Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novel by Daniel Jolowicz

Reviewed by: Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novel by Daniel Jolowicz Silvia Montiglio Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novel. By Daniel Jolowicz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. Pp. 401. Latin Poetry and the Ancient Greek Novel explores the presence and significance of Latin elegy and epic in the novels of Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and Longus. The book begins with a clear, informative, and confident introduction, which debunks the long-lived prejudice that the Greek novelists did not know or use Latin literature (a prejudice, if you will allow me a personal aside, that I shared until recently, before I ventured into a presentation on Chariton and Latin literature at a conference held at the Fondation Hardt). Seven chapters follow: three on Chariton, three on Achilles Tatius, and one on Longus. Chapters One and Two show how cardinal themes in Chariton, such as jealousy, death and exile, are imbued with references to elegiac treatments of the same themes, down to turns of phrases, which in numerous cases seem to translate typical stylemes of elegiac poetry. Jolowicz illustrates how allusions to elegy often serve to distance the ethos of Chariton's novel, in which, for example, (emotional) fidelity is key, from elegy. A [End Page 167] small but brilliant observation is that the use of the voice as a marker of identity, which is unprecedented in Greek literature, comes from Cephalus' recognition of Procnis' voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses (59–60). Chapter Three explores Chariton's use of Virgil's Aeneid. Here the argument, as the author acknowledges (91), is not as original as in the previous chapters. Other scholars, for example S. Tilg,1 have made a strong case for Chariton's knowledge and use of Virgil. But Jolowicz casts the net wider than earlier scholarship, moving beyond Aeneid 4 to Books 1–3 and 5 and further extending the parallels with Book 4. His conclusion, however, that Chariton "produces a novelized version of Rome's national poem . . . and offers a happy, alternative ending to the tragic story of Aeneas and Dido" (119), chimes with Tilg's. Jolowicz goes on to show that the novel of Achilles Tatius is also pervaded by Latin epic (including Lucan) and elegy: most visibly by Ovid's Art of Love, which provides a subtext for Clitophon's erotic instruction. A point particularly worth retaining from Jolowicz's analysis of Leucippe and Clitophon is that elegy serves Achilles Tatius well in his project of innovating the novelistic genre by providing him with a non-marital (or even anti-marital) and socially transgressive model of love. Both Leucippe and Clitophon are "elegiac" lovers, who initially do not plan to marry; he embarks on an Ovidian seduction and persuades her to have sex. At the same time, Leucippe is the Virgilian bride Lavinia, as suggested by her flush, which has Lavinia's blush as subtext (202–211). The final chapter, on Longus, argues that this novelist offers an eroticized and diminutive version of Vergil's Eclogues (especially 1 and 9), lacking the gloomy shadow of the civil war and with Tityros as a shorthand for Virgil (at 2.32.5), while his engagement with the Aeneid seems to reveal Pompeian sympathies. These in turn would strengthen the connection between Longus and the descendants of Pompey's Mytilenean friend Theophanes. Jolowicz's book breaks new ground, exhibits a substantial body of evidence not only at the thematic but also—and perhaps even more decisively—at the linguistic level: for instance it unearths the use of m—now for solus and Ðlow for totus in Chariton (36–39) and Achilles Tatius (126), or exact equivalents in Ovid for the recurring image of the "beautiful tears" in the latter novelist (164). Elsewhere it connects the recommendation that the lover should ensure that his girl "see" his tears to Ovidian passages which make the very same recommendation (169)—the examples are countless. The book succeeds in demonstrating the importance of Latin poetry in the novelists' conception of narrative developments and characterization; in particular, it stresses that the novelists often make a playful and antiphrastic use of that literature

Art · Decorum · Elegiac · Elegy · Literature · Poetry · Classical Antiquity Studies · History