Augustan Poets Research Articles

Gaudia nostra: a hexameter-ending in elegy

In an earlier article in Classical Quarterly, S. J. Harrison explored the varying frequency of hexameter-endings of the type discordia taetra, where a noun that ends in short a is followed by its epithet with the same termination. It appears from this that while most pre-Augustan poets allow a fairly high frequency of such verse-endings (e.g. Lucretius 1:130, Catullus 1:204), some Augustan poets and their imitators show a distinct tendency to avoid them (e.g. Vergil, Georgics 1:547), while some almost exclude them altogether (e.g. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1:4999, Statius, Thebaid 1:1948). The hexameters of elegiac poetry might be subject to the same restriction; the following are figures for elegy from Catullus to Martial.

Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome.

It served a poet well indeed to have Augustus for a friend. And if Augustus were a friend of poets? All the better for the great glory of Roman letters. It is this arrangement, complicated by questions of influence and accommodation and simple human susceptibility to the blandishments of power, that Peter White explores in Promised Verse. Combining social history and literary interpretation, this book reveals the circumstances of poetic production in the golden era of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius. Peter White takes a close look at the relationship between the Augustan poets and the men of wealth and status who befriended them - and rewarded their literary efforts with money, gifts, and the benefits of illustrious connection. These ties - between, for instance, Horace and Maecenas - appear as part of an elaborate system of social conventions, a system of mutual advantage to poet and patron. Within this context, White also considers groups and institutions - the mysterious collegium poetarum, the schools of the grammarians, libraries, and public recitations - that helped the poet make his way and linked him to Roman society. In Augustus we see a patron comparable in many ways to his aristocratic counterparts. The Emperor sought to promote Roman literature, and yet seems to have intervened only rarely in the poetry he sponsored. Contrary to a view that has been prevalent since the eighteenth century, the result was not literary propaganda. Instead, White shows, the public poetry created by Augustan poets was as independent and inventive as the rest of their work.

Valerius' FlavianArgonautica

‘[Valerius']Argonauticais a story of high adventure, not a poème à thèse’: so stated Garson in 1965. Strand later added that the essential nature of this poem and the choice of subject-matter was determined by poetic inability; he describes the prooemium to Valerius'Argonauticaas ‘arecusatio: the theme of the fall of Jerusalem is beyond his powers, and it would instead be treated by Domitian who was fit for such an arduous task; Valerius had to content himself with the theme of an old myth’. It is these two opinions that I wish to question in this article. Indeed, alarm bells immediately sound at Strand's interpretation of the poet'srecusatio. It has long been recognized that the original Callimacheanrecusatiowas twisted by the Augustan poets. Gordon Williams analyses their practice thus: ‘They sadly regret that their poor talents will not rise to great subjects – and the subjects to which they will not rise are not the old mythological tales but the great affairs of contemporary Roman history and, in particular, the deeds of Augustus. It is clear, however, that they are using this form of poem to enumerate and praise the great deeds of Augustus, under the guise of proposing their own inability.’ No-one hesitates to agree that Valerius was well versed in the Augustan poets. It is dangerous, therefore, to assume without question that he was deceived by their insincerity. There is in fact good reason to examine the alternative possibility, namely that Valerius understood well the practice of his literary predecessors, that he dared to tread in their footsteps and that he succeeded in the supreme duty of a poet, that is to say, the business of ensuring thatars celavit artem.

Ceres, Liber and Flora: Georgic and Anti-Georgic Elements in Ovid's Fasti

The Georgics stand at the threshold of Augustan literature, the Fasti at its end, but despite Ovid's respect for Rome's first great didactic poem, Lucretius' De rerum natura, and despite all the intervening achievements of Augustan poets in incorporating national and aetiological themes into other poetic genres, Ovid's poem repeatedly acknowledges by echoes of form and theme the primacy of the Georgics as model for his aetiological work.This paper attempts to measure Ovidian response to the Georgics at two levels, the level of formal, verbal allusion and the level of themes and values. I have been led to focus on Ovid's treatment of Ceres/Demeter (and less prominently Liber/Bacchus) because Ceres as teacher of agriculture and benefactor of men is central to Virgil's representation of evolving human culture. But Ceres is equally important to the Fasti (although her sober personality makes her unappealing as a candidate for interview by the poet) as a major deity in the largely rural Roman calendar, as a symbol of the didactic principle, and for her very centrality in the Virgilian poem that Ovid is emulating.

Ausónio, Mosella 389 e Propércio 3, 1, 13 : Intertextualidade e programa literário

This article purports to demonstrate that Ausonius’ subtle allusion to Propertius 3, 1,13 in Mosella 389 sheds light on his literary intentions and helps to reinstate him as a creative poet who makes intelligent use of Hellenistic poetics (albeit filtered through the Augustan poets) in an age generally considered lacking in artistic vitality.

Julius Caesar in Augustan Rome

IN 1843, HORACE'S SwISS COMMENTATOR Johann Kaspar von Orelli noted in an obiter dictum that the Augustan poets made little fanfare over the name of Julius Caesar. He assumed that they had shied away instinctively from praising a man whose accomplishments might threaten to overshadow Augustus' own.' Other critics took the point about the low visibility of Caesar, but suspected that the initiative must have proceeded directly from Augustus. Various hypotheses were bruited: perhaps Augustus was jealous of Caesar's superior military gifts; perhaps he was uncomfortable about Caesar's destruction of the Republic; anxious to divert attention from similarities between Caesar's methods and his own; and so on. In this way, during the course of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the poets' silence about Caesar became a minor motif of scholarly discussion.2 In 1988, the idea is familiar to all as one of the distinctive emphases of Sir Ronald Syme. Syme took up the suggestion that the Augustan poets had downplayed Caesar and lent it much greater currency than it had had before, partly by force of personal authority and partly by the assiduity with which he preached it.3 But a still more important factor in his presentation of the

The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered by Margaret Anne Doody

These objections notwithstanding, Arthur’s book deserves careful reading by scholars of all levels and without doubt a place in the ever-growing body of Gawain literature. douglas w u r te le / Carleton University Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). xvi, 288. $44.50 (u.s.) Although aspects of Professor Doody’s book are irritating, it is an important polemical contribution to literary history. If its historical references are vague, conventional, and sometimes deliberately anachronistic, if its argument is unclear, circular, and not always logical, it will excite students and give teach­ ers of eighteenth-century letters new ideas for interpreting the period. Writing with enthusiasm for her subject, Doody debunks traditional pedagogical and scholarly habits. Interested in cultural and literary continuity rather than period and generic distinctions and indifferent to rhetorical and moral criti­ cism, she defines Augustan so as to make Milton one and insists the novel and poetry should be taught side by side on the grounds they have more in common than otherwise. As well as scorning modem editions which minimize the aural qualities of poetry, she validates original editions by reproducing a large num­ ber of illustrations which shed light on the visual character of eighteenthcentury poetry. Her analysis of twenty-eight plates is acute and often brilliant. The plates, besides serving as excellent teaching devices, oblige the scholar to confront the aesthetic basis of her literary polemic. Inspired by Johnson’s view of Pope’s genius as “active, ambitious, adven­ turous, always investigating, always aspiring,” Doody seeks to restore “ excite­ ment” to the reading of Augustan poetry (2). Proclaiming that liberty and audacity, adventure and experiment are central to Restoration and later poets, she shows how, in “ To Mr. Congreve,” Swift “surprises us with its range, its variety and its ability to mix likes with unlikes” (6). Yoking a riddle, an exhortation and a biblical prophecy in the last verse, Swift upholds a poetic law which prohibits no subject while involving playful and serious forms (7). The same free-ranging imagination is found in Dryden. Since major poets take the whole world for their subject, decorum is secondary to poetic appetite. In Doody’s eyes, hunger is a key Augustan metaphor for crea­ tivity: the notion that poetry should consume everything marks the selfconsciousness that Butler, Dryden, and Rochester developed and passed on to Swift and Pope. A sense of progress makes the Augustans, like poets of other periods, refuse the constraints of decomm (11). Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis,” 225 recalling Spenser in its mixture of the homely and the grand, economy with sumptuousness, celebrates royalism, nationalism, and commercial expansion (12). Conceding that poets’ acceptance of imperial and commercial expan­ sion may be politically embarrassing, Doody claims that it influences Thom­ son’s The Seasons as well as Pope’s Windsor Forest (16). She stresses the parallel between expansionary ideology and Augustan poetic style, because lit­ erary expansiveness is a mark of the period as much as order or compromise. Doody equates economic and literary ideas: she sees The Rape of the Lock’s wide-ranging reference in terms of both commercial expansion and the period’s admiration for Longinus. Plates in Warburton’s edition of Pope sug­ gest that the poet figured himself to be a bardic genius trafficking with the poetic past as well as with the world (21). With such equivocation Doody challenges literary history. This figurative challenge is apparent when she examines Marvell’s “Last Instructions to a Painter” for affinities with Pope’s poetry. She asserts the continuity of Metaphysical and Augustan modes, view­ ing them as equally expansive and space-creating, equally ambitious and freetrading (24). For Doody, Johnson faulted the cramped wit of the Meta­ physicals because he was committed to mind-filling expansiveness. To cure literary history’s blindness to the way Augustan poets provoke complex sen­ suous reactions (27), she insists that the chief mark of their poems is that each possesses a range of styles and topics. Typically, each contains lyric beauty, satire, pathos, parody, and baroque emotiveness. Their defect is not excessive order or clarity but an experimental overabundance enjoyable only in certain moods...

Eskatologien i tidlig romersk kejsertid

The so-called Messianic thought in Virgil has often been a matter of discussion. This article stresses certain aspects of this thought, namely its eschatological and soteriological implications: The primitivistic conception of the remote past as a Golden Age, exhibited in a majority of writers in classical antiquity since Hesiod, runs forth to the time of early imperial Rome. By the Augustan poets, however, especially Virgil and Horace, the idea of world-ages is presented in a new version. Virgil claims the reappearance of the Golden Age and Augustus, whose reign in the Aeneid is closely connected with the myth of Saturn as a culture-hero, is regarded as a savior, who rescued the Roman citizens from the plague of civil wars. Moreover, as asserted by Virgil, the cyclic recurrence of world-ages has come to an end. This idea must be considered as the fulfillment of an eschatology and thus, from a typological point of view, as fundamentally identical with the corresponding Christian conception of the eschatology as a present state.

Propertius 4.5, Ovid Amores 1.6 and Roman Comedy

‘The absence of Roman comedy … from the influences which the [Augustan] poets like to name proves only that they were not creditable, not in fashion, not that they had made no contribution.’ So Jasper Griffin in his recent book on the Roman poets. Griffin observes that scholars have been deterred from postulating Roman comic influence on the Augustan poets merely by the ‘magisterial pronouncements of the great scholars’, and he amasses considerable circumstantial evidence to support his theory that the Augustan poets, and especially the elegists, were indeed indebted to Roman comedy. He observes, for example, that Cicero provides evidence for the continuing popularity of Roman drama; that (a very important point) Horace complains of the popularity of the Roman comedians whom ‘powerful Rome learns by heart’ (Epist.2.1.60-1); that the same poet, despite his denigration of Roman comedy, obviously knew and referred to it; that Roman comedy seems to be the source, or a source, for the ‘naughtiness’ of elegy and the rejection of traditional Roman values (with the comicamatoresdistressed by contemporarymoresand the elegists flouting them); that if the elegists do not acknowledge their debt to the Roman comic poets, then no more does Horace in theOdesacknowledge his manifest indebtedness to Hellenistic poetry, claiming instead to be following Sappho and Alcaeus.

Latin Poets and Roman Life

In Poets and Roman Life Jasper Griffin studies the inter-relation of literature and life in the Augustan poets. The works of Virgil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid are characterized by a brilliant polish and a dazzling repertoire of devices for stylizing events and emotion; yet they remain convincing as a direct response to experience. Theories which deny that directness are criticized in this book as mistaken. The life of pleasure, in its kaleidoscopic variety - eating, drinking, bathing, love - is a central subject, but so is death. The book also discusses the uses of mythology, the influence of poetry on experience, and the interpretation of central passages in the poems of Virgil. All Latin quoted is translated into English.

Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the 'Canzoniere'

Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the 'Canzoniere'

Review: Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the “Canzoniere”

Review: Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the “Canzoniere”

Paulus Silentiarius, Ovid, and Propertius

In the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth thematic resemblances to the Roman elegists in Paulus Silentiarius (and other late epigrammatists) were explained as the result of the poets' reliance on a common Hellenistic source – usually this was identified as the so-called ‘subjective Alexandrian love elegy’ – and this represented a departure from the views of earlier scholars such as Hertzberg and Postgate, who had maintained that Paulus knew and imitated the elegists. In recent years the pendulum has swung back (partly, perhaps, because the whole notion of a ‘subjective Alexandrian love elegy’ has been abandoned), and the prevailing opinion seems to be that the Roman elegists were known to Paulus. This is the view of, for instance, Giovanni Viansino in his edition of Paulus, of Elmar Schulz-Vanheyden in his important work on Propertius' relationship to Greek epigram, and of Hermann Beckby in his edition of the Greek Anthology. Recently, too, Gordon Williams has put forward a very strong case for earlier epigrammatists like Antipater and Crinagoras imitating the Augustan poets.

Gigantomachy and Natural Philosophy

Augustan poets refer curiously often to the possible composition of a Gigantomachy, as in Prop. 2.1 and 3.9, Ov.Am. 2.1.11 ff.,Trist. 2.61 ff. and 331 ff., and the future study of natural philosophy, as in Verg.Georg. 2.475 ff. and Prop. 3.5.25 ff. These ambitions are rejected, abandoned, or firmly set in the future. I suggest that the function of both is closely similar since they provide traditionally sublime themes to contrast the poet's present ‘humbler’’ task.

Propertius and Antony

In a recent article, ‘Augustan Poetry and the Life of Luxury’, JRS 66 (1976), 87, I argued that much recent scholarship has misjudged the Augustan poets in certain important respects, because it has been thought in principle possible to separate ‘literature’ and ‘life’, as if they were clearly distinguishable entities; in reality, the two affect each other in a ceaseless mutual interaction. That argument was developed as a general treatment of the βίος φιλήδονος as presented in Latin literature, and as lived in reality in a society in which Greek and Italian elements, poetical motifs and real behaviour, were inextricably intermingled.The present paper is devoted to a more particular enquiry into one poet and one type of historical figure. I argue that Propertius' presentation of himself in poetry as a lover—romantic, reckless and obsessed—is closely related to the figure in history of Mark Antony. That historical figure is itself to be seen in a long tradition of great lovers of pleasure, in which the actual lives of real men can be seen to be shaped and coloured by the influence of ‘literature’. The argument of my earlier paper does not depend for its validity upon the acceptance of the present one, but they both pursue the same approach.

Augustan Poetry and the Life of Luxury

The object of this paper is a reconsideration of the relationship in the Augustan poets between experience and convention, between individual life and inherited forms of expression. The problem, which haunts the Sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of the Romantics no less than Horace and Propertius, has notoriously been answered in very different ways at different times. Scholars like Zielinski and Wili, for example, created romantic stories about Lydia and Cinara, and worked out Horace's feelings for them, the chronology of the affairs, and the way it all ended. In revulsion from these excesses, some influential modern writers go to an opposite extreme; they distinguish on the one hand ‘Greek’ or ‘Hellenistic’ elements, which are ‘unreal’ or ‘imaginary’, from ‘Roman’ ones which are ‘real’. Thus, to give a few examples at once, Professor G. Williams, in his important book, writes that ‘Horace's erotic poems are set in a world totally removed from the Augustan State’, while Professor Nisbet and Miss Hubbard, in their indispensable Commentary, say ‘The “love interest” of Horace's Odes is almost entirely Hellenistic’, and, of Odes I. 5, ‘Pyrrha herself is the wayward beauty of fiction, totally unlike the compliant scorta of Horace's own temporary affairs’. The argument here will be that this view is over-schematic and makes a distinction false, in this form, to the poets and to their society. It will, I think, prove possible to argue the point without falling into sentimentality or self-indulgence. The aim is not to reconstruct the vie passionelle of the poet, but to discover the setting and the tone in which he means his poems to be read.

Late Crabbe in Relation to the Augustans and Romantics: The Temporal Labyrinth of his tales in Verse, 1812

For the general reader, George Crabbe's reputation probably continues to be pretty much Village-bound. For the scholar-critic, however, Crabbe's late volumes of verse-tales present more substantial basis for appreciating Crabbe's poetic achievement.1 There is good deal of critical disagreement, though, about the precise nature and extent of Crabbe's achievement in those verse-tales. Some commentators see late Crabbe as sort of vestigial Augustan, anxiously but stubbornly holding to old ways of thinking in the brave new world of Ancient Mariners and Clouds of Glory. Others see him as standing somewhere between the Augustans and Romantics, or even verging upon becoming Romantic himself A few take great leap forward, arguing that he transcends both the Augustan and Romantic camps, becoming, for example, a naturalistic poet far ahead of his time.2 The Crabbe of the late verse-tales has proven hard figure to place in relation to his literary contemporaries. Like number of other readers, I think Crabbe's Tales in Verse, 1812 is the most complex and distinctively interesting among his late volumes of verse. It stands as our best test for measuring the extent to which Crabbe's artistic vision developed beyond his early Augustanism. It seems to me, however, that the common conception of what is going on in that 1812 volume needs reconsideration. Readers commonly suppose that Crabbe's fundamental impulse in the verse-tales is in some manner or degree moral-didactic one. Incautious commentators discover in the poems pretty simple lessons about how to live.3 Without much soul-searching, these readers are given to pronouncing that Crabbe remains clearly Augustan poet. More cautious commentators have recognized that Crabbe's verse-tales are more complex than this: they exert resistance against one's attempt to reap morals from them. As Professor Sale pointed out some years ago, the poems contain balance of many motives and sympathies which preclude, as in real life, easy and absolute

The Augustan Poets and the Permissive Society. The Fifth Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture, Delivered at the University of Exeter 18th February 1972

The Augustan Poets and the Permissive Society. The Fifth Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture, Delivered at the University of Exeter 18th February 1972

On Donald Davie

Of all first-rate poets of age, Donald Davie is most notably re actionary. If only with some strain, we might see him, advantage, as mining great ascetic vein of contemporary art, where classical thins away? as Rothko, Bresson, Sarraute, Beckett, Cage?in ever starker forms. And yet Davie stands far right of most of his fellow ascetics?indeed, within hail ing distance of eighteenth century. In tone, diction, and verse form, he often recalls late Augustan poets, of whom he has written well and whom he has also anthologised. Above all he has tried, like Augustans, be urbane: voice (in words he quotes from Matthew Arnold) the tone and of This is reactionary indeed. For of course there is no longer any center. Or center is but maelstrom, contention. In Purity of Diction English Verse (1952), Davie, comparing Landor unfavorably with Carew, observes that in latter speaks voice of Caroline culture, whereas Landor's verses nothing speaks but voice of poet himself. But of course it is just poet's voice, and only this, that we hear speaking Davie's poetry. It could not be otherwise. To make poetry out of moral commonplace, Davie notes, a poet has make it clear that he speaks not his own voice (that would be impertinent) but as spokesman of social tradition. This is not, I think, true, as Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and still others amply witness. But it does prompt us add that to make poetry out of moral commonplace, as Davie tries do, when commonplace itself seems damaged, indeed marooned?indeed, forlorn?does require something like impertinence; and rapping on roving knuckles with yardsticks borrowed from old classrooms, impertinently using word impertinence with its haughty assump tion of determinate absolutes, what Davie himself exemplifies, we may feel, is not the tone and spirit of any center, but something more courageous and signifi cant, not say lonely: individual man working out necessities of his conscience. Moreover, what really fires this conscience, we may feel, is not at all being at center, whatever that may happen be any age, but being right: right about need for civilized restraint, for faith idea of civilization itself. We hear Davie s poetry voice that will speak out spite of its knowl edge of indifference or incredulity that awaits it?a voice consciously coming, not from center of contemporary culture, but from out on edge, kind of nagging nostalgia for an austerer day, when men lived and died by Nonconformist lights, or for Reason, Loyalty, Restraint, Right. It is voice of conscience that?protestingly?finds itself left behind.

Umbrian Rimbaud

How old was Propertius when he wrote the Cynthia? It makes a difference to our understanding and appreciation of the poems. The poet's handling of language, and the lover's relations with his mistress, will be differently viewed if we guess his age at the date of publication as twenty-five or twenty-six, and if we calculate it at fifteen or sixteen, as seems to me more probable. The date of his birth is unknown; topical allusions in the poems indicate a date before which a poem would not have been written, but do not indicate how much later it was published as part of a book. ‘The Augustan poets—and, probably, other poets in other ages—when they published a book did not trouble to bring every detail in it “up to date” or to eliminate from it everything that had been appropriate at the time of writing but proved less appropriate at the moment of publication’ (E. Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford, 1957), 287). Nor have we any assurance that a poem published in Book Two or Book Three was written later, whether in its original or in its final form, than any poem in Book One. A poem rejected, for whatever reason, from an early collection, may fit quite well, perhaps after reworking, into a later one.