Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons and Society 0674003381, 9780674003385

Citation preview

CENTER

FOR

HELLENIC

STUDIES

COLLOQUIA

Matrices of Genre Authors, Canons, and Society

4

Matrices of Genre Authors, Canons, and Society

EDITED

BY

Mary

Depew e

Dirk

Obbink

HARVARD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

* London, England

+ 2000

Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data Matrices of genre : authors, canons, and society / edited by Mary Depew & Dirk Obbink. p. cm. — (Center for Hellenic Studies colloquia ; 4)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00338-1 1. Classical literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. Greece—History.

2. Literature and society—

3. Literature and society—Rome—History.

5. Literary form.

1. Depew, Mary.

4.Canon (Literature)

II. Obbink, Dirk. _ III. Series.

PA39 .M38 2000 880'.09 21; aa05 06-09—dc00

00-040942

CONTENTS

[n

INTRODUCTION

Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink. .......... ee

1

CHAPTER ONE

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

Glenn

W Most.........

15

CHAPTER TWO

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual

Joseph W. Day...

.....

eee ren

37

CHAPTER THREE

Enacted and Represented Dedications: Genre and Greek Hymn Mary Depew . .... eee ehh

59

CHAPTER FOUR Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry, the Hesiodic Gunaikon

Katalogos, and the Odysseian Nekuia

lan Rutherford..........

81

. ............... eee

97

CHAPTER FIVE

Herodotus’s Genre(s)

Deborah Boedeker

CHAPTER SIX

From Aristophanes to Menander?

Genre Transformation in Greek Comedy

EricCsapo.........

115

CHAPTER SEVEN

Theocritus and the “Demythologizing” of Poetry

Marco Fantuzzi

....

135

CHAPTER EIGHT Lycophron's Alexandra: “Hindsight as Foresight Makes No Sense"? Stephanie West |... hh

153

vi

Contents

CHAPTER NINE

Rituals in Ink: Horace on the Greek Lyric Tradition Alessandro Barchiesi . 6.06

0

2.22

eeeenn

167

Ineke Sluiter......

183

..................... en

205

CHAPTER TEN

The Dialectics of Genre: Some Aspects of Secondary Literature and Genre in Antiquity CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Didactic Plot

DonFowler

CHAPTER TWELVE

Essential Epic: Genre and Gender from Macer to Statius Stephen Hinds . 0... ee es

221

NOTES

247

..

oe

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

ee

rer

. 6.

CONTRIBUTORS

. 2 0 nn

INDEX

ll

......

e

ee ee

he

e e rrr

eR

Re

In Memoriam

Don Fowler

ehh

o

oh om

ees aoo

m à on

m m o.

305

oh o non on 340

9 n n n n 343

Introduction MARY

DEPEW

AND

Dirk

OBBINK

In 1973, Rosalie Colie described the Renaissance as a period in which “literary

invention . . . was largely generic, and [the] transfer of ancient values was largely in generic terms, accomplished by generic instruments and helps.”! Of course, authors were important too: much weight has been attached to the great writers of the past as models, and standard canons of their works have long dominated the course of education, book-collecting and editing, and literary fashion. But Colie’s point focuses attention on authors and their works as “classes,” the formal properties of which could be perceived by similarity, in which membership could be earned by imitation, and innovation achieved through violation, permutation, and hybridization. Greek and Roman literary genres today are in-

voked as concepts central to the transmission of values and institutions. Even this book and its chapters bear marks of their respective “genres”:? they instantiate themselves and suggest patterns for their own evaluation, as well as providing a kind of “instruction” for their own use. As such they may be seen, to an extent, not as products of their individual authors (these being instead themselves conventional constructions) but as predicted by their own categories of discourse, warbling the common cant back through the mouths of generic amanuenses: “Academic course offerings, conferences, and publications persist in massively reinforcing [such generic] categories as ‘a matter of convenience, while remaining for the most part oblivious of the critical consequences this entails.”> What is more, such preconceptions may thus hide the true origins of what eventually comes to be perceived as classes of written discourse or may provide mythical aetiologies for them. Thus Daniel Selden moves from this point to argue that “the range of texts that we have come to call the ‘ancient

2

Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink

novel’ were [never] thought of together as constituting a coherent group" until the seventeenth century, when the genre was invented and inserted into the ancient canon. In this volume, Glenn Most argues a similar point about Greek tragedy: the notion of the “tragic” is a modern construct, which played no part in the conceptualization of the genre in antiquity. The view that literary production in the Renaissance, and therefore in the neo-Classical, Romantic, and even Modernist periods, depended on a successively rediscovered recognition of ancient Greek and Roman poetic genres and rhetorical categories is widely assumed. Matters become a bit more unclear, however, as soon as we ask how these generic categories came into existence in the first place and what their formative history might tell us about the nature and function of poetic genres in antiquity. Answers to these questions might show many of our notions about ancient and modern poetic genres to be modern constructs. What criteria constitute a genre? What genres were recognized

in Greece and Rome? Were there competing schemes for classifying genres and for accounting for literary change, selection, and authority over time and place? How do these schemes differ from our current understanding and application

of Greek and Roman genres? The chapters in this volume, originally presented at a colloquium convened at the Center for Hellenistic Studies, attempt preliminary answers to these questions.

Colie’s assessment of the importance of Greece and Rome to the Renaissance suggests two fundamental models of genre. The model that she attributes to antiquity and to the Renaissance is production-oriented:* generic boundaries are necessary for the composition of literature, a point Horace makes in the Ars Po-

etica (89): “If in producing my work I cannot observe [and don’t know] the required genres and styles, why am I hailed as ‘Poet’? Why prefer wanton ignorance to learning? Comic material resists presentation in tragic verse. Likewise

the ‘Feast of Thyestes’ resents poetry that is conversation and worthy almost of the comic sock” (86-91). In his Foreword to Conte’s analysis of genre in Roman

poetry, Charles Segal points out that the generic concepts at work in these texts

should be understood *. . . not as something external to the work or as a category that modern critics impose for their convenience, but rather as the ancient poet's instrument for reaching the reader, organizing content and projecting thought in forms intelligible to the audience. Genre is a medium of literary communication

(perhaps one could say writerly communication, in Roland

Barthes' sense) in cultures like the Greco-Roman that have strongly defined literary traditions and therefore literary competences to connect author and audi-

ence in a common frame of reference? According to this assessment, genre in

Introduction

3

antiquity is a matter of authorial positioning and readerly conditioning with reference to a coherent tradition. That readerly tradition, however, had itself to be constructed by a succes-

sion of readers and critics working later than the authors in question. Thus there existed in antiquity another way of viewing genres, in which they were defined not only pragmatically, as an inferred set of rules that enabled authors to compose texts that conformed to and innovated within traditions, but also in a way that operated from outside the context of production. Generic concepts

and categories were formulated by philosophers, scholars, and critics engaged in constructing histories, normative criteria, taxonomies, phylogenies, and can-

ons. Of Plato, who was one of the first theorizers of genres, Selden says: "All ancient genres originated in important and recurrent real-life situations, and their institutionalization as patterns of regular response supplied part of the fundamental architecture (themethla) for the social order. It comes as no surprise,

then, that a formal theory of literary genres first emerged as part of political philosophy.”’

Two points emerge. First, in the oral culture that persisted in Greece until the late Classical period, a poem “existed for and through [its] performance; the literary genera in fact reflect different conditions of performance.”® Second, metadiscourse about genre was a different matter, forming a body of metadata (additional to our historical literary evidence) all its own. This came later, and it often took some distance from genres, sometimes falsifying or fictionalizing their performative matrix. Thus theorizing about genre arose quite apart from conceptualizations of genre that were production-and performance-based. It is no accident that the first theories of genre, such as Plato's, arose in a culture that was already textual and not performance-based, and in which descriptive and normative studies of literary history, the visual arts, city planning, etymology, and music were being composed for the first time.? The late fifth century 2.c.e. fits perfectly Gregory Nagy's formula: “the very

concept of genre becomes necessary only when the occasion for a given speechact, that is, for a given poem or song, is lost."'? Rossi's much-cited formula is

this: in the Archaic period, generic laws were unwritten but respected; in the Classical period, they were both written and respected; and in the Hellenistic period, with its philologists and grammarians, generic laws were written but

not respected.!! If genre is indeed "the mediating term between the literary work and the various cultural discourses and social functions within which literature operates,'? concepts of genre will change over time and place. The form and content of literature are set apart somehow from the uses of

ordinary language: that is, literary discourse is "marked"? This tendency im-

4

Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink

plies, as Segal and Conte, among others, have pointed out, that genre entails the self-referentiality of all special speech. It is a code that not only mediates between a literary work and cultural discourses and social functions, but also, at

the same time, self-reflexively signals a text's relation to a body of other texts.'* But what about genre before textuality and the formation of such a coherent, systematic, literary tradition? In a culture that was still fundamentally oral, as Greece was until the fifth century, the production and performance of poetry were one and the same. "The structure of social roles, relations, and interactions; the oral literary text and its meaning; and the structure of the event itself

are all emergent in performance." ? The studies of Parry and Lord introduced this revolutionary understanding into Classical studies, and they in turn have influenced inquiries in various other fields, anthropology and sociolinguistics among them. Repaying the compliment, recent scholars of early Greek poetry have deployed insights from these fields' studies of performance to reinterpret

the Greek tradition, shifting our point of reference from textual and formal analysis to "the actualization of form in a public display."'* Performancecentered interpretations of oral "literature" have pointed out how performance, like a literary text, is already a form of marked speech. Conventions provide expectations and associations. But they are manipulated by the performance as it is going on, through the engagement of the composer/performer, the audience, and the event itself. Thus performance, as a form of communication, can itself rearrange the structure of social relations within the performance event and be-

yond it." Because of new understanding of the relation between tradition and performance, on the one hand, and society and convention on the other, it has be-

come necessary to question the validity of assumptions that may rely on formalist or New Critical approaches-approaches that may be intransigent and distorting products of our own text-based culture. That ancient genres were "originally" somehow emergent from real-life situation" is recognized by many. Thus Francis Cairns, for example, sees genres as "as old as organized societies; [and] . . . universal," and as arising from regular responses to recurrent situations.'? However, Cairns, writing before the effects of performance theory were felt in Classical studies and being still under the influence of a reductionist and empiricist epistemology, goes on to say that "people in antiquity did not think that the genres, or most of them, arose from real life."?? This view is, of course,

true of metadiscursive genres. But it misses the point. The rhetor Menander,

who probably wrote in the third century B.c.E., for example, on whose generic categories Cairns bases his own study of ancient kinds, probably did not care to communicate how flexibly performance-oriented genres might have func-

Introduction

5

tioned. His “metadiscourse” on genre tends toward the dogmatic, a handbook of “as-it-were” rules for the budding encomiastic prose orator. Handbook literature about genre, like many of the genre categories assumed by ancient scholia, form but one side of the ancient dialogue on genre: the poets and their patrons, addressees and audiences form another. The dialogue was not without important consequences for literary production itself, as well as for its capacity to ob-

scure the performance roots and locus of an earlier understanding of genre. We asked participants in the colloquium to address the issue of genre from a perspective that was somewhat limiting but that would facilitate fruitful discussion along these lines. The central question we posed was, “What role do au-

thors play in Greece and Rome in the models of literary production, the genres that were recognized, and the competing schemes for classifying them and for accounting for change, selection, and authority?” The colloquium considered and evaluated the ways in which a traditional autobiographical approach to the author and to literature has been challenged or broadened to include a wider conception of genre as a function of constructed authorial personae, contexts of performance, or types of special speech. For example, do Hesiod’s poems tell us what really happened to him (or even what Hesiod thought happened to him) or simply present us with the plausible virtuality of a fictional character “Hesiod”?

Why

do the humble

characters in the Iliad and

the Odyssey-

Eumaeus, Philoetius, the beggar Odysseus-speak in the same moralizing voice that Hesiod uses in speaking in his own voice? Some would argue that the apparently self-referential statements in Hesiod’s poems are merely conventional,

insofar as they function only within the rhetoric of the poem, and so must be treated with scepticism as history, though they are informative about genre. Others hold that such statements are all authentic, referring to real, lived experience in the life of an authoritative composer. Can any approach-autobiographical or otherwise-reconcile these two positions in such a way as to observe distinctions that are (1) suggested by features of Hesiod’s text and (2) capable

of being appreciated by the poet and his original audience? Do we have from antiquity canons of authors or authors of canons?

It was understood from the beginning that contributors would treat the ways in which a traditional, autobiographical approach to the author and to literature has been challenged (successfully or not) or has been broadened to include a wider conception of genre as a function of constructed authorial personae, contexts of performance, or types of special speech. The studies of Cairns, Bundy, and Conte each established in its own way the normative and heuristic role of generic-specific conventions of composition, as derived from the rhetorical classifications of late antiquity (for example, in Menander Rhetor and our

6

Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink

ancient scholia) and those of the Renaissance (for example, by Erasmus Schmidt), in shaping modern views of ancient literature. Different periods, cultures, and modes of analysis, however, suggest at times similar, at other times

very different, generic and authorial categories. We intended the contributors to combine these philological approaches (and their critiques of them) with methods originating in the humanities and the social sciences (including literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and discourse analysis, ritual, gender, and performance studies). In particular, the studies of genre that

follow tation genre. nition

are distinguished from their predecessors in their application and orienof history (cultural and political) and of religion in relation to literary A central question that this volume poses is, accordingly, how the recogand conceptualization of genres changed from Archaic Greece to Augus-

tan Rome.

.

A working definition of genre was suggested for purposes of discussionone that, if not entirely jargon-free, at least would adequately reflect both tradi-

tional and postmodern critical concerns and anxieties: genre is a conceptual orienting device that suggests to a hearer the sort of receptorial conditions in which a fictive discourse might have been delivered. From this beginning point, we watched a more text-based conception of authorial performance emerge in and through the internalization of various metadiscursive conceptions of

genre. We begin with Glenn Most's paper, "Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic,” because of its contention that one genre, namely tragedy, is particularly useful for thinking about and defining genre. Tragedy, Most argues, provides an especially striking example of the various kinds of confusion that can be produced by essentializing concepts of genre and by divorcing them from the specific

times, places, and modes in which they were composed. Tragedy also provides the most striking instance of such confusion of theoretical precept versus genre as functioning in and through performance. Most examines how and why tragedy has been theorized in Western culture longer and more intensely than any

other ancient genre. He examines both the colloquial and the philosophical use of the term tragic, a construct that Most argues was a product of the Romantic imagining of Greek antiquity and whose influence as a paradigm for understanding the genre of tragedy has remained pervasive, challenged only recently by sociological, anthropological, and ritual models of interpretation. This Romantic construct of the tragic, Most argues, was hypostasized as a genre of “tragedy” that was somehow independent of all particular instances of tragedies, thus leading to a number of mistaken interpretive approaches to extant

Introduction

7

texts. (Since its sections coordinate with the structure of his paper, Most’s bibliography appears at the paper's end; items of more general applicability also ap-

pear in the general bibliography.) Joseph Day and Mary Depew propose a definition of genre that is suitable to early Greece because it is based on the dynamics of oral communication: in this period genres are, as they are in everyday speech, familiar patterns that typically produce certain contexts and effects. Audiences negotiate a relationship

with performers on the basis of the performers’ self-description or representation as engaged in a certain context, accepting and authorizing them in their roles. Thus, a successfully performed poem activates a kind of occasion through its own self-representation. Such representation is not simply generic; it is also

performative, a matter of doing by representing the kind of thing being done. That such representation could be performed had especially powerful effects in large-scale religious or civic rituals and in the poetic performances often associ-

ated with them, but it was also operative on a smaller scale in the reading of dedicatory epigrams. Basing his discussion on the functioning in archaic Greece of dedications to gods, Day argues that an inscribed dedication or a poetic text can be said to belong to a certain genre, not only because it has a certain form but also because, when it was performed (or read aloud), certain acts were

done or effects produced in the speaking of the words and of the hearers’ responses to them. The “generic force” of reading aloud an inscribed dedication involved an effect that parallels the religious ritual of sacrifice or offering, namely, the performance of celebrants, god, and human dedicatory epigrams as lying which she examines not as a

acts that establish a relationship of charis among audience. Mary Depew agrees with Day in seeing on a generic continuum with early Greek hymn, kind of written poetry but as one type of agalma,

or large-scale gift, offered to a god by and on behalf of a community or a group. Artifacts such as dedicatory statues and reliefs, like hymns (although in differ-

ent media), typically represent the offering of a gift to a god, and this representation produces generic force. Hymns, like other kinds of early Greek poetry, represent their own performance in generic terms and invite their audience to

enter into the kind of context that circumscribes the genre. Depew suggests that this generic representation in hymn changes over time not as a movement from

material to formal markers of genre, as has been thought, but by the progressive internalization and imitation of the performative nature of a genre. Depew’s contribution thus looks forward to Hellenistic issues about genre raised by the chapters in the second half of this volume. Ian Rutherford extends the discussion to cover the corpus of early Greek rhapsodic poetry known as the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Exploring as-

8

Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink

sumptions about the generic underpinnings of Greek epic poetry, Rutherford finds an interplay between Homeric text, existing tradition, and rhapsodic in-

novation that creates a genre that might look older than Homer’s own poetry,

namely, catalogue poetry or poetry in the form of lists. Although connection with prototypes such as the Catalogue of Ships in Iliad 2 and the list of Zeus’ lovers in Iliad 14 is obvious, Rutherford shows how the poets of the Hesiodic

Catalogue succeeded in creating a form of generic discourse that could incorporate a wider range of mythological topics than Homer’s epics but that could record and retail them in a fundamentally non-Homeric narrative style. In Deborah Boedeker’s enquiry into Herodotus’s genre(s), we are reminded

of Nagy’s dictum about the birth of genre coinciding with the demise of a performance culture. Poetry was performative in the sense that it was not primarily concerned with propositions and their truth-value but rather with doing, or, as

Day argues, by representing the kind of thing being done. Prose, by contrast, is propositional. Concerned with the degree to which Herodotus is himself aware

of engaging in the process of finding a new discursive form, Boedeker finds in Herodotus’s construction of credibility and authority an essential aspect of the genre that he is engaged in consciously developing, and to this end she surveys

what the Histories have to say about how other kinds of texts relate to their subject matter and audiences. Boedeker examines Herodotus’ “staging” of his genre in terms of credibility, his marking of his project off from poetic genres and their truth-values as well as from other prose authors and their claims to authority. A literary genre is significant only in relation to other genres. We see

Herodotus's genre arising by his incorporation of many voices. Herodotus’s logos, unlike the logoi of the poets or of uncritical logographers, whom Herodotus contests, is aware of the constraints of likelihood and plausibility: people can

say all kinds of things, but only some are true. Eric Csapo treats the problem of genre transformation and the role of authors in defining their genres, both for their contemporary audience and for later generations. He addresses the question of how theories of generic development, from their beginning in Aristotle's evolutionary model-which itself was instrumental in forming the canon of "Old" versus "New" Comedy-tend to perpetuate themselves by creating their own evidence. Early theories of comedy established generic models that remain influential to this day. But there is reason to think that these do not accurately reflect changes in Greek comedy from Aristophanes to Menander. In this sort of history, a single author can actually

be the sole instance of a genre: Old Comedy is instantiated in Aristophanes; New Comedy, in Menander. The very project of writing an evolutionary history

Introduction

9

of fifth- and fourth-century comedy, as scholars to this day persist in attempting to do, is suspect, since it privileges in one way or another an author-based conceptualization of genre. The biological model of birth-maturity-decline is implicit in any generic model that assumes historical and generic progress. Csapo argues instead that Old, Middle, and New Comedy should designate synchronic, and not periodic, styles, since in fact the “political” style usually associated with Aristophanes rose to dominance at various times, typically in association with the prominence of a radical democracy (for example 424—ca. 415

B.C.E.). In the case of Greek drama, Csapo finds that it is performative context in a specifically political environment that marks off genre. Hellenistic poets, as scholars and interpreters of the Greek tradition, created texts that required often demanding interpretation. Marco Fantuzzi con-

siders the generic antecedents to Theocritus’s unique fusion to show how the bucolic poet reinterpreted his mythological material and the reality of the literary tradition to construct a new genre. Theocritus provided his bucolic genre with a credible environment that was at once rural and human, that is, “demy-

thologized.” Instead of gods, there are half gods, who are regularly described as half human. Fantuzzi argues that Theocritus's preference for human contexts allowed him to go beyond inherited generic constraints linking specific themes with specific forms. Stephanie West also addresses the problem of how genres in

this period, as fundamentally dependent on a wide set of existing conventions, can suddenly come into existence, that is, be invented. If that were not paradox-

ical enough, she focuses for her text case on a genre that is exampled, it would seem, by only a single text. Lycophron's Alexandra was much admired in the Byzantine period and in the sixteenth century, but in the modern period, it has been largely neglected, West surmises, because of its generic elusiveness,

namely, the difficulty of assigning it to a recognized literary category or of determining its generic affinities. The narrative is unified by the Aeschylean and Herodotean theme of the rivalry between east and west, Greeks and barbarians, and its elevated style evokes comparison with Aeschylean tragedy. But its purpose, its intended performance context, and the import of its historical telos

have been notoriously difficult to identify. West solves these difficulties through the issue of the text's genre. To interpret a work, the critic needs to be able to relate it to similar texts. Hellenistic poets, as scholars and interpreters of the tradi-

tion, created texts that required often demanding interpretation. The built-in inaccessibility of prophecy, with the interpretive engagement it requires from its recipient, accords well with such a project. And yet there is no parallel in Greek

literature for the length of this narrative and the way its events are intercon-

10

Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink

nected, The Near Eastern genre of apocalyptic prophecy, which does not map on to Greek categories, and in particular the “Oracle of the Potter,” a text inspired by Egyptian nationalism and translated into Greek not long after the foundation of Alexandria, might, however, provide a model.

Turning to Latin poetry and in particular the Augustan poets’ fixation on generic categories and their violation, Alessandro Barchiesi considers the difference between Greek and Roman

attitudes toward genre. Developing three

mainly Roman concerns (genres as productive of the generically new, a sense of loss of the old genre traditions, choice of genre as articulating a political standpoint), he considers the role of the authorial voice in Horace as a type of performance through impersonating famous authors of the past (especially Greek lyric). He finds that the problem of persona forces a crisis of performance for

Horace-who accepts the challenge by impersonating now Sappho, now Pindar, now Alcaeus. Genres, instantiated by each of these canonized authors, become for Horace markers of poetic convention and readerly reception. At the same time, Horace is self-consciously aware of the loss of communal occasions that

oriented earlier poets. This sense of loss gives way to generic reform that has a predictably Augustan political implication. Barchiesi makes a strong case that the interaction between performance and society is not the privilege of Greek literature. Ineke Sluiter, in “The Dialectics of Genre: Some Aspects of Secondary Literature and Genre in Antiquity,’ finds that there is artistic construction and

manipulation even in the most technical, nonpoetic genres. Sluiter deals with a class of ancient literature that is explicit about its second-order status, and she studies its direct relation to and dependence on earlier texts and authors, namely, works of ancient scholarship whose explicit purpose is to elucidate a text or an author's corpus. Sluiter examines a tension inherent in such scholarly

works as lexica, scholia, epitomai, and commentaries: although the very titles of these works claim no more than secondary status, their authors engage nonetheless in a rhetoric of self-legitimation. Commentaries,

Sluiter finds, both

instantiate a genre in their own right and contain some of the earliest reflections on genre in Western European literature. With reference to Galen's commentaries on Hippocrates, the commentators of Aristotle and Plato, and to the technical commentaries on Aratus, Sluiter discusses a number of tensions

inherent in such works: how every commentary assumes at the same time the basic value of its source texts and an element of inadequacy in them that the

commentator must redress; how the commentator's activities presuppose the unchangeable nature of the source text, even as his or her own work is located in the oral, improvisational environment of the classroom; how ancient com-

Introduction

17

mentators are familiar with generic distinctions that they apply to their work on source-texts, yet at the same time how they may not view their own work as exemplifying a separate genre. Don Fowler treats the genre of didactic poetry as an example of a discursive rather than a narrative genre or mode. He finds the genre defined by the pragmatics of utterance, the relation between a teacher who is internalized as a speaker and a pupil who may be characterized or aligned with the general reader. While these are the basic and primary elements, a series of secondary elements accompany them: namely, an implied plot or drama devolving from the

discourse between speaker and reader, teacher and pupil. An obvious example of the working out of such a plot is the fact that the pupil is expected to make progress in the instruction, just as the reader is assumed to understand and redeploy that understanding intelligently in the interpretation of the work. This demand raises the problem of rereading, which may be of central concern to the didactic poet. The heroic quest for knowledge and the transformation of the reader from uninformed to initiate lends didactic the power to compete with epic and other genres in the story that it has to tell. At the same time, one wonders how close the analogy is between the plot of say, a Greek tragedy, and the implied plot Fowler finds implicit in the didactic poem. In the former, the plot is what happens to Oedipus in the play, not what happens to the audience. Or is

the reaction of the audience, as Aristotle may imply, as central to the construction of the plot of a tragedy, as the reader’s is to the structure of a well-made didactic poem? Stephen Hinds rounds out the volume with a consideration of the notion of generic impurity, or “mixing of genres”-a model often invoked to characterize both hellenistic and Roman poetry. He finds that accounts of generic hy-

bridization usually involve some question-begging assumptions about genres as essentialized entities. Although we might assume that a generic essence or permanent form might be found in accumulated poetic precedents, Hinds argues that this conception accords ill with the play between prescription and (changing) practice found in Roman poetry. He offers a case study in the continual renegotiation of generic tensions at Rome, arguing for a healthy Augustan predisposition to treat literary form dynamically rather than as static, fixed, or inherited. In particular, he finds that feminine passion, while it is always announced as extraneous to the epic genre, is nonetheless continually restated in it and is thus converted into a sign of the genre itself. The study of genre once again shows itself as a growth industry even after several Renaissances. In fact, debates about partisans of realia and the friends of

12

Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink

discourse over authors versus authorial voices and personal versus generic identities make it a more and not a less topical starting point for examining ancient literature. The chapters that follow and that have been described here are of-

fered in the belief that the subject of genre has a positive contribution to make to the study of ancient literature and of all culture, something more than simply how to organize a library or where to put the books on the shelf, namely, that it

might go some way in resolving the sort of “‘I see an author’ versus ‘No you don't'" controversies that, as Ernst Badian has complained, fill the pages of to-

day’s Classics journals. There are still more technical contributions to the subject that might be mentioned. E. L. Bundy’s fundamental application of ancient

rhetorical categories and conventions to the Pindaric Odes set the study of these poems on a new and successful track in the last century. Michael Reeve's work on hiatus in the Greek novelists and D. H. Berry’s work on prose rhythm in

Cicero?! argue that even such stylometrically countable features as hiatus and clausula rhythm are generic rather than personal: that is, although authors may personalize and innovate within a small range of patterns, the practices themselves are mainly a matter of conforming to generic prescription and current fashion (in these cases, as taught in the schools), rather than of indulging in a

personal taste peculiar to the author. Rather than giving us the unique thumbprint of an author (as some scholars have maintained), these practices merely give us his or her shoe size-and of course, that shoe size may be shared

by other authors. So it remains to be asked of the literary features that figure in the discussion of genre in the pages that follow-from authors and essentialisms to discourse and performance and form-how many features are thumbprints, and many are shoe sizes? It is possible that even such models as these represent schematic a picture of genre. Thomas Rosenmeyer complains that there never an exhaustive classification of literature in antiquity, that the “Greeks

how too was and

Romans practice model criticism, not generic criticism.”?? Terrence Cave draws attention to the inadequacy of any literary taxonomy, which he terms a “hapax

in disguise”: “Literary taxonomy, like numerology, is a spendthrift affair: One can find significant patterns in virtually any random set of materials . . . They are simulacra of identity, concealing for the purposes of analytic economy the

differences that have to break out if anything serious is to be said. The point of the taxonomic sketch is that its very fragility, its lapses and inadequacies, lead straight to a number of key questions. One has to stage an illusion of coherence and completeness in order to demonstrate that, when one moves out centrifu-

gally into the realm of particular cases, the paradigm may well turn out to be a hapax in disguise.” We would do well to remember that all taxonomies look

Introduction

13

startlingly insufficient, incomplete, and arbitrary when viewed from the outside, as in the famous Chinese encyclopedia in Borges, according to which all

op

animals are divided into the following categories: belonging to the Emperor embalmed

5 5

- Tuer

Tmo

oO

tame

suckling pigs sirens

fabulous stray dogs included in the present classification frenzied innumerable drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush et cetera having just broken the water pitcher that from a long way off look like flies

The list amusingly reflects the tension and uncertainty at the heart of the re-

sponse to the classifications of other peoples, for which the history of GrecoRoman literary genres from antiquity to the present provides a paradigm case. Another point that emerges from Borges’s surreal list is that the purpose of any single element in any classification can be very different from another, as can its

implied collateral category. Some genres, Menippean Satire or the novel, for example, are clearly better suited for adumbrating and calibrating literary change

than for defining or prescribing a fixed type. Changes in society, changes in media and communication, and the formation of canons are all at stake. In addition to the contributors to this volume, we would like to thank two invited respondents, Carolyn Dewald and Kathryn Morgan, who, although they

did not contribute papers to the colloquium or the volume, did much to shape and benefit the colloquium’s discussion, as well as the final form that the volume’s papers have taken. Three other participants who did not present papers but who also made substantial contributions to the discussion are David Depew, Kurt Raaflaub, and Cornelia Romer, and we are also grateful to them.

We would also like to thank the staff at the Center for Hellenic Studies for their

practical support, and also Gwendolyn Gruber, Samuel Huskey, and Pamela Skinner for their editorial and technical assistance. We are deeply grateful to

14

Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink

Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub for the atmosphere of productive collegiality that they have fostered at the Center for Hellenic Studies, and for their sup-

port, both practical and intellectual, of this project. Finally, we dedicate this

book to the memory of Don Fowler, whose role as an intellectual bridge-builder across national and disciplinary boundaries has meant so much to us all.

CHAPTER ONE --Ξ- -- τ Ξ -Ξ

ERSTER]

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic GLENN

W.

MOST

The Use and Abuse of Genre Worrying about genre seems once again to have become a generic requirement of studies in Classics and other fields of literary scholarship. As the pendulum of critical fashion swings back and forth between two extremes—on the one

hand, an exclusive emphasis on the uniqueness and individuality of the poetic utterance and of the voice that generates it, and on the other, an equally onesided attention to the more general social, linguistic, or other determinants that make such utterances possible and shape them in even the tiniest details—it crosses each time a point of potential equipoise in the precise center. That is the crucial moment, the instant at which the issue of genre poses itself most insistently, for the questions associated with genre become most urgent at the inter-

face between the one and the many, the individual and the group. No utterance, poetic or otherwise, can be produced if not by an individual in unique circumstances; but neither can any individual be conceived who is not the intersection of numerous vectors of social determination, nor are any circumstances com-

pletely unique. Genre is the flash point at which the one and the many come together and generate the spark of discourse. The lover who says “I love you” imagines that he or she is giving voice to a sentiment unique in all of world history; and in all of world history, lovers have always said “I love you” and have al-

ways imagined they were unique. Shifters shift: it is only because language supplies general counters that are applicable to more than one situation that it can create the widespread illusion of irreplaceable, authentic uniqueness.

Depending on which direction the critical pendulum has been moving, genre will tend to be invoked at that crucial moment either as a constraining 15

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Glenn W. Most

factor (if criticism has become impatient with an undue emphasis on individuals and wishes to recall to us the evident limits to their autonomy) or as an enabling factor (if the social determinants have come to seem overworked and the

time seems ripe for reminders of personal initiative and creativity), for genre faces in both directions. And for a brief season, it will seem possible to develop a coherent and systematic theory that will unite with one another poet and public, rule and variant, model and instance, expectation, disappointment, and dis-

appointment's darker sister, fulfillment. But alas, the pendulum is always in motion, whistling as it swings with increasing speed through one critical position

after another, and no pious gesture can hope to stop it suddenly before it has reached the opposite extreme; indeed, the moment of potential equipoise is simultaneously the moment of actual greatest velocity, and during that labile season, distortions and oversimplifications will abound. Authors can be just as little imagined without genres as genres without au-

thors: the latter would be an idealist vacuum, the former a positivist chaos. The difficulty lies not in conceding their interdependence but rather in articulating it. No doubt, on the level of generalities, agreement can quickly be reached on a number of truths that we may hold to be self-evident: that it is genres that give authors a chance to express their vision of the world and thereby, intentionally

or inadvertently, their personal identity; that it is a constitutive rule of some genres that the fictional figure of the poet be conspicuously present and of oth-

ers that it be no less obtrusively absent; that no generic rule cannot be violated, but that no two violations have the same weight; that people who read (or watch television) imbibe generic roles so deeply that their own most private and individual identity can become indistinguishable from the cultural models that surround them; that personality can express itself as much in obedience as in transgression; that no text belongs exclusively to a single genre (generic, like environmental or bacterial, contamination is not only frequent but also inevita-

ble) or fully exhausts any genre (whether they want to or not, poets always leave room for their colleagues and successors); that it is always possible to invent new genres, but only by transforming preexisting genres; and that a text's activation of a genre almost always slips imperceptibly into metapoetic reflection

upon that genre, upon itself, and upon genres in general. But, on the level of particularities, no exegesis can dispense with a starting point or can fail to move along a specific trajectory, and the peculiar temporality intrinsic to any act of

nonparaphrastic interpretation of an individual text and genre before our helpless eyes into chicken and Hesiod the name of a person or of a role, and was brother or a figure for the reader? Were Archilochus

tends to transform author egg. Which came first? Is Perses really a recalcitrant and Stesichorus historical

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

17

individuals or names for particular roles in archaic Greek choral lyric? Was Lesbia Clodia or Catullus’s muse? Was Ovid really relegated, or was his exile an enabling device for a particular brand of elegy? On principle, we may have little difficulty in rejecting some (but not all) of these questions as ill-conceived, or in recognizing in the disjunctive particle “or” a trap and answering bluntly, “Both”; but in practice, these pitfalls are hard to avoid. Such dangers are increased if we hypostasize genres, attributing to them a substantial existence independent of the poets, works, and readers who operate in terms of them, so that, like Marx’s fetishized commodities, they seem to appear before us with a spectral autonomy. It is only on such a view that it becomes possible to imagine genres not as ultimately arbitrary choices made by individuals and groups in order to secure a communication of a certain sort but rather as separately existing factors, necessarily constituted in one way and in no other, which are prior to the literary acts they enable and constrain. But, in fact, genres are not natural kinds: if certain ones have tended to be manifested with special frequency over the centuries, this tendency is partly a matter of influence, partly due to the fact that similar causes (societies organized in a particular way) will tend to have similar effects (poetry organized in a particular way). To be sure, there have indeed been periods in Western culture when highly formalized systems of genres have tended to organize poetic production and reception, and largely to determine the identity and value of texts—in high culture, the last such period seems to have come to an end during the eighteenth century, whereas in mass culture, it lives on with undiminished vigor and market success. But even in those cultural situations in which authors and readers face a panoply of preexisting generic possibilities defined in manuals and taught in courses, it is their activities of applying, violating, or neglecting the genres that bring these into functional effectiveness; and these are activities that poets and readers engage in because doing so allows them to communicate with one another, as well as to understand themselves. Linguistics, anthropology, and social theory can cast helpful light on genre conceived not as a recipe from handbooks of poetics but rather as a social phenomenon. Genre is the langue that makes possible any literary parole: though only individual utterances have the minimal spatiotemporal existence of sounds, marks, or bites, even these would never have been possible without a complex set of regularizing and thereby semanticizing presuppositions that themselves need not be explicitly expressed (though of course they sometimes are, especially in family arguments or in scholarly colloquia). Genre is often for-

mulated as a set of rules, but it may be better to understand it as a historically contingent and flexible reciprocal system of mutually calibrated expectations,

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Glenn W. Most

correlating some participants who are more or less active (call them poets, though all poets are listeners or readers before, while, and after they are poets)

with others who are more or less passive (call them listeners or readers, though even today few human recipients seem to be as passive as our machines still are) within a loosely bounded but largely self-conscious cultural community (whose

borders in space and time are often quite unclear), in which each group delegates to the other specific roles, duties, pleasures, and anxieties. Like most forms of tacit knowledge, genre functions implicitly better than explicitly, by practical performance rather than by theoretical precept: indeed, every act of rendering genre explicit seems patently incomplete. As in the case of any well-functioning

procedure, genre allows both the more and the less active partners in the literary transaction to deploy a wide range of degrees of competence and still to attain and provide a certain amount of shared satisfaction: even the least skilled

readers find authors anxious to please them by disappointing only their most predictable expectations, whereas the author of genius performs with apparent effortlessness creative transformations of the subtlest ramifications of the generic system that will usually be punished by canonization and commentary. But it is a fine line that separates error from invention, clumsiness from creativ-

ity. No adequate theory of genre can fail to take account either of the nervous exhilaration that poets feel in treading that line or of the anxious joy that readers take in watching them do so.

Tragedy and the Tragic These considerations apply to all the genres and subgenres of poetic taxonomy. But tragedy seems to be a particularly useful genre with which to think about them, and this for at least two reasons.

1. The first reason is that tragedy is the genre that has attracted the attention of serious literary theorists and philosophers for the longest period in Western culture. In antiquity, no other genre was theorized so early and so in-

tensely. Although many ancient Greek poetic texts, starting with Homer, include metapoetic reflection about their genres as part of their poetry, tragedy is the first genre as such to be the subject of specific metapoetic discussions in

prose, both by tragedians (Sophocles!) and spectators (Gorgias"), and it is the prime object for the aesthetic investigations of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics. By contrast, epic as a genre receives far scanter attention (though Homer himself remains a uniquely privileged subject for the attentions of phi-

losophers and other scholars throughout antiquity), whereas the rare ancient theorizations of all the other genres are attested only by such fragmentary evidence as the implicit practice of the poets themselves, the schematizations of

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

19

occasional late ancient grammarians, and scattered remarks by scholiasts and by a few other more or less scholarly readers. Why tragedy should have received this poetological prerogative is an interesting question. That attention may partly be due to the fact that in the Classical period, tragedy itself was a recent invention (however ancient its lost, primitive roots) that polymorphically juxtaposed all earlier and contemporary poetic genres, and hence was itself visibly obsessed, already from the earliest evidence to which we have access, by the question of its own generic status; surely some role was also played by the simple fact that Plato, the direct or indirect starting point for all later discussions of tragedy, evidently responded to the tragedies he saw with an overpowering emotional upheaval that terrified him (Plato’s fundamental mistake as an aesthetician was his surmise that it was not just some

other people but rather all other people who were affected by poetry as deeply as he was); and of course tragedy was of greater political and ideological importance to the Athenian polis than any other genre was even in the age of Plato and Aristotle, for whom the (real or imaginary) polis remained the horizon of the possibilities of human happiness and excellence. But no set of merely contingent explanations can quite succeed in explaining the longevity of tragedy’s preeminence for literary theoreticians; for after the hiatus of the Middle Ages,

with the rediscovery of ancient tragedy and of Aristotle’s Poetics in the fifteenth century, it was once more this genre that moved to the center of literary theory,

and it remained there for many generations of aesthetic speculation until it was finally dislodged in our own century by the novel. 2. The second reason that tragedy is a particularly good choice with which to think about genre is that the development of thought about it provides an especially striking example of the various kinds of confusion that can be produced by essentializing conceptsof genre, divorcing them from the specific

times, places, and modes in which the concrete texts that are taken to represent them have actually existed, and attributing to them an independent, unchanging existence and character. Tragedy is a specific genre that has flourished in a few cultures in specific periods; yet in the modern world, there is a widespread tendency to speak of certain kinds of real-life events as “tragedies” or to call them “tragic” in a way that seems to pick out permanent and universal features of human experience. When we think of “tragedy” nowadays, it seems difficult

to keep entirely separate two categories that are in fact distinct: the largely formal criteria of the literary kind “tragedy,” and issues of content and meaning that we tend to associate rather with the idea of the “tragic”; the specific genre of “tragedy” seems to be linked in a peculiar way with a determinate ethos, a “tragic” vision of the world, which finds its most appropriate expression in that

20

Glenn W. Most

very genre. In other words, we expect a “tragedy” to be “tragic.” This expectation may sound self-evident, but in fact this “tragic” ethos is a modern construction, one whose links to the ancient genre of Greek “tragedy” are far more tenuous than its connections to philosophical and social developments over the last two centuries. Reconstructing the history of this construction is a complicated and somewhat tortuous procedure; but it may turn out to be worth doing for the light that it can cast not only on the particular genre of tragedy and on the theory and history of genres in general, but also on more fundamental issues of both ancient and modern human self-understanding. For what is it that most people seem to mean nowadays when they call

something “tragic?” Let us differentiate between (a) the use of the term in ordinary language when it is not applied to the genre of tragedy (tragic chorus, tragic ode, and the like) but is generalized metaphorically beyond that literal case and (b) a more complex (and not necessarily more precise) version of the

concept that tends, for the most part, to be limited to philosophical and scholarly contexts. In both cases, it will turn out that striking differences separate modern from ancient usage. a. In ordinary conversation, people tend to use the term “tragic” to pick out and ennoble certain kinds of situations—fatal traffic accidents, the death of small children, and other calamities—that express with particular poignancy a fundamental contradiction between the deepest wishes of human beings for fulfillment and plenitude, and the indifferent universe in which they must live and fail. This extended usage of “tragic” is far more common in the modern vernacular than its application to literary texts. By contrast, in ancient Greek,

tragikos is applied far more often to literature than to life—for most Greeks a tragikos traffic accident would have been the one involving Oedipus and Laius on the way to Delphi; and when the adjective is used metaphorically, it almost always picks out features of situations quite different from those connoted by our word “tragic.” Applied to literary style, the word means “splendid, grandi-

ose,’ is opposed to “clear, readily intelligible,” and is generally negative;? applied to external circumstances or conditions, it means “magnificent, pompous,” is

opposed to “plain, simple,” and is often negative;* applied to personalities and psychological states, it means "arrogant, presumptuous, vain," is opposed to

"modest, affable, and is always negative; applied to varieties of discourse, it means "mythical, fictional, philosophically unserious or historically unverifiable," is opposed to “scientific,” and is uniformly negative.$ It is only in comparatively very few passages that sad events are referred to as being tragikos; in such cases, the link to the theatrical genre of tragedy is almost always obvious, for there is involved not only a high degree of suffering but also an element of

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

21

spectacle and actual spectators. In summary, tragikos describes, most often pejoratively, something or someone that exceeds, or especially wants to exceed, the ordinary human norms that apply to everyone else. Although these extended applications of the adjective (“tragic,” tragikos) do not refer specifically to the genre of tragedies, they nonetheless suggest what ordinary people find, and found, to be most significant, or most characteristic, of that genre. For many of us, that characteristic seems to be our sadness at the discord between the human and the universe, expressed most painfully in the irreparable loss of the unique individuality we consider essentially human. For many Greeks, it seems rather to have been the offensively overweening presumption of the one measured against the many—that of the tragic hero who refuses to be integrated into the human community; of tragic language, lofty and unintelligible; of the genre of tragedy, more sublime than comedy or real life. It might be worth remarking parenthetically that, if this is indeed what ancient Greek audiences and readers tended to get out of their tragedies, it may be because these features are, after all, what ancient Greek poets put into them: not so much metaphysical anxieties about a human's place in an unintelligible universe, as rather the political tensions between the individual and the community associated with Athens’ rapid and controversial democratization, which accompanied, fostered, and was reflected in Athenian tragedy.

b. Next to this modern colloquial usage of “tragic,” another, more complicated concept of “the tragic” has developed among philosophers and philosophically minded scholars over the last two centuries. Though the usage has

many variants, we may perhaps characterize it as a complex set of related conceptions involving most or all of the following features: a semblance of meaningfulness that conceals the fundamental arbitrariness of things; an overwhelming personal responsibility that goes far beyond the narrow limits of freedom of action and is not lessened by the evident constraints of blind necessity; an indestructible nobility in the human spirit, revealed especially in suffering, insurgency, renunciation, and understanding; an inextricable knot of fate, blindness, guilt, and atonement; a final wisdom concerning the individual's grandeur and inconsequentiality in the universe, attained at length, through the purification afforded by deep suffering at least partly unmerited, and sometimes at the cost of total annihilation. There may well be links between what we

might term the vernacular and the metaphysical usages of the term “tragic,” but nonetheless the difference between the philosophers’ use of the word and the crowd’s is evident: where is the baby’s guilt in its death, or the fateful necessity in a fatal collision? “The tragic,” as understood in this way, is not in the first instance an aesthetic concept useful for analyzing a specific genre, but rather it is a

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Glenn W. Most

metaphysical category developed in order to describe the human condition; it is designed above all to designate an important lesson about our place in the world (“tragic wisdom”), and it can then sometimes go on to entrust that lesson to a certain kind of text (“tragedy”) that is said to embody and communicate that lesson with supreme effectiveness. Both these modern understandings of “the tragic,” the colloquial one and the philosophical one, involve a fundamental separation between “tragedy” as a genre comprising a set of specific texts and “the tragic” as a description of certain kinds of experiences or of basic features of human existence. The very suc-

cess of this modern usage is evidence that, for the latter purposes, it has been extremely useful; but for the scholar interested in trying to understand the poetic genre of “tragedy,” it immediately raises a number of difficult, indeed insoluble questions. What is the precise relation between that dimension of human existence that is manifested in “tragic” events and the literary texts we call “tragedies”? Are all tragedies, and only tragedies, “tragic” by definition? If not, might some nontragedies (for example, the Iliad) be more “tragic” than some tragedies, and some tragedies (for example, the Jon) less “tragic” than others or even not “tragic” at all? When is a “tragedy” not “tragic”? There is some evidence, especially in the hypotheses to some of Euripides’ more problematic tragedies, that in ancient scholarship too, such questions, at least in a related if not an identical form, were occasionally discussed. It is, how-

ever, only since the nineteenth century that these issues have become so prominent in criticism of ancient and modern tragedy and tragedies. During this period, scholars have developed a variety of competing strategies to attempt to deal with literary texts that evidently belong to the genre “tragedy” but seem not to be “tragic”: simply to declare that certain tragedies are “tragic” and others are not; to discuss only those tragedies considered “tragic” and to suppress the rest

so as to create the illusion that all tragedies are “tragic”; to submit apparently refractory exceptions to massive interpretive distortion so as to make them seem "tragic"; to define "the tragic” so broadly that it can include all tragedies;

or in despair to claim that tragedies and “the tragic” have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. None of these solutions is particularly satisfactory: doubtless the underlying question they are designed to answer is ill-formed.

Aristotle’s Theory of the Genre of Tragedy In a situation marked by such deep-seated and multifaceted confusion, a brief glance at the history of the development of the concepts of “tragedy” and “the tragic” might provide, if not definitive illumination, at least a useful preliminary orientation. For in those many cases in which it is difficult to explain the

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

23

success of some firmly established cultural phenomenon with reference to its conceptual clarity and cogency or to some useful function it serves, often the only way left to do so is by narrating the sequence of steps by which successive generations eventually arrived at it by a mixture of invention, adaptation, and misunderstanding. In ancient philosophy and literary criticism, there seems to have been nothing whatsoever corresponding to the modern philosophical notion of “the tragic” as a fundamental dimension of human experience; there were instead only theories of “tragedy” as a specific genre. Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy in the Poetics provides the most complete and sophisticated ancient account of any genre at all to have survived; indeed, it need not shun comparison with

many modern theories of poetic kinds. In terms of genre theory, the following features of Aristotle’s account seem most significant: 1. For Aristotle, tragedy is a natural species of poetry defined formally, a type carefully situated by means of relevant formal differentiae within the general system of kinds of poetry.’ Although in its invention and at various moments in the course of its development, tragedy was helped along by individuals of genius, it expresses in its mimetic and formal structure the basic capacities innate in human beings, and it could not have ended up becoming otherwise than it has: the great poets, whether by instinct or by design, simply hastened a natural process that would have reached the same conclusion, only more slowly, even without those poets. As a natural kind, tragedy has a fixed place in the taxonomy of the world; properly performs a function peculiar to it if it is con-

structed in accordance with the constraints of its inherent nature; and is justified, not temporarily and locally by its link to contingent social institutions, but permanently and universally because it corresponds to fundamental con-

stituents of human nature. Perhaps this is why Aristotle’s accountof the histori-_ cal evolution of tragedy, strangely enough, refuses to mention the traditional inventor of the genre, Thespis: for by suppressing the name of its originator, Aristotle makes the genre seem less accidental and Athenian, more inevitable and

human. As with any natural kind, nature herself would have come up with the genre sooner or later. 2. Aristotle treats tragedy as a species of poetry, not of philosophy. On his view, tragedy does not convey a profound vision of the world and of the individual’s place in it, which only happens to be expressed contingently in a poetic medium, and it does not afford a unique and particularly valuable kind of wisdom: tragedy never engages epistemological processes more complex than the discovery “so this man whom I see before me now is really that man of whom I have heard in the past” (houtos ekeinos anagnörisis); tragedy may well be more

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Glenn W. Most

philosophical than history, but it is certainly less philosophical than philosophy? hence it provides the same kind of instruction, but at a lower cognitive order, as philosophy like Aristotle's does. Aristotle, to be sure, does not share

Plato's conviction that the view of the world communicated by tragic poets, plots, and characters is false, dangerously so,'? but he agrees with Plato that the characters whom tragedy brings onto the stage have gotten into difficulties because they have committed various kinds of avoidable mistakes (hamartémata)—a proper philosophical training would no doubt have spared them

much unpleasantness. Hence there is no tragic wisdom, no tragic condition, none of "the tragic" expressed through the medium of poetry: tragedy's vision of the world either is simply mistaken or is a cruder, less scientific version of the very same truths that Aristotle's philosophy claims to know so well. '^ — 3. Aristotle's consideration of tragedy is formal and textual rather than institutional or sociological in orientation. He neglects all the large-scale social dimensions emphasized at the beginning of this paper so as to concentrate instead on the immanent organization of the tragic work of art; he discusses the

kinds of personalities of the individuals who write tragedies and of the individuals they present on the stage, but he downplays the kind of discussion of social categories and classes we find in his ethical, political, and rhetorical writings. Appropriately, the longest sections of the Poetics discuss lexis and answer detailed objections to the text of Homer.!! One expression of this tendency is the

extent to which Aristotle stresses those aspects of the play that are communicated by reading it or even by hearing about it, and correspondingly minimizes its theatricality. Unlike Plato, for whom the fact that tragedies were performed was one of their most dangerously seductive aspects, Aristotle at least accepts the theatrical dimension as an intrinsic, and hence neutral, feature of tragedy, but he evidently does not know quite what to make of it and frequently ignores

or belittles it. However, the most striking example is provided by Aristotle's account of the history of tragedy:'? here, although he locates the origins and early character of the formal dimensions of tragedy in various cultic contexts, some of these contexts persisting to the present day in many cities, he does not even hint with a single word at the institutional function of Attic tragedy within the Greater Dionysia. In Aristotle's eyes, the evolution of tragedy is evidently away

from cult and toward literature: tragedy becomes tragedy by becoming institutionally decontextualized, by becoming a freely available text rather than a performance that forms part of a ritual. This is no doubt one of the reasons why, notoriously, Aristotle ignores, as far as possible, everything about Greek tragedy that has to do with religion. He suppresses the gods and interprets the stories as representations of the successful or unsuccessful actions of human agents; he

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

25

replaces fate, curses, and other extrahuman agencies with human error; he barely mentions the choral odes; and he subordinates the chorus to the plot. 4. Aristotle’s conception of a genre is teleological: tragedy is designed to serve a specific purpose, namely, “by means of pity and fear to perform a purification of emotions of this sort"? In theory, at least, all its elements—above

all, its essential element, the mythos—can be justified to rational inspection insofar as they contribute to this purpose (in practice, some, like music and spectacle, happen to be carried along as historical stowaways, rather to Aristotle's embarrassment). As a consequence, Aristotle’s account of tragedy is neither purely normative nor purely descriptive, but an inseparable blend of the two. The treatise begins by inquiring about “the way in which plots must be constructed if the poem is to be a success” and is replete with numerous imperatives, verbal adjectives, and dei constructions, yet it is hard to imagine that it

was intended as a manual for Creative Writing 101 (and no tragedian is reported ever to have studied with Aristotle). The instructions are presumably

meant not pragmatically, as recipes that the master craftsman expects his impatient journeyman dramaturges to follow, but meant immanently, to indicate

what analytic examination should reveal to be the case in the texts themselves if these are to perform their assigned function well. Wherever possible, the sober description of what inspection discovers is subordinated to an account of the ends that should be served by what reflection shows to be not mere contingent attributes but instead organic means; when Aristotle does not provide such an account himself, the cooperative reader can usually supply it on his or her own. 5, Aristotle’s version of the teleological analysis of tragedy is oriented ultimately not towards the immanent structure of the play itself but instead towards the effect of that structure on the recipient: his approach is not aesthetic

but is psychological and, in this sense, moral. Plato had located in tragedy's pleasurable effect on the audience one of its principal features and its greatest danger. Aristotle takes over his teacher’s emphasis on the pleasure that tragedy produces and that is specific to it (oikeia hédoné), but he also devises the notion of katharsis, the temporary evacuation of inconvenient excess emotion, as a sketchy way of at least trying to provide a justification for tragedy by way of a reply to Plato’s polemic against it: tragedy does, to be sure, excite distressing emotions but ends up liberating the audience from these and thereby providing the audience the pleasure of restoring those emotions to their natural state. The recipients whom Aristotle envisions, like Plato's, are fundamentally/j Passive; they are not so much active collaborators in the creation of meaning by an implicit contractual complicity with the author, as rather helpless victims of

largely irrational forces to which they are incapable of opposing resistance.

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Likewise, human psychology explains the genesis of poetry too: poetry in general arises not just, as Plato had claimed, from the wicked tendencies of a few

poets of genius, but rather from an innate disposition to perform and enjoy mimésis that is common to all human beings by nature.'> As for the relation between authors and specific poetic genres, Aristotle’s author, like Plato's, is a person who happens to be of a certain sort, morally and intellectually, and who by the principle of “like to like” adopts the literary form that he finds most congenial.'° In a celebrated passage at the end of the Symposium," Socrates had tried to convince Agathon and Aristophanes that any poet who could write tragedy

must also be able to write comedy (evidently because both genres can be defined in such a way that they can be seen to belong to the single higher category of dramatic poetry); for Aristotle, Homer, who alone was capable of composing both comedy and tragedy, is the exception that proves the rule that, in general, poets cannot write both.

From the Genre of Tragedy to the Idea of the Tragic Whatever its limitations, this Aristotelian theory of tragedy— poetic, textual, teleological, psychological, above all natural—remains a high watermark of an-

cient genre theory. Moreover, by suppressing tragedy’s links to ephemeral cults and connecting it instead with the permanent structures of human psychology and human action, Aristotle may even have helped secure a place for tragedy in

later theories for which the Realia of Athenian cults and politics were quite unknown, altogether uninteresting, or both. In antiquity, later approaches to the genre may or may not ultimately depend on Aristotle, but they can all be understood as radical simplifications of the complexity of his account, in one or the other of two basic directions. On the one hand, a grammarians’ tradition, largely present for us in Horace's Ars

poetica and in such late ancient scholars as Donatus and Placidus, suppresses the doctrines of katharsis and oikeia hédoné that had provided the justificatory telos underpinning Aristotle's analysis, but nonetheless retains the system of differentiae regulating the internal structure of this genre and its external relations with other ones. But, in the absence of a purpose towards which these constituents can be understood to be subordinated instrumentally, they now become ends in themselves. The inevitable result of the new predominance of the normative component that had already been present to some degree in Aristotle's account is a vicious circle: the rules are not justified further than by

the fact that they are the rules that must be obeyed if the result is to be a tragedy as defined by those rules. Thus Horace enunciates precepts concerning such matters as the relation of meter to genre, the differences between tragedy and

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

27

comedy, the number of acts and the number of actors.!® However, he does not bother to justify them except, if at all, with a circular appeal to the reaction of those audiences who know well these very precepts; when he admits exceptions

to the precepts, as in the sporadically permissible mixture of tragedy and comedy,'? these exceptions are not justified either. In the grammarians of late antiquity, this tendency results in a rigid scheme of binary oppositions distinguishing tragedy and comedy from one another in terms of such criteria as characters, plot, outcome, fictionality, and style.

On the other hand, if the grammarians kept the rules but omitted the katharsis which had ultimately justified them, the philosophers retained the

characters but suppressed the mythos that had ready Aristotle had humanized tragedy (just as but even more so), by applying the instruments he saw as its core, largely unsuccessful actions

concatenated their actions. Althe tragedians themselves had, of his ethical doctrines to what by fallible human agents. His

philosophical successors radicalized this approach by abandoning his own in-

sistence on the centrality of plot and instead concentrated on the individual scene—in much the same way as an emphasis on the single episode rather than on the exigencies of large-scale plot seems to characterize post—fifth century Greek tragedy, Seneca's tragedies, the practice of dramatic performances in the Hellenistic and Roman world, and the visual depictions of tragedies on frescoes and mosaics. Already Theophrastus may have been shifting the focus from plots

to episodes when he defined tragedy as ἡρωϊκῆς τύχης περίστασις, “a crisis of heroic fortune," though his use of the category of tyché suggests an interest in extra-human factors that may have exceeded Aristotle's. But later Greek philosophers seem to have identified, as the essence of the genre of tragedy, the tragic episode: a single crucial moment of human decision, invariably taken on the

basis of insufficient information or the wrong considerations and leading to great unhappiness. When Hellenistic philosophers or Cicero refer to tragedies, they almost always do so to illustrate their discussions of ethical problems by means of examples drawn from universally familiar books: they cite the plays, but to us seem less interested in specific literary texts than in general mythic characters and situations. Thus Medea's cunning stratagems were used by Cicero to demonstrate that reason could be employed for the sake of evil and

thereby to cast doubt on the providential administration of the world, whereas her celebrated monologue in Euripides' play, in which she repeatedly changes her mind but eventually seems to decide to murder her children, was cited by Chrysippus, Epictetus, and Galen to demonstrate their very different views of the relation between reason and the passions.? Epictetus makes the underlying notion explicit: Medea acts under an erroneous impression; a phi-

28

Glenn W. Most

losopher could surely have convinced her that she was making a terrible mistake and thereby have saved the children’s lives.

In the theory of tragedy, the Middle Ages largely form a hiatus: in the Latin West, ignorance of the texts and theaters of antiquity meant that the rare references to tragedy in Boethius and the late ancient grammarians caused more perplexity than illumination. In Byzantium, a small selection of the tragic texts continued to be read in the schools, but there is little evidence that they received much attention for features beyond the purely lexical. In Islam, Averroes could even write two commentaries on the Poetics interpreting tragedy as encomiastic

verse, comedy as satire, and opsis as a kind of speculation that proves the truth of an opinion. But in the Renaissance, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics, of the texts of

Greek and Latin tragedy, and of the remains of ancient theaters led to a new flowering of interest in the theory and practice of tragedy. For the first time since Aristotle, at least as far as we know, literary theoreticians undertook not

only to establish the rules for genres and for the differences between them, especially to justify these rules by appeal to fundamental systematic considerations.

In particular, the concept of plausibility, which in the form of to eikos and to pithanon had played only a minor role in Aristotle’s Poetics but the central one in his Rhetoric, came increasingly to dominate Italian theories in the sixteenth century and French ones in the seventeenth. In a new version of the rhetori-

zation of poetics that had been characteristic of ancient literary theory, the poet was now implicitly conceived of as someone trying to convince bored or distrustful spectators to believe in the poet’s fictions: it was less important that these spectators meet his or her expectations than that the poet adapt himself or herself to theirs, in a kind of poetic contract that defined a cultural space of ever more stringent normativity. The most notorious result—the three unities

of action, time, and place—are often, and rightly, decried as distortions of ancient theory and practice and as unnecessary constraints on poets and audiences. However, it should not be overlooked that they derive not only from a serious misunderstanding of the nature of theatrical illusion—as though the limitations of real time and space could conceivably constrain the time and space imagined by the spectators in the course of a theatrical performance!— but also from a new sense of the competence and activity of the recipient in set-

ting the rules for poetic production, and from a heightened professionalism and sophistication in theatrical audiences. So too, the reductive moralism with

which Castelvetro, Scaliger, Gottsched, and most other early modern theoreticians treated tragedy certainly offends our own enlightened aesthetic sensibility, yet it played an important role in uncovering the differences between ancient

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

29

and modern tragedy and thereby in gradually historicizing the understanding of genres. Finally, the insistent emphasis on the effects of tragedy in arousing pity, fear, and (especially among the French) admiration no doubt belied a taste for striking coups de theätre at the expense of cogent plots and subtle character development; yet that emphasis marked an appreciation for the importance of the audiences emotions in any account of poetry symptomatic of the subjectivization that was eventually to undermine the rational construct of neoclassicist aesthetics.

During the course of the eighteenth century, the growing crisis in the normative and rhetorical theoretical structure for the genres inherited from the Renaissance's transformation of late ancient grammatical pronouncements was manifested

in a number

of simultaneous

developments:

the

decline

of

allegoresis, the rise of the aesthetics of genius, a new attention to emotion, and

the cult of the individual. In the theory of tragedy, neoclassicism's dead end was signaled by Lessing, who located the moral effect of tragedy not in the edifying precepts mouthed by its characters nor in the portrayal of the wicked being punished and the virtuous being rewarded, but rather in a permanent improvement in the moral sensibility of the spectators derived from a refinement of their emotional and judgmental capabilities. Lessing's Christian humanism led him to locate this refinement above all in the faculty of Mitleid, pity or compassion. Thus, in his correspondence with Nicolai of 1756-1757, he reduced the canonical French neoclassical triad of pity, fear, and admiration to variants on the single emotion of pity by defining fear as a sudden surprise of pity and

defining admiration as a pity that has become no longer necessary; moreover, he went so far as to declare that the sole purpose of tragedy was to increase our

capacity to feel pity and that the more pity we could feel, the better it was, so that the best person would be the one who felt the most pity. To be sure, a decade later in his Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing took a less radical position, arguing for moderation even in pity; but the damage was done. Like the French addition of admiration to the Greek pair of tragic emotions, pity and fear, so

too Lessing’s emphasis on pity and his devaluation of the other emotions betrays the widespread early modern discomfort with dread as the central tragic emotion. No doubt, for the age of bienséance, terror was about as unwelcome as a tarantula on a wedding cake. But what kind of theory of tragedy was possible

if fear (phobos) could not be put at its center? Rescue came from an unexpected quarter: the theory of the sublime. Oddly, perhaps, Pseudo-Longinus himself had evidently had very little use for tragedy or for terror. When, in order to disprove Caecilius’s notion that the sublime was simply identical with emotion, he had provided a list of self-evidently

30

Glenn W. Most

nonsublime, vulgar emotions, that list had been limited to the three exquisitely tragic passions of oiktot, lypai, and phoboi (sensations of pity, grief, and fear).??

The authors he evidently finds most sublime are Homer and Demosthenes, not Aeschylus and Sophocles; and the only section of his treatise in which he pro‘vides more than scattered (and usually pejorative) references to tragedy is the

chapter on phantasiai (here instances of “envisioning”), understood as the capacity to imagine that one is seeing what one is describing or hearing described, and illustrated by a series of tragic scenes in which characters on the verge of insanity think they see Furies and make us think we see them too.?* But in the

century after the popularization of Pseudo-Longinus's treatise by Boileau in 1674, the sublime came increasingly to seem the natural home for the emotion

of fear and for the genres that most aroused it: epic and, above all, tragedy. Already John Dennis in his The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry in 1704 established terror as one of the six basic emotions associated with the sublime and linked it

with tragedy. Then in 1757, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful placed terror at the very center of the sublime (though this work linked the genre of tragedy instead to our nat-ural delight in viewing the sufferings of other people). But it was only with

Kant’s Critique of Judgement in 1790 that the sublime received a philosophical formulation that unlocked its full potential usefulness for the theory of tragedy—paradoxically, for Kant himself consistently downplayed terror (he pre-

ferred elevation to consternation) and almost entirely ignored tragedy (in literary matters, he had a tin ear and preferred among poets the satirists Horace and Persius). Developing Pseudo-Longinus's insight into the sublime as the expres-

sion not of the human’s weakness in the face of forces that could crush the individual but of the human’s superiority to the natural world in which he or she happens to find himself or herself,?° Kant argued that the true location of the sublime was not external nature but the human spirit, and that the feeling of the sublime was a reaction to the recognition that, so far from being limited by the physical world, we are in fact morally and rationally fully superior to it. In the mathematical sublime, we are capable of imagining an infinite totality vaster than anything reality has to offer, whereas in the dynamic sublime, even the threatened or achieved physical destruction of an individual by blind natu-

ral forces does nothing to lessen the moral victory of his or her spiritual grandeur.

It was Friedrich Schiller who recognized in these formulations ideas that could be applied fruitfully to the theory of tragedy. Schiller had earlier been an

orthodox follower of Lessing, emphasizing the moral edification by which tragedy was supposed to improve its audiences; but Kant's third Critique had a pro-

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

31

found impact on him that led him to write a series of remarkable essays between the summer of 1790 and the winter of 1792, in which he conceived the tragic on the model of the sublime and interpreted the genre of tragedy as the vehicle for giving expression to the sublime. In this way, Schiller first formulated a view of the tragic as a fundamental feature of human existence, indicative of the irremediable, painful incompatibility between the individual and the world in which he or she happens to find himself or herself—a thoroughly modern idea that is intimately linked with the secularization and disenchantment of the world and is, of course, largely foreign to most of ancient Greek thought—and then, in a second step, assigned to the genre of tragedy the mission of adequately embodying this insight. In so doing, he opened up the possibility of defining both this particular genre and others as well, in terms not of established literary canons but of fundamental dispositional tendencies of au-

thors and basic features of human existence, which precede and legitimate transmitted and future works of literature. Rather than merely inheriting the genres, Schiller undertook to generate them. This new Romantic theory of genre, speculative rather than normative, generative rather than taxonomic, was worked out experimentally in the early

years of the 1790s by Schiller himself in such essays as “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” and simultaneously by Freidrich Schlegel in his published and unpublished treatises and notes on literary theory, and somewhat later by Schelling and Hegel. In its application to the specific genre of tragedy, the theory was developed, in the hands of such philosophers as Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, into the modern theory of the tragic outlined earlier, which inevitably came into various kinds of conflict with the transmitted canon of ancient Greek tragedies. Thus Schopenhauer argued that the ancients

had not yet achieved a tragic view of life and that in consequence, very few ancient tragedies were genuinely tragic. Hegel’s curious notion that tragedy was designed to reveal the harmony of the moral order and the providential government of the world led him idiosyncratically to misunderstand Sophocles’ Antigone and to prefer this play over all other Greek tragedies. Kierkegaard had to reformulate completely the story of Antigone in terms of modern inwardness and subjectivity if he was to derive from it a message capable of reminding the human of his or her embeddedness in contexts that determined his or her individuality. Nietzsche, however, restricted the tragic recognition of the futility of human will and of the limitations of human reason to a very few plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles and identified Euripides, in complicity with Socrates, as

the murderer of Greek tragedy. The very ease with which we can disagree with many of the details of such

32

Glenn W. Most

positions should not blind us to the fact that, in their fundamental structure,

such views of tragedy and the tragic have left us a legacy of habits and instincts that are extremely hard to shake off. Indeed, despite its evident deficiencies, this Romantic construct of the tragic has remained by far the most influential para-

digm for understanding the genre of tragedy until quite recently, when sociological, anthropological, institutional, and religious ritual models have begun to prevail, at least in a few scholarly circles. But just how long this particular pendulum will swing in that direction, and what will come next, remain to be seen.

Conclusion In this way, a genre of “tragedy” was hypostasized and conceived as though it were somehow independent of all particular instances of tragedies. What is more, the burden of that genre came to be thought of as that of giving voice to a

“tragic” wisdom or a view of the human’s place in the universe, which did not have to be expressed in that genre—or, for that matter, in any genre. The attractions that have thereby been created in the modern period for reading Greek tragedies, as well as the difficulties for understanding them, are evident—but

are no doubt of considerable interest only to Greek scholars. Yet the history of the development leading to the pervasive recent use of this ancient term of literary criticism to describe an exquisitely modern predicament of human existence has a wider importance, because it not only illustrates the way in which el-

ements of the Classical tradition have been taken out of context and reinterpreted and misinterpreted so as to provide instruments for modernity’s self-conceptualization, but also provides a striking example of the tendency of

readers to use, and misuse, genres in order both to understand and to misunderstand, not only their books, but also their lives.

Selective Bibliography 1. Genre Theory Behrens, I. 1940. “Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst.” Bethefte zur Zeitschrift fiir Romanische Philologie 92. Halle: Niemeyer. Brunetiere, F 1890. L’Evolution des genres dans l'histoire de la littérature. Paris: Hachette. Colie, R. L. 1973. The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance, B. K. Lewalski,

ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Conte, G. B. 1994. Genres and Readers, trans. G. W. Most. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Conte, G. B., and Most, G. W. 1996. "Genre" In The Oxford Classical Dictionary‘, S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds. 630-31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

33

Donohue, J. J. 1943 and 1949. The Theory of Literary Kinds. Vol. 1: Ancient Classifications of Literature. Vol. 2: The Ancient Classes of Poetry. Dubuque, Iowa: Loras College Press. Fowler, A. 1982. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hernadi, P., ed. 1972. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Hinck, W., ed. 1977. Textsortenlehre-Gattungsgeschichte. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer. Ingarden, R. 1973. The Literary Work of Art, trans. G. G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IIL: Northwestern University Press. Jager, G. 1970. "Das Gattungsproblem in der Ásthetik und Poetik von 1780 bis 1850.” In Zur Literatur der Restaurationsepoche 1815-1848, J. Hermand and M. Windfuhr, eds. 371-404. Stuttgart: Metzler. Komfort-Hein, S., and Knoblauch, H. 1996. “Gattungslehre.” In Historisches Wörterbuch

der Rhetorik, Vol. 3, G. Ueding, ed. 528-564. Darmstadt:

Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft. Lammert, E., and Scheunemann, D., eds. 1988. Regelkram und Grenzgänge: Von poetischen Gattungen. Munich: Ed. Text + Kritik. Rosenmeyer, T. G. 1985. "Ancient Literary Genres: A Mirage?" Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 34. 74-84. Rossi, L. E. 1971. "I generi letterari e le loro leggi scritte e non scritte nelle letterature classiche." Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, London 18. 69-94. Rüdiger, H., ed. 1974. Die Gattungen in der vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter. Scherpe, K. 1968. Gattungspoetik im 18. Jahrhundert: Die historische Entwicklung von Gottsched bis Herder. Stuttgart: Metzler.

Staiger, E. 1963. Grundbegriffe der Poetik?. Zürich: Atlantis. Strelka, J. P., ed. 1978. "Theories of Literary Genre.” Yearbook of Comparative Criticism 8. University Park, Penn., and London: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Szondi, P. 1974. Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie II. Von der normativen zur spekulativen Gattungspoetik: Schellings Gattungspoetik, W. Fietkau, ed. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Textsorten und literarische Gattungen. Dokumente des Germanistentages in Hamburg vom 1.-4. April 1979, hrsg. vom Vorstand der Vereinigung der deutschen Hochschulgermanisten. 1983. Berlin: Schmidt. Viétor K. 1931. "Probleme der literarischen Gattungsgeschichte Deutsche ViertelJahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 9. 425—447. Voßkamp, W. 1992. “Gattungen.” In Literaturwissenschaft: Ein Grundkurs, H. Brackert and J. Stückrath, eds. 253-269. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Wellek, R., and Warren, A. 1956. Theory of Literature’. Ch. 17. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Willems, G. 1981. Das Konzept der literarischen Gattung: Untersuchungen zur klassischen

34

Glenn W. Most

deutschen Gattungstheorie, Niemeyer.

insbesondere zur Ästhetik F.Th.

Vischers. Tübingen:

2. Tragedy and the Tragic Benjamin, W. 1963. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels?. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Brereton, G. 1968. Principles of Tragedy: A Rational Examination of the Concept in Life and Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Breuer, R. 1988. Tragische Handlungsstrukturen: Eine Theorie der Tragödie. Munich: Fink. Gelfert, H.-D. 1995. Die Tragödie: Theorie und Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gellrich, M. 1988. Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict Since Aristotle. Princeton, N J.: Princeton University Press. George, D. E. R. 1972. Deutsche Tragódientheorien vom Mittelalter bis zu Lessing: Texte und Kommentare. Munich: Beck. Kaufmann, W. 1968. Tragedy and Philosophy. New York: Doubleday. Krieger, M. 1960. The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Krook, D. 1969. Elements of Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lucas, E. L. 1966. Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Hogarth Press. Mack, D. 1970. Ansichten zum Tragischen und der Tragódie: Ein Kompendium der deutschen Theorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: Fink.

Mandel, O. 1961. A Definition of Tragedy. New York: University Press. Most, G. W. 1993. "Schlegel, Schlegel und die Geburt eines Tragödienparadigmas.” Poetica 25. 155-175.

Palmer, R. H. 1992. Tragedy and Tragic Theory: An Analytical Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Sander, V., ed. 1971. Tragik und Tragódie: Wege der Forschung 108. Darmstadt:

Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Sewall, R. B. 1959. The Vision of Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Steiner, G. 1961. The Death of Tragedy: A Critical Essay. New York: Knopf. Szondi, P. 1961 and 1978. Versuch über das Tragische. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel-Verlag; repr. in Schriften I. 149—260. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Weber, A. 1943. Das Tragische und die Geschichte. Hamburg: Goverts. Williams, R. 1966. Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus.

3. Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy Belfiore, E. S. 1992. Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bernays, J. (1857).

1970.

Grundzüge

der verlorenen Abhandlung

des Aristoteles über

Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic

35

Wirkung der Tragödie (Breslau), repr. Hildesheim: Olms. Repr. in: (1880). 1968. Zwei Abhandlungen

über

die aristotelische

Theorie

des Dramas

(Berlin),

repr.

Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Partially available in English as “Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy,” trans. J. and J. Barnes, in J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji, eds. 1979. Articles on Aristotle. 4: Psychology and Aesthetics. 154-165. London: Duckworth. Bremer, J. M. 1969. Hamartia: Tragic Error in the Poetics of Aristotle and in Greek Tragedy.

Amsterdam: Hakkert. Else, G. F. 1957. Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. . 1986. Plato and Aristotle on Poetry, P. Burian, ed. Chapel Hill, N.C., and London: University of North Carolina Press.

Golden, L. 1992. Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Goldschmidt, V. 1982. Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote. Paris: Vrin. Halliwell, S. 1986. Aristotle's Poetics. London: Duckworth. Jones, J. 1962. On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. London: Chatto & Windus. Kommerell, M. 1940. Lessing und Aristoteles. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann. Lucas, D. W., ed. 1968. Aristotle: Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Most G. W. 1998. "Katharsis" and “Mimesis,” in E. Craig, ed., The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, 218—220, and Vol. 6, 381-382. London: Routledge. Rorty, A. O., ed. 1992. Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics. Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press.

Said, S. 1978. La Faut Tragique. Paris: Maspero. Sóffing, W. 1985. Deskriptive und normative Bestimmungen in der Poetik des Aristoteles, Beihefte zu Poetica 15. Amsterdam: Grüner.

CHAPTER

TWO

—— p

Coc!

Tg an

wed been

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual JosePH

W.

Day

Insofar as genre is defined as a kind of composition that exhibits a given set of formal characteristics, we can easily say that the brief inscriptions in poetic me-

ters on Archaic Greek offerings to the gods (dedications) constitute a genre of Archaic poetry.! Most dedicatory epigrams reproduce a core formula illustrated in this hexameter from a marble column that supported a now lost offering on the Athenian Akropolis ( CEG 250, ca. 500—480):

"Eumebia Sexarev ἀνέθεκεν [7]& ᾿Αθ

]ναίίαι.

Empedia set up (this or me) as a tithe to Athena.

Conventional additions were made, typically epithets for the god, a description of the offering, information about the dedicator or reason for dedicating, and a direct address to the god; but the core of formal characteristics was remarkably consistent. There exists, however, an alternative view of genre as an aspect of the dy-

namics of communication. As the papers of Eric Csapo, Don Fowler, and Stephen Hinds, among others in this volume, make clear, this view has important implications for understanding ancient literary genres; Deborah Boedeker,

moreover, details the ways Herodotus self-consciously marks out his new genre in terms of its communicative goals. But more important here is that this view of genre has a significant impact on our understanding of Archaic Greek poetry as performance poetry, as Mary Depew makes clear in her treatment of hymns.

A poem can be said to belong to a certain genre, not only because it has a cer37

38

joseph W. Day

tain form but also because, when it was performed, certain acts were done or effects produced in the speaking of the words and in an audience’s responses to them—acts or effects, one must add, beyond the purely linguistic encoding and decoding of information. We can call these effects the force of the performance

and speak of “generic force” to designate the set of comparable effects that defined a genre of performance poetry.

It may seem counterintuitive to apply a performance approach to epigrams written on stone, bronze, or pottery. However, I shall argue that reading epi-

grams aloud—as they would have been read—functioned in a manner parallel to poetic performance and that we can consider epigrams a poetic genre even

under the dynamic, performance-oriented definition of genre. Specifically, the reading of epigrams inscribed on dedications—especially fine dedications or agalmata like bronze or stone statues, which would have been viewed as the inscription was read—would perform certain acts: an affirmation of the god’s and the dedicator's status and, in that, a mediation of a relationship of reciprocal charis or pleasure among dedicator, god, readers-viewers, and their whole

community. The “generic force” of reading these epigrams can be contrasted to that of related genres, for example, the lament and praise performed in reading

epitaphs.? Of more importance here, the effects of reading can be compared with those of religious rituals of sacrifice or offering, namely, the performance of acts establishing a relationship of charis among celebrants, sponsors, god, and human audience. Insofar as ritual is defined functionally as the production of such effects, the “generic force” of reading epigrams consisted in the activation of a ritual of offering to the god. Moreover, since the dedication presented

itself as memorializing the original ritual of its own offering, every new reading became a re-activation of that occasion. The repetition of a certain kind of ceremonial occasion or ritual through the activation of some of its constituent ef-

fects or force was likewise a function of genre in much Archaic performed poetry; and in this way too, we can define epigrams as a genre of such poetry.

Theoretical Background The views about genre previously outlined draw on an array of approaches often collectively referred to as pragmatics, especially as found in discourse theory and performance criticism. I provide here a brief background for my borrowings from this theory. An approach based in pragmatics analyzes speech and other forms of communication as praxis involving not only the transfer of information but also the generation of force, that is, acts or effects that influence or construct social real-

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual

39

ity. A simple “hello,” for example, may convey information, but it also begins the process of constructing a relationship between speaker and hearer.?

Force is generated through contextualization.* The hearer of that “hello” negotiates with the speaker to establish a context, that is, a social and linguistic common ground on the basis of which they can engage in effective communication. The word, the speaker’s tone, and accompanying gestures produce cues to the desired kind of context, and the hearer recognizes them and responds by, for example, entering into a friendly interaction with the speaker. Context is not

usually negotiated ex nihilo; it is constructed out of a cultural repertoire that is shared by speaker and hearer and that consists of a memory of similar contexts from past experience. Contextualization thus involves a kind of representation, a cuing by a speaker of an intended kind of context.? Insofar as a hearer recognizes the cues and agrees to participate in that context, he or she affirms the authority of the speaker to guide the interchange. This process seems trivial in the

case of "hello"; but when a solemn utterance is made in special speech—religious speech, or political, or poetic speech in a culture where performed poetry has serious consequences—then an audience’s affirmation of a speaker’s au-

thority and their agreement to participate in the speaker's proposed context become constitutive acts that are significant socially, religiously, or politically.

Pragmatics-based approaches assign a major role to genre. Genres are familiar patterns of speech that typically result in certain contexts producing certain effects; they are the verbal building blocks of our mental repertoire of past contexts. For example, ordinary speech genres include various patterns of

greeting, and “hello” can serve as a generic marker or cue representing to hearers the beginning of such a pattern and inviting them to enter into the kind of context that experience has associated with such speech. A comparable approach clarifies the function of genre in Archaic Greek poetic performance and similarly, I believe, in reading epigrams. Archaic poetic performance is now widely viewed as a communicative interaction involving the negotiation of context between performers and audience and resulting in socially and religiously constitutive effects or force. Poems constituted a certain genre mainly insofar

as their performances produced a certain kind of context and force.” Form could vary considerably, as long as the context was cued for audiences through

representation and they responded according to “generic” expectations formed by experience with past performances.’ Generally, Archaic poetry exhibits a fuller "generic" representation than does ordinary speech; and as Depew illustrates in this volume, that representation is characteristic of poetic performance

traditions (and of Herodotus’s enterprise defined by his “generic” self-presentation, as Boedeker shows in her paper). One thinks, for example, of the maiden-

40

Joseph W. Day

performers’ descriptions of themselves, their singing, and their participation in cultic acts in Alkman’s Louvre Partheneion. The example illustrates another difference between ordinary conversation and poetic performance: poems were performed on ceremonial, ritualized, often public and religiously significant occasions. Different genres served as special speech for different occasions;? but this is not to say that poetry was “occasional” in the sense of mere accompaniment to the real business of occasions. Rather, the poetic performance was con-

stitutive of the occasion to the extent that the function of the occasion and the effects of the context negotiated between poetic performers and audience were identical at the level of pragmatics. For example, Alkman’s maidens represented

themselves as deficient in beauty and singing skill and thus as unable to accomplish their ritual task without help from the chorus leader and goddess.'’ The audience would negotiate a relationship with these performers on the basis of their self-description, accepting and authorizing them in their roles as diffident (and

therefore,

in

fact,

desirable)

young

women.

The

function

of

this

premarriage ritual was identical, to establish the performers in just such social and religious roles within the Spartan community (which constituted the audience) and to authorize those roles as ideal behaviors for marriageable young

women. The process of contextualizing the poem activated the intended effects of the occasion. A poem belonged to the genre of partheneion in seventhcentury Sparta partly for having a certain form, but more importantly, for functioning in something like this way when performed. The relationship among genre, performance, and occasion can be more complex, as illustrated by epinician poetry. Typically, odes were performed during ceremonies sometime after the athletic contest, on the victor’s return home;

but also typically, the ode represents its performance as belonging to the kind of celebrations immediately following the win at the game site (kömos-revel,

crowning, etc.), even signaling this with language used in such occasions, for instance, the herald’s proclamation of victory. A poetic genre thus subsumed a ceremonial genre (which perhaps included poetic elements).!! By representing its performance as belonging to a genre of ceremony, an ode invited its audience

(who would recognize the cues from past experience of victory rituals) to enter into that kind of context; and audiences would do so, negotiating the performers position as authoritative proclaimers of victory and affirming their presentation of the victor and his victory. As with Alkman’s Partheneion, a successfully

performed epinician activated a kind of occasion through its own “generic” self-representation. However, we can distinguish two occasions in an epinician: the occasion of the original victory celebration that literally lay in the past,"

and the present occasion of epinician performance. At the level of pragmatics,

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual

41

an ode's "generic" self-representation would cause the distinction between the occasions to collapse: as the occasion of epinician performance was activated, that of an earlier victory celebration was re-activated. A ceremony or ritual could in this way be made repeatable through the functioning of genre in poetic performance. The "generic" force of epinician poetry consisted (at least in part) in the reactivation of ceremony.

The approach to genre that was just applied to poetry and other forms of speech as systems of communication can be applied to nonverbal systems like religious or other ritual and visual representation (both of which can include verbal elements). As was assumed earlier, ceremonies and rituals can also be an-

alyzed from the perspective of pragmatics as contexts generated and acts performed in interactions between performers and audiences.'> Different kinds of ritual contexts and acts correspond to different genres of rituals; but what concerns me here is that, as in epinician poetry, a ritual genre could be subsumed by a different performance genre like poetry, or even by a visual genre. Greek iconography offers examples of the latter. The force of viewing images also depended both on pieces calling attention to themselves as members of genres and on the consequent negotiation of context between viewers and objects. When an image represented a kind of ritual, and if the context that emerged was, at the level of pragmatics, comparable to that of such ritual, then we can say that ritual was (re-)enacted. Thus, Osborne reconstructs viewing the Parthenon frieze as a (re-)enactment of the viewer's participation in the Panathenaic procession.!* Visual representation of this sort could be acted out, as Connor and Sinos show in their analyses of the tyrant Peisistratos's entry into Athens: he rode on a chariot, beside a woman named Phye, who was costumed as Athena. Viewers were presented with a collage of visual genre markers that they would recognize from religious processions, in which, for example, statues of (or actors impersonating) gods moved along on carts or chariots, and bystanders interacted with them as if they were gods present in epiphany.'> Of particular interest for what follows, Connor and Sinos investigate two aspects of Peisistratos's entry: its generation of authority and its performativity, both key elements in the contextualization effected by all "generic" representation. By

negotiating context on the basis of religious "generic" expectations, receptive viewers negotiated their relationship with Peisistratos's "Athena" as they did with the gods exhibited in religious processions, not only affirming his authority to stage the performance but also accepting the divine authorization of his status. Sinos, explaining the Athenians' apparent credulity, notes that audiences accept the magical, divine, or invisible things represented in ritual in the sense

that they agree to participate in the performance, even engaging in discourse

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Joseph W. Day

with a god, performing the god into existence in speech, as it were. Verbal mechanisms of such performativity include directly addressing (apostrophizing) the god as if present and the use of metonymy to conjure up the god's whole persona through epithets representing one aspect of it.!® All "generic" representation is performative, a matter of doing by representing the kind of thing being done. In significant religious or civic rituals and in poetic performances often associated with them, this performativity had es-

pecially powerful effects." An epigram, though a pale reflection of a choral ode or an elaborate civic or religious ritual, could also induce the performance of acts having ritual force by means of "generic" representation.

The Reception of Archaic Inscriptions I shall argue, first, that in Archaic Greece, reading a dedicatory epigram, while viewing the dedicated object, was comparable at the level of pragmatics to the performance of a poem, and furthermore, that genre functioned similarly in both cases to (re-)activate a kind of ceremonial or ritual occasion. My method

consists in reconstructing the reading and viewing of one paradigmatic dedication, a small (20.3 cm high) statue of a youth, now in Boston, probably from Thebes, perhaps from the Ismenion there.'? A date in the earlier seventh century is suggested by its construction (solid, cast bronze), style (Geometric rigidity softened by Archaic molding), and the inscription's lettering. Identification of the figure is uncertain. If helmet, shield, and spear are restored and if incisions on the torso indicate a corselet, the figure represents a warrior, perhaps a votive offering for success in battle. If we restore a bow in the left hand and arrows or libation bowl in the right and take the torso markings as muscle definition, the statue probably represents the archer god. I accept the identification as Apollo, though much of my argument remains unchanged if it is rejected. Two hexameters are incised on the fronts of the legs

(CEG 1.326):

Μάντικλός u’ ἀνέθεκε Fexa Boro. üpryvporó£aot τᾶς [ö}öe | κάτας: τὺ δέ, Φοῖβε, δίδοι xapiFerrav ἀμοιβ [dv]. Mantiklos set me up for the far-shooting, silver-bowed (god), out of a

tithe. As for you, Phoibos, may you grant a charis-filled return.

Before reconstructing an ancient reading in the third section, I provide here a brief background in recent discussions of the reading of early Greek inscrip-

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual

43

tions and the meanings they held for contemporaries. Dedications as early as Mantiklos’s confront us with a potentially fatal

problem: the possibility that there was no reading—and perhaps that none was intended, at least not by human visitors to the sanctuary. Regarding the appar-

ently awkward layout of Mantiklos’s epigram on the statue’s thighs, Robb argues that “no concession is made to the needs of a potential reader.” If one adds the hoards of other dedications in the sanctuary and the limited spread of liter-

acy, it seems unlikely that many passersby would undertake a careful viewing or complete reading. Robb concludes that early dedicatory inscriptions “were never intended to be read by humans. Rather, they permitted the object, as surrogate for the donor, to speak continuously before the god."'? The “me” in

Mantiklos's first sentence seems to confirm this position, perhaps suggesting that such objects were conceived of as animate.?? I cannot present here a full ar-

gument for the alternative, that visitors to sanctuaries viewed dedications and read their inscriptions?! However, with special reference to Mantiklos's offering, I shall sketch two lines that such an argument might take, one from direct

evidence that suggests such encounters did occur, another from the way that a process of reading was encoded in the inscriptions. Beginning in the later Archaic period, visitors to sanctuaries certainly paid attention to agalmata and read their inscriptions. One can cite Herodotus's fascination with inscribed dedications,? the carefully readable presentation of in-

scriptions on bases and plaques, and expressions in epigrams indicating their intended audience, for instance, [ἐπι] γιγνο[μένοις ]--“ΟΥ people who live later”

(CEG

1.264);

πᾶσιν

ἀνθρόποις ----ἴοτ

all

men”

(286);

βροτοῖς

écopav—“for mortals to see" (399). De Polignac, Morgan, and others show that even before Mantiklos’s time, dedications had a great impact on visitors to sanctuaries, serving as mediating mechanisms by which members of communities negotiated relationships with a god, each other, and other communities.” An object like Mantiklos’s statue, with its value, quality, and placement atop something like a tripod,’* would certainly call itself to people's attention and

thus invite that kind of negotiation. As to the inscription, reading should not be envisaged as the solitary act appropriate to literate cultures. Hurwit constructs plausible contexts of communal reading, envisaging several people working out a text together, an appropriate scenario for Archaic sanctuaries.?° Additionally,

specific objections to the legibility of Mantiklos’s epigram are exaggerated: the script is clear and incised deeply, and Jeffery believes that the first line’s unusual

movement from left to right accommodated readers whose view was obstructed by an attribute in the statue’s left hand.?*

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Svenbro successfully challenges the idea that early inscriptions were conceived of as speaking for themselves, in part by showing that a first-person pronoun identifying the inscribed object does not support the idea." He argues that Archaic Greeks thought of alphabetic writing as a tool for prompting speech and that uses of the first person encoded the speech situation of an inscription's vocal reading. The god might have been an intended reader of a dedication like Mantiklos's, but human passersby were more likely conceived of in

that role;?® and in any case, the first-person pronoun does not contradict either scenario. No readers could logically say "Mantiklos dedicated me” as an autonomous utterance of their own; but, as often in inscription read aloud was a "narrator," not uttered "ego." Readers lent their voices to the would speak, but only when a reader uttered text thus encoded an intended, presumably

performed poetry, the "ego" of an to be identified with the one who "ego" of the dedication; the object the words aloud. The "ego" in the typical situation of reading. But

Svenbro loses sight of the hearer, offering us, as it were, a tree falling in a lonely woods. I believe the first-person pronouns encode typical situations of hearing

as well as reading; they assume that someone is listening to the “ego,” a “you” standing before the dedication and looking at it, specifically, the readers themselves as hearers of their own voices and anyone else in earshot (including the god). In this way, Mantiklos's epigram encodes its reading as a kind of performance before an audience.

Several scholars have been influenced by Svenbro in their attempts to understand inscribed "texts in terms of the semiotics of speech";? but they have focused more than he has on the meanings that inscriptions and inscribed objects held for contemporaries. Sourvinou-Inwood's methodology, as mine in

part, consists of the reconstruction of readings and viewings—primarily of Archaic epitaphs and grave markers in her case—based on a reconstruction of the

verbal and iconographical associations readers and viewers brought to the process of making meaning." She does not, however, articulate a relationship between the force of reading a certain kind of epigram and the effects of speech and other acts performed in a certain kind of ceremonial occasion; and thus she misses an important aspect of the way epigraphic genres functioned as genres of Archaic performed poetry. Other scholars are more suggestive on the relationship between epigrams and occasions. Thomas and Steiner approach Archaic and Classical inscriptions in ways that could lead one to speak—although they do not—of the "generic" force of reading as the reactivation of a special occasion. Thomas proposes that an in-

scribed object served as an authoritative symbol embodying the force of utter-

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual

45

ances made on significant occasions, inscribed laws, for example, fixing solemn vocal pronouncements of laws.?! Those encountering such an inscription would be as impressed by the law’s authority as when listening to its oral performance. However, since, for Thomas, this occurrence need not—and perhaps normally did not—involve reading the texts, she does not attempt reconstruc-

tions of readings. Steiner surveys Greek literature to document ancient mentalities concerning inscribed agalmata, literally “splendid, delightful objects,” the regular epigrammatic word for dedications. They were conceived of as talismans, representing, symbolizing, and keeping alive “ritual transactions” in

which they played a role, including in the case of dedicated agalmata, “the ratification of the exchanges that structure relationships between men and gods.”?? Steiner's treatment of Pindaric epinicians is most relevant here. She accepts the position, reviewed earlier in the first section, that performances reactivated victory rituals; and she associates this repeatability with Pindar’s frequent metaphor of epinician performance as a dedication offered to a god, a performed agalma for which the words of the song serve as the inscription, repeating, for example, the herald’s proclamation of victory just as athletes’ dedicatory inscriptions do.?? Although Steiner does not say so, the mentalities behind

Pindar’s metaphor seem to have been, first, that composing a poem, crafting an agalma, and writing on it were conceived of as parallel processes of “entextualizing” an occasion—fixing its force in repeatable form, and second, that (re)performing a poem, viewing an agalma, and reading its inscription were “recontextualizations” or reactivations of the occasion, in this case, the victory rituals.*4 In a related vein, Depew in this volume argues that self-representation as an agalma was an essential feature of the genre of hymn; it would function in performance as “generic” self-representation in a genre defining itself as an offering of verbal praise. By describing their singing as an offering to the god, performers of hymns contextualized their performance as a ritual of offering that would be repeated in every performance, when the gift of praise was given again.

“Reading” Mantiklos’s Dedication I believe that “reading” dedications, that is, viewing the agalmata and reading or hearing their epigrams, functioned in ways that suggested to poets and made understandable to their audiences the figure of performed poetry as agalma. Specifically, as Depew does with hymns, I argue from a view of genre based on pragmatics and performance theory: insofar as “reading” dedications contextualized a certain kind of ceremonial occasion, they functioned as a genre of

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Joseph W. Day

performance poetry. But as Steiner does with Pindar, I see the occasion of per-

formance as a reactivation of an older occasion. Now an example is required: Mantiklos’s Apollo, with CEG 1.326 cited previously. I offer a reconstruction of

“reading” this early statue-dedication with its two-hexameter epigram as a paradigm for the “reading” of Archaic inscribed agalmata generally, having demonstrated elsewhere the extent to which its features are typical of the genre.»

The epigram conveys a straightforward message, but what kind of context did readers and viewers find themselves in, and thus, what was the force of reading and hearing?* In what follows, reconstruction of their "generic" expectations and recognition of genre markers, both verbal in the inscription and visual in the statue, will facilitate a limited recovery? of the context that emerged in reading

and

viewing.

I concentrate

on

one

contention

triggered

by

chariwettan (charis-filled): those who read the epigram and viewed the statue

enacted a context of ritual charis, first, by recognizing that that is what was represented—in essence recognizing the piece's genre markers; and second, by generating ritual charis in that very process of recognition, in effect activating ritual

and thus reactivating Mantiklos's original act of offering. Before turning to Mantiklos, however, let us briefly define ritual charis, especially as it relates to explicit poetic uses of the word as a genre marker in the way I shall argue it is used in epigrams. An aspect of the performance of religious ritual—public, festive, "top-rank" ritual—was the negotiation of a context of charis (pleasure, joy)? joining god, sponsor, performer, audience, and community in pleasurable reciprocity. I need not rehearse here the evidence for the aesthetic richness of Archaic religious and other (especially gift-giving) rituals, or poetic uses of charis and its relatives like chairó to describe this richness itself, agalmata used or given in the rituals, their gracious effects on witnesses or recipients, and those persons' grateful responses. However, I shall cite evidence for the "generic," performative force of charis-words in ritual language portrayed in poetic narratives, in ritual or quasi-ritual poems like hymns and epinicians, and in inscribed hymns, all of which seem to reflect actual cultic speech. The only exact parallel for the prayer in Mantiklos's epigram appears in

Homer's description of a libation to Poseidon performed amid sacrificial festivity. "Mentor" prays while libating (Odyssey 3.58): δίδον χαρίεσσαν ἀμοιβήν. Such an occasion was typically characterized by the term charis or a related

word in poetry.? In this context, the prayer "grant a charis-filled return" would be understood at least partly as a request to return like for like, to give charts to

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual

47

the ritual in return for the charis that the ritual gives.*? This practice is supported by many passages, including ones in hymnic and epinician poetic agalmata. In hymns, the god is asked to enjoy the charis-filled offering of song and festivity, most commonly and simply with the hymnic xatpe (rejoice).*! In return, performers ask the god to give festive charis, to fill this or future occasions with it. Homeric Hymn 26 joins both kinds of request (11-12): .. . οὕτω χαῖρε... | δὸς δ’ ἡμᾶς χαίροντας és ὥρας αὖτις ἱκέσθαι, “rejoice in this song ... grant us to come again in future seasons in festive rejoicing."*? Such uses of charis are self-representative: explicitly or implicitly as in Odyssey 3, they attribute charis to the ritual of offering or the agalma as it is being offered. This self-representation is “generic,” performative. Charis-words in these circumstances*? were markers of genre: they alerted the divine and the human audience to the presence of a certain familiar conceptual and verbal frame for understanding the utterance, thereby showing that the speakers intended to initiate a social and religious context of mutual charis. To the extent that discourse continued or responses were made within that frame, a context of charts was activated in speech. And to the extent that the ritual, performance, or offering, was perceived by the audience as charis-filled, the context was enacted in fact. In the performance of religious poetry, then, even indirectly representing the event as charis-filled—and certainly explicitly calling it so—would help fulfill the purpose of the ritual occasion, which was to bring about a relationship of charis binding participants, audience, and god. This performativity

could have powerful religious consequences. For example, in Pindar's fr. 94b, possibly

a daphnephoric

hymn

performed

in procession

to the Theban

Ismenion, the maidens sing, as they bear the bay twigs to Apollo (3—5):** [Yxe]ı yàp ὁ [Ao€]ias | [π]ρ[όὀ]φρω[ν] adavarav χάριν | Θήβαις ἐπιμ«ε»ίξων, “Loxias (Apollo) is come, glad, about to mix immortal

charis into Thebes.”

They then describe themselves and the music. Generic and religious performativity would have been inextricable here. A hoped-for situation was represented: Apollo present, to spread charis. That situation would be reified through the charis of the performance in general, and possibly by dance steps imitating or summoning the god sympathetically. At the level of performance or discourse, but also at a level we might call religious experience, the god

would be felt to be present in epiphany, approaching his shrine in sympathy with his processing worshipers, bringing charis to the festival in return for the charis they bring to make him prophrön.“ I shall now argue that viewing and reading Mantiklos's dedication can be compared with that sort of poetic and religious performance in certain essen-

48

Joseph W. Day

tial aspects of its force, if not in its full aesthetic or emotional power. Let us be-

gin with the dedication’s “generic” representation of ritual charts and turn subsequently to the enactment of such charis. In each part, I start with the statue and proceed to the epigram. As a thing given to a god in an at least minimal ceremony, every dedication was a séma and mnéma of a ritual act, but in many dedications, that occasion is symbolically or figuratively represented as a charis-filled ritual, an especially

fine and prestigious event. Dedications exhibiting a visual quality of charis through their beauty, value, or other characteristics can be said to represent the occasion’s charis symbolically. Mantiklos’s statue certainly qualifies; but because such symbolizing of ritual is less separable from the activation of it, I discuss it later. Dedications as figurative representations of charis-filled ritual include images of a thing sacrificed or offered, of the offerant, of the god as receiver, or of an explicitly narrative combination. Mantiklos’s statue, I believe, represents Apollo as archer god, accoutered as when he answered Chryses’ prayer in Iliad 1,

though here he would be considered benign, prophrön, as if coming to a festival in his honor. The image might have called to a viewer’s mind a cult statue or ritual epiphanies, perhaps ones staged in the Ismenion itself, if we imagine processions there involving the god’s statue or actors playing his role.* Therefore, although too early for secure parallels and not itself a cult statue, it might still be said to represent Apollo in epiphany.*’ If so, it represents what Mantiklos prayed for: Apollo come to receive the charis-filled gift from him, to hear his

prayer, and to grant him the charis of a return.* That idea would be enhanced if Apollo held a phiale in a ritual gesture reciprocating Mantiklos's ritual of offering.” The epigram complements this representation of ritual. Μάντικλός μ᾽ avedexe encodes a basic act of offering. The mention of a tithe announces the type of offering, perhaps implying that it fulfilled a vow, if the association in the common later epigraphic formula euxamenos dekatén (having vowed a tithe) was felt so early.*° The epithets represent Apollo as archer. As Pucci notes,°! they increase the statue’s representational power by making the reader conscious of poetic visualizations, expanding the intertextual frame from visual to verbal genres, so that epiphanies heard in performances of song and poetry would be recalled to complement ones seen in rituals and art. The prayer's parallel in Odyssey 3 shows it was appropriate poetic speech for rites of offering. Ancient readers might have conceived of it as a prayer Mantiklos uttered during his ritual of dedication; and it may transcribe his utterance, but that possibility is un-

provable.* It is normally taken as a simple request for a grateful return;** but

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual

49

that privileges too much the idea of reciprocity as against that of pleasure or the ritual associations in charis. The representation of ritual in the statue and the rest of the epigram would guide readers toward the ritual semantics of charis seen in hymnic requests of like for like: the charis of the statue and of the ritual of its offering are implied as conditions for Phoibos to respond to Mantiklos’s prayer by coming in epiphany during his ritual and giving it charis. I conclude that the epigram, narrating and giving words to an offertory act that invoked Apollo, and the statue, depicting him responding, represent Mantiklos's ritual as a religiously effective interaction in two successive phases. I shall argue next that, in decoding this representation of ritual charis, viewers and readers activated it. Again, let us begin with the statue, followed by the epigram. The representation of Apollo as archer praises him by alluding to his exploits. Thus, from his viewpoint, the statue does what ritual does: it offers to the god the charis of praise.** For the god to decode the representation of ritual is thus for him to enter into the kind of context that ritual tries to bring about and to experience the effects of ritual. Would human viewers have had such an experience? I suggest here two ways that viewing Mantiklos's statue enacted a context of ritual charis that would join god, dedicator, and viewer: first, in the charis of a viewer's aesthetic response, and second, in a religiously and socially constitutive mediation like that effected in contexts of ritual charis. Furthermore, as representations of epiphany in poetry or cult could effect epiphany at least at the level of performance or discourse, so viewers' responses to Mantiklos's statue might have enacted the epiphany it represents.

Greek poetry could use charis to describe the beauty of Mantiklos's statue and viewers’ pleasurable aesthetic responses. We cannot assume that Greeks found the same things beautiful that we do. However, what we know of Archaic ways of looking at visual representations suggests that someone performing po-

etry could call a statue like Mantiklos's daidaleos or poikilos; and things so described were also regularly said to exhibit or inspire charis. Those terms describe objects that are rich in detail, patterning, and the use of metal, incision, or other means of enhancing sheen. Such features of Mantiklos's statue include the bronze itself, lost glass or stone eyes, lost attachments like a flower on the fillet, incision to indicate the fillet, coils of hair, a necklace, torso musculature, a belt possibly overlaid with precious metal,” and pubic hair, and the inscription itself. In Homer, things described as charienta, daidalea, and poikila are used in various rituals and given as prizes; guest, marriage, or other gifts; and as gifts to gods. They are agalmata, another word referring (originally) to aesthetic re-

50

Joseph W. Day

sponse.? These words were increasingly confined to dedications and other religious contexts in Archaic poetry, as seen in epigrams and hymnic and epinician

poetic agalmata. Just as such verbal self-representation helped produce generic, occasional responses in the audiences of performed poems as we saw in the case of charis-words in hymns, the visual qualities referred to by those words belonged to a visual symbolic language that contemporaries would recognize and respond to instantly. Those qualities’ presence in Mantiklos’s statue would both generate an aesthetic response of charis and call a viewer's attention to its status as a ritual agalma. Those qualities therefore represented ritual charis symbolically, even as they reified the representation by activating a context of charis. The tendency to confine these aesthetic terms to religious contexts in poetry reflects eighth- and seventh-century history. A decline in private giftexchange detectable in grave goods and an increase in the publicly visible giving of dedications, especially in metal, are to be connected to aspects of the development of poleis visible also in the elaboration of sanctuary architecture and ritual.5® In such a context, specifically in a period when cult and buildings in the Ismenion were developing along with the Theban polis, the charis of viewing Mantiklos's statue meant more than the pleasure of viewing something physically pleasing. If viewers did not turn away from the statue but instead entered into its visual language to decode what it represented, they negotiated with it over the religious pantheon and the sociopolitical structure of the polis, both

represented in it authoritatively, that is, in a valuable medium erected publicly. For, while the statue reflected preexisting, authorized constructions of cosmic and social reality, discourse with it affirmed their authority. Such viewing was a

constitutive act carried out by the community through its representatives: the viewers who played the part that audiences and choruses did in religious and poetic performances. At the religious level, viewers affirmed that Phoibos had a special role in the Panhellenic pantheon as archer god and that this role somehow corresponded to his local manifestation.?? At the sociopolitical level, they

affirmed the status of the sanctuary and those who controlled it. Viewers also negotiated the dedicator's status in the community as someone enjoying a special relationship to the god and powerful enough to dedicate this fine object. Furthermore, as viewers experienced the statue's aesthetic charis, they felt the force of the dedicator's civic benefaction or euergesia, and such charts required in return the charis of praise and honor.” A religious synthesis of private and polis interests was thus effected through the activation of the charis

or pleasure derived from due recognition of status as well as from physical beauty.

Epigram and Reader: Generic Force as (Re-)Activation of Ritual

51

Elaborate public rituals and dedications like Mantiklos’s statue were thus

functionally parallel sites for, in Bourdieu's terms, the exchange of economic and cultural capital for symbolic capital and the circulation of that capital.$! By generating a context of charis, ritual (including the singing of hymns) mediated between those who sponsored and performed the ritual and those who enjoyed

it, that is, both the divine recipient and the human audience. Such charis constituted a medium for exchange and negotiation,” and thus for the articulation of cosmic and social structure. Viewing Mantiklos's statue, then, would have had something of the communicative force of a public ritual sponsored by him. Mantiklos converted his economic capital, a tithe, into a form that, when

viewed, caused charis to circulate back and forth as beauty, pleasure, favor, gratitude, and recognition of status among Mantiklos, Apollo, and human viewers. Insofar as such an economy of charis constituted an element of the religious and sociopolitical structure of Mantiklos's community, people's viewing of his statue helped construct that community. But would a viewer's response extend to experience of the god's epiphany? Reader-oriented and viewer-oriented approaches invite us to go beyond social function to personal response.” If audiences negotiated with statues or actors imitating gods in ritual processions in

the belief, at least at the level of performance, that they were interacting with the god, why should we deny that, at some level, viewers of Mantiklos's Apollo felt that the god was present, giving and receiving charis? A religious response would thus be inherent in viewing and recognizing the statue's visual signs, or differently, visual markers of genre would guide the activation of a religious occasion of the sort they represent.

Let us return to Mantiklos's epigram. The "generic" force of reading (and hearing) its words, as that of viewing the statue, can be reconstructed as an activation of ritual charis. I discuss first how readers (and hearers) functioned as

performers (and audiences) of ritual speech-acts, and second how the epigram's prayer builds a reader's religious experience into its deictic grammar in a way unique to inscriptions with gods addressed in the vocative and second-person

prayers. By uttering the words aloud in the public space of the sanctuary, readers performed acts typical of charis-filled ritual; and by recognizing the words'

meanings and continuing to read (or listen), people in effect recognized them as cues to a genre of ritual discourse and accepted the invitation to enter into a context of ritual charis. Specifically, readers negotiated on Mantiklos's behalf with the god and the community, as ritual performers would. Readers reminded the god of the dedicator's former gift and prayed for the reciprocal

52

Joseph W. Day

charis due him, as Chryses prays in Iliad 1, reminding Apollo of the charienta (charis-filled) gifts he gave earlier (39-41). The epigram’s prayer would be expected to persuade the god, because the praise in the epithets and the utterance of his name would please him, creating a context of vocal, verbal charis in his sanctuary where he was most likely to hear. The epithets functioned as abbreviated hymnic narratives of Apollo's exploits of archery, thus serving as verbal gerata or markers of recognition that praised the god and affirmed his timéhonor or status in the pantheon, as the statue’s corresponding features also did.

Readers thus spoke the god into epiphany, but not as powerfully as in the prayer in the second hexameter with its apostrophe of Phoibos. At the level of discourse, apostrophe is performative, conjuring up the one apostrophized.%

Within the context created by reading Mantiklos’s epigram, then, the god would come in epiphany, spoken into existence in the prayer and visualized in the first

hexameter’s epithets. It was, of course, Mantiklos’s name that readers uttered first, literally sounding out the kleos or verbal fame of the man who benefited the sanctuary with the pleasing object, and perhaps specifying something about him, if the manti-seer element was somehow biographical, indicating his or his family’s profession." As they continued to read, they further represented Mantiklos’s status to anyone in earshot. The assertion of a do-ut-des relationship with Apollo, the implication of achievement or wealth in labeling the dedication a

tithe, and that label’s praise of Mantiklos’s pious generosity would construct a social persona of him. In agreeing to listen and construe the epigram's meaning, a reader and other hearers of the reading voice accepted the inscription as authoritative, and they affirmed the persona that it presented just as audiences at religious and civic rituals affirmed the status of performers and sponsors.

The preceding reconstruction suggests that, as the epigram’s prayer was uttered, it was answered: the god was spoken into existence in a form corresponding to that visualized in the statue; and reading the whole epigram caused the

charis of praise to circulate among Mantiklos, Apollo, and the community that worshipped at the Ismenion. But we cannot write off the reader as a mere vocal mechanism in this effective religious interaction. The charts enacted in reading and viewing the dedication as I have reconstructed them is a charis that linked god, dedicator, and reader-viewer in pleasurable reciprocity, and that charis is

precisely what the prayer's reader would be asking the god to give. As it was uttered, the representation of the hoped-for state of affairs was reified: the god

"came" to a ritual event bringing its charis with him— "came; that is, in some-

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thing like the way he “came” in sympathy with the performers of Pindar's daphnephoric hymn. The prayer was thus answered as a request by the reader on Mantiklos’s behalf; but it would also appear to be a successful prayer for

charis by the reader on his or her own behalf. I believe the reader’s own religious experience of this sort was built into the epigram’s deictic grammar. Analysis of this short text’s deixis, specifically identification of its “narra-

tor” or “voice,” is complicated. In the first sentence, the dedication is “me” and the implied “you” is the reader, or rather hearers, whereas in the prayer, an im-

plied “ego” addresses the god as “you.” This deictic grammar presents no problem, if the statue is construed as an autonomous speaker and the god as addressee throughout; but various objections weaken appeals to the concept of speaking objects, and my working hypothesis has been that the speaker was always the reader in the Archaic mentality.*? A question arises, then, as to whether

or not the prayer introduces a change in distance between the epigram’s internal speaking voice and the passerby who incarnates that voice in a given reading.’ Readers lent their voices to another “ego” in the first sentence, and also in the second, insofar as they repeated Mantiklos’s prayer or articulated the statue’s message. However, the prayer could also be spoken by readers on their own behalf, whereas the first sentence could not. The emphatic tu, perhaps enhanced by de as a cue to conversational involvement and continued in the vocative Phoibe and second-person didoi, would invite this shift to an open deictic

grammar, which allowed any reader to speak in propria persona. Several epitaphs in CEG 1 require shifts of voice, often marked by de, and other epigrams

seem to invite it."' Even if not required by the syntax, then, a deictic shift in Mantiklos’s epigram should be reconstructed as one way of reading this text,

that is, a shift from statue to reader as the “ego” of the uttered inscription.” That the shift was felt in Archaic readings is suggested by the perfect fit between

the divinely given charis that the prayer requests and the reader-viewer's experience of the god present with charis.”3 In summary, readers and viewers of Mantiklos’s epigram and statue would experience their interaction with his dedication as a context of charis, that is, reciprocal pleasure circulating and defining relations among themselves, their community, Mantiklos, and Apollo. In addition, the visual and verbal generic

markers—the cues representing the context invited— would point toward a certain kind of charis-filled context: fine, top-rank religious rituals of offering. Insofar as the epigram and statue represent Mantiklos's act of dedication, the context of charis enacted in reading and viewing would constitute a reactivation of his ritual, in a way functionally parallel to an epinician performance's reactiva-

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tion of victory rituals. But it would be the readers’ and viewers’ ritual as much as a reactivation of Mantiklos’s ritual. A reciprocal appropriation would take place, with readers and viewers appropriating his dedication for their ritual acts, as it appropriated that ritual to reactivate his. Within this context, chariwettan in Mantiklos’s epigram would function as an especially effective marker of genre. In performed hymns, such charis-words cued an audience

to the charis aloud, gious

intended context of the performance by naming its force or effect: the of a top-rank occasion of offering. As Mantiklos’s epigram was read his original offering was, by implication, represented as such a prestioccasion characterized by charis; and in other epigrams, this characteri-

zation is not simply implied. Charis can be attributed to the act of dedi-

cation, as in CEG 1.365 (pillar base for statue, Argos near the Heraion, ca. 475—468):”4

BáAocs τόνδ᾽ ἀνέθεκ' ᾿Αργεῖος | IIparéa hutos

πατρὸς μνᾶμα, | epovo παιδὶ χαριζόμενος. Balos, an Argive, son of Prateas, set up this as a memorial of his father, giving charis to (charizomenos) the child of Kronos.

In addition, however, Mantiklos’s chariwettan and other epigraphic prayers for a return of charis (typically χάριν avrıöidov)”° would serve as representational

cues to the kind of context enacted in the viewing and reading. In fact, his chariwettan would have performative force: by uttering it in propria persona, readers helped bring about the context it describes, namely, the god’s presence with charis.

Conclusion In its attempt to recover the pragmatics of a genre, this paper has concerned itself with reconstructing the internal context of reception, that is, the perception of contextual (or occasional) cues and the socially and religiously constitutive actions and responses of readers and hearers of epigrams and viewers of dedi-

cated agalmata. In short, our subject has been “generic” representation and force. What must have been a typical external context of encounters with inscribed agalmata in all periods would reinforce the reciprocal ritual appropriation posited earlier for Mantiklos's dedication. Herodas's Mimiambus 4 pro-

vides an illustration. Two women offer a sacrifice in a sanctuary of Asklepios and dedicate a pinax-votive plaque to memorialize it. One woman directs a

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55

prayer to the sanctuary’s gods, depicted there in a series of statues (1, 11, 13):

χαίροις, ἄναξ Ilainov (may you enjoy, lord Paieon); thea δεῦτε. . . δέξαισθε (be present, propitious . . . may you accept [the offering] ). Such language echoes hymns like the inscribed Erythraian paian: yatpé μοι, ἵλαος... ἰὲ Παιάν... 7$ The woman's friend voices amazement at these and nearby agalmata, and thus begins an encounter comparable to my reconstruction of one with Mantiklos's dedication. The quality, placement, and subject of the

agalmata exert authority, which the women respond to and affirm in their awe and in continuing the encounter. The amazed viewer asks who made and dedicated one of the agalmata, and the other reads its inscription out or summarizes it, naming artists and dedicator, and in so doing, sounding out their kleos (24-25): Εὐθίης . . . ἔστησεν ὁ Πρήξωνος (Euthies son of Prexon dedicated).

This prompts her partner, the inscription’s hearer, to respond with a prayer for those men that echoes the one her friend said in making their own offering (25-

26), ἴλεως ein into their ritual side which, as a ritual is in turn

. . . IIawov. The women appropriate verbally, and quite concretely if this is religiously charged spot, the pinax was appropriated by the absent dedicator,

the dedicator's offering the statue of Hygieia beplaced (19-20); but their whose act of offering is

resurrected in their words and actions, especially the prayer requesting what he

would have requested. Mantiklos’s inscribed prayer would have guided its readers through what these women do spontaneously. The experiences of Herodas’s women would not have been out of place

much earlier. Visitors to sanctuaries often encountered and used older dedications while engaged in rituals of their own, as illustrated in Euripides’s Jon. Xouthos’s ritual banquet takes place in a tent made of tapestries that Herakles dedicated to commemorate his victory over the Amazons. That original occa-

sion of dedication was preserved in local memory of the sort that inscriptions enhanced or replaced. The remains of Hera’s sanctuary at Perachora show that a comparable scene occurred regularly as early as Mantiklos's time." Later diners, in preparing their ritual meals, used spits dedicated earlier; but they would also

read out epigrams on the spit-stands found in a ritual dining hall, including

CEG 1.352,. . . [εἸὐμενέοι! σα Ὠνπόδ[ εξαι] (receive (the offering) with kindly intent) and 354, δραχμὰ éyó, hepa Aeve[dAeve] (I am a handful of spits, oh Hera of the white arms). Ritual diners who uttered such prayers and invoked Hera by epithet performed acts appropriate to their own situation, even as they

reactivated the dedicators' original rituals. The reconstructions of ancient readings undertaken in this paper illustrate not only a pragmatics-based approach to Archaic dedications but also a cultural

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one, that is, a method of working from artifacts and texts toward a recovery of the mentalities and contexts of their ancient reception.’ These approaches require attention to the external context of reception; but in articulating the status of the Archaic dedicatory epigram as a genre, my chief concern has been internal or emergent context. Thus, in arguing that the epigram functioned as a genre of performed poetry, I have compared the emergence of communicative

context and thus force in the performance of Archaic poetry with their emergence in the reading and hearing of epigrams. An Archaic poem could be said to belong to a certain genre, insofar as its performance precipitated certain effects; and those effects typically constituted (at least in part) the intended ef-

fects or force of a certain kind of ceremonial occasion or ritual. Similarly, when an epigram like that of Mantiklos was read, a context of charis was negotiated; and within that context, certain constructions of the social and religious orders were affirmed in something like the way they would have been in the charis generated by elaborate rituals of offering, though of course on a much lesser scale. In poetic performances, furthermore, a kind of “generic” self-representation played an important role in this functioning: by representing their song as belonging to a certain genre of poem or of occasion, performers could the more efficiently cue a poetically and culturally competent audience to an intended

context. But this kind of representation also allowed a performance to become a reactivation of an older occasion, as often in epinician poetry: by representing

the original victory rituals and then generating in performance the kind of effects that such rituals typically produced, epinician performances would be experienced by audiences as reactivations of those rituals. Reading (and hearing) epigrams would function in a parallel manner: the representation of the dedicator’s original act of offering as ritual would be activated in the reader's (or hearer’s) experience of a context of charis. Finally, we have seen that “generic” force and contextualization operated at the level of visual representation

in the case of dedications in a way that would support their functioning in readings of epigrams; and this process too can be compared with the performance of poetry, where dance and gestures, the visible gender of the performers, and spectacle of various kinds functioned in tandem with the words of the song. It seems, furthermore, that epigram should perhaps be considered part of a larger performance genre: the hymn. Or more accurately, the “performance” consisting of people’s encounters with the whole ensemble of dedication, inscription, and physical context in a sanctuary may have occupied a different place on the same “generic” continuum as the performance of hymns. As we saw earlier, for example, the function of hymnic xatpe was dedicatory, calling

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57

on the god to come and enjoy the song as an offering of praise. We can recon-

struct readings of CEG 396 similarly, with the reader calling on Apollo to come and enjoy the offering (small terra-cotta stele, Metapontion, ca. 525-500):” Nixöpaxös μ’ ἐπόε. | χαῖρε Fáva£ hépaxdes: | 6 τοι κεραμεύς u’ avébexe: |

δὸς δέ F iv ἀνθρόποις | δόξαν ἔχεν dalv. Nikomachos made me.—Rejoice, lord Herakles; the potter set me up for you; grant him to have good repute among men.

But the relationship between hymn and dedication is the subject of Depew's paper.

CHAPTER

THREE

[3][2 ES

Enacted and Represented Dedications: Genre and Greek Hymn Mary

DEPEW

In modern scholarly treatments of Greek hymn, it is not uncommon to find early texts treated side by side with later, even Hellenistic, examples of the

genre.' A fundamental assumption in what follows is that, although there does exist an evident continuity in the long tradition of Greek hymn, chronology matters in uncovering ancient Greek conceptualizations of genre, and that it is a particularly important consideration in understanding what "genre" might

mean in terms of Greek hymn.’ Archaic and early Classical Greece embodied, in Herington's now famous phrase, a "song culture,’ "a society whose prime medium for the expression and communication of its most important feelings and ideas was song."? Poems were not meant to be read but rather were performed

publicly, on a variety of occasions in and through which communities created and sustained their social, religious, and political identity. For this period, then, we must approach the conceptualization of genre in ways that take into account the nature of oral performance.* In this volume, Joseph Day and Deborah Boedeker articulate and integrate into their own tasks various approaches to the performative character of early Greek poetry and prose. My own focus will

be on the function of display in the hymnic tradition, with regard to which Richard Bauman's definition of the term "performance" is particularly useful: "a mode of communication, . . . the essence of which resides in the assumption

of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative skill, highlighting the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content . . . [Performance also provides] the most concretely empirical framework for the comprehension of oral literature as social action by directing 59

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attention to the actual conduct of artistic verbal performance in social life.” There have been a number of recent studies of early Greek poetry that examine its status as communication, and thus its conformity to many of the rules of ordinary language.* In such a context, poetic genres will be a matter of predetermined structures and conventions, formal and thematic, which act as guidelines, but they will also involve Bauman's definitive criterion to differentiate them from speech genres: the presentation, or display, of the particular social task the performance is accomplishing, and the involvement of the audience in that task." The way Greek hymns praise and display their own performance has been

noted by many. As early as the third century c.e., the rhetorician Menander approves of the way hymnists typically draw attention to the spectacle of their texts' performance: the god will be pleased, he says, by humans displaying their excellence in various activities, and this pleasure will make the god want to be present when hymns are performed. In what follows, I will be concerned with how hymns draw attention to their own performance through deictic language,

or performative first-person verbs, first-person pronouns, reference to and representation of the location and time of the performance, and other linguistic forms that draw attention to the “here,” the "now," and the “I” of a celebratory

occasion. I will agree with the recent arguments of Day and Pulleyn, who both conclude that a hymn is an agalma, or a gift offered to a god by and on behalf of a community or a group.? In particular, I will examine how it is through deictic

markers particular to them that hymns display and enact the giving of a gift to a god. As Day points out in this volume, the function and the form of hymns must be studied alongside the functioning of other agalmata, such as dedicatory statues or reliefs, and placed within the context of sanctuaries and their function-

ing. Artifacts such as statues and reliefs are, like hymns (although in different media), representational. All of these offerings typically display and represent, via deictic expressions suitable to their own medium, the acts of giving and receiving, and thus the reciprocal relation of pleasure and recognition between god and human dedicant that such communication effects, a relation summed up by the word charis.'? Later, in the second section, I will draw connections be-

tween hymns and these other agalmata and will examine the significance of the fact that they typically re-present what hymns present, or enact: a group giving a top-rank gift to a god. In the third section, I will examine how the presence of deictic language in

hymns and in other kinds of Greek poetry, even in the Archaic period, marks an objectification of performances into texts, establishing a break between produc-

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tion and performance that some would deny for this period.'' As agalmata, hymns are also ktémata, negotiable commodities that potentially exist apart from the subjects who construct them and from the time and place in which they are performed." I will suggest, ultimately, that it is this deictic representa-

tion of performance situation that is recognized by postclassical poets as one of the most important markers of the hymnic genre, and that this recognition guaranteed both the continuity and the transformation of the genre.

Prayer and Hymn Sanctuaries were the site not only for performing hymns but also, of course, for

uttering prayers, so it is important at the outset to clarify the relation between prayer and hymn, two different kinds of utterances that are very often

conflated.!? Why these categories tend to be collapsed is well illustrated by a third-century c.g. inscribed text found at the site of the temple of Zeus Diktaios at Palaikastro in Crete, a text that has been called by modern editors both “The Dictaean Hymn to the Kouros” and the “Palaikastro Prayer.” On the face of it,

the piece appears to be a hymn:"* in its earliest usage "hymnos" means simply "song," and the text's refrain, at least, is clearly meant to be sung. However, inso-

far as the refrain is both an invocation and a request, it would seem to suggest that this text is a prayer. With the refrain’s vocatives and imperatives, the chorus invokes the attention and presence of the Kouros: Ἰὼ μέγιστε Koüpe, / xatpé pow Kpóvew / ma ykparés . . . Aixrav ἐς ἐνιαντὸν / ἕρπε, καὶ γέγαθι μολπᾷ / (Io, greatest Kouros, be greeted/delighted, Kronian, ruler of all... come to Dikte to the yearly festival, and rejoice in our song, 1-6). The two im-

peratives that close the refrain, ἔρπε kai γέγαθι μολπᾷ, make the request that the chorus will elaborate and drive home at the song’s close. There they repeat the imperative θόρε (spring up) seven times (lines 47-60): “Spring up—in the wine-jars, and spring up in the fleecy flocks, and in the crops of fields spring up,

and in the house of fulfillment, . . . Spring up in our towns and people, spring up in the seafaring ships, spring up in the young of the people, spring up in the

. . . order.” The point of the song is to request the god's epiphany (the return of spring), that is, to appropriate the Kouros as well as the prosperity and civic

harmony that his presence brings with it.'5 The text's central narrative evokes a past shared by the god and the community for whom the chorus speaks: "You came here once before, at your birth. At that time you introduced an era of peace, fertility and justice" (to paraphrase lines 37-40). Such shared contexts

are what enable successful communications of any kind, since, as Bakker has stressed in several recent papers, all communication depends not on the assertion of facts or the expression of beliefs, but rather on interpersonal involve-

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ment.’ Thus, in a poetic performance, context is not something that is applied to preexisting formal elements, but it is negotiated between a performer (or a poet) and those present at the performance." In the case of this text, that shared past, to which the performers refer in the past tense so characteristic of a hymn’s “myth,” makes possible and meaningful the requests in 47ff. Come to Dikte now, the text continues, és ἐνιαντὸν, to the festal day when this song is sung (5, 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65). If a prayer is a request made to a god, then this text is in-

deed a prayer, made on behalf of a community as a whole. Prayers, of course, require an offering—a do (or dedi or dabo) ut des (1 give/ gave/will give so that you will give). But there is no mention here of a sacrifice, the most common of all offerings. An offering, however, is being presented to the god: the song itself, whose singers present their performance around the very locus of ritual dedication, the god’s altar. Χαῖρε, in the second line of the refrain, is present as a dedicatory formula in countless inscriptions, and is, of course, common in hymnic sign-offs. Charis as Joseph Day has argued in detail, is the quality that all agalmata, or top-rank gifts, possess. “Charis . . . , closely tied [as it is] to chairó . . . is the pleasure-causing quality of [a] gift [and of the occasion of its giving], its charm, beauty, and glamour.”'? Of course, not all

prayers are performed, in the sense that they need not embellish or put on display the communication they attempt to achieve. Thus a sacrifice or some other offering is typically offered, or promised, or referred to as having been given in the past, along with the request. In contrast, the χαῖρε of the Palaikastro text's second line suggests that the chorus is presenting the song they are singing, as

well as the dance that they might also be performing, as an offering that they are in the process of making (9-10). Xatpe here, as in other dedicatory contexts,

means

"enjoy this offering"? As Pulleyn sums

up the issue: “the most

significant functional difference between a hymn and a prayer is that the former

is a sort of negotiable ἄγαλμα which generates χάρις whereas the latter is not."? The Palaikastro text asks for the god's presence, which is what all hymns do just insofar as they are agalmata, and thus they invite a god's presence to delight in them.

The chorus in this text repeatedly refer to what they are doing in the god's sanctuary with a string of performative, first-person verbs and other deictic references to their temporal and spatial surround: xpéxopev πακτίσι, μείξαντες ἅμ᾽ avrotow, στάντες τεὸν ἀμφὶ βωμὸν εὐερκῆς, ἀείδομεν (we play on harps, mixing it with flutes, standing around your well-fenced altar, we sing).

Deictic language, or expressions that are fixed by a threefold axis of reference— by the person who is speaking or gesturing (the “I”), the place of utterance (the

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63

“here”), and the time of utterance (the “now”?!)—puts the singing of a song on display, and it does so in a particular temporal and spatial context. Here the spatial context is the god’s sanctuary (“around your altar”), where other offerings may have been on display, in close proximity, perhaps, to visible reminders

of the god’s presence; the temporal context is the god’s spring festival. Both matrices, secured by language that enables the chorus to speak on behalf of group it represents, connect the community to a mythical past it shares with god, whose epiphany is realized in the present by means of deictic language example, second-person imperatives, “your altar”). Just insofar as the song

the the (for de-

lights the Kouros (note the imperative and its object: yeyadı μολπᾷ, delight in the song)—that is, to the extent that a relation of charis is effected —the request for his presence is granted. In this rather weak sense, then, the Palaikastro text

functions as a prayer, or a request for the return of the Kouros. Insofar, however, as it also functions as an offering of song that is given in order to enable the fulfillment of that petition, it is a hymn.

The Palaikastro text might then suggest that the categories "prayer" and "hymn" are inextricably linked.? Might it thus be better to think in terms of general categories like "cult song" or “ritual poetry?”?? Yet in calling a text a “ritual" or a "cult" song, we may be ignoring distinctions that would have been tied to the demands of particular occasions. The most basic and the most widespread of Greek rituals is sacrifice, and, as Burkert has pointed out, the two words thusia (sacrifice) and euché (prayer) are so closely linked in usage that

they become synonymous.^* But after this pronouncement, Burkert goes on to define "hymn" as “[t]he invocation of the gods, the enunciation of wishes and entreaties.”*> Such an utterance is surely, or at least in some important sense, a

prayer.* To lump hymn together with prayer under the category of “ritual song" would seem to neglect differences between prayer and hymn that the following inscription from the Piraeus makes clear: concerning the cult of Bendis, it specifies that under certain circumstances, "no one is to sacrifice parabomia

in the sanctuary": παραβώμια δὲ μὴ [θύ]ειν [μ]ηδένα ἐν τῶι iepo[c."7 The inscription identifies parabomia ποῖ with prayers but with the offerings that accompany them.?® Hymns, the list implies, are not prayers, but are, like sacrifices and libations, offerings to a god. Some hymnic texts actually make explicit the equation agalma~ thusia (a “sacrificial offering," usually of an animal).? It is this func-

tioning as an offering, shared alike by texts that might be called “cultic” for their use in a god’s recurring festival, and by texts such as the corpus of “Homeric

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Hymns,” whose performance may have been tied more closely to competition

or even to quasi-sympotic occasions, that I would argue unifies the genre of Greek hymn.”

In agreement with Joseph Day, I have noted that the presence of χαῖρε at the close of a text is one marker of its status as a dedicatory offering. There are additional ways in which texts make this function explicit. The beginning of Pindar's sixth Paean, for example, exemplifies what Day calls the “8é€a:-motif”

that is common in dedicatory inscriptions: πρὸς Ὀλυμπίον Διός σε, xpvoéa κλντόμαντι Πυθοῖ, λίσσομαι Χαρίτεσσίν re kai σὺν ᾿Αφροδίτᾳ, / ἐν ζαθέῳ με δέξαι χρόνῳ / ἀοίδιμον Πιερίδων προφάταν (In the name of Zeus I beseech you, golden Pytho, famed for prophecy, with the Graces and with Aphrodite, receive me—the interpreter famous in song of the Muses—at the sacred time). Paeans seem to make most explicit this identification, asking the god to receive the performance as an offering.>' Some texts declare their status as a

dedicatory offering in other ways. Isyllus’s paean, for example, was inscribed and erected in the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus at the end of the fourth century B.c.E.: the text that precedes it says that Isyllus vowed to display the inscription in the sanctuary, having been so instructed in an oracle he received at Delphi.? The paean itself ends with these words: Tatra τοί, ὦ μέγ᾽ ἄριστε θεῶν, ἀνέθηκεν "IavAXos / τιἰμ]ῶν σὴν ἀρετήν, ὦναξ, ὥσπερ τὸ δίκαιον (Isyllus dedicated this to you, oh great one and best of gods, honoring your excellence, oh king, as is right). ἀνέθηκεν, of course, is formulaic in dedicatory inscriptions, where it connects the dedicator and the god in a relation of charis. Here it identifies the inscribed text as a dedicatory offering, meant to stand beside other offerings in the sanctuary as a continual reminder of the honor given

the god by its donor and of the privileged relation to the god that the gift marks and secures. In conclusion: if we understand hymns to have been sung (or inscribed) in the context of a sanctuary, then the performance of a hymnic text should parallel in important ways the functioning of the many dedicatory offerings, large and small, that would have defined such a space. The connection between dedicatory agalmata, inscriptions, and hymn has been made by Day and, to some extent, by Svenbro, Steiner, Kurke, and others, but none of these scholars has

had reason to examine fully the implications of this approach.” Dedicatory statues, votive reliefs, inscriptions, and hymns have one thing in common: they

typically represent, in deictic terms fitting to their medium, the act of dedication itself. If we understand the nature and functioning of this deixis in physical

dedicatory offerings, we will be in a better position to understand how verbal

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65

performances functioned as dedicatory offerings in ways that marked off hymn from other kinds of performed song. Deixis, Dedication, and Display Insofar as deictic expressions situate a communication in its spatial and temporal surround, and in relation to an "I" and a “you,” they are "[the] single most

obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves.”’* Deictics should therefore provide a key to the conceptualization of genre in a "song culture," of how formal elements and content in (what is to us only) a text relate both to particular

performance occasions as well as to wider social contexts. As Day argues in this

volume, the "reading" of dedicatory offerings by visitors to sanctuary is an act that affirms the status that these objects announce for their dedicator, a status

that involves in particular a reciprocal and durative connection of charis between a human being and a god. That connection is represented by means of a verbal and visual grammar of deixis. Archeological evidence dating from the ninth to the seventh centuries suggests a deliberate, new organization of sanctuaries,’ corresponding to a shift of the display of prestigious material goods out of graves to the more public con-

text of cult sites. The lion's share of bronze, for example, which was reintroduced into the Greek mainland around 925, was channeled into sanctuaries, where the dedication of tripods and sculpted figures, made exclusively for these locations, took this luxury material out of circulation on a private level, and "set

it up high for display" (the verb is anatithenai, the noun anathéma), giving permanence to the power and status that its display declared. As many have argued, the rise of Panhellenic sanctuaries in the ninth and eighth centuries is probably to be seen in this perspective, "where the competitive display of gifts

meant playing the [agonistic] game at another level?" The advent of writing in the same period gave “the donors... a means of making known their personal contribution," and the earliest inscriptions make use of the same symbolic

system. As Barry Powell has argued, they use the language and meter of eighthcentury oral poetic composition to display status—to declare ownership, record the giving of a gift, celebrate an object's maker, perpetuate an individual's fame after death, and, somewhat later, to dedicate an object to a god.?? Charis, as

we have seen, is the quality that all such high-ranking gifts possess; it is also, as Kurke observes, the quality that characterizes occasions on which such agalmata are exchanged and the timé (honor, respect, as well as the offering that marks it) bestowed. Thus it is no surprise that these offerings, as Susan Langdon

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puts it, are “not simply a selection of the finest goods in current use, . . . [but that they] partake of a consistent symbolic system that hearkens back to the aristocratic, heroic world of Homer."* Until the mid-sixth century s.c.£., dedicatory inscriptions typically present the object on which they are written as speaking, a strategy that, as Svenbro,

Day, and others have shown, betrays that the primary function of these artifacts

was not only to record language that had once been spoken but to perpetuate it by prompting its reenactment in reading." In this volume, Day analyzes the fa-

mous seventh-century B.c.E. bronze statue dedicated to Apollo by Mantiklos as a dedicatory display that employs both verbal and visual signs to invite any viewer and/or reader to appreciate the status, wealth, and presumed call on Apollo's attention that its placement in the sanctuary would announce. It is im-

portant that it is not Mantiklos who speaks, but, as in all early Greek poetry, an "ego" is dramatized (the statuette's), which, as the deictic "May you, Phoibos,

give a charis-filled return" implies, a god is present to hear. Mantiklos is brought into the equation by the prominence of his name as the utterance's first word

and by the formulaic ἀνέθηκε; both affirm Mantiklos's "place in the social order by publicly asserting his . . . claim on people's admiration"? Statuettes that represent worshipers offering gifts to gods have been found in sanctuaries all over Greece.* Figurines of bronze, or, more commonly, clay, carry a bowl or some other ritual utensil, a wreath, fruit, or an animal marked for sacrifice, such as a lamb or a cock. Many of the Archaic and Classical korai dedicated in the Samian Heraion and on the Athenian Akropolis, for example,

were clearly meant to represent either their donor or the daughter of their donor. Thus the early Archaic statue group from Samos signed by Geneleos bears

an inscription on its base identifying one koré and her function: ἡμᾶς ἐποίησε IL evéAeos, "Geneleos made us,” it says, and continues, [..]óxy εἰμὲ [N] κἀν[έ]θηκε τῆι “Hone, "I am... oche, who has also dedicated it to Hera.’* In part because of its emphasis on the object itself, the inscription, when read aloud by a passerby, would allow the donor not only repeatedly to assert, in deictic terms, the relation that she and her family enjoy with the honored god,

but also to emphasize the quality of charts, inherent in the object itself, that makes that relation possible. By the end of the sixth century B.c.E., the third-person anethéke formula in

common use allows more emphasis to be placed on the relation that the gift has enabled between the donor and the god. As Day points out, it is especially when a third-person dedication's epithet is in the vocative, as in CEG 197 (Athenian Akropolis, ca. 510), that a passerby reading out loud the ἀνέθηκε

would achieve the greatest effect:

formula

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67

[π]ότνι᾿ ’Adevaia, σοὶ Τιμοκράτες avedere|v] Ὠνιὸς ᾿Αρισταίχμο, παῖ Διὸς αἰγιόχο. Lady Athena, child of Aegis-bearing Zeus, Timokrates, the son of Aristaikhmos, dedicated this to you. By pronouncing Timokrates’ name and by using the same verb and the same vocative that he himself would have used, the passerby who reads out loud this

inscription reenacts the one-on-one communication with the god that the dedicant’s action originally accomplished. Timokrates’ absence is emphasized but also alleviated by the enactment in which the reader engages: the “I” of the speaker is no longer Timokrates, or even a simulacrum of Timokrates. Nonetheless, the arrangement of the inscription's first four words indicates the relation that is most important here; it re-presents, whenever the inscription is

read, an original dedicatory occasion, and the deictic relation between the dedicator and the god it commemorates and preserves: [m ]ér™’ ᾿Αθεναία, σοὶ Τιμοκράτες

(“Lady Athena, to you Timokrates . . .").

Votive reliefs become common in sanctuaries from about the end of the seventh century B.c.E., and this medium allows an even fuller representation of the relationship between a human being and a god that the offering of a gift is meant to achieve. These reliefs typically depict worshipers offering gifts and a

god or gods accepting them.*6 For example, an Archaic sculpted relief, found on the Athenian Acropolis, shows a family processing with the victim (a pregnant sow) and other sacrificial paraphernalia (one boy holds a phiale). They are

walking in the presence of Athena herself, who is depicted as standing on the left and looking straight at them, perceiving and thus acknowledging them and their offering." Whether erected as thank offerings for a prayer that has been answered or as offerings that project the outcome of a request, reliefs such as

this represent an established relation with the divine in terms of what had become standardized iconography. By the fourth century B.c.z., the iconography of votive reliefs had standardized the deictic field of such representations, the medium allowing more narrative fullness* than sculpture in the round: the architectural frames, and even the depiction of other votives within the composi-

tion, specify that the exchange is occurring within the context of a sanctuary.?? The temporal situation that such images specify corresponds to the time in which hymns also would have been sung: the procession to the god's shrine and altar, and the presentation there of offerings.” Dedicatory sculptures and sculpture groups, as well as votive reliefs, typically represent the offering of a gift to a god, and the god's participation in the

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interchange. Most important in all of them is the representation, in visually deictic terms, of a dedicatory display, an act of offering, and the relationship be-

tween the dedicator and the god that this act effects. Votive offerings dedicated by a community employ the same means to represent the offering of a gift to a god. The most well-known sculpture to represent, via deictic signs, a community’s communication with a god, who is depicted as accepting their gift is, of course, the Parthenon frieze.?' The relief represents Athenians (or their representatives) processing toward the Parthenon and the image of the goddess inside it, mingling them with the Olympians who are depicted on the temple’s pediments and on the eastern frieze in the mythical moments that charter the polis’s identity, as well as with the heroes depicted in the metopes. As Kroll has

argued, any Athenian viewing this relief relives his or her own viewing of, and thus participation in, the Panathenaic procession, and through the procession’s participants—either in the actual presentation or in this re-presentation—also offers Athena a glorious agalma.’: These images visually construct, and invite viewers both divine and human to construct, a relation between a dedicatory

event in the sanctuary and various moments in mythical time.

There is thus an important difference between such a viewing and the reading of an individual's votive offering or dedicatory inscription. In reading a representation of a group's offering, a viewer, if he is part of that group, does not just stand in, imperfectly, for an original dedicator who is now absent from the sanctuary. Rather, he is in the same relation to the gift offered in the frieze, and to the goddess to whom it is offered, as he is when that gift is offered in the festival that will recur for him year after year: the procession represents the group

and all of its members, and is meant to be read as such by any member of the group. The Parthenon, of course, is not unique in its representation of a community's founding myths. Along with a few other sites, however, its architects innovated in makings its iconography explicitly represent what other buildings

and sculptures had for some time left implicit in practice; it incorporates, on a grand scale, an element definitive, at least in the Archaic and early Classical periods, of all agalmata and mnémata. In larger sanctuaries all over Greece, tem-

ple sculpture and other sanctuary landmarks would have confronted actual dedicatory processions with similar points of reference to community myths, as would the altar before any temple or in any sanctuary have provided a locus for direct human-divine communication.>* Sinos explicates ancient Greek rituals that connect mortals to heroes or gods in terms of their ability to "create the illusion that those witnessing the spectacle have been removed from their mundane world and have left historic time in order to experience the heroic past, the time of myth, when gods and

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humans mingled more freely than they do in our world."** Such rituals for her

“do not show gods and heroes entering our world” (85) but instead effect the lifting up of a human community to a transcendent world of heroic or divine meaning. This picture is very powerful and very accurate; I would add only that

dedicatory offerings typically represent, by means of a visual and/or verbal grammar of deixis, both this “lifting up” of the worshiper(s) and the bringing down to mundane time and space of the god, and thus his or her presence in the sanctuary (that is, his/her epiphany) to delight in the gift and acknowledge its giver's status—the very relation that chaire enacts in a hymnic context.

Hymn as mnéma As many have pointed out, at least through the Archaic period, the word hymnos seems to have been used to refer to any kind of song. Pulleyn, however, argues that in fact the word had three different uses in Greek, corresponding roughly to the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods: any hexameter com-

position; any song directed at a god; a particular kind of song for a god, distinguishable from, for example, the paean or the dithyramb.* For the earliest period, what a hymnos is, is made very clear in lines 157-160 of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo.* The first point is that early hymn does not distinguish between gods and men as its object. In lines 157-160, the poet is describing a chorus of young Delian women: When they have first hymned (ὑμνήσωσιν) Apollo, and now again Leto and arrow-pouring Artemis, they remember (μνησάμεναι) men and women of old, and singing a hymn (ὕμνον ἀείδουσεν), they charm the races of men. (157-160)

As Andrew Ford and others have argued, theogonies, as well as other kinds of poetry about gods and their births or deeds, were not, early on, set apart generically from narratives about the klea andrón, the "famous deeds of men." "The

whole," as Ford says, "embraced a discrete mythic epoch beginning with the birth of the gods and ending when the Trojan war resulted in a breach of the close intercourse between gods and mortals.”*’ As this passage illustrates, at

least in the Archaic period, "hymnos" can designate either kind of song.** Such hymnoi, performed in the context of a sanctuary, would connect a community

both to its own gods and to the human models of its civic identity, thus providing templates for connecting the divine, the heroic, and the human spheres of activity.

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The distinction between monodic and choral poetry also does not appear to be important in marking off hymn from other kinds of verbal perfor mance.? What is true of the memorializing deeds of the pan-Ionic community and of the Delian chorus (whose song is choral, that is, sung and danced® by a

group) is also true of what the poet of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo is doing: “memorializing” the god. He announces this intention at the poem's beginning, “I will remember/memorialize

(mnésomai)

and

not forget Apollo

the far-

shooter”; and at the end of the hymn’s Pythian section, he connects the quality of charis that his song possesses to its status as a mnéma, that is, as a successful evocation of a past shared by poet and audience: “And so, son of Zeus and Leto, chaire, and I shall remember (mnésomai) you and another song too,” 545—546.*!

Charis, as we have seen, is a quality that can be predicated of all dedicatory offerings.

In singing their “hymns,” the poet of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo says that the Delian chorus is "remembering men and women of old.” The participle mnésamenai ("remembering") is significant, since, as we have seen, it connects what the women are described as doing with what the poet himself has just done.” The verb is common in hymnic beginnings: "remembering," as many have argued, is synonymous with the performance of poetry about men and gods, poetry in which the Muses, daughters of Mnémosyne (Memory), put the poets mind

in touch with the past and its connections

to the present.”

“urmoouaı . . . ᾿Απόλλωνος (I shall remember Apollo), both in the deictic configuration of first-person verb and object, and in the choice of verb (con-

nected as it is to mnéma), marks this beginning as hymnic. Along with mnésomai, several first-person verbs are common in hymnic exordia (for example, aeidein, melpein), and when combined, as they typically are, with an object

specifying the god for whom the song is sung, they offer to the audience a particular kind of reception and involvement.™ That the verb mnásthai, however, may carry a more precise or emphatic generic force than other verbs used at the beginning of hymnic texts is suggested in a passage from Pausanias's description of the Argolid (PMG 720 = Paus. 2.28.2). Pausanias says that in the sanctuary of Artemis atop Mt. Coryphaeus,

Telesilla ἐποιήσατο ἐν ao arc μνήμην. Telesilla “composed, or performed, a mnéma in song." It is significant that Pausanias places Telesilla's singing in the context of Artemis’s sanctuary, where mnémata, or memorials, in other media

would also have been displayed. By qualifying μνήμην

with ev ᾷσματι,

Pausanias implies, moreover, that mnémata can be constructed in various me-

dia. One among these media is song. Lines 156 ff. of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo proclaim for the poet several

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71

kinds of mastery that parallel aspects of dedicatory display in other media. Just before his description of the Delian chorus the poet says that Apollo takes pleasure in the sight of men and women “remembering” (mnésamenoi) him in contests of dancing, boxing, and singing: But you, Phoebus, delight most in Delos, where long-robed Ionians gather with their children and their wedded wives. They delight you when, with their boxing and their dancing and their song, they memorialize/remember (mnésamenoi) you in their contests. (146-150)

To “memorialize” Apollo at his Delian festival is to delight him by means of a competitive display of skill and beauty. Such performances, of course, just as

much as sculptures or other physical dedications, were also conceived of as agalmata, valuable offerings meant to produce charis,© The use here of the verb mnésamenoi places these displays on a par with mnémata displayed elsewhere in

the god’s sanctuary, all of which put on display the status of their dedicators and their relation to the god of the place. In this same passage, where the poet is describing the process by which he and poets like him construct a mnéma, he specifies what it is about the Delian chorus's performance that is most impressive: In addition to this, there is a great wonder, whose renown will never perish, the Delian maidens, followers of the god who shoots from afar, when they have first hymned Apollo, and now again Leto and arrow-pouring Artemis, they remember men and women of old,

and singing a hymn, they charm the races of men. The voices and chatter of all men they know how to imitate; each man would say that he himself were speaking, so beautifully is the song composed by them. (156-164) In hymning Apollo (158), the members of the chorus are imitating (mimeisthai,

163) with consummate skill the voices of each member of the group before whom they perform (162—164). This passage has been interpreted in a number

of ways. I would highlight for the purposes of this discussion only the fact that the verses describe how a verbal mnéma to either men or gods necessarily involves deixis: the performer(s) speak (or sing) for, in the sense of on behalf of,

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each member of their audience. Monodic or choral, part of the “mastery” involved in the performance of a hymn involves honoring a god in such a way that the verbal gift that is performed can be given both by the singer(s) and by the group for which he (or they) perform.** That this is how choral poetry functioned is widely recognized; how monodic performance in a fundamentally oral culture also involves the singer quite literally giving voice, through first-person

expressions and other devices, to an audience has been examined by Bakker, Bowie, Martin, and others.° Deictic language, although it is used in an infinite number of specific situations, nonetheless refers to the world in a fluid way: the personal pronoun “I,” which has any number of referents, is meaningful only when it refers to someone who is in a role. The openness of this performative

role is articulated most fully in first-person verbs that typically Such exordia may contain other kind of song to which the a song that celebrated the deeds

choral hymns, but it is functional as well in the begin monodic hymns. a generic imprint connecting them with the name "hymnos" was given in the archaic period: of heroes.** In a recent paper in which he chal-

lenges Parry's conception of Homeric diction as a Kunstsprache schematized

and isolated from ordinary language and its semantic processes, Egbert Bakker has argued that the economic regularity of noun-epithet formulae in epic are not the consequence of their “metrical usefulness.” Rather, as in ordinary languages, repetition over time determines how and why certain expressions become “grammatical,” or part of a system that is used unconsciously and routinely.?^ The more frequently an expression is used in a language, the more regularized and grammatical it becomes. Frequency of use, unsurprisingly, is determined by an expression’s importance in a given community’s communicative settings.

With this in mind, Bakker goes on to refocus Foley’s concept of “traditional reference” in oral or oral-derived texts as a process of use and reuse resulting in the fixation of the constitutive “forms” of a poetic “grammar.” Traditional “forms,” such as noun-epithet formulas, “are sensitive, . . . in relation to other forms, to the frequency with which they are used.”” [n line with the way ordinary languages regularize grammatical forms, epic diction codes best and most regularly what epic singers do most: introduce, or "stage," heroes or gods at mo-

ments "at which the god or hero is presented in his or her quintessential identity, by means of a noun-epithet formula, and when s/he is about to perform a

remarkable and/or characteristic act, that is, at a moment of ‘epiphany.’””! Such narrative staging typically involves anchoring a god or a hero into a scene in a predictable way, exemplified by such hexameters as:

Enacted and Represented Dedications: Genre and Greek Hymn τὸν ὃ ἡμείβετ᾽ MN

73

ἀνδρῶν ᾿Αγαμέμνων.

πολύτλας

δῖος ᾿Οδυσσεύς,

etc.

Then Agamemnon, lord of men [much enduring, godlike Odysseus] answered him... τὸν δ᾽ ὡς οὖν Mug

γλαυκῶπις ᾿Αθήνη

θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη,

When the gray-eyed goddess Athena noted him, ...

etc.

[the white-armed goddess Hera]

These and many other similar verses are some of the most predictable units of epic discourse, their combination of subject (god or hero)—verb—object routinized over thousands of lines. Bakker does not see the forms these lines take,

as Parry and others have, as resulting from their metrical usefulness, but as the consequence of the overwhelming importance of “the ritualized discourse moments of which they are a part.” Foley’s concept of “traditional referentiality”

describes how epithets metonymically conjure the theme or idea of the hero or

god they represent. πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς or γλαυκῶπις ᾿Αθήνη summon "to the present . . . the Odysseus or Athene of all moments, the Odysseus or Athene that is provided by the tradition.”” “Tradition,” however, Bakker argues,

must be understood as “emergent,” dynamic, in that “traditional “forms, such as noun-epithet formulas, are sensitive, qua forms and in relation to other forms, to the frequency with which they are used,”” a factor that is directly re-

lated to their importance to the community of listeners for whom the poet performs. Bakker concludes that it is when heroes or gods are staged in introductions to direct speech that Homeric epic diction is at its most grammatical, or, if one prefers, at its most grammatically formulaic. “What the grammar of epic diction codes best,” and is thus most stereotyped in its occurrence, is the repre-

sentation of heroes and gods speaking to and interacting with human beings.” Hexametric and lyric hymnic exordia typically represent the same scenario, but in reverse: they emphasize human agency by their use of first-person verbs,

and the god’s name, combined with one or more epithets in an oblique case, is the object of that agency: Μνήσομαι οὐδὲ λάθωμαι ᾿Απόλλωνος ἑκάτοιο (I shall remember and not forget Apollo the far-shooter, HH II1.1).”° As we have seen, the deictic aspect of these exordia stage the god’s epiphany insofar as they

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represent the performer(s), as well as the group for whom he speaks, as “remembering,” or “singing” the god, which is to say, bringing the god into the context of the performance to offer him a verbal agalma, which is the same scene, of course, that votive reliefs represent in another medium. Like the

phrases examined by Bakker, these exordia also “stage” for the purposes of the narrative a god at a moment when he or she is presented “in his or her quintessential identity, that is, at a moment of ‘epiphany, ” the epithet representing in miniature the myth that will be developed if the text contains an extended narrative.’®

The mythical narratives that fill out many hymns are elaborations of the theme already present in the god’s epithet, on whose evocative power as “minia-

ture-scale myths”” dedicatory inscriptions so constantly rely. In the Delian section of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the poet “memorializes” the god” by narrating an account of his birth on Delos. The myth accounts for the origin of the

festival at which this song was very probably performed and which the poet describes so vividly in lines 146-164. The kind of authority that a hymnic poet could claim for himself is that he can perform narratives that are true precisely because, by projecting the foundation of cults into his narrative, he can make the authorizing connections between past and present that are true for the group for whom

he is singing.” The aetiological narratives so common

in

hymns prove a performer's authority in the present, since his account is borne out by the manifest existence of the phenomena that he has explained, and in relation to which his gift is given. Hymnic endings typically resemble the close of Mantiklos's dedication, in which he asks Apollo for a χαριέσσαν ἀμοίβαν, “an agreeable return.” As Burkert points out, such a request is emblematic of a gift economy, where “the undeniable profit of ‘nice strategies, goes together with the friendly, cheerful face of those who have come to know each other.”® Particularly common in

hymnic sign-offs is the imperative chaire, which is both a greeting to the god and an affirmation of the song's beauty and quality: if the song has been beautiful, then the god is present at its performance, having taken up, as it were, the other side of the exchange that chaire signifies and the hymn’s first few lines express.*! Many hymnic endings spell out this equation. We have seen one exam-

ple in the refrain of the “Hymn to the Kouros”: Ἰὼ μέγιστε Koüpe, / xatpé pot, Kporew

/ maykparés

...

Aixrav

ἐς ἐνιαντὸν

ἕρπε, καὶ γέγαθι

μολπᾷ / (lo, greatest Kouros, be greeted/delighted, Kronian, ruler of all... come to Dikte to the yearly festival, and rejoice in our song, 1—6; compare the second-person Beßaxes, "you have come,” in 3). Another example, in this instance, monodic, is HH IX.7: Kai av μὲν οὕτω χαῖρε θεαί θ᾽ ἅμα πᾶσαι

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ἀοιδῇ (And may all of you in this way, goddesses, take pleasure in the song).?? The imperatival chaire is so common in hymnic sign-offs because it encodes what a hymn does: it directly addresses a god, whose face has been made “cheerful” by the performance of a verbal agalma that possesses charis just insofar as the god’s epiphany has been successfully accomplished.® The beginning of Pindar’s sixth Paean, a text that vividly announces its status as a dedicatory offering, provides one last example of the “participatory identification” that deictic language enables in hymn: “Golden Pytho, famed for seers, I beseech you, by Olympian Zeus, with the Charites and Aphrodite, receive me, the interpreter of the Pierides, famed in song, at the sacred time. For at the water of Castalia with its gate of bronze hearing a sound of dancing bereft of men, I have come to defend your townsmen and my privileges. Obeying my

own heart as a child obeys its dear mother, I have come to Apollo's grove which nurtures garlands and banquets, where beside the earth’s shadowy navel the girls of Delphi singing the son of Leto often beat the ground with quick foot . . ^ The performers, probably a chorus of Aeginetan youths,® locate themselves in a celebration occurring at a particular place, Delphi: "Golden Pytho,’

“the water of Castalia,” "Apollo's grove,” "the earth's shadowy navel.” The festive scene is described by a number of deictic expressions: "receive me, Pytho, the singer of your praises, at this sacred time”;®’ “I hear the dancing at the Castalian Spring with its gate of bronze”; “I have come to Apollo's grove which nurtures garlands and banquets, where beside the earth's shadowy navel the

girls of Delphi singing the son of Leto often beat the ground with quick foot... .” These references to the sanctuary's identifying features (the Castalian Spring,

the omphalos) seem to belabor the obvious in describing surroundings that would have been evident to every member of the audience. However, such reference to the visible signs of a god's epiphany and history in a sanctuary is ubiq-

uitous and functional in praise poetry. As Steiner notes, Pindar's language, like hymnic language in general, focuses on the visual appeal of the song, and in this resembles the insistence in many dedicatory inscriptions on the beauty of the artifact it accompanies.*^ Moreover, it places both performers and audience in the direct relation to the god that we have seen is fundamental to the functioning of all dedicatory offerings. We might recall in this context the architectural framing of votive reliefs, an iconographical shorthand that also places an act of dedication in the context of a sanctuary. The performative language in Pindar's hymn allows the group that the Aeginetan chorus represents to situate themselves and the myths that construct their religious and social identity in relation

to the sacred geography of Apollo's sanctuary, and so to be, as a civic entity, an

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agalma for the god, meeting him face to face in the relation that charis signifies and deixis enables. There is thus an important difference between a hymn and a “votive relief writ large,” such as the Parthenon frieze, which, when “read,” necessarily involves an individual subject reenacting, via memory, a performative moment in a nonperformative situation. A community’s verbal praise, on the other hand, lacks a definite subject: the effect of deictic language in an actual performance is to open a song and its performative force to a group. However, as Tannen and

others have shown, texts that are the product of cultures that are still fundamentally oral but are becoming literate, often elaborate deictic language and other strategies associated with speaking in order to create the same involve-

ment that would exist between two conversing persons—deixis is, in a sense, always a compensation for the absence of an actual communicative event.®

Deictic language, moreover, by weaving a strip of activity into a "reality," also objectifies that activity by describing it. It is by frequently and vividly describing, or representing, their own performance that hymns do what statues and re-

liefs do in other media: they create dedicatory displays, become mnémata. Bauman and Briggs describe this effect of deictic language and other markers of performance in the following way: "performance [and its markers] puts the act of speaking on display—objectifies it, lifts it . . . from its interactional setting...

performance [then] potentiates decontextualization . . . there are means available to participants in performance situations to render stretches of discourse discontinuous with their discursive surround, thus making them into coherent,

effective, and memorable texts . . . performance as a frame [is such a means], and it intensifies [this] entextualization."* Objectified by the deictic language of its frame, a hymnic narrative becomes, like a votive statue or relief, an artifact, or a ktéma—a display piece. In making possible the decontextualization of

the narrative that it surrounds, deictic language thus creates a memorable and authoritative text that is capable of constituting a community's identity in relation to its founding myths of human-divine interaction. The next stage in this entextualization is when hymns are inscribed and become texts in fact and

when their audiences thereby become readers. Although the evidence for the early inscription of hymns and their erection in temples or sanctuaries is not abundant, there is enough to suggest that it was not an uncommon practice.”! An inscribed hymn, erected in a god's sanctuary, would perform several func-

tions simultaneously. Placed in public view, such a text would become a perpet-

ual reminder of an original celebratory occasion. It would also in and of itself become a dedicatory offering, standing with other offerings in a prominent and public place for any visitor to the sanctuary to see and admire. Again, it would

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serve as a script for reperformance at each celebration of the god’s festival. Finally, it would stage its reenactment on a daily basis by representing these conventional aspects of its performance. In the last respect, a reader would place himself or herself in the origo that the hymn’s deictic language marks out and thereby reenact the original performance and offer to the god a new gift of praise. Such a text is a mnéma indeed, a "memorial" in that it postulates a performative moment in a nonperformative condition, separated in time, if not in place, from the original occasion it preserves. Hymns, I have argued, are characterized and defined by the radically open

invitation to enactment that the deictic language particular to them provides, and that textualization intensifies. The mastery that is unique to the performance of hymn is that the performers are able to speak for every member of their community in connecting a shared past to a present moment in which the status of that community in relation to its gods is displayed and enacted within the public arena of a sanctuary.

Continuity and Discontinuity Pulleyn is correct, I think, to posit three stages, corresponding roughly to the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, in the development of the word "hymnos." It is interesting in this regard that Aristotle, for reasons of his own, proposes a historical development of the hymnic genre, and hence, of tragedy, and that he bases the genesis of both on the innate tendency of human beings to imitate one another (Poet. 1448b20—27). What is interesting in Aristotle's ac-

count is its implicit acknowledgment that tragedians were aware of and exploited the representation, or “mimesis,” that is built into the hymnic genre. This representation became more pronounced over time. Albert Henrichs has

recently examined the effects of the fact that the tragic chorus, when enacting a choral song and dance, sometimes refers to the context of its performance both within the dramatic action as well as in the orchestra. Henrichs shows how the chorus accomplishes this dual reference through the same action descriptions that we have seen in choral and monodic hymn and also shows how this occurs in an increasingly self-reflexive way. While a number of other scholars have commented on such self-reference,?? Henrichs relates this phenomenon to an-

other phenomenon that he calls “choral projection,’ which "occurs when Sophoklean and Euripidean choruses locate their own dancing in the past or the future, in contrast to the here and now of their immediate performance, or when choruses project their collective identity onto groups of dancers distant from the concrete space of the orchestra and dancing in the allusive realm of the dramatic imagination"? Both phenomena—self-reference and choral projec-

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tion—occur most often when the chorus is enacting a hymn (other choral genres, such as the lament, can intermingle), and both employ deictic language to create "a tension . . . between the chorus’s dramatic character, which has no

affinity to choral dancing, and their emphasis on their performative function as a collective of dancers.”” The phenomenon is more highly developed in Sophocles than in Aeschylus; in the former, it typically signals “a chorus out of touch

with the tragic events on stage."? [n Euripides the effect can be more elaborate: “the chorus may establish an ironic distance between its own collective character and the action of the play." In the display and enactment that deixis enables, hymnic performances, by their very nature, can separate the performance of a hymnic text from its context. They do this explicitly for the first time in the context of tragedy (and comedy, of course), because drama can take advantage of the prior mimetic enactment of communal identity to characteristic of hymn. As Calame explains, in such a context, "the cultic action of the chorus,

instead of being entirely self-referential, is in great part fictional, dramatic in the pure sense of drama, an action played onstage."? We can readily imagine, however, yet a third degree of mimetic depth. Callimachus, among other poets, takes up this distanced usage in his own hymns and transforms it. Three of Callimachus's hymns (2, 5, and 6) frame narratives with what appears to be "on-the-spot," first-person participation in the circumstances of the poem's performance. The narrator's statements, by de-

scribing the ritual atmosphere as though present to his own perception, seem to ground his mythological narrative in the audience's direct experience of cult.

Alan Cameron has recently revived Cahen's argument that these texts could have been performed in the contexts to which they seem to refer, but most recent critics would agree either with Bulloch that "the very presence of such details betrays precisely the literary nature of [the] text,’” or with Friedlander,

who explains this aspect of Callimachus’s hymns in the following way: “The Hellenistic age is free of the cultic, political and community conditions in which archaic and classical poetry originated. Hellenistic poetry must therefore try to ground itself in community, and by means of art it must create the

Lebenzusamannenhang that no longer exists.” I have argued elsewhere how this kind of framing works in Callimachus’s Hymns to produce purely intertextual effects.’ What has received less discussion, however, is what Callimachus’s “mimetic

frames” say about his understanding and use of genre. The most commonly accepted approach is Deubner’s, who sees Hymns 2, 5, and 6 as a mixture, a Kreuzung, of two genres: hymn and mime.'?' I would suggest rather that Callimachus’s Hymns fit into the development of the genre that I have de-

Enacted and Represented Dedications: Genre and Greek Hymn

79

scribed, a development out of the traditional cultural and religious contexts in which Greek hymn arose, and that his texts mark a new stage in the decentering

that Henrichs finds was begun most notably in Euripides. The decontextualization of performance and of aetiological narratives from one social setting to another involves, of course, recontextualizing them in another. Callimachus's hymns fit into the genre’s organic development out of interactional contexts in relatively traditional communities, to performance contexts marked by a heightened self-consciousness of the need for constructing authorized narratives and charters. By drawing attention to their constant simulation of the contextual, occasion-bound difference between contempo-

rary instances of a genre and that genre's traditional exemplars, Callimachus's hymns, unlike earlier instances of the genre, acknowledge the loss of their models’ original performance contexts. Textuality, in addition to facilitating and disseminating praise, brings with it new possibilities—possibilities of mimetic iteration that make, in their very textuality, the hymnic genre itself into an object of mimesis, thereby crossing the line from communitarian religion and contestable polis identity to individual artistry. This ascent is not accomplished by moving from material to formal markers of genre, as has been thought, but by further internalizing and reflexively reiterating the performative and occasional

nature of the genre that the poet is imitating, which is freed from its original context by the properties of the same, progressively intensified, deictic language

that from the first fixed it in space, time, and voice. The map I am suggesting, then, is a continuum in which religious speech develops more and more into representation,

into

(re-)performance,

then

to independence

from

perfor-

mance context, and ultimately, into the imitation of conventions of representa-

tion that had once constructed religious and civic meaning for a society.

CHAPTER =

v=.

FOUR '

t

Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry, the Hesiodic Gunaikon Katalogos, and the Odysseian Nekuia lAN

RUTHERFORD

Introduction Archaic Greek poetry knows of two poems that consisted of catalogs of mythological heroines. The first and most often cited was the Gunaikon Katalogos (GK), also known as the Ehoiai because at least some of the entries began with

the regular formula: 7’ oin— “or such as”; the second was the Megalai Ehoiai, perhaps an expanded version of the first (see below). Both were attributed to Hesiod. This paper will explore the generic antecedents of such poems. The suggestion that behind Homeric epic stands a long tradition of orally transmitted genealogical catalog-poems is not new,' but the question of the generic dimensions of such poems, as well as their relationship to attested catalog-poems, has never been fully investigated. After presenting what we know of the GK and its principal literary features, this paper goes on to assess the issue of whether or not there are grounds to consider it as an example of a generic type. After that, I investigate the antecedents of the GK, suggesting that its development can be modeled in terms of the concept of "automatization" familiar from Russian formalism. Finally, I address the question of the relationship between these forms of poetry and the Homeric Odyssey. Before the rich discoveries of papyri published in this century; it had been supposed that the principle of arrangement of the GK had to do with which women slept with which gods: the lovers of Zeus first, then those of Poseidon, 81

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and so on? However, it has turned out that the structure is genealogical and that the basic arrangement was very much that of Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca. The Hellenistic edition of the GK seems to have had five books, book 1 being particularly well attested in the papyrus fragments. Roughly, the huge family of Deukalion occupied book 1 and part of book 2, including the family of Hellen and the Aeolids; the family of Inachus occupied the rest of book 2 and probably part of book 3; the rest of book 3 was taken up with the families of Pelasgos and Arkas; book 4 was devoted to minor families: the daughters of Asopus, Attic heroes; and the Pelopidai, including Alcmene and the birth of Heracles; and finally book 5 contained the episode of the wooing of Helen, culminating in the story of the Trojan War and the decline of the age of heroes. The canonical version was thus Panhellenic in scope, whereas earlier versions may have been

more limited, perhaps confined to the Northern family of Deukalion.* Some sections of the canonical version had a repetitive, genealogical structure, with new entries following in rapid succession. But it also accommodated expansions, for example, the story of Mestra, daughter of Aithon-Erysichthon, and her failed marriage to the son of Sisyphus, perhaps in book 1; the story of Tyro, also in book 1; the story of Atalante and her race with Hippomenes in book 2, a particularly colorful episode; the dramatic combat between the sons

of Boreas and the Harpies in book 3; and finally, largest of all, the wooing of Helen in book 5. Date and place of composition are very much disputed. It can be argued that genealogical lists and catalogs reflect a way of thinking that can be linked to

the introduction of writing. On the other hand, it is also possible to think of repetitive genealogical lists as a mode of thought that would flourish in preliterate, developing cultures; thus, these sorts of abstract considerations do not seem to get us very far? The question of the date and place of composition is complicated by the fact that we are probably dealing with a long tradition of similar poems. The canonical version may be sixth century B.c.z., as West be-

lieves.5 But it is also possible that some elements are as old as Hesiod, as Janko maintains on the basis of linguistic features, and Casanova on the basis of mythology. Another glimpse of an older stratum in the GK has been provided by Margalit Finkelberg, who argues that the Ajax entry in the “wooing of Helen” (GK204.44-51) could be older than the corresponding version in the Homeric

Catalogue of Ships, since the GK entry, which is much larger, better reflects the prominence of Ajax in the Homeric tradition, whereas the Catalogue of Ships entry, which confines Ajax to Salamis, perhaps reflects the requirements of Athens, Argos, and Corinth.’

As to place of final composition, there is no agreement. Martin West sees

Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie- Poetry

83

Athens as the place of final composition, but the origins of the tradition may have been in the north of Greece: catalog poetry is often thought to be Boeotian

because of its Hesiodic pedigree and because the list in the Catalogue of Ships starts in Boeotia, and the Aiolid emphasis of the GK certainly suits such a placement. West speculates that the tradition might have originated in Locris, where there was a matrilineal system of inheritance (Aristotle, fr.547).*

Literary Characteristics of the GK A good way to approach the genre is to look at some of the characteristics of the Hesiodic GK. Much of it is a presentation of genealogy. Names are always specified, even though some of them (particularly the names of women) may be ad hoc inventions.’ Marriages, conception, and birth dominate the content, and

the formulaic style reflects this. Frequent formulas include ὑποδμηθεῖσα (subdued [in marriage]); or λέχος εἰσαναβᾶσα ([she] going up into the bed [of N]); or immowiv τε καὶ ἅρμασι κολλητοῖσι ([N married her, with a dowry of] horses and assembled chariots).'°

One formula deserves particular notice. The Ehoiai derives its name from the fact that some of the entries are introduced by the formula n’otn (or such as she). This formula has never been wholly explained: the prima facie implication is that the poem is a string of alternative mythological paradigms, fanning out

from an initial paradigm, now lost, introduced by simple “oin” (Pyrrha), and that all the paradigms are pivoted on the opening statement partly preserved in GK] (Sing, Muses, the beautiful women of the start, such as... or such as . . .).! But there is a contradiction between the 7’ οἴη formula and the overall plan of the work, since, as we now know, individual stories are not introduced as examples but rather as integral sections contributing to an organic whole. That tendency was noticed long ago by Marckscheffel (1838), who suggested that the poem was arranged in two sections, with the genealogy coming first and the ehoiai grouped afterwards. But it is now established that that scenario is wrong and that the ehoie formula was scattered through the genealogy. So what could the significance of this formula have been? Martin West has suggested that the formula was used with the specific function of “resumption,” or perhaps “progression.” In setting out the genealogy, the poet proceeds in a vertical manner, following the descendants of each son and daughter, and this pattern necessitates sometimes leaping back from the end of one branch of the genealogy to a higher point in an earlier one. When the connection is less oblique, for example, in cases where the poet narrates a sequence of daughters or sons, each with a short story, the 7’ ot» formula is unnecessary. But where the sequence is convoluted, the formula is used

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lan Rutherford

/

Agenor

Demodike

Porthaon

|

J Sterope |

Thestios=Eurythemiste

Leda Figure 1.

| Althaia

Stratonike

Hypermestra

Demodike and Porthaon

to signal an abrupt transition. Three examples are pertinent, all involving com-

plicated genealogies. l. One very large papyrus fragment (POxy 2481, fr.5), consisting of three columns of text, allows us to reconstruct a substantial stretch of the poem that concerns the progeny of Porthaon and Demodike, two children of Agenor. The

first two columns of the surviving text are concerned with Demodike's line, or the three daughters of her son, Thestios (GK23a, GK25). Then we jump to the three daughters of Porthaon (GK26). The stemma is made more complicated

by the fact that Thestios's wife was one of Porthaon's daughters. Both groups of daughters are introduced with “n’ oia." Unfortunately, we cannot tell what

precedes the daughters of Thestios. But the 9’ otac. introducing the daughters of Porthaon seems to signal a leap up and across the family tree.

2. Another example is the Alcmene-ehoie, which survives in its entirety in the first 56 lines of the Hesiodic Shield. A couple of papyri contribute the first lines of the Alcmene-ehoie and parts of the preceding entry (GK195), which in-

cluded an account of the birth of Agamemnon and Menelaus. The best explanation for this arrangement is that the underlying framework is a description of

the children of Pelops: first the daughters, including Lysidike, the mother of Alcmene; then the sons, including Atreus, who in GK is the grandfather of Aga-

Pelops Lysidike

Atreus

Alcmene

Pleisthenes ' Agamemnon

Figure 2.

Genealogy of Alcmene

Menelaus

Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry

85

Aeolus Perieres

Deion

Leukippos

Asterodeia

|

ME

Arsinoe

PM

|

a

Asklepios”

Figure 3.

Genealogy of Asterodeia

memnon and Menelaus. But the story of Alcmene is long and involved, and it was postponed till after the account of the sons (West, 1985, 109ff.). The for-

mula is “resumptive” The poet narrates the birth of Agamemnon and Menelaus, then jumps back across the stemma to Alcmene. 3. A third example is that of Asterodeia, daughter of Deion, a son of Aeolus (GK58). Her ehoie is introduced after mention of Asklepios, who seems to have

been introduced as a descendant of Perieres, another Aiolid.'? In this case, the jump seems less violent, following the regular structure of the stemma. I will return to the question of the meaning of the ehoie formula on page 91. Another feature—one that we might expect to find in a catalog—is rapidity of narrative. Thus, in the long fragment concerning the wives of Sisyphus's son Glaukos (GK43a), the narrative glides rapidly through the crimes of Sisyphus, the transportation of the first wife Mestra to Cos, and the acquisition of the second wife, the Athenian Eurynome." Another of the larger surviving fragments, GK10a, is characterized by a rapid sequence of entries.'?

"Catalog form" is not used just within genealogies; it occurs also in more narrative sections of the poem. Thus in the case of the combat between the Boreadai and the Harpies (GK150), the poet included a fantastic geographical catalog

including the

Katoudaioi,

Pygmies,

Melanes,

Ethiopians,

Libyans,

Scythians, Hyperboreans, Lastraegonians, Cephalleneans, the land of Nisus (?), and the Sirens. West talks about a peg on which the poet hangs races that he cannot fit into the genealogy in any other way, and certainly genealogies for most of the races are supplied.'* Again, in the well-preserved wooing of Helen fragment, we find the poet deploying a catalog of suitors, who include Agamemnon; Odysseus; Thoas, king of the Aetolians; Podarkes and Protesilaus from Phylake; Menestheus from Athens; Ajax from Salamis; Elephenor from

Euboea;

and

Idomeneus

from

Crete.

The

link-formula

here

is pvaro

(*wooed")." Thus, even when the Ehoiai occasionally strays from the primary structure of a genealogical catalog, it seems to compensate by including secondary allusions to catalog poetry.

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To turn now to content, women are naturally the central focus. There may have been a tendency to subordinate male stories to female stories, telling the former within the frame of the later. One clear case of this pattern is the Alcmene-ehoie, where the story of Alcmene provides the frame and introduction to a story about Heracles. Again, in the Asterodeia-ehoie (GK58), the main focus is not on her but on her sons Krisos and Panopeus, and the way that they fought even in the womb. Other cases are not so clear cut. The story of Salmoneus may or may not have been told from the point of view of Tyro, as part of her ehoie (GK30). The story of Sisyphus and his two failed attempts to find a wife for his son seems to have been narrated at the place where we would expect it, in the account of the sons of Aiolos, but it began as if it was the ehoie of the first wife, Erysichthon’s daughter Mestra.'* The attitude toward women is generally encomiastic. In this respect, the

work anticipates later prose works like Plutarch’s Lakainon Apophthegmata or his Aretai Gunaikon.'? The tone of the GK is generally light; for example, the story of Atalante and the apples at GK76, and fantastic characters such as Iphiclus, son of Clymene, who ran so fast that he did not touch the crops (GK62), and Periclymenus, who could change shape; the description of the River Cephisus (GK70) that seems almost pastoral in tone;? the story of Mestra and Aithon (=Erysichthon), which has been described as "comic" by Robertson.?! This light tone is not absolutely consistent: the account of the Proetides included an explicit account of their madness (GK131-132); and the fragment about the daughters of Leda (GK176) focuses on their infidelities.

In the world of the GK, contact between gods and heroes was closer than it is now, and also closer than it became in the time of the Trojan War.? Gods are basically benign, (a) except that they usurp the position of heroes in relationships (Poseidon and Glaucus; Poseidon and Cretheus; and Amphitryon and Zeus); and (b) unless heroes impiously claim the position of deities (as in the case of Keyx or Salmoneus).

Another characteristic of the content of the poem is that there is very little about death. Men are sometimes represented as dying, as Salmoneus is cast down to Tartarus for appropriating the role of Zeus in GK30.16ff.; as Eetion dies in GK178; or as Hyakinthos is killed in GK171. Zeus kills the hemitheot in

the "Wooing of Helen" fragment (GK204.100). But female deaths are rare: the only example is Clytemnestra in GK23a, who is killed by Orestes. Where the end of a life is mentioned, it usually takes the form of a metamorphosis, as in the case of Arethusa in GK188 (?) or that of Alcyone, wife of Keyx (GK10a, 10d). In other cases, there is a hint of immortality. Phylonoe, one

Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry Mimetic

Figure 4.

Mixed

87

Nonmimetic Angeltike

Historike D

Didaskalike

Sententiae

Narrations

Philosophy: Empedocles, Lucretius

Theognis

Genealogy

Astrology: Aratus, Cicero

Chriae

Hesiodic GK

Farming: Virgil

Genres in Diomedes

of the daughters of Tyndareos, becomes immortal and ageless at GK23(a), 9-

10, apparently immortalized by Artemis; Endymion is mentioned at GK10a60. The immortality of Heracles is famously described in GK25, 26-33 (a passage parallel to part of Odyssey 11). There are some suggestions of immortality in the Wooing of Helen fragment: some fragmentary lines about a "terrible snake" (GK204, 135ff.) have been interpreted as some sort of symbol for the immortal-

ity of heroes. Finally, Iphigeneia, called Iphimede in the GK, is saved from sacrifice by Artemis and worshiped as "Artemis Einodie" (GK23a,

17).? We

would not expect to find women dying in battle like the heroes of the epic tradition, but the absence of material relating to death demands an explanation. Cases of direct speech in the GK are rare: in the Atalante episode (GK76),

Schoineus announces the contest (GK75), and Hippomenes addresses Atalante; at GK211, people hail Peleus after he sacks Iolkos; at GK31, Poseidon makes a

genealogical prophecy to Tyro (identical in part to a prophecy in the Odyssean Nekuia: Od.11. 249-250 = GK31. 2-3); in the Sisyphus-Mestra fragment, someone (Athena?) makes a ruling concerning the exchange of property; a god addressed Teuthras on the subject of Auge in F165. Absence of direct speeches in general was regarded as typical of the genre, as we see from the late grammar-

ian Diomedes, who uses the Hesiodic GK to exemplify a certain type of narrative poetry.? Diomedes uses the tripartition: mimetic, nonmimetic, and mixed derived from Plato and Aristotle. Nonmimetic (exegetikon or enarrativum) has

three subsections: angeltike, historike, didaskalike, where historike is defined as including narrations and genealogies and is exemplified by the GK; angeltike,

surprisingly, is gnomic poetry, including sententiae, like that of Theognis; and didaskalike is didactic poetry, like Virgil's Georgics. This is a strange tripartition: moral knowledge, factual knowledge, and practical knowledge. One of the im-

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plications of this arrangement is that the GK, as an “unmixed” form, has little by way of mimetic speeches, unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey or the Aeneid,

which contain a great deal of speeches and are therefore “mixed.” To return to the speeches that are found in the GK, what is perhaps most interesting here is that of all the characters that speak, none is a woman. We will return to speech presently in dealing with the Odyssey.

An approach to genre favored in recent scholarship on archaic poetry is to reduce it to performance situation. No such situational key suggests itself for the GK, however. George Huxley has argued that the tradition recorded in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod that links the death of Hesiod with a festival of Ariadne at Naupaktos may reflect a performance of the minor epic Naupaktia at that festival; could antecedents of the GK have been performed in the context of the cult of heroines??* Certainly some of the heroines are known to have had hero cults, for example, Chloris, a surviving Niobid and mother, by Neleus, of

Pero, who had a cult at Argos; also Alcmene, who had cults in various places. The problem is rather that the poem seems to put no stress on the death of heroines, since it would presumably be their death that marks the start of the cult. Alternatively, the question also arises whether the intended audience of this poetry included young women, rather like the lyric partheneion." It is interesting

in this context that the GK contained an account of the exploits of the Leucippides, since the story of the rape of the daughters of Leucippus by Castor and Pollux was the subject of the myth-section of Alcman’s best preserved Partheneion ( PMG 1).

In the hands of an oral-formulaic composer or even of a literate composer, this form of poetry would have been unusually flexible. Different entries could

have been expanded or played down; different versions of myth could have been introduced. The Pseudo-Hesiodic Megalai Ehoiai could perhaps have been such an alternative expanded version ( "Megalai" implies that it was bigger than the Ehoiai).** Furthermore, entries could have been performed independently from the overall structure or used as introductions to longer poems, as the Hesiodic Shield starts off as the Ehoie of Alcmene and then is extended in a different direction. There could have been other cases as well; there is a reference to a "catalogue of the Leukippides" (GK52), which sounds as though it could have been an expanded version of the section from the catalog of women dealing with the daughters of Leucippus.

A corollary to this idea of flexibility is that it is open for us to see the individual Ehoie as a literary form in itself, roughly a description of a heroine leading into a longer story. It is interesting that the singular form is used in a Hellenistic scholiast on Pindar (GK215), who says that Pindar derived the story of

Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie- Poetry

89

Cyrene from the Hesiodic ehoie about her, ἀπὸ δὲ 'Hoías Ἡσιόδου. The Hesiodic GK could thus be seen as a collection of such smaller units, rather like

those Hellenistic poems that are collections of curses.

Issues of Genre My working hypothesis is that the GK is the culmination of a tradition of cata-

log poems, sharing key formal and thematic features of the sort previously outlined, such as the ehoie-formula, a rapidity of presentation, and a focus on narration rather than on speech. The GK itself imposes a canonical form on that tradition (to that extent, it would be legitimate to talk of a “GK tradition”). A general reason for assuming the existence of such a tradition is that forms of poetry in Archaic Greece tend to be traditional; a specific reason is that there is

cause to think that an earlier version was available to the poet of the Odyssey in about 700 B.c.E. (see page 93).

It is a separate claim that this tradition of poems amounts to a genre. In general, I would argue that, as far as the Archaic period is concerned, we are

justified in talking about a genre if we know or have reason to believe that a group of poems shared a range of distinctive practices and agreed techniques and that this condition is satisfied, if the tradition behind the GK is as I have described it. I propose to call the genre “ehoie-poetry.” Two objections might be made to this argument: (1) it could be argued that in the case of the GK, we should talk about not so much a genre as a style or

"mode" within the genre of epic;? and (2) it could also be argued that whereas the notion of a genre implies a number of poems, in the case of the GK and its hypothetical precursors, we are talking about a tradition of reworkings and reperformances of a single oral-epic poem, which again would not count as a

genre. But both of these objections can be answered. In reply to the first objection,

it could be argued that in that case, the genre of epic would be excessively broad (rather as if one maintained that all the distinctive forms of Greek choral poetry

were different modes of the genre of lyric or hymn). In fact, ehoie-poetry marks itself out from "normal" heroic epic by two distinctive features: first, the organization of narrative into a genealogical structure, and second, the primary posi-

tion given to female characters. These two features reinforce each other to create a recognizable difference of type (compare the differences between male and female characters discussed in Hinds's paper).?! In reply to the second objection, it would be possible to contest the requirement that a genre needs more than one instance and to argue that a single work of art, if sufficiently distinctive, could count as a type by itself. But that argu-

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lan Rutherford

Heroic Epic

Ehoie-Poetry

Organization of narrative

Linear

Genealogical

Primary characters

Male

Female

Figure 5.

Comparison of Features of Ehoie—Poetry and of Heroic Epic

ment is not necessary. To begin with, there is the attestation of the Megalai Ehoiai (a distinct poem, even if in part an expansion of the GK), which shows that there were perceived to be at least two instances. And if two were recorded,

there might have been many more oral instances that were not. But the main factor here is the long tradition of catalog poetry preceding the GK that I will

argue for later; in theory, a diachronic tradition of poetry might amount to no more than a single poem mutating over time, but, all things being equal, it is

much more likely to be realized as a plurality of more or less distinct poems, and so to fulfill the minimal conditions for genreness.

It is worth briefly contrasting this situation with the position of the catalog genre in Hellenistic poetry. It has become a truism that the catalog genre was

popular with Hellenistic authors.*? The best example is Hermesianax's Leontion (CA 98-100), a poem on intellectual figures and their beloveds, some of the en-

tries being introduced by the formula οἵην (Hesiod's beloved is a girl called Ehoie: line 24). Peter Bing links this poem to the Hellenistic interest in pinacography and literary classification.? Another example is Phanocles, Erotes é Kaloi (CA 106-107), where successive entries seem to have been linked by the

formula “ἢ ws.” The titles of a few other Hellenistic catalog poems survive.’* And more generally, Hellenistic poets experimented with linking together shorter units into a whole: there is a subgenre of curse-poetry, in which a catalog of curses is linked together, for example, the newly identified "tattooelegy* Catalog poetry also influences other genres in the Hellenistic period, for example, the catalog of the nymphs who adore Artemis in Callimachus, Hymn 3.184-224.° Stephen Hinds draws my attention to the catalog in Ovid, Tristia 1.6. Some think that the elegiac "catalogue of women" could go back as far to Antimachus's Lyde, which may have been a collection of heroic narratives more or less loosely connected into a whole.? Thus the Hellenistic period shows evidence for imitation of catalog poetry in general, and also specifically for the imitation of the GK and for the use of ehoie as a generic marker or mannerism specific to a particular kind of theme. But there are important differences. First, almost all of the Hellenistic examples

Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry

9]

are in elegiac meter. It is as if by this period, the hexameter is considered an in-

appropriate meter for the sort of subject matter associated with the catalog-ofwomen genre. If so, then this is a case in which Hellenistic poetry pairs off genre and meter in a way that archaic poetry does not. Second, it is possible that for Hellenistic poets, the catalog genre meant imitation of the one canonical model, the Hesiodic GK. In the Archaic period, by contrast, the defining feature

of the genre is not so much adherence to some distant model but rather these poets’ knowledge of and competence in using a range of shared practices.

Generic Archaeology Now let us explore the prehistory of the genre. I have already said that the ehoie

formula seems to be at odds with the overall structure of the GK, insofar as it implies that the story that it introduces is brought in as a paradigm, whereas the

overall structure of the GK should not accommodate paradigms. The problem is how to explain the discrepancy. One promising explanation is that the formula 7’ oin has been adapted from an earlier tradition of catalog poetry, in which famous women were introduced as examples and not as part of a general

plan. So Martin West, who suggests that this sort of primitive ehoie-poetry might have been exemplified by the Megalai Ehoiai.** What sort of poetry might this have been? An "ehoie" could hardly have existed on its own, despite the introduction of the Shield of Heracles. One possibility is that the original form is a catalog poem that listed famous heroines without any genealogical connection. The introductory frame could well have been much as in the extant GK, that is, "sing, Muses, famous women the gods slept with, such as . . .” (GK1.1, 14). This might be linked with the hypothesis mentioned earlier that the intended audience of such poetry might have been women or girls. Another possibility is that the earlier genre was an aretalogy of the god, praising him by listing the beauti-

ful women whom the god has had sex with. One example is that of the Dios Apate in the Iliad (14. 313ff.), where Zeus boasts that he has slept with the wife

of Ixion, and with Danae, Electra, Semele, Alcmene, Demeter, Leto, and Hera; another example is the short catalog of Zeus's lovers and of the offspring of other deities in the final section of the Theogony. In that case, there is a parallel with Tablet 6 of the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh lists the men whom Ishtar has had sex with. Walter Burkert has suggested that this part of the Epic of Gilgamesh was used as a model by the poet who added the Dios Apate to the Iliad. These two alternative models could even be combined in the same genealogical model, the second of these two models being the earlier stage, and the

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Genealogical poetry /

Ehoie-poetry (1): nongenealogical catalogs of women

Ehoie-poetry (2): genealogical catalogs of women

Figure 6.

Generic Crossing and the Evolution of Ehoie-Poetry

first a later one, yielding a model with three stages (list of heroines in aretalogy of god — independent list of heroines — genealogical catalog).

Now, if one generic input into what eventually becomes the canonical Hesiodic GK is some such primitive ehoie-poetry, there might be at least one other. One plausible candidate might be some sort of general "genealogy." Genealogical literature is widely attested in both prose and poetry in the Greek world, and such traditions are clearly very old. We know of both verse and prose

forms; verse forms include the Melampodia and the Phoronis, and prose forms, the works of Acusilaus and Pherecydes. Thus immediate antecedents of the canonical Hesiodic GK could be seen as an early example of generic "crossing."*? If "crossing" is one theoretical model that may be helpful in understanding

the origin of the GK, another is the process described as “automatization” (Avtomatezatsiya) by Russian formalists, particularly Tynjanov and Sklovsky (summarized in Tynjanov). They posit that artistic forms typically move from a

stage wherein a certain type of feature is the dominant element in the system to a later stage when it comes to occupy a weaker, secondary role and then another feature takes over as the dominant one. One of the key points of the theory is that the once dominant element does not disappear but instead survives in an etiolated and vestigial state. Then, the second, weaker stage can be described as

merely "formal" rather than "functional," and also as "automated," the point of the word "automated" being that the element is no longer part of the primary

purpose of the work but follows as a secondary concomitant, and ceases to have a major effect on the audience, who have become more or less numb to the ele-

ment's effect. Finally, this process can help us understand the evolution of literary genres; one genre turns into another when an element that was dominant sinks into a subservient role.*! The development of use of the “ehoie-formula” in the GK tradition could be very like this situation. Originally the formula would have had a dominant

functional role, introducing paradigms of female excellence; but at a later stage, marked by the canonical GK, it would have become less important and would have been reduced to a merely formal device.

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So far we have looked principally at the diachronic issue of how ehoie-

poetry may have developed. But it remains to be considered what the function is of ehoiai within the poem on the synchronic level. One theory is that the repeated formula ehoie adds to the poem’s structure, providing unity, and no doubt it does. Then again, Martin West, as mentioned, attributes to the formula specific functions: he sees it as a device of recapitulation, used only when the transition from one part of the poem to another is not straightforward and linear.“ Another way of thinking about it would be that the poem proceeds along two poetic paths at the same time. One path is the connected path of genealogy, where every entry is closely linked into the overall structure; this path is centripetal. The other path is a looser sequence of paradigms, ehoie entries, which

look in a centrifugal direction. That is, there is tension between paradigmatic and syntagmatic structure. Thus an “ehoie” on its own is paradigmatic and substitutable, whereas

within

the overall genealogical

structure, its role is

syntagmatic. And there is a tension between surface form and true structure.

The surface form is desultory and casual, almost as if the poet were deliberately trying to give the impression of a naive, preliterate form.”

The Odyssey and Ehoie-Poetry Finally, let us turn to the complex issue of the relationship between the Odyssey

and ehoie-poetry. It has often been observed that the relationship between the catalog of women in the Odyssean Nekuia and fragments of the Hesiodic GK is very close. For one thing, there is a high degree of overlap between the women mentioned in the Nekuia and in the GK. In the Nekuia, Odysseus reports that he sees first Anticleia and then Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene, Megara, Epicaste, Chloris, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procne, Ariadne, Maera, and Clymene. The stories of the last few are summarized briefly, but the stories of Maera and Clymene

were apparently filled in by another Nekuia in the Cyclic Nostoi.* Of the women mentioned in the Odysseian Nekuta, Tyro, Alcmene, Chloris, Leda, and

Iphimedeia figure prominently in the fragments of the GK, and we will expect most of the others to have been included in sections that do not survive. Furthermore, there are impressive verbal parallels, for example, the discussion of Tyro (GK31-32; Odyssey 11. 235ff.),*° and also the account of Chloris, wife of Neleus (GK33[a]; Odyssey 11.281ff.). These look a little as if the canonical GK might have imitated the Odyssey.“ But it is also possible that some primitive women’s catalog poetry predates the Odyssey and that something like the GK might have been around before the Odyssey.” There are differences, it is true: the Nekuia does not use the “ehoie-formula” (perhaps it has been replaced with

a set of formulas amounting to “And I saw:” τὴν de... idov..., Kat...

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elSov ... and so on). On the other hand, the structure of entries is broadly the same, with the reference to the woman leading smoothly into an account of a dominant myth. The entries in the Nekuia are not presented as being genealogi-

cally connected; however, there are some hidden genealogical connections. Tyro was mother of Neleus, and Chloris married Neleus and gave birth to Pero, who was wooed by Melampus; Tyro was also grandmother of Melampus, although that relationship is not mentioned, it seems to provide a background to the story of Theoclymenus later in the Odyssey.” It is a reasonable hypothesis, then, that the Nekuia catches and preserves for us an earlier stage in the development of ehoie-poetry, that in a sort of intimation of Bakhtinian polyphony, it deploys the generic voice of the catalog genre. But there are also striking differences between ehoie-poetry as we know it from the GK and its deployment in the Nekuia. First, some of the entries in the Nekuia are in indirect speech, the woman telling her own story: Tyro (φάτο, φής) at 236-237; Alcmene (evxer’) at 261; and Iphimedeia (φάσκε) at 306. That approach seems to be a difference from

the GK, which, as the grammarian Diomedes implied, is nonmimetic with respect to speech and in which women are never represented as speaking.*” Second, we have seen that death is not a major theme of the Hesiodic GK,

but the Nekuia is all about death. Third, Doherty argues that in the Nekuia, women are presented as only an appendage of men:? "the Nekuia gives voice and weight to female subject positions, but favours those defined by loyalty and affection for male kin, and silences those defined by unsanctioned desires or hatred of males.” It would be interesting to assess the GK on the same scale. There are some signs that the GK allowed itself greater freedom in representing women. For example, in the GK, Tyro is a stronger personality; she is spared by Zeus because she stands up to her father Salmoneus, who impersonates gods and is therefore sent down to Tartarus. There is the further question of why the Odyssey should make use of cata-

log poetry in this way. One answer to this question has recently been offered by Doherty, namely that Odysseus is singing an ehoie-type poem to please his Phaeacian audience, particularly Arete. This point works particularly well if, as Doherty suggests, the audience of ehoie-poetry was often composed of women. Another important dimension has to do with the fame of women. As modern scholars like Marilyn Katz have stressed, the Odyssey plays with the idea of female glory, particularly that of Penelope: Antinous the suitor praised her guile

(2. 124-125), saying that she was preeminent in this quality and received it from Athena. He also says she is more beautiful than the greatest women of earlier times: Tyro and Alcmene (a clear reference to two of the major heroines of

Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry

«€ --------------------.------22-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-----

Genealogical poetry N

Nongenealogical catalogs of women using the ehote-formula

Immediate antecedents of GK with genealogical structure and ehoie-formula

~.,

^

-

»

a *

. Odyssean Nekuia

“Hesiodic” GK €

(Prose-Genealogy)

Figure7.

95

Hellenistic adaptations

Sketch of Development

ehoie-poetry). And in the second Nekuia at Od.24 (196—203), Agamemnon

praises the virtue of Penelope, and he says that "the gods will weave a beautiful song for her," contrasting this favor with the bad song that men will sing for Clytemnestra.*' What song is he thinking of? The Odyssey itself? or ehotepoetry, the genre in which female virtue is the established theme? Surely it is precisely because the fame of women is such a major theme in the poem (particularly the good fame of Penelope and the bad fame of Clytemnestra) that the poet of the Odyssey appropriates ehoie-poetry in the Nekuia. The effect of this generic appropriation is to foreground the theme of female virtue and to provide a background of famous women of the past, against which the excellences of Penelope can be evaluated. Thus, I posit a model for the development of ehoie-poetry and for the evolution, within this mode, of a full-fledged and distinct form of poetry cataloging the marriages of heroines in genealogical form. The stages postulated are as follows:

a. Ehoie-poetry (1), an early stage: There are loosely arranged catalogs of prominent women, perhaps originally aretalogical in character, using

the ehoie-formula. b.

Ehoie-poetry (2): Here ehoie-poetry (1) is crossed with genealogical

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poetry, and as a result, automatization of the ehoie-formula occurs. Somewhere in this stage the genre is “appropriated” by the poet of the

Odyssey. c.

The classic, canonical phase: This is represented by the Hesiodic GK.

d. A later stage of creative reuse: GK becomes a model for certain types of Hellenistic erotic elegy.

CHAPTER FIVE —— —

Rei

Herodotus’s Genre(s) DEBORAH

BOEDEKER

Introduction The Father of History is embroiled in paternity suits. Herodotus is both hailed as the single parent of a new genre and considered but one of many contributors to a variety of prose subgenres. He is charged with falsely claiming to report investigations into history and ethnography, and yet is defended as the first serious researcher interested primarily in discovering facts about past human experience. He is portrayed as a transmitter of traditional cultural values conveyed in stories about the past but also described as struggling to master unwieldy tra-

ditions and to give them a stable form.! Such controversies demonstrate the vibrancy of contemporary Herodotean

studies. By analyzing the Histories’ rhetoric and cultural context as attentively as its subject matter, recent scholarship has made great progress in interpreting this complex and puzzling work for its current readers. No longer is it appropri-

ate, at the beginning of a study such as this one, to call up as a straw man Herodotus the charming but naive storyteller: this view of him no longer prevails among Herodoteans.? The nature of the Histories is still far from settled, however, as the “charges”

just listed make clear. We cannot know, generally speaking, how Herodotus's material compares with what his sources reported, or how he decided what to include (and in what order) and what to leave out, or how and for whom his work was “published.” To what degree is the Histories concerned with accurately

reporting past events and foreign customs, with their significance for a contemporary or even future audience, or with establishing its own authority and su-

periority over other narratives? Should we look for significance in each story in97

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dependently or in meaningful patterns of stories?? We cannot even be confident that we know how to read Herodotus’s apparently autobiographical state ments.‘ Nor is it likely that the answers to these questions would be the same for all parts of the Histories. I do not expect to address, let alone solve, all these issues in this brief chapter. Rather, after surveying the major debate about the nature of the Histories, I will focus on what the work has to say about various kinds of narrative—including its own. Occasionally Herodotus speaks of other texts in terms of the narrative strategies or critical methods that limit them; as we shall see, he claims

to transcend their limitations with a different kind of logos. The concern to distinguish his logos from others helps point out the avowed parameters, methods, and intentions of the Histories, and suggests that Herodotus was concerned with what can be called differences in genre.

The Debate: Is Herodotus a Historian? What becomes clear when we consider Herodotus's discussion of other genres

is that his own genre is very much in question: this situation is what gives rise to most of the uncertainties just listed. Donald Lateiner solves the problem neatly by calling the Histories a genre of its own, one that stimulated later practitioners but was never reproduced.? On the other hand, it could be argued that the remarkably wide range of the work in its contents, in the role of its narrator, perhaps even in its chronological range from remote to recent past, comprises

more than a single genre: its contents include political/military events, ethnography and local history, and geography; its discourses include those of historical fiction (the tale of Candaules, his wife, and Gyges: 1.8-12), rationalistic demythologizing (Helen was not really at Troy: 2.120), critical oral history (Spartans versus Samians on what happened to a valuable gift: 1.70), and scientific historiography (why Herodotus concludes that it was Ephialtes who showed Xerxes the path at Thermopylae: 7.214). It is difficult to subsume all

these kinds of materials and authorial voices under one generic umbrella. For the moment though, we can begin with the fact that Herodotus was deemed a "historian" (historikos and writer of historia) by Aristotle (Poetics 9),

about a century after his time, and "father of history" (pater historiae) by Cicero much later. These titles, necessarily bestowed in retrospect, indicate that Herodotus's work became one of those successful "possible solutions" attempted by authors that, according to Gian Biagio Conte, eventually gain au-

thority and are accepted by tradition as contributing to a norm, a new genre.* I will be concerned in part with the degree to which Herodotus shows himself aware of engaging in the process of finding a new discursive form.

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In particular, there are instructive points of contact between Herodotus and his closest successor (who never mentions him by name); Thucydides took

Herodotus's work as a starting point (chronologically and otherwise) and as both a positive and a negative model. For example, as John Moles has recently demonstrated, Thucydides’ prologue bears a very close relationship to Herodotus's. Moles argues that Thucydides’ aims and methods are more similar to those of his predecessor than have been generally assumed—probably because the later historian’s strong claims for originality and superiority tend to persuade his readers, as well as to mask his text’s many resemblances to the His-

tories.’ It is appropriate, then, for us to consider Herodotus an early practitioner of what would be defined as historia, even while acknowledging that his work may predate any formal awareness of such a genre.

As soon as we grant all this, however, a serious problem arises, for a great deal of material presented in the Histories, both historical and descriptive, simply cannot be accurate. In considering how Herodotus conceived of his work “generically,” we must ask about the extent to which he was concerned with dis-

covering and presenting facts. This issue is a subject of much recent debate. One version of the controversy, an ancient but still vital one, frames the problem as one of “truth versus lies,” and focuses on the accuracy and credibility of the His-

tories: did Herodotus simply make things up? A more recent and equally fundamental version of the question is concerned rather with “history versus rhetoric”: given the impossibility of fully re-creating the past, is it fruitful to approach “history” as a (more or less accurate) representation of past events and processes, rather than as an author's literary creation?!’ I will summarize

these two aspects of the debate, before turning to able to tell us about genres. In a series of studies published between Armayor argued that Herodotus must never have Near East, Egypt, and Thrace for which he claims

what Herodotus’s text may be 1977 and 1985, O. Kimball seen a number of sites in the personal autopsy, such as the

great labyrinth near Lake Moeris in the Egyptian Fayyum (2.148). Armayor maintains not only that Herodotus’s description of the lake is highly inaccurate but also that his description of the labyrinth derives from a Pythagorean model and from Homer.'!

Armayor's critique of Herodotus's claims was approved by Detlev Fehling, when his 1971 book on Herodotus's alleged sources (not cited by Armayor) was expanded and translated into English in 1989. Fehling fundamentally attacks Herodotus's trustworthiness, arguing that his entire system of named sources and claims of personal autopsy is essentially a fiction. He charges, for example, that in order to establish credibility, the author puts words into the mouths only

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of those who would be the most likely informants for each part of his “history." Like Armayor, Fehling too charges that Herodotus claims to have ob-

served places he badly misdescribes, such as the pyramids at Giza (2.126.2).? Fehling asserts, in effect, that Herodotus wrote‘as if he were a serious histo-

rian before the mechanisms for historiographical research were developed. To explain this paradox, Fehling argues that Herodotus must have imagined how, in ideal circumstances of which he had no personal experience, one would go about getting good sources of information—and that he constructed the Histories on this “as-if” basis.'* Fehling’s position of course has very unsettling consequences: Herodotus is our major source for the political and military events

of a crucial historical period, and indeed for a great deal most coherent information about the ancient world.!? If narrator of the Histories at face value, this inability affects ment of his literary role and his work’s intended function,

of we not but

our earliest and cannot take the only our assessalso, in a differ-

ent interpretive realm, our evaluation of its historical usefulness.'®

Francois Hartog’s book The Mirror of Herodotus, published in 1980 and translated into English in 1988, also casts doubt on Herodotus as a straightforward transmitter of what was reported to him. Hartog argues that Herodotus’s description of the ancient Scythians is based not only on data available to him

(some of which—supported by archaeological findings—Hartog accepts as accurate), but on a rhetorical strategy to describe Scythia as the “other” with respect to both Persia and Greece. It is possible to judge Hartog’s conclusions as a reflection more of his own structuralist approach, which influenced his selection and emphasis of certain elements, than of Herodotus’s text itself.'” Yet the “rhetoric of otherness,” as Hartog characterizes the Histories’ description of foreign customs in terms that recall their Greek opposites, is not merely the predetermined result of Hartog’s methodology. Scholars with quite different approaches to the Histories also conclude that Herodotus’s Greek perspective determined how he described foreign cultures." Stephanie West presents a thesis related to Fehling’s, with regard to Herodotus's often very inaccurate reports of inscriptions both Greek and foreign.'? In noting that the speaker sometimes claims to have seen these inscriptions himself, West suggests, “(W]e perhaps do [Herodotus] an injustice by taking at face-value a use of the first person which may have been understood by his original audience as a literary convention without any necessary connection with the author's autobiography.””° This remark raises questions related to liter-

ary genre, but West does not pursue them here. On the other side of the debate from Armayor, Fehling, Hartog, and West are Herodotus's “apologists,” including especially W. Kendrick Pritchett, who

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sharply delineates the opposing positions and vigorously defends Herodotus against all charges of prevarication.”' Pritchett marshals evidence from many disciplines to disprove the charge that Herodotus was anything other than a serious historian doing his best to obtain and report information. Independent written sources, archaeological material, and comparative evidence from other cultures indicate that apparently far-fetched reports in the Histories may often be based on real practices.” Pritchett describes a Herodotus who writes with high standards of veracity and accuracy, one who approaches his task as we would expect a modern historian to do,? while also acknowledging that the author of the Histories is primarily an oral historian using sources of varied reliability (as Herodotus himself repeatedly emphasizes), and naturally sharing a fifth-century worldview.” Pritchett’s view of the Histories—ironically not unlike Fehling’s in this respect—assumes that the work follows (Fehling would say, “purports to follow”)

the norms of an established genre of historiography: “the claims and objective of one who is writing history are quite different from those of one who is writing a work of fiction.”*> Pritchett's point is well taken: many of the alleged “lies” in Herodotus’s work derive from other sources, Greek and non-Greek, and were believed by other ancient authors. In general, however, I do not share Pritchett’s

position that everything Herodotus says must be true (or as “true” as he can make it) in order for us to trust and respect him as an author: I will argue that the Histories includes too many different kinds of writing for this to be the case. Gordon Shrimpton has more recently studied the question of Herodotus's attribution of material to various sources. Shrimpton's main concern is not whether Herodotus "got it right"—whether extra-Herodotean data can confirm material in the text. Rather, he is interested in the functions of historical

memory within cultures, and with corresponding differences between ancient and contemporary historical writing. Directly confronting Fehling's charges, Shrimpton and his collaborator Kathryn Gillis provide a statistical analysis of all of Herodotus's source citations—a study that points to conclusions very dif-

ferent from those drawn by Fehling. In particular, they find that most citations of specific sourceseorrelate with an indication that Herodotus doubts the information conveyed\?* ) I agree with Shrimpton that the question of Herodotean fictions cannot be simply resolved. Not every single discrepancy cited by the “liar school” has been successfully contested. One of few discrepancies that Pritchett cannot explain, for example, is the very lengthy inscription that Themistocles is supposed to have had cut in the rocks at Artemisium, asking the Ionians in Xerxes’ fleet not

to engage in battle against fellow Hellenes (8.22). At least Herodotus does not

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say that he saw these inscriptions personally, although he does purport to quote what they said.? It is more illuminating to consider Herodotus's narrative strategy in this passage, rather than the literal truth of what he says. Instead of merely labeling the rock-carved message a fabrication, we can more appropriately regard it as a device used to dramatize an important strategic and moral issue: with Themistocles’ inscription, Herodotus expresses what he believes must have been at stake in the confrontation between mainland Greeks and the Greeks in Xerxes’ armada. Many of the speeches in Herodotus, it is widely recognized, have comparable functions. Like the alleged inscriptions, these passages use fabricated speeches to set forth what the historian sees as underlying issues.

Fehling correctly observes that Herodotus takes pains to present himself as a serious gatherer of evidence; yet the fact that he does so of course need not preclude his trying to report events and their causes as accurately as he can.” Moreover, evidence is increasing that the Histories presents a great deal of well-

founded historical and ethnographic information—not, of course, without its share of cultural distortion. In the face of all the data that Pritchett and others? have brought to bear against a thesis of made-up source citations, as well as the conclusions of Shrimpton and Gillis's thorough analysis of Herodotus's source citations, Fehling’s basic assertion appears weak. The second, and related, part of the debate in Herodotean studies concerns

whether.the Histories can fruitfully be studied as history, or whether it should be confined to literary analysis. Taking an extreme position, A. J. Woodman (who considers Herodotus only tangentially) argues that ancient historiography should be considered essentially a rhetorical rather than a scientific genre: the past is beyond accurate recall even to eyewitnesses, and representations of it depend largely on decisions about what to include, as well as about how and where to present it in a narrative.» John Moles would modify Woodman’s position, on the grounds that style and content cannot be separated but must be considered together." Obviously the text of Herodotus, like any other literary

text, is by no means innocent of rhetorical strategies. Claude Calame, for example, surveys how Herodotus indicates shifting levels of authority or credibility for his subject matter by varying his stance toward the material he reports: unlike the Homeric narrator, Herodotus shows some anxiety about his audience's

acceptance of what he says.*? Herodotus's construction of credibility and authority is an essential aspect of the genre he is developing.” In trying to understand how that incipient genre is imagined, we shall survey what the His-

tories has to say about how other texts relate to their subject matter and audiences.

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Herodotus on Other Genres As Conte has suggested and other contributions to this volume amply demon-

strate, a then, to debated "genres"

literary genre is significant only in relation to other genres.* It is time, move from considering basic characteristics of Herodotus's work as by modern scholars to analyzing what Herodotus himself says about (for want of a better term), in part as a way of clarifying the parameters

of his own work.??

Of all the literary types cited by Herodotus, Homeric epic is by far the most frequently mentioned. Herodotus's debt to Homer has of course long been recognized.* His prologue recalls both Iliad and Odyssey; his primary subject, like that of the Iliad, is a mighty war fought between those who dwell in Greece and Asia, expanded by "Odyssean" tales of travels to distant places and strange sights." Moreover, Herodotus's stated purpose, reminiscent of epic kleos, is to preserve the fame of great deeds. Even part of what he "knows" about the distant past depends on Homeric poetry.?? Notwithstanding these obvious points of contact, Herodotus by no means claims to be following Homeric and Hesiodic precedents; rather, as Herman Verdin has shown especially clearly, he freely criticizes epic poets as trustworthy sources.? He implicitly discounts the idea that reliable tradition, let alone a Muse, necessarily provided poets with their material. The only time Herodotus mentions a poet's divine inspiration is quite suspect: he says that Aristeas of Proconessus (4.13), "possessed by Apollo” (φοιβόλαμπτος γενόμενος), visited and made poems about wondrous inhabitants of the far north: one-eyed Arimaspians, gold-guarding griffins, and finally the Hyperboreans. The existence of the latter is soon amusingly thrown into doubt, when Herodotus claims that if there are Hyperboreans living beyond the North Wind, there must be Hypernotians living beyond the South (4.36). Poetic inspiration such as Aristeas's is clearly not linked with veracity by Herodotus. Even though he sometimes uses it as a source, Herodotus is critical of epic narrative, seeing it as potentially fictional. This idea appears explicitly in a number of contexts (all in ethnographic sections of the Histories): Homer or an

older poet "invented" the name Okeanos and introduced it into his poetry (2.23)? Homer and Hesiod “made” the Greek theogony (2.53.2); some poet “made” the (Greek) name of the Eridanus River—thus causing Herodotus to

doubt the river's very existence (3.115.2). In this light, it is significant that the

words poésis "something made/poetry” and poiétes “maker/poet” are first attested in the Histories, and are used there, together with the related verb poieo, to emphasize the “fabricated” nature of poetic narrative.” When they do not “make” it themselves, Herodotus's poets "use"

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(χράομαι) or even "seize/steal" (ἁρπάζω) material from other sources. He reports, for example, that some of the Greeks who are “in poetry” (presumably as opposed to prose logographers) use the Egyptian belief that one’s birthdate affects one's life (2.82); similarly, Aeschylus stole (ἥρπασε) from an Egyptian logos when he, alone of earlier poets, “made” Artemis the daughter of Demeter (2.156.6).** Poets, however, and perhaps other authors as well, tend to conceal their sources: “There are some Greeks who have used this logos [the allegedly Egyptian account of the transmigration of souls*] as if it were their own"; Herodotus disdains even to record their names (Empedocles? Pythagoras? Orpheus?) in his text (2.123). Herodotus too must use accounts (logoi) from other sources, but unlike his

poets, he often self-consciously reports where a story comes from. As we have seen, this information is frequently intended to raise (and sometimes to dispel,

as in 8.65.6) doubts about its credibility. This is his tendency whether the story comes from poets (“if you have to say what is used by epic poets,” then Priam was losing several sons each time a battle was fought at Troy, and it was very unlikely that he would not have given Helen up to the Greeks if she had really been in his city [2.120]); or interested parties (“this is just what the Spartans would say, according to Herodotus, to exonerate themselves from the charge that they privately sold a great vessel that had been intended for delivery to Croesus

[1.70.3]); or even whole peoples (“let him use the things said by the Egyptians [fabulous tales about Rhampsinitis] whoever finds them credible. It underlies my whole logos that I write the things said by various people to my hearing”

12.123.1]). A logos thus is a commodity that can be appropriated, even stolen. As in

the case of Aeschylus cited earlier, Herodotus sometimes applies standards to other authors’ use of logoi that resemble later notions of intellectual property. In addition, logoi can be more or less credible, and also more or less biased by the self-interest of those who tell them. Herodotus’s criteria of plausibility often sound “natural” to modern readers.

At times Herodotus applies to other texts (such as Homeric epic) the same standards of plausibility that he implicitly claims for himself in the remarks just

quoted—and finds them wanting. These criteria could be merely a way to mark Herodotus's superiority to others, like Homer, assumed to be engaging in the same enterprise (or “genre” )—telling what happened in other times and places.

But as we have seen, Herodotus also distinguishes his goals from what Homer and other poets do.

The clearest example of this phenomenon is his argument with the Homeric version of Helen’s whereabouts during the Trojan War (2.116—120, just

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mentioned). Although Homer places Helen in Troy, Herodotus finds this scenario implausible: the Trojans would certainly have given her up, if indeed (as Homer himself indicates: 2.120) Priam was losing two or three of his own sons every time there was a battle. According to Herodotus, several remarks in the poems show that Homer knew the more likely variant of the story—that Helen was in Egypt the whole time—but the poet put her in Troy because this version was more suitable (εὐπρεπές) for epic- making (ἐποποιίην: 2.116). What is important here is not simply that Herodotus disagrees with Homer, but why he does so. Herodotus maintains that Homer was compelled for generic reasons to tell the story as he did: as a poet he had, so to speak, a different “narrative contract” with his audience." The Helen passage, although unique in its explicitness, indicates very clearly that Herodotus attributes an important difference in narrative motives to different kinds of accounts. In setting off his own work against that of others in this way, Herodotus is

“staging” his genre, a term I borrow from Conte’s analysis of the recusationes of Augustan poets—their famous poetic “refusals” to engage in writing epic. Conte finds the most characteristic element of Augustan poetry to be “the poet's insistence on letting us know that he could be doing something else. The genre ‘stages’ itself, becomes spectacle . . ."** Unlike Propertius or Horace, however, Herodotus is not ostensibly refusing to work in a genre that is beyond his gifts. Rather, in calling attention to the difference between the Histories and epic, he presents his own work as subject to other, more exacting criteria than Homer could appropriately employ. Relevant to the lower level of credibility that Herodotus attributes to epic is Ewen Bowie’s work linking different genres of archaic poetry—categorized by their performance context, as well as by their meter and other formal character-

istics—to varying levels of expectation about their relation to historical or factual reality.” Bowie ranks ten kinds of archaic Greek poetry in descending order of truth claims. Hexameter oracles lead the list,” next come epitaphs and dedi-

cations, then various narrative genres—historical elegy and the iambic or trochaic narratives that purport to relate recent events. Homeric epic, dealing with more distant events, falls lower in Bowie's scale;>! his list ends with epodes, such as Archilochus’s famous seduction story reported by a first-person narrator

(the “Cologne epode,” fr. 196a West). In addition to what we have just discussed for epic narrative, it is possible that the Histories may similarly attribute different levels of credibility to other

poetic genres. Herodotus sometimes identifies poetic works by their meter as well as their composer; it is possible that such references incorporate generic assumptions, including the level of truth claim, for the works mentioned. When

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Herodotus concludes the dramatic story of how Gyges became king of the

Lydians, for example, he adds, “Archilochus commemorated his contemporary Gyges in iambic trimeters” (1.12.2). Here the designation “contemporary” (κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν χρόνον γενόμενος) suggests the basic reliability of Archi-

lochus’s account. This impression may be reinforced by the meter cited (which ranks high in credibility in Bowie’s list): Archilochus mentioned Gyges in a kind of poem associated with more “realistic” rather than “mythical” subjects.* When Herodotus

recounting the failed Cypriot uprising against the Persians, notes, “Those killed in Cyprus by the Persians included . . .

Aristocyprus, son of Philocyprus, whom Solon the Athenian praised most of tyrants in dactylic verses (ἐν ἔπεσι) when he came to Cyprus” (5.113.2: Plut.

Solon 26.4 indicates that the poem was an elegy*>). Here, the point of mention-

ing Solon's elegy in this account of Hellenic freedom fighters is to suggest the accuracy of the report as well as its laudatory character. To Aristocyprus's noble death in battle against the Persians, Herodotus adds the cachet of the wise law-

giver's praise of his father in a genre more sober than, say, epinician or threnody. The way that Herodotus refers to these poetic sources thus would allow for, although it is too curtailed to prove, his assumption of certain "generic" differences among them.™

Evaluating the authority of prose authors in Herodotus poses a different set of problems. Felix Jacoby's paradigm of a step-by-step development of historiography—from Hecataeus to Herodotus to Hellanicus and beyond—has for generations dominated the study of early Greek historical prose.* It is no discredit to Jacoby's seminal work that scholars have begun to revise his evolution-

ary scheme. As Charles Fornara notes, all forms of early historiography "developed within the same creative matrix within a comparatively short span of

time.” With specific reference to Herodotus, Robert Fowler challenges Jacoby's linear paradigm, postulating close intellectual ties between

Herodotus and

other prose writers such as Hellanicus and Charon, who, though

listed by

Jacoby as successors of Herodotus, may be more appropriately considered his conternporaries.”

Whatever cross-influences may have existed on a personal level, however, in the text of the Histories, Herodotus comes across as a competitor more than a collaborator with contemporary authors. An agonistic spirit is most recognizable when he mentions Hecataeus, as we shall see, but it can be detected elsewhere as well. A decade ago, Catherine Darbo-Peschanski and John Marincola

independently asked why Herodotus refers to himself and his inquiry with unique frequency in Book 2, the Egyptian logos.** Both scholars concluded that

he does this precisely because many other Greeks (including Hecataeus) had

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written on Egypt, and Herodotus wants to differentiate his voice and views from theirs.5? Competition with other writers may well be a reason for authorial self-references in other parts of the Histories too, although naturally this possibility must remain conjectural for topics that we do not know were treated in other early prose texts. In positioning himself against logographoi working with similar material, Herodotus is not alone: the "good strife" of "bard rivalling bard" is familiar already from Hesiod (Works and Days 24—26); examples closer in time can be found in the polemical claims made by classical medical writers and also by Herodotus's close successor Thucydides (as in 1.20.3). In contrast to the fifteen poets mentioned by Herodotus, Hecataeus is the only prose writer cited by name in the Histories. In two instances, Hecataeus is a

historical actor, offering practical advice on how to deal with the Persians— once to the Ionians (5.36) and once to the rebel Aristagoras (5.125). In both

cases, his good advice is not taken. Herodotus's comments on Hecataeus as a writer tend to be more negative; his criticism varies from more "generic" to more specific. In one passage, however, where Herodotus alludes to Hecataeus but does not mention him by name, he faults the generic practice of geographers: “I laugh (γελῶ) at the many (πολλούς) who have written (γράψαντας)

‘tours around the world’ (γῆς περιόδους---ἃ title by which Hecataeus's most famous work was often known!) because of their symmetrical maps, drawn as if with a compass" (4.36.2). This is a jibe not only at Hecataeus's well-known

work, but apparently at the whole "genre" of annotated maps. With the words just quoted, Herodotus turns against Hecataeus not only the title of the Ges Periodos but also, through precise verbal allusions, the first words of his Genealogies (or Histories), where Hecataeus declares, "I write (γράφω) as it appears to me to be true; for the logoi of the Greeks seem to me to be many (πολλοί) and laughable (γελοῖοι)" (FGrH 1.1 a).

A little later, Herodotus

remarks,

"I cannot

tell the sources

of the

Borysthenes or Nile, and I think no one of the Greeks can" (4.53.5). This com-

ment similarly alludes to Hecataeus, who had written about the sources of the Nile (FGrH 1.302 a). Here the earlier writer—working with the kind of subject

matter that Herodotus does, but not properly acknowledging the limits of his knowledge—becomes one of "the Greeks" he himself had disparaged in that notorious opening sentence of the Genealogies. When Hecataeus appears briefly

in the persona of a traveling inquirer much like himself, Herodotus makes him sound foolish: Hecataeus naively (or pretentiously) told Egyptian priests that

he could trace his ancestry back to a god in a mere sixteen generations (2.143). Herodotus does not criticize Hecataeus's practice here, only his ignorance. But at least in one instance, an account of Hecataeus is allowed to stand on its own

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merits: on the question of why the Pelasgians were driven out of Attica, Herodotus includes Hecataeus's version, which makes the Athenians look unjust, alongside an Athenian variant explaining that they behaved justly (6.137). These three references to Hecataeus as a compiler of historical and geographical information (again, much like the narrator of the Histories) are directed to specific rather than generic concerns. So too are Herodotus's objections to the foolish views of “the Ionians” on the geography and boundaries of Egypt (2.1516)— probably another reference to Hecataeus.*!

Herodotus on His Own Genre: Range When Herodotus makes judgments about Hecataeus or Homer, he implies that his own account is free from their worst flaws—the generic limitations of subject matter “appropriate” for epic on the one hand, and on the other, the naiveté or speciousness on the part of insufficiently critical logographers. In some ways, moreover, Herodotus explicitly points out generic limits that he too must observe. It is particularly within the areas of subject matter and critical judgment that Herodotus self-consciously describes the parameters of what he calls his “logos” —a notoriously polyvalent term, not least in Herodotus. Often it means an account, large or small, such as a “logos about Herakles” (2.43.1). But some-

times it seems to refer to the whole work and its manner of presentation: “it underlies my whole logos that I write the things said by various people to my hearing” (2.123.1). With “logos” in this sense, Herodotus comes close to talking explicitly about generic features of his work. First, there are both positive and negative restrictions on his subject matter.

He is bound to cover certain things and not to stray too far from the primary topic of human actions announced in the proem, “the great and wonderful things the Greeks and barbarians did, and especially why they fought with each other.” At frequent intervals in the more digressive first half of the Histories,” Herodotus cites a need to follow the main path of his logos, sometimes sounding as if he were under compulsion. “Our logos must go on to inquire who this Cyrus was...” (1.95.1). “I go back to the earlier logos . . .” (1.140.3). “I will go

back to the logos I was going to tell at the beginning” (4.82). “Now it is necessary to take up the logos I was going to tell from the beginning” (5.62). In these passages, the logos corresponds to the main thread of the Histories, the story building up to the conflict between Hellenes and barbarians. Tolerant as it is of digressions (“my logos from the beginning seeks out supplements": 4.30), Herodotus's logos then does not allow any and all kinds of material.?' Its aim is not to be comprehensive, but rather to select things he

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deems worthy of commemoration within the framework of Persian-Hellenic relations. Herodotus’s restriction of his subject matter is sometimes signaled by

statements indicating that he knows more on a subject but will confine his account to the most relevant or important details. For example, in describing the

unsuccessful attempt led by Cleomenes to storm the Athenian Acropolis, he concludes, “Among them [the beseigers captured and condemned to death by the Athenians] was Timesitheos the Delphian, whose deeds of strength and spirit I would very well be able to describe” (5.72.4, see also 2.10, 2.40).*! Cer-

tain events may be reported because they are unusual and wonderful: “we will pass over most of the Persians' conquests, but I will mention only the most la-

borious and most worthy of note" (1.177; compare 2.155, 2.35)—or omitted because they are indecorous. Thus the speaker chastely reports that Oroetes killed Polykrates "in a manner unworthy of telling" (3.125.3), and he refuses to

record the name of the Samian who acquired the possessions of an escaped Persian eunuch: "I know it but have willingly forgotten it" (4.36). So too, Herodotus will not name the Phoenicians’ native commanders in Xerxes’ fleet, for, being more like slaves than generals, their names are not demanded “by the necessity of the inquiry's logos” (7.96, compare 7.99). Occasionally Herodotus omits giving information that would seem both ethically worthy and relevant to his subject matter. He says, for example, that he has learned the names of all three hundred noble Spartans who died with Leonidas—yet he does not list them (7.224.1). The reason for his silence may be that such a long catalog would

be inappropriate in his narrative—another “generic” concern—but as Lateiner

points out, simply by declaring that he has taken the trouble to learn their names, Herodotus gives tribute to the great deeds of these heroes.“ Herodotus also self-consciously claims to refrain from discussing religious material, especially with reference to Egypt (2.46, 2.47, 2.48, among others). In several passages, however, what is necessary for the logos takes priority over what otherwise should not be said: “I will mention the gods only when forced to do so by my logos" (2.3); "I avoid getting into divine matters with my logos, and have done so only a little, when forced by necessity" (2.65). In these instances and others, Herodotus presents himself as bound to follow a requirement of his logos—although the strictures he attributes to it come not from an authority outside the Histories, but from the main outlines of the work as formulated by Herodotus himself in the proem.° Like the Spartans that his Demaratus describes to Xerxes (7.104.4), then, Herodotus is free but not entirely free. Just as they are bound to obey their nomos (7.104.4), so he must ac-

cede to the demands of his logos.

Unlike his Spartans, though, rather than following tradition, Herodotus

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presents himself as wanting to bring something new into the world. He claims to avoid material that has been similarly treated in other accounts: “I do not de-

scribe the camel’s shape since the Greeks know it, but I will tell something not known about it” (3.103). Nor will he repeat what is told by others about how Egyptians long ago became Dorian kings, but instead he will “make mention of things that others have not taken up” (6.55). Originality is thus another important, and not unpolemical, characteristic of Herodotus’s logos. Here again, he is “staging” his genre, setting it off against the background of what others have done, reminding his audience that it would be possible for him to present something different—and inferior. Herodotus will not write everything he knows,® but it does not follow that the Histories is therefore as restricted as Homeric epic by its adherence to what is generically appropriate (evzpezés). For although Herodotus must restrict himself to the (broad) range of subjects that belongs in his logos, we have seen that this range is not limited to what makes an exciting or a heroic or even a credible story. Self-consciously transcending a single level of discourse, the narrator of the Histories is free both to record the heroic, memorable, improbable story and to propose a more pedestrian but plausible version. This happens, for example, with the story of the famous diver Scyllias of Scione, who was said to have swum underwater for eighty stades when he deserted to the Greeks at Artemisium: “let my opinion be set forth, that he came to Artemisium in a boat” (8.9).°

Herodotus’s text thus has wide scope not only in subject matter but also in levels of truth claim; remarkably, the Histories appears to subsume in one text the varying degrees of veracity that Bowie has distributed among many kinds of archaic poetry. The narrator not only calls his sources into question, as we have seen, but otherwise indicates different levels of credibility (through indirect dis-

course, for example, or by attributing a report to sources at several removes from the narrator).

Herodotus can also simply leave an issue unresolved. Especially for exotic geographic and ethnographic matters, he often reports what he has heard without vouching for it—on the contrary, he raises doubts: “not even Aristeas knows exactly about the land this logos is starting to describe; he spoke by hearsay of those places, not by autopsy” (4.16).”° The same is true for various dubious tales (such as what the Egyptian priests say about Rhampsinitus: 2.123.1,

quoted earlier) and for beliefs about the gods and their actions (for example, Herodotus doubts the Chaldean priests’ claim that Zeus/Bel really sleeps with a chosen woman in Babylon: 1.182). Sometimes too, Herodotus tells us that he does not know something, such

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111

as the source of the Nile (2.28). Even in the freedom to admit ignorance, what

Denniston called his "winning fallibility," the narrator displays the superiority of his logos; as Thomas Rosenmeyer has noted, poetry presents itself as cornplete and authoritative, but history, based as it is on the human knowledge that

can be gathered by the narrator, gets its authority from being less certain."! Fa-. mously, Herodotus issues the general caveat, “I have to say what is said, but not at all to be persuaded by it" (7.152.3)!

Herodotus on His Own Genre: Authority and Audience A related "generic" feature that receives attention in Herodotus's work is the narrator's representation of himself as judge of competing accounts. In describing recent events such as the invasion of Xerxes, the Histories makes a high claim to historical truth. But its truth claim is based on the speaker's judgment, not on his alleged involvement in the action described, as it is with some firstperson narratives in archaic poetry. Thus when Herodotus decides that it was Ephialtes who betrayed the Greeks at Thermopylae, and not others who were so charged, he explains that he does so because the Pylagoroi—who must have known who was guilty—put a bounty on Ephialtes' head (7.214). Here a deci-

sion about a historical matter is reached on grounds of plausibility, of rationally weighing the available evidence: the price on Ephialtes' head becomes a sign of his guilt. It is Herodotus who takes responsibility for the inquiry into the matter—and incidentally who guarantees which name shall live in infamy.” In a famous bid for authority, Herodotus declares that he sailed to Tyre to do research on the origins of Herakles, confidently concluding as a result of his inquiries that there are two figures with that name (2.44). The argument here relies on the speaker's claim of special knowledge, attained through autopsy, credible informants, and plausibility. On the other hand, as we have seen, some

parts of the Histories are very skeptical about what they report (the tribes beyond the Scythians, for example). At both ends of the credibility spectrum, then, Herodotus may explicitly indicate the level of truth claim or disclaimer that he is making. He does so in many ways, sometimes straightforwardly (as with Ephialtes), sometimes ironically (as in the competing stories by Spartans and Samians about what happened to the bronze bowl on the way from Sparta to Croesus: 1.707). Although Herodotus relies on many sources for his material, it is he who evaluates them, when evaluation is called for.”* The mix of voices that comprises Herodotean historia is strongly marked by the judgment and authority of the author.”

Judging among different traditions is familiar in archaic poetry as well, especially Pindar's victory odes, in which the speaker both mentions the "law"

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(τέθμος, Nem. 4.33) that governs his own poetry and criticizes accounts of myths as given by other poets. Both kinds of remarks differ from Herodotus's practice, however, in ways that illuminate the different aims of the Histories and the epinician odes. First, Pindar mentions the law that governs his own craft but

does not differentiate his goals from those of others, as Herodotus does when he contrasts his own project to what poets do. Second, whereas Herodotus uses plausibility as a guide to the truth of a report, the epinician poet rejects other poetic accounts on ethical or theological grounds: if those accounts do not accord with praiseworthy beliefs about the gods or heroes, they must not be true (as in Ol. 1.28-55: it is a slanderous story that maintains that the gods ate Pelops's shoulder).”* The narrator of the Histories thus takes a broader perspective on narrative genres, and judges truth by human-centered criteria. The authority of Herodotus is tightly bound up with his use of the first person," but the second person, the audience, is also important.’® Here too generic

considerations can be found in the text of the Histories, these also contrast to

the practices of Herodotus’s poetic predecessors in narrative. The speaker of epic occasionally addresses the Muse(s), still more rarely a character?—but

Homeric epic includes no direct address to its audience. The poets of narrative elegy, however, often use the first and second persons with a group of implicit “insiders.” Thus Mimnermus uses the historical “we” for his fellow Colophonians, in recounting their ancestors’ migration to Ionia: “Aipy we left, and Neleus's city, Pylos, and came by ship to Asia's lovely coast. We settled at fair

Colophon with rude aggression, . . . from there we crossed the river Asteis and took Aeolian Smyrna by gods' plan" (fr. 9.1—6 West). Similarly, Tyrtaeus refers

to Spartans in the first person: "Our king, Theopompos dear to the gods, through whom we took broad-chorused Messenia . . . our fathers’ fathers fought nineteen

years

for

it . . ." (fr. 5.1-6

West).

A

well-known

fragment

of

Archilochus (fr. 5 West) presents a self-deprecating anecdote in the voice of one who left his shield behind in battle but saved his skin. In all these examples, purported first-person experience is recounted by an "T" plausibly understood as addressing a familiar and empathetic audience (often assumed to be fellowsymposiasts of the speaker).*? Herodotus has a vast repertoire of first-person references, but none of them

is addressed to such an intimate or a limited group: "I sailed to Tyre. . . I spoke to the priests . . . I judge this story to be more likely . . . I know but will not tell the names of the three hundred Spartans...” The audience is seldom forcefully confronted in the Histories; when a confrontation occurs, it is generally to anticipate their resistance to an account—when, for example, Herodotus argues that

the Persian conspirators really did discuss what kind of constitution would be

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113

best (3.80.1), or when he advances the allegedly unpopular opinion that the Athenians saved Greece (7.139).

Indeed, in some ways, Herodotus establishes a certain distance performance situation—including, as Wolfgang Rösler has observed, tation toward future audiences that might more readily be associated text of Thucydides, who describes his narrative as a “possession

from his an orienwith the for ever”

(1.22.4). Röslar notes Herodotus's repeated comment that a monument or cus-

tom has endured “upto my time"— which suggests that his words will be heard in a later time as well; he also points out the remarkably detached statement (7.137) that an event occurred well after the narrative time, “at the time of the

war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians"—as if this were just any

war, not the ongoing event of overriding concern for Herodotus’s immediate audience.*! Further, just as Herodotus avoids a specific time-bound perspective

in his work, so too he addresses an audience at no specific place in the Greek world. For example, when he is explaining the shape of the Taurians’ peninsula on the Black Sea, he compares it first with the area of Attica around Sounion, and then—for those not familiar with Attica—with a promontory in southern

Italy (4.99). Paradoxically, however impersonal it may be, the audience is constantly assumed and informally addressed throughout the Histories.*? This practice is one of the most important ways that the Histories acquires its characteristically intimate tone that gives the text so much of its charm and even authority. The nar-

rator constructs a sense of taking the audience into his confidence as he works through his disparate data. Herodotus’s constant comments on where his material is coming from and how it is taking shape harmonize with the narrative digressions (some of them labeled as such), editorial comments of praise, blame, and wonder, and other examples of the narrator’s constant presence. All these

rhetorical characteristics contribute to give the Histories its uneven, anythingbut-seamless character that places the audience in the position of confidante and even collaborator with the speaker.

Conclusions A self-conscious critical engagement with other authors and/or literary kinds— incorporating, subsuming, arranging, and judging them—is one of the defining marks of the innovative and engaging genre developed by Herodotus. As Robert Fowler points out, what defines Herodotus’s variegated work is in large measure this constant foregrounding of authorial issues, including sometimes a contrast between his own and other kinds of accounts." As logios, Herodotus

has heard many traditions, including poetic ones; as histor, he can critique

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them; together, these two roles allow for the narrator’s almost intrusive enunciative presence in the text.

It is just this flexible and self-conscious blend of truth claims, registers of discourse, and subject matter that makes the Histories, in retrospect at least, a

new genre, marked by the critical voice of the performer-as-author. In its deliberately limited authority, as in the judgments of other texts and genres that it is so free to make, Herodotus’s work can claim to transcend all previous genres.

Herodotus’s new genre reflects in essential ways the politics he explicitly admires. First, his account—like the freedom of speech (ionyopia) that he says made Athens successful (5.78)—gives many different voices their say, even while showing that not all speak with equal veracity and wisdom. Second, his

logos, unlike those of narrative poets or uncritical logographers, is aware of the constraints of likelihood and plausibility: people can say all kinds of things, but only some things are true. Similarly, in the realm of action, tyrants can decide to do what they will, but if they are proceeding from false assumptions or otherwise misguided, they will not be successful. Xerxes himself is the best example

of this failure. As Herodotus tells the story, despite the advice of the exiled Spartan king Demaratus, Xerxes failed to anticipate the Spartans’ courage at Thermopylae (the Persians won that battle, but only because of Ephialtes’ treachery); more significantly, Xerxes failed to recognize the Greek disunity that

could be exploited if he were to capture Cythera and threaten the Peloponnese from there.

As with the narrator, so too for his political actors: success depends on good information and a correct assessment of reality, of what is likely to happen.® For this, decision makers need knowledge and experience; they often are provided with good advisers but usually do not listen to them. Xerxes repeatedly follows the advice of flatterers instead of listening to advisers like Demaratus and Artemisia (both Greeks) who understand his enemies and the

way to deal with them.

Herodotus, on the other hand, makes much of assessing the quality of his sources and allowing his readers to do the same; he teaches his audience to judge accounts critically, on the basis not only of their likelihood but also of their source, which can be biased because of the speaker’s self-interest or the predispositions of a narrative genre. His new genre is dedicated both to commemorating human things that were said and done, and to commemorating and demonstrating the many processes by which those things are discovered and evaluated.

CHAPTER

SIX

ABE S

From Aristophanes to Menander?

Genre Transformation in Greek Comedy Eric

CSAPO

The genre transformation best represented by the remains of ancient Greek literature is that of comedy. Many consider the transformation so great that they speak of Old, New, or even Middle Comedy as separate genres rather than subgenres or styles. Saying “best represented” ought to cause alarm, because our ideas about the evolution of comedy are based on the partial remains of two authors, each surviving by separate processes and canons of preservation. I

shall, therefore, in addition to the question of genre transformation, also address another question of importance to this volume: the role of authors in defining their genres, for ancient reception and for modern scholarship. Old Comedy or New Comedy are not generic categories known to the au-

diences of Aristophanes or Menander. There is no evidence for a partition of the comic genre until well after Menander’s lifetime, and then only in scholarly literature, never in theater inscriptions. It is likely that the partition is the work

of a scholar or scholars in the third or second century B.c.E.? For us, Old and New Comedy are by definition Aristophanocentric and Menandrocentric. Was

it different for those scholars who first distinguished them as separate genres? When Norwood writes that “Aristophanes was so unquestionably the finest

comic playwright of the fifth century that not a single work even of Cratinus has survived” (1931:v), he makes the common and dangerous assumption that

Aristophanes was uniquely superior, yet still somehow sufficiently typical of his genre to render his rivals both dull and redundant by comparison. It is comforting to think that all we have is all we need. But unless it can be shown that unique genius and representativity governed the formation of the comic canon, 115

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there is little to justify such complacency. Indeed, the evidence points to very different criteria.

The school of Aristotle had a large enough hand in the partition of the genre to leave fingerprints all over the ancient accounts.’ It was a school with a peculiar theory of the evolution of comedy. By the later Hellenistic period, it took the following form: Comedy originally sprang up in democracy, where it

was a tool of the common people and a check on the powerful. Abuse had a moralizing and a social function (hence Old Comic parrhésia [free speech] and aischrologia [obscenity/invective]). Something happened— various explanations are given—a law was passed because comic writers abused their privileges, or the oligarchs gained power, or the powerful avenged themselves on poets and chorégoi, creating a general terror, and this action brought on a second phase marked by myth travesty with only indirect political content through allegory and innuendo. Afterward Macedonian repression voided comedy of political contents altogether.

I fear that it was this theory of comic evolution that determined the selection. Aristophanes, Cratinus, and Eupolis formed the Old Comic canon, not because they were superior yet typical, but precisely because they were most political, most characterized by free-spoken verbal abuse and most capable of representing the “fierce moralism” that the theory ascribed to comedy’s first phase. (Doubtless the pretensions of the comedians themselves inspired the belief in the moral and social utility of abuse.)* Even within the Aristophanic cor-

pus, Handley suggests, “our surviving selection . . . strongly favors the early political plays” (1983:82); Ecclesiazusae and Plutus also seem to have been chosen for their political contents (if political in a broader sense). At the other end, Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus were canonized precisely because they were least political. To reconstruct the evolution of comedy from the selected plays is

merely to rehearse the logic of the selection. It is a circular argument.° The logic of the canon emerges from the late sources. Cratinus originated the political style. He “added utility to the delight of comedy by abusing evildoers and punishing them with the public whip of comedy” (Anon. On Comedy). But Plato, an older contemporary of Aristophanes, is treated by the Scholiast to

Dionysius Thrax as the representative of Middle Comedy, a category error, as Rosen observes, “because his definition of the terms turned on the amount of invective found in a play” (1995:122). Platonius similarly lists the Odysses of Cratinus as Middle Comedy because “it censures no one.” This confusion between epoch and style led the younger Wilamowitz to suppose that Middle Comedy was intended as a "conceptual; not a “chronological,” category (1907:134 n. 21). But it is less confusion than it is overschematization. Ancient

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scholarship’s evolutionary model required an essential contiguity between the conceptual and chronological distinctions. Problem areas were elided by the process of canonization and categorization. Henderson warns that “our impression of the centrality of political satire in Old Comedy may to some extent be a false emphasis resulting from the selection of plays made for posterity by the Alexandrians” (1995:178). We must reckon with the possibility that the tripartite division of comedy was a late Classical or Hellenistic invention not so much based on the evidence of extant texts as itself the criterion for the selection of the texts. We must reckon, namely, with the possibility that the ancient

writers on “Old,” “Middle” and “New” Comedy created the object of their study. Despite repeated warnings against Aristophanocentricity and Menandrocentricity,° scholarship continues to march in the circle traced by ancient speculation. Nesselrath’s book on “Middle Comedy” stresses Menander’s originality, which he thinks ultimately responsible for the tripartition of Greek Comedy into Old, Middle, and New. “By comparison with [Menander’s Alleingánge] Antiphanes and Alexis and in principle even Philemon and Diphilus simply had to belong to another earlier epoch.” No one today would speak of comedy as a continuum, he argues, if chance had granted us the privilege of measuring the vast gulf that separates Menander from his contemporaries

(1989:333). But

surely it is the absence of Menander’s rivals that allows Nesselrath to speak of a vast gulf. The canon does not exist because of the unquestionable superiority of its preferred authors; rather, the superiority appears unquestionable thanks to the canon. And if Menander really was so distinctive and “went it alone,” then New Comedy is a one-author genre and a classification of doubtful utility when used to designate a literary epoch.

Old and New: Diachronic Transformation or Synchronic Styles? Even the comments of Aristotle and the ancient writers on comedy sometimes

undermine the general picture of comic evolution that they otherwise seem to promote. Despite his admission that the early history of comedy was unknown, Aristotle claimed that Crates, the earliest Athenian comic poet of whom he speaks, “abandoned the iambic form (iambiké idea) and first began to compose

generalizing stories and plots” (Po. 1449b7-8). The iambic form attributed to early comedy seems nothing but a schematic counterbalance to his strange claim that tragedy evolved from epic. But Aristotle presumably knew something

of the works of Crates, and he paints a picture of a comic poet very different from Aristophanes. “Generalizing” implies “not directed at particular persons.” “Abandoned the iambic form” implies “no personal invective.” Both also imply events connected to one another “in accordance with necessity or probability”

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(1451b9, compare

1454a33—36). Crates apparently wrote a different kind of

comedy than Aristophanes did: “a comedy of character and intrigue . . .

désengagée e senza grinta,’ according to Degani, who infers from Aristotle's praise that Crates was "clearly seen as a precursor of New Comedy." Similarly Pherecrates (floruit 440—405) stood out in the eyes of later antiquity because he “refrained from verbal abuse" (PCG T 245). Platonius and the

Anonymus tell us that it was Cratinus (floruit 453—423), “the emulator of Archilochus," who first introduced personal abuse (PCG T 17, 19). We do find

personal abuse in the fragments, though Cratinus's style was varied. The ancient tradition lists Odysses as representative of Middle Comedy because (inter alia) “it censures no one, but is a spoof on Homer’s Odyssey.”® The play is in-

deed an embarrassment to the traditional concept of Old Comedy: only the absence of invective supports Meineke's generally accepted dating of the play to just after 439, the date of the supposed decree of Morychides "against ridiculing people in comedy.” Cratinus's plots also differed from the Aristophanic type. The papyrus summary of Dionysalexandros guesses that it was a political allegory directed against Pericles,’ though its contents and the extant fragments reveal only myth parody. The fact that many Old Comedies, including a third of Cratinus, are myth travesty is a major stumbling block to Nesselrath's attempt to vindicate Middle Comedy as a distinct genre (1989:204, 236—241).'° Webster

calculated that about half the plays performed from 420—400 were based on parody of myth, a larger percentage than between 400—350.!! Parody of myth is probably more useful for marking the division between Middle and New Com-

edy, but even here the argumentation is sometimes circular: the Greek model for Plautus’s Amphitruo is thought to be from Middle Comedy only because it fits our genre stereotype (all known models for palliata are New Comedies). The fragments of fifth-century comedy show a remarkable variety of subjects and styles, including all those traditionally thought typical of fourthcentury comedy. Though not easily distinguished from parody of myth, tragic parody is allegedly a distinctive feature of Middle Comedy: hence one of Aristophanes' last plays, Aiolosikon, is cited by Platonius as the genotype of Middle Comedy.'? Strattis (from ca. 410) was a major exponent of tragic burlesque—he provides us with the first attestation of the verb paratragoidein

(PCG F 50)—and is therefore generally deemed “transitional.” But tragic parody is evident much earlier: Euripides’ Telephus notably structures the plot of Acharnians and Thesmophoriazusae. We cannot be sure that fourth-century

tragic burlesque followed its models more closely. Domestic comedy is said to be characteristic of Crates and Pherecrates!? and is found in Cratinus's Pytine, an allegory in which Cratinus abandoned his wife "Poetry" and made "Drunk-

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enness" his mistress. If Crates "prepares the way for the Comedy of Manners,”' this quality is especially true of Phrynichus (floruit 434—405): his Monotropos, a character study of a misanthrope who rejected society and “led a life of Timon,” is usually cited as a precursor to Menander's Dyskolos; his Korianno and Petale were hetaira comedies, whose "plot is such that you would think it more appro-

priate to the age of Philemon and Menander than of Pherecrates."! The fragments of Old Comedy speak against a qualitative change between fifth- and fourth-century comedy. Even the purely stylistic features that Nesselrath claimed were distinctive of Middle Comedy are shown by Rosen to appear in the fifth century (1995:136). "We should think,” wrote Dover (1968a:145—146)

"of Middle Comedy not as generating several wholly new types of plot but as establishing a preference for some old types of plot over others.” This sentiment was recently echoed by Henderson (1995:181): “we should look rather for dom-

inant trends, or a range of possibilities, in a given era rather than for a series of revolutionary changes." To appreciate the character of this shift in preference, we must first ask how prominent the political style was in the fifth century. The distinctive feature of Old Comedy is invariably identified as abuse directed at real individuals, usually the politically or socially prominent. The best examples of the style not only

mention individuals but also bring them, complete with portrait masks, onto the stage: there are five or six staged komoidoumenoi in Acharnians and at least one in each extant Aristophanic comedy down to Frogs.'® The very best examples of political comedy go one step further and make the plot revolve around these komoidoumenot: these I call ad hominem plots. There is no evidence for

this type of komoidoumenos or this type of plot before the 420s; Aristophanes is thought to have led the development." Cratinus preferred indirection, even if his allegories were thinly disguised. Ad hominem plots have a brief efflorescence in the late fifth century; of twenty-one known (or suspected) plays of this type, all but six were certainly or probably written between 424—415, whereas the six exceptions seem to come in 405 or soon after.'? Komoidoumenoi appearing on stage show a comparable popularity curve. The percentage of

komoidoumenoi merely mentioned declines slightly in Aristophanes’ fourthcentury plays, but the sharpest decline is between 414 (Birds with 61 komoidoumenoi) and 411 (Lysistrata with 14; Thesmophoriazusae with 17). If

the political style can be said to dominate fifth-century comedy, this dominance must be measured only in terms of the brilliance of its reception and not by any statistical measure of production. The style may be typical of only six of some thirty-nine poets. Of these, possibly Eupolis alone consistently wrote in the political style. Moreover, the heyday of the political style lasted little more than a

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decade, in the time of the “radical democracy,” and briefly again at the time of the political upheavals of 405 or after the democratic restoration in 403. For this reason, some would like to place the beginning of the shift to the later comic style between 415 to 411.7 Old Comedy might still be said to have a distinctive essence, if we could show that the political style disappeared after the fifth century. It did not. Webster long ago (1970:10—56) documented the survival of political comedy; I need only mention

the major figures. Ephippus

satirizes Alexander

of Pherae,

Dionysius of Syracuse (PCG F 16), Plato (PCG F 14), Menecrates (PCG F 17), and other contemporaries. His Geryon (PCG F 5) is “a satire of Athenian for-

eign policy in the early 360s, when Athens was attempting both to form an alliance with Macedon and Dionysius, and to start revolts in the east against Persia (Ephippus described the Mediterranean as a vast cooking pot around which different nations, directed by the Athenian fleet, were lighting fires to cook a fish for the triple-bodied monster Geryon)" (Wallace 1995:208). Ad hominem

comedies from this period ridicule foreign potentates: Eubulus's Dionysius (370s); Mnesimachus's Philip (340s). This kind of comedy might be considered less engaged since foreigners are easy targets, but relations with these potentates were among the most contentious issues dividing the Athenian assembly. The survival of personal invective is equally well attested. In 355, Isocrates speaks of

comic poets broadcasting the faults of their fellow citizens to all of Greece (De pace 14), Plato dreamed of banning personal abuse in comedy (Laws 935e), and Aristotle dreamed of restricting the performance of comedy and iambic to mature male audiences (Pol. 1336b).?! In 346, Aeschines describes a recent ex-

change between a comic actor and a chorus in anapests that charged the rhetor Timarchus with prostitution (Tim. 157). Paradoxically, the best evidence for

political comedy in the fourth century comes from the time of Menander. Timocles, in the 320s and 310s, wrote comedies as replete with politics and

komoidoumenoi as one could hope to find in any comparable sampling of Old Comedy. The OCD (second edition) entry on Timocles by Waddell and Dover says, "He practiced with wit and originality the iambike idea of the Old Comedy, attacking, among many others, Demosthenes and Hyperides. Almost one-

half of the fragments are personal references." Shortly before 303, Archedicus accused Demochares of prostituting himself for oral sex; Schwartz argued that Demochares appeared as a character in the drama.” Philippides ridiculed Demetrius the Besieger and his Athenian supporter Stratocles in a comedy of

301; Stratocles probably also appeared as a character in the drama.? The latest documented case of specifically Athenian political invective comes from a comedy of around 294, Demetrius's Areopagite, ridiculing the recently deposed ty-

From Aristophanes to Menander?

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rant Lachares. Komoidoumenoi do appear in later comedies: Philemon ridicules Magas the usurper of Cyrene sometime after 274 (PCG 132): Philipp thinks the

play was performed in Alexandria after Ptolemy reduced the rebel. Indeed, the survival of the political style in comedy can be traced well into Imperial times.*4 General opinion, trained by ancient habits, holds that great and significant changes took place in comedy at the end of the fifth century and again soon after the death of Alexander. The evidence, however, shows that what we normally

think of as Old, Middle, and New Comedy designate synchronic, not period styles. This is not to say that there existed no qualitative difference between

comedy in the fifth and comedy in the late fourth century, but rather that these differences are not characterizable by the broad categories of plot type or style of humor that we have inherited from ancient scholarship. Indeed, we are in a

very poor position to say just what the purely diachronic and qualitative changes were. The discovery of a single complete play of Pherecrates or Timocles would likely alter our received notions of comic evolution beyond recognition. Best to jettison the traditional labels altogether or to retain them only on the understanding that they refer to the dominant?? style in otherwise highly diversified periods and that they do so only in a very rough-and-ready way. Although these warnings have already been heard, they were never listened to, perhaps because scholars tend to work not on comedy, but on Aristophanes or Menander around whom the traditional scheme is conveniently built. The problems arise when scholars turn their attention to writing the history of comedy. For the remainder of this paper, we will consider the reasons for the change in comedy and the causes that have been adduced to explain it. In most cases,

scholars

answer

the wrong

question.

As

the plays

of Aristophanes

and

Menander were selected for us precisely in order to save a given theory of evolution, and one that is misleading at best, it is dangerous to frame the history of comedy as a progress (or regress) “From Aristophanes to Menander” as generally happens, whether explicitly or implicitly.” For convenience the survey will be organized by the elements of the communication chain prioritized by each explanation, following Jakobson’s familiar model (omitting the “message,” or the actual texts, which are the explananda).

The Causes of the Transformation of Comedy Consider, first, addresser, or author-based, explanations. They claim that Aristophanes led the way into Middle Comedy: Dover's "since the ageing but infinitely adaptable Aristophanes was in the vanguard of the change...” isa typical premise (1968a.146). The ancient theorists initiated this trend by re-

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porting that in his last play, “Aristophanes omitted his usual mockery” and that “the character of Middle Comedy is such as the Aiolosikon” (Platon. de diff.com.) or “[Aristophanes] wrote a comedy called Kokalos in which he brings on rape and recognition and all the other things Menander was keen on” ( Vit. Arist. 28.50, p. 135 Koster). Admirers of Aristophanes regard his antitype, Menander, as inferior, with the corollary that their hero leads his genre, but into decline. The late plays of Aristophanes have therefore become the focus of eloquent apologetics, if not a playground for scholars emulating the creative ingenuity of peripatetic biography. The author of Ecclesiazusae, a paragon of the “literature of fatigue,” was “an aging and overtired man... . a disillusioned man" (Murray 1933: 181, 183, 198), “becoming elderly and peevish” (MacDowell 1995.308), a “broken man” (Taylor 1937:210), “a broken-hearted man” (Norwood 1931:265), and “resigned” (Flashar 1967:154), while “the possibility

that [he] had had a stroke cannot be absolutely excluded” (Dover 1972:195, n. 7). The poet of Plutus was “a tired man” (Sommerstein 1978:269), who “in

his old age lacked the energy and will to do much new writing” (MacDowell 1995:327). The two plays are altogether “products of a distinctly failing talent” (Sutton 1990:89) and “may be put down to advancing years and diminishing inspiration” (Sommerstein 1984:314). Middle Comedy is apolitical because “at the end of his long career . . withdrawn from the fray of politics, his very last illusions about having some impact on the life of the polis swept away, the old poet likewise set aside the aggressivity of former times" (Degani 1993:6).? The biography of the genre is simply contingent on the biographies of poets. In this view, comedy passes very literally “from Aristophanes to Menander.” But even if the charges about Aristophanes’ waning powers were better substantiated, they do little to explain how his senile fantasy gave birth, as they maintain, to a form of comedy that dominated the Western stage for the next twenty-four-hundred

years. Aristophanes’ authority, alas, was not that great nor his successors so sheepish. Since we have seen that the “New” style is found long before Aristophanes’ late plays and that he came to it late, and perhaps reluctantly, it

may be time to put the “tired man” to rest. For a different sort of addresser-based theory, consider Wallace's argument (1995) that professionalization and specialization caused a general transformation in the arts of the fourth century, and especially in drama, where the coher-

ent and hierarchical ordering of its various components in the fifth century gave way to fragmentation in the fourth.** The theory seems to envision vested

interests gradually exerting pressure on dramatic form: pipers seeking musical virtuosity, stage functionaries pursuing more spectacular effects, actors eager to maximize their stage presence, and so on. Fragmentation theory is oddly un-

From Aristophanes to Menander?

suited to our received ideas about fourth-century comedy, which greater coherence in plot and characterization, the omission ginalization of music, the standardization of costume, and relative the use of stage machinery. Let us grant that fourth-century drama

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speaks of a and marrestraint in belonged to

actors, if to anyone; it is by no means clear that comedies with coherent plots al-

lowed actors to display their talents better than did political comedies centered on a dominant idea. We can, at least, quantify presence, in the crude sense of the airtime dedicated to the protagonist. What we find is that it actually decreases from the Acharnians, where Dikaiopolis delivered 56 percent of all nonchoral lines, to Frogs, where the protagonist (namely, Dionysus, compare Dover 1993:104-105) delivers just over 34 percent of all nonchoral lines, to Dyscolus,

where, by Handley’s calculation, the protagonist gets less than 30 percent of the lines (1965:30). These statistics do not reflect greater self-assertion on the part

of the protagonist. Despite the existence of a comic actor’s prize at the Lenaea from about 432, the fact that no such prize existed at the Dionysia until 329 to 312 may indicate that comic actors had less clout than fragmentation theory supposes. Another

category of explanation

stresses context in the narrow

sense

adopted by evenemential history.? The catalyst is the Peloponnesian War or Chaeronea or the death of Alexander. “In the field of poetic composition creative energy was already exhausted in the fourth century; nothing really new emerges after the collapse of the Athenian Empire” (Wilamowitz 1921:58). “These changes of form merely reflect an intrinsic transformation of comedy itself; Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent disruption

of democracy had deprived comedy of its traditional source of inspiration” (Flashar 1967:154). “The political orgasm of 404/3 made a break with the past

and inaugurated a fresh tradition; the audience of Plutus did not think politically in the same terms as the audience of Knights” (Dover 1968a:146). Most succinctly of all, “the Spartans imposed a tyrannical government. Political comedy died” (Walton and Arnott 1996:4); and not just political comedy, but the

theater, even the polis died.? The evocation of the oligarchic regime put in place by the Spartans reveals the debt that modern scholars owe to their peripatetic predecessors, with their tendency to fix the boundaries of the tripartition to political events: Walton and Arnott draw directly on Platonius, who ends Old Comedy "when the democracy was driven back by those who wanted to set up a tyranny in Athens and an oligarchy was established and the power of the people

had gone over to a few men and the oligarchy was in charge.” (In fact, the oligarchies lasted only a few months.)

Like Platonius, modern theorists link political events to spiritual and eco-

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nomic collapse (he speaks of “a terror” and a withdrawal of choregoi). Battle fatigue and despair are favorite explanations for fourth-century comedy if not for the fourth century generally. The war is paramount even in the work of Maidment, who sets out to explain the change in comedy from causes internal to the genre (1935:7), and Cantarella (1965) and Ghiron-Bistagne (1974:1342),

who claim to explain the “crisis in the theater” structurally as a symptom of the

“crisis of the polis.” War weariness and evidence for the introduction of assembly pay make P. D. Arnott think that “voter apathy” caused the change in comedy (1989:24). Coulon and van Daele apologize for Plutus by explaining that “the city vegetates in a sleep which already has the appearance of death” (1930:7). Much closer to the ancient tradition “On Comedy” are the frequent

modern attempts to link the economic depression created by the defeat of Ath-

ens with evidence for a synchorégia, which a scholiast (on Frogs 405), drawing on Aristotle, preserves precisely for the purpose of showing “that the poets were already suffering from a reduction in choregic support” (but unfortunately the synchorégia is no later than 406). Others with a truly Platonian ignorance of Athenian history combine this evidence with a supposed “disappearance” of the chorus.*! The whole picture is combined with apathy theory to offer a very satisfying picture of general infrastructural collapse precipitating the disintegration of collective feeling and enterprise: “there is much reason for thinking that fourth-century Athenians were much less public-spirited, more caught up in private affairs, more hedonistic” (Sutton 1990:88). With political collapse came

poetic collapse. “Old Comedy was destroyed by the political downfall,” says Norwood (1931:29), “Thalia’s heart was broken.”

The presumed economic and spiritual collapse of Athens redoubles the author-based explanations. Military, political, economic and cultural decline all weigh upon the heart of the poet who is conveniently also in decline. “The ruin of Athens in 404,” says Norwood (1931:265), “was reflected in the individual life

of our poet... a comparison of the Ecclesiazusae and the Frogs brings it home to the most casual reader.” This melodrama of the poet, the city, and the genre,

all sitting together on the stoop of the fourth century blubbering over lost glory, has had surprising appeal. There is mythopoiesis enough, even without Thalia,

when historians pretend to explain the events of an entire century by calling Athens fatigued, disheartened, depressed, or otherwise on the skids. Despite a general insistence on reading Ecclesiazusae and Plutus within the framework of peripatetic history, they are excellent plays, which give no direct evidence for the spiritual decline of their author or their audience. Disillusionment and despondence have been read into them from the presumptive social climate of collapse. But the putative evidence for this climate of despair is

From Aristophanes to Menander?

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chiefly drawn from the plays themselves. Strauss rightly warns against “the methodological fallacy of characterizing an era on the basis of two comedies” (1986:124, compare Dillon 1987). He also points out that the little evidence we

have suggests that the Plutus of 388, is only a minimal revision of a play of 408, and hence it was written in a period generally characterized by optimism.” Recent scholarship has grown skeptical about the existence of any sort of extended “crisis” in Athens at the end of the fifth century, whether political, economic or spiritual.? Wallace and Rothwell specifically challenge the belief that the transition from Old to Middle Comedy is a product of general ruin and despair. Wallace points out that the theory of a “crisis” in Athenian art and culture at the end of the fifth century rests on the “often uncritical acceptance of elite or satirical Athenian value-judgments . . . conditioned by various factors, such as

anti-democratic sentiment, artistic reactionism, and historical nostalgia" (1995:201). Rothwell’s study of the supposed economic and spiritual crisis and its effect on the chorus and chorégia shows that if such a crisis existed, which he doubts, it left both chorus and chorégia alive and well until the latter was abolished in 317. He attributes our impression of a sudden decline after Frogs to the ancient selection and supposes that Aristophanes’ earlier plays give a larger role to the chorus than usual by the standards of his day. The decline in choral par-

ticipation between Frogs and Ecclesiazusae should not be considered independently of the evidence for tragedy, which shows that the marginalization of the chorus was a steady and continuous process right through the most prosperous years of the fifth century. Our two latest tragedies, Bacchae and Oedipus at Colonus, are the one wrinkle in an otherwise steady pattern of choral shrinkage, and of these, one was performed, probably in the last and worst year of the war, the other after the “collapse.” Both plays have as much choral participation as any earlier play by their authors, a fact very hard to square with theories linking the postwar economy with choral decline. Le Guen (1995) shows that the theory of the mutual collapse of drama and the polis in the wake of Alexander is no less chimerical. The case is somewhat better for theories based on contact, by which I mean the institutional framework joining audience and performers. Important social developments did create new forms of contact. Actors began to travel and perform throughout the Greek world. The book trade also expanded the potential for contact through texts. Slater and Seidensticker use the emergence of an international market to explain the marginalization of the chorus in our fourthcentury texts: the contribution of chorus and actors was separated to facilitate

production in places where traveling actors might have little contact with local choruses before performance.™

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Many indeed write as if the disappearance of the chorus from our texts was tantamount to the disappearance of the chorus from production. The tag “Song of the Chorus” marks the places in our texts where choral performances were excerpted. There are two possible explanations for this practice, neither of which allows us to infer any decline in the quality or quantity of choral participation (as distinct from importance to the plot structure) in drama performed

in Athens. Taplin (1999) suggests that “Song of the Chorus” simply shows that the text is derived from a text designed for performance outside Athens; it does not exclude the performance of the choral parts in Athens nor their composition by the poet for the occasion. The other possibility, which need not exclude

the first, has to do with the configuration of our text by ancient scholars to suit their theories about the history of comedy. The belief that the chorus declined or disappeared at the time of Middle Comedy encouraged ancient editors to leave the choral parts out of their comic texts in the (mistaken?) belief that they

were not composed by the poet. The appearance of the tag “Song of the Cho-

rus" in tragic texts by fourth-century authors (already in third-century papyri) may owe something to Aristotle’s claim that embolima (generic repertory pieces) were common in this period.** Some ancient scholar evidently had a text of Cratinus’s Odysses from which all choral parts had been obliterated,

though the odes survive in our fragments, and this obliteration may be due to the belief that the play was a Middle Comedy and hence produced without a chorus. Slater and Seidensticker also attribute the depoliticization of comedy to the emergence of an international market for Athenian comedy. Seidensticker ar-

gues that “as Archaic and even Classical literature were ‘ephemeral, that is, tied to the place and occasion of their production, so poetry [in the fourth century]

frees itself increasingly from its ‘Sitz im Leben'" (1995:182). Slater applies the rule directly to comedy: “a geographically expanded audience had less interest in specifically Athenian politics” (1995:32). Nesselrath believes that references

to Athenian politics in Middle Comedy are only “local color” (1989:335). Slater would even link the growth of the dramatic illusion to comedy's disengagement

from its Athenian matrix. This is a good, but not a complete, explanation. I see three problems. First, much of the appeal of the internationalization theory depends on the belief that a sudden change in the nature of comedy at the end of the fifth century coincided with a sharp growth in the book trade or with a sharp growth in the in-

ternational demand for comedy. Since there was no sudden or general change in the nature of comedy, only a shift in the dominant style, the appeal of an expanding export market, if it did play a part, was apparently neither sudden nor

From Aristophanes to Menander?

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irresistible. Moreover, Easterling (1994) and Taplin (1999) have challenged the

assumption that tragedy underwent a parallel metamorphosis at this time. They

argue that tragedy already displays an international and Panhellenic character from the time of Aeschylus onwards. We are reminded that as early as Acharnians, the audience of the Dionysia is described as international; that functional theaters existed in fifth-century Syracuse, Argos, probably Isthmia,

and possibly Dion and Chaeroneia; and that there is evidence to show that Aeschylus performed in Sicily, and Euripides and Agathon in Macedonia. If this ar-

gument is right, then comedy was probably subject to the same pressures from early on. In any case, the temporal link is too diffuse to demonstrate more than a secondary contributing causal connection between internationalization and the change in comedy’s dominant style.

Second, Athens remained the privileged venue for any ambitious dramatist, and the growth of the book industry or the internationalization of theater had no measurable impact on the importance or centrality of the city’s major festivals, which, if anything, increased in the fourth century. It may be relevant to

note that the most conspicuously political comic poets of the fourth century are all Athenian citizens (Ephippus, Eubulus, Timocles, Archedicus, Philippides), though they wrote at a time when the comic profession was dominated by for-

eigners. Rather than explaining changes in comedy by emerging foreign markets, we should perhaps acknowledge the primacy of the Athenian market and also ask whether foreigners had the wherewithal, the will, or the standing to write political satire for an Athenian public. The third problem is that the scenario envisioned by Seidensticker and Slater does not fit the only evidence we have for the international reception of comedy. The traditional belief is that Old Comedy was unexportable because it was too mired in its Athenian context. But the archaeological record shows oth-

erwise. Comic artifacts are both imported and manufactured at this time in various parts of the Greek world, especially Magna Graecia. It can now be proven that the so-called “phlyax” vases depict Attic comedy and that their style and popularity indicate that Attic comedy was performed in Magna Graecia in the first half of the fourth century. Four to six objects show scenes from

identifiable plays. All are political Old Comedies: Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, Acharnians, and Frogs, and a Paestan pot showing two labeled komoidoumenoi, Phrynis, and Pyronides, which is the name of a character in Eupolis’s Demoi.* I should also mention an Attic calyx-krater of about 415,

which has been connected with Aristophanes’ Birds or Clouds: there can be no

doubt that it was extracted from a South Italian tomb." We now know, therefore, that the political style of Old Comedy appealed to Italiot Greeks. As Green

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puts it, “Tarentines were prepared to put up with a fair amount of local Athenian content in a comedy,” far more than can be dismissed as “local color,” in-

deed, "one might reckon that the Athenian flavor was in itself attractive" (1994:67). As for Slater's argument that export entails illusionistic drama, one

need only refer to Taplin's study of the richly attested metatheatrical play on the South Italian comic vases (1993:55-78, 105—109).

Another category of explanation stresses the importance of the code, or genre itself, in generating its own changes. Artistic genres have a processual his-

tory of their own and a relative autonomy from other forms of cultural production.”® Most (though not all) genres also include a general novelty-requirement that allows the genre, through constant renewal, to maintain its artistic or aesthetic function. Comedy especially is credited with "an innate tendency towards change"; comic poets speak a great deal about their originality and one might, like Sommerstein, feel that "the continual need to innovate, spurred by the relentless pressure of competition, may do much to explain the rapid evolution of

comedy in the fifth and fourth centuries."?? But this explanation fails to account for change in any specific direction. Modern theories viewing genre as an autodynamic growth owe a lot to Aristotle. They are represented by both biogenetic and phylogenetic evolutionary models. Northrop Frye and Alastair Fowler's theory of Modes models genre change on biological process: born from other genres, a genre grows up in an "assembly stage,” reaches maturity in an “imitative stage,’ and declines and dies in a self-reflexive, self-conscious, ironic stage, only to be disinterred and reincarnated in a later era. In this way,

Old, Middle, and New Comedy might be seen as youth, middle age, and old age. The notion complements explanations of fourth-century comedy based on the decline of Athens and its chief poets. More “scientific” evolutionary theories, on a Darwinian model, speak of continuous adaptive change toward a more efficient performance of art’s social function. To the extent that the description of these processes is independent of human determination, the mysterious “final causes” of genre change exceed historical explanation.“ Given the popularity of modern evolutionary theory, many historians of ancient drama show little hesitation in adopting Aristotle’s scheme for the evolution of tragedy and comedy, according to which both genres developed “from small beginnings,” the one from epic and “those leading the dithyramb,” and the other from iambic and “those leading the phallic procession”; moreover, both genres underwent gradual and parallel increments until each “attained its proper form.” It is not surprising that accounts of Classical tragedy show more

of Aristotle’s influence than do histories of comedy. This is because Aristotle gives hints of a decline in tragedy (though he makes no theoretical provision for

From Aristophanes to Menander?

it). According to Kraus, youth, growth, maturity creativity. Greek tragedy thing fully new (so that

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“one can apply . . . the biological concepts of birth, and death . . . to the forms of intellectual and artistic offers a classical example, which entered life as someNietzsche could speak of its ‘birth’): in the three great

tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the youth, maturity and cor-

ruption of this artform stand before our eyes. The seed of tragedy then, transmitted by Seneca, sank powerful roots once again in Elizabethan England" (1975:436). Such diverse figures as Whitman (1974, ch. 4) and Zeitlin (1980:72)

use Frye's model to explain the decline of tragedy, from a Sophoclean maturity, through the ironic modalities of Euripides, to its "death" in the fourth century. But Aristotle defied modern prejudice by appraising the comedy of the midfourth century as a more mature form than Old Comedy. Thus Kraus hesitates to apply the same organic concepts to Aristophanes, Alexis, and Menander, but claims rather that Old Comedy was a transitory “bloom” and that New Comedy was a hybrid between it and tragedy (1975:436—447). Nevertheless, organic or evolutionary models of an unmistakable Aristotelian or Darwinian tendency frequently lurk behind explanations of the changes in fourth-century comedy. Dillon cites the “poetics of comedy," by which he means the aesthetic drive toward "unity, coherence, and universality" of the plot (1987:156, 176). Evolu-

tionary ideas are also fourth-century arts as and as a "permanent agenda behind artistic

evident in Wallace's characterization a "progress" 1995:215 and Wallace in cultural achievement" (1995:203), as production were the advancement of

of the change in Eder 1995a:218) if the unspoken the "frontiers of

culture" (1995:202).

It remains to consider whether the addressee, or audience reception, can be

considered the significant cause. Certainly the conditions of ancient comic production make this a reasonable prospect—in a mass theater, in competition, before an audience engaged in the production in several important ways: whether ideologically, through the widely felt complementarity of the theater to the democratic institutions of Athens, or administratively, through the public sponsorship and regulation of the festivals, or indeed physically as choreuts or as the at least notional judges of the drama.*! Some scholars assurne an increase in audience participation from fifth- to

fourth-century comedy. This theory finds inspiration in the polemics of disgruntled ancient elites, especially Plato's general theory of cultural degeneration through the devolution of power and authority from an educated "aristocracy" to the dregs of society. In Laws (700c-701a), he regrets the good old days when "the authorities judged competitions" and "there was no whistling nor any rude shouting, as now, nor any applause from the crowd," which the "disciplining

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rod” kept in order. But poets and musicians began to mix genres and said that pleasure was the sole standard by which to judge music and “they made people think themselves capable of passing their own judgment. This then is how the audience, once silent, became vocal, pretending to know what is good music and what not, and instead of aristocracy in music a degenerate theatrocracy

came into being.” Aristotle first gave formal expression to the theory of the divided audience that has mystified literary studies ever since (Pol. 1342a18—28): “There are two types of audience, one free [here = independently wealthy] and educated, and the other vulgar, composed of tradesmen, wage-laborers and other such, and one has to produce contests and festivals for the recreation of such men, but their minds are unnaturally twisted . . . so one has to allow artists to employ the kind of music which suits such people.” As ideological fulminations go, these are not subtle, yet these texts are cited ingenuously in explanation of genre change in the fourth century. Charles Segal

simply follows Plato in ascribing the decline in choral poetry “to taste formed by the mob and the ‘theatrocracy’” (1985:244). Ghiron-Bistagne attributes “the

crisis in the theater in the fourth century” to a division in the audience into “enlightened people’ and ‘vulgus populus’” (1974:1335, 1354). Degani is con-

vinced that the political nature of Old Comedy disappeared “in coincidenze con un’attenzione sempre maggiore nei confronti del basso pubblico” (1993:8).

Though Wallace complains about scholars who uncritically accept the testimony of an antidemocratic elite, his own view of fourth-century art ts overtly Platonic: earnest political counsel to the city gave way to fourth-century catering to audience tastes." Scholars who accept the testimony of elite theorists have to make an unfortunate choice between one bigot and another, since Aris-

totle, who is happy to agree with Plato about the way the mob ruined tragedy, is at the same time quite pleased with fourth-century developments in comedy." Those who think political comedy highbrow and uplifting can blame the mindless sensuality of the mob for its demise. But then how do they explain the con-

comitant demise of obscenity and scatology? It is Aristotle who points out that “the majority" have the sense of humor characteristic of Old Comedy, whereas the more recent comedy of his day suited the humor of the refined members of an audience, one of the main considerations being "to cause no pain to the object of mockery" (EN 1128a4-27), a point stressed by Degani himself (1993:1-4).

But apart from the nostalgic historical reconstructions of a distempered elite, is there anything to suggest that Aristophanes' audience was more or less discriminating and demanding than Philemon's, or that Aristophanes was more or less willing to cater? Much is made of Aristophanes' parabasis in Clouds,

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which complains of the play’s failure (521-527): “Thinking you to be a clever audience and this to be the smartest of my comedies . . . I thought it right to give you the first taste, and then I was undeservingly beaten by vulgar men. For this I blame you wise ones, for whose sake I gave myself such trouble, but I will never willingly betray the clever among you . . .” This is usually taken as a serious statement of principle by Aristophanes that he chooses to pitch his comedies to the enlightened segment of the audience.“ I doubt if this interpretation is correct. First, there is a textual problem. In the entire parabasis, there is only one place that suggests a division between vulgar and clever. Elsewhere the entire audience is addressed as clever (the “vulgar men” by whom he claims to be beaten are, of course, Aristophanes’ rivals). This is consistently the case in Aristophanes’ comedies: when he flatters or chastises his audience, it is the Athenian audience as a whole.“ The exception is line 527 just quoted from Clouds, ipav . . . τοὺς δεξιούς (the clever among you). But ὑμᾶς... τοὺς δεξιούς (you clever people) is also transmitted in the manuscripts. Dover

(1968b:166) rejects the latter reading because it is in conformity with the rest of the passage and "perhaps for that very reason an ancient or medieval emendation." I think it more likely that the double-audience theory of later antiquity

led to corruption in the opposite direction. Aristophanes would surely have no ground for imputing his failure to the clever, if he thought them a minority. At line 522, the speaker praises the audience as a whole as wisest and then goes about demonstrating how unwisely it failed to support his comedy. He is constructing, not dividing, his audience when he invites it to embrace this flattering persona.** The function of this address is no different from that at line 575, where again the audience as a whole is addressed as “wisest” by the Cloud chorus, who then go on to blame them for their errors and ill-counsel in electing Cleon. But even if one accepts the theory of an audience divided in terms of

good and bad taste, as does Bremer, one could not reasonably disagree with his assessment that “[Aristophanes] is constantly aware of the fragility of the link between himself as a poet and his audience, and shows himself, if not always, at least often prepared to accommodate his plays to what this audience likes and dislikes" (1993:127).

This survey of the various factors that have been adduced to explain change in comedy is intended to be critical. [t is negative, but not entirely dismissive. Whether for fairness or for closure, I feel compelled to offer my own selection of a paramount cause behind this shift in comedy's dominant style from the

late fifth through to the end of the fourth century. The factor I choose may seem as Aristotelian as any, involving both politics and the mentalities of divided audiences, but politics in the broadest sense, or more precisely ideologies, in an

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audience growing not more vulgar, but less confrontational and in the end less democratic. If we listen to the disgruntlement in the elite voices, not the fanciful histories they concoct to legitimize their dim and narrow view of classical Athenian politics and culture, we could conclude that the principle cause for the shift in dominance from one style to the other had mainly to do with the changing levels of social tolerance for comic free-speech. From the time of the Old Oligarch onward, elites complain bitterly of the demos’ happy indulgence for the comic ridicule of “the rich, noble, powerful... and those anxious to rise above the demos” (AthPol. 2.18). It is clear that elites felt alienated by the political style of comedy and consoled themselves by ascribing its features to the vulgarity and indiscipline of a degenerate democracy.” They were partly right in thinking that the political style was directed against them.** Political comedy served a democratic function, in Carey’s words, “by leveling down, by emphasizing negatively the quality of all citizens and by confirming the existence of freedom of speech,” indeed by giving Athens an image of itself as “a city characterized by

the principles of isotés and parrhésia [= equality and free-speech],” “as the democratic polis par excellence” (1994:69).

The political style had its “historical moment.” It rose to dominance in the most radical years of the “radical democracy,” 424-ca. 415, and decreased in popularity in the late years of the war, revived briefly in the immediate aftermath of the democratic restoration, and again declined (but very unevenly) in the more conciliatory democracy of the first half of the fourth century. The troubled second half of the century may have seen several minor revivals before the rise of the “bourgeois comedy," represented by Menander, which followed the restrictions of the franchise after 322, and the establishment of the oligarchic regime of Demetrius of Phaleron in 317. Exile, resettlements, disenfranchisement, the abolition of the theoric fund, and the abolition of the chorégia all served to change the face of the Athenian audience and the degree and nature of its engagement. I think it no coincidence that the three datable political

comedies performed in Athens after Demetrius all come from periods of democratic revival.* Still, one cannot say that these events played a determining role in the de-

mise of political comedy. Rather we should look to the effect that the growing power and ideological hegemony of the elite had upon audience sensibilities

(independent of this power and hegemony becoming political facts in the narrow sense). Green and Seeberg have done us an invaluable service in tabulating the change in popular taste through a statistical analysis of roughly 1700 items illustrating comedy from the late fifth century to the mid third. "In the 75 or so

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years down to 350 B.c. figurines and scenes on pots were dominant, even if depictions of masks were beginning to appear in increasing quantity. In the 75

years after 350 B.c. there are about three times as many masks as figures.” The shift in taste that this represents is a gradual one away from “the comic action on stage and the types who produced it... to a more complex drama in which the characters represented by the masks interact with each other.” This archaeological record, which is our best evidence for reception, shows no sudden dis-

ruptions such as might be caused by persons, events, or market trends at the end of the fifth century, only a gradual shift in audience sympathy from a political to an ethical style of drama.”

Conclusion Theories have a way of perpetuating themselves by inventing their own evidence. This process is exemplified by the peripatetic theory of comic evolution.

It is based on highly schematic a priori assumptions about the growth of comedy from iambic poetry and ritual abuse in a democratic setting, and about its perfection as a more genteel, philosophical and graceful form of drama at the

time of the “restrained democracy” under the enlightened rule of the peripatetic Demetrius of Phaleron.°' The traditional partition of Athenian comedy into Old and New is the product of a selection of authors and works that best exemplified this particular theory of comedy's evolution. Written histories of the genre assume global, usually sudden, qualitative changes and characterize that change as one from an Aristophanic to a Menandrian form. Yet the independent evidence of the fragments of the other comic poets shows that the styles associated with these epochs are not neatly separable on a diachronic

scale, but compete synchronically. One reason for the perpetuation of this error, despite plentiful evidence to the contrary, is that a correlation can indeed be observed between “radical democracy” and the popularity of the political style, and between “moderate democracy” or oligarchy and the popularity of alternative styles, especially ethical comedy. But the relationship between these forms

of government and these forms of comedy is by no means as strict and exclusive as the tradition dictates. The changes in comedy from the fifth to the fourth century are best understood, not as a succession of qualitatively distinct products, but as a shift in the dominance of one style over another. An argument can

be made for the primacy of the audience's political sympathies and ideological predisposition in determining the form of its artistic communication. If this argument is right, then the competing styles of comedy are part of a synchronic and a diachronic system that can be described as ultimately conditioned by

competition between the citizen classes of Athenian society.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

elfehete

Theocritus and the “Demythologizing” of Poetry MARCO

FANTUZZI

Many of the poems that may be attributed to Theocritus with certainty— urban mimes, encomia, bucolic poems—have human settings and figures. The urban mimes deal with the bourgeois or with humble persons familiar from fifth- and fourth-century Sicilian mime, which had been revived by the flourishing literary and popular mime of the third and second century B.c.z.! A higher, more or less sublime level of characters and of deeds is appropriate to the recipients of the two of Theocritus’s eulogies, for Hieron and for Ptolemy (Idd. xvi and xvii), poems that are rooted in the ancient literary traditions of encomia written for men (in the case of Id. xvi), or of encomia for men and hymns to the gods (in the case of Id. xvii),? both of which were fashionable genres of the third century B.C.E. The bucolic poems, on the other hand, could not rely on tradition in order to state their identity as a genre. So far as we know, the setting and situations of Theocritus’s bucolic poems had no relevant parallel in the previous literary heritage. The ancients, who eagerly quote Sophron’s mimes as sources of the urban mimetic poems 2 and 15,°

appear to have acknowledged no precedent for them. In fact, Theocritus's bucolic characters defy any traditionally clear-cut characterization. To follow the distinction of éthé (characters) proposed in Aristotle's Poetics, the bucolic character is not always worse than men usually are (as in the Margites and in comedy), and hardly ever superior (tragedy and epic), nor can he always be connected with the "realistic" sketches of everyday life that were probably characteristic of the Sicilian mime. He may range from sublimity (in the case of

Daphnis in Thyris' song in Id. i), to a sort of idealized normality (compare Id. vii), to a vulgarity and banality typical of the popular mime of the Hellenistic 135

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age.‘ The only coherence we can easily ascribe to Theocritus in characterizing

his bucolic poems is his care in excluding, or at least limiting to a minimum, the presence of the characters, gods, and mythical heroes who had monopolized hexametric poetry from Homer onwards.

Theocritus certainly reveals some anxiety of influence with respect to Homer (above all to the Iliadic Homer) a few times in his poetry,? and his anxiety may fully account for the more or less humble level of the main characters of the bucolic and urban-mimetic poems.* At any rate, "anxiety of influence” is a merely “negative” interpretation here, and in particular the intention to “write something different from Homer-and-martial-epic” has been alleged a bit too often in the past to explain the generic choices of Hellenistic poets. I shall investigate whether Theocritus’s decision to introduce human (but not necessarily humble) characters and contexts into “high” hexametric poetry is a strategic choice for the bucolic poems. I shall also ask whether it explains, at least in part, a relevant point of Theocritus’s encomiastic poems: his emphatic assertion that he is writing a hexametric hymn for a contemporary man, and not for a god (xvii.8), as the generic tradition

(preserved, for example, by

Callimachus in the Hymns) demanded.

I will begin with the two encomia and proems of Idd. xvi and xvii both begin traditional proemial invocations to the two of the central authorizing texts of

then I shall return to bucolic poetry. The with a gesture of praeteritio common in gods, and they appear to include hints at traditional religion and religious poetry,

namely Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days.

Id. xvii, in particular, employs the topos of the Muses beginning and ending their song with Zeus: From Zeus let us begin, and with Zeus, Muses, make end, when we sing the best of the immortals;’ but of men let Ptolemy be named, first,

last, and in the midst, for of men he is most excellent. The topos was quite common in archaic Greek poetry. The song the Muses sing after inaugurating Hesiod as a poet (Th. 43-51) mentioned first the gods

born from Earth and Heaven (ἐξ ἀρχῆς, 45), and second, Zeus and his superiority among the gods. Line 48, however (an interpolation in the opinion of several scholars), reaffirms as a general truth that the Muses sing of Zeus first and last “when they begin and end their strain" (ἀρχόμεναί θ᾽... Anyovaal 7’ ἀοιδῆς). In the proem of the Works and Days, Hesiod’s Muses enact what that

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“beginning with Zeus” might mean. There the poet begins the poem by inviting the Muses to celebrate their father Zeus (1-2), and thereafter the Muses cele-

brate Zeus’s power in a short hymn (3-8), so that the reference to the addressee and the real beginning of the work must wait until lines 9-10. Confronted by this delay in subject matter, not only scholars of the second century B.c.E. (Aristarchus and Crates) but also Praxiphanes, who in all probability lived in the age of Theocritus, found the proem to the Works and Days so irrelevant to the context, and therefore so unacceptable to their taste, that they proposed to athetize it.® Yet certainly there was a long tradition of poets (or singing Muses) taking their beginning from Zeus: from Terpander (PMG 698 — 3 Gostoli, “Zeus, beginning of all, leader of all, Zeus, to you I end this beginning of my hymns")? to Alcman (PMG 29 = 89 Calame, “and I shall sing beginning from Zeus"),'? to Pindar (Nem. ii.1—3, "Even the sons of Homer often begin their in-

terwoven lays with a prelude to Zeus, so has this man . . ";! v. 25f. "They began with Zeus and went on to sing of Thetis”).'? This tradition had been followed

by Aratus in the proem to the Phainomena “Let us begin with Zeus” (ex Διὸς

ἀρχώμεσθα, as in Theocritus), “whom we men never leave unspoken” (1-2). In Id. xvii, Theocritus, on the contrary, does not include any further substantial

celebration of Zeus other than the brief reference in line 10 to "the best of the immortals.” In substance, Theocritus seemingly once again takes up the beginning from Zeus but contaminates its function with the traditional encomiastic gesture of the priamel, which was very common in choral poetry. In a priamel,

the excellence of the laudandus, or of his deeds, or of another connected theme, was paralleled and thereby automatically extolled, through the excellence of other things that were normally no less sublime than remote from the explicit concerns of the ode.'4 The main reason traditional proems "from Zeus" are evoked by Theocritus is to hint at the parallelisms between Zeus and Ptolemy,' and between the poet and Hesiod, but the form into which Theocritus shapes this hint subtly implies that Ptolemy should be honored among men more often than Zeus is among the gods (not only at the beginning and at the end, as with Zeus, but also in the middle, that is, always). The poet is not a new Hesiod interested in the gods qua gods; he is interested above all in Ptolemy.

The same poetic strategy operates in the next four lines: the heroes who of old were sprung from demigods, when they had accomplished noble deeds, found skilled poets. So indeed I who am skilled in praising must sing of Ptolemy;

and songs are the meed even of the immortals themselves.

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Soon after the acknowledgment that the brave heroes of the past had found good singers, heroes and aoidoi of the past are put aside, just as Zeus had been, and instead Theocritus claims that he himself is a good singer who is quite satisfied with his subject, Ptolemy (“I who am skilled in praising must sing of

Ptolemy,” 7-8). Apparently, because Theocritus is a contemporary of Ptolemy, who is the new "hero," just as the aoidoi were contemporaries of the heroes of

the past, the king provides a suitable theme for poetry. At the end of the poem, we find again mention of the same three themes in reverse order (Ptolemy,

heroes, Zeus), and again, though the very last words are for Zeus, as promised in lines 1-2, the real emphasis is on Ptolemy, who is made even more equal to the demigods and is promised a new song (135-137): Farewell, Prince Ptolemy, and of you just like as of the other heroes will I make mention, and I will utter, methinks, a word which men hereafter shall not reject; but for excellence you have to pray to Zeus.

The function of this beginning—Ptolemy = Zeus (Zeus is then put aside, though to be hinted at as a parallel later on); Ptolemy — one of the epic heroes (with the heroes then put aside, though also to be hinted at as parallels); even-

tually Ptolemy alone from line 9 on as the "definitive" subject of the poem—is

all the more evident if we compare it with the beginning of Pind. Ol. ii.1—6. The formal structure of this poem appears to be very similar to that of Id. xvii.1—8.

Pindar's text begins, "Songs, lords of the lyre, what god, what hero, what man shall we celebrate? Pisa belongs to Zeus. Heracles established the Olympian feast, first-fruits of war. And Theron must be proclaimed for his chariot vic-

tory.”'* Pindar’s Priamel, however, simply presents excellent superhuman themes that function as foils for his excellent human subject—at most he may

imply that, although he was a mortal man, Theron had gone as far as a man could go." Theocritus, on the other hand, deals with a man-hero who is really going to become a god, and this circumstance is the reason why he writes a eu-

logy of Ptolemy that hints at parallelisms between him and Zeus or the heroes. It is also why his encomium is dressed in the clothes of a hymn. To understand Theocritus's poetic strategy, this historical difference between his laudandus and those of Pindar is no less important than the repeatedly alleged Hellenistic taste for the Kreuzung der Gattungen. From this point of view, lines 7f. may be denser than commonly realized: their initial face value is "I want to write a hymn to Ptolemy, this hymn is my geras (gift, prize) for him; itis an appropriate

geras because hymns had also been a very valuable geras for the gods.” But beyond the encomiastic emphasis on the relevance of the gift, line 7f. also set

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forth, in all probability, a poetic program, namely, the geras of the hymn has al-

ready been offered to gods (namely, the ‘Homeric’ hymns for gods that already exist), therefore I will write a hymn for my new hero (occupying a space that the

"Homeric' hymns had unavoidably left open)." Indeed, analogies have long been noted, both in structure and in use of topoi, between Id. xvii, on the one hand, and the more important "Homeric"

hymns'* and the Callimachean hymns to Zeus and Apollo on the other.'? It is as if Theocritus wanted to use new material—that is, his human protagonist—to fill in the formal structure that hexametric hymns had codified in the Homeric

corpus.”° For the topos (at 9-12) of uncertainty about taking one's pick from the multitude of possible themes, we may compare HHomAp. 19—24 and 207-223; and for the birth of Ptolemy at 58-76, HHomAp. 25ff., for example.?' A detailed

description of the extension of Ptolemy's reign at 77—94 replaces the list of the god's cult sites (compare, for example, HHomAp. 216ff.); the celebration of Ptolemy's piety for the gods and munificence to poets at 106-130 replaces the

list of the god's qualities and prerogatives (compare, for example, HHomHerm. 166—181); a typically hymnic farewell contaminating hymnic epilogues closes the poem (135-137). However, the structural patterns of Id. xvii do not allow a

perfect superimposition of patterns from the "Homeric" hymns, nor are all of their elements exclusive features of divine hymns. At least some of these elements descend from the tradition of encomia for men.” The very point with which Theocritus chooses to begin, namely, the lengthy description of the lineage of Ptolemy II (13—57), since it is strongly emphasized after the topos of uncertainty, is the premise that authorizes the poet to

use the form of the divine hymn in which he had claimed (line 7f.) to be willing to praise the king. Although he is a man (compare 3), Ptolemy II was the descendant of two divinized human beings: he was son of Ptolemy I and Berenike, and Berenike "had escaped death" with the help of Aphrodite and shared her divine status (45—50), while Ptolemy I, along with Alexander, was not only pre-

sented with immortality by Zeus and taken to Olympus (16-19), but both were also νἱωνῶν vuovot (sons of the sons) of Heracles, the most typical ἡμίθεος (demigod) of Greek religion (20-25). Therefore, the introduction of the heroes as "descedants of demigods in the past" (line 5) makes them comparable to the

laudandus, the contemporary ἀπόγονος from an nuideos (compare 26).? It also allows Theocritus to make himself comparable to the bards who sang of the heroes—that is to say, above all, to Homer. Line

5 is thus, in my

opinion,

an

important

clue in detecting

the

intertextual genealogy of the proem (and the poetics) of Theocritus xvii. Up until a few years ago, Theocritus's definition of the heroes was deemed by schol-

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ars unparalleled, or even anomalous,?* as it is in contrast to an equation that was widespread in Greek poetry: heroes = demigods, or heroes = sons of one divine and one human parent. I have suggested elsewhere that Theocritus’s definition can be traced to the elegy by Simonides for the Greeks who had fallen at Platea (IEG 11 West),?5 a poem that, like Id. xvii, was on the whole an en-

comium in intent, if not formally an encomium from beginning to end.” In this poem, the fact that the warriors who fought the Trojan war had gained glory through Homeric poetry—exactly what Theocritus as well is also dealing with—is presented by Simonides through the phrase ἐπώνυμον ὀπί λοτέρ]οισιν / moto" 2u]i8éov ὠκύμορον yeven|v ([Homer] made the demigods' short-lived race famous for later men) (line 17f.). I presume that Theocritus interpreted, or, better, re-interpreted, for the sake of his context, the Simonidean ἡμιθέων... yeven as “progeny of demigods.^ From a merely lexical point of view, the meaning "progeny" is allowed for yeven in every period, and it is especially common in the Archaic period. In-

deed, in early epic, yeven is a subset of yévos, and distinguishes from one another members of two subgroups who all belong to the same γένος but who differ from one another by being born earlier or later and hence belong to different generations? Indeed, this meaning would be more than plausible, as a result of the context of the first part of the Simonidean elegy, which concerns Achilles: not only was Achilles himself a demigod, qua son of a god, Thetis, and of a mortal, Peleus, but he was also a "descendant of demigods," because he had Zeus as his ancestor, via Peleus, the son of Aeacus, who was himself the son of Zeus.?! This status of Achilles as a twofold demigod might fit Theocritus's eulogistic aims quite well, because it was exactly the status of Ptolemy as a twofold demigod that the poet was going to celebrate in song, as we can see from lines 13-33.

The reasons that might motivate Theocritus to focus his attention on this Simonidean syntagm, and more generally to betray his allusive intentions towards Simonides' elegy for the fallen at Plataea, are several. Indeed, ἡμιθέων

'yever occurs in a passage of the elegy where (1) the Greek heroes fighting at Troy are quoted (Achilles is also briefly hinted at) but are rapidly dismissed by Simonides, in order that he may proceed with the real concern of the poem, a human-contemporary subject expressly juxtaposed with Achilles as an epic theme (compare lines 19-27); (2) these heroes are remembered as having gained immortal glory through the poetry of the contemporary Homer (1418); and therefore (3) Simonides most probably implies that he is the new

Homer who is going to provide the contemporary Greeks who had defeated the

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Persians with new glory (compare line 28). The proem of Theocritus xvii deals with the same concepts and with characters who play the same roles: there is a juxtaposition between past heroic themes of poetry and human contemporary subjects; and there is the statement that the Greek heroes fallen at Troy had

gained kleos and that they had gained it by means of epic poetry. Through this allusion to the warriors of Plataea, Theocritus himself could implicitly adopt the same stance that Simonides had had towards Homer: he would be “quoting” Simonides, who had compared himself with Homer, in order to compare his

poem’s ability to provide kleos not only to the ability of ancient epos to glorify demigods but also to the ability of Simonides to do the same.” More generally, the whole proemium of the eulogy to Ptolemy appears to

have adopted as its model the first part of Simonides’ elegy for the victory of the Greeks at Plataea. We cannot be completely sure that POxy 2327 fr. 5 is the be-

ginning of Simonides’ elegy, nor what extant fragments of the elegy are from its first section. At any rate, it is certain that the elegy included a short hymn to

Achilles and to the Greeks who died fighting against the Trojans and then that it bade farewell to Achilles (19f.) and passed on to the celebration of the glory of

the contemporary Greeks who had fought against the Persians. The structure of the Simonidean song goes back most probably to the normal procedure of archaic poets, who began their recitations of heroic epics with a proemium devoted to a god (such as in most of the “Homeric” hymns of short or medium length) and then went on to recite the epic. Simonides “compressed in miniature” a hymn (the hymn to Achilles) and an epicized piece of history (the Greek victory at Plataea).? In my opinion, it is through the correspondence Zeus/

heroes and Muses/aedic poetry on one side, and Ptolemy and Theocritus on the other, that ends with the final option of Ptolemy as the theme of the song (5-8), that Theocritus continues Simonides' attempt at miniaturizing and concentrates the short hymnodic proem of his model into an even shorter preamble of only six lines—lines that resemble a priamel in that they list alternative themes of song.^ At first sight, Theocritus's proem looks like the statement of a personal and radically new choice. In fact, Theocritus's approach to writing a hexametric hymn for a contemporary could indeed be read by ancient readers (and can be read by us now, thanks to the new Sime aides) not only as the explicit refusal of

the bardic tradition of singing in h.xameters on divine or heroic themes but also as an allusive evocation of the legitimizing precedent of Simonides' elegy for the fallen at Plataea, the only "hymn" for a hero + "encomium" of heroic

human beings that is known to us from Greek archaic poetry. Moreover, it is

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written in elegiacs (no less epé as the hexameter, for the ancients), not in a lyric meter as are other encomia known to us from Greek archaic poetry. The same refusal of divine-heroic subjects of song is the substance of the proem of Id. xvi, probably one of Theocritus’s earliest extant works.?* Unlike Id. xvii, Id. xvi is no hymn, and the emphasis of the author on brotoi (mortals) as a

theme of song is not a justification of an unusual combination of subject and generic forms, but looks like a more general program. The poem has an unusually complex structure. It begins with the poet's lamenting the fate of poetry and the materialistic coarseness of his contemporaries (5-21); it continues with a reaffirmation of the value of poetry, in particular, of its capacity to confer immortality on the patrons who support it (22-67); and it concludes by praising, or better yet, promising to praise, Hieron II, who is considered by Theocritus to be the most likely candidate for his praise. If we consider the first section as a kind of introduction meant to show the uniqueness of this potential patron—a uniqueness that would have implied the survival of encomiastic poetry—the complexity of the work is reduced, and praise

can be considered to be the only objective of the poem. This interpretation is especially attractive because, as is well known, the whole poem—even the first,

most mimetic section—is full of more or less explicit topoi and vocabulary from the choral epinician poetry of both Pindar and Simonides." I believe, however, that such a reading of the poem is somewhat reductive and overlooks another, possibly significant, interpretation of its proem: It is ever the task of Zeus’s daughters, ever that of bards, to hymn the immortals and the glorious deeds of heroes. The Muses are goddesses and hymn their fellow-gods, but we are mortals here below, and, being such, of mortals let us mortals sing. This proem sets up a clear distinction between human and divine-heroic themes, which leads to the refusal of the latter. It has usually been considered to

be a by-product of the aim of the poem qua praise, a part of the repertory of encomiastic poetry—and in practice would merely mean “I am an encomion for a

man, and not a hymnos for a god.”** Other interpreters read it as a simple adaptation to the encomiastic context of a traditional hymnodic gesture, that is to say, the customary declaration of modesty and admission of the author’s lim its.’° Still others consider it an anticipation of a specific stylistic choice intended for the public: the author will not allow his subject to masquerade in heroic or

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divine dress as his other contemporaries did, disavowing the pompous flattery then in fashion and promising a more restrained style.“ A more complex choice (and not a mere refusal of the single hymnic “dress” ) may, however, be at stake. A clear distinction between poetry about gods and heroes of the past and poetry about contemporary humans is at least as old as Plato (Leg. 7.801e1-8), but a separation between the function of the Muses (as singers-inspirers of po-

etry on gods and heroes of the past) and the function of mortal poets (as those who have to sing about contemporary humans) appears to be unparalleled. Notwithstanding, not only does Theocritus impose this distinction in the beginning of the poem, but he also confirms it both in the following lines, on the Charites as personifications and inspirers of his encomiastic poems (5—12),*! and also refers twice to the single Muses as responsible, in general, for the poetic

kleos of Homeric heroes (29-33 and 58). Theocritus also wishes for himself, in company with the Muses, to be kecharismenos for his client (68—69)* and appears to overlap the Charites and "his" Muses—as if he were identifying his own Muses as the Charites (107—108).

Theocritus's intention to look for an alternative poetics to the one promoted only by the Muses, or, better yet, for a synthesis of the Muses and the Charites, might simply be explained within the framework of the encomiastic

tradition. It will be sufficient to mention the well-known Pindar, Bacchylides, and Simonides not only to the Muses Charites, and Sosibios's thanksgiving to the Charites in epinician on his Nemean victory (fr. 384.44—45). The very

references of both but also to charis/ the Callimachean same synthesis of

Charites and Muses that we find in Theocritus is paralleled at least in Bacchylides v.1-14 and xix.1-8.* As is clear from these and from other

epinician passages (above all Pind. Nem. 4.6-9 and 6.32-34), the Muses, as the daughters of Mnemosyne, appear to guarantee the substance of encomiastic poetry and the accuracy of its report, whereas the Charites provide it with the attractive beauty that ensures that the words outlive deeds. After all, the themes that Theocritus refuses at the beginning of Id. xvi are exactly those that the Muses and the poets, as the therapontes of the Muses, used to perform, according to Hesiod Th. 100-101: “the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus.” In Hesiod, the price to be paid for this attitude towards divine-heroic song was a very high one. When he first met the Muses, Hesiod was a shepherd on Mount Helicon ( Th. 23), and the Muses

defamed his shepherd's work as degrading: shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, 26. Only afterwards did they assign him

the specific task of "always singing" (aiév ἀείδειν) the immortals’ genealogy (31-35), and he duly fulfilled this “command”

(exeAovro, 33) to sing about

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gods. Consequently, the Theogony, introduced by this proem and promoted by

the Muses, was to be an all-embracing cosmology explaining the divine origin of the world, as well as the relationships between the human and the divine spheres, but it is completely silent about human beings.” Between Hesiod and Theocritus, the refusal to appeal to the Heliconian

Muses as inspirers of mythological material has definite precedents in the tradition of encomiastic poetry. In the proem of his encomium for Polycrates, Ibycus had referred to the Heliconian Muses of the Hesiodic Theogony in order to refuse to compose mythological poetry, where the choice of a mortal as the theme of poetry and the refusal of mythological song are as closely linked as they are in Theocritus: both are connected—differently than in Theocritus— with the fact that only the Heliconian Muses are omniscient and therefore are best in listing all the ships of the heroes who fought the Trojan war, whereas a

mortal is not able to remember everything. Both, however, are also connected—as in Theocritus—with the promise of kleos for the laudandus through the song of the poet. Ibycus’s opening declaration that perfection in epic song is a prerogative of the Muses alludes to the invocation to the Muses that Homer had placed before the Catalogue of the Ships in the second book of the Iliad (484-493). Nevertheless, Ibycus's lines 23-30 replace the Olympian Muses of Homer with their Heliconian counterpart: the Muses invoked in the proem of Hesiod’s Theogony, who thus might have been acknowledged by him as guardians and symbols of mythic-theological wisdom. Again, the reference that the encomiastic Theocritus makes to the Theogonic Muses might simply sound like a traditional topos of encomiastic poetry.

But we must take into account that the human life that Hesiod had repudiated in the Theogony in order to become a singer of gods and heroes was a very spe-

cific one, namely that of a shepherd. Therefore, the Theogonic Hesiod was a perfect negative paradigm for Theocritus, since he symbolized the poet who, in order to be a servant of the Muses and to spread their knowledge, had given up

his human world, and in so doing, he had totally avoided the themes connected with a pastoral environment. Theocritus may have chosen this negative paradigm not only because he was beginning an encomium for a man (which is a fact), but even more so if he had already developed the poetics of a bucolic (and, broadly speaking, human)

poetry, and wished to foreshadow it in the

proem of Id. xvi. This may be something more than a hypothesis, if we take into account a few passages of Id. xvi, which include in nuce the two main trends of Theocritus’s human poetry, namely the urban and the pastoral mimes. The

Bettelgedicht of the first part of this poem’? is full of hints at an urban-mimic environment: lines 5-15 and 16-21, for example, are two short, mimic sketches (failure of the poet's depressed Charites and harshness of the miser, respec-

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tively), which we would not be surprised to find somewhere in Id. xv (idioms and proverbs included).* The bucolic theme surfaces in the choice of the char-

acters exploited as examples of the kleos gained from ancient poets or of the aspects of this kleos that Theocritus chooses to emphasize. We may compare lines 36-39, where the wealth of the Scopadai is presented through a lengthy description of herds of calves, cows, sheep, and shepherds.*' Moreover, in lines 51-57, it is not only the sons of Priam and Odysseus who are cited as the characters whom Homer had endowed with immortality, but also the quite unexpected Eumaeus, who is termed ὑφορβός (swineherd), and Philoetius, who is “busied with the cattle of the herd.” Finally, lines 90-97°? identify the possible victories of Hieron II with the reflowering of agricultural, and in particular of pastoral, activities—a rural focus that appears to have no specific eulogistic function of its own and that in fact shifts the Hesiodic picture of the effects of the government of a good ruler from the polis to the pasture

(Op. 225-247). In conclusion, what we read is not simply a nonmythological encomium for a man but is also a poem in which Theocritus's pervasive attention to mimic-urban or pastoral themes and environments constantly flanks, and sometimes even overcomes, the selection of themes and contexts suggested by the tradition of encomiastic poetry. The emphasis on the Charites as inspirers of poetry who are alternative/ complementary figures to the Muses appears to parallel the approach that Theocritus adopts in the bucolic poems, in which the pastoral Nymphs almost always replace the traditional Muses as the inspirers of bucolic singers whenever they sing of nonmythical themes. The mythical past appears to be the only field under the control of the Muses in Theocritus's pastorals.

The Muses, the gods who sing of gods of Id. xvi.3, hardly appear in Idd. i and iii-vii (the "serious" bucolic poems).™ Instead, they are almost always replaced by Nymphs as the inspirers of "living" pastoral singers (compare Idd. i.12; v.140 and 149; vii.92, and above all 148, where mythological paradigms are introduced through an invocation of the Nymphs who inhabit what already was, or was becoming one of the most famous sacred seats of the Muses: Nymphs of Kastalia that haunt the steep of Parnassus).*> In addition, the Muses cut an ambiguous figure in Lycidas’s derogatory definition of contemporary

poets who imitate Homer as “cocks of the Muses'5 (Id. vii.47—48); and the following line 49, “but come, let us straight begin our bucolic song,” appears somehow to contrast the poetry of the Muses with bucolic poetry. Apart from these passages, the Muses are respectfully quoted as the inspirers of poetry by the town-dweller poet (Id. vii.2)? Simichidas, before, or just after, he is ap-

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pointed a pastoral poet (12, 37) (129). In addition, the Muses are also men-

tioned in a few passages dealing with Daphnis. These passages would seem to be counterexamples to my thesis about Theocritus’s choice of inspiring divinities. Indeed, since they are to be found almost only in Id. i, these passages provide an important confirmation of the close connection that Theocritus sets up between the Muses and mythological material (hence, their “segregation” from the world of “living” bucolic singers). As a matter of fact, the Muses fully exploit their traditional role only in the song for Daphnis in Id. i (lines 64-142)—a song that, being devoted to Daphnis as a mythical pastoral archetype, is placed in a timeless, non-“realistic” environment, where several divine figures are allowed to appear and to speak, and (consequently) the Muses are allowed to supervise the performance of Thyrsis. So it

is that the Muses are also the protectresses of Komatas, the other half-mythical first bucolic singer of Id. vii.78—88, and are quoted by the "living" Komatas of Id. v.80—81, once again in connection with Daphnis. This observation may help with the definition of Daphnis as "he whom the Muses loved, nor did the Nymphs dislike him" (Id. i.141), which closes Thyrsis's song. Certainly in the common versions of his legend, Daphnis was the son of a Nymph and the lover of another one, and in one version he was said to have been nursed by the

Nymphs.** However, Thyrsis himself stresses the absence of the Nymphs among the mourners for Daphnis (lines 66—69), and the contrast between the kinship

of Daphnis with the Nymphs and their surprising absence might be due to some conflict unknown to us (but possibly not to ancient readers). Nevertheless, Theocritus's obscure presentation might have pointed to the inherent ambiguity of Daphnis between the remoteness of a mythical past (whose guardians are the Muses) and the "living" pastoral world, where poetic inspiration is under the control of the Nymphs. A further confirmation of the new function of the Nymphs and of the "part-time" role of the Muses in the bucolic mimes is to be found in the traditional function that the Muses display in connection with Horner in the farewell that closes the battle scene of Kastor and Lynceus, the most epic section of Theocritus's poems (Id. xxii.181-213). After this “uninventive combination of ready made elements" intended to show that "Homer has made any other course impossible" for a battle narrative,? Theocritus promises the Dioskouroi

the kleos with which other singers, along with Homer, had endowed the Iliadic heroes: "to you I too bear the soothing strains of the clear-voiced Muses such as they give me and my own store provides" (lines 221—223). Richard Hunter has brilliantly hypothesized that the Muses' own provisions are the style and model

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texts of the Lynceus narrative—that is, the inherited archaic poetic traditions— whereas Theocritus's own store provides the modern novelties of the previous Pollux-Amycus narrative. Therefore, the end of the poem "would reassert the external agon of the poem, that is, between Theocritus and inherited tradition, just as the opening sets out the structure of the internal agon, that is, between the two encomiastic narratives." Not only has the bucolic genre its own semimythical heroes, but besides shaping its own human characters and contexts, it also selects its own internal inspirers and almost banishes from the horizon of the "living" bucolic singers the Muses who had been the inspiring divinities of traditional hexametric poetry.5! Moreover, the other gods who do appear in the bucolic poems are carefully selected. Together with the Nymphs, Pan, Apollo Paian, and Priapos are the only gods whose presence is substantial and frequent in the bucolic mimes. The Thalysia of Id. vii, a rural feast for the agrarian goddess Deo/ Demeter, appears to counterbalance the Adonia, the urban feast of the urban mime Id. xv. Leaving aside the mysterious faults or personal responsibilities of Daphnis towards Aphrodite (an unknown extratextual fact), and the more or

less “heroic” character of his resistance to Aphrodite? it is particularly significant that Thyrsis' song in Id. i opposes Aphrodite to the "good" pastoral gods who are in favor of Daphnis, namely Pan, Hermes (Pan's father, in a widespread version of the myth), and Priapos, and lets Aphrodite cut quite a poor figure in comparison with Daphnis himself.‘ It is also striking that Hermes behaves as an ally, and even verbally evokes the same consoling phrase that Aphrodite had addressed to Sappho in a less dramatic situation of distress—as if Hermes were intended to replace, in the case of Daphnis, the Aphrodite who had come to be the σύμμαχος of Sappho.‘ Indeed, Sappho's Aphrodite had come “with a smile on her immortal face" (line 14), but Daphnis' Aphrodite comes

“inwardly delighted, and showing her anger”* (lines 95-96). We will never ascertain whether the shepherds of Theocritus's time always swore exclusively by Pan or, occasionally, by Paian, and avoided traditionally swearing by Olympian gods such as Zeus, Heracles, and so on (of course most

probably they did not). In any case, this is how Theocritean shepherds swear, apart from two quite easily understandable exceptions. In Id. iv.50 Battus swears by Zeus, but this character is elsewhere in the poem distinguished by an inclination to exaggeration and paratragic language emphatically counterposed

to the even temper of Corydon (who always swears by Pan and the Nymphs!).*? Analogously, in Id. v.74 Komatas's oath invoking the Nymphs—he is the future

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winner of the agon!—is juxtaposed, in a section of bantering repartee, to Lacon's invocation of Zeus (juxtaposed in the text, and perhaps deliberately counterposed by the author): we may compare how the parodical-mythological

Cyclops of Id. xi.29 swears by Zeus and how the bucolicized Cyclops of Id. vi.21 swears by Pan. Therefore, Theocritus appears to want the shepherds of his new bucolic world to swear “correctly” only by Pan and by Paian, most probably in order to emphasize their rural features, as part of his attempt to create some ef-

fect of “realism” through a credible and systematic rural context for his pastoral characters. Both the emphasis on the Nymphs, Pan, (Apollon) Paian, and Priapos, and

their “realistic” function, however, ought not to be regarded as a more or less bizarre invention of Theocritus. Arrian provides an especially explicit testimony of the worship by different professions of different selections of the traditional

gods. But we need not wait for the late Arrian. The same “metonymical” pantheon that we find in Theocritus is also assiduously exploited in the agrarian epigrams of Leonidas, a contemporary of Theocritus, and some “specialization” of Pan and the Nymphs to stress the rural versus urban setting appears to

have previously been exploited in Plato’s Phaidros and above all in the Dyskolos of Menander. In Plato's dialogue, the rural setting that Socrates chooses as the background for his talk with Phaidros is a place consecrated to Achelous and to the Nymphs (230b-«); Pan and the Nymphs, daughters of Achelous, are the gods under whose inspiration Socrates imagines himself speaking (238d, 241e, 263d); and Pan and the other entopioi gods are the addressees of Socrates' final

farewell and prayer for receiving wisdom and a wise measure of richness (279bC). As for the Dyskolos, this comedy is not set in a large town as is usual in New Comedy, but in an Attic country village." Hence the god who presents the prologue is Pan, and the door of a shrine of Pan and of the Nymphs has a central position both in the skéné and in the dramatic action.?! Therefore, Pan and the

Nymphs appear to be the most notable signals by which Menander stressed the unexpected rural setting of this play, aware as he was that "the more individual character a setting had, the more need to augment what could be shown in the theatre through the words of the text"?

I do not necessarily conclude that the specific precedents of either the Phaidros or of the Dyskolos directly influenced Theocritus (and Leonidas). I am merely suggesting that, above all, Menander's Dyskolos, the aim of which is more manifest (creating a nonurban background that was in contrast to the ex-

pectations of the genre of New Comedy), can help us to acknowledge the inten-

tional selection of gods that Theocritus exploited in his bucolic poems—a background whose "human" setting was quite different from the backgrounds

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that ancient readers could expect from the traditional system of literary genres, where hexametric poetry had usually dealt with mythological themes.

Another device that both the bourgeois New Comedy (or other "realistic" drama such as, most notably, the Sicilian mime) and Theocritus exploit to achieve an effect of "realism"—the "realism" of everyday life, which is common

to most of the bucolic mimes and to all the urban ones—consists of giving an important role to magical or superstitious practices.” Thus I turn to Id. vii.103-114, a passage that will turn out to be a striking

instance of the strategy of appropriation and adaptation through which Theocritus constructs the systematic "verisimilitude" of his bucolic world. The passage is the literary version of a still almost unnoticed magical prayer,"* the

threatening request for help addressed to a god: Ah, Pan, to whom has fallen the lovely plain of Homole, lay him unsummoned in my friend's dear arms, whether it be the pampered Philinus or another. And if you will, dear Pan, then never may Arcadian lads flog you with squills about the flanks and shoulders when they find scanty meat. But if you consent not so, then may you be bitten and with your nails scratch yourself from top to toe; may you sleep in nettles, and in midwinter find yourself on the mountains of the Hedonians, etc. Threatening prayers of this kind appear to have been a peculiar, though not

exclusive, feature of magical texts,” and in at least one of them, a lover threatens that the invoked daemons will be burned if they are not willing to attract his beloved into his arms. We may compare SupplineMag. I, 45, 15 D.-M., in particular 11-15: “if you drive to me Euphemia, . . . I will give to you Osiris Nophriöt

. ., and he draws cold water and will relieve your soul. If you do not fulfill for me what I tell you, Eönebyöth will burn you up. I adjure you, daemons.

. .” The

threatening prayers of the magical papyri are commonly thought to be a heritage of pharaonic Egypt, but at least in erotic contexts, this kind of prayer may have been as ancient as Anacreon, as fr. 127 Gentili

= PMG 445 attests: "you

[Erótes] are violent and wicked, and you do not know against whom you will

hurl your weapons.""5 The passage is too short to allow certainty about its real function, but the testimony of Himerius goes on: "perhaps too I would have uttered the threat made against the Loves by Anacreon: he once loved a handsome youth, and when he saw that the youth paid little attention to him he turned his

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lyre and threatened that if the Loves did not at once wound the youth, he would never again strike up a song in their praise." Anacreon’s apostrophe may have been a yoking threat, and not just simply a magical gesture, that is, intended to

achieve a pragmatic effect. At any rate, if we take into account Anacreontic 11 W., “a certain young man was selling a waxen image of Eros, so I approached him and said: ‘For how much do you want to sell to me this thing?’ . . . ‘give it here, give him to me for one drachma . . ’—Eros, now you behave, and consume me with love's fire; if you disobey, you will be the one melting in flames," and if we also remember the standard relationship between the Anacreontics

and Anacreon,”? we can assume that the author of Anacreontic 11 resumed Anacreon’s apostrophe to Eros and interpreted it as a real magical prayer, as Himerius probably did, in the light of the customs of his time. I believe that Theocritus’s passage too should be considered an instance of this tradition of threatening invocations addressed to gods, which either were magical or could be so interpreted. Moreover, Theocritus’s mention of the Erötes in lines 117ff. as the gods who have to wound Philinus with the arrows of love may be a revealing hint at the specific model of Anacreon, whose magical prayer had been intended to provoke the Erötes to wound his beloved boy with their arrows. I would even advance the hypothesis that the simultaneous presence in Theocritus not only of Pan but also of the Erötes is intended to be a sort of allusive adaptation of the original ancient lyrical model to the new pastoral world: the allusion would be marked by the Erötes, who are traditional or at any rate “nonprofessional” gods mentioned nowhere else by Theocritus’s shepherds; the adaptation is provided through the introduction of Pan, a “professional” pastoral god whom the shepherds believe they can control and threaten in magical terms. As a result, Simichidas’s magical prayer certainly contributes to the effect of everyday rural life that fits Simichidas’s pastoral environment. Most probably, however, it did not sound to the ancients like something borrowed from everyday life: between everyday life and Theocritus’s text, the ancient reader will have felt the palimpsest of Anacreon, and so also will have appreciated the way Theocritus appropriated the lyric precedent in the service of his rural “realism.” Inherited literary genres are always something like directed and metonymic models of the real world, that select some aspects of it (or of past literary worlds), and emphasize them as well as they exclude or de-emphasize others. I have tried to show how vital the dialectic between human (that is, living) subjects of poetry and mythological material was for the metonymic interpretation of the reality and of the literary traditions by which Theocritus wanted to char-

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acterize both his new bucolic and urban-mimic genres and his (hymnic-)encomiastic poems—not only in the choice of the protagonists of the song, but also in the construction of their environment. Indeed, I have suggested some instances of the careful poetic strategies through which Theocritus provided his bucolic genre with the effect of a “realistic,” credible human-rural environment.

If we also take into account the care with which Theocritus chose the protagonists of his mythological epyllia—half gods much more frequently than gods, and half gods who are regularly described as half men in feelings and environment, if not in deeds—Theocritus’s preference for human or at least nondivine protagonists and contexts appears to be a constant in his poetics. This thematic choice more than once allowed him to go beyond the inherited generic constraints qua fixed connections between specific themes and forms—and in several cases appears to me to be a much better interpretative key for several “generic” anomalies of Theocritus than just resorting to the abused ideas of ludic cerebralism and contamination of the genres.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

[4 5 2]

Lycophron's Alexandra: "Hindsight as Foresight Makes No Sense"? STEPHANIE

WEST

Most of the papers in this colloquium have a far wider range than mine, which

is centred on a single text no longer than an average tragedy, the sole surviving work of its scholarly and lively-minded author. In accordance with tradition, I suppose that author to have been the contemporary of Callimachus, who organized

the

texts

of comedy

for

the

Alexandrian

library

under

Ptolemy

Philadelphus and composed not only numerous tragedies (of which we have merely one fragment and twenty titles) but also a satyr play with a contemporary subject, his teacher Menedemus of Eretria. The traditional ascription of the Alexandra to Lycophron has been questioned, because of the problems raised by the poem's references to Roman matters (1226-1280 and probably 1446-1450), and a younger Lycophron, working early in the second century B.C.E., postulated by B. G. Niebuhr, enjoys the weighty support of two RE arti-

cles. However, it is no longer eccentric to accept the traditional attribution, and having discussed this problem at length elsewhere,’ I shall not repeat my arguments here. I shall not apologize for my limited horizons. The Alexandra seems to me unduly neglected; it is simply passed over in discussions to which it is unques-

tionably relevant or is cited as if it were just a rather inconveniently compiled mythological handbook. One reason for this neglect is, I believe, its generic elusiveness, the difficulty of assigning it to a recognized literary category or of determining the appropriate comparanda. Formally the poem is a tragic messenger's speech. Lycophron at the outset

creates the sense of a dramatic context, making it clear that what follows is a re153

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sponse to a request for information from a superior (obliquely identified as Priam at 19), while an apology for long-windedness (2f.) prepares us for unusual length. A servant, ordered by the king to keep watch over Cassandra—

here Alexandra (30)’—whose frenzy has led to her incarceration, reports her prophecy of the Trojan war and its aftermath. Apart from a brief prologue (130) and epilogue (1461-1474), in which the servant sets the scene and explains

his own role, the poem thus consists of a verbatim report, in accordance with Priam’s instructions (1469f.),* of Cassandra's vaticination? at the time when

Paris/Alexander set out from Troy for Sparta.

She devotes relatively little space (31-386) to the war itself and Troy's downfall, concentrating on what concerns her family and herself; her theme is

not heroic exploit but suffering and humiliation, culminating in her own experience, the horror of Ajax’s sacrilegious assault,$ in expiation for which the Greek host undergoes manifold suffering both on the journey home (3871089) and after their return (1090-1282). Her vision then extends to further

conflict between Asia and Europe, the Persian War, the victories of Alexander the Great, and the triumphs of her (not easily identifiable) kinsman by land and sea (1283-1450). With immense ingenuity Lycophron weaves into this framework episodes from other cycles of legend, basic to Greek cultural identity. This

relatively familiar material, rich in colorful and curious detail, is often given an unusual slant by the narrator’s non-Hellenic standpoint. But Cassandra’s hori-

zons extend to the Western Mediterranean, to embrace the foundation legends of Greek colonies and strange tales inspired by the attempt to accommodate

various native peoples within the Greek ethnographic framework.’ The narrative, covering more than a thousand years, is unified by the Aeschylean and Herodotean theme? of the rivalry between East and West—an extraordinarily grand conception, matched by Lycophron's elevated, somewhat Aeschylean, style. The problem of assigning the Alexandra to its proper generic pigeonhole is inextricably linked with uncertainty about the poem’s purpose. Lycophron’s oracular manner raises the expectation that he has something important to say; but when we have worked out most of the individual items, it is still tantaliz-

ingly difficult to make out what, taken together, they amount to. A certain desperation is indicated by Hopkinson’s candid comment: “It is tempting to see the whole monstrous enterprise as an elaborate joke." Cameron’s interpretation hardly seems any better: “Lycophron’s Alexandra is simply a vastly expanded riddle, surely meant to amuse rather than instruct—and if so, perhaps performed in extracts before a live audience, to test their ingenuity.” Since Cameron’s book must have engaged the attention of everyone who is

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interested in Hellenistic poetry, I must say that, greatly as I admire the work as a whole and, in particular, the skill with which he has expelled a herd of sacred

cows, I find this approach to the Alexandra quite unacceptable. The poem has a well-thought-out structure, and though the central part could certainly be cut, the work could not satisfactorily be performed as a series of extracts. Though

we may note a distancing or ironical effect in Cassandra's peculiar perspective, it is crucially important, and we have to take her seriously. There is nothing lighthearted about her description of Ajax’s brutal attempt to drag her away from Athena’s image, an offense of which the consequences were to be almost

unbelievably widespread and long-lasting (348-366),'! or about her prediction of the Locrian Maiden Tribute (1141-1173), the expiation imposed on Ajax's

people for a millennium.’ A selection of brain-twisting excerpts for sym-

posiastic entertainment would give a quite misleading impression. Equally, "the unremitting tenebrosities"'? of Lycophron's crossword puzzle style would make too severe a demand on an audience's concentration for successful recitation of

the work as a whole. Though he may have first "published" it by reading aloud to a select group!* those passages in which he took particular pride,'> the work

as a whole is surely designed for a reflective and erudite readership, not a listening audience.!* What in our initial perplexity we may be inclined to dismiss as self-indulgent obscurantism" will often reveal its sense on a second reading: “Es setzt zwar die Lósung viel Gelehrsamkeit voraus, doch ist sie nicht ganz so schwer, wie es scheint" well wrote Bethe.'? But for live performance, the Alexandra makes excessive demands on the audience's concentration (not to

mention the performer's stamina); the listener who is absorbed in working out the solution to conundrum A will not attend to the details of conundrum B and will thus rapidly lose the thread. Although we may often wonder how a fifth-

century audience managed to make sense of Pindar and Aeschylus, lyric performance was not just a matter of words, and the Athenian who failed to under-

stand what the Aeschylean chorus sang was hardly worse off than most of us are with opera sung in the original Czech or Russian. Lycophron would surely not

have elected to compose in the meter of tragic dialogue if he had envisaged a musical setting;'? moreover, it is hard to see how— notwithstanding an artiste's best efforts to achieve that "animated or impassioned recitation adapted for the subject" that Wordsworth prescribed for his own poetry—monotony could be

avoided in a live performance that could offer no countervailing attractions in the form of music or dance to compensate a listener who had abandoned the attempt to decode the text. "Few scholars now-a-days read Lykophron, and almost all who do claim a

reward of merit by writing something about him,’ tartly observed Gildersleeve

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in 1901.2° But it was not ever thus. Compare the splendid tribute paid to the Alexandra in an anonymous (and undateable) epigram from the Greek Anthology (AP 9. 191): “Not easily, being in my labyrinth of many turnings, will you find your way to the light. Such are the words which Phoebus inspired in Cassandra, Priam’s daughter, reported to the king by a messenger in crooked speech. Yet if Calliope loves you, take me in your hands; but if you know nothing of the Muses, in your hands you bear a burden.””! Virgil evidently read the poem with appreciation,?? and though Lycophron does not figure among the authors recommended to aspirant orators by Quintilian, Statius’s schoolmaster

father (Silv. along 5. 50.

apparently included Lycophron as well as Callimachus in his syllabus 5. 3. 156f), and Clement of Alexandria similarly mentions Lycophron, with Callimachus (the Aetia) and Euphorion, as a school author (Strom. 3). This difficult, allusive poetry did not lack readers in provincial towns;

from Roman Egypt we have papyri representing five separate copies.? The

poem evidently enjoyed a respectable standing even if it did not inspire imitation. Moving rather briskly to the Byzantine reading public, we should note that Eustathius refers to Lycophron more than to any other poet apart from Homer, on occasion quoting Lycophron without name, Eustathius's habit only with works that he knew very well.‘ The poem’s popularity in the Byzantine period is indicated by the proliferation of manuscripts; the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto has produced a list of nearly 150.75 It was regular reading in Byzantine schools, and, as is often the way with school texts, the opening is cited very frequently.?* Lycophron's stock stood very high in the sixteenth century. Nine editions of the Alexandra had been published by 1600.” That of Canter (Basel, 1566) included the archaic Latin rendering of J. J. Scaliger, an eerie neo-Latin masterpiece that demonstrates conclusively the appeal that the Alexandra held for that great scholar as a young man. The Alexandra was highly regarded among the

significantly named Pléiade, the erudite circle to which Ronsard belonged;** his own copy still exists and preserves an ingenious distich composed by Jean Dorat, anagrammatically honoring the poet as a new Terpander (Petros ho

Ronsardos = Sos ho Terpandros)—a tribute that gains in significance if we remember that, according to Tzetzes, Lycophron owed his fame not so much to his poetry as to his skill in devising anagrams that were flattering to the royal pair (Ptolemaios apo melitos, Arsinoe ion Heras).’? At the most easterly outpost of Renaissance humanism, Jan Kochanowski, the greatest poet of prepartition Poland, paid tribute to Lycophron in 1578 in his neoclassical tragedy The Dis-

missal of the Greek Envoys, at a festival celebrating the marriage of Jan Zamoyski, the vice-chancellor of Poland.” His Cassandra’s lengthy monologue

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(501—556) unmistakably echoes the Alexandra.*' Kochanowski was not a professional scholar, though he had enjoyed a splendid education; he divided his

energies between public service and the care of his estate. Thus classically educated readers were once much more sensitive to the strange fascination of this ironically enigmatic text in which the fruits of careful reading are displayed in a manner emphasizing the continuity between the legendary past and the poet's own day. The decline in the Alexandra’s reputation suggests some interesting questions about changing taste—the more interesting

because Callimachus’s stock has risen so dramatically over the past fifty years or so, and many of the qualities generally regarded as characteristically Callimachean are obviously present in good measure—some may feel to excess—in the Alexandra.» I have assembled this testimony to Lycophron’s earlier standing in order to anticipate any suggestion that the Alexandra is merely a freakish curiosity not meriting serious attention: A change set in at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the invention of the Lycophron Question, which turns on the poem’s Roman references. Cassandra’s prediction of the manifold tribulations awaiting the returning Greeks concludes with a lengthy passage on the future fame of Aeneas’s line that was settled in Italy (1226-1280). A poet who owed his position to Ptolemy Philadelphus had no business expressing such an unqualified encomium of the rising power of Rome—and indeed, in the first half of the third century, it might be thought to indicate authentic prescience. Attention is drawn to this problem in the scholia (on 1226)," but hardly anyone

seems to have bothered about it until it attracted of B. G. Niebuhr and, somewhat surprisingly, of James Fox. Fox diagnosed interpolation, for which ately following couplet is a very strong argument:

the the the "So

attention, independently, Whig politician Charles ineptness of the immedimany are the miseries to

be suffered by those who will destroy my fatherland” (1281-1282), Cassandra

sums up with uncharacteristic plainness. This prophecy would fit very well before her prediction of a glorious future for her kin in Italy but is absurd following it. The alternative solution is to postulate a later Lycophron.^* Some, notably

Momigliano, have argued that the problem is illusory;?? but this economical approach to the difficulty is, I think, impossible. A further passage is also affected. Cassandra's prediction culminates in a reference to a kinsman of hers, coming sometime after Alexander the Great, “a unique wrestler” who will triumph by land and sea (1446-1450). Although the general sense is clear, the interpretation of 1446 is problematic and depends on who we think is meant: some have thought it was the Romans collectively; Fabricius and Flamininus have their supporters; I favor a later candidate altogether. Such mystification is not charac-

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teristic of Lycophron; though his style can certainly be described as riddling, a

riddle should have only one satisfactory answer. There is just too much detail in this description to take it merely as an unspecific hope for the future; for the composer of these lines, the advent of this conquering hero had already happened. Our reading of the Alexandra cannot ignore the uncertainties about its his-

torical setting thus created, since the poem is permeated by a sense of historical development.’ As a literary form—that is, where there is no attempt to impose

on the public with what purports to be a genuine record of a prediction uttered long ago—post eventum prophecy can, as the great prophecies of the Aeneid demonstrate, most effectively combine a philosophy of history with the expression of hopes for the future, hopes that gain in persuasiveness by juxtaposition with what we know as historical fact.” Here we have the impression that the

Alexandra's extended message greeting the at a period of change; on whom Cassandra

oracle was intended to yield a political or an ideological reconciliation of East and West and providing reassurance but we are frustrated in our attempts to identify the figure has set her hopes.

Prophecy is peculiarly susceptible to updating (as Auden realized). Isaiah is

a familiar example of updating by simple accretion; the modern fundamentalist's approach is generally by reinterpretation. If the traits of Cassandra’s kins-

man, the “unique wrestler” who will at last bring peace (1446-1450) are infuriatingly vague, it after Lycophron eca's forecast of more truly than

is, I believe, because an interpolator working some generations wanted to create an effect of genuine prediction;** as with Senthe discovery of America (Med. 375ff.), the poet may speak he knows. Precision would have undermined credibility.

There are two awkward corollaries. First, interpolation, if it is admitted as a

probable hypothesis, may have been more extensive than is immediately apparent; even Lycophron’s warmest admirers would concede that the poem’s central section (387-1089) tends to drag, and perhaps further additions have been made to provide heroic origins for communities about whom Cassandra originally had nothing to say. Second, we should not assume that an interpolator can work only by simple addition, and the present ending to Cassandra's prophecy

may have entailed the omission of its original culmination. The treatment of Alexander's conquests is ludicrously skimpy (1439-1445); we should expect Cassandra/Alexandra to display more interest in the decisive role to be played by a second Alexander in the intercontinental feud that was initiated a millen-

nium earlier by her brother.’ But these points are not crucial for the questions that now concern us. Uncertainty about the poem’s historical context is compounded by the

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difficulty of settling its genre. We should not be legalistic in our approach to this question; genres are not ontologically fixed, nor should it be our goal to devise a library classification system buttressed at every point by literary theory. It is rather a matter of the conditions assumed, tacitly agreed, between poet and

public. Successful writing normally depends on creating in the reader or listener certain expectations and then fulfilling them not quite as anticipated. Any serious thought about literature requires us to relate individual works to similar texts,” and real uncertainty about a work's classification is an almost insupera-

ble obstacle to its interpretation.*! Often the occasion of performance or external evidence for a work's Sitz im Leben sets us on the right track, but with the Alexandra, this shortcut is not available. So what do style and content suggest as

the relevant comparanda? Formally the poem is a hypertrophic messenger’s speech; the sense of a dramatic context created at the start may be regarded as an important generic marker. The development of a tragic monologue as an independent literary

form might easily have been stimulated by what we should call concert performances of highlights from tragedy? and by the fashion for tragic rhéseis as symposiastic entertainment.” Still, a monologue that is as long as a tragedy

seems better suited to private reading than to live performance, where the very heavy demands on the performer's voice and stamina would make it particularly hard to reduce the danger of monotony. There is obviously something highly artificial about using a messenger's speech to report not action but some

1,400 lines of direct speech; the nearest precedent is the detailed account of the famous debate in Euripides’ Orestes (866-957, compare Men. Sicyonius 176271, Lucian JTr 33). Wilamowitz thought that the Alexandra should be associ-

ated rather with iambography, comparing the lines that Archilochus put in the

mouth of Charon the carpenter, expressing indifference to wealth and power (F 19). This hypothesis seems a

little perverse—the

impersonality of the

Alexandra sets it apart from the iambus as composed by Archilochus and Hipponax—but Wilamowitz goes on to say that the point hardly matters, since stylization has made the composition as a whole something quite peculiar.” Holzinger, whose commentary, which is now over a hundred years old, has not been superseded,* liked Schoell’s designation “epic monodrama," which he

thought brought out well the work’s twofold nature.* His terminology is unappealing, but his view of the Alexandra as a generic hybrid, a combination of the two loftiest genres, is interesting and deserves attention.” Certainly the Alexandra's affinities with tragedy, and with Aeschylus in particular, are of fundamental importance; we should miss much if we failed to recognize this pervasive intertextuality. The theme of hostility between East and

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West, presented from the Easterners’ standpoint, brings to mind the Persae. Cassandra’s centrality immediately recalls her role in the Agamemnon (1072— 1330), where she not merely offers a prediction of coming events but also reveals the unseen forces that determine the chain of crime and punishment

stretching on into the future.** The strength that she draws from her strange relationship to Apollo gives her an uncanny superiority to her captors and mas-

ters, the more remarkable when we bear in mind how seldom Attic tragedy presented non-Greeks in a sympathetic light.? Lycophron's style, too, manifestly owes much to Aeschylus, and its defects (above all bombast and apparent unintelligibility) are those for which Aeschylus was criticized in antiquity. His

extensive use of animal imagery is as characteristic of the Supplices and the Oresteia as it is of the language of prophecy.” We can find in tragedy some precedent for the Alexandra’s futuristic style, above all in the prophecies of Euripides’ dei ex machina?! But these prognostications are a very minor element, and the Alexandra's concentration of mantic utterance is remarkable, as is its millennial range.*?? Narrative cast in the form of prediction became a popular device with Hellenistic poets;? but Lycophron, by reason of his heroine's peculiar powers, achieves an extraordinarily effective un-

ion of form and content, to offer an interpretation of a millennium of history. The mantis not only views past, present, and future but also sees the reality underlying phenomena and the interconnection of events. There is a seriousness to Lycophron's sustained use of this form not easily paralleled from Greek po-

etry. We ought not to dismiss out of hand the possibility of influence from Near Eastern genres, which, as we see from the Old Testament, did not altogether match Greek literary categories. We should not assume that Hellenistic intel-

lectuals were entirely incurious about the older cultures on which Alexander's conquests had imposed Greek rule or that the process that recycled the story of

the wise Achiqar into the Life of Aesop operated only among the lower classes, at a subliterary level.’ It looks like something more than a poetic device when we consider some Near Eastern examples of the use of post eventum prophecy to provide an assurance of peace and prosperity after much suffering, that suffering often being presented in a positive light, as the necessary prelude to long-lasting happiness. The most obvious, as well as the most familiar, instance is Daniel, which offers a

similar survey of history within a visionary framework set in the distant past; though older material lies behind it, its composition practically dates itself to 167-163 (as Porphyry saw)—the point at which its prediction ceases to accord with the actual course of events (xi 40ff.). Others have noted affinities between

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the Alexandra and Daniel; this, I suggest, is the direction in which we should look for the genre that provided the Alexandra’s other parent. Apocalyptic prophecy subsequently proliferated among both Jews and Christians. The definition of “apocalypse” as a genre has been the subject of some hard thought by biblical specialists.*” Essentially, it seems to be agreed, a literary apocalypse consists of a disclosure of a hidden divine purpose in history (often with the added dimension of an imminent

crisis) within a narrative

framework. A historical survey is thus highly characteristic of the genre. The convention of the narrative frame seems very pertinent to the Alexandra. It might be thought that a figure as well-established in legend as was Cassandra could have been left to identify herself to the reader, and we ought to ask why Lycophron decided against presenting her more directly. Is it a sufficient explanation that interesting effects of irony are produced by the servant's perplexity at what he reports? Samples of Jewish literature have survived, while other literature in Aramaic has perished; it is easy to see as distinctively Jewish what was once com-

mon currency throughout the Levant. Amid the changes that followed the dissolution of the Persian Empire, there must have been widespread longing for

supernatural reassurance that everything was in accordance with a divine plan and that a better time would soon come. Of course, this type of vaticination was not called into life by Alexander's conquests; it can be shown to go back a long

way in Egypt and Mesopotamia.°® But in the cosmopolitan cities of the Hellenistic world, it was much more likely to come to the attention of educated Greeks than it had been previously. The early years of Ptolemaic rule saw the development of a literature written in, or translated into, Greek but evidently inspired by Egyptian nationalism, a trend embodied in the Life of Alexander, the Tale of Nectanebos’ Dream, and the Oracle of the Potter. The rather lowly social status of the readership envisaged may be inferred from the sadly subliterary style of these compositions. It is the Oracle of the Potter that concerns us here. We have the remains of three versions, none complete. Though these copies were made in the second and third centuries c.£., the composition unquestionably goes back to a period

not long after the foundation of Alexandria. There appears a nationalist reaction to a new situation in the prediction of destruction for "the city being established" (hé ktizomené polis)—never named, an alien imposition; for the writer, Egypt's true capital is Memphis.

The prophecy is presented within a narrative framework. The potter (an incarnation of the prophetic creator god Chnum) went to the Island of Helios

and started a fire in his kiln. For some reason, this act was regarded as sacrile-

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gious, and therefore his pots were pulled out and destroyed. The potter then fell into a mantic trance and prophesied the miseries that would come upon Egypt.

He was then brought before King Amenophis to defend himself, and his prediction was repeated. As a result, the king was greatly troubled and commanded that the prophecy should be recorded in a sacred book. The potter then died and was buried at Heliopolis, while the book was deposited in the sacred treasury and made freely accessible to all.

The prophecy itself foretells the coming of a bad king, who will rule in a newly founded city. A new god will be introduced. The city’s inhabitants are

sometimes called Typhonioi, sometimes Zonophoroi, “Wearers of the belt”; once they are specifically said to be Greeks. Chaos and disaster will follow—famine, murder, freak weather conditions, total collapse of law and custom, and inva-

sion. Then civil war will break out among the Greeks themselves. “And then the Agathos Daimon will abandon the city which is being founded, and will leave for god-bearing Memphis, and it shall be deserted, the city of foreigners which is to be founded among us. These things shall be at the consummation of evils, when foreigners shall fall like the leaves of the trees in Egypt. And the city of the Wearers of the belt shall be deserted like my oven, through the iniquities which they have done against Egypt, and the images of Egypt's gods which were transferred there shall return to Egypt, and the city on the coast shall be a place for fishermen to dry their nets because of the departure of the Agathos Daimon and Knephis to Memphis, so that men walking through it can say: ‘This was the nourisher of all, in which every race of men dwelt.” After all this, a king will come from the sun, supported by Isis, to rule over Egypt for fifty-five years, in-

augurating a time of righteousness, prosperity, and happiness. I find this a strangely haunting text. It has clear affinities with Old Testament prophecy but also contains so much that is distinctively Egyptian that its translation into Greek is extremely suggestive. Nationalist protest in Egypt had a long history—the country had actually succeeded in liberating itself for a time from the Persian yoke—and the Oracle of the Potter well illustrates the potential of prophetic literature as a vehicle of nationalist propaganda. The actual effectiveness of such material in fomenting unrest in England and Wales in early modern times is suggested by the energy with which successive governments attempted to suppress its circulation.*! It surfaces in Shakespeare's history plays, a famous reference to Merlin's prophecies by Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1, displaying a variety of zoological symbolism far surpassing Cassandra's oracular fauna and inspiring reflection on the immense adaptability of this animal imagery.? Although sensible people could see well enough

that such vaticinations were bogus, the implications of their circulation among

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the discontented could not be ignored. It would be surprising if this point was not as clearly appreciated in Ptolemaic Alexandria as it was in Tudor England.

Augustus, we may remember, though apparently not in general heavy-handed about literary censorship or oversensitive to uncontrollable subtexts, ordered the incineration of more than two thousand prophetic books (Suet. Aug. 31), a

measure that indicates that he and his advisers took such writing seriously.” Nisbet’s exposition of the affinities of Eclogue 4 with the Jewish missionary propaganda purveyed in the Sibylline Oracles demonstrates the imaginative appeal of a type of material generally dismissed as too obviously second-rate to

engage the attention of educated Greeks and Romans.™ But I should like to suggest that within the framework of the messenger’s speech, Lycophron has given literary elaboration and stylization to a form of composition developed from the visionary apocalyptic literature that flourished in the ancient Near East. Characteristically, such writing shows little concern to take the reader along with it and displays a striking looseness of freedom with imagery, which shifts

abruptly and disjointedly. This feature is sufficiently conspicuous in the Alexandra to have incurred much adverse criticism, notwithstanding the precedent afforded by the Aeschylean Cassandra’s prophetic style. Long-standing Indo-European tradition favored a degree of inaccessibility in certain types of poetry, as Calvert Watkins has magisterially illustrated,

above all in prophecy, where the presence of obstacles between the message and its recipient required the latter to exert himself in order to profit from the guidance offered, so that he would be more likely to value it at its true worth.‘ The obscurantism for which Lycophron is often criticized is thus an essential characteristic of this form of communication. Generic innovation has often resulted from the elevation of the subliterary;* ballads and science fiction novels are obvious examples from modern literature. The stylized mimes of Herondas and Theocritus had humble origins; bucolic poetry, the paraclausithyron, and the Greek romance appear to have

originated in forms of verbal art developed in environments and situations where reading was not easy. Modern discussions of orality/literacy tend to con-

centrate on illiteracy/reading skills, without taking into account the function of storytelling and song in relieving the tedium of jobs that engage the worker's

eyes or where light is too poor to read. You cannot simultaneously watch your goats and read, but you could sing or play your mouth organ. Storytelling has certainly relieved the tedium of textile production and repair well into this cen-

tury. Radio, not books, has taken over from folksong and folktale. The humbler antecedents of bucolic poetry and the novel are largely a matter of speculation; but we do not doubt their existence, and the subsequent success of these genres

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suggests that readers did not find them disconcertingly innovatory.

Generically, then, the Alexandra should be viewed as a hybrid,” exploiting within a framework derived from tragedy a visionary mode at home farther east and, insofar as it was accessible to Greek readers in Lycophron’s time, on the pe-

riphery of literature. The image of hybridization may suggest an outmoded attachment to Kroll's Kreuzung der Gattungen.” Like many other good ideas, this one has been overworked; some scholars who invoke the concept convey the impression that defiance of literary conventions previously as rigidly fixed as those of the icon painter was cultivated as an end in itself by the scholar-poets of Alexandria. Generalization about Hellenistic literary trends is not my pur-

pose. But if consideration of literary genre is meant to serve interpretation by assigning works to the families to which they appear most closely akin, it has to be allowed that some writing will appear to have equally close links with two (or indeed more) families. The Alexandra’s affinities with tragedy are beyond dispute; but a dramatic monologue did not represent a promising modification of tragedy before the development of closet drama, and overemphasis on the poem's dramatic antecedents may lead to the verdict that it was an experiment that should never have been attempted. The widespread feeling that there is something perverse about the Alexandra results, I suspect, from concentration

on its unsatisfactory relationship to the only parent thought to matter. The standards by which it should be assessed become much clearer if we allow that its points of resemblance to the prophetic and apocalyptic literature of the ancient Near East are not just chance coincidences. Of course, a prophetic element was quite at home in Greek tragedy (as in other kinds of poetry); but we must

look eastwards for the best analogies to such post eventum vaticination as a staple ingredient in an extended work of literature.?! If the family image is well suited to expressing the concept of genre, we might think exogamy a more suit-

able term than hybridization." The appropriateness of such a literary development as a contribution to the coexistence of the diverse communities united in Alexandria, in accordance with a cultural policy aimed at fusing native tradition with Greek, needs no underlining.” Close kinship with two families need not exclude a welcome for themes and

motifs from other genres. The culmination of Cassandra's prophecy is an encomium of a victorious leader (1446-1450). Though the individual so distinguished was no doubt imported after Lycophron's time,” this conclusion is unlikely to misrepresent the poet's intentions; Alexandra's vaticination was surely

designed to end in the reconciliation of East and West that was achieved by Alexander and the hope of its continuance through his successors (with particular

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reference to one among them), a theme offering abundant scope for ingenuity

in panegyric. But nothing in the text suggests ἃ celebratory occasion,’> and so much of the poem consists of a relentless inventorizing of misfortunes consequent on the lust of Paris and Ajax’* that encomium of a royal patron could be only a minor element in its composition, overshadowed by the varieties of suffering that engage our attention for so long beforehand. Nor of course are Lycophron's historiographic and ethnographic interests to be denied. His debt to Herodotus's opening chapters (1. 1—5) is clearly advertised (Alex. 1291-1301,

1309-1321,

1362-1365), his grandiose and artificial

style offering a piquant contrast to the historian's prosaic demythologization, and his account of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece (1412-1435) is rich in Herodotean reminiscence. Cassandra's role, as a warner destined to go un-

heeded, exemplifies a motif of great significance in Herodotus's work as one of the means by which (as Deborah Boedeker has reminded us) he focuses atten-

tion on underlying issues. At first sight, an extensive debt to Timaeus ( FGrHist 566) for Western mate-

rial might seem equally clear. Timaeus, whose history of Sicily and the Western

Mediterranean in general was written during his exile at Athens in the first quarter of the third century," is cited in the scholia on 615 (on a monument erected to Diomedes, F 53), 633 (on Boeotian settlement in the Balearic Isles,

F 66), 732 (on Diotimus' institution of the lampadephoria at Naples, F 98), 1050 (on the dream oracle of Podalirius), 1137 (on Daunian women's dress, F 55), and 1155 (on the Locrian Maiden tribute, F 146). However, Timaeus was

certainly not Lycophron's only source of information about the West. Lycus ( FGrHist 570), Lycophron's (adoptive?) father, is cited along with Timaeus in the scholion on 615, and we might guess that Lycophron drew on him elsewhere." The undeniable affinity between the fragments of Timaeus and the

Alexandra may reflect the use of a common source eclipsed by Timaeus's subsequent prestige. We may guess that, when the Alexandra was first published, contemporaries could identify the source(s) of his Western material with ease and

experienced satisfying effects of intertextuality denied to us. Disadvantaged as we are, we may still note the ease with which Western legend and ethnography are assimilated within Cassandra's prophecy. But again, these are elements of

minor importance for consideration of its generic affinities."? Lycophron, like Deborah Boedeker's Herodotus, mixes previously estab-

lished genres to produce a complex and distinctive new form, but, unlike Herodotus, he appears to have lacked obvious followers," and though of course we must allow for the accidents of survival,*! we seem to have before us a genre

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with only one member. Faced with the choice between attributing it to an autonomous author or attributing it to the conventions of a genre, we must surely

opt for the former. Yet in assessing the relative importance of the contributions to literary production of individual authors, generic categories, and social forces, we ought not to ignore the conditions imposed by subject matter drawn from the myths and legends central to our culture and enriched by a diverse

heritage of literary and artistic treatment. Much of the Alexandra's distinctive quality derives from its central figure, who is far more than a mouthpiece for a survey of history transparently disguised as prediction.

Lycophron’s theme was revived in a very different form by the East German novelist Christa Wolf, whose Kassandra (1983), the most successful of all her

books, became something of a cult work with feminists and environmentalists. This relatively brief narrative is supplemented by four lectures in which she gives an account of its genesis and of her method of work; in the GDR edition, these lectures are printed before the narrative, and it is natural to infer that this arrangement reflects the author’s intentions that they should guide our reading of her fiction.? We thus know that she believed that there was no precedent for a narrative of the Trojan war from Cassandra's point of view and indeed thought that only a woman writer would be attracted by such a project. Ironically, she includes many strange details that actually derive from Lycophron,

culled from the German translation of Robert Graves's Greek Myths, to which she is very extensively indebted.9 Cassandra's narrative takes the form of a monologue set within a framework provided by the author's visit to Mycenae;

we may reflect on the unstoppable imperialism of the modern novel, with its tendency to absorb imaginative literature of every sort. There is a striking contrast between the impersonality of Lycophron's use of Cassandra and the mod-

ern writer's adaptation of this legendary figure to project her own self-image, until 1989 very successfully. This is an interesting example of the use of antiquity as a vehicle for the Aesopian technique of veiled criticism practiced by

many authors who lived under regimes that took very seriously the view of the writer as an engineer of human souls. As we compare Lycophron's heroine with this twentieth-century reincarnation, we may be struck not only by the extraor-

dinary adaptability of the great figures of legend but also by their capacity to set their own agenda. In these two very different works, the figure of Cassandra herself is surely of more importance than generic conventions in conditioning

the reader's expectations and creating a sense of an ordered literary structure.

CHAPTER ng,

NINE

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Rituals in Ink: Horace on the Greek Lyric Tradition ALESSANDRO

BARCHIESI

If I were to suggest a simple explanation of why the problems of genre in Augustan poetry differ from those typical of Greek poetry, I would point to three main areas where I find a Roman peculiarity, at least in terms of intensity and investment. In so doing, I am not claiming that Hellenistic poetry did not have similar concerns, only that the following features became dominant in the Roman tradition:

Thematization and dramatization: The "folding" of genre, by which I mean that genre as a theme becomes the productive, and at the same time, a problematic condition of those same texts. One might even speak of the "theatralization of genre": in linguistic jargon, it is now more mentioned than simply used. 2. A sense of rift and loss: That is, a sense of breaking away from "moments of truth," and from origins. The idea of genre oscillates between the actual internalized matrix of the new work and a regressive vision of genre as it used to be, or should be. Politicization: Generic divisions and oppositions take on specific political and social values, for example, discussions of epic versus elegy in Roman poetry imply discussions of “what to do with the Principate in literature"; the limits of the bucolic genre involve the limits between private and political; small forms versus large forms; popular versus elitist ethos, and so on. l.

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I cannot formulate these sketchy theses without the embarrassing feeling that I should immediately qualify and revise them. Their general thrust is reminiscent of the generalizations about Hellenistic poetry that provoked Dover to show that all its “new” features were in fact pre-Hellenistic. In the same way, it could be shown that Greek poetry already employs each of these three points. More particularly, item (2) is dangerous if it leads to acritical assumptions about the guilt of being a latecomer; in fact, I would not claim that the only response to the rift idea is nostalgia and exclusion. Of course, Roman poets are able to foster a feeling of distance in order to create specific poetic and social effects, and not just naively to admit secondarity. However, I would like to retain my illusion that all three items together provide a reasonable description of how poetic genres work in the milieu of Augustan Rome. Moreover, the importance of item (3) seems to me to be unparalleled in Hellenistic poetry. '

I will refer to these three provisional generalizations in what follows. I have two specific aims in discussing the lyric Horace: the role of performance as a central issue in item (2); and the centrality of authors—that is, of impersonat-

ing authors—for the dynamics of this particular genre. The colloquium has confirmed my suspicion that performance and authorial voice would be central topics in its proceedings, and I hope that Horace can bring some contribution to this discussion. More than this, my own discussion is aligned with a working definition of genre sketched by Dirk Obbink in his introductory remarks at the colloquium. I rephrase: let us imagine genre as a conceptual, orienting device that suggests to an audience the sort of receptional conditions in which a given fictive discourse might have been delivered or produced. My discussion begins from this point and will progressively address the three preliminary generalizations.

The Problem of Personae The lyric genre exists for Horace in close symbiosis with images of authorship. Thus the title of this conference seems very fitting for an author who defines his production as a response to a canon of nine great authors (the lyrici vates of 1.1.35)? and then singles form. From this moment for the Roman poet and not easy in such a context

out two of them, who will even guarantee metrical on, “Aeolian” and “Lesbian” will be generic markers will imply two individuals: Alcaeus and Sappho. It is to disentangle formal patterns of continuity from the

problem of subjectivity and authority. In Greece, the tradition of lyric was constituted through repetition, reenactment, and reperformance. Its survival was tied to symposia: in the frame of the symposion, performing Sappho and Anacreon means “becoming” the

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authorial voice of Sappho and Anacreon.? It is no surprise that the first word of the first poem of the “Anacreontea” is “Anacreon,” but of course impersonation can become a foil for diversification. Thus Catullus, in poem 51, launches his appropriation of Sapphic lyric by almost, but not quite, becoming Sappho. This is also how the shield episode at 2.7.10 works: the poet has been reformed into a “shield-loser” by the choice of singing 2.7 in a sympotic frame (“welcome home, let’s drink and remember and forget”). Thus he not just imitates, but becomes Archilochus, Alcaeus, and Anacreon. The rare (in the Odes) diminutive

parmula perhaps indicates that the poet cannot shoulder a full regular shield, an aspis. Therefore, this episode can exist only in a poem like 2.7, and not in an epistle, or in satire. Horace incorporates similarity and distance: he will come out alive as a poet, but after Philippi he will not be a poet-soldier (contrast the bioi of Archilochus and Alcaeus, who are portrayed as having taken on a new shield to keep on fighting).‘ Horace accepts the challenge set by the nexus of lyric tradition and impersonation. Lyric texts have an influence that induces role-playing, not just aes-

thetic pleasure: the roles of authors can be accepted, or, on the other hand, redefined. At moments the poet can get intoxicated like Anacreon, can be proud like Pindar, negotiate patronage like Simonides, and then step back and assert control.’ Even gender problems will arise in this arena: feminization is an inherent danger or temptation in Sapphic influence, and Horace responds to the danger with the construction of a masculine artist in a woman's body: mascula Sappho (Ep. 1.19.28). In other words, within the general view that imitation is what creates literature, lyric posits a special problem: more than other genres, it

implies the imitation of individuals, not just texts. This approach to Horatian lyric in terms of impersonation leads directly

into my first generalization, the folding of genre, or the thematization of genre, as productive of new texts. Horace raises the construction and assertion of a lyric personality to the status of a significant recurring theme in his collection, and the problem of how to establish a personal voice that confronts the canonical voices of the Greek masters becomes not only a prerequisite but also a part of his poetic representation. Time-honored clichés can be reappraised in this context: Horace saying “Come to me Venus, leave your favorite places in Cyprus” is clearly reenacting a plurality of traditional lyric voices—Alcman,

Sappho, and Pindar—and yet making no explicit change to the tradition. Yet by the very fact of being uttered in Roman lyric verse, the invocation acquires a new status: this time Venus has a longer way to go, and by attending to this

prayer, she will bear witness to a successful translation across a wide gulf of culture, time, and idiom. With this approach, Horace develops a paradox that was

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already inherent in the tradition of lyric reperformance: by invoking Aphrodite with the words of, say, Alcman or Pindar, the speaker is both impersonating the author and distancing himself from the origo of the enunciation. The distance of place and time from that origo is compressed into the gaps created in the ut-

terance by the deictic markers “come here, leave your favorite Cyprus,’ but the paradox is now intensified and becomes something of a shock to the system.

Now “here” corresponds, unpredictably, to the Tiber and to Rome. The emphasis on displacement so typical of poems for the gods now also involves displace-

ment from Greece to Italy, and it involves, moreover, the making of a literary transference. This transference occurs as a “live” event, created by the individual

poem. This point about the function of authorial personae brings me to a second problem: performance versus textuality.

The Crisis of Performance If I begin this section by saying that Greek lyric is composed to be performed and that Horatian lyric is written for publication, I will commit myself to a dualistic image of the lyric tradition. Since, however, I am interested in the interplay of performance and textuality in the Horatian oeuvre, I will attempt to be more nuanced. For my present purposes, it will not do simply to say that

Horace, operating in a different historical context, supplants a performance culture with a new model of bookish lyric. Horatian lyric confronts us with two different perspectives: (1) lyric as the product of a transformation of performances into texts, and (2) lyric as stream-

lined by its intention to re-create or to project performance. The first perspective involves the dynamics of the tradition, from Greece to Roman reception;

the second concerns Horace's rewriting of the genre. The process of change "from performance to text" writes traces into Greek texts that in turn become models for Horace. The process of re-creation then begins from these very traces and works toward a poetics of "live" performance.’ This reconstructed idea of performance, in turn, is inseparable from its opposite, pure textuality.

There are two contrasting dynamics at work in this poetics: on the one hand, the permanent fascination of a song-and-performance culture, on the other, the influence of books of poetry as made or remade by the Alexandrians. In both, Horace mixes continuity and discontinuity. I will begin with the second point, which is perhaps the simpler: the use of the book as a model for lyric "perfor-

mance." That Horace acknowledges the book as a basic format of lyric has been thoroughly studied, but Krevans? is right to point out that Horace presupposes, yet also resists, the transformation that such an assumption entails. His collec-

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tion of carmina suggests a collective reading but also encourages a reading of every single poem as an autonomous utterance. It is significant that most books of Greek lyric are already a similar mix of autonomy and planning. Individual songs take on a new meaning from the Alexandrian arrangement, but they also resist the same restructuration. A complex two-way traffic is involved in this process: philologists select poems because of their programmatic potential, and poems receive a new programmatic potential through their positioning in a book.

It is not difficult to conjecture why the poem known for more than twenty centuries as “Sappho One” has been selected to introduce the Complete Works of Sappho, but of course it is also true that “Poikilothron’ athanat’ Aphrodita” is invested with a new meaning? precisely as a result of its inclusion as a first poem in a standard collection. This is a different situation from the one familiar to Roman elegiac and epigrammatic authors, who are looking back to Greek collections, which were planned and composed from the start to be read in book format. Our evidence on lyric books is of course very scanty, but in the hope to recover fragments of textuality in the Horatian reception of canonical lyric, some conjectures can be attempted.

First Poems in Books Of course, the evidence we have is very fragmentary, but it could be interesting to start from what is known about first poems in Hellenistic collections and to look for traces of those poems in the Horatian collection. I am thinking, for example, of Horace 1.1. An initial priamel is, of course, a widespread feature of poetic beginnings, but if we take the initial priamel of 1.1 and focus on its first element, which is, of all things,'? Olympic games and their glory, and if we combine this reference with the first line’s laudatory flavor''— Maecenas

atavis edite regibus—why should we not assume that Horace is referring here to Pindar?

It is not self-evident why “Olympian One” is “Olympian One,’ but it may be that the poem merited its first place in book one of the four books of epinikia because it begins with a priamel, the purpose of which is to put the Olympic games first, and then recounts the origins of these games.'? Poem one in book one by the first of lyric poets: this initial allusion would be consonant with Horatian strategies of reduction and self-protection, because after gesturing towards Pindar—the king of the lyric canon for the king of patrons, Maecenas— the collection falls back to Lesbian models, and it distances Pindar as a model too ambitious to handle. The end of 3.30 saturates the paradigm: the poem is the boldest Pindaric reworking in the tribiblos, and the final crown of Delphic

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laurel’? links the success of the lyric poet with the Pythian games—an allusion precisely to the book of Pythionikai that inspired the text’s initial movement

(exegi monumentum). At 3.30.15—16, lauro cinge volens / Melpomene comam (with Delphic laurel, oh Melpomene, graciously wreathe my hair) may be intended to recall, with the final position of "hair" and the loaded image of crowning, the close of the Alexandrian book-roll of Olympian Odes. Pindar Ol.

14.35, "has wreathed his hair with the radiant wings of victory" By the end of 1.1, Horace has shifted from a Pindaric gesture to an appropriation of Aeolic poetry. This gambit creates expectations about the role of Alcaeus in 1.2, the first (Aeolic) poem inside the collection after the preface of-

fered by 1.1. Poem 1.2, then, is an experimental one for a lyric bard: Horace laments a crisis in Roman society and religion, then mentions the failure of cho-

ral prayers, and finally examines alternative invocations to savior gods. The two

prominent gods in the list, Apollo and Hermes, are known to be the dedicatees of the two first poems in the first book of Alcaeus's collected songs (= frr. 307, 308 Voigt).'° Perhaps Horace is practicing to become a new Alcaeus after all. Later in the first book (1.10.9ff.) he will imitate extensively Alcaeus's "Hymn to Hermes,'* but in the meantime, he recalls Alcaeus One, although κατ᾽

ἀντίφρασιν. Alcaeus One is a successful invocation to Apollo and incorporates the joy of the epiphany of Apollo to answer, whereas Horace simply canvasses

hope in his coming (tandem venias precamur / nube candentis umeros amictus / augur Apollo, "Oh come at last, we pray, in a cloud come, prophetic Apollo, your radiant shoulders veiled," 1.2.30—32). The demoralization created by the portentous flooding of the Tiber (13-20) perhaps reverses the miraculous and joyous "rising in flood" of the river Cephisus, which forms the climax of the extant summary (307c V)," when Apollo comes for good to the land of divination and paians. A clearer example of Horace's Aeolic modeling is suggested by the first poem in the second collection, 4.1. It has already struck others that the initial address here to Venus, complete with military metaphors and the theme of rursus ("once again,” δηῦτε, a password of lyric ideology),'® requires the intertext of Sappho One. The model is first subverted (Horace tries to avoid, not to provoke, the epiphany), then delayed (Horace substitutes another person

as a candidate for Venusian intervention; the goddess never appears or speaks), and finally confirmed (by a surprise ending: Horace cannot get rid of Ligurinus and of erotic poetry after all). Of course, book IV as a whole is anticipated in this tormented and problematic revision of earlier erotic poetry. But my point is that the influence of Sappho here is not just the influence of a poetic voice; it

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is the influence of a specific poem, empowered by its textual dislocation. The text is now inseparable from its bookish label. “Sappho One” has become a source of programmatic effects: the ease of personal communication between poetess and goddess, the summing-up intonation of the dialogue (“again . . . once more .. . what do you want from me this time”), the programmatic value of the text’s military metaphors (σύμμαχος, “ally,” line 28),—all of this influences Horace through the positioning of this text as a programmatic poem, a frontispiece of classical love poetry. The poet oscillates between Sapphic impersonation and a sense of absence and surrogate: the unbelievably long sentence that begins by addressing the epiphanic goddess of Sappho One and that therefore suggests a live dialogue, ends up unpredictably, at lines 19-20, by addressing a statue of Venus—that is by definition a Roman replica, a cold Ersatz poised between presence and absence, a copy instead of a model.'? I would suggest, then, that this process I have been describing can be viewed from three angles: (1) the Hellenistic critics arrange the lyric texts in groups, books, and series of books with an eye on the potential of individual pieces for generic recognizability, artistic design, programmatic

emphasis,

authorial characterization, and more; (2) this very process of positioning and assembling creates and teaches new effects of artistic design;”° (3) Horace reacts

to this dynamic and perceives the whole tradition both as a final artifact (the “Works of the Canonical Lyric Authors”) and as a memory of lost voices, songs, and occasions.?! The study of how performance poetry trespasses into the poetic book has an interesting flip side: the study of how the Horatian collection projects and suggests performance. In the next section, I will examine the occasional nature of Horatian lyric. In general, it is important to note that Horace suggests performance both as a background and as a future expectation. His four-book opus ends by looking forward, self-reflexively, to reperformance (4.15.32 canemus); the poet's afterlife is imagined as an occasion for listening to dead Aeolic poets performing in the Underworld.”

Occasion and Time The semiotics of Horatian odes has been described by Heinze as a three-tiered fiction: "It is a fiction that the poet is facing an addressee. It is a fiction . . . that the poet wants to influence his addressee.? It is a fiction that the listener is able to reconstruct from the song the situation in which the song originates." But of course Heinze thought that the three fictions were highly motivated and productive, and not just frivolous play. In a more general way, Reitzenstein had al-

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ready crossed the gap between books and aural communication thirty years earlier:?° “We know that the Alexandrian poet was working for a bookish circulation, just like the modern poet; yet we should not forget that the poet always

counterfeits a performance, and his work becomes alive for us only insofar as we imagine it as performed.” There are, of course, other ways of complicating

the picture. A constructive discussion should take into account the more recent problems generated by the (post-Heinzian) evolution in the study of Greek lyric and its poetics. A few aporiai should be mentioned here, because they have

a bearing on our approaches to Horatian lyric:

l. Is genre shaped by performance, or by its loss? If one can assume that the original performance and its social context made genre superfluous, then genre, as Nagy has suggested, is a postmortem of performance. This is, however, a valid point, as many have seen, but only, as Nagy himself has clearly explained

in a recent paper, if we are contrasting original performance with late textual circulation. What if we focus instead on the idea of reperformance?*° We should beware that the idea of performance in itself can easily become

metaphysical and thus static, if we forget to keep an eye on social change. For our generation, television “performances” are a simple test case. In the early

days of this technology in Italy, in the 1950s, there were individual events of “television” to be contemplated in religious silence and dark living rooms; nowadays a TV set is more like a radio, always on, while the family negotiates its

daily life under varying conditions of attention, competing with other sources of light and interest. Yet from a distance, one is not prepared to admit that TV performances have changed over the lifespan of one generation, especially since some of its genres have achieved a considerable stability over time. 2. “Spontaneity” and “directness” are limited as concepts in interpreting archaic lyric. We cannot take early lyric poetics for granted when confronting Horace. Precisely because the interpretation of Greek lyric has always been controversial, we need to clarify how selective our own approach is and how different interpretive communities will have reacted differently to this issue.? 3. How did the written, bookish Alexandrian text encourage the remake of a performative culture? It would still have been possible in Classical times to view

the unfolding of the collection as a new kind of performance and to equate occasion with the position of a text in a book, playing on similarities and differences in these two sets of contexts.?® On the other hand, as we will see, the textual transmission of choral lyric, for example, encourages reflections on its original context, in spite of the complete loss, over time, of music and dance.

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4. Does Horace exploit “edges” and clashes between different aspects of the lyric genre to generate meaning, for example, “solo” lyric versus “choral” lyric? This is but a list of open-ended questions. They can, however, help us to return now to Heinze and to his conception of the threefold fictionality of Horatian poetics.

From a historicist point of view, as Mario Citroni has argued in a number of papers,” it is not really helpful in understanding how literary communication works to see the fictional role of addressee as what really counts, since such

a role can be saturated by anyone or anything, including Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a stock character, a personal friend of the poet, a slave, a lyre, or a ship. From a more formalist point of view, Heinze presupposes that the original context of performance is artificial but necessary to Horatian lyric, whereas it is natural and self-evident in early Greek poetry. Now, in the performative context of this volume, I could refer to Depew’s cogent argument that the development of hymn is a process whereby deictic markers function as signs both of presence and of absence, and of a continuum in which the markers glide progressively into a conventional and a connotative function. Let me make a similar, brief argument about one sympotic poem,

Anacreon, fragment 7 G.: The month of Poseidon has come, clouds are heavy with water, savage storms are rumbling heavily.

I do not have much to say about the first performance of this poem, but it is my impression that, unless it was regularly reperformed at the winter solstice, the reception of the text would have been shaped by the aesthetic pleasure created by a gap between its origo and the present occasion: even without any written

circulation, the meaning of the poem would be re-created by unmooring its enunciation from its original context. If we take one more step, we can visualize

a poet creating a song about a given calendrical occasion (“The day of Neptune has come, let’s celebrate”), while he foregrounds the future of the same poem as the loss of its compositional “occasion.” A radical opposition between writing and orality, and between Roman and Greek, is of very little heuristic utility

here.?! What is left to say in favor of Heinze's generalization? At least in one sense, I

still like his extreme formalism; it is a merit of Citroni to have shown that at-

tempts at compromise that followed Heinze's pronunciamiento were much

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worse than his original approach.? Extreme formalism is always a helpful approach because it helps to generalize (an indispensable function of criticism), and it is easily deconstructed when it becomes a nuisance.

In fact, Heinze's position can be recuperated through the idea of thematization, my principle (1) at the beginning of the chapter, or the folding of genre. Consider all the themes and situations that we all spontaneously associate with Horace: a sacrifice, a birthday," a drinking party, the homecoming of a friend, vintage wine, and so on. Not all of these are characteristic of Greek lyric models, for example birthdays or sacrifice; however, some, like symposia, are indeed typical. But what this material has in common is the idea of its occurrence in a particular moment of time. Consider sacrifice: once the blade strikes, there is no turning back—and more animals are sacrificed in Horace's oeuvre than in the text of any other ancient poet I can think of. In other words, Horace begins from a reception of Greek lyric where the quest for original occasion is a dominant feature, and then he folds the occasion into a thematic "inside" of his poetry. The folding internalizes a feature that had been visible on the surface. Then the thematic dominance of occasionality evolves into the practice of reading Horace: every reading is a reperformance, and the position of the text in a book is a surrogate occasion. Feasts for the gods, so often mentioned or implied in individual poems, are a case in point: although they represent unique events, they can and should be regularly reperformed, as the individual poems do in fact anticipate their own performance.

With profound insight, Horace first promotes the use of occasion as a marker of lyric to a generic convention, and then he shifts it from a convention to a theme. Being in time, the times of life, the passing of time, the unique nature of moments, and the caducity of moments will become, as the collection unfolds, the main preoccupations of the poet.** The convention that enables the poem to participate in the lyric tradition is now part of an existential problem. Conversely, the repetition of themes like caducity and the moments of private

life recuperates performance at the level of readerly reception. Clearly, from this angle, the importance of individual addressees is lessened, hence the justified protest of critics preoccupied with social context. But the reception of Greek lyric is an anticipation of the kind of relationship that Horace is projecting: his lyric forestalls the process by which important people

of the past become dependant on literature for their long-distance public image. This is, after all, what time had done to Polycrates in Ibycus and to Hieron in Pindar.

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Public Poetry: The Moment of Truth My final discussion, which is about choral voices, develops an idea that has appeared throughout this paper: the impulse to a new poetics of performance comes to Horace through Alexandrian books. Here we notice an intriguing difference in textual transmission. As a reader of Sappho and Alcaeus, Horace would probably have encountered poems catalogued according to their incipit. His own

practice was

similar. Horace

favors initial mottoes, and his own

incipits are flags for their poems; he would certainly have preferred his last lyric poem to be quoted as “Phoebus volentem proelia me loqui” than as “4.15.” As a reader of Pindar and Simonides, however, Horace could not fail to notice that epinician songs were grouped by Alexandrian editors according to

their destination—whether by athletic speciality or by games (“For Boxers” or "Nemean")—whereas paians were regularly prefaced by a heading mentioning not just the location of the first performance but also the names of the performers or committenti.

In other words, the editorial praxis of the Alexandrians would have encouraged readers to think that some categories of poems comprise not only poems but also records of long-lost communal

occasions. (I deliberately skirt the

difficult question of how the early Greeks themselves would have differentiated the so-called monodic from the so-called choral.)

Now the books of Horation Odes are structured around a progression from address to individuals to more communal situations. As we have seen, the men-

tion of Olympic games in Carm. 1.1 evokes Pindar, the king of poets, for Maecenas, the king of patrons, but the whole model of praise poetry will be reformulated in this text. This new lyric poet is (Callimachus-wise) separated and insulated from his audience through the same devices that had once worked to integrate the proud Pindaric bard into occasion and community: The ivy crowns which reward the brows of the learned link me with the gods above, and the cool groves where agile nymphs dance with Satyrs distinguish me from the crowd . . . (1.1.29-32)

Now crowns and dancers enact separation from, not integration into, society; reeds and barbitons are used to create a music that will be inscribed into a canon of published masterpieces (inseres) but that will never be brought to the

ears of a public. As we saw, Sappho and Alcaeus still sing to a full house, but it is the simulacrum of an audience. Yet as Horace's collection unfolds, references to

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choral utterances and performances increase; as is well-known, the shift is connected to a growing presence of Augustus and of praise poetry in the poetics of

Horace. This evolution provides another example of my principle (3), the politicization of genre. The four books of odes end with a promise of a collective song accompanied by tibiae, a self-definition that could have been used by Pindar and that is mirrored in the collective celebration for Venus in 4.1.23-24 (those who believe that the end of 4.15 basically means “we shall rehearse

Vergil’s carmen Yet terance

epic verse” should think harder about the mixture—remixto—here of and Lydian flute).°* a sense of fracture is still present here: Horace reports as a collective utthe basic (trochaic) slogan o sol pulcher, o laudande (Oh glorious sun,

oh worthy to be praised, 4.2.46—47), along with the prefascist longas, utinam, dux bone ferias / praestes Hesperiae (Bring, oh good prince, long holidays to It-

aly, 4.5.37-38). He begins another poem as a master of ceremonies for the epinician homecoming of Augustus, but at mid-poem he shifts to a monodic request for wine and wreaths and a dinner for two (3.14). Only at 4.6 does he tell us that he has become a choral poet. The "occasion" has finally come true! This extraordinary moment deserves to be the focus of my final section, and I now turn to the Carmen Saeculare and to 4.6, and in particular to how these two poems are both united and separated. Of course, 4.6 is a very self-conscious poem. The only lyric poem in which

Horace names himself, 4.6 ends by reporting as a future event the voice of a choreut looking back to her participation in the Carmen Saeculare (hereafter CS).** Horace is a poeta by the gift of Apollo, says the central section of 4.6; he is now a vates, a seer, because he has been a chorodidaskalos, a chorus-master, says the final section of the same poem. The way in which Horace comes to this rev-

elation is extraordinary: the first section of 4.6 invokes Apollo as a savior of the Trojan origin of Rome: no Apollo, no Trojan Rome. That is, by analogy, we can infer also this: no Caesar, no Horace. What I find striking here is that the Greek

destruction of Troy has annihilated not just a town but also a town of music and dance (4.6.13-16): the strong Graecism choreis" suggests that a possible legacy of choral celebrations existed and was almost wiped out, until, in the last

part of 4.6, we discover that choral song has resurfaced in Rome as a celebration of survival and resilience—the Carmen Saeculare: from a treacherous festival for Pallas ( male feriatos) to a beneficent Apolline celebration. My main point, however, is that the first part of 4.6 features an imitation of one of the most celebrated Pindaric paians, Paian VI. This is one of the most extensive imitations of Pindar in Horace, and it is uncommon to find traces of

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Pindar’s religious poetry in Augustan Rome. Of course, the survival of poems in book form was not problematic in this period, and paianic performances still occurred, even though the genre was neither vital nor prestigious, in the first century B.c.E.’® Moreover, Pindar’s religious poetry was widely read, as Oxyrhynchus has shown, alongside the four books of epinicians, which we continue to this day to associate with the very name “Pindar.” It gives me pause, however, to consider that paianic poetry is found spe-

cifically in a poem that is both for Apollo and for the CS and that is about Horace as a poeta and as a vates. As we have just seen, the poem has a problematic link with choral song: 4.6 authenticates the CS as the work of Horace—the poet who has no name in the text of the CS, although his name is now part of a monumentum, the official inscription of which is “carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus.” In addition, 4.6 authenticates the CS as choral poetry, but it does not authenticate 4.6 as choral poetry. Indeed, the move of introducing a

personal utterance by a speaker who is looking back to a different occasion would be hard to account for in the tradition of choral poetry. Suffice it to say

that 4.6 and the CS are companion pieces but also that their link is a source both of difference and of generic contrast. This is where Horace’s reference to Pindar’s sixth Paian becomes important: the CS takes from Paian VI a very important formulation of its occasional nature: tempore sacro (in this holy time) at line 4 mirrors ev ζαθέῳ pe δέξαι

χρόνῳ at Paian. 6.5 and has a parallel function in the song’s rhetoric of establishing occasion and function. More generally, if I may be slightly dogmatic, the CS is a paian. This simple truth has long been occluded by different scholarly

agendas. Pasquali, who took the issue of Greek models seriously, with a vague nod towards epinician poetry. But the discussion has merized by the spectacular opposition of Mommsen and Fraenkel, instructive querelle. In short, Mommsen did not like the carmen and it as part of a complex program of ritual and celebration. Fraenkel

was happy been messtill a very interpreted did like the

carmen because it was totally independent from an occasion. For Mommsen,

Horace was a great poet—for a Roman—but Mommsen knew that the carmen could have been better, and he even suggested how to make it better according to Romantic taste. For Fraenkel, the CS is a masterpiece because Horace was

providentially free from external pressures: it is vintage lyric in an uncommon setting. In other words, this text is good if it is just poetry; it is bad if it is public poetry. There is thus an unspoken assumption shared by both Mommsen and Fraenkel: Greek lyric is good because it is rooted in its sunlit and merry communal setting; Roman lyric is good only when it is not dependent on artificial,

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boring ceremonies. Let me try to fit these two giants into a suitably oldfashioned structural grid:

Mommsen Fraenkel

Public Orientation

Literary Merit

strong weak

weak strong

A way out of this impasse is indicated by Feeney in his recent book (1998) on religion and Roman poetry. Feeney takes the Ludi as a whole and considers them a worthy object of study in terms of a semiotics of culture. As a result, the CS becomes a text that interacts with a broader complex of signs. Following Feeney's example, I reiterate my suggestion that the CS is a paian. It is relatively simple to demonstrate why this is so. The standard definition of the genre in antiquity—a song to Apollo and Artemis, on behalf of a community, either to cure a state of crisis and/or to celebrate their help—is relevant to the whole structure of the CS. Its simple initial invocation to Apollo and Diana matches the incipits, which were recognized as typical in Alexandrian editions (colendi

semper et culti, “always to be worshipped, always worshipped,” 1-2, spans both Greek poetry and Roman cult). The subdivision into two choral groups, male and female, is not characteristic of paians,? but once you accept a basic similarity, other contacts spring to mind. Tempore sacro, as we have seen, matches Pindar's ἐν ζαθέῳ χρόνῳ: now, for once in a lifetime, the time is right for a com-

munal song. This interpretation thus provides an example of my principle (2), a sense of rift. Pindar’s definition of the paianic genre, “the seasonal songs of Paian in honor of the children of gold-distaffed Leto” (fr. 128c, 1-2 S.-M.), foregrounds the regular and frequent use of poetry in celebrations. We may contrast this with the uniqueness of song for the Roman Ludi. Horace plays with the similarity and the difference between Apollo and Sol, with puzzling effects. A famous Pindaric paian (IX), however, had already shown the same kind of cultural syllepsis: the poem starts with a bold address to the sunbeam, after the crisis initiated by a solar eclipse, and then moves on to

a ritual invocation to Phoibos. There is a clear but unspoken link between the two sections, since in Pindar’s time, Helios and Apollo are even closer to each other than their Roman counterparts will be. The solar atmosphere of the third Horatian stanza is in implicit contrast to the hidden “half” of the official ritual, the nighttime sacrifice,* but paians are by definition tied to daytime celebra-

tions of a luminous god, Phoibos; the reference to a Greek poetic genre supports the asymmetric position of the Horatian song in the celebration.*!

Rituals in Ink: Horace on the Greek Lyric Tradition

The

CS, however, commemorates

only briefly, on the nocturnal

chthonic side of the feast, a sacrifice that few, if any, Roman magistrates ever held before: for Eileithuia and the Moirai. Yet Pindar had explained these divinities fit into the birth of Apollo and Artemis: “they were born the shining daylight, like a body of sunshine” with the support of Eileithuia

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and

had how into and

Lachesis (Patan XII 14-17): lucidum caeli decus.

When all is said and done, the poem is still an outrageous innovation: it is ironic to recall that the Sibyl had requested—in Greek!—Latinoi paianes to be sung, as though doing this were as simple and easy as immolating some more sheep. The paianic tradition, however, had its share of experiments and literary self-consciousness. I am impressed by the reading of the fourth-century poet Philodamos of Scarpheia recently offered by Lutz Káppel, who argues that this paian thematizes its own generic dynamics. Thus, a main theme of this late paian is how to cope with the tradition and yet to be a paian for Dionysos, and not for Apollo. (This theme exemplifies my first principle, the folding of genre.) And of course, Horace is writing in Sapphics, an important choice, and an au-

thor's signature— the only one possible in this context, connecting as it does the CS with poems such as 4.6. The choice is also a self-conscious literary statement: Horace is using here the meter that he himself had domesticated and reformed.*? The choral Sapphics of the CS imply a dynamic transference from poets like Alcaeus and the mascula Sappho. Again, generic reform here has a political implication: the issue of Hellenization is not just a matter of poetics, it is also a central theme of the Ludi (my principle (3), politicization). Augustus is testing the limits of Hellenization in Roman culture, and the Ludi are a revolutionary step forward in the process of Roman Hellenization, after a whole history of power struggle and aristo-

cratic competition. One of the main innovations of the festival is, of course, the centrality of Apollo and Diana," set, as it is, against the traditional Capitoline gods: the generic choice of a Latin paian is not just a poetic experiment but also a response to the whole dynamics of religious politics. The main paradox of the CS as a text of Roman literature, then, is that one cannot have a genre "just once, while the main challenge of the Ludi as a programmatic ritual is that they are "once in a lifetime" (quos aetas aspicit una semel, "to be seen just once in a generation,’ is Ovid's Latin for Saeculares, Trist. 2.26). The relationship between

text and genre—where the text re-creates for just one time its generic matrix— is parallel to the relationship between ritual and religious tradition—where the ritual has to happen just once, thus enhancing uniqueness rather than routine and repetition. Like it or not, there is some interaction of text and occasion

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here: interaction between performance and society is not the privilege of Greek literature, except that Horace makes capital out of his exclusion from the felicitous routine of Greek paians and regular festivals.“ In other words, the points I have been listing in order to argue that the CS is generically recognizable as

paianic performance are also functional links with the Augustan program of the festival. The more we move toward formal issues of genre and literary program,

the closer we are to cultural and social context: this context is not simply mirrored by the text; the text enacts and problematizes its social and ritual setting. This politics of genre brings me back to the tantalizing interplay between the CS and 4.6, as well as to the role and authority of the author in Horatian

lyric. I will also recall at this point my three principles: folding, rift, and politicization. As I suggested earlier, the influence of Pindar’s Paean VI acts as a

link, but also as a telling difference. Horace’s allusions to this model have a negative implication as well. In fifth-century B.c.e. Greece, the paian was a tradi-

tion of communal song that famously combined authorial voice and choral utterance. Reading Paian VI means accepting a flexible compromise* between the

chorus and the authority of the author: the self-representation of aoidimos Pieridon prophatan is a teasing example of this process. (Even Lefkowitz has accepted that the voice of the Paians represents the chorus in performance, but

can we resist thinking of the author when reading the sentence “prophet of the Muses, famous in / for songs” halfway into the Complete Works of Pindar? Imagine you are a Roman reading Paian VII b: the idea of a public performance by a chorus uttering a sentence like “I am riding my chariot outside Homer's beaten

track” would be enough to show that, as Horace famously put it, it is suicide to imitate Pindar.) Whatever “prophet of the Muses” ultimately means, Horace had moved from similar expressions to become, in the Roman odes, a Musarum

sacerdos addressing the community of Roman youths. Ironically, to become the author of the CS, he has to renounce this legacy. The voice of the CS is self-consciously more exclusively choral than the Pindaric original. But no Roman cho-

ral poet could have spoken with the complex voice of Paian VIIb, which is the closest extant model of Callimachus’s Aitia prologue. By bringing back choral lyric in such a different setting, Horace is testing the limits* of a poet's authority in Augustan Rome.

CHAPTER

Pai

TEN

CJ

The Dialectics of Genre: Some Aspects of Secondary Literature and Genre in Antiquity INEKE

SLUITER

Products of ancient Greek literature are characterized to a high degree by their self-positioning vis-a-vis predecessors and contemporaries, and by their deep consciousness of forming part of a tradition, whatever their authors’ views on their relation to that tradition. These elements are all-pervasive, but mostly un-

dercover, in the familiar literary strategies of imitation and emulation. In this paper, I will deal with literature that is explicit about its second-order status, its

direct relation with and dependence on an earlier text or author: those works of ancient scholarship whose explicit purpose is to elucidate a text or an oeuvre.! This class of scholarly work includes lexica, paraphrases, the so-called “zepiliterature” (“on” specific topics in ancient authors), ἐπιμερισ μοί (exhaustive, word-for-word discussions), scholia, ζητήματα / ἀπορήματα / προβλήματαliterature with or without léseis (that is, the identification of critical problems in ancient texts, sometimes with “solutions”), ÁpitomaÉ, and commentaries

(conventionally distinguished by the explicit presence of IÖmmata sections of the source-text that are then being explained)? Note that some literary (for example, poetic) work, while laying claim to independent literary status, can

often be construed as a (critical) commentary on a literary example that functions as a “subtext.” By contrast, although their titles seem to claim no more than secondary status for the works they designate, some commentaries

are the vehicles of independent scholarly thought, so that the choice of genre is

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at least in part a rhetorical device, both a topical expression of modesty and of the less modest claim that their views are backed up by the full weight of the tradition. In the following, I will mainly concentrate on commentaries, and within that group especially on those that do not focus primarily on providing elementary help with a text that is mainly studied qua poetry or exemplary language (for example, scholia on Homer and the tragedians; lexica), but that rather engage the didactic content of the source-text (for example, Galen’s commentaries on Hippocrates, the commentators of Aristotle and Plato, the technical commentaries on Aratus). It is in this group that questions of genre as discourse strategy are most urgent. Doctors, philosophers, astronomers, and other ancient intellectuals were committed to advancing their disciplines. If they chose to present their often original work under the guise of a “commentary,” it

is well worth asking why. Commentaries are an interesting case study on genre in that they both instantiate a genre in their own right and contain some of the earliest reflections on genre in Western European literature, both of the texts commented on, and their own. I will explore both these aspects. Commentaries are especially abundant in the time of the Roman Empire. It is less well-known how much evidence we have for commentary activities in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Therefore, I will give a brief survey of commentary literature from

the fifth to first centuries B.c.E. in the first section of my paper. In the second section, I will argue that the genre of "the commentary" and the persona of "the commentator" emerge as a function of four areas of tension. This will comprise a modern construction of the parameters of the genre. The third section deals with the efforts of ancient commentators to classify their source-texts and with the question whether these classifications are based on generic considerations. Thus this section looks at the use of the concept of genre by the ancient commentators themselves. The fourth and fifth sections deal with ancient ideas on

the genre of the commentary: in the fourth section, I examine the question of whether "secondary literature" itself was ever recognized as a separate genre in ancient classifications of genre (eidographia); in the fifth section, the question is whether the commentators themselves ever tried formally to define and subclassify the genre of their own work in their commentaries. It will turn out that the commentators are aware of the concept of genre and use it in the explanation of their source-texts. As for the "genre" of the

commentators' own work, it is perfectly possible for the modern student to define the elements that are constitutive of it, but it hardly plays a role in an-

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cient classifications of genre. Moreover, although the ancient commentators are certainly engaged in a constant effort of self-positioning, the distinctions they draw in order to do so are not primarily conceived in terms of “genre.”

Early Commentaries Greek commentary literature originates with the exégétai of sacred texts. There must have been a long oral tradition of interpreting divine signs, meteorological phenomena, and possibly even oracles before the focus became purely textual (van Bekkum et al. 1997:163f.). Once “tradition” had been captured in writing, its preservation and transmission became increasingly embedded in the creation of a secondary literature (from the fourth century B.c.E.). Exegesis was also called for in the context of poetry and philosophy. Homer and Hesiod

provoked reactions on the part of the Ionian philosophers and the sophists, but Diogenes Laertius (9.15; compare 6.19) claims that the first actual exégésis was by Antisthenes, and that its subject was Heraclitus. It is questionable whether this refers to a full-blown commentary. This survey will be restricted to what is known of commentaries whose interest is not primarily literary from the fourth to the first centuries 8.c.£., commentaries on philosophical, medical, and astronomical texts: Xenocrates and Speusippus recorded ideas about the interpretation of Plato (it is doubtful whether these constituted “commentaries”), Heracleides Ponticus and Crantor commented on—once again—Heraclitus, as did Cleanthes and Sphaerus (D.L.

9.15). Proclus claims that Crantor was also the first exégétés of Plato but does not expatiate on the form that this exegetical activity took (in Pl. Tim. 1 75.30). There are third-century papyrus fragments that apparently contain a commentary on Plato's Phaedo (Barnes et al. 1991:5).> Theophrastus and Eudemus followed up on the initiative taken by the Platonists, although it is not clear

whether they wrote exegetical commentaries or just reacted to previous scholarship in independent writings. Posidonius may or, more likely, may not have written a commentary on the Timaeus.‘ Potamo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Augustus, composed a commentary on the Republic. Our earliest extant Plato-commentary postdates the period described here: it is the Anonymous in Theaetetum, probably dating from the late first century B.c.E.? Later examples of secondary literature on Plato include monographs on particular topics (“peri-literature”), concordances, and lexica. Secondary literature on Aristotle postdates the period described here.* Turning to Epicurus, we know that in Philodemus's library there were copies of his work with variants and critical tools. Philonides of Laodicea (second

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century B.c.E.) collected Epicurus’s work (vita Philon. PHerc. 1044, fr. 66.6ff.)

and maybe used an Athenian archetype that had been kept in the Garden after Epicurus’s death (Puglia 1993:51f.). Philonides also wrote a commentary on the mathematical work of his teacher Eudemus, a commentary on book 6 of Epicurus’s De rerum natura, and a work “on the commentary of Artemon.” The last title is interesting, because it is an early instance of a study provoked by secondary literature, rather than immediately by the primary sources. Philonides’s commentary on book 6 of De rerum natura may also have been a “commentary on a commentary" by Eudemus. Alternatively, it may have been a report on lectures about Epicurus (Puglia 1988:53). Artemo was the author of a commen-

tary on 33 of the 37 books of the De rerum natura (maybe supplemented by Philonides). Philological-philosophical work on Epicurus also included monographs and summaries of the master’s works to facilitate their study (Puglia 1988:55). Zeno of Sidon (ca. 150-175), a slightly older contemporary of Demetrius Lacon, revised the transmitted texts and pronounced verdicts on

questions of authenticity.’ Demetrius Lacon writes on textual and exegetical problems in Epicurus (PHerc. 1012), ca. second/first century B.c.E.* His work follows the aporiai/luseis model. It is not a running commentary but rather a collection of short essays of an exegetical and philological nature on specific points and problems in Epicurus’s doctrine (Puglia 1988:81). Like the Alexandrian philologists (notably Aristophanes of Byzantium), Demetrius Lacon shows an interest in lexicographical problems in Hippocrates (Puglia 1988:79). This is an indication that, broadly speaking, we are dealing with one unique “intellectual network" from the later third century B.c.E. onwards: philology is available as a paradigmatic method, a responsible way of looking at texts, and (philosophical/technical) commentators avail themselves

of this tool,’ whereas professional philologists do not restrict their attention to poetic texts but extend it to, for example, Hippocratic studies. The texts that were of interest to this "Republic of Letters" are far more wide-ranging than our more narrow conception of "literature" would lead us to assume. However,

among the more pur-sang philologists, interest in prose texts was generally limited. The historians were studied to some extent; Callimachus worked on

Democritus; Hippocrates was studied for interesting phenomena of dialect; and the Suda reports that Asclepiades wrote emendations of philosophical texts. But we also hear that Aristophanes of Byzantium criticized Epicurus's use of language (D.L. 10.13) and that the grammarian Diodotus wrote a commentary on Heraclitus claiming that his work is not about nature but about the constitution of the state (politeia), with phusis just serving as an illustration (D.L. 9.15). As pointed out before, grammarians—and illustrious ones at that—

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wrote lexica on Hippocrates (in fact, according to Erotianus, Xenocritus of Kos was the first to do so at all). In the third section below, we will see that

Aristophanes also worked on Plato. Hippocratic writings provoked secondary literature at least from Bacchius (end of the third century B.c.E.), and perhaps even from Herophilus

(two

generations earlier) onwards. Hippocratic studies consisted mainly of glossography, exegesis, and hints for practical therapy based on Hippocratic principles."

A last group of commentaries deals with astronomical work: Aratus's didactic poem, a poetic adaptation of Eudemus's prose work on astronomy, was

commented on in the second century B.c.e. by Attalus and Hipparchus, among others. All of this illustrates what Geffcken has called the "KommentarAtmospháre" in the Alexandrian era (1932:408). And in fact, we read that when

the art of grammar was introduced in Rome, so was the genre of the commentary (Suet. Gramm. 2). In Alexandria, we find the roots of the Western "Great

Texts" approach to education: the (textual/exegetical) study of great predecessors, both in literature and in any other field.

Ancient Commentaries: The Dialectics of Genre If one constructs a modern picture of the genre of ancient commentaries, four sets of oppositions stand out throughout antiquity. (1) There are two funda-

mental assumptions about the source-text, namely (a) that it is a great text but (b) that it needs the commentator's efforts to be optimally effective (authority versus unclarity). (2) The commentator has to find a balance between (a) making the most of his source-text (a strategy that is bound to increase the importance of his own work) and (b) maintaining the intellectual attitude of an independent critical thinker (charity versus criticism). (3) The commentator is

characterized by having a dual professional affiliation: (a) he is the colleague of his source-author, qua philosopher, mathematician, physician, and so on, and at the same time, (b) he belongs in the tradition of commentators, with a spe-

cific competence in grammar and exegesis. He will feel the need to downplay these latter qualifications in favor of the former, in accordance with the ubiquitous contempt for the "mere grammarian" (“mere grammarian" versus “real scholar"). (4) Finally, there are the modes of transmission: (a) the stable written

nature of the source-text contrasts with (b) the improvised, oral aspects, and fluid nature, of the commentary (written versus oral).'* In what follows, I shall discuss each opposition in turn.

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Authority versus Unclarity The legitimation of writing commentaries is based on two presuppositions, which are in partial conflict. The first presupposition is that the source-text is valuable and should be made widely available and accessible. The second is that whatever is contained in the source-text is not optimally effective unless it is supplemented by the explanations of the commentator. The partial conflict between these two notions resides mainly in the understanding that greatness entails literary, or at least didactic, sophistication; that is to say, a great text should be clear. However, commentary is necessary because it is not clear (compare Barnes 1990).

Aristotle makes the point succinctly (Met. I infer that Anaxagoras recognized two elements, closely with a view which, although he did not have accepted as developed by others . . . (989b4f.)

8, 989a30ff.): “If one were to the inference would accord articulate it himself, he must If one were to follow his doc-

trine carefully, and articulate what he intends to say, it may turn out he is saying something novel" (transl. Tredennick; my emphasis). The author wants to say

something, but it takes an interpreter to articulate precisely what it is. Similarly, a commentator will supplement any "etceteras" left unresolved in the sourcetext.!5 Writing a commentary is one way of filling the gap that separates the au-

thor's text and our own full understanding of it, an undertaking in a way comparable to the Alexandrian poets' supplementing and following up possibilities left implicit in their classical examples, and even earlier, the poets of the Epic Cycle supplementing (or varying) the subject matter of Iliad and Odyssey.'* In that sense, it is not surprising that a major surge of commentary activity coin-

cides with the activities of the Alexandrian poets; people like Philetas and Callimachus engaged in both types of work.

It can be upheld that the retelling of the source-text is necessary whether that text is clear or not: writing a commentary is also the reproduction and digestion of what is considered valuable intellectual and cultural material. Unless the information contained in the source-text, or the skills represented by it, are absorbed, digested, and reproduced (taught) in every new generation, they can no longer form a live part of the cultural capital of a community. (Isocrates, for

example, is aware of this reproductive aspect of teaching [Antidosis 205f.].) The phenomenon of "canonization" is a virtual guarantee that a text will be kept alive through study over the generations.

Where the need of clarification is emphasized, lack of clarity in the sourcetext may be explained in a variety of ways: sometimes the by now archaic language is held responsible; sometimes the obscurity is held to be produced on purpose'? for the personal safety of the author," to ward off the uninitiated,’

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or to be used as a didactic device to whet the audience’s appetite and stimulate their curiosity.?!

The application of the principle of harmonization, which was popular among Platonists, illustrates both the weight accorded the tradition and the necessity of its constant clarification.?? Plato’s text embodies the best available ex-

pression of the truth and is itself a clarification of the partial insights of the sages of old. Attempts to harmonize the poets and oracles, the ancient non-

Greek traditions and customs, and the text of Plato, are the result (compare Dorrie 1987:17ff.). The sheer weight of tradition guarantees stability and lack of change. Everyone can attain full knowledge, but knowledge as such cannot be increased. The best one can hope for, therefore, is to shed “new” light on ob-

scure elements.

)

Charity versus Criticism In a way, the identification of points where the source-text needs clarification presupposes critical activity on the part of the commentator, but the way it works out most often is that the commentator makes an effort to show why his

author was right after all. However, the commentator also has to strike a balance between the natural adoption of a principle of charity in approaching the source-text, and the understandable need to express his scholarly independence and critical faculties. One way of resolving this dilemma is by applying these

two conflicting principles to two different objects: the author of the source-text is mostly given the benefit of the doubt; in that author’s case, criticism is rela-

tively mild and serves to enhance the credibility of the laudatory parts of the exegesis. Severely polemical discourse is reserved for dealing with previous exegetes, especially those not belonging to the same school, and nonspecialists who have ventured an opinion on the text in question. (See Sluiter 1998 and Barnes 1990.) However problematic this approach may seem, it is also a critical neces-

sity. Refusing to assume maximal coherence and sense in one’s source-text, at least initially, inevitably leads to a certain intellectual laziness in the commentator. In the hands of the best commentators, the “Principle of Charity” can lead

to excellent results—this effect is true for antiquity, as it is for our modern critical practice. The late Aristotle commentator David (formerly identified as Elias) (sixth

century c.E.) expresses the need for critical independence as follows (in Ar. Cat. CAG XVIII 1.122.27ff.): “One shouldn’t change oneself in accordance with whatever one is explaining, like actors on stage who put on different roles and imitate different characters. Don't become an Aristotelian when explaining Aristotle, don’t say that never was there such a good philosopher. Don’t become a

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Platonist while explaining Plato’s work, don’t claim that there was no philosopher to equal Plato.”

“Mere Grammarian” versus “Real Scholar” The commentator has the option of directing praise at his author and criticism

at other exegetes because his work is fundamentally dual in nature: he has a professional affinity to the author of the source-text qua philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, or doctor. But at the same time, as a specialist in linguis-

tic interpretation, he belongs in the exegetical tradition. Whatever the topic of the text that is being commented on, it is a text. Inevitably, therefore, philology will have a contribution to make to the successful understanding of the text, either in establishing or defending its correct form, or in explaining its linguistic elements. Indeed, any commentary will provide examples of remarks on the transmission of the text, lexical explanation (glosses), help in the construction of sentences (ro ἑξῆς, the [natural] order),

help with the meaning of larger units or sentences (paraphrase), help with the text's rhetorical form or function, and appreciation of its literary qualities. On the other hand, given the low social status of grammarians in GrecoRoman antiquity and the low intellectual regard in which that discipline was usually held, it is understandable that the commentators tend to play down or

deny both their own interest in matters of text and language, and that of their author. Content is invariably extolled over form, and an excessive interest in

“little words” is denounced, even though the best and most prolific commentators (Galen, Origen, Porphyry) are among the most formidable philologists in antiquity.”

Again, it should be borne in mind als, formed part of one and the same scholarly compartmentalization than were part of the intellectuals’ common

that these commentators, qua intellectu“network,” with a much lesser degree of is familiar to us: the tools of philology stock-in-trade.

Written versus Oral More than any other genre, the class of “secondary literature” presupposes the existence of a written text of a specific, permanent, stable, and correct character. This is a prerequisite for textual criticism, debates about correct readings, and the normal usage of a certain author. One needs to be able to check and double-

check, and the value of a text is dependent on its reliability as the ipsissima verba of its revered author. A commentary always deals with a text, not with a performance, and in that sense it is a “book-conscious” genre, and it is both instrumental in, and an indication of, the “canonization” of its source-text.

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But many of the commentaries themselves originated in oral teaching and often betray their origin as a performance in the context of the schoolroom.*4 The “grammarian” was supposed to have all kinds of information by heart,?° and the impression of improvisation is often cultivated. Moreover, ever since Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus expressed a strong suspicion of the didactic potential of written texts (274b ff.), ancient sources agreed that teaching in the “living

voice" far outweighed anything conveyable through books.?* Traces of the oral nature of explanatory procedures are still visible in some of our scholia, where the text suddenly changes to question-and-answer format (Rutherford 1905:31ff., especially 33). Terms like κατήχησις (instruction by word of mouth) and ἀποστοματίζειν (teach by word of mouth) are reminiscent of the

oral nature of classroom proceedings. Sometimes eyewitness reports of the oral proceedings penetrate the written commentary." Thus, the genre of the commentary is firmly anchored in the ancient (oral) teaching tradition.

The writer of a commentary need not be identical with the exegete. Amelius was used to taking lecture notes in the seminars of Plotinus (third century c.E.), which Amelius then published in one hundred books under the title Scholia (Porph. V. Plot. III 22; Plotinus, of course, claimed to be explaining Plato). Many of the later commentaries indicate their origin in oral teaching in their titles, with the expression ἀπὸ φωνῆς τοῦ X: this means that the commentary is based on oral lectures by X (Richard 1950:196f.; 206) but that it has been written down by someone else. This method sometimes results in illogical changes between the first and third persons singular, both of which can refer to whoever delivered the oral teaching.” If we remember the essentially oral nature of teaching, the paraphrastic mode adopted by some commentators takes on an interesting dimension: it

means that the teacher appropriates the voice of "his" author wholesale. This is signaled in the commentators themselves by their comparison of exegetes to actors who adopt the persona of the author and perform his or her text.?? Another phenomenon worth mentioning here is not so much a function of the opposition between the oral and the written but has to do with the stability

of the written work itself. Although commentaries generally rely on the unchangeability of their source-texts, they themselves form a much more "open" genre, particularly if they take the form of scholia or of anonymous annotations. Their use in teaching makes it necessary for them to remain up-todate, and they tend to accumulate additional material. In this sense, they resem-

ble textbooks like the grammar ascribed to Dionysius Thrax, which similarly changed significantly over time through the addition of later material, while retaining the authoritative name of its "original" author.??

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Commentaries by specific authors sometimes share in this “open” nature if they result from multiple lectures on the same subject.?! They also strive to ab-

sorb previous scholarship, which usually means they will themselves be made redundant by newer attempts, unless the commentary itself becomes part of

the teaching tradition, as happened to Porphyry's introduction to Aristotle's Categories. From the former we may conclude that although it is hard to lay down conclusive formal criteria to define an "ancient commentary"

(see note 2), the

genre may be distinguished by the commentator's struggle with four sets of opposing concepts. Any commentator has to come to terms with the problem of

why the source-text is both worthy of selection and in need of clarification; how the commentator can make the most of the source-text without becoming an

uncritical epigone; how the commentator can remain a professional scholar in a technical discipline and a true colleague of the authoritative author of the source-text instead of turning into a mere word-mincing grammarian; and, finally, how the commentator can both emphasize the stable and unchanging nature of the source-text and at the same time, subscribe to the time-honored practice of oral, impromptu teaching.

Generic Classifications Made in Secondary Literature After this sketch of the arena in which the commentator operated, I now turn to ancient secondary literature itself and look at some examples of its use of genre concepts. First, I will study the relationship between drama and philosophy in

connection with the ordering of Plato's work. I will then look at the attempts of self-styled serious intellectuals in the Second Sophistic to distinguish their work from epideictic oratory. Finally, I will describe a reaction to an attempt at de-

priving Christians access to the genres and masterpieces of Classical literature.

Philosophy and Drama The vast corpora of texts by Plato and Aristotle posed a classificatory challenge to their students. Although clearly the urge to bring order into an unwieldy mass of material can take other forms than one inspired by a philological theory of genre, yet in the case of Plato, something interesting seems to have been going on in this connection. Diogenes Laertius preserves several bits of information about ancient classifications of Plato's work. One type of division into

χαρακτῆρες (lit. forms") is entirely diaeretic (D.L. 3.49);? it consists of systematic binary divisions inspired by Plato's own procedures in the Sophist and the Politicus. The dichotomies are based on method and subject matter, rather

than on formal criteria. A second classification reported by Diogenes (D.L.

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3.50) is into dramatic (δραματικοί), narrative (διηγηματικοί), and mixed dia-

logues, a division based on literary form, although the categories do not seem to be entirely clear-cut. Presumably, it refers to the fact that some dialogues (for example, the Euthyphro) are dramatic, that is, those dialogues are written in direct speech,” and some are reported (for example, the Republic; the narrator may be one of the interlocutors in the central conversation, as in the Republic, or not, as in the Symposium or the Parmenides). A dialogue like the Phaedo can be considered mixed, since there is an opening scene consisting of direct dialogue, followed by the report of the conversations held on Socrates’ last day. Di-

ogenes disapproves of people who order the Platonic dialogues in this way because they “use words that are more suited to tragedy than to philosophy” (τραγικῶς μᾶλλον ἢ φιλοσόφως) to indicate the difference between the dialogues (D.L. 3.50). That is to say, the critical tools used do not fit the genre and

the expectations that come with it. The term δραματικός and Diogenes’ comment τραγικῶς sound a note that will be relevant again later in Diogenes’ report. Let us observe here that this second arrangement, too, owes a debt to

Plato’s own work, namely to his division of poetry into “simple narrative, impersonation/imitation (mimesis) or a combination of both” (Rep. III 392d5f).

After this second method of classification, a discussion follows about the question of whether Plato is a dogmatist. In 3.56 there is an abrupt switch of topic:

Just as in the old days in tragedy at first the chorus performed the play by itself, and later Thespis invented one actor in order for the chorus to have some rest, and Aeschylus invented a second one, and Sophocles the third—and thus he perfected tragedy; in the same way philosophical discourse was uniform at first (it was on physics), Socrates added

ethical discourse as a second topic, and Plato added dialectic as the third and perfected philosophy. Thrasyllus says that he also published his dialogues in accordance with the tragic tetralogy (for they used to compete with four plays at the Dionysia, Lenaea, Panathenaea and Chutroi; the fourth of these plays would be a satyr play. And the four

plays were called a tetralogy) . . . (3.61) Some people, Aristophanes the grammarian among them, forcedly divide the dialogues into trilogies. This intriguing passage calls for a number of comments. In the first place, it seems to recall εὑρήματα (inventions) catalogs, lists of first inventors. Elsewhere, Plato is credited with the invention of the literary genre of the dialogue, although this was a matter of some dispute.** But, more importantly, this narra-

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tive also suggests an organic development both within and between different genres. Tragedy, a paradigmatic genre since Aristotle," functions as a foil on different levels.?? First, it instantiates an intrageneric, threefold development toward a perfected form, a model that can be paralleled within philosophy. In the case of philosophy, not only was new subject matter being explored in the successive stages, but the very parallel with tragedy also hints at increasing complexity in the literary format, although this tendency is not made explicit. But intrageneric developments do not exhaust the relevance of the tragic model, for

tragedy and philosophy can also be regarded as stages of development between genres in one continuous process, tragedy being the earlier, more "primitive"

form of intellectual activity.” It is important to realize that such a hypothetical historical development in Greek society from tragedy to philosophy finds a special application within the personal

development

of Plato himself (“ontogenesis”

replicating “phylo-

genesis"). Plato allegedly first wrote dithyrambs or epic, and then tragedy, a tetralogy even, which he is said to have burned on his getting acquainted with Socrates and turning to philosophy.*' Even then traces of his former interests lingered: according to one commentary, the Phaedrus should come first in a chronological ordering of the dialogues because of its dithyrambic character,

"as if Plato had not quite managed to shake the Muse of dithyramb."*? Indeed, tragedy often functions as a foil to philosophy in Plato's dialogues. Not only does he explicitly engage tragedy as a dangerous form of logoi in the Republic and elsewhere, but tragedy provides the subtext for the Gorgias." Even more

pertinently, it figures as a competitor of Plato's work—inferior, but in the same general league—when Plato has his Athenian stranger explicitly propound the view that he can exclude the tragedians from his city because the lawgivers themselves are a (better) kind of tragedian, and νόμος (law) yields the best kind

of δρᾶμα (Pl. Lg. VII 817a—b). The Stranger will not allow the competition of these inferior tragedians, since the educative value of the lawgivers’ work is greater.“ Laws are superior to tragedies as a form of μουσική." They resemble poetry.* In fact, they are the best kind of literature. The life of the philosopher and his oeuvre are obvious sources of mutual in-

terpretation and harmonization for an ancient philologist.* It would not be surprising if it had been this kind of information that inspired Aristophanes of

Byzantium to make the trilogical arrangement of some of the dialogues. If Tarrant is correct (1993:105f.), this primarily philologically inspired classification led to a philosophical reaction by Thrasyllus, Tiberius's court astrologer, who was eager to emulate Andronicus’s work on the Aristotelian corpus: he reorganized the Platonic corpus into nine tetralogies, probably on philosophical

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grounds, namely, a view of philosophy as a progressive initiation into a sacred rite. At the same time, the influence of literary factors continued:™ instead of

ignoring the connection with tragedy, Thrasyllus corrected its application, changing the incomplete trilogical classification into a complete series of tetralogies.*! Here the question arises whether within the system of ordering Plato's

works in tetralogies, the individual dialogues were meant to reflect the distinction between tragedies and satyr plays? Tarrant's claim (1993:72; 95) that every tetralogy contained an "odd man out," however, on the analogy of the role of the satyr play in a tragic tetralogy, is not convincing. It does not seem to work for all the Platonic tetralogies, and it certainly does not work for the tetralogical division of the works of Democritus that is also ascribed to Thrasyllus in D.L. 9.45. However, although the distinction between tragedy and satyr play seems to have been irrelevant in the tetralogic ordering, Thrasyllus must have taken on board part of the literary associations between tragedy and philosophy. This

fact is suggested not just by the tetralogic ordering itself but also by its explicit linking to the "development narrative" in the passage from Diogenes quoted before (3.56ff.): Plato perfected (ἐτελεσιούργησε) philosophy as the counterpart of the perfection of the tragic genre by Sophocles. This seems the most logical explanation for "also" in “Thrasyllus says that Plato also published his dia-

logues in accordance with the tragic tetralogy" (D.L. 3.56). An ongoing tradition for this kind of literary-inspired assessment

of

Plato is suggested by the papyrus fragment POxy 3219, which seems to have insisted on presenting Plato as a dramatist along the lines of Aristophanes of Byzantium.” It would be possible to call especially the first two of the classifications dis-

cussed here attempts to distinguish “genres” within the dialogues, since they take into account subject matter and/or form (the dihaeretic division), or literary form (the division into δραματικοί, διηγηματικοί, and μικτοί, “dramatic, narrative and mixed dialogues”). The third classification (in tetralogies) uses

genre in that it invokes the analogy with two dramatic genres (tragedy and satyr play), but otherwise generic considerations are not stressed in what is essen-

tially an editorial strategy. However, even in the first two cases, it is questionable

whether description in terms of "genre" is fruitful. The term εἶδος (genre) is not used (but rather χαρακτῆρες [forms]), and it seems we are dealing with categories intended to make a big, intractable corpus more manageable in whatever way is possible. The same phenomenon is apparent in discussions of the Aristo-

telian corpus. There, too, factors of form and content are combined, and increasingly specialized subdivisions are distinguished, until finally every work

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within the corpus can be pigeonholed. Unless we equate every form of drawing distinctions with distinguishing “genres” (a step that is possible but that renders the term “genre” so universally applicable that it loses all descriptive power), we have to acknowledge that there are ways of creating order that do not invoke the concept of genre. All of Plato's works are specimens of the genre of the Platonic dialogue, but it is possible to order them in a variety of ways.

Philosophy and Rhetoric More straightforwardly generic considerations come into play if a work or a body of work does not need internal structuring, but rather has to be positioned vis-a-vis the rest of the literary market. Here the commentator takes it upon himself to perform on behalf of his author something that is endemic even in the source-texts themselves, namely, an explicit attempt at cornering a

market, finding a niche, that is, defining an author or a work by opposition to the available competition. This phenomenon is ubiquitous, not just in the literary arena, but also in technical disciplines like medicine or mathematics.°? An obvious example of a battle in the "rhetoric of legitimation" (Lloyd 1990:43) occurs in the Second Sophistic, when rhetoric tended to become in-

creasingly “literary” and remote from real life, and literature was itself rhetorized. Hermogenes (second century c.E.) divides literature into two groups: the πολιτικὸς λόγος "political speech,” which is the rhetoric of policy recommendations, and panegyric, which covers all literature that does not serve an immediate political purpose—what Hermogenes calls "panegyrical prose"

and all poetry. Plato is his designated model for panegyrical prose,* meaning not only that Plato was looked at from a stylistic point of view (this had been the case ever since Aristotle commented on the intermediate position of his style between prose and poetry, D.L. 3.37) but also that his philosophical work was classified as a particular form of rhetoric, namely panegyric.

Of course, there was no denying that this enemy of rhetoric was a master of that art. Aristides thinks that Plato should be ashamed of his deprecations of rhetoric, since clearly he was no stranger to it himself.’ Yet, this move of Hermogenes ' flies in the face of philosophical attempts, starting with Plato

himself and with Isocrates, to postulate philosophy as an activity and a type of discourse in its own right, separate and distinct from poetry and (epideictic) rhetoric.* In view of the attempts on the part of rhetoricians in the second century c.E. to appropriate philosophical discourse, it stands to reason that philosophers would emphatically try to set their work apart from epideictic oratory.

This is the contextual background of, for instance, the proclamation by the

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commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias about his own work (in Ar. De Fato, CAG Suppl. II 2, 165.5-7): “Our work does not intend to incline towards being a show-piece (ἐπίδειξις). It is geared towards inquiry and a more precise exposition of the problem." Alexander's concern was not unjustified. According to Longinus, Alexander's successors did not write technical work, but rather poems

and

show

speeches

(λόγοι

ἐπιδεικτικοί).57

The

distinction

between

ἐπίδειξις and a more sober or serious form of discourse can be paralleled many times.°® In this particular constellation (“my work is not an ἐπίδειξις, but X”), ἐπίδειξις is invariably judged negatively. Epictetus’s diatribe 3.23, “Against those who hold lectures and discussions in epideictical fashion,” draws a distinction between the aim of a philosopher, which is to benefit oneself and others, and that of the rhetorician, who wants only to be praised. He distinguishes four philosophical xapaxrmpes (forms): protreptic (exhortations), elenchic (refutations), didactic (instruction), and epideictic (showpieces), and he excludes the epideictic genre from the realm of

legitimate philosophical discourse. In fact, protreptic comes to function as the philosophical counterpart to epideictic, covering epideictic oratory “with a philosophical veneer.”5? The whole discussion is a reflection of the age-old opposition between substance and form, but the familiar terminology of πράγματα

ῥήματα (words) is here supplemented and displaced, texts, by a terminology of genre: the genre of (ἐπίδειξις or panegyric) is opposed to that of serious sim.). The authors do not just fight about whether or

(things) and

even within philosophical the demonstration piece teaching (διδασκαλία, vel not their work is content-

oriented or style-oriented, but their claim to work in a specific and distinguish-

able genre is indicative of the fact that the battle is not just about the truth of doctrinal convictions but also about legitimating one’s title to a separate and valuable corner of the literary marketplace. Classical Genres and the Bible In c.£. 362, Julian the Apostate proclaimed an edict that, however innocently phrased it was, to all practical intents and purposes prevented Christians from teaching in pagan schools.© In reaction, two Christian educators who were both named Apollinaris—father and son, a grammarian and a sophist respectively—created an adaptation of the Bible on the basis of the traditional pagan genres. The grammarian father turned the Books of Moses into hexameters, and those parts of the Old Testament that were "in the form (τύπος) of history”

partly into dactyls, partly into tragic drama, using every kind of meter (Socr.

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HE III 16). The similarity with the Iliad and Odyssey was perfected by dividing the work into 24 books, designated by letters of the alphabet. Menander was the model for comedies, Euripides for tragedies, and Pindar for lyric (Sozomenus HE 5.18.3f.). The younger Apollinaris rewrote the gospels and the letters of Paul "in the form (τύπος) of dialogues,” taking Plato as his example. None of their output seems to have lasted beyond Julian's death in 363.

This event is interesting for two reasons: in the first place, it was apparently felt that τέχνη λογική (the art of reasonable speech), imparted by the study of

literature and necessary for everyone, was inextricably bound up with the canonical generic forms of Greek literature: if Christians could not have Homer, they should (at least) have a Homerized Bible, a text that might even provide Homeric τέχνη λογική of a better kind than existing emulations because its subject matter was more worthy. The presupposition was that a Christian, too,

had to be familiar with the forms of epic, history, tragedy, comedy, lyric, and dialogues.

Second, this incident nuances Rosenmeyer's thesis (1985:81—82) that the Greeks should not really be credited with a concept of genre at all, since what they had was rather a literary practice based on imitation and emulation of a specific model (for example "Homer," not "epic"). The "Apollinaris project" suggests that one would imitate Homer, when writing epic, and Euripides, when

writing tragedy! First, the Apollinarises, pere et fils, had to decide what parts of the Bible were to be reformed into what genres. Only then could they go into imitative mode. By this time, genre was firmly entrenched in the educators' tool kit.

The Place of Commentaries in Ancient Classifications of Genre Is "secondary literature" a category in ancient classifications of Greek literature?

Plato has Socrates sum up the types of texts that are relevant to the well-being of the polis and that ought therefore to be based on knowledge, but he omits any kind of scholarship, including even philosophy.” Isocrates, whose selfpositioning on the "literary" map involves elaborate defenses of the values of prose as against those of poetry, claims that there are equally as many modes (τρόποι, Antido. 45) or forms (ἰδέας, ibid. 46) of prose texts as there are of po-

etry. Among the groups of authors distinguished by him is one consisting of those who “have studied the poets" (περὶ rovs ποιητὰς ἐφιλοσόφησαν). This may be a reference either to scholarship on the poets or to intellectual efforts that take the poets as their starting point—or both. Ian Rutherford (forthcom-

ing) thinks of the Derveni Papyrus, Theagenes of Rhegium, Stesimbrotos of Thasos, and Alcidamas' Mouseion. One might also think of passages like the dis-

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cussion about Simonides in Plato's Protagoras (338e-347a), or even of Plato's discussion of Homeric poetry in the Republic (1l, III, and X) or the Ion. In any event, Isocrates' list lays no claim to being exhaustive. In fact, we have to conclude that there is no recognition of "secondary literature" as a separate genre in ancient eidography (the description of genres) before Callimachus, and even then it is doubtful. The prose genres that had been recognized by then were history, oratory, and philosophy. Laws also formed a separate genre. The title of Callimachus's Pinakes was "Registers of those who excelled in every form of paideia, and their works.”“ The crucial word paideia seems to leave open the possibility that the "grammarians" (or better, philologists) could have found a place in the classification, namely, in the register labeled “various” (πίναξ τῶν mavrodam@v). But that is only a possibility. In late classifications of the varii auctores, secondary scholarship did find a place. The Tabula Coisliniana M (tenth century) lists rhetoricians, historians, “those who dealt with the poets in verse and iamboi, the grammarians, the orthographers, authors on vowels of two quantities, ethnographers, pinax of excellent doctors, their commentators, and excellent philosophers."* In general, however, the conclusion must be that in explicit ancient classifications of literature, scholarship played a negligible role.

Generic Self-Reflection in Commentaries? Ancient commentators are aware of working in a distinct genre. Galen (second

century c.E.) points out that there is a difference between texts with an independent (new) didactic message and texts whose purpose it is to elucidate the

teaching of earlier teachers. The former concentrate on “the truth, the latter on accuracy, in rendering the opinions of the source-text (with critical evaluation being referred to a subordinate position).** Jerome (347—420 c.g.) defines the purpose of a commentary as expounding the source's words, clarifying obscuri-

ties, and reporting the results of previous scholarship with the aim of enabling the reader to form a judgment.9? But did ancient commentators also conceptualize the different forms that secondary literature could take in terms of genre? In a classic 1909 article, Praechter identifies three loci classici for generic distinctions among types of commentaries by commentators.” I will argue that

in these texts, the commentators are not interested in generic classification but instead in justifying their personal contribution to Aristotelian scholarship, a strategy that is a common topos in prologues. Themistius (fourth century c.g.) opens his paraphrase of Aristotle's Poste-

rior Analytics with the following programmatic statement: "It seems to me that to write an explication of Aristotle’s works after so many good scholars

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amounts almost to useless ambition. One cannot find much that the earlier commentators have left out, and to throw out whole discussions for some small correction is like taking down Pheidias’ Athena because one thinks one could improve the fastening of the base. But grasping the intention of the content of a book and rendering it concisely, and remedying, as far as one can, the terseness of the philosopher: that seemed to be novel and useful. For we thought it would be a convenient aide-mémoire for people who studied Aristotle once, but cannot keep going over his works because they are so long.” According to Praechter,”! Themistius is here claiming for himself the invention of the genre of the paraphrase—but is he? Intrinsically, that is not terribly likely: the first “commentaries” on Aristotle we have, a first/second-century-c.E. papyrus (P. Fay. 3) and Aspasius on the Ethics (second century c.E.), are paraphrases.

Paraphrase as a commentary-type is much older still. In fact, one need only think of Plato’s paraphrase of Iliad 1 in the Republic (intended to get rid of direct speech) to realize that this must have been a very common school prac tice," an impression that finds confirmation in Theon’s use of the paraphrase as a προγύμνασμα (an elementary exercise in rhetoric). Although Themistius is claiming some originality for his work (it is "novel," καινόν), he does not claim to be inventing a new genre—he does not even use the term "paraphrase" or "genre" here—instead, he is simply justifying his own work, as we all do in project proposals and prefaces, by setting it apart from other work in the field. His

contentions are part of a traditional locus modestiae, the prefatory topos par excellence, meant to put the readers in a benevolent mood.” The novel nature of the work is not so much that it is a paraphrase (which could run to a consider-

able length) but that it offers a very compact (yet illuminating) version of Aris-

totle’s argument. There is certainly some rhetorical self-positioning in this passage, but it does not take the form of generic definition. The second passage cited by Praechter comes from Simplicius (sixth century c.E.), again from the prooemium, this time from his commentary on the

Categories, and it can be summed up as follows: (1) Different people have taken different approaches to dealing with this book; some have dealt with its language only, for example, Themistius; (2) some have dealt with content but have

restricted themselves to Aristotle's own ideas, for example, Porphyrius's work in question-and-answer form; (3) others have added "problems" to this approach, that is, they have explained the thought and identified critical issues, for example, Alexander of Aphrodias; (4) a fourth group have used Aristotle as a starting point for "deep thought," for example, Boethus; (5) another group have simply stated the “problems,” raising objections to everything contained in the work,

for example, Lucius; (6) Plotinus adds three books of "very important examina-

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tions”; (7) Porphyry gives a complete exegesis plus solutions to all the problems,

plus information on parallels in Stoic thought; (8) Iamblichus follows Porphyry, often literally, although sometimes he is more accurate, and he is more

concise; he also demonstrates the similarities and differences between Aristotle and Archytas; (9) and Dexippus gives a short exegesis and enters into a dialogue with Plotinus's aporiés. Simplicius rounds off this passage as follows (2.30ff.): "Therefore, since so much serious work has been done by the most famous philosophers on the Categories, I would seem utterly ridiculous from the start were I to venture to write something myself without being able to give a very good

reason for the enterprise." This reason is then provided in a statement of the σκοπός (purpose, intention) of Simplicius's own work (3.4ff.), which is fourfold: to gain a better understanding of the text himself; to make the elevated thought content clearer and more comprehensive; to reduce the overwhelming quantity of the available comments, not to extreme conciseness (like Syrianus),

but to the point where everything that is necessary is there;”4 and finally, to add what may have occurred to Simplicius himself. Again, it is clear that if the list just given is one of genres, it is so only accidentally and without a claim to being exhaustive—the "genres" have not even been given names. In fact, although Simplicius starts out by describing types of approaches to the text, it becomes increasingly clear that he is actually giving a historical survey of the field, focusing on major names (from (6) onwards),

rather than "genres." This is a status quaestionis, the state of the art of research on the Categories, the main purpose of which is again the prefatory one of selfjustification. What Simplicius is claiming is not that his work will constitute a new genre but that it will be a legitimate addition to works within an existing genre, that of commentaries on the Categories. This is a genre that allows a range of different critical approaches. Simplicius's challenge is to find a way to make a useful contribution to the genre. The third text referred to by Praechter is later still. It dates from the thirteenth/fourteenth-century commentator Sophonias, and in fact this text comes closest to giving a generalization of types of scholarship, but its general character is probably due to its extremely derivative nature. Sophonias also begins with an ἄλλος ἄλλως priamel, a survey of different approaches by different scholars, distinguishing three groups: first come the ex-

egetes in the narrow sense, who concentrates on style and language. They quote a lemma and then explain it. Their own contribution is only meant to advance understanding of the author. Second, there are the paraphrasts, who take on the

role of Aristotle himself and appropriate his voice (see the earlier section "Written versus Oral"). They do not bother to quote and do not care about the

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exact words of the author. Their only concern is to convey the gist of the meaning. This group of texts sometimes presents problems and objections, unlike the

interpreters of the first group who simply follow the author without volunteering anything unless the λέξις (wording) is unclear. As Sophonias points out, both groups are problematic. The first approach is fragmented and makes it hard to grasp the overall meaning of the text. The second group does not really offer help with the difficult λέξις, the wording of

the text. Therefore, Sophonias opts for a third type, which is more concise than that of the exegetes but is longer than that of the paraphrasts,’> and remedies

the problems of both. It is characterized by three features: (a) There is no fragmentation; (b) it articulates the λέξις and elucidates the textual cohesion and coherence; and (c) it assumes the authorial voice. Like Themistius, Sophonias

hopes that his approach will constitute something novel (καινόν). From the foregoing discussion, it should be clear that once again, we are

dealing here with a prefatory topos that involves classification of earlier work with a view to self-positioning of the present author against his predecessors. If classification in whichever form is what ancient thought on genre is about, this might be called a discussion of the subgenres of the commentary, but it has to

be borne in mind that its focus is not the distinction of genres, nor a claim to the invention of a new genre, but rather the unique new achievement of the present author within a recognized genre, for which he deserves a benevolent reception.

Conclusion In ancient eidography (explicit descriptions of "genre"), "secondary literature"

was rarely regarded as a full-blown genre (εἶδος) (see the fourth major section, earlier). However, it is perfectly possible for the modern researcher to identify

the parameters that define the particular niche of the ancient commentator (second section, earlier). Every commentary must assume both the basic value of the source-texts and an element of inadequacy in them, which the commentator must redress. The commentator is duty-bound to give an optimal repre-

sentation of his source-text but at the same time he cannot give up his critical judgment. The commentator has a dual professional affiliation, as a doctor, a philosopher, or an astronomer, etc., and as a “grammarian,” an interpreter of someone else's work. Since the latter qualification is less impressive socially, the commentator will be at pains to downplay that part of his work. Finally, the activities of commentators presuppose the unchangeable nature of the sourcetext, but their own work is located in the environment of the classroom, with

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emphasis on the oral, almost improvised transmission of ever accumulating knowledge. Ancient commentators themselves are familiar with generic distinctions and apply the notion of genre, borrowed from philology, to their work on the source-texts (third section, earlier). They are also aware of the fact that they themselves are engaged in a type of work with distinctive objectives and tasks, they are eager to stress that fact, and they reflect on their position—even though they do not call their own work a separate “genre” (fifth section, earlier).

There is a risk of reducing the term “genre” to virtual meaninglessness, if every subdivision made in ancient texts is described as the recognition of a new genre. Ancient commentators are fond of drawing all kinds of distinctions, both in ordering the corpora they are working on and in identifying the special nature of their own achievement compared with that of their predecessors. The prefatory passages dealt with in the fifth section earlier undoubtedly exemplify the rhetoric of self-legitimation, and they are indicative of the reflection of the commentators on the nature of their activities. However, it is possible to engage in that rhetoric and in self-reflection without conceptualizing it in terms of genre.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Alo

The Didactic Plot DON

FOWLER

Didactic poetry is a paradigmatic example of a discursive (rather than a narrative) genre or mode (I shall come back to this question) defined largely by its assumed pragmatics of utterance.' The primary elements of didactic are a teacher who is usually an explicitly characterized internal speaker, a body of knowledge

that is to be imparted, and a pupil who may be a figure or figures characterized within the text or may be identified with the general reader. In addition, didactic poetry has to be in verse. This may seem an excessively obvious point to make, but didactic poetry is, in fact, unusual in having for much of its history a factual prose genre or genres, technical or isagogic literature, existing alongside it with analogous primary elements of teacher, pupil, and matter. Many other ancient poetic genres originated, or were thought to have originated, in a particular form of practical discourse, and lyric subgenres are often related to genres of everyday life, such as the invitation to a meal, but the relationship be-

tween didactic poetry and the mass of prose artes and institutiones in Greek and Latin is much closer. There is naturally considerable traffic between the prose

and verse genres. To borrow the terminology, but not necessarily the presuppositions, of

Francis Cairns,’ as well as these primary elements, we can see a mass of secondary elements, features frequently found in didactic and associated with it but

neither necessary nor sufficient to mark a text as didactic. These features are, in fact, more important than the primary elements for the purposes to which generic criticism is often actually put. The aim of generic analysis is rarely to enable the critic to fasten a label to a particular work but rather is to construct a

competence or horizon of expectations for a reader against which the particular 205

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details are read, and it is the secondary elements that go to make up that competence. This use of generic analysis is common among discourse analysts and

psychologists, who have exploited Bakhtin’s notion of “speech genres” in their investigations of top-down processing by readers? Someone given a text and told that it is a story processes the text differently from someone who is told

that it is a news report.‘ A further purpose of generic analysis, for linguists and others but especially for literary critics, is the investigation of the phenomena of Kreuzung, the crossing, mixing, or crossbreeding of genres. Here it is clear that

the generic expectations of one genre will usually be brought into another by the presence of secondary elements, along with specific intertextual references. When Anchises in Aeneid 6 (724 ff.) answers Aeneas’s question as to whether

the souls in Hades have to return to the light, we do in fact have a teacher, a pupil, and a body of learning, but it is the secondary elements (along with specific intertextualities) that more strongly signal the contamination of epic narrative by didactic discourse. The particular secondary elements that I wish to discuss here are the story patterns or plots? of didactic. Although, as I say, didactic poetry is a genre of discourse, not narrative, the boundaries between Benveniste's celebrated pair are equally famously uncertain, and critics have come to see that all discourse has a plot, just as all narrative has discursive context. Even a description—and

didactic poetry is notable as a the sequential order of words.* phisticated level in the example tioned. Anchises states that he

genre descriptif—acquires a plot when put into This characteristic can be seen on a more soof Anchises' speech in the Aeneid already menwill enumerate his coming descendants (as he

will later do), but his son first asks why the souls have to return to their bodies (6. 719—721):

O father, are we to think that some souls go from here on high to the sky, and return once more to sluggish bodies? What is this terrible desire of these wretches for the light? The opening section of Anchises' speech represents an attempt to explain to Aeneas why this state of affairs has to be (6. 724—751):

First (principio), the sky and the earth, the liquid plains, and the bright orb of the moon and the Titanian stars are fed within by a spirit, and infused through the limbs, a mind moves the whole mass and mingles in the great body. Thence (inde) the race of men and animals, the lives of flying things and the monsters that the sea bears under the marble plain. These seeds

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have a fiery vigour and heavenly origin, to the extent that harmful bodies do not slow them, or earthly limbs and dying members dull them. Hence (hinc) they fear and desire, feel pain and rejoice, nor do they see the breezes, shut as they are in darkness and a blind prison. Furthermore, even when life leaves them with the last light, nevertheless every evil does not leave the wretches, nor completely all the plagues of the body desert them, and it is necessary for many things for a long time growing together deeply to have become ingrained in miraculous ways. Therefore they are exercised by penalties and repay punishments for old evils: some are hung up empty open to the breezes, from others under the vast whirlpool the deepdyed crime is washed out or burned out by fire. We each suffer our own death-spirits. Thence (exinde) we are sent forth through broad Elysium,

and a few of us possess the happy fields, until long length of days and the completed circle of time has removed the ingrained stain, and leaves pure ethereal sense and the fire of simple air. All these, when they have whirled the wheel for a thousand years, the god calls forth in a great troop to the river of Lethe, clearly so that they might without memory see again the curved heavens, and begin to want to return (reverti) into bodies.

We begin at the beginning, principio, and end (as in the De rerum natura) witha return:’ in between we have words like inde, hinc, and exinde, and the narrative seems to suggest both the creation and development of life on earth and the life of a human being. These plots are constantly, of course, linked by Lucretius.®

But the inde and hinc are in fact logical, not temporal, and in a strict sense, this is a description of a recurring event, not a story with a beginning and an end. Anchises’ speech exploits our natural tendency to emplot description to enforce a stronger suggestion of didactic, via our knowledge of didactic plots. That is, it

is ironic that one of the markers of didactic in this passage inserted in an epic is the presence of some typical narrative secondary elements of didactic. Emplotting the description as a story marks out this embedded passage as di-

dactic within a genre that is itself based on story. This question of the plots of didactic goes deep into our notions of the na-

ture of pedagogy and of the structure of knowledge itself. A body of knowledge such as how to drive a car does not in action possess a beginning, a middle, and an end, but any attempt to teach driving requires that it be linearized. Does one begin with "first principles’—in which case the body of knowledge must be hierarchically ordered? Does one try to make ontogeny repeat phylogeny, and begin with a history of the development of the subject (a great favorite, this, with

computer manuals)? How far does the process by which knowledge of a subject

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has been discovered have to be mirrored in the way that it is set out—a question raised by Jonathan Barnes in connection with Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics?? In the ancient world, some of these questions were raised in connection with the debate over the nature of science (techné) as opposed to experience (empeiria):

a techné will tend to have some kind of natural internal structure in a way that a

practical skill may not, and for this reason a techné is teachable.!° Modern educational theorists, on the other hand, have paid particular attention to the role here of structural metaphors." If one thinks, for instance, of ignorance as a deficiency, one will see the process of education in terms of pouring in information and skills to fill the gap: if one rather thinks in terms of bringing out potential, one may adopt an almost Platonist belief that the knowledge is already there but needs merely to be brought to the surface. Any teacher can supply a much larger set of these metaphors, and we all know how crucial they are in de-

termining the way we view our central activity of teaching. And just as any plot will have an underlying structural metaphor or metaphors, so any metaphor will imply a plot.

I begin with the most obvious plot of all, the progress of the pupil from ignorance to knowledge. During the work, the pupil learns (or is supposed to learn) more things and thus becomes able to do more things with what he or she has learned: knowledge and skill increase together. There is often an urgency about the lack of knowledge with which the pupil begins: it is incapacitating in some way. So, for instance, Vergil at the opening of the Georgics asks Caesar to join him in pitying the farmers who are ignarosque viae (1. 41). That phrase has a Lucretian background, as Philip Hardie has noted,'? and recalls in particular the opening of Books Two and Six of the De rerum natura: the path in question is the path of life, which humans who are miseri and ignari do not

understand.? In the previous line, however, Vergil had asked for a facilem cursum from the new god for his enterprise in writing the Georgics, and the path in question is also the path through the text, the path on which reader and author are setting out together. This is also, of course, a Lucretian metaphor, seen most notably at the end of Book One of the De rerum natura, where Lucretius promises the reader that blind night will not snatch from her the iter before she comes to the ultima naturai: In this way you will get to know these things thoroughly, drawn to the end by a small labour; for one thing will grow clear from another, and blind night will not snatch away the journey from you, before you have seen to the end the finalities of nature: thus things shall kindle lights for things (1. 1115-1118).

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Later in the first book of the Georgics, Vergil recalls his opening words at 1. 121-

123, when he tells us that pater ipse colendi / haud facilem esse viam voluit, primusque per artem / movit agros, “the father himself did not want the path of cultivation to be easy, and was the first to move the fields through art.” The path

there is preeminently the path of human development, seen as the growth of a child, but the echo of the opening alerts us to two further aspects, that of the general notion of the path of life'> and that of the path through the text.'5 Jupiter, with fatherly care,'’ did not want the way to be too easy, and therefore stimulated men to develop technology and art. But in doing this, he was also acting

as a technologist/artist himself, a first discoverer “moving” the fields by art. There is an obvious reflex onto the path that the reader must trace through the text. It is not always good to make things too easy: sometimes art must make things difficult to sharpen perceptions with care. The reading/learning process in the Georgics demands effort and skill of the postlapsarian reader: it is not just

a question of picking up acorns from the ground. There is more than one path in the Georgics: Vergil's own path, the via by which he attempts to rise above his Lucretian ground (3.8, temptanda via est

...), is topped at the end of the poem by the path by which Caesar Augustus is striving for heaven (4.562, viamque adfectat Olympo). It is in fact left open whither the poem tends: to the achievements of Augustus or the indolence of the poet under the spreading tree (4.565—566). The point I want to make by this example is that the structural metaphor of the path implied by the notion of the

pupil’s progress in knowledge very quickly ramifies and connects to concepts such as the pupil’s progress as one of personal growth from childish ignorance to adult understanding (aspects of which have recently been discussed by Philip

Mitsis),'® and to a whole series of related metaphors. A full investigation of just this one didactic plot would similarly quickly ramify: back to the beginnings of the metaphor in didactic and to the role played by texts such as Parmenides’ poem, and out to the wider use of the metaphor of the journey through the text

in other genres. Some of these aspects have already been explored by Piet Schrijvers and Monica Gale.'? I focus here on just a few further aspects specific to didactic, particularly in relation to Lucretius. First, the journey that the pupil undertakes has been traveled before by the teacher, and the pupil thus follows in the footsteps of the person who has gone before: the master is a καθηγεμών, as the Epicureans called their first leaders.?? Lucretius famously expressed his devotion to Epicurus in these terms in 3. 1—4: O you who were first able in such shadows to lift up so bright a light, illuminating the good things of life, you I follow, O glory of the Greek race,

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and I place now the traces of my feet shaped / set (ficta?!) in your deep tracks. This passage connects, however, with a further series of metaphors that are con-

cerned with following up small hints and with tracking down the truth and that is centered in the De rerum natura in the use of vestigia, "footprints," but also "tracks" and "traces," that is, in a specifically Epicurean context, the empirical evidence of the macroscopic world from which the pupil must learn to derive knowledge of the invisible world of the atoms through the process of semeiosis.?? From here it is a small step to the hunting or “venatic” paradigm for "investigation" famously examined by Carlo Ginzburg in his discussion of

Sigmund Freud, Sherlock Holmes, and Giovanni Morelli? and recently explored in the early modern period by William Eamon.* In the didactic context,

the pupil has to hunt down the truth for himself or herself, as well as to follow in the footsteps of the teacher: the locus classicusis De rerum natura 1. 398—409,

where Lucretius says that he has laid before Memmius vestigia parva that will be enough for him to find out the truth for himself: Therefore, however you delay pleading many things, nevertheless it is necessary to admit that there is void in things, and besides I can, by relating

many arguments, scrape together belief for my words. But these small traces (vestigia parva) are enough for a keen mind, through which you may learn the rest yourself. For just as dogs often find with their noses the lairs covered in leaves of a mountain-ranging wild-beast, when once they have set upon the sure traces of the path (vestigia certa viai), so you will be able to see one thing from another yourself in these things, and get into all the blind hiding places and drag out the truth from them.

The links between the metaphor of following in the footsteps of the teacher and that of tracking down the truth for oneself encapsulate a central problem of di-

dactic and connect with the ambivalence of the image of the way that we noted earlier. The teacher has gone before and shows the way, but the pupil must also come to know the path in life for himself or herself and be able to follow it even without the teacher's help. The reader's path through the poem cannot be simply a following of the track already laid down by the poet but must also involve the acquisition of the ability to read and act independently. It is of course con-

troversial how far a text like the De rerum natura is able to reconcile those two aspects, and many people have stressed the authoritarian nature of Epicurean teaching, for which there is one true path in life.?° Epicurus discovered in Book

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Six not a path in life but the only one possible, the one that we anyway naturally follow if uncorrupted: And he explained what was the highest good to which we all tend, and showed the way by which on a small path we might strive towards it in an energetic course. Transferring this instruction to Lucretius as surrogate for his master, there

should be one path through the poem—and when we have reached the end, we should have no further need of the poem, because we should have arrived. The plots of didactic thus raise particularly acutely the central literary

problem of rereading, in that it seems to be built into the genre that by definition, if the poem is successful, it cannot be reread, yet rereading and reuse

are fundamental to the domain of the literary. Those who see reading as the recovery of inherent meaning rather than the construction of new, usually escape this problem through some notion of the inexhaustible nature of the text—so Augustine's mira profunditas.”° Epicurus tells Menoeceus at the end of the Letter to Menoeceus" to "meditate on these things and things like them day and night, to yourself and to a friend," and we could similarly see a didactic poem like the

De rerum natura as accompanying the convert through times of difficulty and as containing material useful for the experienced Epicurean as well as the tiro.”8 But there is an undoubted tension between the rhetorical drive within didactic

that focuses on the end, the achievement of knowledge, rather than the journey to that end, and the claims of a didactic poem as a poem to be reread and rein-

terpreted. My second point is connected with this tension. Plots imply positionality and a structure of relationships: they place the teacher and didactic addressee in a particular relation or suggest a role for one of them in isolation. The pupil

may be a wanderer in life who is put on the right track, or a hunter pursuing the truth, or a child growing up. But the fact that there may be multiple didactic plots operating within a reading of a text complicates this positionality. The child being taught and the adult hunter occupy different positions with regard to their subject matter. Moreover, the teleology of one plot may have implications for the way that other plots work. Philip Mitsis, for instance, has discussed in a sophisticated way how the empirical reader may move in and out of identification with the didactic addressee of the De rerum natura with respect

to the image of the addressee as a child needing instruction,? but he tends to see the image of the child as a static one. The addressee of the De rerum natura does not grow up during the course of the poem. But the progression implied

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by the other didactic plots easily spills over into the positioning of the reader as child: and a view of the poem in which the addressee “grows up” has the merit of fitting in with the most popular modern way of looking at the abrupt end of the poem, as a passing-out examination for the reader.*° Many of the images discussed in recent literature in relation to didactic could arguably benefit from being seen more dynamically, in terms of didactic plots rather than didactic positions. Positionality implies plot, as well as the other way round. I wrote just now of a “passing-out examination” for the didactic addressee and the reader, using the terminology of (I suppose) a military academy. This brings me to my third point and to the question that I left open at the beginning. Is it better to regard didactic poetry as a genre—that is, as something his-

torically grounded and changing over time—or as a mode, that is, as a theoretical system based on a priori (and supposedly ahistoric) assumptions. The basic trio of teacher, matter, and pupil might be said to imply in itself certain plots, such as the move from ignorance to knowledge, which are necessarily there in any conceivable didactic poem. On the other hand, some plots may well be spe-

cific to particular generic instantiations of the mode. Of more importance, even the plots that might be said to be most easily derived from the primary elements may be recontextualized within a particular culture. If, let us say, our construc-

tions of the relation between parents and children differ from one cultural setting to another, then our constructions of the didactic plot of the education of a

child will also vary. It seems obvious, for instance, to place the relationship between Lucretius and Memmius within a context of Roman social relations: in

this respect, critics have concentrated on the relationship of patron and client,°! but arguably one should also bear in mind the way in which older Romans took under their wing young aristocrats**—as well, of course, as the relationships be-

tween pupil and teacher in Epicurean therapy.’ Of necessity, there is likely to be more than one such social contextualization, and the interaction between different models will produce a (welcome) degree of instability into any account

of the genre. The question may then be raised as to what we want to build into our notion of the didactic genre, and what we would rather see as features of a particular text in a particular context: that is, features generated by the interaction of generic or modal elements and the social context. But it does not matter which way we jump: at any level, we are dealing with the construction of expec-

tations for our ideal reader. Generic expectations cannot be shut off from other cultural schemata because the plots typical of a genre are affected by all these other cultural frames. Let me apply these generalities about cultural contextualization to the specific didactic plot of the journey with which I began. We are obviously not talk-

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ing here of catching a plane or taking the train: we are likely to build into our constructions of the concept of travel in the ancient world such notions as the effort of travel, its length, and its dangers. Moreover, the ancient journey cannot be accomplished in one day but requires a number of stops on the way, digressions in which we can temporarily recover our strength. Roads are less reliable, and we may well need a guide. This situation is particularly true if we travel at night. The imagery of light and dark in the De rerum natura is the most obvious of all the metaphorical complexes in the poem and has many obvious ramifications: but when Epicurus at the beginning of Book Three lifts the light in darkness inlustrans commoda vitae, attempting to illuminate the darkness of humanity as revealed at the end of Book Two, he is also showing the way. Immediately afterwards, as we have seen, Lucretius declares that he follows his

master, planting his footsteps in, or even shaping them to, the steps of Epicurus. This image recalls the end of Book One, where it was promised that the reader would be led on from light to light until he or she could see the ultima naturai. We are in the presence here, however, of another didactic plot, that of initiation, in which the postulant is led through darkness and fear to light and a vision of the truth. The process is well illustrated from a fragment of Plutarch (fr. 178 Sandbach) that is describing the fate of the soul after death but that explicitly uses the pattern of initiation into the mysteries: {The soul at death] has an experience like that of men who are undergoing initiation into great mysteries . . . In the beginning there is stray-

ing and wandering, the weariness of running this way and that, and nervous journeys through darkness that reach no goal, and then immediately before the consummation every possible terror, shivering and trembling and sweating and amazement. But after this a marvelous light meets the wanderer, and open country and meadow lands welcome him; and in that place there are voices and dancing and the solemn majesty of sacred music and holy visions. And amidst these, he walks at large in new freedom, now perfect and fully initiated, celebrating the sacred rites, a garland upon his head, and converses with pure and holy men; he surveys the uninitiated, unpurified mob here on

earth, the mob of living men who, herded together in murk and deep mire, trample one another down and in their fear of death cling to

their ills, since they disbelieve in the blessing of the other world. There are numerous correspondences between the plot of initiation as revealed

by Plutarch and both particular parts of the De rerum natura—especially the

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prologue to Book Three—and the overall movement of the work. The use of

the language of the mysteries is widespread in the poem, as of course more generally in ancient philosophical and educational discourse, and the notion of the scientist as revealer of the arcane secrets of nature has been a metaphor cen-

tral to the history of western science—and not always one with beneficial results. In the history of didactic poetry, the initiatory plot is strongly present

from at least the time of Parmenides and Empedocles: in particular, the teacher promises the pupil a revelation, as Lucretius promises Memmius at the beginning of the De rerum

natura that he will learn

de summa

caeli ratione

deumque," "the highest/deepest/innermost system of the sky and the gods” (1. 54). As one would expect, the initiation that the De rerum natura offers is a

specifically Epicurean one, in which the elements from the mysteries are recontextualized. The high truth about the gods that Memmius will learn is that

they have no concern for man; the shout of the hierophant announcing the birth of the holy child becomes the voice of Epicurean reason revealing that there is no heaven or hell:* the ultimate secret of things is that there is no secret, just the way things are." These aspects of the initiatory plot can obviously be developed further, but I concentrate here on just one aspect, the journey from

darkness to light. As we have seen, Lucretius uses this metaphor many times, but there is a paradox, in that the poem opens with light—the coming of Venus

at dawn on the first day of Spring in the prologue—and closes with darkness, the return of the mourners from the funerals of the plague victims: in a sense, we move from daybreak to nightfall, with the action taking place within one day, like a canonical tragedy. The reversal of the expected pattern is all the more noticeable, in that the explicit reference to Lucretius’s own journey through the text at the opening of Book Six recalls the prologue: as he runs praescripta ad candida calcis, “to the ordained white of the chalk” (6. 92) he appeals for help to Calliope, requies hominum divumque voluptas, “peace of men and pleasure of

the gods.” The finishing line of Lucretius’s race is bright-shining, and we recall the atmosphere of the prologue to Book One, but this book will end with the mourners’ fighting over the Iliadic funeral pyres and with disease, death, and grief. This reversal of the programmed initiatory movement from darkness to light has a special point in an Epicurean context, however. The Epicurean in the prologue to Book Three gets to see that there is no hell but in another sense, also has to come to look into the heart of darkness. Since there is no providence, one must be able to face even the horrors of the plague: this cannot be the whole of the revelation, but it is a part of it. The reader may then, of course, return to the more “optimistic” parts of the poem, and indeed to a recontextualized reading of the prologue: the darkness of the end then becomes like

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the preliminaries of initiation, after which the terrors flee away and we see only the model of divine happiness, as in the prologue to Book Three. One point that this reversal of the expected initiatory movement stresses is once again that the plot implied in the reading of a work is not necessarily identical with the plot of its writing. We often find the trope in which the reader tracks the writer as the latter is envisaged producing the text, looking over his or her shoulder, as it were: this process is obviously connected with scenarios in which the reader “accompanies” the writer on the latter’s journey or in which the instruction is imaged as oral, the text a record of what the teacher said to the pupil. But the reader can reread, and the later readings can be incorporated into the plot of the work. The reader of the De rerum natura receives a revelation within the work but in a sense can only fully appreciate this revelation after the full process of instruction has been accomplished: in a sense, the real entry into the telesterion comes in that process of rereading, with the end of the poem describing the preliminary terrors. This entire process leads in turn to a further point, which might be phrased as an objection to what I have written about didactic plots: that although there are some clear signals of progression in the poem, such as the reference to the finishing line discussed before, elements of the plots are actually distributed throughout the work. As we have seen, for instance, the clearest moment of initiatory revelation comes in the prologue to Book Three, not at the end of the poem. I do not think that this placement weakens our sense of the presence of these didactic plots, however, as precisely the same phenomenon occurs in narrative epic. A work like the Odyssey or the Aeneid can be seen to be constantly playing with its ends and beginnings within the body of the work and without: this treatment problematizes the teleology of

the work but does not remove our sense of plot. Similarly, the fact that the ends and beginnings of the various didactic plots may be mirrored within the work makes us aware of the problems inherent in the very notion of plot in didactic, but need not make us abandon their use. Rather than take these thoughts further, however, I want to look at another aspect of didactic plot, that is, its relation to what Oliver Lyne called "implicit myth."* Plots sometimes come associated with a particular canonical story, which can be seen as present even when not explicitly signaled. In the pro-

logue to Book Two of the De rerum natura, for instance, Lucretius describes happiness as consisting of the possession of the secure citadels of the wise (2. 9-13):

from which you can look down on others and see them wander all over and wandering look for the path of life; see them compete with ability,

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strive with nobility, work night and day with outstanding effort to emerge at the top of wealth and get control of things.

Lines 11-13 are repeated in the prologue of Book Three in a description of political life at Rome (59-64): Finally, greed and the blind desire for honors, which force wretched men to cross the boundaries of the law and sometimes, as companions and servants in crime, to work night and day with outstanding effort to emerge at the top of wealth, these wounds of life are fed in no small part by the fear of death.

These lines in turn are echoed in the famous allegorical reading of the myth of Sisyphus in 3.998-1002: For to seek rule, which is empty and is not ever given, and in this always to endure hard labor, this is with effort to push up an opposing mountain a rock, which however then from the highest peak rolls back down again and seeks at speed the levels of the flat plain. The politician constantly striving for office is explicitly compared in this last

passage to Sisyphus, but the use of the common political metaphor of emergere (to emerge) enables us to see in both of the previous two passages the implicit presence of the myth.? Moreover, it is possible that in ad summas emergere opes

(to emerge at the top of wealth) there is present another implicit myth, that of Odysseus tossed on the waves for days and nights before making land. Odysseus's storm-tossed voyage could be allegorized in terms, as John Dillon puts it, of "our struggle through the storms and shipwreck of material existence”:*! these men are tossed on the storm of life because they do not know the correct Epicurean path. The Odyssean plot of struggle and homecoming has been a favorite allegory for human life from antiquity to modern times,* and it is possi-

ble that it is present as an implicit myth in some of the central plots of didactic, as Monica Gale has suggested for both Parmenides' journey and that of the De rerum natura.” As she remarks, the reader of the De rerum natura can be seen

as "an Odysseus figure, journeying towards his true home under the guidance of Epicurus and Lucretius" (125). I would stress only one possible implication of this implicit myth in the De rerum natura, which I agree is present. Odysseus's journey is a journey out, an adventure, but also a journey home, a "journey back,” to use Edwin Muir's term.“ This journey is mirrored by the way that

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Epicurus in the prologue to Book One travels out into the infinite but returns with a message of human finitude, the altus terminus haerens (1.77). The Epicurean version of Odysseus’s journey will stress these elements more because Epicureanism is, in a sense, about returning human beings to their natural state by stripping from them the false beliefs that have corrupted them, rather than providing them with a rich, new belief set. This negative orientation is naturally only one aspect of the philosophy, but it colors many of the plots and metaphors used in the exposition of it. Human beings have wandered far from the truth and so must be brought patiently back to contact with phenomenal reality: they are not to set off on an exciting journey of discovery but instead to return home after being alienated from the way things are by false beliefs. From

an Epicurean point of view, the De rerum natura is the exact opposite of the sort of reading of the Odyssey myth that we see in Tennyson’s Ulysses or Cavafy’s Ithaca: far from the journey's (= reading the poem) being what matters, it is the return to a correct view of the world that is vital. The poetic experience is a

means to that end, not an end in itself. Again, one thinks of Wittgenstein: to see the world correctly, we must surmount the propositions that have brought us to that recognition.* I again want to move on rather than developing this notion of the implicit myths of didactic, but there is one aspect that is especially relevant to the question of genre. The pattern of the Odyssean journey is an importation from epic, which takes its place alongside many other elements in the De rerum natura that

are the on ten

associated with epic. Gian Biagio Conte, for instance, has drawn attention to way that Epicurus's struggle with religio in Book One can be seen as drawing elements of Iliadic combat;** and another model there is gigantomachy, ofthe paradigm of epic in recusationes." The Odyssean implicit myth, with

perhaps some other elements of the plots and structural metaphors that I have been trying to see as secondary elements in the didactic genre, may also be seen as epic elements within didactic. Again, it seems to me that this perception complicates any generic analysis but does not render it pointless. We all know

that genres are always already mixed in practice, but it is often convenient to use a sort of langue/parole distinction, in which individual texts will be mixed, but standing behind them will be Platonic forms of unmixed genres that structure the generic play within the texts. This is a productive approach, which enables

us to give force to generic distinctions even as they are being deconstructed, but of course there is always in practice feedback from the actual texts to the hypothetical generic forms behind them. In this particular instance, there is a sense in which an epic element is always already part of the didactic genre. This sense is only what we might expect, given that didactic poetry tends to be written in

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the same meter as epic, and ancient genre theory is only with difficulty able to separate it off as a separate genre.* The heroic nature of the quest for knowl-

edge and the fight with ignorance is not prominent in Hesiod but comes in particularly with Parmenides and Empedocles; from then on, however, it is an epic element in didactic that then in turn becomes itself a marker of the genre that includes it. This tendency is seen most famously in Vergil's praise of Lucretius ( Georgics 2. 490—493);

Happy the man who has been able to know the causes of things, and who has trampled underfoot all fears, and inexorable fate, and the noise of greedy Acheron.

The gesture of trampling underfoot the conquered enemy is a familiar one from the iconography of conquest and suggests such epic triumphs as Apollo's victory over Python: Lucretius as didactic hero is someone who has the epic power to know and to act. Didactic is a genre of power, which, in contrasting itself with epic and setting intellectual achievement against martial conquest, incor-

porates into itself the qualities of the opposed genre.*? Finally, I should like to draw some general conclusions about the nature of genre from these brief observations about the role of plot in didactic poetry. I

have argued that despite its discursive nature, didactic has a number of plots and that these plots are connected to a complex system of structural metaphors and implicit myths. Although these plots and metaphors are secondary ele-

ments of the genre, they are significant markers of it. 1 have looked only at a few aspects of one or two plots, but it is clear that the ramifications of the system ex-

tend far out into the cultural context of each work and that it is not easy to draw a line in our constructions between generic expectations and the wider cultural horizon. The didactic journey through the text leads us to other genres—above

all epic—and to our configurations of travel in the ancient world. Our readings of individual works activate and recontextualize these plots and metaphors, and in the process, our readings change them: it is clear, for instance, that the genre

before and after Lucretius is not the same. All of this tends towards the unsurprising—perhaps even hackneyed—conclusion that genres are unstable and leaky entities, that there can be no clear answer to a question such as "what is

didactic?" except in the jejune terms of the primary elements. This conclusion does not mean, naturally, that generic analysis is without point—indeed, it

highlights its centrality—but it does suggest that it has to take its place within wider systems of social construction. One cannot isolate out generic from other expectations because, I would argue, the meaning of the secondary elements

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that are part of generic expectation per se is changed by our constructions of the structural metaphors that underlie these elements. If all didactic arguably has a plot of enlightenment, the meaning of “enlightenment” nevertheless changes in history. And this leads to a second, and broader, point. Another way of conceiving of generic conventions is as a set of guidelines for composition: if one wants to write a didactic poem, one needs to have a notion of the primary and secondary

elements of the genre. This necessity seems irrelevant to most of us: few will be thinking of embarking on a didactic poem on, say, the history of Latin literature or of modern literary theory. But I began by noting the links between didactic poetry and prose artes and institutiones, and there is an obvious sense in which not only anyone writing such works but also anyone involved in the enterprise

of teaching will find their practice governed by some of the plots and structural metaphors that I have discussed. And our readers’ and pupils’ horizons of ex-

pectation will similarly be determined by the constraints of the didactic genre more broadly conceived. As I noted at the beginning, much recent educational theory has stressed that what plots and metaphors emerge as dominant from these negotiations are likely to have a major impact on the effects of the whole didactic process. The investigation of genre thus—once more—becomes inevi-

tably self-reflexive. Until recently, just as critical theorizing had tended to take for granted the forms of scholarly debate—the article, the book, the conference paper—so the genres of teaching—the lecture, the textbook, the handout— have tended to be seen as timeless: how they are used may be discussed, but

their existence may not. The electronic age has changed all this, providing new media and new genres: and with them, a new set of structural metaphors and plots (hypertext, the web, surfing). Once more the older metaphors such as that

of the journey that I discussed earlier are similarly recontextualized: the journey

back home becomes the journey back to the Home Page. Although few people would see themselves as didactic poets, the question of the genre of didactic is thus of more than historical concern. When we teach, what genres do we teach in, and what are the expectations engendered by the plots and structural metaphors that are part of them? What is the genre of this piece, and of the book of which it forms a part: and what is the story they tell?

CHAPTER

TWELVE

[2] 2] eats

Essential Epic:

Genre and Gender from Macer to Statius STEPHEN

HINDS

Preface: Heinze, Kroll and Beyond Broadly speaking, three approaches have been taken in twentieth-century criticism to classical Latin poems considered problematic as to generic category;

broadly speaking, each approach has arisen in reaction to its predecessor. For a schematic doxography, consider the poem that is often regarded as the extreme test case of any genre-based reading of Rome's highly formalized literary traditions, the hexameter Metamorphoses of Ovid. (1) The essential purity of the Metamorphoses as an epic has been asserted,

with "unepic" elements played down and their importance minimized; therefore, Richard Heinze's 1919 comparison and contrast of hexametric and elegiac narrative styles in Ovid is still regularly invoked as a starting point for discussion.

(2) The poem's impurity as an epic has been counterasserted, with the implication either (a) that it is to be defined as a post-Hellenistic crossbreed or hybrid of existing genres (that is, as an outcome of "Die Kreuzung der Gattungen,” in Wilhelm Kroll's enduring 1924 formulation)! or (b) that it resists any appeal to genre as a useful interpretative tool (so Galinsky 1975.viii "the generic termi-

nology has imposed its limitations even on those who have disagreed with Heinze"). A third variant (c) might hold that the Metamorphoses renders neces-

sary the invention of a new genre or genre label (compare the idea in Klein 1974 that Callimachus's Aetia establishes a "counter-genre" of aetiology). Knox 1986

embraces elements of (a), (b), and (c), emphasizing the roots of the Metamorphoses in largely unepic Alexandrianism and applying Ross's influential view 221

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(1975:37) of earlier Augustan poetic genealogy: “the discovery of a single unified tradition comprehending a variety of forms and genres means that genre need no longer count for much.” (3) The epic identity of the Metamorphoses is reasserted; but now discrepant elements, instead of being played down (as by Heinze) or of being treated as witnesses to the irrelevance of genre (as by Galinsky), are embraced as part of a

dynamic process of self-definition: the poem’s generic self-consciousness is expressed and negotiated not just in its observance but also in its creative transgression of the expected bounds of epic (3a, Hinds 1987:99—134).? Whereas approach (2) accepts generic poikilia as (in one way or another) a fait accompli, approach (3) insists on a continuing and active dialectic between the genres so

mixed, for author and readers alike, “staged” within the text of the poem concerned.‘ An especially important and well-theorized version of (3) is Conte’s

account of the totalizing ambition of a given genre (3b, 1994:115-125), which reads (say) the Ovidian Herois not as an elegy that threatens cross-border incursions into other genres (transgression) but as an elegy that seeks programmati-

cally to coopt and subsume all other generic systems to its own narrow but allencompassing worldview; such an account can also be applied, mutatis mutan-

dis, to the epic ambition of the Metamorphoses. What approaches (2a) and (3) have in common with (1) is a strong sense

that an appeal to some essence or substratum of a given genre is inscribed in Roman poetic thinking: as the pure form from which crossbred forms are hybridized (2a); as the "default setting" from which experiments and transgressions measure their distance (3a); or as the nucleus into whose orbit all other

matter will be attracted in the formation of an enlarged, totalized genre (3b). This generic essence may be explained simply with reference to meter or with

reference to the sets of stereotyped rules that metrical categories attract in ancient philological and bibliographical traditions of taxonomy—even from practitioners who do not practice what they preach (for example, Ovid at Remedia 372ff., to be discussed later).

Some moderns have sought to define generic essence as a moving target, ever changing to adapt to changes in poetic practice; this emphasis on historical accommodation underlies (say) much of Alastair Fowler’s 1982 book on genre (grounded in a study of the “kinds” of English literature).5 However, such a

commonsensical approach is rendered inadequate to the present paper’s pur-

poses by its very readiness to narrow and to negotiate away the gap between prescription and practice, which is so fundamental to the construction of genre in a classical Roman poem. The remarkable thing about the appeals to generic essence in Roman critical and metapoetic discussion—whether defined in

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terms of approaches (1), (2a), or (3)—is their persistence in the face of poetic practice. “Unepic” elements, no matter how frequently they feature in actual epics, continue to be regarded as unepic; as if oblivious to elements of vitality and change within the genre (for which he himself may be in part responsible), each new Roman writer reasserts a stereotype of epic whose endurance is as re-

markable as is its ultimate incompatibility with the actual plot of any actual epic in the Greek or Latin canon. A good way to look afresh at Roman generic poetics, then, will be to con-

sider how and why some of epic’s most recurrent features are systematically treated as threatening the essence of the genre rather than as helping to constitute it—hence my specific theme. I want to focus on the continually affected surprise of Augustan and post-Augustan poets at the fact that women and love—and women in love—can have a place in epic. The role of the female in actual epics never becomes canonized within stereotyped descriptions of the

genre, but a case can be made that surprise at the role of the female in actual epics does become so canonized: woman never becomes theorized into epic as an essential element of the genre, but woman does achieve a kind of essentialized theoretical status as an ambusher of the purity of epic. How the regular-asclockwork involvement of the female in the actual plots of epic can be obsessively characterized as adulterating the genre, without ever really coming to be characterized as defining it, is a question that exposes the well-known but little understood tension between Roman generic theory and Roman generic practice; and it is a question worth probing in terms formal, ideological, and epistemological. In this respect, of course, Roman epic’s enduring failure to theorize some of its own most representative features involves particular exclusions that are no less interesting to critics of gender than they are to critics of genre; so that my paper will have the further purpose of bringing together two methodological conversations still too often carried on in isolation from one another.

Arms and the [Wo]man We all know what, programmatically and prescriptively, a Roman epic is supposed to treat: arma virumque (arms and the man, Virgil, Aen. 1.1); reges et proelia (kings and battles, Virgil, Ecl. 6.3); res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella (exploits of kings and generals and grim wars, Horace, A.P. 73). We

are also by now familiar with the paradox (just rehearsed in my Preface) that the more Roman poets mix, blur, and hybridize generic categories in their poetic practice, the more persistently they tend to appeal to unmixed, essen-

tialized, and unchanging conceptions of the genre in their poetological policy

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statements. In Ovid (on whom I shall continue to focus for a while) this gulf be-

tween theory and practice amounts to something of a methodological scandal. Here in the Remedia Amoris is the soon-to-be author of Rome’s most elegiac epic (the Metamorphoses) and Rome's most epic elegy (the Fasti): If you have sense, match each theme to its proper meter. Bold wars (fortia . . . bella) rejoice to be related in Homeric feet: what place can there be in this medium

for erotic airs (delictis illic quis locus esse

potest)? . . . Let seductive Elegy sing of quivered Amores, and, light in love, keep to her playful caprices. Achilles is no theme for the meter of Callimachus; Cydippe is wrong for the voice of Homer. (Rem. 372-374, 379-382)

How can Ovid of all poets, the poster boy of Augustan generic hybridization,

offer (in whatever cause) this doctrinaire credo of generic purity? As our understanding of the generic rules of engagement in Augustan poetry has grown more sophisticated, recent critics have found such essentialist and fundamentalist poses by Augustan poets ever more irritating. Of course Ovid knows full well how to import deliciae into epic and (just as important) how to read the previous history of epic as a history of the importation of deliciae into epic. And of course he knows full well how Achilles can fairly be treated in Callimachus's elegiac meter. In the third of his own Heroides, in fact, just a few years earlier, Ovid himself had imported the hero of the Iliad into an

epistolary elegy for 77 couplets—and had done so not by accident but in full generic self-awareness: arma cape, Aeacide, sed me tamen ante recepta, et preme turbatos Marte favente viros! propter me mota est, propter me desinat ira, simque ego tristitiae causa modusque tuae

(Her. 3.87-90)

Take up arma, Aeacides— yet take me back first—and with the favor of Mars put harried warriors to rout! On my account your wrath was stirred, on my account let it end: let me be both cause and conclusion of your grim sadness. To offer a genre-enhanced paraphrase of Briseis’s ventriloquized words here in

their Ovidian context (a paraphrase whose tendentiousness should be justified by the subsequent course of my discussion): “Fulfil your martial epic project,

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225

Achilles, but take care of erotics first! Lay your wrath to rest—i.e. lay to rest your programmatic μῆνιν... Πηληιάδεω ’AxtAnjos—as being coterminous with our temporary elegiac estrangement.”’ In other words, underlying Briseis’s exhortation in Heroides 3 is the idea that the Iliad, although the foundational text of the epic tradition, is also interpretable (on a female-gendered “reading,” anyway) as a tale of erotic elegiac separation and reunion. We should register the real strength in this appropriative argument, even as we register the limitation of the knowledge granted by Ovid to Briseis. (At the time of her writing, Patroclus has not yet gone out to die;* unbeknownst to Briseis, a second, greater source of epic ira / menis awaits Achilles in the near future—which will deny to

his wrath the easy closure that Briseis, the female and elegiac reader, has here envisaged. ) To return to the Remedia passage and its definition of epic, what is interesting about such a normative theorization of the genre, in the light of actual Augustan poetic practice, is not in itself the programmatic insistence on stereotyp-

ing the epic genre as the genre of arma or bella,’ but rather the persistent and often explicit exclusion of anything female or erotic from that stereotyped definition: delictis illic quis locus esse potest? As Ovid’s elegiac “take” on the Iliad in Heroides 3 can remind us, no actual Greek or Roman epic capable of being coopted to the arma stereotype is without its female and erotic elements, from the Iliad to the Aeneid; and the fact is that in most epics, from the Iliad onwards, an eroticized female, rather than just offering an interlude in conflict, functions as the catalyst of conflict. A commonsense Fowlerian characterization of Iliadic and post-Iliadic epic might build on accumulated weight of literary historical precedent to characterize the genre as, in essence, one of war between men and over women; but in the Romans' own characterizations of epic, the essential role

of the female is tendentiously suppressed or skewed. Perhaps the first and most telling terms in which to make sense of this continual remarginalization of the female and the erotic are as follows: The taxonomic bias of Alexandrian and Roman criticism means that essentialized characterizations of epic are most often offered (as in the Remedia passage) in the immediate vicinity of essentialized characterizations of elegy. And generating the same juxtaposition, programmatic allusions to the composition of epic are

a recurrent topos within Propertian and Ovidian elegy. In this well-known topos, an epic project is commonly envisaged as being abandoned, postponed, or better left to someone else; the love poet's choice of elegy over epic is presented as a renunciation of warfare and other concerns of the public, male sphere in favor of the demands of amor (or Amor) and of the (mostly) female beloved. Both structurally and ideologically, the presentation of the elegist's

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typical concerns in these terms has the inevitable effect of excluding the erotic and the female from the stereotypable concerns of epic—however important the

erotic and the female might be to actual epic plots. Again and again in Augustan elegy, then, the topos of contrasting poetic projects has the effect of reinforcing

a programmatic stereotype of epic as “all war, all male, all the time.” Thus, for instance, arma are opposed to amor as epic to elegy in Propertius 1.7, Ponticus, while you tell of Cadmean Thebes and the grim arma of fraternal warfare, competing for primacy (so help me) with Homer himself. . . , I, as is my wont, get on with my amores, in quest of something to use against a hard-hearted mistress (1-3, 5-6) in Propertius 2.10,

Let youth sing of loves, and age sing of conflicts: I will sing of wars, when my girl has been written (bella canam, quando scripta puella meast) (7-8)

and at the beginning of Ovid’s Amores, with its formalist fiction that the poet was set to embark on an epic when Cupid sabotaged his project by stealing a foot from the second of a pair of hexameters: Arms, and violent wars, in weighty measure: that was the output I planned, with matter suited to the meter. The second verse was equal to the first—but Cupid, they say, with a laugh stole away one foot. (Ov. Am. 1.1.1—4)

What is the materia suitable for writing epic in Ovid’s elegiac proem? arma and violenta bella. Any mention of the erotic tensions that so often underlie or structure those arma and bella in actual epics, any allowance for Cupid’s own

appearances in the divine machinery of (say) the Argonautica or Aeneid, is ruled out by the need for a clean rhetorical and ideological contrast with the materia designated as suitable for elegy: “And yet I have no matter suited to lighter measures—neither a boy, nor a girl with combed long locks.” (1.1.19-20)

Not only does the common Augustan habit of contrasting the programs of epic and elegy help to make sense of blank exclusions of the female and of the erotic from theorizations of epic, but also (to move on to my more subtle point)

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that same habit of contrast helps to explain how references to epic’s actual female and erotic forces, where they do occur, tend to present those female and erotic forces as subversive of, rather than constitutive of, the epic plot. This treatment is observable in another poem in the Amores, 2.18. Here, as well as offering the familiar contrast between his elegiac project and an epic project that he had previously envisaged, Ovid makes a further contrast between the elegiac Amores and an actual epic written not by himself, but by his friend Macer: While you, Macer, take your poem down to the wrath of Achilles, and invest the oath-bound men with their first arms (carmen ad iratum dum tu

perducis Achillem / primaque iuratis induis arma viris), 1 dally in the indolent shade of Venus, with tender Amor crushing my grand designs. Often I have said to my girl “Go away, why don’t you?”—her immediate response has been to sit in my lap . . . 1 am vanquished, and my talent is recalled from the taking up of arms: I sing of exploits at home and of my personal wars (resque domi gestas et mea bella cano). (Am. 2.18.1-6, 11-12)

So far, the characterization of epic poetry here is very much along the same lines as in the Propertian and Ovidian passages just discussed: all war, all male, all the time. Note the first couplet’s evocations of the incipit-words of both Iliad and Aeneid;'° note too how the description of elegy in line 12 allusively domesticates and eroticizes the most famous of all Augustan characterizations of epic, Horace’s at Ars Poetica 73 (translated earlier):

res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella

However, when the closing lines of the elegy return to Macer’s “Iliadprequel,” an interesting twist has been added to Ovid’s characterization of his friend’s epic project: nec tibi, qua tutum vati, Macer, arma canenti aureus in medio Marte tacetur Amor: et Paris est illic et adultera, nobile crimen, et comes extincto Laodamia viro. si bene te novi, non bella libentius istis dicis, et a vestris in mea castra venis

(Am. 2.18.35—40)

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Stephen Hinds Nor where it is safe for you, Macer, as a bard of arma, do you leave golden Amor unsung in the midst of Mars. Both Paris and his adulteress—a celebrated scandal—are there, and Laodamia, companion to her husband in death. If I know you well, you do not tell of wars more gladly than of these: you are moving over from your camp into mine.

The erotic, the female and (in Paris’s case) the effeminate turn out to have a

place in Macer’s epic after all—unlike in the stereotyped descriptions of the genre quoted before. But consider the terms in which these elements are introduced: nec tibi, qua tutum vati, Macer, arma canenti

“where it is safe for you .. ": for a poet who sings of arma, it seems that there are risks involved in the introduction of Amor. An incipient interest in Amor makes of Macer a potential traitor to his genre: acknowledgment of the erotic and female dimensions of the Trojan war myth produces, not a broad-based, Fowlerian epicist, but rather a generic turncoat likely to sneak across to the camp of elegy. As soon as a Trojan war epic begins to dwell on the seduction of Helen, indispensable though this be to the war plot, that epic is flirting with ge-

neric transgression. Once again, the ever-available contrast with elegy has locked the genre into a narrow stereotype of itself. The implication is that once epic gets in touch with its feminine side, its essential epic-ness is threatened:

what at first sight looked like a broadening and feminizing of the epic paradigm turns out to be something close to the opposite. “qua tutum vati...”: by way of preparation for the extended discussion of

Statius’s Achilleid that will conclude this paper, let me return parenthetically to a passage in Amores 1.1 that can suggest that something even more shameful than an imputation of treachery may await the poet who adulterates the purity of epic: in a word, emasculation. In that programmatic aition of the elegiac cou-

plet, the move from the “hard” themes of epic to the “soft” themes of elegy entails an enervation in the poet's style, and ultimately (through an easy innu-

endo), in the poet’s own manhood: cum bene surrexit versu nova pagina primo, attenuat nervos proximus ille meos

(Am. 1.1.17-18)

When my new page has risen up well with its first verse, the next verse diminishes my—nervos."!

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To resume. In Amores 2.18, Ovid explains (away) the erotic and the female elements in Macer’s Trojan epic; in his great apologia from exile, Tristia 2, he does the same for the Iliad itself: denique composui teneros non solus amores: composito poenas solus amore dedi... Ilias ipsa quid est aliud nisi adultera, de qua inter amatorem pugna virumque fuit? quid prius est illi flamma Briseidos, utque fecerit iratos rapta puella duces?

( Trist. 2.361—362, 371-374)

Finally, I am not the only author to write tender amores; but I am the only author to be punished for it . . . The Iliad itself —Wwhat is it but an adulteress about whom her lover and her husband had a fight? What occurs in it before the flare-up for Briseis, the wrath of the generals due to the seizure of the girl?

Ovid is using literary historical arguments to deny that there is anything exceptional, or exceptionable, in the erotic poetry of the Ars Amatoria. His tactic, in the lines quoted, is to turn Homer himself into a kind of erotic elegist—rather as he had done with Macer in Amores 2.18, but now in a genre-defining game with higher stakes. What is the Iliad, he asks, but the adultery of Helen and the fire of passion ignited by Briseis? (Note that Ovid here renders explicit the very

reading of the Iliad that I argued to be implicit in Briseis's “own” elegiac arguments back in Her. 3.87-90.) Ovid's characterization of the defining text of epic is clearly meant to come across as a perverse and exaggerated one (Ilias ipsa quid est aliud nisi . . . accents the tendentiousness); and what it perverts is, pre-

cisely, the essentialized view of epic that emphasizes the maleness and militariness of the genre to the exclusion of matters female and erotic. Now the female and the erotic within epic are to be acknowledged—but with a very

characteristic kind of skewing. Recall the distinction proposed in my preface: the role of the female in actual epics never becomes canonized within stereotyped descriptions of the genre; but surprise at the role of the female in actual epics does become so canonized. Such is the dynamic here: Ovid offers a perverse characterization of the Iliad's epic qualities to make an elegiac point (the Iliad is a collection of Amores); what is entirely normal is his use of the Iliad's own female characters to achieve that perversion. So far my approach to these questions of genre and gender has been wholly relational: I have focused on discussions in elegiac texts of what is normal and

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what is transgressive in epic. It is time to consider the operation of these ques-

tions within epic texts themselves. Let me take a few bearings, then, in that most canonical Augustan treatment of epic arma virumque, Virgil's Aeneid—firstly and most summarily in the Dido episode, at whose transgression of the epic

norm of “all war, all male, all the time” Ovid had affected some disingenuous surprise at another moment in his address to Augustus in Tristia 2: Some loudly celebrate wars and their bloody weaponry; some sing of the exploits of your line, some of your own. As for me—envious nature has confined me within a narrow space, granting but slight powers to my talent. And yet that most favoured Aeneid-poet of yours brought his “arms and the man” to a Tyrian couch (et tamen ille tuae felix Aeneidos auctor / contulit in Tyrios arma virumque toros), and no part of the whole work is more read than that union of illicit amor. ( Trist. 2.529—536)

On Ovid's tendentious reading, Virgil sets up an assignation for his epic Aeneid in the purple sheets of a Tyrian bed—in which, at the lowest stratum of meaning, arma virumque can function like a phrase in Ausonius's Cento Nuptialis to endow our man with the "equipment" he needs for erotic burlesque.'? But is some element of surprise at the Aeneid's assimilation of such an erotic episode encoded, albeit less luridly, within the Aeneid itself? I think so: the Tristia 2 vignette is as much a commentary on Virgil's own self-conscious play with epic

norms as it is a parodic reading——even granted that Ovid's purposes lead him to deemphasize

Dido's more

obvious

affinities with tragedy in favor of her

affinities with elegy and other "slight" genres. One might look to the fact that, whereas the Carthaginian episode in

Aeneid | and 4 boasts the full paraphernalia of epic divine machinery, the agent of that machinery is none other than Cupid, the divine player stereotypically

associated with erotic elegy; remember Rern. 379 blanda pharetratos Flegia cantet Amores. One might cite the marked downsizing of epic lexis embodied in Dido’s famously affective diminutive at Aen. 4.328-329, at the moment when her foundation-narrative is definitively eclipsed by Aeneas's: si quis mihi parvulus aula / luderet Aeneas (if a darling little Aeneas were playing in my pal-

ace...). Or one might consider the terms in which hostile witnesses are allowed to define Aeneas's entanglement with Dido in the various narrative focalizations of Aeneid 4: what to Mercury is a stalling of the Aeneid's mission by a hero who has become, unepically, uxorius (Aen. 4.266), is to Fama a forgetting of regnum by a ruler who has sunk into a winter of erotic servitude (Aen.

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4.193-194), and is to Iarbas a perversion of natural justice by a perfumed Paris with a retinue of Asiatic eunuchs (Aen. 4.215-217)—this last being especially unsettling in its alignment of the Aeneid’s hero with the familiar stereotype of an emasculated, orientalized, un-Roman other. So much by way of brief evocation of the Dido episode. Let me dwell a little

longer on another Virgilian nexus of genre and gender, in Aeneid 7—which I select because it is founded on an unexpected and suggestive reprise of a celebrated speech by Hector in the sixth book of the Iliad, in which the Homeric

hero is responding to his wife's attempt to persuade him to avoid the dangers of battle. (My discussion here is deeply indebted to a fine treatment by Alison Keith in her forthcoming book Engendering Roman Epic, a major intervention in the present paper's field of interest.) "But go home and see to your own tasks, the loom and the distaff, and bid your handmaids ply their work; war will be the concern of men, myself

above all, that dwell in Ilium (πόλεμος δ᾽ ἐμοί, Ἰλίῳ Eyyeyaacıv).” So saying, glorious Hector took up his horse-plumed helmet; and his dear wife went home, looking back often, and letting big tears fall. (J. 6.490496)

This famous Iliadic exchange is one that might be expected to generate considerable interest among Augustan characterizers of epic norms, and, perhaps, to be regarded as a foundational moment for the pure-arma stereotype; and I

think it was so regarded by the Augustans.'> Here in Aeneid 7, Virgil’s Turnus confronts an aged priestess—unbeknownst to him, she is really the Fury Allecto—who has just attempted to tell him how to run his war: "sed te victa situ verique effeta senectus, o mater, curis nequiquam exercet, et arma

regum inter falsa vatem formidine ludit. cura tibi divum effigies et templa tueri; bella viri pacemque gerent quis bella gerenda"

(Aen. 7.440444)

"But old age, madam, exhausted, decayed, and barren of truth, worries you needlessly with cares, and deludes your prophetic vision with false fears amid the arma of kings. Your responsibility is to watch over the statues

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and temples of the gods; men will handle war and peace, for wars are theirs to handle.”

For Turnus, as for Hector at Il. 6.492—493, but with much Augustan programmatic enhancement, the making and breaking of war is mars work. But whereas Andromache, the recipient of this speech in the Iliad, accepts Hector's division of labor between the sexes and beats a wordless and tearful retreat, this time the epic male is speaking to a very different kind of epic female—one who is by no means ready to accept a marginalized role within the genre of arma. When Allecto throws off her disguise, she ceases to be the elderly priestess Calybe ( Turnus's ageism is, then, of only momentary interest), but she continues to be a female, albeit a female of a different kind than either Andromache or

the priestess to whom Turnus had imagined he was speaking. And this female throws Turnus's characterization of the genre back in his teeth: "See me now (en ego) exhausted, decayed, whom old age, barren of deludes with false fears amid the arma of kings. Pay heed to this: come from the seat of the dread sisters; war and death are in my (adsum dirarum ab sede sororum, / bella manu letumque gero)"

truth, I am hand (Aen.

7.452455)

Turnus's allusion to the Iliad 6 passage has to be heard in order for the full programmatic force of Allecto's reply here to be apprehended. Turnus had repeated the standard androcentric view of epic arma; he had allusively grounded it in a foundational passage from the Iliad; and he had voiced it within an epic whose very titular opening confirms the androcentrism of epic warfare: arma virumque. But now a female character within the Aeneid challenges the paradigm, thereby challenging not just Turnus but also Hector, Homer, and ultimately the narrator of her own epic. (Not that that challenge is allowed finally to prevail: it is by no means irrelevant to the portrayal of Allecto that her agency

is associated with a brand of warfare represented in the schemes of the Aeneid as both irrational and doomed.)

This discussion well illustrates a point to which I intend to give increasing emphasis in the remainder of my paper: namely, that the institutionalized oth-

erness within epic of the genre's female and erotic elements never becomes formulaic, but rather exists as something mobile and continually open to renegotiation. Let me reinforce that point and also take stock more broadly, by applying some of the categories used in my Preface. Virgilian practice vis-à-vis epic's female and erotic elements does not conform to Heinze's static model of epic pu-

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rity (1), whereby unepic elements are played down and their importance minimized. Nor does it conform

to Kroll’s static model

of epic impurity (2a),

whereby a combination of epic and unepic elements is presented as an achieved hybrid, an outcome of prior negotiation. Rather the model that best explains Virgilian practice is one of dynamic impurity (3). Virgil uses, say, Dido, at once protagonist in her own ktistic narrative and secondary love-interest in Aeneas’s,

to emplot into his epic poem a continuing discussion about the otherness of the epic female; and he does so in such a way that even the terms of reference of the debate do not remain static, either intratextually or intertextually. Thus too, in

the Aeneid 7 nexus analyzed before, Allecto, the demonic Fury, is not Andromache, nor Calybe either: neither the princess tending the palace nor the priestess tending the temple. Turnus repeats in Aen. 7.444 a canonical formulation about the role of women in epic; but the shift in the identity of the female interlocutor, not just between Homer and Virgil but within the Virgilian passage itself, draws attention simultaneously to a continuity in epic’s marginalization of the female, as well as to a mobility and renegotiability as to what such

marginalization of the female may entail, whom it may involve, and how it may be emplotted. A few broader thoughts, then, concerning the theory and practice of epic as a generic category in Rome. One thing that has emerged, I think, is the

interestedness of any Augustan reading of generic norms. The “otherness” within epic of epic’s female and erotic elements persists; but the number of ways in which that otherness can be expressed and the number of different and

sometimes contradictory agendas that it can serve, are legion. We have just seen a single moment in the Iliad invoked by Virgil as the aition for a multiple set of viewpoints on the role of the female in epic. We saw earlier that Ovid could ap-

peal to epic in at least three mildly incompatible ways to defend elegy against the stigma of (over)indulgence in the erotic: Rem. 372ff.: what is right for epic is not right for elegy, and vice versa; Trist. 2.529ff.: even epics sometimes dabble in elegiac amor; Trist. 2.371ff.: epics are nothing but elegiac arnores. This ability of the Augustans to expose an enduring generic prejudice to continual renegotiation is the very thing that (as noted as the outset of the present section) has often exasperated recent critics of Latin poetry. But, in formal terms at least, this ability to renegotiate is a clear strength, which guarantees the dyna-

mism of genre as an operative category in the poetry of Augustan Rome. To sorne extent, this continual renegotiability is nothing more (and noth-

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ing less) than the working out of a universal law of discourse. Iteration entails alteration: with generic oppositions, as noted, but also with generic norms and essences themselves. Even a sign of generic essentialism as solid, say, as the programmatic buzzword arma must pick up and shed traces of context and resonance each time it is (re)cited and (re)framed—whether in discrete passages

quoted earlier such as Prop. 1.7.2, Virg. Aen. 1.1, Ov. Am. 1.1.1, Am. 2.18.2 and 35, and Trist. 2.534, or, within the Aeneid itself, in the changes self-consciously rung on the epic’s opening arma virumque at 1.119, 4.495, 6.233, 8.441, 9.620, 9.777, 11.747, and elsewhere.'* In Duncan Kennedy’s notable formulation, “in

the repetition which attracts the description ‘generic, there is inevitably a recontextualization, involving marks of repetition and traces of citation from

other sources, which brings about generic change in the very act of repeti tion.”'> Kennedy here mediates “a law of impurity or a principle of contamination" that Jacques Derrida seeks to find "lodged within the heart of the law [of

genre] itself"! The Derridean perspective is useful in that it offers us a way to maintain some critical distance from the often occluded appeals to generic essentialism at the core of even the most relativistic model of "dynamic impu-

rity At some ultimate level it is indeed worth thinking of a generic essence like the arma-stereotype as an objectivist fiction masking an infinite set of subjec-

tive negotiations with tradition by an infinite set of infinitely repositionable authors and readers. But perhaps not at every level. The usefulness of the Derridean perspective for a close consideration of poetic form is limited by the

fact that Augustan generic essences really are much more powerfully and pervasively essentialized, among their first reading communities at least, than any-

thing that Derrida contemplates in "La loi du genre"; under the timelessness of his opening aphorisms, Derrida is treating specifically Romantic and postRomantic ideas of genre, and applying his interpretative pressure to the metri-

cally unmarked novel or novella (whose ancient ancestor differs from epic or elegy in that it seems never to be overtly theorized or even named as a generic category by the ancients themselves).

Where Kennedy's Derridean terms of reference can add a fresh dimension to the present discussion, however, is in their (implicit) readiness to reach be-

yond considerations of strict poetic form in envisaging "traces of citation from other sources." In practice, generic essences and oppositions will always find

some interpretative context outside even the most tightly self-referential literary system; and one reason why the role within epic of epic's own female and

erotic elements has to be continually renegotiated, without any closure, is surely sociological. Unless the Romans had somehow and at some point ceased to regard the female as anomalous in the res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia

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bella of contemporary sociopolitical experience, how was any reconciliation between women and weaponry to be expected in the world of epic poetry? As Keith’s forthcoming book will show, the construction of epic at Rome was powerfully complicit with the construction of elite male education and homosocial

discourse." And (to press in this context my argument about the continuing maneuverability of this enduring female and erotic otherness) unless Romans

had somehow lost the capacity to be surprised and perturbed when public affairs actually were disrupted by interventions of female, effeminate, and eroticized agents, why should representations of such otherness in Roman epic

have ever become predictable or routine? In the case of the Aeneid, such interplay between epic and societal tensions is unusually close to the surface in the parallelism of Dido and Cleopatra, in and between the lines of the text—both of them powerful women who threaten the ideological purity and masculine autonomy of the male protagonists associated with them (Aeneas in one story,

Caesar and Antony in the two versions of the other). If the preceding paragraph serves to set a poem like the Aeneid in a particu-

lar cultural frame, let this episode of the stocktaking end with a brief consideration of the proposition that the Aeneid itself constitutes a cultural frame. My case studies in the continual renegotiation of generic tensions have established that there was a healthy tendency in Augustan poetic practice to treat literary form dynamically. But the continuity of such dynamism for post-Augustan epic faced a new threat from the Aeneid itself. Virgil’s chef d’oeuvre was so rapidly and completely institutionalized as Rome’s national epic that it inevitably be-

came the “code model” of the genre for most subsequent Roman poets and readers.'® Does this outcome mean that even elements that had been emplotted by Virgil as transgressive for epic (like the erotic dalliance at Carthage) were now read as normative for the genre? Once the Aeneid became the code model, did it lose all potential to be read as, in places, an unepic epic?

A generation or two ago, most modern Latinists would probably have answered a straightforward yes to the two questions just asked. However, happily (at least for those of us who are devotees of “dynamic impurity”), the most re-

cent revaluations of early imperial poetry, notably by Denis Feeney and Philip Hardie,'? have argued for an epic tradition in the century and more after Virgil's death that challenges its readers to revive and renegotiate Virgilian tensions rather than simply to accept the Aeneid as an achieved hybrid, a Krollian end result. And so it is in my last and most extended case study, from the mid 90s c.E.,

a conspectus of Achilles' erotic encounter with Deidamia on the island of Scyros, which dominates the first book of Statius's unfinished one-and-a-

quarter-book epic fragment, the Achilleid. Whatever the preferred explanation

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may be, more than a century after Virgil had brought Aeneas to Carthage, more than three centuries after Apollonius had brought Jason to Colchis, and more than eight centuries after Homer had given Odysseus an erotic package tour of the entire Mediterranean basin, the canonical epic moment at which the hero

courts a woman on a foreign shore still seems, on the evidence of this episode, to be constructed as threatening its poem’s generic identity rather than confirming it.

Achilles on Scyros? The presence of such generic tension in the Achilleid is expected; and the way in which it is negotiated manages, as expected, to surprise. Previous epic heroes too had adulterated the plot of epic arma by engaging in erotic liaisons with

women; but in the case of the Achilleid, the hero compounds the generic adulteration by engaging in an erotic liaison with a woman while himself dressed as a

woman. Achilles' mother sees him the garments upon him. shoulders, and relaxes his tresses, and switches her

undecided and willing to be compelled, and puts Then she softens his stiff neck, bows his heavy strong arms; she tames and styles his uncombed own necklace to his dear neck; then, shortening

his stride within the embroidered

skirt, she teaches him

how

to walk,

move, and speak with modesty . . . Nor does she struggle long; for abun-

dant gracefulness is at her son's disposal, his manly vigor notwithstanding (invita virtute), and beholders are misled by an indeterminate sex (ambiguus . . . sexus) that by a narrow distinction hides its secret. (Ach. 1.325-331, 335-337)

An Achilles cross-dressed by his mother, anxious to keep him from the Trojan War draft, is a given in any treatment of the action on Scyros. However,

Statius further foregrounds a decision to “unman” his epic hero for the greater part of his poem’s opening book by presenting the entire Scyrian setting as an emblematically unwarlike land (Ach. 1.207 imbelli . . . Lycomedis ... aula), and even as a kind of theme-park of gender- and genre-bending imagery; this is a milieu in which the suppression of Achilles’ manhood and martial impulse

works itself out at the levels of language, setting, and plot in a sustained refraction and distortion of the epic discourses of arma and masculine self-fashioning.?! In fact, with a degree of mannerism that shows Statius at his most thoroughly post-Ovidian, Scyros in the Achilleid is persistently the land not just of

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gender- (and genre-) bending imagery, but of the bending of gender- (and genre-) bending imagery.? It is just after Thetis has presented to the resistant Achilles the idea of "passing" as a female that we, along with Achilles, have our first sight of Deidamia and her sisters. They have come down to the shore to celebrate a festival of Pallas Athena—whose cult statue they adorn by cheering up the goddess's severe hairstyle with leaves and by decorating her spear with flowers: exierant dare veris opes divaeque severas fronde ligare comas et spargere floribus hastam

(Ach. 1.288—289)

They had gone forth to offer the riches of the spring, to bind the stern locks of the goddess with foliage and to shower her spear with blossoms. To

offer a tendentious

paraphrase:

Deidamia

and

her

sisters worship

a

masculinized female, the goddess of war; and they do so by making her more feminine. As if to encourage this way of unpacking the passage, exactly the same reading and revision of Pallas is repeated just below, only this time figuratively, in a comparison that equates Deidamia's appearance with that of the goddess of war... ifthe goddess of war were to divest herself of her martial equipment and demeanour:? atque ipsi par forma deae est, si pectoris angues

ponat et exempta pacetur casside vultus

(1.299-300)

Her beauty is equal to the goddess's own—if the goddess should lay aside the snakes on her breast, remove her helmet and pacify her countenance.

My reading of the codes will initially seem overdone: but the fact is that the scene just sampled, with its problematization of boundaries between male and female, warlike and unwarlike, is retrospectively focalized through the soon-tobe-made-over Achilles (1.301 hanc ubi . . . vidit), and the scene effectively fore-

shadows the terms of the hero's own imminent negotiations with the boundaries of gender and genre. In an earlier context in the book's narrative (1.165—166), Statius had com-

pared Achilles to Apollo, modeling his simile on the famous comparison of Aeneas to Apollo in Aen. 4.143ff. (both Apollos on homecoming from Lycia). In the present scene (1.294—296), Statius fleetingly compares Deidamia to Diana, modeling the passage on the famous comparison of Dido to Diana in Aen.

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1.498ff. (both Dianas standing taller than their entourages). So far, near-perfect

symmetry: the allusion to the Aeneid’s pair of sibling-deity similes sets up

Achilles and Deidamia to repeat the erotic match of their Virgilian forebears Aeneas and Dido. But a little farther on, at the moment when Thetis finishes

talking Achilles through his feminine makeover, the imagery responds with a category disruption of its own: dicit et admoto non cessat comere tactu.

sic ubi virgineis Hecate lassata Therapnis ad patrem fratremque redit, comes haeret eunti mater et ipsa umeros exsertaque bracchia velat; ipsa arcum pharetrasque locat vestemque latentem deducit sparsosque tumet componere crines

(1.343-348)

As she instructs him, she does not cease to apply the styling touch. Thus when Hecate returns worn out from Therapne (haunt of Spartan maidens) to her father and brother, her mother attends her path and veils her child’s shoulders and exposed arms; she arranges the bow and quiver, draws down the hitched-up dress, and takes a mother’s pride in arranging the disordered tresses.

This time it is Achilles who is compared to Diana (under her chthonic alias of Hecate) in an intratextual and intertextual disruption of the protocols: the imagery perversely aligns Achilles with the female, not the male, player in the clas-

sic maritime love story of Virgilian and pre-Virgilian epic. More than that, Statius’s simile foregrounds and complicates the gender transgression: Achilles is compared to the fernale deity of the male province of the hunt at a moment in which that tomboy deity herself receives an uncharacteristically feminine makeover.

Things come to a head at a women-only festival of Bacchus later in Book 1 (598 lex procul ire mares “the law bids males keep far away”), when Achilles, still

dressed as a female, sexually asserts his manhood with Deidamia. Again, the paradoxical situation is accorded a highly mannerist treatment. Statius’s epic imagery responds thus to our hero’s increasingly impressive but sustainedly

ambiguous appearance (605 et sexus pariter decet et mendacia matris “his true sex and his mother’s counterfeit suit him alike”) as he dons the garb of a Bacchant for this paradigmatically liminal rite... and wields the thyrsus (1.612) with noticeable authority:

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talis, ubi ad Thebas vultumque animumque remisit Euhius et patrio satiavit pectora luxu, serta comis mitramque levat thyrsumque virentem armat et hostiles invisit fortior Indos

(1.615618)

Just so Euhius, after relaxing his visage and spirit at Thebes, and enjoying to the full his homeland’s soft living, removes bonnet and garlands from his hair, arms the green thyrsus, and with an accession of boldness goes to meet his Indian foes.

One cannot improve on the Loeb note of Mozley to this passage: “There is a sort of inverted comparison here: the warlike Achilles putting on Bacchic garb is compared to effeminate Bacchus making ready for war.” As early as the opening verse of the episode, in fact, an etymologizing reading of the god’s own patronymic is available to mobilize and to annotate the thematics of gender confusion: 1.593 lucus Agenorei sublimis ad orgia Bacchi ". . . of Bacchus, of RealMan; line.” Finally, back to Deidamia and her entourage, observed at the banquet in honor of the members of the Greek army who arrive in quest of their absentee colleague. By this point, it seems that the Scyrian girls' own collective femininity has been somehow compromised by their absorption of the cross-dressed Achilles; for when they are first espied by Ulysses (our hero amongst them), a simile compares them to Amazons: . . . Subeunt, quales Maeotide ripa, cum Scythicas rapuere domos et capta Getarum moenia, suppositis epulantur Amazones armis

(1.758—760)

They approach like Amazons who, after plundering Scythian homesteads and captured Getic forts, dine on the Maeotid shore with their arma stowed beneath them.

But again there is a mannerist twist: the simile compares the Scyrian girls to transgressively masculinized and militarized women—at the moment in which those women (like Pallas in Ach. 1.299—300) are temporarily dissociated from their weaponry. A move from imagery to plot will show more clearly how all this genderbending is also operative as genre-bending. Immediately after Achilles announces himself to Deidamia in the courtship scene (1.650 ille ego . . .), he de-

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clares himself properly ashamed of the female dress that is cloaking his true male identity: "...nec ego hos cultus aut foeda subissem tegmina, ni primo tu visa in litore: cessi

te propter, tibi pensa manu, tibi mollia gesto tympana .. ."

(1.652-655)

“I would not have put up with this adornment or vile garb, had I not seen you on the shore: on your account I submitted; for you I handle the wooltask and the ‘soft’ drum.” The terms of his protest are significant: the draft-dodging epic hero has shamefully feminized and “softened” himself in the cause of his love for Deidamia; the application of the adjective mollia to the noun tympana is ideological and pro-

grammatic more than straightforwardly descriptive.‘ A reading sensitive to the history of courtship episodes in epic can argue these lines to be symptomatic: the cross-dressed Achilles has externalized and (almost) literalized an emasculation that is the fate of all epic heroes who stray from arma into amor? (as of

all the limp male protagonists of the genre of amor itself?*). What rescues Achilles from his transgressive behavior and unmanly avoidance of war is, precisely, a desire for emblematically epic arma, seen early on in displaced form in Thetis' presentation to the Scyrian king of "Achilles' sister," Amazonian (of course) in “her” interests:

"Do you not see how fierce she is about the eyes, how like her brother? So spirited is she, she would ask for arms and a bow to bear on her shoulders (arma umeris arcumque), and would seek, in the Amazonian way, to reject wedlock.” (1.351—353)

This same desire immediately stirs Achilles, though still dressed inappropriately for arma, just as soon as the Greek leaders arrive: Hardly does Achilles conceal his new joy: eagerly he desires, even as he is, to see the new-arrived heroes and their arms (novos heroas et arma / vel talis vidisse). (1.753—755)

His desire is finally and decisively realized in the actual gift of arma presented by Ulysses to trick the hero out of hiding:

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But fierce Achilles was no sooner confronted by the gleaming shield, engraved with battles—ruddy too, by chance, with the savage stains of war (saevis et forte rubebat / bellorum maculis)—, and leaning there on the spear, than he let out a roar and rolled his eyes, his hair standing up from his brow. Gone are his mother's orders, gone his secret love (nusquam occultus amor): his whole breast is full of Troy. (1.852—857)

The comprehensiveness of Achilles’ conversion from amor to arma is underlined in the fact that the shield presented by Ulysses, unlike the elaborate cosmic icon "later" presented to the hero in the Iliad, is engraved with nothing but battles (caelatum pugnas); its reductively martial message is further enhanced by the bonus of some actual bloodstains. Not only is Achilles ready to embrace the

icons of war, but he is also ready to embrace war itself, gobbets of gore and all.

Achilles-on-Seyros The language and action of Achilleid 1 are internally structured, then, by tensions of genre and gender, through which the repressed terms of arma virumque find devious ways to return to the unwarlike land from which they have been excluded. While my final case study could end there, I have one more perspective to offer. I chose to dwell on the Achilleid in part because, like the Metamorphoses in my Preface, it has often seemed to modern critics to be so peculiar as to resist classification as an epic on any comfortable terms whatsoever. Even among adherents of "dynamic impurity," the dalliance on Scyros has seemed so far to set the agenda as to render the fragment more easily describable under some other rubric: to Conte, the Achilleid is “relaxed and idyllic,” to Feeney a "charming, almost novelistic, fragment"? Such characterizations are fair enough— provided that they do not elide the poem's own internal dialectic of generic self-definition. I want to close with the suggestion that, at an important level, the beginning of the Achilleids second book actually dramatizes or "stages" a metapoetic meditation on the (in)appropriateness of the whole Scyrian episode to the epic narrative that it has inaugurated. What the poet does early in Book 2, I think, is to emplot a number of moves whose cumulative effect is to put the Scyrian action under erasure, sous rature, in a kind of programmatic damnatio memoriae of the episode—proposed by Achilles himself, as epic hero. Here are the stages in the process (para-

phrased a little schematically for the sake of brevity): (1) As Achilles prepares to set sail from the island, now a proper epic hero complete with arma, the people of Scyros are afraid to remember what he had

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been for much of the previous book—an idea expressed in a locution of almost Tacitean pregnancy: There is Aeacides, his breast now bare of the purple dress, shining forth in his newly-seized arma—for the breeze and his kindred seas are calling. All gaze on him and fear him, as young man and chieftain, not daring to remember a thing (Aeaciden . . . prospectant cuncti iuvenemque ducemque / nil ausi meminisse pavent); so wholly changed is he in his restored aspect, as though he had never suffered the Scyrian shores, but were embarking straight from the cave on Mount Pelion. (2.5-11)

(2) A little later, on board ship, Ulysses asks Achilles to explain how on earth Thetis had effected the shameful feminization of the future destroyer of Troy. More than mere narrative economy is involved, I think, in the hero's re-

fusal to be drawn back into an account of the causes of his indecorous delay on Scyros: ... longum resides exponere causas maternumque nefas; hoc excusabitur ense Scyros et indecores, fatorum crimina, cultus"

(2.4345)

“It would take too long to expound inaction's causes and a mother's unspeakable conduct; this sword shall excuse Scyros and the shameful styling, reproach of destiny."

Instead, Achilles asks Ulysses for a very different narrative of causation, namely, an account of the first beginnings of the Trojan war itself: "tu potius, dum lene fretum zephyroque fruuntur carbasa, quae Danais tanti primordia belli, ede: libet iustas hinc sumere protinus iras"

(2.46—48)

“Rather you should declare (while the sea is mild and the sails enjoy the zephyr) what the primordia were for the Greeks of so great a war: my desire is to draw from this a rush of righteous anger." A more manly agenda, to be sure: note in particular how Achilles' active em-

brace of "anger" finds him refashioning himself as, in effect, the canonical Iliadic hero of an epic of ments.?* (3) Ulysses has not forgotten his original question to Achilles, however; and by the time he ends the requested account (2.50—83) of tanti primordia belli, he

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has cunningly managed (via Greek outrage at the abduction of Helen) to bring the conversation back to Scyros, the very area in which Achilles wished to avoid further probing: how would Achilles react, he asks, if someone were to steal Deidamia? Achilles blushes, apparently from a mixture of outrage and embarrassment (2.84-85); but now Diomedes

comes

to the rescue by asking the

young hero himself to put another narrative of first beginnings on the table. This time, the theme is Achilles’ own elemental training on Mount Pelion at the hands of Chiron—a tale of extreme hardiness, as we soon learn, which is en-

tirely free of the softness and effeminacy of the subsequent Scyrian misadventure: ... "quin, o dignissima caeli progenies, ritusque tuos elementaque primae

indolis et, valida mox accedente iuventa, quae solitus laudum tibi semina pandere Chiron, virtutisque aditus, quas membra augere per artes,

quas animum, sociis multumque faventibus edis?"

(2.86-91)

“O worthiest progeny of heaven, why not instead tell us (your friends and admirers) the modes and elements of your early character; and then, as the strength of your youth increased, what seeds of glory, what paths to manhood Chiron was wont to disclose to you, by what arts he would strengthen your limbs and your spirit?”

Here is an Achillean narrative on which Achilles is only too happy to embark. After a diffident beginning, he proceeds to unfold the theme for the next seventy lines: Who would find it a chore to tell of his own deeds? Yet he begins modestly, a little uncertain, and with the air of one compelled. “The story goes that even in my tender and still-crawling years, when the old Thessalian received me on his stark mountain, I did not devour any common food, or sate my hunger at the nourishing breast, but ingested lions’ tough entrails and the marrow of a still-living she-wolf . . ἢ (2.94-100)

What this scene of shipboard storytelling? does, I think, is to adumbrate two ways other than Statius’s of beginning an Achilles epic from first principles: either with the primordia of the whole Trojan war, as in Ulysses’ narrative

(2.50-83), or with the elementa of our hero's own basic training, starting from infancy, as narrated by Achilles himself (2.96-167). Where the poet had chosen

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to begin, of course, back in Book 1, was a little farther on in the eponymous

hero's life story, with the draft-dodging, emasculating intervention of Thetis, which made Achilles into a woman on Scyros. This plan is not how the hero himself would have organized the epic. He ends his own narrative of hardy boy-

hood training at the point where his story catches up to the "soft" narrative controlled by his mother—and does so with a marked aposiopesis:

"hactenus annorum, comites, elementa meorum et memini et meminisse iuvat: scit cetera mater"

(2.166-167)

“Thus far, comrades, I remember and am pleased to remember my forma-

tive years: the rest my mother knows.”

Note how hactenus . . . et memini et meminisse iuvat picks up the vocabulary of memory that described the fearful self-censorship of the Scyrians back in 2.8-9. The aposiopesis in 167 is marked for another reason too: this is the moment at which the Achilleid itself falls silent. Statius publishes no more, and (we assume)

death imposes premature closure on his latest epic project. What Statius had foregrounded in Book 1, Achilles (whose investment in

poetic fame appears as early as 1.188-194 in his performance of a self-reflexive

song about "the mighty seeds of glorious deeds”) would like to forget here in the opening after Virgil, with its own starting an

scenes of Book 2: such is epic's reemplotment, more than a century Ovid, and Macer, of its inevitable but ever-mobile preoccupation generic tensions. Statius versus Achilles on the proper decorum for Achilleid: it is both apt and frustrating that the unfinished poem

breaks off just where the poet has a cue to seize back the agenda from his hero. What is Statius's epic decorum in the Achilleid? Will the narrative be presented in Achilles' strictly martial terms from now on, or will there be more backslid-

ing into the unepic softness and effeminacy authorized by the poet in Achilleid 1? We can never know. However, given the craftiness with which Statius has framed and problematized the generic agenda in his opening book and a quarter, we may be certain of two things: first, that Statius would have failed just as

surely as did all his Roman predecessors to come up with an essentially epic

epic; and second, that the idea of an essentially epic epic would have emerged stronger, not weaker, at the end of the Achilleid's innovative negotiations with the genre.

Notes

Bibliography Index

Abbreviations CA = Powell, J. U. 1925. Collectanea Alexandrina. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

CEG 1 = P. A. Hansen. 1983. Carmina Epigraphica Graeca Saeculorum VIII-V a. Chr. n. Texte und Kommentare, 12. Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter. Addenda and corrigenda appear in CEG 2 — P. A. Hansen. 1989. Carmina Epigraphica Graeca Saeculi IV a. Chr. n. Texte und Kommentare, 15. Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter. Item numbers are cited.

FGE - D. L. Page. 1981. Further Greek Epigrams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. I.Cret. = M. Guarducci. 1935-1950, Inscriptiones Creticae, 4 vols. Rome:

Istituto de archeologia e storia dell' arte. LIMC = Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae.

PMG = D. L. Page. 1962. Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

SIG = Dittenberger, W. and von Gaertringen, F. H. F. 1915—. Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum. Leipzig: S. Hirzel.

NOTES

m3

2]

Introduction

S99

M40

nM:

Colie 1973:17.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

The point is made by Fowler in this volume. Selden 1994:57 n. 81. Beebee 1994:2. Conte 1994:xiii.

For the dichotomy, see Beebee 1994:3. Selden 1994:39. Burkert 1987:49. Rossi 1971:77. As Thomas, Steiner, and others have shown, Greece was, until the

fifth century, fundamentally an oral culture, a fact that has important implications for understanding changing conceptualizations of genre. Nagy 1990:362 n. 127. Rossi 1971. Segal, in Conte 1994:xi. Segal, in Conte 1994:viii. Segal, in Conte 1994:viii-ix. Baumann 1977:3-4.

15. 16. Hanks 1992:111. 17. Bauman 1977:34. 18. Performance is but one example among many of a real-life situation in which lit-

erary categories emerge: others are as diverse as education, politics, and the culture of dining. 19. Cairns 1972:34. 20. Cairns 1972:34. 21. Berry 1996:47-74. 22. Rosenmeyer 1985:74—84. 23. Cave 1988.

1. Generating Genres The first part of this article develops in a summary fashion ideas about genre sketched out in G. W. Most and G. B. Conte, "Genre," in S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, ed., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 630—631; the following sections present, in an abbrevi-

247

248

Notes to Pages 18-37

ated and preliminary form and unencumbered by a full apparatus of annotation, parts of a longer study on the concept of the tragic on which I am currently engaged and which is to be published in Italian by Il Mulino in Bologna. There is an enormous quantity of scholarship on most of the issues discussed here; to guide the reader and to disencumber the argument, I have listed a few of the most important and useful discussions in three highly selective separate bibliographies, on genre theory, tragedy and the tragic, and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, rather than attaching the references to specific points of my paper.

1. Suda s.v. Σοφοκλῆς (S 815, vol. 4, p. 402, 11.2-3) = 5 TrGF 4 Testim. A 2,1. 7. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Gorgias, Encomium of Helen $ 9 — 82 B 11, vol. 2, p. 290,11. 20-25 D-K. E.g., Arist, Rhet. 3.3.1406b8. E.g., Aristoph. Pax 136, Polybius 5.26.9, Plut. Publicola 10.2. E.g., Plut. Lucullus 21.3, Demetrius 18.3. E.g., Plato Rep. 8.545e, Arist. Meteor. 2.1.353b2, Plut. Theseus 1, 15.2. E.g., Xen. Eph. 3.1.4, Plut. Quaest. conv. 8.1.717c, Demetrius 28.1, Marius 27 2. Arist. Poetics $1—6.

9. Arist. Poetics 59.

10. Plato Crat. 408c, Rep. 2-3, 10. ll.

Arist. Poetics $19—22, 25.

12.

Arist. Poetics $4.

13. Arist. Poetics 1449b27—28.

14. Arist. Poetics 1447a9-10. 15.

Arist. Poetics $4.

16. Arist. Poetics 1448b24—27: "Poetry then split into two kinds according to the poet's nature. For the more serious poets represented fine doings and the doings of fine men, while those of a less exalted nature represented the actions of inferior men, at first writing satire just as the others at first wrote hymns and eulogies." 17. Plato Symp. 223d. 18. Hor. Ars poetica 73-88, 89-92, 189ff. 19. Hor. Ars poetica 93ff. 20. Theophr. Fr. 708 FHS&G = Diomedes Ars grammatica 3, cap. de poematibus (GL 1.487.11-12 Keil).

21. Cic. De natura deorum 3.25.65-26.68.

22. Chrysippus περὶ παθῶν Frg. 473 SVF; Epictetus 1.28; Galen On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 3.3,4,7; 4.2,8. 23.

Ps.-Long. $8.

24. Ps.-Long. $15. 25.

Ps.-Long. $35.2-5.

2. Epigram and Reader .

[join my colleagues in thanking Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink for organizing and guiding the success of the Colloquium as an occasion, and for their thoughtful ed-

Notes to Pages 38-41

249

d

iting of the papers. | also join them in offering charis to the Directors of the Center, Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub, and all the Center's staff for the charis they offered us. I owe personal debts of gratitude to Mary Depew, Nancy Felson, and Leslie Kurke, for initiating me into some of the theoretical approaches that influenced this paper, and I thank my colleagues in the Colloquium for their contributions and constructive criticisms of mine. Wabash College assisted with travel both to the Colloquium and to Greece in the summer of 1996, when I wrote this paper. For epitaphs, see Day 1989, Sourvinou-Inwood 1995. Boedeker notes in this volume that "a literary genre is significant only in relation to other genres." . Austin 1962 remains fundamental for his concept of speech-acts. For broader social applications, see Bourdieu 1991. See Bourdieu 1991, Duranti and Goodwin 1992, Nagy 1990a:202-222. See Gumperz 1992. For contextualization in oral poetic traditions like that of Archaic Greece, see Bakker 1993a, 1993b, Bauman and Briggs 1990. For a definition of performance in this sense, see Depew in this volume. For the social and religious effects of poetic performance in Archaic Greece, see Dougherty and Kurke 1993, Stehle 1997; also Calame 1995a, 1997, Nagy 1990b. . A fruitful approach is the identification of genre as, in performance, a certain kind of speech act. Thus Martin 1989 on epic mythos, and Depew 1997 on euché-prayer. For a note of caution, see Cohen 1994. Duranti and Goodwin 1992:26-27. See also Bakker 1993b, Cohen 1986, Cohen 1994, Miller 1994:37—51. For variation in form, see Depew in this volume.

Calame 1995a:24, Gentili 1988, especially chapters 1, 3, 8-9, Thomas 1992:119123. 10. This

1. 12.

13. 14.

is to select one aspect of Stehle's reconstruction of the performance (1997:30—39, 73—88); as she points out, problems abound in this poem, and different reconstructions of its performance exist (compare Calame 1997). Csapo in this volume discusses the dynamic relationship between genre and society in a different way. I thank Mary Depew for suggesting this formulation. Barchiesi in this volume explores Horace's thematization of the Archaic link between occasion and poem. This is made explicit at, e.g., Pind, O. 5.1-8 (the victor's dedication of his crowns and the proclamation at Olympia are narrated) and Bacch. 10.16-28 (the crowning and proclamation are described). Compare Kurke 1993. For “reading” rituals as acts in this way, Geertz is fundamental; see Silverman 1990. See also Assmann 1990, Connor 1987, Sinos 1993, Tambiah 1968, 1979. Osborne 1987. The frieze functioned in this like a votive relief; see Day 1994a, at n. 55, and esp. Depew in this volume. For iconographic genre, see Kippenberg 1990, Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:217-278; for its occasional force, Assmann 1990 (Bildakt

analogous to speech-act), Day 1989, Freedberg 1989, Chapter 7.

250

Notes to Pages 41-45

15. Connor 1987, Sinos 1993. 16. For epiphany, see later, in the third section at nn. 47, 64, and 66. For apostrophe,

see Bakker 1993b:22-23, Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:280, 404—405; for metonymy, Kurke 1991:10-11, Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:113-121, 238, 258; for epithets, Bakker 1993a:13. See also Nagy 1990b:8—9, Ober 1995:92-94, Tambiah 1968, 1979. 17. For example, in the self-referentiality of choruses; see Calame 1994, 1997, Henrichs 1994, Rutherford 1994, Stehle 1997. 18, Havelock

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

1982:196—197; Jeffery 1990:90-91, Boiotia no. 1; Kozloff and Mitten 1988:52—57, no. 2; LIMC 2 s.v. Apollon, 194, 314, no. 40, pl. 185 (O. Palagia and W. Lambrinudakis); Powell 1991:167-169; Robb 1994:57—59. For identification of the figure, see Day 1994a:39 (Apollo), Depew 1997:249—250, n. 64 (the dedicator). Robb 1994:59; compare Havelock 1982:197. Prof. Most supported this position at the Colloquium. Burzachechi 1962. I shall do so in a monograph in preparation, Epigram and Reader, Dedication and Viewer, Chapter 2. Compare Porter 1993:105-116 on seventh-century Assyrian inscriptions. Also one notes poetic passages that quote or echo inscriptions and indicate the response of hearers, e.g., Aesch. Ag. 577—582. Morgan 1990, 1993, 1994, de Polignac 1994, 1995; see also studies in Alcock and Osborne 1994, Hellström and Alroth 1996, Linders and Nordquist 1987, Marinatos and Hágg 1993, Le sanctuaire grec 1992. For caution, see SourvinouInwood 1993. For dedications themselves, see van Straten 1981, 1992.

24. N. Papalexandrou will treat this in his forthcoming Princeton dissertation; see 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

Papalexandrou 1997. Hurwit 1990. See later, Conclusion at n. 76. Jeffery 1990:46—47, 91, who believes the attribute was a shield. Svenbro 1993, especially Chapters 1-3, 9. For reading gods as a late classical development, see Depew 1997:243—247. Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:279—284, Steiner 1993:178—180, Thomas 1992:63—64; the quotation is from Bakker 1993b:5, n. 9. Sourvinou-Inwood 1995, Chapter 3, and above at n. 2; Linders 1992 applies a similar method to temple inventories, and Ober 1995 to horoi. See also Porter 1993, Chapter 5. These scholars interpret meaning both in its conventional semantic sense and as communicative force, though only Ober employs pragmatics explicitly. Thomas 1994 and especially 1992:56—100 (but see the review of Sickinger 1994). Steiner 1994:10—99 (the quotation is on page 6). Steiner 1993, 1994:91—99; compare Day 1994a:63—71, Kurke 1991 (especially 163-

194), 1993:137-149. Olympian 5.8, νικάσας ἀνέθηκε, is a strong example of the poem's words as inscription, though the song is not called an agalma; for that, see Nemean 8.16.

Notes to Pages 45-47

251

Compare Bauman and Briggs 1990, Bakker 1993a, 1993b, Calame 1995a, Nagy 199%0b:8-9. 35. Aspects of this argument appear in Day 1994a; matters treated in detail there are

omitted here, including citation of parallels illustrating how typical the key features of Mantiklos's offering were. An approach based in pragmatics and reading theory was articulated in Day 1994b, aspects of which have been anticipated in print by Furley 1995 and Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:180-216, 362—412; see also Depew 1997 and in this volume. 36. The epigram on Nestor’s skyphos (CEG 1.454) provides an example of what is at issue: Robb 1994:45—48 reconstructs a reading as the contextualization of a Homeric scenario, whereas Faraone 1996 sees it as magical ritual. 37. I cannot offer here a detailed apologia for the reconstruction of ancient readings and viewings in the face of the postmodern contention that no single determinate reading or meaning can be posited for a text, a rite, or an artifact any more than we can speak of a single reader or viewer. For such an apologia, see SourvinouInwood 1995:1-9. 38.

For this as the core meaning of charis and related words, see Latacz 1966:20-127, MacLachlan 1993. For charis in contexts of gift-giving, see Kurke 1991, Chapters 46.

39. Compare

Od. 3.438, where Athena is offered a heifer decorated with gold, iv’

ἄγαλμα θεὰ κεχάροιτο ἰδοῦσα. 40. MacLachlan

1993 sees the aesthetic and ethical sides of charis as inseparable; if charis is the ethical response requested, it must be triggered by aesthetic charis (in my argument that of festive ritual). 41. Among Homeric Hymns, see h.Di. 9.7 = h.Mat.d. 14.6, and implicitly, h. Pan. 19.48 = h.Ap. 21.5. For inscribed hymns, see below, n. 76, and the Palaikastro hymn’s re-

frain, I.Cret. II1.ii.2 (with Depew in this volume). For χαῖρε as dedicatory prayer, see Iliad 10.462, and compare CEG 1.127 (with Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:186, 199, 208, and Chapter 6) and 396 (cited below, at n. 79). 42. Compare

h.Hom.Vest. 24.5; Erythraian paian (Engelmann Powell 1925.136 = PMG 934). at future celebrations of the Theoc. 15.149. 43. Charis alone does not suffice;

Pindar, fr. 75.1-2 Maehler; and the inscribed and Merkelbach 1973, no. 205, lines 21-26 = The prayer in h.Hom. Dion. 26 refers to attendance same festival; see Calame 1995b:9, and compare compare Sourvinou-Inwood

1995:186, 199, 208,

403—410. . The text is Maehler’s 1989:92. Concerning the occasion, sce Calame

1994, Lehnus

1984:77—85, pace Schachter 1981:85. . Compare Calame 1994:139, Furley 1995:35-36, 39; also Depew in this volume, and above, nn. 13, 16, 17. 46. See Connor 1987:44, Furley 1995:36, Sinos 1993:83-84. Farnell 1930:332 suggests

252

Notes to Pages 48-49

that the chorus leader in Pindar fr. 94b (see Maehler 1989:92, Lehnus 1984:83—84) played the god's part. 47. See Gladigow 1990, Pucci 1988:484—489. The distinction (suggested privatim by Prof. O. Palagia) between cult-statue as epiphany and votive god-image as not epiphany may grow less sharp to the extent a votive could serve as a focus for ritual responses. 48. We can possibly reconstruct the ancient way of viewing such an early piece from later votive reliefs depicting the god's receiving an offering from worshipers; compare Akropolis 581, for which see Palagia 1995. They portray the whole sequence of which images of gods alone would be metonymic signs; compare Depew 1997, esp. 247—258, and in this volume. For a compatible "reading" of votive statues depicting gods, see Keesling, forthcoming. 49. This is not attested for the iconography of Apollo until the sixth century (LIMC

2.1 s.v. Apollon, 314-315, W. Lambrinudakis). However, the slightly younger (ca. 675—650) female figure, possibly found with Mantiklos's dedication, probably held a phialé; see Kozloff and Mitten 1988:59 (no. 3). 50. The oldest occurrence in CEG is 1.394, ca. 600—550. 5]. Pucci 1988. 52. Raubitschek 1968; see also Friedlander and Hoffleit 1948:18, 38, 66, Havelock 1982. Such approaches tend to link epigrams with poetic representations of ritual, but not with ritual itself, a link at the level of words rather than the force of words read or performed. As to Classical and later dedications as “records” of ritual, analysis of them, their provenance, and especially in Asklepieia their inscriptions can tell us much

about

dedicators' rituals (van Straten

1981, also Aleshire

1989,

LiDonnici 1992). Archaic agalmata have seemed to offer little specific information in this regard beyond the broad inscriptional categories of votive, first-fruits, tithe, etc., though progress is being made; see, for example, Connor 1987:47—49, Palagia 1995, and, on the rituals echoed in athletes' dedications, above, n. 33. Progress on the issue of ritual is also being made in studies of sanctuaries and all their dedications, not only agalmata; see above, n. 23. 53. As are other occurrences of the prayer and close variations: CEG 1.358—360, 426, also Lazzarini 1976, no. 794d. Compare the simpler requests for charis in return: CEG 1.231, 258, 279a, 313, 321a, also 275, 371, 400; and in addition, FGE 506-507 ("Anacreon" 8). 54. For charis in this sense, see Pulleyn 1997:4-13, Versnel 1981a:47—56. 55, MacLachlan 1993:10 and passim (including 35-36, 52 on charts and images of

light and sheen). For daidal-words, compare Morris 1992, Chapters 1-2; for poikilia, Fowler 1983. I shall discuss the term agalma in Epigram and Reader; see Osborne 1994:90, Steiner 1994, Chapter 2. 56. Kozloff and Mitten 1988:56. 57. All four terms are applied to Suitors’ gifts to Penelope at Od. 18.292-300.

Notes to Pages 50-53

253

58. See above, n. 23, also Seaford 1994:193-199; and for Thebes, Schachter 1981:7785, 1992:26-30. 59. Compare Clay 1989, Furley 1995:40—41, on hymns. 60. Compare Steiner 1994:90, and for Pindar, Kurke 1991, part 3. For the charis derived from due recognition and honor, see MacLachlan 1993, Chapter 2. 61. Bourdieu 1991; compare Kurke 1993, and for charis, MacLachlan 1993, Chapter 5.

As Prof. Barchiesi urged at the Colloquium and Prof. Kurke privately, I shall explore this approach in Epigram and Reader, especially in comparing maidens' rituals (see Bremmer 62. 63.

. . .

68. 69.

70. 71.

1994:69—71,

Calame

1997,

Clark

1996,

Stehle

1997)

with

Akropolis korai (see Osborne 1994:88—92, but compare Keesling, forthcoming). For hymns as “negotiable commodities,” see Pulleyn 1997:49—55. Compare Sinos 1993, Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:31-32, 289-292. For epiphany, see above, at nn. 16 and 45. In Epigram and Reader, | shall explore “recharging” and other cultic acts performed at earlier dedications; compare van Straten 1981:74. See also later, Conclusion, from n. 76. Compare Day 1994a:n. 71; Depew 1997, esp. 236; Furley 1995:35, n. 36. For the charis of praise, see above, nn. 54, 60; for epithets, n. 16. See above, n. 16. See Papalexandrou 1997, Powell 1991:168. Profs. Most and West at the Colloquium suggested partial readings would have occurred, in which case the name, as the first word, was likely to be read, even if nothing else was. For rituals and ritual song, see Calame 1997, Clark 1996, Connor 1987, Sinos 1993, Stehle 1997. See above, at nn. 27-29. Moreover, the god is unlikely to be the primary addressee in the first sentence. As third-person prayers (e.g., CEG 1.225) and articles with gods' names show, the god in the dative in the plain dedicatory formula was probably considered third person, unless introduced by soi or a vocative (e.g., 190). For distance in this sense, see Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:283. Required in CEG 1.80, 108.1, 119, 159, 166; invited in 302, 334, 345, 366, 396, 400,

407, 454. For de, see Bakker 1993b:11-15. Alternatively, addressing the god can be integrated into a syntax with the dedication as "ego" (CEG 1.190). 72. At the Colloquium, Prof. Most and others resisted the notion of a deictic shift,

whereas Profs. Csapo and Rutherford accepted it as a possible reading that merits exploration. 73. The shift to an open deictic grammar would have another effect in reading. Since every member of the community that worshiped at the sanctuary could incarnate the speaking voice by reading the prayer or reciting it from memory, any given reader spoke as the community's representative, thereby enhancing the authority of readings as ways of constructing the community socially and religiously. Compare Depew in this volume; Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:281—284.

254

Notes to Pages 53-59

74. Compare the very fragmentary CEG 1.377. Since charis-filled objects were given

and used on charis-filled occasions, the attribution of charis to the act of dedication would also be implied in epigrams that attribute charis to the dedication; see CEG 1.234, 260, 275.2, 301, 336, 411. 75. See above, n. 53. 76. Headlam and Knox

1922.174 cite Makedonios’s paian (IG II? 4473 = Powell

1925.138—140), but the Erythraian paian is a closer parallel; see Engelmann and Merkelbach 1973, no. 205, p. 340, lines 21-23 = Powell 1925.136 (compare 137) = PMG 934. If the women are in a forecourt (see lines 55—56) and if the inscribed

statue is one of the divine images (Hygieia [note τὴν λίθον ταύτην, 21], see below), those seem not to be conceived of as the chief cult statues. 77. Eurip. Ion 1143-1145; compare 1164-1165. On Perachora,

see Tomlinson

1992.338-346. 78. See, for example, Dougherty and Kurke 1993, Sourvinou-Inwood 1995. These ap-

proaches need not be incompatible with a “historical” one, which places more emphasis on reconstructing the total archeological context of dedications in a sanctuary; see the studies cited above, n.23. 79. Compare CEG 127, if we take it as dedicatory, following Sourvinou-Inwood 1995, Chapter 6.

3. Enacted and Represented Dedications I wish to thank the participants in the colloquium for many helpful suggestions made during the discussion of this paper. For invaluable guidance at other stages of the paper’s formulation, I am also grateful to Elizabeth Asmis, Joseph Day, John Garcia, Michael Haslam, Albert Henrichs, Ahuvia Kahane, and a helpful audience at a Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry Seminar, University of Iowa. . Most recently (and otherwise valuable), Furley 1995. Important studies of hymn include Allen, Halliday, and Sikes 1936; Bremer 1981; Burkert 1994; Clay 1989; Keyssner 1932; Lattke 1991; Meyer 1933; Miller 1986; Norden 1974; Pulleyn 1997; Race 1982; Wünsch 1916. Fowler, 1982:49, points out that at least since the Romantic movement, generic criticism has in principle been committed to a middle ground between abstract speculation about permanent, essential genres and "plodding chronicle history of individual genres that continually transform themselves without ever waiting long enough for generalization." As exceptions to this middle ground, he cites New Criticism and structuralism; and reacting to the limitations of the latter approach, he argues that generic conventions differ fundamentally from linguistic rules: "a literary work may willfully depart from its conventional langue in a comprehensive way, as no ordinary speech act departs from the grammatical system of a natural language" (49). It will be clear from what follows that I agree with this assessment and would apply it especially to the generic innovations of the Hellenistic period.

Notes to Pages 59-60

255

Herington 1985:3. Thomas 1992, among others, has argued that through the fifth century s.c.z.,

Greece should be understood as primarily an oral culture, i.e., a culture in which oral performance remained the dominant mode of communication and in which

writing was used to reinforce and serve this function, rather than marking a “revolution” of thought and communication that from the beginning overshadowed

en

oral context (62).

Bauman 1986:3. For example, Bakker 1993; Martin 1989; Nagy 1990. Bauman 1986:4. Compare also Calame, 1995a:24: “in ancient Greece consistency in the poetic genres stems from their being defined relative to the different rituals

at which they were regularly performed.” On how, in traditional societies (by which I will mean fundamentally oral, homogenous societies), performance is linked to social structures, and “social drama” to cultural performative genres, see Turner 1986:82, 95. . The point is made by Furley 1995:36, who quotes Menander Rhetor II, 17 IIepi Σμινθιακοῦ (ed. D. A. Russell and N. G. Wilson, Oxford 1981) p. 441. Furley cites several examples of “hymns’ tendency to praise themselves (and hence the object

of their worship, the god),” which, along with other texts, I will treat in detail later. Although I agree with Furley’s functional assessment of Greek hymn as an “attempt to win the deity's favour by effective speech" (30), I view his reaction to the Meuli-Burkert "school" and its insistence on the importance of ritual performance as anachronistically rational. I cannot agree, for example, that "belief in or profound cogitation on, aspects of the sacred" (30-31) is relevant to the study of (at least early) Greek hymn. To 31 n. 14, in which he speaks of "personal and com-

munity faith in the . . . gods’, contrast Feeney 1998:22—28. See Day, this volume; Pulleyn 1997:49ff. I use the word "group" here to refer to a community for whom a particular song can construct and perpetuate an identity

and for whom the enactment that I am describing will therefore be functional. Compare Nagy 1996:85: "mimesis is predicated on the mentality of what we may call the group, as distinct from the audience." 10. That the term charis is central to the conceptualization of Greek hymn has been shown by a number of scholars. Thus Race 1982:8, for example: "No other word epitomizes so well the relationship which the hymnist tries to establish with the god—one of reciprocal pleasure and goodwill.” Compare Furley 1995:32. Steiner sums up well the relationship that an agalma establishes between god and man: "The very term ἄγαλμα, repeatedly used to characterise the object [that dedicatory epigrams accompany], implies the act of dedication: it is derived from

ἀγάλλειν, meaning both to honour and adorn a divinity. This votive framework will likewise characterise Pindar's poetic gifts, expressing their capacity at once to promote the glory of the athlete, and to place him in a proper relationship to the

gods who deserve the thanks for his success." Steiner 1993:169. In what follows, I

256

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Notes to Pages 61-63

agree with this assessment but fill it out by extending Day's analysis of charis in dedicatory offerings to the function of performative language in verbal agalmata. Gentili 1988 and Rósler 1980, for example, base their analyses of the generic norms of choral poetry in the Archaic period on the identity, typical of oral cultures, between a song's production and its performance. A status that Burkert (19872), for example, sees in the rhapsodic performances of epic and monodic hymn, where he discerns a development that involves a separation between production and performance. This objectification of performance is incipient, however, as I will argue, in the earliest hymnic texts—monodic or choral—that we possess. The confusion begins with the first extant attempt to define the hymnic genre: Plato, at Laws 700ab. Even Bremer, in his otherwise excellent article, follows Plato in defining hymn as “sung prayer.” For an excellent discussion of ancient and modern reasons for identifying hymn with prayer and for a clear differentiation of the two, see Pulleyn 1997:44—47. For a description of the site, see Bosanquet 1908/9:339. As Bremer 1981:205 (citing Guarducci on the point, n. 48), among others, points out, the text represents a relatively late stage of Cretan worship of the "greatest Kouros,” which probably dates to as early as the second millenium B.c.e. The text I use here is West 1965. Compare PMG 871, a text that Plutarch calls a hyrmnos and says that it was sung by Elean women to invoke Dionysus's presence (Quaest. Graec. 299ab.).

16. Bakker 1995:102, citing Tannen. 17. Compare Day, this volume. 18. Day 1994a:57—58. As Day points out, the common

epigraphic petition is χάριν ἀντιδίδον. Many examples of inscriptions that employ this language of reciprocity and assertion could be cited. To give only a few: CEG 400 (fifth-century B.c.z. Antipolis); 370 (from sixth-century 8.c.E. Laconia); CEG 234, 231, 258, 313 (Athens Akropolis). 19. Day 1994a and this volume. 20. Pulleyn 1997:50. Pulleyn discusses several important texts that provide evidence for the functional equation “hymn = agalma.” Among these are Pind. Fr. 86a S-M, θύσων διθύραμβον (sacrificing a dithyramb): Philodemus's citation and discussion of this phrase at De musica 4 (p. 89. 10 K); Eustathius (Prooem. comm. Pind. 31 [Schol. vet. Pind. iii, p. 302, 15 Drachmann]: "When he [i.e., Pindar] arrived at

Delphi, he was asked what he had come to sacrifice. He said ‘a paean.”) Pulleyn 1997: 49—50. 21. Which Bühler 1965:13—14 calls "the verbal moment marker"; see also Jarvella 1982:10ff. 22. On the "linguistic cross-over between the two categories,” see Pulleyn 1997:54 and n. 39. 23. Compare, for example, Miller's 1986 study of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, in

which, following Bundy's lead, he distinguishes prayer from hymn by calling the

Notes to Pages 63-64

257

former “cult,” or “subjective” hymn, and the latter “epic,” or “objective” hymn. Compare Furley 1995:32: “we should not be mislead [by Alexandrian and later attempts at classification] into assuming a sub-category ‘hymn proper’ within the genus of cult songs.” 24. Burkert 1985:102-103. 25. Ib. 103. 26. I examine prayer in more detail in Depew 1997. Bundy, although his examination of hymn in terms of its functional rhetoric of praise is a major contribution, follows the formalist approach of Ausfeld and Meyer in seeing monodic hymn as a

development out of prayer, as the following quote suggests: “the rhapsodic hymn is primarily a hymn of praise in which the hypomnesis, the record of the god’s exploits, becomes the 'Hauptteil' of the hymn, and the prayer, a disconnected formal appendage in which the singer reestablishes the tone of the invocation and thereby his relation to his theme.” Bundy 1972:45. 27.

IG 2?.1361.7-8. The term *parabomion" does not come into use until the fifth cen-

tury, when it is used to designate a song that was sung standing or moving about an altar (which is literally what para bomion means; the “Hymn to the Kouros" is a “parabomion” in this sense). The first attested use of the term is Soph. OT 184, where it refers to a paean. 28. Compare the following second-century inscription from Pergamum (Or. Graec.

Inscr. Sel. 309, corrected by L. Robert in Étud. Anat. pp. 18-20 [2nd s.c.e.]: quoted by Bremer 1981:201 n. 35): μετὰ TO σνντελεσθῆναι τὰς κατευχὰς καὶ Tas σπονδὰς kai τὰς %

“

^

x

x

a

^A

4

^

*

θυσίας, ἄισαι τοὺς ἐλευθέρους παῖδας παραβώμιον,... ,

*

Ld

,

^

£

After completing the prayers and the libations and the sacrifices, the free young men are to sing a parabomion. 29. Compare,

for example,

Philodamus’s

Paean,

110-113

Kappel

1992:375-380:

Se[tEac] . . . τόνδ᾽ ὕμνον, Ov[c]íav re at-/ve[v] . . . (Receive this hymn to appear as a sacrifice . .). For the tradition that Pindar referred to his hymnic poetry as a thusia, see Pulleyn 1997:49—50, and above, n. 20. 30. For the argument that at least the four long "Homeric Hymns" were performed at the end of a feast or a symposium, see Clay 1989. 31. Heath notes that this "reception motif" is common in Pindar's epinicians, "and implies a connection between [them] and the arrival of the κῶμος at its destina-

tion” (Heath 1988:189). He cites, e.g., O. 4.9: δέξαι...

τόνδε κῶμον, O. 8.10

τόνδε κῶμον... δέξαι, Ρ 5.22 δέδεξαι τόνδε κῶμον, O. 6.98, 13.29, N. 4.11, noting that the address is either to a god or to a temple or location associated with a temple (189). Compare also Pae 5.4446: Adroos ἔνθα pe παῖδες / εὐμενεῖ

δέξασθε

νόΐ θεράποντα / ὑμέτερον; “Paean of Philodamus,” 110-113. The

genre “paean” is the subject of two excellent studies: Kappel 1992 and Rutherford,

258

Notes to Pages 64-66

forthcoming. For the purposes of this paper, it is sufficient, I think, to agree with

Pulleyn in differentiating two kinds of paean, the one a simple shout, in Παιών, separate from but perhaps usually attached to a prayer (but not equivalent to a

prayer), and a ceremonial song including in Παιών, or a variant thereof, as part of its refrain. Pulleyn 1997:182. The paeans described at JL 1.472ff. and at 22.391f. are choral hymns offered in thanksgiving (they thus resemble other votive offerings). Cf. Xen. Hell. IV 7.4, which tells how the Spartans, after an earthquake, πάντες ὕμνησαν τὸν περὶ τὸν Ποσειδῶ παιᾶνα, indicating that the “hymnic” character of a paean was less attached to the god Apollo than it was to the function, at least in part, of offering a god a gift for a service rendered. 32. IG IV 12 no. 128 (=IV! 950 ed. Fraenkel); CA pp. 132-136. The text begins:

Ἴσυλλος

Σωκράτευς

‘Emdavpws

ἀνέθηκε

᾿Απόλλωνε

Μαλεάται

καὶ

᾿Ασκλαπιῶι. 33. See Kurke 1991:204ff. and her discussion especially of Pindar, O. 4.8--12, which she argues adapts dedicatory and hymnic language to the victor and his relation to his city. Hanks 1992:46. . Langdon 1987:107. There are many recent discussions of this phenomenon; Morgan 1994, for example, discusses changes in sanctuaries surrounding Corinth, and cites bibliography. 36. Langdon 1987; Burkert 1987b. 37. Burkert 1987b:49. For a discussion of how in the eighth century B.c.e. "the quali-

tative and quantitative increase in dedications at a wide range of different kinds of sanctuary [suggested] that an ever greater proportion of personal wealth was being invested by individuals from a wider range of social groups,” see Morgan 1993:19. Other papers in the same volume concern the rise of sanctuaries in this period as arenas for competitive display. Compare, for example, Kyrieleis 1993:151-152 (on the monumental kouros dedicated by Isches): “such votive sculptures are not only pious gifts to the divinity; they are there to proclaim the

prestige of the donor or his family in a prominent place, the sanctuary.” See also Kyrieleis 1996. . Burkert 1987b:49. Powell 1991:182-183.

. . . .

Langdon 1987:108. For the former function, compare Powell 1991:181. Day 1994b. For a discussion of the wide variety and provenance of these figures, see Rouse 1902:283—295.

. See, e.g., Richter 1968:49-50, nos. 67 and 68, figs. 217-224; On signification of this group, see Day 1994a:46. 45. Day 1994a:54.

the spatial

Notes to Pages 67-70

259

For social conditions surrounding the rise in this form, see Neumann 1979:10-11. . Athens Akropolis Museum 581 (end sixth, beginning fifth century B.c.B.). LIMC 2

s.v. Athena no. 587, p. 1011; Neumann 1979:34, pl. 18a. I discuss this relief and others in their relation to prayer in Depew 1997. As Joseph Day reminds me. . To which we may compare many deictic references to place in hymns (more on this later).

. Joseph Day points me to Alcman fr. 1.61 and CEG 330 for the use of dépw describing a procession. . Kroll 1979. Compare Day 1994a:50. . Kroll 1979. Connelly 1996 argues that the east frieze shows the mythical Athenian

King Erechtheus about to sacrifice his youngest daughter and that the procession is part of the sacrificial ceremony. I hope that my arguments here have supported the view that the frieze represents the interaction between humans and gods. 53. On arrival at a temple, whether at the site of the victory or on the victor's return home, as the performance context of epinician, see Heath 1988:191-192. Sinos 1988:85. 35. Pulleyn 1997:43-44; Parker 1996. For Alexandrian editors’ use of the category "hymnos" as a "default category" for poems that were directed to gods and that could not be identified in more specific terms, compare Rutherford, forthcoming. For the evidence supporting a date for this hymn of not later than 600 B.c.z., see Allen, Halliday, and Sikes 1936:183—186. 57. Ford 1997:408. 58. The word’s only

occurrence in Homer is at Od. 8.429, where it refers to Demodocus's song about the Trojan horse. At Sappho fr. 44.34, it is used of a song about the wedding of Hector and Andromache, who are described as θεοεικέλοις

(like gods): ὕμνην 8’ “Exropa κ᾽ 'Androméxan ueceikAlo[i. Compare Alcman 59.

60. 61.

62.

3.5 PMG. The point that in the Archaic period the distinctions “monodic” and "choral" are not markers of genre has been made by various scholars, e.g., Davies 1988, Lefkowitz 1988. I would disagree with Pulleyn's claim that kymnos in the archaic period referred to hexametric poetry only. And therefore not in hexameters. Compare Thalmann 1984:81. Whether this text comprises two hymns, one to Delian and one to Pythian Apollo, or only one, is irrelevant to its connection of the two central concepts of charis and mnéma, since lines 545—546 are so typical of hymnic endings as to be almost formulaic. For a somewhat different, and illuminating, interpretation of the Deliades' mimésis and its functioning, see Nagy 1990:43ff. For this use of the first-person future tense to refer to an ongoing performance, see Faraone 1995, with bibliography. Mnésomai is extremely common in hymni: beginnings (e.g., HH. 111.546, IV.580, VI.21, VII.2, X.6).

260

Notes to Pages 70-73

63. Nagy 1979:95, for example, argues that the verb denotes in epic the ability that the aoidos has, with the help of the Muses, to put his mind in touch with the realities of the past.

As Nagy 1990:362 points out about the use of the first-person verb ἐξάρχω. “The verb exarkhö can take as its object the given genre in which the performance is happening, as in Iliad XVIII 51, where Thetis begins her goos ‘lament.” 65. Kurke 1991:204ff. discusses Pindar's construction of the victor's return as an agalma for the city. This is, in fact, a tertiary development and adaptation of an already existing conception of "agalma": the competition is an agalma; it is memorialized in an inscription or a song; the victor's return to his city reperforms at least one of these two prior occasions. 66. Nagy has also seen the importance of this passage in understanding the nature of mimésis in the Greek poetic tradition. He takes mumésis to mean, however, "reenactment

67. 68. 69. 70. 7].

72. 73. 74. 75.

[or] impersonation" (emphasis mine), understanding the Delian

maidens as archetypes "meant to be reenacted in the local ritual context of real choral performances at Delos—in which context any real chorus members would be equated, for the ritual moment, with the archetypal Maidens." Nagy 1995:45. I would argue that the hymn they sing (also) invites the participation of their audience in a far more straightforward way than this. Bowie 1986:17ff. analyzes the function of "the dramatic element in non-dramatic poetry." Clay 1997 argues from a somewhat different, and enlightening, perspective for the parallel development of the longer Homeric hymns and heroic epic. Bakker 1995:98—100. Bakker 1995:98. "Just as the epic performance as a whole is a large-scale re-enactment of a hero's theme, so a noun-epithet expression can be seen as a small-scale, routinized and recurrent re-enactment [of a hero's or a god's] theme... [that] evokes something that vastly exceeds the importance of the specific function of the epithet in a particular context." Bakker 1995:102. Bakker 1995:102. Bakker 1995:106. Bakker 1995:108-111, citing Martin 1989:12-37; 231—239. Compare also ᾿Αμφὶ Διόνυσον Σεμέλης ἐρικυδέος vióv / μνήσομαι (HH VII.1-2); Ἥρν ἀείδω χρυσόθρονον ἣν τέκε Ῥείη (HH III. 208, XII. 1, XVIIL1); Aidoinv χρυσοστέφανον καλὴν ’Adpodirny / dcopat (HH VI.1-2); Πᾶνα

I...

μέλημ᾽ ἀείδω

(PMG 936.1-2); Ajpnrp’ ἠύκομον σεμνὴν θεὰν

ἄρχομ᾽ ἀείδειν (HH 11.1); Δάματρα μέλπω . . . / μελιβόαν ὕμνον ἀναγνέων .../ (PMG 702.1-2, Lasus); Παλλάδ᾽ ᾿Αθηναίην ἐρυσίπτολιν ἄρχομ᾽ ἀείδειν /

δεινήν (HH XL1-2); Πάλλαδα περσέπολιν κλήιζε. . . 735.1-2, Lamprocles); xat μοι συναείσατε

/ τὰν

Ματέρα

παῖδα Διὸς (PMG τῶν

θεῶν (PMG

Notes to Pages 74-75

261

935.34) péXtropev . . . Φοῖβον ᾿Απόλλωνα [also Hes. fr. 265; Hes. Th. 47, 1001; Terpander PMG 698; Alcaeus L-P 261]. 76. Bakker 1995:108—111, on Foley's concept of traditional referentiality. 77. Bakker 1995:108. 78.

Like ἀείδειν and μέλπειν, the verb combines with an object specifying the god being praised to mark genre. Among many other examples, compare HH 1.17-19,

HH 11.495. 79. Henrichs 1993:130. 80. Burkert 1985:49. 81. Race 1982:8 highlights the importance in hymn of establishing charts: “If there is one dominant concern common to all Greek hymns, it is surely the notion of xapıs. No other word epitomizes so well the relationship which the hymnist tries

to establish with the god—one of reciprocal pleasure and goodwill.” Race agrees with Bundy in thus seeing the function of the imperative chaire as part of the concern of the hymnist to please the god. He finds, however, an ambiguity in the chaire of Homeric Hymn endings, since he takes it to mean “farewell” when it is used alone, but “take pleasure in” when it is used with a dative (Race 1982:9). There is no ambiguity, since the imperative does not mean “farewell,” but rather “welcome” or “greetings,” as well as “enjoy this offering,” the song’s beauty having accomplished the god's epiphany. See Day, this volume, for a similar argument. In an important paper that I have seen only as this paper is about to go to press, John Garcfa adumbrates a similar interpretation of chaire and gives a convincing analysis of the hymnic theme of recognition as symbolic action (Garcfa, forthcoming). 82. I would agree with Race (1982:9) in so translating the dative, but with the qualification expressed before. Compare also Aristonous’s Paean (CA pp. 162-164, ll. 45-46: xapeis ὕμνοις ἡμετέροις, ὄλβον ἐξ ὁσίων διδοὺς; also, HH 9.7 = h.Mat.d.

14.6: καὶ ov μὲν οὕτω χαῖρε θεαί θ᾽’ ἅμα πᾶσαι ἀοιδῇ; Bacch. 3.97.)

There are variants of this formula: ἕλαμαι δέ σ᾽ ἀοιδῇ, e.g., means “I seek your

favor with my song" (HH XIX.48, HH XX1.5); xatpé μοι, Κρόνειε / παγκρατές ... Δέκταν ἐς ἐνιαυτὸν ἕρπε, καὶ yeyadı μολπᾷ ("Hymn to the Kouros” 1-6). Compare Race 1982. 83.

Compare δὸς δ’ ἱμερόεσσαν ἀοιδήν, "Grant a pleasing song" (HH Theog. 104); χάριν δ᾽ ἅμ᾽ ὅπασσον ἀοιδῇ, “And also make the song HH XXIV.5, all cited by Race 1982:9; also γελάσειας, ὦ Πάν, em’ εὔφροσι ταῖσδ’ ἀοιδαῖς κεχαρημένος, “May you laugh at these merry

X.5, Hes. pleasing" ἐμαῖς / songs of

mine, having taken pleasure in them,” PMG 887, with Wilamowitz’s reading of the last line. 84.

Πρὸς Ὀλυμπίον Διός σε, xpvaéa κλντόμαντι Πυθοῖ λίσσομαι Χαρίτεσσίν τε καὶ σὺν ᾿Αφροδίτᾳ, ἐν ζαθέῳ με δέξαι χρόνῳ

262

Notes to Pages 75-78

ἀοίδιμον Πιερίδων προφάταν-

ὕδατι γὰρ ἐπὶ χαλκοπύλῳ ψόφον ἀιὼν Κασταλίας ὀρφανὸν ἀνδρῶν χορεύσιος ἦλθον... . κατέβαν στεφάνων καὶ θαλιᾶν τροφὸν ἄλσος ᾿Απόλλωνος,

τόθι Λατοίδαν θαμινὰ Δελφῶν κόραι χθονὸς ὀμφαλὸν παρὰ σκιάεντα μελφπίόΪμεναι moot kporéo|vr« γᾶν Bow. 85. See Rutherford, forthcoming; also Rutherford 1997. 86. Reference to a site’s identifying features (the deictic “place marker”) is common in hymnic and epinician texts. Compare HH III.181 (Κήλοιο περικλύστου); Philodamus’s

Paean

(Coll

Alex.

165-171)

20-23,

131-147;

wap’

᾿Αλφεῷ

is

Pindar's shorthand for “Olympia” (e.g., O. 1.20); compare also, e.g., Alcaeus B 2 (a).L-P 1; Z-1 L-P.4 (Κωραλίω ποτάμω map ὄχθαις); “Paean Erythraeus” (PMG

934) 19-20: yatpé μοι, ἵλαος δ᾽ ἐπινέσεο / τὰν ἀμὰν πόλιν εὐρύχορον. 87. We have seen various examples of how hymns typically mark the performative present (the deictic “now”). The adverbs σήμερον and νῦν are common in hymnic frames, and like verbal tense, allow the singer to represent himself as involved in a present moment of praise (e.g., Pind. Pae. 1.6; 6.122; P. 4.1-2, Zapepov

μὲν χρή oe map’ ἀνδρὶ φίλῳ / orapev). The deictic pronoun ὅδε may perform the same function, as at Pindar Paean 115.1ff., τῷδ᾽ ἐν äparı τερπνῷ. 88. Steiner 1993:173. 89. Calame 1995c:74 n. 35 rightly criticizes Rósler 1983:77 for thinking that a high

number of deictic words indicates the oral character of a text. As Calame points out, Greek poetry becomes more "mimetic" over time. 90. Bauman and Briggs 1990:73-74. 91. For evidence concerning the inscribing of texts in sanctuaries, see Herington 1985:201-203. Compare e.g., Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, ed. Allen in the OCT of

Homer, vol. V, p. 237, lines 319-321: Homer recites the Hymn to Apollo at the panegyris at Delos, whereon "the Delians wrote the verses on a white board, and dedicated them in the temple of Artemis." Paus. 9.16.1, on the dedication by Pindar of a hymn to Ammon. The hymn was inscribed on a stele by an altar in Ammon’s sanctuary in Libya. Herington does not mention either Isyllus’s dedication of his inscribed paean at Epidauros or the possibility that Eumelos's "Prosodion" may have been inscribed at a sanctuary at Delos or Ithome (Paus. 5.19.10). 92. Cited by Henrichs 1996:48—49 n. 1. See also, in the same volume, Calame 1995c. 93. Henrichs 1996:49. As Calame 1995c:137 puts it: "Situated in a time, a space, and

an action which are real, the tragic chorus manages to generate an alternative time, space, and action in which the legendary events are played out." 94. Henrichs 1996:53.

Notes to Pages 78-83

263

95. Henrichs 1996:54. 96. Henrichs 1996:54; compare Henrichs 1995:86-90. In the Aias, Antigone, Trakhiniai, and Oidipous Tyrannos "choral self-reference serves as a counterpoint to moments of dramatic crisis or tragic reversal.” In these plays, ^Sophokles employs different scenarios of choral self-representation to underline the mounting

disparity between joyful dancing and tragic imbroglio.” Henrichs 1996:49, with examples. 97. Calame 1995c:147. In the same paper, Calame studies this dissociation of function assigned to "the performative and self-referential voice of the melic chorus," which he sees as a result of "the distancing effects brought about by the dramatization of

legendary plots and their realization in a festival dedicated to Dionysos." Ibid. 148. 98. Cameron suggests that the hymns could have been performed at ritual celebrations, but “outside the formal framework of the festival itself" Cameron 1995:63— 67. Bulloch 1985:5.

For example, Depew 1994, 1998. 101. Erbse 1955:419, for example, agrees, and says of the result: "Dass dieses künstlerische Bedürfnis im Religiósen wurzele, scheint mir sicher"; compare also, for example, Bulloch 1985:3-81; Hopkinson 1984:3f., 35-39. In a recent paper, Richard Thomas argues that in coming to terms with the generic complexities of

Theoc. Id. 24, the Kreuzung model is unhelpful: in this text, Theocritus both engages with and deflates the hymnic mode, and “to give [the poem] a generic title that would mean anything” is nearly impossible. Thomas, forthcoming.

4. Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry This paper benefited greatly from criticisms and comments made after delivery at the Sumposion. Many thanks to all who contributed, as well as to the anonymous reader. . The fundamental discussion of the tradition is Kakridis 1972.

. The basic guide is West 1985; the basic text is R. Merkelbach and M. West in

Solmsen 1990, superseding Merkelbach and West 1967. Treu 1957, Schwartz 1960. West 1985, Merkelbach 1968. Catalogs and writing: Thomas 1989:183; compare also Goody and Watt 1968:4748; catalog poetry as an oral form: Minchin 1996. West 1985; a date of early sixth century B.c.E. supported now by Fowler 1998:1; that the canonical version is genuine Hesiod has recently been asserted by Drager 1997, referring to an earlier thesis about the Cyrene-Ehoie in GK215 in Drager 1993:221-229,

Janko 1986; Casanova 1979a; Finkelberg 1988; Koenen 1994:26 and n. 62, in favor of a later date. West 1985:168. A northern origin is also favored by Fowler 1998.

264

Notes to Pages 83-88

9. Lyons 1997:54-55. 10. ὑποδμηθεῖσα: GK25.18, 23a28, 35; 177.6?, 1955 cut 53; λέχος εἰσαναβᾶσα: either: θαλερὸν λέχος εἰσαναβᾶσα: 2347, 25.34, 26.8; or: ὁμὸν λέχος εἰσαναβᾶσα: 129.7, 21; 180.11, 193.12; GK25.18, 23a28, 35; 177.6?, 195.53;

ἵπποισίν τε καὶ ἅρμασι κολλητοῖσι: GK26.36; 58.7; 180.15; 190.13; 193.10, 18; 251a5. 11. West 1985:56.

12. Hypothesis to the Hesiodic Aspis: Τῆς ᾿Ασπίδος ἡ ἀρχὴ ἐν τῷ τετάρτῳ Καταλόγῳ φέρεται μεχρὶ στιχῶν v' xail'. (“The start of the Shield is transmitted in the fourth Catalog, up to line 56.”) For the expression φέρεται in ancient commentaries, see Rutherford 1997:9-12. 13. West 1985:68.

14. West 1985:68. 15. That is not to say it is not artfully put together. West suggests cases where the structure is subtle; e.g., sometimes groups, or triads, of daughters are dealt with together. The combination of the two forms shows some imagination; "thematic" or "artistic" links are sometimes important as well as strictly "genealogical" ones (e.g., in GK24, the Meleager-ehoie is followed by one about Deianeira). So at least one criterion for building up the model may have been artistry. 16. West 1985:152.

17. On the poetics of the “catalog of suitors,” see Edwards 1980:97-98. The Atalanta episode (GK145-146) is one that could have attracted a catalog also. Demodike in GK22 is also the subject of a wooing, as is Pero (GK30); the Mestra-ehoie also has

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

as its subject the antics of Mestra, who cheats her husband in order to provide her father Erisychthon-Aithon with food; thus, wooing is quite a theme. Salmoneus: West 1985:64; Mestra: West 1985:64, 68; Brillante 1983. For these and similar works, see McLeod 1991. So the Epic Cycle shows more fantasy than Homer: Griffin 1997. Robertson 1984. For such contact, also GK165. Notice, however, Solmsen 1981a, who argues that the lines about the immortality of Iphigeneia were not original and that different versions of the GK, with and without these lines, were in circulation in the fifth century B.C.E. There may be another genealogical prophecy at fr.10a 1—5. Keil, Gramm. Lat. 1. 482—483. For Diomedes, see Curtius 1973:440. Huxley 1969:69; festival of Ariadne: Certamen p. 234 Allen. So Doherty 1995. For the cult of heroines, see Lyons 1997:42-51. Casanova 1979, has suggested that they were two Hellenistic editions, perhaps one emanating from Pergamum (Megalai Ehoiai), the other (GK) from Alexandria (an

idea based on an earlier hypothesis by Schwartz about the titles), but at any rate two editions. The Megalai Ehoiai is for him a special edition, containing material

Notes to Pages 89-93

265

about epigonoi or forgotten episodes, such as a longer and different treatment of Endymion, son of Kaluke, and a different treatment of Phineus. . X Pindar, Pyth 9.6 (2.221.13 Drachmann). . Cf. Krischer 1971:131-159, on catalog mode in Homer; on the “mode,” see Fowler 1982.

. See this volume p. 221. . See most recently Cameron 1995:381. . Bing 1993. Nicaenetus of Samos (CA2: Gunaikon Katalogos) and Sosicrates (Sostratus?) of Phanagoreia (SH 731: Ehoioi), mentioned by Athenaeus in 13, 590b, who also pro-

duced a sort of catalog of women; Alexander Aetolus's Apollo (CA 122-123), which Cameron now interprets as a collection of prophecies by Apollo concerning pilgrims visiting Didyma; also his Muses. Katalogoi are ascribed to Eratosthenes, but we know nothing about them (Solmsen 1947:n. 15).

35. Cameron 1995:384ff. 36. Reinsch-Werner, 1976, 202; compare in particular “’Apxacidao” at GK129 and Hymn 3, 216; this refers only to the descendents of Arkas in GK, which make Atalanta a daughter of Schoeneus and not an Arkasid, but Callimachus follows the other tradition that she was a daughter of lasios/lasion, an Arkasid, marking this with an epithet derived from GK. 37. See Cameron 1995:348; Serrao 1979. There is even a suggestion that Mimnermus's Nanno might have been a poetry book arranged in a similar way (Cameron 311). Clauss 1990 explores possible Hellenistic imitations of the proem. 38. West 1985:167, thinks it comes from “post-Hesiodic or para-Hesiodic poetry.” 39. Burkert 1992:93 and 202, n. 18. This “catalog of the loves of the deity” is also mentioned in Calypso’s comments to Hermes in the Odyssey. Another Near Eastern parallel worth mentioning is the Jewish tradition recorded in Genesis, 6.4, that angels mated with human women and begat giants. Van Seters 1988:5-9; Hess 1989:25 1-253; later reflexes of this Jewish tradition in Lieu 1992:81—84. Other Near Eastern parallels are discussed by Koenne 1994:26-34. 40. We can see the direction of the crossing moving in two ways: either (1) GK = genealogized ehoie: perhaps the idea of a comprehensive catalog covering the

whole of Greece is inspired by the ehoie tradition, which, without offering a genealogy, is nevertheless in some sense comprehensive; or (2) GK = ehoieized genealogy: the idea of genealogy could be prior, and the “female perspective” of the ehoie tradition a superficial veneer. Either way, the rapprochement between the two forms is complex. 41. Tynjanov 1924, and 1927. I was reminded of this term by the use in Kappel 1992, where he tries to show that in some fourth-century paeans, like the Eruthraean paean to Asclepius, the structure is “automatized.” 42. West 1963:758-759, 1985:16.

266

Notes to Pages 93-98

43. The application of the terms paradigmatic and syntagmatic to poetry goes back to

Roman Jakobson, e.g., Jakobson 1981. . Maera: Pausanias 10.30.5 = fr.6 Bernabe = F5Davies; Clymene

= Pausanias

10.29.5 = 5 Bernabe = 4 Davies.

. Tyro gets a better press in the GK: although the stories are much the same, the GK presents her in a better light by beginning by talking about her role in the story of her father Salmoneus

(GK30-31).

For the parallel, see Heubeck

in Heubeck/

Hoekstra 1992:92. 46. There may be other imitations also: it might be possible to argue that the epithet

applied to Odysseus's wiles, πολύκροτα, in the catalog of Helen's suitors, is an imitation of one of the variant readings of the first line of the Odyssey. Something odd is going on apropos the section on Heracles also (GK25, 26-33; compare GK229); this is ascribed to Onomacritus in the Odyssey (1. 601ff.) and athetized in the

Theogony (950-955), and in one of these passages the athetisis is ascribed to Musaios. 47. Roughly this point was made by Zutt 1894, and other sources mentioned by West 1985:32, n. 7. Page 1955:35ff. sees the GK as the model (with a Boeotian tradition).

Heubeck

in Heubeck/Hoekstra

1992

is skeptical.

I am

also reminded

of

Finkelberg’s thesis about the relationship between the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships and the catalog of suitors in the GK; the GK preserved the older form. It is relevant to observe in this context that some regard the Nekuia as belonging to a late phase of the development of the Odyssey: see Sourvinou-Inwood 1995:71-75. 48. I notice that Most 1992 has recently argued that the Odyssean Nekuia refers to a number of epic genres: (1) the Odyssey itself and the Telegony (Elpenor, Teiresias, Anticleia); (2) the Ehoiai; (3) the Iliad and Iliadic Cycle (Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax); and (4) moral-didactic epos such as Hesiod's Theogony (Minos, Orion,

Tityus, Tantalus, Sisiphus, Hercules, Theseus, and Peitithoos). This thesis goes considerably beyond what is necessary for my argument. 49. Cf. Martin 1989:87—88. 50. Doherty 1995:112. 51. Odysseus himself, in disguise, praises Penelope's fame at Od.19.106.

5. Herodotus's Genre(s) It is a pleasure to thank Carolyn Dewald, John Marincola, and Andrew SzegedyMaszak, who generously commented on an earlier version of this chapter, as well as to record my gratitude to Heath Martin for his able assistance, and to the editors of this volume, especially Mary Depew, for their inspiration, patience, and helpful comments. . Lateiner 1989:7, 214, 227; R. Fowler 1996; Fehling 1989 (1971); Pritchett 1993; Nagy 1987 and 1990:262-267; Dewald 1987.

For the older view see, e.g., Glover 1924:41—48. Dewald 1987:169-170, Boedeker 1987a:201, Griffiths forthcoming.

Notes to Pages 98-101

267

dd

. See below, at n. 15.

Lateiner 1989:214. But see Rosenmeyer 1985:74-75 on the difficulties of determining the criteria by which genres are to be defined, and Marincola 1999 on particular problems of es-

tablishing the genre and subgenres of ancient historiography. Nagy 1990:223-234 argues that Herodotus would have defined himself rather as a . . . .

logios “master of (oral) traditions” than as a historian. See Conte 1994a:114-115 on the formation of new genres. Moles 1993. See also Hunter 1982 and Hornblower 1992, 1994b:138-139 on close relationships between the texts of Thucydides and Herodotus. See, e.g., White 1984, Woodman 1988, and the essays in Canary and Kozicki 1978. Armayor 1985.

. Fehling 1989:12-13, 88-93.

. Fehling 1989:243. . Fehling 1989:252-253. . Hammond 1988, especially 555-557, shows how closely even very recent historical discussions of the Persian Wars follow the dramatic account of Herodotus (in this case, 7.215-224). 16. It should be said, however, that Fehling finds little to challenge in Herodotus’s ac-

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

count of the Persian Wars themselves; most of his examples are drawn from the Egyptian and Scythian logoi. As suggested by Lincoln 1987:267-268. Compare also Dewald in Dewald and Marincola 1987:23-25; Luraghi 1994. See Harmatta 1990:121, quoted in Pritchett 1993:225 n. 186: “However rich and valuable the information and evidence collected by Herodotus [for] Scythian culture and history . . . , they are subordinated to his comprehensive world-concept .. - Similarly, on Herodotus's presentation of Egypt, see A. Lloyd 1988, 1994a, 1994b, and especially 1994a:141—170. S. West 1985. S. West 1985:294; similarly, S. West 1991:151 doubts that Herodotus could have visited Egyptian Thebes and said so little about its wonders. Slings 1990 discusses the problem of a nonbiographical “I” in archaic poetry. Pritchett 1993; see also Rhodes 1994, Luraghi 1994, R. Fowler 1996:80—82. For a critique of earlier apologists, see Fehling 1989:2-8. E.g., Pritchett 1993:94—96: Herodotus says that women on an island off the Gyzantes are reported by Carthaginians to pan for lake gold with pitch-smeared quills (4.195); such a practice was attested by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park in the interior of Africa ca. 1800. Pritchett concludes (p. 96): “We have a firm basis for the Kathaginian story, although the location may be an error.” E.g., Pritchett 1993:9: “The claims and objective of one who is writing history

[meaning Herodotus] are quite different from those of one who is writing a work of fiction.”

268

Notes to Pages 101-103

24. Gould 1989:19-41 provides a good introduction to the subject of Herodotus and

oral history; see also Hornblower 1994:5—6, 17-19. 25. Pritchett 1993:9. Lateiner 1989:219 provides a more nuanced characterization of Herodotus's originality as “the only historian before historiography.” 26. Shrimpton and Gillis 1997. For a similar argument concerning first-person references, see also Marincola 1987 (below, n. 58). 27. Pritchett 1993:159-160, commenting on S. West 1985: 285—286. 28. Similarly, Hornblower 1994a:18-19. See Marincola 1997a on the construction of 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 4]. 42. 43.

authority by ancient historians in general. E.g., Burkert 1995 by Herodotus's use of Lydian king-lists; Ivantchik 2000 for Herodotus's accuracy in describing Scythian culture. Woodman 1988; of special interest is the discussion of problems with eyewitness accounts and other forms of oral history, especially for reconstruction of battles (pp. 17-22). On rhetorical issues in "non-artistic" Greek scientific prose, see van der Eijk 1997. Moles 1993, which relies heavily on the prologues of Herodotus and Thucydides to describe their authorial intentions. Calame 1995:85—88. Marincola 1997a describes the devices used by ancient historians from Herodotus to Ammianus to establish their authority and gain the attention and respect of their audiences, without suggesting that these rhetorical devices are necessarily at odds with historical truth. Conte 1994a, especially 108-109, 115—125. Compare Verdin 1977:54; ". . „en attirant l'attention sur les caractéristiques de la littérature poétique, les historiens peuvent nous fournir en méme temps des indications précieuses sur ce qu'ils considéraient comme la spécificité de l'oeuvre historique." Strasburger 1972, Woodman 1988, and Nagy 1990 emphasize the continuities, and Calame 1995 the differences between the Homeric and Herodotean projects. See now Marincola 1997b for a rich discussion of Odysseus as protohistorian. As I have suggested elsewhere (Boedeker 1996), poetry such as the recently published Simonides fragments on the Battle of Plataea may even have shaped Herodotus's understanding of the not-so-distant past. In addition to Verdin 1977, see Lateiner 1989:99—100 for a concise summary of Herodotus on poets as historical sources. For a contrasting view, see Marincola 1997b. Marincola 1997b argues for a view of Aristeas as a more serious reporter. Similarly, Verdin 1977:61. The only other time poésis is used in Herodotus is when the Ethiopian king, conversing with Cambyses' delegates, evaluates the Persian "manufacture" of myrrh and wine (3.22.3, used twice).

Notes to Pages 104-106

44,

269

In Egypt, Herodotus tells us (2.156), Apollo (Horus) and Artemis (Bubastis) were said to be the children of Demeter (Isis) and Dionysos (Osiris), nursed by Leto.

45. According to A. Lloyd 1988:59, this is not an Egyptian belief. 46. For Herodotus’s source citations, see most recently Shrimpton and Gillis in Shrimpton 1997:229-265. 47. On Herodotus’s narrative contract, see Dewald 1987:147. Compare Verdin 1977:61, with reference to Herodotus's use of εὐπρεπές: ". . . une oeuvre littéraire doit se conformer à des lois intrinséques, qui peuvent varier selon le genre.” Pratt 1993:144—145 similarly finds that in his discussion of Helen, Herodotus "acknowledges a poetic standard different from his own.” I note, however, that whatever he thinks of epic as an accurate source of history, Herodotus does appreciate Homer's "political" significance as a source of identity for Greeks: e.g., in arguing with Gelon, Spartans and Athenians refer to Homeric texts to support their claims to lead the Greek alliance (1.159 and 162); the tyrant Cleisthenes rids Sicyon of the performance of Homeric poems because of their pro-Argive bias (5.67). 48. Conte 1994a:123. 49. Bowie 1993. 50. Baffling oracles that prove truthful in the end is, of course, a well-known narrative motif in Herodotus; on the expectation of truth in clearly stated oracles, see Herodotus 8.77. 51. I would question Bowie's argument that the "fictional" quality of epic is recognized within epic itself, but as we shall see, it is surely recognized by Herodotus; on

the general truth claim of oral epic, see Slings 1990:13. 52. Archilochus fr. 19 West, in which the speaker (who is not the poet but one Charon

the carpenter) rejects the wealth of Gyges, is indeed composed in iambic trimeters. 53. On the use of ἔπεα for elegiacs as well as hexameters, see M. West 19747. 54. Generic considerations related to factual reliability are evident in a much later work, Plutarch De Malig. Her. 872E, which insists that Simonides gave a reliable account of the Corinthians' conduct at the battle of Plataea, since he wrote it not

"training a chorus in Corinth" (χορὸν ἐν Κορίνθῳ διδάσκων), and not “making a lyric in honor of the city" (dpa ποιῶν eis τὴν πόλιν), but rather, “writing these deeds in an elegy, he reported them” (τὰς πράξεις ἐκείνας ἐν ἐλεγείᾳ 22. 26.

57. 58.

γράφων ἱστόρηκεν). Jacoby 1909. Fornara 1983:4; see also p. 12: “Nothing in the nature of genealogy suggests that Jacoby was correct in declaring the work siminal of history as we know it from Herodotus.” R. Fowler 1996. Marincola 1987:122-123 n. 5 (see also p. 137) lists 30 examples of “autobiographical statements" in Book 2, 6 in Book 4, and only 8 scattered among the other seven books of the Histories.

270

Notes to Pages 107-111

59. Marincola

1987:128-131; Darbo-Peschanski

1987:112, naming Thales, Anaxi-

mander, Xenophanes, and Pythagoras, as well as Hecataeus, as Greeks who had written on Egypt. More recently, Marincola 1997b argues that this high incidence of first-person statements may be a sign to the reader not to take things at face value.

For the medical writers, see G. Lloyd 1979:89-98 and 1987:85—91 and passim, Lateiner 1986, Hornblower 1987:20 (the latter on Thucydides as well).

. A. Lloyd 1994b:78-79. . Incontrast to Books 1—5, the second half of the work presents a fairly linear narrative of conflicts between Greeks and Persians.

. See Cobet 1971 on Herodotean digressions, and Dewald 1987:165 for a concise summary of some of the kinds of material avoided. . Herodotus sometimes used praeteritio as well, e.g., at 4.36; compare Lateiner 1989:64—69 on praeteritio and omission. . Lateiner 1989:68. . This reticence can be attributed to the generic range set forth in the proem, where the speaker announces as his subject matter "things done by human beings," but the same degree of hesitation does not prevail when he describes the beliefs and rituals of other peoples, e.g., Scythians in 4.59—63. Such descriptions might be defended on the grounds that they focus on what people do or believe, not on what gods do. More in keeping with his stated practice, Herodotus does not divulge information on the (Greek) Samothracian mysteries (2.51: still within the Egyp-

tian logos), and presents himself as very hesitant about mentioning Demeter's role at the battle of Plataea (9.65.2). On Herodotus and religious matters, see Gould 1994. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

See also Lateiner 1989:224 on the demands of Herodotus's logos. Dewald 1987:165-166 on the λόγων ὅδος, an image of the author picking his way among an unlimited number of routes. See Lateiner 1989:76-90 for a valuable discussion and catalog of alternative versions of stories. For a different evaluation of Aristeas, see Marincola 1997b. Denniston 1960:491 n. 1, quoted with approval by Lateiner 1989:31; Rosenmeyer 1982:245. Lateiner 1989:61—62 concludes, "A Herodotean confession of ignorance may serve rhetorical as well as epistemological purposes.” Fehling 1989:120-127, however, considers Herodotus's expression of ignorance to be a literary technique of "lying literature." See Dewald 1987:159-163, Lateiner 1989:92, Nagy 1990:251-262, Calame 1995:86 on Herodotus as a histor in the sense of “judge.” Discussed earlier at n. 46. Calame 1995:88—89 points out that the "I" of the speaker in Herodotus sometimes blends with, sometimes stands out from, the voices ("they") of his sources.

Notes to Pages 111-115

271

75. As indicated in Marincola 1997a, a study of the ways in which ancient historians

establish their authority. Hornblower 1987:26 agrees with Eduard Meyer “that what distinguishes the keeping of a chronicle from the writing of history in the full sense is the [in Meyer's words] ‘stamp of individuality.” 76. Rossi 1971:75-76; Rosenmeyer 1982:80. 77. Compare Darbo-Peschanski 1987:107-112, Dewald 1987, Marincola 1987, Calame 1995 on the first person in Herodotus. Dewald 1987 in particular shows how a varied, stylized use of the first person makes the narrator of the Histories

vigorously present, as if working with his unwieldy material in full view of the audience; he is an active histor in the sense of both “observer” and “judge” of logoi. On this last aspect, see also Connor 1993.

. See Lateiner 1989:30-33 Boedeker 1998:235—238 For a differentiated view fictional, see Slings 1990. . Rösler 1991:219. On the . On the second person

on Herodotus’s colloquial address to the reader. on Homeric apostrophe. of the “I” in archaic poetry, ranging from biographical to date of Herodotus's “publication,” see Fornara 1971. in Herodotus, see Lateiner 1989:30-33, Hornblower

1994:149.

. R Fowler 1996, especially 86. Thucydides too is concerned with his sources, particularly their veracity, but for the most part, he makes his authorial decisions pri-

vately, rather than sharing them with his audience. . On polyvocality in Herodotus, see Dewald forthcoming. . Fora different kind of parallel between the histor and the politically powerful, see Christ 1994. On practical wisdom in Herodotus, see Dewald 1985.

6. From Aristophanes to Menander? . In inscriptions, archaia and (after the tragedy, comedy, or satyr play, refer, drama (hence "Old Comedy" is used The term kainé is used of brand-new 7.1773 is no exception, despite LSJ).

second century B.c.E.) palaia, when used of with remarkable regularity, to reperformed of what the scholars call “New Comedy"). (i.e., not previously performed) drama (IG But note the unpublished inscription (re-

ported by Stefanis 1988, no. 2814) in the Larissa museum of the second to first century B.C.B., where nea komoidia is used of what elsewhere is called kainé (I thank W. J. Slater for this information). . Henceforth all dates are p.c.g. unless otherwise marked. Janko 1984:244—249 at-

tributes the tripartition to Aristotle, Nesselrath 1989:163—164 to Aristophanes of Byzantium. Neither claim is supported by strong argument; compare Wehrli 1936:12-20. On the assumption that the Tractatus Coislinianus epitomizes Aristotle's second book of the Poetics, Janko argues that a tripartite division of comedy existed before Menander (though the partition was of course different). In Nicomachean Ethics (1128a) Aristotle makes a stylistic (not a generic) distinction

272

Notes to Pages 116-119

between the style of "old" (palaia) and "recent" (kainé) comedy (compare Wehrli 1936:17). Scholars from Wilamowitz (1907:134 n. 21) to Rosen (1995:119) have

cited this passage to prove that the general division between the "Old" and the "New" began at least as early as Aristotle. But in theoretical discourse kainé, unlike nea, is relative (compare previous note) and not, to my knowledge, used in Greek

of periodized literary or artistic styles (the pairs archaia: nea and palaia: kainé are not equivalent, despite Janko 1984:243): see the list of bipartitioned and tripartitioned genres in Nesselrath 1989:341-345, where only nea or neotera are used. . For the formative role of Aristotle and his school on writing on comedy: Wehrli 1936:12-20; Rostagni 1955:188-237; Janko 1984:46—87; Perusino 1989:14—24; Nesselrath 1989:102-171. See, e.g., Sommerstein 1992:27-30, who suggests that Aristophanes is unique in these claims. For the selection of Aristophanes and Menander: Kórte 1921:1212; Wehrli 1936:12-20; Rothwell 1995:114, 116. For the characterization of Old Comedy in later antiquity: Jones 1993; Storey 1998. For the role of the comic poets in developing the theory of comedy's social utility: compare Rosen 1988.47. E.g., Segal 1973; Storey 1987:7; Green 1994:37; Russo 1994:13; Csapo and Slater 1995:350; Henderson 1995:177-178. Degani 1993:5, 4. On Crates: see Norwood 1931:147; Bonanno 1972:47-54; Franqois 1978; Rosen 1995:121 n. 6. Heath argues that Aristotle's claim that Crates "abandoned the iambic form” has no bearing on personal abuse (1989:348-352, 1990:143—144), cf. Hubbard 1991:24 n. 42.

Platon. diff.com. 29ff. p. 4 Koster. See Rosen 1995:127-128. See now Vickers 1997:193—95; Revermann 1997. 10. Nesselrath attempts to establish qualitative and quantitative distinctions between Old Comic and Middle Comic myth parody (1990:204—241). For the quantitative distinction, see next note. Rosen doubts the possibility of establishing any qualitative distinction and shows that for Plato (Comicus), neither the qualitative nor the quantitative distinction holds (1995). 11. Webster 1952 and 1970:85; Handley 1985:398—414; Henderson 12. 13. 14. 15.

1995:176. Com-

pare Dover 1968a:145. Compare Proleg. III p. 9, 44—45 (Koster): it is characteristic of Middle Comedy that κατασχολοῦνται πάντες περὶ τὰς ὑποϑέσεις. Henderson 1995:178-179. On domestic Old Comedy, see Handley 1985:391—398. Norwood 1931:146. Theater artifacts also reflect the popularity of character comedy in the late fifth century: Green 1994:63. Kaibel on Koriannó cited in PCG 7.136; cf. Norwood 1931:157-158; Wehrli 1936:56—-57.

16. See Storey 1998.

Notes to Pages 119-123

273

17. Storey presents some evidence against the usual Aristophanocentric notion that

Eupolis was the imitator (1993, 1994). 18. See Rosen 1988:37-58; Heath 1990:144—149. 19.

Known

ad hominem

comedies

are Aristophanes’

Knights (424), Clouds (423),

Thesmophoriazusae (411), Frogs (405); Eupolis’s Marikas (421), Kolakes (421), Autolykos 1 (420), Autolykos II (419/18); probably Baptat (417); Demoi (416);

Taxiarchoi (415); Ameipsias Konnos (423); Hermippus’s Artopolides (420 or 419), Plato’s Hyperbolus (420-417), Peisandros (422 Körte, before 411 Geissler), Kleophon (405); Strattis’s Kinesias (405 or soon after), Zopyros Perikaiomenos (ca. 400°), Kallippides (ca. 400°); Archippus's Rhinon (ca. 402?); and the Pytine of Cratinus in which the main character was Cratinus himself (423). To these we

might

add

comedies

named

after

hetairai,

though

less

strictly

political:

Pherecrates’s Korianno (?), Petale (after 421?). For Eupolis’s dates, see Storey 1990.

Sutton (1990:83. n. 5) remarks on the vogue at the end of the century. 20. Segal 1973:129-136; Sutton 1990:89; Nesselrath 1995:2; Rothwell 1995:117. 21. For the interpretation of Aristotle's words, see Nagy 1996:163-164, 218-219. 22. PCG F 4. See Habicht 1993; Schwartz 1938-63:2. 177 n. 1. 23. PCG F 25, 26. See Philipp 1973; Webster 1970:106. 24. See especially Jones 1993. Note also Pliny, ep. 6.21.2-4. The tradition of personal abuse long survived in mime and pantomime: see Cassiodorus Variae 1.32.2. 25. I think that my use of the term “dominant” will be intelligible when used in its ordinary meaning: a dominant style would be that which has the greatest impact on contemporary (or later periodizing) aesthetics and need not be understood quantitatively or statistically. My use of the term owes something to the Russian Formalists, who apply it to variable distinctive values that structure hierarchically the various components of works, genres, genre systems, and literary canons. The “dominant” is chiefly responsible for changes in artistic production and reception. An important feature of the “dominant” is that it functions within both the synchronic and diachronic system: indeed it was one of the primary insights of Formalist literary history, that neither of these systems could be thought independently of the other. For the concept, see Jakobson 1987:41—49; for its enunciation context, Striedter 1989:95-106; for criticism, Bennett 1990:83—98. 26. This is the title of (nonetheless excellent) discussions by Arnott 1972 and Handley 1985:398—414.

Needless to say, there have been occasional protests against the view that Ecclesiazusae and Plutus display a decline in inspiration and creativity, or that they are apolitical: e.g., Flashar 1967:175; Rothwell 1990:24. 28. Compare Ghiron-Bistagne 1974:1342-1345. 29. For the term “evenemential,” see Meier 1978, 1987:45—46. Evenemential is distinguished from processual and structural history. An evenemential historical focus is endemic to Classical studies, as Meier puts it (1987:55): "Seeing history as a se27.

274

Notes to Pages 123-127

ries of politico-military events corresponded closely to the way classical antiquity perceived, caused and experienced events and changes within the framework of time. This was particularly true for the fifth century. At that time the citizens of Athens developed a political identity unprecedented in world politics: they are primarily citizens, conscious of themselves as such, and behaved accordingly. Developments in the field of politics were of prime importance to them and to anyone

who had dealings with them.” 30. E.g., Wilamowitz 1927:203, 220-221; Cantarella 1965:54-55; Arnott 1972:67. 31. The synchorégia attested for 410 or 406 can have no possible relevance to this question, though it keeps cropping up (e.g., Sutton 1990:85, n. 11). The words of the scholiast to Frogs 404 show that he is desperately looking for evidence to support a theory that “choregiae were already being performed stingily” (compare 2 Frogs

153); the fact that he could find only a single Dionysiac synchorégia in Aristotle's list shows how poor the theory is. On the synchorégia, see Pickard-Cambridge 1968:87; Rothwell 1995.

32. Strauss 1986:164; compare MacDowell 1995:324-327. This is controversial, but the strongest argument for a completely new play is the belief that “the comedy that we have is so clearly on the road to Later Comedy . . . that it could hardly have been substantially the same as a comedy of 408" (Storey 1996:226). 33. Criticism of "crisis of democracy/polis’: Eder 1995a, 1995b; Davies 1995. Against the "decadence" of fourth-century democracy and democratic institutions: Eder 1995b; Mossé 1995; Rhodes 1995; Thür 1995; Schmitz 1995. Against putative lack of vigor and enterprise: Badian 1995. Against "economic crisis": Mossé 1972; Dillon 1987:157-163; Burke 1990; Lohmann 1995; Leppin 1995. 34. Slater 1995:39—42; Seidensticker 1995:192; compare Henderson 1995:180. For evidence for a later period, see W. J. Slater 1993:189-199. There are of course other factors, especially the professionalization of various entertainment industries related to theater, and the consequent complexity of the New Music and the growing complexity of dance: see Csapo and Slater 1995:351 and the general discussion by Wallace 1995. 35. See Gentili 1979:25-26, who argues that the omissions are due to adaptation for Hellenistic performance. The suspicion that Euripides also used repertory odes may explain the odeless manuscript of Euripides’ Hippolytus (PSorbonne 2252) and the omission of an ode in Oineus (PHibeh 4). If it is true that our version of

Clouds was never performed, then the substitution of an ode with chorou after 888 has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the ancient scholarship. (1 am not convinced by Dover 1968b:xciii, 208 that some scholar added the word when he correctly identified a point where Aristophanes' revision was incomplete.) 36. See Csapo 1986; Taplin 1987; Green 1991b; Taplin 1993:36—47; Csapo 1994:53; Green 1994:64—67; Csapo and Slater 1995:67—69. 37. For the Getty calyx-krater (82.A E.83), see Taplin 1987; Fowler 1989b; Csapo 1993;

Notes to Pages 128-132

275

Csapo and Slater 1995:65—66. Green (1985 and 1991a.30) argues that the vase de-

picts Aristophanes' Birds. 38. For processual art history, see especially Belting 1978. For "semi-autonomy" of art, see Althusser and Balibar 1970, especially 91-118, 209-253; Eagleton 1978:64-101;

Jameson 1981:23—49. 39. Maidment 1936:11, compare 7; Sommerstein 1992:18-19. Frye 1957; Fowler 1971. The history of the more scientistic branch of evolutionary theory is studied by Wellek 1963:37-53. Wellek could write in his day that evolutionary theory "seems to have disappeared almost completely" (1963:37). A generation later it is undergoing a considerable revival, see especially Fleischer 1989; Koch 1993; Carroll 1995. 41. Complementarity: Ober and Strauss 1990; Carey 1994 (the term is his). Judging theory: Csapo and Slater 1995:160. 42. Wallace 1995:212-213 (compare Wallace 1997). 43.

For the effect of the audience on tragedy, see Arist. Rhet. 1403b31—35 (actors dom-

inate the plays because of the degeneracy of the citizens); Pol. 1341b15—18 (bad effect of audience on the performance of mousikoi); Po. 1461b26—62a14 (screed on

mimetic aspects of tragedy that allegedly play to vulgar part of the audience). I do not accept Heath's (1989) arguments that would reconcile Aristotle's standards

with Aristophanic comedy. . See especially Cortassa 1986; Hubbard 1991:88—139. For the background to the modern separation of Aristophanes' audience into cultivated and vulgar segments, see Walcot 1971. 45. Ar. Wasps 65-66, 1037-1059; Frogs 1109-1118. Hubbard (1991:116) claims that at

Wasps 1048—1049 Aristophanes is "distinguishing his audience into two parts, the

ignorant . . . and the wise,” but this is not so: at 1048, rots un γνῶναι παραχρῆμα simply continues the address to the whole audience (by Hubbard's admission), which we find in the passage immediately preceding, especially at

1045: ἃς ὑπὸ τοῦ γνῶναι καϑαρῶς ὑμεῖς ἐποιήσατ᾽ ἀναλδεῖς. 46. The point a divided masses to same time

is made by Hubbard 1991:94, and made reconcilable with his theory of audience by claiming that “the text operates on two levels, inviting the think that they are all complimented as sophoi and dexioi, but at the written with the intention of actually limiting the compliment to those

who have always understood and appreciated the poet’s subtlety” (1991:102). In this view, Aristophanes shows a truly Aristotelian contempt for the intelligence of the masses. Don Fowler suggests to me that Clouds may be exceptional in dividing its audience, since the text we have could have been intended for book circulation only, in which case the real audience (readership) may have been much smaller and more select than the notional audience. 47. Which is why they wished to ban or limit the effects of invective comedy: Plato,

Rep. 606c, Laws 816d, 935e; Arist. Pol. 1336b; see Degani 1993:10. 48. See Henderson 1990, 1993, 1999.

276

Notes to Pages 132-136

49. Archedicus's attack on Demochares

took place before the latter's exile in 303 (Habicht 1993:254); Philippides’ attack on Stratocles probably took place in early 301; before the fall of the democrats (Philipp 1973:506—507); Demetrius's Areopagite after Poliorcetes restored democracy in 294.

50. Green and Handley 1995:72 (quotations); Green 1994:76—88; Webster, Green, and Seeberg 1995:1.53-76. 51. For the constitution of Menander's audience, consult Casson 1976. For the trian-

gle Menander, Demetrius of Phaleron, and Aristotle, see Barigazzi 1965; Wiles 1984; Williams 1987. And for the opposed view, denying any connection, Luria 1965; Gehrke 1978.

7. Theocritus and the “Demythologizing” of Poetry . Compare Hunter 1996:7-10, 116-127 (and also Lawinska 1964).

. To repeat the well-known distinction of Plat. Resp. 10.607a. As we shall see, these two traditional kinds of poetry do not supply the two varieties of Theocritean “human” poetry with much more than a flexible framework that, as regularly happens in Hellenistic poetry, is revitalized by the inclusion of forms and content from different genres. But the role of the “dominant” element (in the terminology of Russian formalism), which a reference, if it is structurally pervasive, may confer upon a specific genre, even if other genres are referred to in the same poem, ought to compel us to rethink the usual idea of Hellenistic poetry as a zoo of hircocervi, such as the one created by the allegedly ludicrous Kreuzung der Gattungen: Compare Fantuzzi 1993. . Schol. ad Theocr. pp. 269-270 and 305 W. . Compare above all Id. v. For a full list of the places in both the urban and the bucolic mimes where Theocritus does not make any attempt to hide the relationship with popular or subliterary forms of expression, compare Pretagostini 1992. On the popular mime in the Hellenistic period, compare Sajeva 1977 and Swiderek 1954. . Both as an author of mythological but no-longer-heroic characters (xxii.215— 223), and as a bucolic author (vii.45—48).

Compare Halperin 1983.

I follow Gallavotti’s 1993 edition (xAeiwuev Schaefer, compare Hes. WED 1): ἀ(ε)ίδωμεν ἀοιδαῖς codd., Jev αοιδης PAntinoae; ἄδωμεν ἀοιδάς Hartung and S. Shechter, RhM 108.1965.184-185. Indeed, τὸν ἄριστον appears to me to be the syntactically most obvious object of the verb at the end of line 2. Latte's and Hartung's emendations, as well as Gow's interpretation (compare ii p. 327) assume that τὸν ἄριστον is in apposition to Ata, line 1, and consequently presuppose that the practice of beginning and ending with Zeus would be general and would apply to all types of poems. At any rate, both interpretations involve a distinction between the theme that Theocritus sets himself in his poem and the usual

Notes to Pages 137-139

277

practice of poetry (whether specifically eulogistic poetry for Zeus, or, generically, poetry tout-court). Compare Proll. c scholl. W&D, pp. 2, 7-10 Pertusi for Aristarchus and Praxiphanes, and Dion.Per. Vita Chisiana (ed. A. Colonna, BPEC 5.1957.11, 51) for Crates. Transl. D. A. Campbell. . Transl. D. A. Campbell. . Transl. F. J. Nisetich. . Transl. F. J. Nisetich.

. Transl. D. Kidd. Aratus's proem is no less full of Zeus than that of Hesiod, and it is so close in spirit to its Hesiodic model that it was to receive the same scholarly treatment. Also Aratus's proem, to judge from the ancient scholia, pp. 33 f. Mart., was considered by some to be spurious, and it was even replaced with more pertinent proems. 14. It will be sufficient to call to mind the incipit of Pindar's first Olympian ode. Obviously Theocritus was not chiefly concerned with the celebration of Zeus but with that of his human subject, Ptolemy (and of Zeus only as parallel with Ptolemy), just as Pindar was interested in exalting the Olympian contest and was concerned with water, gold, or fire just as foils for it. 15. Compare lines 128-134, and also 73-76, whose connections with Theog. 71-74 and 96 (which is also the source of Apoll. Rh. iv.1176-1179) are analyzed master-

fully by Hunter 1996:81f. 16. Transl. F. J. Nisetich. 17. Compare Bowra 1964:203. 18. Perrotta (1926) 1978:145—179 is still fundamental. 19. Compare Gow's comm., ii p. 325 for a useful survey. 20. It is tempting to contrast Theocritus's mode of description of Ptolemy as a hero/

half god with Callimachus's explicit designation (HDel. 165) of the same Ptolemy II as a god (@eos)—though in this case, as well as in the Coma Berenices, Callimachus avoids speaking about the divinization in his own voice (compare Gelzer 1982:23). 21. A full appraisal of the relationship between the two passages is to be found in Meincke 1965:111-116. 22. Compare Cairns 1972:100-114, who emphasizes the connections between Id. xvii

and the rhetorical prescriptions for the prose βασιλικὸς

λόγος by the late

Menander Rhetor. Yet he too agrees that Theocritus is deliberately trying to give ld. xvii "something of the flavor of a Homeric Hymn" (104—105). 23. The emphasis of Theocritus on Ptolemy's descent from Heracles may reflect a detail of the real ideology of the Ptolemic dynastic cult: compare OGIS 54 D. (where

Ptolemy III presents himself at the same time as the son of the θεοὶ ἀδελφοί and as ἀπόγονος of Heracles and of Dionysos), and Satyrus FgH 631F1 J. (about Ptolemy IV), fully discussed by Hunter 1997:124~145.

278

Notes to Pages 140-141

24. Theocritus’s definition appeared unparalleled to Gow ad loc. (ii p. 328) and to

25. 26. 27. 28.

Meincke 1965:93, whereas Lévéque 1991:305 called it “curieuse.” Compare Fantuzzi 2000 for a fuller treatment. The encomiastic character and destination of Simonides’ poem has been analyzed above all by Aloni 1994:18-22, and by Boedeker 1995:221-222. On the debated integration of the verb in line 18, see the review and the reasonable criticism of Burzacchini 1995:31. By qualifying the Homeric heroes in such a way, Simonides intended most proba-

bly to follow in a more or less direct way the tradition of Hom. IL 12.23 (ἡμιθέων γένος ἀνδρῶν; this is the only passage of Homer where the word ἡμιθέος appears, and it can all the more be supposed to be the model for Simonides), Hes.

Op. 159f. (ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος ot καλέονται ἡμίθεοι, “godly race of the heroes who are called demigods”), as well as in another fragment of his, PMG 523. 29. Cf. Most 1994:111-112. 30. In fact, lines 17-18 deal with the heroes fighting at Troy, not specifically with

Achilles, but the attribute ὠκύμορος, “short-lived,” which is itself primarily intended to oppose the short lives of the Greek warriors with the perpetuity of their glory (compare line 15), might also focus somehow precisely on Achilles, the hero short-lived par excellence in Homer, and the one to whose death Simonides had devoted the first ten remaining lines of the poem. 31. At least in the Iliad, Achilles is always and only in touch with his mother, whereas Zeus never appears to remember that he is the ancestor of Achilles. For example, in the Iliad, during the εὖχος over the body of the defeated Asteropeus, who was a demigod, as the grandson of the river god Axios, and thus in a situation where emphasizing superhumanity even in comparison with the other demigods is advisable and well-timed, Achilles boasts about his descent from Aeacus, the son of

Zeus, and calls himself one of the "children of Zeus" (21.184—189). 32. Both Homer and Simonides are also remembered in the other Theocritean eulogy (16.34—57) as poets able to provide human achievements, otherwise ephemeral, with kleos; their skill also is explicitly compared with the author's ability to provide his laudandus with glory. 33. Compare Parsons 1992:12; see also Aloni 1994:13-15. 34. A further clue to Theocritus's allusive intention may also be detected in the avrap ἐγώ through which Theocritus (line 7) states his preference for the human laudandus Ptolemy rather than for Zeus as subject of the song. This syntagm had fulfilled some kind of meta-poetic specialization in Greek archaic poetry, because it had introduced the formulaic last line of many Homeric hymns (I shall remem-

ber you and another song as well), through which, soon after bidding chaire, or farewell to the god, the poet drew the audience's attention to the transition from the hymnodic prelude on a divine matter to the heroic matter of the following rec-

Notes to Pages 142-143

279

itation of epic. Nevertheless, the transition that such a final αὐτὰρ ἐγώ line pointed out in the Homeric Hymns was the transition from a song for a god to a song for heroes (as is most clear from the epilogues of the hymns to Helios, xxxi, and to Selene, xxxii). Simonides, however, uses αὐτὰρ ἐγώ to introduce the tran-

sition between the mythological prelude for the heroic(-divine?) Achilles and the human subject of the poem: the Greeks who had conquered the Persians, and this transition perhaps was intended by the author to be—and certainly could be read by a Hellenistic poet as being—a praeteritio intended to emphasize the choice of a human subject matter (compare Ibyc. PMGF $151 Davies; on such an emphatic

meaning of αὐτὰρ ἐγώ, compare Obbink 1996:201-203; more generally for the emphasis of the countering of Homeric and new themes in Simonides, see Strauss Clay 1996). Theocritus' line 7 appears to exploit not only the transitional value which the hymnodic tradition had attached to αὐτὰρ ἐγώ, but also the new 'refusing tone which Simonides had superimposed upon it. 35. Modern scholars generally agree in dating it around 276/274. Some scholars of the

nineteenth century had maintained a late dating of Id. xvi and supposed that it was written after Id. xvii, but no reaffirmation of this hypothesis appears to have been proposed after Wilamowitz 1906:153ff. and Perrotta (1924) 1978:54-75 (with the single remarkable exception of Petroll 1965:76). Compare Hans 1985 for

an up-to-date reappraisal of the historical context of the poem. 36. Petroll 1965:76ff. and a few more recent scholars maintain that Theocritus would have written Id. xvi on direct commission of Hieron II, but this hypothesis does not appear to fit the potentiality of the optatives used to describe Hieron's military

achievements and glory, and above all to present the appointment to be a poet of Hieron's as a future possibility (lines 104—106).

. Compare Austin 1967, Parsons 1992, and Hunter 1996:90—109. . Compare Koster 1970:114-115. . Compare Austin 1967:101. Compare Gutzwiller 1983:218. . For an appraisal of the twofold meaning of the Charites in Id. xvi (gods-inspirers

in the proem, personifications of Theocritus' poems in lines 5-12, both at the end of the poem), and the precedents of Simonides test. 22 Campbell and of Dion.Chalc. fr. 1 Gent.-Prato, see especially Sanchez-Wildberger 1955:10-11, and MacLachlan 1993:83-85. 42. “1 am seeking to whom of mortals I may come as a welcome guest in company of the Muses.” 43. “Oh Graces, goddesses whom Eteocles adored . . when no man summons me I will abide at home, but to the houses of them that call I will take heart and go, together with our Muses. Nor will I leave you behind, for without the Graces what has man desirable? With them may I ever dwell.” Meincke 1965:59-62 incorrectly understates the function of the Charites and maintains some kind of subordina-

280

Notes to Pages 143-145

tion of theirs to the role of the Muses. The best appraisal of the relationship between Muses and Charites in Id. xvi is that of Kühn 1978:21-39; cf. also Tarditi 1989 and MacLachlan 1993. 44, Respectively, “blessed war-lord of chariot-whirling Syracusans, you if any mortal now alive will rightly assess the sweet gift of the violet-crowned Muses sent for your adornment; rest your thoughts this way: with the help of the slim-waisted Graces your guest-friend, the famous servant of Urania with her golden headband, has woven a song of praise and sent it from the sacred island to your distinguished city” and “countless paths of ambrosial verses lie open for him who obtains gifts from the Muses and whose songs are clothed with honour by the violet-eyed maidens, the garland-bearing Graces.” Transl. D. A. Campbell. Compare also the lyric epigram AP xiii.28 (D. L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams 33—44, p. 12), ascribed by the Pal. cod. to "Bacchylides or Simonides": Hipponicus, the choregos of a dithyramb, is said to have been "riding in the chariot of the Graces (ἅρμασιν ev

Χαρίτων φορηθεῖς), who established for him among men a name renowned, and the fame of glorious victory, for the sake of the violet-crowned Muses

(toorepavwy θεᾶν ἕκατι Μοισᾶν)"; transl. W. R. Paton. 45. Compare Maehler 1997:251 and MacLachlan 1993:102-103. Simonides, or more

likely a pseudo-Simonidean tradition, juxtaposed Hesiod as a son of the Muses and Homer as a son of the Charites, apparently (test. 47k) because the former had "planted the mythologies of gods and heroes" as a “gardener,” the latter had "planted from them the gardens of the Iliad and Odyssey" as a "garland-maker" (test. 47j Campbell). 46.

In Fránkel's words, “how it came into being and how it is, all things in the world, all gods and powers and all nature, excepting only man himself and animals and plants" (Fránkel (1968?) 1975:94).

47. PMGF S151 Davies. 48, Compare Barron 1969:134. The contradiction between this initial address to the

Muses and their subsequent qualification in lines 25, 52, 75, 114 as "Olympian" —a contradiction that has led some scholars to dismiss these lines as interpolations— is probably only apparent: compare Walcot 1957:39: "It is the Muses of Olympus or Pieria who are the daughters of Zeus, and this explains Hesiod's partiality for them after the first invocation addressed to the Muses of Helicon. The use of standard formulas, when the Olympian Muses are addressed, stresses that they are only stock figures from the repertoire common to all epic poets, while the muses of Helicon are sufficiently real to have tripods presented to them by successful rhapsodes" (We>D 658f.). 49. Compare Holzinger 1892 and Merkelbach 1952. 50. The "Bittschriftcharacter" is well paralleled in archaic encomiastic poetry, but

Theocritus’s lowering of his Charites, i.e., his personified poems, to miserable and ridiculously self-pitying women appears to be the outcome of a specific mimic taste: compare Meincke 1965:40—42.

Notes to Pages 145-147

28]

"Many the calves that with the horned kine were driven bellowing to the byres of the Scopadai; countless the choice sheep that for the hospitable Creondai the shepherds pastured afield over the plain of Crannon." This pastoral emphasis seems to be exaggerated, if it were only intended to make a "historical" reference to the rural character of the wealth of these Thessalian families. 52. "May these till fertile fields, while sheep in countless thousands grow fat upon the pastures and bleat over the plain, and cattle gathering in their herds to the homestead speed the twilight traveler on his way. May the fallows be worked for seedtime, while the cicada, overhead, watching the shepherds in the sun, makes music in the foliage of the trees.” Compare Gutzwiller 1983:232: "after suggesting praise poetry in the traditional forms of epic and encomium, Th. brings forth new possi51.

bilities in the realm of bucolic.” That Theocritus might be thinking (ahead) to his

(future?) pastoral poetry had been already pointed out by Kühn 1978:13. 23. Compare Griffiths 1979:41 and Hunter 1996:8—88f. 54. For the characterization of this group of Idylls in terms of their versificatory technique, see Fantuzzi

1995a, where Segal's classification (1977

[1981]), which is

grounded on similarities of content, has also been adopted. On the basis of further elements (textual tradition, ancient and medieval) Gutzwiller 1996 has likewise concluded that Idd. i, v, vi, iv, vii, and iii were singled out for an alphabetically arranged book of poems conceived as bucolic, which would have appeared between the late third and the early second century B.c.&. 55. On Parnasos and the Muses in pre-Roman age, cf. RE 18, 1949, 1654—1658. The meaning of the invocation ought anyway to be understood in connection with the deliberate failure of exemplarity of this mythological paradigm: compare Fantuzzi 1995b:27f-28. 56. “Cocks” because of their quarrelsomeness, according to the new interpretation by

Cantilena 1992-1994; in the traditional interpretation (for which compare lastly Serrao 1995:148—149, n. 18), they would have been called cocks because of the disagreeable sound of their poetry. 57. On the difference between Simichidas's and Lycidas's songs as denoting the difference between “urban” and rural poetics, the most nuanced analyses appear to me to be Reinhardt 1988:116-141 and Stanzel 1995:269-293. 58. Compare Diod.Sic. iv. 84. 59. Compare Hunter 1996.74-75 (with a survey of the previous interpretations of the Kastor narrative).

60. Compare Hunter 1996:76, and also pp. 46-76 for the analysis of the dialectics between the two sections pertaining to each of the Dioskouroi. 61. As noted by Bowie 1985:84 (coll. Long. Soph. 1.4.3), Theocrituss Nymphs may have had an authoritative precedent in Philetas—most probably at least in the case of Id. vii.136-137. At any rate, the innovation of Theocritus’s bucolics will have certainly been at least to systematize this function of the Nymphs as a specific feature of the genre.

282

Notes to Page 147

62. Compare for Pan Idd. i.3, 16; iv. 47, 63; v. 14, 58, 141; vi. 21; vii. 103, 106; for Paian, v. 79; vi. 27; for Priapos, i. 21 and 81 (besides ep. 4.13 e 18). The rustic connections

of Pan and Priapos hardly need comment, and ep. 3, ascribed to Theocritus (3468-3473 G.-P.), jokingly fancies a sexual connection between the couple Pan/ Priapos and Daphnis, namely the prototype of bucolic poetry. (Apollo) Paian was a god who twice endured the life of a shepherd, in the service of Admetos and of Laomedon, and had inter alia many epithets suitable to a protector of the herds (compare for instance RE ii.10). It is also plausible that the ancients considered Paian to be specifically connected with the Nymphs. A very common epithet of the Nymphs, Κωρύκιαι, derived from a Parnassian nymph who took her name from Korykia, who bore a son from Apollo (S Ap.Rh. ii.705—11h), and the Korykian Nymphs were regarded at least by Ap.Rh. ii.704—713 as the first to utter the cry “in

te," from which the first part of the ephymnion “inmaınwv” to Apollo originated (compare % Ap.Rh. ii.712-713), as well as the epithet Paian, in the opinion of the ancients. It is also remarkable that the Korykian cave was sacred to both the Korykian Nymphs and, again, to Pan, according to Paus. x.32.7. I would not rule out the possibility that Theocritus also refers to these Nymphs when he invokes the Nymphs “Kastalides that haunt the steep of Parnassus” in Id. i.148 (discussed

63.

64. 65.

66.

before), because the connection between the Korykian Nymphs and the spring Kastalia is assured by Soph. Ant. 1126f.; Call. fr. 75.56f.; 2 Ap.Rh. 1.704-711h (on the mention of the specific Kastalides Nymphs, see also Bowie 1985:84). The tragic Hippolytus is usually assumed to be the model of Daphnis’ resistance, but a less heroic model may underlie this scene, namely the Helen/Aphrodite episode of Hom. Il. 3.383-420. Compare Zimmerman 1994. Compare lastly Fantuzzi 1995b:21. Compare Id. i.77f. “who torments you, Daphnis? of whom, friend, are you enamoured?” with Sapph. fr. 1.18-20 “whom now must I persuade to join your friendship’s ranks? who wrongs you, Sappho?” Transl. D. L. Page. My personal interpretation of the line brings down to a minimum the oppositive

force of uév . . . δέ, and intends βαρύς to have the meaning “hostile” / “cruel,” which the word has quite often in connection with gods (compare DGE s.v. BII.2), and possibly also in Theocr. 1.100 Κύπρι βαρεῖα. This interpretation seems to me the less problematic way to explain the line, if we are not willing to emend the

text (for instance, considering λάθρη to be an intrusive gloss and replacing it with aöea: Hermann). For a review of the previous interpretations, compare Crane 1987 and Cameron 1995:412-413. The opposition between Daphnis' Aphrodite of Id. i.95f. and Sappho's Aphrodite—but not the assumption by Daphnis’ Hermes (Id. i.77f.) of the role (and of

the questions) of Sappho's Aphrodite—has already been pointed out by several Scholars, most recently by Stanzel 1995:257-260. On Hermes as a shepherds' god, compare RE viii.775.

Notes to Pages 147-149

283

67. Compare most persuasively Segal 1972 (1981):90 ff., who, inter alia, remarks on a

few further "incongruities" in Battus's perception of rural reality (p. 91f.); Lattimore 1973:323 even supposes that Battus is not a genuine herdsman but "an occasional visitor to the country (perhaps first drawn there by Amaryllis).” 68. Poseidon, Amphitrite, Nereids for sailors; Athena and Hephaistos for technicians; the Muses, Apollon, Mnemosyne, Hermes for poets, and so on; and as far as hunters are concerned, he recommends devotion to Artemis, Apollon, Pan, Nymphs, Hermes, and all the other mountain gods (otherwise "the pursuits fall necessarily

unfulfilled: the dogs get disabled, the horses became lame, the men are led astray,” Cyn. 35). 69. Cf. AP vi.334 (= 1966-1971 G.-P.): Nymphs, Hermes, Pan; vi.188 (= 1972-1977): Pan; Nymphs: ix.326 (= 1979-1983); Nymphs: ix.329 (= 1984-1987); Pan: vi.13 (2248-2254) and vi.35 (2255-2260); Pan and Nymphs: POxy. 662 (= 2276-2282), etc.

70. Compare Hunter 1985:109-113. 71. Between the door of the shrine and one of the two other doors in the skéné (possibly the door of Knemon’s house) stood an emblem or an altar of Apollon (com-

pare line 659, with Handley’s note)—but Apollon Agyieus was involved, the protector of houses both in the country and in town (compare Sam. 444 and 474). 72. Handley 1965:2 1-22. 73. From at least the fourth century onwards, the tabellae defixionis, and later the magical papyri testify that magical practices were a substantial part of everyday life. Sometimes these practices had already surfaced in other, “high” poetic genres (compare, e.g., the "binding song” of Aesch. Eum. 307ff., on which compare Faraone 1985). Therefore "life" itself might independently have been the source inspiration both for Theocritus's Id. ii, a dramatization of an erotic agogé totally unparalleled in earlier high literature (compare Faraone 1995), and for the previous "magical" scenes of Aeschylus or of the Sicilian mime. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that the only poetic model suggested by the scholia to Id. ii (ad line

11f. and 70) was Sophron's Tai γυναῖκες ai τὰν θεόν φαντι ἐξελᾶν (CGF pp. 154f.), and we can also add that the rite that this mime dealt with is the same that is also to be found in Menander's Θεττάλη, ii pp. 75f. K.- Th. (on this rite compare, for instance, Hipp. Morb.sacr. 1.27, Plat. Gorg. 513a, Ar. Nub. 749f., Luc. Dialinemer. | and Philops. 14, PGM 34 Preis.; compare Préaux 1970.121f.; van Compernolle 1982, and Fedeli's note to Prop. i.1.19, p. 79). Apart from Id. ii, magic is also a widespread element of "realism" in the bucolic poems. It will be sufficient just to mention such well-known examples as the κοσκινομάντεια of the soothsayer Agroio in iii.31-33 (compare Arnott 1978), or "the spit for good luck" that the old

(witch?)

Cotyttaris

taught

the Cyclops

in

Id. vi, and

the one

that

Simichidas wishes for his own good luck (vii.126f.): compare Gershenson 1969. A possible further magical element in Theocritus may be the unconsciously self-

284

Notes to Pages 149-154

destructive use that the Cyclops makes of some quotations from Homer in Idd. vi and xi: compare Fantuzzi 1995b. In my opinion, the frequency and relevance of "magical" scenes (or hints at magic) is significant enough, both in Theocritus and in his precedents (the Sicilian mime and New Comedy), to let us think that in the ancient system of literary genres, "magic" was considered a feature that repro-

duced the "realism" of everyday life. 74, After an incidental remark by Sicher] 1972:39, which later scholars appear to have

ignored, F. Maltomini has appraised the concrete textual relationships between the Theocritean passage and the structure that is typical of the Greek magical prayer. Compare Fantuzzi-Maltomini 1996 (also for a survey of past misunderstandings of the Theocritean passage). 75. Compare Daniel-Maltomini 1990:169 ad 45, 14, and Fantuzzi-Maltomini 1996 for

full lists and bibliography. 76. Transl. D. A. Campbell. 77. Or. 48.8. On the possible affinity between Anacreon's fragment and Greek magical

prayer, compare Azzarello 1996. 78. Transl. P. Rosenmeyer. 79. Having been now masterfully investigated by Rosenmeyer 1992; compare, for instance, p. 51: the An. "are proudly steadfast in their secondary and imitative role, . . . they repeat, reduce, freeze an image, and recreate the older poet to suit their own tastes; they write with a view to strengthening the anacreontic circle, not in order to challenge or surpass their model."

8. Lycophron's Alexandra . Thus Cameron 1995 simply takes it for granted. The case for the younger Lycophron is revived by Kosmetatou 2000. See West 1984, where references to earlier discussions may be found. . This designation is obviously modeled on Paris' alias, though the explanation offered here in the scholia, connecting it with Cassandra's aversion to wedlock (para to alexein tous andras) is also relevant, as is the curious Laconian identification of

nd

Cassandra with the mysterious Alexandra worshipped at Amyclae (Paus.3.19.6, compare 26.5; Bull. Epigr. 1968, no. 264), though the latter was surely a warrior goddess who defended her city against assault, not a champion of virginity; see further Stiglitz 1953. The poet's association with Alexandria might be thought to add further resonances. Implying that Priam could not quite dismiss her utterances as mindless ravings. Already related in the Cypria. Since Lycophron’s heroine meets her death with Agamemnon (1108-1119), Ajax is evidently supposed to have been frustrated in his deplorable purpose; if Cassandra were no longer a virgin, she would have been of no interest to Agamemnon. . See further Guzzo 1990. . The omission of Lycophron from the discussion of Hellenistic interest in

Notes to Pages 154-156

285

Herodotus by Murray 1972 well exemplifies the widespread neglect of the Alexandra. Hopkinson 1988:230. 10. Cameron 1995:81. 11. We are tantalized here by fascinating suggestions of intertextuality now that we have some idea of Alcaeus's use of the story of Ajax and Cassandra to bring home to his fellow citizens the dangers of failing to restrain criminal fecklessness (LGS

138 [SLG S 262, fr.298 Voigt]) as well as part of the wrathful Athena's speech from Sophocles’ Locrian Ajax (F 106, POxy. 3151). 12. Almost certainly the custom concerned was nothing like as cruel as Lycophron ap-

parently supposed; see further Fontenrose 1978:131-137, Graf 1978:61—79, Asheri 1983. 13. Hutchinson 1989:6. 14. Like the audience of scholars (grammatikoi) envisaged by Philicus for the hymn that he presents as a "new-fangled composition" (SH 677). 15. "As late as the age of Tacitus and Pliny no one wrote poetry direct for distribution

in book form. The Roman evidence makes it clear that a formal recitation was an essential preliminary to the launching of a new book, and the primary method of distribution was presentation to friends" (Cameron 1995:78). 16. Some have thought that the work must always have needed some annotation. We

may note that in POxy 2528 (SH 432) Euphorion is perhaps the interpreter of his own poems: see further Pfeiffer 1968:150 n.5, Cameron 1995:224—225. 17. The twentieth-century reader is of course handicapped by the loss of many works familiarity with which could have been taken for granted in the educated reader. A more unified literary education, in which memorization played a large part, in any case meant that a writer could assume a much larger stock of common cultural baggage than nowadays. 18. Bethe 1924:336. 19. “No one would ever think of setting the Alexandra to music” (Sifakis 1967:77, n. 2).

20. Gildersleeve 1901:344. 21. There are unmistakeable echoes of Al. 6, 14, 1467, 1471. 22. It is rather surprising that Ziegler 1927:2350 held that the Augustan poets knew nothing of the Alexandra; contrast Josifovit 1968:922-925 (though some of his instances are rather questionable); on Virgil's debt to Lycophron, see also Trencsényi- Waldapfel 1961, West 1983:132-135. Cassandra's summary of the effects of Ajax's crime (Al. 365—6) is echoed by both Virgil (A. 1.39—41) and, as

Adrian Hollis has pointed out to me, by Ovid (Met 14.468—469). 23. POxy 2094+ 3445 (II), POxy 3446 (II), POxy 4428 (early III), POxy 4429 (I/II), PMon 156(I/II); in addition PSI 724 (III?) preserves Al. 744—748 (see Vitelli 1922.141f.). POxy 2463 (II/III), a commentary on a poetic text, might, as its editor tentatively suggested, relate to Al. 326—328 (though see Livrea 1989:141—147).

286

Notes to Pages 156-158

PGiss 40 verso (I/II) should be mentioned, in view of its editor's suggestion that it

refers to the Locrian Maidens (though even if this is right, the papyrus need not be a commentary on the AL); the text may conveniently be found as FGrHist 4 F 201bis. It is difficult to understand Mascialino's neglect of the papyri in his edition. 24. See van der Valk 1971:lxxxv. 25. Sinkewicz 1990:Microfiche 004. 26. Compare Scheer 1879:273: "Die zahlreichen Reminiscenzen in der kirchlichen Poesie, die háufigen Citate bei den Lexikographen und der grosse Schwarm von Handschriften beweisen, dass die Alexandra bei den spätern Griechen zu diejenigen Schriften des Alterthums gehórte, die wenn auch nicht am meisten gelesen, doch am meisten studirt wurden." See also Scheer 1881:xviii-xxii, Maas 1927:320. Gregory of Corinth recommends the clearer passages of Lycophron (along with Sophocles) as models in the composition of iambics. See further Wilson 1983:187, 190—191. 27. See further Ziegler 1927:2353-2354. 28. See further Pfeiffer 1976:102—107, Silver 1961:38, 75—77, 229-231. 29. It is remarkably interesting that this apparently trivial detail was handed down to

30.

3l. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

tradition. The most useful edition, with a very helpful introduction and notes, is that of Ulewicz 1962; there is an English translation by G. R. Noyes 1918. We might guess that Kochanowski was attracted to Lycophron as a result of his contacts with the Pléiade, on which see Marek 1984:230—239; on his Greek studies in general, see Lanowski 1984:96-105 (though less than justice is done to his familiarity with Lycophron). Lycophron's interesting coinage nekropernas (AL 276) is reproduced in Kochanowski's trupokupiec (535); Al. 281f.; compare 526-527. "For most readers it typifies the unacceptable face of 'Callimachean' poetry: recondite, inaccessible, self-indulgently obscurantist" (Hopkinson 1988:230). "From here he speaks of Romans, and the poem must be considered the work of another Lycophron, not of the tragedian. For being an intimate of Ptolemy Philadelphus he would not talk of Romans." The scholium is well discussed by Gauger 1984:279-280. The tactic of hypothesizing a homonym when faced with such chronological problems is at least as old as Herodotus (2.43). See Momigliano 1942, 1945. We should not overlook the fact that some of Lycophron's tragedies were on historical themes. See further O'Hara 1990, especially 128-184. On the similar effects produced by retrospective prognostication in Shakespeare's history plays, see Garber 1986. On the Alexandra vulnerability to updating, F G. Welcker well wrote: “Wenn irgendwo Interpolation nicht unerwartet ist, so muss es in einer lange

Notes to Pages 158-160

287

Orakelpoesie seyn; und wenn irgend ein Gegenstand zur Fortfiihrung derselben auffordern konnte, so war es die Morgenröthe einer Weltherrschaft” (Welcker 1841:1261).

See further Hurst 1996.

39,

. See further Fowler 1982, Lewalski 1986:1—29. 41.

This theme is ingeniously explored in James Thurber's The Macbeth Murder Mystery. Though literary theorists perhaps exaggerate the importance of the questions raised by taxonomic uncertainty, the Song of Songs provides a familiar example of a work of which the interpretation, at the most basic level, is indissolubly linked with the interpreter's view of its genre.

42. See further Deubner 1921:368, Turner 1963, Sifakis 1967:96f, Dihle 1981; with ref-

erence to the Alexandrian theater, Fraser 1972.1:620-621. 43. See further Dover on Ar. Nub. 1353-1390, Cameron 1995:72, Csapo and Slater 1995:2, 7-8. If there were good reason to believe that closet drama had developed by Lycophron's time, it would be relevant here. It may be thought that Ezekiel's Exagoge should be mentioned at this point, but this third-rate composition merely demonstrates that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Wilamowitz 1924:2.149 ("Es kommt aber auf den Gattungsnamen wenig an, denn die Stilisierung macht das Ganze zu etwas ganz Besonderem"). 45. The handy annotated edition of Fusillo et al. 1991 is much more modest in its

scope.

47. 48.

49. 50.

5].

52.

Holzinger 1895:25 n. 27: "Damit ist die Doppelnatur des Werkes ganz gut gekennzeichnet. Eine einheitliche Bezeichnung für das Wesen dieser Dichtung kann es gar nicht geben." The more so inasmuch as he wrote before Kroll 1924 made the crossing of genres a commonplace in the study of Hellenistic poetry. Cassandra's mantic gifts were apparently an early post-Homeric development; already in the Cypria she prophesied as Paris set sail for Greece; compare Pi. P. 11.33 (474?). Bacchylides 23, the prototype of Hor. Carm. 1.15, featured Cassandra's prophecy of the Trojan War (compare Kroll 1924.220); but all we know about this poem is that its classification was problematic: see Luppe 1987, 1989. See further Hall 1989. Euripides' Cassandra, as she appears in the Troades, is unimpressive. Compare Hdt. 1.55; 5. 92 b 3; SEG 36.694; 40.611 (see further Burkert 1990); Genesis 49 (“Jacob’s blessings"—better “Jacob’s testament"—the early history of the several tribes presented in the form of the patriarch's deathbed prophecy, "eine visionáre Weissagung in etwas lykophronischem Stil, mit vielen kenningar" [Dornseiff 1956:245]). It is always tempting to overestimate the importance of lost works; but we should note that Aeschylus's Aetnaeae apparently included a prediction of prosperity for the newly founded city of Aetna (476/5) (Vita Aeschyli 9). Our attention is drawn to the period envisaged in Cassandra's account of the

288

Notes to Pages 160-163

Locrian Maiden tribute, which is to last a thousand years (1153); we need not consider more precisely Lycophron’s views on the date of the Trojan war. 53. See Hensel 1908 (40-50 on Lycophron), Deubner 1921; on the Apollo of Alexander Aetolus, see also Cameron 1995:171f., 383-384. There is an obvious danger of circularity in attempting to assess how far Lycophron’s own example might have attracted others to try this form. As the prophecy of Poseidon in the Iliad (20.306308) demonstrates, retrospective prognostication was extremely well suited to the praise of rulers. 54. Philo's attempt (Praem 1-2, Vita Mos. 2.46—7) to analyze the Pentateuch in terms of Greek genres (ideat) is interesting (compare Jos. AJ 1.18). 55. See further, by way of introduction, M. L. West 1968. 56. Thus Speyer 1971:83; Gauger 1980:255. Eissfeldt's introduction, emphasizing the

"marked element of erudition, which very nearly stifles the basic visionary experience, if it really is an experience and the vision is not a mere literary form," highlights features reminiscent of the Alexandra (Eissfeldt 1974:528—529). 57. See further Hellholm 1983. 58. See further Foster 1993:270—272, 304—307; Sherwin-White 1993:8—9, 137; Koenen 1994, especially 14—22. 59, See further Fraser 1972.1:675—687; iii:943—955; Lloyd 1982. 60.

See Koenen

1968a:178—209, 1968b:137-138, 1974:313-319, 1983:143-190, espe-

cially 174ff., 1984:9—13; Assmann 1983. 61. On "ancient prophecies" and their propaganda

value, see further Thomas

1971:461—514.

Henvy IV, Part 1, Act 3, 147-154: "Sometimes he angers me / With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, / Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, / And of a dragon and a finless fish, / A clip-wing’d griffin and a moulten raven, / A couching lion, and a ramping cat, / And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff / As puts me from my faith." 63. The potentially subversive nature of vaticination had been seen at Rome some two centuries earlier; on senatorial determination to control prophets, see Wiseman 62,

1994:64—66.

See Nisbet 1978; on the Sibylline Oracles, see Schürer 1986:1lI i 618—654. . A feature familiar from Revelation: "St. John follows the convention of vision; his

story is presented in ‘still’ —there sode;

but

there

is no

is simple movement within each visionary epi-

continuous

movement

from

one

to another"

(Farrer

1964:56).

Watkins 1995. 67. The treatment of even straightforward Delphic messages as riddles (as with Socrates' reaction to the Pythia's response that no one was wiser than he [Ap. 21B]) is

significant. 68.

See Wellek and Warren 1963:253f., Fowler 1982:158, Erlich 1981:259—261.

Notes to Pages 163-166

69.

289

I have found very helpful the discussion of literary hybrids in Fowler 1982:183188.

70. In discussion the question was raised why a need for such metaphors is felt. Part of the explanation surely lies in the fluidity of current terminology, which might be connected with the fact that “genre” in a literary sense has not long been established (see Wellek and Warren 1962:307 n.8). 71. We might think that Lycophron himself indicated this when he gave the leading

role to the Easterner Cassandra, were there not so many other good reasons for her centrality. 72. Either metaphor implies that this type of Near Eastern vaticination had not already been naturalized and thoroughly assimilated to a Greek context before Lycophron, and it may be said that the use of such images involves unjustified assumptions about the poet's intentions. But any discussion of the influence of one nation's literary tradition on another's is liable to run into similar difficulties unless a writer who consciously borrows from a foreign literature leaves some record of his procedure. 73. Koenen 1985 ingeniously argues for a connection between Callimachus's Hymn to

Delos and an earlier version of the Oracle of the Potter offering a validation of Ptolemaic rule; but I find his argument too speculative to be useful support for mine. 74. See n.2. 75. I would not absolutely exclude the possibility that Lycophron is to be understood to speak to his laudandus in the messenger's opening words, uncharacteristically plain in expression (Alex. 1—3): "I shall tell you everything which you ask me, from

the very beginning; if the tale is prolonged, forgive, master.” Fusillo 1984:506 is

76. 72. 78. 79.

80.

more confident: "Il fatto che questo prologo (come poi l'epilogo) sia rivolta al sovrano Priamo puó rinviare al destinatario immediato dell’ opera licofronea, il circolo della corte tolemaica." We might see here affinities with catalog-poetry, of the gazeteer type exemplified by the Homeric Catalogue of Ships, rather than the Hesiodic type. [Longinus's] characterization of Timaeus (4.1) would admirably fit Lycophron, "not without the capacity for greatness on occasion, learned, and original." On Lycus, see, besides Jacoby's commentary, Amiotti 1982. It was suggested in discussion that mime should not be overlooked; but to me it seems simply too lightweight and frivolous to be relevant. If Iam right in hypothesizing a deutero-Lycophron who updated the Alexandra to suit the Augustan age (see West: 1984), he had a clandestine follower.

81. We can only speculate as to the reason why the Alexandra was preserved, whereas

Lycophron's more generically conventional works were not. 82. It is unfortunate that the Luchterhand edition separates the lectures from the narrative, whereas the Virago Modern Classics translation (1984) inverts the order. 83.

See further West 1991/1992.

290

Notes to Pages 168-170

9. Rituals in Ink I thank Depew and Obbink for being inspiring critics as well as smooth organizers, and Carolyn Dewald and Kathryn Morgan for their generous contributions to the discussion in Washington. Part of this material has been discussed with the participants at seminars organized by Kirk Freudenburg at Ohio State University and by Karl Galinsky at the University of Texas. I thank both of them, and also Stephen White (University of Texas).

Before completing this manuscript, I was able to see some recent or forthcoming work (Feeney 1998; Oliensis 1998), and 1 thank the authors. I have, how-

ever, not seen other important recent (M. Lowrie, Horace's Narrative Odes. Oxford 1997) or forthcoming work (Rutherford forthcoming).

. I deliberately avoid the issue of "generic impurity,” on which see Hinds in this volume; Barchiesi 2000; Obbink in Depew and Obbink forthcoming. Feeney 1993:41—42. . See, e.g., Nagy forthcoming.

. This is clear from Archilochus; about Alcaeus, I would guess that the point of the situation is that the Athenians have dedicated the spoils of Alcaeus, thus showing that he is a famous enemy (so Lapini 1996:88 n. 26). . Of course, this means that the lyric tradition consists not only of texts but also of imagined authorial voices and bioi, as well as posthumous revisions of bioi. Don Fowler rightly stressed in the discussion that recitation is not to be imagined as a mediation between book and performance. Whatever the true importance of recitation in a literary society, Horace fights constantly to reduce its authority; satires and epistles are faithful allies of Horatian lyric in creating a gap between the poet's voice and the recitation arena, the rat maze of the literati. (a) Performative into textual: 4.8.20-22, “for if no texts celebrate your worthy

deeds, you reap no recompense,” alludes to Pind. Nem. 4.5—6: “praise, the companion of the lyre. For the word lasts longer than any deed”; but compare the Pindaric scholia ad loc. (10a): “the word lasts longer than any deed, and by word he means ‘song. In fact, every utterance or written text is more durable than actions. Clearly, actions pass away; texts are transmitted endlessly,” rendering Pindaric “lyre” and "spoken word" through the scholiastic γραφόμενα. Lyric tradition “glides” from spoken to written signs. Horace's next poem (4.9) glosses the evolution by juxtaposing lines 30-31, “I will not, oh Lollius, pass you over in silence, unadorned in my texts” (the only other example of poetry as text in the lyric Horace), with the Pindaric representation of lines 1-4, “Do not believe that they will die, those words which I am speaking, to be accompanied on the strings of the lyre.” (b) Books regenerating performances: the practice in Horatian first lines (mottoes) of alluding to Greek first lines implies textuality: classical poems were cataloged and quoted by ancient critics by their first lines, but the setting of every Horatian song also performs a kind of “live” improvisation that swerves from the model. One feels the textuality of Greek models’ being reshaped in performance.

Notes to Pages 170-172

According to Aristoxenos (fr. 71 a-b Wehrli), Alcaeus own books of poetry as a “confidante” for their private comes “still breathes the love of the Aeolian girl, still the lyre” (4.9.10-12). Sappho “entrusts” her flames

291

and Sappho were using their passions; this for Horace belives her passion, confided to to her musical instrument: I

suspect a pun on fidis, “lyre,” versus fidus, “confidante.” Contrast also the Alexandrian epigram (Poseidippos, in Athen. 13.69) where the “white speaking pages of Sappho’s lovely song remain and will remain.” In other words, Horace can travel the whole way between performance and writing, and back again. Forthcoming.

Similarly, Hunter 1996:153 connects the initial position of the partheneia in Alcman’s Alexandrian edition with their influence on Theocritus 18 (he allows me

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

to report that he withdraws the point about the Louvre partheneion being the first poem, compare POxy 2389); his whole approach to Alexandrian intertextuality is important to scholars of Roman poetry. See West 1995:6 on chariot races at Olympia as a pointer to Pindar. Compare, e.g., the Pindaric incipit of Callimachus's "Victoria Berenices,” SH 254. 2-3: ^ .. oh lady, holy blood of our majesties, the brother and sister, my victory song for your horses," linking games, victory, praise poetry, and kings. This motivation is actually provided by the Pindaric scholia ad loc. See also Willcock 1995:4. The poem is certainly not representative in terms of agonistic occasion, since it is about a horse, and not a chariot race. Note also the effect of having ariston as a first word in the book: this implies a certain reading of Pindar but is also a choice bound to affect successive readings of Pindar: labels of excellence will often function as a synecdoche for praise poetry. I owe this parallel to Oliensis 1998:104 n. 3. In the context, Horace might have seen the muse Thalia, line 21, as the active force. For the ideology of “wings of victory,’ compare palma . . . evehit at 1.1.5-6 (compare 4.2.17-18; Pind. I. 2.28-29), in the "Olympic Games" opening of the whole collection. On what is known of ancient editions of the poet, see Porro 1994:139-141, with bibliography.

16. In the meantime, the god himself performs an act of imitation (1.2.42 irnitaris). 17. The paraphrasis of the song to Apollo by Himerius suggests that Alcaeus was

singing the successful invocation of Apollo by the Delphians, the radiant epiphany of the god on his arrival, the miraculous flowing of Castalia and the rising in flood of the Cephisus, when it reacted to the epiphany. Presumably, the poem was regarded as a powerful example of what poetry for the gods can perform—praising Apollo, retelling the successful choral invocation of the Delphians, and implicating the power of Alcaeus's own poetry. Horace thus places an experimental "crisis poem" as the frontispiece of his lyric career and uses Alcaeus's beginning as a contrasting foil.

292

Notes to Pages 172-174

18. Mace 1993:335-364. 19. In the discussion, Fantuzzi nicely pointed out that the other major influence on

the "amour, encore" dynamics of 4.1 is (compare Mace 1993 for Anacreon's fondness for the motif) Anacreon. Thus when 4.1 sabotages its Sapphic model and delays the final onrush of love, the Anacreontic voice keeps whispering that yes, love and middle age can be reconciled in the poetics of love lyric, although Sapphic inspiration might be difficult for the aging author of book IV. 20. See my principle (1) above. L. E. Rossi (in conversation) has influenced my vision of the process with his usual clarity of thought. Every edition of course had its own problems and priorities. From the remains, at least one general pattern is visible: some major collections had a song "for the gods" as a first poem: compare Pindar's "Hymn to Zeus"; Alcaeus for Apollo (307 V.); Sappho for Aphrodite; Anacreon for Artemis (348 Page, 1 Gentili). 21. Another interesting approach to lyric textuality would be comparing Horace with

ancient commentaries, e.g., to Alcaeus. I provided one specific example in the oral version of this paper, discussing the ship poems of Alcaeus, their exegesis, and their influence on Horace. On the importance of commentaries for the study of ancient genres, see Sluiter in this volume. 22. The irony of 2.13.25—32 is that, as part of an audience, Horace might like Sappho and Alcaeus less than he expected as a reader; in this (so to speak) "live" version, Sappho is at her most passionate and "Lesbian" ("lamenting about the girls of her island"); Alcaeus is powerful, but his success has dangerous hints of late-Republican demagogy ("but the mob, packed shoulder to shoulder, would rather hear with avid ears tales of battle and banished tyrants"). In a sense, the Underworld perpetuates the Greek poets as "alien" masters, while Horace transforms their model and attunes them to modern Rome, e.g., producing a less "effeminate" Sappho and a less aggressive Alcaeus (note the harsh, not very Horatian, triplica-

tion of dura in lines 26-27, dura navis / dura fugae mala, dura belli (the bad times

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

of seafaring, the bad times of exile, the bad times of war), suggesting that Alcaeus's poetic success depends on a tough and manly persona). This must be an especially powerful fiction, since it is the source of many important currents in recent Horatian criticism, such as the focus on addressees in Nisbet-Hubbard 1970 and 1975, the more sociological approach of Citroni, and the postmodernist rhetorical approach of Gregson Davis. Heinze 1960:188. Reitzenstein 1893:1. Nagy 1990:362, and Nagy forthcoming; Feeney 1993:56; Citroni 1995: 276 (e in performances successive alla "prima" la situazione originaria doveva per lo piü essere ricostruita dai fruitori sulla base dei segni presenti nel testo). Feeney 1993:56.

Hinds 1996:253 offers a dense formulation; see also Krevans forthcoming.

Notes to Pages 175-181

29.

293

Bearing in mind that this polarity can be partly a Hellenistic, partly a modern, construct. Horace’s perception of choral versus monodic would repay further dis-

cussion. Lowrie 1995:36 reads 1.12.1-2 as an evocation of “the two branches of lyric” through the use of lyre and tibia. 30. Collected in Citroni 1995. 31. Dupont 1994 is, malgré soi, a reductio ad she tries, simplistically, to identify Greek with books. 32. E.g., Klingner’s Hegelian reading of lyric to express an Ich. 33. On the cultural poetics of birthdays and 59, 34. Contrast temporality in elegy (often used 35.

absurdum of this whole approach, when culture with orality and Roman culture form as a mechanism which needs a Du the Julian calendar, see Feeney 1993:58as a foil in Horace, e.g., Davis 1991:39-

70), where love tends to be an absolute “here and now.” See, for instance, Pind. Ol. 5.42; Pae. 9.36—37 (references to the Paians are from

Bona 1988 throughout my paper). 36. The link between the two poems goes beyond explicit intertextuality: the choral singer will remember her chorodidaskalos as a married woman, and Apollo, the divine hinge connecting 4.6 to the CS, is a protector of transitions to marriage. On the theme of marriage and addresses to young people in Callimachus Hymn II, see Calame 1993:50. The indecision between private negotiation with the god and triangulation with a chorus of young people (being trained by the poetic voice and by the musical authority of the god) is important in the Hymn to Apollo and is clearly an influence on the connection between 4.6 and the CS. 37. An insidious, loaded word in Roman culture, compare Verg. Aen. 9.615. 38. As Rutherford’s book will, I hope, confirm. Rutherford forthcoming (non vidi). Rutherford 1995 argues that the genre was declining, or perceived as old-fashioned, as early as the fourth century B.c.E. 39. Kappel 1992:81. 40. This duality is implicitly mapped by Horace onto the sun/moon polarity of Apollo and Diana. 41. Of course, solar imagery has a strong Augustan implication (compare Barton 1995:45 on the horoscope, Horologium Augusti, and links between the prince and Helios). My intention, however, is precisely to show that issues of literary influence and Augustan ideology should be taken in conjunction. 42. Whatever reading we adopt for the many problems of Hor. Ep. 1.19.19-33, the idea there of bringing Greek poems to Rome is connected to the continuity of the meter, but also to the revision and reform of metrical conventions. 43. Initial invocation of Apollo and Diana is enough to spell out "Paian"; even Socrates, we are told, composed a paian, and the incipit is enough to identify it: "Hail, Apollo the Delian! Hail, Artemis, you noble pair of youths!" (Diog. Laert. 2. 42). As a former Alcaic poet, Horace might also have thought of the formal invocation to

294

Notes to Pages 182-183

Apollo placed by the Alexandrians as an incipit to Alcaeus’s collected poems (fr. 307 Voigt). . But if the prayer is successful—and how can we separate its success from the effect of the poetic performance itself?—the continuity of the Roman nation will bring back, in 110 years, not just another festival, but song and another festival: certus undenos deciens per annos / orbis ut cantus referatque ludos / ter die claro totiensque grata / nocte frequentes (so that a precise cycle, in 110 years, will bring back songs and the Games, celebrated by the people in three luminous days and three amiable nights) (CS 21-24). The position of cantus suggests the importance of this unique performance for keeping alive a slender tradition of communal lyric at Rome (see my comments on 4.6, above). The CS depends, with the ludi, on Greek Sibylline poetry (Sibyllini monuere versus, “the Sibylline verses warned us,” 5), but the next celebration will have to look back to Horace’s song—and text—as its forerunner. 45. In fact, contemporary discussions show how difficult it is to separate the two voices: D'Alessio 1994; Lefkowitz 1995, for example. 46. But see above, n. 44.

10.

The Dialectics of Genre

I would like to thank the participants of the “Matrices of Genre” conference for their helpful criticisms of an earlier version of this paper. This goes in particular for organizers Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink. In addition, I profited from helpful comments by the members of the Amsterdam Hellenist Club and by Harold Tarrant. I owe thanks to all of them. . Compare Montanari 1994. Lamberz 1987:7; Del Fabbro 1979:69. Classification, e.g., as lecture notes or commentary, or scholia or commentary, is often difficult and no more than conventional, compare Lamberz 1987:19; Gudeman 629-630. Considerations of space prevent me from going into the question of ancient terminology, but compare

Lamberz 1987:1ff. and Ian Rutherford forthcoming. The main term is ὑπόμνημα (conventionally translated ‘commentary’; see Bömer 1953:210ff.), distinguished from σύγγραμμα (lit. ‘written composition —i.e., an independent or systematic treatise?) e.g., Gal. in Hipp. Aph. I, 18.1, 102 K., who claims that excessive brevity is fitting for a σύγγραμμα rather than a ὑπόμνημα; contrast D.H. Dem. 46

(p. 231,20 ff. U.-R.), where ὑπόμνημα is characterized by brevity and opposed to σχολικά (scholastic work) in that respect (cf. D.H. CV 22. 47; for brevity, see also S.E. M. 2.106f. and Simpl. in Ar. Phys. CAG IX 60.27ff.). Ammonius (in Ar. Cat. CAG IV 4.4.11f.) says ὑπομνηματικά (commentary-like works) differ from συνταγματικά (treatise-like works) in organization (taxis) and beauty of style. On the distinction ὑπόμνημωσύγγραμμα, see also Todd 1976:16 with n. 77. Sometimes the term ὑπόμνημα is synonymous with βιβλίον (book) or σύγγραμμα (written composition), compare Bómer 1953:219; e.g., D.L. 8.78.

Notes to Pages 185-188

295

Other relevant terms are ἑρμηνεία, ἑρμήνευσις, and ἐξήγησις, all indicating forms of exegesis. The latter term usually emphasizes a more philological approach to the text (compare Romano 1994:593, see, e.g., David [Elias] in Ar. Cat. CAG XVIII 1.122.25ff.; Sophonias Paraphr. in Ar. de An. CAG XXIII 1.4ff.). On early Greek ἐξηγήσεις, compare van Bekkum et al. 1997:163ff. For the term σχόλιον (short note), see Gudeman and Lamberz 1987:13f.

For the history of the commentary form, see Geffcken 1932; Del Fabbro 1979:9192.

For commentators on Plato, see the survey in Dórrie-Baltes 1993. Dörrie-Baltes 1993:329-332, compare S.E. M VII 93; Barnes 1991:116.

Sedley 1993:126; 1996:84. The original editors, Diels and Schubart, had dated the commentary to the second century c.E. For a survey, see Sorabji 1990:27ff. Compare Grafton 1990, Grant 1993, and Puglia 1988:56f. for the history of discussions of authenticity. He is mentioned in Erotianus, Vocum Hippocraticarum collectio 32, p. 5 Nachm.;

81.6 p. 47f. Nachm. S.E. M. 10.219 ascribed an interpretation of Epicurus to him (using the verb ἐξηγεῖται). For the date, compare Puglia 1988:37. And extend it backwards to the "proto-philosopher" Homer: compare Mansfeld 1994:55 n. 98. 10. The Amherst Papyrus

II 17 mentions

Aristarchus’s work on Herodotus,

and

Dionysius of Halicarnassus claims one cannot read Thucydides without some

grammatical help (ἐξήγησις γραμματική, Thuc. 51.1 410.17ff. U.-R., compare 55.] 417.22f. U.-R.). 11. Ilivaf τῶν Anpoxpirov γλωσσῶν καὶ συνταγμάτων (Table of Difficult Words and Works of Democritus), Usener 1892:133. 12. Erotianus 4.21ff. (ed. Nachm.) (Xenocritus of Kos). Aristarchus is mentioned ibid. 5.18. 13. For a survey of ancient scholarship on Hippocrates, see Smith 1979:199ff. On 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Galen's commentaries, see also Manetti and Roselli 1994. The persistent emphasis on the reliability and stability of our Homer text (as a text) may have been an important factor in impeding critics' realization of the oral nature of his poetry. E.g., Alex. in Ar. Met. CAG I 345.4ff.; Hippoc. De vict. acut. 1.1—3.2 Joly. However, this view of the Epic Cycle has come under criticism recently. Burgess 1996 argues for the independence of at least the Cypria from Homer in both content and form. Compare, e.g., Lys. X.16ff., especially 20; Gal. De meth. med. IX 8. 10.632 K. Erler 1993 and, e.g., Simpl. in Ar. Cat. CAG VIII 7.6ff. E.g., Olympiod. in PL Alc. 22.14—23.4, compare 21.15-18. E.g., Simpl. in Ar. Cat. CAG VIII 7.2ff.; on philosophy as a mystery, see Tarrant 1993:98ff. and, e.g., Marinus V. Procli 13.

296

Notes to Pages 189-193

21. E.g., Aug. ddc IV vi 9 $ 27; Simpl. in Ar. Cat. CAG VIII 7.8f. 22. Also between Plato and Aristotle. Similarly, Antiochus is said to have reconciled the Academy and the Stoa (S.E. PH I 235). On harmonization, compare Sorabji 1987:8f. 23. Cf. Pépin 1992:490ff.; Dórrie-Baltes 1993:169. For a stereotypical philosopher's re-

jection of philology, see Epict. Ench. 49; compare also Sen. Ep. 108.23 quae philosophia fuit, facta philologia est (what used to be philosophy, has been turned into philology). For the distinction between textual linguistic analysis and doctrinal interpretation, compare D.H. CV3 (1I 4.6ff. U.-R.). 24. Praechter 1990 (1909):38. 25. Compare, e.g., Lucian Or salaried posts 11. 26. See Alexander 1990. E.g., Gal. De comp. medic. sec. locos VI. 12.894 K. See Sluiter

forthcoming for the teaching qualities that were supposed to inhere in texts. 27. E.g., the emotionally involved debate in Porph. in Pl. Tim. 5.9ff Sodano, or the enthusiastic shouts of the audience at a clever interpretation in Gal. in Hipp. Epid. III comm. I. 18.1. 499f. K. 28. Richard 1950:203, e.g., Choeroboscus Gramm. Gr. IV i 313.7, where "our teacher" is Choeroboscus himself. 29. Compare Sluiter 1998 at n. 25; main references: Sophonias Paraphr. in Ar. de An. CAG XXIII 1.11ff.; Galen in Hipp. Epid. IIl Comm. I. 17.1.506f. K.; compare the text from David [Elias] quoted earlier in the section "Charity versus Criticism." 30. Compare Robins 1995. The commentaries on Dionysius Thrax that have come

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

down to us already work in practice on the assumption that the Techné represents a single body of knowledge, even if they occasionally voice doubts about its authenticity. E.g. Alexander's lectures on Aristotle, see Barnes et al. 1991:4. Aristotle himself set the example. E.g., Porph. in Ptolem. Harm. 4.24ff. Düring; Simpl. in Ar. Cat. CAG VIII 3.8f. This is a feature of scholarship in general (often as a prologue topos), compare, e.g., Hippocr. De diaeta I 1, CMG I 2.4 p.122.1-21 = VI 466 Littré; Ptolem. Almag. I 1.7.25—8.16 Heiberg; Ap. Dysc. coni. Gramm. Gr. II 1.213.1-214.3. Artemidorus finds it worthwhile to stress that he is not going repeat older material ( Oneirocr. II prooem., p. 100,6ff. Pack). The word used for the dialogue genre as a whole is εἶδος (D.L. 3.48). They occur elsewhere though, Sch. in Theocr. D p. 4.11ff. Wendel (where they are called three χαρακτῆρες [forms]). Compare Sch. in Hes. Theog. 75 ἀπὸ rov διηγηματικοῦ μετέβη eis τὸ προσώπων μιμητικῶς (he made a transition from narrative to the character in a mimetic way [i.e., to direct speech]). Haslam 1972:20-21 gives a full survey of attestations of this tripartite arrangement. Also μιμητικοί (mimetic), compare Haslam 1972 and note 34. D.L. 3.48; influence of mimes of Sophron and priority of dialogues by Zeno, com-

Notes to Pages 193-195

297

pare D.L. 3.48; Athen. XI 505c; POxy 3219; Haslam 1972. On the εὑρήματα (inventions) catalogues, compare Thraede 1962. 37. See the contribution by Glenn Most in this volume. . Compare Ar. Po. 4.1449a14ff. 39. Note that in the definition of “dialogue” (e.g., Anon. Proll. in Pl. phil. 14.3ff.), the

addition ἄνεν μέτρου (without meter) is explained as intended to differentiate it from tragedy and comedy. See also Arist. Po. 1447b.

Compare Anon. Proll. in Pl. phil 7.5, where “the poetic school" (ἡ ποιητικὴ αἵρεσις) is considered an early stage in 41. D.L. 3.5; Aelianus VH II 30 describes a philosophy. Even though the last step Aelianus's report, the three stages form scription of the transition from tragedy

the history of philosophy. progression from epic through tragedy to may be considered a quantum leap, in part of one continuum, compare his deto philosophy as "becoming captivated by

[Socrates'] Siren.” 42. Anon. Proll. in PL phil. X 9f. p.45 W.

. Nightingale 1995:67ff.: the Gorgias plays off Euripides’ Antiope with its representation of the active and the contemplative life in the characters of Zethus and Amphion respectively. Compare Nightingale 1995:88. 45. Compare especially VII 817d5 “your songs (@ Sax) compared to ours”; in IV 722de and VII 799e-800a, the Athenian stranger is playing on the double meaning of νόμος as “strain of music, nome," and “law”: “kitharodic νόμοι" are opposed to “political” ones, and it is the very λόγοι the Athenian stranger and his companions

are producing here, that are suggested as the right material for educative purposes, VII 811d.

Pl. Lg. VII.811c9-10 (ποέησις [poetry]). . Pl. Lg. IX.858e, compare XII 957d. Laws were indeed widely recognized as a separate genre, compare Phdr. 278c. Callimachus devoted a special πίναξ (table) to

them, fr. B 5 Schmidt. . Compare Mansfeld 1994:179ff. . A concept again ultimately derived from Plato himself: Rep. VII 527d (Tarrant 1993:98ff.).

50. Compare also Mansfeld 1994:70. 51. Tarrant makes a strong case against the view that the tetralogic division must have predated Thrasyllus. In particular, he rightly questions the relevance of Varro LL 3.73, the cornerstone for this view (1993:74ff.; Barnes 1991:127 n. 50 rightly sus-

pects textual corruption). Usener's (1892/1914) attribution of the tetralogic division to Tyrannio of Amisos is wonderfully imaginative, but it lacks substance. Mansfeld (1994:63ff.; 199) claims Thrasyllus wrote an introduction rather than an

edition. 52. On this papyrus, see Bartoletti 1964; Haslam 1972 and 1977; Tarrant 1993:105.

298

Notes to Pages 196-199

53. Compare Lloyd 1990:57. For Galen's use of genre in his positioning of Hippocrates, see Sluiter 1995. . Hermog. Id. 389.18ff. R. . Or. 45.11 4 D.; compare D.H. Dem. 25.1 185.4ff. U.-R., who points out that Plato's own style is inconsistent with his negative views on poetry. . Compare Nightingale 1995:93ff. . Ap. Porph. V. Plot.XX $ 111. . See, e.g., Alex. De mixt. CAG Suppl. II 2, 215.9f.: ἐπίδειξις, “demonstration,” ver-

sus ἐξέτασις, “examination,” and ζήτησις, “searching”; Alex. in Ar. Top. ΠῚ 2 CAG II 2, 257.17ff.: διδάσκειν, "to teach" versus ἐπίδείκνυσθαι, "to give a demonstrative performance"; Clem. Strom. Li 1: he doesn't write "for the purpose of sophisti-

cated showmanship” (eis ἐπίδειξιν τετεχνασμένην), but rather ὑπομνήματα, “commentaries, notes,” to help him remember the wonderful content of what he learned. Plut. De Pyth. or. 24, 406e states that philosophy should aim at clarity and

didactic quality, rather than “stunning effect” (τὸ ἐκπλῆττον, traditionally associated with show speeches). The same topos in Cic. Or. 63: docendi causa, non capiendi “in order to teach, not to deceive.” 59. Slings 1995:175. Compare also Simplicius's commentary in Epict. Ench. LXIV 13ff. Hadot (where the punctuation in 1. 14ff. must be corrected: there are two questions introduced by πῶς [how?], twice followed by an answer introduced by εἰ

[if]).

Jul. Apost. Ep. 36, ed. Wright, Loeb III 422A ff. 61. In my view, this is confirmed by the organization of Callimachus's Pinakes: the ti-

tle of this work emphasizes the individuals and their work, but the actual πίνακες (tables) are ordered according to genres (e.g., laws, Fr. B 5 Schmidt) or groups of individuals (πίναξ τῶν pmröpwv, "table of the rhetoricians,” etc.). Compare

Pfeiffer, Fragm. Call. 453 adnot. . Pl. Phdr. 278c, listing poetry, rhetoric, and laws, prepared for in 257c; De Vries 1973:4. 63.

E.g., Euagoras 8ff. Schmidt 1922:21; Suda s.v. Callimachus.

65.

Fr. B 6 Schmidt (Athen. 6.244a) and Fr. B 7 Schmidt (Athen. 14.643e). Schmidt (1922:57) assumes the existence of a separate πίναξ of doctors and maybe of

grammarians and mathematicians, but that would disturb the typology of six prose genres versus six poetic genres that is in place now. . Of course, I am by no means disputing that “grammar” and "grammarians" formed a recognizable discipline with recognizable practicians at this point. However, in formal classifications of genres of literature, secondary studies were largely ignored—even though the classifiers were themselves engaged in those studies. 67. Compare further Hesych. illustris Onomatologos (Nomenclator) (sixth century), including sophists, grammarians, and doctors; Tab. Bodl. C, including "authors on

Notes to Pages 199-207

299

letters” (i.e., grammarians, examples: Dionysius Thrax and Apollonius Dyscolus), and "commentators" (ὑπομνηματισταί): texts in Rabe 1910:340ff. 68. Gal. in Hipp. Epid. III Comm. 1, 17.1.516 K. 69. Hier. Ruf. I 16 (SC 303, 44.15—23 Lardet). 70. Them. Paraphr. in Ar. An. Post. CAG V 1.1ff.; Simpl. in Ar. Cat. CAG VIII 1.10ff.; Sophonias in Ar. De An. CAG XXIII 1.1ff. 71. And more recently, Sorabji 1987:4. 72. Compare, e.g., PSI 12.1276 (first century c.B.), containing text from Homer plus

paraphrase, see Del Fabbro 1979:75f. and 101ff. 73. See also the reference to useless ambition; compare Simpl. in Ar. Cat. CAG VIII

2.30ff. reported later; Janson 1964:97 discusses the topical enumeration of predecessors; compare ibid. 124 on the locus modestiae (topos of modesty). 74, Notice the theme of the absorption of previous scholarship; compare the earlier section "Written versus Oral." 75. Simplicius was also concerned with finding the right level of detail.

11. The Didactic Plot . For the distinction between

discourse

and

narrative, see of course

Benveniste

1971, with an extensive later literature deconstructing the opposition: see most famously Genette 1982, and for a recent treatment by a classicist, Lowrie 1997, especially 19—48. Cairns 1972:6: note especially the remark that "the primary elements are the only final arbiters of generic identity since any particular topos (secondary element) can be found in several different genres."

. For Bakhtin's “speech-genres,” see Bakhtin 1986:60-102; for a recent review of work by linguists on genre, see Paltridge 1997 (with his earlier survey, 1995), and for an entertaining romp through the rival metaphors of prototypes, scripts, frames, and schemata, see Parker 1996. The other major modern user of genre theory outside literary studies is film criticism: see, e.g., Grant 1977, 1986, 1995. . Zwaan

1994.

I shall be using "plot" here in the very general sense that it has come to have within postmodernism, which sees all accounts of the world as essentially stories: see, e.g., Cupitt (1991). For a version that contrasts narrativity with philosophical accounts of the world, see Cavarero (1997).

Compare D. P. Fowler 1991. For the notion of a genre descriptif, see Rifaterre 1972.

. Compare P. G. Fowler 1997, who notes the link to the end of the Iliad (among other texts).

. Most explicitly at the end of Book Two of the De rerum natura. Inde constantly functions in Book Five to mark the stages of human development, and it is interesting to note that several of the occurrences of principio in that book seem to mix temporal and logical inception (e.g., 5. 81). The closest parallel to the movement of Anchises' speech in the Aeneid is 5. 783, principio, followed by 786, exinde, right

300

Notes to Pages 207-210

at the beginning of Lucretius's account of living organisms (I owe this point to Gordon Campbell). Barnes 1994. 10. Compare Aristotle Metaphysics 1. 981b 7-10: "In general, the sign of knowledge or

ignorance is being able to teach, and because of this we consider science (techné) rather than experience (empeiria) to be a form of knowledge: for ‘scientists’ can

teach, and the others cannot." The definition of techné was much discussed in antiquity, particularly in relation to the classification of domains such as rhetoric: see Cope 1867:19—27, Schaerer 1930, and, e.g., Blank 1995. 11. The classic work on the cognitive function of metaphor is that of Lakoff and Johnson 1980, which has led to a vast literature on conceptual metaphor: see especially Rohrer 1997, and other resources listed at URL http://metaphor.uoregon.edu/ metaphor.html (19th August 1997). Much modern educational theory deals with what one might term the "search for the perfect metaphor": see, e.g., Carger 1996 (student as “patient” versus student as "client": the “consumer model" has been much discussed), and Ormell 1996 (eight educational metaphors). Educational Abstracts (URL http://www.ref.uk.oclc.org) lists (19th August 1997) some 360 ti-

tles dealing with metaphor in education. For some ancient equivalents, see Sluiter forthcoming. 12. Hardie 1986:158. 13. Compare De rerum natura, 2. 10 errare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae; 5. 87-88 dominos acris adsciscunt, omnia posse / quos miseri credunt, ignari quid queat esse, / quid nequeat (compare 6. 64); 6. 67 (Epicurus)

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

viam monstravit, tramite parvo /

qua possemus ad id recto contendere cursus. 1. 1115-1118. On the text here, see P. G. Fowler 1997:120 n. 27. Compare Becker 1937:92-94 and index s.v. Lebensweg. Compare Doob 1990. Compare D. P. Fowler 1996. Mitsis 1994. Schijvers 1970:19 ("Lucréce exprime l'unité de la pensée épicurienne et de sa propre poésie: la terminologie centrée autour de la notion de la marche est le fil qui les relie l'une à l'autre. Le chemin de la pensée épicurienne coincide avec celui de la poésie lucrétienne, c'est-à-dire avec le chemin qui va du début jusqu'à la fin du poéme lui- méme"), Gale 1994:119—120. Compare Indelli 1988.240 on Philodemus De ira XLV. 1. Ficta is usually taken as a rare form of fixa, as from figo (TLL V1.1. 710.28), but the sense of fingo cannot be excluded: Lucretius "shapes" his footprints to those of the master. Compare Schiesaro 1990:92-101. Ginzburg 1989. Eamon 1994, especially chapter eight, "Science as a venatio" Compare D. P. Fowler 1995.

Notes to Pages 211-216

301

26. Augustine Conf. 12. 14, mira profunditas eloquiorum tuorum, quorum ecce ante nos

superficies blandiens parvulis: sed mira profunditas, deus meus, mira profunditas! horror est intendere in eam, horror honoris et tremor amoris. Reading the bible may bring about the conversion of the Christian, but its work is not then done: it can be constantly studied and re-studied at deeper levels. 27. Ep. Men. 135. 28. Compare also Ep. Hdt. 35-36, where Epicurus uses the term περιοδεία, with Bailey 1926.175 ad loc., “lit. ‘the continuous circuit of the whole system, ‘circuit,

because it is all so closely linked that it is constantly coming back on itself." 29. Mitsis 1994. 30. Compare Clay 1983:266, "the final test of his mastery of the poem"; P. G. Fowler 1997. 31. Compare Wiseman 1974:34—39. 32. Compare Nisbet 1978—1980:57.

33. Compare Gigante 1975. 34. Compare Riedweg 1987, Sluiter forthcoming. The question of the connections between initiation and education has been seen in a new light since the discovery of the commentary on an Orphic text in the Derveni papyrus: see the essays in Laks and Most 1997. 35. The movement in 50—55 recalls that of the opening of the Orphic poem known as the Διαθῆκαι (frr. 245-248 Kern), where Musaios is asked to listen while Orpheus tells him of the truth, and is enjoined not to let his previous views prevent him

from seeing it: σὺ 8’ dxove, φαεσφόρον ἔκγονε Μήνης, / Μονσαῖε, ἐξερέω yap ἀηϑέα, μηδέ σε rà πρὶν / ἐν στήϑεσσι φανέντα φίλης αἰώνος ἀμέρσῃ. / Εἰς δὲ λόγον ϑεῖον βλέψας τούτῳ προσέδρευε, / ἰϑύνων κραδίης νοερὸν

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

κύτος: εὖ δ᾽ ἐπίβαινε / ἀτραπιτοῦ, μοῦνον ἐσόρα κόσμοιο ἄνακτα ἀθάνατον. Similarly Lucretius in 1. 50-55 asks Memmius for empty ears and attention veram ad rationem, lest he reject the message before understanding it: and that message is de summa caeli ratione deumque. De rerum natura 3. 14-17 simul ac ratio tua coepit vociferari / naturam rerum... with Hippolytus Ref. Omn. Haer. 5.8. 40 for the shout of the hierophant. Compare famously Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.52, "We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer." Lyne 1987:139—144. On the political metaphors in the prologues to Books Two and Three, see D. P. Fowler 1989a. Compare Od. 5. 388—389 with Propertius 3.12. 32 totque hiemis noctes, totque

natasse dies. Odysseus was proverbially adversis rerum immersabilis undis (Hor.

Epist. 1.2. 22). 4].

Dillon 1981:183, discussing Philo's use of avarnyopat.

302

Notes to Pages 216-222

42. Compare Chapman's note on the first line of the Odyssey in his translation: “the

information or fashion of an absolute man; and necessary (or fatal) passage through many afflictions (according with the most Sacred letter) to his natural haven and country, is the whole argument and scope of this inimitable and miraculous poem.” In general, compare Stanford 1963, especially 118-127, Bufhére 1956:376 n. 39, Hoistad 1948:94-102. 43. Gale 1994:52, and especially 124-125.

. Muir The Journey Back (Muir 1960:175). Muir constantly returns to the theme of the journey: his second collection was Journeys and Places (1935), his third and fourth The Voyage (1946) and The Labyrinth (1949). See also “The Return of Odysseus” from The Narrow Place (1943). . Tractatus 6.54. Conte 1994:1-3.

. Compare Hardie 1986:209-213, Salemme 1980:9-21. . On the problems of definition, compare Kroll 1925, Fabian 1968, Rifaterre 1972, Pohlmann 1973, Effe 1977, and Schuler and Fitch 1983.

. With this sort of generic “inclusion”—rather than mixing or hybridization— compare Cairns 1989, Davis 1991:11-77.

12. Essential Epic My thanks to my fellow participants in the CHS colloquium, whose comments and whose own presentations helped me better to define this paper's discursive space; especially to Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink (organizers and editors), and to Carolyn Dewald and Kathryn Morgan (respondents). More good advice came my way at Kathleen Coleman's March 1998 Statius Workshop in Trinity College, Dublin: my especial thanks to Elaine Fantham, Peter Heslin, and Susanna Morton Braund, themselves all authors of forthcoming papers that bear in different ways on the Statian matters briefly treated here. Two Texan audiences, in Austin and at Baylor University, sharpened my final revision; I am indebted to Andrew Zissos and to the UT Department of Classics for the opportunity to visit, and to work for a fortnight on the Achilleid with a lively graduate seminar. Alessandro Barchiesi has been an important interlocutor throughout, in person and in print: to Barchiesan bibliography below, add "The Xing," forthcoming in S. J. Harrison and J. Birchall, eds., The Common Task, which situates Krollian Kreuzung anew in literary and intellectual history. . A Krollian reading of the Metamorphoses can better be divined from the chapter thus titled as a whole (Kroll 1924:202—224) than from the remarks specific to the Metamorphoses (pp. 215-216). The latter show some evasiveness, evidently because Kroll is reluctant to acknowledge direct disagreement with the terms of Heinze 1919. 2. Ross's comment (on Virg. Ecl. 6) is cited alongside Kroll at Knox 1986:1 and notes.

Notes to Pages 222-237

In a revaluation

of Heinze's

central

case study

(elegiac

and

303

hexametric

Persephones in Fasti and Met.), especially p. 117: "whether they are being kept or

broken, generic rules are always relevant to an Augustan poem." Compare Barchiesi 1997:66 on Ov. Fast. 3 and 4 proems: "the interplay between literary genres has come out of the workshop and moved onto the stage, and the effect is as ambiguous and shifting as a shadow play.”

. A good point of access, this, to Conte's extensive writings on genre; included is a discussion of the "staging" of generic choice, and a notable critique of Kroll. Fowler 1982, especially 45—48. For tristitia in the erotic estrangements of Augustan elegy, compare Gallus fr. 2 Bü and (e.g.) Prop. 1.18.10. On the "timing" of Her. 3, see Barchiesi 1992:17, 185, 189, 209. . On which see further Barchiesi 1997:16—23 (“‘arma’ and literary genres"). McKeown 1987 ad loc.

. Kennedy 1993:59 (with further discussion): "the word nervus can refer to a sinew, muscle, strength, literary vigour—and the penis.” . Sexual metaphor in arma: compare, e.g., Am. 1.9.26, with Adams 1982:21. See also Barchiesi 1997:27—28. . For a differently tendentious allusion to the Il. 6 scene, see Ov. Am. 1.9.35—36. . See McKeown 1987 on the Am. passages and, more radically, Buchan 1995; Hardie 1994 on Aen. 9.57 for "the eleven repetitions (with varying case and number of vir) in the poem of the first two words of the poem arma virumque"; Fowler

1997:20 on post-Augustan "arma." . . . .

19. 20.

21.

22.

Kennedy 1989:210, in a finely theorized review of Knox 1986 and Hinds 1987a. Derrida 1980, at 178 and 204. See especially her chapter 1 (citing Sedgwick 1985 for the term “homosocial”). For the term “code model," “modello-codice,” see Conte 1986:31; on the generic pressure exerted by the Aeneid on Virgil's epic successors, compare Hinds 1998:105—107, 120-122, 143. Feeney 1991 and Hardie 1993, both transformative of our understanding of epic. This final case study supplements Hinds 1998:124-129 and (especially) 135-144. Here as there, my approach has a debt to Rosati 1994a and 1994b, and a telepathic affinity with work in progress by Alessandro Barchiesi. Compare Koster 1979; and add now Cyrino 1998:232-239, which appeared just before this paper went to press. For comparable manipulation of genre imagery in Ovid's Fasti, see Hinds 1992:81-112. With "the unwarlike court of Lycomedes,” compare in particular the sketch of the island of Battus at Fast. 3.569-578, with Hinds 1992.110-111 and Barchiesi 1997:21-23. More on the post-Ovidian Statius of the Achilleid: Rosati 1994a, Hinds 1998:135— 144.

304

Notes to Pages 237-244

23. See also now Cyrino 1998:234, “a simile tense with transvestite ambiguity.” 24. For mollis as a word charged with unmasculine, unmartial, and unepic values, see

Kennedy 1993:31-34, Hinds 1987b:22-23, and above all, Edwards 1993:63—97. 25. For the startling contribution of the clausula litore: cessi to such a reading (across 26. 27. 28.

the sense pause!), see now Barchiesi 1997b:215-217. On the effeminacy of the elegiac male poet/lover, see Wyke 1994:115-121. Conte 1994b:487, Feeney 1991:376 n. 199. The allusion is not without its intertextual irony: Statius’s Achilles can anticipate his ments, but he “misreads” the source from which that meris will be drawn in Homer's canonical inauguration of the theme: viz from offenses perpetrated by his own side. Pertinent here is Rosati 1994b:42 on an echo/anticipation of Achilles’ anger over Briseis just below at 2.84—85, citing Il. 1.194. Compare also my earlier remarks on Briseis’s own limited foreknowledge of Achillean menis at Ov. Her. 3.87-90. Shipboard: i.e., programmatically enhanced?

29. 30. Ach. 1.188-189 immania laudum / semina (compare Homer’s klea andron); on the

metapoetics of this song, see Hinds 1998:126-128. As Elaine Fantham points out to me, the phrase is echoed in Diomedes’ programmatically charged prompt to Achilles at 2.89 (quoted earlier).

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CONTRIBUTORS

ETE

ALESSANDRO

BARCHIESI,

professor of Latin Literature, University of Ve-

rona, has published on Augustan poetry (Virgil: La Traccia Del Modello, Pisa, 1984) and Ovid (The Poet and Prince, 1997), and has a special interest in the in-

teraction between Classics and modern literary criticism. DEBORAH BOoEDEKER is Professor of Classics at Brown University. She has authored and coedited works on ancient Greek poetry and religion, Athenian tragedy, and Greek historiography, including special issues of Arethusa on Herodotus and

the Invention

of History (1987)

and

"The

New

Simonides"

(1996). Boedeker is also coeditor of Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in FifthCentury Athens, a forthcoming Center for Hellenic Studies Colloquium volume. Eric CsAPo is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and a specialist in the history of the theater. He is coauthor, with William Slater, of The Context of Ancient Drama (1995), and is currently writing a book on

New Music in Euripidean tragedy. JosgPH W. Day is Associate Professor of Classics at Wabash College. His fields of interest include the literature, history, and art and archaeology of Ar-

chaic and Early Classical Greece, with a particular focus on the original reception of epigrams on grave markers and dedications. His publications include articles on sepulchral epigrams (JHS 109) and on dedicatory epigrams (HSCP 96). A monograph, Epigram and Reader, Dedication and Viewer, is in progress. Mary Depew is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa. Her interests include Greek poetry, especially of the Hellenistic period, and Greek religion. Her publications include articles on Greek prayer (CA 1997) and on Callimachus's mode of allusion (HSCP 1998). Currently she is writing a book on Callimachus's Hymns.

340

Contributors

341

MARCO FANTUZZI was "ricercatore" of Ancient Greek Literature in Trento from 1986 to 1992 and has also been an Associate Professor at the University of Florence since 1992. He has dealt above all with Hellenistic literature (other interests: diction and style of Archaic epic poetry, the style of archaic “Hippo-

cratic” writings, and Attic Tragedy). Together with Richard Hunter, he is about to finish a book on Hellenistic poetry, and he is writing a commentary on Euripides’ Rhesus. Among Fantuzzi's publications are Bionis Smyrnaei “Adonidis

epitaphium” (1985); Ricerche su Apollonio Rodio: diacronie della dizione epica (Roma 1988); "Il sistema letterario della poesia alessendrina del III sec. a.c. in G. Cambiano, L. Canfora, D. Lanza, eds., Lo spazio letterario della Grecia antica,

1.2 (1993); and “Mythological Paradigms in the Bucolic Poetry of Theocritus," in PCPhS 42, 1995. He edited, in collaboration with R. Pretagostini, Struttura e storia dell’ esametro greco, vol. I-II (1995-1996).

Don Fow er

was Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. His

interests included Latin poetry and literary theory, and he was the editor, with D. Roberts and F. Dunn, of Classical Closure (Princeton, 1997). At the time of

his death, Fowler was finishing a book on books and reading in Latin literature. STEPHEN HınDs is Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Washington, Seattle. His main research interests are in Latin poetry, as well as in literary criticism and theory. He is the author of The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (1987) and Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics

of Appropiation in Roman Poetry (1998). Also, he is coeditor with Denis Feeney of the Cambridge University Press book series Roman Literature and Its Con-

texts. Hinds is currently preparing a commentary on Ovid, Tristia 1. GLENN W. Mosr studied in America and Europe, and he was trained in Clas-

sics (D.Phil. Tübingen 1980) and in Comparative Literature (Ph.D. Yale 1980). He has published widely on ancient and modern literature and philosophy, on

the history of classical scholarship and the classical tradition, and on literary theory. Most has taught at Yale, Princeton, and the universities of Michigan,

Tübingen, Siena, and Innsbruck, and he is also Professor of Classics at Heidelberg University (since 1991) and on the committee on Social Thought at the

University of Chicago (since 1997). Dirk OBBINK

is University Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature, Stu-

dent and Tutor in Classics, Christ Church, Oxford. His main interests are Greek

and Latin literature, papyrology, and ancient religion. Publications include

342

Contributors

Philodemus On Piety (Oxford, 1996), and “The Addressees of Empedocles” (MD 31, 1993, 51-98). Work in progress is “Sappho fr. inc. 23.” IAN RUTHERFORD

is Reader in Greek, Department of Classics, Reading Uni-

versity, Reading, United Kingdom, and (at the time of writing) Head of Department. Major research interests are Greek lyric poetry, papyrology, pilgrimage in the ancient world, Greco-Roman Egypt, ancient Anatolia, and ancient literary criticism. Recent publications include “For the Aiginetans a Prosodion: An Unnoticed Title at Paean 6.123 and Its Significance for the Poem” (ZPE 118, 1997);

“The Census List P Oxy. 984a” (=P. Oxy. 841 Recto); “The Reverse of Pindar’s

Paeans,’ with Professor R. Bagnall and Professor B. Frier (Papyrologica Bruxellensia 29, 1998); and Canons of Style in the Antonine Age (Oxford, 1998). INEKE SLUITER is Professor of Greek Literature and Linguistics at the Uni-

versity of Leiden. Her main area of interest is ancient views on language and linguistics—ancient grammar, rhetoric, philosophy of language and literary criti-

cism. She is author of Ancient Grammar in Context: Contributions to Anctent Linguistic Thought (Amsterdam: VU University Press 1990) thor of The Emergence of Semantics: The Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Linguistic Traditions (1997). She is presently preparing a monograph

the Study of and coauand Arabic on ancient

commentaries. STEPHANIE WEST is Senior Research Fellow and Fellow Librarian, Hertford College, Oxford. Her main interests are Homer, Herodotus, and Lycophron.

Publications include The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer (1967); Omero, Odissea, libri i-iv (1981, 5a edizione rinnovata 1996); and an English version published in A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey I, with A. Heubeck and J. B. Hainsworth. West's current project is Herodotus iv 1-144 for the Cambridge Greek and Latin

Classics series.

INDEX ele

ond-order genres dependent on, 183, 191;

Aeschines: Against Timarchus, 120 Aeschylus: 31, 78, 104, 159-60; Agamemnon,

benevolent reception of, 202

160; Oresteia, 160; Persae, 159-60;

Supplices, 160 Agalma: 38, 43, 45—47, 49—50, 54—56, 253n10; and hymn, 56, 60, 62—68, 71, 74-76, 256n20 Alcaeus: 168—69, 172, 181

Alcman: 169—70; Louvre Partheneion, 39—40 Anacreon: 168; fr. 7 G., 175; fr. 127 G., 149-50 Anacreontic 11: 150

Apollinaris, father and son: 197-98 Aratus: commentaries on, 187; Phaenomena 1-2,137

Archilochus: 106, 159, 169; “Cologne epode,” 105; fr. 5 West, 112 Aristophanes: Acharnians, 118—19, 123, 127; Aiolosikon, 118, 122; Birds, 119, 127;

Clouds, 127, 521—27, 130-31; Ecclesiazusae, 116, 122, 124—25; Frogs, 119, 123-25, 127; Knights, 123; Kokalos, 122; Lysistrata, 119;

Plutus, 116, 122-25; Thesmophoriazusae, 118-19, 127

Aristophanes of Byzantium: 186—89, 193-95 Aristotle: 19, 87; on comedy, 116-18, 120, 128-30; commentaries on, 192, 195, 199-

202; Metaphysics I 8, 989a30ff., 188, 989b4ff., 188; Nicomachean Ethics 1128a, 130; Poetics, 18-19, 23-24, 28, 98, 135,

1448b20—27, 77, 1449b7—8, 117; Politics 1336b, 120, 1342a, 130; Rhetoric, 28; see also Tragedy: Aristotle on Audience: of ancient comedy, 130-31 Augustan poetry: and Greek poetry, 167-68,

Bakhtin, M.: speech genres, 206 Cairns, F.: 4-5, 205 Callimachus: 186, 188; Hymns, 78-79, Hymn

3, 90; Pinakes, 199 Canon: imposition of canonical form on traditional material, 89; canonical phase of ehoie-poetry, 96; canonization and the creation of “Old,” “Middle,” and “New” Comedy, 117; canonization of sub-literary, 163— 64, of “source texts,” 190, of “the other,” 232 Catullus: C. 51, 169

Charis: 38, 46-50, 52-54, 60, 65-66, 255n10; as praise, 49-50; and economic capital, 5051; and hymn, 62, 70-71, 74-76, 261n81 Charites: 64, 75, 143, 145

Comedy: ancient classifications of, 115-21; and ad hominem plots, 119-21; causes of change in, 121-33 Commentary: and political style, 132-33; origin of, 185, 191-92, 202-3; relationship to source-text, 187-90, 202; and generic clas-

sification of source texts, 192-98, 203; ancient status of, 198-203 Commentator: dual affiliation of, 187, 189— 90, 202

Conte, G.: 222 Crates: 117-18 Cratinus: 115-16, 118-19; Dionysalexandros,

118; Odysses, 116, 118, 126; Pytine, 118-19

181-82

Author: 2-3, 5; as genre, 16-17; first-person and veracity, in Herodotus, 89-102; and

David, commentator on Aristotle: 189-90

authority, 111; and role in defining genre,

Deictic markers: 170, 175

115; and unexampled genres, 165-66; sec-

Deictic shift: 53

343

344

Index

Deixis, deictic language: 52, 62-69, 70, 72-73, 75-78; see also Deictic markers

Derrida, J.: 233-35

“Dictaean Hymn to the Kouros”: 61-63, 74 Didactic plot: 206-8, 211-13, 218-19; of journey, 208-13; and rereading, 211; of initiation, 213-15; and "implicit myth," 21518

Didactic poetry: primary elements of, 205, 218-19; secondary elements of, 205, 218— 19; hunting metaphor in, 210-11; and rereading, 211, 215; and epic, 217-18 Diogenes Laertius: 192-93, 195; D.L. 3.56, 193-94

Diomedes Grammaticus: 87-88, 94 Distancing from model: see Genre: rift in Ehoiai: see Gunaikon Katalogos Elias: see David Encomium: 136-42, 164-65 Ephippus: 120; Geryon, 120

Epic poetry: and didactic, 217-18; “unepic” elements in, 222, 233; purity of, ambushed by women, 223-35 Epicurus: 209-11; commentaries on, 185-86;

Epicurean therapy and didactic "positioning, 212 Euripides: 22, 31, 78-79, 159—60, 198; Bacchae, 125; Ion, 22, 55; Medea, 27; Orestes, 159; Telephus, 118 Evenemental history: 123, 273-74n29

Exegesis: 185, 189; Hellenistic interest in, 187-88 First poems: 171-73 Genealogy: 82-85, 92-93, 143 Generic force: 7, 38—42, 44, 46, 51; and repre-

sentation, 7, 39-42, 54, 56 Genre: as production-oriented, 2; and author, 2-3, 8-9, 16—17; as social phenomenon, 4, 17-18; Romantic theory of, 31-32; Diomedes' schema of, 87-88; as the sharing of range of distinctive practices and agreed techniques, 89; Hellenistic interest in, 90;

Herodotus on, 103; "staging" of, 105, 110, 222, 241; and evolutionary models, 128-29;

and urban vs. mythical themes, 148—49,

150-51; and conditions assumed between poet and public, 159; folding of, 167, 169, 176, 181—82; politicization of, 167, 178, 181—82; rift in, 167, 169, 180, 182; as dis-

course strategy, 184; generic self-reflection, 199-202; as defined by pragmatics of utterance, 205; and configurations of travel, 218-19; generic essence, 222-23; and gen-

der, 241; thematization of, see Genre: folding of Gunaikon Katalogos: canonical version of, 81-82; arrangement of, 81-83, 85; ehoieformula in, 83-85, 91-93, 95; privileging of women in, 86, 89-90, 94; death and immortality in, 86—87, 94; generic classification of, 89-91, 95-96; development of, 9196; generic crossing of 92, 95-96 Hecataeus: 106-8

Hellenistic: interest in catalogue poetry, 90— 91; interest in exegesis: see Exegesis: Hellenistic interest in; interest in genre: see Genre: Hellenistic interest in Heraclitus: commentaries on, 185—86 Hermogenes: 196 Hero/demigod: as subject of praise, 139—42 Herodas: 163; Mimiambus 4, 54-55

Herodotus: accuracy of, 98-102; historical versus literary value of, 102; view of poetic sources, 103-6; and epic, 103-6, 108; logos in, 104, 108-11, 114; view of prose sources, 106-8; Lycophron’s debt to, 165; Histories 1.12, 106, 1.70, 98, 104, 1.95, 108, 1.140, 108, 1.177, 109, book 2, 106-7, 2.3, 109, 2.15-16, 108, 2.23, 103, 2.43, 108, 2.44, 111, 2.53, 103, 2.65, 109, 2.82, 104, 2.116—20, 104-5, 2.120, 98, 104, 2.123, 104, 108, 2.143, 107, 2.156, 104, 3.103, 110, 3.115, 103, 3.125, 109, 4.13, 103, 4.16, 110, 4.30, 108, 4.36, 103, 107, 109, 4.53, 107, 4.82, 108, 4.99, 113, 5.36, 107, 5.62, 108, 5.72, 109, 5.113, 106, 5.125, 107, 6.55, 110, 6.137,

107-8, 7.96, 109, 7.104, 109, 7.137, 113, 7.214, 98, 111, 7.224, 109, 8.9, 110

Hesiod: 5, 81, 103; Shield, 84, 88, 91; Theogony, 91, 143—44, 43-51, 136, 100-1, 143;

Index

Works and Days, 136, 145, 1-10, 136-37,

24-26, 107 Hippocrates: commentaries on, 186-87

Homer: 18, 24, 26, 66, 103-5, 108, 136, 13941, 145—46, 185, 198, 232; Catalogueof Ships, 82-83, 144, 6.490—96, 231-32, 14.313ff., 91; Iliad, 22, 88, 103, 197, 1.3941,

52; Nekuia, 87, 93-96; Odyssey, 81, 88-89, 94-95, 103, 118, 197, 3, 46-48, 3.58, 46

Homeric Hymns: 141; Hymn to Apollo, 69-74, 139, 146-50, 71, 156-64, 71, 157-60, 69; Hymn to Hermes, 139; HH 9.7, 74-75; HH 26, 47 Horace: Ars Poetica, 26-27, 73, 223, 227, 86— 91, 2; Carmen Saeculare, 178-82; Odes 1.1, 171, 1.1.29—32, 177, 1.2, 172, 2.7, 169, 3.14, 178, 3.30, 171-72, 4.1, 172-73, 178, 4.2, 178, 4.5, 178, 4.6, 178—79, 181-82, 4.15, 177-78

Hymnic endings: 74—75 Hymnic exordia: 70, 72-73 Isocrates: Antidosis, 188, 198-99; De pace, 120 Isyllus: Paean, 64 Kant, I.: Critique of Judgement, 30

Katharsıs: 25-27

Kreuzung der Gattungen: 78, 138, 159, 164, 206, 221

Lessing, G.: 29 Logos in Herodotus: see Herodotus: logos in

345

75, 177, 181, 290-91n7; reperformance in, 174, 176; "solo" versus “choral,” 175

Magical invocations: 149-50 Mantiklos statue: 45-54, 66, 74

Megalai Ehoiai: 81, 88, 91 Menander: 115-17, 119, 121-22, 132;

Dyscolus, 119, 123, 148 Menander Rhetor: 4—5, 60 Mimesis: 26, 77, 79, 193, 255n9, 258n66

Mimnermus: fr. 9 West, 112 Muses: 64, 70, 75, 83, 91, 112, 136-37, 142—46

Oaths: 147 Odyssean journey: 216-17 Oracle of the Potter: 161-62 Ovid: Amores 1.1.1—4, 226, 1.1.17-18, 228, 1.1.19-20, 226, 2.18.1—6, 11-12, 227,

2.18.35—40, 227-28; Heroides 3.87-90, 22225; Metamorphoses, 221—22; as extreme test case of generic reading of Roman literature, 221-23; Remedia Amoris 379-82, 222, 224, 230, 233; Tristia 1, 90, 2.26, 181, 2.36162, 371—74, 229, 233, 2.529-36, 230, 233 Paian: 179-82 Performance: "generic force" of, 7, 38-39, 41, 46, 56; reader as performer, 44—45, 47, 5154; and display, 60-61 Pherecrates: 118 Philosophy: and tragedy, 192-96; and rhetoric, 196-97

[Longinus]: 29-30 Lucretius: De rerum natura, 207-8, 1, 213-14,

Phrynichus: Korianno, 119; Monotropos, 119; Petale, 119

217, 1.398—409, 210, 1.1115-18, 208, 2, 213,

Pindar: 88—89, 142, 169—70, 198; Nem. 2.1—3,

2.9-13, 215-16, 3, 213-14, 3.1—4, 209—10, 3.59—64, 216, 3.998-1002, 216, 6, 210-11, 214

137; Nem. 4, 111-12; Nem. 5.25f., 137; Ol. 1, 112, 171; OL 2.1-6, 138; OL 14.35, 172; Pae. VI, 64, 75-76, 178—80, 182; Pae. IX, 180; Pae. XII, 181;fr. 94b, 47; fr. 128c, 180 Plato: 19, 24—26, 87; commentaries on, 185, 187, 189, 192-96, 198-99; Laws, 120, 129-

Lycophron: Alexandra, synopsis, 153-54; form of, 154—55, 159; historical evaluation of, 155-57; and the "Lycophron Question,” 157-58; and tragedy, 159-60, 164; and Near Eastern genres, 160—62, 164; potential for

nationalist propaganda, 162; 1226—80, 157, 1446—50, 157—58, 164—65 Lyric: performance in, 168; authorship in, 168-70, 182; and textuality, 170—71, 173—

30, 194, 7.801e, 143; Phaedrus, 148, 191; Republic, 18, III 392d5f, 193; Symposium, 26 Platonius: 116, 118, 123-24

Plautus: Amphitruo, 118 Plutarch: Aretat Gunaikon, 86; Lakainon Apophthegmata, 86; fr. 178 Sandbach, 213

346

Index

Prayer: 61-64 Priamel: 137-38, 141, 171, 201 Propertius: 1.7, 226, 2.10, 226 Renaissance interpretation of tragedy: 28-29

Rhetoric: and systems of classification, 5-6 Russian formalism: 81, 92, 273n5

241, 2.43—48, 241, 2.86—91, 243, 2.94-100, 243, 2.166—67, 244

Themistius: 199—200, 202 Theocritus: 163; and Homeric Hymns, 139; Id. I, 146; Id. VII.103-14, 149-50; Id. XVI, 136, 142-45, 14, 142; Id. XVII, 136-41, 1-4,

137-38, 5-8, 137-39, 135-37, 138; Id. XXII, Sappho: 168—69; "Sappho One,” 170, 172-73,

146-47

181 Schiller, F.: 30-31

Theophrastus: 27 Thrasyllus: 193-95

Secondary literature: and presupposition of

Thucydides: 99, 107, 113

written text, 190; as a generic category, 198-99 Second Sophistic: and rhetorization of literature, 196-97

Timaeus: 165

Simonides: 142-43, 169; " Plataean elegy,’ 140-41; POxy 2327fr. 5, 141 Simplicius: 200-1

Sophocles: 18, 31, 78; Antigone, 31; Oedipus at Colonus, 125 Sophonias: 201-2

Source text: 187-90, 192, 196, 202 Statius: Achilleid, 235—36, 241, 244, 1.288—89,

Tragedy: as a model genre, 6, 18—19; versus "the tragic,” 6, 19-22; Aristotle on, 22-27; later theoreticians on, 26-32; and philosophy, 192—96; and satyr-play, 195 Tragikos: 20-21 Vergil: Aeneid, 87, 235, 1.1, 223, 230, 237-38, 4, 230, 237, 6.719-21, 206, 6.724-51, 206-7, 7.440—44, 231-33, 7.452—55, 232; Eclogue 6.3, 223; Georgics, 87, 208—9, 1.121—23, 209, 2.490—93, 218, 3.8, 209, 4.565—66, 209

237, 1.299—300, 237, 1.325-31, 335-37, 236,

1.343—48, 238, 1.351—53, 240, 1.615-18, 239, 1.652-55, 239—40, 1.753—55, 240, 1.758—60, 239, 1.852-57, 240-41, 2.5-11,

Women: and epic, 223 Zeus: and Ptolemy, 136-38