Homeric kingship theory in archaic Latin poetry

Abstract

Critics tend to regard the early Latin poets as close imitators of their Greek models and as largely unacquainted with contemporary Greek literary scholarship or philosophy in general. However, Hellenistic theories of kingship deriving from ethical criticism of Homer’s principal heroes had a clear impact on Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius. (The evidence for Naevius is too equivocal to permit judgment.) This reception history is an important point of reference for later poets such as Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, and especially Vergil. From the fourth century onward, critics had stopped admiring Achilles for his unique physical strength and courage and instead deplored his intransigence, while the flexible Odysseus was praised by all philosophical schools. This comports with the attitude of Livius Andronicus in the following century. Livius gave Rome its first epic in the form of an Odyssey, not an Iliad; and the first line of this poem follows Antisthenes, a contemporary of Plato, by interpreting Homeric polytropia as a form of andreia. By the same token, a line probably delivered by Odysseus in Livius’ tragedy Achilles criticizes the title character as forgetting the precepts of his teacher, Chiron – himself an emblem of princely instruction from at least the time of Hesiod. In the early second century, Ennius’ Annals represent one of Rome’s regal enemies, King Pyrrhus of Epirus – a self-styled lineal descendant of Achilles – as bellipotens, not sapientipotens. Another, the one-eyed King Philip V of Macedon, who is metaphorically “gobbling up” the entire Greek world, is likened to an appetitive Cyclops. By making Rome’s opponents avatars of Achilles or enemies of Odysseus, Ennius aligns the Romans themselves with the positive, Odyssean values preferred by kingship theory. He adopts similar attitudes in his tragedies, as do his tragic successors Pacuvius and Accius. On this basis, I infer that a well-documented preference for Odyssean over Achillean values in late Republican poetry was no recent development, and that Vergil’s reception of kingship theory in the Aeneid ought to be understood with reference to Roman predecessors whose influence on him in other respects is very well known. I will not be able to consider Vergil’s response to this tradition in any detail here, but I plan to do so elsewhere; and in the meantime, other contributors to this volume will be addressing this topic.