Latin Poets Research Articles

Recusatio, Prolepsis, and Popular Sentiment in Tennyson's Juvenilia

Tennyson’s early poems in Poems, by Two Brothers is remarkable for its insistence on maturity, a feature that Laurie Langbauer calls prolepsis, evident in an advertisement for this volume, presumably a jointly written by Alfred and Charles, in which the two brothers boldly announce their entry into the profession of poetry: “But so it is: we have passed the Rubicon, and we leave the rest to fate; though its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever emerged from ‘the shade,’ and courted notoriety” (Tennyson and Tennyson, Advertisement). With this language and their subsequent volume of poems, Charles and Alfred Tennyson participate in a common schoolboy tradition of writing poetry as if already imagining themselves fully fledged poets. Moreover, in announcing their crossing of the Rubicon and “submitting to the microscopic eye of periodical Criticism” (ibid.), they strategically decide to disavow their youthful influences by means of the classical rhetorical strategy of recusatio. Yet while both Tennyson brothers participate in the normative schoolboy tradition of writing poetry in imitation of classical Greek and Latin poets, Alfred’s imitation also extends into the vogue for sentimental literature, including the gothic, that was popularized in Tennyson’s boyhood in such novels as Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic romances and in gift books, poetry albums, and literary annuals like the Keepsake and the Forget-Me-Not. In so combining his schoolboy training in classical poetry with his reading of popular sentimental and Romantic literature, which were generally considered feminine and commercial, Tennyson forges a distinctive poetic voice and effectively launches himself into the vocation of poetry.

Горацианская тема в журнале «Библиотека для чтения» (1834–1865)

Researchers differently assess the reception of antiquity in Russian literature in the second third of the 19 c., primarily in connection with the formation of a new system of values in the era of Romanticism. Horace's poetry, having had a significant impact on the development of the Russian literature in the 18 — early 19 century, was being reinterpreted starting from the second third of the 19 c. The paper attempts to identify the characteristics and features of addressing to the work of the Latin poet in the “Library for Reading” journal, published in 1834–1865. As a result of the analysis of critical and literary publications, the conclusion is drawn about the fickle, uneven interest of editors in the work of Horace. Almost total absence of references to him in publications of the 1830s gives way to increasing attention in the 1840s and 1850s, contrary to the popular trend of critical attitude towards the Latin poet. The publication of an essay on life and work, poetic translations, imitation and a critical abstract on the translation of satires informed Horatian theme with a new sounding. In the interpretation of Horace's work, two approaches were present. Horace's biography and literary heritage become the object of academic research in the articles of the sections “Science and Art” and “Miscellaneous”. In the printed translations from Horace, the lyrics of the classical poet become a basis for the dialogue of times, adding reflections on problems common to all ages and answers to questions posed by life that are similar in depth of content and talent of expression. The study of Horace-related publications of “Library for Reading” came to be instrumental in discovering and providing of the first analysis of an anonymous translation of Carm I, 19 overlooked in popular indexes on the works of ancient authors.

Between Sound and Silence – The Sonic World of Calpurnius Siculus’ Eclogues

The aim of the article is to analyze selected ways of sound presentation in Eclogues, written by Calpurnius Siculus, a Latin poet who lived and created in the time of Nero’s rule. Most attention will be drawn to songs performed by shepherds in their agons along with the sounds that are composed by surrounding nature, like rustling trees, murmuring streams and singing birds. What is more, an essential part is played by onomatopoeic effects realized by means of neatly chosen expressions. The correlation of accurate sounds has an impact on the sense of hearing and on the readers’ imagination, as they can be moved into the bosom of nature and almost ‘hear’ the sounds that accompany the scenes.

Care and Afterward: On Heidegger, Kafka, and Blanchot

Taking as its starting point Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time (1927) of the Latin poet Hygenius’s fable about the formation of humankind by Cura, “Care,” this article opens the philosopher’s concept of care to a dialogue with literature. If Hygenius’s fable is, in Heidegger’s terms, a “pre-ontological testimony” to Dasein’s groundedness in care, Kafka’s story “The Cares of a Family Man” (1919) and Blanchot’s novel The Most High (1948) may be called “post-ontological testimonies” of care. Both texts thematize the slipping away of the temporal horizon of care, envisioning a world in which Dasein no longer takes center stage. Through an analysis of the Heideggerian grammar of care and its resonances in Kafka and Blanchot, this article offers a new appraisal of an influential concept in twentieth-century European philosophy and literature.

"Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus": W.H. Auden and the Latin Poet Venantius Fortunatus

Abstract: W.H. Auden's "Under Sirius" (1949), constructed as an engaging interrogation of the Late Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus, has long been recognized as a vehicle for Auden's own self-examination. Yet, despite the importance of "Under Sirius" to the study of Auden's self-awareness and development as a poet, this poem's relationship to Fortunatus's poetry has not previously been explored in depth. A sustained close reading of "Under Sirius" together with its informing texts reveals that Auden has appropriated significant material from Fortunatus's poems. Rather than viewing Venantius Fortunatus as a minor poet who served as an object lesson in unrealized potential, Auden expected an informed reader to know that ultimately this poet had risen above the decadence of his times to fulfill his artistic promise.

Dante and the Latin Poets: Metamorphosis and Literary Antagonism in the Bedlam of Thieves

In Inferno’s Cantos 24 and 25 Dante points out the auctoritas of Latin epic poets (Ovid, Lucan), but uses a series of rhetorical figures intended to emphasise his own superiority and the novelty of his poetic enterprise. Dante competes with Ovid (Cadmus’s metamorphosis into a snake in Ov. met. 4. 569-603 = Dante Inf. 25. 103-138) by recycling Ovid’s grammar of description and lowering its high style according to the new poetic objective as he recounts the anti-sublime world of Malebolge. Virgil as a character of Dante’s Commedia also participates in this procedure, since he presents one of his epic creatures, Cacus (the monster slain by Hercules in Aeneid 8), in terms strongly divergent from the high diction adopted by the real Virgil as Aeneid’s author.

A New Latin Poem by Joseph Addison

Abstract Known almost exclusively now as the author of The Spectator and Cato, Joseph Addison was also highly regarded throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a Latin poet. This article presents a new addition to the canon of Addison’s Latin verse: a 57-line hexameter poem entitled Arcus Triumphalis which survives in a unique manuscript copy recently acquired by Addison’s alma mater Magdalen College, Oxford. The article begins by describing the manuscript (scans of the leaves containing Addison’s poem are included), detailing its likely genesis and confirming its attribution of the poem to Addison. Then it reconstructs the contexts of the poem, which describes a firework display put on in St James’s Square on the evening of 2 December 1697 to celebrate William III’s triumphal return to London after concluding the Peace of Ryswick. A third section provides a critical reading of the poem, concentrating on its surprising presentation of William III and its bold use of ekphrasis. The article concludes by assessing the place of Arcus Triumphalis in Addison’s career, in relation to the early development of his Whiggism and as a forerunner of several of his definitive concerns in The Spectator: privacy and the public sphere, urban spectacle, and the aesthetics of looking. An edited text of the poem and an English translation are provided in an appendix.

Vintilă Horia. Exil și călătorii

Published in 1960, in France, the novel God Was Born in Exile (Dieu est né en exil) confirmed the talent of its author, Romanian born Vintilă Horia, and also the originality of a writer who had to leave his native country after the World War and use a foreign language (in fact, more than one: except from French, he also wrote in Spanish and Italian). It is obvious, then, that the general issue of exile, Horia’s main preoccupation within his entire literary work, also reflects his own tragic situation and stands for the difficult choices the author had to make during his lifetime. Often compared to Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionescu or Emil Cioran, his contemporaries, Horia is another important representative of Romanian exile, even if his circumstances were less favorable as far as the reception of his work is concerned. In God Was Born in Exile, the Latin poet Ovid’s journey to Tomis mirrors Horia’s uprooting, but at the same time expresses a symbolic initiation – both of the protagonist and the author: during his eight years of exile, Ovid discovers not only the fundaments of Christian faith, but also the way to liberate himself from all the personal sorrows (and his youthful vain desires) and to firmly believe in his own literary art.

«Георгики» Вергилия в переводе А.Ф. Воейкова: История создания и забвения.

The article reconstructs three stages of A.F. Voeikov’s translation of Georgics by Virgil, undertaken by him “in competition” with the translations of the ancient epic poetry of A.F. Merzlyakov and N.I. Gnedich. Initially (around 1813), Voeikov translated the Latin poet in iambic 6-foot with cross-rhyming, largely focusing on the French translation of Jacques Delisle (1769), which was considered “exemplary.” But under the influence of S.S. Uvarov’s “polemics about hexameters,” Voeikov joined the winning point of view — about the priority of the transmission of the ancient epic by Russian dactylic hexameter, and reworked his translation, counting on success and imperial favor, similar to those that Gnedich’s Iliad won. But despite the intermediary efforts of V.A. Zhukovsky, Voeikov did not receive any royal favor. At the end of the 1810s for the third time he radically changes the strategy of his translation of Georgics, striving for equilinearity and refusing to look back at Delisle’s experience. This last edition is published from the archival manuscript in the Appendix to this work for the first time.

RHETORICAL DISPLAY AND PRODUCTIVE DISSONANCE IN QUINTILIAN'S QUOTATIONS OF POETRY

Among Latin rhetorical treatises and imperial writers on technical subjects, the Institutio Oratoria stands out for the sheer number of quotations of poetry that Quintilian incorporates into his discussion. Whereas Cicero's De Inuentione has 13 quotations of poetry and the Rhetorica ad Herennium 16, the index locorum in Russell's Loeb edition of the Institutio records 320 quotations from Greek and Latin poets. Despite the distinctive scale of Quintilian's engagement with poetry, scholars have not taken much interest in it, perhaps under the influence of the persistent belief that in the imperial period ‘the introduction of poetry into orations as an ornament of style’ was ‘often a useless affectation’ or that such quotations constitute mere ‘window dressing’. Early twentieth-century treatments such as that of Cole, who evaluated Quintilian's citations of poets for their ‘textual accuracy’, and Odgers, who used the relative infrequency of Quintilian's quotation of Greek literature to establish the limits of Quintilian's knowledge of Greek, set a tone of dismissiveness in relation to any question of how and why Quintilian quotes poetry as he does: Cole and Odgers attribute any ‘discrepancies’ between Quintilian's quotations and those found in the manuscripts of the poets he quoted to a (presumed) tendency to quote from memory that made him ‘rather liable to errors’. Later critics have extrapolated from their findings to attribute to Quintilian the ‘grave deficiency’ of ‘know[ing] little directly of the major Greek writers’ and to diagnose ‘intellectual stagnation’ in his engagement with Latin literature. These negative judgements are, of course, in line with the traditional assessment of Quintilian as ‘neither a great writer nor a great thinker’, one who is ‘more often belittled than understood’.

Tra gli Inferi e le stelle: un problema testuale nel mito di Orfeo in Virgilio (georg. 4,509) e il Leitmotiv astronomico nelle catabasi da Omero a Dante (con echi di Apollonio Rodio)

Abstract The article treats the presence of stars in terrestrial landscapes, in opposition to the Underworld and in connection to the topos of katabasis, above all in order to pursue in more depth a textual problem in the fabula Orphei of Vergil’s Georgics (4,509 astris / antris). The philological question is approached both on the basis of context and in relation to the descent into Hades of Aeneas, as well as in diachronic comparison with the earlier Homeric katabasis of Odysseus and the later otherworldly voyage of Dante in the Commedia. This internal and intertextual investigation reveals multiple functions of the celestial bodies in similar stories, as well as analogies between Homer, Vergil and Dante, linked by interests in nature and astronomy and by reciprocal influences. In fact, the Greek model and the Italian emulator seem to help clarify the contested passage in the Vergilian katabasis of Orpheus, while the Latin poet and Dante (who also share echoes of Apollonius Rhodius) rework a celestial detail already present in the νέκυια of Homer. Finally, both these classical authors, as well as Ovid, are subtly present at the ends of the three parts of the Commedia, each of which closes with the suggestive and symbolic image of “stars”, which evokes and renews an ancient tradition.

Le mythe d’Hermaphrodite dans les Métamorphoses d’Ovide (IV, 274-415) : une réflexion antique sur l’impossibilité de la fusion masculin/féminin

"The myth of Hermaphrodite and Salmacis, narrated by the Latin poet Ovid, is an important myth in the imaginaries that underlie the feminine/masculine dyad. We will see how th effusion of the masculine and the feminine is an unthinkable phantasm for the Romans, because it leads to the failure of the masculine. The narration omits the fate of the feminine. The myth reinforces the traditional patriarchal ideology that makes masculine the norm and denigrates feminine."

Two Newly Discovered Poems by Garcilaso de la Vega

Until now, only three Latin poems by Garcilaso de la Vega have been extant. In this study, I present two newly discovered odes by Garcilaso: one addressed to Pietro Bembo, and another addressed to Johann Alexander Brassicanus. I also present new critical editions of the three previously known poems in the light of the new witness. I argue that the poems constitute sophisticated meditations on the purpose of encomiastic literature and the nature of lyric poetry. In this way I aim to provide a better understanding of Garcilaso’s Latin odes and restore his reputation as a consummate Latin poet.

Dire les mystères en latin, et en vers, au IVe s. apr. J.C. : À propos d’orgia (Aviénus et Optatien Porphyre) et d’Eleusis (Claudien)

Abstract In this article, I first examine the use of the word orgia in the context of Optatian’s, Avienus’ and Claudian’s poetry. I then evaluate the references to the cult of Eleusis occurring in the proemium of the first book of Claudian’s Rape of Proserpina. By these two test cases, I try to survey the way in which the vocabulary of the mystery cults is used by Latin poets writing in the 4th century AD, a time punctuated by events which had progressively pushed the mystery cults to the margins of the Empire. In these texts, which might possibly mirror contemporary religious issues—although they are, first and foremost, literary projects shaped by their own models and narrative mechanisms—the mystery ceremony is sometimes likened to a theatrical performance; the emphasis is placed on the collective sensory experience, on the occult nature of these practices, as well as on their etiological aspects and symbolic meaning.

The Phoenix Complex

The Phoenix Complex

From Dutiful Name-Dropping to Warm Esteem: Dante’s Statius between De Vulgari Eloquentia, Convivio III and Convivio IV.XXV

ABSTRACT Dante’s inclusion of Statius among De Vulgari Eloquentia’s catalogue of Latin poets and his use of Statius’s Thebaid in Convivio III–IV are well-known. Yet critical literature overlooks the significant development in Dante’s treatment of Statius over the course of the two opere minori. This article argues that Dante’s qualitatively different approach to Statius between De Vulgari Eloquentia, Convivio III, and Convivio IV. xxv both sheds light on Dante’s reading programme in exile and acts as a prelude to Dante’s engagement with Statius in Inferno and creation of Stazio-character in Purgatorio. Close analysis of Dante’s changing engagement with Statius between De Vulgari Eloquentia, Convivio III and IV. xxv suggests Dante first encountered Statian epic in extracted form, stimulating Dante’s interest such that he read the Thebaid in entirety. Dante’s use of Statius in Convivio thus signals the beginning of Dante’s intense engagement with Statian epic that culminates in the Commedia.

МІФОЛОГІЧНІ ОБРАЗИ В ЛАТИНСЬКОМОВНІЙ ПОЕЗІЇ УКРАЇНСЬКОГО БАРОКО

The article examines the peculiarities of mythological characters in the Latin poetry of the baroque period in Ukraine. This period contributed a lot to intercultural relations between Ukraine and Western Europe and gave a birth to the phenomenon of the baroque Ukrainian poetry, written in Latin language. In the present paper much research has been devoted to the poetic works of Theophan Prokopovych, Grygoriy Vyshnevsky and Ilarion Yaroshevytsky; their poetic texts are found in printed editions ("Elegia paraenetica", "Epinikion", "Elegia Alexii", "Comparatio vitae monasticae", "Descriptiuncula Kijowiae", "Possesoris horum librorum luctuosum vale") and manuscripts ("Iter laureatum", "Cupido seu amor alatus"). The study analyzes the poetry in various genres, such as panegyric, elegy, epigram, lyrical poem. Addressing to the ancient legacy was defined as the sufficient and necessary feature of the baroque style. The article suggests the idea that a poet gives a preference to one or another mythological character in his individual author's interpretation. The analysis of the poetic texts reveals the most productive mythological characters, which can be classified into the following categories: 1) art (Apollo with the Muses, the winged horse Pegasus); 2) martial arts (Mars); 3) celebrations (Bacchus, Hymenaeus); 4) love (Venus, Cupid, Cypride ); 5) natural phenomena (Aurora, Lucifer, Phosphorus, Titan, Zephyrus, Thetis). The research has demonstrated that contamination of the two worldviews was natural for the baroque poet. This contamination was embodied in the bizarre combination of Christian and ancient elements in their literary works. It was traced that Latin poets of the Ukrainian baroque completely followed the literary traditions of the classical theory of poetry, what was marked in the form of the poetic work and its content.

Once Again on Claudian's Egyptian Origin

The life of Claudius Claudian (c. 370 – c. 404 AD), the great Latin poet active during the reign of Honorius, is unknown, especially the years before his great debut in 395 AD. Communis opinio holds that he was a pagan Egyptian Greek born in Alexandria c. 370 AD, who having come to Italy in 394 AD started a career of a political poet in the service of the elites of the Western Roman Empire. This view codified by Alan Cameron (1970) was challenged by Peder G. Christiansen (1997), who asserted that Claudian was actually a Westerner. The thesis of the poet’s Egyptian origin was defended by Bret Mulligan (2007) and then again attacked by Christiansen and Christiansen (2009). This article aims to reconsider the scarce textual evidence and to put an emphasis on some points that have been underestimated so far: the possibility of Claudian’s early connections with Constantinople and the ruling circles of the eastern capital.

"Idem aliter", czyli o dwóch opisach dyplomatycznej podróży do Persji w poezji późnego antyku (Claud. Cons. Stil.. I 51–68; Sid. Carm. II 75–88)

Two Latin poets of late antiquity, Claudian and Sidonius Apollinaris, included in their verse panegyrics short descriptions of diplomatic journey to Persia. The first mentioned the mission of Stilicho himself in “Panegyric on the consulate of Stilicho” (400 AD), whereas the latter described the mission of Procopius, father of the honorand in the “Panegyric on the consulate of Anthemius” (468 AD). Since Sidonius was in many ways imitator of Claudian, these pieces show a great deal of similarity both in content and form (especially in wording). However, closer scrutiny enables us to discover some differences in the treatment of Oriental topics as well as in general attitude to the praised heroes. Such an analysis allows us an insight into the image of Iranian world created in the Roman poetry as well as the question of sources used by late Latin poets. This paper can be also treated as a small contribution to the discussion on Sidonius’ imitation of Claudian poetry.

Did the Latin poet Lucan report an Ebola virus disease outbreak in his epic Pharsalia? An epidemiological report in Roman literature

Did the Latin poet Lucan report an Ebola virus disease outbreak in his epic Pharsalia? An epidemiological report in Roman literature