Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept 9780226299525

Citation preview

Variety

Variety The Life of a Roman Concept william fitzgerald

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

William Fitzgerald is professor of Latin language and literature at King’s College London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­29949-­5 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­29952-­5 (e-­book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226299525.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Fitzgerald, William, 1952– author. Variety : the life of a Roman concept / William Fitzgerald. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-29949-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-29952-5 (e-book)  1. Latin literature—History and criticism.  I. Title. pa6003.f58 2016 870.9'001—dc23 2015027956 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi /niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Page duBois

Contents

Acknowledgments ix



Introduction: Rescuing Variety

1

1 Words and Meanings

12

2 Variety’s Contexts

31

3 Putting Variety at Issue: Varietas in Pliny the Younger, Lucretius,    and Horace

84

4 Confronting Variety: Listing, Subjectivity, and Genre in Latin Poetry

116

5 Miscellany: Variety and the Book

149

Conclusion

196 Notes  203 Bibliography  231 Index  241

Acknowledgments

The bulk of the work on this book was completed in 2010/11, during a year of research leave comprising a sabbatical term granted by King’s College London and a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am grateful to both bodies for making this possible. My thanks are also due to the inspiring participants of the conference Variety and Miscellany in Latin Literature, which I convened at King’s College London in June 2009: Ruth Morello, John Henderson, Catherine Connors, Erik Gunderson, Victoria Rimell, Rebecca Langlands, Eugenia Lao, Carlotta Dionisotti, and Joseph Howley. Ullrich Langer shared his work on literary pleasure in the Renaissance, which provided vital impetus to the project in its early stages. I benefited from Joseph Howley’s thoughts on Aulus Gellius as examiner of his excellent thesis and in subsequent conversations on his forthcoming book. Audiences at St. Andrews, King’s College London, Kent, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge, and Reading provided helpful feedback, and readers’ reports from the University of Chicago Press guided my revisions of the original manuscript. Susan Bielstein supported, encouraged, and improved this book, and this is not the first time I have had reason to be grateful to her for shepherding a book of mine through the long process to publication. I am grateful also to Kathryn Krug, who was a most scrupulous and eagle-­eyed copy editor. As always, my wife Kathy O’Shaughnessy has been encouraging and questioning in perfect measure. The dedicatee, varia and multiplex in all the best senses, has been an inspiration throughout our friendship.

introduction

Rescuing Variety

What is there to say about variety? Not much, judging by the puzzled or amused reaction among friends and colleagues making the “What are you working on?” inquiry. And, in fact, the blankness that confronts one’s attempt to focus on the concept of variety is part of what attracted me to the subject. Variety needs rescuing. It seems too big, too obvious, too nebulous to be interesting. And yet, clearly it meant something to the Romans. When the words varietas and varius crop up, as they do with great frequency, they carry a force and specificity that are ill-­served by their English equivalents, at least as they are understood now. But well into the twentieth century the English words various and variety had a specificity and resonance, deriving from a long and rich tradition of speaking about variety, that they have now lost. What is the conceptual range of these words, and what issues do they put at stake? Where are they at home, and what is their semantic field? To what effect do they bundle meanings in their particular way? How far do they make their presence felt in the post-­classical world? The first part of this book is a portrait, though not necessarily the history, of a word that has passed, more or less unaltered, from Latin into English, bringing with it a constellation of connected words, metaphors, and topoi. Why is the concept of variety so difficult to bring into focus? The question may appear foolish, for it would seem to be the very nature of variety to evade focus. The loss of contour, the baffling of focus, and the forestalling of a consistent attentiveness are part of the meaning of variety, and together they make it a difficult concept to discuss. And yet these very qualities have been the object of a discussion which has its own tradition. Their value can be understood in negative or positive terms, and the arguments, metaphors, and

2

introduction

commonplaces associated with them over many centuries delineate a particular field of human experience, which can be bought into focus. Our first thoughts about variety might cast it as an ornament, or a correction. Variety is often seen as a corrective, an essential counterweight to the boredom and tedium to which unity and homogeneity are prone. “Unvaried” or “lacking variety” are common criticisms. While the “corrective” sense of variety is certainly part of the tradition, it is by no means the whole story. As a distinctive value, variety has a role to play in the story of some very big ideas. A good example of this is the concept that Arthur Lovejoy (1960) dub­ bed “The Great Chain of Being,” the idea of a hierarchical chain stretching from the perfect being to the lowest form of existence, and conforming to the principles of plenitude and continuity. In the Great Chain of Being each link differs “from that immediately above and that immediately below by the least possible degree of difference” (1960, 59), and, as Lovejoy continues, “In this assumption of the metaphysical necessity and the essential worth of the realization of all conceivable forms of being, from the highest to the lowest, there was obviously implicit the basis of theodicy” (1960, 64). In Plotinus’s version of this idea (Ennead 2.24–­25), the good of the whole consists chiefly in the variety of its parts; it is, for instance, better that one animal be eaten by another than that it should never have existed at all. Conflict is a necessary concomitant of diversity, and the one should be tolerated for the sake of the other. Variety, then, has a value for Plotinus, but to what sphere does this value belong? Is it an aesthetic notion? If so, it is capable of considerable extension. Plotinus goes on to say that to complain that there is evil in the world is as senseless as to complain of a tragedy because it includes among its characters not only heroes, but also slaves and peasants who speak incorrectly. To eliminate these low characters would be to spoil the beauty of the whole (Enn. 3.2.11). The roots of variety’s value lie in the aesthetic realm, as Plotinus’s comparison indicates, but is his prioritization of variety over justice an assertion of the overriding value of the aesthetic? To prioritize the variety of creation is to identify creativity as the essence of divinity, over other characteristics such as justice, for instance. What gives force to this argument? I will argue that the idea that God displays his creativity through variety gains crucial support from two aspects of the ancient varietas complex, which I will describe in the first and second chapters of this book: the close connection between copia (abundance) and varietas in the rhetorical tradition, and the topos that “nature rejoices in variety.” These are just two of the strains of thinking about variety that I will take up in the second chapter of this book, in which I will discuss how variety has become an issue in a number of different spheres of thought.

r e s c u i n g va r i e t y

3

Variety Now What does variety mean to us now? Readers of a certain age will remember a form of entertainment known as Variety, a vital link between the music halls of the Victorian era and early television, persisting into the 1970s, but now defunct. This diverse entertainment, with its acts drawn from different spheres and cultural levels (singing, dancing, acrobatics, comedy, dramatic recitation, etc.) arranged simply by “numbers” on the program, gave way gradually to more homogeneous forms of entertainment demanding a more concentrated, absorbed audience. The strong association of entertainment with variety, which lies behind the name of Variety (or Varieté in its original French form) is no longer as powerful as it once was. New cultural forms have sprung up in the meantime, and none of them prominently features the word variety. On the other hand, and more recently, we have seen the rise of the blog, an authored work whose ancestor has been identified as the commonplace book, which originated in the Renaissance.1 Commonplace books were collections of quotations, observations, and reflections drawn from the author’s reading, and often intended only for the author’s use, without any principle of order—­miscellanies reflecting the tastes, opinions, responses, and thoughts of the author relating to whatever it is that might “come up.” As we shall see in later chapters, ideas of autobiography or self-­portrait are deeply implicated with the value of variety. But if variety has a primal scene for us now, it must be the supermarket shopper, scanning shelf after shelf of the same item, packaged in different sizes and containers, of different provenances and price, and more or less damaging to the health; or the metropolitan diner, weighing the options of various cuisines offered by an array of restaurants. In short, the arena of variety is “choice,” a central value of the consumer society. In this context, the concept of variety seems somewhat removed from its base in aesthetics. But that may not be the case, since the history of variety as an aesthetic concept comprehends the experience of what the Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard called the oeil vagabond (roving eye), which sweeps a varied prospect with a sense of its own empowerment (more on this in chapter 4). The concept of variety is tied to the experience of a certain kind of visual field, and so engages the subjectivity of the viewer in distinctive ways. One of the manifestations of aesthetic variety that will concern me in this book (chapter 5) is the miscellany, an important ancient form with a long afterlife. Barbara Benedict (1996) associates the literary miscellanies of the eighteenth century, which flaunt their variety, with the rise of consumer culture: the metaphor of the feast, an ancient topos for miscellaneous texts,

4

introduction

links consumption, choice, and variety. These associations belong to what one might call the prehistory of modern variety, the preconditions for variety’s having the value it now holds. There is clearly a strong aesthetic component to this aspect of consumer ideology. The suspension of the act of choice in the face of a variegated field, the play of the eye and the mind with the potential of focus and decision, these are as important as the actual exercise of choice. When a supermarket offers “choice,” it is not only offering a choice, allowing you to select exactly what you want, like, or need, it is also offering choice itself, the spectacle of your freedom and entitlement to choose, whether or not you exercise it. It is not uncommon to find the prioritizing of choice, and the short attention span that it encourages, as features of dystopian descriptions of modernity. But variety has always been potentially ambivalent, putting at issue the relative value of different modes of attention. My project is not simply that of uncovering lost meanings and ancient debates, though that is a central component of this book; the project has a genealogical aspect as well, reconnecting some of the issues of variety now with representations and debates that have a long history. Variety, certainly, is an important ingredient of the modern consumer experience, related to the basic right of the consumer, choice. But it bears an uncomfortable relation to another keyword of contemporary culture, belonging to a very different sphere, and bearing with it associations that must be taken very seriously, namely diversity. It is as self-­evident that a diverse society is desirable as it is that a consumer deserves choice. That the word diversity, rather than variety, is used in this context is a mark of the waning strength of the latter word. For instance, although the official Latin motto of the European Union is In varietate concordia, this appears on EU websites in the English version “United in Diversity.” The Latin motto was selected after a contest, open to secondary students in EU member countries, held in 1999–­ 2000. One might be inclined, then, to think of this as T-­shirt Latin, concocted by a student with very little understanding of the resonances of the words used, which are Latin because that is the language of impressive mottoes. But the fact that it is modeled on the motto In varietate unitas of Ernesto Moneta, Italian patriot and winner of Nobel Peace Prize in 1907, refers the EU motto to an author who would have chosen the word advisedly. Perhaps Moneta, a campaigner for Italian unification, was not deliberately echoing ancient texts about the Roman empire (see p. 00), but it is not inappropriate that he was. It is hardly surprising that Moneta’s varietas has not been translated as “variety”—­ that would appear trivial. This was evidently not a problem in 1951, when E. M. Forster gave two cheers for democracy: “one because it admits variety

r e s c u i n g va r i e t y

5

and two because it permits criticism” (1951, 79). Half a century later, variety seems too lightweight a word to do this kind of work. But diversity is itself derived from the Latin adjective diversus (the form diversitas also exists), which is a significant member of the semantic field of varietas. Admittedly, biodiversity is often the model for contemporary political uses of diversity: Article 1 of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, for instance, states that “cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature.” On the other hand, the modern topos that diversity is something to be celebrated echoes the ancient topos that “nature rejoices in variety” ( gaudet varietate). Gaudium (joy) is another concept that is difficult to bring into focus. What is joy? Whatever it is, joy is an important correlative of variety in the classical tradition and feeds into the “celebration” of diversity in modern parlance. Even more important for the modern use of diversity is the fact that its predecessor, varietas, allows us to conceive of a particular kind of whole, one in which the parts insist on their separateness and yet, in this very insistence, create a beautiful whole. In the political arena, diversity, as the opposite and antagonist of assimilation, is about the protection of minorities from the coercive power of the culturally dominant. It is the value that underpins multiculturalism, which Hollinger (1995, 101–­2) describes as the principle that (the US) ought to sustain, rather than diminish, a great variety of distinctive cultures carried by ethno-­racial groups. This is to be distinguished from pluralism, which assumes an expanse of internally homogeneous and analogically structured units. The principle of diversity rejects focus on the “brotherhood of man” in favor of recognizing and tolerating difference. To see this (which is, admittedly, not all that’s involved) we must commit ourselves to an aesthetics of variety. So, while variety and various have lost some of the semantic power that they held well into the twentieth century, some of their meaning, semantic field, and conceptual baggage have migrated into other words that are important and powerful for us now. A Latin Word The danger of my project is that it will flow through the territory of such big, broad concepts as the aesthetic ideal of unity, the Great Chain of Being, and the contemporary politics of diversity, so that it is in danger of being diluted out of existence. It is a project that could easily be sucked into the vortex of “the one and the many,” or disappear as a component of concordia discors, never to be seen again. But my purpose is not to give an account of these, and

6

introduction

other, encompassing concepts and ideals per se. Where I address them, it is from the perspective of an ancillary concept, that of variety, a word which has passed from Latin into English and the romance languages with little change.2 This word (varius with its variants) brings with it a semantic field and a complex of metaphors and topoi; together, they make up the toolkit of the concept of variety. By staying close to the word itself I hope to reveal a distinctive bundling of ideas, values, and issues that remained remarkably stable over a long period of time. It is, then, both a consequence of my subject and an aspect of my argument that this book is organised not by period, but by topic, discourse, and author. The aspect of my project that concerns classical reception sits awkwardly with current scholarly trends, in that it starts from the premise that the vocabulary with which ideas are expressed and debated is largely inherited, not created for the purpose at every turn, and that this vocabulary carries with it the history of its uses. In other words, meaning is not all, nor always, realized at the point of reception, as the mantra of reception studies has it.3 The histor­ icizing trend of recent years sees the forces of context, to exaggerate a little, as a furnace in which what comes from the past is melted down and recast for present purposes. The naming of the field of Reception Studies is in part a reaction against the implications of the earlier name for this subject, the Classical Tradition, with its assumption of obligatory membership of a club with its rules, assumptions, and traditions; in short, its authority.4 The classical world is no longer thought to “influence” the modern; rather it is, graciously or ungraciously, “received.” What is lost in this metaphor is the resistance, or at least suggestiveness, of the ancient material, its ability to mold rather than be molded. But this is a crude polarization of metaphors. Better, perhaps, would be the metaphor of energy, in which classical material is figured as a form of energy, which finds various outlets in its modern continuations. Part of my subject, then, is the potency of ancient ideas of variety. I will often flout chronology, and my argument will bounce around from period to period or author to author. My purpose in this is, first, to show how the “varietas complex” has permeated discourse over a long period of time, and, second, to unpack the discussion that is potentially inherent in the complex of words, metaphors, and topoi that gravitate around the word. While the first part of my project (chapters 1 and 2) belongs to the field of the history of ideas, broadly conceived, the rest can be considered literary criticism, and it is focused on Latin literature, with forays into its reception. Here I put variety into play in relation to three literary categories: author, genre, and the book. My authors are Lucretius, Horace, and Pliny, for all of whom variety is a central issue. In these three case studies (chapter 3), I show

r e s c u i n g va r i e t y

7

how variety functions within a problematic that is characteristic of the particular author, so that the concept of variety becomes a significant focal point of an oeuvre. In the letters of the Younger Pliny, the concept of variety provides the solution to the problem of self-­presentation in face of the anxious question “What do I amount to?” It is the medium in which Pliny’s anxiety is translated into celebration. Lucretius, poet of the Epicurean universe, is concerned to show that a generously varied nature, and a nature generous in its variety, can be generated from a combination of atoms restricted in their variety. The Lucretian take on variety and nature finds resonances in poets as different as Catullus and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This chapter ends by considering some of the programmatic pronouncements of  Horace, among them that shibboleth of a “classical” aesthetic, the phrase simplex et unum. I argue that the poet identifies himself, against the grain of his explicit statement, as a poet of varietas. Horace features in both of the next chapters, and chapter 4 begins with a discussion of the first of his odes (c. 1.1). In this chapter I consider the ways in which different generic subjectivities confront variety through the activity of listing; from the lyric priamel of Horace’s first ode to the satiric list, or the panegyrical recital of wonders in Statius, the experience of variety comes in different generic forms. Whether the spectacle of variety is overwhelming, empowering, or simply an illusion, depends in part on genre, and I offer in this chapter a generic map of variety, or alternatively a map of some poetic genres through the lens of variety. Since genres are not isolated from each other, but contend, overlap, and conflate, this chapter provides another angle from which to consider the discussion that swirls around the concept of variety. Finally, in the last chapter, I address the literary kind that is defined by variety, namely the miscellany. While miscellany is not an ancient term, it is a convenient cross-­generic category under which to examine books, in prose or verse, which lay claim to variety. Some of these feature prefaces and apologias that account for the varied character of the book, while others find less direct means of giving a rationale for their variety. What do the titles, apologias, metaphors, and metaliterary moments of miscellanies, ancient and modern, have to tell us about the aesthetics and ideology of the miscellany? For the literary critic, all of them raise the awkward question of how one is to interpret the variety of a varied work. What, in short, can one say about it? I address this question mainly in relation to Aulus Gellius’s heterogeneous profusion of erudite readings and conversations in his Noctes Atticae. My approach to the subject of variety, then, is various. I consider it as a concept and a value, as a particular kind of aesthetic experience, and as a critical problem. While the toolkit of the variety complex is remarkably

8

introduction

stable and continuous, it is not inert, for along with this toolkit comes a set of issues, problems, and controversies that have been subject to continuing debate. What questions does varietas raise or answer? Why should we care? One reason to care is that classical western aesthetics is so dominated by ideas of unity, complementarity, harmony, and balance that variety is hard to imagine, except negatively. It is often seen as the adjustment needed to prevent the qualities of our central values from degrading through entropy, the counterweight to a regrettable tendency of certain approved qualities. As such, the necessity of variety reveals an ambivalence about the aesthetic value of unity and, in the rhetorical context, of values such as pondus (weight), copia (abundance), ubertas (fullness), and the like. Variety finds itself relegated to those least respectable of aesthetic concepts, ornament and decoration.5 Symptomatic of this are the words of the Pindar scholar Douglas Young, apropos Pindar’s concept of poikilia, one of the Greek relatives of varietas: “the concept of ornament—­even that of variety for variety’s sake—­is wholly absent from the words poikillein, poikilia and poikilos in the Classical period. They concern inherent complexity, elaborateness, or intricacy of essential argument, not mere decoration.”6 In other words, according to Young, variety cannot, in any approved sense, be a goal in itself (“variety for variety’s sake”). As we shall see, this has not always been the case. To look at the ancient concept of variety is both to give us a new perspective on the history of some modern ideas and values, and also to reorient the focus of our understanding of ancient aesthetics. Central to our understanding of ancient aesthetics have been Horace’s words “finally, let it be anything at all provided it is a single homogeneous whole” (denique sit quodvis simplex dumtaxat et unum, Ars Poetica, 23, as translated by Rudd 1979). Behind these words lie Plato’s organic metaphor for the necessity of unity in a speech (Phaedrus 264c) and Aristotle’s privileging of synoptic wholes that consist of a beginning, a middle, and an end (Poetics 1450b–­1451a). The importance of varietas and poikilia as aesthetic values has been underestimated, and the consequences for western aesthetics have been immense. Unity has meant different things at different times, but whether it be the “Aristotelian” unities of neoclassical critics, the organic unity most famously articulated by Coleridge,7 in which the whole is not only given primacy over the parts, but is their raison d’etre, or the New Critical unity, in which tensions are held in balance (as in an Empedoclean concordia discors), unity has been the dominating term in western poetics. But in the ancient world alternative aesthetic values exist, and indeed persist through the modern period, as this book will show.

r e s c u i n g va r i e t y

9

To find these values we have to look beyond the canonical works of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace. As James Porter (2010) has recently reminded us, varietas and its Greek ancestor poikilia both have their roots in sensuous, visual experience. They belong to the strain of materialist aesthetics from which, Porter argues, the formalist tradition of Plato and Aristotle (often taken to stand for ancient aesthetics tout court) has diverted our attention, a strain in which sensuous experience and materialism have a crucial role to play. If we think more broadly about what might constitute ancient aesthetic thought, Porter argues, we find that many terms are applied across a wide range of different art forms and sensuous experiences. They represent aesthetic values. One of these is poikilia, and to this we could add the Latin varietas. These are words that evince a pleasure in particular kinds of sensuous experience, anchored in the material world. The colors and variegated surfaces or expanses that are described by these words demand or solicit a particular kind of attention. While the association of varietas with rhetoric might give a more formalist feel to the term, we should remember that, according to Cicero, varietas properly attaches to colors, and is used of other phenomena by extension (see below, pp. 17–18). All too often, as Malcolm Heath (1989) has argued, we approach ancient literature with the mistaken assumption that our critical task is to rescue the unity of the work from the threat of digressions and diversions, while it is clear that poikilia and varietas are key terms in ancient aesthetics, broadly conceived.8 But if we can concede that a disproportionate amount of time has been spent worrying over “unity,” we can still be puzzled as to what to say about the variety of a literary work. Are we reduced to exclamation? We can point out, as ancient critics often did, that an author avoids monotony by varying the form in which similar elements recur, but this is merely to approve the avoidance of a fault. Is there a poetics, or a hermeneutics, of variety? Writing books on Catullus and Martial, I have been struck, as anybody must be, by the variety their books put on display. The same goes for Horace, Aulus Gellius, the Plinys, and many others. The phenomenon is given a passing nod by all commentators, and then dropped; after all, what is there to say about variety? Not only is it a difficult concept to bring into focus, it also presents a critical problem. How does one talk about a work’s variety? Our critical vocabulary is poor when it comes to speaking of the centrifugal qualities of literary works. The deconstructive turn of postmodern theory does not provide a counterexample, since this strategy still relies on the assumption that the text is trying, against the proclivities of its own nature, to be univocal and unitary. Bakhtin’s notion of carnival is a more likely position

10

introduction

from which to take a celebratory attitude to variety, as these words of Stallybrass and White (1986, 8) attest: “Carnival is represented by Bakhtin as a world of topsy-­turvy, of heteroglot exuberance, of ceaseless overrunning and excess where all is mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled.” But even Bakhtin’s carnival has a polemical, parasitic relation to an unassailable centripetal norm. In the carnival, variety is a means and symptom of defilement, whereas in the ancient tradition nature “rejoices” in variety. The very difficulty of conceiving aesthetic form otherwise than through a dialectic of the building and dismantling of unity is a sign of how necessary it is to look at different strains in western poetics. While classicists of a deconstructive bent have taken apart texts that, vainly, profess unity, others have been busy debunking the professions of randomness made by authors of miscellaneous texts. Either way, the emphasis on debunking impedes the possibility of developing a positive perspective on variety. Concepts such as “dissemination” (Derrida), “rhizome” (Deleuze-­Guattari), and “flow” (Serres) have been developed to de­ scribe organizational structures that are nonlinear; but we do not have to rely exclusively on new terms while old ones are still to be explored. At its limit, an aesthetics of variety might abut on the discourse of the sublime, the concept that western aesthetics presents as an alternative to beauty, but variety is a distinct aesthetic criterion, which cannot be assimilated to the sublime. Edmund Burke, as we shall see, includes variety under the rubric of beauty, rather than sublimity, and there is an interesting line of thought about how variety relates to, but is not coextensive with, the sublime, as we shall see in chapter 3. Nor can the aesthetics of variety simply be identified with one pole of ideals such as the New Critical reconciliation of complexity with unity or of Horace’s concordia discors (Horace, Epist. 1.12.19), a balanced whole formed from the tension between opposites. In classical rhetoric, for one thing, variety is the complement of copia (abundance), not of unity, and sometimes it even appears to be the means of achieving copia. While the aesthetics of varietas does concern how elements relate to each other, it is not concerned with a reconciliation or balance achieved between the disparate. We might start by thinking of variety, in its ancient sense, as a principle of non-­assimilation, or more positively, as a perceptual field where one element sets another off, rather than complementing or completing it. An important member of the semantic field of varius/varietas in Latin is the verb distinguo (to separate, keep distinct, pick out, embellish, punctuate). Aristotelian aesthetics lays great stress on the synoptic, the perceptual field which can be taken in as a whole. The experience of variety is quite the opposite: without the orientation of a beginning, middle, or end, center or periphery, the eye is

r e s c u i n g va r i e t y

11

caught now by one thing, now another, or it passes over a single element (the hide of an animal, for instance) registering its many shades. But I am anticipating a more detailed discussion, which I will conduct under the rubric of pleasure and aesthetics in chapter 2. It is time now to start at the beginning, with words and meanings.

1

Words and Meanings

I will start this chapter about words with some modern English usages, before going on to explore the original meanings of the Latin and Greek words from which they derive. My intention is to show that, not so long ago, the English words various and variety had a semantic richness that allowed them to sustain considerable emphasis, and the best way to show this is to look at how they feature in some passages of English poetry. My purpose is to build a prima facie case for the value of excavating the meaning of these words, and to motivate this excavation by a curiosity born, perhaps, of puzzlement. Emphasizing Variety At its most faint, the word various in English can simply mean that whatever is designated by the noun to which it is attached is not going to come into focus, because variety precludes specificity (“What did he say?” “Oh, various things”). But consider the following passages from some well-­known English poems, in which the word various is emphatically not the two-­syllable word that it threatens to become in modern (UK) English parlance. First, this from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867): Ah, love, let us be true To one another, for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

wor ds and meanings

13

The hopeful expansion of the fourth line requires us to give “various” fuller value than we are accustomed to give it, so that it balances the trisyllabic “beautiful” (and, on the other pole, “certitude”). This reading of the line as a regular pentameter slows down and counterpoints a reading that would make it a three-­stress line (so VARious so BEAUtiful so NEW), which carries a more exclamatory effect. If we give full value to the three syllables of “various” and “beautiful” we pause to survey the world as a “land of dreams, ” a prospect full of detail and wonder. Arnold’s “various” has a significance that is precisely the opposite of the modern sense of “various” as a vague blur of what will not be enumerated. A contemporary reader finds it hard to invest enough content or feeling in the word, for Arnold depends here on a memory of the Latin sense, in which varius can be applied to a particular kind of vi­ sual field. His association of variety with “joy, ” in the next line of this passage, draws on a long tradition of nature’s joy ( gaudium) in variety. Arnold is also remembering Milton’s Eve, recounting her experience after she ate the apple, a similar case of elation followed by disillusionment: Forthwith up to the clouds With him I flew, and underneath beheld The earth outstretch’d immense, a prospect wide And various: wond’ring at my flight and change To this high exaltation; suddenly My guide was gone and I, methought, sunk down. (Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.86–­89)

Again, the modern reader finds that “various, ” in the same position of the line as in Arnold, but followed here by a pause, must be given an unexpectedly full value: the prospect is not only “wide” in scope but its variety provides plenty to catch the eye and keep it on the move. Milton’s enjambment shifts attention from the grand scale of the view (“wide”) to the pleasure of picking out its elements (“various”). The abstract noun variety can also claim more attention than we are accustomed to give it, as in this couplet from Sir Richard Blackmore’s Creation (1712, quoted in Lovejoy 1960, 297), in which “beauty” is only a run-­up to “variety, ” which insists on its full four syllables:

If all perfection were in all things shown, All beauty, all variety, were gone.

“Variety” is so emphatic here because it is not so much a quality as a principle, namely that God’s creation prioritizes diversity and variety, even at the expense of a perceivable order and of the perfection of its individual elements.

14

chapter one

Even where unity is valued over variety we find that the word variety can be given an emphasis and fullness that seem puzzling to modern ears, as in this passage from John Norris’s poem “The Prospect” (1706): Here all thy turns and revolutions cease Here’s all serenity and peace; Thou’rt to the Center come, the native seat of rest, There’s now no further change, nor need there be, When One shall be Variety.1

The wide-­eyed delight with which the last word expands suggests that it is variety, not unity, which is the important quality. Indeed we might be encouraged by a line like this to read Shakespeare’s famous words on Cleopatra so as to stress the word “variety” rather than “infinite”: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety ” (Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 2, 234–­35). We can speculate that Byron read it thus when he used the phrase in Don Juan: I perch upon an humbler promontory Amid life’s infinite variety. (Don Juan, canto 15, stanza 19)

Consider these couplets from Pope’s Essay on Man, a cornucopia of  “various” words: 2 Here then we rest: “The Universal Cause Acts to one end, but acts by various laws. ” (Essay on Man, 3.1–­2) See Matter next, with various life endu’d, Press to one centre still, the gen’ral good. (Essay on Man, 3.13–­14) Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise To fall with dignity, with temper rise. (Essay on Man, 4.377)

If we glide over “various” in these three passages we miss the force of Pope’s lines. In the second of these couplets “Universal” and “various” are the only words of more than one syllable, and they are both Latinate. These Latinate polysyllables represent, respectively, the one and the many in Pope’s contrast, so that “various” is given a prominence and weight that balances “Universal. ” In the second passage, “various” expands, appropriately, to demand its full three syllables, as we take in the scene that we are invited to see, while “gen’ral” is shortened in the “press” to the “good. ” The third passage alludes to ancient can-

wor ds and meanings

15

ons of rhetorical style, which call for a judicious alternation of the high and the low manner. Pope’s couplets expand on the word “various” only to snap shut on the rhyme words. It is appropriate that Milton makes an emphatic use of the Lat­ inate “various” when characterizing Latin poetry by contrast to modern poetry, which relies too heavily on rhyme (“the Invention of a barbarous Age”). In the preface to the second edition of Paradise Lost (1674) Milton has a note on “The Verse”: Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish Poets of prime note have rejected Rime both in longer and shorter Works, as have long since our best English Tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory. (My emphasis)

Milton’s “drawn out” must be an allusion to the Latin deducere, a verb commonly used by the Roman poets to refer to the slender style, but reinterpreted here to describe a general feature of Latin poetry. But what does Milton mean by “the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another”? Is he saying that the meaning of a word changes as we move from one line to another, or is he talking about enjambment (this is the communis opinio)? Depending on whether we associate “variously” with “sense” or with “drawn out” we will understand Milton to be describing the shifting nuances of the sense as the reader moves from one line to another or the different ways in which units of sense are constructed by the flow of the verse (as opposed to the regular “cashing in” of the sense with each rhyme). Milton gives a political force to the ancient practice of “sense variously drawn out” when he goes on to claim that his choice is “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to the Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming. ”3 Does Milton also allude to the rhetorical principle (to be discussed in the next chapter) that copia is achieved, as well as mitigated, by varietas? In that case, “drawn out” means something like “expanded. ” Or is “variously” used in a more visual sense, as a description of the way that the words come into focus as the sense is drawn out (distributed, not given all at once) from line to line? Milton draws attention to the fact that all Latin poetry, by the very nature of an inflected language with freely manipulable word order, is “various. ” Certainly, he makes this word do a lot of work; the puzzling richness of the phrase’s meaning depends, as we shall see, on some ancient senses, without coinciding exactly with any of them.

16

chapter one

The most recent Latinate use of the word various that I know of is a famous line in Louis MacNeice’s much-­anthologized poem “Snow” (1935).4 The room was suddenly rich, and the great bay-­window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it. Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound, for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—­ On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palm of your hands—­ There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Nature rejoicing in variety will become, as we shall see, a model for human creativity, and here it prompts a responsiveness in the poet, rejoicing in the variety of his language. MacNeice sums up in “the drunkenness of things being various” a number of characteristics of his epiphany: suddenness, juxta­ position (“soundlessly collateral”), heterogeneity (“incompatible”), multiplicity (“incorrigibly plural”), and gaiety. “Crazier” neatly refers both to a variegated pattern, as in “crazy paving” or “crazy quilt, ” and to derangement of the mind, “the drunkenness of things being various. ” With “gay” MacNeice may be alluding to the ancient topos that nature rejoices ( gaudet) in variety.5 Its collocation with the incompatible “spiteful” produces a nicely variegated effect, rendered more plausible by a sound association with “spit” in the previous stanza: spite spits, but so does bubbling gaiety. The play of Latinate polysyllables against monosyllables and Anglo-­Saxon diction caps the poem’s variegation. “Various” is obviously a key word here, and it retains much of its Latin semantic fullness (MacNeice taught classics at Birmingham University early in his career). But because his “various” modifies the vague use of “things” in a line about drunkenness it can also be read as the carelessly inarticulate various of modern usage (“various things”), and this double reading is quite appropriate to MacNeice’s subject. So “Snow” features a transitional use of the word various, and does so to some effect. It is clear that in the above passages “various” and “variety” need to be given a strong enough sense to sustain considerable weight. They can sustain this weight because of the tradition that lies behind them, not only the Latin meanings of these words, but also their embedding in a number of discourses and topoi which these words trail, as we shall see. The erosion of the former

wor ds and meanings

17

specificity of the words in modern English has in turn infected our understanding of the Latin varius. Nisbet and Hubbard (1978, 86), for instance, feel obliged to correct our potential misconception in their note on some famous lines of Horace: iam tibi lividos distinguet Autumnus racemos purpureo varius colore. (Horace, c. 2.5.10–­12) Soon variegated Autumn will pick out the blue grapes for you with a purple tinge.

On varius here they comment: “the word (like poikilos) describes lively variegation of colour . . . ; it is therefore strong enough for its late and somewhat isolated position. ” Their note attests to the fact that what various used to mean can now only be approached by the clumsier, and rarer, variegation. Of course, this evidence of the erosion of sense in our contemporary use of the word various is only interesting because the word various used to carry a range of more specific senses, as well as a tradition of thought about nature, pleasure, creativity, politics, and other subjects that I will pursue in the pages that follow. But first we must consider the Latin word from which it is derived. Varietas: The Word The etymology of varius is uncertain. Ernout-­Meillet (1985, s.v.) declare that it is “sans etymologie.”  The Oxford Latin Dictionary is slightly more sanguine, suggesting that it derives “perhaps” from varus, a pimple or inflamed spot.6 While the English word various now has a broad and abstract sense, the meaning of the Latin varius was originally quite concrete. Cicero gives us a definition of varietas in the course of discussing Epicurus’s dictum that, when pain has been removed, pleasure can be varied but not increased (De Finibus 2.3.10): Varietas enim Latinum verbum est, idque proprie quidem in disparibus coloribus dicitur, sed transfertur in multa disparia: varium poema, varia oratio, varii mores, varia fortuna, voluptas etiam varia dici solet, cum percipitur e multis dissimilibus rebus dissimilis efficientibus voluptates. For varietas is a Latin word, and it is properly used of uneven (disparibus) colors, but it is transferred to many uneven things: a various poem, a various speech, various character, various fortune; pleasure is even called various when it is perceived as a result of many different things producing different pleasures.

18

chapter one

Cicero’s claim that varietas was originally applied to color is supported by the appearance of varius in agricultural texts, beginning with Cato, who refers to the ripening of grapes as the point when a bunch of grapes becomes varia (mottled). The use of varius of ripening grapes becomes conventional.7 Varius is also the vox propria of the colors of autumn, so when Vergil has autumn produce “varios . . . fetus” (Georgics 2.521), he does not mean “various fruits” but “variegated fruits. ” If varius is used of the ripening grape’s discoloration, then Cicero’s disparibus (coloribus) is likely to mean “uneven, indeterminate, ” as I have translated it, rather than “different” (colors). When he goes on to cite the application of varius to a poem, a speech, and also to fortune, he confirms that varius can be used of something that is internally inconsistent (a discolored grape) as well as of a conglomeration of objects that are different from each other. Similar to this usage is the application of varius to the dappled hide of an animal.8 To this usage we could add those that refer to the sea dotted with islands or the sky set with stars (Ovid, Fasti 3.449: “iamque ubi caeruleum variabunt sidera caelum”; cf. Met. 2.93).9 On the other hand, a passage in the Orator suggests that disparibus coloribus could also mean “different colors”: verba altius transferunt eaque ita disponunt ut pictores varietatem colorum, paria paribus referunt, adversa contrariis, saepissimeque similiter extrema definiunt. (Cicero, Orator 19.65) They use more extreme metaphors and arrange words as painters do their combinations of colors; they fit like to like, contrary to opposite, and very of­ ten they make endings correspond to each other.

Here varietas clearly does not mean “shifting, varying, ” but denotes a diversity of discrete elements. So the word can indicate either of two different kinds of varied wholes: the internally inconsistent or the combination of different discrete entities.10 The connection of varius with color is apparent in Persius’s use of discolor as a virtual synonym of varius (“rerum discolor usus, ” Persius 5.52) and in the conjunction of varius and discolor in Lucan (“discolor et vario furialis cultus amictu, ” De Bello Civili 6.654) and Valerius Flaccus (“variis floret via discolor armis,”  Argonautica 5.563).11 The Oxford Latin Dictionary distinguishes two senses of discolor: 1. “Of different colours, ” 2. “Variegated, parti-­coloured. ” Like varius, then, this word could apply to variety either within a single surface or between a number of objects. Versicolor, which can refer either to a change in color or to variegation of color, is another word that appears as a synonym of varius.12

wor ds and meanings

19

As Cicero points out, the word varius is commonly used in a transferred sense. Weber (1986, 4) suggests that the original use of varius to denote a color that can’t be exactly specified, or shifts as we look at it, allows for two opposed evaluative uses, one positive (German bunt )13 and the other negative (shifting, changeable).14 In the pejorative sense of “changeable, uncertain, ” varius is used for the seasons or the weather.15 It is also applied to fortune, to war, which is notoriously unpredictable and fluctuating,16 and to the wavering or uncertainty of opinion, or the unreliability of a tradition.17 These uses are parallel to the ethical sense of varius, which is almost always negative. In Roman ethical discourse a varius person is usually changeable, fickle, or deceptive. Most famously, it is applied in this sense, coupled with “changeable” (mutabile), to womankind in general when Mercury persuades Aeneas to leave Dido (“varium et mutabile semper / femina, ” Aen. 4.569–­70).18 Varius seems to have been thought particularly appropriate for Catiline. Cicero uses it in conjunction with multiplex, a word that belongs to the semantic field of varius, to characterize Catiline’s Protean nature (“hac ille tam varia multiplicique natura,”  Pro Caelio 6), while Sallust attributes to Catiline (5.4) an “animus audax subdolus varius. ”19 Another of Cicero’s bête noires, Clodius, merits the same adjective.20 It is, then, surprising that both varius and multiplex can be used to celebrate versatility, as witnessed by Pliny’s effusions on Pompeius Saturninus. Amabam Pompeium Saturninum ( hunc dico nostrum) laudabamque eius ingenium, etiam antequam scirem, quam varium quam flexibile quam multiplex esset; nunc verum me totum tenet habet possidet. (Epist. 1.16.1) I loved Pompeius Saturninus (I mean our friend) and praised his brilliance, before I knew how various, how adaptable, and how many-­sided he was; but now he has me, holds me, and possesses me completely.

Whether this positive valuation speaks more to the different values of Pliny than to the range of meanings encompassed by these words is a moot point, and I will consider Pliny’s special investment in varietas in chapter 3, where this passage will be discussed more fully. In more neutral usages, varius can describe the contradictions in a character. The Historia Augusta sums up Hadrian with these words: Idem severus laetus, comis gravis, lascivus cunctator, tenax liberalis, simulator [dissimulator], saevus clemens et semper in omnibus varius. (14.11)21 He could be grim or jolly, companionable or severe, playful or sluggish, tightfisted or generous, deceptive, cruel or merciful, and always in everything varius.

20

chapter one

The wily deceptiveness of Odysseus polytropos (of many turns) earns him the adjective varius in the Achilleid of Statius (“Heu simplex nimiumque rudis, qui callida dona / Graiorumque dolos variumque ignoret Ulixem, ” Ach. 1.847). This may be a memory of the passage in Euripides’s Hecuba (131) where Odysseus is called poikilophrōn (shifty-­minded).22 Just as the modern English word various is haunted by the Latin varius and its uses, so varius is shadowed by the Greek word poikilos, and the bilingual Statius may have been making the connection. Statius’s usage alerts us to one area in which Greek and Latin do not coincide, for the positive intellectual sense of poikilos (clever, subtle) has no equivalent among the possible meanings of varius.23 Varius can stand for poikilophrōn because here Odysseus is “shifty. ” The Greek words poikilos and poikilia belong to the semantic field of the particular kind of intelligence which Vernant and Detienne (1991) have identified with Mētis. This is a way of knowing that combines “flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic” (3–­4).24 While poikilos covers many of the same meanings as varius (multicolored, variegated, dappled), it can also have a positive intellectual sense, and accommodates meanings such as “intricate” or “complex” (Herodotus 2.148, of a labyrinth; 7.111, of an oracle).25 Poikilia has been recognized as a central concept for Archaic Greek culture, a characteristic memorably recommended by Theognis when he urges himself to turn a poikilon ēthos to his friends, adapting to the temperament of each (Theognis, 212–­13).26 The semantic field of poikilos includes daidalos, which, like poikilos, covers meanings from “dappled” to “cunning, ” via “curiously wrought, ” and also aiolos (quick-­moving, glittering, spangled). All three words are commonly used of weaving or tapestry, and of other artifacts in which the individual elements (threads or different metals, for instance) are perceived as distinct within the unity they compose. The elements of these artifacts catch the light in different and ever-­changing ways to produce an overall shimmering effect.27 Latin daedalus is borrowed from the Greek word daidalos by Roman authors, and the second-­century etymologist Pompeius Festus explicitly makes the connection between daedalus and varius (48, p. 59 Lindsay).28 Like varius, poikilos can denote accidental qualifications or diversification in a surface.29 When describing visual qualities, then, poikilos and related words may describe a surface which is inconsistent and differentiated, or a composite whole in which the parts insist on their separateness, coming into eminence in an ever-­changing and random sequence, so that the eye cannot

wor ds and meanings

21

settle.30 In a literary context, the meaning may be more abstract. The first-­ century miscellanist Pamphile explains that she did not classify her material into separate categories because what is mixed (to anamemigmenon) is more enjoyable, and poikilia more appealing, than homogeneity (tou monoeidous, Photius 1755, 119b). One of the antonyms of poikilia, then, is monoeides. There is no Latin equivalent of this latter word, as Cicero attests when he turns to Greek to express his doubts about his plans for a geographical work to Atticus (Att. 2.6): the subject matter, he says, is homoeides and cannot be made flowery (anthērographeisthai, a metaphor which is closely associated with varietas). As we shall see, poikilia plays a role in Greek rhetoric and literary criticism that is similar to the role played by varietas in Latin. It is, for instance, constantly remarked in the scholia on Homer, and often refers to the way that Homer varies elements of his epic that are frequently repeated (type scenes, for instance). But Homer’s scholiasts use it for variation of all kinds, from change of grammatical case to the avoidance of homoioteleuton.31 Since poetry and oratory are linear, and unfold in a temporal dimension, poikilia in the literary field is closely linked with change (metabolē). Plutarch (Mor. 25cd) claims that poetry is particularly attached to to poikilon kai polytropon, since it is change (metabolai) that creates the effects of pathos and surprise on which poetry’s emotional impact (ekplēxis) and charm depend.32 Varius, then, has its Greek tributaries, absorbing some of the meaning and significance of poikilos, metabolē, and, as antonym, homoeides.33 But it also has a Latin semantic field. This comprises words of similar or overlapping meaning (diversus, multiplex, disparilis, discolor, versicolor) as well as words connected with the reactions which varietas seeks to obviate (satietas, fastidium). The members of this semantic field will be taken up and discussed later in the book, but our next subject is not an adjective but a verb. We have considered the adjectival aspect of varietas, the question of what it is for something to be varius, but we might also ask what varietas does. Of course, there is a verb variare, but a more helpful verb to consider is distinguere, which frequently appears together with varius and its cognates. What Varietas Does (Distinctio) In his commentary on Aeneid 4, Austin (1955) has this to say of varius, apropos line 202: “varius (cf. poikilos) is used of anything ‘variegated, ’ especially where the changing colours fuse into a gay whole: Catullus (61.87) has it of a flower-­garden, Horace (c. 2.5.12) of autumn tints, Ovid (Met. 4.619) of a mottled snake, Petronius (45.1) of a striped pig. ” I would question here Austin’s use of the verb “fuse, ” since it is precisely the refusal of the elements to fuse into a

22

chapter one

whole that produces the gay effect of what is varius, and this brings us to the verb distinguere. This verb, commonly associated with varietas, describes the opposite of fusion, as Cicero attests in the following passage from De Oratore: Ut porro conspersa sit [sc. oratio] quasi verborum sententiarumque floribus, id non debet esse fusum aequabiliter per omnem orationem, sed ita distinctum, ut sint quasi in ornatu disposita quaedam insignia et lumina. (3.96) That it should, as the next point, be sprinkled, as it were, with flowers of language and thought, this is a quality that must not be spread evenly throughout a speech, but must be distributed here and there in the way decorations and lights are arranged when a public place is adorned. (Translation of  May and Wisse 2001, 253).34

In De Oratore 2.36.118 Cicero links variare with distinguere as virtual synonyms (variare et distinguere), and, in a very different context, they appear together in connection with the Epicurean principle that pleasure reaches a point where it can no longer be increased but only varied (De Finibus 1.38: “variari . . . distinguique”). The author of ad Herennium makes varietas the means of distinctio (“dignitas est quae redit ornatam orationem varietate distinguens,”  ad Her. 4.13.18), and the same instrumental relation between varietas and distinctio is described by Cicero (De Or. 2.358 and 359),35 and by Livy (9.17.1), in an interesting passage on digressions.36 Seneca (De Prov. 5.7) makes a point characteristic of satire and philosophical texts when he declares that, while our lives seem to be “distinguished” by a variety of individual elements (“magna videatur varietate singulorum vita distingui”), it all boils down to the one fact that we are mortal, and that what we have will perish (“accipimus perituri peritura”). Here distinctio is again opposed to fusion (“summa in unum venit”) to highlight our illusion that life is picked out with varied incident. The Oxford Latin Dictionary gives as sense 3 of distinguo, “to punctuate an activity or words. ” In this sense the word is characteristically used, often in conjunction with varius or varietas, to describe the way that small individual items break up, or “dot, ” a large expanse. Islands in the sea, stars in the night sky, or flowers scattered over the earth all serve to “distinguish” the expanse in question.37 Distinctio breaks up what could be continuous, turning it into a collection of points. Boccuto (1991, 31) comments on Pliny, Epist. 7.9.7, where writing poetry serves to “distinguish” our employments and cares (“occupationes curasque distinguit”), that “these poems are not recommended as diversions from completing work that is more demanding, but are supposed to separate them into a variety of moments. ”38 Distinctio may be produced by gems (Seneca, Epist. 76.14: “nec cuius vagina gemmis distinguitur”; also

wor ds and meanings

23

Medea 570) as well as by colored marbles.39 Catullus describes the different colors of spring flowers as “picked out” (“distinctos, ” c. 64.90) by the breeze.40 So, varietas as distinctio embellishes by picking things out, and it serves to isolate individual elements from, or against, their environment. As we have seen earlier, varius is the usual term for the color of the grape when it begins to ripen and change in color, becoming variegated. Horace gives us the most vivid description of this moment, assuring the addressee of Odes 2.5 that his Lalage, still too young for love, will soon mature into a nubile girl: tolle cupidinem inmitis uvae: iam tibi lividos distinguet Autumnus racemos purpureo varius colore. (c. 2.5.9–­12) Banish your desire For the unripe grape. Soon variegated Autumn Will pick out the blue grapes For you with a purple tinge.

Lalage is inmitis, “cruel” in love, because she is inmitis, “unripe. ” But this will change, just as surely as every year the grapes are mottled by autumn. Nisbet and Hubbard (1978, 86), after pointing out to English speakers that varius is “strong enough for its late and somewhat isolated position, ” comment on the juxtaposition of purpureo and varius, that “if they say different things, that simply increases the variegated effect of this subtly elaborated passage. ” They are right to suggest that “purpureo  .  .  . colore” should be taken with “distinguet” as well as with “varius”: Autumn will “pick out” colors in the bunches of grapes and, indeed, in the individual grapes. It is for this reason that Autumn is varius.41 Horace’s collocation of varius and distinguere is close and, as we have seen, he is not alone in making this connection. Before we leave this poem we can note that the final stanza offers us a different version of the same image. Horace tells his addressee that soon Lalage will be as dear to him as Pholoe, Chloris, or Gyges, the boy who could pass for a girl: quem si puellarum insereres choro mire sagaces falleret hospites discrimen obscurum solutis crinibus ambiguoque vultu. (Horace, c. 2.5.21–­24)

24

chapter one

Put him in a dance with girls and the subtle difference Would wonderfully deceive your most perceptive guests—­ That flowing hair And that ambiguous face. (Translation of West 1998)

Gyges is infiltrated into the chorus of girls as a flower is woven into a garland (“insereres”), and this association enhances the parallel between the two contexts, encouraging us to contrast “distinguet Autumnus . . . varius” with “discrimen obscurum” (the subtle difference).42 Gyges’s sexual attractiveness lies in the fact that he cannot easily be picked out from his environment, whereas Lalage’s nubility is associated with the moment when autumn picks out colors in the grapes. “Ambiguoque vultu” resonates with “varius colore”: what you can’t quite pick out is contrasted with what is “picked out” in a variegated surface. We are left with a strong impression of pleasurably baffling multiplicities. Horace’s aesthetic is powerfully marked by varietas, and we will be returning to him repeatedly in the pages that follow. In this discussion of the meanings and semantic field of varietas I have barely broached the most familiar use of varius/varietas, in the context of rhetoric. Chapter 2 will take up this particular context in more detail. I have focused, instead, on the phenomenological aspects of these words and their Greek equivalents in order to draw out the implicit aesthetics of the words as they are applied to the physical or material world. According to Cicero, varius is used of anything but color in a transferred sense, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary agrees that color is the primary application. Our familiarity with the rhetorical principle of variation is apt to bury the vivid visual sense of varietas under something more abstract. If we turn back to the passages from English poetry which I quoted under “Emphasizing Variety” we can see that the exclamatory wonder featured, for instance, in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach, ” makes more sense if we bear in mind the Latin meanings I have been discussing. But this is only part of the story, for the emphatic uses of various and variety in Arnold and the other English poets cited above also allude to the role that concepts of variety have played in thinking about nature, creativity, and God. In the next chapter I will consider some of the discursive contexts in which the concept of varietas plays a role, the most familiar of these being the subject of rhetoric. But, before leaving words and meanings, we will take a look at varius in action. More specifically, I will discuss some passages from Latin and English poetry where the concrete, visual sense of varius is made to overlap with more abstract senses of the word. After identifying some examples of this interaction from Plautus, Catullus, and Vergil,

wor ds and meanings

25

I will show the survival of the ancient use of varius in this double sense in an early sonnet by Coleridge. Varius, Concrete and Abstract One of the most shocking conventions of the literature of slavery in the ancient world is the assimilation of the slave’s skin to the hide of an animal. This provides an easy laugh for a Plautine slave. Asked how he is faring, he has only to reply “varie” (Epidicus, 17) for the audience to make the connection. Yes, the life of the clever slave is up and down, variable, but Plautus’s Epidicus has another meaning up his sleeve, and the audience, primed to be on the lookout for whipping jokes, gets it immediately. In case we don’t, his interlocutor explains: “I don’t like that goaty, panthery type of man who fares variously” (17–­18). The comparison to goats and panthers refers to the skin of the slave, mottled by flogging. Plautus’s pun is paradoxical, because it is the very predictability of the slave’s experience that is conveyed by the word varie: the mottled back is the permanent badge of his status. And yet, within the confines of the play, the slave may have his ups and downs. Outside the play it’s different, as the eponymous slave reminds his master at the end of Pseudolus (“Why threaten me? I have a back. ” Pseudolus 1325). The pun in Epidicus’s varie turns the temporal dimension of the slave’s ups and downs into a visual field, a move that will be repeated in my examples from Vergil and Coleridge.43 The passage from Pseudolus is not the only application of varius to the slave’s back in Plautus, nor is this usage in comedy confined to Plautus.44 It is, then, a conventional figure, in which the comic slave’s cunning, his improvisational versatility and shiftiness, are inflicted on the slave himself, as he comes to display varietas on his own back. The qualities of the clever slave that are summed up in the metaphor vorsipellem (literally, skin-­shifting, Bacch. 657) are literalized in the variatio that is inflicted on his back. In a cruel irony the varietas of the slave’s back may be compared to luxury textiles, such as Campanian tablecloths or Alexandrian rugs.45 Or the words of the character threatening the flogging may themselves display rhetorical variatio, as when the prologue of the Poenulus commands the slaves in the audience to make way for the free, “lest they be mottled here by straps and at home by rods” (“ne et hic varientur loris et virgis domi, ” Poen. 26).46 Plautus’s language takes the lordly position of exercising variatio, lexical (loris, virgis) and rhetorical (chiasmus of hic . . . loris . . . virgis domi), while it assigns a very different kind of varietas to the slave’s back. Catullus renews this Plautine motif in his “Peleus and Thetis” (c. 64) where

26

chapter one

it assumes a structural role. This poem, on the wedding of a mortal (Peleus) to a goddess (Thetis), is a “little epic” (epyllion) of some four hundred lines, of which about half is taken up by a description of the coverlet on the wedding bed of the couple in question, which represents the story of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus in Naxos. The ekphrasis is introduced with the words haec vestis priscis hominum variata figuris heroum mira virtutes indicat arte. (c. 64.50–­51)47 This coverlet, variegated by the figures of ancient men Shows the heroes’ valor with marvelous art.

When Catullus’s poem finally returns to the wedding celebration itself, he introduces another artistic object, the song sung by the Fates at the wedding. The Fates prophesy the doings of Achilles, the son that is to come from this union. In a clear echo of the lines which introduce the coverlet, Catullus has the Fates sing the following: illius egregias virtutes claraque facta saepe fatebuntur gnatorum in funere matres, cum incultum cano solvent a vertice crinem putriaque infirmis variabunt pectora palmis. (c. 64.348–­51) His outstanding virtues and famous deeds Will often be confessed by mothers at their sons’ funerals, When they loose their unkempt hair from their heads, And variegate their withered breasts with infirm hands.

The prophecy of the Fates is mirrored by another “artistic” testimony (“fatebuntur, ” 349) to the virtutes of Achilles, the breasts of the grieving mothers, who imprint his exploits on their own flesh, as though they were painting a picture or embroidering a coverlet. Our attention is drawn to “variabunt” ( 351) by its position in the middle of a Golden Line, so that the luxury of the wedding bed and the glory of the exploits pictured on it are brought into contact with the misery of the mothers in a very Plautine wordplay. Both the varietas of the wedding coverlet and the mottled breasts of the grieving mothers are variegated surfaces that attest to heroic “virtutes” (51, 348). Catullus displays a black Plautine humor when the mothers’ breasts become an eloquently varied eulogy (“fatebuntur, ” 349) of Achilles. The effect of this disjunction is to remind us that there are two sides to a war, two opposite perspectives on the same event. That is one sense in which war is “various”; more commonly, war is characterized as varius by virtue of its unpredictability and fluctuations. In

wor ds and meanings

27

Catullus’s variabunt, abstract and concrete, artistry and experience, clash in a pun that Plautus had made into a recognizable topos. Catullus’s image of the mothers’ bruised breats is hardly erotic. Ovid, not surprisingly, eroticizes the variegated skin when his frustrated Narcissus beats his breast. The description lingers lasciviously: pectora traxerunt roseum percussa ruborem, non aliter quam poma solent quae candida parte, parte rubent, aut ut variis solet uva racemis ducere purpureum nondum matura colorem. (Met. 3.482–­85) The beaten breast took on a rosy flush, Not so different from how apples are partly white And partly red, or how the variegated bunch of grapes Takes on a purple tinge when not yet ripe.

If Ovid here alludes not only to Catullus but also to Horace’s Lalage (c. 2.5, discussed above), his Narcissus is making a perverse attempt to perform the maturing role of  Horace’s Autumn, but on himself! Narcissus’s self-­wounding emphasizes the futility of his attempt to make a fit love object of himself, as the passage of time will make Horace’s Lalage an appropriate love object for the addressee of c. 2.5. As we have seen, Catullus c. 64 uses the echo of variata (50) in variabunt (351) as a structural feature of this mini-­epic. In Aeneid 4, Vergil deploys the polysemous varius to shape the final stages of the tragedy of Dido. In his speech urging Aeneas not to delay his flight from Carthage, Mercury twice applies the word varius to Dido. At Aeneid 4.564 he describes Dido as “arousing fluctuating storms of anger” (“variosque irarum concitat aestus”): winter may not be the right time to sail (309–­10) on the changeable (varius) sea, but Aeneas should be equally worried about the varios aestus of Dido’s anger. Mercury then concludes his speech with the famous words heia age rumpe moras. varium et mutabile semper femina. (Aen. 4.569–­70) Come now, break off your delays. Woman was always a shifting (varium), Changeable thing.

Is Shakespeare remembering this line when he makes Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” into the reason why Antony will never leave her?48 Mercury’s semper

28

chapter one

(always) might have become Shakespeare’s “infinite, ” but for Mercury this feminine “variety” is a reason to go, not to stay. Woman is changeable, fickle, like the sea itself. The word varius is echoed, but with a more visual sense, at the end of Dido’s tragedy in Aeneid 4 when Iris, another messenger of the gods, descends in the final lines of the book to release the dying Dido from the pain of her self-­wounding. Now, to the meaning “shifting” is added the sense of “variegated. ” Iris comes “trailing a thousand variegated colors shifting against the sun” (“mille trahens varios adverso sole colores, ” 701).49 The turbulence of Dido’s emotions has resolved into the glittering spectacle of the rainbow. With the words adverso sole (against the sun) adversity and the light that Dido groaned to see (692) conspire to mutate her dangerously unpredictable emotions into a glittering spectacle. It is now another femina, Iris, who draws (trahens, cf. concitat, 564) variety after her, but this variety belongs to the natural world, which is beneficent, unburdened with human emotion. The mutabile of Dido’s femininity is attracted into the realm of the aesthetic as Dido’s death modulates emotional inconstancy into a pleasing visual field by means of two different senses of the word varius.50 On the epiphany of the variegated Iris, personification of the rainbow, the comments of W. R. Johnson, in a chapter of Darkness Visible (1976) titled “Varia Confusus Imagine Rerum, ” are worth quoting at length: The use of colour in the entire passage is at once notable and characteristic. The tawny gold of Dido’s hair is foiled by gruesome darkness (Stygio . . . Orco), then radiant yellows and fresh translucency (croceis pennis, roscida), and, finally, the splendid, swirling indistinction of mille trahens varios adverso sole colores. Varius is . . . a favorite word with Vergil when he wishes to stress complexity and confusion. Here the word paradoxically at once presents a vision and annihilates that vision with excessive brightness. Hence, a delusive splendor throws a beautiful yet sinister screen between us and what we assumed we were to see. (Johnson 1976, 68–­69)51

As a counter-­example (or -­exemplum) to Dido, we can consider the idealized but real-­life Murdia, who is celebrated in an epitaph written by her son. No elaborate words are needed to praise her, runs the epitaph, “because her natural goodness, preserved by its own guardianship, does not need varietas of language . . . and because it is difficult to find new ways to praise a woman, since her life is disturbed by little fluctuation (varietatibus)” (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.10230, cited in Milnor 2005, 31).52 This epitaph, which moves from the rhetorical sense of varietas to the meaning “fluctuating or

wor ds and meanings

29

dangerous circumstances, ” performs the reverse of what Vergil does when he subsumes Dido’s fluctuating passions into an aesthetic varietas, but it makes the same connection between two different aspects of the word’s meaning. Can we call this play on two senses of the word (roughly “variegated” and “changing”) a topos of the varietas complex? Looking ahead nearly two millennia, we find that Coleridge, in an early, somewhat neo-­classical sonnet, makes a similar play with the word “various” so as to structure his sonnet around the same two Latin senses of the word. Coleridge’s sonnet “To the River Otter” (1793) describes how deep-­set memories of his childhood games on the banks of the river rise to his adult mind when he closes his eyes. Addressing the stream, he exclaims “How many various-­fated years have past” since his childhood. The scene that rises to his inner vision in adulthood features the “bedded sand that veined with various dyes / Gleamed through thy bright transparence. ” So the aesthetic variety experienced by the child prevails over, or perhaps provides an aestheticized image of, the changeable (varia) fortune of the years that have intervened between childhood and the moment of writing. The leaping stone skimmed across the smooth surface of the water by the child is offered as a similarly lighthearted version of the alternation described by the words “what happy and what mournful hours, ” themselves a gloss on “the various-­fated years. ” As Coleridge plays off a visual against a narrative form of variety, we witness the survival of a classical trope in a poem on the edge of Romanticism. Like Vergil, Coleridge overlays the temporal sense of  “various” as “changeable” on the visual sense that expresses a pleasing aesthetic experience. As we shall see in the next chapter, the temporal and visual senses of varius represent two distinct foci of thinking about variety, but in these passages they are brought together in deliberate interaction. Vergil’s glittering rainbow suggests that, now that the book is finished and Dido’s story has run its course, we can experience her tragedy, with its fluctuating emotion and fortunes, as a pleasing visual field. In the shorter compass of his sonnet, Coleridge uses the same word to accomplish something similar. With this glimpse at some of the ramifications of Plautus’s pun on varius we have embarked on the topological tradition of variety. The next chapter will pursue the tradition of thought about variety through some of the main topoi and contexts in which it becomes an issue; these provide the background to the strong usages of “various” and “variety” in English poetry which I quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The first two of these contexts, nature and rhetoric, will be the most significant for the life of the varietas complex. I will take nature first, since it is not uncommon to derive the rhetorical demand

30

chapter one

for variety from the example of nature. I will suggest that these two contexts of ancient classical thought about variety are both tributaries to the Christian notion that God displays his creativity in the variety of nature. The idea that variety is the natural extension of divine creativity then feeds back into ideas about the creativity of human artists.

2

Variety’s Contexts

Introduction: A (Very) Brief History Variety rejects the linear and the progressive, and my study adheres to this principle to the extent that, as Pliny says of his letters, “I am not writing a history” (Epist. 1.1.1). Certainly, a history of variety could be written, but this chapter on the tradition of ancient ideas or disputes about variety is not arranged chronologically. To the extent that my account of the concept of variety is historical it is in the sense that, as “historicists” often forget, persistence is a historical fact too, and an important one.1 As a preliminary, though, it will be useful to identify some key moments or periods in variety’s history, in the more conventional sense of change. The aesthetics of variety was particularly congenial, as we shall see, to the art and poetry of  late antiquity and the Byzantine era.2 The light playing variously on the colors of gems and mosaics was appreciated both literally, in the visual arts, and metaphorically, in the art of poetry. But it is the Renaissance that is truly the age of varietas, as a number of scholars have pointed out.3 Variety was the keynote of popular encyclopedic works, such as Jerome Cardan’s De Rerum Varietate (1559) and Louis Le Roy’s De la vicissitude, ou variété des choses en l’univers (1576); and Pedro Mexía’s miscellany Silva de varia lección (1540) was a bestseller (Adam 1988, 227–­33). Even the discoveries of the New World were hailed as evidence of God’s creative variety, and of his concern to obviate the dangers of  human satietas. Angelo Poliziano argued for a docta varietas in the approach to imitation, and his Miscellaneorum Centuria Prima gave us the word miscellany. The essayist Michel de Montaigne and the poet Pierre de Ronsard both championed variety, and the emerging genres of the

32

chapter t wo

romance and the novel justified their episodic, multi-­stranded narrative by appeal to the value of varietas. Arguments between the champions of Tasso and Ariosto, or epic and romance, debated the priority of variety or unity, or the proper relation of one to the other. The very breadth of its applications in the Renaissance indicates that variety is a word by which the humanists set great store, and to which they felt the need to lay claim, and we will have occasion to consider a wide range of Renaissance responses to varietas. A shift in the fortunes of varietas occurs as we move from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, as Langer (2009, 107–­8) notes: the pleasures of free activity, with which it had been associated, give way to different understandings, according to which variety becomes a diversion and a dispersal of the self, which makes it an inferior pleasure. Consonant with this shift is Bakewell’s (2010, 138) neat contrast between Descartes (1596–­1650), sitting in front of his stove and thinking all day long without distraction, and Montaigne (1533–­1592), “pacing up and down, pulling books from his shelves, getting distracted, mentioning odd thoughts to his servants to help him remember them, and arriving at his best ideas in heated dinner-­party discussions with his neighbours or while riding in the woods. ” If this contrast between Montaigne and Descartes might stand for the attention-­shift from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, to the detriment of varietas, the tables are turned as we move from Spinoza (1632–­1677) to Leibniz (1646–­1716). By contrast with Spinoza, Leibniz held the variety of nature to be a prime expression of the Creator’s perfection:4 la sagesse doit varier as Leibniz puts it in his Theodicy (124). Another indication of the shift toward a revaluation of variety is the response to Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Sacra Theoria of 1681. Burnet claimed that the earth was originally flat and regular, but that after the Flood it acquired the irregularities that have rendered it today “a heap of rubbish. ” Nicolson (1959, 260–­61) quotes Herbert Croft’s answering paean to the variety of God’s creation (1685) in her study tracing the shift in attitudes to mountains from the mid-­seventeenth to the late eighteenth century.5 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, diversitarianism gains the upper hand, of which development Lovejoy says: There have, in the entire history of thought, been few changes in standards of value more profound and more momentous than . . . when it came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence; and that of art, in particular, the objective is neither the attainment of some single perfection of form in a small number of fixed genres, nor the gratification of that least common denominator of aesthetic sensibility which is shared by all mankind in all ages, but rather the fullest expression of the abundance of

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

33

differentness that there is, actually or potentially, in nature and human nature. (Lovejoy 1960, 293)

These assumptions hold more fully today than they did in 1936, when Lovejoy was writing. But, as we have seen, the carriers of these ideas are no longer the words various or variety, as we can already conclude from Lovejoy’s choice of diction. In this chapter we will trace, among other things, the classical tradition that lies behind the modern privileging of diversity. But I will begin our exploration by considering the role of variety in concepts of nature. Variety’s Contexts: 1. Variety and Nature Echoing a common association, Pliny the Younger called his uncle’s Natural History “an expansive, learned work, not less various than nature herself ” (opus diffusum eruditum, nec minus varium quam ipsa natura, Epist. 3.5.6). Poliziano, in 1489, makes a similar comparison when he defends the varietas of his Miscellanea in the preface to that work: if anyone should fault this varietas, which both expels boredom and provokes reading, let him find fault also with nature, whose pupil Poliziano professes to be in his cultivation of disparilitas (unevenness).6 Variety characterizes not only what nature is but also what she does, for nature both rejoices in variety ( gaudet varietate) and plays with variety (ludit varietate). Perhaps the earliest extant appearance of the idea that nature rejoices in variety is Plutarch’s citation of the Stoic Chrysippus, where it is a manifestation of nature’s love of beauty that she rejoices in variety ( philokalein de tēn physin tē poikiliā chairousan eikos esti; De Stoic. Repugn. 1044d). The ancient commonplace passes into early modern texts written in Latin. Erasmus, for instance, in his De Copia, states that: Tantam ubique vim habet varietas, ut nihil omnino tam nitidum sit, quod non squalere videatur citra huius commendationem. Gaudet ipsa natura vel in primis varietate, quae in tam immensa rerum turba nihil usquam relinquit quod non admirabilis quodam varietatis artificio depinxit. (De Copia, 1.8.6)7 Variety has everywhere such great force that there is nothing at all so polished that it does not seem sordid without the embellishment of variety. Nature rejoices preeminently in variety, for in this vast crowd of things it leaves nothing anywhere which it has not painted with the art of a wonderful variety.

In 1556 the French translator of  Jerome Cardan’s popular De Subtilitate attests to the currency of the topos when he comments, in his dedication, that “Nature rejoices in variety (according to the common saying). ”8

34

chapter t wo

The topos that nature rejoices in variety can be given a range of different applications. Erasmus, in the passage quoted above (to which we will return under the rubric of rhetoric) makes it clear that nature’s variety is, or should be, a model for human artistry. Another influential formulation, with different implications, is that of the Italian poet Serafino dell’Aquila (1466–­1500), whose words per tal variar natura e bella (“varying like this, nature is beautiful”) occur in a sonnet on the random differences in the fates, and status, of individual humans: we should accept these apparent injustices in the light of the beauty of the variegated whole. Serafino’s phrase became proverbial, and it had a considerable reception in Spain.9 Meric Casaubon (1599–­1671) extends the reign of nature into the field of human culture when he comments that the diversity of human laws and customs show “how even herein nature delights in varietie. ”10 So the topos that nature rejoices in variety can be widely applied, but in what sense does nature rejoice in variety? The Latin phrase gaudet varietate can be taken to mean that variety is an activity in which nature takes delight: “Castor gaudet equis” (Castor takes delight in horses, i.e. riding) says Horace (Serm. 2.1.26), for instance.11 The first-­century agricultural writer Columella stresses that nature takes joy in her own fertility: iam versicoloribus anni fetibus alma parens pingi sua tempora gaudet. (De Re Rustica 10.256–­57) Now the nurturing parent rejoices that its seasons are painted with the variegated fruits of the year.

This is glossed by an ecstatic passage earlier in the work in which Columella describes the scene that greets a visitor to the vineyards when the grapes are ripe (3.21.3).12 Even those most averse to the rustic life, he exclaims, could not fail to be struck by pleasurable wonder (“summa cum voluptate miretur”), and he supports this with a list of various sights in a form which will become canonical for descriptions of variety (cum istinc . . . hinc . . . illinc, etc., see p. 44). Nature rejoices in her fertility “as though in a perpetual childbirth” (“velut aeterno quodam puerperio”; cf. alma parens above). Instead of using the usual gaudet, Columella here describes nature as laeta, a word whose meaning is both “lush, abundant, teeming” and “happy, ” so tying nature’s gaudium to her fertility. The passage also lays considerable stress on colors, with purpureo later echoing the sound of puerperio (childbirth), and versicoloribus standing in for variiis. It is no coincidence that the English “gaudy, ” which contains a hint of showiness, is derived from the Latin gaudium. That nature’s

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

35

joy contains an element of pride is attested by the variant that nature “flaunts” her variety (“varietate se iactat, ” Seneca, QNat 7.27.5). To these connotations of nature’s joy in variety we can add the joys of play, for variety is the prime characteristic of natura ludens.13 Speaking of shells, Pliny the Elder (HN 9.102) comments on the great variety of nature at play (“magna ludentis naturae varietas”) and, speaking of the various forms of animals’ horns, he comments that “nowhere else is nature more willful; these animal weapons are a result of its play” (“nec alibi maior naturae lascivia; lusit animalium armis, ” 11.123).14 Both passages deliver a long list of adjectives describing the variety of nature’s forms. If nature’s joy in variety is that of a mother, her play is that of an innocent child, a lascivia (willfulness), which is to be condoned for the joy that it both manifests and brings. Elsewhere, Pliny declares that the variety of natura ludens, rejoicing in her fertility, exceeds human powers of expression. He describes her superiority in terms of the competition between the sister arts: nature is a painter rather than a rhetorician, and no one could describe her as well as she paints, especially when “she frolics and plays in her great joy at such variegated fertility” (“nulli potest facilius esse loqui quam rerum natura pingere, lascivienti praesertim et in magno gaudio fertilitatis tam variae ludenti, ” HN 21.1). Here Pliny combines the associations of varietas with play and with fertility, qualities that are commonly associated with human creativity, and it is not surprising that natura gaudens or ludens becomes a model for the human artist. Pliny the Elder’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, makes the connection with human creativity when he borrows the language of nature rejoicing in, and playing with, variety to praise the nugatory verse of Cicero: lascivum inveni lusum Ciceronis et illo spectandum ingenio, quo seria condidit et quo humanis salibus multo varioque lepore magnorum ostendit mentes gaudere virorum. (Pliny, Epist. 7.4) I came across Cicero’s risqué verse, notable for that wit of his, with which he used to spice his serious moments, showing how the minds of great men rejoice in cultivated humor and a rich and varied charm.

Besides combining a number of key words from the natura/varietas complex (underlined), the Younger Pliny wittily supports the culinary metaphor in condit (spices), a metaphor which also belongs to the varietas complex, with the word salibus (literally, salt). As we shall see in chapter 3, varietas is a crucial value for Pliny the Younger, applied particularly, though not exclusively, to human ingenium and artistry. His use of the language of natura ludens/

36

chapter t wo

gaudens to praise the minds of great men belongs to a strain of  thinking about variety which takes nature as a model for human creativity in this respect. We will consider this connection in more detail later. But the example of nature is not the only rationale for aesthetic variety. More commonly, as we have seen, aesthetic objects require variety because humanity is prone to boredom and needs the “recreation” provided by variety. In the context of this negative rationale for nature’s variety a contrast may arise between a nature that rejoices in variety and a humanity that needs variety, because it is restless and easily bored.15 The moral implications of nature’s variety mark a clear separation between the human and natural realms. This can be seen in a simple form in Vergil’s praise of the farmer’s life in the second Georgic (“O fortunatos nimium!” 2.458–­74). The farmer has neither experience nor need of city life, where crowds of morning salutatores are disgorged from the halls of the wealthy when they have gaped at the columns variegated with lovely tortoise-­shell inlay (“nec varios inhiant pulchra testudine postis, ” 463). Instead they enjoy the sane life of the country and nature’s bounty (“fundit humo facilem victum iustissima tellus, ” 460). This brings an untroubled peace and a life without deceit (or an unfailing livelihood), rich in the “various” wealth of nature (“at secura quies et nescia fallere vita / dives opum variarum, ” 2.467–­68). Nature’s bounty is both various and variegated in the colors of the autumn harvest, and in this respect it provides a healthy contrast to the artificial variegation of the inlaid columns of grand city dwellings. In the Elder Pliny, nature, whose joyful play with variety is innocent, is opposed to a decadent humanity, which seeks out, among other things, the variegation of nature’s “flaws” in the colored marbles of luxury dwellings. Pliny sometimes effects a stark juxtaposition between the two realms. After describing the variety of shells produced by natura ludens (cited above), Pliny pulls himself up short with the words “but why am I mentioning these trivialities, when the ravaging of morality and indulgence in luxury derive from nothing other than the species of shells?” (9.102; he is alluding to the murex, from which purple dye is produced).16 A similar clash of perspectives is noticed by Plutarch, commenting on the philosopher Chrysippus in a book about the contradictions of the Stoics (De Stoic. Repugn. 1044c). He quotes the Stoic Chrysippus’s statement that nature rejoices in variety (cited above, p. 00) and complains that, though Chrysippus cites peacocks as an example of nature’s joy in variety, he proceeds to censure people who keep them. To call this a contradiction is to assume that nature should be a model for humans (Stoics, after all, aspire to “live according to nature”), whereas Chrysippus here assumes separate moral standards for nature and humanity.

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

37

When nature’s playful variety is subordinated to the corrupt human need for a varied pleasure, this is reflected in the language with which nature’s variety is described. Take the use of the word macula, a spot, blemish or, more neutrally, a patch of different color. The word belongs to the semantic field of varietas. For example, Vergil translates Aratus’s poikilloito (Phaenomena, 822) with maculis variaverit in the first Georgic, where the “speckling” of the rising sun portends rain.17 Pliny the Elder attributes the value of fluorspar (myrrhina) to the maculae whose colors vary as it is revolved in the light (HN 37.19–­20). But it is marble, above all, that is valued for its maculae, and marble is freighted with moral issues for Roman writers.18 Pliny devotes considerable attention to marble in book 36 of his Natural History, where he shows a connoisseur’s knowledge of the different varieties favored in his time. The moral question is introduced at the beginning of  book 36, where Pliny declares that all that he has dealt with so far is created by nature for man’s sake, but this is not true of stone, for nature has created stone to hold herself together. In the previous book, on painting, he had criticized the taste for painted marble, which he assigned to the principate of  Nero: “a method was discovered to give variety to unity by inserting ‘stains’ (maculae) that were not present in the marble patterns” (HN 35.3).19 So far, so good: nature should not be distorted by human art. But in book 36 he inveighs against the modern taste for colored (maculoso) marbles, as opposed to the white marble of the Greeks (“quo in tractatu subit mentem non fuisse tum auctoritatem maculoso marmori,”  HN 36.44).20 Here it is nature itself that is maculate. The term macula recurs frequently in Pliny’s discussion of marble, usefully combining a descriptive with a moral sense. “Lounging amidst the maculae of stones” (HN 36.3) is the epitome of human decadence. As we can see, once marble has been transported into the realm of human culture and luxury its variegation takes on a moral significance, pointing to the perversity of humans who value natural materials for their blemishes (maculae). Pliny’s renaming of nature’s variegation as blemishes has its own reception history; it is significant that Joshua Reynolds uses the term “blemishes” in a Platonizing passage of his Discourses on Art, where he is arguing that artists should copy a nature stripped, in some respects, of  her varietas: All objects which are exhibited to our view by nature, upon close examination, will be found to have their blemishes and defects. The most beautiful forms have something about them like weakness, minuteness, or imperfection. But it is not every eye that perceives these blemishes. It must be an eye long used to the contemplation and comparison of these forms; and which, by long habit of observing what any set of objects of the same kind have in common, has

38

chapter t wo

acquired the power of discerning what each wants in particular. This long laborious comparison should be the first study of any painter, who aims at the greatest style. By this means, he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect taste by her more perfect. His eye being able to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their form more perfect than any one original. (Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 3.44–­ 45. The Third Discourse was delivered in 1770.)21

Underlying the language of this passage is the vocabulary of varietas, insofar as it denotes the accidental qualifications of a surface (“accidental deficiencies” in Reynolds). Reynolds’s use of the word “blemishes” harks back to the maculae of Pliny and others. But the force of his argument owes much to Plato, a confirmed foe of poikilia. As Plato puts it, whatever is poikilos is “never the same as itself ” (Republic 8.568d, cf. 3.399e, tilting at variety in meter). Porter (2010, 87) comments on Plato’s aesthetics of purification as follows: “Plato’s aesthetics is an aesthetics of rigorous and austere limits. . . . It is grounded in the most intense perception of the least amount of variability and fluctuation (or becoming) and the greatest degree of changeless, unwa­ vering, and unadulterated essences. As a consequence it is unfriendly to the senses [and matter]. ” In the continuing debate as to whether, and how, nature should be a model for human artistry, the fact that nature is varius acquires particular values. The tradition of nature’s varietas allows not only positive associations with the play and joy of an innocent nature but also the negative associations of nature’s “blemishes. ” When the emphasis fell on nature’s creativity as a model for that of humans, nature’s variety could only be positive. Seventy-­five years after Reynolds delivered his Third Discourse, J. D. Harding in his Principles and Practice of Art (1845, 39), made a clear statement of the artist’s need to imitate the variety of nature: Variety is essential to beauty, and is so inseparable from it that there can be no beauty where there is no variety. . . . As variety is indispensable to beauty so perfect beauty requires that variety be infinite. It is this infinite variety which constitutes the perfection of Nature, and the want of it which occasions every work of Art to be imperfect.22

Where the Platonic Reynolds sees beauty and perfection in the ability to look past nature’s poikilia or varietas, Harding sees the perfection and beauty of nature precisely in this variety, which is the principle that the artist must follow.23 Harding’s contemporary, Ruskin, insisted that Nature never repeats herself: “There is not a leaf in the world which has the same colour visible

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

39

over its whole surface”; and “there is not one of her shadows, tints or lines that is not in a state of perpetual variation. ”24 Ruskin’s “state of perpetual variation” corresponds to Harding’s “infinite” variety, a common collocation which goes back at least to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (above, p. 27). Edmund Burke uses the phrase, again in connection with nature, in his highly influential A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757): “as to the colour usually found in beautiful bodies; it may be somewhat difficult to ascertain them, because in the several parts of nature, there is infinite variety” (Enquiry, part 3, section 17). Whereas “blemishes” are deviations from what is ideal or unchangeable, and point to the deficiencies of nature, variety is “infinite” and testifies to nature’s creativity (cf. Columella’s “perpetuo quodam puerperio, ” above). These are two sides of the same coin. From the topos that nature rejoices in variety we have arrived at the question of how this aspect of nature relates to human activity, and, specifically, how nature’s variety might be related to the beauty that concerns the artist. As we shall see, the concept of variety will come to play an important role in the idea of  human creativity, and in some respects “infinite variety” can be con­ sidered a characteristic of the “inexhaustible” work of art. But nature is not only to be imitated, it is also to be understood. A nature that rejoices in variety poses problems for the scientist, as well as for the believer who would approach, through nature, a knowledge of the God of creation. u n d e r s ta n d i n g n at u r e , u n d e r s ta n d i n g g o d Seneca puts the problem in a nutshell when he says that, far from producing a work (opus) according to one format, nature flaunts her variety (“varietate se iactat, ” QNat 7.27.5). He goes on to say that anyone who thinks that nature can only do what she does often is ignorant of her power. Naturally, the fact that nature might do something unique creates problems for scientific knowledge.25 Pliny is making the same point when he says that we must not expect to find reason anywhere in nature, but only evidence of will (“Nec quaerenda ratio in ulla parte, sed voluntas, ” HN 37.60).26 For Seneca and Pliny, then, nature’s variety may be a manifestation of sovereign will(fulness) and refuse itself to human reason. Poikilia, as Plato complained, is never the same as itself. What, then, does the variety of nature mean for Christian authors who see an all-­powerful God behind it, a God whom they both worship and seek to know? One answer is that it is wrong to look into the workings of a sovereign who expresses only his will in nature. The appropriate reaction to nature’s (infinite) variety is, simply, wonder.27

40

chapter t wo

Louis Le Roy in the introduction to his De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers (1576, 1) speaks of “Almighty God, maker and ruler of this great work, excellent in beauty, admirable in variety, unique in longevity. ”28 And Jerome Cardan introduces his De Rerum Varietate (1559) by declaring that anyone who looks into the matter will find it a prime source of wonder that such diversity proceeds from a single source.29 I quoted at the beginning of this section Erasmus’s words on nature’s joy in variety, in which he states that there is nothing that nature has not painted with wonderful variety (“admirabilis quodam varietatis artificio depinxit”). Cicero uses the same word of the wonderful spectacle (admirabili spectaculo, De Nat. Deorum 2.104) of the cosmos in all its variety.30 Is the appropriate response to nature’s variety on the part of humans simply to wonder, without attempting to reduce or order what God has so lavishly bestowed? One means to this end is the miscellany. Some Renaissance miscellanists presented the varietas of their compilations as a reflection of the varied creativity of God and Nature, whose random profusion is to be embraced and celebrated, rather than analysed and reduced. The refusal of analysis or ordering in these works responds to the creative activity of God, and to the way in which his creation presents itself to us, overwhelming our perceptual control. Miscellanists stuff their collections more or less at random with wonders, legends, and curiosities, often sourced from a variety of ancient compilations (on which more in chapter 4).31 Here we should remember the words of the Younger Pliny on his uncle’s Natural History, and of Poliziano on his Miscellanea (quoted p. 33), to the effect that the variety of their works reflects that of their subject. Wonder may conflict with understanding, and for some Renaissance thinkers the monsters that contribute to nature’s variety attest to the fact that God plays with nature as he sees fit, and humans are impotent to grasp his reason.32 But, to some extent, God may be known, if not understood, through the very variety of his creation. For Cardan, there is a reciprocal movement that goes from God’s diffusion through the variety of his creation and back from our experience of this variety to the divine unity.33 We know God only through his activity, and this is manifested in nature’s variety. We will come back later to the role of variety in the conception of God’s creativity (and that of the human artist). Another solution to the problematic conflict between the variety of God’s nature and the need to understand a supreme being who is unitary is to think of God as an orator. The variety of God’s creation is not only a manifestation of his creative power, it is also providential, in the sense that it caters to human taste. Cicero’s admirabili spectaculo suggests that nature is laid out as a spectacle for humankind. Humans need variety, and God the artist obliges.

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

41

Augustine, in De Civitate Dei (22.24), echoes Cicero and enlarges on the spectacle that God in his generosity has laid out for men (“divina largitate concessa”). But, if we are formed to love variety how can we know God, who is unique? The problem was tackled by J. P. Crousaz, the Swiss philosopher and theologian, who, in his Traité du Beau (1715), raised the problem of knowledge in the face of variety. It is well known that humans love variety, so how can they be formed to know their creator, who is single? Crousaz answers that God presents an inexhaustible variety to human perception because variety pleases us, animates our spirit, and prevents us from falling into boredom (the human spirit is made for variety).34 But variety is a volatile quality. As Cic­ ero (De Or. 3.96–­103, discussed below, pp. 49–50) pointed out, an excess of variety can lead to satietas. So Crousaz can argue that without unity in nature’s variety we would grow tired and confused. God is an effective rhetorician who knows that varietas is essential, but potentially tiring, to his target audience, and this accounts for the regularities in Nature. The reconciliation of nature’s creative variety with the regularity demanded by human understanding is carried out here on an aesthetic plane, with help from some important ideas from the ancient varietas complex. On the face of it, nature’s variety would seem to preclude scientific understanding, and for Renaissance naturalists, as Finden (1990) shows, the lusus naturae could be a useful explanatory resource for seeming anomalies.35 But, while nature’s play with variety is unpredictable in its results, it is also the case that the differences by which variety is constituted can become the principle of a series. The greater the variety the more the series comes to be characterized by continuity and exhaustivity.36 In fact, variety is necessary for order, for in any ensemble only the existence of difference prevents it from descending into confusion.37 So, at its limit, variety can be the ordered actualization of all rational possibilities.38 Diversification provides mediating steps between things that are very different, and, insofar as it is infinitely various, nature makes no jumps.39 va r i e t y a n d t h e o d i c y The principle that Nature, or God’s creation, is a chain of being in which all possible forms are realized is the subject of Lovejoy’s book The Great Chain of Being (1960), and underpinning the Great Chain of Being is the principle of plenitude. This, as Lovejoy puts it, is not only the thesis that the universe is a plenum formarum, in which the range of living things is exhaustively exemplified, but also any other deductions from the assumption that no genuine potentiality of being can remain

42

chapter t wo

unfulfilled, that the extent and abundance of the creation must be as great as the possibility of existence and commensurate with the productive capacity of a “perfect” and inexhaustible source, and that the world is better, the more things it contains. (Lovejoy 1960, 52)

One important function of the principle of plenitude is to justify the fact that a cosmos created and governed by a supremely powerful and rational intelligence contains evil as well as good, ugly as well as beautiful—­in short, imperfection. As Thomas Aquinas puts it, although an angel is better than a stone, nevertheless two natures are better than one only: et ideo melius est universum in quo sunt angeli et aliae res, quam ubi essent angeli tantum, quia perfectio universi attenditur essentialiter secundum diversitatem naturarum, quibus implentur diversi gradus bonitatis, et non secundum multiplicationem individuorum in una natura. (Aquinas, Sentences d. 44 q. 2 resp.) and therefore a universe containing angels and other things is better than one containing angels only; since the perfection of the universe is attained essentially in proportion to the diversity of natures in it, whereby the divers degrees of goodness are filled, and not in proportion to the multiplication of individuals of a single nature. (Translated by Lovejoy 1960, 77; my emphasis)40

Lovejoy does not stress the role of variety in the history of this idea, although it features in many of the texts to which he refers. For instance, Plotinus justifies the fact that there are different ranks of being (ranging from angels to brute animals) by appealing to an aesthetic metaphor from the realm of painting, the home turf of poikilia/varietas. The logos, he says, “does not make everything good, just as a painter does not paint only eyes in his picture. Rather it makes beings of all ranks, not out of phthonos (envy) but by a reason containing all the rich variety (poikilian) of the intelligible world. ” We are like people who know nothing of painting, but complain because the colors are not beautiful everywhere, though the artist has distributed the appropriate colors to each place (Plotinus, Ennead 3.2.11). In one of the most influential of modern theodicies, Leibniz (1646–­1716) cites the ancient topos varietas delectat and attributes God’s perfection to the choice of the best of all possible worlds, namely the one that contains the greatest variety with the greatest order.41 Perfectio . . . est . . . in forma seu varietate. Unde iam consequitur materiam non ubique sibi similem esse, sed per formas redidi dissimilarem, alioqui non tantum obtineretur varietatis quantum posset. (Leibniz, Philosophische Abhandlungen vol. 8, 12–­13, in Leibniz 1923–­, 6.2.228)

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

43

Perfection is in form, that is, variety. Whence it follows that matter is not everywhere the same, but by means of forms is rendered dissimilar, otherwise it would not achieve as much variety as is possible.

Variety and order are not conflicting principles, for “There is neither delight without harmony, nor harmony without variety. ” Under the influence of  Leib­ niz the Swiss poet and anatomist Albrecht von Haller wrote his Über den Ursprung des Übels (On the origin of evil, 1734), whose theodicy is capped by the statement that Das Glück der Sterblichen will die Verschiedenheit (Mortal happiness needs variety, book 2, 189); this, according to Haller, accounts for the existence of evil and inequality in a perfect world.42 The principle that varietas is the highest manifestation of God’s creativity and a necessary component of a perfect world, then, plays a significant role in Christian theodicy. What seems like imperfection in the universe turns out to be an aspect of its perfection. I will end this section on varietas and nature by taking a close look at a famous theodicy in Vergil’s great poem on nature, the Georgics. Vergil’s deployment of the concept of varietas in the theodicy of the first Georgic is quite different from the uses we have seen in the Christian texts that I have considered above. It is also, characteristically, more elusive. Early in the Georgics, Vergil describes the construction of a threshing floor (1.178–­86). The floor must be rolled until it is even, and packed well so that grass doesn’t push through or cracks appear in the heat. But, with characteristic pessimism, Vergil adds “then the various pests mock you” (“tum variae inludunt pestes, ” 181).43 This balances a more optimistic (and metrically identical) phrase some thirty-­five lines earlier in which Vergil is explaining how Jupiter’s hiding of our means of livelihood spurred humanity on to invention: “tum variae venere artes” (145). The human arts, in all their variety, sprout as spontaneously as the variety of pests.44 This echo gives prominence to the word variae in a section of the first Georgic that contains a particularly dense discourse of  variety, namely the hundred and fifty lines which follow the invocation. Before any agricultural labour can start, Vergil insists, we must know where we are and what the local climate and ecology allow: ac prius ignotum ferro quam scindimus aequor, ventos et varium caeli praediscere morem cura sit ac patrios cultusque habitusque locorum. (Georgics 1.50–­52) But before we cleave with iron the unknown plain We should take care to learn about the winds and the various nature of the sky And the ancestral traditions and customs of the places.

44

chapter t wo

Varium morem caeli (the various nature of the sky) would at first seem to refer to the changeable nature of the weather, but reading on we see that it is more likely to mean the varieties of climate in different geographical areas, and our perspective widens to take on an imperial scope. Vergil follows this with a famous and influential priamel, which begins hic segetes, illic veniunt felicius uvae arborei fetus alibi atque iniussa virescunt gramina. (Georgics 1.54–­56) Here it is crops, there it is grapes that grow more abundantly. Elsewhere the fruits of trees and, growing spontaneously, grasses.

These lines are destined to have a significant presence in the history of the varietas complex after Quintilian cites them in a discussion of metabolē (variatio), which he divides into diversitas coniuncta (variations of the same thing) and diversitas dissipata (unsystematic variety). Vergil’s lines are an example of the latter.45 It is appropriate that Macrobius alludes to these same lines when he compares the variety of Vergil’s verse to the variety of nature itself (Macrobius, Sat. 5.1.19). In the Renaissance, as Langer (2009, 88–­96) demonstrates, Quintilian’s citation of this passage from the Georgics spawns a number of descriptions of a varied natural scene, in which the deictics direct the gaze now to one aspect of the landscape and now to another. But the deictic language of Vergil’s passage is deceptive, because the passage continues: nonne vides, croceos ut Tmolus odores, India mittit ebur, molles sua tura Sabaei, at Chalybes nudi ferrum virosaque Pontus castorea, Eliadum palmas Epiros equarum? continuo has leges aeternaque foedera certis imposuit natura locis. (Georgics 1.56–­61) Don’t you see how Tmolus sends the fragrant saffron, India sends ivory, the soft Sabaeans send their frankincense, But the naked Chalybes iron, and Pontus the rank castor, And Epirus the Olympic victories of her mares? Nature straightaway imposed these laws and eternal compacts On particular places.

Certainly no eye could encompass the diversity of these locations in one sweep. We will return to this passage in a discussion of variety and empire below (p. 215n129), where I will consider the imperial gaze that they assume; in that

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

45

connection, the word mittit (sends, 57) is a telling indication of the relationship between center and periphery. Here it is important to notice that the varied spectacle results from laws and treaties (“leges aeternaque foedera, ” 60) that nature, like the Roman empire, has imposed. The idea of an ordered variety returns a little later when Vergil tackles theodicy. The struggles of man and beast to make the earth productive are hindered by the “various” natural pests (1.118–­ 21). But Jupiter wanted it that way, for adversity sharpens human wits and determination (121–­24). In the Golden Age of Saturn, whom Jupiter supplanted, there was no need for work, as the earth brought forth everything necessary (125–­28). Even the assignment of different crops to the different countries of a various world is a feature of Jupiter’s present dispensation, which is both harsh and providential, not least because Jupiter’s scattering of the earth’s natural products creates the necessity of empire.46 But, most importantly, Jupiter’s interference with the means of human livelihood led to the development of the “various arts, ” hammered out by practice (“ut varias usus meditando extunderet artis,”  133). I don’t think it would be fanciful to see in this use of varius an allusion to the Greek poikilos: the artes are diverse, but also “subtle, ” as manifestations of the inventive resourcefulness which goes by the name of mētis.47 After enumerating some of the skills that primitive man developed, Vergil brings back the “various arts” a few lines later, immediately followed by the famous lines on the invasion/conquest of all by labor:48 tum variae venere artes. labor omnia vicit improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas. (1.145–­46) Then came the various arts, work conquered (invaded?) all, relentless, and pressing need when conditions were hard.

There is a stark contrast between the juxtaposed artes, which are various, and labor, which is relentless. Whether the variety of the arts mitigates the sameness of labor or brings it on is a moot point, as was the earlier question of whether the various arts “sprout” or are hammered out by human effort (133). Variety returns in a less helpful form some fifty lines later, in the passage I quoted above, where the construction of the threshing floor is frustrated by various pests (“tum variae inludunt pestes, ” 181). Play (ludus) is one of the characteris­ tics of nature’s variety, as we have seen. Is Vergil making an ironic allusion to this idea in the words variae inludunt pestes? The very variety of the pests is both a manifestation of nature’s play and a mockery (in-­ludunt) of human endeavor.49 So the artes and the pestes oppose each other, respectively supporting and hindering the human project, but the similar rhythm and vocabulary of

46

chapter t wo

the two phrases assimilates the spontaneous efflorescence of arts, once the inventive process has begun, to the inevitable proliferation of pests when human endeavor encroaches on nature. The two opposed developments are equally “natural, ” or spontaneous. While nature’s recalcitrance and the scattering of  her fruits prompts, at the same time as it frustrates, human endeavor, both nature and humanity are inventively various and variously inventive. In this passage, prominently situated at the beginning of the Georgics, Vergil depicts a complex relation between variety and human labor. Variety is connected with culture, human work, and ingenuity as much as with nature, and its different usages put nature and culture into a providential relation. But, just as the variety of the arts might be seen either as a product of human labor and ingenuity (“varias meditando extunderet artes, ” 133) or of a natural process (“variae venere artes, ” 145), so nature’s variety might be seen as innocent play (lusus) or as mockery (inludunt) of human endeavor. The connection between an indifferent, variously playful nature and an ingenious (poikilos?) humanity is forged by Jupiter’s providential concealing of human livelihood. Variety, then, lies at the center of both the Christian and Vergilian theodicies that I have considered. While for the Christian apologists the concept of variety enables a change of perspective, from part to whole, or from divine justice to creativity and aesthetics, Vergil’s use of variety engineers a duck and rabbit effect in which we oscillate between two different perspectives: nature or culture; providence or spontaneity? Looking back over this section as a whole, we can see that in the context of nature variety’s prime associations are with joy ( gaudium), play (lusus), and creativity. Turning now to the context of rhetoric we will be more concerned with the relationship between variety, copia (abundance), and satietas (satiety). Variety’s Contexts: 2. Variety and Rhetoric When the Christian God displays his creativity through the infinite variety of nature, he takes over some of the characteristics of the ancient natura ludens. But insofar as he is the creator of a copious and varied universe for the delectation of humans, this creativity also imitates the eloquence of the ideal orator.50 The connection is not fortuitous, because oratory must take its cue from the variety that nature presents to us. At the beginning of his hugely influential De Copia (1512, with many subsequent editions) Erasmus justifies the necessity of avoiding tautology, and hence the importance of  variety, by citing the fact that nature rejoices in variety, in the passage quoted above. Erasmus refers to copia as “hanc orationis variandae rationem” (this means of  varying

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

47

speech, De Copia 1.2), a definition which makes copia serve the purposes of varietas. The connection between these two words is deeply rooted in Roman rhetorical theory. In fact, one of the main differences between Roman varietas and Greek poikilia is the lack of an equivalent to copia in the semantic field of the Greek word.51 Terence Cave, in a classic account of Renaissance copia, writes that “Eloquence, for the Romans, is virtually synonymous with copia. Coupled with words from the same semantic domain (abundantia, ubertas, opes, varietas, divitiae, vis, facultas, facilitas), it suggests a rich, many-­faceted discourse springing from a fertile mind and powerfully affecting its recipient” (Cave 1979, 5). Cave comments on other senses of copiae (troops, money) and copia (access, capacity) as follows: “It is as if the instruments of power—­ money, armies—­were aligned with that linguistic facility which assumed the role of resolving both political and private tensions in the quaestiones civiles of forensic oratory. Thus, in many of its senses, copia implies the notion of mastery, whether social or linguistic” (Cave 1979, 3). This observation is confirmed by the sense of copia as “the means of doing something” or “the availability of something or someone” (OLD 7 and 8). Of all the words with which copia is coupled, the most important is varietas. copia and varietas Cicero makes the connection between these two words quite plain when he has Crassus declare, in the first book of the De Oratore, that “the full and perfect orator is one who can speak variously and copiously (varie copioseque) about all matters” (De Or. 1.59). And when he warns the audience of the third Verrine oration that the material he is about to broach in the matter of the corn supply may be rebarbative, he asks the audience not to focus its expectations on the variety and copiousness of the speech, but on the matters at issue.52 The collocation of varietas and copia appears frequently in Roman rhetorical works.53 It even seems to have been a topos to apply this conjunction of terms to Plato and Socrates.54 To bestow this accolade on a Greek was high praise indeed, coming from Romans who liked to think that the Greeks substitute mere loquacitas or volubilitas for copia. To be abundant (copiosus) was distinctively Roman: “for most Greeks, as for him [the Bithynian Fonteius Magnus], volubility substitutes for fullness (copia): they let loose such lengthy and tedious periods in one breath, like a torrent” (Pliny, Epist. 5.20.4).55 Clearly what Fonteius lacks is varietas. So close is the connection between eloquence and varietas that one wonders if Vergil has one eye on this connection when he describes the confused murmurings of a crowd as varius, an ironic use for the precise opposite of eloquence (“adsensu vario, ” Aen. 10.96–­97).56

48

chapter t wo

Why are copia and varietas so closely connected? There are two reasons, and they are to some extent contradictory. Firstly, varietas is a way of producing copia, even a form of copia, and secondly, varietas mitigates the satiety (satietas) that might be brought on by copia. a. Varietas produces copia Quintilian dedicates books 8 and 9 of the Institutio Oratoria to the means of producing copious speech. One of these is figures of repetition, under which category comes what Quintilian calls metabolē, the accumulation of varied detail. This Greek word is translated as varietas by the author of the ad Herennium, marking the first extant appearance of varietas in a rhetorical work (ad Her. 3.22).57 The rhetorical use of Latin varietas, then, is colored by Greek metabolē (change) as much as, if not more than, by poikilia. Copia, along with its synonyms ubertas and amplitudo, is a matter of playing variations on a theme. When Quintilian asserts that “nature did not make eloquence such a poor and starving thing [ieiunam ac pauperem, an interesting use of dicolon in the context!] that there should be only one adequate expression for any one theme” (10.5.5), his “poor and starving” expresses precisely the opposite of copia.58 It is essential for an orator to be able to put it another way (and another, and another . . .) so that he can be sure that in any given situation he will not dry up. But varietas in this sense is not just a decorative matter; it is rather the means of unfolding the dimensions of a thought and proving its worthiness (dignitas), for this depends on its capacity to expand. Without variety, this unfolding proves nothing about the potency of the thought or the speaker. It is mere loquacity.59 b. Varietas complements copia by obviating satietas As Cave (1979, 3) observes, the language of copia overlaps at some points with the language of wealth (opes, divitiae, abundantia). Wealth, by giving one means (copia), can make things possible. But copia can run the risk of fastidium.60 Horace encourages Maecenas to “leave your burdensome wealth” (“fastidiosam desere copiam, ” c. 3.29.9) in the most famous occurrence of what is a conventional collocation, as attested by Livy’s “copia immediately produced fastidium, as it does” (“fecit statim ut fit fastidium copia, ” 3.1.7).61 Horace goes on to say that “Change often pleases the wealthy” (“plerumque gratae divitibus vices, ” 13). So varietas is not only a form of copia, it is also the necessary complement that prevents copia from causing distaste. The an­ tonym of varietas is satietas, and the two words often appear together.62 As we

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

49

shall see in more detail later, the proverbial expression “variety pleases” (varietas delectat) is apt to resolve into the idea that it pre-­empts displeasure, in the form of satietas. Dionysius of Halicarnassus puts it succinctly, in a passage which is interesting for its combination of the two Greek words which feed into the Latin varietas: “for even beautiful things, like things that taste sweet, can produce surfeit because of their sameness, but when brightened up with variation (poikillomena de tais metabolais) they stay fresh indefinitely” (On Composition, 19). Here the temporal dimension of metabolē meets the more visually oriented poikilia. The fact that Latin varietas does duty for two Greek words (metabolē and poikilia) is responsible for a complex drama in a stretch of  book 3 of Cicero’s De Oratore, where Cicero considers the limits of rhetorical ornatus and the dangers of satietas. This aspect of the passage (3.96–­103) has been well explained by Elaine Fantham (1988), whose analysis I follow.63 Cicero (in the person of Crassus) begins the discussion of ornatus by distinguishing between qualities which are discerned in the body of the speech as a whole (charm, dignity, emotion, etc.) from those which are, as it were, applied. Of the latter he says: Ut porro conspersa sit quasi verborum sententiarumque floribus, id non debet esse fusum aequabiliter per omnem orationem sed ita distinctum ut sint quasi in ornatu disposita quaedam insignia et lumina. (De Or., 3.96) That it should, as the next point, be sprinkled, as it were, with flowers of language and of thought, this is a quality that must not be spread evenly throughout the speech, but must be distributed here and there in the way that decorations and lights are arranged when a public place is adorned. (Translation of May and Wisse 2001)

The translation of May and Wisse expands the simile at the end of this passage  to make explicit the comparison with the street decorations of the ae­ diles, as suggested by Fantham.64 The imagery here is clearly visual, and the two compounds in dis-­ (especially distinctum, see pp. 21–24) emphasize the asynoptic aesthetics that characterize the visual sense of varietas. Cicero goes on to address the problem of satietas: it is not enough that a speech delight us, it must delight without glutting (“sine satietate, ” 97). It is an unfortunate fact, he continues, that “Whatever most affects our senses with pleasure, and especially at the first encounter, most swiftly estranges us with fastidium and satietas” (98). As an example of this, Cicero cites modern painting, which is more florid in the beauty and variety of its details than the old style of painting (“Quanto colorum pulchritudine et varietate floridiora sunt in picturis novis pleraque quam in veteribus, ” 98), and as a result modern paintings are quicker to pall. He concludes by summing up this stage of the argument as follows:

50

chapter t wo

sic omnibus in rebus voluptatibus maximis fastidium finitimum est; quo hoc minus in oratione miremur, in qua vel ex poetis vel ex oratoribus possumus iudicare concinnam, distinctam, ornatam, festivam, sine intermissione, sine reprehensione, sine varietate, quamvis claris sit coloribus picta vel poesis vel oratio, non posse in delectatione esse diuturna. (3.100) So in all areas disgust is close to the greatest pleasures; we should not be surprised, then, in the case of oratory, since we can judge either from poets or orators that what is artful, embellished, elegant, decorative or showy, without a break, without restraint, without variety, cannot give lasting pleasure, however bright the colors with which a poem or a speech is painted.

We have reached the paradoxical situation where varietas without varietas is a fault. Clearly, one varietas is temporal (sine intermissione, etc.),65 equivalent to the Greek metabolē, whereas the other is equivalent to the more visual poikilia. What happens here is comparable to the double use of varius at the end of  Vergil’s Aeneid 4 (or Coleridge’s sonnet), where the visual and temporal aspects of variety are played against each other. In this passage, Cicero’s use of the common metaphor of “colors” for rhetorical figures reminds us of the comparison with painting that he has just drawn. Varietas there is a distinctive quality belonging to a visual field, a delight that is itself vulnerable to the tendency of all pleasure over time, and so may elicit the need for varietas in its other sense (change). The close connection between the discourse of variety and questions about the nature and limits of human pleasure is brought to the fore by this passage; it is a connection that will be examined in more detail in my next section, on aesthetics and pleasure; there I will distinguish between a corrective varietas, forestalling satiety, and a more visually conceived varietas, which has a particular aesthetic quality of its own. This passage of Cicero puts the two kinds of varietas in relation to each other and broaches the question of whether varietas itself might become tedious.66 t e d i o u s va r i e t y Ancient rhetoric, betraying some anxiety about the effect of copia, vital though it is, makes the compensating varietas an essential component of the orator’s eloquence. Modern conceptions of eloquence do not revolve around the mutual relations of these two qualities, though the concept of variety survives in the principle known as “elegant variation, ” perhaps derived more from the post-­classical use of the term variatio (varying the phrasing or construction of parallel units) than from varietas. The adjective is in this case ironic, as indicated by the short chapter of The Verbal Icon, in which W. K.

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

51

Wimsatt (1954) asks “When Is Variation ‘Elegant’?” Wimsatt is not trying to define a stylistic virtue; rather he is seeking to describe the vice of the merely elegant. His subject is the stylistic compulsion to vary the way the same concept is presented in circumstances where repetition can’t be avoided. This can become a wearisome tic. Sports writing is (or rather was) particularly rich in these “elegant” variations, as Wimsatt illustrates with amusing relish. A football, in one report, is variously described as an “oval, ” a “pigskin, ” a “spheroid, ” and a “big leather egg”; an Italian boxer appears as the “ambling Alp, ” “Italian mastodon, ” “rudderless mammoth, ” and “robot of the racketeers” (192). This leads Wimsatt to an astute, and somewhat cynical, formulation of an important principle of academic rhetoric: If one has in mind fifteen examples which show that romantic poets were interested in kinetic imagery, one does not state the case in an introductory paragraph and then list the examples; one achieves the appearance of complication by inventing fifteen ways to tie an example to the main theme. (195)

One would hope that variety edges into argument as the process of “inventing fifteen ways” develops, though it is often a moot question whether we are dealing with a disguised version of “inventing fifteen ways to tie an example to the main theme” or an argument which proceeds by means of examples. I have been very conscious of that question as I write this book, which aspires to do the latter! Wimsatt, though, is mainly concerned with the variation of single words (nouns, adjectives). His rule of thumb: “use different words when you mean different things” (199). This is a good principle for writers, but for the interpreter the question of whether the writer does mean a different thing or not can be a problem, as we shall see in connection with Horace’s famous priamel at the beginning of c. 1.1, where we may hesitate between taking a variation decoratively or not: do we have an elegant variation or a different nuance of the topic? Wimsatt’s discussion of (merely) elegant variation is a reductio ad absurdum of the principle of varietas, which dies the death once rhetorical amplification ceases to be a significant literary value. The notion of creativity, which comes to take the place of ancient rhetorical ideas of inventio and copia, has a different relation to the varietas complex, but it does not leave it behind, as we shall see later in this chapter. a va r i e d au d i e n c e ? As the essential complement to copia, varietas is always implicated in a discussion about limits, in the form of satietas and fastidium. How much of any one thing can we take? But there is another way in which varietas might be

52

chapter t wo

relevant to the rhetorical audience, and that is when the audience itself is various. For the most part, ancient rhetoric works on the assumption of a homogeneous audience. Obviously, the acknowledgment of varying tastes and attitudes in an audience would complicate the art of persuasion. When Cicero refers to differences of style it is to the variety of the orators’ tastes and abilities that he attributes this diversity (Orator 52).67 But Pliny the Younger is more radical in drawing attention to the different hearings that the same speech might elicit from a varied audience: Varia sunt hominum iudicia, variae voluntates. inde qui eandem causam simul audierunt, saepe diversum, interdum idem sed ex diversis animi motibus sentiunt. . . . Omnibus ergo dandum est aliquid quod teneant, quod agnoscant. (Epist. 1.20.12–­13). The judgment of men is varied, and their inclinations are varied too, so those who have heard the same speech at the same time often have differing opinions, or sometimes the same opinion stemming from different mental processes. . . . So you must give all of them something they can grasp, or recognize.

Later in the same letter he describes his technique with the help of a familiar metaphor: “So, when arguing a case, I scatter my seeds, as it were, far and wide, to collect whatever comes forth” (“sic in actione plura quasi semina latius spargo, ut quae provenerint colligam, ” 1.20.16). Pliny sows a varied crop on his farms, and the same goes for his speeches, which will be heard by a mixed audience.68 We may be reminded here of the Parable of the Sower in the Gospel of Mark (4:4–­20), where the seed that falls on different kinds of soil, some allowing it to bear fruit and others not, stands for “the word” as it is received by different souls.69 Christian rhetoric is well aware of the diversity of the audience to which it must appeal, and of the need to mobilize the variety of techniques, styles, and arguments to which Pliny lays claim.70 Thus Augustine, after describing the diversity of a Christian audience, which may be few or many, educated or uneducated, urban or rustic, or a mixture of all these types, describes how this audience will affect the speaker: et ut sermo qui profertur, affectionis animi a quo profertur, quemdam quasi vultum gerat, et pro eadem diversitate diverse afficiat auditores, cum et ipsi se ipsos diverse afficiant invicem praesentia sua. (De Catechizandis Rudibus 15.23) And the address which is produced, because of the emotions of the soul from which it is delivered, should display as it were a kind of facial expression,

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

53

and by that same diversity diversely affect the listeners even as they in turn variously influence one another by their presence.

The same point is made by Poliziano in the preface to his Miscellanea (1489), where he claims that the variety of his style ensures that there is something for all readers, the rustics as much as the exquisites.71 As we shall see in chapter 5, it is one of the claims of the miscellany as a form that its variety accommodates a varied readership, and the variety of a book encourages an audience to become conscious of its own diversity. n a t u r e , v a r i e t y, a n d c r e a t i v i t y I will bring this section on variety and rhetoric to a close by considering how images of eloquence shade into ideas of creativity by means of the comparison of the human artist to the God who creates a various nature. When Macrobius, the fifth-­century miscellanist, describes the variety of Vergil’s poetry, he points out that Vergil made himself a universal model by the variety of his eloquence (“eloquentiam omnium varietate distinctam, ” Sat. 5.1.18). In doing so Macrobius has recourse to the language of landscape borrowed from Vergil’s own Georgics, and in particular the passage which Quintilian quotes as an example of diversitas dissipata (see above, p. 44). But the emphasis of this passage is not only rhetorical, for it also harks back to notions of nature’s variety, as Macrobius assimilates Vergil’s oeuvre to the divine “work” of nature. Quippe si mundum ipsum diligenter inspicias, magnam similitudinem divini illius et huius poetici operis invenies, nam qualiter eloquentia Maronis ad omnium mores integra est, nunc brevis, nunc copiosa, nunc sicca, nunc florida, nunc simul omnia, interdum lenis aut torrens: sic terra ipsa hic laeta segetibus et pratis, ibi silvis et rupibus hispida, hic sicca harenis, hic irrigua fontibus, pars vasto aperitur mari. (Sat. 5.1.19) If you look carefully at the world itself, you will see a great similarity between this divine work and that poetic one, for as the eloquence of Vergil forms a whole in the eyes of readers of all tastes, now brief, now copious, now dry, now elaborate, now all at once, at times either gentle or torrential, so the earth itself is here fertile in crops and meadows, there rough with woods and rocks, here dry with sand, there irrigated with streams, and in parts opening on the vast sea.

Macrobius’s comparison is supported by natural metaphors that are commonly applied to rhetorical style ( florida, torrens, sicca). But it is the creativity

54

chapter t wo

of Vergil that Macrobius’s natural metaphor stresses, for Vergil’s work is compared to nature in all its variety as a work (opus). In his Silvae, Poliziano also describes Vergil’s eloquence as a varied landscape: Hic ubere largo luxuriant segetes, hic mollia gramina tondet armentum, hic lentis amicitur vitibus ulmus; illinc muscoso tollunt se robora trunco, hinc maria ampla patent, bibulis hoc squalet harenis litus, ab his gelidi decurrunt montibus amnes; huc vastae incumbunt rupes, hinc scrupea pandunt antra sinus, illinc valles cubuere reductae et discors pulchram facies ita temperat orbem. sic varios sese in vultus facundia dives induit; et vasto nunc torrens impete fertur fluminis in morem, sicco nunc aret in alveo. (Manto 353–­64) Here crops flourish in great abundance; here the flocks browse on tender grasses; here the elm is adorned with the flexible vines; there the oaks rise up with their mossy trunks; here vast seas unfold; there the shoreline lies barren with thirsty sands; from these mountains frozen streams flow down; here huge rocks loom up; here rocky caverns reveal their recesses; there secluded valleys open up; and thus the discordant aspect creates the beautiful harmony of the world. So rich eloquence assumes different appearances: now it is a torrent borne along by a powerful impetus like a river, now it lies parched in a dry river bed. . . . (Translation of Fantazzi, in Poliziano 2004, 27–­29)

The deictics refer us to the same passage of the Georgics that inspired Macrobius, whose description has been expanded by Poliziano to give us a landscape that almost detaches itself from its illustrative function. Facundia dives (rich eloquence, 362) is here equivalent to copia, and it takes on, accordingly, a variety of appearances (varios sese in vultus  .  .  . induit). By the sixteenth century the comparison between landscape and eloquence will become more than a metaphor, as textual production is seen to partake of the same nature as natural processes.72 If Vergil can be compared to the creator God in respect of the variety of  his “work, ” then the reverse is also the case. We have already seen that Christian theodicies identify variety as the essential quality of God’s creation. Cardinal Bellarmino (1542–­1621) makes God an artist in this respect, and here the emphasis is on the activity rather than the work produced. In his De Ascensione

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

55

mentis in Deum per scalas creaturarum (1614) the counter-­reformation polemicist writes: Though the mere multitude of created things is itself wonderful, and a proof of the multiform perfection of the one God, still more wonderful is the variety (varietas) which appears in that multiplication, and it leads us more easily to the knowledge of God; for it is not difficult for one seal to make many impressions exactly alike, but to vary (variare) shapes almost infinitely, which is what God has done in creation, this is in truth divine work, and most worthy of admiration. . . . Raise now, my soul, the eye of the mind towards God, in whom are the ideas of all things and from whom, as from an inexhaustible fountain, its well-­nigh infinite variety (varietas) springs.73

For Bellarmino, the variety of nature is a manifestation of God’s creative power. God the artist displays his divine creativity through his ability to vary “infinitely, ” and it is through the manifestations of this activity in the world that we come to know him better. “Mere multitude, ” wonderful though it is, needs to be inflected by varietas to be worthy of the divine creator. So Bellarmino borrows the ancient definition of rhetorical excellence, copia plus varietas, for the creativity of his God. Once the writer comes to be seen as a creator, the wheel comes full circle, and the language borrowed from the discourses of rhetoric and nature to describe God’s creativity is paid back, with interest, to the divinely creative artist. As Lovejoy puts it, “Since the strain in Western thought summed up in the doctrine of the Chain of Being thus consisted in an increasing emphasis on the conception of God as insatiably creative, it followed that the man who, as moral agent or artist, would imitate God, must do so by being himself ‘creative’” (1960, 296). While innovation and novelty were often taken to be the essence of the artist’s creativity, variety was also an important ingredient of this concept so central to Romantic literary theory.74 Shakespeare is the supreme creative genius because he exemplifies the “infinite variety” of his own Cleopatra, and of God’s creation itself.75 Coleridge, for instance, has this to say about the difference between Athenian drama and that of Shakespeare: But once more let me repeat what can never be too often reflected upon by all who would intelligently study the works either of the Athenian dramatists or of Shakespeare—­that the very essence of the former consists in the sternest separation of the diverse in kind; the latter delights [in variety?]. (Coleridge 1931, 1.197–­98)

Coleridge’s unfinished sentence has been completed plausibly, in line with the familiar topos of nature’s delight in variety, by his editor Thomas Raynor.

56

chapter t wo

Raynor quotes in a footnote the rewriting of this passage by the first ed­ itor of Coleridge’s Shakespearean manuscripts, his nephew, H. N. Coleridge: “. . . the very essence of the former consists in the sternest separation of the diverse in kind and the disparate in the degree, whilst the latter delights in interlacing by a rainbow-­like transfusion of hues the one with the other . . . ” H. Coleridge, as Raynor notes, may be remembering something that his uncle said in conversation. If Raynor is correct in his supplement, which recognizes Coleridge’s citation of a widely disseminated topos, then Coleridge follows a long line of authors who connect human creativity to the variety of nature. The Coleridge passage is quoted by Abrams in his book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953, 221), and it is striking that the seminal works of Lovejoy (1960), on the Great Chain of Being, and Abrams, on Romantic literary theory, do not directly address the role of variety in the conglomeration of ideas that they are describing, though both of them provide us with plenty of material to illustrate the influence of ancient ideas about variety. Lovejoy (1960, 295–­ 96), for instance, quotes Mark Akenside in The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), comparing the divine and human creators. Just as God the Artificer displays “his own immense idea” in Nature (4.83–­84), so to artists A field is open’d wide as Nature’s sphere; Nay wider: various as the sudden acts Of human wit. (Pleasures 4.105–­7)76

It is striking that Lovejoy makes nothing of the ancient rhetorical association of copia with varietas, suggested here by the collocation of “wide” and “various, ” and confirmed when Akenside continues his paean to the God-­ like Bard by declaring that he offers all his treasures to the different organs (senses) of  “the copious mind” (Pleasures 4.109–­10).77 We are reminded of the ancient idea that the fertility of the orator displays itself through the variety of his discourse, while variety prevents his copiousness from turning into mere loquacity. But Akenside’s artist is a creator, like God, and there is even a suggestion of competition with the divine creator in Akenside’s “nay wider. ” The relation is more cooperative in Joseph Addison’s (1672–­1719) version of the artist as divine creator, in which the poet’s invention “has something in it like creation. It bestows a kind of existence, and draws up to the reader’s eye several things which are not to be found in being. It makes additions to nature, and gives greater variety to God’s works. ”78 The poet, then, conspires with Leibniz’s God, who creates the best of all possible worlds by willing into being a maximum of order and variety.79

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

57

Variety’s Contexts: 3. Variety, Pleasure, and Aesthetics Varietas delectat, “variety pleases. ” Not only that, but variety and pleasure are inseparable, for variety is “the great source of pleasure” or “the soul of pleasure. ”80 One reason for this connection is negative: variety is the source of pleasure because its opposite prevents pleasure. Samuel Johnson continues his statement that variety is the great source of pleasure with the words “Uniformity must tire at last, though it be uniformity of excellence, ” and then he quotes Martial (10.46): Omnia vult belle Matho dicere, dic aliquando et bene, dic neutrum, dic aliquando male.81 Matho wants to express everything beautifully, make it beautiful then Sometimes, sometimes ugly, sometimes neither.

This is radical variety indeed! We will return to Martial’s variety in more detail in the final chapter of this book, but Johnson’s quotation in this context reminds us of the fastidium to which pleasure is prone.82 Variety mitigates the limitations endemic to human pleasure. For this reason the human craving for variety itself is not always regarded as a good sign. While everybody knows that “variety is the spice of life, ” the origin of this phrase, in William Cowper’s hugely successful poem The Task (1784), now seldom read, is more ambivalent than we might expect. Satirizing the life of the town by contrast with a countryside imbued with the divine spirit, Cowper rails against the inconstancy and randomness of fashion in clothes: Variety’s the very spice of life That gives it all its flavour. We have run Through every change that Fancy at the loom, Exhausted, has had genius to supply; And, studious of mutation still, discard A real elegance, a little used, For monstrous novelty and strange disguise. (The Task 1.462–­68)

Even the characteristic variety in which nature, according to the ancient topos, “rejoices” may be tainted by the human stain if that variety is seen as the gift of a providential divinity: The earth was made so various, that the mind Of desultory man, studious of change And pleased with novelty, might be indulged.

58

chapter t wo

Prospects, however lovely, may be seen Till half their beauties fade; the weary sight, Too well acquainted with their smiles, slides off Fastidious, seeking less familiar scenes. (The Task 1.506–­11)

Cicero (De Natura Deorum 2.150–­61) had argued that nature can only have been provided for the special use of humankind by a providential divinity; how can we doubt this when confronted by the ubertas and varietas of the fruits of the earth (2.158)?83 But Cowper’s providence indulges humans with variety as an adult would indulge the short attention span of a child. That the pleasure we take in variety is to be attributed to some deficiency of human nature is an idea which can be traced back to a passage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which he cites what is evidently already a proverbial expression from Euripides’s Orestes (234): metabolē pantōn gluku. There is no one thing that is always pleasant, because our nature is not simple. . . . If the nature of anything were simple, the same action would always be most pleasant to it. This is why God always enjoys a single and simple pleasure. . . . But “change in all things is sweet, ” as the poet says, because of some vice; for as it is the vicious man who is changeable, so the nature that needs change is vicious; for it is not simple nor good. (1154b8, tr. McKeon 1973)

Euripides’s words, as quoted by Aristotle, are passed down in Latin translation as varietas delectat, virtually a proverb. Nature is various, according to Cowper, because variety pleases humans, who are “desultory” and “fastidious, ” descriptions which tally with Aristotle’s diagnosis of the human need for variety. Cowper’s language in this passage is heavily Latinate: both “desultory” and “fastidious” are reliant on their Latin meanings, as is “studious. ” Furthermore, the word “spice” echoes the use of the verb condire in Latin texts about variety (e.g. Pliny, “quo seria condidit, ” quoted above, p. 35). The passage is imbued with the vocabulary of varietas, which is immediately called to mind by the allusion to fastidium (“the weary sight . . . slides off / Fastidious”).84 Cowper’s “desultory, ” from the Latin desultorius, is a new recruit to the language of variety. From its original application to a circus rider leaping from horse to horse the Latin desultor came to be used figuratively of inconsistent people who change lovers or political allegiance.85 By Cowper’s time it had acquired its modern sense of the random, purposeless activity of the bored; according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is commonly used of reading from the mid-­eighteenth century. Variety brings pleasure, then, partly because it mitigates the satietas and fastidium to which humans are prone. These dangers became a major concern

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

59

in the Middle Ages, under the names of taedium and acedia, the boredom that particularly afflicted monks, with their monotonous routine of (often silent and solitary) prayer. The grotesques and monsters carved in medieval cloisters served as distractions from “the noonday devil” of tedium brought on by this routine.86 Bernard of Clairvaux inveighed against these grotesques, which he saw as a concession to weakness, creating a distraction from the breviary with their “wondrous variety”: Tam multa  .  .  . tamque mira diversarum apparet ubique varietas, ut multis legere libeat in marmoribus, quam in codicibus, totumque diem occupare singula ista mirando, quam in lege dei meditando. (Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Gulielmum Abbatem 12.29) So multiple, so wondrous a variety of diverse forms appears everywhere, that they would rather read in the marbles than in codices, and occupy the whole day admiring each of those figures rather than meditating on the law of God.

One notices the strong contrast between the dumb wonder expressed by mira and mirando on the one hand, and the appropriate attitude conveyed by meditando on the other; also the close association between varietas and singula (individual details), an association which, as we shall see, is characteristic of the aesthetics of varietas. In spite of his wariness of the dangers of distraction, Bernard was also well aware of  the problems of satietas and fastidium. In his description of the pleasures of  heaven we have a vivid account, by opposition, of the human limitations attached to varietas, for in heaven the limits of human pleasure are dissolved. Hinc illa satietas sine fastidio: hinc insatiabilis illa sine inquietudine curiositas; hinc aeternum illud atque inexplebile desiderium, nesciens egestatem. (De Diligendo Deo 33) Hence this satiation without disgust; hence that insatiable curiositas without anxiety; hence that eternal, never to be fulfilled desire, ignorant of need.

In heaven there is no need for variety to mitigate satietas, for it brings on no disgust. Heaven recommends itself not for the single activity of Aristotle’s god, but rather because the limits of the human capacity for enjoying copia will be lifted, and satietas will be decoupled from fastidium. Furthermore, the pleasures of curiositas (looking too carefully) will cause no anxiety or restlessness.87 Curiositas is the form of attentiveness correlative with varietas, so Bernard is implying that, while there will be no need for varietas, it can be also be enjoyed without the discomforts that attend it.88 Varietas can be included among the pleasures of heaven because it will no longer cause that unquiet dissipation of focus which goes with curiositas.

60

chapter t wo

Cowper and Bernard of Clairvaux may seem strange bedfellows, and indeed they are. But that is my point. They speak to each other because they share in a transhistorical debate inherent in the varietas complex and carried by a number of topoi and verbal collocations (in this case, varietas, satietas, and  fastidium). As Mary Carruthers (2009, 42) astutely remarks, the discourse of varietas puts at issue the value of human feeling along a continuum from tedium to distraction. It is a locus of dispute about the value of tuning human attentiveness toward one or the other end of this continuum. A mark of the perfection of Aristotle’s divinity is that it (he?) can dispense with variety and attend only and always to one thing. But in the human sphere, while concentration is valued, it always threatens to tip over into tedium, as it does for the monks under the influence of the noonday demon. Cowper’s nature is made various by God to accommodate the limitations of human attentiveness.89 At the other end of the spectrum, curiositas is not necessarily to be avoided unless it degenerates into mere distractedness. The eye that takes in the varied spectacle of nature is alive to the wonders of God’s creation and responsive to nature’s joyful play. But at this end of the continuum lie the excesses of distraction. For Plato and others, the pleasures of variety are those of women and children; they are superficial because poikilia is a feature of surfaces and an agent of distraction. Poikilia is “never the same” (Rep. 8.568d), leaving one in a state of suspended wonderment in which the faculty of judgment is baffled. Poikilia dissipates attention across a surface, preventing the experience of depth. It says (delightedly) “and here’s another thing” rather than “and from this it follows that . . . ”90 t o wa r d t h e n o v e l : n a r r a t i v e , v a r i e t y, a n d t h e m u lt i p l e p l o t At the distracted end of the continuum of attentiveness we have the desultory, in the original Latin sense mobilized by Cowper. The Latin desultor is not a common word, and one of its most notable occurrences, in the adjectival form desultorius, is in the prologue to Apuleius’s Golden Ass. There the narrator (praef. 1) declares that he will weave together a variety of tales (“varias fabulas conseram”) to soothe the ears of the reader, whose attention will be rewarded by delight (“laetabaris”). He goes on to describe his Greek-­ speaking origins, and excuses the fact that he is writing this narrative in a foreign language (Latin). But this change of language suits “the technique of composition which I have adopted, much as a circus rider leaps from one horse to another (desultoriae scientiae stilo), for the romance on which I am embarking is adapted from the Greek. ” Though the metaphor of the circus

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

61

rider (desultor) is applied to the fact that the novel’s material has been translated from one language to another, the metaphor will have wider implications for a novel which starts with the hero traveling on horseback, and which recounts his adventures after metamorphosis into the form of an ass. Most importantly, for our concerns, the narrative will indeed jump like a circus rider from one character to another, in the many tales that are inserted into the narrative of Lucius’s adventures. Combining an appeal to variety (varias fabulas) with an advertisement of the “desultory” pleasures of a multiple plot, this preface anticipates some of the issues that will be raised by fictions with multiple plots in the genres which will feed into the modern novel. In these works it is the variety and “desultoriness” of the multiple plot that claims to keep the reader engaged over a long stretch of text. Before discussion of the variety of fictional narrative became focused on multiple plots, Renaissance theorists noted that ancient historiographers had stressed the importance of a variety of action. A key text in this respect was Cic­ ero’s letter to Lucceius, urging him to write a history of Cicero’s consulship:91 Nihil est aptius ad delectationem lectoris, quam temporum varietates fortunaeque vicissitudines. . . . Etenim ordo ipse annalium mediocriter nos retinet, quasi enumeratione fastorum. At viri excellentis ancipites variique casus habent admirationem, expectationem, laetitiam, molestiam, spem, timorem. Nothing tends more to the reader’s enjoyment than varieties of circumstance and vicissitudes of fortune. . . . The actual chronological record of events exercises no very powerful fascination on us; it is like the recitation of the almanac. But in the doubtful and various fortunes of an outstanding individual we often find surprise and suspense, joy and distress, hope and fear. (ad Fam. 5.12.4–­5, tr. Shackelton Bailey 1986, 81)

Here Cicero considers what kind of sequence (ordo) holds the attention of the reader. Mere enumeration is sequence without variety. Annales and Fasti are merely lists, and one suspects that Cicero mentions Fasti at this point to call the word fastidium to our minds. He also makes a connection between the aesthetic meaning of varietas and the implications of danger and unpredictability that cast Fortune as varia (“temporum varietates fortunaeque vicissitudines”). One sense supports the other: the protagonists of history are subjected to vicissitude and so supply a varied narrative. Cicero’s articulation of the need for variety in historical narrative appears in negative form in Tacitus. In this he may be following Polybius, who excuses the uniformity (monoeides) of  his plan in the preface to book 9 of  his Histories (9.1.2–­6).92 Tacitus (Ann. 4.33) admits that his subject has none of the variety of Republican history but is, instead, a dreary recitation of the same points:

62

chapter t wo

Nam situs gentium, varietates proeliorum, clari ducum exitus retinent ac redintegrant legentium animum; nos saeva iussa, continuas accusationes, fallaces amicitias, perniciem innocentium et easdem exitii causas coniungimus, obvia rerum similitudine et satietate. For geographical descriptions, the changing fortunes of battle, the famous deaths of leaders, hold and restore the minds of readers; but I string out a succession of savage commands, continual accusations, deceptive friendships, the downfall of the innocent, and the same causes of death, hampered by the satiation brought on by the similarity of events.

Again, the word varietas is used to characterize the content of a narrative (the unpredictability of battle). The word retinet recurs from Cicero’s letter to Lucceius (5), and Tacitus’s reader is not only “held” by variety but also “restored” (redintegrant), an idea that is represented also by the verbs reficio and recreare in passages on variety in other authors.93 Recreare and its English derivate “recreation, ” of course, are due to have an important afterlife in modern discussions of the function of literature.94 The novel would become the genre of recreation par excellence. Of its many predecessors, the romance of knight errantry was widely regarded in the sixteenth century as the genre that entertains by virtue of its variety.95 In this case, variety is understood as change (metabolē), digression, and multiplicity of plot. The coincidence of the French word for “entertainment” (divertissement) with the word for “diversion” is so familiar that we no longer give it any thought, but it is a connection that goes to the heart of the poetics of narrative in this period. Langer (2009, 70–­79) considers the case of the French versions of the enormously popular and influential Amadis of Gaul, a tale of  knight errantry first published in print form in Spain (1508), but translated and continued in Italy, Germany, and France throughout the sixteenth century. He argues that the narrative of the knightly romance is motivated by the same concern that drives the protagonists themselves, namely the fear of boredom. The reader, carried along from one narrative thread to another, as the story shifts its focus from character to character, is protected from the fastidium of a single narrative. In the same way, the knights are prompted by fastidium to embark again on the wanderings that will make them available for adventure. Neither knight nor reader aims at an end, rather they let themselves be diverted, in both senses of the word, by whatever happens. Langer’s association between locomotion, change, and variety in the pleasures of the prose fiction narrative may remind us of the preface to Apuleius’s Golden Ass, a work that had a considerable Renaissance reception.96

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

63

The tale of knight errantry belongs to the broader genre of romance, which was at the center of early modern arguments over Aristotle’s preference for a plot based on a single action (sometimes extended by would-­be Aristotelians to plots concerning “a single person”).97 While strict Aristotelians might reject the episodic, multi-­stranded plot on the basis of Aristotle’s remarks on unity in the Poetics (1451a), the supporters of romance could take heart from what he says about the extended size of epic as compared with tragedy: So it has this advantage in the direction of grandeur and variety (metaballein) for the hearer, and in being constructed with dissimilar episodes. For it is the similarity and the satiety it soon produces (tachu plēroun) that make tragedies fail. (1459b, tr. Russell and Winterbottom 1989)

Defending the genre of romance in the mid-­sixteenth century, Giambattista Cinzio Giraldi takes Ovid’s Metamorphoses as his model: Diversity of action carries with it variety, which is the spice of delight (il condimento del diletto), and gives the author wide scope for introducing episodes, or pleasant digressions, and for bringing in events which in poems dealing with a single action cannot come about without some hint of  blame. (Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, delle comedie, e delle tragedie [1554, 26, quoted in Heath 1989, 14])

A lively argument about variety, multiple plots, and digression was prompted by the publication and success of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532), an epic poem of episodic structure with multiple strands of plot.98 In Giuseppe Malatesta’s dialogue Della Nuova Poesia (1589), Ariosto is championed both by a historical argument that unity of plot is not now desirable, since variety is more pleasant for moderns, and a more essentialist argument that it never was more desirable, since men have at all times been pleased with variety.99 But with the appearance of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata in 1581, theorists acquired a modern classic to cite in support of the Aristotelian side of the debate.100 Tasso allowed for variety within unity, but not for multiple plots. The romance reserves the right to move from character to character, providing a variety of narrative threads. But even when the focus is narrowed to a single individual, as in the picaresque novel, the episodic, various character of the romance may be retained. In the picaresque, variety attaches to the adventures of the protagonist, the picaro (“rogue”) whose fortunes rise and fall. The picaresque originated in Spain in the sixteenth century, but its influence spread throughout Europe in the next two centuries, and a number of  English novels are commonly assigned to this tradition. One of these is Daniel Defoe’s

64

chapter t wo

Moll Flanders (1722), whose title page provides a survey of the story, emphasizing the variety of the narrative: Born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years besides her childhood, was twelve years a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother) twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent.

This account of “a life of continu’d variety” is not quite a biography, since it mixes the principle of narrative sequence (“twelve years a whore, ” etc.) with that of episodic variety (“five times a wife [whereof once to her own brother]”): variety attaches both to the linear trajectory of Moll’s life and to the list of roles she has played. The title page of Moll Flanders provides a sharp contrast to the idealizing Roman epitaph of the good  matrona, quoted on p. 28, which denies the possibility of varietas in the life of a woman! The pleasures of the romance or novelistic narrative are always partially defined in terms of the looming threat of boredom. In these extended narratives, the readers’ attention is constantly in question, and must be retained by the variety of the narrative, a desideratum which is most influentially articulated by ancient texts on historiography. a n t i -­s y n o p t i c a e s t h e t i c s What I have been describing so far is the corrective, temporal form of varietas (roughly equivalent to Greek metabolē); it is concerned with evading the dangers of satietas and boredom to which humans are prone. But there is also a more positive form of varietas (roughly equivalent to Greek poikilia), to which I will now turn. As we have seen, in the case of the extended narrative, variety can be figured as a journey without a single focus or goal. By contrast, the metaphors that tend to recur in the case of a “various” lyric poetry, and other smaller genres, are more visual. We can situate this second kind of variety by contrast with Aristotle’s requirement of a unified plot that it be eusynopton (“able to be taken in at one view, ” Poetics 1451a). Variety contravenes this criterion, but what it offers in exchange can take two different forms. Either the spectacle of variety creates a pleasing, even sublime, confusion in the perceiver, overwhelmed by a diverse profusion, or it encourages the sovereign exercise of choice, as the perceiving subject surveys the available profusion, picking and choosing at will. The first of these two aesthetic experiences of variety, pleasing confusion, can be traced back to Statius, and I will have more to say about him in chapter 4.101 When Statius describes the villas of his patrons it is an important

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

65

component of the praise that the visitor be overwhelmed by the aesthetic experience. This means that the poet himself suffers aporia when confronted with the spectacle, and Statius frames the challenge of describing the villa of  Vopis­ cus as a problem with Aristotelian form: “What shall I address first, what in the middle, and how shall I draw to a final close?” (“quid primum mediumque canam, quo fine quiescam, ” Silvae 1.3.34). There is no natural order of description because of the heterogeneity of the experience: Statius is divided between the various organs of response, which tug in different directions (“huc oculis, huc mente trahor, ” 38). The visual treats with which he begins (gilded beams, colored marble, 35–­36) are followed by wonder at a technical feat (water supplied to every bedroom, 36) and then by ethical considerations (the venerable antiquity of the groves, 39–­40). This dispersal of attention and confusion of the order proper to aesthetic experience influences Sidonius Apollinaris’s description of the palace of dawn four hundred years later:102 Hic domus Aurorae rutilo crustante metallo bacarum praefert leves asprata lapillos. diripiunt diversa oculos et ab arte magistra hoc vincit, quodcumque vides; sed conditur omnis sub domina praesente decor, nimioque rubore gemmarum varios perdit quia possidet ignes. (Sidonius, c. 2.418–­23) Here the home of Aurora, crusted with flashing gold, displays smooth pearls on its rough surface. The gaze is torn this way and that by different things, and, thanks to their masterly artistry, whatever meets the eye seems to surpass the rest. But all that beauty is dimmed in the presence of its mistress (Aurora), who with her blushing radiance destroys the various fires of her gems, because she has fires of her own.

Sidonius’s play on the prefix dis-­ (di-­ripiunt and di-­versa in the third line) emphasizes the impossibility of a synoptic gaze, as does Statius’s “huc oculis, huc mente trahor. ” In the fourth line, Sidonius introduces the idea of non-­ comparability with the expression “hoc vincit quodcumque vides” (whatever meets the eye seems to surpass the rest). The confusion of the viewer’s experience in these “various fires” is not resolved into unity, but rather dissolved by the blinding radiance of Aurora herself, in which everything else disappears.103 Michael Roberts (1989, 62) comments: “Statius’ Silvae, with its emphasis on the small scale and the play of brilliance and colour, is late antique poetry before its time. ” While Roberts is right to see intimations of the late antique style in Statius, the aesthetics of variety as described in the two texts I have just quoted are articulated as early as Cicero, in De Oratore,

66

chapter t wo

where he argues that the dissimilitude of what the senses perceive in nature produces innumerable delights, and this is the model for the diversity of rhetorical styles. The variety of sense impressions prevents us from giving one priority over another, “For we perceive many sounds through our ears, and even if they delight us with their tones they are so various that often whatever you have heard last seems the most pleasing” (De Or. 3.25).104 Sidonius’s “hoc vincit quodcumque vides” (whatever meets the eye seems to surpass the rest) articulates the same idea; it has become a topos of the varietas complex, as we can immediately see from the sixth-­century historian Procopius’s description of Hagia Sophia (De Aedificiis 1.1.47–­48): All these details fitted together with incredible skill in mid-­air and floating off from each other . . . produce a single and most extraordinary harmony in the work, and yet do not permit the spectator to linger much (emphilochōrein) over the study of any one of them, but each detail attracts the eye and draws it on irresistibly to itself. So there is a constant and quick shift (metabolē) of vision, for the beholder is utterly unable to select which particular detail he should admire more than all the others. (Translation of Dewing 1940)

Attention is distracted by the drawing power of individual details (hekaston), and the impossibility of establishing a hierarchy of impressions or a principle of sequence produces a shifting gaze. The harmony of the whole is, on the one hand (men) “single, ” and yet (de) made up of details; but it is not the impression of the whole that prevents the eye from lingering too much over any one detail, rather it is the attractive power of each single detail as the observer struggles in vain to decide on which is the most wonderful. Again, the unsettled eye of the viewer is unable to prioritize or to choose a principle of sequence. The sense of the whole is lost in the attractive power of the details (hekaston), each of which seems incomparable.105 This topos of the varietas complex has its rhetorical equivalent in the repeated deictics hic . . . hic . . . (here . . . there . . .) that become conventional for the description of “various” scenes as a result of Quintilian’s citation of Georgics 1.54–­55 in his definition of diversitas dissipata. l o c at i n g v a r i e t a s : t h e b e au t i f u l , t h e s u b l i m e , and the picturesque When the discourse of aesthetics takes hold, around the middle of the eighteenth century, the description of variety which I have just examined is still conventional, and the concept of variety itself plays an important role in distinguishing different kinds of aesthetic experience. Where does variety

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

67

belong, with the Sublime or with the Beautiful? Edmund Burke, who discusses variety and variation under the rubric of the beautiful rather than the sublime, has this to say in appreciation of the female breast in A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757): Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and the breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. (Enquiry, part 3, section 15, titled “Gradual Variation”)

The eye at first travels slowly over the undulations of this enticing surface, which suddenly becomes a “deceitful maze,” causing a not unpleasant confusion and loss of orientation. Most importantly, the eye is unable to fix.106 Awkwardly placed between the Beautiful and the Sublime, variety here is coded as feminine, not only in its medium but in its effect (“giddily”), and what was overwhelming in Statius becomes merely deceitful. One can’t help feeling that Burke has in mind Vergil’s phrase varium et mutabile semper / femina (a woman is always a varied and changeable thing, Aeneid 4.569–­70).107 If, as Burke argues, the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is between what we love, because it flatters the sense of our own power, and what we fear for being more powerful than us, then where does this passage locate variety? Burke seems to want to have it both ways. John Baillie, in his Essay on the Sublime (1747), agrees with Burke that variety is not at home in the newly emergent category of the Sublime, but goes further in claiming that it is actually inimical to the sublime. Where an Object is Vast, and at the same Time uniform, there is to the Imagination no Limit of its Vastness, and the Mind runs out into Infinity, continually creating as it were from the Pattern. Thus when the Eye loses itself in the vast Ocean, the Imagination having nothing to arrest it, catches up the Scene and extends the Prospect to Immensity, which it can by no means do, were the uniform surface broken up by innumerable Islands scattered up and down, and the Mind thus led into Consideration of the various Parts; for this adverting to dissimilar parts ever destroys the Power of the Imagination. (Baillie 1953, 9–­10, quoted in Schor 1987, 18).

Baillie’s sea broken up by “innumerable Islands scattered up and down” is a prime example of distinctio, but his “adverting to dissimilar parts” describes an experience of confusion that is fussy rather than overwhelming, as it was for Statius. I suspect that Baillie is here responding to a famous passage in Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam (18.5). Consoling Marcia for the loss of a son,

68

chapter t wo

Seneca asks her to survey the sublime spectacle of the world into which she came at birth, and asks if she would not accept all the sufferings of existence if they were the price to pay for gaining access to this spectacle. Among the sights at her disposal are “sparsae tot per vastum insulae, quae interventu suo maria distinguunt” (“scattered amongst this vastness, the many islands which break up/dot [distinguunt] the seas, coming between them [interventu suo]”). Baillie approves of Seneca’s vastum, which he repeats in its English form three times, but considers the “distinguishing” islands a spoiler, reading Seneca’s interventu (with their coming between), against the grain, as “interference. ”108 The place of variety within the categories of the aesthetic, then, is unstable. Burke’s variety, which is described under the category of gradual variation, slips from the Beautiful toward the Sublime without quite getting there, while for Baillie sublimity, promised by Seneca’s vision of the universe, is stymied by the “distinguishing” islands which lead the mind into “Consideration of the various parts. ” It should be no surprise, then, that the category which, in the 1780s and ’90s, was posited as intermediate between the Sublime and Beautiful is heavily characterized by variety. This is the Picturesque, a category whose definition struggles with a number of issues central to the positing of variety as a prime value. In one of the most thoughtful studies of the aesthetics of the picturesque, Sidney Robinson (1991) begins with a chapter on “Mixture” in which he identifies “abrupt variation” (citing Uvedale Price 1796, 29) and the novelty that produces discontinuity as the dominant features of the Picturesque. Robinson points out that this aesthetic category, generated to correct the languor of beauty and the horror of sublimity, adjusts to the circumstances of whichever category it is attached to, and so is in danger of losing its independent identity (Robinson 1991, 9). We have seen that the notion of variety is similarly always in danger of becoming a mere corrective. The Picturesque composition is one that avoids, in one direction, an excess of connection between the parts, which blurs their identity so that only the whole is evident, and in the other a want of connection, a passion for making everything distinct and separate (Robinson 1991, 123, citing Uvedale Price 1796, 261). The Picturesque is a category introduced in the eighteenth century within a particular intellectual and historical climate, but it relies heavily on a word that has its own history and brings with it a complex of connected words, metaphors, and issues. Take Coleridge’s attempt, in the Biographia Literaria, to characterize the nature of the Picturesque whole, in which we meet an old friend: [The Picturesque is] where the parts by their harmony produce an effect of a whole, but where there is no seen form of a whole producing or explaining the parts, i.e. when the parts only are seen and distinguished, but the whole is felt. (Allsop 1885, 106–­7, cited in Punter 1994, 227).

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

69

Coleridge distinguishes between what can be seen (only the parts, which are not parts of anything that could be taken in by the viewer), and what can be felt (the effect of the whole). This produces an enigma: the effect of a whole comes not from seeing how the parts produce a form, but from the impression of harmony. Much the same distinction is implied in Procopius’s description of Hagia Sophia, where the single harmony and the flitting of the eye from detail to detail are contrasted in a men . . . de . . . construction (on the one hand . . . on the other). At its limit, the centrifugal tendency of variety becomes mere succession, as Coleridge observes elsewhere, when he suggests that the eye, deprived by variety of anything to fix on, will finally experience mere succession, which has the same effect as sameness.109 At this extremity, variety rejoins the Sublime in the particularly postmodern, negative form of the void. The French critic, Jean-­Pierre Richard (1954, 202), articulates this in a discussion of Flaubert’s aesthetic under the category of chatoiement or miroitement (shimmer). His description of the phenomenon will by now be familiar: “this perpetual to-­ing and fro-­ing from one sensation to another . . . is in effect nothing other than a shimmer. . . . Tossing the eye from color to color, it prevents the eye from staying with any of them. ” But the effect of this experience is quite the opposite of what Baillie describes as the loss of the sublime. In Richard’s description, the vastness from which variety distracts Baillie as he confronts the ocean, interrupted with “innumerable Islands, scattered up and down, ” is recovered as the sublimity of the void in the very process of our “adverting to dissimilar parts”: Sending consciousness from one object to another, the shimmer sets nature in contradiction with itself, and leads it to proceed to its own nullification. So the shimmer is a destructive force: where modulation creates form by grading the tints, the shimmer empties color and form, and implies the void. (Richard 1954, 203)

We will return to Flaubert, whose writing Richard is here describing, in the final section of this chapter (Empire and Polity), in connection with his novel Salammbô, where the theme of ethnic diversity is coupled with an aesthetic of varietas which focuses on the visual effect of jewels. We will encounter jewels in the next section, but before we leave the postmodern incarnation of the topoi connected with a visual varietas, here is Fredric Jameson describing what is demanded of the postmodernist viewer, in connection with Nam June Paik’s arrays of video screens: The postmodernist viewer . . . is called upon to do the impossible, namely, to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference . . . and to

70

chapter t wo

rise somehow to a level at which the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship. (Jameson 1991, 31)

Here the sequential confusion in which one detail after another randomly claims the attention of the viewer is no longer adequate to describe the experience of variety. Variety is, paradoxically, conjoined with synopticism in a sublime impossibility that enforces a new experience, and understanding, of relationship. f i g u r e s o f va r i e t y : j e w e l s a n d m o s a i c s Under the rubric of “anti-­synoptic aesthetics” I have been describing a recurrent topos in the varietas complex, the topos that “the eye cannot settle. ” I will turn now to a kind of object that tends to be associated with the asynoptic aesthetic experience, and which provides an important source of metaphor for the varietas complex. Jewels are, not surprisingly, a common figure for the effect of varietas. Seneca twice refers to the “distinguishing” effect of jew­ els (“cuius vagina gemmis distinguitur, ” Epist. 76.14; cf. Med. 573–­74). Significantly, Sidonius attaches this metaphor to Statius’s Silvae when he refers to the latter’s “gemmea prata silvularum” (jewel-­like meadows of little Silvae, c. 9.229). It is a metaphor for poetry which, as Roberts (1989, 62) points out, is explicitly used for the first time in the first century AD, and it is rife in late antiquity.110 Roberts’s characterization of the aesthetics of late antique poetry is worth quoting in full for its relevance to the pleasures of varietas: The stylistic norms of the ekphrasis informed the poetics of late antiquity. In particular, leptologia, with its requirements of exhaustivity, generated the enumerative and synonymic sequences, preference for short clauses, and attention to lexical detail and word order that characterize our texts. It was as though poems were put under a microscope, magnifying the constituent parts at the expense of the whole. The principle of variatio directed the choice and ordering of these small units of composition. In late antiquity a sense for the literal meaning of variatio was reawakened. The elements of the texts were understood chromatically, described as multicoloured flowers or jewels. The art of the poet was akin to that of the jeweler—­to manipulate brilliant pieces (lumen is a quality of both flowers and jewels) and to throw them into relief by effects of contrast and juxtaposition [Roberts could be translating the word distinguere here]. The poet strives for an impression equivalent to that of a flower-­covered meadow in spring. (Roberts 1989, 55)

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

71

Closely related to the metaphor of gems is that of mosaics, though it does not become a prominent member of the semantic field of varietas until after the classical period. Roberts draws the analogies between the techniques by which mosaics of late antiquity liberate the individual stone and invest it with light and color and the literary equivalent (72). He cites H. P. L’Orange to the effect that mosaics have a “natural tendency to dissolve into their constituent parts, and to reduce plastic values to the different colours of the spectrum” (Roberts 1989 71). Probably the most famous application of this metaphor to literature is Nietzsche’s characterization of Horace’s “mosaic of words” in Twilight of the Idols (in the section “What I Owe to the Ancients”). Nietzsche emphasizes the energy that flows from each Horatian word (“as sound, as place, as concept”) to extend its influence to left and to right, as though the experience were visual. This produces an extreme economy (“this minimum in the extent and number of sounds, and the maximum thereby attained in the energy of signs”). Nietzsche’s description of the mosaic goes in the opposite direction to L’Orange’s images of dissolution and reduction, for he stresses energy rather than plastic values. For Nietzsche, the individual elements of Horace’s verbal “mosaic” make connections with each other, but they do so not in order to build up a whole into which they will be subsumed; rather, the individual words are so many nodes of radiant energy. The effect is polyfocal, as in Procopius’s description of Hagia Sophia. Nietzsche’s “mosaic of words” has become canonical for the effect of Horace’s Odes, and rightly so. Surprisingly, there is not much use of the mosaic metaphor in ancient texts, though what there is proves very influential (and may well lie behind Nietzsche’s metaphor).111 A single passage from Lucilius, quoted or cited by Cicero in the De Oratore (3.171), Orator (149–­50), and Brutus (274), is the source of most subsequent uses of this metaphor.112 In the De Oratore Lucilius’s lines are put in the mouth of Quintus Mucius Scaevola, defending himself against Albucius, who was prosecuting Scaevola for extortion in 119 BC. Scaevola mocked Albucius’s hellenomania, and particularly his use of Greek words: quam lepide lexeis compostae ut tesserulae omnes arte pavimento atque emblemate vermiculato . . .113 Charming, the way he’s putting together ses phrases: like pebbles All set artfully in the floor in intricate patterns (De Or., 3.171, tr. May and Wisse 2001)

Lucilius is probably alluding to the variegated effect of Albucius’s mixing of Greek and Latin words, which he imitates himself when he includes the

72

chapter t wo

Greek word lexeis in his line.114 In all three passages in which Cicero quotes or cites these lines he is speaking about the arrangement of words. But it is in the Orator passage that he articulates what he takes to be the criticism implicit in Lucilius’s text. Compositio requires extreme care, but the structure this produces should not be laborious (operosae), “for this would be an endless and childish labor. This is why Scaevola cleverly mocks Albucius in Lucilius’s satire” (Orator 149). After the quotation Cicero comments “I would not have such a fussy structure obtrude itself ” (“Nolo haec tam minuta constructio appareat, ” 150).115 But this is precisely what happens in a mosaic: the minuta constructio does not disappear into the overall picture, but makes a claim on our attention. The positive version of minuta constructio would be a poetics of variety. Quintilian (Inst. Or. 9.4.112–­13) helps us to focus this poetics, again by opposition, when he picks up the Lucilius passage in his discussion of prose rhythm. Too much attention to prose rhythm will prevent the speech from flowing: “If the weight and splendor of the argument is neglected one will produce ‘mosaics, ’ as Lucilius says, and put together phrases in an intricate, speckled (vermiculate)116 pattern” (“si quidem relicto pondere ac nitore contempto ‘tesserulas, ’ ut ait Lucilius, struet et vermiculate inter se lexis committet”). Quintilian then compares the effect to impeding a horse’s gallop with little steps, like those of a dressage horse (9.4.113). In the Renaissance, Lucilius’s image, mediated by Cicero and Quintilian, takes on a new life as a figure for eclectic imitation.117 This brings us closer to Lucilius’s original application of the metaphor to the mixing of Greek and Latin words, but the metaphor is now given a positive valence.118 When the humanist scholar Crinito quotes the Lucilius fragment in his De Honesta Disciplina of 1504, he adds the gloss: “that is, a speech elegantly put together with varied figures and effects” (“hoc est, orationem variis figuris atque coloribus eleganter compositam, ” 22.1).119 Crinito edited Poliziano’s works after the latter’s death, and Poliziano had himself appropriated Lucilius’s mosaic metaphor for the poetics of varietas in the preface to his Miscellanea (1489). Justifying the variety of that work, and particularly his eclectic approach to imitation,120 he describes its style as “vermiculata interim dictio, et tesserulis pluricoloribus variegata” (“sometimes an intricate [vermiculata] style and one variegated by multicolored pieces of mosaic”).121 Poliziano’s metaphor, and the variety it described, were controversial.122 But the Miscellanea were defended by Francesco Pucci, who praised them for a style “luxuriating (lasciviens) in a various and almost mosaic (vermiculato) texture (intertextu) and seeking out all the choice verbal allusions. ”123 We recognize lasciviens as a member of the varietas complex, and also the weaving metaphor in intertextu, which comes very close to the modern sense of intertextuality. Lucilius’s lines produce an

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

73

important figure for the recycling or respositioning of ancient texts in modern contexts through the adoption of his metaphor of the emblema (inlaid work) for the emblem book, beginning with Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum Liber (1531). The emblem, mixing picture and words, modern and ancient, and disparate languages was a prime example of varietas.124 Poliziano, then, introduced a positive version of the mosaic metaphor, where the ancient sources had criticized the distraction from whole to part and the miniaturization of  form and attention that it implies. Nietzsche reviv­ ified the metaphor and applied it to Horace by valorizing the kind of careful placement of individual words that the ancient texts tend to regard as fussy and distracting; he described the Horatian text as a polyfocal field of sources of energy. But literature is not the only field in which the mosaic metaphor features. In modern times it is frequently applied to the diverse, multicultural polity, for which it provides the image of a whole in which the individual parts insist on their separate presence, and the viewer’s eye is drawn both to and away from the composite picture. At its limit, the varietas complex strains toward that understanding of radical difference as relationship which Jameson, surely with one eye to contemporary ideals of multiculturalism, sees in the aesthetic of Nam June Paik’s video installations. It is to polities and empire, then, that we now turn. To what extent does the imagining of the diverse whole of an empire, metropolis, or society draw on aesthetic conceptions of variety? Variety’s Contexts: 4. Variety, Empire, and Polity The eighth book of the Aeneid ends with a description of the shield that Vulcan has made for Aeneas at the behest of his mother, Venus. The description culminates in a scene representing the battle of Actium, which decided the civil war in Octavian’s favor, and is represented by Vergil as the culmination of Rome’s glorious history. Vergil describes the combatants and their armies, the battle itself, and the triumph celebrated by Octavian in one of the great prophetic moments of the Aeneid. When David Quint discusses the shield of Aeneas, in his influential Epic and Empire (1993, 25), he features a table contrasting the qualities associated, respectively, with the armies of Octavian and of Antony at the battle of Actium. The contrasts he draws present a familiar imperialist and orientalist opposition. On the one hand we have the chaos and exoticism of the East (Antony and Cleopatra); on the other the order of Rome. Antony’s army with his barbarian wealth and varieties of armor (“ope barbarica variisque Antonius armis, ” 685) is pitted against the march past of defeated peoples in the triumph of Octavian, in which it is the word ordine (line, rank) that Quint singles out for emphasis (“victae longo ordine gentes, ”

74

chapter t wo

722). But Quint’s opposition between ordine and variis as self and other is misleading, for following close on ordine comes the exclamation “how varied in tongue, in style of dress and of arms” (“quam variae linguis, habitu tam vestis et armis, ” 723). Varius has just as much right to be on the “Roman” side of the table as on the barbarian (think of the Roman army, with its various ethnic units, each wielding a different kind of weapon). We could distinguish the two appearances of the word thus: when drawn up for battle against Octavian and Agrippa, the exotic foreigner exhibits a variety that is chaotic, but in the ordo of the Roman triumph the variety of peoples, whether in language, dress, or weapons (“armis, ” 723; cf. 685), is wondrous, and perhaps it is essential to the effect of the drawn-­out procession that it should be variegated.125 The threat of monotony is conveyed by the spondaic rhythm of the line (“incedunt victae longo ordine gentes, ” 722), but the expression of the following line is carefully varied, with the elements of the phrase habitu vestis distributed to interrupt the single ablatives linguis and armis. Styles of dress and weapons are picked up respectively by discinctos and sagittiferosque (724–­25). The value of variety is a matter of context; in itself it belongs neither to East nor West. Or perhaps we should say that, according to context, its positive or negative meanings are activated.126 As Emma Dench notes in connection with motifs of variegation in Roman conceptions of both Italy and the whole world: “Variegation can thus be alternatively what Rome represents or what Rome rules: at times the distinction between the two is suggestively unclear” (Dench 2005, 273). Martin Goodman quotes Aeneid 8.723 (“quam variae linguis, habitu tam vestis et armis”) in a chapter of his Rome and Jerusalem (2007) titled “Diversity and Toleration. ” In his translation the line reads “The conquered peoples move in long array, as diverse in fashion of dress and arms as in their tongues. ” He comments, “Romans knew that their empire was a mosaic of varied peoples and cultures and they gloried in that variety. ”127 As nature rejoices in variety so Rome glories in it! Goodman’s metaphor of the mosaic returns us to the aesthetics of varietas, while the use of the word “diverse” in his translation, and of “diversity” in his chapter heading, point us toward contemporary concerns, and to a very different view of Roman imperial attitudes than Quint’s. For a response to Vergil’s triumph closer in time to the original, we can turn to the third poem of Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum, where Martial surveys the varied spectacle of the peoples that have come from the bound­ aries of the Roman world to be spectators at the emperor’s Games. In Martial, spectator becomes spectacle, but his emperor assumes the same position as Vergil’s Octavian at the end of Aeneid 8.

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

75

Quae tam seposita est, quae gens tam barbara, Caesar, ex qua spectator non sit in urbe tua? venit ab Orpheo cultor Rhodopeius Haemo, venit et epoto Sarmata pastus equo, et qui prima bibit deprensi flumina Nili, et quem supremae Tethyos unda ferit; festinavit Arabs, festinavere Sabaei, et Cilices nimbis hic maduere suis. crinibus in nodum torti venere Sicambri, atque aliter tortis crinibus Aethiopes. vox diversa sonat populorum, tum tamen una est, cum verus patriae diceris esse pater. (Liber Spectaculorum, 3) What people is so remote, so barbarous, Caesar, That it does not have a spectator in your city? The farmer of Rhodope has come from Orpheus’ Haemus, And the Sarmatian, fed on the blood of horses, And the one who drinks at the discovered source of the Nile, And he who is battered by the wave of farthest Tethys; The Arab has hurried here and so have the Sabaeans, And the Cilicians have been drenched by their own showers. The Sygambrians with their hair twisted into a knot, And the Ethiopians with their hair twisted otherwise. The varied voice of the peoples sounds, which then is one, When you are hailed the true father of the fatherland.

Martial’s “the Arab has hurried here and so have the Sabaeans” (“festinavit Arabs, festinavere Sabaei, ” Spec. 3.7) is a neat reversal of Vergil’s image of a rout in which “Every Arab and all the Sabaeans were turning their backs” (“omnis Arabs, omnes vertebant terga Sabaei, ” 8.706): now the (pacified) enemy is only too anxious to rush toward Rome.128 Another of Martial’s revisionary modifications is that Vergil’s exclamatory “How varied in tongue” (“quam variae linguis, ” 723) supplies the topic from which Martial will construct the point of his epigram: the languages of the empire are wondrously diverse in Vergil, but in Martial this diversity finds momentary unification in the acclamation of the emperor.129 Martial’s list (3–­10) covers the four points of the compass,130 from which the peoples converge on Rome and then focus on the emperor. It is structured by oppositions, between culture and barbarism (cultor/pastus, the latter usually of animals, see Coleman 2006), and between active and passive (qui bibit / quem ferit; festinavere hic / maduere suis); but opposition is varied by the tortis / aliter tortis asymmetry, which is not

76

chapter t wo

actually an opposition, insofar as Martial contrasts two different senses of tortis (hair twisted into a knot and kinky hair). The terms of the contrast shift constantly. In the end, diversa become verus, as the diverse voices acclaim the true father, the pater patriae. But, though the point of the epigram stresses unity, the bulk of it rejoices in the varied spectacle that is made visible by the new Flavian amphitheater that Martial is celebrating, a stage on which imperial variety is put on display. In the arena Rome displayed the diversity and extent of its empire in the form of exotic animals, hunting methods and weapons, and even plants.131 In Rome’s public buildings the diversity of the empire was made into a varied spectacle through the decorative use of marbles of different colors and patterns from different parts of the world. Marble was itself prized for its varietas of color, as we have seen, and the fact that Romans classified their marble by provenance, not by color, makes it natural for the spectacle of various and variegated marbles to conjure up the diversity of the empire itself. As Bradley (2006, 19) reminds us, the interior of the Pantheon was sheathed in “an array of richly-­coloured marble veneers from Asia Minor, the eastern desert of Egypt, mainland of Greece and Tunisia, ” a kaleidoscopic range of colors, from all over the world to celebrate multiple gods from the full expanse of the empire. Exotic peoples in ethnic dress were present in Rome not only as spectators of the Games. Vergil’s march past of the nations solicits Servius’s comment (ad Aen. 8.721) that Augustus built a portico (Ad Nationes) in which he placed images of all the peoples. An indication of how this might have looked is afforded by the reliefs of different ethnē recently discovered at the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias.132 The ethnē are represented by female figures different in pose and dress, with some accompanied by attributes probably meant to characterize the ethnos, identified by an inscription on the base. The message became overdetermined when statues of exotic barbarians with their exotic clothes were represented in the colorful marbles of the East from which they had come.133 The wondrous spectacle of imperial diversity in these texts of Vergil and Martial has a long afterlife. But I want to jump quickly to a point somewhere near its end, where it takes a different turn. The aestheticized presentation of ethnic diversity reaches its limit in a text which is resolutely anti-­or non-­ Roman, namely Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862). Following Polybius, Flaubert tells the story of the “Truceless War” between Carthage and its mercenaries, a conflict that followed the First Punic War against Rome. For most historians this is a side-­show sandwiched into the wars between Rome and Carthage. In Flaubert’s treatment it becomes an anticipation of Carthage’s eventual

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

77

destruction. Every French schoolboy knew that “Carthage must be destroyed” (delenda est Carthago), but Flaubert’s final scene, in which the Carthaginians, having defeated their rebelling mercenaries, make a mass sacrifice of their children to Moloch, gives us a non-­Romanocentric version of why this is so. Michel Butor finds in the non-­Romanocentric slant of Flaubert’s story an agenda that is relevant to our concerns. Looking back from a modern Europe for which the triumph of Rome has been such a significant historical outcome, the Roman empire might seem a force of homogenization rather than diversity. It is from this perspective that Butor (1984, 115) says of Salammbô: “This decentred world is for Flaubert the world before Roman centralization, as it was in its original variety before the imperial monotony had imposed everywhere its Corinthian columns, its triumphal arches and its theaters, ” a prelude, in Butor’s opinion, to the monotony of the modern world, where identical Hiltons make one city much like another. The imperial vision of the conquerors is one of variety, but for the conquered, empire homogenizes. Certainly, Salammbô is a novel of variety par excellence. Polybius began his account of the Truceless War (Hist. 1.65–­88) by declaring that one of its lessons is “how wise the distinction is between the character of troops composed of a mixture of uncivilized tribes and those which have the benefit of education, the habit of social life and the restraints of  law” (65). But Flaubert’s opening, which reminds us of Martial’s description of the audience of the Roman amphitheatre, casts a fascinated eye over the ethnic heterogeneity of the mercenaries: Men from every nation were there, Ligurians, Balearics, Negroes and fugitives from Rome. You could hear beside the heavy Doric dialect the Celtic syllables ringing out like battle chariots, and Ionian endings clashed with desert consonants, harsh as jackal cries. Greeks could be recognized by their slender figures, Egyptians by their hunched shoulders, Cantabrians by their sturdy calves. Carians proudly tossed their helmet plumes, Cappadocian archers had painted great flowers on their bodies with herbal juice, and some Lydians in woman’s dress wore slippers and earrings as they dined. Others who had daubed themselves ceremoniously with vermilion looked like coral statues. (Flaubert 1977, 18, tr. A. Krailsheimer)

The description follows the roving eye and discriminating ear of a spectator, picking out the individual races (“you could hear, ” “Greeks could be recognized”) until the accumulation and detail of the realist text tips over into pure texture. The senses, both sight and hearing, are attracted now by one thing now by another. Sounds clash and bodies are atomized into their parts. But

78

chapter t wo

in Flaubert the contrast between the mercenaries and the Carthaginians is not as clear as Polybius would have it, for Flaubert’s Carthage is itself characterized by varietas, though of a different kind. The varietas of Carthage is epitomized by the multicolored shimmer of jewels, which reaches its apogee in the famous passage in which Hamilcar descends into the store-­room of his treasure (Flaubert 1977, 129). J. P. Richard, speaking of Flaubert’s heterogeneous mercenary army, relates the two kinds of varietas (the diversity of nations and the variegation of jewels) when he uses the imagery of jewels to describe Flaubert’s orientalism: The orient is a vast bazaar suspended over nothingness. Races, civilizations, traditions, are juxtaposed incoherently and with hostility: each flashes its own particular brilliance to come up against the brilliance of its neighbor: everything elbows without mingling and sinks into a barbarous cacophony. The army of mercenaries, therefore, represents a perfect image of pure heterogeneity: it sparkles with all the variety of its facets. (Richard 1954, 204, my translation)

Here Richard supplies us with an image of Butor’s “original variety, ” before the monotony of the Roman empire set in. It is both a dystopian political vision and an instance of the modern sublime, in which the “vast bazaar” of ethnic diversity hovers over “nothingness. ” Richard uses the image of jewels to describe the brilliance of a multiplicity in which the parts refuse to combine into a whole, and in which the effect of the whole derives from the combative juxtaposition of brilliancies. But this brilliance is merely the other side of emptiness, an effect which we have seen in Richard’s description of Flaubert’s “shimmer. ” Like Vergil and Martial, Flaubert stresses the variety of  languages spoken within his diverse gathering. But it is rare for Roman authors to comment on the vast linguistic range within its borders.134 An exception is the description of the first Pentecost in Acts 2:8–­11. In the light of Pentecost, Christian authors make much of the diversity of tongues encompassed by the Church.135 A good example of this is Augustine’s explication of a passage from Psalm 44 as an allegory of the diversity of tongues by which God is praised. The passage describes the clothing of a bride (Psalm 44 [45]:10): “adstetit regina a dextris tuis in vestitu deaurato circumamicta varietate” (“On your right hand stood the queen in raiment of gold, clothed about with various colors”). Augustine interprets the varietas of the queen’s dress as follows: What is the clothing of this queen? It is both precious and of various colors. It is the mysteries of doctrine in all the various languages: one African, one

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

79

Syrian, one Hebrew, one this, one that; these languages produce the various colors of the queen’s clothes. But just as all the colors of the clothes harmonize in unity (in unitate concordat), so do all the languages in the one faith. In the clothing let there be variety, but let there be no tear. See, we have understood variety as being about the diversity of tongues and the clothing to refer to unity. But in the variety what is the gold? Let there be any amount of variety of tongues, one gold is preached: not a different gold, but variety made from gold. (Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmos, 44)

Martial speaks of the various barbarian languages becoming one when their speakers shift to the (Latin) acclamation of the emperor; by contrast, Christian texts inspired by Pentecost represent diversity as compatible with, even requisite for, the praise of the one God.136 The problem of reconciling the diversity of a population with its singularity or unity is most commonly solved by recourse to metaphor. Each metaphor has its own particular implications. One suspects that Augustine’s concordat is punning on chorda and that the metaphor here is musical; if so, it is a pun that goes back at least to Ovid: Ut satis impulsas temptavit [sc. Orpheus] pollice chordas et sensit varios, quamvis diversa sonarent, concordare modos, hoc vocem carmine movit: (Metamorphoses, 10.145–­47)137 When he had tried out the strings enough, plucking them with his thumb, And felt that the various notes, though they sounded differently, Agreed, he began his song as follows . . .

More radical metaphors of a diverse unity seek to eliminate diversity altogether. In modern times one of the most common images for the unification of diversity has been that of the melting pot, crystallized by Israel Zangwill in his play of that name (1908). Zangwill’s metaphor is taken from the process of smelting, and it implies the dissolution of diversity, an idea that has been vigorously challenged by proponents of multiculturalism. But Zangwill’s basic idea finds expression in a phrase from a much earlier work, a work that also plays an important role in the American political imagination. This is the Pseudo-­Vergilian Moretum, where we have to do with a kitchen pot rather than a smelting pot. The phrase is e pluribus unus, which will take its place on the Great Seal of the United States (adopted in 1782), along with two other Vergilian tags: annuit coeptis (Georgics 1.140) and novus ordo saeclorum (Eclogues 4.5); the phrase from the Moretum is a way-­station along the road to the adoption of Zangwill’s metaphor of the melting pot.138

80

chapter t wo

The Moretum describes the morning of a peasant as he wakes to prepare his breakfast, the mixture of garlic, cheese, and herbs named by the title. Simulus mixes the ingredients in a pot, and as the hand turns the ingredients of the Moretum in the pot they lose their individual colors (101–­2): it manus in gyrum: paulatim singula vires deperdunt proprias, color est e pluribus unus. The hand goes round and gradually the individual ingredients Lose their own character so that one color emerges from many.

So far, so good: each ingredient loses its own character to produce a single color, an image quite compatible with Zangwill’s melting pot. But as we read on the picture changes (102–­4): color est e pluribus unus. nec totus viridis, quia lactea frusta repugnant, nec de lacte nitens quia tot variatur ab herbis. One color emerges from many. Not completely green, because the milky bits resist, Nor shining from the milk, because it is variegated by all the herbs.

The color that emerges is varius: indeterminate, uneven, or mottled. The milky bits of the mixture resist assimilation (repugnant) and the herbs variegate (variatur) the mixture. In other words, this passage produces a metaphor more appropriate to the politics of diversity than to the metaphor of the melting pot. What has been forgotten in the modern appropriation of the phrase from the Moretum is the Latin word varius. Writing on “Diversity” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, Louis Menand begins with the words “ ‘Diversity’ is a term with no essential philosophical, political or aesthetic content. It simply names a fact . . . (namely that people are different from one another)” (1995, 336). He then goes on to say that the word has latterly acquired all of these kinds of content: “Since the demise of the Cold War, toward the end of the 1980s, ‘diversity’ has become a slogan in a movement known as ‘multiculturalism, ’ and in this context the term has acquired a content: it is taken to name a good in itself. For multiculturalists, diversity is a condition to be recognized, encouraged and celebrated. ” Replacing and critiquing ideals such as the brotherhood of man, multiculturalism holds that difference is to be celebrated, and that a polity should sustain, rather than diminish, a great variety of distinctive cultures carried by ethno-­racial groups. Menand’s history of the word “diversity” is right as far as it goes. But, as recent translations of varius and varietas with “diversity” attest, there is a longer tradition of positively loaded uses of this concept to

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

81

be considered.139 Since the late 1980s, to say that diversity is to be “celebrated” is as conventional as it was to say that nature “rejoices” in variety in antiquity and the Renaissance. In fact, I would say that the second is a deep cultural memory that helps to facilitate the first. Menand’s thoughtful essay describes the rationale for a multicultural ideal, as well as the intractable problems involved in articulating the principles of a politics of diversity. I cannot weigh in on that debate here. But one of the kinds of content that Menand mentions in connection with diversity is aesthetic content. This is not wholly distinct from political content, since the capacity to imagine and celebrate the image of a particular kind of whole has obvious political potential. Plato is perhaps the first to point this out, though not with approval. When he comes to describe the four different kinds of debased political system in the Republic, Plato says of democracy that, given the variety of types it will comprise, democracy will be the most beautiful of political systems (Republic 557b–­c). A democratic city will be poikilos (Plato repeats the word four times in five lines), and this poikilia will make it seem the most beautiful (kallistē) to women and children, like a cloak decorated (pepoikilmenon) with every species of flower. Plato’s multicolored cloak is clearly meant to bring to mind the peplos (robe) woven for the cult statue of Athena in the Parthenon and presented to her in a ceremony that began with a great procession. That procession, celebrated in the Parthenon frieze, was unusually inclusive, comprising not only citizens, but also women, slaves, metics (resident aliens), and children. Both the procession and the robe might well be taken to represent the diversity of the democractic polis. Plato connects democracy with sacrifices, festivals, and choruses, which stimulate the desires of citizens (Laws 835d–­e; cf. Monoson 2000, 171). Accord­ ingly, he brings back the language of variety (poikilia) in another context when he describes the democratic man, who thinks all pleasures equal and involves himself in a range of activities, jumping from one to another. Such a man is “multi-­hued and multifaceted, as gorgeous and varied a patchwork as that community is” (Republic 561e). Plato assumes that to expose democracy’s aesthetic attractions is to indict it. But surely any desirable political system will project some kind of aesthetic image of itself as a whole. To take a recent example, James Tully’s attempt, in his book Strange Multiplicity (1995), to develop a new philosophy of constitutionalism appropriate to a multicultural age begins and ends with an analysis of a work of art, Bill Reid’s The Spirit of Haida Gwaii. This sculpture, nineteen feet long, represents a canoe with thirteen passengers on board, figures from Haida mythology, animals, humans, and hybrids. The figures in the boat are of various forms, and often it is difficult to see where one ends and the other

82

chapter t wo

begins, to take in one without taking in a part of the other. Tully invites us to imagine contemporary institutionalism in the light of this sculpture (Tully 1995, 202), as follows: As one walks around the sculpture and is drawn to imagine oneself aboard, one is constantly made aware that the passengers never fit into their own shape. The play of one’s imagination is never allowed to settle on this possibility. This Xuuya play is orchestrated by the endless juxtaposition of these diverse and interrelated creatures, the identity of each consisting in the innumerable ways it relates to and interacts with the others. . . . The imperious attempt to colonise this celebration of diversity in one form of recognition . . . is continually resisted and defeated by the play of the irreducible diversity of the work of art on one’s imagination. (Tully 1995, 204, my emphasis)

Tully produces a more optimistic version of Flaubert’s juxtapositions, as described by Richard; perhaps his words are closer to Nietzsche’s description of the relation between words in Horace’s mosaic. Some familiar elements of the varietas complex crop up (“never allowed to settle, ” “celebration of diversity”) to give a positive inflection to the asynoptic aesthetics of varietas. We can set this against Plato’s dismissive attitude to the enticements of a “poikilistic” democracy, as a valorization of the aesthetics of diversity which Plato so emphatically deplores. A more extreme version of the aesthetics of diversity is the idea of radical difference as relationship conjured up by Fredric Jameson in his description of Nam June Paik’s video installations (quoted pp. 69–70). But, whichever version we prefer, it is clear that the politics of diversity leans to some extent on an aesthetics of diversity. The four conceptual areas I have studied in this chapter (Nature, Rhetoric, Pleasure/ Aesthetics, and Politics) are not watertight, and we have seen that they overlap in many respects. Nature provides a model for rhetoric, for instance, and variety functions in theodicy via both the discourses of nature and of rhetoric and pleasure. There is also a strong aesthetic component to the role of variety in thinking about polities. Ideas about divine and human creativity straddle the discourses of nature and rhetoric, while metaphors of mosaics, and the topos of the eye that cannot settle, feature in the discourse of variety both in the aesthetic and the political context. But, in spite of these overlaps, my four areas do carve out distinctive bundles in the toolkit of variety: one can point to the polarities of copia and varietas in the case of rhetoric, and of varietas and satietas in the case of pleasure; in the case of nature, the terms varietas and gaudium are complementary. In the discourse of aesthetics we see the persistence of the double semantic heritage of varietas, temporal

va r i e t y 's c o n t e x t

83

(change) and visual (asynopticism), each of which produces a different rationale for the aesthetic value of variety. Looking forward, the dispute, inherent in the varietas concept, about the value of different kinds of attentiveness will be taken up in chapter 4 with reference to satire and philosophy. Is variety an illusion of those who are not looking properly? What ethical issues are at stake in seeing the world as various or as all the same?

3

Putting Variety at Issue Varietas in Pliny the Younger, Lucretius, and Horace

In the previous chapter we moved swiftly over a broad terrain to consider the role that the concept of variety has played in some specific conceptual domains. The present chapter focuses on authors whose thinking or aesthetic lays a particular emphasis on variety, which may become an issue in a range of different ways. Even when devalued, variety may play an important role in the thinking of an author. For Plato and Seneca the Younger, for instance, varietas or poikilia tends to be a problem, causing a loss of focus, or seducing us into superficial responses. In this chapter, however, I examine authors who uphold varietas as a positive value, and put it to significant work in their oeuvre. I will restrict myself to Latin authors, but two Greek authors who come to mind in connection with poikilia, the Latin equivalent of varietas, are Pindar and Nonnus. Pindar will crop up in connection with Horace, and Nonnus, whose Dionysiaca has often been described as an epic of poikilia, manifests the late antique aesthetic I discussed in the previous chapter.1 My three authors, Pliny, Lucretius, and Horace, make an unlikely trio, and indeed they have very different interests in variety. What they have in common is not only that they place a positive value on varietas, but that varietas plays a central strategic role in their thinking or aesthetic. Pliny: The Variety of the Second-­Rate Pliny’s Letters have left us with a vivid portrait of a man who has been variously an object of affection or disgust in the long history of his reception. As one of the big three Latin letter-­writers, along with Cicero and Seneca, he has profoundly influenced the technique and rhetoric of self-­presentation in

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

85

the west. The life that he conjures up in these letters, with its alternation between a cultivated and industrious leisure in his villas and a busy city life full of obligations, has also been influential (see Whitton 2014). His relentlessly positive image of himself and his world has uncomfortable resonances for us moderns, who find ourselves periodically required, in the course of our professional life, to summarize our “strong points and weaknesses” (and those of others). We have become adept at an all-­purpose boosterism inflected by a strategic confession of faults that quickly turn out to be virtues; we exchange rueful stories about how busy we are in a mixture of solidarity and competitiveness. All of this, and more, makes Pliny our contemporary.2 The pendulum of readers’ reactions to his letters has swung from an admiring affection for his humanity and optimism to a superior antipathy to his boasting and bad faith, to settle on an anxious sympathy for a man who can never quite persuade himself that everything is alright.3 It is fair to say that Stanley Hoffer’s The Anxieties of Pliny the Younger (1999) has set the agenda in Pliny studies over the last fifteen years. Beneath the strident optimism of the letters we now sense that Pliny is anxious and insecure about himself and the culture of his times. Pliny’s insecurities, as Ruth Morello has argued, lead him to practice a policy of inclusiveness, rejecting the invidia that works by exclusion: “In the literary sphere, he makes much of his anxieties, deliberately revealing a lack of self-­confidence which drives him to teach and practice inclusiveness” (Morello 2007, 172). Unlike Catullus, for instance, “Pliny proceeds not by exclusion of the unworthy masses (and the concomitant creation of a select ‘in crowd’) but by ostentatious inclusion and encouragement of as wide a range of people as possible” (Morello 2007, 171). Inclusiveness is not a Roman concept, of course, but one Latin word which features prominently in passages where Pliny names his anxieties and articulates his response to them is varietas. It has often been remarked that varietas is an important value in Pliny’s letters, and indeed a word search of the letters (in the Brill online library) shows forty-­eight occurrences of some form of var*.4 Whether it be in his descriptions of villas and their environs, or of his poetic nugae; in his rhetorical theory; in his accounts of an ideal daily regime or of the capacities and oeuvre of an admired contemporary, Pliny uses the word varius and its companions again and again. But so what? Is this simply a routine genuflection before a generally approved quality, or does it play a significant strategic role in Pliny’s thinking? I start with three striking usages. First, Pliny puts his problem, and his insecurity, in a nutshell in a short letter to Rusticus:

86

chapter three

Ut satius unum aliquid insigniter facere quam plura mediocriter, ita plurima mediocriter si non possis unum aliquid insigniter. Quod intuens ego variis me studiorum generibus nulli satis confisus experior. Proinde cum hoc vel illud leges, ita singulis veniam ut non singulis dabis. (9.29.1)5 As it is better to do one thing with distinction rather than several things indifferently, so it is better to do several things indifferently if you cannot do one thing with distinction. Realizing this, I exercise myself in various kinds of intellectual pursuit because I am not sufficiently confident of any. Furthermore, when you read this or that of mine you will be indulgent about each one of them, since there are several.

To this we can compare a couple of other passages related to different aspects of this statement, the first being the idea that variety is the recourse of those who mistrust their abilities. At 8.21.4, Pliny describes a recitation of his poetic nugae, of which he says: Liber fuit et opusculis varius et metris. Ita solemus, qui ingenio parum fidimus, satietatis periculum fugere. The book was various in genre and meter. That’s how those of us who have little trust in our native ability avoid the danger of boring our audience.

We can note the recurrence of the verb (con)fidere: Pliny’s is a crisis of confidence. The problem he must address is made more explicit in this second passage, where satietas, a common antonym to varietas, is the focus of concern about his ingenium—­will he be too much? Our third passage takes up the idea that varietas works by shifting the burden from the evaluation of individual parts to allow pleasure to be taken in the varied whole. Answering potential criticism that he may have gone over the top in one of his speeches (“laetius fecisse quam orationis severitas exigat”) Pliny declares: Adnisi certe sumus, ut quamlibet diversa genera lectorum per plures dicendi species teneremus, ac sicut veremur, ne quibusdam pars aliqua secundum suam cuiusque naturam non probetur, ita videmur posse confidere, ut universitatem omnibus varietas ipsa commendet. (2.5.7) I certainly made an effort to hold the attention of the widest possible diversity of readers by means of several kinds of style, and although I fear that some part may not appeal to particular readers because of individual taste, so it seems that I can trust that variety itself will commend the speech as a whole to all.

One solution to the problem that you can’t please everybody, since tastes and opinions differ, is to condemn those who don’t think the same way, provided,

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

87

of course, that you are confident in what you have to offer. This is the Catullan solution: a community built on exclusion, exclusiveness, and invective. Pliny’s inclusiveness is the opposite of this, but we should note that the inclusion of all is made possible by a shift of attention from individual elements to a varied whole. Variety gives Pliny confidence (confidere again) in a situation where he is anxious (veremur). Just as Rusticus will go easy on each individual genre of Pliny’s output, knowing that there are others, so individual members of a diverse audience, who find this or that not to their taste, will all be pleased by the variety of the whole. Here is the broadest case Pliny makes for varietas: it is a principle of unity (universitas, omnibus) in the face of diversity, and of the impossibility of pleasing everyone. We could generalize the anxiety that prompts Pliny to have recourse to varietas as the fear of putting all one’s eggs in one basket. The audience cannot be treated as one person, and Pliny can’t rely on his ingenium alone, nor can he stake his claim to respect based on any one field of achievement. But the flip side of this anxious sense of limitation is the supremely affirmative quality of varietas (nature rejoices in variety). It is revealing that we see the same structure of thought in a very different context when Pliny discusses the advisability of building two villas in the same area, another version of the problem of putting all one’s eggs in the same basket: Contra vereor ne sit incautum, rem tam magnam isdem tempestatibus isdem casibus subdere; tutius videtur incerta fortunae possessionum varietatibus experiri. Habet etiam multum iucunditatis soli caelique mutatio, ipsaque illa peregrinatio inter sua. (3.19.4) On the other hand I fear that it may be careless to subject such a big property to the hazards of the same weather; it seems safer to meet the uncertainties of fortune with a variety of estates. Anyhow, a change of soil and sky has its own pleasure, as does the process of traveling between one’s possessions.

Varietas here serves to obviate the dangers of consolidation by fighting fire with fire: fortune is often described as varia (changeable), and here its uncertainty is to be met with possessionum varietatibus (a variety of estates), which in turn releases the pleasures of change (mutatio). This is another case of Pliny making a virtue of necessity. We will return to villas later, but let us pursue the implications of our first passage, where Pliny says that, though it would be better to do one thing insigniter, he must make do with second best. This problem has another dimension, to do not with talent but rather with the value and priority to be

88

chapter three

attached to different kinds of activity. Should Pliny in fact do one thing insig­ niter? Pliny is talking about his studia in that first passage, but should studia themselves be the focus of an elite life? A prominent theme of Pliny’s letters is the relation between studia (literary activity; cf. your own research) and officia (social or administrative duties; cf. teaching load and administrative burdens). For the most part Pliny complains that officia interfere with his stu­ dia, studia being the most satisfying, pleasurable, and possibly glorious, of his activities.6 But we are given conflicting accounts of the relative value of studia and officia right from the beginning of Pliny’s epistolary oeuvre. For Pliny oscillates between recalling his friends from the deep recesses of their villas and their otium to the serious business of officium on the one hand, and, on the other, urging them to find time for themselves and for the creation of something that is their own, away from the distractions of officium. The problem, as he puts it, is that, though studia are the most satisfying form of activity and the single most likely access to gloria, these same studia (in the form of philosophy) tell us that we must prioritize officia.7 So studia cannot alone form the substance of a worthy life, and this gives a particular rhythm to the existence reflected in the Letters. Studia are, and must be, pursued intermittently in time snatched from officia; otium and negotium must be rotated.8 Alternation, intermittency, postponement, and provisionality are the characteristics of elite life as reflected in the Letters. It is hardly surprising, then, that varietas is a recurrent theme: it is the positive response to the fact that neither his abilities nor his values allow Pliny to focus his energies and ambition on one thing. Pliny’s regret that he cannot trust himself to perform one thing insigniter takes on a broader significance in this light. As we trace the source of Pliny’s anxieties from the inner circle of personal capacity through the question of the priority and value of different elite activities, we come to the outer circle of the political regime under which he writes. We might note, first of all, that when Pliny compares himself to Cicero as a letter-­writer he excuses the fact that he writes only short letters by alluding to the difference between Cicero’s times and his own. Varietas is a key term in this distinction.9 Neque eadem nostra condicio quae M. Tulli, ad cuius exemplum nos vocas. Illi enim et copiosissimum ingenium, et par ingenio qua varietas rerum qua magnitudo largissime suppetebat. Nos quam angustis terminis claudamur etiam tacente me perspicis. (9.2.2) Nor is my situation the same as that of  Marcus Tullius, whose example you ask me to follow. For he had a most copious genius and, matching it, a generous

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

89

supply of material, both various and significant. As for me, I don’t need to tell you how constrained my limits are.

Pliny can never be the letter-­writer that Cicero was because he lacks the conjunction of a copious genius with a historical context characterized by vari­ etas. The combination of copia and varietas, as we have seen, is a mainstay of rhetorical theory, and is here used by Pliny to make a point about the relation between genius and the times in which it flourishes. He emphasizes the significance of birthdate lottery by dividing these two complementary rhetorical terms and distributing them between the individual (copiosissimum ingenium) and his historical context (varietas rerum). When Pliny does write a let­ter about high political matters, in the manner of Cicero, he acknowledges that there is now little opportunity for such communications: Sunt quidem cuncta sub unius arbitrio, qui pro utilitate communi solus omnium curas laboresque suscepit; quidam tamen salubri temperamento ad nos quoque velut rivi ex illo benignissimo fonte decurrunt, quos et haurire ipsi et absentibus amicis ministrare epistulis possumus. (3.20.12) Indeed, everything now falls under the will of one person, who has alone undertaken all burdens and labors on behalf of the public welfare; but some streams, as it were, do make their way down to us too, with salutary moderation, from that generous source, on which we can ourselves draw and then distribute to our absent friends in letters.

We should remember this image of the emperor as fons when we get to the famous description of the Fons Clitumnus, which takes up the whole of Epis­ tles 8.8. In this unusual example of pure natural description Pliny makes viv­ idly present the union of copia with varietas which he attributes to the relation between Cicero and his times.10 The letter follows the progress of the river, from its fons at the bottom of a hill “densely wooded with ancient cypresses” (“antiqua cupressu nemorosus et opacus,” 8.8.2). As Pliny follows the stream, he describes the teeming and varied human activity on or by the river, both recreational (the pleasure skiffs) and religious (the temple of  Clitumnus himself, with its accompanying shrines to lesser gods). Without wishing to turn this description into an allegory, which it is not, I would suggest two associations that hover behind the natural description and contribute to its resonance. One is the emperor himself, who has already featured as a fons in 3.20, and is figured as a protective insula in another natural description (6.31.5–­17; see Saylor 1972). The river, powerful, benevolent, and reverend, facilitates a variety of pleasurable human activity, supporting it without coercion. The

90

chapter three

second figure I would see behind this description is that of rhetorical eloquence, which is specifically suggested when Pliny says that the river is carried along “ipsa sui copia et quasi pondere” (8.8.3; for pondus in rhetoric, see OLD 6a). In rhetorical theory, copia is the first requisite of a successful orator, and it is also common to find eloquence itself described as a fons or stream.11 In Pliny’s description, bulk or volume (copia, pondus) is reconciled with detail, for the clarity of the water is such that you can count the individual pebbles and the coins that have been thrown into the river (8.8.2).12 Varietas enters the description of the Fons Clitumnus lexically when Pliny says that pleasure skiffs can vary labor with otium by going with or against the current (8.8.4).13 Here Pliny’s habitual image of the rotation of labor and otium is phrased with rhetorical variatio and inserted into a description that resonates with political and rhetorical associations. The pleasurable rotation characteristic of elite life is facilitated by the powerful flow of the river, on which this varied life depends. The political resonance is obvious. What Pliny gives us here, in his description of the river and the life on or around it, is an aestheticized image of a cohesive yet free communal life, led and enabled, but not dictated, by the emperor. The aesthetic character of this image is marked by the language and figures of rhetoric, which tie what is being described to the eloquent description itself. Rhetorical structure is given a visual realization when the chiasmus describing the trees on the riverbanks (“Ripae fraxino multa, multa populo vestiuntur,” 4) is followed by a visual icon of chiasmus, the reflection of trees in the water (“quae perspicuus amnis velut mersas viridi imagine adnumerat”). Similarly, the words “laborem otio otium labore variare” (4, “to vary labor with rest, rest with labor”) are chiastically phrased and at the same time convey a visual image of chiasmus, as the boat turns one way and then the other to face the current or go with the flow. Con­tinuing the description, Pliny moves on to the religious aspects of the scene. The shrine to Clitumnus houses an image of the god, but all around are smaller shrines, each with its own god and cult. Some of these minor gods have their own stream (5). The letter ends with Pliny facetiously telling his friend that there is even opportunity for studium (“studebis quoque,” 7) in the numerous inscriptions in honor of the spring written on every pillar and wall. He concludes: “Most of them you will admire, but some will make you laugh—­though I know that you are really too kind to laugh at any of them.” Pliny’s ekphrasis allows him to paint an attractive picture of unity and multiplicity, compulsion and freedom, power and pleasure, casting a political image into the structures and terms of rhetoric and, in particular, the relation between copia and varietas.

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

91

In an essay on Pliny’s Fons Clitumnus letter, the great Wilamowitz (1913, 378), no fan of Pliny, borrows the imagery of this passage, but to exactly the opposite effect. He sums Pliny up as “a good fellow, but of meagre ambition and achievement” (“ein braver Mensch, aber gering im Wollen und noch mehr im Vollbringen”). Still, this makes him a good representative of the average man of his time, which is described as “the broad, flat, tranquil bed into which the proud roar and ambitious onrush (hochträumende Strom) of Roman culture had degenerated after a century of imperial peace.” Wilamowitz articulates precisely the anxiety that Pliny’s description exorcises, an anxiety manifested in his comparison between Cicero’s variegated times and the constriction of his own. Pliny’s description of the Fons Clitumnus is pure celebration, an image of copious variety that discreetly figures the flourishing of studia under the good emperor. A prime example of this flourishing is furnished by one of Pliny’s many laudatory portraits, that of  Pompeius Saturninus in the first book (1.16). It is a commonplace that whatever Pliny writes about in his letters his subject is, ultimately, himself. This may be true in a number of senses. When he praises an individual, as he often does, we can take it that the qualities for which he praises that individual are those which he would claim for himself. Or, if we want to be more generous (seldom the case when it comes to Pliny!), he is offering us a model of how to be. But the praise of Pompeius Saturninus is also about Pliny in the sense that in this, and letters like it, he displays his ungrudging generosity and freedom from invidia, which is Pliny’s preeminent bogey. Pompeius is praised for being varius, but the context differs from that of the passages I quoted earlier, which concern Pliny’s diffidence about his own abilities. As the end of this letter will make clear, Saturninus’s varietas is potentially a strategy for avoiding the corrosive effects of invidia. But there is no inkling of that in the opening of this letter: Amabam Pompeium Saturninum (hunc dico nostrum) laudabamque eius ingenium, etiam antequam scirem, quam varium quam flexibile quam multiplex esset; nunc verum me totum tenet habet possidet. (1.16.1) I loved Pompeius Saturninus (I mean our friend) and praised his brilliance, before I knew how various, how adaptable, and how many-­sided he was; but now he has me, holds me, and possesses me completely.

This arresting beginning leaves us in no doubt as to what Pliny admires about Pompeius, but the sentence features an interesting chiasmus. “Amabam Pompeium Saturninum” is echoed at the end by “me totum tenet habet possidet.”

92

chapter three

Pliny has become the object of the man he admired, and the three adjectives which emphasized Pompeius’s Protean genius (varium, flexibile, multiplex, a common collocation in Latin, see p. 19) are echoed in the three verbs with which the sentence ends.14 As I have implied, Pompeius’s varied multiplicity calls the mythical figure of Proteus to mind but, paradoxically, the verbs that confirm this connection (tenet habet possidet) reverse the burden of the Proteus myth. This Proteus holds fast and occupies those who approach him. It is the reader who is implicitly elusive, apt to slip away. At first it appears that the field of Pompeius’s variety is his oratory, for Pliny goes on to describe his mastery of different rhetorical styles and genres.15 But, as we read on, we discover that Pompeius also writes poetry, nugae (light poetry, literally “trifles”) like Catullus and Calvus, a literary type itself characterized by variety. As an exponent of both oratory and nugae, Pompeius is already beginning to look a little familiar when, to cap it all, we learn that he has read Pliny some letters, which he claims were written by his wife. Whether he wrote them himself or his wife wrote them, Pliny adds, it does him equal credit. Like Pliny, then, Pompeius works in several quite different genres, and this versatility prompts Pliny to have Pompeius beside him all day long.16 Est ergo mecum per diem totum; eundem antequam scribam, eundem cum scripsi, eundem etiam cum remittor, non tamquam eundem lego. (1.16.7) So he is by my side all day long; it is the same Pompeius I read before I write, the same after writing, the same Pompeius whom I read in relaxation, but I don’t read him as the same.

Here Pliny quibbles on eundem (the same), distinguishing identity from similarity: it’s always that same Pompeius he picks up, and yet he doesn’t seem the same Pompeius.17 And this is what rescues Pompeius from the satietas that, as Pliny goes on to say, afflicts those who are continually with us because they are still alive. For the epistle ends by complaining that if Pompeius were among those whom we had never seen, we would be eagerly seeking out his busts: “As it is, his honor and gratia among us fades, as if by satietas” (1.16.8). The epistle that began with Pompeius’s varietas draws to a close with its usual antonym, satietas. In the final words of the letter, Pliny chides his contemporaries for their malignitas (meanness) in neglecting Pompeius simply because he is alive and, driving the point home, he produces another trio of verbs in asyndeton, as when he earlier described how Pompeius “has” him: At hoc pravum et malignum est, non admirari hominem admiratione dignissimum, quia videre adloqui complecti, nec laudare tantum verum sed etiam amare contingit.

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

93

But it is wrong and ungenerous not to admire a man who is most worthy of admiration just because we can see, speak to, and embrace him, and not only praise but love him.

Because we “have” Pompeius he may fall victim to our satietas, but instead, by virtue of being various, he “has” ( possidet) Pliny. Varietas, once again, features as the recourse against one of Pliny’s most persistent enemies, invidia, indicated here by the word malignum. Here too we can say that varietas serves to transform anxiety into affirmation, only the order of argument has been reversed, so that the problem is articulated at the end of what is a resoundingly celebratory letter. Invidia is but one of the problems that confronts a writer. Another problem that Pliny addresses strikes at the heart of rhetorical strategy, and in this case varietas is part of the problem as well as the solution. How can rhetoric deal with an audience which is heterogeneous? In raising this problem Pliny gives a new twist to the conventional association between copia and vari­ etas. The letter concerned deals with the relative merits of brevitas and copia, and is addressed to his friend Tacitus. Pliny puts the case for copia in a letter which, one cannot help feeling, must have had particular significance for its addressee, the master of brevitas. Pliny’s case goes as follows: Varia sunt hominum iudicia, variae voluntates. Inde qui eandem causam simul audierunt, saepe diversum, interdum idem sed ex diversis animi motibus sentiunt . . . omnibus ergo dandum est aliquid quod teneant, quod agnoscant. (1.20.12–­13) The judgments of men are various and so are their inclinations. So, if you take people who have heard the same case at the same time, often they have different opinions; sometimes the same, but from different emotional reactions. . . . So all must be given something that they recognize to hold on to.

Pliny then compares his rhetorical practice to his agricultural enterprise: “On my farms I cultivate my fruit trees and fields as carefully as my vineyards, and in the fields I sow barley, beans, and other legumes as well as corn and wheat, so when I am making a speech I scatter many arguments around like seeds in order to reap whatever crop comes up” (“sic in actione plura quasi semina latius spargo, ut quae provenerint colligam,” 1.20.16).18 In this context we can return to take a closer look at one of the three passages I quoted at the beginning of this section. In Epistles 2.5 the argument about the varietas of the speech is not easy to follow. We begin with what seems a simple collocation: “I certainly made an effort to hold the attention of the widest possible diversity of readers by means of several kinds of style” (“Adnisi certe sumus,

94

chapter three

ut quamlibet diversa genera lectorum per plures dicendi species teneremus,” 2.5.7).19 There is something for everyone, in other words. But perhaps this is not the point, since Pliny goes on: “and although I fear that some part may not appeal to particular readers because of individual taste, so it seems that I can trust that variety itself will commend the speech as a whole to all.” Here Pliny seems to be saying that each individual member might balk at some things but will be attracted by the varietas of the whole (cf. “veniam ut non singulis,” 9.29.1). The ground seems to have shifted. Are we talking about the diverse tastes of a diverse audience, or about the distinction between what individual members might think of each particular part, according to their different tastes, and what they might think of the varied whole? The simile of the convivium that follows seems to suggest the latter: “For at a dinner party we may individually refuse several dishes but we’ll praise the whole meal, and the food which is not to our taste does not spoil our pleasure in what we do like” (2.5.8).20 Pliny makes a double contrast, between singuli and omnes on the one hand, and between plerisque cibis and totam cenam on the other. Does varietas address the distinction between an individual’s reaction to each dish (some of which may not be to his taste) and to the (varied) dinner as a whole, or between the reaction of individuals and of the (varied) audience as a whole? Does varietas create a group response rather than an aggregate of individual responses? Perhaps the answer is that Pliny works with both variables at the same time: the way to deal with a varied audience is to shift the focus from parts to whole, though not to what we would now call an “organic” whole. Paradoxically, varietas is the way to get an audience to respond as a whole to a whole, a paradox to which we can compare the fact that Pompeius holds and possesses Pliny by his very changeableness. The successful speech is various, then, because of the variety of its audience. Another wing of Pliny’s literary output is various by its very nature, and that is his nugae, collections of Catullan trivialities which, perhaps mercifully, have not survived.21 In the middle of the letter about Pompeius Saturninus, Pliny describes Pompeius’s nugae: Quantum illis leporis dulcedinis amaritudinis amoris! Inserit sane, sed data opera, mollibus levibusque duriusculos quosdam. (1.16.5)22 What charm, what sweetness, bitterness, love! In fact, with conscious art, he weaves in with the soft and smoother poems some that are a little harsh.

The description, with its asyndetic list, can be compared with other passages in Pliny on collections of nugae. Closest is the passage on Sentinus Augurinus’s poematia:

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

95

Multa tenuiter, multa sublimiter, multa venuste, multa tenere, multa dulciter, multa cum bile. (4.27.1) He wrote much that is slender, much that is lofty, much that is charming or tender or sweet, and much that is angry.

When it comes to his own nugae, Pliny uses the same pile-­up of elements, but gives us more sense of the why and the wherefore. We have already seen him attribute the variety of his book of nugae to a lack of trust in his talent. On another occasion, the writing of nugae manifests the variety and humanity of his diversions:23 Facio non numquam versiculos severos parum, facio; nam et comoedias audio et aspecto mimos et lyricos lego et Sotadicos [mss. Socraticos] intellego; aliquando praeterea rideo iocor ludo, utque omnia innoxiae remissionis genera breviter amplectar, homo sum. (5.3.2) I sometimes write little verses that are none too solemn; for I attend comedies and watch mimes and read lyric poets and understand Sotadics (mss. Socratic dialogues); besides, sometimes I laugh or joke or play, and, to sum up briefly all forms of harmless relaxation, I’m human.

The asyndetic sequence of verbs (rideo iocor ludo) appears, in expanded form, in another reference to Pliny’s trivial verse, but this time with an interesting connection between the variety of occasions and moods that are reflected in the nugae and the variety of tastes in his audience: Accipies cum hac epistula hendecasyllabos nostros, quibus nos in vehiculo in balineo inter cenam oblectamus otium temporis. His iocamur ludimus amamus dolemus querimur irascimur, describimus aliquid modo pressius modo elatius, atque ipsa varietate temptamus efficere, ut alia aliis quaedam fortasse omnibus placeant. (4.14.3)24 You will receive with this letter my hendecasyllables, with which I pass my leisure time pleasantly while in a carriage, in the bath, or at dinner. In these I joke, play, love, grieve, complain, or rage; I write now in a condensed style, now in a more elevated style, and try to bring it about that, through variety itself, different things appeal to different people, some things perhaps to all.

Just as it is characteristic of being “human” (homo) that one’s moods and occupations are varied, so it is characteristic of homines that they have different tastes and opinions (quot homines . . .). The variety of one’s otium is, or should be, a microcosm of the variety of human tastes, so that while otium is often

96

chapter three

associated with retirement to the villa it is also outward-­looking in its embrace of variety.25 So Pliny associates his collections of nugae with a sequence of moods, oc­ casions, entertainments, and styles whose inclusive variety allows him to say homo sum, words that are both a proud testimony to his humanity and an ad­ mission that he is “only a man.” To be a homo is to be inclusive (“et comoedias audio et mimos et . . . et . . . ; omnia . . . genera . . . amplectar”) and thereby to please an audience, and a humanity, which is heterogeneous. Furthermore, the nugae take their place in a portfolio of studia that must itself be varied in view of Pliny’s inability to do one thing with distinction, and the studia themselves are pursued within a life in which they must be rotated with officia or negotium. The principle of varietas, then, permeates each of the concentric circles of Pliny’s contexts from his everyday moods to the political regime. The variety of Pliny’s nugae reflects his off-­duty life, the otium that he enjoys in his villas. No ancient writer has given such a full account of his “studious” leisure and, particularly, of the special places in which he conducts it. Pliny’s villa letters have been perhaps the most influential letters of his oeu­ vre.26 The ideal of villa culture, characteristically, is articulated in a letter in praise of another, namely Vestricius Spurinna, in Epistles 3.1. This letter has recently been discussed by William Johnson (2010) in a book on imperial literary culture, where he points out that the elaborate and varied timetable of activities which makes up Spurinna’s day includes, even emphasizes, literary activities (studia), but that these are not ends in themselves. Johnson writes, “Literary pursuits are a central component of Spurinna’s regimen, but, tellingly, are not ends in themselves. Rather, it is their incorporation into his other activities that makes his a model of cultured existence” (Johnson 2010, 37). Johnson goes on to compare Spurinna’s villa timetable, with its contrived varietas and artful chiasmuses, to a poetry book: “A balanced rotation of physical, intellectual and social exercises, and a contrived varietas. . . . The design of Spurinna’s day is worthy of a poetry book, a refined garden, or in fact any ‘art’ that counterpoises a unifying structure with elaborate variation” (37–­38).27 Though Pliny writes a good deal about villas and the pursuits of a cultured otium, it is significant that he is often imagining the otium of the addressee while he remains mired in the officia of the city. In the medium of the letter, the rotation of otium and officium transpires between members of his society as well as within the individual life. In 2.8 he writes to a friend who has borrowed one of his villas, “Are you engaged in studia or are you fishing or hunting, or all at the same time?” (2.81). Pliny protests that he does not begrudge Caninius his leisure (“non possum dicere invideo”), for Caninius’s

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

97

gain is not Pliny’s loss; the letter creates a new unit out of the pair addressee and writer. Nevertheless, Pliny goes on to contrast his own life in the city with the variety that is at Caninius’s disposal. His business duties, he says, are like chains, one link after another: Nam veteribus negotiis nova accrescunt, nec tamen priora peraguntur: tot nexibus, tot quasi catenis maius in dies occupationum agmen extenditur. (2.8.3) New business piles up on the old before the old is finished, and, as more and more links are added to the chain, I see my work stretching out farther and farther each day.

The life of negotium stretches seamlessly on, unarticulated, unvaried, and uninterrupted. Pliny’s image of a chain is a helpful contrast to the varietas that he so prizes, since the latter is often characterized by the verb distinguere, which implies separation.28 When his friend Fuscus inquires how he should pursue his studia while in retirement (7.9.9–­10), Pliny enjoins on Fuscus a varied menu of activities: translation, imitation, historical narrative, letters, and, finally, the writing of lusus (light verse).29 He begins by suggesting that Fuscus practice translating from Greek into Latin or vice versa. After expounding the benefits of this exercise at some length, Pliny notes that his friend is particularly occupied with oratory. But he should not devote himself exclusively to this combative style: just as the land is refreshed with a variety and a rotation of crops, so our minds are refreshed by switching from one exercise to another (7). Fuscus should try historical narrative, or write a letter with particular care. It’s acceptable, too, to relax by writing poetry, nothing continuous and long (which requires otium), but the short witty kind called lusus “which aptly punctuates (distinguit) duties and responsibilities however pressing” (9). Pliny then launches into elegiacs himself, giving an example of his own versatility while he discusses this very quality. He compares the human spirit to wax that can be molded into a statue of  Venus or Mars, then to sacred springs that can extinguish fires or water flowers (7.9.11): sic hominum ingenium flecti ducique per artes non rigidas docta mobilitate decet. This is the appropriate way for human intelligence to be flexed and adapted to the softer arts, learning versatility.

It is for this reason that great men have delighted and exercised themselves with these lusus:

98

chapter three

Nam mirum est ut his opusculis animus intendatur remittatur. Recipiunt enim amores odia iras misericordiam urbanitatem, omnia denique quae in vita atque etiam in foro causisque versantur. (7.9.12) For it is wonderful how the mind is both concentrated and relaxed by these little compositions. They admit love, anger, pity, sophisticated wit—­in short, everything that goes on in life, and even in the forum.

The asyndetic list of contrasting emotions is Pliny’s characteristic way of describing lusus or nugae. Familiar terms from the semantic field of varietas crop up in this passage (recoluntur, distinguit), but what is striking here is the range of reasons for pursuing varied studia. This varietas both relaxes and sharpens the mind. It punctuates duties, making a variegated routine, for the writing of  lusus serves to splinter the chain of negotia into a variety of mo­ ments.30 Furthermore, it prepares the orator for the variety of affects and attitudes met with in the forum, as well as in life more generally. Variety is both a relaxation from, and a preparation for, occupations (a ludus in both its senses). Putting it more broadly, we could say that varietas staves off the threat of satietas and fastidium, the loss of relish in life’s more serious business (so remittatur, etc.), but it also develops a flexible response to a world that is manifold in its emotional range (intendatur).31 Pliny’s nugae are one kind of aesthetic product that has ramifications for the principle of varietas in his life and thought as a whole; the layout of  his vil­ las is another.32 If we consider Pliny’s descriptions of the landscape surrounding his villas we see that the principle according to which gardens are laid out, or views constructed, is that of a varietas in which elements are both isolated and mixed. Undifferentiated expanses are avoided (compare the chain of ne­ gotia), for it is precisely the fragmentation of terrain into a various multiplicity that restores the eyes.33 Particularly interesting are the words Pliny uses to describe an alcove in his villa as a structuring mechanism for the landscape. Early in the same letter (2.17.3) he describes the scene (facies) approaching the villa as varia. In a long description of the villa itself  Pliny comes to his favorite suite of rooms (amores mei), and in the bedroom is an alcove: a pedibus mare, a tergo villae, a capite silvae: tot facies locorum totidem fenestris et distinguit et miscet. (2.17.21) At its foot the sea, behind it villas, at its head the woods; the alcove both distinguishes and mixes the different views on the landscape with as many windows.

The language of varietas appears in the verb distinguo: the windows pick out different scenes, both distinguishing and mixing them, as though they were

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

99

assembling a bouquet from flowers picked in a meadow.34 We could apply Pliny’s words on the alcove to the aesthetics of the varied literary collection, whose variety makes each individual item stand out, one from another, and yet mixes like with unlike at the same time. As Pliny tells us in the first letter of his first book, he has not attempted to preserve the order in which his letters were written, for he was not writing a history (“non enim historiam componebam,” 1.1.1). What then was he composing? Nowhere does he explicitly tell us, and it is a striking fact that, though Pliny discusses the aesthetics and rhetoric of his speeches, his nugae, and even his villas, he has virtually nothing to say about his books of letters. But it is clear that the collection effects the same kind of fracturing itemization and mingling of heterogeneous items as does his favorite alcove. Let us try, now, to put aesthetics into the context of Pliny’s anxieties and strategies. In the letters, Pliny sometimes speaks of his priorities, and of his worries concerning which of his achievements will ensure him a lasting gloria. There is a strain of zero-­sum thinking in the letters: if it is this, it is not that; if this is most worth doing, then that is less valuable. We might gather from these moments that Pliny puts his greatest trust in the survival of his speeches.35 But, with the exception of the Panegyricus, none of these survive. Has posterity played an ironic trick on Pliny, leaving us with the husk and shucking the fruit itself, so to speak? Or has posterity seen better than he could that Pliny was articulating a new conception of value and a new criterion of judgment in his letters, and that the letters themselves were the best answer to the question of what Pliny amounts to? Yes, the letters are a portrait of Pliny the all-­rounder, and, yes, they also locate him at the center of a society of praise. That, if we want, is what Pliny amounts to. But there is a different way to read the letters. Varietas provides an answer to the question “What does it all (a life, an oeuvre, a society) add up to?” but it is an answer that refuses the terms of  the question, an answer that diverts anxiety into celebration: we cannot, and should not, focus our lives about one center. Not only are there the limitations of ingenium, conflicts of value, and the constriction of the political arena to consider, but there is also the heterogeneity and invidious satietas of the audience to contend with. We have seen that the language of varietas plays a crucial role in framing and negotiating all of these problems. The letters are an account of a life that does not add up, or at any rate is not to be judged by how it adds up. Pliny’s letters both pose the problem and create an aesthetic form that allows him to solve it. In the previous chapter we have seen that varietas can be featured as a corrective or as a celebratory notion. Here we have seen how Pliny uses the concept to move from anxiety to celebration. Our next author, Lucretius, has very little in common with Pliny—­a poet

100

chapter three

of the late Republic not burdened with self-­doubt, but with a burning message to convey to us. Yet here too varietas plays a crucial role in a problematic that is central to the author’s project. Here, too, varietas is something to be celebrated, though the scene will move from biography to nature. Lucretius: Various Nature, Colorless Atoms



Lucretius’s epic poem De Rerum Natura is an exposition of Epicurean physics whose purpose it is to free us from the twin evils that prevent humans from living a happy life, namely fear of death and fear of the gods. To understand how nature works is to be released from the false beliefs that bolster these fears. So Lucretius’s account of the atomic makeup of the world, and of the processes by which the nature in which we live has come about, has an ethical goal: to enable us to live a happy life in accordance with the principle of pleasure, in its austere, Epicurean form. Lucretius’s task is both to describe the constraints within which an atomic universe works, and so mitigate fear of death and the gods, and at the same time to enable us to appreciate and enjoy the pleasures that nature so generously offers. This creates a persistent tension between Lucretius’s stress on the limits imposed by the principles of atomic physics and the generous variety of nature’s manifestations.36 The defining paradox of the atomic universe is that such an austere substrate as the colorless atoms and the void can produce this varied world that we see. De Rerum Natura famously begins with an invocation of Venus and with the spectacle of a varied nature propagating itself at her urging in the spring. But over the course of the first and second books of his poem Lucretius progressively strips away the variety of the sensuous world to confront us with its constituent elements, the atoms, whose only qualities are size, weight, and shape.37 At the same time, Lucretius’s arguments, in his first book, with both the monists and the pluralists is that their theories about the ultimate constituents of matter are inadequate to account for the variety of nature. Against those who hold that everything comes from different densities of fire he argues: nam cur tam variae res possent esse requiro, ex uno si sint igni puroque creatae. . . . nedum variantia rerum tanta queat densis rarisque ex ignibus esse. (1.646–­47, 653–­54)38

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

101

For how, I ask, could things be so various If they are created uniquely and purely from fire. . . . Still less can such diversity in things Come from dense or rarer fire.

So the atoms, severely restricted in their own variety, are a necessary postulate to account for the variety that is one of the chief qualities of natura. Not only does atomic theory account for variety (while establishing its limits), but the variety of the natural world that we see serves as compensation for the limits and austerity of the atomic substrate. We will meet the same complementarity between limit and variation in the Epicurean theory of pleasure. Lucretius’s vision operates on two levels, that of the atomic substrate of matter, with its random movements, and that of the stable system of natura, which has come about from the temporary coordination of movement between the atoms of our universe. While the atomic stratum of reality has no character or will, Natura is persistently personified by Lucretius with words which stress its generous copia, variety, and creativity. In the seventh line of the poem Lucretius introduces the word daedalus (“daedala tellus,” 1.7), a word that will later be transferred to natura itself (“naturaque daedala rerum,” 5.234). This Greek loan word, belonging to the semantic field of poikilia, connotes both ingenious creativity and variety.39 Natura is creatrix (2.1117). She is also abundant and generous. When, in book 5 (195–­234), Lucretius argues that the natura rerum cannot have been created for us by divine providence, he enumerates the many inconveniences of nature that militate against the providential theory. The passage culminates in the famous description of the newborn child, cast up on the shores of light, which he fills with the sound of his crying—­as well he might, given the suffering that awaits him in life (5.222–­ 27). But this is not the case for animals, who are less needy than humans, and are provided for by nature’s bountiful variety: at variae crescunt pecudes armenta feraeque nec crepitacillis opus est nec cuiquam adhibendast almae nutricis blanda atque infracta loquela, nec varias quaerunt vestis pro tempore caeli, denique non armis opus est, non moenibus altis, qui sua tutentur, quando omnibus omnia large tellus ipsa parit naturaque daedala rerum. (5.228–­34) But the various flocks and herds and wild beasts grow Without the need for rattles, nor do they require

102

chapter three

A nurse’s soothing babytalk, nor various kinds of clothes Depending on the time of year, nor finally do they need arms Or high walls to guard their possessions, since the earth and nature The artificer generously gives forth all they need.

The “various” flocks are also the “variegated” flocks, providing a colorful spectacle both in their difference from each other and in the variegation of their individual hides. Young animals, unlike human young, don’t need rattles to amuse them; it is as though their varietas itself provides the gaiety and diversion that rattles provide for human children. Unlike animals, humans need “various” clothing—­various depending on the time of year (light or heavy), but also variegated, in order to satisfy humanity’s aesthetic cravings; to make varius equivalent to our contemporary “various” in this passage would not do justice to the subtle role its different meanings play in Lucretius’s argument. While, for humans, nature is flawed (“tanta stat praedita culpa,” 199), nature the artificer (“natura daedala rerum,” 234) provides the animals generously (“large,” 233) with what they need. Ring composition brings back the words natura . . . rerum, introduced at the beginning of this section (199), but with the genitive rerum now an objective genitive, depending on daedala, rather than a subjective genitive explicating natura. The nature of things is “intricately wrought” (“natura daedala”; cf. “daedala tellus,” 1.7), but also nature is the artful “deviser of things” (“daedala rerum”). So in this passage Lucretius emphasizes a distinction that we have seen is characteristic of the varietas complex: nature’s variety is joyful, whereas the human need for variety is anxious. Earlier in the poem, Lucretius argues that if we would only realize that nature provides all that we need, and more, if we would cease to value the elaborate trappings of wealth (2.20–­33), “especially when the weather smiles on us and the season variegates (conspergunt) the green grass with flowers” (2.32–­33). I have translated conspergunt (literally, scatters) with variegates here in accordance with OLD 2, “to diversify, intersperse, bespatter.” As we shall see in chapter 5, the image of the meadow sprinkled with flowers is a prime representation of varietas. So, connected with nature’s variety, is its generosity (large, 5.233, above). In a later passage, the very diversity of color and facial type among different human populations is taken to be an example of nature’s “generous” variety (6.1110–­1113). It is a typical Lucretian oxymoron that the word largiter in this passage is followed closely by the point that a diverse humanity is prone to different diseases according to type. From the Latin largiri the French word lar­ gesse is derived, and it has been naturalized into English. Largesse is typically

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

103

“scattered” by superiors to inferiors. Taking advantage of this network of associations, Dryden gives Lucretius’s natura a political slant in the opening lines of his Absalom and Achitophel (1681), where the sexual promiscuity of Charles II is mythologized by being grafted onto Lucretius’s description of spring at the beginning of the De Rerum Natura.40 Lucretius’s invocation to Venus (1.1–­40) as the generative principle that infuses nature in spring is one of the passages from the De Rerum Natura that Dryden would translate and publish in 1685. Its presence is felt in the opening of Absalom and Achitophel, over which the metaphor of largesse also hovers discernibly: In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin. Before polygamy was made a sin . . . . Then Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart, His vigorous warmth did variously impart To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command, Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land. (Absalom and Achitophel, 1–­2, 7–­10, my emphasis)

The denigration of “priestcraft” strikes a Lucretian note, and Dryden follows this up by featuring a very Lucretian word, though one which Lucretius himself does not use in his proem. Dryden’s “variously” (8) bears considerable metrical and ideological weight in these lines, translating sexual promiscuity into the generosity and inventiveness of  Lucretius’s natura. “Israel’s monarch” scatters his sexual largesse as though he were scattering coins bearing his image; the phrase “his Maker’s image” means the image of the king as maker (on a coin or in his bastards) as well as that of his maker, God. In his translation of Lucretius’s proem, Dryden hails Venus with the words “through all the living Regions dost thou move, / And scatter’st, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of Love” (27–­28, translating DRN 16–­20). There is no word in Lucretius’s Latin equivalent to Dryden’s “scatter’st,” and the appearance of this verb at the beginning of Absalom and Achitophel (line 10) confirms that Dryden is making a connection between his randy monarch and Lucretius’s generous Venus. Another of the passages that Dryden translated from Lucretius is De Re­ rum Natura 4.1052–­1287, which includes the famous lines encouraging the lover to distract himself with prostitutes, rather than to give his life over to the destructive effects of an obsessive sexual passion, a passage which may also in­ fluence the opening lines of Absalom and Achitophel. I have argued elsewhere (Fitzgerald 1984) that Lucretius’s treatment of love in book 4 revolves around

104

chapter three

a contrast between a sterile or insatiable linear movement and the swerve, which is creative. Human activity must be guided by the limits that circumscribe it, and the lover is misguided in looking for an absolute where none is to be found. The lovers who want to disappear into each other end up in a violent and fruitless collision (4.1105–­1111). Against their straining after an impossible absolute Lucretius holds up the diversion of the “crowd-­wandering Venus” (“vulgivaga Venus,” 4.1071), that is, prostitutes. In the matter of human pleasure the absolute may be unattainable, but variation is potentially infinite. The telos (goal) of human life, freedom from pain, is also a peras or horos (limit), because freedom from pain is the limit of pleasure; anything more dynamic brings along with it pain.41 As Cicero puts it: “Epicurus thinks that the highest pleasure is limited to the removal of all pain, so that pleasure can be varied and distinguished, but it cannot be increased” (“omnis autem privatione doloris putat Epicurus terminari summam voluptatem ut variari voluptas distinguique possit, augeri non possit,” De Finibus 1.38). For the Epicureans, then, variety is not so much the source or prerequisite for pleasure as the means by which pleasure can be sustained or continued once it has reached its natural limit. There is a point at which pleasure cannot become more intense without bringing pain. This point is quickly reached, so variation gives pleasure somewhere to go once it has reached its limit.42 As in physics, so in ethics, Epicurean variety is the compensation for limits. Varietas characterizes every aspect of the Epicurean universe, but it is restricted in the case of the atoms themselves to differences in shape, weight, and size. Lucretius finds an analogy for the capacity of the colorless atoms to generate the varied world we see in the way that common elements rearrange themselves in the language of his own verse: quin etiam passim nostris in versibus ipsis multa elementa vides multis communia verbis, cum tamen inter se versus et verba necessest confiteare et re et sonitu distare sonanti. (1.823–­26)43 In fact, everywhere in my verses you see Many letters held in common by many words, While you must admit that the verses and words Differ both in meaning and in sound.

This analogy turns Lucretius’s own text into a mirror of nature’s ability to generate variety from a strictly limited set of elements, and his point is underlined by characteristic alliteration.44 Both alliteration and anagrammatic play

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

105

help to produce the distinctive texture of Lucretian verse, which can be called varius in the same way that the adjective applies to the variegated hide of an animal: as we have seen, varius can refer to the variegation or slight differences in a surface, like the English words “pied” or “dappled” (on which, more later). In the last line of the passage quoted above there is a particularly dazzling play with similar sounds. The jingle sonitu/sonanti is the most obvious effect, but more interesting is what happens to the syllable re (confiteare et re et sonitu distare sonanti). This syllable appears with three different functions: first, as the mark of the second person singular of the subjunctive (confiteare), then as the ablative of res (re), and finally as the mark of the present infinitive (distare). But, if the two previous elisions (confitear(e) et r(e) et) encourage us to link (-­)re with the words that follow it, then re-­also reappears as the prefix of the implied verb resonanti, made up by the last two words of the line (distare sonanti). The eye, mind, and ear boggle as the same sound produces a variety of meanings and functions, so that the texture of the verse is not identical with itself: what you see and what you hear diverge, and so do the units of sense, grammatical or aural. Shortly before these lines we have the following dizzy play with polyptoton, prominently featuring varius (1.814–­16): nimirum quia multa modis communia multis multarum rerum in rebus primordia mixta sunt, ideo variis variae res rebus aluntur. The reason is that many atoms common to many things Are mixed in many things in many ways, And so various things are nourished by various things.

Multa, multis, multarum; rerum, rebus, res, rebus; variae, variis: the polyptoton is emphatic. Lucretius is here arguing against the view (of Empedocles) that the four elements are the primordia, the most basic constituents of matter. It is true, he allows, that all living things need the four elements to survive and flourish, but this does not mean that they are the primordia. Rather, these elements are, like everything else, themselves compounded of atoms, of which many are common to different things. This explains why different species require different nourishment, while having the four elements in common. Since variety can be achieved by the permutation of a fund of atoms differing only in size, weight, and shape, animate life can be sustained by the four elements, and at the same time individual species can have different food.45 Lucretius’s shuffling of the same words in different cases, combinations, and senses make his point about variety and limit by analogy. Aesthetically, the

106

chapter three

polyptotons in this passage produce a vision of the atomic world as varius in the same way as the dappled hide of an animal is varius. Lucretius is the first great nature poet to stress variety as one of nature’s prime glories. His poetry creates a synergy between language and its objects in a way that puts us in mind of a poet of a very different ideological stripe and far removed in time. I want to suggest that there is a Lucretian synergy between the workings of  language and poetry, on the one hand, and those of a various nature, on the other, in a poet who was probably not influenced by Lucretius, namely Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is a long way from the Epicurean Lucretius to the Catholic Hopkins (1844–­1889) and, as far as I know, Hopkins felt no particular affinity with Lucretius, though he was a distinguished classicist who held the chair in Classics at University College Dublin from 1884 until his death in 1889. Nevertheless, Hopkins’s attitude to language and its relation to the variety of the natural world is comparable to that of Lucretius. “Pied” and “dappled” were two of Hopkins’s favorite words.46 In fact, his emphasis on the “pied” or “dappled” beauty of God’s creation is probably more marked by Greek poikilos than by Latin varius, and he would have comes across the Greek word abundantly in Pindar, whose poetry he knew well. In spite of his classical learning, Hopkins was a foe of latinate language and grecisms, and his own vocabulary is marked by a preference for Anglo-­Saxon forms. His most famous poem, “Pied Beauty,” is a poem about variety that contains not a single word derived from the Latin varius or its semantic field:47 Glory be to God for dappled things—­ For skies of couple-­colour as a brinded cow; For rose-­moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh firecoal chestnut-­falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and iced—­fold, fallow and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-­forth whose beauty is past change; Praise him.

Hopkins’s attitude to nature is permeated by the quality, and value, of variety, and clearly his poetry is influenced by the tradition that connects the perfection of God’s creation with its variety. But the Lucretian jingles and wordplay make it appropriate to quote “Pied Beauty” here, rather than in my earlier discussion of nature and creation. For what is distinctive about Hopkins’s poem

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

107

is the very Lucretian analogy between the physical world and the texture of language itself. Like Lucretius, Hopkins made a connection between language and nature, and in this he was not alone among his contemporaries. Milroy (1977, 51) argues that Hopkins’s attitude to language was influenced by the German philologist Max Müller (1823–­1900), who was professor of comparative theology at Oxford when Hopkins arrived there. For Müller, language study was part of natural history: We are bewildered by the variety of plants, of birds and fishes, and insects, scattered with lavish prodigality over land and sea; but what is the living wealth of that Fauna as compared with the winged words which fill the air with unceasing music? (Müller 1881, 1.33)

Hopkins’s poem certainly greets a varied nature with a variety of words to express that same quality. But Latinate words, and most strikingly those of the var* stable, are studiously avoided, though Hopkins’s juxtaposition of “fickle” and “freckled” gives us an Anglo-­Saxon version of varius in its two senses of “changeable” and “variegated.” Hopkins’s wordplay suggests that the two words are related by derivation from a monosyllabic matrix f*ck (Milroy 1977, 56). The irony is that, although Hopkins the classical scholar specifically avoids using the Latin derivate “various,” his Anglo-­Saxon alternatives only take the topos “nature rejoices in variety” closer to the original meanings of varius and poikilos: “dappled,” “freckled,” and “pied” reach meanings of these ancient words that “varied” or “various,” at least in their modern usage, cannot.48 What strikes one immediately about the vocabulary of this poem is that Hopkins is playing variations on what Milroy (1977, 64) calls “iterative words  in –­l”: “dapple,” “couple,” “stipple,” “tackle,” “fickle,” “freckled,” “adazzle.” He even gives us the aural illusion of such a word in “original.” Hopkins’s journal, in which he collected words rather as he did natural sights, shows a particular interest in words that end in the suffix ‑le, and in “Pied Beauty” the recurrence of these words puts the creativity of language on display.49 Like Lucretius, who delights in etymological wordplay, Hopkins made semantic connections between words with similar sound.50 His (Lucretian) use of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme presents a vision of the varied creativity of language, pointing toward that of the Creator himself. Hopkins must have known Lucretius’s poem.51 But the connection I want to make with Lucretius here is not a matter of reception, as it was with Dryden above, and will be with Catullus below. Certainly Hopkins’s celebration of nature’s variety belongs to the tradition I examined in the previous chapter under the rubric of  Nature, but it is their common materialist

108

chapter three

poetics that makes Lucretius and Hopkins bedfellows here. For both poets, variety is an aspect of language itself, and so they seek to make us feel what it means for poetry to have a texture that is varius in a sense that corresponds to the English “pied.” But, more importantly, for both of them variety is something that language does, rather than simply has, and the behavior of language in this respect belongs to the physical world that is the subject of their poetry. Hopkins’s nature is a manifestation of God’s presence, in stark contrast to Lucretius’s self-­sufficient natura. His vision in “Pied Beauty” is of an immanent divine agency. Dryden uses Lucretius’s Venus to produce a more political image, in which variety is adverbial, as the sovereign propagates his image “variously.” I want to end this chapter with a poem by a contemporary of Lucretius, a poem in which variety, as a form of action, colludes with sovereignty. Catullus c. 46 is so Lucretian in language and imagery that we can hardly doubt that he had read Lucretius.52 Like the great invocation to Venus that opens the De Rerum Natura it is a spring poem; it is also a lyrical version, mapped onto a very different agenda, of Lucretius’s vision of atomic converging and dispersing. In the final line it is varietas that conveys the elations of nature in spring, as Catullus juxtaposes the word varius with the closely related diversus.53 Iam ver egelidos refert tepores, iam caeli furor aequinoctialis iucundi Zephyri silescit aureis. linquantur Phrygii, Catulle, campi Nicaeaeque ager uber aestuosae: ad claras Asiae volemus urbes. iam mens praetrepidans avet vagari, iam laeti studio pedes vigescunt. o dulces comitum valete coetus, longe quos simul a domo profectos diversae varie viae reportant. (c. 46) Now Spring brings back the warmth that breaks the chill, Now the raging equinoctial gales are stilled By the gentle west wind’s breeze. Catullus, leave the Phrygian fields behind, And the rich meadows of hot Nicaea: Let’s fly to Asia’s famous cities. Now my mind’s in a flutter and longs to wander, Now my happy feet are strong and eager. Farewell, my sweet gathering of companions;

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

109

We set out from home together on our long trip But now diverging paths take us back by different routes.

The warmth returns; the stormy weather calms under the influence of the zephyrs; the Phrygian fields are abandoned; the mind begins to wander; the feet grow itchy; the gatherings of companions dissolve and reassemble. Spring is a confluence of centripetal and centrifugal forces that play across the constancies and boundaries of human identity. Catullus calls on himself in the same way as he calls on his companions, as a compound that, depending on your perspective, is either dissolved or assembled in the force field of spring. Here, in miniature, is the vision of Lucretius’s epic of the atomic world: compounds forming, stabilizing, and dissolving in a cyclical process that absorbs the human perspective into the processes of the physical world. Catullus and Lucretius were contemporaries, and there is much that is Lucretian in the vocabulary and rhetoric of the poem. Some of his favorite words play key roles in Catulllus’s poem: vagare (to wander), coetus (gatherings), and varius are all common in Lucretius, and they take us to the heart of his vision of a non-­purposive, changing, and generously diverse natural world. Catullus’s rhetoric, too, is Lucretian. In the final lines a very Lucretian combination of pleonasm and alliteration (diversae varie) is compounded with a very Lucretian oxymoron (valete coetus) and etymological wordplay (comites . . . coetus). The oxymoronic play of centripetal and centrifugal forces of the last three lines is also very Lucretian. But what is most Lucretian about this poem is the way in which this moment in nature reveals that compounds underly the entities we deal in. Spring, the conjunction of various phenomena in nature, is mirrored by the conjunction of happy feet and quivering mind that is Catullus. The word coetus is frequently used by Lucretius of the atomic compounds formed by groups of atoms coordinating their movements into temporarily stable patterns. Here the word is used of the temporary gatherings of companions caught now on the point of dispersal prior to reassembling in Rome. “Goodbye” is “hello,” in true Lucretian fashion, for in the atomic universe destruction is the prerequisite for new creation. But there are differences: Lucretius describes objects and bodies as a temporary coetus of atoms in the eternal round of union and dissolution. He makes us see the world of objects through the metaphor of ever-­shifting human association (coetus, concilium). Catullus’s little poem does the opposite; it invites us to read the bonding and separating of human groups as another event in the physical world, which, of course, it isn’t. In fact, it is the Roman empire which provides the centripetal force that reunites the companions returning from their tour of duty with the governor

110

chapter three

of Bithynia. The companions “flying” to the famous cities of Asia may be like migrating birds, but the westering movement of their path follows the relay of empire, from Greece to Rome. Romans returning from Phrygia remind us of the foundational journey of Aeneas from Phrygian Troy to Italy, while Nicaea and the famous cities of Asia carry particular aesthetic associations for this poet (Nicaea was the home of the influential Hellenistic poet, Parthenius). So there is plenty of cultural baggage in this “nature poem.” We can focus the tension between the physical and political settings of the poem on the mild zeugma that spans it. Spring brings back (refert) the warming breezes in the first line of the poem, and the various roads bring the companions back (reportant) to Rome in the last. All roads lead to Rome, as naturally as the seasons return. But reporto is not simply a synonym for refero. It has a more specific sense as the usual term for bringing home an army, plunder, victory, or a political settlement (OLD 3). The companions have set out on an imperial mission and will return with their booty—­litterbearers, Greek manuscripts, perhaps even a Greek poet.54 So this nature poem has its ideological edge, naturalizing the functions and presence of the Roman empire. The return of the companions, drawn back to the metropolis, seems to infiltrate and variegate the processes of spring, as the sound of the word ver returns in the last line of the poem as diversae varie. Lucretius celebrated nature’s variety within the strict limits of what can and cannot happen, and that celebration has been harnessed by Catullus to the elations of empire. For the return of the imperial group both responds to the pull of empire’s center of gravity and diversifies the experience of its constituents through the scattered imperial world. Imperial variety in this poem is not of the visual kind that we explored in the last section of chapter 2. Rather it is the diversion through which the journey home will pass, serving to diversify the experience of the homogeneous group, whose members return with different stories to recount.55 Catullus has harnessed Lucretius’s atomic physics to describe the empire as a field of centripetal and centrifugal forces, as natural as spring and as variegated/variegating as Lucretius’s nature. The sensation of spring’s permeating presence mutates into the experience of another encompassing presence, empire. Or perhaps the poem expresses the double consciousness of belonging both to a natural and to a political world, and the differently weighted euphorias of abandoning oneself to the pull of one or the other. I began this section by noting that, for the Epicurean Lucretius, variety is a phenomenon that compensates for the austere quality of the atoms that are the basis of the natural world, and for the restricted limits of  human pleasure. The building blocks of matter are different only in size, weight, and shape, but enormous variation is possible in their combinations, which accounts for

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

111

nature’s variety. Similarly, the lovers who cannot reach the impossible absolute of their desire must diversify the partners of their couplings. Meanwhile, the simple fact of nature’s generous variety offers us plenty to rejoice in, and luxury is unnecessary. There is some similarity here with Pliny, for whom also variety was compensatory. In Catullus and Dryden, on the other hand, variety performs a more straightforwardly celebratory role, as Lucretian models are appropriated to glorify the sensation and exercise of power. Variety, in their case, is the mode in which the capacity or license of the powerful expands, just as variety is the dimension in which rhetorical copia unfolds. Horace, Poet of Varietas Like Lucretius, Horace also wrote poems with a texture that one could describe as varius, as Nietzsche’s mosaic metaphor (above) attests, and certainly no study of varietas in Latin literature can omit Horace. The connection did not go unnoticed in antiquity: Sidonius Apollinaris, for instance, describes Horace as vernans per varii carminis eglogas verborum violis multicoloribus. (Epist. 9.13.2, 12–­13) Flowering in the series of a varied song, His words like violets of many hues.

Sidonius seems to be referring to two different aspects of Horace’s varietas: the miscellaneous sequence of his poems (eglogae here means short poems), and the variegated texture of his verse—­those effects of word order on which Nietzsche famously remarked. Later, in chapter 5, I will be discussing the thematic and generic variety that characterizes Horace’s books of odes, and Horace’s programmatic first ode will introduce the next chapter, on variety and subjectivity. Here I will look at two well-­known and important programmatic statements by Horace. What they have in common, I will argue, is not only a concern with varietas but also a conflict between disavowal and avowal, in which the commitment to varietas is expressed against the grain of an explicit statement. Horace seems to be reining himself in, but the terms in which he does so open out to a poetics of variety. C. 4.2 is one of Horace’s most important programmatic statements. An acknowledgment of the dangers of imitating the sublime Pindar, it comes in the second poem of a book that will nevertheless be centrally concerned with the Pindaric activity of praise. The challenge of the high lyric style and the public,

112

chapter three

celebratory mode, associated in the ancient world with Pindar, is a constant worry for Horace: sometimes he stakes a claim to the right to soar, and at other times he reminds his Muse that she is too slight to bear the weight of great matters. In this poem he seems to be carving out a niche for himself in a restricted field, describing himself as a bee collecting thyme by the waters of Tibur to fashion his careful little poems (27–­32). But it is not uncommon for Horace to perform the very thing he claims he cannot, or will not, do, so that the content of the statement and the saying of it pull in opposite directions. In this case, the opening statement rejecting the imitation of Pindar can be read in two different ways: when Horace tells Iullus that whoever seeks to imitate Pindar is doomed to replay the story of  Icarus, he also says that whoever seeks to imitate Pindar relies on (nititur) Pindaric poikilia: Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari, Iulle, ceratis ope Daedalea nititur pennis vitreo daturus nomina ponto. (c. 4.2.1–­4) Whoever aspires to rival Pindar, Iullus, relies on feathers stuck with wax, Daedalus-­fashion, soon to give his name To a glittering sea.

As we have seen, the Greek loanword Daedalea, which appears here as the adjective derived from the name Daedalus, also belongs to the semantic field of poikilia and varietas.56 So, ope Daedalea (or daedalea) means both “with the help of Daedalus” and something like “with curious art.” Daidal* words are important in Pindar, where they have a significant programmatic force for the encomium (Nemean 11.18; Olympian 2.53). On one reading of “ope Daedalea nititur pennis,” then, Horace would be describing the poetics of the Pindarizing poet rather than the precariousness of the project. The combination of wax (ceratis) and “Daedalic art” looks toward the Matine bee which, later in the poem, will be the figure which Horace chooses to set against the Pindaric swan to represent his own, less ambitious, artistry (27–­32, where operosa [31] echoes ope Daedalea [2]).57 But the bee is an important Pindaric figure too. In Pythian 10.53–­54 “the best encomiastic poems dart like a bee from one thing to another” and so appeal to a varied audience. Horace’s vitreus Pontus (glassy sea), a glittering, ever-­changing surface, might allude to the poikilistic style to which he aspires to give his name (“daturus . . . nomina”). Certainly this vivid detail, distracting us from the general point (“it’s a doomed project to imitate Pindar”), is a good example of the daedalic art which Horace shares with

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

113

Pindar. In the final stanza of the poem, Horace makes a comparison between two sacrificial victims, the magnificent offering of the encomiastic poet and the humble contribution of Horace himself. Signing off with a description of the heifer that will be his sacrifice, Horace makes the variegated color of its skin (a common application of the word varius) into an emblem of varietas: qua notam duxit, niveus videri, cetera fulvus. (c. 4.2.59–­60) Where it has a marking its appearance is white, The rest of it tawny.

The explicit tenor of this poem is the gesture of recusatio (refusal): Horace is no Pindar and, being incapable of sublimity, he will leave the celebration of Augustus’s Sygambrian victory to Iullus Antonius (33–­36). But Horace does deliver the encomium he refuses (37–­52), and instead of (or as well as) distinguishing himself from Pindar, he indicates the respect in which he is a Pindaric poet. For Pindar is not only the sublime poet, he is also a miniaturist, a poet of poikilia and of curiously wrought surfaces.58 This is the Pindar that Horace can follow.59 Like Pliny, Horace appropriates varietas as the medium of the second-­rate, but does so in a more aggressive way, suggesting a revisionary view of Pindar that narrows the gap between the two poets. My other exhibit is one of the lynchpins of a classical poetics which privileges the principle of unity, namely the opening of Horace’s Ars Poetica, with its grotesque image of a painting that joins a human head to a horse’s neck, puts variegated plumage on limbs gathered from here and there, and represents a fish below and a woman on top. “Wouldn’t that be ridiculous?” asks Horace, “And wouldn’t that stretch artistic license beyond the breaking point? Do whatever you want, provided that what you produce is simplex et unum” (23).60 Later, Horace recaps his opening image of incongruity: qui variare cupit rem prodigialiter unam delphinum silvis appingit, fluctibus aprum. (Horace, Ars Poetica 29–­30) One who wants to extravagantly vary a single theme Paints a dolphin onto his woods, a boar in his waves.

In the first line we take variare to be modified by prodigialiter (wastefully, extravagantly): to vary extravagantly is to destroy the unity of the theme. But just how ridiculous are the images of the second line? In a painting they

114

chapter three

would look ridiculous, certainly, but in poetry the boar in the waves and the dolphin in the trees are examples of the commonplace figure now known as an adynaton (“impossible”; for instance, “it is as likely that I will cease to love you as that dolphins will swim in the trees”). Horace manages to make his images both ridiculous and conventional, depending on which medium we attribute them to, and perhaps the fact that we are reading poetry makes it paradoxical that we are expected to find these images ridiculous. Similarly, given that we are reading poetry, it is hard to resist the attraction of the phrase rem prodigialiter unam, giving the word prodigialiter its more positive sense: “a theme lavishly unified.” This is the natural way of reading the phrase, but we know that we must resist it, for it is an oxymoron as extravagant as the dolphin in the woods or the boar in the waves.61 Has Horace produced something like a rem prodigialiter unam in this very line? The way to vary a single theme in poetry is not, as with the painters, to add stuff (appingit), but to make the language shimmer with divergent meanings (variare), as does Horace’s line. Certainly the phrase rem prodigialiter unam would qualify as what Horace will recommend, some twenty lines later, as a means of renewing a language subject to entropy, namely a “clever conjunction” (“callida iunctura,” 47–­48) that makes a familiar word new. There is a big difference, at least as Horace represents it, between the way that painting works and the way that poetry works. In the poetic ordering of words (“in verbis serendis,” 46) a cal­ lida iunctura renders a known word new, whereas the painter adds (appingit) something incongruous in a futile attempt to vary a single theme. This iunc­ tura is the positive, or poetic, version of the joining (“iungere,” 2) of incongruous limbs which produces the monstrosity of the opening lines. Poetry allows, even encourages, incongruous joinings in order to produce a res that is prodigialiter una by virtue of  being varia. One might add that Horace gives us a rhetorical version of varietas, or at least variatio, in the chiasmus “delphinas . . . silvis / fluctibus aprum” (30), a structure that would not appear in the imagined painting. There is a contest of the arts here, with the chiasmus and the clausula “fluctibus aprum” naturalizing the visual monstrosity as an elegant verbal construction. It is ironic that Horace’s (apparent) castigating of poetic variation brings back what he has said in the first thirteen lines in a different context; in other words, it is itself a variation. In the later passage, the joining of incongruities is an example of the fact that poets fall into vice when striving for a virtue (“decipimur specie recti,” 25): to vary extravagantly what is simplex et unum only produces monstrosity. But, as so often with Horace, action does not necessarily coincide with words.62 Horace, poet of varietas, will concern us in two contexts later in this book. I will begin the next chapter with another important programmatic poem of

p u t t i n g va r i e t y a t i s s u e

115

Horace, namely c. 1.1, in which Horace will distinguish his own ambition to be numbered among the lyric poets from the ambitions of others in a mighty priamel. There too, I will argue, what Horace dismisses (the various pursuits of others) will serve to characterize him as appropriately as what he explicitly avows. This priamel introduces him, in the first of his Odes, as a poet of variety. Finally, in the last chapter of this book, on miscellany and collections, I will discuss Horace’s conception of the lyric genre as a genre of variety, as manifested in the books of odes themselves. In the next chapter we move from a consideration of variety in the oeuvre of particular authors to a focus on genres and rhetorical figures. Here we will be concerned not so much with the language and topoi connected with variety as with the experience of variety as filtered through different generic subjectivities. How do the subjects constituted by different genres confront variety, or make it an object of their experience? In the differences between generic subjectivities there is a potential contention about variety and an opportunity for putting it at issue.

4

Confronting Variety: Listing, Subjectivity, and Genre in Latin Poetry

The list is the zero-­degree of literature. Rossini famously boasted that he could set (even) a laundry list to music.1 Aristophanes might have said the same. Lists are supposed to be boring, a succession of unrelated items that could go on forever, mere stuff. And yet the flip side of the boredom of mere accumulation is the pleasure of variety. Who could resist the opening of Horace, Satires 1.2?

Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, mendici, mimae, balatrones . . . The Worshipful Companies of Flute Girls, the pedlars of potions, mendicants, mime-­actresses, buffoons . . . (tr. Brown 1993)

Who could resist it? Well, Horace, for one. Frustratingly, he cuts off this motley crowd of foreign-­sounding professions with the words “and all that kind” (“hoc genus omne, ” 2), just as we were enjoying the genus-­defying variety of this gathering.2 But Horace’s genus reminds us that this list belongs to a genre, namely satire. Satire is a genre within the larger category of first-­person poetry, and it revolves around a certain kind of speaker, the satirist. From the generic point of view, it is the act of  listing rather than the phenomenon of the list that is our concern, and the words hoc genus omne retrospectively give a weary tone to the listing, which at first read so expansively. So, how does the satirist confront variety? In the preceding poem, Horace introduced his book of satires with a conspectus of professions, each of whose representatives envies the life of another. The aging soldier envies the merchant, the merchant, faced with a storm at sea, envies the farmer, but the farmer, once an errand

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

117

takes him to the city, envies the town-­dweller (Satires 1.1–­12). Horace wraps up his survey of the variety of human wishes with the words cetera de genere hoc (“the rest of this kind, ” 1.13).3 All of these examples come under the topos of mempsimoiria (blaming of one’s lot): the satirist’s listing contracts variety to a wearisome sameness. In this chapter we will meet a number of different generic subjectivities as they confront variety. While there is something distinctive about each of these, there is also contamination between them (genres are never watertight), or, to put it another way, tension between different attitudes to variety is endemic to certain genres, including satire, as we shall see. Whether the spectacle of human life and mores is a richly varied tapestry or a monotonous and predictable sameness is one of satire’s prime issues, pitting its aesthetic and moral aspects against each other. We will be returning to satire later in this chapter. In some respects, this chapter is about the meeting point between the rhetorical principle of amplification—­the process of composition by variations of the same thing—­and the subjective dimension of poetry which features a first-­person speaker. Different genres of Latin literature feature characteristic rhetorical situations where a speaker confronts variety, and in each case variety presents problems, opportunities, or devices that are specific to that genre. I start with the rhetorical form known as the priamel, which may claim to be emblematic of the lyric genre as a whole: the Alexandrian edition of Pindar begins with a striking priamel, the opening of Olympian 1, and so does the first book of Horace’s Odes.4 In the most characteristic lyric form of the priamel the speaking subject locates itself in relation to a varied array of others with a list (“Some. . . . Others . . . But I. . . . ”). Sappho’s fragment 16 is a good example: “Some say a host of horsemen, others of infantry, others a fleet of ships, is the finest sight on the dark earth, but I. . . . ” We will begin with the most famous priamel in Latin poetry, which takes up almost all of Horace’s first ode, a lyric poem in which we can also see a version of the satiric oscillation between the wondrous variety and comic sameness of human activities. After Horace’s priamel, situating the poet against the background of the various pursuits of others, we will turn to the elegiac lover confronting variety in Ovid’s facetious anti-­priamel (Amores 2.4), in which the promiscuous lover embraces whatever anyone else finds beautiful, surveyed in a compendious list. If variatio is the principle of the elegiac couplet, then Ovid the elegist finds himself condemned to be promiscuous. As we shall see, Ovid’s poem draws radical conclusions from some hints in Propertius, who finds infinite variety in his beloved herself. From elegy we turn to the lyrics of drama, and the beginning of Seneca’s Phaedra, in which

118

chapter four

those two antagonists, hunting and love, are juxtaposed in Hippolytus’s opening speech. Hippolytus delivers a long sequence of directions to his hunters, projecting himself into a copious and various world. In a sense, this is the opposite of the priamel, which focuses in from a varied world onto the self. Hippolytus’s speech goes in the other direction, and engineers an escape from the self into variety. The opening to Seneca’s Phaedra contrasts dramatically the divergent subjectivities of Hippolytus and Phaedra with respect to variety; Phaedra, in contrast to Hippolytus, is confined in a monotonous and obsessive sameness. But we find a similar contrast within the speaking subject of satire, to which we turn next. The satirist finds the variegated material for his book in whatever people (variously) do, while at the same time deriding humanity for its monotonous and repetitive sinfulness. Satire’s very name brings the issue of variety to the fore, by connection with satietas. Satire, moreover, is the genre in which variety emerges from the principle of non-­exclusion (“whatever people do . . . ”); its moral component includes the pull of variety toward sameness, as “whatever (people do)” is drawn toward its contemporary vernacular sense (“it’s all the same”). At the opposite pole to the satirist stands the panegyrist, and the chapter ends with a look at Statius’s Silvae, where the overwhelming variety of the wondrous villas he describes (in Silvae 1.3 and 2.2, for instance) causes a marvelous confusion in the visitor. Variety here touches on the sublime, as the self is flooded by impressions. A coda to the chapter takes us from the sublime to the banal, examining two poems, one ancient and one modern, in which the varied list has become a form of commercial solicitation. Priamel and Anti-­Priamel Priamel is not an ancient term; it was coined by German scholars to translate preambulum, a medieval term for a poem that contains a series of seemingly unrelated paradoxical statements, which are cleverly brought together at the end. The modern usage of the term is different, denoting a rhetorical device whose function is to focus climactically on the last element of a list.5 In the first lines of Pindar’s Olympian 1 it takes this form: “Water is best, and gold, like a burning fire, shines in the night more than all a great man’s wealth, but if, dear heart, you want to sing of games, do not seek for a star in the lonely sky warmer than the sun, nor can we sing a competition greater than the Olympian” (O. 1.1–­7). We arrive at the here and now, the preeminent topic which is to be addressed in this celebration of Olympic victory, by turning away from other forms and contexts of “the best. ” In personal lyric, the priamel tends to pit the varied spectacle of what others do or think against the

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

119

choice or speciality of the speaker, as in the first stanza of  Sappho fr. 16. In this form the priamel is a means of locating the “here” from which the speaker speaks. Horace opens his first collection of odes with what is probably the most famous priamel in Latin literature, detailing the favored pursuits of others in order to home in on the poet’s own ambitions. There is a good possibility that, as Barchiesi suggests, Pindar’s Olympian 1 was put in its prime position by his Alexandrian editors because it begins with a priamel establishing what is best.6 Horace, who alludes to Olympian victories in the beginning of c. 1.1, is cementing the connection between the priamel and the opening of a poetic book. But Horace’s vastly extended priamel bursts its rhetorical function to become an anatomy of the possibilities and problems of variety. Certain conflicts are written into the priamel from the start. In its most common lyric form, the variety of pursuits or choices adopted by others is capped by what the speaker prioritises, and the reader is led from a varied range of possibilities to a point of focus and rest. If we are to keep our end in view during the list, the respect in which the comparison is being made has to be kept stable. However, the list of what others pursue demands variatio of expression, and this variation may shift the grounds of the comparison. There is a further complication when the priamel homes in, as it does in Horace’s first ode, on the speaker as poet, for in that case the survey of variety itself contributes to the claim for which the content of this survey serves as foil: “but I, as poet—­see them all as a varied spectacle. ” There may, in other words, be a tension between two of the poet’s capacities, between the copious rhetorician, who spins out the list with ingenious variation, and the lyric subject, who locates himself by distinction from the others whom he lists; between the rejection of what others do, and delight in the varied field that they pre­ sent (to one specially qualified to describe it). The poet is both inside and outside his list(ing). He says both “I am not them” and “I show who/what I am through my capacity to list them attractively. ” In this particular case, the scale of the priamel is so grand that the poet finally defines himself not by what he chooses or rejects, but as the poet of varietas: Maecenas atavis edite regibus, o et praesidium et dulce decus meum, sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum collegisse iuvat, metaque fervidis evitata rotis palmaque nobilis terrarum dominos evehit ad deos; hunc, si mobilium turba Quiritium certat tergeminis tollere honoribus;

5

120

chapter four

illum, si proprio condidit horreo quidquid de Libycis verritur areis. gaudentem patrios findere sarculo agros Attalicis condicionibus numquam dimoveas ut trabe Cypria Myrtoum pavidus nauta secet mare. luctantem Icariis fluctibus Africum mercator metuens otium et oppidi laudat rura sui; mox reficit rates quassas, indocilis pauperiem pati. est qui nec veteris pocula Massici nec partem solido demere de die spernit, nunc viridi membra sub arbuto stratus, nunc ad aquae lene caput sacrae. multos castra iuvant et lituo tubae permixtus sonitus bellaque matribus detestata. manet sub Iove frigido venator tenerae coniugis immemor, seu visa est catulis cerva fidelibus, seu rupit teretes Marsus aper plagas. me doctarum hederae praemia frontium dis miscent superis, me gelidum nemus nympharumque leves cum Satyris chori secernunt populo, si neque tibias Euterpe cohibet nec Polyhymnia Lesboum refugit tendere barbiton. quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres, sublimi feriam sidera vertice. (Horace, c. 1.1)

10

15

20

25

30

35

Maecenas, sprung from an ancient lineage of kings, My stronghold, my pride, and my delight, There are some who enjoy collecting Olympic dust On their chariot, and if they graze the turning-­post With scorching wheels and win the palm of glory, They are lords of the earth and rise to the gods; One man is pleased if the fickle mob of Roman citizens Competes to lift him up to triple honours; Another, if he stores in his own granary All the sweepings from the threshing-­floors of Libya; The man who delights to cleave his ancestral fields With the mattock, you could never move, not with the legacy Of Attalus, to become a frightened sailor

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y



121

And cut the Myrtoan Sea with Cyprian timbers; The merchant, afraid of the African gale brawling With Icarian waves, praises leisure and the countryside Round his own town, but soon rebuilds his shattered Ships—­he cannot learn to endure poverty; There is a man who sees no objection to drinking Old Massic wine or taking time out of the day, Stretched out sometimes under the green arbutus, Sometimes by a gently swelling spring of sacred water. Some enjoy the camp, the sound of the trumpet merged With the bugle, the wars that mothers Abhor; staying out under a cold sky, The huntsman forgets his tender wife If his faithful dogs catch sight of a hind Or a Marsian boar bursts the delicate nets; As for me, it is ivy, the reward of learned brows, That puts me among the gods above. As for me, The cold grove and the light-­footed chorus of nymphs With Satyrs set me apart from the people. If Euterpe lets me play her pipes, and Polyhymnia Does not withhold the lyre of Lesbos. But if you include me among the lyric bards My soaring head will strike the stars. (Translation of West 1995, slightly modified)

In connection with this ode, Mayer (2012, 48–­49) makes an important distinction between the neutral and the argumentative priamel: the neutral priamel does not privilege any of the listed opinions or activities over any other, whereas in the argumentative form the final element is set above some or all of the “foil. ” Most commentators have disagreed with Porphyrio’s opinion that Horace’s priamel is neutral, merely describing the variety of human pursuits, but Mayer agrees with him that the elements of the foil are not disparaged, and that the priamel is neutral, citing Race (1982, 124) approvingly to the effect that the priamel form can give emphasis simply by means of contrast. However, I would suggest that an emphasis which depends on contrast must in some way “privilege” the item emphasized, especially in a lyric poem. Mayer’s distinction is a tension that is, to varying degrees, internal to any priamel, rather than a firm separation between different kinds. A lyric poem necessarily privileges the final item to which the others are contrasted in a “neutral” priamel, but at the same time there are no negatives in poetry and, even in the case of an argumentative priamel, what is rejected is nevertheless made present. In this connection the priamel has something in common with

122

chapter four

the praeteritio. As Freudenburg (1999, 236, n.1) points out, there is a touch of the praeteritio about Horace’s list of pursuits in lines 3–­28 of this poem. A praeteritio draws attention to the very items which it claims to pass over, and Horace’s list of options passed over paradoxically flags up a number of the themes that will be developed in the rest of the book. The lyric genre that Horace is in the process of defining in this book will be marked not only by its emphasis on the life, relationships, and ambitions of the first-­person speaker, but also by its variety of subject matter (more on this in the next chapter). Furthermore, it is Horace’s handling of variatio in the priamel’s list that underwrites the poetic ambition which he announces in the final lines. In other words, counterpointing the lyric priamel, whose function is to contrast the subjectivity of others with that of Horace, is the priamel as the rhetorical display of copia and varietas, which is the medium in which Horace shines as writer. Does the variety that provides the focusing contrast to the speaker in Odes 1.1 help to make the very claim for which it is supposed to serve as foil? A related, though different, question is whether the “others” can be lumped together as not-­Horace, all (monotonously) the same, or whether they are all (comically) different in a variety to which Horace himself contributes. Humanity is both a single inconstant individual, unsure of what he or she wants, and a crowd, deluded about the variety of activities and tastes that it comprises (the members of the crowd have more in common than they would like to think). David West’s acute analysis of this poem shows how patterns of imagery both connect one activity to another (farmers split [“findere, ” 11] the sod and sailors cut [“secet, ” 14] the sea, for instance) and contrast them (some are restless, others won’t move). There is, as he points out, a mildly mocking tone to the hyperboles throughout.7 Horace situates the first of his Odes, by similarity and difference, in relation to the opening of the first book of his Satires, which Gowers (2012, 59) has described as an “anti-­priamel”: “Each man is unhappy in his own way—­except for me. ” The priamel of c. 1.1 is famously complicated by the appearance, in the “foil, ” of a laid-­back drinker who looks very much like Horace himself (19–­ 22), or at least the persona of the mild Epicurean that Horace constructs for himself in the first book of Odes. It is hard to imagine the poet of the Odes distinguishing himself from this figure.8 A change of grammatical construction, from the accusatives that have introduced the types listed so far (sunt quos . . . hunc . . . illum . . . gaudentem) to the emphatic est qui (19) serves to give this character a particular emphasis.9 But apparently we haven’t arrived at Horace yet, for there are still the soldier and the hunter to go before Horace announces his ambition. The drinker is characterized by the relaxed variety of  his preferred drinking spots (nunc . . . nunc . . .) and by the fact that, unlike

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

123

the others, he is no obsessive (nec spernit . . .). Does Horace divide himself into two in this priamel, the poet and the man of (moderate) pleasure? Is he a component of the variety of human desires that he himself surveys? One could indeed say that, as the Odes progress, Horace the lyric poet will turn out to be the amused observer of human variety, not reluctant to include himself in what he observes. If he can appear both in and out of the list it is because he is both author and content of his poetry. But there is another principle according to which he might appear at two points of the priamel, and in two different guises, and that principle is introduced by the variatio with which the first two items of the focusing list are introduced (3–­6): sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum collegisse iuvat, metaque fervidis evitata rotis palmaque nobilis terrarum dominos evehit ad deos. There are some who enjoy collecting Olympic dust On their chariot, and if they graze the turning-­post With scorching wheels and win the palm of glory, They are lords of the earth and rise to the gods.

Iuvat (enjoy) or evehit ad deos (raises to the gods)? Pleasure or ambition? Is the variatio of the verbs simply decorative, or does it announce two different principles of choice? Certainly we could project this distinction between pleasure and ambition onto the two Horaces in this priamel: the one who appears in the guise of the drinker within the foil and the Horace who caps it with his aspiration to be included among the lyric poets. So, by the time we get to the end of the poem we may have to revise our opinion about the varia­ tio of  lines 3–­6. Rather than simply “elegant variation” could it be a distinction between different kinds of motive governing the choice of  human pursuits? Another variatio structures the dicolon where Horace caps the priamel and arrives at himself: me doctarum hederae praemia frontium dis miscent superis, me gelidum nemus nympharumque leves cum Satyris chori secernunt populo . . . (1.1.29–­32) As for me, it is ivy, the reward of learned brows, That puts me among the gods above. As for me, The cold grove and the light-­footed chorus of nymphs With Satyrs set me apart from the people.

124

chapter four

The phrase secernunt populo (set me apart from the people) can be taken, in parallel with dis miscent superis (puts me among the gods above), to mean “single me out from the mass, ” of which the parallel phrase would be a hyperbolic equivalent. Secernunt populo, then, expresses the principle of the priamel itself, which singles Horace out from the populace with its varied pur­ suits. But since what separates Horace from the mass is “the cold grove and the light-­footed chorus of nymphs with Satyrs” we can assume that Horace is also speaking about physical removal from the city’s populous bustle, on his Sabine farm.10 This country retreat, in turn, is a benefit of his association with the rich and powerful, which casts a retrospective light on dis miscent superis: the ode is addressed to Maecenas, and it begins by making an association with him before it embarks on the distinctions that separate Horace from others. The same tension between association and distinction can be seen in the final lines of the poem (35–­36): quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres sublimi feriam sidera vertice. But if you include me among the lyric bards, My soaring head will strike the stars.

Does inseres suggest the inclusion of  Horace in an anthology, whose variety is enhanced by his inclusion?11 If so, this ending is consistent with the fact that Horace is both distinguished from the various others and included as one of them. Lyric poetry itself is a varied spectacle, a potential anthology, and Horace will be included within this, while at the same time his own collection will be characterized by variety, hence his final boast.12 We can see now that Horace’s first ode displays the contradiction latent in the lyric priamel, in which the poet is likely to become trammeled in the variety of the world “out there” which is supposed to focus on the “here” of lyric subjectivity. In the case of Horace, the variety “out there” will become the variety “in here. ”13 As Freudenburg puts it: “in the course of the poems that follow, we see that the poet will, in fact, raise a cloud or two of Olympic dust; he will launch ships of  his own and contend for honor and immortality; and he will spend a good deal of time in subumbral sipping, unwary of falling limbs. The priamel runs us through options explored, even in promising not to explore them. And in the process, it reminds us of the multifarious nature of  lyric itself ” (Freudenburg 1999, 236). Horace will not so much stake his own place among the variety of lyric poetry, in which the priamel is the form which distinguishes a given poet’s uniqueness, as embrace or contain it

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

125

all within his more various understanding of the lyric genre (more on this in the next chapter). Variety is embraced in a quite different way by Ovid the love poet, who stands the priamel on its head. Ovid’s deliciously varied list, in Amores 2.4, of the varieties of women who excite his desire is capped by the statement that “whatever anyone desires” is the object of his canvassing love (“ambitiosus amor, ” 48). Instead of saying “Some . . . Others . . . But I . . . , ” Ovid says “I love this just as much as that . . . ”14 Far from being a foil for Ovid’s own erotic taste, the spectacle of female variety is what sustains his desiring self. Ovid frames the poem as a confession: since he cannot defend his behavior he must now appear as witness for the prosecution (2.4.1–­4). The words “Odi, nec possum, cupiens, non esse quod odi” (“I hate it, but, however much I want, I can’t avoid being what I hate, ” 2.4.5) state both that he wants (cupiens) to be otherwise, but can’t, and that because he desires (cupiens) he cannot but be what he despises, a typically Ovidian joke. Most of Ovid’s poem is taken up by the list (forty-­four lines long) of the various types that arouse him. It begins with this couplet: non est certa meos quae forma invitet amores centum sunt causae cur ego semper amem. (Amores 2.4.9–­10) There is no specific beauty that attracts my desire But a hundred reasons why I must always love.

The list itself, which must have influenced Leporello’s “Catalogue Aria” in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, proceeds as a series of alternatives: sive aliqua est oculos in se deiecta modestos uror et insidiae sunt pudor ille meae: sive procax aliqua est, capior quia rustica non est, spemque dat in molli mobilis esse toro. (Amores 2.4.11–­14) If a girl modestly keeps her eyes to herself I burn and her modesty entraps me: If another is forward, I am smitten because she is experienced, And can be expected to be active in bed.

The alternatives are sometimes contained within a single couplet, evenly or unevenly divided, and sometimes spread over two. Syntax is varied, and so is the mode of utterance. The passage is a virtuoso display of variatio, in which the monotonously end-­stopped couplets, and the repeated polar oppositions encouraged by the symmetries of the elegiac couplet, are prevented from

126

chapter four

becoming tedious by the inexhaustibly ingenious variety of Ovid’s formulations. It’s always the same thing that he’s after, but always a different same thing. Ovid’s variatio of expression can be distinguished from Horace’s because the alternatives are always contained within the couplet, whereas Horace’s units are unpredictable in length. In Ovid, every couplet successfully and variously concluded is chalked up as a “score”; every polarity ingeniously accommodated to the couplet form cuts a notch on his bedpost.15 The endlessly varied use of the couplet’s symmetries suggests not so much that there are many different types of desirable women as that there are many different ways in which desire is awakened. Desire is mutable, inventive, and opportunistic: est etiam quae me vatem et mea carmina culpet culpantis cupiam sustinuisse femur. (Amores 2.4.21–­22) There is one woman who finds fault with me as a poet, I want to lift up her leg [make love to her] while she criticizes me.

The resourceful poet-­lover can find the desirable in anyone, just as he can hear the cupiam (desire) in culpantis (criticize). This “mis-­hearing” is continued by the pun that moves sustinuisse from the legal sphere (uphold her complaint) to the sexual (hold up her thigh). Ovid’s desire is adaptable to whatever is out there, whether it be myths (“omnibus historiis se meus aptat amor, ” 44), types of women, or the couplet form itself. In the very monotony of the couplet he finds a challenge to make it click in different ways, while the variety of female types is a challenge to find a way to “click” with each of them. The connection between the erotic and the aesthetic is implicitly emphasized when Ovid puns on placeo (I please) and plico (I fold) in lines 17–­18: Sive es docta, places raras dotata per artes sive rudis, placita es simplicitate tua. If you are accomplished, you please because you are gifted with special arts. If you are uneducated, your simplicity pleases me.

It is the fold (-­plic-­) of the antithesis adapting itself to the fold of the couplet form (sive . . . sive) that pleases ( placet). Ovid’s poem caught the attention of several of  his imitators, Ronsard and Donne among them. In a clear echo of Ovid, Donne begins his poem, The Indifferent, with the declaration “I can love both fair and brown, ” and he then continues for nine lines with a list inspired by Amores 2.4. When Venus hears Donne sing this song, she articulates what is implicit in Ovid’s poem: “by love’s sweetest part, variety, she swore / She heard not this til now” (Indiffer­

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

127

ent, 20–­21, my emphasis).16 The word varius does not put in an appearance in Amores 2.4, but Donne supplies a reference to the principle that lies behind Ovid’s poem. Looking backwards rather than forwards in literary history, we can see that in Amores 2.4 Ovid was taking a hint from Propertius, who remonstrates with those who are tormented by an omnivorous desire: vidistis pleno teneram candore puellam, vidistis fuscam, ducit uterque color. (Propertius, 2.25.41–­42) When you saw a young girl with the lightest of complexions, Or when you saw one with darker skin, both attracted you.

For Propertius, by contrast, one woman is trouble enough (46–­47). But Pro­ pertius’s lines are themselves a palinode for 2.22a, in which he confesses to a friend that he used to be susceptible to the charms of many women (“Scis here mi multas pariter placuisse puellas, ” 1). The list of alternative attractions is brief (5–­10), but it proceeds with the familiar sive . . . seu . . . sive. . . . As Labate (1977, 321) puts it, Ovid allows himself  what Propertius didn’t have the courage to complete. The libertine Ovid, then, expands on, and diverges from, some passages in the monogamously obsessive Propertius. If  Ovid finds in the couplet form of his genre a charter for inconstancy, that is by contrast with Propertius, who opens his second book (2.1) with an interesting charter for monogamous obsession, emphasizing the various (seu . . . seu . . .) ways in which Cynthia makes her lover into a poet. We can contrast Ovid’s “there are a hundred rea­ sons why I must always love” (“centum sunt causae cur ego semper amem”) to Propertius’s “a poet, I find a thousand new causes for my love” (“invenio causas mille poeta novas, ” 2.1.11), stressing the creative (invenio) power of  his obsessive love to produce new stories (“maxima de nihilo nascitur historia, ” 16); by contrast Ovid adapts his love to all stories (“omnibus historiis se meus aptat amor, ” 2.4.44).17 But it is not Cynthia who is the addressee of Propertius’s poem, it is Maecenas. As it turns out, this poem is a recusatio (refusal): Propertius’s monomaniacal love is the reason why he doesn’t write epic. If the fates allowed him to write of heroes, then his subject would be—­cue a list of various potential epic topics that Propertius would not sing (19–­24). This takes the form of a regular priamel, moving chronologically from the battle of the gods and the giants to Roman history, remote (Remus, the Punic Wars) or recent (Marius). The priamel is resolved with the expected “but I would sing [of the wars and

128

chapter four

campaigns of your Caesar, and of you always at his side]” (25–­26). And yet, even here the listing is not finished, for Propertius embarks on yet another focusing list, protesting that whether he sang of—­there follows a list of various military victories of Octavian/Augustus (27–­34)—­his poetry would always weave Maecenas into the song (“te mea Musa illis semper contexeret armis, ” 35). Here, rearranged into a different structural pattern, is the panegyrical equivalent of the opening sequence, in which Propertius describes how everything that Cynthia does is the opportunity for poetry. Now it is Maecenas who will always be woven into the song. The poem’s sequence of lists ends with a more conventional, and briefer, priamel: navita de ventis, de tauris narrat arator, enumerat miles vulnera, pastor ovis; nos vero angusto versantes proelia lecto . . . (Propertius 2.1.43–­44) The sailor tells of the sea, the plowman of bulls, The soldier tells over his wounds, the shepherd his sheep; I myself engage in love’s battles on a narrow bed.

We have returned to obsessive love. The narrowness of the bed reflects the obsessiveness of the couplet form, and Propertius finally produces a focusing priamel that narrows to the lyric self. We are just over half-­way through the poem. Propertius’s play with the priamel form in this poem consists in repeatedly defeating our expectations of where the poem is going to touch ground, a paradoxical use of this most goal-­directed of rhetorical devices. We move from from sive . . . seu . . . to non . . . nec . . . nec . . . sed and then off again to quotiens . . . aut . . . aut. In the middle, we have a true priamel (“not this, but that”) and, flanking it, two versions of “whether this or that, I always sing of her/you. ” Propertius’s monomanical devotion to both Cynthia and Maecenas proves to be anything but monotonous and exclusive. Satire is not the only genre in which there is a dialectic of  “always the same” and “always different, ” and between them Ovid and Propertius represent two very different ways in which it can play out in love elegy. Love and Hunting At the end of the first book of the Ars Amatoria, Ovid appends a cautionary coda that puts into question the didactic advice he has been giving up to this point. Women are different, and there are no hard and fast rules of seduction.

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

129

You must adapt your approach to the individual.18 Yet here too Ovid is keeping up the didactic parody: Finiturus eram, sed sunt diversa puellis pectora; mille animos accipe mille modis. nec tellus eadem parit omnia: vitibus illa convenit, haec oleis; hic bene farra virent. pectoribus mores tot sunt, quot in ore figurae: qui sapit, innumeris moribus aptus erit, utque leves Proteus modo se tenuabit in undas, nunc leo, nunc arbor, nunc erit hirtus aper. hi iaculo pisces, illi capiuntur ab hamis, hos cava contento retia fune trahat. nec tibi conveniat cunctos modus unus ad annos, longius insidias cerva videbit anus. si doctus videare rudi petulansve pudenti, diffidet miserae protinus illa sibi. inde fit ut, quae se timuit committere honesto, vilis ad amplexus inferioris eat. (Ovid, Ars Amatoria bk. 1)

755

760

765

770

I was about to finish, but girls’ minds are all different; Address yourself to a thousand different minds in a thousand different ways. The earth doesn’t bring forth everything equally: this soil Is good for vines, that one for olives, whereas here the barley flourishes. There are as many fashions of mind as kinds of faces: The clever man will be adaptable to innumerable types. Like Proteus he will at one point reduce himself to water, And now be a lion, now a tree, now a shaggy boar. Some fishes are caught by spear, others by hooks, Some should be dragged by hollow nets with rope drawn tight. Nor should you use one approach for all ages. An older hind will spot an ambush further off. If you seem learned to an uneducated girl, or aggressive to a demure one, The poor girl will immediately lose confidence. That’s why the girl who fears to commit herself to a man of rank May cheapen herself by accepting the embrace of an inferior.

The basic idea of Amores 2.4 is recalled here by one of Ovid’s favorite words, aptus ( 760, cf. Am. 2.4.44): the lover is, and must be, adaptable if he is to enjoy womankind in all its variety. In lines 757–­58 Ovid the didactic parodist has fun with Vergil’s injunction that the farmer must understand the diversity of climates and ecologies before he starts to sow (Georgics 1.50–­56).19

130

chapter four

As I noted in connection with the Georgics passage earlier, Renaissance authors, following Quintilian, would take Vergil’s “hic segetes, illic veniunt felicius uvae” (Georgics 1.54) as directing the eyes to different points in a single landscape, rather than indicating different countries. Ovid, who adapts Vergil’s words to describe the lover surveying his options, may be the fulcrum for this shift. In the face of diversity, the adaptable lover must be a Proteus who will take the form of an animal or a tree. But then Ovid changes the metaphor to figure love as a hunt (pivoting on the boar of 762), in which it is the woman who is the animal. Once again, he draws attention to the theme of variety in the didactic genre, this time with reference to manuals on hunting and fishing, which stress the variety of prey.20 When it comes to the remedies for love, in his book on that subject Ovid turns from the metaphors of hunting and fishing in the Art of Love to the real thing, a good example of the way that the Remedia Amoris ingeniously recycles material from Ovid’s earlier love poetry to give it a new twist. Love is lazy (Remedia, 143–­50), and so activity is its best antidote; among the recommended pursuits are hunting and fishing (Rem. 210). As Conte puts it, “Reintegrating the rhetoric of elegiac love into a varied and manifold ideological horizon like that of  life in its totality is indeed the basic principle of the art of healing.”  21 As far as hunting is concerned, Ovid reminds us that Venus was often routed by Diana (Rem. 200): hunting is conventionally opposed to loving (the virginal figures in Ovid’s Metamorphoses are often hunters, and vice versa). Ovid then launches into a list of the various ways that different preys are hunted (nunc . . . nunc . . . aut . . . aut, 201–­4), and follow this with a brief account of fowling and fishing (207–­10), concluding: Aut his aut aliis, donec dediscis amare, ipse tibi furtim decipiendus eris. (Rem. 211–­12) Use either these or other methods, until you unlearn your love, You must craftily deceive yourself.

Now variety has become the means by which the lover deceives himself ! Of all the confrontations between Venus and Diana, hunting and loving, in ancient literature the most stark is in Euripides’s Hippolytus, and it is interesting to see that Seneca, in his version of the story, presents a Hippolytus who seems to have taken to heart Ovid’s advice about hunting as a distraction from love. The beginning of Seneca’s Phaedra, with its contrast between Hippolytus the hunter and Phaedra the lover, gives us a new version of the old theme of the relation between hunting and love. Here, it is the variety and

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

131

diversification of the hunter’s world that is contrasted with the lover’s trapped obsessiveness. As Coffey and Mayer (1990, 89) point out, Hippolytus’s prologue to Phae­ dra is an example of the Callimachean narrative technique which creates “the illusory enactment of a scene as related by an observer, or better, by a chief figure in the action. ” It is divided into two parts: preparations for the hunt, in which Hippolytus gives orders to his huntsmen (vos . . . alii . . . pars . . . pars), and an invocation to Diana. Each part is subdivided as follows (according to the scheme of Coffey and Mayer 1990, 90): I. Preparations: 1. 1–­30b localities and quarry 2. 31–­43 hounds 3. 44–­53 gear and strategy II. Invocation: 4. 54–­80 prayer to Diana (i) 54–­72 her haunts and pursuits (ii) 73–­80 her favor

Lists abound, whether it be the list of varied locales of Attica, each briefly characterized in 1; the balancing list of Diana’s haunts in 4 (i); or the various kinds of hound in 2. Hunting is characterized by variety; its opposite, love, is monotonously obsessive and confined. In Hippolytus’s instructions to his hunters, the groups that are sent in different directions are proxies for the self. As Rosenmeyer (1989, 68) puts it, “the summons gives us the impression of a young man’s mind, free and vital and untainted, happy in the beauty and variety of a world to be tracked. ” Hippolytus’s free projection of himself into a varied landscape contrasts with the pile-­up of the same in Phaedra’s opening speech, which follows immediately on Hippolytus’s invocation of  Diana: cur me in penates obsidem invisos datam hostique nuptam degere aetatem in malis lacrimisque cogis? (Phaedra 89–­91) Why do you [Crete] compel me, a hostage handed over to a hateful household, And married to an enemy, to spin out my life in suffering And tears?

Hippolytus’s alii . . . alii . . . is shrunk to Phaedra’s cur me?, in which the word me introduces a monotonous and confining succession of accusatives applied to Phaedra. Where Hippolytus scatters himself variously in the imperative

132

chapter four

mood, Phaedra can only manage a pained question as to why she should be the target of a cruel world. Hippolytus dominates the countryside through his wide-­ranging troupe of hunters, but while Phaedra invokes Crete as having dominance over the sea (85–­88), this can do nothing to prevent her confinement. Both Hippolytus and Phaedra are obsessed, but Hippolytus’s obsession takes him out of himself; he concludes “vocor in silvas” (“I am called to the woods, ” 82). Even when Phaedra expresses the yearning to go to the woods she recognizes it as the same old thing, a family habit inherited from her mother, Pasiphae (“fatale miserae matris agnosco malum / peccare noster novit in silvas amor, ” 113–­14). Hippolytus exhibits what Rosenmeyer has identified as characteristic of the Senecan hero, the rage to embrace a varied nature: “The dwelling on a col­ ourful plenitude of a ‘sympathetic’ environment allows the aesthetic to gain a clear ascendancy over the moral. Hence the serial indulgence, the frequent unwillingness to leave well enough alone and to hold the catalogue entries to a decent modicum” (1989, 172). As Rosenmeyer presents it, the Senecan Schreikatalog (catalogue-­as-­cry) either/both tries to summon and collect the variety of nature under control or/and to “draw out as long as possible the furlough from his own distress” in a “sustained suppression or attenuation of the first-­person focus” (Rosenmeyer 1989, 178, apropos Thyestes, 1006–­20). On this reading, then, the Schreikatalog is an anti-­priamel, or rather an inverted priamel, in which the movement is not from a varied world to the self, but away from the self into a various world. Rosenmeyer’s formulation applies to Senecan characters in distress, which, at this stage of the play, Hippolytus is not. But perhaps Hippolytus’s ranging imperatives are a deflection of what might seek him out, the love or the lover whose quarry he might become. Does the hunting catalogue, with its centrifugal variety, provide Hippolytus with “furlough” from his adolescent self? Seneca has an extraordinary ability to motivate dramatically the rhetorical amplification which has led some to think of  these plays as mere rhetorical exercises, and Rosenmeyer is a brilliant interpreter of this dramatic function.22 Hippolytus’s speech is the obverse of Ovid’s hunting metaphor in the Ars Amatoria, whose amatory agenda it seeks to deflect, and yet we may recognize in the anti-­priamel of Hippolytus the same restless diversion from the self as we sense in Ovid’s priamel-­stood-­on-­ its-­head in Amores 2.4. Variety takes everyone for a ride. Variety, Satiety, and Satire I have already suggested that the satirist, like the lover, plays out a dialectic of variety and sameness, and that Horace’s priamel in c. 1.1 has a satiric edge,

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

133

insofar as it implies that people may not be as varied in their pursuits as they seem to be. It is time now to confront satire directly. The oscillation between variety and sameness starts with the name of the genre satura itself.23 Isidore distinguishes between two kinds of meaning in sat-­ words: satietas ex uno cibo dici potest, pro eo quod satis est; saturitas autem a satura nomen accepit, quod est vario alimentorum adparatu compositum. (Isidore, Origines 20.1.8) Satietas can be used in relation to one food, for that which is enough; but sa­ turitas takes its name from satura, which is composed from a varied provision of foodstuffs.

Whatever the precise derivation of satura, it is clear that the name brings into play the different associations of sat*. Ironically, although satietas and varietas are antonyms, the genre of satura may bring them together, as here in Isidore. In the classic discussion of the etymology of satura, the fifth-­century grammarian Diomedes (Gramm. Lat. 1.485) gives four possibilities. The first is “from satyrs” because of their association with the laughable and the raunchy; then, from “a full dish packed with a large number of varied first fruits” (“referta variis multisque primitiis”), a derivation which is appropriate to the copia and saturitas of satire’s material. Next comes a kind of sausage made from a variety of ingredients. Finally, satura could be derived from a certain kind of compendious law with multiple provisions, because a satire contains many poems. Diomedes makes the association between fullness and variety in the second and third of these derivations.24 Aesthetically, satire rejoices in variety. The satirist says “I’m going to cram the whole variegated mish-­mash, life itself (which is the only real subject), into my work. ” But, as moralist, the satirist has had more than enough, and now he must speak; as he does so, the wondrous spectacle of  human behavior in all its variety shrinks to a monotonous sameness under his gaze. Juvenal’s programmatic first satire alludes to the second and third of Diomedes’s etymologies when he refers to the farrago (mixed mash) of his book:



ex quo Deucalion nimbis tollentibus aequor navigio montem ascendit sortesque poposcit paulatimque anima caluerunt mollia saxa et maribus nudas ostendit Pyrrha puellas, quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli est. et quando uberior vitiorum copia? ( Juvenal, Satires 1.81–­87)

134

chapter four

From the moment the rain raised the sea, and Deucalion Climbed a mountain on board his ship to consult an oracle, And little by little the soft stones grew warm with soul, And Pyrrha displayed her naked girls to the men, Whatever people do, their wishes, fears, anger, pleasure, Joys, their comings and goings, is the mixed mash of my book. And when has there ever been a richer crop of vice?

Earlier in the poem Juvenal has declared that it is difficult not to write satire (1.30) in a Rome where . . . and he continues with a list of the varied spectrum of vice (22–­29). Here he explicitly makes the variety of  human activity his satiric subject (“quidquid agunt homines, ” 85). There follows a list, which begins with familiar motives for vice and symptoms of weakness (votum, timor, ira, voluptas).25 “Discursus” (86) could be a further element in the list, or alternatively a second-­order summation of the other elements: human activity amounts to “running around” (discursus), and is not really varied at all. There might be a similar ambiguity in the phrase ex quo, which introduces this passage: Juvenal is going to deal with the whole range of human activity, from the time when (ex quo) Deucalion and Pyrrha re-­peopled the world after the flood. That’s an impressive range! Or perhaps it isn’t. Juvenal’s description of the miraculous creation of men and women from stones is cynically phrased so as to make Pyrrha appear as a kind of madam, displaying the naked girls to the men. That moment of creation, then, becomes the point at which human vice begins, and since then (ex quo) it’s been the same monotonous story. So the phrase ex quo may open on a variegated field or introduce a monotonous sequence, depending on how we understand it. Juvenal brings the passage I have just quoted to an end with a question: “when has the crop of human vice ever been richer (uberior)?” As we have seen, ubertas belongs to the semantic field of copia in its rhetorical application (see ubertas, OLD 3). The irony of calling the crop of vices “rich” is counterpointed by the rhetorical associations of the words copia and ubertas: a “rich” crop of vices can only produce good rhetoric. How, then, are we to see the satirist, as moralist or as rhetorician?26 Of all the characters that people Juvenal’s satires the “hungry Greekling” (Graeculus esuriens) of the third satire seems to epitomize the moral defect of variety: ede quid illum esse putes. quemvis hominem secum attulit ad nos. grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, pictor, aliptes,

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

135

augur, schoenobates, medicus, magus, omnia novit Graeculus esuriens. (3.74–­78) Say what you think That he is. He has brought us anyone you like in one person: Grammarian, rhetorician, geometrician, painter, masseur, Augur, tightrope walker, doctor, magician—­the hungry Greekling Can do it all.

Starting with teachers, Juvenal’s list moves up the Roman educational curriculum from grammaticus to rhetor and on to the more rarified world of geometry. Teachers were of low status, and so were painters, but with the masseur and the tightrope-­walker we leave the realm of culture altogether. To confuse any sense of order that might remain, Juvenal then separates these two entertainers with augur, a respected position which would not be associated with foreigners. The list is not only heterogeneous in respect of content, it also features a variety of nominal endings, Greek and Latin (-­us, -­or, -­es, -­ur).27 The Graeculus esuriens equalizes all with his appetite. Ironically, it is not far from the hungry Greekling to the hungry satire, whose fodder ( far­ rago) is the varied pursuits of an unregenerated humanity.28 The satirist as moralist would separate himself from the equalizing greed of a “discursive” humanity, but as poet/rhetorician he is part of the problem. Juvenal’s association between the variety of human types, vices, or pursuits and the writing of satire would seem to be a topos of the genre. Horace, for instance, introduces his first book of Satires with a catalogue of professions (merchant, soldier, farmer, lawyer, Satires 1.1.4–­12, discussed above, p. 122). In the opening poem of  his second book of Satires, Horace answers an imaginary interlocutor who is trying to dissuade him from writing in a genre that makes its readers uncomfortable. If you inveigh against Pantolabus the scrounger (scurra) or Nomentanus the spendthrift, says the interlocutor, everyone will fear for themselves and hate you, whether you have attacked them or not (21–­23). “But what else can I do?” Horace replies: quid faciam? saltat Milonius, ut semel icto accessit fervor capiti numerusque lucernis; Castor gaudet equis, ovo prognatus eodem pugnis; quot capitum vivunt, totidem studiorum milia: me pedibus delectat claudere verba Lucili ritu nostrum melioris utroque. (Horace, Satires 2.1.24–­29)

136

chapter four

What can I do? Milonius dances, once the heat Has made his brain reel and the lamps multiply; Castor goes in for horses, his brother, born from the same egg, For boxing: there are as many thousand hobbies As people: I myself like to round off my words into verse Like Lucilius, a better man than either of us.

At first, it looks as though the diversity of  human desires is the inspiration for satire, the genre of variety.29 Horace would be saying “What else can I do, when humans exhibit such a varied spectacle” in the same way as Juvenal will say, in his first satire, “How can I not write satire, when . . . [and he lists a varied array of social outrages]” ( Juvenal, 1.22–­29). But at the end of this passage Horace’s own pleasure in writing satire turns out to be itself a component of the diversity of human interests. The satirist’s inclusion of himself comes as a surprise.30 Now that he has included his own “hobby, ” Horace’s survey of human variety looks more like a priamel focusing on the satirist. “What else can I do? Each has his own obsession. A does this, B that . . . C the other . . . but I write satire. ” The satirist, then, both finds food for his book in the varied spectacle of human pursuits and contributes to the spectrum of human variety through his calling. Satire’s voracious appetite for variety swallows the satirist himself. Not surprisingly, Persius, in whose satires the presence of Horace is ubiquitous, imitates the movement of this passage with a similar shift from survey of variety to priamel. In Satire 5, Persius breaks into his homage to his teacher, Cornutus, with a passage on the variety of  human types and pursuits: mille hominum species et rerum discolor usus, velle suum cuique est nec voto vivitur uno. mercibus hic Italis mutat sub sole recenti rugosum piper et pallentis grana cumini, hic satur irriguo mavult turgescere somno, hic campo indulget, hunc alea concoquit, ille in venerem putris . . . at te nocturnis iuvat inpallescere chartis; cultor enim iuvenum purgatas inseris aures fruge Cleanthea. (Persius, Satires 5.52–­58; 62–­64) People come in a thousand types and go about things in a multicolored way. Each person has his own desire and there is no common goal. This one exchanges wrinkled pepper and cumin’s pale grain For Italian merchandise under an eastern sun. This one prefers to grow fat while drenched in sleep.

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

137

Another goes in for exercise, while another goes bankrupt from dicing. This one is susceptible to sex. . . . But you are happy to acquire a pallor poring over books at night: For, as teacher of the young, you sow cleansed ears With the fruit of Cleanthes’s philosophy.

The relevance of the variety of human types to Cornutus only gradually becomes apparent. To begin with, we are invited to enjoy the spectacle of a various human folly, which is one of the characteristic pleasures of satire. The word discolor aestheticizes the fact of human inconsistency. But in the third line we hear obvious echoes of Horace c. 1.1, and indeed this does turn out to be a priamel, taking us back to Cornutus (at te . . .), whom we seemed so suddenly to have abandoned at line 52. So Cornutus, like the satirist in the Horace passage we have just considered (2.1.28–­29), belongs to the spectacle of a various human striving at the same time as he serves as a preceptor to whom the young should turn to acquire a consistent goal (“finem animo certum, ” 65). In other words, he is both inside and outside the multicolored (dis­ color) spectacle of human endeavor. As Persius’s Stoic teacher, Cornutus is a figure parallel to the satirist himself, and a figure who exemplifies the satirist’s ambiguous relation to the variety that is emblematic of his genre. In this case we may ask whether “humanity” is a single inconstant individual, to be disciplined by the satirist, or an irreducibly varied diversity, of which the satirist’s own predilection is a component. We have seen the same double relation to variety in the priamel to Horace’s first ode, where the lyric poet’s listing serves both to locate himself outside the list and to characterize the variety of his poetry. Variety engulfs its observer. It is a mark of the satiric gaze that the wondrous variety of  human striving may shrink in its presence to a repetitive sameness, which incurs fastidium.31 In this, the satirist approaches the philosopher: Cogita quamdiu iam idem facias: cibus, somnus, libido—­per hunc circulum curritur; mori velle non tantum prudens aut fortis aut miser, etiam fastidiosus potest. (Seneca, Epist. 77.6) Reflect on how long now you have been doing the same: food, sleep, lust—­ you run through this cycle. It’s not only the prudent, courageous, or miserable who can long for death, even the fussy can do that.

In another passage Seneca comes close to blaming philosophy for inculcating in some a desire for death, motivated by the wrong feelings: Quosdam subit eadem faciendi videndique satietas et vitae non odium sed fastidium, in quod prolabimur ipsa inpellente philosophia, dum dicimus

138

chapter four

“quousque eadem? Nempe expergiscar dormiam, edam esuriam, algebo aestuabo. Nullius rei finis est, sed in orbem nexa sunt omnia, fugiunt ac sequuntur; diem nox premit, dies noctem, aestas in autumnum desinit, autumno hiemps instat, quae vere conpescitur; omnia sic transeunt ut revertantur. Nihil novi facio, nihil novi video: fit aliquando et huius rei nausia. ” Multi sunt qui non acerbum iudicent vivere sed supervacuum. Vale. (Seneca, Epist. 24.26)32 Some undergo the same saturation of doing and seeing, and experience not so much hatred of life as disgust, into which we slip under the impulse of philosophy itself, when we say “How much longer must I endure the same? For I will wake and sleep, eat and grow hungry, be cold and be hot. Nothing comes to an end, but everything is tied up in a circle, fleeing and following; night presses on day, summer peters out into autumn, winter comes on the heels of autumn, which is curbed by spring; all things pass only to return. I do nothing new, I see nothing new: eventually there is revulsion even at this. ” There are many who think it is not so much bitter to live as superfluous. Farewell.

The cry of quousque eadem resonates across ancient philosophy, as the philosopher proves that he has seen through the variety that meets the eye and knows what it all amounts to.33 Here, the variety of human experience is reduced to a continuum (“nullius rei finis est”), erasing the distinctio of varietas in a passage that recalls Horace’s lyric description of the cycle of seasons (c. 4.7.9–­12). In another passage (De Providentia 5.7), Seneca points out that although our lives seem to sparkle with variety (“magna videatur varietate singulorum vita distingui”), it all amounts to the same thing (“summa in unum venit”), namely that we are going to die. In this case it is the change of focus from singula to summa which brings home the sameness of it all. Marcus Aurelius ( 7.48) recommends that we take a bird’s eye view of the earth and its doings: “Its gatherings, armies, agriculture, its marriages and separations, its births and deaths, the noise of the law court and the silence of the desert, the various ( poikila) barbarous races, the medley (to pammiges) of it all and its orderly conjunction of contraries (to ek tōn enantiōn sugkosmoumenon). ” This is followed closely by a statement ( 7.49) to the effect that it doesn’t matter how long you live, for it will all be of the same kind (homoeides); there is no escaping the rhythm of existing things. Close up, human life looks poikilos, but from the perspective of a bird’s eye it all looks the same. It is this strain of ancient thought which lies behind the disillusionment expressed in Arnold’s Dover Beach (see pp. ­12–­13). But the ability to see varietas becomes a mark of truth, rather than of illusion, if it indicates that the philosopher is directing his gaze away from the monotony of  human affairs toward the natura rerum, for that can never bring on satietas.

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

139

Vitam enim occupare satietas sui non potest res tam varias, magnas, divinas percensentem: in odium illam sui adducere solet iners otium. Rerum natu­ ram peragranti numquam in fastidium veritas veniet: falsa satiabunt. (Seneca, Epist. 78.26) A life that is spent surveying the variety, grandeur, and divinity of the world cannot be overcome by weariness of itself: it is inactive leisure that brings life to hate itself. To one who explores the nature of things the truth can never bring on disgust: it is falsity that satiates.

Perhaps the collocation of rerum natura with the Lucretian word peragrare (DRN 1.74, of Epicurus) allows Seneca to bring the great philosophical champion of varietas to our minds. We are returned to the spectacle of nature, rejoicing in variety and presided over by a divinity that has an eye to the human need for variety. Seneca distinguishes here between the illusory va­ riety of  human pleasures, which will pall, and the true variety of a divine na­ ture, between a veritas which displays varietas and the falsa which bring on fastidium. We have seen that Horace’s priamel covering the variety of human pursuits in c. 1.1 has satiric potential. The same topos of the variety of human activities and emotions may be given a celebratory or a weary tone. One only has to compare Pliny’s proudly asyndetic lists of the varied moods and moments reflected in his poetic nugae (trifles, see p. 95) to the quousque eadem of Seneca’s asyndeton in Epist. 24.26 (“expergiscar dormiam, edam esuriam, algebo aestuabo”) to see the poles of relish and disgust between which the different generic subjectivities distribute themselves. In the next section we turn to a voice that celebrates variety, the voice of the panegyrist. Panegyrical Variety At the opposite pole to the critical, sceptical stance toward variety in satire and philosophy are the resoundingly affirmative panegyrics of  Statius’s villa poems, in which variety is embraced as a vital constituent of the visitor’s experience of the grandee’s villas. It is with Statius that variety most emphatically stakes its claim to be at home with the sublime (discussed on pp. 6­ 6–­70). In these poems (Silvae 1.3, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1) Statius speaks as a visitor, and describes his experience of the wealth, profusion, and technical ingenuity of these villas with an exuberance undimmed by the moral issues that mark, for instance, Horace’s critique of luxurious villas.34 But how does variety feature in these poems? When Statius describes the villas of his patrons it is an important component of the praise that the visitor be overwhelmed by the experience. He

140

chapter four

frames the problem of describing the villa of  Vopiscus as a problem with Aristotelian form: “what to put first, what in the middle, and what at the end?” (“quid primum mediumque canam, quo fine quiescam, ” 1.3.34).35 Here Statius articulates clearly an important strain in the aesthetics of varietas. He can discover no natural order of description because of the heterogeneity of his experience: Statius is divided between the various organs of response (“huc oculis, huc mente trahor, ” 38). The visual treats with which he begins (gilded beams, colored marble, 35–­36) are followed by wonder at a technical feat (water supplied to every bedroom, 36), and then more ethical considerations (the venerable antiquity of the groves, 39–­40). The word varius crops up twice in quick succession. Statius reports seeing sculpture in which metals were “variously alive” (“variisque metalla / viva modis, ” 47–­48). Then, following the sculpture (miniatures and colossi respectively), come the variegated (56) floor mosaics. But the impression of an orderly succession from one medium to another is broken by the fortuitous way in which Statius stumbles upon this new wonder, again suggesting a subjectivity that is distributed among heterogeneous experiences: dum vagor aspectu visusque per omnia duco calcabam necopinus opes. nam splendor ab alto defluus et nitidum referentes aera testae monstravere solum, varias ubi picta per artes gaudet humus superatque novis asarota figuris. expavere gradus. (Silvae 1.3.52–­57) While my gaze wandered and I led my eyes through every sight I was stepping unawares on riches. For brilliance pouring down From above and tiles that reflected the light showed a bright floor Where the earth rejoiced in painting’s variety, and surpassed The Unswept Floor with its strange shapes. My steps trembled.

At first Statius’s gaze wanders (“vagor aspectu, ” 52), but then he guides it through each of the visual treats (“visus . . . duco, ” 52). Deliberate action soon gives way to involuntary surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly trampling riches (a cut-­price Agamemnon!). Light from above and the reflecting tiles then obligingly display (“monstravere, ” 55) the floor. Not only does the villa present a spectacle of variety, but the mode in which it presents itself to the poet is constantly shifting. The language of variety finally puts in an appearance when the topos of nature rejoicing in its variety is wittily transferred to the mosaic pavement (“gaudet humus, ” 56), and the cliché of the variously

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

141

“painted” earth becomes literal (“varias ubi picta per artes, ” 55). This confusion of experience in the awe-­struck observer produces a stasis brought on by sublime awe: “my steps trembled” (“expavere gradus, ” 57). A similar experience is described in Silvae 2.2: non, mihi si cunctos Helicon indulgeat amnes ... innumeras valeam species cultusque locorum Pieriis aequare modis. vix ordine longo suffecere oculi, vix, dum per singula ducor, suffecere gradus. quae rerum turba! locine ingenium an domini mirer prius? (2.2.36, 41–­45) Not if Helicon should grant me all her streams . . . would I have the power to match the countless sights and beauties of the place with my Pierian verse. My eyes scarcely held out through the long succession, nor were my legs strong enough as I was led through every detail. What a crowd of objects! Should I admire the genius of the location or its master’s first?

The verb duco (lead, 43) recurs, but now coupled with per singula rather than per omnia: the spectacle through which Statius is led disintegrates into details.36 Variety produces a turba (crowd, 44) because the individual elements insist on their individuality ( per singula), crowding the viewer with their demand for attention. As in the passage previously quoted, the panegyrist is confused as to how he should proceed. Among all the luxuries confronting Statius it is marble that is the most distinguished by varietas, as we have already observed in Pliny the Elder’s Histo­ ria Naturalis. Marble is a crucial marker of wealth and luxury in the Silvae.37 Statius regales us with lists of differently colored marbles offered to the gaze (hic . . . hic . . .), and not only in the villa poems.38 Even the more common marbles, which have been spurned by the fastidious owner, may be mentioned, as in this description of the baths of Claudius Etruscus: vix locus Eurotae, viridis cum regula longo Synnada distinctu variat. non limina cessant, effulgent camerae, vario fastigia vitro in species animata nitent. stupet ipse beatas circumplexus opes et parcius imperat ignis. (Silvae 1.5.40–­44) There’s scarcely room for marble from Eurotas, where the long streak of green Picks out and varies the marble of Synnas. The doors don’t fail to compete,

142

chapter four

The roofs flash, the gables shine with variegated glass mosaics, Picturing life. The fire itself gapes as it embraces The blessed wealth, and mitigates its sway.

Variat and vario in the same metrical position of consecutive lines both describe the variation of a surface, shimmering or mottled. The transfer of the viewing gaze to the personified fire allows Statius to indulge in the hyperbole of one blaze outshone by another: the fire “gapes” (“stupet, ” 43), a key word for the confusion which comes upon the overwhelmed viewer faced with the profusion of the visual field. Statius’s Silvae were to be both highly regarded and influential in the Renaissance. Among their early admirers was Poliziano.39 Poliziano gave lectures on the Silvae, arguing that an understanding of  Latin called for knowledge of a wider range of authors than was allowed by the “Ciceronians. ” As a proponent of what has been called docta varietas, he insisted that we should not call worse what is simply different.40 Poliziano admired the Silvae for their variety of subject (argumentorum multiplicitas) and style (dicendi varium ar­ tificium).41 His own very influential Silvae are perhaps his most important poems; they take the form of praelectiones (introductory lectures) on Vergil, Hesiod, and Homer. In the praelectio called Manto (1482), on Vergil, he alludes to Statius, echoing the latter’s sublime confusion in the face of variety when he confronts the problem of where to begin the praises of  Vergil: unde ego tantarum repetam primordia laudum? aut qua fine sequar? facit ingens copia rerum incertum. sic frondifera lignator in Ida stat dubius, vastae quae primum robora silvae vulneret: hinc patulam procero stipite fagum, hic videt annosam sua pandere bracchia quercum, illic succinctas caput exsertare cupressos metiturque oculis Phrygiae nemora alta parentis. (Manto 39–­46) From where should I take the exordium of my fulsome praise? And where should I leave off? The great abundance of matter Leaves me uncertain. So the woodsman in leafy Ida Stands wondering what trees of the vast wood he should Wound first: on one side he sees the tall trunk of a spreading beech, On the other an ancient oak spreads its branches, There the bushy-­topped cypresses rear their heads, And he measures with his eyes the tall groves of the Phrygian ancestor.

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

143

Here Poliziano echoes Statius’s confusion about beginnings and endings (Sil­ vae 1.3.34, quoted above). The problem, he says, stems from the sheer copia of material that Vergil presents for the panegyrist. But the problem is also one of varietas. As Poliziano surveys the Vergilian oeuvre he imitates the deictics of the passage from the Georgics which Quintilian took for his example of diversitas dissipata (Manto 43–­45; on Quintilian, see p. 44). His gaze is attracted this way and that by the different “trees” of Vergilian invention. Just as Aeneas created (“formabat, ” Aen. 9.80; cf. 3.5–­6) a fleet on Mt. Ida from the raw material (silva) of its wood, so Poliziano will craft his Silva from Vergil’s poetry.42 But other authors are included too. The striking phrase metitur ocu­ lis (measures with his eyes) is borrowed from Seneca’s Troades (22), where the Greek victor measures up the fallen Troy for his revenge, an interesting connection for the latecomer poet! Though Poliziano comes to praise Vergil, not to bury him, the Senecan phrase implies capacity and power on the part of the Renaissance poet, who can survey his options. Later in the same poem Poliziano again compares the prospect of  Vergil’s eloquence to a landscape featuring the Georgics’ diversitas dissipata: Hic ubere largo luxuriant segetes, hic mollia gramina tondet armentum, hic lentis amicitur vitibus ulmus; illinc muscoso tollunt se robora trunco. (Manto 351–­56) Here in great abundance The crops flourish; here the flock grazes on the soft grass; Here the elm is clothed with the flexible vine; There the oaks lift themselves up with mossy trunks.

Vergil’s rich eloquence puts on various aspects (“sic varios sese in vultus facundia dives / induit, ” 362–­63), changing from a torrent to a dry riverbed as one style gives way to another. But this variety does not induce the stupefaction which overcame Statius. Instead, the poem ends (368–­73) by appropriating for the reader of Vergil Statius’s images of the tranquil lives of Manilius Vopiscus and Pollio Felix, far from the hurly-­burly in their luxurious villas (Silvae 1.2.90–­110 and 2.2.121–­46). In other words, Vergil is like a landscape available to the proprietorial gaze of the reader. There is a thin line between the gaze baffled by a profusion that stymies the synoptic grasp and the pleasurable exercise of a glance that roves at will through a generously varied prospect. Poliziano moves us from one to the other in his Manto, but for an extreme version of the latter we can turn to

144

chapter four

another Renaissance collection inspired by Statius’s Silvae, namely Ronsard’s Le Bocage Royal (1554), whose title (The Royal Forest) is a clear allusion to Statius’s Silvae. Ronsard begins with a definition of Silva: Comme un Seigneur praticq et soigneux du mesnage Regard en sa forest ou dedans un bocage Mille arbres differents de fueilles et de fruict L’un. . . . . l’autre. . . . . . . Ainsi dans ce bocage on voit de toutes sortes D’arguments differents, comme tu les apportes, O Muse. As a lord, practical and careful with his estate, Sees in his forest or in a wood, A thousand trees different in both leaf and fruit, One. . . . the other. . . . . . . So in this “Wood” you see all kinds Of different subjects, as you bring them on, O Muse.

The high status of the reader as seigneur mutates into a literal height: Comme celui qui voit du haut d’une fenestre Alentour à ses yeux une paisage champestre, Differente de lieu de forme et de façon: Ici une rivière, un rocher, un buisson Se presente à ses yeux. . . . Et la part que son oeil vagabond se transporte, Il descouvre un païs de differente sorte, De bon et de mauvais: Des Masures ainsi Celuy qui lit les vers que j’y portraits ici, Regarde d’un trait d’oeil mainte diverse chose, Qui bonne qui mauvaise en mon papier enclose. (Ronsard 1914ff., vol. 2, 1017)43 As one who sees from a high window Meeting his eyes all around a rural landscape, Different in vicinity, shape, and type, Here a stream, a rock, a bush Presents itself to his vision. . . . And wherever his wandering eye travels He discovers a different kind of landscape, Good or bad: in the same way, Des Masures,

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

145

The reader of the verses that I sketch here Looks with a glance at many a different thing, Whether good or bad, that my page contains.

What is emphasized in this passage is the lordly command of the gaze, rather than the delicious confusion of the beholder, as in Statius. The scene that “presents itself ” is at our disposal. It is both a field to be explored by an eye traveling at its leisure (Ronsard’s oeil vagabond might be derived from Statius’s vagor aspectu, Silvae 1.3.52), and a variegated tapestry, to be taken in at a single glance (d’un trait d’oeil ). Michel Simonin (1987, 55) says of this passage that “its unity is not in the motley (bigarrure) of its constituent elements, but in the gaze that considers them one after the other, even if in a sweeping movement which prevents us (as the punctuation indicates) from lingering on any one. ” Here there is none of the confusion that we see in Statius or Pro­ copius (see p. ­66) as the spectacle draws the viewer from one thing to another. Ronsard, or his reader, is in command.44 Variety’s Solicitation In Ronsard’s version of the reader’s experience, the work to be surveyed, in all its variety, is as inert as a landscape. It is an opportunity for the reader’s activity, exerting no constraint on the “wandering eye” (oeil vagabond ). The confusion of Statius and Poliziano about where to start and how to end has been replaced by a freedom that emphasizes the unimpeded will of the reader. Ronsard’s variety does not solicit the viewer; it has no intention on the gaze to which it is exposed. But variety may be purveyed as well as surveyed, and it is deeply implicated in the rhetoric of advertising. If variety’s primal scene is now the supermarket, where in poetry can we hear the solicitation of variety in this commercial sense? There is no genre or poetic kind through which we can approach this aspect of variety, but the hawker’s cry, which verges on poetry itself, makes an occasional appearance in the poetry of elite culture. The most striking, indeed unique, ancient example of this is the solicitation of the barmaid Copa, subject and speaker of the pseudo-­Vergilian Copa in the Appendix Vergiliana. The Copa consists of a barmaid’s song advertising the pleasures of her tavern. The persistent “there’s this . . . there’s that . . . there’s the other. . . . ” (sunt. . . . est . . . sunt . . . est . . .) of Copa’s listing of amenities, which takes up most of this thirty-­nine-­line poem, leads us to suspect a pun on copia (plenty) in her name.45 Certainly this is a copia is enlivened by variety: wine, flowers of various kinds, music, running water, cheese, fruits—­all, in their manifold variety, serve to distract the prospective guest from the thought of tomorrow

146

chapter four

and the threat of death, with which the poem ends. If modern readers should detect the familiar sound of advertising in the come-­on of exotic Copa (“Copa Surisca, caput Graeca redimita mitella, ” 1), they can hardly be blamed.46 quid iuvat aestivo defessum pulvere abisse quam potius bibulo decubuisse toro? sunt topia et calybae, cyathi, rosa, tibia, chordae, et triclia umbrosis frigida harundinibus. (Copa 5–­8) Why would you rather go away, exhausted by the summer’s dust, Than recline tipsily on a couch? There are plantings and bowers, wine ladles, roses, flutes, and strings, And dining tables cool with the shade of rushes.

Greek and Latin words combine to create a vision of ease and plenty, in which variety plays a central role. We recognize a familiar mix of sex and salesmanship as Copa accompanies her song with a lascivious dance (“crispum sub crotalo docta movere latus, ” 2). This is commercialism, ancient style, an early glimpse of variety as consumer choice. In modern times “the cries of London” have been an occasional theme of the visual arts, music, and poetry; the hawkers who commercialize the city, with its enticing range of options, have variously persecuted or attracted its denizens in these representations.47 They are the descendants of Copa the barmaid. I want to end this chapter with a text that has no particular Latin connection, though it does show the influence of ideas associating nature with variety that I discussed in chapter 2. It is a poem dating from a period in which advertising was beginning to take its hold, and so brings the story up to the consumerist variety that I discussed in the introduction. The variety purveyed by the sinister goblins in Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market, written in 1859, is accompanied by the repeated phrase “come buy, ” which echo distantly Copa’s invitation to “come by” her tavern (est . . . est . . . est . . .): Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries—­ Melons and raspberries, Bloom-­down-­cheeked peaches,

c o n f r o n t i n g va r i e t y

147

Swart-­headed mulberries. Wild free-­born cranberries . . . (Goblin Market, 3–­11)

The goblins’ sales pitch takes up thirty lines of this poem of five hundred short lines, and it lists sixteen fruits. Rossetti’s poem tells the story of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who encounter goblins selling a dazzling variety of fruits. Lizzie warns her sister off the goblins and their fruit, but Laura, who has no money, buys the fruits with a lock of  her hair, and gorges herself. The results would have been fatal were it not for a self-­sacrificing act on the part of her sister. Critics differ as to whether the allegorical dimensions of the poem are sexual, religious, or social. Most obviously, the fruits offered by the goblins may suggest the “fruit forbidden” (479) of the Garden of Eden. But these fruits solicit the passerby as a various multiplicity, and it is this variety which constitutes their temptation, dazzling the moral sense. Lists marked by variety are rife in this poem, and characterize not only the fruits but also the physiognomies of the goblins, as well as their activities. Multiple similes derived from the natural world confirm the association of nature with variety. Confronting the dangerous variety of nature, which confounds the moral sense of  Laura, is the unity of  Rossetti’s sisters, described in metaphors taken from a nature which is more alike than various: Laura and Lizzie are “like two blossoms on one stem / Like two flakes of newly-­fallen snow” (188–­89), not just “like” but “alike. ” There are, then, two different visions of nature competing in the poem. According to Sean Grass (1996, 376), Rossetti’s enticing lists “present in quite real and literal terms the fear she felt of the seductive and multifarious natural world. ” The multifarious, here, is synonymous with seduction. But if Rossetti’s poem is about a seductively multifarious nature it is also, more topically, a critique of marketing, advertising, and incipient consumerism in the Victorian period. As Herbert Tucker argues in his brilliant and witty reading of this poem: “What goblinizes the fruits is a strategic hype that extracts them from their actual origins and recontextualizes them in fantasies of exoticism and abundance, whose unique venue is the marketplace, and whose special broadcast medium is language” (2003, 122). The fruits that Rossetti’s goblins sell are “All ripe together, ” as if anticipating the modern supermarket. Brought from all seasons and provenances under the gaze, and within the reach, of a single consumer, the goblins’ fruits have undergone the same process as Vergil’s diversitas dissipata in Quintilian’s reading of the deictics of Georgics 1.54–­56: what was a feature of geographical diversity has become a spectacle for the roving imperial (consumer’s) eye. I

148

chapter four

would suggest that the fulcrum for this shift is the passage from the Ars Ama­ toria of Ovid (see p. ­129) which applies Vergil’s lines to the array of women available to the roving seducer. Variety is both seductive and a motive for seduction. In this chapter we have met a number of the forms in which variety is experienced or offered as a list, from Horace’s “Some . . . others . . . others . . . I” to Ovid’s “I like this as much as that . . . or that . . . or that . . . ” to Quintilian’s “look here . . . and there . . . and there . . . ” (as imitated by Poliziano), and finally to Copa’s “You can have this . . . that . . . the other. . . . ” Each of these rhetorical forms implies a different relation to variety, and to a considerable extent the speaking subjects of different genres have different, and characteristic, orientations to variety. But there are also some features of listing that are common to different genres, for instance, the speaking subject’s location both inside and outside the list, and the tendency of variety to shrink into sameness. With Rossetti’s “Goblin Market, ” the variety that solicits becomes a moral problem, a temptation, and its lyric attractions have to be reined in by a moralizing narrative. But, like the Latin satirist, Rossetti both offers us variety and denounces it.

5

Miscellany Variety and the Book

Writing about the moral miscellanies of antiquity, Teresa Morgan (2007, 273) remarks that “readers were more tolerant of the miscellany as a literary form than we are today. ” “Today” was 2007. But five years earlier, in 2002, Ben Schott had published Schott’s Original Miscellany, an immediate bestseller, and he followed it up with two further miscellanies, also enormously popular. Publicity for the first book asked, “Where else but Schott’s Original Miscel­ lany will you stumble across John Lennon’s cat, the supplier of bagpipes to the queen, the twelve labours of Hercules, and the brutal methods of murder encountered by Miss Marple?” In the same year, but at the other end of the literary spectrum, Harvard University Press issued a translation of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, often described as a collage, or montage, of quotations, reflections, and sources. Benjamin takes the shopping arcades of nineteenth-­century Paris as a metonym for the urban culture of modernism. The characteristic experience of the urban stroller, or flâneur, in these environments is of juxtapositions, heterogeneity, and variety. In 2011 the display tables of Waterstones in London featured no less than three new books on Michel de Montaigne, whose essays are partially inspired by the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius (see below). Most recently, the huge miscellany of the nineteenth-­century Italian poet and scholar Giacomo Leopardi, the Zibaldone (Hodgepodge), has received its first English translation (2013) and attracted a great deal of attention. Our taste for miscellany is clearly considerable, but so is our conviction that miscellany, disparateness, and diversity are the best categories for describing (post-­)modern experience.1 It is hardly surprising, then, that ancient miscellanies have been receiving more attention in recent years. Works which make a virtue of variety, or a parade of

150

chapter five

randomness, have come to the critical fore, including Pliny’s Natural History, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, Martial’s Epigrams, Statius’s Silvae, and the letters of Cicero and Pliny, on the Latin side, and Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, Plutarch’s Table Talk, and Greek epigram collections on the Greek side. All of these had been ugly ducklings in classical scholarship for some time, mined for the information they may provide, but not considered interesting in literary terms. There has also been interest in other topics relevant to miscellany, such as encyclopedism, the sociology of reading, and popular morality.2 Finally, literary criticism has for some time been casting about for critical models that are not dominated by the ideals of unity. We have become adept at finding unity beneath apparent diversity, but are still struggling when it comes to discussing the uses of heterogeneity and miscellany.3 Another aspect of miscellanies that makes them particularly relevant to contemporary concerns is the role that they have played in the reception of ancient culture. Changing patterns of taste can disguise the fact that the most influential works of antiquity have not necessarily been the “great” writers of the classical periods of Greece and Rome. Some of the most popular ancient works up until the nineteenth century were miscellanies: Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae, Plutarch’s Moralia, Statius’s Silvae, Macrobius’s Saturnalia, and Valerius Maximus’s Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium, to name but a few. These works served as a source of ancient wisdom and of knowledge about the ancient world. They were also models for modern works in which the an­ cient world was packaged as a miscellany, starting with Poliziano’s Miscel­ lanea; furthermore, many texts used for teaching purposes took the form of miscellanies.4 In this chapter I am going to consider miscellaneous collections, in both prose and verse, and in a number of different genres. Certainly, there are some issues that are peculiar to particular kinds of miscellanies, as I will indicate, but there is much to be gained from taking a holistic approach to the phenomenon of miscellany. The title Silva or Silvae, and its various vernacular equivalents (discussed more fully below), is widely used from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century both for poetic miscellanies and for prose miscellanies (Adam 1988). While the concept of miscellany lacks a corresponding ancient Latin term, the preface to Gellius’s Noctes Atticae, as we shall see, suggests that the miscellany was a recognized literary type.5 Not only does the word varius crop up frequently in apologias for different kinds of miscellaneous collections, but writers working in different genres share common metaphors and rationales for what we would now call the miscellaneous character of their work.

miscellany

151

In an essay that functions as the concluding chapter of a volume on the newly published book of epigrams by Posidippus, Alessandro Barchiesi (2005) identifies “the search for the perfect book” as the masterplot of research on Roman poetry in the 1970s and ’80s. The well-­planned book, with its opening sequences, its closural effects, its symmetries, echoes, and numerological extravagances, did take up an inordinate amount of airspace in those decades. It is a relief now to turn to authors who champion the imperfect book, the uneven book, the random, the various, and the miscellaneous. But we have not left the search for the perfect book behind entirely. Sometimes the interest in miscellanies seems to be a mopping-­up operation of the earlier enterprise. The default procedure is to debunk the protestations of the miscellanists as disingenuous, and to show that these too, are perfect books, with their symmetries, opening sequences, and closural effects. The authors’ disclaimers are treated as a pose, characteristic of the strategic self-­deprecation of minor forms in the ancient world (and it should be emphasized that we are dealing with genres that are acknowledged as minor by their practitioners).6 It may indeed be the case that many protestations to the effect that the author in question has assembled the book randomly, as the matter “came to hand, ” are disingenuous. It may even be that the author took extreme care with the arrangement of items. But this does not mean that we should ignore the claims completely, and fall back on the search for the perfect book. Deliberate arrangement may be of different kinds, and may have very different effects; there is nothing incoherent about the notion of a deliberately miscellaneous work, in which heterogeneity produces calculated effects, though the rhetoric of “the perfect book” is inappropriate in such a case. Furthermore, the authors’ protestations themselves tell us something about how the work is to seem, and about what value and effect attach to its seeming thus. To dismiss claims to variety and randomness as disingenuous is to imply that there is nothing to be said about the aesthetic they profess. One reason why there has been little attention to the aesthetics of variety in miscellaneous books is because of the danger of self-­contradiction. Putting it crudely, some might say (erroneously, in my opinion) that if miscellany can be the object of interpretation, then it is no longer miscellany. How does one interpret a miscellaneous book as a miscellaneous book, rather than as a “perfect book” in disguise? I am going to answer this question in two different ways. First, by looking at the implications of the titles, programmatic statements, and metatextual moments in miscellaneous works. Then, by analysing the effects of miscellany and heterogeneity in the case of some specific works. My main exhibit will be Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights).

152

chapter five

Titles and Metaphors How is miscellany thematized by the ancient authors themselves? Some offer explicit apologias in their prefaces for the choice of miscellaneous form, as we shall see, but even titles can tell us something useful about how the variety of miscellaneous collections was conceived. The titles of these collections feature recurrent metaphors, metaphors which can be traced back to Hellenistic Greece and beyond. By and large, both the titles and the metaphors which underly them concern the work as an object, and describe in visual terms the way the book will seem to the reader. But not all titles are of this kind. Aulus Gellius’s title Noctes Atticae, for instance, alludes to the conditions under which the work was produced. Such biographical fictions, whether in titles or prefaces, may cast the miscellany and variety of a work as a reflection of some aspect of the writer’s life. Miscellany can also be the means by which a lower genre makes an issue of its lowness, and it is usually the case that miscellany and heterogeneity make their presence felt in the “lower” genres. I am going to divide my analysis of the thematization of miscellany into five categories which seem particularly salient in the works of the authors themselves: first, titles which characterize the miscellany by comparison with objects (meadows, bouquets, bees, honeycombs, tapestries); next, negative descriptions that emphasize what the work in question is not ; then, descriptions of what the miscellany does; followed by biographical fictions of  how the work came to be; and, finally, characterizations of the reader and reading of the miscellany. Aulus Gellius’s preface to the Noctes Atticae (which I will consider in more detail later) provides a list of twenty-­nine different titles that were given by writers who were aiming at a “varied and miscellaneous and, as it were, disorderly learning” (“variam et miscellam et quasi confusaneam doctrinam, ” praef. 5). Since the list leads to Gellius’s own choice of title, we can call it a priamel, a priamel which itself strives for variety, mixing Greek and Latin titles; loose groupings can be discerned, but nothing systematic. In a sense, this is the first of the essays of Noctes Atticae, an essay “On the Diversity of Titles, ” fruit of Gellius’s reading.7 Gellius makes a clear connection between the varied and recherché nature of the contents of such works and their exotic titles.8 Somewhat disingenuously, he protests that his own title, Noctes Atti­ cae, makes no claim to wit.9 It is interesting that he includes in his list the titles Historia Naturalis and Epistulae Morales, which must allude to Pliny the Elder and Seneca the Younger respectively. In his preface to the Historia Naturalis Pliny ( praef. 26) makes exactly the same gesture as Aulus Gellius, granting the Greeks a wondrous ingenuity with titles (there follows a copious list of “eye-­catching” titles), only to confess that he has no shame in coming up with

miscellany

153

something less enticing. The excursus on title seems to have been something of a topos, as we find the younger Pliny running through a comparable list in a letter in which he introduces his “hendecasyllabi. ” The title, as he says (4.4.8–­9), refers to the meter of his poems, but if his addressee (Tacitus) prefers to call them something else, he is welcome to do so.10 Like Catullus (c. 1.4), Pliny also refers to his poems as nugae (4.14.8). But, as he makes clear at the beginning of the letter, the main characteristic of his collection is its variety, and indifference about the title belongs to the pose that accompanies a collection generated out of the various occupations and moods of its author. Where the title depends on the author’s invention or whim, the work exists outside the repertoire of established genres, and miscellaneous works of varied content present themselves as coming low in the generic hierarchy; we might even identify a category of “self-­deprecating” titles (Nugae, Poematia). So the first thing to be said about the titles of miscellanies is that willfulness or diffidence in the invention of title is indicative of genre. It is striking that Gellius does not include among his list of titles the term that he uses when it comes to assigning his own work to a literary type. Gellius normally refers to the Noctes Atticae as commentarii. This term has a range of meanings, but the most probable sense in Gellius’s case is “a collection of private notes or excerpts. ”11 Commentarii is the Latin equivalent of the Greek hypomnēmata, the title of one of the most influential of ancient miscellanies, the historika hypomnēmata of Pamphile of Epidauros, a miscellanist of the Neronian period whose work, originally in thirty-­three books, survives only in fragmentary quotations. As a title, commentarii and hypomnēmata point to the writer as note-­taking reader, and so have a biographical element (more on this under “Biographical Fictions”). Pamphile’s Hypomnēmata were diverse in subject matter, dealing with many disciplines, according to Photius’s account of her preface (1755, 119b).12 The same is true of Gellius’s miscellany, though its title does not in itself point to that aspect of the work, unlike the title Pantodapē Historia (Inquiries of all Kinds) used by Gellius’s hero Favorinus, a title that stresses the variety of  fields addressed in the work. Another title that draws attention to the variety of disciplines that a miscellany may call upon is Pandectae (All-­Receiving). Gellius remarks, apropos the Pandectae of Cicero’s freedman, Tiro, that the title implies a book that is heterogeneous in terms of subjects and disciplines (“tamquam omne rerum atque doctrinarum genus continentis, ” NA 13.9). We will see that Gellius’s miscellany deliberately puts at issue the divergences between the different kinds ( genera) of questions that it pursues. Many of the more common titles for miscellanies are metaphorical, and these metaphors can be instructive. Titles from the floral world, especially

154

chapter five

meadows and garlands, are common (leimōn, stephanos, pratum, anthēron, etc.); as we have seen, this body of metaphors is closely connected with the concept of varietas.13 While some sort of variety is always implied by these metaphorical titles, this variety may be understood in different ways. A title like Meadow or Garland might lead us to expect that a limited repertoire of items appears in varying configurations, but while some ancient miscellanies actually behave like this (Martial’s Epigrams, for instance), it is not a feature to which ancient writers allude when they unpack the implications of the floral metaphor. Clement of Alexandria, who gave the title Strōmateis (Patch­work) to his miscellany (ca. 200 AD), describes the implications of the meadow metaphor as follows: “The flowers flowering variously ( poikilōs) in a meadow, and the orchards of fruit trees in a park, are not organized or separated by species (in the way learned people put together Fields and Heli­ cons and Honeycombs and Robes, gathering the various flowers). The form of the Strōmateis is thoroughly variegated, like a meadow, deliberately (epitēdes) scattered with those things which happened (hōs etuchen) to come to mind, and without order or bowdlerization” (Strōmateis 6.2.1; notice the collocation of “deliberately” with “happened to come to mind”). With the metaphor of the meadow Clement stresses the spontaneous character of his organizing and the irrelevance of categories in the disposition of elements. But in other collections with floral titles variation is more important than heterogeneity. The most famous of the Stephanoi are those of Meleager (ca. 100 BC) and Philip (Neronian period), collections of epigrams that were both read and imitated at Rome. Meleager (Anthologia Palatina 4.1) describes how he wove a garland of different poets, a pagkarpon aoidan (song compounded of all fruits). While Meleager may have jumbled the poets, the poems are arranged into groups in four categories (erotic, epitaphic, anathematic, and epideictic), and within these categories the poems are grouped according to theme. So Meleager’s organization stresses the variation of a theme rather than heterogeneity ( polyeideia). Related to floral titles and metaphors is another source of metaphors of variety from Pindar on (Pythian 10.53–­54), namely bees. Bees collect pollen from a variety of flowers, and move from one to another with unpredictable movements, and this is reflected in the miscellanist’s title Honeycomb (Kērion). A honeycomb is not in itself varied, but it does manifest the work of bees.14 Certainly the most famous application of the bee metaphor is Horace’s characterization of himself as a Matine bee, culling the thyme among the groves and riverbanks of Tibur (c. 4.2.27–­32; see p. 1­ 12). It is hard to tell exactly what makes Horace’s writing of poetry like the activity of the bee here, but we can perhaps gloss this bee crafting his poetry “with much effort”

miscellany

155

(“per laborem plurimum”) with another Horatian use of the bee metaphor, in Epistles 1.3.20–­22. There Horace asks Iulius Florus what thyme he is “nimbly flitting around” (“quae circumvolitas agilis thyma?” 21), which suggests that for Horace the bee metaphor is about varied movement. It is telling that when Seneca, a foe of varietas, makes an influential anti-­ miscellaneous statement he uses the metaphor of the bee, but gives it a different twist: Nos quoque has apes debemus imitari et quaecumque ex diversa lectione congessimus, separare, melius enim distincta servantur, deinde adhibita ingenii nostri cura et facultate in unum saporem varia illa libamenta confundere, ut etiam si apparuerit, unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est, appareat. (Epist. 84.5)15 We too should imitate these bees, and separate whatever we have gathered together from our various reading, for that is better preserved once it has been divided up; then we ought to carefully apply our intelligence and skill to mix what we have variously culled into a single flavor, so that even when it is apparent where we have taken something from, it appears different from that from which it has been taken.

Seneca urges that, however miscellaneous our reading processes may be (whatever flitting we have done), we must produce a work that shows as little trace of its varied sources and origins as possible. This passage is imitated very closely at the beginning of Macrobius’s Saturnalia (Sat. 1.1), and the bee simile was often used after Macrobius to figure an imitatio that fuses what is taken from here and there into something that is the author’s own.16 But, as we shall see, Aulus Gellius and other miscellanists make exactly the opposite claim, namely that the nature of their work reflects the desultory character of their reading. The bee motif can be taken in different directions, to reflect either the darting movement of the distracted reader or the homogenizing of the miscellaneous in the mind of the author. These divergent implications of the bee metaphor lead us to one important locus of argument about miscellany: to what extent should the product of miscellaneous reading reveal its own genesis and preserve the integrity of its various sources? Seneca’s use of the bee metaphor makes it the complementary opposite of the mosaic metaphor I discussed in chapter 2, for the mosaic metaphor describes a composition made of unhomogenized and variously sourced “bits. ”17 One of the most mysterious of miscellaneous titles taken from the natural world is Silvae. It is first attested as the title of a work by Lucan (in Vacca’s sixth-­century Vita of Lucan), but only one work with this title survives intact, namely Statius’s Silvae. The title has a long afterlife, including Poliziano’s

156

chapter five

Silvae,18 Jonson’s Forrest (1616) and Underwoods (1640), Ronsard’s Bocage Royal, and a number of Baroque German poetical Wälder, as well as J. G. Herder’s Kritische Wälder (1768).19 A generic term suggesting a particular aesthetic rather than a kind of content, the Silva was to become a protean form whose name designates resistance to the norms of the author’s time.20 What exactly Statius meant by his title is not clear, and modern scholars stress either the spontaneous or the miscellaneous.21 Bright (1980, 20–­49) suggests that the title might derive from various passages in Vergil’s Eclogues where a reader could undersand silvae as a title, as for instance Ecl. 4.3: “si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae” (“if we sing Silvae [literally, forests], let Silvae be worthy of a consul”). The connection with Vergil is also made by Ben Jonson, whose title Underwood is inspired by the use of silva as “undergrowth” in Ecl. 1.152–­53 (“intereunt segetes, subit aspera silva / lappaeque tribolique”).22 From silva as spontaneously arising undergrowth it is a short step to Quintilian’s explication of the term as the material orators produce extempore and then work up later in finished form (Inst. Or. 10.3.17); Silva could be a calque of the Greek word hylē (material). Cicero’s contemporary, L. Ateius Philologus, used the Greek Hylē of his commentarii in 800 books, and he stressed their heterogeneous character.23 Another significant miscellaneous title is Sōros (heap), which was probably the title of an anthology of epigrams.24 The associations of the word, as Krevans (2007, 133–­34) points out, might suggest the careless aggregation of polished, selected material, as at the close of  Theocritus’s Idyll 7, where sōros refers to a heap of winnowed grain. Theocritus’s own title, Eidyllion (a miniature form), occurs in the younger Pliny’s list of “miscellaneous” titles cited above (Epist. 4.4.9). Gutzwiller (1996, 131–­32) argues that Theocritus’s Eidyllia are so called to draw attention to their combination of heterogeneous forms ( polyeideia). Clothes and cloths provide another source of titles (Strōmateis, Peplon), usually stressing their multicolored or patchwork appearance. Here we can remember Plautus’s use of tapestries to figure the mottled back of a slave (see p. ­25). Athenaeus (7.321ff.) tells of a Mnaseas who called his book of trivialities ( paignia) Salpē, after a mottled fish. All of these titles were attached to works that would fall under the modern category of the miscellany, which is the term I have been using, although it is not attested as a generic term in antiquity.25 Pfeiffer (1976, 45) suggests that it was introduced by Poliziano, as the title of his first collection of Miscellanea, first printed in 1489. Though the term is not used of a literary kind in antiquity, the modern usage, descending through Poliziano, leans on some ancient passages. Gellius, for instance, speaks of his work as “variam et miscellam”

miscellany

157

( praef. 5), and Poliziano cites Gellius as one of his models (see below). Also, Juvenal uses the word miscellanea for a hash fed to gladiators (11.20: “sic veniunt ad miscellanea ludi”), and it may be that Poliziano saw in the term a useful analogy to Juvenal’s description of  his book as a  farrago (mixed mash, see p. 1­ 33).26 Poliziano calls both on Juvenal’s use of the word farrago for his satires and Lucan’s title Silvae in a passage from the preface of  his first volume of Miscellanies, which also contains unmistakable echoes of Gellius’s preface: At inordinatam istam et confusaneum quasi silvam aut farraginem perhiberi, quia non tractim et continenter sed saltuatim scribimus et vellicatim, tantum abest ut doleamus ut etiam titulum non sane alium quam Miscellaneorum exquisiverimus, in quis Graecum tamen Helianum Latinum sequimur Gellium, quorum utriusque libri varietate sunt quam ordine blandiores. It may be called a disorderly and jumbled forest, so to speak, or mixed mash, because I do not write in a drawn-­out, continuous manner, but jump around and peck at this or that. I am so far from being hurt by this criticism that I have sought out no other title than Miscellanies, in which I follow the Greek Aelian and the Latin Gellius, both of whose books are more attractive for their variety than their order.

In this passage the bee darting from one thing to another has become a bird, hopping around and pecking one thing or another, without order. Negative Description and Minor Status The variety, whimsy, or arbitrariness of the names given to miscellanies emphasize the fact that they lie outside the generic grid. Miscellaneous works are often self-­conscious about their status in relation to the established genres. But while there is no single generic name for what they are, there may be names for what they aren’t. Pliny’s claim that he has assembled his letters without preserving the order in which they were written is followed by the comment “for I was not writing a history” (“non enim historiam componebam,”  Epist. 1.1.1). Aulus Gellius aligns himself with those who have sought for a “various and miscellaneous and mixed learning” (“variam et miscellam et quasi confusaneum doctrinam, ” praef. 5), implying a contrast with a more systematic “Encyclic learning. ”27 Gellius’s inclusion of a table of contents at the head of his Noctes Atticae may itself be intended to distinguish it from one particular more systematic work, namely Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny’s index suggests a more structured work than does Gellius’s summary of chapters, which conspicuously lacks an ordering principle, and so serves to attract

158

chapter five

the reader with the promise of variety.28 Certainly Gellius’s list of topics addressed serves to emphasize the lack of thematic unity within each book. His is quite deliberately not a work of systematic knowledge.29 The epigrammatist Martial, writing at the opposite end of the generic spec­ trum to epic, deliberately composed twelve books of epigrams, a number that he himself associated with the epic (Epigrams 9.50.3).30 His oeuvre is not only a non-­epic but an anti-­epic, whose low status is indicated by Martial’s use of metaphors of eating and dicing of  his poetry.31 The epigrammatist distances his work from its generic antagonist both by discontinuity of form and by his habit of locating importance and significance in a place that is decidedly non-­mythological. The allusion to epic serves to stake out the low aesthetic ground for the epigram. One form of this claim is Martial’s association between miscellany and unevenness. This is not a book to which traditional literary criteria apply, and inconsistency is part of its nature. Here Martial, as so often, takes things to the limit, and dispenses even with the criterion of quality, making it an aspect of the miscellany’s variety that it mixes good, bad, and indifferent: Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura, quae legis hic: aliter non fit, Avite, liber. (1.16)32 There are some good things, some middling, and more bad That you will read here: there’s no other way, Avitus, to make a book.

Ronsard (quoted above, p. 1­ 44) follows Martial when he speaks of the reader’s eye encountering “many a different thing in my book, good or bad, ” and Samuel Johnson quotes a similar statement by Martial (10.46) to deplore the monotonous evenness of Butler (p. 5­ 7 above).33 A good miscellaneous book has to be made out of poems of varied quality, which will contravene the important aesthetic principle of aequalitas, a quality that Martial disowns in two epigrams; the fact that both of these epigrams are addressed to the same Matho suggests that we are dealing with a recognized aesthetic theme.34 Martial’s refusal of aequalitas became a commonplace of miscellanies.35 Poliziano, for instance, in his preface to the first collection of Miscellanea, refers the uneven length of his chapters to the principle of inaequalitas: Si longiuscula capitula alia, breviusque rursus alia putabuntur, credamus hanc quoque esse legem novi operis, ut aequale nihil, nusquam sit sibi par, semper dissimilitudine claudicet, unamque istam regulam tueatur, nequid ad regulam, nequid ad perpendiculum libellum revocet.36

miscellany

159

If some chapters seem a little long and others, by contrast, a little short, let us attribute this to the law of this new kind of work: let nothing be even; may it always limp from dissimilitude; and let this be the one rule—­that nothing should recall the book to the ruler’s line or the perpendicular.

When it comes to the paradoxographers, the miscellanizing of more systematic works is the rule of the genre. So the Collectanea rerum memorabil­ ium of the third-­century paradoxographer Gaius Iulius Solinus, dependent almost entirely on Pliny’s Natural History and Pomponius Mela, is introduced with the statement that the logical order of the material has been “distressed” in order to avoid the reader’s fastidium. Quorum meminisse ita visum est, ut inclitos terrarum situs et insignes tractus maris, servata orbis distinctione, suo quaeque ordine redderemus. inseruimus et pleraque differenter congruentia, ut si nihil aliud, saltem varietas ipsa leg­ entium fastidio mederetur. (Solinus, praef. 3–­4) I decided to recall this material in such a way that I would give an account of the famous locales and the notable stretches of sea each in its appropriate place, keeping to the divisions of the earth. But I have also slipped in many things that go together in different ways so that, if nothing else, variety itself might cure tedium.

Solinus might well be echoing Pliny the Younger’s use of insero where he approves of Pompeius Saturninus’s habit of “slipping in” harsher poems to vary the texture of his nugae (“Inserit sane, sed data opera, mollibus levibusque du­ riusculos quosdam, ” Epist. 1.16.5). This is perhaps the mildest of the miscellanists’ claims to a lack of system. Mixing Metaphors So far we have considered some images of what the miscellany is and some statements of what it is not. But what does it do? Etymology suggests that what a miscellany does is to mix. But no ancient work went under the name “miscellany, ” and of ancient titles only Summeikta specifically refers to mixing.37 If we cast our net a little wider, though, and look for metaphors of mixing in “miscellaneous” works we are not disappointed. Metaphors for their variety are not confined to the titles or paratexts of miscellaneous works, they may become a significant thematic element of the work as a whole, and it is in such cases that we are invited to think about the implications of the metaphor. A case in point is Martial’s first book of epigrams, where themes of contagion, mixing, and boundaries link the miscellaneous character of the book

160

chapter five

with its themes. Rimell (2008, 19–­50) and Fitzgerald (2007b, 4–­7 and 88–­93) both note these themes, which emphasize the relation between the variety of the poems themselves and that of the urban context of Martial’s world. I have noted that Martial’s two-­line poem declaring that there is good, bad, and indifferent in his book (“Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura, ” 1.16) is followed closely by a poem (1.18) on a host who has diluted (“miscere,”  1) fine wine with ordinaire.38 “What good have the bad wines merited from you, or what bad have the good wines merited?” Martial asks (1.18.3–­4). Clearly we are encouraged by the juxtaposition of these poems to reflect on the metaphor of mixing as it might apply to the poems of a miscellaneous book. Does a bad poem “mix” with a good poem to produce a mixture that improves one or corrupts the other? As we reflect on this, we are enhancing both of these poems, an improvement which is not available to the mixer of wines! Later in the first book Martial attacks the plagiarist Fidentinus (1.53), who has contaminated Martial’s book by adding (bad) poems of his own. The poems stand out from their environment and denounce him as a thief: his page is like an oily cloak that contaminates (“contaminat, ” 4) fancy garments, etc. (1.53.4–­10). What has happened now to the idea that a book must inevitably be a mixture of good, bad, and indifferent (“aliter non fit, Avite, liber, ” 1.16.2)? In the poem which follows this (1.54), Martial asks to be admitted into the circle of  Fuscus’s friends. Fuscus should not be put off  by the fact that Martial is new to him: all his old friends were once new; perhaps a new friend can become an old friend. Again, we are invited to compare one kind of collection (a book of poems) to another (a circle of friends) with respect to the possibility of mixing in alien objects and assimilating them to their environment. Martial’s juxtaposition of poems about the epigram book with poems about other kinds of mixtures and groups applies the metaphor of mixing to the miscellaneous book, and it invites us to reflect on its implications. In some (though not all) respects mixing is a bad metaphor for miscellany, or varietas, because it implies fusion, as when Petronius’s Trimalchio declares that Corinthian bronze was created by the accidental fusion of aerea miscella­ nea in the sack of Corinth (Petronius, Satyricon 50.5). The poetics of varietas, by contrast, feature non-­assimilation, rather as the notion of social diversity contrasts with the metaphor of the “melting pot. ” Martial stresses the fact that, since each epigram is closed, we can draw the line on an opus anywhere we like, at the end of a poem or the end of a page, for instance (10.1; 4.89). As well as mixing poems, then, the epigram book is continually separating them. The metaphor of mixing is both raised and put into question by different elements of Martial’s poetics, and in the first book of  his epigrams Martial explores the implications of this metaphor for his collection.39 Like the bee

miscellany

161

metaphor, then, the metaphor of mixing locates a point of potential dispute about the miscellany, its character and its value, and in both cases this dispute revolves around the issue of whether the items of a miscellany should be assimilated to each other or not. The Reader: Miscellany and Access Martial’s oily cloak contaminating the garments that come into contact with it (1.53.4) might bring to mind the improvised cloakroom of a modern party, where the motley nature of the gathering is represented by the variety of outerwear piled on a bed. Social metaphors provide not only a source of figures for the miscellany itself  but also an image of its readership. Some of the most important ancient miscellanies are framed as symposia or banquets, and I will examine the metaphor of the banquet more closely below. At this point it is important to remember that the figure of the miscellany as banquet is not confined to sympotic miscellanies, such as those of Athenaeus (Deipnosophis­ tae), Plutarch (Quaestiones Conviviales), or Macrobius (Saturnalia). Martial compares his miscellaneous book of epigrams to a banquet “sourced from every market” in a passage that I will consider below. It is appropriate, given the social dimensions of ancient feasting, that this metaphor is used as much to characterize the diversity of the audience as the variety of the book. The variety of the miscellany points toward what I have called, in connection with Martial, “the society of the book. ”40 Pliny the Younger, as we have seen, appeals to the ratio conviviorum (2.5.8) to explain the principle of “something for everyone” that he has followed in composing a speech. Ronsard gives this a new twist when he compares his book to a banquet given by a prince. Different dishes may please or displease individual readers, and the banquet cannot ever be acceptable to all. But no one is constrained to come to the banquet, and the prince, who “entertains freely” (librement festie), will not take offense (“Discours à Loys des Masures, ” lines 17–­34). Ronsard here stresses in social terms the same freedom from constraint that characterizes the oeil vagabond as it surveys the landscape of his poetic miscellany (see above, p. 00). The banquet metaphor is ubiquitous in the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­ century English miscellanies studied by Benedict (1996), who comments “Printers and booksellers almost always represent the early miscellany or anthology as a feast, a collation of fruits gathered in one banquet to suit a variety of tastes” (9). This metaphor “reinscribes the paradoxical independence yet community of miscellaneous readers, ” who are invited not only to find something that suits their individual tastes, but also to join the banquet. “Reading the items in a literary collection bonds the reader with a conjured audience: these

162

chapter five

collections not only embody a consensus of writers, but they are stamped with the authority of editors who were themselves accruing more respectability throughout the [eighteenth] century. Yet the touted multiplicity and free organization of the items ensure each reader a private experience, since each is invited to construct his/her own hierarchy of merit” (Benedict 2003, 237). So the banquet metaphor implies that the miscellany mixes not only the items out of which it is composed but also the different individuals to whose diverse tastes the miscellany points. Here too, as Benedict implies, we encounter a central, and very convenient, paradox of the miscellany, namely that the very variety of the miscellany produces both separation (“ensures each reader a private experience”) and mixing, molding a reader who is both individual and part of a community. While the banquet metaphor draws attention to the imagined society of the miscellany, social metaphors may also be applied to the manner in which the miscellany was composed. One of the titles Gellius lists in his preface is Pandectae (All-­Receiving), a Greek title, though one that is better attested for Latin works than for Greek.41 Later, Gellius will tell us of the Pandectae of Cicero’s freedman amanuensis Marcus Tullius Tiro, whose title, he tells us, implies that it contains all kinds of matter and disciplines (NA 13.9.2).42 The idea that the miscellany is a welcoming haven for a variety of disparate material finds expression in another popular title for miscellanies in the eighteenth century, heyday of the modern English miscellany, during which the title Fugi­ tive Pieces was widespread. The OED gives the meaning “ephemeral” to this use of “fugitive, ” but it is belied by the connection with “asylum” in titles such as John Almon’s An Asylum for Fugitive Pieces, not in any collection (1785–­1799). These miscellanies bundled together works that had already been printed, or had circulated in manuscript, and were now to be given a home, along with other orphans.43 “Fugitive” must carry with it the associations of the Latin fu­ gitivus, a runaway slave. Since Roman jurists debated the issue of whether a slave who claimed asylum was to be considered a runaway, the connection between “asylum” and “fugitive” has a good classical pedigree.44 Furthermore, Pliny the Younger applies the figure of the runaway slave to the literary sphere in a passage which may lie behind the title Fugitive Pieces: “Some of your verses have become known, and, without your permission, broken out of their confinement. If you don’t drag them back into your collection, sooner or later, like truant slaves (errones), they will find someone who’ll call them his own” (Epist. 2.10.2–­3).45 To call a miscellany an “asylum” for fugitive pieces is to ward off the accusation of plagiarism, raised by the use of runaway slave metaphors in Pliny and Martial (1.52), by taking the side of the slave. Because it accommodates a

miscellany

163

variety of material, the miscellany can be a home for items that would otherwise be unprotected. Anything can find a place. The title Fugitive Pieces takes the all-­welcoming aspect of miscellanies in one direction, but if we return to Gellius description of  Tiro’s “All Welcoming” collection we find a word that takes us into different territory. Tiro’s books, Gellius tells us, deal with variis et promiscis quaestionibus. Promisc(u)us is a word that Gellius uses in his preface ( praef. 2) of  his own process of compiling the Noctes: Gellius made his notes “promiscuously, ” without distinguishing genre or type.46 The English derivate promiscuous, of course, has connota­ tions that the Latin word did not, and yet the modern meaning of promiscu­ ous derives from one sense of the Latin word, namely “possessed, enjoyed etc. by each (of two or more persons) equally” (OLD 1). Even if Gellius did not make the same sexual connection that we might make, the double sense of promisc(u)us provides an appropriate link between the miscellany’s variety and its accessibility. But I think that Gellius does implicitly connect the mis­ cellany’s variety and accessibility to (sexual) availability with an interesting pun on copia (availability, plenty) in Noctes Atticae 1.8. In this chapter Gellius introduces us, with some fanfare, to a work with one of the titles he mentions in the preface, Sotion’s Keras Amaltheias, a book of wide and varied information. Its title could be translated into Latin, he tells us, as Cornu Copiae, Horn of Plenty. In Sotion’s book there is an anecdote about Demosthenes’s encounter with the prostitute Lais, which originated the Greek proverb “not every man may sail to Corinth” (Lais’s hometown), and it furnishes the subject for Gellius’s chapter. When Demosthenes the orator met Lais the prostitute he asked her for access to her favors (“ut sibi copiam sui faceret, ” 1.8.5). Her price, ten thousand drachmas, no less, was too steep for Demosthenes, who retorted “I wouldn’t pay a price like that for regret. ” But it’s more elegant in Greek, says Gellius, and proceeds to give us the original. The punch line of this story may cling to its original context in Sotion’s Greek, but when it comes to Gellius’s Latin translation of  Sotion’s title there are compensatory advantages. Cornu Copiae creates a nice parallel between the copia of the miscellany’s horn of plenty, which has something for everyone, such is its bounty, and the customer’s copia (access) to the prostitute. It is a pun which is peculiarly appropriate to the miscellany, combining several of its aspects in one word: the miscellany’s copia (profusion) means that there is something that will appeal to each constituency of the readership (plenty means access); at the same time, by culling material from a copious variety of sources, the miscellany gives readers access to a variety of texts, while the miscellaneous character of the collection allows a variety of source texts (fugitive pieces!)

164

chapter five

access to the one work. Copia in the one sense (abundance) affords copia in the other (access), and this connection is in some ways programmatic for miscellanies. It may even be that Gellius’s pun, and his anecdote, allude to the title Pandectae, all-­receiving like the prostitute Lais. Applying the Lais anecdote to the miscellany, we might say that Gellius’s Latin collection gives its readers access to both Latin and Greek texts in a single place. There’s no need for us to go to Corinth, and we get Lais, so to speak, on the cheap. Can we connect the “access” that miscellanies provide their readers to the particular needs that they address? It has been remarked that miscellanies and compendia burgeon from the late first century AD onwards.47 Authors of the early empire sometimes expressed the feeling that to master all the knowledge accumulated through the ages in the various disciplines of Hellenic research was beyond the capabilities of an average individual, hence the need for compilations.48 Gellius identifies one constituency of his book as “people taken up with other kinds of business” (“homines aliis iam vitae negotiis occupatos,”  praef. 12).49 So it may be that the processes of collection, selection, and itemization performed by these miscellanies recommended themselves to a particular kind of reader, interested in acquiring a veneer of specialist knowledge, but too busy to do the reading required to master it.50 At any rate, the idea of the miscellany comprises an idea of the needs of its readership. It is hard to say whether these prose miscellanies actually were used as shortcuts to erudition by their readers or not. But if we are tempted to give these imagined audiences and their needs a real instantiation, it is partially because of modern associations of the spread of miscellanies with social mobility, and with a growing need for a cultural legitimation that could be quickly acquired. According to Benedict (1990; 1996; 2003), this accounts for the burgeoning of literary miscellanies in England from 1780s to the 1820s (though anthologies had been popular in England since Tottel’s Miscellany of 1557).51 Produced cheaply, and in convenient pocket size, they catered to growing literacy among urban women, the working classes and the lower-­ middle classes. These miscellanies were often of a sentimental or religious nature, intended to “stimulate the reader to virtue. ”52 Many contained selections from French or German writers in translation, such as the compilation published in 1793, titled The Literary Miscellany; or, Elegant Selections of the Most Admired Fugitive Pieces, and Extracts from Works of the Greatest Merit: with Originals; in Prose and Verse (Benedict 1996, 103). Slim editions of this miscellany were issued about three times a year. The popularity of these miscellanies prompted a parodic description of a project for a series of miscellanies appealing to women, which states “My hopes of success are

miscellany

165

founded on the wonderful avidity with which mankind receives weekly and monthly Miscellanies. These are generally good things, translated from the French, copied out of old authors, or altogether new and original, the production of modern writers. ”53 The publications appeal to those who have not read the original “old” or French authors, but recognize their prestige; as Benedict (1996, 120) notes, the phrase “good things” is conveniently ambiguous as to whether the criterion is aesthetic or moral, an ambiguity that reflects the confusion of the audience emulating sophisticated discourse. Benedict argues that the miscellanies and anthologies of the period covered by her study (from the Restoration to Jane Austen) were instrumental in making the modern reader, for whom cultural literacy is the manifestation of choice in what one reads (1996, 221). Whether or not we can trace the utility of the miscellany for a particular stratum of society back to the ancient world, it is clear that the miscellaneousness of the miscellany is used to conjure up images of sociality in the ancient texts. But miscellany also has implications for the experience of the individual reader, to which I now turn. The Reader’s Experience Epigraphs and introductory poems to eighteenth-­century miscellanies tend to recycle ancient topoi. John Gay’s “On a Miscellany of Poems” commemorates the miscellany in which the poem appears (Miscellaneous Poems and Translations. By Several Hands, 1721). It is addressed to Bernard Lintott, who published a number of miscellanies in the early eighteenth century, some in collaboration with Pope. So, Bernard, must a Miscellany be Compounded of all kinds of Poetry; The Muse’s Olio which all Tastes may fit, And treat each Reader with his darling Wit. Let every Classic in the Volume shine, And each contribute to thy great Design: Through various Subjects let the Reader range, And raise his Fancy with a grateful Change; Variety’s the source of  Joy below, From whence still fresh revolving Pleasures flow. In Books and Love, the Mind one end pursues, And only Change th’expiring Flame renews. (Gay, “On a Miscellany of Poems, ” 7–­18)

166

chapter five

Gay’s account of the uses of miscellany moves from the society of the book (the miscellany caters to all tastes) to the experience of the individual reader (variety prevents interest from flagging). A culinary metaphor, perhaps echoing Juvenal’s  farrago, casts the miscellany as an Olio, a word derived from the Latin olla (pot) and signifying a dish of many, varied ingredients, all cooked together, which, because of the variety of ingredients, suits all tastes. But the idea of mixture is quickly abandoned for that of change, as we focus in on the reader’s experience. Variety is “the source of  Joy below, ” a phrase in which we recognize the topos that the need for variety is a mark of  human weakness. Authors of miscellanies routinely cite the pleasure of variety and its ca­ pacity to maintain interest or prevent boredom. But this is not all they have to say about the reader. Miscellanies allow, even require, a degree of participation from their readers. How, then, is the reader’s experience to be imagined, and what kind of reader does a miscellany require? Martial’s frequent reflections on the composition of his books stress unevenness of quality, and sometimes recommend skipping poems, or the partial reading of a book that seems too long (e.g., Epigrams 10.1). But this approach may lead to a less varied diet than the book would offer to the reader who consumes it all. Martial makes this point in a poem that applies the “book as banquet” metaphor in an unusual way: Consumpta est uno si lemmate pagina, transis, et breviora tibi, non meliora placent. dives et ex omni posita est instructa macello cena tibi, sed te mattea sola iuvat. non opus est nobis nimium lectore guloso, hunc volo, non fiat qui sine pane satur. (Epigrams 10.59) If a page is taken up by a single poem you pass it by, And shorter poems, not better, please you. A rich dinner is laid out for you, sourced from every market, And you are only interested in the delicacies. I don’t need a reader who’s a total glutton, The one I want is not satisfied without bread.

Martial does not claim that the longer poems are better, nor that the fastidious reader who skips poems misses the effect of an ordered whole. The value of the experience that is offered the reader is that it is varied, “sourced from every market, ” and for the reader to pick and choose according to what appeals (or doesn’t repel) would diminish the variety of the experience. At the same time, the reader is expected to want a square meal, which would be

miscellany

167

incomplete without plain bread. The joke of the epigram is that we are expecting the reader who skips long items to be castigated for failing to live up to a higher standard (his criterion is length, not quality), but the punch line ostentatiously relinquishes the claim to the high ground. Satur, the last word of the poem, bathetically assigns the need to experience the full range of the book’s variety to the need for repletion. In its context, this word reminds us of the oscillation between variety and fullness in satire’s understanding of the word satur.54 However he might disapprove of it, Martial seems here to acknowledge the possibility of skipping. He does not, though, imagine the reader browsing, which would seem to be more characteristic of a post-­codex reading culture (perhaps Martial is on the threshold here, as he provides the earliest evidence for the use of codices). Morgan (2007, 265) argues that the browsing, and dipping in and out, which is characteristic of the way we read miscellanies today, would have been impractical for the reader of an ancient papyrus miscellany, and that they were probably expected to be read from end to end. Martial’s banalizing ending imagines the reading of the miscellany as satisfying in itself. But prose miscellanies often stress the provocative character of variety, which instigates readers to further investigations, or thoughts of their own. Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–­ca. 215 AD) claims an educative function for the variety of his Strōmateis: Let these notes of mine  .  .  . be varied ( poikilos) for the inexperienced who encounter them any old how, and, as the name suggests, let them be thrown together, moving restlessly from one thing to another, and now indicating one thing, now another.  .  .  . For the writing will find the one who understands it. . . . So as you might expect, the fertility of the small seeds of doctrine encompassed in this work is great, “like the fodder of the field, ” as the scripture says. (Strōmateis 4.2)

Clement’s “fodder of the field” alludes to Job 24:6, where the poor gather fodder in the fields of others and glean the vineyards of the wicked. The Hebrew word translated as “fodder” (meslin) denotes mixed provender made up for cattle, a biblical equivalent of farrago. Clement’s reader is cast as a gleaner, moving restlessly about the field, as the Strōmateis themselves move from one thing to another. We could match Clement’s biblical allusion with a passage from Seneca, in which, discussing the style of  his letters, Seneca prefers sermo (conversation) to “prefabricated disputations” (disputationes praeparatae). The softly spoken words of sermo “must be scattered like seed which, though it is small, expands its strength once it has taken hold in a suitable place. ”55 In book 6 of Clement’s Strōmateis, the small seeds that the reader gleans from the miscellaneous text become sparks:

168

chapter five

The flowers flowering variously ( poikilōs) in a meadow, and the orchards of fruit trees in a park, are not organized or separated by species (in the way learned people put together Fields and Helicons and Honeycombs and Robes, gathering the various flowers). The form of the Strōmateis is thoroughly varie­ gated, like a meadow, deliberately scattered with those things which happened to come to mind, and without order or expurgation (diakekatharmenois). And so my notes will be like sparks, and for the one who is prepared for knowledge who happens to encounter them, a real effort to understand will prove advantageous and useful. For it is just that one should labor not only for food, but (much more so) for knowledge. (Strōmateis 6.2.1)

What is the force of Clement’s connection between the random order of the Strōmateis, following only the vagaries of  his memory, and the sparking of the reader? Variegation tends to isolate elements, to set them off from each other, and so, by removing them from the flow of argument, turn them into sparks of thought. It seems that the restlessness of the miscellany, moving from topic to topic in a nonlinear (bee-­like) fashion, is intended to solicit the reader’s participation. The reader, in this respect, is a mirror of the author-­as-­reader: we should read as the miscellany’s author himself read, and we can trace the vagaries and fluctuating attentiveness of the author in the miscellany itself, which acts as the model of a particular kind of intellectual life. Variety and Biographical Fictions A number of titles for miscellanies draw our attention not so much to the na­ture or effects of the work as product as to the process by which it was produced. Aulus Gellius’s own title, Noctes Atticae, offers what I will call an “autobiographical fiction”: Gellius was living in Athens when he assembled the items that make up his book, and “Nights” refers to the lucubrations that made it possible for him to compose them.56 So there is a category of miscellanies which claims to reflect and, more importantly, display the randomness or variety of some aspect of the author’s life or experience. Pliny’s miscellany, both in his letters and in his poetic nugae, as he describes them in his letters, is tied as much to his own persona as to the world he is describing. Sympotic or convivial miscellanies may range around the variety of food presented at the banquet, but they also attempt to catch the variety of free-­ranging and casual conversation. Other miscellanies may reflect the character of the author’s reading (Gellius’s commentarii), conversation, social connections (Pliny’s letters), or moods (Pliny’s nugae). More importantly, a particular value may attach to the role that variety plays in the author’s life: think of  Pliny’s homo sum

miscellany

169

(p. ­95). The phenomenon of variety is translated variously into dimensions of persona, environment, or work-­habits by the different biographical fictions of individual collections. Pliny’s protestation, in the first letter of his first book, that he has arranged the letters “as they came to hand” (“ut quaeque in manus venerat, ” Epist. 1.1) is one of the simplest fictions for the miscellaneous book, however disingenuous it may be. What is stressed here is Pliny’s candor, underlined by the statement that if he writes any letters in future he will not suppress them: “non supprimam” are the last words of this opening letter (1.1.2).57 A more elaborate ethical significance is assigned to the variety of his poetic nugae, in which both the variety of  his affective moods and the diversity of  his entertainments, which take in both the high and the low, attest to his humanity (Epist. 5.3.2). If the variety of Pliny’s nugae projects a particular image of a life, and of a “rounded” human being, the monotony of Ovid’s exile poetry is the reflection of the opposite kind of life, one that is not lived according to the author’s arbitrium (will). Since Ovid’s material is his life, his book must forego varietas now that his situation is one of unrelieved gloom. In Ex Ponto 3.9 Ovid addresses the criticism that he is always saying the same thing. He replies that he has written a monotonous book because he is not inventing his own material: denique materiam, quam quis sibi finxerit ipse, arbitrio variat multa poeta suo. (Ex Ponto 3.9.47–­48) Finally, when a poet has material that he has invented himself, He varies it freely according to his whim.

A various book is a mark of freedom. Ovid goes on to say that he did not attempt to write a book, but rather to send letters to as many people as could help him, regardless of whether this forced him to say the same thing over and over again. He has put the letters together in no particular order (“utcumque sine ordine iunxi, ” 53), perhaps to ensure that no conclusions are to be drawn about the relative status of the addressees. The phrasing is close to Pliny’s words in the first of his letters, and Pliny may be deliberately echoing Ovid, though Ovid’s randomness stresses that the work was not “chosen” (“electum, ” 54). In this case, then, and by contrast with Pliny, the randomness displays some un­ desirable aspect of the author’s life, and furthermore in this case randomness does not preclude monotony. A further inflection is given to the randomness of a miscellany’s order by the prose miscellanist Pamphile. According to Photius (119b6–­120a4) Pamphile tells us that she jotted down everything she learned from her husband

170

chapter five

in thirty years of marriage, adding anything that she heard from those who visited him: She divided all the material as it seemed to her worthy of report and record into mixed commentaries, not distinguished according to their individual content, but randomly (eikē) as she came to record each item, since, as she says, it is not difficult to classify material, but she thought a miscellany (to anamemigmenon) more enjoyable and attractive, and variety ( poikilia) more appealing than homogeneity (tou monoeidous).58

While the miscellany of Pamphile’s work serves a conventional rhetorical purpose, namely to appeal to the reader, it also reflects the wellsprings of the work in Pamphile’s circumstances, and the uses she has made of them. Her miscellany is a record of a marriage, or of the fluctuating attentiveness piqued by her husband and his guests. Pamphile’s “as she came to record each item” is echoed in Gellius’s claim that his Noctes Atticae follows a random order that corresponds to the manner in which he made his excerptions (“Usi autem sumus ordine rerum fortuito quem ante in excerpendo feceramus, ” praef. 1). For, as he picked up a book, Greek or Latin, he noted what took his fancy, whatever its subject ( praef. 2). Whether or not we believe that Gellius arranged his items in an order that was as random ( fortuito) as his note-­taking and excerption, it remains the case that the order of the book is intended to reflect the (dis)order of Gellius’s reading and excerpting.59 The Noctes Atticae provides a model of a life devoted to learning,60 and chance plays a significant role in Gellius’s anecdotes and narratives of intellectual encounters. The word fortuito in the preface is echoed by many a forte expressing the randomness that governs the opportunities for intellectual discussion and the chances that bring up one topic or another. The point is acutely made by Rust (2009, 97–­100), who argues that the disorder of the Noctes Atticae allows the reader to experience the coincidences that govern Gellius’s world. By emphasizing the ubiquity of these coincidences, Gellius makes a strong connection between his intellectual practices and the occurrences of everyday life, and this encourages the kind of lateral thinking required in the competitive world that he describes. As other scholars have emphasized, Gellius is concerned with the appropriate manner in which to engage with knowledge in a particular context, and this accounts for the variety of dramatic occasions for intellectual pursuits represented in the Noctes Atticae.61 It is in a similar light that we can see the variety of Catullus’s nugae. The polymetrics, in particular, range over a variety of occasions and contexts that call for a poem (love, hate, literary judgment, friendship, conviviality), dis-

miscellany

171

playing the flexibility and centrality of the values carried by Catullus’s recurrent words of approval and disapproval (lepidus, venustus, ineptus, etc.) and the different spheres in which these key terms are applicable. These words have no “proper” sphere, but permeate the different aspects of the life that the poems put on display, which in turn presents a variety of contexts for their application. At the same time, the concepts or values that may underly these words are to be understood only in action, like the intellectual values that are recognized by Gellius. As we jump from scene to scene, from one kind of relationship or concern to another, we begin to get the idea, but definition is neither possible nor desirable. Autobiographical fictions bring an element of performance to the miscellany. In the case of Seneca’s letters, the same phenomenon is inflected in a slightly different way. The letters certainly stress the variety and triviality, or everydayness, of the occurrences that offer Seneca food for reflection, or give him pause for thought. And yet this random variety of occasions has a centripetal tendency, since the same restricted repertoire of moral concerns show themselves to be relevant to the wide variety of events that prompt reflection: for Seneca, the variety of everyday life is only a surface phenomenon (p. 2­ 2). Whether it be the noise of the baths above which Seneca lives, the arrival of a ship with news from abroad, or a confrontation with an old slave, Seneca finds the occasion for reflection on the same ultimate questions. Or, as he puts it in letter 64, while wisdom (sapientia) seems to be already complete, there are always new circumstances in which to apply it (64.8).62 The most obvious case in which the variety of the work reflects the circumstances out of which the miscellany has emerged is that of sympotic miscellanies, where the work follows the contours of a specific event, more or less fictional. In sympotic miscellanies, the feast is both an image of, and a prompt for, the variety of the text. Plutarch, (Symposiaka 4592d) attributes to the master of his feast the recognition that in all things variety pleases; that nature rejoices in diversity and, by contrast, simple uniformity bores. For this reason he has provided a various bounty. Athenaeus begins the Deipnosophis­ tae with an explicit association between the feast and the discourse: “The plan of the discourse reflects the rich bounty ( polytelia) of a feast, and the arrangement of the book the courses of a dinner. Such is the delightful banquet of words (logodeipnon) that this wonderful steward, Athenaeus, introduces. ” In Athenaeus, poikilia is valued both in the food and in the types of poetry and entertainment on offer.63 The paradigmatic scene of the Deipnosophistae develops as the banqueters take a hint from the arrival of a dish, or some other symposiastic event, and move from the object or event concerned to a word, which becomes

172

chapter five

the subject of learned discussion.64 Given that the meal has been planned to produce maximum variety, the arrival of a dish models the random prompt that keeps the conversation ranging unpredictably. The randomness of the prompt, supplied by the underlings who bring on the dishes, demands an im­ provisation that confirms the elite’s command of its material. Here too, as in Seneca, the random, the superficial, and the material always leads back to the central cultural preoccupations. In fact, the very randomness and variety of the prompt proves the focusing power of the central preoccupation. And yet, it is important that the display, celebration, and sharing of this knowledge be embedded in social interaction. The miscellaneous character of conversation at the banquet, in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae and other sympotic literature, allows for the gathering of different points of view on the same topic in a non-­hierarchical way.65 It also provides a display of the proper elite use of  leisure. The narratives in Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae often similarly pivot on a random occurrence, which prompts an intellectual discussion. Sometimes the prompt is not entirely contained within the gathering of intellectuals, but is sparked by a chance event in the environment. One of the most interesting of these narratives is Noctes Atticae 19.10, where Gellius recounts an occasion on which he and Celsinus visited Fronto, who was suffering from gout. They found the great man reclining on a couch, surrounded by others notable either for learning, birth, or wealth. Also present were builders, who had been summoned to construct some new baths. The architect was showing Fronto a book with various models for baths, out of which he selected one and asked about the price. The architect quoted the figure of 300,000 sesterces, to which one of Fronto’s friends added “And another 50,000 more or less” ( plus ça change!). Fronto is struck by his friend’s use of the word praeterpropter (more or less) and interrupts his conversation with the architect to ask what the word means. His friend says that the word is not his, but can be found in common use; better to ask X here, who’s a famous grammarian. By now, readers of Gellius know where this anecdote is heading. In the Noctes Atticae, recognized experts fare no better than they do with Socrates. Sure enough, the grammarian blusters. “It’s hardly worthy of discussion. The word is plebeian, used more by mechanics than educated men. ” “Is that so?” replies Fronto, “Then how is it that we find the word in Cato, Varro, and other early writers?” Celsinus helpfully chips in with a citation from no less an authority than Ennius. The text of Ennius’s Iphigeneia is brought in and the relevant passage is read aloud. Fronto turns to the now sweating grammarian. “Since your Ennius uses the word perhaps you would care to explicate it. ” The grammarian

miscellany

173

exits in confusion, calling over his shoulders that he’ll tell Fronto later, when the uninitiated aren’t around to listen in. Johnson (2010, 110–­11) gives a good account of what this anecdote tells us about the literate event in Gellius’s world. A random remark leads to a challenge, which is passed along to a specialist, who himself falls prey to the superior knowledge of the master. As final arbiter, a text is produced, and then, once the book roll has delivered the decisive evidence, the group breaks up, now that the event for which they were waiting has taken place. Absent from Johnson’s account, though, is any reference to the content of the Ennius passage. Gellius is our only source for this good-­sized chunk of the chorus of soldiers in Ennius’s Iphigeneia, and it concerns the distinction between an aimless and a focused otium, between an otiosum otium and what we might call a negotiosum otium: Otio qui nescit uti, plus negoti habet quam, cum est negotium, in negotio. nam cui, quod agat, institutum in otio est negotium, id agit, id studet, ibi mentem atque animam delectat suum; otioso in otio animus nescit quid velit. hoc idem est; em neque domi nunc nos nec militiae sumus: imus huc, hinc illuc; cum illuc ventum est, ire illinc lubet. incerte errat animus, praeterpropter vitam vivitur. (NA 19.10.12) The person who doesn’t know how to handle leisure Has more work than, when there’s work, he has in his working. For the person who has a task set for him to do in leisure, He does that, he concentrates on it, he finds delight for mind and spirit in it. In leisurely leisure the mind doesn’t know what it wants. This is the same with us. See how we are neither at home nor on military duty: We go hither and thither; when we get there, we want to go thence. Our mind wanders uncertainly. We live our life more or less.

This has obvious relevance to the frame of the narrative, which contrasts workmen going about their business with the members of the literate group sitting about expectantly; Fronto stands, or rather reclines, at a nodal point between two kinds of activity. The chance remark of the friend in response to the architect’s estimate allows the action to pivot from one agenda to another, while the grammarian tries to swing it back by returning the word to the world of opifices (was Fronto’s friend mimicking the speech of the workmen?). Finally, the word praeterpropter is assigned a place—­in a high cultural

174

chapter five

text, but spoken by a chorus of soldiers. When your otium has no goal you live praeterpropter, say the soldiers. We can imagine what Fronto’s workmen might have had to say about the conversation they heard at his house. Might they have applied the words of the soldiers’ chorus to the little society that Gellius describes? What kind of otium does it enjoy? A leisured group of men hangs around while others work, until that work casts up a topic into which they can sink their intellectual teeth. Is living randomly in this way constitutive of the elite, as opposed to the workmen and soldiers, who would have trouble handling otium? Ennius’s soldiers may need a project, but not so Fronto’s group, who can conjure one out of thin air. Or is the joke on the intellectuals, who cannot see the significance for themselves of the passage they are investigating, so intent are they on the status of a word? The blustering grammarian offers a satisfying scapegoat, but might there be a more disturbing joke which the grammarian’s unmasking seeks to cover, a joke about the nexus of  leisure, learning, and randomness that goes to the heart of the Noctes Atticae? In the frame narrative, Fronto chooses a model for his baths out of a book picturing varias species (various models, 19.10.2). That’s one attitude to variety: a range of choices and a decision to be made. The choice of a focus for the other group that attends him is much more random, and it depends on the dynamics of a complex social situation. What will crystallize as an object of interest for this group is unpredictable, and we readers are positioned like the non-­participating hangers-­on of the group, waiting for something that we can call an event. In this anecdote, the variety of the Noctes Atticae is related to the peculiar character of elite otium, which is both mythologized and laid open to question by the different perspectives available to the reader of this chapter. Gellius’s Noctes Atticae was well known to one of the most important figures in the modern history of the miscellany, Michel de Montaigne.66 The form to which Montaigne gave the name, the essai (trial), is explicitly linked by him to the notion of miscellany. Montaigne takes the random or chance event which sparks off the (often social) literary event in Gellius and turns it inwards, rather in the manner of Seneca, to “make trial” of the quality of his mind. The point is made by Regosin (1994, 250), who quotes Montaigne’s essay “On Democritus and Heraclitus, ” as follows: Our power of judgment is a tool to be used on all subjects; it can be applied anywhere. That is why I seize on any sort of occasion for employing it in the assays I am making of it here. If it concerns a subject which I do not understand at all, that is the very reason why I assay my judgment on it; I sound out the ford from a safe distance: if I find I would be out of my depth I stick to the

miscellany

175

bank. . . . Sometimes when the subject is trivial and vain, I assay whether my judgment can find anything substantial in it, anything to shore it up and support it. Sometimes I employ it on some elevated, well-­trodden subject where it can discover nothing new, since the path is so well beaten that our judgment can only follow in another’s tracks. (Montaigne 2003, 337)

The essay in which Montaigne gives an account of the origin of  his Essais (first edition published in 1580) is particularly interesting for its glimpse of Ennius’s chorus on otium, as reported in Gellius. De l’Oisiveté (Essais 1.8) tells us of Montaigne’s decision to retire, keep himself to his house and allow his spirit “to entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself ” (“s’entretenir soi-­même, et s’arrêter et rasseoir en soi”). But he finds: variam semper dant otia mentem —­that on the contrary, it bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness, that, so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself. (Montaigne 2003, 31)

Montaigne’s Latin quotation comes from Lucan’s De Bello Civili (“leisure always produces a changeable [variam] mind,”  4.704), and concerns the advisability of letting soldiers enjoy rest and recreation. Behind the Lucan passage lies Ennius’s chorus of soldiers reflecting on the distractedness and lack of focus brought on by an otiosum otium more burdensome than work itself. Montaigne’s wording suggests that he makes the connection with the Ennius passage too: the words “taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else”67 recalls “otio qui nescit uti, / plus negoti habet quam, cum est negotium, in negotio, ” quoted at the beginning of the Ennius passage in Noctes Atticae 19.10.12. Montaigne would have come across the passage in his reading of Aulus Gellius. His “confession” aligns him with Ennius’s soldiers, but while Lucan’s variam is undoubtedly negative (changeable, unsettled), one cannot help thinking that Montaigne’s etiology of his book is drawing attention to one of its greatest pleasures, varietas. Montaigne is being disingenuous: while alluding to ancient uses of varius in a negative sense (inconstant, diffuse) he also expresses a pride in the variety and mobility of his thinking. Arguing, in another essay (3.3, De Trois Commerces), that the most beautiful souls are those which have the most flexibility and variety (“qui ont plus de varieté et de soupplesse”), Montaigne quotes a passage from Livy on Cato the Elder which must have been in Pliny’s mind on many an occasion: “huic

176

chapter five

versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fuit, ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcumque ageret” (“his mind was so versatile, and so ready for anything, that whatever he did you could say he was born for that alone, ” Livy 39.40). It will be from the perspective of the variety of human experience that Montaigne will write his Essais, which shift from one topic to another, and cover the full range of his moods, reflections, and experience.68 It is up to the reader to make the distinction between a troubled mind, which bounces around because it doesn’t know what it wants, and the inquisitive mind, which finds matter of interest wherever it looks. Gellius connected the variety of his miscellany to the chances of his reading, and Montaigne tells us that his Essais are composed in a library, which he describes with a loving care that recalls Pliny’s descriptions of his villas.69 In this library “I can turn over the leaves of this book or that (à cette heure un livre, à cette heure un autre), a bit at a time without order or design. Sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to and fro, noting down and dictating these whims of mine (mes songes que voicy)” (Essais 3.3, De Trois Commerces, Montaigne 2003, 933). Montaigne is confessing to the fault of desultory reading, as described by Seneca: “sed modo” inquis “hunc librum evolvere volo, modo illum. ” Fastidientis sto­ machi est multa degustare; quae ubi varia sunt et diversa, inquinant non alunt. (Ep. Mor. 2.4)70 “But” you say “Now I want to unroll this book, now that. ” It is the mark of a fussy stomach to taste many things; and if they are various and different, they defile rather than feed.

Again, the word varius has negative connotations for Seneca, but in recalling this passage from Seneca, Montaigne seems to be making a confession which is disingenuous, to the extent that he implies a revaluation of Seneca’s distracted reader as curious and fascinatingly mercurial. Gellius, too, recognizes that the desultory variety of  his interests and reading, as displayed in the various and heterogeneous chapters of his Noctes At­ ticae, could be seen in a negative light. In Noctes Atticae 11.16 he discusses the Greek word polypragmosynē, for which there is no single Latin equivalent.71 The Greek word, meaning literally “doing much, ” is applied to busybodies or the curious and officious. When Gellius tries to explain Plutarch’s title Peri Polypragmosynēs to a Greekless friend, the friend takes it that Plutarch is encouraging polypragmosynē as a form of industriousness. Not at all, replies Gellius, “He discourages us indeed in this book, as much as he possibly can, from a various and miscellaneous ( promisca) and unnecessary contemplation

miscellany

177

of, and search for, many things of all different sorts” (NA 11.16.8).72 Unfocused, dispersed activity is futile.73 But both varius and promiscus appear as characterizations of his own project in the preface to Noctes Atticae.74 Later in the preface he describes the kind of book he is writing as one that provides a “variam et miscellam et quasi confusaneum doctrinam” ( praef. 4). Macrobius, whose language is highly influenced by Gellius, uses some of the same words used by Gellius in his preface, but takes a more Senecan approach to miscellany (see p. 155):75 Nec indigeste tamquam in acervum congessimus digna memoratu: sed varia­ r­um rerum disparilitas, auctoribus diversa confusa temporibus, ita in quoddam digesta corpus est ut, quae indistincte atque promisce ad subsidium memoriae annotaveramus, in ordinem instar membrorum cohaerenti convenirent. (Macrobius, Saturnalia, praef. 3) I have not gathered together without organization, as though in a pile, anything worthy of note. Instead, heterogeneous and varied material, by different authors and in a jumble of time periods, has been laid out to produce a kind of body, so that what I noted down in a mingled confusion, as an aid to my memory, has been made to cohere like limbs that belong together.

Macrobius tidies up Gellius’s account of  his composition. But Gellius has anticipated Macrobius’s criticism by including a disquisition on the untranslatability of Plutarch’s Greek word; he acknowledges that the kind of varied reading from which his Noctes Atticae stem, and which they encourage, is not without its critics. This reading practice might be seen as a form of poly­ pragmosynē, a word which does not have a positive sense in Greek. Montaigne seems to offer us the same choice when he applies the word varius in an ambivalent sense to the mental activity that gave birth to the Essais. But his confession is more confident in its assumption that we will be interested in the portrait of a man and his thought, drawn from his reactions to a random and various reading, as unpredictable as the author himself. If he “assays” himself through his response to the random and the various, that is because of the fluid nature of the self. This particular autobiographical element is only potential in the ancient texts, though perhaps we approach it when Pliny sum­ marizes the varied activities and emotions that account for the nature of his nugae with the words homo sum. More generally, we could say that in these miscellanies the random and the various become the arena in which a certain kind of capacity is tested, whether it be the universal applicability of Seneca’s ethical concerns, the erudition of Gellius’s scholars, or the range and scope of Montaigne’s powers of  judgment.

178

chapter five

Lyric, the Various Genre When it comes to some of the most famous of ancient miscellaneous collections, we find that their authors have nothing explicitly programmatic to say about their variety, and that their titles give little away. Horace’s four books of Carmina are the most obvious example, though we have seen that c. 1.1 and c. 4.2 feature implicit claims to a poetics of variety. Catullus, too, says nothing explicit about the variety of what he calls his nugae in the dedicatory poem of his libellus. Nevertheless, as Kathleen McCarthy (2010, 443) astutely remarks, variety is a patterning device which distinguishes Latin lyric poetry books from books of other poetic genres, such as satire and elegy: “where elegy uses a narrative thread to link the poems and satire uses the highly characterized speaker to provide a kind of coherence, lyric plays on the possibilities of variation as a patterning device. ”76 She goes on to say “This is most obvious at the level of meter, which can change from poem to poem, but the topics and formats of the poems differ as well. So, for example, although Horace’s Odes offer a single unitary voice, they also show more freedom in topic and approach than the label ‘lyric’ might lead us to expect, including examples of character speech (1.28) and narrative with character speech (1.15), along with a range of roles for the first-­person voice, from bard to sympotic gossip. ” While Horace’s Odes offer a more or less consistent persona, we should not underestimate the extent to which lyric is itself a genre characterized by variety. Some miscellanists, as we have seen, situate the variety of their work in distinction to the homogeneity or order of a more respectable genre, but the variety of Horace’s Carmina can be attributed to the variety of types and classifications recognized within the genre with which he so proudly associates himself (“quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres, ” c. 1.1.35). For the generic history of Horace’s carmina we must go back to the Hellenistic period, when poets began to compose books rather than poems, as Denis Feeney puts it (2009, 207). Compilations, poetry books, and anthologies, whether designed by authors, editors, or ordinary readers, are characteristic of that period.77 However, the collections of Catullus and Horace bear little resemblance, in their organization, to Hellenistic collections such as the Garland of Meleager, or the recently discovered book of epigrams by Posidippus, both of which group poems by theme or type. In Posidippus’s collection, for instance, titled blocks of poems on the same subject feature variation rather than variety, and transition from one category to another is favored over juxtaposition.78 A more promising model for the organization of Latin poetry books is Callimachus’s Iambi.79 It is in connection with this book that we come across

miscellany

179

the term polyeideia (multiplicity of  kind). We cannot be sure that Callimachus used the word himself, since it appears in a first-­or second-­century papyrus containing a diegesis of the Iambi and other works of Callimachus: “In this he says to those who fault him for the variety ( polyeideia) of the poems he writes that he is imitating Ion the tragic poet. ”80 There is some controversy as to whether Callimachus is responding to criticism of polyeideia in the Iambi or in his oeuvre as a whole: the example of Ion of Chios, who was successful in many genres, seems more appropriate to the latter. Benjamin Acosta-­Hughes (2002, 82–­89) discusses the controversy, and suggests that Ion’s contravention of the “one poet one genre rule” is adduced as a precedent both for Callimachus’s varied oeuvre and for the collection of the Iambi. The diegete uses the term polyeideia in connection with Iambi 13, possibly the last poem of the book.81 From the poem itself we know that Callimachus addresses at least two types of poetic differentiation, metrical (fr. 203 Pfeiffer, 17–­18) and generic (fr. 203 Pfeiffer, 31–­32), and there may have been others: Assuming Iambus 13 to be a poem that both brings closure to the collection and consciously comments on it, Callimachus’ own conceptualization of the collection can be loosely defined as follows. The Iambi is a varied collection of poems (in form, meter and dialect) which interweaves the traditional and the innovative, the elevated and the low, and which all have some antecedents in an iambic tradition, while at the same time refashioning and redefining that tradition. (Acosta-­Hughes 2002, 9)82

What Callimachus does with the iambic tradition is not unlike what Horace was to do in his Epodes, a similarly varied work which takes advantage of the fact that iambos, as practiced by its archaic representatives Archilochus, Hipponax, and Simonides, was a genre that could be inflected in different ways.83 When it comes to Horace’s odes (carmina), we find that already in antiquity they are distinguished by their variety. Sidonius Apollinaris speaks of the odes as “varii carminis eglogas” (“selections of a various song, ” Epist. 9.13.2). The word eglogas must here refer to the individual odes, which can be thought of as “choice extracts” (eklogai) of a song that is varius. Sidonius’s carminis, then, refers to the book of odes which, instead of being perpetuum (continuous), in the manner of epic, is variegated by its individual elements.84 In his odes Horace claims to be following the example of the archaic Greek lyric poets, and Callimachus was an important link in the transmission of this poetry to Horace. It is through his system of cataloguing, as adopted and modified by Aristophanes of Byzantium, that Horace would have encountered Greek lyric. As Feeney (2009, 205) points out, the most striking aspect of this cataloguing is the diversity of criteria for arrangement used by the Hellenistic

180

chapter five

compilers: “We find, then, books of lyric arranged by metre, addressee (human or divine), performer (maidens), by occasion (wedding, funeral), by location of athletic victory, as with Pindar . . . or by type of athletic victory, as with Bacchylides and Simonides (foot-­race or chariot-­race)—­and that is far from being an exhaustive list. ” So, the homogeneous lyric collections of the Alexandrian editors may have given Horace the idea of a miscellaneous book by virtue of the very diversity of their principles of categorization for the lyric genre.85 While Horace makes no apologia for the varied character of  his book, he does end the first of his odes with the request that he be included among the lyric poets: quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres sublimi feriam sidera vertice. (c. 1.1.35–­36) But if you should insert (weave) me in among the lyric poets I will strike the heavens with my upreared head.

The first line is usually taken to refer to the corpus of egkrithentes, the canon of  “included” lyric poets established by Aristophanes.86 But if  Horace’s book is to be inserted into the catalogue of  books of the lyric poets, the question that arises is “as what”? How is this book to be catalogued? A closer look at Horace’s language at this point reveals an interesting met­ aphor. Horace wants to be “inserted” (inseres) among the lyric poets or, more exactly, woven into a garland (serta) or anthology.87 Matthew Leigh (2010, 271) shows how the ending of c. 1.1 is paradoxically both modest and megalomaniac. Horace will be (modestly) “inserted” into a garland of lyric poets, contributing to its variety, but his lyric persona, ambitiously encompassing both the “garlanded intimacy” of Sappho and the grandeur of Pindar (“sublimi feriam sidera vertice”), will also bring the variety of the “garland” within the compass of a single voice.88 In his books of carmina Horace will play many lyric roles for, as Barchiesi (2009, 421) puts it, “lyric texts have an influence that induces role-­playing, not just aesthetic pleasure: the roles of authors can be accepted or, on the other hand, refined. 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 within the oeuvre of a single Greek lyric poet, Horace sees the potential for variety. When he describes the career of Alcaeus in c. 1.32 he finds a model for uniting different lyric personae in a single book: Alcaeus was fierce in war (“ferox bello, ” 6), but when he had tied up his battered ship he would sing of Bacchus, Venus, and the dark-­haired Lycus (9–­12).89

miscellany

181

Horace is not the only Latin poet in whom we can see the subdivisions of the genre in which he writes reflected in the variety of his books. Just as Horace mixes up the kinds of lyric production that would have been separated into different books in Alexandrian editions, so Martial jumps from one type of epigram to another, reflecting the diversity of kind comprised within Greek epigram anthologies (anathematic, epideictic, scoptic, erotic, and epitaphic). It is typical of the practice of Latin poets that Martial mixes the individual epigrammatic types that would have been separated from one another in the original Greek collections.90 Miscellanizing: The Will to Variety The variety of  Horace’s Carmina is most conspicuously displayed in the matter of love. Not only is there no sequence of events to be descried between Horace’s love poems, but the name of the beloved changes from poem to poem. This distinguishes the amatory world of Horace from that of the elegists. McCarthy (2010, 443), who notes this distinction, adds that Horace’s procedure has the effect of “making each poem a mini-­narrative of the charms and disappointments of love rather than, as elegy does, making the collection as a whole a narrative. ” By contrast, Catullus’s polymetric collection does feature recurring characters (especially Lesbia, but also Furius and Aurelius, Calvus, Fabullus, etc.), though it does not, as the elegiac collections do, feed every poem into the implicit narrative of the love affair. This has the effect of claiming independence for each poem. One might add that, though Catullus and the elegists tend toward monogamy, and hence the consistency of names, this only makes their disruption of narrative sequence more noticeable. We are given glimpses of potential narratives only to be frustrated in our attempt to read the sequence chronologically.91 In the case of Catullus and Martial it has been customary for scholars to identify “cycles” of poems linked by theme or narrative, even though they are not placed together within the book. This tendency, however misguided, is a response to the provocative hints by the authors that there might be a narrative to be reconstructed, a narrative that has been miscellanized.92 The disruption of temporal order is perhaps even more striking in prose works. Aulus Gellius, for instance, inserts twenty-­one chapters set in the period of his study at Athens into the Noctes Atticae, but he scatters these throughout the collection. So, while we have intimations of a biography in the occasional reference to a specific point in Gellius’s life, no chronology is observed by the sequence in which these references appear.93 In all of these

182

chapter five

cases (Catullus, the elegists, Aulus Gellius), the biography or narrative implied by the recurrence of names, and other glimpses of a narrative pattern, is miscellanized, though to different effect. In the case of Gellius, for instance, the advantage of what Rust (2010, 83) calls Gellius’s “miscellaneous time” is that he can “compress distances that separate the community of readers in time and in space, ” creating an imaginary intellectual community. By interspersing essays on his reading with episodes from his own life, Gellius creates a community that spans both the living and the dead. There might, then, be positive reasons for what often seemed a purely negative principle, namely that homogeneity must be avoided or, at least, “distressed. ” If Gellius miscellanizes a putative biography, then Poliziano, who cites Gellius as a model, miscellanizes the scholarly edition and commentary. Poliziano had worked on the text of Catullus from his teens, and added comments and corrections to his copy of the first edition, probably with a view to producing his own edition. But he never did. Instead the first Century (hundred chapters) of his Miscellanea contains seven chapters dealing with the text or interpretation of Catullus, but these are scattered throughout the century (1.2, 6, 19, 68, 69, 73, 83), which deals with a range of scholarly issues as wide as those found in Gellius.94 Part of the difficulty of engaging with miscellanies from the perspective of their variety is that variety can appear to be a purely negative principle. Santirocco (1986, 7) describes the arrangement of a poetry book according to the principle of variety as “the avoidance of certain obvious groupings and collo­ cations. ” There is, as we have already seen, a more positive way to understand the disruption of sequence in any given case. However, it is worth noting the conspicuous avoidance of “obvious groupings and collocations” as a signal of the will to variety on the part of the author: the clearest way of signposting variety as a principle of organization is to separate items which belong together. In Catullus’s polymetric liber, there are a number of places where poems paired in theme are separated by another poem contrasting in theme.95 Gutzwiller (1998, 187) sees the same device of separating paired poems at work in Callimachus’s Iambi.96 Not only does Catullus’s liber avoid juxtaposing poems similar in theme, but poems in melic meters (11, 17, 30, 34, 51, 61) are distributed at regular intervals among the hendecasyllables and iambs.97 Horace famously begins his first book of Odes with a “parade” of nine poems, each in a different meter. There is metrical mixing also in the Catalepton, the Priapea, and Martial’s Epigrams. In prose works, the avoidance of sameness will take different forms. Etienne Wolff (2003, 41–­47) lists the different letter-­ types that are found in each book of Pliny’s letters as follows: narrative, description, literary discussion, banter, praise, congratulation, solicitation, invi­

miscellany

183

tation, thanks, recommendation, consolation—­all of which, as he points out, were recognized ancient literary forms. Pliny avoids juxtaposing letters of the same type and to the same addressee and has a penchant for following particularly long letters with short ones.98 Such are the negative devices and avoidances that signal and produce a varied sequence. But “negative” need not be understood negatively! If, as I have argued, the aesthetics of variety are non-­assimilative, the very resistance of the elements of a varied ensemble to assimilation produces a distinctive aesthetic effect. It is perhaps easiest to understand this aesthetic in visual terms, as jewels, for instance, “set each other off. ” Of course, the individual items in a book, whether poems, letters, or essays, do not display themselves to the reader as a visual field. But variety of meter or literary kind fractures the continuity of the reading experience by demanding a shift in orientation as the reader moves from one item to another. The reader can neither quite treat each item as separate, forgetting the last, nor quite integrate the poems into a linear experience. Reading Miscellany What kind of reading can one give to such a miscellanized sequence? Over the last thirty years, approaches to Latin poetry books have shifted from a static, architectural model to a linear model that respects the quality of the reader’s experience. The ancient reader of a book roll could not skip around and browse, as the reader of a codex can.99 Linear readings themselves may emphasize verbal, formal, or thematic connections, like links in a chain, or construct overarching “stories. ” The latter tendency is exemplified by two of the most significant studies of Horace’s Odes of the 1980s, Santirocco (1986) and Porter (1987). David Porter stresses the importance of the book roll (1987, 3) and then goes on to describe the linear progression of  books 1–­3 as a story that deals with human agency and moves from doubt to hopefulness. But this story smooths out the ragged edges with which one poem confronts another and juxtaposes different orientations toward speech (prayer, apostrophe, confession, suit, narrative, etc). Matthew Santirocco, too, prefers the linear development of a theme to “static” patterns (1986, 24). He describes book 1 as representing on a smaller scale the heterogeneity of Odes 1–­3 as a whole, while building a cumulative definition of lyric and of Horace’s place in that poetic tradition (82). This “definition, ” though, turns out to be a set of relations of affiliation and distinction more in line with Feeney’s remarks on the diversity of the lyric genre. Similar linear readings focusing on a “story” have been applied to Catullus.100 But individual poems of Catullus’s collection

184

chapter five

relate not just to their neighbours. Paul Allen Miller (1994) reminds us that each poem encourages us to make connections in line with a number of potential narrative associations, so that each poem exists in dialogical relation to the rest, allowing the reader to assemble his own anthology around the individual poem as it “lights up” a selection of related poems. “Linear” and “narrative” are not the best terms through which to analyze the various sequence. As an alternative, I would suggest that the notion of juxtaposition is helpful. Instead of a continuous thread, in which something is carried over from one unit to the next, juxtaposition implies both separation and proximity, an unsettled shuttling of attention rather than a progression from one thing to the next.101 A linear reading traces the development of themes and narratives, carried over and enriched from poem to poem, while a juxtapository reading examines the way in which themes are assembled and dissolved, and new themes assembled, as we group and regroup poems. The units in a various work resemble the atoms of Lucretius, which coordinate their movements for a while and then go their separate ways to make other temporary connections. Vardi (2004, 179) seems to have Lucretius in mind when he describes the conception of knowledge projected by Gellius’s Noctes Atticae as follows: “In contrast to the vectorial and vertical view of specialized knowledge, which is infinite in terms of higher and deeper, this might better be imagined as a two-­dimensional continuum, a plane dotted with an infinite multitude of items, occasionally meeting to form temporary and limited categories. ” We must not lose sight of the fact, though, that the items in a various col­ lection, however we categorize them, are not infinitely varied. Typically, a miscellany contains a limited repertoire of types, whose members are scattered through the book. In this context we can understand the “parade” of variety that we sometimes see at the beginning of a book. Hoffer (1999, 4) compares the introductory dozen or so letters in Pliny’s first book to the “parade” odes of Horace’s Odes 1, inasmuch as they introduce us to the repertoire, the major topics, and letter types of the collection, just as the parade odes of Horace’s first book introduce us to the different meters.102 But Horace’s first nine odes are not only metrically different, they also constitute an introduction to the major themes and poetic types, including a public poem (2) and a recusatio (6); two erotic poems (5 and 8); a sympotic poem (9); a poem of ad­ monition, introducing the model of nature (4), and a poem of friendship (3). This parade introduces other important Horatian themes if we consider what appears within the poems, which encompass the relation between the personal and the mythical (3, 8), or epic and lyric, various approaches to Horace’s own tastes and values (1, 6, 7), reflections on human folly (1, 3), literary claims

miscellany

185

(1, 6), and references to the places Horace would associate with himself and his poetry (7, 9). Out of the kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of these types and themes emerge fleeting connections. For instance, Horace the retired lover of the Pyrrha ode (1.5) meets Horace the slender poet who refuses the burden of epic (1.6), and they both gratefully pass the job, erotic or poetic, to another. And so on. What then will a “various” reading or interpretation look like? What kind of sense of a book can we make that will not simply look past its variety to a more satisfying, underlying unity, but rather see the variety as integral to the kind of sense that it makes and to the world that it represents? This might appear to be a self-­contradictory project, since any reading or interpretation necessarily unifies, inferring some kind of intention that will subsume elements under a description, attribute a meaning, and therefore render the het­ erogeneous homogeneous. Insofar as it relates to interpretation, variety, so the argument would go, is simply resistance, refusal. In response I would claim that variety, at least in the literary sphere, can be understood as a form of unity, not a lack of it.103 The unity of a various book could be described as combinatorial. In other words, a reading of such a book, rather than aiming to show how its elements fit together in a coherent structure, or as an unfolding, deepening progression, will describe the shifting constellations that can be constructed out of these elements in their different configurations. Rather like the characters in a soap opera, each member of the repertoire of types at some time or other couples with several of the others.104 What controls the various reading, or gives it boundaries, is the finite nature of the repertoire of types or themes that constitutes the world of the book. A miscellaneous reading might ask what we learn about the “world” of these elements as a result of the various configurations in which they appear. “World” would be a less reductive substitute for “unity. ” More basically, one could draw a distinction between a reading that moves from the disparate to the common, resting at the point where the “various” items can be shown to share certain unifying elements, and a reading that moves from the common to its fracturing, or multiplication into different, heterogeneous modes. In such a reading the common element serves not so much to unify the various as to set off (distinguish) the heterogeneity of the different kinds. The epigrams of Martial are certainly ripe for this kind of reading, which I broach in Fitzgerald 2007b. Martial’s epigrams come in a limited variety of types (scoptic, panegyrical, satirical, epideictic, etc), and revolve round a limited repertoire of themes (patronage, sexual preferences, imperial panegyric, social mobility, etc). In Martial’s books these types and themes are jumbled up, rather as if Martial were throwing the dice.105 One

186

chapter five

theme that is particularly prominent in book 1 is the Republican exemplum virtutis. It is striking that twice in book 1 a celebrated display of Republican fortitude is collocated with another of Martial’s common themes, the complaint against a greedy host, and in both cases this is followed by an epigram on a wondrous event in the arena, the lion playing with the hares (1.20, 21, and 22; 42, 43, and 44). A throw of the dice produces a configuration that demands our attention when it happens twice. The second time this happens significant connections are made between these very different themes and types. The two associations of the epigram form, with monumentality (epi-­gram) and with the ephemeral (improvisation, occasionality), are starkly opposed when an event deep in Roman cultural memory, the suicide of Brutus’s wife Porcia (1.42), is juxtaposed with a dinner that happened yesterday (“here, ” 1.43.2). Porcia’s fortitude is celebrated while the stingy host Mancinus is castigated. Ironic connections are there to be seen: Porcia died by swallowing live coals, while Mancinus deprives his guests of a decent meal. The crowd (“turba molesta, ” 42.6) that is castigated for trying to prevent Porcia’s suicide at the end of 42 is echoed by the great number of guests for whom Martial speaks at the beginning of 43: Bis tibi triceni fuimus, Mancine, vocati et positum est nobis nil here praeter aprum. (Martial, 1.43.1–­2) We were sixty guests, Mancinus, yesterday, And all that was served was a boar.

Mancinus’s boar was unaccompanied by side-­dishes, and so small that it could have been dispatched by an unarmed midget in the arena. But the guests didn’t even eat it: the boar was simply displayed (“tantum spectavimus omnes, ” 11). “That’s how boars are ‘served’ us in the arena too, ” Martial comments (“ponere aprum nobis sic et harena solet, ” 12). The poem ends with the wish that the host be “served up” to a boar in the arena, alluding to execution by wild beasts. But, while Martial in 1.43 is a member of the complaining crowd, baying for blood, 1.42 ends with the words I nunc et ferrum, turba molesta, nega. (Martial, 1.42.6) Go on, then, meddling crowd, forbid her the sword.

Turba is commonly used of spectators at a show (Coleman 2006, 194), and this ending reminds us strongly of Liber Spectaculorum 26 (22).12, where Martial castigates a spectatorship that is impatient for its satisfactions: “i nunc

miscellany

187

et lentas corripe, turba, moras” (“go ahead now, crowd, complain about the delays”). The connection emphasizes the fact that, when celebrating Porcia, Martial speaks against the crowd, which is assimilated to the spectatorship of the arena, a not inappropriate connection given the fact that executions could be staged as charades of Republican images of fortitude.106 When addressing his host of yesterday, though, he speaks with, and for, the downtrodden multitude. A very different persona and voice is required for this kind of epigram, and the shared connection with the arena serves to set the poems off against each other, rather than to unify them. While we appreciate Martial’s play on the word ponere in a poem about (not) serving up boar, it would be quite inappropriate for us to hear a pun on the name Porcia (Piggy) in the next poem (so put that thought out of your mind)!107 Clearly the associations of the lone figure in the face of an anonymous crowd changes radically as we move from Republican exemplum to early imperial patron, and from one kind of epigram to another. We could triangulate these two figures with that of the emperor, the ultimate “host” of the arena and the implicit antagonist of Porcia the Republican heroine. I make this connection not to read any particular attitude to the emperor out of these juxtapositions, but to point to the way that, in the context of the early empire, the figure of the lone object of a crowd’s attention fractures into various incompatible instances or generic types, each with its own predispositions, values, and pleasures. With Martial, the different epigrammatic types contained in his books are divided by a basic polarity between scoptic (mocking) and panegyric (praising), each requiring a different attitude of the reader. Either we adopt an attitude of suspicion and prepare ourselves to expect the worst or we ready ourselves to swallow hyperbole and admire. Thematic connections in the juxtaposition of these two different types only set off their incompatibility. In my next section I will be discussing a work in which variety appears in a different medium but to similar effect. Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae, written about 170 AD, and widely read in the Renaissance, consists of twenty books of miscellaneous essays. It calls upon a variety of different disciplines (as we would call them today), juxtaposing, for instance, a philological question with a philosophical conundrum. What can we make of such a work? Interpreting Heterogeneity: Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae We have seen that Gellius’s preface to the Noctes Atticae makes an emphatic claim to variety, and Gellius does not disappoint his reader.108 Let us start with a typical sequence of chapters from Gellius’s Noctes Atticae, 19.11–­13. In the first of these chapters Gellius quotes an epigram attributed to Plato about

188

chapter five

kissing Agathon. This introduces a wordy translation into Latin of the same Greek epigram by an unnamed young friend of Gellius, in which Agathon is replaced by a slave-­boy ( puellum, puerulum). In the next chapter, the sophist Herodes Atticus is challenged by a Stoic that he is grieving too much on the death of a favorite slave (“parum viriliter dolorem ferret ex morte pueri, quem amaverat,”  19.12.2). He answers that it is is neither possible nor desirable to strive for apatheia, the eradication of the emotions which the Stoics call pathē, for these emotions (desire, fear, anger, etc.), though they may be deleterious, are inextricably entwined with a certain energy and liveliness of mind (“vigoribus mentium et alacritatibus, ” 19.12.4), and cannot be eradicated without tearing up the good together with the bad. This is illustrated by a parable about a farmer who destroys his fruitful vines and trees, along with the brambles, in an attempt to make his field pure and clean (“mundus purusque,”  19.12.8). From this we move, in the next chapter, to a philological question. Fronto asks Apollinaris whether the word nanus (dwarf ) is barbarous and should be avoided (“an recte supersederim . . . , ” 19.13.2). Apollinaris replies that, though the word is much used by the uneducated (“inperiti vulgi, ” 19.13.3), it is not barbarous, but is derived from Greek and occurs in Aristophanes. Then another scholar is asked where it is used of mules in Latin, and he comes up with a passage in Helvius Cinna, a poet who is neither undistinguished nor unlearned (“non ignobilis neque indocti poetae, ” 19.13.5). The chapter ends with two lines of Cinna’s poetry. This sequence is certainly varied in its types. To begin with, a literary topic, the comparison of a Latin translation with its Greek original, is introduced without any narrative context, except that the author of the translation is a friend. There follows a philosophical disquisition in the form of a lecture (originally delivered in Greek), as it is remembered by Gellius. Finally, we have a dramatic scene, the record of a discussion among a number of friends about a philological matter. So, three different modes of presentation are combined with three different fields of inquiry, all of them common in Gellius. Thematically, 19.12 and 13 revolve around two kinds of purification, in the ethical field (purification of emotions) and the linguistic field (purification of speech) respectively. In both cases, the good is shown to be mixed up with the bad: you should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Another connection between the group of poems is made by an example of Gellius’s persistent comparison between Latin and Greek, which crops up in 19.11 (the Latin translation of a Greek poem) and returns in 19.13, where the Latin nanus is shown to be derived from Greek; it is also discreetly present in 19.12, where Gellius reports, in Latin, a speech that Herodes made in Greek (“Graeca oratione, ” 19.12.1), of which all agree he was a master (“omnes . . . gravitate

miscellany

189

atque copia et elegantia vocum longe praestitit, ” 19.12.1). The Latin translation of Plato’s elegantly succinct couplet (“venustissimae brevitatis, ” 19.11.1, with a pun on venustus?), quoted in 19.11, goes on for seventeen lines. We might ask ourselves whether the translation would have been better pruned; Gellius comments that it was translated “a trifle extravagantly” (“in plures versus licentius liberiusque vertit, ” 19.11.3). But perhaps to prune it would be to deprive it of its charm as well, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a possibility suggested by the theme of purification raised in 19.12 and 13. Perhaps the clearest connection in this group of chapters is between 19.11 and 12, which both concern philosophers, love, and slaves. In the first, the philosopher Plato is acting the poet, and extravagantly expressing his love for Agathon (who becomes a slave, puellum, in the second line of the Latin translation). The next chapter brings in a philosopher who castigates another’s grief for a beloved slave. So, in consecutive chapters the philosopher-­lover confronts the philosopher who reproves love. More generally, we could say that the question of what can be allowed, introduced perhaps by the word licentius, used of the Latin poet’s extravagant translation of Plato’s epigram in the first of these chapters, plays out in different contexts. The question of whether Herodes should have allowed himself to grieve over a slave boy, raised by the Stoic, produces a critique of apatheia, while the question of whether Fronto is right to refrain from using the word nanus produces a disquisition from Apollinaris on etymology. The themes that connect the little group of chapters that I have assembled are not so much integrated as interwoven, like separate strands that can each be picked out from the texture of the sequence. Or, to look at it another way, the sequence allows different groupings to be made, depending on which strand we pick out. Each chapter will appear in a different light, or even have a different subject, depending on which strand we choose to bring into eminence, and how we choose to pair it. What results is a shimmer, as different strands attract our attention. But this is to take the sequence as continuous, whereas the itemization of the elements in Gellius’s collection lays each at an angle to the other. We must orient ourselves afresh within each chapter, which may require us to shift the character of our intellectual engagement. The diversity of disciplinary orientations and modes of presentation casts different lights on recurring themes. So, the theme of the philosopher in love with a boy looks different in a literary context (19.11) than it does in a philosophical context (19.12), and it it this generic heterogeneity in the Noctes At­ ticae that will be the focus of my reading of Gellius’s variety. Heterogeneity is not quite the same as variety, but it is a concept expressed by words that belong to variety’s semantic field. The Greek word pantodapos

190

chapter five

(of every kind) appears not only in texts such as Plato’s denunciation of the poikilia of democracy (Republic 561e) but also in the title of a number of miscellaneous works, such as Favorinus’s Pantodapē Historia. In Latin, this word cannot be rendered without using the word genus (e.g., omnigenus), which brings the concept of kind to the fore.109 So a number of miscellaneous statements draw attention to the fact that genera have not been separated or that material is collected without consideration of genus. As Gellius puts it in his preface “I used to jot down whatever took my fancy, of any and every kind, without distinction and indiscriminately” (“Ita quae libitum erat, cuius generis cumque erant, indistincte atque promisce annotabam, ” praef. 2). It is no coincidence that the first chapter of Gellius’s first book tells us how Pythagoras calculated Hercules’s superior size when he was among men. This random, inconsequential, and amusing factoid introduces, in a simple and unproblematic way, an issue that will grow more complex as the Noctes At­ ticae progresses: how do you measure one thing in relation to another? Two chapters later in the same book (1.3) the issue has become more complex, because the things to be measured are of a different kind. We are reminded that a great quantity of bronze is more valuable than a small sliver of gold. This point is made in connection with the issue of  how to weigh up utilitas against honestum when the interests of justice and those of friendship conflict. The resolution of these conundrums of comparability within the individual chapters contrasts with more complicated disjunctions between categories and kinds from one chapter to another, as we shall see. We could categorize the chapters of Noctes Atticae according to the five main disciplines on which they draw: grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics and physics, civil and pontifical law.110 Gellius’s juxtapositions take us from one kind of quaestio (intellectual inquiry), with its particular emphases, interests, and procedures, to another with quite different assumptions and interests. This certainly avoids monotony, but it also emphasizes the discontinuities between different kinds of  knowledge. What does the Noctes Atticae make of this miscellanizing of knowledge? We have considered above what this might imply about Gellius’s picture of intellectual life and its value. I want now to consider how it might reflect on the relation between intellectual inquiry and disciplinarity itself. Gellius speaks of the collection’s disparilitas (disparity, praef. 3), which he flags up in his preface as a characteristic of  his book, reflecting the way that he took his reading notes: “It follows that there is in these notes the same disparity that there was in those original jottings” (“Facta igitur est in his quoque commentariis eadem rerum disparilitas, quae fuit in illis annotationibus pristinis, ” praef. 3). The best gloss on disparilitas is Gellius’s statement in Noctes

miscellany

191

Atticae 5.20 that inparilitas was one of the Latin terms for a solecism; a solecism is “an irregular and incongruous joining together of the parts of speech” (“impar atque inconveniens compositura partium orationis, ” 5.20.1).111 Dis­ parilitas is a term that concerns the way items are put together and, above all, the mixing of genera, as Gellius describes it in his preface. As he did not collect his notes systematically, according to categories, in the same way the miscellaneous Noctes Atticae evinces disparilitas. In this connection one might claim zeugma as miscellany’s emblematic figure of speech, for zeugma is conspicuous heterogeneity par excellence (“He took his coat and his leave”). Let us have a look at an implied zeugma in two consecutive chapters of the first book of the Noctes Atticae (1.12–­13), where an antiquarian description of the ritual of coopting a vestal is followed by the philosophical question of whether we should follow orders exactly, or only follow what we take to be their intention or object. The sequence implies a striking and prominent zeugma of the verb capio. Chapter 12 opens with the words “Those who have written about the coopting (taking) of a virgin” (“Qui de virgine capienda scripserunt, ” 1.12.1). It describes the laws and rituals relevant to the coopting of a vestal virgin and explains, among other things, why the word capio is used, and whether it is only used of vestals or also of priests. When the pontifex maximus lays hands on the vestal he utters a formula which ends with the words “te, Amata, capio” (1.12.14). Why is this said? Because the virgin is taken from the parental home like a war captive. When the next chapter (1.13) opens with the words “In officiis capiendis” (“in undertaking obligations”) we may experience a metaphysical shock. Capio is used both of receiving orders and of coopting a vestal, and provides us with the zeugma “he took a virgin and an order. ” So far, so good (the wit of miscellany), but now the interpreter steps up to ask whether this is more than a play on words, for the issue of 1.12 is how active a business it is to “take” an order: should one do everything exactly as ordered, or can one modify the order if to do so would benefit the one giving the order? To put it metaphorically, is taking an order more like taking a blow to the head or like taking (coopting) a vestal? Is the one who takes an order more like the virgin who is coopted as a vestal or like the pontifex who coopts her? We will return to that question later. In these two chapters yoked by a zeugma, Gellius has juxtaposed two different kinds of quaestio, both of which are common in the Noctes Atti­ cae, namely the antiquarian and the philosophical; it is a juxtaposition that is bound to occur once Gellius starts rolling the dice with his limited but various repertoire of subjects. In this case, the zeugma points up the fact that there is a difference between the kinds of things we want to know in the case

192

chapter five

of an antiquarian inquiry into ritual and the kinds of thing we want to know in the case of a philosophical inquiry into what it means to take an order. As the antiquarian investigation of 1.12 progresses, the word capio, repeated ten times, accumulates ritual significance: it is a metaphor that underlies the action of the ritual (the vestal is “taken” from the hand of her parent by the pontifex); it is a ritual term uttered by the pontifex, and it can be extended to other religious cooptations. When it occurs in the first sentence of 1.13 we may wonder whether the word starts again with a clean slate in the new chapter.112 Whether we are to read it as an innocent idiom or as the continuation of a theme is a question posed to the reader by the juxtaposition. If we read it as innocent we are recognizing that ritual has a particular kind of relation to words that philosophy does not. But equally, if we experience the shock of the zeugma implied by this sequence we are recognizing the disparilitas of these different inquiries, antiquarian and philosophical respectively. And yet, heterogeneous as these two kinds of inquiries are, their subjects beg to be compared. A rich discussion could be prompted by the question of whether following an order is, or is not, like following the prescriptions for a ritual. In the case of a ritual, there can be no question of whether the purpose of the ritual might be better served by modifying its specifications: a ritual must be followed exactly, and that is what makes it effective. In the case of officia and mandata there is room for disagreement. A military command is a means of getting something done, and there may be better ways to obey a command than literally, as Gellius points out in the chapter. But perhaps there is something ritualistic about military orders too. Sure enough, Gellius quotes one authority, supporting the case for following orders literally, to the effect that to transgress this rule is to provide an exemplum “which might ruin well-­laid plans by weakening the binding force of a command” (“quo bene consulta consilia religione mandati soluta corrumperentur, ” 1.13.4). If there is to be respect for authority there must be religio, the same attitude that is appropriate to a ritual. In this juxtaposition, the play of like and unlike categories works on several levels, generating both rhetorical zeugma and philosophical reflection. Let me turn to another case of conspicuous disparilitas between two genres of writing: on the one hand poetry and on the other linguistic science. Noctes Atticae 1.24 is another of those chapters which have put us in Gellius’s debt for preserving texts that we would not otherwise know. Here he quotes epitaphic epigrams written respectively by Naevius, Plautus, and Pacuvius, all of them from the early Republican period of Latin literature favored by Gellius and his associates; these epitaphs, he tells us, are worthy of recording for their nobilitas and venustas (“distinction and charm, ” 1.24.1). In the

miscellany

193

next chapter we turn from literature to linguistics. Here Varro’s definition of indutiae (truce, armistice) as “military peace of a few days” (“pax castrensis paucorum dierum, ” 1.25.1) or “a holiday from war” (belli feriae) is described by Gellius as “more charming (lepida) and pleasing in its brevity (iucundae brevitatis) than clear and robust ( plana aut proba), ” (1.25.3). The theme of attractive style serves not so much to link these two chapters as to differentiate heterogeneous kinds of writing, which belong to different worlds. Of course, an epitaphic epigram and a definition do have something in common: they both summarize succinctly; but the criteria of a good epitaph and a good definition diverge. The epitaphs are praised by Gellius for a conjunction of moral and stylistic qualities (“nobilitatis eorum gratia et venustatis, ” 1.24.1; “verecundissimum et purissimum dignumque eius elegantissima gravitate, ” 1.24.4), but this is turned into a disjunction in the following chapter, where charm and brevity (“lepidae et iucundae brevitatis”) are contrasted with upright straightforwardness (“plana aut proba”). So the criteria of excellence in these two disciplines conflict with each other. In this case, the conspicuous disparilitas of Gellius’s mixing draws our attention to the experience of the reader of the Noctes Atticae, who is required to shift the character of his or her orientation to language and its excellences from one chapter to another.113 Let us take a more radical case of conspicuous disparilitas, more radical because the discontinuity opens up within a single word and between two consecutive chapters, which, unusually, deal with the same topic (a throw of the dice may in fact produce continuity). Again, we are concerned with the relation between philosophy and style. In 2.8 and 2.9 Gellius deals with two cases where Plutarch, in the same book, criticized the writing of  Epicurus for irregularities of form. Quite a few of Gellius’s chapters defend a canonical au­thor from the carping of ignorant nitpickers, and both of these chapters belong to that category. Gellius tells us that in the second book of his De Homero Plutarch shows how Epicurus’s famous syllogism concluding that death is nothing to us is incomplete. Any fool can see that, replies Gellius, and surely it did not escape Epicurus’s notice. Epicurus simply left out what was obvious (2.8.6–­8). Why should he be held to the forms that a schoolboy must observe? In the final sentence of the chapter, the example of Plato, who was similarly indifferent to niggling correctness, is adduced: “In Plato, too, you will often find syllogisms in which the order prescribed in schools is disregarded and inverted, with a kind of graceful disdain of criticism” (“cum eleganti quadam reprehensionis contemptione, ” 2.8.9). In the next chapter we are still with Plutarch who, in the same book, criticizes Epicurus for an imprecise use of language: Gellius hammers home the continuity at the beginning of the chapter (“in the same book the same Plutarch criticizes the

194

chapter five

same Epicurus, ” 2.9.1), but the last sentence of this brief chapter introduces a striking asymmetry with the previous chapter, for Gellius vindicates Epicurus against Plutarch’s “word hunting” as follows: “far from hunting up such verbal meticulousness and such refinements (elegantias) of diction, Epicurus hunts them down” (2.9.5).114 It is a mark of Plato’s status that he has contempt for insignificant details, and the same goes for Epicurus, but Plato’s contempt is itself elegans, while Epicurus is contemptuous of elegantia. What, then, happens to the value of elegantia? And to which register does it belong, the stylistic or the ethical?115 Should we try to reconcile these two uses of the same word, as, for instance, a distinction between the ethos of the two philosophers (Epicurus’s sublimity trumps Plato’s)? Perhaps Plato’s sublime transcendence of the niggling demands of “correct” forms is really a matter of style, or at any rate, when we appeal to Plato’s transcendence our values are not what they appear to be. Or should we simply allow the word elegans/elegantia to shimmer in the different light of its two different contexts and not seek to reconcile this discontinuity? Miscellany, in this case, is the juxtaposition of disparate genera or registers to create an effect like that of a meadow, the colors of whose flowers, to take a common metaphor of miscellanists, do not blend into each other but enhance the poikilia of the whole by maintaining their individuality. Another way to look at the juxtaposition of these two chapters would be to consider what Gellius has done to Plutarch. As Andrew Stevenson points out, it is not uncommon for Gellius to use the same text for different purposes in different chapters or books: “Gellius is a prime example [of antiquarian method]: he can dismember a continuous account to provide information on various odds and ends” (Stevenson 2005, 137). While this is not quite what Gellius has done to Plutarch’s essay on Homer, Stevenson’s formulation invites us to think of the ways in which Gellius has miscellanized Plutarch’s essay, making something jagged out of a simple case of two examples of the same thing. My final example of conspicuous disparilitas between consecutive chapters has to do with philosophy and rhetoric, those old antagonists, here pretending to pass each other like strangers in the night (NA 12.11 and 12). In the first (12.11), a philosopher discourses on virtue. The wise man commits no sin, even if men and gods will be ignorant of  his transgression. But lesser mortals will be more inclined to sin if they think they can hide their transgression; if they knew that nothing can be hidden for long they would control themselves. The philosopher cites a passage from Sophocles to bring the chapter to an end, as so often, on a quotation: “time which sees and hears all things brings everything to light. ” The next chapter begins as though it were continuing a

miscellany

195

discussion, but not from the previous chapter: “This too is part of a rhetorical training (Haec quoque disciplina rhetorica est), cunningly and cleverly to admit charges not attended with danger, so that if something base is cast in your face which cannot be denied, you may turn it off  by a jocular reply, making the thing deserving of  laughter rather than censure. ” An example is given from Cicero, caught in a lie, but sidestepping criticism with an elegant joke. The prominent appearance of the words philosophum and rhetorica in the first sentence of the respective chapters emphasizes the fact that we are dealing with two quite separate realms of activity. The moral worlds of these two disciplines are not only different but incompatible: it may be that all transgressions will eventually be revealed, as the philosopher tells us, but rhetoric deals quite efficiently with just such a possibility. Rhetoric is adequate to the demands of any situation, which constitute its starting point (“Given that I’ve been caught in a lie, what should I say?”). But Gellius not only fails to make a connection between the two chapters, so stridently opposed to each other, he conspicuously fails to make it. By beginning the second chapter with the words haec quoque, he gestures toward a continuity—­not, as it turns out, with what we have just read, but with other discussions of rhetoric. Philosophy and rhetoric situate us in our world in incompatible ways, but the reader of the Noctes Atticae is required to appreciate their different excellences in quick succession. In works such as Gellius’s Noctes Atticae where it is genre, or literary kind more broadly, that is the medium of variety, the varied sequence requires a continual reorientation of expectations, satisfactions, pleasures, and assumptions. As we have seen, this may be flagged by the projection of a single theme onto different generic screens. Insofar as miscellany is a form of unity, not a lack of it, the varied collection projects an idea of totality that is neither additive, nor architectonic, nor hierarchical, but rather combinatorial. World is the potential for different encounters within, or configurations of, a repertoire. These confrontations set off the differences between the members of the generic repertoire with respect to a range of topics, each casting its own light on the generic difference.

Conclusion

“Interpreting miscellany” is the final prong of my assault on variety, my final line of approach to the problem of saying something about this most elusive of concepts. As I have indicated, variety is both a conceptual and a critical problem. The last two chapters have been more concerned with this critical problem (what can a literary critic do with this category?), while the earlier chapters explored variety as a concept and a value. As a concept, variety tends to blur in front of us; it’s there, but one can’t quite focus on it, and it doesn’t help to continue staring at it. Loss, or rather diffusion, of focus is intrinsic to the concept, and so is a lack of depth. But perhaps we need a culinary, rather than a visual, metaphor for this difficulty: some might say that variety is a bland concept, that it has a meaning, but not a very interesting meaning. Like “broad,” for instance, variety is too basic, too obvious a category. In response I would say that it is (almost) always valu­ able to reflect on what is too obvious to be worth thinking about. In many cases these concepts can be excavated to a point where they take on a charac­ ter and specificity of usage that help us to understand the work they do. One of the reasons why variety is difficult to bring into focus is that it tends to be absorbed into some of the overarching topics in which it plays a supporting role. Each of the individual conceptual areas within which I situ­ ated it in chapter 2 (nature, rhetoric, aesthetics, pleasure, politics, theology) has its own field of discourse, which I have only skimmed. The call for art to follow nature, for instance, is a vast topic, with a long and eventful history, but the identification of variety as one of the respects in which art is to be related to nature has its own particular dynamic because of the associations cluster­ ing around the Latin varietas. For instance, Pliny’s disapproval of those who luxuriate in the maculae (blemishes) of marble and Plato’s attacks on poikilia

conclusion

197

both together give force and specificity to Joshua Reynolds’s view that artists must look past nature’s “blemishes” when imitating it. Another topic skirted by my study is the aesthetic concept of concordia discors, the lively, tense kind of unity that has been a constant desideratum in western aesthetics. Is the aesthetic principle of varietas not just a version of this? The crucial differ­ ence, of course, is that no one has promoted the value of discordia on its own, whereas varietas has often been valued without reference to some balancing complement, as I have abundantly shown. My excavation of variety has taken us to the bedrock of a word, a Latin word that trails some of its associations into modern usage. These associa­ tions include a semantic field, along with its metaphors, topoi, oppositions, and controversies; the word allows these to be bundled together, transferred from one discourse to another and trailed through history. While varietas is a Latin word, contributing to its range of meanings are two Greek words, the more specific poikilia and the broader metabolē. These, roughly speaking, correspond respectively to the celebratory and the corrective wings of the discourse of variety, and between them these two wings carry a rich discus­ sion about the relations between humans, nature, and God; about the char­ acter and limitations of pleasure; about the nature of a satisfying aesthetic, or even political, whole. The natural tendency of human attentivenes is to­ ward boredom, from which we must be recalled by a corrective variety; but, on the other hand, nature positively rejoices in variety, as does God, and sim­ ilarly the creative artist. Variety oscillates between being parasitic (on bore­ dom) and creative. To which of these factors, human boredom or divine cre­ ativity, should we attribute the fact that the world is various? This is hardly a problem for the modern atheist, of course, but the related issue of whether a distracted form of attention can acquire the same intensity of engagement as a deep and continuous focus, most definitely is a modern issue. What of variety today? The complex I described in the first part of this book has largely dispersed, as is shown by the unfamiliar feel of the use of “various” and “variety” in the passages from English poetry that I quoted to­ ward the beginning of this book. But the concept of variety and its history must remain of interest to a culture that places such value on choice and di­ versity; to a culture in which attention is distracted (and I don’t necessarily mean this in a negative sense), and which rewards the multitasker; a culture whose aesthetic values eclecticism, and surface rather than depth. I hope to have shown that the complex I have described carries with it a reflection, a continuing debate, that is sufficiently rich to have staying power, and suffi­ ciently latent to waken cultural memory in fruitful ways. In contrast to a dominant strain of reception studies, I have focused on

198

conclusion

the conservatism (with a small c) of the varietas complex. Ideas are not al­ ways contemporary with those who express them, nor infinitely malleable to the uses and circumstances of those who wield them at any particular time. If there are good reasons why concepts like the classical “tradition” or “heri­ tage” have been jettisoned in the interests of a more active term like “recep­ tion,” there are also fruitful lines of inquiry that have been closed off as a result. So, against the mantra “Meaning is constituted at the point of recep­ tion” I would posit “Meaning inheres in the tools that are available.” Of course, the current mantra does tell a partial truth, but it is only a partial truth, like my alternative. Each formulation suggests a different avenue of research. If chapter 2 observes variety in action within a number of specific topical areas, chapter 3 looks at the strategic role it plays in the work of certain authors. This tells us not only about the potential uses of the concept but also about the characteristic concerns of the particular author. In Pliny the Younger va­ riety performs a strategic role in the process of his self-­construction. Where the loci of value and honor are uncertain, and Pliny is undecided about where to find his center of gravity, variety comes to the rescue. Variety is a second-­ best, a fall-­back, which wards off anxieties about what Pliny amounts to by switching to another dimension. One could say that variety performs a simi­ lar function for the Epicureans, acting as a compensation for the limits of Epicurean pleasure, which reaches a point where it cannot be increased, but can only be varied. By switching tracks, pleasure finds somewhere to go when it reaches its limit. In Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, variety is an issue at all levels of the Epicurean universe. It is a fundamental aspect of nature’s gen­ erosity, which we must be mentally free to enjoy; but how can this various world which we see have been generated from the colorless atoms, whose only qualities are weight, size, and shape? As Lucretius points out, this won­ drous transformation is mirrored in his text itself, as a restricted repertoire of elements (letters, sounds, prefixes, etc.) generates a huge variety of meanings. In the case of my third author, Horace, variety and its semantic field point us toward an underlying counterstrain to Horace’s avowed poetics. The sweep­ ing gesture of recusatio with which Odes 4.2 opens (“Whoever aspires to rival Pindar, Iullus . . .”), resolves into a sparkling close-­up, replete with words from the varietas-­complex (“relies on feathers stuck with wax, Daedalus-­fashion, soon to give his name to a glittering sea”). This very Horatian effect diverts us from the broad enunciatory gesture to the teeming detail beneath it, and in Horace’s case varietas may assert itself against the grain of an explicit aesthetic that prioritises unity, inviting us to descry a texture that is prodigialiter unus. For the last two chapters we turned from the concept of variety to the phenomenon itself, and put it into play in the context of genre. To the toolkit

conclusion

199

of variety that I described in the earlier chapters (synonyms, antonyms, meta­ phors, topoi, etc.) one might add some practical, formal elements. One of these would be the list or, more specifically, the priamel, both of which are forms through which literature addresses variety. In chapter 4  I examined the use of these devices in different poetic genres in order to reveal an implicit conversation about variety through genre. Any poetic genre can be put to the question “How does its subject confront variety?” In satire, the conflict be­ tween the aesthetic and the ethical aspects of the genre plays itself out in particularly revealing ways with respect to variety, and the wonder induced by variety in the panegyrical Statius is made more vivid by the disgust it induces in the philosopher. But, as in the case of the different discourses I discussed in chapter 2, genres both distinguish themselves through their re­ sponse to variety and overlap with each other in sharing common problemat­ ics. The tendencty of the list to engulf the listing agent as well, for instance, makes itself felt in a number of different genres. And while we can identify the process by which a wonderful variety reverts to sameness as a feature which is at home in satire, it is a tendency that haunts the lyric priamel of Horace’s first ode (c. 1.1) as well. Within a particular genre, variety may serve to mark a significant parameter: consider how the list serves to distinguish the desiring subjectivities of Propertius and Ovid, for instance. My final chapter is also concerned with genre, or more precisely with a literary form that uses variety to locate itself outside the generic grid. The mis­ cellany is quintessentially varied; variety, in fact, is constitutive of the miscel­ lany. Again we confront the problem that miscellany seems too capacious a concept, and too various a form, for one to be able to say much about it. To what extent can it be considered a self-­conscious literary form with its own poetics, and what accounts for the value it assigns to variety? The evidence of titles, prefaces, and metaliterary moments suggests that we can identify ele­ ments of a common poetics of miscellany. The very name of the miscellany (dating back no further than Poliziano, but leaning on some some ancient terms and metaphors) raises the question of how the elements of miscel­ lany relate. Heterogeneous elements may have been “mixed” together, but in what sense can they be said to mix? We saw that Martial puts pressure on this metaphor in connection specifically with his poetic miscellany. This is­ sue of mixing (or not) plays out on a broader canvas if we consider that the miscellany is not just a literary work, but also a nodal point in the recipro­ cal and cyclical relations between reading and writing, for the writing of the miscellanists draws attention both to their own reading and to ours. How should we process the various texts that we read, both as miscellanists and as readers of miscellanies? The bee metaphor, as interpreted by Seneca, and the

200

conclusion

mosaic metaphor deriving from Lucilius, point in different directions: on the one hand to the homogenization that produces the honeycomb, and on the other to the imperfectly assimilated tesserae that retain their integrity as bits sourced from a variety of alien texts. Looked at from the other end, so to speak, miscellanies not only use va­ riety, they also produce it. The burden of my discussion of Gellius’s Noctes Atticae was to show how the same theme or value is made to look quite dif­ ferent depending on the disciplinary context in which it appears. To return to the concerns of my introduction, one could imagine a modern Gellius juxta­ posing a chapter that inveighs against the diffusion of attention encouraged by the diverse distractions of modern electronic media with a chapter dis­ cussing the politics of diversity, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of a multicultural ideal. The same words (and among them some belonging to the variety complex) might be radically changed in value by the difference of context. Throughout this book it is the Roman context and the Latin language that have been the basis for my exploration of the English word variety. My in­ terest was initially woken by the discrepancy between the weak and vague use of the word various in contemporary parlance and the more robust feel of its Latin ancestor. I found that this more robust usage persisted well into the modern period, offering an opportunity to “excavate” the buried mean­ ings of this important word. That it should be a Latin word is not as surprising as it might at first seem. Admittedly, the common image of  Roman culture is not friendly to the notion of variety: centurions marching in orderly rows; marble columns; white togas; theaters, baths, and amphitheaters built to the same specifications all over the empire—­such are the images that ancient Rome first brings to to mind. But one only has to consider the nature of the Latin literary language itself, with its “mosaic” word order, in which indi­ vidual words are separated and set off against each other, to see how the aes­ thetics of variety might have been congenial to the Romans. To take another example from an area that I have left untouched, Roman gardens and wall-­ painting were both crucial to the aesthetic of the elite Roman environment, and they put a high premium on variety. The paintings in Livia’s Garden Room at Prima Porta (see cover image), running along all four walls, im­ merse the spectator in an environment of which varietas is the chief charac­ teristic. Fred Jones (2013, 1005) describes them as follows: We are struck by the alternation of strong uprights and hatching, of fore­ ground and background. The repeated sprinkling of fruits, flowers, and birds that are similar but not the same provides a constant harmonious variatio.

conclusion

201

The verticals interwoven with the areas of hatching, to add subtlety, are not pure verticals. The trees lean, sway, and feather in the breeze; their mutually distinguished varieties of leaf types are another level of contrapuntal inter­ est. The colour scheme picks out the bright highlights of fruits and flowers against the masses of green, and varies them with the wide range of colours and intensities involved in the painting of the birds. The green itself is not monochrome, but comes in architectural masses and is also variegated by the subtle foregrounding of individual leaves because of proximity or the angle of incidence of the light.

The aesthetics of varietas could hardly be more eloquently described. In this same, Roman context, it is appropriate that the genre which Quintilian claimed was “all ours” (satire) is the genre of variety. Its central theme is the city of Rome itself in all its diversity of vice, ethnic types, locales, sights, and smells. The Roman army, with its auxiliary units featuring the distinctive ar­ mor and weaponry of various ethnic groups, was a much less homogeneous sight than Hollywood gives us to suppose. In the arena, the Roman spectator appreciated the asymmetrical pairing of one type of gladiator with another. The Roman privileging of an aesthetics of variety in rhetoric, poetry, and the visual arts extends, as we have seen, to notions of empire, and should chal­ lenge our mental image of the Roman empire as an engine of uniformity (as Michel Butor, for instance, saw it; p. 77 above). I leave the last word to the god who claims, in Propertius 4.2, to be responsible for the variegation of the grapes in autumn (“prima mihi variat liventibus uva racemis,” 4.2.13), the god who sports many forms in one body (“tot in uno corpore formas,” 4.2.1). Vertumnus (“the turner”) tells us that his origins are Etruscan, but that he de­ serted his native hearth for Rome because, in his words, “I like this lot” (“haec me turba iuvat,” 4.2.5).

Notes

Introduction 1. McDaniel 2005. 2. A word on varius in German. As the discipline of aesthetics develops, from the middle of the eighteenth century, varietas comes to be translated as Mannigfaltigkeit, rather than through the loanword Varietät, which was in use in the seventeenth century. But Verschiedenheit is also used, as, for instance, in Albrecht von Haller, Über den Ursprung des Übels, book 2, 189 (1734): Das Glück der Sterblichen will die Verschiedenheit. See Weber 1986, 11. 3. A mantra articulated in its most influential form by Martindale (1993, 3), where it merits italics. 4. See Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow 2014, 11–­13, for a spirited defense of the viability of the term “Classical Tradition” as against “Reception. ” Particularly relevant to my project are the words on language on p. 13. 5. On the fortunes of “ornament” in aesthetic discourse, see Schor 1987. 6. Cited by Heath 1989, 28, n.1. 7. Abrams 1953, 168–­77; see also the stimulating discussion of the word “organic” in Williams 1985, 227–­29. 8. Nünlist 2009, 201: “Poikilia [variety] is, to repeat, a cornerstone of ancient literary criticism that is applied in many forms and contexts. As an interpretive principle, it became particularly important in the Hellenistic period. . . . To put it bluntly, poikilia is a fundamental principle for poetry in general. ” Few ancient poets have set so much store by variety (or poikilia) as Pindar (O. 1.29, for instance), and yet it is the unity of the Pindaric ode that has engaged the attention of scholars far more than its poikilia. Chapter One 1. John Norris, “The Prospect, ” in A Collection (1706), 97 (quoted in Lovejoy 1960, 95). 2. In fact, “various” and “variety” are among Pope’s favorite words. His Eloisa, reading Abelard’s account of his tribulations, is “led through a sad variety of woe” (“Eloisa to Abelard, ” 36), a particularly striking usage in view of the usual associations between variety and joy. A usage striking for different reasons is the following from Pope’s translation of Odyssey, book 6:

204

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 – 1 9 Forth from her hand Nausicaa threw The various ball, the ball erroneous flew.

Here, perhaps (with no prompt from Homer!), Pope plays on the assocation between “various” (varius) and changeability/unreliability, brought out by “erroneous. ” 3. See Lewalski 2000, 459 on the association with the restoration of English liberty from the bondage of Stuart tyranny. 4. A little earlier, but even more striking, is Robert Graves’s “Pygmalion to Galatea” (1926): As you are constant, so be various: Love comes to sloth without variety. Within the limit of our fair-­paved garden Let fancy like a Proteus range and change. So be various. As you are various, so be woman . . . 5. Gaudet varietate (see pp. 33–36). Compare William Cowper’s “the gay diversities of  leaf and flower” in The Task, book 3, line 590. 6. There are entries in Isidore at Etymologiae 10.277 (“varius, quasi non unius viae sed incertae mixtaeque sententiae”), and 12.6.6. 7. “Ubi uva varia fieri coepit, ” Cato, De Agricultura, 33.4. Compare Columella, De Arboribus 12.1; also Horace, c. 2.5.11 (discussed below, p. 00), Juvenal, Sat. 2.81, Propertius 4.2.13 (“Prima mihi variat liventibus uva racemis”), and the proverb “uva uvam videndo varia fit” (Otto 1890, s.v. uva). 8. Varro, De Re Rustica 2.2.4, 2.4.3, and De Lingua Latina 5.100; Culex 164. 9. Trinquier (2006, 242) points out that varius can qualify any surface whose unity is broken by an element of differentiation: the hide of an animal, the sea dotted with islands or the sky inset with stars. He compares it to the word distinctus, on which more below. 10. Coleman 2006, 247, apropos Martial, Spec. 33.2 (“varia arte”) notes that varius with a singular substantive sometimes means “many different kinds, ” comparing Propertius 3.24.5 (“mix­ tam te varia laudavi saepe figura”) and Ovid, Met. 10.375 (“sic animus vario labefactus vulnere nutat”). 11. Compare also Apuleius, “Pro circumversione oris discoloris multiiuga pollens speciem sui variat” (De deo Socratis 1.7). 12. See Trinquier 2006, 241, citing Columella De Re Rustica 3.21.3 and 10.1.1; cf. also Ovid, Fasti 5.356–­58. 13. It is significant that the German term for literary miscellanies is Buntschriftstellerei, reflecting the importance of variety for this literary type. 14. One of the most important of the positive uses will be studied in more detail in the section on rhetoric in chapter 2. But here it can be said that varietas, referring to change of style is a crucial principle of Roman rhetoric, often coupled with that other desideratum of effective oratory, copia, and warding off its potential concomitant, satietas. 15. Cicero, De Or. 2.34.145 and 147; Ovid, Met. 12.465; Celsus, De Med. 2.1; Columella, De Re Rustica 11.2.1. 16. “Fortunae solent mutare, varia vita est, ” Plautus, Truc. 219; “vario certamine pugnatum est,”  Caesar, Bellum Civile 1.46.4; war waged “variante fortuna, ” Livy 23.5.8. 17. Ovid, Met. 15.648 (“sententia dissidet et variat”); Livy 2.57.2 (“ubi cum timore atque ira in

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 9 – 2 2

205

vicem sententias variassent”); Livy 27.2 (“fama variat”), 28.57 (“haec de tanto viro, quamquam et opinionibus et monumentis litterarum variant, proponenda erant”). 18. In the Pseudo-­Aristotelian Physiognomica 908b36 the panther is the woman’s emblem beause it is poikilos like her. 19. For the combination varius et multiplex, see Cicero, Flac. 6; Or. 12 and 106. For multiplex, cf. Cicero, De Amicitia 65 (“neque enim fidum potest esse multiplex ingenium et tortuosum”). 20. “Hanc vos, pontifices, tantam, tam variam, tam novam in omni genere voluntatem, impudentiam, audaciam, cupiditatem comprobabitis?” (De Domo Sua 116). 21. Cf. “Varius in omni genere vitae fuit: nam ut virtutibus eluxit, sic vitiis est obrutus” (Nepos, Paus. 1.1). 22. See Buxton 1981, 172, on the association of poikilia with dolos in this passage. 23. I owe this observation to Professor Richard Hunter. 24. Vernant and Detienne (1991, 18–­20) discuss the relation between mētis and poikilos: “Shimmering sheen and shifting movement are so much part of the nature of mētis that when the epithet poikilos is applied to an individual it is enough to indicate that he is a wily one ( poikiloboulos)” (19). LeVen’s “Colours of Sound” (2013) is a very stimulating discussion of the relation between musical and visual senses of poikilia, which she sees as a word that is not “at home” in either spheres, but rather conveys a rapt pleasure in the experience of the beauty of the object through all the senses. After the classical period, though, in connection with the New Music, it conveys a more ideological than sensual meaning. 25. Bader (1987) traces poikilos back to Indo-­European roots meaning “to use a pointed instrument to make an incision” (60). 26. See Neer 2002, 15–­17, with his bibliography. 27. Frontisi-­Ducroux 1975, 71. 28. “Daedalam a varietate rerum artificiorumque dictam esse apud Lucretium terram, apud Ennium Minervam, apud Vergilium [A.7.282] Circen, facile est intellegere, cum Graeci daidallein significant variare. ” 29. See Guest 2007, 38–­39, on the entries in Stephanus. 30. Poikilia is also an important word in ancient musical discourse, particularly in connection with the New Musicians (Timotheus and Philoxenus). See LeVen 2014, 101–­4. 31. Nünlist 2009, 198–­201. 32. For other conjunctions of metabolē with poikilos, see Dionysius of  Halicarnassus, Pomp. 3, and Longinus, De Sub. 23.1. 33. For poikilos = varius, cf. Goetz 1901, 394, s.v. vario. Fantham (1973, 170) points out that Cicero’s persistent association of colores with variare reflects the attempt to translate Greek poikilia. 34. May and Wisse suggest that the metaphor is drawn from street decoration; cf. Mankin 2011, 185–­86. Compare ad Her. 4.11.16: “Quae [exornationes] si rarae disponentur, distinctam sicuti coloribus, si crebrae conlocabuntur, obliquam reddunt orationem. ” 35. “Nihil minus quaesitum a principio huius operis videri potest quam ut plus iusto ab rerum ordine declinarem varietatibusque distinguendo opere et legentibus velut deverticula amoena et requiem animo meo quaererem, tamen . . . ” 36. “Pictoris cuiusdam summi ratione et modo formarum varietate locos distinguentis” (358), and “sed verborum memoria, quae minus est nobis necessaria, maiore imaginum varietate distinguitur” (359). Compare also Donatus, Ars Maior 3.5.398: “Polyptoton est multitudo casuum varietate distincta ut litora litoribus contraria. ”

206

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 2 – 2 8

37. “Sparsae tot per vastum insulae, quae interventu suo maria distinguunt, ” Seneca, Consolatio ad Marciam 6.18.5; “quae [stellae] noctem decore vario distinguunt, ” Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones 7.24.3; “quorum omnium [herbis arboribus frugibus] incredibilis multitudo insatiabili varietate [terra] distinguitur, ” Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 2.98. Also relevant is Columella, De Re Rustica 10.96: “varios, terrestria sidera, flores. ” Trinquier (2006, 225) notes the connection between literary descriptions of spring fields or autumn landscapes and Roman garden paintings, insofar as they dot the green of the vegetation with color to produce varietas. 38. Compare “qua ratione ductus graviora opera lusibus iocisque distinguo, ” Pliny, Epist. 8.21.2. 39. Statius, Silvae 1.5.24–­25: “vix locus Eurotae, viridis cum regula longo / Synnada distinctu variat”; Silvae 2.2.88–­89: “ubi marmore picto / candida purpureo distinguitur area gyro”; also Pliny, NH 37.194. 40. “Aurave distinctos educit verna colores” (Catullus, c. 64.90). Thomson (1998 ad loc.) notes: “distinctos, an adjective usually applied to the earth as being ‘picked out’ by flowers, ” citing Ovid, Met. 5.266 and Culex 70–­7 1. It is curious that later in the same poem Catullus has Chiron bring unsophisticated wreaths, described as indistinctis (64.283, though Manuscript G has in distinctis). 41. Trinquier (2006, 246–­47) claims that here varius denotes not polychromy but the change of color in the grapes. 42. Oliensis (2002, 98) adds dilecta (dis-­lecta) to the list of words compounded with dis-­. Her excellent discussion of this ode (2002, 95–­100) draws out the wider implications for Horace’s lyric of this poem’s focus on variegation. 43. Another example of this play on varius is Petronius, Satyrica 45.1. “ ‘modo sic, modo sic’ inquit rusticus; varium porcum perdiderat, ” where varius applies to the striped pig that the farmer has lost, but is also appropriate to the farmer’s “checkered” fortune (modo sic, modo sic). This is noted by Sedgwick (1950, ad loc.). 44. Cf. Plautus, Mil. 216; Poen. 26; Ps. 145. In the Atellan fragments of  L. Pomponious Bonon­ iensis we find the phrase tergum varium (fr. 135 Frassinetti 1967 = Ribbeck 135). 45. Ps. 145–­47: “ita ego vostra latera faciam ut valide varia sint, ut nec perstromata quidem aeque picta sint Campanica / neque Alexandrina beluata tonsilia tappetia. ” 46. Variatio in this sense (variation in the grammatical form or word order with which two or more parallel thoughts are expressed) is not an ancient usage. 47. Laird (1993, 26) sees metaliterary comment in variata figuris (50) and decorata figuris (265): Catullus is playing on the language common to rhetoric and the visual arts. In rhetorical texts, as Laird notes, variare is often joined with figurae. Faber (1998) shows that variare here relies on a memory of the Greek poikillein (and cognates), often used to mark an ekphrasis in texts to which Catullus is here alluding. 48. When Shakespeare’s Maecenas declares that Antony must leave Cleopatra utterly, Enobarbus replies “Never, he will not; / Age cannot wither her nor custom stale / Her infinite variety” (Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 2, 233–­35). Cleopatra “makes hungry where most she satisfies” (236–­37), a paradoxical play on the ancient rhetorical principle that varietas prevents satietas. As we shall see, the collocation of “infinite” with “variety” will become common. 49. Seneca too attributes varietas to the rainbow (QNat 1.3 and also 1.4.2: “ingens enim variumque corpus intra momentum subtexitur caelo et aeque celeriter aboletur”). Bradley (2009, 39) comments “Variegation—­discolor or varietas—­is a recurring label for the rainbow in Sene­ ca’s account, and it is the phenomenon of this shift, this flux in colour which attracts Seneca’s

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 8 – 3 4

207

attention. ” Bradley overstates the distinction between varius and diversus, when he says of this passage, “Here too varius refers not to ‘varied’ (this is normally rendered in Latin by diversus), but ‘varying’—­the rainbow is a fluctuating and difficult medium for perception” (47). It is perhaps no coincidence that at another notable appearance of Iris in the Aeneid the word varius appears in the previous line, though not applied to Iris (Aen. 5.605–­6: “dum variis tumulo referunt sollemnia ludis, / Irim de caelo misit Saturnia Iuno”). 50. Vergil’s Iris will become a figure for poetry itself in Girolamo Vida’s De Arte Poetica of 1527, where the “vis daedala fandi” appears “mille trahens varia secum ratione colores” (3.23–­25). 51. With respect to Vergil’s use of varius to express confusion, Johnson cites Aen. 4.564; 8.21; 12.486, 665, 914–­15. 52. “Naturalia bona propria custodia servata varietates verborum non desiderent . . . et quia adquirere novas laudes mulieri sit arduom quom minoribus varietatibus vita iactatur. ” Here iactatur reminds us that varietas can mean “changeableness. ” Chapter Two 1. See the comments of Robbins 1993, 33, and 131–­32. 2. See, for instance, Carruthers 2009 and Bradley 2009, 125–­27. 3. Guest 2007, 18: “Varietas is proclaimed as the great virtue, at once aesthetic unity and modality of ordering in Humanist literature, yet description of it can be disconcertingly wide. ” Also Couzinet 2001, 105. 4. On Leibniz and variety, see Rescher 1979, 31–­33, and Rutherford 1995, 200, citing Leibniz 1923–­, 4.554. 5. Nicolson 1959, 137–­40, shows that Croft was anticipated by Henry More in 1660. 6. Poliziano is alluding here to Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, praef. 3. Compare Jean Henri Samuel Formey, “Essay on the Scale of Being, ” in Mélanges Philosophiques (1754): “Nature diversifies its art in as many ways as possible, ” quoted by Lovejoy 1960, 294. 7. Erasmus’s De duplici copia verborum ac rerum was first published in Paris in 1512. It appeared in at least three revised and enlarged editions during the author’s life. By 1600 there had been over 160 editions. It was widely read across Europe until well into the eighteenth century. One of the best-­known features of De Copia is an exercise in which Erasmus describes ninety-­ five ways of saying “Your letter pleased me mightily”! For more on the significance of De Copia, see Javitch 2005 and Cave 1979. 8. Nature “s’esjouit de varieté ( jouxte le dit commun). ” Quoted in Couzinet 2001, 107. Pliny HN 3.40, the Campanian shore is “felix . . . ac beata amoenitas . . . gaudentis opus . . . naturae. ” 9. On the Spanish reception of this phrase (often misquoted as per troppo variar natura e bella), see Gerbi (1975, 268–­72). The whole sonnet runs: Io pur travaglio, e so che’l tempo gioco, Che se alcun tenta o vive oggi beato Non e viltà, non e virtù, ma fato Che contra ’l ciel nostro operar val poco. Nascon due legni in un medesmo loco E de l’un fassi in Dio vago ed ornato Ch’ognun l’adora, e l’altro e so dicato Ad esser forche, o destinato a foco.

208

n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 4 – 3 9 Cosi va il mondo, ognun segue sua stella, Ciascun e in terra a qualche fin produtto E per tal variar natura e bella. Chi sparge il seme, e chi raccoglie il frutto, E cosi va persin che giunge quella Che con l’adunca falce adegua il tutto.

There is an interesting allusion to Horace, Satires 1.8.1–­3 in lines 5–­8 of this sonnet. 10. Cited in Hodgen 1964, 209. Strabo (Geography 17.1.36) calls providence (pronoia) a poikiltria, producing animals that differ from each other in the extreme. 11. A similar usage is Horace’s “gaudentem patrios findere sarculo / agros” (c. 1.11–­12). 12. “Vel alienissimus rusticae vitae, si in agrum tempestive veniat, summa cum voluptate naturae benignitatem miretur, cum istinc . . . hinc. . . . illinc . . . velut aeterno quodam puerperio laeta mortalibus distenta musto demittit ubera, inter quae, patre favente Libero, fetis palmitibus vel generis albi vel flaventis ac rutili vel purpureo nitore micantis, undique versicoloribus pomis gravidus conlucet Autumnus. ” On this passage, see Trinquier 2006, 247–­49. 13. See Deichgräber 1954 on natura varie ludens. 14. “Varietas is one of nature’s most important attributes in Pliny” (Beagon 1992, 89). 15. Though Finden (1990, 298) shows that in the Renaissance nature’s play with variety was sometimes thought to mitigate the weariness brought on by her more repetitive tasks. 16. As Beagon (1992, 79) comments, “It comes as something of a shock to turn from Pliny’s strictures on luxury to the extravagant language of HN 21.1.”  17. Georgics 1.441 “[sol] ubi nascentem maculis variaverit ortum, ” with Thomas 1988, 142. In a different context Fronto refers to coinage as “polluta et contaminata et varia et maculosa maculosioraque quam nutricis pallium” (de Orationibus 18). 18. Strabo, Geog. 9.5.16 on Scyrian marble, prestigious for its poikilia. On macula, see Maugan-­Chemin 2006, 106–­8. 19. “Neronis [principatu] vero maculas, quae non essent in crustis, inserendo unitatem variare, ut ovatus esset Numidicus, et purpura distinguetur Synnadicus, qualiter illos nasci optassent deliciae. ” 20. Compare Statius, “marmora sola cavo Phrygie quae Synnados antro / ipse cruentavit maculis lucentibus Attis” (Silvae 1.5.37–­38). Seneca uses the word of marble in a similarly bloody context, Thyestes 647: “[trabes] variis columnae nobiles maculis ferunt. ” 21. This passage is discussed by Schor (1987, 15). 22. Quoted in Landow 1971, 119. 23. In reaction to Harding, Ruskin denied that variety can in itself be beautiful, without some further end (Landow 1971, 121). 24. Quoted in Landow 1971, 120. 25. “Non ad unam formam opus suum praestat, sed ipsa varietate se iactat. Alia maiora, alia velociora fecit, alia validiora, alia temperatiora; quaedam eduxit e turba, ut singula et conspicua procederent, quaedam in gregem misit. Ignorat naturae potentiam qui illi non putat licere, nisi quod saepius fecit. ” In this passage the random distribution of talents and fortune among humans is derived from the willfulness of nature, glorying in her variety (compare Serafino dell’Aquila’s sonnet, quoted above, n. 9). Pliny (HN 7.32) declares that nature’s freaks and oddities are ludibria for her, miracula for us (Beagon 1992, 49, 88–­89). 26. As Conte (1994, 84) points out, in Pliny nature does not work according to the precise

n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 9 – 4 3

209

regularities of the upper world, the object of astronomy: “Instead [of precision] nature has such an abundance of means that it often seems almost to abandon itself to play, as though from time to time it were experimenting with its inexhaustible, multiform productivity (even though by now it is approaching the point of exhaustion and the Great Year). ” 27. “There was, especially from eC17 [the early seventeenth century], a critical argument about the observation and understanding of nature. It could seem wrong to inquire into the workings of an absolute monarch, or of a minister of God. But a formula was arrived at: to understand the creation was to praise the creator, seeing absolute power through contingent works” (Williams 1985, 222–­23). 28. “Dieu tout puissant facteur et gouverneur de ce grand ouvrage excellent en beauté, admirable en varieté, singulier en durée. ” 29. “Quicunque res divinas atque humanas diligentius contemplati sunt, optime princeps, illud praecipuum in Divinis admirantur, quod tam diversa atque adeo inter se differentia ab uno individuo ac simplicissimo principio prodeat” (aa3). 30. Var * words occur six times in 2.98–­104. Clearly Cicero sees no contradiction between the varied and wonderful spectacle of nature and divine ratio: one only has to observe this wonderful spectacle, he says, to be convinced that it is the work of ratio (Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.60.15) 31. Jeanneret 1987, 164. 32. Céard 1977, 282. 33. “Quae cum et ego mecum ipse revolverem, duo illa maxima esse existimavi, ut ab illa scilicet inviolate unitate atque individua, infinita perpetuo variaque ac singulis temporibus diversa profluerent: et quod haec mortalia, quantum illis liceret, ad divinitatem contenderent ac prope accederent” (De Rerum Varietate, epistula nuncupatoria, quoted in Couzinet 2001, 112). 34. Crousaz, Traité, vol. 1, 17–­19, quoted in the original French in Weber 1986, 10. 35. Finden is more interested in the lusus of nature than its variety, and she persistently translates lusus as “joke, ” a translation that accords with some of the passages she quotes, in which the Italian word for lusus is scherzo. However, “play” would be more appropriate for many other passages. As Finden points out, Nature’s play with variety, displayed, for instance, in Renaissance cabinets of curiosity, was also a manifestation of her subtilitas, an incentive to humans to display the same quality in their thought about her. Subtilitas is another word in the semantic field of varietas; cf. Pliny NH 21.1, quoted above, and 33.157 (also applied to flowers). It is close to one of the meanings of poikilia. 36. Couzinet on Cardan (2001, 110; 113, citing Ingegno 1980, 212–­13). 37. Céard 1977, 232. 38. Céard 1977, 235. 39. Conte 1994, 101–­2, on the Great Chain of Being in Pliny: transitional or ambiguous beings ensure that nature makes no leaps. 40. Compare Summa Contra Gentiles, 2.45: “non enim creatura potest esse Deo aequalis. Oportuit igitur esse multiplicitatem et varietatem in rebus creatis, ad hoc quod invenires in eis Dei similitudo perfecta secundum modum suum. ” 41. Varietas delectat: Leibniz 1923–­, 6.1.484. On Leibniz’s conception of the best of all possible worlds, see Rutherford 1995, 22–­45. For help with Leibniz, I am grateful to Professor Maria Antognazza. 42. I am grateful to Professor Matthew Bell for help with Haller’s argument.

210

n o t e s t o pa g e s 4 3 – 4 8

43. Less pessimistic is the reading inludant, making the pests another of the problems against which the farmer takes precautions. Inludant is accepted by Mynors in the OCT, but see Thomas 1988, 99, arguing for inludunt, the reading of Servius, the corrector of M and P, and a ninth-­century codex. 44. Human arts “sprout”: venere, OLD sense 5; cf. “illic veniunt felicius uvae, ” Georgics 1.54. 45. “Ut haec in unum congeruntur, ita contra illa dispersa sunt, quae a Cicerone ‘dissupata’ dici puto: hic segetes, illic veniunt felicius uvae, arborei fetus alibi . . . ” (Quintilian, Inst. Or. 9.3.38–­9) 46. Contrast the coming Golden Age, in which “omnis feret omnia tellus” (Eclogue 4.39). 47. Notice the discrepancy between the repetitive hammering implied by meditando ex­ tunderet (with the ictus falling consecutively on -­tand and–­tund ) and the idea of variety. 48. The problems of interpretation are discussed by Jenkyns 2008 and Thomas 1988, ad loc. 49. This phrase is echoed with reference to Proteus (“tum variae eludent species atque ora ferarum, ” Georgics 4.406). 50. A striking example of this is the following passage from the fifteenth-­century Greek scholar George of Trebizond’s De Suavitate Dicendi: “Hence too, God, that glorious craftsman (artifex) of all things, decorates the meadows with white, violet, dark, or multicoloured (variis) flowers and red roses. This teaches us that, if we want to speak well and attractively, we should studiously, diligently, and carefully seek for variety of discourse. ” Baxandall 1971, 95. 51. Nünlist 2009, 199, with n.16 for references to poikilia in rhetoric. On varietas in rhetoric, see Lausberg 1990, 142. 52. “Quae si magna atque adeo maxima vobis videbuntur, quam varie et quam copiose dicantur expectare nolite” (3 Verr. 3.11). 53. Cicero, De Or. 1.240; 2.214; Quintilian, Inst. Or. 10.2.1 (“ex his ceterisque lectione dignis auctoribus et verborum sumenda copia est et varietas figurarum”). Compare also Phaedrus, 4.Epil.2: “supersunt multa quae possim loqui et copiosa abundat rerum varietas. ” 54. Cicero, Academica 1.17: “Qui [Plato] varius et multiplex et copiosus erat”; Tusc. 5.11: “multiplex ratio dicendi rerumque varietas”; De Or. 2.14.58: “minimus natu horum omnium Timaeus . . . longe eruditissimus et rerum copia et sententiarum varietatate abundantissimus”; De Or. 3.16.60 (Socrates): “tum vero eloquentia, varietate, copia, quam se cumque in partem dedisset, omnium fuit facile princeps. ” Compare also Aristides, In Defence of the Four, 616. 55. “Est plerisque Graecorum, ut illi, pro copia volubilitas, tam longas tamque frigidas perhodos uno spiritu quasi torrente contorquent. ” 56. Does this mean “assenting to one side or the other, ” or “assenting in different ways” (or, possibly, “with indistinct assent”)? Cf. dissensu vario, 11.455. At Aen. 11.296–­97 the mouths of the frightened Italians utter a varius fremor. Varius/variare appears three times in Aen 12.216–­37 (217, 223, and 228) of the murmuring, wavering, and rumors circulating in a crowd, the inverse of the copia of the orator, enhanced by varietas. 57. “Et auditorem quidem varietas maxime delectat, cum sermone animum retinet aut exsuscitat clamore, ” ad Her. 3.22. From this passage is taken the expression varietas delectat, proverbial in modern times. The author is echoing Aristotle, Rhet. 1371a, 20ff. Kai to metaballein hēdu; eis physin gar gignetai to metaballein; to gar auto aei hyperbolēn poiei tes kathestōsēs hexeōs, hothen eiretai “metabolē pantōn hēdu” (Euripides, Orestes 234).

n o t e s t o pa g e s 4 8 – 5 5

211

58. Quintilian goes on: “nisi forte histrionum multa circa voces easdem variare gestus potest, orandi minor vis, ut dicatur aliquis, post quod in eadem materia nihil dicendum sit. ” 59. Vice versa: Heath (1989, 112–­13) cites an Iliad scholion which declares that mēkos kai poikilian peripoiei. 60. On fastidium and variety, see Kaster 2005, 106–­7; also, n. 94 on p. 199, re “quousque eadem?” 61. See also Plautus, Trinummus 671; Pliny NH 12.81. 62. “Sed figuram in dicendo commutare oportet, ut gravem mediocris, mediocrem excipiat attenuata, deinde identidem commutentur ut facile satietas varietate vitetur, ” ad Her. 4.16; “Trac­ tatio autem varia esse debet, ne aut cognoscat artem qui audiat aut defatigetur similitudinis sati­ etate,”  Cicero, De Or. 2.177; “clausulae variandae sunt, ne aut animorum iudicis repudientur aut aurium satietate, ” De Or. 3.192; also 3.192. Compare also Cicero, Inv. 1.98. Nünlist (2009, 199–­201) discusses the Greek equivalent: poikilia avoids the monotony (to homoeides) that causes koros. 63. See also Drijepondt 1979, 49–­53, on Cicero’s theory of varietas in the De Oratore. 64. Fantham 1988, 276, citing De Or. 3.92–­93; see also Mankin 2011 ad loc. 65. Fantham (1988, 287) sees in the words sine intermissione, sine reprehensione, sine varietate, a reference to Cicero’s early style, comparing Brut. 313, sine remissione, sine varietate. 66. Cicero has another use for variety up his sleeve. Not only do changes (vicissitudines) avoid audience fatigue, but variety ensures “that the audience is not wearied with disgust at the monotony, and we are not detected exercising deliberate artifice” (De. Or. 3.193). Variety, like the conjuror’s “business, ” distracts us from the deceiving hand of rhetoric. Compare De Or. 2.177, and Orator 219, for similar claims that varietas helps to hide artifice. Variety gives the appearance of naturalness (nature is various). 67. Style may itself be varied as a rhetorical device; see Pernot 1994, 336–­37. 68. Compare Epist. 2.5.7. Pliny’s variety will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3. 69. Compare also Plato’s Phaedrus: the function of philosophical discourse is to “sow seeds” in a “suitable” soul (276e4–­140) and Seneca, Epist. 38.2. 70. Succinctly, Carruthers 2009, 30–­32. 71. “Ergo ut agrestes illos et hircosos quaedam ex his impolita et rudia delectabunt, exascitaque magis quam dedolata, nec modo limam sed runcinas experta nec scobinas, ita ex diverso vermiculata interim dictio et tessellis pluricoloribus variegata, delicatiores hos capiet volsos et pumicatos” (quoted in McLaughlin 1996, 197). 72. See Duport 2000, 9 and 15–­63, a chapter titled “La poėtique de l’abondance et de la varietė.”  73. Quoted and translated in Lovejoy 1960, 91. 74. Innovation and novelty: Williams 1985, 82–­84. Romantic literary theory: Abrams 1953, 272–­85. 75. Hogarth writes, in The Analysis of Beauty, that “Shakespeare, who had the deepest penetration into nature, has sum’d up all the charms of beauty in two words INFINITE VARIETY” (Hogarth 1753, xvi–­xvii). Hogarth’s title page makes much of variety: not only does it contain an emblem which comprises a pyramid enclosing a serpentine line with the word “variety” at the base, but it also quotes Milton’s description of Satan’s sinuous approach to Eve: So varied he, and of his tortuous train Curled many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, To lure her eye. (Paradise Lost 9.516–­18)

212

n o t e s t o pa g e s 5 6 – 6 0

Hogarth’s subtitle, Written with a View to Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste, contains a word that translates one of the meanings of Latin varius (fluctuating). Ironically, Hogarth’s title page both emphasizes the value of variety for beauty and alludes to the negative connotations of the word. 76. Also, from Pleasures of the Imagination (1.114–­20): What he [God] admir’d and lov’d, his vital smile Unfolded into being. Hence. . . . . . . . . And all the fair variety of things. This is followed closely by the statement that nature “on the multitude of minds / Impress’d a various bias” (125–­26). 77. Compare Ficino in Theologica Platonica 13.3 where the divine qualities of humanity are manifested in the ability to create an inenarrabilis varietas voluptatum and to feed its imagination on the oblectamenta sensuum varia, a passage discussed in Langer 2009, 111–­12. 78. Spectator, nos. 419, 421, quoted Abrams, 1953, 288. 79. Leibniz, Monadology 58. Abrams discusses the influence of Leibniz on ideas of the artist’s creativity in aesthetic writings of the mid-­eighteenth century (1953, 276–­79). 80. Respectively, Samuel Johnson in “The Life of Butler” from Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), and Aphra Behn in The Rover, part 2, act 1 (1680). 81. Byron quotes the same epigram in Don Juan (canto 15, stanza 21) as a model for his poem. Quintilian, Inst. Or. 10.1.58, makes a similar point when he suggests that we don’t want to read always and only the best authors, but need the variety afforded by interposing lesser authors in our reading. He compares this to the variety required at dinners (“cum optimis satiati sumus, varietas tamen nobis ex vilioribus grata sit”). 82. Compare Boileau, L’Art Poétique (1.69–­72): Voulez-­vous du public meriter les amours Sans cesse en écrivant variez vos discours. Un style trope égal et toujours uniforme En vain baille nos yeux, il faut qu’il nous endorme. 83. Langer (2009, 108–­12) cites Genesis 1:26 as the biblical wing of this idea, present in Petrarch’s De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (2.93) and Ficino’s Theologia Platonica (13.3). 84. Kaster 2005, 104–­33 on fastidium. Note Horace, Satires 2.6.86: “cupiens varia fastidia cena / vincere. ” 85. Ovid disingenuously asserts “non sum desultor amoris, ” Amores, 1.3.15; cf. Seneca, Suasoriae 1.7. 86. “Demonium meridianum” is the Vulgate translation of Psalm 91:6. On this passage of Bernard, see Carruthers 2009, 37–­42. 87. See the comments of Carruthers 2009, 41–­42 on curiositas, and, in a classical context, Beagon 2011 and Leigh 2013. 88. On the range of meanings carried by curiositas, and its relation the Greek polypragmo­ synē, see Leigh 2013. 89. However, while tedium is obviously to be avoided, it might be that  fastidium is occasionally called for. As we shall see, the satirist or philosopher who surveys the variety of  human emotions and pursuits might justifiably conclude that it all amounts to the same thing; that variety

n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 0 – 6 6

213

is illusory, and that the appropriate response to this semper eadem is fastidium, a lack of relish that lies at the opposite pole to Nature’s joy in variety. This response is a mark of the satirist/ philosopher’s penetrating eye. 90. Seneca (Epist. 115.8–­9), too, finds variety a pleasure suitable to children: “Childen are pleased with the smooth and variegated pebbles which they pick up on the beach, while we take delight in the spots (maculae) of enormous columns. ” On the role of poikilia in Plato’s argument against imitative poetry in the Republic, see Moss 2007. 91. Langer 2009, 175–­83, on the Renaissance reception of this letter. 92. Heath 1989, 81–­84, on the necessity of variety in history. 93. E.g., Pliny, Epist. 5.6.13: “ea varietate, ea descriptione, quocumque inciderint oculi, reficientur.”  94. Olson 1982, 90–­127. See especially 116, 118, and 228 on variety as recreation. 95. Langer 2009, 61. 96. Gaisser 2008; Carver 2007. 97. Heath 1989, 137–­49, on post-­classical arguments over unity of plot. 98. In Ariosto the use of multiple plots sets off the repetition of themes and story patterns and Ariosto’s ability to vary them. “Indeed, the romanzo as a genre possesses so many repetitive features that one could argue that Ariosto wrote one precisely because its matter and structure provided him with the most opportunities for artful variation” ( Javitch 2005, 7). Javitch (10) cites Pigna’s description of Ariosto’s “diversità grandissima” in the treatment of the same motif (Giovan Battista Pigna, I Romanzi, 1554). What Javitch describes is very like what Ovid does in Metamorphoses: the lack of a single narrative thread gives the episodes a paradigmatic relation, which allows us to see variation of the analogous: “Rather than have these readers derive a single moral lesson from a recurrent plight like amatory betrayal, the poet seeks to enlarge and complicate their understanding of it by depicting the various ways that it might occur. It is more valuable to learn how variable and contingent everything is than to trust in some fixity that others may want us to believe” ( Javitch 2005, 14). 99. Weinberg 1961, 664. Malatesta’s historicist argument may be influenced by the speech of Aper in Tacitus’s Dialogus (19–­21). 100. The debate is documented in Weinberg 1961, 954–­1072. 101. On the influence of the Statian aesthetic, see Galand’s introduction in Galand and Laigneau-­Fontaine 2013, 5–­13. 102. For Statius’s influence on Sidonius Apollinaris, see Consolino 2013. 103. The emphasis on the variety of material is characteristic of Late Antique poetry. Compare, for instance, Claudian, Panegyricus in Probini et Olybrii Fratrum Consulatum 94–­99: Et formidato clipeus Titana lacessit lumine, quem tota variarat Mulciber arte: hic patrius Mavortis amor fetusque notantur Romulei; pius amnis inest et belua nutrix; electro Tiberis, pueri formantur in auro; fingunt aera lupam; Mavors adamante coruscat. 104. “Nam et auribus multa percipimus quae etsi nos vocibus delectant tamen ita sunt varia saepe ut id quod proxime audias iucundissimum videatur. ” 105. Carruthers (2009, 40), who cites this passage from Procopius, sums up: “The space of Hagia Sophia is not monofocal but polyfocal, its harmony built from strong contrasts of diverse

214

n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 6 – 7 2

colours and materials and sudden shifts of view. It creates esthetic varietas through mixtura and diversitas. ” We can compare another passage from Procopius, on the colored marble columns and panels in Hagia Sophia: “One might imagine that he had come upon a meadow with its flowers in full bloom. For he would surely marvel at the purple of some, the green tint of others, and at those on which the crimson glows and those from which the white flashes, and again at those which Nature, like some painter, varies [ poikillei] with the most contrasting colors” (1.1.59–­60). On Byzantine perception of color in mosaics, see Bradley 2009, 125–­27: glitter and variegation are what is remarked. Byzantine color words emphasize these qualities rather than hues (Bradley, 69–­90). 106. Gasché (2012, 35–­36) situates this passage in relation to Burke’s theory of the Beautiful as a whole: “Free of finality, it [the eye] can let itself be carried unsteadily along the lines of a beautiful object or body whose whole is constantly changing, without ever having to dominate it. ” Since the eye is not threatened, as it is in the case of the Sublime, it “does not need to master what it sees and touches by sliding over it. ” 107. Possibly, too, Horace’s “nimium lubricus aspici” (c. 1.19.8; compare Burke’s “slides giddily”). 108. It is worth noting that the words “vast” and “various” make an appearance as a complementary pair, rather than an opposition, in Pope’s preface to his translation of the Iliad (1726). Pope makes a Longinian distinction between “a judicious, methodical genius” and “a great and fruitful one. ” The reason why common critics tend to prefer the former is that “they find it easier  .  .  . to pursue their observations through a uniform and bounded walk of art, than to comprehend the vast and various extent of nature. ” 109. “If in the midst of the variety there be not some fixed object for the attention, the unceasing succession of the variety will prevent the mind from observing the difference of individual objects; and the only thing remaning will be the succession, which will then produce precisely the same effect as sameness” (On Poesy or Art, in Bate 1970, 398). Coleridge goes on to give the examples of observing the passing of trees during the rapid movement of a carriage or a file of soldiers passing before us. 110. “For the first time the metaphor of gemmae is used, by Tacitus (Dialogus, 22.4) and Martial (5.11.3–­4), to describe the special quality of first-­century literature” (Roberts 1989, 62). Metaphors of flowers, lumina, and jewels in the rhetorical tradition are discussed in chapter 2 of Roberts 1989. 111. Dunbabin 1999, 742 cites a sixth-­century inscription on the mosaics in the cathedral at Apamea, which uses a play on words to compare the varied wit of the bishop with the many-­ colored or variegated mosaic he had made. 112. On these passages in Cicero, see the enlightening discussion of Butler 2011, 39–­42. 113. Emblema (from Greek emballein) refers to an image set into a paved floor. On vermiculatus, see below, n. 116. 114. This is ironic, since Horace criticizes Lucilius for the same mixing of Greek and Latin words (Satires 1.10.20–­26). 115. Butler 2011, 41 discusses appareat. 116. In modern times, the word vermiculate, which crops up frequently in the context of mosaics, has given rise to the category of opus vermiculatum, the modern name for a particular kind of mosaic in which the outline of the figures is marked by a painterly wavy (wormlike) line. Gioseffi (1975, 32–­35) argues convincingly that this is not the ancient meaning of the term, which is derived from the verb vermiculo, infest, and refers to the variegated effect of the mosaics (screziato, i.e. speckled).

n o t e s t o pa g e s 7 2 – 7 9

215

117. McPhail 2003. 118. Cicero paves the way in the Brutus passage (274), where Lucilius’s vermiculatus is given a positive valence, but now applied to uninterrupted rhetorical flow (see Butler 2011, 42). Renaissance uses of the Lucilius passage retain the associations with variety and minuta constructio but give them a positive force. 119. See Guest 2007, 40, and n. 85 on the mosaic metaphor. 120. McLaughlin 1996, 187–­227. 121. Quoted in McLaughlin 1996, 144. 122. McLaughlin 1996, 201–­7, with interesting remarks on the originality of Poliziano’s vindication of self-­expression. 123. “Vario quodam, at prope vermiculato intertextu lasciviens, omnesque verborum flosculos captans”: Pucci in a letter quoted in McLaughlin 1996, 144. 124. On the emblem, Curran 2010, with bibliography; Guest 2007, 44; McPhail 2003, 262–­63, with interesting remarks on the use of the mosaic (emblēma) metaphor for recycling ancient texts. 125. Vergil’s (and Augustus’s) display of exotic captives also covered up the fact that Actium was a victory in a civil war (Beard 2007, 122–­24). 126. Compare Aen. 12.122–­23, “hinc Troius omnis / Tyrrhenusque ruit variis exercitus armis. ” 127. Goodman 2007, 123, citing the description of Pompey’s triumph over Mithradates celebrated in 59 BC (Appian, Mith. 116–­17). Naerebout 2011, 280, is more cautious: “I know of no source where the Romans celebrate this diversity. . . . But there are also no indications of the Romans trying to stop this process [the interaction between constituent parts of the empire]. ” The passage from Aeneid 8 I have just cited might count as the “missing” source. Naerebout describes the empire as “an organisation of diversity” (278). 128. Hinds 2007, 152. 129. On this epigram, see Fitzgerald 2007b, 40–­42. Martial is also working with a Vergilian passage we have already considered under the rubric of “Nature, ” namely Georgics 1.56–­ 59, where Vergil speaks of the products of different nations (“nonne vides, croceos ut Tmolus odores, / India mittit ebur, molles su tura Sabaei”). Martial has echoed Vergil’s Sabaei in the same terminal position of the line but given the saffron (sprinkled on the crowd at the Games) to the Cilicians. Vergil’s mittit (sends), with its imperial implications, is perhaps echoed by Martial’s festinavere (hurried). 130. If  line 6 is taken to refer to the Britons or Picts, so Coleman 2006, ad loc. 131. K. Hopkins 1983, 11–­12, on the display and hunting of animals in the arena: “As for animals, their sheer variety symbolized the extent of Roman power, and left vivid traces in Roman literature and art” (12). 132. Described by Smith (1988), who distinguishes this Roman series from Hellenistic precursors, 70–­73. 133. Schneider 1986. 134. As Coleman (2006, 51) remarks apropos Martial Spec. 3, citing the passage from Acts as an exception. 135. Carruthers 2009, 44–­46. 136. Paulinus of Nola on Pentecost: “in omnibus unum / voce deum varia laudabat spiritus unus, ” 27.70–­7 1, cf. 98–­102, quoted in Roberts 1989, 146. 137. This passage was brought to my attention by Kamila Wysluch. Compare also Met. 1.518.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 7 9 – 9 2

216

138. Reinhold 1984, 233, with bibliography. Reinhold claims that the phrase on the Great Seal is not taken from Moretum directly, but via the title page of the Gentleman’s Magazine, where the phrase accompanies the picture of a hand holding a bouquet, and refers to miscellany. 139. Compare the translation of the EU motto In Varietate Concordia as “United in Diversity, ” discussed above, p. 00. Chapter Three 1. On the “poikilistic” aspect of Nonnus’s Dionysiaca, see Shorrock 2001, 18–­23, and Faber 2004. 2. Hoffer 1999, 227–­28 for an honest and thoughtful “personal note. ” 3. Wolff (2003, 9–­10) quotes a sample of negative modern assessments of Pliny. His own reassessment is subtitled, revealingly, le réfus du pessimisme. 4. Pliny and varietas: Römer 1981, 101–­10; Picone 1978, 63–­66, on rhetoric. Lefèvre (2009) contrasts the younger Pliny’s “decadent” insistence on variety with his uncle’s monomania (299), and discusses variety in Pliny’s gardens and landscapes (231–­34). Biffino (2003, 175–­87) puts some of the same phenomena under the rubric of temperamentum. Most recently, Gibson and Morello (2012) lay considerable stress on varietas throughout their study. Particularly important is their discussion of “managed variety” in connection with Pliny’s otium (169–­99, especially 187) and their discussion of varietas in oratory, life, and letters at 244–­48. I am happy to see that we have independently reached compatible conclusions. 5. For a similar thought, cf. Pliny, Epist. 4.14.10. The opposite point is made by Livy’s appreciation of Cato: “huic versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fuit, ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcumque ageret” (“His mind was so versatile, and so ready for anything, that whatever he did you could say he was born for that alone, ” Livy 39.40). Did Pliny have this in mind? 6. Distringor officio is a common phrase in Pliny (Morello 2003, 188). 7. On the relative values of officium and studium in Pliny, see Fitzgerald 2007a, 196–­98. 8. Rotation of otium and negotium: 7.3.4 and 7.7.2 and Fitzgerald 2007a, 198–­200. Pliny’s workaholic uncle is the prime example of studia pursued in rescued time (3.5.7–­10, on which see Henderson 2002b, 69–­102). 9. Gibson and Morello (2012, 74–­103) discuss Pliny and the Ciceronian epistolary model and suggest that the varietas rerum available to Cicero became a commonplace among Cicero’s successors (103), citing ad Fam. 6.6 (“temporum nostrorum varietatem”) as evidence that Cicero himself drew attention to it. 10. The purely descriptive character of this letter distinguishes it from the comparable letters on the floating islands of Lacus Vadimo (8.20) and the spring at Lake Como (4.30), which describe and reflect on a wonder of nature. See Lefèvre 1988 on these three letters. 11. “Totos eloquentiae aperire fontes, ” Quintilian, Inst. Or. 6.1.51; “litterarum abundantissimum fontem” (sc. Cicero), Valerius Maximus, 2.2.3. OLD s.v. fluens, 2, smooth, flowing, of speech, composition, etc. 12. For another metaphorical use of the rhetorical language of varietas in Pliny’s letters, compare “Numquam officiorum varietate continuam laudem humanitatis infregit, ” 7.31.3. The rhetorical sense of continuus (unbroken) is attested by OLD s.v., 1.b. 13. “Iucundum utrumque per iocum ludumque fluitantibus, ut flexerint cursum, laborem otio otium labore variare. ” 14. Is it ironic that at 7.8.3 Pompeius is praised for the constantia of  his love?

n o t e s t o pa g e s 9 2 – 9 8

217

15. Drijepondt 1979, 2–­6, takes Pliny’s opening words to apply to Pompeius’s style. In the second sentence of this letter, acriter and ardentem would refer to the high style, ornate to the middle. 16. Compare Vergilius Romanus (6.21.3): “est enim probitate morum, ingenii elegantia, operum varietate monstrabilis. ” 17. Compare 9.31.1, in which Pliny expresses gratitude to Sardus: “Postquam a te recessi, non minus tecum, quam cum ad te fui. Legi enim librum tuum identidem repetens ea maxime (non enim mentiar), quae de me scripsisti, in quibus quidem percopiosus fuisti. Quam multa, quam varia, quam non eadem de eodem nec tamen diversa dixisti” (cf. “eundem . . . non tamquam eundem, ” in 1.16). 18. Compare Plato Phaedrus 276e4–­140 (the function of philosophical discourse is to “sow seeds” in a “suitable” soul), and Seneca, Epist. 38.2. The Gospel parable of the scattering of seed applied to the variety of an audience is also relevant here (Mark 4:4–­20). 19. Compare Horace’s allusion to the problem of the varied tastes of an audience, which anticipates Pliny’s analogy with a dinner, quoted below (Horace, Epist. 2.2.61–­62: “tres mihi convivae prope dissentire videntur, / poscentes vario multum diversa palato”). 20. “Nam et in ratione conviviorum, quamvis a plerisque cibis singuli temperemus, totam tamen cenam laudare omnes solemus, nec ea quae stomachus noster recusat, adimunt gratiam illis quibus capitur, ” Pliny, Epist. 2.5.8. 21. On Pliny’s nugae, see Roller 1998. 22. Compare 9.22.2 on the lyrics of Passienus Paulus, which show “magna varietas, magna mobilitas: amat ut qui verissime, dolet ut qui impatientissime, laudat ut qui benignissime, omnia denique tamquam singula exsolvit” (contrast “veniam ut non singulis, ” 9.29.1). 23. Notice that this is introduced by the words “me celandum non putasti fuisse apud te de versiculis meis multum copiosumque sermonem, eumque diversitate iudiciorum longius processisse” (5.3.1). 24. Erasmus appropriates, and expands, this passage to describe the range of subject matter allowed by the genre of the letter (quoted in Trimpi 1962, 69). 25. Compare the way relaxations prepare for the forum in 7.9.13: “nam mirum est ut his opusculis animus intendatur remittatur. Recipiunt enim amores odia iras misericordiam urbanitatem, omnia denique quae in vita atque etiam in foro causisque versantur. ” 26. On the architectural influence of Pliny’s villas, see the brief account, with bibliography, of du Prey 2010. 27. As Johnson points out (2010, 37), there is an artful chiasmus between light physical exercise coupled with more difficult mental exercise in the morning, and vigorous exercise coupled with lighter mental fare in the afternoon. 28. On the metaphor from slavery in this passage, see Whitton 2013, ad loc. 29. On this letter, see Boccuto 1991. 30. Boccuto 1991, 31. Compare 8.21.1–­2: “Ut in vita sic in studiis pulcherrimum et humanissimum existimo severitatem comitatemque miscere, ne illa in tristitiam, haec in petulantiam excedat. . . . Qua ratione ductus graviora opera lusibus iocisque distinguo. ” Itemization is a con­ stituent of varietas, in which the individual elements of a multiplicity resist assimilation into a whole. We should note that Pliny’s books of letters themselves perform this “distinguishing” operation on his own officia. 31. See Vardi 2002, 89–­96, for the context of Pliny’s idea that light poetry serves as a refreshment or “recreation. ”

218

n o t e s t o pa g e s 9 8 – 1 0 7

32. On Pliny’s descriptions of his villas, see the excellent account of Spencer 2011, 113–­34. Also Gibson and Morello 2012, 200–­203. 33. Epist. 5.6.13, “ea varietate, ea descriptione [see OLD under discriptio: division, allocation], quocumque inciderint oculi, reficientur. ” Compare “Xystus in plurimas species distinctus,”  5.6.16–­18. On the framing of different views by the villa, see the remarks of Lefèvre 2009, 225, re the phrase “quasi tria maria prospectat” (2.17.5). As Lefèvre notes, the Romans were not interested in the sea but in a varied selection of framed views (“diversa caeli partes ut prospectus habet, ” 5.6.27). On villas and views, see Bergmann 1994 (especially 63–­66). 34. For another aspect of Pliny’s views, see Lefèvre 2009, 228, on Pliny’s use of the verb servire. Compare Statius, Silvae 2.2.72–­75: quid mille revolvam culmina visendique vices? sua cuique voluptas atque omni proprium thalamo mare, transque iacentem Nerea diversis servit sua terra fenestris. 35. Fitzgerald (2007a, 191–­93) discusses the issue of Pliny’s gloria and some of the different opinions that have been held about his priorities. 36. On limit and variation in Lucretius, see De Lacy (1969), who comments: “The doctrine of limits has for the Epicureans still another advantage. It permits variation within the limits. There is room for individual differences, even for spontaneity and freedom” (107). 37. The process is described in Clay 1983, 160–­68. 38. Variantia is coined for the metrically impossible varietas. Parallagē is the usual Greek word employed by the Epicureans for variation. But they also use poikilos (De Lacy 1969, 107–­8). Plutarch says that, according to the Epicureans, every aggregate is poikillomenon by the continual coming and going of atoms (Mor. 1116c = Epicurus fr. 16 Usener); cf. “neque ictus gignere per se, / qui varient motus, per quos natura gerat res” (DRN 2.241–­42). 39. Beer (2010) considers the significance of the word daedalus in Lucretius, a word that occurs six times in the De Rerum Natura, though it only occurs once in extant Latin literature before Lucretius. She concludes that the craftsman Daedalus is a model for the didactic narrator, insofar as he produces a poem that can itself stand as reality. She stresses exclusively the active sense of this word, in my opinion underestimating the adjectival, descriptive sense that belongs to the field of poikilia (in senses like “dappled”). 40. A convenient summary of the politics of this satire can be found in Baines 2004, 43–­47. 41. De Lacy 1969, 106. 42. For another example of variety compensating for restricted limits, see the Moretum (47–­ 48): “exiguus spatio variis sed fertilis herbis, ” where the emphasis of the word order falls on variis. 43. Cf. DRN 1.196–­98; 1.908–­14; 2.688–­91; and 2.1013–­14. 44. Snyder (1980, 3–­51) describes Lucretius’s analogy between atoms and the elementa of language. Armstrong 1995 is a more recent discussion, from which mine differs somewhat. 45. The complicated argument is well explicated by Brown 1984, ad loc. 46. Milroy 1977, 236, 240, adding that “fleck” belongs to the same semantic group in Hopkins. 47. Compare Haynes 2003, 168: Hopkins achieves Aeschylean effects through Germanic vocabulary. 48. Hopkins’s “Couple-­colour” might be a translation of the Latin discolor. 49. Milroy 1977, 88, on words with the suffix ‑le in Hopkins’s journal; see also 158.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 0 7 – 1 2 2

219

50. On this aspect of Lucretius, see Snyder 1980. 51. Hopkins quotes Lucretius’s “crassaque convenient liquidis et liquida crassis” (DRN 4.1259) in his journals (September 1864; Hopkins 1959, 44). 52. For Lucretian influence on Catullus, see Skinner 1976. As Professor Jim Zetzel pointed out to me, Catullus and Lucretius shared a patron (Memmius). 53. Cairns 1991 calls the collocation a “first century BC idiom” (442), citing Cicero, De Or. 1.262 and 3.61 and De Imperio Cn Pompei 28. As he points out, the word via crops up frequently in ancient etyomologies of diversus. 54. On Catullus and Cinna in Bithynia, see Hinds 2001, 222–­36. 55. Cf. Catullus c. 9.7, “narrantem loca, facta, nationes. ” 56. Daedalea echoes the rhythm and varies the sound of the word aemulari (to rival). 57. Compare Vergil on the bees’ Daedalic art (“daedala tecta, ” Georgics 4.179). 58. Poikilos of poetry and music in Pindar: O. 6.87; O. 3.8, O. 4.2, N. 5.24, N. 8.15. 59. On the other hand, the sequence of c. 4.1 to 4.2 connects the end of 1, with Horace frustrated in his pursuit of Ligurinus through the rolling waters, with Horace the imitator of Pindar, doomed to fail, like Icarus, and plunge into the sea. 60. It is ironic, or perhaps revealing, that Horace uses two words to express his injunction to simplicity. Furthermore, if simplex means “with one fold, ” then we are already dealing with two, not one. Thanks to the anonymous press reader for pointing this out. 61. Brink (1971, ad loc.), comments on simplex dumtaxat et unum: “simplex ‘of one kind, ’ a thing which is not varium. Its Greek counterpart is haplous, with its opposite poikilos. . . . The concept of poikilia is probably at home in rhetorical practice. ” And “H’s own procedure thus mirrors his subject; being himself suspected of variare prodigialiter he shows variety controlled by unity. ” 62. Similarly, the denigration of the purpureus pannus at lines 14–­18 sits uneasily with Horace’s striking opening. Chapter Four 1. On the poetics of lists, see Sammons 2010, 15–­18, with bibliography. 2. Gowers (2012, 90) points out that Horace’s list gives us “a babel-­like mix of languages (Aramaic, Latin, Greek). ” 3. Gowers (2012, 66) notes that the word genus here draws attention to the (as yet) unnamed genre of the collection. 4. As noted by Barchiesi (2009, 425). 5. Race 1982, 1–­17, on the history and definition of the term. Race cites a number of definitions, all of which stress the principle that the list climaxes in, or focuses on, the last element (8–­10). 6. Barchiesi 2009, 424–­28, on the positioning of c. 1.1 at the head of  Horace’s lyric oeuvre and the relevance of the priamel to poetic beginnings. 7. West 1995, 4–­6; Santirocco (1986, 16–­17) argues that Horace here looks back, alluding to his Satires, and even provides a mini-­mempsimoiria (11–­18). 8. Pomeroy 1980 on the man at the spring in this priamel. 9. Admittedly, the mercator of  line 16 anticipates this nominative, but he appears only in the second line of a section which begins with the cleverly misleading luctantem. Symmetry with what has preceded leads us to apply it to the agent, though it turns out to modify Africum.

220

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 2 4 – 1 3 0

10. Nisbet and Hubbard (1970, 14) cite Ausonius’s “me iuga Burgidalae, trino me flumina coetu / secernunt turbis popularibus” (Epist. 27.90–­91). 11. See Leigh 2010. Compare Pliny: “Inserit sane, sed data opera, mollibus levibusue duriusculos quosdam, ” Epist. 1.16.5. 12. Leigh 2010, 271: “The weaving of a garland therefore implies the same critical judgment as does the reconfiguration of the established canon, but it does so through a figure eminently more visual that what has previously been proposed [egkrinein]. . . . Horace is at once a flower woven into a garland and a Titan striking a blow against the stars; he and his collection will encompass everything from the garlanded intimacy of Sappho to the sublime grandeur of Pindar.”  13. Horace returns to the priamel in c. 1.7, which surprises us by not settling on Horace after nine lines surveying the places which other poets will praise (“Laudabunt alii claram Rhodon aut Mytilenen . . . ,”  1). This remarkably unstable ode pivots briefly on Horace’s preference for the places of his own Tibur, and then sets off to give advice to the addressee Plancus, before coming to rest on a scene from mythology, in which Teucer addresses his companions as they embark on their exile. In the final line we, together with Teucer and his companions, are staring out over the immensity of the sea: “cras ingens iterabimus aequor. ” The ode, which began with a sea variegated (distinctum) by beautiful cities (Rhodes, Mytilene, Corinth “of the two seas”), ends with the undifferentiated sea in all its stark monotony. The priamel’s variety becomes a foil for the “wild surmise” of  Teucer’s gaze (Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is itself a priamel: “Much have I travelled. . . . And many . . . ”). We can note a pun on varius in the poem which precedes c. 1.7: c. 1.6 begins Scriberis Vario fortis et hostium victor Maeonii carminis alite quam rem cumque ferox navibus aut equis miles te duce gesserit. 14. The repeated est quae . . . est quae . . . of lines 19–­22 alludes to the priamel form. 15. Ovid’s variatio (lines 11–­46) is well analysed in Booth 1991, 114. 16. Donne’s Elegy 17 also makes a connection between variety and Ovid’s list. Langer (2009, 81–­83) discusses Ronsard’s choice to be inconstant, and distinguishes it from Ovid’s. Ronsard alludes to Ovid in his second book of Amours (“mais sotte est la jeunesse, / qui n’est point esvei­ ullée et qui n’aime en cent lieux, ” quoted in Langer 2009, 81) and in the comparison of his two beloveds, one fat and one thin, in the first poem of his Livret de Folastries. But, for Ronsard, “L ’a  mour inconstant s’exerce . . . dans un monde de personnes ‘aimables’ l’une relative aux autres. . . . Ce monde n’est pas celui de la valeur absolue de l’objet, et de la valeur incomparable de l’ amour. Dans ce monde d’ objects de valeur relative, seul le jugement compte, et l’amour est en quelque sorte une conséquence du jugement” (Langer 2009, 82–­83). 17. Propertius’s variety is generated by the different ways in which he can express a poetic reaction to the beauty of Cynthia. For instance, “gaudet laudatis ire superba comis” (“She rejoices to walk tall, praised for her hair, ” 2.1.8) tucks in an oblique reference to the poet’s praise, though Cynthia is the subject of the main verb, so varying the statement “I write about her. ” 18. Compare also Remedia Amoris 525: “nam quoniam variant animi variabimus artes. ” 19. Especially “hic segetes, illic veniunt felicius uvae, ” Georgics 1.54; also Georgics 2.109, “nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt” (cf. Ars Amatoria 1.757). 20. See Hollis 1977, 148, citing Oppian, Hal. 1.93–­94. On the last four lines of this passage,

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 3 0 – 1 4 0

221

Hollis (1977, 149) comments: “one of the few occasions where a genuine kindness (which I can believe Ovid to have possessed as a person) seems to break through the glittering [varius!] surface of the Ars. ” Certainly this is a prime example of Ovid playing the psychologist, but there is surely also a characteristic joke about the couplet here, distinguishing between the honestum of the high-­class hexameter, with its epic associations, and the junior pentameter beneath it (inferioris). 21. Conte 1994, 61. 22. Rosenmeyer (1989, 160) summarizes Hugh Kenner (from The Stoic Comedians) on Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: “All three authors attend to the variety and copiousness of the world around us. They, or their characters, for their own moral or aesthetic satisfaction, endeavour to master the riotousness of nature or to make it part of themselves. And that, Kenner believes, is the comedy of their Stoicism. ” 23. On the etymology of satura, see Coffey 1976. Newman (2011, 154–­77) also discusses sat­ ura. As he points out, though, Horace calls his “Satires” Sermones. He quotes Aen. 6.160 (“Multa inter sese vario semone serebant”), where Virgil seems to give the etymology of the noun, and concludes “Varietas then may characterise sermo as well as satura” (178, n.1). 24. Pseudo-­Acro, in his preface to Horace, Satires 1, says: “Ergo et hoc Carmen propterea satyram nominarunt, quia et utilis et variis rebus refertum est, ut audientes saturet” (Keller, Pseudoacronis scholia, 2). 25. With the introduction into this list of gaudia ( joys, 86) we may feel less sure that all items of the list are to be judged negatively. Harrison (1937) suspects that lines 81–­89 are an interpola­ tion, or a passage out of place, since this description does not square with Juvenal’s actual subject matter. 26. Contrast Tacitus and Pliny on the monotony of their own times compared to the varied material available to earlier writers (see above, pp. 61–62). But Juvenal looks forward, not back: “nil erit ulterius quod nostris moribus addat / posteritas, eadem facient cupientque minores, / omne in praecipiti vitium stetit” (147–­49). 27. The words rhetor and pictor respectively distinguish a long o from a short o, and a Greek ending from a Latin ending. 28. Fodder of the satire: taking the genitive ( farrago) libelli of 1.86 as objective rather than subjective. 29. Compare Horace, Satires 1.4.25–­33, which lists the various types of people who hate satire because of its persecution of vice. Gowers (1993, 153–­61) argues that in Satires 2.4 Horace draws an analogy between the variatio required of cuisine and that required for satire. On the importance of stylistic variety in Horace’s theory of satire, see Freudenburg 1993, 179–­84, citing especially Satires 1.10.7–­14. 30. We might compare the very Horatian man at the spring in the priamel of c. 1.1 (see above, p. 122). 31. On fastidium and variety, see Kaster 2005, 106–­7. 32. There is an interesting discussion of this passage in Lampe 2008. 33. Kaster 2005, 199, n. 94; Seneca, Tranq. 2.15 (“Quod proposita saepe mutando in eadem revolvebantur et non reliquerant novitati locum, fastidio esse coepit vita et ipse mundus, et subit illud tabidarum deliciarum: ‘Quo usque eadem?’ ”). Also, Seneca, Epist. 89.19, and Lucretius 3.944–­45 (Nature has nothing new to show us, so we shouldn’t fear death). 34. Newlands 2002, 130–­38. More on Statius’s villa descriptions in Spencer 2011, 104–­13. 35. Confusion about where to begin is also expressed at Silvae 2.1.36–­8.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 4 1 – 1 5 2

222

36. As noted by Hinds (2001, 252), the language here recalls the procession of  Romans in the underworld as they appear to Aeneas in Aen. 6 (especially 6.754–­55 and 888). 37. Newlands 2002, 97–­98; on marbles and mosaics in the Silvae, see Zeiner 2005, 84–­92. 38. Silvae 1.2.148–­51; 1.5.34–­41; 2.2.85–­93; 4.2.26–­30. 39. On Poliziano and Statius, see Adam 1988, 93–­117, and van Dam 2008, 45–­48. 40. “Neque statim deterius dixerimus quod diversum sit, ” quoted by Greene (1982, 148), from Garin 1953, 878. 41. Quoted in van Dam 2008, 47. 42. Incertum, 41: cf. “incerti quo fata ferant, ” Aen. 3.7. 43. Ronsard follows a much-­imitated passage of Martial (10.46) in extending the reach of varietas to include variation in quality (“qui bonne qui mauvaise”). 44. Langer (2009, 88–­99) has an illuminating discussion of this passage in connection with the pleasures of describing variety, relating it to Aristotle’s unimpeded (anempodistos) exercise of our faculties, which is pure activity without ulterior goal (energeia [anempodistos] tēs kata physin hexeōs, NE 1153a 14–­15). 45. As Henderson (2002a) notes, Festus (Müller, p. 40), states that “caupona taberna a copiis dicitur.”  Copa is derived from caupona, which is sometimes spelled with an o. 46. On the Copa, see Henderson 2002a. 47. Hindley (1884) quotes, from the collection known as The Roxburgh Ballads, a poem called “The Cries of London” (113–­16), which features the recurring phrase “come buy” and offers a fabulous variety of products. Hogarth’s “Enraged Musician” is a vivid reminder of the noisy commercialism of London in the eighteenth century. Chapter Five 1. Morgan (2007, 257–­73) makes a good distinction between the way a modern miscellany is expected to be read (dipping in and out), and the assumption of ancient miscellanists that a miscellany is to be read through. 2. Morgan 2007 and especially 257–­73. 3. For a thoughtful discussion of the relation between “unity and its dark cousin disunity” in Horace’s Odes, which is one of the miscellanies that will concern us in this chapter, see Lowrie 1997, 4–­14. 4. On the packaging of ancient knowledge and culture as and through miscellanies, see Jeanneret 1987, 156, and Morgan 2011, 54–­57. Grafton (2005, 337) notes the influence of Poliziano’s Miscellanea, modeled on Aulus Gellius, on the first body of technical literature on philology, most of it in the form of miscellanies. Crane (1993) discusses commonplace books and anthologies, in which antiquity is seen as a fund of aphorisms. For bibliogaphy on commonplace books, see Crane 1993, 201. 5. See Morgan 2011, 49–­54, on the question of genre. 6. A good survey of “the search for the perfect book” is in Anderson 1986; some of the other contributions in Fraistat 1986 are also relevant. There is bibliography on the poetry book in Arethusa 13, special issue, Augustan Poetry Books (1980), 115–­27. 7. See Rust’s appendix (2009, 232–­37) on this list, with examples of works with titles cited by Gellius. Not all of the Greek titles are exclusive to works in Greek. See Henrickson 1956 for the use of Greek titles in Latin literature. In Gellius’s list, we have Leimon (used by Cicero,

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 2 – 1 5 7

223

Henrickson 33–­35), Stromateus, used by L. Caesellius Vindex (Henrickson 137–­39), and Pandektae, used by M. Tullius Tiro, Ulpianus, and Herennius Modestinus (Henrickson 178–­80). 8. “Nam quia variam et miscellam et quasi confusaneum doctrinam conquisiverant, eo titulos quoque ad eam sententiam exquisitissimos indiderunt,”  praef. 5. 9. Disingenuously: Johnson 2010, 99–­100. 10. “Proinde, sive epigrammata sive idyllia sive eclogas sive, ut multi, poematia seu quod aliud malueris, licebit voces, ” Epist. 4.4.8–­9. 11. Vardi 2004, 162–­63 on Gellius. More generally, chapter 5 of Riggsby 2006. 12. Conveniently quoted and translated in Fantham 1996, 247. 13. Janson 1964, 80–­83; compare Simonin 1987 for the use of this metaphor in the Renaissance. 14. Cf. AP 7.13.1–­2; 9.190. 15. Is there a pun on mel in melius? 16. Von Stackelberg 1956. Plutarch uses the bee simile of reading to rather different effect in De audiendis poetis 30c–­d, 32e–­f, and De audiendo 41e–­42b. See Xenophontos 2013. I am grateful to Scott DiGiulio for drawing these passages to my attention. 17. Regosin 1994, 252: “The sheer volume of borrowed ideas and borrowed writing in Montaigne’s text reflects the authority of tradition and might imply as well that a ‘self ’ can indeed be conceived out of that which was originally foreign to it. Renaissance culture—­and Montaigne himself—­used the image of the bee gathering pollen to suggest that this process was in fact an aspect of the organic nature of things. ” Contrast the metaphor of the mosaic, of which McPhail (2003, 262–­63) says that it makes words into things and “challenges the cherished ambition of Renaissance humanism to assimilate the classical past into a modern context. . . . The mosaic of speech reminds us that the past can never be seamlessly integrated into the present but always leaves an awkward verbal residue. ” 18. On Poliziano’s use of this title, see Maier 1966, 201–­11. 19. Adam (1988) discusses the tradition of Silvae from Statius through Poliziano to the late Baroque collections of occasional verse and on to J. G. Herder’s Kritische Wälder (1768), emphasizing the associations of the title with the occasional and the improvised. 20. “Le fil rouge de ces poèmes de circonstance est le regard émerveillé (guidé sans être contraint par les codes de l’épidictique) ou douloureux que le poète porte sur son univers, ” Galand, in Galand and Laigneau-­Fontaine 2013, 5. Galand (5–­11) surveys the history of the Silva, identifying as particular loci of Statian influence the Florence of Poliziano, the Naples of Pontano, Leiden in the seventeenth century, and the circle of Johann Herder (10). 21. Succinct discussions in Coleman 1988, xxii–­xxiv; Newlands 2011, 6–­7; and Nauta 2002, 252–­54. A fuller discussion in Wray 2007. 22. Servius distinguishes the tangled and uncultivated (diffusa et inculta) wood (silva) from the orderly nemus (ad Aen. 1.30). 23. “Hylen nostram . . . quam omnis generis coegimus uti scis, octingento in libros, ” Suetonius Gramm. 10 = Funaioli GRF 136–­37. 24. Cameron 1993, 369–­76. 25. On the term “miscellany, ” see Rust, 2009, 28–­32. Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary (1755) traces the term to the Latin “miscellane” meaning “mixed corn. ” Not all European languages use Poliziano’s coinage. German, for instance, alludes to the varium or poikilon that is the primary quality of all miscellanies by referring to miscellaneous writings as Buntschriftstellerei. 26. Another relevant occurrence of the word is when Petronius refers to the bronze made

224

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 7 – 1 6 4

by chance when Corinth was burned: “factae sunt in unum aera miscellanea” (Petronius, Sat. 50; cf. Isidore, Et. 16.20.4; Pliny, HN 34.6). 27. In this connection Vardi (2004, 168) speaks of Gellius’s “dislike of the tendency of professional experts to specialize in different areas, and thus to effectuate a diffraction of knowledge into distinct fields, which runs against the traditional Roman ideal of a wide general learning. ” 28. “Unlike the items in Pliny’s summarium, the syntax of Gellius’s capita suggest no structuring or ordering that distinguishes groups of chapters from each other” (Rust 2009, 131). Vardi (2004, 176–­77) makes the same contrast with Pliny’s index. Early in the ms. tradition the capita rerum were broken up, and each was placed at the beginning of the relevant chapter. This happened sometime after the shift to codex, facilitating the scanning of chapters, which was against Gellius’s purpose (Rust 132–­33, citing Holford-­Strevens 2003, 333). On ancient tables of contents, see Riggsby 2008. 29. Krevans 2005, 88: “In fact, rather than revealing the careful organization of the work (as Pliny), the list emphasizes the lack of thematic unity within each book. Gellius’s work is meant for browsing, for enjoying adjacent anecdotes which jostle each other as though by chance when in fact Gellius has placed every one of them very carefully. ” 30. Holzberg 2002, 123–­52; Rimell 2008, 95. 31. On epigram as anti-­epic, see Martial 4.49 and 10.4. Eating: 10.58; dicing: 5.30.5–­8; 13.17–­18; 14.1.9–­12. 32. Similar statements in Martial 7.81 and 7.85. 33. Martial 10.46 is also quoted by Byron, Don Juan, canto 15, stanza 21. 34. Martial 7.90.4, with specific reference to aequalitas, and 10.46. On aequalitas as an aesthetic principle, see citations in Galan Vioque 2002, 482, especially Quintilian, Inst. Or. 10.1.54 and 10.1.86–­87. Varietas and aequalitas are contrasted in Manilius, Astronomica 4.416: “Omnia mixtis / viribus et vario consurgunt sidera textu; / est aequale nihil. ” See also Citroni 1968, 272, on variety and adhesion to everyday reality. 35. Besides Johnson, Byron, and Ronsard, cited above, see Thomas Mosse’ s Miscellaneous Collection of Poems, Songs and Epigrams. By Several Hands of 1721 (quoted in Benedict 1996, 152). 36. Quoted in Maier 1966, 213. 37. Aristoxenus, for instance, wrote a Summeikta Sympotika (fr. 124 Wehrli). 38. Fitzgerald 2007b, 89–­90. 39. I have argued that the term “juxtaposition” offers a useful alternative to mixing, though, of course, it is not an ancient term (Fitzgerald 2007b, 4–­7). 40. Fitzgerald 2007b, 139–­66. 41. Henrickson 1956, 178–­80. 42. “Is libros complures de usu atque ratione linguae Latinae, item de variis atque promiscis quaestionibus composuit. In his esse praecipui videntur, quos Graeco titulo pandectas inscripsit, tamquam omnium rerum atque doctrinarum genus continentis. ” 43. Benedict 2003, 247–­48. 44. Garnsey, 1996, 95–­96, on legal debates about the status of asylum. 45. See Fitzgerald 2007b, 93–­97, on plagiarism and metaphors of slavery. 46. “Nam proinde ut librum quemque in manus ceperam seu Graecum seu Latinum vel quid memoratu dignum audieram, ita quae libitum erat, cuius generis cumque erant, indistincte atque promisce annotabam. ” 47. On miscellanies and compendia in the second-­century context, see Sandy 1997, 73–­84, and, more broadly, Morgan 2011.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 6 4 – 1 7 4

225

48. Sandy (1997, 76, n. 27) cites Cicero, De Or. 1.81; Valerius Maximus 1 pr.; Seneca Epist. 88.37 and Tranq. 9.5; Quintilian, Inst. Or. 1.8.18–­21, 10.1.37–­42; Frontinus Strat. Pr. 3. See also Morgan 2011, 58–­60. 49. He continues: “non enim fecimus altos nimis et obscuros in his rebus quaestionum sinus, sed primitias quasdam et quasi libamenta ingenuarum artium dedimus, quae virum civiliter eruditum neque audisse umquam neque attigisse, si non inutile, at quidem vere indecorum est” ( praef. 13). 50. Vardi 2004, 165–­67. Martial flaunts the opposite image of his readership: it is only the unimportant, leisured people who have time to read his work (11.3.1–­2), whereas his patrons are too busy (4.82, 5.80, 7.26, 7.97, 11.106). 51. For an early miscellany with a title that constitutes a mini-­essay on the form, see George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundry Flowres bound up in one small posie. Gathered partly (by translation) in the fyne outlandish Gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, Ariosto and others; and partly by Invention out of our own fruitful Orchardes in England, Yielding Sundrie sweete savours of tragical, comical and moral discourse, both pleasaunt and profitable, to the well-­smelling noses of learned readers (1573). According to the OED, sundry’s original meaning is “separate, ” “special” (compare German sonder), and it does not mean “miscellaneous” until the late eighteenth century. 52. “Fragments of feeling, small vignettes which should stimulate the reader to virtue by softening her heart . . . with stories of  heroism and pathos, ” Benedict 1990, 412. 53. Quoted in Benedict 1996, 120. 54. Martial’s poem reminds us that an important dimension of the miscellany’s variety is length, which is not only a matter of the time it takes to read an individual poem but also of the look of the page, the difference between an unbroken and a subdivided page, for instance. 55. “Seminis modo spargenda sunt, quod quamvis est exiguum, cum occupavit idoneum lo­ cum vires suas explicat, ” Epist. 38.2. Trapp 2003, 250, for the philosophical topos of sowing seeds, including the New Testament (Mark 4:4–­20). To Trapp’s parallels one might add Pliny, Epist. 1.20: “sic in actione plura quasi semina latius spargo, ut quae provenerint colligam. ” 56. Though Pliny the Elder (HN, praef.) associates the title Lucubrationum with drinking! 57. It is significant, then, that the next letter addressed to Clarus, the addressee of 1.1, is 1.15, which deals humorously with the potentially embarrassing fact that Clarus has stood Pliny up. 58. Vardi 2004, 72, for the original. 59. Vardi makes the important point that Gellius’s order is intended to reflect the ordo fortuita in which he encountered the material, not necessarily to follow it (2004, 73). 60. This point is well explored by Howley (2011). On the relation between (Greek sympotic) miscellanies and the reading practices of their participants, see the very interesting discussion in Jacob 2000, 104–­7. 61. Vardi 2004, 82; Binder 2003, 13. 62. This was pointed out to me per litteras by Catharine Edwards, who suggests that the letter’s evocation of the variety of an evening’s conversation (“varius nobis fuit sermo, ut in convivio, nullam rem usque ad exitum adducens, sed aliunde alio transiliens, ” 64.2) is a characterization of the letters more generally. 63. Athenaeus 1.35a, 3.107c, 4.132c, 4.139d, 5.187b, 15.665a, with Lukinovich (1990, 267–­68). 64. Jeanneret 1987, 158. 65. Catoni 2010, 917. 66. On Montaigne’s knowledge of Aulus Gellius, see Heath 2004, 308–­17.

226

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 7 5 – 1 8 0

67. In Montaigne’s French: “il se donne cent fois plus de carrière a soy-­mesme, qu’il ne prenoit pour autrui. ” 68. See especially Montaigne’s essay De l’ experience. 69. It is an interesting coincidence (or maybe not!) that Montaigne’s library is located in a tower, which he describes in De Trois Commerces (Montaigne 2003, 933), while Pliny’s favorite suite of rooms, described in 2.17, has at its heart an alcove (zotheca, 2.17.21), which is where he reads and writes. 70. Compare Seneca, Epist. Mor. 45.1: “Non refert quam multos libros sed quam bonos habeas: lectio certa prodest, varia delectat. Qui quo destinavit pervenire vult unam sequatur viam, non per multas vagatur. ” 71. Leigh (2013, 56–­60) discusses this chapter of Gellius. 72. “Deterret enim nos hoc quidem in libro, quam potest maxime, a varia promiscaque et non necessaria rerum cuiuscemodi plurimarum et cogitatione et petitione, ” NA 11.16.8. 73. Plutarch (521c) compares the vision of the polypragmōn to a badly trained serving girl who runs all over the place rather than discharging her task and returning. See Beagon 2011. 74. “Ita quae libitum erat, cuius generis cumque erant, indistincte atque promisce annotabam, ” praef. 2; notice cuiuscemodi in 11.16.8 and cuius generis cumque here. On Gellius’s preface, see Gunderson 2009, 18–­44. 75. On Macrobius’s relation to Gellius, see Gunderson 2009, 255–­69. 76. Varietas in poetry books: Anderson 1986, 45–­49, and Kroll 1924, 225–­46. 77. Krevans 2007. 78. For instance, the first twenty poems are titled Lithika (about stones). After poems 4 and 6, on gems adorning the body of a women, poem 8 makes the transition to a new subsection with the words “No neck or finger of any woman wore this carnelian. ” Poems 19 and 20 wrap up the section Lithika with a rock disrupted by storms at sea. The next section, on omens, begins with poem 21, on good and bad omens for the launching of a ship. 79. On the potential influence of the Iambi on Catullus’s polymetrics, see Fuhrer 1994, 102–­6. 80. Gutzwiller (1996, 131–­32) concludes that the meaning of eidos in this compound is not “poem” or “song” but simply “type, ” “kind, ” with reference to any number of  literary divisions. 81. Acosta-­Hughes, 2002, 4. 82. On the structure of the Iambi, Gutzwiller (1998, 187) has this to say: “While the Iambi display a controlled poikilia through differences in generic form, meter, and dialect, scholars have identified several cohesive principles operating within this variety. Iambi 1–­5 and 13 are written in the Ionic dialect and choliambic meter, apparently as a generic signal of Callimachus’ affinity with archaic iambography. Iambi 6–­12, on the other hand, display a variety of iambic meters, and some are written in the Doric dialect. Organization by purely formal features, such as meter and dialect, gestures towards techniques of scholarly editing; yet in a poet like Callimachus formal arrangement seems effortlessly combined with artistic design. ” See Acosta-­Hughes 2002, 7–­8, for more on structure (meter, dialect, and theme). 83. Watson 2003, 11–­12. 84. This interpretation is supported by what is probably the model of Sidonius’s phrase, Catalepton 15.4 (“et rudis in vario carmine Calliope”), where the whole collection is described, in its final poem, as a varium carmen. 85. See the excellent remarks of Barchiesi 2009, especially 427. 86. On the evidence for such a list, see Leigh 2010, 268–­69, with bibliography.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 8 0 – 1 8 3

227

87. Leigh (2010) argues that Greek emplekein is more likely than egkrinein to be the allusion of Horace’s inseres. 88. Leigh (2010, 271) comments on the fact that some have seen an allusion to Meleager’s anthology in the garland of c. 1.38: “For now the two collections both begin and end with a garland, and the plurality of voice, metres and motifs that Meleager anthologises in the Garland finds its response in the efforts of Horace to make but one voice encompass features distinctive of all nine members of the established canon. ” 89. “This elegant reluctance to assign clear priority to one sphere or the other catches at the equivocations which must always accompany attempts to bracket Horace in one sphere or another [sc. private or public], as he follows the model of a life in poetry which his master offered him” (Feeney 2009, 212). 90. Gutzwiller 1998, 227–­322. Contrast the miscellanies discussed in Morgan 2007, some of which are arranged alphabetically. Valerius Maximus organized his “memorable sayings and doings” thematically. 91. On narrative in elegy, see Liveley and Salzman-­Mitchell 2008, 2–­7. Salzman-­Mitchell sees the frustration of the reader’s desire for a narrative as a method of engaging the reader’s participation: “Elegy is seen to tell fragmented narratives with missing ‘holes’ that require the active engagement of the reader to be satisfactorily completed and filled” (7). The sequence of Propertius 4.7–­8, in which Cynthia is first dead and then alive, is only the most egregious example of the disjunction between sequence and chronology in love elegy. 92. Fitzgerald 1995, 27–­29. 93. Howley (2011, 70–­72), noting, however, that these episodes are bookended by 1.2 and 9.1 representing the beginning and end of his study at Athens respectively. 94. Miscellanea 1.6 contains Poliziano’s (in)famous identification of Catullus’s sparrow as a phallic symbol. On Catullus and Poliziano, see Gaisser 1993, 42–­47 and 67–­78. Laurens 1995 is a good account of the first century of the Miscellanea in its intellectual context. 95. The most obvious example of this separation of paired poems is Catullus’s interposition of c. 6 between c. 5 and c. 7, the poems in which Catullus counts the kisses he desires from Lesbia. C. 7 is explicitly an encore of c. 5, but it is separated by the very different c. 6, in which Catullus teases a friend about his obviously discreditable secret amour. From c. 5 to c. 6 the perspective shifts from that of the lover to that of the observer of (another) love affair, and then back again in the following poem; that all three poems are written in hendecasyllables only enhances the contrast. Other examples of contrasting poems separating a pair, as noted by Hutchinson (2003, 211), are 2b(?), 17, 22, 38, 71, and 108. Hutchinson (2008, 116) adds the following pairs, carefully separated by more than one poem: 23, 26; 55, 58b; 72, 75. As he points out, this principle is counterpointed by the pairing of adjacent poems: 12–­13; 15–­16; 95–­96; 110–­11; 114–­15. See also Claes 2002, 29–­30, on “disjunctive concatenation, ” and 113–­16, on variation. 96. “The separation of paired poems by one intervening poem (2 and 4 as fables, 3 and 5 as erotica, 7 and 9 on statues of  Hermes) does seem, however, a more clearly discernible device. We can thus posit two primary structuring devices in the Iambi—­grouping in sequence (e.g. 1–­4, 12–­13) and placement of paired poems in non-­contiguous positions . . . devices that by operating together create a desired tension between variety and cohesion” (Gutzwiller 1998, 187). 97. See Fuhrer 1994, 99–­100, on precedents, especially Laevius, and on unconventional associations between meter and theme (a love poem in choliambics, etc., 102). 98. See Gibson (2012), for more on the principles of organization of ancient letter collections. Pliny avoids the two principal organizational modes that articulate the collections of his

228

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 8 3 – 1 9 3

predecessors, Cicero and Seneca, namely the singular address system (as in Cicero) and chronological arrangement (Seneca). See Marchesi 2008, 17–­22, on the tension between paradigmatic and syntagmatic organization. “While they [various techniques of organization] collaborate in maintaining a balance between the two opposed compositional options of the anthology and the epistolary novel, these relations work in different ways. Situationally and thematically linked letters provide some elements of continuity to the collection, but they also fragment it, suggesting that other ways of arranging the texts are always available” (Marchesi 22). 99. Van Sickle (1980) makes this point about the ancient reader’s experience. 100. See Skinner 2007, 44–­46, on Catullus, for linear readings. 101. I have discussed the concept of juxtaposition in Fitzgerald 2007b, 4–­7. Wersinger (1996, 273) has interesting things to say about the relation between poikilia and juxtaposition. 102. Lowrie (1995) describes a parade of odes displaying a succession of different lyric predecessors in c. 1.12–­18. 103. I would distinguish the terms of this formulation from the reflection on unity and disunity in Lowrie’s discussion of the Odes of Horace (Lowrie 1997, 4–­13). Lowrie rightly insists that we must find room for disunity in our understanding of Horace’s Odes, individually and as collections, but asks “What is disunity but our failure to understand?” (10). This suggests that we need another, less negative, term for “disunity. ” Lowrie calls for a category of unity that can accommodate “slippage and supplement and other such cracks in the foundation” (11). I would prefer to speak of varietas as a particular kind of unity rather than unity in a more forgiving mood. 104. By contrast, the linear reading is more like the sexual world of Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde, in which a chain of liaisons leads us from the bottom of society to the top, with one character carried over from each episode to the next. 105. Dicing is commonly associated with poetry by Martial, most strikingly in 11.6.2–­3, but see also 4.14, 5.30, and 5.84. Dicing is allowed during the Saturnalia, whose special license Martial claims for his poetry. 106. Compare the Mucius Scaevola charade celebrated in 8.30 and 10.25. 107. I argue that the same effort is required of the reader with respect to 11.90 and 91 (Fitzgerald 2007b, 128–­29). 108. See Vardi 2004, 169–­79, on random order and miscellany. Vardi (169–­70) distinguishes the random order of Gellius’s miscellany from the more homogeneous thematic groupings to be found in Athenaeus and Macrobius. Rust (2009, 30–­31) lists three dimensions of Aulus Gellius’s “miscellaneity”: 1. The contents relate to many disciplines; 2. The chapters are written in various formats (first-­person narratives, dialogues, short notes, and short treatises); 3. The chapters are randomly arrayed throughout the work. 109. “Libri . . . elegantiarum omnigenus referti, ” Gellius, NA 19.4.1 (on Aristotle’s Problemata Physica); “poemata omnigenus, apta . . . lyrae, socco, coturno, ” Apuleius, Florida 9 (on his own versatility). 110. Rust 2009, 19–­20, citing Theodor Vogel. 111. Disparilis is used of conflicting emotions on hearing a philosophy lecture at NA 5.1.4. 112. It is significant that at 12.13.3 Gellius has a rare use of pontificium in the sense of “power of authority, ” which echoes the word pontifex, prominent in the previous chapter. 113. I have discussed something similar in the case of Martial, whose reader must often move directly from a hyperbolic poem of praise to a satirical unmasking of a hypocrite. After enjoying a nice bit of bad faith, the reader must turn on a dime to savor the opposed pleasures of suspicion (Fitzgerald 2007b, 110–­12).

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 9 4 – 2 0 1

229

114. “Has enim curas vocum verborumque elegantias non modo non sectatur Epicurus sed etiam insectatur. ” The Loeb translation, which I have quoted, has a nice version of Epicurus’s play on sectatur/insectatur. Notice the false equivalence of non sectatur and insectatur: here the prefix in-­ is not equivalent to non. 115. Elegantia seems to be a word that interests Gellius. In NA 11.2 he discusses the change in its value, from negative to neutral, between Cato the Elder and Cicero, and then considers the positive uses in his own day. Contrast 16.5.5, homo eleganti (= exact) scientia.

Bibliography

Abrams, M. H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford. Acosta-­Hughes, B. 2002. Polyeideia: The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition. Berkeley. Adam, W. 1988. Poetische und Kritische Wälder. Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Formen des Schreibens “bei Gelegenheit. ” Heidelberg. Agosti, G. 1997. “The Poikilia of Paul the Bishop. ” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 116:31–­38. Allsop, T. 1885. Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge. London. Anderson, W. 1986. “The Theory and Practice of Poetic Arrangement from Vergil to Ovid. ” In Fraistat, Poems in Their Place, 44–­65. Armstrong, D. 1995. “The Impossibility of Metathesis: Philodemus and Lucretius on Form and Content in Poetry. ” In D. Obbink, ed., Philodemus and Poetry: Poetic Theory and Practice in Lucretius, Philodemus, and Horace, 210–­32. Oxford. Austin, R. 1955. P. Vergili Maronis: Aeneidos, Liber Quartus. Oxford. Bader, F. 1987. “La racine de poikilos, pikros. ” In J. Killen, J. Melena, and J.-­P. Olivier, eds., Studies in Mycenean and Classical Greek Presented to John Chadwick (= Minos 20–­22), 41–­60. Baillie, J. 1953. (1747) An Essay on the Sublime. Los Angeles (Augustan Reprint Society). Baines, P. 2004. The Long 18th Century. London. Bakewell, S. 2010. How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. London. Barchiesi, A. 2005. “The Search for the Perfect Book: A PS to the New Posidippus. ” In Gutzwiller, The New Posidippus, 320–­42. ——— —. 2009. “Rituals in Ink: Horace on the Greek Literary Tradition. ” In Lowrie, Horace: Odes and Epodes, 418–­40. Bate, W. 1970. Criticism: The Major Texts (2nd ed.). New York. Baxandall, M. 1971. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Dis­ covery of Pictorial Composition. Oxford. Beagon, M. 1992. Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder. Oxford.

232

bibliogr aphy

——— —. 2011. “The Curious Eye of the Elder Pliny. ” In R. Gibson and R. Morello, eds., Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts, 71–­88. Leiden, Boston. Beard, M. 2007. The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA. Beer, B. 2010. “Der Daedalus der Dichter: Zur Poetologischen Selbstdarstellung des Didaktischen Ich bei Lukrez. ” Philologus 154:255–­84. Benedict, B. 1990. “Literary Miscellanies. The Cultural Mediation of Fragmented Feeling. ” En­ glish Literary History 50 (2): 407–­30. ——— —. 1996. Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Antholo­ gies. Princeton. ——— —. 2003. “The Paradox of the Anthology: Collecting and Difference in Eighteenth Century Britain. ” New Literary History 34 (2): 231–­56. Berardi, E., F. Lisi, and D. Micalella, eds. 2009. Poikilia. Variazioni sul Tema. Rome. Bergmann, B. 1994. “Painted Perspectives of a Villa: Landscape as Status and Metaphor. ” In E. Gazda, ed., Roman Art in the Private Sphere, 49–­70. Ann Arbor, MI. Biffino, G. 2003. “Il Temperamentum e l’uomo ideale dell’età Traianeo. ” In L. Castagna and E. Lefèvre, eds., Plinius der Jüngere und seine Zeit, 173–­88. Munich and Leipzig. Binder, V. 2003. “Vir Elegantissimi Eloquii et Multae Undecumque Scientiae—­Das Selbstver­ ständnis des Aulus Gellius zwischen Fachwissen und Allgemeinbildung. ” In Marietta Horster and Christiane Reitz, eds., Antike Fachschriftsteller: Literarische Diskurs und sozialer Kontext (Palingenesia 18), 105–­20. Stuttgart. Boccuto, G. 1991. “Plinio Ep. VII 9, 11: Un Affermazione Letteraria in Distichi Elegiaci. ” Atene e Roma n.s. 36:26–­36. Booth, J. 1991. Ovid: Amores II. Warminster. Bradley. M. 2006. “Colour and Marble in Early Imperial Rome. ” Cambridge Classical Journal 52:1–­22. ——— —. 2009. Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome. Cambridge. Bright, D. 1980. Elaborate Disarray: the Nature of Statius’ Silvae. Meisenheim am Glan. Brink, C. 1971. Horace on Poetry II: The “Ars Poetica. ” Cambridge. Brown, P. 1984. Lucretius: “De Rerum Natura” 1. Bristol. Butler, S. 2011. The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors. Wisconsin. Butor, M. 1984. Improvisations sur Flaubert. Paris. Buxton, R. 1981. Persuasion in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Cairns, F. 1991. “Catullus 46.9–­11 and Ancient Etymologies. ” Rivista di Filologia e d’Istruzione Classica 119:442–­45. Cameron, A. 1993. The Greek Anthology, from Meleager to Planudes. Oxford. Carruthers, M. 2009. “Varietas: A Word of Many Colours. ” Poetica 41 (1): 33–­54. Carver, Robert. 2007. The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Oxford. Catoni, M. 2010. “Symposium. ” In Grafton, Most, and Settis, eds. The Classical Tradition, 915–­18. Cave, T. 1979. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance, Oxford. Céard, J. 1977. La Nature et les prodiges: l’insolite au XVIème siècle en France. Geneva. Citroni, M. 1968. “Motivi di polemica letteraria negli epigrammi di Marziale. ” Dialoghi di Ar­ cheologia 2:259–­301. Claes, P. 2002. Concatenatio Catulliana: A New Reading of the Carmina. Amsterdam. Clay, D. 1983. Lucretius and Epicurus. Ithaca and London.

bibliogr aphy

233

Coffey, M. 1976. Roman Satire. London. Coffey, M., and R. Mayer. 1990. Seneca: Phaedra. Cambridge. Coleman. K. 1988. Statius’ Silvae IV. Bristol. ——— —. 2006. Martial: Liber Spectaculorum. Oxford. Coleridge, S. T. 1930. Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raynor. 2 vols. London. Consolino, F. 2013. “Sidonio e le Silvae. ” In Galand and Laigneau-­Fontaine, La Silve, 213–­36. Conte, G.-­B. 1994. Genres and Readers: Lucretius, Love Elegy, Pliny’s Encyclopedia. Baltimore. Couzinet, M. 2001. “La varieté dans la philosophie de la nature: Cardan, Bodin. ” In Dominique Courcelles, ed., La varietas à la renaissance, 105–­17. Paris. Crane, M. 1993. Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth Century England. Princeton. Curran, B. 2010. “Emblem. ” In Grafton, Most, and Settis, The Classical Tradition, 307–­8. Deichgräber, K. 1954. “Natura Varie Ludens. Ein Nachtrag zum griechischen Naturbegriff. ” Aka­ demie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur. Abhandlungen der Geistes und Sozialwissen­ schaftlichen Klasse, no. 3, 67–­86. De Lacy, P. 1969. “Limit and Variation in Epicurean Philosophy. ” Phoenix 23:104–­13. Dench, E. 2005. Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian. Oxford. Dewing, H. 1940. Procopius. Vol. 7. On Buildings. Harvard, MA. Drijepondt, H. 1979. Die Antike Theorie der Varietas. Hildesheim. Dunbabin, K. 1999. “Mosaics and Their Public. ” In M. Ennaïfer and A. Rebourg, eds., La mo­ saïque gréco-­romaine VII: Actes du VIIe Colloque International pour l’étude de la mosaïque antique, Tunis 3–­7 Octobre 1994, 739–­45. Tunis. Duport, D. 2000. Les Jardins qui sentent le sauvage: Ronsard et le poétique du paysage. Geneva. Du Prey, P. 2010. “Pliny’s Villas. ” In Grafton, Most, and Settis, The Classical Tradition, 746. Ernout, A., and A. Meillet. 1985. Dictionnaire ėtymologique de la langue latine. Histoire des mots, 4th ed., rev. J. André (Paris). Faber, R. 1998. “Vestis . . . Variata (Catullus 64.50–­51) and the Language of Poetic Description. ” Mnemosyne 51:210–­15. ——— —. 2004. “The Description of Staphylos’ Palace (Dionysiaca 18.69–­86) and the Principle of Poikilia. ” Philologus 148:245–­54. Fantham, E. 1973. Comparative Studies in Republican Latin Imagery. Toronto. ——— —. 1988. “Varietas and Satietas, De Oratore 3.96–­103 and the Limits of Ornatus. ” Rhetorica 6:275–­90. ——— —. 1996. Roman Literary Culture, from Cicero to Apuleius. Baltimore and London. Feeney, D. 2009. “Horace and the Greek Lyric Poets. ” In M. Lowrie, ed., Horace: Odes and Epo­ des, 202–­31. Oxford. Reprinted from N. Rudd, ed., Horace 2000: A Celebration. Essays for the Bimillenium (London 1993), 41–­63. Finden, P. 1990. “Jokes of  Nature and Jokes of  Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe. ” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (2): 292–­331. Fitzgerald, W. 1984. “Lucretius’ Cure for Love in the De Rerum Natura. ” Classical World 78 (2): 73–­86. ——— —. 1995. Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position. Berkeley. ——— —. 2007a. “The Letter’s the Thing (in Pliny, Book 7). ” In R. Morello and A. Morrison, eds., Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Episolography, 191–­210. Oxford.

234

bibliogr aphy

——— —. 2007b. Martial: The World of the Epigram. Chicago. Flaubert, G. 1977. Salammbô (originally publ. 1862; tr. A. Krailsheimer). London. Forster, E. M. 1951. Two Cheers for Democracy. London. Fraistat, N., ed. 1986. Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections. Chapel Hill, NC. Frassinetti, P. 1967. Atellanae Fabulae. Rome. Freudenburg, K. 1993. The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire. Princeton, NJ. ——— —. 1999. Review of M. Lowrie, Horace’s Narrative Odes. Classical Philology 94 (2): 234–­38. Frontisi-­Ducroux, F. 1975. Dédale. Mythologie de l’artisan en Grèce ancienne. Paris. Fuhrer, T. 1994. “The Question of Genre and Metre in Catullus’ Polymetrics. ” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 46:95–­108. Gaisser, J. 1993. Catullus and His Renaissance Readers. Oxford. ——— —. 2008. The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Recep­ tion. Princeton, NJ. Galan Vioque, G. 2002. Martial Book VIII. A Commentary (tr. J. Zoltowski). Leiden. Galand, P., and S. Laigneau-­Fontaine, eds. 2013. La Silve: Histoire d’une Ecriture Liberée en Eu­ rope, de l’Antiquité au XVIIIe Siecle. Turnhout. Galand-­Hallyn, P. 1995. Les Yeux de l’Eloquence: Poétiques Humanistes de L’Evidence. Orleans. Garin, E., ed. 1953. Prosatori Latini del Quattrocento. Milan. Garnsey, P. 1996. Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine. Cambridge. Gasché, R. 2012. “. . . And the Beautiful? Revisiting Edmund Burke’s ‘Double Aesthetics. ’ ” In T. Costelloe, ed., The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, 24–­36. Cambridge. Gerbi, A. 1975. La natura delle Indie Nove: da Cristoforo Columbo a Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. Milan. Translated 1986 as Nature in the New World, tr. J. Moyle, Pittsburgh. Gibson, R. 2012. “On the Nature of Ancient Letter Collections. ” Journal of Roman Studies 102: 56–­78. Gibson, R., and R. Morello. 2012. Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger. Cambridge. Gioseffi, D. 1975. “Terminologia dei sistemi di pavimentazione dell’Antichita. ” In Mosaici in Aquileia e nell’Alto Adriatico [Antichita Altoadriatiche 8], 25–­38. Udine. Goetz, G. 1901. Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum VII. Leipzig. Goodman, M. 2007. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Civilizations. London. Gowers, E. 1993. The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature. Oxford. ——— —. 2012. Horace: Satires, Book 1. Cambridge. Grafton, A. 2004. “Conflict and Harmony in the ‘Collegium Gellianum. ’ ” In Holford-­Strevens and Vardi, The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, 318–­42. Grafton, A., G. Most, and S. Settis, eds. 2010. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge, MA. Grass, S. 1996. “Nature’s Perilous Variety in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market. ’ ” Nineteenth-­Century Lit­ erature 51 (3): 356–­76. Green, A. 1982. Flaubert and the Historical Novel. Cambridge. Greene, T. 1982. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. Yale. Guest, C. 2007. “Varietas, Poikilia and the Silva in Politian. ” Hermathena 183:9–­48. Gunderson, E. 2009. Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library. Madison, WI. Gutzwiller, K. 1996. “The Evidence for Theocritean Poetry Books. ” In M. Harder et al., eds., Theocritus, 119–­48. Groningen. ——— —. 1998. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. Berkeley.

bibliogr aphy

235

——— —, ed. 2005. The New Posidippus: A Hellenistic Poetry Book. Oxford. Harrison, E. 1937. “Juvenal i.81–­9.”  Classical Review 51:55–­56. Haynes, K. 2003. English Literature and Ancient Languages. Oxford. Heath, M. 1989. Unity in Greek Poetics. Oxford. ——— —. 2004. “Gellius in the French Renaissance. ” In Holford-­Strevens and Vardi, The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, 282–­317. Henderson, J. 2002a. “Corny Copa: The Motel Muse. ” In E. Spentzou and D. Fowler, Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature, 253–­78. Oxford. ——— —. 2002b. Pliny’s Statue: The Letters, Portraiture and Classical Art. Exeter. Henrickson, K. 1956. Griechische Büchertitel in der Römischen Literatur. Helsinki. Hindley, C. 1884. A History of the Cries of London, Ancient and Modern. London. Hinds, S. 2001. “Cinna, Statius and ‘Immanent Literary History’ in the Cultural Economy. ” In E. Schmidt, ed., L’Histoire Immanente dans la Poésie Latine, Entretiens Hardt 47, 221–­57. Geneva. ——— —. 2007. “Martial’s Ovid / Ovid’s Martial. ” Journal of Roman Studies 97:113–­54. Hodgen, M. 1964. Early Anthopology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadelphia. Hoffer, S. 1999. The Anxieties of Pliny the Younger. New York. Hogarth, W. 1753. The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a View to Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste. London. Holford-­Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement. Revised edition. Oxford. Holford-­Strevens, L., and A. Vardi, eds. 2004. The Worlds of Aulus Gellius. Oxford. Hollinger, D. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York. Hollis, A. 1977. Ovid: Ars Amatoria, Book 1. Oxford. Holzberg, N. 2002. Martial und das Antike Epigramm. Darmstadt. Hopkins, G. M. 1959. The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. H. House and G. Storey. Oxford. Hopkins, K. 1983. Death and Renewal. Sociological Studies in Roman History, volume 2. Cambridge. Howley, J. 2011. “Intellectual Narratives and Elite Roman Learning in the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius. ” Ph.D. dissertation, St. Andrews University. Hutchinson, G. 2003. “The Catullan Corpus, Greek Epigram, and the Poetry of Objects. ” Clas­ sical Quarterly 53:206–­21. ——— —. 2008. Talking Books: Readings in Hellenistic and Roman Books of Poetry. Oxford. Ingegno, A. 1908. Saggio sulla filosofia di Cardano. Milan. Jacob, C. 2000. “Athenaeus the Librarian. ” In D. Braund and J. Wilkins, eds., Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman World, 85–­110. Exeter. Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham. Janson, T. 1964. Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in Literary Conventions. Stockholm. Javitch, D. 2005. “The Poetics of Variatio in Orlando Furioso.”  Modern Language Quarterly 66 (1): 1–­19. Jeanneret, M. 1987. Des Met et des Mots: banquets et propos de table à la renaissance. Paris. Jenkyns, R. 2008. “Labor Improbus. ” In K. Volk, ed., Vergil’s Georgics, 128–­37 (= Classical Quar­ terly 43 [1993]: 243–­48). Oxford. Johnson, W. A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford.

236

bibliogr aphy

Johnson, W. R. 1976. Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid. Berkeley. Jones, F. 2013. “Drama, Boundaries, Imagination and Columns in the Garden Room at Prima Porta.”  Latomus 72 (4): 997–­1021. Kaster, R. 2005. Emotion, Restraint and Community in Ancient Rome. Oxford. Krevans, N. 2005. “The Editor’s Toolbox: Strategies for Selection and Presentation in the Milan Papyrus. ” In K. Gutzwiller, ed., The New Posidippus, 81–­96. ——— —. 2007. “The Arrangement of Epigrams in Collections. ” In P. Bing and J. Bruss, eds., Brill’s Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: Down to Philip, 36–­146. Leiden. Kroll, W. 1924. Studien zum Verständnis der römischen Literatur. Stuttgart. Labate, M. 1977. “Tradizione Elegiaca e Società Galante negli Amores. ” Studi Classici e Orientali 27:282–­336. Laird, A. 1993. “Sounding Out Ecphrasis: Art and Text in Catullus 64. ” Journal of Roman Studies 83:18–­30. Lampe, K. 2008. “Seneca’s Nausea: ‘Existential’ Experience and Julio-­Claudian Literature. ” Helios 35 (1): 67–­87. Landow, G. 1971. Aesthetic and Critical Theories of  John Ruskin. Princeton, NJ. Langer, U. 2009. Penser les formes du plaisir littéraire à la renaissance. Paris. Laurens, P. 1995. “La Poétique du philologue: Ange Politien dans le lumière du premier centenaire. ” Euphrosyne n.s. 23:349–­67. Lausberg, H. 1990. Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 3rd ed. Stuttgart. Lefèvre, E. 1988. “Plinius Studien 4.”  Gymnasium 95:236–­69. ——— —. 2009. Vom Römertum zum Ästhetizismus: Studien zu den Briefen des Jüngeren Plinius. The Hague. Leibniz, G. 1923–­ . Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften. Multiple vols. in 7 series. Darmstadt/Leipzig/Berlin. Leigh, M. 2010. “The Garland of Maecenas (Horace, Odes 1.1.35).”  Classical Quarterly 60:268–­7 1. ——— —. 2013. From Polypragmon to Curiosus. Oxford. Leopardi, G. 2013. Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Leopardi, ed. M. Caesar and F. D’Intino. London. LeVen, P. 2013. “The Colours of Sound: Poikilia in Its Aesthetic Contexts. ” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 1:229–­42. ——— —. 2014. The Many-­Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry. Cambridge. Lewalski, B. 2000. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Malden, MA. Liveley, G., and P. Salzman-­Mitchell. 2008. Latin Elegy and Narratology: Fragments of a Story. Columbus, OH. Lovejoy, A. 1960. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. New York. Lowrie, M. 1995. “A Parade of Lyric Predecessors: Horace C. 1.12–­18. ” Phoenix 49:33–­45. ——— —. 1997. Horace’s Narrative Odes. Oxford. ——— —, ed. 2009. Horace: Odes and Epodes (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies), Oxford. Lukinovich, A. 1990. “The Play of Reflections between Literary Form and the Sympotic Theme in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus. ” In O. Murray, ed., Sympotica: A Symposium on the “Symposion, ” 263–­76. Oxford. Maier, I. 1966. Ange Politien. La Formation d’un poète humaniste. Geneva. Mankin, D. 2011. Cicero, De Oratore Book III. Cambridge. Marchesi, I. 2008. The Art of Pliny’s Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence. Cambridge.

bibliogr aphy

237

Martindale, C. 1993. Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Cambridge. Maugan-­Chemin, V. 2006. “Le couleurs du marbre chez Pline l’Ancien, Martiale et Stace. ” In Rouveret, Dubel, and Nass, Couleurs et matières dans l’antiquité, 103–­25. May, J., and J. Wisse. 2001. Cicero, On the Ideal Orator. Oxford. Mayer, R. 2012. Horace: Odes, Book 1. Cambridge. McCarthy, K. 2010. “First Person Poetry. ” In A. Barchiesi and W. Scheidel, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, 435–­49. Oxford. McDaniel, C. 2005. “The Roots of Blogging. ” Chronicle of Higher Education 51.47, B2. McLaughlin, M. 1996. Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo. Oxford. ——— —. 2000. “Poliziano’s Stanze per la Giostra: Post-­Modern Poetics in a Proto-­Renaissance Poem. ” In J. Everson and D. Zancani, eds., Italy in Crisis: 1494, 129–­51. Oxford. McPhail, E. 2003. “The Mosaics of Speech’: A Classical Topos in Renaissance Aesthetics. ” Jour­ nal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 66:249–­64. McKeon, R., ed. 1973. Introduction to Aristotle (2nd ed.). Chicago. Menand, L. 1995. “Diversity. ” In F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd ed.), 336–­53. Chicago. Miller, P. 1994. Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome. London. Milnor, K. 2005. Gender, Domesticity and the Age of Augustus. Oxford. Milroy, J. 1977. The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins. London. Monoson, S. 2000. Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Phi­ losophy. Princeton. Montaigne, M. de. 2003. The Complete Essays, tr. M. A. Screech. London. Morello, R. 2003. “Pliny and the Art of Saying Nothing. ” Arethusa 36 (2): 18–­209. ——— —. 2007. “Confidence, Invidia and Pliny’s Epistolary Curriculum. ” In Morello and Morrison, Ancient Letters, 169–­90. Morello, R., and A. Morrison, eds. 2007. Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolog­ raphy. Oxford. Morgan, T. 2007. Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. ——— —. 2011. “The Miscellany and Plutarch. ” In F. Klotz and K. Oikonomou, eds., The Philoso­ pher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s “Table Talk” in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, 49–­73. Oxford. Moss, J. 2007. “What Is Imitative Poetry and Why Is It Bad?” In The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G. Ferrari, 415–­44. Cambridge. Müller, M. 1881. Selected Essays on Language, Mythology and Religion. London. Naerebout, F. 2011. “Convergence and Divergence: One Empire, Many Cultures. ” In G. Kleijn and S. Benoist, eds., Integration in Rome and in the Roman World, 263–­81. Leiden. Nauta, R. 2002. Poetry for Patrons. Literary Communication in the Age of Domitian. Leiden. Neer, R. 2002. Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-­Painting: The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530–­460 BCE. Cambridge. Newlands, C. 2002. Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire. Cambridge. ——— —. 2011. Statius’ Silvae, Book II. Cambridge. Newman, J. 2011. Horace as Outsider. Zürich. Nicolson, M. 1959. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Ithaca, NY.

238

bibliogr aphy

Nisbet, R., and M. Hubbard. 1970. A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book I. Oxford. ——— —. 1978. A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book II. Oxford. Nünlist, R. 2009. The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge. Oliensis, E. 2002. “Feminine Endings, Lyric Seduction. ” In D. Feeney and A. Woodman, eds., Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace, 93–­106. Cambridge. Olson, G. 1982. Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY, and London. Otto, A. 1890. Die Sprichwörter und sprichwörtlichen Redensarten der Römer. Leipzig. Pernot, L. 1994. La Rhétorique de l’Éloge dans le Monde Greco-­Romaine. Paris. Pfeiffer, R. 1976. History of Classical Scholarship 1300–­1850. Oxford. Picone, G. 1978. L’Eloquenza di Plinio: Teoria e Prassi. Palermo. Poliziano, A. 2004. Angelo Poliziano: Silvae, edited and translated by C. Fantazzi. Cambridge, MA. Pomeroy, A. 1980. “A Man at a Spring: Horace, Odes 1.1. ” Ramus 9:34–­50. Port, W. 1926. “Die Anordnung in Gedichtbüchern augusteischer Zeit. ” Philologus 81:280–­308; 427–­68. Porter, D. 1987. Horace’s Poetic Journey: A Reading of Odes 1–­3. Princeton, NJ. Porter, J. 2010. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation and Experi­ ence. Cambridge. Preston, K. 1918. “Aspects of Autumn in Roman Poetry. ” Classical Philology 13:272–­82. Price, U. 1796. Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful. London. Punter, D. 1994. “The Picturesque and the Sublime: Two Worldscapes. ” In S. Copley and P. Garside, eds., The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, 220–­39. Cambridge. Quint, D. 1993. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, NJ. Race, W. 1982. The Classical Priamel from Homer to Boethius. Leiden. Reinhold, M. 1984. Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States. Detroit. Regosin, R. 1994. “1595: Montaigne and His Readers. ” In D. Hollier, ed., A New History of French Literature, 248–­52. Cambridge, MA. Rescher, N. 1979. Leibniz: An Introduction to His Philosophy. Oxford. Richard, J.-­P. 1954. Stendhal Flaubert: Littérature et sensation. Paris. Riggsby, A. 2006. Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words. Austin. ——— —. 2008. “Guides to the Wor(l)d. ” In J. Koenig and T. Whitmarsh, eds., Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, 88–­107. Cambridge. Rimell, V. 2008. Martial’s Rome: Empire and the Ideology of Epigram. Cambridge. Robbins, B. 1993. The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below. Durham, NC. Roberts, M. 1989. The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity. Ithaca, NY. Robinson, S. 1991. Inquiry into the Picturesque. Chicago. Roller, M. 1988. “Pliny’s Catullus: The Politics of Literary Appropriation. ” Transactions of the American Philological Association 128, 265–­304. Römer, J. 1981. Naturästhetik in der frühen römischen Kaiserzeit. Frankfurt. Ronsard, P. 1914ff. Oeuvres Complètes, 20 vols. Edited by P. Laumonier, 4th rev. ed. Paris. Rosenmeyer, T. 1989. Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology. Berkeley, CA. Rouveret, A., S. Dubel, and V. Nass, eds. 2006. Couleurs et matières dans l’antiquité. Paris. Rudd, N. 1979. The Satires of Horace and Persius. Harmondsworth.

bibliogr aphy

239

Russell, D., and M. Winterbottom, eds. 1989. Classical Literary Criticism. Oxford. Rust, E. 2009. “Ex Angulis Sercretisque Librorum: Reading, Writing, and Using Miscellaneous Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae. ” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California. Rutherford, D. 1995. Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature. Cambridge. Sammons, B. 2010. The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue. Oxford. Sandy, G. 1997. The Greek World of Apuleius: Apuleius and the Second Sophistic (Mnemosyne supplement 174). Cologne. Santirocco, M. 1986. Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes. Chapel Hill, NC. Saylor, C. 1972. “The Emperor as Insula: Pliny Epist. 6.31.”  Classical Philology 77:139–­44. Schneider, R. 1986. Bunte Barbaren. Orientalstatuen aus farbigen Marmor in der römischen Rep­ resentationskunst. Worms. ——— —. 2001. “Coloured Marble: The Splendour and Power of  Imperial Rome. ” Apollo Magazine n.s. 473:3–­10. Schor, N. 1987. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York. Screech, M. 2003. Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays. Harmondsworth. Sedgwick, W., ed. 1950. The “Cena Trimalchionis” of Petronius. 2nd ed. Oxford. Shackelton Bailey, D. 1986. Cicero: Selected Letters. Harmondsworth. Shorrock, R. 2001. The Challenge of Epic: Allusive Engagement in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus (Mne­ mosyne supplement 210). Leiden. Silk, M., I. Gildenhard, and R. Barrow. 2014. The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought. Oxford. Simonin, M. 1987. “ ‘Poésie est un pré, ’ ‘Poème est une fleur’: metaphore horticole et imaginaire du texte à la Renaissance. ” In Letteratura e i Giardini: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi di Verona, 2–­5 Ottobre 1985, 45–­56. Florence. Skinner, M. 1976. “Iphigeneia and Polyxena: A Lucretian Allusion in Catullus. ” Pacific Coast Philology 11:52–­61. ——— —. 2007. “Authorial Arrangement of the Collection: Debate Past and Present. ” In M. Skinner, ed., A Companion to Catullus, 37–­53. Malden, MA. Smith, R. 1988. “Simulacra gentium: The ethnē from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias. ” Journal of Roman Studies 78:50–­77. Snyder, J. 1980. Puns and Poetry in Lucretius’ “De Rerum Natura.”  Amsterdam. Spencer, D. 2011. Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity (Greece and Rome, New Surveys in the Classics 39). Cambridge. Stallybrass, P., and A. White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca. Stevenson, A. 2004. “Gellius and the Roman Antiquarian Tradition. ” In Holford-­Strevens and Vardi, The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, 118–­57. Thomas, R. 1988. Virgil, Georgics. Volume 1: Books I–­II. Cambridge. Thomson, D. 1998. Catullus, Edited with a Textual and Interpretative Commentary. Toronto. Trapp, M. 2003. Greek and Latin Letters: An Anthology with Translation. Cambridge. Trimpi, W. 1962. Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style. Stanford. Trinquier, J. 2006. “Quid de pratorum viriditate plurima dicam? (Cicero, De Senectute, 57): les couleurs du paysage de Lucrèce à l’époque flavienne. ” In Rouveret, Dubel, and Nass, Cou­ leurs et matières dans l’antiquité, 213–­59. Tucker, H. 2003. “Rossetti’s Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye. ” Representa­ tions 82:117–­33. Tully, J. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge.

240

bibliogr aphy

Van Dam, H. 2008. “Wandering Woods Again: From Poliziano to Grotius. ” In The Poetry of Statius, ed. J. Smolenaars, H-­J. van Dam, and R. Nauta, 45–­64. Leiden. Van Sickle, J. 1980. “The Book Roll and Some Conventions of the Poetic Book. ” Arethusa 13 (1): 5–­40. Vardi, A. 2002. “A Book of  Verse beneath a Bough: Literature for Recreation in the Early Principate.”  Scripta Classica Israelica 21:83–­96. ——— —. 2004. “Genre, Conventions, Cultural Programme in Gellius’ Noctes Atticae. ” In Holford-­ Strevens and Vardi, The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, 159–­86. Vernant, J.-­P., and M. Detienne. 1991. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Chicago. Von Stackelberg, J. 1956. “Das Bienengleichnis. ” Romanische Forschungen 68:271–­93. Watson, L. 2003. A Commentary on Horace’s Epodes. Oxford. Weber, H. 1986. “Varietas/Variatio/Variation/Variante. ” In Handwörterbuch der Musikalischen Terminologie (1976–­2006), ed. H. Eggebrecht. Wiesbaden. Weinberg, B. 1961. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago. Wersinger, A.-­G. 1996. “L’entrelacs et la bigarrure dans la pensée grecque antique. ” Recherches sur la Philosophie et le Langage 18:255–­76. West, D. 1995. Horace, Odes 1: Carpe Diem. Text, Translation and Commentary. Oxford. Whitton, C. 2013. Pliny the Younger: Epistles Book 2. Cambridge. ——— —. 2014. “Minerva on the Surrey Downs: Reading Pliny (and Horace) with John Toland. ” Cambridge Classical Journal 60:127–­57. Wilamowitz-­Möllendorff, U. von. 1913. Reden und Vorträge. 3rd ed. Berlin. Williams, R. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised edition. Oxford. Wimmel, W. 1960. Kallimachos in Rome. (Hermes Einzelschrift 16). Wiesbaden. Wimsatt, J. 1954. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. London. Wolff, E. 2003. Pline le Jeune ou le réfus du pessimisme—­Essai sur sa correspondance. Rennes. Wray, D. 2007. “Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Genius. ” Arethusa 40 (2): 127–­43. Xenophontos, S. 2013. “Imagery and Education in Plutarch. ” Classical Philology 108 (2): 126–­38. Zeiner, N. 2005. Nothing Ordinary Here: Statius as Creator of Distinction in the “Silvae. ” New York and London.

Index

Abrams, M. H., 56 Addison, Joseph, 56 Akenside, Mark, 56 Apuleius, 60–­61 Aquinas, Thomas, 42 Ariosto, 63 Aristotle, 8, 10, 58, 63, 64 Arnold, Matthew (“Dover Beach”), 12–­13, 24 Athenaeus, 156, 171–­72 Augustine, 52, 78–­79 Baillie, John, 67 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9–­10 Barchiesi, Alessandro, 151 Bellarmino, Cardinal, 54–­55 Benjamin, Walter, 149 Bernard of Clairvaux, 57 Burke, Edmund, 39, 67 Butor, Michel, 77 Byron, George, 14 Callimachus, 178–­79 Cardan, Jerome, 40 Catullus varietas of polymetrics, 170–­71, 182 varius in (c. 46), 108–­11 varius in (c. 64), 26 Cave, Terence, 47 Cicero definition of varietas in (De Finibus 2.3.10), 17 on distinctio (De Oratore 2.3.96), 22 Lucilius on mosaic style, quoted by, 71 Pliny on letters of, 88 on spectacle of cosmos (De Natura Deorum 2.104), 40

topos of “what to prioritize?” in (De Oratore 3.25), 65–­66 two kinds of varietas in (De Oratore 3.96–­103), 49–­50 Clement of Alexandria, 154, 167–­68 Coleridge, Samuel, 8, 29, 55–­56, 68–­69 commonplace book, 3, 222n4 concordia discors, 5, 8, 10, 197 Copa (Ps-­Vergil), 145 copia, 2, 8, 10, 15, 46–­48, 88–­90, 134, 145, 163–­64 Cowper, William (The Task), 57–­58 Crinito, Petro, 72 Crousaz, J. P., 41 curiositas, 59 daedalus, 101, 111–­12 Defoe, Daniel, 63–­64 Dell’Aquila, Serafino, 34 Diomedes (grammarian), 133 disparilitas, 190–­91 dissemination, 10 distinguo, distinctio, 10, 22, 67–­68, 97–­98, 220n13 diversity, 4–­5, 74, 80–­83 Donne, John, 126–­27, Dryden, John, 103 emblema, 73 Ennius, 172–­74 Erasmus on the letter’s variety, 217n24 nature’s variety in (De Copia 1.8.6), 33–­34, 46–­47 Flaubert, Gustave (Salammbô), 69, 76 Forster, E. M., 4–­5

242

index

garden painting, 200–­201, 206n37 Gay, John, 165–­66 Gellius, Aulus on copia (Noctes Atticae 1.8), 163 intellectual discussion in Noctes Atticae (19.10), 172–­74 miscellanized autobiography in, 181–­82 Noctes Atticae as miscellany, 187–­95 Poliziano, influence on, 156–­57 on polygragmosynē, 176–­77 randomness in Noctes Atticae, 170 on titles of miscellanies, 152–­53 genre, 116–­48 Great Chain of Being, 2, 41–­42, 55

Milton, John, 15 miscellany, 3, 7, 40, 149–­94 and banquet, 161–­62, 166, 171–­72 metaphors of, 153–­61 miscellany (term), 156 and readers, 161–­68, 183–­95 titles of miscellanies, 152–­57, 162 Moneta, Ernesto, 4 Montaigne, Michel de, 32, 174–­76 Moretum (Ps Vergil), 79–­80 Müller, Max, 107

Harding, J. D., 38 Heath, Malcolm, 9 Hogarth, William, 211n75 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (“Pied Beauty”), 106–­8 Horace bee metaphor in, 154–­55 listing in (Satires 1.2.1–­2), 116–­17 poetics of varietas in, 111–­15 priamel in (c. 1.1), 119–­25 on satire and variety, 135–­36 unity in (Ars Poetica), 8 variety in ode books of, 178–­81, 183 varius in (c. 2.5.12), 17, 23–­24, hunting, 129–­30

Ovid didactic variety in Ars Amatoria (1.755–­70), 128–­30 listing in (Amores 2.4), 125–­26 monotony in exile poetry of (Ex Ponto 3.8.47–­ 48), 169 varius in, 27

Isidore of Seville (Origines), 133, 204 Jameson, Fredric, 69–­70 Johnson, Samuel, 57 Jones, Fred, 200–­201 Juvenal, 133–­36, 157 Langer, Ullrich, 32, 44, 62 Leibniz, 32, 42–­43 Leopardi, Giacomo, 149 Lovejoy, Arthur, 32–­33, 41–­42, 55–­56 Lucilius, 71–­73 Lucretius, 100–­111, 184, 198 MacNeice, Louis, 16 Macrobius (Saturnalia), 53, 155, 177 macula (blemish), 37–­38 marble, 37, 76, 141–­42 Martial empire as varied in (Spec. 3), 74–­76 juxtaposition in, 185–­87 metaphors of mixing in, 159–­61 quality as dimension of variety in, 57, 158 melting pot, 79 Menand, Louis, 80 metabolē (change), 21, 48–­50

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71 Nonnus, 84

Paik, Nam June, 69–­70 Pamphile of Epidaurus, 153, 169–­70 pantheon, 76 Persius, 136–­37 picaresque, 63 picturesque, 68 Pindar, 111–­13, 117–­18, 154 Plato defended by Gellius, 193–­94 exemplar of copia and varietas, 47 foe of poikilia, 38, 60, 81 on unity, 8 Plautus, 25 Pliny the Elder, 35–­37, 53 Pliny the Younger random ordering of letters, 169 on title of his nugae, 153 varietas as leitmotif of letters of, 84–­100 on variety of audience, 52 variety of letter types in, 182–­83 varius in poem on Cicero in (Epist. 7.4), 35 varius with positive ethical sense in, 19 Plotinus, 2, 42 Plutarch, 33, 36 poikilia, poikilos, 8–­9, 20–­21, 38, 45, 47, 49, 60, 81, 84, 111–­13, 203n8, 206n47, 211n62, 218n38 Poliziano, Angelo aequalitas rejected by, 158 miscellanizes commentary on Catullus, 182, 222n4 on mosaic style of Miscellanea, 72–­73 title of Miscellanea, 156 varied style and audience of Miscellanea, 53

index variety of Miscellanea compared to nature by, 33 on Vergil’s variety (Manto), 54, 142–­43 Polybius, 61, 77 polyeideia, 179 polypragmosynē, 176–­77 Pope, Alexander, 14–­15, 203–­4 Porter, James, 9, 38 Posidippus, 178 praeteritio, 121–­22 priamel, 118–­28, 152 Procopius, 66 Propertius, 127–­28 Quint, David, 73–­74 Quintilian, 44, 72 reception studies, 5, 197–­98 recreare, recreation, 62 Reynolds, Joshua, 37–­38 Richard, Jean-­Pierre, 69, 78 Roberts, Michael, 65, 70–­71 Robinson, Sidney, 68 romance, 62–­63 Ronsard, Pierre de, 3, 126–­27, 144–­45 Rossetti, Christina (“Goblin Market”), 146–­47 Ruskin, John, 38–­39 satire, 132–­37 Schott, Ben, 149 Seneca the Younger bee metaphor in (Epist. 84.5), 155 on desultory reading, 176 Letters, role of variety in, 171 quousque eadem in, 137–­39 on sermo, 167 sublime in Consolatio ad Marciam (18.5), 67–­68 variety in Phaedra (1–­91), 130–­32 Shakespeare, William, 14, 55 Sidonius Apollinaris, 65, 70, 179 silva, silvae, 150, 155 Solinus, Gaius Iulius, 159 Statius 64–­65, 139, 156 Tacitus, 61–­62 Tasso, Torquato, 63 Tully, James, 81–­83 variatio, 125–­26 variety anti-­synoptic, 64–­73

243 and attentiveness, 59–­60 of audience, 51–­53 (Brief ) History of, 31 and “choice,” 3–­4 as corrective, 2, 57–­64 and creativity, 39–­41, 53–­56 and deictics, 44, 53–­54, 66, 129–­30, 142–­43 and “elegant variation,” 50–­51 and empire, 4, 44–­45, 73–­82, 109–­10 and jewels, 70 and lists, 116–­48 and lyric poetry books, 94, 178–­83 meadows as image of, 102 and mosaics, 71 and multiple plots, 60 and nature, 33–­46, 101–­2, 106 “nature rejoices in variety” topos, 2, 5, 13, 16, 33–­36, 140–­41 as non-­assimilation, 10 and ornament, 8 in Renaissance, 31, 40, 44 in rhetoric, 46–­56, 93–­94 and satietas, fastidium, 48–­51, 57–­64, 86, 92, 137 as spice of life, 57 and sublime, 10, 66–­70 and theodicy, 2, 13, 41–­46 and unity, 8–­9, 113–­14, 185 varietas syndrome, 2, 6 and “Variety Show,” 3 Various and variety collocated with infinite, 38–­39, 55, 206n8 in English poetry, 12–­17 varius, varietas and color, 17–­18, 23 in ethical sense, 19 etymology of, 17, 20, 204n6 meanings of, 17–­21 temporal and visual senses, 25–­30, 49–­50 varietas delectat, 49, 57–5­8 vox propria of Autumn colors, 23 words for in German, 19, 203n2, 204n13 Vergil Macrobius on variety of, 53 Poliziano on variety of, 142–­43 varius in Aeneid, 47, 73–­74 varius in Aeneid Book 4, 27–­28 varius in Georgics, 36, 43–­46 Von Haller, Albrecht, 43, 203n2 Wilamowitz, Ullrich von, 91 Wimsatt, W. K., 50–­51