Latin Literature: A History 0801846382, 9780801846380

Citation preview

Gian Biagio Conte

Latin Literature A HISTORY Translated by Joseph B. Solodow Revised by Don Fowler and Glenn W. Most

THE JOHNS

HOPKINS

BALTIMORE

AND LONDON

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Original Italian-language edition, Letteraturalatina: Manuale storicodal!e origini alla fine dell'imperoromano,published by Casa Editrice Felice Le Monnier. Copyright© 1987 by Le Monnier, Firenze © 1994 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The Johns Hopkins University Press 2 7 l 5 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4319 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicarion can be found at the end of this book.

Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents

Detailed Table of Contents

ix

Foreword, by Elaine Fantham Preface

xxiii

xxix

Acknowledgments

xxxiii

Introduction: Literary History and Historiography

PART ONE

1

The Early and Middle Republics The Origins

I

3

The Early Roman Theater Livi us Andronicus Naevius

43

Plautus

49

Caecilius Statius

29

39

65

Oratory and Historiography in the Archaic Period

68

literature and Culture in the Period of the Conquests Ennius Cato

7I

75 85

Terence

92

The Development of Tragedy: Pacuvius and Accius

104

The Development of Epic Poetry: From Ennius to Virgil Lucilius

I 10

r r2

Politics and Culture between the Era of the Gracchi and the Sullan rI8 Restoration

V

PART TWO

The Late Republic The Age of Caesar (78-44 B.C.) Neoteric Poetry and Catullus Lucretius Cicero

l

133 136

55

175

Philology, Biography, and Antiquarianism at the End of the Republic 209

PART THREE

Caesar

225

Sallust

234

The Age of Augustus 43

17: Characteristics of a Period

B.C.-A.D.

Virgil

262

Horace

292

Elegy: Tibullus and Propertius Ovid Livy

249

321

340 367

Directions in Historiography

3 77

Scholarship and Technical Disciplines

386

Legal Literature: From Its Beginnings to the Early Empire PART FOUR

394

The Early Empire Culture and Spectacle: The Literature of the Early Empire Seneca

408

The Poetic Genres in the Julio-Claudian Period Lucan

440

Petronius

453

Satire under the Principate: Persius and Juvenal Epic in the Flavian Period

481

Pliny the Elder and Specialist Knowledge Martial and the Epigram Quintilian

505

5 12

The Age of the Adoptive Emperors Pliny the Younger

vt

426

Contents

525

5 19

497

467

401

Tacitus

530

Suetonius and the Minor Historians Apuleius

546

553

Philology, Rhetoric and Literary Criticism, Law Developments in Poetry: The PoetaeNovelli PART FIVE

57 I

588

The Late Empire From the Severans to Diocletian (193-305)

593

From Constantine to the Sack of Rome (306-410) The Apogee of Christian Culture

678

From Honorius to Odoacer (4ro-476) The Dawn of the Middle Ages

621

698

7 13

Appendixes r. Chronological Tables 2.

729

Greek Authors and Texts

776

3. Roman Culture: Politics, Society, Ideology

794

4. Terms of Rhetoric, Metrics, and Literary Criticism Index of Names

806

819

Contents

vtt

Detailed Contents

Foreword, by Elaine Fantham Preface

xxttt

xxtx

Acknowledgments

xxxttt

Introduction: Literary History and Historiography PART ONE

1

The Early and Middle Republics The Origins

I

3

r. The Chronology and Spread of Writing 14 2. Nonliterary Forms of Communication 15 Laws and Treaties 16 The Fasti and the Annales 17 The Commentarii 18 The Dawn of Oratory: Appius Claudius Caecus 3. Preliterary Forms: The Carmina 19 Sacral Poetry 22

Popular Poetry 2 3 Heroic Poetry 24 The Problem of the Sarnrnian Bibliography 2 7

The Early Roman Theacer

2

18

5

29

r. The Stage 29 2. The Forms 33 3. A Dramatic Subgenre: The Atellan 36 Roman Terminology for the Theatrical Genres Bibliography 3 7

36

Livius Andronicus

39 Life, Works, Sources 39 The Birch of Verse Translation Bibliography 42

40

IX

Naevius

43

Life, Works, Sources 43 Between Myth and History Bibliography 47

Plautus

44

49

Life, Works and Sources 49 1. Typical Features of the Plots and the Characters 5I 2. The Greek Models 56 3. "Comic Lyricism" 58 4. The Structures of the Plot and the Reception of Plaurine Drama 5. Literary Success 62 Bibliography 63

60

Caecilius Scatius

65 Life, Works, Sources 65 A Grear Comic Writer 66 Bibliography 67

Oratory and Historiography in the Archaic Period Oratory 68 2. The Annals ofFabius Pictor 68 3. Cincius Alimenrus and the Other Annalists Bibliography 70

68

1.

69

Literature and Culture in the Period of the Conquests

7I

Ennius

75 Life, Works, Sources 75 1. The Drama 77 2. The Annals: Structure and Composition 78 3. Ennius and the Muse: His Poetics 80 4. Experimentation: Language, Style, Merer 81 5. Ennius and the Period of the Conquests 83 Bibliography 84

Cato

85

Life, Works, Sources 85 r. The Beginnings of Senatorial Historiography 2. The Treatise on Agriculture 88 3. Cato's Political-Cultural Battle 89 4. Literary Success 90 Bibliography 90

86

Terence 92 Life, Works, Sources 92 1. Historical Background 93 2. Style and Language 96 3. The Prologues: Terence's Poetics and His Relation to His Models 4. Themes and Literary Success of Terence's Comedies 99 Bibliography 102

x

Detailed Contents

97

The Development of Tragedy: Pacuvius and Accius r. Pacuvius

ro4

104

Life, Works, Sources ro4 Accius 105 Life, Works, Sources 105 3. The Development of Tragedy Bibliography ro9 2.

ro6

The Development of Epic Poetry: From Ennius to Virgil Lucilius

1

ro

I I2

Life, Works, Sources r r 2 Lucilius and Satire 1 r 3 Bibliography 116

Politics and Culture between the Era of the Gracchi and the Sullan Restoration 1I 8 r. Oratory and Political Tensions

II8 Asianism and Atticism 120 121 2. The Development of Historiography Sisenna and "Tragic" Historiography r22 The Beginnings of Autobiography 123 3. Antiquarian, Linguistic, and Philological Studies 123 Analogy and Anomaly in the Use of Language 124 4. Comedy after Terence: The Fabula Palliata and the Fabula Tagata 125 5. The Atellan at Rome in the Late Republic: Pomponius and Novius 126 6. The Mime: Laberius and Syrus 127 Bibliography 130 PART TWO

The Late Republic The Age of Caesar (78-44

B.C.)

Neoteric Poetry and Catullus

I

33

136

The Pre-Neoteric Poets 138 2. The Neoteric Poets 140 3. Catullus 142 Life, Works, Sources 142 The Short Poems r 44 The Carmina Dorta 148 Style 151 Literary Success r 5 I Bibliography r53 I.

Lucretius

r 55

Life and Evidence, Works 155 r. Lucretius and Roman Epicureanism r57 2. The Didactic Poem 15 8 3. The Study of Nature and the Serenity of Man 4. The Course of History 164

163

Detailed Contents

xt

5. The Interpretation of the Work

166

6. Language and Style 169 7. Literary Success I 7 1 Bibliography

17 3

Cicero 175 Life, Works, Sources 175 r. Tradition and Innovation in Roman Culture 177 2. The Supremacy of the Word: Political Career and Practical Oratory 178 First Successes and the Trial ofVerres 178 The Program of Concord among the AtBuent Classes r 80 The Defense of Marcus Caelius: Cicero and Roman Youth 183 Real Speeches and Written Speeches: The Defense of Milo 184 From the Civil War to the Dictatorship of Caesar 184 The Struggle against Antony 184 The Significance ofCicero's Political Program 185 3. The Supremacy of the Word: The Rhetorical Works 186 Eloquence and Philosophy 1 86 The History of Eloquence and Controversies about Style 188 4. A Project of State 189 5. A Morality for Roman Society 191 The Theory of Knowledge 193 Ethical Systems in Conflict: Cicero's Philosophical Eclecticism 193 Old Age and Friendship 194 The Duties of the Ruling Class 195 The System of the Virtues 196 The Origins of Etiquette 197 Flexibility and the Pluralism of Values 198 6. Cicero as Prose Writer: Language and Style 199 7. The Poetic Works 200 8. The Correspondence 202 9. Cicero's Literary Success 203 Bibliography 207

Philology, Biography, and Antiquarianism at the End of the Republic 209 Studies of Antiquity and Nostalgia for the Roman Past 209 Titus Pomponius Atticus, Antiquarian Scholar and Organizer of Culture 210 3. Varro 210 Life, Works, Sources 210 I.

2.

Antiquarian Learning, Philology, and Linguistic Studies Literary and Philosophical Works 2 15 Agriculture and the Expansion of Consumption 2 r8 Literary Success 219 4. Nigidius Figulus 220 5. Cornelius Nepos 22r

xu

Detailed Contents

212

Life, Works, Sources

22 r

Traditional Values and Cultural Relativism in the Biographies of Cornelius Nepos 222 Bibliography 223

Caesar

225

Life, Works, Sources

225

r. The Commentariusas a Historiographic Genre

226

The Gallic Campaigns in Caesar's Narration 227 3. The Narration of the Civil War 228 4. Caesar's Truthfulness and the Problem of Historical Distortion 5. The Conrinuators of Caesar 2 3 o 6. Linguistic Theories 23 r 7. Literary Success 23 I Bibliography 23 2 2.

Sallust

229

234

Life, Works, Sources 234 r. The Historical Monograph as a Literary Genre 2 35 2. Catiline's Conspiracy and the Fear of the Lower Classes 236 3. The Bellum lugurthae: Sallust and the Opposition to the Nobility 4. The Histories and the Crisis of the Republic 240 5. Style 241 6. The Epistulae and the lnvectivae 242 7. Literary Success 243 Bibliography 244 PART THREE

239

The Age of Augustus 43

B.C.-A.D.

17: Characteristics of a Period

249

r. Introduction 249 A Mature Literary Consciousness: The System of the Genres Augustan Ideology and the Sincerity of the Poets 2 5 5 2. Literature, the Political Background, and the Poetic Circles

Virgil

2

53

257

262

Life, Works, Sources 262 r. The Bucolics 264 Theocritus and Virgil 264 The Book of the Eclogues 265 The Limits of the Bucolic Genre 266 2. From the Bucolicsto the Georgics(38-26

B.C.)

268

3. The Georgics 270 The Georgicsas a Didactic Poem 270 The Augustan Background 2 72 Structure and Composition 273 The Story of Aristaeus and Orpheus 2 75 4. From the Georgicsto the Aeneid 276 5. The Aeneid 276

Detailed Contents

xm

Homer and Augustus (I) 2 76 The Legend of Aeneas 278 The New Epic Style 281 Homer and Augustus (II): The Motives of the Defeated 6. Literary Success 284 Bibliography 290

283

Horace 292 Life, Works, Sources 292 r. The Epodesas Poetry of Excess 296 2. The Satires 298 An Entirely Roman Genre: Horace and Lucilius 298 Satire and Diatribe: Horatian Morality 299 The Second Book and the New Stance ofHoratian Satire 301 The Sryle of the Horatian Sermo 302 3. The Odes 303 The Cultural and Literary Premises of Horatian Lyric 303 Themes and Characteristics of Horace's Lyric Poetry 306 4. The Epistles: Cultural Project and Philosophical Withdrawal 3 I 2 5. Literary Success 3 17 Bibliography 3 19 Elegy: Tibullus and Propertius 321 r. Cornelius Gallus 324 2. Tibullus 326 Life and Evidence, Works 326 The Myth of Rural Peace J 2 7 Tibullus as Poeta Doctus 328 Literary Success 329 3. The Corpus Tibullianum 3 3 o Lygdamus 330 The Panegyric of Messa/la and the Other Poems 3 3 o 4. Propertius 331 Life, Works, Sources 331 In the Name of Cynthia: The First Book 333 A Larger Corpus and the Break with Cynthia 335 Civic Elegy 335 Density of Style 336 Literary Success 337 Bibliography 338 Ovid 340 Life and Evidence, Works 340 r. A Modern Poetry 3 41 2. The Amores 343 3. The Didactic Love Poetry 344 4. The Heroides 346 5. The Metamorphoses 3 5 o

xtv

Detailed Contents

Composition and Structure 35 I Metamorphosis and the World of Myth Poetry as Spectacle 354 6. The Fasti 355 7. The Works of Exile 3 5 7 8. Literary Success 358 Bibliograpy 3 64

Livy

353

367

Life, Works, Sources 367 1. The Plan of Livy's Work and His Historiographic Method 3 67 2. The New Regime and the Tendencies ofLivy's Historiography 369 3. Narrative Style 372 4. Literary Success 374 Bibliography 3 76

Directions in Historiography

3 77

Asinius Pollio and the History of the Civil Wars 3 77 2. Autobiography and Propaganda: Augustus 378 3. Pompeius Trogus and Reflections of Anti-Roman Opposition 378 4. The Historiography of Consensus: Velleius Paterculus and Valerius Maximus 380 5. The Historiography of the Senatorial Opposition 382 6. Historiography as Literary Entertainment: Curtius Rufus 383 Bibliography 384 I.

Scholarship and Technical Disciplines

386

r. Scholarship and Grammatical Studies in the Augustan Age 386 Verrius Flaccus 386 2. The Technical Disciplines in the Age of Augustus and the JulioClaudians 3 87 Architecture: Vitruvius 387 Medicine: Celsus 388 Agriculture: Columella 389 Geography: Agrippa and Pomponi us Mela 39r Culinary Instruction: Apicius 392 Bibliography 392

Legal Literature: From Its Beginnings to the Early Empire Bibliography PART FOUR

394

396

The Early Empire Culture and Spectacle: The Literature of the Early Empire

401

r. The End of Patronage 4or Literature and Theater 403 3. Seneca the Elder and Declamation 404 4. Recitation, or Literature as Spectacle 40 5 Bibliography 406 2.

Detailed Contents

xv

408

Seneca

Life, Works, Sources 408 1. The Dialogi and Stoic Wisdom 4ro 2. Philosophy and Power 4r2 3. The Day-to-Day Practice of Philosophy: The Epistulaead Lucilium 4. "Dramatic" Style 415 5. The Tragedies 416 6. The Apocolocyntosis 420 7. The Epigrams 42 r 8. Literary Success 42 I Bibliography 424

The Poetic Genres in the Julio-Claudian Period The Minor Poetry of Ovid's Generation 426 2. Astronomical Poetry: Germanicus and Manilius 3. Developments in Hisrorical Epic 429 4. The Appendix Vergiliana 430 5. Phaedrus: The Fable Tradition 433 6. The Poetic Genres in the Neronian Age 435 The Return of Pastoral 435 Mythological Poetry and Minor Genres 436 Bibliography 437

426

1.

Lucan

427

440

Life, Works, Sources 440 1. Versified History? 441 2. Lucan and Virgil: The Destruction of the Augustan Myths 443 3. The Praise of Nero and the Evolution ofLucan's Poetics 444 4. Lucan and the Anti-Myth of Rome 445 5. The Characters of the Poem 446 6. Style 448 7. Literary Success 449 Bibliography 4 51

Petronius

453 Life and Evidence, Works 453 I. The Satyricon 454 The Author and Dating 454 The Plot of the Novel 457 The Literary Genre: Menippean and Novel Realism and Parody 462 Literary Success 464 2. The Priapea 465 Bibliography 466

459

Satire under the Principate: Persius and Juvenal I.

xvi

Persius 468 Life and Evidence, Works

Detailed Contents

468

467

4I3

Satire and Stoicism

469

From Satire to Examination of Conscience The Harshness of the Style 4 72 Literary Success 4 73 2. Juvenal 474 Life and Evidence, Works 474 Indignant Satire 47 5 The Sublime Satiric Style 477 Literary Success 478 Bibliography 479

Epic in the Flavian Period

470

48r

Statius 481 Life, Works, Sources 48r The Silvae 482 The Thebaid 484 The Achilleid 487 Literary Success 487 2. Valerius Flaccus 488 Life, Works 488 The Argonautica 488 Literary Success 491 3. Silius ltalicus 491 Life, Works, Sources 491 The Punica 4 91 Literary Success 495 Bibliography 495 1.

Pliny the Elder and Specialist Knowledge

497 Life, Works, Sources 497 1. Pliny the Elder and Encyclopedism 499 Eclecticism and the Encyclopedic Project 501 Literary Success of the Natura/is Historia 502 2. A Technical Writer: Fronrinus 503 Bibliography 504

Martial and the Epigram

505 Life and Evidence, Works 505 r. The Epigram as Realistic Poetry 2. The Mechanism of Wit 508 3. Literary Success 509 Bibliography 5 IO

Quintilian

5 06

5I 2

Life, Works, Sources 5 r 2 1. Remedies for che Corruption of Eloquence 2. Quintilian's Educational Program 5I 5 3. The Orator and the Princeps 516

5I 3

Detailed Contents

xvii

4. Literary Success 516 Bibliography 5r8

The Age of the Adoptive Emperors

5I 9

A Period of Peace and Stability 519 2. Cultural Refinement and Erudite Philology 520 3. The Signs of the Future: Religious Syncretism and the Revival of Beliefs in 1.

an Afterlife

Pliny the Younger

521

525

Life, Works, Sources 525 r. Pliny and Trajan 525 2. Pliny and the Society of His Day 3. Literary Success 528 Bibliography 529

Tacitus

526

530

Life, Works, Sources 530 r. The Causes of the Decline of Oratory 5 3 I 2. Agricola and the Futility of Opposition 5 32 3. Barbarian Virtue and Roman Corruption 533 4. The Parallelisms of History 5 3 5 5. The Roots of the Principate 538 6. Sources 54r 7. Literary Success 542 Bibliography 544

Suetonius and the Minor Historians

546

Life and Evidence, Works 546 1. Biography in Suetonius 547 2. Literary Success 549 3. Florus and the "Biography of Rome" Bibliography 552

Apuleius

550

553

Life and Evidence, Works 553 r. A Complex Figure: Orator, Scientist, Philosopher 2. Apuleius and the Novel 559 3. Language and Style 567 4. Literary Success 568 Bibliography 569

Philology, Rhetoric and Literary Criticism, Law

554

57 I

r. Latin Philology: A Summary of Its Historical Development The Birth of Philology at Rome 5 7 r Aelius Stilo and the Tendencies of Philology in the Second Century B.C. 572 Valerius Cato and Philology in the Age of Caesar 574 Philology in the Age of Augustus 5 75 Remmius Palaemon and Asconius Pedianus 577

xvm

Detailed Contents

5 7I

Valerius Probus and Later Developments in Philology 578 2. The Archaizing Tendency of the Second Century 5 So Fronto 581 3. Aulus Gellius 583 4. Legal Literature: The Systematization of Doctrine 584 Bibliography 586

Developments in Poetry: The PoetaeNovelli Bibliography PART FIVE

588

590

The Late Empire From the Severans to Diocletian (193-305)

593

r. The Great Social Changes 593 The Establishment of Christianity 595 2. Towards the Origins of a Christian Literature 596 The Translation of che Sacred Texts 598 The Acta Martyrum and the Passiones 598 3. The Apologises 600 Tercullian 601 Minucius Felix 603 Cyprian 604 Other Apologists 606 4. Commodian 606 5. The Last Fruits of the Poetics of the Novelli 608 Literary Genres and Poets of the Anthologia Latina 609

The Pervigilium Veneris 609 The Other Poecs of the Anthologia Latina 610 Terenrius Maurus 611 Wisdom and Medicine in Verse 612 Nemesianus and Didactic Poetry 613 6. Learned Literature 6r4 The Jurists: Papinian, Ulpian, and Others 6 r 5 Censorinus 616 Solinus 617 Bibliography 618

From Constantine to the Sack of Rome (306-4ro) 1.

The Great Cultural Renaissance 62 r The Great Heresies 622 The Empire of the West and the Barbarians 624 The Grammarians: Charisius, Diomedes, Dositheus Nonius Marcellus 626 The Commentators: Donat us and Servius 62 7 The Rhetoricians 629 Macrobius 629 The Editing of the Classics 632 The Panegyrists 63 2

62 I

625

Detailed Contents

xtx

2.

Symmachus 634 The Scientific Disciplines 63 7 The Triumph of Christianity 638

Arnobius 639 Lactantius 640 Firmicus Maternus 642 The Anti-Arians 642 Marius Victorinus 642 Hilary of Poitiers 643 Poetry: Juvencus, Optatianus, Tiberianus 644 3. The Last Pagan Historiography and the New Christian Historiography 645 Aurelius Victor and the Historia Tripertita 646 Eutropius and the Breviaries 646 Ammianus Marcellinus 647 The Historia Augusta 650 The Histories by Subject 652 Novelized Histories 652 The Lives of Saints 653 4. Poetry and Drama 655 Ausonius 655 Claudian 658 Other Court Poets: Avienus, Naucellius, Avianus Christian Poetry of Religious Inspiration 66 I Damasus 662 Proba 663 Prudentius 664 Paulinus of Nola 667 The Quero/us 670 Bibliography 67 r

The Apogee of Christian Culture

66r

6 78

The Fathers of the Church 678 2. Ambrose 678 3. Jerome 681 4. Augustine 685 Life, Works 685 Augustine and the Confessions 688 The City of God 691 Thought and Style 693 5. Other Fathers of the Church 694 Rufinus 694 Sulpicius Severns 694 Bibliography 696 I.

From Honorius to Odoacer (410-476) 1.

xx

698

The End of the Western Empire: New Political Institutions From the Crisis to a New Cultural Synthesis 699

Detailed Contents

698

Martianus Capella

2.

700

Scientific Handbooks

701

Law and Bureaucracy

702

Christian Chronicle and Historiography Orosius 702 Salvianus

702

703

Minor Historians The Sermons

703

704

Julian ofEclanum,

Cassian

Novelized Histories 3. The New Poetry

705 705

Rurilius Namatianus Merobaudes

704

70

5

707

Sidonius Apollinaris The Minor Poets Bibliography 7 ro

707 709

The Dawn of the Middle Ages

7I 3

r. Continuity and Innovation in Medieval Literature 2.

7 13

Culture in Sixth-Century Italy: Boethius and Cassiodorus Boethius 7l 5 Cassiodorus The Poets

716

71 7

Benedict of N ursia and Gregory the Great 3. Literature in Africa 7 18 Dracontius

7 14

717

7 18

Fulgentius 7 r9 Victor of Vita 7 l 9 Corippus

720

4. Literature in Spain Isidore of Seville

720

720

5. Literature in France 722 Venancius Fortunatus 722 Gregory of Tours

723

6. The Venerable Bede 724 7. Towards the Creation of National Literatures: A Diffusion Rather Than a Termination Bibliography

725

7 26

Appendixes

72 9 r. Chronological Tables 729 2. Greek Authors and Texts 776

3. Roman Culture: Politics, Society, Ideology 794 4. Terms of Rhetoric, Metrics, and Literary Criticism

Index of Names

806

819

Detailed Contents

xxi

Foreword

The book you are holding in your hand is an extraordinary achievement. If you care at all about Rome and its literature, pagan and Christian, this book will soon become your friend, and before long you will wonder how you ever managed without it. Three notable ingredients have been combined in this encyclopedic history of Latin literature: Gian Biagio Conte's exceptional distinction as an interpreter and literary critic; the careful planning he and his team of colleagues put into the design of the first and second Italian editions; and the enthusiasm and good judgment the editors of the Johns Hopkins University Press applied to enlist the most sympathetic and perceptive scholars from Europe, Britain, and the United States to cooperate with Professor Conte in redesigning the book for American and British readers. If the author had been less humane, or the publisher less enterprising, this might have ended up as another standard literary handbook, telling you both too much and too little, supplying raw dates, titles, and summaries without critical exegesis. Or again, it might have resembled the recent Roman volume of the CambridgeHistory of ClassicalLiterature, providing a series of interpretive essays varying in approach and critical acumen from one contributor to another, while presupposing the reader's command of all the elementary facts. Many of us are unable to read Italian with ease, and it is a regrettable aspect of Anglo-American culture that until recently very few works of literary criticism were translated from other European languages for student use. None of Gian Biagio Conte's critical interpretation or theory was available in English before 1987, twenty years after the publication of his first articles on Lucretius and Lucan, poets distant from each other in time, technique, and, many would claim, genre. The best critics reach their major achievement in large-scale interpretation only after carefully testing their methods on detailed analysis of controversial texts, and this has been the pattern of Conte's achievement. His major critical studies Memoriadei poeti e sistemaletterario(1974) and II generee i suoi confini:Cinque studi sulla poesiadi Virgilio (1980) are firmly based on earlier criticism of complex and allusive Latin texts. Fortunately the greater part of these two books has

xxm

recently been translated by Charles Segal, with the addition of a special introduction by Conte himself, as The Rhetoricof Imitation: Genreand Poetic Memoryin Virgil and OtherLatin Poets(1987). Conte's criticism is always stimulating, often demanding, but never without the highest consideration for the art of the ancient writer and the needs of the modern reader. This is not the place to go into the relationship of his critical theories to traditional German philology (for which he shows derailed appreciation and respect), Russian formalism, reader-response theory, or the Italian structuralist tradition. But some of the principles he maintains are so important to our understanding of ancient literature that they deserve to be recalled in this foreword, not least as an acknowledgment of my own debt to his writing. From the beginning Conte has concerned himself with reexamining the major concepts that articulate all literary history and theory: canons, genres, the imitative processes of emulation and allusion, and context in its fullest sense. Most literary historians implicitly or explicitly accept certain authors as canonical, unwittingly doing an injustice to both the subordinated and the privileged texts. For the new reader the affirmation that the text before him or her is by a great poet (or prose author) can be as oppressive as it is discouraging to approach the marginalized work of a "minor" author (or poet). (Horace has perhaps suffered more than any other Roman from this canonization, which interposes itself between the student and his unprejudiced enjoyment of a text.) Conte rightly insists that writers be treated without prejudice, and this inclusive approach is apparent in his willingness to explore the thought of Pliny the Elder, in his encyclopaedic Natural History-ostensibly an extreme instance of the nonliterary workin search of the author's organizing principles and ideology. Many of Conte's early studies explore texts that stand poised at the boundaries of genres-between bucolic and elegy, between didactic and epic, or between elegy and didactic. In his investigation ofVirgilian poetry in "Genre and Its Boundaries" (The Rhetoricof Imitation, roo-208) Conte shows how genre and literary artist interact. The expectations established by the genre challenge the artist to create both within its code and beyond it, so that the work that is his response itself contributes to redefining the nature of the genre for future writers and their audience. Most classicists study their Greek and Latin texts as students of Shakespeare read his plays-with commentaries stocked with parallels and precedents for the author's usage. Some of these are useful to explain a point of language or clarify an argument, but most are included as demonstrations of the artist's inherited forms (or content), implicitly detracting from his uniqueness and originality. More recently we have been taught to appreciate two aspects of the dialogue between the young artist and his predecessors: the attitude of emulation and the technique of allusion. But emulation alone does not make an orator or a poet, and allusion is something more than erudite name-dropping, the incorporation of tags from approved classical and Hellenistic Greek poets. Scholars in the United States and Britain

xxzv

Foreword

have greatly refined our understanding of the nature and art of allusion in the last few years, and many of us now share Conte's concern to show how deeply allusive reference can enrich the new text with significance from the (unquoted) original context; indeed, an artist such as Virgil often simultaneously evokes by a single resonant phrase the treatment of the same (or another) theme in exemplary passages from both Greek and Latin models. Not to recognize such allusion is to enjoy only a part of the poet's meaning or his art. At the same time, Conte has taught us that the relationship between a poet and his predecessors includes both intended and, as it were, spontaneous assimilation of elements from previous traditions: Cicero and Quintilian acknowledged that even imitation of style alone will produce a new style compounded of the chosen features of the model and the innate personality of the successor, and Seneca in turn compared the relationship between model and emulator to that between father and son, where there is individuality as well as resemblance. Finally, context is all-important both in the work of art and in its model. And context extends to historical setting, requiring a full understanding of the intellectual, social, and political circumstances of the artist and the individual creation. The Augustan context changed between the creative years of Horace, Virgil, Tibullus, and Propertius and the early years of Ovid, and Ovid's own circumstances underwent an extreme change with his relegation to the Black Sea outpost of Tomis. It makes a difference to the appreciation of Senecan tragedy or Tacitus's Dialogue on Orators whether we believe they were composed in exile or in Rome, during or after the reign of terror ofDomitian. All this Gian Biagio Conte himself will explain better and more subtly than I can hope to in the new introduction that he has composed for this English-language edition of Letteratura latina. So let me pass on to the book itself. Even in a country where histories of Latin literature are published by almost every major scholar and are in constant demand for liceidassiciand universities, Letteratura latina has been a landmark. Conte and his colleagues have been able to cover the history of Latin literature from the hymns of the Salii and Saturnian accentual verse to the founding fathers of medieval poetry and history. More than a hundred pages discuss literature after the death of Apuleius, with substantial treatment of Augustine and the other church fathers, the poetry of Ausonius, the philosophy of Boethius, and the histories of Bede and Gregory of Tours. Poetry and creative writing have not been privileged over prose or nonfiction genres such as oratory, letter writing, and philosophy. Both Cicero and Seneca are treated at length, and technical writers receive separate chapters in parts 3 and 4, as do the jurists and the history of the legal corpus. For each generation or significant cultural phase there is a separate preliminary discussion, as there is for all the authors. Horace, for example, is treated at several levels. His relationships with Virgil, Maecenas, and Augustus are considered in the introduction to the literary period (carefully

Foreword

xxv

delimited by events of literary rather than political history, from 43 B.C. and the death of Cicero to the death of Ovid in A.D. 17). Then the entry for Horace (as for each author) begins with the known details of his career and introduces his Epodes,Satires, Odes,and Epistles with brief analyses of the content of each poetry book. Then the reader is ready to follow the interpretive discussion of each book within its generic tradition-Horace's Epicureanism, his debt to Alcaeus or Sappho, Anacreon or Pindar, or his relationship to Hellenistic critics. After the generic and roughly chronological treatment of Horace's works comes a brief account of his posthumous influence, rounded off by a bibliography of editions and critical studies. The supporting materials that follow the main body of the text are no less useful: an appendix of Roman political, social, and ideological terms (e.g. clientela,fides, senatus)complements the extended appendix of rhetorical, metrical, and literary terminology. The separate list of Greek authors and texts, Appendix 2, meets an urgent need of which I complained when reviewing the CambridgeHistory.(It more than passes my five-P test, identifying and documenting Polybius, Panaetius, Poseidonius, Philodemus, and Parthenius.) Each writer is again listed in the extensive index including every named individual or anonymous work. Appendix r, the chronological table, sets Roman cultural history year by year opposite political history and Greek culture up to A.D. 300 (when Greek culture and history are subsumed under Roman). Thus the entry for 65 B.C. lists Horace's birth, Caesar's aedileship, and Atticus's return to Rome; A.D. 65 reports the deaths of Seneca and Lucan and the exile ofCornutus (with the failure of the Pisonian conspiracy in political history); and in the entry for 565 Venantius Fortunatus leaves Italy to begin his pilgrimage, while Justinian's death is followed by the succession of Justin II as emperor in the East. Many of us have longed to be able to refer our students to just such a comprehensive and sophisticated literary history, and the Johns Hopkins University Press is to be warmly congratulated (and heartily thanked) for the initiative that has made this international enterprise possible. But the story does not end with an unmodified translation of the most recent Italian edition: The translator, Joseph Solodow, himself an author of important work on Roman poetry, was consulted for his expertise in literary criticism. Author and publisher have sought out scholars from America and Britain to advise on the special needs and interests of English-speaking readers, many of whom meet Latin literature at a later age, and hence with more maturity and sophistication, than most young Italian students. Sections on posthumous influence have been reoriented towards American and British cultural history, and the bibliographies have been updated and reconsidered to focus primarily on scholarship in English. (As an "AngloAmerican" educated in England, who has since taught in Scotland, Canada, and three American universities, I particularly appreciate the need for this bilateral approach.) Finally Gian Biagio Conte himself, with typical concern for his readership, has written a completely new introduction to the

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Foreword

history and added to the introductory account of Augustan literature an important section on Roman selective redefinition of genres from the hybrid multigeneric poetry of Alexandria. Responding to recent major advances in scholarship, he has also expanded or rewritten the discussions of Lucretius, Catullus, Varro, Horace, Ovid, Statius, Silius Italicus, Martial, Apuleius, and Martianus Capella. Readers will find that the aims of an informative history are not incompatible with sophisticated (and lucid) literary criticism and that criticism itself does not preempt the reader's opinions but merely sharpens his or her alertness and enjoyment of the text. It is my belief that professional classicists will be as stimulated by this work as students or teachers in other fields. I have learnt much from it and look forward to continued pleasure in its use, if I can prevent my copy from being borrowed or stolen as soon as I let it be seen. ELAINE FANTHAM

Foreword

xxvtt

Preface

THE

TRANSMISSION

OF LATIN

LITERATURE

In order to deepen our understanding of Roman literature, we should keep in mind the nature of the documents we use as source material. These documents are to a large extent literary texts and have reached us by way of manuscript tradition. Modern printed editions take up this long tradition and try to improve it still further. We call critical editions those that adopt scientific principles and rules and take into consideration the entire manuscript tradition of a work, in the most complete and direct way possible. (The information needs to be complete because no ancient literary text has come down to us in autograph and because the manuscripts we have do not show the same degree of uniformity among themselves to which printed texts have accustomed us.) The principles and procedures that guide these editions cannot be cited here. Let it suffice for the moment to say that the witnesses to a text can vary considerably in quality and quantity. A text of a Roman author might be transmitted to us solely by a papyrus of the first century B.C. (this is very rare in Latin literature, unlike in Greek) or solely by an edition printed in the sixteenth century (obviously in the case where the other, earlier materials have been physically lost). Far more often, the text has reached us through manuscripts of the late ancient or medieval or humanist eras: a single manuscript (e.g., the first six books of Tacitus's Annals and an important part of Petronius's Satyricon)or many (more than two hundred in the case of Ovid's Heroides).Whatever the particular character of an author's manuscript tradition, our relation with these texts can be called direct in the sense that they have been reproduced for their own sake, on account of the interest they aroused. This does not cure the physical injuries, errors, omissions, interpolations, and other injuries they have suffered, but a direct tradition at least proposes the goal of literally transmitting the words of the author. Nonetheless, Latin literature is not made up solely of texts that we can read directly. An enormous quantity of it was lost already at the threshold of the Middle Ages. The reasons for this loss are intrinsically interesting and worth analyzing: changes in taste and esthetic criteria or more general cultural transformations led certain works to be discarded; others were, so

XXIX

to speak, replaced, by reworking, abridgment, or simplification; material factors also had a large role-fire, plunder, destruction of books and libraries, lack of writing material, all these in an age of crisis. This unknown Latin literature remains important for us, nonetheless. The extant texts intersect constantly with the lost texts. Latin literature would be much less substantial if we did not attempt to take into account these fragmentary, half-hidden texts. Authors crucial for the development of Roman culture, such as Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius, are known to us exclusively by indirect means, and only in this way do we know some important authors' works that fate has not preserved, such as the Originesof Cato or the Hortensiusof Cicero. What is meant by indirecttradition? Using terms that are vague but as precise as possible, we call indirecta tradition in which a text is reported by means of an extraneous, nonoriginal context. The typical form in which these secondary texts present themselves is the fragment; the typical function guiding the indirect tradition is quotation. The existence of a quotation implies both the disappearance of the original context and the formation of a new context. Scholars need to devote much attention to this second aspect: the loss of the original context causes a loss of information, and the new context for its part may create confusions. For chat reason the texts transmitted in fragments are particularly tricky and controversial, as well as especially fascinating for philologists. It seems worthwhile to clear up several possible misunderstandings. First, the term fragment is also applied in cases of direct tradition, for instance, in cases in which material difficulties have intervened: papyrus fragments, manuscripts that are paged incorrectly, mutilated, or partially illegible, palimpsests, and so on. The distinction between direct and indirect tradition, therefore, is not quantitative but depends only on the manner and the context in which a text has been transmitted to us. There are fragmentary texts of direct tradition and complete texts (generally, of course, not very long!) of indirect tradition. Second, there is no true qualitative opposition between these two modes: direct tradition is not necessarily good and faithful, and indirect tradition is not necessarily inaccurate. The problem needs to be evaluated case by case, author by author, passage by passage. Finally, texts can be transmitted by both direct and indirect tradition (as when Virgil is quoted by Gellius, Macrobius, Servius, or other authors), and there is a direct tradition of those texts that also transmit to us part of other texts. The Latin grammarians, for example, have preserved for us a valuable collection of fragments from texts that are lost to us; but because these fragments are quoted by grammarians, they are subject to the tradition, which obviously is direct, of those grammarians. For this reason too, no fragment can be properly evaluated if it is abstracted from the context that preserves it for us. Let me conclude this brief notice with a fresh exhortation to caution, which ought to be applied especially to the use of textbooks of literary history. A considerable part of the literature dealt with here is known to us

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Preface

only indirectly. Consider the case of an author such as Lucilius, who was regarded by the Latins themselves as a figure of the first importance in the development of their literature. Only fragments and indirect notices of him are left to us, and on these alone do we base our picture of him. This picture has a wide margin of uncertainty, and it would not be honest to conceal this from those who begin to study him from a textbook, and not only because, as is inevitable, the fragments pose greater problems than the texts preserved entire. It is also necessary to recall that the fragments are the result of a selection that has been made for its own purposes. Those who quote fragments of Lucilius, mostly ancient grammarians, have their own particular linguistic interests: they attach importance to what seems to them difficult, on any of various grounds, especially the unusual individual word or construction, the archaism, the neologism, the Grecism, the linguistic experiment. It is evident that Lucilius was a great experimental poet, but our picture of his experimentation is based largely on examples previously chosen by the grammarians, and we do not know, within the totality of his work, the actual density of these features, the frequency with which they were found. In relying on what remains, therefore, we must always take into account the means of transmission as well as the limits of our information-an interesting reminder of the relativity that every literary study contains.

REFERENCE

WORKS

ON LATIN

LITERATURE

At a scholarly level, Latin studies are still admirably international, and contributions appear in all the major languages of Europe. This causes obvious problems at the school and college level, however, where knowledge of more than English should not be presumed, and the bibliographies in this volume concentrate on scholarship in English. The bibliographies to the original Italian edition of this manual were intended for an Italianspeaking audience, and some of the references have been left in: to leave them out would be to encourage the existing neglect of Italian scholarly work by English-speaking scholars. As in the original edition, major works in French and German, and occasionally other languages, have also been cited, but there is no attempt at systematic coverage. Useful first ports of call for information on authors are the OxfordClassical Dictionary (ed. 2 Oxford 1970, ed. 3 in preparation) and especially the multivolume German Realenzyclopadieder c/assischenAltert11mswissenschaft (known as RE or Pauly-Wissowa from its first editors) and its smaller and more up-to-date companion Der kleine Pauly (5 vols. Munich 1979). The Reallexikonfur Antike 11ndChristent11m (RAC) is another large-scale German enterprise still in progress: its articles are usually more up-to-date than those in RE, and it has of course a wider coverage. The standard German history of Latin literature by M. Schanz and C. Hosius (Munich 1914-35) is being updated by R. Herzog and others (only vol. 5 published to date, Munich 1989). The nearest English equivalent, the CambridgeHistory of

Reference Works on Latin Literature

xxxi

Latin Literature, which forms the second part of the CambridgeHistory of ClassicalLiterature(CHCL, Cambridge 1982), contains good bibliographies by M. Drury. Further bibliography may be obtained from the comprehensive analytical listings in the: annual L'Anneephilologique,published in Paris, usually several years in arrears; for very recent work the lists in the periodicals Gnomonand Bolletinodi studi latini (which also publishes systematic surveys) are invaluable. L'Annfe philologiquealso contains the definitive list of abbreviations for periodical titles. There is a useful guide to further bibliographical aids at the end of The OxfordClassicalDictionary, 1I51-5 3. The periodical Lustrum is exclusively devoted to bibliographical surveys of authors and topics, and similar surveys are a particular feature of Classical World and Anzeigerfur die Altertumswissenschaft;many older surveys appeared in the volumes of the Jahresberichtiiberdie Fortschritteder klassischen Altertumswissenschaft,founded by Conrad Bursian, which ceased publication in 1955. The massive volumes of Aufstieg und Niedergangder rtimischenWelt (ANRW, Berlin 1972-) also contain many surveys, of variable quality. Finally, the volumes of the series Wege der Forschung, published by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, of Darmstadt, contain selections of important articles (usually translated into German) with bibliographies, and the bibliographies in the Dizionario degli scrittorigreci e latini, ed. F. della Corte (Milan 1987), are often excellent. There is an excellent survey of bibliographies published between 1945 and 1979 by J. H. Dee in Classical World 73 (1979-80) 275-90.

xxxii

Preface

Acknowledgments

Non possumreticere.Like Catullus, I cannot leave unmentioned how much the completion of this book owes to the perceptive collaboration of friends and colleagues, especially of Alessandro Barchiesi, Emanuele Narducci, Giovanni Polara, Giuliano Ranucci, and Gianpiero Rosati. Several others, my familiar working associates, have freely given me the support of their attentive and considerate criticism: Mario Labate, Alessandro Schiesaro, Rolando Ferri. As a teacher I make sure that I often hear the criticism of my victims; in fact I have often gained from them valuable suggestions and various improvements of detail. Most deserving of mention are Ernesto Stagni, Sergio Casali, and Andrea Cucchiarelli. To all of them I offer my warmest gratitude. But my acknowledgments cannot stop here: the English edition has put me in the debt of still more friends. Elaine Fantham has contributed a generous foreword that notices only the merits of my work.Joseph Solodow has gallantly translated a cumbersome book with exceptional fluency and versatility. Don Fowler, with his customary learning and discernment, has provided a bibliography at once selective and academically satisfying; in a sense he has helped to direct the whole editorial enterprise. Glenn Most, a scholar deeply versed in comparative literature, has entirely rewritten the sections covering the posthumous history of the major authors, giving particular attention to literature composed in English, and following the varying reception or adaptations of Latin literature by successive generations of medieval and modern readers and writers. The assistance of such friends, old and new, has made the task of producing this book a very great personal pleasure.

xxxiii

LATIN

LITERATURE

Introduction: Literary History and Historiography

The traditional manual of literary history is easily justified by its practical usefulness. The author of such a work may not be able to invent or reinvent very much, nor does he need to begin with a justification. All one can do is indicate certain small corrections and expedients, certain minute changes made to a device that has long since assumed a tried and tested form. I think it is worthwhile, however, to ask whether there are good reasons for writing literary history and whether it can actually be written. Some scholars have concluded that it cannot be done. For them, writing a history of literature is an activity that goes beyond the elementary necessity of setting the individual literary texts in a historical context. As they constantly remind us, every text is an entity that fuses together into a single structure elements of historical experience and expressive codes; the former are continuously variable, the latter more stable, conventional, and slow to change. It is the symagmatic relation between these elements of varying historicity that produces meaning. Hence, tracing the development of any one element of the text, whether it belongs to the sphere of expression or the sphere of content, has the result of throwing into disorder the structural unity of the individual texts and so robbing them of their specifically literary values. A truly literary history is therefore regarded as impossible, because it could not be genuinely literary. The problem is real, though not necessarily insoluble. It is important not co overestimate this danger but instead openly to acknowledge the fact that every literary historical judgment can claim only an approximate value. Every history, and hence every literary history, because it organizes events and characters in a narrative succession, must necessarily be a story. In the case of a literary history, the events and the facts to be narrated are the lives and the literary programs of authors, their association together in schools, their reciprocal thematic and formal influences, the continual emergence of new rhetorical features besides the traditional ones, and the location of the individual texts within the system of genres. This narrative framework leads one to say of a certain author that he or she "derives" a particular feature from another author; or, similarly, someone may be said

I

to "anticipate" an innovation that develops fully only later or to "rediscover" old veins of poetry long since abandoned. Such a story must have some authors who play a major role, the ones who animate whole episodes of the culture, and others to whom we can assign only a limited role. In this way, currents of taste, poetic theories, literary genres, and ideologies become part of the narrated action, as though they too functioned as characters moving against a backdrop of historical events. It is the responsibility of the historian-critic to keep a watchful eye upon all the events, the vicissitudes, and the characters of this story, for it is he who narrates and who, as the occasion permits, can take advantage of the procedures proper to narrative-delays and surprises, complications and resolutions. This is the organization the study ofliterature inherited from the culture of Romanticism when it left behind the erudite history of the eighteenth century. It was this narrative model that realized the ideological model of historicism: the primary interest lay in reconstructing the genesis of the facts presented and in considering those facts in the light of a scheme of teleological development. Literature was investigated as the product of a variety of external factors. It became a kind of repository of disparate items of historical information (biographical, sociological, psychological). Literary history thus came to concentrate above all on individual works and on the contingent conditions that brought them into being, conditions that were seen as substantially "external" to the texts. The twentieth century, however, has seen many attacks on historicism and on the prevailing historical method. As a result, a new model has begun to appear, one that holds out the promise of a more secure foundation for literary study. The factors that caused this model to emerge were the (to some extent convergent) experiences of phenomenology, formalism, stylistic criticism, thematic and symbolic criticism, the New Criticism, and also the more recent developments in structuralism and its successors. This new critical approach focuses upon the individual works as manifestations of a specifically literary language: literariness, understood as the feature that is relevant and distinctive of texts, has become the center of attention. Literary works are seen as forming a historical sequence proper to themselves. Because every work is formed and finds meaning in relation to other literary works, every text is viewed as conditioned by other texts, through similarity or differentiation. Thus modern literary historical investigation has increasingly directed its attention to intertextuality, to precisely those relations that, like a network of signification, connect one text to another within the body of literature. On this model, literature can be studied as a system in continuous evolution, containing both constants and variables, and the latter are as important as the former. Literary history as practiced according to the model of genetic historicism largely denied an internal development to literature itself and took into account only the external influences, with the result that, as I have already said, literary texts were reduced to documents, to evidence for the reconstruction of history. Now, however, each text has

2

Literary History and Historiography

come to be seen as the product of two forces, the internal dynamic of the literary system and the external impulses, which are undeniable. Obviously, the crisis of historicism, and therefore the crisis of the genetic and teleological model of literary history that I have described, cannot free us from our obligation to reintegrate the works within the historical context in which they were conceived and within the culture that supplied them with an expressive language. Indeed, the enormous historical distance that separates us from these texts makes this reintegration all the more urgent. Only a painstaking and rigorously disciplined philological criticism that fully recognizes the distance separating us from the language of that culture can hope to restore to us the meaning of that distant world, a world, moreover, that we know only by means of a discontinuous tradition and a few fragmentary survivals. Certainly it will be difficult, in some cases very difficult, to rediscover the true intention of the texts. But withour the tension that drives us to seek an original intention in the literary work, our very relation to these works loses any real interest. I see no other protection from the arbitrary incursions of many modern interpreters, who may be eager readers but whose views are often unconsciously alien to the original historical contexts and cultural codes. These new techniques of literary criticism and historical research, the refinement of philology in its broadest sense and of its ancillary disciplines, make it easier to evaluate and control our attempts at interpretation today. To reconstruct the expectations that were the original cultural context of distant texts, modern interpreters must become reader-historians. Every literary text is constructed in such a way as to determine the intended manner of its reception. To identify by philological means the intended addressee within the text itself means to rediscover the cultural and expressive codes that originally enabled that addressee to understand the text. But this historicization, in order to produce the results it can, must keep a firm grasp upon the philological reading of those texts. They may be archetypal monuments of our culture, yet they always remain distant from us in conception and expression. Besides the continuity that binds those texts to us, their substantial cultural otherness must always be acknowledged too. There is only one way for the modern interpreter to grasp the value and the meaning of ancient literature, and that is precisely to forget that it is called classical,a term that all too readily induces in the modern reader the complacent belief of easy accessibility (this is the familiar humanistic illusion that imagines it is rendering past literature more up-to-date by seeking within it the direct confirmation of a contemporary interest). Only if we acknowledge the otherness of ancient culture will we stand a chance of reliably reconstructing the expectations of the audience for whom the texts of Greek and Latin literature were originally composed. Within the form of the text the "form" of its addressee, that is, the form of its culture, is inscribed. This is both the limit within which modern interpreters must stay and their only guide along the difficult path of interpretation. To clarify the contrast be-

Literary History and Historiography

3

tween the expectations of the ancient addressees and our own expectations invites us to reflect upon the otherness of function and meaning inherent within the texts of Latin literature and mediates our correct understanding of it. Even within a rnlture such as that of Rome, the corpus of literary texts has its own specific elements, since each of the texts that make up that corpus has within it qualities and functions originally different from those of nonliterary texts. Yet we all know that between literary and nonliterary texts there is a wide band of intermediate forms, and indeed it is a particular feature of ancient culture that it does not make sharp distinctions between these categories. Moreover, literariness itself, however problematic its definition may be, comprises a complex of characteristics that can be found in the most disparate verbal products. Indeed, it is precisely the continual shifting of the institutional boundaries of the Latin literary system that seems to be one of its most powerful dynamic factors, a fruitful opening outwards that continually assures new vitality. Texts that were not originally intended for the literary corpus but seemed susceptible to esthetic evaluation and were in some way marked by rhetorical characteristics often received a generous and honorable welcome within the official literature. This happened, for instance, with many religious and legal texts. Almost every natural genre of discourse tends to correspond to some codified literary genre: one thinks most obviously of the letter or of Caesar's war diaries. And yet, Latin literature, like almost every other major literature, can reproduce within itself, even if only through stylized features, any register or level of language, including the special languages that are most distant from any hint of literariness. In this way Latin literature opens up its own boundaries. In itself, literature is only one of the means by which the imagination of a culture can be represented. To produce these representations, literature makes use of rhetoric, that great reservoir of ideas, symbols, forms, and languages. Through rhetoric the different models of discourse, complexes of metaphors, strategies of communication, and techniques of style that traditionally mark the various literary genres and subgenres are differentiated from each other and given a dynamic organization. These conventions of expression provide history and events, ideologies and cultural projections, with the possibility of becoming literary discourse, of being "spoken" literarily. In this sense, the various literary genres are languages that interpret the empirical world: genres select and emphasize certain features of the world in preference to others, thereby offering the representation of various forms of the world, different models of life and culture. It is the literary genre, in fact, that suggests the general meaning of the individual texts and the audience to whom they are directed. Genre constitutes a field of reference within which, by means of comparisons and contrasts, the author can direct the specificity of his texts and the addressee can recognize it. However, the historian ofliterature knows that the constantly shifting and overlapping nature of the genres makes it im-

4

Literary History and Historiography

possible to define them in too rigidly schematic a way. Even if, hypothetically, a genre could be imagined in its pure state, its realization in individual texts is subject to many possible deformations: it can be combined, reduced, amplified, transposed, and reversed; it may suffer various types of functional mutations and adaptations; the content and expression of one genre may become associated with another. But it remains true that in the ancient literary system any combination of literary forms and strucrures, however complex and disparate it may be, always respects a single discursive project (this we would call a genre).A single genre predominates and thus subordinates to itself all the elements that come together to make up the text. It is from this perspective that the unending process of textual generation we have learned to call intertextuality becomes so important. Classical scholars have always known about this phenomenon. The ancient grammarians and commentators already knew that poets read one another and that they imitate one another by stealing bits of texts and individual stylistic features; scholars could engage in heated discussions about whether these were actually thefts or episodes of creative emulation. But collections of loci similes usually remain a static register of more or less clandestine, more or less voluntary debts and loans. Whether locisimilesare inert reminiscences or allusions fraught with significance, the relation among the various texts is reconstructed in such a way as to offer a static frame that reproduces chance coincidences and juxtaposes isolated fragments. Such a static model is even implicit in some classical structuralism, despite its emphatic attention to the phenomenon ofintertextuality. An excessive preoccupation with the organic structure of individual texts ends up immobilizing their meaning and function, as if literary works were not also mechanisms able to provoke questions, answers, or reactions, as if there were not a constant dialogue between texts. If we instead see every text as an interlocutor of some other text, the frame becomes animated and starts to move. Every new text enters into a dialogue with other texts; it uses dialogue as a necessary form of its own construction, since it tries not only to hear other voices but somehow to respond to them in such a way as to define its own. Precisely because of the typological stability of the classical literary system, intertextuality does not connect bare episodes, scattered occurrences, or casual encounters within the body of texts; instead, it sets in motion long chains of significance, mobilizes whole blocks of the literary tradition. Every interdiscursive phenomenon suggests more general relationships and for the most part involves not only particular texts but also the rhetorical classes to which it belongs. Thus intertextuality, while pursuing the paths marked out by the genres, produces a complex set of effects: it displaces, frees, and shifts spaces occupied by other discourses and often contrasts them polemically. The dialogue begun with other voices becomes a way to measure the difference between them and to propose new rhetorical projects. If literary genres were merely closed structures, obedient to the inviol-

Literary History and Historiography

5

able rules laid down by Hellenistic theorists, then this dialogue between texts would only rake the form of direct patrilineal succession: in each instance, the patriarch, the author-inventor, would stand at the beginning of the family, and after him would follow a pure-blooded genealogy. But in reality, voices of various origins are continuously superimposed in the memory of the poets. A genre, in fact, often continues to live by diffusing itself through other forms of discourse: even if it abandons its characteristic trappings, it will survive if it can preserve some of the features that animated it in the beginning and that adhere to it by connotation and accompany it, still recognizable, in new literary panoramas. I have no wish to hypostasize the category of genre: my perspective is purely empirical. Just as genres were of service to authors as means of projecting a discourse, and of projecting it in such a way as to be understood, so they serve the critic as a scheme to explain the processes of intertextual derivation as simulacra of meaning still recognizable behind the various transformations of the original model. Often the factor that serves to distinguish a line of descent in a new context is merely a residual feature of the original model, but it is still enough to orient the reader and to produce meaning. Let me give an example. The didactic genre as it had been recreated by Lucretius seems not to have found an authentic continuation; it did not escape from the intense, sublime experience of the De Rerum Natura. But traces of it may be discerned in a number of important later developments in Latin literature. These traces are often implicit and not easily visible. The genre survives only as a function, or, rather, as an attitude of discourse, a way of talking. In the Augustan and post-Augustan periods, a didactic literature takes shape that refers back to the experience of Lucretius but diminishes its specific demands in contexts that are various and increasingly distant, to the point of entirely denying them. I am thinking here not so much of the special case of Virgil's Georgicsas of Horace and the satiric tradition. In the Epistles(a different genre from didactic, based on the colloquial form of conversation, the sermo)Horace enters into a dialogue with Lucretius's great codification of didactic poetry and transfers its features into the context of modern Augustan culture, thereby modifying them. But one important feature of the Lucretian model remains: that literary attitude which projects the teacher towards the possible disciple, the friend to whom the affectionate epistolary message is directed. Horace invites his addressee to attain to a philosophical refuge that reproduces the sublime templa serenaof Lucretius's poem in the more modest existential angulus that Horace can offer. He transfers the same pedagogical gesture into a substantially different genre, and the intertextual dialogue that he thereby sets up with the De Rerum Natura produces a revision in the missionary element Lucretius had embedded in didactic. In the Epistles,however, this revision, while establishing its distance, intends only to reduce the model's enthusiasm, its way of pressing against its readers, upsetting them, elevating them to grandeur of spirit. Horace does not have the radically polemi-

6

Literary History and Historiography

cal, negative intentions that are evident in Persius's Satires, the next stage of this implicit didactic tradition. Persius has lost any hope of finding an attentive and docile addressee, and the contrast between his own didactic gesture and the combative and agonistic model of Lucretian didactic is acute. In the new satiric form, the original teacher is reduced to the figure of a disappointed monologist, enclosed within a bitter solipsism, and forced to attack the many, who are weak, rather than seek out someone who might be strong. Thus the Lucretian model moves through different forms and genres, from Horace's Epistles to Persius's Satires: the didactic idea leaves behind its institutional boundaries and explores new possibilities of adaptation and persistence. Such an analysis could be further expanded to reveal literary interdiscursiveness as the index of large-scale cultural choices. Intertextuality is similarly central, for example, to the works of the archaic Roman poets (Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Ennius): Latin literature, which is born with them, is marked from its very beginning by the perceived need for dialogue. This is the historical outcome of an original bilingualism. The Greek matrix resides in the very geography of those authors and produces in Rome the first literature based upon textual-and cultural-translation. But once we come to see the memory of the poets as a necessary structural factor in every literary communication, the ancient prejudice that viewed Latin literature as devoid of originality loses all support. It would not even be worth mentioning the terms of this old debate (born from the ideologies of Romanticism and practically obsolete by the turn of this century) if it did not offer an opportunity for literary historical considerations of some importance. Nowadays no one would wish to deny the profoundly innovative character of those early poets, who constructed a new national poetry, not from primitive folklore, but from the sophisticated culture of Hellenism, the innate reflexivity of which it takes over. Hence the inclination towards polemics from the beginnings of Roman literature, and its basic conception of literature as difficult. The practice of these poets reveals their awareness that a literary phenomenon takes form chiefly when its expressive rules and its very legitimacy are called into question. To a large extent, it is the experience of the Greek artistic tradition that refines in them the sense of what is specifically literary: passing through different linguistic codes permits them to compare alternative possibilities of verbal rendering, opens writing to the effect of expressive connotations, emphasizes cultural differences, establishes rhetoric as a substantial science, and predisposes authors towards the creation of novelty. This is why the lesson of Hellenism seems the deepest one in archaic Latin poetry, however mediated by the Roman context. And when Latin literature, with the Augustans, goes on to choose a modern and different originality, the polemics it directs against the ancients of the Roman tradition (who are now seen as insufficiently accurate mediators of Greek form and style) will aim, paradoxically, at establishing contact with the true ancients, those distant Greeks who seemed to be the creators of

Literary History and Historiography

7

the very first literature of all: Homer, Hesiod, Alcaeus, Archilochus, Pindar, and the other great lyric poets. Thus the ambition of originality becomes, as it were, a search for origins. The great Augustan poets strive to secure for themselves the status of classics, and to find it they look directly (and no longer only by mediated forms) to the canonical figures who had marked the origins of the Greek literary tradition: now at Rome too a Homer, a Hesiod, an Alcaeus comes to seem possible. A literary history conceived in this way-a history of literary codifications and their transformations-seems to me not only possible but even legitimate and effective. I said before that the author of a handbook can attempt but minor improvements in a tool that is intended for study and for consultation and has developed, with use, a form that serves these purposes. My changes are chiefly the result of new concerns; they derive from my experiences and from an interest in methods like those that I have attempted to explain above. To reveal myself candidly to the reader, I give here the particular features that characterize the work. 1. Dimensions have been altered. Today it is no longer necessary for works such as this to respect unnatural hierarchies of scale by continuing to give relatively more space to school authors precisely because they are school authors, at the expense of others who, for various reasons, are read less frequently in school. Now that we have decisively lefr behind all fetishes-the timeless value of classical culture, the worth of certain classical texts for moral training, and so on-we can no longer exclude very large texts, such as Plautus or Petronius, on grounds of literary value (not to speak of the prejudices against all late Latin authors). I have thus reassigned space within the book, without, I hope, having done serious harm to the treatments of Terence, Caesar, and Cornelius Nepos. On the same principle of fairness, readers will find the treatment of the late ancient period more full and derailed than usual; here it seemed important to "recount" the texts somewhat more than is customary, because in this field textbooks often take the place of a direct meeting with the texts. A careful textbook treatment of this field is as new as it is traditional. 2. Periodization is notoriously the crucial operation in any historical enterprise. We recognize that dividing the facts into periods enables the reader to grasp them, if not to comprehend them. But we recognize also that this division is subjective and culturally bound. In any event, accepting the traditional framework and its references to political history does not necessarily mean obscuring the continuity of the transitions or abstractly regularizing the changing rhythms of the development. In this matter we have been utterly traditional, except for the necessary adjustments in the dating of the texts: for instance, scholarship today makes it impossible to go on treating the Appendix Vergilianaamong Virgil's works and not among the poetic genres of the first century A.D. 3. We have in no way intended to challenge the biographical framework that is typical of handbooks and remains central in teaching Latin literature: from a certain point of view the authors may also appear as the (real)

8

Literary History and Historiography

characters of a story that is the very story of the culture and its literature. It did seem necessary, however, to distinguish clearly between the lives of the authors and their works (in part for convenience of study). Given the nature of our sources, we attempted to avoid the danger of providing biographical fantasies where it was possible at least to describe the texts with a certain objectivity. (We are not speaking here only of clearly false and invented biographical notices, which, as is well known, form part of the ancient history of a text: our Plautus gladly gives up his wearisome mill.) In fact, even where there are consistent and reliable biographies, the confusion between life and texts is always a risk. All the better forms of literary and philological criticism practiced in the twentieth century, even the ones most distant and most hostile to one another, have at least this much in common: they have taught us to be cautious in tracing relationships between biographical information and the analysis of literary texts. It should be added that only rarely are the biographical notices truly independent from the texts: they have often been derived from the texts themselves, conjectures drawn from their words in order to fill in a vacuum of information. One must beware the vicious cycle that may lie behind biographical interpretations. For this reason, we have incorporated into the biographical treatments a certain sense of their problematic nature. Where necessary, and to the extent allowed by considerations of clarity and space, we have emphasized in which points the biography is based on deductions and reconstructions and from which texts, which combinations of evidence, and what indirect (more or less reliable) source we derive our knowledge. Anyone may memorize the dates pure and simple, or go a bit deeper into the problems connected with them and see how little we really know about such figures as Lucretius or Pecronius. We realize that there is little appeal in presenting things this way (in many authoritative literary histories authors' lives are given a special importance and a lively, concrete attractiveness), but we would prefer not co superimpose on the direct fascination of che texts the fascination of our projections. 4. Many of the devices modern literary histories esteem highly-literary sociology, geography, the material nature of the texts, statistics, study of oral communication, microhistories, and so on-have only a limited application to our field of work (because cf the limits of our information and sources). Nonetheless, we have, so far as we were able, taken into account these concerns coo, at least by posing the relevant problems, and this especially when our ideas on the public to whom the texts were addressed have a direct importance for understanding the texts themselves and the various kinds of conventions that govern and shape chem. 5. This brings us to the difficult matter of the authors' literary success. Some reference must be made to their later fame, but how should this be conceived? If the idea is to contribute to the students' general culture, we have grave doubts about the practicability of the matter. Take the case of Ovid, for instance. The ideal, of course, would be a monograph of twenty, thirty, forty, or more pages. The alternative of a mere list of the salient

Literary History and Historiography

9

points would create more confusion than cultural enrichment: in a few lines one would jump hastily from medieval poetry and Flemish painting to Ariosto, Shakespeare, and neo-classicism. Certain information must be provided, however, and we have no formula for resolving the dilemma. As a stimulus to greater knowledge, though, we should like to indicate a guiding principle we have followed: to regard the literary success as a form of the text's existence, or rather as a history of its reception by classes of the public not intended or foreseen by the author. Thus the modern artists who refer to the ancient text are to be viewed as readers just like the others; and the work's fate is interpreted as a dialectic between the text's original qualities and the changing expectations of the reading public. If the study of the literary success of the texts does not become a study of their reception, we, for our part, see no reason to take much interest in it. 6. Now we come to the question of the genres. Here we are on firmer ground, since no one now appears to question the usefulness of this. Naturally, we too see no reason for setting the literary genres in competition with the individual people. It is necessary only that the genre operate as a literary program inscribed in the work, as a model of meaning and of form that can be recognized behind the discursive structure of the text. If genre is the point of reference by which each new text locates itself, it becomes possible to follow the dialectic between tradition and innovation as the main highway; and here each artistic personality has its natural room. The importance accorded to the literary genres does not, therefore, contradict the structure of the sketches that is traditional in literary histories. It is enough that in the different historical segments we be quite clear about the working of these institutions of communication, these modes already prepared to construct the discourse, that are the genres. Above all, it must always be kept in mind (and here periodization can do its greatest harm) that each genre has its different tempos, stubborn perseverance or varying rhythms of development. It has thus been possible to respect absolute chronology, with some natural adjustments. Figures who for various reasons are minor have often been incorporated in the clarifying framework of a genre. In one particular case, the archaic period, we have provided a chapter on institutions, which sets the scene for and facilitates the treatment of the dramatists from Livius Andronicus to the age of the Gracchi. For the history of philology too, which is so important and not always given its due, and for the history of legal literature we have practiced an almost monographic concentration, with the result that some small repetitions with the diachronic sequence were inevitable. We have gone on too long, and may have allowed some personal idiosyncrasy to show itself here and there. Yet even the authors of "objective" textbooks have their inevitable obsessions, likes, and dislikes. It is not a bad idea, before assuming the detached voice of the expert, to admit them and put them on record.

10

Literary History and Historiography

_oN_E __

The Early and Middle Republics

The Origins

Birth of Latin literature

Artistic works and forms of communicatirm

The question how artistic works originated in the Latin language was posed by the Romans themselves in quite simple terms. The prevailing opinion was that the precise date of birth could be fixed: 240 B.C., the year in which Livius Andronicus put on the stage a drama he had written, presumably a tragedy. On the far side of this historic threshold lay a long period, perhaps four centuries, during which literature was silent. This notion of the origins may appear simplistic, but it makes sense in relation to its own presuppositions: if literature is limited to works of art fixed with the aid of writing, then a precise date of birth can be accepted. Yet the Romans of the classical period were fully conscious themselves that the origins of literature do not coincide with the origins of the forms of communication in which a culture finds expression. The history of these forms of communication is complex; it is not limited to written communication nor to anticipating and preparing the development of literature. The Romans themselves were fully aware that the origins of Greek literature provided an analogy that aided the understanding of their own. The splendid Greek cheater of the fifth century must have had a prehistory: simpler dramatic actions, not fixed in written texts and closely related to rural rites and festivals. Homeric poetry presupposes as background a rich tradition of epic songs entrusted to wandering bards. Thus the Romans, too, became curious about their literary prehistory. Yee the Greek example could be not only a stimulus but also a source of deception. Some Roman reconstructions of their origins, of their epic and cheater, for instance, seem too closely tied to the Greeks' reconstructions of their own literary past. The Greeks, in having Homer, had an undeniable advantage: a great poem and cultural document standing astride the very beginnings of literature, a text the layers of which revealed a long prior tradition. No Roman literary text occupied a similarly privileged position. The theatrical works of Andronicus, which for the Romans were the threshold of their literary chronology, are in fact secondary texts, translations made from an already mature literary genre, the Greek tragedy of the classical and Hellenistic periods. I will limit myself here to a separate treatment of some questions that

13

are indispensable to the discussion of literary origins: (a) chronology and spread of writing; (b) nonlirerary forms of communication; and (c) preliterary forms: the carmina. It is important to keep in mind that the evidence we rely on is varied in nature. We have information drawn from Roman literary sources. These are notices derived from sources far later than the time they refer to: historians, antiquarians, jurists, literary men, grammarians, and others. They must be evaluated critically, their limits and true importance studied. Then, too, we have the contributions of modern scholarship, based on historical, archaeological, linguistic, epigraphic, and other material. These data, combinations of data, and hypotheses are useful for the reconstruction of Roman culture in its preliterary phase.

I. THE First instances of written Latin

Literacy and the diffusion of books in archaic Rome

CHRONOLOGY

AND

SPREAD

OF WRITING

From the remotest times, at least the seventh century, Latin-speaking inhabitants ofLatium recorded in writing the simplest messages: an invitation to drink, upon a wine cup; an artisan's signature, on an artistic vessel ("Novius Plautius made me in Rome"); a religious prohibition, on a gravestone; and others as well. The use of writing therefore is connected with occasions of daily life. The distinctions between languages are still fluctuating, and in the territory of the earliest Rome people are found who speak and write in Greek, Oscan, and Etruscan. We have Latin inscriptions in the Greek alphabet and boustrophedon writings, which go from right to left and then from left to right. The alphabetic signs are still very much prone to variation. There is no reason to believe that the Romans of the first centuries wrote only upon durable materials: the conditions of our records for archaic Larium-different from those in Egypt, for example-are responsible for the failure of perishable writings to be preserved. Consequently we have only graffiti and inscriptions, and we lack funerary documents, which ordinarily, as in Greece, are important sources. What is left shows the existence of a melting pot of peoples and languages. Only gradually does the use of Latin and the Larin alphabet assert itself. The Latin alphabet itself, in fact, gives clear testimony of the situation in early Rome. In substance, it is derived from a particular West Greek alphabet, the one used in the powerful Campanian city of Cumae, but it is also somewhat influenced by Etruria. (This explains, for example, how the letter C serves as the abbreviation for the name Gaius: Etruscan had a single sign for the two velar consonants, voiceless and voiced.) The presence of inscriptions on objects of daily, domestic use seems to prove that already in earliest Rome a certain capacity for writing was found even among persons of middling social position. It is natural in any event to suppose that writing was more widely diffused in the higher classes of society, among the priests and those likely to hold public office. The use of writing is indispensable for a number of public functions: preservation of oracles, religious formulas and p1escriptions, lists of magistrates and

I

4

The Origins

priests, statutes, laws, treaties. And it was certainly important for the nobility, which began very early to record genealogies, family traditions, and the commemorative inscriptions of their ancestors. In this period, however, before the appearance of the first figures ofliterary history, such as Andronicus, or of prehistory, such as Appius Claudius, there is no evidence of a genuine circulation of books, such as is presupposed by written literary communication. Characteristically, the most ancient books of which we have any notice, the famous Sibylline books that were said to be introduced at Rome in the days of Tarquin the Proud, are religious texts and were, as far as we can tell, written in Greek. Already by the middle years of the Roman Republic, in the times of Livius Andronicus and Plautus, literacy seems to be quite extensive. In parallel to the rise of true literary texts, the ability to read and write is notably more extensive. First of all, a large number of citizens, those engaged in civil, priestly, or military affairs, are accustomed to possessing written records of their activity, even records of their personal activity (commentarii). But it is credible that many common people as well had at least the rudiments ofliteracy. At the end of the third century, moreover, a guild of scribes (scribae)is recognized by the state. At first their social position, like that of writers, is not very high; they are simple artisans of writing, manual laborers. The middle and upper classes of society are already thoroughly literate.

2. NONLITERARY Literature and nonliterary communication

Greek influences on archaic Rome

FORMS OF COMMUNICATION

It is appropriate now to review briefly forms of communication that presuppose the use of writing but, at least in the mind of the writer and of the recipient, do not constitute literature, however uncertain and variable the boundaries of that category may seem. Each of these forms of communication undoubtedly played a role also in preparing the ground for a true literary culture in Latin. For example, the use of Latin as the official language of the Roman people, employed in laws, treaties, religious formulas, public inscriptions, and oratory, gave an invaluable impulse to the development of Latin, continuously enhancing its expressive abilities. But looking ahead also to the development of the literary culture, it is possible to identify a specific inheritance from these nonliterary forms, which we may rather call preliterary. The characteristic traditionalism of Roman culture during the Republic favored the perpetuation of certain formulas and structures of thought. Traces of them exist even in authors who are imbued with the new Hellenizing culture, and not only in Naevius or Plautus but in the Latin of Catullus and Virgil as well. We will see this aspect of formal continuity better in the section on the carmina. A preliminary observation is in order. If we consider the legacy from these forms of communication to much later literary texts, in an author such as Plautus, for example, or Virgil, it is easy to set up a neat opposition: on the one hand, an original and autonomous Italian-Roman ground, on

Nonliterary Forms of Communication

I

5

the other, superimposed Greek influence; on the one hand, the rigid formulas of law and religion, on the other, the plastic forms of the language of Homer, Menander, and Callimachus. But this opposition should not be exaggerated. Historical, especially archaeological, research shows that in the history of Rome a Greek influence, however variable in degree and intensity and however liable to change, was always present. Rome in the sixth century, for example, appears increasingly to be a crossroads of trade and of cultures; and long before Roman writers consciously follow Greek literary models, Greek influence is already present in many aspects of Roman life. It is a gradual process, without sudden changes. The Roman writers themselves tend to exaggerate the qualitative change with respect to the tradition. Ennius, for instance, in the name of the new poetic principles that are open to Hellenistic taste, attacks his "primitive" predecessors, who stood for an unrefined, obscure poetry. But among these "primitives," we know, was Naevius, a writer nourished on Greek culture and engaged in a great effort to fuse the different cultures. As we will see shortly, even the Saturnian, the most ancient Roman meter, which the Romans themselves considered their only refined native verse, may have been affected very early by contacts with the Greek world. In studying the origins of Rome a recurring theme is the necessity not to draw excessively sharp boundaries between different cultures.

Laws and Treaties

Laws of the kings

Laws of the Twelve Tables

From the earliest days of the Roman city-state the use of writing was linked to the need for precise official records, of treaties, international pacts, and laws. These needs also exercised a strong influence on the shaping of Latin prose. Of treaties (foedera)from archaic times we have only indirect attestation, no actual fragments: one example is the treaty made between Rome and Carthage in 509 B.C., about which the Greek historian Polybius (second century B.C.) informs us. The historic, social, and cultural importance of the first laws of Rome was immense. We have, to begin with, remains of ancient legesregiae,which must go back to the monarchic period of the city's first centuries. They were dominated, as far as we can tell, by a rigidly sacral approach, as in this: "A concubine must not touch the altar of Juno. If she will do so, she must make expiation by sacrificing a lamb to Juno, with her hair unbound." The earliest law naturally must have been based chiefly on customary regulations. A great civil and political achievement was marked by the composition of the Laws of the Twelve Tables, so called because they were engraved on twelve bronze tablets displayed in the Roman Forum. The weaker segments of the population especially found in these laws, once written and made public, a bulwark against the excessive power of the great families. The laws are said to have been written by a special commission from 451 to 450. The version we have is undoubtedly recast, but it still preserves a clear trace of archaic language.

r6

The Origins

The Romans of the classical period saw in the Laws of the Twelve Tables the truest foundation of their cultural identity. According to Livy (3.34.6), they were always/ons omnis publici privatique iuris; for Cicero they surpassed all the books of the Greek philosophers, at least in usefulness and seriousness (De Oratore 1.195). Boys learned them by heart; scholars continued to comment on them and analyze them. In their monumental assonances and alliterations, in the staccato rhythms of their parallel cola, these laws unfailingly produce the effect of a judgment against which there can be no appeal, for instance: Si noxfurtum faxsit, si im occisit. iure caesus esto. "If by night he shall have committed a theft, if he shall have killed him, he shall have been killed in accordance with law." (Note the ellipse of the subject, which occurs repeatedly even though there are obviously different subjects, the thief and his killer.)

The Fasti and the Annales The calendar

Another very ancient use of writing, also connected to the informational needs of public life, was for the calendar. The Roman community had developed an official calendar, regulated and sanctioned by the religious authorities. The days of the year were divided into fasti and nefasti, according to whether the conduct of public affairs was permitted or forbidden. The pontiffs were responsible for the regulation of this. Soon the term fasti began to designate not only the annual calendar but also the lists of magistrates elected year by year (fasti consulares,fasti pontificates) and the record of military triumphs won by magistrates in office (fasti triumphales). The amount of information stored in the fasti increased over time. The magistrates used them to record their official acts. Another important step was the use of the tabula dealbata: the supreme pontiff used to set up in public a "white tablet," which announced, in addition to the names of the magistrates for the current year, events of public concern, such as treaties, declarations of war, prodigies, or natural catastrophes. These official records, deposited year by year, took the collective name annales and began to form a true collective memory of the Roman state. In the time of the Gracchi the pontiff Publius Mucius Scaevola undertook to collect on rolls the annales of the previous 280 years; the collection was called the Annales Maximi.

The year-by-year scheme

It is obvious that these bare collections of facts, set down in chronological order, possessed great potential as historical documents. The historians concerned with Rome's first centuries, Cato or Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, would later refer to this record to buttress the authority of their own accounts. More generally, these official annales of the pontiffs exercised an enormous influence upon the structure of Latin historical works: the chronological framework of the annales tended to yield a narrative of Roman history that was arranged according to a year-by-year scheme. Thus the tradition of the pontifical annales contributed an original element, one free from Greek influence, to the development of a characteristically Roman historiography; and traces of it still remain in Livy and Tacitus.

Nonliterary Forms of Communication

17

The Commentarii

Private memoirs

Public memoirs

Alongside the official tradition of the annales we find the use of commentarii, more personal and not necessarily public writings. The term has a wide range of applications in classical Latin: by itself it may denote nothing more than "notes," "memoirs," "observations," of a private character. The term would later be used, for instance, by Julius Caesar for his narratives of the Gallic War and the war against Pompey. These works have a high literary finish and a deliberate political stance, but by calling them commentariiCaesar wanted to emphasize that they were not so much literary historiography as firsthand recollections. Already before Julius Caesar, Lucius Cornelius Sulla bad written at least twenty-two books of Memoirs (according to some, the title was probably Commentarii Rerum Gestarum). The commentariithus present themselves as nonprofessional works, merely supplying information and personal recollections. Whether they actually were so is a separate question. The origin of this meaning lies in a practice of the republican magistrates. An important magistrate, a consul, for example, tended to collect in a kind of diary the principal actions and events of his term of office. These commentariimight take on the character of official records and be deposited with the priestly colleges: later on, the pontiffs themselves preserved records of their own activity in the libri pontificum. We possess, however, only indirect notices of these works. The use of commentariipresumably favored the development of a prose writing that was connected to contemporary politics and not far removed from the composition of proper memoirs. This tradition of Latin prose remained distinct from the tradition of judicial and public oratory, which was always more liable to rhetorical literary elaboration.

The Dawn of Oratory: Appius Claudius Caecus

Oratc,ry as the basis of public life

Before Roman culture was decisively Hellenized, which took place during the century between the war against Tarentum (280-272 B.C.) and the invasion of Greece, writing was considered a technique, and unquestionably a very useful one, but speaking well was much more important: the Romans considered oratorical ability a form of power and a key to success. It is not an accident that the first name we meet in the history of Latin literature belongs to a man of eloquence, a semi-legendary figure who was regarded as the founder of oratory: Appius Claudius Caecus. Henceforth, at least until the age of the Scipios, oratory is considered the only intellectual activity truly worthy of a distinguished citizen. Whereas poets for a long time, until Accius and Lucilius, were freedmen or non-Roman Italians of low status, oratory was from the start the domain of noble citizens. The ability to persuade was the indispensable basis of a political career, and the Romans had no need, as they did in the case of poetry, to import from outside an interest in rhetoric; they needed the assistance of rhetores,Greektrained "professors of eloquence," solely to refine their own natural apti-

I

8

The Origins

Appius Claudius Caecus

tudes as oratores. Unlike true literature, which belongs to a man's otium, the "free time" he may choose to dedicate to pleasurable pursuits, oratory is considered an integral and essential part of the active life. Appius Claudius Caecus, who came from a very noble family, was consul in 307 and 296, censor in 312, and dictator. The ancients attached his almost legendary name to a large number of important undertakings in war and in peace. He fought against Etruscans and Sabines and was victorious over the Samnites in the Third Samnite War. He permitted plebeians to enter the Senate. During his censorship he promoted fundamental public works: from him the aqua Claudia or Appia, the first Roman aqueduct, takes its name, as does the Via Appia, the first of the great roads built by the Romans, which upon its completion would link Rome with Brundisium. In certain features Appius Claudius appears to be a forerunner of Cato. He is remembered for his forcefulness and oratorical ability: in a famous oration he opposed Pyrrhus's peace proposals, and Cicero refers to this as the first official speech ever published in Rome. We do not know whether the text that circulated in Cicero's day was genuine, but the notice is interesting regardless, since it demonstrates already in that early period a lively interest in the ability to speak. Appius Claudius was, moreover, an expert in law and was concerned, it seems, with scholarly questions of language: the replacement of intervocalic s with r (rhotacism) is traditionally attributed to him. Under his name there circulated a collection of maxims (Sententiae) of a moral and philosophizing character, which was held to be a repository of archaic wisdom (a famous sententia is "Each man is the artisan of his own destiny"). In this too Appius seems to herald the personality of Cato. We do not know whether his expressive abilities were already fostered by contacts with Hellenistic culture, as would be the case with Cato; certain of his moral maxims suggest Greek Pythagorean sources. It is significant that Cicero mentions (Tusculanae Disputationes 4-4) the existence of a carmen by Appius, who was, we have seen, the father of prose at Rome. This does not mean chat Appius was really, properly speaking, a poet. We will understand this better in the following section.

3. Frmin nrmliterary texts

PRELITERARY

FORMS:

THE CARMINA

Even though all the forms of communication we have been concerned with up to this point had a practical aim, each one of them, in its own way, may have contributed to the formation of literary Latin. It ought not to be thought that the formal elements of a text are solely those directed to an artistic purpose. The effects produced by certain formal devices have an importance even outside what we call literature. The laws, for example, are authoritative texts par excellence: in archaic Rome the style of the laws is deliberately solemn, vigorous, monumental. Alliteration, rhyme, thefigura etymologica, parallelism, chiasmus, and other similar effects were probably far more common in such texts than in the spontaneous language of daily life or private communications, including written ones. The same is true

Preliterary Forms: The Carmina

r9

Memorability of formal structures

Carmen and poetry

Poetry and prose in archaic Rome

for prayers and ritual formulas, the message of which should imitate acertain order in the world, imposing upon the words of the phrase a structure that is perceived as ordered, or even lead to certain patterns of behavior. The form should also, naturally, aid the memory in learning to repeat the phrase exactly: like rhythm and rhyme, it should create artificial links among the words so that the whole can be memorized. And of course magic formulas, medical prescriptions, wise saws, and rules for agriculture ought to be viewed in the same light. As for political communication, the importance attached to public speeches and commemorative inscriptions points up the necessity of certain forms. There is, then, a large field in which certain cultural manifestations appear together that we would group very differently and that the Romans themselves kept clearly separate. This shared field is defined by formal character and has to do with the unusual range of possible meanings for the word carmen.The most common meaning of carmen,which derives from cano, "sing, sound," is "poem." Yet a poet like Ennius does not seem fond of the term, since he denominates his work with a Greek word, poema. There are two reasons for this. First, Ennius wanted to stress his own novel inclination for writing poetry in the Greek style. Second, he underscored his rejection of a certain ancient tradition. In this tradition carmenmeans far more than "verses" or "poem." The Augustan poets would be the first to narrow the meaning of the term, which had an aura of national antiquity about it, and to apply it to their own works in verse. In archaic Rome, by contrast, carmen is an oddly ill-defined term; for this reason Ennius does not like it. Cicero, in speaking of the Twelve Tables, calls them a carmen.In speaking of magic formulas, the Twelve Tables refer to them as carmina. For Livy the text of a very ancient treaty is a carmen.The same word is applied to prayers, oaths, prophecies, judicial judgments, and lullabies for babies. A carmen therefore is not a carmen by virtue of its content or its use; to characterize it we must look at its form. We can establish now an important point about the relations between poetry and prose in archaic Rome. The boundary between these two is much less sharp than in our culture or, still more, than in Roman culture of the classical period. The earliest Roman prose, on one side, is characterized by a strong stylization, as we have seen. It has an intensely marked, perceptible rhythmic texture, on account of its phonetic and morphological repetitions, and particularly the correspondences it shows among the members (cola) of the phrase, which are constructed so as to have equal length and matching syntactic structure-in short, on account of its strong effects of verbal parallelism. Archaic poetry, on the other side, has a peculiarly feeble metrical structure, since it exists in a loose framework and is subject to rules with large loopholes (at least so it seems to us, but also to an educated Roman of Cicero's time!). As a result, prose and poetry seem to draw close to one another: "weak" verses and "strong" prose practically touch and meet. Among classical meters no other verse is so unpredictable as the Satur-

20

The Origins

nian (seep. 25), except perhaps, to some extent, Plautus's iambic senarius. Nor is there in classical prose the same tendency towards a highly formalized construction, based on parallelism, homoeoteleuron, alliteration, and brief symmetrical cola. A single stylistic matrix unites the extremely various manifestations and employments of carmina such as the following: . . . uti tu morbos v1s0s mv1sosque viduertatem vastitudinemque calamitates intemperiasque prohibessis defendas averruncesque (a private prayer for the ritual purification of the fields, recorded, without attribution, by Cato in De Agri Cuftura 14r.3: "that you, o Mars, prevent, fend off, and avert diseases seen and unseen, sterility and desolation, catastrophes and storms"); novum vetus novo veteri

vinum bibo morbo medeor

(an incantation to be uttered when drinking the new wine, in order to restore its medicinal powers, in harmony with the cycle of nature-a disputed interpretation: "I drink the new, the old wine, I heal the new, the old disease" [?}); summum 1us

summa crux

("extreme justice, extreme torment": an ancient and popular variant, recorded in Columella r.7.2, of the more familiar summumius summainiuria, "extreme justice, extreme injustice"); magna sapientia aerate quom parva

multasque virtutes posidet hoe saxsum

("great wisdom, many virtues, but a brief life this rock contains," from the epitaph of one of the Scipios, second century B.C.); male perdat, male exset, male disperdat. Mandes, tradas nei possit amplius ullum mensem aspicere, videre, contemplare (from a curse formula of the late Republic, requesting that a certain person not survive beyond February: "may he be terribly ruined, terribly consumed, terribly destroyed; order, command that he not be able to look upon, see, behold a single month more." The Latin is vulgar yet stylized). There is, undoubtedly, something arbitrary in collecting popular sayings, magic formulas, prayers, and sophisticated metrical epitaphs of illustrious persons all in one place. And yet if we include items solely on the basis of certain recurring formal features, the collection becomes larger still and reaches into regular literature: for the attuned ear, certain cadences or rhythms in Plautus and Ennius, and even in Catullus and Virgil, may still recall the tradition of the carmina.

Preliterary

Forms: The Carmina

2

r

Carmina and Roman literary history

The stylistic tradition of the carmina is the most important element of continuity linking the period of its origins to the rest of Roman literary history. While Greek influences accumulate and become stronger and deeper, the tradition of the carmina never completely disappears: it has left a lasting mark on Latin literary style, a mark that distinguishes it even from chose Greek models chat are the most carefully imitated. It is a manner of writing for effect, without observing sharp distinctions between poetry and prose; it stands in opposition to the casual, informal style of ordinary conversation; it represents a stylistic attitude unknown to literary Greek but ingrained in the expressiveness of the Romans (and perhaps of other Italic peoples as well). Catullus and Virgil, when they echo this manner, are closer to rustic proverbs and religious litanies than to Homer and Callimachus.

Sacral Poetry

The Carmen Saliare

The Carmen Arvale

The most ancient forms of carmina to come down to us, except for funereal inscriptions, which we will take up below, are of a religious and ritual nature. Rituals are by nature conservative and inviolable, and they evolve more slowly than religious sensibility; and the Romans are a people noted for conservatism. And so we possess remains and traces of religious songs that were bound up with the performance of annual public rituals. The chief pieces of evidence we have refer to two important ritual carmina, the Salian and the Arval. The first was the chant of a venerable priestly college, the Salii, which is said to have been founded by Numa Pompilius. The Romans connected the name etymologically with salio, "leap." The college consisted of twelve priests of the god Mars, who in March of every year carried in procession the twelve sacred shields, the ancilia; one of the shields was the famous shield that fell from the sky as a pledge of divine protection for Rome. The Salii must have had several different carmina. They pronounced them while advancing in a kind of ritual ballet, moving to a triple beat-the movement was called tripudium because they beat the ground three times rhythmically with the foot-and accompanied by percussion, as they struck the shields with lances. The language of the Salii was incomprehensible to the Romans of the historical period, and the remains of the hymn that we have are very obscure to us. We do know that a fundamental concern was to invoke, individually and collectively, all the divine powers, in order to avoid potentially disturbing omissions. Early Roman religion worshipped a complicated set of numina, in which Hellenized divinities were found alongside what might be called functional powers, who were tied to the minute, discrete forces of everyday life; thus, Sator presided over sowing and Sterculinius over manuring. The invocations, then, we should suppose, were found in litanies of great length. The Carmen Arvale, or Carmen Fratrum Arvalium, "Chant of the Arval Brethren," is a little less shadowy for us. In May the fratres Arvales, a college

22

The Origins

Expressive rhetorical features

of twelve priests created, according to legend, by no less a personage than Romulus, sang a hymn for the purification of the fields (arva in Latin); they implored the protection of Mars and of the Lares, ancestors regarded as the propitious spirits of the dead. We have a fairly reliable version of the text, though the interpretation is difficult. The insistent triple rhythm is notable here too, as in the tripudium of the Salii: the carmen began, for instance, with a triply repeated request for aid, enosLases iuvate (nos, Lares, iuvate in classical Latin, "aid us, o Lares"). In religious folklore and in magic, triple words and acts are widely considered to guarantee efficacy. Despite the archaic language, the chant must be the work of a real artist, a vatic bard not untouched by Greek literature and culture. Some characteristics of these hymns, such as expressive fullness, repetition, and certain rhetorical figures, must have had lasting influence on nonreligious Latin literature. Yet Rome in the historical period did not possess a true religious literarure. There were but a few scattered exceptions: during the Second Punic War, Andronicus was commissioned to write a hymn to Queen Juno; Horace's later Centennial Ode is, more than anything else, a work for a particular occasion, propagandistic in intent, and marked by Hellenistic influence. Similarly, Rome did not possess a true distinct priestly class. Greek religion and mythology therefore could penetrate all the more thoroughly, bringing with it all its weight of literary creativity and, still more important, figurative imagination.

Popular Poetry

The Fescennine verses

We have already noticed in passing, when speaking of the carmina, certain manifestations that belong here: proverbs, curses, spells, rustic precepts, and healing formulas. The freedmen who appear in Petronius's Satyricon seem still immersed in this oral culture. It is obvious that a vast legacy has been lost to us here-work songs, love songs, and the lullabies that Catullus, Horace, and many another heard from their nurse. The fullest evidence we have pertains to oral, improvised poetry of a mocking and comical character, the most common defined type being that of the Fescennine verses. According to the ancients, the etymology derives either from Fescennia, a small town in southern Etruria, or fromfascinum, "the evil eye" and also "penis," the indecency of which had power to cast a spell. The term would be, then, either a trace of Etruscan influence or the expression of an apotropaic function (i.e., keeping the evil eye at a distance), which these songs were thought to have. It seems that the home of the fescennini was the rustic festivals. According to Horace (Epistles 2.1.139 ff.), out of this developed a tradition of biting mockery, which might even become a kind of public defamation. Horace connects this trend to the characteristic cursing of the earliest Attic comedy. Fescennine verses came into play on many social occasions in ancient Rome: the jests traditional at weddings (see Catullus, poem 61); "popular justice," a form of public defamation (again see Catullus, poem 17); also

Preliterary Forms: The Carmina

23

Carmina triumphalia

the carmina triumphalia. At a triumph the soldiers improvised songs that mingled praise for the conqueror with mockery and pasquinade; perhaps here too an apotropaic function can be discerned by which the exaltation attendant on success was moderated and tempered by laughter, in order not to bring down the consequences of sacrilegious arrogance. It is clear that this popular feeling for the comic had a considerable influence on certain comic elements in literary works, namely, Plautine comedy and the development of satire and the satiric epigram. But there is no proof that the "fescennine spirit" was transformed directly into proper literary genres. The. chief impulse to the creation of the comic theater undoubtedly came from contact with the Greek theater of Magna Graecia and from the circulation of Attic and Hellenistic literary texts. The origin of satire should also be looked on in this light (for Livy's notices about "Etruscan" spectacles and "dramatic satura" see pp. 30 and r 13). Italic popular comedy found more immediate reflexes in the success of the Atellan farce (see p. 36).

Heroic Poetry

Small importance of heroic songs in early Rome

Analogy with other Mediterranean cultures might lead us to think that at Rome too a celebratory poetry was in use: verse accounts of heroic deeds, conceived orally and performed at private gatherings, such as parties and funeral banquets. These heroic songs, or ballads, could have had a notable influence on the development of a native Latin epic poetry and would have been the ideal vehicles for transmitting myths and legends of earliest Rome, tied, as they would have been, to the ancestral traditions of the great Roman families. This reconstruction is appealing but quite hypothetical. The analogy with other cultures could be a mirage, and in fact the significance of these carmina was played up especially in the Romantic period, as if in reaction to the excessively learned and literary character of the extant Latin epic poetry. Such a reconstruction romanticized at least the prehistory of Latin epic, which thus could become a heroic poetry that one might imagine was spontaneous, as if it were the natural, original product of mythopoetic inclinations working in the service of national pride. Moreover, the analogies with Greek epic affected the Romans of the classical period themselves, who may under this influence have harbored hazy notions of primitive epic composition. The words of Cato, as reported by Cicero and Varro, are our principal evidence about these carmina convivalia. Not even Cato, who was born before the Second Punic War, seems to have ever heard them directly: he cites them by indirect tradition. If, as it might seem, there really were songs of praise for the deeds of ancestors, it is conceivable that the historians of the second century B.C. made use of them. We do not have, however, any indications of written versions of such poetry, and the historians do not customarily refer to any poetic sources. It is a striking fact, moreover, that no trace whatever has been left of

24

The Origins

H ellenization of R&meand decline of heroicpoetry

professional singers-bards, poets, balladeers, or what you will. It is difficult to imagine that a tmly literary form could evolve without such figures. If, however, this poetry found performers and audience in the (rather restricted) circle of the great families, as might be implied by the term carmina convivalia, which suggests banquets and private gatherings, then it becomes clear why already at the end of the third century we no longer hear any echoes of it. The great families of the city are precisely the social groups among whom a Hellenizing culture takes hold most rapidly, from the third to the second century, between the war against Tarencum and Roman expansion eastward. The aristocratic circles were clearly the first to reject certain traditions and to assimilate instead the fruits of the great artistic and literary culture of Greece. Only now, in the shadow of these great families, do professional writers appear, but from Livius Andronicus onwards they employ literary forms that are learned and profoundly shaped by Greek influence. A comparison with other branches of writing is instructive. The evolution of popular genres was somewhat different: farce, for instance, retained its original Italic character for a much longer time. Yet it should be observed that already at the beginning of the second century Plautus achieves success even among the lower classes, with a literary form such as the palliata, which is based on the artistic principles of regular Attic comedy. It is clear, in short, that the celebratory, laudatory function of poetry did not disappear during this new phase; on the contrary, through such Hellenizers as Livius, Ennius, and Accius poetry increasingly becomes a means of securing and perpetuating the glory of distinguished men and families, both in the immediate present and reaching back to the example of the ancestors. The ever greater care over form that is seen in poetry begins to rival the care shown in the Greek models, always the criterion of excellence, and this care becomes a means of vouching for the message of glorification, transforming thereby the literary artifact into a lasting monument. And the poet, by taking on the role of dispenser and guarantor of fame, in which capacity he is valued, affirms his own social usefulness. Into the discussion of the carmina convivalia it is usual to bring two works that are quite nebulous for us, the Carmen Nelei and the Carmen Priami; but any connection is improbable. Since the Carmen Nelei, of which we have very few fragments, was in iambic meter, it was not, as far as we can tell, a proper epic poem. The Carmen Priami, of which we have a single verse, a Saturnian, presents itself as an epic but does not have the feel of being genuinely archaic. It is likely to be, rather, a later forgery, connected to an archaizing taste; its terminus ante quem is the time of Varro, who cites the fragment. Thus it is impossible to use this evidence in conjunction with the carmina convivalia. The motive for such a use could only be to lend substance to some intuition of primitive preliterary epic composition.

The Problem of the Saturnian Apart from the mysterious rhythmic cadences of the religious songs, the most ancient evidence we have about Roman poetry bears on a particular

Preliterary Forms: The Carmina

25

Elogia of the Scipios

verse, the Saturnian. The first two Roman epics, Livius Andronicus's translation of the Odysseyand Naevius's Bel/um Poenicum,are composed in Saturnians. Also in Sarurnians are perhaps even older texts, the funeral elogia found upon the tombs of two illustrious persons from the family of the Scipios. The two most ancient elogia refer to Lucius Cornelius Scipio, consul in 259, and his father, of the same name, who was consul in 298. The texts are the products of fine literary craftsmanship and reveal a certain familiarity with Greek culture and the traditions of Greek funerary poetry. One of the epitaphs, for instance, praises not only the military but also the intellectual virtues of the deceased and associates, in characteristic fashion, physical attractiveness and personal valor: fortis vir sapiensque quoius forma virtutei parisuma fuit. "He was a brave man and a wise one, and his looks were equal to his courage" -a harmonious fusion of courage, handsomeness, and intelligence that recalls the Greek ideal of kalokagathia, or "nobleness." The Saturnian poses complex problems for the students of early Rome. The very etymology of the name suggests something indigenous, purely Italic-the god Saturn, for example-but all the instances we have bear the stamp of a period that is already imbued with Greek culture. The epitaphs of the Scipios presuppose a cultivated, Hellenizing environment. Even the Carmen Arvale, several centuries older, is not immune from Greek influences, and it seems possible to find Saturnian cadences in it. Andronicus and Naevius do not write exclusively in Saturnians: in their works for the theater the same authors show a complete mastery of meters that follow the principles of Greek dramatic poetry. Thus it is not possible to situate the Saturnian in a pure, indigenous period free from Greek interference. The metrical interpretation of this verse poses severe problems: its remarkably fluid structure does not permit a derivation from any regular verse of Greek poetry; indeed, some scholars even doubt whether the principles of the Saturnian's structure are the same as those of classical Greek and Latin meters, that is, whether they are based on alternation in length. As a result, radically different interpretations have been proposed. The debate is important for another reason too, because it involves our ideas about the development of a "prehistory" in Latin literary culture. Whatever the exact solution to the problem of the meter, it is important to realize that the Saturnian cannot be situated entirely outside of the GrecoRoman world. It is difficult to accept that Andronicus and Naevius could compose poetry simultaneously in accordance with mutually incompatible sets of principles. Less drastic solutions exist: for instance, to see in the Sacurnian the transformation of certain cola,certain metrical units, that can be found in Greek poetry; or to hold that a decisive role was played by the number of syllables or by the grouping of words. However its genesis is judged, the Saturnian remains the only truly original contribution made by the Romans in the field of metrical forms. Evi-

26

The Origins

Versus quadratus

dently, it was precisely its conspicuous irregularity with respect to the principles of Greek literature that was responsible in the end for its disappearance. Yet there exist other metrical forms that, though traceable to a precise Greek model, seem to enjoy an autonomous and not exactly literary vitality. This is the case with the versusquadratus, a trochaic septenarius stylized in a particular way, which is attested for the classical period in popular, anonymous uses: riddles, children's ditties, banter, pasquinades from the people, as in postquam Crassus carbofactus, Carbo crassusfactus est, "ever since Crassus became carbon, Carbo became fat" (Carbo was notoriously an opponent of Crassus). This versusquadratus seems to have been firmly planted among the Romans before their writers adopted, in a learned way, metrical forms from Greek literature: it represents a subliterary, popular diffusion, brought about perhaps by the first contacts with Magna Graecia. At the present time the chronology is quite hypothetical, and given our uncertainty about the Saturnian's origins (see above), we can say nothing further about the relative chronology of the various types of popular verse at Rome. The history of the versus quadratus is but one aspect of a more general phenomenon: Roman literature, right from its recorded beginnings, knows both a "pure" Hellenizing metric (e.g., the hexameter ofEnnius, imported bodily from Greek epic poetry) and "impure," adapted forms (e.g., the majority of the verses used by Plautus and the other comic writers), which, though they have exact counterparts in Greek, nonetheless follow a number of altogether new principles. A fundamental characteristic of early Roman poetry is precisely the coexistence of these two different metrical bases. In the end, the "pure" metric naturally wins out, and already in the first century B.C. the Romans have to labor to understand the structural rules of the Plaurine senarius. It is clear, then, that the two different tendencies presuppose different times of adaptation and different paths of transmission, on the one hand, the simple imitation of the regular forms, and on the other, a more gradual and more complex process of acclimatization. Once again the state of our tradition suggests the existence of a long prehistory, now almost completely lost, that came to maturity in the fertile crucible of cultural fusion that was ancient Italy. This is necessarily presupposed by the abrupt "creation" of a national literature in the days of Andronicus, livius, and Plautus.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

On the origins of Latin an