Routledge (2024) h/b 202pp £140.00 (ISBN 9781032456508)
This collection of ten wide-ranging essays poses thought-provoking questions about the didactic mode in Roman literature, showing throughout ‘how lively, experimental and intertextual the didactic ethos of this period is, and how deeply it engages with the social political and philosophical questions that are of critical importance to contemporary Rome and of enduring interest into the modern world’ (p.2).
Michael Paschalis looks at the way Lucretius borrows Callimachean imagery while nonetheless aspiring to the non-Callimachean goal of teaching ‘on great matters’ with poetry which is there to sweeten the pill rather than as ars gratia artis. If Callimachus is ‘teaching’ his audience, it is a very different style of education being offered, and Lucretius plays on this literary tension between them.
The next two chapters looks at Epicureanism in Virgil. The Epicurean sphragis which ends Virgil Georgics 4 is well known, but the other codas are less obviously grist to that philosophical mill. Alison Keith looks closely at these codas for evidence of Epicurean strategies, with a little help from Philodemus (whose own view of ‘working the land’ was that it was ‘wretched’). Virgil’s views are complex: book 2 ends with the idyllic vision of the happy farmer, while the next book ends with a grisly plague, and the first book ends with the image of Octavian as cosmic saviour. All these passages are well discussed, although I felt that K. oversimplifies when she describes ‘the Epicurean principle that work is unpleasant and should be avoided’ (34: nuanced better by Heslin p. 56). Nor is the contrast between the happy farmer at the end of Georgics 2 and the wretched plague at the end of 3 such a contradiction: ever since Zeus’ jars of good and bad fortune in the Iliad (24.525-33) it had been recognised that life is never going to be all good, and Epicurus’ anti-teleological arguments (Lucretius 1.180-1=5.198-9) are eloquent on the way this world was not made for our comfort. Peter Heslin suggests that the Epicureanism of the Georgics is ironic and that philosophy is not necessary for happiness. If the goal is tranquillity, then rural piety can deliver it just as well as Greek philosophy: ‘Epicureanism is chemotherapy for the soul: why would you give it to someone who is not ill?’ (p.58).
Leah Kronenberg examines winter in Hesiod and Virgil, finding masturbatory imagery in Hesiod’s injunction to avoid ‘squeezing a swollen foot with thin hand’ (Works and Days 497) and seeing this as metaphorical for the lack of productivity and fertility in winter. Going further, she finds abundant sexual imagery in the Hesiodic riff on winter cold (WD 518-35) with its penetrating wind, the ‘boneless one’ gnawing its own foot, and the old man bent double. In all this (she says) Hesiod is ‘creating a “poetics of masturbation” in which ‘autoerotic activity is exploited for its symbolic potential’ (p.82). Virgil (she tells us) uses masturbatory imagery as metaphor for the Hellenistic poetics in which poetry is an end in itself. The lovely vignette (1.291-6) of the man and his wife by the winter fire has sexual and literary imagery: the man is ‘sharpening his torch/flame of passion’ while the wife is using a ‘shuttle’ (dildo) to console her long labor and then is ‘frothing the wine’. She is singing and weaving (both poetic activities as well as being typical female pursuits since Circe in Homer Odyssey 10.226-7) and this adds a sense that the activity is aesthetically productive. Virgil recasts Hesiod’s miserable winter in more positive terms: while summer is the time for work, winter is the season for a hedonistic symposium enjoying the fruits of summer labour. In all this Virgil ‘redeems the pleasures of idleness and non-‘useful’ art without relinquishing his poetry’s claim to a certain kind of utility’ (p.88).
Steven Green looks at organised animal mating in Grattius and Ovid, reading it as a commentary on Augustan moral legislation. Virgil and Grattius both describe organised mating of animals in terms of human marriage and adultery, and Grattius’ females are to be locked up rather than the males—and his female has to be univira (Cyn. 280). Ovid uses animal imagery as part of his argument (Ars 2.477-88) and uses adulterium of canine sex, thus appearing to condone as ‘natural’ what Augustus had forbidden—although sophists in 5th century Greece had used animal behaviour as part of their discussion of nomos and physis. Germanicus also sails close to the political wind with his adulterous Augustus/Jupiter rewarding his go-betweens.
For Melanie Racette-Campbell, Propertius is not the instructor but the pupil, even though this teacher (Love) refuses to supply a curriculum. Verbs of teaching and learning predominate more than they do elsewhere in the didactic canon, and this sense of a poet craving to understand his own experience is brought out by the use of this didactic terminology.
The final section (‘Metadidaxis’) welcomes on to the page the polymath Varro in two essays: Joseph McAlhany looks at the fragments of the satire Papia Papae as an example of playful intertextuality linking satire and didactic, while Sarah Culpepper Stroup reads Varro’s De Re Rustica as a political metaphor, teaching the reader ‘how to read between the lines’ in its poignant study of the disrepair into which the late republican state had fallen. Her engaging essay argues strongly against the idea that De Re Rustica is a farmer’s manual and shows how the text engages with the Ciceronian world in which it is working. Here I would have liked more discussion of the economic background whereby senators were expected not to engage in trade but to invest their money in land: in this world of landed aristocrats, agriculture was certainly a means of maintaining the status quo, but that does not translate to an easy equivalence of ager and state.
Del A. Maticic examines the Constitutio Limitum of Hyginus’ Gromaticus, whose superficially dry treatises on agrimensorial matters make use of intertextuality which sustains his reading of it as subversive in its revelation of the violence lying behind the wars which delivered the imperial land-divisions and show how ‘strife is encoded into the atoms’ (p.172).
The book ends with James O’Hara’s exuberant essay on Horace’s Ars Poetica which asks us to (re)consider the extent to which the Letter to the Pisones is a teaching text at all, given that it breaks its own poetic rules: the surprise here is that so many readers of the Ars Poetica have taken it at face value. Much of this poem is concerned (for instance) with long-dead forms such as the satyr play, which is ‘like recommending in the 2020s that your student… specialize in typewriter repair’ (p.183). As he says pointedly, ‘if Horace’s Ars Poetica is your only evidence for something, you have no evidence’ (p.185). So what is this poem—the longest poem in Horace’s entire oeuvre—actually about? Why does it begin with the crazy hybrid image if not to signal to us that this poem is itself a crazy hybrid of satire, didactic and verse epistle?
Each chapter has its own bibliography of works cited—although in some essays references in the text fail to be listed in the bibliography—and there is a general index at the end. Most of the book is well-edited, but Keith’s essay has allowed autocorrect to mangle Latin words into absurd English ones (premit becomes ‘permit’, pulsata becomes ‘pulsate’ and manibus becomes ‘minibus’).
Much of the material here is challenging and readers may well disagree with some of the findings: but this is a book which deserves to be studied by everyone who cares about didactic literature.
John Godwin