Search Results

Beyond Pastoral? Generic Pressures in Vergil's Eclogues

S.J. Harrison

in Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace

The Eclogues is examined as a collection extending the bounds of Hellenistic pastoral, partly on the model of the Theocritean collection. Particular emphasis is laid on Eclogues 4, 6, and 10, where ... More

The Eclogues is examined as a collection extending the bounds of Hellenistic pastoral, partly on the model of the Theocritean collection. Particular emphasis is laid on Eclogues 4, 6, and 10, where generic complexity is most obvious and most overtly foregrounded. Here, we have a classic case of generic complexity, driven both by Hellenistic precedent (Theocritus) and by the political demands of the stormy triumviral period (Caesar, Pollio, land-confiscations).Less

Pastoral and the Painful Schoolmaster

Andrew Wallace

in Virgil's Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England

This chapter argues that early modern pedagogical authorities and commentators find in Virgil's Eclogues several close engagements with the vocabulary of teaching. These authorities and commentators, ... More

This chapter argues that early modern pedagogical authorities and commentators find in Virgil's Eclogues several close engagements with the vocabulary of teaching. These authorities and commentators, in turn, wring from Virgil's words a series of complex statements about repetition, dialogue, echo, and instruction. This chapter argues that they locate in pastoral and pedagogical dialogue an erotics of the voice, a responsiveness of one voice to another as of one body to another. In addition to offering an extended treatment of the collection's pedagogical diction and a detailed examination of the Sixth Eclogue, the chapter discusses texts by Erasmus, the Spanish humanist, teacher, and commentator Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), late antique and early modern grammar books, schoolroom dialogues by the humanist grammar-school teacher Maturin Cordier, and translations of the Eclogues by Abraham Fleming, John Brinsley, and William Lisle (c.1569–1637). The chapter concludes by reading one of the most vexatious aspects of Milton's Lycidas (what Stanley Fish calls its studied hesitation ‘between monologue, dialogue, and something that is not quite either’) as a record of Milton's own conversation with the pedagogical subplot of Virgil's Eclogues.Less

Hellenistic Nympholeptoi

Corinne Ondine Pache

in A Moment’s Ornament: The Poetics of Nympholepsy in Ancient Greece

Leaving the city of Athens in the classical period, chapter 6 turns to the countryside of the Hellenistic poets. Hellenistic poets highlight the indeterminacy of nympholeptic encounters, which can ... More

Leaving the city of Athens in the classical period, chapter 6 turns to the countryside of the Hellenistic poets. Hellenistic poets highlight the indeterminacy of nympholeptic encounters, which can result in blindness, death, disappearance, or poetry. For Theocritus, the death of a nympholeptic herdsman, Daphnis, becomes the beginnings of a new genre, bucolic poetry. Callimachus plays on the paradigm of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite to tell a story of divine punishment that leaves the mortal Teiresias blinded but endowed with a prophetic gift. The pastoral nymph, a goddess who lives in the human landscape, displaces the more traditional Muses as the source of inspiration for this new genre of poetry that fuses folk narratives and archaic models into a new poetic and religious landscape, where the nympholept becomes a central figure simultaneously as he disappears.Less

Shifting Perspectives of Comic Abjection: Odysseus and Polyphemus as Figures of Satire

Ralph M. Rosen

in Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire

This chapter analyzes various characters from Greek myth who illustrate the dynamics of satirical interaction. It examines in particular the complicated tradition that pits Odysseus and the Cyclops ... More

This chapter analyzes various characters from Greek myth who illustrate the dynamics of satirical interaction. It examines in particular the complicated tradition that pits Odysseus and the Cyclops Polyphemus against each other. The versions found in Homer, Theocritus (6 and 11), Euripides' and Philoxenus' Cyclops are discussed. The argument here develops some of the principles articulated in Chapter 3, that an audience's perception of what constitutes satire will depend on the ways in which poets manipulate narratological perspective and moral pretenses of their characters.Less

Scots Pastoral

Nigel Leask

in Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland

This chapter moves from the socio-economic context to situate Burns's poetry in relation to literary genre. Taking its point of departure from Annabel Patterson's Pastoral and Ideology, it suggests ... More

This chapter moves from the socio-economic context to situate Burns's poetry in relation to literary genre. Taking its point of departure from Annabel Patterson's Pastoral and Ideology, it suggests that the distinctive mode of ‘Scots Pastoral’ emerged from the early-18th century Neoclassical debate about pastoral, and was devised by Allan Ramsay as part of a campaign to create an integrated ‘British’ poetic in the wake of the Act of Union. Picking up on the argument of Chapter 1, the chapter examines Burns's rationale, as an improving farmer, for employing pastoral rather than georgic in his turn to poetry. It studies Ramsay's successors, especially Robert Fergusson, and their influence on the poetics and language theory of Burns's 1786 ‘Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’.Less

Erotic Translation

Matthew Reynolds

in The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue

‘Translation‐as‐desire’ can mutate into ‘translation as fantasy’: this occurs when the translator's imagination is frustrated by the source with the result that he (this is a predominantly masculine ... More

‘Translation‐as‐desire’ can mutate into ‘translation as fantasy’: this occurs when the translator's imagination is frustrated by the source with the result that he (this is a predominantly masculine mode) goes off into a dream of his own. The mode flourishes in translations of romance: I dwell on Fairfax's Tasso (1600), and give a counter example from translations of Petrarch in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784). But since translation‐as‐fantasy has its main root in the translator's feelings rather than in the source text it leads beyond the boundaries of translation to enormously elaborative responses like Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini (massively expanded from Dante's episode of Paoloa and Francesca) and Swinburne's reveries on Sappho.Less

Performance and Occasion

Andrew Ford

in Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts

This Chapter compares another pair of representations of Hermias, two epigrams in elegiacs. An epigram Aristotle is said to have composed for a memorial at Delphi is read against the mocking response ... More

This Chapter compares another pair of representations of Hermias, two epigrams in elegiacs. An epigram Aristotle is said to have composed for a memorial at Delphi is read against the mocking response to this verse by Theocritus of Chios and the different social functions of elegiacs as opposed to lyric verse are introduced. It emerges that Aristotle’s poetry for his friend necessarily took on a polemical, even propagandistic aspect. The genre of epigram also raises possibility that the occasion projected by a poem for its ostensible performance may be fictive, as in the case of “book epigrams.” Although it declares itself a poem inscribed on stone, Aristotle’s Delphic epigram shows a rhetorical subtlety that suggests that he, like Theocritus, may have anticipated the Hellenistic tradition of literary epigrams.Less

Hellenistic Poetry

THOMAS K. HUBBARD

in Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents

The poets treated in this chapter came from a stunning variety of places: Libya (Callimachus), Sicily (Theocritus), southern Italy (Nossis), Syria (Meleager), Asia Minor (Strato), and Crete ... More

The poets treated in this chapter came from a stunning variety of places: Libya (Callimachus), Sicily (Theocritus), southern Italy (Nossis), Syria (Meleager), Asia Minor (Strato), and Crete (Rhianus). Hellenistic poetry and art differed from that of the archaic and classical periods in the attention it gave to realism and even the grotesque in preference to idealization of the human figure and society. Lesbianism is less often in evidence as a theme. The greatest flowering of the Hellenistic epigram actually occurred long after the first generation of poets. Fragments from AP, Diegesis to Iamb, Idyll, Collectanea Alexandrina, Mimiamb, and Anacreontea are also presented.Less

Virgil's Contribution to Pastoral: [From Proceedings of the Virgil Society 22 (1996) 53–77.]1

Niall Rudd

in The Common Spring: Essays on Latin and English Poetry

This chapter identifies five Virgilian modifications of Theocritus in the Eclogues: toning down Theocritus's fiestiness and moving the material to a higher literary register, use of other genres, ... More

This chapter identifies five Virgilian modifications of Theocritus in the Eclogues: toning down Theocritus's fiestiness and moving the material to a higher literary register, use of other genres, presenting Roman current events in Theocritean mask, use of unTheocritean Greek poetry and the Romanising of the Theocritean style. Virgil is shown to consistently use, modify and refine Greek poetry as he develops his own style.Less

‘Where do I Begin?’: An Odyssean Narrative Strategy and its Afterlife

Richard Hunter

in Defining Greek Narrative

The proem of Odysseus’ narrative of his adventures at Odyssey 912-18, in which he asks in what order he should tells his many troubles, was influential throughout later Greek narrative and Greek ... More

The proem of Odysseus’ narrative of his adventures at Odyssey 912-18, in which he asks in what order he should tells his many troubles, was influential throughout later Greek narrative and Greek narrative theory. Beginnings were difficult not just as a problem of arrangement, but because to choose a narrative beginning is also to decide on a chain of causality. In Theocritus 2, Simaitha reflects on the origins of her love, which is a more complex question than it appears. In Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, Calisiris presents himself as an Odysseus/Proteus while also invoking Plato and the interpretive tradition. Ancient readers saw Homer and Odysseus as exceptionally close to teach other as narrators, both as fabulists and as self-conscious orderers of narrative.Less

Metalepsis and Readerly Investment in Fictional Characters: Reflections on Apostrophic Reading

Felix Budelmann

in Metalepsis: Ancient Texts, New Perspectives

This chapter is a critical discussion of the metaleptic phenomenon of apostrophizing fictional and/or long-dead characters. It asks what model of engagement with fiction emerges if one takes the ... More

This chapter is a critical discussion of the metaleptic phenomenon of apostrophizing fictional and/or long-dead characters. It asks what model of engagement with fiction emerges if one takes the gesture of speaking to a fictional character literally, not merely as a rhetorical trope but a meaningful speech act. In this mode of reading, modelled by an apostrophizing author as first reader of their own text, apostrophe suggests that characters are, somehow, still available to be interacted with. Apostrophe therefore serves as an invitation for readers to invest in characters and form relationships with them, for instance loving them or mourning for them. By discussing four rather different examples—Homeric epic, Sapphic lyric, a bucolic poem by Theocritus, and a progymnasma by Musonius Rufus—the chapter argues that apostrophe not only repays reading as a model of how readers engage with fiction, but that each text offers its own version of this engagement.Less

Anachronism as a Form of Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature

Peter Bing

in Metalepsis: Ancient Texts, New Perspectives

This chapter discusses anachronism as a form of metalepsis and different ways of understanding anachronism in the ancient and modern worlds. The chapter begins by highlighting potential complexities ... More

This chapter discusses anachronism as a form of metalepsis and different ways of understanding anachronism in the ancient and modern worlds. The chapter begins by highlighting potential complexities in applying Genette’s model of metalepsis to ancient literature, drawing out the differences between the case of a character about to murder a reader in Cortázar’s ‘Continuity of Parks’ (discussed by Genette) and that of a character, Helen, blinding and then healing an author in Stesichorus’ Palinode. It then turns to anachronism, a phenomenon which renders synchronous things that, from a historical/chronological perspective, do not belong to a shared temporal plane, and can thus be understood as metaleptic when the time periods involved are ‘the world in which one tells’ (the present) and ‘the world of which one tells’ (often, in the ancient world, the remote heroic past). The chapter moves from a modern instance which highlights anachronism’s pointedly transgressive potential (the use of 1970s music in Brian Helgeland’s 1370s-set movie, A Knight’s Tale) to the dominant ancient discourse about anachronism, according to which most anachronism is inadvertent and the critic’s job is to correct it. But the chapter argues that despite this, ancient sources such as Plato’s Symposium do recognize a more artful use of anachronism and potential modes of audience response to it, and concludes by asking what a pointedly erudite astronomical anachronism in a poem of Theocritus tells us about the audience envisaged by its author.Less

The Grounds of Hexameter Poetry

G. O. Hutchinson

in Greek to Latin: Frameworks and Contexts for Intertextuality

Hexameter should be recognized as a super-genre, which is not the same as calling all hexameter poetry ‘epic’. The genres within the super-genre differ greatly in their grounds; these are derived ... More

Hexameter should be recognized as a super-genre, which is not the same as calling all hexameter poetry ‘epic’. The genres within the super-genre differ greatly in their grounds; these are derived from Greek poetry, and Latin and Greek are compared. The basic ground of narrative hexameter poetry is typically an account of the past addressed to no one, and marked by ironic knowledge; it typically contrasts with the inset grounds of speeches, marked by emotion. The basic ground of didactic poetry is an account of things which obtain generally, addressed to a pupil; there are few other characters. Latin and Greek are here close in phrasing. Pastoral, especially in Latin, minimizes narrative, and emphasizes fictional speech and song. Satire emphasizes a first-person narrator, but has considerable connections with Theocritus and pastoral in ground. Occasional and inscriptional poetry is also discussed.Less

Space and Intertextuality in Hexameters

G. O. Hutchinson

in Greek to Latin: Frameworks and Contexts for Intertextuality

The two types of narrative hexameter poetry — on Greek myth and Roman history — stand at a different distance from Greek poetry; and even within the type on Greek myth there are different distances ... More

The two types of narrative hexameter poetry — on Greek myth and Roman history — stand at a different distance from Greek poetry; and even within the type on Greek myth there are different distances from Greek models. The various subjects of didactic poetry, intrinsically general, are localized to different degrees, and involve different degrees of proximity to Greek poetic models; Greek prose is also important. Pastoral uses names to bring a Greek world into different places. Placing and proximity to Greek are connected but Calpurnius makes considerable use of non-bucolic Theocritus. Satire is less separate from the lower kinds of Greek hexameter poetry than might appear. Theocritus is again important, as is the Italian country. Occasional poetry is connected with Greek occasional hexameters, but has a different spatial focus. Greek and Latin inscriptional poetry come together particularly at Rome.Less

Pastoral and Idyll

G. W. Pigman III

in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 2 1550-1660

This chapter surveys translations of pastoral poetry in the 1550–1660 period. These include translations of Theocritus' Idylls, Moschus, Bion, Virgil, and vernacular pastorals.

Virgil’s Eclogues as Meditation

Aaron J. Kachuck

in The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil

This chapter argues that Virgil’s Eclogues give literary form to Rome’s solitary sphere and make solitude their central social and literary problem. A meditation on Virgil’s use of the verb meditari ... More

This chapter argues that Virgil’s Eclogues give literary form to Rome’s solitary sphere and make solitude their central social and literary problem. A meditation on Virgil’s use of the verb meditari (“to meditate, contemplate, practice”) and on the fourth Eclogue provides background for a formulation of Virgil’s model of “loveful reading” that, in its solitude, nuances readings of the Eclogues as representing dreams of social reciprocity and communal (pastoral) humanism. Drawing on multiple genealogical and comparative sources, and the whole of the Eclogues book, it argues that the first, fifth, and tenth Eclogues privilege the solitary over the private and public. Finally, it shows how Virgil confounds the commonplace assignment of the pastoral of solitude to later literary periods, in ways appreciated by two of Virgil’s closest readers: John Milton and Andrew Marvell.Less

Rethinking the Classics: 59–42 BC

T. P. Wiseman

in The Roman Audience: Classical Literature as Social History

Lucretius wanted to reach a wider public than just his patron Memmius; Philodemus and the authors he cited took it for granted that both prose and poetry were meant to be heard by a general audience. ... More

Lucretius wanted to reach a wider public than just his patron Memmius; Philodemus and the authors he cited took it for granted that both prose and poetry were meant to be heard by a general audience. Demetrius On Style treated historians as analogous to poets, and serious letter-writers to epideictic orators, implying oral delivery in each case. Caesar’s war commentaries, as annual reports to the People rather than the Senate, were probably composed to be read out in public. Catullus’ attacks on Caesar presuppose a wide audience; poems 61–3 are evidently for performance; and the genre we call ‘epyllion’ may have been intended to accompany music and dance. The ‘Greek stage’ attested at Rome in the second and first centuries BC may have influenced both Catullus and Virgil to imitate the ‘mimes’ of Theocritus.Less

The Conditions of Poetic Immortality: Epicurus, Daphnis, and Hagnon

Lisa Whitlatch

in Grattius: Hunting an Augustan Poet

This chapter focuses on Grattius’ praise of the mercurial figure of Hagnon in the central portion of the extant poem and argues that Grattius takes us on an intertextual journey back through Virgil’s ... More

This chapter focuses on Grattius’ praise of the mercurial figure of Hagnon in the central portion of the extant poem and argues that Grattius takes us on an intertextual journey back through Virgil’s Eclogues (the figure of Menalcas) to Lucretius (the figure of Epicurus), and ultimately to Theocritus (the figure of Daphnis), in an effort to secure for hunting positive associations that are absent from the Roman forebears. By means of such intertextual dialogue, as well as pointed use of the language of dowries, Grattius subtly promotes the notion that hunting is an eternal symbiotic relationship between man, god, and nature, which ensures its sustainability.Less