalent to the Christian divine right of kings, where the king derives his authority from acting as God’s representative on earth, but doing so constrains him to act according to His will. Many of the commonplaces Seneca deploys in the ode’s penultimate section also occur in Horace, where they knit together a message that Augustus’ success in restoring order in the wake of civil war depended on subordinating himself to the higher norm of Jupiter’s rule. We can only wonder if Varius’ Thyestes conveyed a similar combination of praise and warning. After all, it was performed in Augustus’ triple triumph over Illyrium, Actium, Egypt, which celebrated the end of civil war along with the foreign victories.⁴⁰ The Senecan chorus’ optimistic statement about the supreme ruler’s fear of the gods, like its proclamation of peace after tumult, will of course come to ruin as soon as the messenger announces Atreus’ horrific revenge in the next scene and will not be borne out by the rest of the play, where “the evil generated by Atreus’ passions is so great that it exceeds the limits of what, in a well-ordered universe, ought to be possible” (Tarrant 1985: lines 610 – 14). Just as in the De Clementia, where Seneca defines the good ruler as clement to Nero, Horace was setting before Augustus a model for kingship based on leaving vengeance and strife behind. The fear traversing this section, however, suggests the fragility of the cosmic and the political order: no restorative model of kingship will hold. Starting with mutability between the “lowest” and the “highest” positions (ima … summis), which recalls Horace’s phrasing (ima summis, Odes, 1.34.12) with the same message, Seneca hits Horatian notes in his depiction of the “anxious” (anxius) emperor. Like the man under the sword of Damocles at Odes 3.1.17– 24 – a metaphor for the tyrant’s state of mind that Horace extends to anyone who lives on perpetual tenterhooks – Seneca’s emperor “fears” (metuit) despite his position because he knows the threats to his throne from plotting rivals who “move all” (mouentes / cuncta) and from chance. In the same poem Horace produces his most quoted expression of the hierarchy from Jupiter through kings to their subjects.

 It also won its author a handsome monetary reward from Augustus. See Housman (); Jocelyn ().

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regum timendorum in proprios greges, reges in ipsos imperium est Iouis, clari Giganteo triumpho, cuncta supercilio mouentis. Odes 3.1.5 – 8 The empire of fearsome kings is over their own flocks, that of Jupiter over the kings themselves, Jupiter, resplendent from his triumph over the Giants, who moves all with his eyebrow.

Seneca transfers Horace’s cuncta mouentis of Jupiter’s power to the conspirators and the reference to the battle of the gods with the Giants in line 7 is a conventional figuration of civil war as cosmic disorder in this period. ⁴¹ Those who recognize the allusion will fill in the context of civil war. Horace also expresses a similar idea about the hierarchy of power in Odes 1.12, the poem that provides wording for Seneca’s scene where the storm is calmed. Horace addresses Jupiter: tu secundo / Caesare regnes … te minor latum reget aequos orbem (“May you rule with Caesar as your second. … Lesser than you he will rule the wide world fairly,” Odes 1.12.52, 57). Seneca’s formulation similarly emphasizes hierarchy with the vocabulary of greater and lesser: Vos quibus rector maris atque terrae ius dedit magnum necis atque uitae, ponite inflatos tumidosque uultus: quidquid a uobis minor expauescit, maior hoc uobis dominus minatur: omne sub regno grauiore regnum est. 607– 11 You to whom the ruler of the sea and the land gave the great right over death and life, lay aside your puffed up and swelling countenances. Whatever someone lesser fears from you, this the greater lord threatens you with. Every rule is under a weightier rule.

Even the list of foreign foes who have ceased to wage war recalls Horace: the conjunction of the Mede and the Indian (Medus et … Indus) is also found at Odes 4.14.42 (Medusque et Indus), where Horace praises Augustus as the guardian of Italy and Rome, for subduing those who have never before been subdued, and for arousing wonder even beyond his empire. All these Horatian resonances signal that the chorus is expecting a new kind of leadership in the wake of the cessation of civil war and fraternal  Hardie ()  –  with further bibliography specifically on civil war at  n. .

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strife. The supreme commander will follow in Augustus’ model, lay down the savagery of his youth and become god-fearing, because he is well aware of the mutability of fortune. Yet again, the chorus is wrong. Fortune’s mutation will defy expectation. Thyestes will not rise to prominence from his lowly position, but rather fall further from humility to abjection.

Fortune (615 – 22) The concluding section of the ode is extremely conventional and Tarrant notes Seneca’s failure to deploy a more orthodox Stoic message here, which would emphasize that everything accords with god’s plan for the universe (1985: 617– 21). The standard answer to such puzzles is that here he speaks as a playwright, not a philosopher, and one could note furthermore that the chorus shows no signs of formal philosophical training. Their conventionality accords entirely with their dramatic role. To restrict Seneca’s philosophical interventions to doctrine, however, is to miss the ode’s work in synthesizing a basic figure of the Roman political imaginary. The conjunction of fortune and civil war suggests another look at Horace. Seneca keeps Horatian resonances in play. He denies we can count on another day with crastinum (“tomorrow”), which recalls: quis scit an adiciant hodiernae crastina summae / tempora di superi? (“Who knows whether the gods above will add time tomorrow to the sum of today?” Odes 4.7.17– 18). His superbum evokes Horace’s most extensive treatment of Fortune, who lays low the proud in the ode bearing her name (superbos, Odes 1.35.3). Especially resonant for Seneca’s chorus is his ending the poem with a prayer to preserve Caesar (Odes 1.35.29), specifically in his capacity as the conveyor of imperial expansion, the conventional antidote to civil war. The poet exclaims (heu, heu cicatricum et sceleris pudet / fratrumque, “Alas, alas, we are ashamed of our scars, our crime, our brothers!” Odes 1.35.33 – 4) and wishes that the blade be reforged and turned against foreign foes. The conjunction of crime with brothers deploys the common periphrasis for civil war. Ending the choral ode in the Thyestes with an expatiation on fortune prepares for the revelation to follow. Horace’s wish to avert civil war in a context of fortune supports the desires of the chorus and evokes its fears.

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Tropology Civil war is no mere standard metaphor for fraternal strife at line 562. The extensive parallels and allusions marshaled here show that Seneca organizes his ode according to a broader set of discursive associations that cluster around the concept of civil war in Roman thinking.⁴² The Romans had an abundant vocabulary for internal violence and bellum ciuile specifies formal warfare among citizens over against other disturbances such as sedition, conspiracy, tumult, war with allies (bellum sociale) or slaves (bellum seruile).⁴³ Beyond the technical category, however, civil war carries a tropological burden that invites thought about the ties binding the psychic, social, and cosmic orders all together. Seneca’s choral ode provides a concise example of how a complex network of tropes, including fraternal strife, the storm, the unwilling right hand, the subordination of the rule to god, the mutability of fortune, all work in conjunction as a system. This semantic field does not merely enrich the concept. Civil war does not serve merely as a specific designation of a type of warfare in contradistinction to others. Rather, the semantic field conveys an idea about the structure of the world that surpasses the expressive capabilities of a single concept and can only be conveyed through figuration. Poetry does not advance an argument based on the abstract analysis of concepts, but rather imparts meaning by a constellation of allusions, conventions, metaphors, and other figurations. If the odes’ beauty consists in part in its dense and shifting imagery, it draws power from the way its network of tropes conveys a consistent, familiar, and specifically Roman thought world, where civil war poses an existential threat at all levels.

 For a treatment of the semantic fields surrounding social and political concepts, see Koselleck () . Ahl () , whose focus is on the “nexus of relationships among sounds,” nevertheless recognizes as one task of scholarship the discovery of “related words and concepts.” I hope to have contributed a small chapter to the “investigation of figurative language in poetry” that Curtius ()  calls for on the basis of Goethe’s outline of a program for such in a passage on tropes in “Oriental poetry.” Curtius continues, “It would have to extend to all literatures, ascertain their peculiarities, and present the facts in orderly fashion. Thus it would have to be at once general and comparative.”  Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck ()  –  survey Roman terminology for various kinds of internal strife (sub-section by C. Meier within a larger article on “Revolution” authored by Koselleck). On differences between civil war and revolution, see Koselleck ()  – , with a plethora of terms (). Armitage (forthcoming) shows that Greek stasis and Roman civil war similarly follow different logics.

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Philosophy at its most creative is also not limited to the strictly conceptual. If Blumenberg’s ‘absolute metaphor’ may extend beyond philosophy’s fundamental ontological to its fundamental political questions, his description certainly pertains to civil war: “The realm of the imagination could no longer be regarded solely as the substrate for transformations into conceptuality … but as a catalytic sphere from which the universe of concepts continually renews itself, without thereby converting and exhausting this founding reserve” (2010: 4). As a concept, bellum ciuile may be restricted to warfare among citizens, but its consistent analogical extension from the soul to the cosmos commutes it into a figure of thought that fights internally against conceptual confinement. That is, civil war performs as a figure the internal divide it denotes. Seneca’s ode turns out to be profoundly philosophical not because it accords – imperfectly at that – to the tenets of Stoicism, but because it adduces and gives concise form to a fundamental trope of the Roman political imaginary, one with a bright and bloody future.⁴⁴

Bibliography Ahl, F. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY. — 1984. “The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius”, ANRW II.32.1: 40 – 111. — 2000. “Seneca and Chaucer: Translating both Poetry and Sense,” in: G.W.M. Harrison (ed.), Seneca in Performance. London, 151 – 71. Armitage, D. (forthcoming). Civil War. New York. Asmis, E. 2009. “Seneca on Fortune and the Kingdom of God”, in: S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, 115 – 38. Bannon, C. 1997. The Brothers of Romulus: Fraternal Pietas in Roman Law, Literature, and Society. Princeton, NJ. Bartsch, S. 2006. The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. Chicago. — 2009. “Senecan Metaphor and Stoic Self-Instruction,” in: S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, 188 – 217. Blössner, N. 2007. “The City-Soul Analogy,” in: G.R.F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic. Cambridge, 345 – 85.

 This essay is informed by a book project on Roman tropes for civil war and their reception, Civil War and the Republic to Come, that I am writing in collaboration with Barbara Vinken. I am grateful to her as well as to Phillip Mitsis, David Wray, and the anonymous readers for stimulating discussion and thoughtful suggestions. Anselm Haverkamp deserves special thanks – he has seit lange prodded me in the direction of Blumenberg.

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Blumenberg, H. 1997. Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Trans. S. Rendall. Cambridge, MA. — 2010. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Trans. R. Savage. Ithaca, NY. Brunner, O., W. Conze, and R. Koselleck. 1984. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Vol. 5. Stuttgart. Busch, A. 2009. “Dissolution of the Self in the Senecan Corpus”, in: S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, 255 – 82. Carver, T. and J. Pikalo. 2008. Political Language and Metaphor: Interpreting and Changing the World. London/New York. Connolly, J. 2007. The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ. — 2015. The Life of Roman Republicanism. Princeton, NJ. Cornell, T.J. (ed.). 2013. The Fragments of the Roman Historians. 3 vols. Oxford. Curtius, E.R. 1973. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. W.R. Trask. Princeton, NJ (original publication Bern, 1948). Davis, P.J. 1989. “The Chorus in Seneca’s Thyestes”, CQ 39: 421 – 35. Dressler, A. 2012. “‘You Must Change Your Life’: Metaphor and Exemplum, Theory and Practice, in Seneca’s Prose”, Helios 39.2: 45 – 92. Gill, C. 2006. The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought. Oxford. Hamilton, J. 2013. Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care. Princeton, NJ. Hammer, D. 2008. Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination. Norman, OK. — 2014. Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine. Cambridge. Hardie, P. 1986. Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford. Haverkamp, A. 2007. Metapher. Munich. Hollis, A.S. 2007. Fragments of Roman Poetry c. 60 BC – AD 20. Oxford. Housman, A.E. with rejoinder by H.W. Garrod. 1917. “The Thyestes of Varius”, CQ 11.1: 42 – 9. Instinsky, H.U. 1952. Sicherheit als politisches Problem des römischen Kaisertums. Baden-Baden. Jocelyn, H.D. 1980. “The Fate of Varius’ Thyestes”, CQ 30.2: 387 – 400. — 1996. “Accius, Lucius”, in: S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edition). Oxford, 3. Kenney, E.J. 1971. Lucretius: De Rerum Natura Book III. Cambridge. Koselleck, R. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. and introduction K. Tribe. New York. Kovacs, D. 2007. “Envy and ‘Akrasia’ in Seneca’s ‘Thyestes’ “, CQ 57.2: 787 – 91. Langlands, R. 2011. “Roman Exempla and Situation Ethics: Valerius Maximus and Cicero de Officiis”, JRS 101: 100 – 22. — 2015. “Roman Exemplarity: Mediating between General and Particular”, in: M. Lowrie and S. Lüdemann (eds.), Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law. London, 68 – 80. Lowrie, M. 1995. “A Parade of Lyric Predecessors: Horace ‘C’. 1.12 – 1.18”, Phoenix 49.1: 33 – 48. — (in progress). Safety, Security, and Salvation in Roman Political Thought. — (forthcoming). “Le salut, la sécurité, et le corps du chef: transformations dans la sphère publique à l’époque d’Horace”, in B. Delignon, N. Le Meur, O. Thevenaz (eds.), Le poète lyrique dans la cité antique. Lyon.

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Lowrie, M. and S. Lüdemann (eds.). 2015. Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law. London. Lowrie, M. and B. Vinken. (in progress). Civil War and the Republic to Come. Marti, B.M. 1945. “The meaning of the Pharsalia”, AJPh 66: 352 – 76. Nisbet, R.G.M. and M. Hubbard (eds.). 1975. Horace: Odes Book 1. Oxford (corrected reprint). Park Poe, J. 1969. “An Analysis of Seneca’s Thyestes”, TAPhA 100: 355 – 76. Peter, H. (ed.). 1914. Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae. Leipzig. Ribbeck, O. (ed.). 1962. Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta. Hildesheim (reprint of 1871 edition). Roller, M. 2015. “Between Unique and Typical: Senecan Exempla in a List”, in: M. Lowrie and S. Lüdemann (eds.), Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law. London, 81 – 95. Rosenmeyer, T.G. 1989. Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology. Berkeley, CA. Schauer, M. (ed.). 2012. Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta. Vol. 1. Göttingen. Schiesaro, A. 2003. The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama. Cambridge. — 2009. “Seneca and the Denial of the Self”, in: S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, 221 – 35. Star, C. 2012. The Empire of the Self: Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronius. Baltimore, MD. Tarrant, R.J. (ed.). 1985. Seneca’s Thyestes. Atlanta, GA. Teaching History http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24468 accessed 15 November, 2014. Trinacty, C.V. 2014. Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry. Oxford/New York. Wray, D. 2009. “Seneca and Tragedy’s Reason”, in: S. Bartsch and D. Wray (eds.), Seneca and the Self. Cambridge, 237 – 53. Zwierlein, O. (ed.). 1986. L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae. Oxford.

Erica Bexley

Doubtful Certainties: The Politics of Reading in Seneca’s Oedipus Qui legis Oedipoden caligantemque Thyesten, Colchidas et Scyllas, quid nisi monstra legis? Martial, 10.4.1– 2 non tam interest quo animo scribatur quam quo accipiatur Cicero, Ad Familiares 6.7.1

Summary: This paper examines Seneca’s Oedipus as a reader both of poetry and of himself. I argue that when Seneca describes prophecy (233 – 38; 626 – 58) and extispicy (293 – 399), he presents these acts as poetic texts that demand interpretation and that Oedipus repeatedly fails to comprehend. The tragedy overall emphasizes the gap between the protagonist’s assumed knowledge and the audience’s. As a result, it belittles Oedipus’ authoritarian attitude and creates a sustained joke at his expense. Seneca undermines Oedipus by depicting him, simultaneously, as a paranoid ruler bent on enforcing his own version of events, and as the unwitting object of others’ analysis. Over the course of the play, Oedipus is reduced to a set of signs that Seneca invites the audience to decode. The playwright also uses the binary dubius / certus to illustrate Oedipus’ increasing lack of political and analytical control. Keywords: Seneca; Oedipus; authority; signs; ambiguity; reader; interpretation There are four episodes in Seneca’s Oedipus that find no equivalent in Sophocles: Oedipus reminisces about his encounter with the Sphinx (92– 102); Creon reports the Delphic oracle in full (233 – 38); Tiresias conducts an extispicy (293 – 399); and Laius’ ghost rises from the dead to condemn his criminal offspring (530 – 658).¹ These differences are so marked that they cannot simply be ascribed to Seneca’s style or to contemporary Roman tastes.² Rather, they

 It is not clear whether these episodes are entirely Seneca’s invention or whether they have been adapted from earlier literary version of the myth, tragic or otherwise. On the sources likely to have been available to Seneca when he composed his play, see Töchterle ()  – .  Previous generations of scholars typically blamed these scenes on what they regarded as Seneca’s degenerate tastes and/or dramatic incompetence. The play’s extispicy, in particular, has attracted a lot of hostile verdicts over the last century, of which I provide just a few. Friedrich ()  –  argued that it was composed as a sensationalist and entirely detachable episode; Mendell ()  accords it little significance: “the scene is long and harrowing and well nigh exhausts even Seneca’s vocabulary, but produces no results as far as the solution of the plot is

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are integral to the way in which Seneca’s tragedy approaches issues of knowledge. Whereas Sophocles’ Oedipus interrogates individuals in his search for Laius’ killer, Seneca’s Oedipus confronts evidence much more directly, in the form of prophetic utterances and rituals that demand analysis from protagonist and audience alike.³ Prophecy, extispicy, and memory take on meta-poetic qualities in this play, functioning as quasi-literary texts that Oedipus must scour for meaning.⁴ His failure to do so is a source of prolonged dramatic irony, because Seneca’s play encourages the audience to see what Oedipus cannot.⁵ Occupying the core of this tragedy is a contest over interpretation, over how one reads omens, prophecy, poetry, and finally, Oedipus himself. It is a contest that subordinates the protagonist to the audience’s sense of superior knowledge. This act of subordination is what makes knowledge such a deeply political issue in Seneca’s tragedy. Like Sophocles’ Oedipus, Seneca’s takes pride in his ability to solve riddles, or in his own terminology, to transform dubia into certa. He cannot, however, exercise control over poetic meaning, because he himself is fundamentally dubius, an object of audience analysis, and of hostile critique from the play’s various uates. The language of Seneca’s tragedy draws close connections between Oedipus’ autocratic power and his desire either to regulate poetic utterance, or to enforce his own interpretation as absolute and final. The fact that he achieves neither of these possibilities demonstrates his

concerned.” Although Pratt ()  –  and ()  –  has far more patience for the extispicy’s symbolism, he too regards it as a symptom of Senecan ‘melodrama’. Recent, favorable appraisal of Seneca’s dramatic aims in the Oedipus is given by Boyle () and Kohn ()  – .  On rhetoric and interrogation in Sophocles’ Oedipus, see Ahl ()  –  and ()  – . It seems reasonable to suppose, with Holford-Strevens ()  – , that Seneca was acquainted with the Sophoclean version, though Seneca’s play is, of course, very much an independent work.  Several scholars have acknowledged, in passing, the meta-literary qualities of one or more of these scenes: Schiesaro ()  –  regards the Tiresias-Laius episode as fundamentally metapoetic; Trinacty ()  –  examines Oedipus’ role in ‘reading’ the literary intertext of the necromancy scene; Seo ()  attributes a meta-poetic function to Oedipus’ memory of the Sphinx.  I use the term ‘audience’ throughout this paper regardless of the debate over whether Seneca’s tragedies were or were not intended for performance, and the adjacent debate over whether they are in fact performable. Those in favor of treating the plays as fully stageable dramatic scripts include: Sutton () and Kohn (); those who define Seneca as ‘recitation drama’ include: Zwierlein (); Fantham ()  – ; and Goldberg (). For a new approach to the question of dramatic recitation, see Bexley (). Rather than address such issues here, I regard the term ‘audience’ as encompassing anyone who watches, listens to, or even reads this play.

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weakness at the same time as it creates an atmosphere of ‘doublespeak’ or veiled criticism, in which the ruler cannot detect the hostile content that is patently obvious to other readers.⁶ The uates of Seneca’s play attack Oedipus, but he cannot understand their message. In the end, he himself becomes a monstrum for the play’s audience to interpret: his body is a text; he is presented as a sacrificial victim; he is a riddle “more perplexing than his own Sphinx” (magis…Sphinge perplexum sua, 641). In Seneca’s version of the Oedipus story, deciphering poetic meaning is equivalent to challenging the ruler’s sense of himself; it is an essentially political act.

Oedipus Reading Each of the four episodes under discussion in this paper – the Sphinx (92– 102); the Pythia’s oracle (233 – 38); the extispicy (293 – 399); Laius’ prophecy (626 – 58) – is described by Seneca in language that evokes the composition and performance of poetry. In other words, these episodes may be regarded as poetic texts not only for the reason that they invite analysis, but also because they reflect on the very act of creating a text. The Sphinx is a perfect example. When Oedipus recalls his encounter with her, he depicts her as a weaver who “twines words in blind rhythms” (caecis uerba nectentem modis, 92) and speaks “knotted words and entwined trickery” (nodosa…uerba et implexos dolos, 101). He also calls her a uates (93), which in the context of the surrounding imagery hints at the word’s etymology a uersibus uiendis (“from the weaving of songs” Varro L. 7.36).⁷ Such terminology doubtless alludes to Sophocles’ description of the Sphinx as ἡ ῥαψῳδός (Oedipus Tyrannus 391), but Seneca’s purpose also goes beyond mere recognition of his dramatic predecessor.⁸ Unlike Sophocles, who has Creon mention the Sphinx in passing, Seneca has Oedipus recollect her in substantial detail. As a consequence, he brings to the fore Oedipus’ encounter

 On doublespeak and veiled criticism, see MacMullen (); Ahl (a) and (b); Bartsch (); and Rudich ().  For the various Latin etymologies of uates, see Newman () .  It is likely that the Greek term ῥαψῳδός also takes its etymology from weaving, combining ῥάπτω and ἀοιδή, as in Pindar Nemean Odes . ῥαπτῶν ἐπέων…ἀοιδοί. On the links between Seneca’s uates and Sophocles’ ῥαψῳδός, see Töchterle () ad Oedipus , who provides an extensive list of comparanda, and Boyle () ad Oedipus .

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with a poet and with her poetry.⁹ Not only is weaving an established metaphor for the creation of a poetic text, it also implies a deceptive and potentially hostile act: the weavers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular, often use their art to trick others and to challenge higher powers.¹⁰ Artistic practice is just as political in Seneca’s Oedipus, where poetic texts often critique Oedipus in aggressive terms, and where the protagonist’s ability to overcome figures like the Sphinx is closely related to his capacity for secure, stable kingship. Oedipus’ acquisition of political power depends upon his having interpreted the Sphinx’s poetry correctly, and although this event is a standard element of the Oedipus myth, Seneca, as we shall see, uses it to draw close links between politics and reading. In this regard, Oedipus’ recollection of the Sphinx functions programmatically, anticipating his encounter with other uates in the play and presenting the only example of his analyzing a poetic text and comprehending its hostility with any degree of success. His position as a reader, moreover, is highlighted by the phrase carmen…solui (“I untied the song”, 102), because the verb soluere can be used to denote literary analysis (e. g. Quint. Institutio Oratoria 1.9.2: uersus… soluere, “to analyze poetry”). The fact that Oedipus does not quote the riddle at all in his reminiscence suggests that its meaning is no longer an issue; it has been resolved and hence, the play’s audience will not get a chance to examine it. The Pythia’s oracle, in contrast, is quoted in full. It is even marked off as a quotation, because when Creon delivers it at 233 – 38, he switches out of trochaic tetrameter and into the dactylic hexameter typically used for oracles.¹¹ Whereas Sophocles’ Oedipus must examine Delphi’s information second-hand in the form of Creon’s summary (Oedipus Tyrannus 84– 105), Seneca’s protagonist and those watching him are given a complete text on which to pass judgment. The text, moreover, is presented as inherently poetic, since the Pythia, like the Sphinx, is a uates (230), and her “tangled response” (sorte perplexa, 212) and “twisted obscurities” (ambage flexa, 214) recall the Sphinx’s implexos dolos. (101). Oedi-

 Seo ()  regards the episode as having yet another meta-literary layer, namely Oedipus’ recollection of his former self, which she argues recalls the strong, decisive Oedipus that appears at the beginning of Sophocles’ tragedy.  Snyder () investigates the origins of weaving imagery and its association with poetic composition in early Greek epic and lyric. As regards Ovidian scholarship, weaving is as popular a theme as it is in the Metamorphoses itself. Harries () treats the Arachne episode; Rosati () analyzes the entwined topics of weaving and poetry in Metamorphoses  and ; Johnson ()  –  discusses the ways in which weaving – and poetic activity more generally – inspire divine anger in Ovid’s epic.  Ahl ()  draws attention to the significance of this metrical change.

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pus, naturally, boasts of his ability to comprehend such material; he commands Creon: fare, sit dubium licet / ambigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur (“speak it, even though it is uncertain: understanding ambiguities is a skill granted to Oedipus alone” 215 – 16). Alluding to his previous triumph over the enigmatic Sphinx, Oedipus implies that superior knowledge is now integral to his self-definition. His choice of words likewise conveys this idea, because the conjunction of noscere and Oedipus points to a pun on οἶδα present in the hero’s name and used already by Sophocles (Oedipus Tyrannus 397).¹² Of course, Oedipus’ claims to knowledge produce ironic effects in both the Greek and Roman versions of the tragedy, but Seneca makes this irony much starker, by presenting the Pythia’s entire text, which cannot seem at all dubius to the audience: Mitia Cadmeis remeabunt sidera Thebis, si profugus Dircen Ismenida liquerit hospes regis caede nocens, Phoebo iam notus et infans. nec tibi longa manent sceleratae gaudia caedis: tecum bella geres, natis quoque bella relinques, turpis maternos iterum reuolutus in ortus. Gentle to Cadmean Thebes will the stars return in their motion If the fugitive guest leave the spring of Ismenian Dirce. He killed the king and brought plague, marked out an as infant by Phoebus. Villainous killer, you will not enjoy your pillage much longer! You’ll fight a war with yourself, leave war to your sons as their portion, Son, who vilely returned to rise back in the womb of the mother.¹³ (Oedipus 233 – 8)

Contrary to Oedipus’ expectations, there seems to be nothing to solve here. The oracle’s latter lines even employ second-person forms to point to Oedipus directly as the guilty party.¹⁴ When, following this quotation, Oedipus proceeds to question Creon about Laius’ murder, his inability to interpret the Pythia’s poetry could not be clearer. At the same time, the audience has been given a chance to exercise its own interpretive powers, and to comprehend what Oedipus cannot.

 The noscere / Oedipus wordplay is noted by Frank ()  and Fitch and McElduff () . For Sophocles’ punning on Oedipus’ name, see Goldhill ()  – ; for puns in the myth overall, see Segal () .  All block translations in this essay come from Ahl () which is a masterful translation of both Seneca’s and Sophocles’ plays.  Both Boyle () ad Oedipus  –  and Töchterle () ad Oedipus  remark on the Pythia’s second-person address without, however, considering how it affects the characterization of Oedipus.

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Seneca pursues these themes of poetry and reading later in the second act, where Tiresias and Manto conduct a sacrifice in the hope of conjuring the name of Laius’ murderer from the entrails.¹⁵ As many scholars have observed, the physical signs produced by this lengthy ritual appear to symbolize episodes from Oedipus’ life, and from the Theban mythic cycle more generally.¹⁶ Hence: the sacrificed heifer is pregnant in an unnatural way, signifying Jocasta (371– 5); smoke from the altar settles in a ring around the king’s head, designating his kingship and self-blinding (325 – 6); the sacrificial flame splits in two and fights itself, designating Eteocles and Polynices (321– 3); further signs of the impending Theban civil war are found in the liver, which has seven veins – the seven gates of Thebes (364) – and two nodes, indicating shared power (359 – 60).¹⁷ Given their wealth of allusions, these entrails are comprehensible only to someone who possesses prior literary knowledge of the Theban cycle. Like so much of Senecan drama, the extispicy scene plays on its own ‘secondariness’, encouraging the audience to situate it within the context of earlier poetry.¹⁸ It is those watching the play, and not those inside it, who can understand fully the literary texture of this ritual.

 Where and how to divide the acts in Seneca’s Oedipus is a tricky question, one over which scholars themselves are divided. See Boyle ()  –  for a summary of the arguments. Overall, I concur with Paratore () , Müller ()  n. , and Boyle ()  –  in giving the play a six-act structure, which divides as follows: Act  ( – ); Act  ( – ); Act  ( – ); Act  ( – ); Act  ( – ); Act  ( – ).  Major studies of the episode’s symbolism include: Pratt ()  – ; Bettini () and (); and Busch (). Töchterle () ad loc. and Boyle () ad loc. both provide ample commentary in their discussion of this section.  On the symbolism of the flame and smoke, see Pratt ()  –  and Paratore () . In his discussion of the liver, Pratt ()  makes a further, ingenious observation: the two nodes rising from the divinatory organ “with equal swelling” (capita paribus bina consurgunt toris, ) can also be taken to represent the two occupants of Jocasta’s marriage bed (torus). Bettini ()  –  provides the most comprehensive and convincing analysis of the pregnant heifer, proposing not only that its perversion evokes Jocasta and Oedipus, but also that Seneca’s contradictory phrase conceptus innuptae bouis () recalls Sophocles’ Oedipus , where the chorus states that time has long ago condemned the king’s “unmarried marriage”: δικάζει τὸν ἄγαμον γάμον πάλαι. Busch () advances a contrary argument by suggesting that the extispicy’s signs do not permit such clear analysis; while clever, his suggestions are undermined somewhat by the fact that Statius (Thebaid . – ) regarded the details of Seneca’s extispicy as very clear indeed.  Such ‘secondariness’ more usually results in self-conscious metatheatre, as in the famous cases of Seneca’s Medea citing her own name. On the literary self-awareness of Senecan drama, see in particular: Boyle ()  – ; Schiesaro ()  – ; Littlewood (); Hinds (); and Seo ()  – .

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Further, the ritual itself resembles poetic material and its interpretation is described as if it were a form of reading. Tiresias is called upon to analyze the signa (384) and notae (331; 352) present in or on the victims’ bodies; the latter term, in particular, conflates ritual interpretation with reading, since nota denotes not only symbols, but also lettering and written communication. Similarly, the verb eruo, which Tiresias employs at 297 – fata eruantur (“let fate’s decree be rooted out”) – can also be used in the context of uncovering hidden meanings in literature or oratory, as in Quintilian’s description of rhetorical emphasis: cum ex aliquo dicto latens aliquid eruitur (“when something hidden is extracted from some phrase”, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.64). This connection between interpreting natural signs and interpreting a literary text is not unique to Seneca, either, because Cicero regards the two practices as analogous in his De Divinatione: interpretes, ut grammatici poetarum, proxime ad eorum, quos interpretantur, diuinationem uidentur accedere (“men capable of interpreting seem to approach very near to the prophecy of the gods they interpret, just as scholars do when they interpret the poets”, Div. 1.34).¹⁹ The extispicy, therefore, is yet another kind of poetic material that Oedipus, and the audience, must confront in this play. The fourth and final scene of reading comes in Act 3, when Creon reports the necromancy conducted by Tiresias, and recites in full Laius’ prophetic, condemnatory speech. Although many of this scene’s meta-poetic qualities have been noted already by Alessandro Schiesaro, I shall summarize them briefly here.²⁰ First, Seneca draws attention to Tiresias’ combined role as mantis and poet, calling him uates three times in the space of Creon’s speech (552; 571; 607). The seer’s authorial role extends further still, because when he summons the dead from Hades, he engages in an act of poetic creation, reanimating major literary characters from the Theban cycle: Zethus and Amphion (611– 2); Niobe (613 – 5); Agave and Pentheus (615 – 8). Schiesaro remarks that Tiresias’ action “powerfully re-enacts what poetry and poets do”; it revivifies – and in Laius’ case, endows with speech – personae that otherwise have no agency of their own.²¹ In this regard, the carmen magicum that Tiresias utters (561) functions as both an incantation and as poetry. It may even be construed more specifically as tragic poetry, since the dead whom Tiresias reanimates belong to tragedy more than to any other genre: Zethus and Amphion featured in Euripides’ lost Antiopa, and in Pa-

 The connection is explored in more detail by Struck ()  –  who argues that the semiotics of divination resemble closely ancient allegorical readings of poetry, and that the two approaches were particularly popular among adherents of Stoic philosophy.  Schiesaro ()  – .  Schiesaro () .

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cuvius’; Niobe in plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles; Pentheus and Agave most famously in Euripides’ Bacchae. As if to match its meta-tragic content, Seneca’s necromancy scene is also meta-theatrical. While Tiresias resembles an author composing a text, Creon resembles an actor presenting that text to an audience. As was the case with the Pythia’s oracle, Creon relays Laius’ words in direct speech (626 – 58), an action that leads him to step into the part of Laius and assume his dramatic persona for more than thirty lines. Although most striking, understandably, when staged, this layering of performance within performance nonetheless emerges clearly even when the scene is read. Creon is an actor, and once again, Oedipus is the audience. Creon could even be said to play the further part of a tragic messenger, inasmuch as he reports at length the details of an off-stage event, to someone waiting for news, at a critical point in the tragedy’s action.²² Dramatic self-awareness permeates this entire scene and, as in the previous three instances, it puts Oedipus in the position of watching, listening to, and ultimately having to interpret what has been performed. Seneca also emphasizes the poetic texture of the necromancy scene by drawing close connections between Tiresias qua uates and Laius’ ghost, and further connecting the two of them to Vergil’s Sibyl. Laius in particular resembles Tiresias so closely that he becomes almost an extension of the seer himself.²³ Both are disheveled – Tiresias wears “dirty attire” (squalente cultu, 554), Laius’s hair is “caked with dirt and grime” (paedore foedo squalidam obtentus comam, 625) – and both speak ore rabido (“with raging mouth”, 561– 2; 626). The latter phrase is significant because it recalls Vergil’s Sibyl (os rabidum, Aeneid 6.80; rabida ora, Aeneid 6.102), herself a simultaneously poetic and prophetic figure, whose role as vates makes her, in the words of Emily Gowers, “a plausible surrogate for Vergil.”²⁴ This potential confluence of author and character occurs at an internal level in Seneca’s Oedipus, with Laius replicating Tiresias’ authorial role as uates. Just as Creon’s speech overall may be regarded as a kind of poetic text with Creon as its performer, so Laius’ speech resembles a poetic text with Laius/Tiresias as its author. Examined from one angle, Laius is a dramatic character; from another, he is a poet figure like the Pythia and the Sphinx.

 Boyle () ad Oedipus  –  likens Creon’s retelling of Laius’ speech to a messenger speech. The hesitancy Creon displays prior to delivering his report is likewise typical of Seneca’s messengers: see, for instance, Phaedra  – .  On Laius as an extension of Tiresias, see Schiesaro () . Statius, always a close reader of Seneca, acknowledges this connection between Laius and Tiresias at Thebaid . – , where the former appears to Eteocles in a dream, disguised as the seer.  Gowers () .

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Taken altogether, the four poetic ‘texts’ in this play achieve the same end: they foreground the act of reading. Seneca compels both Oedipus and the audience to test their respective powers of interpretation. At the same time, audience members are able to analyze this material from a more informed standpoint than Oedipus qua character could ever hope to achieve. Thus, Seneca creates a gap between internal and external ‘readers’, and this gap widens progressively over the course of the drama.

Oedipus Ruling As much as Seneca’s Oedipus prides himself on his ability to answer riddles and decode oracles, he also regards that ability as fundamental to his status as ruler. In this tragedy, acts of interpretation are in themselves acts of power: Oedipus strives to resolve not only ambiguous poetic meaning, but ambiguous political motives as well; he makes parallel efforts to exert his grip on kingship and his grasp of the play’s multiple poetic texts. Seneca associates these two spheres of Oedipus’ activity via the binary terms dubius and certus, which dominate the play’s language whenever the protagonist attempts to impose or confirm his authority. In his influential study of Seneca’s Oedipus, Donald Mastronarde shows how the tragedy’s themes develop around repeated images and clusters of adjectives that draw various sections of the text together into a tight, symbolic system.²⁵ The adjectives dubius and certus belong to this pattern; Mastronarde notes that the former is particularly prominent, and that it contributes to the play’s overall atmosphere of foreboding.²⁶ Yet dubius evokes more than just Oedipus’ fear and uncertainty; it also describes the kinds of ambiguity that Oedipus persistently, if misguidedly, opposes throughout the drama. When Creon returns from Delphi, for instance, he announces that the oracle has given responsa dubia (“unclear answers”, 212). Oedipus’ own immediate response is to imbue the adjective with political connotations and use it to imply that the Pythia, and/or Creon, is not assisting the state by being opaque: dubiam salutem qui dat adflictis negat (“uncertain help is no help at all”, 213). In his role as king, Oedipus wants to feel secure, which means he wants definite solutions to the problems besetting him. Despite Creon’s reminder that Delphic oracles are usually indirect – ambage flexa Delphico mos est deo / arcana tegere (“it is custom-

 Mastronarde ().  Mastronarde ()  – .

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ary for the Delphic god to hide secrets in twisting riddles” 214– 5), Oedipus insists that he alone has the ability to resolve dubious poetic material: fare, sit dubium licet / ambigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur (“speak, even if it is uncertain: understanding ambiguities is a skill granted to Oedipus alone” 215 – 6). Aside from acknowledging Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus 397, where Oedipus likewise boasts of his victory over the Sphinx – ὁ μηδὲν εἰδὼς Οἰδίπους, ἔπαυσά νιν (“I, know-nothing Oedipus, I stopped her”) – line 216 of Seneca’s version also characterizes Oedipus as a selfish autocrat, a role he shares with many other Senecan protagonists.²⁷ By claiming sole interpretive power, Oedipus implies that he controls poetry itself, what it means and how it is received. In fact, Oedipus presents his singular authority (soli…Oedipodae) as the only solution to the oracle’s inherent doubleness (dubia, 212; dubiam, 213; ambage flexa, 214; dubium, 215; ambigua, 216). Seneca uses this language of one and two to depict a fundamental conflict between autocratic rule, which must by nature be singular, and poetic meaning, which tends to resist being resolved into one, simple message. As far as Oedipus is concerned, ambiguities threaten his status as king. A later scene between Oedipus and Creon explores this idea more fully. At the end of Act 3, Oedipus accuses his kinsman of plotting to take the throne, and although Creon protests that one should not condemn a potentially innocent man (699), Oedipus waves this caveat aside in favor of an autocratic response: dubia pro certis solent / timere reges (“kings often fear uncertainties as certainties”, 699 – 700).²⁸ A typically Senecan sententia, Oedipus’ reply reveals his urge to impose a single, definite meaning on ambiguous material: Creon’s guilt has not been proven, it is merely suspected and, in this regard, it is open to interpretation. But Oedipus cannot tolerate such semantic ambivalence, because it has the potential to destabilize his power both as a ruler and as a reader. To protect his political position, Oedipus must judge Creon guilty, a need that he himself acknowledges with the phrase omne quod dubium est cadat (“everything doubtful must fall”, 702).²⁹ Such an assertion puts Oedipus in the position not only of being able to judge what counts as dubium, but also of being able to enforce it. Oedipus’ status as king allows him to enshrine his own version of events as official and final. In effect, Oedipus transforms dubia into certa precisely by punishing Creon, because once the king’s verdict has been passed, interpreting

 On the rhetoric and psychology of power in Senecan drama, see Braden () and ()  – .  Detailed analysis of this scene can be found in Mader ().  The tyrannical quality of Oedipus’ statement is acknowledged by the anonymous author of the Octavia, who adapts Oedipus  and puts it into the mouth of Nero: quidquid excelsum est cadat (Octavia ).

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the situation in any other manner amounts to an act of political rebellion. As Aegisthus remarks in the Agamemnon, “when a master hates, a person becomes guilty without trial” (ubi dominus odit, fit nocens, non quaeritur. Agamemnon 280). The exchange between Oedipus and Creon exemplifies the truth of this aphorism: Creon’s actions are defined entirely by Oedipus’ autocracy, and anything dubius is certus if Oedipus declares it so. Gordon Braden’s description of Senecan rhetoric sums up the effect perfectly: “absolute power inserts itself between words and their significations and rewrites them as opposites.”³⁰ We may add, too, Stephen Greenblatt’s remark about Renaissance politics, which applies just as well to Seneca’s Oedipus: the quintessential sign of power is “the ability to impose one’s fictions upon the world: the more outrageous the fiction, the more impressive the manifestation of power.”³¹ Oedipus’ reaction to Creon in Act 3 corresponds in some essential respects to his treatment of the Pythia in Act 2. In both instances, Oedipus sets himself up in opposition to everything that is dubius: vatic inscrutability on Delphi’s part, political untrustworthiness on Creon’s. A major result is that Oedipus associates his ability to interpret with his ability to rule. Further, the binary of dubius and certus applies also to Oedipus himself, as Jocasta acknowledges in the play’s very first scene: regium hoc ipsum reor: aduersa capere, quoque sit dubius magis status et cadentis imperi moles labet, hoc stare certo pressius fortem gradu Being a king, I think, means this: coming to grips with what confronts you. The harder it is to stand, the more power’s burden slips and slides, the more determinedly you must take your stand. Be brave! Step confidently now! (Oedipus 82– 5)

Although Jocasta means to depict autocratic firmness in positive terms, the behavior she adumbrates is what Oedipus himself exhibits when he condemns Creon: he shows no sign of wavering, he reacts with absolute certainty, even in a situation that is far from clear. In effect, Oedipus confirms his own certitude by imposing it on whatever material he is required to interpret. At the same time,

 Braden () . Although Braden applies this remark to Sen. Thyestes  – quod nolunt uelint – it fits Seneca’s Oedipus equally well.  Greenblatt () .

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however, the terms of Jocasta’s description reveal a deep irony: the king must confront an uncertain situation (dubius…status) and take a stand (stare) with secure step (certo…gradu), all of which recalls the popular etymology of his name from οἰδέω and πούς, “swollen-foot”.³² Underlying Jocasta’s words is the suggestion that Oedipus is actually far more dubius than he, or anyone else suspects. If, as Jocasta implies, Oedipus’ governmental position depends on his displaying himself as certus, then Oedipus’ very identity undermines his power. Despite his attempts to eradicate ambiguities, Oedipus will end up being the play’s most ambiguous figure. A possible objection to the argument I have advanced so far is that Seneca’s Oedipus behaves in a fearful, hesitant manner far more often than he behaves in an autocratic one. Fear, in particular, appears to be his default mode, and Mira Seo notes how Oedipus’ apprehension contributes to the play’s already high levels of dramatic irony.³³ But even in this regard Oedipus displays a solipsistic attitude typical of Senecan protagonists. For instance, he fears and laments the destruction the plague has visited on Thebes only to wonder what special disaster awaits him alone: iam iam aliquid in nos fata moliri parant /…cui reseruamur malo? (“now the fates are devising something against me…for what evil am I being reserved?” 28 – 31). As in the scene with Creon, Oedipus’ autocracy reveals itself in his exceptionalism. His suffering only makes him feel more prominent; paradoxically, it reinforces his own sense of power, since only the very powerful can be faced with such disasters.³⁴ Thus, Oedipus’ fear enhances rather than diminishes his unshakeable sense of his own importance. By the end of the play, he even goes so far as to exult that his misfortune outstrips what Apollo predicted: o Phoebe mendax, fata superaui impia! (“Apollo, you lied, I have surpassed my sacrilegious fate” 1046). Oedipus’ dominant attitude at this moment is the same one he displays towards the Pythia and towards Creon: even at this nadir of wretchedness, his feelings of singularity and specialness induce him to promote his own version of events as the most valid. The power he asserts as a ruler gives him the capacity to define events as he pleases, even to the extent of calling Apollo a liar. Of course, Oedipus can never really define events at he pleases, and that is why the business of interpretation involves such high stakes in this play. On the one hand, Oedipus desires to be both an autocratic ruler and an autocratic read As far as I am aware, Ahl () is the first to note, via his translation, the way this passage puns on Oedipus’ name.  Seo ()  – .  As Oedipus himself declares at lines  – , the more supreme one’s power, the more open one is to fortune’s blows. It is a standard sentiment in Senecan tragedy.

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er; on the other, his perspective is so limited that he does not realize his fundamental ignorance of the play’s poetic texts. Neither Oedipus nor his interpretive powers can be certus as long as the audience understands what he cannot. Essentially, Seneca’s drama is so arranged that it invites the audience to exercise its critical powers in competition with Oedipus’ own; further, those who watch, listen to, or read the play are encouraged to analyze Oedipus himself, to treat the king as precisely the kind of ambiguous poetic material he often desires to control.

Oedipus Text Far from being able to resolve ambiguities, Seneca’s Oedipus himself comprises a collection of signs that require interpretation.³⁵ In the first section of this chapter I discussed Oedipus’ apparent inability to understand the play’s various poetic texts such as extispicy and prophecy. In this section, I argue that Seneca assimilates Oedipus himself to poetic and prophetic material. The result is that Oedipus, too, becomes subject to the audience’s interpretive powers, which necessarily weakens his autocratic claims. Not only is Oedipus unaware of the meaning conveyed by the Pythia, by Laius, or by the extispicy, he also fails to read the text that is his own identity. I mention above that the extispicy in Seneca’s play may be read as a text of events from Oedipus’ life and from the Theban mythic cycle. The reverse is also true: the figure of Oedipus, especially his physical form, is portrayed throughout the drama as material suitable for an extispicy. Notably, Seneca likens Oedipus to a sacrificial victim. Just as Tiresias seeks “definite signs” in the bulls’ entrails (certis…notis, 331; certas…notas, 352), so Oedipus carries unmistakable marks on his own body (certas…notas, 811). When Oedipus commands the Corinthian, nunc adice certas corporis nostri notas (“now tell in addition the definite marks on my body,” 811), he presents himself as essentially extispicial material, inviting interpretation in the same way that Tiresias demands to hear from Manto which signs are present in the entrails: sed ede certas uiscerum nobis notas (“but tell to us the innards’ definite signs”, 352). Language used in the extispicy scene

 The prevalence of signs in this play, and the onus repeatedly laid on interpreting them, suggests a connection with Sophocles’ Antigone, especially Antigone  – , where Tiresias describes a moment of divination and a failed sacrifice, both of which he struggles to interpret. A further potential connection between the Antigone and Seneca’s Oedipus comes when Oedipus orders guards to take Creon away and shut him up in a cave as punishment: seruate sontem saxeo inclusum specu ().

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also returns when Oedipus is punishing himself: he searches out his eyes (scrutatur, 965) just as Manto searches through the entrails (scrutemur, 372); when he tears at his sockets, the participle eruentis (961) recalls Tiresias’ remarks at 297, fata eruantur (“let fate’s decree be rooted out”).³⁶ Similarly, Oedipus’ act of “unrolling” his eyes’ shattered orbs (uulsos…/ euoluit orbes, 966 – 7) likens his body to a poetic text, because the verbs uoluere and euoluere can denote either the unraveling of scrolls, or the recitation of verse. This latter meaning applies in the necromancy scene, when Tiresias “recites a magic song” (carmen…magicum uoluit, 561) in order to summon the dead. Finally, Oedipus’ encounter with the Sphinx likewise presents him as a sacrificial victim, since the creature’s impatience to tear his innards (uiscera expectans mea, 100) can, in the context of so much extispicial activity, double as a potentially interpretive action. The Sphinx is a uates (93) intent on Oedipus’ uiscera (100). The fact that she sings “in blind rhythms” (caecis…modis, 92) also assimilates her to Tiresias, the blind uates par excellence, who, in the process of analyzing a sacrifice incidentally analyzes Oedipus as well.³⁷ The main effect of these associations is to invite the play’s audience to treat Oedipus precisely as if he were a piece of poetry or prophecy, a set of physical signs and symbols. Further, the protagonist’s ignorance of his own identity is presented as proof of his inability to ‘read’ poetic material. Despite Oedipus’ desire to be certus, he fails to grasp the significance of his own certas notas; the fact that he cannot properly comprehend these notae suggests his broader inability to comprehend texts. The marks on Oedipus’ body are one example of Seneca resuming the certus / dubius binary, this time to illustrate the protagonist’s loss of authority.³⁸ Although Oedipus tries to eradicate ambiguity, he himself turns out to be fundamentally ambiguous material. Seneca emphasizes Oedipus’ dubius status throughout the play. For instance, when Laius condemns his son to “hobble, unsure of the path” (reptet incertus uiae, 656), the image recalls and reverses Jocas-

 The latter correspondence is noted by Boyle () ad , who declares eruere a “thematic verb” in the context of this play. The verb scrutari is also significant, because it associates Oedipus’ physical ‘self-examination’ with the moral self-examination Seneca advocates in his philosophy (e. g. Epistulae .: excute te et uarie scrutare et obserua); for more on such practices of therapeutic psychology in Seneca’s Oedipus, see Dressler ()  – .  Busch ()  suggests another, equally valid, way of interpreting the phrase caecis modis: he regards it as relating to the smoke from the sacrificial flame, which blinds Oedipus during the extispicy (Oedipus  – ).  Curley ()  – , examines the ways in which Seneca uses the dubius/certus binary to evoke Oedipus’ weakness as well as his strength.

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ta’s exhortation for Oedipus to stand firm (82– 5).³⁹ Similarly, Tiresias enquires during the sacrifice whether the flame is strong or whether it “creeps along uncertain of the way” (serpit incertus uiae, 312). Once again, such corresponding phrases draw a close connection between the events of the extispicy and the events of Oedipus’ own life, to the extent that interpreting sacrificial signs is the same act as interpreting the figure of Oedipus. The bull, too, symbolizes the king: it “rushes, doubtful, here and there” (huc et huc dubius ruit, 343) and, when sacrificed, gushes blood from its eyes in a manner that anticipates Oedipus’ own self-directed violence: sed uersus retro / per ora multus sanguis atque oculos redit (“a great amount of blood turns back and flows through the mouth and eyes”, 349 – 50).⁴⁰ Even the conjunction of versus and retro in line 349 makes us think of Oedipus, whose incestuous actions figure in this play both as a form of return (reuolutus, 238) and as an overturning of the laws of nature (natura uersa est, 371) and of generation (reuersas generis…uices, 870). Not only does the extispicy represent Oedipus, on a more essential level, it is Oedipus; it is a natural perversion deriving from the protagonist’s perverted nature. Moreover, by using the dubius / certus binary in this scene, Seneca reinforces the idea that Oedipus is subject to interpretation rather than in control of it. Although the king of Thebes has on several occasions attempted to assert himself as an active ‘reader’, he has featured all along as a passive object of other people’s analysis. As much as he fails to understand poetry, Oedipus simply is poetry, in all its ambiguity and multiplicity. Laius, too, characterizes Oedipus as poetic material when he denounces his son as implicitum malum / magisque monstrum Sphinge perplexum sua (“an intertwined evil, a monster more perplexing than his own Sphinx”, 640 – 1). Recalling both the Sphinx’s song and the Pythia’s prophecy, the adjectives implicitus and perplexus point to Oedipus being a kind of text. The term monstrum serves a similar end, branding Oedipus not just a freak of nature, but also a prophetic symbol that requires analysis.⁴¹ Because of the comparisons it draws, Laius’ interpretation of Oedipus directly challenges the king’s autocratic authority. In fact, Laius adopts the same position towards Oedipus that Oedipus once adopted towards

 Chinnici () , makes the interesting observation that the verb repto at Oedipus  denotes the crawling movement of a child, hence Laius’ curse evokes Oedipus’ infancy and his wounded feet, along with his imminent exile as a blind old man.  The parallel between Oedipus and the bull is noted by Fitch ()  n. .  In the words of Jeffrey Cohen () : “the monster exists only to be read…a glyph that seeks a hierophant.” For the ancient etymologies of monstrum, see Maltby ()  – ; on the term’s significance in Seneca tragedy, see Staley ()  – , and Bexley ()  and  – .

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the Sphinx. Whereas Oedipus described the Sphinx as having “bloodied jaws” (cruentos…/rictus, 93 – 4), Laius calls Oedipus a “bloodied king” (rex cruentus, 634) who “wields the scepter with bloodied hand” (cruenta sceptra qui dextra geris, 642).⁴² By equating Oedipus with the monster he defeated and the riddle he solved, Laius implies that Oedipus has not, in fact, succeeded in reading any poetic text. Further, by asserting his own interpretive ability, Laius robs Oedipus of the power to define the world as he pleases; even more crucially, he implies that power itself has led Oedipus to misinterpret and misrepresent reality: it is because he assumes that he knows, or can dictate, what the truth is, that Oedipus has failed to see the monstrum he actually embodies. Laius is not the only figure in this play who redefines and thus undermines Oedipus’ claims; the Pythia, too, uses her prophecy to reassess Oedipus’ image of himself. When she describes Laius’ murderer as a profugus (“fugitive” 234) and a hospes (“guest”, 234), she picks up on only to redeploy two key words from Oedipus’ introductory monologue: at line 23, Oedipus calls himself a profugus from Corinth, and at 80, an “ill-omened guest” (infaustus hospes). He also uses an imperative form, profuge (“flee”, 80) when he muses that his mere presence is having a catastrophic effect on Thebes. By repeating this terminology, the Pythia’s prophecy draws attention to the ways in which Oedipus has misread both his situation and his identity.⁴³ For Oedipus, his supposed exile from Corinth represents proof – or at least reassurance – of his innocence; for the Pythia, it represents precisely the opposite. Further, the term profugus in the Pythia’s oracle makes most sense if read as a substantive in apposition to the verb liquerit: mitia…remeabunt sidera…/ si profugus Dircen Ismenida liquerit hospes (“gentle stars will return if the guest leaves Ismenian Dirce as an exile”). Taken in this way, profugus implies not Oedipus’ past, not the exile he assumes he is undergoing already, but his future exile from Thebes, a journey he will begin at the play’s end. Thus, the text of the Pythia’s speech reinterprets the text of Oedipus’

 Parallels noted by Mastronarde ()  and Boyle () ad Oedipus  – . The final syllable of cruenta in line  can in fact scan as either long or short, ambiguously agreeing both with sceptra and with dextra.  Pratt ()  notes that the Pythia’s prophecy echoes key words from Oedipus’ earlier speech, but a mistake in the manuscripts leads him to overstate his argument. Pratt follows manuscript A in reading non at the beginning of line  – non ego penates profugus excessi meos – rather than the far more plausible hoc suggested by Bentley and accepted by Zwierlein (); Töchterle (); and Boyle (). As a result, Pratt asserts that the Pythia contradicts Oedipus directly (by calling him an exile) when she actually reinterprets the king’s words in a subtler manner.

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own, earlier speech; in doing so, it invites the play’s audience to see in both Oedipus’ and the Pythia’s words meanings that are opaque to Oedipus himself. The Pythia also challenges Oedipus’ claims about knowledge, by declaring the king Phoebo iam notus et infans (“known to Phoebus already, as a child”, 235). The passive form, notus, balances the active form, noscere, that Oedipus has used just 20 lines earlier when asserting his ability to interpret oracles: ambigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur (“understanding ambiguities is a skill granted to Oedipus alone”, 216). Given that, throughout the play, Oedipus is the object of other people’s analysis, the passive notus is perfectly appropriate: far from knowing, Oedipus is known. He is, moreover, known via the notae on his body, which must be recognized and interpreted in the same manner as a text – Frederick Ahl notes this pun when he translates notus in line 235 as “marked”.⁴⁴ This passive form of noscere appears again later in the tragedy, at another significant moment, when Oedipus asserts his self-knowledge in face of what is by now overwhelming evidence to the contrary: sed animus contra innocens / sibique melius quam deis notus negat (“but on the other hand my mind, innocent and better known to itself than to the gods, denies it”, 766 – 7). The phrase deis notus recalls Phoebo notus in 235 and in doing so, it points once again to Oedipus’ status as an object of analysis and a text to be read. It also confirms – if any confirmation were necessary – that Oedipus has failed an as interpreter of texts because he does not know himself. Despite Oedipus’ valiant assertions to the contrary, events will prove that the gods actually do comprehend his mind far better than he does.

Unveiled Speech As must be clear by now, Seneca’s tragedy relies on the audience’s prior knowledge of the Oedipus story, and it is from this assumed knowledge that the play derives the majority of its effects. Seneca ensures even at the play’s outset that his audience is aware of Oedipus’ guilt, for instance by having the king declare correctly – albeit for the wrong reasons – that he is the cause of the plague (Oedipus 36). The audience is also expected to understand Oedipus’ identity in advance, from its reading of earlier texts, Sophocles above all.⁴⁵ The result is not just dramatic irony, however, because by inviting audience members to see

 Ahl () .  In making this claim, I disagree with Ahl () and (), who argues for Oedipus’ innocence both in Sophocles’ text and in Seneca’s.

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what Oedipus cannot, Seneca encourages them to take a critical view of Oedipus’ kingship. A striking characteristic of poet figures and poetic texts in this play is that they are, on the whole, hostile towards Oedipus. The Sphinx is an obviously antagonistic uates, but the Pythia and Laius too denounce the protagonist in remarkably violent terms, portraying him more or less as a tyrant who has seized power and enjoys it by illegal means. The Pythia describes Oedipus’ current state of kingship as sceleratae gaudia caedis (“the joys of criminal slaughter”, 236) while Laius calls his son “a bloodied king, who seizes the scepter as a prize of savage slaughter” (rex cruentus, pretia qui saeuae necis / sceptra…occupat, 634– 5). Although technically correct, both descriptions attribute to Oedipus an unfair degree of intent, as if he had murdered Laius for the express purpose of stealing his throne. In effect, Seneca grants both the Pythia’s and Laius’ speeches a slightly political bent; he presents them as opposing not just Oedipus, but Oedipus in his position as king. Because of its political quality, moreover, Laius’ and the Pythia’s poetry bears some resemblance to opposition literature: it criticizes the way a powerful figure wields his power, and it invites the audience to acknowledge this criticism, while the ruler himself cannot fully access the text’s meaning. This gulf that Seneca creates between Oedipus’ understanding and the audience’s results in what may reasonably be termed ‘doublespeak’, a situation in which a text’s potentially subversive meaning is comprehensible only to those who can detect its ‘code’ and therefore interpret it in the proper way.⁴⁶ This kind of veiled speech typically takes the form of allusive language, which hides a hostile meaning beneath a more innocuous one. Careful work by Frederick Ahl in particular shows how Roman writers under oppressive regimes use figured language to voice their political opposition.⁴⁷ The two scenes of prophecy in Seneca’s Oedipus perform a similar function, though they do not use quite the same method. Nothing of what the Pythia or Laius says could be classed as allusive, figured, or veiled. If anything, their accusations are presented in very clear terms, and seem to be made clearer still when both texts address Oedipus directly, in the second person. The Pythia, as reported by Creon, declares: nec tibi longa manent sceleratae gaudia caedis: tecum bella geres, natis quoque bella relinques, turpis maternos iterum reuolutus in ortus.

 For further definition of the term ‘doublespeak’, see Bartsch ()  – .  Ahl (a) and (b).

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Villainous killer, you will not enjoy your pillage much longer! You’ll fight a war with yourself, leave war to your sons as their portion, Son, who vilely returned to rise back in the womb of the mother. (Oedipus 236 – 8)

Laius, also reported by Creon, addresses Oedipus in much the same manner: te, te cruenta sceptra qui dextra geris, te pater inultus urbe cum tota petam You hold my scepter in your bloodstained hands. But I, your father, as yet unavenged, Will, with the whole world, hunt you down. (Oedipus 642– 3)

Strictly speaking, it is not unusual for oracles to be delivered in the second person, as they are, for example, in Herodotus 1.65 (ἥκεις, ὦ Λυκόοργε, ἐμὸν ποτὶ πίονα νηόν; “O Lycurgus, you have come to my rich temple”) and 1.85 (Λυδὲ γένος, πολλῶν βασιλεῦ, μέγα νήπιε Κροῖσε; “Lydian, king over many, O Croesus, you great fool”). In the case of Seneca’s Pythia, however, the second person forms are particularly striking because Oedipus does not acknowledge them as being directed at him. In any other context, these forms could be interpreted as generic exclamations; when spoken by Creon, directly to Oedipus, they acquire an unavoidably condemnatory tone. For an audience acquainted with Oedipus’ story, the meaning of both the Pythia’s and Laius’ words is clear to the extent of being thoroughly ‘unveiled’.⁴⁸ But Oedipus still cannot make sense of these pronouncements, and it is from this dissonance, from this gap between Oedipus and the audience that doublespeak emerges. Laius and the Pythia both create poetic texts that criticize a ruler; the ruler neither understands, nor in the Pythia’s case even detects the criticism; the play’s audience, however, is able to activate the text’s meaning and in doing so, is able to smile grimly at Oedipus’ expense.⁴⁹ Thus, the poetic texts presented in Seneca’s play appear subversive not just because they critique a ruler, but more specifically because they condemn him in terms that he himself cannot properly comprehend. By pitting Oedipus’ analytical ability against that of the tragedy’s external audience, Seneca evokes the po Thus Boyle () ad Oedipus  –  calls Laius’ prophecy “a masterpiece of clarity.”  Understandably enough, the audience plays a crucial role in detecting subversive meaning and creating doublespeak; MacMullen ()  remarks, “code depends on decoders.” Bartsch ()  –  makes a similar point: “in practical terms it was the audience’s reaction that transformed a given statement into an act of opposition or an ad hominem slur.”

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litical pressures brought to bear on literary activity under the principate, a time when writers would voice their resistance by relying on the shared and prior knowledge of a particular interpretive community. The Pythia and Laius likewise rely upon an interpretative community in order to convey their accusations. The only difference, in their case, is that their speech is made allusive by its context rather than through its language.

Conclusion The scenes of extispicy, prophecy, and necromancy that punctuate Seneca’s Oedipus draw attention to repeated confrontations between poets and autocrats, rulers and readers. Each of these episodes resembles a poetic text, which, in the process of revealing the king of Thebes’ identity, also contests his power. A major theme of Seneca’s tragedy is the struggle for authority that occurs simultaneously in the realm of politics and of art, with Oedipus in particular assuming that his analytical ability is an extension of his position as king. All acts of interpretation, in this play, are bids for control: Oedipus develops his own version of events in order both to assert and to preserve his absolute power; the play’s uates undermine that power by transforming Oedipus himself into a text; finally, the play’s audience members are encouraged to assume power because of their superior ability to read and comprehend the texts that Oedipus cannot decipher. Far from being certus, in his rule, his views, or even his sense of himself, Seneca’s Oedipus turns out to be fundamentally dubius, a collection of poetic and prophetic symbols, a riddle for others to decode and thereby, to dominate. Over the course of the tragedy, Oedipus moves from analyzing subject to analytical object, a transformation that deprives him of his privileged position chiefly because he fails to understand, or even try to understand, himself. What characterizes Seneca’s Oedipus is his persistent assumption that power can be translated into knowledge. But the play’s uates and the audience realize that this equation only works when it is the other way around.⁵⁰

 I would like to thank the volume’s editors and the anonymous readers for the helpful feedback I received during the drafting process. Thanks are also due to the Australian National University, for providing me with the visitor’s status I needed in order to complete this paper.

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Greenblatt, S. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago/London. Harries, B. 1990. “The Spinner and the Poet: Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”, PCPhS 36: 64 – 82. Hinds, S. 2011. “Seneca’s Ovidian Loci”, SIFC 104: 5 – 63. Holford-Strevens, L. 1999. “Sophocles at Rome”, in: J. Griffin (ed.), Sophocles Revisited. Oxford, 219 – 60. Johnson, P. 2008. Ovid Before Exile: Art and Punishment in the Metamorphoses. Madison, WI. Kohn, T.D. 2013. The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy. Ann Arbor, MI. Littlewood, C.A.J. 2004. Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy. Oxford. MacMullen, R. 1966. Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire. Cambridge, MA. Mader, G. 1993. “Tyrant and Tyranny in Act III of Seneca’s Oedipus”, GB 19: 103 – 28. Maltby, R. 1991. A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies. Leeds. Mastronarde, D.J. 1970. “Seneca’s Oedipus: The Drama in the Word”, TAPhA 101: 291 – 315. Mendell, C.W. 1941. Our Seneca. New Haven, CT. Müller, G. 1953. “Senecas Oedipus als Drama”, Hermes 81: 447 – 64. Newman, J.K. 1967. The Concept of Vates in Augustan Poetry. Collection Latomus. Brussels. Owen, W.H. 1968. “Commonplace and Dramatic Symbol in Seneca’s Tragedies”, TAPhA 99: 291 – 313. Paratore, E. 1956. “La poesia nell’Oedipus di Seneca”, GIF 9: 97 – 132. Pratt, N.T. 1939. Dramatic Suspense in Seneca and His Greek Precursors. Princeton, NJ. — 1963. “Major Systems of Figurative Language in Senecan Melodrama”, TAPhA 94: 199 – 234. — 1983. Seneca’s Drama. Chapel Hill/London. Rosati, G. 1999. “Form in Motion: Weaving the Text in the Metamorphoses”, in: P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, and S. Hinds (eds.), Ovidian Transformations: Essays in the Metamorphoses and its Reception. Cambridge, 240 – 53. Rudich, V. 1997. Dissidence and Literature under Nero: the Price of Rhetoricization. London/New York. Schiesaro, A. 2003. The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama. Cambridge. Segal, C. 1993. Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge. New York. Seo, M.J. 2013. Exemplary Traits: Reading Characterization in Roman Poetry. Oxford. Snyder, J.M. 1981. “The Web of Song: Weaving Imagery in Homer and the Lyric Poets”, CJ 73: 193 – 6. Staley, G. 2010. Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy. Oxford/New York. Struck, P.T. 2004. Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts. Princeton, NJ. Sutton, D.F. 1986. Seneca on the Stage. Leiden. Töchterle, K. 1994. Lucius Annaeus Seneca Oedipus Kommentar mit Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung. Heidelberg. Trinacty, C.V. 2014. Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry. Oxford. Zwierlein, O. 1966. Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas. Meisenheim am Glan.

David Konstan

Doubting Domitian’s Divinity: Statius Achilleid 1.1 – 2 Summary: The opening couplet of Statius’ Achilleid declares that Jupiter sought to prevent his son (in reality, his grandson) Achilles from ascending to Olympus. Since Domitian is explicitly equated with Achilles, I argue that these verses allude to the fact that Vespasian chose as his successor Titus rather than Domitian (the older brother), thereby effectively preventing Domitian’s deification. Various details in the epic support the implicitly subversive character of the poem. Keywords: Statius; Achilleid; Domitian; subversive poetry Frederick Ahl is preeminent among those scholars who have discovered subversive innuendos in the literature composed under the Roman Empire, and especially in the first century of the Principate, when memories of republican liberties still lingered in the minds of highborn Romans who chafed under imperial autocracy. Of necessity, any such criticisms had to be expressed not only guardedly but cryptically; the emperors were neither illiterate nor fools, and if they detected a hostile insinuation, however subtle, in a work of literature or art, their response would be swift and very likely lethal. As a result, it requires considerable ingenuity to detect such nuances, and this fact naturally invites disagreement and controversy. Is what appears to us like excessive and indeed obsequious praise of an emperor such as Nero or Domitian, whom we regard as arbitrary and tyrannical, necessarily ironic, meant to alert the reader to its own insincerity? It is tempting to think so, but perhaps we misunderstand the conventions that inform such eulogies and the attitudes to authority even of poets such as Lucan and Seneca, who paid with their lives for what was perceived as opposition to the regime. The poetry of Statius is an interesting case in point. He seems to have accepted happily Domitian’s claims to divinity, referring to him as deus in his verses (cf. Siluae 4.3.128 – 9), and, in the words of one critic, who wrote before the time when paradox and ambivalence began to be regarded as poetic virtues, “is abandoned in his flattery” of the emperor.¹ And yet, scholars have seen indications of  Scott () ; contrast Newlands () : “the extravagant language of the Silvae not only expresses the poet’s intense appreciation for his object of praise; it also admits doubts and reservations and draws attention to the wider cultural significance of the original occasion. For praise … can encompass advice, admonition, criticism, even anxiety, as well as celebration”; cf.

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a less subservient posture in his Siluae and especially in his grand epic, the Thebaid. As Carole Newlands puts it, “all Statius’ work to varying degrees, the Thebaid in particular, reflects Rome’s troubled dynastic history of the past hundred years and the rupture with Augustan optimism.”² In this respect, the Achilleid is an exception: in general, it has escaped political interpretations, and has been discussed, when at all, for its rich allusions to earlier epic and other genres, beginning, of course, with Homer’s Iliad, which Statius self-consciously claims, if not to rival, then at least to supplement with an account of the entire life of the hero.³ No doubt, at least part of the reason is the unfinished state of the text, which breaks off early in the second book; though the fragment as we have it is highly polished, its completion may have been forestalled by Statius’ death, probably in 96 and shortly before the death of the emperor Domitian in September of that same year. The existing text, moreover, treats Achilles’ youth, including the episode of his cross-dressing, at his mother’s insistence, so as to escape service at Troy, where Thetis knew he was doomed to perish. This is material less amenable to a political reading, unless one wishes to see a negative reference of some sort to Domitian’s own younger years; but there is no obvious point of comparison, and in any case Achilles is represented as tough and warlike, and once his disguise is penetrated he is eager to join the expedition.⁴ Now, there is perhaps an episode in Domitian’s life that might have been evoked by Achilles’ masquerade on the island of Scyros, to which I will return below. But I wish mainly to examine the opening verses of the Achil-

p. : “Today the Silvae have provoked sharply opposing reactions, particularly as regards the poems concerning Domitian and his entourage. They have been considered either as court propaganda or as a form of ‘doublespeak’ that mocks and subverts a hated tyrant.” Newlands ()  pays homage to “Ahl’s brilliantly subversive reading” of Siluae .; cf. Ahl ()  – . See also the sobering conclusion in Criado (): “The Thebaid and the Silvae, as with the Greek tragedies about Thebes, offered no room for political dissent. Nevertheless, there is definitely room for reflection, hopeless though it may be.”  Newlands () ; for a pioneering study in this direction, see also Dominik (). But contrast Sharrock and Ashley () : “it is difficult to read the epic [sc., the Achilleid] as a subversive allegory.”  See especially Hinds (); Hinds notes, for example, that Achilleid . – , where Thetis rises from the sea to behold Paris sailing back to Troy with Helen, echoes Catullus . – , where Thetis and other Nereids emerge to see the Argo (pp.  – ). Given the horrific picture of Achilles’ achievements narrated by the Parcae in the latter poem, such an allusion might invite a darker interpretation of Statius’ epic. See also McGowan ()  with n.  for the image of Achilles in Ovid.  In Statius’ epic, Achilles rapes Deidamia (an allusion to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria . – ), rather a brutish way of asserting his masculinity; Heslin ()  remarks: “Rape, that Ovidian signifier of maleness, has surprisingly limited repercussions for Achilles’ own identity.”

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leid, where I believe we may plausibly see a remarkably clear, if still cautious, challenge to Domitian’s divine pretentions. Yet these lines seem not to have excited the suspicions even of readers disposed to find hints of a dissident voice in the poem. Perhaps they are more circumspect than I imagine; or else, the reverse may be the case, and the critique, rather than being latent, would be so obvious, were it there, that Statius cannot possibly have intended it. I will suggest a reason why he might have, despite what may seem its brazen conspicuousness. But first, the verses themselves: Magnanimum Aeaciden formidatamque Tonanti progeniem et patrio uetitam succedere caelo, diua, refer (Achilleid 1.1– 3).

I translate literally: Tell, goddess, of great-hearted Aeacides, offspring dreaded by the Thunderer and forbidden to succeed to his paternal heaven.⁵

Aeacides signifies, of course, the grandson of Aeacus, a status that Achilles shared with his cousin Ajax. The Thunderer is Zeus or Jupiter, and the back story is that Jupiter had been warned of a woman whose son was destined to be greater than his father; there was thus a risk that the succession to the throne of Olympus, which had already passed from Jupiter’s grandfather Uranus to his father Cronus (that is, Saturn) and from him to Jupiter himself, might yet by occupied by a son of Jupiter’s. When Jupiter learned that the fated woman was Thetis, he betrothed her to the mortal Peleus, thereby neutralizing the threat. Now, by any standard, Statius’ allusion to this tale is strained: Achilles was not the offspring of Jupiter, but of Peleus; that is precisely the point of the myth. Perhaps

 Cf. the version by Mozely (): “Tell, O goddess, of great-hearted Aeacides and of the progeny that the Thunderer feared and forbade to inherit his father’s heaven.” Slavitt () offers a freer translation, which incorporates explanatory material: “Of the great-spirited hero of Aeacus’ line, of him even the Thunderer feared to beget, lest, as Proteus warned, the son might exceed the father, inheriting heaven, goddess tell.” Shackleton Bailey () renders the lines: “Goddess, tell of great-hearted Aeacides, and offspring feared of the Thunderer and forbidden to succeed to his father’s heaven.” Hall and Ritchie ()  give: “Tell, O Goddess, of the greatsouled grandson of Aeacus, a child feared by the Thunderer and forbidden to succeed to his father’s heaven”; cf. Heslin () : “Goddess, consider Achilles, great-hearted grandson of Aeacus, the offspring who was feared by Jupiter the thunderer, and who was forbidden to inherit the kingdom of heaven.” Wartel () leaves no doubt about the sense: “Le magnanime Achille, ce héros à qui le maître du tonnerre craignit de donner la vie, de peur de le voir un jour lui ravir le trône du ciel, Muse, c’est à toi de le chanter.”

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we might render the phrase formidatamque Tonanti/ progeniem in a predicative sense, “feared as [i. e., were he to be] a child of Jupiter’s”; but then, what to do with patrio … caelo, that is, “paternal [or ancestral] heaven”? Once again, we are obliged to take it as a contrary to fact proposition: “his father’s heaven [sc., had Jupiter been his father].”⁶ Statius seems to have gone out of his way to suggest that somehow Achilles really was the son of Jupiter, though in the poem it is perfectly clear that he was not (he was Jupiter’s great-grandson).⁷ But in any case, why begin with this detail about Achilles’ parentage, so enigmatically expressed? Why note, however obscurely, that the hero of the epic was denied access to Olympus and immortality? It could, of course, be seen as an indirect statement of his grandeur – had it not been for Jupiter’s foresight and precaution, Achilles would indeed have ascended to the throne of the gods.⁸ But there may be something more elusive at stake. In her excellent study of Statius as a poet mentioned above, Carole Newlands offers an interpretation of this passage that I take the liberty of quoting in extenso: The Achilleid is not the expected poem about Domitian’s military achievements, despite the earlier promise in the introduction to the Thebaid that Statius would tackle such a work later. The proem ends with another deferral of Domitianic epic (1.14– 19). Although Domitian is represented here as a good reader for Statius’ mythological epic, for he is praised for his twin competencies in the martial and liberal arts (Ach. 1.15 – 16) – his education, in other words, reflects what we learn of Achilles’ education by Chiron – nonetheless he does not

 Dilke (), in the commentary ad v.  f., under the lemma patrio … caelo, quotes Beraldus (): “Id est Iovis, qui Achillis pater fuisset ni a Thetide abstinuisset.” Méheust () notes that the phrase could simply mean “le ciel de son ancêtre,” since Jupiter was Aeacus’ father and hence Achilles’ great-grandfather; but as Méheust observes, “la simplicité n’etant pas chose courante chez Stace, sans doute vaut-il mieux entendre avec C. Béroalde” (citing the same comment), and adds (: ): “Le poète établit ainsi un contraste entre ce qu’est Achille et ce qu’il aurait pu être”. So too Jannaccone ()  notes ad v. , s.v. patrio: “sarebbe stato paterno (no lo era), se Giove avesse sposato Tetide.”  Statius may have had in mind Valerius Flaccus . – , where, in an ecphrasis, Thetis is represented as lamenting that Achilles will not be born greater than Jupiter (Peleos in thalamos uehitur Thetis; aequora delphin/ corripit, sedet deiecta in lumina palla/ nec Ioue maiorem nasci suspirat Achillen).  Criado ()  observes that in the Thebaid, “Jupiter decrees that two houses of which he is progenitor, Argos and Thebes (. – ), should perish. If it is necessary, Jupiter claims, he will himself raze Thebes to its foundations (. – ) and destroy the innocent city of Argos, whose only crime is that of having been descended from the criminal Tantalus (. – ), with a great flood (. – ).” Statius is bolder than either Silius Italicus or Valerius Flaccus in assuming the mantle of Ovid in his representation of the chief god of the pantheon.

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inspire the poem.⁹ Achilles is introduced in the poem as a hero who, unlike Domitian and his family, has been forbidden deification (a child forbidden to succeed to his father’s heaven). The opening patronymic by which Achilles is named (Ach. 1.1), Aeaciden (grandson of Aeacus), emphasizes his mortality through the male line. Not only has Statius again deferred writing about Domitian’s deeds, he has also focused on a hero who in a key respect was very different from the emperor who energetically cultivated the idea of his own divinity, and closely associated himself with Jupiter … ¹⁰ Counterbalancing his own literary imperial ambitions, Statius puts spatial bounds around a hero who will never seek the sky.¹¹

Domitian had indeed taken to describing himself as a god, in his correspondence and in other contexts, and as I have mentioned, Statius, like other poets of his time, did not hesitate to represent him as a divinity. Nevertheless, by what was now a venerable tradition, emperors were formally declared to be deities and a cult was devoted to their worship only after their death; and however close Domitian may have been to such a transformation when the Achilleid was written (we know it was a late work of Statius, probably begun in the year 95), he had not yet achieved it and was, in fact, denied posthumous apotheosis, as the Senate decreed a damnatio memoriae, erasing his image and records of his reign to the extent possible (in practice nowhere near totally).¹² Rather than a contrast between an emperor who “closely associated himself with Jupiter” and “a hero who will never seek the sky,” we might see here a none too subtle intimation that Domitian will be equally denied immortality. After all, in the proem Domitian is not identified with Jupiter but precisely with Achilles; as Statius declares in his invocation to Domitian, “great Achilles is a prelude to you” (magnusque tibi praeludit Achilles, 1.19), referring both to the poem, which is a foretaste of the grand epic on Domitian that Statius is once again postponing, and to the qualities of the hero, who, as Newlands observes, is also described as accomplished in warfare and in song. If we take seriously the analogy between Achilles and Domitian, and there is no reason why we should not, then Statius has opened his epic with the broad hint that Domitian has been denied access to heaven by his father, which is to say, Vespasian – a point that might very well have struck a nerve with the notoriously hyper-sensi-

 There may, of course, be irony here; Ahl () , citing Suetonius’ Domitian , remarks that the emperor may “have paid little attention to the poetry he commissioned.”  The note here (n. ) refers to Zanker ()  – .  Newlands () .  See Flower (), chapter , titled “The Shadow of Domitian and the Limits of Disgrace” (esp. pp.  – ); also Varner () chapter  (on Domitian).

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tive emperor, who had recently put to death several writers on suspicion of oblique criticism.¹³ It is well known that Vespasian passed over Domitian in favor of his brother Titus as his successor to the imperial throne, and it possible to view this act as a way of denying him access to the heavens. To be sure, after Titus’ short reign and early death, Domitian acceded to royal power, with at least the hope of post-mortem divinization. But Statius does not say that Achilles never made it to heaven (legend had it that he enjoyed an afterlife in the Elysian Fields, and for his virtues succeeded in having as his bride none other than Medea),¹⁴ but only that his father vetoed it. In any case, as we have observed, Domitian was still in this world, and was not inspiring a great deal of affection among the elite classes at this time. It might have begun to seem that Vespasian’s distrust in his son’s abilities to rule the Empire was not entirely misplaced. Alternatively, one might see in Jupiter’s quashing of his descendant’s aspirations a kind of small-minded spite, a move to eliminate the possibility that the son would prove greater than father; such a reading might be more in line with Domitian’s own pretensions. I would not wish to claim that the Achilleid is a straightforward allegory, with Achilles standing in for Domitian, though a comparison with the great Homeric hero would not in principle be unflattering. Since we do not know how Statius might have developed Achilles’ character, it is not possible to draw plausible parallels with the emperor. We have already seen that Statius himself draws attention to Domitian’s literary skills, which he then gave up in favor of military achievement (cui geminae florent uatumque ducumque/ certatim laurus – olim dolet altera uinci, 1.15 – 16), a reference to his maturation and relinquishing of lesser pastimes. Thetis’ efforts to prevent her son from engaging in military activity may reflect Vespasian’s reluctance to assign Domitian responsibility for campaigns. Suetonius, who is to be sure a very hostile source, reports that Domitian “began an expedition against Gaul and the Germanies, which was uncalled for and from which his father’s friends dissuaded him, merely that he might make himself equal to his brother in power and rank. For this he was reprimanded, and to give him a better realisation of his youth and position, he had to live with his father, and when they appeared in public he followed the emperor’s

 See Suetonius, Domitian .; Juvenal Satire .. – ; Jones () ; Rutledge ()  – .  According to a scholium on Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (ad .), this story was first related by Ibycus and subsequently by Simonides.

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chair and that of his brother in a litter.”¹⁵ Suetonius adds that “when Vologaesus, king of the Parthians, had asked for auxiliaries against the Alani and for one of Vespasian’s sons as their leader, Domitian used every effort to have himself sent rather than Titus; and because the affair came to nothing, he tried by gifts and promises to induce other eastern kings to make the same request” (2.2– 3).¹⁶ Like Achilles, Domitian is eager to prove himself as a warrior, but is inhibited by a parent’s opposition. Even the cross-dressing episode, in which Achilles hides out in drag to avoid engagement in the Trojan War, may have an analogue in Domitian’s early career. For Suetonius tells us that during the civil war with Vitellius, Domitian took refuge in the Capitol with his paternal uncle Sabinus and a part of the forces under him. When the enemy forced an entrance and the temple was fired, he hid during the night with the guardian of the shrine, and in the morning, disguised in the garb of a follower of Isis and mingling with the priests of that fickle superstition, he went across the Tiber with a single companion to the mother of one of his school-fellows. There he was so effectually concealed, that though he was closely followed, he could not be found, in spite of a thorough search (1.2).¹⁷

Now, as Stefano Rebeggiani has brilliantly shown, far from concealing what might have been regarded as an ignoble flight in the midst of battle, Domitian made the episode out to be an early example of his exceptional courage, joining the besieged group, fighting his way free, and cunningly exploiting a form of camouflage.¹⁸ What is more, as Rebeggiani convincingly argues, Statius had sub Expeditionem quoque in Galliam Germaniasque neque necessariam et dissuadentibus paternis amicis incohauit, tantum ut fratri se et opibus et dignatione adaequaret. Ob haec correptus, quo magis et aetatis et condicionis admoneretur, habitabat cum patre una sellamque eius ac fratris, quotiens prodirent, lectica sequebatur; trans. Rolfe ().  cum Vologaesus Parthorum rex auxilia aduersus Alanos ducemque alterum ex Vespasiani liberis depoposcisset, omni ope contendit ut ipse potissimum mitteretur; et quia discussa res est, alios Orientis reges ut idem postularent donis ac pollicitationibus sollicitare temptauit.  Bello Vitelliano confugit in Capitolium cum patruo Sabino ac parte praesentium copiarum, sed irrumpentibus aduersariis et ardente templo apud aedituum clam pernoctauit, ac mane Isiaci celatus habitu interque sacrificulos uariae superstitionis cum se trans Tiberim ad condiscipuli sui matrem comite uno contulisset, ita latuit, ut scrutantibus qui uestigia subsecuti erant, deprehendi non potuerit.  Rebeggiani (forthcoming) esp. ch. , “The Gauls on the Capitol.” As Rebeggiani explains, “When he became Emperor at the age of , Domitian, unlike his brother, could boast no military success. In spite of his strong desires, he had not been given a chance to lead a military expedition before his accession to the throne. One thing, however, he could pride himself on: he had played an active role in the events of  CE, being the only member of the Flavian family to fight Vitellius in person. True, the future Emperor was not credited with any particularly hero-

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tly alluded to this episode in his account of the siege of Thebes in the Thebaid (10.514– 18), giving it a decidedly positive spin. Seen from a hostile perspective such as that of Suetonius, however, doing himself up as a priest of the foreign cult of Isis smacked not only of cravenness but also of effeminacy. Suetonius suggests as much in his life of Otho: Neither Otho’s person nor his bearing suggested such great courage. He is said to have been of moderate height, splay-footed and bandy-legged, but almost feminine in his care of his person. He had the hair of his body plucked out, and because of the thinness of his locks wore a wig so carefully fashioned and fitted to his head, that no one suspected it. Moreover, they say that he used to shave every day and smear his face with moist bread, beginning the practice with the appearance of the first down, so as never to have a beard; also that he used to celebrate the rites of Isis publicly in the linen garment prescribed by the cult (Suet. Otho 12.1, trans. Rolfe [1914]).

Is it far-fetched to compare Domitian’s refuge with a friend’s mother to Achilles taking shelter among the maidens of Scyros, at his mother’s behest?¹⁹ This is not the place for a full-scale analysis of the political resonances of Statius’ Achilleid, though I believe that such a study would be fruitful. Returning, then, to the opening verses that are the focus of this paper, we may, I think, confidently recognize an allusion of some kind to Domitian’s vexed relationship to his own father. Perhaps, as I have suggested above, Statius meant his readers, or at least Domitian, who is, in Newlands’ words, represented “as a good reader for Statius’ mythological epic,” to understand that Domitian, unlike (or possibly like) Achilles, succeeded in gaining his father’s throne despite the paternal veto.²⁰ But hinting, at the very beginning of the poem, at Vespasian’s misgivings ic deed during the siege, but the story could be used to underline his courage (in spite of his young age when he had joined his uncle to fight Vitellius) and to demonstrate that he enjoyed the gods’ favour…. The story soon became a special topic in panegyric of Domitian. Both Statius and Silius praise Domitian’s heroic participation in the  siege.” Rebeggiani shows too that Domitian’s propaganda analogized the siege of the Capitol by Vitellius to the sack of Rome by the Gauls in the th century B.C. I am immensely grateful to Rebeggiani for permitting me to read and quote from the manuscript of his book in progress.  We may note too that, according to Suetonius, Domitian in his youth allowed himself to be abused (corruptum), as Suetonius imagines it, by one Claudius Pollio and also, rumor had it, by the future emperor Nerva, who succeeded Domitian to the throne (Domitian .).  Stefano Rebeggiano points out to me (per litteras) that in the beginning of Domitian’s reign, the fact that he had been passed over was an embarrassment, and that the poets are silent about it, “for they are not sure how to treat this delicate matter and how the emperor himself wants to frame his relationship with father and brother.” In the proem to the Thebaid, written soon after Titus’ death, “Titus is conveniently ignored, and Domitian is described as having received power directly from his father (subeuntem exorsa maturi parentis, .).” Later, poets felt free to men-

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about his second son might equally have reminded readers of the father’s prescience, especially as Domitian revealed increasingly paranoid traits in his final years.²¹ Would Statius have risked so dangerous an ambiguity? He was approaching the end of his life, as we have remarked, and there is no reason why he could not have revised the proem at the last moment – poets do not compose linearly, from start to finish. I imagine Statius, back in Naples, taking a chance in the final touching up of his epic, knowing he would not live to complete it and making bold to register, with practiced poetic craftiness, his ambivalence concerning the emperor upon whom he had so often fawned in the past.

Bibliography Ahl, F.M. 1984. “The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius”, ANRW 2.32.2: 40 – 124. Beraldus, C. 1685. Publii Papinii Statii opera. Paris. Criado, C. 2013. “The Contradictions of Valerius’ and Statius’ Jupiter: Power and Weakness of the Supreme God in the Epic and Tragic Tradition”, in: G. Manuwald and A. Voigt (eds.), Flavian Epic Interactions. Berlin, 195 – 214. — 2014. “The Constitutional Status of Euripidean and Statian Theseus: Some Aspects of the Criticism of Absolute Power in Statius’ Thebaid”, in W. Dominik, C. Newlands, and K. Gervais (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Statius. Leiden, 291 – 306. Dilke, A.O.W. 1954. Statius Achilleid. Cambridge. Dominik, W.J. 1994. The Mythic Voice of Statius: Power and Politics in the Thebaid. Leiden. Flower, H.I. 2006. The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Chapel Hill, NC. Hall, J.B. and A.L. Ritchie (in collaboration with M.J. Edwards). 2007. P. Papinius Statius: Thebaid and Achilleid, vol. 2. Newcastle. Heslin, P.J. 2005. The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid. Cambridge. Hinds, S. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Jannaccone, S. 1950. P. Papinio Stazio: L’Achilleide. Florence.

tion Titus, even suggesting that “Domitian had voluntarily yielded command to his brother out of his pietas.” Later still, poets might “make Vespasian an envious and fearful Jupiter who saw his son as a threat.” Rebeggiano suggests that Statius’ hostile representation of Vespasian is a sign of his yielding to pressure from Domitian: “He has to find room in his poem even for the most hideous propaganda of Domitian’s last years.” Iudicet lector!  Donncha O’Rourke has suggested to me that there may be a similarly subtle hint of criticism when Domitian’s new palace is said to outdo the piling of Mt. Ossa on Mt. Pelion in Martial .; after all, the latter was an attempt to overthrow Jupiter. Contrast Martial ., where the poet is now free to lambast Domitian for excesses that made Jupiter look poor.

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Jones, B.W. 1992. The Emperor Domitian. London. McGowan, M.M. 2009. Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae Ex Ponto. Leiden. Méheust, J. 1971. Stace: Achilléide. Paris. Mozely, J.H. 1928. Statius: Thebaid, Achilleid. Cambridge, MA. Newlands, C.E. 2004. Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire. Cambridge. — 2012. Statius, Poet between Rome and Naples. London. Rebeggiani, S. (forthcoming). Statius’ Thebaid and the Destiny of the Empire. Rolfe, J.C. 1914. Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars. Cambridge, MA. Rutledge, S.H. 2001. Imperial Inquisitions: Prosecutors and Informants from Tiberius to Domitian. London. Scott, K. 1933. “Statius’ Adulation of Domitian,” AJPh 54: 247 – 59. Shackleton Bailey, D.R. 2004. Statius: Thebaid, Books 8 – 12, Achilleid. Cambridge, MA. Sharrock, A. and R. Ash. 2002. Fifty Key Classical Authors. London. Slavitt, D.R. 1997. Broken Columns: Two Roman Epic Fragments, The Achilleid of Publius Papinius Statius and the Rape of Proserpine of Claudius Claudianus. Philadelphia, PA. Varner, E.R. 2004. Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture. Leiden. Wartel, M. 1842. “Stace: Oeuvres”, in: M. Wartel et al. Stace, Martial, Manilius, Lucilius Junior, Rutilius, Gratius Faliscus, Nemesianus et Calpurnius. Paris, 306 – 31. Zanker, P. 2002. “Domitian’s Palace on the Palatine and the Imperial Image,” in A.K. Bowman, H.M. Cotton, M. Goodman, and S. Price (eds.), Representations of Empire: Rome and the Mediterranean World. Oxford, 105 – 30.

Martha Malamud

As if: Reflections on an Exemplary Wife Summary: Statius’ Siluae are an example of the public medium of elite reading culture in Flavian Rome. This article examines the politics of reading Siluae 5.1, a consolation to Abascantus, a high official in Domitian’s court, for the death of his wife, Priscilla. Siluae 5.1 exposes the disturbing dynamic of exemplarity, spectacle, and surveillance that characterized Flavian Rome. Dead Priscilla is recreated as an exemplary wife, but the various representations of her never harmonize into a coherent whole. There is the Priscilla that Statius would have painted or carved if his hand had the skill, the Priscilla that Apelles, master of illusionistic realism, would have painted, or that Phidias would have carved. Hovering allusively in the background are the wax statue that Laodamia takes to her bed and the mannequin Alcestis that Admetus looks forward to taking to his. As Statius proceeds through the poem, Priscilla is further refracted through simile bewilderingly piled upon simile. As Priscilla disappears into a sort of hall of mirrors, Abascantus emerges as a reflection and extension of Domitian. Keywords: Statius; Domitian; Siluae; Flavian literature; Latin poetry; Roman women; statues That’s my last duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will’t please you sit and look at her?

Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a dramatic monologue spoken by a widowed Duke who is showing someone a portrait of his wife. The reader is trapped in a one-sided dialogue in which he can never respond to the serially monogamous, relentlessly monologous narrator. The poem centers on a painting that we cannot see—a “wonder” that causes us to wonder: what does the painting look like? We are led to question the identity of the duchess who is the subject of the painting; the nature and motives of the narrator, the painter, and the painted duchess; the identity of the interlocutor; and finally our own complicity in the possessive, voyeuristic gaze of the narrator. Siluae 5.1, another poem about a widower’s response to the death of his wife in which her representation figures prominently, resembles “My Last Duchess” in several ways. In both poems, women are presented “as if” they were alive; in both, husbands replace their dead wives with artistic replicas. Like “My Last Duchess,” 5.1 is a meditation on likeness

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of various sorts—replication, representation, exemplarity, imitation, simile and similitude— set not in Renaissance Italy, but in the very different cultural context of Flavian Rome. The poem is addressed to the Emperor Domitian’s secretary ab epistulis, Abascantus, a year after the death of his wife, Priscilla. The earliest date for the poem is 94. Sometime before Domitian’s assassination in 96, Domitian replaced Abascantus, a freedman, with Titinius Capito, an equestrian, who held the post under Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. What happened to Abascantus is unknown, but some suspect he may have been a potential victim of Domitian’s purge of high-level freedmen from his court near the end of his reign. Alex Hardie has argued that against the backdrop of political turmoil at the end of Domitian’s reign, this poem should be read not so much as a consolatio as an attempt to allay Domitian’s growing mistrust of the freedmen in his household by emphasizing Abascantus’ loyalty and devotion.¹ Noelle Zeiner, picking up on this, analyzes the poem as Statius’ attempt to increase Abascantus’ social capital, and makes the case that Statius (perhaps on his own initiative, but more likely at the explicit request of Abascantus) has artfully exploited the occasion of Priscilla’s death, and deliberately molded her portrayal for the purpose of highlighting her husband’s distinction. By carefully fashioning Priscilla’s characterization as an idealized faithful wife, much like a “faithful Penelope,” Statius directly and indirectly promotes her husband’s imperial pietas as a form of symbolic capital distinctive in its own right…²

So, part of the work of this poem of mourning is political: as Carole Newlands puts it, “In the Siluae, consolation invites exploration of the interaction between the home and the state….This seems to be a defensive poem that uses mourning to cancel suspicions that Abascantus was less than loyal to Domitian.”³ As Newlands has pointed out, while the epic Thebaid explores at great length the phenomenon of female grief, the Siluae explore male grief for premature death. In both works, grief reverses traditional gender roles; the grieving women at the end of the Thebaid are possessed by masculine violence and frenzy, while in Siluae 5.1, Abascantus takes on the ritual behavior associated with grieving women and slaves when he surpasses his slaves in lamentation and prostrates himself upon the ground during his wife’s funeral. The excessive reality of death leads to excessive expression of grief, which the poet addresses with a strategy of

 Hardie ()  – . Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.  Zeiner () .  Newlands () .

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his own, a strategy of excessive exemplarity—an aspect of Statius’ over-the-top style so at odds with our modern conventions that, as Frederick Ahl noted in his seminal article on Statius, “The Rider and the Horse,” it could be taken as “mannerism gone mad.”⁴ The poem opens with an introductory prose preface, a letter to Abascantus, the first sentence of which is: omnibus adfectibus prosequenda sunt bona exempla, cum publice prosint. “Good exempla must be pursued with all our energies, when/since they benefit the public.”⁵ With this opening sentence Statius casts 5.1 as a meditation on exempla, which, true to his word, he does pursue with all his energies.⁶ The range of meaning of exemplum is vast—imitation, image, portrait, model, pattern, precedent, warning. Statius promises to pursue good exempla with all his energies: ego enim huic operi non ut unus e turba nec tantum quasi officiosus adsilui “For I have leapt to the task, not like one from a crowd nor only because I owe you a favor.” The dynamic verb adsilui reflects the breakneck poetics of the Siluae. ⁷ As he promises in the preface, Statius rushes to provide in 5.1 a torrent of exempla of various sorts, real and imagined, each an attempt to reflect the absent Priscilla; in the course of the poem, as Gibson observes, “Abascantus becomes exemplary by surpassing or matching other examples of devotion” (2006) 77. In what follows, I want to use 5.1 to examine various aspects of this exemplarity, which is a product of the elite reading and visual culture of Flavian Rome. As John Henderson has argued, cultural institutions such as poetry and the visual arts are inevitably focused on power relations: The whole point of the public medium of elite reading culture is to focus and orient civic discourse around the modelling and re-modelling of power-relations at the social summit. Institutions such as poetry frame terms for peaceful coexistence and parameters for (in) subordination; they need not only lead and reconcile people to their place. This is why the politics of reading is so crucial for any community this side of civil strife.

 Ahl () .  Henderson is worth reading on the importance of the prefaces to the project(s) of the Siluae: “Preface mediates between poems and reader, proposing a perspective for their reception. But Preface and poems also interact, in particular staging a discussion of ‘temporality.’ Readers of the book can move back and forth between reading the poems as representations of the occasions that motivated their composition, and reading the poems re-motivated as Statius’ offering to his reading public” Henderson () .  As Newlands ()  notes, Statius’ prose prefaces to the books of the Siluae “provide a significant forum…for laying out the poetic principles of the collection….The prefaces are a crucial part of the packaging of the poetry book as a tightly controlled artistic form”.  Wray () explores the far-ranging implications of the word silua and its Greek equivalent, hulē.

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Most scholars read 5.1 as a defense of Abascantus at a politically difficult moment. I do not disagree with this reading, but I would like to push beyond it to contemplate how Statius explores and exploits exemplarity as a means of modeling and re-modeling social relations between husband and wife, emperor and freedman, patron and artist, artist and subject.

Portraits of a Lady Statius begins with a recusatio in which he conjures up the encaustic paintings and ivory and gold sculptures that his hand is not skilled enough to bring to life (5.1.1– 9). Abascantus, Statius apostrophizes, deserves to have you, Priscilla, returned, your face represented by Apelles (the master of illusionary realism, whose paintings cannot be told from the real thing) or, in another medium, born again as a statue carved by Phidias, sculptor of the enormous statues of Olympian Zeus and Athena Parthenos. Then there is Priscilla the phantom, the umbra her husband vainly tries to snatch from the bier; and finally, the multiple portraits produced by exhausted artists to meet the frustrated Abascantus’ demands. As Helen Lovatt has observed, Statius, although he does not mention them by name in these opening lines, evokes literary exempla as well artistic representations: Admetus and Laodamia, widowed spouses who attempt to comfort themselves with images of the dead.⁸ In Euripides’ Alcestis, Admetus tactlessly tells his dying wife Alcestis of his intention to have a statue made of her and to take it to bed with him as a surrogate when she is gone (349 – 60). Admetus (at least apparently) gets his wife back from the underworld because Heracles appears fortuitously and manages to defeat Death in a wrestling match: Statius refers to this at lines 7– 8, ingens certamen cum Morte gerit, he [Abascantus] wages a huge battle against Death. In Alcestis, it is Heracles, Admetus’ surrogate who literally wrestles with Death; in Siluae 5.1, Abascantus wrestles Death by hiring artists to portray his dead wife. In Alcestis, Admetus’ sexual surrogate statue remains imaginary, unless we view the veiled and silenced woman who appears at the end of the play as the statue’s equivalent. Because the woman cannot speak, the audience does not know for sure whether Heracles has indeed  Lovatt () . She also notes that in addition to Admetus and Protesilaus, Statius here evokes Siluae ., where Lucan’s widow Polla continues to worship his statue long after his death. Admetus and Alcestis and Protesilaus and Laodamia are also paired and offered as role models in Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto ., a poem that serves as a source for both Siluae . and Statius’ poem to his own wife, Claudia (Siluae .).

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brought back Alcestis from the dead, as Heracles claims, or a different woman, or even, as Stieber (1998) suggests, Alcestis’ funerary statue. The story of Protesilaus and Laodamia has several variants. All agree that Protesilaus leaves his bride to fight with the Greeks in the Trojan War; according to an oracle, the first Greek to leap to shore was destined to die. As the etymologies of his name suggest, Protesilaus fulfilled that destiny. His name can be construed as “first to jump,” from Greek protos + hallomai, to leap or jump; or “first of the troop,” protos + laos, assembly, people, troop). In some versions of the story, the gods take pity on the devastated bride and send Protesilaus back from the dead, but only for a short time; Laodamia then dies of grief as she embraces his corpse and accompanies him to the underworld. In other versions, she consoles herself for his original absence or his death by sleeping with a statue of him.⁹ When her father discovers her strange behavior, he has the statue burned; she casts herself on the pyre and is burnt along with the statue. In his discussion of the myth, Maurizio Bettini notes the emergence of a model from the different versions of the story, that the shade of the dead Protesilaus is equivalent to the portrait surrogate possessed by Laodamia.¹⁰ We see the same quasiequivalency in Abascantus’ attempt to lift the umbra of his wife from the pyre and to “love her in every material.”¹¹ Both are ways of “waging war on death.” In the sentence from the preface quoted above, ego enim huic operi non ut unus e turba nec tantum quasi officiosus adsilui, Statius characterizes himself as leaping to the task, but not as one of a turba (‘troop’). In his use of adsilui and turba Statius alludes to both etymologies of the second half of Protesilaus’s name (turba recalls laos, while adsilui renders hallomai). One might note further that, anagrammatically, adsilui contains silua, as does Protesilaus. And while it is likely that Siluae 5 was published posthumously, and so may not have been arranged by Statius, it is still worth noting one further anagrammatical play: 5.1 is the first, protos, poem of this book of Siluae. Protesilaus, who appears in many forms—a living man, a dream, a dead body, a ghost, a statue, and a subject

 Protesilaus is first mentioned at Iliad . – . According to the Cypria (f.  Davies), his wife was Polydama, daughter of Meleager but later accounts say she was Laodamia, daughter of Acastus. The first attestation of her meeting with Protesilaus’s ghost after death seems to be Euripides’ (lost) Protesilaus. See also Pseudo-Apollodorus, Epitome to The Library, E..; Ovid, Epistulae (Heroides), ; Hyginus Fabulae  and . Collard and Cropp ()  –  have a good summary of the sources for variants of the story of Protesilaus and Laodamia.  Bettini () .  See Gibson ()  on translating metallum as material. And, surely it should be her body, not her shade, which can be lifted from the pyre?

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of poetic texts—is an appropriate figure to underlie the preface both to this poem and to Siluae 5 as a whole, in which three of the five poems are consolations. Statius moves from attempts to reproduce the dead Priscilla to describing the emotions of Abascantus at her death; this involves more exemplars. One is Orpheus, who is closely associated with the myth of Alcestis, but not in a way flattering to Abascantus.¹² Abascantus is so distraught that Orpheus would not have been able to comfort him, not even if backed by a parade of priests of Apollo and Bacchus and all eight of his aunts, the Muses The ninth is his mother Calliope, who is not mentioned; she may still be busy mourning dead Lucan, as she was in Siluae 2.7. Helen Lovatt has analyzed the use of Orpheus in the Siluae; in regard to 5.1 she notes, “This image slips away from what you might expect: Orpheus triumphant over death, who succeeded up to a point in resurrecting his wife. Instead, he is Statius, in competition with Abascantus’ grief for control of his mind. Far from resurrecting Priscilla, Statius encodes the defeat of the function of his poem: he cannot even console.”¹³ In the next cluster of exempla, Abascantus out-weeps a triad of archetypal grieving mothers: Niobe, Thetis, and Aurora.¹⁴ His extravagant grief symbolically unmans him, casting him in an abjectly feminine role;¹⁵ as we shall see, the gender reversal is sustained throughout the poem, with Priscilla taking on the active, masculine role opposite her feminized husband. At this precise point there is an imperial intervention, as Abascantus’ excessive grief attracts Domitian’s attention: macte animi! notat ista deus qui flectit habenas orbis et humanos propior Ioue digerit actus, maerentemque uidet lectique arcana ministri. hinc etiam documenta capit, quod diligis umbram et colis exsequias. hic est castissimus ardor,

 See Plato, Symposium d for Orpheus as a failed Alcestis, and Euripides, Alcestis  – , where Admetus promises to create a statue of Alcestis as a sexual surrogate, then imagines a phantom Alcestis visiting in his dreams and wishes he had the voice of Orpheus to summon her back from Hades.  Lovatt () .  Of these three, Niobe and Aurora are associated with statues—Niobe becomes a statue, and there was a famous speaking statue that commemorates Aurora’s son Memnon. Ancient sources on the statue: Strabo, Geography ..; Tac. Annals .; Plin. Naturalis Historia .; Pausanias, Guide to Greece I..; Lucian Toxaris ., Philopseudes .. The most extensive account is in Philostratus’s Vita Apollonii ..  Cf. Plato Symposium d (and n.  above), where Orpheus is less successful than Alcestis in saving his spouse.

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hic amor a domino meritus censore probari. Siluae 5.1.37– 42 Bless your soul! The god who guides the reins Of the universe and, closer than Jove, interprets human performances, takes note of those things, and sees both the grieving man and the secret thoughts of his chosen minister. From here indeed he gathers proof that you love her ghost and care for her funeral rites. This is most chaste passion, this love deserves to be approved by the Lord Censor.

Statius here stresses Domitian’s divinity: he is a god, deus, closer than Jupiter, who guides the reins of the universe. Readers of the Siluae—and of Fred Ahl’s “The Rider and the Horse” – have seen this god guiding the reins before, in the description of the enormous equestrian statue of Domitian in Siluae 1.1: An te Palladiae talem, Germanice, nobis Effinxere manus qualem modo frena tenentem Rhenus et attoniti uidit domus ardua Daci? Siluae 1.1.5 – 7 Was it the hands of Pallas, Germanicus, that shaped you thus for us, holding the reins, just as the Rhine and the steep home of the astonished Dacian saw you?

A little later in that poem, Statius describes the statue, addressing it, or the emperor, in the second person: Ipse autem puro celsum caput aere saeptus Templa superfulges et prospectare uideris, An noua contemptis surgant Palatia flammis Pulchrius, an tacita uigilet face Troicus ignis Atque exploratas iam laudet Vesta ministras. Siluae 1.1.32– 36 But you yourself, your lofty head surrounded by the pure ether, gleam above the temples and seem to oversee whether the new Palace rises more lovely, scorning the flames, or whether the Trojan fire stands guard with silent torch and Vesta now praises her tested servants.

The emperor controls, through his prospective gaze, both the rising buildings of Flavian Rome and the archetype of forbidden interior space, the temple of

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Vesta.¹⁶ The colossal statue’s scrutiny of the Vestals is a reminder of one of Domitian’s most notorious actions, his prosecution of the Vestal Virgins and the men accused of being their lovers. These trials culminated in the condemnation of the Chief Vestal Cornelia, who was buried alive in 86, the year when Domitian made himself Censor for Life. Once again, it is in the role of censor perpetuus that Domitian appears in Siluae 5.1; the language in lines 37– 42 makes this strikingly clear. He takes note of things (notat ista); he interprets the performances of people, humanos…digerit actus; he sees (uidet) both the grieving Abascantus and his innermost secrets (arcana), and gathers proof (documenta) about him. Abascantus’ love of his wife’s ghost and his care for her remains meet with official censorial approval—“this most chaste passion, this love deserves to be approved by the Lord Censor.” Suetonius describes the correction of public morals through the policing of personal behavior as a hallmark of Domitian’s reign.¹⁷ It is evident in this poem as well, and it extends beyond Domitian’s scrutiny of Abascantus’ official duties to the scrutiny of his secret thoughts and gestures of mourning as well. The theme of Concordia was important to Domitian,¹⁸ and the figure of Concordia appeared on his coinage with both Domitian’s niece, Julia, and his wife, Domitia. Statius draws attention to this Flavian virtue in lines 43 – 47: Nec mirum, si uos collato pectore mixtos iunxit inabrupta Concordia longa catena. illa quidem nuptumque prior taedasque marito passa alio, sed te ceu uirginitate iugatum uisceribus totis animaque amplexa fouebat; Siluae 5.1. 43 – 47 It is no wonder if Concordia joined you two, mingled in love, breast to breast, with a long, non-snapped chain. She, indeed, endured another marriage earlier and a wedding to another husband, but she embraced and cherished you, yoked to her in marriage, like a virgin, body and soul.

Gibson (2006: ad loc.) notes the irony (“The image of the unbroken chain, referring to the married life of Priscilla and Abascantus, is ironic, since the link has been broken by death”) and the etymological wordplay on collato pectore and Concordia. John Henderson brings out the emphasis in his rendering of lines 43 – 44:

 Fredrick () .  Suet. Domitian .  Nauta () .

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No surprise, you two. Linked hearts, stir, conjugate. Harmonics sostenuto. Enchained melody.

He comments, “The (too much protestant) coinage and hapax in-ab-ruptus, (“non-snapped”) tells us (generically) to mark the end—and that white wedding hocus, what’s that?“¹⁹

Like a Virgin Yes, what is that white wedding hocus? Lines 45 – 46 are odd enough to have generated textual difficulties. Editors have found the manuscript reading iugatum vexing; as Gibson puts it, this gives the “slightly strange sense” ‘she used to cherish you, when you had been married…as if in her maidenhood.’ Baehrens proposed, and Gibson accepts, the emendation iugata, which he translates “she cherished you as if joined to you as a virgin bride,’” taking iugata as a nominative—this is the translation he uses in his edition.²⁰ But, as Frederick Ahl takes great pains to teach his students, sometimes a perceived textual problem is generated by editors’ expectation of what the author must have intended to say. In this case, editors think, surely it must be the wife who is yoked and domesticated by marriage, not the husband. Wouldn’t a yoked husband be “slightly strange?” There is, however, a notable precedent for such a reversal of roles at Siluae 3.5, where Statius reflects on his own marriage to Claudia. In both poems, the wife is in control, older, and more experienced than her husband. Here is Statius describing his own wedding night: Etenim tua, nempe benigna, Quam mihi sorte Venus iunctam florentibus annis Seruat, et in senium, tua, quae me uulnere primo Intactum thalamis et adhuc iuuenile uagantem Fixisti, tua frena libens docilisque recepi, Et semel insertas non mutaturus habenas Vsque premo… Siluae 3.5.22– 8 For willingly and tamely I took your reins—your kind reins! For Venus keeps you, luckily joined to me in my young years,

 Henderson () .  If iugata is an ablative to be construed with uirginitate, says Gibson () ad loc., “the sense is perhaps more strained: she, as if her maidenhood were being yoked, used to cherish you…”

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safe for me into old age, you who pierced me when I was still untouched by sex and confused, like a teenager. And, not about to exchange those reins you inserted, I press on, all the way…

In this marriage, it is the older, experienced Claudia who does the penetrating and taming—the youthful Statius was intactum until she pierced him (fixisti); he tamely (docilis) receives the reins she inserts in his mouth (insertas…habenas). If Statius himself is the horse bridled and ridden by his wife, why find it “slightly strange” that Abascantus is the one who goes under the yoke in 5.1?²¹ To me, the most peculiar aspect of this line is not who is yoking whom, but rather the erasure of Priscilla’s previous marriage. Lest we miss the point, Statius picks up on this notion and hammers it home in lines 51– 6: laudantur proauis seu pulchrae munere formae, quae morum caruere bonis falsaeque potentes laudis egent uerae: tibi quamquam et origo niteret et felix species multumque optanda maritis, ex te maior honos, unum nouisse cubile, unum secretis agitare sub ossibus ignem. Siluae 5.1.51– 6 Women who lack good character and have reputations Rather than good repute are praised for their ancestors and The gift of a lovely form: although you have a splendid Ancestry and a fortunate appearance and are greatly In demand as a wife, there is a greater honor that comes from you yourself: That you know only one bed, that one flame stirs deep within your bones.

Here it is instructive to read 5.1 against another of the Siluae. Statius tells us in the letter to Abascantus that Priscilla was a particular friend of his own wife, Claudia, and there are a number of echoes throughout the poem of Siluae 3.5, which Statius presents as a “conversation,” sermo, with his wife, intended to persuade her to retire with him to Naples. Both women are older than their husbands, both have been married before. The fidelity of both is compared to that of ancient heroines—in Priscilla’s case, immediately after praising her for being a uniuira, Statius compares her to a triad of heroines, Helen, Aerope (wife of Atreus), and Penelope. All are exemplary—two exemplars of unfaithfulness, one of loyalty. illum nec Phrygius uitiasset raptor amorem Dulichiiue proci nec qui fraternus adulter

 Henderson () ; Treggiari ()  – .

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casta Mycenaeo conubia polluit auro. Siluae 5.1.57– 9 That Phrygian pirate would not have violated that love of hers, Nor the Ithacan suitors nor the one who committed adultery against his own brother and polluted a chaste marriage with Mycenean gold.

Claudia too is compared to Penelope at the beginning of 3.5, in an amusing sketch that perhaps gives us a glimpse of her strong personality, ²² and later to a cluster of heroines—Penelope, Aegiale, Meliboea, and Laodamia, again exemplars of both good and bad wifely behavior. In Priscilla’s case, her achievement of the status of uniuira is what raises her to the rank of exemplary women. Claudia, however, demonstrates her exemplary wifely qualities in a very different way: Sic certe cineres umbramque priorem Quaeris adhuc, sic exsequias amplexa canori Coniugis ingentes iterasti pectore planctus Iam mea. Siluae 3.5.51– 4 Certainly in just this way you still seek the ashes and shade of your prior husband, in just this way you embraced the remains of your poet-husband and again and again you—my wife now—have poured laments from your breast.

In addition to Claudia, other examples from the Siluae suggest that Priscilla’s erasure of her first husband is extraordinary—Polla, Lucan’s wife, has a shrine to her first husband and celebrates his birthday; Violentilla hesitates to remarry out of loyalty to her dead husband. It is thus puzzling that critics find nothing odd about the claim that Priscilla know only one bed. “To be called uniuira was one of the highest compliments to a married woman, particularly in an age when divorce and remarriage were by no means uncommon,” says Bruce

 Etsi egomet patrio de litore raptus Quattuor emeritis per bella, per aequora lustris Errarem, tu mille procos intacta fugares, Non imperfectas commenta retexere telas Sed sine fraude palam, thalamosque armata negasses. Siluae 3.5.6 – 10 Indeed if I had been torn from my native land and were wandering for twenty long years through wars and over the seas, you, unviolated, would have put a thousand suitors to flight, not by deceptively reweaving the unfinished fabric—no, you would have grabbed a sword and openly, without fraud, refused to let them in your bed.

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Gibson.²³ He and Zeiner-Carmichael (2007) both agree that casting Priscilla as a uniuira is a way of expressing the depth of her love of her husband. But the claim to monogamy comes right after the reminder of Priscilla’s previous marriage in 45 – 6, and the effect is jarring. The poker-faced claim that Priscilla was just like a virgin when she married, and just like a uniuira (except for the fact that she was married before) is quintessential ‘truthiness,’ and Statius, like American comedian Stephen Colbert, is adept at exposing its mechanism and leaving us to deal with the resulting cognitive dissonance.²⁴

The Good Wife After doubling down on Priscilla’s faux virginity, not to mention the erasure of her former husband, Statius returns to praising her, imagining how she would have heroically followed her husband into battle or risked dangerous sea voyages to be with him—but fortunately, she did not have to; she was able to help him just as much by her prayers to the gods and the emperor: sed meliore uia dextros tua uota marito promeruere deos, dum nocte dieque fatigas numina, dum cunctis supplex aduolueris aris et mitem genium domini praesentis adoras. Siluae 5.1.71– 4 But –a better way—your prayers have rendered the gods Favorable to your husband, as you wear them down night And day, as you prostrate yourself in prayer at every altar And worship the kind genius of the lord who is with us.

Priscilla’s assiduous supplication of the emperor echoes that of other poems in praise of an absent but carefully constructed literary wife; Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1, which, as Henderson (2007) has demonstrated, is an important model for Siluae 3.5, and Tristia 1.6. In Tristia 1.6, Ovid compares his wife to many exemplary

 Gibson () .  ‘Truthiness’ was the American Dialect Society’s word of the year in , after being coined by Stephen Colbert in . Merriam Webster defines it thus: 1. truthiness (noun) 1 : ‘truth that comes from the gut, not books’ (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” October 2005) 2 : ‘the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true’ (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

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wives, including Laodamia and Penelope, and ends the wives with Livia, the wife of Augustus (Ovid’s wife, like Augustus’ Livia, was his third): ²⁵ femina seu princeps omnes tibi culta per annos te docet exemplum coniugis esse bonae, adsimilemque sui longa adsuetudine fecit, grandia si paruis adsimilare licet. Tristia 1.25 – 8. Or whether that first among women, worshipped by you through the years, teaches you to be the exemplary good wife, and, by long association, makes you like herself, if one may liken small things to great.

In Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1 Ovid, writing from exile, lays out in detail what he wants his wife to do for him back in Rome. Priscilla’s labors on behalf of Abascantus are clearly modeled on Ovid’s instructions to his wife, who is told to work for him night and day (nocte dieque, 3.1.40), and not to demonstrate her heroism by going into battle (which Priscilla is prepared to do but does not), but rather to supplicate the emperor (which is what Priscilla, successfully, does): Nota tua est probitas testataque tempus in omne: sit uirtus etiam non probitate minor. Nec tibi Amazonia est pro me sumenda securis aut excisa leui pelta gerenda manu. Numen adorandum est, non ut mihi fiat amicum, sed sit ut iratum quam fuit ante minus. Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1.93 – 8 Your virtue is known and established for all time: don’t let your courage be less than your virtue. You don’t have to lift an Amazon’s axe on my account, or carry a crescent shield on your slender arm. You must beseech the god, not that he befriend me, but that he be less angry with me than before.²⁶

Ovid specifically states that his wife is playing a role, and that she will be called an exemplum of the good wife: Magna tibi inposita est nostris persona libellis: coniugis exemplum diceris esse bonae.

 Thanks to Ioannis Ziogas for this observation.  Transl. A.S. Kline () poetryintranslation.com, (http://www.poetryintranslation.com/ PITBR/Latin/OvidExPontoBkThree.htm#anchor_Toc)

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Hanc caue degeneres, ut sint praeconia nostra uera; uide Famae quod tuearis opus. …… Quicquid ages igitur, scena spectabere magna et pia non paucis testibus uxor eris. Crede mihi, quotiens laudaris carmine nostro, qui legit has laudes, an mereare rogat. Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.43 – 6; 59 – 62 A great role has been imposed on you in my little books: you are said to be the model of a good wife. Take care you don’t slip from that position, so what I have Published is true. See that you guard Fame’s work. … And so, whatever you do, you will be watched on a great stage, and you’ll be a virtuous wife before many witnesses. Believe me, whenever you are praised in my verse, whoever reads that praise asks if you deserve it.²⁷

Both Ovid’s wife and Priscilla play the role of the Good Wife before “many witnesses”—the emperor above all, for whom the performance is intended, but also his court, the commemorating, judging poet, and posterity. The parallel with Mrs. Ovid suggests that a significant part of Priscilla’s claim to be a good wife was her successful intercession on her husband’s behalf to Domitian. In Siluae 5.1.75 – 83, Statius congratulates Priscilla for persuading Domitian to appoint Abascantus as secretary ab epistulis, a job that entails passing on intelligence and tracking soldiers and bureaucrats—very similar to Domitian the Censor’s own activities. And, once again, Domitian appears as the all-seeing, all-knowing, master of the four quarters of the universe. Priscilla’s exemplary wifely qualities are described through a cavalcade of oddly juxtaposed similes. Prostrating herself at Domitian’s feet, she pours out her heart, and her rapture is compared to two types of violently possessed, raving women: the Pythia wandering, somewhat out of her Delphic zip code, on Helicon, and a Bacchant leading the revels. These similes of frenzied women are at odds with the qualities Statius singles out to praise—Priscilla’s quies, probitas, and mores modesti. Her career culminates in an imaginary trip by her husband’s side, as he enters battle next to Domitian (127– 34): parva loquor. tecum gelidas comes illa per arctos Sarmaticasque hiemes Histrumque et pallida Rheni

 Translation adapted from A.S. Kline ().

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frigora, tecum omnes animo durata per aestus ²⁸ * * * * * * et, si castra darent, uellet gestare pharetras, uellet Amazonia latus intercludere pelta; Caesarei prope fulmen equi diuinaque tela uibrantem et magnae sparsum sudoribus hastae dum te puluerea bellorum nube uideret. Siluae 5.1.127– 34.

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I speak of trifles. She, your companion through The icy north, the Slavic winters and the Danube And the white cold of the Rhine, with you she endured in her mind Through all the summer heat * * * And, if the camps allowed, she would carry quivers, She would protect her flank with an Amazon’s shield, As long as she could see you, in the dusty cloud of war, Next to the thunderbolt of Caesar’s horse, hurling divine weapons And sprinkled with sweat from his great spear.

Like Statius’ Claudia and Ovid’s wife, Priscilla would follow her husband anywhere, even play the part of an Amazon, as long as she could see him next to Domitian’s war horse, brandishing divine weapons as if he were the deified emperor, bizarrely sprinkled with the sweat of the imperial spear. Cut, and cue the violins—it’s time for the death scene. Pausing only to change his costume (he exchanges his laurel crown for funereal cypress), Statius hastens from describing the highlight of Priscilla’s life—her husband’s proximity to Domitian’s spear—to her death and Abascantus’ reaction to it. The peripeteia provokes an impassioned outburst from the poet: Quisnam impacata consanguinitate ligauit Fortunam Inuidiamque deus? quis iussit iniquas aeternum bellare deas? nullamne notauit illa domum, toruo quam non haec lumine figat protinus et saeva proturbet gaudia dextra Siluae 5.1.137– 41 For what god has bound Fortuna and Envy in implacable kinship? Who ordered these unjust goddesses to wage eternal war?

 The asterisks that follow represent a lacuna. See Gibson () , note ad  – . The text is vexed, and he follows Courtney in positing a lacuna at line .

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Is there no house noted by the former that the latter does not instantly fix with her evil eye and overthrow its joys with her savage hand?

Statius attributes Priscilla’s sudden illness to the “implacable kinship” of Fortuna and Invidia, goddesses who should not belong together but who team up to bring destruction to the household. Once again the language of censorial surveillance surfaces, as Fortuna takes note of houses, notauit, which Inuidia then fixes with her evil eye, toruo…lumine figat. Etymological wordplay is at work again here, as Inuidia is deployed against Abascantus. Baskania is a Greek equivalent of inuidia—it means malignant magic or jealousy, the evil eye, as the etymological gloss toruo lumine brings out. Abascantus should be “free from inuidia,” as his name implies, but instead he falls prey to it. ²⁹ Priscilla’s deathbed bears a strange resemblance to the imperial court, with Priscilla taking on the role of censor in her death throes. Like the emperor, she is surrounded by a throng of hangers-on—in her case, doctors and servants—who conceal their true feelings. Both hypocrisy and surveillance are present in the dying woman’s chamber, as her comrades try to deceive her with feigned expressions of hope, while she takes censorial note (notat) of her weeping husband: comites tamen undique ficto/ spem simulant uultu, flentem notat illa maritum. The more fortunate Mrs. Ovid did not, as far as we know, have to keep on playing the Good Wife on her deathbed, but Priscilla keeps up her exemplary performance to the end, even outdoing Alcestis as she succumbs to her illness: Iamque cadunt uultus oculisque nouissimus error optunsaeque aures, nisi cum uox sola mariti noscitur; illum unum media de morte reuersa mens uidet, illum aegris circumdat fortiter ulnis immotas obuersa genas, nec sole supremo lumina sed dulci mauult satiare marito. Siluae 5.1.170 – 5 And now her face falls and her eyes begin their final wandering and her ears are dulled, except when her husband’s voice alone is recognized; her mind, returned from the midst of death, sees only him; bravely, she throws her feeble arms around him, turning her motionless eyes³⁰ towards him. She would rather sate her eyes with her sweet husband than with a last glimpse of the sun.

 The wordplay is noted by Nauta ()  n.  and Gibson () ad loc.  Gibson () ad loc. argues convincingly for translating genas as ‘eyes’ here.

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The scene is modeled on Alcestis 201– 8, when Alcestis is feeling the effects of impending death.³¹ Admetus holds her in his arms, mourning, begging. Alcestis’s only action is to search desperately for one last look at the Sun’s bright circle of rays—rather pointedly not at her self-pitying husband. But in 5.1, Priscilla takes a far more active role, perhaps embodying, as she reprises Alcestis’ death, the strength inherent in Alcestis’ name (from Greek alkē, courage, prowess, strength—a manly quality). Though her senses are fading, she can still recognize her husband’s voice, still see him; she puts her sickly arms around him, and she out-wifes the exemplary Alcestis by preferring the sight of her husband to a final glimpse of the sun. A little later, after her deathbed speech, she takes an even more proactive role. Normally the grieving relative catches the dying person’s last breath, and closes his or her eyes. But it is Priscilla who passes her dying breath into her husband’s mouth, she who takes his hands and closes her own eyes with them. On her deathbed, Priscilla gathers her strength for a final speech, in which she rehearses the reasons why she is willing to accept her fate. Once again, from a husband’s point of view, she outdoes Alcestis. While Alcestis complains that she is taken from life too soon, and that it would have been more natural for his parents to sacrifice themselves for Admetus, Priscilla argues that because she is older, she ought to die first. Where Alcestis’ urgent concern is for her children, and she makes Admetus swear not to replace her with a stepmother, the childless Priscilla’s concern is entirely for the further advancement of her husband’s career. We shall return to her advice on the best means for advancement below. After Priscilla’s death, Abascantus reacts with maddened grief, first attempting suicide, then indulging in necrophilia.³² He holds a lavish, no-expensespared funeral, awash in exotic incense and spices, featuring the Loved One’s embalmed body on a palanquin shaded by purple fabric. We learn that Priscilla has been laid to rest in a tomb outside the city, on the Via Appia near the Almo river. The actual tomb has likely been identified; it is a round, two-story structure with thirteen aediculated niches on the upper story in which statues would have been placed. Statius describes it at length: hic te Sidonio uelatam molliter ostro eximius coniunx (nec enim fumantia busta clamoremque rogi potuit perferre) beato

 In Epistulae ex Ponto .. – , Ovid proposes Alcestis as a role model for his wife.  Statius rather graphically describes his passionate embrace of his dead wife’s corpse: ore ligato/ incubat amissae, with mouth glued to hers, he lies on top of his missing wife, . – .

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composuit, Priscilla, toro. nil longior aetas carpere, nil aeui poterunt uitiare labores: sic cautum [siccatam] membris; tantas uenerabile marmor spirat opes. mox in uarias mutata nouaris effigies: hoc aere Ceres, hoc lucida Cnosis, illo Maia nites, Venus hoc non improba saxo. accipiunt uultus haud indignata decoros numina Siluae 5.1.225 – 35 Here your excellent husband placed you, Priscilla, softly veiled in Sidonian purple, on a blessed couch (for he could not endure the smoking pyre and the roar of the funeral fire). Additional years will not be able to harm; the toils of time will not be able to corrupt you, so much care has been taken with your body [with your limbs thus embalmed], so much wealth the venerable marble exudes. Soon you are made new, changed into various shapes: you gleam as Ceres in this bronze statue, in this one as the shining Cretan, Maia in that, and as modest Venus in this stone. The goddesses, not at all angered, accept your lovely features.

In the tomb are statues of different goddesses, each with Priscilla’s features; wherever Abascantus looks, he sees Priscilla in a different guise and a different material. In Statius’ conceit, the goddesses are honored to be given her beautiful features. Abascantus has servants prepare constant banquets there, and the place is always crowded. It is, cries Statius, a house, a house, not a tomb!³³ And this emotional response triggers a revelation in a passer-by: hac merito uisa pietate mariti protinus exclames: ’est hic, agnosco, minister illius, aeternae modo qui sacraria genti condidit inque alio posuit sua sidera caelo’. Siluae 5.1.238 – 41 Once you have seen the husband’s piety, you would instantly, and rightly, exclaim, “I recognize him! This man is the minister of that man who just recently founded a temple to his eternal dynasty and placed his own constellations in another heaven!”

That man, ille, is Domitian. You, says Statius, would be able to recognize Abascantus through his likeness to Domitian, who in 94 dedicated the Templum Flaviae Gentis on the site of his own birthplace, near the Temple of Romulus on the Quirinal. Domitian’s temple is the tenor, Priscilla’s tomb the vehicle; similitude

 Perhaps another allusion to Protesilaus, who is described by Homer as being in the process of building his house when he died.

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yokes the emperor and his aspiring freedman together in an inseparable bond, like the unnaturally yoked Fortuna and Inuidia. Imitating his emperor, Abascantus creates a hybrid structure that is both a house and a tomb. Domitian’s Templum was also a hybrid, both a mausoleum and a temple, marking a change from Julio-Claudian practice of keeping the mausoleum separate.³⁴ Abascantus has the resources to represent his wife as a series of goddesses. As a god himself, Domitian was able to go farther and have his family members— Titus, Vespasian, and Domitian’s son, who died as a child—officially deified and later buried in the Flavian Templum. Perhaps more to the point for 5.1, the most recently deified occupant of the Temple of the Flavian Dynasty was Titus’s daughter and Domitian’s niece, Julia, who died in 91.³⁵ As Zeiner reads the meaning of Priscilla’s tomb, “(t)he implication is that Abascantus’ religious pietas mirrors that of the Emperor—in this case imitation is not only a form of flattery, but proof of imperial pietas….Like Domitian Abascantus provides not just a funerary tomb, but a monument and temple. This act of faithful imitation may become even more significant when we realize that higher-ranked Romans generally did not follow such a funerary practice, and thus Abascantus has “shown himself a true servant of Domitian.”³⁶ The similarity between the emperor and his official is reinforced through a metaphor comparing Domitian to a great ship and Abascantus to a small bark, both sharing the same sea.³⁷ With this exuberant apostrophe, Statius encourages “you,” his audience, to read Priscilla’s tomb as an imitation, or emulation, of the Templum Flaviae Gentis, and thus to read the multiple representations of Priscilla as reflections of the divinized Julia. According to several sources, Domitian had a long-standing, public affair with his niece. Suetonius says: After persistently refusing his niece, who was offered him in marriage when she was still a virgin, because he was entangled in an intrigue with Domitia, he seduced her shortly afterwards when she became the wife of another, and that too during the lifetime of Titus. Later, when she was bereft of father and husband, he loved her ardently and without disguise, and even became the cause of her death by compelling her to get rid of a child of his by abortion. Suetonius Domitian 22.1, Loeb transl. Rolfe (1914).

   

Davies ()  – . Wood ()  – . Zeiner () . .. – ; see Zeiner () .

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Whether or not Domitian actually had an affair with his niece, Julia played an important role in Domitian’s construction of the imagery of the imperial family.³⁸ There are numerous coin-types representing her on one side and a goddess on the other. A half-naked Venus is a common reverse, but she also appears as Concordia, Ceres, Vesta, and Cybele. The women of the imperial household were frequently represented as goddesses. Three busts of Julia as Venus survive; no fulllength statues of her remain, but Martial 6.13 describes a statue of Julia as a sexy, half-nude Venus.³⁹ At Statius’ urging, “you” will identify Domitian’s treatment of the dead Julia as a model for Abascantus’ uxorious behavior, and it is evident from Martial and Juvenal (who wrote after Domitan’s death) that Domitian’s relationship with Julia was not necessarily construed as a positive model.⁴⁰ But while Abascantus imitates Domitian in the architecture of his wife’s tomb, he looks back to an earlier emperor in his treatment of Priscilla’s body, which he has embalmed, draped in purple, and displayed on a couch. This is highly unusual. Embalming was not a normal Roman practice, and when it is described, it is marked emphatically as non-Roman: Tacitus calls it “a custom of foreign kings” (Annals 16.6.2). But Abascantus is not acting entirely without precedent. Pompey’s head was embalmed, according to Lucan, so it could be presented to Caesar,⁴¹ and Marc Antony was embalmed so he could

 Vinson () argues that the charge of adultery is post-Domitianic invective; Grewing ()  concurs.  Coleman ()  notes that Martial, at least, portrayed the relationship as adulterous in ..  Juvenal hones in on both the proliferation of images of Domitian and his inability to sire a successor in an invective against Julia written after Domitian’s death that stresses the hypocrisy of his moral reforms: qualis erat nuper tragico pollutus adulter concubitu, qui tunc leges reuocabat Amaras omnibus atque ipsis Veneri Martique timendas, cum tot abortiuis fecundam Iulia uulvam solueret et patruo similes effunderet offas. Juvenal Satires 2.29 – 33 “That’s how Domitian, that recent adulterer, behaved, defiled By a fatal union, he who revived such bitter laws in his day, To terrify everyone, even the deities, even Venus and Mars, While Julia, his niece, ditched the contents of her ripe womb With abortifacients, and shed lumps resembling her uncle. Is it not just then and right, when the extremes of depravity Sneer at every false Scaurus, and bite back when castigated? (Transl. A.S. Kline 2011).  Lucan BC . –  (tr. Braund): Then by their hideous art

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be buried by Cleopatra. Given that Pompey and Antony both died in Egypt, where embalming was standard practice, this is not a startling development. More surprisingly, Nero embalmed his wife, Poppaea Sabina, after her untimely death. The grief-stricken husband gave her an elaborate funeral, in which a year’s worth of exotic spices was consumed; delivered the funeral oration himself; and had her buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus, which housed the remains of the Julio-Claudians. According to Cassius Dio 63.26, Poppaea was later posthumously honored with a temple inaugurated by Nero in the spring of 68, shortly before his own death. There she received honors in the guise of the goddess Venus. Patrick Kragelund (2010) has recently proposed that this temple was located in Campania, and that Nero may have hastened his own demise by lingering longer than was wise in Naples, ignoring urgent messages about trouble in Rome, in order to dedicate the temple on the Kalends of April (the month he had renamed after himself). If Kragelund is correct, Neapolitan Statius is likely to have visited the temple himself. But even embalming, deification, and a temple were not enough for Nero. He also surrounded himself with Poppaea surrogates: ….Nero missed her so greatly after her death that on learning of a woman who resembled her he at first sent for her and kept her; but later he caused a boy of the freedmen, whom he used to call Sporus, to be castrated, since he, too, resembled Sabina, and he used him in every way like a wife. In due time, though already “married” to Pythagoras, a freedman, he formally “married” Sporus, and assigned the boy a regular dowry according to contract; and the Romans as well as others publicly celebrated their wedding.⁴²

Not content with having female and male surrogates, the histrionic and sentimental emperor performed Poppaea as well—Dio tells us that he “wore masks, sometimes resembling his roles, sometimes resembling his own face; [but] all his female masks were fashioned in the likeness of Poppaea, so that she, even though dead, might tread the stage” (Dio 63.9.5).⁴³

the fluid is taken from the head, the brain removed and skin dried out, and rotten moisture flowed away from deep 690 within, and the features were solidified by drugs instilled…  Dio ., tr. E. Cary (Loeb  – ).  Transl. Cary. It was a common custom for aristocratic families to hire professional mimes to imitate the dead at funerals—at Vespasian’s funeral, the dead emperor was impersonated by a mime actor named Favor. “Even at his funeral, Favor, a leading actor of mimes, who wore his mask and, according to the usual custom, imitated the actions and words of the deceased during his lifetime, having asked procurators in a loud voice how much his funeral procession would cost, and hearing the reply “Ten million sesterces,” cried out: “Give me a hundred thousand and

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The obsession with theatricality and spectacle, simulation and dissimulation in Neronian and Flavian Rome is well summed up in Joseph Smith’s comment on the post-Neronian drama Octavia, which brings out the uneasy slippage between resemblance and dissemblance that permeates the literature of the period: “The face…in so far as it provides the superficial signs of the underlying person, functions as a mask; Nero’s court, as Octavia would have it, is a cabinet of living imagines.” ⁴⁴ The Flavian emperors were busily transforming the city of Rome into an imperial stage set for this cabinet of masks. In “Architecture and Surveillance in Flavian Rome,” David Fredrick describes how the architecture and urban space of Flavian Rome reflects the construction of the emperor as an omniscient, omnipotent being, arguing that “…a polarized model of spatial relations emerged. On the one hand, an emperor who attempts to see everything through a labyrinth of peepholes and mirrors; on the other, senators and knights isolated and feminized in the dark before his gaze…”⁴⁵ Siluae 5.1 exposes the disturbing dynamic of exemplarity, spectacle, and surveillance that characterized Flavian Rome. Dead Priscilla is recreated as an exemplary wife, but the various representations of her never harmonize into a coherent whole. There is the Priscilla that Statius would have painted or carved if his hand had the skill, the Priscilla that Apelles, master of illusionistic realism, would have painted, or that Phidias would have carved. Hovering allusively in the background are the wax statue that Laodamia takes to her bed and the mannequin Alcestis that Admetus looks forward to taking to his. As Statius proceeds through the poem, Priscilla is further refracted through simile bewilderingly piled upon simile, allusion upon allusion—she is Eurydice, Niobe, Aurora, Thetis; she is the elm tree supporting a grapevine; she is NOT Helen or the seduced wife of Atreus, but she IS Penelope. She is like an Amazon, a possessed Sibyl, a raving Bacchant, an Apulian or Sabine farmer’s wife, a ruined vineyard, a pine tree stripped of its foliage. Her deathbed scene is modeled on Alcestis; she is cast as both Ovid’s wife and Statius’ own wife Claudia. After death she reappears, metamorphosed in statue form as Ceres, Ariadne, Maia, Venus—and presumably as nine other divinities as well, as there were thirteen niches for statues in her tomb. No longer herself, mutata, Priscilla is the fantasy Good Wife, becoming through Abascantus’ representation of her what Statius ensures that we know she was not—a virgin bride, a uniuira. Abascantus, imperial freedman and fling me even into the Tiber” (Suet. Vespasian , transl. Rolfe (Loeb) ). Thus it was in keeping with Nero’s self-created persona as actor-emperor for him to play Poppaea himself.  Smith () .  Fredrick () .

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right-hand man of Domitian, expresses his grief in the imperial idiom, using myth, art, architecture, and surrogates of all sorts to construct his own version of reality. This is what you, unnamed bystander, recognize when your viewing of the tomb reveals the similarity between Abascantus and Domitian. There is another statue I have not yet mentioned. The dying Priscilla has one last request for her husband. Unlike Alcestis, whose final wish is that Admetus put their children first and refrain from marrying again, Priscilla is fully focused on Abascantus’ future career—such a Good Wife! —and she has figured out with astonishing specificity how he can advance himself in Domitian’s favor. Cutting through the saccharine clichés of the deathbed scene, Priscilla, this pastiche of allusions, tropes, similes, and stereotypes, hones in unerringly in her final words on her husband’s best survival strategy: suck (it) up, honey—you know you want to. nunc, quod cupis ipse iuberi, da Capitolinis aeternum sedibus aurum, quo niteat sacri centeno pondere uultus Caesaris et propriae signet cultricis amorem. Siluae 5.1.188 – 91 Now—and you yourself want to be told to do this— give eternal gold to the Capitoline hill, weighing a hundred pounds, through which the sacred face of Caesar may shine and signify the love of his very own worshipper.

Unlike those useless surrogate statues Statius dismissed at the beginning of the poem, this statue serves a function. It is a love signifier, one hundred pounds of love-signifying gold!⁴⁶ And it signifies Abascantus and Priscilla’s love—but not for each other. There is, and has been throughout, a third party in this marriage—the all-seeing, ubiquitous Domitian. The imperial visage was omnipresent: “So many honors of this kind were voted to him that nearly all of the world under his rule was filled with his likenesses and statues made of silver and gold,” says Cassius Dio (67.8). Domitian even specified the minimum weight for gold and silver statues of himself erected on the Capitoline. Priscilla’s instruction to her husband shows what is necessary to survive under Domitian: to present to the imperial gaze a gleaming, precious  The world’s largest gold bar stands at  kg ( lb), measuring at the base . cm × . cm and  cm high with  degree draft angle (equal to , cm³, or . in × . in × . in ≈ . in³)—according to Wikipedia. One must therefore assume that Priscilla’s statue is a colossal gilded statue, like the Colossus of Nero, rather than a solid gold statue.

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reflection of itself, sparing no expense. Abascantus and Priscilla have fully absorbed the imperial mindset, and express it through replication. His grief replicates the gestures of the bereaved Nero, and the bereaved Domitian. And acting like an emperor turns Abascantus, briefly, into a second Domitian, the object of every gaze. At Priscilla’s funeral it is Abascantus, not Priscilla, who is the object of the gaze of Magna Roma: sed toto spectatur in agmine coniunx solus; in hunc magnae flectuntur lumina Romae ceu iuuenes natos suprema ad busta ferentem: Siluae 5.1.216 – 18. But in that whole group the husband alone is looked at: the eyes of Great Rome are bent on him, as if he were carrying adult sons to the final funeral pyre.

The topos of a father burying his sons expresses the exceptional grief that comes from a death that contradicts the natural order of children burying their parents. As so often in this poem, though, the dissimilarities between tenor and vehicle are as significant as the similarities. At the moment all Rome looks at Abascantus, they see a bereaved father, but Abascantus was not a father. The adult sons in the simile are the children Abascantus and Priscilla never had. Once again, through Abascantus’s staging of her death Priscilla becomes to the watching crowd something she was not in life. While the crowd shed tears for the husband, they call her felix for having died a tranquil death.⁴⁷ At the moment when Abascantus is most like Domitian, the object of Great Rome’s obsessive gaze, he shares the emperor’s ability to re-stage and re-shape reality through spectacle. It is as if his Priscilla is felix, fruitful, as well as being a uniuira and a virgin bride. In the end, the many Priscillas conjured up by Abascantus through his obsessive replication of her in omni metallo, in every material, and by Statius through his shower of similes and allusions to mythical and literary exemplars, when put in the balance, are counter-weights to the one hundred pound, colossally expensive, gold statue commissioned by the politically adept cultrix Priscilla. As Abascantus becomes a reflection and extension of Domitian, Priscilla disappears into a series of surrogates, a hall of mirrors, and the overwhelmed

 Gibson () ad loc. points out that felicemque uocant may be an allusion to Tristia ..  – , another reminiscence of Ovid’s urging his wife to exemplary behavior: quae te/ nostrorum cum sis in parte malorum/ felicem dicant, they may say that you, who share my woes, are fortunate.

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reader is left to ponder the cognitive dissonance of excessive exemplarity as “the rhetorical project deconstructs into a baffled reach for its desired goal, or cure, and endless deferral through representation.”⁴⁸

Bibliography Ahl, F.M. 1984. “The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius”, ANRW II.32.1: 40 – 108. American Dialect Society. January 2006. “Word of the Year 2005”, http://www.american dialect.org/Words_of_the_Year_2005.pdf Augoustakis, A. and C.E. Newlands (eds.). 2007. Statius’ Siluae and the Poetics of Intimacy. Baltimore, MD. Bettini, M. 1999. The Portrait of the Lover. Berkeley, CA. Braund, S.M. 1992. Lucan, Civil War. Oxford. Cary, E. 1925. Dio Cassius Roman History. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA. Colbert, S. 2005. The Colbert Report. 17 October, 2005. Coleman, K. 2002. “Review of F. Grewing 1997. Martial, Buch VI. Ein Kommentar”, Gnomon 74. Bd., H. 4, 318 – 322. Collard, C. and M. Cropp (eds.). 2008. Euripides VIII: Fragments. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA. Davies, P. 2004. Death and the Emperor: Roman Imperial Funerary Monuments from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. Cambridge. Fredrick, D. 2003. “Architecture and Surveillance in Flavian Rome”, in: A.J. Boyle and W.J. Dominik (eds.), Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text. Leiden, 199 – 228. Gibson, B. 2006. Statius Siluae 5. Oxford. Grewing, F. 1997. Martial, Buch VI. Ein Kommentar. Göttingen. Hardie, A. 1983. Statius and the Siluae: Poets, Patrons, and Epideixis in the Graeco-Roman World. Liverpool. Henderson, J. 1998. A Roman Life: Rutilius Gallicus On Paper & In Stone. Exeter. — 2007. “Bringing It All Back Home: Togetherness in Siluae 3.5”, in: A. Augoustakis and C.E. Newlands (eds.), Statius’ Siluae and the Poetics of Intimacy. Baltimore, MD, 245 – 78. Kline, A.S. trans. 2003. Ovid Ex Ponto. Poetryintranslation.com http://www.poetryin translation.com/PITBR/Latin/OvidExPontoBkOne.htm — trans. 2011. Juvenal, Satire 2. Poetryintranslation.com http://www.poetryintranslation. com/PITBR/Latin/JuvenalSatires2.htm Kragelund, P. 2010. “The Temple and Birthplace of Diva Poppaea”, CQ 60.2, 559 – 68.

 Henderson (). Thanks to: Michael Fontaine for organizing the fabulous Fredfest (“Ars Latet Arte Sua: A Conference in Honor of Fred Ahl”, Cornell University, September  – , ); the Cornell Classics department for hosting it; Phil Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas for editing this Festschrift (with particular thanks to Ioannis for his helpful editorial comments on my paper); and to the anonymous reader for the volume.

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Lovatt, H. 2007. “Statius, Orpheus, and the Post-Augustan Vates”, in: A. Augoustakis and C.E. Newlands (eds.), Statius’ Siluae and the Poetics of Intimacy. Baltimore, MD, 145 – 64. Nauta, R.R. 2002. Poetry for Patrons: Literary Communication in the Age of Domitian. Leiden. Newlands, C. 2013. Statius, Poet between Naples and Rome. Bristol. Rolfe, J.C. 1914. Suetonius: Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA. Smith, J. 2003. “Flavian Drama: Looking Back with Octavia”, in: A.J. Boyle and W.J. Dominik (eds.), Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text. Leiden, 391 – 430. Stieber, M. 1998. “Statuary in Euripides’ Alcestis”, Arion 5.3: 69 – 97. Treggiari, S. 1991. Roman Marriage: ‘Iusti Coniuges’ from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian. Oxford. Vinson, M.P. 1989. “Domitia Longina, Julia Titi, and the Literary Tradition”, Historia 38: 431 – 50. Wood, S. 1999. Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC-AD 68. Leiden. Wray, D. 2007. “Wood: Statius’ Poetics of Genius”, in: A. Augoustakis and C.E. Newlands (eds.), Statius’ Siluae and the Poetics of Intimacy. Baltimore, MD, 127 – 43. Zeiner, N. 2005. Nothing Ordinary Here: Statius as Creator of Distinction. New York. Zeiner-Carmichael, N. 2007. “Perfecting the Ideal: Molding Roman Women in Statius’ Siluae”, in: A. Augoustakis and C.E. Newlands (eds.), Statius’ Siluae and the Poetics of Intimacy. Baltimore, MD, 165 – 82.

Arthur J. Pomeroy

Silius Italicus and Greek Epic: Imperial Culture Wars

Summary: Pliny the Younger’s well-known letter on the death of Silius Italicus is regularly cited for biographical information on the poet and literary judgement on his epic. Certainly the portrayal of the senator’s reverence for Cicero and Vergil is important, but Silius’ literary forerunners include Ennius (who briefly features in his poem) and Homer. The significant Homeric allusions are important both for the structure of the Punica, which turns Livian history into the manifestation of divine destiny as in the Iliad, and as indications of the combined GrecoRoman culture dominant in the Second Sophistic. Silius, like other Flavian writers, sought to indicate that his age showed a clear break with the extravagance of the Neronian period. This was reflected both in social behaviour and in poetic style, recalling the classical models of Greek and Roman prose and verse. After the downfall of Domitian, however, the new generation of Roman senators such as Tacitus and Pliny sought to distance themselves from the previous dynasty. Hence Pliny’s critical comments on Silius, whose poetry should be overshadowed by the Trajanic epic in Homeric verse to be composed by his letter’s recipient. A carefully phrased evaluation of Silius using allusions to Thucydides deliberately suggests that for Pliny Silius remained in fact a profligate Neronian, the last remnant of a past that had now been swept away. Keywords: Silius Italicus; Flavian culture; Roman epic; Homer; Pliny the Younger; Vergil; Ennius

The Protagonist A letter from the younger Pliny (Epistle 3.7) announces the passing of the ex-consul and significant figure in Roman society, Silius Italicus. In this case Pliny has been given an opportunity not merely to record the demise of an individual, but also the passing of a generation. Silius was the last appointed of Nero’s consuls and the last of the consuls serving under that emperor to die. The message is clear: life is short and art is long, so best to get cracking and compose while one still has the opportunity.

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As with all of Pliny’s letters, the content rewards unpacking.¹ First, the recipient is Caninius Rufus, an old friend of Pliny’s from Comum. Like Pliny, Caninius was a benefactor of his birthplace, since he is given advice on civic philanthropy in 7.18. He was almost certainly also regarded by the established senator as his protégé in literary circles. The very first letter to him in the collection encourages him to leave aside his other duties and achieve immortality by writing (1.3) and later letters indicate shared literary interests: for instance a discussion of the modern writer of comic plays, Vergilius Romanus, is directed to Caninius (6.21) and he is the recipient of the famous missive on the death of the Hippo dolphin (9.33). Perhaps most interestingly, the reader discovers from Epistle 8.4 that Caninius is preparing to write an epic on Trajan’s Dacian War. The material is rich, full of romantic and storybook elements (poetica et … fabulosa materia)², including the glorious suicide of king Decebalus. Of course incorporating into hexameter verse a foe whose name begins with three short syllables would be problematic. Still, if Homer could shorten or lengthen and otherwise modify the pliant vocabulary of the Greeks, why shouldn’t Caninius do something similar not from self-indulgence but with the licence of necessity? On reflection, then, Caninius was no chance recipient of Pliny’s report of Silius’ death, but chosen because of a shared interest in epic. Indeed it is quite likely that he and Pliny had both on occasion been present at Silius’ literary soirées packed with attendees from all social status groups (cubiculo semper, non ex fortuna frequenti: 3.7.4) or one of the many public recitations of his poetry (non numquam iudicia hominum recitationibus experiebatur). Although Pliny does not specify Silius’ literary masterwork, the seventeen book Punica on the Second Punic War, it is more than tempting to contrast that epic, devoted to heralding the revival of Rome in the Flavian era, with Caninius’ Trajanic epic that celebrates the achievements of a new dynasty. That Silius in retirement in Campania had not returned to Rome to greet the new emperor arriving at last from the German frontier shows a clear break from the Flavian era. That Trajan was not upset by this behaviour shows how libertas, the right to act as one feels befits one’s status, was to be a feature of the new regime. Furthermore, there was no longer need for the cooperation of men whose time has passed. Once upon a time in Rome Silius had received constant attention from those coming to pay their greetings at the morning salutations or seek advice and offer services as clients (salutabatur colebatur). In Campania, he in turn devoted him-

 On Pliny, Epistulae ., see in particular Vessey (), McDermott and Orentzel (), Pomeroy ()  – .  All translations from Latin and Greek throughout are those of the author.

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self to serving the liberal arts and even appeared to offer worship to the images of Vergil that he owned, treating the Roman poet’s birthday as more sacred than his own and at Naples paying homage at his tomb as if it were a holy shrine (multum imaginum … non habebat modo, uerum etiam uenerabatur, Vergili ante omnes, cuius natalem religiosius quam suum celebrabat Neapoli maxime, ubi monumentum eius adire ut templum solebat: 3.7.8). The Vergilian connection, also emphasized by Martial, is visible throughout the Punica. The Aeneid, the epic of the Augustan era, is thus the obvious reference for Silius’ Flavian epic. However, the veneration of the poet as a demi-god in the Hellenized setting of Campania recalls the cult of Homer in the Greek world after Alexander.³ Indeed, it is Homer that Pliny recalls when recommending ways of celebrating the exploits of Trajan to Caninius. Although Pliny’s rhetoric might suggest that Homer is to Caninius as Vergil to Silius, the question of poetic authority and indebtedness is more complex and worth exploring. So I will now turn to Silius’ use of Greek poetry and Homer in particular, which I hope will highlight some previously underappreciated features of the Punica before returning to Pliny’s death notice for Silius which I believe can then be better understood in its literary and political milieu.

Silius and Greek Poetry We know nothing for certain about the background of Silius, although an inscription that indicates his nomen was Catius and cognomen Ascanius (Tib. Catius Asconius Silius Italicus) may indicate a relationship to the Ciceronian commentator Asconius Pedianus and a northern Italian origin for his family.⁴ However, his governorship of the prestigious senatorial province of Asia Minor (AD 77 or 78),⁵ the time he spent around the Bay of Naples, and his poetry all indicate that, like most Romans of his class, he was bilingual and well versed in Greek literature. He advertised his adherence to the classical figures of Roman literature: in prose this was Cicero (whose Baian villa he owned), in poetry, Vergil, whose tomb on the road out of Naples he seems to have placed under his protection. Certainly Martial describes him as a worthy dominus, owner of Cicero’s property, and heres for Vergil’s tomb and the first line of his epigram announcing this (11.48.1) is composed in the style of an inscription to be attached to

 Brink ().  Calder (); Syme ()  n. .  Eck ()  – , .

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the shrine: Silius haec magni celebrat monimenta Maronis (“This is the memorial to great Vergil that Silius Italicus honours”). After the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, in which Pliny records heavy ash fall and seismic tremors as far west as Misenum (Epistles 6.20.13 – 20), it is likely that both Cicero’s villa, the Cumanum, located close to the bradyseismic area of the Phlegraean fields, and Vergil’s tomb would have needed repair and restoration.⁶ Still Pliny indicates his Hellenic values by describing the senator using the Greek term φιλόκαλος (“a connoisseur of the arts”). He would have been familiar as the fountainhead of Greek poetry and traditions, a deduction that is thoroughly confirmed by Homeric references in the Punica. Silius had also read at least parts of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, and Bruce Gibson has highlighted Silius’ cognizance of Hellenistic Greek prose traditions about Sicily, whether from reading the original authors’ works or indirectly via compilations of these tales.⁷ This is entirely consonant with the interest in geographical details seen throughout Roman poetry. In addition, as a senator in favour with Nero, Silius would surely have been well aware of the Hellenistic sources so beloved by the poet-actor emperor, which include overwrought dramatic depictions of mythological heroines or emotional retellings of the sack of Troy. This makes it all the more surprising that Silius in his Punica, unlike Statius in the Thebaid, makes no display of his acquaintance with Greek tragedy or the Callimachean tradition of Hellenistic poetry. The Greek epic tradition based on the quest for the Golden Fleece, most evident in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and still strong in Valerius Flaccus’ almost contemporary retelling, leaves no trace in the Punica. ⁸ The closest possible link is between Medea’s unhappy brother Apsyrtos and Silius’ Camilla-like Libyan heroine, Absyrte, from Book Two of his epic. Absyrte, like Apsyrtos/Phaethon is a charioteer who meets a tragic end. Still, her origin can be more obviously linked to the Punic cult of Hammon Asbystes (2.66).⁹ No use of Pindar by Silius can be clearly detected, nor borrowings from Hellenistic poetry, in contrast with Lucan whose snake epi-

 The well-known painting () by Joseph Wright of Derby showing Silius at Vergil’s tomb offers a more romantic depiction of the poet worshipping alone at the ruined structure, probably a cistern, at Naples that had come to be associated with the poet in modern times.  Pomeroy (), Gibson ().  Fucecchi ()  claims that Apollonius should be included in Silius’ epic models, while admitting (n. ) that Argonautic material could come from other sources. Chaudhuri ()  –  discusses the portrait of Idas as despiser of the gods in Argonautica . –  as a forerunner of Statius’ Capaneus and Silius’ Flaminius without making any claims for direct influence.  Spaltenstein ( – ) ad loc.

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sode has obvious Greek antecedents. Use of the Latin poets Horace and Ovid is more readily perceived and strong similarities in language and subject matter indicate familiarity with other Flavian epic writers. Yet even more than Valerius and Statius, Silius follows in the footsteps of Homer via Vergil. Statius may have acknowledged his debt to the Augustan vates in his epilogue to the Thebaid, but Silius, as noted above, undertook the role of Vergil’s heir, not only upholding the dignity of the deceased, but also undertaking the care of his funeral monument as a duty that would normally accrue to the inheritor (heres) of a Roman estate. Leaving aside the mythological figure of Orpheus, only four historical poets are mentioned in Silius’ epic: Homer, Hesiod, Ennius, and Vergil. The last is specifically celebrated by mention of both the Georgics and the Aeneid in the catalogue of Roman forces that fought at Cannae: Mantua mittenda certauit pube Cremonae, Mantua, Musarum domus atque ad sidera cantu euecta Aonio et Smyrnaeis aemula plectris. (Punica 8.592– 4) Mantua strove to surpass Cremona in sending its youth, Mantua, carried up to the home of the Muses and the stars by Hesiodic song and a match for the lyre-playing of Homer.

Indeed Vergil is Homer’s match, since Aeneas’ katabasis in Aeneid Six is a major source for Silius’ depiction of the Underworld within which the shade of Homer appears (Punica 13.778 – 97).¹⁰ Still, as he has not been born yet, let alone died, Vergil can only be adumbrated via this depiction of Homer. Born, but not yet dead and so not in Elysium, is Quintus Ennius, the author of the first epic that incorporated the Hannibalic War.¹¹ Silius might have incorporated him within the epic as a performing bard, as Demodocus is shown in the Odyssey, Iopas in Aeneid 1, and Teuthras, who entertains Hannibal at Cumae, in Punica 11. Instead, he inserts Ennius as a character into an epic that encompasses the material he would later narrate, a trope that has become common in modern novels and films, as when, for instance, Conan Doyle is portrayed as solving crimes in the fashion of his character, Sherlock Holmes. Silius makes Ennius a heroic warrior engaged in the fighting in Sardinia in 215 BC (Punica 12.387– 419). He even promotes him to the rank of centurion, which as a Messapian he certainly could not have been.¹² An Italian socius would be ineligible for this Roman rank: Ennius

 Reitz (), Billerbeck ().  Bettini (), Casali (), Dorfbauer (), Augoustakis ()  – .  It is amusing to see Silius in turn depicted as a delator in AD  Rome in Lindsey Davis’ The Accusers (). This characterization is based on Pliny’s suggestion (Epistulae ..) that Silius

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gained his citizenship from his praise poetry in 184 (Cicero, Brutus 80), long after he had left Sardinia for Rome as a praise poet in 204 BC.¹³ This event recorded in Nepos seems to have inspired Silius to place Ennius on the island a decade earlier and to elevate the skirmishes on the island that Livy hardly ranks worthy of noting in 23.40 – 1 into the greatest of campaigns. The epic tone is pronounced: the poet notes his inability to describe the countless deaths and dreadful deeds of the participants and thus must call on Calliope who as Muse can ensure that the deeds of a great hero, hardly remembered in Silius’ day, be transmitted to a future age. Silius, just as he in real life protected Vergil’s tomb, here acts with the Muse to enshrine (sacremus) in his poem the honour due to the bard (12.392). Like Orpheus fighting at Cyzicus in the Argonautica, Ennius is shown as able to ply the martial arts as well as sing of them. When Hostus, the son of the Carthaginian leader casts his spear at him, Apollo intervenes to turn the spear aside and an avenging arrow transfixes Hostus’ head. The enemy immediately retreats in panic and Hostus’ father, Hampsagoras, maddened by grief commits suicide. Clearly this incident is based both on the story of Mezentius and his son Lausus from Aeneid 10 (Silius describes Hostus as “his handsome offspring, worthy of a better warrior for his parent” in Punica 12.346) and the tale of Ascanius’ singular act of valour in striking down Numanus Remulus in Aeneid 9.621– 58. Ennius and his exploits are described in terms of Augustan poetics: the poet is under divine patronage (sacer), protected by the Muses of Helicon and a worthy mouthpiece (uates) for his tutelary deity, Apollo. ‘This is the man who will be the first to sing of Italy’s war in noble verse [that is, in hexameters, unlike Naevius’ Saturnians] and raise its leaders to the heavens; this is the man who will teach Helicon to echo with Latin song and who will match the old man of Ascra [Hesiod] in respect and reputation’ (Punica 12.408 – 13). What is striking is that while Ennius can rival Hesiod, presumably through compositions such as his Euhemerus, he is no rival for Homer, even if Ennius had in his Annals suggested that he was a reincarnation of the Greek bard. In the Punica, Homer is still in the Underworld, not reincarnated in the Messapian poet. Indeed the intervention of Apollo on Ennius’ behalf both recalls the efforts of the god on behalf of the Trojans in the Iliad and his intervention to praise Ascanius and dissuade him from further martial efforts in the Aeneid. While Apollo appears in Augustan poetry to frustrate epic pretensions and support lighter verse forms (Horace, Odes 4.15 is the model for such action), here the god intermight have brought prosecutions on his own account under Nero that harmed his reputation (but note the proviso credebatur, ’people thought’: he need not have acted so and his behaviour afterwards was exemplary).  Badian ().

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venes to ensure the birth of Roman epic. Yet the truly divine genius of Roman poetry who will be Italy’s Homer is still to be born.¹⁴ Silius’ cult of Vergil can thus be seen as a parallel to the Hellenistic worship of Homer, as epigonoi, the descendants of the great, can claim parental authority for their verse. The parallelism between Vergil and Homer is reinforced by passages in the Punica that draw on the work of both poets. For instance, the potamomachia at the Trebia of Punica 4.570 – 703 draws substantially on Iliad 21, but the intervention of the raging river on Juno’s request follows the causality of the storm in Aeneid 1; the games staged by Scipio in Spain (Punica 16) are derived both from Iliad 23 and Aeneid 5.¹⁵ Furthermore, Scipio’s descent into the Underworld in Punica 13 is both based on the nekyia of Odyssey 11 and the katabasis of Aeneid 6: Odysseus meets his mother, Aeneas his father, but Scipio meets both his parents separately). In brief, Silius has both a Greek father and a Roman parent and acknowledges both.¹⁶ This willingness to embrace both cultures seems typical of the Flavian Age and the cultural movement that will come to be labelled ‘the Second Sophistic’. Both Achilles and Hector can enjoy the Elysian Fields in the company of Homer (Punica 13.800: ‘he was dumbfounded by Achilles, he was dumbfounded by great Hector’) and Odysseus is seen as the equal of Achilles (Punica 15.803), not as the infamous Greek trickster of Aeneid 2.¹⁷ Of course, the Punica is saturated with Homeric echoes that by the Flavian Age were an accepted part of Roman culture. Silius’ account of the Second Punic War begins with the theme of kleos for the descendants of Aeneas and the imposition of Italian law on wild Carthage (Punica 1.1– 3). Rome breeds great heroes, while it is the role of the race of Cadmos to challenge the terms of peace. As in Livy’s summation of the Hannibalic War (21.1), the event is a near-run thing where at one point it looked like the eventual winner was down for the count. While the Dardanian leader (Scipio) forced open the Agenorean citadel (Carthage), the Palatine was surrounded by a Punic ditch and Rome had to trust to its walls for its salvation. The two opponents are here clearly described in Homeric terms and, perhaps surprisingly, they are both of Trojan descent. Silius’ description of the impius ensis of the Carthaginians both links them to the Romans through the Lucanian reference and offers a devastating reproach for their continuing resort to violence, unlike their Roman cousins.

 Van der Keur ()  rightly notes that ‘Silius is the new Homer exactly because he is also the new Virgil’.  Potamomachia: Juhnke ()  – , ; funeral games:  – ,  – .  Von Albrecht ()  – ; Juhnke ()  – .  Ripoll ()  – .

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In this new Iliad, Rome may appear as the Greek camp, surrounded by a ditch but never taken by Hector. Similarly, the actual capture of Troy did not occur under Scipio, the Roman Achilles, but by his descendant, Scipio Aemilianus as Neoptolemus. All this is the final outcome of a process that began when Ennius portrayed Rome’s enemies as neo-Achaeans threatening the offspring of Aeneas, drawing on Pyrrhus of Epirus’ self-depiction as the descendant of Achilles coming to wage war on those Trojans who had escaped their city’s destruction. Vergil extends this in the Iliadic half of the Aeneid, turning the Italian champion Turnus into an Achilles (so, for instance, he pursues the phantom of Aeneas in Book 12, as Achilles does with Agenor in Iliad 21). However, Aeneas can also assume Greek roles: as Menelaus wounded by the arrow that ends the truce (Aeneid 12; cf. Iliad 4), or as Achilles, mortally wounding Turnus just as his counterpart kills Hector in Iliad 22. Likewise, Turnus can take on the role of Hector that is mainly associated with Aeneas, for instance when he attacks the Trojan camp in Book 9. In the Punica, Hannibal can be Achilles threatening a substitute Troy/Rome at Saguntum in Books 10 – 12, but he can also be Hector seeing in his son Astyanax the future of his city in the Imilce episode of 4.763 ff. All this is well known and the examples could be multiplied. Silius’ actual Homeric usage was investigated in detail by Herbert Juhnke in his 1972 monograph that includes a lengthy appendix listing all Homeric parallels for the Punica that had been noted by commentators up to that time. Juhnke’s volume, following the lead of Georg Knauer’s Die Aeneis und Homer (1964), is particularly strong on verbal parallels and direct borrowings of epic terms. More recently François Ripoll has extended the comparison to the role of Homeric epic in Silius’ artistic enterprise: for instance, comparisons between Fabius and Nestor confirm the epic tone of his retelling of historical events, as does the revival of common Homer aetiologies, such as the relationship between Diomedes and south Italy, in the context of the battle of Cannae. This admixture of historical and epic is most evident in Scipio’s wish, expressed after viewing Homer in the Elysian Fields, that he might obtain a poet capable of celebrating his achievements. This wish, to be fulfilled both by Ennius and more obviously by Silius himself, is of course based on Alexander’s lament that he lacked a literary talent in his entourage who could advertise his own kleos in the manner that Homer celebrated Achilles.¹⁸

 Ripoll (), esp.  – .

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Homer’s Influence on Silius’ Narrative Structure To extend the exploration of Homer’s influence on Silius, I think it is worth examining an allusion that seems to have attracted little attention previously, possibly because of its narratological implications as opposed to verbal intertextualities.¹⁹ When in Punica 3 Hannibal arrives in Italy, Venus is deeply alarmed and hastens to Jupiter to complain about this potential gigantomachy: Alpibus imposuit Libyam finemque minatur/imperio (‘he has set Africa up on top of the Alps and threatens an end to Rome’s rule’: 563 – 4). The context suggests that the imperium is that of Rome, but as the noun is not modified it also implies a threat to Jupiter himself. Jupiter reassurance is well-known: the future of the city is guaranteed, but his intention is in the meantime to test the mettle of Rome’s heroes. magnae molis opus multoque labore parandum tot populos inter soli sibi poscere regna. (Punica 3.583 – 4) It is a task involving great effort and enormous toil To demand for itself alone amid so many nations the power to rule.

Paulus, Fabius, and Marcellus will by the spilling of their blood (per uulnera) bring forth an empire (regnum) that cannot be destroyed by the extravagance of their descendants (3.588). This empire will be begun by Scipio’s victory over Hannibal and lead to a long series of rulers descended from Venus, to be replaced in turn by the Flavian dynasty (3.590 – 629). According to Ruperti (1795 – 8: ad 3.570), Heinsius the Elder in the seventeenth century was the first to connect Jupiter’s prediction of Rome’s future greatness with Anchises’ description of the parade of Roman heroes in the Underworld from Aeneid 6. More recently the general message of the inevitability of Roman rule and its culmination in the Flavian dynasty has been well explored by Raymond Marks (2005). However, only Herbert Juhnke, and then only in a brief aside (1972: 223), appears to have noticed that there is an Iliadic parallel of significance. Jupiter explains why he should wish to test the Romans by offer-

 It is not the intention of this paper to re-investigate the intertextuality of the Punica with Homeric epic, whether through Vergil or by direct relationship to the Greek text. For those interested in this subject, I refer in particular to Juhnke () and Karakasis () who discusses Silian intertextuality and, in particular, ‘window references’ where an allusion to one text also sets in motion a chain of references to similar texts that may extend as far back as Homeric epic while also bringing the ethical force of earlier parallels into play in the Flavian world ( – ).

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ing numerous victories to Hannibal by suggesting that this is a ‘toughening-up’ process, a sort of boot camp for future rulers. gens ferri patiens ac laeta domare labores paulatim antiquo patrum desuescit honori, atque ille haud umquam parcus pro laude cruoris et semper famae sitiens obscura sedendo tempora agit multum uoluens inglorius aeuum sanguine de nostro populus, blandoque ueneno desidiae uirtus paulatim euicta senescit. (Punica 3.575 – 81) The race which had endured steel and was glad to overcome its tasks Has gradually grown unaccustomed to the ancient honour of its fathers And while it was once never sparing of its blood in exchange for glory And always thirsty for renown, the people sprung from my blood is now leading A life without fame, in disesteem, and completely defeated by the pleasant poison Of inaction its courage is gradually fading away.

This nigh-Darwinian treatment of survival of the fittest is well in line with ancient theories of inevitable decline that can in fact be reversed by stern treatment of the subject. Indeed Seneca’s views on tree-pruning follow exactly this pattern: severe amputation will force renewed invigoration (Epistles 112). Within Roman society the animalistic thirst for reputation and willingness to shed one’s own blood to achieve this has been diluted by inactivity and the poisonous pleasures of leisure. The ‘Choice of Hercules’ offered to Scipio in Punica, Book 15 is adumbrated by the use of the terms labores (‘toil’) and desidia (‘sloth’) in Jupiter’s speech. Yet behind all this is the famous choice of Achilles from Iliad 9.410 – 16: μήτηρ γάρ τέ μέ φησι θεὰ Θέτις ἀργυρόπεζα διχθαδίας κῆρας φερέμεν θανάτοιο τέλος δέ. εἰ μέν κ’ αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι, ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται· εἰ δέ κεν οἴκαδ’ ἵκωμι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν, ὤλετό μοι κλέος ἐσθλόν, ἐπὶ δηρὸν δέ μοι αἰὼν ἔσσεται, οὐδέ κέ μ’ ὦκα τέλος θανάτοιο κιχείη. My mother, the silver footed goddess, tells me That two fates, ending in death, bear me along. If I were to remain here and fight around the city of the Trojans I would lose my chance to return, but my glory would be everlasting. If I were to go home to my beloved fatherland, My noble glory would perish, but my life would be Long, and the death’s end would not quickly catch up with me.

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Achilles has to choose between a long life of obscurity or to fight at Troy, gain everlasting fame, but die in the process. In line with his claim to be ‘best of the Achaeans’, he will inevitably finally choose the latter path. To return to the prayers of Venus to Jupiter in the Punica, it is clear that the original inspiration is again Homeric, if also filtered through Jupiter’s pronouncement in Aeneid 10 that the fighting between the Trojans and Italians should cease since a war with genuine cause is already fated to occur in the distant future: adueniet iustum pugnae (ne arcessite) tempus, cum fera Karthago Romanis arcibus olim exitium magnum atque Alpis immittet apertas. (Aeneid 10.11– 13) The time will come for a honest war – don’t hurry it along – When wild Carthage will at some stage hurl great destruction Against the Roman citadel and throw open the Alps.

Venus’ complaints to Jupiter are also reminiscent of her outraged call for divine support in this same divine council (10.16 – 62), countered by Juno’s defiant response (62– 95), and Jupiter’s decision to let the efforts of mortals decide the outcome – for that day (104– 13). Thetis’ entreaty to Zeus that the Trojans may succeed until Achilles, who is pining away after withdrawing from the fighting, is once more honoured by the Greeks (Iliad 1.495 – 530) is also filtered through Zeus’ promise to Venus in Aeneid 1.227– 96. The king of the gods promises that Juno’s pursuit of the Trojans will eventually end once Aeneas defeats the Italians. This will mark of turn of Fortune for his people, rather than simply the justification of an individual: his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi. (Aeneid 1.278 – 9) For them [the new Roman race] I set neither boundaries nor time limits: I have given them empire without end.

Silius, combining both the fate of individuals and that of the Roman nation as a whole, both in the narrative time of the epic and the future of his own day, thus draws on both Homeric and Vergilian tradition. In the Iliad, Hector himself boasts in Book 8 that Zeus has guaranteed him victory and that the ruler of heaven will assist him to cross the Achaean ditch and attack the Greek ships: γιγνώσκω δ’ ὅτι μοι πρόφρων κατένευσε Κρονίων νίκην καὶ μέγα κῦδος, ἀτὰρ Δαναοῖσί γε πῆμα.

(Iliad 8.175 – 6)

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I see that Zeus looking into the future has agreed to Victory and fame for me, but suffering for the Greeks.

The will of Zeus is most clearly expressed in his instructions to the Olympian deities in 15.59 – 77: Hector is to drive the Greeks back to their ships, after which Achilles will send Patroclus out to fight for him. Hector will kill Patroclus, Achilles Hector, and the fighting will continue back and forth until the destruction of Troy. Until, however, the Greeks are forced to retreat in desperation, as Achilles wished and Zeus had guaranteed to Thetis, no divine help may come their way. The plan is accomplished when the Trojans push the Greeks back (15.592– 600): Τρῶες δὲ λείουσιν ἐοικότες ὠμοφάγοισι νηυσὶν ἐπεσσεύοντο, Διὸς δ’ ἐτέλειον ἐφετμάς, ὅ σφισιν αἰὲν ἔγειρε μένος μέγα, θέλγε δὲ θυμὸν ᾿Aργείων καὶ κῦδος ἀπαίνυτο, τοὺς δ’ ὀρόθυνεν. Ἕκτορι γάρ οἱ θυμὸς ἐβούλετο κῦδος ὀρέξαι Πριαμίδῃ, ἵνα νηυσὶ κορωνίσι θεσπιδαὲς πῦρ ἐμβάλοι ἀκάματον, Θέτιδος δ’ ἐξαίσιον ἀρὴν πᾶσαν ἐπικρήνειε· τὸ γὰρ μένε μητίετα Ζεὺς νηὸς καιομένης σέλας ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἰδέθαι.

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The Trojans fell on the ships like lions Eating their prey alive and Zeus’ orders were accomplished, Who continually awoke the great spirit within them, but dulled The hearts of the Argives and denied them glory, while he encouraged the others. For his heart wanted Hector, the son of Priam, to achieve Glory so he might thrown unquenchable fire into The curved ships and bring to fruition Thetis’ terrible curse Completely. So counselling Zeus waited To see with his own eyes the blaze of a ship on fire.

Eventually a Greek ship is set alight and Zeus’ plan completed. In the context of the Punica, Zeus’ plan of gaining kleos for the Romans thus does not only revolve around the defeats they suffer at the Tîcînus, Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae, but around a turning-point. This must certainly be Hannibal’s attack on Rome in Book 12 (541– 752), a challenge to the city of Aeneas’ descendants that might be seen as completing Dido’s curse.²⁰ Still Hannibal is an attacker before the Trojan city, who may desire to destroy the enemy, but is repeatedly turned back by Jupiter’s thunder and lightning, as is Diomedes in Iliad 8.167– 71. However, if Diomedes hesitates three times in quick succession,  On this, see now Stocks ()  – .

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Hannibal’s more substantial threat needs to be thwarted on three consecutive days by Jupiter (12.609 – 26; 651– 63; 686 – 728).²¹ The last attempt results in the king of the gods despatching Juno to warn Hannibal: ‘siste uirum. namque, ut cernis, iam flagitat ignes et parat accensis imitari fulmina flammis.’ (12.699 – 700) “Halt your hero. For, as you can see, he is now demanding torches And readying to match the lightning with the flames he was kindled.”

Hannibal is here thus both Hector ready to burn the Achaean ships and Capaneus, challenging the divine: rursus in arma uocat trepidos clipeoque tremendum increpat atque imitatur murmura caeli. (683 – 4) [uenus: mss; armis: edd.; minis: Bauer; amens: Summers; tonans: Watt] He called his frightened men back to fight and let out a fearful boom With his shield and in his madness imitated the roar of the sky.

This is his third and final attempt. The first repulse is excused by use of Stoic physics when Hannibal ridicules the warning signs as blindly directed fire from the clouds and an empty roar spread by the winds. After the next attempt, like Lucan’s Caesar in the holy grove at Massilia, he reassures his fearful men that attempting to destroy Rome is no unholy act (nec Romam exscindere Poeni/ credant esse nefas: 670 – 1). Now, however, Juno clears the mist from Hannibal’s view of Rome and reveals the Olympians defending the city (12.706 – 25), a reversal of Aeneas’ vision of the same gods destroying Troy in Aeneid 2 (594– 631). Only now does he withdraw. The rush of the Romans after Hannibal’s departure to inspect the enemy’s camp, after carefully checking for any Punic trap, once again mirrors the actions of the unsuspecting Trojans in Aeneid 2 (26 – 30), but this time without harm. In 1964, Michael von Albrecht was the first to examine in depth the threat to Rome as a leitmotiv of the Punica in a substantial subsection of his monograph on Silius (Moenia Romae, 24– 46). The attack on the capital has been Hannibal’s dream from his youth, achieved by proxy through his capture of Saguntum and the goal of all his victories in Italy. Von Albrecht, however, compares Hannibal’s efforts with those of Homeric Greek heroes. His attack on the city spreads panic through its inhabitants, just as the Trojans are terrified by the spectre of a victo-

 For a detailed treatment of this episode, see now Chaudhuri ()  – , as part of his chapter on Hannibal as theomach.

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rious Achilles in Iliad 21. However, Jupiter, returning from Ethiopia (12.605) recognizes what is occurring, an Homeric reference, that recalls Neptune’s reaction to seeing Odysseus daring to cross his realm in Odyssey 5.282– 3: τὸν δ’ ἐξ Αἰθιόπων ἀνιὼν κρείων ἐνοσίχθων/τηλόθεν ἐκ Σολύμων ὀρέων ἴδεν (“far off from the mountains of the Solomoi, the lordly earthshaker on his way back from the Ethiopians spotted him”). The ruler of heaven first intervenes personally, then invokes the aid of the full group of Olympic deities. Von Albrecht concluded that Book 12 was the high point of Silius’ epic and that the dramatic tension is released after Rome’s successful defense.²² This treatment of the epic, however, did not seem to adequately explain the composition of the Punica, and in 1986 Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy suggested that it might be more valuable to take into consideration the central position of the battle of Cannae, a Roman defeat that can also be seen as a victory for the indomitable spirit of a people.²³ Still it is not Cannae, but the attack on Rome that Silius highlights in his preface (1.14– 16) following the Vergilian encapsulation of the Hannibal War, with wild Carthage (fera Carthago; cf. ferox Carthago in Punica 1.2– 3) hurling destruction and the unlocked Alps at the Roman citadel (10.12– 13). Yet, as I have indicated, Rome is more than a more fortunate Troy. It is also the Achaean camp that represents the pinnacle of Hector’s achievement when the first ship is burnt and in turn indicates a peripeteia that will lead to Achilles’ glory. Historically, Hannibal’s attack on Rome was but one minor action in a campaign that would extend for a decade more. In Silius, however, it represents the point from which Rome’s success can be dated as the figure of Scipio, returning to the fighting after the Trebia and Cannae, becomes the Achilles who threatens Carthage. In short, the drama is not over after Hannibal’s attack, merely moving to its inevitable conclusion (Hannibal as Hector metaphorically coming to the limits of his success outside the walls of Carthage). And Rome? It is both the historical city and, in Vergilian pattern, another, but more successful Troy. Yet, as epic heroes can be both Hector and Achilles, Aeneas and Turnus, so Rome can be both the Trojan refuge and the Greek encampment.²⁴ This reflects its author: a Roman senator whose cultural values come not so much from the Campanian community in which he lived as from the renewed classicism of the Flavian era. It is this cultural invention that

 Von Albrecht () : “Die dramatische Spannung … lässt nach.” Cf. Tipping ()  – : “Repulse of Hannibal marks a divinely aided victory of Rome and das Recht over the transgressive evil of Carthage and its demonic leader.”  Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy ()  –  (‘The Battle-centered Structure’).  Hardie () Chapter One.

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needs now to be explored both to recognize what Silius intends with his epic and to appreciate Pliny’s response to the poet with which this chapter began.

Flavian Rome While it is a common modern practice to attach labels to particular cultural or historical periods (for instance, the Renaissance, the Victorian Age, or the Thatcherite/Reaganite eras), the use of such nomenclature seems less common in Rome. The regal period, the Republic, and the imperium of Augustus and his descendants are the main divisions expressed by Tacitus in his prefaces to the Histories and the Annals. Appian was undoubtedly drawing on earlier sources when he described as the Civil Wars those years between the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 131 BC and the death of Sextus Pompeius in 35 BC. Unlike Tacitus, he does not end the era with the battle of Actium, since he is following the Augustan tradition of a Roman revival begun in the 30s that was not challenged by the conflict between Rome and Egypt (the latter led by Cleopatra and the renegade Roman, Marcus Antonius). The death of Nero, of course, led to a dynastic change from the Julio-Claudians to the Flavians, but not a change in the system of the Principate. However, Tacitus in a fascinating passage (Annals 3.55.1), poses a topic for discussion: ‘Why has extravagance gradually disappeared?’ The question is an important one, since conspicuous consumption was regarded by Roman historians and moralists as the reason for the decline of the Republic and the lapse into civil war. In Silius, Jupiter sees the rebirth from the Hannibalic War as creating a dominion (regnum) that the descendants of the Roman heroes weak of spirit and sunk in luxury will not be able to ruin (quod luxu et multum mutata mente nepotes/ non tamen euertisse queant: Punica 3.589 – 90). Tacitus suggests that two changes in social practice have produced the unusual result of an improvement in Roman mores. First, the old aristocracy was undermined by their own competitive practices, especially when the imperial family would not brook any rivals. Then from AD 70, one must take into account the behaviour of the new intake from Italian country towns and the provinces into the Senate, men of traditional parsimony who continued to be reluctant to spend their wealth even after their elevation in status. In addition, the figure of Vespasian, famed for his tight-fistedness, offered a model that was advantageous to emulate in the competitive world of Roman politics and provided a decisive impetus for universal change. The passage has been frequently noted in discussions of Tacitus’ historiography. Most notably Reinhard Häussler in his work on ‘Tacitus and Historical

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Awareness’ stresses the convergence of individual (or ‘great man’) causation and group psychology that is rare elsewhere in ancient historiography.²⁵ The break coincides with the death of Nero (the most extravagant of the Julio-Claudians) and the elevation of Galba, a man of old-fashioned stubbornness and excessive sternness (antiquus rigor et nimia severitas) according to Tacitus in Histories 1.18.3, a characterization to which he adds ‘which we can no longer match’ (cui iam pares non sumus). The historian is thus not merely describing a change in dynasty, but a difference in mindset. One might parallel the cocaine-sniffing decadence of the Reagan era, most notably portrayed in Brian DePalma’s Scarface (1983), that apparently gave way to the small-town morality of the Clinton administration or the way the egoism of Thatcherite Britain is said to have been transformed by Blair’s ‘Third Way’ into a much more socially responsible mind-set. A more interesting question is whether this depiction of discontinuity in Roman lifestyles is a Tacitean idiosyncrasy or not. Clearly life changed little for the majority of the populace in the Roman world, just as a good proportion of the world’s population was bemused by the Judaeo-Christian fixation on the year 2000 that ignored Islamic and Buddhist calendars. If they had an opinion, the majority probably regretted the end of displays of imperial generosity as effected by Nero. However, there are other indications of similar attitudes to that of Tacitus in the upper sections of Roman society. If we return to Pliny’s letter on the death of Silius Italicus, it is clear that the writer constructs a clear division between life under Nero (where “some say Silius brought charges against others without any pressure being applied”) and the subject’s blameless civic service and social influence in the years that followed. The change in times is particularly stressed by Silius’ decision to remain in Campania rather than make his way to Rome for the inauguration of Trajan, a mark of the felicitas of the era that echoes Tacitus’ approving description of the Nervan-Trajanic age in the introduction to the Histories (1.1.4). Still, just as he is tepid toward Silius’ poetry, Pliny stresses that the senator was in many ways a survivor from an earlier age, noted for his extravagant expenditure on villas and works of art, and that the passing of the last of Nero’s consuls also marks the dying of a lifestyle. These two Flavian senators, who flourished in the age of Trajan, in many ways formed a mutual admiration society if Pliny’s letters to his friend are anything to go by.²⁶ Hence, that they should have a similar view on recent history may not be surprising. Their careers began under the Flavians and they would

 Häussler () .  Marchiesi (); Gibson and Morello ().

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have felt little connection with the previous period (the case of Nerva, a sterling performer in suppressing the Pisonian Conspiracy of AD 65 is exceptional). However the suggestion that the present age is an improvement on the past can already be detected in the literature of the Flavian period. After AD 96 this is adapted to turn the generally unmentionable Domitian into a Neronian throwback, while Nerva and Trajan are portrayed as being in direct descent from the earlier Flavian model. Silius Italicus, in a passage almost certainly composed in the 80s, depicted the Flavians as successors to the Julio-Claudians in Jupiter’s prophecy of Rome’s future (Punica 3.594– 629). Perhaps he was following the lead of Vespasian who erected a temple to his benefactor Claudius and justified the construction of the Flavian amphitheatre on the grounds that he was following Augustus’ original intentions (Suetonius, Vespasian 9.1). Both of these acts were of course intended to suggest the illegitimacy of Nero, since Claudius’ adopted son had ‘destroyed’ (or perhaps more realistically, altered) the temple to his predecessor that had been begun by Agrippina and the Colosseum was later created on the site of the lake in front of the Domus Aurea. Silius also places stress on the humble origins of the Flavii in the reference to their origin from Cures and their self-earned glory (se … uirtus caelestis ad astra/ efferet: Punica 3.594– 5), echoing the dominant theme of his epic: the display of Roman manliness when faced by adversity. In addition, the Flavian gens’ rustic habits could be associated with oldstyle military virtue (bellatrix gens bacifero nutrita Sabino: “a warlike race nurtured by the olive-bearing Sabine land”, 3.596). Still, there is no sign of discontinuity in Silius’ depiction of Roman history – one might even suggest that he glosses over the civil wars of 69, since only the story of Domitian’s miraculous escape from the Capitol is referenced in 3.608 (nec te terruerint Tarpei culminis ignes: “nor will the flames at the top of the Capitoline terrify you”). That is hardly surprising, given that, as Pliny notes, he was a confidant of Vitellius at the time.²⁷ By contrast, Valerius Flaccus in the proem to his Argonautica, in a passage whose date is disputed but certainly composed in the Flavian era,²⁸ contrasts the martial abilities of Vespasian and Titus with those of the Julio-Claudians. In a barbed jab at the claimed Asiatic origins of the gens, the failures of the Phrygian Julii on the North Sea from Julius Caesar onward are recalled to contrast  See also his role in negotiating the transfer of power from Vitellius to Vespasian, a peaceful transition that was thwarted by the army mutiny that led to the siege of the Flavian representatives and supporters on the Capitol and the destruction of the site in the subsequent fighting (Tacitus, Histories . – ).  See most recently, Stover ()  – .

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with the deeds of Vespasian in conquering Britain and Valerius emphasizes the heroics of Titus at Jerusalem as well. The war exploits of Titus, black with the grime of war as he sets fire to the towers of the city, are the antithesis of the displays of eastern extravagance by the previous dynasty. Indeed, the poet implies, the Judaean war would be a splendid theme for real epic – if only it hadn’t been forestalled by a composition from Vespasian’s second offspring (Argonautica 1.5 – 14). Statius’ treatment of Vettius Bolanus in Siluae 5.2 shows a similar strategy to that of Valerius when he stresses the martial prowess of a man who was to become a Flavian stalwart. Bolanus while still a youth was able to quell the Armenians who had refused to submit to Nero and achieved success in Britain, just as Vespasian had done before him. We might note that the Armenian successes of Corbulo (Bolanus’ superior) were actually achieved under the auspices of Nero and that Bolanus was in fact appointed to govern Britain in 69 by Vitellius, not the Flavians. That, however, is not the impression given. A similar use of Trojan themes to the detriment of the Julians that is visible in Valerius Flaccus can be observed in one of Martial’s epigrams on Titus’ naval games, his naumachia (De Spectaculis 34).²⁹ According to the epigrammatist, Augustus’ naval theatre was nothing in comparison with the complexity and length of Titus’ displays. That emperor’s naumachia even surpass the Fucine Lake naval battle put on by Claudius, memorably described by Suetonius and Tacitus (Suetonius, Claudius 21.6; Tacitus, Annals 12.56). Finally there is a direct comparison with the salt water pond (stagna) created by Claudius’ successor (see Suetonius, Nero 12.1 for an event in 57 and Dio 62.15.1 for a possible display in 62), who is dismissed with a telling epithet as ‘Trojan’ Nero. If, as Kathleen Coleman argues in her commentary, the Neronian naumachia was actually staged in the lake that was part of the Domus Aurea, now converted as a civic amenity to the Flavian Amphitheatre, the pointed comparison is even stronger.³⁰ Certainly Martial hints at both the extravagance and effeminacy of the Neronian age, compared to the glories of his own time. When Vespasian became princeps, the gens Flavia had little to boast about in comparison with the dynasty that preceded them. Vespasian and Titus could, however, claim military success in Judaea, whereas the last of the Julio-Claudians to engage in campaigning in his own right was Tiberius and that was prior to his ascent to the purple. Nero was notoriously unwarlike: his ‘expedition’ to Greece was high class tourism around the major sites of the Greek games and his projected eastern campaign was abandoned in the face of Galba’s rebellion

 Cf. Suetonius, Titus . and Dio .. –  for descriptions of this or similar events.  Coleman () .

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(Suetonius, Nero 19). I suspect this image of a cowardly emperor, imbellis Nero, also offered an opportunity for the supporters of Vespasian, the new intake into the Roman Senate, to differentiate themselves from the earlier aristocracy. With a war hero now emperor, they could compete on domestic, not military terms. So Statius describes the wife of Domitian’s ab epistulis Abascantius as supporting her husband and serving him simple meals after the fashion of the emperor’s own (Siluae 5.1.119 – 23). Priscilla thus becomes the proverbial Apulian woman or better, given the origins of the Flavii, Sabine wife. The trope of parsimony vs. extravagance can then be read back into Neronian history. Consider Tacitus’ description of the outsiders who fail to applaud Nero sufficiently and need to be physically encouraged in their efforts at applause (Annals 16.5.1). These seem to be exactly the same type of people who would later prosper under the Flavians, the forerunners of the canny senators of Annals 3.55. Indeed their future leader, Vespasian, is to be seen dozing through the brilliance of the imperial performance, an act which was said to have placed him in serious danger at the time (Annals 16.5.3). Tacitus thus seems to be having a little joke in defining an imperial rival to Nero by his cultural habits, rather than suggesting any political threat. A similar strategy can be seen in Tacitus’ recreation of Galba’s speech when he adopted Piso to be his successor in AD 69 (Histories 1.16.1– 2). One household (the Julio-Claudians) had treated the Roman state as their property to be inherited generation after generation. But that was a family that had descended into extravagance: Nero’s monstrousness (immanitas) and profligacy (luxuria) grew to such an extent that the entire state was unable to bear the weight. Time to put big government on a diet, as a modern politician might say. It was also helpful that Vitellius had attempted to legitimate his reign by advertising his family connections with the Julio-Claudians (his father’s prominence under Claudius was in fact his main claim to power). A man who made funeral offerings to Nero (as Tacitus, Histories 2.95.1 reveals him doing) needed to be overthrown. An obvious point of attack on Nero was via the Golden House and its opulence. Even while the emperor was alive there were epigrams circulating that suggested a project that had got out of hand (Suetonius, Nero 39.2). Roma domus fiet: Veios migrate, Quirites, si non et Veios occupat ista domus. Rome will become the Palace. Flee to Veii, citizens – Unless your Palace has got in first to Veii as well.

Our reaction obviously depends on whether we believe Suetonius’ statement that these were contemporary verses and not later compositions. Furthermore, Nero’s

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attempts to rebuild Rome as a better city after the fire of AD 64 need not be seen as pure self-aggrandizement, since imperial buildings and their grounds were also open to the public and could be seen as civic amenities. The clearing of the Subura certainly had much to recommend it (Tacitus, Annals 15.42.1 talks of open fields and ponds flanked by woods along with viewing areas). The rebuilding of the rest of the city or what had escaped the Palace (ceterum urbis quae domui supererant), as the historian sarcastically remarks in Annals 15.42.1, changed a rabbit’s warren of buildings into a modern city with open boulevards, a major improvement, particularly in the light of the Great Fire of Rome. Whether Nero acted for public good or from personal designs is open subject to debate – similar comments might be made about Mussolini’s clearance of the same area for the via dei Fori imperiali in 1931– 33. Nevertheless the emperor’s actions gave the following dynasty a chance to appear as civic-minded saviours. Martial (Liber Spectaculorum 2) celebrates the building of the Baths of Titus over Nero’s dining hall and the Flavian Amphitheatre in the area of the palace’s lake. Such communal projects are regularly celebrated in Flavian literature. In fact the dynasty’s public works were remarkably numerous. Approximately sixty buildings or restorations can be attributed to Domitian alone, the most prominent of which are listed by Suetonius (Domitian 5). Domitian also sought to widen the streets of the city and pave the roads, a project that is the subject of a positive epigram by Martial (7.61). All these efforts are remarkably similar to Nero’s activities after AD 64. The discourse of big-spending government contrasted with public-minded austerity, however, does not end with the Flavian dynasty. The emperor Trajan is portrayed by Pliny in his Panegyricus of AD 100 as opening up the palace to the public (after all, he was actually installed in the Domus Flauia). This requires the (rather unpersuasive) suggestion that the building had been kept barred by Domitian. Pliny even opines, even more unpersuasively, that Domitian had actually been a supporter of Nero, since his punishment of Nero’s freedman Epaphroditus, a man who had risen to the post of a libellis in his court (Suetonius, Domitian 14.4), could only be taken as a sign of support for Epaphroditus’ former master (Panegyricus 53.2– 4). Ironically, in AD 100 Trajan, in the years before his Dacian and Parthian campaigns, has no military successes to celebrate and must publicize his euergetism in contrast to that of the regime he is replacing. He may continue Domitian’s public donations (congiaria) and support schemes for the youth of Italy (alimenta), but at least, according to Pliny, he does not do it to salve his conscience. The Flavians had simultaneously reconfigured Neronian monuments for public use and sought to surpass the works of their predecessors. Trajan plays the same game. An inscription from the Circus Maximus dating to 103 indicates a rebuilding of the stands and the dedicatory

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thanks of the tribes of Rome for the extra seating given to the populace (Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae 286). If this construction was the one that reused the stone from Domitian’s naumachia (Suetonius, Domitian 5) possibly even as a continuation of a Domitianic project as was the forum of Nerva, we can see the populism of the Flavians now adapted for propaganda against their dynasty. Only three years before, in 100, before Trajan had time to create major monuments, he was a restorer, not a builder (parcus in aedificando, diligens in tuendo, Pliny, Panegyricus 51.1), a penny-pinching emperor (frugalissimus princeps) in the Flavian mould. In brief, after AD 68, all Romans were post-Neronian. This was not necessarily a true cultural break, but a deliberately constructed relationship to the past that was created by the Flavians, an ideology readily adapted by their successors. While military success was part of the mythology of the princeps as imperator, emperors could not count on suitable victories within their reigns and were unlikely to possess such glory at the outset. So, instead of thinking about events in war (belli), services on the home front (domi) were more readily celebrated. Just as modern political parties laud their own services to the nation and blame their fiscally inept predecessors, so after the emperor Nero his age became the reference point for future development.

The Culture Wars Returning to Silius, it is now clear that he too shares in this Flavian ideology. His portrait of a Rome that had suffered and could survive the extravagances of the years and look to a bright Flavian future corresponds completely with the outlook of his contemporaries. However, this Domitianic viewpoint would be unacceptable to the likes of Pliny and Tacitus, who are post-Neronian but, through their service to Trajan, post-Domitianic as well. They are proud to have been part of the Flavian revival, but distance themselves from the last of the dynasty. It is as part of this strategy that Pliny treats Silius not as a Flavian senator but as the last of Nero’s senators. Silius himself appears to react against the past by treating Rome as eternal (no Iliou Persis recitations during the Great Fire for him) and choosing the most respectable of models (Homer, Vergil) in an Augustan-style revival of Roman epic. Pliny, however, is tepid toward his poetry (he views Homeric verse as more fitted to the era of Trajan). Most notably, he strikes at Silius’ entire cultural strategy. When he describes the senator as philokalos, he is recalling the values of Periclean Athens, particularly the famous quotation in the Funeral Oration: φιλοκαλοῦμεν μετ’ εὐτελείας (“we appreciate the beautiful without extravagance”). It is initially unclear whether philokalos is rather to be

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taken in its disparaging sense (‘a lover of bling’), but Pliny’s reservation usque ad emacitatis reprehensionem (‘to such an extent that he was criticised as a shopaholic’) indicates that this must be the case.³¹ Using an archaic Latin term (emacitas, from emere, ‘to buy’) contrasts Greek extravagance with Roman parsimony in a carefully crafted epigram whose Thucydidean origins would be recognized by the educated. To Pliny, Silius is irredeemably fixed in the discredited Neronian past, while he and Caninius represent the social and literary future.

Bibliography Ahl, F., M. Davis, and A. Pomeroy. 1986. “Silius Italicus”, ANRW II.32.4: 2492 – 561. Augoustakis, A. 2010. Motherhood and the Other: Fashioning Female Power in Flavian Epic. Oxford. Badian, E. 1972. “Ennius and his Friends”, in: O. Skutsch (ed.), Ennius. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique de la Fondation Hardt 17. Vandoeuvres. Bettini, M. 1977. “Ennio in Silio Italico”, RFIC 105: 425 – 47. Billerbeck, M. 1983. “Die Unterweltsbeschreibung in den Punica”, Hermes 111: 326 – 38. Brink, C.O. 1972. “Ennius and the Hellenistic Worship of Homer”, AJPh 93: 547 – 67. Calder, W.M. 1935. “Silius Italicus in Asia”, CR 49: 216 – 17. Casali, S. 2006. “The Poet at War: Ennius on the Field in Silius’s Punica”, Arethusa 39: 569 – 93. Chaudhuri, P. 2014. The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry. Oxford. Coleman, K.M. 2006. Martial: Liber Spectaculorum. Oxford. Davis, L. 2003. The Accusers. London. Dorfbauer, L.J. 2008. “Hannibal, Ennius und Silius Italicus: Beobachtungen zum 12. Buch der Punica”, RhM 151: 83 – 108. Eck, W. 1970. Senatoren von Vespasian bis Hadrian. Munich. Fucecchi, M. 2014. “The Philosophy of Power: Greek Literary Tradition and Silius’ On Kingship”, in: A. Augoustakis (ed.), Flavian Poetry and its Greek Past. Leiden, 305 – 24. Gibson, B. 2010. “Silius Italicus: a Consular Historian?”, in: A. Augoustakis (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Silius Italicus. Leiden, 47 – 72. Gibson, R.K. and R. Morello. 2012. Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger: An Introduction. Cambridge. Hardie, P. 1993. The Epic Successors of Virgil. Cambridge. Häussler, R. 1965. Tacitus und historische Bewusstsein. Heidelberg. Juhnke, H. 1972. Homerisches in römischer Epik flavischer Zeit. Munich. Karakasis, E. 2014. “Homeric Receptions in Flavian Epic: Intertextual Characterization in Punica 7”, in: A. Augoustakis (ed.), Flavian Poetry and its Greek Past. Leiden, 251 – 266. Knauer, G. 1964. Aeneis und Homer. Göttingen.

 For the negative use of philokalos, see Liddell and Scott, φιλόκαλος . Pliny may be recalling an apothegm of Cato, that the head of a household should be a constant seller (uendax), not a constant buyer (emax: Cato de Agri Cultura .).

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Marchiesi, I. 2008. The Art of Pliny’s Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence. Cambridge. Marks, R. 2005. From Republic to Empire. Frankfurt am Main. McDermott, W.C. and A.E. Orentzel. 1977. “Silius Italicus and Domitian”, AJPh 98: 24 – 34. Pomeroy, A.J. 1989. “Silius Italicus as doctus poeta”, Ramus 18: 119 – 39. — 2000. “Silius’ Rome: The Rewriting of Vergil’s Vision”, Ramus 29: 149 – 68. — 2010. “To Silius through Livy and His Predecessors”, in: A. Augoustakis (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Silius Italicus. Leiden, 27 – 45. Reitz, C. 1982. Die Nekyia in den Punica des Silius Italicus. Frankfurt am Main. Ripoll, F. 2001. “Le monde homérique dans les Punica de Silius Italicus”, Latomus 60: 87 – 107. Ruperti, G.A. 1795 – 8. Caii Silii Italici Punicorum Libri Septemdecim. 2 vols. Göttingen. Spaltenstein, F. 1986 – 90. Commentaire des Punica des Silius Italicus. 2 vols. Geneva. Stocks, C. 2014. The Roman Hannibal. Remembering the Enemy in Silius Italicus’ Punica. Liverpool. Stover, T. 2012. Epic and Empire in Vespasianic Rome. Oxford. Syme, R. 1958. Tacitus. 2 vols. Oxford. Tipping, B. 2010. Exemplary Epic: Silius Italicus’ Punica. Oxford. Van der Keur, M. 2014. “Meruit deus esse videri: Silius’ Homer in Homer’s Punica 13”, in: A. Augoustakis (ed.), Flavian Poetry and its Greek Past. Leiden, 287 – 304. Vessey, D.W. 1974. “Pliny, Martial and Silius Italicus”, Hermes 102: 109 – 16. Von Albrecht, M. 1964. Silius Italicus: Freiheit und Gebundenheit römischer Epik. Amsterdam.

List of Contributors Rhiannon Ash is Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Merton College, Oxford University. She has research interests in Roman Historiography, especially Tacitus, and in Latin literature of the imperial age more generally. She has published widely in these areas, including Ordering Anarchy, her monograph on Tacitus’ Histories (1999), and her commentary on the Latin text of Histories 2 (2007). She is currently in the final stages of writing a commentary on Tacitus Annals 15 for Cambridge University Press. Erica Bexley is Lecturer in Classics at Swansea University. She earned her PhD from Cornell University in 2013. She then held a Visiting Fellowship at The Australian National University before moving to the University of Cambridge to take up a temporary lectureship in Latin. Erica’s main research interests are Neronian literature and Roman drama; she is currently writing a monograph about character and identity in Seneca’s tragedies. Joy Connolly is Professor of Classics and Dean for the Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University. She works on the history of Roman political thought and ancient ideas about aesthetics and rhetoric, concentrating on the many points where those areas meet. Her most recent book is The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton 2014). Currently she is co-editing an Oxford volume on Greek and Roman literary theory and criticism with Nancy Worman and writing articles on Hannah Arendt, Roman imperialist nostalgia, and the debate over republican revolutions in late eighteenth century England and America. Gregson Davis, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, is currently Andrew W. Mellon Research Professor in the Humanities at Duke University. He has taught both Classics and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Cornell, Duke and New York Universities. A native of Antigua in the English-speaking Caribbean, he received his higher education at Harvard College (AB) and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD). His main research interests include Latin poetry, primarily of the Late Republican period, as well as contemporary francophone and anglophone Caribbean poetry. Among his published monographs are: Polyhymnia: the Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse; Parthenope: the Interplay of Ideas in Vergilian Bucolic; and Aimé Césaire. Peter J. Davis is a Visiting Research Fellow in Classics at the University of Adelaide and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania, Austral-

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ia. He works primarily on Ovid, Seneca, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus. He is the author of three books, Shifting Song: The Chorus in Seneca’s Tragedies (1993), Seneca: Thyestes (2003), and Ovid and Augustus: a Political Reading of Ovid’s Erotic Poems (2006). Alex Dressler is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. His interests include Roman literature and ancient philosophy, gender and sexuality, subjectivity and the self, and ancient and modern aesthetic theory. His book, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, is entitled Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy and considers the interrelation of gender and personhood in the figurative language of the Roman philosophers, Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca. John Fitch completed his Dissertation in 1974 under the direction of Frederick Ahl. His published scholarship has been chiefly concerned with Senecan tragedy, and includes a widely accepted relative dating of the dramas (1981), an editio maior of the Hercules (1987), and a new edition of all the plays in the Loeb Library (2002– 4), with an accompanying textual commentary (2004). He has also published a translation of Palladius’ Opus Agriculturae (2013). Most of his career was spent at the University of Victoria, from which he retired in 1999 as Professor and Chair of the Department of Greek and Roman Studies. Michael Fontaine is Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Cornell University, and in 2014 was the Paideia Professor at the Paideia Institute’s Living Latin in Rome course. He is the author of Funny Words in Plautine Comedy (Oxford, 2010), co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy (Oxford, 2014), and the editor and translator of Joannes Burmeister: Aulularia and Other Inversions of Plautus (Leuven University Press, 2015). He is proud to be a colleague of Fred Ahl’s and has learned more from him than he can say. Emily Gowers is Reader in Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. She is author of The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (1993) and Horace: Satires I (2012) and co-editor (with William Fitzgerald) of Ennius Perennis: The Annals and Beyond (2007). She is working on a book about Maecenas in Latin literature and later Western culture. Mathias Hanses is Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State University (PhD: Columbia University, 2015). He is currently

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working on a book manuscript entitled The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus, which examines Roman comedy and its influence from the stage onto the pages of Latin literature (ranging from Cicero to Juvenal). He has published on the reception of Plautus in the Imperial era, Greek and Latin wordplay, ideological biases in Roman historiography, and the History of Classical Scholarship in Europe and North America. Joshua T. Katz is Professor of Classics and sometime Director of the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1998. A linguist by training (B.A. Yale 1991, MPhil. Oxford 1993, Ph.D. Harvard 1998), a classicist by profession, and a comparative philologist at heart, he counts wordplay as one of his principal scholarly and extracurricular interests. His publications, which consider topics from Vedic riddles to Irish pronouns, include a number of papers on Vergil, as well as one on a hidden signature in another Roman author, Horace (MD 59 (2007) 207– 13). David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University. Among his books are Roman Comedy (1983), Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (1994), Greek Comedy and Ideology (1995), Friendship in the Classical World (1997), Pity Transformed (2001), The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006), Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea (2010), and Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea (2014). He served as president of the American Philological Association in 1999, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Matthew Leigh is a Professor of Classics at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement (Oxford, 1997), Comedy and the Rise of Rome (Oxford, 2004), and From Polypragmon to Curiosus. Ancient Concepts of Curious and Meddlesome Behaviour (Oxford, 2013). Michèle Lowrie is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. Her interests focus on the intersection of literature and political thought at Rome and on the reception of Roman figurations. She has published Horace’s Narrative Odes (Oxford 1997) and Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome (Oxford 2009), as well as edited Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace’s Odes and Epodes (Oxford 2009), and co-edited several volumes. Forthcoming in 2015 is Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law (Routledge), co-edited with Susanne Lüdemann. Current projects include: Safety, Security, and Salvation in Roman Political Thought; Con-

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sequential Narratives: The Exemplum and Exceptional Politics from Cicero to Augustus; and Civil War and the Republic to Come, the last co-authored with Barbara Vinken. Martha Malamud received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and wrote her Cornell Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Frederick Ahl, from whom she learned much, but who should not be held accountable for the idiosyncrasies of her scholarship. She taught at the University of Southern California for eight years and is currently a Professor in the Classics Department at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). She has edited the journal Arethusa since 1995. Her research interests include late antique Latin poetry, the classical epic tradition, and Neronian and Flavian poets. Matthew M. McGowan (Ph.D. NYU) is Associate Professor of Classics at Fordham University in New York City. His research focuses primarily on Latin poetry, ancient scholarship, and the classical tradition, and he is the author of Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (Brill 2009). At present, he is at work on a survey of dictionary writing in ancient Rome provisionally titled Latin Lexicography: The Art of Dictionary Writing in Ancient Rome. Phillip Mitsis is the A. S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization at NYU, a Senior Affiliate in the Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Academic Director of the American Institute of Verdi Studies. He was first a student and then a colleague of Fred Ahl for twenty years at Cornell. His most recent book is L’Éthique d’Épicure (Garniers, 2014). Michael Paschalis is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Crete, Department of Philology. He has published or edited 14 books and over 80 articles on Classical and Hellenistic Poetry, Classical Roman Literature, the Ancient Novel, the Poetry of Late Antiquity, the Reception of the Classics, Modern Greek literature as well as Italian, French and English literature. His latest books are: Holy Men and Charlatans in the Ancient Novel, Groningen 2015 (coedited with Stelios Panayotakis and Gareth Schmeling); Nikos Kazantzakis: From Homer to Shakespeare. Studies on his Cretan Νovels, Heraklion 2015. Arthur Pomeroy published, with Frederick Ahl and Martha Davis, the Silius Italicus chapter in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 34.4 (1986). His publications include Arius Didymus: Epitome of Stoic Ethics (Scholars Press, 1999), Roman Social History: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2007), and Then it was De-

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stroyed by the Volcano (Duckworth, 2008). He has written various articles on Silius and Tacitus, as well as the reception of the ancient world in film, and is presently editing the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen. He is Professor of Classics and Head of School at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Michael C.J. Putnam is MacMillan Professor of Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature, emeritus, Brown University. His recent books include Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace (2006), Jacopo Sannazaro: The Latin Poetry (2009), The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil’s Aeneid (2011), and (with Rodney Dennis) The Complete Poems of Tibullus (2012). A past president of the Society for Classical Studies, he is Life Trustee of the American Academy in Rome and recipient of its Centennial Medal (2009). He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society. Jay Reed is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He has published commentaries on Bion of Smyrna and Ovid, Metamorphoses 10 – 12, as well as Virgil’s Gaze, a study of Roman identity in the Aeneid. He has also published articles and delivered talks on Greek bucolic and other Hellenistic poetry, Augustan poetry, Lucan, the myth and cult of Adonis, and the literary reception of Greek and Roman antiquity. Ioannis Ziogas is Lecturer in Classics at Durham University. He is the author of Ovid and Hesiod: The Metamorphosis of the Catalogue of Women (CUP 2013) and co-editor (with M. Skempis) of Geography, Topography, Landscape: Configurations of Space in Greek and Roman Epic (DeGruyter 2014). He has published articles on Augustan poetry and its reception.

Publications by Frederick Ahl Monographs, Translations 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 39. Ithaca, NY. 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, NY. 1986. Seneca: Three Tragedies. Ithaca, NY. Also published as three separate volumes: 1986. Seneca: Trojan Women (repr. 1996). Ithaca, NY. 1986. Seneca: Medea (rev. 2nd edition 1991; repr. 1994). Ithaca, NY. 1986. Seneca: Phaedra (rev. 2nd edition 1991; repr. 1994). Ithaca, NY. 1991. Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction. Ithaca, NY. 1996. The Odyssey Re-Formed. Ithaca, NY. (co-authored with H. Roisman). 2007. Virgil Aeneid a verse translation, with notes and glossary. Oxford. 2008. Two Faces of Oedipus. Ithaca, NY.

Articles, Book Chapters, Reviews 1967. “Cadmus and the Palm Leaf Tablets”, AJPh 88: 188 – 94. 1969. “Pharsalus and the Pharsalia”, Classica et Medievalia 30: 331 – 46. 1971. “Lucan’s De Incendio Urbis, Epistulae ex Campania, and Nero’s Ban”, TAPhA 102: 1 – 27. 1972. “Hercules and Curio”, Latomus 31: 997 – 1009. 1974. “Propertius 1.1”, WS NF 8: 80 – 98. 1974. “Review of David Vessey Statius and the Thebaid”, PhQ 53.1: 141 – 4. 1974. “The Pivot of the Pharsalia”, Hermes 102: 305 – 20. 1974. “The Shadows of a Divine Presence in the Pharsalia”, Hermes 102: 566 – 90. 1982. “Review of R. Syme History in Ovid”, Prudentia 14.1: 75 – 7. 1982. “Review of S. Newmyer Statius’ Silvae”, Phoenix 36.1: 92 – 4. 1982. “Lucan and Statius”, in: J. Luce (ed.), Ancient Writers. New York, 917 – 41. 1982. “Amber, Avallon, and Apollo’s Singing Swan”, AJPh 103.3: 373 – 411. 1984. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105.2: 174 – 208. 1984. “The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius”, ANRW II.32.1: 40 – 110. 1984. “Review of H.-J. van Dam Statius’ Silvae II”, Phoenix 40: 360 – 2. 1985. “Review of Richard Thomas Landscapes and Peoples in Roman Poetry: the Ethnographical Tradition”, CPh 80: 186 – 9. 1985. “Review of The Cambridge History of Latin Literature, vol. 4”, EMC 29: 478 – 83. 1986. “Silius Italicus”, ANRW II.32.4: 2492 – 561. (Co-authored with M. Davis and A. Pomeroy). 1986. “Statius’ Thebaid: A Reconsideration”, ANRW II.32.5: 2803‐912. 1987. “Review of D.E. Hill Statius’ Thebaid”, Phoenix 40: 358 – 60.

444

Publications by Frederick Ahl

1988. “Ars est Caelare Artem: Art in Puns and Anagrams Engraved”, in: J. Culler (ed.), On Puns: The Foundation of Letters. Oxford, 17 – 43. 1989. “Uilix MacLeirtis: The Classical Hero in Irish Metamorphosis”, in: R. Warren (ed.), The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field. Boston, MA, 173 – 98. 1989. “Homer, Vergil, and Epic Narrative”, ICS 14: 1 – 31. 1991. “Classical Gods and the Demonic in Film”, in: M. Winkler (ed.), Classics and Cinema. Bucknell Review 35. Lewisburg, PA, 40 – 59. 1991. “Pindar and the Sphinx: Celtic Polyphony and Greek Music”, in: R. Wallace and B. MacLachlan (eds.), Harmonia Mundi: Musica e filosofia nell’antichità. Rome, 131 – 50. 1992. “Moenia Mundi: The Akritic Poet: a response to Charles Segal”, in: G.K. Galinsky (ed.), The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics? Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 157 – 69. 1993. “Form Empowered: Lucan’s Pharsalia”, in: A.J. Boyle (ed.), Roman Epic. London, 125 – 42. 1994. “Apollo in Latin Epic after Virgil”, in: J. Solomon (ed.), Apollo: Origins and Influences. Tucson, AZ, 113 – 34. 1997. “Admetus Deuteragonistes”, ColbyQ 33.1: 9 – 25. 1998. “Review of H. MacL. Currie, Silver Latin Epic”, CO 76: 2000. “Seneca and Chaucer”, in: G.W.M. Harrison (ed.), Seneca in Performance. London, 151 – 71. 2002. “Wordplay and Apparent Fiction in the Odyssey”, Arethusa 35.1: 117 – 32. 2007. “Troy and Memorials of War”, in: M. Winkler (ed.), Troy from Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic. Malden, MA, 163 – 85. 2007. “Spartacus, Exodus, and Dalton Trumbo: Managing the Ideologies of War”, in: M. Winkler (ed.), Spartacus. Malden, MA, 65 – 86 2009. “Chaucer’s Englishing of Latin Wordplay”, in: A. Galloway and R.F. Yeager (eds.), Through A Classical Eye: Transcultural & Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee. Toronto, 267 – 86. 2010. “Gendering the Underworld: Bodies in Homer, Virgil, Plato, and Silius”, in: F. Schaffenrath (ed.), Silius Italicus (Akten der Innsbrucker Tagung vom 19.–21. Juui 2008). Frankfurt am Main, Germany/Berlin, 47 – 58. 2010. “Quintilian and Lucan”, in: N. Homke and C. Reitz (eds.), Lucan’s Bellum Civile: Between Epic Tradition and Aesthetic Innovation. Berlin/New York, 1 – 16. 2011. “Translating a Paean of Praise”, in: J. Parker (ed.), Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern Proof. Oxford, 29 – 37. 2011. “Making Poets Serve the Established Order: Censoring Meaning in Sophocles, Virgil, and W.S. Gilbert”, Partial Answers 10.2: 271 – 301. 2015. “Transgressing Boundaries of the Unthinkable: Sophocles, Ovid, Vergil, Seneca, and Homer Refracted in Statius’ Thebaid”, in: W. Dominik, C.E. Newlands, and K.G. Gervais (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Statius. Leiden, 240 – 65. 2015. “A mão de Deus: Diego Maradona e a natureza divina da trapaça na antiguidade clássica”, Archai 14: 11 – 19. (forthcoming). “Etimologias do heroismo: buscando e destruindo identidade, de Odisseu a Lampião”, (trans. J. Avellar and Maria Cecília de Miranda N. Coelho) in: G. Cornelli and Maria Cecília de Miranda N. Coelho (eds.), Deuses, homens e heróis – entre gregos e Baianos. São Paulo, Brazil.

Index of passages discussed Aratus Phaenomena 16‐18

78

Callimachus Aetia Fr. 1.21‐2 Pf. Fr. 67.1‐4 Pf.

228 221

Calpurnius Siculus Eclogues 1.1‐23 4.1‐15 4.73‐7 7.1‐6

302 306 308 309

Catullus 63.50‐73 64.50‐1 64.57 64.60‐2 64.91‐5 64.171‐2 64.175‐6 64.180‐1 64.250 64.295 64.338‐41 64.348‐51 64.353‐5 64.357 64.360 64.368 64.368‐70 64.372‐3

143 163 163 156 160‐1 162 155 155 154 159 158 152 165 163 164 164 166 161

Cicero Letters to His Friends 6.7.1 CIL 4.8297 Dio Cassius 62.28

355 204

407

Homer Iliad 8.175‐6 9.410‐16 15.592‐600 Horace Epodes 7.17‐20 Odes 1.14.17‐20 1.34.12‐16 2.2.5‐8 2.10 2.11.13‐17 3.1.5‐8

423‐4 422 424

342 347 52 55 50‐1 58 349

Lucan Bellum Ciuile siue Pharsalia 1.1‐4 343 1.151‐7 280 1.366 344 1.374‐8 344 1.372‐86 262 2.108‐9 286 2.177‐85 291 4.500‐2 287 4.558‐66 286‐7 7.454‐7 281 7.617‐18 290 7.630‐1 290 9.787‐8 286 Lucretius De rerum natura 1.80‐2 1.922‐5 2.646‐51 3.70‐3

143 78 171 340‐1

Martial 10.4.1‐2

355

446

Index of passages discussed

Ovid Ars Amatoria 1.1‐2 1.41‐2 3.469‐514 Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1.93‐8 3.43‐6 3.59‐62 Fasti 5.45 – 6 Heroides 20.7‐8 20.27‐30 20.91‐2 20.107‐9 20.155‐6 20.237‐40 Metamorphoses 2.657‐60 15.3‐11 15.153‐75 15.746‐7 15.871‐9 Remedia Amoris 79‐80 Tristia 1.25‐8 4.10.17‐20 4.10.99‐100 4.10.125‐32 Seneca Medea 61‐2 583‐5 587‐90 479‐82 Oedipus 82‐5 233‐8 236‐8 642‐3 On Mercy 1.8 1.19.5‐6

217 232 200‐1 399 400 400 2 225 222 223 224 224 227 193‐4 246 251 193 247 234 399 214 196 248

322 323 324 324‐5 365 359 372‐3 373 183 338‐9

Thyestes 215‐18 582‐5 607‐11

339 346 349

Silius Italicus Punica 3.575‐81 3.583‐4 8.592‐4 12.683‐4 12.699‐700

422 421 417 425 425

Statius Achilleid 1.1‐3 Siluae 1.1.5‐7 1.1.32‐6 3.5.22‐8 3.5.51‐4 5.1.37‐42 5.1.43‐7 5.1.51‐6 5.1.57‐9 5.1.71‐4 5.1.127‐34 5.1.137‐41 5.1.170‐5 5.1.188‐91 5.1.225‐35 5.1.238‐41 5.1.216‐18

393 393 395 397 392‐3 394 396 397 398 401 401‐2 402 409 404 404 410

Strabo Geography 1.2

253

Suetonius Domitian 1.2 22.1 Nero 39.2 Otho 12.1

379

383 405 431 384

Index of passages discussed

Tacitus Annals 3.49.1 4.31.1‐2 6.29.3‐4 13.15.2 14.48.1 14.52.3 15.49.3 15.70 Dialogus 13.5 Vergil/Virgil Aeneid 1.1‐8 1.8‐11 1.278‐9 1.479‐82 1.742‐9 4.1‐4 4.9‐23 4.10 4.10 – 11 4.20 – 2 4.23 4.28‐9 4.65‐7 4.77‐9 4.101 4.171‐2 4.253‐5 4.354‐50 4.381‐4 4.408‐10 4.531‐2 4.462‐3 4.566‐70 4.657‐8

18 19 21 24 25 26 29 29 81

96 170 423 153 101 154 133 155 158 155 158‐9 161 160 102 157 162 120 178 115 156 157 108 88‐9 162

4.696‐9 6.851‐3 7.173‐6 7.601‐5 7.808‐11 7.789‐91 7.720‐1 9.486‐7 10.11‐13 10.198‐203 10.495‐500 10.501‐2 10.503‐4 10.513‐5 10.821‐4 10.846‐56 11.176‐81 11.234‐7 11.272‐4 11.340‐1 12.107‐9 12.370 12.587‐8 12.862‐4 12.926‐7 12.945‐7 12.947‐9 12.948‐9 Eclogues 1.1‐10 5.1‐15 Georgics 1.1‐2 1.406‐9 1.424‐37 2.319‐33 2.475‐82 4.559‐66

153 92 186 207 97 177 165 152‐3 423 98 177 173‐4 174 165 134 135 175 186 122 187 173 166 74 120 166 145, 176 175 167 301 303‐4 70 118 71 73 77‐8 69

447

General Index Abascantus 387‐92, 394, 396, 399‐406, 408‐10, 431 Achilleid 7, 378‐82, 384 Achilles 7‐8, 151‐3, 157‐60, 163‐7, 184‐5, 188, 208, 231, 245, 252, 378‐84, 419‐20, 422‐4, 426 acronym 5, 69, 79 acrostic 71‐2, 75‐6, 199, 202‐3, 207‐08 adultery 21, 216, 225‐6, 233, 236, 397 Aeneas 7‐9, 88‐103, 107, 109‐10, 115‐27, 132‐6, 139, 145‐7, 151, 155‐6, 158‐60, 162‐7, 169‐80, 185, 188‐90, 193, 206, 243, 306, 318, 417, 419‐20, 423‐6 Alcestis 387, 390‐2, 402‐3, 408‐9 allusion 7, 10, 32, 57, 70, 72, 75, 78‐9, 114, 116, 122, 140, 153, 155‐7, 159, 162, 164, 166, 185, 196, 214, 223, 229, 245, 254, 263, 305‐6, 314, 317, 321, 326, 336, 341‐2, 346‐7, 349, 351, 357, 359‐60, 372, 374, 378‐9, 384, 391, 408‐10, 421 ambiguity 2, 4‐5, 8, 21, 133, 145‐7, 190, 268, 284, 359, 363‐4, 366‐9, 371, 385 Amor 5‐6, 10, 17, 26, 77‐8, 80, 87‐90, 92‐3, 98‐104, 119, 122, 133, 157, 161‐2, 178, 199‐200, 202‐8, 214, 221‐3, 226‐7, 237, 246, 263, 265, 285, 287, 318, 393, 396, 409 anagram 5‐6, 70, 72, 80, 87‐90, 93, 96, 99‐100, 103, 202, 204, 206, 391 Apollo 32, 39, 51, 53, 60, 95‐6, 191‐2, 194, 195‐6, 224, 228‐9, 306‐7, 366, 392, 418 Aratus 70, 72, 75‐6, 78, 80, 203, 330 Ariadne 7, 116, 154‐7, 160, 162‐3, 408 Augustan/anti-Augustan 4, 8‐9, 23, 38, 40, 42‐4, 47, 49, 50, 61, 63, 65, 89, 95, 158, 180, 183, 190‐1, 196‐7, 215‐16, 233, 235‐6, 247, 256, 308, 378, 415, 417‐8, 427, 433 Augustus 2‐5, 8, 10, 38‐40, 42, 44, 47‐9, 52, 60‐2, 64‐5, 69, 92, 95‐6, 179, 180, 193, 216‐18, 235‐7, 242, 244, 246‐7, 250, 254‐5, 299, 308, 342, 347‐50, 399, 407, 427, 429‐30

authority 3‐4, 7, 10, 25, 112, 186, 189, 215‐19, 223, 227, 229, 277‐9, 281, 285, 293, 348, 363‐4, 368‐9, 374, 377, 415, 419 birds 6, 73, 107‐8, 112‐28, 190‐1, 196 Caesar see Augustus and Julius Caesar Callimachus 191, 195, 214, 220‐1, 223‐5, 228‐30, 416 Calpurnius Siculus 10, 300‐2, 304‐9 carmen perpetuum 242, 256 Cato 14‐15, 30, 233, 261, 264, 274‐5, 277, 280, 283, 285‐8, 294 Catullus 7‐8, 27, 123, 142‐3, 151‐67, 195, 220 characterization 6, 7, 22, 95, 151, 155, 164, 176, 284, 388, 428 Cicero 1, 7, 16, 122, 146, 189, 217‐18, 233, 245, 248‐9, 252, 260, 264‐6, 269‐70, 292, 337, 355, 361, 415‐16, 418 civil war 9, 50, 57, 179, 244, 250, 262, 269, 274‐6, 281, 285, 288, 292, 333‐7, 340‐52, 360, 383, 427, 429 clementia 8, 19, 178‐80 conspiracy 5, 29‐30, 37‐40, 44‐7, 52, 55, 60, 62, 64‐5, 349, 351, 429 Coriolanus 260, 263‐71 cosmos 205, 277, 281, 294, 334, 336, 346, 352. decorum 39, 50, 278 delay 5‐7, 58‐9, 78, 87‐96, 98‐103, 137, 175, 201‐2, 269, 283 desire 10, 60, 87‐90, 93‐4, 100‐1, 160, 221‐3, 225, 227, 231‐2, 234, 236, 255, 279, 285, 293, 322, 347, 350, 356, 368 Dido 6‐9, 87‐90, 95, 100‐3, 107‐12, 115‐19, 121, 123‐8, 132‐4, 136, 139, 142, 146, 148, 153‐63, 165‐7, 178, 180, 424 doctrina 28, 122, 326 Domitian 7‐8, 17, 28, 378‐85, 388, 392‐4, 400‐1, 404‐6, 409‐10, 429, 431‐3 Drances 183, 187‐9, 196

450

General Index

Ennius 1, 87, 99, 251‐2, 317‐18, 417‐18, 420 Epicurean philosophy 8‐9, 79, 143, 171‐2, 174 ethics 174, 180 etymologizing 1‐3, 6, 9, 116, 121, 125, 307, 314, 320, 322‐3, 325 etymology 1‐2, 7, 119, 121, 315, 317, 322, 327‐8, 330‐1, 357, 366 exempla 57‐8, 265, 338, 389‐90, 392 exemplarity 5, 388‐90, 408, 411 exile 6, 9, 26, 38, 45, 125, 135, 189, 194, 196‐7, 207, 214, 241‐5, 247‐8, 250, 253‐6, 263‐6, 301, 370, 399 figuration 157, 162, 270, 335‐6, 345, 349, 351 figured speech 24‐5, 38, 40, 61 flattery 292, 377, 405 Flavian literature 432 foundation 6, 59, 87‐9, 99, 236, 244‐6 Freud 6, 132, 136‐7, 140‐1, 148, 235 Freudian slip 6, 132, 137‐8, 140‐2 friendship 21, 50, 188, 263, 265, 267, 270 Furies 107, 110, 145‐7, 176, 321 furor 145‐6, 153, 157, 160‐1, 169, 192 graffiti 6, 199, 204‐5, 208 grotesque 4, 279, 281‐5, 288, 291‐4, 296 guilt 6, 26, 39, 132, 135‐6, 138‐9, 141‐3, 147‐8, 176, 269, 273, 292, 359, 364‐5, 371 hermeneutics of suspicion 5, 39, 56, 62 Homer 7, 107, 116, 121‐2, 132, 151, 171‐2, 185, 188, 194, 196, 252‐3, 327, 378, 382, 413‐21, 423, 425‐6, 433 illusion 5, 42, 178, 232, 295, 340, 390, 408 immortality 30, 171, 192‐4, 242, 247‐8, 250, 254‐6, 281, 290, 380‐1, 414 interpretation 4‐5, 7‐8, 10, 15, 38, 40‐3, 48, 50, 54, 57, 60, 62‐3, 102, 140‐2, 145, 147, 169, 176, 202, 205, 215, 222, 226, 233, 235‐6, 274, 277, 292, 317, 325, 356, 361, 363‐4, 366‐7, 369, 374, 378, 380 intertextuality 7, 10, 99, 123, 196, 207, 225, 228‐9, 421 ira 8‐9, 97, 145, 157, 169‐71, 173, 176, 194, 200, 202, 247, 255, 340

irony 15, 40, 46, 90‐1, 152, 162‐4, 167, 177, 205, 254, 274, 288, 294‐5, 336, 338‐9, 356, 359, 366, 371, 377, 394, 432 Julius Caesar 7, 179, 193, 244, 246, 250, 254, 259‐62, 265‐6, 268‐71, 274‐5, 277, 280‐7, 292, 294, 296, 300, 308, 343‐44, 406, 425, 429 Jupiter 2, 39, 51, 53‐4, 60, 89‐91, 94, 97‐8, 100‐2, 120, 124, 162, 193, 248, 348‐9, 377, 379‐82, 393, 421‐7, 429 kerygma 42, 56‐62 ktisis 89‐90, 93‐4, 97‐100, 103 law 3, 9, 10, 69, 89, 118, 201, 214‐20, 222‐3, 225‐7, 230, 232‐3, 235‐7, 241‐2, 244‐5, 247, 255, 277‐81, 291, 294, 303, 305, 315, 369, 419 libertas 5, 7, 26, 183, 189, 275, 285, 414 Livia 21, 399 love 6, 10, 17, 26, 73, 78, 88‐9, 91‐2, 94, 97‐103, 116‐17, 119, 122, 127‐8, 133‐4, 154, 157, 161‐2, 167, 202, 205‐6, 208, 213, 215‐18, 221‐2, 225‐7, 231‐2, 234‐6, 246, 261, 263, 265, 282, 285, 287‐8, 304‐5, 340, 345, 393‐4, 397‐8, 409 love letter 10, 199‐200, 202, 204, 221, 225, 229 Lucretius 40, 78‐9, 142‐3, 171, 234, 247, 249, 340‐2 ludic signature see signature magic 21, 109, 121, 160, 162, 215, 219‐21, 361, 368, 402 marriage 128, 133, 158‐9, 160‐3, 216, 223, 225‐8, 232, 235‐7, 315, 322‐3, 394‐8, 405, 409 materiality 229‐31, 288 metaphor 30, 50, 53‐4, 57, 89‐90, 94, 96, 124, 128, 138, 146, 154, 159, 164, 167, 213‐14, 255, 289, 323, 334, 336, 338, 348, 351, 352, 358, 405, 426 metaphorology 333, 335, 337 metapoetics 71, 74‐6, 79 metempsychosis 241

General Index

modus 172 mora 5‐6, 78, 80, 87‐104, 202, 329 Nero 4, 9, 13, 20, 24‐30, 32, 277, 291‐2, 294, 306, 309, 333‐4, 348, 377, 407‐8, 410, 413, 416, 427‐33 Numa 9, 241‐7, 249, 251, 255 Oedipus 5‐6, 25, 316‐17, 328‐31, 355‐74 palindrome 6, 72, 87, 204‐6 panegyric 3, 10, 40, 299‐309, 432‐3 parrhesia 7, 270 pastoral 10, 61, 114, 299‐309 performance 9‐10, 13, 15, 24, 28, 30, 32, 53, 173, 316, 357, 362, 393‐4, 400, 402, 431 Philodemus 172 pietas 7‐9, 92, 134, 170, 175‐6, 178‐9, 181, 251, 261, 267, 270‐1, 286, 306‐7, 339‐40, 342, 388, 404‐5 pius 180 Pliny the Younger 413‐16, 427‐9, 432‐4 politics 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 31‐2, 47‐8, 50‐1, 53, 180, 206, 215, 274, 276‐9, 284, 295, 334, 337, 345, 358, 365, 374, 389, 427 Polyxena 8, 163‐4, 166‐7, 314 Pompey 122, 260‐1, 265, 274, 276‐7, 280, 282‐5, 343, 406‐7 postcolonial 4, 278, 285, 293 principate 10, 17, 23‐4, 26, 28, 30‐1, 189, 242, 250, 374, 377, 427 Priscilla 388‐90, 392, 394, 396‐406, 408‐10, 431 prophecy 61, 192‐4, 248, 300, 302‐3, 305, 307, 356‐7, 361, 367‐70, 372, 374, 429 prosopography 37‐8, 45, 56 psycholinguistics 6, 139‐41 psychopathology 136, 138, 140 puns 2‐3, 5‐6, 116, 121‐2, 131‐9, 142, 145, 147‐8, 159, 162, 202‐3, 207‐8, 214, 226, 230, 255, 283, 286, 327, 359, 371 Pythagoras 9, 241‐7, 249‐56, 407 recusatio 52, 77, 213‐14, 235, 390 Republic/res publica 5, 7, 42, 49, 93, 183‐4, 186‐7, 192, 249‐50, 266, 274‐5, 277, 282‐3, 285, 287‐9, 342, 347, 377, 427

451

revenge 13, 32, 116, 134, 170, 176, 281, 322, 335‐6, 339, 348 Roma 5‐6, 87‐90, 93, 99‐100, 103‐4, 199, 202‐8, 262, 269, 274, 276, 281, 306, 410, 425, 431 Roman Empire 8, 256, 296, 337, 377 sacrifice 8, 99, 115, 163, 167, 175‐6, 196, 247, 286‐8, 322, 360, 368‐9, 403 securitas 337‐8, 340 seduction 10, 88, 215, 223, 226, 234, 317, 335 semantic 1, 3, 6, 88, 94, 99, 103‐4, 140, 142, 351, 364 signature 5, 70, 72‐6, 78‐81, 229 signs 71, 113, 201‐2, 208, 294, 336, 355, 360‐1, 367‐9, 408, 425 soul 9, 14, 93, 124‐5, 133, 135, 192, 218, 241, 250‐4, 334, 336‐41, 343, 345‐7, 352, 394 sound 6, 27, 79, 96, 99, 107‐8, 110, 112‐16, 118‐19, 121, 123, 126‐8, 140, 142, 148, 163, 280, 301, 303, 307‐8, 319‐20, 323 spectacle 5, 259, 275, 283, 309, 408, 410 statues 390‐1, 393‐4, 403‐4, 406, 408‐10 Stoic philosophy 9, 171, 275, 338‐9, 350, 352, 425 sublime 4, 276, 280‐4, 288, 291, 293‐4, 296 Syme, Ronald 27, 37‐50, 52, 64‐5 Tacitus 9‐10, 13‐14, 16‐25, 27‐32, 49, 65, 81, 342, 406, 413, 427‐8, 430‐3 telestich 5‐6, 75, 199, 202‐8 testatio 227‐9 Theocritus 300, 304 Thersites 184‐5, 187‐8 Theseus 8, 125, 152, 155‐6, 158, 160, 162‐4, 318‐19 Thyestes 9, 27, 322, 327‐31, 333, 335, 344, 347‐8, 350 Tiberius 18‐23, 32, 430 trope 2, 4, 7, 9‐10, 89, 94, 102, 176, 225, 335‐6, 338, 341, 343, 346, 351‐2, 409, 417, 431 Turnus 8‐9, 90‐2, 94, 99, 120, 124‐5, 134, 146‐7, 165‐7, 169‐70, 173‐80, 183, 187‐9, 420, 426

452

General Index

tyranny 4, 117, 250, 255, 276, 279, 284‐5, 289, 294, 344 tyrant 4‐5, 113, 122, 275, 287, 339, 348, 372 uates 190‐2, 256, 328‐9, 356‐8, 361‐2, 368, 372, 374, 418 uis 1, 3 uniuira 396‐8, 408, 410 Valerius Flaccus 416, 429‐30 Varro Murena 38‐40, 43‐6, 48, 55, 61‐2, 64‐5

violence 1‐4, 7, 10, 40, 44, 89, 117, 125‐6, 147, 165, 170‐1, 174‐6, 179, 268, 273‐4, 276‐80, 282‐5, 288‐9, 291, 294‐5, 323‐4, 343, 351, 369, 372, 388, 400, 419 wit 233, 307, 325, 327 wordplay 1‐3, 5‐7, 9, 70‐1, 75‐6, 80‐1, 87, 89‐90, 93, 98‐100, 131, 199, 202‐7, 229‐30, 313‐16, 319‐20, 325, 327, 394, 402