An Aspect of the Style of Valerius Flaccus' "Argonauticon"

Abstract

R. W. GARSON has recently renewed W. C. Summer's ninety-year-old plea for a fair reappraisal of much neglected poet Valerius Flaccus.1 However, it may be suggested that preliminary to any such general reevaluation there is a need for detailed investigations of various poetic aspects of the Argonauticon. In this paper there will be an attempt to provide one such study by reporting the results of an extensive examination of the style of the Argonauticon. Because our principal concern was to produce a style description the appropriateness of which would rest on evidence assessable by independent analysis and verification, this particular study became, in effect, an exercise in applied stylistics. For in the last decades, linguistic stylisticians, in an effort to make possible more objective descriptions of style, have attempted to provide a theoretical basis for the concept of style. Central to many of their theories is the notion of selection or choice.2 Its prominence appears to grow from the linguist's realization that the producer of a text is, at every level of production, faced with a selection from among a multitude of grammatical, phonological, and lexical alternatives. And the logical deduction from this is that his decisions with respect to these choices, ultimately, completely determine the text he produces. Various related definitions of style have been based on the apprehension of the importance of such selection to the eventual nature and organization of a text. For example, Seymour Chatman's summary: