Augustan Poetry Final

Augustan Poetry
New Trends and Revaluations

Universidade de São Paulo
Reitor: Vahan Agopyan
Vice-Reitor: Antonio Carlos Hernandes
Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas

Diretora: Maria Arminda do Nascimento Arruda
Vice-Diretor: Paulo Martins
Departamento de Letras Clásiscas e Vernáculas

Chefe: Manoel Mourivaldo Santiago Almeida
Programa de Pós-Gradução em Letras Clássicas

Coordenador de Pós-Gradução: Daniel Rossi
Sociedade Brasileira De Estudos Clássicos

Presidente: Tatiana de Oliveira Ribeiro
Vice-Presidente: Luisa Severo Buarque de Holanda
HUMANITAS Editora Humanitas

Presidente: Ieda Maria Alves
Vice-Presidente: Mario Antônio Eufrásio
Apoio financeiro à publicação:
Realização
Rua do Lago, 717 – Cid. Universitária

Proibida a reprodução parcial ou integral desta 05508-080 – São Paulo – SP – Brasil
obra por qualquer meio eletrônico, mecânico, Telefax: 3091-0458
inclusive por processo xerográfico, sem permissão e-mail: editorafflch@usp.br
expressa do editor (Lei nº. 9.610, de 19/02/98). http:///editorahumanitas.commercesuite.com.br
Foi feito o depósito legal

Impresso no Brasil / Printed in Brazil
Agosto 2019
Edited by
Paulo Martins
Alexandre Pinheiro Hasegawa
João Angelo Oliva Neto
Augustan Poetry
New Trends and Revaluations
HUMANITAS
São Paulo
2019
Copyright 2019 dos autores
Catalogação na Publicação (CIP)

Serviço de Biblioteca e Documentação da FFLCH-USP
Maria Imaculada da Conceição – CRB-8/6409
A923 Augustan poetry [recurso eletrônico] : new trends and revaluation /
Edited by Paulo Martins, Alexandre Pinheiro Hasegawa, João
Angelo Oliva Neto. -- São Paulo : FFLCH/USP, 2019.
2.204 Kb.
ISBN 978-85-7506-371-2
1. Literatura latina – História e crítica. 2. Elegia. 3. Poesia latina.

4. Poesia lírica. 5. Poesia épica. I. Martins, Paulo, coord. II. Hasegawa,
Alexandre Pinheiro, coord. III. Oliva Neto, João Angelo, coord.
CDD 870.9
Serviço de Editoração e Distribuição

editorafflch@usp.br
Coordenação Editorial e Arte de Capa

Mª. Helena G. Rodrigues – MTb n. 28.840
Revisão
Autores
Projeto Gráfico e Diagramação

Selma Consoli – MTb n. 28.839
Contents
Prefácio ..........................................................................................7
Paulo Martins, Alexandre Hasegawa, João Angelo Oliva Neto
Part I - Elegy
Dalla città degli amori alla città che cresce: Properzio e la
Roma augustea .............................................................................15
Paolo Fedeli
A rumour in Propertius ................................................................37
Paulo Martins
‘Imperii Roma deumque locus’: la Roma augustea come
città celeste ...................................................................................67
Gianpiero Rosati
Malum, pomum or fetus? Naming fruits in Ov. Her. 20-21 .........95
Andreas N. Michalopoulos
Metrical patterns and layers of sense: some remarks on metre,
rhythm and meaning .................................................................. 123
João Batista Toledo Prado
Part II – Horatian lyric, iambus and satire
Metafore, allegorie e altre trasformazioni: Quintiliano interprete di

Orazio (sul carme 1.14, con alcune osservazioni riguardo alle navi
di Virgilio e Ovidio) ................................................................... 145
Andrea Cucchiarelli
Horace and his audience: the role of reception in the genesis
of genres ..................................................................................... 189
Bénédicte Delignon
Flaccus’ Poetics: Horace-Paris saved by Mercury-Augustus ....... 213
Horace’s hymn to Bacchus (Odes 2.19): poetics and politics ...... 231
Stephen Harrison
Sob a Batuta de Horácio: Metros Horacianos em Português,
Alemão e Inglês .......................................................................... 253
Érico Nogueira
Bacchus, Augustus and the poet in Horace Odes 3.25 ............... 275
Lya Serignolli
Part III – Epic

Epic Anger, and the State of the (Roman) Soul in Virgil’s
First Simile ................................................................................. 309
Kirk Freudenburg
Orphic Metamorphoses ............................................................. 335
Andrew Feldherr
Tereus’ tears: the performance and performativity of crying
in Met. 6.412-674 ....................................................................... 385
Jessica A. Westerhold
Prudentius’ Metamorphoses ....................................................... 417
Fernando Gorab Leme
Contributors ............................................................................... 445
Prefácio
De 08 a 10 de julho de 2015 organizamos o V Colóquio

Internacional “Visões da Antiguidade Clássica”, dedicado à poesia
augustana (Augustan Poetry: New Trends and Revaluations), em
São Paulo, a fim de discutir novas abordagens e reavaliar as an-
tigas, reunindo nomes que são referência no estudo de Horácio,
Ovídio, Propércio e Virgílio, das mais diversas universidades. Do
evento resultou este livro por cujas contribuições esperamos que
os estudos sobre poesia augustana possam se renovar e aumentar
(augere). A imagem augusta do princeps, perpetuada por mais de
dois mil anos, com sua grauitas, eternamente jovem, continuará
ainda, queiramos ou não, a se fazer presente, ano a ano, sob o
nome do mês que o celebra: agosto. Reunidos por ele, um deus
na terra, os poetas aqui discutidos, que o eternizam, também se
perpetuam (non omnis moriar), crescendo e renovando-se (crescam
recens), pelas novas abordagens, pelo cuidadoso trabalho filoló-
gico e pelas discussões proporcionadas pelos autores (auctores)
deste livro que vem assim organizado em três grandes partes:
I – Elegia, com contribuições sobre Propércio, Ovídio e

métrica;
II – Lírica, iambo e sátira, com contribuições sobre
Horácio e sua recepção;
III – Épica, com contribuições sobre Virgílio, Ovídio e
recepção.
8 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Na parte elegíaca, apresentam-se cinco estudos. Paolo

Fedeli e Gianpiero Rosati tratam da Roma de Augusto:
o primeiro, concentrando-se inicialmente nos três primeiros
livros elegíacos de Propércio, mostra a ambivalência dos lugares
descritos pelo poeta, ora os teatros, pórticos e o Foro são lugares
das aventuras eróticas, ora os mesmos locais assumem conota-
ção negativa, quando o poeta deve aceitar a traição de Cíntia
ou duros períodos de abstinência sexual. Parece, porém, haver
grande mudança no quarto livro elegíaco, quando o poeta celebra
Augusto como artífice da renovação das construções romanas,
elogiando os novos tempos e as restaurações. Por fim, mostra,
em contraste, como a mesma cidade augustana é descrita na obra
de Ovídio, enfatizando a Roma perdida para o poeta exilado.
Rosati, por sua vez, partindo da célebre comparação ovidiana
entre o Palatino e o céu (met. 1.173-6), mostra que, se o céu é
como Roma, Roma também é como o céu. Daí, neste processo
de assimilação, pelo qual o Olimpo é romanizado, Júpiter se
torna o princeps, assim como Augusto é, em particular na obra do
exílio, um deus na terra. Em seguida, mostra como a construção
ovidiana torna-se um topos da poesia encomiástica do período
imperial com Estácio e Marcial, no louvor a Domiciano, e an-
tecipa o lugar cristão da cidade divina, elaborada por Agostinho
no De civitate dei. Paulo Martins, em estudo de Propércio 2.7,
investiga as relações entre as construções poéticas do elegíaco e
aspectos históricos da sociedade romana do período. Assim, por
exemplo, nas descrições de Mecenas, Augusto e do próprio poeta
misturam-se características históricas e convenções genéricas.
Além disso, os eventos históricos ou leis, independentemente
de terem existido ou não, são descritos nos versos com base em
discursos morais e políticos da época. Daí, passa a analisar o
estatuto do “rumor” e como é usado retoricamente na poesia.
Andreas Michalopoulos volta a atenção para as Heroides de
Ovídio, em particular para as epístolas de Acôncio e Cidipe (20-
21). Em comparação com a única fonte disponível da história,
os Aetia de Calímaco (3, frr. 67-75 Pf.), estuda os termos para
PREFÁCIO 9
o fruto usados pelo poeta (malum, pomum e fetus). O autor não

só investiga a identificação do fruto – se se trata de maçã ou
marmelo –, mas também procura mostrar que os termos não
são mera variação poética; antes, não há arbitrariedade ou acaso,
mas um jogo cuidadoso, a cada vez, com a etimologia poética
dos termos. João Batista Toledo Prado discute, levando em
consideração modernas teorias linguísticas, a métrica da poesia
latina, com particular atenção ao dístico elegíaco. Para ilustrar
a discussão teórica inicial, o autor passa a fazer análise métrica
detalhada de Tibulo (1.10.1-10).
Na parte lírica, iambo e sátira, reúnem-se seis estudos.
Stephen Harrison e Lya Serignolli, em diferentes odes
de Horácio, estudam a figura de Baco: o primeiro, ao analisar
Odes 2.19, procura mostrar, lançando mão de outros trechos dos
carmina (3.3.9-16 e 3.25, por exemplo) e da poesia augustana,
como o deus representa Augusto. Chama atenção ainda para a
nomeação da divindade como Liber, associado à ideia de libertas,
aspecto importante no contexto da batalha de Ácio, caracteri-
zando assim Antônio e Cleópatra como figuras tirânicas. Além
dos aspectos políticos, por fim, estuda os poéticos, pois o poeta
vê Baco a ensinar canções (carmina). Daí, traz para discussão
passagens das Bacas de Eurípides, mostrando o enriquecimento
genérico produzido por Horácio na composição dessa ode, em
que se misturam política e poética. O segundo texto que se
concentra sobre a figura de Baco, de modo semelhante, estuda
também as relações políticas entre o deus e Augusto, mas agora
com especial atenção em Odes 3.25. Ademais, procura mostrar
como, por meio de Baco, há identificação entre Horácio e
Augusto. Os seguidores do deus, o poeta e o princeps têm um
futuro promissor e serão imortalizados. De Baco a Mercúrio,
Alexandre Pinheiro Hasegawa busca, primeiramente, des-
crever uma ‘poética da fraqueza’ nas obras de Horácio Flaco.
Daí, o poeta que se descreve como imbele, não guerreiro, será
identificado com o imbele Páris, pelo estudo e comparação das
Odes 1.6 e 1.15. Em seguida, à luz dessa relação, o autor propõe
10 AUGUSTAN POETRY
leitura de Odes 2.7, em que Horácio/Páris é retirado da batalha,

em clara imitação homérica, por Mercúrio, que será associado a
Augusto, pela leitura das Odes 1.2 e 1.10. Bénédicte Delignon
estuda o papel da recepção do público romano sobre a compo-
sição de Sátiras, Epodos e Odes. A autora propõe, por exemplo,
que Horácio apresenta a seu público a sátira, não como gênero
de polêmicas políticas, mas da libertas. Dado o contexto político,
Horácio, segundo a estudiosa, sabia que a prática desse gênero
era problemática. Daí, isso teria forçado Horácio à realização de
sátira menos polêmica e aparentemente apolítica, pensando nas
reservas da audiência em relação ao modelo luciliano. Por fim,
concentrando-se nas odes eróticas, defende que o poeta inventou
uma lírica erótica romana, transformando o canto da paixão
em exortação ao casamento. Andrea Cucchiarelli, por sua
vez, reavalia a célebre interpretação alegórica que Quintiliano
faz (8.6.44-47) de Odes 1.14 em que se vê identidade entre a
nau e a respublica. A leitura foi retomada continuamente pelos
comentários modernos que, por vezes, chegam a desvalorizar
o poema horaciano em relação ao modelo alcaico, adotando
ponto de vista romântico, ou a propor outra alegoria (erótica)
para a nau. Antes de tratar de duas outras naus augustanas, nas
epopeias de Virgílio e Ovídio, o autor ainda discute a palavra
malo no v.10 da ode, propondo a lição (salo), em confronto com
outras passagens, seja de Horácio, seja de outros poetas. Érico
Nogueira, por fim, estuda como poetas, em alemão, português e
inglês, tentaram reproduzir, cada qual à sua maneira, e seguindo
estratégias diversas, os metros líricos de Horácio em suas lín-
guas, tal como o poeta latino reproduziu os metros gregos em
latim, orgulhando-se de ter sido o primeiro a fazer isso (Odes
3.30.13-14).
Na parte épica, Kirk Freudenburg, retomando o modelo
iliádico, estuda, primeiramente, a raiva na Eneida de Virgílio, em
particular aquela de Juno contra os troianos. Em seguida, passa
a analisar o primeiro símile na epopeia latina, o do “estadista
piedoso” (1.142-56). Tal como Netuno, em seu carro, põe fim à
PREFÁCIO 11
tempestade, assim o estadista piedoso governa com suas palavras

as paixões. Assim, o autor lembra da imagem platônica no Fedro,
em que a alma humana é comparada a um carro puxado por
dois cavalos. Ora, se a violenta tempestade representa o estado
apaixonado da raivosa Juno, tal como uma vingativa Medeia, o
carro conduzido por Netuno é imagem da alma (romana) con-
trolada pelo estadista piedoso. Andrew Feldherr, estudando
os temas órficos no epos de Ovídio, retoma inicialmente o Orfeu
das Geórgicas de Virgílio entendido como representante da poé-
tica virgiliana a fim de discutir a personagem no livro 10 das
Metamorfoses de Ovídio. O autor discute, então, as transforma-
ções genéricas por que passa a personagem, do elegíaco ao épico/
didático, já trabalhadas por Virgílio e retrabalhadas por Ovídio.
Essa voz órfica presente nas Metamorfoses, que recupera não só
o modelo virgiliano, traz no próprio nome do poeta, Orpheus,
posto no início do relato (10.3: Orphea nequiquam uoce uocatur),
a marca da oralidade, passando ao onomatopeico lamento (heu) e
concluindo com a letra da serpente, que, por fim, silencia a voz e o
canto. Assim, Ovídio não poderia terminar essa narrativa (11.66)
de outra forma senão com o nome desse auctor, dessa autoridade
poética: Orfeu. Ainda nas Metamorfoses, mas agora voltando-se
para as lágrimas (lacrimae, fletus) de Tereu, sem deixar de obser-
var também Procne e Filomela, Jessica Westerhold, estuda
o pathos do luto, da dor (dolor), no episódio do livro 6. Segundo
a autora, no início do relato, Tereu forja lágrimas, construídas
retoricamente na ausência da emoção. No entanto, a personagem
passa não só por uma transformação física, em pássaro, mas
também por uma metamorfose emocional no fim da narrativa.
Fernando Gorab Leme, justamente no limite do volume,
desenvolve estudo sobre a recepção das Metamorfoses de Ovídio
na obra de Prudêncio, analisando como o poeta cristão imita o
augustano, ressignificando diversas passagens em novo contexto.
12 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Esperamos que os leitores encontrem deleite e utilidade

nos textos aqui reunidos, que, com abordagens variadas, procu-
ram reavaliar leituras já consagradas e propor novos caminhos
para o estudo dos poetas augustanos. Que, então, eles continuem
a renascer, sempre novos, em possíveis textos derivados dessa
coletânea!
Os editores
PART I – ELEGY
Dalla città degli amori alla città che cresce:
Properzio e la Roma augustea
Paolo Fedeli
Università degli studi di Bari Aldo Moro
Una città può essere la somma dei nostri sentimenti o il

riflesso dei nostri stati d’animo. Credo che per tutti sia così,
perché una città è ben più che un luogo fisico: è la proiezione
simbolica di quello che siamo o che riteniamo di essere.
Che Roma sia divenuta ben presto il riflesso dello stato
d’animo di Properzio e delle sue mutevoli concezioni di poetica,
lo si capisce dalla distanza che divide l’immagine della città
del poeta d’amore da quella del cantore degli splendori della
Roma augustea. La città del poeta d’amore è quella delle visite
di notte o al sorgere del giorno in casa dell’amata (1.3; 2.29b),
delle suppliche e degli improperi alla porta chiusa perché si apra
per accoglierlo (1.16), è la Roma della Suburra e delle audaci
fughe di Cinzia (4.7.15-18), degli amori ‘en plein air’ (4.7.19-
20), delle meretrici che percorrono in lungo e in largo la via
Sacra (2.23.15), delle scenate di gelosia nelle sordide taverne
dell’Esquilino (4.8.19-20).
16 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Finché Properzio si considera poeta d’amore e non pratica

vie diverse, Roma è per lui lo spazio dell’amore,1 come lo era
stata per Catullo e, poi, per Cornelio Gallo: che al suo amore per
Licoride abbia fatto da sfondo l’ambiente cittadino è Virgilio ad
attestarlo, quando nella X bucolica per lenire le sofferenze che
a Gallo provocano il tradimento e la fuga dell’amata Licoride
gli suggerisce di trasferire la propria esistenza e il proprio canto
d’amore in uno scenario bucolico. Che quello di Properzio sia
un tipico amore cittadino lo si intuisce subito, sin da quando
nella prima parte dell’elegia 1.8 egli fa di Cinzia una seconda
Licoride, che vorrebbe seguire un suo occasionale ma danaroso
spasimante sin nella gelida Illiria: vi rinuncerà, tuttavia, per
amore del poeta e della sua poesia, e sarà quello il momento del
trionfo di Properzio (1.8.31-32):
illi carus ego et per me carissima Roma
dicitur, et sine me dulcia regna negat.
Per Cinzia, dunque, l’amore per Properzio s’identifica

e si confonde con quello per Roma, ed è l’atteggiamento di
devozione del poeta a renderle gradita la vita cittadina.
Sono gli amici stessi a ritenere l’amore della coppia
elegiaca indissolubilmente legato alla città, al punto che Pontico
nell’esordio dell’elegia 1,122 può facilmente congetturare che
Properzio non si decide a lasciare Roma perché la sua ‘liaison’
con la donna che ha scelto di cantare gli impedisce di allontanarsi
da quel contesto cittadino che costituisce lo spazio dell’amore
elegiaco (1.12.1-2):
quid mihi desidiae non cessas fingere crimen,
quod faciat nobis, Pontice, Roma moram?
1
Riprendo qui liberamente quello che sulla città quale spazio dell’amore ho scrit-
to in Fedeli (2010, 4-10).
2
Naturalmente se si accetta di correggere con Kraffert nel vocativo Pontice
l’improbabile conscia del v. 2, che andrebbe riferito a Roma. Sulla situazione
testuale cf. Fedeli (1980, 288-290).
DALLA CITTÀ DEGLI AMORI ALLA CITTÀ CHE CRESCE 17
D’altra parte è significativo che ai periodi di dura astinenza

sessuale per il tradimento faccia riscontro invariabilmente la
negazione dei luoghi e dei momenti tipici della vita cittadina,
tanto che, quando Properzio descrive il trionfo in amore del
barbarus che gli ha sottratto la donna amata,3 la sua condizione
disperata di amante abbandonato si manifesta non solo con
l’inappetenza, ma anche col rifiuto di quei luoghi, come il teatro
e il Campo Marzio, che dello spazio cittadino sono i simboli
privilegiati (2.16.33-34):
tot iam abiere dies, cum me nec cura theatri
nec tetigit Campi, nec mea mensa iuvat.
All’interno della città quale scenario dell’amore, lo spazio

in cui esso si concretizza si restringe alla casa e al letto di Cinzia.
Properzio non parla mai della propria casa come di un luogo
d’amore, ma sempre si descrive mentre fiducioso si presenta alla
porta della casa di Cinzia. L’eccezione è costituita da 4.8, ma
dipende dalle modalità di esecuzione del tentativo di rivalsa del
poeta nei confronti del tradimento di Cinzia: se la donna amata
ha deciso di scorazzare fra Roma e Lanuvio sul cocchio di un
ricco ed eccentrico amante, sarà nella propria dimora a Roma,
sull’Esquilino, che Properzio organizzerà un festino consolatorio
con due donnine allegre. Ma il ritorno improvviso e inatteso
di Cinzia è quello tipico di una domina che considera violato
lo spazio dell’amore a lei sola riservato, e per questo motivo –
oltre a dettare le regole di un rinnovato foedus – provvede alle
purificazioni di rito, prima di sancire la pace con una battaglia
erotica sul letto di Properzio.
Se, però, la norma vuole che a Roma lo spazio degli amanti
sia quello della casa di Cinzia – che anche per questo motivo
palesa la condizione di meretrix più spesso di quella di matrona –
allora non c’è da meravigliarsi né dei frequenti accenni ai custodes
3
2.16.27-28 barbarus exutis agitat vestigia lumbis / et subito felix nunc mea regna
tenet.
18 AUGUSTAN POETRY
che impediscono l’ingresso né della raffigurazione di una dimora

in cui tutti possono entrare perché Cinzia si comporta come
una grande cortigiana;4 una dimora dove i giovani si disputano
animosamente la precedenza e con i loro reiterati appelli non
le consentono di dormire.5 Se la casa di Cinzia costituisce lo
spazio dell’amore, ben si capisce perché nella fase del discidium
essa possa assumere una connotazione negativa, che ben s’intona
con l’atteggiamento desolato e querulo di una Cinzia che soffre
per la lontananza del suo uomo e per il sospetto del tradimento.
In 3.6.11-18
nec speculum strato vidisti, Lygdame lecto 11
scriniaque ad lecti clausa iacere pedes 14
ac maestam teneris vestem pendere lacertis? 13
Ornabat niveas nullane gemma manus? 12
Tristis erat domus, et tristes sua pensa ministrae 15
carpebant, medio nebat et ipsa loco,
umidaque impressa siccabat lumina lana,
rettulit et querulo iurgia nostra sono?
la condizione di abbandono e di trascuratezza in cui versa Cinzia

si riflette sullo stato della sua casa: lo specchio giace abbandonato
sul letto, il cofanetto con gli ingredienti per il trucco è confinato
ai piedi del letto, la veste è neghittosamente gettata sulle sue
spalle e nessuna pietra preziosa adorna le sue dita.
In quale quartiere di Roma il poeta collochi lo spazio
dell’amore è Cinzia a dircelo, nella rievocazione di un tempo
4
2.6.1-6 Non ita complebant Ephyraeae Laidos aedis, / ad cuius iacuit Graecia tota
fores; / turba Menandreae fuerat nec Thaidos olim / tanta, in qua populus lusit
Ericthonius; / nec quae deletas potuit componere Thebas, / Phryne tam multis facta
beata viris.
5
2.19.5-6 nulla neque ante tuas orietur rixa fenestras, / nec tibi clamatae somnus
amarus erit. La rixa ante Cynthiae fenestras a cui allude Properzio nel v. 5 sarà
con ogni probabilità una disputa fra spasimanti avvinazzati perché reduci dal
banchetto e desiderosi di avere la precedenza nei favori sessuali, piuttosto che
un alterco fra uno spasimante e il portiere o un tentativo di attirare, urlando,
l’attenzione della donna.
ormai lontano nel suo sfogo post mortem nei confronti dell’amante
ingrato e immemore (4.7.15-18):
iamne tibi exciderant vigilacis furta Suburae 15
et mea nocturnis trita fenestra dolis,
per quam demisso quotiens tibi fune pependi,
alterna veniens in tua colla manu?
Che la scena sia ambientata nella Suburra potrà sorprendere

i patetici e irriducibili sostenitori di una Cinzia matronale, ma
offre una definitiva conferma a quanti ritengono che Properzio
abbia voluto conferire alla donna da lui cantata i tratti di una
meretrix da commedia (quanti suoi monologhi patetici, allora,
piuttosto che un tono tragico potrebbero assumere cadenze
paratragiche!).
Insomma, nei primi tre libri di elegie sembra proprio che
abbiano un ruolo solo i luoghi convenzionali del corteggiamento
e dell’amore e che nulla esista al di fuori di essi. Sembra proprio
che per i monumenti della Roma augustea da parte del poeta
non esista alcun interesse e si direbbe che egli passi ogni giorno
accanto ad essi con lo sguardo fugace e assente. Si capisce,
però, che è il genere praticato a orientare i contenuti della
poesia. Talora, però, possono presentarsi esigenze diverse, tali
da preannunziare quel mutamento di rotta che nel IV libro
diverrà esplicito.
Ha scritto Paul Zanker che “l’immagine complessiva di
una città in una particolare situazione storica «rappresenta un
coerente sistema di comunicazione visiva, in grado di influenzare
gli abitanti anche a livello inconscio per il fatto stesso della sua
continua presenza.”6
Neppure il poeta d’amore può restare insensibile di fronte
al fascino della città che cresce: con i suoi interventi nei campi
più diversi, Augusto è intento a riscrivere tutto e, al tempo stesso,
6
Zanker (1989, 23).
20 AUGUSTAN POETRY
“iscrive se stesso in ogni aspetto della vita, pubblica e privata.”7 È

l’architettura, in particolare, ad avere un ruolo di primario rilievo
nel suo progetto di conquista di un generale consenso, grazie
alla felice intuizione di legare il programma di rinnovamento
edilizio a quello di esaltazione dei valori religiosi: già a ridosso
di Azio egli da un lato favorisce la costruzione sul Palatino
dell’imponente tempio di Apollo, dall’altro erige il Mausoleo
nella parte settentrionale del Campo Marzio e trasforma
profondamente il Foro. Cassio Dione (52.30.1) attribuisce a
Mecenate il merito di aver suggerito a Ottaviano, nel 29 a.C.,
il necessario abbellimento della città quale punto di primaria
importanza ai fini della conquista del consensus. Da allora gli
interventi edilizi si susseguirono con un ritmo incalzante e
furono tali da incidere sensibilmente sulla fisionomia della
città repubblicana.8 Come attesta Svetonio,9 dando prova di
accortezza e lungimiranza Augusto si preoccupò di coinvolgere
in qualità di committenti i personaggi di maggior rilievo, sicché
nel corso degli anni «membri della famiglia imperiale, vecchi
alleati politici, seguaci di Antonio poi passati dalla sua parte,
famiglie cooperanti della nobiltà tradizionale, membri dei nuovi
ceti in ascesa, e, non da ultimo, senato e popolo; tutti furono
chiamati a collaborare, in una grande e concertata azione di
consenso».10
7
Barchiesi (1994, 59).
8
Un ottimo sguardo d’insieme, oltreché in Zanker (2013, 51–56), in Sommella
– Migliorati (1991, 291-7) e soprattutto in Favro 1996, in particolare nelle
pgg. 79-142.
9
Suet. Aug. 29.4-5 sed et ceteros principes viros saepe hortatus est ut pro facultate
quisque monimentis vel novis vel refectis et excultis urbem adornarent. Multaque
a multis tunc extructa sunt, sicut a Marcio Philippo aedes Herculis Musarum, a L.
Cornificio aedes Dianae, ab Asinio Pollione atrium Libertatis, a Munatio Planco
aedes Saturni, a Cornelio Balbo theatrum, a Statilio Tauro amphitheatrum, a M.
vero Agrippa complura et egregia.
10
Così Hölscher (2009, 151); sulla partecipazione delle gentes cfr. anche Sommella
– Migliorati (1991, 291–5).
L’elegiaco Properzio sin dal II libro sembra preannunciare

gli esiti dichiaratamente augustei del IV, pur evitando – almeno
per ora – di entrare in aperto conflitto con i contenuti della
poesia erotica. Sono gli anni in cui Augusto dà inizio all’opera
di restauro e di nuova edificazione dei templi e degli edifici
pubblici: testimone attento e interessato dei mutamenti della
città, il cantore di Cinzia capisce bene che l’introduzione nella
poesia erotica di tematiche connesse con l’attività edilizia rischia
di risultare piuttosto stravagante in un canzoniere per la donna
amata, e ricorre, quindi, a un ingegnoso espediente: invece
di accogliere all’interno del tessuto erotico elementi ad esso
estranei, presenterà come accessorio proprio l’argomento erotico.
È quello che egli fa nella XXXI elegia del II libro, dove il tenue
legame con la poesia di corteggiamento galante è definito nel
distico iniziale (2.31.1-2):
Quaeris cur veniam tibi tardior? Aurea Phoebi
Porticus a magno Caesare aperta fuit.
A un appuntamento con l’amata, Properzio non è giunto

in orario; colpevole del ritardo che Cinzia gli rimprovera è stata
l’inaugurazione del portico di Apollo, annesso al tempio del dio
sul Palatino, di cui egli dà una parziale descrizione. Nel marasma
dell’attuale II libro, confluenza a parer mio pressoché certa di
due libri originari,11 l’elegia ha tutta l’aria di esserci giunta in
modo incompleto; tuttavia il suo probabile stato frammentario
non c’impedisce di cogliere il forte impatto ideologico del com-
plesso.12 Edificato su un terreno di proprietà di Ottaviano che
era stato colpito dal fulmine,13 il tempio era stato votato nel 36
a.C. dopo la vittoria su Sesto Pompeo a Nauloco14 e dedicato
11
Ne ho discusso ampiamente nell’introduzione al mio commento del II libro
Fedeli (2005, 21–35).
12
Sul tempio di Apollo come sintesi di un progetto politico-culturale cf. Zanker
(1989, 97).
13
Cf. Suet. Aug. 29.3; Cass.Dio 49.15.5.
14
Vell. 2.81.3; Cass.Dio 49.15.5.
22 AUGUSTAN POETRY
nel 28 a.C.:15 poiché la casa di Augusto sul Palatino era collegata

alla terrazza del tempio da una rampa di accesso, dimora del
principe e luogo di culto del dio suo protettore costituivano un
complesso unitario di grande significato ideologico.16
Il fatto stesso di aver inserito in una raccolta di poesia
d’amore un carme che, invece, tesse l’elogio di una simile realiz-
zazione del principe costituisce di per sé una significativa testi-
monianza di adesione del poeta elegiaco al programma edilizio
del magnus Caesar (v. 2): basterebbe questo esempio a far capire
come sia fuori luogo tacciare il poeta di totale disinteresse nei
confronti del progetto edilizio di Augusto.17 Non solo la XXXI
elegia del II libro, ma anche i vv. 11–16 della successiva, con
la loro presentazione della porticus di Pompeo ci mostrano un
poeta che, sensibile all’aspetto della città e pienamente partecipe
delle sue trasformazioni, descrive con compiaciuta insistenza i
luoghi in cui si svolge la vita dei giovani, dal Campo Marzio ai
portici e ai templi.
Si può dire che proprio l’elegiaco Properzio sia divenuto il
più convinto cantore del progressivo mutamento della fisionomia
della città dei tempi suoi: come Augusto aveva ben capito «che
l’architettura, intesa come strumento per dare una nuova forma
a Roma, era un mezzo tanto efficace quanto la poesia»,18 così
Properzio, una volta ammesso nella cerchia di Mecenate, relegati
nel I libro e ormai dimenticati gli eccidi del bellum Perusinum
compiuti da Ottaviano al tempo della presa di Perugia, si era reso
ben conto dell’importanza e dell’originalità che avrebbe potuto
conseguire la sua poesia elegiaca in quanto fiancheggiatrice del
nuovo modo di concepire e di realizzare la città.
15
Cass.Dio 53.1.3; CIL I² 214. 245. 249.
16
Cf. Zanker (1989, 57); (2014, 221-244) e, per il forte effetto scenografico,
Sauron (2014, 85).
17
È questo il giudizio espresso da Zanker (2014, 222).
18
Wallace-Hadrill (2014, 137).
Quando, fra il 20 e il 15 a.C., egli compone il IV libro, la

sua adesione al programma di Augusto appare sincera e convinta
sin dalla prima, programmatica elegia e per lui si tratta solo di
saper scegliere, nella presentazione di una raccolta a metà strada
fra poesia delle origini e poesia d’amore, quale aspetto celebrare
dell’attività del principe: non a caso egli decide di privilegiare il
restauro di edifici sacri ormai fatiscenti e la nuova costruzione
di templi e di teatri. Illuminante è l’esplicita dichiarazione di
poetica che sovrintende a tale scelta: il poeta, infatti, si consi-
dera in procinto d’intraprendere un’impresa che non ha nulla
da invidiare a quella di un fondatore o rifondatore di città:
quando, infatti, nel v. 57 della 4.1 mette in chiaro l’aspirazione
a moenia disponere versu, egli fa di sé un singolare fondatore, che
si serve della poesia in luogo dell’aratro. C’è in quell’espressione
la consapevolezza che, celebrando la crescita delle mura e della
città, l’attività del poeta finisca per coincidere con quella di un
Anfione, che al suono della lira edificò le mura di Tebe.19 Sullo
stesso piano dell’attività edilizia promossa da Augusto, grazie
alla quale Roma sta mutando la sua fisionomia, si colloca dunque
quella del poeta, che muta il suo modo di far poesia adattandolo
alle istanze dei tempi nuovi; e come Augusto con la sua opera di
restauro e di nuova costruzione di templi e di edifici pubblici sta
rifondando Roma, così Properzio si accinge a riscrivere Roma
con la sua poesia delle origini dei sacra, degli dei e dei cognomina
locorum. Ma come Roma cresce nel rispetto della continuità col
passato, così il poeta apre nuove vie alla poesia elegiaca senza
escludere quelle già percorse nel passato.20
19
Osserva Gazich (1997, 324) che mentre moenia “può riferirsi a materiali riguar-
danti la fondazione e la storia delle origini, moenia disponere non segnala solo la
tensione tra materia gravis e arte tenuis (...), ma definisce il modo in cui questa
materia, prelevata da contesti epici, viene introdotta in ambito elegiaco, cioè
ricodificata attraverso una ridistribuzione degli elementi e un loro reciproco
adattamento”.
20
Il motivo del poeta-architetto e fondatore verrà ripreso nel v. 67 (Roma, fave, tibi
surgit opus!), dove il verbo surgere non è in rapporto soltanto col libro di poesia
di Properzio, ma per estensione di significato con la città interà: alla città che
24 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Nell’accingersi ad aprire nuove vie alla sua poesia,

Properzio guarda a Virgilio, in particolare alla ‘passeggiata’ di
Evandro e di Enea nei luoghi in cui sorgerà Roma (Aen. 8.307–
368), dall’Ara Massima al Foro Boario sino al Palatino, dov’è
la dimora di Evandro: la forza del modello è tale che nell’elegia
incipitaria del IV libro sarà il poeta stesso ad appropriarsi del
ruolo di Evandro e ad indicare a uno straniero le realizzazioni
più significative della maxima Roma augustea, a cominciare
dall’edilizia templare. Anche in questo a indicargli la via era stato
Virgilio, che nel descrivere il triplice trionfo del 29 a.C. effigiato
sullo scudo di Enea aveva insistito sul momento religioso, con
la consacrazione di un numero infinito di templi agli dèi italici
da parte di Augusto (Aen. 8.714-6 at Caesar, triplici invectus
Romana triumpho / moenia, dis Italis, votum immortale, sacrabat
/ maxima tercentum totam delubra per urbem).
Quando il poeta elegiaco, forte di un simile precedente,
in apertura della prima elegia offre allo sguardo dell’hospes la
visione degli aurea templa che si ergono nella loro maestosa
imponenza, non si propone soltanto di esaltarne lo splendore e
l’architettonica perfezione, ma vuole mettere in risalto la pietas
del principe nei confronti degli dèi e la fusione della nuova Roma
augustea col momento religioso. Lo sguardo del poeta indugia sul
tempio di Apollo e sugli altri del Palatino, prima di soffermarsi
su quello di Giove Capitolino (vv. 7–8). Al Palatino fa ritorno
con la casa Romuli recentemente restaurata (v. 9) per passare
poi alla Curia (vv. 11–12) e, quindi, di nuovo al Campidoglio
(vv. 13–14), prima di rivolgere lo sguardo ai teatri (vv. 15-16):
l’andamento desultorio e segnato da continui ritorni sui propri
passi non dà l’impressione di un’ordinata e composta periegesi,
cresce corrisponde il libro di poesia che cresce, sino a raggiungere il suo aspet-
to definitivo. Lo stesso motivo verrà riproposto da Ovidio, ironicamente negli
Amores (1.1.27 sex mihi surgit opus numeris, in quinque residat), seriamente nei
Fasti (4.830 auspicibus vobis hoc mihi surgat opus) e nei Tristia (2.559–560 surgens
ab origine mundi / in tua deduxi tempora, Caesar, opus).
come quella di Evandro e di Enea nell’VIII libro della virgiliana

Eneide, ma vuole riprodurre il soffermarsi dello sguardo sugli
edifici che più lo colpiscono. Si capisce, tuttavia, che punto
d’osservazione privilegiato resta il Palatino, ideale per instaurare
un confronto tra la Roma del passato e quella del presente e per
legare strettamente luoghi di culto (il tempio di Apollo, divinità
protettrice di Augusto) e luoghi del potere (in primo luogo la
dimora del principe).
Quella dei versi iniziali di 4.1 è solo una prima presenta-
zione: il tempio di Apollo Palatino verrà riproposto nell’elegia
che celebra il XV anniversario di Azio (4.6), quello di Giove
Capitolino nell’elegia di Tarpea (4.4), e nel corso del libro altri
templi saranno ricordati e celebrati: nella X elegia quello di
Giove Feretrio, che versava in uno stato d’abbandono e d’incuria
tali da giustificarne l’inclusione da parte di Augusto fra i templi
di nuova costruzione,21 laddove sia Cornelio Nepote sia Livio
parlano di restauro.22 Nella IX elegia, oltre all’Ara Massima in
onore di Ercole trova un implicito riconoscimento l’attività in
campo edilizio dell’augusta imperatrice: il ruolo insolitamente
ampio e importante lì accordato al culto della Bona Dea e al
luogo sacro in cui viene celebrato si giustifica se si considera
che, mentre il programma edilizio di Augusto era in una fase
d’intenso sviluppo, Livia decise di affiancarlo promuovendo
proprio il restauro del tempio della Bona Dea Subsaxana, sul
fianco orientale dell’Aventino: lo attesta Ovidio, che nel V libro
dei Fasti non si limita a parlare del tempio e della sua origine,
ma ricorda l’efficace e decisiva opera di restauro promossa da
Livia (vv. 149-158):23
21
Res gest. 19.2 aedes in Capitolio Iovis Feretri ...feci.
22
Nep. Att. 20.3; Liv. 1.10.6; cfr. Coarelli (1996, 135–6).
23
Anche se dell’epoca del restauro mancano notizie certe e neppure Augusto ne
parla nel cap. 19 delle sue Res gestae riservato ai templi restaurati o edificati, non
è da escludere che esso sia stato realizzato durante il periodo della sua assenza da
26 AUGUSTAN POETRY
est moles nativa loco, res nomina fecit:

appellant Saxum; pars bona montis ea est. 150
Huic Remus institerat frustra, quo tempore fratri
prima Palatinae signa dedistis aves.
Templa Patres illic oculos exosa viriles
leniter acclini constituere iugo.
Dedicat haec veteris Clausorum nominis heres, 155
virgineo nullum corpore passa virum.
Livia restituit, ne non imitata maritum
esset et ex omni parte secuta suum.
Vitruvio, rivolgendosi ad Augusto nella prefazione del

De architectura, confessa di non aver osato pubblicare le sue
riflessioni finché il principe era impegnato nella lotta politica
e militare (1 praef. 1), temendo di disturbarlo in un momento
poco opportuno. “Quando però – egli continua – notai che tu
non ti prendevi cura soltanto della vita pubblica della comunità
e dell’organizzazione dello stato, ma anche dell’opportunità di
dare sviluppo all’edilizia pubblica, in modo che per opera tua non
solo lo stato risultasse accresciuto grazie alle nuove province, ma
la grandezza del potere si manifestasse anche nello straordinario
prestigio degli edifici pubblici, ritenni di non dover lasciare
passare la prima occasione per pubblicare, dedicandoli a te, quei
miei scritti sull’argomento in questione”.24 E, subito dopo, così
ribadisce e completa il suo pensiero: “Cominciai a comporre
quest’opera dedicata a te, perché mi accorsi che tu avevi fatto
costruire e continuavi a far costruire molti edifici, e che anche
nel tempo a venire avresti curato che gli edifici pubblici e privati
fossero degni di essere affidati alla memoria dei posteri, in
rapporto alla grandezza delle tue imprese” (1 praef. 3).
Non a caso, nel contesto properziano, dagli aurea templa lo
sguardo si sposta ben presto (vv. 11–14) sulla Curia e sui senatori
antichi e contemporanei: il senato è il simbolo della persistenza
Roma fra il 22 e il 19 a.C.: cf. Fox (1996, 170), Spencer (2001, 273 n. 28), Welch
(2004, 68-72) e sul tempio Chioffi (1993, 200-1).
24
Vitr. 1 praef. 2; le traduzioni del De architectura sono quelle della Romano 1997.
dei valori repubblicani, e ben si capisce che, nel tessere l’elogio

del programma edilizio di Augusto, il poeta abbia inteso mettere
in luce non solo il suo rispetto dei valori religiosi (l’architettura
sacrale), ma anche la continuità fra ideologia imperiale e antichi
valori repubblicani. Considerata, poi, nell’ambito delle realizza-
zioni edilizie, la Curia Iulia segna la continuità col programma
di Cesare, che l’aveva voluta per rimpiazzare la Curia Hostilia:
cominciati nel 44 a.C., i lavori erano stati fortemente osteggiati
dall’aristocrazia senatoria25 e non vennero completati prima del
29 a.C., quando la nuova Curia fu inaugurata da Ottaviano.26
Tra gli edifici pubblici i teatri hanno una funzione di
primaria importanza perché, oltre ad essere il luogo d’incontro
privilegiato del principe col popolo, svolgono una significativa
funzione culturale: se Roma voleva assumere l’aspetto di una
capitale ellenistica, era necessario che si dotasse di grandi e
splendidi teatri, in grado di esercitare la stessa funzione svolta, in
particolare, da Atene.27 Nella properziana 4.1 ai teatri è riservato
un solo distico (vv. 15–16), in cui vengono messe in risalto la
modernità dell’uso dei vela e la raffinata consuetudine di profu-
mare la scena. Su questo terreno il confronto tra l’epoca augustea
e il tempo antico si rivela impietoso: a sollecitarlo saranno state
sia la ricostruzione del teatro di Pompeo, voluta da Ottaviano
ancor prima di Azio, nel 32 a.C.,28 sia l’edificazione del teatro
di Marcello, che era certamente attivo nel 17 a.C.;29 per quello
che possiamo desumere dalle elegie databili del IV libro, non
era stato ancora completato il teatro di Balbo, inaugurato poi
nel 13 a.C.30 Nell’ambito della riorganizzazione augustea dello
spazio urbano s’inserirà, nei versi successivi, l’implicita con-
25
Cf. Tortorici (1993, 332).
26
Cf. Aug. Res gest. 19.1, Cass.Dio 51.22 e Hülsen (1901, 1821-25).
27
Cf. Zanker (1989, 160).
28
Cf. Gros (1999, 36).
29
Cf. Ciancio Rossetto (1999, 31–35).
30
Cf. Cass.Dio 54.25.2, Manacorda (1999, 30-31).
28 AUGUSTAN POETRY
trapposizione dello spazio della festa dei tempi antichi a quello

della Roma augustea (vv. 21–22 Vestalia, vv. 23–24 Compitalia,
vv. 25–26 Lupercalia).31
Quando nel 19 a.C. Augusto rientrò a Roma dopo
tre anni di assenza, Properzio pensò bene di celebrare il suo
trionfale ritorno dalle vittoriose campagne di guerra istituendo
un parallelo nella IX elegia col leggendario transito nel Lazio
di Ercole reduce dalla Spagna dopo l’esito felice della decima
fatica. Fondandosi sulla testimonianza di Augusto nelle sue Res
gestae (cap. 11), Stephen Harrison ha ricostruito il suo percorso
da porta Capena sino al Foro e al Campidoglio e ha constatato
che esso include proprio i luoghi della IX elegia del IV libro, dal
tempio della Bona Dea Subsaxana al Velabro, all’Ara Massima
e alle pendici del Palatino.32
Ma c’è di più: secondo una felice intuizione della
Fantham,33 ripresa da Labate, «la struttura del IV libro proper-
ziano sembra prevedere che il poeta antiquario visiti con le sue
illustrazioni e le sue ricostruzioni eziologiche i luoghi di quella
stessa area del centro di Roma che lo sguardo proemiale aveva
panoramicamente abbracciato».34 Della I e della IX elegia si è
già detto: tuttavia non è soltanto la serie di carmi eziologici, ma
il libro nel suo complesso, che dà l’impressione di organizzarsi
in modo da riprodurre l’aspetto della città. Fatta eccezione per
l’XI elegia, il cui scenario è costituito dall’oltretomba, tutte
le altre sono funzionali all’illustrazione della città: assolvono
questo compito, nella II elegia la statua di Vertumno nel Foro
(vv. 3-6), il Tevere col suo corso mutato (vv. 7-10) e il vicus Tuscus
31
Sulla riorganizzazione augustea dello spazio urbano e in particolare sui
Compitalia cfr. Fraschetti (2005, 184–242).
32
Harrison (2005, 118-120); egli, inoltre, ha formulato l’ipotesi che Properzio si
sia servito dell’aition della fondazione dell’Ara Massima per ricordare la fonda-
zione recente dell’Ara Fortunae reducis.
33
Fantham (1997, 128. 131); (2009, 65).
34
Labate (2010, 158 n.1).
(vv. 49–50); nella III, i sacella, i compita (v. 57), la porta Capena
fra il Celio e l’Aventino (vv. 71-72); nella IV, il Tarpeium saxum
(v. 1), il piccolo tempio di Giove Feretrio (v. 2), il Campidoglio
(vv. 27 e 93–94) e il tempio di Giove Capitolino (v. 30), il Foro
(vv. 11–12), la Curia (v. 13), lo spazio urbano e suburbano desti-
nato alla celebrazione dei Parilia (vv. 73-78), il tempio di Vesta
(vv. 17-18; 45-46); nella V, porta Collina (v. 11) e i sepolcreti
del Campus Sceleratus; nella VI, il tempio di Apollo sul Palatino
(v. 11); nella VII, la Suburra (v. 15); nell’VIII, l’Esquilino e
le fonti sulle sue pendici (v. 1), gli horti di Mecenate (v. 2), il
tempio di Diana sull’Aventino (v. 29), l’asylum (la depressione
fra il Campidoglio e la rocca capitolina, nel v. 30), la porticus
di Pompeo (v. 75), il Foro e i teatri (v. 77); nella X, il tempio di
Giove Feretrio sul Campidoglio.
È ben noto che la politica di Augusto sulla città, pur
abbandonando la grandiosità dei progetti di Cesare, non volle
rappresentare un momento di rottura nei confronti del suo
programma. Dell’edilizia templare Augusto stesso nelle Res
gestae tenderà a mettere in luce gli interventi di risanamento e
di restauro che avevano caratterizzato gli inizi, sostanzialmente
conservativi, della sua attività (20.4 duo et octoginta templa deum
in urbe consul sextum ex auctoritate senatus refeci, nullo praetermisso
quod eo tempore ref ici debebat).35
Alla scelta augustea della continuità piuttosto che della
rottura fa riscontro un analogo atteggiamento del poeta ar-
chitetto. Nel discorso di Properzio all’hospes nella prima parte
dell’elegia incipitaria del IV libro, a prima vista si ha l’impressione
che sia privilegiato il motivo del contrasto e che, per di più,
esso si manifesti nei campi più diversi: il più evidente, quello
35
Sul progetto di Cesare, sulle resistenze del senato repubblicano e sul declino dei
templi e dei luoghi di culto cfr. Zanker (1989, 24-9), Sommella – Migliorati
(1991, 287-91); sulle fasi di passaggio dalla Roma cesariana a quella augustea cf.
ora La Rocca (2014, 93-5).
30 AUGUSTAN POETRY
fra presente e passato, prende le mosse dall’invito all’hospes

(vv. 1-4) perché s’immagini un solitario paesaggio di colli e di
campi erbosi, là dove ora si erge imponente la Roma di Augusto,
e un luogo di pascolo per le sfinite giovenche di Evandro là dove
ora splendido s’innalza il tempio di Apollo sul Palatino. Tuttavia,
come qui e nei confronti istituiti nel contesto successivo non c’è
condanna del lusso e degli splendori della Roma di Augusto,
così non c’è neppure rifiuto del passato, non solo perché esso
s’identifica con le origini della città, ma anche perché tutto è
considerato alla luce di una ininterrotta continuità fra la Roma
di un tempo e quella di Augusto.
Il senso della continuità – che anche nel programma
politico Augusto aveva preferito alla rottura nei confronti del
passato, con la sua concezione dell’impero inteso come una pro-
secuzione della repubblica – nell’elegia incipitaria si riflette nella
raffigurazione del principe che innova nel solco della tradizione.
Anche per questo motivo il confronto tra passato e presente
viene sempre inteso come un fenomeno di crescita ed è questo
il principio che governa il IV libro delle elegie di Properzio.
Cornelia, protagonista dell’ultima elegia, col suo discorso di
fronte al tribunale degli Inferi costituisce una realizzazione
perfetta di una tale concezione della storia di Roma: da un lato
Cornelia è orgogliosamente legata al suo passato familiare, che
s’identifica con la gloria degli Scipioni e con i momenti più
significativi della storia di Roma; dall’altro, però, nelle parole
rivolte ai figli mostra di concepire il rapporto col passato come
un fenomeno di crescita, che può solo preludere a un futuro mi-
gliore per la stessa Roma. Il poeta, per parte sua, lo aveva messo
in chiaro fin dall’inizio della prima elegia del IV libro, quando
nell’istituire il confronto tra i fictiles dei dei tempi antichi e gli
aurea templa del presente augusteo (v. 5 fictilibus crevere deis haec
aurea templa) si era servito proprio del verbo crescere, che tra il
passato e il presente stabilisce un solido nesso e dà il senso di un
presente che si alimenta del passato nell’intento di perfezionarlo
e di farne una cosa nuova.
Con Ovidio, che pure è sensibile all’influsso del più

anziano Properzio, muta radicalmente la funzione della città
augustea nel libro di poesia d’amore.36 Nell’Ars i luoghi della
Roma augustea si limitano a costituire lo sfondo necessario
per i precetti in materia amorosa del poeta: nel I libro, in
particolare, essi s’identificano con gli ambienti più adatti agli
incontri, ai corteggiamenti, alle conquiste d’amore. In assenza
di celebrazioni sia dell’edilizia templare sia di quella pubblica,
paradossalmente la città augustea sembra concepita proprio per
favorire il corteggiamento e gli approcci: in tal modo essa diviene
parte attiva dell’opera di conquista amorosa.
Insieme al ruolo della città augustea ora muta, nel libro di
poesia elegiaca d’amore, il modo stesso di concepire il rapporto
col passato: il senso augusteo della continuità, che Properzio
aveva fatto suo, viene sostituito dall’aperta rottura col passato,
in nome di un atteggiamento dichiaratamente modernista, che
conduce a una decisa e convinta svalutazione di tutto ciò che al
passato appartiene.37 Il testo chiave per capire come il punto di
vista di Ovidio sia antitetico a quello di Properzio è costituito
da Ars 3.113–128:
simplicitas rudis ante fuit; nunc aurea Roma est
et domiti magnas possidet orbis opes.
Aspice quae nunc sunt Capitolia quaeque fuerunt: 115
alterius dices illa fuisse Iovis.
Curia consilio nunc est dignissima tanto,
de stipula Tatio regna tenente fuit;
quae nunc sub Phoebo ducibusque Palatia fulgent,
quid nisi araturis pascua bubus erant? 120
Prisca iuvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum
gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis,
non quia nunc terrae lentum subducitur aurum
lectaque diverso litore concha venit,
36
Oltre al libro della Piastri (2004) resta fondamentale Labate (1984, 48-64.
81-85).
37
Buone osservazioni in Piastri (2004, 82).
32 AUGUSTAN POETRY
nec quia decrescunt effosso marmore montes, 125

nec quia caeruleae mole fugantur aquae,
sed quia cultus adest nec nostros mansit in annos
rusticitas priscis illa superstes avis.
Lo schema è sempre quello della ‘passeggiata archeologica’;

ma mentre in Virgilio e poi in Properzio i luoghi del passato
servivano a caratterizzare, ma senza svilirla, la rudis simplicitas
dei tempi antichi, in Ovidio la Roma augustea non è aurea per
lo splendore dei suoi templi, ma perché possiede ricchezze im-
mense, frutto delle guerre di conquista (vv. 113-4). Assumono,
allora, un senso diverso i luoghi e gli edifici che segnano la
storia della città: anche qui, come in Properzio, compaiono il
Campidoglio, la Curia, il tempio di Apollo sul Palatino; ma essi
servono solo a fissare la distanza che inesorabilmente divide il
passato dal presente, e del passato sanciscono l’indiscussa infe-
riorità. A confronto di quello che era in passato, il Campidoglio
augusteo sembra dedicato a un Giove diverso; la Curia, che ora
accoglie nel modo più degno i senatori, al tempo di Tazio era
fatta di paglia; il Palatino, che ora risplende per il tempio di
Apollo, nella Roma delle origini era un pascolo per i buoi. Per
parte sua il poeta non può che proclamare la propria felicità
perché ha avuto la fortuna di nascere nel presente, caratterizzato
dall’opulenza e dalla magnificenza.
Lo stesso schema resiste anche nei Fasti, benché
l’immagine della Roma arcaica sia considerata alla luce della
grandezza futura: quando, però, si tratta d’instaurare un confron-
to con gli splendori del presente augusteo, il passato è simbolo
di una semplicità che sconfina nella rozzezza. Emblematica è
la presentazione della Roma delle origini nel I libro, aperta da
un distico che contrappone alla povertà del passato le ricchezze
del presente (Fast. 1,197-198):
pluris opes nunc sunt quam prisci temporis annis,
dum populus pauper, dum nova Roma fuit.
Ovidio ha occhi solo per la Roma augustea: di essa esalta l’oro

dei templi e lo splendore degli edifici,38 e aureus è l’epiteto che
assegna al Campidoglio (Fast. 6.73).
Tutto ciò appartiene al tempo felice della produzione
ovidiana. Quando, però, il poeta cade in disgrazia e viene
relegato nella solitudine remota di Tomi, nella poesia dell’esilio
prendono a convivere due volti della Roma augustea, quello
ufficiale e quello ideale, con l’inevitabile conseguenza della
nostalgia della città perduta. Col trascorrere del tempo nel
lontano luogo di relegazione l’immagine di Roma serve a dare
concretezza e drammatico spessore al contrasto fra la vita
della capitale e quella dell’inospitale Tomi, così diversa dalla
pulcherrima Roma augustea (Pont. 1.2.81).
Nonostante le suppliche, Ovidio sa bene in cuor suo
che mai potrà fare ritorno a Roma per l’inflessibile decisione
del principe. Sarà il libro, allora, a recarsi a Roma al posto suo
e a salutare i luoghi a lui più cari: il poeta lo aveva previsto
sin dall’esordio del I libro dei Tristia,39 ma è solo nell’elegia
proemiale del III che il libro giunge a Roma e, inatteso, si
presenta ai lettori e li prega di accoglierlo con animo amico.
A loro chiede d’indicargli quella che dovrà essere la meta del
suo percorso, e si capisce bene che sta pensando a una delle
biblioteche pubbliche della città augustea: fra i lettori ovidiani,
però, solo uno è disposto a mostrargli la strada e con lui il libro
compie lo stesso cammino che nell’VIII dell’Eneide Enea aveva
percorso con Evandro. Sarà il suo occasionale accompagnatore a
indicargli i monumenti della città che cresce, lungo un percorso
che ha inizio nei Fori di Cesare e di Augusto e si snoda lungo
la via Sacra sino al tempio di Vesta, dove un tempo sorgeva la
reggia di Numa, e poi, girando a destra per la porta Palatina,
38
Fast. 1.77–78 flamma nitore suo templorum verberat aurum / et tremulum summa
spargit in aede iubar.
39
Trist. 1.1.1–16.
34 AUGUSTAN POETRY
sino al tempio di Giove Statore. Affascinato da tanti e tali

mirabilia, il libro non riesce a trattenere lo stupore quando ai
suoi occhi si presenta il palazzo di Augusto;40 di lì, percorrendo
un’alta gradinata, raggiunge il tempio di Apollo Palatino e, dopo
aver ammirato il portico delle Danaidi, invano cerca di essere
accolto nella biblioteca del tempio, prima, in quella situata in
prossimità del teatro di Marcello, poi, infine in quella annessa
all’atrium Libertatis. La città che ai tempi dell’Ars aveva aperto
le vie, i teatri, i monumenti al maestro di avventure galanti, la
città tanto celebrata nei suoi versi ora lo ripaga, ingrata, dapprima
con l’indifferenza, poi con l’aperta ostilità nei confronti del suo
libro. Al poeta elegiaco, rassegnato alla sua condizione di esule,
resta solo la possibilità d’immaginarsi l’ormai perduta Roma di
Augusto, e di riviverla nel ricordo.
Bibliografia
Barchiesi, A. 1994. Il poeta e il principe. Ovidio e il discorso augusteo, Roma
– Bari.
Chioffi, L. 1993. Bona Dea Subsaxana, LTVR I: 200-201.
Ciancio Rossetto, P. 1999. Theatrum Marcelli, LTVR V: 31-35.
Coarelli, F. 1996. Iuppiter Feretrius, Aedes, LTVR III: 135-136.
Fantham, E. 1997. Images of the City: Propertius’ New-old Rome. In: The
Roman Cultural Revolution, ed. by T. Habinek – A. Schiesaro, Cambridge:
122-135.
______. 2009. Latin Poets and Italian Gods, Toronto – Buffalo – London.
Favro, D. 1996. The Urban Image of Augustan Rome, Cambridge.
40
Trist. 3.1.35 Iovis haec, dixi, domus est?. Lo stupore sarà stato provocato dal pen-
siero che lì abita il rappresentante di Giove in terra, piuttosto che dall’aspetto,
almeno a quanto attesta Suet. Aug. 72.1 habitavit primo iuxta Romanum forum
supra Scalas anularias, in domo quae Calvi oratoris fuerat: postea in Palatio, sed
nihilo minus aedibus modicis Hortensianis, et neque laxitate neque cultu conspicuis,
ut in quibus porticus breves essent Albanarum columnarum, et sine marmore ullo aut
insigni pavimento conclavia.
Fedeli, P. 1980. Properzio. Elegie. Libro I, introduzione, testo critico e

commento, Firenze.
______. 2005. Properzio. Elegie. Libro II, introduzione, testo e commento,
Cambridge.
______. 2010. Properzio: lo spazio dell’amore. In: R. Cristofoli, C. Santini,
F. Santucci (eds.), Tempo e spazio nella poesia di Properzio, Assisi: 4-26.
Fox, M. 1996. Roman Historical Myths. The Regal Period in Augustan
Literature, Oxford.
Fraschetti, A. 2005. Roma e il principe, Roma – Bari.
Gazich, R. 1997. ‘Moenia disponere’: Properzio, Callimaco e la città augustea,
Aevum(ant), 10: 289-336.
Gros, P. 1999. Theatrum Pompei, LTVR V: 36.
Harrison, S. J. 2005. Hercules and Augustus in Propertius 4.9, PLLS 12:
117-131.
Hölscher, T. 2009. Potere, spazio ed effetti visivi: le apparizioni degli
imperatori nell’architettura romana In: Resistenza del Classico, a cura di R.
Andreotti, Milano: 137-59.
Hülsen, C. 1901. Curia, RE, IV 2: 1821-1825.
Labate, M. 1984. L’arte di farsi amare, Pisa.
______.2010. Passato remoto. Età mitiche e identità augustea in Ovidio,
Pisa – Roma.
La Rocca, E. 2014. La Roma di mattoni diventa marmo, in Augusto, catalogo
della mostra (Roma 2014), a cura di E. La Rocca, C. Parisi Presicce, A.
Lo Monaco, C. Giroire, D. Roger, Milano: 92-105.
Manacorda, D. 1999. Theatrum Balbi, LTVR V: 30-31.
Piastri, R. 2004. L’elegia della città. Roma nella poesia elegiaca di Ovidio,
Vercelli.
Romano, E. 1997. Vitruvio. ‘De architectura’, a cura di P. Gros, introduzione
e commento di A. Corso e E. Romano, Torino.
Sauron, G. 2014. Mito e potere: la mistificazione augustea. In: Augusto,
catalogo della mostra (Roma 2014), a cura di E. La Rocca, C. Parisi
Presicce, A. Lo Monaco, C. Giroire, D. Roger, Milano: 85-88.
Sommella, P. – Migliorati 1991: P. Sommella, P.; Migliorati, L. (1991).
Il segno urbano, in AA.VV., Storia di Roma, II 2, Torino: 287-309.
36 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Spencer, D. 2001. Propertius, Hercules, and the Dynamics of Roman Mythic

Space in Elegy 4.9, Arethusa 34: 259-84.
Tortorici, E. 1993. Curia Iulia, LTVR I: 332.
Wallace-Hadrill, A. 2014. Ottaviano e il tramonto della repubblica romana,
in Augusto, catalogo della mostra (Roma 2014), a cura di E. La Rocca,
C. Parisi Presicce, A. Lo Monaco, C. Giroire, D. Roger, Milano: 134-7.
Welch, T. S. 2004. Masculinity and Monuments in Propertius 4.9, AJPh
125: 61-90.
Zanker, P. 1989. Augusto e il potere delle immagini, trad. ital., Torino.
______. 2013. La città romana, Roma – Bari.
______. 2014. Il tempio di Apollo Palatino in Properzio e i suoi resti.
In:Properzio e l’età augustea. Cultura, storia, arte, a cura di G. Bonamente,
R, Cristofoli, C. Santini, Turnhout: 221-44.
A rumour in Propertius*
Paulo Martins
Universidade de São Paulo
mixtaque cum ueris passim commenta uagantur

milia rumourum confusaque uerba volutant1
This paper investigates the relationship between historical

reality and personae poeticae as fiction in Propertius 2.7. 2 Besides
its poetic value, this elegy shows us precisely the border between
reality and fiction in which Roman elegy is situated. On the one
hand, we observe the personae poeticae as fictional constructions,
and, on the other hand, we can glimpse referential aspects of the
*
I would like to thank my students, Cecilia Gonçalves Lopes and Lya Valéria
Grizzo Serignolli, the work with the originals and the corrections and
suggestions of Jessica Anne Wasterhold.
1
Ov., Met. 12.54–55.
2
I use for this analysis Teubner’s edition, elaborated by Fedeli in 1984, and
reviewed by him in his commentaries, in 2005, to Propertius’ second book,
but not forgetting other editions (Giardina (2010), Goold (1990), Heyworth
(2007b), Moya and Ruiz de Elvira (2001), Viarre (2005) and commentaries
Butler (1905), Camps (1966), Richardson, Jr. (1977), Fedeli (2005), Heyworth
(2007c) and Shackleton Bailey (1956).
38 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Roman society of this period. Nevertheless, the personae may

be impregnated with real characteristics as well, since we can
neither deny the historical existence of Propertius, Maecenas
and Augustus, nor that historical events may be nuanced by
rumour, which can be considered as a rhetorical kind of proof.
Gavisa es[t] certe sublatam, Cynthia, legem,
qua quondam edicta flemus uterque diu,
ni nos diuideret: quamuis diducere amantis
non queat inuitos Iuppiter ipse duos.
‘At magnus Caesar.’ sed magnus Caesar in armis: -5
deuictae gentes nil in amore ualent.
nam citius paterer caput hoc discedere collo,
quam possem nuptae perdere more faces,
aut ego transirem tua limina clausa maritus,
respiciens udis prodita luminibus. -10
a mea tum qualis caneret tibi tibia somnos,
tibia funesta tristior illa tuba!
unde mihi patriis natos praebere triumphis?
nullus de nostro sanguine miles erit.
quod si uera meae comitarem castra puellae, -15
non mihi sat magnus Castoris iret equus.
hinc etenim tantum meruit mea gloria nomen,
gloria ad hibernos lata Borysthenidas.
tu mihi sola places: placeam tibi, Cynthia, solus:
hic erit et patrio nomine pluris amor. -20
Four questions, beyond the textual surface of the elegy

2.7, arise: a) In what terms may the information – seemingly
historical – about the annulment and the edition of a law,
presented in a fictional text, give us concrete elements about this
law? b) Up to what point may this text present an opinion – in
favor or against – Augustus? c) What does, in the elegiac genre,
this essentially referential information mean when we consider
that this genre is essentially fictional? d) If this information has
any historical value, may the roman elegy be considered a genre
between reality and fiction?
A RUMOUR IN PROPERTIUS 39
Even though Maria Wyke works essentially with the

construction of the persona Cynthia, I believe she builds up a
premise applied to referential aspects in the elegies that may be
useful when it comes to the use of the revoked law (presented by
Propertius as the poem’s motor force, according to Wyke): the
poetic discourse, of which Cynthia is a part, is firmly informed
by political, moral and literary discourses of the Augustan period.
Thus, even if we deny Cynthia an extra-poetic existence, we
cannot deny her relationship with the society.3
I begin, then, with this: even if the law does not exist, it
is unquestionable that its representation as a constituted law in
a text (as part of the poetic discourse) is involved with political,
moral and literary discourses of the period. I go beyond: it is
not possible to deny its involvement with discourses, that is,
rumours spread in that society as public opinion.4 As Wyke
shows Cynthia participates in a poetic language of love and,
in this way, although she is not related to the poet’s actual love
life, she is related to the grammar of this poetry.5 It seems to
me that all the referential elements translated in the elegiac
poetical discourse are connected with this elegiac grammar that
presupposes those rumours.
In the republican and imperial Rome, rumour may be
considered an institution, that is, it has a legal statute and is
observed when justice is applied, since it is a kind of proof. We
can find it in Seneca the Elder’s Controuersiae, in formulations
3
Wyke (1989, 27).
4
Bettini (2008, 351) presents an excellent relationship between the sense of verb
fari and its gerund fandus and the idea of rumour, hearsay: We should recognize
that in an oral culture such as Rome was, systems of belief and cultural repre-
sentation are constructed primarily on the basis of verbal communication–in
other words, hearsay. But “hearsay” is not simply gossip; rather, it is a source of
knowledge for the formulation of shared rules. “Hearsay” defines what is fandus,
that which is at the same time both “sayable” and “just.”
5
Wyke (1989, 35).
40 AUGUSTAN POETRY
like rumour erat de adulterio matris et procuratoris,6 in which

the death of a pater familias is discussed (two suspects are
presented, the son and the attorney of the family, possibly the
widow’s lover). More than simple exercises of declamation, the
institutionalization of rumour as a kind of proof is presented
by Quintilian in Institutio Oratoria, supported by Aristotle and
Cicero. The orator stresses that, among the non-artificial proofs,
rumour possesses the same credibility of previous judgements,
evidences extracted from torture, documents, oaths and
witnesses. So, if rumour is a kind of proof, we have to consider
its power and its penetration among the Romans and even
among the Greeks.7
On the other hand, nowadays many have studied this trans-
historical phenomenon – the rumour. It does not interest me,
here, to review its treatment by Social Psychology or Sociology,
but to stress some important characteristics of the phenomenon
and how we can look at it in this poetic and political context. It
is known that rumour exists if the subject has any importance
to the person who listens to it and who spreads it. This is why
rumour moves around in a given environment - besides, of
course, all the interests that people have in transmitting it.8
There are three kinds of rumour, which are divided into three
pairs: a1) retrospective rumors focused upon the implications of past events;
a2) prospective or predictive rumors anticipating the future; b1) rumors
planted and systematically transmitted to serve the ends of special group; b2)
spontaneous; c1) rumors which represent extreme flights of imaginative
fantasy; c2) rational. Facing so many possibilities, I do not aim to
classify or establish a taxonomy to rumour, but to understand that
it serves the collectivity (whose voice represents common sense
or a belief ). That is, rumour as a discourse has no author or source;
6
Sen. Contr. 7.5. pr.
7
Quint., Inst. 5.1.2; 5.9.1. Cic., Inu. 2.46; De Or. 2.27.116; Arist., Rhet. 1418a.
8
Allport; Postman (1946–7, 503 – 4).
for, rumour transmits temporary and floating attitudes or, beliefs

that people form in order to interpret new emerging situations.9
More recently rumour was defined by Rosnow; Kimmel10 as a
proposition, not verified, of a belief that has relevance to people
actively involved in its dissemination. So, rumours are supposedly
factual, but lack authenticity and confirmation. This way we may
see the difference between rumour and news (the last one being
verified and confirmed). Rumour shares, with gossip, the aspect
of not being proved – although they differ in importance and
relevance--rumours are related to topics which are noteworthy
to a group, while gossip is chitchat.11
Taking this into consideration, we are led to think that
rumor or rumores are, sometimes, to the History produced by
the Romans and may show up in Livy, Tacitus or Suetonius
(no matter how different they may be). Vitruvius, on the other
hand, discussing a monumentum, a source of water, refers to a
rumour about it: is autem falsa opinione putatur uenerio morbo
inplicare eos, qui ex eo biberint. sed haec opinio quare per orbem terrae
falso rumore sit peruagata (...).12 I do not consider it important
whether this spring source passed any venereal disease. The
falsus rumour interests me. If there is a falsus rumour, there is
also a uerus rumour. Rumour is “hearsay,” which may be truth or
deception. Horace, in Sat. 2.6.50-60, talking about his friendship
with Maecenas, shows us how useful he was to the general,
his friend, answering his nugae during his trips. Such nearness
would have caused envy among people in Rome. Once, when
they met him in Campus Martius, they asked him questions
of a sort which could be answered by anyone who was close to
the source/event (?):
9
Peterson; Gist (1951, 159).
10
Rosnow; Kimmel (2000, 122).
11
Bordia; DiFonzo (2004, 33).
12
Vitr. 2.8.12.
42 AUGUSTAN POETRY
‘fortunae filius’ omnes.

frigidus a rostris manat per compita rumor:
quicumque obuius est, me consulit: ‘o bone – nam te
scire, deos quoniam propius contingis oportet –,
numquid de Dacis audisti?’ ‘nil equidem.’ ‘ut tu
semper eris derisor.’ ‘at omnes di exagitent me,
si quicquam.’ ‘quid? militibus promissa Triquetra
praedia Caesar an est Itala tellure daturus?’
iurantem me scire nihil mirantur ut unum
scilicet egregii mortalem altique silenti.13
In this passage of the Satires, it is easily observed that

rumour is used as information, but it needs reliable confirmation--
it is not a trustworthy source by itself. In this situation, Horace’s
acquaintances, knowing how close he was to Maecenas, ask him
to guarantee the information which came out of rumour. That
is, rumour may be untrue, true, or lack confirmation. It is worth
noticing that what Nisbet tells us:
An ancient reader would understand the urban environment,
and sympathise with the concern of the crowd. When
public life is conducted in the open air, ‘a chill rumour’ in
Horace’s phrase ‘seeps from street-corner to street-corner’
(Satires 2.6.50 frigidus a rostris manat per compita rumor). If
trouble came in the middle of the night, a public-spirited
or curious citizen went outside to see what was happening,
as when Propertius had a row with Cynthia (4.8.2). In
the alleys of an old city a crowd soon built up, and Cicero
needs only a few words to communicate a sense of crisis.
It is unlikely that he had precise evidence for the details,
but most readers would be content with an account that
seemed plausible in the situation. Much ancient oratory,
and history, is neither obviously true nor obviously false,
but a reasonable guess at the sort of thing that might well
have happened.14
13
Hor., Serm. 2.6..49-58.
14
Nisbet (1992, 8).
Nisbet’s last statement (Much ancient oratory, and history,

is neither obviously true nor obviously false, but a reasonable guess
at the sort of things that might well have happened) seems to me
essential for understanding rumour among the Romans and
understanding how this social phenomenon passes through
various genres (in this case, the epistolary genre). I believe
that rumour is crucial in the construction of the verisimilitude
in Roman literature, even if such representation may distort
historical reality. Livy, when talking about Scipio’s disease, admits
that rumours may aid the anticipation of actual outcomes - as
a sort of trial balloon:
Scipio ipse graui morbo implicitus, grauiore tamen fama
cum ad id quisque quod audierat insita hominibus libidine
alendi de industria rumores adiceret aliquid, prouinciam
omnem ac maxime longinqua eius turbauit; apparuitque
quantam excitatura molem uera fuisset clades cum uanus
rumor tantas procellas exciuisset. non socii in fide, non
exercitus in officio mansit.15
Another point that this passage reveals is the proximity

between rumour and fama. It is common to associate fame
with something true, consolidated by public opinion. But in the
Roman World fama may be based on information without any
evidence – thus, it is unbelievable. OLD’s second definition of
fama puts it near hearsay, rumour, gossip – that is, we have the
same problem: we do not identify a trustworthy source. Another
detail that may help us see the difference between them is that
rumour is the result of rumination – linked to the sound animals
make when masticate (there is, then, a distinction between
rumour and fama). While fama is the product of a powerful voice
that replaces others by the presence of a second speaker – which
15
Liv. 28.24.
44 AUGUSTAN POETRY
may be society or a group -, rumour may seem the product of

a slow process of accumulation from one person to another.16
There is a passage in Julius Caesar about the proliferation
and the effects of rumours: Haec Afranius Petreiusque et eorum
amici pleniora etiam atque uberiora Romam ad suos perscribebant.
multa rumores adfingebant, ut paene bellum confectum videretur.17
Here, the rumour that is spread is false and produces a uisio, for
multa rumoures adfingebant. This same uisio, then, is associated
with political communication in the city of Rome, according
to Laurence, the results of the elections and the assemblies
seem to have been dependent on the political knowledge and
on the behavior of the Roman citizens informed by rumours
spread by word-of-mouth. Then: In this chain communication the
process was not lineal. Each time the information was conveyed to
another person that person interpreted and speculated about what the
information meant, prior to communicating with another person.18
The addressees would delete what was not important and would
emphasize what they believed was important, adding more
information than they possessed.
The term rumour among the elegists is very relevant,
especially in Propertius and in Ovid, 19 and to a lesser extent
in Tibullus too.20 In Propertius 1.5, for example, the “ego”,
addressing himself to Gallus – and this is very meaningful,
for the persona poetica Galo may be identified with the elegiac
poet – warns Cynthia that any track (uestigia) of her infidelity
will become rumour: quod si parua tuae dederis uestigia culpae,/
quam cito de tanto nomine rumor eris!,21 and still reaffirms that,
16
Bettini (2008, 361).
17
Caes., Ciu. 1. 53.
18
Laurence (1994, 63).
19
Prop. 1.5.26; 1.13.13; 2.18D.38; 2.32.24; 4.4.47 e 4.5.7. Ov., Ep. 16.141; Fast.
3.543; 4. 307; 6. 527; Trist. 3.12.43; Pont. 2.1.49; 3. 1. 82; 3.4.59; 4.4.19.
20
Tib. 3.20.1 e 3.20.4.
21
Prop. 1.5.25-26.
in such a circumstance, he will only be able to offer a shoulder

for her to cry on. This situation shows how strong rumour
could be, especially if we think about the place where it is born
– nequitia--, an element that frames those elegiac actions. In
Propertius 1.13, the “ego”, before the same person, Gallus – says
he is an expert in matters of love and that this knowledge has
not come from bad rumour, nor from any omen. He says his
knowledge comes from seeing, and he asks Gallus whether he
has a witness that may refute him: haec ego non rumore malo,
non augure doctus;/ uidi ego: me quaeso teste negare potes? .22 Here
we find some shading of rumour--there may be a malus rumour
(but there may also be a bonus rumour). Malus rumour is parallel,
in fides, to the omen whose frailty is derived from the lack of
evidence (which is proved by line 14, with its uidi ego, that is,
the “ego” is the eyewitness of the events). This construction of
the verdict ascribed to the “ego” seems to me to be essential in
elegiac discourse; for, it effects truth (whose association with the
nomen Propertius contributes to verisimilitude, which confused
the critics so much).
For decades, scholars treated this law that is announced
in Propertius 2.7 as historical data, that is, as a poetic element,
which would reflect the specific reality of a biographical truth
of the elegiac personae. So, as Propertius is a historical fact in
the poems, Cynthia is a pseudonym for Hostia23 (following
Apuleius, Apol. 10). By this approach the revoked law in 2.7
would be social, institutional and legal data, which would frame
22
Prop. 1.13.13-14.
23
Wyke (1989, 35): “The Propertian elegiac narrative does not, then, celebrate
a Hostia, but creates a fictive female whose minimally defined status as mis-
tress, physical characteristics, and name are determined by the grammar of erotic
discourse in which she appears. The employment of terms like “pseudonym” in
modern critical discourse overlocks the positive act of creation involved in the
depiction of elegy’s mistresses. Therefore, when reading Augustan elegy, it seems
most appropriate to talk not of pseudonyms and poeticized girlfriends but of
poetic or elegiac woman.”
46 AUGUSTAN POETRY
those non-fictional characters. The anti-biographical criticism

of Allen,24 Veyne25 and Wyke26, - to which I subscribe27 -, rejects
this hypothesis– or, at least, minimized. If we do not take the
law as concrete and real, this elegy becomes fiction in totum.
However, I believe this anti-biographical interpretation may be
too extreme – converting the hypothetical law into a synthesis
of events and/or concrete aspirations of the historical moment
which reverberates in the elegiac discourse as verisimilitude in
the poetic grammar, a rumour, so to speak.
For example, Gordon Williams28 assumes a reckless posi-
tion, in my point of view, when he understands that Propertius is
a historical source for this law which would have been approved
(edicta) and revoked (sublata). On the one hand, it presupposes
the existence of the subject affected by a positive legal docu-
ment whose credibility is unquestionable and, on the other,
it disregards the generic expression of the literary text. Thus,
the lack of evidence about the law in historical sources argues
against the adamant position of Williams: The fact seems gene-
rally to have been suppressed and is missing in the main historical
sources.29 It seems obvious to me that the fact that there are not
any references about this law strengthens the possibility that
it has never existed formally. However, it is not safe to assume
that the discussion about the appropriateness and relevance of
this law in the period is unreasonable, since it is widely known
that there was an intention of restoration of the Republic’s
moral standards during the Augustan Principate,30 which will
24
Allen (1950).
25
Veyne (1983).
26
Wyke (2002).
27
Martins (2009); (2015a); (2015b).
28
Ver Goddard (1923, 153-6).
29
Williams (1962, 28).
30
Bowditch (2009, 403).
publish in 18 and 17 BC,31 the Lex Iulia Maritandis Ordinibus

and Lex Iulia Adulteriis Coercendis, respectively, and in 9 AD, Lex
Papia Poppaea, laws.32 For, in the years preceding these laws, the
intention of moral reform, along with other effective political
actions of Octavius, may not constitute historical acts, but did
bolster the program of moralization of Rome. As for these laws
specifically, we have concrete information in Justinianus’ Digesta
23.2: De ritu nuptiarum, and 38.11: Vnde Vir et Vxor, and in the
Isidorus’ Origins.33 Their stories are not sufficiently clarified yet.
Del Castillo, besides defending, for example, the existence of the
28 BC law, draws a hypothesis that it would be more extensive
in marriage bans than the one from 18 BC, so that in addition
to prohibiting marriage between free men and courtesans or
actresses and between senators and freed women, it extended
the latter to equites.
More recently, and this may be significant, some scholars
continue taking as reasonable the thesis that Propertius is a
historical source and, therefore, the proposition that elegy 2.7
is the only source that has survived, despite severe criticism of
this thesis produced from the 1950’s on. Syndikus has already
warned us in this regard:
Octavian (...) there was also one that was intended to revive
the morality in marriage and family relations customary in
Ancient Rome. When this law caused resentment in the totally
changed society he withdrew the law, without, however,
abandoning his intention forever.34
31
Cohen (1990, 124).
32
See Frier; McGinn (2004, 34-9).
33
Isid. Orig. 5.15.1.
34
Sindikus, 2006, 260.
48 AUGUSTAN POETRY
The acceptance of the elegy as a document is grounded,

according to him, in the fragile argument of his opponents:35 “the
arguments (...) would have to be more convincing.” Interestingly,
I find it clear that it is precisely this scholar who does not
present more convincing arguments. Based on Williams,
Wallace - Hadrill said that the issue of laws that encouraged
procreation and ensured military power is explicitly clear in the
Augustan poets and, accordingly, presents as an illustration of
this argument this elegy of Propertius and Horace’s Ode 3.6.
However, he does not relativize the historical use of this poetic
source, as we should expect from the historian.36
Del Castillo also supports the hypothesis of the existence
of the 28 BC law, based on an argument formulated from Dio
Cassius,37 who, accustomed to the imperial constitutions, would
report as if the emperor legislated for himself. He, therefore,
makes reference to this Augustan legal project without specifying
it more clearly. He says only that Augustus had given orders that
provincial governors be elected by groups, except those who had
had some privilege as a result of marriage and descendants.38
The difficulty in finding a truth between historical and literary
sources is further complicated by legal sources, making it an
increasingly difficult discussion.39
Badian,40 when dealing with this law as a phantom law
of marriage, finds Gordon Williams and others’ arguments for
the existence of a law in 28, citing a passage in Tacitus, Annals
3.25, persuasive: Historically, serious discussion seems to have
come from the direction of Tacitus and only gradually moved to
35
Kienast (1982, 137 ss.) e Beck (2000, 303-24).
36
Wallace-Hadrill (2009, 251).
37
DC 53.13.2.
38
Del Castillo (2005, 180).
39
Raditsa (1980, 280).
40
Badian (1985, 82).
Propertius. According to the author of the Annals, Rome sees,

in these first three years after Actium, the enactment of a series
of moralizing laws:
Relatum dein de moderanda Papia Poppaea, quam senior
Augustus post Iulias rogationes incitandis caelibum
poenis et augendo aerario sanxerat. nec ideo coniugia et
educationes liberum frequentabantur praeualida orbitate:
ceterum multitudo periclitantium gliscebat, cum omnis
domus delatorum interpretationibus subuerteretur,
utque antehac flagitiis ita tunc legibus laborabatur. ea res
admonet ut de principiis iuris et quibus modis ad hanc
multitudinem infinitam ac uarietatem legum peruentum
sit altius disseram.41
Tacitus continues forward:

sexto demum consulate Caesar Augustus, potentiae
securus, quae triumuiratu iusserat aboleuit deditque iura
quis pace et principe uteremur. acriora ex eo uincla, inditi
custodes et lege Papia Poppaea praemiis inducti ut, si
a priuilegiis parentum cessaretur, uelut parens omnium
populus uacantia teneret.42
The first passage in Tacitus points to a series of actions

that Octavius would have performed after their triumvirate.
However, at the end of his government they had not had the
desired effects, so Octavius revoked and created certain laws that
would afterwards need reforms, including those that regulated
celibacy and encouraged procreation. In the second passage,
such actions have their historical period, since they continue
into the sixth consulate. This would, therefore, be a period of
reformulation of customs and the creation of laws and taxes
that would have restored the moral standards of the Republic,
having had the effect needed at the time, while opening the way
41
Tac., Ann. 3.25.
42
Tac., Ann. 3.28.
50 AUGUSTAN POETRY
for the laws of 18 and 17 BC and 9 AD. About this historical

moment, Suetonius, in turn, approves:
Leges retractauit et quasdam ex integro sanxit, ut
sumptuariam et de adulteriis et de pudicitia, de ambitu, de
maritandis ordinibus. hanc cum aliquanto seuerius quam
ceteras emendasset, prae tumultu recusantium perferre non
potuit nisi adempta demum lenitaue parte poenarum et
uacatione trienni data auctisque praemiis.43
In this passage he leads the discussion of reforms to its

reception, and therefore, to its impact. Fundamentally, the idea
contained in the expression prae tumultu recusantium points to
it. That is, certain reforms carried to term in the sixth consulate
had to be revised almost immediately and, among them, the
laws of marriage, celibacy and procreation. This same expression
seems to me to be linked with the idea of rumour, since the
biographer does not specify clearly what kind of uprising, riots
or disorder they are and who effectively rejected the measures.
This inaccuracy, in my view, supports the idea that Octavius’
actions, not just a law, may have contributed to a rumour in
Rome.
In the preface of Ab urbe condita, Livy, when making a
referenceto the moral circumstances of the Republic, sums up
the period:
ad illa mihi pro se quisque acriter intendat animum,
quae uita, qui mores fuerint, per quos uiros quibusque
artibus domi militiaeque et partum et auctum imperium
sit; labente deinde paulatim disciplina uelut desidentes
primo mores sequatur animo, deinde ut magis magisque
lapsi sint, tum ire coeperint praecipites, donec ad haec
tempora quibus nec uitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus
peruentum est .44
43
Suet., Aug. 34.
44
Liv. 1 pr. 9-10.
There is, in the sentence donec ad haec tempora quibus nec

uitia nostra nec remedies pati possumus peruentum est, an interesting
assessment of the late Republic and early Empire, since it reveals
the general circumstances and the moral issues which concerned
the social actors of the momentin Rome. It must be remembered
that the first five books of Livy were published between 27-25
BC, so the preface may be dated approximately to these years.
Collares, commenting on Livy ‘s preface, says: “the term remedia
appears as a representation of a specific context, suggesting, as has
envisaged Petersen (1961, 440), a veiled criticism to the set of reforms
articulated by Octavius, especially those proposed in the year 28 BC
concerning the moral precepts of marriage.”45 Curiously, although
Livy is composing History and Propertius Elegy, both of them
refer to the moral reforms with reservations, despite the fact that
both had access to power. Livy identifies two opposing ideas
--vices and cures for them--, noting that the Roman people can
endure neither. Propertius, in his turn, is happy with the uitia
and saddened by its end, the remedia. The fact is that, even if
they disagree about the vices, both disapprove of the measures
meant to solve them. Yet, for both authors, as in Suetonius, the
reference to reforms are veiled, not explicit, ensuring once again
some place to rumour.
Another historical source often alluded to, and which can
be taken as an argument in favor of the existence of this 28 BC
law, is an aureus coined in the same year, the sixth consulship
of Octavius. The artifact refers to the princeps’ restoration of a
law and a right, but we do not know which law it is and which
law was restored in this specific case. We have to consider
the changes in the political system, since we are in a time of
transition--the end of the triumvirate and the beginning of the
Principate (princeps senatus). New rights ask for new laws.
45
Collares (2010, 119-20).
52 AUGUSTAN POETRY
The reverse of this aureus (coined in the province of Asia)

is significant, since it shows us Octavius in his toga and sitting
at a curialis sella - the official seat of the higher judiciary, the
consulate - holding a uolumen of laws enacted by him, which
is confirmed by the legend LEGES ET IVRA P[OPVLO]
R[OMANO] RESTITVIT (‘He has restored to the People
of Rome their laws and their rights’). The obverse of the coin
features a typical legend, that is, IMP[ERATOR] CAESAR
DIVI F[ILIUS] (Emperor Caesar son of the divine), and the
date of the coin, i.e., VI COS - sixth consulate.46 Richardson
proposes a general thesis, and therefore not specific, to the
context of this currency when he argues that the coin refers
to a return to the old ways, marked by a series of actions –
symbolic ones, in my point of view.47 The return to normal
laws and the restitution of people’s rights in general (and not
by a specific law of adultery) are presented to the people in a
monetary form, in the formal register of legal jargon, so that
purely bureaucratic and informal events that would mark the
end of a regime receive a high, official tone. In a way, therefore,
46
See Rich; Williams (1999, 169-213); Martins (2011, 139-50). Hor., Carm. 4.15.
47
Richardson (2012, 85).
we may link this information to rumours, especially because the

currency has a provincial coinage. When reading the term iura,
any Roman would understand the set of rights, duties, powers,
and obligations, that were related to him according to his place
in the civic community,48 the life in society returned to normal,
and then his group would have again their rights guaranteed.
This same use of a currency can be seen a few years earlier, when
Octavius issues a series of coins with the image of a comet that
was associated with deified Julius Caesar.49 So, in this case, a
planted rumour (b1) became propaganda.
Badian, although asserting that sublata lex refers to an
obsolete tax measure, and not to a “law,” as the poem suggests,
concludes that, based on historiographical information, we may
not say anything about the content of this legal document. In
particular, it is not possible to state how the taxes were assessed
for celibacy or on the absence of children. We do not know how
the uxorium aes worked. Could any censor take it, whenever he
wanted? Then, he adds: “Propertius’ whole elaboration in that
sense is mere poetic treatment: Dichtung and not Wahrheit”. Thus,
we should not expect: “an unreasonable amount of reality in
poetry”. After all, he continues:
critics and historians have perhaps been guilty of doing just
this: to deduce the nature and purpose of the law alluded to
from its treatment by the poet is not sound method either
literary or historical interpretation.50.
Finally, Galinsky, when dealing with the laws of 18 and 17

BC and AD 9, said this was a gradual process in order that they
be approved, as they were approved after some stages (including
the years 28 and 27, which were important). He continues to
present his position on Propertius 2.7: “Whether there was in
48
See Cizek (1990, 52-3).
49
See Gurval (1997) e Pandey (2013).
50
Badian (1985, 97-8).
54 AUGUSTAN POETRY
fact such a law has been a matter of heated controversy (Badian vs.
Williams). There are no references to it in other writers (…). This
indicates that such matters were certainly on his mind from early on.51
Interpretation of poetic references as historical ones,
in fact, can generate a double mistake: the poetic analysis is
restricted, or rather, subordinated, limiting the universal, to
paraphrase Aristotle in the Poetics,52 to what it was - as the
historical event loses its authority when it draws upon a genre
that deals with what could be.
Another biographical fact that is discussed in this elegy,
is the nominal reference to Octavius in vv . 5-6 and the value
judgment that the elegy may be making. As we have seen, there
are a few immediate implications made by the text; however,
two issues must be observed more carefully, not necessarily in
this order: the direct speech that opens the couplet; and the
existence or not of historical critics to Octavius through the kind
of analytic treatment that should be given to a poetic -historical
persona as Octavius which may be inferred from a poem.
The question of direct speech at magnus Caesar, despite
having been sidelined by Butler, Camps, Goold, Moya y Ruiz
Elvira, was discussed by Fedeli and Richardson, Jr. The latter
states: “the implication that Caesar sets out to outdo Jupiter in
these matters is light and deft. The speaker is still the poet; he is
simply quoting a catch phrase that lent itself to quotation with
either admiration or irony.”53 In this case, it is interesting to
associate this direct speech to the concept of rumour that I
mentioned before. Whether the statement can be read as an
ironic or admiring quotation, in both cases, it may just be a
rumour, reflecting current political opinion. In turn, Fedeli says:
“Properzio prevede una facile obiezione da parte di un interlocutore
51
Galinsky (1996, 131).
52
Arist, Poet. 1451a to 1452a.
53
Richardson, Jr (2006, 231)
f ittizio (non certo da parte de Cinzia, che mal ci s’immagina

impegnata in una discussione sui massimi sistemi) ... .54 The same
argument can be associated with Fedeli´s statement, introducing
a fictional character to this party, which does not preclude, of
course, the character of rumour.
Boucher, in turn, reaffirms the biographical-referential
interpretation of Roman elegy: “mais il reste un point où Properce
s’est opposé au prince de façon visible et indiscutable; celui de la reform
des moeurs. Pour rester l’ amant of Cynthie refuse il le mariage et
la paternité, il refuse to donner des soldats à sa patrie.”55 Stahl also
has a contrary position: “this ( ... ) does not (yet) change Propertius
‘ stand (as expressed in 2.7) against authoritarian interference with
his personal and poetic sphere to the pro-Augustan position”.56 Both
Stahl ‘s and Boucher’s views endorse biographical readings,
support the invariance of types or genres of discourse, poetry
or prose, undermine the detail of specific textualities of poetic
discourse, giving it possibilities that were not foreseen and
removing from it its fictional character.
Gale notes that there are a variety of interpretations of 2.7
--both pro- and anti-Augustan.57 Thus, pro-Augustan readings,
as Cairns’ (2007), and anti-Augustan, as Lyne’s (1980) and
Stahl’s (1985), are controversial. Gale finds attractiveness and
weaknesses in both, for example, arguing that this poem shares
general and strategic errors in the treatment of militia amoris. The
poet, according to her, is neither in favor nor against Augustus,
for he is interested in presenting ambivalence to the reader. We
are asked to decide which parts are sincere:
The literary and political (or ideological) levels of
meaning are not separable, and we should not simply
54
Fedeli (2005, 228).
55
Boucher (1980, 135).
56
Stahl (1985, 162).
57
Gale (1997, 78-9).
56 AUGUSTAN POETRY
dismiss Propertius’ use of the militia amoris, and his

anti-establishment stance more generally, as literary
conventions. On the other hand, the very overt ‘literariness’
of elegy opens up levels of irony which make it impossible
(or at least inadequate) to regard the poet as offering us a
straightforward ideological program or political message.58
Dealing with the general issue involving the relationship

between writers and the princeps, Heyworth contributes much
when pointing to an argument about the Ovidian text and its
modern reception. He says that, while an ancient poet could
not have total control over the reception of his texts, it does
not mean that he has written it without any specific intention.
He also informs us that, in his attempt to rebuild the sense
of several poems by Propertius, he assumes that they were
originally written by a single individual, whose character and
attitudes had a consistency and unity similar to what we expe-
rience within ourselves, either through personal knowledge or
by other means. His poetry expresses a façade and an identity
with a name, Propertius. The attitudes of this persona are soon
established initially, leading us to interpret whatever he wrote
from the perspective of an elegiac lover.59
A possible relationship between the princeps, the elegiac
poet and the Leges Iuliae is presented by Della Corte. First, it
is shown that the main feature of these laws is to treat celibacy,
that is, the singleness of Roman citizens. It states that if the
single man did not marry because of a desire for chastity, there
would be nothing wrong. However, many of them did so in
order to have a concubine per sfogare così la propria immonda
libidine, hindering the country’s ability to survive in the future.
In this sense, the laws of moral austerity, before worrying about
morality, were founded on population growth. Hence, one of its
precepts was to reduce the marriageable age of puellae. Augustus
58
Gale, 1997, 91).
59
Heyworth (2007a, 94-5).
was actually worried as pochi intendessero sposarsi and pochissimi

volessero mettere figli al mondo.60 It is precisely these men, or at
least the image of these young people to which the elegiac lover
refers and, hence, by similarity, to the elegiac poet himself. It is
around these elements that Della Corte mistakenly proposes
that the Roman elegiac poets refused the cursus honorum and
the subsequent military involvement and declared themselves
pacifists. They also endured infamy while continuing to live next
to their own dona or puella.
The fact that Gale’s statement somehow considers the
position of Cairns does not make it less reasonable; however, her
second position is closer to mine. For, I start from the premise
that we must reject the tacit assumption underlying many inter-
pretations-- that Propertius’ poemsare equivalent to, or at least
can be equated with confessional statements, with a journal, or
even with a communicative practice of single recipient - there-
fore, absolutely personal and real. Rather, the elegy is directed
to a wider audience than their nominal recipients - all very well
constructed - and it is necessary for the poet to adopt and adapt
its elegiac persona to the appropriate set of elegiac conventions,
assuming specific res and uerba. It is precisely in this sense that
Cairns proposes a a constructed persona, adapted to the precon-
ditions of his own speech.61 This persona, completely built from
the first book, maintains a clear relationship with Augustus.
If there is an explicitly ethical construction around the
elegiac self, despite the nominal identification, and, therefore,
60
Della Corte (1982, 540-2).
61
Cairns (2006, 322): his solution was to depict himself as an unhappy lover of
an ‘antisocial’ cast, disliking war, reluctant to marry, and generally shirking civic
obligations. Johnson (2014, 43): The Propertian lover is not a husband and not a
father, nor is he cursed with that patriarchal temper, so revered in the past, one
of whose chief obligations is to keep control of one’s women (wives, daughters,
concubines). Rather, he is – or pretends to be – not the master of his mistress
but her slave, and that voluntary (and unreal) slavery allows him to claim that he
has liberated himself from the stern voices of the implacable fathers.
58 AUGUSTAN POETRY
historical construction, one has to understand Propertius as a

hybrid and liminal figure, whose way of being simultaneously
embraces two different worlds: the rumour and the reality,
without either one moving away from the verisimilar at any time.
It seems to me that the other equally historical figures, which are
targets of the elegiac texts, such as Gallus, Ponticus, Maecenas,
Caesar, or Tullus, undergo the same process of composition. So,
the essentially poetic mechanism, in this sense, takes advantage
of the given framework, i.e., the historical nomen, and applies to
it elegiac colors and flavors - be they lyrical, satirical, epistolary,
epic, etc. Even though Maecenas and Augustus are present in
the elegy as historical characters, or historically guided, their
êthe present themselves as contaminated, so to speak, by generic
fictionality of the elegy itself and this fictionality is recognized
by the audience, at least since Catullus. Octavius, being part of
that cultured and literate reception, recognizes «his elegiac role,»
and is aware of the general dimension of this kind of poetry.
He realizes the distinction between the princeps who proposes
to carry out the moral reforms in the future (after Actium) and
the rebellious young lovers accustomed to the elegiac demi-
monde, who opposed the reform and participated in the rumores
surrounding the moralization of Rome.
The politicization of the elegiac poets as pro-Augustan
or anti-Augustan, therefore, is a mistake because, I believe, the
presence of historical facts and characters does not endorse this
genre as concrete and real testimony. The most we can ask of this
genre as a source of concrete evidence is to treat them as rumores,
that is, conjectural evidence as presented in the Rhetorica ad
Herenium62 and referenced, for example, in practical perspective
by Cicero in Pro Caelio.63. Soon, any opinions proposed in elegies
in relation to an Augustan policy should not refer poetic ego
62
Her. 2.11.
63
See Dufallo (2000, 121) and Fear (2005, 14-7).
utterance as for or against someone. But this selection must be

made by text reception, reaffirming what Monica Gale said, as
we have seen.
Thus answering the questions that I proposed, we
understand that referential information of historical events
presented in this elegy should be approached carefully and with
attention, as they are not supported by positive historical sources.
Such an idea may only be considered as something credibly
founded in rumour which, as we have seen, can be of service
to a dominant group (b1), or, otherwise, occur spontaneously
as explanation of public opinion or latent opinion (b2). In
the specific case of the law presented as a motivator of happy
and unhappy conditions of the poeticae personae, Cynthia and
Propertius, even if it is clear that, in Octavius’s political objectives
after 31 BC., there is a intention of restoring Republican moral
values, it is certain that there are also not any record of laws that
condemn adultery and, at the same time, encourage procreation,
such as the Julian laws of 17 and 18 BC, or even the Papia Poppea
of 9 AD, with the exception of\ a coin which prevents us from
confirming any data regarding these laws or rights stated in the
legend Leges et Iura restituit.
So, when using elegiac poetry as a historical source, we
may understand that disagreement over Octavius’s project of
moralization does not enjoy unanimous support among citizens,
while Elegy represents a credible opposition in the form of
the elegiac personae in Rome. It also reveals a potential public
opinion about Augustan moral policies in the years that follow
Actium.
The second aspect to which supposedly we have access in
the elegy would be Propertius’ anti-Augustan position – when
he proposes two peremptory statements: a) The denial of a
supreme power to Caesar, saying that he has no power over
love and b) The recusatio of children to add to the legions of
Rome. Although consider Octavius an unquestionable historical
60 AUGUSTAN POETRY
figure and not merely a poetic character, the genre makes certain
demands. For example, the Persona Octavius must, because of
the genre, favor the expansion of the empire, while Propertius
and Cynthia should be against the actions that separate the
lovers under the government. This opposition does not reflect,
therefore, Propertius’ actual opposition regarding Octavius, but
it is a scenario necessary to the elegiac genre.
We must also remember that recusatio was more than
a simple assumption of callimachean style. It was part of the
social theater of Rome in the period. The social actors are,
therefore, willing to produce their recusationes, even if under
the power of the princeps. Augustus himself, well exemplified
by Freudenburg, was fruitful in recusationes - imperii recusatio
- that could safely be read along with the recusationes by poets
of literary circles close to him. The proposition undermines
Propertius’s anti-augustan position, since it was a procedure
widely used by Augustus. In this sense, Octavius is fully aware
of the poetic conventions inherent to the genre.
The third issue to be taken up, in conclusion, is the role
of most poetry, including Roman erotic elegy, as a reflection
of historical and cultural circumstances. We must always keep
in mind that poetry is not the genre that serves historical
record -- other genres have been formulated for this purpose.
This seems to have been surpassed at least since Aristotle’s
Poetics, as we have seen. However, it is undeniable that ancient
poetry is full of social and cultural characteristics suited to an
ideal reader’s opinions and lifestyle. This ideal reader acts as
enunciator, receiver and its first translator, so to speak/in a sense.
It is this necessary and privileged interpreter, whom the elegy
of Propertius, therefore, addresses in the voice ofthe a type of
man who is fully immersed in the present state of affairs. That
is, his lifestyle is reflected by the elegiac lover and, accordingly,
any measures that may oppose his modus uiuendi will be
resisted (?).
Propertius 2.7 represents this particular vision, not

as accurate historical record of an event, but as a believable
perspective that may be important for us to understand. Treating
Propertius 2.7 as a particular way of seeing the world allows us
to study the Roman world not as a monolithic block, but as a
sum of characteristics including loving untruths that run into
everyday truths, producing a border genre.
References
Allen, A. W. 1950. ‘Sincerity’ and the Roman Elegists. In: CPh, 45, 3, 145-
60. [<http://www.jstor.org/stable/266153>]
Allport, G. W.; Postman, L. 1946-7. An Analysis of Rumor. In: The Public
Opinion Quarterly, 10, 4, 501-517. [DOI: 10.1093/poq/10.4.501]
Badian, E. 1985. A Phanton Marriage Law. In: Philologus, 129, 82-98.
[DOI: 10.1524/phil.1985.129.12.82]
Beck, M. 2000. Properzens Elegie 2, 7 und die augusteische Gesetzgebung.
In: Philologus, 144, 303-24. [DOI: 10.1524/phil.2000.144.2.303]
Bettini, M. 2008. Weighty Words, Suspect Speech: Fari in Roman Culture.
In: Arethusa, 41, 2, 313-375. [DOI: 10.1353/are.0.0000].
Bordia, P.; Di Fonzo, N.. 2004. Problem Solving in Social Interactions on
the Internet: Rumor as Social Cognition. In: Social Psychology Quarterly, 67,
1, 33-49. [DOI: 10.1177/2F019027250406700105]
Boucher, J.-P. 1965, 1980. Études sur Properce. Problèmes d’Inspiration e
d’Art. 2a ed. Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard.
Bowditch, L. 2009. Palatine Apollo And The Imperial Gaze: Propertius 2.31
and 2.32. In: AJPh, 130, 3, 401-438. [DOI: 10.1353/ajp.0.0064]
Butler, H. E. 1905. Sexti Properti Oera Omnia with a Commentary.
London: Archibald Constable & CO. LTD.
Cairns, F. 1979. Propertius on Augustus’ Marriage Law (II,7). In: Cairns,
F.. 2007. Papers on Roman Elegy (1969-2003). Bologna: Eikasmos, Pàtron
Editore: 141-55. [=Grazer Beiträge 8, (1979):185-204].
______. 2006. Sextus Propertius. The Augustan Elegist. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
62 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Cohen, D. 1991. The Augustan Law on Adultery. In: Kertzer, D. I.; Saller,
R. P., eds. 1991. The Family in Italy. From Antiquity To The Present.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 109-126.
Camps, W. A. 1966. Propertius Elegies Book II. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Collares, M. A. 2010. Representações do Senado Romano na Ab urbe Condita
de Tito Lívio. Livros 21-30. São Paulo: Cultura Acadêmica Editora
Cizek, E. 1990. Mentalités et institutions politiques romaines. Paris: Fayart
Della Corte, F. 1982. Le Leges Iuliae e l’elegia romana. In: ANRW, II.30,
1, 539-558
Del Castillo, A. 2005. “En Torno a la Problemática sobre la Condición
Jurídica de Cynthia, Musa de Propercio” In: Ibañez, J. Ma. N. (2005).
Estudios sobre la Mujer en la Cultura Griega y Latina. León: Universidad
de León: 179-91.
Dufallo, B. 2001. ‘Appius’ Indignation: Gossip, Tradition, and Performance
in Republican Rome. In: TAPhA, 131, 119-142. [DOI: 10.1353/
apa.2001.0005]
Fear, T. 2005. Propertian Closure. In: Ancona, R.; Greene, E., eds. 2005.
Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry. Baltimore: The Jonhs Hopkins
University Press, 13-40.
Fedeli, P. 1984. Sexti Properti Elegiarum Libri IV. Edidit Paulo Fedeli.
Studigardiae: in Aedibus B. G. Teubneri.
______. 2005. Properzio Elegie Libro II. Introduzione, testo e Commento.
Cambridge: Francis Cairns.
Freudenburg, K. 2014. Recusatio as Political Theatre: Horace’s Letter
to Augustus. In: JRS, 104, 1-28. DOI: <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/
S007543581300124X>.
Frier B. W.; McGinn, T. A. J. 2004. A casebook on Roman family law
(Classical resources series / American Philological Association; no. 5).
New York: Oxford University Press.
Gale, M.R. 1997. Propertius 2.7: Militia Amoris and the Ironies of Elegy
in JRS, 87: 77-91. [DOI: 10.2307/301370]
Galinsky, K. 1969. The Triumph Theme in Augustan Elegy. In: WS 82,
75-107.
______. 1996. Augustan Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Giardina, G. 2010. Elegie. Properzio. Pisa & Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore.
Goddard, E. H. 1923. Propertius, Cynthia, and Augustus. In: CR 37,7-8,
153-6. [DOI: 10.1017/S0009840X00085152]
Goold, G. P. 1990. Propertius Elegies. Cambridge, Mass. & London:
Harvard University Press.
Gontijo Flores, G. 2014. Elegias de Sexto Propércio. Belo Horizonte:
Autêntica.
Gurval, R. A. 1997. Caesar’s Comet: The Politics and Poetics of an Augustan
Myth. In: MAAR, 42, 39–71. [<http://www.jstor.org/stable/4238747>]
Heyworth, S. J. 2007a. Propertius, Patronage and Politics. In: BICS 50:
93-128. [DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-5370.200.tb00266.x]
______. 2007b. Sexti Properti Elegos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______. 2007c. Cynthia. A Companion to the Text of Propertius. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Johnson, W. R. 2012. Propertius. In: Gold, B. K., ed. A Companion to
Roman Love Elegy. Malden: Wiley & Blackwell: 39-52.
Kienast, D. 1982. Augustus. Princeps und Monarch. Darmstadt: Philipp
von Zabern.
Laurence, R. 1994. Rumour and Communication in Roman Politics. In:
G&R, 41, 1, 62-74. [DOI: 10.1017/S0017383500023214]
Lyne, R.O. A. M. 1980. The Latin Love Poets from Catullus to Horace.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martins, P. 2009. Elegia Romana. Construção e Efeito. São Paulo:
Humanitas. [DOI:10.13140/2.1.3644.9605]
______. 2011a. Breve história da crítica da Literatura Latina in Classica
(Brasil) 21, 2, 189-204.
______. 2011b. Imagem e Poder. Considerações sobre a Representação de
Otávio Augusto. São Paulo: EDUSP. [DOI: 10.13140/2.1.3959.5844]
______. 2015a. O jogo elegíaco: fronteiras entre a cultura intelectual
e a f icção poética. In: Nuntius Antiquus, 11, 1, 137-172 [DOI:
10.17851/1983-3636.11.1.137-172]
______. 2015b. Sobre a metapoesia em Propércio e na poesia erotica romana:
o poeta rufião, Classica (Brasil), 28, 1, 125-159
Moya, F.; Ruiz de Elvira, A.. 2001. Propercio Elegias. Intoducción,
Traducción y Notas (Fedeli, 1984 com alterações). Madrid: Cátedra.
64 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Nascimento, A. A.; Pimentel, M. C.; Alberto, P. F.; Segurado e Campos,

J. A.. 2002. Propércio Elegias. Texto Latino e Introdução de Paolo Fedeli.
Assis e Lisboa: Accademia Properziana del Subasio e Centro de Estudos
Clássicos da Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa.
Nisbet, R. G. M.. 1992. The Orator And The Reader: Manipulation and
Response in Cicero’s Fifth Verrine. Woodman, T.; Powell, J.. Author and
audience in Latin literature, 1-17.
Pandey, N. B. . 2013. Caesar’s Comet, the Julian Star, and the Invention of
Augustus. In: TAPhA, 143, 405–449.
Petersen, H..1961. Livy and Augustus. In: TPAPhA, 92, 440-452.
Peterson, W. A.; Gist, G. P.. 1951. Rumor and Public Opinion. In: American
Journal of Sociology, 57, 2, 159-167. [DOI:10.1086/220916]
Raditsa, L. F.. 1980. Augustus’ Legislation Concerning Marriage, Procreation,
Love Affairs and Adultery. In: ANRW, 2, 13, 278-339.
Rich, J.; Williams, J. H. C.. 1999. LEGES ET IVRA P.R. RESTITVIT. A
new aureus of Octavian and the Settlement of 28-27 B.C.. In: Numismatic
Chronicle, 5, 159, 169-213.
Richardson, J. S.. 2012. Augustan Rome. 44 BC to 14 AD. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Richardson, Jr., L.. 1977. Propertius Elegies I-IV. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press & American Philological Association.
Rosnow, R. L.; Kimmel, A. J.. 2000. Rumor in Encyclopedia of Psychology,
Vol. 7, edited by Alan E. Kazdin. New York: Oxford University Press:
122-23.
Shackleton Baley, D. R.. 1956. Propertiana. Cambridge: At The University
Press.
Sindikus, H. P.. 2006. The second Book in Günther, H.-Ch., ed. 2006. Brill’s
Companion to Propertius. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 246-318.
Smith, W.. 1875. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. London:
John Murray.
Stahl, H.-P.. 1985. Propertius: Love and War. Individual and State Under
Augustus. Berkeley: University California Press.
Veyne, P.. 1983. L’élégie érotique romaine. Paris: Le Seuil.
______. 1985. A Elegia Erótica Romana. O Amor, a Poesia e o Ocidente.
São Paulo: Brasiliense.
Viarre, S. 2005. Properce Élégies. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

Wallace-Hadrill, A.. 2009. Family and Inheritance in the Augustan
Marriage Laws. In: Edmondson, J.. 2009. Augustus. Edinburgh Readings
on Ancient World. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. [=PCPhS,
27 (1981): 58-80.]
Williams, G.. 1962. Poetry in the Moral Climate of Augustan Rome. In:
JRS, 52, 28-46. [DOI: 10.2307/297875]
Wyke, M.. 1989. Mistress as Metaphor in Augustan Elegy. In: Helios 16,
25-47.
______. 1989b. In pursuit of love, the poetic self and a process of reading:
Augustan elegy in the 1980s. In: JRS, 79, 167-8. [DOI: 10.2307/301188]
‘Imperii Roma deumque locus’:
la Roma augustea come città celeste*
Gianpiero Rosati
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
1. Tutte le strade portano (gli dei) a Roma

Che ci sia un legame intrinseco e inscindibile tra la
religione romana e la città di Roma, intesa come entità fisica, è
cosa ben nota; anzi, quella romana è una religione che non può
esistere senza un nesso stretto, identitario, con la città intesa
come realtà concreta, con i suoi monumenti, i suoi spazi, il
suo paesaggio.1 Di quest’ultimo si è addirittura parlato come
tipico ‘sacred landscape’ (H. Cancik), cioè uno spazio in cui gli
elementi della natura (come i colli, o il fiume Tevere) collaborano
a costruire un loro sistema di senso attraverso elementi culturali
e religiosi ad essi connessi (come ad es. storie eziologiche
depositate in nomi, riti, monumenti).
*
Una versione parzialmente diversa di queste pagine sarà pubblicata in inglese in
un volume di vari autori, a cura di Monica Gale e Anna Chahoud, in corso di
stampa presso Cambridge University Press.
1
Cf. Edwards (1996, 44-5); sul tema è importante anche Jenkyns (2013).
68 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Al di là di questa generale interrelazione tra spazio urbano

e religione a Roma, cioè tra elementi naturali, costruzioni umane
(come la città) e mondo soprannaturale (cioè gli dei), vorrei qui
soffermarmi su un’idea molto particolare, cioè sull’immagine di
Roma come ‘città degli dei’, come ‘città celeste’ (perché il cielo è
tradizionalmente la loro sede: non a caso in poesia fin da Ennio
sono detti caelicolae, abitanti del cielo). Un’idea che in realtà ha
una sua matrice letteraria e un ambito specificamente politico:
originata in età augustea, si intreccerà poi in qualche modo con il
multiforme mito della ‘città eterna’, un mito storicamente molto
fortunato e ovviamente alimentato dalla circostanza che avrebbe
fatto di Roma la sede della religione cristiana e del papato, fino
a cristallizzarsi nell’opposizione istituita da Agostino tra città
terrena e città celeste. La vicenda storica decisiva che rende
possibile e favorisce l’elaborazione di questo concetto – Roma
è città celeste, appunto, in quanto divina, in quanto sede che
gli dei hanno scelto per vivere – coincide con l’affermarsi a
Roma di una struttura di potere autocratica, monarchica: il
principato di Augusto, da cui si svilupperà e consoliderà l’impero,
è l’istituzione, sotto molti aspetti rivoluzionaria, che poteva far
apparire la figura del princeps regnante così eccezionale e tanto
‘superiore’ alla condizione umana da renderla affine a quella
divina.2 D’altra parte l’idea di un sovrano-dio – un’idea in sé
molto audace, che viola i limiti che la religione tradizionale
fissa nella distinzione/separazione tra uomo e divinità – è anche
politicamente dirompente: si sa quanto forte sia a Roma la paura
della monarchia, del potere di un uomo solo, e naturalmente
l’idea di un princeps che poteva apparire come un monarca, o
addirittura un dio, si esponeva a questo rischio. Tuttavia l’idea di
un sovrano-dio (concepito cioè come tale già in vita, e non grazie
all’apoteosi che a partire da Cesare tutti gli imperatori si vedono
tributata dopo la morte), fuori da Roma era stata già ampiamente
2
Il tema è molto studiato: oltre a Koortbojian (2013), per una ridiscussione
approfondita cf. Citroni (2015), con ottima bibliografia aggiornata.
‘IMPERII ROMA DEUMQUE LOCUS’ 69
acquisita nel linguaggio politico delle culture orientali e dell’età

ellenistica, soprattutto in relazione ad Alessandro, e sulla scena
romana si affaccia lentamente ma con intensità crescente in età
augustea.
A dare corpo, e visibilità pubblica, a quell’idea sono
soprattutto gli artisti: mentre il linguaggio politico pubblico
e ufficiale è vincolato da precise limitazioni, deve cautelarsi
dal rischio di prestare il fianco agli attacchi degli avversari, il
linguaggio dei poeti e degli artisti (un linguaggio a suo modo
anch’esso politico, ma in cui possono prevalere le intenzioni
encomiastiche) è più libero e disinvolto, può esprimersi anche
per metafore e iperboli, e dire cose che il linguaggio ufficiale
‘non può dire’, anche eludendo appunto la radicata idiosincrasia
romana al regnum. La tarda età augustea, con la produzione
poetica dell’ultimo Orazio e soprattutto dell’Ovidio dell’esilio,
in cui il tono encomiastico si accentua e la divinizzazione del
principe affiora e si afferma in maniera sempre più manifesta,
rappresenta il punto cruciale di questa elaborazione concettuale.
E naturalmente le innovazioni che in quell’ambito emergono
nel linguaggio poetico trovano riscontro anche nel linguaggio
figurativo,3 e sono destinate ad avere una vasta fortuna nei secoli
successivi.
Augusto comincia ad essere apertamente divinizzato a
Roma nella letteratura celebrativa già negli anni di Filippi e poi
soprattutto dopo Azio.4 Della sua condizione divina si esalta
soprattutto il rapporto che essa instaura tra il principe-dio e
l’ambiente che lo circonda: la presenza (praesentia) del suo numen
comunica allo spazio fisico circostante l’aura superumana che al
principe è connaturata, trasmettendo a chi abita quello spazio i
3
Cf. spec. Pollini (2012, ch. 2).
4
Tra i passi più noti, Verg. ecl. 1.6-8 e 41-3; georg. 3.1-39; Hor. carm. 1.2.41-
52; 3.5.1-4; 4.5.5-8; epist. 2.115-17, etc.; ma è importante anche un prosatore
come Vitruvio, praef. 1-2.
70 AUGUSTAN POETRY
suoi effetti benefici. In Ovidio dunque Augusto è un dio praesens

e conspicuus (per te praesentem conspicuumque deum, trist. 2.54),
una realtà concreta e visibile, percepibile nella vita di Roma, nel
suo spazio fisico, a cui il poeta esule lamenta di non avere accesso
diretto, e dal quale lo divide una distanza come quella che separa
il centro del mondo dalla sua periferia più remota (Ov. trist.
5.2.45-6 adloquor en absens absentia numina supplex, / si fas est
homini cum Iove posse loqui). Anzi, riprendendo da Orazio (carm.
3.5.1-3 Caelo tonantem credidimus Iovem / regnare: praesens divus
habebitur / Augustus) un modulo adulatorio già attestato in poesia
ellenistica, e che sarà poi largamente diffuso in età imperiale,
Ovidio afferma la superiorità del Giove-Augusto terreno sul
Giove celeste: mentre infatti alla divinità di quest’ultimo si può
solo credere in modo fideistico, senza averne una percezione
diretta, il principe è un dio vivo e concreto, visibile (trist. 4.4.20
quorum hic aspicitur, creditur ille deus), come i benefici effettivi
che da lui derivano.
La natura divina del sovrano rende così possibile, nel
mondo da lui governato, un’esperienza che secondo il mito era
stata tipica dell’età dell’oro, e cioè la convivenza tra umani e
dei, la visibile e concreta presenza di questi ultimi sulla terra.
Negli ambienti della corte imperiale, vista come un trait d’union
fra cielo e terra, le divinità si muovono in piena naturalezza,
trasmettendo l’impressione di una presenza percepita come
protettiva e rassicurante; e i testi letterari danno forma in vari
modi a questa convinzione. Così, ad esempio, i figli di Livia
responsabili nel 6 d.C. del restauro del tempio dei Dioscuri,
cioè Tiberio e Druso (fast. 1.707 fratribus illa deis fratres de
gente deorum), sono non solo figura terrena dei fratelli celesti,
ma vengono essi stessi assimilati alla grande famiglia degli
immortali; e analogamente Livia, che condivide a sua volta
le due sfere, quella umana e quella divina, viene vista come la
moglie del grande Giove terreno (fast. 1.650 sola toro magni digna
reperta Iovis; Pont. 3.1.118 sola est caelesti digna reperta toro). Del
resto, il notorio legame privilegiato di Apollo con Augusto, che

sul Palatino ha fatto costruire un famoso tempio in onore del
dio accanto alla propria casa,5 porta Ovidio a definire Apollo
addirittura un dio domestico (Phoebe domestice, met. 15.865), un
dio ‘di casa’, quasi fosse anche lui un appartenente alla familia
del sovrano terreno. Oltre ad aver ‘privatizzato’ insieme alla
sua famiglia Roma e i suoi spazi pubblici, che si riempiono dei
segni concreti, fisici (i monumenta), della sua presenza e dei
presunti effetti benefici da essa derivanti (protezione, prosperità,
benessere etc.), Augusto acquisisce quindi nel proprio spazio
anche gli dei, quasi subordinandoli ai propri fini e facendone
degli strumenti della propria politica culturale.6
Se da un lato egli si presenta infatti come il restauratore
dell’identità religiosa romana, dall’altro usa la religione come
uno degli strumenti grazie ai quali appropriarsi della città
inscrivendovi integralmente la propria presenza: lo fa nello
spazio (cioè attraverso i monumenti), così come nel tempo
(mediante la riforma del calendario) e nella storia (ad es.
nella mitizzazione del passato troiano della sua famiglia). Il
Pontefice Massimo Augusto fa cioè di sé stesso un elemento
imprescindibile dell’identità di Roma, e in questa progressiva
‘conquista’ della città la sua acquisita dimensione divina (un dato
ovviamente non ufficiale, ma accreditato come una costante dal
linguaggio encomiastico promosso dagli artisti) è uno strumento
particolarmente potente; anche l’idea di Roma come ‘città celeste’
è una conseguenza della sua divinizzazione. Sono i poeti della
prima età augustea, come abbiamo detto, a parlare del giovane
Ottaviano (che poi, dal 27 BCE, sarà designato Augusto) come
di un dio; ed è evidente che i poeti attingono dall’immaginazione
mitologica, e in particolare dalla rappresentazione letteraria del
5
Cf. Miller (2009, ch. 4).
6
Gros (1976, 29) parla di un’operazione di “systematic resacralisation of the
urban space” da parte di Augusto.
72 AUGUSTAN POETRY
mondo degli dei, detentori del potere sugli umani, i modi adatti
a concettualizzare i rapporti con loro così come la topografia
che fa da scenario alla loro azione.
L’immaginazione comune associa gli dei ai loro templi,
cioè fa di questi la loro casa; ma mentre, secondo questo punto
di vista, gli dei abitano i loro templi ovunque, in qualunque città
del mondo, Roma ha la peculiarità di riunirli tutti, di essere
una città ‘sacra’: l’unicità monarchica del sovrano, che infatti
nel linguaggio comune in età imperiale è Giove in terra, tende
a fare di Roma un luogo in qualche modo sacro. Non un luogo
sacro fra tanti altri, ma la sola città sacra nel mondo, la città-
Olimpo, appunto imperii… deumque locus (come dice Ovidio in
trist. 1.5.70), il luogo del potere imperiale e degli dei: quello in
cui è naturale che gli dei si rechino e scelgano come propria sede
(Ov. fast. 4.270 dignus Roma locus quo deus omnis eat). Roma è
insomma lo spazio che realizza concretamente, storicamente, la
metafora dell’apparato divino come figura letteraria dell’assetto
di potere che governa il mondo umano.
2. Roma come il monte Olimpo

Nell’immaginazione letteraria, da Omero in poi, la sede
degli dei, ben distinta dal mondo dei mortali, era considerata
il monte Olimpo, il massiccio più alto della Grecia: lì essi
abitano sotto la guida di Giove, loro padre e padrone, il quale
estende così la sua supremazia anche sulla terra e gli uomini che
la abitano. Per la sua altezza, l’Olimpo finisce per assimilarsi
e confondersi con il cielo stesso. L’assimilazione, e anzi
identificazione, fin da Omero (ad es. Il. 8.3-27; 24.97-104), del
monte Olimpo con il cielo fa sì che la sede del potere supremo,
quello di Giove padre degli dei, venga sempre immaginata in
alto, nel punto più alto; così come, in opposizione simmetrica
rispetto alla terra, il Tartaro è ‘in basso’ (cf. Verg. Aen. 6.578-
80 tum Tartarus ipse / bis patet in praeceps tantum tenditque sub
umbras / quantus ad aetherium caeli suspectus Olympum). E che

il potere si collochi in alto – perché dall’alto, evidentemente, si
può esercitare il controllo su un più vasto territorio7 – è un dato
costante dell’immaginario antico, di matrice orientale, trasmesso
fino a noi e radicato nella stessa lingua (‘essere in alto’, avere ‘una
posizione elevata’, in alto loco, etc.). Lo ‘sguardo del potere’, di un
potere imperiale, è anche quello di Roma che dall’alto dei suoi
sette colli guarda al mondo, lo controlla e lo governa (Ov. trist.
3.7.50-1 dumque suis victrix septem de montibus orbem / prospiciet
domitum Martia Roma).8
Il potere ha insomma una dislocazione verticale (anche
Roma come città e centro dell’impero è dunque alta: Ov. trist.
1.3.33 Vrbs habet alta Quirini; 4.2.3 alta… Palatia), come
l’immaginazione mitologica lo rappresenta.9 Quando Virgilio
descrive la sede in cui Giove convoca il concilio degli dei, la
presenta come una casa situata nel cielo, dall’alto della quale essi
guardano in giù agli umani, che abitano la terra (Aen. 10.1-4):
Panditur interea domus omnipotentis Olympi
conciliumque uocat diuum pater atque hominum rex
sideream in sedem, terras unde arduus omnis
castraque Dardanidum aspectat populosque Latinos.
[Si apre frattanto la casa dell’onnipotente Olimpo,
e il padre degli dei e re degli uomini convoca
un concilio nella sede celeste, da dove altissimo guarda
tutte le terre e il campo dei Troiani e i popoli latini.]
7
Come, proprio nel contesto di un concilio degli dei, il narratore dichiara
esplicitamente in Stazio, Theb. 1.199-201 (spatiis hinc omnia iuxta, / primaeque
occiduaeque domus et fusa sub omni / terra atque unda die). Cf. anche Ov. Fast.
1.85-6 Iuppiter arce sua totum cum spectet in orbem, / nil nisi Romanum quod
tueatur habet.
8
Sulla ‘visione dall’alto’ come modalità di sguardo tipicamente imperiale cf.
Murphy (2004, 132-3). Cf. anche Rosati (2002, 231-9).
9
Sull’immagine di Roma come urbs pensilis, come città ‘sospesa’ (come la chiama
Plinio il Vecchio, 36.104), cf. Purcell (1992, 423); un invito a immaginare,
anche sulla base di alcuni testi poetici augustei, una ‘Roma più verticale’ formula
Barchiesi (2008, 527-30).
74 AUGUSTAN POETRY
E quando anche Ovidio racconterà il concilio che Giove convoca

in cielo per decidere delle sorti del mondo, descriverà l’arrivo
degli dei come una ‘ascesa’ dalla terra al cielo attraverso la Via
Lattea (met. 1.168-76):
Est via sublimis, caelo manifesta sereno;
lactea nomen habet, candore notabilis ipso.
Hac iter est superis ad magni tecta Tonantis
regalemque domum: dextra laevaque deorum
atria nobilium valvis celebrantur apertis.
Plebs habitat diversa locis: hac parte potentes
caelicolae clarique suos posuere penates;
hic locus est, quem, si verbis audacia detur,
haud timeam magni dixisse Palatia caeli.
[Esiste una via nell’empireo, visibile a cielo sereno:
si chiama Via Lattea e s’impone per bianco fulgore.
È il cammino che fanno gli dei per recarsi alla regia dimora,
alla casa del grande Tonante. A destra e a sinistra, ospitali,
spalancano le porte i palazzi dei nobili dei.
Altrove, disperse, le case del popolo; ma i loro Penati
li hanno messi, i Celesti potenti e illustri, in questo quartiere.
Se la battuta non fosse temeraria, non esiterei
a definire il quartiere il Palatino del cielo supremo.]
Tra terra e cielo non c’è più cioè come in Virgilio una
netta separazione ma c’è continuità, i due spazi non sono più
distinti e lontani, ma sono direttamente collegati: lungo la Via
Lattea sono collocate le abitazioni degli dei, da quelli di rango
minore (la plebs) a quelli più importanti man mano che si sale,
per arrivare al punto più alto dov’è la reggia di Giove. È insomma
un criterio gerarchico che fa corrispondere l’altezza del rango
all’orografia delle diverse abitazioni celesti. Il passo di Ovidio
è molto noto e importante per le sue implicazioni:10 anzitutto
porta all’estremo la tendenza già omerica di immaginare uno
spazio fisico umano (quello della polis e dei suoi edifici) entro il
quale far agire gli dei, istituendo così un evidente parallelismo
10
Cf. Wiseman (1994).
tra mondo umano e apparato divino, con relative gerarchie, fino

a identificare precisamente quello spazio con Roma.11 Al tempo
stesso rappresenta “una rivelazione della natura monarchica del
nuovo potere di Roma”.12 Infine conferma che ormai è il Palatino
(Palatia),13 e non più il Campidoglio, dove Giove aveva il suo
famoso tempio, il centro del potere romano (la sede del Palazzo
inteso appunto in questo senso, come nella fortunata storia del
termine nella cultura politica europea),14 e lo è soprattutto in
quanto sito della casa di Augusto, il punto simbolicamente più
alto della piramide del nuovo potere.
Accanto a questo processo di assimilazione, per cui
l’Olimpo viene ‘romanizzato’, Giove diventa il principe, e gli
altri dei i suoi cortigiani, assistiamo però anche all’evoluzione
contraria e simmetrica, che vede Roma diventare una sorta di
Olimpo, cioè la sede degli dei sulla terra. L’elaborazione di
questa idea si riscontra con particolare evidenza nella poesia
ovidiana dell’esilio. Al poeta che dal centro del mondo è stato
relegato in uno degli angoli più remoti e selvaggi dell’impero la
terra dell’esilio appare come il mondo degli inferi, e viceversa,
come ha scritto Catharine Edwards,15 quella Roma da cui egli è
tenuto lontano gli sembra ‘il cielo sulla terra’, il luogo migliore
in cui vivere. Ma, come abbiamo detto sopra, anche in un altro
senso Roma è il cielo in terra, perché è la città dorata in cui gli
11
Sull’importanza del passo di Ovidio nell’esplicitare l’analogia tra la realtà politica
romana (le riunioni del senato) e il topos, già della poesia latina arcaica, dei
concilia deorum cf. Barchiesi (2009).
12
“Attraverso il parallelo fra Giove e il principe si suggerisce che, se il secondo
assomiglia al primo […] è perché anche il suo potere è incondizionato”,
Barchiesi (2005, 183).
13
Sulle possibili differenziazioni nell’uso di plurale e singolare cfr. Royo (1999,
168-70).
14
Un’accezione che si affermerà diventando comune in età flavia, e che secondo
Miller (2009, 186 n. 3), emergerebbe a partire da questo passo ovidiano e da Ars
am. 3.119.
15
Edwards (1996, 125).
76 AUGUSTAN POETRY
dei hanno scelto di vivere, e che dall’alto dei suoi colli guarda
il mondo su cui esercita il suo dominio: quae de septem totum
circumspicit orbem / montibus, imperii Roma deumque locus (trist.
1.5.69-70). Roma è insomma il centro del potere terreno e
insieme divino, perché le due entità ormai si identificano:
a Roma hanno sede gli dei che concretamente governano il
mondo. Diventando la città degli dei, di tutti gli dei, anche
di quelli stranieri, Roma abbandona un orizzonte culturale e
religioso del suo passato arcaico (come quello evocato nella
prima elegia del quarto libro di Properzio: cfr. 4.1.17 nulli cura
fuit externos quaerere divos), angustamente autarchico, e può
realizzare invece in pieno la sua nuova dimensione imperiale,
l’ambizione a esercitare un completo dominio sul mondo.
È noto che la poesia ovidiana dell’esilio, non solo per le
ragioni più ovvie (cioè l’intenzione di ottenere la clemenza di
Augusto), sviluppa una tendenza già attiva nella letteratura
augustea precedente e accentua in maniera vistosa alcune forme
del linguaggio encomiastico anticipando gli esiti estremi che esso
conoscerà in età imperiale, in primo luogo – come abbiamo già
detto – la aperta, enfatica dichiarazione della natura divina del
principe come anche della sua famiglia. Un esempio significativo
è nell’elegia di addio a Roma, quando il poeta racconta la sua
ultima notte prima della partenza per Tomi (trist. 1.3.29-42):
hanc (scil. lunam) ego suspiciens et ab hac Capitolia cernens,
quae nostro frustra iuncta fuere Lari,
‘numina vicinis habitantia sedibus’, inquam,
‘iamque oculis numquam templa videnda meis,
dique relinquendi, quos Vrbs habet alta Quirini,
este salutati tempus in omne mihi,
et quamquam sero clipeum post vulnera sumo,
attamen hanc odiis exonerate fugam,
caelestique viro, quis me deceperit error,
dicite, pro culpa ne scelus esse putet,
ut quod vos scitis, poenae quoque sentiat auctor:
placato possum non miser esse deo.’
Hac prece adoravi superos ego, pluribus uxor…
[Alzando gli occhi alla luna, e guardando al suo chiarore

il Campidoglio, inutilmente contiguo alla mia casa,
“Dei che vivete in questa dimora vicina” dissi, “templi
che i miei occhi ormai più non vedranno, dei che
albergate nell’alta città di Quirino e che io devo lasciare,
vi saluto per sempre; e anche se troppo tardi, dopo che
già sono ferito, prendo lo scudo, togliete però al mio
esilio il fardello dell’odio, e dite a quell’uomo celeste
qual è l’errore in cui sono incorso, perché non ritenga
un atto voluto quella che è solo una colpa, e perché
quanto voi sapete giunga anche all’orecchio di chi ha
emanato la pena: se quel dio si placa, posso non essere
uno sventurato”. Così pregai rivolto agli dei, e ancora
di più pregò la mia sposa…]
Dalla sua casa il poeta guarda al tempio di Giove sul Campidoglio,

e lo prega di fare da mediatore con l’altro Giove, quello terreno
che ha sede sul Palatino, cioè Augusto, implorandone la
clemenza: se quest’ultimo, l’’uomo celeste’16 si placa, il poeta può
coltivare la sua speranza di un futuro migliore. Roma è quindi
la sede non solo degli dei celesti, che hanno in città la loro casa-
tempio, ma anche del nuovo dio terreno che abita accanto ad
essa e che condivide la condizione ‘celeste’ degli dei olimpici.
E siccome dal tempio del principe-dio il poeta è
forzatamente lontano, nella remota Tomi cerca di ovviare
alla distanza facendosi mandare dai suoi amici alcune
statuette di Augusto, il numen caeleste, e della sua familia alle
quali tributare il suo culto privato, come ad altrettante divinità
(Pont. 2.8.13-18):17
Caesareos video vultus, velut ante videbam:
vix huius voti spes fuit ulla mihi.
Vtque salutabam numen caeleste, saluto.
Quod reduci tribuas, nil, puto, maius habes.
16
Sull’epiteto e il relativo motivo encomiastico, introdotto da Ovidio, cf. Canobbio
(2011, 115).
17
Cf. Galasso (1995, 344-5)
78 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Quid nostris oculis nisi sola Palatia desunt?

Qui locus ablato Caesare vilis erit.
[Vedo il volto dei Cesari come lo vedevo in precedenza;

non avrei mai neppure sperato che questo desiderio si
compisse.
Ora saluto il nume celeste come già facevo prima;
non hai, credo, nulla di meglio da darmi al mio ritorno.
Cos’altro manca ai miei occhi se non il solo Palatino?
E quel luogo non avrebbe alcun valore senza Cesare]
Il Palatino in quanto sede del Giove terreno è quindi ormai

il cuore di Roma;18 anzi, afferma il poeta, lo è solo grazie alla
presenza di Cesare. Il tradizionale primato del Campidoglio,
fondato su basi religiose (il tempio di Giove nella sua prima
versione risaliva al VI sec. BCE), passa ora in secondo piano
rispetto al Palatino, il colle su cui Roma era stata fondata e su
cui ora il nuovo-Romolo, il pater patriae Augusto,19 ha fatto
costruire la propria casa (giusto in prossimità della cosiddetta
casa Romuli). E il nuovo primato del Palatino ha una ragione
non più religiosa ma soprattutto politica: accanto alla propria
casa – anzi, a stare alle parole di Svetonio, in una parte della
casa (in ea parte Palatinae domus, Suet. Aug. 29.3) – Augusto
ha fatto erigere il sontuoso tempio di Apollo: è questa anomala
vicinanza che spiega probabilmente l’intenzione di Ovidio
nel definire il dio domesticus del sovrano (met. 15.865), quasi
alludendo alla volontà inclusiva del principe e alla priorità della
sua presenza, che conferisce significato e prestigio a tutto il
complesso architettonico (come l’altro verso ovidiano visto
sopra, qui locus ablato Caesare vilis erit, realisticamente constata).
Certo quel complesso, che comprende la domus Augusti più il
tempio di Apollo e il portico-biblioteca che lo affiancava, e che
ha un rilievo politico, civile e religioso insieme, può vantare una
18
Sulla storia urbanistica, sociale e culturale del Palatino è fondamentale Royo
1999.
19
Cf. Favro (2005, 256).
preminenza e una centralità che ne fanno indiscutibilmente il

centro del potere.
Il primato del Palatino è un tema che torna più volte nella
poesia ovidiana dell’esilio a definire la nuova topografia di Roma
e del potere: nel proemio che apre il primo libro dei Tristia,
in cui l’autore indica all’opera la strada da percorrere al suo
arrivo a Roma, così il poeta esprime le sue esitazioni per quanto
riguarda l’eventuale avvicinamento alla casa di Augusto (trist.
1.1.69-74):
Forsitan expectes, an in alta Palatia missum
scandere te iubeam Caesareamque domum.
Ignoscant augusta mihi loca dique locorum!
venit in hoc illa fulmen ab arce caput.
Esse quidem memini mitissima sedibus illis
numina, sed timeo qui nocuere deos.
[Forse ti aspetti che ti dica di andare alla sommità del
Palatino, e di salire alla dimora di Cesare. Chiedo
perdono, augusta sede, e voi numi del luogo: da quella
rocca è venuta la folgore che mi ha colpito. So che sono
mitissime le potenze di lì, ma temo gli dei che mi hanno
nociuto].
Qui gli dei sono quelli terreni, e la designazione degli
augusta loca in cui essi hanno la loro sede (l’epiteto è ovviamente
un chiaro segnale di identificazione con il princeps attuale),
appunto il Palatino, definisce la topografia del nuovo potere
divino sulla terra indicando in quel colle la rocca-fortezza (arx)
da cui il Giove terreno esercita il suo dominio e scaglia i suoi
fulmini. C’è un altro proemio importante in questa chiave,
quello in cui il terzo libro dei Tristia illustra la strada che a Roma
percorre, passando dal Foro di Augusto alla Via Sacra per salire
quindi al Palatino, e disegna la topografia dell’Urbe costruita
sulla centralità di questo colle e di chi lo abita (3.1.31-8):
Inde petens dextram ‘porta est’ ait ‘ista Palati,
hic Stator, hoc primum condita Roma loco est.’
Singula dum miror, video fulgentibus armis
80 AUGUSTAN POETRY
conspicuos postes tectaque digna deo,

‘et Iovis haec’ dixi ‘domus est?’ quod ut esse putarem,
augurium menti querna corona dabat.
Cuius ut accepi dominum, ‘non fallimur’, inquam,
‘et magni verum est hanc Iovis esse domum.
[Da lì si diresse verso destra: “Quella è la porta del

Palatino, e questo il tempio di Giove Statore: in questo sito
originariamente fu fondata Roma”. Mentre contemplavo
a uno a uno gli edifici, vidi, messi in risalto dallo scintillio
delle armi, i battenti di una dimora degna di un dio. “È
questa” domandai “la casa di Giove?” Era una corona di
quercia che mi suggeriva questa idea. Quando seppi di chi
era la casa: “Non è un abbaglio,” dissi, “questa è veramente la
dimora del grande Giove]
La topografia del viaggio del libro ovidiano attraverso il

centro monumentale di Roma rispecchia notoriamente quella
della ‘passeggiata archeologica’ di Enea guidato da Evandro nel
libro ottavo dell’Eneide, e come il tour virgiliano si concludeva
con l’arrivo alla casa del re arcade (Aen. 8.359-65), così quello
del libro ovidiano culmina, in maniera allusiva, con l’arrivo alla
casa di Augusto (vv. 33-42).20 Se le implicazioni ideologiche
di questa sovrapposizione sono ovvie, meno evidenti sono le
intenzioni di Ovidio, anche per l’apparente contrasto tra la
spoglia sobrietà dell’angustum tectum (v. 366) del re Evandro e
le augustae fores (v. 40) della vistosa casa del principe, decorata
delle tipiche insegne onorifiche e ‘degna di un dio’ (v. 34),21 anzi
del più grande tra loro, di Giove. L’assimilazione del padre degli
20
Per i dettagli e la bibliografia rinvio a Newlands (1997, 66-7); importante la
discussione dell’elegia ovidiana in Miller (2009, 210-20).
21
Il senso preciso dell’espressione non è chiaro (cf. Miller 2009, 213), ma
indubbiamente implica “some impressive physical characteristic”; secondo
Miller, Ovidio “inverts the context, in a typical bit of deconstruction,
from Evander’s poor palace to the splendid imperial residence in the same
neighborhood, thereby obliquely calling into question the Emperor’s reputation
for humble living” (214).
dei al Giove terreno che, nella conclusiva preghiera di clemenza,

viene definito appunto il dio più grande (di, precor, atque adeo –
neque enim mihi turba roganda est – / Caesar, ades voto, maxime
dive, meo, vv. 77-8), trova il suo marchio più vistoso nell’impiego
dell’epiteto-chiave, augustus.
Quel termine ritorna in altri due passaggi molto rilevanti
e tra di loro legati da un vistoso rapporto intertestuale: si tratta
della descrizione di due palazzi regali, cioè di due strutture
ecfrastiche dalle forti valenze ideologiche. La prima è la reggia
del mitico re Cipo nel settimo dell’Eneide (vv. 170-2):
Tectum augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis
urbe fuit summa, Laurentis regia Pici,
horrendum silvis et religione parentum.
[Il palazzo, augusto e spazioso, elevato su cento colonne,

era in vetta alla città, reggia del laurente Pico,
e le selve e il culto dei padri l’avvolgevano di sacro orrore…]
Nella sua solenne proiezione verticale (sublime, summa),

l’edificio è un luogo che riassume ed esalta, anche sotto
l’aspetto visivo, i valori tradizionali della comunità urbana
che esso fisicamente sovrasta: valori sia religiosi che civili – le
due dimensioni sono anzi indistinguibili22 – integrati anche
fisicamente nel territorio (horrendum silvis; antiqua e cedro) e
soprattutto radicati nella memoria della collettività come spazi
delegati alla celebrazione dei suoi rituali (hic sceptra accipere et
primos attollere fascis / regibus omen erat; soliti; veterum effigies ex
ordine avorum; servans; ab origine reges etc.).23 Come osservava
già Servio, l’epiteto iniziale augustum allude alla casa di Augusto
22
Le spiccate analogie di funzioni con il tempio di Jupiter Optimus Maximus
sul Campidoglio sono state più volte segnalate: cfr. (anche per la bibliografia)
Bleisch (2003, 94-5), che rileva anche le analogie della regia con il tempio di
Apollo sul Palatino (97).
23
Bleisch (2003, 94) insiste giustamente sulla ‘interiority’ che caratterizza
l’ekphrasis della reggia e sul suo legame col passato leggendario dell’Italia.
82 AUGUSTAN POETRY
sul Palatino (domum, quam in Palatio diximus ab Augusto factam,

per transitum laudat, “elogia di passaggio la casa che, abbiamo
detto, Augusto si costruì sul Palatino”),24 conferendole il
prestigio di un lieu de mémoire centrale nella storia di Roma, cioè
indicando in essa il tramite che riconduce il presente al mito
remoto della città,25 facendone quasi il luogo-simbolo della sua
memoria culturale. È l’origine eloquente di quel fenomeno che
porterà il termine Palatium, nella sua fortuna plurimillenaria, a
sancire l’identificazione del nome ‘palazzo’ con l’edificio-simbolo
del potere monarchico-imperiale.26
Ma il discorso non finisce qui, e il rapporto tra il re mitico
Pico e il re storico Augusto si estende all’età flavia e coinvolge
la rappresentazione di un altro monarca insediato sul colle
ormai sede ufficiale del potere imperiale di Roma: è il passo in
cui Stazio descrive il palazzo di Domiziano, alla cui mensa egli
ha avuto il privilegio di essere ammesso. Quello di Domiziano,
l’imperatore dominus et deus, appare al poeta come un banchetto
in cielo, insieme agli dei (mediis videor discumbere in astris / cum
Iove; silv. 4.2.10-11),27 e l’edificio in cui il banchetto ha luogo
così viene descritto (18-26):
Tectum augustum, ingens, non centum insigne columnis,
sed quantae superos caelumque Atlante remisso
sustentare queant. Stupet hoc vicina Tonantis
regia, teque pari laetantur sede locatum
24
Anche la vicinanza della reggia di Pico al palazzo di Latino richiama la contiguità
tra la casa privata di Augusto e gli spazi politici e religiosi nel nuovo complesso
architettonico del Palatino: su questa e altre analogie cf. Bleisch (2003, 98).
25
Il tema della successione/continuità politica è centrale nell’intera ekphrasis.
26
Favro (2005, 261): “The new Augustan nod created on the Palatine became the
eponimous nucleus for Rome’s great imperial, “palatial”, residences. Extensively
exploited by Augustus, the use of multicolored, richly carved marble became a
hallmark of Roman imperial construction not only in Rome but throughout the
world”.
27
Il linguaggio sacrale è una componente essenziale della letteratura encomiastica
flavia (che sviluppa ampiamente gli spunti di quella augustea), soprattutto di
Stazio e Marziale; una ricca documentazione in Canobbio (2011, 115 e 123-6).
numina (nec magnum properes excedere caelum):

tanta patet moles effusaeque impetus aulae
liberior, campi multumque amplexus operti
aetheros, et tantum domino minor; ille penates
implet et ingenti genio iuvat.
[Un augusto palazzo, immenso, straordinario non per cento

colonne,
ma per tante quante potrebbero sorreggere le volte e gli
abitanti
celesti se Atlante si allontanasse. La vicina reggia del
Tonante
l’ammira stupita e i numi gioiscono che tu dimori
in una sede pari alla loro. Non affrettarti a raggiungere il
vasto cielo:
così ampia si estende la mole e così libero è lo slancio
dell’immenso palazzo che abbraccia un largo spazio di
terra e di cielo, ed è inferiore solo al suo padrone: egli
riempie la casa e l’allieta col suo immenso genio.]
L’ekphrasis del palazzo imperiale inizia con una vistosa ripresa

della descrizione virgiliana del palazzo di Pico, così come l’incipit
stesso della silva (1-2) dichiarava un confronto-sfida con il
banchetto regale offerto da Didone a Enea. L’implicazione
della ripresa/correzione del testo di Virgilio è ovviamente che
il palazzo di Domiziano è ben più solenne della reggia di Pico e
del complesso augusteo del Palatino cui esso allude; così come, se
ne deve dedurre, l’imperatore attuale è più grande di Augusto.28
Più grande anzi dello stesso Giove, il Tonante celeste, che dal
suo tempio capitolino lo guarda ammirato, e si compiace – quasi
intimorito – di averlo come suo vicino, al suo stesso livello
(pari… sede); e così fanno tutti gli altri dei.29 Anzi, il destino
di Domiziano è di andare oltre il cielo, di superare gli dei: il
28
Newlands (2002, 270) vede in questa iperbole una ripresa indiretta del topos
epico delle ‘cento bocche’. Ovvio osservare che l’idea del confronto/sfida
coinvolge lo stesso Stazio rispetto a Virgilio.
29
La vicinanza dei due dèi sui colli vicini, uno cioè sul Campidoglio e l’altro sul
Palatino, ricorda la vicinanza del Giove Capitolino alla casa di Augusto su cui si
soffermava Ovidio in trist. 1.3.29-42.
84 AUGUSTAN POETRY
topos encomiastico serus in caelum redeas (Orazio, carm. 1.2.45),

cioè l’augurio all’imperatore di lunga vita, di ‘tornare tardi’ nel
mondo divino dal quale egli proviene – un topos comune in
poesia augustea (Prop. 3.11.50; Ov. met. 15.868-70; trist. 2.57;
5.2.52 etc.) – diventa ora serus caelum excedas, vale a dire ‘aspetta
a superare il cielo’, cioè gli dei.30 Perché oltre ad essere un dio, il
sovrano è già ‘più potente di Giove’, come vuole un altro abusato
topos encomiastico della poesia imperiale; e naturalmente il suo
palazzo sul Palatino abbraccia già il cielo, secondo l’immagine di
un epigramma di Marziale sull’architetto Rabirio, la cui perizia
artistica ha saputo portare il cielo sulla terra (7.56):
Astra polumque pia cepisti mente, Rabiri,
Parrhasiam mira qui struis arte domum. 31
Phidiaco si digna Iovi dare templa parabit,
has petet a nostro Pisa Tonante manus.
[Hai piamente concepito, Rabirio, un cielo e le sue stelle, tu

che con arte mirabile innalzi la reggia Parrasia. Se Pisa
vorrà dare a Giove un tempio degno, chiederà al nostro
Tonante di prestarle le sue mani].
L’aula Parrhasia, come la poesia encomiastica coeva chia-

ma la domus Flavia sul Palatino,32 potrebbe fare da modello
30
Questo è il senso richiesto dalla lezione excedere della tradizione manoscritta
(cioè il solo codice Matritensis); cfr. Lucan. 2.271 nubes excedit Olympus.
L’effetto di auxesis dell’iperbole – superare Augusto, anzi superare in questo
slancio ascensionale persino il cielo, cioè gli dei – si vanifica, com’è ovvio, se
con la generalità degli editori moderni si corregge excedere in escendere (un
emendamento del Gronovius) che riconduce l’espressione nell’alveo del topos
serus in caelum redeas.
31
Parrhasia, una città dell’Arcadia che per sineddoche designa l’intera regione,
allude al re arcade Evandro come mitico abitatore del colle (che da lui, secondo
una tradizione, sarebbe stato chiamato Palatino; ma sulle numerose etimologie
del nome cf. Royo (1999, 42-3 n. 128)).
32
Ma il sostantivo aula implica in sé una nozione di carattere religioso, cioè un
richiamo al modello del santuario monumentale: cf. Royo (1999, 346-7). Per
l’immagine del palazzo imperiale come tempio cf. ad es. Mart. 5.6.7-11 (con
Canobbio 2011, ad loc.).
come ambiente ideale ad accogliere il capolavoro di Fidia, la

statua criselefantina di Giove a Olimpia: comunque si voglia
intendere astra polumque… cepisti,33 è evidente che Domiziano
(il ‘nostro’ Tonante terreno) rappresenta il punto di contatto
tra cielo e terra, come colui che, unico, alla dimensione umana
aggiunge quella divina.
Un altro epigramma di Marziale celebra le dimensioni
eccezionali del palazzo, che superano qualunque monumento
regale del passato (8.36):
Regia pyramidum, Caesar, miracula ride;
iam tacet Eoum barbara Memphis opus:
pars quota Parrhasiae labor est Mareoticus aulae?
Clarius in toto nil videt orbe dies.
Septenos pariter credas adsurgere montes,
Thessalicum brevior Pelion Ossa tulit;
aethera sic intrat, nitidis ut conditus astris
inferiore tonet nube serenus apex
et prius arcano satietur numine Phoebi,
nascentis Circe quam videt ora patris.
Haec, Auguste, tamen, quae vertice sidera pulsat,
par domus est caelo, sed minor est domino.
[Ridi, o Cesare, delle prodigiose piramidi dei faraoni;

ormai la Barbara Menfi deve tacere dei capolavori
d’Oriente; quest’opera mareotica è ben poca cosa rispetto
al palazzo parrasio. La luce del giorno non vede una cosa
più bella in tutto il mondo. Si direbbe che i sette colli si
ammucchino l’uno sull’altro: è meno alto in Tessaglia
l’Ossa ammassato sul Pelia. Entra a tal punto nel cielo,
che la sua sommità, immersa tra gli astri splendenti, nel
sereno fa risuonare i suoi tuoni sulle nubi più basse, e si
sarà già saziata dell’arcano nume di Febo prima che Circe
veda il volto del padre che nasce. E tuttavia, Augusto,
questa casa che tocca col tetto le stelle è alta come il cielo,
ma è inferiore al suo padrone]
33
Cioè come una decorazione della volta, o in senso metaforico come un ‘portare il
cielo’ nel palazzo, per indicare l’altezza di quest’ultimo: cfr. Galán Vioque 2002,
ad loc.
86 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Le dimensioni dell’aula Parrhasia sono tali da far pensare

che i sette colli si siano accumulati l’uno sull’altro:34 un’altezza
maggiore di quella raggiunta dai Giganti nel loro assalto al
cielo, e lo slancio verso l’alto fa sì che anche il tuono risuoni più
in basso (v. 8), cioè che Domiziano sovrasti Giove Tonante. Il
palazzo imperiale è sì ‘pari al cielo’, ma inferiore a Domiziano,
che evidentemente è il nuovo dominus universale (come se avesse
realizzato l’ambizione dei Giganti…), la cui persona si assimila
all’universo. La formulazione di Marziale, vistosamente simile
a quella già vista di Stazio (silv. 4.2.25 tantum domino minor),35
identifica nell’imperatore il Jupiter cosmocrator che controlla il
mondo e lo governa.
Aula Parrhasia, l’espressione che nella poesia encomiastica
flavia designa il Palatino come luogo eponimo del potere
romano, condensa quindi insieme l’idea del legame col territorio
e la sua memoria culturale, espressa dall’aggettivo, e quella della
sacralità del luogo, spazio esclusivo di una figura divina, cioè del
Giove romano, espressa dal sostantivo.36 Le stesse idee racchiuse
cioè nel Palatia caeli ovidiano, a cui la frase di fatto equivale.
E per concludere sulla fortuna antica di questa immagine del
Palatino celeste, vorrei richiamare la descrizione di un altro
palazzo divino, di eccezionale bellezza come si addice al dio che
ospita, quello di Cupido descritto in un testo di pochi decenni
più tardi, cioè nelle Metamorfosi di Apuleio. Così si conclude
la lunga, elaboratissima ekphrasis (met. 5.1.7):
34
In senso diverso interpreta Schöffel (2002, 332) (la reggia mostrerebbe tutti i
colli contemporaneamente, sarebbe una Roma in miniatura), ma il riferimento
del verso seguente all’altezza ottenuta grazie all’accumulo dei monti sembra non
lasciare dubbi sul significato dell’immagine.
35
Per una discussione sulle ipotesi di priorità tra i due testi cf. Schöffel (2002,
337-8). Ma è notevole il precedente dell’invocazione ad Augusto di Ovidio,
trist. 5.2.50 o vir non ipso, quem regis, orbe minor.
36
Cf. (Royo 1999, 346), con bibliografia.
Nec setius opes ceterae maiestati domus respondent, ut

equidem illud recte videatur ad conversationem humanam
magno Iovi fabricatum caeleste palatium.
[anche tutte le altre ricchezze corrispondono alla

magnificenza della casa, tanto che davvero e a ragione si
direbbe che quel palazzo divino sia stato costruito per il
sommo Giove, quando deve incontrarsi con gli umani]
Qui il ‘palazzo celeste’, una formula che riunisce la dimensione

divina e quella terrena, viene indicato come spazio specifico
dell’incontro tra Giove e gli umani, un’esperienza tipica della
leggendaria età dell’oro. Il caeleste palatium del Giove di Apuleio37
è il corrispettivo del palazzo celeste (palatia caeli) occupato dal
Giove di Ovidio: è il luogo che l’immaginario romano definisce
come la sede di una entità superiore, dove la magnificenza del
potere si manifesta ai livelli più alti, e dove l’umano e il divino si
toccano attraverso la figura che condivide questa doppia natura,
e nella quale le funzioni politico-civili e quelle religiose finiscono
per sovrapporsi (il palazzo cioè è anche un tempio).
La distinzione formalmente mantenuta da Augusto
tra la propria residenza privata e il vicino tempio di Apollo38
viene ormai meno del tutto nella retorica encomiastica flavia,
che identifica apertamente i due spazi:39 non c’è più ragione
di distinguerli quando all’imperatore è ormai riconosciuta una
statura divina, e ai suoi sudditi il privilegio di godere della sua
presenza tra loro. Il mito dell’età dell’oro, cioè di una società
idealizzata in cui gli dei vivevano ancora in mezzo a una società
umana pacifica e incorrotta, un mito già sfruttato in chiave
ideologica durante il principato augusteo, trova un largo impiego
37
Così Psiche presume: in realtà il palazzo è di Cupido.
38
Anche se l’uso, che abbiamo visto, dell’epiteto domesticus per Apollo da parte
di Ovidio (Met. 15.865) può essere pungente in questa chiave, e anticipare gli
sviluppi futuri.
39
Cf. Royo (1999, 358-9).
88 AUGUSTAN POETRY
politico nella poesia encomiastica d’età imperiale. E contribuisce

ad alimentare l’idea di Roma, città divina ed eterna, che la rende
unica al mondo.
3. Gli dei lasciano Roma: una diversa città celeste

Il mito di Roma città eterna si afferma largamente
soprattutto grazie agli scrittori augustei (ad es. Liv. 4.4.4;
5.7.10; 28.28.11; Tib. 2.5.23-4; Ov. fast. 3.72, etc.). Un potere
illimitato, come è ormai quello di Roma imperiale, implica
anche una sede fisica, una città, ugualmente ‘senza fine’, al di
sopra dei limiti terreni; e la compiuta divinizzazione del sovrano
comporta anche una ridefinizione della topografia che fa da
sfondo al nuovo Giove terreno e alla sua corte. Se gli dei ora
sono a Roma, allora Roma è come l’Olimpo, una città celeste,
una città che gli dei hanno eletto come propria sede privilegiata
e ovviamente ‘eterna’.
Il luogo canonico del ‘mito di fondazione’ dell’eternità
di Roma era stato il testo letterario più autorevole, l’Eneide, e
precisamente la promessa di Giove a Venere che il figlio di lei,
Enea, e i suoi discendenti daranno vita a un impero ‘senza fine’
nello spazio e nel tempo (Aen. 1.278-9 his ego nec metas rerum nec
tempora pono: / imperium sine fine dedi). Il mito di un imperium sine
fine avrebbe nei primi secoli dell’impero indirettamente trovato
forte alimento nella nuova religione, quella cristiana, che ormai
a Roma aveva la sua sede.40 Ora, l’idea che ci sia una continuità
tra l’imperium romano e l’evangelium cristiano, nonostante la
radicale divergenza di fondo tra i due mondi, poteva trovare
sostegno in numerosi elementi, e si prestava ovviamente anche
a diventare un forte argomento di legittimazione per l’affermarsi
40
Naturalmente sul mito della continuità-eternità di Roma la bibliografia è
sterminata: mi limito a segnalare, anche per indicazioni ulteriori, Jenkyns (1992)
e Giardina-Vauchez (2000).
della nuova religione. Un grande apologista e padre della

Chiesa come Lattanzio, nelle Divinae institutiones – un’opera
portata a termine nel 313, cioè nell’anno in cui Costantino con
l’editto di Milano sanciva la tolleranza religiosa e la libertà di
culto, avviando una svolta radicale nella storia dell’occidente –
teorizzava una continuità tra le istituzioni politiche romane e
la nuova religione che si stava affermando anche in occidente,
creando così una teologia della storia romano-cristiana. Proprio
la fine della religione di stato, e dunque del rapporto di necessità,
quasi di identificazione tra la religione pagana e la città fisica
in cui essa si radicava, rendeva possibile l’associazione di quella
città, una città eterna e tuttora sede delle istituzioni imperiali,
con la nuova religione.
La tesi di Lattanzio, di un legame necessario tra il glorioso
passato imperiale di Roma e il nuovo messaggio cristiano, sarà
condivisa e sostenuta, insieme ad altri, da un grande storico
come Paolo Orosio (III-IV sec.), autore delle Historiae adversus
paganos, un’opera destinata ad avere una vastissima fortuna per
tutto il Medioevo. La sua concezione provvidenzialistica della
storia faceva da fondamento alla continuità tra l’universalismo
monarchico dell’impero romano e il monoteismo cristiano, un
nesso sancito dalla nascita di Cristo proprio sotto il principato
di Augusto e che porta alla concreta realizzazione storica il mito
della Roma aeterna, cioè di un luogo nello spazio e nel tempo
in cui il potere politico trova il suo garante e fondamento nel
potere divino.
Non stupisce che dell’implicita ricerca di questo rapporto
di continuità-legittimazione tra la grande storia di Roma e
la nuova religione cristiana finiscano per restare tracce che
riconducono proprio alla grande letteratura augustea. Ne dà
conferma significativa, per limitarci a un unico esempio, un
passo del De civitate dei di Agostino (2.29):
90 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Haec tibi numquam nec pro terrena patria placuerunt.

Nunc iam caelestem arripe, pro qua minimum laborabis,
et in ea veraciter semperque regnabis. Illic enim tibi non
Vestalis focus, non lapis Capitolinus, sed Deus unus et
verus nec metas rerum nec tempora ponit, imperium sine fine
dabit.
[Non fu mai questo il tuo ideale, nemmeno come patria

terrena. Ora, subito, fai tua la patria celeste; ti costerà assai
poco, e in essa regnerai davvero per sempre. Là non avrai
il fuoco di Vesta né il sasso capitolino, ma il Dio unico e
vero a te non pone limiti di spazio né di tempo, / ma ti darà
un impero senza fine]
Il passo di Agostino incastona in maniera abilmente

dissimulata la citazione del passo dell’Eneide visto sopra (1.278-
9): si appropria anzi delle parole di Virgilio, di cui denuncia
altrove la falsità dettata da intenzione adulatoria,41 e rivela il
nesso che in qualche modo lega implicitamente insieme l’idea
classico-pagana dell’eternità di Roma e l’idea cristiana di una
patria spirituale, di una città celeste, senza confini di spazio e
di tempo.42 Trasferendo le parole del Giove pagano garante del
fato (pono, dedi) all’azione concreta (ponit, dabit) dell’unico e vero
dio, quello cristiano, spogliato degli antichi feticci, Agostino
mutua da Virgilio il mito di fondazione dell’impero eterno
di Roma e lo trasferisce alla cultura cristiana, nel contesto di
un’opera che è una vibrante denuncia dell’impostura costituita
da quel Giove (e dagli dei suoi affini) delle cui parole tuttavia
lo scrittore cristiano si appropria.
Vediamo così che il mito di Roma città celeste elaborato
dalla cultura augustea viene declinato in forma ben diversa,
anzi antitetica, nella nuova cultura cristiana; e sarà proprio il De
41
Cfr. Augustin. Sermo 103, 7, 10. Sul tema in generale cfr. Lamotte 1961.
42
Anche se, beninteso, Agostino è agli antipodi delle posizioni di continuità tra
imperium e evangelium che erano proprie di Lattanzio e Orosio.
civitate dei di Agostino a definire l’opposizione tra le due città

che rappresentano due mondi contrapposti (14.28):
Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet
amor sui usque ad contemptum dei, caelestem vero amor
dei usque ad contemptum sui. Denique illa in se ipsa,
haec in domino gloriatur. Illa enim quaerit ab hominibus
gloriam; huic autem deus conscientiae testis maxima est
gloria. Illa in gloria exaltat caput suum; haec dicit deo suo:
‘gloria mea et exaltans caput meum’. Illi in principibus
eius vel in eis quas subiugat nationibus dominandi libido
dominatur; in hac serviunt invicem in caritate et praepositi
consulendo et subditi obtemperando. Illa in suis potentibus
diligit virtutem suam; haec dicit deo suo: ‘diligam te,
domine, virtus mea’.
[I due amori crearono quindi due città: quella terrena la

creò l’amore di sé spinto fino al disprezzo di Dio, quella
celeste l’amore di Dio fino al disprezzo di sé stessi. La
prima si glorifica in sé stessa, la seconda nel Signore.
La prima cerca la gloria dagli uomini, per la seconda la
massima gloria è Dio, testimone della sua coscienza. La
prima innalza la sua testa nella gloria; la seconda dice al
suo Dio: ‘O gloria che innalzi la mia testa’. Nella prima la
brama di dominio domina i suoi prìncipi o le nazioni da lei
assoggettate, nella seconda si offrono vicendevole servizio
i governanti con il consiglio e i sudditi con l’obbedienza.
L’una ama nei suoi potenti la propria forza, l’altra dice al
suo Dio: ‘amerò te, Signore, mia forza’]
Il cielo della città ideale di Agostino non è più quello di Roma,

come in Ovidio e nella poesia encomiastica flavia: Roma al
contrario, che cerca la gloria tra gli uomini e domina le nazioni
col suo potere, è proprio l’emblema della città terrena.43 Ovidio
aveva dato una lettura laica del mito:44 al massimo del suo
43
Su questo punto cf. MacCormack (1998, 209).
44
Portando all’estremo la tendenza della cultura tardo-repubblicana lamentata
da autori come Varrone, Cicerone, e altri cultori della religione tradizionale
romana: cf. Edwards (1996, 49).
92 AUGUSTAN POETRY
potere, Roma sembrava aver portato il cielo sulla terra, e aver

fatto di Augusto il Giove terreno, ben più concreto del suo
omologo olimpico.45 E per farlo, nell’enfasi dell’encomio, aveva
appunto usato il linguaggio del mito e della religione, aveva cioè
assimilato il potere religioso e quello terreno, a tutto vantaggio
di quest’ultimo, indicando nel potere augusteo al suo massimo
la realizzazione storica del mito, facendo cioè di Roma la città-
Olimpo, la città celeste. Muovendo in direzione contraria a
questa laicizzazione della religione, all’assimilazione di religione
e potere operata dalla cultura letteraria pagana, Agostino separa
di nuovo il cielo dalla terra, rendendo antagoniste e alternative
tra loro la città terrena e quella celeste. Gli dei se ne vanno, e il
cielo di Roma torna ad essere vuoto.
Bibliografia
Barchiesi, A. (ed.). 2005. Ovidio, Metamorfosi 1-2, Milano.
Barchiesi, A. 2008. “Le Cirque du Soleil”. In: J. Nelis-Clément – J.-M.
Roddaz, Le Cirque Romain et son image, Bordeaux.
______. 2009. “Senatus consultum de Lycaone. Concili degli dei e
immaginazione politica nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio” in MD 61: 117-45.
Bleisch, P. 2003. “The ‘Regia’ of Picus: Ekphrasis, Italian Identity, and
Artistic Definition in ‘Aeneid’ 7.152-93”. In: Ph. Thibodeau and H.
Haskell (eds.), Being There Together. Essays in Honor of M.C.J Putnam,
Afton: 88-109.
Canobbio, A. (ed.) 2011. M.V. Martialis Epigrammaton liber quintus,
Napoli.
Citroni, M. 2015. Autocrazia e divinità: la rappresentazione di Augusto e
degli imperatori del primo secolo nella letteratura contemporanea. In: Ferrary,
J.-L. – Scheid, J. (edd.) Il princeps romano: autocrate o magistrato? Fattori
45
Come osserva Barchiesi (2009, 136), Ovidio inverte “i termini tradizionali della
comparazione laudativa ‘i potenti sono come gli dèi’”, cioè li rovescia a favore del
potere terreno e romano, che domina e governa realmente il mondo.
giuridici e fattori sociali del potere imperiale da Augusto a Commodo, Pavia:

239-91.
Edwards, C. 1996. Writing Rome: textual approaches to the city, Cambridge.
Favro, D. 2005. Making Rome A World City. In: K. Galinsky (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus: 234-263.
Galán Vioque, G. (ed.) 2002. Martial, Book VII, Leiden.
Galasso, L. (ed.) 1995. P. Ovidii Nasonis Epistularum ex Ponto liber II,
Florence.
Giardina, A. – Vauchez, A. 2000. Il mito di Roma. Da Carlo Magno a
Mussolini, Bari.
Gros, P. 1976. Aurea templa. Recherches sur l’architecture religieuse de Roma
à l’époque d’Auguste, Rome.
Jenkyns, R. 2013. God, space, and city in the Roman imagination, Oxford-
New York.
Koortbojian, M. 2013. The Divinization of Caesar and Augustus. Precedents,
Consequences, Implications, Cambridge.
Lamotte, J. 1961. “Le mythe de Rome ‘ville éternelle’ et Saint Augustin”,
Augustiniana 11: 226-60.
MacCormack, S. 1998. The Shadows of Poetry. Vergil in the Mind of
Augustine, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London.
Miller, J.F. 2009. Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets, Cambridge-New York.
Murphy, T. 2004. Pliny the Elder’s Natural history: the empire in the
encyclopedia, Oxford.
Newlands, C. 1997. “The Role of the Book in Tristia 3.1”. In: Ramus
26: 57-79.
Paschoud, F. 1967. Roma aeterna. Études sur le patriotisme romain dans
l’occident latin à l’époque des grandes invasions, Rome.
Pollini, J. 1992. From republic to empire: rhetoric, religion, and power in the
visual culture of ancient Rome, Norman.
Purcell, N. 1992. “The City of Rome”. In: R. Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of
Rome. A New Appraisal, Oxford: 421-53.
Rosati, G. 2002. “La scena del potere. Retorica del paesaggio nel teatro
di Seneca”. In: G. Urso (ed.) Hispania terris omnibus felicior. Premesse ed
esiti di un processo di integrazione, Pisa: 225-39.
94 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Royo, M. 1999. Domus Imperatoriae. Topographie, formation et imaginaire

des palais imperiaux du Palatin (IIe siècle av. J.-C. – Ier siècle ap. J.-C.), Rome.
Schöffel, Chr. (ed.) 2002. Martial Book 8, Stuttgart.
Wiseman, T.P. 1994. Historiography and Imagination. Eight Essays on
Roman Culture, Exeter: 98-115.
Malum, pomum or fetus?
Naming fruits in Ov. Her. 20-21
Andreas N. Michalopoulos
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
In the last pair of letters of his Heroides (20-21) Ovid treats

the story of Acontius and Cydippe. Ovid himself considers this
story as elegiac material par excellence, in contrast to Achilles
who naturally belongs to epic (Rem. 381-2):
Callimachi numeris non est dicendus Achilles;
Cydippe non est oris, Homere, tui.
“Achilles is not to be spoken of in Callimachus’ rhythms,

Cydippe is not for your mouth, Homer.”1
The story of Acontius and Cydippe does not feature in
Parthenius’ Ἐρωτικά παθήματα or in any other surviving Greek
or Roman text prior to Ovid, except of course for Callimachus’
Αἴτια, which most likely has been Ovid’s single source.2 This is
1
Ovid mentions the story of Acontius and Cydippe two more times in his work:
at Ars 1.457-8 as an example of amatory deception through a written message
(littera Cydippen pomo perlata fefellit, / insciaque est verbis capta puella suis), and at
Tr. 3.10.73 in relation to the inhospitable place of his exile (poma negat regio, nec
haberet Acontius in quo / scriberet hic dominae verba legenda suae).
2
Of course, the use of other source texts cannot be ruled out. On the existence of
other sources see the bibliography cited by Rosenmeyer (2001, 112 n. 28).
96 AUGUSTAN POETRY
arguably the most popular story of the Αἴτια and is the longest
surviving story of the work (Book III, frr. 67-75 Pf.); it is the
αἴτιον of the Acontiadae family of Ceos. Callimachus mentions
Xenomedes as his source for this myth (fr. 75.50-55 Pf.):
ἐκ δὲ γάμου κείνοιο μέγ’ οὔνομα μέλλε νέεσθαι·
δὴ γὰρ ἔθ’ ὑμέτερον φῦλον ᾿Ακοντιάδαι
πουλύ τι καὶ περίτιμον ᾿Ιουλίδι ναιετάουσιν,
Κεῖε, τεὸν δ’ ἡμεῖς ἵμερον ἐκλύομεν
τόνδε παρ’ ἀρχαίου Ξενομήδεος, ὅς ποτε πᾶσαν
νῆσον ἐνὶ μνήμῃ κάτ θετο μυθολόγῳ.
“And from that marriage a great name was destined to arise.

For, O Cean, your clan, the Acontiadae, still dwell, numerous
and honoured, at Iulis. And this thy passion we heard from old
Xenomedes, who once enshrined all the island in a mythological
history”
It is universally accepted that Ovid’s version is innovative
and considerably independent from Callimachus, especially
since the two protagonists, Acontius and Cydippe, exchange
letters for the first time in their literary career.3
A. The Story
Very briefly the story goes as follows: during a religious
festival on Delos Acontius, a handsome young man from Ceos,
sees Cydippe, a beautiful girl from Naxos, and instantly falls
in love with her. Acontius engraves on an apple (or a quince) a
certain oath and then secretly rolls the fruit towards Cydippe,
who is standing in front of Artemis’ temple together with her
old nurse. The nurse picks up the fruit, but is unable to read
the oath, so she hands it over to Cydippe. The text of the oath
does not feature in the surviving part of the Αἴτια nor is it
3
See Kenney (1996, 15-8).
MALUM, POMUM OR FETUS? 97
translated into Latin in Ovid’s Heroides. It is attested, however,

by the epistolographer Aristaenetus (5th century C.E.) in a prose
adaptation (1.10.37-8 Mazal), which does not scan in dactylic
verse: «μὰ τὴν Ἄρτεμιν Ἀκοντίῳ γαμοῦμαι». Upon reading the
oath Cydippe is automatically, albeit unintentionally, obliged to
marry Acontius in the name of Artemis. She throws the apple
away without revealing anything to her mother and returns to
Naxos,4 where her ignorant father has arranged for her to marry
another man. Each time the wedding is prepared Cydippe falls
seriously ill. After the third unsuccessful attempt her father
consults the oracle of Delphi. Apollo reveals to him the truth
and finally Acontius and Cydippe get married.
B. The Symbolism of the apple

Apples were considered to be symbols of love, and the
apple imagery is prominent in ancient erotic poetry.5 The apple
is a well-established erotic gift, also thought to be an aphrodisiac,
and is frequently used in love magic.6 Apples are often used
as means of erotic seduction: e.g. Theoc. 3.10 (ἠνίδε τοι δέκα
μᾶλα φέρω) [“see, here I brought you ten apples”], Verg. Ecl.
3.70-71 (quod potui, puero silvestri ex arbore lecta / aurea mala
decem misi; cras altera mittam) [“ten golden apples did I pluck,
ten golden apples a wild tree bore: All that I could, I sent to
4
In Callimachus’ version Acontius returns to Ceos tormented by his passion for
Cydippe. He spends his time in the woods, carving Cydippe’s name on the bark
of trees.
5
For the apple as fruit of love see Dilthey (1863, 112ff.), Palmer (1898, 481-2),
Foster (1899), Gow (1952) on Theoc. 5.88, Trumpf (1960), Littlewood (1968),
Lugauer (1967), Brazda (1977), Coleman (1977) Verg. Ecl. 3.64, Fedeli (1980)
Prop. 1.3.24, Clausen (1994) Verg. Ecl. 3.64, Kenney (1996) 20.9 and Intro. 15
n.60, 19 n.74, Rosenmeyer (2001, 109 with n. 23), Petropoulos (2003, 64-9 and
69-73). See also PA 5.79, Lucian Dial. Mer. 12.1, Aristaen. 1.10, Ant. Lib. 1,
Heliod. 3.3.8, Hesych. s.v. μηλοβαλεῖν, Ov. Tr. 3.10.73.
6
See Faraone (1990, 230-43) and Faraone (1999, 69-78).
98 AUGUSTAN POETRY
my boy, tomorrow he shall have ten more”], Prop. 1.3.24 (nunc

furtiva cavis poma dabam manibus)7 [“or to cupped hands I gave
stolen fruit”].
The apple (and the quince) are associated with Aphrodite
and wedding rituals. There are statues of the goddess holding an
apple.8 The similarity of the apple with the female breast may
have contributed to its association with love:9 e.g. Ar. Lys. 155
(ὁ γῶν Μενέλαος τᾶς Ἑλένας τὰ μᾶλά πᾳ / γυμνᾶς παραϊδὼν
ἐξέβαλ᾽, οἰῶ, τὸ ξίφος), [“Just as Menelaus, they say, seeing
the bosom of his naked Helen flang down the sword”] Theoc.
27.49-50: [ΚΟ.] τί ῥέζεις, σατυρίσκε; τί δ’ ἔνδοθεν ἅψαο μαζῶν;
/ [ΔΑ.] μᾶλα τεὰ πράτιστα τάδε χνοάοντα διδάξω. [“What are
you at, satyr-boy? Why have you put your hand inside on my
breasts?” “I will give your ripe apples their first lesson.”]
The throwing of an apple by a man to a woman
(μηλοβολεῖν) signifies erotic desire. These are two characteristic
epigrams from the Greek Anthology (5.79 Πλάτωνος):10
Τῷ μήλῳ βάλλω σε· σὺ δ’ εἰ μὲν ἑκοῦσα φιλεῖς με,
δεξαμένη τῆς σῆς παρθενίης μετάδος.
εἰ δ’ ἄρ’, ὃ μὴ γίγνοιτο, νοεῖς, τοῦτ’ αὐτὸ λαβοῦσα
σκέψαι τὴν ὥρην ὡς ὀλιγοχρόνιος.
“I throw the apple at you, and you, if you love me from your
heart, take it and give me of your virginity; but if your thoughts
be what I pray they are not, take it still and reflect how short-
lived is beauty.” (tr. W.R. Paton)
7
Cf. Prop. 3.13.27: illis munus erat decussa Cydonia ramo.
8
Foster (1899, 40f.) For artistic representations of Venus with apples see LIMC
8.1.176-181, and 23a, 26, 28.
9
For μῆλα ‘breasts’ see LSJ s.v. II.I; Foster (1899, 51-5), Littlewood (1968, 157).
10
Cf. Hes. fr. 85, Theoc. 5.88 (βάλλει καὶ μάλοισι τὸν αἰπόλον ἁ Κλεαρίστα)
with the ancient scholia ad loc., 6.6-7 (βάλλει τοι Πολύφαμε τὸ ποίμνιον ἁ
Γαλάτεια / μάλοισιν, δυσέρωτα τὸν αἰπόλον ἄνδρα καλεῦσα), Schol. Ar. Nub.
996, Verg. Ecl. 3.64 (malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella). See also Theoc. 2.120,
3.10, 10.34, 11.10, Artem. 1.73, Lucian Tox. 13, Athen. 12.553E, Colluth. 67,
Prop. 1.3.24, 2.34.69, 3.13.27, Verg. Ecl. 3.64, Ov. Tr. 3.10.73.
Cf. PA 5.80 (ΠΛΑΤΩΝΟΣ)11

Μῆλον ἐγώ· βάλλει με φιλῶν σέ τις. ἀλλ’ ἐπίνευσον,
Ξανθίππη· κἀγὼ καὶ σὺ μαραινόμεθα.
“I am an apple; one who loves you throws me at you. But

consent, Xanthippe. Both you and I decay.” (tr. W.R. Paton)
Apart from the story of Acontius and Cydippe, an apple is
central to other well-known love stories:12 the wedding of Peleus
and Thetis (the apple of the goddess Eris, which was effectively
the cause for the outbreak of the Trojan war), the race between
Hippomenes and Atalanta,13 the wedding of Zeus and Hera.14
Acontius’ apple is listed among other famous apples of myth in
an epigram from the Carmina Priapea (Priap. 16, ed. Baehrens):
qualibus Hippomenes rapuit Schoeneida pomis,
qualibus Hesperidum nobilis hortus erat,
qualia credibile est spatiantem rure paterno
Nausicaam pleno saepe tulisse sinu,
quale fuit malum, quod littera pinxit Aconti,
qua lecta est cupido pacta puella viro:
qualiacunque, pius dominus florentis agelli
imposuit mensae, nude Priape, tuae.
“As the apples with which Hippomenes ravished

Schoeneus’ daughter; for which the garden of the
Hesperides was renowned; which one may imagine
Nausicaa often carrying in her teeming lap as she walked
in her father’s domains; as was that apple graced by
the words of Acontius, which, read aloud, pledged the
maiden to this ardent lover: such are those which the boy-
owner of a small but fertile field has placed on thy sacrificial
11
Discussed in brief by Rosenmeyer (2001, 108-10).
12
Dilthey (1863, 113-14), Viarre (1988, 772-3).
13
See Michalopoulos (2014) on Her. 21.123.
14
Gaia presented her granddaughter, Hera, with a wondrous tree. Hera planted
this tree, richly hung with Golden Apples, in her garden under the care of the
Hesperides.
100 AUGUSTAN POETRY
table, O naked Priapus.” (tr. Leonard C. Smithers and Sir

Richard Burton).
C. Apple or Quince?
Let us now have a closer look at the most crucial episode
of the Acontius-Cydippe story, Cydippe’s visit to Delos.
Unfortunately, this particular episode is missing from the
surviving part of Callimachus’ Αἴτια, nor is there any mention
of the fruit on which Acontius inscribed his oath. On the other
hand, in their Ovidian correspondence both Acontius and
Cydippe narrate the Delian episode – each from their own point
of view – and they frequently refer to the fruit.
But what type of fruit was it? There are two obvious
choices: an apple or a quince. The Greek term μῆλον is not
used only for apples; it also stands for other fruits (except
dried fuits): apricot (Ἀρμενιακόν), quince (Κυδώνιον), citrus
(Μηδικόν), peach (Περσικόν).15 Beck16 claims that Acontius
used a quince and cites Aristaenetus (1.10.25-6 Mazal):
ὡς ἐθεάσω προκαθημένην τὴν κόρην, τοῦ κήπου τῆς Ἀφροδίτης
Κυδώνιον ἐκλεξάμενος μῆλον [“when you saw the girl sitting,
you picked a quince from the garden of Aphrodite”]; moreover,
at Ov. Her. 21.215-6, Cydippe’s paleness is compared with the
colour of the fruit on which Acontius inscribed his oath:
concidimus macie, color est sine sanguine, qualem
in pomo refero mente fuisse tuo.
“I am enfeebled by emaciation: my colour is bloodless, / just

like your fruit was, I recall to mind.”17
15
See Littlewood (1968, 147-8), Döpp (1995, 342).
16
Beck (2002, 239 n. 4).
17
All Heroides translations are by Tony Kline (<http://www.poetryintranslation.
com/PITBR/Latin/Heroideshome.htm>, last visit 12/08/2017), with slight
modifications.
For the pale colour of the quinces see also Οv. Ars 3.703-5:
palluit, ut serae lectis de vite racemis
pallescunt frondes, quas nova laesit hiemps,
quaeque suos curvant matura cydonia ramos.
“She grew pale, as the leaves of choice vine-stalks grow pale,
wounded by an early winter, or ripe quinces arching on their
branches.”
Furthermore, Barchiesi18 cleverly notices the sound-play
between a Cyd-onium malum (a quince) and Cyd-ippe.19
On the other hand, a few lines below Aristaenetus
is obviously describing an apple (1.10.33-4 Mazal):
ὡς ὑπερμέγεθες, ὡς πυρρωπόν, ὡς ἐρύθημα φέρον τῶν ῥόδων.
[“how big, how flame-coloured, bearing the redness of roses.”]
Besides, the throwing of an apple on Delos is particularly
symbolic, since this island is closely related to this particular
fruit. Servius narrates (on Verg. Ecl. 8.37)20 that there was a man
named Melus, who came from Delos. He travelled to Cyprus
and became friends with the king Cinyras. He married Pelia and
18
Apud Rosenmeyer (2001, 118).
19
See also Kenney (1996) Ov. Her. 20.9.
20
Servius (Ecl. 8.37): sane unde melus graece traxerit nomen, fabula talis est: Melus
quidam, in Delo insula ortus, relicta patria fugit ad insulam Cyprum, in qua eo
tempore Cinyras regnabat, habens filium Adonem. hic Melum sociatum Adoni filio
iussit esse, cumque eum videret esse indolis bonae, propinquam suam, dicatam et ipsam
Veneri, quae Pelia dicebatur, Melo coniunxit. ex quibus nascitur Melus, quem Venus
propterea quod Adonis amore teneretur, tamquam amati filium inter aras praecepit
nutriri. sed postquam Adonis apri ictu extinctus est, senex Melus cum dolorem mortis
Adonis ferre non posset, laqueo se ad arborem suspendens vitam finit: ex cuius nomine
melus appellata est. Pelia autem coniux eius in ea arbore se adpendens necata est.
Venus misericordia eorum mortis ducta, Adoni luctum continuum praestitit, Melum
in pomum sui nominis vertit, Peliam coniugem eius in columbam mutavit, Melum
autem puerum, qui de Cinyrae genere solus supererat, cum adultum vidisset, collecta
manu redire ad Delum praecepit. qui cum ad insulam pervenisset et rerum ibi esset
potitus, Melon condidit civitatem: et cum primus oves tonderi et vestem de lanis fieri
instituisset, meruit ut eius nomine oves μῆλα vocarentur; graece enim oves μῆλα
appellantur.
102 AUGUSTAN POETRY
had a son with her, whom they called Melus too. Out of grief for
the death of Adonis, Cinyras’ son, Melus the elder hang himself
from a tree, and so did his wife. The tree was named ‘μηλέα’
after Melus. Aphrodite transformed Pelia into a dove and Melus
into the fruit of the tree. When the younger Melus came of age,
he was sent by Aphrodite to Delos. Melus taught men how to
shear the sheep and how to work the wool, therefore sheep were
named μῆλα after him.
It is hard to determine the type of fruit that Acontius used
and, sadly, I am unable to offer a definitive solution. I adopt the
traditional view that the fruit was an apple ‘μῆλον’, still whether it
was an apple or a quince does not really affect my discussion here.
Ovid uses the following terms for the fruit of the story:21
malum, pomum, and the periphrasis fetus arboris. All these terms
are generic and may be used for any type of tree-fruit, not just
for an apple (or a quince).22 So, is Ovid’s choice arbitrary? Should
the alternate use of malum, pomum, and fetus be attributed simply
to Ovid’s wish for variatio and his intention to avoid irksome
repetitions? Are there any deeper reasons that govern his choice
of a particular term for the fruit? I will try to look for answers
to these questions and to evaluate Ovid’s choice of diction for
the fruit which plays such a vital role in the story of Acontius
and Cydippe.
i) fetus
Acontius opens his letter by declaring that Cydippe does
not need to take a new oath (20.1f.):
pone metum: nihil hic iterum iurabis amanti;
promissam satis est te semel esse mihi
21
For Acontius’ apple as a letter see Barchiesi (2001, 119-20), Rosenmeyer (2001,
114-30).
22
See OLD svv. fetus, malum, and pomum.
“Do not fear! You will not swear another oath to your lover: /
it is enough that you once promised to be mine.”
Still, despite this statement, Acontius artfully and repeatedly
tries to get Cydippe to take the oath again,23 because he needs
her to reconfirm her obligation to marry him. His efforts for a
repetition of the oath testify to his insecurity. Acontius’ steady
goal is to entrap the unsuspecting girl.24
Acontius mentions the fruit for the first time at the
beginning of his letter. This is not at all haphazard given the
importance of the fruit in the story. Reminding Cydippe of the
oath she took Acontius writes (20.9f.):
verba licet repetas quae demptus ab arbore fetus
pertulit ad castas me iaciente manus.
“You might recall the message, that the fruit from the tree /
brought to your chaste hands, when I threw it to you.”
Ovid is notably vague about the exact type of the fruit. The
word fētus stands for ‘a fruit of a plant’ (OLD, s.v. 4),25 hence
not exclusively for an apple.26 The combination fetus arboreus
(or similar phrases) first occurs in Vergil (Georg. 1.55), but is
used more frequently by Ovid (Met. 4.125, 10.665, 14.625,
14.689, 15.97). Kenney suggests that the periphrasis demptus
ab arbore fetus “probably signals the learned poet’s awareness
that his sources differed as to the identity of the fruit, which is
conventionally referred to as an apple”.27
23
Rosenmeyer (2001) 123-4.
24
In her letter Cydippe claims that her oath is not valid (Her. 21.133-8).
25
Mynors (1990) Verg. Georg. 1.55: “fetus: a favourite word, used equally of the
fruit of plants and trees and the young of animals”. Cf. Bömer (1976) Ov. Met.
6.81 and (1986) Ov. Met. 15.97.
26
See Ov. Met. 4.125 with Bömer (1976) ad loc., 10.665, 14.625, 15.97, Ciris 230
etc.
27
See Kenney (1996) Ov. Her. 20.9: “malum (209, 237, 21.107) and pomum (239,
21.123, 145, 216) cover any orchard fruit, and the Diegesis to Callimachus is
104 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Kenney’s suggestion makes perfect sense, yet I would like

to delve into the matter a bit more. A first thought would be that
Ovid takes pains to highlight the fruit from a stylistic point of
view, since this is its first appearance in this pair of letters. The
periphrasis demptus ab arbore fetus is lofty,28 and is used only here
in the correspondence of Acontius and Cydippe. It might pick
up a parallel Greek phrase about Acontius’ fruit occurring in
the missing part of the Αἴτια, but conclusive evidence is lacking.
I would suggest that etymology has probably been one
more reason for the choice of fetus at Her. 20.9. In this particular
passage Acontius narrates how he threw the fruit (me iaciente)
and how the fruit carried the message (pertulit) to the hands of
Cydippe (ad castas manus).29 Acontius is the sender, the fruit is
the message, Cydippe is the receiver.30 The noun fetus is especially
suitable for a context of message-carrying, since it supposedly
originates from the verb ferre ‘to carry’. Ovid himself attests
this specific etymology in the Fasti, a work which may have
been contemporary with the double Heroides31 (4.632): hinc (sc.
a ferendo)…fetus nomen habere putant.32
similarly vague (Z2-3 μήλωι καλλίστωι)”.

28
Cf. Ov. Met. 14.689: sed neque iam fetus desiderat arbore demptos.
29
In the discussion following the oral delivery of this paper Stephen Harrison
cleverly suggested that the use of the verb iacere here by Acontius may be a
symbolic anticipation of the couple’s sexual encounter after their wedding, given
the association of iacere with iaculor and eiaculatio, and the meaning of the name
Acontius (cf. Her. 21.209-10: mirabar quare tibi nomen Acontius esset: quod faciat
longe vulnus, acumen habes).
30
Acontius admits to rolling the apple towards Cydippe’s feet. Later on, however,
he pretends he knows nothing about the origin of the apple (Her. 20.209-10).
31
See Kraus (1968, 294), Hintermeier (1993, 190-5) with bibliography. Latta
(1963, 2-8) dates the double letters between 4 and 8 C.E., while Kenney (1970,
388) places them around 5 C.E. based on certain metrical analogies with the
Fasti. Rosati (1989) 47 claims that the double Heroides were composed between
4-5 C.E.
32
See Maltby (1991) s.v. On Ovid’s vivid interest in etymology see among
others Ahl (1985), Porte (1985), O’Hara (1996), Tissol (1997), Keith (2001),
Michalopoulos (2001).
Furthermore, the use of the neuter pomum or malum

instead of fetus in this particular sedes is impossible for metrical
reasons, since the final syllable of the neuter participle demptum
would have to be elided before ab. On the other hand, an accom-
plished master of language and metre such as Ovid would have
easily overcome this metrical difficulty, had he really wished to
use pomum or malum.
To sum up so far, three reasons have been put forward
as regards Ovid’s choice of the term fetus for the fruit at Her.
20.9-10:
1. vagueness of the sources as to the identity of the fruit,
2. etymology, and (perhaps)
3. metre.
To these reasons I would like to add yet another which
is related to the relationship of Her. 20-21 with their source
text, Callimachus’ Αἴτια. As already noted above, the story of
Acontius and Cydippe is included in the Αἴτια as the αἴτιον
of the family of the Acontiadae. Ovid’s version of the story
lacks any aetiological dimension, at least evidently. Cydippe
simply closes her letter by announcing her total submis-
sion to Acontius, since this is the will of the god Apollo
(21.239-40):
teque tenente deos numen sequor ipsa deorum
doque libens victas in tua vota manus.
“And I follow the will of the gods, gods you are master of, / and
willingly give my captive hands to your wishes.”
This is a happy end; the reader is left to assume that the
wedding of the young couple will immediately follow, still this
wedding lies beyond the temporal space covered by the two
letters. Actually, in his letter Acontius does mention wedding
and children, but not his; he refers to the forthcoming wedding
of Cydippe with her unnamed fiancé. Acontius severely
106 AUGUSTAN POETRY
attacks Cydippe’s fiancé asking him to withdraw immediately

from her side (20.135-170), and he further tries to avert the
possibility of Cydippe creating a family with anyone else but
himself (20.191-6). He warns Cydippe that if she violates her
oath to Diana and marries somebody else, she will not be able
to rely on Diana’s help when she will be pregnant, because
she will have betrayed the goddess. Diana will refuse to help
Cydippe, because Acontius will not be the father of the child
(20.191-6):
his quoque vitatis in partu nempe rogabis
ut tibi luciferas adferat illa manus.
audiet et repetens quae sint audita requiret
iste tibi de quo coniuge partus eat.
promittes votum: scit te promittere falso;
iurabis: scit te fallere posse deos.
“Even if you avoid this, you will surely call on her in childbirth,
pleading that she might bring you her shining hands. She will
hear, and recalling what she has heard, she will ask what husband
has given you this child. You will promise gifts: she knows your
promises are false. You will swear: she knows that you betray
the gods.”
Hence, the family that Cydippe is going to start is actually one

of the issues touched upon in the Ovidian correspondence of
Acontius and Cydippe.
Given the above, the use of the periphrasis demptus ab

arbore fetus for the fruit at the beginning of Acontius’ letter
acquires an interesting new dimension, thus far hidden. Besides
‘fruit of a plant’, the word fetus also means “offspring, of human
beings” (OLD s.v. 3). This fetus arboris – the first name Ovid
chooses for the fruit – will actually lead to the wedding of
Acontius and Cydippe; and this wedding will produce the
descendants, the fetus, the Acontiadae, as narrated in the source
text of the story, Callimachus’ Αἴτια. The fetus arboris will be the
αἴτιον of the family of the Acontiadae, so to speak.33
ii) malum
The fruit is again mentioned at 20.209-12, where

Acontius narrates the events on Delos:
postmodo nescioqua venisse volubile malum
verba ferens doctis insidiosa notis,34
quod quia sit lectum sancta praesente Diana,
esse tuam vinctam numine teste fidem.
“Presently an apple came rolling from I know not where, /

bearing artful words in cunning letters: / which, being read out
loud, in sacred Diana’s presence, / made your pledge binding,
with her as divine witness.”
The noun mālum was originally used of any soft-skinned
tree-fruit,35 but later it most often stood for the apple (OLD
s.v. 1). The combination volubile malum occurs here for the
first time in Latin literature. Ovid’s use of malum is possibly
intended to pick up the Greek μῆλον,36 which was most probably
used by Callimachus in the Αἴτια, although it does not occur
in the surviving part of the story. A μῆλον is mentioned in the
33
Perhaps the idea of the arbor genealogica is lurking at the background. The family
tree is not established iconographically before the Middle ages, however, both
Greek and Roman writers often apply arboricultural terms and images when
referring to genealogy, family lineage and familial relationships. See Gowers
(2011) and Bretin-Chabrol (2012).
34
The message (nota) inscribed on the apple can only be docta, since it was
inspired, according to Acontius, by the ingenious Amor himself (20.27-30):
te mihi compositis (siquid tamen egimus) a se / astrinxit verbis ingeniosus Amor. /
dictatis ab eo feci sponsalia verbis / consultoque fui iuris Amore vafer.
35
See Coleman (1977) on Verg. Ecl. 2.51 and 3.64.
36
μᾶλον Dor. and Aeol. Varro (LL 5.102) notes: malum, quod Graece Aeolis dicunt
μᾶλον.
108 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Diegesis of the Acontius and Cydippe story: Κυδί]ππης μήλῳ

καλ- / λίστῳ.37
But why does Ovid choose the noun malum and not pomum
or fetus in this particular passage? I would suggest that the answer
lies in the context. Acontius bestows a sinister role on this fruit
by mentioning the insidiosa verba that it carried. Moreover, he
distances himself from the fruit by pretending ironically that he
does not know where it came from (nescioqua).38 This ignorance
as to the fruit’s origin adds to its dark role. Ovid here produces
an excellent double-entendre, based on the similar sound of
malum ‘apple’ and malum ‘evil’. The prosody of a (short in the
adjective mălum, long in the noun mālum) is not a problem in
such wordplays and double entendres.39 In fact, the proof that it
was indeed possible for the average Roman to associate malum
(apple) with malum (evil) is Rufinus’ attempt to explain that
the two words are actually not related (Orig. in cant. 3 p.180.4
B): ne…simpliciores aliqui arborem mali malam arborem putent
et a malitia dictam, dicamus nos arborem meli, Graeco…nomine
utentes.40 Strikingly, a double-entendre between malum ‘apple’
and malum ‘evil’ is impossible in Greek, because in Greek ‘apple’
is μῆλον and ‘evil’ is κακόν. Ovid displays remarkable creative
originality and great skill at elaborating on the sound and the
multiple meanings of words.
37
According to Pfeiffer (vol. I p. 71) this Diegesis may have been much longer
than the other Diegeses of the Αἴτια stories (“Diegesis huius fabulae celeberrimae
multo longior fuisse videtur quam reliquorum Aetiorum enarrationes”).
38
This is how Cydippe depicts the episode in her letter (Her. 21.107): mittitur ante
pedes malum cum carmine tali.
39
On this wordplay see Boyd (1983, 171).
40
Other etymologies of malum attested in Maltby (1991) s.v.: malum a Graecis
dictum quod sit fructus eius pomorum omnium rotundissimus (Isid. Etym.
17.7.3), and in Libya ad Hesperidas, unde aurea mala, id est secundum antiquam
consuetudinem capras et oves, Hercules ex Africa in Graeciam exportavit. Ea enim a
sua voce Graeci appellarunt mela (Varro Rust. 2.1.6).
Notice too the wordplay on the double meaning of legere,

‘to read’ and ‘to collect’ at line 20.211: quod quia sit lectum sancta
praesente Diana. Two different readings are possible: either “being
read out loud in sacred Diana’s presence”, taking legere in the
sense ‘to read’ or “being picked up in sacred Diana’s presence”,
taking legere in the sense ‘to collect’. This whole passage is
teeming with alternative semasiological possibilities.
The malum double-entendre resurfaces in Cydippe’s letter,
when she refers to the events on Delos, i.e. in a part of her
letter corresponding to Acontius’ account of the Delian episode,
where the term malum had been used for the first time (20.209).
Cydippe writes (21.107):
mittitur ante pedes malum cum carmine tali.
“An apple was thrown at my feet with this verse on it”.

Cydippe uses this particular term for the apple only here; she
then uses the term pomum for reasons I intend to explain shortly.
Just like Acontius, Cydippe also refers to his insidiae inscribed
on the malum (21.109-10):
sustulit hoc nutrix mirataque ‘perlege’ dixit:
insidias legi, magne poeta, tuas.
“My nurse picked it up and, marvelling, said: ‘Read this’. / I

read your deceitful lines, mighty poet.”
These remarkable correspondences indicate that the choice of
the term malum for Acontius’ fruit in these particular passages
in both letters is deliberate; with this double-entendre Ovid
alerts his readers to the ‘sinister’ aspect of the fruit (malum).
iii) pomum
As shown above, Cydippe calls the fruit malum only

the first time that it turns up in her letter (21.107), and she
110 AUGUSTAN POETRY
does so by analogy to Acontius’ letter; Ovid produces a striking

double-entendre: malum = ‘apple’ and ‘evil’. In all the subsequent
appearances of the fruit Cydippe uses the term pomum (twice at
21.123 and then at 21.145 and 216). This noun covers a wider
semantic area than malum and may refer to any orchard fruit.41
It occurs for the first time at 21.123-4:
Cydippen pomum, pomum Schoeneida cepit:
tu nunc Hippomenes scilicet alter eris.
“An apple caught Cydippe, an apple Atalanta: / surely now

you’re a second Hippomenes”.
Cydippe conjures up a well-known mythological
exemplum. This is the famous story of the race between Atalanta
and Hippomenes. Atalanta was the daughter of the Boeotian
Schoeneus; she was a virgin huntress who shunned marriage.42
She was very beautiful and swift-footed and she would challenge
her suitors to a footrace. The deal was this: she would marry the
man who could outrun her, but she would kill those who lost the
race. After many men failed and lost their lives, Hippomenes
managed to win the race with the help of the goddess Aphrodite,
who gave him three golden apples from the garden of the
Hesperides.43 During the race Hippomenes was rolling the three
apples, one by one, in front of Atalanta, who kept stopping to
pick them up; as a result she was delayed, she lost the race and
she became Hippomenes’ wife.44
The points of contact between the story of Atalanta and
Hippomenes and the story of Acontius and Cydippe are hard
to miss:
41
See OLD s.v. 2 and Kenney (1996) Ov. Her. 20.9.
42
Theogn. 1293W: φεύγουσ’ ἱμερόεντα γάμον.
43
Philetas fr. 18 Powell, Verg. Ecl. 6.61.
44
The story of Hippomenes and Atalanta is narrated by Ovid in his Metamorphoses
[10.560-707 with Anderson (1972, 517-18)]. Cf. Hes. frr. 72-6 M-W, Theoc.
3.40-2, Ov. Her. 4.99-100, Hyg. Fab. 185, Serv. Aen. 3.113.
1. in both stories fruits play a decisive role.

2. in both stories a man deceives a woman with the help
of fruits.
3. Atalanta was thought to be an Arcadian version of
Diana,45 who plays such a crucial part in the story of Acontius
and Cydippe.46
4. The name Hippomenes-‘Ιππομένης contains the root
ιππ-, which it shares with the name Cydippe-Κυδίππη. But
47
not only that; line 123 is masterly built: the verb cepit is placed at
the end, while the two hemistichs are symmetrical on either side
of the caesura; they consist of a name (Cydippen and Schoeneida)
and the noun pomum.48 Although the combination aurea mala
is most frequently used for the apples of the Hesperides, thanks
to which Hippomenes won the race with Atalanta, in this
particular passage Ovid has preferred the noun pomum instead.
I suggest that the reason is none other than the similar sound
of the noun pomum and the name Hippomenes. Hippomenes
is the perfect mythological exemplum for this particular case,
because he combines in his name both the -ipp- part of the
name Cydippe and the pom- part of the word pomum, thus
creating a tight bond between the persons involved and the fruit
(pomum).
The next two times that Cydippe mentions the fruit, she
uses again the noun pomum. It is the context once again that
determines the choice of diction. After Cydippe has managed
45
See Rosen–Farrell (1986, 248 n. 25) with bibliography.
46
According to Cairns (2002, 477) the exemplum of Hippomenes and Atalanta
may have featured in the lost part of the Acontius-Cydippe story in Callimachus’
Aetia.
47
The same stands for the names of Hippolytus and Hippolyte also used by
Cydippe as exempla at Her. 21.10 and 21. 119-20 respectively.
48
Moreover, the line consists only of spondees, with the exception of the fifth
foot.
112 AUGUSTAN POETRY
to prove that her oath was not valid, she blames Acontius for his
deceitful trick.49 In an impressive reductio ad absurdum50 – which
I am sure Ovid must have enjoyed a lot – she deals with the
possible applications of the trick. At lines 21.145-6 Cydippe,
with a great deal of sarcasm, urges Acontius to use it so as to
deceive the rich and obtain their wealth:
decipe sic alios, succedat epistula pomo;
si valet hoc, magnas ditibus aufer opes.
“Deceive others so, let your letters follow apples: / if it’s valid,
carry away the riches of the wealthy.”
I suggest that in this case, too, etymology governs the
choice of words. Ovid most probably has in mind the etymology
of the noun pomum from the adjective opimus ‘plentiful, abundant’
[OLD s.v. 6b], later attested by Isidore (Etym. 17.6.24): poma
dicta ab opimo, id est a copia ubertatis. This etymology is extremely
suitable for this context, especially since Ovid skillfully places
the cognate noun opes at the end of the pentameter,51 that is in
the same metrical sedes as pomo; this is a common practice in
etymological wordplays intended to highlight the two members
of a wordplay.52 What Cydippe ironically suggests to Acontius is
for him to use his pomum (< opimum) in order to steal the opes (<
opimum) from the rich. Etymology and proper choice of diction
enrich the semasiological background of the text.
49
Epistolography is the genre of deception par excellence. It is usually the women
who are associated with guile and deceit. See Rosenmeyer (2001, 27-8, 43-4,
45-60), Lindheim (2003, 25-8). In the story of Acontius and Cydippe the roles
have been reversed; it is the man that deceives the woman with some sort of a
written message (the oath inscribed on the apple). Besides, Acontius does not
hesitate to speak openly about his treachery (20.21-32).
50
Kraus (1968, 292), Kenney (1970, 401).
51
For the probable etymological link opimus < ops see OLD s.v. and Maltby (1991)
s.v. opimus.
52
For this particular etymological marker see Cairns (1996, 3) and Michalopoulos
(2001, 5). For the sedes of ops see Kenney (2002, 35 n. 48).
Perhaps etymology lies again behind the choice of pomum in its

final occurrence in Cydippe’s letter (21.215-7); this is a passage
already discussed in relation to the type of fruit that Acontius
used:
concidimus macie, color est sine sanguine, qualem
in pomo refero mente fuisse tuo,
candida nec mixto sublucent ora rubore.
“I am enfeebled by emaciation: my colour is bloodless, / just

like your apple was, I recall to mind.”
Cydippe describes her bad physical condition caused by her
illness. She writes about her leanness (macies) and her pallor
(color est sine sanguine) and she likens the colour of her skin
with the colour of the fruit that Acontius had rolled to her.53 As
discussed above, this comparison leads to the conclusion that
this fruit may have been a quince (which is yellowish) and not
an apple (which is red). Cydippe’s memory (refero mente) comes
from her ‘real-life’ experiences: the girl supposedly remembers
the events on Delos. Moreover, this memory is also literary:
Ovid’s Cydippe recalls the memories of her Callimachean
counterpart, Ovid’s Cydippe remembers what Callimachus’
Cydippe had experienced on Delos. The phrase refero mente
clearly functions as an Alexandrian footnote54 joining Ovid’s
text with its source text, Callimachus’ Αἴτια.
In this passage Ovid has preferred the generic term
pomum for the fruit. I would suggest that the image of a fruit,
which has lost its natural colour and has started to wither,
53
According to Kenney (1996) ad loc. the fruit’s yellowness might point to a
quince, however “this apparent touch of realism is somewhat compromised by
what follows”.
54
The term ‘Alexandrian footnote’ was established by Ross (1975, 78). This role
is usually played by verbs such as dicunt, ferunt, habentur, dicitur etc. See Wills
(1996, 31). For the Alexandrian footnote see Hinds (1987, 17-19), Harrison
(1991) Verg. Aen. 10.189 with bibliography, Horsfall (1990), Thomas (1992),
Miller (1993), Michalopoulos (2006, 34-5) and on Ov. Her. 16.137-8.
114 AUGUSTAN POETRY
brought to Ovid’s mind an alternative etymology of the noun

pomum, very fitting to this context. Varro (Rust. 1.31.5) attests:
quod indigent potu, poma dicta esse possunt.55 Both the pomum and
Cydippe, who is burning with fever (21.169: at mihi, vae miserae,
torrentur febribus artus),56 need water, a fact which might justify
the choice of pomum for ‘fruit’ in this particular context.57
In fact, I would also be tempted to suggest that Ovid
here elaborates on an alternative meaning of the Greek noun
μῆλον. Μῆλον may also mean ‘cheek’ [LSJ s.v. (B) II.2]. With
this meaning in mind (μῆλον = cheek) Ovid compares the
colour of sick Cydippe’s face (ora) with the colour of Acontius’
fruit (μῆλον),58 even if here he uses the term pomum. A most
symptomatic use of the word μῆλον as ‘cheek’ can be found in
the Greek Anthology (9.556 ΖΩΝΑΣ):
Νύμφαι ἐποχθίδιαι Νηρηίδες, εἴδετε Δάφνιν
χθιζόν, ἐπαχνιδίαν ὡς ἀπέλουσε κόνιν,
ὑμετέραις λιβάδεσσιν ὅτ’ ἔνθορε σειριόκαυτος
ἠρέμα φοινιχθεὶς μᾶλα παρηίδια.
εἴπατέ μοι, καλὸς ἦν; ἢ ἐγὼ τράγος οὐκ ἄρα κνάμαν
μοῦνον ἐγυιώθην, ἀλλ’ ἔτι καὶ κραδίαν;
“Nereids, Nymphs of the shore, you saw Daphnis yesterday,

when he washed off the dust that lay like down on his skin;
when, burnt by the dog-star, he rushed into your waters,
the apples of his cheeks faintly reddened. Tell me, was he
beautiful? Or am I a goat, not only lame in my legs but in my
heart too?”
55
See Maltby (1991) s.v.
56
Cydippe’s fever is also mentioned in Callimachus (fr. 75.16-17 Pf.): δεύτερον
ἐστόρνυντο τὰ κλισμία, δεύτερον ἡ π̣α̣[ῖ]ς̣ / ἑπτὰ τεταρταίῳ μῆνας ἔκαμνε πυρί.
57
The choice of pomum instead of the more specific malum may be also explained
in psychological terms. Cydippe possibly wishes to avoid uttering the name of
the fruit which has been the cause of her misfortunes.
58
At Eccl. 903-4 Aristophanes writes: κἀπὶ τοῖς μήλοις ἐπανθεῖ. The ancient
scholiast ad loc. interprets the word μῆλα as παρειαί.
iv) malum and pomum

Hoping for a happy end to his erotic siege Acontius
announces the dedication of a golden effigy of the fruit which
helped him win Cydippe. The golden replica of the fruit will
be the proof and the reminder that the wedding of Acontius
and Cydippe has been realized. In this way the fruit becomes
a monument and gets immortalized. Memory acquires a body,
it becomes tangible.59 With the dedication of the golden effigy
of the fruit the story of the young couple, which has been
clandestine so far, will become public.60
Acontius is once again going to inscribe a text. He has
already inscribed:
a) Cydippe’s name on the bark of trees (Callim. fr. 73
Pf.): ἀλλ’ ἐνὶ δὴ φλοιοῖσι κεκομμένα τόσσα φέροιτε / γράμματα,
Κυδίππην ὅσσ’ ἐρέουσι καλήν (only in Callimachus and
Aristaenetus 1.10.57-60, not in Ovid), and
b) the oath on the fruit that he rolled in front of Cydippe
(in both Callimachus and Ovid).
Acontius quotes the votive epigram that is going to
accompany the effigy, which he vows to Artemis of Delos. It
reads (20.235-40):
quod si contigerit, cum iam data signa sonabunt
tinctaque votivo sanguine Delos erit,
aurea61 ponetur mali felicis imago,
causaque versiculis scripta duobus erit:
59
See Barchiesi (1993, 355). For similar dedications in elegy see Ov. Am. 1.11.27-
8 with McKeown (1989) ad loc.
60
See Rosenmeyer (2001, 129).
61
Acontius will use the most precious material, gold. The objects of the gods were
made of gold (or silver). See Heubeck et al. (1988) Hom. Od. 1.97, Murgatroyd
(1994) Tib. 2.2.17–18. Cf. Hom. Il. 1.611 (χρυσόθρονοςἭρη), 4.2 (χρυσέῳ ἐν
δαπέδῳ), 4.3 (χρυσέοις δεπάεσσι), 5.509 (Φοίβου Ἀπόλλωνος χρυσαόρου), 13.36
(πέδας χρυσείας), Od. 1.96-7 (πέδιλα χρύσεια), Pind. Pyth. 1.1 (χρυσέα φόρμιγξ),
116 AUGUSTAN POETRY
EFFIGIE POMI TESTATUR ACONTIUS HUIUS

QUAE FUERINT IN EO SCRIPTA FUISSE RATA.
“If you will do this, when the signal has sounded, / and Delos is
drenched with sacrificial blood, / a golden image of the fortunate
apple will be offered, / and the reason for the offering will be
written in two short lines: / ‘With this likeness of an apple,
Acontius bears witness / that what may have been written on
it, has been done.’ ”
The style of the epigram is pompous enough; the absence of
Cydippe’s name is striking, a sign of Acontius’ egocentricity.
Acontius calls the fruit a pomum for the first time in this pair of
letters. Perhaps this is due to the fact that its wider semasiological
scope renders it more suitable for a votive epigram.62 Besides,
the choice of pomum may very well be attributed to Ovid’s
intention to avoid the awkward repetition of the metrically
equivalent malum, which features in the previous couplet (237-
8). Moreover, Acontius promises to place this epigram under
the effigy of the fruit, hence it will be obvious to anyone reading
it which type of fruit the word pomum refers to.
I would also like to draw attention to the striking
combination mali felicis at line 237.63 Acontius deems the fruit
(malum) as felix, because it proved to be favorable and fortunate,64
Nem. 5.24 (χρυσέῳ πλάκτρῳ) etc. One should not forget that the trick with the
apple was an idea of the god Amor.
62
Both Ovid (x7) and Vergil (x8) are fond of the noun effigies.
63
The combination felix malum occurs only once before Ovid in Vergil’s Georgics
(2.127), where it refers to the citron. Servius notes ad loc.: felicis mali secundum
eos, qui dicunt citrum, fecundi: nam haec arbor, id est citri, omni paene tempore plena
est pomis, quae in ea partim matura, partim acerba, partim adhuc in flore sunt posita.
aut certe ‘felicis’ salubris: nulla enim efficacior res est ad venena pellenda. felicis mali
fertilis, fecundi: aut quod a morte revocet.
64
For felix as ‘bringing good luck, lucky, auspicious’ see OLD s.v. felix 2a, Lewis-
Short s.v. felix 2.
and yielded the desirable outcome.65 At the same time, however,

if one thinks of the double entendre discussed above, i.e. malum
as ‘apple’ and ‘evil’, then this combination becomes a salient
oxymoron, which invests the closure of Acontius’ letter with
great irony. For Acontius the malum ‘apple’ was felix, because
thanks to it he won Cydippe. For Cydippe, however, the malum
she picked up and read proved to be malum ‘evil’, it caused her
a great deal of trouble, and it brought her to the brink of death
(Her. 21.11-4, 31, 43-6, 60, 155-76).
Apart from the double-entendre discussed above, the
choice of the noun malum in this particular context, where
Acontius vows the dedication of a golden effigy of the fruit, may
have been influenced by the frequent use of the noun malum
for the apples of the Hesperides,66 traditionally thought to be
golden.67 As we have already seen, the golden apples of the
Hesperides appear in Cydippe’s letter too, where she mentions
the story of Hippomenes and Atalanta (21.123f.), in which these
golden apples feature prominently.
65
For felix as ‘fruitful, productive’ see OLD s.v. felix 1, Lewis-Short s.v. felix 1.
Interestingly, the apple is called felix, an adjective usually attributed to the trees
bearing fruits. See Lewis-Short s.v. 1. On the sense of felix as ‘fertile’ see also
Cato [(Paul. ex Fest. p. 92): felices arbores Cato dixit, quae fructum ferunt, infelices
quae non ferunt.] and Pliny (N.H. 24.68: vulgus infelicem arborem eam appellat,
…, quoniam nihil ferat, nec seratur unquam.)
66
With the exception of Varro, who mentions the golden “sheep” of the
Hesperides instead of the golden “apples”, since in ancient Greek ‘μῆλον’ stands
for both ‘apple’ and ‘sheep’ (Rust. 2.1.6): ut in Libya ad Hesperidas, unde aurea
mala, id est secundum antiquam consuetudinem capras et oves, [quas] Hercules ex
Africa in Graeciam exportavit. ea enim <a> sua voce Graeci appellarunt mela. See
also Serv. Aen. 4.484 and Apollonius Lexicon Homericum p.112 s.v. μῆλα κοινῶς
μὲν τὰ τετράποδα, ὅθεν καὶ πᾶν δέρμα μηλωτὴ λέγεται, κατ’ ἐπικράτειαν δὲ
πρόβατα καὶ αἶγες. καὶ ὁ καρπὸς τῆς μηλέας καὶ πάντων δὲ τῶν δένδρων ὁ
καρπὸς λέγεται μῆλα· “αὐτῇσι ῥίζῃσι καὶ αὐτοῖς ἄνθεσι μήλων.”
67
Vergil (Ecl. 3.71, 8.52-3) mentions the mala aurea. For the golden apples of the
Hesperides see Lucr. 5.32, Catul. 2b.11-3, Hyg. Fab. 30.12, Serv. Georg. 1.244,
Serv. Aen. 3.113, 4.246, 4.484, Bömer (1980) on Ov. Met. 10.644. The apple
which the goddess Eris threw among the gods at the wedding of Peleus and
Thetis was golden too (Serv. Aen. 1.27, 1.651.
118 AUGUSTAN POETRY
One final point before closing: as seen above, the first

time that Acontius mentions the fruit, he calls it a fetus arboris.
I have suggested that the choice of the noun fetus may have
been determined by its alternative meaning, ‘offspring’; the
noun fetus may allude to the fact that the story of Acontius and
Cydippe is the αἴτιον of the Acontiadae family in Callimachus’
Αἴτια, since this family will result from the union of the couple
thanks to this fetus arboris. By the same token one can look
for something similar at the end of Acontius’ letter, especially
since, as Barchiesi pointed out,68 in that passage one finds the
terminus technicus for an αἴτιον, i.e. causa. My attention focusses
on the combination malum felix. The most frequent meaning
of the adjective felix is ‘fruitful, productive’ (OLD s.v. 1).69
With this meaning in mind the combination felix malum may
hint at the family of the Acontiadae, which will result from
the union of Acontius and Cydippe, made possible thanks to
this particular felix malum. If this train of thought is legitimate,
then at the beginning and the end of Acontius’ letter, with the
combinations fetus arboris and malum felix, Ovid has concealed
allusions to the aetiological dimension of the story in his source
text, Callimachus’ Αἴτια.
To conclude: I hope to have shown that Ovid’s choice
of terms for Acontius’ fruit is neither arbitrary nor haphazard.
Ovid takes particular care in picking names for the fruit which
played such a crucial role in the story. Ovid’s choice of malum,
pomum or fetus is determined by the following factors:
a) his wish for variatio,
b) metre, and, most importantly,
68
Barchiesi (1993, 355) pointed out that Acontius’ causa alludes to the model of
the story, Callimachus’ Αἴτια (αἴτιον = causa). See also Michalopoulos (2014) on
Her. 20.22.
69
The adjective is usually attributed to the trees bearing fruits (Lewis-Short s.v. 1).
c) the immediate context and the proper semasiological

aspects that he wishes to highlight. Poetic etymology plays a
most decisive role in bringing out multiple levels of meaning
which allow for various interpretations. Whether an apple or a
quince, whether malum, pomum or fetus, this fruit is perhaps the
real protagonist in a great story of love and deception.70
Bibliography
Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations. Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other
Classical Poets. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press.
Anderson, W.S. 1972. Metamorphoses Books 6-10, Norman and London:
University of Oklahoma Press.
Barchiesi, A. 1993. “Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovid’s
Heroides”. HSCP 95: 233-65 [= Barchiesi (2001) 105-127].
______. 2001. Speaking volumes. Narrative and intertext in Ovid and other
Latin poets. London: Duckworth.
Beck, M. 2002. “Ein argumentum a finitione in Cydippes Mund”. Hermes
130: 238-41.
Bömer, F. 1976. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen. Kommentar Buch VI-VII.
Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
______. 1980. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen. Kommentar Buch X-XI.
______. 1986. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen. Kommentar Buch XIV-XV.
70
I would like to thank the organizers of the V Colóquio Internacional “Visões da
Antiguidade Clássica” (Augustan Poetry. New Trends and Revaluations), Paulo
Martins, Alexandre P. Hasegawa and João Angelo Oliva Neto, for their warm
hospitality in São Paulo and for putting together a truly memorable conference.
I have benefited greatly from the feedback and comments of many friends and
colleagues, to whom I am grateful: Andrea Cucchiarelli, Bénédicte Delignon,
Andrew Feldherr, Kirk Freudenburg, Stephen Harrison, Gianpiero Rosati,
Jessica Westerhold.
120 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Boyd, B.W. 1983. “Cydonea Mala: Virgilian Word-Play and Allusion”.

HSCP 87: 169-174.
Brazda, M.K. 1977. Zur Bedeutung des Apfels in der Antiken Kultur. Diss.
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn.
Bretin-Chabrol, M. 2012. L’arbre et la lignée: métaphores végétales de la
filiation et de l’alliance en latin classique. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon.
Cairns, F. 1996. “ ‘Ancient etymology’ and Tibullus: on the classification
of ‘etymologies’ and on ‘etymological markers’ ”. PCPS 42: 24-59.
______. 2002. “Acontius and his οὔνομα κουρίδιον: Callimachus Aetia
fr. 67.1-4 Pf.”. CQ 52: 471-7.
Clausen, W. 1994. A Commentary on Virgil: Eclogues. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Coleman, R.G.G. 1977. Vergil Eclogues. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dilthey, C. 1863. De Callimachi Cydippa. Accedunt Aristaeneti epistula
1.10, Ovidianae epistulae XX et XXI etc. Leipzig.
Döpp, S. 1995. “Mῆλον κυδώνιον (malum Cydonium) – Quitte oder
Apfel?”. Hermes 123: 341-5.
Faraone, C.A. 1990. “Aphrodite’s κεστός and Apples for Atalanta:
Aphrodisiacs in Early Greek Myth and Ritual”. Phoenix 44: 219-43.
______. 1999. Ancient Greek Love Magic. Cambridge (MA) and London:
Fedeli, P. 1980. Properzio; Il primo libro delle elegie; Introduzione, Testo
critico e commento. Florence: Leo S. Olschki.
Foster, B.O. 1899. “The Symbolism of the Apple in Classical Antiquity”.
HSCP 10: 39-55.
Gow, A.S.F. 1952. Theocritus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gowers, E. 2011. ‘Trees and Family Trees in the Aeneid’. Cl.Ant. 30:
87-118.
Harrison, S.J. 1991. Virgil: Aeneid Book 10. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Heubeck, A. – West, S. – Hainsworth, J.B. 1988. A commentary on Homer’s
Odyssey, Vol. I: introduction and books I-VIII. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hinds, S. 1987. “Generalizing about Ovid”. Ramus 16: 4-31.
Hintermeier, C. M. 1993. Die Briefpaare in Ovid’s Heroides: Tradition und

Innovation. Stuttgart: F. Steiner.
Horsfall, N.M. 1990. “Virgil and the illusory footnote”. PLLS 6: 49-63.
Keith, A.M. 2001. “Etymological Wordplay in Ovid’s ‘Pyramus and
Thisbe’ (Met. 4.55-166)”. CQ 51: 309-13.
Kenney, E.J. 1970. “Love and legalism”. Arion 9: 388-414.
______. 1996. Ovid Heroides XVI-XXI. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
______. 2002. “Ovid’s language and style”. In: Brill’s Companion to Ovid,
ed. Boyd, B.W., 27-89. Leiden: Brill.
Kraus, W. 1968. “Die Briefpaare in Ovids Heroiden”. In: Ovid, ed. von
Albrecht, M. & Zinn, E., 294-94. Darmstadt: WBG.
Latta, B. 1963. Die Stellung der Doppelbriefe (Heroides 16-21) im
Gesamtwerk Ovids. Studien zur ovidischen Erzählkunst. Diss. Marburg.
Lindheim, S.H. 2003. Mail and female. Epistolary narrative and desire in
Ovid’s Heroides. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
Littlewood, A.R. 1968. “The Symbolism of the Apple in Greek and
Roman Literature”. HSCP 72: 147-181.
Lugauer, M. 1967. Untersuchungen zur Symbolik des Apfels in der Antike.
Diss. Erlangen.
Maltby, R. 1991. A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies. Leeds: Francis
Cairns Publications.
McKeown, J.C. 1989. Ovid: Amores, Vol. II: A Commentary on Book One.
Leeds: Francis Cairns Publications.
Michalopoulos, A.N. 2001. Ancient Etymologies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
A Commented Lexicon. Leeds: Francis Cairns Publications.
______. 2006. Ovid Heroides 16 and 17: Introduction, Text and Commentary.
Cambridge: Francis Cairns Publications.
______. N. 2014. Ovid Heroides 20-21: Acontius and Cydippe. Introduction,
Text, Translation, Commentary [in Greek]. Athens: Papadimas
Editions.
Miller, F.J. 1993. “Ovidian allusion and the vocabulary of memory”. MD
30: 153-64.
Murgatroyd, P. 1994. Tibullus: Elegies II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
122 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Mynors, R. A. B. 1990. Virgil: Georgics: Edited with a Commentary.

O’Hara, J.J. 1996. “Vergil’s best reader? Ovidian commentary on Vergilian
etymological wordplay”. CJ 91: 255-76.
Palmer, A. 1898. P. Ovidi Nasonis Heroides with the Greek translation of
Planudes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Petropoulos, J.C.B. 2003. Eroticism in Ancient and Medieval Greek Poetry.
London: Duckworth.
Pfeiffer, R. 1949-53. Callimachus, 2 Vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Porte, D. 1985. L’étiologie religieuse dans les Fastes d’Ovide. Paris: Les
Belles Lettres.
Rosati, G. 1989. Lettere di eroine. Milan: Rizzoli.
Rosen, R.M; Farrell, J. 1986. “Acontius, Milanion, and Gallus: Vergil, Ecl.
10.52-61”. TAPA 116: 241-54.
Rosenmeyer, P.A. 2001. Ancient Epistolary Fictions. The Letter in Greek
Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ross, D.O. Jr. 1975. Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry: Gallus, Elegy and
Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas R.F. 1992. “The old man revisited: Virg. Georg. 4.116-48”. MD
29: 44-51.
Tissol, G. 1997. The Face of Nature: wit, narrative, and cosmic origins in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Trumpf, J. 1960. “Kydonische Apfel”. Hermes 88: 14-22.
Viarre, S. 1988. “Acontius et Cydippe ou la métamorphose d’un thème
alexandrin dans les Héroïdes d’ Ovide”. Latomus 47: 772-84.
Wills, J. 1996. Repetition in Latin poetry: Figures of Allusion. Oxford:
Metrical patterns and layers of sense: some
remarks on metre, rhythm and meaning*
João Batista Toledo Prado

State University of São Paulo, Araraquara
Introduction
Ideally, all metric phenomena should be observed as
empirically as possible on the phonetic-phonological dimension
of a language. Empirical observation has however considerably
restricted limits when it comes to classical languages, due to the
present manifest reductions created by their historical fate, which
puts them among those idioms not any longer spoken today.
Only legitimate speakers of the Latin language, that is,
those who have had it as their mother tongue, were totally able
to empirically experience features such as cadence, harmony,
rhythm of speech as well as other traits crafted by versification
techniques, especially when one takes into account the fact that,
from a certain time on, almost all verse compositions in Rome
were meant to be read aloud and for public performances1. The
*
I wish to thank FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation, Brazil) for the
granting of a scholarship that allowed me to develop a post-doctoral research in
France of which the final form of this text is one of the many results.
1
Dupont (1985, 402).
124 AUGUSTAN POETRY
standards set by classical metrics were also based on the phonic

qualities of the articulate sounds, and metrics treatises, written
by ancient scholars as well as those produced by later critics, have
always involved sound matter on the basis of their settings for
the metrics phenomenon in poetry.
Classical Metrics manuals have always sought to catalog
regularities seen in classical poetry and formulate the standards
of its occurrence in verses, by proceeding to investigate their
harmony measures, i.e., poetic meters, and establishing the laws
that rule their use as well as the effects produced by them, but
always based on the sound phenomenon of ancient languages
like Greek and Latin, which could not deliver to posterity any
positive evidence of how their phonemes were articulated.
Metrics studies as a form of research and better understanding
of poetry demand some sense, however, only in the grounds
of prosody. This subcategory of Poetics involves much of the
materiality of language, i.e., the plane of articulate sounds. This
seems to be the biggest problem faced today by Metrics studies,
either as a didactic and pedagogical component in the study of
classical poetry, or as a valid instrument to investigate the poetic
nature of classic literature.
The fact that it is no longer possible to empirically
observe phonetic data of a given language has a direct impact
on the project of studying the expressiveness of a poetic form.
However, this would be desirable, because the understanding of
the expressiveness domains may help to achieve layers of meaning
that lie beyond and/or above the mere sense of phrasal sentences,
by strengthening them and apparently materializing them in the
phonological level, by contrasting them and creating effects of
all kinds in sense layers that expose themselves only when one
takes into account this level of articulation in conjunction with
that of the poetic phrase.
The procedure which overcomes those restrictions imposed
by the historical fate of the Latin language (and of the Greek
and other languages no longer spoken today) is processing and
METRICAL PATTERNS AND LAYERS OF SENSE 125
analyzing data of sounding not in their material aspect, but in

the interplay created by poetic contrasts, and this is achieved by
investigating the prosodic plane of poetry without taking the
nature of sound in consideration, but its oppositive differences
instead, which are located in the formal system of the Latin
language. This procedure features a linguistic and at the same
time literary approach to the field of poetry.
This form of poetry analysis will be illustrated through
critical reading of technical procedures consigned by the classical
Latin poetry studies. At the same time, we intend to propose
mechanisms for initiating an analysis of the expression plane, by
applying them to to the reading a passage from one of Tibullus’
Elegies, composed in the Age of Augustus.
Notwithstanding the specificity of the analyzed corpus,
the intended goal here is to show in which ways a poetics of the
expressiveness can be an efficient tool to read poems composed
in the Latin language, as well as to put in evidence the social
character of any academic investigation, in this case because it
involves a study of the Latin language as an overcoming of the
merely scholar knowledge, made possible through a philosophy
of language and a reflection that operates on the form instead of
on the substance, either when it comes to the expression plane or
when it comes to the linguistic contents. The notion of language
philosophy implies here that substance is put aside, be it phonic,
graphic or of meaning, for the benefit of what is perceived only
psychologically in the relations between signifier and signified.
Some Benchmarks
Modern readings and approaches to Greek and Latin
classical poetry are in general made from biases that include
analysis of its thematic traits, its discursive-rhetorical articulations,
consideration of the settings of its poetic images and critical
views of the codes and sub-codes belonging to the genres
126 AUGUSTAN POETRY
that guide verse composition. Except for one or another more

salient feature employed by the poet, phenomena on the textual
surface of a poem, that is, in the dimension of the form of the
expression plane, do not usually play a major role in most of
the analyses; nevertheless they are responsible for engendering
layers of meaning other than that of the content plane. In most
cases, they thicken the meaning conveyed by the text, ultimately
reaching the highest and fullest degree of iconicity, when the
content plane and the expression plane fully converge, creating
an impression of identity with the real world. Those are naturally
privileged moments of poetic expression, where a text manages
to produce a referential illusion in order to establish a “similarity
of relationship” with manifestations of extra-linguistic reality2.
Full iconicity is not always attained, of course, but generally
great poets employ resources of convergence between planes,
so that they can conform them to construct a cohesive poetic
speech in order to generate a permanent effect, in which a given
poetic form predominates over time. Sometimes, however,
the expression plane is organized in a form leading to the
construction of alternative layers of sense, which are subtexts
that expand and dialogue with the basic text.
On the other hand, the most common forms of analysis to
read and interpret classic poems, through their thematic features,
rhetorical-discursive formations, settings of poetic imagery and
critics to codes and sub-codes of literary genres, are compliant
with an epistemic philosophy according to which every speech
act is an articulation between themes and figures – respectively
the most abstract and the most concrete level – so that a given
theme is manifested through the installation of figures in the
text, which is already a classical idea in the Greimasian semiotic
theory (even though the Greimasian semiotics is a theory still
in progress). Those most common forms of analysis achieve the
conception that it is through such resources that meaning is built.
2
cf. Greimas; Courtés (1983, 222-3), s.v. ‘iconicity’.
One can claim that analyses of this type are compatible a priori
with the semiotic theory of A. J. Greimas. Since this theory is
still in its fieri, only in more recent times it does begin to deal
with the articulations of sense made on the expression plane as
an important part for the production of poetic meaning, and it
may have already achieved successful results.
In general terms, although the expression plane has not
been privileged in methodologies of full poetic analysis, the
starting point for the considerations that favor this component
as a mechanism capable of studying the production of the poetic
sense and poetic ability to express poetry, had already been
formulated in a simple but appropriate question, such as: – What
makes one statement a poetic message? Or, in an even more direct
way: “What makes a verbal message a work of art?”3.
More specifically in the field of the classical studies, similar
intuitions have been suggested in the course of time, so that the
famous Jakobson’s question could be linked to Whiton’s booklet
Introduction to prosody of Latin, according to which many errors
could be avoided if the verses of Latin poets were taken as simply
poetry:
I think that many make a false beginning in their Vergil, or
Ovid, by not beginning it as poetry. While the first month’s
reading-lessons are progressing, the pupil is learning
prosody from the grammar. Until this is done, an initiation
into the mysteries of scanning and proving is deferred. One
or two books of Vergil – often more – are accordingly read
with as much indifference to metre and rhythm as if they
were so many books of Caesar. The only difference that
this method enables a pupil to discern between prose and
poetry is, that poetry allows what seems to him a much
more blind and confused arrangement of words. A poetical
author ought to be treated as such from the outset, and
no false dealing with the subject should be allowed. To
facilitate a true beginning by abridging and simplifying the
3
Jakobson (1960, 350).
128 AUGUSTAN POETRY
introductory lessons is the object of this primer, which, I

recommend, should be mastered before commencing to
read “Arma virumque” or “Ante mare et tellus”4.
Controversial and bold as it may seem, it is certain that if

on the one hand Whiton’s recommendation seems to suggest a
methodological renewal, its practice, on the other hand, focuses
on the still somewhat mechanical observation of the laws of
meter and verse.
Anyway, later on others will continue and give greater
consequences to the use of metrics data in the reading of
Latin poems. Perhaps an eloquent example could be the first
considerations of A. Cartault’s work (1911), now classic, on
the elegiac couplet. Cartault’s book begins the first chapter
with a kind of warning to the reader, based on the following
consideration:
The proportion of dactyls and spondees in verse is
very important; that is what gives its color and rules its
movement; the prevalence of dactyl reveals the dactylic
rhythm, and the prevalence of the spondee obscures it; the
dactyl is light, bright and cheerful; the spondee is heavy,
serious and stable; the frequency of one or the other can
provide the poet with a means of expression5 (emphasis
added here).
However, although complete and rich in details, Cartault’s

study focused on extensive statistical surveys, numerous variation
catalogs, and metrics inventories, all based on what can be found
in the poems contained in the Corpus Tibullianum, but still
4
Whiton (1879, III).
5
Cartault (1911, 5): “La proportion des dactyles et des spondées dans les vers a
une grande importance; elle lui donne sa couleur et règle le mouvement; la pré-
dominance du dactyle accuse le rythme dactylique, celle du spondée l’obscurcit;
le dactyle vif et alerte est léger, le spondée stable et grave est lourd; la fréquence
de l’un ou de l’autre peut fournir au poète un moyen d’expression”. Unless oth-
erwise noted, translations from foreign languages into English in this text were
prepared by its author.
without integrating more effectively the occurrence of metric

features on the reading of a poem as a poetic device. However,
Cartault’s work draws the reader’s attention to the possibilities
of observing such data to achieve a better understanding of the
poetic expressiveness, which, under its ultimate consequences,
could contribute to a Poetics whose privileged object should be
the expression plane or the expressive effects of the poetic text,
that is, its expressiveness.
It is always worth remembering that etymologically
expressiveness derives from exprīmo (ex + premo), whose usual
meanings include, for example, to squeeze or press (to extract a
liquid, etc.), wring out; to press (clothes); to extract by pressure,
squeeze out; to eject by pressure; to squeeze outwards; but also
to model, reproduce, translate, and even pronounce, articulate,
utter and even to express. At least those are the most frequent
meanings listed by trustworthy lexicographers6, who add also,
in the form of the adjective expressus, -a, -um, the meaning of
high, protruding, prominent, therefore, it can be inferred that its
meaning could be described by something that, when pressed,
is brought out and remains protruding, prominent, hence,
something that appears, and draws attention.
Some benefit can be drawn from these etymological
considerations because the concept of a Poetics of the
Expressiveness intends to evoke a whole set of poetical devices.
Those devices first occur in the expression plane of a poem and
derive from the expressive value of the signs. This feature has
already been pointed out by critical thinkers like Charles Rosset7,
and that sums up the concept of expressiveness. Meaning traits
like protrusion, elevation and prominence may consider as
expressive all poetic utterance (and it is worth remembering that,
although Latin poems are concerned here, this naturally does
not happen exclusively in texts written in verse). Constituting
6
Cf., e.g., Glare (1968, 652-3) s.v. “exprimo”.
7
Rosset (1970, passim).
130 AUGUSTAN POETRY
instances of particular density of that formal confluence

between the two planes of language – a moment of great formal
convergence – on which any text is structured, these expressive
utterances stand out from others because of their high isomorphic
density, which generally leads to the impression that a given form
of content can only be expressed by a given and particular form
of expression. This is perhaps what leads to the desire to know
poems by heart, to quote them, to recite them and to repeat
them, without producing, however, any exhaustion or satiety.
Regarding the isomorphism between expression and
content, and the expressive character that are in all the poems,
it must be said, at first, that this trait may permeate the entire
poem (and most likely that’s the rule!). Nevertheless, there are
passages in which such feature becomes more evident than in
others, because it is ultimately a matter of degree and intensity
by which a given passage demonstrates it. On the other hand,
the isomorphism and, moreover, all other concepts mentioned so
far, have been developed by prestigious and influential authors,
even though they don’t state their findings with this term, more
familiar, perhaps, to the semiotics of our times.
Considering Jakobson’s previous question (“What makes
a verbal message a work of art?”8), he tried to answer it by
suggesting a confrontation between the place traditionally
occupied by poetry studies, i.e., by the Poetics, and the science of
the language phenomena, the Linguistics, in order to determine
under what perspective should be seen those linguistic utterances,
produced according to artistic criteria:
Because the main subject of poetics is the differentia specifica

of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relation to other
kinds verbal behaviors, poetics is entitled to the leading
place in literary studies.
8
Jakobson (1960, 350).
Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the

analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure.
Since Linguistics is the global science of verbal structure,
poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics.9
Jakobson comes to the conclusion that the Poetics should

be seen as a branch of Linguistics and it should be submitted, in
general, to the same analyzing procedures of the structures that
are adequate for each type of enunciation – which is in accordance
with the idea that poetry is one of the aspects of language, as
stated by Fónagy10. Jakobson’s proposition is that this should be
done through an analysis that takes into account the functions
performed by language – a theory created and developed by Karl
Bühler – among which there is the poetic function: “Language
must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. Before
discussing the poetic function we must define its place among the
other functions” and “The verbal structure of a message depends
primarily on the predominant function”11.
The use of versification tends to produce a dominant
role for the poetic function – since only there can a regular and
recurring use of phonological matrices produce the sense that a
message carries, when configured that way. But the versification
alone is not enough to produce poetry (as stated at least since
Aristotle’s Poetics12). To do that, there must be a confluence
between the two planes of language, in a formation combining
phonological featured elements with significant sentence traits.
It is Jakobson who once more acknowledges this fact, stating that
“Mnemonic lines [...], modern advertising jingles, and versified
9
Jakobson (1960, 350).
10
Cf. Fónagy (1966, 72).
11
Jakobson (1960, 353).
12
Cf. Arist. Poet. 1447b: “They are in the habit of calling any writer of a medical
or scientific treatise in metre a poet, but in fact Homer and Empedocles have
nothing in common except the metre, so that one should call Homer a poet and
Empedocles a physicist rather than a poet” Hammond (2001, 13).
132 AUGUSTAN POETRY
medieval laws [...], or finally Sanskrit scientific treatises in verse

[...], all these metrical texts make use of poetic function without,
however, assigning to this function the coercing, determining
role it carries in poetry”13.
A reading and analysis example: Tibullus 1.10.1-10

A reading of a poetic passage based on analysis of the ar-
ticulations between the expression and the content planes now
follows, taking into account the role of metrics and rhythm in
verse and their tendency to “resonate” in accordance with the
form of the content plane. The following five pairs of lines (or
couplets or stanzas) of Tibullus’ elegy 1.10.1-10 were reproduced
below according to the text established by Max Ponchont14, with
metric notations, as well as penthemimeris caesuras assigned by
A. Cartault15 and supplemented as needed with other phonotactic
elements by the author of this text (such as main and secondary
caesuras, sandhis and synaloephas):
13
Jakobson (1985, 359).
14
Ponchont (1989, 75). Actually, the text edited by Max Ponchont was used here
with only two minor changes: v. 4 tum (instead of et); though Cartault (1909,
192) and Ponchont (1989, 75) have chosen et, more modern researchers have
chosen tum cf. Murgatroyd (1980, 44) or Juster (2012, 54) its variant tunc; Maltby
(2002, 97); v. 9 somnumque (instead somnosque); again, somnos is supported by
Cartault (ibid.) and Ponchont (ibid.), while Murgatroyd, Maltby and Juster
use somnum. Though an older researcher, it is worth mentioning that Postgate
has also preferred somnum in v. 9; and incidentally tum too in v. 4 Postgate
(1912, 244).
15
Cartault (1911, passim). Cartault makes a thorough and detailed inventory of
the caesuras as well as a statistical projection of all elisions and synaloephas
found in the elegies of the Corpus Tibullianum, but he does not take into account
the sandhis nor discusses the secondary caesuras, since they exist in a potential
state. Even though potential – they exist in a latent state but can be activated
and thus felt – they work as a hint of caesura and represent some psychological
impact. After all, caesuras are not necessarily cuts nor breaks in the phonological
sequence of a verse: they are moments of a certain emphasis that can be perceived
by the adressee of the poetic speech, although in a surreptitious manner.
Quīs fŭĭ|t, ‫ٮ‬hōrrēn|dōs || prī|mūs || quī | Who was the first to make horrific two-
prōtŭlĭ|t‫ٮ‬ēnsēs? edged swords?
Quām fĕrŭ|s‫ٮ‬ēt || uē|rē || | fērrĕŭ|s‫ٮ‬īllĕ fŭ|ĭt! How ired and truly iron that man was!
Tūm cāē|dē||s‫ٮ‬hŏmĭ|nūm || gĕnĕ|rī, || tūm | First murder of the human race, then war
prōēlĭă | nātă, was born,
tūm brĕuĭ|ōr || dī|rāē || | mōrtĭs ‫ٮ‬ă|pērtă then quicker ways to grisly death were
∩
uĭ|a ēst. opened.
Ān nĭhĭ|l‫ٮ‬īllĕ mĭ|sēr || mĕrŭ|īt, || nō|s‫ٮ‬ād Or was the wretch not guilty? Don’t we
mălă | nōstră turn against
uērtĭmŭ|s, ‫ٮ‬īn || sāē|uās || | quōd || dĕdĭ|t‫ٮ‬ ourselves the evils he designed for beasts?
īllĕ fĕ|rās?
∩ Gold riches are to blame; there was no
Dīvĭtĭ|s‫ٮ‬hōc || uĭtĭ|um ēs||t‫ٮ‬āū|rī, || nēc | bēllă warfare when
fŭ|ērūnt,
a beechwood goblet stood at sacred feasts.
fāgĭnŭ|s‫ٮ‬ādstā|bāt || | cūm scўphŭ|s‫ٮ‬āntĕ
There were no forts, no palisades, and,
dă|pēs;
safe among
nōn ‫ ٮ‬ār|cēs, || nōn | vāllŭs ‫ ٮ‬ĕ|rāt, ||
the mottled ewes, a shepherd sought his
sōm|nūmquĕ pĕ|tēbăt
sleep16.
sēcū|rūs || uărĭ|ās || | dūx || grĕgĭ|s‫ٮ‬īntĕr‫ٮ‬
ŏ|uēs.
Distich Analyses/Commentaries
1-2 Hex.: besides the remarkable reiteration of multiple and simple
vibrant phonemes (in horrendos, primus and protulit) that reinforces the
accumulation of dental and bilabial plosives (in fuit, horrendos, primus
and protulit), with which the poet seems to build, on the plane of the
form, the noise figure of a clang, like the clash of swords, it must be also
noted that the caesura of this verse is penthemimeris (between horrendos
and primus), with a suggestion of a secondary caesura hephthemimeris,
after the last syllable of primus. This feature highlights the term between
caesuras: primus; doing so at the exact center of the opening verse of
the elegy I, 10, the poetic speech underlines its elocutory key (after all,
primus is also the fourth word of a set of seven), namely, the presence
of a founding myth, i. e., of a character, be it a god, a demigod or a
human inspired by a numen, who has first conceived the idea of making
swords; the sense of disapproval of that act considered as criminal in
the speech of this verse, and communicated in the content plane, also
seems to find support in the form of the expression, through the sum of
3 cumulative spondees, occupying almost the entire verse, from the 2nd
to 4th feet, to which is also added the initial long syllable of the 5th foot;
this construction still finds an echo in the 6th final foot of this hexameter
one out of the only two spondees in the final position in this passage),
16
Transl. by a.n. Juster (2012, p.15)
134 AUGUSTAN POETRY
which causes the phrase to suffer a delay, to be in a slower rhythm and

to have a solemn emphasis on the monstrosity of that act, considered
as a disaster for all mankind.
Pent.: uere (“really”) is also highlighted in this pentameter, as it is situated
between the fixed caesura (between uere and ferreus) and a suggested
secondary caesura, a trithemimeris placed between et and uere, as if to
mark the unequivocal judgment about the fierce nature – inhuman
perhaps? – of the inventor of swords. Another feature is the reiteration
of the fricative phoneme “f ”, generally followed there by the vowel
-e-, which seems to echo the initial syllable fe- from ferus scattered all
over this verse, as if it was a rhetorical amplification of the very idea
of fierceness.
3-4 Hex.: The main caesura is a penthemimeris one, located after hominum,
which divides the two hemistichs approximately in half and it is flanked
by two secondary caesuras: the first one a trithemimeris, between caedes
and hominum, the second one, a hephthemimeris, between generi and
tum. The result of this is the enhancement of the phrase hominum
generi (“for all mankind”), setting a tension that comes from a two-pole
opposition, formed by tum caedes (“then the slaughter”) on one side, and
by tum proelia (“then the fighting”) on the other side; both segments
flank and at the same time involve “the human race”, that has to suffer
such damages due to the invention of weapons. The structure of this
verse is SDDS – i.e., it consists of two slow, wide pace and solemn
spondees, involving two fast and easy pace dactyls – and it also seems
to reinforce and create concrete contours supporting this same idea in
the materiality of the verse.
Pent.: in this verse, the fixed caesura (after dirae) also finds the
unexpected support of a trithemimeris secondary caesura, which isolates
both the word dirae (“fearful”), an attribute for mortis (“of death”),
and the initial phrase tum breuior (“then faster”) which agrees with uia
(“route”). Such an idea is capital there because: a) the “route” of the
syntactic-semantic relationships between words is built by means of
a concrete and transverse movement which runs from breuior in the
beginning up to uia at the end of this verse; b) moreover, a synaloepha
between uia and the verb est is also ultimately building in prosody an
expediting effect that materializes in the expression plane the very idea
of a shortest route now opened to death, because of the invention of
weapons.
5-6 Hex.: only in the hexameter of the verse 5, the dactyls (the three first feet)
come to predominate, giving a more sprightly and smoother pace to the
sentence utterance, precisely when the poetic speech also softens a little
and asks if the now poor inventor of weapons was even to be blamed
for the misuse of his invention, which may have been only misused by
the modern era men (that is, the contemporary fellows to Tibullus),
who instead of using weapons to protect themselves against beasts, have
been using them to kill each other. The main caesura occurs there after
miser and is followed by an incidental hephthemimeris after meruit, a
procedure that isolates and highlights the verb meruit (“earned”) and, by
doing so, also highlights and protrudes from the phrase two isometric
halves which are nevertheless opposite in sense: on the one hand, there
is an ille in the first hemistich, which creates a rhetoric tension to a nos
in the second one, and which means that “he”, whoever the inventor of
weapons may have been, may not have had a malicious intent, nor is he
to be blamed, therefore. The contemporary countrymen of Tibullus –
according to the myth of the Ages of Man (quattuor aetates)17, one can
suppose they are all men of the Age of Iron – have distorted a worthy gift
by using it to shed the blood of their fellow men. It is also noteworthy
the enjambement which causes a reading movement there, featured by a
certain suspension of the logical progression, creating an expectation that
will be remedied only when the verb uertĭmus (“we return”) is reached,
in the first foot of the pentameter. Needless to say, the enjambement is
not a very common resource in Tibullus’ distichs; besides, at this point
17
In his commentaries to Tibullus 2.3.35-6, Miller (2002, 153) states that “The
theory of the four ages, gold, silver, bronze, and iron, is first found in Hesiod
and becomes a favorite topos for Roman poets in the Augustan age”). The Ages
of Man are four in the Ovidian version (Ov. Met 1.89-150), and it is important
to note that the concept of a qualitative lowering in the ages of humanity arises
from this myth, which features a metal degradation beginning with the Age of
Gold (or simply Golden Age), successively followed by the Ages of Silver, Bronze
and Iron. The allusion to the Age of Gold, a paradisiacal time for all mankind,
fits well in the general framework of the elegiac poetry, since the idea of an
innocent humanity, not yet corrupted by greed, befitted the general criticism to
the venality in love relationships and to gold as a symbol of the corruption of
customs, which predominates in the last and most criminal of all Ages, that of
Iron. This myth first appeared in the poetry of Hesiod (cf. Hes. Op., 109-201),
which also describes an Age of Heroes (cf. Hes. Op., 156-73) between the Ages
of Bronze and Iron, thus forming the five Ages of Man. Although this myth is
widespread in classical literature, Grimal (2005) presents a small inventory of
the occurrences of the Golden Age myth in some of the Greek and Latin poets
cf. Grimal (2005, 241), s.v. ‘Idade de Ouro’. For further information on the
genesis and especially on the structure of this myth in Hesiod, one should refer
to Vernant’s (1965) very instructive article.
136 AUGUSTAN POETRY
of the sentence, it makes concrete and almost “material” the concept

expressed by the verb uertĕre (“to return”), whose etymology, incidentally
(or not), is exactly the same as the etymology of the word uersus (“verse”).
Pent.: occurring after saeuas, the fixed caesura of the pentameter is
balanced there by a secondary trithemimeris after in and also by an
unusual secondary hexamimeris18 after quod; the result is an enhancement
of the term saeuas (“wild”), an adjective that agrees with feras (“beasts”);
the emphasis in this passage seems to affect the phrase in saeuas at the
end of the first hemistich, and feras, at the end of the verse; that is, for
allocating these words in prominent positions, it is emphasized the sense
of the content plane, that is, the fact that weapons served primarily in
saeuas feras (“against the wild beasts”), not against men themselves.
18
A real or potential, primary or secondary caesura occurs every time when two
units of the lexicon cut a metric foot (cf.: “In assoluto, si ha cesura ogni volta
che la parola ‘taglia’ (caedo) il metro”. PERINI, 1982, p. 219) in two – this
is of course a figurative cut – that is, it occurs by means of a sort of tension
brought by the superposition and confluence of two different systems: that
of a given language, which is taken as if it were plastic matter, and that of
poetics which projects itself on a given language that becomes a constitutive
part of it. Thus, even if it exists only in a potential condition, this pentameter
shows the suggestion of a hexamimeres caesura; it is worth noting that the usual
caesuras, both in hexametric and in pentametric lines, are penthemimeres. As
for the hexameter, there is also the possibility of a balanced pair of caesuras:
a trithemimeres and a hephthemimeres. Perhaps the hexamimeres caesura
would go unnoticed and inactive there, had it not been for an also potential
trithemimeres caesura that infiltrates itself between the preposition in and the
adjective saeuas. The pentameter has always a fixed penthemimeres caesura, a
fact that certainly mitigated other potential caesuras, relegating them to the
status of mere psychic suggestions; when the suggestion occurs, however, it
exists, persists and acts in order to highlight the segment in which the main
caesura lies. Manuals of Classic Latin Metrics usually treat a phrase formed by
preposition plus noun as just one word, separated only by a graphic convention
– which is sometimes called metrical or phonetical words [cf. Nougaret
(1956, 5)]. The argument raised, for example, by Nougaret (ibid., § 10) is based
on a passage by Quintilian (1.5.27). The French scholar, however, quotes only a
portion of Quintilian’s passage and he does not discuss the context in which the
opinion conveyed by Quintilian is inserted. The full passage reads (the passage
as quoted in Nougaret’s Manual is underlined here as follows): Mihi videtur
condicionem mutare, quod his locis verba coniungimus. Nam cum dico ‘circum litora’,
tanquam unum enuntio dissimulata distinctione, itaque tanquam in una voce una
est acuta, quod idem accidit in illo ‘Troiae qui primus ab oris’ (“It seems to me that
the circumstances are quite different here because in such phrases we use to
join words. For when I say circum litora – ‘near the shore – I utter it as in a
7-8 Hex.: following the DDSS scheme, with the initial dactyls covering
two-thirds of the first hemistich and whose meaning is somewhat
neutral, the interplay (or reciprocal action) between dactyls and
single voice emission, concealing the distinction between the two words; this
way, it contains just a single accent since I pronounce it as a single word. The
same occurs in Troiae qui primus ab oris – ‘the first one who, from the shores of
Troy...’ ”). It is noteworthy that the question for Quintilian is the occurrence
of a single accent in the phrase, and the verse 1 from the Aeneid provided by
way of example is also a proof of that. Quintilian seems to draw attention to
the fact that the quoted line reads Troiáequi and abóris, but it is significant
that the first case is analogous to the enclitic conjunction -que, and that the
second case is a matter of sandhi between -b (from ab) and o- (from oris), two
phonotactic phenomena that explain the coalescence between those words. We
might also infer that the “single accent” noted by Quintilian refers probably to
the main and most prominent accent of the two words that form circumlítora.
The quoted passage of Quintilian has great interest, especially for discussions
on the demarcation function performed by accents and on the ways they were
probably pronounced in Latin (especially in the post-classical Latin, at the time
when Quintilian lived), but it does not relate either directly or exclusively with
different units of the lexicon being perceived as a single and amalgamated entity.
Quintilian witnesses, instead, the speaker awareness acting as to distinguish
those two units, even if they were uttered in the same vocal emission; one should
note the ablative absolute dissimulata distinctione, that is, the only and same
emission testified by Quintilian masks at the phonological level something
that the linguistic competence of the speaker always realizes: the fact that the
phrase contains two items of the lexicon. This happens because prepositions are
independent forms and they form syntagmas with any lexical entities that satisfy
their grammatical constraint of triggering a case marking in a given noun. Thus,
while listening to that pentameter of Tibullus, the listener-adressee certainly
knew that there is no single entity equivalent to insaeuas in the Latin lexicon,
therefore, his conscience and speaker competence were able to recognize the
preposition and the adjective that form the phrase in saeuas… (feras). Such a
conscience should be produced by the contrast between the independent status
of a preposition like in (capable of forming phrases with any nouns of the
linguistic repertoire of the Latin language, and of triggering case marks in them)
and other similar forms like the prefix in, a dependent constituent which does
not trigger case marks and whose grammatical forms are provided and included
in the language repertoire (cf. inabruptus, “not broken”; inaccessus, “inaccessible”;
inadustus, “non-combustible”, etc.). This is an essential and unanswerable
difference that raises awareness, yet intuitive, between prefixes and prepositions
in Latin language, and a fact that always regulates the individuality of a ruler
preposition and therefore this does not allow it to be confused with a ruled
noun, even though the resulting syntagma was pronounced in the same vocal
emission. As for the rest of this issue, in the phonological level of the linguistic
138 AUGUSTAN POETRY
spondees serves to reinforce the weight of spondees which give gravity

to the idea conveyed there: the evil caused by the hunger for gold is the
real cause of wars. Indeed, the penthemimeris caesura after est (“is”) finds
itself counterbalanced by a secondary trithemimeris after hoc (“this”), and
a hephthemimeris after auri (“of gold”), which ultimately highlights the
phrase uitium est auri (“the gold is to blame”), which is the key argument
of the whole first part of the poem, and that also echoes the elegiac topos
as well as a wide literary tradition of putting the blame for all warlike
atrocities committed by men on their insatiable hunger for gold, that
is, on their greed19. and accumulation (of goods) are reinforced by two
phonotactic resources: the sandhi, which lends the final -t from the verb
est to the first syllable of auri, as well as the synaloepha between the last
syllable of uitium and the monosyllable est, which prosodically merges
them into a single phonological unit and concretizes the concept of
non-dissociation between the idea of “gold” (aurum) and the ones of
“lack, crime, guilt” (uitium).
Pent.: the fixed caesura after -bat, added to the spondee of the second
foot, hightlights the verb adstabat (“it was built”) that ends the first
hemistich; this creates a pause for expectation that will be satisfied only
when the phrase ante dapes (“before the feast”) is reached out at the end
of the second hemistich. Thus, there is a transposition here, creating
an enhancement in the form of the completive sense of the adverbial
phrase ante dapes.
realization everything is a syntagmatic chain, which means that the phonetic-

phonological reality of the sequence which is called a verse (and of course also
that of a sentence) is always a chain of sounds (for example: VÉRTIMVSINSÁ
EVASQVÓDDÉDITÍLLEFÉRAS?), in which real breaks may even occur when
the rhythm and the semantic content of a sentence require or suggest that,
but by no means all the time, what counts in favor of conceiving the caesura,
whatever its nature may be, as a more psychological than acoustic phenomenon.
19
On the elegiac topos of refusing war and greed – symbolized here by the
reference to gold – as well as the refusal of obtaining wealth in order to praise
a life dedicated to the idleness of love, cf. [Boucher (1965, 19-21). It is worth
noting that some of Ovid’s lines describing the Golden Age are also linked to a
partly similar reasoning such as: Nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut uiseret orbem, /
montibus in liquidas pinus descenderat undas, / nullaque mortales suas litora norant
(Ov. Met. 1.94-6), “No pine had yet, on its high mountain felled, / Descended
to the sea to find strange lands / Afar; men knew no shores except their own”
Melville (1986, 4). In the Golden Age there was no knowledge yet of nautical
arts and men therefore did not know other lands, so there was nothing to covet,
which also explains there was no need for palisades or ditches to defend the
cities (in fact, men had not lived in cities yet) from enemy attacks (Ov. Met.
1.97) and, consequently, the art of war did not even exist (Ov. Met. 1.98-9),
9-10 Hex.: in the passage transcribed here, this is the only hexameter whose
main caesura is in fact double, i.e., a trithemimeris after arces (“wall”
or “citadel”), and a hephthemimeris after erat (“it was”). The effect
of such prosodic situation strengthens the syntactic-semantic level
in the expression plane of this verse, and it is made up by juxtaposed
and coordinated phrases, which led the editor (Max Ponchont) to
punctuate them with commas; the effect thus is clear: each segment is
naturally highlighted by virtue of the homology between the content
and expression planes, a fact reinforced by two initial spondees, which
require the pronunciation to stop and lengthen, emphasizing, on the one
hand, the idea of an absence of fences, walls and trenches, when men
lived content with simplicity, a concept iconized in the previous verse
by the image of a cup made of beechwood20 and, on the other hand, by
which allowed all people to live safely (Ov. Met. 1.100). The Tibullan elegiac-I
rejects the ambition and wars in other passages too, as in the opening verses of
Corpus Tibullianum (1.1.1-2), and as Maltby notes, “T.’s rejection of military life
is based partly on the implicit moral objection that it is motivated by greed (cf.
cupidis). The connection between war and wealth/greed is frequently emphasized
by T., e.g. 1.2.67-72, 1.10.7-10, 2.3.41-6; […]” Maltby (2002, 116). It is worth
remembering that the criticism of wealth occurs in the context of praising the
idealized notion of a farmer living a humble life in the fields: “T. rejects riches in
favour of the elegiac ideal of paupertas” Maltby (2002, 117); this is a transversal
and recurring topos in the elegies of the Corpus Tibullianum, that appears even
in the third book whose authorship is uncertain: “More conventional is perhaps
his [Lygdamus’s] use of the paupertas-theme, ‘not wealth, but love’, in elegy 3.3.
This elegy consists of a series of topoi, such as the uselessness of prayer and the
ups and downs of fortune […], but the dominant topos is the poverty-theme
[…]. Although the poem perhaps does not add much to Tibullus 1.1, it shows
how the topos might be framed in different ways” Skoie (2012, 92). Although
the poem does not present any defined time reference, the opening couplet
of the elegy I.10 is generally associated with the elegy I.1 and considered as
a reference to the Golden Age, because of the absence of wars and swords, of
the idealized pastoral life and of rustica paupertas [cf. p. ex., Maltby (2002,
116; 340); Mugatroyd (1980, 280-1). Finally, it is interesting to note the sharp
contrast between the criticism of the greed for gold (symbol of wealth) as a
peculiar trait of the Iron Age, and the praising of characteristic features of the
Golden Age, in which precisely the desire of gold-riches did not exist, a point
also highlighted in Ovid’s Ars 2.277-8, as pointed out by Maltby (2002, p. 343).
20
It should be noted that the first word in the line 8 is the adjective faginus
(beechwood) that contrasts with auri (golden / of gold), which is also the first
word in the second hemistich of the line 7; both terms are highlighted (the
latter by the caesura, the former by its position in the very head of the line),
reinforcing the polarization between the greed of the Iron Age and the rustic
simplicity of the Golden Age. The image of the cup made of beechwood has,
140 AUGUSTAN POETRY
the idea of a shepherd enjoying his calm sleep in the serenity of peaceful
surroundings. This idea is conveyed by verses of dactylic and trochaic
pacing and it fits well there for being the image of a sweet sleep, as light
as one might conceive it; after all, dactyls and trochees are a kind of feet
much lighter than spondees. The whole scene will be completed in the
next verse by the effect of a slight enjambement.
Pent.: the first hemistich of this verse opens with two long syllables of a
spondee, which makes a heavier rhythm (reinforced by the following long
syllable -rūs, which belongs to the following metrical foot), alternates to
a dactyl that brings a lighter rhythm, and closes with the main caesura
after -ās, which naturally contains another long syllable, after which
comes the second and fixed part of the pentameter, beginning by the
long syllable of dux (“leader”, “conductor”). Actually, the entire rhythm
here graciously alternates along the metrical structure formed by SD-
long syllable+DD-long syllable; there are also two secondary caesuras,
a trithemimeris after securus (“safe”) and another hexamimeris after dux
(“conductor”), which ultimately highlight each of the three initial terms
(securus – uarias – dux); once uarias (“spotted”) refers to oues (“sheep”),
here we have the three most important factors on this bucolic scene:
an untroubled herdsman among his ewes; the rhythmic lightness of
this verse provides the proper sensation of tranquility of this pastoral
scene. Furthermore, the delay in the initial pacing of the pronunciation,
obtained by a phonological chain formed by the initial three long
syllables, plus the highlighting effect of the caesuras, strengthen the
idea of stability and security enjoyed by the conductor of herds21, which
could then achieve a peaceful sleep in the midst of his mottled ewes
grazing scattered, loose and free. Interestingly enough, the word order
also composes the image of a safe shepherd among his flock, given that
the word dux (“shepherd”) is surrounded by uarias (“spotted”) and oues
(“sheep”). And lastly, the vocalic dispersion caused by a vowel palette that
employs almost the entire spectrum of the available Latin vowels (ā, ĕ,
ē, ĭ, ī, ŏ, ū) also helps to compose the image of a flock of spotted sheep.
indeed, the purpose of functioning as a rustic simplicity icon [cf. Maltby (2002,
344); Murgatroyd (1980, 283)].
21
In the introduction to his comments on the elegy 1.10, Murgatroyd praises the
Tibulan image of a lying pastor surrounded by his herd of sheep and feeling safe
to get to sleep; the author considers this to be one of the “charming touches”
of this elegy [cf. Murgatroyd (1980, 281)]. Commentators usually point out
that the adjective uarias acts as an index to the rustica paupertas since mottled
wool sheep were less appreciated and less valued than those of a single color
[cf. Maltby (2002, 344); Murgatroyd (1980, 284)]. Murgatroyd also indicates
two possibilities to interpretate uarias: according to this author, it is either a
reference to the mottled color of wool from sheep or it denotes that each one of
Bibliography
Cartault, A. 1909. Tibulle et les auteurs du Corpus Tibullianum. Texte établi
par A. Cartault. Paris: Armand Colin.
______. 1911. Le distique élégiaque chez Tibulle, Sulpicia, Lygdamus. Paris:
Félix Alcan.
Dupont, F. 1985. L’Acteur-Roi: le théâtre dans la Rome antique. Paris: Les
Belles Lettres.
Fónagy, I. 1966. “Le langage poétique: forme et fonction”. In: Problèmes
du langage, Benveniste, É. et al., p. 72-116. Paris: Gallimard.
Glare, P. G. W., ed. 1968. Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLD). Oxford (UK):
Greimas, A. J., Courtés, A. 1983. Dicionário de semiótica. Trad. Alceu Dias
Lima et al. São Paulo: Cultrix/EdUSP.
Grimal, P. 2005. Dicionário da mitologia grega e romana. 5a. ed. Trad. Victor
Jabouille. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil.
Hammond, N.G.L. 2001. Aristotle: Poetics. Transl. by N.G.L. Hammond.
Copenhagen (NO): Museum Tusculanum / Univ. of Copenhagen.
Jakobson, R. 1960. “Linguistics and Poetics”. In: Style in language, Sebeok,
Thomas A., ed. Cambridge (MA-USA): The MIT Press / New-York
(USA): John Wiley & sons.
Juster, A. M. 2012. Tibullus: Elegies. Transl. by A. M. Juster; intro. and
notes by Robert Maltby. Oxford (UK): Oxford University Press (Oxford
World’s Classics).
Maltby, Robert. 2002. Tibullus: elegies. Text, introduction and commentary.
Cambridge (UK): Francis Cairns.
Melville, A.D. 1986. Ovid: Metamorphoses. Translated by A.D. Melville,
with intro. and notes by E.J. Kenney. Oxford (UK) / New York (USA):
them had a different color (ibid.). Whatever the interpretation is, our comment
on the figurative relationship between the vowel dispersion presented in this line
and the image of sheep variety (be it in different colors for each individual or in
multiple colors for every single one) remains true and equally applies.
142 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Miller, Paul Allen. 2002. Latin erotic elegy. An anthology and reader. Ed.
with an introd. and comm. by Paul Allen Miller. London (UK)/New
York (USA): Routledge.
Murgatroyd, Paul. 1980. Tibullus I. A commentary on the first book of
the elegies of Albius Tibullus. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal.
Nougaret, L. 1956. Traité de métrique latine classique. 2e. ed. corrigée.
Paris: Klincksieck.
Perini, G. B. 1982. “Fondamenti di metrica”. In: Propedêutica al latino
universitario, Traina, A., Perini, G. B., p. 201-41. 3. ed. Bolonha: Pàtron.
Ponchont, M. 1989. Tibulle et les auteurs du Corpus Tibullianum. 8e. tirage.
Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Postgate, J. P. 1912. “Tibullus”. In: Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigium Veneris.
Translated respect. by F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate and J. W. Mackail,
p. 185-339. London (UK): William Heinemann / New York (USA):
Macmillan Co. (Loeb).
Rosset, C. 1970. L’Enseignement élémentaire du Latin. Paris: Université
de Paris IV-Sorbonne.
Skoie, Mathilda. 2012. “Corpus Tibullianum, Book 3”. In: A companion
to Roman love elegy, GOLD, Barbara K., p. 86-100. Malden (MA-USA)/
Oxford (UK): Wiley-Blackwell.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1965. “Genèse et structure dans le mythe hésiodique
des races”. In: Entretiens sue les notions de Génèse et de Strutucture,
Gandillac, Maurice de, Goldmann, Lucien, Piaget, Jean (ed.), p. 95-124.
Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-La-Salle: Mouton & Co.
Whiton, James Morris. 1879. Auxilia Vergiliana. First steps in Latin
prosody. Boston: Ginn&Heath.wool from sheep or it denotes that each
one of them had a different color (ibid.). Whatever the interpretation is,
our comment on the figurative relationship between the vowel dispersion
presented in this line and the image of sheep variety (be it in different
colors for each individual or in multiple colors for every single one)
remains true and equally applies.
PART II – Horatian lyric, iambus
and satire
Metafore, allegorie e altre trasformazioni:
Quintiliano interprete di Orazio (sul carme 1.14,
con alcune osservazioni riguardo alle navi di
Virgilio e Ovidio)*
Andrea Cucchiarelli
Sapienza – University of Rome
Nella sua trattazione di quel particolare tropo che è

l’allegoria, nel libro VIII dell’Institutio oratoria, Quintiliano fa
riferimento al carme 1.14 di Orazio e alle Bucoliche di Virgilio (in
particolare l’ecloga 9). Questi due riferimenti, che si spiegano e
giustificano all’interno di una institutio volta a formare un abile
retore, hanno rappresentato per secoli, già a partire dall’età antica
fino all’età moderna, l’interpretazione standard dei due testi di
Orazio e di Virgilio. Ciò anche in conseguenza, come è naturale,
della grande autorità scolastica di Quintiliano. Vale la pena di
rileggere con attenzione il luogo quintilianeo:
*
Rielaboro qui la relazione tenuta al convegno di San Paolo, che è stato una preziosa
occasione di incontro e riflessione: ringrazio gli organizzatori e i partecipanti
tutti, alcuni dei quali sono stati particolarmente generosi di osservazioni (si
vedano infra le nn. 16 e 24). Desidero inoltre ringraziare Giuseppe Lentini per
aver discusso con me di alcune questioni “nautiche” (alcaiche e non). Le pagine
che seguono conservano alcune tracce di oralità, che spero al lettore non riescano
troppo sgradevoli.
146 AUGUSTAN POETRY
allegoria, quam inversionem interpretantur, aut aliud

verbis, aliud sensu ostendit, aut etiam interim contrarium.
Prius fit genus plerumque continuatis translationibus ut
‘O navis, referent in mare te novi / fluctus: o quid agis?
fortiter occupa / portum’, totusque ille Horati locus, quo
navem pro republica, fluctus et tempestates pro bellis
civilibus, portum pro pace atque concordia dicit. [45] tale
Lucreti ‘avia Pieridum peragro loca’, et Vergili ‘sed nos
immensum spatiis confecimus aequor, / et iam tempus
equum fumantia solvere colla’. [46] sine translatione vero
in Bucolicis: ‘certe equidem audieram, qua se subducere
colles / incipiunt mollique iugum demittere clivo, / usque
ad aquam et veteris iam fracta cacumina fagi, / omnia
carminibus vestrum servasse Menalcan’. [47] hoc enim loco
praeter nomen cetera propriis decisa sunt verbis, verum non
pastor Menalcas, sed Vergilius est intellegendus.
L’allegoria, che si traduce con il termine ‘inversione’, o

mostra una cosa con le parole, un’altra con il senso, oppure
significa anche, talvolta, il contrario. Il primo genere è dato
per lo più da una successione di metafore, come «O nave, ti
riporteranno in mare nuovi / flutti: ma che fai? forza, entra
/ in porto», e tutto quel famoso luogo di Orazio, in cui il
poeta intende la nave per la repubblica, i flutti e le tempeste
per le guerre civili, il porto per la pace e la concordia. [45]
Così Lucrezio «percorro i remoti luoghi delle Pieridi» e
Virgilio «ma noi abbiamo concluso un’immensa distesa / ed
è tempo ormai di sciogliere ai cavalli il collo fumante». [46]
Senza metafora, invero, l’allegoria compare nelle Bucoliche:
«certo, io avevo sentito, là dove i colli / cominciano a
scendere e a piegarsi in dolce pendio, / fino all’acqua e
ai vecchi faggi, ormai cime spezzate, / che tutto il vostro
Menalca avesse conservato grazie ai canti». [47] In questo
luogo, infatti, tutto il resto, tranne il nome, è definito da
termini propri, ma in realtà si deve intendere che non si
tratta del pastore Menalca, ma di Virgilio.1
1
Quint., Inst. 8.6.44-47.
METAFORE, ALLEGORIE E ALTRE TRASFORMAZIONI 147
Dunque, Quintiliano definisce un primo genere di

allegoria, consistente in una successione continuata di metafore
(continuatis translationibus), privo cioè di qualsiasi elemento,
per così dire, ‘extra-allegorico’, il quale, facendo riferimento al
significato reale, sveli il gioco. Ad esemplificare la definizione
il primo riferimento che Quintiliano va a scegliere è il carme
oraziano, la cui conoscenza egli dà certo per scontata tra i suoi
allievi e lettori (totusque i l l e Horati locus). Seguono due più rapidi
esempi tratti da due altri testi assai noti, il De rerum natura e le
Georgiche, in cui, naturalmente, lo spazio percorso (peragro loca;
confecimus aequor) è quello, metaforico-allegorico, della poesia
(Lucr. 4.1 = 1.926; Verg., Georg. 2.541-2). Ultimo esempio
tratto dalla poesia, prima che Quintiliano passi alla prosa, per
la quale fa riferimento ad un’opera perduta di Cicerone, è quello
dell’ecloga nona (vv. 7-10), in cui appunto Menalca non sarebbe
altro che allegoria di Virgilio: verum non pastor Menalcas, sed
Vergilius est intellegendus.
In un contesto in cui si voglia riflettere sul tema di New
trends and revaluations, cioè Nuove tendenze e rivalutazioni
(ovvero nuove valutazioni) nella poesia augustea, fortunatamente
non si avverte il bisogno di riaprire la discussione sulla allegoricità
della poesia bucolica virgiliana. Qui il retore Quintiliano è buon
testimone dell’antica tradizione esegetica secondo cui il testo
bucolico presenterebbe una precisa identificazione allegorica tra
Virgilio e i suoi personaggi (Menalca, nella fattispecie). Da questa
tradizione esegetica, perdurante lungo tutto il Medioevo e l’età
moderna, è derivata, soprattutto all’interno della grande stagione
critica Otto-Novecentesca (più o meno consapevolmente
post-romantica) una certa svalutazione della poesia virgiliana
che, rispetto al modello teocriteo, si concederebbe ad un gioco
intellettualistico, tutt’altro che spontaneo, di travestimenti e
allusioni. Ma, va ribadito, non è il caso di insistere oggi sul fatto
che le allusioni alla realtà contemporanea delle confische, che
certo interessarono più o meno direttamente anche il poeta, sono
148 AUGUSTAN POETRY
soltanto una componente tra le tante di una poesia che mira

ad una visione della storia di ben più ampio respiro2. Sarebbe
opportuno, in realtà, tentare una riflessione complessiva, che
fosse anche una sorta di bilancio critico, sulla reale incidenza
dell’allegoria nell’opera virgiliana, a partire dalle Bucoliche.
Ma in questo contributo ci concentreremo su Orazio, la cui
interpretazione sembra necessitare di un più urgente correttivo.
1. Quale allegoria per la nave di Orazio? (Quintiliano

va sicuramente relativizzato)
Se, dunque, l’interpretazione quintilianea, nel caso
di Virgilio, può essere oggi serenamente relativizzata come
appartenente ad un preciso contesto storico e culturale, ormai
lontano, nel caso del carme oraziano, ben diversamente,
Quintiliano è ancora a fondamento dell’interpretazione corrente,
come si può facilmente osservare consultando i commenti
di riferimento al libro I dei Carmina3. Dunque, stando a
Quintiliano, qui Orazio si rivolgerebbe, esortandola ad entrare
in porto, ad una nave piuttosto malridotta, in cui andrebbe
riconosciuta la respublica, mentre flutti e tempeste starebbero
per la guerra civile e il porto, invece, per la pace e la concordia.
2
Basti ricordare come si esprime uno tra i più influenti commentatori delle
Bucoliche, Coleman (1977, 274-5), che pure non si distingue certo per l’eccessivo
scetticismo a riguardo: «Clearly Vergil’s own experience provided much of the
inspiration in both poems [scil. ecl. 1; 9]; but his chief concern is once again a
more general one etc.»; ancor più reciso Clausen (1994, 271) ad 9.10: «Menalcas
is a general benefactor». È noto che la tradizione biografica virgiliana, con le
sue implicazioni esegetiche, è attualmente vagliata con occhio assai critico dagli
studiosi, come ben si può vedere dalla trattazione di Horsfall (1995).
3
Con la menzione di Quintiliano si apre l’introduzione al carme di Nisbet;
Hubbard (1970, 179), che in seguito si esprimono più d’una volta in termini di
‘Ship of State’ (pp. 180-181); l’interpretazione quintilianea è, in sostanza, fatta
propria ancora da Mayer (2012, 136-7) (dove è definita, significativamente,
come lo ‘standard’: spec. p. 136); ma cfr. già, come esempio assai autorevole e
influente, Kiessling; Heinze (196010, 71).
Così, appunto, la decodificazione quintilianea: navem pro

republica, fluctus et tempestates pro bellis civilibus, portum pro pace
atque concordia.
Diciamo subito che l’interpretazione di Quintiliano è
nella sostanza corretta, nel senso che stabilisce giustamente la
natura allegorica del carme in un quadro interpretativo che è
quello p o l i t i c o. Ma la facile generalizzazione ‘Nave dello
Stato’ ovvero ‘Ship of State’ (navis = respublica), se poteva bastare
a Quintiliano e ai suoi allievi, interessati all’impiego pratico di
una comoda allegoria in contesto retorico, non dovrebbe bastare
agli interpreti oraziani. Non si può pretendere da Quintiliano,
che citava presumibilmente a memoria i testi poetici (talvolta, a
quanto pare, con qualche inesattezza4), e unicamente in funzione
dei propri scopi didattici, la precisione e gli interessi dell’esegeta.
E infatti, a dimostrazione della sua problematicità, l’equivalenza
nave = respublica ha prodotto due conseguenze molto diverse,
ma pure, in fondo, analoghe: da un lato la svalutazione estetica
del carme, dall’altro l’idea che qui l’allegoria non sia di ambito
politico ma di ambito erotico. Due conseguenze estreme, si
potrebbe dire eccentriche (e, aggiungerei, insoddisfacenti), di
quello che è, in effetti, un reale problema.
Della prima conseguenza dà buona testimonianza un
fondamentale commento al libro I dei Carmina, quello di
Nisbet; Hubbard (1970, 181) dove si legge: «Horace ode,
though elegant as always, is less than a masterpiece. The poet’s
immediate impulse was not a worsening political situation
(which is perhaps why the date is so uncertain), but a perverse
determination to write allegory. Alcaeus knew what was like to
be swept along in a black boat [...]. Horace can supply only a
4
Un caso in cui, probabilmente, la memoria ingannò Quintiliano è carm. 1.12.41
incomptis ... capillis (che egli in inst. 9.3.18, cita con intonsis); sulla non totale
affidabilità delle citazioni quintilianee giunse a conclusioni condivisibili già Cole
(1906, 51) spec. 51; cf. anche Odgers (1933, 186). Questi studi, ancora validi e
utili, andrebbero però, senza dubbio, aggiornati.
150 AUGUSTAN POETRY
civil servant’s inventory of the damage. His personification of

the ship is stereotyped and unconvincing, more so than in I. 3».
Nella citazione l’idea dell’allegoria oraziana come astrazione
intellettualistica si salda, evidentemente, al (pre-)giudizio già
romantico (e non solo romantico) di Orazio poeta freddo e
mediato, rispetto al suo predecessore greco, più spontaneo e
immerso nella realtà di ciò che descrive5.
La seconda conseguenza è legata ad un brillante articolo
di W. S. Anderson6, che ha avuto l’indubbio merito di osservare
una serie di incongruenze da cui l’interpretazione della nave in
termini di astrazione onnicomprensiva (la ‘Nave dello Stato’) è
resa quanto meno disagevole: di qui l’interpretazione della nave
come allegoria di una donna che il poeta avrebbe amato, almeno
in passato, ma che ora farebbe bene, in ragione dell’età matura,
a ritirarsi dalle tempeste dell’amore (e, forse, a ritornare dal suo
amante, Orazio stesso). Delle incongruenze notate da W. S.
5
È ben probabile che in Nisbet e Hubbard agisca direttamente l’influente giudizio
di Fraenkel (1957, 157), che, aprendo la trattazione di Carm. 1-3 proprio con
1.14, scriveva: «O navis referent is certainly not one of Horace’s masterpieces»;
cf. l’ediz. ital. (1993, 217); a sua volta Fraenkel si poneva sulla linea della grande
filologia tedesca, in particolare il Wilamowitz (1913), per quanto dal Wilamowitz
qui Fraenkel prendesse le distanze riguardo alla questione, che egli giudicava
evidentemente futile (ma che non lo è affatto!), se Orazio si ritragga o meno a
bordo della nave: cf. (1957, 157, n. 2.). Vale la pena citare lo stesso Wilamowitz,
perché qualcosa delle sue parole sembra risuonare ancora (nonostante Fraenkel,
nello specifico!) nel comm. di Nisbet; Hubbard: «Denn er [scil. Horaz] steht
am Ufer und sieht das Schiff im Kampfe mit den Wellen, Alkaios fährt darauf
und besteht die Gefahr» (1913, p. 312). Giova, a questo punto, ricordare come
si esprimesse a suo tempo G. Pasquali, quando reagiva al «pregiudizio, qualche
anno fa ancor più diffuso che non ora, che Orazio fosse un Alcaeus dimidiatus
come Virgilio un dimidiatus Homerus» (1964 [1920], 18).
6
Anderson (1966, 84-98); la tesi di Anderson ha trovato non pochi riscontri, a
partire già da Shackleton Bailey (1982, 89), che mostra di prenderla in seria
considerazione; cf. inoltre Knorr (2006); Kruschwitz (2007). Non più di un
rapido riferimento all’articolo di W. S. Anderson si legge in Nisbet; Hubbard
cit., che si esprimono a riguardo in termini di «strange theories» (p. 180): non
è forse ozioso notare che W. S. Anderson nel suo articolo si era mostrato assai
critico, seppure rispettosissimo, nei confronti di E. Fraenkel.
Anderson, e da altri dopo di lui, mi limito per ora a ricordarne

una sola: come potrebbe il poeta nella quinta e conclusiva strofa
rivolgersi alla Nave dello Stato come ad un’entità distinta da
sé, verso la quale egli avrebbe provato prima sazietà/disgusto e
poi desiderio? Come ci si può estraniare dallo Stato, di cui, per
definizione, ogni cittadino fa parte?
Ma è arrivato il momento di ascoltare la voce di Orazio
stesso, con i suoi dinamici asclepiadei (il sistema metrico del
carme 1.14 è il cosiddetto terzo asclepiadeo):
O navis, referent in mare te novi
fluctus. o quid agis? fortiter occupa
portum. nonne vides, ut
nudum remigio latus
et malus celeri saucius Africo 5
antemnaeque gemant ac sine funibus
vix durare carinae
possint imperiosius
aequor? non tibi sunt integra lintea,
non di, quos iterum pressa voces malo. 10
quamvis Pontica pinus,
silvae filia nobilis,
iactes et genus et nomen inutile:
nil pictis timidus navita puppibus
fidit. tu nisi ventis 15
debes ludibrium, cave.
nuper sollicitum quae mihi taedium,
nunc desiderium curaque non levis,
interfusa nitentis
vites aequora Cycladas. 20
O nave, ti riporteranno in mare nuovi

flutti. Ah, che fai? Forza, entra
152 AUGUSTAN POETRY
in porto! Non vedi forse, come

la fiancata sia priva di remi
e l’albero ferito dal veloce Africo,
come le antenne gemano e senza le funi
a mala pena la chiglia resistere
possa ad un così imperioso
mare? Non hai integre le vele,
non gli dèi, che tu, premuta dal male, di nuovo possa
invocare.
Per quanto tu, fatta di pino del Ponto,
figlia di nobile selva,
ti vanti della tua origine e del tuo nome inutile,
il marinaio, se ha paura, di poppe dipinte
non si fida. Tu, se dei venti
non vuoi divenire trastullo, sta’ attenta.
Di recente tu mi sei stata affannoso disgusto,
ora mi manchi, mia angoscia non lieve:
che tu possa evitare il mare che sta
tra le Cicladi splendenti.7
Del carme 1.14 mi sono occupato una decina di anni fa

e sono tornato ad occuparmi recentemente all’interno di uno
studio sul mare (anche non-allegorico!) in Orazio8. Mi rendo
conto di quanto sia difficile mettere in discussione uno stereotipo
così radicato nell’insegnamento scolastico, di Orazio e non solo,
quale è la ‘Nave dello Stato’, che tanta fortuna, anche attraverso
Quintiliano, ha avuto nella cultura occidentale. E non escluderei
che l’immagine di un Orazio che si rivolga, indistintamente,
ad un’entità astratta come la respublica Romana possa riuscire
7
Hor., Carm. 1.14
8
Cf. Cucchiarelli (2004); (2005); Cucchiarelli (2015a, spec. 301-317).
confortevole e rassicurante, in linea con l’interpretazione

generale di un Orazio non troppo politicamente esposto (e
quindi un poco vago e indistinto), nel male come nel bene9.
Proprio il fatto di aver già discusso la questione in dettaglio
altrove mi permette, spero, di essere piuttosto sintetico. Dunque,
mi limiterò ad elencare quelli che ritengo i punti fondamentali
per arrivare ad una corretta interpretazione del carme oraziano,
qui e là concedendomi qualche breve osservazione di sostegno
o in aggiunta rispetto a quanto ho già avuto modo di osservare
in passato. Nel passaggio dall’uno all’altro punto (per un totale
di otto) chiarirò progressivamente quella che ritengo essere la
giusta interpretazione del carme.
1) Il modo in cui Orazio si esprime, soprattutto nell’ultima
strofe, non si adatta ad una nave intesa come astrazione
onnicomprensiva, quella dello Stato-respublica. Orazio parla
come se non fosse a bordo della nave, ma ciò sarebbe impossibile,
o quanto meno molto difficile, se egli si stesse riferendo allo
Stato, di cui naturalmente è parte. Termini come desiderium
e cura appartengono ad un lessico personale, dell’amore/
amicizia, adatto piuttosto ai rapporti con un individuo o un
gruppo di individui, ma non del tutto appropriato e consono
allo Stato-respublica.
2) Quella di Quintiliano non è l’unica interpretazione
antica del carme. Sia Porfirione che il cosiddetto Pseudo-Acrone
(interpreti, si noti, istituzionalmente più vicini al testo oraziano
rispetto a Quintiliano) testimoniano il tentativo di identificare,
all’interno dell’allegoria politica, un preciso riferimento ad un
definito individuo, che si tratti di Bruto o di Sesto Pompeo.
9
Si veda in proposito Clay (2010, 139-40), che, infatti, si dichiara non convin-
ta dalle argomentazioni da me avanzate nell’articolo del 2004-2005 (n. 41, a
p. 145).
154 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Ecco i due luoghi dei commentatori10 (si noti che in Ps.-

Acrone l’interpretazione navis = respublica è liquidata piuttosto
rapidamente come una possibilità tra le altre):
in hac ode ad Marcum Brutum loquitur, qui apud
Philippos Macedoniae urbem ab Augusto fusus videbatur
rursus se instruere ad pugnam. Merito autem poeta per
allegoriam metuere se pro eo testatur, quoniam sub ipso
militaverat. Qui tamen ex proelio Philippico fatigatus,
receptus ab Augusto veniam ab eo meruit.11
per allegoriam ode ista bellum civile designat, ut quidam

volunt, alii rempublicam. Certius tamen est quod Sextum
Pompeium filium Pompei moneat qui, postea quam foedus
cum triumviris fecit, bellum civile denuo reparare voluit.
Secundum autem civile bellum inter Augustum Caesarem
et Cassium et Brutum fuit, qui fuerunt Gai Caesaris
interfectores, sub quibus Horatius militavit.12
3) La nave, per la sua stessa natura di oggetto collettivo (che

presuppone, cioè, un equipaggio) non può essere agevolmente
identificata con un solo individuo, che sia Bruto, Sesto Pompeo
o altri, ma piuttosto identifica un gruppo, cioè, allegoricamente,
una parte politica. Già nei celebri carmi alcaici (spec. frr. 208a;
6 V.) la nave rappresenta lo strumento di aggregazione di un
gruppo di compagni (gli hetairoi) che si percepivano, certo,
come depositari dei veri valori della polis, ma non potevano
propriamente identificarsi con essa13. Un concetto come quello
quintilianeo di Stato-respublica, molto vicino di fatto al concetto
10
Qui riportati nel testo al momento più affidabile, che è quello curato da M.
Spurio (Porfirione) e L. Paretti (Ps.-Acrone), nel III volume dell’Enciclopedia
Oraziana (Roma 1998); sull’esegesi antica di 1.14 cf. già Reitzenstein (1918,
393-6).
11
Porph. Ad carm. 1.14.1.
12
Ps.-Acr. Ad carm. 1.14.1.
13
Presuppongo qui il noto lavoro di Rösler (1980).
moderno, è senz’altro anacronistico per Alceo, ma ancora forse

non del tutto appropriato nemmeno per Orazio e la sua epoca.
4) In questa prospettiva si chiarisce non soltanto l’ultima
strofa del carme, ma tutta la sua seconda parte (si noti che Orazio
ha nettamente bipartito il carme, dedicando alle prime due
strofe e mezzo la ripresa di Alceo, alle seconde due e mezzo la
codificazione del nuovo e originale messaggio allegorico14). La
nave che si vanta dei suoi illustri natali (13 iactes et genus et nomen
inutile), ma che è nella realtà troppo malridotta per ispirare fiducia,
nei confronti della quale Orazio ha provato prima un senso di
distacco molto forte, ma comunque angoscioso (17 sollicitum
... taedium), e poi un senso di mancanza e preoccupazione (18
desiderium curaque non levis), va identificata con la parte politica
degli oppositori, in cui fu sempre ben netta la componente della
grande aristocrazia romana. Erano gli aristocratici della nobilitas
ad essere vanamente fieri delle loro origini.
5) Nel contesto della concreta vita politica e militare
di Roma, per come fu vissuta in prima persona dallo stesso
Orazio, l’imitazione di Alceo perde quel suo aspetto freddo
e intellettualistico, si direbbe libresco, che tanto ha nuociuto
all’interpretazione del carme. Come Alceo e i suoi compagni,
così anche Orazio e tanti altri cittadini di Roma si trovarono a
combattere contro altri concittadini, conobbero le durezze del
campo di battaglia e anche della vita marinara15. Per il poeta
Orazio e il suo pubblico, dunque, doveva essere più che evidente
quale concreto contesto trovasse una tale imitazione allegorica
14
Su questo vd. infra, p. 161.
15
Come Orazio dice proprio a proposito di Alceo: dura navis, / dura fugae mala,
dura belli (Carm. 2.13. 27-8). In questo contesto è significativo che già nell’epodo
16, come strumento di fuga dalle guerre civili, sia presa in considerazione la flot-
ta, su cui il popolo romano viene esortato dal poeta a salire, per lasciare Roma e
volgersi verso le utopistiche Isole dei Beati: cf. Epod. 16, spec. 24 ratem occupare
quid moramur?; su navi, flotte, dissidi civili, si può vedere Mastrocinque (2016).
156 AUGUSTAN POETRY
dello stasiotico Alceo: quello della guerra civile, lungamente

combattuta, dalle Idi di Marzo e Filippi in poi, per mare e in
Grecia. La parola finale del carme, sull’interpretazione della
quale si è molto discusso, senza dubbio ha l’effetto di proiettare
l’immaginazione del lettore appunto nei mari della Grecia:
Cycladas16.
6) L’allocuzione di Orazio ad una nave (alcaica) che,
nonostante fosse malridotta, voleva continuare ad affrontare
i pericoli dei venti, identifica quel partito di irriducibili che,
fondandosi su di una forte matrice aristocratica, continuò
l’opposizione anche dopo Filippi, prima schierandosi con Sesto
Pompeo e poi con Antonio. Qui Orazio non ha bisogno di
far riferimento ad un contesto storico preciso, perché quello
che gli interessa è definire un paradigma comportamentale e
politico che, dopo Filippi, non aveva più senso: quello della
ribellione (o, in termini alcaici, stasis). Non è tanto corretto
parlare di incertezza nella datazione, come fanno Nisbet;
Hubbard («the date is so uncertain»), quanto di deliberata e
mirata indeterminatezza, che rende il carme valido e attuale in
tutta la situazione politica e militare successiva a Filippi (e, si
può aggiungere, anteriore ad Azio). Orazio aveva combattuto a
Filippi dalla parte repubblicana, ma poi si era staccato dai suoi,
16
Proprio le Cicladi si affacciano alla mente di Virgilio nell’iperbolica compara-
zione che mira ad esprimere le enormi dimensioni delle navi che si scontreranno
ad Azio, la battaglia con cui, nella propaganda augustea, le guerre civili si con-
clusero: Aen. 8.691-2 pelago credas innare revolsas / Cycladas aut montis concurrere
montibus altos (l’effetto è anche di suggerire la forza devastante delle guerre ci-
vili, capaci di sconvolgere il mondo come in un cataclisma o gigantomachia).
Nel convegno di San Paolo Andreas Michalopoulos, considerata la trasparente
etimologia di Cyclades (ad es. Plin., Nat. 4.65 in orbem sitae; anche Serv. ad Aen.
3.126; Maltby (1991, 169), s.v. Cyclades), ha osservato che una geografia circolare
(‘ciclica’) è particolarmente adatta al contesto oraziano: l’ultima parola del carme
vuole dunque contribuire a suggerire il pericolo della guerra civile, che è ‘avvol-
gente’ e in perenne rinnovamento, ‘ciclico’, appunto (1-2 novi fluctus, all’altro
capo del carme) – un pericolo da cui è assai difficile uscire, una volta che si sia
commesso l’errore di entrarvi.
per i quali ora torna a provare un vivo sentimento, che è quello

della preoccupazione. Al paradigma della ribellione il carme
1, 14 contrappone quello della resa: una resa decorosa, di chi
ha molto combattuto, ma si rende conto che proseguire sarebbe
solo un insensato suicidio, un suicidio oltretutto dannoso per
l’intera comunità dei concittadini.
7) Lo stesso Orazio riconosce nella nave di Alceo lo
strumento della lotta e dell’impegno guerriero, nell’allocuzione
al barbitos che riveste un ruolo rilevante nella sequenza finale
del libro I: Lesbio primum modulate civi, / qui ferox bello tamen
inter arma, / sive iactatam religarat udo / litore navim eqs.
(Carm. 1.32, 5-8). Si noti, la nave che Alceo all’occasione sa
legare all’umida riva è una nave s q u a s s a t a, evidentemente
dalle tempeste di un mare che è anche allegorico, da cui, cioè, è
rappresentata potentemente la violenza della stasis.
8) Nell’edizione alessandrina di Alceo, che si impose

come normativa nella diffusione tra il pubblico dei lettori
ellenistici e quindi romani, i carmi allegorici ricevevano la loro
soluzione interpretativa sia da appositi sussidi esegetici (come
i commentari) sia dal fatto di essere collocati all’interno dei
libri stasiotici. Risultava evidente dalla loro stessa collocazione
editoriale che i carmi della nave avevano un significato
politico, giacché essi seguivano o precedevano carmi in cui
l’argomento stasiotico era esplicito. In primo luogo, dunque,
osserverei – anche se non intendo insistere troppo su questo
punto – che nella raccolta oraziana il carme 1.14 è seguito
dal carme 1.15 Pastor cum traheret, in cui non pochi interpreti
hanno ravvisato la proiezione mitico-omerica della vicenda
di Antonio e Cleopatra: dunque, un tema che rimanda alle
guerre civili, nella loro fase ultima e decisiva. Ma credo che,
affidandosi all’insieme della propria raccolta lirica, Orazio abbia
in effetti voluto indirizzare i lettori esperti (che, cioè, conoscono
l’insieme della poesia lirica oraziana nei suoi vari volumina)
158 AUGUSTAN POETRY
verso la giusta soluzione dell’allegoria. Nel carme 2.7, all’amico

Pompeo finalmente rientrato a Roma (forse dopo l’amnistia
successiva ad Azio?), Orazio rievoca in nitidi e dignitosissimi
versi l’avventura di Filippi. Sono versi veramente molto celebri,
ma pure gli interpreti del carme 1.14 non ne hanno tenuto debito
conto:
tecum Philippos et celerem fugam
sensi relicta non bene parmula, 10
cum fracta virtus et minaces
turpe solum tetigere mento:
sed me per hostis Mercurius celer
denso paventem sustulit aere,
te rursus in bellum resorbens 15
unda fretis tulit aestuosis.
Con te Filippi e la rapida fuga

patii, perso malamente lo scudo,
quando la virtù fu distrutta e gli spavaldi
toccarono col mento il turpe suolo:
me il veloce Mercurio tra i nemici,
spaurito, sottrasse nell’aria raddensata,
te di nuovo risucchiandoti in guerra
l’onda portò tra i flutti tempestosi.
Nel metro più propriamente alcaico, cioè, appunto, la strofe

alcaica, Orazio dice come Mercurio lo avesse fortunosamente
sottratto alla mischia. I due amici si erano ritrovati entrambi
assai a malpartito, dopo aver subito quel terribile colpo
capace di annientare qualunque forma di virtus. Entrambi
malridotti, dunque, c o m e la nave di 1.14. Ma il solo Pompeo
fu risucchiato dall’onda (della guerra civile) tra mari agitati:
rursus ... resorbens / unda fretis ... aestuosis (15-16), che è una
variazione, oserei dire esplicativa, di 1.14, spec. 1-2 referent ...
novi / fluctus; 19-20 interfusa ... / ... aequora Cycladas (qui non
conta, naturalmente, il rapporto cronologico tra i due carmi,

ma la loro connessione sincronica). Così, dunque, i destini dei
due amici si divisero, esattamente come sono separati Orazio
e la nave in 1, 14. Verso un amico come Pompeo, lungamente
e pericolosamente assente da Roma, che cos’altro potrà aver
provato Orazio, prima che egli facesse ritorno, se non un
sentimento di mancanza e di preoccupazione (desiderium e
cura)? In Alceo l’allegoria trova la sua soluzione nel contesto
editoriale dell’opera: anche per l’allegoria oraziana vale
analogamente il principio aristarcheo di ‘chiarire Orazio con
Orazio’17.
Dunque, in sintesi: la nave del carme 1.14 va identificata
con la parte degli oppositori, quei repubblicani, spesso di nobili
origini o comunque guidati da nobiles, assieme ai quali Orazio
aveva combattuto a Filippi. Ma dopo Filippi Orazio si arrese,
mentre molti tra i suoi vecchi compagni continuarono la lotta
almeno per un decennio: a loro qui Orazio si rivolge.
Non sto ad entrare in questioni di gusto, oserei dire
che non è questo il mio compito. Lascio, dunque, al giudizio
personale di ognuno la questione sollevata da Nisbet; Hubbard
con la loro svalutazione del carme oraziano. E certo Orazio
stesso doveva rendersi conto di quanto fosse difficile gareggiare
con Alceo. Ma è lecito credere che una così decisa svalutazione
del carme sia la diretta conseguenza di un’interpretazione che
veda nella nave una generica, direi sbiadita, raffigurazione della
17
Che la guerra civile debba essere immaginata come un grande e trascinante
movimento lo dice anche un altro fondamentale luogo oraziano, l’attacco del
libro II, nel carme a Pollione, in alcaiche: Motum ex Metello consule civicum /
bellique causas eqs. (1-2). Vale la pena di notare che, dopo il carme 2.2 in saffiche
a Sallustio, nipote e figlio adottivo dello storico, nel carme 2.3, di nuovo in
alcaiche, Orazio si rivolge a un personaggio fortemente coinvolto nelle varie
vicende delle guerre civili, Q. Dellio. Non ci possono essere dubbi sul tono
storico-politico del libro II nel suo avvio, che riprende, dopo la parentesi degli
erotici carmi 2.4-5 e del carme 2.6 (dove comunque già si affaccia il tema della
stanchezza, dopo i viaggi e la militia), con il carme 2.7.
160 AUGUSTAN POETRY
respublica tout court. In realtà, come ho cercato di dimostrare, la

concretezza descrittiva e immaginativa delle allegorie alcaiche
non va del tutto perduta nella reinterpretazione e nuova sintesi
di Orazio.
La nave, che in Alceo era simbolo e strumento della lotta
politica, principio di aggregazione per il poeta e i suoi compagni,
diventa in Orazio allegoria di una partecipazione militante alla
lotta civile, da cui il poeta si era distaccato, ma che invece ancora
riuniva interi equipaggi di antichi compagni. Non so se si può
dire che quella di Orazio fosse una «perverse determination
to write allegory» e se una simile perversione sia un genere
di peccato che va rimproverato ad un poeta. Ma direi che
un’opportuna conoscenza del contesto storico tra il 44 e il 31 a.C.
mostra quanto l’autore del carme 1.14, non troppo diversamente
da Alceo, dovesse trovarsi nel vivo di una «worsening political
situation»: ancora fino ad Azio (e ancora oltre, in realtà) il
pericolo di una ricaduta nella guerra civile era costante (e questo
pericolo, certo, era amplificato dagli intellettuali come Orazio
vicini al gruppo di potere di Ottaviano, Mecenate, Agrippa)18.
18
Su questi argomenti resta fondamentale ediz. ital. a cura di A. Momigliano.
Ma si aggiunga anche, in particolare sull’ascesa di Ottaviano nelle prime fasi
della sua azione politica, il volume di Canfora (2015). Se Azio fu percepita
come la grande battaglia che segnò un punto di svolta nel potere di Ottaviano-
Augusto (ad es. D.C. 51.1.1-2), la memoria di Filippi venne costantemente
mantenuta viva dal regime, anche perché a Filippi, attraverso la vendetta del
padre, il giovane Divi filius legittimò il proprio potere: tale continuità con Filippi
si fa evidente, in particolare, nella costruzione del tempio di Marte Ultore con
l’annesso Foro monumentale, che fu promesso in voto proprio a Filippi e
finalmente inaugurato soltanto nel 2 a.C. (cf. Suet. Aug. 29.2 aedem Martis bello
Philippensi pro ultione paterna suscepto voverat; anche r. gest. div. Aug. 21, p. 36
Volkm.3 in privato solo Martis Ultoris templum forumque Augustum ex manibiis
feci; anche 2, p. 12 Volkm.3 ultus eorum facinus). Tutto ciò aiuta a comprendere
perché, quando rievocherà la battaglia vari anni più tardi, Orazio veda Augusto
stesso nel ruolo di un robusto e muscoloso eroe, unico protagonista, come una
specie di dio (Marte ultore?) in terra: Epist. 2.2.47-8 arma / Caesaris Augusti
non responsura lacertis (in realtà, dal punto di vista strettamente tecnico-
militare il ruolo dell’allora giovanissimo Ottaviano sul campo di Filippi fu assai
modesto).
Orazio ha voluto scrivere un carme stasiotico, sintetizzando a suo

modo le allegorie nautiche del civis Alceo, per dire che era il mo-
mento, dopo tante battaglie e dissidi, di tentare un’impresa ancor
più difficile, quella del ‘porto della concordia’, per parafrasare
Quintiliano.
E dunque, che dire di Quintiliano? Che nella sostanza,
possiamo ripeterlo, ha ragione: nel senso, cioè, che quella di
Orazio è un’allegoria di ambito politico, che effettivamente
esorta a temere i pericoli della guerra civile e a navigare verso
la conciliazione. Ma, come nel caso delle Bucoliche virgiliane, il
giudizio di Quintiliano va ridefinito e delimitato, perché non
abbia l’effetto di paralizzare le nostre capacità interpretative,
riuscendo quindi, in ultima analisi, fuorviante. È vero che
Menalca, Titiro, ma a tratti anche Melibeo (e forse Coridone?),
sono personaggi che alludono a fatti, sentimenti, esperienze,
propri del poeta che quei personaggi concepì. Ma sarebbe
assurdo stabilire una corrispondenza biunivoca tra il personaggio
Menalca e l’autore Virgilio, come Quintiliano sembrerebbe
voler fare nel luogo citato del libro VIII. Così, la nave di
Orazio non è identificabile con la respublica, per quanto Orazio
nel carme 1.14 mostri una precisa idea politica (che riguarda
anche, ma indirettamente, la respublica nel suo insieme). La
schematica generalizzazione navis = respublica, se poteva bastare
a Quintiliano e ai suoi allievi, non può bastare agli interpreti del
carme 1.14.
2. ‘Metafora continuata’ e il testo del v. 10 (Quintiliano

va qui, invece, valorizzato)
Se, come abbiamo visto, il giudizio di Quintiliano è stato
fin troppo preso sul serio per quel che riguarda l’interpretazione
generale del carme, su di un punto specifico, che interessa una
questione critico-testuale nel v. 10, non se ne è tenuto abbastanza
162 AUGUSTAN POETRY
conto19. Quintiliano, infatti, fa un’affermazione che avrebbe

meritato di attrarre maggiore attenzione, quando dice, nello
specifico, che il carme oraziano è un buon esempio del primo tipo
di allegoria, in cui cioè si abbia una serie continuata di metafore
(continuatis translationibus). In effetti, la navis è presentata al
lettore come una ‘vera nave’, senza alcun esplicito riferimento
a fatti extra-allegorici (cioè a quel significato ‘altro’ che della
allegoria è la soluzione). Altrimenti, certo, gli interpreti non ne
avrebbero così lungamente discusso, con divergenze e dissensi
anche molto consistenti! – come abbiamo potuto vedere.
Prima di arrivare al v. 10 e alla sua questione testuale è
opportuno considerare, con qualche dettaglio, la struttura del
carme, proprio per comprendere come l’invenzione metaforica
si articoli all’interno di esso. A ben vedere, infatti, il carme è
caratterizzato da una struttura molto costruita. Lo sviluppo del
tema, dunque, si divide studiatamente in tre sezioni, ciascuna con
un numero decrescente di versi (il che mira probabilmente ad un
effetto di progressiva condensazione e intensificazione emotiva e
concettuale). Nella prima sezione, che comprende i primi dieci
versi ovvero esattamente due strofe e mezzo, l’allocuzione diretta
alla nave, dopo l’enfatico attacco esortativo (1-3), si dispiega
nella descrizione della nave, che resta su di un piano oggettivo,
puramente visuale, in corrispondenza con il verbo reggente
(3 nonne vides): all’unico periodo che si estende dal v. 3 all’inizio
del v. 9 seguono i quasi due versi conclusivi della sezione
(9-10). Nella seconda sezione, che comprende sei versi ovvero
esattamente una strofa e mezzo, viene abbandonato il modo
descrittivo e la nave è presentata nella sua caratterizzazione
morale tramite una vera e propria personificazione: alla nave,
insomma, Orazio si rivolge come ad una persona, ribadendo
19
Riprendo qui, in una prospettiva diversa e con qualche nuova osservazione, quanto
ho sostenuto in un apposito contributo critico-testuale, che, successivamente
alla data del convegno, è stato nel frattempo pubblicato: Cucchiarelli (2015b).
l’ammonizione con il conclusivo verbo cave (11-16). La

terza e ultima sezione, di quattro versi ovvero una sola strofe
(17-20), riprende e chiarisce il discorso morale, esprimendo
l’atteggiamento del poeta nei confronti della nave e dunque
specificando in senso strettamente oraziano l’allegoria. Questa
tripartizione, con progressiva riduzione nel numero dei versi, va
a sovrapporsi le tre parti, disuguali, sono rispettivamente di dieci,
sei e quattro versi, va a sovrapporsi alla simmetrica bipartizione
del carme cui già abbiamo avuto modo di fare riferimento (supra,
p. 153), bipartizione dalla quale esso è suddiviso in due parti
di dieci versi ciascuna (e, ciascuna, di due strofe e mezzo):
la prima parte, quasi del tutto descrittiva, è assai vicina al
modello alcaico (1-10); la seconda parte, morale e riflessiva,
è del tutto originalmente oraziana (11-20). Sia che si guardi
alla bipartizione sia che si guardi alla tripartizione, resta chiaro
che tra il v. 10 e il v. 11 passa una netta incisione strutturale del
carme20. E proprio nell’ultima parola del v. 10, subito prima,
dunque, di tale incisione, credo che sia da ravvisare la questione
di testo che ci interessa.
Fino al v. 10 compreso, dunque, la descrizione della nave è
tutta propriamente nautico-marinara. Anche gli ‘dèi’ non sono le
divinità del mare o del cielo, che non si capisce come potrebbero
essere danneggiate al pari delle vele, ma quelle immagini sacre
(statuette o simulacri) che, poste in genere a poppa, proteggevano
la navigazione21. Ma l’ultima parola, che chiude tutto questo
drammatico movimento sintattico-descrittivo, subito a precedere
la netta incisione strutturale che suddivide il carme, non ha nulla
20
Non c’è da dubitare del fatto che nel successivo v. 11 quamvis Pontica pinus
eqs. inizi un nuovo periodo, secondo l’interpretazione corrente, oggi senz’altro
maggioritaria tra editori e commentatori. Alcuni, invece, in passato legavano la
concessiva a quel che precede.
21
Cf. Nisbet; Hubbard (1970, 185) ad loc., dove è osservato, appunto, che di deve
riferirsi «like malus, lintea, etc., to a part of the boat»; ma già Kiessling; Heinze
(1960, 73); inoltre Mayer (2012, 134).
164 AUGUSTAN POETRY
di specificamente marinaro e anzi comporta una opacizzazione

dell’invenzione allegorica: a nulla servirebbe rivolgersi a quei
simulacri divini ormai infranti, quando di nuovo la nave si
trovasse a essere ‘p r e m u t a d a l m a l e’ (pressa ... malo).
L’incolore e generico aggettivo malo, sostantivato all’ablativo
singolare, rende obbligata un’interpretazione essa stessa generica
di pressa che invece, di per sé, è termine del tutto proprio, e
specifico, in riferimento ad un natante che si trovi ad avere
cospicuamente abbassata la linea di galleggiamento (Verg.,
Georg. 1, 303): dopo la fiancata priva dei remi, l’albero maestro
ferito, il gemito delle antenne e la carena priva dei suoi legami
a rinforzo, dopo le vele e i simulacri danneggiati, la parola
conclusiva del movimento stando al testo tràdito è, dunque, un
generico ‘male’.
Del problema dovettero in qualche misura accorgersi
Nisbet, Hubbard, che, dopo aver notato la particolare semantica
di pressa, osservano appunto che malo è molto meno appropriato
al contesto: «In our passage the word [scil. pressa] is particu-
larly appropriate as it is sometimes applied to the sinking of
ships [...]. But malo is much less appropriate than tempestate»
(1970, 185-6). Ma forse la valutazione di questo carme come
un ‘non-capolavoro’, che ereditavano da E. Fraenkel, agevolava
i due dotti e finissimi commentatori nell’ammettere in Orazio
un uso linguistico meno efficace e appropriato: è vero che
malo è parola generica, si potrebbe dire incolore, ma essa non
può sorprendere chi veda in Orazio soprattutto una fredda e
intellettualistica «determination to write allegory». Credo che
qui, però, l’improprietà sia da imputare non ad Orazio ma ai
manoscritti.
Credo, cioè, che l’ablativo scelto da Orazio per determinare
pressa sia non malo ma salo: non un generico male opprimerebbe
la nave, come potrebbe esserne oppresso un qualunque individuo
(essere vivente o oggetto personificato), ma è il ‘mare aperto’,
con il suo potente moto ondoso, ad abbassarne pericolosamente
il galleggiamento, ‘premendola giù’22. Probabile prestito dal

greco σάλος, il termine salum (anche al maschile salus) è parola
letteraria, ben presente nella lingua repubblicana, in tragedia
(Enn. trag. 179 Joc.; Acc. trag. 10 R.3) e nelle orazioni di Cicerone
(Verr. 2.5.91; Caecin. 88) e ancora utilizzata da Livio (37.10.10;
37.13.8): con essa si indica il mare al largo, caratterizzato dalla
sua forza ondosa trascinante, come ben si vede, in particolare,
dal luogo di Catullo, 63.16 rapidum salum tulistis truculentaque
pelagi. Il mare lontano dalla costa o quanto meno fuori dal porto
(ante portum, ad esempio, nel già menzionato Liv. 37.10.10), è
esattamente dove la nave si trova al momento, se il poeta deve
esortarla perché nel porto, appunto, si sbrighi ad entrare (fortiter
occupa portum), evitando di essere trascinata via, cioè in alto
mare (in mare), dai novi fluctus. Il pericolo deve essere ribadito
da un sostantivo che abbia in sé l’idea della forza trascinante
del mare: e questo sostantivo, come testimonia l’esplicitazione
rapidum salum di Catullo, è salo. La parola è utilizzata dallo stesso
Orazio, proprio in contesto di naufragio, in un testo che con ogni
verosimiglianza è anteriore al carme 1.14 (e sicuramente noto ai
lettori del carme per il fatto di essere stato pubblicato in raccolta
già in precedenza): non saxa nudis surdiora navitis / Neptunus
alto tundit hibernus salo (Epod. 17.54-55). È ben possibile che,
nel descrivere la drammatica situazione in cui si trova la nave,
l’Orazio lirico si sia ricordato dell’epodo, recuperandone quella
parola così significativa, con un deliberato gioco di memoria
interna: in entrambi i casi salo, all’ablativo, è ultima parola del
verso (e del periodo), con insistenza fonica sul suono /s/ rispetto
alla fine di parola precedente (voceS Salo ≈ hibernuS Salo). Anche
Virgilio nell’Eneide, quando deve far descrivere a Ilioneo la forza
travolgente del mare, che ha spinto i troiani tra secche e scogli
impervi (costringendoli a riparare fortunosamente verso la riva
africana) utilizza l’ablativo salo, qualificandolo con superante,
22
Mi limito qui ai dati essenziali; per una discussione filologica più dettagliata si
rinvia a Cucchiarelli (2015b).
166 AUGUSTAN POETRY
proprio ad esprimerne la capacità soverchiante: cum subito

adsurgens fluctu nimbosus Orion / in vada caeca tulit penitusque
procacibus Austris / perque undas superante salo perque invia saxa
/ dispulit: huc pauci vestris adnavimus oris (Aen. 1.535-9). Con il
participio presente superante Virgilio esprime l’azione del salum
sulla flotta troiana, con il participio passato pressa Orazio descrive
l’effetto che la nave ne riceve.
La tradizione manoscritta, dunque, ha offuscato un tratto
di lingua letteraria elevata, già repubblicana23, con cui Orazio ha
voluto caratterizzare l’estremo pericolo in cui la nave versa. Una
parola specifica, si potrebbe dire ‘tecnica’ del lessico letterario
nautico, chiude con efficace vivacità la sezione, disponendosi
in corrispondenza verticale con l’altrettanto specifico lintea del
verso precedente24. Già nelle fasi più antiche della tradizione il
relativamente difficile salo, nella sequenza pressavocessalo, dovette
corrompersi con il concorso dell’aplografia in un più banale e
generico malo, che sembrò scorrevole e ben comprensibile a
generazioni di copisti e lettori: per chi non coglieva più in dii il
riferimento ai concreti simulacri divini che corredavano la nave e
quindi vedeva nel v. 10 non altro che una disperata (ma generica)
invocazione a dei non più esistenti, un concetto (generico) come
23
Repubblicana anche per quella sua coloritura greca che in poesia romana
spesso suona ‘antica’ e ‘poetica’. Si aggiunga che la coloritura greca è quanto mai
pertinente ed evocativa, dal momento che il corrispettivo greco, da cui deriva il
latino salum per prestito, figurava già nel diretto modello di Orazio, cioè Alceo
(proprio, con ogni verosimiglianza, l’Alceo delle allegorie nautiche): fr. 73, 2 V.
δ᾽ὄττι μάλιστα σάλ[ωι, dove l’integrazione di J. M. Edmonds è generalmente
accettata da editori e studiosi; uso metaforico nel contesto della nave-città anche
in Soph. Ant. 163; Oed. tyr. 24.
24
Come ha osservato Stephen Harrison nel convegno di San Paolo, la rispondenza
lintea ... salo è un caso che può rientrare in uno schema oraziano piuttosto tipico
(nomi specifici appartenenti alla medesima area semantica in corrispondenza
verticale, collocati entrambi a fine di verso e periodo); restando al libro I dei
Carmina Stephen Harrison menziona: 1.9.11-2 cupressi ... orni (nomi di
alberi); 1.17.27-8 coronam ... vestem (abbigliamento); 1.21.11-2 pharetra ... lyra
(equipaggiamento); 1.23.11-2 matrem ... viro (relazioni familiari).
quello di ‘oppresso dal male’ era ben opportuno e perfettamente

significativo25.
Ma qui la nave di Orazio è ancora descritta, a pieno titolo,
come una vera nave, in una successione continuata di metafore,
proprio come voleva Quintiliano. Una parola marinara suggella
la prima sezione del carme (che lo si consideri come bipartito
o come tripartito), e qui, da retore, Quintiliano ci mette sulla
strada giusta: la nave di Orazio, come ogni nave, è premuta non
genericamente dal male, ma dall’alto mare26.
3. Altre navi augustee, tra identità e dissidio, sulla scia

di Orazio
Per l’interprete del carme 1, 14, che guardi ad esso come
parte di una tradizione nautica (e allegorica) risalente ad Alceo
e ben stabilita nella poesia ellenistica e in quella latina, è di
sicura rilevanza la risposta che, sul tema della nave, danno due
importanti poeti augustei, Virgilio e Ovidio. Proprio il confronto
tra due forme letterarie pur così nettamente distinte, già nella
percezione antica, quali la poesia lirica (Orazio) e la poesia
epico-narrativa (Virgilio e Ovidio) si rivelerà utile e produttivo
di significato. Ciò, almeno, è quanto ci proponiamo di mostrare
in questa sezione: vorremmo, cioè, che la nostra interpretazione
dell’allegoria oraziana trovasse conferma in Virgilio e Ovidio
(forse, anche, ricavandone degli spunti di riflessione non
inopportuni per l’opera di questi ultimi).
25
Tanto più quando si pensi che la ‘pressione’ del male (o del Maligno?) è concet-
to di forte suggestione per lettori e copisti cristiani: cfr., tra gli altri, Min. Fel.
28.4 si qui infirmior malo pressus et victus Christianum se negasset; altri esempi in
Cucchiarelli (2015b, 358-9, n. 11).
26
Ancora in forma corretta, verosimilmente, il testo di Orazio era letto
dall’Auctor Octaviae, che proprio dal carme 1, 14 prende l’espressione salo pressa,
riadattandola ad una donna, l’Agrippina ormai destinata a morte certa: ruit in
pelagus rursumque salo / pressa resurgit (346-7).
168 AUGUSTAN POETRY
È utile, preliminarmente, ancora una breve avvertenza di

metodo. Bisogna aver chiaro, cioè, che il gruppo metaforico della
navigazione, nelle sue varie forme che vanno dalla comune langue
alle invenzioni allegoriche dei poeti, appartiene a quel livello
condiviso della cultura che attraversa tutti i mezzi espressivi,
artistici e figurativi, politici e sociali. Dunque, l’interpretazione
del testo poetico può soltanto giovarsi di una visione più ampia,
che permetta di collocare la voce di Orazio (di Virgilio, di
Ovidio...), nel contesto di pubblico che era proprio della Roma
augustea27.
Dunque, anche sulla base di quanto abbiamo visto
analizzando il carme 1, 14, si possono isolare due aspetti salienti
della metafora-allegoria nautica, quando essa si presenti nella
forma della nave personificata (naturalmente nei suoi vari gradi
di personificazione): due aspetti che si riveleranno importanti
anche nell’analisi di Virgilio e Ovidio.
Il primo aspetto è quello identitario, cui strettamente si
collega l’autocoscienza (un aspetto, dunque, ‘interno’, se si vuole
connaturato): la nave ricorda le proprie origini, appartiene ad
un gruppo, può collaborare ad identificarlo.
Il secondo aspetto è ‘esterno’ rispetto alla nave, cioè il
comportamento della realtà/natura, che in genere, trattandosi
del mare, si esprime nei pericoli della navigazione, cui la nave (e
torniamo così al primo aspetto, quello ‘interno’) deve rispondere
con la propria capacità di sopportazione o, se possibile, con la
propria capacità previsionale.
Si capisce che i due aspetti sono di per sé legati tra loro e
come tali si presentano nei testi: in un momento emotivamente
27
Sull’importanza culturale e politica di navi e navigazioni, specialmente
nell’epoca di Augusto, quando alla memoria delle grandi vittorie navali
repubblicane si andava sovrapponendo quella recente di Nauloco e, soprattutto,
di Azio, si rinvia, in una prospettiva sostanzialmente virgiliana, a Cucchiarelli
(2016).
intenso e ricco di potenzialità poetiche (e ideologiche) come

è quello della tempesta, è naturale che la nave mostri la
propria identità. Nell’allegoria politica è appunto il pericolo
che rivela le capacità del ‘governante’ e quindi la nobiltà e le
qualità della nave e del suo equipaggio: d’altra parte anche
per un bravo nocchiero, capace quindi di prevedere l’arrivo
della tempesta, non è facile sapersi regolare di fronte ad eventi
così incontrollabili, come si legge verso la conclusione di un
testo politico assai importante (e ben noto a Roma almeno dai
tempi di Cicerone), la settima lettera attribuita a Platone28.
Nell’incontro o scontro tra le qualità dell’imbarcazione (e di
chi la governa) e l’azione del mare si gioca la possibilità di
successo o insuccesso, nautico e, nel caso di un testo allegorico,
politico.
Nell’importante modello catulliano che già abbiamo
avuto occasione di ricordare, il phaselus del carme 4, non si può
parlare di allegoria politica, naturalmente, ma i due aspetti sono
ben rappresentati: è la stessa ‘barchetta’ a rammentare le proprie
qualità marinare, in particolare l’origine dal Ponto, che le hanno
permesso di superare tante difficoltà, come tanti mari e regioni
(tra cui anche le isole Cicladi: 7) stanno a testimoniare, e di
portare in salvo il padrone (Catullo stesso, presumibilmente:
19). È molto probabile che Orazio, guardando ad Alceo, avesse
ben presente il carme catulliano: anche la sua navis proviene
dai boschi del Ponto e appunto le Cicladi sono un riferimento
geografico già catulliano. Ed è significativo come entrambi
28
Cf. 351d κυβερνήτου δὲ ἀγαθοῦ πάθος ἂν ἴσως οὐ θαυμαστὸν εἰ πάθοι, ὃν χειμὼν
μὲν ἐσόμενος οὐκ ἂν πάνυ λάθοι, χειμώνων δὲ ἐξαίσιον καὶ ἀπροσδόκητον
μέγεθος λάθοι τ᾽ἂν καὶ λαθὸν κατακλύσειεν βίᾳ «non ci si può meravigliare
se gli succede [all’uomo buono, in particolare il buon governante, come Dione,
tra i malvagi] di patire lo stesso destino del buon nocchiero, cui certo non può
sfuggire l’arrivo della tempesta, ma può sfuggire invece la grandezza insolita e
imprevista delle tempeste, che poi, con violenza, lo sommerge». Si ricordi già
l’Alceo della nave, che osservava la necessità di saper prevedere da terra la rotta:
fr. 249, 6 V. ἐκ γᾶς χρῆ προΐδην πλόον.
170 AUGUSTAN POETRY
i poeti stabiliscano un vero e proprio contatto comunicativo

con l’imbarcazione, che, personificata, esprime essa stessa il
proprio punto di vista: in Catullo si legge ait, nel v. 2, poi nel
v. 6 negat, di nuovo ait nel v. 15, dicit nel v. 16 (non sorprende
che già in forma arborea il phaselus fosse piuttosto loquace: 12
loquente saepe sibilum edidit coma); in Orazio c’è un solo verbo, ma
estremamente significativo, iactes (13), ad esprimere la superba
‘iattanza’ della nave, che appunto è così fiera di quelle nobili
origini che, nella realtà, rischiano di riuscirle inutili, se non
dannose.
Per il poeta lirico, attraverso la personificazione, è facile
rivolgersi ad un oggetto inanimato quale un’imbarcazione è, dare
ad esso la parola e quindi farsi rispondere: poeta lirico è Orazio
e, da questo punto di vista, alla forma ‘lirica’ appartiene anche
Catullo; entrambi si allineano al lirico Alceo, che aveva fatto
parlare anche lui la propria nave (fr. 73, 5 V. φαῖσι). Il poeta epico,
di per sé, ha tutto l’agio di rappresentare la nave, descriverla,
raccontarne le avventure, può eventualmente rivolgersi ad essa
con un’allocuzione, ma trova qualche difficoltà a farla ‘parlare’,
dovendosi attenere nei fatti cha racconta ad un principio di
realtà più stretto o, se si preferisce, diversamente codificato. Nei
poemi omerici navi e imbarcazioni si incontrano spesso, sono il
vettore dei Greci e dell’avventuroso nostos di Odisseo e nel libro
II dell’Iliade il catalogo ne valorizza proprio l’aspetto identitario:
ad ogni flotta, ad ogni equipaggio, corrisponde un popolo. Ma
in Omero non ci sono navi propriamente personificate né,
tantomeno, parlanti. Fu Apollonio Rodio a trovare il modo di
dare vita e parola a quella che, comunque, resta una nave molto
particolare: oltre ad essere la prima nave in assoluto, Argo è
diretta invenzione della dea Atena. Proprio Atena, dunque,
stando alla tradizione mitografica raccolta da Apollonio, avrebbe
inserito nel mezzo della chiglia di Argo una trave proveniente
da una quercia di Dodona, dotata quindi di potere oracolare: per
questa ragione, dunque, la stessa Argo fa sentire potentemente la
propria voce, dando il via all’impresa, nel libro I (524-527 spec.

525 ἴαχεν Ἀργὼ ἐπισπέρχουσα νέεσθαι)29.
Dei limiti che il poeta epico è tenuto a rispettare, in termini
di forma comunicativa e verosimiglianza, doveva ben rendersi
conto Virgilio, che però riuscì anche lui a trovare un modo per
dare vita e parola alle navi dell’Eneide, che sono quelle della flotta
troiana. Anche Virgilio attinge alle risorse fantastiche del mito,
e in particolare all’intervento divino, ma ricorre, diversamente
da Apollonio, alla metamorfosi: non più una nave che ha in sé
un sacro legno parlante, inserito da Atena, ma un’intera flotta
che proviene da un bosco dell’Ida sacro a Cibele e che – grazie
alla promessa di Giove alla stessa Cibele, infine mantenuta – si
trasforma in uno stuolo di ninfe marine (9.77-122). Non la
metafora, eventualmente disposta in allegoria, ma la metamorfosi
è l’artifizio poetico sfruttato da Virgilio per dare parola alle navi:
una forma di ‘straniamento’ che interviene sull’oggetto stesso e
non si limita, cioè, ad agire sul livello linguistico30. Metafora e
metamorfosi, dal punto di vista del poeta inventore di res e verba,
condividono una analoga capacità dinamica di ‘spostamento’ e,
quindi, di innovazione: trasformano le parole come le cose.
All’invenzione virgiliana si allineerà Ovidio, nell’ambito
così appropriato di un poema interamente dedicato alle trasfor-
29
Parlerà ancora, nel quarto e ultimo libro, in una vera e propria profezia: 4.580-91.
È forse significativo che le altre attestazioni di navi parlanti si abbiano, a quanto
pare, nei generi comico-drammatici: nell’Argo di Eschilo (forse un dramma
satiresco?), che può essere considerato un precedente diretto per Apollonio (cfr.
TrGrF, III, frr. 20; 20a, pp. 135-136 Radt), e nelle Holkades di Aristofane, in
cui le navi (da carico) parlavano e cantavano/danzavano perché evidentemente
costituivano il coro che dà il nome alla commedia (cfr. PCG, III.2, frr. 415-443
K.-A.).
30
È possibile che in questa sua fantasia poetica Virgilio debba qualcosa alle
invenzioni della commedia antica: si pensi al coro delle navi nelle Holkades
di Aristofane, che si è appena avuto occasione di ricordare (supra, n. 29); del
suo ‘coro’ di navi ‘danzanti’, Cimodocea è, evidentemente, la corifea (cfr. 224
lustrantque choreis, in corrispondenza verticale con l’apparizione del nome, alla
fine del v. 225).
172 AUGUSTAN POETRY
mazioni, nel quale si aggiunge distintamente la funzione ezio-

logica di spiegare il perché del mondo nelle sue varie parvenze.
Vedremo come in entrambi, Ovidio e Virgilio, l’esperienza lirica
della nave animata e parlante (allegorica, nel caso di Orazio), non
sia passata invano ma abbia lasciato invece tracce riconoscibili.
Sembra, anzi, che proprio la trovata della metamorfosi abbia
permesso ai due poeti epici di recuperare quella componente
di ‘accortezza’ (non soltanto nautica) che è o dovrebbe essere
la caratteristica precipua di qualunque nave, imbarcazione o
navigio, che siano o non siano allegorici.
3.1 Le navi di Enea in Virgilio

Che la nave, come il carro o le armi, sia uno strumento
in cui la virtù dell’eroe epico si esplica e si fa evidente, è cosa su
cui non si può dubitare. Le capacità di dominio, aggressione,
controllo, ma anche giustizia ed equità, che ci si può attendere
da un capo, trovano dunque un loro sostituto simbolico nella
nave (come in molti altri oggetti dell’apparato epico-guerriero).
Già nell’Iliade l’episodio dei giochi per Patroclo mostrava,
nella dimensione agonistica ma non guerriera dell’azione
ludica, come i capi dell’esercito greco sapessero misurarsi, in
particolare, nella gara dei carri. Così Virgilio ha disposto nel libro
V dell’Eneide varie gare di forza e abilità in onore di Anchise,
la più cospicua delle quali è la gara delle navi. In Omero come
in Virgilio i vari partecipanti danno prova nelle gare delle loro
capacità (e il lettore ritrova gli eroi in azione, ognuno con le sue
tipiche caratteristiche). Per quel che riguarda la gara delle navi
virgiliana, non si è mancato di osservare come in essa l’abilità nel
governo nautico abbia un evidente valore dimostrativo sul piano
‘politico’31. Il poeta mette in condizione il lettore di riconoscere
31
La rilevanza ideologica e politica della gara delle navi è stata ben valorizzata in
particolare nei lavori di Hardie (1987); Feldherr (1995); Delvigo (2001).
nella gara delle navi valori propriamente militari e civici, che

rinviano alla futura città di Roma. Per limitarci agli esempi più
evidenti, già il microcatalogo delle quattro navi (5.115 quattuor
ex omni delectae classe carinae) presenta navi, equipaggi e capitani
come prefigurazioni, quasi si direbbe ‘araldiche’, di famiglie ro-
mane (in tre casi su quattro): i Memmi da Mnesteo; i Sergi da
Sergesto; i Cluenzi da Cloanto (5.116-123). Altrettanto evidente
il significato non esclusivamente marinaro di vicende nautiche in
cui ad avere la meglio sono i capitani e gli equipaggi che riescono
a restare solidali e compatti, mirando uniti al risultato: anzi, l’aver
saputo coinvolgere la divinità con un’opportuna preghiera è ciò
che permette a Cloanto di ottenere la vittoria (233-243). Nel
caso di Sergesto, una manovra troppo audace lo porta a cozzare
contro gli scogli della meta, ma egli riceve comunque un premio
per aver saputo salvare la nave e i compagni (283 servatam ob
navem ... sociosque reductos): una parziale analogia, dunque, con
il destino del più malfamato discendente, Sergio Catilina32, ma
soprattutto un contrasto, perché qui Sergesto riesce a evitare il
disastro e anzi a ‘salvare’ i suoi.
Ma Virgilio non si limita, seguendo in sostanza l’esempio
omerico, a valorizzare nei suoi capitani ed equipaggi quelle
virtù (o non-virtù) che sono determinanti nel governo sia di
una nave sia di un esercito o di una città. Poeta post-ellenistico,
probabilmente anche stimolato dall’esperienza lirica dell’amico
Orazio (l’Alceo romano), e forse in particolare proprio dal
carme 1.14, Virgilio allude alla tradizione della nave-città, ma
in un contesto negativo, a rimarcare le potenzialità rischiose
contenute nell’immagine. L’unica nave che abbia un capitano di
cui Virgilio non menzioni la discendenza romana, la Chimera
di Gia, destinata a dare prova di ‘malgoverno’ a causa della
32
Già La Cerda notò come alla nave di Sergesto pendente dallo scoglio (5.206
inlisaque prora pependit) corrisponda la punizione di Catilina nel Tartaro, per
come Virgilio la rappresenta sullo scudo di Enea in 8.668-669 et te Catilina
minaci / pendentem scopulo Furiarumque ora trementem.
174 AUGUSTAN POETRY
lite tra lo stesso capitano e il nocchiero Menete, viene infatti

paragonata proprio ad una città: ingentemque Gyas ingenti mole
Chimaeram, / urbis opus, triplici pubes quam Dardana versu /
impellunt, terno consurgunt ordine remi (118-120). Dimensioni
enormi, grande novità tecnologica (tre ordini di remi, mentre
normalmente nel mondo omerico le navi sono ad un solo ordine),
notevoli potenzialità, che però risultano essere semplicemente
eccessive (secondo il modello della hybris), perché disgiunte
da un reale affiatamento nell’equipaggio e in particolare tra i
vertici del comando, capitano e nocchiero33. Dunque, l’analogia
con la città, che Virgilio evoca con la densa espressione urbis
opus, resta soltanto esteriore ed è invece fallimentare sul piano
della metafora politica: spinta da tanta gioventù troiana (pubes
... Dardana), la triplice Chimera non allude ad alcun futuro
romano e Virgilio non nomina nessuna famiglia che si richiami
al capitano Gyas34. Il poeta stimola il suo lettore a ricordarsi della
metafora-allegoria che lega la nave alla città, ma soltanto perché
giunga alla conclusione che q u e s t a nave epica assolutamente
n o n sia paragonabile ad una città ben governata35.
La nave epica è un oggetto attraverso cui si esprime e fa
evidente la capacità di comando del capo: vettore necessario al
viaggio e all’azione di guerra, al tempo stesso diviene sostituto
simbolico dell’autorità. Nel suo ruolo di capitano più volte viene
rappresentato lo stesso Enea, con un dettaglio, quello dell’alta
33
Ad esprimere il malgoverno della città, l’analogia con una nave in cui l’equipaggio
sia indisciplinato, litigioso e non rispettoso del capitano è già in Platone, rep. 6,
488a-489a, spec. 488b τοὺς δὲ ναύτας στασιάζοντας πρὸς ἀλλήλους περὶ τῆς
κυβερνήσεως.
34
Sulla nave Chimera e in particolare sull’espressione urbis opus rinvio a Cucchiarelli
(2016, spec. 146 e n. 27).
35
Anche il timore del nocchiero Menete, che si guarda dagli «scogli nascosti»
(164-165 ‹caeca ... / saxa› timens), oltre a essere giustificato dai saxa latentia
di Aen. 1.108, come osserva Delvigo (2001, 19), si spiega con l’esperienza,
specificamente nautico-allegorica, della nave di Alceo, che si era trovata a
sbattere proprio contro una ‹roccia invisibile›: ἀσάμῳ / δ᾽ἔρματι τυπτομένην (73,
5-6 V.).
poppa, che rappresenta con immediatezza visiva la forza della sua

autorità36, e lo stesso dettaglio lo si ritrova, significativamente,
per l’Augusto di Azio, nella rappresentazione celebrativa dello
scudo (8.680 stans celsa in puppi). Che la poppa della nave fosse
un punto focale nella percezione dell’osservatore lo conferma,
a contrasto, il carme 1.14, dove appunto proprio le puppes
variopinte, adorne cioè degli emblemi più nobili e fastosi,
riescono di per sé poco affidabili al marinaio timoroso: nil pictis
timidus navita puppibus / fidit (14-15). Per il poeta dell’Eneide la
parte posteriore della nave, dove è facile che stia l’eroe a governare
la navigazione, rappresenta con la sua imponenza affidabilità e
autorità; per il poeta lirico-allegorico del carme 1.14, una poppa
che sia notevole soltanto per il suo aspetto, senza una reale
garanzia di buon governo e forza, è null’altro che un dettaglio
patetico, al più da compatire.
Particolarmente significativa in Virgilio è una scena
del libro X, in cui Enea, lungamente atteso dal figlio e dai
compagni troiani, finalmente fa ritorno dall’Etruria per via di
mare: giunto in contatto visivo con le sue truppe, egli appunto
si mostra ritto sull’alta poppa, con lo scudo rilucente sollevato,
così suscitando l’entusiasmo nell’accampamento troiano (260-2
iamque in conspectu Teucros habet et sua castra / stans celsa in puppi,
clipeum cum deinde sinistra / extulit ardentem). Ma la ‘poppa di
Enea’, secondo una formulare metonimia da cui però è appunto
valorizzata proprio q u e s t a parte della nave, è apparsa al lettore
già un centinaio di versi prima, quando l’eroe troiano guidava la
36
Cf. soprattutto 10.261, che citeremo presto nel testo; inoltre 4.554 Aeneas celsa
in puppi iam certus eundi (Enea ha ormai deciso di staccarsi da Didone); 8.115
tum pater Aeneas puppi sic fatur ab alta (primo discorso di Enea a Evandro e agli
Arcadi); anche, per Anchise, 3.527 stans celsa (v.l. prima) in puppi. Vale la pena
notare che il dettaglio, del resto ricorrente nell’iconografia delle navi arcaiche, si
ritrova nella nave di Enea monumentalizzata, per come essa viene descritta da
Procopio di Cesarea, che afferma di averla vista con i propri occhi a Roma, nella
zona dei Navalia (ma sembra assai difficile che un tale monumento esistesse già
all’epoca di Virgilio): Bell. 8 (Goth. 4), 22.11; cf. Cucchiarelli (2016, 175-181).
176 AUGUSTAN POETRY
flotta etrusca: Aeneia puppis / prima tenet rostro Phrygios subiuncta

leones, / imminet Ida super, profugis gratissima Teucris (156-158).
Anche, dunque, la nave con cui Enea fa ritorno dall’Etruria è
adorna di immagini estremamente significative, che rinviano al
cuore dell’identità troiana (l’Ida e i leoni frigii, simbolo di Cibele,
come subito vedremo), ma in questo caso l’elemento estetico, che
interessa il rostro, cioè la prora dell’imbarcazione (tenet rostro),
si accompagna ad una reale sovranità, di armi e carisma, ben
diversamente dalle pictae puppes della nave oraziana.
Proprio l’aspetto identitario è valorizzato da Virgilio per
le navi troiane e, in particolare, per la nave di Enea, a dimos-
trazione di come egli ne percepisse l’importanza per il tema
della nave: vale la pena seguirne rapidamente lo sviluppo nei
vari libri dell’Eneide. Nel libro V l’unica nave di cui non venisse
prospettato l’esito romano, la Chimera, della quale anzi si enfa-
tizzava l’origine troiana del giovane equipaggio (pubes Dardana),
faceva – come abbiano visto – una riuscita modesta, mentre un
soggetto troiano quanto altri mai si presentava per il vincitore,
Cluenzio, cui veniva donato un ricco mantello con la raffigura-
zione di Ganimede sull’Ida (250-257; si noti l’enfasi su Ida data
dalla ripetizione in fine dei versi 252 e 254). Già all’inizio del
libro III, del resto, il poeta aveva chiarito come la flotta troiana
(protagonista del poema a partire dalla tempesta con cui si apre
il libro I) fosse stata costruita proprio ai piedi dell’Ida, evidente-
mente con il suo legname (5-6 classemque sub ipsa / Antandro et
Phrygiae molimur montibus Idae), ma è soltanto con il libro IX,
quando la flotta troiana è minacciata dal fuoco di Turno, che
il poeta rivela i dettagli di quell’origine ‘idea’. Si scopre allora
che le navi provengono da un bosco dell’Ida sacro a Cibele, che
appunto ha ottenuto da Giove la promessa di immortalità per le
navi: la promessa si realizza a tempo debito, con la metamorfosi
in ninfe marine che le sottrae alla distruzione (spec. 107-122).
Al poeta doveva talmente premere la connessione tra le
navi troiane e il monte Ida, da reiterarla specificamente per la
nave di Enea del libro X, anche a prezzo di forzare sensibilmente

la coerenza del poema. La formulazione Aeneia puppis indurrebbe
a credere, infatti, che questa possa essere davvero la nave che
è propria di Enea (e di lui soltanto), quella cioè originale
con cui è partito da Troia, e così quella raffigurazione a prora
dell’Ida, ‘graditissima ai Troiani esuli’, che suona quanto mai
appropriata per una nave ‘troiana’; anche il dettaglio dei ‘leoni
frigii’ corrisponde ad un altro elemento che, dal libro IX, il
lettore ha imparato a conoscere come specifico della flotta di
Enea, cioè la tutela della dea Cibele37. Ma è molto difficile che
questo sia vero, che cioè l’Aeneia puppis del libro X sia l’originale
nave troiana di Enea.
Partendo dalla città degli Arcadi, Enea si è recato in
Etruria con un ristretto numero di accompagnatori e, soprattutto,
per via di terra, con i cavalli fornitigli da Evandro: come,
dunque, poteva avere con sé la sua nave, quella con cui è partito
da Troia? Si aggiunga che le navi originali della flotta troiana,
come si è visto, si sono trasformate in ninfe marine e a breve,
anzi, si incontreranno con Enea e la sua nave, senza però che
venga fatto alcun tentativo di appianare la difficoltà: la Aeneia
puppis che proviene dall’Etruria si incontra con le navi troiane
trasformatesi in ninfe marine, provenienti dal Lazio, e con loro
si incontrano due linee narrative del testo, non perfettamente
armonizzate38. È ben possibile che Virgilio, se soltanto ne avesse
37
A breve lo stesso Enea, nel rivolgersi alla dea, ricorderà gli animali così
caratteristici del suo culto e della sua iconografia: spec. 253 biiugique ad frena
leones; cf. Harrison (1991, 104) ad 156-157.
38
In termini di «logistical problems» si esprime qui opportunamente Harrison
(1991, 104); per una disamina più dettagliata, con dossografia, posso rinviare
ancora a Cucchiarelli (2016, 171, n. 73). Della questione, nella sua sostanza,
si erano già resi conto i lettori antichi, come testimoniano le annotazioni di
Servio (sane notatur a criticis Vergilius hoc loco, quemadmodum sic cito dixit potuisse
naves Aeneae fieri: quod excusat pictura, quam solam mutatam debemus accipere) e
del Servio Dan. (ergo hanc navem Aeneae ab Etruscis datam intellegamus. quidam
volunt hanc navem ex his esse quibus Aeneas ad Evandrum erat evectus, et ad
Etruriam terra esse portatam).
178 AUGUSTAN POETRY
avuto il tempo, avrebbe trovato il modo di risolvere la difficoltà,

ma quel che qui conta più osservare è quanto gli premesse
connotare come riconoscibilmente ‘troiana’ la nave con cui Enea
ritorna dall’Etruria, guidando la flotta degli alleati e portando
la salvezza all’accampamento. Dunque, in un momento di forte
enfasi sul suo personaggio e in particolare sul suo ruolo di capo.
Questa forte istanza identitaria, che, come abbiamo visto,
è tradizionale per le navi in poesia, torna immediatamente a farsi
evidente nel caso delle navi troiane trasformatesi in ninfe marine.
Come dice ad Enea una di esse, Cimodocea, accostandosi
alla nave: nos sumus, Idaeae sacro de vertice pinus, / nunc pelagi
nymphae, classis tua (230-231). Nella nuova forma, le navi della
flotta troiana possono assolvere ancor meglio al loro ruolo di
protezione, in questo caso non tanto contro le avversità del mare,
quanto avvertendo Enea del pericolo, la durissima offensiva
di Turno che ha costretto Ascanio e compagni a rinchiudersi
nell’accampamento (236-240); l’esortazione ad affrettarsi
è tutt’uno con una prodigiosa spinta che Cimodocea, con
opportuna conoscenza tecnica (247 haud ignara modi), rivolge
alla nave, qui visualizzata proprio nel suo dettaglio più ‘epico’
e dignitosamente rappresentativo, l’‘alta poppa’ (246-247 altam
... puppim)39. In quest’ultimo gesto, con cui la ninfa favorisce la
39
La stessa trasparente etimologia del nome rinvia ad un rapporto armonico con il
mare: Cymodocea (Κυμοδοκεία) è colei che ‘prende’, ‘accetta’, l’onda (κῦμα) – ben
diversamente, dunque, da quel che avviene ad una nave, come quella oraziana,
soggetta ai (novi) fluctus, ovvero all’amico Pompeo, trascinato in mare dall’unda
della guerra civile (carm. 2.7.16). Si aggiunga che il nome è evidentemente una
variazione di Cymodoce, la Nereide che figura nel corteggio marino di (propizio)
accompagnamento alla flotta troiana in Aen. 5.826 (in posizione rilevata, a fine
di verso e periodo); già nominata in Hom. Il. 18.39; Hes. Theog. 252-4 (dove
la sua prerogativa, che condivide con Cimatoleghe, è quella di placare flutti e
venti), ricomparirà in Silio Italico, che, con ogni verosimiglianza ricordandosi
della Cimodocea virgiliana, la sceglierà, tra le altre Nereidi, per parlare a Proteo:
7.428-429 ad quae Cymodoce, nympharum maxima natu / Italidum: ‘nosti nostros,
praesage, timores eqs.’ (si noti l’ormai compiuta ‘italicizzazione’ e il superlativo
maxima, in risposta al virgiliano doctissima).
navigazione di Enea (c’è dunque un contatto diretto tra la ninfa,

ex nave, nata sull’Ida e la nave che porta raffigurata l’Ida), si vede
come ormai la flotta troiana sia divenuta essa stessa una forza
divina e benevola, tutela per i naviganti: ed Enea ben si rende
conto del contesto divino, rivolgendosi, come abbiamo visto, alla
divinità più appropriata, Cibele. A distanza di vari libri, con delle
giunzioni non proprio perfette, si completa così il tema della
‘nave dell’Ida’: la costruzione all’inizio del libro III; la gara, con il
primo premio contenente un soggetto ideo (Ganimede), nel libro
V; la sequenza di rischiato incendio, intervento divino, flashback
esplicativo (la promessa di Giove), metamorfosi e incontro con
Enea – il tutto nel segno dell’Ida e di Cibele – nei libri IX e X.
Abbiamo visto come Virgilio reinterpreti, da poeta epico,
il tema della nave come depositaria di identità e al tempo stesso
ausilio contro le avversità (del mare e non solo). Nel libro V, a
proposito della nave Chimera, l’identità troiana (dardana) viene
nominata in un contesto di imponenza (o hybris?) tecnologica,
che però, in assenza di un’accorta capacità di governo, risulta
fallimentare o, quanto meno, scarsamente efficace e priva di
futuro romano: di conseguenza, il potenziale metaforico e
allegorico insito nell’espressione urbis opus si attiva a contrasto,
per significare la mancanza di una reale efficacia di governo e
identitaria. Invece, nel caso delle navi idee (10.230 Idaeae ...
pinus), la metamorfosi le rende eterne, divine forze benevole a
sostegno di Enea in lotta per il governo dell’Italia.
Nel poema epico virgiliano, dunque, la metafora si
ferma, non ha sviluppo, ma dove non arriva la metafora c’è la
metamorfosi. Con un potente impulso dell’immaginazione
Virgilio trova il modo di dare voce alla stessa nave, non
personificandola all’interno di un gioco metaforico-allegorico,
ma trasformandola in creatura parlante. Allora la nave dirà essa
stessa la propria identità, che non è dal Ponto, in questo caso
(come avviene in Catullo e Orazio), ma obbligatoriamente
dall’Ida: su di lei, e sulle sue sorelle, adesso divenute divinità
180 AUGUSTAN POETRY
del mare, tutto lascia credere che potranno contare non soltanto
Enea ma anche i suoi discendenti italici. Nella fase fondativa
dell’Eneide nuove divinità vengono all’esistenza, una nave
troiana fatta di legno sacro a Cibele diviene dea marina. Ben
diversamente rispetto a quel che avviene nel dissidio civile
dell’allegorica nave oraziana, che non ha più dei ‘integri’ su cui
contare, quando, cioè, gli dei (o meglio i loro simulacri nautici)
si spezzano.
Far parlare una nave ‘identitaria’ è stata una audacia di
Virgilio, che pure non mancava almeno di una autorizzazione
ellenistica, quella della prototipica nave Argo per come è
rappresentata da Apollonio Rodio. Il poeta si rendeva ben
conto di quale fosse la sua trovata e volle metterne a parte
il lettore, richiamandone l’attenzione proprio sul tema della
‘parola’. Cimodocea è presentata come ‘la più dotta nell’eloquio’
tra tutte le sue sorelle: quae fandi doctissima Cymodocea (225)40:
non soltanto è una nave parlante, ma è una nave bravissima a
parlare. E qui il poeta ritrova, almeno parzialmente, un altro
prototipo poetico, ma romano, il Catullo del carme 4, con il suo
loquace phaselus.
3.2 Le navi di Enea in Ovidio

Nella sua riscrittura dell’Eneide l’Ovidio delle Metamorfosi
non si lascia sfuggire l’opportunità di raccontare a modo suo
la trasformazione delle navi troiane in ninfe marine, tra l’altro
40
L’atmosfera di ‘sollievo’ umoristico, di tutto l’episodio e in particolare del v. 225,
è ben colta da Harrison (1991, 133), che cita il comm. di T. E. Page (London
1900): «fandi doctissima has been objected to as inappropriate for a sea-goddess
[...], but Page’s note sees the point: ‘surely there is a touch of humour in the
suggestion that these new-made nymphs were not yet very fluent’. Such humour
matches other elements of light relief in this passage». Ma qui la notazione sulla
(raffinata) capacità di espressione rimarca l’adesione ad una lunga tradizione
di navi cui non mancano pensiero e parola (tradizione, in effetti, molto ‘dotta’:
Apollonio, Catullo, Orazio; Alceo, Eschilo, Aristofane...).
presentandola quasi come un ritorno ad uno stato anteriore, nel

senso che sull’Ida esse avevano già avuto uno status divino (erano,
insomma, già ninfe, ma arboree41). Particolarmente notevole, in
Ovidio, il gioco immaginativo e linguistico per cui i vari dettagli
delle imbarcazioni si trasformano in reali dettagli antropomorfici:
colpisce, in prospettiva oraziana, la trasformazione del latus della
nave (la fiancata) nel latus della fanciulla-ninfa42.
Diversamente da Virgilio, qui Ovidio non sfrutta, però, la
metamorfosi per dare la possibilità alle navi di parlare: lo stile
del racconto, del resto, è in Ovidio volutamente compendiario
e, anzi, buona parte del divertimento per il poeta (e per il suo
lettore) consiste proprio nell’assistere alla condensazione di
un tema enorme quale è quello dell’Eneide. Ma anche Ovidio
non trascura di valorizzare quei due aspetti che ci sono parsi
fondamentali nella rappresentazione della nave in poesia
(identità etnica e rapporto con i pericoli del mare): le navi
ovidiane trasformate in ninfe, sebbene si trovino perfettamente a
loro agio nell’elemento marino, non si scordano delle loro passate
esperienze e, quindi, sono pronte ad aiutare le imbarcazioni in
difficoltà, purché non trasportino gli odiati greci, responsabili del
disastro troiano (met. 14.559-562 non tamen oblitae, quam multa
pericula saepe / pertulerint pelago, iactatis saepe carinis / subposuere
manus, nisi siqua vehebat Achivos. / cladis adhuc Phrygiae memores
odere Pelasgos eqs.). Sono ninfe marine di origine troiana, ormai
italiche, ma che restano ostili ai greci: soltanto, dunque, in
corrispondenza della loro identità possono svolgere il loro ruolo
di benevole ed esperte assistenti alla navigazione.
41
Cf. Hardie (2015, 440), ad met. 14.557 in montibus ortae.
42
Cf. carm. 1.14.4 nudum remigio latus; Hardie (2015, 439) ad 552 latus. Va
anche detto che nella tradizione della nave allegorica non mancano margini
di sovrapposizione tra l’ambito politico (la nave-polis; la nave-eteria; la
nave-Stato) e l’ambito erotico-femminile (la nave-donna; in special modo la
nave-πόρνη); se ne trova testimonianza, a quanto pare, nel commentario alcaico
POxy 21, 2307 fr. 14 (306 i Voigt), sulla cui complicatissima interpretazione si
rinvia a Porro (1994, 108-10).
182 AUGUSTAN POETRY
4. Conclusione: Orazio, Quintiliano e la nave ribelle

Passando per metafora e metamorfosi il grande tema
poetico della nave dialoga tra la forma lirica e quella epica. Con
la probabile mediazione di Orazio (e già di Catullo) Virgilio
e Ovidio43 apprendono dalla tradizione metaforico-allegorica
a leggere ed esprimere i significati ideologici della nave, che è
oggetto concreto dell’esperienza e al contempo rappresentazione
di valori identitari, sia individuali sia comunitari e politici.
L’allineamento di Virgilio (e, in subordine, di Ovidio) alla
tradizione della nave catulliano-oraziana porta dunque con sé
i due aspetti che sono tipici di quella tradizione, cioè l’identità
individuale e il rapporto con gli eventi (marini e allegorici)
dell’esperienza. Ovvero, se si preferisce, la personificazione
della nave che figura già nel carme 1.14 di Orazio, con il suo
precedente catulliano, mette in una prospettiva chiarificatrice e
illumina l’invenzione epico-narrativa di Virgilio, in particolare
nei suoi significati ideologici. Ma questa linea che, pur nelle sue
discontinuità e difformità di forme e di contenuti, unisce Alceo,
Catullo, Orazio, Virgilio e Ovidio, proprio nel suo elemento
comune finisce per chiarire l’anello centrale della catena, cioè
il carme 1.14. Perché nel duplice aspetto dell’identità e del
rapporto con gli eventi la nave oraziana rientra sì nella lignée
nautica, ma contrastivamente.
In Alceo la nave identificava il gruppo e il suo destino era
tutt’uno con quello del poeta, che si sforzava, senza successo
a quanto pare, di trovare una via d’uscita dalla tempesta
(allegorica): al più una divergenza tra essa e il poeta potrebbe
scorgersi nel fr. 73 V., in cui la nave, provata dalle tempeste,
non se la sente più di riprendere il mare, dando prova, in realtà,
di avvedutezza nautica (e, c’è da credere, politica). Anche in
43
Quest’ultimo mostrerà di aver ben presente l’Alceo dei carmi nautici nella
poesia dell’esilio, in particolare i Tristia; cf. Cucchiarelli (1997).
Catullo c’è totale solidarietà tra il phaselus e il suo padrone:

la barchetta, fiera della sua origine dal Ponto, racconta come
sia riuscita a portarlo incolume attraverso tanti mari lontani,
resistendo a venti burrascosi, per trovare quiete, infine, nella
sua nuova veste di ex-voto o monumento consacrato ai Dioscuri
(4, 25-26 recondita / senet quiete). Nella versione metamorfica
di Virgilio le navi fanno tutt’uno con Enea e i suoi compagni
e, dopo aver resistito a tempeste e vari pericoli marini e a due
tentativi di incendio, finalmente, tramutate in ninfe, spiegano
all’eroe attraverso la più loquace di loro come egli debba
comportarsi nella guerra e ne agevolano la navigazione. Non
diversamente, infine, nel poeta specialista di metamorfosi le
navi troiane, memori della loro identità, restano ostili ai Greci,
ma tanto più benevole, presumibilmente, verso i connazionali
e i loro discendenti italici (è, in Virgilio, la mostruosa Chimera
a non realizzare il suo potenziale nautico ed etnico a causa di
un cattivo governo, che dunque rende soltanto dimensionale
l’analogia con la città – urbis opus).
Invece, appunto, la nave di Orazio è sì evidentemente fiera
della propria origine ‘pontica’, ma non ragiona nei termini di
un’accorta saggezza nautica (almeno, in questi termini il poeta
ce la presenta): ben diversamente dalla nave del fr. 73 di Alceo
i pericoli del mare sembrano non scoraggiarla dal continuare i
suoi viaggi ed essa non ha alcuna intenzione di entrare in porto,
trovando un suo quieto approdo. Non ci sta, la nave del carme
1.14, a farsi legare alla riva, per quanto malridotta sia, come
appunto faceva Alceo, l’auctor stasiotico-allegorico, con la sua
nave sconquassata, stando almeno alle parole di Orazio che già
si è avuto occasione di citare (Carm. 1.32.7-8 iactatam religarat
udo / litore navim). Né, dopo tanta devota e onorata carriera, è
pronta ad acquietarsi nel porto – se non definitivamente, come
aveva fatto il catulliano phaselus, almeno per un po’. La stasis
qui non è una forza esterna che investa il poeta a s s i e m e
alla sua nave, ma crea una frattura proprio tra il poeta e la nave:
184 AUGUSTAN POETRY
da strumento e principio di identità la nave si fa in Orazio

protagonista del dissidio. Alceo dichiarava di non comprendere
(il celebre ἀσυννέτημμι) la stasis dei venti, ma in Orazio è la
nave stessa a sottrarsi alla razionalità, ad essere incomprensibile
essa stessa. La nave del carme 1.14 è tanto fiera quanto ribelle,
irriducibile, impenitente. Così considerata, essa si svela come
efficacissima rappresentazione di quella nobilitas romana che si
ostinava a proseguire la lotta: una determinazione suicida, che
però viene onorevolmente descritta dal poeta che un tempo
con il destino di quella nave era stato del tutto solidale (ed è,
questo, un modo abbastanza onorevole per Orazio stesso di
rappresentare così il proprio distacco da quella che era stata la
sua parte politica). Se proprio deve continuare a stare in mare,
che almeno la navis stia attenta, dice il poeta concedendosi un
ultimo moto d’affetto e preoccupazione.
È il momento di concludere, riprendendo le fila di quanto
detto riguardo al carme 1.14 e alla sua interpretazione. Una
prima osservazione è che, proprio nella sua incomprensibile
e ribelle determinazione a proseguire la lotta con il mare, la
nave di Orazio si riconferma nella sua concreta individualità.
Il confronto con Catullo e, sul versante epico, con Virgilio e
Ovidio aiutano a sentire l’estraneità, rispetto al testo oraziano,
di una astrazione onnicomprensiva e non individuata quale è
la respublica tout court: la nave poetica si collega ad un’identità
precisa, a una individualità, di una persona o di un gruppo, vista
in contrapposizione ad un’altra entità, individuale o collettiva. E
in questo, come abbiamo visto, il carme oraziano può ritrovare la
sua forza di rappresentazione poetica, che gli viene comunemente
negata: nel descrivere, cioè, l’irriducibile ostinazione della nave
che è quella di uno specifico e determinato equipaggio di uomini
(e, certo, il poeta avrà in mente soprattutto alcuni individui a
lui particolarmente vicini, come l’amico Pompeo del carme
2.7). Si comincerà ad apprezzare il carme 1.14 nel momento
in cui se ne comprenderà il concreto contesto situazionale, che
è vivo, reale, tutt’altro che astratto e intellettualisticamente

costruito.
Tornando a Quintiliano, credo che una tale ‘rivalutazione’
del carme 1.14 di Orazio sia un caso esemplare, in cui il
ripensamento di un celebre giudizio antico, canonico ormai
anche per i moderni, può portare ad una più precisa esegesi e
interpretazione del carme (e anche, come abbiamo visto, ad un
guadagno sul piano critico-testuale). Non ci pronunciamo su
questioni di estetica, che lasciamo al giudizio di ognuno. Ciascun
lettore, insomma, è libero di apprezzare o non apprezzare il
carme di Orazio, a seconda dei propri gusti e inclinazioni. Ma
l’interprete è chiamato a chiarire il testo definendone quanto
più precisamente possibile la forma comunicativa e quindi il suo
significato poetico e, nel caso del carme 1.14, politico.
Per il Virgilio delle Bucoliche l’antichità ci ha trasmesso,
accanto a tante elucubrazioni allegoristiche, anche il sano
correttivo metodologico di Servio, che saggiamente annotava
nel commento a Ecl. 1.1: hoc loco Tityri sub persona Vergilium
debemus accipere; non tantum ubique, sed tantum ubi exigit ratio.
Per Orazio ad aiutarci a relativizzare o se si preferisce integrare
l’interpretazione di Quintiliano sono, nonostante tutte le loro
ingenuità, gli antichi commentari oraziani che puntano verso i
grandi ‘ribelli’ da cui l’azione politica del Divi filius fu contrastata.
Come ogni buon maestro Quintiliano aveva in mente soprattutto
il proprio programma, che nel suo caso era quello di esemplificare
con chiarezza ai propri allievi il funzionamento di quel tropo
che è l’allegoria. E ai nostri occhi autorevole, certo, è soprattutto
Quintiliano, ben più vicino, come egli è, all’idea moderna di
interprete rispetto ai modesti (o modestissimi) commentatori
oraziani. Ma questi ultimi in realtà erano rimasti attaccati al
testo, ben più di quel grande maestro, anche forse semplicemente
perché non pretendevano di aver qualcosa d’altro da insegnare.
Quintiliano è prezioso, ma va compreso, relativizzato e anche
valorizzato, all’interno dei suoi propri limiti.
186 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Per ripetere le parole di Servio, a dirigere le nostre scelte

interpretative deve essere soprattutto la ratio, che sia nutrita di
conoscenza dell’autore, del suo contesto storico, dei suoi modelli
letterari, che sia sgombra di preconcetti (e qui, più che i limiti
di Quintiliano, tocchiamo i nostri).
Bibliografia
Anderson, W. S. 1966. Horace, Carm. 1, 14: What kind of Ship? in CPh
61: 84-98.
Canfora, L. 2015. Augusto figlio di dio. Roma-Bari: Laterza.
Clausen, W. 1994. A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Clay, J. S. 2010. Horace and Lesbian Lyric in G. Davis (ed.), A Companion
to Horace. Chicester: 128-46.
Cole, C. N. 1906. Quintilian’s Quotations from the Latin Poets in CR
20: 47-51.
Coleman, R. 1977. Vergil, Eclogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Cucchiarelli, A. 1997. La nave e l’esilio (allegorie dell’ultimo Ovidio).
in MD 38: 215-24.
______. 2004. La nave e lo spettatore. Forme dell’allegoria da Alceo ad
Orazio in SIFC s. IV, 2: 172-88. (prima parte).
______. 2005. La nave e lo spettatore. Forme dell’allegoria da Alceo ad
Orazio in SIFC s. IV, 3: 30-72 (seconda parte).
______. 2015a. Orazio al confine del mare (tra biografia, poesia e allegoria
politica) in Maia 67: 298-324.
______. 2015b. Il peso del male (Nota testuale a Hor. carm. 1.14.10) in
RFIC 143: 354-61.
______. 2016. Archeologia epica della nave città (in margine a Virgilio,
Aen. 5, 119) in Rationes Rerum, 7: 133-84.
Delvigo, M. 2001. Litus ama: linguaggio e potere nella regata virgiliana
in MD 47: 9-33.
Feldherr, A. 1995. Ships of State: Aeneid 5 and Augustan Circus Spectacle
in ClAnt. 14: 244-65.
Fraenkel, E. 1957. Horace, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edizione

italiana a cura di S. Lilla, con premessa di S. Mariotti: Orazio. Roma 1993.
Hardie, P. 1987. Ships and ship-names in the Aeneid in Whitby, M.;
Hardie, P. (eds.), Homo viator. Classical Essays for John Bramble. Bristol
1987: 163-71.
Hardie, P. 2015. Ovidio, Metamorfosi, VI (libri XIII-XV). Testo critico
di R. Tarrant, traduzione di G. Chiarini. Milano: Fondazione Lorenzo
Valla/Mondadori.
Harrison, S. J. 1991. Vergil, Aeneid 10. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horsfall, N. H. 1995. Virgil: his Life and Times in N. Horsfall (ed.), A
Companion to the Study of Virgil, Leiden, New York, Köln: 1-24.
Kiessling, A.; Heinze, R. 1960. Q. Horatius Flaccus, Oden und Epoden.
Berlin: Weidmann (10 edizione).
Knorr, O. 2006. Horace’s Ship Ode (Odes 1.14) in Context: A
Metaphorical Love-triangle in TAPhA 136: 149-69.
Kruschwitz, P. 2007. Fluctuat nec mergitur: Überlegungen zu Horaz’
Ode 1, 14, in Hyperboreus 13: 151-73.
Lilla, S. 1993. Orazio. Con premessa di S. Mariotti. Roma.
Maltby, R. 1991. A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies. Leeds: Cairns.
Mastrocinque, A. 2016. Il muro di legno. Dall’esilio dei Focei all’Epodo
XVI di Orazio in SIFC s. IV, 14: 200-9.
Mayer, R. 2012. Horace, Odes Book I. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Nisbet, R. G. M.; Hubbard, M. 1970. A Commentary on Horace: Odes,
Book 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Odgers, M. M. 1933. Quintilian’s Use of Earlier Literature in CPh 28:
182-8.
Pasquali, G. 1964. Orazio lirico. Studi, a cura di A. La Penna. Firenze: Le
Monnier (prima edizione: Firenze 1920).
Porro, A. 1994. Vetera Alcaica. L’esegesi di Alceo dagli Alessandrini all’età
imperiale. Milano: Vita e Pensiero.
Reitzenstein, R. 1918. Die Scholien zu Horaz Od. I 14 in Nachr. Gött.
Ges. Phil.-hist. Kl.: 393-6.
188 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Rösler, W. 1980. Dichter und Gruppe. Eine Untersuchung zu den

Bedingungen und zur historischen Funktion früher griechischer Lyrik am
Beispiel Alkaios. München: W. Fink.
Shackleton Bailey, D. R. 1982. Profile of Horace. London: Duckworth.
Syme, R. 1939. The Roman Revolution, London: Clarendon Press (edizione
italiana a cura di A. Momigliano: La rivoluzione romana. Torino 1962).
Wilamowitz, U. 1913. Sappho und Simonides. Berlin: Widmann.
Horace and his audience:
the role of reception in the genesis of genres
Bénédicte Delignon
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
In the Augustan Age, Horace revived satire, invented

the Latin iambus and gave lyric poetry an unprecedented
place in Rome. During the last twenty years, conclusive studies
have shown that for the meaning and impact of these poetic
innovations to be understood, they have to be placed in their
political, ideological and cultural context1. Like any poet, Horace
took into account what the public could/would or could not/
would not hear, for political, ideological or cultural reasons:
reception plays a role in the genesis of the Satires, the Epodes and
1
Freudenburg (2001, 71-124) has shown that the position occupied by Octavian
and the particuar post-Actium climate conferred quite a singular form on
the book 2 of the Satires, with the poet questioning his own legitimacy as a
composer of satires when he is close to those in power. In the same perspective,
I have shown that while the ideological context of the end of the Republic and
the beginning of the Empire could legitimise recourse to the satire genre, it
could also make it difficult (Delignon 2006). Barchiesi (2000, 167-182) and
Lowrie (1997) have studied the lyric corpus closely and have thrown light on
the means by which Horace managed to transpose archaic Greek occasional
poetry for performance to the Latin context, even though this was not part of
the Roman culture.
190 AUGUSTAN POETRY
the Odes. But inversely, Horace affected his audience and was
not without influence on its expectations. This subtle dialogue
between the poet and his contemporary readers is obviously
difficult to reconstruct. We would however like to show, through
some examples taken from the Satires, the Epodes and the Odes,
that considering reception in all its complexity, and not merely as
a constraint, makes it possible to throw some light on important
aspects of Horace’s poetry.
The revival of satire and the constraints of reception

By choosing to compose satires, Horace established a
complex relationship with his public from the outset. In Rome,
in the years before and after Actium, not only was this genre
unexpected, but also to a certain extent unwelcome. Lucilius,
its main representative and its primus inuentor, had composed
partisan and aggressive satires, in an extremely tense political
climate which had led to the assassination of the Gracchus
brothers. Yet polemic, especially when it was open and public,
was disapproved of in Rome and it was probably made illegal
by the praetor’s edict from the 1st century BC on2. What’s
more, after decades of rivalries, internecine struggles and social
disorder, after the assassination of Caesar and the battle of
Philippi, the Romans aspired to civil peace, and like all ambitious
men at the time, Octavian presented himself as the pacificator
of the Vrbs, guaranteeing a return to order. In this context,
claiming to be a new Lucilius was rather risky. Horace was
even worse placed than others on this front: at Philippi, he had
actually fought beside Brutus and was among those who, after
defeat, had taken advantage of the national amnesty declared
by Octavian to return to Rome; it is a little strange to see him
2
See Ulpien 56, 1, Horace Serm. II, 1 and Ducos (2003, 294), Suspène (2009,
16-17)
HORACE AND HIS AUDIENCE 191
composing satires, a genre so politically charged, just when he

should have been living down his past errors. From this point
of view, Horace did not seem to make any allowances for his
audience’s expectations.
But the corollary of Lucilian satire’s aggression is plain
speaking, one of the forms of libertas, regarded by the Romans
as a fundamental value of the Republic. For at the same time as
they were demanding civil peace, the Romans were anxious to
see republican institutions preserved. Octavian had completely
understood this and he presented the Principate as the only
form of government capable of re-establishing them: this is
the promise of the res publica restituta. From this point of view,
the choice of satire is totally in the spirit of the times. That is
why Horace, when presenting himself as Lucilius’ heir at the
beginning of Satire 1.4, does so in the name of this libertas: what
he is imitating in Lucilius is his libertas, his plain speaking, and
not his partisan aggression. To avert any suspicion, he takes
the precaution of transferring his satirical plain speaking from
political to moral ground: he speaks freely, not in order to fuel
fratricidal struggles, but to encourage virtue by stigmatising
the vices.
And so satire, as the genre of political polemics, offended
the taste and aspirations of the Roman public in the 30s. But as
the genre of libertas, it satisfied their attachment to the vanished
Roman republic. By reviving the genre, Horace was going to
respond to this fundamental contradiction.
As K. Freudenburg has shown very clearly3, Horace knew
that because of the political context and his personal situation,
satire was a problematic choice: not only did he admit that he
could not show the same partisan aggression as Lucilius, but he
made a point of it. By demonstrating his desire to stay on the
fringes of public affairs, he transformed the genre. In Satire 1.5
3
See Freudenburg (2001, 15-58).
192 AUGUSTAN POETRY
for example, he accompanies Maecenas on a diplomatic mission,

but instead of addressing the political issues of this mission, he
settles for giving an abundance of details on the meals, lodgings,
mosquitoes, his eye infection and his missed assignation with a
maid. Still with this in mind, he consistently claims to have a
limited audience, reduced to a small number of friends. In Satire
1.4.21-24, he maintains that satire annoys people and that he
cannot read his poems to everybody. In Satire 1.10, he refuses
to submit his verse to general criticism (Serm. 1.10.36-39), only
accepting judgement from his closest friends. Horace probably
read his first satires to a few people selected from Maecenas’
circle, but it is certain that in 34, when he published the first
book, and a fortiori after 29, when he published the second,
his poems were widely known. From book 1 to book 2, we can
indeed see Octavian take the place of Maecenas in the role of
patronus, which is an indication of growing fame and influence.
The audience as represented in the collection does not therefore
reflect exactly the Satires’ actual public, but it does reveal their
expectations: contemporary readers would disapprove of poetry
which was too overtly political and polemical, in the tradition
of Lucilius; Horace openly rejected public life and presented
himself as a poet “in private”4.
The example of the Satires thus shows that reception plays
a role in the genesis of the work at several levels: it can explain
the choice of satire which, as a type of libertas, meets some of
the aspirations of readers in the 30s; it forced Horace to invent
a less polemical and apparently apolitical form5, in order to
accommodate audience reservations about the Lucilian model.
4
Delignon (2006, 161-189)
5
In reality, there is no lack of political attacks in the Satires, but they are always
veiled and distorted. Horace, to attack the anti-Caesars of his day, lashed out for
example at anti-Caesars of the past and stigmatised them for supposed moral
vices, rather than for their political action. On indirect attacks in the Satires, see
Delignon (2006, 107-129)
The invention of the Latin iambus and the constraints

of reception
The Epodes were written at about the same time as the
Satires, even a little earlier in some cases. Like the Satires,
probably even more so, this genre is associated with polemic.
Horace should therefore have exercised the same prudence to
accommodate his audience’s reservations. Yet this is absolutely
not the case. While the Satires are presented as poems firmly on
the fringes of public affairs, even for private consumption only,
the Epodes take on a public and overtly polemical dimension
from the outset. In Epode 7, for example, the poet castigates all
Romans. He addresses an impious and bellicose 2nd person
plural who is not identified straightaway:
Quo, quo scelesti ruitis? aut cur dexteris

aptantur enses conditi? (Ep. 7.1-2)
“Where, where are you rushing to in this evil madness?

Why are you drawing swords that have only just been
sheated?”6
At the end of the epode, there can be no doubt as to
the identity of this 2nd person plural, as the poet, noting how
ineffective his own words are, ends the exhortation in these
terms:
Sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt. (Ep. 7.17)
“That’s it: a cruel fate (…) has driven the Romans on.”
Hence the first lines were targeting the Romans, incapable

of putting an end to fratricidal struggles and civil war. Contrary
to what he did in the Satires, Horace seemed ready to go against
both the taste and the expectations of an audience which
disapproved of polemics for cultural and political reasons, as we
6
For the Epodes, I give the english translation of Rudd (2004).
194 AUGUSTAN POETRY
have said. To understand this, we must consider the complexity

of the relations Horace had with his audience.
As in the Satires, Horace first had to make concessions to
the image the Romans had of the genre. With the Epodes, he
imported to Rome a Greek form, the iambic form as exemplified
by Archilochus and Hipponax. Now this form is very difficult to
define. In Epistle 1.19.23-25, Horace uses the metrical criterion:
when composing the Epodes, he wanted to adapt to the Latin
language Archilochus’ epodical distich, consisting of a iambic
dimeter and a iambic tetrameter. But this definition only holds
for the first ten poems in the collection and is certainly not
the one adopted by the Romans. In Epode 6.11-14, Horace
characterises the genre by its tone: aggression, often in the form
of invective. This is certainly more faithful to the image the
Roman public had of Archilochus’ poems. In fact, the iambus had
been taken to be the genre of invective since the archaic Greek
period7 and this still held for the Romans, who consistently
associated it with two anecdotes handed down by Hellenistic
tradition: Archilochus was said to have pushed Lycambes to
suicide just by the aggressive tone of his poetry; Hipponax’
iambic poetry apparently reduced the scultor Bupalus to the
same state. Horace does in fact allude to these two episodes in
Epode 6, when claiming the legacy of Archilochus and Hipponax:
7
In the second Pythian Ode, before singing the praises of Hieron, victor in the
four-horse chariot race, Pindar contrasts his own poetry, based on the elegy, with
that of his predecessor, Archilochus, based on blame and invective (P. 2.52–56).
For West (19892, 22 and 25), who refers to some of Archilochus’ Iambi and to
Arist. Poet. 1448 b 31, the aggression criterion had won out in the end over the
metrical criterion and Archilochus’ poems written in trochaic tetrameters, for
example, were called iambi because of the place given to invective, which had
become characteristic of the genre. This idea also prevailed in the Hellenistic
period. Thus Epigram 69 in book 7 of the Palatine Anthology puts Cerberus on
his guard against the aggression of Archilochus arriving in Hell. Epigram 352 in
the same book gives voice to young virgins outraged by Archilochus’ iambi.
Caue, caue, namque in malos asperrimus

parata tollo cornua,
qualis Lycambae spretus infido gener
aut acer hostis Bupalo. (Ep. 6.11-14)
“Take care now, take care! For I am utterly ruthless against

villains, and now toss my horns in readiness, like the son-
in-law rejected by the treacherous Lycambes, or the fierce
enemy of Bupalus.”
When he inveighs against the Romans, Horace therefore

fits perfectly into the horizon of expectations which he aroused
in his readers by claiming the legacy of Archilochus and
Hipponax.
But as in the Satires, Horace also had to take into account

what the period would or would not allow, what his readers did
or did not want to hear, for political or cultural reasons. As we
recalled earlier, the years preceding Actium were marked by a
deep yearning by the Romans for civil peace: nothing prepared
them to give a favourable welcome to poetry of abuse. On top
of that, contrary to satire, a Roman genre, the epode is a Greek
genre, in other words a genre with a long tradition which was
bound to influence Roman reception. In the Augustan Age,
Romans often had access to the great Greek texts through
Alexandrine editions and commentaries, and Hellenistic
practices were a prism the importance of which is generally
recognized today8. Callimachus composed iambi, and even if
only a small number of fragments have survived and it is difficult
to know exactly what position archaic Greek heritage occupied
in it9, it is certain that he developed the genre. In a fragment
8
Mankin (1995, 12-14) encourages us not to minimise the importance of
Callimachus in the genesis of the Epodes.
9
Watson (2003, 11) defends the idea of continuity from Archilochus to
Callimachus and thinks that Archilochus’ epodes offered a formal variety which
we no doubt underestimate, not having conserved all his work.
196 AUGUSTAN POETRY
which probably belonged to the prologue, fragment 191 Pfeiffer,

he actually puts into the mouth of Hipponax a sort of renuntiatio
iamborum, or in any case the announcement of a poem written in
iambic meters, but without the aggression which characterised
the attacks against Bupalus:
Ἀκούσαθ´ Ἱππώνακτος· οὐ γὰρ ἀλλ´ἣκω
ἐκ τῶν ὃκου βοῦν κολλύβου πιπρήσκουσιν,
φέρων ἲαμβον οὐ μάχην ἀείδοντα
τὴν Βουπάλειον [.] (Callimaque, Iambus I, fr. 191, 1-4
Pfeiffer)
“Listen to Hipponax ! That’s right:

I’m back from hell, where an ox
Sells for a penny. I’m back,
Loaded with iambi
Aimed not at old Boupalos.”10
Callimachus, while remaining in the invective tradition,

therefore very definitely offered a sanitized and civilized version.
And at a time when Alexandrine refinement, introduced by the
Neoterics, was completely established in Rome, it is obvious that
the taste of Horace’s audience led him to Callimachus’ iambus,
and that Archilochus’ iambus, with its propensity for invective,
was bound to offend against the new aesthetics of cultivated
Romans.
And so as soon as he set out to compose epodes, Horace

had to meet his audience’s contradictory expectations: he had
to indulge in some invective, since it was the generic marker of
the iambus in the Roman mind; but he had to avoid appearing
too aggressive, so as not to arouse general disapproval and to
respect the good taste of his readers. He achieved this firstly
by having recourse to a form of invective which, under cover
10
I give the translation of Nisetich (2001).
of a personal attack, in fact only expressed a moral consensus.

Thus Epode 4 lashes out at a freedman who had succeeded in
manœuvring himself into the rank of knight:
Videsne, sacram metiente te uiam
cum bis trium ulnarum toga,
ut ora uertat huc et huc euntium
liberrima indignatio? (Ep. 4. 6-10)
“Do you notice how, as you stride along the Sacred Way
in your nine-foot toga, people walking this way and that
turn their faces towards you in the most undisguised
indignation?”
The poet does not name the person he is addressing: thus,

the epode takes on a universal moral value rather than the truly
iambic value of a personal attack. He emphasizes moreover that
disapproval was general, by mentioning the indignant looks
which all the passers-by gave him: the moral condemnation
of the epode is based on consensus; the poet does not arouse
polemic. Epodes 8 and 12 have occasionally shocked modern
readers: Horace makes fun of two old women who refuse to
renounce the pleasures of love and describes their physical
decrepitude in a particularly violent and crude way, rich in
details of their most private parts. Here again, however, Horace’s
contemporaries could not fail to adhere to both poems, as they
stigmatise behaviour condemned both by the mos maiorum and
by Ciceronian ethics of the passions11: the epode is based on
a moral consensus and not on a real personal attack. It is also
to meet his audience’s paradoxical expectations that Horace
composes insults which are simply literary games. In Epode 3 for
example, the attack is like a joke. The poet hurls imprecations at
Maecenas who had made him eat a dish with too much garlic.
His entire revenge is in a single curse: his mistress will deny
11
In De Officiis I, 34, 122-123, Cicero uses the notions of decorum and persona to
affirm that the degree to which erotic passion is reprehensible depends on age.
198 AUGUSTAN POETRY
him a kiss and will sleep with her back to him. This is a long
way from the deadly lines of Archilochus and Hipponax. From
this point of view, S. Harrison’s analysis of genre problems in
the Epodes is very interesting12. For Harrison, Horace began the
collection with a homage to his patronus to emphasize that he
was moving the iambus from a sympotic context to a clientelist
context, in other words from a context of free speech to a more
constrained context. The collection can then be interpreted as
showing clearly Horace’s iambic poetry, along with its limits and
the difficulties caused for the poet by wanting to be a Roman
Archilochus13. But to the constraints specific to the patronage
relationship may be added constraints which are more cultural
than social: Horace also had to take into account his audience’s
expectations, in other words what the public could/would or
could not/would not hear. It is also because he was making
concessions to this audience’s horizon of expectations that the
Epodes collection only took on part of its iambic form.
Now it needs to be explained why, in spite of everything,

Horace chose to compose iambic poems and why he was keen to
play the role of a Roman Archilochus, in such an unfavourable
context. To do so we must turn to the we must turn to the
ambition of the Epodes: Horace chose the iambic genre because
he hoped to influence his public.
12
Harrison (2001, 165-186).
13
Cucchiarelli (2001, 131-132) develops a similar idea, suggesting that the poet
opened the collection with poems which are not iambic because he was seeking
to demonstrate that he was gradually adhering to Archilochus’ ethos. See also
Thévenaz (2016, 99-130): his analysis of the Epode 1, Epode 9 and Ode 1.37
clearly shows how Horace uses the Actium motif to link iambic and lyric
inspirations and to highlight the transition.
The choice of the iambic form: a pragmatic approach

to reception
In certain political epodes, we find attacks which
have nothing to do with either the moral consensus, or the
literary game and the poet then seems to be going against the
expectations of his audience. Thus Epode 9 lashes out overtly
against Antony, who is represented as an effeminate soldier,
under the authority of a woman and of some old eunuchs. In
Epode 7.1-14, the poet castigates the entire Roman people,
accusing them of fratricidal struggles which were still tearing
them apart. The same theme is taken up at the beginning of
Epode 16, but the invective is directed at the 1st person plural,
as the poet finally includes himself in the impious generation
(impia aetas l. 9) which is ruining Rome. Horace is not here
relying on a political consensus to make iambic aggression
acceptable in the Roman context. By attacking Antony, he is
overtly taking Octavian’s side and fuelling internecine struggles.
In Epode 16 (l. 41-66), he finally invites the Romans to leave
for the Fortunate Isles, a sort of imaginary ideal society, where
peace, piety and a natura naturans characteristic of the golden
age reign. This is a way of saying that the only possible way out
is utopian and a commitment to withdraw from politics, which
is shocking to Roman morality. To understand the status of these
epodes, we must consider another aspect of Horace’s relationship
with his public: the reactions he was trying to elicit, in other
words the pragmatic dimension of his poetry.
Horace composed his Epodes between 41 and 30.
This period was marked by the fragile entente of the Second
Triumvirate and by the rivalry between Antony and Octavian, a
succession of ruptures and incessant negotiations. The Romans
lived in fear of another civil war. In the political epodes, Horace,
far from attempting to reassure them, seemed to be darkly
pessimistic: civil war was always presented as an inevitable
curse which would always hang over the Romans and for
200 AUGUSTAN POETRY
which the Romans were themselves ultimately responsible14.

Epode undoubtedly shows best the aim of this type of discourse
and the meaning of poetry which deliberately refuses to be
consolatory. Indeed in Epode 7, not only does Horace hurl abuse
at the Roman people, reproaching them for the hatred which
was tearing them apart, but he also expresses their reaction to
such reproaches:
Furorne caecus an rapit uis acrior

an culpa? responsum date.
Tacent, et albus ora pallor inficit
mentesque perculsae stupent.
Sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt
scelusque fraternae necis,
ut inmerentis fluxit in terram Remi
sacer nepotibus cruor. (Ep. 7.14-17)
“Is it a blind frenzy that hurries you along, or some stronger
force, or is it guilt? Answer my question! … They are silent;
a ghastly pallor spreads over their faces, and their minds are
shocked and confused. That’s it: a cruel fate and the crime
of a brother’s murder have driven the Romans on, ever since
the innocent Remus’ blood was spilt on the ground, blood
that has brought a curse on his descendants.”
The silence associated with pallor marks first the terror of

the Roman people: Horace is trying above all to raise awareness
in the face of a political situation which should frighten them
all. But the idea of silence is also intended to provoke anger. If
the Romans continued to keep quiet, that would mean that they
accepted the inevitable, as indicated by the adverb sic, which
takes up what precedes as much as announcing what follows.
Consequently, if the Romans wanted to stop this destiny, they
had to break their silence: like the poet, they must get angry in
14
See also Epode 13, which expresses the worry felt by the poet and his friends
faced with political instability and future uncertainty, and Epode 9 on the victory
at Actium, which is also on the theme of anxiety while waiting for the return of
Maecenas.
order to reject civil war. Horace had recourse to iambic invective

because he wanted to raise awareness and trigger political action
among the Romans. It is interesting to note that he was thus
reviving one of the functions of the Greek iambus. While Greek
iambic invective certainly had a ritual value at the beginning, as
M.L. West’s work has shown15, we know that between the 6th
and the 5th centuries, having lost its role in worship, the iambus
was intended mainly for the symposion. Now the symposion
in archaic Greek society was the place where alliances were
formed between the great aristocratic families who divided up
power between themselves. One of the functions of the iambus
was certainly to affirm the cohesion of a political faction by
stigmatising its enemies16. In what was in the end a fairly similar
way, mutatis mutandis, the iambic invective in the Epodes had
to give Rome a means of finding some form of cohesion while
defending itself against all those who were stoking fratricidal
rivalries.
Some of the epodes can therefore be read in the light
of the expectations of the Roman public: while invective is a
necessary iambic marker, it had not to be actually polemical.
Other epodes can be read in the light of the pragmatic aim of
the poem, the effect Horace was trying to have on his public:
the invective is political and must arouse both terror and anger.
Within the collection, there is a balance between these two
ways of playing with the iambic genre. It is obvious that in the
absence of amusing epodes, the pessimism and violence of the
political epodes would be unbearable. Inversely, some epodes
which tackle moral questions with a lighter tone gain depth in
the light of the civic-minded epodes. The elegy to rural life in
Epode 2, the condemnation of social climbers in Epode 4, and
of erotic passion in Epodes 8, 10, 11, 12 and 15 are some of the
15
West (19892)
16
Aloni (2016, 21-33)
202 AUGUSTAN POETRY
moral themes which, surrounded by more public-spirited epodes,

take on another dimension, to the extent that moral and political
reform are inseparable in the Roman imagination. This is also the
perspective in which the long final epode may be understood:
Epode 17 against the witch Canidia. Strangely, this epode seems
to seal the victory of the witch over the poet, whom Canidia’s
violent imprecations reduce to silence for good and in the whole
second part of the poem. This ending could have a cathartic
function: if in the epode which closes the collection, the iambic
invective finishes in the mouth of Canidia alone, this is perhaps
because the poet envisioned a Rome purified of the aggression
which she had been turning against herself for decades, a Rome
in which violence would be reserved for a few figures on the
fringes of society. Be that as it may, the poetry of the Epodes is
based on a compromise between the public’s expectations and
the poet’s hopes, taking into account on the one hand what the
iambus must be in terms of literary tradition but cannot be in
the Roman cultural context, and on the other hand what the
iambus can arouse in the political arena.
To shed light on the complexity of the Epodes and the
generic problems it poses, it is therefore worth considering
the audience contemporary with Horace both as a horizon of
expectations with which the poet had to deal and as a recipient
with whom he established a form of exchange, in other words
to consider the dialogue between the poet and his audience as
bilateral: the genesis of the work is determined both by what the
audience expected of the poet and by what the poet expected
of the audience.
The erotic odes and the constraints of reception

In the Odes, when Horace explicitly claimed the heritage
of the archaic lyric, in particular that of Sappho, Alcaeus and
Anacreon (Carm. 4.9.1-12), he had to respond to the ideas that

the Roman public had of erotic Greek poetry. In archaic Greece,
erotic song had an important place in symposium and it often
alluded to the social occasion for which it had been composed,
mentioning in particular wine, love and garlands of flowers:
σύν μοι πῖνε, συνήβα, συνέρα, συστεφανηφόρει,
σύν μοι μαινομένῳ μαίνεο, σὺν σώφρονι σωφρόνει.
(Carmina conuiualia 902 P.M.G.)
“Drink with me, be young with me, love with me, wear
garlands with me, be crazy with me when I am crazy, wise
with me when I am wise.”
There are many examples of this type of association of

wine, love and garlands in an erotic poem17 and they became
Greek markers in the eyes of the Romans. And so Horace
regularly introduced them into his erotic odes18: it was a way
for him to fit in to the lyric tradition to which he was laying
claim. In Ode 1.17 for example, the poet invites Tyndaris to
join him at his Sabine property, but endeavours to transform an
invitation to a very Roman country dinner into an invitation to a
Greek symposium: Tyndaris will play the lyre (l. 18), drink wine
(l. 21) and wear a garland (l. 27). For the poet, this is less about
Greek realities than about a whole poetic tradition, the archaic
erotic lyric. The lyre is called Teia, that is it comes from Teos,
Anacreon’s home city: Horace could not have placed himself
any more clearly in the lineage of the the Anacreon’s poems
which are often sympotic poems. In the same way, the wine
is from Lesbos. Apart from the fact that Lesbos wine is sweet
17
Anacreon 346, fr. 4 P.M.G. associates Dionysos and Aphrodite in a fragment
which deals for that matter with bringing wine. Alcaeus 347 V. opens with an
invitation to drink and finishes with an evocation of masculine and feminine
desire. It is also encountered in Sappho. In fragment 94 V., Sappho lists the
memories she has kept of a young woman she loved, the garlands she put in her
hair and the wine she would drink, as she lay next to her.
18
Carm. 1.17, 1.27, 1.36, 3.19, 3.28, 4.11.
204 AUGUSTAN POETRY
and light and well-suited to the peaceful atmosphere which the

poet promises Tyndaris19, Lesbii associated with pocula gives an
opportunity to allude to the sympotic poetry of Alcaeus and
Sappho, both from this island and who also associated wine and
love in a sympotic context 20.
Also, when Horace was composing his Odes, erotic poetry
in Rome was mainly represented by the elegy, to which Tibullus
and Propertius had just given a new lease of life. This obviously
had an impact on the expectations of the public who now
associated erotic poetry and songs of passion. It was to meet this
other horizon of expectations that the erotic Odes, apart from
the Greek markers, contain numerous elegiac motifs associated
with erotic passion: the seruitium amoris (Carm. 1.33.13-16),
the paraklausithyron (Carm. 3.10), the figure of the rival (Carm.
1.13, 3.7), and the figure of the dura puella (Carm. 1.5, 3.26).
Horace thus combined the two ideas his audience had of the
erotic genre: the archaic Greek lyric as people then imagined it
in Rome, and the elegy in the form that Tibullus and the first
Propertius had given it at that time.
But P. Fedeli has shown that Horace, while borrowing
certain motifs from the elegy, differentiates himself clearly from
the elegiac genre: to the love of the elegiac poet for one and
only one puella, he preferred multiple partners, characteristic
of the Greek erotic lyric, the uulgiuaga Venus which, according
to Lucretius, protects against passion21. And in fact the erotic
odes, while meeting the contemporary public’s double horizon
of expectations, came somehow as a disappointment to them,
19
See Nisbet and Hubbard (1970, 225), who quote Athen. 28e-30b, Clearchus fr.
6K, Eubulus fr. 124K, Archestratus fr. 59.10, Longus 4.10.
20
The fact that, in the Odes, Italian wine is normally drunk rather than Greek is
an argument in favour of this metapoetic interpretation of Lesbos wine. Cecubi
is drunk in 3.28, Alba in 4.11, Falerno in 1.27.
21
Fedeli (2001, 109-124).
and Horace, while remaining in a certain formal continuity with

the archaic lyric and the Roman elegy, broke with this poetic
tradition. For Horace did not settle for merely meeting the
public’s expectations: he also intended to have an effect on it.
Erotic inspiration and matrimonial inspiration in the

Odes: for a pragmatic approach to reception
When he composed the Odes, Horace was part of
Augustus’ inner circle and even acquired, between book 3 and
book 4 of the Odes, the status of official poet, by composing the
Carmen Saeculare. M. Citroni has shown that the first books
of the Odes were already shaped by this aspiration to become
the voice of society22. This new position fundamentally altered
his relationship with the public. The time for invective was
past, Octavian was now Augustus, and Horace celebrated the
renewal of Rome and invited the Romans to contribute to this
restoration. Now in Augustus’ discourse, Rome’s renewal had
to be political, religious and moral. It was about giving the Vrbs
back its former grandeur, by restoring republican institutions,
putting an end to civil wars and reinstating the mos maiorum.
This is how the laws on marriage promulgated by Augustus in
18 BC must be understood: the lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus,
which reaffirmed class segregation and prohibited the marriage
of free Romans with freedwomen; the lex Iulia de adulteriis
coercendis, which severely punished adultery23. To defend the
22
Citroni (2016, 225-242). The image of the public which Horace gives in Ode
2.20 goes completely in this direction: metamorphosed into a swan, the poet
flies away and carries his song to the most remote provinces (Colchis, Dacia,
Iberia l. 17-20).
23
On the ideological value of marriage in the Odes, see Delignon (2016, 121-
135). On the sociological and legal realities of adultery in the republican period
and under the Empire, see Treggiari (1991, 262-275), Treggiari (2002) and
Delignon (2008).
206 AUGUSTAN POETRY
institution of marriage was to defend the purity of the great

lineages and to restore the well-regulated society of the maiores.
In the Roman odes, Horace himself also associated political,
religious and moral reform24. In Ode 3.6 for example, he invites
the Romans to restore religious edifices, then recalls that the
internecine struggles which had torn Rome apart, in particular
the conflict between Antony and Octavian, could have benefited
enemies, and goes on, without any transition, to condemn young
Roman women’s loose living. In the verses which follow, Horace
celebrates the old Rome, which associated warrior courage and
high morality: he paints the portrait of a generation of rustic
soldiers (rusticorum mascula militum proles l. 37-38), as hardy in
war as when working in the fields and completely respectful of
a strict mother’s authority (seuerae matris ad arbitrium l. 39-40).
24
Nevertheless we must be clear that Ode 3.6 appeared five years before the
marriage laws were promulgated, as the publication of the first three books of
Odes has been dated to 23 BC. That does not mean that we must consider
Horace a visionary, or even the creator of an ideology still under construction.
Augustus did not wait till 18 BC to make marriage and adultery political subjects.
Propertius’ Elegy 2.7.1-6 even leads us to believe that a draft law compelling
freeborn Romans to marry may have seen the day around 28 BC, before being
abandoned. And even if the existence of a draft law like this in 28 BC is not
confirmed, not being attested to by any other source than Propertius, it is
certain that the moral side of Augustus’ thought emerged early. The restoration
of religious buildings was already in Octavian’s programme: in 42 BC, he had
already entrusted the restoration of the temple of Saturn to Munatius Plancus.
Later, he had L. Cornificius finance that of the temple of Diana, which went on
till at least 28 BC, also the year in which he inaugurated the temple of Apollo
Palatinus: see Suetonius, Aug., 29 and Bert Lott (2004, 68-69), Kardos (2000,
287). As for marriage, he used it as a political argument well before Actium:
in an attempt to discredit his rival and to justify the coming offensive, he
claimed to embody the values of mos maiorum and stigmatised Antony’s lifestyle
at Cleopatra’s court. He reproached him in particular for being married to a
foreigner, and an easterner at that (See Dio. 50.3 and 50.23-30 and Suet., Aug.,
69.3). From Octavian to Augustus, there is therefore an ideological continuity,
and even if the contexts and the stakes vary, political use of the mos maiorum and
its values of marriage is a constant. It is not therefore surprising to see Horace
associate restoration of religious buildings, military virtue and matrimonial
morality as early as 23 BC.
Here again, reception plays a complex role in the genesis of

the work: on one hand Horace intended to meet the expectations
aroused by a whole poetic tradition, by introducing into his erotic
odes markers of the sympotic lyric and the elegy, which celebrated
desire and passion; on the other hand he wanted to invite his
audience to contribute to the restoration of Rome and therefore
had to invent a moral erotic poetry, celebrating marriage. This
double constraint played a central role in the poetry of the erotic
odes. We will take here the example of Ode 2.5.
Several odes sing of the erotic power of a nubile young
girl, but are in reality exhortations to marry. In Ode 3.11, this is
explicit: the poet declares that Lyde is nuptiarum expers (l. 11:
“who had not had the experience of nuptials”) and calls for the
assistance of Mercury and the lyre to convince her to be less
rebellious. In Ode 2.5, the situation is slightly less clear. The poet
invites the person he is addressing to renounce the beautiful but
awkward Lalage, who is not yet ready for marriage. He then
declares that soon enough she will look for a husband of her own
accord (l. 16: petet Lalage maritum). For some commentators,
maritum refers metaphorically to a lover and the subject of the
ode is sexual initiation rather than marriage25. And the ode does
indeed open with an imitation of one of Anacreon’s erotic poems,
in which a maiden is compared to a wild filly which the poet
is getting ready to tame. To the extent that maritum designates
both husband and male, Horace is perhaps continuing to extend
the animal metaphor, maintaining that Lalage will soon want to
find herself a male, that is, a lover. Yet, in lines 9-12, he compares
Lalage to a bunch of grapes which will ripen and we know,
thanks to Gregory of Corinth, that this image appeared in an
epithalamium by Sappho and it was used in an erotic context by
Theocritus in his Idyll 1126. We must therefore accept that Ode
25
See for example MacLeod (1979, 92-101).For an opposing view, see Fantham
(1979, 47-52).
26
Greg. Cor. Rhet. Gr. 7.1236.10 ss. Walz = Sapph. fr. 156 test.
208 AUGUSTAN POETRY
2.5 is both erotic and matrimonial27. This apparent contradiction

makes sense if we accept that Horace was endeavouring both to
meet his audience’s expectations and to influence them. All the
first part of the ode is an exhortation to control desire, which
must be contained by the institution of marriage: the person he is
addressing must renounce his desire as Lalage is a young girl who
must be kept for a future marriage; Lalage will one day forget her
fears and feel ready to fulfil her role as wife. Such encouragement
is in line with the Roman odes and their call to moral restoration.
Reception comes in here in its pragmatic dimension: Horace
was setting himself up as city poet, he wanted to speak out in
public and convince his readers of the necessity of refounding
Rome; celebrating marriage was part of this role. But Horace
also had to take into account the expectations of his readers, for
whom an erotic poem celebrated passion above all: that is why
he emphasized the erotic potential of the nubile young girl by
imitating Anacreon; that is why he invoked Sappho’s wedding
poem through the prism of Theocritus’ erotic poetry.
Horace therefore invented a Roman erotic lyric and
here again reception played a central role: to meet his readers’
expectations, Horace followed in the tradition of songs of
passion; because of his pragmatic goal, he transformed this
song of passion into an exhortation to marry. If we take into
consideration all the interactions between the poet and his
audience, we can clarify numerous contradictions and put an
end to a lot of debates.
Conclusion
The role played by reception in the genesis of Horace’s
writings is therefore both important and complex. Horace first
had to deal with the horizon of expectations of his audience, with
27
On this interpretation of Ode 2.5, see Delignon (2012, 95-108) and Delignon
(forthcoming, 276-384).
their many contradictions. As a genre of political polemic, the

satire offended the taste and the aspirations of Romans to civil
peace, but it also embodied the genre of libertas, a republican
value which everyone claimed to defend: to please his readers,
Horace had to both be and not be a new Lucilius; in response
to this paradoxical injunction, he transformed the genre. In the
same way, readers of the Epodes expected invective, because it
was inherent to the iambus, but disapproved because it shocked
their good taste and their expectations. That is why Horace
invented a Latin iambus in which invective is sometimes based
on consensus and sometimes on a literary game, and does not
take up the whole collection. But understanding the role of
reception in the genesis of his work also involves considering
the pragmatic dimension: the work is determined by what the
public expected of the poet, but also by what the poet expected
of the public. Thus Horace chose to compose iambic poetry
because political invective was for him a way of making the
Romans react to the political situation at the time. In the same
way, he invented an erotic lyric which celebrated both marriage
and passion together, because he wanted both to follow a poetic
tradition and to encourage his contemporaries to refound Rome.
Horace composed in a variety of genres and the genres
never seemed to be chosen by chance: they were always the
product of a compromise between audience expectations and
the poet’s aspirations, between the role which the audience was
ready to give to poetry and the role which the poet intended to
play for his audience.
Bibliography
Aloni, A. 2016. “Kῶμος et cité”. In: La poésie lyrique dans la cité antique:
les Odes d’Horace au miroir de la lyrique grecque archaïque, ed. Bénédicte
Delignon, Nadine Le Meur, Olivier Thévenaz, 21-33. Lyon: De Boccard,
coll. CEROR.
210 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Barchiesi, A. 2000. “Rituals in Ink: Horace on the Greek Lyric Tradition.”

In: Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society, ed. Mary Depew, Dirk
Obbink, 167-182. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bert Lott, J. 2004. The neighborhood of Augustan Rome. Cambridge:
Citroni, M. 2016. “Cicéron, Horace et la légitimation de la lyrique comme
poésie civique”. In: La poésie lyrique dans la cité antique: les Odes d’Horace
au miroir de la lyrique grecque archaïque, ed. Bénédicte Delignon, Nadine
Le Meur, Olivier Thévenaz, 225-242. Lyon: De Boccard, coll. CEROR.
Cucchiarelli, A. 2001. La satira et il poeta: Orazio tra Epodi e Sermones.
Bibliotheca di Materiali e discussione per l’analisi dei testi classici 17. Pise:
Giardini editori.
Delignon, B. 2006. Les Satires d’Horace et la comédie gréco-latine: une
poétique de l’ambiguïté. Paris: Peeters.
______. 2008. “Les amours adultères dans la Satire I, 2 d’Horace:
exagérations comiques et réalités socio-politiques”. In: Amor Romanus,
Amours romaines, ed. Jean-Marie Fontanier, 45-68. Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes.
______. 2012. “Érotisme et mariage dans la lyrique amoureuse d’Horace:
l’exemple de l’ode II, 5”. Euphrosyne 409:95-108.
______. 2016. “Le Prince et les bonnes mœurs: la restauration du mos
maiorum dans les Odes érotiques d’Horace”. In: Entre mots et marbre. Les
métamorphoses d’Auguste en mots, ed. Sabine Luciani, 121-135. Bordeaux:
Ausonius editions.
______. 2018 La morale de l’amour dans les Odes d’Horace. Philosophie,
politique et poétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne.
Ducos, M. 2003. “Le droit romain et la politique.” In: La parole polémique,
ed. Gilles Declercq, Michel Murat, Jacqueline Dangel, 283-296. Paris:
Honoré Champion.
Fantham, E. 1979. “The mating of Lalage. Horace, Odes 2.5”. Liverpool
Classical Monthly 4:47-52.
Fedeli, P. 2001. “Poesia d’amore di Orazio”. In: Giornate filologiche «
Francesco Della Corte » II, ed. Ferruccio Bertini, 109-124. Genève:
Université de Genève.
Freudenburg, K. 2001. Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to
Juvenal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, S. 2001. “Some Generic Problems in Horace’s Epodes.” In:

Iambic Ideas. Essays on a Poetic Tradition from Archaic Greece to the Late
Roman Empire, ed. Alberto Cavarzere, Antonio Aloni, Alessandro
Barchiesi, 165-186. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Kardos, M.-J. 2000. Topographie de Rome, Les sources littéraires latines.
Paris: L’Harmattan.
Lowrie, M. 1997. Horace’s narrative odes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
MacLeod, C.W. 1979. “Horatian imitation and Odes 2.5”. In: Creative
imitation and Latin Literature, ed. David West, Tony Woodman, 89-102.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mankin, D. 1995. Horace: Epodes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Nisetich, F. 2001, The Poems of Callimachus, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Nisbet, G. M. and Hubbard, M. 1970. A commentary on Horace, Odes,
Book I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rudd, N. 2004, Horace: Odes and Epodes. Cambridge, London: Harvard
University Press.
Suspène, A. 2009. “Le poète irrévérencieux et la société impériale (Ier
siècle av. J.-C. – Ier siècle ap. J.-C.): une liberté sous conditions”. In: Le
poète irrévérencieux: modèles hellénistiques et réalités romaines, ed. Bénédicte
Delignon, Yves Roman, 15-29. Lyon: De Boccard, coll. CEROR.
Thévenaz, O. 2016. “Actium aux confins de l’iambe et de la lyrique”.
In: La poésie lyrique dans la cité antique: les Odes d’Horace au miroir de
la lyrique grecque archaïque, ed. Bénédicte Delignon, Nadine Le Meur,
Olivier Thévenaz, 99-230. Lyon: De Boccard, coll. CEROR.
Treggiari, S. 1991. Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero
to the Time of Ulpian, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______. 2002. “Caught in the act”. In: Vertis in usum. Studies in honour of
Edward Courtney, ed. C. Damon, J. Miller, K. Myers, 243-249. München:
Sauer.
Watson, L. 2003. A Commentary on Horace’s Epodes, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
West, M. L. 19892. Iambi et Elegi Graeci Ante Alexandrum Cantati. Vol. I:
Archilochus, Hipponax & Theognidea. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Flaccus’ Poetics: Horace-Paris saved by
Mercury-Augustus*

University of São Paulo
In this paper, firstly I want to discuss some Horatian

passages in which we find the recusatio, that, more often than not,
is taken as a declaration of poetic principles which Callimachus
invented. But recently, the staging of the refusal of the epic genre
by Augustan poets has been understood as a representation of
political recusationes, often carried out by Augustus himself1. I
believe, however, that one can explore the poetic and political
topos in Horace, from another perspective yet: the affirmation
of his weakness by refusing the highest genre or war, in all his
works, is not only a subterfuge used to associate himself with the
poetics of Callimachus and representation of political acts, but
it is also a facetious statement, which plays with its own name
and proposes a poetics of weakness. Hence, in the second part
of this paper, I intend to show how, in the Odes, this weakness
*
I would like to thank Artur Costrino and Artur Padovan for helping me ela-
borate the English version of this article. I would also like to thank Stephen
Harrison for his corrections and suggestions.
1
Freudenburg (2014).
214 AUGUSTAN POETRY
is identified with the effeminate Paris, a warrior suitable for

the lyre and love, and, conversely, Horace as a lyric poet unfit
for war. In this second part I also explore an aspect sometimes
forgotten in reading certain poems, although it is not a new
trend in Horatian studies, the poetic book format
Opening the book of Epodes, the poet, addressing his

friend Maecenas, calls himself imbellis ac firmus parum (epod.
1.16), being, by litotes – a weak mode of expression – not suitable
for war. Previously, the feeble poet, even when speaking about
the brave (v.10: qua ferre non mollis uiros), uses the euphemism
that Cavarzere (1992, 121) noted as a possible joke on the poet’s
own cognomen (Flaccus). He also notes that the litotes at v. 16
– imbellis ac parum firmus – is likely an echo of Homer2. I think
that it is a sure reference to the second book of the Iliad (v. 201),
in which Odysseus, to rebuke those who want to return home,
addresses one of them in these terms: ... ἀπτόλεμος καὶ ἄναλκις
(unwarlike and feeble). Horace, therefore, portrays himself, not
wanting to go to war, as a weak warrior who wants to return
home, like Thersites, whom Odysseus addresses (vv. 246-264)
and makes him the object of the Achaean’s laughter. Thus the
poet, in turn, laughs at himself.
This inaugural weakness - and comedy - will pervade all the
epodic work so that the iambic poet who once led his opponents
to death, like Archilochus and Hipponax3, wants, conversely, to
die, but powerless - in many ways – he is subjugated by Canidia
the sorceress, his most constant opponent, and suffers at her
2
Cavarzere (1992, 122).
3
On the paradoxicality of the arquiloquean Horace, see Barchiesi (2001, 154) and
Harrison (2001, 167-74). However, for the resumption of the despised genre of
the infidel Lycambes and of the bitter enemy of Bupalus, see Cucchiarelli (2008,
92-4). Remember that Archilochus also has his moments of weakness when
leaving the shield: fr. 5 W.
FLACCUS’ POETICS: HORACEPARIS SAVED BY MERCURYAUGUSTUS 215
hands, as a last act of the book (epod. 17), which proposes a

reversal of iambics and leaves the epodic mode 4.
Throughout the epodic collection, the image of the weak
Flaccus intensifies5. In epod. 3, the belly of the poet is able to
endure garlic, in a convivial context, at the hands the jocular
Maecenas (v. 20: iocose Maecenas), just like the tough digestion
of rural reapers (v. 4: o dura messorum ilia). The exaggeration here
in invective against the effects caused by garlic, hyperbolic from
start to finish, studied in detail by Gowers (1996, 249), further
emphasizes Horace’s weakness and delicate stomach, suffering
as if he had poison in the very bowels (v. 5: quid hoc ueneni saeuit
in praecordiis?).
In the beginning of the collection’s second part (epod.
11), Horace enacts his poetic crisis6: hurt by violent love, the
poet cannot carry forward the poetic book he has begun (vv.
1-2: Petti, nihil me, sicut antea, iuuat / scribere uersiculos amore
percussum graui). The poet, with such a wound, introducing
the elegiambic meter, assumes both the elegiac character of
mourning, crying (v. 12: ... querebar adplorans tibi). And so
exhausted (v. 9: languor) later in the book, he leaves the violent
invective, “the iambics once started, the promised work” (epod.
14. 7: inceptos olim, promissum carmen, iambos), which is afflicted
by “soft inertia” (epod. 14. 1: mollis inertia), i.e., we see again the
poet who lacks strength.
It is precisely lacking strength, helpless, that we find
Horace in the next epode (epod. 12)7, jokingly involved with
an old woman, in which we find, again, double litotes (v.3: nec
firmo iuueni neque naris obesae), when he resumes, in part, the
4
On epod. 17, as iambic in reverse, see Barchiesi (1994).
5
For the development of this idea, see Hasegawa (2011). See also Oliensis (1991)
and Fitzgerald (1988).
6
About the poetic crisis, in relation to that of Catullus, in carm. 65, see Hasegawa
(2010b).
7
As it was in epod. 8. For epod. 12 and 8, see Hasegawa (2010, 63-71).
216 AUGUSTAN POETRY
initial characterization of the book (epod. 1. 16: firmus parum);

a characterization that prepares the speech of the woman under
attack, impatient with a flaccis young man (v. 16: mollis) 8, with
a virtual spado (v. 17: inertem).
Horace, then, seeing Rome itself collapse by its own
strength (epod. 16. 2: ipsa Roma uiribus ruit), before succumbing
to the magical powers of Canidia, does not propose to stay and
fight but rather to flee (v. 66: piis secunda uate me datur fuga).
The poet then tries to escape the war, at the beginning, looks
helplessly to escape from the woman in the middle, and tries,
eventually, to flee Rome (ῥώμη, ‘strength’), because he is feeble.
At the beginning of the second book of Satires, to
Horace’s question on what to do about criticism of his excess
and deficiency, that is, of his strength and weakness (sat. 2.1.1-
2: nimis acer .../ sine neruis)9, the jurist Trebatius responds
laconically, “be quiet” (v. 5: quiescas), i.e. the lawyer suggests to
the satirist to stop writing, to abandon poetry. Horace recognizes
that this is the best solution for his problem, but he cannot sleep:
he suffers from insomnia and therefore cannot stop writing. To
heal his insomnia, Trebatius suggests that he swim the Tiber
three times and at night drink copious amounts of wine, or if
the love for writing is too intense, he advises Horace to narrate
the deeds of Caesar (sat. 2.1.10-15)10:
aut si tantus amor scribendi te rapit, aude 10
Caesaris inuicti res dicere, multa laborum
praemia laturus.’ ‘cupidum, pater optime, uires
deficiunt; neque enim quiuis horrentia pilis
agmina nec fracta pereuntis cuspide Gallos
aut labentis equo describit uolnera Parthi.’ 15
8
Term that resumes epod. 1. 10: mollis uiros and will be resumed in epod. 14.1:
mollis inertia.
9
To read these terms, first, with reference to the sublime and humile genera, and
then, as sexual allusion, see Freudenburg (1990).
10
On the recusatio scheme here, see Fedeli (1994, 534-6).
But if Horace is unable to stop writing, then he should

dare to write epic poetry and narrate the deeds of the undefeated
Augustus, because thus he will win reward for his work. The
satirical genre, as Horace himself says in sat. sat. 1, 4, 24-25
(quod sunt quos genus hoc minime iuuat, utpote pluris / culpari
dignos), is appreciated by few, as many are blame worthy. But
if, at first, Horace mentions that he received criticism for being
feeble and sinewless in satires, now he acknowledges he lacks
strength to describe deeds of war. Following the precepts that
he will writte in the Ars Poetica (vv. 38-40: vv. 38-40: Sumite
materiam uestris, qui scribitis, aequam / uiribus et uersate diu quid
ferre recusent, / quid ualeant umeri), the satirical author knows that
his shoulders are not able to bear such subjects. By refusing the
higher genre, he situates the satire on minor genre, pedestrian,
suited to his weakness, alluded to by his name with which he
plays in sequence (sat. 2.1.16-20):
‘attamen et iustum poteras et scribere fortem,
Scipiadam ut sapiens Lucilius.’ ‘haud mihi dero,
cum res ipsa feret: nisi dextro tempore Flacci
uerba per attentam non ibunt Caesaris aurem:
cui male si palpere, recalcitrat undique tutus.’ 20
Having introduced the inventor and the satirical genre

model, Lucilius, Horace says he intends to praise Augustus, but
fears that, at the right time, the words of a weak person do not
reach the listening ear of Caesar. By playing with his own name,
the satirist characterizes himself as weak, but this weakness is
not that of verses without sinews, I think, but another kind
that is, in fact, a virtue in the description that Horace makes
of himself in sat. 1.4, to oppose himself to Lucilius, his model.
I quote the passage in which he remembers the models of the
creator of the satirical genre (vv. 1-21.):
Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanes poetae
atque alii, quorum comoedia prisca uirorum est,
siquis erat dignus discribi, quod malus ac fur,
218 AUGUSTAN POETRY
quod moechus foret aut sicarius aut alioqui

famosus, multa cum libertate notabant. 5
Hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, hosce secutus
mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque, facetus,
emunctae naris, durus componere uersus;
nam fuit hoc uitiosus; in hora saepe ducentos,
ut magnum, uersus dictabat, stans pede in uno. 10
Cum flueret lutulentus, erat quod tollere uelles;
garrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem,
scribendi recte: nam ut multum, nil moror. Ecce,
Crispinus minimo me prouocat: “accipe, si uis,
accipiam tabulas; detur nobis locus, hora, 15
custodes; uideamus uter plus scribere possit”.
Di bene fecerunt, inopis me quodque pusilli
finxerunt animi, raro et perpauca loquentis;
at tu conclusas hircinis follibus auras
usque laborantis, dum ferrum molliat ignis, 20
ut mauis, imitare.
Thus, to Lucilius faulty when composing verses, to the

lutulentus inventor who at one time would dictate two hundred
lines, chatty and lazy, just like the philosopher and poet
Crispinus, is opposed Horace who has a weak heart, small, needy,
speaking little and rarely. Similarly, Persius will also oppose the
two models, claiming to be a violent Lucilius, biting opponents
until breaking his teeth, and a subtle Flaccus, touching the vices
of his laughing friend (sat. 1.114-117):
(...) secuit Lucilius urbem,
te Lupe, te Muci, et genuinum fregit in illis. 115
omne uafer uitium ridenti Flaccus amico
tangit (...).
In the second book of the Epistles, addressing Augustus,

again in a military context, he states that modesty does not
dare to sing what the shoulders cannot bear (epist. 2.1.258-
59: ... nec meus audet / rem temptare pudor quam uires ferre
recusent), similar to what he says at the Ars Poetica, 38-40:
sumite materiam uestris, qui scribitis, aequam/ uiribus et uersate
diu quid ferre recusent,/ quid ualeant umeri) where he advises
choosing a subject appropriate to one’s strength. Although he

prefers writing about great deeds to writing pedestrian sermones
(vv. 250-251: nec sermones ego mallem / repentis per humum quam
res componere gestas), he is not able to do it. One who is weak can
only offer to the princeps a carmen paruum that the Augustan
majesty cannot accept (vv. 257-258: sed neque paruum / carmen
maiestas recipit tua)11.
As we have seen so far, the poet’s weakness is present in
Epodes, in the Satires and Epistles. Most of the time, as stated
at the beginning, the passages have been studied as refusals12
to writte epic, although the reasons are found already in older
poetry, in the Aitia of Callimachus (fr. 1. 17-24 Pf.). However,
more recently, the refusal has been studied as a representation of
the political recusationes. Now, in the second part, knowing that
the poetic refusal is a weakness inherent to the poet Flaccus, I
want to understand it as a mode of identification, with the Odes,
in the inappropriate warrior Paris.
I begin with the most quoted and commented refusal of
Horace, carm. 1.6:
Scriberis Vario fortis et hostium
uictor, Maeonii carminis alite,
quam rem cumque ferox nauibus aut equis
miles te duce gesserit.
Nos, Agrippa, neque haec dicere nec grauem 5
Pelidae stomachum cedere nescii,
nec cursus duplicis per mare Vlixei
nec saeuam Pelopis domum
conamur, tenues grandia, dum pudor
imbellisque lyrae Musa potens uetat 10
laudes egregii Caesaris et tuas
culpa deterere ingeni.
11
For an analysis of the excerpt, with bibliography, see Piccolo (2014, 121-123;
173-175).
12
For the history of recusatio, see Pasquali (1920, 313-5), Nisbet; Hubbard (1970,
81-83) and Davis (1991, 28-33).
220 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Quis Martem tunica tectum adamantina

digne scripserit aut puluere Troico
nigrum Merionen aut ope Palladis 15
Tydiden superis parem?
Nos conuiuia, nos proelia uirginum
sectis in iuuenes unguibus acrium
cantamus, uacui siue quid urimur
non praeter solitum leues. 20
I do not intend to do a close reading of the ode, already

much studied13. First of all, I am interested in placing it in the
first book of Odes: it is the first poem written in the second
Asclepaid stanza: three minor asclepiads followed by a glyconic.
In the parade of Odes in which Horace presents several meters
that he will use throughout his lyrical work, the carm. 1.6 as a
“proemio al mezzo” opposes lyra imbellis (v. 10) to the praise of
the egregious Caesar (v. 11), or, as in epist. 2.1.258-59, the modest
poet does not dare to try subjects that his shoulders refuse to bear.
Here, however, as we are in the lyrical genre, beyond modesty,
we have the powerful Muse of the unwarlike lyre also vetoing
the diminution of the praises of Augustus by a carmen paruum.
It is also worth mentioning that, if he rejects, on the one
hand, certain subjects, on the other, by saying what he does sing,
announces (vv. 16-20) only erotic and convivial topics (ars 85:
et iuuenum curas et libera uina referre), or the humblest species
of the genus. He does not oppose here epic subjects such as
the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, or mention the lyric
hymns, encomia and epinicia he alludes to in the ars (83-4) or
to epinician, higher genres and therefore closer to the epic.
Further in the book, the second Asclepiad stanza returns,
repeated for the first time, only in carm. 1.15, an ode in which
Nereus, turning to Paris, returning to Troy with Helen, makes his
prophetic fateful speech. The perfidious Paris is thus described
in the fourth and fifth stanzas (vv. 13-20):
13
I refer to Piccolo (2014), with bibliography.
Nequiquam Veneris praesidio ferox

pectes caesariem, grataque feminis
imbelli cithara carmina diuides: 15
nequiquam thalamo grauis
hastas et calami spicula Cnosii

uitabis strepitumque et celerem sequi
Aiacem: tamen, heu serus, adulteros
crines puluere collines. 20
Davis (1991, 27), from the peaceful lyre (v. 15) suggests a
confrontation with the carm. 1.6, in which we have the powerful
Muse of the peaceful lyre (v. 10). Thus, we can identify the poet
Horace with Paris, the lyric poet unfit for war with the warrior
suitable for the lyre. But if we now compare with the passage
in which Alexander is reproached by his brother, Hector, before
the battle with Menelaus, in Book 3 of the Iliad, we can deepen
the comparison (vv. 39-57):
Δύσπαρι εἶδος ἄριστε γυναιμανὲς ἠπεροπευτὰ
αἴθ᾽ ὄφελες ἄγονός τ᾽ ἔμεναι ἄγαμός τ᾽ ἀπολέσθαι: 40
καί κε τὸ βουλοίμην, καί κεν πολὺ κέρδιον ἦεν
ἢ οὕτω λώβην τ᾽ ἔμεναι καὶ ὑπόψιον ἄλλων.
ἦ που καγχαλόωσι κάρη κομόωντες Ἀχαιοὶ
φάντες ἀριστῆα πρόμον ἔμμεναι, οὕνεκα καλὸν
εἶδος ἔπ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἔστι βίη φρεσὶν οὐδέ τις ἀλκή. 45
ἦ τοιόσδε ἐὼν ἐν ποντοπόροισι νέεσσι
πόντον ἐπιπλώσας, ἑτάρους ἐρίηρας ἀγείρας,
μιχθεὶς ἀλλοδαποῖσι γυναῖκ᾽ εὐειδέ᾽ ἀνῆγες
ἐξ ἀπίης γαίης νυὸν ἀνδρῶν αἰχμητάων
πατρί τε σῷ μέγα πῆμα πόληΐ τε παντί τε δήμῳ, 50
δυσμενέσιν μὲν χάρμα, κατηφείην δὲ σοὶ αὐτῷ;
οὐκ ἂν δὴ μείνειας ἀρηΐφιλον Μενέλαον;
γνοίης χ᾽ οἵου φωτὸς ἔχεις θαλερὴν παράκοιτιν:
οὐκ ἄν τοι χραίσμῃ κίθαρις τά τε δῶρ᾽ Ἀφροδίτης
ἥ τε κόμη τό τε εἶδος ὅτ᾽ ἐν κονίῃσι μιγείης. 55
ἀλλὰ μάλα Τρῶες δειδήμονες: ἦ τέ κεν ἤδη
λάϊνον ἕσσο χιτῶνα κακῶν ἕνεχ᾽ ὅσσα ἔοργας.
222 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Although Porphyrio recognizes in carm. 1.15 the imitation

of Bacchylides14, there is allusion, directly or indirectly, to the
weak and non-warrior Paris who uses the lyre and love, but spoils
his beautifully arranged hair in vain . The lyre of Alexander/Paris
will be of no use to him in war, and, like Horace’s lyre, although
belonging to the powerful Muse, is not warlike. Similarly,
Horace is iambic, peaceful, and thus will not be able to help his
friend, Maecenas, in his departure to war or narrate the deeds
of oustandigg Caesar. The only course left to Paris, as to Horace,
is just to run away, because he is feeble (carm 1.15.31: sublimi
fugies mollis anhelitu).
Horace-Paris Saved By Octavian-Mercury

We can then assume Horace is close to Paris, both too
weak for war, but suited to the lyric, especially erotic. Now let
us consider carm. 2.7, in which the poet states he abandoned his
shield during the battle of Philippi (42 BC), when Mark Antony
and Octavian, the future Augustus, defeated the murderers of
Caesar - Cassius and Brutus - whom the poet had joined at the
time studying in Athens. The ode is addressed to Pompey, an
unknown character to us, with whom Horace shared the dangers
of civil war and the pleasures of the symposium. Now, on the
princeps’ side and patronised by Maecenas, Horace celebrates his
friend’s return to Italy and invites him to a sympsoium:
O saepe mecum tempus in ultimum
deducte Bruto militiae duce,
quis te redonauit Quiritem
dis patriis Italoque caelo,
14
Porphyrio (1979, 23): Hac ode Bacchylidem imitatur. Nam ut ille Cassandram facit
uaticinari futura belli Troiani, ita hic Proteum [In this ode he mimics Bacchylides.
Indeed, he makes Cassandra foretell the future of the Trojan War, as here (the
poet makes) Proteus (foretell)].
Pompei, meorum prime sodalium? 5

Cum quo morantem saepe diem mero
fregi coronatus nitentis
malobathro Syrio capillos?
Tecum Philippos et celerem fugam
sensi relicta non bene parmula, 10
cum fracta uirtus et minaces,
turpe solum tetigere mento:
sed me per hostis Mercurius celer
denso pauentem sustulit aere,
te rursus in bellum resorbens 15
unda fretis tulit aestuosis.
Ergo obligatam redde Ioui dapem:
longaque fessum militia latus
depone sub lauru mea nec
parce cadis tibi destinatis. 20
Obliuioso leuia Massico
ciboria exple, funde capacibus
unguenta de conchis. Quis udo
deproperare apio coronas
curatue myrto? Quem Venus arbitrum 25
dicet bibendi? non ego sanius
bacchabor Edonis: recepto
dulce mihi furere est amico.
It is the critical consensus that Horace here recounts

historical fact, namely, that he actually fled from the battle at
Philippi15 in a rapid escape (v. 9: ... celerem fugam), regardless of
whether he abandoned the shield (v. 10: relicta ... parmula) or
not, and of having been saved by the quick action of Mercury,
snatching the poet from amidst the enemy in a mist (vv. 13-14:
sed me per hostis Mercurius celer / denso pauentem sustulit aere). The
poet also mentions the fight or alludes to that battle in other
passages (cf. sat. 1.6.48, in which he points out that out that
15
Cf. Fraenkel (1957, 11); Nisbet; Hubbard (1978, 106-7); Romano (1991, 659).
Cf. also Harrison (2016, 89-98).
224 AUGUSTAN POETRY
he was tribunus militum in Brutus’ army: quod mihi pareret legio

Romana tribuno; epist. 2.2. 46-48, in which recalls the time of
study in Athens, when he enlisted in the army of Brutus: dura
sed emouere loco me tempora grato / ciuilisque rudem belli tulit aestus
in arma / Caesaris Augusti non responsura lacertis). So, most likely,
it was from the information of the Horatian texts that not only
the historical Suetonius (De poetis, 40, 5-6: bello Philippensi
excitus a M. Bruto imperatore tribunus militum meruit), but other
historians and philologists have tried to rebuild the poet’s life.
However, it is also well known that Horace, when
reporting the escape of the battle of Philippi, and especially
the abandonment of the shield, updates a topos found already
in archaic Greek poets, important models for his lyrics.
Archilochus (fr. 5 W), Alcaeus (fr. 428 ALP) and Anacreon
(fr. 381b PMG)16 also narrate in poetry the abandonment of
their own shield. Therefore, although it is plausible that the
fact occurred, it seems likely that Horace is faking the pain of
a historical abandonment17, emulating the archaic lyric poets.
Having identified the commonplace, we can continue to analyse
and try to understand why Horace uses the topos in this poem,
as other scholars have done18.
First, about the comparison with other occurrences of
shield abandonment in archaic Greek poets, one can say that
they do not mention the fact that the warrior was removed from
the battle by a god. The withdrawal of the poet, in a thick mist
(v. 14: denso ... aere) carried by swift Mercury recalls a passage
16
For an analysis of the fragments, especially Archilochus’, see Corrêa (1998,
110-33).
17
Fraenkel (1957, 11-2) already said that: 11-12: “The scholars who take Horace’s
phrase in this literal way discard as irrelevant the fact that some poets with
whom Horace was thoroughly familiar and who inspired him in various ways,
Archilochus, Alcaeus, and, possibly, Anacreon, had said of themselves that in the
course of a battle they had thrown away their shield”. For a comparison of the
passage in carm. 2. 7 with Archilochus, see Cavarzere (1996, 211-5).
18
See, for instance, Harrison (2007, 25-6).
in Homer in which Paris, about to be defeated by Menelaus in

a single fight, is subtracted from the fighting, wrapped in thick
mist by the goddess Aphrodite and led to his bed-chamber to
meet Helen (Iliad 3.380-382) 19:
(...) τὸν δ’ ἐξήρπαξ’ Ἀφροδίτη 380
ῥεῖα μάλ’ ὥς τε θεός, ἐκάλυψε δ’ ἄρ’ ἠέρι πολλῇ,
κὰδ δ’ εἷσ’ ἐν θαλάμῳ εὐώδεϊ κηώεντι.
If here, in the Homeric excerpt, the character is removed

from the war by the goddess of love and brought to the bed-
chamber to make love, in carm. 2.7, the character is removed
from the war by the god who created the lyre20 (cf. Homeric
Hymn to Hermes, vv. 23 ff.) and saved in order to write lyric
poetry, to, among other things, to sing of love, the main subject
of carm. 1.6. In this sense, one can understand the topic of shield
abandonment as a form of epic denial, different from carm. 1.6
and 4.15, in which the Latin poet has as a model, especially the
Αἴτια of Callimachus, and explicitly states that he will not sing
of war, because he has not strength enough to do it. In carm. 2.7,
therefore, the object of the shield may represent, by synecdoche,
the epic genre21.
Let us return to the presence of Mercury, which, in addition
to representing the lyric poetry, as we have said in meta-poetic
19
The withdrawal of a hero by a God during the battle is recurrent in the Iliad (5:
314 ff .; 20, 325 ff., and 20, 443 ff.). Romano (1991, 661) thinks Horace mimics
rather the last excerpt (20, 443 ff.), when Apollo takes Hector away from the
battle, but we know that in book 22, Hector dies in combat at the hands of
Achilles. Thus, imitation seems to be rather of Book 3, in which Paris, taken
from the battle, survives and enjoys the love of Helen, as the poet, taken from
the battle survives and sings of love in his lyric verses.
20
Here I suggest a different interpretation from that of Harrison (2007, 25), who
understands Mercury as the god of poetry, without specifying a genre. Harrison
(p. 24) also associates this fact with a different one: the fall of the tree that almost
killed the poet, who, here too, was saved by a god (cf. carm. 2.13; 2.17, vv. 27-30;
3.4, v. 27).
21
On this association, see Hasegawa (2012).
226 AUGUSTAN POETRY
reading, can be interpreted in a political sense, as we intend to

show in what follows. Paul Zanker (1989, 48-58) showed how
Sextus Pompey, with political objectives, compared himself
with Hercules, Bacchus and Neptune22, or how Mark Antony
was represented as Bacchus23, while Octavian would rather
play the role of favorite of Apollo, to whom he attributed, for
example, the final victory over Sextus Pompey24. Unsurprisingly
the use of the Roman political characters made of deities and
heroes. Thus we can also understand through the confrontation
with other Horace’s Carmina whom Mercury can represent in
carm. 2.7, a fact not yet explored by critics, as far as we know.
Mercury-Octavianus
For this identification, we must return to the beginning
of the first Book of Odes. In carm. 1.2, the first poem in Sapphic
stanza, the poet narrates many terrible events (vv. 1-24), which
happened to the Romans after the assassination of Julius Caesar
(44 a.), As the civil war rages (vv. 21-24) the poet asks which
god people will call on at the time the empire falls (vv. 25-25:
Quem uocet diuum populus ruentis / imperi rebus? ...). After calling
Apollo, Venus and Mars (vv. 30-40) in the final three stanzas he
looks at Mercury, who on earth, transfigured into a young man,
appears as Caesar’s avenger (vv. 41-52):
siue mutata iuuenem figura
ales in terris imitaris almae
filius Maiae patiens uocari
Caesaris ultor,
serus in caelum redeas diuque 45

laetus intersis populo Quirini,
22
Horace, for instance, refers to him as Neptunius dux (epod. 9, 7-8).
23
He, after defeating the armenians, entered Alexandria dressed as Baco [cf.
Zanker (1989, 52)].
24
Cf. Zanker (1989, mainly 55-8).
neue te nostris uitiis iniquum

ocior aura
tollat: hic magnos potius triumphos,

hic ames dici pater atque princeps, 50
neu sinas Medos equitare inultos
te duce, Caesar
Mercury’s identification with Octavian, which causes

some surprise25, is explicit and exploited by all commentators.
Although surprising, there seems to exist material evidence from
the Augustan period, in which the emperor identified himself
with this god26: there is, for example, an image of Augustus
carrying the caduceus27; we can also find a cameo on which the
face of the princeps is shown, with the caduceus28; finally, there
is numismatic evidence in which Mercury appears sitting on a
rock and the inscription Caesar divi f 29. So the identification of
Octavian with Mercury does not seem to be just an invention
of Horace, but may have circulated among the Romans, and is
rooted in the Hellenistic cult of the sovereign (Alexander, for
example, already dressed as Hermes, and Ptolemy III appears
on a gem using this god’s attribute30).
So after the first ode (carm. 1.1), which opens Horace’s
lyric career and contains poetic program for what follows, there
is a poem dedicated to Octavian Augustus (carm. 1.2), which
is exactly the one that removes Horace not from the battle, but
rather from political faction, considered the enemy of the Vrbs,
25
Nisbet and Hubbard (1970, 34): “Horace’s identification of Mercury and
Octavian is a matter for surprise, which needs a note of some length”. On this
identification, see also Martins (2017).
26
Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1970, 34).
27
This object, however, seens to be of a posterior date to carm. 1.2, see Fraenkel
(1957, 248, n.1).
28
Zanker (1989, 285, 210 fig).
29
For the numismatic evidence, see still Pasquali (1920, 182).
30
Cf. Nisbet; Hubbard (1970, 35).
228 AUGUSTAN POETRY
so that it allows him to be the poet of love, of the wine, of Rome

and of the princeps. Thus, if we have in carm. 1.2 a praise of
Octavian identified with Mercury, as protector from the internal
and external enemies of Rome, we also find praise of Augustus
in carm. 2.7, who, under the figure of Mercury, preserves the poet
of Rome (cf. carm. 4. 6), removes him from the middle of the
battle, just like Paris, for being weak and not knowing how to
fight, and from the misunderstanding of aligning himself with
Brutus and Cassius. The poet is safe so he can sing love in his
lyric, a suitable subject for Flaccus.
Bibliography
Barchiesi, A. 1994. “Ultime difficoltà nella carriera di un poeta giambico:
l’epodo XVII”, in Atti dei Convegni di Venosa, Napoli e Roma, Venosa,
pp. 205-220.
Cavarzere, A. 1992. Orazio. Il libro degli Epodi, tr. di F. Bandini, Venezia:
Marsilio.
______. 1996. Sul limitare. Il «motto» e la poesia di Orazio, Bologna, Pàtron
Editore.
Corrêa, P. da C. 1998. Armas e varões: a guerra na lírica de Arquíloco, São
Paulo: Editora UNESP.
Cucchiarelli, A. 2008. “Eros e giambo. Forme editoriali negli Epodi di
Orazio”, MD, 60, 69-104.
Davis, G. 1991. Polyhymnia, The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse.
Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press.
Fedeli, P. 1994. Q. Orazio Flacco. Le Opere II (Le Satire), tomo secondo,
Roma, I. P. Z. S Libreria dello Stato.
Fitzgerald, W. 1988. “Power and Impotence in Horace’s Epodes”, Ramus,
17: 176-91.
Fraenkel, E. 1957. Horace, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freudenburg, K. 1990. “Horace’s Satiric Program and the Language of
Contemporary Theory in Satires 2.1”, AJPh, 111: 187-203.
______. 2014. “Recusatio as Political Theatre: Horace’s Letter to
Augustus”, JRS, 104: 1-28.
Gowers, E. 1996. La pazza tavola. Il cibo nella letteratura romana, tr. di L.

Giacone, Torino: Società Editrice Internazionale.
Harrisson, S. J. 2001. Some Generic Problems in Horace’s Epodes: Or, On
(Not) Being Archilochus, in Cavarzere, Aloni, Barchiesi: 165-86.
Harrison, S. J. 2007. The Cambridge Companio to Horace, Cambridge:
Harrison, S. J. 2016. “Horace Odes 2.7: Greek models and Roman civil
war”. In: B.Delignon, N.Le Meur and Olivier Thévenaz (eds.), La poésie
lyrique dans la cité antique (Paris, 2016), 89-98.
Hasegawa, A. P. 2010. Dipositio e distinção de gêneros nos Epodos de Horácio:
estudo acompanhado de tradução em verso, São Paulo, tese de doutorado
(inédita).
______. 2010b. “Crisi poetica e forma editoriale”, SIFC, 103: 5-10.
______. 2011. “A fraqueza de Flaco no Livro dos Epodos”. In:
Paulo Martins, Henrique F. Cairus, João Angelo Oliva Neto (eds.).
Algumas Visões da Antiguidade. 1 ed. (Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2011),
v. 2: 133-44.
______. 2012. “Deuses e ordo no livro IV das Odes”, in Leni Ribeiro
Leite, Gilvan Ventura da Silva, Raimundo N. B. de Carvalho (org.).
Gênero, Religião e Poder na Antiguidade, Vitória: GM Editora,
pp. 89-110.
Klingner, F., (ed.). 1959. Horatius. Opera, Lipsiae.
Martins, P. 2017. “Augusto como Mercúrio Enfim”, Revista de História
da USP, 176, 2017.
Nisbet, R. G. M.; Hubbard, M. 1970. A commentary on Horace, Odes,
Book I. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Oliensis, E. 1991. “Canidia, Canicula, and the Decorum of Horace’s
Epodes” Arethusa, 24: 107-38.
Pasquali, G. 1920. Orazio lirico, Firenze: Felice Le Monnier.
Piccolo, A. 2014. O Arco e a Lira: Modulações da épica homérica nas Odes
de Horácio, Campinas, tese de doutorado (inédita).
Thomas, R. 2011. Horace. Odes IV and Carmen saeculare. Cambridge,
Zanker, P. 1989. Augusto e il potere delle immagini, Torino, Giulio Einaudi.
Horace’s hymn to Bacchus (Odes 2.19):
poetics and politics
Stephen Harrison
The University of Oxford, Corpus Christi College
Bacchum in remotis carmina rupibus I have seen Bacchus teaching his songs
uidi docentem, credite posteri, Amid distant rocks – believe me, you who come after
Nymphasque discentis et auris With the Nymphs as his pupils and the sharp ears
capripedum Satyrorum acutas. Of the goat-footed satyrs.
euhoe, recenti mens trepidat metu 5 Euhoe! My mind is atremble with fresh fear
plenoque Bacchi pectore turbidum And rejoices confusedly with a heart full of Bacchus:
laetatur. euhoe, parce Liber, Euhoe! Spare me, Liber, spare me
parce, graui metuende thyrso. You who are to be feared for your deadly thyrsus.
fas peruicacis est mihi Thyiadas It is right for me to sing of the tireless Maenads,
uinique fontem lactis et uberes 10 The fountain of wine and rich streams of milk,
cantare riuos atque truncis And tell again of the honey flowing
lapsa cauis iterare mella; From hollow tree-trunks:
fas et beatae coniugis additum Right too to sing of the ornament of your blest consort
stellis honorem tectaque Penthei Added to the constellations, and the house of Pentheus
disiecta non leni ruina, 15 Scattered in no gentle collapse,
Thracis et exitium Lycurgi. And the destruction of Thracian Lycurgus.
tu flectis amnes, tu mare barbarum, You turn the course of rivers and the foreign sea,
tu separatis uuidus in iugis You, wet with wine, in isolated hills
nodo coerces uiperino Bind harmlessly with a band of snakes
Bistonidum sine fraude crinis. 20 The hair of the women of Thrace.
tu, cum parentis regna per arduum You, when the impious squad of Giants climbed
cohors Gigantum scanderet inpia, Your father’s realm through the heights,
Rhoetum retorsisti leonis Thrust back Rhoetus, terrible to behold
unguibus horribilisque mala, For your lion’s claw and jaws,
232 AUGUSTAN POETRY
quamquam choreis aptior et iocis 25 Though, said to be apter for dances, games
ludoque dictus non sat idoneus And sport, you were rumoured to be
pugnae ferebaris; sed idem Not fit enough for fighting: but you were the same
pacis eras mediusque belli. Central figure in both peace and war.
te uidit insons Cerberus aureo Cerberus saw you without trying to harm you,
cornu decorum leniter atterens 30 Beautiful with your golden horn, gently rubbing you
cauda et recedentis trilingui With his tail, and as you departed he touched your
ore pedes tetigitque crura. feet
And calves with his three-tongued mouth.
1
1. Introduction
This poem is a form of hymn to Bacchus, though its
opening vision-scenario is unusual for a hymnic poem.2 Bacchus/
Liber, 3 the Roman form of Dionysus, is of course a traditional
god of poetry and a character in famous literary texts (some of
which are duly drawn on for the accounts of his deeds in this
poem, as we shall see later). In my view, it does not report a
personal religious experience of Horace the real individual,
though Fraenkel believed that it did: ‘I think Horace means
what he says. He did see Dionysus’;4 there is no reason to
believe that this particular statement by the poet/narrator
represents an actual event. This does not prevent any connection
of the poem with religious texts; indeed Albert Henrichs has
persuasively shown that this ode presents a number of formal
elements which also occur in Dionysiac aretalogies, religious
1
All translations are my own; the text of 2.19 used is that of Harrison (2017),
where the textual choices at lines 24 (horribilisque) and 31 (cauda) and the
language of the poem in general receive fuller consideration. For the main
literature on the poem in addition to commentaries [especially Nisbet; Hubbard
(1978), Syndikus (2001)] see Pöschl (1973); Henrichs (1978); Batinski (1990-
91); Davis (1991, 107-11); Koster (1994); Krasser (1995, 108-11; 119-27; 138-
41); Lowrie (1997, 205-10); Stevens (1999), and the complete list to 2006 in
Holzberg (2007).
2
For a comparison with Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo cf. Krasser (1995, 111-20).
3
I use these forms of the name interchangeably (as Horace’s poem does).
4
Fraenkel (1957, 200).
HORACE’S HYMN TO BACCHUS ODES 2.19: POETICS AND POLITICS 233
texts praising the god and enumerating his deeds and qualities. 5
Accordingly, we need to analyse this poem as an example of the
literary presentation of a divine encounter, as a kind of poetic
consecration; 6 Hesiod’s Theogony, where the poet encounters
the Muses who encourage him to sing (22-34), suggests that
this encounter with Bacchus will have something to say about
the poetics of the Odes, and we will find this to be true.
2. Why Bacchus and not Apollo?

It is interesting that Horace chooses Bacchus in this
ode as his inspiring deity; in Callimachus’ Aetia (fr.1 Pf.) and
Virgil’s sixth Eclogue this role is played by Apollo, and Apollo’s
association with the lyre would make him a natural god for this
role in the Odes (cf. Odes 1.31.17-20). Like Apollo, Bacchus/
Dionysus is a god widely associated with different types of lyric
poetry, especially dithyramb,7 and thus suits the lyric genre of the
Odes; his role as the god of wine also helps to explain his presence
in the Odes, given their frequent concern with the symposium
and the consumption of wine as a theme and setting for poems8
(this is made more explicit in Odes 3.25, see below). As we shall
see in section 4 below, there is also some affinity between the
presentation of Bacchus in this poem and the poet’s own self-
framing as a lyric poet. Further, the poet is surely conscious
of appropriating for his lyric a god whose primary generic
association was with Greek tragedy,9 a rather different form of
writing, and this link with a theoretically ‘higher’ literary genre
perhaps reflects the poet’s ambition as the collection of Odes
5
Henrichs (1978, 211-19).
6
For this theme in Greek and Roman poetry see still Kambylis (1965).
7
For Dionysus’ link with dithyramb see e.g. Zimmermann (1992, 37-8).
8
For this theme see e.g. Davis (2007).
9
For an excellent summary of this connection see Easterling (1997).
234 AUGUSTAN POETRY
1-3 approaches Book 3 and the elevated Roman Odes. 10 This

rich literary history of Bacchus in Greek tragedy also makes a
him a channel for a key technique of the Odes in appropriating
material strongly associated with other literary kinds, ‘generic
enrichment’ - see section 4 below.
This paper also argues that Bacchus is parallel to
Augustus – that the selection of this god rather than Apollo is
political as well as poetical. Since the foundation by the young
Caesar of the temple of Palatine Apollo at Rome (dedicated
in 28 BCE) as a celebration of the victory of Actium, the
connection between Augustus and Apollo was perceived as
a close one, even to the extent that rumours circulated that
Apollo was Augustus’ father (Suetonius Div.Aug. 92). As in
Odes 1.2, where he suggests a link between the young Caesar
and Mercury, Horace seems in 2.19 to be avoiding the obvious
divine associations of Augustus with Apollo. Odes 1.2 and 2.19
appear to present a common strategy, to create a link between
the young Caesar and a wider range of gods than just the
established Apollo. This strategy is parallel to that of Vergil
in the dedication of the Georgics, published probably in 29
BCE a few years before the Odes, which lists twelve traditional
gods of agriculture and then turns to the young Caesar, seen
as a potential new god who could oversee earth, sea or heaven
(1.24-35). In both cases the divine links of the young leader are
emphasised and extended. As we will see, the choice of Bacchus
is not only an extension of divine links for the young Caesar; it is
also an appropriation for Caesarian purposes of a god previously
closely linked with the young Caesar’s most dangerous rival and
enemy, Marcus Antonius.
10
On this feature of the later poems of Odes 2 see the introduction to Harrison
(2017).
3. Bacchus/Dionysus and politics
(a) identifying with Dionysus – Antony and afterwards

It seems clear that while in Egypt with Cleopatra in the
30s BCE, Marcus Antonius chose to identify himself with the
god Dionysus; 11 this was largely because in Egypt Dionysus
was widely linked with the god Osiris, the brother and husband
of Isis (cf. e.g. Herodotus 2.42) and Cleopatra was keen to
present herself as Isis, 12 and there was a tradition of Greek and
Greek/Egyptian kings identifying themselves with Dionysus
which goes back to Alexander. 13 In poetry written after the
battle of Actium Antony’s link with Dionysus, like his link
with Hercules, seems to be transferred to the young Caesar, the
future Augustus, and I would like to argue that this is a possible
way of reading Odes 2.19; as we shall see, multiple links can be
established between the young god Dionysus and the young
semi-divine Caesar. 14
One text written a few years before Horace’s ode, and
to which it seems to allude, is Tibullus 1.7 (27/26 BCE). This
is addressed to Messalla, ally of young Caesar at Actium and
Antony’s replacement as consul for 31, and its main section
praises the qualities of the god Egyptian god Osiris, clearly
identified with Bacchus (1.7.33-48):
Hic docuit teneram palis adiungere vitem,
Hic viridem dura caedere falce comam;
Illi iucundos primum matura sapores
Expressa incultis uva dedit pedibus.
11
See Pelling (1988, 209), Śnieżewsk (1998).
12
See e.g. Takács (2011).
13
For some references see Woodman (1993, 213-15).
14
A similar and rewarding approach has been taken to the deployment of the
figure of Bacchus in Vergil by Mac Góráin (2013). For a useful broader study of
the cultural/political status of Bacchus at Rome see Fuhrer (2011).
236 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Ille liquor docuit voces inflectere cantu,

Movit et ad certos nescia membra modos,
Bacchus et agricolae magno confecta labore
Pectora tristitiae dissoluenda dedit.
Bacchus et adflictis requiem mortalibus adfert,
Crura licet dura conpede pulsa sonent.
Non tibi sunt tristes curae nec luctus, Osiri,
Sed chorus et cantus et levis aptus amor,
Sed varii flores et frons redimita corymbis,
Fusa sed ad teneros lutea palla pedes
Et Tyriae vestes et dulcis tibia cantu
Et levis occultis conscia cista sacris.
He it was who taught how to join the soft vine to stakes,

He how to cut its green hair with the cruel pruning-hook:
For him the ripe grape first produced its joyous flavours,
Pressed by the feet of the uncultivated.
That drink taught voices to modulate in singing,
And moved limbs that knew not how to fixed measures.
Bacchus too granted that the heart of the farmer, worn out
By great labour, should be freed from sorrow.
Bacchus too brings relief to afflicted mortals,
Though his legs clank with the sound of the cruel
fetter.
Grim cares or grief do not befit you, Osiris,
But rather dancing and singing and the lightness of
love,
But rather colourful flowers and a brow bound with
ivy-berries
But a yellow dress spreading down to your soft feet,
And Tyrian purple clothes and the pipe sweet in song,
And the light box aware of its secret rites.
The hymnic repetition of pronouns is found in both

this poem and Odes 2.19, but what makes it likely that Horace
alludes to Tibullus is the couplet on Bacchus/Osiris’ penchant
for love and the dance: 2.19. 25-6 quamquam choreis aptior et iocis
/ ludoque dictus appears to pick up 1.7.43-4 Non tibi sunt tristes
curae nec luctus, Osiri, / Sed chorus et cantus et levis aptus amor.
This echo is of interest for the political aspect of Bacchus

I have suggested for Odes 2.19. Given that Messalla had recently
been a close lieutenant of the young Caesar in his victories
over Antony in the East (as documented in this same poem), 15
Tibullus’ elegy can be seen like Horace’s ode as an appropriation
of Antony’s identification with Bacchus for a leader on the
opposite Caesarian side. Just as Tibullus suggests a clear
encomiastic parallel between his addressee Messalla, bringer
of peace and civilisation through his military achievements and
their peaceful celebrations, and the god Osiris/Bacchus, bringer
of peace and celebration through wine, 16 so (I would like to
suggest) Horace suggests a similar symbolic parallel between
the young Caesar and Bacchus in this poem. The parallel way
in which the two poets proceed shows the topical nature of
great men identifying with Bacchus/ Osiris: both the young
Caesar and the young Caesar’s lieutenant can be identified with
the god previously appropriated by Antony. Thus the capacity
to identify oneself with a particular deity becomes part of the
spoils of military success in the war of Actium and its Eastern
aftermath. We shall see below that Hercules too receives much
the same treatment as Bacchus in this respect, as another deity
associated with Antony who becomes an important analogue
for Augustus.
(b) Bacchus as warrior, conqueror and liberator
One aspect of Bacchus mentioned prominently by Horace
in Odes 2.19 points in particular to the contemporary political
context of the young Caesar and the recently concluded Roman
civil wars. This is the role of Dionysus in the Gigantomachy,
the traditional war of the gods and giants, in which he was
15
See e.g. Syme (1986, 207-10).
16
See e.g. Lee-Stecum (1998, 219).
238 AUGUSTAN POETRY
a prominent combatant, alluded to at 2.19.21-4 and much

depicted in ancient art.17
This has political aspects since it is clear that the battle
of Actium could be treated as a version of the Gigantomachy in
which the young Caesar plays the role of the victorious Jupiter
and his enemies Antony and Cleopatra become the defeated
giants; this symbolism clearly underlies one of Horace’s Roman
odes (3.4.37-80) 18 and the description of the battle of Actium
on the Shield of Aeneas (Aeneid 8.671-713). 19
This equivalence between Bacchus and Augustus becomes
more explicit in other passages of Augustan poetry. At Odes
3.3.9-16 in another of the Roman odes we find Augustus
compared to Pollux, Hercules, Bacchus and Quirinus (the divine
name of Romulus) as an example of virtus or military courage:
hac arte Pollux et vagus Hercules
enisus arcis attigit igneas,
quos inter Augustus recumbens
purpureo bibet ore nectar,
hac te merentem, Bacche pater, tuae

vexere tigres indocili iugum
collo trahentes, hac Quirinus
Martis equis Acheronta fugit..
It was by this quality that Pollux and wandering Hercules

Strove and touched the fiery heights:
Augustus, reclining with them,
Will drink nectar with crimson mouth,
It was by your deserving in this quality,

Father Bacchus, that your tigers bore you,
Drawing the yoke with untamed neck, by this quality
That Quirinus avoided Acheron on the horses of Mars…
17
See Vian (1988, 251-70).
18
see Lowrie (1997, 238-42).
19
see Hardie (1986, 97-109).
Here again we find the warrior Bacchus, described as

in the stories of his conquest of India, well known to poets
of the Augustan period (cf. e.g. Vergil Aeneid 6.801-5 and
Ovid Metamorphoses .4.21-2 as well as Odes 2.19); the Eastern
victories of the god are clearly to be compared to those of the
contemporary Roman leader, another way in which the battle
of Actium and its following campaigns can be assimilated to
the career of Bacchus as well as through the Gigantomachy.
The naming of Bacchus as Liber in Odes 2.19 points
to a particular element of the identification of Augustus
and Bacchus in the context of the battle of Actium which is
especially important in propaganda terms. Peter Wiseman has
suggested that in Roman culture Bacchus as Liber had long
been associated with libertas, ‘freedom’, and the overthrow of
tyrants, 20 and Bacchus’ name of Liber is specifically invoked in
the famous opening of Horace Odes 1.37, the poet’s celebration
of the victory of Actium ( 1.37.1-2):
nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero
pulsanda tellus,
Now we must drink, now pound the ground

with the foot of freedom.
The ‘foot of freedom’ specifically identifies Antony and

Cleopatra as tyrannical figures threatening Rome, who have now
been defeated by the young Caesar; Horace and the supporters
of Caesar should now celebrate this just victory. The parallel
figures to Antony and Cleopatra in Odes 2.19 are the tyrants
Pentheus and Lycurgus, who both wrongly resisted the power
of the god Dionysus. The story of the Theban Pentheus, who
is gruesomely torn apart by his own mother who is under the
influence of Bacchus as a Bacchant, is famously told in Euripides’
tragedy Bacchae, which is clearly referred to here (see further 4
20
Wiseman (2004, 64-70).
240 AUGUSTAN POETRY
below), while the story of Thracian Lycurgus, like Pentheus a

monarch who refused to recognise the god’s identity and was
driven to death via madness, was narrated in the Lycurgus
tetralogy of Aeschylus and the lost Lycurgus of the early Roman
tragedian Naevius.21 So the figure of Liber in Odes 2.19 can be
seen as a parallel to the young Caesar, who uses violence to
establish proper order in the world and to defeat and destroy
tyrannical figures who represent disorder and lack of respect
for the divine character of their opponent. As we shall see, this
includes a realistic assessment of the violence needed to achieve
domination over one’s enemies.
This divine identity of Liber/Bacchus/Dionysus is in
fact just as important politically for Augustus as his military
aspect. It is the other characteristic which Bacchus shares
with Pollux, Hercules and Romulus/Quirinus: all in Roman
thought are mortals who achieve divinity through their personal
achievements. This is precisely how the Augustan poets come
to conceive the status of Augustus himself: the young Caesar is
close to the gods, being divi filius, son of a god, as the adoptive
son of Julius Caesar who becomes Divus Iulius in 42 BCE,
but he is not yet a god – that is a status he will achieve after
death, after a life of service to mankind. Such in general is the
presentation of the young Caesar in encomiastic poetic texts
after Actium (e.g. Odes 3.3.9-16 (cited above), Vergil Georgics
1.24-42, 4.562, Aeneid 1.290), after an earlier period in the
30s BCE where straightforward association with gods was
more prevalent (e.g. Odes 1.2.41-44, Vergil Eclogues 1.6-10,
42-3), which was understandable in a context where the young
Caesar’s opponents Antony and Cleopatra were following the
Egyptian tradition of proclaiming themselves as living gods
(see above).
21
For the Aeschylean tetralogy see Seaford 2005, for the Naevian play Spaltenstein
2014, 423-519.
As support for the equivalence of Bacchus and Augustus

we should look at the parallel hymn to Bacchus to be found in
the next book of the Odes, and that I have already mentioned,
3.25:
Quo me, Bacche, rapis tui
plenum? Quae nemora aut quos agor in specus
uelox mente noua? Quibus
antris egregii Caesaris audiar
aeternum meditans decus 5
stellis inserere et consilio Iouis?
Dicam insigne, recens, adhuc
indictum ore alio. Non secus in iugis
exsomnis stupet Euhias,
Hebrum prospiciens et niue candidam 10
Thracen ac pede barbaro
lustratam Rhodopen, ut mihi deuio
ripas et uacuum nemus
mirari libet. O Naiadum potens
Baccharumque ualentium 15
proceras manibus uertere fraxinos,
nil paruum aut humili modo,
nil mortale loquar. Dulce periculum est,
o Lenaee, sequi deum
cingentem uiridi tempora pampino. 20
Where, Bacchus, are you taking me off to,

Full of you? What groves or caves are these I am driven to,
Swift with strangeness of mind?
In which grottoes shall I be heard practising
To slot the eternal glory of Caesar
Into the stars and the council of Jupiter?
I shall proclaim something remarkable, something fresh
As yet unspoken by another’s mouth. Just as in the hills
The sleepless Maenad is stupefied,
Gazing at the Hebrus and Thrace white with snow
And Rhodope, traversed
By foreign foot, so it is open to me, off the known way,
To wonder at the banks and empty grove.
You who hold sway over the Naiads and
The Bacchants who have strength
242 AUGUSTAN POETRY
To tear up lofty ash-trees with their hands,

I shall say nothing small or of humble mode,
Nothing mortal. It is a sweet peril, you of the wine-press,
To follow the god who girds
His temples with the green leaf of the vine.
The reference to inserting Augustus in the council of

the gods (line 6) clearly looks back in the same book to Odes
3.3, where, as we saw above, we find Augustus in the future
sitting drinking ambrosia among the gods on Olympus, and
the poem plainly refers to Horace’s innovation in the Odes,
using the traditional language of untrodden paths which looks
back to Lucretius and Callimachus (lines 12-13). 22 The second
half of the poem compares the inspired poet to the devotee of
Bacchus; here perhaps we can see again the parallel between
Bacchus and Augustus, since the poet has already suggested that
he is dedicated to Augustus and celebrating his achievements,
and the god that the poet is to pursue could be the future god
Augustus himself. The vine-leaf garland of the god could
provide an interesting parallel to the triumph-garland of bay
worn by Augustus as a great military conqueror in the triple
triumph of 29 BCE.
(c) full political allegorisation of Odes 2.19

So far I have argued that the focus on Bacchus’ military
career and his aspect as a mortal who achieves divinity in Odes
2.19 points to his identification with Augustus. This type of
allegorisation of the poem is not new ; indeed, J.A.Stevens, in
an article published in 1999 has strongly pursued this mode of
interpretation. 23 Stevens argues not only that Horace’s poem
suggests that Bacchus’ role in the Gigantomachy points to the
22
Lucr. 1.926-30 = 4.2-5, Call., Aetia fr.1 Pf.
23
Stevens (1999).
role of the young Caesar in re-establishing political order in

the context of a monstrous threat at the battle of Actium (as
outlined above), but also goes on to argue that just as Bacchus
is defending his father Jupiter’s realm against the impious
Giants, so Augustus should be seen as defending the realm of
his late father Julius Caesar against the threat of Antony and
Cleopatra. Stevens also suggests that the nymphs and satyrs
of the opening stanza are symbols of the licentious coterie of
followers of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, while the scene
in which Cerberus fawns on Dionysus scene is ‘a meeting of
Octavian and a sexually submissive Egypt’. 24
Most elements here are convincing. The identification
of Jupiter as Julius Caesar, the great father whose realm is
defended through his warrior son, makes sense for the poet who
proclaimed the young Caesar as the avenger of his dead father
at Odes 1.2.44 Caesaris ultor; its indirect and symbolic form is
understandable, given that Odes 1.2.44 is the only mention of
Caesar in the whole of the Odes, and that both Horace and
Vergil in the 20s BCE are circumspect about alluding to Julius
Caesar. 25 Although the legacy and name of Caesar was vital
for the future Augustus, Julius Caesar’s last years, where he was
in effect an unconstitutional monarch who was assassinated by
his own people and who received controversial and unparalleled
divine honours at Rome in the last months of his life, 26 did
not present a model that the young Caesar wished to follow
closely, and as Peter White has argued, 27 this surely explains
24
Stevens (1999, 292).
25
For Vergil’s similar reticence in this same period see the highly ambivalent allu-
sion to Caesar as protagonist of civil war at Aeneid 6.830-35 (where notably he
is not named), the only sure allusion to Caesar in Vergil apart from the reference
to his death at Georgics 1.466; for me, Aeneid 1.286-90 must be Augustus not
Caesar (see Harrison 1996).
26
See Gradel (2002, 54-72).
27
White (1988).
244 AUGUSTAN POETRY
why Julius Caesar is largely absent from or only indirectly

alluded to in Augustan poetry. The idea that the fawning hound
Cerberus represents a submissive Egypt also has its attractions,
since the theriomorphic dog-god Anubis is twice presented
amongst the defeated forces at Actium in Augustan poetry (cf.
Propertius 3.11.41, Vergil Aeneid 8.698), though the suggestion
of a specifically sexual element is perhaps a little fanciful; but
the notion that the nymphs and satyrs of the opening stanza
represent the debauched followers of Antony and Cleopatra at
Actium is less persuasive. As we shall see, this mixed-gender
group of Bacchus’ auditors finds a more persuasive symbolic
match in the boys and girls who are the explicit addressees of
Odes 3.1.
One element worth considering here is how far a
comparison with Bacchus can reflect an interestingly complex
view of the young Caesar. The ruler of Rome is being compared
to a great and mighty god, but also to a god of unpredictable
violence, who can exercise his devastating powers of destruction
not only against his father’s enemies in the Gigantomachy, but
also against members of his own family in the plot of Euripides’
Bacchae, where he causes the death of his cousin Pentheus and
ruins the life of his mother Agave (who kills her son in Bacchic
frenzy) and grandparents Cadmus and Harmonia (who are
transformed into snakes in the play’s fragmentary conclusion).
Here perhaps we can see some reflection by the poet on the
darker side of autocracy and personal power, carefully concealed
in a symbolic parallel; the young Caesar was content to agree to
the legalised killing of many distinguished Romans (e.g. Cicero)
in the proscriptions of 43 BCE, and even in the campaign of
Actium he was happy to destroy his former brother-in-law
Marcus Antonius . We may compare the complex depiction
of Aeneas in Vergil’s Aeneid, whose undoubted violent side in
establishing a proto-Roman foothold in Italy for his Trojans
may reflect the violence which his distant descendant Augustus
needed to apply in his establishment of the monarchical rule of

the principate. 28
4. Bacchus and poetics in Odes 2.19

I now want in my final section to turn to the issue of
poetics. If this poem talks symbolically about key political
themes of Horace’s time, can we also identify some key elements
of contemporary poetics? I would like to argue that we can, and
that in particular we can see the figure of Bacchus as representing
not only Augustus as god and conqueror but also Horace himself
as the powerful and controlling poet of a particular type of
lyric in the Odes, a type which encompasses material normally
associated with other literary genres.
(a) Bacchus, poetic memory and generic enrichment
As already suggested, part of Horace’s account of Bacchus
in this poem is plainly drawn from the Bacchae of Euripides
(2.19.9-16): 29
fas peruicacis est mihi Thyiadas It is right for me to sing of the tireless Maenads,
uinique fontem lactis et uberes 10 The fountain of wine and rich streams of milk,
cantare riuos atque truncis And tell again of the honey flowing
lapsa cauis iterare mella; From hollow tree-trunks:
fas et beatae coniugis additum consort Right too to sing of the ornament of your blest
stellis honorem tectaque Penthei Added to the constellations, and the house of
[Pentheus
disiecta non leni ruina, 15 Scattered in no gentle collapse,
Thracis et exitium Lycurgi. And the destruction of Thracian Lycurgus.
28
See e.g. Harrison (1991, 215).
29
It is not unlikely that a lost intermediary Latin tragic version of the Pentheus
story such as Pacuvius’ Pentheus or Accius’ Bacchae also plays a role here, as
seems probable for the non-Euripidean details of Vergil Aeneid 4.469-73 =[see
Fernandelli (2002)]; for the ‘missing link’ of Roman republican tragedy as an
influence on extant Augustan poetry see e.g. Griffin (1985, 198-210).
246 AUGUSTAN POETRY
The simultaneous streams of wine, milk and honey here

(10-12) clearly recall those stimulated by the divine presence
of Dionysus in Euripides’ play, at Bacchae 142-3 ῥεῖ δὲ γάλακτι
πέδον, ῥεῖ δ’ οἴνωι, / ῥεῖ δὲ μελισσᾶν νέκταρι, ‘the ground runs
with milk, runs with wine, runs with the nectar of bees’, and
Bacchae 707-11:
καὶ τῆιδε κρήνην ἐξανῆκ’ οἴνου θεός·
ὅσαις δὲ λευκοῦ πώματος πόθος παρῆν,
ἄκροισι δακτύλοισι διαμῶσαι χθόνα
γάλακτος ἑσμοὺς εἶχον· ἐκ δὲ κισσίνων
θύρσων γλυκεῖαι μέλιτος ἔσταζον ῥοαί.
And with this the god released a spring of wine:
And all those who had a desire for the white drink,
Clawing the ground with the tips of their fingers
Had swarms of milk: and from their thrysi
Of ivy-wood flowed sweet streams of honey.
Likewise, the account of Dionysus’ destruction of Pentheus’

palace (14-15, especially tectaque Penthei) picks up Bacchae 587-
8 τάχα τὰ Πενθέως μέλαθρα διατι- νάξεται πεσήμασιν, ‘swiftly
will the palace of Pentheus / be shaken with falls’; the choice
of the verb disiecta at 2.19.15 also looks to the sparagmos of
Pentheus by his female relatives which forms the tragic climax
of Euripides’ play. 30
These echoes would have been obvious to the more
learned readers of Horace’s poem, which thus evidently repeats
the material of a famous literary text in a genre other than that
of lyric. This repetition seems to be marked explicitly in our text:
at line 12 the verb iterare, ‘repeat’, surely points to the fact that
Horace is telling the story of the Bacchae once more, an example
of the ‘poetic memory’ influentially argued for by Gian Biagio
Conte; we may compare with this Horatian iterare the famous
30
Cf. Horace Satires 1.4.62 inuenies etiam disiecta membra poetae, Seneca Phaedra
1256 disiecta … membra laceri corporis.
Ovidian use of iterum at Fasti.3.471-2 which demonstrates to

the reader that the later poet is recalling the plot of Catullus 64
in a very different type of work. 31 This technique of drawing
into lyric material which is clearly identifiable as belonging to
another literary genre, and thus expanding the boundaries of
lyric, is one that is frequently used in the Odes, and which I have
studied in detail elsewhere. 32
(b) Bacchus and Horace: poetic teaching and flexibility
In the opening stanza of 2.19 we find Bacchus teaching his
carmina to a set of younger subordinates of either sex (2.19.1-4):
Bacchum in remotis carmina rupibus I have seen Bacchus teaching his songs
uidi docentem, credite posteri, Amid distant rocks – believe me, you who
Nymphasque discentis et auris come after
capripedum Satyrorum acutas. With the Nymphs as his pupils and the sharp
ears
Of the goat-footed satyrs.
This is precisely parallel to Horace at the beginning of

the following book of Roman Odes, who presents himself as
singing his carmina to an audience of boys and girls: (3.1.1-4):
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo: I detest the uninitiated throng and keep them
favete linguis: carmina non prius back:
audita Musarum sacerdos Give favourable silence with your tongues: I,
virginibus puerisque canto. as priest
of the Muses sing songs unheard before
For girls and boys.
As Michèle Lowrie has put it, ‘Was it the Roman Odes the
poet witnessed Bacchus teaching?’; the reader of Odes 3.1 need
only look back to 2.19, only two poems earlier in the sequence
and the collection of books 1-3, to see the parallel between
Horace and Bacchus as lyric performers. Both Horace and
Bacchus sing their songs to a young audience of mixed gender.
31
Conte (1986, 60-2).
32
Harrison (2007, 168-206).
248 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Though I would not go all the way with Helmut Krasser, who
has argued that Bacchus represents the prime model for the lyric
poet throughout Odes 1-3, 33 it is difficult not to link Bacchus
here with the self-description of the poet of the Roman Odes.
This parallel between Horace and Bacchus can be taken
further if we consider the penultimate stanza of 2.19 (25-8):
quamquam choreis aptior et iocis Though, said to be apter for dances, games
ludoque dictus non sat idoneus And sport, you were rumoured to be
pugnae ferebaris; sed idem Not fit enough for fighting: but you were the
pacis eras mediusque belli. same
Central figure in both peace and war.
Here, I think, we can see a clear parallel between the

Bacchus of Odes 2.19 and Horace’s self-descriptions as a poet in
other contexts. Bacchus here is concerned with ioci (25) and ludus
(26), but also ready for participation in warfare. This is surely
analogous to Horace, who in the very first poem of this same
second book of Odes has defined himself as being principally a
poet of ioci ( 2.1.37 relictis … iocis), and who in the first book of
Epistles defines the Odes and the accompanying lifestyle as ludus
and ludere (cf. Ep.1.14.36 nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum),
but who like Bacchus is prepared to engaged in the poetry of
war when needed: we recall Odes 2.7 in this same book, where
Horace looks back on his time as a soldier at Philippi, and the
general broad range of the Odes, which deal with such a wide
range of topics, from civil war and Actium to symposia and
casual love. The Horace of the Odes, like the Bacchus of Odes
2.19, is a poetic figure who can cover both war and peace and
who can stand at the centre of both as the controlling poet, just
as the Horace of real life can move from a warlike career as a
soldier at Philippi to the peaceful role of a symposiastic amicus
of the great at Rome, and can represent himself as pleasing those
who lead Rome in both peace and war (Ep. 1.20.23 me primis
urbis belli placuisse domique).
33
Krasser (1995, 92-149). [for my reservations see Harrison (1998)].
5. Conclusion
This paper has argued that Odes 2.19 presents Bacchus
both as a parallel for the young Caesar in his role as bringer of
moral order through the destruction of tyrants, reflecting the
Caesarian appropriation of Dionysiac identification from Marcus
Antonius after Actium, and as a parallel for Horace as author
of the Odes: Odes 2.19’s description of Bacchus’ wide-ranging
actions and deeds suggest the range of topics covered by the lyric
poet Horace himself, including the self-conscious incorporation
of material from another genre associated with this god (Attic
tragedy), which provides evidence for an important technique of
the Odes in general (generic enrichment). The encomiastic link
of Bacchus and Augustus is not without interesting ideological
tensions: Bacchus’ twin functions of bringer of vinous pleasure
and instigator of chaotic violence (often closely connected in
mythology) could reflect the uneasy marriage of violence and
order in the pre-Actium career of Augustus. In some sense, too,
the figure of Bacchus in Odes 2.19 could be said to be a site of
contest between poet and princeps: should the reader look more
to the parallel between the lyric poet and a suitable patron god
of his immortal poetry, or to that between the divine conqueror
and the mortal victor and ruler who is ultimately destined for
the status of a god? 34
Bibliography
Batinski E.E. 1990-91. “Horace’s rehabilitation of Bacchus.” Classical
World 84: 361-78.
Conte, G.B. 1986. The Rhetoric of Imitation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
34
My thanks to Paulo Martins for his kind invitation to USP and for his editorial
patience.
250 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Davis, G. 2007. “Wine and the Symposium,” in The Cambridge Companion

to Horace, ed. S.J.Harrison, 207-220. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
______. 1991. Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse.
Berkeley and London: California University Press.
Easterling, P.E. 1997. “A Show for Dionysus.” In: The Cambridge
Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling, 36-53. Cambridge:
Fernandelli, M. 2002. “Come sulle scene: Eneide IV e la tragedia”.
Quaderni del Dipartimento di filologia A. Rostagni. 1: 141-211.
Fraenkel, E. 1957. Horace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fuhrer, T. 2011. “Inszenierungen von Göttlichkeit. Die politische Rolle
von Dionysos/Bacchus in der römischen Literatur.” In: A Different God?
Dionysos and Ancient Polytheism, ed. R.Schlesier, 373-89. Berlin and
Boston: De Gruyter.
Gradel, I. 2002. Emperor worship and Roman religion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Griffin, J. 1985. Latin Poets and Roman Life. London: Duckworth.
Hardie, P. 1986. Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Harrison, S.J. 1991. Vergil: Aeneid 10. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______. 1996. “Vergil Aeneid 1.286: Julius Caesar or Augustus ?’, Papers
of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 9: 127-33.
______. 1998. Review of H.Krasser, Horazische Denkfiguren. Gnomon
70: 672-6.
______. 2007. Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
______. 2017. Horace Odes Book II. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Henrichs, A. 1978. “‘Horaz als Aretaloge des Dionysos. Credite posteri.’
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82: 203-211.
Holzberg, N. 2007. Horaz: Eine Bibliographie, Munich [self-published].
[online at <http://www.niklasholzberg.com/Homepage/Bibliographien.
html>, accessed 22.1.2016]
Kambylis, A. 1965. Die Dichterweihe und ihre Symbolik, Heidelberg:

Winter.
Koster, S., 1994. “Quo me Bacche rapis? (Hor.carm.3.25 und 2,19)”’,
in Horaz-Studien, ed. S.Koster. 51-70. Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek
Krasser, H. 1995. Horazische Denkfiguren. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht.
Lee-Stecum, P. 1998. Power-Play in Tibullus. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lowrie, M. 1997. Horace’s Narrative Odes. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Mac Góráin, F. 2013. “Virgil’s Bacchus and the Roman Republic.” In
Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic, ed. D. Nelis and J. Farrell, 124-
45. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nisbet, R.G.M. and Hubbard, M. 1978. A Commentary on Horace: Odes
II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pelling, C.B.R. 1988. Plutarch: Life of Antony. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pöschl, V. 1973. “Die Dionysosode des Horaz (c. 2, 19)”. Hermes 101:
208-230.
Seaford, R. 2005. “Mystic light in Aeschylus’ Bassarai.” Classical Quarterly
55: 602-606.
Śnieżewski, S. 1998. “Divine connections of Marcus Antonius in the
years 43-30 BC.” Grazer Beiträge 22: 129-144.
Spaltenstein, F. 2014. Commentaire des fragments dramatiques de Naevius.
Bruxelles: Latomus.
Stevens, J.A. 1999. “Seneca and Horace: Allegorical Technique in Two
Odes to Bacchus (Hor. “Carm.” 2.19 and Sen. “Oed.” 403-508).” Phoenix
53: 281-307.
Syme, R. 1986. The Augustan Aristocracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Syndikus, H. P. 2001. Die Lyrik des Horaz [2 vols; 3rd ed]. Darmstadt:
Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaft.
Takács, S. 2011. “Cleopatra, Isis, and the formation of Augustan Rome.” In
Cleopatra: a sphinx revisited, ed. Margaret Melanie Miles, 78-95. Berkeley
and London: University of California Press.
252 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Vian, F, 1988. “Gigantes”, Lexicon Iconographicum Mytologiae Classicae

IV: 191-270.
White, P. 1988. “Julius Caesar in Augustan Rome’, Phoenix 42: 334-356.
Wiseman, T.P. 2004. The Myths of Rome. Exeter: University of Exeter
Press.
Woodman A.J. 1993. Velleius Paterculus; The Caesarian and Augustan
Narrative (2.41-93). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zimmermann, B. 1992 Dithyrambos: Geshichte einer Gattung. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.
Sob a Batuta de Horácio: Metros Horacianos em
Português, Alemão e Inglês
Érico Nogueira
Federal University of São Paulo
Gostaria de começar este estudo sobre certa fortuna

de Horácio – ou, mais especificamente, sobre como Horácio
enriqueceu o repertório métrico do latim e como o seu
precedente foi seguido por diferentes poetas em diferentes
línguas, inclusive brasileiros escrevendo hoje em português –
refletindo sobre um passo de Paul Veyne no já clássico Como se
Escreve a História (1971). A certa altura do ensaio, fazendo o
panegírico de Michel Foucault, Veyne afirma que sua principal
contribuição para a teoria e para a escrita da história foi a ênfase
na diferença – isto é, a opção de Foucault por concentrar-se nas
rupturas, na descontinuidade, na heterogeneidade, em suma,
radical entre o presente do escritor e o passado que se escreve.
Lembrando um adágio conhecido – tanto que é quase um
clichê –, “O passado é um país estrangeiro”.
Bem, a esse conhecido e, digamos, clicheesco adágio,
contudo, eu responderia com estoutro, possivelmente mais
adequado a um texto como este: Est modus in rebus – ou, como
diz o vulgo, “Nem tanto ao mar, nem tanto à terra”. Pois a
254 AUGUSTAN POETRY
constatação – óbvia, de resto – de que o passado é distinto do

presente não pode, ou pelo menos não deve, nos cegar para a
obviedade oposta, e por isso mesmo complementar, de que
também são semelhantes; semelhantemente diferentes ou
diferentemente semelhantes entre si, portanto, com o perdão
do oximoro.
Dessa maneira, a despeito das previsíveis torções e dis-
torções que sofreu e vem sofrendo, é lícito que evoque a figura
tão romana, em geral, e em particular tão augustana, do poeta
doctus. Surgido, ou pelo menos celebrizado, na Alexandria dos
Ptolomeus, o ao mesmo tempo bibliotecário e poeta, teórico e
prático, juiz de poesia e fabricante de poemas, enfim, é – com
todas as mudanças por que passou, repito – uma constante ou
tipo ideal na história da literatura do Ocidente, que, se se en-
carna à perfeição num Horácio, num Petrarca ou mesmo num
Eliot, aparece também, aqui e ali, desmilinguido e desfigurado.
Decadências à parte, o facto é que a especialização dos
domínios ou esferas do saber em que Max Weber enxergava
o próprio núcleo da modernidade levou boa parte dos poetas
contemporâneos, nas Américas e na Europa, a refugiar-se na
academia, e, como poetas-pesquisadores ou poetas-docentes,
escrever uma poesia esotérica que segue de perto ou de longe
alguns dos princípios teóricos de sua confraria particular – preci-
samente o meu caso. Ora, lembrando nossa ideia inicial, nem o
fenômeno é de todo novo, nem deixa de ter lá a sua novidade,
evidentemente: pois, se, por exemplo, as muitas “querelas de
antigos e modernos” que se têm repetido ao longo da história da
poesia mais refinada, subtil e erudita são prova mais que contun-
dente de especialização extrema e de um como fechamento de
poetas-especialistas em grupelhos diversos e via de regra opostos,
a relação que esses grupelhos, do Romantismo em diante, têm
mantido com a tradição, e a noção mesma de tradição e de câ-
none, parece que se tornaram mais problemáticas, questionáveis,
arbitrárias até. Descrita nesses termos, soa como puro incômodo,
SOB A BATUTA DE HORÁCIO: METROS HORACIANOS EM PORTUGUÊS 255
mas não se enganem – a situação pode ser bastante confortável.

Nas palavras do poeta e bibliotecário Philip Larkin1:
Não é nem de longe um exagero dizer que o poeta acedeu
à feliz posição em que pode elogiar sua poesia no jornal e
explicá-la na sala de aula, de maneira que o leitor se sente
intimidado a abdicar do seu direito de consumidor – qual
seja, o de dizer “Este eu não quero: me traga outro”.2
Enfim: toda essa conversa sobre relações entre passado

e presente, e a deselegância, ademais, de “Eu isso, eu aquilo”,
foi um desvio – ou um atalho – para chegar ao meu ponto: isto
é, primeiro, que, o experimento de Horácio sendo ao mesmo
tempo semelhante e diferente dos modernos que se lhe seguiram,
como tal deve ser lido e considerado; segundo, que o espaço e
o tempo do que direi sobre poetas de fora e de ontem é o Brasil
de hoje, de maneira que o princípio e o fim do meu discurso –
arqué e telos – é a observação ou constatação pessoal, embora
não restrita à minha pessoa, de que ao menos parte da poesia
brasileira contemporânea original e traduzida pode descrever-se
como classicizante, filoclássica ou algo do teor, e nela Horácio é
mais que um nome: é um princípio de composição; e, terceiro,
por fim, que, sem ser exclusivo de Horácio, mas transmitido
sobretudo por ele aos classicismos posteriores ao seu, esse
princípio compositivo não é outro que a celebérrima imitação.
Assim, proponho um itinerário que percorra todos os três
momentos ou aspectos do meu ponto tríplice, em sentido, porém,
inverso ao em que acabo de o apresentar – isto é, começando com
breve reflexão sobre o conceito e a prática da imitação na poesia
da Europa e das Américas, e passando, depois, exatamente nesta
ordem, à caracterização de uma possível tendência classicizante na
poesia brasileira contemporânea e à consideração, enfim, de umas
inovações métricas de Horácio e de dois poetas modernos que lhe
1
Esta e todas as traduções referidas neste texto são de nossa autoria.
2
Larkin (1983, 81).
256 AUGUSTAN POETRY
seguiram o autorizado exemplo (no caso, Johann Heinrich Voss

e Geoffrey Hill) – momento em que, tão detalhadamente quanto
puder, discutirei questões técnicas como acentuação, cesuras e
fins de verso em versos gregos, latinos, alemães e ingleses, claro
está, mas também e sobretudo em sua tradução portuguesa, que
procurarei justificar. Mãos à obra.
I.
Em instigante e eloquente trabalho apresentado ao
Departamento de Letras Clássicas e Vernáculas da USP como
tese de livre-docência – refiro-me a “Dos Gêneros da Poesia
Antiga e sua Tradução em Português” – João Angelo Oliva Neto
observa que o conceito grego de imitação, ao sair da Atenas de
Platão e Aristóteles e aportar na Roma de Horácio, fez escala
na Alexandria de Calímaco, onde o seu sentido primeiro se
enriqueceu e se modificou: isto é, de imitação, principalmente,
dos objetos, de ações humanas – de algo, em suma, que está no
mundo, e que em última instância é extralinguístico ou extra-
poético –, passou a ser também, e preponderantemente, imitação,
vá lá, intrapoética ou intralinguística de paradigmas autorizados.
Bem, qual tenha sido a importância da teoria e da prática
da imitação de modelos canônicos, em poesia, do arcaico
Hesíodo ao neoclassicismo do século XVIII, todos sabemos e
estamos cansados de saber – imitar era simplesmente o motor
da fábrica poética, só isso, para usar metáfora industrial. Mas
o que não sabemos assim tanto, e, se sabemos, olvidamos
frequentemente, é que a ala ou seção literária da Revolução
Francesa, a que soemos chamar Romantismo, se, por um
lado, encareceu a originalidade, a singularidade, a em termos
kantianos “saída do homem da menoridade que a si mesmo
se inflige”3 e consequente libertação das autoridades que não
3
Kant (1784, 481).
pudesse racionalmente justificar, por outro não cancelou, não

baniu, não exterminou a antiga prática da imitação. Como
ensina Rosado Fernandes em página exemplar que vale a pena
aduzir integralmente:
Mímesis, imitatio, imitação, eis um termo cuja riqueza
semântica passa despercebida ao leitor moderno, uma vez
que desde há muito tempo o ato de imitar passou a ser
conotado como reprodução ou cópia servil de um modelo.
A própria moda intelectual da atualidade repudia qualquer
imitação, pois todos pensam atingir certa originalidade e
pensam que a originalidade, embora potencialmente ligada
a modelos, a arquétipos, aparece como que flutuante e ligada
ao artista que a criou. Daí a criatividade ser entendida como
original, sem que jamais se macule com qualquer ideia de
imitação. Cremos que esta noção romântica e recente, se
atendermos à história do mundo, de originalidade, sempre
existiu, só que existiu a paredes meias com a imitação, como
processo em si, como forma de reproduzir artisticamente
o real, ou como forma de aproveitar de modelos, para
neles incluir algo de pessoal, inevitavelmente existente,
quando provém de um artista criativo. Imitar significa,
agora, para qualquer cultor das artes o mesmo que plagiar;
significava contudo na Antiguidade e até o século XVIII,
algo de diferente, de formalmente diferente, ainda que na
essência tudo seja, antes e agora, profundamente o mesmo.
Só o acidental mudou, como mudou a moda, como se
alteraram os preceitos, que no mundo moderno parecem
menos evidentes do que nos velhos cânones. Mudou a
atitude, o que é significativo, mas não há dúvida de que
os autores ou os artistas continuam a pertencer a escolas,
continuam a escolher modelos – continuam a imitar,
se a palavra e a noção, se o significante e o significado
estivessem em uso, se os realistas ou os neorrealistas se
reclamassem dos seus modelos, se os cultores do nouveau
roman afirmassem a paternidade do seu discurso, se os
que seguem cuidadosamente as estruturas narrativas de
um James Joyce admitissem que claramente o imitam, sem
que com isso o reproduzam e dele façam centões. Tudo
isso passou; fala-se de “reescrita”, de “intertextualidade”,
quando há um modelo evidente, como é o caso de Homero
258 AUGUSTAN POETRY
para o Ulysses de Joyce, ou de Horácio para o Ricardo Reis

de Pessoa, mas já não se fala de imitação. Na Antiguidade
não era assim, nos tempos antigos, se assim podemos dizer,
também não.4
Sábias palavras, sem dúvida – quando mais não seja, por-

que denunciam o óbvio: isto é, e insistindo na metáfora fabril,
que, se a imitação não é mais todo o motor da produção e do
consumo de poemas, nunca deixou de integrar suas engrena-
gens... Vale dizer, em termos mais exatos, que, deixando embora
de ser o mais importante e explícito (essa é a palavra) critério
de composição e apreciação de poesia, nem por isso a imitação
caducou ou prescreveu. Muito pelo contrário: escamoteada sob
os pseudônimos de “reescrita”, “intertextualidade”, “alusão”, “em-
préstimo”, “diálogo”, “influência”, etc. etc. etc. – o importante é
um nome up-to-date –, a imitação, como no passado, original e
criativa de modelos que, aí sim distintamente do passado, não
estão estabelecidos nem dados de antemão, é expediente fulcral,
nuclear, imprescindível, se não de todas, de muitas das obras que
a Modernidade paradoxalmente vem considerando “clássicos
modernos”. Além das que Rosado Fernandes menciona, quem
ignora que os autos medievais são o modelo do Fausto de Goethe
ou que a Divina Comédia está na base de As Flores do Mal de
Baudelaire, por exemplo, para citar apenas as inescapáveis? Acho
que ninguém.
Sendo assim, o que mudou entre a antiga e a moderna
prática da imitação foi, primeiro, a natureza do cânone: ontem
mais rígido e restrito, hoje mais flexível e mais aberto; segundo,
o carácter explícito e obrigatório da imitação mesma, e sua
função, dir-se-ia, pedagógica e diretora, tanto para aspirantes
a poeta como para poetas consumados: hoje imitar (refiro-me
à atividade consciente) é opção, e isso talvez explique a técnica
4
Rosado Fernandes (1986, 11-12).
sofrível e o paupérrimo cabedal de muitos poetas jovens... e não

tão jovens. Vovô Horácio já dizia:
Cur ego, si nequeo ig|noro|que, poeta salutor?
Ora, por que, se sou néscio | e ignaro, me chamam poeta?5
Finalmente, gostaria de terminar esta primeira parte do

meu argumento com uma famosa passagem de Eliot, em que se
distingue o poeta bom do ruim, o maior do menor, precisamente
pela maneira de tomar emprestado, imitar, furtar o alheio e fazê-
lo seu. Ainda que não fosse esta a sua intenção, tais distinções
testemunham a constância da imitação criativa, na história da
poesia antiga e moderna, já que basicamente repetem e refundem
o arquifamoso conselho do venusino no tocante à “matéria de
domínio público” que se pretenda fazer “de direito privado”...
– todos sabemos: Arte Poética 131-135. Será mera coincidência
– sobretudo se se nota que Eliot, para quem a imitação deve ser
original, é original ele próprio em relação ao conselho que imita?
A mim me parece que não. Mas vamos ao texto:
Um dos testes mais seguros [da maturidade e da grandeza
de um poeta] é a maneira como toma emprestado. Poetas
imaturos imitam [i.e., copiam servilmente]; poetas
maduros furtam [ou seja, criativamente remodelam]; maus
poetas deformam o de que se apropriam, mas os bons o
transformam em algo melhor ou pelo menos diferente.
O bom poeta funde o que pilhou numa singular unidade
de percepção em última instância diferente da origem;
o mau o mistura com o que não tem nenhuma coesão.
[Finalmente,] o bom poeta costuma tomar emprestado a
autores distantes no tempo, de língua estrangeira ou com
interesses distintos dos seus.6
5
Hor., Ars 87.
6
Eliot (1921, 114).
260 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Retenhamos a ideia final – imitar (ou pilhar) autores

longínquos no tempo, no espaço ou na poética mesma – e
passemos adiante.
II.
A fim de identificar e descrever a parte filoclássica do todo
mais ou menos heterogêneo chamado “poesia brasileira contem-
porânea”, vou me valer de uma teoria – a dos polissistemas – que
o estudioso israelense Itamar Even-Zohar vem desenvolvendo
e aperfeiçoando desde a distante década de setenta, a partir de
sugestões da dita linhagem dinâmica ou funcionalista do forma-
lismo russo: principalmente Chklóvski, Tynianov e Ejxenbaum.
Em termos bastante resumidos – e simplificados –, trata-
-se de fazer justiça ao fator “tempo”, considerando, a par e par
dos sincrônicos, também os elementos diacrônicos, ao buscar-se
uma descrição acurada das estruturas que integram e regulam
o sistema literário (sempre plural: daí polissistema) num lugar
e num momento precisos.
Assim, escapando de tudo o que é sociologismo rasteiro,
Even-Zohar (1990) pôde enriquecer e expandir em muito o raio
de ação do estruturalismo mais rigoroso e – por que não? – cien-
tífico, granjeando-lhe a possibilidade, ou antes a necessidade, de
correlacionar (a via aqui é de mão dupla) o polissistema literário,
em geral, e em particular o poético que nos interessa, com outros
polissistemas da cultura eventualmente em causa: o filosófico; o
econômico-social; o político – por exemplo.
Mas fica a pergunta: Do sem-número de elementos pas-
síveis de observar-se no domínio da literatura, quais seriam os
axiais, ou, pelo menos, os mais aptos a compor um modelo teórico
suficientemente amplo e exato desse domínio – um modelo, por-
tanto, capaz de lhe mapear e detalhar o funcionamento interno,
e as principais relações com contradomínios quaisquer? Ora, se
a descrição que Jakobson pretende aplicável a toda comunicação
verbal tem qualquer validade científica – fazer ciência em sen-

tido forte: meta do formalismo russo que Even-Zohar atualiza
e mantém –, nada mais racional do que adaptar essa descrição
ao caso específico da comunicação literária, sendo esta, como é,
uma instância particular da verbal pura e simples. Dito e feito:
partindo de Jakobson, eis o modelo de Even-Zohar e as palavras
com que o descreve:
INSTITUIÇÃO [contexto]
REPERTÓRIO [código]
PRODUTOR [remetente]-------------[destinatário] CONSUMIDOR
MERCADO [canal]
PRODUTO [mensagem]
Neste caso, um CONSUMIDOR pode “consumir” um

PRODUTO fabricado por um PRODUTOR, mas, a fim
de que o “produto” (por exemplo, o “texto”) efetivamente
se produza, é preciso haver um REPERTÓRIO comum,
cujo emprego é determinado por alguma INSTITUIÇÃO.
Também deve haver um MERCADO em que essa
mercadoria circule. Não se pode descrever isoladamente o
funcionamento desses fatores, e suas relações observáveis
dão-se em todos os possíveis eixos desse esquema.7
Muito bem: se, pois, atribuindo um valor específico às

variáveis acima, eu puder fornecer uma descrição minimamente
satisfatória da que chamei tendência classicizante ou filoclássica
na poesia brasileira contemporânea, ficam provadas e justificadas,
primeiro, a eficácia de nosso modelo teórico, segundo, a existência
mesma dessa tendência, se não incondicionalmente ou “em si”,
ao menos condicionada a um modelo teórico eficaz. Para tanto,
7
Even-Zohar (1990, 34).
262 AUGUSTAN POETRY
contudo, é preciso fazer umas observações preliminares, e definir

mais exatamente nossos conceitos principais:
1) Tendência classicizante: procedimento ou traço mais
ou menos comum a um grupo significativo de poetas,
segundo o qual se apropriam da forma (técnicas,
ritmos) e do fundo (motivos, tropos) da poesia latina
e grega, em particular, e, em geral, da dos chamados
classicismos e neoclassicismos subsequentes.
2) Imitação: em termos resumidos, a apropriação do
fundo e da forma, que acabamos de mencionar;
mais detalhadamente, a (no jargão de Even-Zohar)
interferência de um repertório dito clássico em
outro que, ou porque jovem, ou pobre, ou porque
passa por alguma crise, se vê na contingência de
firmar-se, enriquecer-se ou alterar-se exatamente
mediante essa interferência – conceito que, pois, o
de interferência, abarca a imitação propriamente dita
(isto é, a preconizada nas antigas poéticas e retóricas),
o furto de T. S. Eliot e a transcriação de Haroldo de
Campos (19924), por exemplo, e põe a poesia original
e a traduzida como que em pé de igualdade.
3) A fatia filoclássica do bolo poético brasileiro
contemporâneo: poemas originais expostos à
interferência do legado clássico, e traduções poéticas
desse legado.
Feito isso, partamos agora para a descrição efetiva.
Diferentemente do que acontecia há trinta ou mesmo há
vinte anos quiçá, o PRODUTO “poesia clássica original e
traduzida em português” parece que está em voga, porquanto o
evidente prestígio de que hoje gozam as traduções de Manuel
Odorico Mendes, Carlos Alberto Nunes, Haroldo de Campos,
Jaa Torrano, Trajano Vieira e João Angelo Oliva Neto, entre
outras, – aliado, esse prestígio, ao da poesia original dos clas-
sicizantes Alexei Bueno, Paulo Henriques Britto, Alberto da

Cunha Melo, Bruno Tolentino e Gerardo Mello Mourão (a
lista não é exaustiva) – é indício mais ou menos seguro, creio
eu, de que esse produto circula no MERCADO e é procurado
pelo CONSUMIDOR, a quem o PRODUTOR se remete.
Sancionada por universidades, imprensa, academias de letras e
galardões literários – por tudo, enfim, que integra a chamada
INSTITUIÇÃO –, a fabricação de poesia classicizante, no Brasil
de hoje, se caracteriza pelo uso de matéria clássica, claro, que é
o traço mais saliente das empresas do jaez: o que, porém, não
é um traço muito saliente delas, por seu turno, e a meu juízo
distingue umas recentíssimas manifestações da tendência ora em
pauta, é o uso da métrica latina e grega, que, ao lado de outros
expedientes elocutórios, compõe, com a referida matéria, o grosso
do REPERTÓRIO clássico ontem, hoje e sempre à disposição.
Ufa! – com isso de métrica chego ao terceiro aspecto
e ao cerne deste texto, afinal, cujo título “Sob a Batuta de
Horácio”, fazendo do poeta compositor e regente, prometia
uma consideração mais sistemática de como uns intérpretes
seus, de lugares, períodos e línguas diversos, têm respondido a
essa regência e executado sua música... Promessas à parte, a esta
altura o meu circunlóquio se explica: pois a sala de concerto,
por assim dizer, onde essa música é lida, tocada e ouvida não é
outra que um novo desenvolvimento da tendência classicizante
que acabo de caracterizar, o qual, numa palavra, consiste na
aclimatação de metros latinos e gregos ao português. No caso
da poesia traduzida, essa como última floração é representada
principalmente pela reavaliação positiva de Carlos Alberto
Nunes8 e suas traduções da Ilíada, Odisseia e da Eneida – e, mais
ou menos em sua órbita, pelo Píndaro de Leonardo Antunes
(2012), o meu Teócrito (2012) e – voilà! – o Horácio lírico
de Guilherme Gontijo Flores (2014), entre outros, todos três
8
Cf. Oliva Neto; Nogueira (2013).
264 AUGUSTAN POETRY
apresentados ao Departamento de Letras Clássicas e Vernáculas

da USP como teses de doutoramento. Já no que toca à poesia
original, me ocorrem por ora os ritmos hexamétricos de João
Filho em A Dimensão Necessária (2014) e os milhares – sim,
milhares – de hexâmetros vernáculos compostos à maneira de
Klopstock pelo jovem e infelizmente inédito poeta brasilo-
germânico Gregório Barbosa Souza – além de meus próprios
experimentos com o hexâmetro de Virgílio e com células
métrico-rítmicas inspiradas em estrofes de Horácio encontráveis
em Poesia Bovina (2014).
Bem: chega do que pode soar uma inconveniente apologia
pro poetica mea e vamos logo (ou finalmente) ao que interessa.
III.
Escrito por um dos mais importantes e ativos protagonistas
das relações entre romanos e gregos, o exórdio das Tusculanas
testemunha uma espécie de “angústia da influência”, digamos
assim anacronicamente, e, conquanto teime em ostentar que
não, trai um sub-reptício sentimento de inferioridade do
conquistador romano, no tocante às letras e as artes gregas em
geral. A história é manjada – e nas igualmente manjadas palavras
de Horácio diz-se assim:
Graecia capta ferum | uictorem cepit et artis
intulit agresti Latio.
Grécia, a cativa, o feroz | vencedor cativou – e as artes
introduziu no agreste Lácio.9
Ora: se pudermos, então, partindo do mote de Cícero em

sua formulação horaciana, glosar aqui a já mencionada teoria da
interferência de polissistemas literários relativamente centrais
sobre os ocasionalmente periféricos (que podem ser jovens,
9
Hor., Ep 2.1.156-7.
pobres, estar em crise, ou todas as anteriores – é bom lembrar),

abriremos um terreno mais ou menos seguro, me parece, so-
bre que construir nossas comparações entre Horácio, Johann
Heinrich Voss, Geoffrey Hill e a novíssima voga filoclássica
da poesia brasileira, haja vista que, como nos revela uma breve
e compulsória relação de certas obras-chave e suas respectivas
datas de publicação, tanto o sistema poético de Horácio em
relação ao grego, quanto o de Voss comparado ao francês e
ao inglês, e o brasileiro no tocante ao hispano-americano, ao
norte-americano e ao europeu ocidental, se encontram sim, de
uma maneira ou de outra, em situação de relativa inferioridade
– raciocínio este, enfim, que, ao menos a julgar pelo incisivo A
Sinking Island, de Hugh Kenner, publicado em 1988, se aplica
também ao antigo (e antiquado) sistema poético inglês – o de
Hill – ao lado do americano, considerado pujante, diversificado e
vivamente atual. (A omnipresença de Pound – e, mais que a dele,
a de Eliot – na poesia e nos ensaios de Hill parece confirmar o
juízo de Kenner.) Bem, vamos lá.
Considerando, pois, como disse, algumas obras-chave da
poesia latina, alemã, inglesa e brasileira, e a relação que mantêm
com modelos clássicos ou tradições concorrentes, noto uma
semelhança entre o tempo de Horácio e o de Voss, por um lado,
e, por outro, entre a Inglaterra e o Brasil atuais.
Com efeito, tanto os esforços de Horácio para aclimatar
a lírica grega ao latim como as traduções horacianas de Voss
precedem, em poucos anos, a publicação do maior monumento
poético da respectiva língua, já que os primeiros três livros das
Odes foram publicados em 23 a. C. e a Eneida de Virgílio pouco
depois de 19 a. C., enquanto o primeiro volume das Obras de
Quinto Horácio Flaco de Voss apareceu em 1806 e a primeira
parte do Fausto de Goethe em 1808... Essas são as datas, esses
são os factos; – ora, sem nem sugerir nem muito menos postu-
lar qualquer mecânica relação causal entre Horácio e Virgílio,
Voss e Goethe, não me parece de todo descabido dizer que as
266 AUGUSTAN POETRY
mais altas realizações da poesia latina e da alemã se inserem

em ambiente e situação bem mais amplos, de ativa apropriação,
aclimatação, imitação do legado grego, no caso do latim, e, no do
alemão, dos legados grego e latino, principalmente. Já quanto à
semelhança da poesia que se vem fazendo na Inglaterra com a
que no Brasil se vem fazendo hoje, observo primeiro que, tanto
lá como cá, há quem julgue um poema classicizante como o
auge e cúmulo dessa poesia, no século XX – refiro-me a “Four
Quartets” de T. S. Eliot e “A Máquina do Mundo” de Carlos
Drummond de Andrade; segundo, que, atingido esse cúmulo e
auge entre os anos quarenta e cinquenta daquele século, seguiu-
-se-lhe um período de relativo declínio; e, terceiro e por último,
que, a fim de remediar esse declínio relativo – isto é, um robusto
polissistema em crise, no caso do inglês; e um polissistema em
crise, pobre e jovem, no caso do brasileiro –, volta-se sempre e
de novo e mais uma vez aos clássicos.
Dessa maneira, supondo seja possível tirar conclusões mais
gerais dos exemplos demasiado particulares que acabamos de
referir, eu diria que a imitação do legado clássico, tendencial-
mente e no mais das vezes – não se trata de uma “lei da história
literária”, observe-se –, bem, a imitação ativa e criativa do legado
clássico parece acompanhar, em muitas circunstâncias, seja o
movimento ascendente, que leva e eleva uma tradição poética à
plena realização – e nesse caso ela é uma força propulsora –, seja
o movimento descendente, que dilapida e degrada a conseguida
excelência – e aí ela é uma força de reação. O que de certa maneira
parece corroborar a sentença de Kant – paradoxalmente, como
o seu paradoxal século XVIII, o pai da mais radical moderni-
dade, em matéria de ética e de metafísica, e o mais implacável
defensor do classicismo, em matéria de arte –, segundo quem
(1974, §32) o juízo de gosto, porque não se define por conceitos
e prescrições universais e necessários, é o que mais necessita do
exemplo daquilo que, no desenvolvimento da civilização, tem
recebido mais longo assentimento. Ou, em outras palavras, sejam
tempos de abundância ou de penúria, os clássicos são sempre os

clássicos – e ajudam a discernir o que presta do que não presta.
Enfim: adaptando para a poética comparada um famoso
par de conceitos nascidos e criados no seio da filologia – refiro-
me aos de história externa e história interna de uma língua
qualquer –, isso é tudo o que eu gostaria de dizer sobre a história
externa dos experimentos métricos de Horácio, e sua relação
com os de Voss, Hill, e também de alguns brasileiros. Sendo
assim, resta-me, então, falar um pouco de sua história interna,
em que é preciso entrar na minúcia e como que na filigrana da
composição – para o que, neste caso, com o fito de exemplificar a
poética brasileira de tendência classicizante, permito-me utilizar
minhas próprias traduções dos poemas que vamos ler.
1) Comecemos com um fragmento de Alceu e sua
tradução, recriação ou imitação horaciana, ambos acompanhados
de traduções portuguesas que tanto quanto possível buscam
reproduzir o original (no grego e no latim, as longas estão em
negrito; no vernáculo – como também em inglês, conforme se
verá –, em negrito estão as tônicas e algumas subtônicas, e em
itálico, as sílabas acentuadas pela posição ou, na terminologia
de García Calvo [2006], pelo engaste rítmico em que se
encontram; tanto lá como cá, as sinalefas, elisões e sinéreses
vêm sublinhadas).
Alceu, Fragmento 338 (ed. Campbell, 1982) Alceu, Fragmento 338 (trad. Nogueira, 2015)
ὔει μὲν ὁ Ζεῦς, | ἐκ δʼ ὀράνω μέγας Dilúvio de Zeus | – o éter imensamente

χείμων, πεπάγαισιν | δʼ ὐδάτων ῥόαι... desaba, e as correntes | se congestionaram
ἔνθεν donde
κάβαλλε τὸν χείμωνʼ, | ἐπὶ μὲν τίθεις Desaba? – dá de ombros, | e repõe então
πῦρ, ἐν δὲ κέρναις | οῖνον ἀφειδεως o fogo e a granel | vinho na copa, amigo,
μέλιχρον, αὐταρ ἀμφὶ κόρσα melífluo: e à roda já das têmporas
μόλθακον ἀμφι<βάλων> γνόφαλλον. mole uma fita ao redor amarra.
268 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Horácio, Ode I 9 (ed. Klingner, 1959) Horácio, Ode I 9 (trad. Nogueira, 2015)
Vides ut alta | stet niue candidum Percebes a ne|ve alta que está no branco
Soracte nec iam | sustineant onus Soracte? que não | mais lhe sustêm o fardo
siluae laborantes geluque os bosques a tremer? que o gelo
flumina constiterint acuto? congestionou, afiado, os rios?
dissolue frigus | ligna super foco Derrete esse frio, | vai, e de lenha o fogo
large reponens | atque benignius entulha ao repor – mas na amizade agora
deprome quadrimum Sabina, espreme o quadrienal sabino,
o Thaliarche, merum diota. ó Taliarco, licor da bota.
permitte diuis | cetera, qui simul Remete o restan|te aos supernais: tão logo
strauere uentos | aequore feruido no pego os tufões | brabo turbilhonantes
deproeliantis, nec cupressi abatam, nem cipreste nem tam-
nec ueteres agitantur orni. -pouco se agita o vetusto freixo.
quid sit futurum | cras fuge quaerere et O que é do amanhã? | Ah, não perguntes, mas
quem Fors dierum | cumque dabit lucro os dias que te | der a Fortuna põe
adpone, nec dulcis amores no lucro e os (sabem a mel) amores
sperne puer neque tu choreas, nunca desprezes, rapaz, e os coros,
donec uirenti | canities abest enquanto é da co|ma inda distante a lenta

morosa. nunc et | Campus et areae canície. Eia, pois: | Campo e igualmente praças
lenesque sub noctem susurri e leves sob o breu sussurros
composita repetantur hora, mais uma vez na marcada hora;
nunc et latentis | proditor intumo pois eia: e da esqui|va índice – o riso grato –
gratus puellae | risus ab angulo mocinha de lá | da última das vielas
pignusque dereptum lacertis e algum penhor roubado ao pulso
aut digito male pertinaci. ou a um seu dedo que mal resiste.
Comentários
(a) Em grego e em latim, observo a possibilidade de não
coincidência entre o acento natural da palavra e o
acento rítmico do verso nas duas primeiras sedes do
hendecassílabo – como em ὔει (1) e uides (1) – e do
eneassílabo alcaicos – como em μέλιχρον (6) e siluae
(3); e, em latim, a absoluta regularidade da cesura na
quinta sede, em comparação com a oscilação entre a
quinta e a sexta, no hendecassílabo grego.
(b) Em português, noto a dificuldade de reproduzir as três

longas consecutivas na quarta, quinta e sexta sedes do
hendecassílabo; a opção por ressaltar a regularização da
cesura na quinta sede desse verso mediante uma tônica
portuguesa; e, atendendo ao que ensina de Mattoso
Câmara (1985) em pioneiro e autorizado estudo – a
saber, que nossas sílabas postônicas têm força expirató-
ria tendente a zero e assim pouco ou nada influenciam
as sílabas precedentes –, bem como à difusa prática da
recitação escolar de poesia antiga – que marca o último
acento rítmico, não a última longa –, a possibilidade de
fins de verso indiferentemente agudos, graves ou es-
drúxulos, desde que a última tônica vernácula coincida
com o último acento rítmico (não com a última sílaba)
do latim ou do grego, de que, pois, legitimamente o
português se exime de reproduzir todas as sílabas de
um verso.
2) Leiamos e comentemos agora a cuidada tradução alemã
de Johann Heinrich Voss dessa mesma ode:
Horácio, Ode I 9 Horácio, Ode I 9 (trad. Voss, 1806)
Vides ut alta | stet niue candidum Du siehst, wie glanzhell | steht in getürmtem Schnee
Soracte nec iam | sustineant onus Sorakte, kaum noch | unter der Flockenlast
siluae laborantes geluque Der Wald sich aufringt, und von scharfer
flumina constiterint acuto? Kälte der laufende Bach erharscht ist.
dissolue frigus | ligna super foco Den Frost zu lindern, | häufe Gehölz dem Herd
large reponens | atque benignius In reicher Stapel; | und, Thaliarchus, mild
deprome quadrimum Sabina, Gewähr’ uns dein vierjährig Labsal
o Thaliarche, merum diota. Aus dem sabinischen Henkelweinkrug!
permitte diuis | cetera, qui simul Das andre lass du | Himmlischen! denn sobald
strauere uentos | aequore feruido Ihr Wink die Sturmwind’| auf dem zerwühlten Meer
deproeliantis, nec cupressi Gehemmt vom Ansturz, ruhn Cypressen,
nec ueteres agitantur orni. Ruhn ungeregt die bejahrten Ornen.
270 AUGUSTAN POETRY
quid sit futurum | cras fuge quaerere et Was morgen annaht, | meide vorauszuspähn:
quem Fors dierum | cumque dabit lucro Und welchen Tag auch | gönnet das Los, empfah
adpone, nec dulcis amores Ihn als Gewinn: nicht traute Liebe,
sperne puer neque tu choreas, Jüngling, verschmäh, noch o du! den Reihntanz,
donec uirenti | canities abest Dieweil du blühest, | ferne des grauen Haars
morosa. nunc et | Campus et areae Misslaunen! Nun sei | Kamp noch und Wandelbahn,
lenesque sub noctem susurri Und leises Dämmerungsgeflüster
composita repetantur hora, Gerne gesucht in besprochner Stunde;
nunc et latentis | proditor intumo Nun auch des Mägdleins, | wo sie geheim sich barg,
gratus puellae | risus ab angulo Verrätrisch holdes | Lachen vom Winkel her;
pignusque dereptum lacertis Und Herzenspfand, dem Arm entwendet,
aut digito male pertinaci. Oder, wie trotzig er tut, dem Finger.
Comentários
(a) Observe-se a frequência com que o alemão – ou a
perícia de Voss no trato com o alemão – consegue
reproduzir as três longas consecutivas na quarta, quinta
e sexta sedes do hendecassílabo alcaico mediante três
tônicas alemãs. A despeito do espinhoso problema do
espondeu, nessa língua – Klopstock (1989) costumava
lastimar sua escassez (reclamava de barriga cheia) en-
quanto Voss (18312) distinguia-lhe dois tipos –, o facto
é que, segundo o primeiro, palavras e sílabas alemãs
são longas quando exprimem ideias primárias [como
em “Sturmwind’”], e quando exprimem ideias secun-
dárias [como a desinência do nominativo em “holdes”,
que, sem embargo, tratando-se de sílaba fechada, Voss
considerava longa] são curtas.
3) Finalmente, um trechinho de uma ode sáfica de Horácio
(IV 2) – só pra observarmos-lhe os principais característicos
métrico-rítmicos – seguida de poema simplesmente magistral
de Geoffrey Hill no mesmo metro (ambos acompanhados de
traduções), com que me despeço e concluo.
Horácio, Ode IV 2, 25-32 Horácio, Ode IV 2, 25-32 (trad. Nogueira,

2015)
multa Dircaeum | leuat aura cycnum, Grã lufada eleva | o de Tebas cisne
tendit, Antoni, | quotiens in altos quando, Antônio, quer | que demande a altura
nubium tractus: ego apis Matinae nublosíssima: eu, | da matina abelha ao
more modoque, modo e à maneira,
grata carpentis | thyma per laborem que com tanto suor | o tomilho grato
plurimum circa | nemus uuidique colhe, nos jardins | e do rociado
Tiburis ripas | operosa paruus Tíbur logo ao pé | ’scrupuloso limo
carmina fingo. odes lavradas.
Geoffrey Hill, Odi Barbare IV (2012) Geoffrey Hill, Odi Barbare IV (trad. Nogueira,
2015)
Have I cloned Horace | or reduced myself to Reproduzo Horá|cio ou não passo aqui de
Weeping plasma? | Never again so rightly, plasma em pranto? | Nunca tão certo mais,
Not again those ‘mar|vellous early poems’ nem os de ontem hoje | reconhecidos
Lately acknowledged grandes poemas.
How the sea-lightning | with a flash at hazard Qual marinho raio, | rajando ao léu, en-
Cleft the lanterned yard | into pelting angles. -carquilhou com quinas | o horto claro.
Had we been there, had | you then turned towards me, Ah nós dois ali, | ah se tu me olhasses,
By this remembered… fotossensível.
Yo, my sad love, clad | in our dark declensions; Veste, amor, vai, nossas | flexões funéreas;
Never once more naked | to the other given; nu jamais ninguém | se entregou a alguém;
Honey, milk, spices, | of that night forgathered leite, mel, mostarda | naquela noite
Lost in summation; vindo, se foram;
Mirrors fading where | the bright-brutish roses ’spelhos murcham – há | claro-escuras rosas
Held themselves roy|ally akin to nature. regiamente postas | ao natural;
Berkeley could have grant|ed us our existence Berkeley afiançava | e existiríamos
Had we but known him. se o conhecêssemos.
Still suffices lan|guage its constitution; Inda basta à língua | sua compleição;
Solipsist somehow | must acknowledge this. Not mesmo o solipsista | o confessa (ou quase).
Quite enough said when | what was said is nothing Não se disse muito | se não se disse
Granted recital. num recital.
Here is my good voice; | you may well remember Minha voz é esta; | quiçá te lembres
Making up these things. | It is what I do. Hark, de isso pôr com aquilo. | É o que faço. Escuta
Love, how cross-rhythms | are at stake to purpos como, amor, em mira | há cruzados ritmos
From the beginning. desde o começo.
Comentários
(a) Em latim, embora o trecho escolhido o não patenteie,
o hendecassílabo sáfico admite cesura na sexta sede,
272 AUGUSTAN POETRY
que, não obstante, é muito mais rara que a cesura na

quinta.
(b) Em português, ressalto a dificuldade de reproduzir as
três longas consecutivas na terceira, quarta e quinta
sedes do hendecassílabo sáfico.
(c) Em inglês, valendo-se do que Gerard Manley Hopkins
(2003) chamou sprung rhythm, Hill é amiúde bem-
-sucedido em reproduzir as já mencionas três longas
em série mediante três tônicas inglesas.
É isso10.
Bibliografia
Antunes, C. L. B. 2012. “Métrica e Rítmica nas Odes Píticas de Píndaro”.
Tese de Doutoramento. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo.
Câmara Jr. J. M. 1985. História e Estrutura da Língua Portuguesa. Rio
de Janeiro: Padrão.
Campbell, D. A. (ed.) 1982. Greek Lyric. Sappho. Alcaeus. Cambridge-
MA / London: Loeb.
Campos, H. 1992 4. Metalinguagem & Outras Metas. São Paulo:
Perspectiva.
Eliot, T. S. 1921. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Even-Zohar, I. 1990. “The ‘Literary System’”. In: Polysystem Studies:
27-44.
Filho, J. 2014. A Dimensão Necessária. Ilhéus: Mondrongo.
Flores, G. G. 2014. “Uma Poesia de Mosaicos nas Odes de Horácio:
Comentário e Tradução Poética”. Tese de Doutoramento. São Paulo:
Universidade de São Paulo.
10
Gostaria de registrar o meu agradecimento ao crítico e tradutor britânico Chris
Miller – tradutor inclusive do português, observe-se – pelo prestimoso auxílio
que me ofereceu na tradução do poema de Hill.
García Calvo, A. 2006. Tratado de Rítmica y Prosodia y de Métrica y

Versificación. Zamora: Lucina.
Hill, G. 2012. Odi Barbare. Thame: Clutag.
Hopkins, G. M. 2003. Major Poems and Sipiritual Writings. New York:
Vintage Spiritual Classics.
Kant, I. 1974. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
______. 1784. “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” In:
Berlinische Monatsschrift 12: 481-494.
Kenner, H. 1988. A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers. New
York: A. Knopf.
Klingner, F. (ed.) 1959. Quintus Horatius Flaccus: Opera. Leipzig:
Teubner.
Klopstock, F. G. 1989. Gedanken über die Natur der Poesie. Frankfurt:
Insel.
Larkin, P. 1983. “The Pleasure Principle”. In: Required Writing:
Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. London: Faber and Faber.
Nogueira, É. 2014. Poesia Bovina. São Paulo: É Realizações.
______. 2012. Verdade, Contenda e Poesia nos Idílios de Teócrito. São
Paulo: Humanitas.
Oliva Neto. J. A. 2013. “Dos Gêneros da Poesia Antiga e sua Tradução
em Poetuguês”. Tese de Livre-Docência. São Paulo: Universidade de
São Paulo.
Oliva Neto, J. A. & Nogueira, É. 2013. “O Hexâmetro Dactílico Vernáculo
antes de Carlos Alberto Nunes”. Scientia Traductionis 13: 295-311.
Rosado Fernandes, R. M. (ed.) 1986. Dionísio de Halicarnasso: Tratado da
Imitação. Lisboa: Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica.
Veyne, P. 1971. Comment on écrit l’histoire. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Voss, J. H. 1831 2. Zeitmessung der deutschen Sprache. Königsberg:
Universitäts-Buchhandlung.
______. 1822 3 . Des Quintus Horatius Flaccus Werke. 2 Bänden.
Braunschweig: F. Vieweg.
Bacchus, Augustus and the poet in
Horace Odes 3.25
Lya Serignolli
University of São Paulo
Introduction
As a god of sympotic pleasures and enjoyment, Bacchus
naturally fits into Horace’s lyric poetry.1 The god’s sacred drink,
libera vina (liberating wines), is included in the Ars Poetica
among the subjects assigned by the Muse to be sung in lyric
verse.2 Horace presents Bacchus (also called Lenaeus/ Liber/
Lyaeus) not only as a sympotic deity, but also as a deified hero
and patron of poetry. Bacchus’ presence is particularly remarkable
1
For recent research on Bacchus in Horace, cf.: Harrison (2017) on the parallels
between Bacchus, Horace and Augustus in C. 2.19; Giusti (2016) on the
connections between Dionysiac themes, politics and dithyramb in Epode 9;
Feldherr (2010) on the politics of representation through the image of Cleopatra
in C. 1.37; Davis (2010, 116-121) on the Dionysiac aspects of Horace’s lyric
ethos; Schiesaro (2009) on the functions of Bacchus as a god of poetry in
Horace’s Odes. See also: Batinski (1991), Silk (1969), Commager (1957).
2
Hor., Ars Po. 83-85: Musa dedit fidibus … libera vina referre; see also C 1.32.9:
Liberum et ... canebat ... barbite ... decus Phoebi.
276 AUGUSTAN POETRY
in the Odes, in which three poems are entirely dedicated to this

god: 1.18, 2.19 and 3.25.3
Odes 3.25 focuses on the poet’s approach to Bacchus as
his patron of poetry. Horace compares his poetic persona to a
Bacchant, who is dragged to the remote landscapes of Bacchus
only to give shape to a poem about the apotheosis of Augustus.
Horace stresses the pleasure and danger of being committed to
Lenaeus, a paradox that suits the god’s ambivalent nature. In this
paper, my aim is to discuss the associations between Bacchus,
Augustus and Horace’s lyric persona in Odes 3.25.4 First, I
shall investigate the ambiguities and paradoxes of the state of
Dionysiac possession as a metaphor for poetic enthusiasm in
Horace’s lyric poetry. Secondly, I will observe the identification
between Horace’s lyric persona and Augustus through their
connections with Bacchus. I will suggest possible reasons for
Horace’s choice of Bacchus as a patron of poetry in this poem
in praise of Augustus, where other divinities, such as Apollo
or the Muses, would apparently seem a more suitable choice
for this role.5 Finally, I will examine the role of Bacchus in an
issue much discussed by scholars regarding Odes 3.25, which is
whether Horace is announcing another poem when he says that
he will sing praises of Augustus. I intend to show how Horace’s
3
For Bacchus and Bacchic motifs in Horace, cf. Sat. 1.4.89; Epod. 9.38, 11.13;
C. 1.1.29-32; 1.7.3, 23; 1.12.22; 1.16.7; 1.18; 1.19.2; 1.27.3; 1.32.9; 1.37.1, 32;
2.6.19; 2.11.17; 2.19; 3.3.13; 3.8.9; 3.21.16, 21; 3.25; 4.8.34; 4.12.14; 4.15.26;
Epist. 1.19.4; 2.1.5; 2.2.78.
4
For research on Hor., C. 3.25, cf.: West (2002, 207-213), Oliensis (1998, 127-
131), Lowrie (1997, 317-325), Quinn (1980, 285-287), Nisbet and Rudd (2004,
296-309), Parker (1992, 304-309), Connor (1971), Aricò (1985), Fraenkel
(1957, 257-260), Xynue (2015, 156-161), Harrison (1998, 675).
5
For Apollo as Horace’s patron of poetry, cf.: Hor., C. 1.31.1; 3.4.4; 4.15.2; 4.6.29-
30: spiritum Phoebus mihi, Phoebus artem carminis nomenque dedit poetae. For the
choice of Bacchus instead of Apollo in Hor., C. 2.19, see Stephen Harrison
(forthcoming, 2017). For Horace as a poet of the Muses: Hor., C. 1.6.10; 3.1.3:
Musarum sacerdos; 3.4.21: vester, Camenae, vester.
BACCHUS, AUGUSTUS AND THE POET IN HORACE ODES 3.25 277
approach to Bacchus in this ode reflects on issues of genre and

on the treatment of Augustus as a theme of lyric poetry.
Dionysiac poetics in Odes 3.25

Bacchus is a god of many names, whose etymology can
be associated with some of his traits. So I would like to start
my analysis by looking at how the names chosen by Horace to
refer to Bacchus in Odes 3.25 allude to the main themes explored
in the poem. The poem starts with the god being addressed as
Bacchus, a name that is associated with the frenzy and madness
of Dionysiac revels and orgies.6 Bacchus is also called Naiadum
Baccharumque potens (ruler of the Naiads and of the Bacchants),
a periphrasis that stresses his power as the leader of an entourage
of female followers. At the end the poem, he is invoked as
Lenaeus, a name of Greek origin that is connected with his roles
as god of the wine press, patron of the Lenaia (a Greek festival
with dramatic competitions) and leader of the Maenads (also
called Lenai).7 Horace’s choice of these names is in tune with
the contents of the poem, which is about Dionysiac possession,
maenadism and poetic composition:
6
See Hor., C. 2.7.27: bacchabor; Plaut., Am. 2.2.71: Baccha bacchans. For the mean-
ings and uses of words Bacchus and Bacchants, see Schlesier (1993, 93-94);
Pailler (1995, 112-114).
7
Before Horace, Virgil attributes to Lenaeus the role of god of poetry, stressing his
connections with theatre and agriculture: Virg., Georg. 2.7-8: huc, pater o Lenaee,
ueni, nudataque musto tinge nouo mecum dereptis crura coturnis. For Bacchus/
Lenaeus as god of the wine press: Virg., Georg. 2.4; Ov., Met. 4.14; Servius,
Vergilii Aeneidos Libros 4.207.9-10: nam Liber Lenaeus dicitur, quia torculis
praeest, qui et Graece ληνοί dicuntur: nam cum sit Graecum, a mentis delenimento
non potest accipi. Tib 2.3.63: et tu, Bacche tener, iucundae consitor uvae. Lenaeus in
sympotic contexts: Virg., Aen. 4.207: gens epulata toris Lenaeum libat honorem.
Tib. 3.6.38: Odit Lenaeus tristia verba pater. For Bacchus in Virgil’s Georgics, cf.:
F. Mac Góráin (2014). “The Mixed Blessings of Bacchus in Virgil’s Georgics.” In:
Dictynna 11. For the Lenaia and the Lenai, cf.: Guía (2013, 100-117); Seaford
(2011, 39).
278 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Quo me, Bacche, rapis tui

plenum? quae nemora aut quos agor in specus
velox mente nova? quibus
antris egregii Caesaris audiar 5
aeternum meditans decus
stellis inserere et consilio Iovis?
dicam insigne, recens, adhuc
indictum ore alio. non secus in iugis
exsomnis stupet Euhias 10
Hebrum prospiciens et nive candidam
Thracen ac pede barbaro
lustratam Rhodopen, ut mihi devio
ripas8 et vacuum nemus
mirari libet. o Naiadum potens 15
Baccharumque valentium
proceras manibus vertere fraxinos,
nil parvum aut humili modo,
nil mortale loquar. dulce periculum est,
o Lenaee, sequi deum 20
cingentem viridi tempora pampino.
Where are you hurrying me, Bacchus, full as I am, of you?

Into what woods, what caves, am I being driven at such
speed in a strange state of mind? In what grotto shall I
be heard as I practise setting the eternal glory of peerless
Caesar among the stars and in the council of Jove? I shall
sing on a momentous theme, that is modern and has
never been sung by another’s lips. Just as the Maenad,
unsleeping on the mountaintops, stares in wonder as she
looks out on the Hebrus and Thrace white with snow, and
Rhodope recently traversed by barbarian feet, so I in this
lonely place delight in marvelling at the rocks and deserted
woods. O Lord of the Naiads and of the Bacchanals who
have the strength to uproot tall ash trees with their bare
hands, nothing small or in a low style, nothing mortal,
shall I sing. It is an intoxicating danger, o God of the wine
press, to follow your divinity, wreathing my temples with
green vine leaves.9
8
rupes.
9
Translated by Niall Rudd (2004).
Odes 3.25 begins with the poet asking where he is being

taken: quo me, Bacche, rapis? The privileged position of this
sentence calls attention to the relevance of the landscape in the
poem. The ambivalent Bacchus is both a wild and a civilizing
god, and these contrasting facets tend to be presented in different
settings. As a god of the wilderness, Bacchus is often depicted
being worshipped in orgiastic rituals in caves, woods and on
high mountain peaks. As a civilizing god, he is presented as a
patron of wine and a deified hero, to whom libations are offered
at public and private banquets. However, as we shall see, the
wild and civilizing aspects of Bacchus are often interdependent
and overlap each other at various points, resisting rigorous
distinctions.
The wild side of Bacchus is prominent in Odes 3.25. The
repeated mention of remote places in nature reinforces this
idea: the references range from woods, caves and mountaintops
(nemus, 2, 13; specus, 2; antrum, 4; ripae/rupes, 13; iugae, 8) to
specific regions of Thrace known for their associations with
maenadic rituals (river Hebrus and Rodophe Mountains, 10-
13). In poetry, secluded places in nature, which are often - but
not necessarily - associated with Bacchus, may be described as
poetic haunts, denoting poetic space/territory.10 It is precisely in
these places that Horace most frequently presents Bacchus as a
god of poetry. In Epistles 2.2, Bacchus is depicted as a peaceful
deity (somno gaudentis et umbra, 76-77) that is worshipped by
the writers in a grove (nemus).11 There is a sense of otium in
10
For remote places as poetic spaces in Horace, see also.: woods/grove (nemus):
Hor., Epist. 2.2.76-77; C. 4.3.11, C. 1.1.30-31: me gelidum nemus/ Nympharumque
leves cum Satyris chori. Cliffs (rupes): C. 2.19.1: Bacchum in remotis … rupibus.
Cave (antrum): C. 2.1.39; C. 3.4.40: Pierio antro; C. 1.5.3 (with erotic connota-
tions): grato, Pyrrha, sub antro. For the symbolism of the Bacchic cave, cf.: Pailler
(1995, 59-77), Lowrie (1997, 323).
11
Hor., Epist. 2.2.76-77: scriptorum chorus omnis amat nemus et fugit urbem,/ rite
cliens Bacchi somno gaudentis et umbra. For the figure of the poet enjoying nature,
cf.: Hor., C. 1.1.19-22; Juvenal 7.58-9; Quintilian, Inst. Or. 10.3.22-4.
280 AUGUSTAN POETRY
approaching the god as a patron of poetry in this passage that

contrasts with the startling and disquieting epiphany of Bacchus
in Odes 3.25, which emphasizes the power, the violence and the
challenges presented by the god.12
Bacchic enthusiasm and poetic furor

Descriptions of epiphanies (apparitions/manifestations) of
deities were widely used by Latin and Greek poets to justify their
choices of certain themes, metres or styles of poetry. This topos
consists in saying that a deity manifested itself and interfered in
the poet’s decisions, indicating what treatment should be given
to poetry and possibly suggesting a “way” to follow. One of the
models for this topos can be found in Callimachus’ prologue to
the Aetia, in which Apollo appears to the poet and gives him
instructions as to how to write poetry, advising him to keep
his Muse “slender” and to follow the “untrodden path” (which
are usually interpreted respectively as metaphors for elegance
and innovation in poetry).13 In Odes 3.25, the difference is that
Bacchus does not speak to the poet, but - in a much more
vehement way than the Callimachaean Apollo - carries him
off to remote landscapes in order to write a poem to Augustus.
In both Odes 3.25 and 2.19, in which Bacchus plays the
role of god of poetry, the epiphanies of Bacchus are linked with
Dionysiac possession and poetic composition.14 As we have seen,
12
In Hor., C. 2.19 the epiphany of Bacchus is also disquieting, emphasizing the
fear and restlessness triggered by the presence of god with his powerful thyrsus:
Parce Liber, parce gravi metuende thyrso (8) .
13
Call., Aetia fr. 1.21-28 Pf.. See also: Lucr. 1.925-27: quo nunc instinctus mente
vigenti/ avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante/ trita solo; Virg., Ecl. 6.3.9a.
Harrison (2017, 240) notes that C. 3.25 “plainly refers to Horace’s innovation in
the Odes, using the traditional language of untrodden paths which looks back to
Lucretius and Callimachus (lines 12-13)”.
14
For Bacchus as an epiphanic deity, see Henrichs (1993, 19): “the transformative
power of Dionysus is inseparable from his epiphanies”. See also: epiphany of
in 3.25, Horace’s poetic persona declares to be possessed by

Bacchus (Bacche … tui plenum, 1-2) and then announces that he
will sing praises of Augustus. Similarly, in 2.19, the poet claims
to be full of Bacchus (plenoque Bacchi pectore, 6) before he starts
singing praises of this god. Bacchic possession is described in
these odes as a strange state in which the mind is violently
shaken and confused with contrasting sensations of pleasure/joy
and fear/danger (2.19.5-7: recenti mens trepidat metu … turbidum
laetatur; 3.25.3, 18: mente nova… dulce periculum).15
Dionysiac possession was used as a metaphor for poetic
enthusiasm by the Greeks as well as the Romans. Plato, for
instance, in the Ion, makes Socrates compare epic and lyric poets
to possessed Bacchants.16 Poetic enthusiasm (or furor poeticus) -
which can be understood as a state apart from reason and above
reason - was not necessarily connected with Dionysus.17 The
topos of the poet who spoke to or through a deity was widely
used by the Greeks. Plato, in the Laws, uses the simile of the
poet as a fountain that channels water to describe how poets,
out of their senses, received knowledge from the Muse.18 Pindar
normally appears as an interpreter of - and not possessed by -
the Muses.19
The earliest reference to the notion of poetic enthousiasmos
(ἐνθουσιασμός) comes from Democritus, who says that what
the poet writes with enthusiasm is very beautiful.20 Cicero,
Quirinus, in Hor., Serm. 1.10.31-35; of Cupid in Ov., Am. 1.1.1-6.

15
For mente nova as divine possession, cf.: Sen., Ag. 720; Lucan 5.167.
16
Plato, Ion 533.e.4. See also Democritus, fr. 21.
17
For Bacchic enthusiasm and furor poeticus, cf.: Sperduti (1950), Tigerstedt
(1970), Aricò (1985), Hunter (2006, 44), Schiesaro (2010, 61-79), Kilpatrick
(1986, 19), Rudd (1989, 199), Mckinlay (1953).
18
Plato, Laws 719C.
19
Pindar, fr. 150 S. (137 B.), Pyth. 4.279, Paean 6.6 (fr. 40 B).
20
Democritus, fr. B.18 Diels-Kranz: ἐνθουσιασμοῦ καὶ ἱεροῦ πνεύματος, καλὰ
κάρτα ἐστίν. For poetic enthousiasmos, see: Dodds (1951, 82), Tigerstedt (1970).
282 AUGUSTAN POETRY
commenting on this passage of Democritus, translates

ἐνθουσιασμός as inflammatio animorum or adflatus furoris, a
state of violent mental agitation or wild excitement.21 The word
enthousiasmos derives from entheos (to be full of a god), and
corresponds to the expressions plenoque Bacchi pectore (C. 2.19.6)
and Bacche tui plenum (C. 3.25.1-2) used by Horace to describe
Dionysiac possession. Lucretius was probably the first to use
this metaphor in Latin poetry, saying, in De Rerum Natura, that
the sharp thyrsus (as a metonymy for Bacchus) infused in his
heart the love of the Muses, instigating him to write his poem
(sed acri percussit thyrso … incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem
Musarum, 1.922-925).22
In Greek poetry, one of the earliest examples of the
connection between Bacchus, wine and poetic enthusiasm is from
Archilochus, who boasts about his ability to lead the dithyramb
of Dionysus when his wits are thunderstruck by wine.23 Stephen
Harrison has noted that dulce periculum of Odes 3.25.18 “conveys
the excitement of poetic inspiration, couched with Horatian irony
in language which suggests that the poet’s confused enthusiasm
21
Cicero, De Orat. 2.46.194: saepe enim audivi poetam bonum neminem (id quod a
Democrito et Platone in scriptis relictum esse dicunt) sine inflammatione animorum
existere posse et sine quodam adflatu quasi furoris. Also: De Divin. 1.38.80: negat
enim sine furore quemquam poetam magnum esse posse, quod idem dicit Plato. Hor.,
Ars Po. 295: ingenium misera quia fortunatius arte credit et excludit sanos Helicone
poetas Democritus.
22
See also Virg., G. 2.475-76: Me uero primum dulces ante omnia Musae,/ quarum
sacra fero ingenti percussus amore.
23
Arch., fr. 120 W: ὡς Διωνύσου ἄνακτος καλὸν ἐξάρξαι μέλος/ οἶδα διθύραμβον
οἴνωι συγκεραυνωθεὶς φρένας. Archilochus (1971). Iambi et elegi Graeci, vol.
1, ed. West, M.L. Oxford: Clarendon Press. For wine-drinking poets (vinosus,
potus) in Horace: Ep. 1.19.1-7: laudibus arguitur vini vinosus; Homerus Ennius
ipse pater numquam nisi potus ad arma/ prosiluit dicenda. For water-drinking
poets (aquae potor): Epist. 1.19.8-9: nulla placere diu nec vivere carmina possunt,
quae scribuntur aquae potoribus. Sober poets (siccus): C. 1.18.3-4: siccis omnia
nam dura deus proposuit. For the topos of wine and water-drinking poets, cf.:
Crowther (1979, 1-11), Knox (1985, 107-119).
may be connected with over-consumption of the munera Bacchi,

as befits a symposiastic bard”.24
There is no doubt that in Odes 3.25 poetic enthusiasm is
more closely associated with maenadic possession than with the
ecstatic powers of wine. However, orgiastic rituals and wine-
drinking are connected by the effects, being both described as a
combination of contrasting sensations. Both the sweet danger
(dulce periculum, 3.25.19) and the confused ecstasy (metu …
turbidum laetatur, 2.19.6-7) of Dionysiac orgies sound like
other the expressions used by Horace to describe the frenzy
produced by wine, such as lenis tormentum, amabilis insania or
dulcis furor.25 For instance, in Odes 2.7, Horace refers to the dulcis
furor trigerred by wine drinking (non ego sanius/ bacchabor Edonis:
recepto/ dulce mihi furere est amico, 26-28). The verb bacchor, which
refers to Bacchic mental excitement, is associated with dionysiac
experience from both sources, rituals and revels. Horace suggests
that his poetic persona will go mad like an Edonian, a people
of Thrace who had a reputation for drinking and who were also
known for their association with the cult of Dionysus. Another
example is Odes 4.12.28, dulce est desipere, in which Horace
combines sweetness with madness (desipere, colloquial term
that means to be out of mind, lose one’s reason) to describe the
ecstatic effects of wine.
The term dulcis qualifies other pleasures of the conuiuium
besides wine, such as food, love, friendship and poetry. It is an
attribute of the god of Love (dulcis Cupido/ Amor), who, like
dulcis Lyaeus, is also sympotic deity with ecstatic and liberating
powers. Horace also uses the word dulcis to qualify his patron
and friend Maecenas, who is often depicted enjoying banquets
in the poet’s company in the Odes and Epodes. Finally, in the Ars
24
Stephen Harrison (1998, 675).
25
For the paradox of Bacchic excitement, cf.: Hor., C. 3.4.5: amabilis insania;
C. 3.19.18: insanire iuvat; C. 3.21.13: lene tormentum. For dulcis furor in Horace,
cf. La Penna (1995, 273-275).
284 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Poetica 99, dulcis appears as an essential feature of poetry, which

is to delight and to move the affections.26
In Horace, serious themes, like war and politics, may
also be associated with some form of sweetness or pleasure.27
More specifically, an example of the connection between the
sweetness of wine, politics and war can be found in the sympotic
Epode 9, which is the first example of Bacchic poetics associated
with Octavian/Augustus in Horace: curam metumque Caesaris
rerum iuvat/ dulci Lyaeo solvere (37-38). As we can see, dulcis
Lyaeus helps to release anxieties and fears in times of political
uncertainties.28 Solvere (which means to loosen, untie or relax)
emphasizes an aspect of Bacchus that is already implicit in the
etymology of the Greek name Lyaeus (Λυαῖος, the relaxer,
unbender, the one who sets free; a variant of λύσιος, deliverer).
29
Lyaeus’ function, in this case, is to liberate from madness
26
For the sweetness of Bacchus/wine, cf. Hor., Epod. 9.37-38: dulcis Lyaeus; C.
3.12.1-2: dulci mala/ vino lavere; C. 3.13.2: dulci mero; C. 1.7.19: mollis merum.
Sweetness of Cupid/love: Hor., C. 4.1.4-5: dulcium/ mater saeva Cupidinum; C.
1.9.15: dulcis amores; Sappho, Frag. 130 Voigt.: Ἔρος γλυκύπικρος (bitter-sweet
Love). Sweetness of the food: Hor., C. 3.8.6-8: voveram dulcis epulas et album/
Libero caprum prope funeratus/ arboris ictu. Sweetness of Maecenas: Hor., Epist.
1.7.12; C. 1.1.2: dulce decus meum. Sweetness of poetry: Hor., Ars Poetica 99: non
satis est pulchra esse poemata: dulcia sunto. For the use of dulcis in the Ars Poetica 99,
cf. Rudd (1989, 167): “dulcis implies a direct influence on the emotions, perhaps
affecting”. For metaphors from food and drink in Horace, cf.: Gowers (1993,
126-179), Bramble (1974, 44-59).
27
For the topos of the brave soldier who finds satisfaction in giving his life for the
good of the patria in Horace, see also: C. 3.19.2, 4.9.51-52. For this topos as a
reformulation of Tyrtaeus, cf. Quinn (1980, 245). For instance, the sweetness of
dying at war in Odes 3.2 (dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, 13) sounds sublime,
evoking the honours dedicated to the heroes who died for their fatherland.
28
For Epode 9 as a sign of Horace’s political reconciliation with the Augustan
regime, cf. Giusti (2016).
29
For Lyaeus (Bacchus/Liber) as loosener or releaser, see also: Virg., Ecl. 5.69;
Hor., C. 1.7.17-23, 2.11.17, 3.8.13-17, 3.21.15-16; Epod. 9.37-38, 13.17-18;
Ep. 1.5.16-21: quid non ebrietas dissignat? operta recludit, … contracta quem non
in paupertate solutum? (dissigno, to unseal and reveal something; solutum puns on
Lyaeus as releaser). For the releasing effects of wine in Horace, see: Kilpatrick
(1986, 64), Putnam (2006, 394), Mayer (1994, 140). For the connections be-
(of civil war), instead of causing it. As we can see, in Horace,

the term dulcis is often used to refer to a pleasurable aspect of
something (which possibly belongs to the symposium, such as
wine, love, poetry or friendship) that helps to counterbalance or
relieve affections and impulses (furores) associated with serious
themes, like war and politics.
This is how the poet’s challenge of following Lenaeus
sounds like in Odes 3.25 (dulce periculum est/ o Lenaee, sequi deum,
19-20). The expression dulce periculum combines the pleasure/joy
of surrendering to the gifts of the god together with the danger/
fear of approaching his terrifying powers. This paradox suggests
the state of mind in which poetry will be conceived, and can
also be seen as a metaphor for the pleasure and risk involved in
the task of writing poetry in praise of the princeps.
Dionysiac possession: the poet as a Maenad

After announcing that he will sing of Augustus, Horace
turns the focus back to his poetic persona, introducing the
simile of the poet as Maenad (non secus in iugis/ exsomnis stupet
Euhias … ut mihi .. mirari libet, 8-14).30 Maenadic possession
is described as a paradoxical state that combines pleasure and
astonishment with vigorous action and violence.31 Horace
suggests that his poetic persona is both amazed and delighted
by what he sees at the lonely places of Bacchus, like a sleepless
Maenad looking out in wonder (prospiciens, 10) on the remote
tween Liber (the liberator) and Dionysus Eleuthereus (eleutheros, free; patron of
the City Dionysia at Athens), see Wiseman (1998, 36).
30
The choice of the name Euhias (from euhoe!, the cry of the Bacchants) suggests
the excitement of Bacchic possession. For the simile of the poet as a Maenad in
Hor., C. 3.25, see Oliensis (1998, 130).
31
For Maenadic possession, violence and ecstasy in Greek poetry, see Schelesier
(1993, 94-7); for Pentheus impersonating a Maenad in Euripides’ Bacchae, see
Segal (1982, 28-31).
286 AUGUSTAN POETRY
landscapes of Thrace. On the other hand, Dionysiac possession

also engenders power and violence, which is suggested by
words that define the actions and the character of Bacchus
(rapio, 1; potens, 14) as well as those that refer to the courage
(valentes, 15) and the unnatural strength and vigour of the
Maenads, who can traverse long distances in ritual dance
(pede barbaro, 11) and are capable of uprooting tall trees when
possessed by the god (vertere fraxinos, 16).
Potens indicates the power Bacchus holds over his
entourage of Bacchants and Naiads. Power and violence are
central aspects of Bacchic possession in Odes 3.25, which starts
with the poet being dragged by the force of Bacchus (Quo me,
Bacche, rapis tui plenum?, 1-2), like a Maenad, without knowing
where he is being taken, until he discovers that he will sing
praises of Augustus. Therefore, it is worth considering more
carefully the use of the verb rapio (which means to take away
by force, capture, ravish), an action that usually implies rapidity
and violence.32 The rapidity implicit in this verb is emphasized
by the adjective velox, in line 3, which, according to Nisbet and
Rudd, “refers to the impetus of composition and the dithyrambic
rapidity of the ode itself ”.33 On the other hand, the verb rapio
also suggests violent action, and places the poet in a passive state
in relation to the powers of the god.34 This idea is reiterated by
the verb ago in the passive form (quae nemora aut quos agor in
specus, 2), used in the sense of being carried off and led to do
something.35
32
For rapio and furor applied to civil war/politics, cf. Hor., Epod. 7.13-14: furorne
caecus an rapit vis acrior /an culpa? For the use of rapio in the carpe diem topos, cf.:
Hor., C. 4.7.7-8 (the swift passage of time): inmortalia ne speres, monet annus et
almum/ quae rapit hora diem; Epod. 13.3-5 (to grasp the opportunity offered by
the day): rapiamus, amici,/ occasionem de die, dumque virent genua/ et decet.
33
Nisbet and Rudd (2004, 300).
34
For the vehemence of Bacchus as a god of poetry, cf. Batinski (1971, 371).
35
See also the use of the verb ago to describe Amata’s state of Dionysian madness
in Virgil’s Aeneid 7.383-4: non cursu segnior illo per medias urbes agitur populosque
2. Bacchus and genre

Bacchus, as god of poetry, plays an important role in
Horace’s treatment of the lyric genre. In Odes 2.19, the god
allows (fas est, 9, 13) the poetic persona to sing higher themes
in his praise.36 In 3.25, Bacchus literally drags (rapio, 1) Horace
to a higher level, urging him to write a panegyric to Augustus.
Reaching such heights where Bacchus is worshipped certainly
involves many risks and dangers. One of the dangers of facing
the challenge posed by the god, which consists in singing
higher themes in a new way, can be seen as an allusion to the
risk of trying to emulate Pindaric high lyric in the panegyric
to Augustus.37 Despite the dangers, in 3.25 the poet seals his
commitment to Lenaeus (and consequently to Augustus),
wreathing his forehead with the vine (cingentem viridi tempora
pampino, 20).38 So what would be the benefits of following
such a dangerous yet delightful path that leads to the remote
landscapes of Lenaeus? The answer to this question requires
further analysis of some aspects of the Dionysiac experience as
it is presented in Horace.
Dionysiac enthusiasm, in both orgiastic rituals and
wine-drinking, is said to trigger a state of excitement that easily
ferocis. For the Dionysiac madness of Amata, cf.: Mac Góráin (2014, 218).
36
See recusatio in Hor., C. 1.6.10-13, in which the unwarlike lyric Muse stops
the poetic persona from writing epic: inbellisque lyrae Musa potens vetat/ laudes
egregii Caesaris et tuas/ culpa deterere ingeni.
37
For Pindaric associations in Horace, cf.: Hor., C.1.6; 2.20; 3.1; 4.2. For Pindaric
associations in C. 3.25, cf. Schiesaro (2009, 68), West (2002, 209), Lowrie (1997,
238-42).
38
Another interpretation of this line (20) is to take cingentem of Bacchus. However,
this use would probably give a weaker sense to the passage, since attention is
fixed on the poet, especially at the end of the ode. Contrast with the use of the
Perf. Part. in the epithet in C. 4.8.33: Liber ornatus viridi tempora pampino. For
the use of cingetem in line 20, cf. Nisbet and Rudd (2004, 308). See Quinn (2002,
287) for the garland as a symbol of the poet’s surrender to inspiration. For Hor.,
C. 3.25 as an odd analogy for the poet’s political commitment to Augustus, cf.
Nisbet and Rudd (2004, 299).
288 AUGUSTAN POETRY
leads to excess. Throughout the Odes, Bacchus usually appears as

a civilizing figure, provider of numerous benefits, if approached
properly. In Odes 1.18, Horace praises the god’s gifts provided
both at the symposium and in ritual, but warns that no one
should cross the limits of the moderate Liber (ac ne quis modici
transiliat munera Liberi, 7). Wine in association with the iocus
of the sympotic environment may be a remedy for the worries
of life.39 However, in excess, it may lead to inappropriate and
violent behaviour. The episode of the brawl of the Centaurs and
the Lapiths, which ends in death, is an exemplum of the excesses
of sympotic life.40 Therefore, the ambivalent Liber can be either
verecundus or inverecundus (modest or immodest), depending on
how he is approached.41
The overwhelming powers of Bacchus as a leader and
patron of poetry are in constant tension with his releasing
effects as an orgiastic and sympotic deity. This tension between
binding and freeing is a central aspect of the paradox faced by the
followers of this god, which consists in freedom in servitude, as
suggested in Euripides’ Cyclops, that ends with the satyrs happy
to be freed from Polyphemus so that they can serve Dionysus
again.42 As we shall see, by suggesting that he surrenders to
Bacchus, Horace hints at his approach both to the lyric genre
and to Augustus as a theme of poetry.
39
For wine as a source of iocus (joy, jest) and as a remedy for the worries of life, cf.:
Hor., C. 2.11.17: dissipat Euhius curas edaces; C. 3.21.14-16: iocosus Lyaeus; Virg.,
Ecl. 5.69: et multo in primis hilarans conuiuia Baccho.
40
For the brawl and madness of the Centaurs, cf. Hor., C. 1.18.8-9; 2.12.5-6;
Virg., Georg. 2.454-57. For drunken brawls and passionate love, cf. Hor., C.
1.13.10-11: inmodicae mero rixae. For Bacchus and the excesses of sympotic life
in Horace, cf. Cucchiarelli (2011, 264).
41
Hor., Epod. 11.13-14 (inverecundus): simul calentis inverecundus deus/ fervidiore
mero arcana promorat loco. C. 1.27.3-4 (verecundus): verecundumque Bacchum/
sanguineis prohibete rixis.
42
Eur., Cycl. 708-9.
Bacchus is the god of freedom (libertas), and two of his

names, often used by Horace in sympotic poems, allude to these
liberating powers: the Italic name Liber (the liberator) and the
cult-title Lyaeus (the releaser). The liberation granted by the
god, among several other possibilities, may affect speech. In Odes
3.21, the joyful (iocosus) Lyaeus, as a metonymy for wine, releases
from worries and mellows the sober-minded, causing them to
reveal their secret thoughts and intentions: tu sapientium/ curas
et arcanum iocoso/ consilium retegis Lyaeo (14-16).
The wine’s tongue releasing effect is presented as either
beneficial or harmful. In Epistles 1.5.19, one of the benefits
of drinking consists in making people eloquent: fecundi calices
quem non fecere disertum? (disertum, from dissero: to examine,
argue, discuss; to speak, discourse). However, Bacchus’ tongue
liberating impulse may be associated with lack of restraint in
speech. As we have seen above, the fluency in speech caused by
ebrietas may unlock secrets (arcana), an effect that is not always
considered convenient. An epigram of Meleager refers to the
paradoxes of Bacchus as a tongue releaser, saying that although
Bacchus is the god of the mysteries, who keeps his own arcana
secret, he is less scrupulous regarding other people’s secrets.43
Let us therefore examine some aspects of the liberating powers
of Bacchus associated with poetic libertas or licentia (freedom
or frankness of speech) in Horace.
Liber “in excess” may be a source of sarcasm, ridicule,
laughter, violence, invective or vituperation, which are
characteristic of lower genres. In Odes 1.16, Horace compares
the furor poeticus that originates the violent iambus to the mind-
shaking Dionysiac experience (quatit mentem … Liber, 5-7) and
refers to the passionate frenzy that moves his poetic persona
(fervor… misit furentem, 22-25) to write offensive, harsh and
fast iambi (criminosi, 2; tristes, 9, 26; celeres, 24).
43
Meleager, A.P. 12.199.5-6. For the relation between Meleager’s epigram and
Epode 11, see Watson (2003, 371).
290 AUGUSTAN POETRY
In Satires 1.4, Liber receives the epithet verax (condita …

verax aperit praecordia Liber, 89), which suggests this god’s ability
to reveal what is hidden and to promote truth-telling (in vino
veritas). In this specific example, verax refers to the excessive
frankness (licentia) that is typical of satire.44 The Dionysiac
tongue releasing effect is also described in Epode 11, a sympotic
poem in which a comic-iambic facet of Bacchus emerges.45 In
this epode - in which Horace expresses concern about poetic
composition (scribere versiculos amore percussum gravi, 2) -
Bacchus is presented as the shameless god (inverecundus deus,
13) who presides over the convivium.46 The heat of the wine
causes the poetic persona to lose control of speech and reveal
secrets (calentis … fervidiore mero, arcana promorat loco, 13-14).
Another reference to Liber’s tongue liberating enthusiasm
in this epode is associated with bilis. The expression meis
praecordiis libera bilis (liberating rage/bile in my vitals, 15-16)
recalls Dionysiac possession in both Odes 3.25 (Bacche tui plenum,
1-2) and 2.19 (plenoque Bacchi pectore, 6). The word libera may
44
Libertas as freedom of speech directly affects the way Horace presents his per-
sona as a satirist. In Satires 1.4, in which Horace tries to define his place in the
satirical tradition, Liber appears as the truthful god who unlocks secrets (verax
Liber, 89). Horace argues that the poets of Old comedy and Roman satirists, like
Lucilius, had freedom in abundance (multa cum libertate notabant, 5), whereas
his own libertas was more restricted in terms of personal invective. The setting
of this satire is the conuiuium, where the ritual of amicitia is central. Horace
defines himself as sanus (129) in contrast with other poets that are compared
to abusive dinner guests, who drink freely and make public their friends’ secrets
(81-91). On Horace’s poetic libertas in the Satires, cf. Dessen (1967, 78-9),
Schlegel (2000, 103), Oliva Neto (2003, 88-90), Gowers (2003, 127-129),
Freudenburg (2004, 15-51).
45
Hor., Epod. 11.13-16: simul calentis inverecundus deus/ fervidiore mero arcana
promorat loco./ ‘quodsi meis inaestuet praecordiis / libera bilis. For Liber in Hor.,
Epode 11, see Mankin (1995, 192-201). For the dangers of wine as a tongue
loosener, cf. Hor., Ep. 1.18.37-38: arcanum neque tu scrutaberis illius umquam,/
conmissumque teges et vino tortus et ira; S. 1.4.84-5: conmissa tacere/ qui nequit: hic
niger est.
46
See also Ov., Pont. 1.10.29: immodico Lyaeo.
pun on the god’s name, Liber, probably suggesting his role

as tongue liberator.47 Praecordia, often used in lower genres
(notice that this word also appears in Satires 1.4.89, mentioned
above), corresponds to pectus as the seat of passions.48 And bilis,
which can be interpreted as rage (according to the notion that
black bile could trigger such affection), may also be associated
with poetic furor (enthusiasm/madness). There is a passage of
Ps.-Aristotle’s Problem 30.1 that connects both bilis and wine
with poetic enthusiasm. It says that hot black bile, like wine,
would trigger frenzy, which, among other effects, would help
with poetic composition.49 In Horace, the liberating effects of
both wine and bilis may function as sources of poetic furor and
licentia/libertas in speech.50
Therefore, as regards Bacchic possession, it is a fine line
that separates ecstasy from madness, freedom from slavery,
and higher from lower genres of poetry. The ambiguities and
paradoxes of Bacchus as well as the god’s connections with a
variety of poetic genres (from tragedy and epic to iambus and
comedy) give Horace flexibility to introduce and combine topoi
from different sources in his lyric poetry.51 In Odes 3.25, Bacchus
47
See Naevius, Palliatae 113 (NB. Paul. Fest. 116M): Líbera linguá loquemur lúdis
Liberálibus.
48
Praecordia are literally the vital organs below the heart. For praecordia as seat of
the passions, cf. Hor., S. 1.4.89; Epod 5.95.
49
For black bile and frenzy: Ps.-Arist., Problem 30.1.954a.15-25. For frenzy and
poetic enthusiasm: Ps.-Arist., Problem 30.1.954a.35. Bilis as rage: Hor., S. 1.9.66:
meum jecur urere bilis. Bilis in Arch., frag. 234 W.: χολὴν γὰρ οὐκ ἔχεις ἐφ› ἥπατι.
For bilis and poetic enthusiasm, cf. Giusti (forthcoming). “The Metapoetics of
Liber-ty: Horace’s Bacchic Ship in Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Animi”.
50
For poetic libertas in Horace as a prerogative of the poets: cf. Ars Poetica 9-13:
poetis audiendi potestas ... veniam petimus. For poetic libertas and licentia in
Horace, see also Giusti (forthcoming). “The Metapoetics of Liber-ty: Horace’s
Bacchic Ship in Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Animi”.
51
For the inclusion of topoi from other genres (generic enrichment) in Horace’s
lyric, cf. Harrison (2007, 168-206); (2017, 243-246).
292 AUGUSTAN POETRY
particularly propels the poetic persona towards panegyric in

lyric verse.
Politics and wine: the symposium as a place to sing of

Augustus
Horace stresses both his taste for and his moderation
with the gifts of Bacchus, describing the behaviour of his poetic
persona as both a symposiast (conviva) and a symposiarch
(magister bibendi). As magister bibendi, he stablishes the rules
of the symposium, prescribing the proper measures of wine and
water to be drunk and trying to control the mood of the guests
in order to avoid chaos. As a conviva, his poetic persona may
drink large quantities of wine, but chooses very carefully when,
what, how and with whom to celebrate and go mad, especially
if patrons or friends are involved.52
Having the god of freedom under control is the guarantee
that excesses in speech will be avoided, especially in connection
with Augustus as a subject of poetry. When Horace says that it
is dangerous to follow Lenaeus, he may also be suggesting that
he must be careful in his approach to his patron, Augustus, so
as to avoid revealing what should be kept secret, as if he were
dealing with the mysteries of Dionysus himself.53 Therefore, as
52
For Horace as symposiast (conviva), see: Hor., C. 4.5.39; 3.8.13-14: sume,
Maecenas, cyathos amici/ sospitis centum. For Horace as symposiarch (magister
bibendi), see: Hor., C. 1.27.1-4; 3.19.5-18. For the measures of wine and water in
Hor., C. 3.19, see Pavlock (2001, 53), Quinn (1980, 277-79). Wine was usually
drunk mixed with water, to drink pure wine was considered a barbarian habit.
For the right occasion to celebrate, see: Hor., C. 4.12.28: in loco; C. 2.7.27-28:
recepto amico. For the duties of the symposiarch, cf.: Cairns (2012, 265), Smith
(1984, 259), Nisbet and Rudd (2004, 229).
53
For Horace’s political discretion, cf.: Hor., Epist. 1.18.38; Sat. 1.5. For secrecy in
the mysteries of Bacchus, cf. Hor., C. 1.18.11-13: non ego te, candide Bassareu,/
invitum quatiam nec variis obsita frondibus/ sub divum rapiam. The secrecy in the
mysteries of Demeter can also be seen as a metaphor for political discretion:
regards freedom of speech (libertas), Horace does not employ the

abusive language of invective associated with the iambic-satiric
Bacchus in poems addressed to Augustus, but emphasizes the
civilizing aspects of the god, who helps to relax and to forget
worries about the future, and who aggregates people in joyful
celebrations of victories, triumphs and peace.54
Having the god of wine as a patron of poetry in Odes 3.25
seems like an opportune way of justifying the praise of Augustus
in lyric, a genre that “has fundamentally symposiastic rather than
encomiastic associations”.55 Horace makes the symposium an
appropriate environment to sing of Augustus, both in lyric and
iambic poetry, linking the relaxing effects of wine with serious
themes, like war and politics, by the carpe diem topos. As we
have seen, in Epode 9 - published when Actium was still a cause
of concern - dulcis Lyaeus (37-38) appears as a remedy for the
anxieties and fears for (or of ) Caesar’s cause.56
Another striking example is Odes 1.37, the well-known
sympotic poem that commemorates Augustus’ victory in
Actium - a decisive battle for Rome, which was made to look
like a fight against a foreign enemy personified in the figure of
Cleopatra. Andrew Feldherr has noticed that although Bacchus
is not literally named in this ode, there are verbal markers of his
presence at the beginning and end of the poem. Pede libero, in
Hor. C. 3.2.25-32: vetabo, qui Cereris sacrum/ volgarit arcanae; see also: Quinn
(2002, 246), Rudd (2004, 145).
54
For wine libations and poetry in praise of the heroes, see Hor., C. 4.5.31-36,
4.15.25-32. For harmless and invective humour in Horace, cf. Oliva Neto (2003,
87-97).
55
Harrison (1998, 675): “is this poem [Odes 3.25] in fact a justification of praising
Augustus in lyric, which has fundamentally symposiastic rather than encomi-
astic associations?”
56
For the fear for (or of ) Octavian’s cause in Epode 9, see Giusti (2016, 133): “ei-
ther fear for or fear of Caesar, depending on which side one is on: in any case, a
fear which can only be dissolved by Bacchus himself (37–8)”.
294 AUGUSTAN POETRY
line 1, and triumphus, in line 32, are both linked with dithyramb,
a form of Greek lyric composition connected with Dionysus.57
In the expression pede libero, in the opening line, libero may
pun on Liber as both god of freedom and patron of dithyramb.
Therefore, pede libero can be seen as a reference to the metrics of
dithyramb (Liber’s metrical foot) and also as an allusion to the
liberating powers of Liber (foot of freedom) against tyrannical
forces threatening Rome.58 Dionysiac traits characterize both
Octavian and Cleopatra in this poem.59 The Egyptian queen is
portrayed with eastern and decadent Dionysiac features, as a
drunken and mad woman who suddenly becomes sober when
faced with the powers of Rome. Octavian, in his turn, resembles
the Roman Liber as the new liberator of the Republic, who
returns from battle as conqueror of the East.60 Therefore, Liber
represents the two extremes of libertas in Odes 1.37: liberation
from oppression in the figure of Octavian, and licentia that leads
to decadence in the figure of Cleopatra.
Odes 1.37 closes with the word triumphus (32), which is
connected to the Greek term thriambos, a cult-title of Dionysus
that refers to the god’s association with triumphal processions.61
57
Feldherr (2010, 223). Hor., C. 1.37.1, 32: Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero/
pulsanda tellus… deduci superbo/ non humilis mulier triumpho. For dithyramb as an
epithet of Bacchus, see Eur., Ba. 526-529: Ἴθι, Διθύραμβ’, ἐμὰν ἄρσενα τάνδε
βᾶθι νηδύν· ἀναφαίνω σε τόδ›, ὦ Βάκχιε, Θήβαις ὀνομάζειν. For Bacchus and
dithyramb, see also Seaford (2011, 192).
58
Pede barbaro in Hor., C. 3.25.11, also suggests the idea of Bacchic rhythm, em-
phasizing the foreign character of the maenadic dance. For the liberating pow-
ers of Bacchus against tyranny (pede libero, foot of freedom) in C. 1.37, see also
Harrison (2017, 237). For the dithyrambic mode and its political meaning in
Horace, see Giusti (2016, 131-139).
59
For Octavian vs. Antony/Cleopatra in Hor., C. 1.37, see also Galinsky (2012,
47-58), Oliensis (1998, 138).
60
For Bacchus as warrior, conqueror and liberator in Horace, cf. Harrison (2017,
235-240); in Virgil, cf. Mac Góráin (2013).
61
Varro, De Lingua Latina 6.68-69: sic triumphare appellatum, quod cum imperatore
milites redeuntes clamitant per urbem in Capitolium eunti ‘<i>o triumphe’; id a
This ode marks a turning point in the representation of Bacchus

in the Roman world. Bacchus had been Mark Antony’s
divine model at least since 41 B.C, when he entered Ephesus
triumphantly, calling himself the New Dionysus.62 After Actium,
Bacchus, almost as a spoil of war, becomes a symbol of Caesar’s
triumph over Antony.
Bacchus, apotheosis and immortality

Odes 3.25 is also part of the process transformation and
assimilation of Bacchus into Augustan imagery. It suggests that
the god, as a patron of poetry, supports Augustus, determining
that he must be addressed with elevation. So, finally, I would like
to consider the role of Bacchus in a question that has been much
discussed by scholars: what does Odes 3.25 possibly announce
in Horace’s work? In other words, what poem(s) would Horace
have in mind - if he had any - when he says that he will sing of
the apotheosis of Augustus in a new, high and immortal way?63
It has been suggested that the so-called Roman Odes (3.1-6) are
the poems announced in 3.25. However, one of the problems
of this interpretation noticed by scholars is the later position
of 3.25 in the book. Nisbet and Rudd think that it is unlikely
that this ode foreshadows any particular poem, so a possible
explanation for the use of the future forms audiar, loquar and
dicam would be that these verbs are made to sound as if they were
θριάμβῳ ac graeco Liberi cognomento potest dictum. See also Diodorus Siculus
(4.5.2).
62
For divine models in Augustan poetry, cf. Cucchiarelli (2011.a, 157). For Anthony
as Dionysus, cf.: Plutarch, Life of Antony 24 and 60; Cassius Dio 50.5.3; Seneca,
Suasoriae 1.6: Nam cum Antonius uellet se Liberum patrem dici et hoc nomen statuis
subscribi iuberet, habitu quoque et comitatu Liberum imitaretur, occurrerunt uenienti
ei Athenienses cum coniugibus et liberis et Διόνυσον salutauerunt.
63
For discussions on this issue, cf. Nisbet and Rudd (2004, 298-299; 2002, 285),
Lowrie (1997, 317-321), Fraenkel (1957, 259-260).
296 AUGUSTAN POETRY
the present, a Pindaric usage.64 Nevertheless, scholars agree that

the poem has a retrospective element, looking back to the theme
of Augustus’ greatness. So let us look at this issue considering
examples in which Bacchus and Augustus are connected through
this theme.
The apotheosis of Augustus in 3.25 (stellis inserere et consilio
Iovis, 4-5) has clear parallels with Odes 3.3, in which Augustus is
compared to Bacchus and other deified heroes (Polux, Hercules
and Quirinus). For his services to mankind, Augustus would also
achieve immortality, being allowed to participate in the banquet
of the gods (quos inter Augustus recumbens/ purpureo bibet ore
nectar, 11-12). In this ode, Bacchus receives the epithet pater,
which gives an Italic nuance to an Hellenized construction of
the god as a conqueror and triumphator, whose civilizing powers
are represented by the tigers under the yoke (hac te merentem,
Bacche pater, tuae/ vexere tigres indocili iugum/ collo trahentes,
13-14). For Horace’s audience, the image of Bacchic triumph
would evoke associations with Alexander the Great as conqueror
of the East. Augustus mirrors the immortal and heroic aspects
of Bacchus in 3.3, whereas in 3.25 the poet mirrors Bacchus’
power to attribute immortality.65 Horace’s project of inserting
Caesaris decus in the stars in 3.25.4-5 recalls Bacchus’ catasterism
of Ariadne’s honos in Odes 2.19 (beatae coniugis additum stellis
64
For the use of the future as present, see also Hor. C. 1.12.21-22: neque te silebo
Liber. For this artifice in Pindar, cf. Ol. 11.14. For the use of future in C. 4.15,
cf.: Nisbet and Rudd (2004, 298-299), Quinn (2002, 286). Another view: David
West (2002, 208-209) interprets loquar as present subjunctive, which would give
the passage a tone of prayer instead of sounding like a prediction of success. For
him, it would be the poet’s appeal to the god to reach the standards of Pindar
(the master of dithyramb) in the panegyric to Augustus.
65
For more parallels between Augustus and Bacchus in Hor., C. 3.3 and 3.25, cf.:
Lowrie (1997, 317-324), Cucchiarelli (2011, 265), Harrison (2017, 236-240).
For Bacchus’ yoked tigers as a symbol of civilizing powers, see also Virg., Aen.
6.805. For parallels between Horace and Bacchus as lyric performers and poets
of ioci with a young audience of mixed genre, cf.: Hor., C. 2.19.3-4, 3.1.4.
honorem, 13-14), “her crown, another sort of decus”.66 As Lowrie

has pointed out, the apotheosis of Augustus is future in 3.3 (quos
inter … bibet) in part because it depends on the poet’s decision
to place him among the gods, a decision reached explicitly in
3.25 with inserere (6).67
The theme of apotheosis is programmatic in the sense that
it places both Augustus and Horace’s lyric persona on a higher
level. As we have just seen, it connects Augustus and Bacchus
as deified hero in Odes 3.3. On the other hand, in Odes 1.1, 2.20
and 3.30, Bacchic motifs suggest the triumph and apotheosis
of the poet: in 1.1, Horace envisions himself in the company of
Satyrs and Nymphs in a secluded grove from where will reach
apotheosis, knocking his head against the stars (feriam sidera
vertice, 36). In 2.20, uplifted by Bacchic ecstasy from the previous
ode, Horace emphasizes his status as vates (3-4). He anticipates
his own immortality as a poet (non ego … obibo, 6-7), describing
his metamorphosis into a swan, an animal that is symbol of both
poetry and apotheosis.68
And, finally, in 3.30, Horace claims immortality as princeps
of lyric poetry, being crowned by the muse Melpomene (non
omnis moriar … lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam, 6-16).69
Odes 3.30 suggests Horace’s conquest of Greek poetry (princeps
Aeolium carmen … deduxisse, 13-14), and echoes Virgil in Georgics
3, who leads the Muses captive in triumphal procession (primus
ego … deducam Musas, 10-11).70 Horace’s description of his poetic
66
Harrison (1998, 43).
67
Lowrie (1997, 317-321).
68
For Bacchus as an agent of metamorphosis, responsible for the poet’s transfor-
mation into a vates, see Schiesaro (2009). For the swan as a symbol of poetry, see
also Hor., C. 4.2.25-26.
69
For Melpomene as Muse of lyric poetry in Horace, cf.: Nisbet and Hubbard
(1970, 282); Nisbet and Rudd (2004, 377).
70
Both Hor., C. 3.25 (Caesaris audiar/ aeternum meditans decus/ stellis inserere et
consilio Iovis, 5-7) and Virg., Georg. 3 (templum de marmore ponam … in medio
298 AUGUSTAN POETRY
persona as princeps would inevitably evoke associations with

Augustus as a leader of the Romans.71 Potens - in ex humili potens
(a man of humble origin risen to power, 12) - suggests Horace’s
achievement of a position of power as a poet, and also recalls
the characterization of Bacchus as a leader of the Maenads and
patron of poetry in 3.25 (Naiadum potens Baccharumque, 14-15).72
As we can see, Bacchic motifs of power, leadership, triumph,
apotheosis and immortality align Horace’s lyric persona with
the figure of Augustus in these odes.
Later poems in which Bacchus has a role in the praise of
Augustus suggest different associations. For example, in Odes
4.15, the conuiuium appears as a place of perpetuation of the
memory of Augustus’ legacy through poetry. Liber is at the
centre of a celebration intended to gather Roman citizens with
their families (inter iocosi munera Liberi/ cum prole matronisque
nostris, 26-27) to offer libations to the gods and to sing praises
of the immortal heroes and of the gens Iulia according to old
customs.73 Stephen Harrison has pointed out that 4.15 describes
“the victories of peace in terms that recall the lyric encomium
of the Carmen Saeculare, but which also echoes elements in the
Aeneid”.74
mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit, 13-15) refer to the immortalization of

Augustus through poetry. However, it is easier (but still problematic) to think of
the Aeneid as the future panegyric promised in the proem to Georgics 3. As to C.
3.25, if we consider the use of the future (audiar, dicam, loquar) as a promise to
write a future poem about the divinity of Augustus, this promise was apparently
not fulfilled.
71
For Horace as princeps and dux of poetry, see also Hor., Ep. 1.19.21-23. For
a discussion on the rivalry and identification between emperor and poet in
Augustan poetry, cf. Ziogas (2015).
72
See also Hor., C. 1.6.10: inbellisque lyrae Musa potens, that presides over unmar-
tial lyric poetry.
73
For the custom of celebrating the deeds of men in song at banquets, cf.: Cic.,
Brutus 75; Tusc. 4.3. For poetry as perpertuation of memory, cf. Martins (2011,
135-139).
74
Harrison (2007, 204). See Virg., Aen. 1.293-4; 8.721-8.
Despite its encomiastic and epic features, it is unlikely that

4.15 is the poem supposedly promised in 3.25. It was published
about ten years later, when neither the political circumstances
nor the status of Bacchus in Roman culture were the same. In
4.15, Liber (replaced by Apollo as patron of poetry: Phoebus …
increpuit lyra, 1-2) is still presented as the joyful deity (iocosus
Liber, 26) that presides over the conuiuium.75 But his functions
are different from previous sympotic poems in which he has
some kind of association with Augustus. In 4.15, Liber is
neither a remedy for the anxieties about Caesar’s future, nor
the triumphant warrior and liberator, who, as an allegory of
Octavian’s power, defeats Cleopatra and her Osiris-Bacchus
(Mark Antony) in Actium. Odes 4.15 presents a domesticated
version of Liber, who symbolizes the otium, the peace and the
abudance of a Golden Age. The god’s main role is to celebrate
the pax Augusta, when threatening Dionysiac elements, such
as licentia (10) and madness (furor civilis, 18), are attenuated
or eliminated under Caesar’s command (custode rerum
Caesare, 17).76
75
For Apollo as Horace’s patron, see also Hor., C. 4.6.29-30. For Bacchus, poetry
and iocus, see Hor., C. 3.21.15: iocosus Lyaeus; 3.3.69: iocosa lyra.
76
For Bacchus’ role in Hor., C. 4.15, cf. Quinn (2002, 326). For frena licentia as
a debasement of political freedom in Hor., C. 4.15.10, cf. Thomas (2011, 265).
For licentia and civil war, see also Hor., 3.24.29: refrenare licentiam. For licentia/
libertas in politics, cf. Cic., Rep. 1.68.2. For the representations of Pax Augusta in
Hor., C. 4.15, cf. Martins (2011, 139-154). See also the encomium to Augustus
in Hor., C. 4.5, which also focuses on the celebrations of peace and on the
prayers and libations offered to Augustus’ numen at both public and private ban-
quets. These honours are compared to those dedicated to deified heroes: te multa
prece … Laribus tuum miscet numen, uti Graecia/ Castoris et magni memor Herculis
(32-35). The divinity of Augustus was not officially declared at Rome before his
death, so libations and prayers had to be dedicated to his numen in association
with the Lares. To confer deification before death would be against the old
Republican custom. For the honours dedicated to his numen of Augustus, cf.
Hor., Ep. 2.1.5-17; see also Thomas (2011, 160-161).
300 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Conclusion
There is no neat answer to the question of what poem
Horace might be referring to when he announces that he will
sing of the apotheosis and immortality of Augustus in Odes 3.25.
In fact, this ode may not refer to another poem, being itself an
announcement of Augustus’ greatness, as some scholars suggest.
However, through this analysis, it was possible to notice some
associations between 3.25 and other poems that create a mirror
effect between poet and patron/princeps through Bacchus.
More specifically, we saw that there is a strong connection
and identification between Horace and Augustus through
Bacchus as a symbol of triumph, apotheosis and immortality
in Horace. Bacchus - who is known for leading his followers
to a good end (Liber vota bonos ducit ad exitus)77 – points to
a promising future for both Augustus and Horace. As a god
of poetry, he raises the poet to a place where he can address
Augustus with elevation. As a deified hero, he is a model for
the encomium of Augustus as a conqueror and leader, and
symbol of the princeps’ triumph over Mark Antony. And as a
sympotic deity, he turns the praise of Augustus into a suitable
theme for lyric celebration. The sweetness and iocus of the
sympotic Bacchus counterbalances his epic and tragic features,
matching Horace’s irony and humour, and lending a lighter
tone to the risky associations between this god, the poet and the
princeps.
By following the paths of Dionysus in Odes 3.25, Horace
places Augustus on a higher level, and by doing so he also reaches
new heights. However, Dionysiac poetic enthusiasm/furor does
not necessarily lead to the sublimity of higher genres, it also
belongs to lower genres. Libertas - which, as we have seen, was
both a gift of Bacchus and a prerogative of the poets - had to
77
Hor., C. 4.8.34.
be adapted to the restrictions imposed by the Augustan regime.

So Horace carefully keeps the abusive side of Bacchus at a safe
distance from Augustus. One the other hand, the sweet side of
the god as a patron of poetry allows for more softness in the
encomium of Augustus, making it sound more appropriate in
lyric.
Furthermore, Horace’s choice of Bacchus as a patron of
poetry in Odes 3.25 was opportune because, as Stephen Harrison
has pointed out, it would add a further deity to be identified
with the princeps (avoiding the obvious associations between
Augustus and Apollo).78 This choice would also contribute to the
process of appropriation and reshaping of a symbol previously
linked with Mark Antony. In this transformation, Bacchus -
the god of metamorphosis - had some of his traits enhanced
and others attenuated or to become a more suitable figure to
symbolize the new rules of the principate as well as the victory
and triumph of Augustus over the licentious, excessive and mad
aspects of Dionysus that were associated with Mark Antony/
Cleopatra.
Different versions of this paper were delivered at the Augustan Poetry
Conference in São Paulo (2015) and at the Institute of Classical Studies
Post-graduate Seminar in London (2016). I am grateful to the audiences of
these events for their stimulating responses. I would like to thank William
Fitzgerald, Stephen Harrison, Elena Giusti, Fiachra Mac Góráin and Andrew
Feldherr for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this
paper. I extend my thanks to FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) for
the financial support for this research; and also to the Institute of Classical
Studies, King’s College London, University College London and Princeton
University, where part of this research was carried out.
78
Harrison (2017, 231-232).
302 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Bibliography
Commentaries and translations
Horace 2002. Horace. Odes III. Dulce Periculum. Text, Translation and
Commentary. David West. Oxford: Oxford University Press
______. 1970. A Commentary on Horace: Odes, Book I. R. G. M. Nisbet,
M. Hubbard. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______. 1991. A Commentary on Horace: Odes, Book II. R. G. M. Nisbet,
M. Hubbard. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______. 2004. A Commentary on Horace: Odes, Book III. R. G. M. Nisbet,
N. Rudd. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______. 2004. Odes and Epodes. Ed. and Transl. by Niall Rudd. Cambridge:
______. 1942. Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica. With an English Translation
by H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
______. 1980. The Odes. Edited with introduction, Revised Text and
Commentary by Kenneth Quinn. London: Bristol Classical Press.
______. 2012. Odes Book I. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. Edited by
Roland Mayer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
______. 1989. Horace. Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (Ars
Poetica). Edited by Niall Rudd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
______. 2003. A Commentary on Horace’s Epodes. Lindsay Watson. Oxford:
______. 1995. Epodes. Edited by D. Mankin. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
______. 2011. Horace. Odes, Book IV and Carmen Saeculare. Edited by
Richard F. Thomas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Other works
Aricò, G. 1985. “Dulce Periculum. Il momento dionisiaco nella lirica
oraziana”. In: Nuovo Romanticismo. Numero tre, pp. 7-19.
Batinski, E. E. 1991. “Horace’s Rehabilitation of Bacchus”. The Classical
World, Vol. 84, No. 5, pp. 361-378.
Bramble, J. C. 1974. Persius and the Programmatic Satire. A Study in Form

and Imagery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bordoy, F. C. 2013. “Dionysian Enthusiasm in Plato”. In: Redefining
Dionysos. Edited by A. Bernabé, M. Herrero de Jáuregui, A. I. Jiménez
San Cristóbal, R. M. Hernández. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Carpenter, T. H.; Faraone, C. A. 1993. Masks of Dionysus. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Commager, S. 1957. “The Function of Wine in Horace’s Odes”.
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol.
88, pp. 68-80
Connor, P. J. 1971. “Enthusiasm, Poetry, and Politics: A Consideration
of Horace, Odes, III, 25”. The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 92, No.
2, pp. 266-274.
Crowther, N. B. 1979. “Water and Wine as Symbols of Inspiration”.
Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, Vol. 32, Fasc. 1/2, pp. 1-11.
Cucchiarelli, A. 2011. “Virgilio e l’invenzione dell’‘età augustea’ (Modelli
divini e linguaggio politico dalle Bucoliche alle Georgiche)”. In: LEXIS
– Poetica, retorica e comunicazione nella tradizione classica, vol. 29.
Davis, G. (ed.) 2010. A Companion to Horace. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Dodds, E. R. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. London: University of
California Press.
Feldherr, A. 2010. “Dionysiac Poetics and the Memory of Civil War
in Horace’s Cleopatra Ode”. In: Citizens of Discord. Rome and Its Civil
Wars. B. W. Breed, C. Damon, A. Rossi (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University
Press, pp. 223-323.
Fraenkel, E. 1957. Horace. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Freudenburg, K. 2004. Satires of Rome. Threatening poses from Lucilius to
Juvenal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Galinsky, K. 2012. Augustus: Introduction to the Life of an Emperor.
Guía, M. V. 2013. “Redefining Dionysos in Athens from the Written
Sources: The Lenaia, Iacchos and Attic Women”. In: Redefining Dionysos.
Edited by A. Bernabé, M. Herrero de Jáuregui, A. I. Jiménez San
Cristóbal, R. M. Hernández. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Giusti, E. 2016. “Dithyrambic Iambics: Epode 9 and its General(s’)
Confusion”. In: P. Bather and C. Stocks (eds.). Horace Epodes:
304 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Contexts, Intertexts, and Reception. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

pp. 131-51.
______. (forthcoming). “The Metapoetics of Liber-ty: Horace’s
Bacchic Ship in Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Animi”. In: M. Stöckinger, K.
Winter and T. Zanker (eds.). Horace and Seneca: Interactions, Intertexts,
Interpretations. De Gruyter.
______. (forthcoming). “Ovid’s Ars Poetica: Metapoetic Didactic in the
Ars Amatoria”. In: L.G. Canevaro and D. O’Rourke (eds.). Didactic Poetry:
Knowledge, Power, Tradition. Classical Press of Wales.
Gowers, E. 1993. The Loaded Table. Representations of Food in Roman
Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Harrison, S. J. 1998. [Review of Horazische Denkfiguren. Theophilie
und Theophanie als Medium der poetischen Selbstdarstellung des
Odendichters, by Helmut Krasser. Verlag: Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht 1995. Hypomnemata 106. 164 S.]. Gnomon, 70(8),
pp. 672–676.
______. 2017. “Horace’s Hymn to Bacchus (Odes 2.19): poetics and
politics”. In: Martins, P.; Hasegawa, A. P.; Oliva Neto, J. A. August Poetry.
New Trends and Evaluations. Humanitas: São Paulo, pp. 229-250.
______. 2007. Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hasegawa, A. P. 2010. Dispositio e Distinção de Gêneros nos Epodos de
Horácio. Tese apresentada ao P.P.G. em Letras Clássicas e Vernáculas da
FFLCH – USP. São Paulo.
Henrichs, A. 1993. “‘He has a god in him’: Human and divine in the
perception of Dionysus. In: Carpenter, T. H.; Faraone, C. A. Masks of
Dionysus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hunter, R. 2006. The Shadow of Callimachus. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kilpatrick, R. 1975. The Poetry of Friendship. Horace, Epistles I. Edmonton:
The University of Alberta Press.
______. 1990. The Poetry of criticism. Horace, Epistles II and Ars Poetica.
Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.
Knox, P. E. 1985. “Wine, Water, and Callimachean Polemics”. Harvard
Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 89, pp. 107-119.
La Penna, A. 1995. “Il Vino di Orazio: nel modus e contro il modus”.

In: In Vino Veritas. Edited by O. Murray and M. Tecusan. London: The
British School at Rome.
Lowrie, M. 1997. Horace’s Narrative Odes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mac Góráin, F. 2013. “Virgil’s Bacchus and the Roman Republic”. In:
Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic, pp. 124-145. Ed. D. Nelis and
J. Farrell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______. 2014. “Apollo and Dionysus in Virgil”. In: Incontri di Filologia
Classica XII – 2012-2013. Edizione Universitá di Trieste.
Martins, P. 2011. Imagem e poder: considerações sobre a representação de
Otávio Augusto. São Paulo: Edusp.
Mckinlay, A. P. 1953. “Bacchus as Inspirer of Literary Art”. The Classical
Journal, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 101-110+135-136.
Mitchell, E. 2010. “Time for an emperor: old age and the future of the
Empire in Horace Odes 4”. In: Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi
classici, n. 64, pp. 43-76.
Murray, O. 1991. “War and the Symposium”. In: W. J. Slater (ed.). Dining
in a Classical Context. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
______. 1985. “Symposium and Genre in the Poetry of Horace”. The
Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 75, pp. 39-50.
O’Gorman, E. 2002. “Archaism and Historicism in Horace’s Odes”.
In: Clio and the Poets. Augustan Poetry and the Traditions of Ancient
Historiography. Ed. by D. S. Levene and D. P. Nelis. Leiden: Brill.
Oliensis, E. 1998. Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority. Cambridge,
pp. 127-131.
Oliva Neto, J. A. 2003. “Riso invectivo vs. riso anódino e as espécies de
iambo, comédia e sátira”. In: Letras Clássicas, n. 7, p. 77-98.
Pailler, J. M. 1995. Bacchus. Figures et Pouvoirs. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Parker, H. N. 1992. “Fish in Trees and Tie-Dyed Sheep: A Function of
the Surreal in Roman Poetry”. Arethusa 25, pp. 293-323.
Pavlock, B. 2001. “The Propriety of the Past in Horace Odes 3.19”. The
American Journal of Philology, Vol. 122, No. 1, pp. 49-66.
Schiesaro, A. 2009. “Horace’s Bacchic Poetics”. In: L. B. T. Houghton
and M. Wyke (eds.). Perceptions of Horace. A Roman Poet and His Readers.
306 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Schlegel, C. 2000. “Horace and His Fathers: Satires 1.4 and 1.6”. The
American Journal of Philology, Vol. 121, No. 1, pp. 93-119.
Schlesier, R. 1993. “Mixtures of Masks: Maenads as Tragic Models”.
In: Carpenter, T. H.; Faraone, C. A. (1993). Masks of Dionysus. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, pp. 89-114.
Seaford, R. 2011. Euripides Bacchae. With an introduction and translation
by Richard Seaford. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Segal, C. 1982. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripide’s Bacchae. Expanded edition.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Silk, E. 1969. “Bacchus and the Horatian Recusatio”. In: Yale Classical
Studies, Studies in Latin Poetry, Vol. 21. Edited by C. Dawson and T.
Cole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slater, W. J. 1991. Dining in a Classical Context. Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press.
Sperduti, A. 1950. “The Divine Nature of Poetry in Antiquity”.
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association,
Vol. 81, pp. 209-240.
Tigerstedt, E. N. 1970. “Furor Poeticus: Poetic Inspiration in Greek
Literature before Democritus and Plato”. Journal of the History of Ideas.
Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 163-178.
Wasmuth, E. 2015 “ὥσπερ οἱ κορυβαντιῶντες: The Corybantic Rites in
Plato’s Dialogues”. CQ n.s. 65, pp. 69-84.
Williams, G. 1986. Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Winnington-Ingram, R. P. 1969. Euripides and Dionysus. An interpretation
of the Bacchae. Amsterdam: Adollf M. Hakkert Publisher.
Wiseman 1998. “Two Plays for the Liberalia”. Roman Drama and Roman
History. Exeter: University of Exerter Press.
Xinyue, B. 2015. The divinity of Augustus in the poetry of Vergil, Horace,
and Propertius. Doctoral thesis, UCL (University College London).
Ziogas, I. 2015. “The Poet as Prince: Author and Authority under
Augustus”. In: The Art of Veiled Speech. Self-Censorship from Aristophanes
to Hobbes. Edited by Han Batulssen and Peter J. Davis. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
PART III – EPIC
Epic Anger, and the State of the (Roman)
Soul in Virgil’s First Simile1
Kirk Freudenburg
Yale University
Virgil’s Aeneid begins with the goddess, Juno, both ‘still’

and ‘already’ angry: mene incepto desistere victam? ‘Am I to desist
from what I’ve begun, beaten?’ Rivers of Trojan blood have been
spilt, and Priam’s city has been looted and leveled. Extreme
revenge has been exacted in the form of retaliatory rapes, forced
enslavements, and so on. And yet somehow Juno thinks that
her project of paying back the Trojans is not only not finished,
but only just begun. The famous, translinguistic pun that issues
from her first words (mene incepto) reminds us of Achilles’
rage, certainly, but by the Iliad’s end Achilles has gained some
1
This paper is a heuristic ‘first go’ at an idea that I have been mulling over for
years, on the problem of anger in ancient epic, and the soul work of Virgil’s
first simile. Since I plan to do a larger workup of these ideas for a (distantly)
forthcoming book, I will be more than happy to receive feedback on the paper’s
contents and arguments. The paper’s core ideas were tested at the annual Latin
Day Colloquium held at Yale University on April 16, 2016. For helpful com-
ments and criticisms, I wish to thank the day’s star and colloquium leader, Denis
Feeney, as well as the event’s invited speakers, Jay Reed, Tom Biggs, and Irene
Peirano. Thanks also to Christina Kraus for organizing the event, and to the
group of graduate respondents who were active participants throughout the day:
Niek Janssen, Rachel Love, Kyle Conrau-Lewis, and Treasa Bell.
310 AUGUSTAN POETRY
perspective on his rage, and his revenge taking has (at least for
the time being) played itself out. Reconciling himself to Priam,
and to his own humanity, Achilles returns the body of Hector
to his father, and he promises a twelve-day armistice that will
allow the Trojans to bury their dead. In the divine council of
Il. 24.33-76, Zeus tells Hera that she has no choice: she must
relent. And that message is passed down to Achilles by Thetis.
Both Hera and Achilles are forced to do what they are told, and
yet it is clear that Achilles has been made to face up to the cost
of his rage in ways that Juno has not. By the time the curtain
rises on the Aeneid, she is still at it, hounding the last of the
city’s refugees outside the borders of her old Homeric world.
Virgil asks in line 11: tantaene animis caelestibus irae? ‘Are
the gods in heaven capable of such vehement wrath?’ Put the way
he puts it, the question suggests its own answer, because the term
for ‘heaven dwellers’ (caelestibus) covertly names the goddess
of Carthage, Tanit, whom Romans knew as dea Caelestis, Juno
Caelestis, or simply Caelestis. Not all the gods in heaven, then,
but that particular heaven dweller, is the one driven by such
extreme rage. The idea is immediately taken up with in the next
lines, where Virgil explains Juno’s wrath in terms of her abiding
concern for Carthage, a city as yet un-built: urbs antiqua fuit …
Karthago ‘there was an ancient city … Carthage.’ In Punic the
name Karthago, means ‘the new city,’ so we have yet another
translational pun in these lines that can be heard to say ‘there
was an ancient city … the new city.’2 There is irony here, of
course, but also a crucial first hint that the old time horizons
observed by Homer will no longer apply. Ancient to Virgil’s
audience, and long since wiped off the map, the ‘ancient city’ of
Carthage will be spotted rising from the soil in Virgil’s poem,
as a ‘new city’ founded by Dido, even as the old new city, which
2
For the translinguistic figura etymologica in the phrase urbs antiqua, see Reed
(2007, 129-30). On the reference to the Carthaginian goddess Tanit/Caelestis in
caelestibus, see Selden (2014, 230-1).
EPIC ANGER, AND THE STATE OF THE ROMAN SOUL IN VIRGIL’S... 311
had been leveled and salted more than 120 years before, was
being newly rebuilt by Augustus in Virgil’s own present (along
with her sister city in Spain, Carthago Nova ‘the new new city’).3
Juno’s wrath is that of a tragic Medea: barbarized,
feminized, and completely out of control. Like the anger
that consumes Achilles, her anger is impressive for being
so unbending, and capable of such vast destruction. And
yet, despite resemblances that are obvious enough, Juno is
remarkably unlike the gods and heroes from whom she is
constructed: those characters never strayed across the strict
ethnic, spatial, and temporal confines of the epics and tragedies
that kept them hemmed in as characters. They were as lions
howling from their cages. Not so, Juno. Made over as Tanit,
an enemy of Rome’s ever expanding world order, Juno storms
across those old generic borders, into the realm of Clio, and the
lived history of Rome. As such, her rage is scarier and more real
and relatable than theirs, and it tends to smolder in the ashes
of whatever pyre it has fueled, only to flare up again, (like a
phoenix, or a Phoenician Carthage) from the ashes that Rome
has made of it. Her reconciliations are notoriously many, and
they never quite take.4 And that leaves Virgil with a teleology
problem to deal with that Homer and Euripides never had to
face. Somehow he must manage Juno’s anger in a way that will
allow Aeneas’ imperial project to move forward, and the poem
to end, but without putting an end to the anger by which the
poem has been fueled. He must reconcile Juno for the time
3
On the collapsing timescales (‘wormholes’) of the Aeneid, see Feeney (2007,
161-3). On the rebuilding of Carthage during the reign of Augustus, see
Thomas (2007, 145-6). On the potential slippage between old Carthage and
new (Colonia Victrix Iulia Nova Carthago) in Virgil’s Aeneid, see Shi and Morgan
(2015). On the wholesale remaking of Spanish cities by Augustus and Agrippa
in aftermath of the Cantabrian wars (29-19 BCE), see MacMullen (2000)
50-84.
4
The classic study of the ‘Reconciliations of Juno’ (emphasizing the plural) is
Feeney (1984).
312 AUGUSTAN POETRY
being, in a way that keeps her anger on a slow boil, until such
time as it is needed again as a source for renewed hatreds, and
further wars. Put differently, Virgil needs to write his ending
in a way that anticipates Ennius, and the freshly enraged Juno
of the Annales.5 Already in antiquity, the question of how to
put aside Juno’s anger without resolving it was debated among
scholars of the Aeneid. One of the ways that the question was
solved can be made out from Servius’s remarks on the heavenly
concilium of Aeneid 12.793-842, where Jupiter and Juno reach
a settlement that allows the poem to end. In commenting on
these lines, Servius tells his readers that Juno was successfully
placated (exorata) in the second punic war, but only later, in the
final war against Carthage, was she ‘translated’ (translata) to
Rome, along with her rites (in Ennius, Juno is hostile to Rome
for much of the second Punic War, but ends up relenting and
giving aid to the Roman cause6). Such comments speak to the
long durée of Juno’s anger, as well as to the necessary irresolution
of the Aeneid’s end. But there are several aspects of the end-
initiating concilium, both as a deal brokered by Juno, and as an
anger problem commented on by Servius, that deserve further
study, because they have much to tell us about how thoroughly
‘domesticated’ Virgil’s translation of Juno’s anger is, both in
its structuration (as a problem to be solved via negotiation)
and in the peculiarly Roman qualities that inhere in its partial/
temporary placation.7
First, looking to the Homeric background of the heavenly
negotiation that allows the Aeneid to end, in book 24 of the
Iliad Zeus intervenes in the heated exchange that takes place
between Apollo and Hera by ordering Hera to stop flying off in
5
On Virgil writing as if in anticipation of Ennius, see Feeney (1984, 181-2).
6
On the reconciliation of Juno to the cause of Rome in Ennius’s Annales, see
Skutsch (1985, 465-6).
7
On ‘domesticating’ translation in Roman appropriations of Greek literature, see
Feeney (2015, 56-64).
such rage at her fellow gods (Ἥρη μὴ δὴ πάμπαν ἀποσκύδμαινε

θεοῖσιν, 65). He decrees that Achilles must accept a ransom
for Hector’s body and give it back to Priam. And that’s that.
Zeus lays down the law, and the other gods fall in line. Despite
the lather of rage that she has worked herself into, Hera backs
down and says not another word. In fact, she disappears from
the poem altogether and is not heard from again. That is not
the way Virgil stages his version of the end-initiating concilium
of book 12. He departs radically from the Homeric original by
staging a back-and-forth negotiation between Jupiter and Juno
that finds them settling into a compromise. He has introduced
a drawn out process of negotiation that was not there before,
overhauling the scene as a version of Roman cultural practice.8
Though it is never pointed out in the commentaries, the deal
that is hashed out between Jupiter and Juno refers to the deals
that were struck (the condiciones, the foedera) between Rome and
her enemies (potential or actual) in order to avert, or conclude,
hostilities, and to expand Rome’s imperial reach into new
territories.9 Jupiter deals with Juno the way Rome dealt with
whatever part of the world came under her imperial boot. He
says, ‘look, coniunx, I am Jupiter,’ as if to say, ‘I am Rome.’ ‘I
will have no more of this: ulterius temptare veto. Defying me
is pointless because you know that, in the end, I will have my
way. I do not lose. That means we can do this the hard way
8
I say ‘overhauling’ with reference to the spatial underpinning/tenor of Latin
translatio.
9
On the elaborate array of individual (largely makeshift) agreements that Rome
used to incorporate conquered cities and rivals into the Roman state, see
Scullard (1969, 88-90; 126-32), and Sherwin-White (1973). On the minimal
administrative machinery imposed on incorporated communities, and the
Roman preference for keeping pre-existing political structures in place, see
Lintott (1980), and Woolf (1998, 34-40; 65-7); cf. Sherwin-White (1973, 71),
concerning the settlement of 338 BC: ‘When the evidence is considered as a
whole … the general indication is clearly that Rome did not seek to abolish
the local life of her new boroughs … in however rudimentary a fashion, Rome
entered at this period on the road that led to the municipal system of the
empire.’
314 AUGUSTAN POETRY
(lots of pointless violence, wasteful destruction, and disgrace –

just look to the crosses outside of any given town in my world,
and to the dead zones that were once great cities, and you will
see what I mean). Or we can do this the easy way, which is
the preferred way, and the way that the gods would have it. In
this scenario we do not destroy you, and there is no (or at least
minimal) bloodshed. Rather, you concede to the inevitability
of our success, and then you will be folded into that success as
one of us. We mix and marry and have children together, and
soon enough they will become citizens of Rome, and conquerors
themselves. You keep your religion and your cultural habits,
perhaps with some modifications, and we toss in some of ours.
As to language, you’ll speak your own, of course, and you can
continue to wear your native dress. But the leaders among you
will learn Latin (the language of the courts, assemblies, and
so on) and they will wear the toga – an outfit that even we
Romans don’t like to wear. The important thing is that you
become Romans, fighting for a new collective cause, enjoying
the benefits of our shared success.’ Such is the deal that Rome
offers to the beaten, and it is from such deals that Virgil crafts
the final pact between Jupiter and Juno.
For his part, Jupiter lets Juno do most of the demanding,
and he puts his concession to her in words that remind us of
her opening outburst: verum age et inceptum frustra summitte
furorem: / do quod vis, et me victusque volensque remitto. ‘But come
now, scale back the fury that you’ve pointlessly undertaken. I
give you what you want. Beaten, and of my own will, I relent.’
Respecting her powers to defy him and cause further devastation,
Jupiter concedes to her demands. He declares himself the loser,
even as he has just won from Juno the crucial concession that
allows Aeneas to defeat her beloved Turnus. There is little
resemblance here to the concilium deorum of Iliad 24, because
this is a negotiation made over from a very different Roman
world, where noble women were possessed of very real powers,
and where they were not to be trifled with or summarily ordered
about. In fact Jupiter began the negotiation by trying to pull rank

on Juno, as husband to wife: ‘what’s the end going to be, wife?’
(quae iam finis erit, coniunx? 793).10 But by the time she is done
with him, his tone is that of someone who has lost whatever
upper hand he may have thought he had: ‘es germana Iovis
Saturnique altera proles / irarum tantos volvis sub pectore fluctus’
(‘you are Jupiter’s sister from the same parent, and the second
offspring of Saturn. So massive are the tides of wrath that you
roll beneath your chest’). In the course of these negotiations,
Juno has gone from ‘wife’ to ‘sister,’ and it is as his sister, an
absolute equal in the quality of her birth (an altera inter pares),
that Juno wins the dazzling concessions that allow her to relent,
and the poem to end.11
Servius is not quite sure what to make of Jupiter’s statement
in line 130 ‘you are the Jove’s sister from the same parent, and
the second born of Saturn.’ Why does Jupiter say that to Juno
here? Servius indicates that some commentators construed this
statement rather as I take it above, as Jupiter’s acknowledgment
of the impressive power that she wields in forcing him to cede
to her demands. But Servius says that, taken this way, the line is
not a good fit for the line that follows, where Jupiter continues
by saying: ‘so massive are the tides of wrath that you roll beneath
your chest.’ Servius thinks that it is in connection to this line
that Jupiter mentions her birth, because he needs to explain not
just the massiveness of her rage, but her superhuman ability to
keep it in check, as if reserving it for a later time. Paraphrasing
Jupiter’s thought process, Servius writes: ‘being from such stock
10
In contrast, Tarrant (2012) ad loc. takes the vocative coniunx as ‘intimate’ rather
than exasperated in tone.
11
Cf. Apuleius Met. 6.4.1-3 where Psyche calls on Juno to intercede on her behalf.
She addresses the goddess in her various regional guises and powers, naming
Samos, Carthage and Argos as places where she is most venerated (the same
three named by Virgil). And she begins by calling upon her as magni Iouis
germana et coniuga. On Carthaginian features of Apuleius’s novel with specific
attention to the wrath of Juno, see Graverini (2014, 119-23).
316 AUGUSTAN POETRY
(unde), it is no wonder that you keep such huge wrath held back
beneath your chest. For we know that each person is roused to
anger according to the quality of his birth or family line (pro
generis qualitate). For nobles, even if they seem to be indulgent
and to forgive in the present, nonetheless they keep their wrath
in reserve for a later time. This is what he ( Jupiter) seems to
charge against Juno here. For although she claims to surrender,
she has pursued whatever would do serious harm to the Trojans.
Thus Homer has Calchas say of Agamemnon: “the anger of
kings is such that even if they seem to be lenient for now, they
are holding back the goads of wrath for another time.”’
Of particular interest here is the ‘matter of fact’ way that
Servius makes his claim: scimus ‘we know,’ as if to say ‘it’s perfectly
self-evident,’ that the ability to suppress anger, and to keep it on
a slow boil until such time as you choose to let it out, is directly
proportional to the quality of one’s birth (pro generis qualitate).
The higher up the scale of nobility, the more you have it, and
the farther down you slide on that same scale, the less of it you
have, until such point as you have none at all. And to prove his
point, he trots out a passage gleaned from the pages of Homer,
telling us that kings know how to store up their anger, and to
keep it in check, waiting until the time is right. It is a particular
gift that kings have, because they are nobly born, and capable of
such self-control. The quote comes from lines 81-3 of Iliad book
one, where Calchas warns Achilles that some king (the as yet
un-named Agamemnon) will become very angry if he proceeds
to divulge the cause of the plague. He worries aloud that even
if this king were to pretend that all is well for the moment, he
will keep his anger pent up, and unleash it against him at a later
time. Calchas hints to Achilles that he is about to provoke a
powerful man, who is bound to seek retribution, and that claim
is generalized by Servius into a lesson about how kings behave,
and the superior qualities of the souls they possess. As strained
as this take on Calchas’s words may seem, Servius’s comments
shed a sliver of light on how Homer was taken up with in the

schools of the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE; how
his poems were used not only for the grammatical and literary
instruction of young Romans, but for their moral instruction as
well, i.e. Homer understood in Roman terms, put to use for the
reproduction of Roman cultural values, and for telling stories
to Romans about themselves. In this case, the lesson spun from
Virgil, by way of Homer, concerns how young Roman nobles
should understand what they are made of inside; how their
emotional selves (their souls) were, in fact, superior to those of
most others in the world; how, in essence, they were born to
rule, because they had something that most people did not: a
noble family line, and the complete inner self that goes with it.
To make his point, Servius refers his readers to a scene
that all would have recalled from their earliest days as students
of Greek poetry. Pored over in the schools of the grammarians,
no other book was more basic to the education of Greeks in the
east, and learners of Greek in the west, than book one of the
Iliad.12 Servius’s comments let us see how the anger of Achilles
and Agamemnon was taken up with in the schools of Rome,
turned to the cause of teaching lessons about self-control;
lessons about how persons of a certain higher ‘kind’ behave,
and how they differ from others in the fundamental makeup
of their inner selves. Persons who are well born, says the stick-
wielding grammarian, know how to assert control over their
emotional demons in ways that ignoble people do not. There
are many memorable (and therefore easily cited) moments in
the Odyssey and the Iliad where one might pause to teach this
lesson: Odysseus resisting the urge to kill the Cyclops in book 9,
for example, or his restraining himself from killing the maids as
12
On the centrality of Homer in the enkyklios paideia of the Greeks, and within
Greco-Roman education more generally, see Morgan (1998, 67-78) (‘Homer is
the quintessential Greek author, associated with hellenism and pan-hellenism as
far back as we can trace,’ p. 75).
318 AUGUSTAN POETRY
they slink off to sleep with the suitors at the beginning of book
20. But to explain the ‘stowing’ of Juno’s illimitable anger at
the end of the Aeneid, Servius takes his readers back to the fight
that erupted between Agamemnon and Achilles in Iliad book
1, which is likely to have been their first encounter with epic
rage as a narrative theme parlayed into lessons about themselves.
That men of noble birth have superior self-control is hard to
make out as the best and/or most obvious construal of Calchas’s
assertion about kings holding their rage in reserve. But it is easy
to see why Servius should make reference to book one of Iliad in
order to spin this lesson, because the idea is famously dramatized
in lines 188-218 of Iliad book one, where Achilles draws his
sword in order to kill Agamemnon, but then Athena arrives on
the scene to stay his hand. Taking control of his rage, as logos to
menos (reason asserting control over rage), she grabs him from
behind by the hair, and he spins around, quite shocked to see
her there. Athena then commences to reason with him, and to
strategize: ‘I have come from heaven to restrain your fury,’ she
says (ἤλθον ἐγὼ παύσοuσα τὸ σὸν μένος, 20713). She urges him
to let Agamemnon have his way for the moment, saying that
the better plan is to step away and let Agamemnon suffer the
disastrous consequences of his folly. Achilles sees the sense of
this. He swallows his rage, and for the next 15 books he keeps
his sword peacefully stowed away. This is both the initial, and
most famous, instance of rage suppression in the Iliad. I will
return to it, as a point of comparison, in dealing with the rage
suppression of the Aeneid’s first simile.
But first, I would like to consider another famous moment
of violent emotions brought to heel in book two of the Iliad, a
scene that is, in many obvious ways, parallel to the suppression of
13
The scholiasts ad 207-9 see Athena as a healer: τὸ σφριγῶν τοῦ θυμοῦ μαλακοῖς
ἰᾶται λόγοις. ὅμῶς ἐκδειματατοῖ, καὶ τὸν ἐχθρὸν θεοφιλῆ εἶναι λέγουσα (‘she
heals the swelling of his passion with soothing words. At the same time she
thoroughly frightens him, saying that his enemy is also dear to the gods’).
Achilles’ wrath in book one. In fact, as Denis Feeney has so well

shown, it is this latter scene that Virgil engages with in firing up,
then sedating the storm that scatters the Trojan ships in Aeneid
book one.14 At the beginning of Iliad book 2, sent a false dream
by Zeus, Agamemnon takes it into his head to announce to the
gathered armies of the Greeks that they are through with figh-
ting; that it is time to go home. Thinking that his announcement
would shame them, and work them into a fury for finishing the
job, Agamemnon actually causes the gathered throng of soldiers
to break out in a rush towards the ships, only too glad to give up
the nine-year siege and sail for home. Chaos ensues. Odysseus
sees that Agamemnon has done something reckless, and that
he has lost control, so (sent by Athena who, as in book one, has
been sent by Hera) he grabs the king’s studded scepter and enters
into the fray. His authority and verbal cleverness are required.
Every time he meets a person of rank, Homer says, someone in
charge of other men (βασιλῆα καὶ ἔξοχον ἄνδρα)15, he reasons
with him using gentle words (ἀγανοῖς ἐπέεσιν)16, as a friend, and
he calls upon him to understand Agamemnon’s real purpose, and
to honor Zeus’s will and continue the fight by taking control of
his men. But, Homer says, whenever he came across a common
soldier celebrating (δήμου τ᾽ ἄνδρα ... βοόωντα)17, and urging
retreat, he beat him with the king’s scepter and berated him as
a fool, a deserter and a coward. The most famous loud-mouth
among these common soldiers is Thersites, whose ugliness (he is
a bald, hunch-backed, bandy-legged, and club-footed weakling)
is the outward expression of his internal state. When Odysseus
catches Thersites scoffing at a king he berates him as a dog. He
threatens to strip him of his clothes, and whip him howling back
to the ships. Then he cracks the scepter across his back, raising
14
Feeney (2014).
15
Hom. Il. 2.188.
16
Hom., Il. 2.189.
17
Hom. Il. 2.198.
320 AUGUSTAN POETRY
a bloody welt between his shoulder blades and bringing tears

to his eyes. Thersites is chastened. He obediently cowers like
the dog he has been called out as, and says not another word.
The other common soldiers see this and, respecting the kingly
scepter in Odysseus’s hand, they join in berating Thersites. Then
they come back into their ranks, become silent, and stand at
attention. Order is restored.
In both the cases that I am inviting you to consider, that
of Achilles near the beginning of book one, and that of Thersites
near the beginning of book two, powerful emotions of anger and
pent up passion burst forth from characters who are momentarily
swept up by a loss of emotional control. Their outbursts are then
swiftly checked by forces that come from outside the characters
themselves: for Achilles, a godlike king, his rationality, the ability
to strategize and to control the powerful impulse that urges him
to kill Agamemnon on the spot, comes in the form of a goddess
whom he alone can see, and who is uniquely concerned with his
achieving the unparalleled honor that he covets and demands as
‘the best of the Achaeans.’ For Thersites, a low-born, recalcitrant
loud-mouth, ‘listening to reason’ has nothing to do with reason,
or with strategizing, and everything to do with the fear of pain
and public shame. Reasoning, Homer indicates, is reserved for
leaders. Odysseus addresses himself differently to them. Given
who he is, Thersites (it is understood) is incapable of reason.
His impulse control comes from the outside not in the form
of a goddess, but a studded stick that Odysseus uses to inflict
pain and public shame by planting it in his back.18 Thus, built
18
The scholiasts ad Il. 2.265-6: πῶς ἠπείλησε μὲν περὶ τῶν ἔπειτα, νῦν δὲ τὴν
ἀπειλὴν ἐκτελεῖ; ἀλλ᾽ οὐχ ἃ ἠπείλησεν ἐτέλεσεν, ἀλλὰ διὰ τῆς βραχείας πληγῆς
πιστοῦται ὅτι μὴ σωφρονιζόμενος καὶ ταῖς μείζοσιν αἰκίσεται πληγαῖς. ‘How,
on the one hand, did [Odysseus] make threats about these things before-- and,
on the other hand, is he delivering on those threats now? But he has not car-
ried through with what he threatened. Rather, through this one passing blow,
he confirms that one who is recalcitrant and out of control will be tortured with
blows by better men.’
into these two stories we have two very different, and yet clearly
related, ways of thinking about human agency, the assertion of
control over the emotions, and the human self. Achilles, on the
one hand, is psychologically completed by having the goddess
of reason herself take an interest in him and intrude upon his
thoughts: Homer’s gods are concerned with nobles who, it is
understood, are descended from them, and they maintain an
actively favoring ‘presence’ in their lives. As for ignobles and
nobodies in the Homeric world-- and much of what I say here
can be taken to apply to the perceived psychological makeup of
women, slaves, children, and foreigners as well – they are psycho-
logically ‘completed’ not by anything in themselves, not by the
capacity for reason that Athena represents, but by someone who
is himself psychologically complete in himself (a father, an elder
male, a king); persons complete and in control of themselves,
persons gifted with reason in a way that they can never be. It
is taken for granted that inferior persons, such as Thersites, are
naturally incapable of self-control. Their psyches are incomplete.
They require a male ‘head’ outside of themselves to make them
complete by asserting control over not only their bodies and its
physical needs, but their emotional inner workings as well, by
putting strict limits on those emotions, training them (insofar as
they can be trained), and teaching them to obey. The ones gifted
with self-control are needed to control others, persons of lower
‘kinds.’ The main expositor of this way of thinking in antiquity
is Aristotle, but his categorizations of humans according to their
kinds in the first book of the Politics take up with ideological
‘givens’ that had been around for as long as the Greeks had given
thought to the question of why some men rule, and others obey.
Though it is as yet under-rationalized as political theory, the
basic thinking behind Aristotle’s categorizations can be made
out in the assumptions and doings of Homer’s heroes.
I want to turn now to book one of the Aeneid, to see how
some of these same ideas about anger and its suppression pro
generis qualitate are taken up with by Virgil in the famous ‘pious
322 AUGUSTAN POETRY
statesman’ simile that is the first extended simile of the poem.

In a recent study of the epic’s initial simile, Damien Nelis has
argued that the violent winds and surging seas that are whipped
up by Aeolus literalize an analogy common in Lucretius: that
of the ‘storm-tossed’ soul. The storm is a soul image, in other
words, ‘a symbol of Juno’s impassioned state of mind.’19 As such,
the angry seas that threaten to annihilate the Trojans do not just
arise from Juno’s anger (as a mere narrative fact), they represent
the enraged state of her soul. The storm is thus both fact and
figurative symbol at the same time (something that Virgil is very
fond of ).20 In a separate article on first similes in epic, Denis
Feeney has shown how Virgil constructs his programmatic first
simile out of initial similes and simile sequences in earlier epic
poems, thereby availing himself of similes that were already
heavily encoded and programmatic in function, each serving
as a uniquely constructed ‘icon of the relationship between
human beings and the natural world.’21 With Virgil’s ‘orator in
the storm’ simile, Feeney shows, the main points of comparison
in earlier epic are with initial similes and simile sequences in
Homer’s Iliad and Lucretius’ de Rerum Natura, where chaotic
storms are used to introduce, in picture form, the political and
natural/elemental workings of their respective worlds. A ‘storm’
of sedition put down by kingly authority in Homer (the second
simile of the Iliad that describes the riot of book two) becomes,
19
Nelis (2015, 156); cf. Sen. Ep. 14.7: itaque sapiens numquam potentium iras provo-
cabit, immo [nec] declinabit, non aliter quam in navigando procellam.
20
For example, the storm-tossed ship that Aeneas sails in is easily read as a ‘ship of
state,’ especially given the political tenor of the simile that describes the storm.
The ship is obviously susceptible to being treated as an allegory in that sense.
And yet it is a ‘ship of state’ in a more literal sense as well: should this ship sink
and take Aeneas to a watery grave, it will take the (future) Roman state down
with it. It is thus a symbol of a state in peril, and an actual state in peril (Rome),
at the same time. Further on the gods in Virgil as, all at once, symbols/tropes
and epic characters/gods, see Feeney (1991) 134-137 on Virgil’s ‘stereoscopic
focus’ on the gods in the Aeneid.
21
Feeney (2014, 189).
in Lucretius, a way of imagining Nature’s powers as blindly

destructive and not subject to human authority.
It is my intention in the remainder of this paper to make
a tertium quid out of what these two recent papers have argued
by calling attention to certain features of the image’s internal
figuration that actively invite us connect ‘state’ to ‘soul’ in Virgil’s
first simile, and to regard them as inseparable, each its own
metaphor for the other. In so doing, I hope also to show just
how radically Virgil has recalibrated the workings of the soul
to make it receivable as an expression of Roman ideas about
the Roman self, and the Roman state, respectively. Because
specific figurative details are crucial to this argument, I quote
the simile in full:
Sic ait, et dicto citius tumida aequora placat,
collectasque fugat nubes, solemque reducit.
Cymothoe simul et Triton adnixus acuto
detrudunt navis scopulo; levat ipse tridenti;
et vastas aperit syrtis, et temperat aequor,
atque rotis summas levibus perlabitur undas.
Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est
seditio, saevitque animis ignobile volgus,
iamque faces et saxa volant – furor arma ministrat;
tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem
conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant;
ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet, –
sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, aequora postquam
prospiciens genitor caeloque invectus aperto
flectit equos, curruque volans dat lora secundo.22
Neptune says these things, and before his final word is
spoken he soothes the swollen waves, sends the gathered
clouds flying and brings back the sun … he lays the sea
flat and glides over the surface of the waves on light
wheels. Just as, often, when a riot breaks out in a huge
crowd, and the low rabble are howling in their spirits,
and soon torches and stones are sent flying – their rage
22
Virg. A. 1.142-56.
324 AUGUSTAN POETRY
serving them with weapons – then, if they happen to catch

sight of some man who is heavy/burdened with piety and
accolades well earned, they are silent and stand still, with
their ears pricked up to listen. He steers their passions
with his words, and he soothes their emotions (lit. ‘pets
their chests’). Just so the crashing of the sea subsides after
the Father, looking out over the waters and riding in the
open sky, turns his horses aside and gives them free rein
as he flies trailing in his chariot.
Homer compares a political riot to a storm. Virgil

compares a storm to a political riot. So much is obvious. But
within the simile Virgil develops a further metaphorical conceit
comparing the rampaging winds to unruly horses calmed and
steered by an expert driver. The ‘horsey-ness’ of the simile has
been noted by several scholars,23 and I have nothing to add to
their observations here: Aeolus controls the winds by ‘knowing
how to hold tight and give slack to the reins’ (premere et laxas
sciret dare … habenas, 1.63); the winds go racing out of their
carcer (a prison, that is also the starting gate of a horse race; in
fact it is one that gets poked in the side by a goad); they are
steered and petted by the man who arrives to calm them (regit,
mulcet), and they even prick up their ears as horses do (Servius
notes that there is a an animal metaphor here, a translatio a
mutis animalibus, quibus aures mobiles sunt ‘a metaphor from the
realm of dumb animals that have mobile ears’). Then, to contrast
and carry through with the imagery of wild horses restrained
by an expert horseman, Virgil paints a picture of Neptune, the
horseman/statesman’s counterpart, riding away once the storm
has been stilled. Exerting effortless control over his horses,
Neptune loosens the reins and lets them fly ahead as they pull
him into an open sky.24 The language is that of heavenly flight
23
On the equine imagery of Aeolus’s winds, with relevant background in previous
scholarship, see Feeney (2014, 215).
24
Wilhelm (1982, 217): ‘In the Aeneid mastery and control of the chariot is an
effective political metaphor: in the first simile of the Aeneid (1.148-156), the sea
(caeloque invectus aperto … volans), as if these were the winged

horses of Helios rather than Neptune’s hippocamps scudding
along on top of the waves.
The devil, I suggest, is in the details: the chastened rioters’
pricked up ears, with the soothing stroke of the mystery leader’s
words, set alongside the imagery of Neptune as a skilled chariot
driver, steering horses that are the picture of restraint. If, as
Nelis has argued, there is soul symbolism built into this simile,
I suggest that the details add up to the basic figurative conceits
of the soul imagery Plato’s Phaedrus. There, famously, the ideal
human soul was likened by the philosopher to a chariot hitched
to two horses, steered by a driver skilled at checking the passions
of a frenzied horse. One recalls that Plato, in fact, draws two
pictures of chariot souls in the Phaedrus that he sets in contrast:
the souls of the gods, comprised of drivers pulled by white
winged horses, perfectly trained, that soar effortlessly upwards
into the heavens, to the higher places where they belong;25
contrasting human souls that stay low to the ground, because
they are heavy, erratic and prone to going off course, pulled along
by horses of opposite types: one white, well born, and attuned
to the wishes of the driver, the other dark, unsightly, ignoble,
and erratic.26 Though not entirely un-trainable, this ignoble
horse has to be whipped and scolded in order to stay on course
and keep an even pace with its better half. He is the symbol of
is quieted and the winds forced to retreat by Neptune who drives a currus like
a wise statesman imposing Roman order on the mob threatening destruction.’
Wilhelm goes on to mention the charioteer/soul allegory of Phaedrus
246A-247A within a longer list of Greek sources where crazed and ferocious
mental states are compared to chariots racing out of control, but he does not
attach any of these soul potentials to Virgil’s first simile. In commenting on the
chariot race simile of Virgil Georg. 1. 509-514, Schindler (2000) 207 cites all the
most important ‘soul’ and ‘state’ uses of the metaphor prior to Virgil (including
that of Plato’s Phaedrus) but makes no attempt to explore the possibility of their
full integration.
25
Pl. Ph. 246e-247c.
26
Pl. Ph. 253d-e.
326 AUGUSTAN POETRY
unchecked impulse and base desire. In essence, he is a Thersites

in need of a stick, wielded by a rational power outside of himself.
According to the political rendering of the tripartite soul idea
in Plato’s Republic, he is the impulsive and erratic demos of the
democratic stae.
We see similar things going on in Virgil’s first simile.
Or so I maintain. The storm that both symbolizes, and erupts
from, the outraged state of Juno’s soul, is likened to a city torn
apart by civic strife, its violent masses of low born men (ignobile
volgus) figured as so many ill-bred horses careening wildly out
of control, then brought into line by a seasoned statesman who
knows how to work the reins. Within a larger Platonizing
reading of Homer’s heroes, the second century CE rhetorician/
philosopher, Maximus of Tyre, found in Homer’s Thersites not
just a despicable character in need of a thrashing, but ‘a perfect
allegory of an insubordinate citizenry.’27 I suspect that it is from
some early version of this allegorization that Virgil fashions
his ignobile volgus, by concretizing the symbolic potentials that
others had worked out from Homer’s Thersites. But in Virgil’s
reworking of the ‘political storm’ of Homer’s second book, there
are no beatings, and no beratings. The statesman who calms
the riot is an Odysseus (‘a good man and a meticulous leader’28)
without a regal stick. The simile has built into it a fantasy of
authority that speaks to the desires of a people worn out by civil
strife. Virgil’s Romans knew all about buildings being torched
and riotous gangs marauding through the streets, killing as they
went. The scenario Virgil paints in the simile was all much
too real to a Roman audience of the twenties BCE. Such was
the reality that all Romans knew from their own lives in the
27
Maximus Oration 26.5. Further on Maximus of Tyre’s allegorization of
Thersites, see Kim (2010, 11), and Hunter (2012, 59-60). On the proliferation
of political and ‘origins of satire’ readings of the Thersites episode in imperial
Greek sources, see Hunter (2009, 86-9).
28
Maximus of Tyre Oration 26.5, referring to Odysseus as a proto-Socrates.
previous thirty years. For most of this period Rome was rocked
by periodic upheavals of partisan violence. It had become a city
of burnt out ruins. But Virgil’s opening simile paints a wondrous
scenario wherein all of that violence instantly disappears. It lets
Romans think: ‘what would it be like to have some man, a living
monument of traditional values, come along who could make
all that go away, just by stepping out onto the scene?’ That is
what the simile, loaded with resonances to Homer, Hesiod,
Lucretius, Greek political and moral philosophy, and recent
Roman history, has us imagine: a man whose auctoritas is just
that overwhelming – legible by all, immediately recognized
and respected, and not subject to confusion or deleterious
interpretation.29 What a wonderful fantasy!
Many answers to the mystery man’s identity have been
proposed.30 But what I find so fascinating about the soul/state
figure as Virgil (re)deploys it here is less the identity of the man,
which I take to be deliberately irresolvable (with its irresolvabi-
lity being the point31), but that his authority should be said rest
not in his superior reasoning capacity (his ratio or logos) but in
29
On the simile’s various models and intertextual engagements, see Beck (2014,
69-75).
30
The man most commonly proposed is Augustus, who was favored by Neptune
in his defeat of Sextus Pompey. See Galinsky (1996, 21-3). There is no doubt
that Augustus is in some sense ‘here’ as bait for the taking. But the simile invites
multiple identifications, and can be entered into from various political angles,
such that a reader of one political persuasion will end up with Augustus, while
another will end up with Poppilius Laenas, or Menenius Agrippa, or someone
else who fits the bill. One sees, for example, that in describing Lucan setting off
to compose his Pharsalia at Silvae 2.7.68-9, Statius makes reference to Virgil’s
first simile in a way that has the younger Cato in the role of the mystery man
(= a way of reading Lucan for the way that Lucan read the Aeneid): Libertate
gravem pia Catonem / et gratum popularitate Magnum (‘You will sing of )
Cato, heavy in pious commitment to freedom, and Pompey, the favorite of the
masses.’
31
Feeney (2014, 214): ‘It is in the end misguided to press too hard for an
identification with one particular individual or episode, given the generalizing
and paradigmatic nature of the simile.’
328 AUGUSTAN POETRY
his ‘piety’ (pietas), a concept Roman to the core, and virtually

without equivalent in Greek. For as Greek as this soul picture
is in its origin and basic design, it has something new about it
that it never had, nor could have had, in any Greek source. In
fact, it is this precise word, pietas, that the Romans were wont
to trot out when touting their superiority over the Greeks, and
rationalizing their right to rule over them. This is what both
Polybius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are getting at when
they attempt to describe to their Greek readers the special re-
ligious ‘something’ that Romans had that they themselves did
not, and that gave the Romans superior skills of statesmanship,
and success at running a world empire. At Histories VI.56.6-
14, for example, Polybius famously asserts that ‘the respect in
which the Roman constitution is most markedly superior is in
their behavior towards the gods (τῇ περὶ θεῶν διαλήψει).’ For
his Greek readers, this is a stunning claim. He goes on to say
that it is their ‘superstitiousness’ that keeps the Roman state
bound together and under control (τοῦτο συνέχειν τὰ ᾽Ρωμαίων
πράγματα, λέγω δὲ τὴν δεισιδαιμονίαν), and he says that one
cannot overstate just how completely this cautious disposition
towards unseen powers dominates their public and private lives.
He then adds: ‘For many would find this astonishing. To me at
least it seems clear that all this has been done for the sake of the
common people (τοῦ πλήθους χάριν)… since the mass of every
people is fickle and full of lawless desires, irrational anger and
violent impulses, it is essential that they should be restrained by
invisible terrors and other suchlike melodramas.’ All silly stuff,
in other words, dismissed as the δεισιδαιμονία of the masses.
And yet this ‘fear of spooks’ is unlike anything known to the
Greeks, because the Romans are so preternaturally absorbed
by it as a people, constantly performing their commitment to
getting things right between themselves and unseen tutelary
powers in every aspect of their lives. It is this mystery stuff that,
Polybius claims, binds the Roman state together, and commits
all Romans to their collective cause, allowing them to run an
empire for the long term. Much else that Polybius says about
the cultural factors behind Roman imperial success in book six
of his Histories -- their patriotism, for example, their respect for
ancestors, the melodramatic nature of their aristocratic funerals,
and so on-- any Roman might look at and say, ‘yes, what you’re
noticing about us is our pietas. Why don’t you just say that?’ And
of course he cannot. There is no equivalent cultural disposition
among the Greeks, and thus no handy Greek word to express
it. Polybius might have tried using the term eusebeia, which is
the most common Greek translation of Latin pietas, but because
eusebeia is much too suggestive of the right and measured atta-
chment to the gods that the Greeks themselves thought they
knew best how to maintain, its use in describing something that
was as privately and personally and culturally all-encompassing
as pietas was to the Romans is severely limited.
The idea that pietas keeps the Roman masses in check,
then, is not new to Virgil. What is new is his elaboration of
that idea in picture form, in a simile that shows the workings of
auctoritas within the Roman state on its surface (as its obvious
‘tenor’ or point of comparison), even as it develops a second
metaphor of the workings of the soul by calling to mind the
imagery of Plato’s Phaedrus, along with the state/soul analogy
of the Republic.32 The conceptual prerequisites for producing
32
Cicero develops a charioteer ‘state/soul’ metaphor at de Republica 2.67-
68. There, in concluding the political conversation of day two, he has Scipio
and Laelius reminisce about their days together in Africa: (Scipio) ‘<quem>
iamdudum quaero et ad quem cupio pervenire.’ (Laelius) ‘prudentem fortasse
quaeris?’ tum ille (Scipio): ‘istum ipsum’ (Laelius) ‘est tibi ex eis ipsis qui adsunt
bella copia, velut a te ipso ordiare.’ tum Scipio: ‘atque utinam ex omni senatu
pro rata parte esset! sed tamen est ille prudens, qui, ut saepe in Africa vidimus,
immani et vastae insidens beluae, coercet et regit [beluam] quocumque volt
et levi admonitu aut tactu inflectit illam feram.’ (Laelius) ‘novi et tibi cum
essem legatus saepe vidi.’ (Scipio) ‘ergo ille Indus aut Poenus unam coercet
beluam, et eam docilem et humanis moribus adsuetam; at vero ea quae latet in
animis hominum quaeque pars animi mens vocatur, non unam aut facilem ad
subigendum frenat et domat <beluam>, si quando id efficit, quod perraro potest.
namque et illa tenenda est ferox.’
330 AUGUSTAN POETRY
such a re-elaboration (that is, the pre-existing propensities of

thought that would make such an image conceivable as such)
were already there to be tapped into and played upon, as pre-
-existing langue to the parole of the simile’s specific articulation.
For Virgil’s Roman audience, pietas is not just a disposition that
regulates behavior in the public sphere, i.e. a dispositional affect
of the group that influences the emotional states of individuals
from the top down. Rather, it is both first and foremost a gui-
ding force that steers good Romans from inside themselves,
committing them to the causes of family, gods, and the state. It
is an emotional disposition that checks and steers individuals
from the inside, thus working from the bottom up.33 And thus,
‘(It’s him) I have been seeking out for some time, and whom I’m anxious to
reach. (L) ‘Perchance you are seeking a man endowed with wisdom/foresight?’
Then he: (S) ‘That’s the one!’ (L) ‘You have a lovely abundance of them among
men right here. You can start with yourself !’ Then Scipio (S) ‘If only that were
the settled opinion of the entire Senate! However, there is that wise man whom
I would often see in Africa, sitting atop a giant and monstrous beast. He checks
and steers the beast wherever he wants, and with the slightest utterance and
touch he turns the beast.’ (L) ‘Yes, I know the man. I saw him lots of times when
I was with you as a legate.’ (S) ‘And so it is that a man from India or Carthage
controls a monster that is a single entity, both docile and accustomed to the ways
of humans. But what hides in the souls of men, and the part of the animus that
we call ‘mind,’ reins in and tames a beast that is not singular or easily mastered.
It’s a rare thing when it happens, for it’s a wild thing to hold onto.’
Section 68, directly following, is highly fragmentary, but clearly invokes the
metaphor of the charioteer statesman (ut auriga indoctus e curru trahitur, opteritur,
laniatur, eliditur ‘as an ignorant charioteer is dragged from his car, trampled,
torn apart, crushed’) within a larger discussion comparing unruly passions to
violent beasts that must be held in check.
Commenting on the fragments of sections 67-68, Ferrary (1995, 62) concludes:
‘The image of the mahout illustrates the spirit of reason within the soul of the
prudens, but implicitly also the role of the prudens or rector within the city. As in
Plato’s Republic, the parts of the city are analogous to the parts of the soul.’
33
This is a very big proposition that requires much more space than I can devote
to it here. If only to suggest that such ideas about human agency were at least
‘available’ to Virgil and his readers, I offer two small textual illustrations, one
from an author that Virgil is sure to have read, and a second from Virgil himself.
The first is fragment 2 Courtney (= Priscian apud G.L. II, p. 419 Keil) of Livius
what Virgil puts on display in his image of a soul/state regulated

by pietas is a very different articulation of what the human soul
is, unlike anything seen in the Greek sources from which Virgil
gathers the simile: not mind over body, but a moral conscience
structured by, and steeped in, tradition. Piety over body. In fact,
what we have here is not the human soul generally construed,
but an idealized Roman soul, one dominated in its decision-
-making and emotional comportment not by its capacity for
logos, for calculation and rational dialectic, but by an ingrained
reverence towards tradition and towards the reverential ways of
Andronicus’ Latin translation of Homer Od. 20.19-20. There, in fighting down

the urge to kill the wayward maids, Odysseus reminds his heart of the rage he
felt ‘on that day when the Cyclops, irrepressible in his menos, consumed your
excellent comrades’ (ἥματι τῷ ὃτε μοι μένος ἄσχετος ἤσθιε κύκλωψ / ἰφθίμους
ἑτάρους). In his Odusseia Livius translates: cum socios nostros mandisset
impius Cyclops. The passage is thought to be a very loose translation of the
Greek, especially in rendering μένος ἄσχετος as impius. Either this a very large
‘leap’ made by Livius, or (to introduce an idea that is as yet unconsidered) he is
working with a different sense of what piety is and how it operates, i.e. as an
internal check on ‘rage’ that the Cyclops, being a Cyclops, does not have. My
Yale colleague, Egbert Bakker, notes per litteras that the LSJ entry for ἄσχετος
is in need of revision: ‘The point is that ἄσχετος is often combined with πένθος
(e.g., Il. 16.549-50: πένθος ἄσχετον, οὐκ ἐπιεικτόν) with the idea of grief that
cannot be repressed (and is “unyielding”). But this “passive” meaning does not
translate to cases where the adjective is applied to persons. When Antinoös
the Suitor addresses Telemachos as Τηλέμαχ᾽ ὑψαγόρη, μένος ἄσχετε, he does
not mean that Tel. is “irresistible in his menos”, but someone impetuous, who
cannot repress his (own) menos (note also that μένος ἄσχετε occupies the
same slot in the hexameter as μένος ἄσχετος at Od. 20.19). Looks like this is
a typical Odyssey usage. At 3.104 it could go either way.’ Similarly, at Aeneid
4.393-96, it is Aeneas’s piety that keeps his passions (pity and love) in check:
At pius Aeneas, quamquam lenire dolentem / solando cupit et dictis avertere
curas, / multa gemens magnoque animum labefactus amore / iussa tamen divum
exsequitur classemque revisit. Cf. Aen. 7.21 where it is again their piety that
keeps the Trojans from being lured aside by Circe’s seductive song. The several
translational leaps taken by Livius in his translation of Homer Od. 20.19-20 are
sorted through by Traina (1960), who argues that it is in fact a translation of Od.
9.296-7. This argument poses its own set of problems, but has been lent support
by Courtney (1993, 45).
332 AUGUSTAN POETRY
one’s ancestors. It is, in end, a way of thinking about the inner

workings of mind over body that is also a theory of empire.
Works Cited
Beck, D. 2014. ‘The First Simile of the Aeneid,’ Vergilius 60: 67-83.
Courtney, E. 1993. The Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford.
Feeney, D.C. 1984. ‘The Reconciliations of Juno,’ Classical Quarterly 34:
179-184.
______. 1991. The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition.
Oxford.
______. 2007. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of
History. Berkeley.
______. 2014. ‘First Similes in Epic,’ Transaction of the American
Philological Association 144: 189-228.
______. 2015. Beyond Greek: the Beginnings of Latin Literature. Cambridge,
MA.
Ferrary, J-L. 1995. ‘Statesman and law in Cicero’s political philosophy.’ In:
A Laks and M. Schofield, eds. Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic
Social and Political Philosophy. Cambridge: 48-73.
Galinksy, K. 1996. Augustan Culture: an Introduction. Princeton.
Graverini, L. 2014. ‘The Negotiation of Provincial Identity through
Literature: Apuleius and Vergil.’ In: B. Lee, E. Finkelpearl, and L.
Graverini, eds. Apuleius and Africa. New York and London: 112-128.
Harrison, S. J. 1988. ‘Vergil on Kingship: the First Simile of the Aeneid,’
PCPS 34: 55-59.
Hunter, R. 2009. Critical Moments in Classical Literature. Cambridge.
______. 2012. Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature. Cambridge.
Kim, L. 2010. Homer Between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek
Literature. Cambridge.
Lintott, 1980. ‘What was the “imperium Romanum”?’ Greece and Rome
28: 53-67.
MacMullen, R. 2000. Romanization in the Time of Augustus. New Haven.
Morgan, T. 1998. Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds.

Cambridge.
Nelis, D. 2015. ‘Juno, sea-storm and emotion in Virgil, Aeneid 1.1-156:
Homeric and Epicurean contexts.’ In: D. Cairns and L. Fulkerson, eds.
Emotions Between Greece and Rome. London: 149-162.
Reed, J. 2007. Virgil’s Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the Aeneid. Princeton.
Schindler, Claudia 2000. Untersuchungen zu den Gleichnissen im römischen
Lehrgedicht: Lucrez, Vergil, Manilius. Göttingen.
Scullard, H. H. 1969. A History of the Roman World, 753 to 146 BC.
London.
Selden, D. 2014. ‘Apuleius and Afroasiatic Poetics.’ In: B. Lee, E.
Finkelpearl, and L. Graverini, eds. Apuleius and Africa. New York and
London: 205-270.
Sherwin-White, A.N. 1973. The Roman Citizenship. Oxford.
Shi, V. and Morgan, L. 2015. ‘A Tale of Two Carthages: History and
Allusive Topography in Virgil’s Libyan Harbor (Aen. 1.159-69),’ TAPA
145: 107-133.
Skutsch, O. 1985. The Annals of Quintus Ennius. Oxford.
Tarrant, R. 2012. Virgil Aeneid XII. Cambridge.
Thomas, E. 2007. Monumentality and the Roman Empire: Architecture in
the Antonine Age. Oxford.
Traina, A. 1960. ‘Note esegetiche I: Il pasto di Ciclope e gli esametri
pseudoliviani,’ Maia 12: 220-224.
Wilhelm, R 1982. ‘The Plough-Chariot: Symbol of Order in the Georgics,’
CJ 77: 213-230.
Woolf, G. 1998. Becoming Roman: the Origins of Provincial Civilization
in Gaul. Cambridge.
Orphic Metamorphoses*
Andrew Feldherr
Princeton University
In 1824, the young Heinrich Heine paid a visit to Goethe,

already a pillar of world literature, at his home in Weimar.
After he and the master had talked about the weather and
the attractions of the poplar alley linking Weimar to Jena, the
older poet condescended to ask what his young visitor was
working on. Heine brightly replied that he was, “working on
a Faust.” At that point an extremely displeased Goethe asked
him whether he perhaps had some other business to attend to in
Weimar. 1 The brashness with which Heine proposed re-making
Goethe’s most distinctive poetic creation as though it were just
*
A first version of this paper was presented in July, 2015, at the conference from
which this volume originates. A fuller, final, draft was submitted in January 2016,
and it was shortly afterwards that I became aware of Shane Butler’s The Ancient
Phonograph. Butler’s brilliant treatment there of how sonic effects call forth
their authors in this episode, which builds in turn on his 2011 analysis of the
Orpheus story as an account of the experience of reading, shares many interests
and emphases with the interpretation to follow, and I gladly acknowledge his
priority. I hope that the paths taken and some of the specific readings will be
different enough for this article still to have value as a complement to his work.
1
So the event is recorded by Heine’s brother Maximilian [Heine (1868, 122-3)];
according to Heinrich they talked merely about the quality of the Saxon plums.
336 AUGUSTAN POETRY
another subject to treat – a Faust – seems to find a parallel in

Latin literature when the poet Ovid appropriates Orpheus as
the central figure of the tenth book of his Metamorphoses. For
forty years before Vergil, who rivals Goethe in the rapidity
with which he was proclaimed a classic, made Orpheus quite
literally central to his own poetic identity while at the same time
quite probably working one of the most consequential mythical
transformations in classical literature. For the Orpheus of the
Georgics who perhaps here first loses his dead wife Eurydice for
the second time, 2 at once looks back to the lonely lover Gallus
who ends the Eclogues and ahead to Aeneas’ future separations
from Creusa and Dido.
Appropriately the relationship between Ovid’s Orpheus
and Vergil’s has become a synecdoche for expressing the com-
parison between the poets themselves, usually to illustrate the
ways in which Ovid was no Vergil. The rhetorical maneuvers
and shear wordiness of the Met.’s Orpheus both demonstrate
and figure the perceived superficiality and “over-explicitness”3 of
Ovid himself, especially in contrast to the pathos of the Vergilian
original. Vergil never allows us to hear Orpheus singing, but only,
as I will describe, the echoes of his song; and it takes a mere 72
lines to go full circle from the river where Eurydice perishes to
the one whose banks the lyre of the dead Orpheus fills with the
sound of her name, a textual model perhaps of the uncrossable
rivers that hold her in the underworld. And the story is further
set apart in the sense that it is not told by the main poetic voice
but by that slipperiest of narrators, Proteus. By contrast Ovid’s
Orpheus dominates an entire book of the poem, and instead of
retreating as in Vergil from the surface narrative through his own
failure to speak directly or be directly spoken about, this new
auctor (10.83) seems to take over the voice of the poet, giving
2
Contra Heath (1994).
3
For this formulation of a common critique, see Hinds (1987, 4-11).
ORPHIC METAMORPHOSES 337
not only the longest reported speech in the poem, but one that
seems to go back to the beginning and re-cast the entire poem
and the entire literary career of the poet himself. In Vergil’s case
it is surprising to recognize that you have never heard Orpheus
speak, in Ovid’s it can be difficult to remember that Ovid and
not Orpheus is the poet of Metamorphoses.
Ovid’s treatment of Orpheus has become among the epic’s
most intensely studied sequences. Its self-referential capacities,
as a metamorphic epic embedded within Metamorphoses, have
made it a valuable tool for working out Ovid’s conception of the
nature and role of his own epic by a process of comparison and
contrast. The figure of Orpheus can be the generic prototype of
the poet, but his remarkably varied and Protean mythological ca-
reer make him nevertheless a useful figure for highlighting what
is distinctive in any particular poet’s persona. Hence in Ovid
we meet a reformed lover, now speaking inevitably in hexame-
ters, and composing a poem of which he is not the subject, one
indeed that ingeniously weaves together a number of disparate
tales all of which, coincidentally, conclude with a transformation.
Nevertheless Orpheus’ own desires shine through every story
he tells, making many of their characters potential emanations
of his own presence, as much as he is of Ovid’s.
For these reasons, nearly all large scale critical re-imagi-
nings of Ovid’s poem have paid close attention to an episode
where so many central Ovidian themes come together: eroticism
and language, art as representation and replacement, and the
nature of transformation itself. In one of the most wide-ranging
and influential of these readings, Micaela Janan argues that
Orpheus’ ultimately unattainable desire to understand and re-
-configure his own experience of eros through language reveals
the limits of linguistic expression and the power of the author.
This powerfully deconstructive reading has influenced Hardie’s
interpretation of the episode within the dynamic of presence
and absence that unites Ovid’s entire poetic project, as well as
338 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Oliensis’ exploration of the place of the subconscious in the cons-

truction of Latin poetry. More recently still, Elizabeth Young
has convincingly interpreted the episode as a parable for the rise
of an imperial literary history that at once writes a history of all
earlier literary production with itself as telos, and symbolically
explores the relationship between writing as a permanent me-
dium and the oral poetics of presence and change it supplants.
All of these analyses also strikingly privilege the intratextual
over the intertextual. While comparison with Vergil used to be
the starting point for readings of the episode, many of which
to be sure aimed only at what may seem in comparison, and in
hindsight, rather limited and limiting formalist appreciations
of Ovid’s poetic aims and means, these more ambitious recent
studies orient themselves by and large to themes and problems
privileged within Ovid’s own poetic oeuvre. My aim here will
similarly be to highlight a theme that unifies multiple aspects
of Ovid’s treatment of the arch-poet, the pursuit of immortality.
This emphasis seems inevitable given the myth of the poet whose
song aims to re-animate the dead. But the presence of a Vergilian
model again gives a specific focus to Ovid’s handling of this
very general motif: the question of how poetry does and does
not transcend the limits of death becomes bound up with the
dynamics of poetic succession. An Ovidian voice in the episode
may seem to emerge at the expense of an awareness of a Vergilian
presence. So too, since the survival of a literal voice becomes the
means of Orpheus’ own survival, its circumscription within any
specific text can itself become a problem in ways suggested by
Heine’s reply to Goethe: Ovid’s Orpheus reminds us that Vergil’s
depiction of the poet constitutes merely an Orpheus, not the
Orpheus. Conversely, an ability to recognize this transcendent
mythical figure will be sharpened through Ovid’s engagement
with the way Vergil had already articulated the problem of poetic
survival. My discussion will have two parts, each focusing on
Ovid’s handling of one specific technology for triumphing over
death: the first section will thus focus on the manifestation of

immortality through poetic performance and the second on
sexuality and reproduction. As will already be seen, this very
pairing of emphases in Ovid’s narrative recalls the tension in
Vergil’s didactic poem between a response to death that involves
the evocation of a single, lost, human life and another based on
generational replacement.4
I.
The reader of Ovid’s Metamorphoses too learns to see in
the poem’s central theme a dialectic between loss and survival,
but a dialectic whose terms are themselves continually shifting.
The single individual survives as, or is replaced by, a persistent
type. Daphne is transformed into a laurel and all laurels,
though she may or may not still be Daphne. The results of
metamorphosis are eternal and/or reproducible, because they
are things that last forever, like a river (just don’t try to step into
it twice), or a statue that can survive or be copied, or trees or
animals that can replicate themselves without the variety that
attaches to human offspring.
The problems of survival parsed through all the changes in
this paradigm extend directly to the challenges of apprehending
Ovid’s own text. As we may ask of the laurel or the wolf whether
the thing here really is the figure in the story, so we may identify
Ovid’s poetic opus with a present reality, the text subsisting as
a physical presence before the reader, or with its own narrative,
that lost past that seems to reveal the transience of present
artifacts by pulling them back into a story world of change.
4
I am indebted for the language in which I sketch this opposition to Batstone
(2006, 127), although his own argument stresses the instability of such
oppositions.
340 AUGUSTAN POETRY
The dualities of metamorphoses have proven especially

useful for conceptualizing the relationship between the poem’s
written and oral aspects. The text that seemingly remains the same
recalls those works of art or indeed inscriptions that constitute
the permanent, transformed bodies of figures like Niobe or
Phaethon. The spoken voice seems to summon up the presence of
the poet and perhaps to infuse otherwise mute and meaningless
matter with the ability to signify lost or forgotten narratives. Yet
in a poem that pays such attention to re-performance and to the
nuances and intentions that emerge from each act of narrating,
the idea of an immutable text comes into question. Ovid’s
narrators ring many changes on myths familiar from written
narratives and whose specific textual versions are immediately
recognizable. Ovid’s text freezes all these tendentious, partial,
and improvisational vocalizations of myth in a permanent form,
yet his own epic of course enters into an intertextual world
where it will be changed into new texts over the course of time.
And perhaps the text that achieves true permanence will itself
cease to be alive. In the poem’s epilogue the song as material
object is no more eternal than the other physical monuments
that are subject to time’s power. Indeed a papyrus lasts much
less long than a pyramid. What gives the text its immortality,
what makes Ovid’s written nomen indestructible,5 will be its
apprehension as the surviving presence of the poet – when the
praesagia of the poet, that alone authorize his claims about the
future, are read, are taken up through the voice of the people,
and he achieves a spoken presence as fama (15.878-9). The very
reading of these lines therefore fulfills the prophecy they contain,
or at least gives the poet’s audience grounds for construing the
words’ oral performance as his survival. In the poem’s final word,
5
nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, 15. 876: I feel justified in terming this the poet’s
“written” nomen because indelebile, even if metaphorical, evokes the name as a
physical presence otherwise capable of destruction.
vivam, meaning and enactment come together as the poet is

brought to life through the very utterance of his claim. And we
may perhaps see the entity who partakes in this future life not
simply as the human poet proclaiming his immortality, but as
the book itself announcing its animation.6 Yet the realization
of the poet’s future (“I shall live”) within the reader’s present
cannot itself stop the flow of time, and we may also choose to
see the life of the author, and of his book, balanced precariously
against the possibility of silence, as the uncertain real future takes
over from the apprehension of a now that miraculously elides
the difference between the present and the future of the past.
The shifting properties of script and performance provide
one locus for apprehending how the opposition between
disappearance and immortalization generated by the poem’s
metamorphic subject affects how we understand its own status
as a physical presence in our world. But in this paper I want to
zero in on the voice in its own right, and explore how Ovid uses
it to illustrate the mechanisms and risks of poetic survival. I take
my start from a metamorphosis which challenges assumptions
that the transformed subjects of Ovid’s narrative acquire
permanence, if not presence, in their new manifestations, and
connects this issue with the signifying power of language in its
spoken and written form: the transformation of Adonis into a
windflower that ends Orpheus’ song, as the prediction of his
own immortality does Ovid’s. 7
In this case, the monument for the lost individual seems
to have taken on the very transience that such material survival
might seem to remedy. A physical flower may seem to preserve
the fleeting beauty of youth, embodying the metaphorical
6
Cf. Hardie (2000, 94), though with different emphasis: “the living presence of
the poet is the text.”
7
For an earlier argument describing how Adonis and Orpheus as mythical figures
associated with re-birth look forward to Ovid’s own projected immortality, see
M.D. Thomas (1998, 106-9).
342 AUGUSTAN POETRY
flos aetatis, or else to reify its essential impermanence. Earlier

in Orpheus’ song, for example, Hyacinthus had become the
hyacinth. But in that case the short life of real flowers is left
unspoken: the emphasis falls on endurance “durat” (10.218),
and the reference to an annual festival helps link this paradox of
permanent flowering to a natural cycle of rebirth. Here, though
the goddess herself identifies a festival that will reproduce
not the lost boy but Venus’ own sense of loss, specifically the
sound of her mourning (annua plangoris … simulamina nostri,
10.727), the flower itself seems ambivalently related to it.8 The
manuscripts suggestively divide over whether an et links the
flower to the festival, or an at contrasts them.
When the poet describes the metamorphosis, as oppo-
sed to the goddess’ predicting it, he highlights destruction as
inevitably linked to re-birth. The polarity between death and
preservation takes symbolic form when the goddess scatters
the blood with nectar, but the poet’s description by underli-
ning the temporality of the process rather than the immortal
product, seems again to memorialize the youth only through
change itself. By contrast to the divine nectar that triggers it,
the flower’s coming into being is likened to a bubble. The poet
then goes on to describe how the flower arises in no less than
a full hour. The goddess may be thinking in terms of recurring
seasons, but, as elsewhere in the poem, the narrator collapses
that to a single point of time by translating a Greek season
(hora) as a Latin hour (10.734).9 Against the rebirth promised
by the simile of the pomegranate,10 with its pliant or “sluggish”
rind (lento, 10.736), the flower seems to outdo all others in its
ephemerality, lasting not a season, nor even the hour it takes for
8
For an analysis of how Venus’ pre-occupation with herself seems to write Adonis
out of his own memorial, see Pavlock (2009, 100-1).
9
cf. Barchiesi (2005, 241) on 2.26.
10
Pavlock (2009, 101-2).
this original generation. “The very winds that name it destroy

it,” (10.739). The reference to the flower’s existence immediately
suggests its destruction (at least to the narrator). And the com-
memoration willed by the goddess stands at odds with both the
mortal youth she mourns – for a while – and with the monument
that she creates. The narration itself seems to make the flower
disappear, while the divine view sees continuity in recurrence.
In the telling then, the monument simply becomes part of a
story that has reached its end, as opposed to the divine “future
perfect” perspective. Finally, unlike the hyacinth, the anemone
would never name Adonis, nor is it even named itself directly.
Even to recover the identity of the flower demands re-translating
Ovid’s Latin into Orphic Greek and recognizing in venti, the
eponymous anemoi that name the anemone.
It is not surprising then that interpretations of this pivotal
metamorphosis have emphasized its deconstructive capacities
and applied them outward to the poetic products of both
Orpheus and Ovid himself. Metamorphic artifacts do not im-
mortalize the dead in the flesh – there is no Adonis in the flower.
They can only vanish, and by extension the poet does not name
even the non-existent image. As Micaela Janan, has shown, all
language seems to have lost its power to signify, though it can
perhaps imitate its referents in the process of its passing away.
Elizabeth Young offers perhaps the most ambitious interpreta-
tion of such representations of mortality when she argues that
Ovid’s Orpheus narrative figures his death as inscription – a
translation into writing typical of the Augustan ambition to
construct a totalizing and permanent story of everything that
ends in the imperial present., that nevertheless silences all its
subjects even as it inscribes them.
However, as Joseph Reed notes in his new commentary,
the poet supplies the missing name of the flower in the very first
line of the next book with the description of Orpheus leading
344 AUGUSTAN POETRY
animosque ferarum (11.1). This “word play”11 may seem retros-

pectively to diminish the semiotic inadequacies of Orpheus’
conclusion, as a new level of poetic narrative rescues the signi-
fying power of his song, and with it perhaps the lost life of the
“exanimis” Adonis (10.721). And to start my argument, I would
like to make two points about the particular form this resurrec-
tion takes. First, the meaning of animosque has nothing to do
with windflowers, nor indeed with very much else – animosque
ferarum seems simply an overblown periphrasis for feras. By
contrast the word answers the riddle of the missing sign largely
through its sound. Latin animus may or may not mean the same
as the Greek anemos, but the echo connects them, and that link
allows us to see the windflower as restoring, or at least evoking
the lost anima of Adonis himself.
Any reader, of course, could well argue against the ca-
pacity of this sonic re-duplication to evoke the dead youth,
beginning perhaps by querying the identity between the animus
and the anima, and that is in part my point, the assonantial
associations that extend the signifying power of words are
inevitably uncertain, and fleeting, all the more so when we
imagine them heard in performance rather than immortalized
on the page. Hardie observes that already nomina in the final
line of Orpheus’ song seems at once to name and avoid naming
by suggesting the sounds of the anemone. In a complementary
way the letters on the page seem to ask palindromically whether
this anemone can serve for a soul animon’? But this too suggests
that the components that make up words, whether as sounds or
elements, are already undergoing dissolution and any apparent
manifestation of souls in names can be as random or misleading
as the deceptive presence of ignis in lignis, according to Lucretius
(DRN 1.901).
11
Reed (2014, 303).
My second point about this sonic effect also involves

animosque’s own partial echo of nomina at the bridge between
Orpheus’ song and Ovid’s resumption of the role of narrator.
Along with the semantic evocation of an absent third party
through a chain of sonic likenesses, sound effects can continue to
evoke or echo speaking presences in the direct sensory experience
of the audience. Animosque may or may not remind you of nomina
or the anemone, much less restore the soul of exanimis Adonis,
but if we interpret the word under the influence of the windy
anemos then at the same time as it echoes Orpheus, the word
not only names itself but manifests its presence as breath. The
breath of any speaker through which the poem is articulated
becomes a physical manifestation of the animus. And within
the narrative as well the crucial agency of wind helps to set
the chain of connections between the dead and the living in
motion: the flower in its creation is compared to a “glistening
bubble [is] wont to rise from tawny mud,” (10.733-4).12 And
there is a similar continuity at the narratological level. Ovid is
describing a poetic performance, one that indeed happened in
the past and whose ending is all too imminent, yet he is at the
same time giving one. Such a mise-en-abime13 may re-inforce
the aural continuity that similarly bridges the gap between
books. The sonic presence of the voice contradicts the sense of
finality imposed by the ending of the story, even as the same
voice that had been Orpheus’ describing the death of Adonis
now becomes Ovid’s describing the death of the previous
narrator. Again the breath that names simultaneously destroys.
Young convincingly demonstrates that Orpheus’ death seems
to happen through inscription, but the pre-requisite for this is
that his own song be lost in a clamor of other noises (11.16), and
12
Pavlock (2009, 101) perceptively compares the “bubble,” bulla, to the amulet
that boys put away at their transition to adulthood.
13
The expression is used in a somewhat different sense of Orpheus’ song by
Pavlock (2009, 89).
346 AUGUSTAN POETRY
the image of his being written may have as much to do with

his shift from the role of narrator to being the subject of Ovid’s
narrative.
This other aspect of the restorative presence of sound may
operate in tandem with the way words semantically re-animate
Adonis through assonance. But it also raises interestingly
complementary interpretative challenges. In place of working
outward from a narrative of the distant and unbelievable past
and then allowing us to hear it, here the sound comes first.
This unmistakeable sensory experience invites interpretation
of the past. And if the uncertainties of sonic resemblance
raised a problem for an author, whose own words were likely to
decompose as the wind of a new speaker’s voice blows through
them, here we might consider the problem from the perspective
of the present speaker who is made aware of another’s words
emerging from his mouth. One Roman epitaph chillingly
links recitation to possession: “lo,” it makes the reader himself
proclaim “your voice has become mine,” (quod legis, ecce, loquor,
vox tua nempe mea est, Possidius, Vita Aug. 31=Anth. Lat. 721).
Orpheus/Ovid’s coming back to life through the speech of a
reader may seem to bear a similar threat for those whose own
voices become his instrument.
In the remainder of this section I would like to provide
some contexts for interpreting the role of auditory presence
in this passage. Specifically, I want to treat it as a way of re-
-positioning Ovid’s poem in relation to its literary predecessors.
The question of Orpheus’ survival in the narrative voice of Ovid
overlaps of course with a specific instance of literary reception
– Vergil’s Orpheus provides the inescapable intertext for Ovid’s
treatment. And indeed the issue of vocality already marks a
central difference between the two poet’s representations of
this figure. As I mentioned in the introduction, to look back at
Vergil’s treatment from the perspective of Ovid’s can highlight by
contrast Orpheus’ absence as a speaker in the Georgics. If Vergil
highlights the narrative contexts that separate the reader from

Orpheus, nevertheless allowing us to hear at fleeting moments
his voice as Orpheus’, the dynamic in Ovid’s poem works in
the other direction. The presence of Orpheus seems to take
over the narrative so that it is the Ovidian author who seems
to magically address us in the guise of Orpheus. The “now” of
the narrative has been in Ovid’s case displaced for the duration
of the utterance. As we will see, not only does the problem of
Orpheus’ vocality re-develop a Vergilian dialectic about the place
of poetry in time, meditation on the voice as a means of poetic
survival raises questions about the nature of reality that inform
and are informed by our sense of the capacities of poetry.
First let me remind you that the contrast between hearing
animos in 11.1 as representing the spirits of beasts the poet “leads”
as the narrative moves to a new phase, and hearing animos as the
literal echo of the anemos is hardly unprepared for within the
poem. Orpheus’ own name seems to convey the different stages
of sonic progression, summoning up the source of the voice, the
ora (11.8), its medium, the aura (10.59, 11.6) and its destination,
the aures (10.62). And complementing the transformation of his
body into a written text, which Young has traced, Orpheus’ death
itself not only involves the question of his sonic survival, it also
quite literally echoes the metamorphosis that repeats the death of
Adonis, both Orpheus’ description of it, and the sonic traces with
which Ovid re-iterates the passage at the beginning of the new
book:
perque os, pro Iuppiter! illud
auditum saxis intellectumque ferarum
sensibus in ventos anima exhalata recessit.
(11.41-3)
As in the case of Adonis, the wind will be involved in the

destruction of a soul, but that anima suggested by the anemone
and named in the masculine by Ovid is itself now named here
directly, as if finally resolving the thematic hints of the earlier
348 AUGUSTAN POETRY
passages linking the soul to the wind, and completing a process

of naming by allowing not just the verbal sign for the soul to
name the wind (animos>anemos) but the physical wind to define
the soul (ventos=anima). At the same time, again the very moment
its destruction is narrated, this anima is made present here in
the onomatopoetic exhalation of the breath. Thus the death of
Orpheus makes the dissemination of the breath correspond not
only with its presence at the moment of performance, but also
with a dissolution of its signifying capacities. The mouth that had
once been the source of understanding now becomes the orifice
through which the merely material soul departs into its essence,
the wind. The loss of a distinctly Orphic animus corresponds
more sharply with the felt, and heard, presence of the breath.
But immediately this sonic presence is echoed within, and
again by, the narrative as the natural world takes up the lament:
Te maestae volucres, Orpheu, te turba ferarum,
te rigidi silices, te carmina saepe secutae
fleverunt silvae, positis te frondibus arbor
tonsa comas luxit.
(11.44-8)
Not only does the anaphoric repetition, further projected th-

rough assonance and alliteration, take up the echo in the text,
but the name Orpheus itself becomes the expression of this
collective lament, as a vocative ending in heu (and this is the
first and only time this vocative form is used). Again the sense
of vocal presence connecting myth and reality must be qualified
by a loss of distinctive voices, and indeed an encroachment on
the semantic functions of language by its merely evocative ones.
If the song of Orpheus could be understood miraculously by
inanimate objects, now it is precisely the inhuman sounds of
nature that have found their echo in Ovid’s poetry. He repeats
the song of the birds and rocks. And Orpheus has become the
expression of lament as much as the name of a person. A similar
linguistic co-existence had been predicted earlier in Orpheus’
song, with the inscription of AIAI on the hyacinth (10.215). That

this flower will later gain a competing commemorative function
as the monument of Aias, demonstrates how written texts too
can change over time (13.396-8). But this transformation in-
volves more than the crowding out of one name by another: the
function of writing has changed as well so that the inscription
memorializes Hyacinthus and Ajax in fundamentally different
ways. As Ovid will put it, AIAI records the name that designates
Ajax, but it transcribes the sound of the lament made by Apollo
(haec nominis, illa querelae, 13.398).14 To read Aias represents the
later tragic victim, but its sound echoes the voice of the god. So
later when the also voiceless lyre of Orpheus imposes its echo
of the flebile aliquid, on the poem, Janan notes the intellectual
incoherence of the echo. But on the other hand, at least a flebile
aliquid is something, and something whose presence in the sen-
sory world of the audience gives it a distinctive immanence. We
may recall that one specific quality of the Apolline song of the
lyre, as opposed to the Bacchic flute-playing that overwhelms
it, was that it gave expression to a rational voice.15
Within Ovid’s poem, the tale of Echo highlights a tension
between meaning and mere repetition and again shows the
transformation between these two aspects of sound operating
in both directions: a purposeful, rational utterance dissolves into
sound, and a universal sonic effect assumes the capacity to name
and evoke presence. When Echo first attempts to communicate
her love in Narcissus’ own words, we know the intention of the
author, but perceive also the inadequacy of these casual sounds
to express it (3.380-92). A few lines later, there is no longer
a named Echo, but merely the voice in deserted landscapes
(3.400-401). Now we have a present sonic phenomenon, and
14
Young (2008, 17-9) especially stresses the function of writing as a transcription
of sound in this passage.
15
Plut., Alc. 2.5; Arist., Pol. 1341a21-8.
350 AUGUSTAN POETRY
use it to reconstruct, indeed to bring to life, a subjective presence

(again assuming the lines are not interpellations). An example
of this re-animation comes appropriately when Narcissus’ death
seems to resurrect Echo herself, whom the reader might assume
had vanished as a corporeal presence. For when his farewell to
his image, “vale”, resounds in the forest, we assume instantly
that it is not just an echo, but the voice of Echo (3.501). The
sound itself reconstructs a voice which picks up the words
of one lover for a non-existent image, to apply it to the lover
himself at the moment that he ceases to be a body. The exam-
ple of Echo, therefore, read in connection with the end of the
Orpheus’ story, again heightens the paradox of the vocal image,
immortalizing a chain of vanished speakers at the instant of
their destruction – but only if we are already prepared to hear it
as a voice.
Echo’s fictive farewell will itself re-emerge at the
beginning of Orpheus’ story, as the only utterance of Eurydice
during her all too brief return to life. But before considering that
passage, it is time to move outward from “echoing” as an internal
phenomenon of the text, to more substantial echoes, that is the
re-production of words from one text to another. Specifically
I want to consider Ovid’s re-articulation of Vergil’s Orpheus.
And my aim will be to show that the paradoxes surrounding
sonic survival are themselves an echo of tensions within the
poetics of the Georgics. At the same time Vergil’s own presence
as an author seems to add a new link in the chain of voices re-
animated through sound. As Echo echoes Narcissus mourning
a mere image, so Ovid echoes Vergil echoing a purely fictive
Orpheus, mourning a Eurydice who is already absent when
addressed. The voice either unites these speakers in the now, or
prompts us to dwell on the different levels of separation between
life and death, reality and fiction, and historical narrator and
mythical narratee.
We seem most fully to catch an echo of Orpheus himself

in those marvelous lines describing how the poet mourns his
first loss of the still unnamed Eurydice:
ipse caua solans aegrum testudine amorem
te, dulcis coniunx, te solo in litore secum,
te ueniente die, te decedente canebat.
Taenarias etiam fauces,
(4.463-65)
As John Arthur Hanson beautifully observed, the assonantial te

appears not only where it semantically designates “you”, the lost
coniunx; we also hear it echo in words of quite different meaning
– at the end of the coming day (veniente) and of the declining
day (decedente). This provides already a good example of the
pointed ambiguity of the voice that I am describing. For on the
one hand we can perceive the sounds themselves as tracking the
temporal progression the lines describe, as the long e of te in the
arsis of the first foot fades into the minor key when echoed by
short e’s in the theses, where -te forms a component of words
that temporally separate Orpheus from Eurydice. Again the
content and rational semantic capacity of the verse co-exist
uncertainly with its function as a purely emotional expression.
And the crossing of limits, both temporal and spatial, gives this
sonic continuity thematic importance in a poem so conscious
of the right time for actions and the difference between places.
As Orpheus’ monothematic, indeed monosyllabic utterance, fills
all of time, so the expressions that measure time, the coming
and ending of the days, now express that song: each passing day
says “te”. Spatially the sound seems literally to arise from the
first striking of the lyre (testudine), and to reach the gates of
the underworld itself (Taenarias). And this resonance already
accomplishes the mission of Orpheus’ unrecorded infernal song,
for he has fitted the underworld into the sonic pattern that brings
back his lost wife (te). Finally, the naming of the wife as “you”
creates a powerful narratological gravity that pulls every speaker
352 AUGUSTAN POETRY
into the perspective of Orpheus. The effect of an apostrophe to

summon an absent presence is well known16, and we can see it
at work here as the naming of Eurydice seems to configure or
call up the absent addressee. But the second level of supernatural
ventriloquism comes when we consider how the identification
of the addressee also transforms the identity of the speaker – as
the song addresses the dead coniunx as you, and makes “you” the
dead coniunx, then this emotive vocalization turns every speaker,
from Proteus, to Vergil, to the amicus or slave or self reading
Vergil, into the Orpheus.
But for all that these verses both describe and demonstrate
how the emotion of loss takes over the words of the speaker and
refigures the worlds the poetry describes and within which it is
performed, they bear a curiously anomalous relationship to the
narrative voice of the poem where they occur. As the content
of the story stresses the ultimate impossibility of crossing the
rivers that bound the underworld and leave the poet alone on
the other side of a threshold, so the sound that emanates from
the dead poet’s lyre remains within banks (ripae, 4.527), that
echo the precisely designated un-Georgic space he is given for
his song (Riphaeis, 4.518). And the very insistence with which
Vergil or Proteus names Orpheus’ song as fletus (4.505, 514) or
questus (4.515) re-inforces the limits to its effect: the mourning
may be infinitely repeated, but that repetition clarifies that
its initial apparent success in persuading the shades, from the
perspective of the completed narrative will end in failure. And
the designation of Orpheus’ song as mourning also gives it a
generic identity as elegy which is consistently out of place in
Vergil’s own work. The elegiac figure whose continual song of
love and loss mimics the ideally unchanging subject matter
of a Propertius (Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit, 1.12.20)
16
Within the vast literature on apostrophe, Alpers (2013) is an especially helpful
introduction to the issues.
provides a foil to a didactic project aimed at provoking change

and distinguishing times and places.
At the end of the poem, however, Caesar thundering
at the Euphrates and giving laws (iura, 4.562) seems to do
for Vergil himself what that poet had done for Orpheus. He
creates a spatial boundary that reveals the limits of poet’s
sphere of activity and simultaneously the structure of time that
measures it. It is during “that time” illo tempore (4.463) poet
works, and the strangely epistolary imperfects highlight the
real distance between the poem’s composition in the past and
the present moment of its performance: the time when Vergil
was writing differs from the now of its reading, whereas the
sonic echoes in Orpheus’ song assimilate the time in which
the poetry is heard to the distant past when it was spoken.
This suggests a nested structure of poetic controls as Vergil
limits Orpheus, to be limited by Octavian, whose place at
the bank of another river, and threatened ascent to Olympus,
seem, according to the model of the poet, to hint at another
Orphic reversal. Vergil plays Orpheus to Octavian whose own
limits then come into view. The image of a parade of Orphic
replacements moving outward from the mythical past to the
poetic present to the imperial future will form an important
model for how Ovid inserts himself in this tradition. When
Ovid in turn re-produces the voice of Orpheus, the awareness
of succession itself hints at Ovid’s own distinctive moment
in a sequence of time that will necessitate his replacement.
When it is time to kill off Orpheus, the weapons Ovid supplies
come from the Georgics themselves, the (ultra-Vergilian)
arma of passing farmers, whose cattle are violently destroyed
to boot.
At the same time, and literally at the same time in the
narrative, the nature of the Orphic song as an almost pre-verbal
instantiation of mourning coming through every attempt to
measure time and space in language suggests an alternative
354 AUGUSTAN POETRY
temporal perspective on Orpheus. Not only is he a model

whose failure to transcend limits every new protagonist will
eventually reach. His is the voice that is always present now.17
And this is aspect of Orpheus’ song appears more forcefully
when we remember that while Proteus may describe the song
in the language of elegy, in terms of sound and the techniques
of apostrophe they seem rather to echo the very line with which
Vergil established his own poetic voice, and which he echoes
to establish the persistence of that identity at the end of the
Georgics: Tityre tu patulae, recubans sub tegmine fagi (E.1.1, cf.
G. 566). Moreover, to hear that echo recalls the way echoing
itself was thematized as the source of that utterance. The name
Tityrus reproduces the sound of the word psithurisma in Vergil’s
Greek model, and that not only designates but onomotapoetically
reproduces the effects of the whispering breath itself.The Vergilian
identification with Orpheus, therefore, however delimited in the
georgic context, itself animates a specific mechanism of poetic
memory. Vergil does not reproduce the “matter” of the Greek
verse, conspicuously changing the hyle from Theocritus’ pine to
the native Italian beech, but the sound of the verse links these
two moments in literary history. And indeed both are connected
not just to the ever-present sound of any performance but to a
timeless natural phenomenon.18
Not only will this opposition between an essentially
Vergilian Orpheus, or Orphic Vergil, and the limiting, didactic
emphasis on progression and replacement, re-emerge in Ovid’s
treatment of the Orphic voice, but the real presence of the
Vergilian intertext brings the issue of poetic succession into the
17
This aspect of my reading is deeply indebted to Parry 1972, who however sees
the demonstration of Orpheus’ art as “the epitome of all human art and craft,
[wherein] lies the true immortality of the poem” (p. 52), whereas I prefer to
stress how this vision is countered by the more literal ars that is the poem’s
ostensible subject.
18
On the sound effects in this line, see now especially Cucchiarelli (2012, 136),
who also suggests an echo of the bucolic flute.
orbit of this dialectic. Ovid may be replacing the dead Vergil,

but this condemns him to be himself replaced. Or we may hear
the Vergilian presence in the identity that each speaker assumes
in the now of poetic utterance, but only through a model of
possession that raises questions ultimately about how meaning
or authorial identity persist through time.
This use of the Orpheus myth to fold issues of reception
into performance makes it tempting to see other Ovidian evo-
cations of Vergil in Orphic terms, and to note conversely how
a Vergilian presence is summoned up elsewhere in Orpheus’
narrative. The famous phrase Vergilium tantum vidi (Tristia
4.10.51) condemns the earlier poet of Orpheus to play Eurydice,
slipping away at the very moment the young Ovid summons
him back. And perhaps we can catch a further glimpse of this
model of poetic succession, and mechanism of poetic persis-
tence in that moment in Orpheus’ own narrative that seems
to re-visit and reverse his earlier necromantic failure. When
Pygmalion’s artistic illusion seems to call forth “the face of a
true maiden”, that line seems to call forth the true Vergil in
two ways, as a visual reflection and a sonic echo. For the first,
recall that Vergil himself, according to the Suetonian life (11)
was “vita et ore et animo tam probum …, ut Neapoli Parthenias
vulgo appellatus sit.” Simultaneously the name Vergil recurs
as an echo of words that do not signify his presence, much as
the earlier poet had evoked Eurydice through the assonantial
half-echos of “te”. Virginis est verae facies, quam vivere credas.
(10.250).
In recovering the operations of this inherited opposition
between song as a marker of mortality and its capacity to over-
come temporal separations, I want to focus now on the figure
of Eurydice, who within the poem begins the chain of mour-
ning that will eventually resound for her own poetic mourner,
Orpheus. I start though with a paradox of Orpheus’ first song,
the one addressed to the underworld divinities. Vergil’s decision
356 AUGUSTAN POETRY
not to depict this song directly has been acclaimed by critics

of the Metamorphoses, who detect a tone of frigidity bordering
on parody in the legalism of Ovid’s language.19 But Orpheus’
mood-killing sophistry that he only wants to borrow Eurydice
not possess her in perpetuity also raises a more serious question
about time and mortality. What exactly will be the term of the
lease? Or, put another way, how long a stay on earth would
be enough for Orpheus? Indeed the glimpse that he gains of
his beloved might be as much a fulfillment of his request as a
technicality that voids it. As the song tries to express both the
law and the desire that transgresses it, so its failure to achieve
its ends coincides with its success.
And Eurydice herself figures this collapsing together of
incompatible temporal frames – the transcendent and always
repeatable instant, and its disappearance at the very moment it
comes into being – in two ways, first in her own utterance and
then when she is named. Another much noted difference in
Ovid’s treatment of this episode is that where Vergil had given
Eurydice a five line lament at the moment of her return, centered
on the poignant farewell, “iamque vale,” (4.497), Ovid provides
the Reader’s Digest condensed version, “vale”, which itself seems
less a direct quotation than a reference to one: “she spoke her
last farewell” (10.62). In doing this, the poet emphasizes the
problems of temporality latent in Orpheus’ contract with the
gods. For the moment in which Eurydice becomes a direct
presence in his own poem is reduced to a vanishing point that
signifies only her passing away. And that effect is strengthened
by Ovid’s own appropriation of the temporal adverb “iam” that
in Vergil seemingly froze the time of Eurydice’s verbal presence
by letting his readers experience the moment of final parting
from within the frame of the narrated “now”. For Ovid at once
19
For a fine and informative comparison, see Anderson (1982, 40). On legal
metaphors see Reed (2013, 173-4), with further bibliography.
“echoes” iamque again in his own narrative of Eurydice’s speech

(iamque iterum, 10.60), as if to stress the reproduction of her voice
even in his indirect account of it, but he then repeats the echo
in a way that suggests the distance between the utterance and
its recipient. Orpheus could already (iam, 10.62) scarcely hear
the speech that its own re-production has made so inaudible,
just as his own uncertain presentation of her speech as direct
discourse makes it hard for his audience to tell whether they
are hearing Eurydice’s farewell, or simply hearing of it. In the
instant of its coming into being, the word slips away from
its recipient(s).
But it is not just as a voice that Eurydice creates this effect,
it also emerges from the ambiguities of her own nomen. The word
Eurydice first appears, in a Greek genitive form, in line 10.30.
Just before Ovid had called on the divinities of the underworld to
grant his request “per … vasti silentia regni,” (10.29). Thus at the
instance when Eurydice becomes herself in the text, her name
is also susceptible to being read as a gloss on the underworld
itself. The “broad domain” her name signifies in Greek translates
the Latin vasti regni, a linguistic transference intensified by the
hyper-Greekness of the form Eurydices. Even at the moment
when she is being called forth from the underworld, as Milton
might put it, she herself is hell. It is important to note too that
in this case it is the meaning of her name, not its sound, that
seems to evoke the kingdom of the dead. But the reverse occurs
later in the song, when Eurydice’s ability to translate the powers
that compel her absence is complemented by a sonic resonance.
A more direct translation of dike into Latin will be ius, and seven
lines later, when Orpheus promises the gods of the underworld,
one of whom, Persephone, already has the cult title Eurydice,
that she will always be “yours”, he uses the phrase iuris erit vestri.
The words iuris summons up Eurydice not only in meaning but
as an assonantial echo in the same metrical sedes. (It’s only a
shame that Ovid could not avail himself of the English your as a
358 AUGUSTAN POETRY
translation of vestri.) And this same echo links the beginnings of

the episode to its endings at the conclusion of Orpheus’ second
song. As Venus creates her transient monument for Adonis,
she depicts as an inferior rival the goddess Orpheus had to
supplicate: if Persephone had the power to turn a woman into a
plant, she can do the same for a man. She also explicitly asserts
that this gesture will defy the same fates to whom Orpheus
was subject with a denial of the very assertion that Orpheus
had made to limit his song: “non tamen omnia vestri/ iuris erat,”
(10.725).20 Note that as opposed to the first example where the
translation of the actual name describes the underworld, the
signifying process now works backwards. The word that desig-
nates Eurydice is absent, but her presence can be suggested by
the sounds.
Ovid’s Orpheus episode simultaneously evokes multiple
accounts of poetic origins and transformations, finding a sour-
ce for the Latin poetic presence of Ovid’s recited text in some
fabulous, Hellenic past. Reed and Young both describe how the
sounds emanating from the Orphic head become the source for
the Aeolic songs that begin multiple traditions of erotic poetry.21
At the same time, as I have tried to argue here, Ovid’s echoes
of Vergil’s Orpheus themselves place him in a tradition of sonic
continuity that finds in the echo a trope and a mechanism for
the appropriation of Greek models and harmonizes all these
dissonant voices in the motion of the breath. And Ovid gives
this tangible phenomenon an unbelievable aetion by pegging it
to the actions of a mythical presence, Echo, whose voice we can
claim to hear in the responsions of nature. But the breath that
I have argued optimistically seems re-born in the resonances of
animus that make the second Orphic song, at least when it mer-
20
For a discussion of how Venus’ echo of Orpheus’ song to Persephone advertises
Orpheus’ presence as narrator, see Pavlock (2009, 103-4).
21
Reed (2013,312); Young (2008, 9).
ges with Ovid’s, a successful means of bringing back the dead,

recalls another even more ancient story of the origins of Roman
literature,22 for it was the anima of Homer that made possible
Ennius’ own sonic echo of Greek poetry in the hexameter.
However, as these examples show, all such narratives do
more than link song to some lost but perceptible predecessor, the
story itself becomes a prompt to probe certain views of nature.
In the Georgics the presence of an Orphic echo contrasts with
a model of agricultural reproduction based on a knowledge
of the world as it is that makes it possible to replace lost lives
with others. And in Lucretius, of course, the story of Ennius
introduces only implicitly a poetic genealogy for the De Rerum
Naturae. Rather, as Monica Gale (2007, 108-9) observes, the
transmigration of Homer’s soul prompts an inquiry into the
nature of souls themselves, just as Ennius himself becomes a poet
of natural philosophy. This oscillation between using nature to
think about literary appropriation and literary appropriation to
think about nature also emerges in Ovid’s invitation to perceive
the survival of animi in the sonic presences of the natural world.
And the problem is rooted in a struggle between a Lucretian
definition of an anima as uniquely existing only once, and an
Ennian/Pythagorean model of transmigration of intact souls.
When Ovid says that the winds that name the flower also destroy
it, the words assimilate that flower to the soul itself, which in a
key passage of Lucretius was not an eternally living essence, nor
composed of breath, but rather itself destroyed by the winds who
scatter the light round atoms of which it is made (3.487-509).
And in that very passage the irrational vocal utterances of an
epileptic give evidence of that soul’s dissolution. All these vocal
22
Cf. the comments of Ahl (1985, 59), based on very different arguments about
the poem’s opening lines: “Ovid gives voice to forms that cannot speak for
themselves. In doing so he is animating nature as Orpheus had done.” Ahl thus
finds in Orpheus an echo of the poet’s title, and a sonic anagram of the mutatas
… formas with which it begins.
360 AUGUSTAN POETRY
sounds that re-shape the words of the past do not of course really
express the animi or echo the animae of figures who perhaps,
like Orpheus or Echo, were never really there in the first place,
they are replacements composed of an entirely different physical
substance, like a soul may be made of re-used atoms without
being the same soul. And this in turn cuts away the future of
any poet’s voice, by making its survival depend on the will of
the reader to discountenance what she knows about the world.
Yet the seeming reality of poetic presences, bolstered by lessons
taught through and by these mythical figures, provide just such
an impression of survival. That same Ennius who claimed to have
been inspired by the soul of Homer, would also in his epitaph
take possession of new readers in turn, flying alive through their
mouths. And in philosophical traditions, one of the essential
authorities for the notion of the immortality of the soul was
the possibly non-existent Orpheus himself.
This model of reception, while it is good for the author
looking forward may be a quite uncomfortable one for the rea-
der or recipient who comes to hear his own voice as another’s.
The tension between these two models, as Ovid struggles to
impose a medium of poetic survival resistant to physical change,
while at the same time raising the specter that even in doing
so he has lost the fundamental aspects of his identity, emerges
ultimately from these Orphic reflections on what we hear when
we reproduce his song. And indeed a final internal echo reveals
how the stakes of this dilemma are linked particularly to Ovid’s
text. For the entire scope of the poem progresses from a focus
on the Ovidian animus, here masculine and strongly linked to
the rational, intentional capacities of an individual author, to
that same author’s willed but uncertain presence in the voice of
each speaker.23 Each instance of the poem’s utterance as sound
therefore offers a synchronic epitome of its epic motion. Not only
23
I owe this point to observations made Alexandre Hasegawa during the discussion
that followed the presentation of this paper as a lecture.
does the phrase animos ferarum thus re-echo the work’s opening,
perhaps reminding us further that this is now Ovid’s poem not
Orpheus’ but it integrates this transition into the progression
from a lost anima, to a present “breath”, anemos, that may or
may not be a soul. Again, precisely the most physically tangible
manifestation of poetic performance, the breath of the speaker,
that makes these aural presences seem so miraculous, also pro-
vides the material refutation of such literary metempsychosis.
As Ovid, or Orpheus, might put it, the very winds that name
these figures from the poetic past also destroy them.
II.
My aim in the second part of this discussion will be
to integrate the problem of what sort of presence can be
conveyed by the voice into the larger concern with the desire
for immortality in the episode. I will concentrate on a second
great transformation Ovid effects in the Vergilian Orpheus, for
not only does he make him a more emphatically vocal figure,
he also re-casts his desires in the amatory sphere.24 Instead of a
lover whose elegiac longings were always directed towards the
perpetuation of a lost past, Ovid’s Orpheus seemingly moves
on to greener pastures. He no longer manifests his old love but
teaches new ones, and the various imagined objects of desire will
serve as replacements not only for Eurydice, but also for himself.
My analysis of Orpheus’ sexual desire will not only suggest
a link between this erotic transformation and the pursuit of
immortality through poetry, it will also treat the specific means
of this pursuit – sexual as opposed to “vocal” reproduction – as
a trope for poetic succession. At the same time, this perspective
will show how Orpheus’ second song, with its own distinctive
24
However this was itself a return to a pre-Vergilian tradition of Orpheus as a
pederastic poet, on which see Makowski (1996).
362 AUGUSTAN POETRY
mixture of generic properties, forms a bridge between the zero-

grade of immediate sonic utterance and the epic scope of Ovid’s
epic as a whole. For, as the presence of the voice instantiates and
miraculously escapes the limits of physical reality, at the same
time that Orpheus tries to teach lessons about time’s passage,
rather than experiencing them, the song as a whole signals its
own subjection to temporality. 25
We will begin by returning to the way that paradoxes of
generic affiliation in Ovid’s Orpheus extend the use of generic
struggles in the Georgics to sketch different views of human
temporal limits.26 In the previous section, I noted the references
to lamentation and complaint in Vergil’s poem that characterize
Orpheus’ song with the distinctive vocabulary of elegy and thus
point a contrast with the more forward-looking and productive
discourse of didactic poetry, which teaches you how to get on
with things. 27 Ovid, whose elegiac origins can frequently be
glimpsed through the Metamorphoses’ epic affiliations, in making
the lamenting figure not the subject but the speaker of his poetry
seems to be challenging Vergil by removing the representational
boundaries that marginalized Orpheus, putting elegy back into
hexameters rather than shutting it out.28 But he has another
25
Oliensis (2009), from a psycho-analytic perspective offers a somewhat
analogous double reading of Orpheus’s second song as at once a lamentation
and a subconscious revelation of his guilt.
26
I should note that many generic ‘strains’ have been detected in this episode in
previous scholarship [especially perhaps Knox (1986, 48-64)]; in what follows,
though, I will emphasize one particular ‘dialogue’, that between elegy and
didactic. For the model of generic dialogicity as a method of interpreting the
poem, see especially Farrell (1992). Of particular note is Ziogas’ (2013, 148-54)
account of the song as a post-Hesiodic catalog poem.
27
For such elegiac intrusions see also Thomas (1988, 2.204). Bound up in the issue,
of course, is the presence of the arch-elegist Gallus behind Orpheus, on which
see Thomas (1988, 1.13-6).
28
For other, very influential, readings of how Orpheus re-forms Ovid’s poetic
career, see especially Leach (1974, 119-25), Janan (1988, 114-6), and Nagle
(1988, 111-21).
tactic up his sleeve in this generic skirmish. For his Orpheus

does not just recall and expand the original elegiac voice; he
also figures the same sequence of succession and condemnation
that Vergil puts in motion. At the moment when Orpheus takes
over as the narrator of Ovid’s poem, he has moved on. Leaving
the language of mourning and desire for Eurydice behind, he
is now a poet with a didactic mission. Vergil’s Orpheus masters
time with language – resisting the markers of time’s passage
by re-writing them as elegiac lament – but Ovid’s experiences
time’s transformative powers. And the effect of its passage is
both to remove him from the actual sphere of erotic activity (at
least with females) and to turn him into an author (10.79-85).
During that same time, Orpheus has shut himself off from the
sexual preference that Ovid himself helps establish as canonical
for elegy, rejecting women and turning to pederasty, and also
seemingly embraced the kind of lyric acceptance of temporality
in the advice to “pluck (carpere) the brief spring of youth.” Such
are the themes of Orpheus’ song and the wisdom he wants to
convey to the Thracian community. And the particular ironies of
a song that at once aims to teach its audience of the inevitability
of time’s passage, the lesson Vergil’s Orpheus never learned,
and seemingly also to escape it emerges when we remember
that the specific listeners he tells to “pluck the first flowers” are
themselves trees, and indeed trees who, as the absent presence
of Cyparissus reminds us, might themselves have been ripe for
metaphorical as well as literal plucking.
A closer consideration of those trees helps further connect
these generic ambiguities with the contradictory vantage points
on temporality. A salient characteristic of these trees, and one
much observed is that their own unstable identity matches the
proliferation of literary genres that they evoke.29 The breakable
(fragiles) hazel bushes, like those under which Vergil’s pastoral
29
The interpretation of trees as signifiers of different poetic genres/registers goes
back to the virtuoso discussion of Pöschl, 1960 (particularly interesting here for
364 AUGUSTAN POETRY
goat miscarries, are themselves sonically hardened into the quin-

tessentially warlike ash trees (fraxinus), whose literary roots go
all the way back to Priam of the good ash spear (10.93).30 The
trees are anthropomorphized not only because they are endo-
wed with magical motion by Orpheus’ song, but because Ovid’s
own song has taught us to see in several of them an unnamed
human presence.31 Conversely, as Orpheus sets the wood in
motion, that action reminds us that in Ovid becoming a tree
means losing the softness and mobility of life in exchange for
the hard facts of memory. Thus the trees each figure Orpheus’
own literary instability, either as an always elegiac presence
renewed in the genres of epic and didactic, or as having lost his
defining characteristics by being transformed into the hard but
lofty genre of epic. Yet the problem of whether trees connote
the mortals who once inhabited them or their highly fixed lite-
rary identities itself relates to a fundamental symbolic function
of trees in classical literature, as symbols of mortality. In both
archaic epic (Il. 6.145-51) and elegy (Mimn., 2.1-8W) we are
reminded that the generation of men is like the generation of
leaves. Trees juxtapose the brief but recurring produce of fruit
and leaves, there to be “plucked”, and the diachronic presence
that becomes visible as each specific individual disappears.
While Ovid’s first song is addressed to shades who were once
its emphasis on how sonic effects make the woods themselves echo Orpheus’
song). See also, especially, Nagle (1988, 118-20).
30
And the generic interference seems especially heightened through a pattern of
cunning and meticulous allusion. Thus in Ennius the hard ash is itself broken,
frangitur, (6.177), but Ovid seems to have displaced this property onto the
shrubbier hazel. But in respect to Vergil’s tree catalog at the beginning of
Georgics 2, the transformation works the other way. Because there coryli are not
breakable, but, on the contrary, exceedingly hard, edurae, for the feet that trod
on them (2.65). Neatly Ovid anthropomorphizes the tree by making us consider
that being stepped on is bad for the hazel bush too. But he simultaneously
exaggerates a generic contrast between hard and soft the early literary tradition
itself blurs.
31
Also emphasized by Ahl (1985, 214).
alive but are now eternally the same, stereotyped figures of the
literary landscape, he sings his second song to fixed presences
of the literary landscape through which we see the humans who
once inhabited them occasionally emerging through the leaves.
The song Ovid’s Orpheus produces on this occasion has
attracted much attention for its remarkable semantic complexity.
One central problem is that the voice of Orpheus seems overly
present. Apollo seems to ventriloquize for him when he at once
blames and exculpates himself for the death of his beloved
Hyacinthus. Pygmalion’s ability to bring life to the dead – or
rather the tactful displacement of this superhuman power onto
the divinity not the artist – seems transparently an exercise in
wish fulfillment. Cinyras’ recognition of his daughter Myrrha
echoes the fatal backward glance that sent Eurydice back to
death, and Venus’ failed attempt to preserve Adonis fits the same
pattern. The Orphic perspective seems therefore to cross gender
and species boundaries as it is appropriated by male and female
as well as human and divine. In doing so, and in combining the
lamentation for his own condition with the assumption of those
divine identities that enforce by contrast the mortal constraints
that condemn Orpheus to lament, Orpheus’ song mimics the
doubleness I have been trying to define. He at once manifests
and experiences sorrow and he teaches it, viewing mortality from
the outside, and indeed putting himself in the very position of
the divinities who impose the necessity of Eurydice’s return to
the dead, and from the subjective perspective of the mourner,
as indeed the divinities themselves are transformed by anthro-
pomorphization. Apollo only falls in love in poetry, and when
he does he loses his own enduring characteristics.
The complexities of this song have been powerfully analy-
zed by Micaela Janan and Victoria Rimell, both of whom place
particular emphasis on what these narratives tell us about love and
desire. Janan, for example, stresses how Orpheus’ song promotes
a fantasy of desire immune from the loss of control that happens
366 AUGUSTAN POETRY
when identities merge. Orpheus wants to remedy or avenge his

sorrow by casting the blame on a female other, and from now
on only loving those who are already the same as he; and the
outcomes that show the failure of such a strategy complicate
his authority and language within the poem. Yet Janan’s piece
appeared slightly before a “Roman sexual revolution” that forced
a re-evaluation of how ancient categories of sexual behavior
match our own. When we name Orpheus’ desires homosexual,
it inevitably underlines the “sameness” of subject and object
within this relationship. But the Romans’ highly polarizing
descriptions of the participants in sexual intercourse as active
or passive impose difference where we might be inclined to see
sameness. And so if the particular language Ovid uses can make
gender a point of similarity between the poet and his partners,
he sets up another boundary between them, one defined by time.
The males Orpheus loves are, unlike some of the trees, tender,
teneros and they are on “the near side of youth”.32 The latter
distinction conforms of course to common ancient aesthetic
preferences for males just at the point of youth – an ephemeral
moment often described as here with the imagery of vegetable
“flowering”. It also, though, highlights a tension with the ideal
elegiac relationship, which is everlasting and unchanging. This
stress on a difference of age rather than sameness of gender gives
a very different perspective on the thematic significance of such
desire here. It is the desire not for another identical to one’s self,
but to one’s younger self. And, as we shall see, it is precisely this
element of temporal difference that emerges in more exagge-
rated form when Orpheus gives his own version of his didactic
theme. The narrator’s description had highlighted “translating”
love to males before youth (10.84), but what Orpheus announces
as his theme is a specific version of that, boys loved by divini-
32
On the importance of transitional temporal moments in Orpheus’ song, see
Rimell (2006, 106-9).
ties (10.152-3). The ephemeral “flower” of youth now stands

out all the more by contrast to the immortality of the boys’
lovers.33
My interpretation of this new Orphic theme takes its
cue from a much later comparand that also has an ancestor in a
Vergilian underworld. In Canto 15 of Inferno, Dante depicts the
punishment of the sodomites as an endless procession, beneath
a fiery rain, around the circular trajectory of the seventh level of
the underworld. John Freccero demonstrates that the nature of
the punishment and the placement of the sinners argues here
too against the notion that excessive desire or the particular
gender desired alone condemns the sodomites as “violent against
nature”. Rather it is their pursuit of immortality “by other
means”; in this case the succession of teacher and student, linking
the figure of Brunetto to his pupil Dante, suggests a desire
for worldly fame that displaces other models of generational
succession. In particular this lateral motion round and round
contrasts with the ideal relationship between father and son
that finds its didactic realization in Aeneas’ encounter with
Anchises in Vergil’s epic catabasis, and can be re-interpreted in
the Christian transfiguration of worldly experience through the
embodiment of the Father in the Son. Of course this particular
vertical route to eternity cannot figure in Ovid’s poem, but
Freccero’s analysis of Dante makes a particular sense out of two
aspects of Orpheus’ song, the way that pederasty translates into
problems of representation and immortalization, and, second,
the use of incest as a foil to the praise of the love of pueri.
33
Note as well that a different inequality is given in the Ars (2.682-4) as the
reason for Ovid’s dislike of pederasty: unlike the ideal heterosexual coupling,
in which both partners share in the pleasure ex aequo, sexual pleasure with boys
is always one-sided. If authentic Ovidian erotodidaxis leads to success, frozen
in a moment of amatory bliss that concludes the Ars in both its two-book and
three-book forms, Orpheus re-injects a more authentically elegiac note, where
what endures is lamentation for lost loves.
368 AUGUSTAN POETRY
The importance of modalities of immortality as a theme

in the song is signaled at its very beginning. As I noted before,
the translation of Orpheus from elegy to epos mirrors at once
Ovid’s succession to Vergil, and the attempt to revise his former
elegiac self. So too Orpheus’ starting point suggests a resumption
and a correction of earlier metamorphic catalogs in the poem.34
And here it is striking that Orpheus’ song seems at once strictly
to follow the rules of hierarchical propriety by beginning as
that arch-didactic poem, Aratus’ Phaenomena, with Jupiter
himself. (And I note in passing that this is a gesture of filiation
as well; Jupiter is Orpheus’ maternal and paternal grandfather.)
This incipit corrects the beginning of Ovid’s own epic, which
pointedly reverses Aratus’ own sequence. In the Phaenomena
the sea is full of Zeus, but Ovid’s poem takes us back “before
the sea” (ante mare, 1.5) not to an intrinsic Zeus, but to a time
before metamorphosis was possible because there was only one
countenance in all nature, Chaos, a face that is at once a sign
of emptiness, if we cleave to its Greek meaning, and all faces
indistinguishably merged, according to Ovid’s definition of it
as rudis indigestaque moles (1.7). But of course at the same time
that Orpheus’ beginning seems to bring Ovid’s back into literary
and religious orthodoxy, it is also immensely transgressive.35
For the context of this catalog paints Jupiter not in naturalistic
terms, but in the hyper-anthropoid and philosophically
scandalous guise of a sexual predator. The always elegiac Ovid
still seems to be giving form to his gods rather than the other
way around.
This face of Ovid’s Jupiter emerges more clearly when
we measure Orpheus’ beginnings not against external poetic
norms, but against other didactic catalogs generated within
the poem. One internal artist who does begin with Jupiter is
34
See also Johnson (2008).
35
Cf. especially the discussion of Barchiesi (1989, 65-6).
of course Arachne, whose catalog of divine rapes opens with

Jupiter’s deceptions of Europa, Leda, and others (6.103-14).
The rape of Ganymede, which similarly requires Jupiter to
assume an animal disguise, would seem to continue Arachne’s
subject, but it differs in important respects. First, Arachne not
only concentrates on women, but as Ovid himself had done in
his Europa narrative, changes the tenor of the story by leaving
out the offspring to focus on the sexual encounter. She is not
interested in Minos or Castor and Pollux, and her reference
to Jupiter filling Nycteis with offspring seems primarily an
aggressive inversion of Aratus’ claim that all things are “full”
of Zeus. What Arachne’s tapestry preserves is of course an
accusation of the gods that makes them forever bestial, and an
artistic image of the facies of “all” the god’s female victims (6.121-
2). And it is this emphasis on the falsity of the gods’ disguises
that will be the second important variation in Orpheus’ song.
Janan reads Jupiter’s transformation into an eagle as a sign of the
alienating power of desire, that makes even the king of the gods
no longer himself (1988, 116-7). And the feathers are described,
in highly Arachnid terms as “cheating”, mendacibus (10.159).
Yet from another perspective, Jupiter’s choice of form uniquely
conveys his identity as much as it masks it. The eagle is, again
in rebuttal of Arachne’s polymorphic divinity, the only thing
into which Jupiter would wish to be changed. And since this
form already conveys, through its own unique potency (posset),
the identifying weapons of Jupiter; what Jupiter turns himself
into here is a sign that can only denote the god himself. And
equally importantly, Ganymede too will be enabled to preserve
his identity forever, not obviously through the offspring he bears
Jupiter, nor through an artistic representation such as Arachne
offers Europa, but as himself.36
36
See also the similar reading of Hardie (2002, 65).
370 AUGUSTAN POETRY
This beginning thus delicately balances the possibilities

of reading Orpheus’ song as an eroticized debasement of a
didactic poem that could show the truth about the gods, where
the minute we see Jupiter, he vanishes into a viciously motivated
deception, or rather as a revelation of song as the expression
of immortal essences – a Jupiter unchanged by desire, and a
youth who escapes from temporality not as a mere sign or
image, but as himself. Such a translation of pederastic desire
to an artistic aspiration, indeed to the transcendence of the
mortal condition, provides a template for reading the imperfect
approximations of the pattern that follow. Jupiter’s son Apollo,
does not elevate his beloved Hyacinthus, who only becomes
eternal in a very qualified way (qua licet, aeternus tamen es,
10.164): through annual recurrence as a flower. Nor does this
his divine lover remain himself; rather he assumes the paleness
of the youth he mourns (10.185-6). The final distance between
Adonis and the windflower, and the link of its naming and its
disappearance discussed in the previous section, stand out all
the more as the polar opposite to Jupiter’s blending of erotic
success, immortalization, and self-representation at the song’s
beginning.
Another way Orpheus’ sexual preferences figure
simultaneously the transience of life and the pursuit of an
eternal self is through intratextual comparison to the experience
of the poem’s most conspicuous earlier male lover of young
men, Narcissus. Orpheus has sometimes been described as
“narcissistic” in the modern sense of someone whose desires are
always ultimately directed towards himself,37 but the comparison
with Ovid’s own Narcissus can help sharpen the significance of
this resemblance beyond a vague sense of moral impropriety or
psychological pathology. Let us recall for a start that Narcissus
37
For the characterization of the poetic Orpheus as a narcissist, see Anderson
(1989, 3).
exists in that transient instant of beauty that an Orpheus most

desires. He benefits from the autonomy that such beauty gives
him without the suspicion that times will change and the
desired will ever come to desire. In larger mythical terms, his
ephebic moment, enjoyed, appropriately beyond the reaches
of civilization, may remind us of the condition of Hippolytus,
whose similar rejection of women and marriage suggests a too
close approximation to the divine Artemis. Such absolute purity
figures the divine removal from the cyclicality of human life
– reproduction and the loss of a beloved – which Hippolytus’
mortal status rules out for him.38 In Orpheus’ case the situation
is in some senses very different, because he has married, but in
his new grief he pursues a version of Narcissus’ ideal isolation,
and it is in revenge for this that he is ultimately killed, just
as Narcissus’ death will be brought about by the reciprocity
of Nemesis. However, there is of course one other salient
difference between Narcissus and Orpheus. Narcissus rejects
lovers of both sexes, while Orpheus has a strongly polar set of
preferences, hating women as much as his Hippolytan exemplar,
but strongly post-Narcissan in his desire for the reflection of
himself. This dichotomy helps make clear both that what begins
as the pursuit of autonomy in the case of Narcissus, acquires a
retrospective element in the case of Orpheus, who is looking
back at the moment of his youth, perhaps as though he never
married, and simultaneously the powerful rejection of another
mechanism available to humans for transcending their own
mortality, that is, offspring.39 In this regard it is interesting to
note that Orpheus’ sexual preferences do not subsist after death
38
For this interpretation of Hippolytus’ virginity as an avoidance of temporal
transitions, see Goldhill (1986, 120-1). Other allusions to the Hippolytus in
Orpheus song have been analyzed by Pavlock (2009, 96-9) and M. D. Thomas
(1998).
39
For offspring as an alternative to a number of commemorative strategies in the
poem, see Meinrath (2014).
372 AUGUSTAN POETRY
but are reset to an ideal originary desire for Eurydice in the

underworld.
And the image of Ser Brunetto in Inferno may perhaps
give new significance to another element of Ovid’s final portrait
of the two lovers, the parity of their steps as they walk through
the arva piorum:
invenit Eurydicen cupidisque amplectitur ulnis.
hic modo coniunctis spatiantur passibus ambo,
nunc praecedentem sequitur, nunc praevius anteit
Eurydicenque suam iam tuto respicit Orpheus. (11.63-6)
As Freccero describes, Brunetto’s encounter with his younger

protégé Dante will be mapped in a(n all too momentary) spatial
displacement around the circular course of the pit, as he lingers
to converse with him:
E quelli: “O figliuol mio, non ti dispiaccia
se Brunetto Latino un poco teco
ritorna ’n dietro e lascia andar la traccia”.
(Inf. 15.31-3)
As he seems to go back to his earthly existence and to recapture

the past in the company of this false son, so his progress slows
relative to the group he was originally with. At the end of
their conversation, a new group is approaching of which he
is forbidden to be a part. He turns back and “seemed one of
those who race for the green cloth through the countryside in
Verona, and one of those who wins, not loses,” (15.121-4). The
ambiguous seeming victory of Brunetto in a race that he really
has already lost by being a competitor most directly describes
the ambiguous place he has come to occupy, so far behind one
group that he seems to be the winner among the next. Freccero
(1991, 71) comments, “if the infernal race were thought of as
analogous to the succession of generations, then he would be
the man who attempts to pause in the race towards death and
so, momentarily, seems to be out of front in the succeeding
pack.” In a similar way, the dead Orpheus’ ability to gaze back on
Eurydice in safety does more than simply reverse the moment in

which he lost her as a mortal presence. The tragic priority that
took Eurydice to the underworld before her time and before
Orpheus, which Orpheus is powerless to reverse by maintaining
the lead or by only looking ahead, emphatically vanishes in this
vision of eternity.40
But the concluding emphases on being ahead or behind
also highlights the role of games and competition in Orpheus’
song as a depiction of what lovers do. The only interaction
between Apollo and Hyacinthus depicted in the poem is a most
unequal certamen, in which Apollo’s first throw of the discus
proves literally crushing. In the penultimate narrative, Atalanta’s
experience of sexuality depends on the outcome of a race. As in
that contest the playful modulation of her speed in response to
the stirrings of Venus contrasts with the circumstance that her
defeated suitors really were running for their lives, so the entire
imagery of the contest recalls at once the erotic “race” that both
lovers only win by finishing at the same time (Ars 2.727), but the
race of mortality in which we only win relative to others, always
overtaken by those born later. According to an erotic reading
of the image, the equal steps of Orpheus after being re-united
with Eurydice may signal the return to an original heterosexual
40
There, the fatal backward glance forms part of a highly linearized progression.
The “law” Persephone gives in the Georgics is simply that Eurydice follow behind
(pone sequens, 4.487); and Orpheus breaks it at first not so much by looking
backwards as by halting (restitit, 4.490). When Ovid revises this by applying the
goddess’ prescription simply to the gaze (ne flectat retro sua lumina, 10.51), he also
himself casts a glance backwards at this model. The bathetic-seeming detail that
Eurydice was still slowed by her wound (10.49) points to the Vergilian emphasis
on pace, which Ovid will pick up in turn at their reunion. It further links this
imagery specifically to the facts of mortality, since what literally and figuratively
slows her is the wound that caused her death. And finally, the humor of the
image itself poses a question highly important to the themes of this discussion:
do souls participate in material reality? The double reversal in book 11, evoking
both Vergil and Ovid’s own account of Orpheus’ transgression, is also noted by
Neumeister (1986, 181).
374 AUGUSTAN POETRY
desire where such a climax is uniquely possible, given Ovid’s

construction of pederasty as defined by unequal pleasure. But
reflection on other paradigms of the race create an extremely
polarized reading. Hector’s death may be imagined as a footra-
ce, but only to have the ludic aspect of that image immediately
rejected. He is running for his life, and will never be re-united
with the wife who gazes at him from the uncrossable boundary
of the walls. The quality of interference between the different
generic associations of the language in which Orpheus and
Eurydice’s re-union is described serves perhaps to superimpose
an epic seriousness about mortality and a didactic lesson about
replacement on the subject of elegiac desire, but it does so only
at the risk of pulling the integrity of the discourse apart, by
subjecting the weightier readings of the episode to the suspi-
cion of parody, but conversely by suggesting that such stylized
erotic happy endings exist only in stories, as a fantastical and
highly literary conceit as removed from any real struggle for
immortal existence as the poetic underworld is from the reality
of death.
A similar kind of generic self-consumption by which
Orpheus’ song constructs two antithetical readings of its aims
and success appears when we try to understand his pre-occu-
pation with incest in terms not of his own pathological wish to
displace the guilt he feels for Eurydice’s loss onto women but
rather as illuminated by his emphasis on the pursuit of eternal
presence through desire. The emphatic revulsion Orpheus fo-
cuses on children as objects of desire highlights by contrast the
opposing idealization of objects of desire taking the place of
children. When Jupiter makes Ganymede immortal in the face
of Juno’s hostility, we may think of this as another example of
the queen of the gods characterized as perpetually jealous of
erotic rivals like Semele, whatever their gender. But Juno is of
course equally vengeful against the children of these unions,
such as Hercules and Dionysus. And this whole motif may recall
the more ancient rivalry between the male and female based on
reproductive capacities. Zeus’ ability in the Theogony to produce
an offspring that will always represent but never succeed him,
contrasts with the rebellious and misbegotten parthenogenetic
children of Hera and Gaea.41 (It was these very earth-born
giants whose defeat Orpheus used to sing about, 10.150-1.) In
this case, the immortalization of the youth Ganymede may be
as much about the production of an immortal offspring as an
immortal erotic rival. So too the lover in the next song is also
a father, the poet’s own genitor (10.167), juxtaposing Orpheus
the offspring who emulates his father as a singer with the only
cyclically immortal youth whom that father “loved before all
others”. Although Ovid uses diligere almost exclusively in erotic
contexts, since it can in Latin be commonly used of offspring
(TLL, s.v. 1177.81ss.), one wonders whether Orpheus’ ante om-
nes here also implies a comparison with his father’s love for him
as his child. And when Venus falls in love with Adonis, she does
so after a potentially incestuous encounter with her own son,
Cupid – pierced by his weapon in the midst of kisses (10.525-
8).42 And the person with whom she falls in love, Adonis, had
just been figured as the visual image of that child (10.515-8).
This substitution for the child by the beloved also inflects
the particular aspirations and nature of Orpheus’ song. I have
argued that in relation to the first of Orpheus’ themes “boys
loved by the gods” (10.152-3), we should place the emphasis
on the disparity of duration between gods and boys as much
as their sexual sameness. When gods love youths it prompts at
once a prospect of immortality for a beloved youth, and after
the first normative example of such desire actually fulfilled in
Jupiter and Ganymede, provides an unceasing and recurrent
41
Zeitlin (1995, 108).
42
See M. D. Thomas (1998, 102-3); Hardie (2002, 187-8), and Pavlock (2009,
96-7).
376 AUGUSTAN POETRY
source of song as mourning. When mortal offspring desire their

parents it reveals by contrast the parents’ age and can serve as
the accusation of song itself. Orpheus, introducing the story of
Myrrha, who conforms to his second theme (women struck by
illicit desire, 10.153-4) he worries about the seductive capacities
of his own song, and counters by stripping it of its fundamen-
tal didactic pre-requisite fides. (And this seems a very Ovidian
gesture in combining his ironic defense of the Metamorphoses as
untrue, e.g. at Tr. 2. 64, with his defense of Ars as not actually
transforming morality, Tr. 2.307-14.) Thus the same song that
translates the loss of the beloved into a lamentation for the
transience of mortality from the perspective of divinities, can
simultaneously emerge as a transgressive attempt to transcend
the limits of nature. As the speaker whose real presence must be
emphatically denied, Myrrha, wants to be like the gods through
incest, so the song comes to police and accuse itself. Its ultimate
failure as a mode of propagation now seems willed by a poet who
rejects the existence of its subject, while the elegiac perpetuation
of mourning derived from failure compensates for the inevita-
bility of change. If Orpheus had not lost Eurydice he would
never have sung, or rather his voice would never have reached
us, since his only earlier song, the cletic hymn to Hymenaeus,
is mentioned but not represented. As elegy, song’s failure is its
success, while as didactic its success, its ability to inspire fides
and emulation, to persuade the gods of the underworld to end
their empire, or to provide an exemplum for mortal girls of the
divine pleasures of incest, would be a transgression. Elegy can
become didactic if it teaches limitations as well as attempting
to overcome them, but it cannot ever succeed in providing a
reliable means of reproduction, like Vergilian didaxis.
To help parse how reproduction and remembrance cor-
relate with the paradoxical combination of transcendence and
transgression in Orpheus’ song, let us press the issues of literary
genealogy and biological paternity a little farther. The starting
point for Freccero’s reading of Dante’s Brunetto is the contrast
between this pederastic literary father and the capacity of real

fathers to set their offspring on a track back to life on earth.
And one of the paradigms for this ideal poetic act of instruc-
tion is Vergil’s own Anchises. At that moment in Vergil’s epic,
the georgic bees propagated through Aristaeus song take on
substance as Aeneas sees offspring who will become real in
history (Aen. 6.707). But he also re-enacts and displaces the
moment of Orphic failure when the son’s inability to grasp his
father’s shade at once repeats and transforms the poet’s loss of
his beloved Eurydice: Aeneas gains a future sine fine for the
sacrifice of a return to/of the past. Orpheus’ second song in the
Metamorphoses does not teach successions of generations beco-
ming real. As it replaces sons with lovers, so it simultaneously
re-casts the relationship between real parents and children as
erotic transgression. 43 In generic terms, by sticking with the
authentic Orpheus, as opposed to his “successor”, in terms only
of Vergil’s literary production, Aeneas, Ovid may seem to be
highlighting the pre-eminence of an elegiac over a didactic voice,
but he is also transforming the capacity of the two genres to
define one another. He brings out the erotic in the “real” human
succession that at once necessitates didactic poetry and provides
the medium for its propagation, as fathers teach their offspring
what they need to know about the nature of life. In doing so he
re-casts that mechanism of succession and that poetic tradition
as repugnant, and a violation of limits precisely because of the
kind of immortality it promises. By contrast in giving elegy the
long temporal reach of epic and the persuasiveness of didactic,
he makes the failures of desire compete with the lessons of epic
“success”ion as the truest kind of instruction.
Orpheus’ emphasis on pederasty thus reciprocally deforms
the programmatic relationship that figures and inspires poetic
43
As the phrase “sons and lovers” reveals, this argument about the slippage between
erotic objects and offspring is much indebted to Oliensis’ (1997) analysis of a
similar tension in the Aeneid.
378 AUGUSTAN POETRY
production for both elegy and epic/didactic. In comparison to

elegy, the Orphic substitution of relationships between those
different in age for those different in gender sets that genre’s
interest in unending love and lament on an epic scale. The dis-
parity between dying boys and immortal divinities pushes the
contrast between mortality and immortality to the extreme, and
substitutes for the elegiac poet, claiming to love throughout his
life and recognized as a lover at the moment of his death, an
ambition for escaping the cycle of mortality. By contrast, the
substitution of relationships based on subjective erotic desire
for those based on genealogical succession hints that even the
licit and recognizably mortal strategies of ideological repro-
duction, through the training of like-minded offspring and a
poetic strategy grafted to such propagation, have their roots in
the same individual desire for immortality. And this can appear
as transgressive within the theogonic frame of myth as the
alliance between imperial propagation and desire can in terms
of contemporary ideological polarities. In return, the model of
the elegiac poet’s voice surviving alone as a record of loss makes
it possible to hear Orpheus’ didaxis in new ways. It is now the
poet’s voice and not the wisdom he represents that endures.
Orpheus’ end perfectly depicts this, for he survives both as a
disembodied voice in this world, and as an unreal presence in
the underworld, where he loves Eurydice with a fervor, time-
lessness, and reciprocity that fulfills all the desires embodied in
a Propertian or Tibullan underworld. But just as he will never
cross the threshold back to reality, so we need never believe in
his existence there as anything other than a poetic fantasy.
****
The Orpheus who matches his steps with Eurydice in

this fictive underworld may seem to return via Ovid’s text to a
version of the conceptual space he occupies in the Georgics. There
he was constrained and limited by a series of geographic rivers,

marking the boundaries of Thrace as they do of the underworld,
that figure the containment of his own desires and mechanisms
for achieving them within the compass of a didactic poem that
itself crosses oceans to put the mythical artes of distant cultures
to work in the real soil of Italy. Yet balancing the Orpheus who
is described in this way, emerges another who makes the world
echo his song, and whose presence is heard through the chain of
voices that seemingly distance him from Vergil’s text. My aim in
this paper has been to show how Ovid’s treatment of Orpheus
inserts his own poem into both dimensions of the Vergilian
tradition. In doing so, he interrogates and further destabilizes
the doubled presence of Orpheus established there through
what I have loosely called elegiac and didactic readings of his
predecessor’s poem. But equally important is the way he deploys
those alternative perceptions of poetry to manifest central the-
mes of his own work. An Orphic Metamorphoses does more than
take Ovidian epic back to its roots in elegy, it fundamentally
doubles the voice of the poet and locates its source inside and
outside his text. The narrating Ovid who seems nowhere more
in control of his narrative than when he so transparently engages
the work of a literary predecessor, simultaneously appears as
possessed by the voice that text generates and ultimately ends in
the same place as Orpheus and Vergil before him, at a boundary
between the past he can describe and the future he can only really
occupy as a voice himself. His poem as a whole, like the goddess
whose words Orpheus takes over at the conclusion of his song,
speaks the “law” to which he is subject. Yet that law controverts
itself by naming, and making any reader name, the lost figure of
Eurydice. Arguably no aspect of Ovid’s poem is more present in
the world of its audience, more undeniably immanent than the
sounds it produces from the mouths of its readers. An effort to
hear an Orphic voice makes this present phenomenon at once
signify merely the prompts of a tradition of earlier texts that
380 AUGUSTAN POETRY
produce vibrating echoes in the air, and re-configure that breath

as the surviving animae of a series of lamented souls.
At the border between the between the depiction of
Orpheus as a living sonic presence, making the river banks
echo his flebile nescioquid, and an Orpheus who has, so to speak
returned to script in the arva piorum, comes a final figure at once
of finality and re-birth, the serpent who bites the poet’s severed
head, or was about to when Apollo freezes his gaping mouth
open. The resulting silence makes the serpent itself an emblem
of Young’s account of Orpheus’ condemnation simply to being a
part of literary history by an act of writing that silences his voice.
Her own memorable treatment of the scene, however, stresses at
once the corporeal vulnerability of the serpent’s victim and how
the sibilants in Ovid’s narrative manifest to the reader this very
moment of bodily danger.44 I would like to conclude by further
considering the doubleness of the serpent. An interpretation of it
as a symbol of script suggests its ability not just to figure Ovid’s
text but to figure immediately within it. While I cannot find
any evidence that the ancients interpreted it so, the very shape
of the serpent suggests various graphic features of the Ovidian
page. While Orpheus’ name may begin “orally” and progress
through the onomatopoetic lament “heu” it ends with what Ben
Jonson calls “the serpent’s letter”. And this name forms the last
word of Ovid’s narrative (11.66).45 But, as Young describes, the
serpent is as much a heard as a graphic presence in Ovid’s poem.
The letters that may make Ovid’s poem reflect that hardened
visual monument produced by Apollo also echo its own sibilant
voice. On the one hand, the snake that killed Eurydice and then
threatens Orpheus’ os, traces a progression in the text, literally
44
Young (2008, 1).
45
Based on Barchiesi’s (1997, 190-91) description of a similar closural serpent in
book 15, I wonder whether a coronis, the paratextual marker that separates the
individual poems in a manuscript, may similarly have coiled beside this textual
boundary within the poem.
from head to toe, or heel to face, that signals the inescapable

recurrence of death. (Or perhaps its transcendence, since its
proverbial sting is thwarted at last by the actions of Apollo.) It
is always the same, and its hissing may be heard as well as seen
in both the underworld passages it introduces:
quam satis ad superas postquam Rhodopeius auras
deflevit vates, ne non temptaret et umbras,
ad Styga Taenaria est ausus descendere porta
perque leves populos simulacraque functa sepulcro
(10.11-14)
invenit Eurydicen cupidisque amplectitur ulnis;

hic modo coniunctis spatiantur passibus ambo,
nunc praecedentem sequitur, nunc praevius anteit
Eurydicenque suam iam tuto respicit Orpheus. (11.63-6)
These sonic and visual echoes, the latter perhaps mirroring

too the rivers that enclose the Orphic textual landscape as
much in Ovid as they do in Vergil, make it an all too apt
closural device.46 Yet the very actions the lovers perform in the
underworld, their embracing, and not least the passibus by which
now one and now another advances, equally give their life after
death a serpentine quality. As much as a demarcation we may
choose to see the serpent as marking a return, and imagine him
as a figure for the recovery of the past as much as its loss, a kind
of ouroboros47 that marks the beginning of Orpheus as much
as its ending.
46
Genovese (1983, 152): “Like the epic in which it is set, [the Orpheus-Eurydice
story] begins and ends with a serpent.”
47
In a class discussion of this passage in fall 2014, one of my Princeton students,
Miles Hinson, asked about the image of the serpent as ouroboros, and I happily
acknowledge my debt to this perception.
382 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Bibliography
Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Alpers, P. 2013. “Apostrophe and the Rhetoric of Renaissance Lyric.”
Representations 122: 1-22.
Anderson, W. A. 1982. “The Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid: flebile nescio
quid.” In Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth, J. Warden, ed., 25-50.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
______. 1989. “The Artist’s Limits in Ovid: Orpheus, Pygmalion, and
Daedalus.” Syllecta Classica 1: 1–11.
Barchiesi, A. 1989. “Voci e istanze narrativi nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio.”
MD 23: 55-97.
______. 1997. “Endgames: Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 and Fasti 6.” In:
Classical Closure, D. H. Roberts, F. M. Dunn, and D. Fowler, eds., 181-
208. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
______, ed., 2005. Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Volume I: Libri I–II. Milan:
Fondazione Lorenzo Valla.
Batstone, W. 1997. “Virgilian Didaxis: Value and Meaning in the
Georgics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, C. Martindale, ed.,
125-44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, S. 2011. The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient
and Medieval Authors. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
______. 2015. The Ancient Phonograph. Brooklyn: Zone Books.
Cucchiarelli, A., ed., 2012. Publio Virgilio Marone: Le Bucholiche. Rome:
Carrocci Editore.
Farrell, J. 1992. “Dialogue of the Genres in Ovid’s ‘Lovesong of
Polyphemus’ (Metamorphoses 13.719-897).” AJP 113: 235-268.
Freccero, J. 1991. “The Eternal Image of the Father.” In The Poetry of
Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, R. Jacoff and J. T.
Schnapp, eds., 62-76. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Gale, M. 2007. Myth and Poetry in Lucretius. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gärtner, T. 2008. “Die hellenistische Katalogdichtung des Phanokles über
homosexuelle Liebesbeziehungen. Untersuchungen zur tendenziellen
Gestaltung und zum literarischen Nachleben.” Mnemosyne 61: 18-44.
Genovese, E. N. 1983. “Serpent Leitmotif in the Metamorphoses.” In

Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History III, C. Deroux, ed., 141-
55. Brussels: Éditions Latomus.
Goldhill, S. 1986. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hanson, J. A. 1982. “Vergil.” In Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome, T. J.
Luce, ed., 669-701. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Hardie, P. 2002. Ovid ’s Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Heine, M. 1868. Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine und seine Familie. Berlin:
F. Dummler Verlag.
Hinds, S. 1998. Allusion and Intertext. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Janan, M. 1988. “The Book of Good Love? Design versus Desire in
Metamorphoses 10.” Ramus 17: 110-137.
Johnson, P. 2008. Ovid Before Exile: Art and Punishment in the
Metamorphoses. Madison, Wisc: University of Wisconsin Press.
Knox, P. 1986. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan
Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leach, E. W. 1974. “Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.” Ramus 3: 102-42.
Lowrie, M. 2009. Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome.
Makowski, J. F. 1996. “Bisexual Orpheus: Pederasty and Parody in Ovid.”
CJ 92: 25-38.
Meinrath, D. 2014. Leading (and Reading) by Example: Exemplarity in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Diss. Princeton University.
Nagle, B. R. 1988. “Two Miniature Carmina Perpetua in the
Metamorphoses: Calliope and Orpheus.” GB 15: 99-125.
Neumeister, C. 1986. “Orpheus und Eurydike. Eine Vergil-Parodie Ovids
(Ov. Met. X.1-XI.66 und Verg. Georg. IV.457-527).” WJA 12: 169-81.
Oliensis, E. 1997. “Sons and Lovers: Sexuality and Gender in Virgil’s
Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, C. Martindale, ed., 294-
311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
384 AUGUSTAN POETRY
______. 2009. Freud ’s Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Literature.

Parry, A. 1972. “The Idea of Art in Virgil’s Georgics.” Arethusa 5: 35-52.
Pavlock, B. 2009. The Image of the Poet in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Madison,
Wisc: University of Wisconsin Press.
Pöschl, V. 1960. “Der Katalog der Baüme in Ovids Metamorphosen.” In
Medium Aevum Vivum: Festschrift für Walter Bulst, H.R. Jauss and D.
Schaller, eds., 13-21. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Verlag.
Primmer, A. 1979. “Das Lied des Orpheus in Ovids Metamorphosen.”
Sprachkunst 10: 123-37.
Reed, J., ed. 2013. Ovidio Metamorfosi. Volume V: Libri X-XII. Milan:
Fondazione Lorenzo Valla.
Rimell, V. 2006. Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination.
Rosati, G. 2002. “Narrative Techniques and Narrative Structures in the
Metamorphoses.” In Brill’s Companion to Ovid, B. W. Boyd, ed., 271-304.
Leiden: Brill Publishers
Segal, C. 1993. Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
1998. “Orpheus’ Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the
Metamorphoses.” Arion 5:9-41.
Thomas, M.D. 1998. “Ovid’s Orpheus: Immoral Lovers, Immortal Poets.”
MD 40: 99-109.
Thomas, R., ed. 1988. Virgil: Georgics. 2 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wheeler, S. M. 1999. A Discourse of Wonders. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Young, E. M. 2008. “Inscribing Orpheus: Ovid and the Invention of a
Greco-Roman Corpus.” Representations 101: 1-31.
Zehnacker, H. 1993. “Sur quelques aspects de l’oralité dans la poésie
d’Ovide.” In Beiträge zur mündlichen Kultur der Römer (=ScriptOralia 47),
G. Vogt-Spira, ed., 159-76. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Zeitlin, F. 1995. Playing the Other. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ziogas, I. 2013. Ovid and Hesiod. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tereus’ tears: the performance and
performativity of crying in Met. 6.412-674
Jessica A. Westerhold
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
In book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we encounter the

gruesome and heartbreaking story of the Athenian princess
Procne, her husband Tereus, king of Thrace, and her sister
Philomela (Met. 6.412-674). After returning to Athens in order
to fetch Philomela back to Thrace for a family visit, Tereus is
overcome by lust. He returns with the maiden to Thrace but
locks her in a hut in the woods and rapes her repeatedly, cutting
out her tongue in order to prevent her from calling for help and
revealing his crime. She succeeds in communicating with her
sister by means of a woven message, and the two take revenge.
They kill Tereus’ and Procne’s son, Itys, and feed him to his
father. The three are changed into birds – a hoopoe, a swallow
and a nightingale.
Scholarship on this passage has fruitfully explored its debt
to Greek and Roman tragedy,1 and, in some cases, attempted to
reconstruct the lost tragedies of Sophocles and Accius.2 Scholars
1
See, e.g., Curley (1997; 2003; 2013); Gildenhard and Zissos (1999; 2007).
2
See, e.g., Coo (2013); Curley (2003); March (2003).
386 AUGUSTAN POETRY
have also noted the metapoetic significance of Philomela’s web

and the relationship between free speech, power and violence
which it may represent.3 In this paper I focus exclusively on the
shedding of tears (lacrimae, fletus).4 We may see tears performing
emotions – that is, demonstrating to others through gesture a
character’s experience of grief (dolor), anticipation of grief, or
fear. They are also performative – that is, they do something.5
In Ovid’s tale, for example, Tereus’ tears often create a sense of
trust. The emotion grief (dolor) also incites characters to act –
specifically, to seek revenge for a wrong. For Procne, Philomela
and Tereus, however, the performance of dolor and action
motivated by dolor are mutually exclusive.6 Action motivated
by dolor requires the effective suppression of its performance
3
See, e.g., Enterline (2000); Gildenhard and Zissos (2007); Joplin (1984); Marder
(1991); Richlin (1991); Segal (1994).
4
See Hollenburger-Rusch (2001) for a comprehensive treatment of tears in the
Metamorphoses as a whole and 19-29 for an analysis of the poem’s vocabulary of
crying. See Osmun (1984) for tears and their function in Roman erotic elegy,
including Ovid’s eroto-didactic and epistolary elegy. See James (2003) for the
power of the lover to elicit tears from the puella. See further Fögen (2009) for
tears in ancient Greece and Rome.
5
I am following Austin’s seminal (1955 [1975]) definition of performative
utterances, a name that “indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the
performing of an action” (6). For more recent theoretical developments of
Austin’s performative utterance, see e.g., Sedgwick (2003, 3-8 and passim),
and (35-38, 61-65), for shame and performativity; and Butler (1993, 1-21 and
passim). See Vingerhoets, Bylsma and Rottenberg (2009, 439-75), for a summary
of recent studies on the function and effect of crying. See de Libero (2009, 210-
22), on “appealing tears” in Livy. See Lateiner (1992; 1996) for the performative
functions of non-verbal behavior in Ovid’s Met. in general and (1992, 260-61),
and (1996, 234-35), for crying in particular.
6
More often, especially in Greek literature, weeping motivates revenge. Cf.
Achilles’ tears and subsequent revenge (Hom. Il.), Electra’s tears and Orestes’
revenge (Aesch., Or.; Soph., El.; Eur., El.), or Lucretia’s tears and the expulsion
of the Tarquins (Liv. 1.58-60). For the connection between lament and (male)
vengeance in ancient Greek culture and literature, see, e.g., Alexiou (2002
[1974], 21-23, 124-25, 171); Due (2006, 47, 117-35); Foley (2001, 23-25, 145-
71); Holst-Warhaft (1992, 75-97, 140-53); Loraux (1990); Murnaghan (1999,
210-12). In Roman culture and literature, see, e.g., de Libero (2009, 210-11,
TEREUS’ TEARS 387
through weeping. Moreover, Tereus, who initially applies tears

as a rhetorical technique in the absence of the emotion they
perform, undergoes an emotional metamorphosis at the close
of the tale. Ironically, while Ovid’s tale represents only the false,
performative tears of Tereus as successful, his success creates the
circumstances under which he will genuinely experience dolor.
Tereus’ performance of grief produces grief.
Lateiner (1992) and (1996) has explored the importance
of non-verbal communication in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and
Hollenburger-Rusch (2001) discusses the function of tears
in particular. I chose to focus on weeping in this tale due to
its central importance to the myth. Procne and Philomela,
associated with the nightingale and swallow, are exemplary
in mythology for mourning Procne’s dead son Itys.7 Homer’s
Penelope likens herself to Procne mourning her child (Od.
19.518-23). Likewise, Sophocles’ Elektra is compared on three
occasions to Procne (El. 107, 148-9, 1077). In the second
instance, Elektra pairs Procne with another exemplary lamenting
mother, Niobe (150-52), whose story precedes Procne’s in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. It is surprising to find that Ovid’s Procne, who
is famous for her eternal tears, does very little crying in his
version.8 The narrator closes the tale with the familiar description
of the metamorphoses and their significance as examples in
myth. Neither sister becomes the querulous bird of Homer.
229); Erker (2009, 144-49); Fantham (1999); Keith (2008, 249). In Ovid’s Met.,
see, e.g., Fantham (2004-2005); McAuley (2012, 151-8 and passim).
7
Procne functions thus elsewhere in Ovid: Am. 3.12.32, concinit Odrysium
Cecropis ales Ityn; Ep. 15.154, concinit Ismarium Daulias ales Ityn; Fast. 2.855,
Procne, nimium properasse quereris; Fast. 4.482, ut amissum cum gemit ales Ityn; Tr.
2.390, luget …mater Ityn; Tr. 5.1.60, querulam Procnen. Cf. of Philomela: Am.
2.6.7, 10, quereris, Philomela,…magna, sed antiqua est causa doloris Itys. See, e.g.,
Anderson (1972, 206-37); Loraux (1990, 84-100); Monella (2005) for Procne
as an exemplum of the mourning mother in Greek and Roman literature.
8
Itys’ cry (‘mater, mater’, 6.640), Curley (1997) argues, may also replace Procne’s
own traditional lament of “Itys, Itys” from Greek poetry, while serving as aetiol-
ogy for her lament as an answer to her son’s.
388 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Instead, Ovid’s birds carry the mark of their murderous revenge,

“their feathers marked by blood” (signataque sanguine pluma est,
670),9 while Tereus’ metamorphosis is characterized by the grief
traditionally associated with the sisters, for the narrator describes
him as “swift due to his own grief (dolor) and desire for revenge”
(ille dolore suo poenaeque cupidine uelox, 671).
Tereus is the first character and the last character to cry in
the tale. His initial tears are shed while entreating Pandion to
entrust Philomela to him, ostensibly on behalf of Procne.10 We
are told, however, that Tereus is seized by lust for Philomela at
their first meeting: “Tereus burned at the sight of the maiden”
(exarsit conspecta uirgine Tereus, 455). His desire has already led
him to consider the usual comic and elegiac routes to a beloved
(her friends, 461; her nurse, 462; and gifts, 463)11 as well as a
more epic route (war captive, 464). Finally Tereus focuses his
attention on his father-in-law (458-60, 467-74).
digna quidem facies, sed et hunc innata libido
exstimulat, pronumque genus regionibus illis
in Venerem est; flagrat uitio gentisque suoque.
…
iamque moras male fert cupidoque reuertitur ore
ad mandata Procnes et agit sua uota sub illa.
facundum faciebat amor, quotiensque rogabat
ulterius iusto, Procnen ita uelle ferebat;
addidit et lacrimas, tamquam mandasset et illas.
pro superi, quantum mortalia pectora caecae
noctis habent! ipso sceleris molimine Tereus
creditur esse pius laudemque a crimine sumit.
9
See also Procne in Ovid’s Ars 2.384, where the poet-praeceptor notes signatum
sanguine pectus habet; Rem. 60: quae socii damno sanguinis ulta uirum est; of Medea
in Am. 2.14.29-30, 32, paired with the lamenting Procne: Colchida respersam
puerorum sanguine culpant/ aque sua caesum matre queruntur Ityn… iactura socii
sanguinis ulta uirum.
10
Hollenburger-Rusch (2001, 134-8).
11
Curley (2013, 71).
TEREUS’ TEARS 389
…Indeed her appearance was worthy, but a natural lust also

stimulates him, and the people of that country are prone
to lust; he is inflamed by his national vice and his own…
He is already bearing the delay badly and is turned with a
face of desire back to Procne’s commands and makes his
own pleas as if for her. Love was making him eloquent, and
whenever he was asking with a little too much enthusiasm,
he said that Procne wanted him to do so; he added tears as
well, as if she had commanded even these. By the gods, the
human heart has such dark blindness! Through the sheer
size of his crime Tereus is trusted to be pious and he earns
praise from his crime.12
He pretends to carry out the requests of his wife (sub illa,

468). In truth, he is now secretly speaking on his own behalf (sua
vota, 468-70). We are told that love was making him eloquent
(facundum, 469). He “adds tears as if she had commanded even
these” (et lacrimas, 471). The tears seem to be the final touch
which sells his credibility to Pandion (474).
The verb addidit highlights their function as a tool,
employed at will in order to persuade by arousing pity or
sympathy.13 This was a common rhetorical technique in Ovid’s
day.14 Cicero, for example, tells us that he uses tears (lacrimis)
when appealing to Caesar on behalf of Quintus Ligarius
(Lig. 5.13).
Quodne nos petimus precibus ac lacrimis, strati ad pedes,
non tam nostrae causae fidentes quam huius humanitati, id
12
All translations are my own.
13
Hollenburger-Rusch (2001, 136) calls Tereus’ tears “a prop” (“Requisit”) for his
theatrical performance.
14
See Hall (2014, 98-128); MacMullen (1980) on the use of tears by Roman
rhetoricians and aristocrats in order to arouse pity, gain sympathy and/or
demonstrate sincere concern, with further Greek and Latin examples. Vergil’s
Anna on behalf of Dido employs tears in her attempt to win back Aeneas at A.
4.413-15, 437-39: Hudson-Williams (1990); MacMullen (1980). See Lateiner
(1996, 232-34), on actio and its relevance to Ovid’s poetry.
390 AUGUSTAN POETRY
ne impetremus pugnabis, et in nostrum fletum inrumpes,

et nos iacentis ad pedes supplicum uoce prohibebis?
Will you fight against our obtaining what we seek with
prayers and tears, prostrate at his feet, putting confidence
not so much in our case than in his humanity, and will you
interrupt our weeping, and will you prevent us from lying
at his feet with the voice of suppliants?
In de Oratore, Cicero’s M. Antonius reports that he and

Marius, on behalf of Manius Aquilius, shed tears (lacrimis) (de
Orat. 2.196).
cum C. Marius maerorem orationis meae praesens ac

sedens multum lacrimis suis adiuvaret cumque ego illum
crebro appellans collegam ei suum commendarem atque
ipsum advocatum ad communem imperatorum fortunam
defendendam invocarem, non fuit haec sine meis lacrimis,
non sine dolore magno miseratio omniumque deorum
et hominum et civium et sociorum imploratio. quibus
omnibus verbis, quae a me tum sunt habita, si dolor afuisset
meus, non modo non miserabilis, sed etiam inridenda
fuisset oratio mea. quam ob rem hoc vos doceo, Sulpici,
bonus ego videlicet atque eruditus magister, ut in dicendo
irasci, ut dolere, ut flere possitis.
When Gaius Marius who was in attendance and seated

greatly augmented the sadness of my speech with his
own tears and when I, frequently calling upon him, was
entrusting his own colleague to him and I was calling
him as advocate to defend the shared fate of the leaders,
this pity and call for help from every god and human and
citizen and ally was not unaccompanied by my own tears
nor great grief. If my own grief had been absent from all
of these words which then were spoken by me, my speech
would have been not only not pitiable, but even ridiculous.
Therefore I teach you this, Sulpicius, clearly as a good
and educated teacher, so that you can be angry, aggrieved,
tearful when speaking.
Antonius maintains that the speaker will not be successful

unless he genuinely feels the emotions himself (189-94) and
TEREUS’ TEARS 391
claims that he cried because of his own “grief ” (dolor, 195).

Later, in book 3 of de Oratore, Cicero’s Crassus elaborates
the performance of genuine emotion by an orator (de Orat.
3.214-16).
haec eo dico pluribus, quod genus hoc totum oratores, qui

sunt veritatis ipsius actores, reliquerunt, imitatores autem
veritatis histriones occupaverunt. ac sine dubio in omni re
vincit imitationem veritas; sed ea si satis in actione efficeret
ipsa per sese, arte profecto non egeremus. verum quia animi
permotio, quae maxime aut declaranda aut imitanda est
actione, perturbata saepe ita est ut obscuretur ac paene
obruatur, discutienda sunt ea, quae obscurant, et ea, quae
sunt eminentia et prompta sumenda. omnis enim motus
animi suum quendam a natura habet voltum et sonum et
gestum;
The reason I speak of these things at such length is

because the orators, who are the agents of truth itself, have
neglected this entire category; actors, however, imitators
of the truth, have taken it over. And there is no doubt that
truth surpasses imitation in every way; but if this very
thing were accomplishing enough in delivery on its own,
we would not need skill at all. But because emotion, which
especially must be made clear or imitated in delivery, often
is so mixed up that it is obscure and almost concealed,
what obscures must be removed, and what is distinctive
and visible must be taken up. For every emotion has by
nature a certain unique expression and sound and gesture…
In this passage, he emphasizes the importance of actio

(“delivery”) for the rhetorician, for which tears may be employed
as they were in the last two examples. He calls the orator a
performer of “truth itself ” (veritatis ipsius, 214) by contrast to
actors (histriones) who merely imitate the truth.15 Emotions
(animi permotio, 215), moreover, each have their own distinctive
15
See, e.g., Gunderson (2000, 111-48 and passim), for the issue of authenticity and
emotional performances in oratory and the orator’s troubled resemblance to the
actor.
392 AUGUSTAN POETRY
(eminentia) and visible (prompta) physical characteristics (215-

216), which are often hard to detect. The orator, therefore, must
stylize the real emotion with the oculi, vox and gestus (214)
peculiar to that motus animi in order to make it obvious to
the audience. Quintilian similarly recommends adopting the
emotions of one’s client. He offers the example of actors who
bring themselves to tears (flentes) at the end of a scene (Inst.
6.2.35) and attests (in the following section) to being moved
to tears (lacrimae, 36) himself.16
In contrast to the advocate’s genuine weeping as a
performance of genuine sympathetic emotion, Ovid’s Tereus
applies deceitful tears. He opportunistically exploits the trust
of his audience, Pandion. The tears of an advocate, according to
Antonius, are persuasive because they are (presumed to be) shed
in sincere sympathy with one’s client and their suffering. Tereus,
by contrast, simulates this strategy – crying in order to convey his
wife’s strong feeling and his own sympathetic emotion. Pandion
trusts Tereus, for he is his affine and his military ally. In reality,
Tereus’ tears, disguised as Procne’s longing for her beloved sister,
are in fact motivated by his own lust for the same woman. This
lust, moreover, is marked by difference. The narrator tells us
that Thracians have a proclivity to lust (458-60). He is not the
trustworthy man Pandion takes him to be.
We may compare his deceitful tears to other contemporary
representations. In Livy’s extant books, deceitful tears never
belong to Romans.17 de Libero (2009, 215-16) only notes
two examples, the Cibyrian tyrant Moagetes (38.14.14) and
Macedonian prince Perseus (40.12.3). Moagetes employs
deceitful tears (simulatis lacrimis, 38.14.14) in order to obtain
16
The rhetor of ad Herennium 2.31.50, however, admonishes the speaker not to
linger too long in appeal to pity, for “nothing dries more quickly than tears”
(nihil enim lacrima citius arescit).
17
See further Lateiner (2009, 131), on Cleopatra’s fake tears in Plutarch’s Life of
Antony 53.4 as a means of portraying Cleopatra’s manipulativeness.
TEREUS’ TEARS 393
mercy from the Roman consul Gnaeus Manlius in 189 B.C.E. In

182 B.C.E. the Macedonian prince Demetrius accuses his brother
Perseus of simulating tears (simulatis lacrimis, 40.12.3) which, in
turn, has made his own real tears (veras lacrimas) suspicious. It
is noteworthy that the Macedonian Demetrius is both a victim
of his treacherous brother, the false weeper, and Demetrius is a
friend to the Romans. In erotic elegy we see deceitful tears used
primarily by women. The amator in Propertius 3.25.5-7 accuses
Cynthia, for example, of manipulating him with tears which are
called an ars associated with treachery (insidiae).18 In his Remedia
Amoris 689-90, Ovid’s praeceptor warns his male pupils to be
wary of women’s tears (lacrimis) because they have taught their
eyes how to weep (flere).19 The qualitative difference between
deceitful tears and persuasive tears seems to be in the motivation.
Tereus’ crying as Procne’s advocate is good rhetorical technique,
but deceitful tears employed for selfish reasons is another sign
of his difference. Despite being deceitful, his tears are successful
in accomplishing Tereus’ goals, which resemble Procne’s at the
outset, but will harm her and her family in the end.
18
Fögen (2009, 179-208), cites further, e.g., Prop. 1.15; Ovid, Am. 2.2. Cf. Ter.
Eu., where Parmeno warns Phaedria that Thais, a courtesan, will be able to
shift blame from herself to Phaedria with “one little fake tear” (una mehercle
falsa lacrimula/ Quam oculos terendo misere uix ui expresserit, 67-68); and Catul.
66.16, where the lock of Berenice wonders whether virgins frustrate their eager
grooms with false little tears (frustrantur falsis gaudia lacrimulis, 66.16). Hall
(2014, 110 n. 37) suggests that Cicero’s critic, Laterensis, at Planc. 76 (discussed
below, n. 20) may have been quoting Ter. Eu. (cf. una falsa lacrimula and tuam
lacrimulam), associating Cicero’s emotional plea with the scheming tears of a
foreign prostitute.
19
Dipsas instructs the puella at Am. 1.8.83 to let her eyes learn how to cry: discant
oculi lacrimare coacti; Osmun (1984, 47). Fögen (2009) and Gildenhard and
Zissos (2007, 2.25 and n. 55) also note Ovid’s praeceptor in the Ars recommends
false tears to his male and female students (1.659-662; 2.197-202; 3.673-82).
Hardie (2002, 267, n. 17) comments that Tereus may have learned his tricks
from book 3.677. The instruction for male pupils are in the interest of winning
and maintaining a beloved, which one may argue is not very different from
Tereus’. While the tears may be faked, the goal will be transparent. The lover’s
interest in winning and keeping the beloved is not concealed, as Tereus’ goal is.
394 AUGUSTAN POETRY
As we saw, Tereus “added” (addidit, 471) his tears. By

contrast, Pandion has no control over his (Met. 494-510):
lux erat, et generi dextram conplexus euntis
Pandion comitem lacrimis commendat obortis:
“hanc ego, care gener, quoniam pia causa coegit
et uoluere ambae (uoluisti tu quoque, Tereu),
do tibi perque fidem cognataque pectora supplex,
per superos oro, patrio ut tuearis amore
et mihi sollicitae lenimen dulce senectae
quam primum (omnis erit nobis mora longa) remittas.
tu quoque quam primum (satis est procul esse sororem),
si pietas ulla est, ad me, Philomela, redito.”
mandabat pariterque suae dabat oscula natae,
et lacrimae mites inter mandata cadebant.
utque fide pignus dextras utriusque poposcit
inter seque datas iunxit natamque nepotemque
absentes pro se memori rogat ore salutent,
supremumque “uale” pleno singultibus ore
uix dixit timuitque suae praesagia mentis.
It was light, and Pandion embraces his departing son-in-

law’s right hand and entrusts him with his daughter as
companion as tears rose up: “Dear son-in-law, because a
pious reason compels it and both sisters wish it (you want
it too, Tereus) I give her to you and by your word and our
kin hearts, by the gods above, I supplicate and beseech you
to guard her with a father’s love and to send back this sweet
solace to my anxious old age as soon as possible (every
delay will seem long to me); and you too, Philomela, as
soon as possible (it is hard enough that your sister is far),
if you have any sense of duty, come back to me.” He was
making these requests and giving kisses to his daughter
in equal measure, and gentle tears were falling amid his
requests. He requested their right hands as a pledge of their
loyalty and he joined their hands between them and asked
them to greet his absent daughter and grandson for him
with words of remembrance, and he scarcely said his last
goodbye because his voice was full of sobs and he feared
his mind’s foreboding.
TEREUS’ TEARS 395
His tears rise up in a passive ablative construction

(lacrimis…obortis, 495) as he embraces his son-in-law and
entrusts Philomela, called “companion”, to Tereus’ care (494-
95). Pandion continues to cry while entreating both travelers
to consider his paternal love and show their piety by returning
Philomela to him soon (496-503). Pandion’s tears appear of their
own accord, as if a natural, physical response to the emotional
moment. They continue and their quality of gentleness (mites,
505) suggests a lack of force or compulsion. These tears are
involuntary and independent of Pandion’s intentions. Pandion’s
last goodbye is punctuated and almost prevented by his sobs:
supremumque “uale” pleno singultibus ore/ uix dixit (509-10). Livy
tells us that the Macedonian prince Demetrius, in the speech
cited earlier, began his speech with difficulty because weeping
(fletus) prevented him: “Then there was a long silence, since it was
clear to all that he was flooded by weeping and could not speak.
Finally necessity itself overcame grief, since they ordered him to
speak, and so he began” (Deinde diu fuit silentium, cum perfusum
fletu appareret omnibus loqui non posse. Tandem uicit dolorem ipsa
necessitas, cum dicere iuberent, atque ita orsus est, 40.12.2). We may
also see tears interrupt the sincere speech of Cicero in his defense
of Plancius (104): “your tears, and yours, judges, not just my own,
prevent me from saying many things” (plura ne dicam tuae me
etiam lacrimae inpediunt vestraeque, iudices, non solum meae). This
tearful interruption demonstrates Cicero’s genuine and deeply
felt emotion, as Pandion’s sobs demonstrate his own.20 Despite
20
In the same speech Cicero defends his emotional rhetoric from an earlier trial
of P. Cispius. He quotes the defendant who seems to have accused him of
pretending to cry: et mihi lacrimulam Cispiani iudici obiectas. sic enim dixistis:
“vidi ego tuam lacrimulam,” (Planc. 76). His response is to claim to have wept
profusely, demonstrating his sincerity: non modo lacrimulam, sed multas lacrimas
et fletum cum singultu videre potuist, (Planc. 76). See Hall (2014, 109-28), for a
full discussion with further bibliography. See also Hutchinson (1998, 32), for
analogs in Cicero’s letters, where tears are given as an excuse for not writing. Cf.
also Cicero in his defense of Marcus Caelius Rufus. Recalling the late Quintus
Metellus Celer, the orator says that remembering him weakens his voice with
396 AUGUSTAN POETRY
the genuine feeling motivating his tears, Pandion’s weeping is

unsuccessful in eliciting Tereus’ sympathy and cooperation.21
As Philomela is being abducted, tears accompany
questions about her sister (Met. 6.521-26):
in stabula alta trahit, siluis obscura uetustis,
atque ibi pallentem trepidamque et cuncta timentem
et iam cum lacrimis ubi sit germana rogantem
includit fassusque nefas et uirginem et unam
ui superat, frustra clamato saepe parente,
saepe sorore sua, magnis super omnia diuis.
[Tereus] drags [Philomela] into a hut hidden by an ancient

forest, and there growing pallid and trembling and fearing
everything and now asking with tears where her sister is he
locks her in and after saying the unsayable he overcomes by
force a maiden all alone while her father’s name is shouted
out in vain, often her sister’s name, above all the names
of the great gods.
We are not told that the tears rose up of their own accord,
but she doesn’t begin her speech until after her reason is restored
(mens rediit, 531), suggesting that she is temporarily unable to
act with reason or intention. The tears, we are left to surmise, are
an automatic physical reaction to her distress along with other
physical symptoms – her pale complexion and trembling (522,
weeping and distracts his mind: sed reuertor ad crimen; etenim haec facta illius
clarissimi ac fortissimi uiri mentio et uocem meam fletu debilitauit et mentem dolore
impediuit (Cic. Cael. 60).
21
Pandion’s unsuccessful lacrimae obortae may be compared to Lucretia’s success-
ful lacrimae obortae (Liv. 1.58.7). Like Pandion, Lucretia’s tears “well up” before
she asks for right hands and a promise (date dexteras fidemque) in the swearing
of an oath to avenge her rape. Livy tells us that the men “give their promise”
(dant ordine omnes fidem, 1.58.9), whereas Ovid’s narrator makes no mention of
Philomela’s or Tereus’ response to Pandion’s requests. On the Livian Lucretia’s
tears, see de Libero (2009, 210-11). See Feldherr (2010, 199-39); Pavlock (1991,
36-37) for the interplay of Ovid’s epic tale of Philomela and his elegiac tale of
Lucretia in the Fasti.
TEREUS’ TEARS 397
527) – for when she regains her wits (mens), her words are not
accompanied by tears (Met. 6.531-36):
mox ubi mens rediit, passos laniata capillos,
[lugenti similis, caesis plangore lacertis,]
intendens palmas “o diris barbare factis,
o crudelis” ait, “nec te mandata parentis
cum lacrimis mouere piis nec cura sororis
nec mea uirginitas nec coniugialia iura?”
Soon after her reason returned, tearing at her loosened

hair[, like one in mourning, arms scratched from striking],
stretching out her palms she said “O terrible man barbaric
because of your deeds, O cruel one, did the pious and tearful
requests of my father not move you nor a concern for my
sister nor my maidenhood nor your marriage vows?”
Instead of crying, Philomela cites her father’s tears, which

she expects to have the same utility as Tereus’ rhetorical tears.
She calls Tereus cruel because he failed to be moved by Pandion’s
tearful commands. Cum lacrimis … piis (535) surrounds the
verb mouere, emphasizing their role in persuading the listener.
Just as Tereus’ insincere crying, like his lust, marks him as
a deceitful foreigner to the external audience, so Philomela
remarks his difference by his failure to be moved by the sincere
and pious performance of grief.22 Unlike her father, Philomela
recognizes this difference and replaces tears with threats to
expose his crimes. Neither strategy is effective. Her tears fail to
elicit sympathy and mercy, and her threats elicit anger and fear
(549, 550).23
22
As Pavlock (1991, 38), notes, quoting this line, Philomela represents pietas and
normative family roles in contrast to Tereus.
23
de Libero (2009, 217-18), notes the importance of context and performance to
the success of tears in Livy: “Ill-timed mourning tears can, in fact, prove fatal”
(218). She cites as an example Horatia’s lament at Liv. 1.26.2-5. In the case of
performative utterances, Austin (1975, 12-24; 34-38), observed a similar result,
which he termed “Infelicities” or, more specifically, “Misinvocations,” where the
398 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Tereus uses tears once again in order to deceive Procne:

“But [Tereus] feigns laments and tells the story of a false funeral
and his tears earned him trust” (dat gemitus fictos commentaque
funera narrat,/ et lacrimae fecere fidem, Met. 6.565-66). Here their
function and success are stated more explicitly by the narrator.
Like his feigned groans of mourning, Tereus’ tears perform grief
and create trust (fides),24 and Procne believes the contrived story
of Philomela’s death.
We are not told that Procne sheds any tears when Tereus
tells her about Philomela. She is only described as mourning, in
appropriate attire, a sister who should not be mourned (et luget
non sic lugendae fata sororis, Met. 6.570). Et luget (570) echoes et
lacrimas (471, of Tereus) and et lacrimae (505, of Pandion), and
less closely et iam cum lacrimis (523, of Philomela). The contrast
highlights a difference in behavior; for lugere (“to mourn”) is
neither an emotion nor does it presume lacrimae (“tears”) or fletus
(“weeping”). It is a ritualized performance of grief.25 Procne does
not cry when she reads Philomela’s woven carmen miserabile “sad
song”. In fact, Procne has no time for tears (Met. 6.581-86):
euoluit uestes saeui matrona tyranni
germanaeque suae carmen miserabile legit
et (mirum potuisse) silet. dolor ora repressit,
uerbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae
defuerunt; nec flere uacat, sed fasque nefasque
confusura ruit poenaeque in imagine tota est.
The savage king’s wife unrolled the cloak and read the sad
song of her sister and (a wonder that it was possible) she
is silent. Grief held back her voice, and to her searching
“particular persons and circumstances in a given case” are not “appropriate for
the invocation of the particular procedure invoked” (15).
24
Segal (1994, 263); Hollenburger-Rusch (2001, 137).
25
For female lament in ancient Rome, see, e.g., Corbeill (2004, 67-106); Dutsch
(2008); Erker (2009); Fantham (1999); Keith (2008); Loraux (1990, 19-48);
Richlin (2001).
TEREUS’ TEARS 399
tongue, words expressing enough outrage were not there;

nor is there time to weep, but mixing up right and wrong
she rushes out and is entirely the image of vengeance.
After rescuing her sister, Philomela seems to have begun

weeping; for Procne criticizes Philomela for crying (Met.
6.609-13):
…pro uoce manus fuit. ardet et iram
non capit ipsa suam Procne fletumque sororis
corripiens “non est lacrimis hoc” inquit “agendum,
sed ferro, sed si quid habes, quod uincere ferrum
possit.”
…, instead of a voice there was gesture. Procne is on fire

and does not contain her anger and stopping short her
sister’s weeping, she said “this must not be done by tears
but by sword, or if you have anything else which can
surpass a sword.”
It is not clear whether Philomela’s tears are voluntary or

involuntary. The context recommends her voluntary performance
of tears in order to elicit sympathy from Procne. The narrator
describes her desire to speak in her own defense, a familiar
context for rhetorical tears. The narrator also describes her use
of gesture in place of words (pro uoce manus fuit, 609).26 As we
noted earlier, delivery (actio) required oculi vox and gestus. In fact,
Cicero’s Crassus deems it the most important aspect of rhetoric
(de Orat. 3.213). Actio includes, and in certain circumstances
such as this one, demands, tears. Philomela appears to have
improved her rhetorical skills, but she has again misjudged, not
the audience, but the context.
Procne tells her that the occasion calls for the sword,
not tears (611-12). Procne’s suppression of weeping for them
both indicates her conscious decision to choose action over
26
See Lateiner (1996, 244-47), for gesture used in place of words in Met. 14.
400 AUGUSTAN POETRY
persuasion.27 Procne has correctly judged her audience (he is

her husband, of course). She knows, as we do and as Philomela
learned, that Tereus is unable to be moved by the emotions of
others. Instead of crying, Procne becomes “entirely the image
of revenge” (poenaeque in imagine tota est, 586) and takes up a
sword (ferro, 612). Here we may see that dolor, as a stimulus to
action, excludes the rhetorical performance of dolor. Procne’s
dolor, to the surprise of the narrator, has reduced her to silence
(et (mirum potuisse) silet, 583).28
Procne, however, does soon cry (Met. 6.627-30):
mota quidem est genetrix, infractaque constitit ira
inuitique oculi lacrimis maduere coactis.
sed simul ex nimia mentem pietate labare
sensit, ab hoc iterum est ad uultus uersa sororis
As a mother she was indeed moved, and her shattered anger

halted and unwilling eyes grew wet with welling tears. But
as soon as she perceived that her mind was slipping from
excessive piety, again from [Itys] she turned to her sister…
27
Hollenburger-Rusch (2001, 41, n. 148).
28
Hardie (2002, 268), notes that Procne “is deprived of the means by which Tereus
had maintained control of the plot, words and tears.” Fantham (2004-2005, 117
and passim) identifies the same speechlessness in Ovid’s epic Ceres after she
is told of Persephone’s fate (Met. 5.509-10), leading to a grievous dolor (511),
and in Hecuba upon discovering Polydorus’ body (13.538-40; 123). Fantham
further notes the connection of dolor with both grief and vengeance (117,
123). Hecuba’s speechless tears rise up (lacrimas…obortas, 539) like Pandion’s,
but her ira leads to revenge (13.544-46). Compare Althaea (luctus et a lacrimis
in poenae uersus amorem est, 8.450) and Hecuba (poenaeque in imagine tota est,
13.546) to Procne at 6.586; Curley (2003, 185-86); Fantham (2004-2005, 118,
123). See further Lateiner (1996, 237-38), on the syntax of stupefaction in
Verg. A. and Ovid Met., which “imitates the momentary stillness…reported”
with a pattern of enjambment, caesural pauses and choppy phrasing (238). cf.
Procne’s silence: defuerunt; || nec flere uacat, || sed fasque nefasque, 6.585. Curley
(2003, 190-91) and Feldherr (2010, 209, 230) remark the reversal of positions.
In Ovid’s narrative, notes Feldherr, Procne’s silence signals her identification
with the mute Philomela. Curley hypothesizes Procne’s Ovidian silence reverses
her Sophoclean eloquence, while Philomela’s Ovidian speech reverses her
Sophoclean silence.
TEREUS’ TEARS 401
Like her father’s, Procne’s tears, in the ablative, swell and

wet her unwilling eyes (628).29 This is what Procne is known for,
eternally weeping over the loss of her child. In Ovid’s version,
she and her father cry when they anticipate this loss.30 As soon as
(simul, 629) Procne perceives her maternal feeling, she reminds
herself of her sister’s mistreatment (629-30) and there is no
further mention of tears.
Tereus is the last character to weep when his son Itys is
revealed to be the meal he has consumed (Met. 6.661-73):
Thracius ingenti mensas clamore repellit
uipereasque ciet Stygia de ualle sorores;
et modo, si posset, reserato pectore diras
egerere inde dapes semesaque uiscera gestit,
flet modo seque uocat bustum miserabile nati,
nunc sequitur nudo genitas Pandione ferro.
corpora Cecropidum pennis pendere putares;
pendebant pennis! quarum petit altera siluas,
altera tecta subit; neque adhuc de pectore caedis
excessere notae, signataque sanguine pluma est.
ille dolore suo poenaeque cupidine uelox
uertitur in uolucrem, cui stant in uertice cristae,
prominet immodicum praelonga cuspide rostrum.
The Thracian pushes away the table loudly and calls upon
the snaky sisters from the Stygian valley; and now, if only
he could, he wants to open up his chest and vomit forth
the terrible feast and half-digested organs, now he weeps
and calls himself his son’s sad tomb, now he pursues
Pandion’s offspring with a naked sword. You would think
that the Athenian women’s bodies were gliding on wings;
they were gliding on wings! One of them headed for the
forest, the other flew under the roof; still the signs of the
29
See Hollenburger-Rusch (2001, 40-41).
30
Many have recognized in Procne’s speech the speech given by Medea before she
kills her own sons (Eur., Med. 1021-80). See Anderson (1972, 231-32); Ciappi
(1998, 445-47); Feldherr (2009, 35; 2010, 203); Gildenhard and Zissos (2007,
3.29); Larmour (1990, 132); Newlands (1997, 192-95); Pavlock (1991, 43-44).
402 AUGUSTAN POETRY
murder have not faded from their chest, and their feathers
are marked with blood. [Tereus] swift because of his grief
and a desire for revenge is turned into a bird, whose crest
stands up on his head, an immoderate beak stretches out
as far as a very long spear.
He calls upon the Furies (662), wishes to tear open his

chest or vomit up his meal (663-64), but first he weeps (flet modo,
665). For a moment weeping precludes action. The correlatives
modo… modo…nunc (663, 665, 666) suggests he first cries and
then pursues the sisters. As mentioned above, Tereus’ trans-
formation is introduced by a full line describing him as “swift
due to his grief and desire for revenge” (ille dolore suo poenaeque
cupidine uelox, 671).
Tears speak in this passage. They communicate emotions
– grief or longing for an absent loved one, the anticipation
of this kind of loss, or fear. In addition to the emotions com-
municated by tears, the narrator makes clear to us readers the
sincerity of the tearful performances. Pandion’s and Procne’s
weeping is represented as unconscious physical responses to the
anticipated loss of a child. Pandion has no grammatical control
over his tears which are described first in an ablative absolute
(lacrimis … obortis, 495), next as the subject of their own verb
(lacrimae mites … cadebant, 505) and finally as an ablative of
means (pleno singultibus ore, 509). Procne’s are also represented
as an ablative of means in a sentence governed by the subject
“eyes” qualified as “unwilling” (inuitique oculi lacrimis maduere
coactis, 628). While Philomela’s own tears could be interpreted
as rhetorical – employed in order to elicit pity – nevertheless,
her emotion is marked as genuine. In the first instance tears
attend (cum lacrimis, 523) her terror which has temporarily left
her senseless. When Procne later stops her weeping, Philomela’s
genuine feeling of shame is marked by the narrator’s description
of her gesture and psychological state (Met. 6.605-9):
TEREUS’ TEARS 403
amplexumque petit; sed non attollere contra

sustinet haec oculos, paelex sibi uisa sororis,
deiectoque in humum uultu iurare uolenti
testarique deos per uim sibi dedecus illud
inlatum, pro uoce manus fuit….
and [Procne] tried to embrace [Philomela]; but [Philomela]

cannot bear to raise her eyes to meet [her sister’s], because
she seemed to herself to be the other woman, and, while
her eyes were cast on the ground, she, who wanted to swear
and call to witness the gods that that shame was forced
upon her, had hands in place of a voice…
The sisters’ sincere tears stand in contrast to Tereus’, whose

false tears and inability to “feel” in response to genuine tears are
explicitly noted by the narrator (471, 565-66) and by Philomela
(535). In each case the grammar marks lacrimae as an addition:
et lacrimae/as (471, 505); lacrimis obortis (495); cum lacrimis (523,
535). Tears attend the emotion, simulated or real, but do not
themselves constitute emotion. They also attend speech. In every
case the weeping character is speaking, has spoken or will soon.
The verb flere and the noun fletus are also used in this
passage and, in the case of Procne’s injunction to Philomela,
together with lacrimae (610-11): “reproaching her sister’s
weeping (fletum), she says “this must not be accomplished with
tears” (lacrimis).” While flere and fletus also describe weeping, the
words seem to mark a qualitative difference in the behavior.31
31
TLL s.v. “fleo” de sensu quotes Servius ad A. 11.59 and Diff. ed. Beck, 66, who
differentiate fleo from lacrimare as a vocalized weeping and a more serious
weeping respectively. Serv. ad A. 11.59: flere enim est cum voce lacrimare; Diff.
ed. Beck, 66: lacrimare levis strictura cordis est, flere gravioris affectus est, plorare
violentioris. Flere and lacrimare, however, often are synonyms. See TLL s.v. “fleo”
I. “intranstive: A proprie i.q. lacrimas effundere, lacrimare necnon plorare.” Compare
TLL s.v. “fletus” de notione Servius ad A. 6.427 (= Isid. Diff. 1.425): sane ploratus
tantum lacrimarum est, plactus tantum vocum, fletus ad utrumque pertinent. quae
plerumque confundunt poetae. See also Maltby s.v. “fleo” citing Isid. Diff. 1.227;
Orig. 10.111, who further defines fleo as the pouring (fundere, fluere) of tears
(lacry(i)mae). Cf. Ernout and Meillet s.v. “fleo”
404 AUGUSTAN POETRY
By contrast to the rhetorical performance of emotion, which

lacrimae have represented throughout this passage, flere appears
to describe a different embodied grieving, but one which is still
the physical reaction to an emotion and able to be controlled.
The verb is first used to describe Procne and Philomela, who
interrupt weeping (585, 610) in order to do something else with
their bodies. Tereus weeps (flet, 665) when he learns the fate of
his son. This weeping, described as flere, is differentiated from
and appears to obstruct action.32
Comparing other instances of lacrimare/ae and flere/fletus
in Met. 6, we may see a similar distinction. The first instance
is found on Minerva’s weaving, where she represents Cinyras
shedding tears (lacrimare, 100). In an artistic representation,
lacrimae may be understood as the symbolic signs of grief. Here
the representation is intended by the artist to elicit sympathy,
as Pandion’s and Philomela’s tears are. The next instance is,
unsurprisingly, found in the Niobe episode, where the tears
of her friends alert Niobe to the seriousness of her situation
(lacrimaeque suorum/ tam subitae matrem certam fecere ruinae,
267-68). Again we may see lacrimae as the sign of emotion
and a form of communication. In this passage the performance
is also performative. Just as Tereus’ tears generate trust in
his words, the tears of Niobe’s friends generate awareness in
Niobe. At the end of her tale (310-12), we see a collocation
32
Hollenburger-Rusch (2001, 54-55), notes the contrast between passive
weeping and active revenge and suggests the pause for weeping could prevent
violent action: “Die Tränen stehen hier antithetisch zu ferro als Symbol und
Metonymie komplexer seelischer Zustände. Durch und in Tränen kann ein
Verarbeitungsprozess (oder eine Überlegung) in Gang gesetzt werden, der den
Racheimpuls verstummen läβt” (55). Looking back again at Cic. Cael. 60, cited
above n. 20, fletus accompanying dolor briefly distracts and interrupts Cicero’s
speech: mentio et uocem meam fletu debilitauit et mentem dolore impediuit. de
Libero (2009, 229), notes “crying prevents action” in Tacitus Hist. 5.3.1 and Ann.
15.16.4. In Vergil’s Aeneid 9.498-502, the weeping of Euryalus’ mother (hoc fletu,
498) stops the action of the Trojan soldiers and makes them weep. See further,
e.g., Erker (2009, 144); Fantham (1999, 225); Sharrock (2011).
TEREUS’ TEARS 405
of lacrimae and flere. Transformed into stone, Niobe cannot

move, “nevertheless, she weeps” (flet tamen, 310). The marble
continues to “drip tears” (lacrimas…manant, 312). An observer
knows that this rock grieves because it weeps (flere) and sheds
tears (lacrimae) performing the emotion. Following Niobe’s
transformation there is a brief inset narrative in which we hear
other tales about the wrath of Latona and Apollo. In the final
tale, the woodland inhabitants, divine and mortal, weep over
(flerunt, 394) Marsyas’ fate. The resulting tears (lacrimas, 397)
are transformed by the soaked earth into a clear stream.33 As a
language of grief lacrimae are able to be translated. Returning
to the Niobe narrative, Pelops alone is said to grieve for (flesse,
404) his sister Niobe. Weeping (flere) and tears (lacrimae) are
a performance of affect. Tears (lacrimae) are also performative
and communicate in order to create trust and/or sympathy. In
each case, the performance of the emotion constitutes “speech”
that does something, to be distinguished from physical “action.”
All of the characters follow the precepts of the Roman
orators cited earlier. Lacrimae are employed as a means to elicit
sympathy and thereby persuade an addressee to act according to
one’s desire – grant a favor, keep an oath, be merciful, or forgive
a transgression. Not surprisingly, the civilized Athenians are
more Roman in their sincere performance of emotion, while
the Thracian king behaves more like Livy’s foreign (and Greek)
weepers or elegy’s manipulative crying puellae.34 As Feldherr
(2009, 41) has noted, the Athenians are credulous audience
members for Tereus’ performances. This representation may
be identifying the Athenians as kindhearted. Their capacity
for sympathy toward Tereus’ performance is contrasted to his
33
See Feldherr (2004, 81-82, 87), for the connection between Marsyas’ stream and
poetic creation.
34
Feldherr (2010, 212) suggests that the Athenians sophistication and Tereus’
marked barbarity would encourage Roman sympathy for Pandion and his
daughters. See also, e.g., Segal (1994, 263 and passim).
406 AUGUSTAN POETRY
lack of sympathy. This representation, however, may also be

interpreted as a failure to recognize Tereus’ true character. As a
direct result of Pandion’s and Philomela’s mistake, their tearful
speeches are ineffective. Tereus is the wrong audience because
he is unable to feel with (be sympathetic to) them. While the
tears of the genuine feelers are ineffective, Tereus’ fake tears are
very effective.35
The passage, however, does not privilege deceitful, foreign
rhetorical tricks. For weeping as a form of persuasion is, in
the end, less effective as a means of overcoming or preventing
the negative emotion it performs. Tereus’ fake tears, moreover,
produce the circumstances that result in his genuine experience
of the emotion he pretends to perform.36 By suppressing the
performance of hers and her sister’s dolor, Procne is able to
35
As Hardie (2002, 271), observes, Tereus’ genuine tears, which he finally sheds at
the end of the tale, are as ineffective as the Athenians’. Lateiner (1996, 225-26
and passim), also noted this pattern in non-verbal behaviors more generally in
Met. 14. Lateiner (1996, 249), further observes that 40% of non-verbal behaviors
mentioned by Ovid in Met. 14 are “conscious, voluntary, therefore controllable
and falsifiable.” de Libero (2009, 225) identifies a similar representation of cry-
ing in Tacitus, where, for both men and women, “seldom is the shedding of
tears depicted as an honest, heartfelt plea for an honourable cause.” Noting a
difference in the representation of weeping between Livy and Tacitus, de Libero
(2009, 222-29), suggests that the increased danger of honest speech during the
Principate may be one cause.
36
In the end, Tereus has inadvertently followed the precepts of Cicero’s Antonius
and Quintilian. Not only has he sympathetically shared the dolor of Procne
“in her place” (sub illa), he appears to have taken her place in the mythological
tradition. Such a phenomenon is attested by Seneca Rhetor and recommended
by Ovid’s praeceptor amoris. Gallus Vibius, according to Seneca, so well performed
madness that he himself becomes mad (Con. 2.1.25: nam dum insanos imitator,
dum lenocinium ingeni furorem putat, quod toties simulabat ad verum redegit). See
Baumgarten (2009, 88-89), for Plato on the danger of mimesis in poetry. In his
erotodidactic poems, Ovid’s praeceptor enjoins his pupils to simulate emotions,
for through performance they will become sincere (A.A. 1.611, 616: est tibi
agendus amans imitandaque uulnera uerbis;/…saepe, quod incipiens finxerat esse,
fuit; Rem. 497-98, 504: quod non es, simula, positosque imitare furores:/ sic facies
uere, quod meditatus eris./… qui poterit sanum fingere, sanus erit). Likewise, the
Ovidian Tereus so well performed Procne that he becomes her.
TEREUS’ TEARS 407
redirect this emotion towards action. Tereus’ suppression is too

late. He is transformed before he exacts his vengeance. He is
left, therefore, with his grief and a longing for revenge (dolore suo
poenaeque cupidine, 671).37 Pandion, too, dies from grief (Hic dolor
ante diem longaeque extrema senectae/ tempora Tartareas Pandiona
misit ad umbras, 675-76). By contrast, both Procne and Philomela
feel joy as they take their revenge. The narrator states that “Procne
could not pretend that she was not feeling a cruel joy” (dissimulare
nequit crudelia gaudia Procne, 653) and that “never before did
Philomela want to be able to speak and testify to her joy more”
(nec tempore maluit ullo/ posse loqui et meritis testari gaudia dictis,
659-60). It is noteworthy that Tereus’ false tears were shed in
the service of obtaining his own joy (exsultatque et uix animo sua
gaudia differt, 6.514).38 Violence, not communication, frees the
sisters from their famous fate of weeping. The blood of their
revenge marks their Ovidian transformation, replacing the sound
of their mournful song (neque adhuc de pectore caedis/ excessere
notae, signataque sanguine pluma est, 669-70).39
Ovid’s depiction of weeping, furthermore, may ensure
that his external audience approves the outcome and, at least
temporarily, finds himself promoting the violence of a second
Tereus – Boreas – in the final tale of the book. Feldherr (2010,
202) has demonstrated that Procne becomes her antithesis,
Tereus, at the moment she identifies against him with his
victim Philomela. The narrative signals this in a variety of ways,
including a simile comparing her to a tigress (636-37) and
through her deceptive disguise of revenge with a pious ritual,
a Terean strategy.40 Likewise, the emotional transformation
37
Feldherr (2010, 227), notes that Tereus “sings” Procne’s song by repeating Itys
(Met. 6.652, 656).
38
Segal (1994, 268-69).
39
Feldherr (2010, 226).
40
See further Feldherr (2010, 216-17), on the tale’s collapse of the categories
barbarian and Athenian in this tale. See Gildenhard and Zissos (1999, 165-
408 AUGUSTAN POETRY
into one’s antithesis does not happen for Ovid’s ideal Roman
reader through mimesis as it does for Tereus and as Greek
and Roman philosophers as early as Plato feared, but through
rejection.
A good Roman would, like Cicero’s audience, be moved
by the genuine tears of the Athenians. We are guided to identify
with them and against Tereus both by their familiar performance
of grief and fear and by the multiple ways the narrative marks
his foreignness, including his non-Roman exploitation of the
Roman-Athenians’ sympathies. His deceitful tears reinforce our
disgust toward him and our sympathy with the Athenians. The
failure of their genuine tears, however, and the failure of the
weepers to recognize Tereus’ lack of feeling, elicits frustration
along with sympathy. Procne’s recognition that tears don’t work
on Tereus is a relief. We experience her violent plans and their
execution while still feeling pity for her and her family, disgust
at her adult victim, and relief that we do not need to “see” her fail
to move Tereus as her father and sister have. We are therefore
more likely to approve of her violence even though, as Feldherr
and others have well noted, hers participates in the very violence
she is punishing.41 Tereus’ weeping, moreover, is less likely to
elicit our sympathy. We are both the wrong audience (guided
already to identify against him) and we have learned that tears
are ineffective in this tale. His genuine tears seem to be deserved
punishment.
67), and Newlands (1997, 194), for the similarity of grammar describing Tereus’
mutilation and Procne’s murder and the resemblance of Procne to Tereus.
41
By contrast to Tereus’ victim Philomela, Itys does not cry. This perhaps denies
the audience one opportunity for feeling sympathy with him or further
associating Procne with Tereus and distancing her from a Roman audience by
representing her as unmoved by rhetorical tears: Feldherr (2010, 202). See also,
e.g., Gildenhard and Zissos (1999, 167; 2007, 3.30-36 and passim); Larmour
(1990, 133-34); Joplin (1984, 45); Newlands (1997, 194-95); Pavlock (1991,
40-46); Schiesaro (2003, 82-83); Segal (1994, 267, 269 and passim).
TEREUS’ TEARS 409
It is with these feelings that Ovid’s audience enters the

story of Boreas. The narrator introduces his tale by stating that
Tereus and the reputation of Thracians – for Boreas is Thracian –
were hurting his cause (682). The narrator also tells us that Boreas’
entreaties (684-85) to win his Athenian beloved, Orithyia, did
not work (agitur nihil, 685). Were his story focalized through the
eyes of Orithyia’s father Erectheus, we might redirect our disgust
from one Thracian to another (from Tereus to Boreas) as the
narrative suggests the internal Athenian audience has done. But
the emotions are represented as genuine, his entreaties are not
deceptive. By stating that Tereus has hurt his cause, the narrative
implicitly sets Boreas in opposition to Tereus and, despite his
nationality, associates him with Procne, our last agent. For both
Procne and Boreas soon move toward violence as a resolution.
His rape of Orithyia repeats on the divine level Philomela’s rape
by Thracian Tereus, but it results in a marriage and the birth of
two famous heroes, Calais and Zetes. Book six ends with the
familiar swift transition to the next tale of the next book ( Jason,
the Argonauts and Medea – another Procne).42 Meanwhile,
Ovid’s audience members may be surprised and troubled by
their facile identification with a second Tereus.43 The irony of
Tereus’ final and genuine feelings of grief are paralleled by the
external audience’s ironic sympathy toward Thracian violence
42
The praeceptor of Ars Amatoria pairs the two heroines, calling Procne “the other
terrible parent” (altera dira parens, 2.383). The two are also collocated at Am.
2.14.29-34, Rem. 59-63, Fast. 2.627-30, Tr. 2.387-90 and Pont. 3.1.119-20.
43
Feldherr (2010, 233-39), argues that the Boreas episode repeats but Romanizes
Thracian vis, offering a distilled Romulus. He notes in particular the effective
elision of a competing feminine perspective. See also Newlands (1997, 205-6).
Newlands (1997, 203-7), and Segal (1994, 277-79), read the Boreas episode as
a comic antidote to the previous tale. Hardie (2002, 260-62), locates another
external audience identification with Tereus at the moment he sees Philomela.
The “approximative simile” (260) collapses the gaze of the audience and Tereus
as both project desirous expectations upon Philomela, by inviting audience par-
ticipation (quales audire solemus, 452) and through intertexts with Vergil’s Dido
(A. 1.496-503) and Ovid’s Corinna (Am. 1.5).
410 AUGUSTAN POETRY
which was guided by emotional identifications with the crying

victims of Thracian violence.44
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexiou, M., Yatromanolakis, D. and Roilos, P. 2002. The Ritual Lament
in Greek Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Anderson, W. S., ed. 1972. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Books 6-10. With intro.
and comm. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Alton, E.H., Wormell, D.E.W., and Courtney, E., eds. 1978. P. Ovidi
Nasonis Fastorum libri sex. Leipzig: Teubner.
Austin, J.L. 1975. How to do Things with Words. 2nd ed. eds. J.O. Urmson
and M. Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Baumgarten, R. 2009. “Dangerous Tears? Platonic Provocations and
Aristotelic Answers.” In: Tears in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. T. Fögen,
85-104. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge.
Ciappi, M. 1998. “Contaminazioni fra tradizioni letterarie affini di
ascendenza tragica nel racconto Ovidiano del mito di Procne e Filomela
(Met. VI 587-666).” Maia 50: 433-63.
Clark, A.C., ed. 1905. M. Tulli Ciceronis Orationes: Volume II: Pro Milone,
Pro Marcello, Pro Ligario, Pro Rege Deiotaro, Philippicae I-XIV. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Coo, L. 2013. “A Tale of Two Sisters: Studies in Sophocles’ Tereus.” TAPA
143:349-384.
44
I am grateful to the organizers and participants of the 2015 conference “Augustan
Poetry: New Trends and Revaluations,” for the opportunity to share an earlier
version of this paper and for their valuable comments. I would also like to thank
my colleagues at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville for suggestions and
advice on initial drafts, in particular the members of the Classics department,
Allen Dunn, La Vinia D. Jennings, and Lois Presser. I am also grateful to
Justin Arft, Daniel Moore, Jocelyn Rohrbach Moore, Jaclyn Neel, and Melaine
Racette-Campbell for suggestions on later drafts. All remaining errors are my
own.
TEREUS’ TEARS 411
Corbeill, A. 2004. Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.
Curley, D.E. 1997. “Ovid, Met. 6.640: A Dialogue between Mother and
Son.” CQ 47:320-322.
_____. 2003. “Ovid’s Tereus: theater and metatheater.” In: Shards from
Kolonos: Studies in Sophoclean Fragments, ed. A.H. Sommerstein, 163-97.
Bari: Levante Editori.
_____. 2013. Tragedy in Ovid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Libero, L. 2009. “Precibus ac lacrimis: Tears in Roman Historiographers.”
In: Tears in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. T. Fögen, 209-34. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter.
Due, C. 2006. The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Dutsch, D. 2008. “Nenia: Gender, Genre, and Lament in Ancient Rome.”
In: Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond, ed. A. Suter,
258-80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dyck, A.R., ed. 2013. Cicero: Pro Marco Caelio. With intro. and comm.
Enterline, Lynn. 2000. The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare.
Ernout, A. and Meillet, A. 1967. Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue
Latine: Histoire des Mots. Paris.
Erker, D. Š. 2009. “Women’s Tears in Ancient Roman Ritual.” In: Tears in
the Graeco-Roman World, ed. T. Fögen, 135-60. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Fantham, E. 1999. “The Role of Lament in the Growth and Eclipse of
Roman Epic.” In: Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of
Community, eds. M. Beissinger, J. Tylus, and S. Wofford, 221-34. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
_____. 2004-2005. “Mater Dolorosa.” Hermathena 177/178:113-24.
Fedeli, P., ed. 1984. Sexti Properti Elegiarum libri IV. Stuttgart: Teubner.
Feldherr, A. 2004. “Flaying the Other.” Arethusa 37: 77-87.
_____. 2009. “Intus habes quem poscis: Theatricality and the Borders of the
Self in Ovid’s Tereus Narrative.” In: Vom Selbst-Verständnis in Antike und
Neuzeit / Notions of the Self in Antiquity and Beyond, eds. A. Arweiler and
M. Möller, 33-47. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
412 AUGUSTAN POETRY
_____. 2010. Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fögen, T. 2009. Tears in the Graeco-Roman World. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
Foley, H. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Gildenhard, I. and Zissos, A. 1999. “‘Somatic Economies’: Tragic Bodies
and Poetic Design in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” In: Ovidian Transformations:
Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception, ed. P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi
and S. Hinds, 162-81. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society.
_____. 2007. “Barbarian variations: Tereus, Procne and Philomela in
Ovid (Met. 6.412-674) and Beyond.” Dictynna 4:1-25.
Gunderson, E. 2000. Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in
the Roman World. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Hall, J. 2014. Cicero’s Use of Judicial Theater. Ann Arbor, MI: The University
of Michigan Press.
Hardie, P. 2002. Ovid’s Poetics of Allusion. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hollenburger-Rusch, C. 2001. Liquitur in lacrimas: zur Verwendung des
Tränenmotivs in den Metamorphosen Ovids. Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann.
Holst-Warhaft, G. 1992. Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek
Literature. London/New York: Routledge.
Hudson-Williams, A. 1990. “Lacrimae Illae Inanes.” In: Virgil, ed. I.
McAuslan and P. Walcot, 149-56. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutchinson, G.O. 1998. Cicero’s Correspondence: A Literary Study. Oxford:
James, S.L. 2003. “Her Turn to Cry: The Politics of Weeping in Roman
Love Elegy.” TAPA 133:99-122.
Joplin, P.K. 1984. “The voice of the shuttle is ours.” Stanford Literature
Review 1:22-53.
Keith, A. 2008. “Lament in Lucan’s Bellum Civile.” In: Lament: Studies
in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond, ed. A. Suter, 233-57. Oxford:
Kenney, E.J. ed. 1961. P. Ovidi Nasonis Amores, Medicamina Faciei
Femineae, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
TEREUS’ TEARS 413
Kiessling, A.G., ed. 1966. Annaei Senecae Oratorem et Rhetorum Sententiae

Divisiones Colores. Stuttgart: Teubner.
Knox, P.E., ed. 1995. Ovid Heroides: Select Epistles. With intro. and comm.
Kumaniecki, K., ed. 1969. M. Tulli Ciceronis Scripta Quae Manserunt
Omnia 3: De Oratore. Leipzig: Teubner.
Larmour, D.H.J. 1990. “Tragic Contaminatio in Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Procne and Medea; Philomela and Iphigenia (6.424-674); Scylla and
Phaedra (8.19-151).” ICS 15:131-41.
Lateiner, D. 1992. “Affect displays in the epic poetry of Homer, Vergil,
and Ovid.” In: Advances in Nonverbal Communication, ed. F. Poyatos,
255-69. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
_____. 1996. “Nonverbal Behaviors in Ovid’s Poetry, Primarily
“Metamorphoses” 14.” CJ 91:225-53.
_____. 2009. “Tears and Crying in Hellenic Historiography: Dacryology
from Herodotus to Polybius.” In: Tears in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. T.
Fögen, 105-34. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Loraux, N. 1990. Les mères en deuil. Paris: Seuil.
MacMullen, R. 1980. “Romans in Tears.” CP 75: 254-55.
Maltby, R. 1991. A Lexicon of Ancient Etymologies. Leeds: Cairns.
March, J. 2003. “Sophocles’ Tereus and Euripides’ Medea.” In:: Shards from
Kolonos: Studies in Sophoclean Fragments, ed. A.H. Sommerstein, 139-61.
Bari: Levante Editori.
Marder, E. 1991. “Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela.”
Hypatia 7:148-166.
Marouzeau, J., ed. 2003. Térence Comédies. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Marx, F., ed. 1964. M. Tulli Ciceronis Scripta Quae Manserunt Omnia 1:
Incerti Auctoris de Ratione Dicendi Ad C. Herennium Libri IV. Leipzig:
Teubner.
McAuley, M. 2012. “Matermorphosis: Motherhood and the Ovidian
Epic Subject.” EuGeStA 2: 123-68.
Monella, P. 2005. Procne e Filomela. Dal mito al simbolo letterario. Bologna:
Pàtron.
Murnaghan, S. 1999. “The Poetics of Loss in Greek Epic.” In: Epic
Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community, eds. M.
414 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Beissinger, J. Tylus, and S. Wofford, 203-20. Berkeley: University of

California Press.
Mynors, R.A.B., ed. 1969. M. Vergili Maronis Opera. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Newlands, C.E. 1997. “The Metamorphosis of Ovid’s Medea.” In: Medea:
Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, ed. J.J. Clauss
and S.I. Johnston, 178-208. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Olechowska, E., ed. 1981. M. Tulli Ciceronis Scripta Quae Manserunt
Omnia 25: Pro Cn. Plancio, Pro C.Rabirio Postumo. Leipzig: Teubner.
Osmun, G.F. 1984. “Desistas lacrimare: Tears in Latin Elegy.” CB 60:45-47.
Owen, S.G., ed. 1915. P. Ovidi Nasonis Tristium Libri Quinque, Ibis, Ex
Ponto Libri Quattuor, Halieutica Fragmenta. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Pavlock, B. 1991. “The Tyrant and Boundary Violations in Ovid’s Tereus
Episode.” Helios 18:34-48.
Radermacher, L. 1965. M. Fabi Quintiliani Institutionis Oratoriae Libri
Duodecim. Leipzig: Teubner.
Richlin, A. 1991. “Reading Ovid’s Rapes.” In: Pornography and
Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. A. Richlin, 159-179. Oxford:
_____. 2001. “Emotional Work: Lamenting the Roman Dead.” In: Essays
in Honor of Gordon Williams, ed. E. Tylawsky and C. Weiss, 229-48. New
Haven: Henry R. Schwab.
Schiesaro, A. 2003. The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of
Senecan Drama. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sedgwick, E. 2003. Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Segal, C. 1994. “Philomela’s Web and the Pleasures of the Text: Reader
and Violence in the Metamorphoses.” In: Modern Critical Theory and
Classical Literature, eds. I.J.F. de Jong and J.P. Sullivan, 257-80. New
York: E.J. Brill.
Sharrock, A. 2011. “Womanly Wailing? The mother of Euryalus and
gendered reading.” EuGeSta 1:55-77.
Tarrant, R. J., ed. 2004. P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
TEREUS’ TEARS 415
Vingerhoets, A.J.J.M., Bylsma, L.M. and Rottenberg, J. 2009. “Crying:

a Biopsychosocial Phenomenon.” In: Tears in the Graeco-Roman World,
ed. T. Fögen, 439-75. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Walsh, P.G., ed. 1999. Titi Livi Ab Urbe Condita Tomus VI. Libri XXXVI-
XL. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prudentius’ Metamorphoses
Fernando Gorab Leme

University of Michigan
One of the difficulties of studying Prudentius has to do

with a gap in the fields of study: he is too ancient to be medieval,
too recent to be ancient, too Christian to be classical and too
classical to be Christian1. So, he, alongside with Ausonius,
Paulinus of Nola, Juvencus and even Claudian are reunited
under the umbrella denomination “Late Antique poets”. Even
though such perspective is merely historical and quite imprecise,
it allowed many advances in the sense of understanding the
aesthetics of Late antiquity and the similarities between its
authors. One of the marked features is exactly the authors’
dependency to models that were already well established and
considered “canonical”. Such use and remodeling of prior works
– especially Augustan and Neronian in the case of Roman
authors – is what we can call, so far without much reflection,
“intertextuality”. In addition to that, the specific concerns,
1
Bardzell (2009, 32) makes a similar case in considering that the lack
of scholarship around Prudentius is due to the fact that “Prudentius
falls into the cracks between modern disciplines: he is too late (and,
according to Macklin Smith, too Christian) for most classicists, and too
early (and perhaps too Roman) for most medievalists.”
418 AUGUSTAN POETRY
changes in taste, and about three to four centuries of distance

from their literary predecessors will enable to find out that “late
antiquity is a period of continuity and change, of transition and
transmission. Its literature is the product of a tension between
the prestigious pagan masters, the social conditions and aesthetic
presuppositions peculiar to late antique culture, and, at least in
the case of Christian authors, the new conceptual and ethical
world of Christianity” (Roberts 1989, 38).
With all of its peculiarities, often enough late antique
authors have not been appreciated. Edward Gibbon, in 1901,
said that “the poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of
his age”; H. J. Rose, in 1936, mentioned a “senile degeneration”
and the “feebleness” of Ausonius’ circle; Moses Hadas, in 1952,
was yet less kind: “for writers like Ausonius, who is after all the
poet of the fourth century, it is too generous to attribute their
classicizing emptiness to anything but rampant rhetoric”2. One
of the reasons that makes such view be on vogue is exactly
intertextuality. Prudentius, for instance, referring so frequently
to canonical roman authors has been considered a Christian
Horace, Vergil, Lucretius and even Juvenal (Marie 1962, 41).
The critics, finding difficulties to understand his poetry in its
own terms, approximate it to what they already know. However,
at the same time that the title of “Christian Vergil” is quite
appealing, the reading of Prudentius’ poems turns out to be very
disappointing. Hence, the perception that his poetry is nothing
but a decadent second hand copy of Vergil that falls short when
compared to his classical model. Nowhere Prudentius attempts
or claims to write a Christian version of the Aeneid, Odes, De
rerum natura or Satyras, but it is what his critics expect from
him. So, in 1982, Browning (1982, 713) comes to the conclusion
that “at his best Prudentius writers with an economy and force
equal to those of the classical models he so often imitates. But
2
All of the quotations are from Roberts (1989, 1).
PRUDENTIUS’ METAMORPHOSES 419
his prevailing vice is long-windedness and repetition. […] His

poetry, while not of first quality – how little was in late antiquity
– is important in making a new departure in Latin literature
[…]”. This way, Prudentius is more important for creating a
new way of doing Christian poetry (and the legacy he left for
medieval authors) than for the works themselves, as Lavarenne
(1943, xiv) many times mentions when speaking of an “intérêt
historique certain de son œuvre”.
Luckily, not all scholarship around late antique poets is so
critical: there are plenty of works that try to understand authors
in their own terms, and that explore the ways they rework and
resignify different traditions through an intertextual framework.
Such critics also analyze the novelties brought by their – and
their audience’s – interests, besides the narrative possibilities
Christianity brought when it was the case. Malamud (1989, 8-9)
for instance, perceives that Prudentius’ poetry “[…] is difficult
verse – dense, dark, and frequently violent – but the reader who
develops some feeling for Prudentius’ allusiveness, his abstract
and often punning use of language, and his manipulation of
sources, whether literary, mythical or historic, cannot help but
find it fascinating.”. Many of these aspects can be found in
other poets of the time and also support the criticisms against
them. Therefore, when seen as virtues and not as flaws, they can
underline the poetic qualities these authors sought after. These
dynamics between what modern critics expect out of ancient
poets versus what they actually deliver is not new to classical
studies and is well known for those who study, for instance,
Hellenistic and Imperial Greek literature facing the gran d
models of archaic and especially classical Greece. It seems that
late antique literature will be absorbed by the more “mainstream”
classics scholarship, following exactly the example and recovery
of Hellenistic poets: “French critics in particular, e.g. J. Fontaine,
J.-L. Charlet and J.-M. Poinsotte, are sensitive to this ‘mixing of
genres and tones’, this ‘original poetic alchemy’, this ‘colour at
420 AUGUSTAN POETRY
once epical and precious’, these ‘impressions of polychromatism’”

(Bastiaensen 1993, 120-121). Such way, out of those authors,
Fontaine perceives Prudentius’ work to be influenced by a “[…]
classicism tinged by Alexandrian elements, late-Latin neo-
Alexandrianism, [and a] Christian orientation” (Bastiaensen
1993, 121). But, while Hellenistic poets find their models in
archaic and classic Greece, Prudentius and his contemporaries
find their inspiration in the achievements of the Latin poetical
tradition, especially, the Augustan, Flavian and Neronian
(Bastiaensen 1993, 120).
Based on that, this paper turns to the relationship between
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Prudentius. Such choice seemes
important because it is less ordinary than Vergil or Horace.
Moreover, Prudentius’ references to Ovid are far from obvious.
For instance, the four passages selected here, even though evoking
scenes from Ovid’s epic, do no, at any point, quote him. This
brought to light the question about the necessity of quotations
(or “allusions”) for there to be intertextuality. That is to say: how
decisive are quotations for the perception of intertextuality? On
the one hand, they are the most certain and clear guides to the
connection between a source and a target text. On the other, can’t
authors refer to each other without quoting from their models?
And, if that is the case, how can one delimit the boundaries
between an actual intertext and the expectation of readers? All
of that made me turn to the nature of intertextuality and also to
think more specifically about different types of intertextuality
to be found in late antique texts. Edmunds (2001, 134) defines
intertextuality in such terms:
The study of intertextuality is the study of a certain
kind of relation between texts: one text quotes another
or others. Quotation is chosen here, in preference to the
more common reference, allusion, echo, reminiscence or
transformation, as a general, inclusive way of describing the
phenomenon. To quote means to repeat part of another
text in such a way (which would sometimes entail sufficient
quantity) that its status as a quotation and its source may

be discernible. Quotation, of whatever length, may be
either exact or inexact. At one extreme, the same word or
words are repeated in the same case in the same metrical
position. At the other extreme, scholars have discussed
quotation through content, context, syntax, and also sound
(i.e., even without repetition of any of the same words
from one poem to another). But none of these means of
quotation is possible without the repetition of words (even
if it is only the word shape, the word order, and the sound
of the words that are perceived as repeated).
As Edmunds himself admits in a note on that same page,

the spectrum of intertextuality is much more complex, but I
would like to focus on three different patterns I could perceive
in late-antique poems. Two are derived from Edmund’s ordering
and one is not. The first is the direct quotation in which segments
from the source text is to be found in the target text, usually
bringing new layers of meaning to the target text. This is the
easiest form of intertextuality to find and so it is the “ideal”
for scholars. Two different and significant examples can be
mentioned from Prudentius’ work: in his Praefatio, for instance,
the poet briefly describes his life up to the moment of (at least
fictionally) writing his œuvre. When referring to his youth, he
is subtle, but mentions the topos of a wretched life changed later
by faith3: Tum lasciva proteruitas4/ et luxus petulans (heu pudet
ac piget!) / foedauit iuvenem nequitiae sordibus ac luto [“then
lewd sauciness and wanton indulgence, to my shame and sorrow
now, marred my youth with the filthy dirt of wickedness.”, vv.
10-12]5. In this strophe, the poetic persona regrets having been
taken by impudence and excess. A single verse quotes two
3
Eagan (1962, xi) comments on the similarity between such biographical narra-
tive to Cyprian and Augustine who, earlier, confessed their youth “wew stained
with wanton indulgence”.
4
Horace, Carmina I. 19, 3: et lasciua Licentia; ibdem, 7: urit grata proteruitas.
5
Text of Prudentius established and translated by Thomson (1949 ; 1953), unless
indicated otherwise.
422 AUGUSTAN POETRY
different verses from the same poem by Horace (Odes I, 19),

about the splendor (nitor) of Glýcera. According to Kaimowitz
(2008, 31), the name Glýcera “means ‘sweet woman’ and was
often used by courtesans”. Moreover, the ode is about sexual
desire and it is a praise of the female beauty6. Hence, it adds a
new layer to Prudentius text by demonstrating that the nequitia
(“bad moral quality”) referred to in very general terms and with
a lot of guilt by the Christian author can actually be related to
debauchery. A second example to be mentioned is the opening
verse of the Psychomachia, which quotes the Aeneid (VI, 56):
“Christe, graues hominum semper miserate labores”; “Phoebe,
grauis Troiae semper miserate labores7”. The Psychomachia is an
epic text that “has arma, but no uirumque” (Cunningham 1976,
59): it describes the battles that true Christian virtues have to
fight against vices. Hence, the Aeneid (especially its second,
Iliadic, part – books 7-12) is quite significant. And, by using this
passage of book VI, Prudentius is able to foreshadow the end of
his own work: while Aeneas starts his descent to the Underworld
in Apollo’s temple, to find a turning point in his narrative (from
the journey to Italy, to the wars fought there), Prudentius’ poem
will end with the construction of another temple, the temple
of Wisdom (vv. 823-887). After the wars in the soul have been
finished, there is space for men to journey as virtuous Christians.
Thus, the Psychomachia can be read in a similar manner to the
second part of the Aeneid, but through an inversion.
6
In Kaimowitz’s translation: “The ruthless Mother of Desires/ with the Theban
son of Sémele/ and lustful Wantonness demand/ I yield again, though I’ve for-
saken love. // The gleam of Glýcera, who shines/ more brightly than the whitest
marble, scorches/ me, her pleasing brazenness/ and face too ravishing to look
upon.// Rushing against me, Venus has/ deserted Cyprus nor permits me speak/
of Scythians or Parthians attacking/ in retreat and things that matter not.//
Here put for me an altar of/ fresh turf, here put green sprigs and incense with/ a
cup of unmixed wine: for with/ a sacrifice, more gently she will come.”
7
Vergil’s text by Mynors (1969).
A second type of intertextual relationship, following

Edmunds’ formulation, is the quotation through content, devoid
of a proper repetition of words or verses. This is the case of all
the passages selected from Prudentius to be soon analyzed. It
should be mentioned that in the excerpt from his text, Edmunds
considers intertextuality without the repetition of words (through
word shape, order and sounds) impossible. Reading Prudentius,
it is possible to try to challenge his view and show how only
through synonyms, narrative patterns, adaptation of myths
and the use of similar themes, intertextuality can be achieved.
One example to be provided right away is Claudian’s De raptu
Proserpinae and its relationship to the passage of same theme in
the Metamorphoses (V, 341-571). As noted by Eaton8, “Claudian’s
verbal imitations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses do not come from the
Proserpine episode but from elsewhere in the work”. Moreover,
following comments of the same sort made by Bernert, there
is a theoretical line defending that Claudian used Alexandrian
texts (now lost) as his sources as well as Homeric and Orphic
hymns. Hall (1969, 108), on the other hand, will consider that,
albeit the quotations are missing, “the thematic reminiscences
are unmistakable”. Therefore, the lack of quotations shouldn’t
be taken as a token of lack of intertextuality, especially at this
context where poets expect to have a learned audience.
Besides the quotation and the content-based intertex-
tuality, one more type can be perceived in late-antique poetics.
It is not mentioned by Edmunds (and it shouldn’t even be,
since his range of authors goes up to the Augustan) and it is
represented by only direct quotations of different verses creating
a new story that is not related to the source verses: the cento.
These texts, made up only with verses by Homer or Vergil, for
example, tell Christian tales. There is no intent to import the
content or context from the source verses into the target verses
8
Eaton (1943, 118) apud Hall (1969, 108).
424 AUGUSTAN POETRY
of the centones, only their form: “[…] cento, meaning a patchwork

garment. The genre is an extreme form of paraphrase whereby
the composition brings forth a new story consisting of familiar
building-blocks” (Sandnes 2011, 107). These collages of hemis-
tiches and entire verses of classical texts become “a pastiche of
lines or quotes from a classical text” and a “classical paraphrase
of biblical texts” (Sandnes 2011, 2; 3). The greatest exponents of
this genre were Eudocia, Proba and Ausonius. The former one
thus defines the genre of the cento in his prologue to the Cento
nupitialis: “a little work that is continuous, although made out
of disconnected verses; bearing unity, although made out of
different; playful, although made out of serious; our, although
made out of foreign9”. Therefore, it is possible to perceive that
the cento is not to be considered a serious matter and that it
reutilizes the literary past as a living present, in a very unique
and extreme intertextual genre. Moreover, in its exaggeration
of quotations, it highlights exactly how intertextuality works,
that is, by leaving “[…] the reader caught between texts, made
fully aware of the unfixed nature of language, whose elements
[…] can be reassembled, at will or at random” (Malamud 1989,
37-38). The “original”, source, text is always present and the
reader is forced to take an active role in reading intertextuality,
finding the limits of the quotations and understanding the layers
of meaning they bear.
Having briefly discussed three different ways late-antique
authors refer to canonical authors and transport them into their
literary craft (i.e. by using direct quotations and adding layers of
meaning through the intertext; by referring to the content of a
work without quoting it; by only quoting, regardless of the source
content or context), it is possible now to turn to the passages by
Prudentius, and analyze how, even without any quotations from
Ovid, he will still be able to create intertextuality.
9
“[...] opusculum de inconexis continuum, de diversis unum, de seriis ludicrum,
de alieno nostrum [...]” (White 1919, 372).
The metamorphosis into a weeping statue

The Hamartigenia is an hexametric poem that in general
terms discusses the origin of sin. At a certain point, Prudentius
mentions that God can send signs to prevent good people from
being touched by sin. To exemplify, he uses a passage about Lot
in Genesis 19: two angels arrive at Sodom, ready to destroy the
city. There they find Lot, who offers them a place to spend the
night, because the city was quite dangerous. The inhabitants of
the city try to attack Lot’s house, in order to rape the angels.
Lot protects them and therefore they tell him about their plan
to destroy the city, absolutely wicked. They advise Lot to escape
early in the morning and not to look back. He tells his family and
arranges everything following the angels’ commands. As soon as
they flee, a blazing fire reaches the city. Lot’s wife, however, looks
back and becomes a pillar of salt. This metamorphosis is quite
simple: “but his wife looked back behind him, and she became
a pillar of salt10”. This is how Prudentius renders the passage:
Loth monitis sapiens obtemperat, at levis uxor Lot, being wise, obeyed the [angels’] warning, but his
mobilitate animi torsit muliebre retrorsus light-minded wife with unsteady purpose, like a woman,
ingenium Sodomisque suis revocabilis haesit. 740 turned her thoughts backwards, and hearing the call of her
traxerat Eva virum dirae ad consortia culpae: dear Sodom, cleaved to it. Eve had drawn her husband into
haec peccans sibi sola perit; solidata metallo partnership in an accursed fault, but this woman by her sin
diriguit fragili [...] brought death on herself alone. She stiffened in a solid mass
of wasting stone; […]
Prudentius’ scene starts towards the end of the biblical

passage, focusing more on the escape than in the events that
lead to it. Many of the details present in the Hamartigenia are
missing in the text of the Genesis, as the general description
of the setting and the comparison between Lot’s wife and Eve
(who is barely mentioned in Prudentius’ work but is of seminal
10
Genesis 19, 26, in the 1975 translation of the New King James Version (Thomas
Nelson Publishers).
426 AUGUSTAN POETRY
importance as the text discusses also the original sin11). The

differences do not stop there, as Prudentius will take one verse
from the bible and transform it into a larger description about
Lot’s wife as a statue made out of salt:
[...]saxumque liquabile facta […] turned into soluble rock she stands there a woman
stat mulier, sicut steterat prius, omnia servans still, as she had stood before, preserving every detail
caute sigillati longum salis effigiata, 745 modelled in a pillar of salt that has long borne her image,
et decus et cultum frontemque oculosque comamque her graceful form, her dress, brow and eyes and hair, her
et flexam in tergum faciem paulumque relata face turned to look behind, the chin carried slightly
menta retro, antiquae monumenta rigentia noxae. backwards, a stiff memorial of an ancient sin. Her wet
liquitur ilia quidem salsis sudoribus uda, figure dissolves, indeed, in salt sweats, but she suffers no
sed nulla ex fluido plenae dispendia formae 750 loss to her full form from the waste that drips away; and
sentit deliquio, quantumque armenta saporum however much the cattle wear away the savoury rock,
attenuant saxum, tantum lambentibus umor there is always as much moisture for them to lick, and
sufficit attritamque cutem per damna reformat, she grows again the skin that is rubbed off and lost.
hoc meruit titulo peccatrix femina sisti, Such is the memorial statue earned by a woman who
infirmum fluidumque animum per lubrica solvens 755 sinned, for she let her weak, unstable resolution melt
consilia et fragilis iussa ad caelestia. [...]. away in slippery courses and had no firm constancy to
keep heaven’s commands.
The treatment of the biblical text as proposed by Prudentius

makes the passage resemble a different metamorphosis, that of
Niobe (Metamorphoses, Book VI, 267-312)12. Both characters
meet the same destiny, for similar reasons. Niobe is punished for
her impiety, and Lot’s wife, always nameless, for her sin. The first
detail to be noticed is that Niobe is the only one who survives
Latona’s fury, to then be transformed into a marble statue. Lot’s
wife, on the contrary, is the only who perishes, becoming a salt
statue. No comment about this is made in Prudentius’ texts,
however, the comparison (only to be noticed when the inter-
11
From the prologue of the Hamartigenia, Prudentius sets the killing of Abel by
the hands of his brother Cain as the original sin, to approximate it to an attack
to the dualist heretics.
12
Important ressonances appear in: “Nioben unam”, v. 287; “[…] nullos
movet aura capillos,/ in vultu color est sine sanguine, lumina maes-
tis/ stant inmota genis, nihil est in imagine vivum”, vv. 303-305; “flet
tamen”, v. 310; “liquitur, et lacrimas etiam nunc marmora manant”,
v. 312.
textual game is perceived) can lead Christian readers to realize

how their god is more merciful than the heathen pantheon13.
While Ovid will focus on the living elements that leave
Niobe, turning exsanguinis, Prudentius will focus on the ones
that remain, as Lot’s wife’s decus and cultus. As for the first, these
are the capilli, uultus, and lumina; as for the latter, the frons, oculi
and comae. The synonyms mark the relation between the texts.
Both statues cry and liquitur, a detail absolutely absent from the
biblical account, and that will mark exactly the intertextuality,
even though there are no quotations from Ovid in Prudentius’
text. The wife’s tears, however, somehow differ from Niobe’s
weeping: “Prudentius describes her as a sort of liquid stone,
eternally dissolving but never losing her form” (Malamud 2002,
355). The suffering of both is eternal, but not without a shift.
Ovid’s narrative seems more etiological, describing the birth of
a fountain in a mountain, whereas Prudentius’, more mythical,
with a liquid never-dissolving statue made out of salt. Such shift
represents well the movement suggested by intertextuality in
general terms, because it makes the same thing be at the same
time itself and something different and new. The intertext is
alone significant to the target text, but it also proposes new
readings to the source text: “when the reader activates allusion,
reading becomes a struggle between a ‘linear’, forward moving
impulse and the retrograde or distracting pull of other texts.
Intertextuality demands the interpretation of at least two texts”
(Edmunds 2001, xviii). Moreover, no matter how an author
includes a source text in his own target text, the elements of
the original cannot be the same, as the radical experience of
the centones shows. This way, Prudentius is able to transform a
biblical narrative into an amalgam of sources, twisting selected
elements to bring forth a new text that is neither completely
Christian nor Classical, but that heavily depends on both.
13
A similar point is made in the Contra Symmachum I, especially in verses 1-21.
428 AUGUSTAN POETRY
The creation of the universe.

The famous ovidian passage about the creation of the
universe is also recreated by Prudentius and, in turn, the scene
of the organization of the chaos, by Claudian. Both scenes are
brief, but, once again, with no direct quotations, manage to
refer to Ovid’s text. The Peristephanon 13 narrates the passio
of Cyprian, an African martyr from Carthage, home of the
Donatist movement that wished to separate the church from the
“world” by excluding sinners, unworthy bishops and opposing
the alliance between church and Empire (Malamud 1989, 127-
128). In that setting, Cyprian is known for his rhetoric: before
his conversion, this beautiful lad used spells to seduce married
women. After, he used his lingua to inspire followers with his
preaching14. He is able to convince one group of followers,
known as the “candida massa” to deny paganism even if it
meant to die as a Christian. The whole group accepts obediently
Cyprian’s teachings (Peristephanon 13, vv. 76-87; this poem is
in Archiloquian verses):
Fama refert foueam campi in medio patere iussam, Tradition tells that there was a pit which had been opened
calce uaporifera summos prope margines refertam; by command in the midst of a piece of level ground and
saxa recocta uomunt ignem niueusque puluis ardet, filled nearly to the brim with smoking lime, the heated
urere tacta potens et mortifer ex odore flatus. stones pouring out fire, the snow white dust hot, capable
Adpositam memorant aram fouea stetisse summa 80 of burning anything it touched and killing with the smell
lege sub hac: salis aut micam iecur aut suis litarent of its breath. They say an altar was set up by the top of the
christicolae aut mediae sponte inruerent in ima fossae. pit and the order was that the Christians must either offer
Prosiluere alacres cursu rapido simul trecenti, in sacrifice a grain of salt or a sow’s liver, or else throw
gurgite puluereo mersos liquor aridus uorauit themselves into the depths in the midst of the pit. Three
praecipitemque globum fundo tenus inplicauit imo. 85 hundred together sprang forward eagerly with a quick rush
Corpora candor habet, candor uehit ad superna mentes, and sank in the powdery gulf, where the dry sea swallowed
‘candida massa’ dehinc dici meruit per omne saeclum. them, enveloping the plunging mass in its lowest depths.
Whiteness possesses their bodies, and whiteness carries
their souls to heaven. “The White Throng” justly gained its
name from that day forth for ever more.
The passage in fact shows Ovid’s scene in reverse. While

Ovid starts the universe in an indistinct mass (chaos) to then
demonstrate Nature separating and ordering all elements,
Prudentius will have an ordained world being transformed
14
Peristephanon 13, vv. 21-28.
into a massa: “the fiery pit that swallows up the candida massa
re-creates this primeval chaos: its rocks produce fire, its dust
is like snow, and its liquid is dry” (Malamud 1989, 144). Life
is transformed into raw material, in opposition to Ovid’s
description (Metamorphoses, I, 05-75) which begins with
mass (“rudis indigestaque moles”, v. 07) and has it organized
by Nature. First with the major elements (“nam caelo terras
et terris abscidit undas/ et liquidum spisso secrevit ab aere
caelum”, vv. 22-23), and then smaller, that reaper in Prudentius
(“rapidisque… ventis”, v. 36; “litora”, vv. 37/ 42; “flummina”, v.
39; “campo”, v. 41; “lapidosos… montes”, v. 44). In verses 52-56,
the power of thunder and wind to take over the body and mind
of men, is similar to the power of whitness that transforms the
“candida massa”15:
Inminet his aer, qui, quanto est pondere terrae The air hung over all, which is as much heavier than fire
pondus aquae levius, tanto est onerosior igni. as the weight of water is lighter than the weight of earth.
illic et nebulas, illic consistere nubes There did the creator bid the mists and clouds to take their
iussit et humanas motura tonitrua mentes 55 place, and thunder, that should shake the hearts of men,
et cum fulminibus facientes fulgura ventos. and winds which with the thunderbolts make chilling cold.
Prudentius uses intertextuality and inversion to deconstruct

Ovid’s cosmos. What is seen as creation in the Metamorphoses,
becomes destruction, and death alone, in the name of god, is
capable of promoting the ascension to heavens, as martyrdom
literature defends. Hence, “intertextuality is yet another
defamiliarizing device, by which a poem uses the existence of
other poems, often in very precise aspects, as a means of signaling
its own poetic status” (Edmunds, 2001, 99).
15
Ovid translated by Miller.
430 AUGUSTAN POETRY
The dismembered tongue.

Cyprian’s rhetoric was indeed remarkable. He used his
tongue to convert pagans and so was willingly transformed into
a martyr16. His tongue, then, was turned into a relic. Hence, even
after death, he can continue with his teachings (Peristephanon
13, vv. 1-15; 96-106):
Punica terra tulit, quo splendeat omne, quidquid The Punic land bore Cyprian to give lustre to the whole
usquam est, earth everywhere; that was the home he came from, but
inde domo Cyprianum, sed decus orbis et magistrum. he was to be the glory and the teacher of the world. As
Est proprius patriae martyr, sed amore et ore noster, martyr he belongs to his native country, but by his love and
incubat in Libya sanguis, sed ubique lingua pollet, speech he is ours. His blood rests in Africa, but his tongue
sola superstes agit de corpore, sola obire nescit, 05 is potent everywhere; it alone of all his body still survives
dum genus esse hominum Christus sinet et uigere in life, it alone cannot die, as long as Christ shall suffer the
mundum. race of men to exist and the world to function. As long as
Dum liber ullus erit, dum scrinia sacra litterarum, there shall be any book, any collections of sacred writings,
te leget omnis amans Christum, tua, Cypriane, discet. every lover of Christ will read thee, Cyprian, and learn
Spiritus ille dei, qui fluxerat auctor in profetas, thy teachings. The Spirit of God, which formerly flowed
fontibus eloquii te caelitus actus inrigauit. 10 into the prophets to inspire them, was sent from heaven
O niue candidius linguae genus, o nouum saporem! and flooded thee with streams of eloquence. What speech
is thine! It is purer than snow, and of a new savour! […]
Africa wept in sorrow at the departure of the man
whose teaching advanced her in cultivation, and of whose
eloquence she boasts of having been the pupil. Afterwards
with tears she raised a tomb and consecrated his ashes.
[…] Weep no more for this great blessing! He has attained to
Fleuit abire uirum maesta Africa, quo docente facta est the realms of heaven, yet none the less he moves over the
cultior, eloquio cuius sibi docta gloriatur: earth and does not leave this world. He still discourses, still
mox tumulum lacrimans struxit cineresque consecrauit. holds forth, expounding, teaching, instructing, prophesy-
Desine flere bonum tantum, tenet ille regna caeli ing; and not only does he direct the peoples of Libya, but
nec minus inuolitat terris nec ab hoc recedit orbe: 100 goes forth to the east and the west, nurturing the Gauls,
disserit, eloquitur, tractat, docet, instruit, profetat. training the Britons, keeping guard over Italy, spreading the
Nec Libyae populos tantum regit, exit usque in ortum knowledge of Christ in farthest Spain. Indeed he is both
solis et usque obitum, Gallos fouet, inbuit Britannos, teacher on earth and martyr too in heaven; here he instructs
praesidet Hesperiae, Christum serit ultimis Hiberis, men, from there as their patron gives them gifts in love.
denique doctor humi est, idem quoque martyr in
supernis, 105
instruit hic homines, illinc pia dona dat patronus.
Cyprian’s lingua is able to produce revelations even long

after oblivion. Another tongue with super-human powers
to be mentioned is Philomela’s. Her lingua, after being cut
16
Peristephanon 13, v. 95 (canit triunfans).
with brutal violence, is still able to move and search for

her owner17:
A Talibus ira feri postquam commota tyranni The savage tyrant’s wrath was aroused by these words,
nec minor hac metus est, causa stimulatus utraque, 550 and his fear no less. Pricked on by both these spurs, he
quo fuit accinctus, vagina liberat ensem drew his sword which was hanging by his side in its sheath,
arreptamque coma fixis post terga lacertis caught her by the hair, and twisting her arms behind her
vincla pati cogit; iugulum Philomela parabat back, he bound them fast. At sight of the sword Philomela
spemque suae mortis viso conceperat ense: gladly offered her throat to the stroke, filled with the eager
ille indignantem et nomen patris usque vocantem 555 hope of death. But he seized her tongue with pincers, as
luctantemque loqui conprensam forcipe linguam it protested against the outrage, calling ever on the name
abstulit ense fero. radix micat ultima linguae, of her father and struggling to speak, and cut it off with
ipsa iacet terraeque tremens inmurmurat atrae, his merciless blade. The mangled root quivers, while the
utque salire solet mutilatae cauda colubrae, severed tongue lies palpitating on the dark earth, faintly
palpitat et moriens dominae vestigia quaerit. 560 murmuring; and, as the severed tail of a mangled snake is
hoc quoque post facinus (vix ausim credere) fertur wont to writhe, it twitches convulsively, and with its last
saepe sua lacerum repetisse libidine corpus. dying movement it seeks its mistress’s feet. Even after this
[….] horrid deed – one would scarce believe it – the monarch is
Signa deus bis sex acto lustraverat anno; 571 said to have worked his lustful will again and again upon
quid faciat Philomela? fugam custodia claudit, the poor mangled form. […]
structa rigent solido stabulorum moenia saxo, Now through the twelve signs, a whole a whole year’s
os mutum facti caret indice. grande doloris journey, has the sun-god passed. And what shall Philomela
ingenium est, miserisque venit sollertia rebus: 575 do? A guard prevents her flight; stout walls of solid stone
stamina barbarica suspendit callida tela fence in the hut; speechless lips can give no token of her
purpureasque notas filis intexuit albis, wrongs. But grief has sharp wits, and in trouble cunning
indicium sceleris; perfectaque tradidit uni, comes. She hangs a Thracian web on her loom, and skillfully
utque ferat dominae, gestu rogat; illa rogata weaving purple signs on a white background, she thus tells
pertulit ad Procnen nec scit, quid tradat in illis. 580 the story of her wrongs. This web, when completed, she
evolvit vestes saevi matrona tyranni gives to her one attendant and begs her with gestures to
germanaeque suae fatum miserabile legit carry it to the queen. The old woman, as she was bid, takes
et (mirum potuisse) silet: dolor ora repressit, the web to Procne, not knowing what she bears in it. The
verbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae savage tyrant’s wife unrolls the cloth, reads the pitiable tale
defuerunt, nec flere vacat, sed fasque nefasque 585 of her misfortune, and (a miracle that she could!) says not
confusura ruit poenaeque in imagine tota est. a word. Grief chokes the words that rise to her lips, and
her questing tongue can find no words strong enough to
express her outraged feelings. Here is no room for tears, but
she hurries on to confound right and wrong, her whole soul
bent on the thought of vengeance.
As Cyprian, Philomela is willing to die. Both of their

tongues are powerful. Cyprian’s lingua alone expresses the
martyr’s mind. Philomela, however, has to take a different
direction: tongueless, she must find a way to express the nefas
she suffered. Moreover, it is exactly a voiceless utterance that
17
Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 326-329, book VI, vv. 549-586. Worth quoting in full
because it is referenced by the two passages by Prudentius here analyzed.
432 AUGUSTAN POETRY
will allow the sisters to find revenge: to kill Thereu’s son and
feed the flesh to his father, keeping the beheaded head as a proof
of the deed18. The two narratives, however, are quite different
and the presence of the living tongue alone will approximate
them. The lack of quotations also makes it harder to decide on
the presence of intertextuality and the comparison between
the passages will point out to the issue of the boundaries of
intertextuality. The feebleness of textual evidence points to
the fact that intertextuality depends on the reader to spot
it. The uncertainties are only to be accepted by the one who
reads intertextuality and, hence, different readings will present
different understandings of the texts19. Especially because “the
perception of intertextuality is not absolutely necessary to the
meaningfulness of the poem” (Edmunds 2001, 46). This way, a
reader who, in any case, is incapable of perceiving the references
and quotations an author makes, will still understand the text.
His reading will be, nonetheless, much less deep.
Returning to the structure of Philomela’s narrative, then,
it is possible to see that it starts with a quarrel between her and
her brother-in-law, followed by the removal of her tongue that
culminates, in a revengeful manner, in the murdering of a child.
The same elements, in a different order, will be reworked in a
part of Prudentius’ Peristephanon 10, a long poem describing
the torture and martyrdom of Romanus (vv. 766-775; 821-845;
853-858; 868-880; 886-960):
18
Metamorphoses, book VI, vv. 636-660.
19
“[…] the reader will have to make a decision or decisions, at least pro tempore,
at least for the sake of his own reading, in face of the text’s undecidability”
(Edmunds 2001, 153).
20
linguam tyrannus amputari iusserat The oppressor commanded the tongue of one of the young
uni ex ephybis; mater aiebat: “satis lads to be cut out, and his mother said: “now we have won
iam parta nobis gloria est; pars optima glory enough, for lo, the best part of our body is being sacri-
Deo inmolatur ecce nostri corporis; ficed to God. The faithful tongue is worthy to be an offering.
digna est fidelis lingua, quae sit hostia. 770 The mind’s spokesman, which declares our sentiments, the
interpres animi, enuntiatrix sensuum,20 heart’s servant, which proclaims the silent thoughts of our
cordis ministra, praeco operti pectoris, breast, let it be offered first for the celebration of the mystery
prima offeratur in sacramentum necis of death, and be the first to redeem all the members, and
et sit redemptrix prima membrorum omnium, then the rest will follow their dedicated leader.”
ducem dicatam mox sequentur cetera.” 775 “Why not at once destroy them both,” said the judge,
[...] “the boy and his teacher, since they are confederates in their
“quid differo”, inquit ille, “utrosque perdere, 821 impious doctrine? Let the sword cut off the trumpery head of
puerum ac magistrum, conplices sectae inpiae? the child, scarce man, and avenging fire consume this other;
gladius recidat uile uix hominis caput let them have different ends but die together.”
infantis, istum flamma uindex concremet, They reached the place where sentence of death was to
sit his sub uno fine dispar exitus.” 825 be executed, the mother carrying her son in her arms on
peruentum ad ipsum caedis inplendae locum. her bosom […]. The executioner called for the boy and his
natum gerebat mater amplexu et sinu, mother gave him up. Wasting no time on tears, she pressed
[...] but one kiss on him, saying: “Farewell, my sweetest, and
puerum poposcit carnifex, mater dedit, 831 when in blessedness you enter Christ’s kingdom, remember
nec inmorata est fletibus, tantum osculum your mother, changing from son to patron.” So she spoke,
inpressit unum: “uale”, ait, “dulcissime, and while the headsman struck the little neck with the sword
et, cum beatus regna Christi intraueris, the woman (for she was trained in music) sang a hymn, a
memento matris, iam patrone ex filio!” 835 song of David […] While repeating the words, she spread
dixit. deinde, dum ferit ceruiculam out her robe and stretched forth her hands beneath the
percussor ense, docta mulier psallere stroke and the blood to catch the stream that ran from the
hymnum canebat carminis Dauitici: flowing veins, and the round head as the mouth breathed its
[…] last; and catching it she pressed it to her fond breast. […]
manusque tendebat sub ictu et sanguine, “How long,” he [the tyrannus] asked, “is this great sorcerer
uenarum ut undam profluam manantium to make game of us through his skill in turning punishment
et palpitantis oris exciperet globum: to mockery with a Thessalian spell? Perhaps his neck, if I
excepit et caro adplicauit pectori. 845 order that it bend to receive the sword-stroke, will prove
[...] impervious to the blow, or the wound that cuts it in two will
heal and join again, and his head be set on his shoulders and
“quousque tandem summus hic nobis magus stand erect. Let us first try, therefore, cutting off some part
inludet”, inquit, “Thessalorum carmine of his body with the steel and leaving the rest alive, so that
poenam peritus uertere in ludibrium? 870 this man of many crimes may not fall by one single death,
fortasse ceruix, si secandam iussero, this traitor perish by one act of bloodshed. I will have him
flecti sub ensem non patebit uulneri, die as many deaths as he has members. […]”.
uel amputatum plaga collum diuidens
rursus coibit ac reglutinabitur
umerisque uertex eminebit additus. 875
temptemus igitur ante partem quampiam
truncare ferro corporis superstitis,
ne morte simpla criminosus multiplex
cadat uel una perfidus caede oppetat:
20
Compare with Lucretius, De rerum natura, VI, 1149: “atque animi interpres
manabat lingua cruore”.
434 AUGUSTAN POETRY
quot membra gestat, tot modis pereat uolo. 880 “[…] This moment let a skilled master of the knife attend,
[...] one who knows how to take apart all the contiguities of the
iam nunc secandi doctus adsit artifex, flesh, all the fast attachments of the tendons. Produce the
qui cuncta norit uiscerum confinia man who heals dislocated bones or ties them together and
uel nexa neruis disparare uincula: mends them when they are broken. First let him remove
date hunc, reuulsis qui medetur ossibus the tongue by its roots, for it is the very wickedest organ
aut fracta nodis sarciens conpaginat. 890 in the whole body; with its impudent wagging it has both
linguam priorem detrahat radicitus, violated our long established divine law by a most foul at-
quae corpore omni sola uiuit nequior; tack upon our gods, and been so presumptuous as not even
illa et procaci pessima in nostros deos to spare the emperor.” One Aristo, a doctor, is sent for and
inuecta motu fas profanauit uetus comes. He bids Romanus put out his tongue, and at once
audax et ipsi non pepercit principi.” 895 the martyr puts it out from cover, expos ing his throat to its
Aristo quidam medicus accitus uenit, depths; and the doctor feels the palate, exploring the voice’s
proferre linguam praecipit. profert statim outlet with his finger and seeking for the place to make the
martyr retectam, pandit ima et faucium wound, then drawing the tongue far out from the mouth he
ille et palatum tractat et digito exitum puts his lancet inside, right down to the gullet. While he was
uocis pererrans uulneri explorat locum. 900 gradually cutting the filaments one by one, the martyr never
linguam deinde longe ab ore protrahens bit nor let his teeth meet to close his mouth, nor swallowed
scalpellum in usque guttur insertans agit. blood […]. The prefect then, thinking that a tongueless man
illo secante fila sensim singula could be forced to offer sacrifice, since for lack of speech he
numquam momordit martyr aut os dentibus could not prate against the honour of the gods, ordered him
conpressit artis nec cruorem sorbuit. 905 to be brought back, silent now and disabled, whereas before
[…] his great blast of speech had scared him. He set up the altar
praefectus ergo ratus elinguem uirum again by his judgment-seat, with incense, and fire glowing
cogi ad sacrandum posse, cum uerbis carens on the coals, bull’s entrails and swine’s paunch, but Romanus
nil in deorum blateraret dedecus, on coming in and seeing these preparations, blew on them as
iubet reduci iam tacentem ac debilem if he were seeing very devils. Asclepiades, his spirits raised,
multo loquentis turbine olim territus. 915 laughed in scorn at this, and then said: “Are you ready with
reponit aras ad tribunal denuo your rough speech, as you used to be? […] Romanus, heaving
et tus et ignem uiuidum in carbonibus a long, deep sigh, a long-drawn groan of protest, thus began:
taurina et exta uel suilla abdomina; “Tongue never failed him who spoke of Christ, and you need
ingressus ille, ut hos paratus perspicit, not ask what organ controls the speech when it is the giver
insufflat, ipsos ceu uideret daemonas. 920 of speech himself who is proclaimed. […]”.
inridet hoc Asclepiades laetior,
addit deinde: “numquid inclementius,
sicut solebas, es paratus dicere?
[...]
Romanus alto corde suspirans diu
gemitu querellam traxit et sic orsus est:
“Christum loquenti lingua numquam defuit,
nec uerba quaeras quo regantur organo,
cum praedicatur ipse uerborum dator. 930
The narratological elements of this scene are the same as

Philomela’s, but in a different order. First, there is a long quarrel
with the executioner, Asclepiades (also identified as tyrannus).
In the middle of this, so to say, contest21 – to decide whether the
21
“Prudentius [himself, also] engages in a contest with the predominantly pagan
texts and traditions from which he derives his skill and authority, but whose
beliefs he as a Christian poet must oppose” (Levine 1991, 19).
pagan or Christian faith is superior –, Romanus asks for a child

to be brought in order to prove that Christianity was inherent
to good people. The child confirms Romanus’ claims and the
executioner decides to cut off his tongue. His mother is quite
glad with how the events turn out, since the child will become
a martyr and she explains and interprets the situation to her
child, who accepts such destiny willingly (as Romanus later and
Philomela). The executioner changes his mind, commanding the
child to be beheaded. Then, he is embraced by the now blissful
mother. As it happens with Procne, the child is handed in to
die to fulfil a revengeful agenda, and in both cases the mother
rejoices with the action. The executioner then, irritated by the
martyr, decides to burn Romanus alive (vv. 853-858). The saint
replies that such is not how his ending will be and, by miracle,
extinguishes the fire that would consume him. The executioner
is fed up: “quousque tandem summus hic nobis magus inludet”.
The solution is to remove Romanus’ tongue by the root, as it
happened to Philomela. Here the saint’s highest miracle takes
place: he is able to speak even without a tongue. The reference
to Cicero is important because it shows Romanus’ superiority
as an orator. Some traditions have that Cicero had his tongue
removed before being assassinated. After losing his tongue,
he is obviously unable to speak. That is not the martyr’s case
(Levine, 1991: 33). Philomela has to find means to express her
last words. Romanus, in turn, also superior to her, can just do
so with the help of God. In addition, as Thereus, Asclepiades
loses the contest22. The tyranni, however, will have it their way.
Thereus tries to kill Philomela and Procne before the three are
transformed into birds23. Asclepiades demands for Romanus to
be strangled to death and that is done until his neck is broken24.
Here, the similarities between the scenes are hard to grasp at first,
22
Peristephanon 10, 1100: “[...] est victus [...]”.
23
24
Peristephanon 10, 1102-1110.
436 AUGUSTAN POETRY
as Prudentius’ text is very long and has many speeches amongst

the actions. Notwithstanding, when the element of the tongue
is highlighted, the narrative elements of each story become clear
and it is hard not to notice the intertextuality.
The rivalry with Minerva.

The last scene to analyze is the beginning of the
Peristephanon 1425, not so clearly connected to the Ovidian source
text in narrative terms, but showing a strong proximity regarding
the characters. Arachne and Agnes are depicted as audacious
women, notable for their art (weaving and the Christian virtue,
respectively) who dare to fight against Minerva. Ovid’s passage
(Metamorphoses, VI, 05-53; 129-145) follows as such: Arachne
was known for her artistry in weaving (“lanificae… artis”, v.
06) and, even though came from a humble abode, was famous
for her work (“[…] studio nomen memorabile, quamvis/ orta
domo parva […]”, vv 12-13). Her talent was so incredible (“opus
admirabile”, v. 14) that even the nymphs went to see (“spectare”,
v. 17) both she working and her works. People could see that
such was the gift of Pallas, but Arachne refused to admit (vv.
23-25). Pallas, then, disguised as an old woman advised the
girl to recognize the godess’ power and eminence in weaving
(“cede deae veniamque tuis, temeraria, dictis/ supplice voce roga:
veniam dabit illa roganti”, vv. 32-33). Pallas reveals herself and
challenges Arachne to a competition (“certamina”, v. 45). The
girl is not taken by fear, but bluses for a second (“[…] non territa
virgo,/ sed tamen erubuit, subitusque invita notavit/ ora rubor
rursusque evanuit […]”, vv. 45-47). Both weave tapestries and
the work of both is perfect. Athena’s tapestery represents the
olimpian gods in a reverent fashion, as well as several mortals
25
In alcaic verses.
that were punished by rilviring such gods26. Arachne’s represents

various gods taking animal and human forms in order to trick
mortals into having erotic encounters27. Despite being extremely
different, both works show the exact same quality. The goddess
(identified as a virago, v. 130) cannot find any flaws in Arachne’s
weaving and, filled with rage, decides to spoil the web. Upon
such sight, Arachne decides to kill herself. Pallas, however,
commands the girl to live (“vive”, v. 136) and transforms her
into a spider, concluding that her story would be told among
generations to come (“dicta tuo generi serisque nepotibus esto”,
v. 138). Prudentius’ scene is quite different, but the characters
present similar qualities (Peristephanon 14, vv. 01-60):
Agnes sepulcrum est Romulea in domo, The grave of Agnes is in the home of Romulus; a brave
fortis puellae, martyris inclytae. lass she, and a glorious martyr. Laid within sight of their
conspectu in ipso condita turrium palaces, this maiden watches over the well-being of Rome’s
servat salutem virgo Quiritium, citizens, and she protects strangers too when they pray with
nec non et ipsos protegit advenas 5 pure and faithful heart. A double crown of martyrdom was
puro ac fideli pectore supplices. vouchsafed to her, the keeping of her virginity untouched
duplex corona est praestita martyri: by any sin, and then the glory of her dying by her own will.
intactum ab omni crimine virginal, They say it happened that as a young girl in her earliest
mortis deinde gloria liberae. years, scarce yet marriageable, but warm with the love of
aiunt iugali vix habilem tore 10 Christ, she bravely withstood godless commands, refusing
primis in annis forte puellulam to make herself over to idols and desert her holy faith. For
Christo calentem fortiter inpiis though she was first assailed with many arts, now with
iussis renisam, quo minus idolis seductive words from a smooth-tongued judge, and again
addicta sacram desereret fidem. with threats of cruel torture, she stood firm with strength
temptata multis nam prius artibus, 15 indomitable, and even offered her body for the sore torment,
nunc ore blandi iudicis inlice, not refusing to die. Then said the savage persecutor: “If it is
nunc saevientis carnificis minis, easy for her to overcome the pains and bear the suffering
stabat feroci robore pertinax and she scorns life as of little worth, still the purity of her
corpusque duris excruciatibus dedicated maidenhood is dear to her. I am resolved to thrust
ultro offerebat non renuens mori. 20 her into a public brothel unless she lays her head on the altar
urn trux tyrannus: “si facile est,” ait, and now asks pardon of Minerva, the virgin whom she, a
“poenam subactis ferre doloribus virgin too, persists in slighting. All the young men will rush
et vita vilis spernitur, at pudor in to seek the new slave of their sport.” “Nay,”
carus dicatae virginitatis est.
26
27
438 AUGUSTAN POETRY
hanc in lupanar trudere publicum 25 says Agnes, “Christ is not so forgetful of his own as to let
certum est, ad aram ni caput applicat our precious chastity be lost and abandon us. He stands by
ac de Minerva iam veniam rogat, the chaste and does not suffer the gift of holy purity to be
quam virgo pergit temnere virginem. defiled. You may stain your sword with my blood if you will,
omnis inventus inruet et novum but you will not pollute my body with lust.” When she had
ludibriorum mancipium petet.” 30 thus spoken he gave order to place the maid publicly at a
“haud,” inquit Agnes, “inmemor est ita corner of the square; but while she stood there the crowd
Christus suorum, perdat ut aureum avoided her in sorrow, turning their faces away lest any look
nobis pudorem, nos quoque deserat. too rudely on her modesty. One, as it chanced, did aim an
praesto est pudicis nec patitur sacrae impudent gaze at the girl, not fearing to look on her sacred
integritatis munera pollui. 35 figure with a lustful eye; when behold, a fire came flying like
ferrum inpiabis sanguine, si voles, a thunderbolt and with its quivering blaze struck his eyes,
non inquinabis membra libidine.” and he fell blinded by the gleaming flash and lay convulsed
sic elocutam publicitus iubet in the dust of the square. His companions lifted him from
flexu in plateae sistere virginem. the ground between life and death and bewailed him with
stantem refugit maesta frequentia, 40 words of lamentation for the departed. But the maiden
aversa vultus, ne petulantius passed in triumph, singing of God the Father and Christ
quisquam verendum conspiceret locum. in holy song because, when an unholy peril fell on her, her
intendit unus forte procaciter virginity won the day, finding the brothel chaste and pure.
os in puellam nec trepidat sacram Some have told that being asked she poured forth prayers
spectare formam lumine lubrico. 45 to Christ that He would restore sight to the prostrate sinner,
en ales ignis fulminis in modum and that then the breath of life was renewed in the young
vibratur ardens atque oculos ferit. man and his vision made perfect.
caecus corusco lumine corruit
atque in plateae pulvere palpitat.
tollunt sodales seminecem solo 50
verbisque deflent exequialibus.
ibat triumphans virgo Deum Patrem
Christumque sacro carmine concinens,
quod sub profani labe periculi
castum lupanar nec violabile 55
experta victrix virginitas foret.
sunt qui rogatam rettulerint preces
fudisse Christo, redderet ut reo
lucem iacenti: tunc iuveni halitum
vitae innovatum visibus integris. 60
Right from the start, Agnes’ qualities as a virgo and a virago

are highlighted. Both Arachne and Athenas are “manly” women
and the goddess is known in the pantheon for her chastity. As a
Christian under the dome of Christianity, it suits Agnes to be
a docile virgin. When she has to fight paganism, she must take
on the form of virago and use bravery to stick up for her beliefs,
“exploring how female audacity was both entertained and firmly
restrained through […] the tale of the virgin martyr Agnes”
(Burrus 1995, 26). As Arachne, this young maid is known due
to her art, as an exemplar Christian. In addition, as Arachne,
she is unwilling to cherish Athena (here, Minerva). In Ovid’s

passage, Athena herself confronts Arachne. In Prudentius, the
goddess is represented in the form of the torturer, who demands
the goddess to be recognized. When confronted, Agnes’ pudor
becomes clear, similar to Arachne’s blushing. Alike, both are
challenged and accept to fight. In Ovid’s version, the characters
weave. In Prudentius, Agnes is to be put on display, naked to
everyone’s eyes in a public brothel. People would gather to see
Arachne working and, the same, people will gather to see Agnes’
nudity. Her modesty, however, makes the viewers turn their sight
from the virgin. Except for one, who dares to violate the virgin
with his sight, as if raping her with the gaze, and is punished by
a lightning28. Irritated, the torturer orders a soldier to kill her by
the sword. She wants to be perforated in the bosom, in a quite
erotic manner, but has her head cut off instead29.
Malamud (1989, 161-162) sees similarities between Agnes
and Medusa too, as Ovid tells her myth in the Metamorphoses
(book IV, vv. 793-803). “Both are virgins, both are sexually
threatened at the altar of Minerva. Agnes is sent to a brothel,
while Medusa is raped. As a result of the violation and exposure,
both are endowed with a paralyzing power” (Malamud 1989,
162). Besides, both die through decapitation. Burrus (1995, 39-
42), in turn, analyzes Agnes’ death – regarding especially gender
and how a cut in the breast would represent a more masculine
death, and decapitation, a feminine one, making Agnes once
again a virgo instead of virago – as a collage of sources (Euripides,
28
“Roman elite texts refer to the gaze repeatedly, making it clear that its complex
manifestations – threatening, sexual, regulatory, penetrating, shaming, control-
ing, admiring, imitative – shaped civic and personal identity as they fueled ethi-
cal, gendered, and hierachical forms of the characterization of self and other in
the Roman state.” S. Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006), 119.
29
Peristephanon 14, 61-93.
440 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Vergil and Ovid) to see Agnes as an intertextual Polyxena30. Such

readings are also convincing and demonstrate that there are as
many intertextual readings as there are readers to spot them.
The approximation between Arachne and Agnes, nonetheless,
can bring to light yet one more aspect of intertextuality that is
perhaps closer to how ancients perceived it. That is, the idea of
emulation. “Intertextuality” is, after all, a modern term to explain
how two or more texts depend of and respond to others. The idea
of aemulatio, however, can hint at the literary effects expected
by the authors:
For if a person is annoyed at the good fortune of
someone because it is injurious to himself – for instance,
if Agamemnon is aggrieved at Hector – what he feels
is not properly called envy [invidentiam]. The person
who truly envies [invidere] is the one who is annoyed at
another’s gains even though they do no harm to himself
at all. Rivalry [aemulatio] is used in two senses, as a term
of praise [in laude] or as a term of blame [in vitio]. For the
imitation of excellence is termed “rivalry” [nam et imitatio
virtutis aemulatio dicitur] (although that is not what we are
referring to here, since it is a term of praise), and rivalry
may also be “distress [aegritudo] that another has obtained
what one desired for oneself but does not have. [si eo quod
concupierit alius potiatur, ipse careat]”31
In fact, the comparison between the scenes of Arachne

versus Athena and Agnes versus Minerva (imposing herself
30
“It is to Virgil’s treatment of Polyxena that Prudentius most directly alludes, ad-
ressing Agnes as ‘O virgo felix’ […]” “[…] his [Ovid’s] Polyxena, like Prudentius’
Agnes, breaks out in impassioned speech upon seeing her sacrifice standing and
gazing upon her with sword in hand.”; “Prudentius provides Agnes with the
place of death which for him, as for ancient Greek tragedy, reestablishes her
essential femininity in sexualized subjugation. […] Euripedes’ Polyxena offers
both breast and throat only to die by the more feminine death of the throat. But
Prudentius’ still more virile Agnes offers only her breast, so that it is in complete
and chilling disregard of her words that her neck is served” (Burrus 1995, 39;39;
41).
31
Tusculanae disputationes, IV, 17. Translated by Graver (2002, 45).
through the tyranny of a persecutor) depicts exactly both types

of aemulatio. The goddess, imbued by aegritudo (clearly expressed
by the perception of impiety and how well the strong female
mortal characters can succeed without her participation), uses
this rivalry in the worst possible manner (in vitio), destroying her
opponents. The issue has a completely different interpretation
when the stratum of the characters is left aside to reach the
stratum of the authors. The tapestries weaved by Athena and
Arachne point to two different types of epic texts: one is grand
and well divided, representing the most common types of epic,
following Homeric conventions. The other one, blurring the
lines between the episodes – that are clearly the same already
told by Ovid – bears the freshness of novelty. Both are absolutely
distinct, but equally enjoyable and beautiful. This aemulatio in
laude that Ovid pursuits in relation to his epic predecessors is
the same Prudentius pursuits in relation to – especially – the
Augustan poets and, as here defended, Ovid. Intertextuality
resides mostly in the reader. Aemulatio, in turn, rests in the author,
that makes use of the approximations and connections between
texts in order to surpass or, at least equal his predecessors.
Hence, through intertextuality, the sense of novelty arises from
a comparison of source and the target texts, making “originals”
that seemed perfect (also in the vernacular sense of “finished”)
challenged. The dynamic between the texts then, makes them
come to life, what highlights how authority, creativity, memory,
and literary competition worked in antiquity32.
32
This paper, produced first as a talk, indended to tease out some key aesthetic fea-
tures of late antique style, specially with regards to the weight of the Augustan
tradition in the late 4th, eartly 5th centuries, for an audience that, although very
specialized in Roman poetics, might have been somewhat unaware of the later
fashions. Therefore, a lot the more specific and even recent scholarship had to be
left out, and the long quotations from Prudentius figure copiously. Nonetheless,
this talk, as well as the other ones presented at the conference “Augustan Poetry:
New Trends and Revaluations” has produced instigating and clever discussions,
in an extremely multicultural and rich environment. For that reason, professors
Paulo Martins, João Angelo Oliva Neto, and Alexandre Hasegawa (all of whom
442 AUGUSTAN POETRY
Bibliography
Bastiaensen, A. A. R. 1993. “Prudentius in recent literary criticism” In
Early Christian poetry – a collection of essays, edited by J. Den Boeft & A.
Hilhorst, 101-134. E.J. Brill.
Bardzell, J. 2009. Speculative grammar and Stoic language theory in Medieval
Allegorical Narrative – from Prudentius to Alan of Lille. Routledge.
Browning, R. 1982. “Poetry” In The Cambridge history of classical literature
vol. II – Latin literature, edited by E. J. Kenney, 692-722. Cambridge.
Burrus, V. 1995. “Reading Agnes: the rhetoric of gender in Ambrose and
Prudentius”. Journal of Early Christian Studies, vol. 3 (1): 25-46.
Cunningham, M. P. 1976. “The context of Prudentius’ poems”. Classical
Philology vol. 71 (1): 56-66.
Edmunds, L. 2001. Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman poetry. The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eagan, M. C. 1962. The poems of Prudentius, vol. 1. The Catholic University
of America Press.
Fruchman, D. 2014. “Modeling a martyrial worldview: Prudentius’
pedagogical ekphrasis and Christianization”. Journal of Late Antiquity,
vol. 7 (1): 131-158.
Graver, M. 2002. Cicero on the emotions – Tusculan disputations 3 and 4.
The University of Chicago Press.
Hall, J. B. 1969. Claudian – De raptu Proserpinae edited with an introduction
and commentary. Cambridge.
Kaimowitz, J. H. 2008. The odes of Horace. The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Lavarenne, M. 1943; 1961; 1963a; 1963b. M. Prudence – tomes I-IV. Les
Belle Lettres.
I was fortunate enough to come across during my undergraduate degree) have

to be much aknowleged for the organization of the event. All the speakers too,
sharp as ever in their articulations, and the audience, who came with an open
mind to learn how classicists from different areas of the globe and of different
generations approach their primary sources, must be thanked for their insight
and passion.
Levine, R. 1991. “Prudentius’ Romanus: the rhetorician as hero, martyr,

satirist, and saint”. Rhetorica: a journal of the history of rhetoric, vol. 9 (1):
5-38.
Malamud, M. A. 1989. A poetics of transformation – Prudentius and classical
mythology. Cornell University Press.
______. 2002. “Writing original sin”. Journal of Early Christian studies,
vol. 10 (3): 326-360.
Marie, S. 1962. “Prudentius and Juvenal”. Phoenix, vol. 16: 41-52.
Miller, F. J. 1951. Metamorphoses I. Harvad University Press and William
Heinemann Ltd., for the Loeb Classical Library.
Mynors, R. A. B. 1969. P. Vergili Maronis opera. Oxford.
Roberts, M. 1989. The jeweled style – poetry and poetics in late antiquity.
Cornell University Press.
Sandnes, K. O. 2011. The Gospel ‘According to Homer and Virgil’. Brill.
Thomson, H. J. 1949; 1953. Prudentius vols. I and II. Harvard University
Press, for the Loeb Classical Library.
White, H. G. E. 1919. Ausonius, vol. I. William Heinemann & G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, for the Loeb Classical Library.
Contributors
ANDREA CUCCHIARELLI is Professor of Latin language and

literature at Sapienza - University of Rome. He has published
articles and notes mainly on Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid
and Petronius, and he is the author of four books: La satira e il
poeta. Orazio tra Epodi e Sermones (2001), La veglia di Venere -
Pervigilium Veneris (2003), Publio Virgilio Marone, Le Bucoliche
(2012), and Orazio, L’esperienza delle cose. Epistole, libro I (2015).
BÉNÉDICTE DELIGNON is an Associate Professor of Classics at

the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. She is the author
of Les Satires d’Horace et la comédie gréco-latine: une poétique de
l’ambiguïté (2006). She has edited volumes and published many
articles on Augustan Poetry.
PAOLO FEDELI è Professore emerito di Letteratura latina

nell’Università di Bari e Accademico Nazionale dei Lincei.
Editore critico delle Philippicae di Cicerone e delle elegie di
Properzio per la Teubner, commentatore di Catullo, Orazio,
Properzio, è autore di numerosi studi sulla poesia latina e sul
romanzo petroniano.
ANDREW FELDHERR is Professor of Classics at Princeton

University. His particular scholarly interests are Roman
Historiography and Augustan poetry. Publications include
446 AUGUSTAN POETRY
articles on Vergil, Ovid, Catullus, Tacitus, and Cicero and the

books Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History (Berkeley, 1998)
and Playing Gods: The Politics of Fiction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
(Princeton, 2010). He is currently at work on a narratological
study of Sallust, After the Past: Sallust on History and Writing
History.
KIRK FREUDENBURG is a professor in the Deparment of Classics

at Yale University. His research has long focused on the social
life of Roman letters, especially on the unique cultural encodings
that structure and inform Roman ideas of poetry. His main
publications include: The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory
of Satire (Princeton, 1993), Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses
from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge, 2001), the Cambridge
Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge, 2005), and Oxford
Readings in Classical Studies: Horace’s Satires and Epistles (Oxford
University Press, 2009). In 2002 he was a Rome Prize Fellow at
the American Academy in Rome.
A LEXANDRE P INHEIRO H ASEGAWA is Professor of Latin

Language and Literature at Universidade de São Paulo. He has
published on Latin poetry (especially Horace and Vergil). He is
author of Os limites do gênero bucólico em Vergílio: um estudo das
éclogas dramáticas (Humanitas, 2012). He is currently working
on a commentary on Horace’s Epodes.
STEPHEN HARRISON is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus

Christi College, Oxford and Professor of Latin Literature in the
University of Oxford. He is author of books on Vergil, Horace
and Apuleius and editor of a number of volumes including
the Blackwell Companion to Latin Literature (2005) and The
Cambridge Companion to Horace (2007). His commentary on
Horace Odes Book 2 is forthcoming with CUP (2017).
CONTRIBUTORS 447
FERNANDO GORAB LEME is a Ph.D. candidate at the University

of Michigan. He finished his undergraduate studies at the
Universidade de São Paulo, with a project on the translation
and study of Prudentius’ lyrical prologues. Then, he pursued an
MA at Durham University, discussing the importance of the
Platonic definition of mimesis, and the reception of Homer
for Philostratus’ Eikones, before moving to Ann Arbor, MI.
His research interests include intertextuality, generic memory,
and visuality, and he is in the process of publishing the article
“Heavenly visions: experiencing Euphemia’s and Hippolytus’
martyria” in the Journal of Early Christian Studies.
PAULO MARTINS is a professor in the Department of Classics

at the University of São Paulo. His research has focused on
visuality in elegiac and lyric poetry as well as on the cultural
memory of the Augustan Age and the interactions between
visual arts and literature. His main publications include: Elegia
Romana. Construção e Efeito (Humanitas, 2009), Algumas Visões
da Antiguidade (7 Letras, 2009), Imagem e Poder (EDUSP, 2011),
Literatura Latina (IESDE, 2011), and Limites da Representação.
Pictura loquens, poesis tacens (EDUSP, 2017, forthcoming). Since
2015 his research has been supported by a National Council for
Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) Fellowship.
In 2012 he was a visiting professor at King’s College London
and in 2013-14 a visiting fellow at Yale University, both on
fellowships from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).
ANDREAS N. MICHALOPOULOS is Associate Professor of Latin

at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He
is the author of: Ancient Etymologies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
A Commented Lexicon (Leeds, 2001), Ovid, Heroides 16 and
17: Introduction, Text and Commentary (Cambridge, 2006),
Ovid, Heroides 20 and 21: Introduction, Text, Translation, and
Commentary (Athens, 2013), Roman Lyric Poetry: Horace Carmina
448 AUGUSTAN POETRY
(Athens 2016, with Charilaos N. Michalopoulos), Roman Love

Elegy (Athens 2016, with Charilaos N. Michalopoulos). His
research interests include Augustan Poetry, Ancient Etymology,
Roman Drama, Roman Novel, and Modern Reception of
Classical Literature.
ÉRICO NOGUEIRA is a poet, translator and professor of Latin

at Unifesp, Brazil. His research focuses on Greek and Latin
Metrics, The Classical Tradition, and Ancient Philosophy. He
is the author of “Verdade, Contenda e Poesia nos Idílios de
Teócrito” (2012) and “Poesia Bovina” (2014), inter alia.
LYA SERIGNOLLI is a postdoctoral researcher in Classics at the

University of São Paulo, where she is currently working on her
project, Horace and the Muses: the Construction of Memory under
Augustus. She received her MA (2013) and PhD (2017) in
Classics from USP. She was awarded fellowships from FAPESP
to work on her masters and doctoral research projects at King’s
College London (2012 and 2016) and Princeton University
(2016). Her doctoral thesis, Bacchus, the Symposium and the
Poet, received honourable mention at “Prêmio Tese Destaque
USP 2018”. She is a member of the research group “Images of
Classical Antiquity” (IAC-USP/PROAERA-UFRJ/SBEC).
Her publications include articles on Augustan poetry. Her
research focuses mostly on Latin Literature, especially poetics,
rhetoric, memory and images in Augustan poetry.
JOÃO BATISTA TOLEDO PRADO is a tenured professor of Latin

Language and Literature in the Deparment of Linguistics at
UNESP University (SP-Brazil). His research has long focused
on the metrical and expressive features of the Augustan poetry,
mainly elegy and epic. In 2008-09, he conducted a post-doctoral
research entitled «Metric theories of ancient Rome», linked
to the Università Degli Studi di Roma II - «Tor Vergata»
CONTRIBUTORS 449
(UNIROMA II), Rome-Italy, supported by a CNPq scholarship;

in July 2013 he was a visiting fellow at Yale University; in 2015-
16 he conducted a second post-doc. entitled «Poetic feet, meters
& verses: the rhythm in ancient Greek and Latin poetry», linked
to the University of Rouen and Paris IV-Sorbonne, supported
by a FAPESP scholarship.
GIANPIERO ROSATI insegna Letteratura latina alla Scuola

Normale Superiore (Pisa). Ha lavorato su vari settori della poesia
augustea, soprattutto sull’elegia e Ovidio, sul quale ha pubblicato
sia saggi (ad es. Narciso e Pigmalione. Illusione e spettacolo nelle
Metamorfosi di Ovidio, Firenze 1983) sia commenti (come I
cosmetici delle donne, Venezia 1985; o le epistole 18 e 19 delle
Heroides, Firenze 1996; o i libri 4-6 delle Metamorfosi nella
collana della Fondazione Valla, Milano 2007-09). Negli ultimi
anni ha rivolto la sua attenzione alla letteratura del primo
impero, e soprattutto alla poesia flavia, in particolare Stazio, su
cui sta lavorando a un libro che coniuga l’interesse per le forme
letterarie e quello per i loro rapporti con la cultura visiva e la
cultura materiale.
JESSICA WESTERHOLD studied Classics at the University of

Kansas and the University of Toronto. She is a lecturer in
Classics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is
currently working on a book on Ovid’s reception of the tragic
heroine.
Livraria Humanitas
Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, 315 – Cidade Universitária
05508-010 – São Paulo – SP – Brasil
Tel: (11) 3091-3728 / Telefax: (11) 3091-3796
e-mail: livrariahumanitas@usp.br
Distribuição (11) 3091-2920

e-mail: humanitas.disc@usp.br
Vendas on line: http://editorahumanitas.commercesuite.com.br
Ficha técnica
Formato 14 x 21 cm
Mancha 10,5 x 18,5 cm
Tipologia Adobe Caslon Pro 12 e PF Agora Serif Pro 17
Papel Miolo: Pólen Soft 80 g/m2
Capa: Supremo 250 g/m2
Número de páginas 452
Tiragem 500 Exemplares

Augustan Poetry Final

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Augustan Poetry Final

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Augustan Poetry

New Trends and Revaluations

Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas

Departamento de Letras Clásiscas e Vernáculas

Programa de Pós-Gradução em Letras Clássicas

Sociedade Brasileira De Estudos Clássicos

HUMANITAS Editora Humanitas

Apoio financeiro à publicação:

Rua do Lago, 717 – Cid. Universitária

Foi feito o depósito legal

Catalogação na Publicação (CIP)

1. Literatura latina – História e crítica. 2. Elegia. 3. Poesia latina.

Serviço de Editoração e Distribuição

Coordenação Editorial e Arte de Capa

Projeto Gráfico e Diagramação

Part II – Horatian lyric, iambus and satire

Metafore, allegorie e altre trasformazioni: Quintiliano interprete di

Part III – Epic

De 08 a 10 de julho de 2015 organizamos o V Colóquio

I – Elegia, com contribuições sobre Propércio, Ovídio e

Na parte elegíaca, apresentam-se cinco estudos. Paolo

o fruto usados pelo poeta (malum, pomum e fetus). O autor não

leitura de Odes 2.7, em que Horácio/Páris é retirado da batalha,

tempestade, assim o estadista piedoso governa com suas palavras

Esperamos que os leitores encontrem deleite e utilidade

Una città può essere la somma dei nostri sentimenti o il

Finché Properzio si considera poeta d’amore e non pratica

Per Cinzia, dunque, l’amore per Properzio s’identifica

D’altra parte è significativo che ai periodi di dura astinenza

All’interno della città quale scenario dell’amore, lo spazio

che impediscono l’ingresso né della raffigurazione di una dimora

la condizione di abbandono e di trascuratezza in cui versa Cinzia

Che la scena sia ambientata nella Suburra potrà sorprendere

“iscrive se stesso in ogni aspetto della vita, pubblica e privata.”7 È

L’elegiaco Properzio sin dal II libro sembra preannunciare

A un appuntamento con l’amata, Properzio non è giunto

nel 28 a.C.:15 poiché la casa di Augusto sul Palatino era collegata

Quando, fra il 20 e il 15 a.C., egli compone il IV libro, la

Nell’accingersi ad aprire nuove vie alla sua poesia,

come quella di Evandro e di Enea nell’VIII libro della virgiliana

est moles nativa loco, res nomina fecit:

Vitruvio, rivolgendosi ad Augusto nella prefazione del

dei valori repubblicani, e ben si capisce che, nel tessere l’elogio

trapposizione dello spazio della festa dei tempi antichi a quello

fra presente e passato, prende le mosse dall’invito all’hospes

Con Ovidio, che pure è sensibile all’influsso del più

nec quia decrescunt effosso marmore montes, 125

Lo schema è sempre quello della ‘passeggiata archeologica’;

Ovidio ha occhi solo per la Roma augustea: di essa esalta l’oro

sino al tempio di Giove Statore. Affascinato da tanti e tali

Fedeli, P. 1980. Properzio. Elegie. Libro I, introduzione, testo critico e

Spencer, D. 2001. Propertius, Hercules, and the Dynamics of Roman Mythic

mixtaque cum ueris passim commenta uagantur

This paper investigates the relationship between historical

Roman society of this period. Nevertheless, the personae may

Four questions, beyond the textual surface of the elegy

Even though Maria Wyke works essentially with the

like rumour erat de adulterio matris et procuratoris,6 in which

for, rumour transmits temporary and floating attitudes or, beliefs

‘fortunae filius’ omnes.

In this passage of the Satires, it is easily observed that

Nisbet’s last statement (Much ancient oratory, and history,

Another point that this passage reveals is the proximity

may be society or a group -, rumour may seem the product of