Hardie-Moore-Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception

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C l a ssic a l L i t e r a ry C a r e e r s
a n d T h e i r R ec e p t ion
This is a wide-ranging collection of essays on ancient Roman

Â�
literary careers and their reception in later European literature,
with contributions by leading experts. Starting from the three
major Roman models for constructing a literary careerÂ€ – Virgil
(the rota Vergiliana), Horace and OvidÂ€ – the volume then looks
at Â�alternative and counter-models in antiquity:Â€Propertius, Juvenal,
Cicero and Pliny. A range of post-antique responses to the ancient
patterns is examined, from Dante to Wordsworth, and includ-
ing Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Dryden and Goethe.
These chapters pose the question of the continuing relevance of
ancient career models as ideas of authorship change over the cen-
turies, leading to varying engagements and disengagements with
classical literary careers. The volume also considers other ways of
concluding or extending a literary career, such as bookburning and
figurative metempsychosis.
p h i l i p h a r di e is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College,

Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature at the
University of Cambridge. He is a leading figure in Latin literary
studies, a fellow of the British Academy, and author of books on
Virgil, Ovid and other Latin poets. He also has strong interests in
the Renaissance reception of Classical literature, and is co-editor
(with Patrick Cheney) of the Renaissance volume in The Oxford
History of Classical Reception in English Literature (in preparation).
h e l e n mo or e is University Lecturer in English at the University

of Oxford, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. She has pub-
lished editions of Amadis de Gaule (2004) and Guy of Warwick
(2007), and is currently working on a book on the English reception
of Amadis de Gaule.
C l a ssic a l L i t e r a ry
Ca r eers a nd Their
R ece p t ion
e di t e d b y
ph i l i p h a r di e
Trinity College, Cambridge
and
h e l e n mo or e
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
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Contents
List of contributors page vii

Preface xi
Note on the text xii
Introduction:Â€Literary careers –Â€Classical models

and their receptions 1
Philip Hardie and Helen Moore
1 Some Virgilian unities 17
Michael C. J. Putnam
2 There and back again:Â€Horace’s poetic career 39
Stephen Harrison
3 The Ovidian career model:Â€Ovid, Gallus,
Apuleius, Boccaccio 59
Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie
4 An elegist’s career:Â€from Cynthia to Cornelia 89
Stephen Heyworth
5 Persona and satiric career in Juvenal 105
Catherine Keane
6 The indistinct literary careers of Cicero and
Pliny the Younger 118
Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel
7 Re-inventing Virgil’s Wheel:Â€the poet and
his work from Dante to Petrarch 138
Andrew Laird
8 Did Shakespeare have a literary career? 160
Patrick Cheney
v
vi Contents
â•‡ 9 New spins on old rotas:Â€Virgil, Ovid, Milton 179
Maggie Kilgour
10 Bookburning and the poetic deathbed:Â€the legacy
of Virgil 197
Nita Krevans
11 Literary afterlives:Â€metempsychosis from Ennius
to Jorge Luis Borges 209
Stuart Gillespie
12â•… ‘Mirrored doubles’:Â€Andrew Marvell, the remaking
of poetry and the poet’s career 226
Nigel Smith
13 Dryden and the complete career 241
Raphael Lyne
14 Goethe’s elegiac sabbatical 256
Joseph Farrell
15 Wordsworth’s career prospects:Â€‘peculiar language’
and public epigraphs 275
Nicola Trott
Epilogue:Â€Inventing a life –Â€a personal view of
literary careers 287
Lawrence Lipking
List of works cited 300
Index 327
Contributors
a l e s s a n dro b a rc h i e s i teaches Classics at the University of Siena at

Arezzo and at Stanford; his recent work includes editing a multi-author
commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Oxford Handbook of
Roman Studies (with W. Scheidel).
pat r ic k c h e n e y is Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has written books
about the literary careers of Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well
as co-edited (with Frederick de Armas) European Literary Careers:Â€The
Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2002). Currently, he is writ-
ing an essay on ‘literary careers’ for the Renaissance volume (co-Â�edited
with Philip Hardie) in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in
English Literature.
jo s e p h fa r r e l l is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author of Vergil’s Georgics and the Traditions
of Ancient Epic (1991) and of Latin Language and Latin Culture (2001)
and is co-editor of two forthcoming volumes of essays on Vergil’s
Aeneid and Its Reception and on Augustan Poetry and the Roman
Republic.
roy g i b s on is Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester
and author of a commentary on Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3 (2003), and of
an introductory book on Pliny the Younger (co-authored with Ruth
Morello) forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He is cur-
rently working on a commentary on Book 6 of Pliny’s Letters.
s t ua r t g i l l e spi e is Reader in English Literature at the University
of Glasgow. He is the editor of the journal Translation and Literature
and joint general editor of the five-volume Oxford History of Literary
Translation in English (2005– ). In the field of Classical reception he
has recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (with Philip
vii
viii List of contributors
Hardie, 2007). His study of historical English translation as a form of
Classical reception will be published in 2011.
ph i l i p h a r di e is a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature in the University of
Cambridge. Recent publications include The Cambridge Companion
to Lucretius (co-edited with Stuart Gillespie, 2007) and Lucretian
Receptions (2009). With Patrick Cheney he is co-editing the Renaissance
volume in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature.
s t e ph e n h a r r i s on is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, and Professor of Latin Literature in the University of
Oxford. He is the author of Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace
(2007) and of many articles on Horace; and editor of Homage to Horace
(1995) and The Cambridge Companion to Horace (2007).
s t e ph e n h e y wort h is Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Wadham
College, Oxford. In 2007 he issued a new edition of Propertius in the
Oxford Classical Text series together with a detailed textual commen-
tary entitled Cynthia. With James Morwood he is currently completing
a commentary for students on Book 3. Future work will concentrate on
Ovid’s Fasti.
c at h e r i n e k e a n e is an associate professor of Classics at Washington
University in St Louis, Missouri. She is the author of Figuring Genre
in Roman Satire (2006), Roman Verse Satire Reader (forthcoming) and
numerous essays on satire and related literature. Her current book pro-
ject is provisionally titled Looking at the Satirist:Â€Personae and Poetics in
Juvenal.
m ag g i e k i l g ou r is Molson Professor of English Language and
Literature at McGill University. The author of From Communion to
Cannibalism:Â€ An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (1990), The
Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995) and articles on subjects savoury and
unsavoury, she is currently completing a book on Milton and the
Metamorphosis of Ovid.
n i ta k r e va ns is an associate professor in the Department of Classical
and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research
interests centre on Hellenistic and Latin poetry and the history of the
book. In addition to numerous articles on Hellenistic poetry, she has
published several articles on Virgil and a study of print and the Tudor
poets.
List of contributors ix
a n dr e w l a i r d is Professor of Classical Literature at Warwick
University. His publications, mostly on Roman literature and early
modern Latin, include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power (1999),
The Epic of America (2006), Ancient Literary Criticism (2006) and, with
Carlo Caruso, Italy and the Classical Tradition:Â€Language, Thought and
Poetry 1300–1600 (2009).
l aw r e nc e l i pk i ng is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities
Emeritus at Northwestern University. His books include The Ordering
of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (1970), The Life of the
Poet:Â€ Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981), Abandoned Women
and Poetic Tradition (1988) and Samuel Johnson:Â€The Life of an Author
(1998). He is currently writing a book on the Scientific Revolution.
r a ph a e l ly n e is a senior lecturer in English at the University of
Cambridge, and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. He is the author
of Ovid’s Changing Worlds (2001) and Shakespeare’s Late Work (2007),
and the editor (with Subha Mukherji) of Early Modern Tragicomedy
(2007).
h e l e n mo or e is a university lecturer in English at the University of
Oxford, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. She has published edi-
tions of Amadis de Gaule (2004) and Guy of Warwick (2007), and is
currently working on a book on the English reception of Amadis de
Gaule.
m ic h a e l c . j. pu t n a m is MacMillan Professor of Classics and
Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus, Brown University. His
most recent books are Poetic Interplay:Â€ Catullus and Horace (2006),
The Virgilian Tradition (2008, with Jan Ziolkowski) and Jacopo
Sannazaro:Â€The Latin Poetry (2009). He is a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical
Society.
n ig e l s m i t h is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center
for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. He is the
author, among other works, of Literature and Revolution in England,
1640–1660 (1994), Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? (2008) and Andrew
Marvell:Â€The Chameleon (2010); and editor of Marvell’s Poems (2003).
c at h e r i n e s t e e l is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow.
She is the author of Cicero, Rhetoric and Empire (2001), Reading
Cicero:Â€ Genre and Performance in Late Republican Rome (2005) and
x List of contributors
the Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics volume on Roman
Oratory (2006).
n ic ol a t ro t t is Senior Tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, and until
2007 was Head of the Department of English Literature at the
University of Glasgow. She has published widely on authors of the
English Romantic period. Recent work includes essays about Southey,
Austen, the Gothic, and an edition of Isaac D’Israeli’s Vaurien.
Preface
This volume is based on a selection of the papers delivered at the Second

Passmore Edwards Symposium on Literary Careers, held in Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, on 2–4 September 2004, together with two
additional chapters commissioned to cover important aspects of the sub-
ject. The conference was generously funded by the Passmore Edwards
Committee of the University of Oxford; we are also grateful to Corpus
Christi College for its support.
xi
Note on the text
For the abbreviations of the names of ancient authors and texts, readers
are referred to the Oxford Classical Dictionary.
xii
I n t roduc t ion
Literary careers –Â€Classical models

and their receptions
Philip Hardie and Helen Moore
The subject of literary careers has attracted considerable interest recently

among both classicists and students of English and other vernacular
Â�literatures.1 ‘Career criticism’ has emerged as a distinct branch of liter-
ary scholarship and criticism. It is to be distinguished from the older
fashion for a life-and-works approach to the biographical criticism of an
author, and also from the more recent interest in the ancient tradition of
authors’ lives. Instead of starting from what might be known, or claimed,
about the historical life and times of an author, career criticism takes as
its Â�starting point the totality of an author’s textual output and asks how
that oeuvre as a whole shapes itself, both in its intratextual relationships
(what kinds of beginnings, middles, and ends are traced in the pattern
of an oeuvre), and in the claims it makes to reflect or mould extraÂ�textual
Â�conditions of production (whether located in the personal history of
the author, or in the relationship of the author to political and cultural
Â�structures of power and authority). The previous sentence ascribes an
agency to the oeuvre in ‘shaping’, ‘reflecting’ or ‘moulding’, an agency
that can only be Â�realized through a reader’s perception of these processes.
‘Careers’, however, are things that authors, not texts or readers, pursue,
and career criticism is unabashed in making the author its focus, always
with the Â�recognition that the author is mediated through texts, which in
turn are always received by readers.2 This is what Patrick Cheney, one of
1
Essential bibliography:Â€Helgerson 1983; Lipking 1981. More recently Patrick Cheney has worked
intensively in the field, with books on Marlowe, Spenser and Shakespeare. The collection of
essays in Cheney and de Armas 2002 focuses mostly on post-antique authors; this volume is
divided fairly equally between antique and post-antique authors, and centres on the reception of
the ancient models.
2
The status of the author in this kind of criticism may usefully be compared to the qualified
‘intention-bearing authorial voice’ constructed for the purposes of his study of allusion and inter-
textuality by Stephen Hinds in Hinds 1998:Â€47–51. Career criticism is consciously post-‘death of
the author’.
1
2 Philip Hardie and Helen Moore
the Â�leading practitioners of career criticism, means by ‘emphasizing the
category of the literary (rather than, say, the biographical …)’.3
The presence of the reader in all of this, and the possibility that we may
read into a writer’s oeuvre patterns of which he or she may only have been
dimly aware, should at least prompt the general question of ‘who decides
whether a poet has a career’. One answer might indeed be the reader,
tempted to see patterns in a disparate body of texts. If we are prepared to
allow the author some say in the matter, is it a decision taken at or near the
beginning of a career, in the shape of a syllabus for future action (Virgil
has often seemed to be this kind of careerist)? Or is it a matter of the retro-
spective realization of a pattern in what during the passage of the years
may often have seemed a haphazard and accidental process (Ovid is very
good at rearranging, at least, the pieces in the puzzle with the aid of hind-
sight). Another answer to the question of who decides whether a poet has
a career, might be other, earlier poets. This is an answer that will usually
imply a decision early in a career. By this we mean to refer to the intensely
intertextual (or perhaps interauthorial) quality of literary careers.4 As this
volume abundantly shows, writers are acutely aware of the career patterns
of great writers of the past, and motivated by that awareness to emulation,
or in some cases conscious avoidance, of the paths of their predecessors.
This is a particular, and particularly large-scale, example of the rivalry,
aemulatio, that characterizes many intertextual relationships.
An author’s sense of his or her literary career is traced through state-
ments or hints, explicit or implicit, in an oeuvre that point to a develop-
mental relationship between the individual works in the oeuvre. There are
some examples in ancient Greece where reference is made by an author in
one work to another, for example in Aristophanes’ explicit reference in the
parabases of some of his comedies to a previous play of his own. The para-
basis is formally privileged as the place in an Attic old comedy where the
playwright uses the chorus to speak in propria persona; but Aristophanes
exploits the occasion (as does Terence in the prologues to some of his
Roman comedies) in order to engage in literary polemic or literary criti-
cism, praising his own earlier work and the good taste of the audience,
not to present us with the outlines of a literary career. The modern critic
may trace a development within the surviving plays of Aristophanes, say
from the conventions of Old Comedy in the direction of the different
conventions of Middle Comedy (and formal development of this kind
Cheney 2002a:Â€6.
3
Noted by Cheney 2002a:Â€11–12.
4
Introduction:Â€Literary careers 3
has also been discerned in the corpora of the Attic tragedians), but this is
not evidence that the author has self-consciously given shape to his career
over the literary production of a lifetime. Furthermore the development
is a matter of change within a genre (comedy, tragedy), rather than pro-
gression from one genre to another, which is a common (if not essential)
marker of a literary career.
At the end of his elegiac poem in four books on ‘Causes’, the Aitia, the
Hellenistic poet Callimachus states that he is moving on to ‘the pedes-
trian pasture of the Muses’, which is normally taken to refer to the Iambi,
a work in a more pedestrian, prosy metre than the elegiac couplet.5 Here
we have self-conscious moving-on, from one genre to another, but it is
unclear that it is part of a larger plan, of a career teleologically designed
(the ‘pastures new’ of a Milton), rather than simply a change of course
for the sake of variety. We simply have no way of knowing whether a
part of the highly self-conscious poetics of Callimachus consisted in the
representation of his multiform output as shaped by what might be called
a strategic career-plan.
Joseph Farrell has argued powerfully that it is in Rome that is first
to be found a strong experience on the part of an ancient author of his
output over time as conforming to the pattern of a career.6 According
to Farrell, the decisive impetus was given by the position of the poet at
Rome, typically dependent on an upper-class patron, and who came to
fashion his own literary career on the political career of his patron, the
aristocratic cursus honorum, the hierarchically ordered sequence of magis-
tracies through which the successful Roman ascended to the consulship.
Cursus, literally ‘running’, may refer to the running of horses in a chariot-
race, the public career viewed as a competitive race to the top (the same
image is found in curriculum uitae, lit. ‘racecourse of life’).7 The pinnacle
of the Roman military career was to ride in a chariot as triumphator:Â€the
motif of the literary triumph has a long history that perhaps goes back to
Ennius (239–169 BC), whose culminating literary achievement was the
writing of the national Roman epic of its time, the Annals, the first edition
of which climaxed with the literal triumph of Ennius’ patron. Farrell gives
a leading role to Ennius in stimulating the development of the Roman
5
For the issues see Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004:Â€33.
6
Farrell 2002.
7
Cic. Rab. Perd. 30 exiguum nobis uitae curriculum natura circumscripsit, immensum gloriae; Sest.
47 uitae breuis cursus, gloriae sempiternus. On the racing connotations of ‘career’ see Cheney
2002a:Â€8.
model of the literary career.8 To the institutional factors identified by
Farrell as promoting the emergence of the Roman literary career might be
added a marked tendency on the part of Roman poets to engage in auto-
biographical utterances, often with reference to their social status and to
their relationship to their powerful patrons. Ennius cast out the imper-
sonal objectivity of the epic narrator in opening the Annals with a scene
of poetic initation in a dream, and gave a notice of his age, possibly in the
last book of either the first or second edition of the Annals (sed. inc. fr. lxx
Skutsch ed. 1985), and possibly in a passage in which he also referred to
himself as an ageing racehorse (coming to the end of its career?). While
Ennius does not seem to have used this autobiographical mode to talk
about a career pattern stretching over his larger (and very varied) oeuvre,
he offered what one might call a ‘licence to autobiography’ to later poets
who might wish to reflect openly on their careers. Later in the first cen-
tury BC the satirist Lucilius writes largely in autobiographical mode, and
in this he is very influential on Horace. Lucilius does not appear to have
shaped his output according to any coherent model of progression, but,
Farrell suggests, this may have been deliberate:Â€as a member himself of
the aristocratic patron class his choice to write poetry represents a deliber-
ate rejection of the cursus honorumÂ€– an anti-career.
The Roman literary career finds its fullest and most influential mani-
festation in the three major works of Virgil:Â€ the Eclogues, Georgics and
Aeneid.9 The perceived upwards progression through these three hexam-
eter works was formalized in the medieval rota Vergiliana.10 There is a
seemingly inevitable, and almost prescripted, development from the small-
scale and self-reflexive green cabinet of the Eclogues, through the didactic
intervention in the world of the farmer in the Georgics, to the sublime epic
flight of the Aeneid, engaging with the widest themes of Roman history
and imperial power. The generic variation that in Callimachus had not
apparently been guided through time by a planned curriculum, is here
informed by a drive to achieve progressively more ambitious goals in the
genres of bucolic, didactic and epic. The poet comments on these ambi-
tions at key points, most prominently in the proem to the third Georgic,
the midpoint of the middle of the three poems, in which future poetic
Farrell 2002:Â€37–8; see also Hardie 2007b.

â•‡ 8
Very little, if any, of the Appendix Vergiliana, a body of works attributed to the young Virgil, is
â•‡ 9
considered these days to be authentic; the situation was different from antiquity through to the
early modern period, so yielding a more complex picture of the development of Virgil’s career.
On the reception of the Appendix Vergiliana in the Renaissance see Burrow 2008.
10
See Putnam below, Ch. 1.
success is presented as a figurative triumph, the chariot of poetry har-
nessed to the horses that draw the imperial triumphator. In another crucial
modification of the Alexandrian model, Virgil disobeys the Callimachean
injunction to avoid the large-scale and epic,11 so allowing himself a career
that audaciously challenges comparison not just with that of a Republican
consul or general, but of the princeps Augustus himself.
The Virgilian career has a formal perfection such that it almost seems
that it could be explained purely in terms of the unfolding of a law of
generic development. At the same time the smooth progress through lit-
erary genres is also a progressive rapprochement with the political and
military realities of Rome. The question of the exact degree of pressure
or constraint applied to Virgil by Augustus and his ministers will never
be resolved. But, however much some readers will continue to find in the
poems signs of a deep reluctance to accept the aims and ideology of the
principate, the career itself, understood as a progression through genres
that is at the same time a progression to an increasing engagement with
the extra-literary world, shows remarkably few signs of strain. Indeed,
Michael Putnam, in his revisionist account of the rota Vergiliana in this
volume, directs attention to the continuity in change, unity in diversityÂ€–
itself a sign of the smoothly oiled machine.
Partly because of its seeming inevitability, and partly because its prod-
ucts immediately established themselves as the central classics of Latin
literature, the Virgilian career has been an enduring temptation, chal-
lenge or reproach to later poets. The Latin love elegists persist in the
Callimachean refusal to venture beyond slighter genres, now not as a
matter of aesthetic choice but because of the harsh necessity of a life of
love that restricts their literary career to the narrow circle of love poetry,
just as in his life the love elegist consciously rejects the career expected
of the upper-class Roman male, the public cursus honorum. Once the
Virgilian model for a literary career is available, the elegiac anti-career
can also represent itself as a (forced) alternative to the Virgilian career.
Stephen Heyworth shows how Propertius, despite the variety of his four
books of elegies, repeatedly fails to break away from a life spent writ-
ing poetry about Cynthia to follow other paths; even in Book 4, a book
which contains much allusion to the Aeneid, Cynthia, given her marching
orders at the end of Book 3, and now further distanced through death,
11
Whether Callimachus himself referred to epic or other kinds of large-scale poetry in his literary
polemics is disputed; what matters is that in the Latin recusatio (‘refusal’ to write in a more ambi-
tious genre) the standard opposition is between slighter genres and epic (or sometimes tragedy).
returns to life, irrepressible. In 3.9 Propertius justifies his own refusal to
change course from elegy with an appeal to his patron Maecenas’ refusal
to pursue a senatorial cursus honorum. In Propertius’ last elegy, 4.11, the
emperor’s stepdaughter Cornelia boasts of a feminine kind of cursus
honorum; but since in Rome only men can have public careers, this is a
contradiction in terms, and the imperial matrona is dragged back into
the elegist’s own world of lamentation and separation.
Ovid, last of the love elegists, flags a relationship to the Virgilian
model with the very first word of his oeuvre, arma, the first word of his
elegiac Amores and also the first word of the Aeneid.12 In this context it
introduces a version of the conventional elegiac recusatio, a refusal to
venture into epic because of the erotic enslavement to which the poet
is condemned in his real life. By the third book of the Amores Ovid
has shuffled off the inevitability of the elegist’s lot, and looks forward
to a career move to the higher genre of tragedy. From the Medea (now
lost) he advanced higher still, to the epic Metamorphoses, outbidding the
Aeneid both in length and in chronological scope. Within elegy itself
Ovid progresses from the slight matter of love to the subject of Roman
religion and history in the Fasti. After a career that has cheerfully freed
itself from the personal and private constraints that dictate the literary
output of his predecessors in Latin love elegy, as well as registering a
fair degree of indifference to any claims that Augustus might have on a
writer, Ovid has what might be called an ‘after-career’, the consequence
of the harshest of external constraints, exile from Rome to the outer
darkness of the Black Sea as a result of the emperor’s displeasure. This
has the effect of undoing the satisfying closure of the Virgilian career:
not only is the Metamorphoses not the crowning glory of Ovid’s career,
what follows is a reversal of the upwards trajectory as the grief of exile
forces the poet to return to the tearful elegies of his youth. Ovidian
exile, or the danger of the artist losing status or position by offend-
ing through his art, is a recurrent model for literary careers:Â€Barchiesi
examines three examples, the first an Ovidian retrojection of his own
woes on to the first Latin love elegist, Cornelius Gallus, the second an
ingenious reworking of the Ovidian elision of the boundary between
art and life in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, and the third Boccaccio’s suc-
cessful use in the Decameron of Ovidian apologetics to negotiate the
rocks on which Ovid himself had foundered.
â•‡ On aspects of Ovid’s use of the Virgilian career model see Farrell 2004.
12
Yet even in the Ovidian pattern of an upwards career trajectory broken
by exile there are traces of a Virgilian model. Exile, as Michael Putnam
shows in this volume, is indeed one of the elements of unity in the diver-
sity of the rota Vergiliana. At the end of his career Ovid relives the experi-
ence of Meliboeus, the shepherd-farmer who in Virgil’s first Eclogue has to
leave the pastoral world for exile at the ends of the earth. At the very end
of the Aeneid Turnus ‘flees’ into the perpetual exile of death, dispatched
by the distant ancestor of Augustus. This is also the point at which to
note another way in which Ovid’s ‘after-career’ mirrors the Virgilian car-
eer, but with reference not to the Virgilian oeuvre but to the biographical
tradition that on his deathbed Virgil asked to be allowed to burn the
manuscript of the Aeneid (vita Donati 39); in the first book of the Tristia
Ovid claims that on being sent into exile he put the manuscript of the
Metamorphoses on the fire (1.7.15–22; somewhat disingenuously Ovid now
realizes that there were other copies in circulation). But this gesture marks
all of the exilic poetry as, figuratively, poetry from the other side:Â€Ovidian
exile is thereby equated with Virgilian death. The gesture of bookburn-
ing, real or threatened, will be used recurrently by later writers who do
not want to leave their unpublished works as the coping-stone of a literary
career, as Nita Krevans records. The epilogue to Ovid’s Metamorphoses
itself, on the other hand, alludes to the notion of a more successful after-
life than exile in the Pythagorean belief of metempsychosis:Â€Ovid’s ‘soul’,
his great poem, will survive the death of his body, given the breath of
life by the living bodies of his future readers.13 By this conceit Ovid also
acknowledges that his poem is the latest product in the history not of an
individual writer, but of a tradition that goes back to Ennius, who in the
prologue to his epic Annals claimed, in a speech put in the mouth of the
phantom of Homer, to be the reincarnation of the true soul of Homer.
If bookburning violently breaks off a career, the Ennian claim to be the
reincarnation of an earlier poet extends a career to a time before the bod-
ily birth of a writer:Â€Stuart Gillespie traces episodes in the afterlife of the
Ennian conceit.
The Ovidian career is an alternative, but also a reaction, to the Virgilian
model. A third way is represented by Horace, who neither follows nor
reacts against his friend Virgil, their two paths diverging, although not
beyond close hailing distance, after each producing as a major early work
a book of ten poems in hexameters, the Eclogues and the first book of
â•‡ See Hardie 2002a:Â€95.

13
Satires.14 Horace’s career thereafter is characterized by a diversity at the
generic level that may, as Stephen Harrison suggests in this volume,
mark a reversion to the poikilia (generic variety) of Callimachus’ output.
Horace is the most autobiographical of the Latin poets, allowing us to
see (a carefully manicured version of) the external and internal pressures
to which his writing responded at various junctures in his life. Great
patrons, Maecenas and Caesar, are both empowering and constraining.
The Carmen saeculare, written for performance at the Secular Games
of 17 BC, was an important commission in itself, and may have been a
significant factor in prompting Horace to return to a lyric career seem-
ingly brought to a final conclusion, with a fourth book of odes. Equally
important, so Horace tells us, as a determinant of literary choice is an
inner desire for freedom that makes him kick against the demands of
patrons, politics and the literary marketplace, a drive for independence
that finds most sustained expression in Epistles 1. This more varied kind
of career might be seen as anticipating the increasing fragmentation in
post-Classical centuries of the shapeliness of Virgilian and Ovidian mod-
els, whether through the changing conditions of literary production and
consumption, or, at a later date, through a set towards the expression of
the writer’s inner self.
Post-Augustan epic poets are keenly aware of the Virgilian challenge.
Statius charts the poetic career of the dead Lucan (Silvae 2.7), a young
man in a hurry and who is reported to have boasted that he had writ-
ten his great epic at an age when Virgil had only got as far as the Culex
(one of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, attributed to the young
Virgil). Dead before his twenty-sixth birthday, Lucan had no time to
waste:Â€ Statius outlines an ascent from epic juvenilia on merely Greek,
Iliadic, themes, to the Jovian thundering of his epic on the Roman civil
war, a poem inspiring awe even in the Aeneid itself.
In his first satire Juvenal uses the autobiographical conventions of
Roman satire that go back through Horace to Lucilius and Ennius to
present a colourful picture of the reasons that impelled him to take up a
literary career in the first instance. That career is confined to one genre,
and the variations in tone between the five books of Satires have often
been seen as formalist, rhetorical variations of a satirical mask or persona.
Catherine Keane reads, rather, in the Juvenalian sequence a consistent
story of self-fashioning over time, as the satirist calibrates his several
satirical postures as an on-going negotiation of the excessively angry, and
â•‡ For the conscious engagement of Satires 1 with the Eclogues see Zetzel 1980.
14
in some ways epic, indignation with which he burst on to the literary
stage.
Writers in prose as well as verse may have literary careers. Roy Gibson
and Catherine Steel develop Joseph Farrell’s insight into the connection
between the political cursus honorum and the literary career with refer-
ence to Cicero and Pliny the Younger, both of whom did make it to the
top of the cursus honorum. The prolific writings of Cicero are subordi-
nated to the needs of his political career, and as a result display a ‘generic
profligacy’, because in this case there is no literary career that shapes
itself independently of the public career. On the other hand Pliny the
Younger’s insouciant indifference, in his Letters, to a progression of the
Virgilian kind in his own literary output, pointedly parades the fact that
one who has reached the top of the political ladder has no need to aspire
upwards in a literary cursus (in contrast to the career in literary prose of
his equestrian uncle, Pliny the Elder); this snobbishness is all the more
necessary in the conditions of the principate, when to reach the consul-
ate in fact brings no real power on the political stage.
The Classical models for the literary career, and the Virgilian career
above all, exercise a fascination over medieval and early modern writers,
but their applicability comes under increasing strain as conditions of lit-
erary production and consumption change, and as the ancient generic
system expands and metamorphoses. In the middle ages the Virgilian
model serves Dante well enough, as he crowns his writing career with
an ‘epic’ even more universal and totalizing than the Aeneid. The epic
Africa, however, does not similarly mark the culmination of Petrarch’s
career:Â€begun in the middle of his life, the ambitions that Petrarch held
out for it as the great work that would both sum up his dealings with
antiquity revived and satisfy his own desire for lasting fame, were not
realized. Andrew Laird takes a fresh look at some of the complexities of
Dante’s and Petrarch’s imitation of Virgil and of their relationship to the
Virgilian career pattern.
From the earliest days of career criticism, ideas of progression, devel-
opment and purpose have clustered around the notion of the literary car-
eer, accompanied by an acknowledgement of the existence of dissident
and countering career practices:Â€ Lipking, for example, cites in passing
Propertius, Ezra Pound, Yvor Winters and Robert Graves as poets whose
‘contempt’ for the career model ‘implies a reverse ambition’ manifested
as ‘a self-consuming devotion to craft’. Similarly, his brief reference to
Emily Dickinson raises the question of whether and to what extent the
classically sanctioned (and implicitly male) career models are open to or
embraced by women once they enter the world of public writing.15 Of
the English literary careers discussed in this volume, none is straight-
forwardly Classical in the way of a Spenser or a Marlowe, whose car-
eer models have been successfully described by Cheney and others as
Virgilian in the first case and Ovidian in the second.16 The existence, let
alone format, of Shakespeare’s career is still a matter of debate; Milton’s
later career, with his revision (in 1673) of the 1645 Poems and his ambigu-
ous final work, Samson Agonistes, undermines the Virgilian confidence of
his early self-proclamations; the range of Dryden’s careerÂ€– encompassing
criticism as well as compositionÂ€– ushers in a new element to the career
matrix; and assessments of the careers of both Marvell and Wordsworth
are rendered problematic by a lack of self-commentary in the case of the
former, and competing versions of the poetic self in the case of the latter.
Within the context of English letters, there is also a notable lack of an
English poetic career model to rival those of Virgil, Horace and Ovid. In
particular, the failure of Chaucer’s life-narrative ‘to translate itself into a
model for an Elizabethan poetic “career”’, as Kevin Pask puts it,17 both
enhances the longevity of the Classical career models and ensures diver-
sity in the scope and structure of their English successors.
Patrick Cheney’s pertinent question framed in this volume, ‘Did
Shakespeare have a literary career?’, hovers over any discussion of the
literary career in the early modern period, and draws attention to the
profound changes in the mechanics of literary production that were
consequent upon printing, the opening of the public theatres, and the
increasing professional self-reliance of the writing life (although, as dis-
cussed below, literary patronage continued to figure in much of the period
covered by this book).18 Unlike Spenser and Marlowe, Shakespeare’s car-
eer has so far eluded characterization, mainly because the shape of his
15
Lipking 1981:Â€xii–xiii. Outlining the ‘anti-careerist vocation’ of Dickinson, Lipking highlights
‘her unwillingness to publish, her preference for intensity and brevity, her hesitation to try new
forms or to “develop”, her sublime independence’ (p.xiii); he develops this ‘anti-careerist’ line of
thought further in Lipking 1988. For the applicability of the term ‘career’ to early modern women
writers see Woods and Hannay 2002 and for the emergence of the nineteenth-century woman of
letters see Peterson 2009. The relationship between English women writers and Classical modes
and models of authorship is treated in Hurst 2006; see in particular ch.3, ‘Unscrupulously Epic’,
on Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
16
Cheney 1993. Two other roles, those of secretary and bard, also figure in assessments of Spenser’s
poetic identity. Rambuss 1993 examines the literary impact of Spenser’s other career as secretary
and bureaucrat, and its intersection with his poetic career; whilst Highley 1997:Â€21–39 addresses
Spenser’s ‘fugitive’ interest in the proscribed poetic persona of the Gaelic bard.
17
Pask 1996:Â€30.
18
For the professionalization of the male and female writing lives see B. S. Hammond 1997 and
Turner 1992 respectively.
career, whether viewed in its entirety or in its parts (beginning, middle
and end), does not conform to Classical prototypes. It lacks both generic
progression and a clear destination; critical dissatisfaction over the years
with the ‘late’ plays might well be due in part to a feeling that they do not
provide a fitting telos for this particular literary life.19 Another important
factor is that the early ‘missing years’ in Shakespeare’s biography mean
that it is impossible to pinpoint the reasons for, and mechanisms of, his
entries to stage and print.20 Thus there is no identifiable trajectory to
Shakespeare’s career, whether of the upwards or reverse kind. Lacking
information as to the circumstances of Shakespeare’s initiation to the
literary life, or other self-articulationsÂ€ – both traditionally important
aspects of the ‘managed vita’ (see Lyne below, Ch. 13)Â€ – scholars have
tended to construe Shakespeare’s career in non-classical terms that place
his literary endeavours firmly in the context of his financial and busi-
ness engagements with London’s professional theatreÂ€ – concentrating,
in other words, on ‘Shakespeare’s job’.21 Recent studies have shed much
light on the precise mechanics of this ‘job’, revealing a world of extended
financial and artistic collaboration (between playwrights, actors and
owners), and textual revision. In short, the world of the London play-
houses was one in which ‘authorship could be a continual process, not
a determinate action’.22 Inevitably, however, such an interest in the
theatre as Shakespeare’s ‘job’ has created over time a false distinction
between his theatrical and poetic careers, a distinction that Cheney has
sought to break down in another context by asserting a different kind
of Ovidian identity for Shakespeare as ‘poet-playwright’ (the pertinent
aspect of Ovid’s vita in this case being the surviving two lines of his
tragedy Medea).23 In his chapter for this volume, Cheney turns his atten-
tion to the ‘classical underpinnings’ of Shakespeare’s career, one that he
terms ‘counter-laureate’. Through a reading of the Choruses to Henry V,
Cheney engages head-on with Shakespeare’s perceived failure (or playful
refusal) to present himself in his works, finding instead a detailed engage-
ment with the six elements Cheney identifies as constituting the ‘career
19
On the critical significance of the terms ‘late’, ‘last’ and ‘final’ see Richards and Knowles
1999:Â€1–6 and McMullan 2007.
20
The classic articulation on this subject is Honigmann 1998.
21
P. Thomson 1992:Â€xv; see also Bentley 1971.
22
Ioppolo 2006:Â€1; see also Vickers 2002.
23
Cheney 2004. Lukas Erne has also sought to resolve the problems of Shakespeare’s career
through a composite formulation, ‘literary dramatist’, arguing that, contrary to much hitherto
received wisdom, Shakespeare did indeed take an interest in the publication of his plays (Erne
2003).
template’. In Cheney’s analysis, Shakespeare is no longer an absent pres-
ence in his own works, but a writer with a finely tuned sense not only of
his own composite career(s), but also those of his Classical forebears and
‘laureate’ contemporaries.
In its avoidance of the laureate model, Shakespeare’s literary career
employs strategies of self-effacement and authorial displacement that are
reminiscent of Ovid. For Shakespeare, and later Milton, the uncertainties,
recapitulations and reversals of the literary career as manifested in Ovid
are just as important as the stylized assurance of the received Virgilian
rota. Indeed, Ovid’s revision of the Virgilian career is a frequent point
of reference for English writers, and most English relationships with the
Virgilian model combine imitation with revision, a fact that is not always
openly acknowledged at the time. As Kilgour argues in her essay, osten-
sibly Virgilian careers can be read as illusory self-representations that vari-
ously suppress early uncertainties, minimize the significance of deviation
from the Virgilian norm, and play down public acts of self-correction
or revision. Milton’s literary career was certainly announced in uncom-
promisingly Virgilian terms, with the inclusion of an epigraph from
Virgil’s Eclogues on the title page, Baccare frontem / Cingite, ne vati noceat
mala lingua futuro (‘wreathe my brow with foxglove, lest the evil tongue
harm the bard that is to be’), which claims both Classical and Christian
poetic eminence through the ‘vates futurus’ tag, but as Colin Burrow has
pointed out, the cracks in this Virgilian confidence were already appar-
ent in Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis, which ‘hint at early deaths and
poetic unfulfilment’.24 The fact that Milton was thirty-eight when this
collection of largely youthful poems was published is particularly signifi-
cant in this context, drawing attention to the temporal gap between the
actual and the public initiations of the poetic career. In the overlapping
manuscript and print cultures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the literary career arguably has two beginnings.25
Kilgour’s chapter examines the closing stages of Milton’s career, the
time when, according to Lipking, the ageing poet asks himself ‘whether
he has accomplished everything of which he is capable’.26 She identifies a
specifically Ovidian circularity and return to origins in Samson Agonistes,
the tragedy on an Old Testament hero that in the 1671 volume comes after
Paradise Regained, the epic on a New Testament hero. Viewed in career
24
Eclogue 7.27–8 (trans. Goold; Virgil 1999:Â€69) and Burrow 1999:Â€57. See also Moseley 1991; Revard
1997.
25
Cf. Love 1993. 26 Lipking 1981:Â€68.
terms, it is remarkable that Milton chooses to project himself through
a hero, Samson, who literally brings the edifice tumbling down around
his ears, and biographical parallels are seemingly irresistible. Accordingly,
Helgerson writes that ‘Samson Agonistes reflects the experience of the older
man whose work in the cause of liberty had failed to achieve its expected
end and who seemed denied a second chance. The crisis of his defeat, his
blindness and his captivity forces Samson, as the crisis of 1660 must have
forced Milton, to review the signs of his vocation.’27 From a different per-
spective, however, the violence and destruction of Samson can be viewed
as regenerative, although there are signs that the critical wheel is turn-
ing full circle and once more articulating a visceral horror at the poem’s
action (see survey in Kilgour below, Ch. 9, n. 22).
Lipking hints in his epilogue to this volume that the self-authored
‘grand design’ of the literary career is, indeed, something of a chimaera in
post-Renaissance English literature, with contingent circumstances such
as financial exigency, occasion and commission increasingly coming to
dominate the writing lives of many authors and determining the shape
of their vita; the modern literary career is just as likely to be unplanned
or fortuitous, as it is to be modelled or managed. In some cases, such as
that of Marvell, there is a notable absence of any grand design:Â€Marvell
remained largely unpublished in print throughout his life, and, as Smith
writes, he ‘seemingly … missed all the boats that guaranteed esteem’
(p.237). In stark contrast to Milton, Marvell did not seek or articulate
a public place for himself within the traditions of Classical and English
poetry. His sense of a career is revealed rather through the correspond-
ences and coincidences that connect him to the writings of his contem-
poraries and forebears, as illustrated by the way in which the personal
trauma of his father’s death by drowning resonates with Milton’s watery
elegy, Lycidas. Smith characterizes Marvell as a secretive and elusive
writer, whose poetic autobiography needs to be reconstructed from the
‘patina of allusion’ (p.236) that characterizes his poetry.
Partly as a consequence of its fortuitous character and partly because
of the diminishing power of Classical models, the post-Renaissance lit-
erary career typically ranges over a far greater generic territory than that
of the ancients and their sixteenth-century imitators. Adherence to the
hierarchy of genres is correspondingly weakened, most notably by the
inexorable rise in the status of prose writing, primarily fiction and criti-
cism. Accordingly, a new vocabulary of career criticism comes into play,
27
â•‡ Helgerson 1983:Â€279.
one that emphasizes range and quantity rather than generic develop-
ment. Steven Zwicker, for example, opens his assessment of Dryden’s
poetic career by noting its ‘breadth and authority’ and characterizing it
as ‘various and fecund’, ‘opportune and adventitious’, before baulking
slightly at his own taxonomic task:Â€‘even the idea of a literary career gives
a false stability to the haphazardness of Dryden’s literary production’.28
Raphael Lyne’s essay on Dryden addresses this fecundity by proposing
a new model he terms the ‘complete’ career, in which ‘many different
sorts of writing are attempted in an implicit or explicit project to com-
mand as much canonical territory as possible’ (p.241). ‘Variety and total-
ity’ (p.246) are the characteristics of the complete career, characteristics
that would seem to be at odds with the generic priorities and focused
management of the Classical models, yet which co-habit with them in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary careers. The variety and
totality of the complete career make possible surprising juxtapositions
such as that manifested in Dryden’s Fables, when his translation of Iliad
Book 1 is followed by The Cock and the Fox, translated from Chaucer’s
Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Rather than being incongruous, this acts as a show-
case for Dryden’s command of incident and detailÂ€– his ‘trivial virtuos-
ity’ (p.254)Â€– and declares the power of his own ‘unifying presence’ that
can bring great authors of the past into such proximity and thematic
conversation.
Of all the aspects of the Classical literary career that fed through
into the Renaissance and later, patronage is perhaps the most enduring.
Despite the increasing cultural and financial influence of the middle
class, political and ecclesiastical patronage was still pervasive throughout
the eighteenth century, and intersected with literary patronage in what
David Griffin has termed ‘the interwoven braid of dependency’.29 All of
the English writers addressed here were mapped into varying kinds of
patronage relationships as well as engaging directly with the day-to-day
business of the literary marketplace. Shakespeare dedicated Venus and
Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) to the Earl of Southampton, and prob-
ably wrote his earliest plays for Lord Strange’s Men, who became the
Earl of Derby’s Men. Marvell was employed in the early 1650s as tutor to
the daughter of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, a situation that gave rise to argu-
ably the greatest of English country-house poems, Upon Appleton House.
Dryden enjoyed the favour of royals, politicians and peers, for whom he
Zwicker 2005:Â€132.
28 29
D. Griffin 1996:Â€8.
wrote dedications of such effusive praise that he called down centuries
of criticism for flattery upon his head. Even Wordsworth and Coleridge
benefited from the traditions of patronage by accepting the hospitality of
leading figures of their day.
The chapters on Goethe and Wordsworth test the continuing applic-
ability of the Classical career model to writers of the later eighteenth to
nineteenth centuries, a period which saw enormous changes both in the
external conditions of authorship and in writers’ perception of their own
relation to earlier tradition. Joseph Farrell focuses on a discrete segment
of Goethe’s vast and polymorphous career, his Italian journey of 1786 to
1788, and on the classicizing Römische Elegien written out of the experi-
ence of those years. Reference to the literary careers of the ancient Roman
elegists allows us to reflect on the ways in which the Römische Elegien
both mark a brief, self-contained, elegiac career, separated from the public
career in Weimar that Goethe had abandoned for the time being, com-
parable to the Propertian rejection of the public Roman career, and, if we
think rather of Ovid, form only a stage in a more extended career, that will
progress, once more, beyond the private and the erotic to works of greater
ambition. In the case of Wordsworth, Nicola Trott has shown elsewhere
how the shape and character of the poetic career as it is generally and per-
sonally inflected receive intense scrutiny through the ‘self-explorations’
of Tintern Abbey and The Prelude. The hitherto dominant metaphors of
the path or journey that were traditionally employed by poets at the start
of their careers are side-stepped by Wordsworth, to be replaced by the
river and the church as ‘organic, counter-classical modes of organization’.
A further element to Wordsworth’s poetic career that contrasts with the
received classical models is the fact that his great work, The Recluse, was
never completed.30 In her chapter for this volume, Trott continues her
analysis of Wordsworth’s literary career through a reading of the 1807
Poems, in Two VolumesÂ€– in particular their Virgilian epitaphsÂ€– as a dis-
junctive moment in Wordsworth’s career that in one sense enforced a
‘career break’ as the poet sought to revise his work in a less ‘peculiar’
direction, and in another advanced whilst concealing Wordsworth’s
‘hidden career’ working on The Prelude (p.285). As Trott points out, it
is this ‘hidden’ career that has subsequently commanded greatest crit-
ical attention, in a marked break with the traditionally valorized motif of
the unified and public cursus honorum. All of the post-Classical literary
30
â•‡ Trott 2003:Â€9.
careers addressed hereÂ€ – from Shakespeare’s ‘counter-laureate’-ship to
Wordsworth’s Â�‘hidden’ career and Goethe’s elegiac ‘sabbatical’Â€ – bear
eloquent testimony not only to the continuance in post-antique litera-
ture of ancient career models, but also to that Ovidian principle of career
Â�re-scription and re-vision that is as much a part of the ancient conception
of the literary career as is the rota Vergiliana.
Ch apter 1
Some Virgilian unities

Michael C. J. Putnam
The standard demarcations of the Virgilian career are already present at,
or soon after, the poet’s death in 19 BC in his epitaph and in the famous
lines that purport to introduce the Aeneid. The first may, or may not, be
the work of Virgil:
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces.1
Mantua begot me, the Calabrians snatched me away, Parthenope now possesses
me. I sang of pastureland, the country, leaders.
The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid are denoted by the words pascua, rura
and duces, pasture for animals, ploughlands and heroes, standing emblem-
atically for pastoral, didactic and epic verse.
Servius tells us that the second passage was excised from its place as the
opening hexameters of the Aeneid, but scholarly opinion largely regards it
as Tiberian in date:2
Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus auena
carmen et egressus siluis uicina coegi
ut quamuis auido parerent arua colono,
gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis …
I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, and, departing from the
woodland, compelled the neighbouring fields to obey the husbandman, how-
ever grasping, a work welcome to farmers:Â€ but now [I sing] of the bristling
[arms] of Mars.
Here carmen, in association with gracili auena and siluis, stands for
Virgil’s initial masterpiece. The Georgics is an opus that has uicina arua,
Quoted in Vita Donatiana 36 (in Brugnoli and Stok 1997).

1
See Thilo and Hagen 1881:Â€preface to Book 1 of the Aeneid, and Vita Donatiana 42.
2
17
18 Michael C. J. Putnam
worked by a colonus, and agricolae for its theme. We move into the Aeneid
via the phrase horrentia Martis, anticipating arma to come.3
Though the arc from ego to cano implies a unity of imagination behind
the whole of Virgil’s output, the lines dwell on distinctions and on evolu-
tionary development. Both the first and, implicitly, the last centre on the
poet and his song (carmen, cano), with the pastorals having as sign a reed
pipe, slender like the stylistics of the poems it accompanies. The second,
presuming a progress (egressus) from woods, which is to say unculti-
vated nature, to arua, lands tamed by the plough, heralds the emerging
from one imaginative sphere into another. As we dwell on the poetry of
instruction, an element of compulsion appropriately enters the language
that describes its creator (coegi) and of greed, that of his human pupil
(auido). Finally, horrentia anticipates the weapons, bristling and inspir-
ing dread, that are a metonymy for the Aeneid.
The two passages complement each other:Â€pascua, nourisher of ani-
mals and setting for singers, finds a counterpart in auena and in siluis,
the milieu for song and those who ponder its ‘woodland Muse’, rura
in the more specific arua, and duces in the instruments of a warrior’s
force. The brisk, asyndetic compartmentalization of the epitaph is tem-
pered, and glossed, in the four-line segment by the participle egressus.
This suggests a creative evolution on the poet’s part from one genre
to the next, an evolution that depends both on acculturation, as the
addressee leaves the forest of primitivism for the task of domesticating
fields and for the uses of energy that founds cities and builds empires,
and on power. The verb egredior means to emerge but also to climb.
Virgil, it suggests, was involved in a poetic journey that moved both
outwards and upwards. Its horizontality follows a typology that takes
us, metaphorically, from woods to fields to urban communities, and
to the specific itinerary from Troy to Rome. The vertical dimension
places us, metaphorically, on a societal, cultural ladder that ascends
hierarchically from lowly shepherd, inhabiting the woods of hard pas-
toral, to intermediate farmer, taming and educating his fields in the
battle against nature, to the high grandeur of heroes whose prowess
brings the ways of civilization to mankind.4
3
The implication of uicina is that arua and siluis are proximate, as aspects of the natural world
and as emblems of types of poetry that tell of them. In adjacent lines at the opening of the first
Eclogue Virgil has Meliboeus contrast the siluestrem Musam (2), that Tityrus can continue pon-
dering, and the dulcia arua (3) that he himself must abandon.
4
Compare Propertius 2.34.61–80 for another, more intricate summary of the Virgilian career, as
well as Ovid Amores 1.15.25–6 (with the comments of Cheney 2002a:Â€9–10).
Some Virgilian unities 19
This complex progress from pastoral to georgic to epic, though touched
upon in both the Virgilian vitae and in the commentary tradition from
Servius on, is formalized graphically in the thirteenth-century Parisiana
Poetria of John of Garland.5 Such a cursus served as a model, with varia-
tions, for poets from Ovid, Virgil’s immediate successor, and Statius, in
the subsequent century, to Dante and Petrarch, at the dawn and early
morning of the Renaissance, to Spenser and above all Milton whose
accomplishment might be considered its modern climax.
The poets whose careers most resemble that of VirgilÂ€– besides those just
named I could add later poets such as Pope, Wordsworth (see ch. 15) and
TennysonÂ€– were imbued with the Classical tradition and, however multi-
form the results, learned the craft of writing in part from studying the
bard of Mantua. They were self-consciously fashioning their development
as writers on the forward advance of the master’s poetic progress. But what
of Virgil himself? Was he aware from the start, and, if so, to what degree,
of the way his career would evolve, especially in terms of the genres that
it would follow? The answer, I think, is positive, but I wonder if such an
affirmation should rely specifically on the genres of his three great poems
that proved so significant in assuring his future status as model for the
spiritual development of poets. We have the famous recusatio at the open-
ing of Eclogue 6, prominently placed halfway through the first collection.
There the speaker claims to have pondered the singing of epic deeds (reges
et proelia ‘kings and battles’), in particular the ‘praises and gloomy wars’
(laudes … et tristia … bella) of Alfenus Varus.6 Apollo twitches his ear and
urges a ‘song fine-spun’, namely a continuation of pastoral.7
But two matters tell against taking this declaration as a ‘refusal’ that
is in fact an omen for the future. The first is that, as an allusion to the
Â�opening of Callimachus’ Aetia and to its stylistics,8 the lines are a self-
conscious act on Virgil’s part of modelling himself on his Hellenistic past,
not a declaration of originality directed toward a vocational path. Second,
even assuming that this might be the case, the exploits of P. Alfenus Varus
were hardly worth the epic context into which Virgil’s speaker contem-
plates putting them.9
5
See Garland 1974, ed. and trans. Lawler, and, on the Rota Vergilii, Faral 1924:Â€ 86–9; Curtius
1953:Â€201 n. and 231–2; Laugesen 1962; Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008:Â€744–50.
6
Ecl. 6.3.6–7.
7
The placement of programmatic moments at positions halfway through their respective works is a
common feature of Eclogues (opening of the sixth eclogue), Georgics (opening of the third georgic)
and Aeneid. On these median moments see Conte 1992.
8
Callimachus Aetia fr. 1.21–4 Pfeiffer.
9
See for example Coleman 1977 on Ecl. 6.7; Clausen 1994 on Ecl. 6.6–7.
My concern, therefore, about early understanding and assurance on
Virgil’s part of his poetic journey rests primarily on questions of genre.
I am not certain that Virgil at the start of his career could, or would, have
deliberately set out to climb the ladder of perfection that we know he
chose, and that led him backwards in Greek literary time from Theocritus
to Hesiod and Homer, from pastoral to didactic to epic, to complete at
the end a circle that returns to origins and that makes a whole of western
literature as Virgil would have known it. What I am assured of is that
certain topics and themes remain constant throughout Virgil’s writing,
themes that withstand the mutations of genres and that give a sense of
unity to the total ensemble. It is aspects of this homogeneity that I would
like to trace. Though this may seem a reactionary aspiration, it is my hope
that this pursuit will also be of value as we survey the careers of those
who modelled themselves on the generic framework that, for generations
beginning with Ovid, became one of Virgil’s major trademarks.
I will begin by focusing on the Aeneid and by suggesting reasons for
its wholeness. I will then expand our horizon within the Virgilian corpus
to examine the informative relationship between the epic and the first
Eclogue and to propose that the latter poem is proleptic, indeed program-
matic, for its author’s works as an amalgamated entity.10 I will then ask
whether or not any of the interconnecting strands serve to elucidate fur-
ther the careers of those authors who knowingly fashioned their writing
and its evolution according to the pattern established by the Latin poet’s
development, a pattern which remained paradigmatic because of the
authority exercised by Virgil’s imagination.
Let us look first at some particularities. It is well to remember how
Â�verbal repetition and rhyme bring the Aeneid, technically, to a firm
Â�conclusion. I quote 12.947–52 as Aeneas begins his final speech:
‘tune hinc spoliis indute meorum
eripiare mihi? Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas
immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit’.
hoc dicens ferrum aduerso sub pectore condit
feruidus; ast illi soluuntur frigore membra
uitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.
‘Are you, clothed in the spoils of my own, to be snatched from me? Pallas, Pallas
sacrifices you with this wound and exacts punishment from your criminal
On the programmatic aspects of the experiences of Tityrus and Meliboeus vis-à-vis Virgil’s
10
ambiguous views of Rome throughout his career, see Batstone 1990:Â€10–11. The tensions between
ideal and real, between the dream of Augustan aurea saecula and the immediacies of the uses of
power in the progress of history, are already present at the initiation of the Virgilian career.
blood.’ Saying this, ablaze he buries his sword in the chest of his enemy. But
[Turnus’] limbs are undone with cold, and his life with a groan flees resentfully
beneath the shades.
The repetitions of meorum and mihi in lines 947–8, and of the name Pallas
in the later line, slow the text, for the reader to pause and to consider
Aeneas’ words as he in turn contemplates Turnus and, vicariously, the
young warrior whom Turnus had earlier killed. Though the enjambment
of feruidus moves our attention along and, for his last appearance, puts
stress on Aeneas’ intense emotionality, the two sets of end rhymes, with
sumit and condit followed by membra and umbras, bring a standard form
of closure.11 The balanced pairs have an inexorability about them. Aeneas’
final word, with its imputation that he has become the incorporation of
Pallas’ vengeance, anticipates the occurrence of the deed itself. The move-
ment from membra to umbras in the poem’s extraordinary, ultimate hex-
ameters is equally gripping. Within the penultimate line we turn from
active to passive, from victor, in the heat of anger’s fury, to victim whose
limbs are, ironically, loosened by cold. The final rhyme aims our attention
strictly at the dying Turnus. Repetition again plays a slowing role here as
sub pectore (950) leads to sub umbras. But it is the assonantal twining of
membra with umbras that lends the final lines their conclusive force as
lexical interplay helps us eye closely not the hero in glory but the disin-
tegration in death of his adversary, as collapsing limbs enter the world of
disembodied shades.12
The impressive tightness of the epic’s conclusion helps form part of a
larger unity. Resonances between the final lines as a whole and the epic’s
opening segments have the effect of complementing the poem’s climac-
tic linearity with an equally potent element of circularity. Such an act
of enclosure forces the reader’s attention back to the poem’s start and
into an act of rereading and of reprobing meaning. The phrase soluun-
tur frigore membra, for example, applied to Turnus in the epic’s penulti-
mate hexameter, serves as a reminder of 1.92:Â€extemplo Aeneas soluuntur
Â�frigore membra. ‘Suddenly the limbs of Aeneas are undone with cold.’ As
the first line in which Aeneas is named, the hexameter endures in the
11
On rhyme as a standard signpost of conclusion, and closure, see B. H. Smith 1968:Â€44–5.
12
There is no rhyme when 12.952 makes its first appearance at 11.831, or with sub umbras at 4.660
and 6.578, or ex sanguine sumit at 11.720. At the end of the Aeneid, the iterations of prosody
replace the literal rituals, with description of ceremony mimicked in the formality of a poem’s
completion, which the conclusions of the Iliad and the Odyssey lead us to expect from Virgil’s
own finale. Virgil’s final paradox is to have the patterned shaping of words bring order to Aeneas’
summary violence.
reader’s memory as reminder of the hero’s initial brush with mortality.13
The recurrence of its final phrase at 12.951, during Turnus’ passage from
life to death, announces a larger mutation within the poem, of Aeneas
from stoic sufferer of destiny to a warrior who controls the fate of his
defeated antagonist.
This echo is complemented by the vocabulary of emotion that swathes
both events. At the conclusion it is Aeneas, ‘set aflame by furies and ter-
rible in his wrath’ (furiis accensus et ira / terribilis, 946–7), a rage stemming
from the ‘fierce resentment’ (saeui … doloris) that the reminder of Pallas
precipitates, who brings death to his opponent. At the epic’s opening it is
the remembering wrath (iram, 4; irae, 12; irarum, 25) of ‘fierce’ (saeuae,
4) Juno and her ‘fierce resentments’ (saeui dolores, 25), soon embodied in
Aeolus’ storm, that seek annihilation for Aeneas. On each occasion vic-
tim has become victimizer.
We should attend further to the verb condere. At the beginning of the
poem we find it associated with Aeneas’ founding of the city of Lavinium
(conderet urbem, 5) which anticipates ‘the walls of lofty Rome’ (altae moenia
Romae, 7), then with the Rome, in the famous line (33):Â€tantae molis erat
Romanam condere gentem. ‘Such an effort it was to found the Roman race.’
At the end we find the verb employed to describe the burial of Aeneas’
sword in the chest of his opponent. We will return in a moment to the city
as a notion central to Virgil’s thought. We should observe here the implicit
irony to be discovered in a founder who is also last remembered as a killer,
in generalized initiations that have negative particularities about them, in
births that need, or claim, deaths to bring them to fruition, and in the
moral dilemmas that often ensue from such tensions.
Last is the idea of exile, carried from the poem’s second line, where
the compound adjective profugus is applied to Aeneas, to its concluding
verse where the verb fugit characterizes the brisk departure of Turnus’ life
beneath the shades. We are again engaged with a form of metamorphosis
as one man’s topographical exile leads to another’s eternal relegation from
a sublunar existence to the realm of the dead. But here, too, we must have
recourse to particularities. The same hero who suffers fated exile from
the shores of Troy and survives its terrors to become the emblem of the
future of Rome is the instigator of the more permanent exile inflicted
upon his antagonist as the poem reaches its extraordinary final moment
with a vision of mortality.
For a discussion of this and other examples of ring-composition, connecting the opening and
13
closing of the epic see Hardie 1997a:Â€150–1.

Let us return to the theme of the city by means of another set of cir-
cularities, this time between Books 7 and 12, demarcating the poem’s
second half. One of the astonishing moments in the epic’s concluding
book, astonishing because it is as unexpected as it is gratuitous, is Aeneas’
instigation of the destruction of Latinus’ city (12.554–92). Because his
words (567–9) are addressed to his soldiers as ciues (572), citizens are iron-
ically preparing to destroy other ciues (583):
â•…â•…â•‡ ‘urbem hodie, causam belli, regna ipsa Latini,
â•…â•…â•‡ ni frenum accipere et uicti parere fatentur,
â•…â•…â•‡ eruam et aequa solo fumantia culmina ponam’.
‘The city, the reason for war, the very kingdom of Latinus, unless, vanquished,
they agree to submit to the bridle and to obey, I will today raze and will place its
smoking rooftops level with the ground.’
Words turn to deeds as the men advance to the walls while ladders and
fire are prepared. Aeneas leads the charge as ‘strife arises among the anx-
ious citizens’ (exoritur trepidos inter discordia ciues, 583) about how to
respond. The poet metaphorizes the whole in simile (587–92):
inclusas ut cum latebroso in pumice pastor
uestigauit apes fumoque impleuit amaro;
illae intus trepidae rerum per cerea castra
discurrunt magnisque acuunt stridoribus iras;
uoluitur ater odor tectis, tum murmure caeco
intus saxa sonant, uacuas it fumus ad auras.
Just as when a shepherd has tracked down bees in haven-studded pumice and
filled it with bitter smoke; in anxiety about their situation they rush through
their waxen fortifications within. The black stench swirls through their dwell-
ings, the rocks inside re-echo with their black rumble, smoke pours out into the
empty air.
There is a past history here that begins most immediately in Book 7. Near
its start Virgil introduces us to Latinus as the founder of a citadel (pri-
mus cum conderet arces, 7.61).14 At its foundation a swarm of bees settled
on the peak of a laurel tree growing deep within Latinus’ dwelling. A
seer pronounces (68–70):Â€‘externum cernimus’ … / ‘aduentare uirum et par-
tis petere agmen easdem / partibus ex isdem et summa dominarier arce’. ‘I
see a foreigner approach’ … ‘From the same quarter a troop seeks the
14
Virgil would have us compare Latinus’ present with Aeneas’ future, as summarized in words we
have seen opening the epic’s first half (dum conderet urbem, 1.5). The verb condere links Latinus,
and the narrative of Book 7, with the conclusion of the poem as well.
same quarter and lords it over the topmost citadel.’ The language is suit-
ably oracular, but commentators have shied away from the full sense of
the final words. Deryck Williams sees the concluding phrase as mean-
ing ‘that the foreign invasion will be successful’ while Nicholas Horsfall,
in his commentary, finds that ‘the verb [dominarier] … looks ahead to
Aeneas’ rule as Latinus’ successor, after the end of the poem’.15 But there is
a before and after here that complicates these readings. What precedes the
omen is a reminder that the newly landed Trojans are now characterized
by Virgil’s narrator as an aduena exercitus (7.38–9), a foreign army poised
for the attack. The phrase anticipates the concentration on the arrival of
an outsider (externum … / aduentare uirum), namely Aeneas who will
become master of the city and its citadel.16
If we follow out the implication of the omen for later events in the epic,
we find ourselves watching Aeneas first prepare to destroy Latinus’ city,
then actually in control of its core. For when we last see him before the
final duel begins we are told (12.698):Â€ deserit et muros et summas deserit
arces. ‘He abandons the walls and forsakes the lofty citadel.’ Though we
hear eight lines later of battering rams at work on the city’s bastions, the
suggestion of the phrase summas arces is that Aeneas is now in possession
of the city. It is again with some irony that Virgil presents his hero as
the demolisher-in-progress of Latinus’ anonymous city since he is at pains
shortly later in Book 7 (170–91) to draw connections between aspects of
the aged king’s temple-palace and edifices of Augustus’ Rome, on both the
Capitoline and Palatine hills. Our city founder also has within him the
potential to be a razer of cities. In particular we find him both conquer-
ing and savaging a city’s central monument that has similarities to build-
ings in a Rome that Virgil’s contemporaries would have recognized.17
There is a larger history embracing both earlier and later moments in
the Aeneid of which events of Books 7 and 12 form a part. Aeneas’ involve-
ment with the destruction of cities begins in Book 2 where, both in the
fighting and as a witness, he participates in the demise of Troy. Aeneas
15
Williams in Virgil 1973 on 7.64; Horsfall 2000b on 7.70.
16
The negative use of aduena, an outsider who does violence to a land’s denizens, begins at Ecl.
9.2–3, which take notice of the aduena … possessor who has displaced the shepherds. In Book
7 we hear, immediately after the mention of aduena exercitus, of, among other matters, exor-
dia pugnae and horrida bella, in the précis of Books 7 to 12 mentioned earlier. At Aen. 4.591
Dido considers Aeneas an aduena who has scorned her, while at 12.261, in the eyes of the augur
Tolumnius, he is an improbus aduena.
17
The primary figure for the forfeiture of pastoral innocence is Silvia’s tamed stag, maimed by the
arrow of Ascanius (see Putnam 1998:Â€ 97–118). On the loss that she finds compensated for ‘by
Rome and civilization’, see Theodorakopoulos 1997:Â€162.
is largely the passive sufferer of fate’s twists, not the initiator and imple-
menter of action, especially when it takes a negative turn. For the sake of
both parallelisms and comparisons let us look simply at the word arx. It is
‘from the top of the citadel’ (summa … ab arce, 41) that Laocoön descends
to forewarn his countrymen about the dangers of the wooden horse. He
is replaced by the enormous creature itself. In Aeneas’ words (244–5):
Â�instamus tamen immemores caecique furore / et monstrum infelix sacrata
sistimus arce, ‘Forgetful and blind with frenzy we press on and establish
the ill-fated monster on the doomed citadel.’18 The horse is soon replaced
by twin snakes, which make their way ‘to the topmost shrines’ (delubra ad
summa, 225) and ‘the citadel of harsh Minerva’ (saeuae Tritonidis arcem,
226). They yield place to the Greeks in person. Finally we have the ruin-
ous gods. Watch Minerva, commands his mother (615–16):Â€iam Â�summas
arces Tritonia, respice, Pallas / insedit nimbo effulgens et Gorgone saeua.
‘Behold, now Tritonian Minerva has taken her seat on the topmost cita-
del, gleaming with her storm-cloud and her fierce Gorgon.’19 The capture
of the arx means the capitulation of the city.
Chronologically the next city with which Aeneas is involved is
Carthage. Here his role in the city’s metamorphosis is more subtle, com-
bining aspects that are both active and passive. When we first come upon
the city, we see it through his eyes (1.418–40), gazing at houses, gates,
streets. The inhabitants are at work on a citadel, harbour, theatre and a
temple for Juno. On its steps Dido dispenses rights and laws. With the
arrival of Aeneas, and the arousal of the queen’s passion for him, all this
creative energy comes to a halt (4.86–9):
non coeptae adsurgunt turres, non arma iuuentus
exercet portusue aut propugnacula bello
tuta parant:Â€pendent opera interrupta minaeque
murorum ingentes aequataque machina caelo.
The towers they had started do not rise, the youth does not practise with its
weapons, they do not ready the harbours or the bulwarks for safety in war.
The works hang, their construction cut off:Â€huge, menacing walls, a crane that
reaches the sky.
Gone is emphasis on the evidence of culture. Instead Virgil has us notice
how preparations for defence are no longer in progress. The city’s guard
is down.
18
Virgil puns on sacrata which means both hallowed as well as accursed.
19
The verb insideo here has specific military overtones of occupation and entrenchment.
There is a more sinister side to events, built as much on metaphor as on
immediate circumstances, that suggests that the enemy is already within.
The sequence begins at 1.673–4 where we hear of Venus’ plot ‘to seize
[the queen] by guile and gird her with flame’ (capere … dolis et cingere
flamma). The metaphorical pattern, which likens Dido to a Troy-like city
readied for capture, continues with the verb insido at 719 to describe the
love-god’s posture as besieger.20 By the next occurrence in the pattern, at
4.330, the ‘city’ has already been seized, when Dido exclaims that, had she
conceived a child, non equidem omnino capta ac deserta uiderer, ‘I would
not seem so completely captured and abandoned.’ Metaphor is expanded
into simile, and Dido replaced by her city, for which she now stands as
synecdoche, in the final instance of the comparison. The queen’s death,
and the mourning that ensues, create a scene (669–71):
â•…â•…â•… non aliter quam si immissis ruat hostibus omnis
â•…â•…â•… Karthago aut antiqua Tyros, flammaeque furentes
â•…â•…â•… culmina perque hominum uoluantur perque deorum.
no different than if all of Carthage or of ancient Tyre were to collapse, once the
enemy was at loose within, and raging flames billow through rooftops belonging
to men, belonging to gods.
However vicarious his responsibility, the result of Aeneas’ arrival at
Carthage is the literal as well as figurative weakening and destruction of
both the queen and her city.
The transition for Carthage and its ruler from powerful to powerless,
from industrious builders to subjects of ruinous incursions, can also be
illustrated by simile, as we move from Book 1 to Book 4. At 1.430–6 the
creative Carthaginians are compared to bees fostering their hive. The
simile’s imagistic complement and lexical counterpart occurs at 4.402–5
where the absconding Trojans find kinship with ants, ransacking a heap
of grain. Virgil makes his point by a brilliant transfer. At 1.527–8 Ilioneus,
spokesman for the Trojans before the Carthaginian queen, asks forbear-
ance of Dido:Â€ non nos aut ferro Libycos populare penatis / uenimus, aut
raptas ad litora uertere praedas, ‘We have not made our way here either to
despoil with the sword the household gods of Libya, or to turn shoreward
booty that we have claimed.’ But Virgil’s re-employment of parallel lan-
guage in the later ant simile tells another tale (402–5):
For dolus in Book 2 alone, see 34, 44, 152, 196, and 264. For parallels with insidat we have noted
20
the use of the cognate verb insideo at 2.616. Cf. appearances of the noun insidiae at 36, 65, 195, 310
and 421. For use of the phrase cingere flamma in connection with the besieging of a city see Aen.
9.160 and 10.119.
â•…â•…â•… ac uelut ingentem formicae farris aceruum
â•…â•…â•… cum populant hiemis memores tectoque reponunt,
â•…â•…â•… it nigrum campis agmen praedamque per herbas
â•…â•…â•… conuectant calle angusto.
And just as when ants, mindful of the winter season, despoil a huge heap of grain
and carry it within their dwelling, a black troop makes its way along the open
spaces, and they carry their booty on a narrow pathway through the fields.
Crafting Carthaginian bees, instinctive cherishers of their ordered exist-
ence, have been replaced by ravaging Trojan ants who parasitically sup-
port their lives on what the labour of others has amassed.21 They, too,
symbolically are devastating Dido and her city.
In Book 7, at a moment in the epic’s second half parallel to these earlier
events in its opening book, Ilioneus is again spokesman for his country-
men, this time before Latinus. His words follow by some hundred hexam-
eters the omen we earlier examined of the Trojans, now in the guise of bees
who, as the prophet forewarns, will swarm possessively toward the king’s
citadel. The apian horde is seconded shortly by the appearance of flames on
the head of Lavinia (7.73–6, where words for fire are heaped one upon the
other).22 Latinus is told that the monstrum portends her future fame but,
more immediately, a ‘mighty war’ (magnum bellum, 80). The next occasion
that flame and smoke are associated with Latinus is when his city and its
houses are set afire by Aeneas and his men, as the epic nears its conclusion.
There are several ways in which Virgil invites his readers to connect the
three booksÂ€– 2, 4 and 12Â€– in which Aeneas is associated with the down-
fall of cities. One of the most salient is again his use of simile to help us
deepen our understanding of his text’s meanings. For example, these are
the only books of the epic where Aeneas is compared to a shepherd whose
situation serves as potent metaphor for the contexts in which they are
placed. The climactic sequence from one to the other is central to one of
the poet’s designs, namely to illustrate Aeneas’ growing responsibility for
his actions, as he turns from endurer of fate to apparent realizer of his own
destiny and imposer of their fate on those subject to him. The first occurs
at 2.304–8, when Aeneas listens to the sounds of his city’s catastrophe:
â•…â•…â•… in segetem ueluti cum flamma furentibus Austris
â•…â•…â•… incidit, aut rapidus montano flumine torrens
21
Virgil uses the phrase farris aceruum, also at line ending and accompanied by a form of populo, in
a literal agricultural context at Geo. 1.185 where marauding ant is joined by weevil.
22
Within five lines lines we have ignem, flamma and accensa (bis). Lavinia is fumida fuluo lumine,
and Vulcan shares in the enterprise.
â•…â•…â•… sternit agros, sternit sata laeta boumque labores
â•…â•…â•… praecipitisque trahit siluas; stupet inscius alto
â•…â•…â•… accipiens sonitum saxi de uertice pastor.
‘Just as when flame with raging south winds falls on a crop, or a rushing swirl
of a mountain stream lays low fields, lays low fertile seedlings and the efforts of
cattle, and drags forests headlong. The ignorant shepherd stands amazed on the
rock’s lofty crest, taking in the noise.’23
Troy’s fall is like the moment when elemental forces of nature obliterate
the traces of humankind, in this case of man the farmer, one of whose
tasks, the Georgics teaches us, is to keep wild nature at bay. The shepherd,
standard protagonist of pastoral poetry, is both physically and, in terms
of metapoetics, generically removed from the distant horror that he wit-
nesses. This he absorbs only through hearing, much though we expect
sight to be his organ of sensation because of the eminence on which he
stands. Though we watch him closely (Virgil gives him the last word,
pastor), the shepherd’s ignorance keeps him aloof from what he hears but
cannot see, senses but cannot intellectually comprehend.
The second appearance of Aeneas as shepherd, at 4.68–73, finds him in
a more involved posture. Though Dido is the primary object of compari-
son, the pastor is now a focal figure in the story, just as the word is central
to the simile:
â•…â•…â•… uritur infelix Dido totaque uagatur
â•…â•…â•… urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerua sagitta,
â•…â•…â•… quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit
â•…â•…â•… pastor agens telis liquitque uolatile ferrum
â•…â•…â•… nescius:Â€illa fuga silvas saltusque peragrat
â•…â•…â•… Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo.
Ill-starred Dido burns and in her frenzy ranges the whole city, like an unwary
hind, upon the shooting of an arrow, whom a shepherd amid the groves of Crete
has pierced from afar as he herds it with his weaponry, and unwittingly has left
[in her] the speeding steel. In her flight she roams the woods and glades of Dicte.
The deadly shaft clings to her side.
We have moved from Aeneas observing to doing. The shepherd is dis-
placed from his ordinary regimen of tending tame flocks into the more
tangential, more primitive, role of hunter, just as Aeneas in Carthage has
been momentarily seduced from following out his quasi-impersonal des-
tiny into a situation where emotionality rules. The gist of the simile is
For a detailed discussion of this simile in relation to its sources in Homer and as the first in the
23
sequence of comparisons between Aeneas and a shepherd, see Anderson 1968.

a pictorial expansion of one of the several erotic metaphors that, in the
book’s opening hexameters, reinterpret the situation of Dido in particu-
lar. We are told how, as part of the extensive wound she suffers, Aeneas’
‘features and words cling pierced to her breast’ (haerent infixi pectore
Â�uultus / uerbaque, 4.4–5).
We also learn that Aeneas in fact reciprocates Dido’s feeling. But the
force of the narration puts more emphasis on the effect than on the cause,
on the wound rather than on its perpetrator. Both aspects are present in
the powerful simile, but spatial distance between hunter and prey serves
to suggest ethical differentiation as well. The doe is incauta, with a lack
of guard that suggests irresponsibility. The hunter purposefully causes the
hurtÂ€– he is driving the animal with his arrowsÂ€– but remains ignorant
that the shaft has struck home and that the wound is mortal. Aeneas
may be the instigator of Dido’s self-slaughter, and the implicit agent of
the doom of her city, but he is unaware of the extent of the harm he has
caused.
Turning to the final simile in the chain, Aen. 12.586–92 quoted earl-
ier, we find the word pastor placed prominently at the analogy’s start just
as the shepherd himself is now in control of a dramatic situation that he
instigates. Once again there is a sense that the shepherd is deliberately
placed out of his element, as if to affirm that Aeneas is involved with a
morally questionable activity as he sets Latinus’ city afire. The sugges-
tion is borne out by a comparison with Virgil’s source in the second book
of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (130–4). The Roman poet typically
adds details that not only requalify the simile’s object of comparisonÂ€– the
hive, for instance, like Latinus’ city, has been turned into a waxen version
of an armed camp (castra, 589)Â€– but also personify his protagonists. His
bees worry about their situation (trepidae rerum) and respond with anger
to provocation.
Apollonius lists two initiators of his simile’s action, shepherds and bee-
keepers. Virgil dispenses with the latter and focuses on a single example
of the former, as if to emphasize that one particular shepherd, the cen-
tral figure of his poem, was as out of place in firing his opponent’s city
as would be a shepherd when smoking out bees from a rocky hive. Here,
too, we confront the same metapoetic element that we found in the pastor
simile in Book 2, and it reinforces Virgil’s point. Beekeeping in its poetic
manifestations belongs under the rubric of didactic, as illustrated in the
fourth book of the Georgics. The shepherds of pastoral verse are as incon-
gruous in the role of apiarists as is an Aeneas in the position of city-razer.
Yet this is exactly how Virgil would have us see him.
In our discussion of the first Eclogue we will return to Virgil’s detail-
ing of the events reinterpreted by the simile. Let us conclude our sur-
vey of Aeneas’ literal and figurative connection with cities by a glance at
the brief final similes in the poem. At the moment when Aeneas hurls at
Turnus the spear that fells but does not kill him, the poet offers two com-
parisons for the noise its onrush makes (12.921–3):Â€ murali concita num-
quam / tormento sic saxa fremunt nec fulmine tanti / dissultant crepitus,
‘Never do rocks roar so loudly when sped from a besieging catapult, nor
do such crashes burst forth from a thunderbolt.’ Aeneas’ spear-thrust has
a share in Jovian omnipotence. It also represents metaphorically a force
that is bent on capturing a city.24 In his initial wounding Turnus therefore
vicariously becomes a city under assault. The deadly plunging of Aeneas’
sword into his antagonist’s chest, which we witness some thirty lines later,
completes the epic with the final evolution of this particular metaphoric
drama through the ambiguities which we have already traced of the verb
condere. The hypothetical founder of Lavinium, and ancestor of Rome,
can also behave in such a way that, at least in the medium of the meta-
phoric, he is, in the reality of his final deed, a city-destroyer as well.
Dido, too, makes a figurative appearance here. In the extraordinary
first simile of Book 12 Turnus is compared to a lion wounded by hunters,
become a single robber, in Punic fields. The language of the simile’s second
line (saucius … graui … uulnere, 12.5) echoes the opening hexameters of
Book 4 where Dido, ‘wounded with the weight of anxiety, nourished the
hurt with her veins’ (graui … saucia cura / uulnus alit uenis, 4.1–2). And
the topographic placement at Carthage reconfirms the echo. Dido and
her city become symbolically complementary at her death. The demise of
Turnus as city is meant by Virgil to be parallel, with the salient difference
that, in the first instance, the titular hero was only in part blameworthy
for the resultant suicide whereas in the second he bears responsibility for
his final burst of fury and subsequent killing.
Once again figurative turns to literal in the final reach of the story of
Turnus. Here the eroticism involved is, if anything, more complex than
in the tale of Dido’s liaison with the Trojan hero. In the concluding lines
of the epic Turnus renounces Lavinia, the presumed source of the meta-
phoric wound of the initial simile as well as the prey of its latro. Aeneas
kills, however, not to punish his opponent for his ill-fated expectation of
marriage with the Latin princess but because he is reminded of Pallas,
killed by Turnus. The more sweeping vengeance against Latinus’ city
24
â•‡ See Putnam 1995:Â€195–6; Rossi 2004:Â€203.
takes an intricate turn toward specificity as Aeneas slays Turnus in the
final moment of the poem.25
Using the city and its several connotations as common ground, let us
turn back from the Aeneid to the first Eclogue. We will be watching again
the notion of exile and taking up for the first time the idea of shade and
its many nuances. But first a word on the poem as a whole. The reader
shares in a dialogue between two shepherd-singers given the Greek names
of Meliboeus and Tityrus, evocative of the Theocritean background of
Virgilian pastoral yet placed in a country setting within the orbit of
Rome’s influence. This bucolic landscape is largely perfect and allowed to
remain the permanent setting for Tityrus.26
For Meliboeus matters are different. There is illness in his flock. Worse,
he, along with an apparent majority of his colleagues, is being forced from
this spiritual centre toward the bounds of the empire. Tityrus alone seems
fortunate in continuing to inhabit his world of fountains, shade and the
various musics of man and nature. The poem’s narrative seems to run the
partial course of a day, leading us from the happy shepherd, reclining
under a spreading beech and chanting of Amaryllis, to nightfall as the
mountain shadows lengthen. But this crepuscular beauty means different
things to the two protagonists. For lucky Tityrus it signifies the conclu-
sion of an ordinary ideal bucolic day of leisure and song. For Meliboeus it
portends the possible passing of one more night within his beloved land-
scape before departure into a land or lands whose remoteness helps set off
its core differences from the realm of Tityrus. Ideal contrasts with real,
happiness with suffering, stability with motion, while the diurnal time of
the pastoral arcadia stands against the vast temporalities of history and of
ordinary life.
Meliboeus is leaving the pastoral world, but there are aspects to his
existence other than storyline that contrast with that of Tityrus. For
one thing he is closely linked to the georgic as well as to the pastoral
sphere. Already in the poem’s third line we hear of his ‘sweet plough-
lands’ Â�(dulcia arva). As the poem nears its end, we are told of ‘ears of
corn’ (aristae, 69), of his ‘newly-tilled fields’ (noualia, 70) and ‘crops’
(segetes, 71). The language of Virgilian didactic is concentrated at lines
25
This series of metaphors suggests a commonality between Books 4 and 12 as conclusions, respect-
ively, of the first and last thirds of the epic. The suggestive parallels with the finale of the middle
third, the only full-scale description of the city of Rome in the epic as climax of the ecphrasis of
Aeneas’ shield, deserve separate treatment.
26
For a recent survey of the pointed, but limited, allusions to Theocritus in this very Roman poem,
see Tracy 2003:Â€66 and n. 1.
72–3 where Meliboeus addresses himself with irony:Â€his nos conseuimus
agros! / insere nunc, Meliboee, piros, pone ordine uitis, ‘For this we have
sown our fields! Graft now your pears, Meliboeus, place your vines in a
row.’ The tasks that the displaced shepherd must forgo draw us lexically
into the farmer’s world, the subject matter of the first and second books
of the Georgics.
But there is a third characteristic to Meliboeus’ condition that further
differentiates him from Tityrus. We attend to it first also in the opening
lines where we hear, once, of his ‘bounded lands’ (fines, 3) and twice of
his ‘fatherland’ (patriae, patriam, 3–4). The territory in which he resides
is defined in a broadly political sense as his homeland, with all the word’s
civic connotations which further set his life apart from the idyllic, yet
hermetic, existence of Tityrus. And at line 67, as the unlucky shepherd
prepares to reveal the reasons why he must abandon the pastoral world,
we are told again of ‘the domain of his fatherland’ (patrios fines, 67), of
a national landscape that also stands for the identity of his people as a
governed entity.
There is a more potent dimension to the distinction between the two
shepherds, the examination of which will take us beyond Eclogues and
Georgics, and back to the Aeneid, for Meliboeus represents aspects of all
three poems.27 This further dimension centres on the idea of the city, in
the case of Eclogue 1 the city of Rome. As with the Aeneid where the pres-
ence of power looks both to its raw, personal manifestations in the present
and to its golden applications in an Augustan future, so in the program-
matic introduction to the Virgilian career Rome makes its force felt in
two ways. There is the young god (deus, 6–7; iuuenem, 42), worshipped
by Tityrus, from whom in Rome he has received his libertas (32). For him
this means release from slavery which results in leisure (otia, 7) to create
easeful song. For the reader, allowed to plumb the depths of Meliboeus’
misfortunes in ways Virgil shows were impossible for the naïve, cosseted
Tityrus, his situation also suggests larger freedoms open to citizens in a
peaceful political situation.
To view the second way in which Rome appears in Eclogue 1 we must
turn from distance to immediacy, from general to particular, from a
The three ‘divisions’ of the Virgilian career converge at other moments. The most striking is the
27
opening of the third Georgic where the self-consciousness of the poet is most apparent in his
work. It comes at the central moment of Virgil’s tripartite production. That it, too, like the first
Eclogue at the initiation of the Virgilian career, partakes in aspects of pastoral, georgic and epic,
further confirms the unity amid this triple diversity that typifies Virgil’s work.
perfected centre of righteous power to the tangible effects on the land-
scape of a different Rome, riven by civil strife. One immediate sign of this
internecine warring was the distribution of lands to veterans of the win-
ning side in the years after the Battle of Philippi, in 42 BC. The ‘young
god’, presumably Octavian, was one of those victors. His alter ego, and
palpable emissary from a different Rome from that granting Tityrus his
freedom, is a soldier whom Meliboeus styles impius (70) and barbarus (71).
Impius contrasts the soldier’s behaviour with Meliboeus’ culta noualia (70),
tilled lands that, metaphorically, are both ‘civilized’ and ‘worshipped’ by
their tender (to Meliboeus, divinity inheres in his landscape, not in some
remote youth). The adjective also implies that the soldier incorporates
in himself, and stands as a synecdoche for, Furor impius at Aen. 1.294,
emblem of civil war imprisoned in an Augustan peace envisioned for the
future. Barbarus has parallel significance. It, too, reorients us so that, at
least in Meliboeus’ eyes, civilization exists in the pastoral foreground, not
in the metropolis on the Tiber that brutally inflicts its inner turmoil on a
subservient world.
It is by means of this aspect of the city that we can turn back, in con-
clusion, to the Aeneid and to the larger circles of the Virgilian poetic car-
eer that lend it wholeness as well as distinctiveness. Let us begin with Ecl.
1.71–2:Â€en quo discordia ciuis / produxit miseros, ‘behold whither discord
has brought our wretched citizens’, following upon Meliboeus’ charac-
terization of Rome’s encroaching soldiery. Virgil repeats the phrase dis-
cordia ciuis, also at the hexameter’s conclusion, at Aen. 12.583 to qualify
the reaction of the inhabitants of Latinus’ city to the start of Aeneas’
setting it afire. His action is the cause of controversy for those penned
within the walls about whether to fight back or to open the gates. But
since Aeneas shortly before has addressed his besieging army as o ciues
‘o citizens’ (572), Virgil implies that we are dealing with a larger form of
discord, an example of war between citizens that is a microcosm of the
events which take up the epic’s second half. Already in the first Eclogue
Virgil has prepared us for this particular type of warfare as well as for
the more general fighting of Aeneid Books 7 to 12 which allegorizes
the recent condition of modern Rome and its destructive penchant for
fratricide.
I have already quoted three earlier lines in Aeneas’ exhortation to his
troops (12.567–9). There is one phrase in the last of these hexameters that
also has the effect of returning our attention to the first Eclogue:Â€aequa
solo fumantia culmina ponam, ‘I will place [the city’s] smoking rooftops
level with the ground.’ The phrase fumantia culmina completes a further
circling back to Virgil’s first poem, this time to the eclogue’s concluding
lines that Virgil allots to Tityrus (79–83):
â•…â•…â•… Hic tamen hanc mecum poteras requiescere noctem
â•…â•…â•… fronde super uiridi:Â€sunt nobis mitia poma,
â•…â•…â•… castaneae molles et pressi copia lactis,
â•…â•…â•… et iam summa procul uillarum culmina fumant
â•…â•…â•… maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.
Here, nevertheless, you could rest this night with me upon green leaves. I have
ripe apples, soft chestnuts and an abundance of cheese. And now afar off the
roofs of the farmhouses are sending up smoke, and deeper shadows are falling
from the lofty hills.
In the narrow confines of Tityrus’ world and language, the phrase cul-
mina fumant looks to a typical evening scene in the countryside, lower-
ing the curtain on a shepherd’s quotidian existence.28 Cottages send up
smoke, shadows lengthen, and a pastoral poem comes to an appropriate
finale.29 To the reader of Virgil’s work as a whole the phrase takes on a
more complex meaning. We have seen how in Aeneid 12 it forms part of a
description of civil war that led us back to Meliboeus’ suffering. The poet
now offers us a further connection between Eclogue 1 and the same event
in the epic. As we read, and reread, the phrase can be interpreted in sev-
eral ways. Seeing the smoking ridgepoles through the eyes of Tityrus, we
contemplate the beauty of an ebbing pastoral day. Applying what we have
garnered from the end of the Aeneid, which itself offers a further articu-
lation of the reasons for Meliboeus’ plight, we contemplate these smok-
ing dwellings in a more sinister light, as the literal, but equally symbolic,
manifestation of what civil war does to citizensÂ€– a group for which our
suffering shepherd also standsÂ€– and to their various landscapes, whether
urban or rural.30
This connection leads to two further instances of the unity of the
Virgilian career that help form the outer ring of this concentricity. The
28
On the ambiguities of poteras, as fulfillable invitation or acknowledgement that the possibility of
further respite for Meliboeus has passed, see Batstone 1990:Â€11, who finds that the word offers us
‘not closure, but the imagination of closure’.
29
The use of fumant at 82 recalls altaria fumant (43) and Tityrus’ unambiguous offerings to Rome’s
young god. Culmina recalls the culmen of Meliboeus’ hovel (68). These are the only uses of the
word in the Eclogues. For its connection in the Aeneid with the destruction of cities see, in Book 2
alone, 290, 410, 446, 479 and 603. For fumo and fumus and the razing of cities see Aen. 2.609, 3.3
(omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia) and 10.45–6 ( fumantia Troiae / excidia). Fumus, as we saw,
appears twice in the shepherd simile of Aen. 12 (588, 592), as echo of fumantia (569).
30
For a further echo between Eclogue 1 and Aeneid 12 note the reflection of nos patriae … arua (Ecl.
1. 34) in nos patria … aruis (Aen. 12.236–7). See Putnam 2001:Â€331–2.
first is the idea of shade.31 Virgil’s use of umbrae, as the concluding word
of Eclogue 1, works its magic by several means.32 It looks back to the
poem’s fourth line which finds Tityrus, in Meliboeus’ words, lentus in
umbra (at ease in the shade), and the repetition helps bring to a satisfying
fulfilment the regular continuum of a pastoral day, from one moment of
shade to another.33 It also anticipates the last word of the epic as (Aen.
12.952) uita … cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras, ‘[Turnus’] life,
indignant, flees with a groan beneath the shades.’ Again, Virgil would
have us reread, and recontemplate. But is John Hollander, in his recent
splendid lectures on shade, entirely on the mark when he states that ‘the
umbrae into which Turnus descends with a moan of indignation … are
of another stuff entirely’ from Tityrus’ nocturnal shadows (Hollander
unpublished)? Virgil has already educated us into the understanding that
any attempt to measure the richness of his work depends on the reader’s
cyclic meditation of his three masterpieces en groupe. If we leave Tityrus’
umbrae with only the sense in which the lucky shepherd would find
them, as evidence for the passing of a day and of a song, then they bear
little kinship with Turnus’ vita as it descends into the eternal shadows.
But if we accept what discordia means in the life of Meliboeus and carry
its intensity through to its logical conclusion, in the narrative of Aeneid
12, from Aeneas’ burning of Latinus’ city to his furious killing of Turnus,
then even in Eclogue 1 its resonances take on an ominous tone.
The world of on-going time into which Meliboeus is forced is one in
which helpless citizens become a prey to the might, as well as to the Â�foibles,
of the empowered. It takes no great leap of the imagination to envision
the effects of such warring not only in the suffering of Meliboeus but in
the finality of one fighter’s demise at the hands of his stronger adversary.
31
For the figurative importance of shade in the poetry of Virgil see D. Kennedy 1983. For its role as
a unifying factor in Virgil’s poetry see Theodorakopoulos 1997:Â€162–3.
32
On the conclusion of Ecl. 1 see Traina 1968 and Van Sickle 1984.
33
Shade plays a multivalent, often structuring, role throughout Virgil’s poetry. Its appearance at
Ecl. 10.75–6, for instance, serves at least two purposes. By reference back to the conclusion of the
first Eclogue it brings unity to the book of Eclogues. But the phrase nocent … umbrae (Ecl. 10.76)
also anticipates its use at Geo. 1.121 (umbra nocet). It thus helps create a verbal nexus that forms a
transition to ‘pastures new’ in Virgil’s career, which is to say from Eclogues to Georgics (the most
prominent example of these connectives is the reuse of uere novo [Ecl. 10.74] at Geo. 1.43, the
initiation of the later poem’s didacticism). But whether in terms of the history of his ideas or of
his acts of poetic structuring, the evolving and developmental aspects of Virgil’s poetry are ever
in counterpoint to the circular and the recurring. Direct quotation of the first line of Ecl. 1 in
the last of Geo. 4 and parallelism in the configuration of the last eight lines of Ecl. 10 and those
of Geo. 4, make it further clear that Virgil authorizes us from the start of his career to think of
cyclicity as a guiding principle of his ideas and their formulation.
Here, too, it is appropriate that mention of shade likewise brings another
poem, and with it this time a poetic career, to a conclusion.34 In terms of
genre we have, of course, left pastoral behind for the heroics of epic. If we
adopt the categorization of John of Garland, warrior has replaced shep-
herd, just as country yields to city and diurnal time to the grander reaches
of history’s temporal sweep. But the larger context of Tityran shade leads
inexorably from idealism to realism, and with realism comes the darkness
of death. Through mention of shade the initiation of this extraordinary
poet’s imaginative course contains intimations of its finale. The reader
moves forward, following the writer’s sequence of production, through
three great opera. But Virgil’s extraordinary, demanding gestures of cir-
cularity keep us, his admirers, in a continuous present of contemplation.
Paradoxically shade both bounds the poems and remains central to their
meaning.35
The second, enclosing manifestation of the unity of the Virgilian car-
eer, one closely tied to the various nuances of shade, lies in the theme
of exile.36 We have already observed how in the Aeneid it runs from the
second line of the poem, where we find the titular hero fato profugus, to its
last, as the life of Turnus flees in exile. This technical use of the verb fugio
we find already in the fourth line of Eclogue 1 as Meliboeus tells of him-
self and his colleagues:Â€nos patriam fugimus, ‘we are being exiled from our
fatherland’.37 Meliboeus’ banishment is horrific enough, relegated as he is
34
Fowler 1997:Â€14 n. 47, finds that the final umbrae ‘figure the death of its author’. If so, and the
biographical facts bear out a literal acceptance of the suggestion, it is a death in possession of the
force of revival, a clear moment of stoppage invested with a dynamism that places exceptional
demands on the reader to reach beyond any superficial sign of termination. See also Hardie
1997a:Â€145 and n. 26.
35
In the heady world of Virgilian circularities, we must take due note of the careful repetition of
virtually the whole of Eclogue 1.1 as the concluding hexameter of the fourth Georgic. The clarion
echo asks us to reread the Eclogues in the light of what we have learned from the later poem as a
whole, as well as to utilize our appreciation of the earlier poem in the interpretation of the later.
Close study of the Georgics with their multivalent meditation on power and its uses, will give us
good reason to ponder why the speaker (in the guise of the poet), in the poem’s penultimate line,
can proclaim the earlier poem to be the product of someone ‘bold in his youth’ (audax iuuenta).
The depth of that ‘audacity’ is still further clarified in the final book of the epic whose more sub-
tle references back to Eclogue 1 ask us to perform what the conclusion of Georgic 4 accomplished
more directly. Virgil once again urges us to see his trifold achievement both developmentally and
as a complex whole.
36
For the importance of Meliboeus’ exile as a theme that reaches out beyond the poetic space of
the first Eclogue, see Van Sickle 2000, especially 45–9. See also 42–3 for the part played in the
poem by ‘the tensions of contemporary Rome’, ‘the crisis of the late republic’.
37
The close parallels between Ecl. 1.3–4, nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua. / nos patriam
fugimus, and Aeneas’ reaction to Mercury’s command that he must leave Carthage (Aen. 4. 281)
ardet abire fuga dulcisque relinquere terras, ‘he burns to depart in flight and to depart from the
sweet lands’, are scarcely coincidental. It is the presence of the adjective dulcis that, in the first
from the sequestered existence of pastoral’s dream to actuality’s great dis-
tances. But even here lies the incipience of that greater exile from life to
death, as we again move out into history and especially to those moments
when men take each other’s lives. The ending of the Virgilian career is
clearly present at its start as, in terms of genre, pastoral both anticipates
and in several senses is defined by epic. Et in Arcadia ego.38
If I am correct about the particular intellectual force of Eclogue 1, then
Virgil self-consciously initiates and concludes his career not with any first-
person apologia, but by adopting more subtle and more powerful frames
of reference which lexically and ideologically link the beginning with
the end, and vice versa. His most forthright statement of poetic purpose
comes at the centre of his poetic accomplishment, during the prooemium
of the third Georgic, halfway through his central work. But linkage of the
first Eclogue with the finale of the Aeneid expresses, however indirect the
poetic means, the deeper interests conveyed by Virgil’s master text. At
the epic’s end we move from apparent reconciliation between Juno and
Jupiter in heaven to the hero’s enraged killing of Turnus. We turn from
anticipating the deification of Aeneas, peace between warring parties and
the glory of Rome to come, to the reality of an angry hero inflicting ven-
geance on a suppliant.
My goal has been to use Virgil’s treatment of the city, of the rich ambi-
guities he associates with shade and the problematics of exile to help find
unity amid the splendid diversity of his poetic progress.39 I would hope
to stimulate discussion of these and other amalgamating factorsÂ€– or lack
thereofÂ€– in the poets who were influenced by the generic superficies of
the Virgilian career. Take exile as an example. Virgil’s naming of Scythia
instance, lends poignancy to the idea of Meliboeus’ banishment and, in the second, helps give
a secondary nuance to the word fuga. Aeneas must flee at the god’s insistence, but to flee from
something that is also ‘sweet’ implies an element of unwillingness, and of untoward compulsion,
that helps the noun also attract the sense of exile. Cf. also the use of dulcia limina in relation to
exile at Geo. 2.511, and of patriae and relinquo in relation to exul at Aen. 3.10–11. For fugio, and
fuga, as components of the language of exile see also Aen. 8.320 and 11.541–2, 547, 559, and 563.
38
The phrase pererratis … finibus exul appears pointedly at Ecl. 1.61 in Tityrus’ list of adynata, as
part of a series of analogies that, for him, will never occur. Already however at line 3 the reader
knows that exile is in the process of becoming a central reality in Meliboeus’ life.
39
My insistence on certain ‘enclosing’, unifying, themes in Virgil’s poetry is meant in no way to
extract Virgil’s work, especially the Aeneid, from its position in the larger sweep of Augustan cul-
ture, and from its important place in determining, as well as exposing, Rome’s complex reliance
on power. Circularity does not demand finality, and rereading presumes constant intellectual
motion and the expectation of change. In one sense Virgil does away with the problematics of
closure, by teasing the reader away from projecting the future, or futures, beyond his text and
into reading it again, and thereby into deepening and broadening the experience such rumin-
ation provides.
as a potential place of banishment for Meliboeus unwittingly anticipates
the fact that this region would be the site of Ovid’s relegation.40 But exile
as a theme permeates not only literally the later poet’s elegies from the
Black Sea but also, on a deep psychological level, the Metamorphoses with
their notion of change as a form of exilic limbo, poised between life and
death.41
We think also of Dante, the exile, and the complex combination of
love and hate, even in Paradiso, in which he held the city of his birth.
Likewise it is no accident that in the first of his twelve pastorals, written
in the 1340s and collected as Bucolicum Carmen, Petrarch associates him-
self not with the stable Monicus (a figure for his brother Gherardo) but
with the poet-wanderer Silvius.42 We could ponder, too, Milton’s many
exiles. On the biographical level he is excluded from politics after the
Restoration, and from ordinary human life by his blindness. On the level
of his poetic genius we contemplate exile as a major theme of Paradise
Lost:Â€ the banishment of Satan and his followers from heaven, of Adam
and Eve, and their offspring, from Eden, to live in a world of woe until
the Second Coming in the distant future brings the final relenting of
God’s angerÂ€– the Miltonic equivalent of Virgil’s distant aurea saecula and
Dante’s imagined heaven.43 Here, too, the continua of the Virgilian career
loom as a potent presence.
40
And, of course, after we have read Ovid’s nine books of exilic poetry, we return to the first
Eclogue with renewed understanding of Virgil’s figurations, especially of Meliboeus.
41
With Scythia and Ovid’s exile see Fasti 4.82 as well as the numerous references in Tristia and
Epistulae ex Ponto. For the connection between exile and metamorphosis see Met. 10.232–4.
42
Petrarch thus clearly adopts Meliboeus as his modelÂ€ – a clear challenge to the inherited alle-
gorical tradition, which saw Tityrus as Virgil (see Servius’ comment on Ecl. 1.1). He thus
acknowledges the force that Virgil lodged in the itinerant singer whose life is to be one of dis-
placement. Both are partial models for Diggon Davie in Spenser’s September eclogue. See further
W. J. Kennedy 1984:Â€89–95. Petrarch’s bow to the epic segment of the Virgilian career was the
Africa, on which he worked sporadically from the late 1330’s until his death (the poem was not
published until 1397). His chief ancient model was both honoured and criticized, for in Scipio
Africanus, unlike Aeneas, we have a hero verging on the faultless.
43
Anger, too, is a unifying factor. We have already seen the importance of its appearance at the
beginning and the conclusion of the Aeneid. It figures prominently as a motivating force for the
implementation of mutation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The locus classicus for a discussion of anger
as a primary motivating force for the events of epic, from Homer to Milton, is to be found at the
opening of the ninth book of Paradise Lost, lines 1–19.
Ch apter 2
There and back again:Â€Horace’s poetic career 1

Stephen Harrison
1.â•‡ I n t roduc t ion:Â€s om e f r a m e wor k s

This chapter considers the self-constructed poetic career of Quintus
Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BC) through his various poetic collections, mov-
ing from his debut as writer of hexameter sermo in Satires 1 (35 BC) and
2 (30 BC), through his iambic poetry in the Epodes (30 BC), his lyric
activity in Odes 1–3 (23 BC), his reprise of sermo in letter form in Epistles
1 (20/19 BC), his return to lyric in the Carmen Saeculare (17 BC) and
Odes 4 (13 BC), to his final phase of epistolary sermo in Epistles 2 and
the Ars Poetica (12–8 BC). This catalogue of works presents several
Â�patterns:Â€ ascent from humble sermo to higher lyric, engagement in dif-
ferent genres at the same time, and (ultimately) a parabolic move from
lyric back to sermo. My investigation will be especially interested both
in the ‘vertical’ aspect of Horace’s career, its representation of the poet’s
apparent rise from lowly and ‘outsider’ political and poetic beginnings to
a more elevated ‘insider’ status in both fields, and its ‘horizontal’ aspect,
its representation of the broad variety of genres in which the poet works,
sometimes simultaneously.
Discussions of the poetic career in Augustan poetry have mainly con-
cerned themselves with the evident self-fashionings of Virgil’s ascent
through the Greek hexameter genres and Ovid’s parabolic progress
through elegy to the Metamorphoses to return to elegy in exile.2 Horace’s
trajectory has elements in common with both:Â€ a Virgilian pattern of
ascent through lowly sermo and iambus to higher lyric, using increasingly
elevated Greek models and growing in political commitment, and an
1
My thanks to Philip Hardie for the invitation to write this piece. I have referred freely to the
evidence recently gathered in Harrison 2007a, Harrison 2007c and Harrison 2008, where more
detail may be found on a number of elements briefly discussed here. Translations of Horace are
taken from West 1997 (Epodes, Odes) and Rudd 1979 (Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica).
2
See Theodorakopoulos 1997, Farrell 2002, S. J. Harrison (2002), and Barchiesi and Hardie in this
volume.
39
40 Stephen Harrison
Ovidian parabolic pattern of returning to a slightly modified and epistol-
ary version of the initial literary genre.3 Within this overall framework, a
bipartite structure can also be discerned:Â€until the publication of Odes 1–3
in 23, the route is almost entirely one of conscious ascent, while after that
date choices of poetic genre represent something of a horizontal spread,
with sermo and lyric alternating.
Discussions of the Roman poetic career have also naturally compared
it to the Roman political career:Â€this was a ready analogy which occurs
in Horace himself, in the catalogue of life-choices at the beginning of the
Odes which rejects alternatives in favour of the career of poetry:Â€the pol-
itician seeking election (1.1.7–8) is ultimately contrasted with the poet’s
divine calling (29–34). In Horace’s case, his career as poet is indeed a
kind of continuation of his interrupted public career:Â€ beginning (albeit
in extraordinary times) as a tribunus militum under Brutus, a normal first
career step for a Roman elite youth,4 Horace ends up at the literary sum-
mit as the national bard of Rome:Â€his political career is in effect diverted
into that of poetry and then goes all the way to the top. His move from
poet of protest in Epodes 7 and 16 to the laureate of the Carmen Saeculare
is a long journey indeed, and it is important to see his poetic ascent as
keeping pace with his socio-political rise. The final stage of Horace’s
poetic career, that of the wise preceptor of Epistles 2 and the Ars Poetica,
nicely parallels the last stage of a Republican political career, the office of
censor, in which an experienced senator would give moral and political
guidance. Economics play a part here, too:Â€ looking back on his poetic
career in Epistles 2.2.49–51, Horace identifies post-Philippi paupertas as his
motive for turning to poetry at all, but of course progress in poetry brings
the wealth and landed independence available through the patronage of
Maecenas and Augustus. In what follows, I want to keep these various
models in mind as I consider Horace’s developing poetic career.
2 .â•‡ 1, s at i r e s 2 a n d e p o d e s :Â€
s at i r e s
f rom ou t s i de r t o i ns i de r
The three earliest books of Horatian poetry begin from self-consciously
low literary predecessors:Â€Satires 1 and 2 pick up the hexameter sermo of
Lucilius, the humble and parodic cousin of Ennian hexameter epic, look-
ing at least momentarily to Attic Old Comedy as a Greek parallel (Satires
Ovid’s last epistolary phase seems indeed to be conscious of Horace’s (see section 5 below).
3
Nisbet 2007:Â€8.
4
1.4.1–6), while the Epodes take on the rumbustious and low-life world of
archaic Archilochean iambus. This constructs a poetic career as beginning
near the bottom of the generic scale:Â€such self-positioning, along with the
elements of aggression fundamental to both these low genres, nicely fits
a poet who starts the period as an angry young man who has suffered
real worldly dispossession. It has been well argued that within Satires 1
we find a kind of autobiographical progress of Horace from the excluded
moralist of Satires 1.1–3 to the Maecenatic poet of 1.4 and beyond who has
entered the literary establishment:Â€we move from the apparently isolated
street preacher to the amicus of Maecenas in 1.5, 1.6 and 1.9 who in 1.10
takes his place amongst the leading writers of the day.5
This trajectory comes out especially in the two literary catalogues of
this concluding satire of Horace’s first book. In the first of these, Horace
looks to take his place amongst the master poets of his time just as he has
taken his place amongst the amici of Maecenas (1.10.40–8):
arguta meretrice potes Dauoque Chremeta
eludente senem comis garrire libellos
unus uiuorum, Fundani, Pollio regum
facta canit pede ter percusso; forte epos acer
ut nemo Varius ducit, molle atque facetum
Vergilio adnuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae:
hoc erat, experto frustra Varrone Atacino
atque quibusdam aliis, melius quod scribere possem,
inuentore minor.
In constructing chatty comedies where Davus and a crafty mistress
outwit old Chremes, you, Fundanius, delight us more
than anyone living. Pollio celebrates the deeds of kings
with triple beat. Varius marshals heroic epic
with a fiery spirit no one can match. To Virgil the Muses
who love the country have given a light and charming touch.
This form had been tried by Varro of Atax and others
without success and was therefore one which I could perhaps
developÂ€– though always below its inventor.
Indeed, the social and the poetic circles are to some degree co-extensive:
in 1.6 Varius and Virgil are said to have introduced Horace to Maecenas,
and all three are found in Maecenas’ train in 1.5, while it is Fundanius
who reports to Horace in Satires 2.8 the gastronomic excesses of the cena
Nasidieni at which Fundanius himself, Varius and Maecenas were all pre-
sent. The implication of this passage is that Horace clearly places himself
5
â•‡ See Zetzel 1980.
42 Stephen Harrison
as the contemporary master of satire (better than Varro of Atax, presum-
ably dead at this point) amongst the contemporary masters of other gen-
res (Fundanius/comedy, Pollio/tragedy, Varius/epic, Virgil/pastoral). The
second catalogue is that of the critics Horace would like to please now
that his poetic career is seriously under way (1.10.81–92):Â€
Plotius et Varius, Maecenas Vergiliusque,
Valgius et probet haec Octauius optimus atque
Fuscus et haec utinam Viscorum laudet uterque
ambitione relegata. te dicere possum,
Pollio, te, Messalla, tuo cum fratre, simulque
uos, Bibule et Serui, simul his te, candide Furni,
conpluris alios, doctos ego quos et amicos
prudens praetereo, quibus haec, sint qualiacumque,
adridere uelim, doliturus si placeant spe
deterius nostra. Demetri, teque, Tigelli,
discipularum inter iubeo plorare cathedras.
i, puer, atque meo citius haec subscribe libello.
I should like these poems to win the approval of Plotius and Varius,
Maecenas and Virgil, Valgius, Octavius, and the admirable Fuscus;
and I hope the Viscus brothers will enjoy them; I can also mention
you, Pollio, without incurring any suspicion
of flattery, you, Messalla, and your brother, and also you,
Bibulus and Servius, and you, my dear candid Furnius,
and several other accomplished friends whose names I purposely
omit. I should like them to find my work attractive,
such as it is; I’d be sorry if I caused them disappointment.
But you, Demetrius and Tigellius, go and moan somewhere elseÂ€–
the ladies are waiting for their singing lesson in their armchairs.
Off with you, boy; add this at once to my little volume.
These lists obviously overlap, with Varius, Virgil and Pollio appearing
from the earlier catalogue, but this one addresses them in their critical
rather than poetic capacity (like the poets of Hellenistic Alexandria, they
are deemed to excel in both). Those added are partly further poet/Â�critics
(Plotius Tucca, supposed co-editor of the Aeneid, the elegist Valgius
later addressed in Odes 2.9), but also important contemporary patronsÂ€–
Maecenas (of course), Messalla and his brother, and Pollio (the last as
patron rather than tragedian), as well as those known only as critics
(Octavius, Fuscus, the brothers Visci, Bibulus, Servius, Furnius); this long
list of fellow-spirits is balanced by the inferior Demetrius and Tigellius.
This list of potential reviewers is the last item in Satires 1:Â€Horace’s first
poetic book is offered for the approval (presumably forthcoming) of his
literary colleagues. This epilogue to critics may be fashionable in the
period:Â€in what seems to be the final sequence of a book from his Amores,
to be dated either to the mid-40s BC or not long after Naulochus in 36
(fr.2 Courtney lines 6–9),6 Cornelius Gallus (interestingly not mentioned
by Horace at all) likewise addresses Viscus and Cato, two of the critics
named in Satires 1.10. A final appeal to critics seems then to be a standard
gesture in Latin poetry of the triumviral period, and a standard way of
marking the entrance of a new work, and in Horace’s case of a new poet,
whose literary career is now launched under impressive auspices.
In Satires 2 and the Epodes we find the first example of Horace’s work-
ing on more than one poetic genre simultaneously:Â€not only were these
two books published about the same time (30 BC:Â€both appear to be after
Actium in 31 but before the triple triumph of summer 29), but the Epodes
also show traces of Horace’s emerging work on lyric (though Odes 1–3 are
published in around 23, some at least seem to predate Actium in date of
composition). As already noted, this ‘horizontal’ aspect is an interesting
part of Horace’s poetic career:Â€such an implicit self-construction as a poet
who operates on more than one generic front suggests the poikilia or gen-
eric versatility for which Callimachus represents himself criticized in the
first of his Iambi, a collection which is certainly significant for Horace’s
Epodes.7 Satires 2 itself shows only a little overt contact with the Epodes:Â€its
mention of Canidia in its final line (2.8.95) is presumably a clever allusion
to the ending of the simultaneous Epodes, in the last poem of which (17)
Canidia makes her most extensive appearance. In general, the second book
of the Satires reinforces the ‘vertical’ aspect of Horace’s poetic career:Â€five
years or so on from Satires 1, he can open his new sermo collection by
implying that not just Maecenas but also Caesar is a supporter:Â€Satires 1.1
began with an address to Maecenas, but Satires 2.1, addressed to the law-
yer Trebatius, has as its first major topic a discussion of whether Horace
should address Caesar directly (10–20) and ends with the poet’s self-
characterization as laudatus Caesare, ‘praised by Caesar’ (84). Maecenas
himself has to wait for mention until the end of 2.3 (2.3.312), though he
re-emerges in the last three poems of the book, especially in 2.6, effect-
ively a thanks-offering for the gift of the Sabine estate (see also 2.7.33 and
the dinner party of 2.8, mentioned above). The implicit support of Caesar
through the amicitia of Maecenas in Book 1 is replaced by direct praise
of the great man:Â€the pair of passing complimentary allusions to Caesar
6
See Anderson, Parsons and Nisbet 1979. 7
See Watson 2003:Â€12–17.
44 Stephen Harrison
of the first book is surpassed, not only by the introduction of Caesar as
the first topic of the second book but also by a complimentary prophecy
about his victories wittily inserted into the mouth of Tiresias in 2.5.62–4.
This apparent social elevation after the ascent of Book 1 is matched by
a literary elevation. Satires 2 has only eight poems to the ten of Satires 1:
this is mainly because of Satires 2.3 (a vast 326 lines), where the Stoic
Damasippus comically fails to stick to Stoic brevity in his philosophical
exposition. Such impressive length (even if parodic here) was not found
in Satires 1, not least because that book criticized Lucilius for his prolixity
and promoted Callimachean polish and brevity, and represents a Horace
unafraid to expand, even parodically. Satires 2 also contains a wholesale
epic parody in 2.5, a rewriting of Odysseus’ underworld consultation with
Tiresias in Odyssey 11 as a set of instructions on how to repair an impaired
fortune by captatio or legacy-hunting:Â€this return to a traditional feature
of Lucilius naturally stresses the affinity of satire with the higher genre of
epic as its lower twin, only implicitly stated in Satires 1.8
As already noted, this ascent between the two books of Satires is
accompanied by the simultaneous emergence of Horace as an iambic poet
in the Epodes. In generic terms this is again an ascent:Â€ the lowly musa
pedestris of satire (Satires 2.6.17) and the self-image of Horatian sermo as
not really lofty enough to be poetry9 mean that even the bluff, aggres-
sive and sometimes pornographic persona of Archilochus is a move up
because of his undoubted status as a vigorous and inspired poet. As
scholars have noted, Horace’s version of Archilochus is toned down and
less ‘potent’ than the original,10 but once again we find the Horatian lit-
erary career paralleling his socio-political positioning. Though published
after Actium, the Epodes show the whole extent of the movement from
outsider to insider:Â€ the aggressive, Archilochean analyses of the ills of
Rome in Epodes 7 and 16, which have plausibly been suggested as the
poems which triggered Horace’s recruitment into the Maecenatic circle,11
turn into equally Archilochean celebrations of the victory at Actium in
Epodes 1 and 9, both addressed in warm terms to Maecenas, which recall
Archilochus’ poems of friendship and shipboard action in war.12
This ‘vertical’ aspect of the Epode book is matched with the evident
turn in its second part towards an interest in higher literary genres. As
â•‡ 8
Most evidently in Satires 1.5, which constructs Horace’s journey to Brundisium as a kind of
Odyssey:Â€see conveniently S. J. Harrison 2007a:Â€86–9.
â•‡ 9
See conveniently S. J. Harrison 2007c:Â€32–4.
10
See Watson 1995. 11 Nisbet 1984. 12 See S. J. Harrison 2007a:Â€106–14.
scholars have shown,13 the Epodes’ opening sequence of ten poems in a
strongly Archilochean metre is followed by a group of poems which,
in both metre and subject matter, look to love elegy and to lyric:Â€ the
former anticipates the emergence of the Odes, some of which were
surely composed at this time. Epode 13, with its scenario of a landscape
description with a storm motivating a sympotic occasion and moralizing
reflections, famously represents a striking anticipation of Odes 1.9. The
interest in elegy is surely helped by the flexible output of Archilochus
himself, who composed both elegy and iambus:Â€Epode 11, with its pres-
entation of the exclusus amator, and Epode 14, with its helpless lover,
look to the world of the love-elegy, no doubt to the lost Amores of
Gallus. Those Gallan elegies are also alluded to in the Eclogues of Virgil,
published in 38 BC.14 Just as Virgil had been instrumental in Horace’s
social career in introducing him to Maecenas (Satires 1.6.54–5), so the
same poet’s first published poetry book (briefly commended as we have
seen at Satires 1.10.44–5) exercises considerable influence over this first
phase of Horace’s poetic career. The ten poems of Satires 1 may fol-
low the number of poems in the Eclogues,15 while Epode 2 and Epode
16 plainly interact with the collection’s poetic world:Â€the praise of the
rural life ironized in the former has clear elements drawn from Virgilian
bucolic, while the fantastic dimension of the Islands of the Blest in the
latter inverts in pessimistic mode the optimistic pastoral fantasies of the
prophecy of Eclogue 4.16
This first and formative phase of Horace’s poetic career, then, is marked
by a rhetoric of literary and socio-political ascent. Horace rises from the
humble exponent of rough Lucilian satire, refining it in Callimachean
terms, through Archilochean iambus, tempered for new times, to the
brink of lyric operations, matching his movement from Republican defeat
at Philippi and loss of property to the generous patronage of Maecenas
and political engagement with the interests of the young Caesar. This ver-
tical element is counterbalanced by a horizontal axis:Â€Horace’s simultan-
eous collections in Satires 2 and the Epodes look out not only to each other
but also to the contemporary poetic scene sketched in detail at the end of
Satires 1.10. Horace has arrived amongst the poets of triumviral Rome,
and is concerned to negotiate his space on the current literary horizon by
13
See S. J. Harrison 2007a:Â€119–30.
14
Especially Eclogue 10, where Gallus appears as a character. I here hold that Eclogue 8 is addressed
to Pollio and dated 39–38, following Tarrant 1978.
15
Zetzel 1980. 16 See the references collected by S. J. Harrison 2007a:Â€130–4.
46 Stephen Harrison
interacting with its important strands. As we shall see, all these elements
will continue in the lyric project of Odes 1–3.
3. â•‡ o d e s 1– 3 a n d e p i s t l e s 1:Â€ t h e t u r n t o
ly r ic a n d t h e f i r s t r e t u r n t o s e r m o
Though it is possible that it was also published serially in single books,17
the collection of Odes 1–3 which emerged as a unit about 23 BC must
be conceived as a single stage in Horace’s poetic career. Its opening
and closing poems, Odes 1.1 and 3.30, share a metre (first Asclepiad)
not otherwise used in the eighty-eight odes of the three books, and the
latter poem is clearly a pendant to the former. At the end of 1.1, itself
constructed on the basis of a priamel framework from early Greek lyric,
Horace famously asks for inclusion in the canon of Greek lyric poets
(29–36):
me doctarum hederae praemia frontium
dis miscent superis, me gelidum nemus
Nympharumque leues cum Satyris chori
secernunt populo, si neque tibias
Euterpe cohibet nec Polyhymnia
Lesboum refugit tendere barbiton.
quod si me lyricis uatibus inseres,
sublimi feriam sidera uertice.
As for me, it is ivy, the reward of learned brows,
that puts me among the gods above. As for me,
the cold grove and the light-footed choruses of Nymphs
and Satyrs set me apart from the people,
If Euterpe lets me play her pipes, and Polyhymnia
does not withhold the lyre of Lesbos.
But if you enrol me among the lyric bards
my soaring head will touch the stars.
Though tempered with the humour Horace often uses when making grand
statements about his own poetic status (the star-striking here at least partly
suggests a literal headache),18 this represents a lofty ambition:Â€the canon of
Greek lyric poets had been fixed at nine in the Hellenistic period, and its
re-opening is a lot to ask. Nevertheless, in Odes 3.30, Horace suggests that
he has done enough to deserve this (3.30.10–16):
G. O. Hutchinson 2008.
17
See S. J. Harrison 2007c:Â€28–31.
18
dicar, qua uiolens obstrepit Aufidus
et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
regnauit populorum, ex humili potens
princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
deduxisse modos. sume superbiam
quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica
lauro cinge uolens, Melpomene, comam.
I shall be spoken of where fierce Aufidus thunders
and where Daunus, poor in water,
rules the country people. From humble beginnings
I was able to be the first to bring Aeolian song
to Italian measures. Take the proud honour
well-deserved, Melpomene, and be pleased
to circle my hair with the laurel of Delphi.
Aeolium … carmen identifies Horace as the new Roman exponent of the
archaic Lesbian lyric of Sappho and Alcaeus, two of the nine canonical
poets, and the poetic status requested of Maecenas in 1.1 is here demanded
as a right from the lyric Muse Melpomene, symbolized by the garland of
bay, picking up her sister Muses Euterpe and Polyhymnia from the earlier
poem.
One subject of justifiable pride in Horace’s lyric achievement in Odes
1–3 is the dexterous employment of choriamb-based Greek lyric metres,
harder to accomplish in Latin with its greater number of long syllables,
something made even harder by Horatian tightening of the archaic
rules.19 This is clearly an ascent in complexity from the simple hexameters
of the two books of Satires and the identical epodic metres of Epodes 1–10,
though the more mixed metres of Epodes 11–17 (one of which (the first
Archilochean) re-appears in the Odes:Â€Epode 12 = Odes 1.7 and 1.28) are
some kind of anticipation of this move. This metrical prowess is famously
stressed by the use of nine different metres for the first nine odes, fol-
lowed by a sequence of poems (12–18) in which thematic elements appear
from an identifiable range of individual Greek lyric poets.20 This appre-
ciable technical step in Horace’s career is thus strongly marked in a major
group of initial poems.
Between the challenge of Odes 1.1 and its fulfilment in Odes 3.30, there
is some sense of internal ascent and onward movement. While I do not
fully subscribe to general interpretations of Odes 1–3 which regard their
See Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:Â€xxxviii–xlvi

19
Lowrie 1995.
20
48 Stephen Harrison
order as completely plotted by their author with narrative significance,21
some element of progress through the collection seems clear. The ini-
tial window-display of the adaptation of Greek lyric through metre and
themes just noted is followed in Book 2 by a quieter approach to both
metre and subject matter:Â€ a set of topics in which moral philosophy is
prominent is treated in twenty poems which mostly comprise the com-
monest Horatian lyric metres (the Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas). As the
book comes to a close, it shows some anticipation of the national and
grave themes of the Roman Odes at the beginning of Book 3:Â€in particu-
lar, 2.18, with its criticism of luxury and commendation of the poet’s own
modest sufficiency in the Sabine estate, looks forward to themes from
Odes 3.1.
In Odes 3, there is a clear elevation of content:22 the opening sequence
of six lengthy Roman Odes tackles major themes of politics and public
morality in an enigmatic style which combines a vatic, oracular stance
with elements of higher poetic genres. Odes 3.3 gives a version of the div-
ine assembly approving the apotheosis of Romulus from Ennius’ Annales,
while Odes 3.5 tells the story of Regulus, likely to have been treated in
the account of the First Punic War in Naevius’ Bellum Punicum. Several
other poems later in the book narrate myths associated with tragedy
(Hypermestra in 3.11, Danae in 3.16) or epyllion (Europa in 3.27), and
the lofty tone and impressive length of 3.24 and its address to a general-
ized reader pick up the initial Roman Odes symmetrically towards the
book’s end, just as 3.29 combines Roman Ode-style length and moral-
izing with a final address to Maecenas before the epilogue of 3.30. Here
in the final book of the first collection of Odes, Horatian lyric reaches its
most elevated literary texture:Â€though the Carmen Saeculare and Odes 4
address equally lofty subject matter, in Horace’s subsequent poetic career
his mid-life lyric achievement seems to represent his finest moment, and
his lasting reputation is presented as that of the Roman Alcaeus (Epistles
2.2.99), a clear allusion to his extensive use of that poet in Books 1–3 of
the Odes (see above on 3.30 and also 1.32) rather than to Book 4, where
Alcaeus is barely present.
The first book of Epistles dates to 20/19 BC and presents a conscious
contrast with the first collection of Odes. Its opening programmatic poem
claims that Horace has renounced the frivolities of lyric for the serious
concerns of philosophy (1.1.7–12):
See Porter 1987 for an extreme version of this thesis, Santirocco 1986 for a milder one.
21
See Lowrie 1997:Â€224–316.

22
est mihi purgatum crebro qui personet aurem:
‘solue senescentem mature sanus equum, ne
peccet ad extremum ridendus et ilia ducat.’
nunc itaque et uersus et cetera ludicra pono,
quid uerum atque decens, curo et rogo et omnis in hoc sum;
condo et compono quae mox depromere possim.
A voice whispers in my well-rinsed ear:
‘Have some sense and release the ageing horse in time,
or he’ll end by stumbling and straining his flanks to the jeers of the crowd.’
So now I am laying aside my verses and other amusements.
My sole concern is the question ‘What is right and proper?’
I’m carefully storing things for use in the days ahead.
The pose of not writing poetry is surely ironic in this book of carefully
crafted hexameters, and forms part of a consistent ambiguity about the
poetic status of Horatian sermo (is it ‘really’ poetry?).23 The collection’s
overt epistolary shape, though picking up epistolary elements in Lucilius,
points to a genre of prose, as does its philosophical content (though one
should not underestimate the influence of Lucretius’ philosophical poem),
but in terms of Horace’s poetic career Epistles 1 represents a conscious
return to the sermo of the 30s, in a slicker, more varied poetry book:Â€the
greater number of items (twenty in Epistles 1 as opposed to ten and eight
in Satires 1 and 2) reflects not only the relative brevity conventional for
the letter but also a poet who has in the last decade produced eighty-eight
lyric poems in three books.
The turn from Horatian lyric form is matched by a partial turn from
Horatian lyric persona. Though Horace can still describe himself as
Epicuri de grege porcum (‘a porker from Epicurus’ herd’, Epistles 1.4.16)
and can still suggest (in the same poem, at 1.4.13) that each day should
be treated as one’s last in the true Epicurean style, the poet’s hedonis-
tic involvement in the sympotic and erotic world of Odes 1–3 has indeed
vanished, and the poet is presented as a trainee moral philosopher who
encourages his friends along the same road by appearing equally fal-
lible rather than a stern and superior sage. The themes of love, drinking
and politics linked with lyric in the style of Alcaeus (Odes 1.32.1–12) are
replaced by concerns with ethics, friendship and patronage, all part of
moral philosophy in Roman terms. This is best seen in two pairs of poems
where an addressee is shared between the two collections. Horace’s friend
23
Note that condo and compono in line 9 can refer to poetic composition:Â€see Mayer 1994:Â€90. On
the ‘non-poetry’ pose in Horatian sermo see S. J. Harrison 2007c:Â€32–4.
50 Stephen Harrison
Fuscus can be teased for his Stoicism in both Odes 1.22 and Epistles 1.10,
but where the former poem then turns to Horace’s own comic love-affair
with Lalage, the latter poem develops an ethical argument about living
according to nature. Likewise, the Quinctius invited to put away political
concerns and attend a symposium in Odes 2.11 is in Epistles 1.16 invited
(via a description of Horace’s Sabine estate) to match good reputation
with good actions and determined moral character. Likewise, the polit-
ical themes prominent in Odes 1–3 and soon to be central to Odes 4 are
introduced only briefly and incidentally:Â€the military doings of Agrippa,
Tiberius and Augustus are added as mere epistolary topical references at
the end of Epistle 1.12 (25–9), while Augustus is further alluded to only in
celebrating his birthday (Epistles 1.5) and as a presentee of the first collec-
tion of Odes (Epistles 1.13).
The last two poems of the first book of Epistles stress further this more
relaxed and less grand self-presentation of the philosophical and self-
ironizing poet. In 1.19 Horace, in a poem which wittily uses the idea of
the drunken poet to pick up the sympotic themes of the Odes, asserts his
literary importance as the exponent of iambus and lyric in Latin, taking
stock of his poetic career so far while ignoring sermo as less important
(1.19.21–34):
libera per uacuum posui uestigia princeps,
non aliena meo pressi pede. qui sibi fidet,
dux reget examen. Parios ego primus iambos
ostendi Latio, numeros animosque secutus
Archilochi, non res et agentia uerba Lycamben;
ac ne me foliis ideo breuioribus ornes
quod timui mutare modos et carminis artem,
temperat Archilochi Musam pede mascula Sappho,
temperat Alcaeus, sed rebus et ordine dispar,
nec socerum quaerit, quem uersibus oblinat atris,
nec sponsae laqueum famoso carmine nectit.
hunc ego, non alio dictum prius ore, Latinus
uolgaui fidicen; iuuat inmemorata ferentem
ingenuis oculisque legi manibusque teneri.
Beholden to no-one I blazed a trail over virgin country;
nobody had trodden that ground. The one who trusts himself
will rule and lead the swarm. I was the first to show
the iambics of Paros to Latium, keeping Archilochus’ rhythms
and fire, but not his themes or words which hunted Lycambes.
In case, however, you think I deserve a smaller garland
because I declined to change his metres and verse technique,
manly Sappho largely retains Archilochus’ metres;
Alcaeus does the same, though different in themes and arrangement;
he doesn’t look for a father-in-law to smear with invective,
or make a noose for his bride out of his scarifying verses.
I, the lyrist of Latium, have made him familiarÂ€– a poet
never sung before. I am glad to be held and read
by the better sort, and to convey things that no-one has uttered.
As so often, this proud claim is counterbalanced by Horatian self-
irony:Â€ the poem closes with the comic picture of Horace’s determined
avoidance of poetic recitation (1.19.35–49), and the collection’s final piece
takes up the witty conceit of addressing its own poetry book as if it were
a slave-boy destined to lose its bloom and beauty through sexual experi-
ence. Both poem and book end with an ambivalent autobiography which
provides the personal counterpart to the poetic career sketched in 1.19
(1.20.19–28):
cum tibi sol tepidus pluris admouerit auris,
me libertino natum patre et in tenui re
maiores pinnas nido extendisse loqueris,
ut quantum generi demas, uirtutibus addas;
me primis urbis belli placuisse domique,
corporis exigui, praecanum, solibus aptum,
irasci celerem, tamen ut placabilis essem.
forte meum siquis te percontabitur aeuum,
me quater undenos sciat impleuisse Decembris
collegam Lepidum quo duxit Lollius anno.
When the warmer sun brings you a larger group of listeners,
you will talk about me:Â€‘he was born in a home of slender means,
a freedman’s son:Â€but his wingspan proved too large for the nest.’
(In this way what you take from my birth you will add to my merits.)
‘In war and peace he won the esteem of the country’s leaders.
Of small build, prematurely grey, and fond of the sun,
he was quick to lose his temper, but not hard to appease.’
If anyone happens to ask my age, you can let him know
that I saw the end of my forty-fourth December in the year
when the consul Lollius was later joined by his colleague Lepidus.
Comic self-deprecation is here matched with some pride:Â€Horace’s strug-
gle from his unpromising background and early setbacks to the position
of friend of Maecenas and Augustus is presented for approval, and the
marking of his forty-fourth birthday in December 21 BC is not so much
a date for the book (which must have appeared in 20 or 19) as a parallel
to the normal cursus of the elite Roman:Â€Horace has passed the normal
consular age (42 in the late Republic), and here sets himself as a private
52 Stephen Harrison
citizen with personal foibles and achievements against the consuls who
would normally be his co-evals. It is notable that his poetic career (listed
in 1.19) is not set against the conventional political career here, as hap-
pened in Odes 1.1.7–8 (see section 1 above). Just as Epistles 1.1 represented
Horace as renouncing poetry, so the final position in the same book,
often a locus for poetic self-projection (cf. Satires 1.10, Odes 2.20 and 3.30),
presents him as a private individual in the context of the public magistra-
cies of the Roman state.
4 .â•‡ car men saecul ar e and odes 4 :Â€

r e t u r n t o ly r ic
Horace’s commission to write a lyric poem (conventionally labelled the
Carmen Saeculare) for performance by a mixed choir of boys and girls at
Augustus’ ideologically crucial Ludi Saeculares of 17 BC, celebrating the
renewal of the saeculum or generation of 110 years, represents an anomaly
in his career as a one-off lyric piece outside a collection written in a choral
rather than an monodic mode.24 Its link with the Greek lyric genre of
paean is clear, but its importance in Horace’s poetic career is not so much
for its literary qualities as for its status as an occasional poem commis-
sioned for an express politico-religious occasion, and the ancient life of
Horace attributed to Suetonius suggests the hand of the princeps himself
in Horace’s selection. The death of Virgil in 19 left Horace as the unchal-
lenged chief poet of Rome, and the Carmen Saeculare clearly presents him
as a kind of laureate, addressing the gods on behalf of the Roman state on
a public occasion of the highest profile.
This externally motivated resumption of Horatian lyric clearly led to a
further period of production in the genre (this time in its monodic form)
which culminated in the fourth book of fifteen Odes in about 13 BC.
Whether or not (as the Suetonian life suggests) Augustus himself stimu-
lated this sequel collection by requesting the poems in praise of the victor-
ies of his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus (Odes 4.4 and 4.14), the character
of this last lyric book is distinctly different from that of the first three.
It begins by figuring itself as a return to love (and therefore lyric love-
poetry) presented as inappropriate for a man past 50 (4.1.6–7), adding six
years to the age paraded at the end of the first book of Epistles (1.20.16–8,
above) and a decade to that advertised (at least partly ironically) as already
past the time of love in the second book of Odes (2.4.22–4), and love
24
â•‡ For recent helpful material on the Carmen see Feeney 1998, Putnam 2000 and Barchiesi 2002.
and its sympotic context appear only in the sequence of poems 4.10–13
(see further below), while the rest of the book is dedicated to weightier
themes. This change from the first collection is interestingly indexed in
4.7 and 4.8:Â€4.7, the famous ode to Torquatus, linking the return of spring
with thoughts of changing seasons and human mortality, echoes that to
Sestius in 1.4, but without the explicit sympotic and erotic references of
the earlier poem (1.4.16–20), while 4.8, stressing the power of poetry to
commemorate great deeds, uses the first Asclepiad metre reserved in the
first collection for marking Horace’s own poetic ambitions in 1.1 and 3.30
(see section 3 above), but apparently honours Censorinus for his military
services to Rome.25
This turn to more nationalistic themes in Horace’s final lyric book
is partly thematized in 4.2.26 There Horace addresses Iullus Antonius,
claiming that it is impossible to imitate Pindar, the grandest of the Greek
lyric poets, and encouraging Iullus in an alternative epic project to praise
the victorious Augustus on his forthcoming return from German cam-
paigns. Horace’s strictures against Pindaric imitation are at least partly
belied in this same poem, where Pindar’s function as the encomiast of
the victories of great leaders surely points to Horace’s own celebrations
of Augustus, as well in the Pindaric colour of 4.827 and the very obvi-
ously Pindaric victory odes for the two imperial princes Tiberius and
his brother Drusus (4.4 and 4.14), which celebrate their conquests of the
Raeti and Vindelici in 15 BC. The framework of Pindaric celebration of
athletic victory is here turned to the praise of Roman military success.
This nationalistic tendency of the book comes to a climax in 4.5 and
4.15, which address Augustus himself directly:Â€ 4.5 longs for his return
to Italy and honours him as bringer of peace and prosperity,28 while 4.15
rounds off Horace’s lyric output with an equally enthusiastic encomium
of the princeps.29 In both these poems Horace moves into the first person
plural in his descriptions of the capacity of the Roman nation to praise
its leader, suggesting solidarity with the community’s feelings. This cap-
acity to address and praise Augustus in a whole ode is a new feature in
Horace’s lyric output, no doubt expressing his increased personal and
professional proximity to the princeps, but also matching the capacity
of Pindar to address the greatest figures of the Greek world:Â€ amongst
the most enthusiastic political poems in the first collection, Odes 1.2
turns to Augustus directly only at the end (1.2.41–52), Odes 1.12 turns
25
See S. J. Harrison 1990. 26 For a more detailed analysis see S. J. Harrison 1995b.
27
See again S. J. Harrison 1990. 28 See Du Quesnay 1995. 29
See J. Griffin 2002.
54 Stephen Harrison
to Augustus at the end but actually addresses Jupiter (1.12.49–60), and
Odes 3.5, though it suggests that Augustus will be a god on earth after his
conquests, does not ever address him personally.
The public and professional recognition conferred by the Carmen
Saeculare commission stimulates an important set of themes in Odes 4,
which contains Horace’s most extensive reflections so far on the status and
function of the poet in Rome:Â€the fame that the poet can himself achieve
is compared with athletic and military achievement (4.3.1–9), while the
fame he can confer on others is consistently seen as outlasting more con-
ventional modes of commemoration (thematized especially in the pair of
poems 4.8 and 4.9). Horace’s public fame is alluded to openly. In 4.3 he
thanks the muse Melpomene for his celebrity (4.3.21–4):
totum muneris hoc tui est,
â•… quod monstror digito praetereuntium
Romanae fidicen lyrae;
â•… quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est.
This is all your gift,
that people as they pass point to me
as the player of the Roman lyre.
That I breathe, and give pleasure, if I give pleasure, is due to you.
Similarly, in 4.6 he imagines the words of one of the maidens who had
served in the choir at the Ludi Saeculares (4.6.41–4):
nupta iam dices:Â€‘Ego dis amicum,
saeculo festas referente luces,
reddidi carmen docilis modorum
â•… uatis Horati.’
In time to come when you are a Roman wife, you will say,
‘When the Secular Festival brought back its lights,
I performed the hymn which so pleased the gods,
And was taught the music of the poet Horace.’
This is the only self-naming by Horace by his nomen gentilicium in the
Odes and one of only two in all his works,30 and points to his high public
recognition factor after 17 BC.
This increasingly public aspect of Horace’s poetic stance is a crucial
feature of Book 4, but at the same time continuities with Odes 1–3 should
not be neglected:Â€this final lyric book coheres with as well as departs from
the framework of the previous three.
â•‡ The other is at Epistles 1.14.5; his cognomen, Flaccus, is used at Epodes 15.12 and Satires 2.1.18.
30
The sequence 4.10–13 is important here. Ode 4.10 picks up the ironic
address of 4.1 to Ligurinus and similarly looks to pederastic material
in the earlier collection,31 while 4.11 is a sympotic/erotic ode celebrat-
ing the birthday of Maecenas. The appearance here both of this lighter
material and of the great patron of Odes 1–3 (mentioned only here in
Book 4, presumably because his role as patron has now been taken
by the princeps himself ) again looks self-consciously back to the earl-
ier collection in its themes. Ode 4.12 is also sympotic, addressed to
a Vergilius with evident echoes of the Eclogues and Aeneid:Â€ though it
is possible that a relative is meant rather than the poet himself, dead
for some years by the time of the poem’s publication, both addressee
and theme look back to the first collection (where the poet Virgil was
addressed in 1.3). Likewise, 4.13 returns not only to an erotic theme of
the first collection (the beloved grown old, also alluded to in 4.10Â€– see
1.25) but also to a name used for a love object in Odes 3.10 to which it
serves as an ironic pendant (in 3.10 Lyce rejected Horace, and now she
no longer attracts him).
But the main emphasis in Odes 4 is undoubtedly that on the mature
poet at the zenith of his career who has established himself in a pub-
lic and national role. One further feature allied to this is the promin-
ence in the book of odes to addressees who are both young and from
the highest level of Rome’s eliteÂ€ – the imperial princes Tiberius and
Drusus (4.4 and 4.14), Iullus Antonius, the nephew and then favourite
of Augustus (4.2), and the nobilis Paulus Fabius Maximus (4.1, which
alludes to his recent marriage to Augustus’ niece Marcia).32 As with his
more direct relationship with Augustus himself (see above), Horace
presents himself as operating at the very highest level in Rome, but the
youth of these addressees also allows him to come across as a fatherly
figure dispensing wise advice to the younger generation. This stance,
natural to the ageing poet, had been deployed with good effect with
addressees such as Lollius, Florus, Celsus and Scaeva in the first book of
Epistles,33 and will be seen as central to the last phase of Horace’s career
in his return to sermo. The older poet who advises the younger literary
aspirant Iullus Antonius in Odes 4.2 is a recognizable anticipation of the
national authority on poetry in the didactic mode of the second book of
Epistles and the Ars Poetica.
E.g. 1.4.19–20, 1.32.11–12, 3.20.5–16.

31
See Bradshaw 1970.
32
Epistles 1.2, 1.3, 1.8.

33
56 Stephen Harrison
5.â•‡ epistles 2 a n d a r s p o e t i c a :Â€

fi na l r et u r n to ser mo
The three poems Epistles 2.1, 2.2 and the Ars Poetica, which may have been
conceived by the poet as a unit and issued separately by another hand
after the poet’s death, seem to belong together and to the final phase of
Horace’s poetic career.34 Epistles 2.1 and the Ars Poetica can both be dated
to the period after Odes 4 and in particular to the period between 12 BC
and the death of the poet in 8, and though Epistles 2.2 is usually dated
shortly after the first book of Epistles around 19 BC, there are plausible
arguments for grouping it chronologically with Epistles 2.1 and the Ars.
Florus’ service to Tiberius which opens both Epistles 2.2 and Epistles 1.3
may refer to two different campaigns rather than the same eastern exped-
ition:Â€ indeed, 2.2.1 fidelis amice Neroni may allude pointedly to Florus’
years of faithful service since Epistles 1.3, and the references in Epistles 2.2
to having given up writing lyric could be to the second ‘lyric silence’ after
Odes 4 (13 BC) rather than the gap between Odes 1–3 and the Carmen
Saeculare (23–17) alluded to in Epistles 1 (above).
This sense of a final phase in a distinguished career is accentuated by
several features of these three poems as a collectivity. First, all deal with
the theme of poetry in general from a didactic angle. Epistles 2.1, address-
ing Augustus himself, argues against the automatic honouring of older
writers, criticizes the crudity of early Roman literature and praises the
civilizing influence of literary Hellenism, while 2.2, to Florus, himself
probably a poet, talks about the right and wrong ways to approach the
profession of poetry, using Horace himself as an example, and the Ars
Poetica famously sets out a series of precepts on poetry, its kinds and the
behaviour of the poet for the appreciation of the young Pisones. This role
of poetic preceptor follows naturally on the advisory role Horace had
assumed to some addressees in Epistles 1 and Odes 4 (see above). Second,
all three poems share a sense of Horace’s self-location in the Roman lit-
erary tradition:Â€ a wide range of previous poets is discussed, and there
is some emphasis on the dead Virgil and Varius and on the living
Propertius, suggesting that Horace has some consciousness that the great
days of Augustan poetry are coming to an end and that he is the final
survivor of the generation which emerged around the time of Actium
(31 BC). Third, all three poems deal with the theme of the usefulness of
the poet and of Horace in particular to the community of Rome (2.1.124,
â•‡ See S. J. Harrison 2008.

34
2.2.121, Ars Poetica 396–401), though typically this self-elevation is on
each occasion followed by some final self-deflation:Â€ 2.1 concludes with
the lowly fate of bad poets and their verses which Horace seeks to avoid
(2.1.267–70), 2.2 with a playful self-address which suggests that the poet
has enjoyed more than enough of the pleasures of life (2.2.213–16), and
the Ars with the celebrated picture of the mad poet who will not leave his
listener alone (470–6).
Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, it is in these poems that Horace
gives us the fullest retrospective on his poetic career, augmenting the
account in Epistles 1.19 (see section 3 above). This is done through the
poet’s self-representation as the author of a body of works in various
genres which can now be presented for comparison and assessment. In
Epistles 2.2 Horace’s friends are said to differ in their preferences between
odes, epodes and sermones (59–60):Â€carmine tu gaudes, hic delectatur iam-
bis, / ille Bioneis sermonibus et sale nigro, ‘You put lyric poetry firstÂ€– he’s
for iambicsÂ€– / he prefers the tangy wit of Bion’s homilies.’ This generic
variety is matched at Ars 79–85:
Archilochum proprio rabies armauit iambo;
hunc socci cepere pedem grandesque coturni,
alternis aptum sermonibus et popularis
uincentem strepitus et natum rebus agendis.
Musa dedit fidibus diuos puerosque deorum
et pugilem uictorem et equum certamine primum
et iuuenum curas et libera uina referre.
Madness handed Archilochus her own missileÂ€– the iambus.
The foot was found to fit the sock and the stately buskin,
because it conveyed the give and take of dialogue; also
it drowned the noise of the pit and was naturally suited to action.
The lyre received from the Muse the right to celebrate gods
and their sons, victorious boxers, horses first in the race,
the ache of a lover’s heart, and uninhibited drinking.
This passage implicitly covers key elements of Horace’s career with elegant
indirection, moving from Archilochus (as the model of the Epodes) via a
digression about the use of iambics in drama to a Pindarizing account
of lyric which clearly encapsulates the major themes of the Odes:Â€hymns,
epinicians (no doubt looking to the Pindaric imitations of Odes 4), love
and the symposium.35 Once again the element of surveying the poet’s
35
With 83–5 compare Odes 4.2.13–20, describing Pindar’s lyric output but also alluding to Horace’s
own:Â€see S. J. Harrison 1995b:Â€112–13.
58 Stephen Harrison
output, whether explicitly or implicitly, would be appropriate to a unified
and self-consciously ‘late’ book in Horace’s poetic career.
These factors, taken together, present a consistent picture of the poet in
his fifties, a self-constructed Roman laureate at the end of a distinguished
career who combines proud self-elevation and self-inscription in the
annals of literature with a beguiling touch of self-deprecation. In return-
ing to sermo and his earliest and least ambitious literary mode, albeit in
the refined epistolary form which he himself had created in the first book
of Epistles and in a group of works including the longest poem in his out-
put, Horace’s poetic career has in a sense come full circle. Though the
commitment and importance of his strictures on poetry are not to be
underestimated, Horace here elects to bow out on a note of self-restraint
and irony towards his own undoubtedly paramount poetic status, and
to return to a modified form of the poetic mode in which he had made
his name perhaps a quarter-century previously. This parabolic trajectory
stands in contrast with the Virgilian model of steady and continuous
ascent which Horace had before him, and provides some precedent for
Ovid’s return within two decades of Horace’s death to a modified form of
elegy in exile after the grand enterprise of the epic Metamorphoses.36
36
See S. J. Harrison 2002:Â€89. Ovid’s letter to Augustus in Tristia 2 indeed has several points of
contact with Horace’s in Epistles 2.1:Â€see Barchiesi 2001:Â€79–103.
Ch apter 3
The Ovidian career model:Â€Ovid, Gallus,

Apuleius, Boccaccio
Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie
1.â•‡T h e Ov i di a n c a r e e r
Ovid has the historical privilege of being next in line and the first to
react to what had been the boom in poetic self-reference and auto(bio)
graphy in the times of Catullus, Virgil, Propertius and Horace. He is also
the one who does the most to continue Horace’s invention of a ‘literary
system’ and a ‘school’ and an ‘Augustan age’ model of Roman poetry
(compare e.g. Horace, Serm. 1.10.31–50 with Ovid, Tristia 4.10.41–56;
Ex Ponto 4.16.5–40).
Furthermore, Ovid is unique in ancient literature for the sheer number
and quasi-systematic regularity of autographic situations:Â€ in his extant
production, every single work (with the exception of genres that cannot
accommodate authorial self-expression:Â€ his heroic epic, and presumably
his lost tragedy Medea) has a space of self-expression and, often, of recap-
itulation. Equally important, there is no single poetic text by Naso that
remains ‘unsigned’, either through the inclusion of the author’s name, or
by explicit reference in another Ovidian text, or, often, both. In other
words, there is almost no Ovidian poem that remains unacknowledged.
Even more important, in a number of cases his texts ‘talk to each other’
(Hinds 1985; Barchiesi 2001; compare Frings 2005), with the result that
each work is positioned within a career:Â€for example, the Fasti engage the
earlier elegiac/erotic work with the question ‘Who would believe that a
path could lead from there to here?’ (2.8).
Central to Ovid’s construction of his poetic career is the model of
Virgil, exploited in different ways in different contexts. In histories of
western literature the Virgilian and the Ovidian have recurrently been
elevated to opposing ideological and formal principles. On the one
hand a Virgilian poetics evolving in symbiosis with the construction
of the Augustan principate and working towards the achieved monu-
mentality of the Aeneid, a totalizing epic that sums up and contains
59
60 Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie
both Virgil’s own earlier works, the Eclogues and the Georgics, and the
previous Greco-Roman literary tradition as a whole. On the other hand
an Ovidian poetics whose invention and humour feed on a detachment
from the political goals of Augustus, and which in formal terms is char-
acterized by a drive to repetition that undermines teleology and clos-
ure, the ‘evolutions of an elegist’, to use Stephen Harrison’s phrase,1 a
poet who does not forget that he is an elegist even in the hexameter
Metamorphoses, and who in the exile poetry returns to a pure strain of
elegy of unending lament.2
Ovid himself is the first to write the literary history of this opposition,
but the opposition itself is subject to the same lack of finality and clos-
ure that characterizes other aspects of Ovid’s literary activity. There are
times when Ovid aspires to an enduring monumentality perhaps greater
even than Virgil’s, for example in the Epilogue to the Metamorphoses, and
times when Ovid imputes to Virgil a changeability and antifoundational-
ism that licenses Ovid’s own shifting standpoint.
A similar oscillation3 characterizes Ovid’s construction of his own lit-
erary career, which contains moments of a rise through the genres in con-
scious emulation of the Virgilian career pattern, moments of unchanging
continuity, as well as moments of regression. But the Virgilian model
is always present, whether through affirmation or negation, and the
Ovidian career is the first episode in the long history of the reception
of the Virgilian career. The first word of the Amores, Arma, notoriously
repeats the first word of the Aeneid, so highlighting the sharp generic
Â�contrast between the career of love elegist forced on Ovid by Cupid in
Amores 1.1 and Virgil’s national epic. That is the contrast which Ovid
presents in self-assertive mode in his defence against Envy at Remedia
361–96, Â�culminating in the expansive claim at 389–96:
rumpere, Liuor edax:Â€magnum iam nomen habemus;
â•… maius erit, tantum quo pede coepit eat.
sed nimium properas:Â€uiuam modo, plura dolebis;
â•… et capiunt animi carmina multa mei.
nam iuuat et studium famae mihi creuit honore;
â•… principio cliui noster anhelat equus.
tantum se nobis elegi debere fatentur,
â•… quantum Vergilio nobile debet epos.
1
S. J. Harrison 2002:Â€79–94.
2
On the history of this Virgilian/Ovidian polarization see Hardie 2007a.
3
‘Oscillation’ is the term of Cheney 1997:Â€ch. 1.
The Ovidian career model 61
Burst, devouring Envy; I already have a great name, and it will be greater, if only
its feet continue on the path on which it began. You are in too much of a hurry;
if only I live, you will have more cause for pain, and my genius has room for
many songs. I enjoy my appetite for fame, which has grown with recognition;
my horse pants at the beginning of the ascent. Elegy admits that it owes me as
much as noble epic owes Virgil.
Here Ovid is at the beginning of a course that will lead to yet greater
things in the future, but which will not diverge from its present met-
rical and generic track (tantum quo pede coepit eat). The language of 393–4
echoes Propertian formulations of elegiac ambition; 4.1.70 has meus ad
metas sudet oportet equus, ‘this is the goal towards which my horse must
sweat’; 4.10.3–4 magnum iter ascendo, sed dat mihi gloria uires:Â€/ non iuuat
e facili lecta corona iugo, ‘I am set on a great climb, but glory lends me
strength; a crown plucked from an accessible hill gives no pleasure’; but
where Propertius speaks of the elevation of his elegy to national and epic
themes, Ovid looks forward to increasing fame within the narrow limits
of his habitual lasciuia ‘playfulness’ and materia iocosa ‘jesting subject-
matter’ (385, 387).
On the other hand Joseph Farrell has argued that the allusion to the
Aeneid in the first word of the Amores, followed by the scene in which
Cupid thwarts Ovid’s epic ambition, is a moment of poetic initiation that
corresponds to Virgil’s reworking of the Callimachean Aitia prologue in
Apollo’s warning in Eclogue 6 to the pastoral poet not to sing of epic kings
and battles.4 With hindsight Ovid’s reader knows that that had been only
the first stage in a career that would culminate in the grandest of Roman
epics, and the same might be expected of Ovid in due course. Indeed,
as Ovid tells us himself in Amores 2.18, by the time of the publication
of the three-book second edition of the Amores he had already branched
out beyond personal love elegy into didactic, with the Ars Amatoria, cor-
responding to the second of the three major works in the Virgilian career,
the Georgics, and also into a form of erotic elegy focused on the great
legendary figures of epic and tragedy, the Heroides.5
4
Farrell 2004. In this article Farrell also traces the apparent echoes in the Ovidian corpus of the
Ille ego proem to the Aeneid, and the implications for Ovid’s retrospective construction of his
own career.
5
Discussion of the actual sequence of works in Ovid’s career is bedevilled by problems of dat-
ing:Â€Amores 2.18 speaks of a tragic venture followed by a relapse into love poetry, while Amores
3.1 and 3.15 look forward to the writing of tragedy. For the issues of dating see Hollis 1977:Â€150–1;
McKeown 1987:Â€74–89. Ovid is more interested in the gesture politics of career construction than
in presenting a consistent and coherent account of the chronology of his works.
Book 3 of the Amores is framed by poems that announce a generic
ascent, after the completion of the business of love elegy, to the greater
work of writing tragedy, an area maior (3.15.16) for the exercise of the
horses that pull the chariot of Ovid’s poetry.6 The loss of Ovid’s Medea
may lead us to underestimate the importance of tragedy for Ovid’s sense
of his own career; Patrick Cheney argues that it was given full weight in
Marlowe’s construction of his own ‘counter-national’ career.7 At Amores
3.1.24 it is tragedy that is the maius opus ‘greater work’, a phrase used
by Virgil of the greater business of the second half of the Aeneid (Aen.
7.44–5 maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo, / maius opus moueo), and echoed
by later poets with reference to the bold epic ambitions of the Aeneid as a
whole.8 At Tristia 2.63 Ovid, addressing Augustus, uses the phrase of his
own long hexameter poem, the Metamorphoses:Â€inspice maius opus, quod
adhuc sine fine reliqui, ‘look at the greater work, which to date I have left
unfinished’.
If the Ars Amatoria is Ovid’s answer to the Georgics, the hexameter
Metamorphoses together with the Fasti in elegiac couplets constitute
Ovid’s complex and confident rewriting of the Aeneid:Â€the long narrative
poem that covers the history of the world from creation to the genesis of
the Augustan imperial cosmos, together with the aetiological poem that
focuses the Callimachean interest in origins exclusively on the matter of
Roman and Augustan history. Together the Metamorphoses and the Fasti
form the monumental climax to a career that begins in Amores 1 with
Cupid’s sabotage of the poet’s epic project. Intense intertextual engage-
ment with the Aeneid characterizes both poems, but for explicit compari-
son of the careers, as opposed to the works, of Ovid and Virgil we must
look not to programmatic statements about the coming ascent to the
greater works of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, but to Ovid’s textual
processing of the event that interrupts their completion, his exile (in the
qualified form of relegation) to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8. Ovid was
exiled in his fifty-first year (Trist. 4.10.95–6); Virgil died in his fifty-first
year (so, correctly, Vita Probiana 17). According to the biographical trad-
ition Virgil left the Aeneid lacking the summa manus, and on his deathbed
asked to burn the poem (for the longer history of the reception of this
deathbed gesture see Krevans below, Ch. 10). Out of this Ovid fashions
6
Ovid alludes to this passage at Fasti 4.10 nunc teritur nostris area maior equis, in another restaging
of a generic ascent, this time within the elegiac metre, to aetiological didactic; at the same time,
in typical Ovidian fashion, he protests that in fact it is more of the same, continued devotion to
the goddess of love (8 tu mihi semper opus).
7
Cheney 1997. 8
Starting with Prop. 2.34.66 nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.
the myth of his own exile as a form of death, the exequies of which are
conducted on the night of his departure from Rome (Trist. 1.3), leaving
behind the unfinished Metamorphoses, which, Ovid tells us, he placed on
the fire as he left Rome, in conscious fulfilment of Virgil’s deathbed wish
(Trist. 1.7.15–22).9 Death, the biological fact that ends and comes after the
literary career of Virgil, figuratively becomes exile, another brutal fact of
a writer’s biography but one which Ovid transforms into the last stage of
his own literary career (fittingly enough, since, according to Ovid, his
poetry, specifically the Ars Amatoria, was one of the causes of his real-life
exile).
A number of further points may be drawn out with regard to exile
and the literary career. First, Ovid incorporates exile into poetry with
such intensity that readers are almost forced to situate every text as
‘pre-exilic’ or ‘exilic’. This has interesting consequences:Â€ the impact of
exile is so strong that when we discuss the chronology of the so-called
Â�double Heroides (16–21), a series of poems surely written later than the
single Heroides, and we find metrical and stylistic clues indicating a late
composition, we are reluctant to accept this fact, simply because in his
‘sad’ poems Ovid is explicit that erotic poetry is over for him and only
a poetics of gloom can suit his changed circumstances. Since the double
Heroides are about love, although with an interesting atmospheric mix of
the gleeful and the doomed, critics have preferred (we think wrongly) to
assign them to the pre-lapsarian career of Ovid; in so doing, they show
the power of Ovid’s model of poetry as a coherent response to changing
circumstances in life.
The second point is to note the significance of Ovid’s exile, and of
Ovid’s literary representation of his exile, for the later history of exile,
literal or figurative, in the self-representation of writers and intellecÂ�
tuals.10 Sometimes this is a matter of a persona, permanently or tempor-
arily adopted, but sometimes exile forms a stage in a larger pattern. Janet
Smarr argues that Boccaccio sees Dante’s journey in the Commedia as
a reversal of the tripartite career of Ovid, viewed as successively poet of
love, poet of transformations, and poet of exile; the three cantiche move
from the realm of exile, through the realm of transformation, into the
realm of love.11
The third point concerns the relationship between literary career,
viewed as a consciously literary construction, and the historical biography
9
See Hinds 1985:Â€21–7 on Trist. 1.7. See Lyne 2002.
10
Smarr 1991.
11
of the poet. The literary career is by definition not the same as the life of
the poet, but the extent to which elements of a ‘real-life’ autobiography
may be woven into the pattern of a literary career varies from author to
author. In the Eclogues Virgil exploits pastoral’s generic predisposition to
the allegorical in order to define his version of pastoral in part through a
veiled account of a personal history of exile from a rural home, as a result
of historical land-confiscations. In the Georgics Virgil eschews the licence
for the autobiographical granted by Hesiod in the Works and Days; the
most extensive passage of first-person self-representation, the triumph of
poetry at the beginning of Georgics 3, is a fantasy on the parallel courses
trodden by princeps and poet. In the Aeneid Virgil’s cameo appearances
are limited to moments of metapoetry. Horace by contrast writes mostly
in first-person genres which elicit the construction of an autobiography
(see Harrison above, Ch. 2). Ovid begins and ends his career with first-
person genres that test the relationship between literature and life in
various ways. Where Horace for the most part claims to be in control
of the shifting directions of the paths through his life (with the notable
exception of the complaint at the beginning of Odes 4 of a forced return
to a former state of slavery to love), Ovid presents himself as the unwill-
ing victim of circumstances at the beginning and end of his career. The
author of the Amores serves up for the nth time, and now in not very
convincing terms, the love elegist’s complaint that the force majeure of
the god of love and of the mistress prevents him from pursuing a more
respectable and more Roman path in his poetic and non-poetic careers.
For this unserious flirtation with the inexorability of real life when it
comes to poetic choices, reality takes its revenge with the relegation of
AD 8, a thunderbolt of a blow which interrupts Ovid’s upward course
(graphically in the truncation of the Fasti at the poem’s halfway point)
and knocks him back to his elegiac beginnings. The tears of the elegist
are now for real.
The exile poetry also gives a more veristic account of the relation-
ship between life and literature at the beginning of Ovid’s career, in the
autobiographical Tristia 4.10. Here the young Ovid attempts to obey the
superior power of his father’s argument for the uselessness of poetry, but
is thwarted not by the counterforce of a divinity or personification, but
by the spontaneous flow of metrical words from his lips (Trist. 4.10.21–6).
After this scene in the family home, the young poet next gives up on the
cursus honorum after embarking on the first stage (33 cepimus et tenerae
primos aetatis honores, ‘I undertook the first office for a young man’), find-
ing body and mind inadequate to the labour. At a similar stage of his life
history Propertius had combined Callimachean divine machinery with
Roman topography, 4.133–4 tum tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat Apollo /
et uetat insano uerba tonare Foro, ‘then Apollo dictated a few words from
his song and forbade me to thunder in the mad Forum’. Ovid gives the
reader what appears to be unadorned autobiography. This divergence
from the public cursus honorum onto an alternative path of poetry is per-
haps in conscious rejection of a conception of a Roman literary career
as equivalent to the public cursus honorum, in Joseph Farrell’s suggestive
Â�formulation (see Introduction above).
2 .â•‡ Ov i di a n au t o g r a ph i e s, f rom C or n e l i us
G a l lus t o B occ acc io
The life of our poet … was bisected.
Rand 1925:Â€8
i.â•‡ Gallus in Ovid

Ovid needs to be singled out as a major influence on career autography.
He teaches by example not just because he talks a lot about his career at
different times, not just because he reacts at lightning speed to the first
fallouts of the Virgilian boom, but also because he is ready to compare
his mix of biography and authorship to other examples, and to enhance
patterns of ‘exemplary’ careers in his models. As a test case of what might
be labelled ‘retrospective reception’, we will examine what can be recuper-
ated about the case of Cornelius Gallus, according to Ovid the father of
Roman elegy. We will focus not just on what can be inferred from Ovid
about Gallus, and about Ovid’s relationship to him:Â€our central interest
is in the use of intertextual connections in a dynamic and almost narra-
tive way, so as to suggest the evolution of a career, not just an individual,
textual model.
Now Gallus was without doubt a striking early example of what Farrell
2002 might call a cursus litterarum, a mix of the traditional Roman cur-
sus honorum and literary career. The two paths converge for example in
the breathtaking moment when the most famous love poet of Rome has
the duty of arresting Cleopatra, the future dark lady of Roman elegy
(Plutarch, Antony 78, although we can only speculate on what younger
Roman elegists made of this), but there is a problem:Â€ this elegiac poet
seems to have had no occasion to register his own downfall in poetryÂ€–
this is precisely where Ovid jumps in and completes the job. We are
convinced (thanks also to Ingleheart forthcoming, who contributes two
of our observations on lines 1–8) that there are traces of Gallus in Ovid’s
apology to Augustus, Tristia 2. This is how the poem begins, with an
apostrophe by Ovid to his books of poetry, and indeed to his entire career
(Trist. 2.1–8):
Quid mihi uobiscum est, infelix cura, libelli,
â•… ingenio perii qui miser ipse meo?
cur modo damnatas repeto, mea crimina, Musas?
â•… an semel est poenam commeruisse parum?
carmina fecerunt, ut me cognoscere uellet
â•… omine non fausto femina uirque meo;
carmina fecerunt, ut me moresque notaret
â•… iam demi iussa Caesar ab Arte mea.
What have I to do with you, my books, ill-starred labour? Why do I return to
my condemned Muses, the causes of my guilt? Is it not enough to have earned
one punishment? It was my poems that made women and men want to know
me, an unlucky undertaking; my poems that made Caesar brand me and my
ways, commanding that my Art of Love be removed.
In spite of our huge ignorance of the poems of Gallus, there is a cluster
of details that point in his direction. The appositional use of cura in the
first line of Tristia 2 is found in a crucial passage of Virgil’s Eclogue 10 in
a context addressing Gallus and his beloved Lycoris (22):Â€tua cura, Lycoris.
It has been clear since Servius that Virgil in Eclogue 10 is interested in
Gallus’ career and also in intertextuality with his elegies. Virgilian com-
mentators suspect that the erotic connotation of cura was in itself a Gallan
innovation.12 Ovid uses cura in a different sense, but of course the context
requires that we identify the dangerous libelli as erotic elegy. In the next
hexameter, another appositional construction, damnatas … mea crimina,
Musas, puts the downfall of Ovid in a nutshell. The stylistic device has
been labelled by modern critics ‘schema Cornelianum’ (Skutsch 1956).
The attribution to Gallus rests on the combination of passages such as
Virgil, Eclogue 1.57 raucae, tua cura, palumbes ‘the hoarse doves, your love’
(again with appositional use of cura), Propertius 3.3.31 et Veneris uolucres,
mea turba, columbae, ‘Venus’ birds, my flock, the doves’ (explicitly about
erotic poetry). The repetition of carmina fecerunt in the next two hexam-
eters offers a parallel to one of the few lines of Gallus known to us though
direct transmission, fr. 2.6 Courtney tandem fecerunt carmina Musae, ‘at
last the Muses have made songs’. Considering the proximity of the Muses
â•‡ Clausen 1994 on 10.22; Skutsch 1956:Â€198–9; Ross 1976:Â€69.

12
in Ovid’s context, it may well be that he is thinking of Gallus:Â€translators
normally assume that in Ovid carmina is the subject, but the memory of
Gallus’ model could suggest an ambiguity:Â€‘my poems’ as subject, but also
as object, with Musae understood as the subject from the previous couplet
(as argued by Hollis apud Ingleheart:Â€ after all, the Muses’ involvement
makes them as guilty as the poems).
In the same fragment, Gallus had expressed self-assurance in the face
of a judge, presumably in a context of aesthetic criticism (non ego …
iudice te uereor, ‘I have no fear if you are judge’). Ovid’s damnatas Musas
might be a bitter rejoinder to Gallus’ statement, now that the circum-
stances of life have brought about the downfall of two love poets through
the verdict of a judge, Augustus, who cannot be ignored. damnatas Musas
expresses the unexpected result of Gallus’ stance, one that Ovid had
largely adopted in his early poetry:Â€‘not being afraid of a iudex’ because
of the quality of the creation made by his Muses. Now Ovid’s Muses
have been put on trial and a much harsher kind of judgement has been
made, by the same judge who had caused Gallus’ political downfallÂ€– the
same person is now judge, emperor and supreme critic of Roman litera-
ture, and this is a crucial idea for Tristia 2.13 Ovid wants his readers to
recall not only the poetic model of Gallus the elegist, but also his entire
‘cursus of dishonour’.
In the juvenile Remedia the Ovidian Muse had been acquitted (387–8)
si mea materiae respondet Musa iocosae, / uicimus, et falsi criminis acta rea
est, ‘if my Muse meets the charge of mirthful subject matter, I have won,
and she is accused on a false charge’. Now she is guilty. Now, according
to the only substantial fragment we have from Gallus’ poetry there was a
certain dynamics in his work, an intertwining of two life choices, poetic
and political career:
– SAD FATE because of Lycoris
– SWEET FATE because of Caesar
– And nothing to worry from a ‘judge’:
Tristia nequit[ia … ]a Lycori tua.
***
Fata mihi, Caesar, tum erunt mea dulcia, quom tu
â•… maxima Romanae pars eri<s> historiae
The elegiac tradition had made much of the puella as a judge of poetic quality, in self-conscious
13
modification of the theatrical tradition in which the audience was ‘the judge’:Â€Terence is our cru-
cial witness to the use of judicial discourse in a context of evaluation and competition of poetic
texts (see Focardi 1978).
postque tuum reditum multorum templa deorum
â•… fixa legam spolieis deiuitiora tueis.
***
] … tandem fecerunt c[ar]mina Musae
quae possem domina deicere digna mea:
â•… ] . atur idem tibi, non ego, Visce,
â•… ] ….. Kato, iudice te uereor
… sad because of your naughtiness, Lycoris. Caesar, my fate will be sweet when
you are the greatest part of Roman history, and when after your return I read
of the temples of the gods enriched with the spoils you have fixed to them… At
last the Muses have made songs that I can sing as worthy of my mistress …. the
same to you, I do not, Viscus, … Cato, fear you as judge. (C. Cornelius Gallus
fr. 2 Courtney)
This is now reconfigured in Ovidian exile poetry as
– SWEET FATE as a love poet
– SAD FATE (Tristia) because of Caesar
– And a judge to worry about (not Cato but Caesar)
Even the title Tristia in this context retains some implications from
Gallus’ career, except that this new Gallus ‘talks back’, Tristia 2 being
in part an experiment in alternative history:Â€what if Gallus the inventor
of Roman elegy had used elegy as a way to react against the Augustan
indictment? Tristia, quo possum, carmine fata leuo, ‘I lighten my sad fate
in the only way I can, through song’ (Trist. 4.10.112). Another indication
that Ovid is meditating on the pattern of Gallus’ career is his use of the
Virgilian ‘epitaph’ of Gallus in his own death fantasy, now set in Pontus
not Arcadia:
tristis at ille ‘tamen cantabitis, Arcades,’ inquit
‘montibus haec uestris; soli cantare periti
Arcades. o mihi tum quam molliter ossa quiescant,
uestra meos olim si fistula dicat amores!’
In his sadness he said ‘But you, Arcadians, will sing these songs to your moun-
tains, Arcadians alone skilled in song. Oh how softly would my bones then rest
if only your pipe were to sound my loves in future.’ (Virg. Ecl. 10.31–4)
hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum
â•… ingenio perii Naso poeta meo
at tibi qui transis ne sit graue quisquis amasti
â•… dicere ‘Nasonis molliter ossa cubent.’
I who lie here once played with tender loves, Naso the poet who perished by my
own genius. Passerby, if you have loved, do not begrudge the words ‘May Naso’s
bones lie softly.’ (Ov. Trist. 3.3.73–6)
As a poet of amores (like Gallus) Ovid will be remembered in the same
soft elegiac language that Virgil’s Gallus had used about his own death.
Tristia 2 is in fact the only text in Roman poetry where the author
dares to speculate on why Gallus had been forced to commit suicide,
445–6 non fuit opprobrio celebrasse Lycorida Gallo, / sed linguam nimio non
tenuisse mero, ‘Gallus was not blamed for celebrating Lycoris, but for not
holding his tongue under the influence of wine’.14 The disclosure, allusive
and abrupt as it is, almost forces one to think about possible analogies.
If we try to think of an implied model, where a friendÂ€– because of too
much wineÂ€– provokes the destructive reaction of a ‘king’, we end up with
a famous episode (indeed a turning point) in the career of Alexander the
Great:
These and similar things the young soldiers heard with pleasure, but they were
odious to the older men, especially because of Philip, under whom they had
lived longer, when Clitus, who was himself by no means wholly sober, turned
to those who were reclining below him, and quoted a line of Euripides in such a
tone that the sound could be heard by the king rather than the words made out,
to the effect that it was a bad custom of the Greeks to inscribe on their trophies
only the names of kings; for the kings stole the glory won by the blood of others.
Therefore Alexander, for he suspected that the words had been somewhat mali-
cious, began to ask those next to him what they had heard Clitus say. (Curtius
Rufus 8.1.27–9, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb))
A sinister analogy for Octavian in the early 20s, especially because what
Clitus had said, with the help of Euripides, is not so different from what
people, at least in hindsight, must have speculated about, in the absence
of official disclosure, as to the crime of GallusÂ€– when he had inscribed
on stone in three languages ‘not even kings have dared to tread the land
I have conquered’,15 did people argue post factum that he had been stress-
ing his proud autonomy vis-à-vis Octavian’s growing monopoly on far-off
victories? As Euripides would have said, the victory monuments are only
for kings, but the blood is always someone else’s.
Thus Ovid constructs a narrative of Gallus’ career, the princeps of elegy
becoming a victim of the princeps, and Tristia 2 is implicitly structured
as a supplement to Gallus’ career, an opportunity for a victimized elegiac
poet to talk back. This link is also credible on the ‘juristic’ levelÂ€– Roman
historians have independently argued that the model of ‘imperial dis-
pleasure’ used in Ovid’s case has a precise precedent in Gallus (cf. Rogers
On the frequency of Ovidian allusions and references to Gallus see Barchiesi 1981.
14
See IG Philae II 128.

15
1966) even if Gallus had only been forbidden from imperial provinces
and declared odiosus, persona non grata, to the emperor. Therefore, the
beginning of Tristia 2 is even more sensitive to ‘Gallan’ resonance.
A ‘career man’ himself, Ovid is especially sensitive to the career of his
predecessors:Â€he imitates predecessors not only through textual memories,
but by constructing a mix of poetic utterances and (auto)biography.
ii.â•‡ Ovid and Lucius Apuleius

We turn to Apuleius, intense reader of Ovid. Ovid’s approach to his own
poetic career is influential on Apuleius, but with a twist:Â€ the Ovidian
career model is now adapted not to authorial self-fashioning but to a fic-
tional plot:Â€the plot of the novel Metamorphoses. Apuleius alludes to Ovid
not only as a major influence on his novel, but as a dynamic model of evo-
lution from one text to another. Thus he continues the strategy we have
encountered in Ovid’s recreation of Gallus in his exile poetry, that of
inscribing a career within literary allusions. This time, of course, Ovid’s
exile poetry begins to assert its influence.
The hotspot for Ovidianism in the Metamorphoses (we have a vested
interest in preferring this title to The Golden Ass:Â€ more on titles below)
is the description of the wealthy house of Byrrhena at the beginning of
Book 2 (4):16
The atrium was particularly beautiful. Columns were erected in each of its four
corners, and on these stood statues, likenesses of the palm-bearing goddess; their
wings were outspread, but, instead of moving, their dewy feet barely touched
the slippery surface of a rolling sphere; they were not positioned as though sta-
tionary, but you would think them to be in flight. Next I saw a piece of Parian
marble made into the likeness of Diana, occupying in balance the centre of the
whole area. It was an absolutely brilliant statue, robe blowing in the wind, viv-
idly running forward, coming to meet you as you entered, awesome with the
sublimity of godhead. There were gods protecting both flanks of the goddesses,
and the dogs were marble too. Their eyes threatened, their ears stiffened, their
nostrils flared, and their mouths opened savagely, so that if the sound of barking
burst in from next door you would think it had come from the marble’s jaws.
Furthermore that superb sculptor displayed the greatest proof of his craftsman-
ship by making the dogs rear up with their breasts raised high, so that their
front feet seemed to run, while their hind feet thrust at the ground. Behind
the goddess’s back the rock rose in the form of a cave, with moss, grass, leaves,
bushes, and here vines and there little trees all blossoming out of the stone. In
â•‡ For a rich commentary and bibliography see van Mal-Mader 1998.
16
the interior the statue’s shadow glistened with the marble’s sheen. Up under the
very edge of the rock hung apples and the most skilfully polished grapes, which
art, rivalling nature, displayed to resemble reality. You would think that some
of them could be plucked for eating, when wine-gathering Autumn breathes
ripe colour upon them; and if you bent down and looked in the pool that runs
along by the goddess’s feet shimmering in a gentle wave, you would think that
the bunches of grapes hanging there, as if in the country, possessed the quality
of movement, among all other aspects of reality. In the middle of the marble
foliage the image of Actaeon could be seen, both in stone and in the spring’s
reflection, leaning towards the goddess with an inquisitive stare, in the very
act of changing into a stag and waiting for Diana to step into the bath. (trans.
J. A. Hanson (Loeb))
The Ovidian allusion is well known, as is its impact on the plot of the
novel. The subject of the décor in the atrium is the myth of Actaeon
and Diana as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (3.137–252), and the com-
plex poolside sculpture in the atrium imitates the setting of Actaeon’s
transformation:
Vallis erat piceis et acuta densa cupressu,
nomine Gargaphie succinctae sacra Dianae,
cuius in extremo est antrum nemorale recessu
arte laboratum nulla:Â€simulauerat artem
ingenio natura suo; nam pumice uiuo
et leuibus tofis natiuum duxerat arcum;
fons sonat a dextra tenui perlucidus unda,
margine gramineo patulos incinctus hiatus.
There was a valley thick grown with pine and cypress, called Gargaphie, sacred
to high-girt Diana. In its inmost recess there was a woodland grotto, worked
by no artist’s hand. Nature by her own cunning had imitated art:Â€for she had
shaped a native arch out of the living pumice and soft tufa. On the right side
sounded a clear spring with its slender stream, widening into a pool surrounded
by grassy banks. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.155–62)
Apuleius turns a passage of obvious ecphrastic quality into the ecphrasis
of an actual work of art, and the intertextuality is sealed by the wonderful
meta-allusion whereby the marble fruits in the statuary complex within
the atrium are the product of ‘art imitating nature’ while the cave of the
nymphs in Ovid is a product of ‘nature imitating art without any artistic
labour’ (Hinds 2002:Â€146).
We might consider this simply as a homage to Ovid, but the sequel
shows that this episode is less decorative and digressive than it seems. At
this very momentÂ€– when we begin to feel that the narrator is a little too
absorbed in the activity of viewing this sensual and enchanting work of
artÂ€– the owner of the house, Byrrhena, appears and announces to Lucius,
her nephew, that ‘all you see is yours’ (2.5):
I was staring again and again at the statuary enjoying myself enormously, when
Byrrhena spoke. ‘All that you see’, she said, ‘is yours.’ And with that she ordered
everyone else to leave so that we might talk in private. When all had been dis-
missed she began. ‘My dearest Lucius’, she said, ‘I swear by this goddess that
I am very worried and afraid for you, and I want you to be forewarned far in
advance, as if you were my own son. Be careful! I mean watch out carefully for
the evil arts and criminal seductions of that woman Pamphile, who is the wife of
that Milo you say is your host. She is considered to be a witch of the first order
and an expert in every variety of sepulchral incantation, and by breathing on
twigs and pebbles and stuff of that sort she can drown all the light of the starry
heavens in the depths of hell and plunge it into primeval Chaos.
The situation somehow combines thoughts of sensual desire with ideas
of appropriation, and tua sunt quae uides could well be a pointer towards
what is going on at the level of programmatic allusion:Â€ the appropri-
ation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a central model for the entire work.17
But the situation is also seminal at the level of plot, because Byrrhena
immediately adds a warning about Pamphile and her sensual magic:Â€in
other words, she warns Lucius about the imminent turning-point of the
plot, the magical metamorphosis of the narrator into an ass. The two
fields of reference converge because of course metamorphosis is what
links Apuleius to the Ovidian model. It is also important to realize that
when Byrrhena dramatically warns that the sorceress is able to bring
down the daylight of the upper world into Tartarus, and to bring back
primeval chaos (chaos uetustum), she is using Ovidian language:Â€ at a
dramatic moment in Book 2, the goddess Tellus warns Jupiter that
the cosmic crisis brought about by Phaethon’s skyride will ‘bring back
ancient chaos’ (Met. 2.298–300):
‘si freta, si terrae pereunt, si regia caeli,
in chaos antiquum confundimur! eripe flammis,
si quid adhuc superest, et rerum consule summae!’
If the sea perish and the land and the realms of the sky, we are hurled back into
primeval chaos. Save from the flames whatever remains, and take thought for
the safety of the universe.
The analogous expression in the Psyche tale, tua sunt haec omnia (5.2.1), is also used to cap an
17
ecphrasis of a wealthy palace, and the entire situation is based on an intertext from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, the description of the Sun’s palace and Phaethon’s reactions to its cosmic setting
(see Met. 2.31; 95–7).
For readers of Ovid’s epic, the threat of a regression to ‘old’ chaos is a
powerful one, since chaos had been the first form of reality evoked in the
work at the beginning (1.4–5:Â€‘before sea, lands, sky, there was only one
face of nature … chaos’). Even the location of Byrrhena’s utterance, the
magnificent atrium dedicated to Diana, is affected by the resonance of
the Ovidian model:Â€a couple of lines before the menace of chaos appears,
Tellus had warned the gods that the disaster will strike even their mag-
nificent atria and provoke a celestial collapse (Met. 2.294–7):
at caeli miserere tui! circumspice utrumque:
fumat uterque polus! quos si uitiauerit ignis,
atria uestra ruent! Atlas en ipse laborat
uixque suis umeris candentem sustinet axem!
Take pity on your sky ! Look around:Â€both poles are smoking. If fire weakens
them, your homes will fall in ruins. See, Atlas himself is labouring and can
scarcely hold up the white-hot vault on his shoulders.
The pattern of Ovidian negotiations also extends back to the beginning of
Book 2, in the description of Lucius’ emotions after waking up in Hypata,
just before he enters the suburban villa of his aunt (2.1–2):
As soon as night had been scattered and a new sun brought day, I emerged from
sleep and bed alike. With my anxiety and my excessive passion to learn the rare
and the marvellous, considering that I was staying in the middle of Thessaly,
the native land of those spells of the magic art which are unanimously praised
throughout the entire world, and recalling that the story told by my excellent
comrade Aristomenes had originated at the site of this very city, I was on ten-
terhooks of desire and impatience alike, and I began to examine each and every
object with curiosity. Nothing I looked at in that city seemed to me to be what it
was; but I believed that absolutely everything had been transformed into another
shape by some deadly mumbo-jumbo:Â€the rocks I hit upon were petrified human
beings, the birds I heard were feathered humans, the trees that surrounded the
city wall were humans with leaves, and the liquid in the fountains had flowed
from human bodies. Soon the statues and pictures would begin to walk, the
walls to speak, the oxen and other animals of that sort to prophesy; and from
the sky itself and the sun’s orb there would suddenly come an oracle. I was in
such a state of shock, or rather so dumbfounded by my torturous longing, that,
although I found no trace or vestige whatever of what I longed to see, I contin-
ued to circulate anyway. As I wandered from doorway to doorway, like a man
bent on prodigal extravagance, suddenly without knowing it I stumbled upon
the provision-market. There I saw a woman …
Guided by his long-standing fascination with magic, Lucius accepts the
idea that the Thessalian city of Hypata is the capital of magical arts:Â€he
starts looking at everything in a spirit of credulity as well as curiosity
and sensual desire, and sees magical transformation wherever he looksÂ€–
stones, birds, trees, fountains, statues. In Hypata, nothing is what it
seems, everything is the result of metamorphosis, and metamorphosis
is the revelation of magic in natural life. More exactly, the mental state
of Lucius could be summed up in the words used by Leonard Barkan
to explain the huge influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in later ages:Â€‘The
extraordinary fascination that the Ovidian poem has exercised over two
millennia can be traced in large part to this paradox:Â€it proves the natural
world magical and the magical world natural’ (Barkan 1986:Â€19). So when
Lucius insists that in Byrrhena’s atrium it is all about stone and art imitat-
ing nature, he is not being totally sincere:Â€in Hypata, he believes, statues
are transformations of humans, and are ready to change again.
Lucius has whetted his appetite for magic through avid assimilation of
Ovidian metamorphic ideology;18 only this Roman text, not the novel-
istic models in Greek, could have prompted such a cosmic and euphoric
belief that everything is in fact a transformation of something else, or
bound to become something else. Of course, there is the Apuleian twist,
and Lucius is in a sense a naïve, literal-minded reader of Ovid; he is trivi-
alizing the Ovidian idea, he thinks that metamorphosis is the result of
magical acts, while the Ovidian approach is that nature is magic because
storytelling can be attached to it.
The next question is how far the specific choice of the Ovidian version
of the Actaeon myth contributes to the programmatic importance of the
ecphrasis, with its undertones of magic. The first aspect is of course the idea
of human consciousness in an animal body. This is one of the few Ovidian
transformations19 in which the focus is on the enduring human conscious-
ness of the animal. The image of Actaeon as a human body with stag horns
is of course relevant hereÂ€– one might debate whether this common iconog-
raphy aims to make the subject immediately recognizable, or to illustrate a
pregnant moment in the narrative, or even to make the point that the final
result of the metamorphosis will be not just game, but game with human
feelings. This last approach is clearly a link between Apuleius, Ovid and
the visual tradition of the story. So the main narrative strategy of the novel,
18
Penwill 1990:Â€8 n. ‘Lucius is suffering from lurid imagination arising from too literal a reading of
Ovid’s Met.’ (a Petronian approach to narrative intertextuality).
19
The other obvious example being the story of Io, the Argive heroine transformed into a cow and
striving to get free of this animal body which does not match her identity. The plot provides
the clearest mythical parallel to the story of the human ass which Apuleius found in his Greek
Â�models (including retro-morphosis, see Bandini 1986), and offers the aetiology for a goddess who
will prove to be the most compassionate and helpful in the divine cosmos of the poemÂ€– Isis (see
Met. 9.686–701; 773–81).
that Lucius is still ‘himself’ in the body of an animal, is recapitulated in
advance through the encounter with an Ovidian monument.
The second factor is the framing of authorial irony as a passive, not (as
usual) active, concept. Actaeon has a special status in the Ovidian model
not only because he is one of the few characters who focalize their stories
from within an animal bodyÂ€– but also because he is the only character
of the poem who has a proleptic control, a magnetism over the destiny,
of the unwitting narrator. In a weird postscript to the poem in his exile
poetry, Ovid will explain that he has become Actaeon, and not just any
version of this character, but his own version, the innocent victim20 of
arbitrary divine retribution:
cur aliquid uidi? cur noxia lumina feci?
â•… cur imprudenti cognita culpa mihi?
inscius Actaeon uidit sine ueste Dianam:
â•… praeda fuit canibus non minus ille suis.
scilicet in superis etiam fortuna luenda est,
â•… nec ueniam laeso numine casus habet.
Why did I see anything? Why did I make my eyes guilty? Why did I thought-
lessly become privy to a fault? Actaeon saw Diana naked, unwittingly:Â€none the
less he became prey to his dogs. Clearly with the gods even bad fortune must be
paid for, and chance is no excuse when a god is offended. (Trist. 2.103–8)
Now if Ovid’s downfall and punishment is the story of Actaeon, the
author is entering the human and animal body of his mythic character;
he is being trapped within one episode of his epic and becoming the
subject and victim of the most insane metamorphosis of them all:Â€being
punished by becoming a part of his own creation (the innocent version
of another favourite mythologeme of Ovid’s exile poetry, the Phalaris–
Perillus story). Lucius is a Milesian narrator about to be swallowed up
by his own fiction, just as the Pontic Ovid is a narrator trapped within a
stag’s hide, a poet in exile experiencing humiliation and loss of civilized
life. In other words, and this is for us the relevant aspect, Apuleius has
used as a model not only Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but Ovid’s reinterpret-
ation and revision of the Metamorphoses in exile (see Hinds 1985).21 He
has combined localized allusion with an idea of authorial career, which
20
His own version because Ovid’s Actaeon is the most innocent in the entire history of the motif,
while Apuleius is more interested in innuendoes of sinful voyeurism:Â€see Schlam 1984 and Heath
1992.
21
There had been a comparable tendency in Neronian and Flavian poetry, see Hinds 2007 and
forthcoming, on Seneca and Martial imitating Ovid. Sometimes one suspects that intertextual
contaminations between the Ovidian epic and the exile poetry are enough to suggest a similar
is what Ovid had been doing with Cornelius Gallus, with Virgil and of
course with his own earlier self. The difference is that the author is now
more protected than Ovid, through the fictional character of the work
and the more ambiguous relationship between author, narrative voice
and protagonist.
This revealing episode encourages us to look for other points of con-
tact between Apuleius and his Ovidian model. Apuleius’ novelistic plot is
dominated by a single instance of metamorphosis, but the author broadens
and multiplies the concept of metamorphosisÂ€– and so justifies the plural
in the titleÂ€– by extending it to ideas of translation, style, change of for-
tune and transition from life to book. He is in fact justifying the plural of
his title by using Ovidian strategies. The idea of reversal of fortune (Greek
metabolē or peripeteia) as a further revelation of metamorphosis is funda-
mental to the novel’s programme from the prologue on, and it betrays the
influence not just of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but of Ovid’s rereading of his
epic in the elegies of exile:Â€the author’s change of fortune should now be
inscribed into his poem of changes, and will retrospectively transform its
originary meaning (Trist. 1.1.117–22):
sunt quoque mutatae, ter quinque uolumina, formae,
â•… nuper ab exequiis carmina rapta meis.
his mando dicas, inter mutata referri
â•… fortunae uultum corpora posse meae,
namque ea dissimilis subito est effecta priori,
â•… flendaque nunc, aliquo tempore laeta fuit.
There are also fifteen rolls about changing shapes, poems recently snatched from
my funeral. I bid you tell them that the appearance of my own fortune can now
be counted as one of the changed bodies, since it has suddenly been made differ-
ent from what it was, a cause of tears now, though once of joy.
Thus when Apuleius announces a work about shape-shifting but also
change of fortune (1.1),22 figuras fortunasque hominum in alias imagines
scenario. For example, the only substantial fragment we have of Lucan’s poem on Troy, the
Iliacon (fr. 7 Morel; 6 Courtney), comments on the catastrophic paradox of natura uersa after
the fall of Phaethon, with a clear allusion to Met. 2.329–32, contaminating this model with the
expression uice mutata from a crucial passage of the exile poetry, Ov. Trist. 4.1.99. Perhaps Lucan
wanted to reinscribe the fallen Ovid into his own Phaethon myth, which is what Ovid had done
with the Actaeon story; Lucan’s situation was no less tense than Ovid’s, if one considers that the
Iliacon was itself in competition/collusion with Nero’s Trojan epic, the Troica (see Dio 62.29.1),
and that Nero himself was often identified as a modern Phaethon.
22
Once again, as we remarked about the Actaeon episode, the new version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
is an ameliorative one:Â€there is nothing in the Ovidian model to balance the idea of ‘restoring the
original shape’; in Boccaccio, as we will see, the idea of an improved and safer version of Ovid’s
career is again important.
conuersas et in se rursum mutuo nexu refectas ut mireris. exordior, ‘so that you
may be amazed at men’s forms and fortunes transformed into other shapes
and then restored again in an interwoven knot. I begin my prologue’, he
alludes to Ovid’s ‘first-person’ exilic version of the Metamorphoses, and the
prologue of the novel takes on not only the prooemium of the epic, but the
prooemial elegy of the Tristia.23
The prologue to the novel is also remarkable for extending to the level
of linguistic and literary form the theme of metamorphosis. This is again
an Ovidian programme:Â€the prooemium to the Ovidian Metamorphoses
had implicitly commented on how metamorphosis extends from the level
of mythological narrative to that of poetics.24 The prologue of Apuleius
similarly foregrounds the idea of uocis immutatio as a thematic but also
formal aspect of the work (see also Shumate 1996), and even alludes to
code-shifting from Greek to Latin as a related issue, just as Ovid had
implied that the transition from Greek to Latin, as seen in the juxtapos-
ition of the paratext Metamorphoseon libri with the incipit formas mutatas
in noua corpora, ‘forms changed into new bodies’, is itself an instance of
metamorphosis. In Apuleius, the principle of uocis immutatio goes hand
in hand with the perception of the story as an example of mutatio of body
(as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and also of fortune (as in Ovid’s Tristia,
where again the style has to morph accordingly and change; cf. Apuleius
3.9 dii boni, quae facies rei? quod monstrum? quae fortunarum mearum
repentina mutatio?, ‘Good gods, what a sight! What an apparition! What a
swift transformation of my fortunes!’).
On the other hand, the characterization of the work as intended to pro-
voke amazement and curiosity (ut mireris) has a precise match not just in
the Ovidian epic but in Ovid’s interpretation of his epic from exile:Â€Ovid
had categorized his epic of change as a poem of non credendos … modos.
The correspondence becomes very precise when, in a unique episode of
foreshadowing, Lucius receives a prophecy about his future (2.12):
When I asked him about the outcome of this trip of mine, he gave several
strange and quite contradictory responses:Â€on the one hand my reputation will
really flourish, but on the other I will become a long story, an unbelievable tale
(incredunda fabula), a book in several volumes.
quid referam libros, illos quoque, crimina nostra,
â•… mille locis plenos nominis esse tui?
23
Tatum 1972.
24
On the implications of 1.2 nam uos mutastis et ista see Tarrant 1982: 351 and n. 35; Barchiesi 2005
ad loc., with further references.
inspice maius opus, quod adhuc sine fine tenetur,
â•… in non credendos corpora uersa modos.
Why should I say that my books, even those that accuse me, are full of your
name in a thousand places? Look at the greater work, which is as yet unfinished,
on bodies changed in unbelievable ways. (Ov. Trist. 2.61–4)
vt mireris and incredunda fabula confirm that the rereading of the Ovidian
epic from exile is important to Apuleius. If the reference to the ‘incred-
ible’ (Greek apiston, paradoxon, apithanon) fits the status of both works as
fantastic fiction, the reference to ‘I will become books’ anticipates the fate
of Lucius by activating a link with Ovid’s nightmarish ‘metamorphosis
in exile’:Â€ the transformation of authorial humiliation into additional
material for the author’s own texts. The Apuleian novel can be seen as a
first person version of the Ovidian epic, one in which the narrator fails
to keep a safe distance from the metamorphic Â�narrative25Â€– and the basis
for this self-destructive strategy is precisely Ovid’s construction (or per-
haps destruction)Â€– through his exile poetryÂ€– of his career as supplemen-
tary metamorphosis and as reinscription of the author within a narrative
of woe. The shared idea of seeing as a crime or error is programmatically
mythologized in the shared iconography of Actaeon and Diana. Ironically,
this new first-person version of Metamorphoses brings ordeals to the narra-
tor, but final redemption for the author, while Ovid the author, after his
safe joyride through the metamorphic stories, ends up as a victim. In the
endgame, the author Lucius Apuleius will reap profit from Lucius’ trans-
formation into ‘books’. This is the glorious prospect entertained by the
author Naso at the end of Metamorphoses (‘Ovid will go higher than the
stars, and become a book’, Feeney 1991:Â€249; ‘Hercules and the others may
have become gods in eternity, but Ovid will become his poem’, Barkan
1986:Â€88), but the exile poetry had changed this outcome. The novel turns
Lucius into metamorphic books of exile from himself, only to reward him
with the safe prospect of becoming the author.
iii.â•‡ Boccaccio and Ovid

Ovid in the Middle Ages is an author perpetually falling foul of
authority.
Dimmick 2002:Â€264
On the idea of danger and the transgression into the fantastic mode see the incisive comments of
25
Laird 1993.
Ovid and Apuleius are favourite authors for Boccaccio, and, like Apuleius,
Boccaccio reacts not just to individual models in Ovid but to the whole
career. Even more than Apuleius, Boccaccio has invested Ovidian
Â�memories26 with the problems and dangers of being a prose author:Â€the
author of Decameron, a programmatic work of fictional prose. The import-
ance of authorial voice is already clear in the rich Proemio, which is a real
author’s foreword:
From my tenderest youth until today, I have been aflame with love … This
love has … proved wellnigh unendurable … my disordered appetite has
ignited in my heart an uncontrollable fire which has refused to leave me satis-
fied with moderate expectations but has caused me constant and quite needless
vexations … my love, then, was passionate beyond all measure. (Proemio § 3
(Boccaccio 1993:Â€3, trans. Waldman))
This is the initial drive of Ovid’s career, from the programmatic uror of
the Amores to the confession of the prooemium to the Remedia (7–8:Â€ego
semper amaui, / et si, quid faciam, nunc quoque quaeris, amo, ‘I have always
loved, and, if you ask what I am doing now, I love’:Â€ cf. Decameron IV
Intro. 32 and 42). Boccaccio continues straight into the signature success
of the early Ovid, the Ars Amatoria:
And who is going to deny that this offering, such as it is, should properly be
devoted to the fair sex very much in preference to the men? It is women who
timorously and bashfully conceal Love’s flame within their tender breasts;
and those who have had experience of him know well enough how much
harder it is to control the suppressed than the open flame. (Bocc. Dec.
Proemio § 9–10)
This is typical Ars material (cf. 1.275–88., esp. 276 on gender and dissimu-
lation), already revised by Ovid in the prologue to Ars 3,27 and Boccaccio’s
reasoning soon embraces the related subject matter of the Remedia, the
therapy for men in love (Rem. 151–224):
If a man is down in the dumps or out of sorts, he has any number of ways to
banish his cares or make them tolerable:Â€he can go out and about at will, he can
hear and see all sorts of things, he can go hawking and hunting, he can fish and
ride, gamble or pursue his business interests. (Proemio § 12)
26
There is already a distinguished bibliography on Ovid in the Decameron (we have profited espe-
cially from Mazzotta 1986; Smarr 1987 and 1991; Hollander 1997; S. Marchesi 2001 and 2004):Â€we
will not list individual contributions below for reasons of space; the focus of our discussion is on
the cumulative effect of the allusions.
27
See Gibson 2002 on Ars 3.29–30 and 30, and also on 31–2 for the revision of Ars 1.645–6, 657–8.
But what about women? If the Ars already rewrites men-oriented argu-
ments for a female audience, can one extend this approach to the Remedia?
Now since Fortune has tended to be at her most niggardly in that one quarter
where strength has proved the most defective, as is evident in the gentle sex, I
will to some degree make amends for her sin:Â€to afford assistance and refuge to
women in loveÂ€– the rest have all they want in their needles, their spools and
spindlesÂ€ – I propose to tell a hundred tales (or fables or parables or stories or
what you will). (Proemio § 13)
This decision to provide assistance and therapy for a female audience is
consonant with Ovid’s surprise gambit of tucking in a book for women
after the conclusion of the ‘official’ programme of the first two books of
the Ars Amatoria (cf. Ars 3.29–52); equally important is the recollection of
a programmatic passage of Remedia amorisÂ€– a text that turns out to be
relevant to Boccaccio’s poetics precisely for its central positioning in the
Ovidian Lebenswerk (49–52):
sed quaecumque uiris, uobis quoque dicta, puellae,
â•… credite:Â€diuersis partibus arma damus,
e quibus ad uestros siquid non pertinet usus,
â•… attamen exemplo multa docere potest.
But whatever is said to men, consider it said to you as well, girls; I give weapons
to opposing sides, and if any of this does not serve your needs, yet it can teach
much by example.
The echo of the prooemial section of the Remedia, a text that is in itself
another surprise coda to the Ars Amatoria, a ‘fourth’ book on antidotes
after two books on male and one book on female seduction, is interesting,
because Boccaccio is framing the Decameron as a substitute for a miss-
ing ‘fifth’ book in the erotic cycle:Â€ a text offering remedies to a female
audience, a text that for Ovid’s audience had existed only in a potential
state of readerly reception. In Ovid, women had been invited to respond
to a text written for men, using strategies of ‘exemplary’ interpretation
for their own benefit (there is perhaps an innuendo that men can apply
a similar strategy, with even more profit, to the ‘women’s studies’ depart-
ment of Ars Amatoria 3).28 Now Boccaccio will step in and offer guidance,
although by using examples and ‘parables’ (not without a memory of the
Ovidian exemplo … docere project).29
On this approach see Gibson 2002, passim.

28
The issue of examples and parables is of course much broader, and a crucial one for the poetics of
29
narrative in Boccaccio, see e.g. Marchesi 2004:Â€1–8, with bibliography and new suggestions.
After this eloquent prooemium, the existence of a second prooemium,
located at the beginning of the Fourth Day in the ten-day festive cycle of
the Decameron, comes as a real surprise:Â€this proem in the middle disrupts
the narrative program, forcefully projects the authorial voice into the pro-
gress of the work, constructs the author as commentator of his own text,
and the book, ‘after being presented as an opera-sistema, begins to appear
as a work in progress’;30 it merges women as addressees of the work and
women as represented in the work.31 There is also an apologetic style that
surprises a reader who has been influenced by the ‘early Ovidian’ enthusi-
asm of the first prooemium:
I always assumed that it was only the high towers, the loftiest tree-tops that
bore the brunt of the searing blasts of envy; this is what I have read and myself
observed, and what I have heard from the lips of wise men. (Carissime donne, sia
per le parole de’ savi uomini udite …). But I find myself gravely deceived. I avoid,
and have indeed always striven to avoid, the fierce onslaught of this rabid spirit
of envy:Â€to do so I’ve made a point of sticking to the low ground, of stealing in
furtive silence along the valley floor. (Bocc. Dec. IV 2–3)
By now, it should be clear that ‘savi uomini’ is a reference to a poet who
did famously32 say that thunderbolts strike high places, but precisely by
saying this got himself into further trouble with JupiterÂ€– once again, this
had happened in the proem-in-the-middle of the Remedia (369–71):
summa petit liuor; perflant altissima uenti:
â•… summa petunt dextra fulmina missa Iouis.
at tu, quicumque es, quem nostra licentia laedit …
Envy seeks the heights, the winds blast the highest points, thunderbolts cast by
the hand of Jupiter seek the highest points. But as for you, whoever you are, who
find my licence offensive …
– the same context where Boccaccio found the image of a literary car-
eer as a journey, Rem. 394 principio cliui noster anhelat equus, ‘my horse
is panting at the beginning of the hill’ (see p.61). This is an interesting
prophylactic use of literary appropriation:Â€ the dangerous results of the
thunderbolt imageÂ€– so obsessively reworked in the exile poetryÂ€– have
now taught Boccaccio’s literary horse to ‘stick to the valley floor’ instead
of proudly striving for the mountain tops.
30
Baratto 1982:Â€35. 31 Forni 1992:Â€58.
32
On the importance of this Ovidian formulation in medieval literature, note e.g. Modoin of
Autun on Ovid’s exile, Dümmler 1881: 371 Livor edax petit alta fremens (and compare Dimmick
2002:Â€267 on Ovid as an ‘indispensable’ but also ‘acutely combustible’ author).
Now the apology in the Remedia is framed by two significant passages,
closely related to each other. The defence speechÂ€– if this is what it isÂ€–
actually interrupts a sequence that goes beyond the usual, almost ascetic
limits of Roman elegy in describing love as a physical activity:Â€ nausea,
body odour, even bowel functions will not be screened off this time, and
this choice is empowered by the advertisement that more is to come, and
by the dangerous hermeneutic principle of ‘readers are to imagine more
than my words suggest’ (Rem. 357–60):
nunc tibi, quae medio Veneris praestemus in usu,
â•… eloquar:Â€ex omni est parte fugandus amor.
multa quidem ex illis pudor est mihi dicere; sed tu
â•… ingenio uerbis concipe plura meis.
Now I will tell you what I recommend in the middle of sex; love must be routed
on every side. Much of this I am ashamed to speak; but use your wit to under-
stand more than I say.
Those are the last words before Ovid confronts his detractors and censors
in 361–98. There is a clear symmetry with the restarting of the didactic
plot after the long proem-in-the-middle33 (both passages stretching sexual
licentia in elegy almost as far as it will go), with its blunt use of concubitus
and the technical advice about bedroom strategies, Rem. 399 ergo ubi con-
cubitus et opus iuuenale petetur, ‘so when you get down to copulation and
the work of youth’.
The Decameron mirrors this structure with a parallel symmetry of ris-
qué narratives. Before the prologue to Day Four (which will be, by the
way, the occasion for ‘Stories about People whose Love Has Ended in
Tears’) there has been an unforgettable end to the narrative of Day Three,
amid gales of inexhaustible laughter of the audience at the level of first and
second narrative instance: ‘Learn therefore, young ladies, as you stand in
need of God’s favour, to put the devil back into hell.’ Alibek, a very naïve
14-year-old, retreats into the Thebaid only to discover the well-known
secret of how to restore the Devil to hell. Before the regular beginning
of the narrative, the prologue to Day Four incorporates the truncated lit-
tle tale of the goslings:Â€‘do let’s bring one of these goslings back with us,
and I’ll see to feeding it grain.’ ‘Absolutely not,’ said his father, ‘you don’t
know which end to feed it.’ The son of Filippo Balducci, raised in abso-
lute ignorance of women in the Apuleian location of Monte Asinaio, goes
On the extreme character of the framing passages in the Remedia and their intentional recuper-
33
ation of the most explicit sexual material in the whole Ars see Gibson 2007:Â€134.
to Florence only to discover the not-so-secret art of love. These two tales
are not only parallel at a narrative level:Â€ they push the envelope of the
Decameron towards a level of licentiousness very rarely achieved elsewhere
in the collection.
Again, however, Boccaccio not only alludes to the Remedia’s proem-in-
the-middle and its framing in the poem; he also learns from the atmos-
phere of looming danger and the courting of disaster that every post-exilic
reading of the Remedia is bound to sense. So the author substitutes the
deft and unassuming parable of the dust for the proud image of envy’s
thunderbolt striking high places:
I shall turn my back on this squall and leave it to rage, for I can’t see myself
faring any worse than a handful of dust:Â€when the wind blows, either the dust
remains undisturbed or else it’s caught up into the air and deposited, more often
than not, on people’s heads, on the crowns of kings and emperors, on the roofs of
lofty palaces and high towers; and if it is dislodged from these places it cannot fall
lower than whence it was scooped up. (Bocc. Dec. IV, 40)
He also begins adopting, in a timely way, defensive strategies from Tristia 2,
the Ovidian exile text that functions as a remedy to the crisis caused by
the Ars and exacerbated, not palliated, by the ironically named Remedia:
these little tales of mineÂ€– not only are they written in the vulgar tongue and in
prose (rather than in a high-flown Latin verse) not only do they lack even a title,
but they’re couched in as humble, unassuming style as could be. None of this
has saved me, however, from being savagely buffeted by this storm-wind, nay,
I’ve been practically torn up by the roots, I’m totally lacerated by it … nothing is
beyond the reach of envy save poverty. (Bocc. Dec. IV § 3–4)
When claiming, in the manner of Tristia 2, that a humble genre is not
safe from the highest authority, Boccaccio anticipates Ovid’s late turn
to humility:Â€in so doing, he uses one more Ovidian allusion, perhaps a
Â�double one. On the one side, talking about a work that ‘lacks even a title’
is a loaded Ovidian move in the Middle Ages, when Ovid’s Amores was
both famous and circulated with the unpretentiousÂ€– but famousÂ€– title
‘sine titulo’. On the other, Boccaccio knew Ovid so well that he may have
been impressed by the importance of titles in the exile elegies. In the
Tristia, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is the one text that does not dare to display
its title, now that it has been punished:
aspicies illic positos ex ordine fratres,
â•… quos studium cunctos euigilauit idem.
cetera turba palam titulos ostendet apertos,
â•… et sua detecta nomina fronte geret;
tres procul obscura latitantes parte uidebis;
â•… sic quoque, quod nemo nescit, amare docent.
…
deque tribus, moneo, si qua est tibi cura parentis
â•… ne quemquam, quamuis ipse docebit, ames.
You will see your brothers arranged in order, the products of the same sleepless
toil. The rest of the band will display their titles openly, bearing their names on
their exposed edges, but you will see three lurking in a dark distant part; even
so, as everyone knows, they teach how to love … And I warn you, if you have
any concern for your father, do not love any one of them, although he himself
teach you. (Trist. 1.1.107–12, 115–16.)
As one who goes one better (or worse) than Ovid, Boccaccio now realizes
that repression is on the cards:
For if before I’ve completed even one-third of my labour they’re already such
a swarm and lay such claims upon me, I suspect that before I reach the end,
if they’re not stopped in their tracks, they will have increased and multiplied
to a point where they could trample on me without the smallest effort. (Bocc.
Dec. IV § 10)
In fact his farewell to the incomplete story of the ducks bears a clear sign
of self-repression, a virtue that had been clearly lacking in the Ars and
Remedia (‘But that’s as far as I …’ [Bocc. Dec. IV § 30]).
Next, the final chapter of Day Ten, the author’s Afterword, immedi-
ately confronts the dangers of authorship:
Conceivably some of you ladies will observe that in writing these stories I have
made a little too free, occasionally putting into my ladies’ mouths, and fre-
quently having them listen to, things that no reputable woman should say or
hear. (Bocc. Dec. Conclusione dell’autore § 3)
After mobilizing the ‘generic’ defence typical of the Remedia:
To begin with, supposing there were something off-colour in any of the stories, the
nature of those stories required it, and any reasonable person considering the mat-
ter objectively would readily grant that there was no other way in which I could
have told them without distorting them out of their proper form. (Concl. § 4)
Boccaccio begins adapting arguments from Tristia 2:
Besides, my pen should be accorded no smaller licence (auttorità) than is
granted to the brush of the painter who attracts no criticism – at any rate, no
justified criticismÂ€– if he shows Saint Michael piercing the serpent with a sword
or lance, and Saint George striking the dragon here, there, and everywhere,
and, what is more, if he portrays Christ as a male and Eve as a female; why, he
will stick sometimes a single nail, sometimes two, through the feet of the One
who was ready to die for the salvation of human kind, to fasten him to the
cross. (Concl., § 6)
The example of painting ‘Christ as a male and Eve as a female’ is the
Christian version of a famous defensive argument from Tristia 2 (287–90,
301):
quis locus est templis augustior? haec quoque uitet,
â•… in culpam si qua est ingeniosa suam.
cum steterit Iouis aede, Iouis succurret in aede
â•… quam multas matres fecerit ille deus.
…
omnia peruersas possunt corrumpere mentes.
What place is more august than temples? But these too should be avoided by
any woman whose nature inclines to fault. When she stands in Jupiter’s temple,
in the temple of Jupiter she will think of all the women made mothers by that
god ... All things can corrupt perverted minds.
Boccaccio’s familiarity with this line of argument is confirmed by another
of his main works, the Genealogie (14.18), where the discussion of the fres-
coes of Castelnuovo in Naples, ‘in the rooms of the king and of the nobles
the same painter is allowed to paint the loves of the ancient gods and the
crimes of men, and any other invention he likes, without any ban’, looks
back to a related (and even bolder) argument in Tristia 2.521–8:
scilicet in domibus uestris ut prisca uirorum
â•… artificis fulgent corpora picta manu,
sic quae concubitus uarios Venerisque figuras
â•… exprimat, est aliquo parua tabella loco.
utque sedet uultu fassus Telamonius iram,
â•… inque oculis facinus barbara mater habet,
sic madidos siccat digitis Venus uda capillos,
â•… et modo maternis tecta uidetur aquis.
To be sure in your houses, just as figures of old heroes shine, painted by an artist’s
hand, so there is a small panel somewhere that represents the various copulations
and sexual positions. There sits not only Telamonian Ajax with a look confessing
anger, and the barbarian mother has crime in her eyes, but dripping Venus too
wrings out her wet hair and seems barely covered by her maternal waves.
This way the crux of the apology in the Afterword requires identification
not with the authorial voice of the Remedia, but with that of Tristia 2:
Now whether those stories, for what they are worth (indeed whether anything
of any description) prove wholesome or noxious depends entirely on the hearer.
(Concl. § 8)
– this being of course the core argument of the entire epistle to Augustus,
Trist. 2.255–66 (esp. 264 posse nocere animis carminis omne genus).
This evolution from Remedia to Tristia is glossed by a famous34 series of
exempla, where the two sources are layered:
We know that wine is highly beneficial to sound constitutionsÂ€ – we have it
on the authority of Messrs Bacchus and Silenus, to name only twoÂ€– but it is
harmful to those with fever … and fire, fire is undeniably an asset, indeed vital
to human life. Are we going to condemn it because it burns down houses and
villages and entire cities? Again, weapons safeguard those who wish to live in
peace, but they also slay people all too often, and not because those weapons
are evilÂ€– the evil resides in those setting hand to them. To the corrupt mind
nothing is pure. (Concl., § 9–10)
The emphasis on wine as a danger and a therapy comes from the Remedia,
131–2:
temporis ars medicina fere est:Â€data tempore prosunt,
â•… et data non apto tempore uina nocent.
quin etiam accendas uitia inritesque uetando,
â•… temporibus si non adgrediare suis.
The art of timeliness is almost a medicine; wine given timely helps, untimely
harms. Indeed you would inflame and irritate the disease by forbidding it,
should you attack it at an unfitting time.
and is seamlessly joined to the argument about fire, weapons, and a read-
er’s responsibility, from Trist. 2.263–76:
persequar inferius, modo si licet ordine ferri,
â•… posse nocere animis carminis omne genus.
non tamen idcirco crimen liber omnis habebit:
â•… nil prodest, quod non laedere possit idem.
igne quid utilius? siquis tamen urere tecta
â•… comparat, audaces instruit igne manus.
eripit interdum, modo dat medicina salutem,
â•… quaeque iuuet, monstrat, quaeque sit herba nocens.
et latro et cautus praecingitur ense uiator;
â•… ille sed insidias, hic sibi portat opem.
discitur innocuas ut agat facundia causas;
â•… protegit haec sontes, immeritosque premit.
sic igitur carmen, recta si mente legatur,
â•… constabit nulli posse nocere meum.
â•‡ Mazzotta 1986:Â€39; Smarr 1987:Â€248–9.

34
I will show later, if only I can present it in order, that every kind of poetry can
harm the mind. But not on that account will every book be held guilty. Anything
useful can also harm. What is more useful than fire? But whoever sets out to burn
a house, arms his criminal hands with fire. Medicines sometimes remove, some-
times bestow health, teaching which plant cures, and which harms. Highwayman
and the cautious traveller alike gird on a sword :Â€the one carries it to attack, the
other for protection. Eloquence is learned for the conduct of just cases; yet it pro-
tects the guilty and crushes the innocent. Just so if a poemÂ€– one of mineÂ€– is read
with upright mind, it will clearly harm no one.
Now Boccaccio is also able to confront what is a signature obsession in
Ovid’s late work, the complex of frons (front, frontmatter, forehead):
In order to deceive no one, my stories all carry signed on their front (nella fronte)
that which they hold concealed in their bosom. (Concl., § 19)
Frons in Ovid’s exile work is a very representative word:Â€technical ‘front-
matter’ of a book + place of textual manipulation, as well as ‘forehead’, the
locus of shame/public image/ageing/sincerity.35 Now Boccaccio’s novelle can
forestall this forehead complex:Â€they are innocent, because they may lack a
title, but they always carry ‘frontally’ their own description as Â�‘frontmatter’,
without deceiving, or hiding any dangerous secrets.
We have registered the Ovidian invocations in the sequential order they
have in the text of the Decameron because our interest is in the dynamic
effect that those intertextual contacts create, both in Boccaccio’s text, and
as a rereading of Ovid’s career and its unforgettable consecutio temporum.
In the unruly appropriative culture of the Middle Ages, the very fact that
the Ovidian texts are being alluded to in their unmistakable proper auto-
graphical order (ArsÂ€– RemediaÂ€– Tristia) should give one pause.
Once again, exile is being used as a hinge. The sequence of Ovidian
allusions mobilizes a series of Ovidian models that are recognizably
organized in a biographical sequence and an argumentative evolution.
The author’s prooemium finds a keynote in the early amatory works,
including the first part of the Remedia, a work whose positioning in
Ovid’s oeuvre had always instigated creative revisions in medieval authors
(‘The acutely unstable relationship between Ars and Remedia in medieval
readings’, Dimmick 2002:Â€273). The proem-in-the-middle prefixed to Day
Four is modelled on the apologeticÂ€– but also bold, in-your-faceÂ€– oration
35
See e.g. Trist. 1.1.8 candida nec nigra cornua fronte geras; 1.1.11 nec fragili geminae poliantur pumice
frontes; 1.1.110 et sua detecta nomina fronte geret; 1.7.33 hos quoque sex uersus, in prima fronte libelli;
3.7.34 rugaque in antiqua fronte senilis erit; Pont. 4.13.7 ipse quoque, ut titulum chartae de fronte
reuellas.
that functions as a proem-in-the-middle to the Remedia, but it also antici-
pates the growing censorial reactions that will lead to the late and exilicÂ€–
therefore more oblique and cautiousÂ€– defence speech of Tristia 2. In the
Afterword, the Remedia lead into the recreation of Tristia 2, and the effect
is now clear, especially if one thinks of previous modifications of the
Remedia model, such as the ‘envy strikes high places’ topos turning into
the ‘dust’ parable, and the ‘uphill journey’ being replayed as a safer non
solamente pe’ piani ma ancora per le profondissime valli kind of journey (see
pp.81, 83 above).
This revised Ovid turns out to be a great poet of mediation:Â€now he
knows that the blunt formalistic defence of the Remedia must be com-
pleted by the oblique and ironic judicial defence of Tristia 2:Â€the Ovidian
strategies had been incompatible in their original contexts (the Remedia
proem-in-the-middle claiming that every genre should be evaluated
according to its own decorum, Tristia 2 that sexual content is endemic to
every act of communication and that responsibility should be laid at the
reader’s door) but now they can be combined into a more mediated and
sly forestalling of future censorial interpretations.
The point, for us, is not just that Boccaccio at times likes to imagine
himself as a new Ovid; it is more about his dynamic reimagining of Ovid’s
entire career as the story of an ‘improved Ovid’, a poet of moderation,36 in
fact an author of fictional prose who discovers a safer, remedial approach
to writing about love, yet combines it with Ovidian edginess:Â€one of the
peculiar ‘judicial’ responsibilities typical of the implied reader of the
Decameron is that of having to arbitrate between dangerous and safe
Â�interpretations of Ovid’s model.
36
Gibson 2007 shows the importance of recuperating moderation and medietas in Ovidian
poetics.
Ch apter 4
An elegist’s career:Â€from Cynthia to Cornelia

Stephen Heyworth *
Virgil created the ideal poetic career, an upwards progression within the
range of hexameter poetry, pastoral to didactic to epic. He marked this
movement in ways obvious and less obvious:Â€ he gets up from the shep-
herd’s sitting position at the close of the Eclogues; at the end of the second
Georgic he regrets both the loss of pastoral innocence and his inability to
write Lucretian natural philosophy; at the start of the third Georgic he
looks ahead to an Augustan epic of sacred importance; in each work he
presents an emblematic vision of the nymph Arethusa. Subsequently Ovid
produces his own more ambitious versions of the ideal career, going from
love elegy to tragedy to the universal epic of the Metamorphoses, and within
elegy itself advancing from personal love elegy through the didactic of the
Ars to the sacred and aetiological narratives of the Fasti. Each cycle then
returns to the personal elegy of lamentation in the Tristia; but even in exile
Ovid expands his range with the curse poem Ibis, and more letters.1
What of Propertius, Ovid’s predecessor as love elegist? Does he show a
similar reaction to the Virgilian pattern? Ovid’s poetry repeatedly builds
on Propertian models, and there is a temptation to see the elegiac books
as describing a similar arc to that from the Amores to the Ars and the
Fasti, with the personal material of Books 1 and 2 opening out to more
general material, discursive and moral in 3, aetiological in 4. There is truth
in this, but more truth in a rather different view, which I shall pursue
here. Rather than a rising curve we should perceive stasis, and a persistent
refusal to have a career. After all, Ovid himself defines Propertius as the
poet whose work is solely concerned with Cynthia (Rem. 763–4):
carmina quis potuit tuto legisse Tibulli
uel tua, cuius opus Cynthia sola fuit?
* Translations throughout the chapter are the author’s own, unless otherwise stated.
1
On the Virgilian and Ovidian careers, see the Introduction and Putnam, Ch. 1 and Barchiesi and
Hardie, Ch. 3 in this volume.
89
90 Stephen Heyworth
Who could safely have read the poems of Tibullus, or yours, whose work was
Cynthia alone?
T h e c a r e e r r ej e c t e d:Â€s ta s i s a n d r e pe t i t ion
Book 1 stresses that, because of his commitment to Cynthia, Propertius
cannot choose to vary his output. This is symbolized by his exclusive con-
centration on her in poems 1 to 19, and by his refusal of other careers,
whether as poet (1.7 and 1.9 reject the epic of Ponticus) or as politician
(Prop. 1.6.1–2, 5, 19–22):2
Non ego nunc Hadriae uereor mare noscere tecum,
â•… Tulle, neque Aegaeo ducere uela salo, …
sed me complexae remorantur uerba puellae, … 5
tu patrui meritas conare anteire secures,
â•… et uetera oblitis iura refer sociis. 20
nam tua non aetas umquam cessauit amori,
â•… semper at armatae cura fuit patriae.
I do not now fear to experience the Adriatic sea with you, Tullus, nor to spread
sail on the swell of the Aegean, …; but the words and embrace of my girl
hold me back, … You should try to go in advance of the axes your uncle has
earned, and bring back old laws to forgetful allies. For your life has never had
the leisure for love, but always there has been a concern for your country and
its arms.
Tullus travels abroad, but Propertius is stuck in Italy:Â€the words and the
embrace of Cynthia hold him back. Whereas love of his belligerent coun-
try is Tullus’ permanent condition, for the poet love is to be a lifelong
career, and his assertion that he is not suited to gaining glory in warfare is
attached to a forecast of his death (27–30):3
multi longaeuo periere in amore libenter,
â•… in quorum numero me quoque terra tegat.
non ego sum laudi, non natus idoneus armis:
â•… hanc me militiam fata subire uolunt. 30
Many have willingly perished in a long-lasting love:Â€ may I too be among
their number when the earth covers me. I was not born suited to glory, nor to
arms:Â€this is the soldiering that the fates wish me to undergo.
2
The Propertian passages are cited in the form in which they appear in the new Oxford Classical
Text (Heyworth 2007a); the text is explained in Heyworth 2007b.
3
Philip Hardie points out the implicit contrast with Gallus, whose elegiac career (sadly lost to us)
did not stand in the way of a political career.
An elegist’s career:Â€from Cynthia to Cornelia 91
The most explicit statements come in 1.7. Not only are the travails of love
his way of life (verses 5, 9), but this is where he wants the fame of his poetry
to come from (10). Even though he is forced to serve his passion rather than
his intellect (7–8), he has no ambition to make a name in another genre.
nos, ut consuemus, nostros agitamus amores, 5
â•… atque aliquid duram quaerimus in dominam;
nec tantum ingenio quantum seruire dolori
â•… cogor, et aetatis tempora dura queri.
hic mihi conteritur uitae modus, haec mea fama est,
â•… hinc cupio nomen carminis ire mei. 10
me legat assidue post haec neglectus amator, 13
â•… et prosint illi cognita nostra mala. 14
me laudet doctae solitum placuisse puellae, 11
â•… Pontice, et iniustas saepe tulisse minas. 12
We, as is our custom, deal with our love affair, and search out something for a
hard-hearted mistress. I am forced to serve my emotions more than my talent,
and to complain about the harsh circumstances of my life. This is the way of life
I tread, this is my fame, from this I desire the name of my poetry to come. May
the abandoned lover read me assiduously in the future, and may knowledge of
our woes help him; may he praise me as one who regularly pleased a learned girl,
Ponticus, and often endured unfair threats.
Again the inexorable nature of his condition is stressed by reference to
death (Prop. 1.7.21–4):
tum me non humilem mirabere saepe poetam;
â•… tunc ego Romanis praeferar ingeniis;
nec poterunt iuuenes nostro reticere sepulchro:
â•… ‘ardoris nostri magne poeta, iaces?’
Then you will often wonder at me as no humble poet; then I shall be set above
Roman wits; nor will the young men be able to keep quiet at my tomb:Â€‘Great
composer of our passion, do you lie dead?’
Though death features in these earlier poems, it is the dominant theme
for the first time in 1.19, the poem that ends the Cynthia sequence in
Book 1 (1–4):
Non ego nunc tristes uereor, mea Cynthia, manes,
â•… nec moror extremo debita fata rogo;
sed ne forte tuo careat mihi funus amore:
â•… hic timor est ipsis durior exsequiis.
I do not now fear the grim underworld, my Cynthia, nor do I put off the death
owed to the final pyre; but that my burial may happen to lack your love, this is a
fear harsher than the funeral itself.
92 Stephen Heyworth
These opening lines are at first sight a striking announcement of
Â�closure:Â€death is inevitable, and the poet accepts that. Nunc and nec moror
suggest death’s imminence, extremo stresses that it is an end. But then
through the interest in the arrangements of the funeral we are given hints
of a future beyond death; and the following lines confirm this (Prop.
1.19.5–6, 11–12, 17–18):
non adeo leuiter nostris puer haesit ocellis 5
â•… ut meus oblito puluis amore uacet. …
illic quidquid ero semper tua dicar imago: 11
â•… traicit et fati litora magnus amor. …
quamuis te longae remorentur fata senectae, 17
â•… cara tamen lacrimis ossa futura meis.
Not so lightly does the boy stick in my eyes that love would be forgotten and
absent from my ashes. … There whatever I will be, I shall ever be called your
image:Â€great love crosses even the shores of death. … Though you be held back
by the fates of a long old age, yet shall your bones be dear to my tears.
What has seemed the finishing line for Propertius and Cynthia is treated
rather as a turning post, the end of one lap, but the start of another:Â€the
poet’s death will mean separation, but not forgetfulness; whatever the
metaphysical truth of existence after death, Propertius will remain iden-
tified as Cynthia’s (mirror) image; their love transcends death to such an
extent that he in the underworld will mourn her death. The denial of
delay in verse 2 is undone in 17:Â€however imminent the death of one lover
may be, the story can continue through the lengthy old age of the otherÂ€–
and beyond, with the concrete nouns lacrimis (tears) and ossa (bones) pre-
senting a physical encounter after the second death. The closing couplet
then invites the reader to see a withdrawal from this confident assertion
of an unending future (Prop. 1.19.25–6):
quare, dum licet, inter nos laetemur amantes:
â•… non satis est ullo tempore longus amor.
So, while we may, let us enjoy our love between the two of us:Â€love is not long
enough over any period.
‘While we may’; but the final pentameter insists on the need for infinite
continuation. Satiety, so often a marker of closure (most obviously at the
end of Eclogues 3 and 10), is here denied. Though this is the final Cynthia
poem in the book, as it finishes we are given a hint that this is not enough
(non satis est), that more must follow. Propertius had begun, famously,
with Cynthia:Â€ she was the first (Cynthia prima, 1.1.1), but also, he has
promised us, the end (1.12.19–20):
mi neque amare aliam neque ab hac desistere fas est:
â•… Cynthia prima fuit; Cynthia finis erit.
For me it is not possible to love another nor to abandon her:Â€ Cynthia was the
start; Cynthia will be the end.
The first book thus in various ways establishes that this is not a poet who
aims at a career, but one whose work will remain forever concentrated on
a single mistressÂ€– unless he misleads her, and us.
One can imagine several possibilities for further development. Cynthia
prima might in the second book be followed by a different mistress (as
it were Anna secunda), just as Tibullus’ Delia is replaced by Nemesis in
Book 2. Or we might see the poet moving away from erotic material, even
abandoning love elegy, as he has seemed to do in the epigrams, sepulchral
and signatory, that end Book 1. In fact, he largely gives us more of the
same (2.1.1–4):
Quaeritis unde mihi totiens scribantur amores,
â•… unde meus ueniat mollis in ora liber.
non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantat Apollo:
â•… ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit.
You ask how it happens that so often I write of love affairs, how my book comes
in elegiac form on to people’s lips. It is not Calliope who sings this for me, nor
Apollo:Â€it is my girl herself who creates my poetic talent.
The book begins by marking itself as continuing a sequence.4 The amores
of which he has already written in his elegiac book have reached an audi-
ence and provoked a response, from the vague plurality of readers implied
by Quaeritis. The sense of seriality is stressed especially by totiens (‘so
often’);5 the poet even gives his readers a touch of impatience:Â€When are
they going to get something other than amores? Isn’t one book of more
than twenty poems enough? He immediately raises doubts about how
long his erotic material can be pursued. In starting from a question he
4
This is one reason for rejecting the attempt by Butrica 1996 to distinguish Book 1 as a Monobiblos,
separate from the four books that follow under the (supposed) patronage of Maecenas. More sub-
stantial reasons can be found in the use of alter at 2.3.4 to number the second book as the second
book, and the way 3.24–5 recalls 1.1 in bringing the Cynthia cycle to a premature close.
5
It is worth noting that the poet has created an image of repetition already with Cynthia’s saepe
at 1.3.44 interdum leuiter mecum deserta querebar / externo longas saepe in amore moras:Â€ in her
creative mind, even by the time of his third poem Propertius has often dallied in other affairs.
Then we see similar effects at 1.5.21 nec iam pallorem totiens mirabere nostrum, 1.9.21 pueri totiens
arcum sentire medullis, where Gallus and Ponticus (respectively) are warned about the impact of
love. Again, in the first line of 2.13 (perhaps the first line of the original third book) tot sagittis
implies the plurality of the poet’s works:Â€there is a constant threat of ending through death, but
the address to Cynthia prompts continuation.
94 Stephen Heyworth
implies that an answer may be given, that the conversation will continue.
The figuring of his elegy as conversational is a significantly Callimachean
touch:Â€ one thinks perhaps of the λέσχη (‘talk’) in Epigram 2 Pfeiffer
(= A.P. 7.80), but especially of the conversation with the Muses through-
out Aetia 1 and 2. And yet when the answer begins to be given in verses
3–4, he rejects the Callimachean model:Â€unlike the Aetia, his material is
not spoken by Calliope (and her sisters) or written under the instructions
of Apollo. What he emphasizes is not τέχνη (= ars) but ingenium (‘talent’
or ‘inspiration’):Â€contrast Ovid, Amores 1.15.13–14 on Callimachus (which
perhaps picks up on the earlier summary judgements that Propertius has
in mind):
Battiades semper toto cantabitur orbe:
â•… quamuis ingenio non ualet, arte ualet.
The son of Battus will always be sung all over the world:Â€ although he is not
strong in inspiration, he is strong in craft.
Propertius’ (superficial) rejection of Callimachus in 2.1 is markedly in
contrast to the opening poem of the first book, where the first word
Â�echoes Callimachus’ name for Apollo (used at fr. 114.8, as well as at 67.6,
cited below), and subsequent details amplify the echo of the Acontius and
Cydippe episode of Aetia Book 3. Compare Propertius 1.1.1–5:
Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis,
â•… contactum nullis ante Cupidinibus.
tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus
â•… et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus
donec me docuit castas odisse Puellas.
Cynthia was the first; she caught me with her eyes and made me miserableÂ€– I
had never been infected with desire before. Love forced me to drop my look of
resolute pride, put his feet on my head and pressed it down, until he had taught
me to dislike the chaste girls (i.e. the Muses).
and Callimachus, fr. 67.1–6:6
Αὐτὸς Ἔρως ἐδίδαξεν Ἀκόντιον, ὁππότε καλῇ
â•… ᾔθετο Κυδίππῃ παῖς ἐπὶ παρθενικῇ,
τέχνην (οὐ γὰρ ὅγ’ ἔσκε πολύκροτος) ὄφρα λέγοιτο
â•… τοῦτο διὰ ζωῆς οὔνομα κουρίδιον.
See Puelma 1982:Â€288, n.86. He notes the link with Venus as teacher of the lover at Tib. 1.8.5; cf.
6
also Virg. Ecl. 8.47 and Tib. 1.2.19 (with Murgatroyd 1980). None of the other passages are as
close as the Callimachus to Propertius’ opening lines (beyond the links picked out in italics, we
may note that Acontius is a child, hence inexperienced like Propertius).
ἦ γάρ, ἄναξ, ὁ μὲν ἦλθεν Ἰουλίδος, ἡ δ’ ἀπὸ Νάξου,
â•… Κύνθιε, τὴν Δήλῳ σὴν ἐπὶ βουφονίην.
Love himself taught Acontius when the boy burnt with love for the fair maiden
Cydippe, taught him craft [or a trick] (for he was not cunning) so that he might
choose for himself this name, bridegroom, throughout his life. For, lord, he came
from Iulis (Ceos) and she from Naxos, Cynthius, to your sacrifice in Delos.
However, in 1.1.17–18 the poet complains that in his case, unlike that of
MilanionÂ€– and, implicitly, Acontius and Hippomenes7Â€– Amor does not
think up any tricks to help him win his beloved:
in me tardus Amor non ullas cogitat artes
â•… nec meminit notas, ut prius, ire uias.
In my case Love is slow and does not think up any tricks [literally arts], nor does
he remember to travel the old familiar courses.
Already in 1.1, then, the Callimachean model is evoked to be abandoned.
What has looked like a striking change at the start of Book 2 turns out to
be a repetition.
A major difference from 1.1 is the omission of Cynthia’s name from 2.1.
After its extraordinary prominence as the opening word of the opening
poem of the first book, Cynthia does not appear until poem 5 of Book 2
(though earlier lacunae may mislead us here), and there is room for us
to wonder about the identity of the beloved.8 Different readers may see
ipsa puella in 2.1.4 as a sign of coyness about disloyalty, or as carrying the
implication that Cynthia’s identity is so securely linked with the poet’s
that he could not possibly mean any other girl. In either case, he is play-
ing against the preconceptions built up by the existence of his first book.
But he maintains his career as the lover of Cynthia, and this clearly per-
sists, despite a variety of divagations and distractions, until the end of
Book 3.
Prope r t i us on t h e p oe t ic c a r e e r : Â€ B o ok s 2 a n d 3
As we have seen, Book 2 from the very start emphasizes the repetitive-
ness of what the poet is offering. There will be increasing numbers of
divergent poems, as we move on to Books 3 and 4 especially, but the love
See Heyworth 2007b:Â€8.

7
Even after 2.3.8 differtur, numquam tollitur ullus amor, for he may be repeating for a new mistress
8
his earlier claims of love until death, and beyond.

96 Stephen Heyworth
elegist’s voice dominates. However, one repeated motif is the pointer to
a change of genre followed promptly by a refusal to carry out any such
promise. Thus the opening verse of 2.2 describes Propertius’ determin-
ation to change:
Liber eram et uacuo meditabar uiuere lecto.
I was free and thinking of life in an empty bed.
but the abandonment of love is set in the past, and Cynthia’s attrac-
tions are too great for him to persist (2.2.5–8). The following poem like-
wise starts with a retrospective account of a failed abandonment of love
(2.3.1–4). The poet was experimenting to see if a fish could live out of
waterÂ€– or if he could stay awake at night engaged in some serious study
(2.3.5–7):
quaerebam, sicca si posset piscis harena 5
â•… nec solitus ponto uiuere toruus aper;
aut ego si possem studiis uigilare seueris.
That was me investigating if a fish could live on dry sand and a grim boar in
the sea, being unaccustomed, or if I could stay up all night pursuing serious
matters.
The use of uigilare recalls Lucretius 1.142 noctes uigilare serenas (‘to pass
the calm nights awake’) and carmina uigilata (‘poems resulting from
sleepless nights’) in Cinna 11 (= 13 Hollis), his version of Callimachus’
epigram hailing Aratus’ Phaenomena (27 Pfeiffer = A.P. 9.507), and thus
(with studiis … seueris) implies an aborted move to didactic on a serious
topic.
A more concerted movement in a new direction comes in 2.10. This
poem starts9 with a clear announcement of an immediate change of
style:Â€sed tempus lustrare aliis Helicona choreis (‘But it is time to traverse
Helicon with other dances’); and this drive towards the new is main-
tained in subsequent couplets, with pointers towards the new manner
(2.10.9–12):
nunc uolo subducto grauior procedere uultu;
â•… nunc aliam citharam me mea Musa docet.
surge,10 anime, ex humili iam carmine; sumite uires,
â•… Pierides; magni nunc erit oris opus.
Sed reacts to a preceding context, possibly the book as a whole, but possibly some verses now
â•‡ 9
lost:Â€see Heyworth 2007b:Â€153.

10
cf. Virg. Ecl. 10.75 surgamus.
Now I want to advance more serious with a frown on my face; now my Muse
teaches me a different lyre. Rise, my spirit, from a song now humble; take
strength, Pierides; now there will be need of a big voice.
The new music is to be that of military epic (2.10.3–4, 7–8):
iam libet et fortes memorare ad proelia turmas
â•… et Romana mei dicere castra ducis. …
aetas prima canat Veneres, extrema tumultus:
â•… bella canam, quando scripta puella mea est.
Now it pleases both to record the squadrons valiant for battle and to tell the
Roman camp of my leader. … Let the first age sing Venuses, the last disorder:Â€I
shall sing wars, since my girl is written.
In this last verse the poet goes as far as to assert that he can now go on
to writing bella because his puella is finished. But she is not; and in 2.13,
which a number of scholars11 have seen as belonging at the start of the
original third book, Love with his very different, more potent weapons,
turns Propertius back towards Cynthia and elegy (2.13.1–7):
Non tot Achaemeniis armatur Itura sagittis
â•… spicula quot nostro pectore fixit Amor.
hic me tam graciles uetuit contemnere Musas,
â•… iussit et Ascraeum sic habitare nemus;
non ut Pieriae quercus mea uerba sequantur,
â•… aut possim Ismaria ducere ualle feras,
sed magis ut nostro stupefiat Cynthia uersu.
Itura is not armed with so many Persian shafts as Love has fixed arrows in
my breast. He has forbidden me to disdain Muses as slender as mine are, and
ordered me to dwell in the Ascraean [i.e. Hesiodic] grove in the way that I do;
not in order that Pierian oaks may follow my words, or so I can lead wild beasts
through the Ismarian valley, but rather to stun Cynthia with my verse.
The god insists on poetry to enrapture the mistress:Â€the arma of warfare
will feature only in (dis)similes, and any move to Augustan panegyric is
postponedÂ€– or forgotten.
Between these two poems12 2.12 offers an account of Amor that empha-
sizes permanence and continuity:Â€ tela manent, manet et puerilis imago
(13:Â€‘the weapons remain valid; so too does the boyish appearance’). This
is emphasized especially by the failure of the image of Amor’s wings, at
least in the case of Propertius. In the generalized picture in verse 8 non
11
E.g. J.K. King 1980; Heyworth 1995 (esp. 165–8); Günther 1997:Â€6–14; on the programme of 2.13,
see Heyworth 1992 and Wilkinson 1966.
12
But see Heyworth 1995:Â€166–71, where I argue that the poem has been displaced.
98 Stephen Heyworth
permanet (‘does not remain steady’) pictures Amor flying away; but this is
negated for Propertius in 13–14 (in me … certe pennas perdidit ille suas:Â€‘In
my case … he has certainly lost his wings’). The poem closes with a fur-
ther paradox, building on the idea of Love unto Death. Propertius has
already become a shadow of himself; if the god continues to beat the
shade he will lose his poet, and there will be no continuation of his love
poetry, no one to sing elegiac songs of the elegiac mistress (2.12.20–4).13
Another poem that reasserts the permanence of his love for Cynthia is
2.25. His career is never-ending:Â€unlike soldiers, plough-oxen, boats and
shields, he will not retire (2.25.5–10):
miles depositis annosus secubat armis, 5
â•… grandaeuique negant ducere aratra boues,
putris et in uacua requiescit nauis harena,
â•… et uetus in templo bellica parma uacat:
at me ab amore tuo deducet nulla senectus,
â•… siue ego Tithonus siue ego Nestor ero. 10
A soldier of many years sleeps away from the arms he has laid down, and aged
oxen refuse to draw the plough; the rotting ship rests on the sand of an empty
shore, and an old military shield rests in a temple. But no old age will draw me
away from loving you, if I become a Tithonus or a Nestor.
Poem 3.5 follows 2.10 in announcing a new topic for the poet as he
grows older, but the change is not imminent here, and warfare is replaced
by natural philosophy as the improbable subject for Propertius’ old age
(19–20; 23–5):
me iuuat in prima coluisse Helicona iuuenta
â•… Musarumque choris implicuisse manus; … 20
atque ubi iam Venerem grauis interceperit aetas
â•… sparserit et nigras alba senecta comas,
tum mihi naturae libeat perdiscere mores.
It pleases me to have cultivated Helicon in first youth, and to have entwined
my hands with the dancing Muses; … And when the weight of time has stolen
Venus away, and white old age has speckled my black hair, then let it be my
delight to learn the habits of nature.
In 3.9 Maecenas is praised for his analogous reluctance to follow the
cursus honorum;14 he could easily lay down the law in the forum and
fix victorious arms to his walls (23–6), but he prefers humility and the
The passage is brilliantly explored by Lyne 1998:Â€175–7 (= 2007:Â€202–5).
13
See the Introduction and Farrell 2002 on the significance of the cursus honorum for poetic careers
14
in Rome.
shade (29–30), a judgement that sets him up as a new Camillus (31–2).
Propertius is just the same, an unambitious writer of elegy, who rejects
Maecenas’ attempts to thrust him into the ocean (3–4):Â€any epic is made
to depend on Maecenas’ willingness to lead by taking up electoral office
(te duce, 47)Â€– and so it will not happen. The programmatic poems thus
provide an assertion of stasis, not a route map for a career.
The poet’s sophisticated interest in the concept of the career is demon-
strated most clearly in 2.34. Lynceus, the poet’s friend, has fallen in love
with Propertius’ darling, and tried to seduce her (1–26). At this point he
is revealed to be a moral philosopher and a poet of high pretensions, who
must consequently give up his serious study and grand poetic genres, and
move to elegy, to poetry that can help in love affairs (27–46). Propertius
thus constructs for this friend, as previously for Ponticus, a career that
moves on from the traditionally high to the erotic. Before he can enjoy
love properly, Lynceus needs to learn from his friend’s experience (47–50).
Girls are not interested in natural philosophy (51–4). Propertius himself
reigns over groups of them at symposia, entirely thanks to his ability as
an elegist (55–8). This is what he enjoysÂ€– the life of love (59–60); it is for
Virgil to compose an Aeneid (61–4):
me iuuat hesternis positum languere corollis,
â•… quem tetigit iactu certus ad ossa deus;
Actia Vergilio est custodis litora Phoebi
â•… Caesaris et fortes dicere posse rates,
qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat arma
â•… iactaque Lauinis moenia litoribus.
Me it pleases to languish settled on yesterday’s garlands:Â€the god, certain in his
aim, has touched me to the marrow. It is for Virgil to have the power to tell of the
Actian shores of Phoebus the protector and the bold boats of Caesar, Virgil, who
now rouses the arms of Trojan Aeneas and the walls cast on Lavinia’s shores.
Here he goes far beyond what he has done in 1.7/1.9, in setting his poetic
achievements in the erotic sphere with Virgil’s as the singer of the Aeneid.
But the celebration of Virgil continues with an account at greater length
of the non-epic works, and in particular of the Eclogues, cast as essentially
erotic poems (67–76):
tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi
â•… Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus,
utque decem possint corrumpere mala puellas,
â•… missus et impressis haedus ab uberibus. 70
felix qui uiles pomis mercaris amores,
â•… huic licet ingratae Tityrus ipse canat.
100 Stephen Heyworth
felix intactum Corydon qui temptat Alexin
â•… agricolae domini carpere delicias.
quamuis ille sua lassus requiescat auena, 75
â•… laudatur faciles inter Hamadryadas.
You sing, beneath the pinewoods of shady Galaesus, of Thyrsis and Daphnis with
well-worn reeds, and how ten apples can seduce girls, together with a kid sent
from the milked udder. Happy are you who buy love cheap with apples; to her
though she be ungrateful let Tityrus himself sing. Happy is Corydon who tries
to pluck the untouched Alexis, darling of his master, the farmer. Although he
rests tired from his pipe, he is praised in the conversations of the easy nymphs.
This is the kind of poetry readers enjoy, Propertius claims, just like the
erotic verse of Varro, Catullus, Calvus, GallusÂ€– and himself (81–2, 85–8):
non tamen haec ulli uenient ingrata legenti
â•… siue in amore rudis, siue peritus erit. …
sic quoque perfecto ludebat Iasone Varro, 85
â•… Varro Leucadiae maxima flamma suae;
sic quoque lasciui cantarunt scripta Catulli,
â•… Lesbia quis ipsa notior est Helena.
But these songs will not come unpleasing to any reader, whether he happens to
be new to love or experienced. So too did Varro play once his Jason was finished,
Varro the great flame of his Leucadia; so too did the writings of playful Catullus
sing, through which Lesbia is better known than Helen herself.
Virgil’s Eclogues are thus likened to the work of Catullus, Calvus and
Gallus, consistently erotic poets (as they are represented here). But there
is a contrast, in the presence of the Aeneid in Virgil’s oeuvre; and his
is even unlike Varro’s career, in which the Argonautica was followed by
erotic verse (85–6), and unlike the course Propertius advises for Lynceus,
another writer of epic (perhaps philosophical epos) who must now turn to
love poetry. Moreover, as we have seen, he places Eclogues and Georgics,
the lighter genres, after the Aeneid, and so artfully inverts the ascent of
genres and imposes on Virgil a career like Varro’s.
Bio g r a ph y, u n i t y a n d t h e
c u r s u s h o n o r u m :Â€B o ok 4
Propertius’ life within his poetry is dominated by Cynthia:Â€they repeat-

edly fight and make up, and eventually at the end of Book 3 undergo
an acrimonious divorce. The final poem of Book 3 is a firm farewell to
Cynthia:Â€her constant infidelity has at last compelled the poet to abandon
her. He will weep as he leaves, but he leaves nonetheless, and curses her
as he goes (3.25.7–16). When the next book begins, there is no mention of
Cynthia in the first poem, and where she does appear, in 4.1b, it is only
in the account of the poet’s past with which the astrologer Horus tries
to bolster his claim to insight into the poet’s future (121–46), and even
here she is not named. Horus repeats Apollo’s early advice to the poet,
warning him of the una puella who will elude his palms (140). But the
book continues without any mention of Cynthia, even in the attack on
the lena Acanthis, who is encouraging the venality of his girlfriend:Â€there
is nothing here to show the poet has gone back to his earlier mistress, and
the implication that the girl needs advice on how to behave seductively
suggests that she is not to be read as the experienced and always culta
Cynthia.
Book 4 thus at last offers a real change:Â€the poet presents himself has
having moved on from Cynthia biographically and poetically. Even if
his announcement sacra deosque15 canam (‘rites and gods I shall sing’) is
not whole-hearted, the compositions have undergone a major change:Â€he
speaks in other voices (Vertumnus and the pseudonymous Arethusa fol-
lowing Horus), and his narratives of Tarpeia’s treachery (4.4) and Actium
(4.6) are not motivated by the erotic interests of himself or his friends
(contrast e.g. 1.20; 3.12, 13, 15). He writes with the love elegist’s perspec-
tive, but is expanding his range of material into aetiological narrative and
social commentary.
Eventually Cynthia does appear, in 4.7. But the incident narrated is
placed just after her burial, and the figure that seems to lie on his bed
(uisa est incumbere fulcro, 3) is now her ghost. The sense of separation is
thus compounded:Â€ she chides him for his infidelity, his indifference to
her funeral and her fate, and she ends by avoiding his embrace. Their
affair may continue in time to come in the underworld, but his career as a
love elegist is clearly at an end.
However, any sense of an apt ending to a lifelike story is overturned by
the following poem:Â€4.8 is one of the most vivid expressions of love elegy,
yet it comes immediately after this second apparent farewell to the genre.
Cynthia is once more alive, and driving off to Lanuvium on an assigna-
tion with a toy boy. She returns to catch Propertius with two prostitutes
and to lay down the law. He accepts her peace terms, and the poem ends
with them in bed togetherÂ€– a rare sight, and an effective ending to their
poetic career, but ‘biographical’ nonsense after 4.7. Far from a career,
Propertius does not have a life that makes sense.
â•‡ Or diesque, as the MSS have it.

15
How far are we to make a unity of a single poet’s career, especially
when he strays into unfamiliar territory? As I have said, Propertius can
for the most part in Book 4 be read as continuing to write with the love
elegist’s perspective:Â€when he sings of a deity it is the slippery Vertumnus
whose voice he adopts, the statue who can be dressed to fit any char-
acter, including the non dura puella (4.2.23 ‘an easy girl’); as a Roman
matron, he inveighs against the separation of man and wife caused by for-
eign wars (4.3; cf. 3.12); his Tarpeia sells her city for love in 4.4, not gold
(as in Livy 1.11.6); his Actium is sung in the mode of the supremely elegiac
Callimachus,16 and he moves away from the narrative for a party with the
words bella satis cecini (4.6.69:Â€‘I have sung wars enough’); his Hercules
pleads with a woman as he stands outside a locked door (4.9). Yet the
book has one aetiological poem that lacks any hint of an elegiac voice, the
account in 4.10 of three occasions on which the spolia opima were won.
This is a military theme and a heroic one; the treatment is concise but
comparatively straightforward, and shockingly bloody (4.10.11–12, 37–8,
43–4):
hic spolia ex umeris ausus sperare Quirini
â•… ipse dedit, sed non sanguine sicca suo. …
di Latias iuuere manus:Â€desecta Tolumni
â•… ceruix Romanos sanguine lauit equos. …
illi uirgatas maculanti sanguine bracas
â•… torquis ab incisa decidit unca gula.
He, having dared to hope for spoils from the shoulders of Quirinus, ended up
yielding them himself, and they were wetted by his own blood. … The gods
aided Latin hands:Â€the cut neck of Tolumnius washed the Roman horses with
blood. … To Claudius, as he spattered striped breeches with blood, fell the
twisted necklace from the cut throat.
After the formal dedication at the end of 4.9, asking Hercules to favour
his book, this poem has been marked as a new, grander beginning
(4.10.1–3):
Nunc Iouis incipiam causas aperire Feretri
â•… armaque de ducibus trina recepta tribus.
magnum iter ascendo, sed dat mihi gloria uires.
Now I shall begin to reveal the origins of Feretrian Jove and the three sets of
arms received from three leaders. It is a great route I climb, but glory lends me
strength.
â•‡ See Heyworth 1994:Â€59–67.

16
Note the references to Jupiter, arma, grand scale, travel, ascent, glory,
strength:Â€the lines imitate Georgics 4.559–62 in their use of such diction
to imply a change of topic. In Virgil’s case, a twelve-book poem in a
new genre follows. But for all the blood Propertius gives us a rather half-
hearted poem, in which the three winnings of the spolia opima are treated
at decreasing length (eighteen verses for Romulus, sixteen for Cossus, six
for Claudius):Â€how different from the Ennian or Livian pattern by which
the treatment gets longer the closer to the author’s own day. The contrac-
tion suggests boredom with the topic, and we should not be surprised
when we find a reprise of the bella satis cecini with which he has signed off
from the narrative of Actium at 4.6.69:Â€after a poem that seems to show
how alien to Propertius’ elegiac voice military narrative could be, he starts
4.11, his final publication, with a resounding Desine, ‘Stop’. Once more a
development is denied.
Before he ends his career Propertius leaves a final puzzle. Poem 4.11 is
an apology, delivered in her own voice, for the life of the matron Cornelia,
daughter of Scribonia, and thus step-daughter of Augustus. In her pub-
lic defence before the judges of the underworld (the very speech a bold
assertion of a masculine power), she lays claim to the various honours
and achievements more typically associated with Rome’s men (29 tropaea,
‘trophies’; 32 tituli, ‘titles’; 47 leges, ‘laws’; 61 honores, ‘magistracies’; 61
sellam … curulem, ‘consul’s chair’; 70 facta, ‘achievements’); she has lived
a distinguished life between wedding and funeral (46) and in producing
three children while remaining married to a single husband she has won a
female equivalent of the triumph (4.11.71–2):
haec est feminei merces extrema triumphi,
â•… laudat ubi emeritum libera fama torum.
This is the ultimate reward of a woman’s triumph, when gossip freely praises her
conjugal service as duly completed.
Thus she creates a kind of feminine cursus honorum:Â€marriage, childbirth,
death. This stress on magistracies and triumphs is in contrast not only
with the absence of political and military achievement in the matrona’s
own life, but also with the poet’s own refusals of a political or military
career for himself in 1.6 (see above), and for his descendants in 2.7 (nullus
nostro de sanguine miles erit, 24:Â€‘There will be no soldier from my blood’).
Moreover, in this final poem it plays up his continuing refusal to follow
the poetic cursus honorum established by Virgil. Even if we emphasize the
difference between the dead matrona celebrated here and the lively ghost
of 4.7, the final poem does not break away from elegiac norms. From the
start elegiac motifs predominate:Â€ tears, death and unopening doors in
verses 1–4, for example:
Desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum:
â•… panditur ad nullas ianua nigra preces;
cum semel infernas intrarunt funera leges,
â•… non exorando stant adamante uiae.
Cease, Paullus, to burden my tomb with tears:Â€the dark door is opened to no
prayers; when once the corpse has entered the domain of the underworld, the
way stands fast with inexorable adamant.
The speaking voice is female, the text a quasi-epigram (compare the ref-
erence to the memorial stone on which Cornelia imagines her words
appearing, 36), a poem that reasserts elegy as the poetry of lamentation
and separation.
And even the move from Cynthia to Cornelia may be read as a final
trick of the fallax opus (4.1.135:Â€‘tricky work’). As we have seen, the poet
in Book 1 has promised that Cynthia, who was the beginning, shall also
be the end (1.12.20). Cynthia was literally the first word, as well as the
dominant theme of Book 1. Poetically, however, the promise about the
finis was not fulfilled there, but left for later. By including 4.7 within
the final book the poet has invited us to ask why he has not taken the
opportunity to place the poem on his dead beloved at the end. If we
wish to find a development, we may see the young man maturing, and
coming to prefer the sobriety of Cornelia to the unpredictability of
Cynthia. But if we take the poet determined to have no career at his
word, Cornelia is a representation of Cynthia. If Cynthia is to be read as
the end, as the poet has advised, Cornelia, Augustus’ step-daughter, is
the unemotional, idealized, public face of the woman whom Propertius
has loved in private in all her liveliness and changeability:Â€this is what
polite Roman society makes of its women. And with this conundrum
the Propertian career lapses into silence.
Ch apter 5
Persona and satiric career in Juvenal *

Catherine Keane
V e r s ions of t h e s at i r ic c a r e e r
In discussions of Roman poets, the term ‘career’ is most often used in
reference to authors who wrote in a variety of genres, such as Ennius,
Virgil and Ovid. In the work of these poets, well-marked transitions from
one genre to another adumbrate literary biographies of sorts. By contrast,
the satiric poets, with the exception of the prolific and versatile Horace,
are not described as having progressed through ‘careers’.1 This has sev-
eral likely causes:Â€ the fact that most of the poets in question restricted
themselves to satire, the different length and structure of each poet’s con-
tribution, differences among the authors’ social and financial circum-
stances, the genre’s strong associations with performance and the idea of
the Â�fictive persona, and the current interest in satire as social discourse.
But the prominent constructed author figure and his commentaries on
his environment, his memories and his aims, encourage us to consider
satiric texts as stories about the author. Satire’s characteristic subjectivity
can be read as manifesting a ‘career consciousness’ in the generic formula.
We may define the satiric career as the narrative that is strung together
with even the briefest fictionalized portraits of the satirist figure, a narra-
tive that posits an on-going and symbiotic relationship between the satiric
text and the world that the poet inhabits and negotiates.
Recent interpretations of the earlier satirists have focused heavily on the
subjective element. In Horace and Persius, piecemeal personal accounts
have been shown to function as symbolic narratives about the develop-
ment of the texts themselves. In studies of their successor Juvenal, how-
ever, there is no expressed or operative notion that the text contains such
*â•‡I thank Philip Hardie, the other participants in the 2004 conference, and Michael Sharp for
their input on this essay.
1
See Harrison above, Ch. 2 in this volume.
105
106 Catherine Keane
a narrativeÂ€– even though his five books of poems reflect many yearsÂ€–
and phasesÂ€– of labour.2 One reason for this is that studies of Juvenal’s
oeuvre as a whole (and its fictional author figure) are rare; another is that
we know virtually nothing about the historical author’s experiences in his
social, political and literary culture. Unlike his predecessors, he acknowl-
edges no patron or social context for his poetic project; rather, from the
beginning, he presents his work as a solipsistic experiment motivated by
both psychological and literary impulses. This aspect of Juvenal’s poetry
planted him at the centre of formalist satire studies in the mid twenti-
eth century. But as many satire scholars shifted their focus to the genre’s
social and political contexts, Juvenal’s work drifted toward the sidelines.
In short, current interpretive models handle Juvenal differently than they
do his predecessors. This gap will be narrowed if we conceive of his oeu-
vre as dramatizing a ‘satiric career’, despite the absence of elements that
are present in earlier cases. Juvenal’s work still typifies satiric subjectivity,
and encourages the reader periodically to consider the author’s circum-
stances and aims.
The inaugural performance of the Satires builds both an autho-
rial self-portrait and a complex definition of satire. In Satire 1 Juvenal
describes himself as entering an already glutted Roman poetry indus-
try, as revenge for his constant subjection to comedies, elegies, trag-
edies and epics (he evokes the last genre with clever parodies in lines
4–11). The rant culminates in a vignette of the satirist as a schoolboy
learning declamatory techniques (15–17), which we are to interpret as
the literary credentials that qualify him to join the fray. Among the
striking aspects of this self-portrait are Juvenal’s framing of satire as a
delayed enterprise following a period of passivity (he claims to be no
longer young),3 his claim to be writing out of indignation (79), and the
ironic parallel between satireÂ€ – Juvenal’s revenge against poets!Â€ – and
the equally self-gratifying recitations of contemporary hacks, who like
himself are clearly not being encouraged by modern-day Scipios or
Maecenases.4 Satire is held up both as anti-poetry, and as a predictable,
competitive literary product of the times; as a product of emotions, and
of an entirely typical education; a spontaneous individual choice, and
2
Several references in the text suggest a career spanning about AD 110 to 130; see e.g. Highet
1954:Â€11–16.
3
Juvenal refers to the barber who used to shave his beard ‘when I was a young man’ (iuueni mihi,
25). This could mean that he is now past forty (Braund 1996b:Â€82).
4
On Juvenal’s parody as a sign of his immersion in the literary culture, see Henderson
1999:Â€249–73.
Persona and satiric career in Juvenal 107
an entrance onto a path already cut by Lucilius’ thundering chariot
(19–20). The reader is made to juggle various conceptions of the genre
and the sort of person who writes in it. Amid all these contradictions,
however, the opening of Satire 1 clearly focuses on the satirist figure and
on his decision to begin writingÂ€ – even figuring the latter as a ‘career
change’. The passage starts textual time rolling and links it to ‘real time’
in Juvenal’s Rome, where at this very moment pompous foreigners and
lawyers are crossing his path.5
This authorial ego is a descendant of those planted in early satire by
Ennius and Lucilius.6 The device creates a fiction that personal expe-
riences and observations are prompting the composition of the poetry.
Horace is stressing this aspect of Lucilius’ poetry when he likens it to a
votive tablet that illustrates ‘the old man’s entire life’ (Satires 2.1.30–4).
The calculated comparison of Lucilius’ satire to a simple visual medium
allows Horace to promote his own literary autobiography as being more
subtly and more artistically presented.7 Horace’s real life story also hap-
pens to be quite dramatic and entangled with major historical events,
from the ill-fated Republican stand after Julius Caesar’s assassination
through the struggle between his successors. As a result, scholars have
long regarded political and personal themes as essential to Horace’s con-
struction of the Sermones. The two books, published on either side of
Octavian’s decisive victory, Â�represent two distinct stages of a career-long
process of Â�self-presentation. In Book 1, Horace’s evolution from bum-
bling adolescent to articulate socialite is a subtly expressed but significant
theme.8 In turn, Book 2 manifests Horace’s new concerns as a satirist
after Octavian’s rise to power. Scholars have summed up the book’s pro-
gram with Â�various metaphors, including Saturnalian reversal, prudent
ventriloquizing, a hunt for equal Â�companionship and self-induced exile.9
Such interpretations recognize that in the Sermones, real experience is
fictionalized, and in turn that fiction becomes part of satire’s evolving
generic theory.
5
Juvenal claims to scribble on the street corner; like the poetasters whom he mocks, he crams his
tablets full (1.63–4; compare 5–6).
6
Muecke 2005.
7
G. Harrison 1987. On Horace’s own autobiographical plot, see W. Anderson 1982:Â€50–73.
8
For a summary of the ‘rhetoric of literary and socio-political ascent’ that spans the whole satiric
phase of Horace’s career, see Harrison above, Ch. 2 in this volume. On Book 1 see e.g. Oliensis
1998:Â€18–41; Schlegel 2000; Cucchiarelli 2001; and Gowers 2003.
9
On Book 2 see Oliensis 1998:Â€41–63; Gowers 1993:Â€130–79 and 2005:Â€57–61; compare Freudenburg
2001:Â€108–24; and Keane 2006:Â€89–92 and 113–21.
108 Catherine Keane
Persius has also received attention of this kind, although he produced
just one book and his life story is shorter and less dramatic than Horace’s.
His six hexameter Satires, augmented by a so-called ‘prologue’ in cho-
liambics, spin a narrative based on the generic theme of teaching, pieces
of Persius’ real life story and aspects of his culture. Throughout the book,
the poet figure acts both as teacher and as maturing student, undertaking
a course in self-reliance in a world obsessed with self-presentation. The
poet also becomes preoccupied with the future of his text, his ‘legacy’,
according to metapoetic readings of the sixth Satire.10
These stories are not typically called ‘careers’, but the term would fit.
They convey a sense of the passage of time both inside and outside the
text. They also highlight the relevance of external circumstances to a
poet’s constructed experiences and personality, whether the product is
a poet figure whose friends are involved in world-changing affairs or a
story of the increasing appeal of self-education (which itself tells a story
about what is happening on the ‘outside’). Some of these themes call to
mind other literary genres with prominent author figures, which influ-
ence the satirist figure and the story that he presents. Horace’s Sermones
1, with its overarching narrative, embodies the structural conventions of
the Augustan poetry book.11 Love elegy especially cultivates a story of the
poet’s life and erotic experiences outside the text, which are cited as the
explanation for the text’s existence.12 Persius’ extensive use of Stoic themes
and ideas permeates not just the moral content of his satire, but his own
self-presentation.13 It is natural to compare his satire to the philosophi-
cally themed letters and dialogues of Cicero and Seneca, especially con-
sidering the vivid textual personalities of the latter two authors (made
more striking in retrospect by their fatal entanglement with their political
environments).
All of these models for the earlier satirists are reflected to some extent
in Juvenal’s work, which stands at the end of the Roman satiric trad-
ition and looks back, omnivorous, on the ‘hodge-podge’ ( farrago, 1.86)
that helped build the genre.14 Throughout the Satires, we can find peri-
odic and tantalizing suggestions that Juvenal is modelling his oeuvre
on one or other of the traditional types of literary career. His ‘revenge’
10
See Henderson 1999:Â€228–48; Malamud 1996; and Freudenburg 2001:Â€195–208.
11
Zetzel 1980.
12
See e.g. Holzberg 2002:Â€17 on Ovid’s Amores. As Heyworth above, Ch. 4 of this volume shows,
Propertius’ staged career highlights both consistency and change.
13
Cucchiarelli 2005.
14
Rimell 2005 sums up Juvenal’s contribution in these terms.
against trite epic in the opening lines of Satire 1, which takes the form
of a Â�sustained parody, foreshadows his own epic-style descriptions of
Â�ordinary life. Beginning his second ‘book’, Satire 6, Juvenal recalls the
literary mistresses of Propertius and Catullus as he begins his own rather
different poem on women (7–8). In Satire 7, he plays the experienced
man of letters, advising impoverished writers (‘get to work, young men’,
20). In his last two books of poems, the satirist’s musings become more
visibly influenced by philosophy, conjuring an author who like Cicero has
undertaken to study conventional moral topics in his later years.15 Even
the treatment of soldiers’ legal rights in what remains of the sixteenth
and last Satire oddly evokes the martial climax of the idealized Virgilian
literary career.16 The above instances do not only underscore satire’s para-
sitic relationship to other genres,17 but suggest that the very shape of
Juvenal’s oeuvre is ‘allusive’. Along the way, however, Juvenal presents
a distinct narrative about the satirist figure, using well-Â�documented
rhetorical transitions.
C on t e m p or a r y s at i r e s t u di e s: Â€ J u v e n a l
l e f t at t h e c ro s sroa d s
Juvenal’s tendency to appropriate other discourses is especially evident
in the declamatory rhetorical character of his Satires.18 This feature is
largely responsible for making his texts so central in the development of
the Â�persona theory, which began to influence scholarship on Roman sat-
ire in the 1960s. The persona (‘mask’) theory conceives of satire as a form
of drama or rhetorical performance. Juvenal, initially characterized as a
virtuoso of ‘angry’ satire that contrasts with the gentler Horatian mode,
soon came to be appreciated as a master of several different modes, all
exhibited through strategies that were the fruits of the typical Roman
secondary education in rhetoric.19 The ability to convey particular emo-
tions or attitudes,
Â� a basic tool of persuasion in forensic oratory and other
literature, was one goal of this training. The reference in Juvenal’s first
15
Highet 1949b takes the philosophy-laced later Satires as evidence of the poet’s conversion to
Epicureanism (see Highet 1954:Â€122–37). See also Keane 2007.
16
See Introduction and Putnam, Ch. 1 in this volume.
17
See Schmitz 2000 on allusion and parody in Juvenal.
18
De Decker 1913.
19
Juvenal’s trademark indignation is a theme of Kernan 1959; W.S. Anderson 1982:Â€277–92 analyses
rhetorical differences across the five books. Braund 1988 examines Book 3 closely, but sketches
Juvenal’s entire series of personae.
110 Catherine Keane
Satire to the poet’s experience in declaiming conveniently invites a rhe-
torical approach to the text. Fictive autobiography serves as an interpre-
tive key.
Juvenal’s text was not only the chief beneficiary of the persona
approach but an essential source of fuel for it. The impressive rhetorical
range Â�exhibited in the Satires, which seems to render authorial tempera-
ment irrelevant, was just the element that the persona scholars needed to
highlight in order to argue the genre’s dramatic and literary richness.20
But clear as the influence of rhetoric is, an entirely different feature of
Juvenal’s work may have had an equally crucial role in linking the poet
to persona theory:Â€ namely, the fact that the sixteen Satires come to us
unaccompanied by a reliable biography of the author. The ancient vita is
a combination of generic and implausible material, and since Highet, it
has hardly featured in handbook discussions, let alone interpretations.21
Far more so than with the other satirists, in the case of Juvenal schol-
ars were given a free pass to go straight to the text. In turn, Juvenal’s
text served as a vehicle for the persona scholars as they expounded the
rhetorical-dramatic theory of the genre. The persona scholars were react-
ing to the limits of the biographical and moral approaches to satire, and
ultimately built a picture of Juvenal as a self-conscious parodist of flawed
moral discourse.22
A new shift in methodology, another reaction to limits, has occurred in
the last decade and a half. While satire scholars have certainly not rejected
the idea that satire is a performance, they have been developing more socio-
politically grounded notions of ‘performance’ than the rhetorical persona
theory offers. In giving more emphasis to satire’s social functions, they
aim to correct two problems:Â€first, the paradoxically Â�moral-biographical
premise behind readings that argue Juvenal’s self-critical intentions, and
second, the inadequate attention paid to satire’s cultural context in some
20
W.S. Anderson’s essays on Juvenal were among his earliest, and stimulated work on the other
authors. The persona theorists paved the way for sociological study, analyses of satiric allusivity
and politics, and readings of satire as a performance of cultural identity; see e.g. Oliensis 1998,
Freudenburg 1993 and 2001, and Henderson 1999.
21
According to the vita, Juvenal practised declamation before taking up satire in middle age; after
arousing resentment, he was banished to Egypt while in his eighties, and died of bitterness there.
Much of this surely derives from remarks in Satire 1, and the banishment story in particular from
the poet’s later claim that he has observed Egyptian culture (15.45). Highet 1954:Â€2–41 makes a
few adjustments to the ancient account, but still draws on the Satires. More recent handbooks do
not discuss the poet’s life:Â€in Braund 1996a:Â€xii–xiii, the summary of Horace is highly biograph-
ical in contrast to that of Juvenal. Courtney 1980 also avoids biographizing (see especially 9–10).
See the author chapters in Hooley 2007.
22
See Winkler 1983.
rhetoric-focused persona studies. Thus some recent work aims to elucidate
what is at stake socially and politically in the performance of satire’s con-
structed spokesmanÂ€– a more complex, more fleshed-out and more recog-
nizably Roman persona.23
It has been acknowledged that emphasis on the rhetorical (i.e. dec-
lamatory) persona risks figuring satire as either a frivolously ‘entertain-
ing’ game without moral or cultural resonance, or a fundamentally
moral parody of invective.24 In either scenario, paradoxically, the
author’s intentions would be the most important source of meaning.
But the rhetorical approach has another built-in flaw that has not been
addressed. While the persona studies illuminate the range of personae in
Juvenal’s work, they do not try to explain (or challenge future scholars
to explore) why he adopted particular personae at particular points in
his career. The persona approach essentially posits an ever-resourceful
poet who adeptly switches from one persona type to another.25 While
the general idea is plausible, it is of limited use in this undeveloped
form. It implies that Juvenal was motivated only by his rhetorical com-
petence and a drive to experiment, that he wrote frozen in time and in
an intellectual vacuum. Nevertheless, attempts to account for specific
changes in his approach to satire are rare and rarely consulted, as if
reading in this vein might be seen as unwise regression to the biographi-
cal approach.26
The scholars who study satire as Roman discourse have not pointed
to this problem, perhaps because they have not yet outlined an alterna-
tive strategy for interpreting changes across the oeuvre. Instead, genre-
oriented studies have tended to draw on ‘key’ poems of Juvenal that
exhibit interesting satiric methods, such as the telling explorations of
bodies and sexual deviance in 2, 6 and 9.27 Gestures to book division
23
See especially Freudenburg 2001 and many of the essays in Freudenburg 2005. Many critics now
see little value in what I call the basic ‘negative’ form of persona theory (which dwells on the
distinction between author and speaker) and recommend a ‘positive’ model that focuses on the
strategies of the speaker. On this matter, Wray 2001:Â€161–7 and P.A. Miller 2003:Â€51 are enlight-
ening. Clay 1998 and Mayer 2003a argue that ancient audiences would not have consciously
made an author/speaker distinction.
24
For criticisms in this vein see Freudenburg 2005:Â€28–9 and Green 1998:Â€xxviii.
25
E.g. Braund 1996a:Â€18:Â€‘By the end of Satire 6 … Juvenal … has exhausted the artistic possibili-
ties of anger. So he needs to bring this venture in angry satire to a close.’
26
Bellandi 1980 examines poetics, but leans on biography, arguing that Juvenal’s anger is his natu-
ral mode and that it bursts through even when he tries his hand at more conventional diatribe.
In contrast, Lindo 1974 adumbrates a reading of Juvenal’s oeuvre as an evolving literary experi-
ment in the self-conscious manner of the Augustan poets.
27
E.g. Gold 1998, Walters 1998, Habinek 2005:Â€185–8 and Gunderson 2005. Freudenburg 2001:Â€11–12
gestures to the new perspective reflected in Books 3 and 4 before focusing exclusively on Satires
112 Catherine Keane
and structure seldom feature in studies of satire as social discourse. This
may reflect deliberate avoidance of any approach that smacks of New
Criticism. One result is that the later Satires, brought into the fore-
ground in the rebalancing achieved by the persona studies, have slipped
into the background again. Meanwhile, the sensationalist early Satires
and others with prominent sexual or political content have occupied
scholars’ attention. No truly comprehensive and theoretical study of
Juvenalian satire has appeared since the concluding survey in Braund’s
Beyond Anger.
All of the Satires, by definition, should play some role in theories of
satire; they represent a whole rangeÂ€– five? sixteen? more?Â€– of ways to
‘do satire’. But we still lack a language with which to discuss the stages
of Juvenal’s oeuvre. Whether or not we want to highlight these as rep-
resenting stages in the poet’s life, we ought to be able to discuss their
areas of difference and continuity. Until we do, the later Satires will
be neglected as weak afterthoughts, and we will not fully appreciate
Juvenal’s version of the satiric career. To begin this task, we need to pick
up where the Â�persona studies left off, and consider the organization of
the five books.
A c a r e e r i n a ng e r a n d i t s
a lt e r n at i v e s
Four distinct rhetorical personae are employed over the five books of
Satires:Â€ the angry, the ironic, the mocking and the cynical.28 Juvenal
makes his persona types identifiable with two kinds of clues:Â€ declama-
tory rhetorical devices that convey the speaker’s emotional attitude, and
statements that the speaker makes about emotions, which usually appear
in the beginnings of poems or books. A third type of evidence consists
of portraits of other characters that convey the effects of undesirable
Â�emotion (usually anger); in these cases, the reader is supposedly being
encouraged to mock the emotion or at least to recognize that the satirist
is doing so.29
The following table outlines Juvenal’s personae and the clues that reflect
their characteristics:
1–6. A. Hardie 1990:Â€152, analysing the speaker’s ‘personality’ in Satire 7, urges further investiga-
tion of the later Satires in this vein; compare Keane 2007.
28
The next several paragraphs draw on Braund 1988 and W.S. Anderson 1982:Â€277–361.
29
The last is a trickier kind of evidence, in that it leaves room for circular reasoning that engages
preconceived ideas about the satirist’s position.
Book/Satires Persona Announced by

1 / 1–5 angry rhetorical clues (e.g. over-generalizations, Â�aggressive
rhetorical questions); the speaker’s references to
Â�physiological manifestations of his emotion; speeches
by angry characters (particularly in Satires 2 and 3)
that elicit the speaker’s approval
2/6 angry rhetorical clues (as above)
3 / 7–9 ironic rhetorical clues (e.g. a less aggressive style of Â�expression,
undercutting of explicit statements with alternative
Â�perspectives); the speaker’s attitude of moral indifference;
his subtle mockery of an angry interlocutor (9)
4 / 10–12 mocking the speaker’s praise of laughter and condemnation
of tears (10); topics suggestive of philosophical
Â�detachment (human ambition, wealth and
hospitality, friendship)
5 / 13–16 cynical the speaker’s advice to addressee against vengefulness
and naïveté (13); his condemnation of the violent anger
of narrative subjects (15)
With this many different satiric modes on display, it is best not to Â�conflate
‘Juvenalian satire’ with any one. We could conclude that the collection
does not tell a story about one satirist, but about many. But the persona
studies reflect a different way of thinking. While the distinct perform-
ances in the individual books each provide evidence of Juvenal’s rhetorical
versatility, the persona scholars also highlight moments of self-conscious
contrast between books. The satiric mode of each book is accentuated
by its differences fromÂ€– and sometimes by suggestive allusions toÂ€– the
others. Thus the persona theorists presuppose a poet behind the scenes, a
self-conscious actor who regularly reminds his audience that he is behind
every new mask.
While this assumption is not discussed in the persona studies, it is the
basis for their most tantalizing conclusions. When we envision a consist-
ent poet behind the masks, we can discern not only significant variation,
but a specific trajectory. The most noticeable contrasts are those between
the angry Satires 1 through 6 and the ironic, mocking and cynical per-
formances of each of the next three books. In each of the later books, the
satirist appears to reject the extreme emotion that he exhibited previously,
using dramatic characters to illustrate the negative effects of strong emo-
tion. In the last poem of Book 3, the ranting of the angry gigolo Naevolus
throws the satirist’s own recently acquired ironic perspective into sharper
114 Catherine Keane
relief. At the opening of Book 4, the negative exemplar is the philosopher
Heraclitus, who wept at examples of human folly; his foil Democritus
wisely laughed at the same sights (10.28–32). The addressee of Satire 13 is
the first straw man of Book 5:Â€Calvinus is portrayed as being consumed
with unseemly and naïve anger after being defrauded of a sum of money.
This accidental social critic is reminiscent of the early Juvenal, who seethes
with indignation, but the satirist in this poem is cynical and worldly, not
indignant. Later in the same book, in Satire 15, Juvenal also condemns
Egyptian villagers who acted on their own rage towards Others and
Â�cannibalized a neighbour during a brawl.
In sum, it is not simply rhetorical experimentation that Juvenal under-
takes in the Satires, but an extended exploration of the angry mode and
its alternatives. Anderson all but acknowledges that such a reading posits
a consistent author behind the masks:Â€ ‘The farther he gets away from
Satire 1, the more outspoken does the satirist grow against his once cher-
ished indignatio.’30 In other words, the story unrolled in the Satires revolves
around the ‘actor’ Juvenal’s repeated consideration, from different angles,
of the emotions that characterize his early satiric mode. To be sure, this
narrative does not embed the poet in society, thematize his patronage
relationships or relate personal intellectual progress. But it is inspired
by those themes in Horace and PersiusÂ€– writing as therapy, friendship,
philosophical retirementÂ€– and is more usefully read as a dynamic nar-
rative than as a series of isolated portraits. Each time Juvenal chooses a
new Â�rhetorical mode, he conjures the memory of his first performance,
Â�weaving his own career narrative.
The openings of Books 4 and 5 contain the most strikingly self-
Â�conscious commentaries on the emotions, and especially invite a Â�revision
of the traditional rhetorical interpretation. At the beginning of the pano-
ramic Satire 10, which catalogues human ambitions and the disasters
they inevitably incite, Juvenal imagines the philosopher Democritus
transported from fifth-century Thrace to modern-day Rome (10.28–53).
In the satirist’s vision, Democritus still finds the inner peace to laugh at
what he sees around him (specifically, a parade that precedes the races
and that embodies Roman hierarchy and pomp). The philosopher’s men-
tality, described as enviable tranquillitas by Seneca (Dialogue 9), becomes
the foundation of the recommendations on prayer offered at the poem’s
climax. Considering its important position in the book, the portrait of
W.S. Anderson 1982:Â€290. Compare Braund 1996a:Â€22:Â€Satire 10 with its programmatic opening
30
‘amounts to a clear rejection of the angry mask adopted in the early satires’.
Democritus looks like a declaration of Juvenal’s new satiric perspective as
he commences once again to ponder human folly.
The remaining two Satires of the book do seem to reflect a continuing
desire for emotional detachment on the satirist’s part, an effect that is
achieved partly through a continuation of the religious theme of Satire 10.
The next two poems are set in the satirist’s domestic retreat, where he
criticizes the bustle and ambition of the world outside and savours his
own unpretentious social and religious rituals. For all the assertions of
the persona theorists, however, this does not exactly represent an imita-
tion of Democritus. The philosopher is described in Satire 10 as crossing
his threshold (limen, 29) to watch Roman public rituals in action. In
Satires 11 and 12, in contrast, the satirist writes from home, only imagin-
ing the social, religious and commercial activity of the city and the
empire outside. He thus keeps his distance from the emotional urban
crowd (envisioned in the tableau of the races at 11.193–202) and duplici-
tous, greedy individuals (the legacy hunters described at 12.95–130). On
the safe side of his threshhold (meum … limen, 11.190), occupied with
friendships and sacrifices, the satirist can remain relatively unperturbed.
This is no Democritean experiment, but a pre-emptive retreat, which
suggests that perhaps Juvenal cannot quite live up to the philosopher’s
example. The contrasting sketches of Democritus and Heraclitus, then,
do not so much prefigure the satirist’s own tranquillity in the poems to
come as set an emotional goal that he is motivated to achieveÂ€– one way
or another. The portrait of the ideal initiates a dynamic plot in the book,
in which the poet constructs his own ambivalent version of Democritean
detachment.31
The other often-cited illustration of Juvenal’s increasing emotional
detachment is the address to the angry Calvinus in Satire 13 (Book 5). The
satirist’s addressee is fuming with indignation at the crime committed
against him, and Juvenal criticizes his friend’s naïveté and vengefulness,
recommending calm realism (‘Let’s put aside this excessive groaning’,
11). Like the earlier praise of Democritus, Satire 13 appears to advertise
Juvenal’s own rejection of the indignant mode. While the satirist proposes
to talk Calvinus out of his anger, his chosen strategies are really vehicles
for his new cynical style of satire. His representation of human moral
character is unvarnished, to say the least; he also vividly portrays the vis-
ceral pleasures of anger and the gratification that comes with envisioning
See, however, A. Hardie 1990:Â€151–60 for the argument that a performance of non-tranquillitas
31
can already be detected in Satire 7.

116 Catherine Keane
revenge. Calvinus is both an unwilling exhibit and a near-silent partici-
pant in this drama.32
This new anti-anger programme must be more than a demonstration
of rhetorical versatility. Why would the poet make a theme of the rejec-
tion of anger? More precisely, why would he construct such a reactive pro-
gramme in order to demonstrate emotional detachment? After all, the
satirist has not recently expressed anger himself. The mask of Book 4 is
striving for amused tranquillity, and that of Book 3 is ironic. Anger is the
mode of Juvenal’s first six Satires, those poems that represent satire-Â�writing
as a visceral and therapeutic response to everyday outrages (‘indignation
makes my verse’, 1.79). Although that all changes in Books 3 and 4, in
Book 5 Juvenal returns to the theme of indignatio. Indeed, he revives it,
specifically the notion of anger’s appeal, in the character of his frustrated
friend. In this way, Juvenal reminds his reader of anger’s pleasures and its
dangers even as he makes a show of condemning it.33 If Satire 13 is pro-
grammatic for Book 5, then the programmatic theme that it puts forth is
this conflict between the allure of anger and the need for reason.
This idea should also prompt us to adjust the traditional rhetorical
interpretation of Satire 15 on the angry cannibals, according to which the
inflamed Egyptians are a foil for the rational satirist. In 15, the satiric
speaker is again preoccupied with the problem of anger; it is (in the fic-
tion) encroaching on his world for the second time in one book, and
prompting him to respond. But Juvenal chose this angry subject. To be
sure, he does not start out the poem in the angry mode, but resembles
the speaker of Satires 13 and 14. As anger becomes his theme, however,
it also gradually erodes his air of detachment and permeates his rhetoric.
The grisly account of the cannibalistic act (33–92), and the invocation
of humanity’s lost capacity for reason in the final section (131–74), make
Satire 15 look almost as angry as the early poems. In condemning the
cannibals’ anger, the satirist is both sarcastic and hyberbolic (‘You won’t
find a worthy punishment … for a people in whose minds anger and
hunger are one and the same’, 129–31). The rhetorical question that opens
the poem suggests dry world-weariness (‘Who has not heard of the per-
verse beliefs of the Egyptians?’, 1–2), but the one that ends it is far more
indignant, in the style of the early Satires (‘What would Pythagoras, the
vegetarian philosopher, say?’, 171–4). As the Egyptian mob in the poem
32
See Braund 1997. Calvinus emits groans (gemitus, 11), feels resentment (dolor, 12) and burns
inside (spumantibus ardens / uisceribus, 14–15)Â€– similar symptoms to those exhibited by the angry
Juvenal and his ancestor Lucilius (1.45, 152–3, 165–6).
33
Harris 2002:Â€225–7 gives a brief cultural and literary interpretation of anger in Juvenal.
closes in on and consumes its unfortunate neighbour, in a moment that
dissolves the boundaries between the equally ‘perverse’ communities of
Egypt, so too the satirist seems to have swallowed his angry subjects and
thereby stirred up his own capacity for savagery.34
In Book 5, anger is dynamic, not simply an object of the satirist’s study.
It infects his narrative subjects and tests his own emotional stability, in the
way that the troubling sights of the city did in Book 4. A programmatic
sentiment or exemplar may be prescriptive, but is not necessarily descrip-
tive, as the original persona studies posited. In these two cases, the program-
matic discussions look like portrayals of dilemmas, not of decisions firmly
made. The two books dramatize a struggle between the satirist’s new, self-
preserving emotional stance and the alternatives of anger, despair and other
destructive passions. Enriching the larger plot that spans the series of five
books, there are even plots within the individual books of Satires, linked by
the image of the author constantly revising his approach to the genre.
As Juvenal composed Book 1 with its portrait of the rhetorically quali-
fied, and indignant, satirist, he may well not have anticipated his future
shifts to irony, mockery and cynicism. Nevertheless, the Satires grow into
a story that has as its foundation the image of the angry neophyte satirist.
This fictionalized career narrative is not an autobiography; rather, it enacts
Juvenal’s re-invention and negotiation of his genre by means of the anger
theme. Although anger becomes one of many modes at which this satirist
excels, it is cast as the one with the most persistent allureÂ€– no doubt because
it is associated with his own debut and sets him so decidedly apart from his
predecessors. The strong and vividly portrayed emotion of the early persona
becomes the foil for the alternative stances of irony, amusement and cyni-
cism, further highlighting the poet’s chosen rhetorical shifts.
Juvenal begins his career as the angry, passionate satirist, who cannot
‘not write satire’ (1.30). His dramatic entrance into the genre initiated cen-
turies of biographical interpretation, and eventually motivated scholars’
emphatic separation of poet from persona. In short, Juvenal’s early indig-
nant performance helped to change the way Roman satire was read. It
would be throwing the baby out with the bath water to label the satirist’s
series of personae as simply a parade of mastered styles, each having equal
significance in his generic recipe. Although his first performance is both
disingenuous and finite, the poet draws on its energy again and againÂ€–
reviving the notion of a satiric career inspired and shaped by experience
and receptionÂ€– as he re-fashions himself and his genre.
34
â•‡ Keane 2006:Â€68–71.
Ch apter 6
The indistinct literary careers of Cicero

and Pliny the Younger
Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel
The careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger go well together. Or at least
so Pliny, who explicitly modelled himself on Cicero, would have hoped.1
Both were men of equestrian and non-Roman origins, noui homines who
rose to the consulship (although Pliny notes at Epist. 4.8.5 that he attained
both consulship and augurate while younger than Cicero), masters of elo-
quence in senate and law court, and recognized practitioners of a wide
range of literary genres, including forensic oratory, poetry and epistolog-
raphy. Pliny of course was well aware of the gulf in talent and, no less
important, in political and forensic opportunities under the Principate
which separated him from Cicero under the old Republic.2 Within the
context of the present collection, nevertheless, the literary careers of
Cicero and Pliny are a productive pairing, inasmuch as they both exhibit
a certain indistinctness. However, the reasons for the indistinctness of
each author’s career differ in meaningful ways. These differences, as will
be suggested later in the paper, possess significance in the context of the
post-Ciceronian emergence of the ideal of a literary careerÂ€ – associated
above all with VirgilÂ€– which pursues a trajectory from humbler to higher
genres.3
One conclusion of the second part of this paper will be to affirm the
usefulness of the ‘Virgilian’ literary career as a way of thinking about
the careers of other Classical authors. In particular, validation will be
sought for Joe Farrell’s argument that ‘In all cases, the career of the
patron class is the standard of reference against which the literary career
defines itself or is judged.’â•›4 In sum, according to Farrell, ‘the careerist
1
See Pliny, Epist. 1.2.4, 1.5.12, 1.20, 3.15.1, 4.8.4, Cugusi 1983:Â€223–5.
2
See Pliny, Epist. 2.14, 4.8.5–6, 9.2, Mayer 2003b:Â€227–9.
3
This ideal literary career may of course be a creation of Virgil’s inheritors rather than the poet
himself; see the contribution of Putnam to this volume, which emphasizes continuity and circu-
larity in the Virgilian corpus.
4
Farrell 2002:Â€43.
118
Cicero and Pliny the Younger 119
ideology of the patron class’Â€– obsessed as it is with progression up the
strict sequence of the political cursus honorumÂ€ – plays a direct role in
shaping the idea of the literary career.5 From the first part of the present
paper, however, it may inferred that Farrell’s taxonomy of pre-Â�Virgilian
literary careers may require some broadening, since he presents a spec-
trum of patterns established for a literary career by the end of the
Republic which leaves little room for Cicero. The four basic patterns
identified are:Â€a) a complicitous relationship (where a poet’s literary car-
eer enhances a patron’s political position on the cursus honorum); b) a
competitive relationship (where a poet’s literary career both enhances
and competes with his patron’s political career); c) a complementary
relationship (where ‘men of the patron class … write poetry in their
leisure time and ha[ve] the good taste not to write in praise of their own
achievements’ (Farrell 2002:43)); and d) an antithetical relationship
(where the literary career is seen as alternative to the political career).
These patterns provide the larger context within which the Virgilian
pattern arose; but none, of course, quite works for Cicero. It is not only
poets who may have a literary career, but prose writers too. It is one of
the purposes of this paper to suggest that room be made for the literary
careers of prose authors.
C ic e ro’s i n di s t i nc t l i t e r a r y c a r e e r
In terms of the varieties of literary career open to Roman writers out-
lined above, Cicero falls between the third and fourth stools:Â€ some of
his writings, such as his lyric poetry, are clearly the product of the otium
of a Roman aristocrat, whilst othersÂ€ – most obviously, the philosoph-
ical works of the 40s BCÂ€ – are set up as an alternative to his political
activity, in abeyance at that time due to Caesar’s dictatorship. But stating
the problem in these terms indicates the extent to which invocation of
the writer–patron model cannot cover the blurred and indistinct case of
Cicero. Equally, however, simply to classify Cicero’s writing as the (un)
reflecting mirror of a Roman politician’s public life misses the dynamic
relationship between writing, authority and memorialization in the late
Republic, to the development of which nexus Cicero was a majorÂ€– but
not uniqueÂ€– contributor.
If the development of poetic genres at Rome can be clearly understood
within the framework of aristocratic patronage, prose writing was, from
5
â•‡ Farrell 2002:Â€44; see also 35.
120 Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel
its beginnings, more complex.6 Historiography was a leisure occupation
for the political classes as well as the potential product of patronage, and
liable to the distortions imposed by family pride.7 Other forms of prose
writing reflected the interests and expertise of the ruling classes:Â€ most
obviously, agriculture and law.8 In disseminating such works, their
authors were presumably conscious of their own reputations as men
whose lives were dedicated to the service of the Roman state. These prose
works were all the result of their authors’ volition, who had made a choice
first to write and then to disseminate:Â€if writing was an acceptable use of
otium for members of the senatorial class, it was by no means expected or
demanded. Oratory was a different matter:Â€formal speech was one of the
activities expected from a man in public life, rather than an acceptable
diversion. But the transition from oral delivery to written form was not
automatic:Â€it depended upon the orator’s choosing to prepare and dissem-
inate a written text.
Much of Cicero’s written corpus should be seen, therefore, as the
result of a series of decisions about what it would be appropriate for him
to write at any particular time and what was possible. The constraints
included the time for writing and mental capacity as well as what his
public career allowed. Thus, the composition of poetry was in theory
always possible,9 whereas written speeches had to follow appearances in
court.10 Cicero’s speeches, indeed, provide a clear demonstration of the
capacity of written texts of speeches to contribute to self-promotion in
public life. As Crawford has shown, the numerical relationship between
the number of speeches which Cicero delivered and the number which
he disseminated in written form varies very considerably over the course
of his public career from his first legal case in 81 BC down to the final
Philippic in 44 BC.11 Initially, he disseminated a high proportion of his
cases; later, the proportion drops noticeably. It is easy to establish an
explanatory framework:Â€at the start of his public life, he needed all the
attention he could generate; later, he had more freedom to select what he
preserved.12
â•‡ 6
Rawson 1985; Courtney 1999; Goldberg 2005. â•‡ 7
Wiseman 1979.
â•‡ 8
Cato, Agr.; on early legal writing, see Rawson 1985:Â€201–14.
â•‡ 9
Cicero wrote poetry from his adolescence onwards; see Courtney 1993:Â€149–78.
10
Two of Cicero’s most famous speeches, or sets of speechesÂ€ – the Verrines, and the Second
PhilippicÂ€– were never delivered; in both cases there were good reasons why delivery had not been
possible, and the written versions rely on the illusion that the speeches had been given.
11
Crawford 1984:Â€1–21. 12 Steel 2005:Â€21–8.
The result of Cicero’s choices about whether or not to write up a
speech is a heavily edited account of Cicero the orator:Â€one which has
largely removed his failures, his obscure clients and the grosser humiliÂ�
ations of court and Senate. The written speechesÂ€ – of which a large
though by no means complete record survivesÂ€– provide the wherewithal
to construct a narrative of Cicero’s public career, which demonstrates its
own set of generic transitions within oratory, from civil to criminal law
and from forensic to deliberative oratory, as the range of locations and
circumstances for speech expand as Cicero rises up the political cur-
sus. Indeed, Cicero draws attention to the novelty of the circumstances
of the delivery of a speech where appropriate. The first sentence of On
the Command of Gnaeus Pompeius underlines the fact that this is the
first occasion on which Cicero has addressed the Roman people.13 In the
exordium of In Defence of Sextus Roscius of Ameria he ascribes surprise to
the jurors, that he, Cicero, should be undertaking the defence, given his
youth, lack of talent and lack of authority. He then revels in these char-
acteristics, establishing them as qualifications to undertake resistance
to ‘an abuse concocted by a new type of criminality’.14 In On Behalf of
Marcellus, over thirty years later, Cicero combines the appeal to novelty
with reference to his own established practice:Â€Caesar’s unprecedented
mercy paradoxically enables Cicero to return to his ‘original habit’ of
speaking.15
The narrative of Cicero which emerges from his speeches is nonethe-
less a partial and lacunose account. The generic conventions of written
speeches get in the way; so strong is the illusion that what one is reading
is a record of what was said that framing material which could contrib-
ute towards understanding the context is excised.16 Combined with the
denseness of legal argument, in some of the forensic cases, and of allu-
sion to contemporary political events, this austerity of presentation was
demonstrably causing readers difficulties within a generation of Cicero’s
death, as Asconius’ set of explanatory notes on five speeches indicates.17 In
13
Cic. Leg. Man 1; Steel 2001:Â€174–6.
14
Cic. Rosc. Am. 1; on the rhetorical strategies of this exordium more generally, see Loutsch
1994:Â€127–74.
15
Cic. Marcell. 1.
16
Indeed, the written texts seem to offer a more unified and coherent account than would have
been the case, eliminating the cross-examination of witnesses, for example:Â€see Humbert 1925.
17
Marshall 1985:Â€26–38.
large part, one can make a narrative out of Cicero’s speeches only because
there are so many of them.18
In the aftermath of Catilina’s attempted coup, Cicero’s attention turned
explicitly to the question of how to record his activities and ensure that
a favourable account of them dominated the historical record. In part he
did so through a collection of ‘consular speeches’, which contained the
oratorical highlights of his year as consul, but his attention turned also to
the potential of poetry and history to preserve his memory.19 Initially he
addressed the problem as one which could be solved through patronage.
One of the poets he identified was A. Licinius Archias, who had built
a long and, it seems, reasonably prosperous career through responding
to the desires of the elite to have their achievements recorded. Cicero
defended him on a charge of usurping citizenship in 62 BC and hoped
that Archias would reciprocate with a poem on Cicero’s consulship; he
was to be disappointed in this, however, and as far as we can tell from
the letters he did not look for a substitute poet.20 For a history, he turned
to Posidonius, to whom he sent an outline account:Â€Posidonius declined
the commission, on the grounds that Cicero’s own prose draft needed
no embellishment.21 Cicero’s next documented candidate for historian is
Lucceius, to whom Cicero wrote a famous and much-discussed letter.22
This commission too was apparently not taken up.
It is too easy to see Cicero’s difficulties here as a mildly comic commen-
tary on vanity and lack of judgement after his consulship. As an episode
in the history of Roman patronage, it deserves considerable attention,
both for the independence displayed by the intellectuals approached and
for the range of possible relationships between the one who commissions
a work and the one who is commissioned. Posidonius had no qualms
about turning Cicero down; Archias, a much more obscure figure, does
not seem to have said no with the same directness, but nonetheless com-
municated his lack of enthusiasm successfully. These men relied on the
Roman elite for their prosperity to a greater or lesser extent, but were by
no means dependent upon specific Romans. At the same time, patron-
age was not always the relationship involved:Â€Lucceius was Cicero’s social
and political equal. In asking him to write his history in a way that took
18
There is a comparison here to be made with the elder Cato, whose output of speeches was simi-
larly voluminous; but Cato also wrote history.
19
Consular orations:Â€Att. 2.1.3.
20
Att. 1.16.15, in which Cicero also refers to Thyillus, otherwise unknown, as someone who has not
written poetry for him.
21
Att. 2.1.2. 22 Fam. 5.12; Hall 1998.
Cicero’s interests into account Cicero was asking a favour of a friend and
not making a request of a client.
Faced with uncooperative writers, Cicero elected to provide his own
memorialization, and chose poetry as well as prose as a suitable medium.
In so doing he does appear to have done something new in terms of the
generic range of an elite writer; he also innovated in the nature of the
epic he wrote, combining the divine apparatus of hexameter epic with
the traditions of self-serving prose autobiography already well estab-
lished in Latin literature.23 It was not a successful experiment, if judged
by audience reaction; but it can be seen as a decision to control both
message and publication timetable by eliminating dependence on the
writing skills, and diligence, of another.
Cicero never wrote a full-scale piece of conventional historiography,
a gap in his output to which he draws attention in the opening of De
Legibus.24 His explanation there is that history requires a commitment of
time which he cannot provide. One might speculate further on his rea-
sons. One may have been a lack of fit between what Cicero felt should be
recorded and the usual preoccupations of Roman historiography. In par-
ticular, his consulship had been exclusively civilian:Â€indeed, this became
one of the aspects of his conduct in 63 BC he stressed. He might well
have felt hesitant about setting himself up in a form easily to be compared
with, most obviously, Pompeius Magnus, whose historian, Theophanes
of Mytilene, was recording his conquest of the east at this very time.25
Moreover, the letter to Lucceius betrays a consciousness of the difficulty
which attends the writing of history where the historian himself is one of
the characters; Cicero may well have concluded that it was impossible to
combine the intellectual dignity of a historian with his own urgent need
to establish his version of events.26 Caesar, of course, demonstrated only
a few years later that this could be done; and Cicero acknowledges his
achievement in Brutus.27 But it is not easy to see how Cicero could have
successfully accomplished it.
Until the outbreak of civil war in 49 BC, Cicero’s literary activity is
marked by generic flexibility and inventiveness, but it is hard to see any
specific concern for a literary career:Â€ the point of writing is initially to
assist his public career and then, increasingly, to ensure that his achieve-
ments in public life are remembered in the right way. It is his ascent of the
political cursus which provides the energy and framework for his writing.
23
Steel 2005:Â€55–9. 24
Leg. 1.5–12. W.S. Anderson 1963.
25
26
Fam. 5.12.8. 27 Brut. 262.
During and after the civil war the relationship between writing and pol-
itical career changes:Â€ two phases can be discerned, the first the period
down to Caesar’s murderÂ€ – during which Cicero wrote many, though
not all, of his philosophical worksÂ€– and the second the year and a half
between Caesar’s death and Cicero’s own assassination. In neither period
can one speak of a straightforward literary career; but during the last five
years of his life Cicero did explore new ways of structuring, and promot-
ing, his writing.
Throughout his rhetorical and philosophical writing Cicero is con-
cerned to justify the activity as an appropriate occupation for the otium of
a Roman statesman, but these concerns take on particular resonance after
the civil war, where there is no negotium to act as a counterweight. The
writing of philosophy is then presented as the best way that Cicero can
now fulfil his duties towards the State.28 And he also displays an aware-
ness that generic completeness is an issue within philosophy.29
In the period after Caesar’s death, Cicero’s use of writing undergoes a
further evolution into a dynamic tool in its own right, something which
initiates events and is not merely the recorder and commentator upon
them. This is a distinction one should not press too far, inasmuch as some
of Cicero’s letters, throughout his career, were intended to secure a specific
outcome. But during the intense struggle with Antonius Cicero’s letters to
magistrates throughout the empire become a major factor in his efforts to
orchestrate, and control, a broad and desperately unstable coalition in sup-
port of the Senate. They work in parallel with the Philippics; the written
texts of these speeches are primarily records, but uniquely among Cicero’s
oratory record a story whose ending Cicero does not himself know at the
time of writing. The Philippics derive a large part of their distinctive power
from the sense they convey of unfolding and unpredictable events, as well
as from the reader’s knowledge with hindsight of their part in leading to
Cicero’s death. During this final period, writing has become central to the
operation of politics:Â€and, as Butler has shown, this shift is captured by the
stories which are told about the nature and aftermath of Cicero’s death.30
28
See, for example, Tusc. 1.1, Diu. 2.1. Cicero includes within his philosophical corpus some of his
rhetorical works, using the example of Aristotle and Theophrastus as justification (De Diuinatione
2.1.4). But one could slice up the whole differently to create a group of rhetorical works (e.g.
De Inuentione, De Oratore, Orator, Brutus, Topica, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Partitiones
Oratoriae), a grouping which demonstrates that writing on rhetorical theory, just as writing
poetry, was an option available to Cicero throughout his career. On the political ambitions of the
Tusculans, see now Gildenhard 2007.
29
Diu. 2.4, where there is reference to the reliqua, the remaining, unwritten, books of philosophy.
30
Butler 2002.
So, for Cicero, writing is essential to his careerÂ€– but writing derives
its meaning from other activities. His literary career is entirely subordi-
nated to the needs of his career as a politician, and generic profligacy is
the result:Â€ his strategy is based on using texts to multiply possibilities
for communication and directed, in a very clear and obvious way, by
the external political climate. Indeed, one could argue that the problem
which Cicero has as a writer is not how to place himself within the gen-
eric and chronological structures of a Roman literary career, but how to
fashion a convincing and coherent form of narrative which can record
his political career. Cicero never tells the story of Cicero the writer; but
more intriguingly, and despite his prolific and largely solipsistic output,
he never in a straightforward way tells the story of Cicero.31 And that is
undoubtedly the omission which Cicero himself found more frustrating.
Pl i n y ’s i n di s t i nc t l i t e r a r y c a r e e r
Pliny’s literary career, it will be argued below, ultimately shares the
same quality of indistinctness possessed by Cicero’s literary career.
But if Cicero’s generically profligate ‘indistinctness’ is driven by the
demands of political opportunism, similar opportunism was clearly
not an option for Pliny the Younger. The latter operated under a system
where one man alone now had the monopoly of political agency and
attendant fame. Pliny’s own literary career is not driven by the subor-
dination of his output to the needs of his career as a politician:Â€he is
too obsessed with his own literary fame for that (in the absence of any
real opportunity for political fame).32 Rather, it is driven by the desire
to rise above the new Virgilian model of generic progression and to
suggest a ‘Ciceronian’ attitude to generic progression (albeit one now
stripped of any political significance). But where Cicero was flexible
in relation to genre and its attendant hierarchies, Pliny shall be self-
consciously ‘indifferent’.
The poetic career of Pliny the YoungerÂ€– for the Younger did write
poetry (as we shall see), even if little of it survivesÂ€– conforms to the type
of career identified by Farrell as being ‘complementary’.33 For according
31
In Brut. 305–19 Cicero offers an account of his intellectual formation; but he stops this story at
the point where his public life begins.
32
See Epist. 5.8. All translations of Pliny are taken or adapted from B. Radice or P. G. Walsh
(whose use is gratefully acknowledged).
33
Farrell 2002:Â€43 (quoted above); poetry thus produced was meant ‘to provide momentary relief
from the ubiquitous pressures of a political career’ (Farrell 2002: 41).
to its author’s own most common descriptions, Pliny’s poetry is firmly
in the ‘nugatory’ mode, a product of otium. But if we look at Pliny’s
entire ‘literary’ outputÂ€ – not just his poetry, but also his letters and
‘Ciceronian’ courtroom speechesÂ€– then an interestingly different pic-
ture begins to emerge. Farrell notes that, ‘For later ages, Virgil’s grad-
ual ascent from humbler to grander genres was generally regarded as
defining the ideal poetic career’34Â€– and the Virgilian model, arguably,
had already begun to wield its influence in Pliny’s time. But Pliny’s
own literary career invites reading as a species of reaction against the
Virgilian model of a generic cursus honorum. A non-senator such as
Virgil might rise through the genres in a progression that could be
interpreted as parallel to an ascent to the summit of Roman political
offices. How then might PlinyÂ€– who was in fact a senator and rose up
the actual cursus honorum in strict sequenceÂ€– fashion his own literary
career?
Pliny was perfectly capable of reproducing the Virgilian modelÂ€– and
additionally of linking it with a rising political careerÂ€– as is clear from
a reading of Epist. 3.5. This letter was destined to have great influence in
shaping the reputation and reception of the Elder Pliny,35 and in it the
Younger Pliny fashions for his uncle and adopted father a literary car-
eer which moves upwards through the prose genres, culminating in
the latter’s master work, the Natural History. The letter is addressed to
one Baebius Macer, Pliny’s fellow Transpadane,36 whose ‘close study of
[Pliny’s] uncle’s books has made [him] wish to possess them all and ask
for a complete list’. Pliny goes on (3.5.2):
fungar indicis partibus, atque etiam quo sint ordine scripti notum tibi faciam;
est enim haec quoque studiosis non iniucunda cognitio.
I shall perform the role of an index, and I shall also inform you of the order
in which the books were written, for this too is knowledge which scholars are
pleased to have.
The complete listing of the Elder’s seven works is as follows (repro-
duced here in tabular form with Pliny’s interspersed commentary and
context):37
34
Farrell 2002:Â€24. 35 See S. Carey 2003:Â€5–7, 10–11.
36
For the addressee, who is mentioned or receives a letter elsewhere at 4.9.16–17, 19, 4.12.4, 6.24,
see Birley 2000:Â€41 s.v.
37
For Pliny the Elder’s career, see Healy 1999:Â€1–30, also Beagon 1992:Â€1–25; 2005:Â€1–5; Sherwin-
White 1966:Â€219–21.
Title Translation Younger’s Translation

Comments
1 De Iaculatione Throwing the hunc cum praefectus A work of industry and
Equestri Javelin from alae militaret, talent, written when he
unus Horseback pari ingenio was a junior officer in the
(one curaque composuit cavalry
volume)
2 De Vita The Life of a quo singulariter My uncle was greatly loved
Pomponi Pomponius amatus hoc by him and felt he owed
Secundi Secundus memoriae amici this homage to his friend’s
duo (two quasi debitum memory.
volumes) munus exsoluit.
3 Bellorum The German incohauit cum in He began this during
Germaniae Wars (twenty Germania militaret, his military service in
uiginti volumes) somnio monitus:Â€ Germany, as the result of
astitit ei quiescenti a dream; in his sleep he
Drusi Neronis saw standing over him the
effigies … ghost of Drusus Nero …
4 Studiosi The Scholar quibus oratorem in which he trains the
tres (three ab incunabulis orator from his cradle and
volumes) instituit et perficit. brings him to perfection.
5 Dubii Problems in scripsit sub Nerone this he wrote during
Sermonis Grammar nouissimis annis, Nero’s last years, when
octo (eight cum omne studiorum the slavery of the times
volumes) genus paulo liberius made it dangerous to write
et erectius anything at all independent
periculosum or inspired.
seruitus fecisset.
6 A Fine A Continuation [none]
Aufidi Bassi of the History
triginta unus of Aufidius
Bassus (thirty-
one volumes)
7 Naturae A Natural opus diffusum a learned and comprehensive
Historiarum History eruditum, work as full of variety as
triginta (thirty-seven nec minus nature itself
septem volumes) uarium quam
ipsa natura
In his recent monograph on Pliny’s third book of Letters, John Henderson

identifies a number of ‘progressions’ in this catalogue of the Elder
Pliny’s works.38 The first involves a move from the military life (1, (2), 3)
38
Henderson 2002:Â€97–100. For the details of the various works mentioned and subjects covered,
see Healy 1999:Â€31–5.
to civic life (4, (5)), to full imperial history (6), and finally to natural his-
tory (7). Alongside this operates a progression from Pomponius Secundus
(2) to Drusus Nero, the hero of his work on the German wars (3). Pliny
ascends from the personal (a biography of his early patron Pomponius
Secundus) to military history and the personal-national (Germany and
Drusus Nero). Having brought this stage of his career to a close, the Elder
(in the words of Henderson) now ‘trains himself as scholar and stylist’
(4, 5)Â€– composing a handbook of rhetoric and a work of grammar during
the last years of Nero’s malign reign39Â€– ‘before raising his game to full
imperial history’, by continuing where the historian Aufidius Bassus had
left off (6). At the end of his career Pliny produces ‘a learned and compre-
hensive work as full of variety as nature itself’.
Here is a classic Virgilian style ascent from low to high, from small to
big. Starting out with a single-volume work on one aspect of military tac-
tics in one technical area, the Elder Pliny ends his career with his longest
work, an ‘epic’ thirty-seven-volume monster on Nature herself. Indeed one
could argue the Younger has deliberately engineered the list of the Elder’s
works so as to make the parallel clearer. The latter evidently conceived of his
Natural History as a representative national work to rival and even replace
the Georgics and Aeneid,40 but in the preface to that work nevertheless
implies it is a mere ‘trifle’ when compared to his continuation of the his-
tory of Aufidius Bassus (Nat. praef. 18–20; compare 1). In the same passage,
he declares that this apparently greater work, although already written and
ready to appear, is to be reserved for posthumous publication. It will (neces-
sarily) be his final work. By contrast, not only is the Younger conspicuously
silent on this magnum opus of Flavian historyÂ€– these are the only volumes
in the list to pass without authorial commentÂ€– but his decision to list the
works in order of composition, rather than in order of publication, ensures
that is the Natural History which now rounds off the Elder’s career (rather
against the tenor of the wishes expressed in the preface to that work).41
Rising in parallel with the Elder’s literary career, as the Younger’s
own commentary strongly hints, is the uncle’s political career.42
39
This slight disruption in the otherwise smooth trajectory of the Elder Pliny can fruitfully be
read within the context of the ideal Virgilian literary career:Â€ bad emperors may cause authors
to stall in their generic ascent; Virgil under Augustus rose unimpeded. However, the Elder’s
political career may have continued under Nero without serious interruption; see M. T. Griffin
1992:Â€438–9.
40
See Bruère 1956; Howe 1985:Â€570–2. 41 See further Gibson (forthcoming 2011).
42
Healy 1999:Â€2, 5–6 fills in the specific details of the Elder’s rising early career. An equestrian,
by the time of the Elder Pliny, did have his own career path to follow, rising from militiae
NeverthelessÂ€– and this is the point which requires emphasisÂ€– the Elder
Pliny remained all his life an equestrian, and never became a senator
(unlike his nephew).43 The junior posts to which the Younger refers
hereÂ€– along with the more senior posts to which he alludes laterÂ€– in
Epist. 3.5 are all equestrian positions. Is it significant that the clearest
example in the whole of Pliny’s Letters of a Virgilian ‘gradual ascent
from humbler to grander genres’ is constructed for a man of this rank
and order? Not only that, but the Elder’s rise through the genres is
nudgingly associated, at least at the early stages of his career, with his
rise through equestrian positions. Furthermore, in the sequence of let-
ters 3.5–7 the Younger is strongly focused on issues of rank and status.
If Epist. 3.5 is a kind of monument to an equestrian career, then 3.6,
as Henderson also suggestsÂ€ – wherein Pliny describes a statue he has
boughtÂ€– is a monument to the Younger Pliny’s senatorial aspirations.
On the pedestal of this statue, to be set up in the temple of Jupiter in
Pliny’s home town of Comum, will be inscribed nomen meum honoresque
(‘my name and official titles’). That is to say, the base will carry Pliny’s
own cursus honorum, which of course would include the consulship, so
recently achieved in AD 100. And 3.7 focuses on both the (chequered)
political career and (second-rate) literary career of the recently deceased
ex-consul Silius Italicus.44
My suggestion of some significance for the construction of a Virgilian
generic progress for a rising equestrian, is perhaps lent some support by a
subsequent letter in which the Younger Pliny comments very pointedly on
both his own (‘superior’) status and that of Virgil. In Epist. 5.3 he defends
his own ‘far from serious verse’ (uersiculos seueros parum), insisting that it
‘it is an honour to imitate their lighter as well as their more serious work’
(quorum non seria modo uerum etiam lusus exprimere laudabile est). The
models he has in mind are all senators, and include (not insignificantly
equestres through the post of procurator to one of the various prefectures; but it is fair to say
that the equestrian ‘cursus’ lacked the history, dignity and indeed clarity of the senatorial
cursus.
43
For the Elder’s pride in his equestrian rank, see also the famous passage on the history of the
order at Nat. 33.29–36; for the Natural History itself as the product specifically of equestrian
interests and emphases, see Beagon 2005:Â€16–17. Henderson 2002:Â€97 wittily glosses the title
of the Elder’s first work De Iaculatione Equestri as ‘Mounting the Missile:Â€ On Equestrian
Pride’.
44
The sequence 3.5–7 is further bound together by the pointed allusion in the Younger’s unflat-
tering description of Silius Italicus’ magnum opus at 3.7.5 (scribebat carmina maiore cura quam
ingenio) to the earlier description at 3.5.3 of the Elder’s first literary effort (hunc cum praefectus
alae militaret, pari ingenio curaque composuit). The Elder’s first work, so the allusion strongly sug-
gests, showed greater evidence of cura and ingenium than Silius’s national epic.
for this paper) Cicero, as well as Asinius Pollio, Memmius and some (if
not all) emperors (5.3.6):
Neronem enim transeo, quamuis sciam non corrumpi in deterius quae aliquando
etiam a malis, sed honesta manere quae saepius a bonis fiunt. inter quos uel prae-
cipue numerandus est P. Vergilius, Cornelius Nepos et prius Accius Enniusque.
non quidem hi senatores, sed sanctitas morum non distat ordinibus.
I except Nero, though I know that what is the occasional practice of the vicious
is not corrupted thereby, but retains its integrity through being the usual prac-
tice of the virtuous. In the latter class Virgil, Cornelius Nepos, and, before their
date, Accius and Ennius must rank high:Â€ it is true they are not senators, but
moral integrity knows no class distinctions.
Putting Pliny’s pointed awareness of the non-senatorial status of Virgil in
Epist. 5.3 together with the construction of a Virgilian-style generic ascent
for his rising equestrian uncle in 3.5, we might possibly attribute to Pliny
an underlying desire to associate this style of literary career with non-
senators. Such a desire might ultimately, of course, be defeated (as we
shall see later). But the plausibility of attributing such a desire to him may
receive support from some other circumstances, namely the manner in
which Pliny chooses to reveal his own ‘literary career’.
The first three books of Pliny’s letters appear to have a dramatic date
of AD 96–103.45 These books contain numerous references to prose works
written up for publication or circulation by Pliny himself, including his
forensic oratory, other speeches, and Letters.46 Running alongside Pliny’s
discussions of his own literary works or works in progress are numerous
references to the literary activities of others, either those of his own friends
and acquaintances or in Rome at large. In Books 1–3 the majority of such
references are to endeavours by others in the field of poetry47 (although
it is noticeable that Pliny attempts to insinuate himself into the role of
45
The dramatic dates of Pliny’s books remain controversial (their publication dates even more so);
for one reconstruction, see Sherwin-White 1966:Â€41.
46
Epistles 1–3 contain four letters on his own speeches (1.2, 1.8, 2.5, 2.19); two on the Panegyricus
(3.13, 3.18); one on a eulogy for the deceased son of an amicus (3.10); and two references to the
progress of his own letters as a literary work (1.1, 3.20). For the order of Pliny’s ‘career’ in speeches
published or edited in AD 96–8, see Sherwin-White 1966:Â€91 on Epist. 1.2.6; for his later speeches,
see Sherwin-White 1966:Â€334 on Epist. 5.8.6. For Pliny’s increasing awareness, over the course of
his letter collections, of the full status of letters as a separate genre, see Fitzgerald 2007.
47
Pliny praises the excellent verses of Titinius Capito on the latter’s heroes (1.17), urges Octavius
Rufus to circulate his poems (2.10), describes the leisure-time composition of lyric verses by
Spurinna (3.1), sets out the literary and political career of the recently dead Silius Italicus (3.7),
and informs Cornelius Priscus at length of the death of the poet Martial (3.21). See also 1.3 (an
encouragement to Caninius Rufus to write something that will last), 1.16 (on the mixed literary
production of Pompeius Saturninus), andÂ€– of courseÂ€– 3.5 (on the prose output of the Elder).
Ciceronian senior literary statesman here).48 Of his own poetry, however,
there is no mention by Pliny until Book 4, where he takes care to men-
tion it in four separate letters (4.14, 4.18, 4.19, 4.27), alongside continuing
references to his speeches (4.5, 4.19, 4.26; compare 4.9.23, 4.20). This fact
is remarked upon by Sherwin-White:49
The letters about Pliny’s versification begin in IV and continue through to IX.
The longer letters form an orderly series:Â€ here his first volume of hendecasyl-
lables is introduced [= IV.14], V.3 gives his reply to criticism of it, VII.4, 9–14 is
an account of its composition, VIII.21 announces his second volume of verses.
Interspersed are shorter references … Certain cross references tie these letters
to the chronological frameworks of the books … There are no references to
his verses in I–III, although his elder friends are mentioned as amateurs of the
game … The total absence of any reference to his versification in I–III is in
striking contrast to his parade of it from IV onwards.
So, why does Pliny introduce us to his poetry only at this moment in his
‘literary career’, long after the letters and speeches?
Pliny’s purpose can perhaps be understood best by looking at Epist.
4.14, which sets out the author’s poetic programme and practice. Pliny
has not published epic or a tragedy, but rather a book of (Catullan)
Â�hendecasyllables.50 From 4.14 it emerges that the hendecasyllables are a
product of leisure time (2 ‘… with which I amuse myself when I have
time to spare in my carriage, my bath, or at dinner’), and the subject
matter and style of the book is deliberately varied (3 ‘here are my jokes
and witticisms, my loves, sorrows, complaints and vexations; now my
style is simple, now more elevated’), even to the point of including some
indelicate work (petulantiora)Â€– although this is justified (4) by the pre-
cedent of ‘distinguished and serious writers’, who refrained neither from
lasciuia nor ‘plain language’. Pliny adds that he has not gone so far in
this direction as his models, but in his defence maintains the arguments
of Catullus poem 16 (5), and ends the letter with the reminder that his
poems are ancillary to his main literary careerÂ€– by which he means, most
48
In Epist. 3.15.1 Pliny responds to Silius Proculus’ request for comment on the addressee’s own
poems and the flattering remark of the latter that ‘Cicero was wonderfully generous about
encouraging the talent of poets’. In 1.13 Pliny welcomes the new crop of (nameless) poets that
April has brought to Rome, in a manner that is reminiscent of the reception given by Horace to
the poetic efforts of Julius Florus and his young friends (Epist. 1.3) orÂ€– less kindly (and perhaps
more accurately)Â€– of the list of non-entities pointedly provided by Ovid in his review of the lit-
erary scene in his absence from Rome (Epist. Pont. 4.16).
49
Sherwin-White 1966:Â€ 289; see also Fantham 1996:Â€ 217; Hoffer 1999:Â€ 166–7; I. Marchesi 2008:
67–8.
50
On Pliny’s poetry in general, see now I. Marchesi 2008:Â€53–96; also Hershkowitz 1995; Gamberini
1983:Â€82–121; compare the commentary of Courtney 1993:Â€367–70 on the surviving fragments.
probably, his career as a publisher of speeches in the mould of Cicero and
others in the past (and for which his Letters act, at least initially, as a kind
of insurance policy).51
The kind of poetry which Pliny writes can now be put together with the
moment at which the author chooses to introduces his poetry. His hen-
decasyllables appear in Book 4, immediately after the book which marks
Pliny’s arrival in the top stratum of Roman society. On 1 September,
AD 100, Pliny became consul.52 This moment is underlined in Book 3 by
Pliny’s references to the reading and revision of his Panegyricus, a speech
addressed to Trajan and rendering thanks for his ascension to the summit
of the cursus honorum. It is only after this key progression in his political
career that Pliny chooses to reveal in Book 4 the next step in his literary
career. Having extensively trailed his career as a writer of Ciceronian-style
forensic speeches, and having allowed us to track his development as a
writer of exemplary letters, Pliny now reveals that his next step is into
poetryÂ€– and trifling, nugatory, Catullan, somewhat risqué poetry at that.
His political career has reached its summit; but his literary career shows
no sign of generic ascension. Quite the opposite in fact. This is a generic
choice which refuses to make the same kind of progression in the literary
field which Pliny’s other career had just so clearly made in the political
field.
Generic ascent was a viable option for the Younger Pliny. He might
have turned his hand towards patriotic and national epic, such as the
consular Silius Italicus produced in his leisure time (Epist. 3.7), and to
which Pliny in a rather later book admits having occasionally turned his
hand (Epist. 7.4).53 Alternatively, as the Elder Pliny moved from theoreticalÂ�
rhetÂ�orical-grammatical works on to history in the grand manner of
Aufidius Bassus, so the Younger might have moved from publishing
examples of rhetoric in practice and epistles ‘upwards’ into imperial his-
tory. In fact Pliny floats this as a possibility in his next book. For in Book 5,
he considers emulating the example of his uncle in the field of historiog-
raphy. In Epist. 5.8, Pliny admits the attractions of history as a genre over
51
For this last point, see Mayer 2003b. Pliny’s letters in some measure retell the ‘story’ of his
speeches, and in this sense Pliny’s output resembles Cicero’s multiple attempts to retell the story
of his consulship across a range of genres. The one exception here is Pliny’s poetry, whichÂ€– in
accordance with the expectations of senatorial light verseÂ€– may have done little such retelling.
52
For the major dates of Pliny’s political careerÂ€– many being a matter of debateÂ€– see the most
recent reconstruction in Birley 2000:Â€5–17.
53
Nevertheless, for the pressures acting on Pliny which made a choice of epic unlikely, see
I. Marchesi 2008:Â€61–2.
oratory and poetry (4) and suggests that the example of his uncle gives
strong encouragement (5):
me uero ad hoc studium impellit domesticum quoque exemplum. auunculus
meus idemque per adoptionem pater historias et quidem religiosissime scripsit.
In my case family precedent is an additional incentive to work of this kind. My
uncle, who was my father also by adoption, was a historian of scrupulous accuracy.
Pliny insists, however, by way of apology, that he is currently planning to
revise all his important speeches and that one cannot realistically expect
to rewrite speeches and write history at the same time (6–8).54 The let-
ter ends, nevertheless, with an invitation to the addressee to give some
thought to what period might appropriately be treated; Pliny would not
be deterred even from writing modern history (12–13).
The history was never completed (perhaps not started)Â€– or at least Pliny
does not mention it again. Nevertheless, the important point is that Pliny
does put himself on recordÂ€– like Cicero in De Legibus 1.5–12 (a passage
clearly in the Younger’s mind here)Â€– as contemplating a move to history.
And Pliny confesses, not without some attempt at irony, that the move
from rhetoric to history would be a kind of ‘ascent’. The greater potential
for history rather than rhetoric to grant an author fame is admitted (4,
6–7), and, while oratory and history are agreed to have much in common,
it is conceded that they differ in terms of importance of topic covered
(history being less mundane) (9).
Nevertheless, after his ascent to the summit of the cursus honorumÂ€ –
and here is the nub of the argument about PlinyÂ€– it would seem to be a
matter of indifference whether, alongside his letters and speeches, Pliny
write hendecasyllabic poetry or turn his hand to history. Pliny’s literary
careerÂ€ – at least as it is presented in the LettersÂ€ – begins at an already
elevated generic level, with forensic and panegyrical speeches (and the
epistles which record these literary endeavours). But once the summit of
the political career has been ascended, Pliny allows himself to descend to
nugatory poetry in Book 4 or to consider varying his output with history
in Book 5. The ‘generic cursus honorum’, it would appear for Pliny, is a
matter of indifference to one who has completed its political counterpart.
54
Epist. 5.8 in fact represents the first act in Pliny’s big push towards the revision of his speeches.
The earlier books contain numerous references to the revision of speeches for publication, which
are then in Book 4 rather overshadowed by the preoccupation with poetry, only to reappear in
Book 5 (here and at 5.12), before dominating Books 7 to 9 (where, however, verse does not dis-
appear by any means); see Sherwin-White 1966:Â€334 on Epist. 5.8.6, also Sherwin-White 1966:Â€91
on Epist. 1.2.6.
Such pointed ‘indifference’ gives some support to the idea of Pliny’s
underlying desireÂ€ – suggested earlierÂ€ – to associate a career of generic
ascent with non-senators. The clearest example of a ‘Virgilian’ literary
career in the Letters is constructed for that equestrian among equesÂ�
trians, Pliny the Elder. The senator and consul Pliny the Younger, by con-
trast, flaunts the non-progressive nature of his literary career after he has
ascended to the summit of the cursus honorum. One reason why it might
have been useful for him to emphasise the redundancy of the progressive
model is the spectre of Tacitus. The literary career of the latter, starting
from such minor works as the Agricola, Germania and Dialogus and rising
eventually to imperial history, preserves the same upwards trajectory as
that of the Elder Pliny. This most eminent of senators and consuls can-
not, of course, be convincingly associated with ‘equestrian’ literary pro-
gressiveness. But it is nevertheless useful for Pliny to hint that the model
of generic ascent is not invariably appropriate to a senator, particularly
in Book 5. For, as Syme suggested, Epist. 5.8 may record the moment
when Pliny catches first wind of Tacitus’ composition of the Histories (or
presents himself as doing so).55
To bolster this position, Pliny had of course the example of Cicero.
While Pliny never contemplates full generic profligacy in the Ciceronian
mannerÂ€ – no works of philosophy or rhetorical theory are advertised
(although the Panegyricus does contain elements of political theory)Â€ –
Pliny does place emphasis on Cicero’s importance as a literary role model.
Cicero sets the standard for Pliny’s speeches (1.5.12 ‘personally I do try to
copy Cicero … and am not satisfied with the oratory of today’, 1.20.4),
letters (9.2.1–2 [of a request that Pliny write long letters] ‘besides, I lacked
subject matter for writing more. You want me to follow Cicero’s example,
but my position is very different from his’), and, not least, his poetry in
the nugatory mode, where Cicero heads the list of exemplars (5.3.5 ‘but
surely I need not be afraid that this practice is unsuitable for me, when it
was perfectly proper in the case of Cicero, C. Calvus, Asinius Pollio …’;
compare 7.4.3–6). But Pliny could profitably use Cicero as a model not
only for individual works, but also for his literary career as a whole (see
esp. 4.8.4 M. Tullius … quem aemulari in studiis cupio, ‘Cicero … whom
I am anxious to make my model in my literary work’). Just as the repub-
lican Cicero moved freely between genres without thought of ascent or
Syme 1958:Â€ 117 ‘The consular orator (it appears) was hankering after history. There was one
55
impediment, however, that he does not mention. The best subject, embracing both written and
unwritten annals, had already been undertaken.’
generic progress, so might a latter-day Cicero follow his model and avoid
the pressure placed (latterly) on him by the example of Tacitus. Cicero’s
generic profligacy, of course, is driven by the subordination of his literary
to his political career. Pliny’s generic indifference cannot have the same
source, for he lives under a political system which supplies personal con-
straints of which Cicero knew nothing (9.2.2–3):56
illi enim et copiosissimum ingenium, et par ingenio qua uarietas rerum qua
magnitudo largissime suppetebat; nos quam angustis terminis claudamur etiam
tacente me perspicis.
[Cicero] was not only richly gifted but was supplied with a wealth of varied and
important topics to suit his abilities, though you know without my telling you
the narrow limits confining me.
There was little enough fame to be had from a career in the law courtsÂ€– as
Pliny himself is quite aware.57 Literature cannot be subordinated to politics;
rather, it is literature alone, in the absence of opportunity for significant
(political) actions, which now offers a chance for lasting fame (3.7.14):58
sed tanto magis hoc, quidquid est temporis futilis et caduci, si non datur fac-
tis (nam horum materia in aliena manu), certe studiis proferamus, et quatenus
nobis denegatur diu uiuere, relinquamus aliquid, quo nos uixisse testemur.
All the more reason then why we should prolong all our passing moments,
uncertain though they are, not perhaps by action, since here the opportunity no
longer rests with us, but at any rate by literary work. Since we are denied a long
life, let us leave something to bear witness that at least we have lived.
The only field in which Pliny does reveal full and positive generic prof-
ligacy is that of poetry.59 A letter on the author’s poetic career, late in the
collection, confirms in retrospect Pliny’s commitment to generic indiffer-
ence in the larger sense. In Epist. 7.4, Pliny confesses that he has always
been interested in poetry and provides a full survey of his poetic career to
date. At age 14 he composed a Greek tragedy (2), before attempting next
Latin elegiacs about the sea and islands (3). Next he reveals that he has
‘occasionally tried [his] hand at epic verse’ (3 expertus sum me aliquando et
56
Cf. 3.20.10–12.
57
See 2.14.1 (of cases at the Centumviral court) sunt enim pleraeque paruae et exiles; raro incidit uel
personarum claritate uel negotii magnitudine insignis. Pliny is more sunnily optimistic elsewhere
about these courts; see Sherwin-White 1966:Â€181 ad loc.
58
Compare 5.8.2–4. For the Elder’s own valuation of literary over political achievement, see Beagon
2005:Â€51 on the eulogy of Cicero at Nat. 7.116–17.
59
For his generic profligacy across prose and verse, Pliny constructs only a ‘negative’ manifesto:Â€in
9.29 he declares he tries his hand at many genres because he cannot be supremely good at one
(although Sherwin-White 1966:Â€512 takes the reference here to be to verse alone).
heroo), and that the book of poetry which is the subject of the letter is the
ultimate result of his first attempt some time ago at hendecasyllables (3).
Cicero’s epigram to Tiro is cited as the explicit inspiration for Pliny’s own
light verse (3–6). Pliny’s poetic career then took him back to elegiacs (7),
and next on to an attempt at other metres in scattered moments of leis-
ure (8 ‘whenever I had time, especially when travelling’),60 before a final
decision was made to put together a separate volume of hendecasyllables
(8–9).
Again the poetic ‘career’ outlined by here Pliny conforms to Farrell’s
‘complementary’ pattern. More importantly, Pliny’s interest in and
involvement with verse has been more or less a constant since he was a boy
of 14. Yet, as we have seen, there is no mention of it until Book 4, after
Pliny has reached the consulate. Such leisure-time verse, it seems, must be
kept hidden while ascending the cursus honorum, but upon completion of
the cursus may be paradedÂ€– perhaps as evidence of the success of the pol-
itical career. Furthermore, Pliny’s hidden poetic career displays the same
disregard for generic progression from high to low which his broader
literary careerÂ€ – of speeches, letters, poetry and contemplated historyÂ€–
also parades. For in this hidden poetic career, Pliny traces a path which
evinces the same sort of generic profligacy which Cicero displayed across
his larger literary career, both in poetry and prose. Pliny’s non-hierarchi-
cal movement between genres is confirmed by the verb chosen to describe
his passage from hendecasyllables to elegiacs:Â€transii ad elegos (7 ‘I passed
on to elegiac verses’).61 Here is a disregard for Virgilian poetic progres-
sion from low to high:Â€Pliny refrains from fashioning his poetic career as
progression upwards through the genres. This is in obvious contast to his
other ‘political’ career, which was a classic example of orthodox movement
60
The contrast with how the Elder Pliny used his travelling time rather more seriouslyÂ€– described
in Epist. 3.5.15–16Â€– cannot but be deliberate. The Younger, following the ascension of the senat-
orial cursus honorum, underlines his difference by writing verse in the manner of previous con-
suls (see Epist. 5.3). There is a also a strong hint of a contrast between respective literary-political
careers:Â€the Elder wrote the De Iaculatione Equestri ‘when he was a junior officer in the cavalry’
(3.5.3), and the work on the German Wars was begun ‘during his military service in Germany’
(3.5.4); but the Younger reveals that he ‘wrote some Latin elegiacs with the island and sea for
theme’ while ‘on [his] way home from military service’ and he was ‘weatherbound in the island
of Icaria’ (7.4.3). Even in his youthÂ€– we belatedly learn here in Book 7Â€– the Younger was head-
ing in a distinctly dilettantish direction, appropriate to a future consul and quite different from
the equestrian Elder. If these strong contrasts between Epist. 3.5 and 7.4 constitute an invitation
to compare literary careers, then it will be seen that 7.4 deliberately eschews the upward generic
ascent implicitly attributed in 3.5 to the Elder.
61
For an alternative reading of this complex letter, and the way in which it first sets up ‘an
ascending order of cultural importance’ in verse only to reverse it immediately, see I. Marchesi
2008:Â€78–88.
up the political cursus honorum. Here we may Â�contrast Catullus, Pliny’s
hendecasyllabic model. As Farrell argues,62 Catullus perhaps meant his
poetic career to be the antithesis ofÂ€– in the sense of a rebuke toÂ€– the
political cursus honorum:Â€ though he composed in a dazzling array of
genres, Catullus ‘does nothing to define his career as progressing over
time through a hierarchy of genres’. This poet, who defines himself in
opposition to the cursus honorum, finds himself adoptedÂ€ – and neutral-
izedÂ€– as model by Pliny as he catches his breath in the intervals of pur-
suing the conventional honours of this same political paradigm. Pliny’s
poetic career is the antithesis of the cursus honorum only in the sense that
it provides relief from its pressures to climb upwards, perhaps (later) even
a sign of having completed it successfully.63
In sum, Cicero and Pliny were both authors (primarily) of prose whose
political careers followed the normal ascent up the cursus honorum, but
whose literary careers are marked instead by flexibility and evince few
signs of sustained generic ‘progression’. The reasons for the ‘indistinctness’
of the two literary careers differ markedly. Cicero’s generic profligacy is
the product of his desire to multiply possibilities for the public commu-
nication of his evolving political career. For Pliny the political imperative
is necessarily less paramount. His generic indifference is driven rather by
a desire to rise above the new Virgilian model of generic ascent, and to
insinuate the idea that one who has risen up the political cursus honorum
need not concern himself with its literary counterpart.
62
Farrell 2002:Â€43.
63
For Pliny’s general ideological suppression of Catullus the social radical, see the brilliant study
of Roller 1998; see also I. Marchesi 2008:Â€62–78. In the preface to the Natural History, the Elder
Pliny adopts towards Catullus the rather different stance of (submerged) hostility and mockery;
see Howe 1985:Â€567–70.
Ch apter 7
Re-inventing Virgil’s Wheel:Â€the poet and

his work from Dante to Petrarch*
Andrew Laird
The Italian word for ‘career’, carriera, had become associated with a
working life or employment from the mid-1600s, long before its English
equivalent acquired the same sense in the early nineteenth century.1 In
fact the first attested use of carriera in this way was in association with
the profession of literature. In the preface to his Trattato dell’arte e dello
stile del dialogo (1662), the historian and poet Pietro Sforza Pallavicino
expressed his thanks to the Bishop of Fermo for encouraging his ‘child-
hood in the career of letters’ (la mia puerizia nella carriera delle lettere).2
Carriera, like the Latin via carraria from which it derives, originally
denoted a ‘carriage road’ or track for a wheeled vehicle (carrus).3 The
meaning turns out to have a felicitous bearing on the idea of the literary
career which is unlikely to be coincidence:Â€in the middle ages, the most
influential literary career of all was visualized as a wheelÂ€– the rota Vergilii
or rota Vergiliana (‘the Wheel of Virgil’.)4 An arrangement of the poet’s
works and their respective themes and styles in a circular diagram seems
to have developed from the use of rota as synecdoche for the Classical
image of the Muses’ chariot, an image mediated by the schoolmasters of
late antiquity.5 And when Virgil conceives his poetic cursus as a military
*â•‡I am very grateful to Carlo Caruso, Philip Hardie and Antonio Ziosi for their comments on this
chapter. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
1
Battaglia 1961–2003, vol. II, sv. carriera, § 8. (‘fig. indirizzo dato alla propria vita, studio, profes-
sione’) citing Pallavicino 1662 and Frugoni 1960. Battisti and Alessio 1950–7, vol. I, 781 concurs
with the seventeenth-century origin of the figurative use, as does Cortelazzo and Zolli 1979,
which also cites the first use by Pallavicino.
2
Pallavicino 1662:Â€3. Cardinal Pietro Sforza Pallavicino (1607–67) published an apologetical his-
tory of the Council of Trent. His literary works include a poem in octaves, I Fasti cristiani (1636),
and a tragedy, Ermenegildo (1644).
3
Compare Cheney 2002a:Â€8 and Hardie and Moore’s Introduction to this volume, on uses of the
word ‘career’.
4
On the rota, see Laugesen 1962; Hardie and Moore, Introduction, and Putnam above, Ch. 1, in
this volume.
5
Bajoni 1997 is an ingenious demonstration of this, adducing testimonia from Sidonius Apollinaris
and Ausonius, with a range of earlier Classical sources.
138
Re-inventing Virgil’s Wheel 139
triumph at the opening of Georgics Book 3, he envisages himself as a vic-
tor, crowned with palms, who will set a hundred chariots in motion.6
That passage has been taken to hint at a future epic, but Virgil gives no
more explicit indication of his poetic programme from one work to the
next.7 Taken as a whole his compositions really only indicate a de facto
progression from the bucolic to didactic poetry, and then from didactic
to epic. However, the four hexameter verses which were long transmit-
ted as the poet’s own introduction to the Aeneid place the epic as the last
in a planned sequence of his compositions.8 On the basis of those verses
alone, medieval readers might readily assume, as had Virgil’s ancient biogÂ�
raphers, that the high poetic genre of epic represented the culmination of
his achievement.
What follows can only provide a very selective account of the emulation
of Virgil’s ascending course in Dante and Petrarch.9 The focus will be on
their works in Latin, so that most attention will be devoted to Petrarch, as
his Latin writingsÂ€– especially those in verseÂ€– engage far more frequently
and intensively with the Roman poet than those of Dante. However,
the first part of this discussion (I) will summarize the significance that
Virgil acquires in Dante’s work, with some reference to the vernacular
Commedia. That short treatment will put into relief the rather different
character of Petrarch’s reception.10 A brief account of the way Petrarch’s
Latin poetic works accumulate to display a trajectory which is explicitly
Virgilian (II) will be followed by a more extensive examination (III) of
passages from the Africa and two epistles from Familiares Book 24. A
complex and competitive interaction with the poet of the Aeneid is exhib-
ited in Petrarch’s epic, whilst imitation is directly explored through the
persona he adopts in his letters to Homer and Virgil. As well as recogni-
tion of the notion of persona, a distinction between the rationalized author
and the historical author will be important for the conclusion (IV).11
6
Virg. Geo. 3.17–18; see Hardie 1993b:Â€100–1.
7
Passages commonly viewed as connecting Virgil’s works are Georgics 3.1–48, Georgics 4.559–66
(in relation to Eclogue 1.1), Aeneid 1.742–6 (in relation to Eclogue 6.64 and Georgics 1.1–6).
8
See Putnam above, Ch. 1 in this volume, and Horsfall 2000a:Â€24 and 300 on these verses. Laird
2003 considers their significance for later performance and reception of the Aeneid.
9
Good orientations on Virgil and Dante are Comparetti 1997, Consoli 1984, C. Hardie 1984,
Highet 1976:Â€70–80, Villa 2009, Whitfield 1969, Zabughin 1921:Â€i.3–21; for Virgil in Petrarch see
Billanovich 1947, Feo 1988, Highet 1949a:Â€81–8, Nolhac 1907, Zabughin 1921:Â€i.21–38.
10
Petrarch’s handling of Virgil can prompt some conclusions about his relation to Dante, even
though Dante’s role as a model or foil for Petrarch’s career cannot be pursued directly here:Â€see
e.g. Feo 1973, Baranski and McLaughlin 2007.
11
The rationalized author is constructed by the reader from the text (whether the reader imagi-
nes him as present in the text, or as the mastermind behind it) and cannot possess any of the
attributes of an historical authorÂ€– except, conventionally, his or her name. Any details of the
140 Andrew Laird
In trecento Italy, an environment in which the Roman practices of the
triumph and of crowning poets with laurel were being enthusiastically
revived, the attempt to re-enact Virgil’s role took literary homage into
broader social and political domains. Petrarch’s coronation in Rome in
1341 represents at once acclaim for his individual success and the confirmÂ�
ation of continuity with Italy’s Roman past.12 Thus the appropriations of
Virgil in both Dante and Petrarch are normally approached from a his-
torical and biographical perspective.13 However, the aim of the following
discussion is to show how author-oriented criticism can advance specific-
ally literary interpretation of Dante and Petrarch in relation to VirgilÂ€–
without appeals to intentionalist models of poetic communication and
without giving centre stage to biographical questions.14
I
The greatest writer of the middle ages was far more of an originator than an
imitator. Dante’s works in Latin and Italian, in prose and verse, combine
Christian thought with the influence of writers from Classical antiquity.
Given the thematic and disciplinary range of his oeuvre, it is unsurpris-
ing that the author whom Dante invokes most in his works is Aristotle.
But Virgil’s prominence is striking:Â€leaving aside his role as companion to
the dramatized figure of Dante in the Commedia, the number of citations
or echoes of his work (mostly, though not entirely, from the Aeneid) is
almost equal to that of all the references to Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Cicero
and Boethius put together.15 Although the popular myths of Virgil as a
historical author, including his other works, are usually discounted for the purposes of categoric-
ally literary interpretation because they will be extraneous to the text from which the rationalized
author derives. Thus the text of The Catcher in the Rye has a named narrator (persona), Holden
Caulfield, and an author (the rationalized author) whom the reader perceives to be ultimately
responsible for generating Holden, for concocting the fictional events Holden experiences and
for staging the manner in which Holden relates them. For convenience, this author who is con-
structed from the text is referred to as ‘J. D. Salinger’. The reclusive writer of that name who
lived in New Hampshire is quite different (the historical author). For further discussion of issues
raised by these distinctions, see Laird 1999:Â€71–4, 211–13.
12
Dante refused the honour of coronation because he was in exile (n. 20 below). The significance
of the laurel crown for Petrarch is explored in Usher 2009. A text of the Collatio laureationis or
‘Coronation Oration’ is in Godi 1988; English translation in Wilkins 1955:Â€300–13.
13
Holmes 1980:Â€ 1 remarks:Â€ ‘Dante’s ideas evolved in response to important experiences … His
thought was in a constant state of evolution which is why a biographical approach to it is essen-
tial.’ Similar approaches are naturally applied to Petrarch, e.g. Dotti 1987.
14
This is not, of course, to deny that biographical information is important for an historical under-
standing of the thought of Dante and Petrarch and no pretence is made that it can be ignored
insofar as the historical authors are involved in what follows (n. 11 above).
15
Highet 1976:Â€79 summarizes the statistics collected in Moore 1896 for the main Classical sources
in all of Dante’s works.
sorcerer still current in Dante’s time are disregarded, the presentation of
the poet in his work is still very different from that provided by Petrarch
and other later Italian humanists.16 In particular Dante lays emphasis on
Eclogue 4 as a prophecy of the birth of Christ and on the allegorical or
‘polysemous’ quality of Virgil’s expression.17
Two passages in his Latin writings in which Dante claims for him-
self something like his ancient predecessor’s ability and achievement will
be reviewed here. First, in a chapter (2.4) of the De Vulgari Eloquentia
(written between 1302 and 1305) which warns amateurs against casually
attempting vernacular poetry on the weighty subjects of salvation, love
and virtue, Dante moves towards what appears to be a coy characteriza-
tion of his own accomplishment:
Caveat ergo quilibet et discernat ea que dicimus et quando hec tria pure cantare
intendit, vel que ad ea directe ac pure secuntur, prius Elicone potatus, tensis fidi-
bus ad supremum, secure plectrum tum movere incipiat. Sed cautionem atque
discretionem hanc accipere, sicut decet, hic opus et labor est, quoniam nunquam
sine strenuitate ingenii et artis assiduitate scientiarumque habitu fieri potest. Et
hii sunt quos Poeta Eneidorum sexto Dei dilectos et ab ardente virtute sublimatos
ad ethera deorumque filios vocat, quanquam figurate loquatur. Et ideo confutetur
illorum stultitia qui, arte scientiaque immunes, de solo ingenio confidentes, ad
summa summe canenda prorumpunt; et a tanta presumptuositate desistant, et si
anseres natura vel desidia sunt, nolint astripetam aquilam imitari.
Caution and discrimination in what I am talking about are required and let
anyone who intends to sing of the three great subjects [salus, amor, virtus] purely
and simply, or things which directly and purely bear on them, let him first drink
of Helicon and then, after finely tuning the strings, confidently begin to use
the plectrum. But exercizing proper caution and discernment, this is the work
and toil, since it cannot be done without strenuous exercise of talent (ingenium),
constant practice of the art, and habitual mastery of the sciences. It is those [so
inclined] whom the poet of the sixth book of the Aeneid calls ‘beloved of God’
and ‘exalted by fiery virtue to the heavens’ and ‘the sons of the gods’, although
he is speaking figuratively. And so for those untouched by art and science rely-
ing on their native talent alone who burst forth to sing of high subjects in a
high manner, let their stupidity stand confuted and let them cease from such
16
Whitfield 1969:Â€94–5 remarks ‘Boccaccio, so often hailed as the initiator of the Renaissance, is
more medieval than Dante. For Dante … gives no heed at any point to the childish legend which
had grown up around Virgil the Magician’ (the story told by Boccaccio that Virgil freed Naples
of a plague of flies and mosquitoes).
17
This observation does not solely rely on Dante’s Latin letter to Can Grande (edited in Toynbee
1920:Â€ 166–211), the authenticity of which is much debated:Â€ see e.g. Cecchini 1995. Fulgentius’
mediation of an allegorizing Virgil is crucial to the Commedia:Â€Maresca 1981, Laird 2001. Virgil
first appears in Convivio 4.4–5 where he is praised in the context of a celebration of Rome’s
imperial mission.
142 Andrew Laird
presumption:Â€if they are geese by nature or by indolence, they should not wish to
imitate the starwards flight of the eagle.
Echoes of Virgil perfuse this part of the treatise on the Italian Â�vernacular.18
The phrase hic opus et labor est (‘this is the work and toil’) recalls the
Sibyl’s warning to Aeneas about the difficulty of ascending from Avernus
to the world above (Aeneid 6.129); through her very next words (6.129–31),
Dante tells us, Virgil is ‘speaking figuratively’ about poets. The contrast
between the goose and eagle which closes this chapter of the De Vulgari
Eloquentia also has its source in Virgil:Â€in Eclogue 9.35–7, Lycidas consid-
ered his poetry inferior to that of Varius and Cinna and described himself
as a goose honking among shrill swans. Dante’s proud deprecation of the
geese, his substitution of the eagle for the swans, and his supposition that
he, like Virgil, can make these discriminations suggest that he regards his
own status as comparable.
The second passage is from the first of the two Latin Eclogues which
Dante composed in response to a letter in Latin hexameters he received
in 1319 from Giovanni del Virgilio, a professor at Bologna. Giovanni
praised the Commedia (which he has read as far as the Purgatorio) but
gently reproached its author for writing in Italian, urging him to com-
pose an epic in Latin on a martial theme. As a follower of Virgil (vocalis
verna Maronis), Giovanni would be happy to crown Dante with garlands
before the cheering students of Bologna.19 Dante’s reply took the form
of a bucolic poem in which the persona of Tityrus, often identified with
Virgil, turned down this request.20 But to placate Giovanni who was cast
as the absent Mopsus, Tityrus pledged to send him ten vessels of milk
from his favourite ewe. This is widely agreed to stand for ten cantos of the
recently finished Paradiso but in such a pastoral context the ten Eclogues
are doubtless in play as well. A likely implication is that the vernacular
Commedia represented a bold fusion of Virgil’s bucolic and heroic modes.
Dante’s experiments in pastoral are a form of recusatioÂ€– to refrain from
composing a Virgilian epic, but they ended up contributing to a major
trend. Petrarch and Boccaccio both produced pastoral poetry in Latin,
and later Renaissance authors followed suit. If writing Latin bucolic came
to be a benchmark for those aspiring to a Virgilian curriculum, Dante
had a part in this.
18
For the conjunction of Helicon with movere compare Aeneid 7.641, 9.163 (also Dante, Purgatorio
29.40).
19
The texts of this correspondence are in Bolisani and Valgimigli 1963.
20
Tityrus indicates (41–9) that he would prefer to be crowned by the river Arno in FlorenceÂ€– from
where Dante was exiled. Compare Paradiso 25.1–9.
Among many other things, Virgil’s role in the Commedia as a guide
through Hell and Purgatory indicates that his poetry in Latin contrib-
uted to Dante’s capacity to describe and present in Italian a vision of eter-
nity. What the Commedia reveals about Dante’s actual perception of his
creative course in relation to that of his ancient Roman predecessor has
to be a matter of conjecture. Too much can be made of the dramatized
Dante’s courteous declaration to Virgil in Inferno 1.86–7:Â€‘You are alone
the one from whom I took the fine style [lo bello stile] that has brought me
honour’Â€– this is odd given that he writes in a different style, a different
metre and a different language. Conversely in Purgatorio, it is the charac-
ter of Virgil who says when taking his leave:
‘Tratto t’ho qui con ingegno e con arte;
lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce
…
Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno;
libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio.’
Purg. 27.130–1, 139–42
‘I have brought you here with poetic talent and with skill. Take henceforth
your pleasure as your guide … No longer expect word or sign from me. Free,
upright and whole is your will, and it would be an error not to act on its bidding;
Â�therefore over yourself I crown and mitre you.’
The poet is thus staged as formally disowning any status he may have had
as a model.
But another important association between Dante and Virgil rests on
the latter’s reputation as a Christian avant la lettre or at least as an uncon-
scious witness to the faith.21 The significance of the apparent prediction of
the birth of Christ by the Sibyl in Eclogue 4 was reinforced by her function
as seer in the underworld of Aeneid Book 6Â€– and the whole of the Aeneid
is concerned with the fulfilment of the great prophecy of the establish-
ment of Rome which would have so much consequence for the Christian
era. Consequently, throughout the Commedia Dante draws connections
between pagan antiquity and the Weltanschauung of his own epoch and
his own self-portrayal:Â€thus the imperial Roman poet Statius is portrayed
as a Christian converted by his reading of Virgil in Purgatorio, and in
Dante’s celebrated account of his encounter with Homer, Horace, Ovid
and Lucan in Inferno 4, those Classical poets, along with Virgil, welcome
â•‡ Augustine, Epistula ad Volusianum 137.12:Â€see further Comparetti 1997:Â€96–103.

21
144 Andrew Laird
the Tuscan vernacular author as a sixth member of their ‘fair school’, la
bella scola.22 The Commedia also contains a number of prophecies of its
own, notably of the birth of a saviour of Italy in the first canto of Inferno
(1.100–11) which resonates with Jupiter’s foretelling of the foundation of a
Roman imperium ‘without end’ in the first book of the Aeneid.23
Dante’s De Monarchia had affirmed that an empire uniting human-
ity was God’s will, and this idea of empire is endorsed in many parts of
the Commedia:Â€in Inferno 34.61–7 Dante and Virgil witness Satan as he
devours Caesar’s assassins Brutus and Cassius, along with Judas Iscariot.24
Finally the choice of title for the Commedia indicates that the work’s con-
ception is designed to match the Aeneid rather than merely imitate it. At
Inferno 20.113, Virgil refers to his epic as l’alta mia tragedia. By calling his
own work a ‘comedy’ Dante is aligning it with Virgil’s tragedy, a comple-
ment to it, if not an actual rival.25
The author of the Commedia (far more than in other texts such as the
De Monarchia and the De Vulgari Eloquentia) emulates the position of
Virgil in history and eschatology, and not merely in poetry. This form
of appropriation goes beyond purely literary competition:Â€any attempt to
construct a ‘literary life’ for Dante through his works has to accommo-
date apprehension of political, religious and scientific sources as well as
poetic models.26 And those poetic modelsÂ€– Virgil is very much a case in
pointÂ€– cannot be conceived as exclusively literary either.27
22
Statius appears in Purgatorio 21; in Purgatorio 22.64–73 he explains how the fourth Eclogue led
him towards Christianity. Highet 1976:Â€70–80 provides an excellent accounts of Dante’s relation
to pagan antiquity, and Curtius 1953:Â€17–30 of its context and origins in the ‘Latin Middle Ages’.
23
Hollander and Russo 2003 discover significant numerological connections between Dantean and
Virgilian prophecies. Purgatorio 33 is connected to the momentous historical prediction that an
unidentified figure will come to bring peace and unity to a troubled Italy:Â€Holmes 1980:Â€93–4.
24
See Convivio 4.4–5 (n. 17 above).
25
See Highet 1949a:Â€ 70–1. Although medieval comicus and tragicus did not correspond respect-
ively to our own idea of comedy and tragedy, comedy was a lower genre than tragedy, as Dante
recognizes in De Vulgari Eloquentia. Horace, Ars Poetica 93–4 tamen et uocem comoedia tollit ‘yet
comedy elevates its tone’, provided some authorization for regarding comedy as on a par with tra-
gedy:Â€the passage, quoted at the beginning of the Epistle to Can Grande, was known to Dante,
whether or not he was author of the letter (n. 17 above). Villa 2009:Â€ 143–7 examines Dante’s
understanding of comedy in connection with other ancient sources including Virgil. The rela-
tion between Virgil and tragedy in antiquity, with ramifications for later periods, is addressed in
Pöschl 1978 and Hardie 1997b.
26
Cheney 2002a:Â€6 bears on this:Â€‘Such holistic commentary [sc. ‘on the total oeuvre of an author from
beginning to end’] differs from other overview accounts by emphasizing the category of the literary
(rather than, say, the biographical, which often includes the non-literary) … we can define career
criticism as a form of commentary that looks holistically at the literary dimension of a writer’s life,
especially as that life is grounded in his or her works.’ The formalist response to this would be that
the category of the literary naturally excludes the biographical anyway; but the ‘literary dimension of
a writer’s life grounded in his works’ can be nothing other than a form of biography.
27
Curtius 1953:Â€207–8, 221–7.
II
Petrarch, like Dante, is more celebrated for his poetry in Italian than for
his prose and verse in Latin, though he set far greater store by the latter.
His work too conjoins pagan and Christian influences, but draws from
a wider range of Classical textsÂ€– and in more detail. In a Latin letter he
wrote at the end his life (Seniles 16.1), Petrarch recounts that his father
burned all his books, except those by Virgil and Cicero, in order to pun-
ish him for reading Classical literature instead of law. The pervasiveness
of both Classical authors in his work does justice to that story.28 But while
the Dante of the Commedia could portray himself being welcomed into
the scola of the Classical poets, Petrarch tends to emphasize his sense of
distance or even exclusion from their company.29
As well as being the object of Petrarch’s scholarly attention (demon-
strated by his extensive annotations on the Ambrosian manuscript from
1338 onwards), Virgil was also involved with his self-presentation.30 The
Bucolicum Carmen and Africa are conceived along the lines of the Eclogues
and the Aeneid respectively, but Petrarch’s own place in literary history
is a concern in both those texts.31 In the tenth eclogue of the Bucolicum
Carmen, after the death of the laurel at 376–7 (representing both Laura,
the mistress of the Canzoniere, and Classical poetry), the future of
Classical learning and literature is entrusted to Silvanus (who stands for
Petrarch himself); the ninth book of the Africa has FranciscusÂ€ – that is
Francesco PetrarchÂ€ – hailed as Ennius’ long-awaited successor by none
other than Homer.32
In the last letter of the Seniles, known as Epistola Posteritati (‘Letter to
Posterity’) probably written in the year before his death in 1374, Petrarch
28
An earlier letter (Familiares 22.10) had affirmed that Cicero and Virgil meant more to him than
any living man. As well as the influence of the Tusculan Disputations on the De Remediis utriusque
Fortunae, Cicero’s correspondence is the obvious inspiration for Petrarch’s 477 prose letters col-
lected in the Familiares and the Seniles. The burning of the books is a literary conceit with many
obvious precedents in Classical literature:Â€compare Familiares 24.11.62–3 quoted below. For later
variants of the conceit see Krevans below, Ch. 10 in this volume.
29
Greene 1982:Â€ 28–32, cited in an essential chapter on imitatio in Petrarch:Â€ McLaughlin
1995:Â€22–48.
30
Petrarch’s postille on the Ambrosian Virgil are edited in Baglio, Nebuloni Testa and Petoletti
2006. W. J. Kennedy 2002 treats Petrarch’s self-presentation in relation to Virgil; a chapter enti-
tled ‘The life as work of art’ in Mann 1984:Â€87–104 is a good general account.
31
Fielding 2006 is a recent exploration of Virgil’s influence on the Bucolicum Carmen. Fraenkel
1927:Â€487:Â€‘in grossen Stücken ein erstaunliches Denkmal für die Zeugungskraft des virgilischen
Epos’ (my emphasis). Virgil’s pervasive influence on the Africa is now well established after
Nolhac 1907:Â€Hardie 1993a:Â€295–302, Kallendorf 1989, Seagraves 1976 and Foster 1979.
32
Freccero 1986 examines the role of laurel in Petrarch’s self-creation in the Canzoniere and other
texts.
146 Andrew Laird
offers a narrative of his life which follows a Virgilian path.33 Dates and fac-
tual details are effaced in favour of a more idealistic ‘autobiography’:Â€the
writer’s visit to Rome recalls Aeneas’ movement from Carthage to Italy,
but most significantly mention of the Bucolicum Carmen in this text pre-
cedes that of the Africa in order to give the impression that the latter, like
Virgil’s Aeneid, represents the culmination of a life’s workÂ€– when in fact
Petrarch had embarked upon his unfinished epic in 1338–1342, some four
or five years before his endeavour in pastoral.
This sustained and systematic emulation, fashioned over the course of
some decades, should not be summarized as crudely as it has been here.34
But what makes Petrarch’s appropriation of Virgil distinct from Dante’s
is clear enough. Apart from the imitation (or parody) of Virgil in his
Eclogues, Dante uses the Aeneid as an impetus for the independent experi-
ment of the Commedia. On the other hand Petrarch’s detailed knowÂ�
ledge of Virgil’s entire oeuvre facilitates far more direct imitation of him
in Latin. The latter form of reception has something in common with
the aspirations of Virgil’s successors in imperial Rome:Â€the bucolic poet
Calpurnius Siculus, the didactic poet of the Aetna and epic poets such as
Lucan, Statius and Silius, as well as those who masqueraded as Virgil him-
self by producing poems like the Culex which rapidly acquired the status
of juvenilia in narratives of the poet’s creative development.35 For ancient
imitators trained in prosôpopoeia, the impersonation of their model relied
on close study or proficient memorization of the authentic Virgilian cor-
pus.36 A testimony from Propertius shows that Romans in Virgil’s lifetime
could perceive a progression in his worksÂ€– or at least an increase in their
importanceÂ€– from the Eclogues and Georgics to the Aeneid.37 But perhaps
post-Classical vernacular poets such as Cervantes and Spenser discerned,
and responded to, a progression because the pattern of the Virgilian
career was made so evident in Petrarch’s Latin works.
33
Kennedy 2002 discusses Epistola Posteritati, noting at 146:Â€‘The poet’s programmatic statements
in the Africa, Bucolicum carmen, the “Coronation oration”, and the “Letter to Posterity” project
an idealized course conformable generally with the Virgilian rota.’
34
Kennedy 2002 treats the complexities, ambivalences and contradictions. Kallendorf 1989:Â€ch. 2
and R. F. Thomas 2001:Â€157–8, 164 treat Petrarch from the perspective of Virgilian reception.
35
Suetonius, Vita Lucani; Statius, Silvae 1, praefatio.
36
Quintilian explains prosôpopoeia in Institutio Oratoria 3.49–54, saying it is invaluable for future
poets and historians. Cicero’s posturing as both Appius Claudius Caecus and Clodius, respectÂ�
ively rebuking and encouraging Clodia’s vices in the Pro Caelio 33, is specified as an example.
37
Prop. 2.34.61–80. The responses of other Roman poets, including Ovid, to Virgil’s career are
considered elsewhere in this volume but there is not one Latin poet from antiquity who sought
faithfully to re-enact it.
For that reason alone it is worth looking at the manner of Petrarch’s
appropriation of Virgil in some specific texts.38 Consideration of the Africa
itself is especially important:Â€this ambitious undertaking epitomizes the
intersection between the climax of Virgil’s career and his own. But all the
texts reviewed belowÂ€– from the Familiares as well as the AfricaÂ€– throw
some important light on Petrarch’s poetic practices and authorial identity
in relation to his model.
III
Themes and structures from the Aeneid abound in the Africa.39 There is
an obvious debt to Virgil’s narrative of Aeneas and Dido, for example, in
the fifth book in which Massinissa, the Numidian chief allied to Scipio,
decides against his better judgement to marry the beautiful Sophonisba,
the captive wife of Syphax, an ally of the Carthaginians.40 Other parts
of the Aeneid are also recalled in the same book of the Africa:Â€ 5.59–63,
part of the long description (5.18–78) of Sophonisba’s beauty, compares
her to Venus asking Jupiter to help Aeneas:Â€an episode narrated in Aeneid
1.227–96. Massinissa’s enumeration of women in the underworld at Africa
5.657–63 is informed by Virgil’s katabasis, as are the details of the dead
Turnus who is aggrieved that Lavinia had been snatched away from him
(Africa 6.64), and of Lilybaeum as the location of the tomb of Anchises
(Africa 6.694–5).41
But wherever one might expect references to the story of the Aeneid to
prompt an overt or positive acknowledgement of its poet, that expectÂ�ation
is confounded. An episode in Africa Book 3 shows how its epic narrator
can even disparage Virgil. The embassy of Laelius to forge an alliance
38
The other reason is to avoid replicating the important discussion of Petrarch’s career in relation
to Virgil provided by Kennedy 2002.
39
Virgil’s influence in the Africa is less discernible in terms of lexical echoing, although Foster
1979:Â€295 observes that ‘key words from Vergilian passages in the same metrical sedes … form a
substructure’. In addition to the nineteen instances Foster collects,Â€see Africa 5.746–58 as a recolÂ�
lection of Dido’s curse in Aen. 4.612–29; Africa 8.45–6 and Georgics 4.184–5 (with Aen. 8.184);
Africa 7.362–4 and Aen. 1.286–8; Africa 7.489–99 and Aen. 7.632–40. Kallendorf 1989:Â€54 (com-
pare 181 n. 5) remarks on the recreation of Virgilian verse in Petrarch’s Africa:Â€‘Petrarca’s hexam-
eters are surprisingly free of postclassical words and constructions when we consider how little
serious work had been done before in those areas; indeed the notes to his Ambrosian Virgil and
the body of annotations to the Africa identified by Fera [1980] show how hard Petrarca worked
at purifying his diction and metrics.’ Compare Petrarch, Fam. 23.19.3. The most comprehensive
study of the Petrarchan hexameter runs to 515 pages:Â€Ruiz Arzalluz 1991.
40
Africa 5.240–76:Â€ cf. Aeneid 4.169–73, 189–94; Africa 5.257–73:Â€ cf. Aeneid 4.460–70; Africa
5.242–4:Â€cf. Aeneid 4.288–91; Africa 5.245:Â€cf. Aeneid 8.526.
41
The grouping of underworld heroines is in Aen. 6.445–61; the burial place of Anchises is given in
Aen. 3.705–15.
148 Andrew Laird
with Syphax against Carthage involves a feast in which Laelius’ com-
pany is entertained by a Numidian bard who sings of the accomplish-
ments of Hercules, Dido and Hannibal.42 The bard’s portrayal of Dido in
this embedded poem culminates in an aside which is implicitly directed
against Virgil:
Post regina Tyro fugiens his finibus ampla
Menia construxit magnam Carthaginis urbem.
Ex re nomen ei est. Mox aspernata propinqui 420
Coniugium regis, cum publica vota suorum
Urgerent, veteris non immemor illa mariti,
Morte pudicitiam redimit. Sic urbis origo
Oppetiit regina ferox. Iniuria quanta
Huic fiat, si forte aliquisÂ€– quod credere non estÂ€– 425
Ingenio confisus erit, qui carmine sacrum
Nomen ad illicitos ludens traducat amores!
Africa 3.418–27
Later a queen fleeing from Tyre constructed huge walls in this territory, the great
city of Carthage:Â€ from this fact it derived its name.43 Soon after, she spurned
marriage with a neighbouring king, although her people’s wishes pressed
for this, but she, never forgetting her former husband, redeemed her chastity
through death. And so the fierce queen, the founder of the city, met her end.
How much wrong would be done to her, if someone by chanceÂ€– impossible to
believeÂ€– relying on his talent for poetry were to play at sullying her sacred name
with illicit passions!
The name of the queen is not given, although ‘Dido’ is later mentioned by
Syphax in 4.5. Virgil is not named either:Â€the bard performing in 206 BC
could not know of him. In his other writings, Petrarch drew from ancient
sources to highlight Dido’s chastity and the fact that she lived three cen-
turies after Aeneas.44 Here in the Africa, Dido is a moral exemplum to be
42
The embedded poem is obviously based on Iopas’ recitation in Aeneid 1.740–7, just as the situ-
ation in which it is recited follows the precedent of the Trojans’ encounter with Dido in Aeneid 1.
The introduction of Dido into this reported poem is also significant. The bard’s account of
Hercules which immediately preceded the passage quoted here ended at 3.417 with Sic nocuit
mundo vivens moriensque Medusa ‘So, alive and dead, Medusa did harm to the world.’ In Aeneid
1.496–7 Dido’s first entrance, where (as here) she is described as regina, directly follows the retro-
spective representation of Penthesilea’s death in the temple pictures of Aeneid 1.490–3 discussed
in Conte 1986:Â€194–5.
43
The derivation of Carthage from the Phoenician ‘Kereth-Hadeshoth’, ‘new city’ was known to
Roman authors and hence to Petrarch:Â€t he third-century AD grammarian C. Julius Solinus notes
(40):Â€istam urbem Cathardam Elissa dixit, quod Phoenicum ore exprimit Civitatem Novam ‘Dido
called this city Catharda which means ‘New City’ in the tongue of the Phoenicians’. Compare
Servius on Aen. 1.12 and 4.683.
44
Petrarch’s best-known defence of the historical Dido is the invective against the ignorant popu-
lace (’ l vulgo ignorante) in the vernacular Trionfi:Â€ Triumphus Cupidinis 153–9. According to
complemented by the account of Lucretia’s suicide in Laelius’ survey of
Roman achievements that follows. The implicit charge against Virgil in
verses 425–7 (that he traduced Dido’s reputation) is complemented and
supported by Laelius who is asked by Syphax to tell of the origins and
leaders of his own people. Like Aeneas in Dido’s court, Laelius prefaces
his words by saying this is too much to recount late at night:45
Nunc quantum nocturna patet sermonibus hora,
Principia expediam. Teucrorum a sanguine longe
Gentis origo venit, victrix quem Grecia bello
Dicitur ad patrios muros sparsisse bilustri:
Et fortasse aliquis iam tanti criminis ultor 495
Natus in Italia est. Sed nunc ad cepta revertor.
Naufragio ex tanto vixque et tot milibus unus
Integer enavit sine crimine. Namque ubi Troiae
Matris adhuc Frigio fumabat litore bustum
Iamque cinis facilem incipiens glomerare favillam, 500
Inclitus et claris multum spectatus in armis
Dux Anchisiades, cui non via prona salutis
Viribus aut propriis aut urbibus esset amicis,
Destituit patriam lacrimans caramque cubilis
Consortem, et passus terra casusque tremendos 505
Erroresque vagos et mille pericula ponti,
Impiger Ausonias tandem tamen attigit oras:
Isque, ubi belligerum Latii sensere coloni
Troiugenam, externoque viro Lavinia pactos
Reddidit amplexus, sacro pia flumine membra 510
Deseruit moriens. Puer hunc excepit Iulus
Succedens illumque alii.
Africa 3.491–512
Now I will set forth the major points for as long as the hour of the night has
room for talk. The root of our people comes from far away, from Trojan blood,
which conquering Greece is said to have shed by our ancestral walls, in a ten-
year war. And perhaps someone to avenge so great a crime has already been born
in Italy. But now I return to the subject I began. From such a great shipwreck
Servius on Aen. 4.682 and 5.4, Varro had recorded it was Dido’s sister Anna who killed herself
for love of Aeneas. The only full account of Dido–Elissa prior to Virgil is in Justinus’ epitome of
Trogus, 18.4–6. Warner 2005 observes that Petrarch actually presents Massinissa in the mould
of Dido, as he nurtures ‘the wound burning through all his marrow’ (vulnus inardescens totis
errare medullis:Â€Africa 5.70; compare Aeneid 4.66–7:Â€est mollis flamma medullas / interea et tacitum
vivit sub pectore vulnus). However in Seniles 4.5 Aeneas’ meeting with Dido is incorporated into
Petrarch’s allegorical reading of the Aeneid as a triumph over lust. Warner 2005:Â€20–51 considers
the significance of this for an interpretation of the Africa as a poem of spiritual struggle.
45
Africa 3.475–90.
150 Andrew Laird
involving so many thousands, scarcely one emerged intact and without harm.
For when the pyre of Mother Troy was still smoking on the Phrygian shore and
ash was already beginning to form over the embers, a glorious leader, the son
of Anchises, much tested in famous deeds of war, once he saw no ready route
to safety in his own resources or in friendly cities, tearfully left his native land
and the dear woman who shared his bed. He underwent fearful trials on land,
long wanderings and a thousand perils at sea. Undaunted he at last reached the
shores of Ausonia. Once the Latian tribes experienced for themselves this war
hero born in Troy, and once Lavinia had bestowed the embraces contracted with
a foreign husband, he died leaving his pious limbs in the sacred river. His child
Iulus took his place, and others succeeded him.
The constraints of chronology which prevent Laelius from knowing
of Virgil facilitate a strategic occlusion of Petrarch’s clear model. This
has become increasingly evident as Laelius’ narration gets underway.46
Aeneas, who was completely absent from the Numidian poet’s account
of Dido, is the central figure here, but he is identified only by his pat-
ronymÂ€– Anchisiades. It is as if the actual name of Aeneas (never men-
tioned in the Africa) would draw too much attention to the fact that this
embedded narrative is effectively an epitome of the Aeneid. But closer
examination shows that these verses, even though their organization
owes much to Virgil’s poem, do not yield a particularly precise summary
of it. Dido is absent. Aeneas’ Trojan wife and his Latin wife Lavinia are
given an emphasis which is disproportionate in comparison with the
Virgilian version of events. No gods are involved, there are no prophÂ�
ecies, and there is no katabasis. What Laelius relates has a naturalistic,
historical quality.
Only at the end of the story is there a supernatural element:Â€the death
of the Trojan hero is presented as a kind of transmigration, as he leaves
his membra (limbs, physical body) in the ‘sacred river’. This particular
suggestion of Aeneas’ divinity comes not from Virgil, but draws from
Livy’s mention of the event as it is amplified by Ovid, in Metamorphoses
46
There is multiple reference to Virgil in this passage. At 3.495–6 Fortasse aliquis iam tanti crim-
inis ultor / Natus in Italia est ‘And perhaps someone avenging so great an atrocity has already
been born in Italy’ alludes to the Virgilian Dido’s hope that someone will avenge her, similarly
expressed in Aeneid 4.625 (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor). But on the historical plane,
Laelius appears to be hinting at Mummius Achaicus, whose career he presents as revenge for
the fall of Troy. Laelius’ Fortasse aliquis also recalls the forte aliquis used by the Numidian per-
former for the ‘someone’ who might one day use poetry to link Dido with ‘illicit passions’ earl-
ier at 3.425. The connection between Mummius and Virgil might involve a kind of romantic
irony:Â€Petrarch after all identifies his own epic endeavour with the achievements of Scipio him-
self in Africa 1.53–5:Â€Ipse ego non nostri referam modo temporis acta, / Marte sed Ausonio sceleratos
funditus Afro / Eruere est animus nimiasque retundere vires; compare Africa 9.233–6.
14.598–604 where Venus intervenes to achieve her son’s deification.47
Petrarch’s use of this episode as the conclusion to the ‘Aeneid’ of Laelius
significantly prefiguresÂ€– and may well have determinedÂ€– the complex-
ion of Maffeo Vegio’s close to his thirteenth book of the Aeneid (1428) in
which Venus secures her son’s immortality with the help of Numicius,
after her supplication to Jupiter and the assent of Juno.48
In Book 2, the shade of the Elder Scipio outlines to his son the course
of events in future times, assuring him that he will be celebrated by
Petrarch who, though he is not named, is identified as a ‘second Ennius’
(Ennius alter 2.443). There is no place for Virgil in this sketch of future
literary history:Â€ the original Ennius is to be honoured for bringing the
rough Muses to Latium in the first place; his successor, who is Petrarch,
for delaying them as they flee. Again in Book 9, on the return voyage
to Rome Ennius recounts to Scipio how he conversed with Homer in a
dream. In the vision which followed, Ennius saw a young man sitting in
a secluded valley (clausa valle = Vaucluse, Petrarch’s retreat near Avignon),
pondering something of great importance. Homer explains to Ennius
who this person will become:
Hic egoÂ€– nam longe clausa sub valle sedentem
Aspexi iuvenemÂ€– :Â€‘Dux, o carissime, quisnam est,
Quem video teneras inter consistere lauros
et viridante comas meditantem incingere ramo?
Nescio quid, nisi fallor, enim sub pectore versat
Egregiumque altumque nimis.’ Non falleris’ inquit:
‘Agnosco iuvenem sera de gente nepotum,
Quem regio Italie, quemve ultima proferet etas …
Ille diu profugas revocabit carmine Musas
Tempus in extremum, veteresque Elicone Sorores
Restituet, vario quamvis agitante tumultu;
Francisco cui nomen erit; qui grandia facta,
Vidisti que cunta oculis, ceu corpus in unum
Colliget:Â€Hispanas acies Libieque labores
Scipiadamque tuum:Â€titulus poematis illi
AFRICA.’
Africa 9.216–23, 229–36
Then, catching sight of a young man sitting far off in a secluded valley, I said
‘O dearest guide, who is it I see resting among the tender laurels and planning
47
Livy 1.2.6 situs est, quemcumque eum dici ius fasque est, super Numicum flumen:Â€Iovem indigetem
appellant ‘he is buried, whatever it is right and authorised for him to be called, by the river
Numicus:Â€they call him Jupiter Indiges’.
48
Vegio, Supplementum 593–630; text and translation in Putnam and Hankins 2004.
152 Andrew Laird
to bind his hair with green shoots? Unless I am mistaken he is pondering in his
heart something remarkably special and noble.’ ‘You are not mistaken,’ he said.
‘I recognise the young man from a late line of your descendants whom the king-
dom of Italy and its last age will bring forth … With his poetry he will call back
the long-exiled Muses to his late age, and he will restore the ancient Sisters from
Helicon, though disturbed by all kinds of uproar. His name will be Francesco
and he will collect all the great deeds you have seen with your own eyes as if into
one body:Â€the battles in Spain, the trials of Libya and your very own Scipio. The
title of his poem will be Africa.’
Petrarch, through Homer’s words, embedded in Ennius’ account of his
vision to Scipio, goes so far as to mention himself and his poem by name.49
There is no mention of Virgil even here, when the debt to him could not
be more obvious. The scenario however recalls Virgil’s role in inducting
Dante into the bella scola of ancient poets in Inferno 4.88 as well as Virgil’s
own work:Â€Ennius’ questions, Homer’s responses, and the apparition of a
youth still unborn are reminiscent of the exchange between Aeneas and
Anchises presenting the Marcelli at the close of Aeneid Book 6.50 And what
is more, the very opening of Ennius’ dream in the Africa has an obvious
precedent in Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ dream of Hector (Aeneid 2.268).
Thus the poet of the Africa draws extensively from Virgil, but avoids
referring to him at all costsÂ€– and even disparages him by innuendo. That
curious stance cannot be reconciled with the importance the historical
Petrarch attached to his renowned predecessor’s life and work without
this fundamental realization:Â€ the speaker or narratorial persona of the
Africa (who strives to eliminate all thematic reference to Virgil) is the
creation, not the porte-parole or mouthpiece, of its rationalized author,
whose presence is betrayed by the imitation of Virgil.
A distinction between Petrarch as rationalized author and his constructed
persona is just as important for making sense of Petrarch’s epistle to Homer
(Familiares 24.12). Virgil is characterized in this letter as some who ‘was in
very many respects [Homer’s] imitator’:Â€in pluribus imitator tuus fuit.51 That
observation leads to the elaboration of a conception of imitation:
Iam vero de imitatione quid dicam? Debuisti praesagire, dum tam alte alis
animi te sublatum cerneres, numquam tibi defuturos imitatores. Gaudendum
49
Ennius’ dream of Homer is in the Annales 1 ii–x Skutsch 2005. Usher 2005 examines the implica-
tion of Petrarch’s avowed succession to Homer and Ennius for Boccaccio.
50
The sense and diction of Africa 9.229–31 here recall Aen. 6.855–9:Â€aspice, ut insignis spoliis Marcellus
opimis / ingreditur uictorque uiros supereminet omnis. / hic rem Romanam magno turbante tumultu /
sistet eques.
51
Ancient accusations against Virgil of theft from Homer inform Petrarch’s discussions here.
Donatus’ life of Virgil (45) mentions an eight-volume collection of these thefts compiled by
vero talem te cui multi similes fieri velint, sed non multi possint. Quid ni autem
gaudeas tu primi semper certus loci, cum ego ultimus hominum gaudeam, nec
gaudere sat est, glorier quoque tanti me nunc fieri, ut sit aliquis, si tamen est
aliquis, qui imitari optet ac fingere, illud magis gavisurus tales imitatores fore
qui me superent? (Ad Familiares 24.12)
Now indeed what am I to say about imitation? You, Homer, must have foreseen,
as long as you beheld yourself raised so high on the wings of your talent, that
you would never lack imitators. It is really a matter for rejoicing that you are
such as many wish to resemble, but not many are able. So why should you not
rejoice, always assured of first place, when even I, the last of men rejoice, and,
more than rejoice, I also glory in the fact that I am now held in such account,
that there is someoneÂ€– if indeed there is someoneÂ€– who wishes to imitate and
model himself on me, with all the more cause for joy in that my imitators will be
such as to surpass me.
The writer compliments Homer for inspiring so many literary imitators
and imagines he may be able to do the same, expressing the hope that
his imitators’ work might surpass his own. Petrarch’s lack of reference
here to his recurrent imitation of Virgil is one reason to be wary of tak-
ing these comments at face value. The entertaining implication is clear
enough:Â€ Virgil may not outdo Homer who can always be sure of his
supremacy, but, if imitators can surpass their models, there is room for
Petrarch to outperform the poet of the Aeneid.
Familiares Book 24 also contains epistles to Cicero, Seneca, Varro,
Quintilian, Livy, Pollio, Horace and Virgil.52 Although these letters exhibit
considerable erudition, such a correspondence with long-dead luminaries
is evidently playful:Â€the letter to Homer should not be read as a veridical
source for the way Petrarch regards his own work and its legacy. But by
again exhibiting a distinction between Petrarch’s constructed persona (here
the dramatized figure who addresses Homer) and Petrarch the author
(who is responsible for the ironies in that address), this text can enhance
our understanding of his imitation of Virgil from another perspective. If
Petrarch created an evidently distinctive persona for his own epic and for
his other Latin poems, then it is likely that he discernedÂ€– or simply presup-
posedÂ€– that Virgil had engaged in a similar practice. Such an understand-
ing of Virgil would naturally entail a disinclination to regard first-person
Quintus Octavius Avitus. The nature of Virgil’s plagiarism is debated at length by the inter-
locutors of Macrobius’ Saturnalia. Laird 2002 reads Petrarch’s cameo in Africa 9 as following a
metapoetic tradition in Classical epic.
52
Hinds 2004 considers the significance of the presentations of Cicero and Virgil in Ad Familiares
24 for Petrarch’s literary activity.
154 Andrew Laird
affirmations or programmatic statements made in his poetry (such as the
proem of the third book of the Georgics or the coda to the fourth) as literal
forms of autobiographical testimonyÂ€– Petrarch’s propensity for allegoriz-
ing Virgil would certainly be consistent with that position.53 That position
would actually render the course of imitation more viable for Petrarch and
his successors:Â€no one could be Virgil himself, but it was possible to fash-
ion a comparable persona as a stylistic Â�vehicle. That in turn would render
it feasible to embark on a programme of emulating Virgil through a suc-
cession of works. The Latin bucolic and epic of Iacopo Sannazaro and the
didactic and heroic poetry of Girolamo Vida from the sixteenth century
illustrate some ways in which this could be achieved.
Even though Petrarch may not overtly discriminate between author
and persona, an equally important distinctionÂ€– between the figure of an
author on the one hand and his work on the otherÂ€– is made directly in
relation to Virgil in Familiares 24.11.54 The letter lays emphasis on the fact
that its addressee, the historical author, is dead. This is accented from the
very beginning which recalls the epitaph Virgil reputedly composed for
himself:
Eloquii splendor, latine spes altera lingue,
Clare Maro, tanta quem felix Mantua prole
Romanum genuisse decus per secula gaudet.
Fam. 24.11.3–5
Luminary of eloquence and [with Cicero] another hope of the Latin tongue,
famous Maro, fortunate Mantua rejoices in bringing forth so great a son as you,
a glory of Rome through the ages.
The last three words of Virgil’s lapidary distich had encapsulated the
three stages of his poetic career:
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
â•… Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.55
Mantua brought me forth, Calabria snatched me away, now Parthenope holds
me:Â€I sang of pastures, farms, leaders.
Petrarch’s verse epistle goes so far as to envisage Virgil in the underworld
that he himself described in Aeneid 6 and Georgics 4.56 The engagement
53
In addition to the allegorical interpretations on the Ambrosian manuscript Petrarch explicates
the hidden meaning of the Aeneid in Senilis 4.5.
54
The title (constituting verses 1–2) is Ad Publium Virgilium Maronem heroycum poetam et latino-
rum principem poetam ‘To Publius Virgilius Maro, heroic poet and principal poet of the Latins’.
55
See Horsfall 2000a:Â€21 for bibliography on the transmission and early circulation of this epitaph.
56
This is not the first time that a Christian writer has inserted Virgil in the hell he Virgil himself
created:Â€ see Laird 2001 on Fulgentius and Ermenrich of Ellwangen. The ‘circle’ (circulus) is a
with Aeneid 6 is developed in detail:Â€Petrarch asks Virgil whether Aeneas,
‘sent out through the ivory gate’, the exit of false visions from the world
below in Aeneid 6, is now there to receive him. While the purpose of
Aeneas’ jouney to the realm of the dead had been to seek wisdom about
future historical events, Virgil will now need to rely upon a messen-
ger from the world of the living to discover what has occurred since his
demise (30–4):
Tu, mundo siqua silenti
Umbra recens nostra veniet tibi forsan ab ora,
Quis tria cara tibi loca nunc totidemque libellos
Exitus excipiat, nostris simul accipe verbis.
And for your part, if any shade fresh from our own shore should by chance come
to you in your silent world, learn from my words what has become of the three
places dear to you and of your little books, the same number.
There could be more particular correspondences between the three
opera or ‘little books’ (libelli) that constitute the life’s work of Virgil and
the locations whose fortunes Petrarch goes on to explain:Â€Virgil hints that
he composed the Eclogues in Parthenope (Georgics 4.564); he envisages
wearing a poet’s palms to honour Mantua (Georgics 3), and he fanfares
the foundation of Rome as the programme of his epic (Aeneid 1.5–7, 33).
Petrarch’s news of these locations affirms his own personal association
with all of them. The possibility that this association might bear on the
relation of his literary production to Virgil’s is confirmed by what he says
about Mantua (42–50):
Hic tibi composui que perlegis, otia nactus
Ruris amica tui, quonam vagus avia calle
Fusca sequi, quibus in pratis errare soleres,
Assidue mecum volvens, quam fluminis oram,
Que curvi secreta lacus, quas arboris umbras,
Quas nemorum latebras collisque sedilia parvi
Ambieris, cuius fessus seu cespitis herbam
Presseris accubitu, seu ripam fontis ameni;
Atque ea presentem michi te spectacula reddunt.
Here I have composed for you what you are reading, and have found the friendly
repose of your own countryside, the path on which you used to roam the unfre-
quented shades, the meadows in which you used to wander. Continuously I
wonder which shore of the river, which recesses of the curving lake, which shady
trees, which hidden parts of woods, which banks on a small hill you frequented,
clear evocation of Dante’s InfernoÂ€– as Usher 2000 has remarkedÂ€– but thereafter Virgil’s own
imagery is used to ring some funereal changes on the Classical apparatus of poetic inspiration.
156 Andrew Laird
what grassy lawn you rested on when tired, or what bank of a pleasant stream.
These sights make you present to me.
The meadows, groves, hills, and banks are at the same time poetic topoi.
Petrarch’s speculations about Virgil’s haunts as a location for his own
composition suggests that following in Virgil’s footsteps is a precondition
for his own literary endeavours.
The distinction between Virgil’s poetic corpus and Virgil the historical
author is most clearly expressed at the end of the letter (53–67):
melioribus aurem
Ergo adhibe et rerum successus disce tuarum:
Tityrus ut tenuem senior iam perflat avenam, 55
Quadrifido cultu tuus ut resplendet agellus,
Ut tuus Eneas vivit totumque per orbem
Et placet et canitur, tanto quem ad sidera nisu
Tollere conanti mors obstitit invida magnis
Principiis; miserum Eneam iam summa premebant 60
Fata manu iamque ore tuo damnatus abibat,
Arsurumque iterum pietas Augusta secundis
Eripuit flammis, quem non morientis amici
Deiecti movere animi, meritoque supremas
Contempsisse preces evo laudabitur omni. 65
Eternum, dilecte, vale nostrosque rogatus
Meonium Ascreumque senes salvere iubeto.
So turn your ear to better tidings and learn of the success of your endeav-
ours:Â€how old Tityrus still blows on a slender oaten pipe, how your small farm is
resplendent through fourfold cultivation, how your Aeneas lives, gives pleasure
and is sung all over the world, he whom you were attempting so strenuously
to elevate to the stars when envious death obstructed your great undertaking.
Already the last fate weighed on poor Aeneas, and he was already on his way out,
condemned by your mouth, when the piety of Augustus snatched him from a
second conflagration, when he was on the point of burning again. The dejected
thoughts of a dying friend did not move Augustus and he will be rightly praised
by every age for having defied your last request. Farewell for ever, beloved one,
and, at my request, greet our elders, Homer and Hesiod.
The final farewell comes very abruptly after a rebuke to Virgil for asking
the Aeneid to be burnt when he was dying and depressed:Â€ in Christian
teaching a ‘dejected soul’ commanded reproach more than sympathyÂ€–
something encountered by any reader of Dante’s Inferno.57 And the praise
lavished upon Augustus for preserving the work seems almost to match
Compare e.g. Thomas Aquinas, In Psalmos, Ps.36, num. 23:Â€Iste ergo sciens se separatum a Deo per
57
peccatum, reputat se miserum; et ex hoc dicitur animus ejus dejectus.

the credit due to the poet for composing it. Whilst immortality is attrib-
uted to the characters Aeneas and Tityrus, and even to Virgil’s smallhold-
ing, the mortality of the poet who created these entities continues to be
heavily emphasized:Â€ Petrarch’s other letters to other ancient authors do
not draw such attention to the fact that their recipients are dead.
The imitation of Virgil accomplished in this epistle is of vital meta-
literary significance in that it provides a practical demonstration of the
categorical division between the dead poet on the one hand, forever con-
fined to remote antiquity or Avernus, and the Virgil ‘present’ to Petrarch
through his work on the other. Virgil’s poetry is now the property of
Petrarch’s epoch, subject to reinterpretation in the light of insights from
Christian theology, the passage of time, contemporary events, and liter-
ary history. And it is again through a crafted persona of his own that
Petrarch clarifies the distinction between Virgil the historical author and
the Virgilian corpus that is now prone to appropriation, imitation and
recreationÂ€– in the manner of this very epistle.
IV
Biographical approaches to both Dante and Petrarch in relation to their
work continue to be fruitful. However, the selection of texts surveyed
above shows that heavy emphasis on biography is not an absolutely neces-
sary prerequisite to appreciate the significance of the Virgilian career for
either Dante or Petrarch. And the intricacies of their engagement with
Virgil highlight the problemsÂ€– identified in antiquityÂ€– that the postula-
tion of an author’s personal will can raise for literary interpretation.58 Signs
of human intention and agency can of course be seen in the responses
to Virgil provided by Dante and Petrarch, but those human touches are
in the end only discernible in texts. To confuse a persona or rational-
ized author with the historical author, or to read a literary programme
58
The problem of authorial control is raised in Plato, Phaedrus 275, and, with varying degrees
of explicitness in Roman poetry (e.g. Catullus 42, Horace, Satires 1.10.92, Ovid, Tristia 1.7,
Propertius 3.23). The ‘intentional fallacy’ was addressed by Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946 long
before Barthes 1977 (1967), which preceded and provoked Foucault 1998 (1969); compare Cheney
2002:Â€21. Aristotelian criticism, mostly mediated to Dante and Petrarch by Horace, and mediÂ�eval
literary theory are rarely given to intentionalism:Â€Servius’ intentio Virgilii refers to the meaning
of Virgil as a rationalized author. Petrarch’s actual practice in appropriating Virgil nicely illus-
trates Barthes’s observation that ‘the text is a tissue of citations … [its writer’s] only power is to
combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others’, while the words Dante has
Virgil speak in Inferno 26.73–4 could have a metapoetic implication bearing on authorial con-
trol:Â€Lascia parlare a me, ch’ i’ ho concetto / ciò che tu vuoi ‘Allow me to speak, for I have conceived
what you want.’
158 Andrew Laird
in a literary work as autobiographical testimony is rather like mistaking a
Â�fictional character for a real individual.
The respect in which ‘career criticism’ makes an important contribu-
tion to literary interpretation is in relaxing the formalist tenet that only a
single text (and not a collection of texts) can be subjected to literary anaÂ�
lysis. That tenet has always been justified on the basis that ‘if we amend
the rationalized author’s image with the help of the historical author we
destroy the text’:Â€ the perceived threat is that interpretation of a literary
text will be distorted or constricted by the consideration of an historical
author or of his other works.59 But it can be countered that an explicit
reference to the Eclogues in Virgil’s Georgics (4.565–6) is as demonstrably
attributable to Virgil the rationalized author of the Georgics as it is to Virgil
the historical author. Thus bringing the Eclogues to bear on interpretation,
even stylistic interpretation of the Georgics, is perfectly justified.
To ascribe all the compositions by Virgil to the same rationalized
author is audacious in that it is tantamount to regarding his entire oeuvre
as a single text.60 But this may not be unwarranted where Virgil’s medi-
eval reception is concerned:Â€ generic boundaries and texts were config-
ured differently in a time before printing became widespread and Virgil’s
poems were presented together in the manuscripts.61 Moreover, Virgilian
‘paratexts’, like the spurious introduction to the Aeneid or the apoÂ�cryphal
epitaph quoted above, along with other material, notably Fulgentius’
Virgilianae Continentiae (which was frequently copied and later printed
in the form of a preface to the poet’s corpus), might all contribute to a
sense that Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid constitute a unity. The
depiction on the rota Virgiliana, for mnemotechnical purposes, of each
of Virgil’s poems as a third part of a whole circle, three in one, could be a
reflection of this.62
However, Dante and Petrarch show ample recognition of the generic
distinctions between Virgil’s works:Â€as we have seen, Dante hints that his
Commedia offers an adventurous fusion of them, whilst Petrarch imitates
59
Riffaterre 1983:Â€5. The argument against explaining one work in the light of others by the same
historical author, from a formalist point of view, is that to do so presupposes stylistic identity
between different worksÂ€– an impossibility if style is taken to be the unique quality of a work,
tantamount to the text itself.
60
Theodorakopoulos 1997 offers a reading of the ‘book of Virgil’ as a single text.
61
Reynolds 1983:Â€433–6.
62
Carruthers 2008:Â€ 251–2:Â€ ‘Virgil’s Wheel was clearly a mnemonic diagram that his [John of
Garland’s] students held; it is likely that it could be physically manipulated, as its concentric
circles suggest. The figure of the rhetorical “rota Virgili” may provide the connection between
the Latin word rota, “wheel,” and the English phrase “by rote”.’
bucolic and epic in separate projects. But both authors can present their
own individual compositions as parts of a whole:Â€Dante’s La vita nuova
(which shows no Virgilian influence) embedded thirty-one of his Italian
poems in a prose narrative, in order to recount his relationship with
Beatrice; Petrarch organized his vernacular sonnets into the series of the
Canzoniere which became as influential as the sonnets themselves.63 The
rota Virgiliana served as a tool for rhetoricians and poets who sought to
remember and replicate the three Virgilian styles, at the same time as it
conveyed a consistent identity underlying the poet’s works. But the circu-
lar form of the wheel could not linearise the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid
into a temporal sequence. And it is certainly the case that Petrarch did
not follow the diachronic trajectory of his Roman precursor, as he only
started composing his own pastoral poetry after he had embarked on his
heroic epic. However, the hints, such as we find in the Epistola Posteritati,
that the Africa succeeded the Bucolicum CarmenÂ€– compounded with the
disciplined memorization of Virgil’s corpusÂ€– may have helped to spin the
Virgilian literary career into motion as a vehicle for Petrarch’s successors.
63
â•‡ Carrai 2009.
Ch apter 8
Did Shakespeare have a literary career?

Patrick Cheney
Among the authors addressed in this volume, William Shakespeare is

something of a special case:Â€ he alone is thought to lack a ‘literary car-
eer’. Unlike Virgil and Horace, or Petrarch and Boccaccio, or Milton
and Dryden, Shakespeare is thought to have a ‘professional career’:Â€he is
a man of the theatre, a jobbing playwright, a consummate actor and a
savvy shareholder of an acting company, too preoccupied with the daily
business of his new commercial enterprise to take an interest in the lit-
erary goals of English authorship.1 Only during the past few years, how-
ever, have we detached ourselves enough from this twentieth-century
classification to recognize it as a classification, a critical construction of
‘Shakespeare’ born out of specific temporal origins, with its own loca-
tion in history. That history, we shall see, is less Shakespeare’s than our
own. Even so, we need to begin with it because so many critics continue
to subscribe to it. Indeed, during the past century many were intent to
announce this classification as a seminal achievement, and we may single
out two primary movements that coalesced to create it.
The first is theatrical, which Harry Levin summarizes in an important
1986 essay:Â€‘Our century has restored our perception of him to his genre,
the drama, enhanced by increasing historical knowledge alongside the
live tradition of the performing arts.’2 Levin is reacting to the Restoration,
Augustan, Romantic and Victorian reduction of Shakespeare’s theatri-
cal art to what John Dryden called in 1668 ‘Dramatick Poesie’.3 If crit-
ics from the late seventeenth century through the nineteenth tended to
read Shakespearean drama as poetry, critics in the twentieth century suc-
ceeded in detaching the drama from poetry, viewing it largely as theatre.
The flagship for this theatrical project continues to be the 1986 Oxford
1
Bentley 1971; P. Thomson 1992. As we shall see, Helgerson 1983 is the bridge between Bentley
and Thomson, classifying Shakespeare as a ‘professional’ rather than either a ‘laureate’ or an
‘amateur’.
2
Levin 1986:Â€228. 3 Vickers 1974–81:Â€i. 136.
160
Did Shakespeare have a literary career? 161
Shakespeare, the goal of which is to produce a Shakespearean text as it
was originally performed.4 In 1997, The Norton Shakespeare:Â€ Based on
the Oxford Edition institutionalized this theatrical classification for the
American academy, with Stephen Greenblatt presenting ‘Shakespeare’ as
‘the working dramatist’.5
The second movement is materialist, which we have anticipated by
mentioning Greenblatt. In origin, this movement is post-structuralist,
indebted to Roland Barthes’s work on ‘the death of the author’ and
Michel Foucault’s on the ‘author function’.6 The general goal has been to
challenge traditional notions of the autonomous author by seeing literary
work produced through cultural institutions. In Renaissance dramatic
circles, the playwright emerged not as an intending author who wrote
masterpieces of literature for all time but as a bending collaborator in a
complex cultural process that includes businessmen, actors, printers and
so forth.7
As recently as 2001, David Scott Kastan can indicate the complicity
of the materialist with the theatrical movement:Â€ ‘At least in his role as
playwright, Shakespeare had no obvious interest in the printed book.
Performance was the only form of publication he sought for his plays. He
made no effort to have them published.’8 According to Kastan, for a critic
to work on the ‘book’ of Shakespeare means to decentre the individuated
literary author and foreground the process of theatrical collaboration.
The coalescence of the theatrical and materialist movements was popu-
larly rehearsed in the 1998 Academy Award-winning film, Shakespeare in
Love, when a new financial sponsor asks the owner of the Rose Theatre,
Philip Henslowe, ‘Who’s that?’, pointing to a young Shakespeare. ‘No
one’, Henslowe remarks. ‘He’s the author.’â•›9
During the past few years, however, a backlash has set in, and sev-
eral critics have challenged the man-of-the-theatre model as simplistic
and anachronistic. Most importantly, in 2003 Lukas Erne published
Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, arguing that Shakespeare became
a dramatic author during his own lifetime. Whereas most recent
bibliographical work joins the Oxford Shakespeare in producing a
Shakespearean text that editors believe was performed, Erne uses bibli-
ography to show that Shakespeare and his acting company produced
4
Wells, Taylor, Jowett and Montgomery 1986:Â€xxxvi.
5
Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard and Maus 1997:Â€1. 6
Barthes 1977; Foucault 1998.
7
See Orgel 1991; De Grazia and Stallybrass 1993; Masten 1997. 8 Kastan 2001:Â€5–6.
9
Shakespeare in Love, directed by John Madden, written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard
(Miramax Home Entertainment, 1998). See Wall 2006:Â€1.
162 Patrick Cheney
playtexts for both performance and publication. As Erne himself puts
it, ‘Printed playbooks became respectable reading matter earlier than
we have hitherto supposed, early enough for Shakespeare to have lived
through and to have been affected by this process of legitimation …
The assumption of Shakespeare’s indifference to the publication of his
plays is a myth.’10
Within the past five years, enough criticism has emerged to allow
Catherine Belsey to speak of ‘a quiet revolution in Shakespeare stud-
ies’:Â€‘More than two decades after New Historicism turned our attention
away from close reading and toward locating Shakespeare more firmly in
his own culture, scholarship is shifting our focus onto Shakespeare’s own
place in that culture itself, and the case is founded firmly on the texts.’11
In addition to Erne, Belsey cites James P. Bednarz’s 2001 Shakespeare and
the Poets’ War, which shows Shakespeare to be a deeply self-conscious
dramatist using the stage between 1599 and 1601 to challenge Jonson’s self-
Â�proclaimed authority as an English author; and my own 2004 Shakespeare,
National Poet-Playwright, which responds to Erne (and Bednarz) by
reclassifying Shakespeare as a literary poet-playwright, the author of both
poems and plays.12
Since 2005, the ‘quiet revolution’ has become louder. Not simply has
Erne written a number of follow-up essays, but considerable bibliograph-
ical support has emerged.13 For example, Stanley Wells has examined the
unpublished manuscript of William Scott, The Model of Poesy (1599–1601),
to document the way in which a Shakespearean play, Richard II, was read,
by a contemporary, in quarto form alongside his published poem, The
Rape of Lucrece, for verse style.14 Additionally, M. P. Jackson has argued
that Shakespeare created the figure of the Rival Poet in the Sonnets in
response to Francis Meres’ 1598 portrait of him in Palladis Tamia, by
drawing on bits of Meres’ discourse about Marlowe, Chapman, Jonson,
Drayton and even Spenser.15 Finally, Alan Nelson has surveyed book
owners of Shakespeare’s poems and plays before 1616 to ‘conclude, against
the grain of much modern criticism, that Shakespeare’s poems and plays
ought to be approached, if we are to respect history, not as documents of
politics, theology, religious controversy, philosophy, or anthropology, but
as “poesy”:Â€that is to say, as objects of delight, as verbal and dramatic art,
asÂ€– dare I think it?Â€– English Literature.’16
10
Erne 2003:Â€25–6. Erne traces his project to Berger 1989 and Peters 2000.
11
Belsey 2006:Â€170. 12 Bednarz 2001. 13 Erne 2006, 2007 and 2008.
14
Wells 2008. 15
Jackson 2006. 16
Nelson 2005:Â€70.
In addition to bibliographers, literary critics have looked at
Shakespeare’s poems and plays to find evidence of Shakespeare’s stand-
ing as a literary poet-playwright:Â€not simply my own 2008 Shakespeare’s
Literary Authorship but Charlotte Scott’s 2007 Shakespeare and the Idea of
the BookÂ€– two monographs that try to break apart the binary thinking
that sees Shakespeare as a man of the theatre opposed to print culture.17
Finally, two 2008 collections support this project:Â€ Shakespeare’s Book,
edited by Richard Meek, Jane Rickard and Richard Wilson, which forms
‘part of a new phase in Shakespeare studies’ by challenging the man-of-
the-theatre model with that of ‘a literary “poet-playwright”, concerned
with his readers as well as his audiences’ (jacket cover); and Shakespeare
and Spenser:Â€Attractive Opposites, edited by J. B. Lethbridge, which dem-
onstrates that ‘Shakespeare read Spenser, remembered what he read and
put it to good use.’18
With such recent work now available, perhaps the question, ‘Did
Shakespeare have a literary career?’, acquires new urgency. When we look
into this question, however, we confront an immediate paradox:Â€theorists
of literary careers have viewed Shakespeare as the arch-theatrical man who
foregoes print. As a result, we do not merely lack a study of Shakespeare’s
literary career; we have absented this author from the felicity of a literary
career altogether.
In this chapter, I would thus like to look further into the topic of
Shakespeare’s ‘career’, with particular reference to its Classical underpin-
nings.19 In the first section below, I review our main critical models for
a literary career to discover a template against which to answer the title
question, including Virgilian and Ovidian intertextuality as mediated by
Spenser and Marlowe, respectively. In the second section, I summarize the
evidence of Shakespeare’s poems and plays as it maps onto this template,
focusing on a single example:Â€the Choruses to the mid-career history play
Henry V, replete with a well-known ‘epic’ presentment. In a concluding
section, I suggest not that Shakespeare lacked a literary career but that we
lack a lexicon for classifying it. If we are to map Shakespearean author-
ship historically, perhaps we need a more empirically grounded idea of
a literary career than has yet been developed. Although the following
account cannot sufficiently map such terrain in its limited space, some
preliminary work might open up areas for further research.
Scott 2007; Cheney 2008a.

17 18
Lethbridge 2008:Â€52.
On Shakespeare’s Classicism see, for example, J. Bate 1993 and H. James 1997. Also invaluable
19
are P. Hardie 2002a; Martindale and Martindale 1990; Martindale 2004b.

164 Patrick Cheney
C r i t ic a l Mode l s of a L i t e r a r y C a r e e r
The two inventors of criticism on ‘literary careers’ have little to say about
Shakespeare. In his 1981 Life of the Poet:Â€ Beginning and Ending Poetic
Careers, Lawrence Lipking includes only a unit on Ben Jonson’s memor-
ial poem to Shakespeare from the 1623 First Folio. Lipking may exclude
Shakespeare because his book examines ‘poetic careers’Â€– the careers of
‘great poets’ writing poems, not playwrights writing plays.20 If so, we
indeed run into a deep structural problem:Â€ Shakespeare’s practice as a
playwright in the newly marketed theatre is simply too messy to allow for
a literary career.
Lipking’s model is nonetheless important. His book is ‘about the life
of the poet:Â€poetic vocations, poetic careers, poetic destinies … By listen-
ing carefully both to what poets say about their works and to what works
say about themselves, it hopes to arrive at a clearer understanding of the
way that a poem can constitute the experience of a life’ (ix). Accordingly,
Lipking organizes his study around ‘Three points’ in the poet’s life:Â€‘the
moment of initiation or breakthrough; the moment of summing up;
and the moment of passage, when the legacy or soul of the poet’s work
is transmitted to the next generation’ (ix). Lipking’s method, then, is to
read the ‘poems’ of ‘great poets’ for their self-reflexive sense of vocation
or destiny, their idea of a literary career.
If Lipking emphasizes a great poet’s self-discovery, the other path-
finding book on literary careers, Richard Helgerson’s 1983 Self-Crowned
Laureates:Â€ Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System, emphasizes
the poet’s self-presentation.21 Helgerson proposes a three-part classifi-
cation for Renaissance writers:Â€ laureates, amateurs and professionals.
Laureates are the national writers, such as Spenser, Jonson and Milton,
who write serious literature throughout their adult lives to serve both
the state and eternity (8). Like Lipking (1981:Â€xi, 69, 76–80), Helgerson
discusses (but does not emphasize) the Classical underpinnings of an
English Renaissance literary career, since Spenser selects Virgil as his pri-
mary model; Jonson, Horace; and Milton, Homer (Helgerson 1983:Â€ 1).
According to Helgerson, ‘the something of great constancy at the centre
of the laureate’s work is … the poet himself’ (40):Â€‘His laureate function
requires that he speak from the centre’ (12). In contrast, amateur poets,
Lipking 1981:Â€ix.
20
As Helgerson himself puts the difference:Â€‘where I direct my attention to the outer works of both
21
careers and textsÂ€– that is, to the system of differences by which a poet might make his status
knownÂ€– Lipking directs his to the inner development of both’ (Helgerson 1983:Â€153).
such as Philip Sidney, write poetry during their youth, see their art as a
pastime, and do not publish their work. The professionals are primarily
public playwrights, like Marlowe, who write to make a living.
Helgerson briefly classifies Shakespeare as a ‘professional’ writer who
‘made … [his] living from the public theater’ (Helgerson 1983:Â€4–5). In
contrast, Spenser is Renaissance England’s first ‘laureate’ (100), because
this print-author uses strategies of self-crowning to present himself as a poet
who will shape national destiny.22 As Helgerson deftly puts it, ‘Shakespeare
[as an author] is simply not there. The laureates are’ (10). Helgerson’s dis-
tinction between the laureate Spenser who is there and the professional
Shakespeare who is not continues to inform criticism today. In fact, this
distinction updates one of the longest held commonplaces in Shakespeare
studies, tracing most famously to John Keats’s model of ‘Negative
Capability’, and articulated well by Alvin Kernan in 1995:Â€‘Shakespeare
was not an autobiographical poet, at least not in any simple, direct sense.
Anything but. He remains, in fact, the most anonymous of our great
writersÂ€ – we seem always to glimpse only the back of his head just as
he slips around the corner.’23 This commonplace is so entrenched that it
becomes a recurrent feature of Greenblatt’s 2004 biography, Will in the
World:Â€How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare:Â€‘Shakespeare was a master
of double consciousness … [H]e contrived … to hide himself from
view … [he had an] astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere,
to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints.’24
Thus, Helgerson and Lipking may bypass Shakespeare because he does
not conform to the gold standard for a literary career that they share; this
standard is based on authorial agency. In his 1996 Big-Time Shakespeare,
Michael Bristol does accommodate the gold standard to Shakespeare, yet
helps us to understand the problem:Â€‘It is not clear … whether William
Shakespeare did or did not aspire to the status of author [as established
by Spenser and Jonson] … [W]e [simply] don’t know what we need to
know about Shakespeare as an author.’25 Bristol’s formulation helps
explain why Wendy Wall, in her 2000 overview essay, ‘Authorship and
the Material Conditions of Writing’, foregrounds the laureate achieve-
ments of Spenser and Jonson yet mentions Shakespeare only once in
Â�passing:Â€‘When Spenser and Jonson used the book format to generate the
22
Criticism on careers has grown up around Spenser, foregrounded in Helgerson 1983, ch.1:Â€ see
Rambuss 1993 and Cheney 1993. On ‘career criticism’, see Cheney 2002a.
23
Kernan 1995:Â€179. For Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’ see Cook 1990:Â€370.
24
Greenblatt 2004:Â€155. 25
Bristol 1996:Â€57.
166 Patrick Cheney
author’s laureate status, … they produced … modern and familiar images
of literary authorityÂ€– classically authorized writers who serve as the ori-
gin and arbiter of a literary monument that exceeds its place in everyday
cultural transactions.’26 Effectively, Shakespeare has been written out of
our narrative about the invention of English laureate authorship, and thus
the idea of a literary career.
Let us see if we can summarize why. To have a ‘literary career’, a
writer needs to aspire to the status of author, in the canonical literary
tradition of authorship growing out of Virgil and other classical authors,
in open competition with authors in his own literary system, via a gen-
erically patterned set of traditional works that rely on visible strategies
of both self-presentation and self-discovery, in order to achieve the twin
goals of national service and literary immortality. While this definition
may be cumbersome, it has the advantage of bringing together six con-
cepts that form a career-template:Â€authorship, intertextuality, genre, self-
crowning consciousness, nationalism, fame. Together, these concepts (I
suggest) form the foundation of an early modern author’s literary career
as we understand it today.
For most critics, Shakespeare gets himself into hot water quickly in
terms of the career-template. For we do not know what we need to know
about Shakespeare’s aspiration to be an author. We cannot find the sus-
tained quotation of Classical authors that we expect of someone who
aspires to be an author. Nor does this professional write in the genres
expected of a literary career, especially Virgilian pastoral and epic. In the
plays and poems he writes, he notoriously fails to present himself, and
thus to represent his self-discovery. Consequently, we cannot determine
the pedigree of his politics in relation to the nation, or discover a concern
with a literary afterlife.
Yet those who resist this author’s agency by relying on the revisionist
principle of ‘social construction’ forget that we have moved into a post-
revisionist era. Since the mid-1990s, many leading Renaissance critics
have been articulating a model of authorship that allows for both social
construction and individual agency. The leading voice is that of Louis
Montrose, who offers a thrilling indictment of Foucault:
Foucault’s own anti-humanist project is to anatomize the subject’s subjection
to the disciplinary discourses of power. I find this aspect of Foucault’s social
visionÂ€– his apparent occlusion of a space for human agencyÂ€– to be extreme. In
â•‡ Wall 2000:Â€83, 86; on Shakespeare, with reference to the First Folio, see p. 83.
26
other words, my intellectual response is that his argument is unconvincing, and
my visceral response is that it is intolerable.27
In responding to Foucault, however, Montrose does not ‘seek to restore
to the individual the illusory power of self-creation’; nor does he ‘wish
to remystify the social production of the text, to reassert its status as an
expression of the autonomous author’s singular creative genius’:Â€ ‘Any
meaningful response to Foucault’s provocative concept of the “author
function” will commence, not by rejecting it, but rather by expanding
and refining it, by giving greater historical and cultural specificity and
variability both to the notion of Author and to the possible functions it
may serve’ (Montrose 1996:Â€ 92). More succinctly, Helgerson has said in
his 1992 Forms of Nationhood, when discussing the topic of Shakespeare’s
authorial agency, ‘he helped make the world that made him’.28
Among leading Shakespeareans, it is Bristol who has looked into
Shakespeare’s authorship and career in most detail, and he outlines a
post-revisionist model:
Authorship need not be understood as a sovereign and proprietary relationship
to specific utterances. It is perhaps more fully theorized in terms of dialogue and
ethical sponsorship. The author is both debtor and trustee of meaning rather
than sole proprietor; authority is always ministerial rather than magisterial.29
Bristol acknowledges Shakespeare’s intentions as an author within a
collaborative culture, and sees him working intertextually with other
authors:Â€ ‘Shakespeare labored in his vocation at the selection, compos-
ition, and verbal articulation of scripts intended for production in the the-
ater … He was in continual dialogue with other writers, including both
his literary sources and his immediate contemporaries.’ Consequently,
Bristol interprets ‘Shakespeare’s vocation’ both ‘as the practice of a craft
and as the production of a commodity in the context of a nascent show
business’ (Bristol 1996:Â€58).
In this pre-Ernean account, Bristol aims to correct the emphasis on
collaboration, which minimizes individuation, to allow the author’s
agency to accrue force. His word ‘vocation’ replaces the more traditional
word, ‘profession’, used by Bentley, Helgerson and Thomson.30 Bristol’s
post-revisionist model of Shakespeare’s authorial vocation, anticipating
Erne’s ‘literary dramatist’, prepares us to take up the question of whether
27
Montrose 1996:Â€92. 28 Helgerson 1992:Â€215. 29 Bristol 1996:Â€58.
30
Bristol prefers vocation over profession, because of ‘its fundamentally religious sense of active
commitment to the values of a particular craft’ (Bristol 1996:Â€55).
168 Patrick Cheney
Shakespeare might be an author with an enigmatic literary careerÂ€ – so
enigmatic we have yet to chart it.
‘Ou r Be n di ng Au t hor’: Â€S h a k e s pe a r e’s

C ou n t e r-L au r e at e C a r e e r
Once we try to chart it, we discover not simply how different Shakespeare’s
writing practice seems from the laureates but finally how deeply embed-
ded it is in the laureate craft. For instance, Spenser tells fictions directly
about the literary career of the author, but, according to the received wis-
dom, Shakespeare does not. Here is E.K.’s gloss on Colin Clout in the
Januarye eclogue from The Shepheardes Calender:Â€‘Under which name this
Poete secretly shadoweth himself, as sometime did Virgil under the name
of Tityrus.’31 In contrast, we are told, Shakespeare tells fictions about char-
acters such as Falstaff and Hamlet.32 If, as Lipking says, ‘to teach us how
to see him, the poet must first project himself into his work’ (Lipking
1981:Â€ ix), we face sternÂ€ – or perhaps playfulÂ€ – resistance from William
Shakespeare. In Timon of Athens, the tragic hero precisely ridicules a figure
named The Poet for ‘Stand[ing] for a villain in [his] … own work’:Â€‘Wilt
thou’, Timon adds, ‘whip thine own faults in other men?’33
Yet, as the case of The Poet in Timon intimates, Shakespeare turns out
to possess knowledge of, and control over, the western idea of a literary
career, as we have defined it in our template. For instance, even though
we cannot find a recurrent, recognizable persona like Colin Clout in the
Shakespeare canon, critics have repeatedly made cases for cameo appear-
ances of the author in his plays, with the three ‘William’ characters the
most formalized, since they gesture to the author’s own name, as iden-
tified in Sonnet 136 (‘my name is Will ’ ([14]):Â€ William of Windsor in
The Merry Wives of Windsor; William of Arden in As You Like It; and
Williams of England in Henry V.34 Moreover, by looking in on each of
the six concepts in our template, we may see that Shakespeare is his-
toric precisely for putting the idea of a literary career centre-stage, and
in doing so for countering the notion of a laureate career, especially as the
31
Spenser quotations come from Spenser 1909–10 (ed. Smith and de Selincourt). The i–j, u–v, and
other early modern typographical conventions, such as the italicizing of names and places, have
been silently modernized from all early modern texts.
32
Bloom 1998 is vocal about the historic significance of Shakespearean ‘character’.
33
Timon of Athens 5.1.37–9, in Evans and Tobin 1997. All Shakespeare quotations come from this
edition.
34
On William of Arden, see Bednarz 2001:Â€117–29. On William of Windsor, see J. Bate 1997:Â€8, 13.
And on Williams of England, see Patterson 1989:Â€88–92.
Classically oriented Spenser and Jonson define it for their contemporar-
ies:Â€Shakespeare invents a counter-laureate authorship, and thus a counter-
laureate career.35
Shakespeare’s counter-laureate career is on display throughout his
poems and plays, but here we need to let a single example ‘St[and] for
the whole to be imagined’ (Rape of Lucrece 1428)Â€ – in particular, the
visible (and detailed) meta-theatre of the six-piece sequence in Henry V,
which consists of a Prologue, four Choruses and an Epilogue. Critics
have discussed these bits of metatheatre a good deal, but have tended
to focus on their authorship (the consensus is that Shakespeare wrote
them), on their uniformity with the plot of the play, and especially on
the relation expressed between actor and audience, with Shakespeare
assigning remarkable authority to the audience in the working of
Â�theatre:Â€ ‘eche out our performance with your mind’ (Chorus 3.35).36
Thus far, however, no one has looked at the Choruses as ‘career
Â�documents’Â€ – moments inside Shakespeare’s plays that reflect on his
‘literary career’.
Shakespeare’s plays contain twenty-eight such documents, although
eleven (from Pericles, Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen) may not be
by him. That still leaves seventeen, from the two-scene Induction of The
Taming of the Shrew to the Epilogue from The Tempest. To these, we may
add the two Dedicatory Epistles to Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape
of Lucrece (1594), as well as the Dedicatory Epistle to Troilus and Cressida,
which may (or may not) be by Shakespeare.37 These meta-documents
demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion, Shakespeare does present
himself.
In particular, he joins the laureates in presenting his authorship, as the
opening to the Epilogue to Henry V makes clear:
Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursu’d the story.
Henry V, Epilogue 1–2
Throughout his canon, Shakespeare uses the word ‘author’ twenty-four

times; fully half of them refer to the author as a writer. As Katherine
Duncan-Jones suggests, the phrase ‘Our bending author’ has two mean-
ings, especially if Shakespeare performed the part of the Chorus himself,
35
This is the topic of Cheney 2004 and 2008a.
36
For these issues, see Taylor 1982; Gurr 1992a; Craik 1995. For recent criticism, see Baldo 2008;
Kezar 2001:Â€176–95; Weimann 1988.
37
On the possibility of Shakespeare’s co-authorship, see K. Duncan-Jones 2001:Â€219–22.
170 Patrick Cheney
as critics believe:Â€1) the author bends over his desk working with pen, ink
and paper; 2) the author-actor ‘bends’ in genuflection before his audi-
ence. She adds ‘a further point’, that ‘our bending author’ identifies the
play as ‘the work of a single writer only’ (K. Duncan-Jones 2001:Â€ 112),
and, equally important here, she sees the phrase evoking the Keatsian
principle of Negative Capability, the ability of this author to rise by bend-
ing (107):Â€ ‘Shakespeare draws attention to his sole authorship so unob-
trusively and tactfully that modern readers … may not even notice that
anything unusual is being claimed’ (112). In this way, the Chorus uses a
single phrase to mark the signature of Shakespearean counter-authorship
as we understand it today.
The bending author’s word ‘Our’ draws attention to a feature of
Shakespeare’s authorship much commented on:Â€ he communalizes the
agency of the ‘author’, drawing himself into the community of the thea-
tre, which rehearses a dialogue between actors and audience. The word
‘pen’ recalls the author’s material instrument, which Shakespeare had
recently featured in the coat of arms drawn up for his family:Â€a spear in
the shape of a pen.38 The word ‘pursu’d’ draws attention to the author’s
agency, while ‘story’ makes sure we do not mistake his Life of Henry the
Fifth for mere ‘history’; rather, it is a work of historical fiction. Finally,
the phrase ‘rough and all-unable’ not only deploys the author’s modesty
topos but transposes the laureate self-presentation of Spenser to the stage.
For, in the June eclogue Colin Clout tells his friend Hobinoll, ‘I wote my
rymes bene rough, and rudely drest’ (77). Spenser’s use of ‘rough’ intro-
duces a Virgilian provenance to the Chorus’ utterance:Â€the Shakespearean
author presents himself unobtrusively as a pastoral poet. In sum, this
inept (pastoral) author, in the raw of nature, works hard at the refined art
of literary courtesy.
He works so hard that he makes the opening two lines of the
Epilogue the beginning of a Shakespearean sonnet, as scholars have
long realized.39 The presence of an inset sonnet within a Shakespearean
play, familiar from Romeo and Juliet and elsewhere, speaks deftlyÂ€– one
wants to say, invisiblyÂ€ – to this author’s standing as a national poet-
playwright. More to the point:Â€the man of the theatre presents himself
as a literary poet-playwright, an author with a dramatic career, combin-
ing plays with poems, following the lead of Marlowe, and, before him,
Ovid.40
For details, see Cheney 2008a:Â€34–7.

38
See, for example, Walter 1954:Â€156.
39
Cheney 2004:Â€17–73.
40
The opening two lines to the Prologue of Henry V also self-present
Shakespeare’s theatrical authorship:
O for a Muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
Henry V, Prologue 1–2
This utterance is oblique, so much so that the Victorians chose to Â�perform

it as a ‘Pre-Raphaelite sigh’ uttered by a female,41 yet it feels masculine
enough, and anything but a sigh. Rather, it is an exclamation, voicing
a resounding literary possibility:Â€that an author (‘a Muse of fire’) could
use his inspired (female) imagination to ‘invent’ a work so powerful it
participates in the divine (‘ascend / The brightest heaven’). The Christian
resonance of ‘ascend’ and ‘heaven’, together with the imagery of light
(‘fire’, ‘brightest’), makes this author’s Classical invocation to the Muse
not a mere convention but a semi-religious ritual. In the October eclogue,
Spenser had used the topos to describe the literary fame of ‘the Romish
Tityrus’, Virgil, whose three-part careerÂ€– ‘Oaten reede’, ‘laboured lands’
and ‘warres’Â€– affects the divine:Â€‘So as the Heavens did quake his verse
to here’ (55–60). Like Spenser’s Virgilian career-poetics, Shakespeare’s
poetic metatheatre has a metaphysical dimension to it; yet, rather than
invoke the Muse for inspiration, this author vaunts the telos of his own
renown.
In particular, Shakespeare’s Classical reference to the Muse presents
his play as an English national epic in the tradition of Homer and
Virgil. Thus, Shakespearean authorship operates through intertextual-
ity, and intertextuality itself is the singular marker of authorship. In his
Oxford edition of the play, Gary Taylor glosses the opening two lines
of the Prologue as ‘a collocation of phrases in Chapman’s Achilles’ Shield
(1598):Â€“his ascential muse” (Dedication, l. 117), and “Bright-footed Thetis
did the sphere aspire / (Amongst th’immortals) of the God of fire” (ll.
1–2)’.42 In his introduction, Taylor takes the eighteenth-century cue of
George Steevens, who first cited Chapman’s 1598 Seven Books of the Iliad
as a source-text:Â€‘though Shakespeare is known to have read Chapman’s
translation some time between its publication in 1598 and the compos-
ition of Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), the possibility of Chapman’s influ-
ence on Henry V has never been followed up. This is surprising, since
Shakespeare clearly encourages comparison of Henry with his classical
counterparts’ (Taylor 1982:Â€ 52). For Taylor (as for many), the Classical
41
Taylor 1982:Â€56. 42
Taylor 1982:Â€91.
172 Patrick Cheney
matrix ‘elevate[s] … Henry V to the status of “epic”’ (58), in part because,
like the Iliad and Odyssey, the play is ‘a study in human greatness’ (72)Â€– a
‘greatness’, Taylor ‘believe[s]’, that ‘Shakespeare, in 1599, was aware of’,
especially with respect to ‘his own success’, ‘his achievement and poten-
tial as an artist’ (73).
In Shakespeare’s hands, the intertextuality by which his Classical
English counter-authorship proceeds foregrounds ‘consciousness’.43 Thus,
the Choruses of Henry V script a dramatic poetics linking ‘author’ with
actor and audience by featuring the power all three share, imagination:
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
…
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance.
The effect of linking author, actor and audience is to highlight the

Â�cultural ‘work’ of the literary imagination that theatre performs. As such,
the Choruses show the author engaging in the process of self-Â�discovery
outlined by Lipking. I propose that the Choruses constitute a his-
toric ‘summing-up’ of Shakespearean art at the midpoint of his career.
According to Lipking, this middle phase can ‘take many forms’, but the
one he discusses first is relevant to Henry V:Â€ ‘an epic could conclude a
career’ (Lipking 1981:Â€68). Henry V is not the epic crowning Shakespeare’s
career, but criticism has long argued that in this play, as in the Henriad as
a whole, the author puts the genre of national epic on the stage.44
What has escaped notice is Shakespeare’s use of a Classical topos for
the generic shape to a literary career, ‘to compare great things with small’,
which John S. Coolidge identifies as a Virgilian strategy for representing
the progression from pastoral to georgic to epic:Â€ ‘To signalize this pro-
gression Virgil makes special use of the familiar phrase, “to compare great
things with small” … Thus the idle shepherd carries the implicit promise
of … the strenuous hero, to come; and the lowly pastoral kind looks for-
wards towards the epic.’â•›45 For Virgil, pastoral contains or compresses epic
in order to predict it. As Coolidge shows, writers from Lucretius to Milton
rely on the topos, including Ovid, who uses it several times, in part to
counter the Virgilian progressive model with one featuring his oscillation
On this concept, see Cheney 2008a:Â€203–33, especially 205 n. 8 for a history of criticism.
43
See Cheney 2008a:Â€31–62.

44 45
Coolidge 1965:Â€2, 11.
through the genres of erotic elegy, tragedy and epic.46 In Elizabethan
culture, Marlowe and Spenser both use the career topos to play out the
opposition between an Ovidian and a Virgilian career model:Â€ Spenser,
in Cuddie’s Emblem concluding October; Marlowe, in his translation of
Amores 2.17.4.
In the Choruses to Henry V, Shakespeare deploys the career topos three
times, and in each he applies it to his theatrical poetics, as his phrasing in
the third example formalizes:Â€‘in that small most greatly lived / This star
of England’ (Epilogue 5–6). First, in the Prologue, the bending author
addresses the audience directly:
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million.
Typically, editors unravel the mathematics:Â€ ‘a zero, in the unit’s place,

transforms 100,000 into 1,000,000 … The same point is made in George
Peele’s Edward I’.47 I suggest, rather, that Shakespeare has his eye on
another Elizabethan dramatist, whom critics identify as his greatest
rival, including in Henry V:Â€ Christopher Marlowe.48 For, Shakespeare’s
formulation, in which a single actor (‘crooked figure’) may represent
(‘attest’) ‘in little place a million’, rewrites one of Marlowe’s most famous
lines:Â€‘Infinite riches in a little room.’49
In The Jew of Malta, Barabas refers to the wealth in his counting-house,
yet, as the actor gestures with his arms, the ‘little room’ becomes the thea-
tre, and the ‘infinite riches’ the wealth of the theatre itself. Chapman may
have been the first to hint at this meaning, when he writes of Ovid seeing
Corinna/Julia in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595):
He saw th’ extraction of all fairest dames:
The fair of beauty, as whole countries come
And show their riches in a little room.50
Shakespeare had himself rewritten the Marlovian line in As You Like It,
when Touchstone refers to ‘a great reckoning in a little room’ (3.3.12–15)Â€–
an ‘allusion to Christopher Marlowe’s death at the hands of Ingram Frizer
in 1593 in a quarrel over a tavern bill’.51 In particular, the Henry V Chorus
46
For details, see Cheney 1997:Â€63 and 286 n. 30. 47 Taylor 1982:Â€92.
48
See Shapiro 1991; J. Bate 1997:Â€ 101–32. On the Tamburlainian underpinnings of Henry V, see
Logan 2007:Â€143–68.
49
Jew of Malta 1.1.32. Quotations from Marlowe’s plays come from Burnett 1999.
50
Chapman, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, in Shepherd 1911–24:Â€ii.29.
51
Evans and Tobin 1997:Â€421.
174 Patrick Cheney
may gesture to the Marlovian ‘reckoning’ in the term ‘accompt’, mean-
ing ‘reckoning’ (Evans and Tobin 1997:Â€ 979). If so, Shakespeare credits
Marlowe with voicing the theatrical strategy evoked in the Choruses:Â€the
communal ability of author, actor and audience to make ‘infinite’ with
‘little’, ‘great’ with ‘small’.52
Second, to open Act 2, the Chorus says,
O England! model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart.
Henry V, Chorus 2.16–17
Here, Shakespeare extends the career topos to the communal perform-

ance of nationhood, as the word ‘model’ indicates. England is a ‘model’
(or ‘small-scale replica’)53 of its ‘inward greatness’; or perhaps it is a ‘mould’
of that greatness,54 the way a small body contains a big heart. Like theatre,
the nation is a small thing containing ‘inner greatness’.
In keeping with the generic dynamic operating in the ‘great things in
small’ formula, the second Chorus is important because it begins with
displaced versions of both the Ovidian and Virgilian career models:
Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies;
Now thrive the armorers, and honor’s thought
Reigns solely in the breast of every man.
Then sell the pasture now to buy the horse,
Following the mirror of all Christian kings,
With winged heels, as English Mercuries.
Here, Shakespeare transposes the authorial ‘Muse of fire’ from the first
Chorus to the character of the ‘youth of England’, who ‘are on fire’Â€ –
inspired with the author’s epic ambition. Thus they have left their ‘silken
dalliance’ in the ‘wardrobe’ and donned manly ‘armor’, reversing the tra-
jectory of Ovid in the Amores, when he turns from ‘stern war’ to ‘amorous
lays’.55 Like Virgil, the Chorus presents the English youth moving from
the domain of pastoral to that of epic, when they ‘sell the pasture’ to
‘buy the horse’. The reference to ‘winged’ Mercury confirms this metapo-
etic reading, for Mercury is not simply the messenger god but the god of
52
The editions of Walter 1954, Taylor 1982, Craik 1995 and Gurr 1992a do not gloss the lines with
Marlowe.
53
Taylor 1982:Â€118. 54 Craik 1995:Â€153.
55
Ovid, Amores 1.1.32–3, trans. Christopher Marlowe, in Cheney and Striar 2006.
poets, as Michael Drayton knew when he used Mercury’s hat on his coat
of arms to exhibit his laureate status.56
The Epilogue uses the Marlovian topos a third time, right where we
should expect it:
Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursu’d the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time; but in that small most greatly lived
This star of England.
Henry V, Epilogue 1–6
Here Shakespeare defines the essence of his counter-authorial poetics, the

stage means by which the ‘bending author … pursu[es] the story’:Â€he con-
fines ‘mighty men’ in a ‘little room’, ‘misrepresenting their glorious series
of achievements through the fragmentary nature of this play’.57 Again,
Shakespeare acknowledges the limitation of theatre while highlighting
the Mercurial leap of imaginationÂ€– both his own and that of actor and
audienceÂ€– which makes theatre work. Then he locates the career topos in
the hero of the epic history, King Henry, who lived but a ‘Small time’ but
nonetheless who concentrates greatness:Â€ ‘but in that small most greatly
lived’. In sum, Shakespeare rewrites the career topos to highlight not
the author alone but the link between author, actor, nation and national
hero.
The phrase ‘the full course of their glory’ warrants pause here. Taylor
glosses ‘course’ as meaning four things:Â€‘(a) gallop on horseback (b) mili-
tary encounter (c) hunt, pursuit of game (d) sequence, narrative’ (Taylor
1982: 281). The fourth meaning is especially to the point, for the meta-
poetic word ‘course’ can also refer to the ‘narrative’ or ‘story’, even as
it gestures to the original meaning of career, ‘Of a horse:Â€a Short gallop
at full speed’ (OED, Def. 2), ‘By extension:Â€A running course’ (Def. 3).
The sixteenth-century definition of ‘career’ derives from the Latin word
cursus, the course of a chariot-race, used by Ovid and Virgil to represent
their progress as poets. For instance, Ovid ends the Amores by announ-
cing the conclusion to his poem:Â€ ‘This last end [= turning-post] to my
Elegies is set’ (3.15.2). Similarly, Virgil opens Book 3 of the Georgics by
imagining himself entering Rome in triumph to greet Caesar:Â€ ‘In his
honour I, a victor resplendent in Tyrian purple, will drive a hundred
â•‡ Craik 1995:Â€152 and Cheney 2008a:Â€34–7, including scholarship on Mercury as a poet-figure.
56
Craik 1995:Â€370.
57
176 Patrick Cheney
four-horse chariots beside the stream.’58 As Leo Braudy writes in The
Frenzy of Renown, ‘Although the Latin cursus remains most obviously in
the English course, it shares a more intriguing metaphorical relation with
career:Â€ Both are words that first applied to horse races and later to the
stages of professional development.’59
Significantly, Shakespeare uses the word that is Braudy’s great sub-
ject:Â€ ‘glory’Â€ – authorial fame, as the sonnet-rhyme with ‘story’ intimÂ�
ates. Indeed, the ‘story’ of Henry V is about ‘glory’, as the king himself
announces:Â€‘I will rise there with so full a glory / That I will dazzle all the
eyes of France’ (1.2.278–9). Pistol parodies Henry’s project after the king
urges his men, ‘Once more unto the breach’ (3.1.1), for the Ancient lapses
into mock-frenzy of ‘plain-song’ (3.2.7):
… God’s vassals drop and die,
And sword and shield,
In bloody field,
Doth win immortal fame.
Henry V 3.2.8–11
Long ago, William Hazlitt noted, ‘It has been much disputed whether
Shakspeare was actuated by the love of fame’, but he himself goes on to
dissent. Milton, Spenser, Bacon, Chaucer, Dante and others sought fame,
‘But it is not so in Shakspeare’:Â€‘There is scarcely the slightest trace of any
such feeling in his writings … And this indifference may be accounted
for from the very circumstance, that he was almost entirely a man of
genius’, not a man of ‘taste’.60 The idea is still current, for in 1992 Andrew
Gurr says of Shakespeare and fellow dramatists, ‘Except for a few poets,
nobody gave a thought to posterity.’61
Yet Erne has reminded us of the historical context for viewing ‘literary
fame’ at this time:Â€‘Toward the end of the sixteenth century, an English
poet’s hopes that his verse would live on after his death were probably
more likely to come true than ever before’, because of the steady emer-
gence of printed books (Erne 2003:Â€6–7). Erne cites J. B. Leishman, who
in 1961 challenged the notion that Shakespeare took no interest in the
afterlife of his plays:Â€Shakespeare, ‘who is commonly supposed to have
been indifferent to literary fame, … has written both more copiously
and more memorably on this topic than any other sonneteer’.62 Erne’s
58
Georgics, 3.17–18, in Fairclough 1916–18. On Virgil’s use of the chariot as a figure for his poetry,
see P. Hardie 1993b:Â€100–1.
59
Braudy 1986:Â€61 n. 4, and see Introduction above. 60 Hazlitt 1930:Â€iv.21–3.
61
Gurr 1992b:Â€46. 62 Leishman 1961:Â€22.
conclusion, that ‘Shakespeare’s dramatic writing … does suggest a fair
amount of Â�artistic ambition and self-consciousness’ (2003: 5), can be
amply supported. For starters, Shakespeare uses the word ‘fame’ and its
cognates nearly 200 times; the word ‘renown’ and its cognates, over 50
more; and the word ‘glory’ and its cognates, an additional 100Â€– bring-
ing the total to around 350. From beginning to end, he meditates deeply
on the topic of literary fame, as passages from 2 Henry VI (1.1.92–102,
5.3.29–33) to Sonnet 55 make clear.63
The Act 5 Choruses to Henry V both bear on Shakespeare’s literary
quest for fame by engaging in a well-marked strategy of a literary car-
eer:Â€the advertisement for both past and future works. To open Act 5, the
Chorus pauses to compare Henry’s wartime London to Classical Rome:
Like to the senators of th’ antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in.
According to Duncan-Jones, ‘Shakespeare looks forward to his next play

in the initial comparison of the return of Henry from Agincourt with
that of Caesar from his triumph over the sons of Pompey.’ Specifically,
Shakespeare ‘neatly provides the Globe audience with some of “the story
so far” as background to Julius Caesar’.64 Yet Duncan-Jones does not
record the self-reference in the last line:Â€the Caesarian phrase ‘go forth’.
In Act 2, scene 2 of Julius Caesar, the phrase occurs three times, when
the emperor says to his wife, Calphurnia, on the morning of the Ides of
March, ‘Caesar shall forth … / Yet Caesar shall go forth … / And Caesar
shall go forth’ (10, 28, 48). The repetition is notable because, as editors
have long recognized, it repeats the repetition in Marlowe’s Massacre at
Paris, where the Guise, about to be assassinated, says, ‘Yet Caesar shall go
forth … / Thus Caesar did go forth’ (21.71, 91).65 Shakespeare’s allusion to
The Massacre in Henry V may help confirm the Marlovian provenance of
the ‘great things in small’ topos elsewhere in the Chorus.
As Duncan-Jones also observes, ‘The Epilogue … reminds the audi-
ence of Shakespeare’s earlier work, the Henry VI cycle, “Which oft
our stage hath shown”’, adding:Â€ ‘Though Shakespeare has often been
viewed as careless about personal fame …, these allusions show him
effectively “puffing” his own history plays, … but doing so in such an
affable and relaxed way that we scarcely notice that it is being done’
See the Index to Cheney 2008a under ‘fame’, ‘glory, Christian’, ‘literary eternal’ and ‘immortality’.
63
K. Duncan-Jones 2001:Â€113. 65 See Cheney 2008b:Â€145–6.

64
178 Patrick Cheney
(K. Duncan-Jones 2001: 113–14). Not mere puffery, the allusions to
the Henry VI trilogy and to Julius Caesar constitute Shakespeare’s ver-
sion of the career advertisement made famous by England’s Virgil,
Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queene begins with an announcement
that the national poet who wrote pastoral in the past progresses to epic
in the present (1.Pr.1). Yet, as is almost always the case, Shakespeare’s
announcement is counter-laureate, because in the self-presentment of
his counter-career ‘we scarcely notice that it is being done’.
‘T wo T ru t h s A r e T ol d’:Â€S h a k e s pe a r e’s C a r e e r s
Did Shakespeare have a literary career? According to our received critical
narrative, he did not. Rather, he had a ‘professional career’, devoted to the
commercial demands of the new London theatre. But, according to the
narrative he invents in his fictions, as concentrated here in the Choruses
of Henry V, William Shakespeare also has a second career, and he uses the
theatre to re-imagine the very concept of a career. Bending between a pro-
fessional career in staged theatre and a literary career in printed poems
and plays, England’s (future) National Poet manages to author the most
sustained counter-laureate career on record. Four hundred years later, we
are still trying to chart it.
Ch apter 9
New spins on old rotas:Â€Virgil, Ovid, Milton

Maggie Kilgour
As other essays in this volume have already indicated, the contours of

the Virgilian rota, once considered the dominant career pattern for any
serious Renaissance poet, do not seem as clear as they once did. Despite
the trope of the wheel, critics have often focused on the linear, teleo-
logical thrust of the Virgilian model, which has been seen to give a
progressive, developmental shape to the poet’s life that reflected sim-
ultaneously the movement of civilization.1 As Michael Putnam’s essay
reminds us, Virgil’s model is also a rota in a truer sense, as it comes full
circle to trace a movement back to its earlier origins. Virgil’s career ends
where it began, in the dubious land of shades, umbrae.2 This return to
origins reveals the unity of the works as a whole and brings them to
a close in a final self-gathering of climactic fulfilment and resolution.
But it also creates a counter, centrifugal pressure to the linear thrust
of Virgil’s career that resists closure. The unresolved tension between
the two movements mirrors the conflict now frequently noted in the
Aeneid itself. While Aeneas’ career involves progression, his transform-
ation from defeated Trojan into the Roman whose climactic victory
over Turnus suggests the triumph of civilization over barbarism, the
final moments of the text seem to suggest that the hero is relapsing into
barbarism.3 The abrupt ending of the poemÂ€– which focuses on the slay-
ing of the defeated TurnusÂ€– calls the progress of Rome into question.
But it also raises questions about the career of the author which ended
1
On this model and its influence, see Curtius 1953:Â€231–2, Lipking 1981:Â€76–93, Coolidge 1965:Â€1–23,
Neuse 1978:Â€606–39, Cheney 2001:Â€79–80 and also Cheney 1993:Â€49–63.
2
See Putnam above, Ch. 1, and also Theodorakopoulos 1997:Â€157, 162–4 especially.
3
For a discussion of the tradition of darker readings of the poem, see R. F. Thomas 2001. David
Quint also shows how Aeneas’ linear progress is haunted by the temptation not just to return
to Troy but also to repeat his past. The journey to Rome must include but redirect this drive
backwards:Â€rather than simply replicating the past, Aeneas must find a way of recreating it ‘with
a difference’ (Quint 1993:Â€50). Readers do not agree as to whether the end demonstrates such a tri-
umphant recreation, or a darker type of regression.
179
180 Maggie Kilgour
equally abruptly with death.4 Like the poem, the Virgilian path seems
haunted by shadows and questions that make the end of the poem and
the author’s life less the triumphal climax of interdependent empire
and authorial self than a confession of radical uncertainty about the
poet’s past and future. If the poet’s rota comes full circle, where indeed
has he been going? Moreover, who has been spinning the wheel? As
Nita Krevans’ essay in this volume further shows, Virgil’s reported and
highly ambiguous deathbed request that the Aeneid be destroyed both
reinforces and undermines the final shape of the rota. While the ges-
ture seems one of supreme authorial control, the story reveals the lack
of the poet’s authority over his own works; the Aeneid was published, as
Donatus tells us, ‘auctore Augusto’.
As critics have begun to look more closely at Virgil’s career, they have
also begun to re-examine its meaning for and indeed dominance of
Renaissance poets. Certainly other models were possible, especially for
the growing number of professional playwrights whose careers took a
very different shape. As several essays in this volume demonstrate, other
Classical writers established alternatives as well. Patrick Cheney, who has
gallantly rescued several writers from the relentlessly ‘grinding circum-
ference of the Virgilian Wheel’ (Cheney 1993:Â€53) has argued that Ovid
offered Marlowe a fruitful counter-Virgilian model. Cheney suggests that
Ovid’s vision of his own development from elegy to tragedy in the Amores
presents Marlowe with ‘a relatively stable and coherent Ovidian career
model’ (Cheney 1997:Â€ 41). Moreover, Ovid offers an alternative to the
Virgilian model which is (Cheney 1997:Â€29):
non-progressive and non-typological:Â€ it sets up a sacred generic order only to
scramble it. In this generic play, oscillation infiltrates, contaminates, and finally
orders progression. Thus genre progression and genre itself remain vital to the
Ovidian poet, but he delights in a series of deft manoeuvres that explode the
developmental idea of a career (literary or civic) so important to Roman and
Elizabethan culture, even as he clearly develops himself.
Given Ovid’s general influence in the Renaissance it seems highly
Â�
plausible and helpful to imagine that writers studied his example. But
I have some reservations about this model. It first of all presupposes an
opposition between Virgilian and Ovidian paradigms. Where Virgil is
progressive and typological, Ovid is not; he scrambles the order Virgil
A rather literal identification of the death of Turnus with that of the author was made by Petrarch
4
who wrote in his copy of Virgil:Â€‘You were too sure a prophet of your own death:Â€for with such
words on your lips life fled you’ (qtd in P. Hardie 1997a:Â€145).
New spins on old rotas 181
sets up. This is a common way of thinking about the two poets, as well as
their legacies in the Renaissance. It assumes that Ovid is a ‘“bad” reader’Â€–
or at least a very naughty oneÂ€ – of Virgil (Cheney 1997:Â€ 15).. I’ll return
to this traditional antithesis shortly. But the alternative looks somewhat
limited, as Cheney’s reading has Ovid creating another typological and
teleological sequence, with an ‘Ovidian triad’ (Cheney 1997:Â€ 41), based
on the plan of the Amores, that indeed progresses as it evolves from elegy
to tragedy (epic’s rival for the highest status in the Renaissance hierarchy
of the genres). Although Cheney notes that, in reality, Ovid offers two
career models, the one he announced in the Amores and the other that he
actually lived, Cheney argues that only the first is important to Marlowe
(Cheney 1997:Â€12, 47). This may be true of Marlowe, whose career reached
its own abrupt and unexpected ending. But it is not true of other Â�writers
of the time. While Ovid’s early proposed programme sets his (and our)
expectations, it is finally his lived career, like that of Virgil, that later
writers knew all too well. The spectre of Ovid’s life haunted the reception
of his works from the beginning.5
In his career, as in so many other ways, Ovid has indeed seemed the
antithesis of VirgilÂ€– and certainly has not offered an obviously attractive
role model for any later poet! Where Virgil’s writing appears to unfold
itself naturally towards its final epic triumph, Ovid’s career has been seen
as one of sad decline, a myth of regression not progression. He reaches his
epic peak prematurely with the Metamorphoses; his last poems, written
from exile in Tomis, are repetitive, and frankly whiney. It is hardly heart-
ening for a reader when a poet himself announces that his creative powers
have been worn down by circumstance. But the loss of ability becomes
itself a major theme of these works, as Ovid constantly complains that his
talents have been worn away by hardship; he fears that he is regressing,
devolving from the urbane and witty Roman into a barbaric demi-Gete.
He notes that his writing is becoming monotonous in its subject, for the
exiled poet can only write of one single subject:Â€his own dismal fate. If
the Metamorphoses, like the Aeneid, ends like a grand symphony, in which
beginning and end are gathered together into a single climactic whole,
the end of Ovid’s exilic work might better be compared to the fade-out
on a modern recording, when a tune simply repeats itself over and over,
echoing itself, until it disappears altogether.
5
See Lyne 2002:Â€ 288–300. See also Robathan 1973:Â€ 191–209 and Smarr 1991:Â€ 139–51; Piccone
2003:Â€389–407; and Pugh 2005.
182 Maggie Kilgour
For a long time, Ovid’s disclaimers made it easy for critics to ignore
these works except as the sorry end of a great talent. Still, if they are
indeed the failure Ovid insists, their attraction and importance for later
writers, especially those who also experienced some form of exile, seems
odd, or at least sadistic or possibly masochistic. Recent criticism has
begun to suggest the importance and complexity of Ovid’s last poetry.6
Even as the poet complains that his career is overÂ€– crushed by the prin-
ceps’s powerÂ€– he is subtly putting himself back together and reinventing
himself. In exile, he reviews and indeed rewrites his entire career, giving it
a unifying shape, so that it appears held together as carefully as Putnam
shows Virgil’s was, and by oddly similar means.7 After experimenting
with the epic in the Metamorphoses, Ovid returns in his final works to his
first source of poetry, the elegy. The themes of the erotic verse reappear,
though typically metamorphosed:Â€the frustrated sexual desire of the erotic
verse becomes the longing to return home and the disdainful mistress is
replaced by the princeps. At the end, the poet comes full circle, back to
where he started.
Here again Ovid might seem Virgil’s opposite, who is deliberately and
cheekily turning the Virgilian rota the wrong way, setting it in a back-
wards motion.8 Yet given the retrogressive undertow of the Virgilian
career itself it seems too simple to see Ovid as merely reversing Virgil’s
motion. Rather than being an antithetical ‘bad reader’ of Virgil, Ovid
shows himself here to be, as Stephen Hinds notes, ‘one of Virgil’s most
sympathetic and perceptive readers’ (Hinds 1988:Â€16). As Richard Thomas
suggests, ‘he brings out what was already there in Virgil’ (R. F. Thomas
2001:Â€80).9 Like Virgil, at the end of his career Ovid returns to his own
origins. In so doing, he circles back to the questions raised at the end of
the Aeneid. Where indeed has the rota brought the poet? At the end of
the Metamorphoses, and in the Fasti, Ovid asserts that art takes him to the
stars. The last work suggests that poetry also has led to Tomis, to exile,
where, as Putnam reminds us, Virgil’s poetry began. Ovid seems to have
gone both too far and nowhere at all.
6
See especially Kenney 1965:Â€37–49, Dickinson 1973:Â€154–90, Nagle 1980 and H. Evans 1983. Also
see Hinds 1985:Â€13–32 and Hinds 1999; Williams 1994 and P. Hardie 2002a:Â€283–325.
7
See also Hardie 2002a:Â€31 n. 1.
8
In a paper presented at the conference in which this volume originated, Patricia Parker spoke of
Ovid’s Medea as a figure for the ‘preposterous’ career, modelled on Medea’s powers to reverse the
forces of nature and make time run backwards. Given Ovid’s interest in and later identification
with Medea, a figure to whom I will return, Parker’s reading is highly suggestive.
9
On Ovid’s adaptation of Virgil, and its influence, see also Farrell 2004:Â€ 41–55 and Barchiesi
2005:Â€cxlviii–cxlix.
At the same time, Ovid’s final poetry is a powerful summary of and
conclusion to his career in which the poet seems to take control of his life
once again. It is an astonishing feat, in which he gives his careerÂ€– a career
which was interrupted and derailed by external circumstances over which
he had no controlÂ€ – the illusion of authorial organization. As Putnam
suggests, Virgil’s career seems planned, crafted itself by the poet’s art. By
following Virgil and bringing his poetry back to its origins, Ovid asserts
his control over the shape of his life. At times also, especially early on, he
defiantly asserts the inability of Augustus to influence his art.10 Speaking
of himself as already dead, he both conveys his insubstantiality outside
of Rome and gives himself a striking authority:Â€he is a voice issuing from
beyond the grave, posthumously pronouncing the last word on his own
poetry.11 As Krevans notes also in the following chapter, Ovid restages
Virgil’s deathbed scene playing all the roles:Â€it is he, not Augustus who
saves his work for posterity and shapes his career. But at the same time,
the poetry draws attention to the poet’s loss of control. This is not just a
strategy of self-deprecation, though it clearly has a rhetorical purpose. It
suggests the other pressing question:Â€ who finally determines the shape
of the poet’s career? In a very real sense, the answer for both Ovid and
Virgil is Augustus, who rescued Virgil’s epic and sent Ovid to Tomis.
As Ovid explains too, Augustus had exiled the poet partly in anger after
reading Ovid’s earlier erotic verse (Trist. 2.207). The princeps demonstrates
the power of the reader over the works and, in Ovid’s case, even over the
poet himself.
Given the questions Ovid’s last verse raises, it is not surprising that it
moved poets, especially at the end of their lives. The influence of Ovid’s
exilic review is evident at both the beginning and end of Milton’s Â�career.
In the early Elegy 1 (the first of the Latin poems in his 1645 volume of
works), Milton playfully compares his own pleasant rustication with
Ovid’s bleaker relegation; his final works suggest more sombre parallels
between his own situation and that of the exiled Ovid.12
Ovid’s example, however, seems in conflict with a career that is usually
imagined as planned and executed on a linearly Virgilian trajectory. As
often noted, the young Milton bursts on the scene in 1645 with a volume
10
See especially his poem to his protégée Perilla:Â€Ovid Trist. 3.7.43–54.
11
On the theme of exile as death see Nagle 1980:Â€21–32.
12
See lines 17–24. E. K. Rand suggests the parallel also:Â€ Rand 1922:Â€ 109–35. The connection is
implied but never really developed by Louis Martz (Martz 1980). It is common to see Milton’s
life after the Restoration as a period of exile; so Elizabeth Sauer notes wryly that ‘Ovid’s punish-
ment is now visited on Milton in his late years’ (Sauer 2001:Â€217).
184 Maggie Kilgour
that is carefully crafted to present him as a Virgilian poet.13 His early
autobiographical statements impose a deterministic and rigorously lin-
ear shape upon his life that seems, in retrospect, uncannily prophetic.
Richard Neuse and Louis Martz see his debut collection as prophesy-
ing a Virgilian career, a prophecy which is neatly fulfilled in Paradise
Lost. According to John Coolidge, moreover, Milton is finally able to go
beyond Virgil:Â€the epic’s ‘sequel’, Paradise Regain’ d, is Milton’s Christian
transcendence and fulfilment (by typological completion) of the Virgilian
progression (Coolidge 1965:Â€20–3).14
Milton’s cunning presentation of his own development has too often
encouraged readers to see him as a monolithic ego, sure of himself from
the very start and unchanging from beginning to end. This is Stanley
Fish’s Milton, a ‘poet of closure’ and relentless consistency (Nuttall
2001:Â€19).15 This monumental Milton has been challenged in recent years
by readings which have focused on a Milton who is conflicted, destabi-
lized, ‘uncertain’, even, in Gordon Teskey’s deliciously provocative term,
‘delirious’ (Teskey 2006).16 Milton’s development, like Ovid’s, was cer-
tainly derailed by forces he neither foresaw nor controlled. Moreover, the
early works and statements show an uncertainty about direction under-
standable in even a highly gifted young man:Â€Milton has a sense of his
own promise, but the path to fulfilment is shadowier to him than it is to
the modern reader, blessed with the prescience of hindsight.17 While the
opening of the English section of the 1645 Poems with the Nativity Ode,
with its echoes of Eclogue 4, seems to present his own poetic nativity as
Virgilian, the opening of the second Latin section with the exilic Elegy
1 gives us a second beginning with a more ominous subtext that points
to another possible career path. If Milton begins his career twice he also
gives us two endings from which to choose. In general, Milton brings
13
See Neuse 1978; Martz 1980:Â€31–59; and Revard 1997. For the young Milton’s identification with
Virgil, see also Campbell 1984:Â€234–8.
14
Martz’s identification of Paradise Regain’ d as a ‘Georgic’ work, however, suggests the possibility
of a different sequence; see Martz 1980:Â€293–304.
15
Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson also note how Milton continues ‘to enjoy the status of
the most monumentally unified author in the canon’ (Nyquist and Ferguson 1987:Â€xii).
16
See also Fallon 2007 and Herman 2005.
17
Lorna Sage notes the danger of simply accepting the superb illusion of self-completion in
Milton’s self-presentations:Â€‘Milton has excluded muddle, failure, contingency, all the signs of
the experiment he was continuously engaged in’ in order to ‘present himself so determinedly as
a finished product’ (Sage 1973:Â€261). As Sage reminds us, ‘We tend to under-rate the amount of
creative energy certain artistsÂ€– Milton and Joyce among themÂ€– put into shaping their lives in
order to write their works. It is easy to be taken in by the illusion they project, and to treat them
as distantly god-like figures in control of all the pressures and accidents of existence’ (262). One
might add Ovid to her list.
his career to a stutteringly clumsy conclusionÂ€– in which two versions of
the grand climactic epic (1667, 1674) frame another complex and gener-
ically shady pair of poems, Paradise Regain’ d and Samson Agonistes (1671)
(a brief epic and a closet drama).18 These poems are themselves about
careers and career choice; the first shows Christ searching for the path
by which he may start to fulfil his destiny, and the second, the path by
which Samson may end his.19 Together they therefore show the beginning
and endings of a career, and each has frequently been read autobiograph-
ically. In 1673 Milton also returned to where he started as a poet, releasing
a new edition of the 1645 Poems, with the addition of some other early
but previously unpublished works. Talk about generic scrambling!Â€– and
at the very point in his career when Milton might have been expected to
be arranging things carefully to present his final word and summing-up
of his achievement.20 But this, I believe, is precisely what he was doing.
Milton’s encyclopedic mind certainly had the power to absorb events, his-
tory, the literary and intellectual tradition, and shape them into a focused
whole, whether that be the myth of Genesis or the myth of his own mat-
uration. Given Milton’s care with the publication of individual works in
this periodÂ€– his revision of the 1645 Poems (in which also the addition
of dates of composition to the individual poems gives a precise and lin-
ear sequence to artistic development) and his restructuring of Paradise
LostÂ€ – it seems hard to imagine that he was not involved in the pres-
entation of the 1671 volume. As Milton must have anticipated also, the
juxtaposition and order of the two poems has influenced their reception,
and especially the reading of Samson Agonistes as in some sense the blind
failed revolutionary’s last word. I therefore want to look at Samson as part
of Milton’s retrospective on his poetic development, his spin of the rota
as he also looks back on his career.21 Milton’s tragedy depicts the end and
18
John Shawcross notes also the contemporary concern with questions of genre; see Shawcross
1983:Â€238.
19
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy argues that in Paradise Regain’ d ‘the interpretation of one’s career’ is ‘the
basic temptation in the poem’ (Rushdy 1988:Â€ 255). One might expect it to be a temptation to
which Samson, unlike Christ, succumbs; as I will suggest, the end of Milton’s play however
makes the temptation that of the reader.
20
Lipking notes how writers have often felt that ‘Last works, like last words, have a special aura
of authenticity’, so it is ‘Small wonder that poets should take such care to end on a proper note’
(Lipking 1981:Â€ 67, 68). Herman suggests that, while ‘it seems as if Milton intended his final
poems as a summa of his life’s workÂ€– a crowning achievement that summons all his previous
writing on stage for a final, brilliant affirmation and curtain call’, Samson undermines the grand
climax:Â€ ‘Samson Agonistes undoes whatever certainties Paradise Regain’ d achieves’ (Herman
2005:Â€24).
21
My argument here is anticipated in some points by Coiro 1998:Â€123–52.
186 Maggie Kilgour
summing-up of a life which leaves us not with a triumphant sequence of
early promise posited and then neatly fulfilledÂ€ – which would be truly
fearful symmetryÂ€– but with a messy and open ending, full of questions
about the past, and the future.
Milton’s most disturbing and controversial work is doubly so because of

its apparently intimate relation with Milton’s own life and even, as in
Virgil’s case, death. Milton’s blind and imprisoned Samson, a revolution-
ary betrayed by his people, is inevitably compared to the poet himself. Yet
critics disagree violently on Milton’s attitude towards his violent hero.22
These debates are in many ways reminiscent of critical disagreement
over the end of the Aeneid. In a longer paper, I argue for a Virgilian
Â�subtext in Samson Agonistes, especially comparing Samson and Aeneas as
heroes.23 I’ll abridge a few important points of comparison here. Both her-
oes’ careers are themselves derailed by disasters connected with the sea: at
the start of the Aeneid, Aeneas first appears in the storm that tosses his
ships off course to Carthage, while Samson and the Chorus both describe
him as shipwrecked by his Dido, Dalila (SA 198–200; 1044–5). The situ-
ation symbolizes the protagonists’ loss of a past heroic identity and marks
the beginning of their transformation into a new kind of hero. Their jour-
neys take them through a process of rebirth and renewal, reinforced in
both cases through images of fire and serpents, which culminate when
the originally shipwrecked heroes obtain symbolic power over water.24
Even more strikingly, however, both heroes undergo this regeneration by
22
As Stephen M. Fallon notes, Samson is ‘Milton’s most indeterminate poem, the most resistant
to critical consensus’ (Fallon 2007:Â€251). Many readers have seen Samson’s final act as proof of
his recovery of his insight and his fulfilment of God’s plan; the drama thus shows the process
of regeneration. See Radzinowicz 1978; Low 1974; and Shawcross 2001. While most regenerative
readings tend to downplay the violence as an unpleasant but necessary side-effect of spiritual
growth, Michael Lieb argues forcefully that Milton approves of violence as a regenerative act.
Violence is not a by-product of the action, it is the main action:Â€‘The drama is a work of vio-
lence to its very core. It extols violence. Indeed, it exults in violence’ (Lieb 1994:Â€237). See also
Feisel G. Mohamed who argues that current critical denials of Milton’s support of violence sug-
gest a need to idealize both Milton and the western tradition as rational and pacific (Mohamed
2005:Â€327–40). In contrast, John Carey and Joseph Wittreich especially have argued that Milton
means us to denounce, not applaud, Samson’s violent end. Carey’s article, ‘A Work in Praise of
Terrorism’ (2002:Â€15–16), pushes to an extreme the arguments of his earlier work; see especially J.
Carey 1967:Â€395–9, J. Carey 1969, as well as the notes in J. Carey 1968:Â€337–41. See also the series
of arguments developed by Joseph Wittreich (Wittreich 1986b, 2002; Wittreich and Kelly 2002).
Derek Wood provides a thoughtful summary and critique of the critical disagreements over the
character of Samson during the last fifty years (Wood 2001:Â€3–26).
23
See Kilgour 2008:Â€201–34.
24
On the imagery of fire and serpents in Virgil, see especially Knox 1966:Â€124–42. On this imagery
and that of water in Milton, see Carey 1967 and Wittreich 2002:Â€247–60.
means of a process of definition by contrast in which they reject alternative
models of heroism embodied in a series of potential rivals. In the Aeneid,
Aeneas’ identity is transformed through relationships with three central
figures who serve as doubles for aspects of himself:Â€Anchises, Dido and,
finally, Turnus. Similarly, the main action of Samson Agonistes revolves
around the encounters with Manoa, Dalila and Harapha which lead up
to the drama’s climax. Each hero thus faces a benevolent father figure who
ties him to his own past, a female counterpart who dangerously seduces
him from his destiny, and a foreign hero who most directly represents an
alternative set of heroic values. Each hero must leave behind these seduc-
tive potential selves, undergoing renewal through psychological amputa-
tion. Both narratives thus seem to suggest a pattern of heroic growth and
development, through loss, trial and the rejection of temptation. Despite
the initial setbacks, these seem progressive career models.
The fates of both Aeneas and Samson are more complex, however, than
this model might suggest. The violent climactic act that seems to separ-
ate the hero from his alternatives in fact potentially confirms continuing
identification and hints at a darker end for individual and historical pro-
gress. Both endings generate parallel questions:Â€do the authors celebrate
or critique violence, as a tool of empire, in Virgil’s case, or of revolution-
ary change in Milton’s? The final scenesÂ€– the slaying of Turnus and the
slaughter of the PhilistinesÂ€– make us question whether the career of the
hero is one of progression or regression.
Like the Aeneid, Samson Agonistes seems to look backwards. In every
way it seems a throwback. Generically, Milton is returning to the Classical
models renounced in Paradise Regain’ d. Stylistically and thematically the
poem seems also to belong to an earlier stage of Milton’s careerÂ€– a fact
which has caused some critics to argue that it was written much earlier.25
The verse builds on patterns of doubling and repetition.26 The retrogres-
sive quality is evident in Samson himself, who evokes earlier models of
heroism and who moreover, like Aeneas, has a bad habit of repeating the
past. Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips claimed that the name Samson
meant ‘There a second time’Â€– an appropriate etymology for a man whose
25
See especially Parker 1949:Â€ 145–66 and Shawcross 1961:Â€ 345–58. In response, see Radzinowicz
1978:Â€387–407. As the subtitle of Radzinowicz’s book (‘The Growth of Milton’s Mind’) suggests,
debates over Samson, including the date of composition, are very much concerned with the shape
of the poet’s development.
26
See Carey 1968:Â€328–9. There has been much discussion of repetition and doubling in the poem;
see especially the analyses of the role of verbal repetition and rhyme in the poem in Carey
1968:Â€335–8 and Coiro 1998:Â€134–6. See also the powerful reading in Shoaf 1985:Â€169–89.
188 Maggie Kilgour
fall is linked to a repeated compulsion to marry foreign females. As a
result of his choices Samson finds himself in a helpless state of depend-
ency and weakness, in which he appears infantilized. By succumbing to
temptation, Samson has returned to a more primitive state of individual
development.
But the climax of the poem is seen by his followers as a more positive
form of return, in which Samson recovers his original identity and divine
purpose. The dead Samson now appears to his father, Manoa, to be reu-
nited with his early self (1709–11):
Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson and heroicly hath finish’d
A life Heroic.27
As the verbal circularity suggests, Manoa and the Chorus think that
Samson’s career reaches fulfilment by both moving forward and coming
full circle. To celebrate this achievement, Manoa claims he will build a
memorial monumentÂ€ – the traditional marker for Classical closure and
poetic immortalityÂ€– and heads off any further doubts by telling us not
only the meaning of Samson’s life, but how we are to respond to it:Â€‘With
peace and consolation … And calm of mind all passion spent’ (1757–8).
Closure is thus marked symbolically and achieved aesthetically, through
the creation of the illusion of Aristotelian catharsis.28
There are, however, some unsettling elements here that open up the
questions Manoa and the Chorus seem to be trying to close off. Manoa’s
tautological comparison of Samson ‘to himself’ draws on a Renaissance
commonplace, used to stress a hero’s self-consistency and integrity.29 It
shapes Samson’s character as a closed and autonomous circle. Yet the
verbal and logical redundancy, in which an anticipated simile collapses
in on itself in perfect likeness (A is like A), seems potentially suspicious
here, especially given Samson’s previous tendency towards repetition. The
phrase has also disturbing parallels with the language of Shakespeare’s
Roman plays. Lucilius prophesies that the captured Brutus ‘will be found
like Brutus, like himself’ (Julius Caesar 5.4.25), and we later learn that
by committing suicide, ‘Brutus only overcame himself’ (5.5.56).30 The
27
All citations of Milton’s works are from Flannagan 1998.
28
The impression of closure and the containment of strong feeling is reinforced by the forceful
emergence of rhyme in the final speech which, as Coiro notes, almost settles into the form of a
sonnet (Coiro 1998:Â€146). The technique here also looks backwards in Milton’s career, to the con-
clusion of ‘Lycidas’ with an ottava rima.
29
See Price 1940:Â€178–81.
30
Citations to Shakespeare’s works are from Evans and Tobin 1997.
redundant phrasing contributes to Shakespeare’s image of Rome as a
divided world, caught in an endless and self-destructive cycle of violence.31
Brutus’ enemy and conqueror Antony will in turn commit suicide, as ‘a
Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquish’d’ (Ant. 4.15.57–8).32 Despite the
Chorus’ attempts to convince us of the contrary (SA 1665–6), Samson’s
end is also hard to differentiate from sheer suicide. The Chorus suggests
that Samson has progressed from a physical hero to a more saintly fig-
ure of heroic suffering and patience (1287–95)Â€ – one who might seem
to later readers as a type of Christ. But his final violent action is hardly
Christlike or patient; to many modern readers especially it marks an even
more vicious relapse into barbarism than that suggested at the end of the
Aeneid. Even in terms of practical effects it seems ambiguous, as it does
not lead to an even brief liberation of Samson’s people. Instead it pro-
duces a state of anarchy which, tellingly for British history, leads eventu-
ally to the Israelites’ request for a king (I Samuel 8:5). As in the story of
the Augustan empire, the revolutionary leader leads to the consolidation
of power in one man:Â€all roads lead to Rome, indeed. It is hard not to ask
cynically what Samson’s career has achieved.33
The complicated imagery at the end of the play further suggests the
underlying tensions here. When Manoa hears of his son’s death, he is first
crushed (SA 1574–77):
What windy joy this day had I conceiv’d
Hopeful of his Delivery, which now proves
Abortive as the first-born bloom of spring
Nipt with the lagging rear of winters frost.
‘Delivery’ is a key word in the poem, connected to Samson’s sense
of his own identity as the liberator of his people. The wordplay here
shifts it into an image of birth (see also 1504–6), only to slip once
again:Â€ Samson’s death is imagined grotesquely as an abortionÂ€ – a
31
See Kahn 1997.
32
On the influence of Antony and Cleopatra, a play which combines Ovidian and Virgilian elem-
ents, on Samson, see Guillory 1986:Â€112–15 and Ferry 1968. A central question of Shakespeare’s
play is when is Antony ‘himself ’ (see for example 1.1.42–3, 57–9; 3.11.7; 3.13.92–3, 185–6):Â€he is
divided between his Egyptian and Roman natures which are only resolvedÂ€– if everÂ€– through
suicide. Shakespeare also exploits the potential humour in these tautologies in Antony’s comic-
ally redundant description of the crocodile:Â€‘It is shap’d, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath
breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth
it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates’ (Ant. 2.7.42–5).
33
As Teskey notes, ‘any episode chosen from history for heroic celebration will be unintentionally
ironized by our knowledge of what is to follow; our knowledge, that is, that in history, nothing
heroic is definitely achieved’ (Teskey 2006:Â€140).
190 Maggie Kilgour
collapsing of birth and death.34 It turns Samson into a child again,
who has prematurely died before he could be reborn, and who ends
before he can begin. The sense of regressive, almost self-consuming,
circularity is reinforced by the fact that in these lines Milton is com-
ing back to one of his earliest English works, ‘On the Death of a Fair
Infant Dying of a Cough’, which he would publish for the first time
in his collected poems of 1673. There the dead child is a ‘Fairest flower
no sooner blown but blasted’ (1) by ‘Bleak winters force’ (4). At the end
of Milton’s career, he, like Virgil, looks back to his own beginning,
through an image of the destructive identification of birth and death,
beginning and ending.35
However, this image of a destructive return is itself overturned. If
Manoa’s anticipated birth turns into death, Samson’s death is quickly
reimagined by the Chorus as rebirth through an elaborate and intricate
series of images of birds and snakes, which culminate in the figure of the
phoenix (SA 1697–1707):
So vertue giv’n for lost,
Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d,
Like that self-begott’n bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay e’re while a Holocaust,
From out her ashie womb now teem’d,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deem’d,
And though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird ages of lives.
The phoenix is of course a conventional, even predictable, figure for

rebirth, appropriated by Christians as a type for Christ.36 Milton’s read-
ers would have recognized this significance, which reminds them that
Samson is also a type for Christ. While the Hebrew Chorus is obviously
ignorant of typology, the image seems intended to celebrate Samson’s tri-
umphant recoveryÂ€– his return to ‘himself’.
However, if the general meaning seems Christian, the image and
wording itself are Classical, looking back especially to Ovid’s phoenix in
Metamorphoses 15.391–407, a figure which brings other elements into the
34
â•‡ On the imagery here, see also Kerrigan 1974:Â€212–17.
35
â•‡ On the echo here as part of Milton’s retrospect, see also Coiro 1998:Â€138.
36
â•‡ See Van den Broek 1972.
poem.37 It suggests a subtle shift from Virgilian influence to an Ovidian
one, recalling especially a moment in which Ovid is himself comment-
ing on Virgil. The phoenix appears near the end of the Metamorphoses,
in which Ovid directly retells the Aeneid. While chronology gives these
last books a slightly more linear thrust, Ovid’s version of Virgil’s story
is typically digressive and redundant.38 Moreover, his history of Rome
is jarringly interrupted by Pythagoras’ lengthy lecture which provides
a vision of eternal return that counters and here even impedes the for-
ward linear movement towards Augustan Rome. In contrast to the grand
linear march of Virgilian history, Pythagoras suggests a world of end-
less recycling, in which things change, omnia mutantur (Met. 15.165), but
stay the same:Â€animam sic semper eandem / esse, sed in uarias doceo migrare
figuras ‘I teach that the soul is always the same, though it takes different
forms’ (15.171–2).39 Pythagoras’ vision of eternal return is especially easy to
identify with the poet of endless flux who himself recycles old stories in
new forms.40 Juxtaposed with the linear narrative of Roman history that
emerges, if faintly, in the last books, Pythagoras seems to reinforce an
opposition between Virgilian and Ovidian routes.
The figure of the phoenix appears itself as a kind of further digres-
sion within or exception to this Pythagorean digression. Pythagoras
notes that in a world of flux and mutable identities, the phoenix is the
only thing that does not change, that is, in essence, always and only like
itself:Â€una est quae reparet seque ipsa reseminet ales ‘there is one bird which
itself renews and reproduces itself’ (15.392). For this reason, it was a use-
ful image for Elizabeth I, associated with her motto, Semper eadem.41 In
the Metamorphoses, the figure has itself a kind of autonomy, detached
from the narrative proper and even outside of Pythagoras’ vision of flux.
On the periphery of the Virgilian narrative, from which it seems com-
pletely cut off, however, it is one of Ovid’s most perceptive readings of the
darker undertones of Virgil’s story. The image of the son who fertque pius
cunasque suas patriumque sepulcrum ‘piously carries his own cradle and his
37
See especially Kerrigan 1974:Â€232–9, 256; Wittreich 2002:Â€261–9. As in Ovid, the phoenix is both
male and female, which complicates matters further.
38
On the revisions of Virgil in these books especially, see Solodow 1988:Â€ 110–56; Hinds 1998:
104–22.
39
Citations are from Tarrant 2004. Translations are my own.
40
See Solodow 1988:Â€162–8 for overviews of the critical responses to this pivotal episode. As Solodow
notes, readers have tended to see it either as the metaphysical key revealing the principles behind
Ovidian metamorphoses, or utter nonsense, Ovid’s little joke.
41
Strong 1987:Â€82–3, 104; as Strong also notes, Elizabeth used imagery that identified her rather
ambiguously with both Aeneas and Dido, otherwise known as Elissa, or Phoenissa; see 106–7.
192 Maggie Kilgour
father’s tomb’ (15.405), recalls the journey of the pious Aeneas who carries
his father out of Troy. For Virgil, Anchises borne on his son’s shoulders
from the burning city is a central image for the progress of civilization
through the pious transmission of the past. In this succinct rewriting,
Ovid suggests that the Virgilian line is in fact sheer repetition, an end-
lessly circular exit from and return to a fiery origin by a son who is his
own father.42 The wheel may be spinning, but it is not advancing.
Milton’s phoenix is similarly a problematic image for transcendence.
Like Ovid’s bird, it provides an indirect interpretation of the main action,
one that seems to counter, not support, Manoa’s reading. The description
of the bird seems to echo Ovid’s claim at the end of the Metamorphoses
that:Â€per … omnia saecula fama … uiuam ‘I will live in fame through all
time’ (15.878–9). The wording thus might suggest Samson’s own achieve-
ment of immortality beyond changeÂ€– an idea that is reinforced by his
father’s plan to turn the dead man into his own monument. But Milton’s
‘secular bird’ (SA 1707) seems bound to the endurance of ‘fame’ (1706)
and to the repetitive cycles of human time and the world, ‘saeculum’,43
and thus cut off from the spiritual resurrection of Christ. The fact that it is
‘self-begott’n’ (1699) recalls Satan’s claim in Paradise Lost to be ‘self-begot,
self-rais’d’ (PL 5.860). The phoenix suggests an ideal for self-sufficiency,
which, as in Shakespeare’s Roman works also, seems at least socially sui-
cidal. If the phoenix generates itself, it also cannot generate anything
else:Â€it knows no second or third. There is no succession when the bird
that dies is simply reborn as itself. When the son is his own father, the
present is an exact repetition of the past, recycled without progression or
difference and, as ‘secular’ may suggest, without transcendence. Like the
Aeneid, Milton’s tragedy makes much of father–son relations, and gives
a central role to Samson’s father, Manoa. But it ends with the rupture of
succession. Samson does not leave a son. In this he is differentiated from
his final adversary, the giant Harapha, a figure Milton not only invents
but also ostentatiously claims is the father of Goliath. By making the rival
Harapha the founder of a gigantic dynasty, Milton emphasizes Samson’s
contrasting lack of progeny. For Samson, circling back to the past entails
a cutting off of the future. The father becomes his son’s heir, custodian of
his memory, builder of his monument and shaper of his career and fame;
succession is both broken off and reversed.
42
See also my discussion of this figure in relation to Roman law, in which the son is heres sui ipsius
in Kilgour 1990:Â€41–2. The fact that Ovid’s bird is female also creates an unsettling parallel with
Dido, Phoenissa, who immolates herself and from whose ashes will be born war with Rome.
43
See also Kerrigan 1974:Â€245–6.
This sense of a backwards movement is reinforced by the poem’s pres-
entation. It was published in 1671 along with Paradise Regain’d, the poem
which Neuse and Coolidge have read as the climax of Milton’s Virgilian
career. The pairing of the two poems and heroes makes it hard not to
see the Old Testament hero from a New Testament perspective and to
compare the two. But Paradise Regain’ d precedes Samson Agonistes in the
volume:Â€the order of their presentation seems provocative and even per-
verse.44 If Samson had been placed first in the volume, the two poems
would have presented a neat piece of typology:Â€we would read the shad-
owy antitype of the Old Testament hero first and then move on to the
new, improved New Testament fulfilment. The volume itself might then
suggest repetition that includes progression:Â€ Samson would be the his-
torically earlier and therefore morally inferior version of Christ whom
Christ completes and replaces when he imagines a new form of heroism.
Instead, the reading experience takes us backwards in time, undercutting
any sense of historical advancement.
The tension between progressive and regressive movements here
points to a perhaps surprising but suggestive parallel between Samson
and the conclusion of another work written at the end of its author’s
life:Â€ Shakespeare’s Tempest. Prospero is often read as a double for
Shakespeare as he concludes his career.45 Like Samson, The Tempest has
a complicated literary genealogy that has itself generated much debate.
Partly because of interest in the play’s relation to colonization, many
recent readings of the play have focused on allusions to Virgil.46 Yet in
some ways the Virgilian references seem subsumed by a vaguer yet more
discernable Ovidian element;47 certainly the interweaving of these two
sources contributes to the complexity of the work. In a recent reading,
44
Nothing is known of the publication of the volume, so we simply do not know whose decision
it was to print the texts together, and in the present sequence. Stephen Dobranski notes that
authors at this time had little control over publication, but argues that the sequence conforms
to Milton’s general practice of pairing poems. He therefore suggests a collaboration between
publisher and author (Dobranski 2002:Â€ 32–3). Wittreich also notes how the present order of
the poems conforms to Milton’s recurrent habits of thought:Â€ see Wittreich 1986a:Â€ 164–6. For
other discussions of the unity of the volume, see Wittreich 1986b:Â€ 329–85, Coiro 1998:Â€ 127–8,
Shawcross 1983:Â€225–48, Rajan 1973:Â€82–110, Barker 1973:Â€3–48 and Herman 2005:Â€155–76.
45
The engraving of Prospero’s speech (Tempest 4.1.149–58) on Shakespeare’s monument in
Westminster Abbey set the identification in stone. On the Shakespearean career see Cheney
above, Ch. 8; on the relevance of Prospero to Shakespeare’s review of his own career, see also
Nuttall 2007:Â€376.
46
See especially Hamilton 1990 and Kallendorf 2007.
47
On the Ovidian elements in the play generally, see J. Bate 1993:Â€ 8–10, 239–63; and Lyne
2000:Â€ 150–64. Charles Martindale argues that Shakespeare’s engagement with Virgil is rarely
profound:Â€see Martindale 2004a:Â€89–106.
194 Maggie Kilgour
Craig Kallendorf argues that Prospero takes on aspects of the character of
Aeneas (Kallendorf 2007:Â€107). At the same time, Prospero’s great speech
renouncing his art (Tempest 5.1.33–57) is based on Medea’s summoning of
her powers in Metamorphoses 7.192–219. The emergence of this subtext as
Prospero both returns to his old life and yet seems to move forward to
a higher stage of art is unsettling:Â€Medea is a figure associated with the
relapse into barbarism; her powers, as she notes in her speech, enable her
to reverse nature and time. It is tempting to speculate that Shakespeare
reads Ovid’s Medea as a comment on the Aeneid, which suggests that
Aeneas himself is at heart a truly deranged version of Dido.48 But it is also
tempting to read Prospero as a redeemed Aeneas, and a Medea Â�corrected
by reversalÂ€ – black magic turned into white. Still, the superimposition
of a scene of renunciation of power on one of its affirmation creates an
uneasy effect of simultaneous detachment and reattachment, exclusion
and inclusion:Â€ vale atque ave. The rhetorical analogue for this kind of
strategy is the recusatio, in which the stance of exclusion inevitably entails
inclusion. Jonathan Bate thus can state that:Â€‘Prospero and Medea are in
some sense the same’ (J. Bate 1993:Â€9).49 But the situation is not that clear;
Charles Martindale notes the problems raised by the subtext:Â€‘Is Prospero
being sharply differentiated from Medea, the mage who renounces his
white magic from the witch who abuses her black powers? Or is there a
worrying insinuation that one form of magic may not differ much from
another?’ (Martindale 2004b:Â€204).50 The author leaves the question and
relation open:Â€it is the readers who have to make the choice.
The parallel with Prospero may not be coincidental; as Ann Baynes
Coiro argues, ‘The idea of Shakespeare haunts, I think, Milton’s last poem’
(Coiro 1998:Â€125). As she suggests also, in this Milton is returning to pre-
occupations also evident in his early works, especially his first publication
‘On Shakespeare’.51 In Samson, the sense of going backwards is heightened
48
The Argonautica is of course one of Virgil’s important subtexts. Virgil himself links Medea and
Aeneas, transferring Apollonius’ simile describing Medea’s troubled mind (Met. 3.756) to Aeneas
(Aen. 8.20–5). Ovid’s representation of Medea has one eye on Virgil’s rewriting of Apollonius’
Argonautica.
49
For Bate also, Sycorax, a version of Medea, is Prospero’s ‘dark Other’ (J. Bate 1993:Â€254). See also
Lyne, who reads the renunciation as a farewell to Ovid in which ‘if Shakespeare plays with the
idea of renouncing the “magic” of Ovid, that too is only partial’ (Lyne 2000: 162).
50
In fact, Martindale, who is arguing for caution in interpreting the relation between text and
subtext, notes other options:Â€‘Or is Shakespeare adapting a famous locus about magic with little
regard for its original context or speaker? … The reader will have to decide between such mutu-
ally exclusive possibilities’ (Martindale 2004b:Â€204).
51
Coiro argues that the echoes of ‘On Shakespeare’ suggest Milton’s concern with artistic immor-
tality:Â€ Milton looks back to his earlier poem on a great dead poet from the ‘threshold of his
further by the sense of the poet returning, like Virgil and Ovid, to the
start of his career. The poem makes us consider the relation between the
young and old Milton, the poet’s beginnings and his ending. Debates on
the politics of the poem have noted the echoes and parallels with Milton’s
early political pamphlets.52 What is their role here? Is Milton returning to
these scenes to affirm and renew his continuing beliefs, or to critique and
detach himself from them? The tantalizing question thus concerns the
development of his political thought:Â€does it change, or does he remain
relentlessly the same, true to his early revolutionary principles?53
It is also striking, however, how in Samson Milton returns to his early
poetry, and especially passages dealing with young and premature deathÂ€–
the topic that also haunted Virgil and with which his epic abruptly
concludes. The imagery of shipwreck recalls Virgil, but it also echoes
‘Lycidas’, Milton’s early lament for the drowned Edward King. Manoa’s
plans to take Samson’s body and, ‘from the stream / With lavers pure
and cleansing herbs wash off / The clotted gore’ (SA 1726–8), recalls both
‘Lycidas’ and the description of the watery baptism of another young sui-
cide, Sabrina, in Milton’s masque, Comus (832–41). I have already noted
parallels with Milton’s very early ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’. Manoa’s
closing claim that ‘Nothing is here for tears’ (SA 1721) translates ‘Nec tibi
conveniunt lacrymae’ (202), of Milton’s ‘Epitaphium Damonis’, a poem
written on the death of his closest friend, Charles Diodati, in which also
he first used the image of the phoenix to suggest rebirth (187–9). The
theme of young death moved the young Milton, as it had Virgil, perhaps
because of his own fears of mortality cutting short his poetic career.
In Samson, as the poet looks back on his beginning from the per-
spective of his end, these images of premature ends seem to return with
renewed urgency. They create the impression that Milton is writing an
elegy for himself that will safeguard his own immortality. As in Virgil’s
return to his shadowy origins, the bringing together of beginning and
end of Milton’s career creates the effect of a self-gathering towards climac-
tic fulfilment and resolution that seems appropriate for what was Milton’s
last published new work. But at the same time, as Ovid shows, such a
return inevitably opens up new questions. Has Milton indeed acquitted
himself like MiltonÂ€– and, if so, what does that mean?
becoming a great dead poet himself ’ (1998:Â€126). For a related discussion of ‘On Shakespeare’, see
also Lipking 1981:Â€139–40.
52
See especially Lieb 1994:Â€226–63.
53
The poem thus seems to keep making us return to Joseph Wittreich’s question:Â€‘whether Milton’s
is a mind fixed or changing’ (Wittreich 2005:Â€1641).
196 Maggie Kilgour
As Milton comes back to his beginning, things must have looked rather
different from the view in 1645. When he set out on his Virgilian jaunt,
Milton did not know that there would even be a revolution, let alone
that it would be lostÂ€– as would be two wives and his eyesight along the
way.54 In Samson, Milton rereads his own life in order to find a pattern,
the underlying coherence to unify a life full of change, revolution in all
senses, and to understand the meaning of his own achievement. Like the
exiled Ovid, he turns the Virgilian rota to review and make sense of his
career.
Samson’s absence at the final summation, however, is important. In
Virgil, it is the narrator who brings the story and the author’s career to an
end; in Ovid, it is the poet himself, as he struggles to assert his own power
over the shape of his life. In a drama, the task falls usually to a character.
Here, significantly, the hero does not have the last word on the meaning
of his life; this is given the Chorus and his heir, who also happens to be
his own father. A conservative figure who looks back to the past, Manoa
tries to resolve ambiguity and achieve what we today call ‘closure’. He ties
up the loose ends of Samson’s life, asserting its essential unity. Projecting
the act of summation and unification onto this backwards-looking char-
acter suggests that coherence may itself be simply a fiction. Moreover, it
enables Milton to include within the play the act of interpretation that
will continue long after the poet is himself dead. Samson himself exits in
a state of ‘abiding uncertainty’ (Fish 2001:Â€420),55 not knowing that the
end is near or what it will mean. His last words are a simple confession of
his own ignorance of his fate:Â€‘the last of me or no I cannot warrant’ (SA
1427). For many critics, these words are a sign of Samson’s final redemp-
tion through submission to faith and indeed uncertainty.56 But they also
suggest the author’s submission to a future whose reading he cannot con-
trol, and which may, in a new Augustan age especially, be as severe as that
of Augustus. The audience or reader decides Prospero’s fate:Â€is he really
Medea or not? If Milton’s final work is about Milton, it is also about us,
the readers, and our role and responsibility in the poet’s career.
54
See also Fallon on Samson as Milton’s darker double who reflects ‘the distance Milton has come
from the fantastic and naïve self-constructions of the young man’ (Fallon 2007:Â€263).
55
See also Fish 2001:Â€417, 464–5.
56
See Fish 2001. The concept of uncertainty is key also to Herman’s reading of the poem and
Milton’s works generally (Herman 2005), as well as to Shawcross 2001. Barbara Lewalski argues
that the play shows how ‘political choices must be made and actions taken in medias res, in
circumstances always characterized by imperfect knowledge and conflicting testimony. The the-
matics of true political experience in this work offers readers no definitive answers, but instead
presents a process for making such choices in such circumstances.’ (Lewalski 1988:Â€248)
C h a p t e r 10
Bookburning and the poetic deathbed:Â€

the legacy of Virgil *
Nita Krevans
Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

Oscar Wilde, Intentions
The Virgilian tradition preserves three problematic and somewhat contra-

dictory sets of testimonia about Virgil’s role in framing his own corpus as
a ‘career’. On the one hand, there are the passages where Virgil himself
clearly marks his own progression from Eclogues to Georgics to Aeneid.
These include instances of self-quotation (Ecl. 5.85–7; Geo. 4.566) and
promises of future work in higher style (Ecl. 8.6–13, Geo. 3.46–8) as well
as less explicit passages whose imagery is now interpreted as foreshad-
owing the pastoral–didactic–epic progressionÂ€– for example, the closing
lines of Eclogues 1 and 10 often read as a transition to the harsher world of
the Georgics.1 Reinforcing and completing these internal signposts are two
pseudo-Virgilian texts. First, there is Virgil’s supposedly self-Â�composed
‘epitaph’, which neatly concludes cecini pascua rura duces (‘I sang pas-
tures, farms, and war-leaders’).2 The other passage is the famous ille ego
prologue which, according to Servius and Donatus, originally opened the
Aeneid. It offers a brief literary biography of the poet:Â€ first I composed
with a ‘slender reed’ (gracili … auena); then I left the woods and pro-
duced a work ‘pleasing to farmers’ (gratum opus agricolis), ‘but now’ (at
nunc) I sing of arms and the man.3 The potent combination of Virgil’s
own statements, the pseudepigraphical additions, and the canonization of
the Aeneid quickly transformed the Virgilian corpus into a poetic version
*â•‡ Translations are the author’s own, unless otherwise stated.

1
For references to Virgil’s career in his own works see Theodorakopoulos 1997. On the ending of
Eclogues 1 and 10 see P. Hardie 1997a:Â€144–5; Martindale 1997b:Â€113–14.
2
All excerpts from the vita of Virgil are quoted from Brummer 1912. Although the life is attributed
to Donatus, Horsfall 1995:Â€3–4 argues that it is copied, nearly verbatim, from Suetonius. The epi-
taph is found at Brummer 1912:Â€136–7 = Vit. Verg. 36, and discussion at Horsfall 1995:Â€21.
3
On this early addition to the Aeneid see Austin 1968 and Horsfall 1995:Â€ 24 with further
references.
197
198 Nita Krevans
of the cursus honorum. By the medieval period this model, the so-called
‘wheel of Virgil’ had became so iconic that it even acquired its own
Â�pastoral–georgic–epic line of accessories:Â€ trees (beech–fruit–laurel), ani-
mals (sheep–cattle–horses) and tools (shepherd’s crook–plough–sword).4
The third set of testimoniaÂ€ – and the focus of this essayÂ€ – presents
a troubling counterpoint to this anthem of literary triumph. Virgil,
it appears, did not wish to complete the cursus by publishing his epic.
Donatus’ vita tells us that the poet ordered the Aeneid burned as he lay
dying in Brundisium (Brummer 1912:Â€149–57 = Vita Verg. 39–41):
egerat cum Vario, priusquam Italia decederet, ut si quid sibi accidisset, Aeneida
combureret; at is ita facturum se pernegerat. igitur in extrema ualetudine assi-
due scrinia desiderauit, crematurus ipse; uerum nemine offerente nihil quidem
nominatim de ea cauit. ceterum eidem Vario ac simul Tuccae scripta sua sub ea
conditione legauit, ne quid ederent, quod non a se editum esset. edidit autem
auctore Augusto Varius, sed summatim emendata, ut qui uersus etiam imperfec-
tos, si qui erant, reliquerit.
Before he left Italy he had proposed to Varius, that Varius should burn the Aeneid
if anything should happen to him, but Varius said he would not do it. Thus in
the last stages of his illness he constantly called for his book-boxes, meaning to
burn it himself, but when no one brought it to him he took no specific measures
about it. For the rest, he left his writings to that same Varius and also to Tucca,
on the condition that they publish nothing he would not have published. Varius,
however, published [the Aeneid] on Augustus’ orders, but only lightly corrected,
so that he even left any verses that were incomplete in that state.
This report is not without its own problems,5 but it is transmitted by
numerous other imperial sources6 and becomes, in its own way, as canon-
ical as the Virgilian career. As Horsfall points out, Virgil is not the first
writer to propose burning his oeuvre before he died; similar stories are
told about Plato, for example.7 But Virgil’s deathbed gestureÂ€ – like his
Aeneid, like his three-step careerÂ€– becomes an instant classic. The vitae
even preserve a poem celebrating the rescue of the manuscript (Brummer
1912:Â€143–8 = Vita Verg. 38):8
iusserat haec rapidis aboleri carmina flammis
â•… Vergilius, Phrygium quae cecinere ducem.
4
Curtius 1953:Â€201 n. 35 and 231–2; Lipking 1981:Â€208 n. 77.
5
See Avery 1957; Horsfall 1995:Â€22–3.
6
E.g. Gellius 17.10.7, Pliny HN 7.114.
7
See Horsfall 1995:Â€22 for further references.
8
The author’s name is given variously as Sulpicius Carthaginensis (presumably Sulpicius
Apollinaris, the teacher of Gellius) or (in the vita of Probus) as Servius Varus.
Bookburning and the poetic deathbed 199
Tucca uetat Variusque; simul tu, maxime Caesar,
â•… non sinis et Latiae consulis historiae.
infelix gemino cecidit prope Pergamon igni,
â•… et paene est alio Troia cremata rogo.
Virgil ordered the poem which sang of the Phrygian leader to be destroyed with
devouring flames; Tucca forbids it, and Varius, and you, great Caesar, do not
allow it, and you take thought to save the story of Latium. Unhappy Pergamum
nearly perished twice by fire, and Troy was almost burned on a second pyre.
Virgil’s attempt to destroy the Aeneid is usually read as a gesture of artistic
modesty. The language of the directive to Varius and Tucca (ne quid eder-
ent, quod non a se editum esset) certainly supports this,9 as do the reports
of Gellius and Pliny:Â€ Gellius mentions the deathbed incident immedi-
ately after his famous description of Virgil licking his imperfect works
into shape like a mother bear (Gell. 17.10.2), while Pliny explicitly uses
the word modesty (uerecundiam) in his account (Pliny HN 7.114):Â€Diuus
Augustus carmina Vergili cremari contra testamenti eius uerecundiam uetuit
(‘The deified Augustus forbade the poems of Virgil to be burnt, counter-
manding the modesty of the instructions in [Virgil’s] will’). In one sense,
then, the bookburning episode can be read as an inevitable by-product of
the ‘career’ narrative:Â€as Virgil ascends up the generic ladder, his stand-
ards for his own work grow correspondingly more stringent until he can-
not meet them to his own satisfaction even after eleven years of work on
the Aeneid.10 The vita itself, however, emphatically rejects Virgil’s mod-
esty; it underlines the poem’s status as a masterpiece by quoting Sulpicius’
epigram and by presenting the rescue of the manuscript as a suspenseful
narrative of danger and salvation.
A second, and much darker reading transforms Virgil’s verecundia
into despair. Virgil becomes a nihilist, refusing poetic closure, unwriting
9
As does the interpolation into the Donatan life at Vita Verg. 35 (Brummer 1912:Â€ 123, see his
apparatus plenus ad loc.), which says that Virgil wished to burn the Aeneid because it was ine-
mendatam imperfectamque (uncorrected and not properly finished).
10
The equation higher genre = higher level of poetic craft is standard in the Renaissance adapta-
tions of the Virgilian model, but is already present in ancient sources, notably Catalepton 15,
a closing epigram for a collection of Virgilian juvenilia. The epigram alludes to the Eclogues,
Georgics and Aeneid in order and then ‘adds’ the Catalepton at the beginning of the sequence,
noting that ‘et rudis in uario carmine Calliope’ (‘even in these varied songs there is Poetry, how-
ever unpolished’; translation from Oosterhuis 2007:Â€ 27, where see further discussion). The
Renaissance formulations are exemplified by E. K.’s ‘Epistle to Harvey’ preceding the 1579 edi-
tion of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar:Â€[Spenser writes pastoral] ‘following the example of the
best and most auncient Poetes, which devised this kind of writing … at the first to trye theyr
habilities:Â€and as young birdes, that be newly crept out of the nest, by little first to prove theyr
tender wings, before they make a greater flight. So flew Theocritus … So flew Virgile, as not yet
well feeling his winges.’ See Cheney 2002b; Helgerson 1983:Â€67–82; Krevans 1992.
200 Nita Krevans
his poem, dismantling his career.11 This is the reading which informs
Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil, whose central section con-
sists of a long debate between Augustus and the poet about Virgil’s plan
to destroy his epic. As Virgil explains to Augustus:Â€‘It must sink out of
memory, and I with it … I want to forget … to forget everything … and
I want to be forgotten.’12 Broch’s Virgil thus echoes the Aeneas of Book 6,
who, seeing the souls of future Romans preparing to be born, cries out
(6.721):Â€quae lucis miseris tam dira cupido? (‘why do these wretched souls
have such a dreadful longing for the light [of the world above]?’). It is
instructive, in this regard, to contrast Virgil’s attempted self-censorship
on his deathbed with the reports about early Imperial authors such as
Petronius, Seneca and Lucan catalogued in Toohey’s study of literary
suicide. Their deaths, although self-inflicted, are a defiant affirmation of
their careers; far from destroying their work as they die, they are writing,
dictating or reciting up until the last moment.13
There is, however, a third way to read this episode in terms of career
studies, a middle ground between the modest Virgil and the neurotic
Virgil. This reading brings forward the figure of Augustus and recognizes
that Virgil’s career requires not only a vates, but a deus ex machina. Just as
the young god Octavian saved Tityrus’ (i.e., in the ancient biographical
tradition, Virgil’s) farm in Eclogue 1, so now Augustus rescues the Aeneid
from destruction. In fact, although the epigram cited above aptly figures
the Aeneid manuscript as Troy, an even better analogy between poem
and vita is the near-destruction of Aeneas’ fleet in Aeneid 5 (5.604–99).
The Trojan women, exhausted by years of wandering towards an ever-
receding goal, are incited by Juno to burn their ships. The flames are
already consuming the hulls when Aeneas arrives; no mortal actions can
save the fleet (5.684, nec uires heroum infusaque flumina prosunt, ‘neither
heroic feats nor gouts of water are of any use’). In despair, Aeneas prays
to Jupiter, who immediately quenches the fires with a massive rainstorm
and saves all but four of the ships. In this deathbed scene, then, Augustus
plays the part of Jupiter, rescuing Rome’s future from the fire and mid-
wifing the birth of the Virgilian Wheel, which cannot come into being
without the publication of the Aeneid.
11
Critics beginning with Petrarch have speculated about connections between the abrupt and mor-
bid ending of the poem, Virgil’s own death and his plan to destroy the manuscript. See Lipking
1981:Â€83; P. Hardie 1993b:Â€101–2; Theodorakopoulos 1997:Â€163–4.
12
Broch 1983:Â€332. On Broch’s novel see Cox 1997; Lipking 1981:Â€130–7.
13
Toohey 2004:Â€173–93. Tacitus preserves descriptions of all three deaths in the Annales:Â€Seneca
(dictating):Â€15.63; Lucan (reciting):Â€15.70; Petronius (writing/reciting):Â€16.19.
Virgil’s dying request has nearly as many imitators as his career; the
list begins with Ovid and continues into the modern period.14 In some
cases (Dickinson, Gogol) modern biographers see the request as part of
a larger pattern of isolation and neurosis.15 In other cases, however, it
is clear that the request is a gestureÂ€ – both in the literary sense (as an
acknowledgement of earlier poetic deathbeds) and in the psychological
sense (as an attempt at self-destruction that is intended to fail).16 I would
argue that we can recognize an allusion to the tradition of Virgil’s death
in these later anecdotes by the presence of four key elements. First, the
modesty of the poet designates the work as somehow imperfectÂ€– either
incomplete, or generically unworthy. Second, the poet requests on his
deathbed that the work be burned. Third, the biographer refutes the
poet’s judgement and provides evidence of the greatness of the work.
Finally, a patron or friend intervenes to rescue the manuscript and pub-
lish it posthumously.
A good example is the case of George Herbert (d. 1 March 1633).
Walton’s Life of George Herbert (1670) describes the poet’s last thoughts
for his work as follows:17
Having said this, he did with so sweet a humility as seem’d to exalt him, bow
down to Mr. Duncon, and with a thoughtful and contented look, say to him,Â€–
Sir, I pray deliver this little Book to my dear brother Farrer [Nicholas Ferrar], and
tell him, he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past
betwixt God and my Soul … desire him to read it:Â€and then, if he can think it may
turn to the advantage of any dejected poor Soul, let it be made publick:Â€if not, let
him burn it:Â€for I and it, are less than the least of God’s mercies.Â€– Thus meanly did
this humble man think of this excellent Book, which now bears the name of The
TEMPLE:Â€Or, Sacred Poems, and Private Ejaculations.
Walton initially seems to present his subject as conforming to the Â�‘modest’
reading of Virgil’s deathbed wish (‘humility’, ‘meanly’, Â�‘humble’), and con-
cludes the poet’s speech with Herbert’s supposed motto (which prefaces
14
Authors alleged to have called for the destruction of their writings under similar circumstances
include Heinrich Heine, Nikolai Gogol, Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka. Heine only thought
he was dying; see his postscript to Romanzero (1851).
15
For Dickinson see Erkkila 2002:Â€25–6 and 29 n. 27; for Gogol see Zholkovsky 1992:Â€175:Â€‘[Gogol]
had a penchant for destroying his writings:Â€he burned a juvenile novella, a romantic poem, a his-
torical drama (after it put Zhukovsky to sleep) and twice the second part of his “epic” … [his]
annihilatory pyrotechnics can be viewed as a will to monopolize his literary rights, and his near-
suicidal death, as a desperate gesture of control over his very life.’
16
E.g. Kafka; see Mailloux 1989:Â€11–12. Kafka left letters addressed to his friend and literary execu-
tor Max Brod directing him to burn all the unpublished work. As Mailloux points out, Brod was
the last person likely to obey such a request.
17
Walton 1927:Â€314–15.
202 Nita Krevans
The Temple):Â€‘less than the least of God’s mercies’.18 This humility is leav-
ened, however, by hints of the future success of the manuscript. Herbert
does not, for example, describe the work itself as imperfect or unfinished;
it is a book, albeit a little one, and Ferrar is ‘desired’ to read it. Moreover,
Herbert identifies himself with the book (‘I and it’), and instead of burn-
ing it himself or even requesting its destruction, he transfers the responsi-
bility for choosing between the fire and the printer to Ferrar.
This mixture of modesty and ambition is in fact well suited to Herbert.
Although his reputation now rests largely on his vernacular religious
Â�lyrics, he initially served in the court of King James and wrote a num-
ber of poems in Latin, including lengthy works defending royal positions
on church policy. One recent biographer has explicitly suggested that he
hoped to become the Virgil for James I’s Augustus.19 Even when Herbert
turned to more private, religious verse, his architectural design for The
Temple hints at larger poetic goals than the Christian humility of the
poems’ speaker might at first suggest, and Herbert’s family ties to Sidney
provide yet another model for poetic achievementÂ€– not to mention yet
another example of a poet who imitated Virgil on his deathbed. When
Herbert offers Ferrar control over the fate of his manuscript, then, he is
writing Ferrar into the Virgilian story in the role of Varius, Tucca and
Augustus. Ferrar, of course, plays his part, shepherding the work through
publication and even writing the preface.20 Walton continues:
of which, Mr. Farrer would say, There was in it the picture of a divine Soul in every
page; and that the whole Book was such a harmony of holy passions, as would enrich
the World with pleasure and piety. And it appears to have done so:Â€for there have
been more than Twenty thousand of them sold since the first Impression.
Walton’s account thus takes full advantage of the Virgilian model.
Herbert is allowed to express the modesty appropriate for a religious poet
on his deathbed, while Ferrar’s turn as Augustus is triumphantly justified
by a bestseller. (In fact, Ferrar’s choice of the word ‘enrich’ in his praise
of the book’s virtues acquires new meaning after Walton’s naïve boast
about sales figures.) The allusion to Virgil’s death combines Christian
18
As in the case of Philip Sidney (see below), this follows the conventional portrait of the ‘good
death’, but as Gouws points out, the dying man is also aware of the conventions. Thus, ‘it is
often difficult to decide whether the actor or the reporter was responsible for the shaping of the
incidents recorded in a narrative’ (Gouws 1986b:Â€67). This observation, in my opinion, holds true
not only for the Christian elements of the Renaissance poetic deathbed, but also for the Virgilian
elements.
19
Malcolmson 2004:Â€51.
20
A detailed discussion of Ferrar’s role in publishing The Temple can be found in Charles
1977:Â€177–86.
motifs with an implicit suggestion that The Temple is a masterpiece like
the Aeneid.
Deathbed anecdotes about Sir Philip Sidney, Herbert’s kinsman and
poetic predecessor, also include the Virgilian motif, but here it is in
conflict with other potential narratives. Sidney died in October of 1586
after being wounded in the thigh a month earlier during a skirmish near
Zutphen. The weeks of illness provided an opportunity for extensive
communication with friends (both by letter and by visits to his sickbed);
accounts of these letters and visits were then woven into a series of
increasingly hagiographic descriptions of the battle, Sidney’s illness and
his death. One set of anecdotes aims to portray Sidney as a knightly hero
in the style of his own romances, attributing his failure to wear armour
on his legs to chivalry and praising him for refusing water in favour of a
more gravely wounded soldier, an incident borrowed from Plutarch’s life
of Alexander.21 A second set of anecdotes, as with Herbert, attempts to
emphasize Sidney’s Christian humility as he prepares his soul for death. It
is here that we find references to Sidney’s wish to destroy his manuscripts,
but instead of a neatly balanced blend of modesty and self-assertion lead-
ing to a happy ending (20,000 copies sold), the sources are confused and
contradictory.
The briefest description is in Moffet’s Nobilis, a portrait of Sidney
Â�written for Sidney’s nephew William Herbert in 1592.22 Sidney’s death is
presented as a model (exemplum):Â€Sidney first condemns his own eyes for
their former adoration of Stella (Lady Penelope Rich, disguised heroine of
his sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella) and cleanses them with tears; he
then asks his brother repeatedly to prevent any of this sort of poem from
being published:Â€ne quid eius generis poematum in lucem prodiret, fratrem …
semel atque iterum rogavit (fol. 24r). After this double renunciation of illicit
love and the poetry inspired by it, Sidney turns to Christian contempla-
tion and dies in prayer clasping a Bible. Earlier in the work there is another
mention of Sidney’s wish to suppress publication, this time not only
the Stella sonnets but also the Arcadia:Â€ Stellam (lepidum sane opus atque
Â�festivum) primum tenebris, deinde flammis addixit. Immo Arcadiam (calami
non mali filiam) partitudinis tempore suffocari voluit (fol. 9r:Â€ ‘He con-
signed his Stella (truly an elegant and pleasant work) to darkness and then
favoured giving it to the fire. Nay, more, he desired to smother the Arcadia
Â�(offspring of no ill pen) at the time of its birth’). After a few sentences in
â•‡ Alex. 42.3–6. See Gouws 1986b.

21
22
â•‡ For text and translation see Heltzel and Hudson 1940.
204 Nita Krevans
praise of the Arcadia, Moffet returns to Sidney’s wish to suppress Stella and
the Arcadia and suddenly introduces a motif straight from the Virgilian
wheel, the ascent to worthier themes:Â€ ad digniora conversus argumenta
Â�canere aliquid, quod vel severissimi Catonis censuram ferret, valde voluit
(fol. 9v:Â€‘having turned to worthier subjects, he very much wished to sing
something which would abide the censure of the most austere Cato’).
A slightly more extended description of the deathbed is preserved in
an account attributed to George Gifford.23 It conforms strictly to the
‘good death’ model and focuses on Sidney’s repentance. Sidney’s writings
are not mentioned, but once again he renounces his love for Penelope
Devereux, saying to Gifford, ‘There came to my remembrance a vanity
wherein I had taken delight, whereof I had not rid myself. It was my Lady
Rich. But I rid myself of it, and presently my joy and comfort returned.’24
Finally, there is the very detailed account by Fulke Greville in his A
Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, likely the latest of the three accounts
(c. 1612).25 Greville, a friend who helped edit and publish parts of the
Arcadia, discusses the wound and illness in gruesome detail, and offers
several quotations from Sidney as he lies dying. There is no reference to
his poetry or to the Arcadia. Earlier in his portrait of Sidney, however,
Greville follows a long discourse praising the Arcadia with the admission
that when Sidney was dying he looked back on it as a ‘vanity’ and for
this reason ‘in that memorable testament of his, he bequeathed no other
Â�legacy but the fire to this unpolished embryo’.26
From these various narratives it is possible to interpret Sidney’s death-
bed renunciations in a number of different ways. Does the man Sidney
repent an adulterous affair with Lady Rich? Or does the renunciation of
Lady Rich/Stella represent the reluctance of a court poet to see his son-
nets in print?27 Is the Arcadia Sidney’s unfinished masterpiece, which, like
Virgil, he consigns to the flames on his deathbed knowing that his sister
and Greville will play Augustus and Varius?28 Or is the Arcadia merely a
23
The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death; see Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 1973:Â€163–5.
24
Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 1973:Â€169. On the odd wording of this passage, see their note
ad loc. Modern scholars continue to debate both the authenticity of this accountÂ€ – and espe-
cially of this particular statementÂ€– and its significance. See Stewart 2000:Â€318; K. Duncan-Jones
1986:Â€172–3.
25
Gouws 1986a. For the date of composition, see his introduction, pp. xxi–xxiv.
26
Gouws 1986a:Â€ 11. Gouws notes ad loc. that Sidney’s will does not, in fact, mention his
manuscripts.
27
Sidney in Helgerson 1983 is the exemplar of the ‘amateur’ poet as opposed to the ‘laureate’ and
‘professional’; here Helgerson follows Saunders 1951. But see Krevans 1992.
28
See Buxton 1963:Â€ 246:Â€ ‘[Arcadia] was but a patched-up fragment which the dying Sidney (no
doubt remembering Virgil) had asked his friends to destroy. They (likewise remembering Virgil)
had not obeyed his wishes’.
stepping-stone to a greater work, a work ‘which would abide the censure
of the most austere Cato’, which Sidney’s untimely death prevented him
from writing? While the accounts disagree, it is clear that the Virgilian
model plays a major role:Â€in every biographical passage where Sidney dis-
parages his writing and calls for its destruction, the narrator praises it and
records its preservation.
In a telling demonstration of the power of the Virgilian anecdote, even
Sidney’s own testimony about the Arcadia ends up contaminated with the
bookburning motif. Here is an excerpt from his prefatory epistle to his
sister about the Arcadia; it is a catalogue of apologetic topoi from classical
prefaces, including key terms such as ‘idle’ and ‘trifle’, the comparison
of the book to an unwanted child, and the assertion that the patron (his
sister) has demanded the work. The only non-conventional item is the
description of the composition of the work (highlighted in bold):
Here now have you … this idle worke of mine:Â€which, I feare (like the Spiders
webbe) will be thought fitter to be swept away, then worne to any other purpose.
For my part, in very trueth (as the cruell fathers among the Greekes, were woont
to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well finde in my heart, to cast
out in some desert of forgetfulnesse this childe, which I am loath to father. But
you desired me to doe it … Now, it is done onely for you, only to you:Â€if you
keepe it to yourself, or to such friends, who will weigh errors in the ballance of
goodwill, I hope, for the fathers sake, it will be pardoned … though in itselfe it
have deformities. For indeed, for severer eies it is not, being but a trifle, and that
triflingly handled. Your deare selfe can best witness the manner, being done
in loose sheetes of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest, by sheetes,
sent unto you, as fast as they were done.29
Compare this description of the composition of the Arcadia from the
normally reliable 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica (error highlighted in
bold):
The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia written by Philippe Sidney (1590), in quarto,
is the earliest edition of Sidney’s famous romance. A folio edition, issued in 1593,
is stated to have been revised and rearranged by the countess of Pembroke, for
whose delectation the romance was written. She was charged to destroy the
work sheet by sheet as it was sent to her.
The report that Sidney wished to burn the Arcadia has become confused
with other traditional apologetic motifs. The result is a bastard anecdote
in which Sidney, taking Virgilian modesty to a new extreme, asks Mary
Herbert to burn the work as it is being written.
29
â•‡ Sidney 1593:Â€¶ 3r-v.
206 Nita Krevans
The very first imitation of Virgil’s deathbed, of course, is Ovid’s assertion
that he burned the Metamorphoses as he went into exile (Trist. 1.7.11–16):
sed carmina maior imago
â•… sunt mea, quae mando qualiacumque legas,
carmina mutatas hominum dicentia formas,
â•… infelix domini quod fuga rupit opus.
haec ego discedens, sicut bene multa meorum,
â•… ipse mea posui maestus in igne manu.
but my poem, whatever sort of work it may be, is a better portrait of me, and
I bid you read the verses which recount the transformed bodies of men, a work
which the wretched exile of its author cut short. This poem, as I was leaving, I
placed sadly with my own hands (like so many of my things) in the fire.
Ovid next compares this bookburning with infanticide, in a simile
which references Althea’s burning of the brand which contained her son
Meleager’s life, and mourns the fate of his innocent books (non meritos
mecum peritura libellos, ‘little books that did not deserve to perish with
me’, Trist. 1.7.19), now designated by a term that can mean either ‘off-
spring’ or ‘entrails’ as he repeats the description of the burning (imposui
rapidis viscera nostra rogis, ‘I put them on the devouring pyre, my own
flesh’, Trist. 1.7.20). The poem is identified physically with its author; thus,
as the author ‘dies’ (is exiled), the work perishes with him. The allusion
to burning viscera strongly suggests a sacrificial context in which Ovid is
both priest and victim.30
After this disquieting image, Ovid suddenly becomes a commentator
on his own narrative. He offers two possible explanations for his actions,
introduced by the repeated scholiastic phrase uel quod (Trist. 1.7.21–2):31
uel quod eram Musas, ut crimina nostra, perosus,
â•… uel quod adhuc crescens et rude carmen erat.
Either because I hated the Muses, as the basis of the charge against me, or
because the poem was still evolving and rough.
As the horrified reader envisions the Metamorphoses crumbling to ash,
Ovid again changes his tone:Â€wait, the work survivedÂ€– copies existedÂ€–
and now Ovid prays that the poem will flourish and bring readers pleas-
ure as it reminds them of Ovid (Trist. 1.7.23–6).
See Hinds 1985:Â€22 and 31 n. 30.

30
Ovid repeats this story in his verse autobiography in Tristia 4, but the two different motives
31
for the bookburning in Tristia 1.7 (perfectionism versus anger) are now applied to two different
actions:Â€t he perfectionism engenders an ongoing practice of discarding flawed drafts, while anger
becomes the sole motive for burning the Metamorphoses (Trist. 4.10.61–4; compare. 5.12.61).
This account has long been seen as a deliberate re-enactment of the
Virgilian episode.32 Ovid’s analogy of exile to death permeates the Tristia;
he represents his departure from Rome as his funeral, and his burning of
the Metamorphoses thus has a ‘deathbed’ setting.33 Acting as both dying
poet and biographer, Ovid invokes all the elements of the Virgilian scene.
As poet, he disparages the Metamorphoses with Catullan terms like quali-
acumque34 and describes the work as unfinished:Â€‘broken off’ (1.7.14), ‘still
evolving’ and ‘rough’ (1.7.22);35 he emphasizes that he burns the work
himself (ipse, mea manu, 1.7.16) As biographer, however, he praises and
preserves the work. He offers the poem to the reader as a portrait of him-
self (1.7.11) using the word maior (‘greater’, a word strongly associated with
the Aeneid),36 rescues the work retroactively from the fire by revealing the
existence of copies, and wishes the verses a long life (uiuant, 1.7.25).
It should not surprise us, since this is Ovid, that there are several ironic
twists to this passage. First, the whole episode is self-consciously tongue-
in-cheek. The poet did not die; the book did not burn. By exaggerating
his personal tragedy Ovid steers it towards satire; the scholarly specula-
tion about his own motives, for example, adds an element of parody to
the versified biography. More significantly, a key player is missing from
the narrative. Where the Virgilian account emphatically names the agents
of salvationÂ€– Varius, Tucca, AugustusÂ€– Ovid’s report is vague and pas-
sive:Â€pluribus exemplis scripta fuisse reor (‘I think several copies were made’,
Trist. 1.7.24). Here is repetition and difference with a vengeance:Â€Augustus,
the hero of the Virgilian story, is conspicuous by his absence.
If Augustus is absent as rescuer, he is present in another, uglier role, for
Ovid’s poem traces a second narrative alongside the Virgilian deathbed
scene. There is, after all, a different tradition involving bookburning in
ancient RomeÂ€– a tradition of censorship and purificationÂ€– which is all
too applicable to Ovid’s situation. Normally the purged texts were reli-
gious; during the republic both Roman and foreign sacred scrolls were
burned, and Augustus ordered unauthorized prophetic books destroyed
32
Nagle 1980:Â€29; Hinds 1985:Â€22; Williams 1994:Â€82; Holzberg 2002:Â€36.
33
On the pervasive imagery of exile as death in the Tristia see Nagle 1980:Â€19–32; more recently
R. J. King 1998 reads Ovid’s autobiography in Tristia 4.10 as a memorial addressed to mourners
at a funeral.
34
A device he uses repeatedly in the exile poetry; see Luck 1977 (ad Trist. 1.7.11).
35
Hinds 1985 and 1999 and Williams 1994 analyse the new preface to the Metamorphoses at the end
of this poem, demonstrating that Ovid’s treatment of the Metamorphoses in Tristia 1.7 unravels
his epicÂ€– makes it more unpolished, less finishedÂ€– to match his exiled state, thus reversing the
upward trajectory of Virgil’s writings.
36
See Prop. 2.34.66, quoted in the vita (Brummer 1912:Â€102–3 = Vita Verg. 30).
208 Nita Krevans
when he was pontifex maximus.37 But not all the burned books were cult
texts. Under Augustus and Tiberius, several orators committed suicide
after their works were burned by decree of the senate.38 While most of
these incidents postdated Ovid’s exile, there is a similar and very famous
incident that did not:Â€ the damnatio memoriae of Antony. By senatorial
decree, Antony’s statues were pulled down, inscriptions erased, his birth
date designated as unlucky, and his praenomen forbidden to males in his
family. The familial, monumental and inscriptional record of Antony’s
achievements was, literally, erased.39
Ovid pointedly reminds the reader several times in the Tristia and
Epistulae ex Ponto that his writings have suffered condemnation along
with their author. (The most vivid description occurs in Tristia 3.1, where
Ovid’s personified books, sent to Rome on their master’s behalf, discover
that they and their ‘brothers’ are banned from the public libraries.)40 Ovid
is well aware, then, that his own literary cursus honorum has suffered the
same fate as Antony’s:Â€ erasure.41 The image of bookburning thus has a
double valence in Tristia 1.7. As an allusion to the Virgilian deathbed,
it equates Ovid’s epic to the Aeneid and reinforces the picture of exile
as death which is so prominent in Ovid’s exile poetry. As an allusion to
state censorship, it reminds Ovid’s reader that the Augustus who failed to
appear as rescuer in Ovid’s recapitulation of Virgil’s tale is, in fact, present
in the bookburning scene as the instigator of damnatio and relegatio. The
man who created Virgil’s career by preserving the Aeneid has destroyed
Ovid’s career and erased his masterpiece.
37
Livy 25.1, 39.16, 40.29; Pliny HN 13.84; Suet. Aug. 31. See Sarefield 2006:Â€ 288–9 with further
references; he and Bosmajian 2006:Â€24–32 both emphasize the public nature of the destruction
of the texts; the burnings occur in marketplaces or forums and are the equivalent of a public
execution.
38
Cassius Severus, Labienus and Cremutius Cordus; Suet. Calig. 16; Tac. Ann. 1.72, 4.21, 4.35. See
Bosmajian 2006:Â€143–5; Báez 2004:Â€87–93.
39
Dio Cass. 51.19; Plut. Ant. 86, Cic. 49.
40
See Nagle 1980:Â€85–7 and compare Trist. 3.14.79, Pont. 1.1.5.
41
For the comparison of the poetic career to the cursus honorum see Cheney 2002a:Â€8–9.
Ch apter 11
Literary afterlives:Â€metempsychosis
from Ennius to Jorge Luis Borges*
Stuart Gillespie
As well as providing paradigms for the literary life, ancient authors and
texts have also furnished highly influential models for what may be
termed the literary afterlife. That is to say, ancient works have led later
writers to envision and present their predecessors, and their relationships
to those predecessors, in highly specific ways. This essay explores how one
ancient trope has been used for these purposes over the long period indi-
cated by my title, together with some other metaphorical concepts into
which it has ramified during the last two centuries.
Since Joyce intended Ulysses to contain everything, it naturally contains
a reference to metempsychosis, when, in the ‘Calypso’ episode, Molly
asks Bloom to explain the word in a book she is reading. The reference is
fleeting; Joyce wishes to avoid labouring Bloom’s role as reincarnation of
Odysseus:
– Metempsychosis?
– Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?
– Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek:Â€from the Greek. That means
the transmigration of souls.
– O rocks! She said. Tell us in plain words …
– Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body after death,
that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the
earth thousands of years ago or some other planet. They say we have forgotten it.
Some say they remember their past lives.1
Bloom’s ‘some other planet’ is misinformation, but the rest of his informal
definition is substantially correct. Metempsychosis, the transmission or
* For suggestions on this paper I am grateful to Leon Burnett, Robert Cummings, Richard Cronin
and Philip Hardie, as well as to members of the audiences who heard and discussed versions of
it in British Columbia, April 2008, and my hosts there Susanna Braund (University of British
Columbia), Alison Chapman (University of Victoria) and John Lepage (Malaspina University
College).
1
Joyce 1993:Â€62. For a recent study of the novel’s use of metempsychosis see Levy 2002.
209
210 Stuart Gillespie
transmigration of the psyche, has its Classical treatments in the myth of
Er in Book 10 of Plato’s Republic; Macrobius on the dream of Scipio; the
underworld of the Aeneid; and of course the soliloquy of Ovid’s drama-
tized figure of Pythagoras in Book 15 of the Metamorphoses. All these loci
have something to say about the subject. But metempsychosis takes on in
other literary contexts a special sense, for which these loci are not sem-
inal. It is used for the notion that what in English is usually called the
soul or spirit of one writer can be transferred to another born later. This
special sense has usually been invoked by poets who invite readers to see
them as the current embodiment of a predecessor poet. Invoking the con-
cept of metempsychosis has been a means for such writers to express their
relationship to the tradition in which they stand, orÂ€– to adopt the lan-
guage they have themselves sometimes usedÂ€– their relationship to their
family:Â€their ancestors and descendants. It is, in other words, a vehicle for
staking a claim to a place in the succession, registering their own status,
and (just like other appropriations and rejections of Classical career para-
digms discussed in this volume) constructing their role.
The teachings of the historical Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans
are the first point at which the idea of metempsychosis can be discerned
in western thought.2 Pythagoras himself, according to Heraclides
of Pontus, believed he was a reincarnation of the Trojan warrior
Euphorbus. But the first point at which we can see it appearing as a
trope for literary succession is in Ennius. Because the post-antique
world has never possessed a text of the Annales, Ennius’ epic on the
history of Rome, only limited precision can be achieved about what
went on here. But the fragments taken together with the ancient tes-
timonia inform us that near the start of the poem came allusions to
natural cycles and the transmigration of souls, plus a dream-vision in
which Homer appeared and said, in a phrase quoted by Donatus, that
he had once been a peacock (Memini me fiere pauum).3 Ennius’ dream
has fascinated ancients and moderns alike, and this enigmatic frag-
ment, in particular, kicked off a crazy history of glosses and explanÂ�
ations. Persius in an obscure line in his sixth satire talks of Ennius
considering himself to be descended from ‘the peacock of Pythagoras’,
and the scholiast on this line in Persius, in turn, drew up a hypothetical
Â�
Some of the early sources are discussed by Barnes 1982:Â€103–20 and Burkert 1972:Â€120–65.
2
Donatus cites this expression in his commentary on Terence at Andria 429, Phormio 74, Adelphi
3
106. For this and other surviving fragments of the Ennian passage see Skutsch 1985.
Metempsychosis from Ennius to Jorge Luis Borges 211
sequence or Â�genealogy, the order of transmission being Pythagoras,
peacock, Euphorbus, Homer, Ennius.4
There are variations on this genealogy in antiquity, and a fuller account
in Diogenes Laertius (8.4–6), but much more important in the present
context is Ennius’ claim about his relationship to Homer. It looks as
though in Ennius’ dream Homer told him that his soul, ‘in the course of
its migrations’, was currently ‘embedded in Ennius’ himself.5 Ennius was
claiming Homeric inspiration and authority, and hence staking his claim
to primacy at the head of a Latin poetic tradition. On the other side of
the equation Ennius apparently assumes that poets can live on in later
poets, so that Homer’s survival after death, his immortality, is not sim-
ply in the metaphorical sense that his poetry survives as something to be
read. Taken together with the proem to Annales 7, the move has recently
been described as ‘an attempt on Ennius’ part to canonize the history of
Latin literature in Enniocentric terms, as the poet proclaims himself, on
the basis of his Homeric credentials, simultaneously founder, pater, and
telos of a new Roman literature’.6 It can also be seen as a way of justify-
ing the Homeric features (such as quantitative hexameter verse) which
Ennius wanted to introduce into his poem, a work which in this respect
constituted a distinct departure from the Latin epic tradition.7
What happened next was a sequence of revisitings and revisions of
this passage in later Latin writers,8 of which the most decisive as a claim
to cultural authority is Virgil’s programmatic statement in Georgics 3 in
which he renegotiates the role of primus for himself (Geo. 3:Â€10–12):
Primus ego in patriam mecum, modo uita supersit,
Aonio rediens deducam uertice Musas;
primus Idumaeas referam tibi, Mantua, palmas
In the Dryden translation (Dryden 1987:Â€5.209):
I, first of Romans shall in Triumph come
From conquer’d Greece, and bring her Trophies home:
With Foreign Spoils adorn my native place;
And with Idume’s Palms, my Mantua grace.
4
Persius 6.10–11:Â€cor iubet hoc Enni, postquam destertuit esse / Maeonides, quintus pauone ex Pythagoreo.
The scholiast tried to explain this by taking the word quintus, which probably refers merely to the
name ‘Quintus Ennius’, as meaning that Ennius was the fifth possessor of one soul.
5
Skutsch 1944:Â€85.
6
Rossi and Breed 2006:Â€412.
7
Aicher 1989:Â€227; see further 232:Â€‘the dream helps to authorize the Homeric (and all the Greek)
elements of the verse, and they in turn give evidence of the dream experience’.
8
For some of these see W. R. Hardie 1913; Skutsch 1985:Â€150–3.
Just as Ennius seems to have done, Virgil claims here to have been the
first to import Greek muses to his homeland. And just as Ennius had
used Homeric features for his poem, Virgil uses language and (probably)
imagery that evokes Ennius.9 Of course, what Virgil is doing at his quite
different point in time cannot be exactly the same as what Ennius was
doing. For example, if we accept Skutsch’s arguments, one of Ennius’
purposes was to release himself from the Alexandrian prohibition against
the imitation of Homer, on the grounds that if he actually is Homer, then
he cannot be imitating him.10 This obviously has no relevance to Virgil.
But a mix of humility and self-aggrandisement is still there. Virgil, in
‘becoming’ Ennius, taking on the role Ennius had performed, is ambiva-
lent about Ennius’ importance. Ennius is a source of authority, but on
the other hand he is ‘out of date’, retroactively ‘old’ now that Virgil is
proclaiming himself the coming thing.11 We shall return to this mix in
later writers, and we shall return too to the way both Ennius and Virgil
refer to a transference across languages. But from the ancient beginnings
our itinerary now embraces the surprisingly extensive subsequent history
of metempsychosis.
Petrarch’s Africa is the first modern handling of some of these materials

in a poetic context. Like other Renaissance readers, Petrarch had access
to all the well-known ancient texts on metempsychosis (understood in
the general sense of transmigration of souls)Â€ – Plato, Ovid, Macrobius,
VirgilÂ€– and was plainly familiar with them. He was also well aware of
Ennius’ presentation as well as various responses to it, as we shall see.
But greatly significant for Petrarch were certain intervening traditions.
The Church had since its early days condemned metempsychosis as a her-
esy; it ran too obviously counter (or too embarrassingly close) to the doc-
trine of Redemption.12 Other authorities had treated it as a subject for
levity:Â€Horace, for example, dismissed it as the ‘somnia Pythagorea’ (Ep.
2.1.52; compare Carm. 1.28.9–15), and Lucian made sport with it in a story
in which Pythagoras arrives in the Underworld.13 Nevertheless, there is no
aversion to using the trope for poetic tradition in the middle ages. Hence
Petrarch reflects a kind of forking of paths that had taken place between
Hinds 1998:Â€53–6; P. Hardie 2007b:Â€137–9.

â•‡9 10
Skutsch 1944.
11
This point is developed by Rossi and Breed 2006:Â€414–15.
12
To be more specific:Â€Jerome reports that metempsychosis was a secret doctine of certain sectar-
ies in his time. It was held in a Platonic form by the Gnostics, and is so taught by Origen Peri
archon. Augustine De Moribus Manichaeorum ridicules the Manichean version.
13
Lucian, The True History, 2.21; see also The Dream, or the Cock.
metempsychosis as a philosophical or religious doctrine Â�(dangerous and
heretical, or comically fantastical), and metempsychosis as a poetic meta-
phor (attractive and traditional). Outwardly he expresses his contempt
for the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul, publicly characterizing it as
ridiculous.14 But Petrarch’s own epic Africa, the Latin hexameter poem
he worked on for most of his life, engages vigorously with the other trad-
ition, in particular with what he knew of Ennius’ part in itÂ€– so much so
that it constitutes easily ‘the most important document we have for the
reception of Ennius and his work at the dawn of the Renaissance’.15
The climax of the Africa is the key point for Petrarch’s elaboration of
his authority topos in his work as a whole, ‘staging the drama of his liter-
ary predecessors authorizing his epic endeavor’16 in an elaborate scene for
which the famous ‘Somnium Scipionis’ in Book 6 of Cicero’s De Republica
is the initial pretext. In Book 9 of Petrarch’s narrative, his hero Scipio set-
tles down to a long conversation with his companion and commemorator
Ennius. Ennius recounts (9.158–285) that as a result of his long cultivation
of Homer, he dreamed of him the night before the battle of Zama in
which Scipio has just been victorious. Homer appeared to him, explained
the nature of poetry, and revealed the outcome of the battle. Then Homer
took him to see a youth sitting under a laurel whose leaves seemed about
to crown him:Â€he was Petrarch, at the moment he conceived the Africa
itself. (A lacuna precedes this point, in which Petrarch may have intended
to present a vision of the great poets who followed Ennius.) Homer now
makes a full prophecy to Ennius revealing who Petrarch is, the nature
of the poem he will undertake, and the laurel crown he will win at the
Capitol, the first time it has been awarded in a millennium. Homer now
hails Petrarch as his ‘only friend among the Latins’ (Salve, care michi Latie
telluris amice / Unice!, 9.174–5). At these words, Ennius reports, he was
inspired by great affection for Petrarch, before being awakened from his
dream by battle trumpets.
In rewriting Ennius in the fourteenth century, Petrarch’s aims seem to
correspond closely to what we can discern of Ennius’. Petrarch seeks to
position himself as the modern poet who will stand as the Homeric foun-
tainhead of a new literature, just as Ennius had claimed to stand in Rome.
Thus, in the words of a recent commentator, ‘it is the historical fact of his
laureation … for his Latin epic that serves to confirm his genealogical
14
Petrarch’s various animadversions are conveniently assembled, quoted and translated in Usher
2005:Â€125.
15
Houghton 2007:Â€145. 16 Brownlee 2005:Â€479.
link to his poetic predecessors:Â€ Homer, the founder of Greek epic, and
Ennius, the founder of Latin epic. Petrarch would then be the equally
“foundational” poet of renovatio.’17 The legitimizing translatio of Ennius is
extended by making Petrarch himself into the third poet in the series. We
note that while Petrarch presents himself in self-effacing fashion, ‘about
to melt into a composite with his poetic kin’, paradoxically ‘that tendency
to self-effacement results in an almost hubristic self-affirmation’.18 There is
an inevitable conflict in Petrarch’s conception of Ennius, for while he pre-
figures Petrarch and embodies his ideals, Petrarch was also well aware of
the denigration of Ennius’ work in ancient literature.19 In fact, Petrarch’s
Horatian prediction20 earlier in the Africa that he will come to celebrate
Scipio ‘as another Ennius’ (velut Ennius alter, 2.443) can be understood
as realizing itself in Petrarch’s replacing EnniusÂ€– substituting for Ennius’
work which has not survived. Or else we might say that Petrarch could
claim to have made Ennius live and speak again.
Few modern responses to the notion of poetic metempsychosis are as rich

as Petrarch’s, but there are many of them to mention, so the rest of this
tour must move at rapid pace. Petrarch himself sponsored several, includ-
ing Boccaccio’s brief flirtation with the idea, which involved proposing
for his hero antecedents in Virgil and Dante (Petrarch rejected both).21
We may travel northwards through the European Renaissance via a final
glimpse of Petrarch in the sixteenth century. By this time he has been
canonized not for his epic verse, but as the guiding spirit of vernacular
love lyric. This is the context in which Petrarch is himself figured as the
soul undergoing metempsychotic displacement in Ronsard’s ode to Du
Bellay of the 1560s:22
â•…â•…â•… Si ce qu’a dit Pythagore
â•…â•…â•… Pour vrai l’on veut estimer,
â•…â•…â•… L’ame de Petrarque encore
â•…â•…â•… T’est venue r’animer:
â•…â•…â•… L’experience est pour moi,
Veu que ses vers Tuscans tu ne leus onques
17
Brownlee 2005:Â€480–1.
18
Murphy 1997:Â€ 116. See Brownlee 2005 for the argument that Petrarch’s strategy is expressly
designed to promote his authority over that of Dante.
19
See further Suerbaum 1972.
20
Horace characterizes Ennius as ‘alter Homerus’ at Ep. 2.1.50.
21
For discussion see Usher 2005.
22
This passage is the focus of Murphy 1991. The quotation is from ‘A Joachim Du Bellai’, Ronsard
1993–4:Â€2.984.
Et tu écris ainsi comme lui, donques
â•…â•…â•… Le même esprit est en toi.
If we choose to believe what Pythagoras said was true, the soul of Petrarch has
returned again to live in you:Â€that is my experience, given that you have never
read his Tuscan verses, yet you write like him, therefore the same spirit must
dwell in you.
In a further piece of cross-hatching in this intertextual picture, Du Bellay
himself makes similar use of the doctrine in his own ode to Antoine
Héroet, Du Bellay’s conceit being that Plato is revived in Héroet.23 His
verb is revivre, Ronsard’s (above) r’aminer:Â€the term métempsychose itself
is awkward to incorporate in metrical verse, and few French poems make
bold to use it, while English poets have yet another syllable to contend
with.24
But the concept is common currency over the full range of English
as well as French Renaissance culture. The simple ‘transmigration of
souls’ version of metempsychosis is ubiquitous:Â€ the idea was in the air,
and expressions of it are easily called to mind.25 Malvolio in Twelfth
Night mentions it (4.2.51), as does Nano in Volpone (1.2.6–24, drawing
on Diogenes Laertius’ life of Pythagoras), as tooÂ€– less comicallyÂ€– does
Faustus at the end of Marlowe’s play:
Ah Pythagoras Metemsycosis; were that true,
This soule should flie from me, and I be chang’d
Unto some brutish beast.
Burton cites Ovid on metempsychosis, and summarizes Lucian’s story of
the cock.26 Sir Thomas Browne has a good deal to say about it, offering
at one point a down-to-earth interpretation in terms of how ideas will in
time inevitably resurface:
For as though there were a Metempsuchosis, and the soule of one man passed
into another, opinions doe find after-revolutions, men and mindes like those
that first begat them. To see our selves wee neede not look for Plato’s yeare,
23
Du Bellay 1919:Â€1.196–7.
24
For an example of how not to do it, see Richard Lovelace’s 1659 lines ‘To the Genius of Mr. John
Hall On his exact Translation of Hierocles’:Â€‘Who now shall doubt the Metempsychosis, / Of the
great Author, that shall peruse this?’
25
For further French Renaissance allusions see Montaigne, Essais, 2.11; Rabelais, Gargantua et
Pantagruel, 5.4. Full-scale discursive treatments of the doctrine around Europe include Paganini
Gaudenzio’s De Pythagorica Animarum Transmigratione (Pisa, 1641), Whitlock Bulstrode’s
Μετεμψυχωσις, or an Essay of Transmigration, in Defence of Pythagoras (London, 1692), and
Gulielmus Irhovius’ De Palingeneia Veterum seu Metempsychosi sic dicta Pythagorica (Amsterdam,
1733).
26
Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.1.2.9.
every man is not onely himselfe; there have beene many Diogenes, and as many
Timons, though but few of that name; men are lived over againe, the world is
now as it was in the age past, there was none then, but there have been some one
since that paralels him, and is as it were his revived selfe.27
John Donne’s Progress of the Soul is, at least in ambition, the most elabor-
ate, and today perhaps the most familiar English Renaissance handling.
Ben Jonson summed up Donne’s plan thus:
The conceit … was, that he sought the soul of that apple which Eva pulled, and
thereafter made it the soul of a bitch, then of a she wolf, and so of a woman. His
general purpose was to have brought in all the bodies of the heretics from the
soul of Cain.28
The only completed canto of the poem is roughly the length of one book
of an epic, taking the soul’s progress through a mandrake, a sparrow,
several fish, a whale, a mouse, two wolves and an ape, to Cain’s wife,
Themech. It would have required a full epic-sized work to bring it from
Eden to what the poem indicates was to be its last resting-place in the
body of Luther.29
But these many references, though they help suggest the wide recogniz-
ability of the concept of metempsychosis, whether among poets, scholars
or theatre audiences, do not deploy it for the most characteristic liter-
ary purposesÂ€– those of laying claim to cultural capital. We come closer
to such claims with perhaps the best-known remark on metempsychosis
from the English Renaissance, Frances Meres’ on Shakespeare, to the
effect that the English poet had acquired the soul of Ovid. Meres made
specific reference to the Classical tradition summarized above:Â€ ‘As the
soule of Euphorbus was thought to liue in Pythagoras:Â€so the sweete wittie
soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare.’30 But,
as with Ronsard and Du Bellay, this is more of an elegant compliment
than a purposeful use of the idea. Of more substance is Spenser in the
Faerie Queene (1596), stating his sense of poetic discipleship to Chaucer in
a passage which might be called the defining Chaucerian moment of the
Elizabethan era:31
27
Browne 1642:Â€11.
28
Conversations with William Drummond, 8; Jonson 1975:Â€464.
29
For a standard scholarly account of the scheme, and failure, of The Progress of the Soul see Milgate
1967:Â€xxv–xxxiii. Milgate also supplies a list of the sources for the doctrine of metempsychosis
available to Donne at pp. 171–2. See also Allen 1952.
30
Meres 1634:Â€623.
31
For a recent reading of the passage see Cheney 2009:Â€103–5.
Then pardon, O most sacred happie spirit,
That I thy labours lost may thus reuiue,
And steale from thee the meede of thy due merit,
That none durst euer whilest thou wast aliue,
And being dead in vaine yet many striue:
Ne dare I like, but through infusion sweete
Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me surviue,
I follow here the footing of thy feete,
That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.32
This is certainly a complex intertextual moment. Spenser pays his tribute
to Chaucer in terms used in Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus as well as in
the envoi to Troilus and Criseyde.33 Spenser is in fact claiming here a pos-
ition analogous to what Ennius had claimed, because of Chaucer’s role
as the generic ‘father’ of English poetry; Chaucer is the fountain-head
for Spenser as Homer was for Ennius. One of the differences, however,
is that whereas Homer is a Greek and Ennius a Roman poet, Chaucer
and Spenser are both English ones. This makes Spenser unusual, because
the metempsychosis trope was most often used to refer specifically to
cross-cultural inheritanceÂ€– Greek or Roman to English.34 For instance,
the latinate Cowley is lauded as a reborn Virgil by Denham in his elegy
on the poet, with specific reference to the Pythagorean doctrine (‘She’ is
Denham’s Muse):
’Twas taught by wise Pythagoras,
One Soul might through more Bodies pass;
Seeing such Transmigration here,
She thought it not a Fable there.35
But Homeric ‘infusion’ remains the more usual claim. George Chapman
advances it in the especially charged context of his translation of Homer,
although the passage, as it happens a rather fine one, is out of the way.
Chapman has Homer speak:
I am (sayd hee) that spirit Elysian,
That (in thy natiue ayre; and on the hill
Next Hitchins left hand) did thy bosome fill,
32
Faerie Queene 4.2.34 (Spenser 2007:Â€424).
33
For Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus see De rerum natura 3.1–30; Spenser’s particular borrowing is
from line 4, ficta pedum pono pressis uestigia signis in ‘follow … the footing of thy feete’. Note also
the secondary meaning ‘feete’ = ‘metrical divisions’, specifically Chaucer’s iambic pentameter.
For Troilus and Criseyde, see 5.1791–2 of Chaucer’s poem.
34
This point is made by Terry 2001:Â€162.
35
Sir John Denham, ‘On Mr Abraham Cowley his Death and Burial Amongst the Ancient Poets’,
67–70, in Denham 1969:Â€151.
With such a flood of soule; that thou wert faine
(With acclamations of her Rapture then)
To vent it, to the Echoes of the vale;
When (meditating of me) a sweet gale
Brought me vpon thee; and thou didst inherit
My true sense (for the time then) in my spirit;
And I, inuisiblie, went prompting thee,
To those fayre Greenes, where thou didst english me.36
This beckons us on towards a more elaborate use of the same rhetoric of
spiritual inheritance at the very end of the seventeenth century, by a poet
who is probably the first English writer ever to have a full sense of the
complete English poetic tradition down to his own time, and who is also
a major Homeric translator:Â€John Dryden.
Introducing his last collection of poems and (mainly) translations,
the Fables Ancient and Modern of 1700, a collection which happens to
include a superb translation of the Pythagorean section of Metamorphoses
15, Dryden muses on the family resemblances between the characters of
the writers he has been translating. Before long he is claiming these are
very much more than coincidence, and is thus led to refer to the claim we
have just seen Spenser making in regard to Chaucer, as well as other cases
of ‘lineal descent’:
Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax; for we have
our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. Spenser more than once
insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body; and that he
was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowl-
edged to me that Spenser was his original; and many besides myself have heard
our famous Waller own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the
Godfrey of Bulloigne which was turned into English by Mr Fairfax.37
We perhaps see in Dryden here the earliest manifestation of a different
nudge given to the metempsychosis idea in later times. References so far
canvassed make no mention of family relationships as such; in those cases
the peregrine soul of the poet seems, like that of the Dalai Lama, to light
on an otherwise unrelated body. But Dryden insists that all concerned in
the sequence of English poets belong to a single family, using the word
‘clan’, almost uniquely in his work,38 to enforce the sense he requires of
36
Chapman 1609:Â€A4r–v.
37
Dryden 1995–2005:Â€5.49–50. ‘More than once’:Â€Spenser alludes to Chaucer in a similar way in the
Envoi to The Shepheardes Calender. For further discussion of the Dryden passage, with particular
reference to its relationship with the accompanying translation of the Pythagorean section of the
Metamorphoses, see Hopkins 2001.
38
The sole other use appears to be The Hind and the Panther, 1.521.
consanguinity between different branches of a single family network.
This idea of the interrelation of all poets seems to be new. As we shall see
in a moment, it is taken further in a later era, towards the more extrava-
gant idea that these related writers are not merely relatives but actually, at
some deep level, the same writer.
The language of literary paternity was a generic one for Dryden’s time,
but he seems to have used it in particularly significant ways.39 He had
elsewhere employed in a similar context the word ‘traduction’, technic-
ally the notion espoused by Hippocrates that the parent engenders the
child’s soul as well as its body.40 Poets of the past were regularly envis-
aged as ‘fathering’ living poets, and accounts of the Fables’ Preface have
rightly stressed Dryden’s use of these standard metaphors. But the trope
of metempsychosis raises the stakes, and, as we might by this time expect,
Dryden implies (though it would not be good manners to insist) that he is
himself rather more than merely the descendant of these illustrious fore-
bears:Â€he is their reincarnation. In the course of his work he has found,
he says, that he ‘ha[s] a Soul congenial’ to Chaucer’s, and he feels he has
been led to translate him by the influence of ‘something … like fatality’.41
And if we wish for a more explicit presentation of the claim that Dryden
is the modern avatar of the poets he translates, we need look no further
than the poem an admiring Joseph Addison wrote on the publication
of one of Dryden’s earlier translations of Ovid. Addison invites Dryden
to ‘prolong his noble task’ (which he did) until he reaches the passage
in Metamorphoses 15 which tells of ‘How some in feathers, or a ragged
hide, / Have lived a second life, and different natures tried’. ‘Then’, writes
Addison, ‘will thy Ovid, thus transformed, reveal / A nobler change than
he himself can tell.’â•›42
If poets down to the eighteenth century like to imagine themselves as pos-

sessing the souls of their great predecessors, the post-Romantic era takes
this one step further. Poets may still present themselves as animated by the
spirit of Chaucer or Homer, but they also have a new tendency to envisage
all great poets as one and the same poet:Â€in a current but not completely
standard piece of terminology, a (or the) ‘universal author’. Before embark-
ing for the twentieth century, one early and, for its time, extraÂ�ordinary
statement of this idea calls out to be registered. Shelley, expressing the
39
Terry 2001:Â€145–56; Terry 1996.
40
‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew’, 23; Dryden
1995–2005:Â€5.7.
41
Dryden 1995–2005:Â€5.79, 83. 42
‘To Mr Dryden’, Addison 1854–6:Â€vol. I. 2.
fundamental oneness of the poetry of the world in the ‘Defence of Poetry’,
assumes not only that all poets are one, but that all poems are (or are part
of) a single poem. Here he is discussing the Greeks:
It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse
and Alexandria who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus were less cold,
cruel, and sensual than the rest of their tribe. Corruption must have utterly
destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred
links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through
the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a mag-
net the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and
sustains the life of all … And let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic
and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was
addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions
simply as fragments and isolated portions:Â€those who are more finely organized,
or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem
which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up
since the beginning of the world.43
This too has clear precedents in the thought of the ancients. The central
idea of a chain down the links of which influence is exerted is evidently
drawn from Plato’s theory of inspiration in the Ion (533, 563), which
Shelley himself translated. Inspiration is like a magnetic force holding
together the links of a chain:
And as the power of the stone circulates through all the links of this series, and
attaches each to each, so the Muse, comunicating through those whom she has
first inspired, to all others capable of sharing in the inspiration, the influence of
that first enthusiasm, creates a chain and a succession. For the authors of those
great poems which we admire … utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state
of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed of a spirit not their own.44
The twentieth century, like the Renaissance, is an era in which met-
empsychosis has considerable literary currency. I have alluded to Joyce’s
exploration of it; Yeats could also be adduced, or for the specific idea of
the transmigration of the poet’s own soul, Valéry. T. S. Eliot’s famous
use of Dante’s words of acknowledgement to Arnaut Daniel in dedicating
The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, ‘il miglior fabbro’, was certainly intended
to hint at a mysterious transference of poetic spirits. For a more head-on
Shelleyan presentation there is Proust. At the conclusion of his essay on
Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire, Proust dwells on Baudelaire’s final portrait,
a portrait depicting the long white hair which Baudelaire joked made
Shelley 1954:Â€286–7.
43 44
Quoted from Shelley’s own translation:Â€Shelley 1880:Â€3.263–4.
him look like an academician abroad. Proust, far from finding anything
humorous about it, sees this portrait as corroborating a Shelleyan notion
of the unity of all poets and all poems:
In this last portrait he bears an uncanny resemblance to Hugo, Vigny and
Leconte de Lisle, as if all four were only slightly different versions of a single
face, the face of that great poet who has been fundamentally one, since the
world began, whose life is intermittent yet as long as that of mankind … and the
cantos of whom, contradictory at times as is natural in so great a work, within
none the less ‘a dark and profound unity’, are bound together, would understand
one another were the various parts known to each other, and which ‘answer one
another’ in our hearts, that have entertained them and recognize themselves in
them!45
The notion of the ‘unity of all poems’, as I have called it (the logical term
might be ‘the universal poem’), has obvious implications for intertext-
ual practices on the part of poets, a theme which could be developed
in relation to translation, for example,46 and to a number of twentieth-
century writers. It has, for instance, been remarked in the work of Anna
Akhmatova by Sonia Ketchian, who observes:Â€‘if the œuvre of each poet
can be construed as one lifetime or stage in the process of literary reincar-
nation, then resonances with other writers’ works represent, as it were, an
incorporation of other lives and the memories of others into the frame-
work of Akhmatova’s verse’.47 Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘A Primitive like an
Orb’ embodies it quite explicitly, beginning by referring to ‘The essential
poem at the centre of things’, ‘something’, we are told, ‘seen and known
in lesser poems’. This essential poem has its own procreative capacity, and
thus fathers offspring just as the family of poets has (in Dryden’s expres-
sion) its ‘lineal descents’:Â€ ‘The essential poem begets the others.’â•›48 One
thinks, too, of Mallarmé’s unrealized and unrealizable project of writing
Le Livre, the ‘total book’ in which the whole world would be gathered
(‘tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre’, he wrote).49
There is space here to do little more than draw attention to a few mod-
ern contributions to these strands of thought and imagery. But one word
more on Proust, who himself used the term métempsychose on the first
page of À la recherche du temps perdu. This is disguised in most English
translations:Â€the translators, presumably not wishing to send their readers
45
‘Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire’ (written 1909, text of 1971), quoted in corrected form from Proust
1988:Â€55.
46
For some further suggestions here see the essay ‘Metamorphosis as Translation’, in Tomlinson
1983: 72–97.
47
Ketchian 1981:Â€46. 48 Stevens 1955:Â€440–1. 49
Mallarmé 1945:Â€378.
to the dictionary at this early point, actually do, in Leopold Bloom’s
words, ‘call it reincarnation’. Swann has dozed off after reading a book
about Charles V and François I; on waking he imagines himself back
in their world. Lydia Davis’s recent rendering is an exception to English
translators’ normal practice of substituting the word ‘reincarnation’ here:
This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my rea-
son but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the
candlestick was no longer lit. Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after
metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book
detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not.50
This first episode of Proust’s great work could, like Joyce’s, be said to be
more substantially concerned with the theme of metempsychosis. But this
is at a remove from our primary interest here.
Jorge Luis Borges is our finishing point, not least because he harks back
explicitly to several episodes in the history I have been describing. There
is in this respect a fitting element of recapitulation in what Borges has to
say about what he calls the ‘unity of authors’. For instance, Sir Thomas
Browne, some of whose writings Borges translated, was a long-term influ-
ence on him, and is often somewhere on hand in Borges’s allusions to
metempsychotic matters.51 But his take on the subject is his own. In fact,
he develops it away from metempsychosis and reincarnation (involving
death and rebirth) and towards the typically Borgesian idea of ‘an imper-
sonal author of all literature’, a universal author (involving continuous
existence through time).52 It is typically Borgesian in that it plays heavily
on the paradoxes of the one and the many that are treated so oftenÂ€– too
often, some would sayÂ€– in his stories. As we shall see, though, the dir-
ection Borges’s meditations take is not so very different from the cases of
Ennius, Petrarch or Dryden.
This passage from Borges’s essay ‘La flor de Coleridge’ is one instance
of his very self-conscious reflections in this area:
The pantheist who declares the plurality of authors to be illusory finds
Â�unexpected support in the classicist, to whom such a plurality barely matters.
For the classical mind, literature is the essential thing, not individuals. George
Moore and James Joyce incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of
others; Oscar Wilde used to give plots away for others to develop; both procÂ�
edures, though apparently contradictory, may reveal an identical sense of art,
an Â�ecumenical, impersonal perception. Another witness of the Word’s profound
Proust 2002:Â€1. 51 See recently C. Johnson 2002.

50
The phrase is from Dominique Jullien’s essay on Borges’s Homeric stories, Jullien 1995:Â€139.
52
unity, another who defied the limitations of the individual, was the renowned
Ben Jonson, who, upon writing his literary testament and the favorable or
adverse opinions he held of his contemporaries, simply combined fragments
from Seneca, Quintilian, Justus Lipsius, Vives, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon,
and the two Scaligers.
… Those who carefully copy a writer do so impersonally, because they equate
that writer with literature, because they suspect that to depart from him in the
slightest is to deviate from reason and orthodoxy. For many years I thought that
the almost infinite world of literature was in one man. That man was Carlyle, he
was Johannes Becher, he was Whitman, he was Rafael Cansinos Asséns, he was
De Quincey.53
Borges expresses the concept of the universal author in characteristically
topsy-turvy terms:Â€he used to think not that all authors are one, but that
one author was all. But he is also characteristically poised between the
suggestive and the evasive. He believed this ‘for many years’Â€– but does
so no longer? And is he describing something routine (borrowings, appro-
priations), or something extraordinary (‘the Word’s profound unity’; an
‘infinite world … in one man’)? I turn finally to Borges’s ‘El inmortal’
(1957), a short story in which, in a fictional context, he allows himself a
freer play of implication.
‘El inmortal’ is a tale ‘alternatively viewed as Borges’ most reward-
ing and most forbidding, yet unanimously accepted as his most ambi-
tious’; ‘perhaps more than any of Borges’s other works … an allegory of
literature’.54 The last words (in English translation) of its protagonist and
narrator, Joseph Cartaphilus, are these:Â€‘I have been Homer; shortly I shall
be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.’55 This
improbable declaration is made less so by a dense surrounding frame-
work of incident and allusion. A one-sentence summary of the narrative
might go:Â€a Roman centurion drinks from a fountain of youth, thereafter
leading a peripatetic existence as a transhistorical personality in search of
an antidote for his immortality. ‘Cartaphilus’ is the name of the Roman
guard who becomes the Wandering Jew of the earliest written accounts
of that legend. More recent literary precedents include OrlandoÂ€– at one
point Cartaphilus visits Alexander Pope in England, just as Woolf’s
53
‘La flor de Coleridge’ (1945), translated by Suzanne Jill Levine; quoted from Borges 1999:Â€242.
Asséns (1883–1964), the Andalusian poet, was Borges’s early mentor.
54
M. Evans 1984:Â€275; Jullien 1995:Â€138.
55
Quotations from this story are taken from Borges 1970:Â€135–49 (here 148–9). The translator is
Irby. The Spanish originalÂ€ – though in fictional terms the text is itself a translation from an
English originalÂ€– was published in El Aleph, 1957.
protagonist doesÂ€– though it is much darker in tone, and another relevant
precedent is Swift’s sordid and despairing immortals, the Struldbruggs.56
Now Cartaphilus is, as the final words say, a shadow of Homer; he is also
a shadow (through quotations and plagiarism) of Browne.57 He is in fact,
as previous commentators have recognized, all authors.
What is more, Borges has embodied in this tale a more than ordinarily
intertextual play that will make his story itself a ‘witness of the Word’s
profound unity’, as he had called it in ‘La flor de Coleridge’. In Michael
Evans’s words, ‘the verbal repercussions carry beyond the bounds of the
work itself and communicate with a constellation of external texts’.58 Not
only Browne is quoted:Â€a facetious fictional postscript draws attention to
‘interpolations’ from Pliny, De Quincey, Descartes and George Bernard
Shaw. The postscript also makes mention of Ben Jonson, who himself
‘defined his contemporaries with bits of Seneca’. ‘El inmortal’ is a version
of the Wandering Jew, but it also rewrites Ulysses, and indeed ‘all those
texts that both thematize and theorize the … amalgamation of cultural
fragments’. In fact, ‘El inmortal’ ‘tends to incorporate other texts in order
to represent the essence of all literature’.59 But one of the authors alluded to
is of special significance. Immediately on drinking the water the protag-
onist ‘repeat[s], inexplicably, some words in Greek’. These turn out to be
from the end of the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad. Cartaphilus becomes
Homer. So does his companion, whom he calls Argos, and who utters a
line from the Odyssey.60 So too, in a slightly different sense, does Borges,
partly through the tale’s stress on blindness, partly because the first of
these Homeric lines has been previously used by Borges elsewhere.61
Borges’s story, of course, does not present us with the transmigration
of soulsÂ€ – rather the survival through times and places of one soul in
one body. But not just any soul. The narrative framework itself turns on
Cartaphilus’s copy of Pope’s Iliad, which he informs us he subscribed for
in 1714, and tucked into the back of which has been found the sole copy
56
M. Evans 1984:Â€281 n. 3 suggests another ‘possible precedent’ in the ‘fantastic chapter’ of the ‘poi-
sonous book’ in Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray. With Orlando (which Borges translated in 1968)
the involutions begin to multiply, and readers starting to imagine that there might, after all,
be something more than metaphor in the notion of the transhistorical author may consult (for
Thomas Browne as a source for Orlando) Caughie 1985, (for Proust ditto) Shore 1979, (for Ulysses
ditto) Webb 1994, and (for Orlando as a source for Borges) Ayuso 2004.
57
For the connection with Browne see Stephens 1992.
58
M. Evans 1984:Â€275. 59 Jullien 1995:Â€140.
60
Jullien 1955: 138, 143; the lines are Il. 2.824 and Od. 17.394. The first one is itself rewritten
slightly:Â€see Evans’s analysis of this (1984:Â€278).
61
For the blindness and association with Homer see M. Evans 1984:Â€ 277; for Borges’s previous
quotation (in ‘Las versiones homéricas’) see Jullien 1995:Â€142.
of his memoir which, when translated, constitutes the story itself. Borges
is still talking, some 2,200 years after Ennius, about Homer, ‘the “absent”
figure around whom the story pivots’, as the fount of his literary tradition,
and ‘deliberately chooses to relate to Homer through the chain of authors
who have echoed his work’ in a mise en abîme of allusions each reflecting
‘a different member of an infinite succession of rhapsodists and writers
who have repeated and re-written’ Homer.62 One important qualification
is that this chain is, of course, a canon personal to Borges.
Borges, we can now see, is doing the sort of things that it has always
been the function of these ideas to do, from antiquity to the present. My
plural ‘ideas’ acknowledges that there are differences between reincar-
nation, rebirth, metempsychosis and transhistorical personality; but all
express a version of literary afterlife as a kind of immortality, and the
purposes for which writers use them are uniform enough. To make them
more fully explicit, they include the following: stressing the prestigious
pedigree of your literature, and thereby of your own individual work.
Claiming that your own writing is just as valid as the more prestigious
literature you draw on (Greek in the case of Ennius; primarily Roman in
the case of Dryden). Proposing that your literary tradition does not exist
merely inertly, but as a living reciprocity between writers past and pre-
sent (also good for you, because just as the past lives in you, you have the
godlike power to make past writers live again). And more negatively, per-
haps, suggesting that all creativity must take place within the tradition,
the tradition you specify (or, if powerful enough, create), and including
some writers within that tradition while excluding others. These are some
of the ways in which writerly roles may be constructed by the representa-
tion of literary afterlives.
M. Evans 1984:Â€278, 280. Borges’s other ‘Homeric’ short story, the two-page ‘El hacedor’, falls
62
outside the scope of this essay; see here Jullien 1995:Â€136–8.

Ch apter 12
‘Mirrored doubles’:Â€Andrew Marvell, the remaking

of poetry and the poet’s career
Nigel Smith
For someone whose reputation as a major poet depends almost entirely

on retrospective construction in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
tury, Andrew Marvell has a surprising amount to say about his own
literary career.1 For someone who was consciously aware of the way in
which others around him and just before him had sounded their own
trumpets, proclaiming themselves latter-day Virgils, Ovids or Lucans,
Marvell is remarkable for the degree to which he is able in his verse and
his prose to speculate on his own career as a poet even while refusing the
terms of aggrandizement claimed by his contemporaries. Jonson, Milton,
Herrick, Cowley, Davenant and Katherine Philips all took pains to make
their voices major, distinctive and above or beyond the tradition that had
formed them. Marvell is a poet who denied this sense of poetic egotism
by a form of studied imitation (echoing all of the people named above
and many more) but who nonetheless made a virtue and indeed a highly
creative resource of being other men’s (and women’s) mirrors.
I once said, and was pilloried for it, that Marvell was a ‘weak poet’
in this sense and of course it was meant in a Bloomian sense.2 He did
not murder his father poets in order to find his own voice so much as
echo them within his own voice, never letting the discerning reader for-
get about their distinctive identity. Marvell was aware that this could be
regarded as a kind of feminine principle of writing, which begs Â�further
questions of the intriguing issue of his sexuality.3 He had no interest
in anyone hearing his poetic ‘echoing voice’ since he remained almost
entirely unpublished in print until after his death. Furthermore, no
1
See Ray 1998; N. Smith 2007a.
2
Conference on Marvell and Liberty, Institute for English Studies, University of London, July
1996. See also Bloom 1973.
3
The classic discussion is P. Hammond 1996; a later version, ‘Marvell’s Ambiguities’, is ch. 4 in
P. Hammond 2002.
226
Marvell, the remaking of poetry, the poet’s career 227
substantial collection of his lyric verse survives in manuscript form and
very little of it circulated in manuscript miscellanies. Most of his prose
tracts, the majority of which are rich with literary and theatrical allusion,
were published anonymously.
Marvell was the son of a provincial ‘low church’ Jacobean divine. It
is probable that he too intended or was intended to be a divine, possibly
a university man, and in that role he could have prospered as a poet if
he had so desired.4 Two of his favourite poets were important academic
divines:Â€George Herbert and the Oxonian William Cartwright. But the
death of his father in 1641 and the loss of his scholarship at Trinity College,
Cambridge, put paid to that ambition, depriving him both of means and a
place in the institution of the university and the church.5 He was cast adrift
in the capital early in the Civil War decade, dependent on the goodwill of
those with whom he had connections (usually northern ones), the sale of
small propertiesÂ€– all that could be called a patrimonyÂ€– and eventually
became a tutor for the great, in their households, or on tours of Europe.
He would gain a reputation as a tutor, indubitably overqualified, a man
with secretarial and ambassadorial skills who had been kept waiting too
long.6 He would remain a servant in some sense for the rest of his life.
In this way, although from a family background that became in the
1640s and 1650s mostly parliamentarian and republican, Marvell fell in
with royalists, and, while in Europe, possibly in Italy, appears to have
met and spent time with the Villiers brothers, George, the young second
Duke of Buckingham, and his younger brother Lord Francis. This led to
all of four lines of aggressively royalist poetry in an elegy of 128 lines writ-
ten in the summer of 1648, when Lord Francis was killed in a skirmish
at the beginning of the Second Civil War. Indeed the dominant concern
with all of Marvell’s royalist poems of the late 1640s is the business of
writing poetry, none more so than the verse epistle to the cavalier Richard
Lovelace, another father poet for Marvell, and where the literary impact
4
For Marvell’s life records, including the complexity of Andrew Marvell Sr’s position and beliefs,
see Maltzahn 2005.
5
The evidence of an encounter with Roman Catholicism might be adduced as one reason for being
required to leave Trinity College. But probably more suggestive is the evidence that he did not
keep up his residence requirement. Was he in London enjoying city life, as his own later testi-
mony in The Rehearsal Transpros’ d (1672) hints? See further Smith 2008.
6
Samuel Hartlib’s ‘Ephemerides’ reports from Dr John Worthington, c. October 1655:Â€ ‘There is
one Marvel of 40. years of age who hath spent all his time in travelling abroad with Noblemens
Sonnes and is skilled in several languages, who is now again to goe with one’s … sonne of 8.
thousand a year, who is fitter to bee a Secretary of State etc. Hee is advised to make the like con-
tract as Page hath done being thus far in years’ (Sheffield University, Hartlib Papers, 29/5/50A).
228 Nigel Smith
of the Civil War (pamphlet wars and the rise of serial journalism) is ana-
lysed with remarkable clarity (ll. 11–14):
These virtues now are banished out of town,
Our civil wars have lost the civic crown.
He highest builds, who with most art destroys,
And against others’ fame his own employs.7
In this poem, the speaker’s allegiances remain with the old world of
courtly, cavalier verse, but he will soon be tainted, if it has not already
happened with the new (and in his view debased) values of the pamphlet-
eers, journalists and Puritans. It has also been conjectured that in the last
line of the elegy on Lord Hastings the Hippocratic formula describing the
physician’s vocation (art is long, but life is short) is meant also to refer to
the literary art of the elegist.8
These perceptions also testify to Marvell’s membership of a literary cir-
cle at the point of the regicide and the creation of the English republic
in 1649–50 that was attempting to reframe English letters in the context
of the tumultuous events that it found itself living through. Many of
its members, although not all, were royalists, or had had royalist con-
nections, and many of them sought patronage with the new regime.9
Thus, even as their verse endeavours to address a new age, so also traces
of past associations and sentiments remain. Nowhere was this signalled
more clearly than in the packing of Lucanic, Lucretian, Longinian and
Machiavellian energy inside Horatian tightness in Marvell’s most famous
political poem, An Horatian Ode (13–24):
And like the three-forked lightning, first
Breaking the clouds where it was nursed,
â•… Did thorough his own side
â•… His fiery way divide.
(For ’tis all one to courage high,
The emulous or enemy;
â•… And with such to inclose
â•… Is more than to oppose).
Then burning through the air he went,
And palaces and temples rent;
â•… And Caesar’s head at last
â•… Did through his laurels blast.
All references are to N. Smith 2007b.

7 8
â•‡ McWilliams 2003.
This picture was first described in Worden 1984. See also Norbrook 1999:Â€ 158–82 and 243–71;
9
McDowell 2005:Â€273–303; McDowell 2008.

This was coupled a few months later with Marvell’s poetic dismissal of
a poet from the former generationÂ€ – Tom May, would-be laureate and
translator of LucanÂ€– in the voice of Ben Jonson:Â€a voice from the past
to be sure, but in the very act of imitation, Marvell was both distancing
himself from Jonson’s anti-republicanism while allowing it to attack May,
and ensuring that his readers understood that poetry’s career had moved
onÂ€– as it certainly had in An Horatian Ode. May’s literary crime, accord-
ing to Jonson’s voice, is that he has alienated the true role of the poet by
expressing Classical republican views in partisan pamphlets and histories.
The poem understands that May’s ‘decline’ began with the translation of
Lucan’s De Bello Civili or Pharsalia (1627), which is presented not as the
complicatedly ambiguous epic it was for readers in the 1620s and 1630s,
but very much as the reading matter of republicans and of commonwealth
supporters, one of the very sources for An Horatian Ode.
While Upon Appleton House (composed in summer 1651 just one year
after An Horatian Ode) rewrites the parameters of both estate and pro-
spective poetry, it is also a meditation upon epic poetry, the proper busi-
ness of the commonwealth poets. This was highly appropriate:Â€ Marvell
had been hired to teach Lord Fairfax’s daughter Mary on his estate at
Nun Appleton, Yorkshire, Fairfax having recently retired from being com-
mander of the New Model Army. He was out of sorts with the republic’s
politicians, and Marvell was out of sorts with new literary fashions, not of
the republic’s men of letters but of the exiled royalists. The episode in the
Aeneid in which Evander puts Aeneas to bed on a couch of strewn leaves
(Aen. 8.359–69) offers a model for the pastoral depiction of the great man,
in this case the retired general Fairfax. Marvell is replying to Sir William
Davenant’s recently published heroic poem Gondibert (1651), with its pre-
tentious claims of producing epic literature on subjects distanced from
the present time, its grand claims for poetry as high architecture (to be
read by princes only), its preference for books (as opposed to the book of
nature), and the influence in its preface of Hobbes’s psychological and pol-
itical theories. To all of these themes, Upon Appleton House replies in the
negative, most notably through its concern with a living hero who, unlike
Davenant’s heroes, confronts military action before retreating. Gondibert
describes a Baconian natural utopia, whereas Marvell’s poem enacts one;
Gondibert reveals a suspicion of courts, described at first by Davenant
as gardens, whereas Marvell makes the garden the centre of Fairfax’s
noble life.10 Rhodalind’s beauty is compared in Gondibert to alchemical
10
E. E. Duncan-Jones 1975:Â€77 makes the case for Davenant as the hero referred to in ‘Tom May’s
Death’, 65–6.
230 Nigel Smith
processes, but the poet doubts that ‘Verse has Chymick pow’re’ (1.4.4.1);
Marvell’s figure of Maria Fairfax effects an alchemical transformation,
communicated through the verse.
In this light, the embrace of French libertin verse as part of a poetics
of retirement offered in the poem becomes an act of subversion against
those such as Davenant who postulate literary rules, and the ostentatious
making of a new literary era. Upon Appleton House is full of echoes and
reworkings of Lord Fairfax’s poems, and in particular his translation of
Saint-Amant’s ‘La Solitude’ (1625). Fairfax’s translation replicates Saint-
Amant’s vivid interest in ruins and the quarries from which the rocks
came, and their representation of an absolute retirement. The libertin
poets had been banished from the official court-centred French literary
panoply, which is where Davenant and other English royalists sought
their literary guidance at this time.
This truculent pursuit of doubleness is at the heart of Marvell’s under-
standing of literary activity, and it is an element in the consciousnesses
of his characters. Thus, the Villiers elegy is concerned not with a loyal
subject but a lover; it is ‘a poem attempting to mediate between modes
of representing its dead’. ‘There is a narcissistic, self-enclosing movement
about [Villiers’] gaze which is directed at himself, and which finds other
masculine objectsÂ€– even the eyes of an enemy soldierÂ€– to reflect it back,
rather than the eyes of his mistress. Marvell’s conceit labours to preserve
the all-male circuit of vision.’11 More famously, we have the gaze of the coy
mistress, textually drawn from Ovid’s Narcissus and its English transla-
tions, engaged in mutual reflection with the poet (in the position of Ovid’s
Echo), who can only promise to the future his ‘echoing voice’ (25–7):
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song.12
Reflexiveness had already been explored by Marvell with regard to poetic
careers in the splendid Flecknoe, An English Priest at Rome, probably written
in 1646. Here the intricate, theologically acute satire of the English Jesuit
poet Richard Flecknoe stands as a frightening and even repellent mirror
of what Marvell the emergent poet might become. In a dining scene that
alludes to Trimalchio’s dinner in Petronius, the observing poet is a ‘mar-
tyr’ to Flecknoe’s ‘hideous verse … in dismal tone’, the poem standing
P. Hammond 1996:Â€107–9.
11
Marvell also echoes in several significant places in his poem the translations of Golding and
12
Sandys:Â€ see Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, in N. Smith 2007b:Â€ 82–3, nn. 26, 27, 33–6, 36,
39–40.
then as an exploration of how not to be a certain kind of poet:Â€Roman
Catholic, not Protestant, pretentious, exiled, forced to survive by ignoble
means as household priest and confidante, emaciated and bad on the lute.
Flecknoe was in truth a fine, innovative lutanist, but Marvell, his brush
with Catholicism and the desperation of recent years never far from his
mind, writes with excruciating percipience:Â€this was all far too close to the
bone, a destiny as poet that he might well have adopted.
Poetry beckons from wherever it comes, and martyrdom in this poem
represents the compelling lure of verse. The passage in question begins
with a parodic allusion to Milton’s already famous call to poetic ambi-
tion in Lycidas, passes through the listener’s depiction of himself as
St Lawrence, turning first one, then another ‘burning ear’ to Flecknoe
(just as the saint asked his torturers to turn him over on the grid-iron),
to the uncomfortable picture of listener as mistress being wooed by priest
Â�troubadour with tremulous lute and rumbling stomach (27–36):
Only this frail ambition did remain,
The last distemper of the sober brain,
That there had been some present to assure
The future ages how I did endure:
And how I, silent, turned my burning ear
Towards the verse; and when that could not hear,
Held him the other; and unchangèd yet,
Asked still for more, and prayed him to repeat:
Till the tyrant, weary to persecute,
Left off, and tried t’allure me with his lute.
The reference (one of several such in Marvell) to Lycidas, 70–1, unmis-
takably signals poetic ambition, although poetic endeavour is as much
present from an audience’s point of view as it is from one of composition
and performance by the poet.13 Poet as imprisoned martyr lover, bound
to retransmit in his own verse that to which he is subjected, connects
directly with the wonderful image of Flecknoe as transparent, and there-
fore (again the description figures poetry) like a chameleon, changing his
appearance according to his surrounding. Here the poet is like an earthly
version of Marvell’s soul in The Garden, projecting from human bodies,
like a bird flying onto a tree bough, waving in its plumes the ‘various
light’ (56) of the world (79–82):
But were he not in this black habit decked,
This half-transparent man would soon reflect
See Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Death by Drowning:Â€ Marvell’s “Lycidas”’, read at Modern
13
Language Association, Chicago, December 2007.

232 Nigel Smith
Each colour that he passed by; and be seen,
As the chameleon, yellow, blue, or green.
But chameleons were not well regarded in early modern Europe, being
associated with flattery, changeability and vacuity.14
The near parody of Lycidas, where Milton’s ‘Fame is the spur that the
clear spirit doth raise / (The last infirmity of noble mind)’ (70–1) becomes
‘Only this frail ambition did remain, / The last distemper of the sober
brain’, associates ambition not merely with embattled faith but also with
personal history. Nicholas von Maltzahn connects Marvell’s interest in
Lycidas, the poem that elegizes a man who drowned, with the watery
fate of Marvell’s father. While Marvell’s close engagement with Milton’s
great elegy enables him to find a voice for grief at the abrupt ending of
young lives (in the elegy of Lord Francis Villiers), the deeper trauma of
death by drowning, so crucial to Marvell’s career path, is signalled in the
presence of Lycidas in no fewer than eight Marvell poems. Marvell turns
Milton’s ‘beaked promontory’ (Lycidas, 94) into the ‘beaked promontor-
ies’ of English Commonwealth battleships (First Anniversary, 358) that
terrify the monarchs of Europe. They are the dry refuge in the middle
of the waters for the worthy subject who would otherwise drown. In this
respect, the scene brings to mind Marvell’s unfortunate lover clinging to
a rock. Marvell’s lover has been very plausibly connected with images of
the orphaned royal princes in 1649:Â€Charles, Prince of Wales, and James,
Duke of York. But the motif, with its roots in prose romance, also sug-
gests a personal connection:Â€‘The Unfortunate Lover’ becomes the poem
in which Marvell’s complicated sense of severance from his source of well-
being and guidance in his father, and his further sense of torture at the
word’s expense, is superbly encrypted.15
There is no space here to discuss in detail Marvell’s second two poems
on Oliver Cromwell, the panegyric The First Anniversary (1655), and the
elegy, except to note the forceful deployment of Pindar and Milton in a
continued reworking of Caroline court poetry, and where the military
hero becomes a kind of poet who far exceeds the powers of his lesser mir-
ror, the poem’s poet, to match or catch up (First Anniversary, 125–6):
â•… Till then my muse shall hollow far behind
Angelic Cromwell who outwings the wind.
See Hartwig 1996:Â€192 and 196.

14
I am grateful to Stephen Zwicker for discussing his psychological reading of ‘The Unfortunate
15
Lover’ with me.

It is in a further echo of Lycidas that the transference of creative Â�powers
from poet to martial and civic hero becomes evident. Milton’s swain
‘touched the tender stops of various quills’ (188), and Oliver Cromwell ‘still
new stops to various time applied’ (58). In Marvell’s imaginative engage-
ment with Milton, Cromwell becomes the living hero who is already
redeemedÂ€– Lycidas on earthÂ€– and in this way is a new father figure for
the lost poet. Marvell spent much of the later 1650s as Cromwellian house-
hold and civil servant and diplomat, writing exquisite Latin verse praising
the Protector to foreign powers (such as Queen Kristina of Sweden), but
mostly translating a lot of letters. He was never present at the initial recep-
tion or performance of this verse, although his name is present in the first
known version of the Kristina poem, which was the version probably read
to her.16 The verse epigrams attached to the portraits of Cromwell can
only have exaggerated this sense of the poet as mere echo to the hero. Just
one year after Marvell wrote The First Anniversary, he was busy helping to
distribute Milton’s Defensio Secunda in France, playing the role of facili-
tator to a literary figure who declared his identity and affiliations loudly
and proudly. The First Anniversary was published anonymously.
The poet who is imitated throughout is Ben Jonson. If Milton makes
possible a world of registers for Marvell, it is Jonson who becomes the
voice of poetic authority:Â€ the figure whom Marvell has condemn Tom
May, and whom the voice of Cleveland imitates when Marvell has him
praise Captain Douglas at the beginning of The Loyal Scot. Although
Marvell stands between Milton and Dryden in ‘On Mr. Milton’s
Paradise Lost’, the poem itself imitates Jonson’s ‘To my Chosen Friend,
The Learned Translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq.’ The phrasal echoes
of Jonson, especially at the beginning and end of the poem suggest that
Marvell wanted to praise Milton as the author of a Lucanic poem, a Stoic
and a republican.17 This has been regarded as evidence that Marvell was
the greatest ‘son of Ben’, even as he was adapting Jonson’s own master,
Horace.18
But the political reversal of 1660 abruptly caused a change in fortune,
making Marvell’s choices of verse composition fit again the pattern we
have already seen, albeit contingently rather than by design. Yes, Marvell
was in a general sense part of the new regime in that he was an MP,
and undertook diplomatic missions on behalf of the government. But
he also became a conspiratorial operator, writing and publishing poetry
See Holberton 2005:Â€233–53; N. Smith 2007b:Â€259–66.

16
See Shifflett 1996. 18â•‡ See Scodel 1999:Â€546.

17
234 Nigel Smith
clandestinely in order to undermine Lord Clarendon’s regime. If The First
Anniversary remodels Edmund Waller’s court panegyrics of the 1630s,
and if Waller allegedly wrote his ‘Augustan’ panegyric of Cromwell to
correct Marvell, rejecting Marvell’s incisive Machiavellianism, Marvell
upended Waller’s jingoistic Instructions to a Painter (1665) in the Second
and Third Advices to a Painter (1666–7).19 There is no challenge to Waller’s
strong sense of poetic signature, and this is compounded by the fact that
the painter satires may have been jointly written, not even unsigned but
attributed to an improbable author, Sir John Denham, who was insane at
this time. The Second Advice begins however with an allusion to Horace’s
De arte poetica, 9–10:Â€unlike the useless courtiers who sacrifice England’s
honour at sea, the poet and the painter both ‘dare all’ in their endeavours.
It is no small point. Marvell was already aware of the way in which his
former Protectoral foreign office colleague John Dryden was at this time
successfully redefining the nature and reputation of English letters to fit
the restored monarchy, and in order to forget republicans, Cromwellians
and Puritans. Dryden’s influential Essay on Dramatic Criticism (1668) is
a dialogue that takes place in a small boat whose occupants had been
down the Thames to witness the Battle of Lowestoft, the engagement that
Waller’s panegyric glorified. In the Essay, the Longinian ideals of repubÂ�
lican and Commonwealth verse are sunk in the year following the publi-
cation of the Commonwealth’s greatest literary monument, Paradise Lost.
Marvell’s mirror answered back, most pointedly in the Last Instructions to
a Painter (1667) where the heroes of the hour are those whose self-sacrifice
contains both martyrdom and narcissistic self-awareness:Â€most famously
in the figure of Captain Archibald Douglas, who is, we intuit, an object
of at least admiration for the speaker.
Another epigram added to the front of the Directions to a Painter vol-
ume is from Tacitus, Annals III.49–51. Here, Tacitus relates how Clutorius
Priscus, having been handsomely rewarded by the Emperor Tiberius for
a poem on the death of his adopted son Germanicus, composed another
in anticipation of the death of the Emperor’s other son, Drusus, hoping
for an even bigger reward. Having recited the poem to an audience of
women, he then boasted of his performance and predictably fell victim
to an informer. Marcus Lepidus tried to plead leniency but Priscus was
Â�summarily tried and executed. The passage is at the front of the poem
because it facilitates another swipe at Waller, who had published two ver-
sions of his Instructions to a Painter. As Martin Dzelzainis argues, the
â•‡ See Raylor 2002.

19
epigram reads as if the ‘Company of Poets’ who sign the verse are both
censoring and ostracizing one of their members.20 Of course, this sense
of joint enterprise (and the fact that the Directions volume contained
poems certainly not by Marvell) makes it hard to tie the Tacitus passage
to Marvell with any certainty. Tellingly, and with more certainty that
Marvell was the author, The Third Advice, 3–10, opens with the choice
of painter as not Lely, who after all was Dutch, but Richard Gibson, the
dwarf miniaturist, who, not unlike Marvell, was a great survivor, having
been a page in the court of Charles I, then Cromwell’s portraitist, and
finally official miniaturist in the court of Charles II. He was a tiny man,
and he copied Lely in miniature; in Marvell’s imitation of him there is a
sense of resonance with the small, the unnoticed, not a self-proclaimed
aesthetic leader, but someone with powers of great observation.
Marvell’s satirical prose pamphlets of the 1670s, for which he was
notorious in his lifetime, were written, so he claimed, in disgust at authori-
tarian Church of England divines, one a former Puritan, who had alien-
ated their proper pastoral role, and with it the vision of a tolerant national
church that Marvell probably shared with his father. In several letters to
his nephew, William Popple, Marvell wittily delights in the fact that the
author, widely supposed to be Marvell, has not been found.21 Two of the
passages are written in the third person, Marvell sharing silently with
Popple the joke of his authorship, but concealing it still should the letter
have been intercepted and steamed open by a government agent.
The appeal of Marvell’s pamphlet was rooted in its hilarious fusion of
satirical drama and ecclesiastical controversyÂ€ – an irreverent subversion
of religious propriety that was guaranteed to produce titters, or Â�outrage.
Marvell’s editors source his chosen technique in John Owen’s use of
Aristophanes to attack Patrick, and Parker’s suggestion that Ben Jonson’s
anti-Puritan drama would have been just as appropriate a model. Behind
this still lay the Marprelate traditionÂ€– the Elizabethan Puritan who had
used the humanist jesting tradition to abuse the bishops in the name
of Presbyterianism in the late 1580s and early 1590s. But the choice of
Buckingham’s play, which is densely and playfully alluded to and Â�echoed
throughout the text, can also be seen as a form of appropriate praise or
Â�signalling of affiliation, just as Marvell’s Cromwellian poetry uses ideo-
logically appropriate poetic models. Marvell was signalling and exploit-
ing the love of wit that prevailed amongst Buckingham and his friends,
20
Dzelzainis 2008:Â€63.
â•‡ Marvell 1971:Â€vol. II. 328, 345–6, 357.
21
236 Nigel Smith
including the King, who certainly thought that some of the Â�bishops
deserved to be mocked.
In Marvell’s play The Rehearsal, a satirical parody of Dryden, the lat-
ter appears as the buffoon Mr Bayes, and Marvell’s intention is to show
that Parker and Bayes ‘do very much Symbolize’ each other. The dramatic
framework allows Marvell to make the vagaries of ecclesiological anim-
adversion acceptable to those who would normally prefer the stage, the
coffee houses or the court.
While The Rehearsal Transpros’ d (1672) contains within it a compact
theory of magistracy, it begins with a patina of literary allusion that
looks like a poetic autobiography of Marvell, even as his prose develops
its attack on Bishop Parker. The prose also reworks passages from the
verse as if it were a mirror unto it. Thus, the weaknesses of nature are
expressed through the Italian (and an English translation) of Amaryllis
in Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido. This is a reversal of the valance of expression
in which Bishop Samuel Parker becomes a whining nymph complaining,
reversing one of Marvell’s most famous lyric figures. At the end of this
section Parker (already ‘doubled up’ by being represented as the Duke
of Buckingham’s comic creation, Mr Bayes in The Rehearsal) is likened
to an old-fashioned romance hero, and one whose fitting poetry par-
odies that given by Marvell to Cromwell in An Horatian Ode. Marvell’s
Parker looks at a bloated reflection of himself in a mirrorÂ€– not unlike
‘Damon the Mower’s’ (another Marvell lyric) version of the Polyphemus
eclogue in TheocritusÂ€ – and like Damon he is discomforted by the
dog-days of high summer.22 More famously, the conceit in ‘A Dialogue
between the Soul and Body’ of the soul as the torturing rack of the
body, so that stretched and upright, he imagines himself as a walking
precipice, always in danger of falling over himself, is reworked to sug-
gest the exaggerated heights of Parker’s delusion:Â€ ‘he was stretch’d to
such an height in his own fancy, that he could not look down from top
to toe but his Eyes dazled at the Precipice of his Stature.’23 There is also
the invocation of the Platonic love cult of the Renaissance, instanced in
the conjunction of astronomy and astrology in ‘The Definition of Love’,
now redirected in The Rehearsal Transpros’ d to mock Parker’s desire for
absolute authority. ‘As smiling and frowning are performed in the face
with the same muscles very little altered; so the changing of a line or
Two in Mr. Bayes at any time, will make the same thing serve for a
â•‡ Marvell 2003: vol. I.43–4, 101.

22
â•‡ Marvell 2003:Â€vol. I.75.

23
Panegyrick or a Phillippick’, wrote Marvell of Parker, but the sentence
applies equally to himself in respect of method.
These qualities of self-enclosedness, self-reference, and perception
or argument by doubles, are related to the chiming effect of Marvell’s
rhymes, about which I have written elsewhere, where the power of the
rhyme throughout and not merely at the ends of lines suspends our ability
to make distinct judgements of who is speaking and what is happening:
Oh let our Voice his Praise exalt,
Till it arrive at Heavens Vault:
Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may
Echo beyond the Mexique Bay.24
The other or echoing voice speaks when you have spoken, and in a rhym-
ing poem is always there, a fraction of a second behind the lead voice:Â€the
rhyme, the mirror of the maker. Some of the qualities discussed above
have been identified and venerated by critics for a long time:Â€ ‘reversals
transposed’ and ‘its own resemblance’.25 But my point is not merely that
these are formal qualities of the poetry and the prose. They are ways for
Marvell to structure his own sense of career as a poet, his own sense of
performance, despite seemingly having missed all the boats that guaran-
teed esteem. Not for the first time in this period, the reference back to
Ovid’s verse and the idea of Ovidian perception is telling. In the well-
known poem on Paradise Lost, Marvell ‘commends’ Paradise Lost into
praise (because praise won’t rhyme with ‘offend’), even as he lets Milton’s
blank verse largely stand, and mocks Dryden’s own attempts to rhyme
Paradise Lost for the stage. In this prefatory verse, the mirror of rhyme is
subversive both of Miltonic authority (even as the poem offers deep respect
to Milton) and once again also of those who would have regular literary
rules in authoritarian monarchies. In Marvell’s last poem, in Latin, an (in
his view) unjustly tortured Scottish Presbyterian and assassin is given a
victory because the verbs suggest that it is the executioner administering
the torture who is more the sufferer. I cannot help but feel that the arrest
induced by Marvell’s rhyme was as subversive of orthodox perspectives as
his panegyrics are notable for articulating the contrary energies that make
up polities. The complexities of difficult choices that he shows as part and
parcel of a literary career afford just such a narrative that refuses hurdles
or doubts them even as it presses forward in inventive power. Marvell’s
doubles are inherently subversive entities, making verse do its arresting or
24
See Smith 2001.
25
â•‡ From the titles of essays respectively by John Carey and Christopher Ricks in Patrides 1978.
238 Nigel Smith
troubling work in a disturbing career when the sublime was neither avail-
able nor appropriate. At his best Marvell did what, in his view, in one of
his rare pieces of critical judgement, Simon Ford failed to do:
a Poem, writ (but that is a piece of a secret) by Mr Ford the Minister that was of
Northampton, of Exeter &c:Â€The Latin, in this last, (if I may presume to cen-
sure in your Lordships presence) hath severall excellent heights, but the English
translation is not so good; and both of them strain for wit and conceit more then
becomes the gravity of the author or the sadnesse of the subject.26
In an equally rare piece of confession in The Rehearsal Transpros’ d, Part
II, Marvell answered the charges of his opponents that he was a mask for
Milton. There is much in this important passage for the biographer to tease
out regarding the complexity of Marvell’s religious position and his view of
English history. Marvell insists that Milton had no hand in the writing of
The Rehearsal Transpros’ d, which was Parker’s charge, even as he had used
Milton’s history of printing in Areopagitica to lambast Parker.27 In all of this,
somewhat disingenuously, he insists that Milton (‘a man of great Learning
and Sharpness of wit as any man’) cannot have written so ‘simple a book’.28
But the presence of Milton in the tract is palpable from its opening pages.29
It would be neat to be able to say that Marvell’s works show a par-
ticular imitation and development of Ovid, one that echoed in its own
way the ancient poet’s shadowy career:Â€highly promising as a public poet
but marred by scandal, banishment and exile. Marvell might not have
achieved the fame of Ovid as a poet in his own lifetime, but the ludic
sophistication of his love poems bear a resemblance to Ovid’s love poetry.
The Restoration satirical poetry, and what we know of the circulation of
the lyrics then, suggests a life for these poems among candid libertines as
well as discontented former commonwealthsmen. Far from Marvell is the
imperial strain of Virgil, and the complicated engagement with Virgilian
themes that we find in Dryden’s work.30 The same might be said, with the
exception of An Horatian Ode, of Horace as a model for Marvell. The poet
who was reconciled with Augustus does not chime with the private con-
text of the Ode; the later Cromwell poetry is not notably Horatian. It was
in respect of public life and politics rather than poetry that Marvell wrote
to his nephew William Popple on 21 March 1670, quoting Aeneid 12.435–6,
Aeneas’ exhortation to Ascanius to learn valour and toil from him.31
26
Marvell to Lord Wharton, 2 April 1667 (Marvell 1971:Â€vol. II.310). See Ford 1667.
27
Marvell 2003:Â€vol. I.45–6. 28
29
See further Marvell 2003:Â€vol. I.329, n. 565 and 335, n.592.
30
P. Hammond 1999. 31
â•‡ Marvell 1971:Â€vol. II.316.
There is something scandalously Ovidian about The Rehearsal
Transpros’ d. If Bramhall is effeminated, Parker is subjected to a sexual
travesty. His energies in respect of his verbal superabundance are com-
plicit with a sexual intemperance, so Marvell suggests:Â€he is the slave of
a mistress as well as a bookseller, the child of his invention inseparable
from the work of his loins. Later on, his overblown rhetoric makes him a
lover of Bishop Bramhall (‘he should make a dead Bishop his Mistress’).
His love of uncontrolled discourse makes him an enthusiast, the very
kind of Puritan he wishes to attack, and the climax of his pleasure is not
to be hidden from public view. Indeed, in a parody of Aretino, Marvell
has Parker running naked and erect down the street, a phallic travesty of
Archimedes, perhaps with more water to displace:
But there was no holding him. Thus it must be and no better, when a man’s
Phancy is up, and his Breeches are down; when the Mind and the Body make
contrary Assignations, and he hath both a Bookseller at once and a Mistris to
satisfie; Like Archimedes, into the Street he runs out naked with his Invention.32
Picking up on a common Restoration theme, heroic boasts are indicative
of unbounded priapic energy. Elsewhere, we glimpse Parker as a sexual
deviant, a sadist deriving sexual pleasure from the punishment he wreaks
on nonconformists:Â€‘down with their breeches as oft as wants the prospect
of a more pleasing Nudity’. Taking this pathology further, Marvell sees
that this attitude may have an educational root. Parker had formerly been
under John Owen’s sway when the latter was Vice-Chancellor of Oxford.
Now in the driving seat in the Restoration, Parker can transfer his abuse
to Owen, to say nothing of the spy networks that Marvell associates with
this persecutory attitude.
Marvell writes to correct the want of wit among the clergy, and with a
refinement he had not yet deployed in prose spans the amusing analogy
between apostolic succession and the conferring of wit. It is in fact an
elaboration of the same concern with the witty writer that occurred in
RT, II:
It is not every man that is qualified to sustain the Dignity of the Churches
Jester:Â€and, should they take as exact a scrutiny of them as of the Non-conformists
thorow their Diocesses, the number would appear inconsiderable upon this
Easter Visitation. Before men be admitted to so important an employment, it
were fit they underwent a severe Examination; and that it might appear, first,
whether they have any Sense:Â€for without that how can any man pretend, and
yet they do, to be ingenious? Then, whether they have any Modesty:Â€for without
32
240 Nigel Smith
that they can only be scurrilous and impudent. Next, whether any Truth:Â€ for
true Jests are those that do the greatest execution.33
Francis Turner ‘took up an unfortunate resolution that he would be Witty’
but such was his shortfall, it was as if he had sinned against nature, an
assertion that has been seen to carry associations of simony and sodomy.34
The consequence of the unnecessary terms of Turner’s attack upon Croft
is a polluting of the public, a folio’s worth of falsehood inside one side
of quarto, and ‘that Calumny is like London-dirt, with which though a
man may be spatter’d in an instant, yet it requires much time, pains, and
Fullers-earth to scoure it out again’.35 It is only fitting for Marvell to con-
clude a section with a quotation of Rochester’s ‘Satire against Reason and
Mankind’, which had an added section attacking ‘prelatic pride’.36
Mr. Smirke (1676) marks a new stage in Marvell’s literary career:Â€a full
engagement in the literary scene of the day, notably the theatre and lib-
ertine verse. Gone is the sense, by allusion, of continuous literary ven-
ture. Ovidian reference is certainly present in the form of three indented
quotaÂ�tions, but very much (for the purposes of mocking Francis Turner)
as a memory of grammar-school learning practice.37 The same is true of
the Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government with its
heavy investment in the record of parliamentary deliberations and the
final work, the defence of John Howe, except for one recourse to the fig-
ure of the mirror with an Ovidian allusion to the story of the Cyclops
Polyphemus.38 In both of these works, Marvell was able to disappear into
the foliage of his subject matter. In the case of the latter tract this occurs
to such an extent that it has become a matter of dispute what the author
really thought. Finally then, Marvell’s sense of being an author in a cause
was best served by his total anonymity. But elsewhere there is enough
reflection of himself in the mirror of his art to see his sense of author-
ship and of literary identity. It is as disturbing and transgressive as it is
exquisite and delightful. We glimpse it just like the face in the mirror in
Vermeer’s painting, thought to be the artist himself.
33
Marvell 2003:Â€vol. II.40. 34
â•‡ Marvell 2003:Â€vol. II.42.
35
Marvell 2003:Â€vol. II.58. 36â•‡ Marvell 2003:Â€vol. II.61.
37
Marvell 2003:Â€vol. II.45–6, 101.
38
Marvell 2003:Â€vol. II.447. See Ovid Met. 13.767.
C h a p t e r 13
Dryden and the complete career

Raphael Lyne
I may venture to say in general Terms, that no Man hath written in

our language so much, and in so various Manners, so well.1
Congreve’s comment reveals itself as praise only at the lastÂ€– at least he did
it ‘so well’. The volume of Dryden’s achievement is undoubted. It is not so
clear how to evaluate his literary career, or indeed to assert that his col-
lected works constitute a literary career at all. Steven Zwicker opens The
Cambridge Companion to Dryden with this very point:Â€‘Who first thought
of The Works of John Dryden? Not, I think, the poet himself.’2 If the goal is
‘holistic commentary’, then it may be unattainable.3 When Zwicker faces
the challenge of assessing Dryden’s poetic career, he emphasizes the role
of irony, and finds the author ‘disappearing into his art’.4 He does not fit
the post-Virgilian mould that has dominated career criticism, though he
certainly had plans and ambitions. It may be that Dryden actually had
multiple careersÂ€ – epic poet, translator, dramatist, critic, satiristÂ€ – that
overlap at times but cannot feasibly be made to cohere. However, he may
also be a significant representative of another sort of literary career:Â€the
‘complete’ career, where many different sorts of writing are attempted in
an implicit or explicit project to command as much canonical territory as
possible.
Dryden wrote in almost all the key modes of his day, and about the
key issues of his day:Â€he reflected critically on his own time, the preced-
ing era, the ancients and the key contemporary competitors (the French);
1
William Congreve, epistle to the Duke of Newcastle in the 1717 Works, in Kinsley and Kinsley
1971:Â€265.
2
Zwicker 2004:Â€ 3. See also pp. 4, 13 and 285 on the ‘elaborate, opportunistic, and incredibly
Â�productive collaboration’ between Dryden and his time.
3
The phrase is used by Cheney 2002a:Â€6.
4
Zwicker 2005:Â€ 159. P. Hammond 1992 also sheds useful light on the shape of Dryden’s
oeuvre: the poems were indeed uncollected but the process suggests ‘professionalism’ as well as
‘modesty’ (p. 409).
241
242 Raphael Lyne
he wrote tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies for the stage; he did not
write Paradise Lost, but he did turn it into an opera; he translated vast
swathes of Classical poetry including definitive versions of the whole of
Virgil. So his complete career actually encompassed the archetypal man-
aged vitaÂ€ – but was itself not visibly managed:Â€there is no explicit pro-
gramme to dominate the literary world in all its variety. In addition,
many of his literary decisions were made in reaction to worldly circum-
stances:Â€patronage, changing political events, changing religious viewsÂ€–
the largest impact being made by the revolution of 1688, after which
Dryden, as a Catholic, lost his posts as Poet Laureate and Historiographer
Royal. In the late twentieth century influential critics reclaimed the integ-
rity of Dryden from lingering accusations of opportunism and fickleness.5
The arguments were for consistent interests and views rather than for a
consistent project; nevertheless the new coherence in modern images of
Dryden may open up possibilities in the realm of career criticism.
There is nobody quite like Dryden, but there are other people with ten-
dencies towards complete careers. This category, as I conceive it, does not
include those who write individual works that dominate the canon or are
praised for containing the whole of a given worldÂ€– The Divine Comedy or
Ulysses or The Canterbury Tales. Rather this kind of completeness derives
from diversity and volume of output, ideally including criticism, poetry
and drama (or appropriate contemporary equivalents), and should not
result in an altogether stable achievement:Â€in Dryden’s case completeness
results partly from difficult scrambles to maintain a position and a voice.
The best candidates in English literature are Samuel Johnson (poet, nov-
elist, critic, editor, writer of a dictionary) and T. S. Eliot (poet, dramatist,
critic, publisher). Ben Jonson might qualify as a miniature ‘complete’ but
was too abstemious in his choice and use of different genres; Pope comes
close. In other languages a shortlist might include Voltaire, Diderot,
Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, Lope de Vega, Tasso, Soyinka and no doubt
others.
All the English-literature candidates, and most of the others, act
as mediators between literary past and present. These complete careers
incorporate and categorize what came before; in Dryden’s criticism there
is a remarkable restless need to organize the past, returning repeatedly
to the contrast between Homer and Virgil, and reviving the reputation
of Chaucer. He is unusual in the extent to which he is also acclaimed as
See P. Hammond 1991 and Fujimura 1993:Â€236:Â€‘The real Dryden accommodated himself to chan-
5
ging times while maintaining his integrity.’

Dryden and the complete career 243
the voice of his own time.6 T. S. Eliot found one way of expressing what
amounts to a double nature:
Being so completely representative, Dryden not only formed the mould for the
next age, but himself derived very clearly from the last. In his work there is
nothing unexpected, no new element with unknown properties.7
This attitude is recognizable from Eliot’s criticism more generally:Â€ he is
always interested in how past, present and future relate.8 Dryden is repre-
sented as an ideal individual talent wholly deriving from, and yet reshap-
ing, the tradition. This helps explain, but does not wholly assuage, the
faint praise in deeming him ‘completely representative’Â€ – Dryden is a
super-everyman. Although Eliot’s career shares the ‘complete’ pattern he
has to grapple with the phenomenon when seen in his predecessor:Â€ its
particular shape of greatness does not attract unalloyed praise.
Dryden and several other ‘completes’ are Neo-classical in tempera-
ment, and yet the complete career is not conventionally a classical thing
to do. The most famous ancient careers were limited and structured:
Â�tragedy or comedy, drama or poetry. In some casesÂ€ – perhaps OvidÂ€ –
the management of modes may be more adventurous than in others.
Horace’s complaints about the over-prolific hardly provide models to
emulate. The Hellenistic period comes nearest to providing Classical
precedents for later complete careers:Â€it was characteristic to write in dif-
ferent Â�genresÂ€ – and not only in poetry. Eratosthenes’ soubriquet ‘beta’
(a universal second-best across all fields of philosophical endeavour) is
emblematic of this alternative career goal. There is a difference, how-
ever, between the miniature encapsulations of weighty inherited material
characteristic of the work of Callimachus, and the grand aspirations of
later ‘completes’.9 It is also the case that for Dryden not being like Virgil
was something to contend with, whereas being like Callimachus, who
was hardly known, was not.
In this context it is not surprising that the complete career is difficult
to acknowledge as well as to appreciate. If it is not planned, then it could
hardly be proposed; if planned, it may still go unproposed because to do
so would be to take an enormous risk. In order for it truly to be a career,
however, it ought to be more than the sum of its parts. It ought to be
held together:Â€if not proposed or planned, it ought to be discovered, or
6
â•‡ Hopkins 1986:Â€2 (for example) calls him ‘in a very literal sense, the spokesman of his age’.
7
â•‡ Eliot 1932a:Â€9.
8
â•‡ The classic essay is ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Eliot 1932b:Â€3–11.
9
â•‡ Farrell 2002, especially 31–4.
244 Raphael Lyne
recognized, or implied. In fact there are numerous fleeting and surrepti-
tious engagements with the idea that are evident in Dryden’s work. But
before moving on to these, it is worth establishing in more detail how
other writers (especially those with completist tendencies) appreciated the
completeness of Dryden in his time and shortly after.10 One, Voltaire, was
decisively negative:
Voici encore un passage d’un fameux tragique anglais, Dryden, poète du temps
de Charles II, auteur plus fécond que judicieux, qui aurait une réputation sans
mélange s’il n’avait fait que la dixième partie de ses ouvrages, et dont le grand
défaut est d’avoir voulu être universel.11
Here is another passage from a famous tragedian, Dryden, a poet of the time
of Charles II, and an author more fertile than judicious, who would have an
unmixed reputation if he had written only a tenth of his works, and whose great
failing is that he wanted to be universal.
At this point in the letter (XVIII:Â€ ‘Sur la Tragédie’) Voltaire is prais-
ing the energy, though not the correctness, of English tragedy. He
pauses to note another unclassical quality in Dryden’s career:Â€his range.
‘Universel’ relates primarily to excessive fecundity, but it implies that
this is all in the service of completeness. It is not easy to weigh the word
‘voulu’, but it seems that Voltaire is basing his assessment purely on the
works and treating everything in them as willed. When writers do take
biography into account they are often even less sympatheticÂ€– and this
starts early:
And so much for Mr Dryden, whose burial was the same as his life, variety and
not of a piece:– the quality and mob, farce and heroicks; the sublime and ridi-
cule mixed in a piece;– great Cleopatra in a hackney coach.12
In this wry comment there is a possible overlap between the discussion of
a mixed career and a discussion of a mixed mode of writing:Â€this all hap-
pens ‘in a piece’ and yet the variety of life unfolds over time. At various
points (as will be seen below) there is a productive interplay, in what may
be Dryden’s covert career awareness, between discussion of tragicomedy
and implications about a varied writing life. Farquhar sees mixedness
everywhere in Dryden, in moments and in the overall structure of his
writing life.
10
The Voltaire example that follows is the most useful, but Van Doren 1920:Â€ 241–78 details a
wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century responses, including the influentially hostile
Macaulay (Van Doren 1920:Â€265). Lewis 2001 looks at ‘the awkwardness of Dryden’s exemplar-
ity’ in the same period.
11
Voltaire 1943:Â€71. 12 George Farquhar, letter in Kinsley and Kinsley 1971:Â€242.
Dryden, then, attracted rather mixed appreciation for the range and
Â�
diversity of his achievements. A notable voice in this chorus is that of
Samuel Johnson, whose life of Dryden ends in a high estimation of his
genius, but also involves some sharp thoughts about his subject’s depend-
ency on patronage, and his attitude to work:
Though the life of a writer, from about thirty-five to sixty-three, may be sup-
posed to have been sufficiently busied by the composition of eight-and-twenty
pieces for the stage, Dryden found room in the same space for many other
undertakings.13
However, being prolific is not the same as being hard-working; he later
asserts that Dryden displays little love for laborious effort (Johnson
1975:Â€159). Johnson does not make the fact that Dryden ‘found room’ for
a range of undertakings sound like a grand plan. In crucial ways he finds
his subject enigmatic (Johnson 1975:Â€162):
He who writes much will not easily escape a mannerÂ€– such a recurrence of par-
ticular modes as may be easily noted. Dryden is always another and the same, he
does not exhibit a second time the same elegances in the same form, nor appears
to have any art other than that of expressing with clearness what he thinks with
vigour. His style could not easily be imitated, either seriously or ludicrously; for,
being always equable and always varied, it has no prominent or discriminative
characters.
This description has a number of suggestive and perceptive pairings:Â€‘clear-
ness’ and ‘vigour’, ‘equable’ and ‘varied’, and of course ‘another’ and ‘the
same’. The dynamic between integrity and change is, as so often in rela-
tion to Dryden, vital.14 Again there is little sense that all this variety, with
its complex relationship to the author’s artistic integrity, can truly be seen
as a career, planned or discovered. And yet, when Johnson gathers his Life
together, he is drawn towards an analogy that suggests something more
than Protean (Johnson 1975:Â€193–4):
Of Dryden’s works it was said by Pope, that ‘he could select from them bet-
ter specimens of every mode of poetry than any other English writer could
supply.’ Perhaps no nation ever produced a writer that enriched his lan-
guage with such variety of models. … What was said of Rome, adorned by
Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished
by Dryden, ‘lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit,’ he found it brick, and
he left it marble.
Johnson 1975:Â€136.
13
Pechter 1975 returns to this Johnsonian territory in exploring Dryden’s ‘balanced’ critical out-
14
look, in which a variety of things can be good.

246 Raphael Lyne
The initial note is again variety, but then he moves on to an ambiguous
and provocative analogy. On the one hand, likening Dryden’s achieve-
ment in giving decorum to English poetry to that of Augustus in build-
ing a glorious Rome might endow it with great substance. This also has
the character of a projectÂ€– a coherent and measurable achievement that
results from a systematic plan. But this is something ‘embellished’, not
builtÂ€ – and the real value could still lie in the brick. Overall, Johnson
comes close to saying, but steps back from saying, that Dryden compro-
mised his talent and himself in creating such variety, when in another
way variety was his talent and did not compromise his integrity at all.
Most of the time one completist contemplates another and cannot see
the wood for the trees, but in the final analysis the overall programme is
asserted.15
In retrospect Dryden’s achievement had tendencies towards variety and

towards totality; these two appear to be necessary though paradoxical
companions. This awkward pairing makes a strategic account of this
and perhaps all complete careers very difficultÂ€– since from some angles
it appears that it is by being unsystematic and unprogrammed that the
grand structure is created. This makes the construction of any strategic
account of Dryden’s career, already problematic owing to the pivotal
role played by contingent decisions, all the more difficult. Nevertheless
it is possible to glean signs of an awareness of the emerging structure of
Dryden’s career from local tactics rather then the overall strategy. These
come at early and late points and do not sit comfortably into an evolving
narrative; nevertheless they can be arresting in different ways. The issue
of the complete career comes to or near the surface in details at various
points in Dryden’s work, as in the shadowy and sporadic discussion of the
author’s multi-faceted dramatic career, which is enabled by the need to
account for the mixed mode of tragicomedy.
The four voices of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie present alternative
views of the decorum of plays and playwrights. One foray into the ques-
tion of how a literary career should be constituted comes from Eugenius,
who recognizes the schism between modern multiplicity and ancient
singularity:
Tragedies and Comedies were not writ then as they are now, promiscuously,
by the same person; but he who found his genius bending to the one, never
See Lipking 1970:Â€442–8 on the Life of Dryden and Lipking 1998 on Johnson’s reinvention of the
15
idea of authorship. See also Clingham 1993; Adams 1990.

attempted the other way. This is so plain, that I need not instance to you, that
Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, never any of them writ a Tragedy; Æschylus,
Euripides, Sophocles and Seneca, never medled with Comedy; the Sock and
Buskin were not worn by the same Poet:Â€having then so much care to excel in
one kind, very little is to be pardon’d if they miscarried in it.16
The usual attack on the English stage emphasizes its indecorousness.

The pugnacious response is that the ancient models of decorum made
their tasks easier by narrowing their expertise. As he says, specialization
among Classical writers is ‘so plain’Â€– everyone knew it. This partly leads
to an argument for toleration:Â€under the prevailing circumstances strict
adherence to inherited rules is not likely. It also opens up the possibil-
ity of a surreptitious, but perhaps emerging, endorsement of the modern
mixed career as decorous within its own milieu, and more challenging
to the writer.17 The Essay does not really pursue this line of argument as
such. There is a rejoinder of sorts, though, in a later preface to The Spanish
Fryar, an indecorous tragicomedy:
The truth is, the Audience are grown weary of continu’d melancholy Scenes:Â€and
I dare venture to prophesie, that few Tragedies except those in Verse shall suc-
ceed in this Age, if they are not lighten’d with a course of mirth. For the Feast
is too dull and solemn without the Fiddles. But how difficult a task this is, will
soon be try’d:Â€for a several Genius is requir’d to either way; and without both of
’em, a man, in my opinion, is but half a Poet for the Stage.18
The argument from popular taste would have worried Ben Jonson, but
again a crucial tension between centrifugal and centripetal elements crops
up in relation to Dryden. The audience’s weariness is lightly validated
(‘continu’d scenes’; though perhaps the ‘Feast… without the Fiddles’ is
sardonically put). There is a sense of contingent factors compromising
any author’s wish to follow the true path. Then, however, the nature of
focused, decorous Classical drama is quite rudely questioned:Â€maybe the
imagined ‘half a Poet’ is only a contemporary phenomenon, but this is
not stated, and the implication is that the aspirant writer ought to aim at
a full range of achievements.19
16
Dryden 1971:Â€28.
17
Gelber 1999 provides encouragement for reading across from the criticism to the author’s own
career with his repeated emphasis on the personal, life-story element in the critical works.
18
‘Epistle Dedicatory’, The Spanish Fryar (1681), in Dryden 1992:Â€103.
19
See Fujimura 1993:Â€ 29–30, and more generally, which identifies lively, constructive attack and
defence, debate and battle, as essential characteristics of Dryden’s outlook in many contexts. See
also Salvaggio 1983:Â€14–21.
248 Raphael Lyne
The explicit subject in the Preface to The Spanish Fryar is tragicomedy,
a form of drama which has a very rough ride in the Essay of Dramatick
Poesie. In both works there is an implicit subjectÂ€ – the mixed, or com-
plete, career. Lisideius is the pro-French voice and not surprisingly he has
little time for the traditions of English tragicomedy where they offend
classical standards, deeming them fundamentally ‘absurd’ (35). The key
defence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is that their variety cor-
responds to the decorum of nature (itself various). Some of the time the
discussion of tragicomedy is clearly distinct from that of promiscuous
working habits, but the naturalness of variety, for example, might make a
suggestive contribution to the consideration of the mixed dramatic career
(and even the wider complete career). The topic does not blossom expli-
citly, but then Dryden’s complete career does not manifest itself readily as
it goes along:Â€these ideas, like the discoveries of the career as a career, hap-
pen below the surface. There are a few more direct hints at the problems
of poetic careers in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie. Neander presents the
modern writer’s inheritance from the past as a predicament rather than
an opportunity (72–3):
We acknowledge them our Fathers in wit, but they have ruin’d their Estates
themselves before they came to their childrens hands. There is scarce an Humour,
a Character, or any kind of Plot, which they have not us’d:Â€all comes sullied or
wasted to us:Â€and were they to entertain this Age, they could not now make so
plenteous treatments out of such decay’d Fortunes.20
He is referring to the legacies of the triumvirate of the previous era, before
the rupture of the Civil War:Â€ Fletcher, Jonson and Shakespeare. His
tribute to these predecessors acknowledges the burden of their example.
Dryden’s assessment of the territory they have spoiled (‘There is scarce an
Humour, a Character, or any kind of Plot’) parallels others’ assessments of
his work. He stands as a point of convergence between the spent variety of
the past and the new variety bestowed by the present on the future:Â€per-
haps a true characteristic of the complete career with its fleeting con-
tainment of literary vicissitude.21 There is a rich analogy for the complete
career along these lines in Dryden’s poem printed with Congreve’s play
The Double-Dealer:
20
‘Us’d’ is the reading of Q2 and Q3 but Q1 and F have the more vivid ‘blown upon’, presumably
in the sense ‘To take the bloom off; to make stale or hackneyed; to bring into discredit, defame’
(OED 30), but also with some relationship to flies laying eggs in meat, rendering it inedible
(OED 28). See also Brady 1993.
21
Hume 1970:Â€66–80 and 160–1 discerns Dryden from conventional images of Neo-classicism by
exploring his interest, and indeed his belief, in progress. See also Miner 1961.
Well then; the promised hour is come at last;
The present age of wit obscures the past.
Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit;
Theirs was the giant race before the flood,
And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood.
Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured;
Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art indued.22
‘Our sires’ are Fletcher, Jonson and Shakespeare, and the point (as so
often) is that the new era has added refinement. The ‘flood’ is the cultural
razing of the Civil War and the Interregnum, and it suggests a crucial
comparison for the poet stuck between ancient and modern. The Noah
who saved the diversity of nature from this flood is Dryden himself. His
complete career, perhaps other complete careers, is an Ark of past culture
preserved and categorized and resituated for a new era. This works well
with the complete career’s deep involvement in the relationship between
past and present, and with its commitment to both diversity and whole-
ness, change and continuity. It is also a role we would not expect writers
to proclaim or even plan for themselves. Noah takes precious few with
him; it is an exclusive and difficult calling.
This analogy may be a deeply embedded acknowledgement of the nature

of the career suggested by the emerging pattern of his works. Something
of this awareness may be apparent in a rather different way in more super-
ficial, almost throwaway comments about nature, variety and change.
As has been said already, a crucial part of the defence of tragicomedy is
an emphasis on the variety of nature. This may sometimes also stand as
a justification of writing in a variety of modesÂ€ – it is only natural, and
indeed the complete career may be a full expression of human possibility.
Dryden embraced his own human changeability, or at least deployed it
when it suited him, as in a Latin quotation which undergoes a striking
repetition. It is first seen in the dedication to Aureng-Zebe:
Yet, after all, I will not be too positive. Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum
puto. As I am a Man, I must be changeable:Â€and sometimes the gravest of us
all are so, even upon ridiculous accidents. Our minds are perpetually wrought
22
‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, on his Comedy called The Double-Dealer’, in Dryden 1995–
2005:Â€IV, 326–35, ll. 1–10.
250 Raphael Lyne
on by the temperament of our Bodies:Â€ which makes me suspect, they are
nearer alli’d, than either our Philosophers or School-Divines will allow them
to be.23
The line comes originally from Terence, where it has a rather different
sense:Â€Chremes uses the phrase to explain why everything concerns him.
The Loeb translation runs:Â€ ‘I hold that whatever affects another man,
affects me.’24 It is quoted by Cicero in De Officiis, with the same meaning,
and from there became a Renaissance commonplace.25 Dryden shifts the
meaning towards the individual’s centrifugal variability, and away from
the interdependence of people. Specifically, here it gives a way of step-
ping back from commitment to an opinion about a point of dramatic
decorum. Generally, it rationalizes changeability. In the later play Don
Sebastian it does a similar job, exonerating people of their failure to be
obdurateÂ€– this is part of an anti-Stoic section:
True Philosophy is certainly of a more pliant Nature, and more accommodated
to human use; Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto. A wise man will
never attempt an impossibility; and such it is to strain himself beyond the nature
of his Being; either to become a Deity, by being above suffering, or to debate
himself into a Stock or Stone, by pretending not to feel it.26
Paul Hammond’s analysis of the use of Latin quotation in these prefaces
uncovers the ways in which the practice of quotation itself relates to the
vulnerability of constancyÂ€– quotation in part resists change by appealing
to static authority, but it also resituates that authority and participates in
change.27 Both these uses of the tag are wry, if not regretful. The human
condition is changeable and fragile, and what are often acclaimed as the
best efforts to resist this are made to look unnatural. In one case Dryden
is reflecting on artistic practice; in the other, on how best to live your life.
It seems reasonable to suggest that, for him, these things are intimately
connected, and that the doctrine of nihil alienum maps onto his artistic
life, and the complete career.
On the large scale, the task of identifying a ‘complete career’ in Dryden’s

life and work depends on the identification of signs of a coherent pro-
gramme amid manifest variety. This method is applicable also to the
23
‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Aureng-Zebe (1676), in Dryden 1994:Â€157.
24
Terence, Heauton Timoroumenos, line 77, in Terence 1912. 25 Cicero 1975:Â€30.
26
‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Don Sebastian (1690), in Dryden 1976:Â€62.
27
P. Hammond 1999:Â€59–68. Dryden’s practice in quoting is an important aspect of Kramer 1994,
in which he emerges as acquisitive and invasive in his imitative practice:Â€this surely overlaps with
any covert ‘complete career’.
Fables, which is both miscellaneous and a part of its author’s monumental
achievementÂ€– in the last year of his life, Dryden tackles Homer, Ovid,
Chaucer and Boccaccio. Its Preface gives hints that the accompanying
poems have canonical aspirations beyond the obvious. The bluff open-
ing passage says that the process of writing was haphazard, but more and
more this looks like a ruse (47–8):
’Tis with a poet as with a man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he sup-
poses, in casting up the cost beforehand; but, generally speaking, he is mistaken
in his account, and reckons short of the expense he first intended:Â€ He alters
his mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more,
of which he had not thought when he began. So has it happened to me:Â€I have
built a house where I intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain
nobleman, who beginning with a dog kennel never lived to finish the palace he
had contrived.
From translating the first of Homer’s Iliads (which I intended as an essay to
the whole work) I proceeded to the translation of the Twelfth Book of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, because it contains, among other things, the causes, the begin-
ning, and ending, of the Trojan War. Here I ought in reason to have stopped,
but the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying next in my way, I could not balk
’em. When I had compassed them, I was so taken with the former part of the
Fifteenth Book (which is the masterpiece of the whole Metamorphoses) that I
enjoined myself the pleasing task of rendering it into English.28
One grand plan, the whole Iliad, is replaced by another, but the genesis
of Fables sounds very genial hereÂ€– we are given a robust and unpreten-
tious expression of the poet refusing to baulk at an obstacle. The order
of the poems in the collection is not the same as the order of encounter
described:Â€ the eventual book suggests an arrangement with a purpose.
Recent critics have indeed identified a range of themes around which
the poems group:Â€ love, power, the good life, succession, reproduction,
change.29 This identification has been crucial to the perception of Fables
as a key work in Dryden’s career, and the general restoration of his trans-
lations to the mainstream.
The chance encounters imagined by the Preface bring Dryden into
contact with writers in his own and other literary traditions. His
Â�reflections on these open up issues surrounding literary careers and the
28
Quotations from Fables are taken from Dryden 1995–2005, vol. V.
29
Vital reassessments include P. Hammond 1991:Â€158–68; Hopkins 1986:Â€168–200; Miner 1967:Â€287–
323; Sloman 1970–1 (which differs from the others in emphasizing overall pessimism); Garrison
1981; Winn 2000. Bywaters 1992 is sceptical:Â€variety for its own sake is the anti-thematic theme.
See also Miner 1986; Reverand 1988.
252 Raphael Lyne
fabric of authorial identity. He describes, discerns and organizes his
models’ Â�positions in the canon. This takes him on to the issue of literary
inheritance (49–50):
Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax; for we have
our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. Spenser more than once
insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he
was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowl-
edged to me that Spenser was his original; and many besides myself have heard
our famous Waller own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the
Godfrey of Bulloigne which was turned into English by Mr Fairfax.
‘We’ (poets) have our lineal descents, says Dryden, and it is only reason-
able to wonder who his forebears are, given the drift of the passage. But he
coyly avoids asserting his own paternity. He translated Virgil more than
anyone else, but pronounced himself more stirred by doing HomerÂ€– but
he does not try to find a Classical ancestor here. The complete career is
a several rather than a single inheritance, so the filial metaphor would
be a paradox. And as was seen above, Dryden repeatedly emphasizes the
cultural gap between him and Shakespeare’s time. When writing about
Chaucer, though, he asserts continuity (74–6):
He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because,
as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his
Canterbury Tales the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of
the whole English nation in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. All
his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and not only in their
inclinations but in their very physiognomies and persons. … ’Tis sufficient to
say according to the proverb that here is God’s plenty. We have our fore-fathers
and great grand-dames all before us as they were in Chaucer’s days; their gen-
eral characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though
they are called by other names than those of monks, and friars, and canons, and
lady abbesses, and nuns:Â€for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of
nature, though every thing is altered.
In his assessment of Chaucer there is, yet again, a rich dialogue between
diversity and fullnessÂ€ – because the pilgrims are ‘severally distin-
guished’ from one another this creates ‘plenty’. Chaucer is ‘comprehen-
sive’, holding variety together, like the complete writer must. This leads
towards a philosophical gesture:Â€ everything is still the same, though it
is all changed. This picture of literary diversity and fullness, change and
continuity, Â�resonates with key themes of the complete career:Â€ perhaps
Dryden’s discovery and assertion of Chaucer’s virtues is yet another hint
at an appreciation of his own work.
Since others have demonstrated the larger-scale coherence of the col-
lection, and the ways in which its larger purposes work, the aim here will
be to observe this tendency working on a smaller scale, at close quar-
ters, in the creation of miniature points of friction between difference and
unity. Two transitions between stories reveal new ways in which surpris-
ing coherence may be discovered. The end of Iliad Book 1 is followed by
a translation from Chaucer, The Cock and the Fox. The initial expectation
might be that this could be an incongruous transition from the initiation
of a grand epic to a beast fable borrowed from the mouth of a Nun’s
Priest. Even as the Homeric sequence closes, however, the expectation
requires modification (800–15, p. 332):
At Vulcan’s homely mirth his mother smiled,
And smiling took the cup the clown had filled.
The reconciler-bowl went round the board,
Which emptied, the rude skinker still restored.
Loud fits of laughter seized the guests, to see
The limping god so deft at his new ministry.
The feast continued till declining light;
They drank, they laughed, they loved, and then ’twas night.
Nor wanted tuneful harp, nor vocal choir:
The Muses sang, Apollo touched the lyre.
Drunken at last, and drowsy, they depart,
Each to his house, adorn’d with laboured art
Of the lame architect. The thundering god,
Ev’n he withdrew to rest, and had his load.
His swimming head to needful sleep applied,
And Juno lay unheeded by his side.
This is a long way from the anger of Achilles, where Book 1 started. The
scene of ‘homely mirth’ and a ‘swimming head’ welcomes the succeeding
text rather than challenging it. The homeliness continues (1–8, p. 333):
There lived, as authors tell, in days of yore,
A widow somewhat old, and very poor:
Deep in a dell her cottage lonely stood,
Well thatched, and under covert of a wood.
This dowager, on whom my tale I found,
Since last she laid her husband in the ground,
A simple sober life in patience led,
And had but just enough to buy her bread.
Words such as ‘clown’ and ‘skinker’ in the Homer passage have already
prepared the way for the Chaucerian tone. Any bathos The Cock and the
Fox might cause is blunted by the image of drunken, sleeping Jupiter,
254 Raphael Lyne
whose thunder turns to snores. Dryden alters the image of Juno to
enhance the hint of sexual frustration (he adds the idea of ‘unheeded’).
So when the next tale starts it is as if we have discovered a surprising simi-
larity between the tales. And there is a parallel between the two female
figures here, both patient while their husbands rest.30 This may seem like
a casual, even facetious link between the ‘dowager’ and the queen of the
gods, but the sort of trivial virtuosity implied here, finding a throwaway
connection between the two sources, puts extra focus on the unifying
presence in the bookÂ€– Dryden himself.
A similar technique may be identified in the transition between the
speeches of Ajax and Ulysses from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Wife
of Bath’s Tale. The initial expectation would be that the change would
be a stark one:Â€ from a grand rhetorical set-piece deriving from Homer
(and in the Preface Dryden sets out exactly this route to Ovid), to a tale
full of robust and pugnacious humour (and indeed elves and fairies at the
outset). Ovid’s story ends, as usual, in metamorphosis, rather than in the
anger of the debate (603–13, p. 498):
He said, and with so good a will to die
Did to his breast the fatal point apply;
It found his heart, a way till then unknown,
Where never weapon entered but his own.
No hands could force it thence, so fixed it stood,
Till out it rushed, expelled by streams of spouting blood.
The fruitful blood produced a flower, which grew
On a green stem; and of a purple hue,
Like his, whom unaware Apollo slew.
Inscribed in both, the letters are the same,
But those express the grief, and these the name.
In Dryden’s version, as in Ovid’s, there is irony in the hyacinth flower’s
double inscription:Â€ AIAS for the stricken hero, AIAI, previously, as a
record of Apollo’s lamentation for Hyacinthus. The event is extraordin-
ary but it is not as unique as it should be. In neither the original nor the
translation is the issue tackled. It does have an effect, though, on the way
the next story arrives (1–6, p. 499):
Miner 1967:Â€ 291 argues generally for the ‘shared emphasis of juxtaposed tales’, and picks out
30
features on a slightly larger scale than the ones discussed here. Between The First Book of Homer’s
Ilias and The Cock and the Fox debate between characters and sexual non-events are shared fea-
tures (Miner 1967:Â€298). In both the Wife of Bath’s Tale and The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses he
says ‘wisdom or skill triumphs over brutal strength’ (Miner 1967:Â€299).
In days of old, when Arthur filled the throne,
Whose acts and fame to foreign lands were blown,
The king of elves and little fairy queen
Gambolled on heaths, and danced on every green;
And where the jolly troop had led the round
The grass unbidden rose, and marked the ground.
The switch to Chaucer is less drastic because the majesty of the Trojan
material has already been compromised. There is also another moment of
trivial virtuosity:Â€in both stories we see the spontaneous growth of plants
(a flower from blood, and grass from fairy dancing). This is, of course,
nothing like as important as the larger thematic connections within the
Fables that others have explored. However, it does suggest in a signifi-
cantly different way that there is a unifying presence in the collection.
In this case there is something skittish but irresistible about the complet-
ist tendency to complement its more substantial aspects with miniature
demonstrations of coherence amid diversity. Variety and co-ordination
are operating at different levels, just as throughout Dryden’s career var-
iety and co-ordination interact. This is not an argument for a strategy
or a consistent process, but rather for the existence of numerous tactics,
enough tactics to constitute, in hindsight, a kind of strategic tendency. It
is debatable whether this means that the complete career, in this case or
in general, actually existed in anything like the same way that Spenser’s
Virgilian career existed. The various forms in which Dryden hints at,
implies, justifies and enables the completeness of his work do add up
to a significant presence for the idea, especially in proportion with how
emphatic one might expect an author to be, and the pressures on his work
exerted by historical circumstances.
Ch apter 14
Goethe’s elegiac sabbatical

Joseph Farrell
Any effort to interpret Goethe’s career according to a single, pre-existing

pattern would obviously be misconceived. Not only was his literary career
a vast, sprawling thing in itself, but it was thoroughly intertwined with
several others, including those of courtier, politician, diplomat, scientist
and artist. Moreover, several of these callings interacted quite directly
with his work as a writer. Even if we focus on Goethe’s literary career in
the narrowest possible sense, we cannot really speak in any simple way
either of continuous Virgilian ascent through ever more elevated genres,
or of Horatian retirement to an aesthetic angulus, or of any other model
derived from the careers of Classical poets as the dominant lens through
which to view Goethe’s experience. And let us admit this at once:Â€ the
evidence that Goethe himself modelled his own career upon any of these
patterns is non-existent. In this respect he differs from Petrarch, Spenser,
Marlowe, Milton and other poets who explicitly represent themselves as
fashioning their careers after Virgilian, Horatian and Lucanian proto-
types. All of this might seem to make Goethe an unpromising subject in
the context of career studies.
I take the opposite view. To date, career studies have flourished par-
ticularly in contexts where ingredients such as imperial patronage, epic
pretensions and a strong sense of Classical precedent are found. But it is
reasonable to investigate the applicability of the method to other literary
systems, whether contiguous to or widely removed from the homeland.
And it is especially worth trying it on some hard cases. Goethe lived and
worked well after the Renaissance and in a very different literary culture
from those that obtained for Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, Spenser or Milton.
He lived a different life as well. And yet some of the factors that informed
earlier ages are visible in Goethe’s relationship to princely patronage and
in his distinctive, highly deliberate approach to Classicism, so that it
seems worth looking for at least some common ground. In addition, the
256
Goethe’s elegiac sabbatical 257
singular course of his career makes it appealing as limit-case for this sort
of analysis.
In this spirit I propose to examine the Römische Elegien, one of the
principal literary remains of the period that Goethe spent in Italy from
1786 to 1788, which is widely recognized as a distinct and important
episode in Goethe’s protean career. Accordingly, I consider the epi-
sode as a kind of ‘sabbatical’ in the context of Goethe’s career as a
whole. This is perhaps a departure from the established paths of career
studies, but I hope that my analysis will bear out the validity of the
approach.
Let me begin with a brief syllabus. After surveying the most salient fea-
tures of Goethe’s biography I will summarize what scholars consider the
main results of his Italian sojourn. I will then turn to my principal text,
the Römische Elegien, first to contrast them with the Italienische Reise as
a record of Goethe’s Italian adventures, and then to elucidate their place
in Goethe’s career. In the course of this elucidation, I will have some-
thing to say about the specific Classical models that I believe are behind
Goethe’s self-conception as Roman elegist; and I will conclude with
some observations about one model whose importance seems to me to be
underappreciated.
G oe t h e’s e a r ly c a r e e r a n d h i s
I ta l i a n s ojou r n
When Goethe went to Italy, he had been a major literary figure for over a
decade, having gained precocious prominence with the phenomenal suc-
cess of his novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers when he was only 25.1
Lionized by German literary society as a leader of the Sturm und Drang
movement, and recognized as a figure of European importance, in 1775Â€–
just a year after the publication of WertherÂ€– Goethe made the first of sev-
eral mercurial moves that mark out discrete stages in his unconventional
career. Despite or because of his early success, he found himself at a loose
end.2 Some change was necessary, and Goethe was torn between two
1
For the general shape of Goethe’s life in the period up to the conclusion of his Italian permanenza,
see Boyle 1991. The evidence that establishes Goethe’s movements in detail is assembled in Steiger
1982–96. I cite the text of Goethe’s works and letters from the Frankfurt edition (Goethe 1985– ),
cited herein as SW. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
2
As he confesses for instance in a letter to C. L. von Knebel dated 14 April 1775:Â€‘Leben Sie mich?Â€–
Ich!Â€– falle aus einer Verworrenheit in andre.’ SW 2.1:Â€446–7 (#363).
258 Joseph Farrell
possibilities:Â€ a trip to Italy, which his father advocated and was willing
to finance, and an invitation to join the court of Carl August, the young
Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.3 After some hesitation, in November of
1775 Goethe arrived in Weimar.4
This move represents a major reorientation of Goethe’s activities. He
was undoubtedly recruited to Weimar to advance the ruling family’s cul-
tural ambitions in accordance with policies laid down by Carl August’s
mother, the Duchess Anna Amalia.5 But his duties there were essentially
bureaucratic. He was for most of his time in Weimar a member of the
privy council, and he served various terms in other capacitiesÂ€– Director
of Mines, Chair of the War and Highways Commissions, and, on an
acting basis, Chancellor of the Exchequer.6 These are all posts of major
administrative and even political responsibility, and for over ten years
Goethe devoted himself very successfully to his governmental career. He
did not entirely neglect his literary work:Â€this same decade witnessed the
writing of Wilhelm Meister, Iphigenia and other works, and culminate in
an agreement with the Leipzig publishing house of G. J. Göschen to pub-
lish Goethe’s literary works in an edition of eight volumes.7 But it must
be emphasized that this first Weimar period was one in which Goethe’s
literary creativity and also his reputation did suffer. One critic wrote of
him as early as 1781 that ‘he has given what he has given; he is now as
unfruitful for the public as the desert sand’.8 And for that matter, the
eight volumes of collected works that were contracted with Göschen in
1786 and eventually published in 1789 consisted of previously published
and unfinished works in about equal proportions. The edition thus had
something of a memorial character, almost as a monument to promise
unfulfilled. Goethe himself was well aware of this interpretation. As he
wrote to Carl August at the end of 1786, ‘When I decided to have my
fragments printed, I regarded myself as dead.’9
In response to this awareness that his literary career had stalled, Goethe
made a second decisive move, even more dramatic than the first. After a
lot of preparation that he managed to keep obsessively secret until the last
3
For Goethe’s evaluation of the alternatives see Boyle 1991:Â€210.
4
Letter of C. M. Wieland to F. H. Jacobi, 10 November 1775, in Herwig 1965–1987:Â€1.167 (#323).
5
On the character of the court at Weimar see Boyle 1991:Â€223–9 and, on Anna Amalia, 241; more
controversially, Ghibellino 2007.
6
Boyle 1991:Â€251–6. On Goethe’s experience with the mines in particular see further below.
7
On Goethe’s relations with the Göschen Verlag see Unseld 1996:Â€34–79.
8
Cited by Boyle 1991:Â€391.
9
‘Da ich mir vornahm meine Fragmente drucken zu lassen, hielt ich mich für tot’ (letter dated
12 December 1786, SW 2.3:Â€190 (#40)).
minute, on Tuesday, 24 July 1786 he boarded a coach and quit Weimar for
a vacation in Carlsbad, probably with the intention not of returning but
of going on to a lengthy stay in Italy, as he in fact did.10 The trip was even-
tually sanctioned and largely financed by Carl August, though it involved
no official duties whatsoever.11 For most of the next two years Goethe
travelled through much of the peninsula and through Sicily, enjoying
two extended periods of residence in Rome. Then on Tuesday, 24 April
1788, after a series of delicate communications with Carl August, Goethe
boarded the coach that would take him away from RomeÂ€– for the last
time, as it turned outÂ€– and, after a journey that lasted two months, back
to Weimar.12
The effects of this Italian sojourn on Goethe’s life and art are well
known. Most immediately, after a dozen years as courtier and bureaucrat
in Weimar, the sheer freedom from official duties presented a welcome
opportunity to advance a number of literary projects. Goethe took good
advantage of this. But in some larger sense, the experience reoriented
Goethe’s energies and self-conception towards his true calling. He states
this very clearly in announcing to Carl August his approaching return
from Rome:Â€‘I can truly say:Â€in these one and a half years of solitude I
have found myself again; but as what?Â€– As an artist!’13 Nicholas Boyle’s
interpretation of this remark is convincing:
He is first and foremost an artistÂ€ – by contrast with any other administrative
tasks to which Carl August may choose, and is welcome, to direct him. Less
politely:Â€Goethe is willing to remain a servant of the state of Weimar, on condi-
tion that the primacy of his ‘artistic’ vocation is acknowledged. And it is his time
in Italy which has clarified what that vocation is.14
So the first point is that Goethe’s Italian journey was a significant,

though not a total, break with his activities of the previous decade or so.
In general terms, it represents a turn away from the bureaucratic career
that he had been following and a return to the life of poet and artist that
10
For the departure from Weimar see Steiger 1982–96:Â€2.664. It is unclear how definite Goethe’s
plans were even as he arrived in Carlsbad, where he celebrated his birthday with other mem-
bers of the court. Certainly he confided his intentions to no one, even Carl August:Â€see Boyle
1991:Â€391–7. Goethe begins the Italienische Reise with his stealthy departure from Carlsbad in the
dead of night on Sunday, 3 September 1788 (IR 13–15; SW 15.1:Â€11–14).
11
Boyle 1991:Â€394. 12
Boyle 1991:Â€508–9; Steiger 1982–96:Â€2.664.
13
‘Ich darf wohl sagen:Â€ ich habe mich in dieser anderthalbjährigen Einsamkeit selbst wiederge-
funden; aber als was? Als Kunstler!’ (letter to Carl August dated 17 March 1788, SW 2.4:Â€394–5
(#164)).
14
Boyle 1991:Â€491.
260 Joseph Farrell
he had enjoyed beforeÂ€– or even to a closer approximation of the ideal art-
istic life than he had ever previously experienced. At the same time, it was
an officially sanctioned and limited, if indeterminate, leave of absence
from the official duties to which Goethe eventually returned, even if in
modified form. In short, it was a sabbatical, and in every respect a notably
successful one.
But there is an additional point. Biographers are agreed that one cannot
account fully for the significance of Goethe’s Roman permanenza without
understanding certain developments in his personal life as well. It is uni-
versally held that Goethe, at the time of his arrival in Rome, was rather
more inexperienced in sexual matters than one might have expected in a
man of 37 years, and one who had lived for over a decade in the worldly
court of a German prince who fancied himself an expert in this area. In
Weimar, however, this aspect of Goethe’s life was largely absorbed by an
intensely platonic relationship with Charlotte von Stein, who was several
years his senior and the wife of another court official.15 In this respect as
well Rome represented a decisive change:Â€it was there that from January
to March of 1788 Goethe had an affair with a young Roman widow and
so, it is generally believed, enjoyed the first experience of real erotic ful-
filment in his life.16 The Römische Elegien, in the style of Classical Roman
elegy, present themselves as the record of this affair. But the elegies were
composed after Goethe’s return to Weimar over a period of several years
during which, crucially, he had begun what was to be a lifelong relation-
ship with Christiane Vulpius.17 This relationship began almost immedi-
ately upon Goethe’s return to Weimar, and the following year Christiane
produced the first of the couple’s five children (and the only one who sur-
vived past infancy). In 1806 they were married and they remained happily
together until Christiane’s death in 1816.
Goethe composed the Römische Elegien during the first years of his
relationship with Christiane. It was a period during which he tried in a
number of ways to recreate aspects of his Roman sabbatical. The liaison
with Christiane, especially in its initial stages, seems to fit very well into
this pattern. Scholars agree, therefore, that both Goethe’s sexual initi-
ation with his Roman mistress and what was to become his marriage with
Christiane provide the essential biographical context within which the
Römische Elegien are to be understood. And the effect of this sabbatical
Boyle 1991:Â€256–66; Lavater-Sloman 1960. 16 Eissler 1963 2:Â€988; Boyle 1991:Â€507.

15
On Christiane see Boyle 1991:Â€ 537–40, 570–4 and passim. Goethe’s relationship with her has
17
been the subject of a number of studies including Klessmann 1993; Damm 1998; Keuthen 1999;
Frühwald 2007.
was long-lasting:Â€ after returning to Weimar, Goethe was able to main-
tain a much better balance between the competing claims of the vita
activa and the vita contemplativa and to reclaim his place of leadership in
European letters.
The römische elegien and the i ta l i e n i s c h e r e i s e
Anything like a detailed account of the effect that Goethe’s journey had
on his literary output as a whole is well beyond the scope of this paper.18
Our main concern is with two works that were in fact largely written
after the return to Weimar. One is the journal that Goethe kept during
his journey, which was partially revised and ultimately published between
1816 and 1829 under the title Italienische Reise.19 The other is the collection
of Römische Elegien, poems in elegiac couplets that Goethe began writ-
ing in 1788 and started fashioning into a cycle under the working title
‘Erotica Romana’ in 1790 or 1791, publishing them for the first time in
1795.20 Both works provide illuminating, but not totally consistent, per-
spectives on Goethe’s Italian sojourn.
The significance of the Elegies is acknowledged by all Goethe special-
ists. As Nicholas Boyle observes, this significance stems in large part from
the appearance within the cycle of features never before seen in Goethe’s
poetry but common thereafter, all of which Boyle relates to a new poetic
self-reflexiveness on Goethe’s part.21 Indices of this self-reflexive quality
include frequent references within the poems to their elegiac form; epi-
sodes dramatizing the production of distichs; the poet’s apostrophes to his
verse, in which he addresses the initial line of the distich and its partner
as hexameter and pentameter, respectively.22 In a related move, it is clear
that the protagonist of these poems is not merely the generalized ‘I’ of
Goethe’s previous lyrics, but that he is very emphatically a poet and most
particularly the author of these very elegies.23 And this poet-protagonist
regularly draws explicit analogies between his own experience and that of
the ancient love poets, inscribing this analogy within a more general com-
parison between the ancient and modern worlds.24 All of these elements
18
Some of the more recent work on the subject includes Hoffmeister 1988; Zapperi 1999; N. Miller
2002; Block 2006; Buck 2008.
19
The early publication history of this work is conveniently reviewed by Thomas P. Saine in Goethe
1989:Â€5–7.
20
Boyle 1991:Â€631–41. 21 Boyle 1991:Â€631–4. 22 RE 20.21 (SW 1.1:Â€437); cf. 5.16 (SW 1.1:Â€407).
23
RE 5:Â€15–20 (SW 1.1:Â€407); 11 (SW 1.1:Â€413, 415); 13:Â€1–36 (SW 1.1:Â€417, 419); 15.31 (SW 1.1:Â€427).
24
RE 3:Â€7–18 (SW 1.1:Â€399); 12.9–34 (SW 1.1:Â€415, 417):Â€13.19–24 (SW 1.1:Â€419); 15 (SW 1.1:Â€425, 427); cf.
Erot. Rom. 17 (SW 1.1:Â€420, 422).
262 Joseph Farrell
look forward to ideas that would become still more important in Goethe’s
later work and that would exert a broader influence on European litera-
ture generally. All, in addition, can be easily correlated with analogous
features of Classical Roman love elegy.
The Italienische Reise agrees perfectly with the elegies in making
antiquity a touchstone of Goethe’s experience in Italy and in regarding
poetry as a privileged medium by which to understand Italy as an ancient,
symbolic space. In the elegies, for example, he revels enthusiastically in
the inspirational quality of Rome (RE 5.1–2; SW 1.1:Â€405):
Froh empfind’ ich mich nun auf klassischem Boden begeistert;
Lauter und reizender spricht Vorwelt und Mitwelt zu mir.
Gladly I find myself inspired upon Classical soil; past and present speak to me
more clearly and charmingly.
The Reise offers a fascinating gloss on this form of inspiration. In a fam-
ous early episode of the Italienische Reise Goethe visits Lake Garda and
(prompted by his guidebook) quotes Virgil’s beautiful line in which he
addresses the lake (Geo. 2.159):
Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marinis.
And you, Benacus, rising up with roaring waves worthy of the sea
Goethe’s comment is that (IR, entry for 12 September 1786 (SW 15.1:Â€32)
Der erste lateinische Vers, dessen Inhalt lebendig vor mir steht und in dem
Augenblick, da der Wind immer stärker wächst und der See höhere Wellen
gegen die Anfahrt wirft, noch heute so wahr ist als vor vielen Jahrhunderten.
So manches hat sich verändert, noch aber stürmt der Wind in dem See, dessen
Anblick eine Zeile Vergils noch immer veredelt.
This is the first line of Latin verse whose content has come to life before me, and
which is as true at this moment, when the wind is growing ever stronger and the
lake is casting higher waves against the landing place, as many centuries ago.
Many things have changed, but the wind still churns the lake, and the sight is
still ennobled by a line of Virgil. (Goethe 1989:Â€28–9)
And without question in the Journey as a whole Classical poets serve as
privileged interpreters of the landscape that Goethe was to explore over
the next two years.25 By the same token, in Goethe’s elegiac project ancient
Roman poets were to serve him as guides to the highly charged world of
25
In Naples, for instance, Goethe looked back on his earlier visit to Sicily and commented that
what he saw there made the Odyssey live in his eyes for the first time (IR 256 = SW 15.1:Â€ 345
(17 May 1787)).
erotic experience, into which Goethe was initiated along with the other
mysteries of Italy and Rome.
So the similarities between these works are not negligible. But for our
purposes the differences are much more striking. The Römische Elegien
focus solely on Rome while the Reise follows Goethe through the length
and breadth of Italy. In addition, the elegies, which adopt the most salient
conventions of ancient love elegy, are notable for their literary formality
and self-reflexivity, while the Italienische Reise gives the appearance of a
diary narrating in real time Goethe’s spiritual and intellectual reawaken-
ing. But the relatively unmediated appearance of the latter work is an illu-
sion. The Reise, it is true, is based largely on letters that Goethe wrote and
received during his Italian sojourn and on a journal that he kept at that
time. But ironically, it is the collection of elegies that was published soon
after the experiences that they purport to describe (even if scholars regard
Goethe’s domestic arrangements in Weimar as being equally important
to his Roman affair as a context for interpreting the poetry); but the pub-
lication of the Italienische Reise was not complete until twenty-five years
after the fact.26 The end result is more memoir than a diary, and it is
hardly in all respects a careful redaction of the original sources. Of its
three parts, the first two were published in 1816 and 1817 and the third,
which is much less finished than the first two, not until 1829. Altogether,
then, the Römische Elegien and the Italienische Reise are very different
Â�literary records of ‘the same’ formative experience.
It is true of course that the author of the journal, like the author of
the elegies, is a poet. But in the journal, Goethe the poet is basically
trying to finish off projects to satisfy his publisher back in Germany.27
In the Â�elegies, poetic composition, enthusiastic love-making, and wil-
ful self-fashioning join forces to produce nothing other than the elegies
themselves. Crucially, the Italienische Reise makes no reference at all to
the affair that is the subject of the Römische Elegien. Indeed, it contains
much that is so foreign to the spirit of the elegies that one could wonder
that they are the work of the same author. Conversely, there is nothing in
the Elegien that recalls Goethe’s official duties in Weimar, where he had
been among other things, as I have noted, Minister of Mines. But in the
Italienische Reise Goethe can never visit a place without remarking on its
geological position, its wealth or poverty in mineral resources and so on.28
26
See n. 19 above. 27 Entry for 8 September 1786 (IR 22 = SW 15.1:Â€24) and passim.
28
The very first entry for 3 September 1986 (IR 13–15 = SW 15.1:Â€11–12) is almost programmatic in
this regard.
264 Joseph Farrell
Goethe was a man of almost limitless intellectual interests, but in this
respect his behaviour seems obsessive, rather like that of the overworked
court functionary that he actually was and almost as if he were unable,
especially in the early stages of his journey, to unwind and begin to enjoy
a long vacation. And even after six months in Italy, during his visit to
NaplesÂ€ – which charms him as it does so many other northern visitors
because it seems the perfect opposite of the cities that they know, and
thus the most quintessentially Italian of placesÂ€– even then, when he visits
Herculaneum, he cannot keep himself from complaining about the way
the site has been treated (IR, entry for 18 March 1787 (SW 15.1:Â€228):
Jammerschade, daß die Ausgrabung nicht durch deutsche Bergleute recht plan-
mäßig geschehn; denn gewiß ist bei einem zufällig räberischen nachwühlen
manches edle Altertum vergeudet worden.
A great pity that the excavation was not systematically carried out by German
miners:Â€for certainly the haphazard later digging has wastefully destroyed many
a noble relic of antiquity. (Goethe 1989:Â€173)
In this as well as other ways the Italienische Reise, which represents the
author as being in constant communication with friends back home, con-
nects the two worlds of Weimar and Italy and treats the experience of
life in both places in a more continuous way than do the elegies. The
journal begins by recounting in detail every stage of Goethe’s journey
from Germany to Rome, thus establishing a sense of geographical con-
tinuity. In sharp contrast, the elegies open suddenly with the poet simply
in Rome:Â€how he got there is not important.29 In the Reise Goethe takes
with him everywhere many of the same concerns that were typical of his
life in Weimar; in the elegies he cares about nothing other than love.
In these ways it is the elegies much more than the Italienische Reise that
establish Goethe’s Roman permanenza as the life-altering experience that
critics agree it was.
G oe t h e a n d t h e e l e g i ac c a r e e r
Several clear indications situate the Römische Elegien within the larger,
sprawling diversity of Goethe’s career as an episode that conforms to what
29
The theme of Goethe’s nationality appears at RE 2.28 (SW 1.1:Â€397), where the poet calls himself a
barbarian conqueror (but cf. 4.32 (SW 1.1:Â€405) where he is the captive); at 7.1–10 (SW 1.1:Â€410–11),
where he contrasts the climate and atmosphere of Rome with that of the north; at 13.5–6 (SW
1.1:Â€417), where Love says that he has followed the poet into a foreign country; at 15.9–10 (SW
1.1:Â€425), where the poet refers to a coterie of fellow German expatriates.
we may call the canonical elegiac experience. In fact, we have Goethe’s
own observations about the place of the elegies within his career to date,
and these observations belong to the textual history of the poems them-
selves. Here are the opening lines of the second elegy as they were actu-
ally published in 1795 (RE 2.1–4 (SW 1.1:Â€397)):
Ehret, wen ihr euch wollt! Nun bin ich endlich geborgen!
â•…â•…â•… Schöne Damen und ihr, Herren der feineren Welt,
Fraget nach Oheim und Vetter und alten Muhmen und Tanten,
â•…â•…â•… Und dem gebundnen Gespräch folge das traurige Spiel.
Auch ihr Übrigen fahret mir wohl, in großen und kleinen
â•…â•…â•… Zirkeln, die ihr mich oft nah der Verzweiflung gebracht.
Wiederholet, politisch und zwecklos, jegliche Meinung,
â•…â•…â•… Die den Wandrer mit Wut über Europa verfolgt.
Flatter all you want! Now I am finally safe! Fair ladies and you fine gentlemen
of the beau monde! Ask about your old aunts and uncles and cousins, and let
the unhappy game follow the elegant talk. And farewell to you too, who have
often driven me almost mad with your social circles great and small! Repeat,
politically and vainly, that opinion which the traveller angrily flees right across
Europe.
And now here is the earlier, unpublished version of these same lines from
the ‘Erotica Romana’ manuscript (SW 1.1:Â€398, 400):
Fraget nun wen ihr auch wollt mich werdet ihr nimmer erreichen,
â•…â•…â•… Schöne Damen und ihr, Herren der feineren Welt!
Ob denn auch Werther gelebt? ob denn auch alles fein wahr sei?
â•…â•…â•… Welche Stadt sich mit Recht Lottens der Einzigen rühmt?
Ach wie hab ich so oft die törigten Blätter verwünschet,
â•…â•…â•… Die mein jügendlich Leid unter die Menschen gebracht!
Wäre Werther mein Bruder gewesen, ich hätt ihn erschlagen,
â•…â•…â•… Kaum verfolgte mich so rächend sein trauriger Geist.
Now ask all you want, you will never get near me, you fair ladies and you fine
gentlemen of the beau monde:Â€did Werther really live? and it was all really true?
In which town did dear Lotte actually live? Alas, how often I’ve cursed those
foolish pages that spread my youthful sorrow abroad! Had Werther been my
brother and I had killed him, his unhappy ghost would hardly have haunted me
so vengefully.
The published version alludes vaguely to the tedious niceties of the soci-
ety that Goethe has left behind, and to the refuge offered him by his
unpretentious mistress, who knows nothing of her lover’s former life.
What emerges clearly from the variant is that Goethe, while composing
the elegies after his return to Weimar, looked back on the Italian sojourn
as an escape not only from his bureaucratic duties at court and the jejune
266 Joseph Farrell
social rituals that they entailed, but from his earlier literary reputation as
well. The Werther phenomenon, as I noted before, greatly oppressed him;
and in the light of his complaints about this oppression, the refuge that
he finds in the bosom of his beloved takes on a significant Â�metaliterary
aspect. The move to Rome and to elegy amounts to a metamorphosis by
which the author of Werther recreates himself as a poet of love in the
mould of the ancient elegists.
There is more. A number of scholars have explored the generic and
intertextual relationship between the Römische Elegien and Classical love
elegy, and it is well known that Goethe incorporates most of the specific
motifs that define the genre.30 One of these involves the name of his mis-
tress, whom he calls Faustine (RE 18.9, SW 1.1:Â€429). Many scholars think
that this is the real name of the woman with whom Goethe actually
had his Roman flingÂ€– namely one Faustina di Giovanni Antonini who,
like the Faustine of the elegies, was a young widow who had a son.31 But
whether or not this is so Goethe follows the ancient convention of giv-
ing the beloved a name laden with literary significance. Propertius and
Tibullus (in his first book of elegies) followed the founder of the genre,
Cornelius Gallus, whose works did not survive antiquity, by giving their
mistresses names that allude to cult titles of Apollo, the god of poetry
(Cynthia, Delia and Lycoris, respectively). The proto-elegist Catullus,
and Ovid, the last member of the elegiac canon, opted for names, Lesbia
and Corinna, that allude to two of the great women poets of Greece,
Sappho of Lesbos and Corinna of Thebes. Goethe takes a different and
more self-referential tack.32 Faustine’s name gestures not to models from
the past or to external literary ideals but to what would become the
poet’s masterpiece, his Faust. Many precise details regarding the long
genesis of this work cannot be established with confidence, but for our
purposes the main outlines of the process are clear enough.33 It is certain
that Goethe had conceived the idea of a Faust at least ten years before
his Italian journey. A nearly complete play that was never published,
conventionally known as the Urfaust, exists in a manuscript that was
written down about two years before Goethe’s flight to Rome. While
30
There is, as one might expect, a long tradition of investigating Goethe’s sources. Some of the
principal studies include Bronner 1898; Klingner 1956; Wimmel 1958; Luck 1967; Rüdiger 1978
and 1984; Neumeister 1985; Ammer 1990; Althaus 1994; Appel 1998.
31
RE 6.6, 27–8 (SW 1.1:Â€407–9).
32
Cf. Boyle’s remarks on the self-referentiality of the elegies, n. 21 above, and see further Schweling
1964.
33
For details see Hamm 1997.
in Rome, he came up with a new plan for the work, one that involves
Mephistopheles presenting Faust with different experiences upon which
he, Faust, would pass judgement; and the text of the play as written,
probably, within a year of Goethe’s return to Weimar speaks of ‘a new
career’ that will take Faust from low life to high life as represented by
his relationships with Gretchen and Helena, respectively.34 This version
of the play, published in 1790 as Faust:Â€ein Fragment, was being put into
final form just at the time when Goethe was working on the ‘Erotica
Romana’, which would become the Römische Elegien. So, from these
relationships, it seems more than reasonable to infer into the Römische
Elegien a measure of self-Â�consciousness concerning their importance to
the development of Goethe’s literary career.
Indeed, by piecing together the clues that I have just been discussing,
one could almost construct a quasi-Virgilian cursus that would explain
Goethe’s career as a progression from Werther to the Römische Elegien to
Faust. The phrase that Virgil uses to describe himself as author of the
Eclogues is audax iuuenta, ‘youthfully bold’, or ‘precocious’ (Geo. 4.565),
and this would certainly be apt for the author of Werther as well. The
Georgics has often been seen as a transitional work, as have the Römische
Elegien. And of course Faust as the poet’s masterpiece answers very well
for Virgil’s Aeneid. But any invocation of the Virgilian rota merely con-
firms my earlier point about the inadequacy of prefabricated schemes. The
Virgilian model of ascent cannot fully capture the dynamic of Goethe’s
struggle to find his way from Werther to Faust. Virtually absent from the
Virgilian model, for instance, is the important notion of a turn towards
antiquity, very evident in Goethe’s representation of the elegies as some-
thing different from his Werther. And this is to say nothing of Goethe’s
astonishingly diverse literary activity in other genres. But the idea that I
want to stress is that the Römische Elegien were crucial to his development
because the elegiac genreÂ€– in its form, in its characteristic concerns and
in a sense by virtue of its curious nature as a simultaneously closed and
unclosed genreÂ€– gave Goethe the opportunity in effect to enjoy a com-
plete career as an elegiac poet in a comparatively brief episode within a
long and multiform literary life; and that it was this possibility that made
his elegiac sabbatical both an antidote and a stimulus to the various other
life-projects in which he was engaged.
The alternative openings of the second elegy link Goethe’s Roman per-
manenza and his elegiac project to the theme of escape, whether from his
34
â•… Faust 1:Â€2072 (SW 7.1:Â€88).
268 Joseph Farrell
earlier literary reputation or from the demands of the society in which
he lived. But as I have said, the biographical record makes it very clear
that escape from his official duties at court was a crucial factor as well.
All three factors are linked, but it is the first and third, literary reputation
and bureaucratic duties, that are most relevant to the idea of Goethe’s
career. The elegies do not allude directly to the third element, duties at
court. But the genre of elegy itself embodies this theme in such a way as
to make it, in effect, a constitutive element of the ancient genre and one
that echoes throughout Goethe’s work as well.
We can begin to get at this aspect by considering a very well known
acknowledgement of Goethe’s generic indebtedness and pressing it for its
careerist significance. The fifth elegy, which expresses the most intense
perception in the entire collection of the relationship between presence
in Rome, Classical learning and erotic fulfilment, ends with a vignette of
the god Amor holding a lamp that softly illuminates the lovers in their
embrace (RE 5.19–20 (SW 1.1:Â€407)):
Amor schüret indes die Lampe und denket der Zeiten,
â•…â•…â•… Da er nämlichen Dienst seinen Triumvirn getan.
Amor tends the lamp and recalls the times when he did the same service for his
own Triumvirs.
The imagery of this passage virtually conflates the emblematic ‘mirror’
and ‘lamp’ that M. H. Abrams uses to suggest the difference between
Classical and Romantic imitatio.35 For Goethe, Amor’s lamp illuminates
a realm of natural experience that was, to him, previously obscure. At the
same time, he revels in the fact that his erotic adventures are also rework-
ings of highly overdetermined, conventional subjects that had been the
defining material of Classical love poetry. But the reference to Love’s ‘tri-
umvirs’ is also of great significance. By the word Triumvirn Goethe alludes
to the phrase triumviri Amoris, a flourish of Joseph Scaliger, and Goethe’s
use of it here has been taken as an acknowledgement of his principal ele-
giac models.36 Quite apart from the specific identity of these triumviri (a
point to which I shall return), I see no evidence that Scaliger coined the
phrase with any ulterior purpose. It was, as I say, a rhetorical flourish, an
imaginative and slightly elevated way of saying ‘the three principal love
poets of ancient Rome’. But to connoisseurs of the kind of generic pos-
turing that was so dear to the Roman elegists, and so perhaps to Goethe
Abrams 1953.
35
On this phrase see Bernays 1899. Goethe also uses it at IR 386 (SW 15.1:Â€515) in an address given
36
on the occasion of his induction into the Arcadian Society on 4 January 1787.
himself, the phrase is capable of meaning much more. A triumvir is of
course, in ancient Roman terminology, a member of a board of three
appointed by the government for some specific purpose. But the word
gained a defining resonance from the activity of a specific board of three,
Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Antonius and M. Aemilius Lepidus, who in
42 BC became iiiviri rei publicae constituendaeÂ€ – something like ‘com-
missioners for the establishment of public order’. These triumviri wielded
extraordinary powers, quarrelled and bargained, and made war upon one
another, until one of them, Octavian, got the better of his colleagues and
became the sole leader of the Roman state for the remaining forty-five
years of his life. From this historical episode the word triumvir acquired
its associations with extraordinary power, and did so in the context of the
turbulent transition from Roman Republic to Roman EmpireÂ€ – which
happens to be the setting in which the genre of elegy took shape as well.
These points might have little relevance to my argument were it not
for the fact that the relationship of poetry to power was a stock theme of
ancient elegy. Permutations in the treatment of this theme are many and
complex, but a few general tendencies can be stated. In ancient elegy, the
poet wields no political power. He has in effect renounced political ambi-
tion altogether. He maintains his relationship to at least one powerful
man, who is his patron, and generally supports this patron’s career, which
involves joining the patron in support of the princeps, Caesar Augustus;
but the poet is concerned to represent his own career as one of aban-
donment with respect to political power and even as the anti-career of
enthralment to a whimsical belovedÂ€– who is herself a woman, probably
foreign-born and definitely from a lower social class, and therefore abso-
lutely devoid of political power herself.37 In short, the elegiac career is the
total antithesis of a Roman political career. The canonical ancient elegists
are all clear and insistent on this point.38
So, even if Scaliger did not have these ideas in mind when naming his
erotic triumviri, I think we can be open to the possibility that Goethe
found in this phrase something more attractive than the opportunity to
quote a great philologist. The paradoxical, almost oxymoronic formulation
On the elegiac puella see Lilja 1965; S. L. James 2003 and the essays in Part 1 of Wyke 2002.
37
The Roman elegists consistently represented their poetic calling as an anti-career. Catullus in
38
several poems speaks disparagingly of his experiences serving as part of a praetorial cohors gov-
erning the province of Bithynia (see especially Poems 10 and 28). Tibullus contrasts his life with
that of military men, particularly his patron Messalla (1:Â€1.53–6, 75–9, 3.81–2, 6.43–6, 10.29–34,
45–52, 2:Â€ 6, 4.14–16). For an effective point of entry into the question vis-à-vis Propertius see
Gale 1997. Ovid speaks of how, at his father’s insistence, he took the first steps towards an official
career, but abandoned it for poetry (Trist. 4.10.17–40).
270 Joseph Farrell
triumviri AmorisÂ€– men of power in a field of powerlessnessÂ€– speaks to
Goethe’s situation immediately before, during and after the period of his
permanenza. When he left Weimar, Goethe was at the apex of his polit-
ical power. As acting president of the privy council, he was the highest
authority in Weimar after the prince himself.39 He renounced this pos-
ition to go to Rome, and before returning to Weimar he negotiated with
his own ‘Augustus’, Carl August, an agreement that would relieve him of
any regular and continuing responsibilities of the sort that he had previ-
ously fulfilled.40 He did rejoin the privy council, however, which (I note
in passing, for whatever it may be worth) happened to be a board of usu-
ally three, though sometimes four, men.41 And it was at this point that he
wrote the elegies that look back to his experience in Rome.
It thus seems to me possible that Goethe found in Scaliger’s arrest-
ing phrase something that spoke to his own complex attitude towards his
dual careers as poet and politician. But in any case, I think it certain that
he was attracted to the elegiac genre in part by the generic inheritance
that involves these themes. The tenth elegy expresses the typical elegiac
attitude towards such things:Â€the lover in his private obsession with erotic
matters rules a kingdom greater than mighty empires and is a fit object of
envy by the likes of Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, the kings and
princes of France and Prussia (RE 10.1–3 (SW 1.1:Â€413)):
Alexander und Cäsar und Heinrich und Friedrich, die Grossen,
â•… Gäben und hälften mir gern ihres erworbenen Ruhms,
Könnt ich auf eine Nacht dies Lager jedem vergönnen.
Alexander and Caesar and Henry and Frederick, the great ones, would gladly
give me half of their fame if I could grant them to lie in this camp for one night.
Before closing, I want to return as promised from the connotative to
the denotative range of the expression triumviri Amoris. In one sense it is
not important to whom exactly the phrase refers. The Quellenforscher have
shown that Goethe’s Classical models go well beyond any three ancient
love poets whom one might care to nominate. If we ask about the poets
whom Goethe actually names in the elegies, we find that there are three,
but that they are Propertius (Erot. Rom. 16.19, SW 1.1:Â€422), Horace (RE
15.28, SW 1.1:Â€425) and Lucretius (Erot. Rom. 16:Â€13, SW 1.1:Â€422). Propertius
of course is a canonical elegist; more on him in a moment. Horace is a
love poet, but not, as it were, a full-time one and in any case not an ele-
gist at all; and the particular passage of Horace that Goethe seems to
Boyle 1991:Â€307.
39
Boyle 1991:Â€267–8.
40 41
Boyle 1991:Â€238, 252.
have in mind is from the Carmen Saeculare (11–12), one of Horace’s least
erotic compositions. As for Lucretius, commentators point to his rec-
ommendation that any sexual urges be satisfied before they get out of
hand (De Rerum Natura 4.1063–7), but this occurs in the context of a
diatribe against love, which is not encouraging for anyone who would see
Lucretius as a presiding genius in the Römische Elegien; and, of course,
like Horace, he is not an elegist. Many others could be named to whom
Goethe alludes not for purposes of establishing the elegiac ambience of
the cycle, but his conception of antiquity, while centred on elegy, expands
far beyond the normal boundaries of the genre; and of course, though it
sounds paradoxical to say it this way, aficionados will recognize this as a
tendency of Classical elegy itself.42
So who are these triumviri? Clearly they are in some sense none other
than who Scaliger says they areÂ€– not Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid, the
three surviving elegists of Quintilian’s canon, but Catullus, Tibullus and
PropertiusÂ€– a grouping that makes perfect sense when we consider the
textual history of these poets. Their rather slender collective output made
inclusion of all their works within a single volume very common, both
in manuscripts and in printed books, at least from the later middle ages
onward.43 The more voluminous productions of Ovid stood alone.
But from our perspective, which is the interpretive history of the
Römische Elegien, the results of this historical accident have been unfor-
tunate. From an early date there has been a consensus that Goethe’s most
important elegiac model is Propertius. There is no difficulty in mustering
evidence, internal and external, to lend credibility to this theory. In par-
ticular, Propertius’ first book, his Monobiblos, which he purports to have
written as a means of coping with the effects of his virtual enslavement to
Cynthia over the course of the preceding year, is probably the closest par-
allel we have from ancient elegy to Goethe’s record not of enslavement,
but of fulfilment in his relationship with Faustine during his last months
in Rome. Moreover, as we have seen, Propertius is the only one of the
Classical elegists whom Goethe names in the Römische Elegien. To speak
of external evidence, Schiller in his essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry
42
The tendency is especially notable in Ovid (see e.g. S. J. Harrison 2002 and Farrell 2003) but it
is clearly a feature of earlier elegy as well, most obviously perhaps in respect of the aetiological
focus of Propertius’ fourth book and of certain poems of Tibullus (J. F. Miller 1982).
43
Scaliger himself in fact published a one-volume edition and commentary (entitled castigationes)
on all three poets in 1577, though he was not the first to do so:Â€see Grafton, 1983:Â€161–79. The
tendency to group these poets together is abundantly illustrated in the materials catalogued and
described in Butrica 1984.
272 Joseph Farrell
hailed Goethe as the German Propertius; and Goethe himself in his elegy
‘Hermann und Dorothea’ referred to Propertius as an inspiration for the
Römische Elegien.44 This assessment has become traditional, and in much
of the secondary literature the centrality of Propertius to Goethe’s con-
ception of elegy is simply assumed.45
One effect of all this has been to obscure the importance of Ovid to
the Römische Elegien. In one sense, this has been a non-problem:Â€ again
the Quellenforscher have done their jobs and have uncovered a wealth of
Ovidian material in these poems.46 But when we regard the Römische
Elegien from the particular angle of Goethe’s career, Ovid assumes a
greater importance than he might from the perspective of genre criti-
cism. Ovid, though a canonical elegiac poet, was also more than that; one
might say that he was also a distinctly non-canonical elegiac poet whose
career conformed to established patterns, which generally involve some
sort of generic differentiation, more than is true of Catullus, Propertius
and Tibullus.47 Thus Ovid’s potentially larger relevance to Goethe’s
conception of his own career starts to come into focus. If we regard the
Römische Elegien as, in effect, an entire elegiac career, then it is probably
adequate to think of Propertius as Goethe’s chief conceptual model. If we
regard the elegies as part of a more extended career that both began some
44
Schiller 1962:Â€465 and SW 1.2:Â€198, where Goethe goes on to mention Martial as the model for the
Venetian Epigrams. But the issue of Propertius seems to me less than straightforward. Schiller’s
point is very much implicated in his argument about the two categories of poetry that are at issue
in his essay. For him, both ‘The Roman and the German Ovid’ (i.e. Friedrich Manso, author
of Die Kunst zu lieben (Berlin 1794)) belong to the camp of the sentimental poets, while ‘the
Roman and German Propertius’ (i.e. the Goethe of the Römische Elegien) belong to the naïve
camp. Both passages, then, have to be read not merely as data concerning how Schiller and
Goethe both saw the latter in his relationship to ancient elegiac models, but also as contribu-
tions to an ongoing discussion between the two on the nature of poetry and on Goethe’s poetry
in particular. Relevant here is the fact that the Römische Elegien were first published by Schiller
in his journal Die Horen (1795), but not without the excision of two poems (3 and 17 in modern
editions) that Goethe had wanted to include, but that Schiller regarded as coarse and offensive to
common decency (letter to Korner dated 20 July 1795 in Schiller 1969:Â€13). The literature on the
relationship is large:Â€see (e.g.) Martin 1949 and Oberlin 2007.
45
In his assessment of Goethe’s models, Boyle (1991:Â€591–2) follows the majority in emphasizing the
role of Propertius:Â€he notes that Goethe studied the elegiac form with Knebel, ‘who was translat-
ing Propertius at the time’, and that ‘it is no surprise that he should have been reading, and no
doubt looking for models in, Catullus and Propertius, and probably Tibullus and Ovid’s amatory
poetry too’ (emphasis mine).
46
Specifically or characteristically Ovidian are:Â€the dialogues with Amor (Am. 1.1, Pont. 3.3), the
motif of writing in wine on a tabletop (Am. 1.4.17–20, 2.5.17; Ars 1.569–72; Her. 1.31–6, 17.87), the
motif of the magister amoris (Am. 1.4, 2.19, 3.1, 3.4, and the erotodidactic works as a whole), not
to speak of the many myths that Goethe mentions, many of which occur in the Metamorphoses
but not in surviving love elegy.
47
Cf. Farrell 2004.
time before the elegies and continued long after them, then Ovid may be
more relevant.
On the other hand, perhaps we should regard Goethe as having adopted
a more restrictive conception of ancient elegy than Ovidian exuberance
and experimentation would allow, and thus of Ovid rather than Propertius
as casting his particular spell over not the elegies, but the Reise. As a final
thought along these lines, consider the way in which Goethe frames
Part 3 of his memoir – one of the relatively scarce indications of care-
ful revision in this part of the work. The epigraph is taken from Ovid’s
Fasti:Â€ it is the prayer that Romulus pronounces for the welfare of the
city that he has founded.48 Even more resonant is the conclusion of the
work, perhaps its most famous passage, in which Goethe wanders about
the ancient city under a full moon, finding his way to the Colosseum,
where he goes over his entire stay in Italy, a process that ‘being felt deeply
in my agitated soul, evoked a mood that I might call heroic-elegiac, out
of which an elegiac poem began to take form’ (Goethe 1989:Â€ 497–8: in
aufgeregter Seele tief und groß empfunden, erregte eine Stimmung, die ich
heroisch-elegeisch nennen darf, woraus sich in poetischer Form eine Elegie
zusammenbilden wollte (SW 15.1:Â€596)). It would be natural to try to relate
this remark to the Römische Elegien themselves, which so closely identify
Goethe’s Roman permanenza with this specific poetic form; but heroic-
elegiac does not seem very apt as a description of the erotic cycle. It would
make more sense to think here of the Fasti, where the relationship of the
heroic and elegiac modes, or of heroic content to elegiac form, is a per-
vasive theme; and the epigraph that I cited previously may also point in
this direction. But Goethe immediately follows up this remark about the
heroic-elegiac mood by asking,
Und wie sollte mir gerade in solchen Augenblicken Ovids Elegie ins Gedächtnis
zurückkehren, der, auch verbannt, in einer Mondnacht Rom verlassen sollte.
Cum repeto noctem! seine Rückerinnerung, weit hinten am Schwarzen Meer, im
trauer- und jammervollen Zustande, kam mir nicht aus dem Sinn, ich wied-
erholte das Gedicht, das mir teilweise genau im Gedächntnis hervorstieg, aber
mich wirklich an eigner Produktion irre werden ließ und hinderte; die auch,
später unternommen, niemals zustande kommen konnte. (SW 1.15:Â€596)
And how could I not recall Ovid’s elegy at these very moments, for he too was
banished and was about to leave Rome on a moonlit night? Cum repeto noctem!Â€–
his recollection far away at the Black Sea, where he was sad and miserableÂ€– kept
48
longa sit huic aetas, dominaeque potentia terrae, / sitque sub hac oriens occiduusque dies (Fasti
4.831–2; IR 275 = SW 15.1:Â€373).
274 Joseph Farrell
recurring to me, and I recited the poem, which in part I remembered exactly.
But actually it only interfered with and hindered my own production, which,
although undertaken again later, never came into existence. (Goethe 1989:Â€498)
Goethe’s memoir then concludes by quoting a passage from the Ovidian
poem that has crowded Goethe’s own heroic-elegiac effort out of his
mind. The poem in question is Tristia 1.3, which for its Virgilian reminis-
cences comparing Ovid’s final night in Rome with Aeneas’ final night in
Troy, might well be considered heroic-elegiac in mood.49 Remembering
that Goethe published this memoir many years after his Italian journey,
the idea that an Ovidian experience of elegiac eroticism followed by exile
from the site of those pleasures presents itself as another factor of rele-
vance to our assessment of Goethe’s elegiac career.
To conclude:Â€the biographical data suggest to most critics that Goethe’s
excursion to Italy represents both a break in his bureaucratic career and
a readjustment of the balance between his official duties and his literary
ambitions. On this basis, I have argued that the excursion helped bring
about a redirection of Goethe’s literary representation of his career. One
of the most direct literary results of this excursion, the Römische Elegien,
takes advantage of the ancient genre’s potential to embody in literary
form qualities antithetical to the life of a responsible civic or court official,
whether in Augustan Rome or in eighteenth-century Weimar. These anti-
thetical qualities were essential to the success of Goethe’s Italian sojourn.
But Goethe also took advantage of the elegiac poet’s capacity to fashion
himself as someone who deliberately rejects other literary genres and the
entire way of life that he takes them to represent, both in the form of overt
comments on the course of Goethe’s career, as in the original opening of
Elegy 2 with its jaundiced comments on Werther, and in their manipula-
tion of elegiac conventions, such as the name of the beloved Faustine and
elegy’s constitutive rejection of political careerism. And finally, I just raise
the possibility that Ovid, the only one of the canonical Roman elegists
who might be said to have led a career that was not entirely elegiac, and
one in which erotic elegy as strictly defined plays a more circumscribed
roleÂ€– that Ovid might be an important model for Goethe’s design of his
own brief elegiac career. In a broader sense, in keeping with my opening
remarks, I hope to have contributed as well to a small expansion of career
studies as a method of literary history.
Goethe first makes the connection between Ovid’s departure and his own in a letter to Herder
49
dated 12 December 1788 (#221, SW 2.3:Â€452). On this motif see Huskey 2002 and Putnam 2010.
C h a p t e r 15
Wordsworth’s career prospects:Â€‘peculiar

language’ and public epigraphs
Nicola Trott
Coleridge to Southey, July 1803, discussing plans for a ‘Bibliotheca

Britannica’, to include ‘all great names as have either formed epochs
in our taste, or such, at least, as are representative; and the great
object to be in each instance to determine, first, the true merits and
demerits of the books; secondly, what of these belong to the ageÂ€ –
what to the author quasi peculium.’1
‘The modern “epic”’, Lawrence Lipking has observed, ‘is dominated by
one story and one story only:Â€the life of the poet.’2 The Prelude; or, Growth
of a Poet’s Mind is the classic example. But if Wordsworth’s is the model
of a modern ‘literary career’, it is so because of its insufficiency as a model,
its incapacity to offer anything so generic.3 For one thing, The Prelude
addresses itself not to the poet’s life but to his Mind and, even if that
mind’s making is revealed through life events, its material is something
altogether more elusive than is the stuff of autobiography. For another,
the subtitle, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, conveys, in that small detail of
the indefinite article, a gesture of humility that demonstrates complete
specialness:4 ‘a’ Poet, this Poet, can never be ‘the’ Poet whose attributes
are common to poets in general, or whose skills aim to be transferable
to others. Of the closing lines of ‘There was a Boy’ Coleridge memor-
ably remarked that, ‘had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of
Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out “Wordsworth!”.’â•›5 Even with
1
Griggs 1956–71:Â€vol. II:Â€955.
2
Lipking 1981:Â€70. Lipking takes as his starting point the pseudo-Virgilian openingÂ€– much-imitated
and often considered authenticÂ€– of The Aeneid:Â€‘Behind the story of arms and the man, another
insistently makes itself felt, the Virgilian story that begins with Ille egoÂ€– “I am the one.”’ (69).
3
Wordsworth’s career has been discussed by various recent commentators:Â€ Galperin 1989;
Schoenfield 1996; Pfau 1997; Trott 2003; Siskin 2006. See also accounts of the money Wordsworth
made from authorship in Douglas 1948 and L. Erikson 1990.
4
The subtitle was not, however, Wordsworth’s, but his widow’s.
5
Griggs 1956–71:Â€ vol. I:Â€ 453; the lines referred to are ‘that uncertain heaven, received / Into the
bosom of the steady lake’. By contrast, Seamus Heaney offers a notable reading of ‘There Was
a Boy’ precisely in terms of the transferable skills of a ‘poetic career’. Heaney identifies ‘three
275
276 Nicola Trott
no other cultural markers to orientate his reader, the Wordsworthian iden-
tity would declare itself unmistakablyÂ€– indeed, it is as though the very
potency of that identity makes it the only surviving life form in an other-
wise deserted land. That this poetic DNA should reveal itself especially
in language is only appropriate:Â€that is the code in which the poet works,
and of which this particular usage is the uncloneable signature. Coleridge
found another, equally hyperbolic, way of putting it when writing to
Robert Southey in 1803:Â€‘Wordsworth’s words’, he observed, ‘always mean
the whole of their possible Meaning.’6 Setting aside the improbability that
any poet’s words could always fulfil their potential so entirely, what stands
out is the insistence on this poet’s linguistic properties:Â€ ‘Wordsworth’s
words’ are especially his, we gather, in the sense that they are omniseman-
tic. Coleridge’s assertion stands out because it contradictsÂ€– and, in the
wake of the 1800 and 1802 Prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads, very deliberately
contradictsÂ€– the key argument that Wordsworth had made for poetry as
originating in ‘common life’ and as composed out of the ‘language really
used’ or ‘really spoken by men’;7 and in doing so it calls into question
the literary career that Wordsworth, half accidentally,8 half provocatively,
built out of that polemical stance. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads expressly
denies the poet the use of ‘a peculiar language’:Â€given that ‘Poets do not
write for Poets alone, but for men’, ‘he must express himself as other men
express themselves’ (Gill 2000:Â€608). Still more challengingly, the society
that is ‘chosen’ to keep the poet grounded in the ‘real’ is ‘Low and rustic
life’ (597). The loftiest claims are made for the language of such a society.
Nevertheless, by this account, ‘Wordsworth’s words’ are not his at all, or
are his only by virtue of their being in general circulation.
In setting out his ‘opposition’ to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge
later insists that, insofar as the peasant’s language is identical with the
degrees of poetic achievement’ and allegorizes ‘There Was a Boy’ ‘as a parable of these three
stages’. Stage one is emergence into craft-consciousness, the boy’s ‘fingers interwoven’ to make
the sound of owl-hooting; stage two is ‘the classically empowered poet’Â€ – art that ‘has found
ways by which distinctively personal subjects and emotional necessities can be made a common
possession of the reader’s’Â€ – and occurs in the poem ‘When the vale fills with the actual cries
of owls responding to the boy’s art’; stage three, which takes place after the owls have fallen
silent, is ‘that in which the poem’s absolute business is an unconceding pursuit of poetic insight
and poetic knowledge’. This last achievement can be arrived at only by passing through the first
and second stages, of ‘poetic making’ and ‘of social relation and emotional persuasion’ (Heaney
1988:Â€153–63).
6
Griggs 1956–71:Â€vol. II:Â€977. The words Coleridge has just ‘quoted’ as Wordsworth’s refer to his
daughter Sara Coleridge:Â€‘She feeds on Quietness, & “has the most truly celestial expression of
countenance, I ever beheld in a human Face.”’
7
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Gill 2000:Â€597, 602.
8
The late Wordsworth protested he ‘never cared a straw about the theory’ (Little 1975:Â€62 n. 101).
Wordsworth’s career prospects 277
poet’s, it is because it is ‘ordinary, or lingua communis’ and not because it
is ‘real’ or ‘rustic’; and that, for all higher uses, requiring Â�‘general terms’,
‘reflection on the acts of the mind itself’ or ‘moral and intellectual proc-
esses’, the language-gap between poet and peasant will be self-evident
and enormous.9 Granting all this, there is still very considerable resist-
ance in Wordsworth’s work to the ‘principle’ which Coleridge, looking
to Aristotle, requires it to uphold, namely ‘that poetry as poetry is essen-
tially ideal’ and ‘generic’ (Coleridge 1997:Â€ 204).10 The Preface to Lyrical
Ballads defines the Poet, at his most elemental, as ‘a man speaking to
men’ (Gill 2000:Â€603). Apropos of which, there again is that seemingly
modest indefinite article. For all the fact of his and their shared man-
hood, Wordsworth preserves the singularity of the poet, as against the
plurality of his audience. And the poetic effects are indeed singular. To
take Wordsworth’s language theory to its extreme, and Wordsworth for
a period does precisely that,11 is to find poetry not just in ‘the language
really spoken by men’ or by speakers of English (Gill 2000:Â€602), but in
the ‘Chatter, chatter, chatter’ of Harry Gill’s teeth,12 the ‘burr, burr, burr’
of an Idiot Boy’s lips,13 the ‘Bumming, bumming, bumming’ of a Tinker’s
patter;14 in a valley filled with the ‘long halloos, and screams, and echoes
loud’ of hooting owls,15 andÂ€– by still more comprehensive ‘sympathies’Â€–
in ‘things that hold / An inarticulate language’,16 phenomena for which no
audible sound-world exists at all, but which, to the poet who has learnt to
9
Biographia Literaria ch. 17 (Coleridge 1997:Â€211, 210).
10
As Coleridge would have been aware, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads had itself cited Aristotle to
similar effect, probably on his own authority:Â€‘Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that Poetry
is the most philosophic of all writing:Â€its object is truth, not individual and local, but general,
and operative’ (Gill 2000:Â€605).
11
See Barstow 1917.
12
‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ 4. Unless stated otherwise, all Wordsworth poems are quoted
from Gill 2000.
13
‘The Idiot Boy’ 115Â€– words regarded by Coleridge as unfortunate in that they only ‘assisted in
recalling’ to the reader ‘the disgusting images of ordinary, morbid idiocy’ (Coleridge 1997:Â€206).
Johnny’s percussive ‘noise’ starts at l. 19, ‘His lips with joy they burr at you’, takes up again at l.
107 and l. 387, and emerges in actual speech in the final stanza, ll. 460–1, where it is his ‘idiot’
wisdom that fuses the poem’s various elements in poetry.
14
Wordsworth cancelled The Tinker from the printer’s MS of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807),
and never afterwards published it (first printed, Hale White 1897:Â€ 67–8); but, to judge from
Rawnsley’s transcription of the talk of a former Rydal Mount gardener’s boy, the Tinker’s rhyth-
mical working song was humorously close to that of the poet himself:Â€‘out upon his gres walk …
he would start a bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, Stop; then bum, bum, bum reet down
till t’other end, and then he’d set down and git a bit o’ paper out and write a bit; and then he git
up, and bum, bum, bum, and goa on bumming for long enough … I suppose, ya kna, the bum-
ming helped him out a bit’ (Rawnsley 1903:Â€15–16).
15
‘There Was a Boy’ 14.
16
‘Not Useless Do I Deem’ 2–3; Gill 2000:Â€678.
278 Nicola Trott
discern ‘an active principle alive in all things’,17 are merely different aspects
of a single, universal ‘song’ (Prelude 2.431). That metaphysical ‘principle’
can lead to fits of evocatively gnostic abstractionÂ€– ‘And I would stand, /
Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are / The ghostly language of
the ancient earth’ (Prelude 2.326–8)Â€– but is equally tuneable to the sort of
demotic vocality that is found in the ballads (6.562–4; my emphasis):
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them.
Conversings such as these extend the concept of ‘real language’ (Gill
2000:Â€ 608) so far in the direction of the extra-linguistic as to amount,
at least potentially, to a private poetic idiom. This is an irony, albeit one
that has travelled light years away from the specialized Augustan diction
against which Wordsworth set his faceÂ€– and his Preface. The intersection
of Wordsworth’s ‘system’, as it was dubbed in the press, and Coleridge’s
doubts about the experiment he himself had started, would last
Wordsworth’s lifetime and beyond, becoming referred to by shorthand
as ‘the Wordsworth question’.18 In this respect, Wordsworth’s career is not
his either, but is that of modern poetry at large. Wordsworth is the very
model of a modern literarian, the model that claims to be wholly represen-
tative because utterly unique. It is his ‘peculiar grace’Â€– qualities which, to
his hostile critics, are straightforwardly peculiarÂ€– that has made him so
intensely indicative. The critical reaction to his apparently quixotic adven-
ture in his own time saw him mock-elected to the leadership of a ‘Lake
School’, and nowadays sees him charged with various sins of cultural or
historical commission or omission.19 The paradox can be scaled up, and
to do so is to encounter, if not Wordsworth exactly, then the epistemic
shift of which he is a partÂ€– the modern cult of individualism arising in a
pan-European order of things:Â€a Rousseauist tradition of autobiogÂ�raphy,
an Idealist philosophy of consciousness, a ‘Copernican revolution in
epistemology’.20 The Christian pilgrimage of Everyman morphs into the
autonomous journey of the Individual. But while saying these things may
describe important turnings in Wordsworth’s career pathÂ€– his discovery
17
‘There Is an Active Principle Alive in All Things’ 1; Gill 2000:Â€676.
18
Simpson 1993:Â€152.
19
Claims about the agency of History by new historicist critics or about alternative Â�centres
of Romantic authorshipÂ€ – Byron or BlakeÂ€ – have typically been made in contestation of
Wordsworth.
20
Abrams 1953:Â€58, a phrase routinely associated with the philosophy of Kant and sometimes attrib-
uted to him.
of ‘the evanescenece of any subject’ for poetry ‘but subjectivity’,21 for
instanceÂ€– it does not ‘instantly scream out “Wordsworth!”’.
The limits imposed or invited by Wordsworth’s oddity or individual-
ity are if anything most obvious in places where the poetry is most aware
of its duty in embracing universals. ‘Points have we all of us within our
souls / Where all stand single’, the Prelude poet declares, having led his
readers ‘Up to an eminence’ from which the grand narrative of the work
thus far is made visible (Prelude 3.186–7, 169, 171–4):
Of Genius, Power,
Creation and Divinity itself
I have been speaking, for my theme has been
What passed within me.
A superb nonchalance ends by compressing the whole of the ‘heroic argu-
ment’ (3.182)Â€– ‘Genius, Power, / Creation and Divinity itself’Â€– into the
single personal pronoun ‘me’; but this ‘me’ then opens up again, in subse-
quent lines, to include a whole world of others:
Points have we all of us within our souls
Where all stand single.
These lines adopt the first-person plural of Wordsworth’s most inclusive
pronouncements; but, as the syntactical inversionÂ€– and inverted footÂ€–
suggest, the ‘Points’ themselves have priority and they each by definition
cannot be occupied by any other body. And yet, the jostling of these irre-
ducible experiencesÂ€– ‘Points’Â€– and plural pronounsÂ€– ‘we … us … our’Â€–
memorably elbows them onto the same ground, ‘Where all stand single’.
In the space between one line ending and the next beginning, ‘all of us’
have found room to ‘stand single’, a crowded universe of exclusive selves.
It is characteristic that the ‘Points’ might be rhetorical or literary as well
as autobiographical or epistemological; and characteristic, too, that at
‘Points’ like these, the declamation of summative wisdomÂ€– such as might
be appropriate to the summit of a literary careerÂ€– is so faithful to intri-
cacies of Wordsworth’s own making, to the perplexity of a poetry that is
seeking to generalize that which originates in moments of self-colloquy
‘far hidden from the reach of words’ (3.185), yet which must be held in
common if the claim to epic vision is to have validity and to achieve any-
thing like a mass communication (‘Home at Grasmere’ 897–9, 901–2):
Possessions have I wholly, solely, mine,
Something within, which yet is shared by none,
â•‡ Bloom 1970:Â€8.

21
280 Nicola Trott
Not even the nearest to me and most dear …
I would impart it; I would spread it wide,
Immortal in the world which is to come.
At one level, the paradox of the exclusive and the exemplary becomes
merely a problem, and one that is readily solved. Alongside the vatic seer,
who rejoices in the gifts of the spirit, is the psychological materialist who
knows that he shares his mental equipment with everyone else. The two
can co-exist in the space of as many lines. While the former has to ‘make /
Breathings for incommunicable powers’, the latter can immediately offer
the normative qualification, ‘Yet each man is a memory to himself’ (Prelude
3.187–9). That being the case, the precise contents of each man’s memoryÂ€–
his ‘Points’ or ‘spots of time’Â€ – are exclusive ‘Possessions’, but the fact of
their ‘existence’ is necessarily universal (11.258):Â€ ‘And, therefore’, the poet
comforts himself, ‘I am not heartless; for there’s not a man / That lives
who hath not had his godlike hours’ (3.190–2).22 A Miltonic inspiration
assures the poet of his special ascendancy, a Hartleian associationism of his
ordinary mentality. Preoccupied as it is with poetic authority, the Preface
to Lyrical Ballads expounds at some length the psychological theory that
supports it. The poet’s capacity to speak intelligibly to others derives from
his observing the ‘general’ laws of the mind:Â€‘thoughts’ are the means by
which our current ‘influxes of feeling’ are ‘modified and directed’, but are
also ‘the representatives of all our past feelings’, and it is ‘by contemplating
the relation of these general representatives to each other [that] we discover
what is really important to men’ (Gill 2000:Â€598). The innumerable layer-
ings of thought upon feeling constitute ‘general representatives’, and these
in turn ensure that the poet himself becomes a representative figure, whose
every emotion ‘will be connected with important subjects’ (Gill 2000:Â€598).
Representativeness is placed at the heart of a subjective art-form. The beauty
of the system, for Wordsworth’s poetry, is that it combines a necessarily
general psychology with an equally individual set of results. Its weakness,
for Wordsworth’s critics, is on the contrary that the poet’s appeal to ‘Moods
of [His] Own Mind’ appears arbitrary, his choice of subjects ‘uninteresting’
and his ‘associations’ about them ‘forced, strained, and unnatural’.23
22
The tension remains however:Â€ compare for instance the question posed by Wordsworth’s
Fenwick Note to the Ode:Â€‘Who has not felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own
mind?’ with his January 1815 letter to Catherine Clarkson on the same:Â€‘A Reader who has not
a vivid recollection of these feelings having existed in his mind cannot understand that poem’
(Wordsworth 1970:Â€189).
23
All three quotations refer to Poems, in Two Volumes (1807):Â€Wordsworth’s subheading to a group
of thirteen works in vol. II; Robert Southey to Anna Seward, December 1807 (quoted, E. Smith
1932:Â€84); Francis Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review (Jeffrey 1807:Â€218).
That antagonistic response to Wordsworth was fixed by the Poems, in
Two Volumes (1807), which were read and reviewed in light of the theory
provided by the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The comparison of the two
publications had been deliberately encouraged, in that the title page
of the 1807 Poems advertised that they were ‘By William Wordsworth,
Author of The Lyrical Ballads’, and the printer had been instructed that
the volumes themselves were ‘to be presented uniform with the Lyrical
Ballads’ (quoted by Jones, Wordsworth 1987:Â€ x). According to Patrick
Cheney, ‘a “life” becomes a “career” when a writer can be seen to plot his
time on earth through a sequence of literary works that stage both his
and the work’s development’.24 Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other
Poems (1800) and Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) are self-consciously the
staging-posts of Wordsworth’s early and middle career. It is at this period,
too, that the relationship between the ‘representative’ and the ‘peculiar’
Wordsworths is at its most tense or intense. One rather surprising aspect
of that relationship, and one which may be of special interest in a study
tracing the literary career from its Classical roots, involves the particular
use that Wordsworth makes of Latin sources.
The career-making volumes of 1800 and of 1807 are identified as such
by means of Classical devices. Subsequent to the jointly authored and
anonymously published Lyrical Ballads (1798), the first and second major
publications of Wordsworth’s solo career are graced by Latin epigraphs.
Few literary conventions are as career-minded as the epigraph; and Latin,
at least in the age of Wordsworth, is the language of public announce-
ment. In 1800Â€– and again in the 1802 and 1805 editionsÂ€– the title pages
of Lyrical Ballads bore the words ‘Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane,
tuum!’ Only in 1898 was the source of the epigraph traced, to a piece
by John Selden reproduced in Anderson’s British Poets.25 The Latin text
from which he in turn had quoted was tracked down as late as 1980;26
but its transmission through Selden, a seventeenth-century jurist, has lent
credit to the identification of Papinian with the third-century Roman
lawyer Aemilius Papinianus. An alternative candidate has recently been
proposed, by David Chandler, in the shape of Papinius Statius, the Latin
poet of the Silver Age who had come to be ‘associated with an elaborate,
24
Cheney 2002a:Â€8.
25
Foreword prefixed by Selden to Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1898:Â€lix).
26
To a verse epistle by a sixteenth-century Dutch writer named Jan Dousa the Elder (Binns
1980:Â€223).
282 Nicola Trott
mannered style of writing’.27 H. W. Garrod had already plausibly suggested
that the Papinian in question would be a Popean, or ‘hanger-on of the
school of Pope’;28 and, given that the periodicals, those arbiters of a largely
Augustan contemporary taste, often had lawyers among their reviewers,
it is conceivable that in the minds of Wordsworth and Coleridge at least
there was a deliberate connection to be drawn between the two Classical
faces of Papinian. The epigraph has been variously translated, ‘How abso-
lutely not after your liking, O learned jurist!’, ‘absolutely worthless in
comparison with your genius, Papinian!’, and ‘worthless and insignificant
according to your taste, Papinian!’.29 However it is rendered, and what-
ever its antecedents, this title-page exclamation demands attention. It is
the mark of the avant-garde artist, just as the Preface is his manifesto,
and with its exclamatory punctuation (think of Look! We Have Come
Through!) abruptly and intentionally utters a challenge to the reader. Like
other consciously modern art movements since, Lyrical Ballads aims to
attract and repel in equal measure.
In 1800, ‘Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!’ excites curios-
ity in those who dare and inspires dislike in those whom propriety for-
bids. There is considerable irony in the fact that a learned language is
used to frame a work which addresses itself to ‘real language’ in ‘rustic
life’; but the intention is at once to shock and to influence an educated
reading public. In 1807, by contrast, a very different note is struck. The
title pages of Poems, in Two Volumes feature these lines from ‘Culex’, a
poem traditionally thought to be Virgil’s, Posterius graviore sono tibi Musa
loquetur / Nostra:Â€dabunt cum securos mihi tempora fructus, or, ‘Hereafter
shall our Muse speak to thee in deeper tones, when the seasons yield me
their fruits in peace’ (Wordsworth 1987:Â€ xv). This epigraph was origin-
ally to have had a gloss in an Advertisement which sought to place the
‘short Poems, of which these Volumes consist’ in the context ‘of a work
of length and labour’ not yet completed (Wordsworth 1987:Â€145). Written
while Coleridge was staying with the Wordsworths during their residence
at Coleorton, the Advertisement was clearly a response to the renewed
pressure he was exerting on Wordsworth to abandon ‘small pieces’30 and
27
Chandler 2002:Â€ 35. Chandler 2002:Â€ 40 n. 4 summarizes the argument between scholars over
whether or not ‘Papinian’ is also a coterie joke on the part of Wordsworth and Coleridge against
the Scottish lawyer Sir James MackintoshÂ€– a private reference first mooted by Hutchinson.
28
Garrod 1923:Â€152.
29
Hutchinson in Wordsworth and Coleridge 1898:Â€ lix; Mason in Wordsworth and Coleridge
1992:Â€95.
30
Wordsworth to Scott, Wordsworth 1969:Â€96.
return to the philosophic epic that they both regarded as his true poetic
destiny. By allusion if not by name, the Advertisement referred to the
unfinished business of The Recluse and to the epic-derived judgement of
poetic achievement that had been a standing reproach to Wordsworth
since at least 1803.31 The Advertisement seems to have been set up in proof
but then deleted, while the epigraph from ‘Culex’, which was not in the
printer’s manuscript, was inserted at proof stage instead (Wordsworth
1987:Â€145, xii). This choice of epigraph, it might be said, also contrives to
tell the story of the poet’s career, but from an impersonal point of view.
The Muse that ‘Hereafter shall … speak to thee in deeper tones’ notifies
the reader that there are greater works to come, that the poet is versed in
the hierarchy of poetic genres, and that he labours within the long shadow
that is cast by epic example. Although the Virgilian lines are quoted from
the original, readers of Latin could be relied upon to know both that they
have an English version by Spenser, ‘Virgil’s Gnat’,32 and that the Classical
shorthand for career progression is the ‘rota Vergiliana or Wheel of Virgil’,
whereby the writer ‘progressively matur[es] from lower to higher forms
along a temporal life span’.33 In this brief text, then, Wordsworth alludes
to the entire Classical structure of the poetic career and to his own linea-
tion within the epic tradition that begins with Virgil and is descended in
English through Spenser and Milton.
The epigraphs of the 1800 and 1807 publications are distinct car-
eer markers. In 1800, the poet claims to be ahead of his time, in 1807
he appears to be marking time. While the one gives notice of arrival, the
other gives promise of more to come. In the first, the poet bursts upon the
literary scene; in the second, he craves his audience’s patience. The first
is a challenge to literary orthodoxy; the second an apology for poetry, or
poetry of a particular kind. David Ginsberg has allocated the genre of
the shorter 1807 Poems to ‘the ancient rhetorical tradition of “adoxogra-
phy,” or the praise of “things without honor.”’34 That hardly reflects the
‘true pleasure’ Wordsworth took in these works (Wordsworth 1969:Â€96),
31
Viz. Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, early 1804, echoing explicit criticism voiced in
October 1803 by Coleridge:Â€ ‘I have great things in meditation, but as yet I have only been
doing little ones’ (Wordsworth 1967:Â€436)Â€– a letter which goes on to mention his attempt at
three long and ambitious works, later known as The Prelude, The Recluse and The Excursion.
32
The Spenserian link is explicit in Pelion and OssaÂ€– a poem Wordsworth cancelled in proof from
Poems (1807), along with a note identifying its reference to Virgil’s Gnat 21–4 (Wordsworth
1987:Â€183).
33
Cheney 2002a:Â€7–8; and discussed in the present volume by Maggie Kilgour.
34
Ginsberg 1995:Â€112. See also Curran 1986:Â€234–53.
284 Nicola Trott
the weight he attributed to them ‘taken collectively’,35 or the fertile idio-
syncrasy of the lyrics themselves, but it does indicate their Classical
precedence in the English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies which he had been reading, chiefly in Anderson, and which also
devoted itself to apparently trivial subjects. In Spenser’s rendering of the
Virgilian ‘Culex’, the ‘excuse’ for ‘This Gnats small Poeme’ is ‘that th’
whole history / Is but a jest’, not to be taken in earnest or judged too ser-
iously either (‘Virgil’s Gnat’ 4–6). Wordsworth practises by his epigraph
a similar sort of deflection of judgement, while his lyrics find the poet
‘at ease’ among his favourite objects and occupations and content to
‘weave a web of similies’, ‘As is the humour of the game, / While I am
gazing’.36 Yet to attend to that strain alone is to under-estimate the self-
assertiveness that matches the self-protectiveness or playfulness of these
poems. Wordsworth’s daisy with its ‘function apostolical’ lays a weight
of Latinate elaborateness upon a feminine rhyme scheme that will not
keep within the ostensibly ‘unassuming Common-place’.37 The poet who
‘drink[s] out of an humbler urn / A lowlier pleasure’ is also a virtuoso rhet-
orician agilely linking ‘high and low’.38 And the volumes are full of select
self-images of his performance:Â€ the butterfly ‘Historian of my Infancy!’
(‘To a Butterfly’ 4), the linnet, ‘Presiding Spirit … perch’d in ecstasies’
(‘The Green Linnet’ 14, 27), the stockdove’s ‘Song, the Song for me!’ (‘O
Nightingale! thou surely art’ 20), the cuckoo’s ‘wandering Voice’ whose
elusiveness makes the earth itself a poetic or ‘unsubstantial, faery place’
(‘To the Cuckoo’ 4, 31). The daisy, ‘The Poet’s darling’,39 and the celandine
or ‘Common Pilewort’, his notice of which Wordsworth considered a first,
prompted the strongest analogies with his own wayward poetic progress:
Thou wilt be more belov’d by men
In times to come; thou not in vain
Art Nature’s Favorite.
‘To the Daisy’, ‘In youth’, 78–80
35
Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807, referring specifically to the ‘Moods of My Own
Mind’ section, and already through the Beaumonts conscious that the 1807 Poems are fated to
appear ‘very trifling … to many’, but asking if, ‘taken collectively’, they do not address a ‘subject
eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects in nature derive from the predominance of
certain affections more or less permanent, more or less capable of salutary renewal in the mind
of the being contemplating these objects? This is poetic, and essentially poetic, and why? because
it is creative’ (Wordsworth and Wordsworth 1969:Â€147). The career move of taking a collective or
‘ensemble’ view of a poet’s work is noted by Lipking 1981:Â€70.
36
‘To the Daisy’, ‘With little here’, 10, 15–16.
37
‘To the Same Flower’, ‘Bright Flower’, 23; ‘To the Daisy’, ‘With little here’, 5.
38
‘To the Daisy’, ‘In youth’, 51–2; ‘To the Small Celandine’, 20.
39
‘To the Daisy’, ‘In youth’, 32.
Prophet of delight and mirth,
Scorn’d and slighted upon earth!
Herald of a mighty band,
Of a joyous train ensuing,
Singing at my heart’s command,
In the lanes my thoughts pursuing,
I will sing …
‘To the Small Celandine’, 57–63
The fuller complexity of the covert ambitiousness of Poems, in Two

Volumes emerges only with the very last poem of the collection, the ‘Ode’
(later titled ‘Ode:Â€Intimations of Immortality’), and in the Latin Â�epigraph
that was affixed to it. Paulo majora canamus, ‘Let us sing a loftier strain’,40
is taken from the invocation to the Muses of Sicily or pastoral at the
opening of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, which prophesies, in the birth of a
wondrous child, a future ruler over a new golden age. The immortality
glimpsed in Wordsworth’s poem is very much harder won;41 but the odic
epigraph, which stands on a page of its own, makes for an answering voice
to the epigraph on the title page, Virgil countering Virgil (or pseudo-
Virgil), and relating to it rather as does antistrophe to strophe in the ode
form itself. That suggestion of a deliberate counter-voice is corroborated
by the fact that this epigraph, too, like the title-page quotation, was added
in proof (Wordsworth 1987:Â€xii). At any event, the Poems that begin by
protesting their modesty end on a consciously high note. His inclusion
of Virgil’s invocation of poetic power allows Wordsworth to leave off the
1807 volumes with a suggestion of the heights to which he aspires and
which his title-page epigraph had foretold. In this limited sense he enacts
the promise of his own Poems within the cycle of the poems themselves.
By this astonishing feat of Pindaric ode-writing, Wordsworth in mid car-
eer masters a form that in the hierarchy of genres is midway between
lyric and epic. The latter is a genre which, in one formÂ€ – that of the
Coleridge-commissioned encyclopediac RecluseÂ€– he feels himself unable
or incompetent to write, but which, in another formÂ€– the Prelude to that
philosophical epicÂ€– he has already accomplished in thirteen books. This
achievement was hidden from Wordsworth’s contemporaries and would
remain so until shortly after his death. The Latin epigraphs to the 1807
volumes both acknowledge and conceal this hidden career. However, the
volumes’ reception, combined with their very slow sale, also resulted in a
40
Gill 2000:Â€714. Wordsworth 1987:Â€180 prefers ‘Let us sing of somewhat more exalted things’.
41
See Manning 1983:Â€526–40 for a fine discussion of the ‘Ode’ in relation to its different epigraphs
in 1807 and 1815.
286 Nicola Trott
profound career break. The break in the career is twofold:Â€Wordsworth
was dissuaded from publishing anything further until 1814, a seven-year
silence; and he was persuaded into a continuous revision of his earlier
work in the direction of a less ‘peculiar’ style, a trajectory that has been
described as a ‘regression’ to Classicism42 and has traditionally been sum-
marised as ‘Wordsworth’s anti-climax’.43
The broken career is the public shape that Wordsworth’s peculiarity
takes. Wordsworth criticism began by taking sides in this matter, and as
often as not has gone on doing so ever since. Until quite recently, there
has been an academy-led interest in the ‘professional’ career, the poetry in
its public relations to law, contract, copyright, economics, cultural pro-
duction, or to the Victorian age in which it came to prominence. But
it was the hidden career, the performances Wordsworth did not publish
and which have since been painstakingly edited, that occupied much of
the later twentieth century’s estimate of his writing. This hidden career
made him as exemplary a figure as, for different reasons, he was to the
Victorians and moderns. Each critical era, perhaps, makes a career in its
own image. For Mill, or Arnold, Wordsworth was a salvational force, who
showed a path back from alienation to psychic and emotional health. For
A. C. Bradley at the start of the twentieth century, Wordsworth was on
the contrary a means of seeking out alienation, if by that was meant the
power ‘to dispense with custom and surroundings’ in order to ‘startle and
confuse with intimations of infinity’.44 In this broadly idealist tradition of
criticism, anti-climax, like other sorts of Wordsworthian deprivation, is
no simple failure but rather the pre-condition of a ‘peculiar’ and solitary
greatness.
42
Hartman 1987:Â€ 93. Kneale 1999:Â€ 4–6 offers a useful summary of the critical literature on
Wordsworth’s Classicism, on which see further Harding 1995.
43
Sperry 1935.
44
Bradley 1909:Â€144; cf. 101:Â€Wordsworth’s ‘poetic experience’ is ‘original, and something more …
it is, for good or evil or both, peculiar’.
E pi l o gu e
Inventing a lifeÂ€–Â€a personal view

of literary careers
Lawrence Lipking
There is an old story about an analytic philosopher who became

Â�exasperated with the shocking neglect of history in his field. He decided
to give a lecture on the Meaning of Truth, and prefaced it by saying that,
this time, he would go back to the very origins of the problem. Then the
Â�lecture proper began:Â€‘In 1910 Bertrand Russell …’
A part of me finds that story quite sympathetic. Reflecting on the schol-
arly field of literary careers, I might follow the same route back to the very
origins of the problem. The study of poetic careers began one January day
in 1981, in Santa Barbara, California, when I gave a talk that drew on my
forthcoming book The Life of the Poet, and that evening took part in an
informal seminar where Richard Helgerson described his work in pro-
gress on laureate poets. Together we made history that dayÂ€– though no
one then seemed to notice. Eventually our ranks would swell and others
would join the conversation, until a whole new discourse was born.1 Or
so goes my story, which seems as plausible as most that scholars tell about
their own importance.
But even in a personal view, that history might be just a bit self-Â�serving.
Perhaps one ought to go back a littleÂ€– say three millennia or so. Instead
of starting in Santa Barbara, then, the story would begin on the mountain
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Richard Helgerson. In his introduction to European
1
Literary Careers (Cheney 2002a:Â€4), Patrick Cheney credits The Life of the Poet (Lipking 1981) and
Self-Crowned Laureates (Helgerson 1983) as twin founders of the field. Cheney’s account of this
joint ‘invention’ prompted a correspondence in which I elaborated many of the ideas and recol-
lections that inform this paper; I am grateful for his interest and suggestions. In Self-Crowned
Laureates, Helgerson suggests that the two books are ‘complementary accounts of the same phe-
nomenon’:Â€‘He emphasizes the individual poetic utterance, the parole; I emphasize the literary
system, the langue’ (Helgerson 1983:Â€153 n.). A fuller chronicle of modern career criticism would
have to mention many more pioneers. For instance, as early as 1979 Wayne C. Booth identified
‘career-authors’ as one of the five main types of authorship (writers, dramatized authors, implied
authors, career-authors, and public characters) and observed that:Â€‘Some authors … work as hard
at planning the trajectory of their artistic careers as they work at their actual writing’ (Booth
1979:Â€270–1).
287
288 Lawrence Lipking
of Helicon. It was there that the shepherd Hesiod, while quietly minding
his lambs, was accosted by Muses, who first insulted his greedy guts and
then gave him an olive staff and a voice, so that he could spend the rest
of his life singing their praises. That is his story, at least; he tells it in
both the Theogony and Works and Days. But one might note a slightly
different emphasis in those two poems. The poet of the Theogony might
be described as a vates, or less nicely as a ventriloquist’s dummy; involun-
tarily inspired, he sings whatever words have been put in his mouth. But
the Muses have taught the poet of Works and Days to sing for himself; he
crosses the sea to compete against other poets at funeral games, and there
wins a prize. One theme drives this book:Â€a man must work hard for a
living; and poetry, evidently, is Hesiod’s work. If he has been called to a
prophetic vocation, he also has made a career.
Two fundamental points emerge from Hesiod’s story (whether or not
we believe it).2 The first is the peculiar relation between composing poems
and making a living. To put it bluntly, the poetry business has never paid
off. Very few poets historically have earned their keep through the poems
they create. Other artists at least produce some tangible artefacts to be
sold:Â€a portrait, an urn, a shield. Poets rely on less solid goods, or on the
pleasure of those who read and feed them. Hesiod competes for applause,
until some other favourite comes along. From a material point of view,
the history of literary careers is a subset of the history of patronage, or
later of print culture. Hence ‘career criticism’ always involves some ten-
sion between the internal shape of a careerÂ€ – its movement or progress
from one sort of work to anotherÂ€– and the external conditions that allow
an author to function or just stay alive. Many do not stay alive. Hesiod,
like Orpheus and Osip Mandelstam and plenty of others, was killed when
he fell in with the wrong crowd.
The second point is the strange disparity between two versions of the
poet, as inspired bard or as master artistÂ€ – Virgil’s sibyl, or Virgil the
craftsman, who each day patiently licks a few lines into shape. How does
someone become a poet? Traditionally with a visit from the muse, or
today we might say with bi-polar disorder; against one’s will, the rage to
compose descends. The ancients knew all about it. In his famous epis-
tle to a young would-be poet, Horace offered prudent advice:Â€ submit
all your writing to some wise critic, then put it away for nine years (Ars
386–9). But The Art of Poetry starts with a crazy painter who mates people
with horses, and ends with a crazy poet, cursed with an itch that drives
â•‡ C. G. Thomas 2005:Â€88–127 examines contested traditions about Hesiod’s life and work.
2
Epilogue:Â€Inventing a life 289
him to rave at passers-by and hang on like a leech till gorged with blood.
Evidently most poets are mad. To counter that charge, Horace and legions
of other well-endowed craftsmen insist on the dignity of their profession.
Spewing verses does not make one a poet, they say; the master of a discip-
line is always in control. This argument has given much comfort to poets.
A career involves rational planning; good training; a logical progress; a
sense of the work as a whole or oeuvre. It does not depend on whimsical
spirits who strike in the night. No wonder that authors and critics prefer
to believe that writing can be a career.
Nevertheless, few poets achieve that blessed steady state. A sceptic
might view the career ideal as a convenient illusion, a way of imposing
some sense of order on the chance inspirations that come and go during
a lifetime. In retrospect, a work called The Prelude can crown a project
under construction for fifty years; and thus the antechamber becomes the
temple. But critics took a long time to see it as anything other than anti-
climactic. Nor do the careers of most poets make sense, even posthu-
mously. Virgil’s Wheel set the pattern for only a tiny number of heroes.3
By contrast Wordsworth, in a black moment (he was about to get mar-
ried), accounted for hundreds, past and to come:
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.4
The vast majority of British working-class poets, the ‘children of nature’
from Stephen Duck and Mary Leapor to Robert Bloomfield and John
Clare, fall into that track (though not all began in gladness). From this
point of view, the prospect of a literary career might seem a fiction foisted
on gullible, needy young people. More grandly, successful authors join
an exclusive club, restricted to one or two new members each generation.
Like other professions, that of the laureate poet engages in a conspiracy
against the public, relieving it from any need to pay attention to the less
well off or merely talented. The field of career criticism is in this regard an
agent of the conspiracy, united against leeches and sibyls. Poetry, we col-
lectively say, can make lives meaningful. And insofar as scholars devote
themselves to that discipline, it makes their lives meaningful too.
Thus far, however, my survey of the field has centred on poets
rather than scholars, as if it were Hesiod and Horace and Petrarch and
Wordsworth, rather than modern critics, who invented this discourse.
On Virgil’s supposed creation of a model career, see Theodorakopoulos 1997.

3
‘Resolution and Independence’, 48–9 (Gill 2000:Â€262).

4
That emphasis is quite intentional; for I do think that career criticism first
belonged to poets. As The Life of the Poet argues, ‘it is through rereading
their own work, discovering the hidden meanings sown by their younger
selves, that poets grow’ (Lipking 1981:Â€xiii), and such acts of interpretation
also shape the paths they follow to the end. The role of scholars is therefore
recreative; we try to understand careers as poets once did, and to retrace
their steps. Much modern theory has been contemptuous of authors’ self-
understandings or conscious intentions. Randall Jarrell once ridiculed
critics who do not care what poets say about poems:Â€‘if a pig wandered up
to you during a bacon-judging contest, you would say impatiently, “Go
away, pig! What do you know about bacon?”’ (Jarrell 1953:Â€66–67). But as
René Wellek pointed out, ‘this is literally true of the pig. It does not know
anything about bacon’ and could not appraise it. One would not make
an elephant Professor of Zoology, Wellek concludes (Wellek 1967:Â€100).
Since then many critics have gone much further; like vegans, they would
never touch bacon and speak not of pigs but pig-functions. Yet poets, I
venture, can be quite articulate about what they bring forth. Through
most of western history, at least since Horace, they have been among the
most influential critics. In England in particular, they dominate the crit-
ical tradition:Â€Sidney, Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot and so
many more. This point is so obvious that I feel embarrassed to make it.
Yet lately it has not seemed obvious at all. Poets still write intelligently
about poetry and about their careers; reviews of poetry are written almost
exclusively by members of the clan. But poet-critics no longer figure in
the landscape of critical theory. In the early 1980s I was commissioned
to write a piece on ‘Poet-Critics’ for The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, Volume VII:Â€Modernism and the New Criticism. The piece lay
in a drawer for a couple of decades. By the time it was published, in 2000,
the subject must have seemed dated, a historical curiosity, like the manual
typewriter on which it was composed. Volume VIII of the series, From
Formalism to Poststructuralism, had already appeared in 1995, without any
hint that poet-critics had existed lately or ever existed, as my piece was
able to note (Lipking 2000:Â€466–7).5 The same is true of recent antholo-
gies, not only of Literary Theory but of Contemporary Literary CriticismÂ€–
no poet-critics there. Thus modern criticism, once organized around a
revolution in poetics, now dangles from developments in linguistics,
Â�philosophy, cultural studies and psychoanalysis.
Vol. IX of the series, Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives

5
(Knellwolf and Norris 2001), also excludes poet-critics.

Career criticism, by and large, has been more attached to poetics and
to the past. One reason, of course, is that so much of it is occupied with
Classical texts as well as what, in this context, we still might call the
Renaissance and not the Early Modern. Good literary historians cannot
abandon their ties to tradition. But perhaps career critics are also accus-
tomed to listening hard to poets. As a matter of fact, The Life of the Poet
evolved as an offshoot or cast-off of a much larger manuscript on poet-
critics. Eventually some chapters bloated so much that they had to be
given a room of their own. The traces of that primal manuscript can still
be detected, I think, not only in my book but in some later work on lit-
erary careers. The Life of the Poet itself has had two modest careers:Â€one as
an occasional influence on scholars; the other as a master plan for poets.
The poets, on the whole, have been more loyal. Regularly a sheaf of poems
arrives by mail or email, in which a well-wisher suggests that he or she
amazingly fits my guidelines and asks what to do now. I am grateful for
the attention, of course, and try not to mention my book’s gloomy dic-
tum, that most poets fail. At any rate, whatever their talents, these readers
offer hope and a faith in the future. The idea of a career, for poets, is no
curiosity, but still a living enterprise.
From my own perspective, as a literary historian and critic rather than a
poet, the field of career criticism arose, or perhaps resumed, as a response
to two contrary movements in the 1960s and 70s. One might call them
historicism and anti-historicism. Anti-historicists included both formalists
and structuralists, as well as early poststructuralists; or as we called them
then, New Critics and deconstructionists (those labels now seem quaint).
What all these varying schools shared, despite their dramatic differences,
was an effort to read texts divorced from stories about authorial inten-
tion or historical contexts. New Critics developed techniques to analyse
anonymous poemsÂ€– poems, that is, reduced to I. A. Richards’ ‘protoÂ�cols’,
discussed without reference to names and dates and origins and footnote
information (Richards 1929). Structuralists and poststructuralists devel-
oped techniques to analyse poems as dehumanized pieces of language,
under Heidegger’s slogan ‘Die Sprache spricht, nicht der Mensch’ (appar-
ently the agent who spoke for National Socialism in the 1930s was not
a person but language itself).6 Many of these close readings were tech-
nically brilliant. But their triumphs were won at the cost of the many
questions they did not ask:Â€ not only questions about what authors had
6
Heidegger’s lectures on language, Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959), have been translated by Peter
Hertz (Heidegger 1971).
meant but also questions about the worlds and times and minds through
which poems pass. The cleverest readings of Cleanth Brooks and Roman
Jakobson and Paul de Man often left me hungry. Like many others, I
wanted readings that were saturatedÂ€ – alive not only to the intricacies
of language and form but also to the situations and contexts that are so
deeply woven into any kind of writing. History is not external to poems;
it leaves its mark in every thread of the fabric.
Yet historicism did not seem to be the answer. The critique that anti-
historicists had mountedÂ€ – that literary scholarship had long been in
thrall to a literal-minded philology, preoccupied with source materÂ�ials
and biographical detailsÂ€ – still rang true in the 1960s. When Roland
Barthes accused academic criticism of ‘a kind of analogical determin-
ism, according to which the details of a given work must resemble the
details of the author’s life’, etc.,7 he may have been unfair, but he did
describe the ideology behind much of my own graduate training. Nor
did a broader historicism, which interpreted individual works as expres-
sions of the thought of their timeÂ€– Courtly Love; the Elizabethan World
Picture; the Mirror and the Lamp; the Revolt of the MassesÂ€– escape from
similar charges of determinism. Specific authors and texts always slipped
through the mesh. Some of the great philologists, such as Erich Auerbach,
Ernst Robert Curtius and Leo Spitzer, undoubtedly managed to combine
immense historical learning with acute and refined close readings. But
they were rare, and the culture that nourished them had already broken
apart. When P. O. Kristeller looked back on his career, he compared it
to the ride across Lake Constance; the ice that sustained him had melted
(Kristeller 1990). A new historicism was called for. And of course it soon
came. In an essay written in 1984, ‘Life, Death, and Other Theories’,
I associated Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) with
Self-Crowned Laureates and The Life of the Poet as books that redefined the
author by conceiving identity as the scenario for a programme of action,
within the social and historical circumstances that enabled a possible self
(Lipking 1985:Â€188). Perhaps that was too optimistic. New historicist read-
ings often turned out to be no less deterministic than the old. But at their
best they did provide new ways of looking at careers and interrogating the
texts and contexts that shaped them.
Some earlier critical and scholarly works also went into my personal
habits of thinking about careers. One was W. Jackson Bate’s very mov-
ing biography, John Keats (1963). That book, along with The Burden of
â•‡ Barthes 1971:Â€433; originally published in 1963.

7
the Past and the English Poet (1970), and to some extent Bate’s anthol-
ogy Criticism:Â€The Major Texts and his books on Johnson and Coleridge,
examined the lifework of authors in terms of two questions that no ambi-
tious writer could keep from asking:Â€what has been done? what is there
left to do? Those questions have haunted me too. Taken seriously, they
rearrange the history of literature as a series of projects, in which each new
age or writer responds to the past by gathering in what has been done and
charting a new direction. That view of literary history is not altogether
novel; to some extent it had been anticipated, for instance, by one of my
own teachers, M. H. Abrams. But career criticism has found fresh ways to
explore it. When Harold Bloom dramatically and violently recast Bate’s
questions, in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), he made the history of poetry
intensely personalÂ€ – a series of agons, not a succession. Some reviewers
of The Life of the Poet suspected that Bloom had influenced me. I do not
think so; nor am I conscious of feeling anxious about it. But like everyone
who ponders the struggles of poets, both of us do take up again the bur-
den of the past.
My own work, along with that of most later career critics, departs
from both Bate’s and Bloom’s in three crucial, interrelated aspects. The
first is their devotion to Freud. Bate admires his timeless insights into
a universal human nature, akin to Samuel Johnson’s; heroes such as
Johnson, Coleridge and Keats are valuable because they represent ‘most
of us’, the driven, grasping, often tormented selves that Freud described
as the human condition. Bloom embraces and generalizes the Oedipus
Complex; in his view we suffer most because we have not created our-
selves, and all strong writers must forge original selves, even at the cost of
killing their fathers (Bloom himself has killed many critical fathers, not
excluding Yahweh the Creator). These Freuds are not my guide. I do not
believe that his wisdom is timeless, nor does patricide appeal much to me
(as I once argued, Oedipus did not want to kill his father and marry his
mother; the problem that rules his life is that, abandoned at birth, he does
not know who he is (Lipking 1988:Â€ 19–20)). Insofar as Freud does cast
light on literary careers, his ideas seem most useful in Erik Erikson’s ver-
sions of identity and the life cycle, which draw on the existential account
of life as a series of projects; the life of the poet might be a project either
for wholeness or death.8
My second departure from Bate and Bloom concerns their investment
in greatness. Bate sinks himself so deeply into his heroes that their causes
â•‡ E. H. Erikson 1959. On life as a project for death, see Jaspers 1955.
8
become his ownÂ€– or vice-versa. However inspiring, these identifications
tend to shut out rival views or ‘minor’ poets and critics. Bloom famously
favours ‘strong misreadings’ over the craven submission to others that
scars poetic and academic correctness; only the strong will survive. This
homage to genius certainly simplifies the study of careers; for instance,
one can pass directly from Milton to Blake and Wordsworth without
having to pause at Pope or Thomson or Gray or Cowper or Charlotte
Smith. Yet sometimes greatness itself must bow to the creatures it has
excluded. (Virtually every great male poet has needed to borrow, at some
point in his career, an abandoned woman’s voice (Lipking 1988:Â€128–9).)
As all of us know from our own lives, deep influence can flow from
the humblest sources. Nor should we read history only by flashes of
lightning.
And this reaction spurs my third departure from Bate and Bloom:Â€the
need to repair their historical oversimplifications. Like many Romanticists,
they tend to divide the story of literature into two halves, Before and
After, or as in the title of one of Bate’s books, From Classic to Romantic
(1946)Â€– the Great Divide of 1789 or 1798. The spirit of revolution, a revo-
lution in poetic as well as political visions, thus marks a decisive turning
point in human affairsÂ€ – not least, by positing that there can be such
turning points, when everything changes, including human nature (pace
Johnson and Freud). That story places Milton in Eden, the world before
the Flood. But Renaissance scholars might well put him into the midst of
the Flood, the counter-counter-Reformation that forced a poet to invent
his own career track. Indeed, even Dante had to invent the pattern of
his career (Ascoli 2008). The life of the poet has never been untroubled.
Hence part of the attraction of career criticism, for me and many other
literary historians, has been the opportunity it offers to watch the con-
stantly shifting historical and cultural moments that entwine with each
author’s effort to make a life and lifework.
From the standpoint of the individual artist, every era has a poten-
tial for revolution; we all live in times of unsettling changes and hopeful
or menacing futures. Young authors always stand at a crossroads, choos-
ing a path whose end cannot yet be seen. Poetic breakthroughs, The Life
of the Poet argues, often occur at the critical juncture when ‘the poet
realizes that his own personal history, reflected in his poems, coincides
with the universal spiritual history of mankind’ (Lipking 1981:Â€ 18). For
Dante, he and Italy have reached the point when the secular and spiritual
Romes must come back together; for Blake, the New Jerusalem is born
in London and himself; for Yeats, the wheel of history has come round
as Anima Hominis enters Anima Mundi; for Whitman, America and the
great American poem suddenly seem identical with his own coming of
age; and Anna Akhmatova takes on the burden of preserving the memory
of a silenced Russia in her poems. Each of these stories is different; his-
tory, despite Yeats’s gyres, does not repeat itself. But telling such stories
allows the poet to fabricate a historical vision in which he or she will be, if
not the unacknowledged legislator of mankind, at least its acknowledged
seer. Then scholars follow, unwinding the path, and interpreting the poet
in terms of history, and history in terms of the poet.
In recent decades, those histories have usually been shaped accord-
ing to national interests. Career criticism, by and large, has moved in
the track of Helgerson, from self-crowned laureates to forms of nation-
hood (Helgerson 1992).9 There is a good historical reason for this:Â€ from
the beginning, the histories of literature served patriotic causes. In my
first book, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (1970),
a chapter on the uses of literary history concludes that the first histor-
ies of English poetry were written to affirm a national identity and to
define the superiority of the national character. The idea seemed novel
to some scholars then, but looks like a commonplace four decades later.
Some years ago, when the editor of the eighteenth-century volume of The
New Cambridge History of English Literature commissioned me to write
its essay on criticism, he supplied a title:Â€‘Literary Criticism and the Rise
of National Literary History’. I do not think that Alexander Pope would
have approved of that conjunction; his Essay on Criticism mocks British
self-congratulation, and he never wrote his prospective epic Brutus, on the
origins of Britain’s national ideals, because (he told Joseph Spence) ‘I did
not care for living always in boiling water’.10 Most poets prefer to separate
their careers from the party lines of patriotism. But the subordination of
criticism as poets would like to think of it, in service to poems, to a mode
of national history, in service to politics, has been confirmed by many
recent articles and books. I took the assignment; the essay joined the con-
sensus and did its duty (Lipking 2005).
The identification of poetic careers with national interests is not some-
thing new; it might be traced back to King David or Homer, if not to
Enheduanna of Ur (the first poet whose name we know (Hallo and van
Helgerson’s contributions to career criticism deserve an essay of their own. A Sonnet from
â•‡ 9
Carthage:Â€Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe (Helgerson 2007),
published less than a year before his death in April 2008, exemplifies his remarkable ability to
found an original literary history on the fine-grained close reading of one particular author.
10
Spence 1966:Â€vol. I:Â€134.
Dijk 1968)). But its full potential depends, of course, on the rise of the
modern nation-state, over which poets often preside as emblems or guard-
ian angels. The phenomenon is especially clear in nations that struggle
for a place in the world. In Britain the question of whether Shakespeare
should claim the title of national poet, in competition with Chaucer,
Spenser and Milton, provokes some interesting arguments, among them
issues of what is the nation and what is a poet. Do playwrights qualify?
Is the nation Great Britain or England? But such questions hardly arise
in Portugal and Poland. Luis Vaz de Camões towers over Portuguese lit-
erature and history, just as his statues stand watch over Lisbon. Adam
Mickiewicz represents the soul of Poland as well as its story. It is not only
that Os Lusíadas and Pan Tadeusz are great poems about the making
and breaking of nations, or that both poets had long and distinguished
careers. It is also that each poet equates his own strivings with those of his
native landÂ€– most famously in the words Camões wrote from his death-
bed:Â€‘All will see that my country was so dear to me that I was content to
die not only in her but with her’ (later that year, 1580, Portugal would be
swallowed by Spain). Nor is it coincidental that both poems were written
in exile:Â€Os Lusíadas in the Far Eastern reaches of the Portuguese empire,
Pan Tadeusz in Paris, where Chopin, already the national composer of
Poland, wrote polonaises and ballades inspired by Mickiewicz. If nations
are best understood as imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson
argues, then no one imagines them better than exiles, whose dreams of
community are uninterrupted by the confusion of the actual country,
with all its local frictions (Anderson 1991). Thus displaced poets keep faith
with their dreams. Even in times when those nations had ceased to existÂ€–
when Portugal was a province of Castile, and Poland a spoil of Russia,
Germany and AustriaÂ€– the national poems preserved them. Indeed, some
lovers of poems and country might feel that such poems were the nation.
Career critics, however, might bring a somewhat different perspective.
Perhaps the sense of exile in such poems, which culminate long careers, is
internal as well as external; that is, the expression of a personal estrange-
ment from some of the sources of national pride. The glory of Portugal
lies in the past, according to Os Lusíadas. At present it wallows in greed
and narrow self-interest, reflected not least by the inattention it pays to
its starving poets. Many readers think that the best parts of the poem,
as in Paradise Lost, are those in which the poet speaks directly in his
own voice, lamenting the belatedness and afflictions that keep him apart
from the bygone visions his epic unfolds, when men and gods talked
together. The real nation has not lived up to its dreams, and he has been
left stranded on a farther shore. But the poet may be revealing a still
darker secret:Â€a flaw at the heart of the nation. It was not only enemies
who sapped the strength of Portugal; her own imperial ambitions both
raised and doomed her.
Mickiewicz never published the epilogue he drafted for Pan Tadeusz,
but there he makes one undercurrent of the poem into something per-
sonal and explicit:Â€his Poland is a fairytale or land of childhood, created
in part to balance the exile’s self-hatred. Can anyone live in that fairyland?
Just before the end of the poem, when everyone claps to the sound of the
national anthem, ‘Poland is not yet dead’, it is Jankiel, an ancient Jew,
who plays the song on his dulcimer and draws the patriotic moral:Â€Poland
awaits its saviour as the Jews their Messiah. Love and irony are both thick
in the air (within the world of the poem, the moment will forever be 1812,
when Napoleon and his Polish allies are poised to join forces to conquer
Russia and set Poland free forever). But the special insight of the poet in
1834 is that his nation exists in memory alone, where he invents a com-
munity healed of its real tensions and fissures.11 There, at least, the Jews
will be converted. Rather than being the nation, therefore, the poem con-
trives a substitute nation, not unlike Zion.12 Poetry, rather than people,
will have the last word.
But poetry also has its own logic, which often differs from the ways of
nations. The integrity of that internal poetic logic cannot be ignored by
those who study careers. Each major poet is of course unique, not only
because of the circumstances that shape him or her but also because of
his or her special gifts. Yet poetic careers rehearse the same stories again
and again. From one point of view, Camões and Mickiewicz have noth-
ing in commonÂ€– no nation or language or background or genre or time.
And yet their achievements, and even despairs, coalesce in their lives as
poets. This was the sort of puzzle I tried to addressÂ€– if hardly to solveÂ€–
in The Life of the Poet. But most of the pieces of that larger picture have
yet to be filled in. One reason, obviously, is specialization. Career critics
believe in reading a poet’s lifework as a whole, and doing justice to even
one poet’s total achievement can be the work of a lifetime. Camões and
MickiewiczÂ€– and Ovid and Dante and Milton and hundreds of othersÂ€–
are fields in themselves, not merely parts of a field.
11
A modern reader will surely notice two glaring contradictions in this picture of an ideal Polish
community:Â€the setting is a village in Lithuania, which is reckoned the heart of Poland; and the
plot is driven by a brutal feud between local factions.
12
In his great poem of exile ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’, Camões, like Mickiewicz, specifically asso-
ciates his distant homeland with Zion.
Nor has the recent expansion, or rather explosion, of canons helped to
build bridges across the frontiers of global specialization. In the 1960s a
group of literary scholars in the former, always imperilled Czechoslovakia
collaborated on a textbook, The World of Literature, intended to teach
the history and principles of literature to every gymnasium student. The
first volume of this text was published in 1967, but the authorities quickly
suppressed it, on the eve of Prague Spring; few copies survive (Striedter
1989:Â€288). That may have been the last fling for the ideal of world litera-
ture. Moreover, comparative literature, as it used to be practised, has also
gone out of style. Literature now seems too diverse for Northrop Frye’s
anatomies or other attempts at comprehensive systems. Perhaps the word
‘literature’ itself has regressed from its modern sense of ‘writing of per-
manent worth’ to its older inclusion of any writing at all. In similar fash-
ion, the title of poet might no longer be honorific but simply a term for
any writer of verses. If that is so, then the life of the poet, as the sign of a
special career or vocation, must yield to the multiple, undefinable lives of
the poets.
That takes me back to where I once began. ‘We have heard too much
about the lives of the poets’, the first sentence of The Life of the Poet, haz-
ards a little inside joke, since my previous book had wrapped up with
Johnson’s Lives. The itch to gossip, or to pry into what writers do when
they are at home, can deflect attention from what they write (Johnson
himself did not write lives, of course, but biographical and critical pref-
aces to a collection of poems). Most biographies of writers fail at the cru-
cial task of shedding light on the work. What we need instead, I argued,
is studies of the life that gets into poems; of Dante within the Commedia,
converting his experience into vision. That argument still seems persua-
sive to me. But it will never be easy to carry out.
Johnson’s own life as an author exemplifies the problems (Lipking
1998). Most people, and many reviewers, would rather read about himÂ€–
or about that mythical figure or hero of anecdotes Dr JohnsonÂ€– than look
at the work that he left. Moreover, Johnson did not lead the life of a poet.
It is no accident that his most lasting piece of verse is called The Vanity of
Human Wishes. He never claimed to be a major poet who would devote
his life to ever greater poems; and though his kind of verse did influence
many later poetsÂ€– Goldsmith, Crabbe, Landor, Housman, and in recent
times Samuel Beckett, Donald Davie, John Wain and Philip LarkinÂ€– that
line of influence conspicuously omits the great poetic careerists. Johnson’s
verse, quite obviously, is but a small part of his larger life as an author.
And even that life might be considered glorified hackwork, shaped not
by visions of work he wanted to do but by the commissions he took for
money. Perhaps that is the real story of any career:Â€no grand design but
only one thing after another.
But career critics do not think so. For themÂ€– for usÂ€– the contrast of
whole to part, or of a lifework to any piece of it, always seems superficial.
The two are not opposed but mutually sustaining. Just as the word ‘life’
can refer to the daily grind experienced by each of us minute by minute,
or else to the total shape of everything that each of us has been, so ‘the
work’ can refer equally to an individual piece of writing or to a whole
corpus. The best critics know how to read those relations. In this respect
the field that we are building has expanded the hermeneutic circle. If we
can understand the meaning of the whole only through understanding
the meaning of each of its parts, and the parts only through a prior sense
of the whole, a whole that takes in the full career will also illuminate the
details of any particular text. In Gadamer’s terms, the reader questions
the text as if it were a ‘Thou’, in dialogue with an ‘I’; so every good read-
ing brings about a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Gadamer 1994:Â€306–7). The life of
the poet thus represents a larger Thou who points to a further horizon. I
do not regard this as merely a matter of theory. At its best, career criticism
has been far more than an alternate way of writing lives; it has also been
the source of deeper and better readings of texts. In an era when close
reading has lost its glamour, the study of poetic careers has shown how
much remains to be explored. Great poets have made themselves the hard
way, line by line, and that is how we must make sense of their lives. To
speak for myself, that seems enough work for a lifetime.
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Index
Abrams, M. H. 268 ‘El inmortal’ 223–5

Actaeon 71, 74–6 Boyle, N. 261
Actium 43, 44 Bradley, A. C. 286
Aeneas as shepherd 27–9 Burrow, C. 12
Akhmatova, A. 221, 295 Burton, R. 215
Alcaeus 48 Butler, S. 124
Alexander the Great 69
Anderson, W. S. 114 Callimachus 3, 19, 43, 94–5
Antony 208 Camões, L. V. de 296–7
Apollonius of Rhodes 29 career criticism 1–2, 164–5, Ch. 16 passim
Appendix Vergiliana 4 [n.9] Carthage 25–7
Apuleius Metamorphoses, 70–8 Catullus 137
and metamorphosis 76–8 Chapman, G. 171, 173, 217
prologue 77 Chaucer 10
Archias, A. Licinius 122 Cheney, P. 1, 62, 162, 180, 181, 281
Archilochus 44 Cicero 9, 118–25
Aristophanes 2–3 and civil war 123–4
Ascanius 121 historiography 123
Augustus (Octavian) 43–4, 52–4, 67, 69, 183, Philippics 124
200, 208 philosophical works 124
poetry 123
Barkan, L. 74 speeches 120–2
Barthes, R. 161, 292 Cleopatra 65
Bate, W. J. 292, 293, 294 Coleridge, S. T.
Bednarz, J. P. 162 on Wordsworth 275, 276
Belsey, C. 162 Coolidge, J. S. 172, 184
Blake, W. 294 Cornelia 103–4
Bloom, H. 293, 294 cursus honorum 3, 39–40, 51, 65, 103, 119, 133, 175
Boccaccio 214 Cynthia 90–3, 95, 100–1, 104
Decameron 79–88
De Genealogia Deorum 85 Dante 9, 38, 63, 294
bookburning 7, 62–3, 156, Ch. 10 passim Commedia 143–4
Booth, W. C. 287 De Monarchia 144
Braudy, L. 176 De Vulgari Eloquentia 141–2
Braund, S. 112 Eclogues 142
Bristol, M. 165, 167–8 and Virgil 140–4
Broch, H. 200 Democritus 114–15
Browne, T. 215 Denham, J. 217
influence on Borges 222 Dido 148–9
Borges, J. L. 222 Donatus 198, 199
‘La flor de Coleridge’ 222–3 Donne, J. 216
327
328 Index
Dryden, J. 10, 14, 160, Ch. 13 passim Heaney, S.
Aurang-Zebe 249–50 on Wordsworth 275
on Chaucer 252 Helgerson, R. 13, 164–5, 167, 287,
Don Sebastian 250 295
Essay of Dramatick Poesie 246–7, 248 Henderson, J. 127
Fables Ancient and Modern 218–19, 250–5 Herbert, G. 201–3
on literary inheritance 252 Hesiod 288
The Spanish Fryar 247 Highet, G. 110
‘To My Dear Friend Mr Congreve, on his Hollander, J. 35
Comedy called The Double-Dealer’ 249 Horace 7–8, Ch. 2 passim, 288–9
Du Bellay, J. 215 Ars Poetica 56–8
Duncan-Jones, K. 169, 177 Carmen Saeculare 52
Epistles I 48–52
Eliot, T. S. Epistles II 56–8
The Waste Land 220 Epodes 40–6
on Dryden 243 and Greek lyric 46–7
Erikson, E. 293 on metempsychosis 212
Erne, L. 161, 162, 176 Odes I–III 46–8
Ennius 3–4, 7, 151–2, 210 Odes IV 52–5
and Homer 211, 212 and philosophy 49–50
and Virgil 212 and Pindar 53–4
exile 6, 7 on the poet’s fame 54
seeÂ€alsoÂ€Ovid, Virgil Satires 40–6, 107
and Virgil 45, 55
fame 176
Farquhar, G. 244 intertextuality 163, 172
Farrell, J. 3–4, 61, 118, 125, 137
Foucault, M. 161, 166 Jackson, M. P. 162
Freud, S. 293 Jarrell, R. 290
John of Garland 19, 36
Gadamer, H. G. 299 Johnson, S. 298–9
Gallus, Cornelius 43, 45, 65–70 on Dryden 245–6
Gellius 199 Jonson, B. 216
genre, hierarchy of 285 Volpone 215
Gibson, R. 235 Joyce, J. 209
Gifford, G. 204 Juvenal 8–9, Ch. 5 passim
Giovanni del Virgilio 142 ancient life of 110
Goethe 15, Ch. 14 passim and anger 114–17
and classical models 270–1 personae of 112–13
early success 257 Satire I 106–7
Faust 266–7
Italienische Reise, Ch. 14 passim Kastan, D. S. 161
in Italy, 1786–8, 258–60; in Rome, 260 Kernan, A. 165
and Ovid 272–4 Ketchian, S. 221
and Propertius 271–2 Kristeller, P. O. 292
relationships with women 260, 266
Römische Elegien Ch. 14 passim Levin, H. 160
and Virgil 262, 267 Lipking, L. 9, 164, 275
in Weimar 258 love elegy, Latin 5–6, 266
Greenblatt, S. 161, 165 as anti-career 269
Greville, F. 204 power, theme of 269
Griffin, D. 14 Lucan 8
Lucceius, Lucius 122, 123
Hammond, P. 250 Lucian 212
Hazlitt, W. 176 Lucilius 4, 40, 44, 107
Index 329
Maecenas 41, 43, 98 Fasti 62
Maffeo Vegio 151 and Gallus 65–70
Mallarmé, S. 221 Heroides 63
Marlowe, Christopher 10, 62 Medea 62
Doctor Faustus 215 Metamorphoses 62, 190–2
Marvell, Andrew 10, 13, 14, Ch. 12 passim and Propertius 89
Account of Popery and Arbitrary Government Remedia Amoris 80, 81–3
240 Tristia I.3 274
and Dryden 234 Tristia I.7 206–7, 208
Flecknoe, An English Priest at Rome 230–2 Tristia II 65–9
and Horace 238 Tristia III.1 208
An Horatian Ode 228 Tristia IV.10 64–5, 83–7
and Jonson 233 and Virgil 59–63, 180–1, 182, 192, 206
and ‘Lycidas’ 231, 232, 233
and Milton 237, 238 Parker, P. 182
Mr Smirke 240 Pask, K. 10
and Ovid 238, 239, 240 patronage 14
parentage 227 Persius 108
The Rehearsal Transpros’ d 235–7, 238–40 persona theory 109–11, 153–4
rhyme 235–6 Petrarch 9, 38, 180
Royalist poetry 227–8 Africa 147–52, 212–14
and Tacitus 234 Bucolicum Carmen 145
‘Tom May’s Death’ 229 and Ennius 151–2
as tutor 227 Epistle to Homer 152–3
and Waller 234 Epistle to Posterity 145–6
Upon Appleton House 229–30 Epistle to Virgil 154–7
and Virgil 232 laureation 140
Meres, F. 162, 216 and Virgil 145–57
metempsychosis 7, Ch. 11 passim Phaethon 72
Mickiewicz, A. 296, 297 Plato 220
Milton, John 10, 12–13, 38, Ch. 9 passim Pliny the Elder 126–9, 199
Comus 195 Pliny the Younger 9, 118, 125–37
‘Epitaphium Damonis’ 195 and Catullus 131–2
‘Lycidas’ 195 and Cicero 133, 134–5
‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a as consul 132
Cough’ 190 and historiography 132–3
and Ovid 183, 184 poetry 131–2, 135–7
Paradise Regained 185, 193 statue of 129
Poems, 1645 185 and Tacitus 134
and premature death 195 and the Virgilian career 125–30
Samson Agonistes 185, 186–96 poet-critic 290
and Shakespeare 188–9, 193–4 poet laureate 52, 58
and Virgil 183–4, 186–7 poetry
Moffet, T. 203–4 counter-laureate 168–78
Montrose, L. 166 language of 276–8
laureate 165, 168, 175
Nelson, A. 162 poikilia (generic versatility) 43
Pope, A. 295
Ovid 6–7, 12, 38, Ch. 3 passim Posidonius 122
Amores 60–2 Propertius 5–6, Ch. 4 passim
and Apuleius 70–8 Book I 90–3
Ars Amatoria 79 Book II 93–100
and authority 183 Book III 98–9
and Boccaccio 79–88 Book IV 100–4
and exile 62–4, 75–7, 181–2 and epic 97, 100–1
330 Index
Propertius (cont.) tragicomedy 248
and Virgil 99–100
prose genres, ancient 119–20 Virgil 4–5, Ch. 1 passim, 166
Proust, M. 220, 221 Aeneid 20–31, 200
Pythagoras 210 ille ego proem 17–18, 197
city, theme of 23–31, 32–3
Quint, D. 179 Culex 282
civil war, theme of 33
rationalized author 139 Eclogue I 31–7
recusatio 6, 19 Eclogue IV 141, 285
Richards, I. A. 291 Eclogue VI 19
Ronsard, P. de 214 epitaph 17, 154
rota Vergiliana 4, 19, 138–9, 158–9, 172, 179, exile, theme of 22, 36–8
197–8, 267, 283, 289 and Gallus 66
Georgics 31–2, 211
Sage, L. 184 and Ovid 59–63
satiric career, Ch. 5 passim as proto-Christian 143
Scaliger, J. 268 shade, theme of 35–6, 180
Schiller, F. 271 Voltaire 244
Shakespeare, William 10–12, 14, Ch. 8
passim Wall, W. 165
As You Like It 173 Walton, I. 201–2
and fame 177 Wellek, R. 290
Henry V 168, 169–77 Wells, S. 162
and Marlowe 173, 175, 177 Whitman, W. 295
Merry Wives of Windsor 168 women and the literary career 10 [n.15]
and Ovid 170, 174 Wordsworth, William 10, 15, Ch. 15 passim
Rape of Lucrece 162 and classicism 286
Richard II 162 and epic 285
Sonnets 162, 168 ‘Home at Grasmere’ 279
Tempest 193–4 his language 276, 278
Timon of Athens 168 Poems, in Two Volumes Ch. 15
Twelfth Night 215 passim
and Virgil 174 epigraphs 282–4, 285
Shakespeare in Love 161 relationship to Lyrical Ballads 281
Shelley, P. B. 219 and poetic authority 280
Sherwin-White, A. 131 The Prelude 275, 279, 280, 289
Sidney, P. 203–5 The Recluse 283
Silius Italicus 132 and subjectivity 279, 280
Smarr, J. 63 and Virgil 282, 283, 285
Spenser, Edmund 10, 178, 283, 284 Wordsworth, W. and S. T. Coleridge
and Chaucer 216–17 Lyrical Ballads
Shepheardes Calendar 168, 170, 171, 173 epigraph 281–2
Statius 8 preface 276, 277
Stevens, W. 221
Yeats, W. B. 294
Tacitus 134
Taylor, G. 171 Zwicker, S. 14, 241

Hardie-Moore-Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception

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This is a wide-ranging collection of essays on ancient Roman

p h i l i p h a r di e is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College,

h e l e n mo or e is University Lecturer in English at the University

Cambridge University Press

© Cambridge University Press 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the

ISBN-13 978-0-511-90974-0 eBook (NetLibrary)

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

List of contributors page vii

Introduction:Â€Literary careers –Â€Classical models

a l e s s a n dro b a rc h i e s i teaches Classics at the University of Siena at

This volume is based on a selection of the papers delivered at the Second

Literary careers –Â€Classical models

The subject of literary careers has attracted considerable interest recently

Farrell 2002:Â€37–8; see also Hardie 2007b.

â•‡ See Hardie 2002a:Â€95.

Some Virgilian unities

Quoted in Vita Donatiana 36 (in Brugnoli and Stok 1997).

closing of the epic see Hardie 1997a:Â€150–1.

sequence of comparisons between Aeneas and a shepherd, see Anderson 1968.

There and back again:Â€Horace’s poetic career 1

1.â•‡ I n t roduc t ion:Â€s om e f r a m e wor k s

See Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:Â€xxxviii–xlvi

See Lowrie 1997:Â€224–316.

4 .â•‡ car men saecul ar e and odes 4 :Â€

E.g. 1.4.19–20, 1.32.11–12, 3.20.5–16.

Epistles 1.2, 1.3, 1.8.

5.â•‡ epistles 2 a n d a r s p o e t i c a :Â€

â•‡ See S. J. Harrison 2008.

The Ovidian career model:Â€Ovid, Gallus,

i.â•‡ Gallus in Ovid

â•‡ Clausen 1994 on 10.22; Skutsch 1956:Â€198–9; Ross 1976:Â€69.

See IG Philae II 128.

ii.â•‡ Ovid and Lucius Apuleius

iii.â•‡ Boccaccio and Ovid

On this approach see Gibson 2002, passim.

â•‡ Mazzotta 1986:Â€39; Smarr 1987:Â€248–9.

An elegist’s career:Â€from Cynthia to Cornelia

See Heyworth 2007b:Â€8.

his earlier claims of love until death, and beyond.

lost:Â€see Heyworth 2007b:Â€153.

Propertius’ life within his poetry is dominated by Cynthia:Â€they repeat-

â•‡ Or diesque, as the MSS have it.

â•‡ See Heyworth 1994:Â€59–67.

Persona and satiric career in Juvenal *

Book/Satires Persona Announced by

can already be detected in Satire 7.

The indistinct literary careers of Cicero

Title Translation Younger’s Translation

In his recent monograph on Pliny’s third book of Letters, John Henderson

Re-inventing Virgil’s Wheel:Â€the poet and

â•‡ Augustine, Epistula ad Volusianum 137.12:Â€see further Comparetti 1997:Â€96–103.

peccatum, reputat se miserum; et ex hoc dicitur animus ejus dejectus.

Did Shakespeare have a literary career?

Among the authors addressed in this volume, William Shakespeare is

Scott 2007; Cheney 2008a.

are P. Hardie 2002a; Martindale and Martindale 1990; Martindale 2004b.

‘Ou r Be n di ng Au t hor’: Â€S h a k e s pe a r e’s

Throughout his canon, Shakespeare uses the word ‘author’ twenty-four

For details, see Cheney 2008a:Â€34–7.

This utterance is oblique, so much so that the Victorians chose to Â�perform

The effect of linking author, actor and audience is to highlight the