S J Harrison
Biographic Data
| ID | 5626280 |
|---|---|
| NAME | S J Harrison |
| GIVEN NAMES | S J |
| FAMILY NAME | Harrison |
| SIGNATURE | HARRISON S J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Corpus Christi College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 362 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Horace’s Mercury and Mercurial Horace
In this piece I have surveyed the various guises under which the god Mercury is presented in the poetry of Horace. Mercury is an important figure in the Odes as inventor of the lyre, a key patron of lyric poetry and divine protector of the poet; though he can be paralleled with the young Caesar at one moment, he is not to be taken as symbolizing him at others, especially in Horace’s account of Philippi in Odes 2.7. References to his epic role as …
Hercvlis Ritv: Caesar as Hercules in Cicero's Pro Marcello
Cicero's praise of Caesar in the Pro Marcello of September 46 b.c.e. has been much discussed for its sincerity or otherwise. Here I would like to point out some unobserved literary colour which may make some contribution to the argument, namely Cicero's subtle evocation of Hercules in describing the achievements of the victorious Caesar. Such an analogy is not unlikely in the context of Roman military image-making: Sulla in 78 b.c.e. and Crassus …
Menander's Thais and Catullus' Lesbia
Menander's lost comedy Thais with its famous protagonist, the hetaira lover of Ptolemy I Soter and perhaps Alexander himself, was plainly well known at Rome, and is alluded to several times in Latin poetry of the Augustan and later periods, as Ariana Traill has shown. My purpose here is to argue that the literary characterisation of Thais in Menander's play underlies certain aspects of Lesbia as presented in the poetry of Catullus; that Catullus'…
Virgil: The Aeneid
The after-life of the Aeneid
Influence and reputation Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the after-life of the Aeneid is the sheer variety of ways in which it has been read, explained, criticised, imitated and admired from late antiquity until our own time. Homer enjoyed no such continuity, for the study of Greek virtually disappeared from Europe in the Dark Ages and was not fully revived until the Renaissance. It is not possible here to consider in any detail the poem's…
Reading the Aeneid
The text The modern reader of the Aeneid , whether he reads it in Latin or in translation, will be reading a text which, in its physical appearance, seems no different from, say, a text of Paradise Lost. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting briefly on the differences between an ancient and a modern text. Ancient texts were written on scrolls or rolls: long ‘books’ like the twelve into which the Aeneid is divided, each of between 700 and 1,000 lin…
Virgil and Homer
‘Arms and the man’ Other Latin poets before Virgil had written important large-scale hexameter compositions. Lucretius' great didactic epic De Rerum Natura (‘on the nature of things’) was an exposition of the physical universe according to the doctrine of Epicurus: although Virgil reacted against its materialism, he was much indebted to Lucretius' style and technique. Earlier, Quintus Ennius (239–169 bc ) had written heroic narrative epic, proudl…
Catullus (review)
Reviewed by: Catullus S. J. Harrison Julia Haig Gaisser. Catullus. Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell 2009. Pp. x, 243. $99.95. ISBN 978-1-4051-1889-7. This book answers very well a perceived current need for a balanced undergraduate critical text on Catullus that digests the results of recent scholarship in an attractive form. The first chapter provides a good account of Catullus’ life and its cultural…
Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture
Living classics: Greece and Rome in contemporary poetry in English
Inconsistency in Roman Epic: Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and Lucan (Roman Literature and Its Contexts) by James J. O'Hara
408 PHOENIX believedwas his situation?thenwe will inevitably have difficulty inunderstanding what Cicero is trying todo, in this work and elsewhere.Indeed, theemphasis inGildenhard's book upon theprefaces may unwittingly contributeto an assumptionthatthe intellectual and argumentative content of Cicero's philosophical writings does not merit our serious engagement. This isa denselyarguedbookwhich offers most to thereader who is willing to engage …
Epic Inclusivity: Vergil's Aeneid
The Aeneid is not just the culmination of all ancient epic traditions, but also exploits generic complexity to enrich its texture. Apart from the obvious but still underrated interface with tragedy, e.g., in the Dido-episode, there are encounters with many other non-epic styles (e.g., pastoral, didactic, elegy). As in the Odes, a classic and inimitable text is formed by generic enrichment.
Intra‐Epic Debate: Vergil's Georgics
Clearly transitional between the Eclogues and the Aeneid, this poem shows generic strain in its second half, especially in the proem to Book 3 with its anticipation of martial epic, and in the Aristaeus section at the end of Book 4, where the interplay of questions of literary form and political commitment is brilliantly explored (Homeric, neoteric, Hesiodic, Hellenistic).
The Meeting of Stylistics and Textual Criticism
Defensor Vergilii: Richard Heinze on Virgil’s Epic Technique
This chapter discusses the work of Richard Heinze on Virgil's Aeneid. It provides a fascinating and well-informed analysis of Heinze's work in his epoch-making ‘Virgil's Epic Technique.’ This does not merely present Heinze's well-known role as the founder of the modern study of the poem's subjectivity, but most effectively sets his concerns and critical stance in the German intellectual context of his time. This chapter notes the ‘carve-up’ of Vi…
On Not Being Archilochus: Horace's Epodes
Horace's Epodes both incorporate and react against their archaic model Archilochus, and also interact significantly with other contemporary genres (Vergil's Eclogues and love-elegy). The second half of the book shows especially generic uncertainty; an interesting and rich generic mixture results.
Lyric Flexibility: Literary Form in Horace's Odes
Horace's re-invention of archaic Greek lyric for Augustan Rome raises many issues of generic complexity, which are deliberately foregrounded by the texts. The boundaries of lyric are severely probed and tested by the incorporation and admixture of other literary genres (e.g., epic, epigram, prophecy, and tragedy).
Anatomy of a Style: Enallage and the New Sublime
This chapter discusses the anatomy of a style, showing how the phenomenon of enallage was noted in the ancient commentators and associated with Virgil's supposed cacozelia, ‘lack of taste,’ but conversely how its defamiliarising effect actually elicits the feeling of sublimity traditionally seen in epic by critics such as Longinus. It also looks to ground the critical perceptions in detailed analysis of the epic language of the Aeneid. The chapte…
Ambition to Rise: Horace, Satires 1
Horace's first poetic collection presents poems which interact notably with other genres — epic, both mythological and didactic, epigram, Priapean material, etc. This higher poetic material helps this book of lowly sermones show poetic ambition and react to other contemporary poets such as Vergil.
Beyond Pastoral? Generic Pressures in Vergil's Eclogues
The Eclogues is examined as a collection extending the bounds of Hellenistic pastoral, partly on the model of the Theocritean collection. Particular emphasis is laid on Eclogues 4, 6, and 10, where generic complexity is most obvious and most overtly foregrounded. Here, we have a classic case of generic complexity, driven both by Hellenistic precedent (Theocritus) and by the political demands of the stormy triumviral period (Caesar, Pollio, land-c…
Introduction by Stephen Harrison
This chapter describes the new collection of papers on Virgil and characterises Gian Biagio Conte's scholarly output as a whole and its development over the years. In much of the collection, Conte makes a crucial argument that the exceptional status of the Aeneid in Latin literature derives from its remarkably complex and ambiguous poetic texture. This book shows Conte's characteristic powers of focused analysis and critical exploitation of detai…
Introduction: Generic Groundwork
This introductory chapter presents an account of ancient genre theory (basically Aristotelian ideas about appropriate form matching appropriate content) and surveys modern genre theory to find models for the idea of generic enrichment, looking at the question of generic complexity and interaction in the work of Conte, Cairns, Fowler, and other genre theorists. It proposes a set of generic signposts or repertoire which signal the presence of a gen…
The Virgilian Paradox: An Epic of Drama and Pathos
This chapter discusses the Virgilian paradox, an epic of drama and pathos that goes back to the origins of modern debate on Virgil in the Romantic period, where the supposed natural primitivism and fresh naivete of Homer was commonly and unfavourably contrasted with the more artificial and sophisticated Virgilian epic. It argues that Virgil too sensed from the beginning that the naturalness and noble simplicity of Homer was essentially irrecovera…
Towards a New Exegesis of Virgil: Reconsiderations and Proposals
This chapter discusses several reconsiderations and proposals towards a new exegesis of Virgil and continues the theme of Virgilian scholarship. It points to the importance and diversity of the commentary tradition on Virgil and to the cultural situatedness of its practitioners, with illuminating remarks on such figures as Germanus, de la Cerda, Forbiger and Nettleship, Traina and Puttnam, and on how a modern commentary might cope with modern lit…
Proems in the Middle
This chapter discusses proems, a notable term to the grammar of classical literary scholarship. It traces the development of the poetic proem from plot-summary to programme, and stresses how programmatic restarts are found at the beginning of the second half of many poetic works and books, both in Virgil and elsewhere like Lucretius and Horace. This is a key tool in the analysis of Latin and other poetry. At the border between fully poetic speech…
Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace
This book responds to an important question of literary history: why did the period 40-13 BC in Rome produce such a rich range of complex poetical texts? The co-existence of great poets such as Vergil and Horace in contemporary literary circles, and the political stimulus and stability offered by the upheavals of the triumviral period and the following pax Augusta offer a sociological and historical background, but the concern here is with litera…
Apuleius A Latin Sophist: A Latin sophist
This book is a response to the literary pleasures and scholarly problems of reading the texts of Apuleius, most famous for his novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass. Living in second-century North Africa, Apuleius was more than an author of fiction; he was a consummate orator and professional intellectual, Platonist philosopher, extraordinary stylist, relentless self-promoter, and versatile author of a remarkably diverse body of work, much of which i…
Homage to Horace: A Bimillenary Celebration
This book collects together seventeen new pieces on the Roman poet Horace, all specially written for the volume by scholars of international reputation. The book is intended both as a celebration of the bimillenary of Horace's death, and to mark the retirement of Professor R. G. M. Nisbet, noted Horatian scholar, from the Corpus Christi Chair of Latin at Oxford. Almost half the contributions deal with Horace's Odes, treating individual poems and …
The Poetry of Pathos
This volume presents a collection of pieces from a celebrated world-class scholar and interpreter of Latin poetry, focusing on the interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid. It forms the sequel to two widely influential earlier books on Virgil by the same author and translates and adds to a collection of papers published in Italian in 2002. Its central concern is the way in which Virgil reworks earlier poetry (especially that of Homer) at the most detail…
The Survival and Supremacy of Rome: The Unity of the Shield of Aeneas
What is the most plausible connection which can be constructed between the various scenes from Roman history selected for depiction on the Shield of Aeneas, described in Aeneid 8.626–728? This question has found a variety of answers since Warde Fowler raised it in 1918, but none is entirely satisfactory. The order of presentation of the individual scenes is evidently chronological, from the beginnings of Rome to the poet's own day, but the poet's…
Classical constructions: Papers in memory of Don Fowler, classicist and epicurean
1. Laocoon's point of view 2. Phillip Mitsis 3. Bicycles, centaurs, and man-faced ox creatures: ontological instability in Flann O'Brien, Lucretius, Empedocles, and Piero di Cosimo 4. Didaxis, rhetoric, and the law in Lucretius 5. Making an exemplum of yourself: Cicero and Augustus 6. 'Natura barratur': Tullius Laurea's elegy for Cicero (Pliny, HN 31.8) 7. Contrasts 8. Horace's body, Horace's books 9. Ovid among the conspiracy theorists 10. 'Haec…
Drink, suspicion and comedy in Propertius 1.3
Propertius 1.3 famously begins with the drunken poet returning from a night out to find his puella Cynthia asleep. The sleeping Cynthia is then apparently idealised by the poet through a series of comparisons with mythological heroines, until she wakes up and shows her true and less elevated character, shrewishly nagging the poet for staying out late with another woman, and thereby destroying his illusions. Some of the wit and irony of the situat…
Collected papers on Latin poetry: Collected Papers on Latin Poetry
Introduction 1. Propertius and Cynthia. Elegy I.3 2. Critical Appreciations. I. Propertius III.10 3. Propertius I.5 4. Scilicet et tempus veniet ... Virgil, Georgics I.463-514 5. The Neoteric Poets 6. Seruitium amoris 7. Introduction to Virgil: The Eclogues, the Georgics, translated by C. Day Lewis 8. Virgil and the Politics of War 9. Lavinia's Blush: Virgil, Aeneid 12.64-70 10. Ovid's Metamorphoses, Callimachus, and l'art pour l'art 11. Virgil's…
Deflating the Odes: Horace, Epistles 1.20
Epistles 1.20, the last poem of its book, begins with an elaborate joke on the entry of Horace's book of epistles into the world and ends with a well-known σφραγίς describing the poet himself. It will be argued here that this final poem recalls and subverts the pretensions of two earlier final poems in Horace's own Odes , and that its good-humoured depreciation of Horace himself is matched by a similar attitude towards his previous grand poetic c…
Notes on the text and interpretation of Catullus
2 Passer, deliciae meae puellae, quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere, cui primum digitum dare appetenti et acris solet incitare morsus, cum desiderio meo nitenti 5 carum nescio quid lubet iocari, et solaciolum sui doloris, credo ut tum grauis acquiescat ardor; tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem, et tristis animi leuare curas! 10 *** 2b tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae pernici aureolum fuisse malum, quod zonam soluit diu ligatam. Robin Nisbet, w…
The Praise Singer: Horace Censorinus and Odes 4. 8
The criticism of the eighth ode of Horace's fourth book has been bedevilled by three major uncertainties: probable interpolation in its text, confusion about the identity of its addressee, and doubt as to its literary quality. 1 These issues will form the central concerns of this discussion. Earlier critics have been consistently scathing in their view of Odes . 4. 8: some editors have even gone so far as to deny Horatian authorship, 2 many have …
The potential effects of climate change on the Scottish tourist industry
Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil
Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and addresses one of the fundamental questions regarding any literary pursuit: How shall we read? Basing his methodology on the philosophy of Martin Buber, R. A. Smith advances the notion poets who allude to their predecessors embrace the text of their models. Allusion need not, strictly speaking, be looked at as a process of poetry, but can be seen as a high regard for the texts precede it in the literary trad…
The Speaking Book: The Prologue to Apuleius' Metamorphoses
at ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram auresque tuas benivolas lepido susurro permulceam, modo si papyrum Aegyptiam argutia Nilotici calami inscriptam non spreveris inspicere. figuras fortunasque hominum in alias imagines conversas et in se rursum mutuo nexu refectas, ut mireris, exordior. ‘quis ille?’ paucis accipe. Hymettos Attica et Isthmos Ephyrea et Taenaros Spartiatica, glebae felices aeternum libris felicioribus conditae,…
Lucretius, Euripides and the Philosophers: De Rerum Natura 5.13–21
Here in the proem to his fifth book Lucretius is praising the philosophical achievements or discoveries (‘reperta’) of Epicurus through favourable comparison with other discoveries of traditional heroic or divine figures; first, in this passage, with the products of bread and wine associated with the gods Ceres and Liber (Bacchus), and later with the deeds of the god-hero Hercules. This technique clearly derives from the σ⋯γκρισις of formal rheto…
Augustus, the Poets, and the Spolia Opima
The winning of the ultimate military honour of spolia opima , spoils taken personally from an enemy commander killed by a Roman commander, traditionally occurred only three times in Roman history, the winners being Romulus in the legendary period, A. Cornelius Cossus in either 437 or 426 and M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 B.C. 1 The dedication-place of these special spoils was the temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, traditionally founded by…
The lark ascending: Corydon, Corydon (Vergil, Ecl. 7.70)
At the end of the singing contest of Thyrsis and Corydon in the seventh Eclogue , the narrator Meliboeus summarizes its result in the poem's last lines (69–70)
Discordia Taetra: The History of a Hexameter-Ending
In Latin Hexameter Verse , his 1903 manual for composers of Latin hexameters which is still useful as a guide to Vergil's metrical and prosodic practices, S. E. Winbolt states that a hexameter ‘must not end with an adjective preceded by a noun with a similar short ending, e.g.... flumina nota ’ unless the adjective is emphatic, ‘i.e. strongly distinctive, predicative or antithetical’. Whether or not his distinction between emphatic and non-emphat…
Halls Full of Girls? Catullus 89.3
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Dividing the dinner: Book divisions in Petronius' Cena Trimalchionis
The information transmitted on the numeration of the books of Petronius' Satyrica is notoriously contradictory. Parts of the extant fragmentary text are variously assigned to Books 14–16: the testimonia are clearly set out in Muller's recent fourth edition (whose numeration I use here), and briefly discussed by Sullivan: of Müller's testimonia , no. 10 places Sat . 89.1 in Book 15, no. 13 puts Sat . 20.5 in Book 14, no. 21 identifies the Cena Tri…
Hereditary Eloquence Among the Torquati: Catullus 61.209-18
Hereditary Eloquence Among the Torquati: Catullus 61.209–18 S. J. Harrison Torquatus volo parvulus matris e gremio suae porrigens teneras manus dulce rideat ad patrem semihiante labello. sit suo similis patri Manlio et facile omnibus noscitetur ab insciis et pudicitiam suae matris indicet ore. 1 At the close of Catullus’ lyric epithalamium for a Manlius Torquatus, the speaker of the poem wishes for children from the marriage, a standard epithalam…
The Arms of Capaneus: Statius, Thebaid 4.165–77
The lack of a separate commentary on the fourth book of Statius' Thebaid has meant that many significant details in this description of Capaneus in the catalogue of the Seven have gone unremarked. This article aims to fill the deficiency, pointing out the rich literary allusions, artful symbolism and the careful use of language in this well written passage
Philosophical Imagery in Horace, Odes 3.5
The high moral tone of Horace's Reguhls ode (3.5) makes it unsurprising that the poet should employ the traditional imagery of philosophers, both in the speech of Regulus and in the final simile. I should like here to point out some instances which seem to have escaped the notice of commentators. This passage is intended to illustrate the lost ‘virtus’ of the prisoners in Carthage, who, Regulus claims, will be of no greater use to the Romans if r…
A Note on Euripides, Medea 12
Euripides, Medea 11–13 (Diggle's Oxford text): 12 πολιτ⋯ν codd. et Σ bv ; πολίταις (B gl ) V 3 , sicut coni. Barnes 13 αὐτῷ Sakorrphos; αὐτή codd. et gE et Stob. 4.23.30 In his recent discussion of this passage ( CQ 34 [1984], 50–1), Diggle has convincingly argued for πολίταις and αὐτῷ , the latter of which he places in his new Oxford text, but recognises that ɸυγῇ remains highly problematic (51): ‘The truth, I think, is still to seek’. It is to …
Cicero and ‘Crurifragium’
Quid enim? si Daphitae fatum fuit ex equo cadere atque ita perire, ex hocne equo, qui cum equus non esset nomen habebat alienum ? aut Philippus hasne in capulo quadrigulas vitare monebatur? quasi vero capulo sit occisus. Quid autem magnum aut naufragum illum sine nomine in rivo esse lapsum – quamquam huic quidem his scribit in aqua esse pereundum? ne hercule Icadii quidem praedonis video fatum ullum; nihil enim scribit ei praedictum: quid mirum i…
Evander, Jupiter and Arcadia
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Philosophical Imagery in Horace, Odes 3.5
The high moral tone of Horace's Reguhls ode (3.5) makes it unsurprising that the poet should employ the traditional imagery of philosophers, both in the speech of Regulus and in the final simile. I should like here to point out some instances which seem to have escaped the notice of commentators. This passage is intended to illustrate the lost ‘virtus’ of the prisoners in Carthage, who, Regulus claims, will be of no greater use to the Romans if r…
A Note on Euripides, Medea 12
Euripides, Medea 11–13 (Diggle's Oxford text): 12 πολιτ⋯ν codd. et Σ bv ; πολίταις (B gl ) V 3 , sicut coni. Barnes 13 αὐτῷ Sakorrphos; αὐτή codd. et gE et Stob. 4.23.30 In his recent discussion of this passage ( CQ 34 [1984], 50–1), Diggle has convincingly argued for πολίταις and αὐτῷ , the latter of which he places in his new Oxford text, but recognises that ɸυγῇ remains highly problematic (51): ‘The truth, I think, is still to seek’. It is to …
Horace, Epode 6.16
Here Horace gives warning to an adversary of his powers of literary attack, comparing himself with the great iambists Archilochus (‘Lycambae spretus infido gener’) and Hipponax (‘acer hostis Bupalo’). The general sense of the last two lines seems clear: ‘If someone attacks me (gifted as I am with the weapons of the iambist), shall I weep like a mere boy?’, i.e. ‘Am I not to take revenge?’
Horace, Satires 2.4.61
Here Horace's Catius lists restorative foods for drinkers. There seem to be two stages of drinking and two corresponding restoratives: the ‘marcens’ or drooping imbiber may be revived for more by prawns and snails, but not by lettuce, bad for the acidic and vinous stomach, while the man who is further gone needs ham and sausages or anything of that sort from the cook-shops. ‘Immorsus’ causes some difficulty here. It is usually taken with an under…
Horace, Odes 3.7: An Erotic Odyssey
Horace's Asterie ode (3.7) has been somewhat neglected by critics. Fraenkel, uninterested in the erotic odes, fails to mention it, and others see it as merely counterbalancing the preceding six Roman Odes by its frivolity and light irony. However, it is one of Horace's most subtle and best-organized erotic odes, matching the more obvious conventions of Latin love-elegy with a romanticized Odyssey as an underlying framework
Three Notes on Apuleius
I quote Griffiths' translation: ‘A crown of many designs with all kinds of flowers had girt her lofty head; in its centre a flat disk above the forehead shone with a clear light in the manner of a mirror or indeed the moon, while on its right and left it was embraced by coils of uprising snakes; from above it was adorned also with outstretched ears of corn’. This is the detailed description of the crown worn by Isis in her epiphany to Lucius at C…
Deflating the Odes: Horace, Epistles 1.20
Epistles 1.20, the last poem of its book, begins with an elaborate joke on the entry of Horace's book of epistles into the world and ends with a well-known σφραγίς describing the poet himself. It will be argued here that this final poem recalls and subverts the pretensions of two earlier final poems in Horace's own Odes , and that its good-humoured depreciation of Horace himself is matched by a similar attitude towards his previous grand poetic c…
Two Notes on Horace, Epodes (10, 16)
Epode 10: the Mystery of Mevius' Crime Horace's tenth Epode , an inverse propempticon, calls down dire curses on the head of a man named Mevius as he leaves on a sea-voyage.1 Scholars have naturally been interested in what Mevius had done to merit such treatment, but answers have been difficult to find, for nothing explicit is said on this topic in the poem; as Leo noted, ‘[Horatius] ne verbo quidem tarn gravis odii causam indicat’. This is in di…
Augustus, the Poets, and the Spolia Opima
The winning of the ultimate military honour of spolia opima , spoils taken personally from an enemy commander killed by a Roman commander, traditionally occurred only three times in Roman history, the winners being Romulus in the legendary period, A. Cornelius Cossus in either 437 or 426 and M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 B.C. 1 The dedication-place of these special spoils was the temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, traditionally founded by…
Lucretius, Euripides and the Philosophers: De Rerum Natura 5.13–21
Here in the proem to his fifth book Lucretius is praising the philosophical achievements or discoveries (‘reperta’) of Epicurus through favourable comparison with other discoveries of traditional heroic or divine figures; first, in this passage, with the products of bread and wine associated with the gods Ceres and Liber (Bacchus), and later with the deeds of the god-hero Hercules. This technique clearly derives from the σ⋯γκρισις of formal rheto…
The Speaking Book: The Prologue to Apuleius' Metamorphoses
at ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram auresque tuas benivolas lepido susurro permulceam, modo si papyrum Aegyptiam argutia Nilotici calami inscriptam non spreveris inspicere. figuras fortunasque hominum in alias imagines conversas et in se rursum mutuo nexu refectas, ut mireris, exordior. ‘quis ille?’ paucis accipe. Hymettos Attica et Isthmos Ephyrea et Taenaros Spartiatica, glebae felices aeternum libris felicioribus conditae,…
The Praise Singer: Horace Censorinus and Odes 4. 8
The criticism of the eighth ode of Horace's fourth book has been bedevilled by three major uncertainties: probable interpolation in its text, confusion about the identity of its addressee, and doubt as to its literary quality. 1 These issues will form the central concerns of this discussion. Earlier critics have been consistently scathing in their view of Odes . 4. 8: some editors have even gone so far as to deny Horatian authorship, 2 many have …
A Note on Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.31
Sic effata et osculis hiantibus filium diu ac pressule saviata proximas oras reflui litoris petit, plantisque roseis vibrantium fluctuum summo rore calcato ecce iam profundi mans sudo resedit vertice, et ipsum quod incipit velle, set statim, quasi pridem praeceperit, non moratur marinum obsequium: adsunt Nerei filiae chorum canentes et Portunus caerulis barbis hispidus et gravis piscoso sinu Salacia et auriga parvulus delphini Palaemon... ( Met .…
Discordia Taetra: The History of a Hexameter-Ending
In Latin Hexameter Verse , his 1903 manual for composers of Latin hexameters which is still useful as a guide to Vergil's metrical and prosodic practices, S. E. Winbolt states that a hexameter ‘must not end with an adjective preceded by a noun with a similar short ending, e.g.... flumina nota ’ unless the adjective is emphatic, ‘i.e. strongly distinctive, predicative or antithetical’. Whether or not his distinction between emphatic and non-emphat…
The Arms of Capaneus: Statius, Thebaid 4.165–77
The lack of a separate commentary on the fourth book of Statius' Thebaid has meant that many significant details in this description of Capaneus in the catalogue of the Seven have gone unremarked. This article aims to fill the deficiency, pointing out the rich literary allusions, artful symbolism and the careful use of language in this well written passage
Fuscus the Stoic: Horace Odes 1.22 and Epistles 1.10
Our information on Horace's friend Aristius Fuscus, whom he addresses in Odes 1.22 and Epistles 1.10, is neatly summed up by Nisbet and Hubbard: ‘he was a close friend of Horace's ( serm . 1.9.61 ‘mihi cams’, epist . 1.10.3 ‘paene gemelli’). He wrote comedies (Porph. on epist . 1.10) and seems to have had a sense of humour: it was he who refused to rescue Horace from the ‘importunate man’ in the Sacra Via ( serm . 1.9.60ff.). Horace says elsewher…
Vergil: Aeneid 10
A Roman Hecale: Ovid Fasti 3.661–74
This is one of the identities offered by Ovid for the goddess Anna Perenna, whose festival falls on the Ides of March. Ovid's lines give us the following information about this version of Anna: she was a poor but industrious old woman living in the suburbs of Rome, her benevolent baking and distribution of cakes provided much-needed sustenance for the plebs during their secessio on the Mons Sacer, and the plebs repaid this service when peace was …
The Romance of the Novel
Students of the ancient world are falling for the ancient Greek and Latin novels in increasing numbers, a state of affairs of which there were few intimations a generation ago. To be sure, the Satyrica of Petronius and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius were given standing-room on the edge of the classical canon, though few scholars and fewer students made the acquaintance of the complete texts. Encounters were usually restricted to the Cena Trimalchi…
Ferox scelerum ? A note on Tacitus, Annals 4.12.2
Commentators on this passage have drawn attention to the unusual genitive in the phrase ferox scelerum , ‘fierce in his crimes’: ‘this adj. seems here alone to take an objective genitive’, says Furneaux, while Martin and Woodman state that ‘the dependent genitive of an external attribute, evidently on the analogy of its use with personal characteristics (e.g. Ovid, Met . 8.613 mentis ), seems unparalleled and is perhaps intended to suggest that S…
Drink, suspicion and comedy in Propertius 1.3
Propertius 1.3 famously begins with the drunken poet returning from a night out to find his puella Cynthia asleep. The sleeping Cynthia is then apparently idealised by the poet through a series of comparisons with mythological heroines, until she wakes up and shows her true and less elevated character, shrewishly nagging the poet for staying out late with another woman, and thereby destroying his illusions. Some of the wit and irony of the situat…
Collected Papers on Latin Literature
This book contains twenty-six articles on a wide range of topics in Latin literature by the eminent scholar and former Professor of Latin at Oxford, Robin Nisbet. Original, stimulating, and at times provocative, this collection represents some of the best in Latin scholarship in recent years.
Homage to Horace: A Bimillenary Celebration
This book collects together seventeen new pieces on the Roman poet Horace, all specially written for the volume by scholars of international reputation. The book is intended both as a celebration of the bimillenary of Horace's death, and to mark the retirement of Professor R. G. M. Nisbet, noted Horatian scholar, from the Corpus Christi Chair of Latin at Oxford. Almost half the contributions deal with Horace's Odes, treating individual poems and …
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