Clay, D. (1998) The Theory of The Literary Persona in Antiquity - MD 40, Pp. 9-40

Diskin Clay
The Theory of the Literary Persona

in Antiquity
«Moi, et, quand je dis 'moi', c'est ne qu'une

façon de parler».
Pierre-François Lacenaire, in Jacques Pré-
vert,
Les Enfants du Paradis
1. First Persons and Personae
This essay is an inquest into two missing persons and a search

for an ancient theory or, if not theory, an ancient awareness
of the literarypersona, both of the poet and his addressee.As
criticism of ancient poetry has shifted our attention from the
poet and the poem itself to an original audience or an imag-
ined reader(and to the critic himself), the concept of the liter-
ary persona has become familiär- perhaps tediously familiär.
And, as the Romantic concept of the poet's personality has
withdrawn from the stage of the criticism of Greek and Ro-
man poetry, its vivid and varied characters hâve become
masked, and what readersonce saw as thè immediate expres-
sion of a poet's individuality has corne to be regardedas the
expression of his rhetorical intentions. Paradoxically,the an-
cient critics of «Classical»poetry must now seem almost Ro-
mantic in their assumption that a poet can be read directly
through his, or more rarely her, poetry1. This attitude is
1. Thus, poetry supplied the ancient biographer with much of his raw mate-
rial, as Janet Fairweather has shown in her treatment of the fictions of ancient
biography, Fiction in the Biographies of Ancient Wnters, «Ancient Society» 5,
1974, pp. 234-255 and as Mary Lefkowitz has demonstrated more systematically
in her treatment of The Lives of the Greek Poets, Baltimore 1981 (Lives). An im-
portant contribution to the history of biography and the lives of thè poets in An-
tiquity is Graziano Arrighetti's Cameleonte, La mimesis e h critica letteraria, in
Poeti, eruditi e biografi: Momenti della nflessione dei greci sulla letteratura, Pisa
1987, pp. 141-159. In this essay, I am not primarily concerned with the actual
rhetorical practice or communicative stratégies of the ancient poets who speak in
This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
10 Diskin Clay
clearly exhibited in Aristotle's Poetics, where he makes it clear

that he regarded comic poetry as thè work of frivolous men
and tragic poetry as thè work of serious men, even though
their genre was strictly «mimetic» and these early poets did
not speak in their own persons (4.1448b24-27). It is obvious
from even the most cursory study of the comments on ancient
poets that most ancient readers regarded poetry as autobio-
-
graphical and - to use the word Goethe made famous
confessional.
This kind of reading was especially congenial for the lyric
poets and the elegists who spoke of themselves or for them-
selves in the first person, but it holds for the poets of hexame-
ter poetry when they speak in the first person, as is thè case of
Hesiod of the Theogony and Works and Days2y of Empedo-
cles, Lucretius, and Virgil of the Georgics, as well as Horace
of the Satires, and Persius and Juvenal. I commemorate this
view of poetry as autobiographical and the unmediated ex-
pression of a poet's personality and life because it is so long-
lived, tenacious, and so «anthropological» - in the Greek
sense of this term. In treating the , Aristotle
states that he is not , a gossip (Nicomachean
Ethics 5.1125a5). Most ancient readers were interested in the
man or woman behind the poem and became themselves the
poets of biographical fictions. A brief survey of this manner
of reading ancient poetry will suggest, in some measure, the
the first person singular (or plural). An instructive survey of the broad and va-
ried terrain of the autobiographical «I» in ancient poetry is La componente auto-
biografica nella poesia Greca e Latina: Atti del Convegno, Pisa, 16-17 maggio,
1991, ed. Graziano Arrighetti and Franco Montanari, Pisa 1993 (La compenente
autobiografica). Arrighetti provides a judicious conspectus of the work of the
conférence in terms of the controversy over the status of first person Statements
in lyric poetry (pp. 11-24). I also refer to Mega nepios: il destinano nelVepos di-
dascalico, ed. A. Schiessaro, P. Mitsis, and J. S. Clay («MD» 31), Pisa 1993 (Mega
Nepios).
2. Whose fictive persona is well treated by Mark Griffith, Personality in He-
siod, Classical Antiquity 2, 1983, pp. 37-83, and whose addressee, Perses of the
Works and Days, is unmasked to reveal a rhetorical persona by Jenny Strauss
Clay in The Education of Perses (Mega Nepiosy pp. 23-33). In his study of He-
siod, Textualization of Personal Temporality (La componente autobiografica, pp.
73-91), Glenn Most properly calls attention to the manner in which Hesiod insi-
sts on his development as a poet from Theogony to Works and Days. M. L. West
lays out the external évidence for regarding Hesiod's Perses as a rhetorical per-
sona in his commentary to the Works and Days, Oxford, 1978, pp. 33-40.

The Theory of thè Literary Persona in Antiquity 11
great obstacles that stood in the way of any ancient theory of

the literary persona. The practice of ancient poets is another
thème, but thè biographical fashion of literary criticism,
which has persisted well into this Century, has obscured the
rhetorical practice of ancient poets.
We begin with Homer, whose «personality» is not revealed
in the first person singular and who stands in striking contrast
to Hesiod, who names himself, and to the lyric poets, whose
lyric «I» has arrested the attention of their later readers.
Homer was already regarded as blind by the author of the
Delian Hymn to Apollo (172), because he described the Phaea-
cian singer Demodokos as blind (Odyssey 8.62-66). (Just so,
Hesiod was regarded as the son of Dios because he addressed
his brother Perses as , Works and Days 229). After
Homer appears the first Greek lyric poet, Archilochos, with
whom Homer is frequently paired by the ancient literary crit-
ics. Some of Archilochos' poetry is «dramatic», but he speaks
most often in the first person singular or addresses others,
such as Glaukos and Perikles, and in so doing créâtes a lyric
«I». Critias notoriously derived his bad opinion of Archilo-
chos directly and exclusively from his poetry: «We would
never hâve known that he was an adultérer except from his
poetry»3. This view of Archilochos has been very tenacious.
Bruno Snell greeted him as thè poet who initiated thè era of
the lyric and introduced «upon the stage of European history
a number of highly individualized actors, with a great variety
of rôles»4. A confessional reading of the Cologne epode of
Archilochos led one of its first editors, Reinhold Merkelbach,
3. Diels, Vorsokr. 88B44 = testimonium 46 in G. Tarditi, Archiloco, Rome,

1968.
4. The Discovery of thè Mind, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer, Cambridge, Mass.
1953), p. 44. Where Snell's stress was on «individualized», the words «actors»
and «rôles» hâve increasingly received the stress. The studies of M. L. West in
Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Berlin, 1974, pp. 26-27 and Gregory Nagy
on iambos, The Best of the Achaeans, Baltimore, 1979, pp. 243-252, transform
Archilochos and Lykambes from vivid individuai personalities into stock charac-
ters in the repertory of public and performed poetry. Simon Slings has reminded
us of the alternative view of first person Statements in Archlochos represented
by Hermann Fraenkel in his Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums
(1951), who speaks of the poet's «représentative I» («das urteilende Ich»), The I
in Personal Archaic Lyric: An Introduction The Poet's I in Archaic Lyric, Am-
sterdam 1990, pp. 1-29.

12 Diskin Clay
to thè severe judgment that Archilochos was «ein schwerer

Psychopath»5. Alcaeus, who might have known her, de-
scribed Sappho as , chaste6.Wilamowitz, who believed
he knew her, read her poetry as if it came from Goethe's
Dichtung und Wahrheit and constituted «fragments from a
great confession»7.The first person Statementsto be found in
the lyric poetry of Pindar are responsible for a tissue of bio-
graphical hypothèses about Pindar's career that have entan-
gled critics both ancient and modern in their web8.
Even the tragic and comic poets of Athens, who never
speak in their own voice (even in the parabasis of Aristo-
phanic comédies), were seen as revealing themselves in what
their characters say. In Aristophanes' Frogs, Aeschylus is
shown in a deep rage and boasts that he has written a play
«filled with Ares» (his Seven against Thebes). The rage, of
course, is taken from the play. Euripides is scolded by
5. Merkelbach and M. L. West, Ein Archilochos-Papyrus, «Zeits. Pap. Ep.» 14,

1974, 113. We should note that the Cologne Archilochos epode yields a name for
Neoboule's mother, Amphimedo (line 7). Daughter takes after her mother in
that she cannot make up her mind; both have speaking names, as does father
Lykambes.
6. E. Lobel and D. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955)
384.
7. «Bruchstücke einer grossen Konfession», Dichtung und Wahrheit, from
Goethes Werke in zwei Bände, vol. 1, Munich, 1957 pp. 1040. Wilamowitz gal-
lantly protected Sappho from the authorship of (PMG frag-
mentum adespotum 976 Page), because he could not conceive of his Sappho as
waiting through the clear night for a lover who never appears: «das soll Sappho
sein?», Isyllos von Epidaurus, Philologische Untersuchungen 9, Berlin, 1886, p.
129, n. 7.
8. As Elroy Bundy argued in his Studia Pindarica of 1962 (reprinted by the
University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1986). Mary Lefkowitz
has continued thè line of argument and distinguished between the «I» of the poet
and the «I» of his chorus first and almost simultaneously in The First Person in
Pindar, «Harv. St. Class. Phil.» 67, 1963, pp. 177-253, then in her treatment of
Pindar in Lives, 57-66; she has taken her argument for Pindar further in the arti-
cles collected in First-Person Fictions: Pindar's Poetic T, Oxford, 1991. G. B.
D'Alessio has responded by arguing that thè persona loquens in Pindar and ear-
lier choral poetry has an important public and social dimension: «the construc-
tion of a poet's literary persona in this period cannot be divorced from the con-
struction of his social persona», First-Person Problems in Pindar, «Bull. Inst.
Class. Stud.» 40, 1994, pp. 117-139 (p. 138). This does not, of course, speak to
how later reader's attempted to see the poet through the poet's self-presenta-
tion.

The Theory of the Literary Persona in Antiquity 13
Aeschylus for his obsession with Aphrodite. Aristophanes,

who is the voice behind the masks making thèse charges,is as-
sumed by the guests at Agathon's victory banquet to be a
clown and devoted to Dionysos and Aphrodite, simply be-
cause he is a comic poet9.
As for the Roman poets and the elegists especially, we
know thè fate of those who spoke in their own person of
something as personal as love. Even the didactic poet Lu-
cretius, who speaks in vehement terms about the madness of
love, is said to hâve taken a love potion, which drove him to
insanity and suicide10.Catullus was read from his poetry, and
poems 5 and 7 specifically, as being a sensualist and no red-
blooded Roman male. Some time ago Léon Hermann sur-
veyed the Odes and Epodes of Horace for the history of his
love life and illustratedhis results by an impressive «table an-
alytique» listing some 37 affairs- both hetero- and homosex-
ual11.Propertiusmakes it clear that his erotic élégies had made
him a legend {fabula) in Rome (II 24al-2)12.Ovid's fate we
know, and we can judge from it the abilities of Augustus as a
literary critic and censor.
The biographical mode of literary criticism is especially
congenial and welcome to the Classical philologist. Outside
9. Ran. 1060-1022 (Aeschylus), 1045-1047 (Euripides). A like charge cornes

from Satyros' Life of Euripides. Satyros, who needed to explain Euripides' miso-
gyny (as read in his plays), hit upon the theory that he was so hostile to women
because he was so attracted to them, Vita di Euripide·, Pisa 1964, p. 126 Arri-
ghetti. For the subject of Euripides, see especially Lefkowitz, Lives, pp. 88-104.
In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes is described as hung-over, a clown, and de-
voted to the gods of love and intoxication, Sym. 176B, 177E, 189A-B,
213C
10. According to St. Jerome ab Abr. for the year 96, p. 149 Helm. Lucretius' fu-
ror is surely read from his treatment of the furor of love, Lucr. 4,1069 and
1117.
11. «La vie amoureuse d'Horace», «Latomus» 14, 1955, pp. 4-30.
12. Tu loquerisycum sis iam noto fabula libro I et tua sit toto Cynthia lectaforof
Propertius' fate at the hands of one editor is a curious case of the biographical
reading of poetry. O. L. Richmond assumed that Propertius' poetry must be the
direct reflection of his life, but found that reflection distorted in thè mss. of his
confessional poet: «Much that would follow from a new text is clear to the least
Professional eye. ... He would be found ... to hâve expressed his moods as other
lovers, to have ordered his diary of love by its calendar, the tale of its phases by
their rotation or succession in the expérience of life», Sexti Propertii quae super-
sunt opera, Cambridge 1928, p. 63.

14 Diskin Clay
an ancient poet's poetry we hâve very little to guide us in en-

visaging an individuai poet's life. Even philosophers, who
spoke in the first person, were not exempt from this mode of
reading. Heraclitus died buried in a düng heap because he said
that a corpse should be dumped out more quickly than a
chamber pot13. Empedocles leaped into Aetna as he is «made
to die by his own words»14. Such readings are inspired by a vi-
sion of philology as biography and what might be called the
cult of personality. Its enterprise is most forcefully articulated
by its greatest modern practitioner, Ulrich von Wilamowitz
Moellendorff, writing in the age of Stephan Georg and
Friedrich Gundolf:
The biographerproceeds from work to work, from interprétationto

interprétation,always seeking the author behind the book. If a hu-
man being stands out whom we can recognize as such, if thè individ-
uai featuresunite themselves into a single portrait which as a unit is
crédible, the task of the philologist is accomplished15.
This is from the Introduction to Wilamowitz' Piato, a writer

who never (except in his letters) spoke in his own person. I
give Wilamowitz' summation of the attitude we hâve briefly
surveyed in the translation of Harold Cherniss, who was, in
1943, one of the first Classicists to challenge the biographical
fashion of literary criticism. Eric Havelock had preceded him
in 1938 in his The Lyric Genius of Catullus16.But in their vig-
orous protests neither Cherniss nor Havelock were con-
13. As was made clear by Hermann Fraenkel, Thought atterri in Heraditus,

«Am. Journ. Phil.» 59, 1938, pp. 309-314.
14. The words of Diels, Vorsokr. 31B115. A biographical reading whose source
is nicely illustrated by Ava Chitwood, The Death of Empedocles, «Am. Journ.
Phil.» 107, 1986, pp. 175-191. The biographical lens transforme Pausanias, the ad-
dressee of Empedocles' On Natura, into his young lover (D.L. 8,60). Dirk Ob-
bink has provided the first careful study of Empedocles* multiple addressees in
Mega Nepios, pp. 51-92.
15. Piato: Sein Leben und Seine Werke,3Berlin, 1929, p. 8, trans. Harold Cher-
niss, Me ex versiculis meis parum pudicum, University of California Publications
in Classical Philology 12, 1943, pp. 279-292 (reprinted by J. P. Sullivan, Criticai
Essays on Roman Literature, Cambridge, Mass. 1962, pp. 15-30). Wilamowitz
first published his Platon in 1918.
16. The Canons of Catuüan Criticism, in The Lyric Genius of Catullus, Oxford,
1938, pp. 73-86.

cerned with replacingthe personality and biography they had

attempted to remove from Catullan criticism with a Catullus
who is a rhetoricalpersona and as much his own création as
Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus. The seemingly modem
notion of the literary persona was invoked (if not introduced
in modem criticism of Classical Literature)by William S. An-
derson in his analysis of Juvenal's persona in Anger in Juve-
nal and Seneca17.Thè criticai enterprise of unmasking an au-
thor, as as he présents himself within a work of prose fiction,
to reveal a mask or a cabinet of masks seems commonplace
since Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. This book can-
onized the conception of the author of prose fiction as a per-
sona or a characterprojected into his work - not for the pur-
poses of confession or self-revelationor self-exploration- but
for the task of persuasion18.
The new awarenessof the rhetori-
cal persona has extended to our understandingof the poetry
of Archilochos, Hesiod, Pindar, Lucretius, Catullus, and
Propertius, ail of whom hâve been read since antiquity as
highly personal poets19.This récent shift in criticai interest
from author to persona has led to practical criticism of indi-
17. University of California Publications in Chssical Philology 19, no. 3, 1964

(reprinted in Essays on Roman Satire, Princeton, 1982, 293-361). The approach
was inspired by A. Kernan's The Cankered Muse, New Haven, 1959. Maynard
Mack's treatment of Pope's Epistle to Dr. Aburthnot in Masks and Fates in Sa-
tire, «Yale Review», 1950, pp. 80-92. and the menace of its application to Roman
satire moved Gilbert Highet to protest this new mode of criticism in Masks and
Faces in Satire, «Hermes» 102, 1974, pp. 321-327. His distinctions of genre are
worth taking seriously, but few critics will now agrée with him that: «In the
ostensibly autobiographical satires of Horace thè persona theory will not work»
(p. 337). Niall Rudd in his fine essay Sincerity and mask, Lines of E&quiry:S$u-:
dies of Latin Poetry, Cambridge 1976, pp. 145-181 (pp. 176-181 especially) ob-
jects to the application of the theory of the literary persona to Horace's satires,
but J. E. G. Zetzel's essay Horace's Liber Sermonum: The Structure of Ambi-
guity, «Arethusa» 13, 1980, pp. 70-73 is a convincing attempt to make it
work.
18. Chicago 1961. Parts II-III are devoted to the rhetoric of narration and their
arguments are conveniently summarized in pp. 149-169. I cite the second édition
of 1983.
19. This shift from an interest in personality to the study of rhetorical personae
is especially evident in the essays of Mega Nepios. I make the argument that Lu-
cretius' Memmius is a rhetorical persona (rather than the Memmius of Münzer
RE article) in Lucretius and Epicurus, Ithaca and London 1983, pp. 212-225.
Gian Biagio Conte has treated Lucretius addressee in more sublime terms In-
structionsfor a Sublime Reader: Form of the Text and Form of the Addressee in

16 Diskin Clay
vidual authors. Little has been done to document and assess

the ancient theoretical awarenessof what now seems a famil-
iär distinction between a poet and reader outside a poem and
poet and reader, or audience, within a poem.
Among the Greek critics, the séparationof a poet from his
persona came late and with great difficulty. Yet, we should re-
cali the practice of poetry and Aristophanes' présentation of
Agathon in the Thesmophoriazusaein one of the disguises
that were acknowledged to be an integral part of the poet's
craft20.The most sustained protest against identifying a poet
with what his characterssay came from Alexandriain the sec-
ond CenturyB. C. and a critic whose universe centered on the
books that were his responsibility as a librarian.Our évidence
is clear in showing that Aristarchos of Samothraceopposed
thè condemnation of some speeches in Homer by pointing
out that they were spoken «in [an assumed] character»(
). In response to his predecessors, who censured Homer
for what his characterssay, Aristarchos developed a criticai
principle disassociatingHomer from his characters:«It is the
characterwho speaks» ( ). In the case of
Homer, this edict reads: «if something is said in the Homeric
poems, is is not Homer who says it» ( '
5 )21. (The same could be said for
Piato, who is too often taken at Socrates'word.) In a fascinat-
ing column from his treatise On Poems V, Philodemus speaks
Lucretius's De rerum natura, in Genres and Readers, trans. Glenn W. Most, Bal-
timore 1994, pp. 1-34. He never once refers to «Memmius» in this essay.
20. This is stated as a principle by the poet dressed as a iemale character: «A
poet must adapt his character to thè dramas he intends to create», Thesm. 149-
150. On this large thème, we hâve the penetrating interprétation of Froma Zei-
tlin, «Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes* Thesmophoriazusae», in
Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. Helene P. Foley, New York 1981, pp.
169-217.
21. This last formulation cornes from Ath. 5,178D (on //. 1,225, a line which
Zenodotos had athetized). There is a brief exposition of the principle in G. M. A.
Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics, Toronto 1965 (reprinted 1995), pp. DO-
DI. Earlier studies of the principle are to be found in A. Roemer, Die Homere-
xegese in ihren Grundzügen, ed. E. Beizner, Paderborn 1924, pp. 223-224 and
253-256 and the dissertation of his Student, Hans Dachs, Die -
, Erlangen, 1913, pp. 8-26 especially. . J. Richardson has conveniently set
out the évidence for an interest in ethos visible in the Homeric scholia, Literary
Criticism in the Exegetical Scholia to the Iliad: A Sketch, «Class. Quart.» 30,
1980, pp. 272-275.

of charactersas being a part of the «material»of the poet and

he seems to suggest that the poet himself is a characteras well
as the charactershe deploys in his poem22.
The theory of the literarypersona seems to hâve dawned as
a new day in modem criticai discourse. As it arose at the be-
ginning of this Centuryin the criticism of English literature23,
it illuminatedonly thè persona of the author as created by the
author in and for his poem. Ezra Pound's Personae(1909) was
a produci of this awareness and helped make it more acute,
but prose fiction was the primary focus of criticism. The per-
sona of the reader- or addressee,or narratee,or mock reader
- emerged only later, but his mask now faces the mask of the
poet on the stage of reader response criticism24.
This mask has become familiär only recently in the criti-
cism of Classical literature.The hard won distinction that has
now emergedis that there is a différencebetween thè poet of a
poem and a poet in a poem; that there is a différence between
the readersof a poem and the reader in a poem. The distinc-
tion between thè poet of thè poem and thè poet in his poem is
familiärfrom English literatureas Chaucer, the author of the
Canterbury Taies, is distinguished from Chaucer the pilgrim
within his poem. In Italian literaturethe distinction between
Dante as the poet of his Divine Comedy and the pilgrim
within it is equally familiär. For ancient prose fiction and
Apuleius' Métamorphoseswe now hâve the distinction be-
tween «auctor» and «actor»25.But for both modem criticism
22. «If he (an anonymous critic) were to say that poets in generai do not em-
ploy formai démonstrations, either of themselves or of other characters ... (*
' ' ' ), ... he will command .. », Col. 1,11-16 Man-
goni. Elizabeth Asmis makes a similar suggestion for what Philodemus claims in
Col. 34.35-35.1 Magnoni, An Epicurean Survey of Poetic Theories (Philodemus on
Poems 5, Cols. 26-36, «Class. Quart» 42, 1992, p. 410. The conception of charac-
ters () as part of an author's «material» extends to Proclus* commentary
on Plato's Republic, vol. 1, pp. 6,7-12 and 16,26-19,25 Kroll. In the remarks that
introduce his commentary, Proclus treats the occasion, setting, and characters of
a Platonic dialogue as their «material» ().
23. For which there is the history of Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona,
Chicago 1967.
24. A useful summary and anthology is Jane Thompkins, Reader-Response Cri-
ticism: From Formalism to Post Structuralism, Baltimore, 1980.
25. Brilliantly set out by J. J. Winkler in his Auctor and Actor: A Narratological
Reading of Apuleius 'Golden Ass\ Berkeley, 1985. I hâve studied the narrative

18 Diskin Clay
and its ancient antécédents this distinction is so novel that it

required an entry in the supplément to the enlarged édition of
the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics where we
can also find headings for «Semiotics», «Structuralism», and
«Swahili Poetry»26.
I shall not claim that there is nothing new under the sun. I
intend rather to return our modern theory of thè literary per-
sona, which I take as read, to ancient literary criticism - both
-
implicit and explicit in order to determine what analogues it
had in antiquity. The more interesting project of this essay is
to discover the cultural déterminants that made the ancient
theory of thè poetic persona so différent from our modern
théories of the literary persona. The authors who figure in
this survey do not, with the exception of Longinus, consider
prose fiction, and the writers who protest the biographical
reading of their poems are all Roman poets. Yet in practice,
Greek and Roman poets exploited thè persona of both the
poet and that of his audience, or reader. One only has to re-
cali the Convention of funerary inscriptions in which the de-
ceased identifies himself (or the monument identifies itself) to
an unknown passerby or the passerby enters into a dialogue
with the person hidden under the monument, who is no
longer able to speak out or to respond. These are monuments
of an age of literacy. Their epigram is composed by the epi-
grammitist Lucillius, who wrote (AP XI 312)27:
, .
.
2. Poets, actors, and their masks
The first of the distinctions we will meet in this survey come
persona of Lucian (created in part by his doubles) in Lucian of Samosata: Four

Philosophical Lives (Nignnus, Demonax, Peregnnus, Alexander Pseudomantis),
ANRW II 365, Berlin. New York 1992, pp. 3406-3450.
26. Ed. Alex Preminger, Princeton 1974, pp. 959-961. Persona now assumes its
proper alphabetical piace in the 1993 édition of the Encyclopedia.
27. The lines are effectively cited by Guido Paduano, Chi dice «io» nelVepi-
gramma ellenistico}, La componente autobiografica, p. 129. In this same collec-
tion, Luigi Spina's Autobiografie impossibili, pp. 163-178, is an appropriate sequel
as a study of actual funerary epigrams.

The Tbeory of thè Literary Persona in Antiquity 19
from two Greek texts of the fourth Century . C, Plato's Re-

public and Aristotle's Poetics. The distinction Piato and Aris-
totle draw between a poet «himself» and his characters is not
exactly new. It is strikingly présent in fourth Century dedica-
tory reliefs and the familiär scene of the tragic or comic poet
contemplating thè masks of his repertory. So far as the audi-
ence is concerned, the more fundamental distinction is be-
tween thè actor and thè character he plays. This distinction is
illustrated in the fragment of the mid-fourth Century Gnathia
krater from Taranto now in the Martin von Wagner Museum
in Würzburg (Figure 1). Hère a tragic actor with a stubble
beard and close cropped hair and in costume contemplâtes the
mask of the Thracian king whose character he will play. In the
Peiraeus actors relief (Figure 2), which is perhaps contempo-
rary with Euripides' Baccbae, the distinction between the
poet, his actors, and their masks is clear and indelible. The
heroized poet sits on a couch holding a rhyton in his left
hand. He contemplâtes three actors. One carries a mask; one
holds up a tympanon, and the figure closest to the poet seems
to be playing the rôle of a woman. The fragment of a relief of
the comic poet in Lyme Park from c. 380 (Figure 3) shows a
seated comic poet (possibly Aristophanes) contemplating two
comic masks and silently and eloquently pointing to the dis-
tinction Piato was making at about the same time28.This relief
has a striking and developed parallel in the marble relief of the
first Century A. D. now in the British Museum. This shows a
comic poet, who turns from his banquet couch to greet
Dionysos and his retinue. The scene indicates a festival. Be-
low the couch and table of the reclining and garlanded poet is
a ehest containing four comic masks29.These distinctions are
made without words. The Gnathia crater shows a tragic actor
contemplating his mask. The relief at Lyme Park shows a
28. The first two illustrations can be conveniently found in Arthur Pickard-
Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens2, Oxford 1968, Figures 51 (Pei-
raeus relief) and 54a (Gnathia crater at Würzburg); the Lyme Park relief is
shown as Figure 201 (page 48) of Margarete Bieber's The History of the Greek
and Roman Theater2, Princeton 1961.
29. An illustration can be found in Richard Green and Eric Handley, Images of
the Greek Theater, Austin 1995, Figure 44 (p. 73). The relief might hâve an origi-
nal in the second Century . C. The fact that comedy and tragedy were masked
drama has a crucial bearing on the practice of both tragedy and comedy. For this
Helene P. Foley's The Masque of Dionysus, «Trans. Proc. Am. Phil. Ass.» 110,

20 Diskin Clay
comic poet and his masks, which signify his actors as they
wear these masks;the Peiraeusactors relief shows a poet, gaz-
ing at his actors, who carry their masks. AU are distinct, yet
associated. In the Würzburg crater the poet is only im-
plied.
Figure 1: Gnathia crater, mid-fourth Century

«Martin von Wagner Museum, Würzburg»
1980, pp. 107-133 is an excellent guide, as is the anthropological study of A. Da-

vid Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox, Berkeley, 1986.

Figure 2: Peiraeus actors relief, end of fifth Century

«Athens, National Museum 1500»

22 Diskin Clay
Figure 3: Relief of comic poet, c. 380

«Lyme Park»

The Tbeory of thè Literary Persona in Antiquity 23
The first explicit attempt to distinguish a poet from his masks

is that of Piato in the discussion of the content and the style of
poetry in the Republic. This passage is now more familiär
than it once was30.It cornes from book 3 of the Republic and
Socrates' discussion of the style () as distinct from the
content () of poetry. The terms of Socrates'essay in crit-
icism decisively shaped Greek théories of style31.Socratesputs
the question to Adeimantos:Do poets manage their narration
() through unbroken narrativeor through narrativeas
impersonation() or through both narrativeand imper-
sonation? These distinctions now seem obvious in light of
their tradition in Greek rhetorical theory, but Adeimantos'
difficulty with Socrates' terms alerts us to its novelty.
Socrates makes his meaning plainer by giving an example
from the opening of the Iliad. He produces Homer's third
person narrative of how Chryses approached Agamemnon
and Menelaos to ransom his daughter {Iliad 1.9-16). This he
contrastswith its immediatesequel (1.17-21), in which Homer
shifts to his mimetic mode and gives Chryses' actualwords of
entreaty to the Greek army and its Commanders.Adeimantos
seems to grasp Socrates'point from this example, but for the
reader of modem prose fiction what is disquieting about
Socrates' theory of narrative style is the conception of the
30. Thanks to the attention of G. R. F. Ferrari, Piato and poetry, in The Cam-
bridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1 Classica! Criticism, Cambridge, 1989,
pp. 92-148; more recently and briefly Penelope Murray, Piato on Poetry, Cam-
bridge 1995, pp. 3-6 (her comments on books 2, 3, and 10 of the Republic\ and
Christopher Janaway, Images of Excellence: Phto's Critique of the Arts, Oxford,
1995, Chapters 5 and 6.
31. Michael Haslam has shown how thèse distinctions apply to the Platonic
dialogues, PUto, Sophron, and the Dramatic Dialogue, «Bull. Inst. Class. Stud.»
19, 1972, pp. 17-38. The distinction is evident in the ancient commentaries to He-
siod and Theocritus noted in sequel. The fact that all «literature» was read aloud
and dramatically in the Greek context Piato addressed, means that ail of his dia-
logues should be considered «dramatic». Their reader takes the part of Socrates
as narrator. It is precisely this feature of Plato's context that qualifies the success
of Gérard Gennette's attempt to reduce Plato's concept of lexis to a tautology:
«[T]he very notion of imitation on the level of lexis is a pure mirage The
only thing that language can imitate perfectly is language, or, to be more precise,
a discourse can imitate perfectly only a perfectly identical discourse; in short, a
discourse can imitate only itself. Qua lexis, direct imitation is simply a tauto-
logy», Frontiers of Narrative [1966], in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan
Sheridan, New York, 1982, p. 132.

24 Diskin Clay
poet himself (). Socrates sees Homer as speaking «him-

self» in the purely narrativeopening of thè Iliadi «nor does he
attempt to divert our minds to the thought that anyone other
than he himself is speaking. In what follows these [narrative]
Uneshe speaks as if he were Chiyses himself, and does his ut-
most to convince us that the speaker is not Homer, but the
priest, who is an old man»32.
By «himself» {autos) Socratesclearly means the poet speak-
ing as the narratorof his poetry, and not as thè persona he
projects into his poetry. That is, the distinction between
Homer as narratorand Homer as Chryses does not allow for
a distinction between Homer as the poet outside of the poem
and Homer as a narrativevoice or a variety of narrativevoices
within the poem. Homer's only other guise is that of an actor
in the rôle of Chryses or another of his characters.This and
not his narrativepersona is the means to his concealment or
effacement:«Now, if the poet were never to conceal himself,
he would deliver ail of his poetry without acting or imperson-
ation (mimesis) and it would qualify as pure narrative»33.
Aristotle displays this same conception of Homeric narra-
tive style in thè Poetics, when he distinguishes between
Homer as he speaks himself (autos) and Homer as he assumes
speaking parts within his narrative. The modem critic and
reader again asks why Aristotle can so easily identify Hom-
er's narrativevoice with the voice of Homer himself. There
are three passages in the Poetics where Aristotle seems to
replicate thè distinctions of Republic 3. They give us no new
understandingof what Socrates meant by Homer speaking as
«himself»34. Although he gives mimesisa status it never attains
in the Platonic dialogues, Aristotle expresses a distinct prefer-
32.
" -
" , -
, Resp. 3,393A. Homer «himself», or his narrative voices and modes,
is the object of the study of Scott Richardson, The Homenc Narrato^ Nashville,
1990.
33. Eì ,
, Resp. 3,393C-D.
34. These are:
1 3,1448*19-22 Kassel:
. -

enee for dramaticor mimetic poetry35.He establishes a three-

fold distinction among thè subjects, medium, and style of imi-
tative poetry. As for style, a poet can imitate thè same subjects
in thè same medium, but in différent modes. That is, a poet
represents heroes (subject), in the dactylic hexameter
(medium), in three différent modes: 1 as a narratorwho as-
sumes no other rôle than that of narrator;2 as the narrator
when he assumes the rôle of his characters,as does Homer;
and 3 as a poet who represents (for he can no langer imper-
sonate) the men who are the objects of his imitation in action
- obviously the case of drama.This, at least, is how I interpret
Aristotle's meaning in his third distinction.
Aristotle returns to thèse distinctions as he characterizes
Homer as not only a serious poet who wrote well, but as a se-
rious poet who was in some sensé a dramatist (Poetics
4.1448b32-36). In one last comment on the epic (Poetics
24.1460a5-ll), Aristotle praises Homer again for his dramatic
rejection of his narrativeself - that is, for his récognition of
what the poet should do (, not «write») himself: «The
poet himself should speak as little as possible. For in this, he is
not an imitator (). Now, other poets dramatize them-
selves throughout their entire recitations. But seldom and in
only a few cases are they imitators. But, when he has recited
his short proem [Iliad 1.1-17, exactly the passage Socratesad-
duces in Republic3], Homer immediatelyintroduces a man or
a woman or some other character() and none of them out
of characterbut ail are convincing». What is striking about ail
" ,
"!".
2 4,1448b32-36 .
" ( -
) ...
3 24,146035-11:
, "
, ' ,
"
, ' ' .
35. Yet a préférence for the dramatic mode of discourse is expressed in Adei-
mantos* unexpected préférence for the «pure imitator of a décent character»
(Resp. 3,397D), a préférence that seems quite forgotten in the remarks that open
Republic 10.

26 Diskin Clay
thèse passages is Aristotle's clear restriction of mimesis to the

dramatic mode of poetry. An early translator and exegete of
the Poetics described this mode as «Personative Poetry»36. It
has been estimated that as much of one fifth of the Homeric
poems is dramatic or «mimetic»37.By contrast, the narrator, as
performer, can only be himself; he cannot «personate» what
he already is38.
The first of Aristotle's three comments on Homer as speak-
ing in a dramatic mode is difficult for us. It requires an act of
cultural translation to grasp the context in which his meaning
becomes clear. In the public and dramatic context of Homer
reciting () his poetry, one can recover what it
means for Homer to recite the narrative of thè Iliad or
Odyssey «himself», and what it means for him to assume the
part of one of his epic characters - that is, to become someone
eise and to «personate» a character. Homer's audience could
never doubt who Homer was himself: he stood there before
them singing the wrath of Achilles.
Aristotle's third mode of poetic présentation cannot belong
to the epic, for in it there is no narrator and all the poet's
characters are engaged in action; nor is it mixed. This mode is
pure drama, or a form of imitation like the Sokratikoi logoi or
the Sophronic mime. In this mode, the poet «conceals him-
self» completely and nowhere speaks in his own person. If
this is the case, a distance opens between the poet or imitative
artist and his work as it is enacted autonomously. And it is
precisely in this gap that we should expect to detect our mod-
ern notion of the literary persona and the analogue to the an-
cient représentations of thè Greek tragic or comic poet con-
templating his masks. But hère again the cultural context in
36. Aryeh Kosman helpfully cites Thomas Twining's comments in his Aristo-
tle's Treatise on Poetry Translated (London, 1789, reprinted New York, 1971),
Acting: Drama as the Mimesis of Praxis, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty ed., Essays
on Aristotle's Poetics, Princeton 1992, p. 53.
37. Samuel Bassett, The Poetry of Homer, Berkeley, 1938, pp. 59-64.
38. When Porphyry speaks in his Homeric Questions of what Homer said him-
self and in his own person ( ' , , in Quaest. Hom.
in //. 100.5-7 Schraeder), his meaning is that of «narratorial»control, as James I.
Porter has pointed out, Hermeneutic Lines and Circles: Aristarchus and Crates
on the Exegesis of Homer, Homer's Ancient Readers, ed. Robert Lamberton and
John J. Keaney, Princeton 1992, pp. 78-79.

which Aristotle developed his concept of imitative poetry

strictly limits his sensé of still other possible modes of poetic
présentation.
A passage in Aristotle's Rhetoric helps restore this context:
even in the third category of poets imitating in an entirely
dramaticmode, the poet seems to be présent as an actor in his
drama,unlike Euripides, or Sophron, or Piato. In his discus-
sion of style () in the third book of the Rhetoric(1403b21-
24 Kassel),Aristotle claims that the study of the style of deliv-
ery came late to tragedy and the public recitationsof the epic,
«for at first the poets of tragedy were themselves actors»39.So
possibly, even as he is masked as an actor, and even as he per-
forms in the purely dramatic mode of imitative poetry, the
Greek poet was at first présent to the audience as an actor be-
hind a mask and not a beguiling and elusive absence, as he is
in the Gnathia craterin Würzburg,where we can see only the
actor and his mask. There is only one occasion in which a
Greek tragic poet appeared before his audience as himself:
this is during the , or preliminary ceremony of the
day before the dramaticfestival began, when poet and actors
appeared before their audience, the actors without their
masks40.
What Socrates' discussion of style in the Republic shows,
and what Aristotle's theory of imitative poetry confirms, is
the simple fact that, in its beginnings in the fourth Century,
Greek theory had no real conception of the literary persona.
The Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the guises and
disguises of the poet are alien to our modem conception of
the poet - or narrator- as he fashions «himself» within his
poem. For in the Greek context, the poet himself is not absent
39. That is, the poets did not need to instruct their actors. The text is:
, , ' , .
. For the évidence on which we can evaluate Aristotle's state-

ment, see Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals2, p. 93 and p. 130 n. 4 and P.
Ghiron-Bistagne, Les Acteurs dans h Grèce Antique, Lille 1976, pp. 151-
157.
40. What is known of this event from fourth Centurytexts is set out in Pickard-
Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals2, Oxford 1968, pp. 67-69. The scholion to Ae-
schin., In Ctes. 67 provides the information that the actors did not appear in
masks or costumes.

28 Diskin Clay
from his text. Rather, the image of the rhapsode stands before
Aristotle as he appeared,like Plato's Ion of Ephesos, in the
festivals of Athens and dramaticallyrecited, with staff in hand
and in his magnificent costume, thè narrativesections of the
Iliad and Odyssey and played the parts of Chryses and
Agamemnon41.Aristotle could envisage the early tragedians
not as authors remote from the texts they had created but as
acting in the dramas they had composed. Unlike Aristotle,
Piato glimpsed and hinted at the possiblility that the poet
could conceal or disguise himself in his characters,as he did
himself in his purely dramatic dialogues (Republic
3,393C11).
3. The poet and his page
The Roman situation is différentfrom the Greek, but both the

Greek and Roman situations are very différent from our own
expérience as silent readers of closet poetry and prose. The
change is already evident in the Centuryafter Aristotle. Posei-
dippos, in the poem Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones has called his seal,
expresses the wish that he will survive as a statue in the agora
of Pella, «unrollinga book». If the seated statue of a poet with
a papyrus roll in thè Stanza delle Statue of the Vatican repre-
sents Poseidippos of Pella and not Poseidippos of Kassan-
dreia, the contrast with the seated statue of «Archilochos» in
the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek is striking. The archaicpoet is
intensely engaged in the performanceof his poetry; the Hel-
lenistic poet languidly holds a book roll in his right hand42.
The advent of literacy and the book and the development of
41. Such a performance is vividly evoked by John Herington, Poetry into

Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition, Berkeley, 1985, pp.
10-15.
42. Supplementun Hellenisticum, éd. H. Lloyd Jones and P. Parsons, Berlin and
New York, 1983, 705. The poem is well treated by Lloyd-Jones in The Seal of
Posidippus, «Journ. Hell. Stud.» 83, 1983, pp. 75-99 (The Académie Papers of Sir
Hugh Lloyd-Jones: Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and
Miscellanea, Oxford, 1990, pp. 158-195). As for his statue, Matthew Dickie has
made a convincing case for removing it from the comic poet from Kassandreia
and giving it to Posidippus of Pella, the epigrammatist, Which Posidippus?, «Gk.
Rom. Byz. Stud.» 35, 1994, pp. 373-383. For «Poseidippos», see the documenta-
tion in G. M. A. Richter, Portraits of the Greeks, London 1965, vol. 2, pp. 238-

libraries changea the fundamental conditions of poetic pro-

duction, just as it radicallytransformedthe relation between a
poet and his audience. The term «audience» is ambiguous,
now that we have lost its original meaning. Horace, for exam-
ple, can say of Homer that he transportshis audience into the
middle of his narrative(in médias res ... auditorem rapit), but
he does so in a verse epistle addressedto the Pisones (Ars Po-
etica 148-149) of which they were not auditores but lectores.
Smith Palmer Bovie's translation of auditorem as «reader»is
inaccurateto the social context of Horace, in which poetry
was read aloud; it is also a symptom of our âge of literacy43.
Roman readers performed the poetry they read, and poetry
continued to be recited before small groups and performed
before large groups. We are reminded of this by the funerary
monument of Q. Sulpicius Maximus who recited Greek po-
etry at thè Capitoline contest of 94 A. D. at the âge of eleven
(Figure 4). Although he holds a papyrus roll in his left hand,
he does not read from it44.On the left edge of the deep niche
in which he stands is inscribed the Greek text of thè poem he
recited, which would have been read aloud - if discretely - by
a few of the passers-by on the Via Salaria.But, as for what
both Piato and Aristotle refer to as the poet «himself»,the pa-
pyrus rôle or parchmenttransformsthe dramaticprésence of
thè performer into a text, or, nostalgically, in the cases of
Martial'sapophoreta>into the painted portrait of the poet as
the frontispiece to a présentationcopy of his book of poetry.
By metonymy the writer is transformedinto the book itself.
In a présentation copy, Livy is reduced to small characters
239 (Figs. 1647-1650); for «Archilochos» (who I take to be Archilochos), vol. 1,

pp. 66-67 (Figs. 231-232).
43. The Satires and Epistles of Horace, Chicago 1959, p. 277.
44. Rome, Museo Nuovo Capitolino, illustration from The Cambridge History
of Classical Literature II: Roman Literature, Cambridge 1982, Plate II. Accor-
ding to the inscription, the young Quintus' performance was «spontaneous» -
this we can doubt - and his thème (Zeus's rebuke to Helios for giving the reigns
of his chariot to his son) was suggested by his audience. The Greek text of his 43
line epyllion is inscribed on the left edge of the large aitar in which he is sculpted
in deep relief, IGUR 1336 Moretti. Covering the large subject of literacy and
performance are E. J. Kenney's chapter on Books and readers in the Roman
world, Cambridge History of Classical Literature II, pp. 3-32 and its counterpart
in Bernard Knox's Books and readers in the Greek World, The Cambridge Hi-
story of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature, Cambridge 1985, pp. 1-41.

30 Diskin Clay
transcribed onto fine parchment: pellibus exiguis artatur

Livius ingens (14,190)45.
In this age of books and readers, Persius writes from his
own closet to the closet of a potential reader:scribimusinclusi
{Satire 1,13). And, when Martial writes the poem that intro-
duces his first book of epigrams,he can speak of himself as his
book: Hic est quem legis ille, quem requins I toto notus in
orbe Martialis(1,1,1-2). Martialis his book, and his readercan
find «him» at the bookshop of Secundus,in a small boxed édi-
tion (1,2). The reiteratedclaim ille ego, qui is the expression of
this age of reading. The poet, famous only from his books,
will be recognized as the poet of still another book46.
Literacy and thè ancient book opened a gap between a poet
and his audience, and the absence of the performing poet is
filled by thè mask or persona of the writer. Contemplating
this mask is the unfamiliarmask of the reader. Both are the
créations and necessities of wide-spread literacy. It is true that
poetry was commonly recited in Rome. For this we have the
testimony of Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Pliny, Tacitus, and
Suetonius47.But even when poetry had become the private
and secluded transactionbetween a readerand a book, poetry
45. Epigrams 14,183-195 are a collection of dedicatory inscriptions. The same

coneeit is applied to Vergili Quam brevis immensum cepit membrana Maronem I
ipsius vultus prima tabella gerit, 186. Such portraits are beautifully illustrated by
the frontispiece to the comédies of Terence showing Terence in a medallion and
flanked by two actors wearing comic masks, Vat. lat. 3868, f. 4v (tenth Century,
in Illustration: Ten centuries of illustration from thè most precious medieval and
Renaissance Codicesin existence, ed. G. Morello, Rome 1996, p. 76).
46. The most famous case of this formula is the four line signature opening the
Aeneid in some late mss. of the poem. In arguing against their authenticity, R. G.
Austin Coversmost cases of this formula, «Class. Quart.» N. S. 18, 1968, pp. 107-
115 (pp. 110-111 especially), including the instance in Martial and Ovid, Am. 2.
1,1-2.
47. Gibbon gives an appropriately satirical notice of thè fate of the Roman tra-
gic poet: «In the time of Quintilian and Pliny, a tragic poet was reduced to the
imperfect method of hiring a great room, and reading his play to the Company
whom he invited for that purpose (see Dialog, de Oratoribus, c. 9, 11, and Plin.
Epistol. vii, 17)», Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. Bury, London,
1909, vol. 3 p. 323 n. 84. JuvenaFs characterization of the périls of Rome is apt
and notorious: et Augusto recitantes mense poetas (Juv. 3,9). The most telling évi-
dence cornes from Pliny, Ep. 1,13 (with Sherwin-White's commentary). The Ro-
man situation is studied by A. M. Guillemin. Le publique et L· vie littéraire à
Rome, Paris 1937. For readers rather than audience we now have the contribu-

Figure 4: Funerary monument of Q, Sulpicius Maximus

«Rome, Museo Nuovo Capitolino»
tions to J. G. F. Powell and A. J. Woodman, Authors and Audience in Roman Li-

terature, Cambridge, 1992.

32 Diskin Clay
was read aloud; and, by a psychology well known to Piato,

thè readerof the book impersonatedthe absent poet as he be-
came for a moment the «I» of the poem he was reciting or, in
thè case of a dramatic poet, he took the parts of his
characters.
In their fundamentalattitudes, Roman readerswere not un-
like Greek readersin the age of performed and public poetry.
The poet was as he presented himself in his book. Take the
case of the first Roman poet who émerges as both a striking
personality and a writer, who, by his use of thè verse epistle,
remainedabsent from his audience48.Lucilius has struck read-
ers from Horace to the aged Goethe as a confessional poet.
Horace, in his Satires (2,1,30-34), gives us an unforgettable
reading of Lucilius as he presented himself in his books of
poetry:
ille velut fidis arcanasodalibusolim
credebatlibris,nequesi malecesseratusquam
decurrensalio, nequesi bene;quo fit ut omnis
votivapateatveluti descriptatabella
vita senis ...
This is an antique version of Goethe's présentationof his own

poetry and life in Dichtung and Wahrheit.Indeed, these lines
stand as an epigraph to Goethe's late Zahme Xenien49.In the
remains of Lucilius, Goethe discovered «fragmentsof a great
confession» (Bruchstückeeiner grossen Konfession),or better
the fragments of very small and personal confidences. Lucil-
ius, for Horace at least, entrustedhis personal secrets (arcana)
to his books, as if they were his dosest friends, and his open-
ness and sincerity are that of an old man commiting his life's
history on a votive tablet dedicated to a god. But there is an-
other mannerof readingLucilius' satires,and this is Horatian,
not in what Horace explicitly says about Lucilius in his satires
48. Even the studied style of the epistle was thought to reveal character, not
rhetorical ethos. Demetrius in his treatise On Style says of the letter that it re-
veals «an image of the soul» of the writer (
, Eloc. 227).
49. Aptly adduced by Eduard Fraenkel in his Horace Oxford 1957, 152; he goes
on to cite the familiär passage from Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit recalled in
note 7 above.

but in the practice of the personae Horace adopts in his own

satires.
In the following Century,Catullus was the first Roman poet
(and so far as I can judge the first ancient poet) to protest that
he could not be read in his book and to disassociate himself
from his poetry. His déclaration of independence from his
poetry cornesin that essay in criticism addressedto two of his
readers,Furius and Aurelius. Furius and Aurelius hâve com-
mitted the same grievous fault that almost all readers of po-
etry committed throughout antiquity. They committed the li-
bel of confusing the poet with his libellas. Catullus protests
that even the poet of non serious poetry like his Vivamus,
mea Lesbia (c. 5) must be pure and prudent himself (c. 16:
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo).Catullus uses the pronoun ipse
in making this protest: nam castum esse decet pium poetam I
ipsum (c. 16.5-6). The pronoun ipsum is not the sign of the
présence of a poet, as it was in Piato and Aristotle; it is the
sign of his absence. Catullus présents his verse as au-
tonomous, and most importantly, he présents Furius and Au-
relius as readers {quod ... legistis, c. 16.12-13). Clearly, they
are readerswho will pay the penalty for their vile biographi-
cal habit of criticism and their incautious conclusion that the
poet is «no real man» {male marem). If they are right, they
hâve nothing to fear. But, if they are wrong: Pedicabo ego vos
et irrumabo.
Catullus is not an epic poet performing before an audience
and describing and taking the part of men in action; he is a
lyric poet dramatizinghis own life in a poem. But is this life
his own? The distinction he insists on is between Catullus the
poet in his life outside of his poetry and Catullus as he ap-
pears within his poetry. We should not forget that he makes
this distinction in a poem, and, by this very gesture, removes
the grounds of his argument.The distinction is so severe that
his poetry and by implication the Catullus of his poetry are
presented as autonomous. This was, I would argue, a distinc-
tion that was unavailable to a culture dominated by public
and performed poetry.
Catullus had his successors in Roman poetry, just as Furius
and Aurelius had theirs as readers of poetry. His most im-
pressive successor is Ovid, who had Augustus for a reader.As
Ovid imagineshis situation, Augustus seems to hâve read sure

34 Diskin Clay
signs of a licentious life in OvicTs amatory poetry. To this se-

vere and censorious mode of interprétation Ovid protests in
his long letter of apology to Augustus. Here is the disclaimer
that most concerns us (Tristia 2,353-60):
crede mihi, distant mores a carminé nostro

(vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea)
355 magna pars mendax operum est et ficta meorum;
plus sibi permisit compositore suo.
nec liber indicium est animi, sed honesta voluntas:
plurima mulcendis auribus apta feres.
Accius esset atrox, conviva Terentius esset,
360 essent pugnaces qui fera bella canunt.
Another successor to Catullus in this kind of apology pro

poesi sua is Martial. In his elegy to Domitian, who then held
the office of censor, he asks the emperor to relax and read his
verse with the lightheartedness it requires: Usava est nobis
pagina, vita proba. (Epigrams 1,4,8). This is my final example
for the disassociation of a poet from his page in Roman po-
- lusores
etry. AU my examples come from amatory poets
amoris. The protests voiced by none of these poets seem to
have convinced its audience. The habit and attraction of a
voyeuristic reading of erotic poetry were too powerful. Au-
gustus, if he ever read Ovid's verse epistle, remained unmoved
by it. Both Ovid and Propertius became fabulae with their
readers and contempories {Amores 3,1,5 and Propertius
2,24al-2), as art was taken to imitate life. As for Martial, one
modern account of his claim to a life of purity {vita vere-
cunda) is severe: «This must mean (as Martial was a sensualist
of the grossest kind) that his life had not received any censo-
rial notice»50.
50. Paley and Stone, M. Valent Martialis Epigrammata Selecta, London 1868,
quoted in Peter Howell in A Commentary on Book One of the Epigrams of Mar-
tial, London 1980, p. 116. Howell also calls attention to Martial 11.15.13 (mores
non habet hic meos libellus) and Pliny's statement of the «law» (legem) Catullus
expressed with violence in e. 16 (Letter 4,14,5). His other références are equally
relevant. Apuleius recalls Hadrian's epitaph on the poet Voconius (Uscivus
versHymente pudicus eras) in Apology 11. Only the censorious critics insist on a
biographical reading of poetry, as does Seneca, EpistuUe 114,3. On the Greek
side there is the obscène and late iambic poem in Cod. Vat. Barb. gr. 69 f.lO4r

4. Personae
The indignant language of Catullus, Ovid, and Martial is not

our own. They contrasted the poet himself in his life outside
of his poetry with his poetry - versiculi,liber, or pagina. The
word persona in our literary sensé of the term occurs only in
late authors such as Diomedes and Servius. One of the well
attested meanings of persona is that of a falsely assumed char-
acter or pretense (Giare, OLD 2d.)51.Persona in the sensé of a
character introduced into a poem does occur in rhetorical
writings. In describingthe narrativeand didactic mode of po-
etry, the grammarianDiomedes (4th CenturyA. D.) claims
that in this mode: «the poet speaks himself without the inter-
vention of another persona (or character),as is the case of the
first three books of the Georgics and the beginning of the
fourth [up to the dramaof the epyllion of Aristaeuswhich be-
gins at 321] and the poem of Lucretius and other similar
poems»52.
Diomedes was not a careful reader of Lucretius, but his
termpersona supplies thè word that has been missing from the
theory of the genres of poetic présentation as it was estab-
lished by Piato. One can put the situation in terms of a para-
dox: strictly narrativeand third person poetry is personal in
which ends by proclaiming that thè poet's life and Muse are chaste (16-17),
lambì et Elegi Graeci2 vol. 1, Archilochus 328 West.
51. In Lucretius, persona is both a mask (thè creta persona of 4,297) and a social
pretense, that can be unmasked: eripiturpersona, manet res, 3,58. In Martial, Epi-
grams 3,43, we find this same sensé of persona:
Mentiris iuvenem tinctis, Laetine, capillis.
iam subito corvus, qui modo cycnus eras.
non omnes fallis; seit te Proserpina canum:
personam capiti detrahet illa tuo.
Martial's phrase in the last line seems an allusion to the Lucilius of Horace, who
strips the victims of his satire of their skin (detrahere et pellem, Horace, Satires
II 1,64). res, 3,58. In Martial, Epigrams 3,43, we find this same sensé of persona:
The character of the social persona is best described by Cicero in his De Officiis,
especially 1,107-121. This, of course, leads directly to the conception of all hu-
man life as a play, documented in E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages [1948], trans. Willard R. Trask, New York 1953, pp.
138-144.
52. exegeticon est vel enarrativum, in quo poeta ipse loquitur sine ullius personae
interlocutione, ut se habent très Georgia et prima pars quartiy item Lucreti car-
mina et cetera his similia, Diomedes, Keil, Gramm. Lat. vol. 1, p. 482.20:

36 Diskin Clay
that it involves the poet «himself»;but it is impersonalin that

it dispenses with the masks and disguises of dramaticpoetry.
The termpersona is used by ancient critics, but for Diomedes,
Vergil remained Vergil throughout most of the Georgics and
Lucretius remained Lucretius throughout the entire De Re-
rum Natura. The author in the book was the author of the
book. This distinction hardly catches sight of thè persona of
an addresseeor a reader.There is another meaning of persona
and in both Greek and Latin. This describes the
«person» in the verb53.When Longinus speaks of a dramatic
style of literature (of both poetry and prose), he notes how
Herodotus can appeal to his readeras if he were présent, just
as he himself often turns to address his own reader, Postu-
mius Terentianus.But his example from Herodotus (Historiés
2,29,2-6) and his term , or «vivid», are vestiges of the
earlier era of public performance54.Such a performance or
long séries of performanceswas Herodotus' reading from his
Historiés in Athens - a performanceThucydides disparaged
as a «compétition to be heard [and presumably enjoyed] for
the moment»55.
We now move from «Longinus» to four last exhibits and a
conclusion. In his Prolegomenato Hesiod's Worksand Days,
Proclus rehearses the main distinctions first articulated by
Piato, and he identifies the genre of this the earliestpurely di-
dactic poem in Greek literature:«Narrative (or «reporting»)
poetry is the genre in which only the poet speaks - as is the
case of the entire Works and Days; dramatic poetry is the
genre in which the poet appears nowhere; and the mixed
genre is that in which the poet both speaks [himself] and char-
53. Thus, the term for the infinitive is modus impersonativus, Diomedes, Keil,
Gramm. Lat., vol 2. p. 340,37 Keil. Varrò states the System of three personae in
Ling.y 7,8,2. The term , meaning person in the verb, is found in Dio-
nysius Thrax 638,4 Bekker-Uhlig and Apollonius Dyscolus, Pron., 3,12 Schnei-
der.
54. ' , []
, [Longinus], Subi. 26,1-2
Russell: After producing examples from Homer, Aratus, and Hesiod, he turns to
his addressee, Postumius Terentianus, and adduces Herodotus' address to his
reader: , ,
;
55. , Thucydides, 1,22,4; FGrHist 2,360 (Synkellos,
Plutarch, De Malignitate § 26).

acters () are introduced who enter into dialogue, as is

the case of the Iliad»56.Hère we hâve thè word, , but
thè literary persona éludes us. The fact remains that the the-
ory of style created by Piato allowed for the author as an im-
personatoronly in the mixed genre of epic poetry. But, as we
hâve seen, Aristotle could imagine a situation in which the
tragedianwas both poet and actor.
The theory of narrativeand dramatic style was, however,
extended to the new genre of bucolic poetry, which came to
be regardedas a mixed genre, like epic. Sometimes it is narra-
tive poetry; sometimes dramaticpoetry; at times it is mixed.
Accordingly, we rediscover a Platonic characterizationof the
style of Theocritus' bucolic poetry in an introduction to The
Idylls of Theocritus: «The dramatic genre never exhibits the
character() of the poet; the narrativegenre reveals it
throughout; and the mixed genre exhibits it at some times and
not in others»57.How should the term be translated
hère? Is it a characteror the disguise of the literary persona?
Other of this critic's introductory remarks to Theocritus
help, for in their metaphoricallanguage they suggest that the
term is conceived as a mask or a disguise: «In ail
thèse modes, [this poetry] casts in its mold the characterof
the rustics and characterizestheir blunt farm-yardlanguagein
a wonderfully charmingway»58.Clearly, the refined Theocri-
56. Prolegomeni ad Hesiodi Opera (cited in Gudeman, Anstoteles Poetica, Ber-

lin and Leipzig, 1934, p. 104):
() *
' . -
(, ) . ...
, ^ -
.
For Proclus in the scholia of the mss. of Hesiod's Work and Days, see A. Pertusi
in Aevum 25, 1951, pp. 147-179, Scholia Vetera in Hesiodi Opera et Dies, Milan
1955, and M. L. West's discussion, Hesiod: Works and Days (note 2 above), pp.
68-70.
57. ,
, , , Scholia in
Theocritum vetera, Prolegomena D, p. 11 Wendel:
58. * , .
-
, , -
), , , .
' , ,

38 Diskin Clay
tus forced at least one ancient critic (very possibly Proclus) to

regard thè persona of thè civilized bucolic poet as a kind of
genial comic mask. Perhaps this is as close as we can come in
ancient rhetoricaltheory to the notion of the literary persona
of the poet. The reciprocai theory of thè persona of the ad-
dressee or reader does not readily emerge from two of the
three modes of the ancient theory of the characteresof poetry.
It is excluded from thè dramaticmode by the fact that charac-
ter addressescharacter(although in both comedy and tragedy
actors address their audience and in comedy the chorus ad-
dress the audience on behalf of the poet). It is excluded too
from the epic, except in Homeric and Hesiodic apostrophe. It
is only possible in the theory of narrativeand specifically of
didactic poetry.
In Servius' commentary to the beginning of the third book
of VirgiPs Georgicswe hâve for the first and only time in an-
cient rhetorical theory (so far as I can discover) a discussion
that combines the persona (in a sensé to be determined) of
both the author and the addressee: «These books», Servius
writes, «are didactic. For this reason they must be addressed
[his word is scribantur]to someone. For instruction requires
thè persona of both a teacherand a pupil. So [Vergil]writes to
Maecenas,just as Hesiod [wrote] to Perses, and Lucretius to
Memmius»59.There is no hint in this that any of the persons
named are anything more than the actual poet as he takes on
the rôle of the teacher or the reader as he adopts the rôle of
the disciple. Ail seem historical figures and not the rhetorical
créations of the poet.
There is one last exhibit in this inquest into the ancient the-
ory of the literarypersona. It seems to go against the ténor of
the testimony gatheredfor the standing of the author and his
addresseein a genre that would, as it appearedto a critic like
Diomedes, seem to be purely narrative- a genre in which the
poet speaks «himself» and without the intervening speech of
another, sine ullius personae interlocutione.We discover this
'
, Scholia in Theocritum, p. 4-5 Wendel.
59. Hi libri didascalia sunt unde necesse est ut ad aliquem scribantur;nam prae-
ceptum et doctoris et discipuli personam requirit. unde ad Maecenatem scribit, si-
cut Hesiodus ad Persen, Lucretius ad Memmium, Servius, prooemium ad Georgi-
cos III 1.129 Thilo.

criticai attitude in the hypothesis of the ancient commentaries

to Hesiod's Worksand Days: «Hesiod [introduced Perses] by
fashioning a dramaticcharacter() and taking it from
his brother Perses, either because it was true to life or because
it was plausible as a characterand suited Hesiod's intention,
in order to avoid making this dramaticallyimplausibleand to
make it seem that he had come to this pass because of a quar-
rel that involved his brother»60.
In this inquest into the theory of the literarypersona in an-
tiquity, we have followed a single rather meager vein: what
ancient critics had to say about the relation of poet to his au-
dience and what Roman poets had to say about the relation of
their poetry to their lives. Rhetorical critics were well aware
of how importantthe projection of a characterwas to the suc-
cess of a speech and the theory of has a long career
that is parallel to, but does not intersect, the lines of inquiry
we have been following61.If there is a end to this searchfor an
ancient theory of the literarypersona, it is to be found not in
ancient literary criticism but in our increasing awareness of
the practice of the poets who created personae within their
poetry for their own rhetoricalpurposes and who also created
a persona for their reader.A search of ancient criticai theory
for any real équivalents of our concepts of the literary per-
sonae of author and readeris frustratedby the liminal aware-
ness in antiquity of distinctions that now seem of great and
accepted importance in the interprétation of poetry and of
60. , '
xf\ ,
, Scholia vetera
ad Hesiodi Opera et Dies, Pertusi, p. 3.13.
61. In thè Pbaedr. 271A-272B, Socrates is quite aware that the words of the
orator should be adjusted to the souls of those he addresses. But it was Aristotle
who insisted on , the projected by a speaker, as an élément of persua-
sion, along with the argument and émotion he créâtes in his audience (Rh. 1,2,3-
6). In Rh. 2,12-17 he enlarges on how the ethos of the speaker should harmonize
with the character of his audience. Christopher Gill has given a brief assessment
of the career of two of thèse éléments of persuasion in «The Ethos/Pathos Di-
stinction in Rhetorical and Literary Criticism», «Class. Quart.» N. S. 34, 1984,
pp. 149-166. Ethos is the subject of Wilhelm Süss's, Ethos: Studien zur älteren
griechischen Rhetorik, Leipzig and Berlin, 1910. The praxis of this theory in Ci-
cero's orations is treated by James M. May in Trials of Character: The Eloquence
of Ciceronian Ethos, Chapel Hill 1988.

40 Diskin Clay
prose fiction especially. We do discover thè terms

and persona in some late commentaries,but thè thing éludes
us, except for a bald and unelaboratedstatementin the scbolia
to Theocritus and a comment about Perses in the scholia to
Hesiod's Works and Days. Eripiturpersona, manet res. But
the very limited awarenessof our concepts in the ancient crit-
ics and commentators is significant in itself, for it defines re-
ciprocally our culture of the book and its silent readerand ab-
sent author. It is the product of an earlier âge of public and
performed poetry.
In its origins in Piato and the theory of the three styles of
poetic présentation, the ancient theory that distinguishes a
poet as he speaks himself and as he speaks as a «personator»
could not easily accommodate itself to thè thought of a poet
projecting a persona imo his poem. In the poetry with which
Piato and Aristotle were most familiär,the poet stood before
his audience, in ail of his festival splendor and dramaticprés-
ence. The magnetic field that linked Ion's audience to the
rhapsode, then to Homer, and finally to Homer's Muse did
not yet extend to the poet's reader62.
Duke Università
62. In Socrates' conceit, Ion 533D-E. At the conclusion of this essay, begun as I
investigateci the context in which Lucretius* «Memmius» might be regarded as a
rhetorical persona, I would like to thank Richard Lamberton for advice on an
early version; Elizabeth Asmis for advice on a still later version; and Graziano
Arrighetti for prompting me to enlarge my horizons in this last and necessarily
elliptical version.


Clay, D. (1998) The Theory of The Literary Persona in Antiquity - MD 40, Pp. 9-40

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Clay, D. (1998) The Theory of The Literary Persona in Antiquity - MD 40, Pp. 9-40

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Diskin Clay

The Theory of the Literary Persona

«Moi, et, quand je dis 'moi', c'est ne qu'une

1. First Persons and Personae

This essay is an inquest into two missing persons and a search

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

clearly exhibited in Aristotle's Poetics, where he makes it clear

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

great obstacles that stood in the way of any ancient theory of

3. Diels, Vorsokr. 88B44 = testimonium 46 in G. Tarditi, Archiloco, Rome,

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

to thè severe judgment that Archilochos was «ein schwerer

5. Merkelbach and M. L. West, Ein Archilochos-Papyrus, «Zeits. Pap. Ep.» 14,

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

Aeschylus for his obsession with Aphrodite. Aristophanes,

9. Ran. 1060-1022 (Aeschylus), 1045-1047 (Euripides). A like charge cornes

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

an ancient poet's poetry we hâve very little to guide us in en-

The biographerproceeds from work to work, from interprétationto

This is from the Introduction to Wilamowitz' Piato, a writer

13. As was made clear by Hermann Fraenkel, Thought atterri in Heraditus,

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

cerned with replacingthe personality and biography they had

17. University of California Publications in Chssical Philology 19, no. 3, 1964

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

vidual authors. Little has been done to document and assess

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

of charactersas being a part of the «material»of the poet and

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

and its ancient antécédents this distinction is so novel that it

2. Poets, actors, and their masks

The first of the distinctions we will meet in this survey come

persona of Lucian (created in part by his doubles) in Lucian of Samosata: Four

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

from two Greek texts of the fourth Century . C, Plato's Re-

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

Figure 1: Gnathia crater, mid-fourth Century

1980, pp. 107-133 is an excellent guide, as is the anthropological study of A. Da-

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

Figure 2: Peiraeus actors relief, end of fifth Century

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

Figure 3: Relief of comic poet, c. 380

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

The first explicit attempt to distinguish a poet from his masks

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

poet himself (). Socrates sees Homer as speaking «him-

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

enee for dramaticor mimetic poetry35.He establishes a three-

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

thèse passages is Aristotle's clear restriction of mimesis to the

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

which Aristotle developed his concept of imitative poetry

. For the évidence on which we can evaluate Aristotle's state-

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

3. The poet and his page

The Roman situation is différentfrom the Greek, but both the

41. Such a performance is vividly evoked by John Herington, Poetry into

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

libraries changea the fundamental conditions of poetic pro-

239 (Figs. 1647-1650); for «Archilochos» (who I take to be Archilochos), vol. 1,

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.25 on Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:30:52 AM

transcribed onto fine parchment: pellibus exiguis artatur

45. Epigrams 14,183-195 are a collection of dedicatory inscriptions. The same