E-Book Overview
In these studies of Latin poetry Niall Rudd demonstrates a variety of critical methods and approaches. He shows how it can be fruitful at different times to consider the historical background of a poem, its language or structure, its place in a literary tradition, the role of critical paradigms, and so on. But if no single approach has special and invariable authority this does not imply critical anarchy. Each has its own validity for different purposes, its own strengths and limitations. The reader must be versatile and sensitive to a range of possibilities, but not doctrinaire.
E-Book Content
LINES OF ENQUIRY Studies in Latin Poetry
LINES OF ENQUIRY Studies in Latin Poetry
NIALLRUDD Professor of Latin in the University of Bristol
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE LONDON • NEW YORK • MELBOURNE
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 1976 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1976 First paperback edition 2004 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress catalogue card number: 75—12467 ISBN 0 521 20993 5 hardback ISBN 0 521 61186 5 paperback
Contents
Preface
vii
Abbreviations
xi
1
H I S T O R Y : Ovid and the Augustan myth
2
ID EA: Dido's culpa
32
S
I M I T A T I O N : association of ideas in Persius
54
4 T O N E : poets and patrons in Juvenal's seventh satire 5
1
84
A R C H I T E C T U R E : theories about Virgil's Eclogues
119
T H E O R Y : sincerity and mask
145
7 TRANSLATION: Catullus 85 (Odi et amo) Horace, Odes iv.7 (Diffugere nines) Ovid, Amoves 1.5 (Aestus erat)
182
6
Index of writers, scholars and translators
211
Preface
Although the book which follows cannot be said to make a formal whole, it is not just a collection of miscellaneous essays. Each chapter starts intentionally from a different position and employs a different method; yet they all converge on the subject of Latin poetry. And so, taken together, they illustrate, however imperfectly, the idea that in the study of literature no single point of view (whether philological, religious, historical, or economic) has any special authority, and that the value of a given technique depends entirely on its fruitfulness. Apart from this impure, empirical, theory, there is another common factor. While these papers no doubt contain their share of prejudice and error, they do attempt in their different ways to expound some kind of thesis. They work through argument and are therefore open to refutation. And they assume that the old tag de gustibus non disputandum is something which a critic utters only when he wishes to break off an argument without coming to blows. In case this sounds too attractively pugnacious I should add that, when other writers are referred to, it means that I value their work, have learned much from it, and wish to put forward a different view only on the particular point at issue. Usually this is not a matter of direct confrontation but of trying to modify or supplement what those scholars have said. This has part