56 Rosenmeyer observes: ‘the desperation, the longings, the self-deception, and the resistance to fate found in the Tristia are all prefigured in the Heroides’ at ibid., p. 32.
57 Jo-Marie Claassen, Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (Madison, 1999), p. 12.
58 Spentzou, ‘Silenced subjects’, p. 319.
59 Raphael Lyne, ‘Love and exile after Ovid’, in Hardie (ed.), Cambridge Companion, p. 290.
60 A.J. Boyle, Ovid and the Monuments (Bendigo, 2003), p. 19.
61 Ibid., p. 18.
62 According to Ovid, Getic and Sarmatian were the languages most often heard at Tomi; the Greek spoken there was a bowdlerized version of the language, full of local words (see Tristia 5.7.52, 5.10.34–36). Latin, Ovid kept insisting, was a language utterly unfamiliar to the locals (see Tristia 5.10.37, 5.7.53–54).
63 Tarrant, Ovid and Ancient Literary History, p. 30.
64 Davis, Ovid and Augustus, p. 8.
65 Barchiesi, Poet and the Prince, p. 27.
66 Williams, ‘Ovid’s exile poetry’, p. 238.
67 Ibid., p. 239.
68 Green, Poems of Exile, p. liv.
69 Robert Graves, ‘The Virgil cult’, The Virginia Quarterly Review, 38 (1962), p. 13.
70 Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘Ovid in the twentieth century’, in Knox (ed.), Companion to Ovid, p. 455.
VII. Death and Afterlife
1 The elegiac couplet, however, retained its popularity in antiquity and even appeared in later prose novels such as Petronius’ Satyricon (c.66 CE) and Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (c.160 CE). For a survey of elegy across the centuries and into the modern period, see Karen Weisman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford and New York, 2010).
2 For more on the classical tradition, begin with Craig W. Kallendorf (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 2007).
3 The term Rezeptionsästhetik (sometimes translated as ‘the poetics of reception’) was coined in 1967 by the German academic Hans Robert Jauss and has subsequently been applied to discussions of the European reception of antiquity. See Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (eds), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford, 2008); and Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas (eds), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 1–13.
4 See, for example, Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge and New York, 1992), pp. 117–127.
5 This period saw the marked rise of textual criticism itself, including close study and preservation of earlier Greek literature.
6 Kenneth Quinn, ‘The poet and his audience in the Augustan Age’, in Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase (eds), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, 2.30.1 (1982), pp. 83–87.
7 See ibid., pp. 88–93; see also Holt Parker, ‘Books and reading Latin poetry’, in W.A. Johnson and H.N. Parker (eds), Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome (Oxford and New York, 2009), pp. 186–229.
8 See Raymond J. Starr, ‘The circulation of literary texts in the Roman world’, The Classical Quarterly, NS 37/1 (1987), pp. 213–223. Significantly, Catullus refers to ‘book stalls’ in his work (14) suggesting the presence of a public trade in books. See also Peter White, ‘Bookshops in the literary culture of Rome’, in Johnson and Parker (eds), Ancient Literacies, pp. 268–287.
9 The most extensive discussion of ancient literacy can be found in William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, 1989). Harris makes the critical point that Latin was not the first language for many residents of the Empire during that period, including those in Italy (pp. 175 ff). On the different ways in which literacy might be defined, see also Greg Woolf, ‘Literacy or literacies in Rome?’, in Johnson and Parker (eds), Ancient Literacies, pp. 46–68.
10 On Martial’s interest in Ovid, see also Craig Williams, ‘Ovid, Martial, and poetic immortality: traces of Amores 1.15 in the Epigrams’, Arethusa, 35/3 (2002), pp. 417–433.
11 Sven Lorenz, ‘Catullus and Martial’, in Marilyn B. Skinner (ed.), A Companion to Catullus (Malden, 2007), pp. 424–426.
12 Propertius’ work alone can be identified in three different instances; see James Butrica, ‘The transmission of the text of Propertius’, in H.-C. Günther (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Propertius (Leiden and Boston, 2006), p. 31. Virgil is the most prominent intertext in graffiti, however; see Kristina Milnor, ‘Literary literacy in Roman Pompeii: the case of Vergil’s Aeneid’, in Johnson and Parker (eds), Ancient Literacies, pp. 288–319.
13 For more information and bibliography for these poets, see Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History, tr. J.B. Solodow, rev. Don Fowler and Glen W. Most (Baltimore and London, 1994), pp. 655–661.
14 See L.D. Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, in id. (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), p. xiv.
15 For an excellent survey of the textual transmission of most Roman writers, see Reynolds (ed.), Text and Transmission.
16 Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii.
17 See Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (New York, 1969).
18 For an excellent account of how Latin texts are edited, see Richard Tarrant, ‘Classical Latin literature’, in D.C. Greetham (ed.), Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (New York, 1995), pp. 95–147.
19 Julia H. Gaisser, ‘Catullus in the Renaissance’, in Skinner (ed.), Companion to Catullus, p. 439. See also Julia H. Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (Oxford, 1993), p. 15.
20 As Gaisser argues, Martial reinforced the sense of Catullus as a ‘light and racy epigrammatist, witty and often obscene, without emotional complexity, political animus, or Alexandrian intricacy’ at Gaisser, ‘Catullus in the Renaissance’, p. 441.
21 James Butrica, ‘History and transmission of the text’, in Skinner (ed.), Companion to Catullus, pp. 26–28.
22 See Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 6.20.6; see also Butrica, ‘History and transmission’, p. 15.
23 As Butrica writes, ‘among ancient Latin poets, perhaps only the text of Propertius was corrupted to a comparable degree’ at Butrica, ‘History and transmission’, p. 30.
24 Gaisser, ‘Catullus in the Renaissance’, p. 445.
25 Butrica, ‘History and transmission’, p. 32. See also John M. Trappes-Lomax, Catullus: A Textual Reappraisal (Swansea, 2007).
26 Francis Newton, ‘Tibullus in two grammatical florilegia of the Middle Ages’, Transactions of American Philological Association, 93 (1962), p. 254.
27 Ibid., p. 258.
28 Butrica, ‘The transmission of the text’, pp. 36–37.
29 Although relationships between the various manuscripts and their descendants continue to be contested, critics generally identify two distinct families deriving from A and N. Butrica identifies a third branch beginning with X, a now-lost manuscript dated to around 1425; see ibid., pp. 39–42. Tarrant treats this copy as part of N’s family; see Richard Tarrant, ‘Propertius’, in Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission, pp. 325–326. For a fuller account, see James Butrica, The Manuscripts of Propertius (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1984).
30 Butrica, ‘The transmission of the text’, p. 41. See also Tarrant, ‘Propertius’, pp. 324–325.
31 Paolo Fedeli, ‘The history of Propertian scholarship’, in Günther (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Propertius, pp. 3–4.
32 See D. Thomas Benediktson, Propertius: Modernist Poet of Antiquity (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1989).
33 Butrica helpfully identifies five specific types of error that entered Propertius’ text over the centuries at Butrica, ‘The transmission of the text’, pp. 31–36.
34 For an excellent survey, see Fedeli, ‘The history of Propertian scholarship’, pp. 1–21.
35 Paul Allen Miller, ‘What is a Propertian poem?’, Arethusa, 44 (2011), pp. 331–333.
36 See the thoughtful discussion of this issue at ibid., pp. 329–352.
37 Richard
Tarrant, ‘Propertian textual criticism and editing’, in Günther (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Propertius, pp. 47–48, 65.
38 On Heyworth’s use of Housman, see G. Luck, ‘Lessons learned from a master’, in D.J. Butterfield and C.A. Stray (eds), A. E. Housman: Classical Scholar (London, 2009), pp. 249–250.
39 See S.J. Heyworth, ‘Housman and Propertius’, in Butterfield and Stray (eds), A. E. Housman: Classical Scholar, pp. 11–28.
40 Ibid., pp. 23–25.
41 Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (New York, 1997), p. 69. See also Kenneth Reckford, ‘Stoppard’s Housman’, Arion, 9/2 (2001), pp. 108–149.
42 Stoppard, Invention of Love, p. 56.
43 John Richmond, ‘Manuscript traditions and the transmission of Ovid’s works’, in B.W. Boyd (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Ovid (Leiden and Boston, 2002), p. 443. As Possanza observes, ‘we can glimpse from the indirect tradition what is happening to the text, and what we see is not encouraging’ at Mark Possanza, ‘Editing Ovid: immortal works and material texts’, in Peter E. Knox (ed.), A Companion to Ovid (Malden and Oxford, 2009), p. 316.
44 Possanza, ‘Editing Ovid’, p. 316. There is only one fragment dated to the second half of the fifth century CE, which contains twenty-four lines of Ovid’s exilic poetry.
45 Our account of Ovid’s manuscript tradition closely follows the survey provided at Richmond, ‘Manuscript traditions’, pp. 450–451.
46 A few words should also be said about an unexpected and curious resource for restoring Ovid’s elegiac texts: the Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes (c.1255–c.1305), who translated the Amores and the Heroides, along with the epic Metamorphoses, into Greek. His translation was so literal that it has allowed scholars to reconstruct some of the readings and the proper spelling of Greek names in the lost Latin manuscripts that he was relying on. See ibid., p. 456; and Possanza, ‘Editing Ovid’, p. 317.
47 For more on editing and the amended editions, see Richmond, ‘Manuscript traditions’, pp. 457–459; and Possanza, ‘Editing Ovid’, pp. 318–323.
48 Conte, Latin Literature, p. 329.
49 Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers, p. 193; see also pp. 220–229.
50 Ibid., p. 233.
51 Simona Gavinelli, ‘The reception of Propertius in Latin antiquity and Neolatin and Renaissance literature’, in Günther (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Propertius, p. 404. The changing status of the Latin love poets in schools continued to shape their reception over the centuries. See, for example, Ronnie Ancona and Judith P. Hallett, ‘Catullus in the secondary school curriculum’, in Skinner (ed.), Companion to Catullus, pp. 481–502. On the other hand, knowledge of ancient poetry for many people was limited over the centuries to what was recorded in ‘commonplace books’; see Julia H. Gaisser, ‘Introduction’, in ead. (ed.), Catullus in English (London and New York, 2001), p. xxxi.
52 Gordon Braden, ‘Classical love elegy in the Renaissance (and after)’, in Weisman (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, p. 158.
53 Braden, ‘Classical love elegy’, p. 158 ff.
54 Conte, Latin Literature, p. 329.
55 See Jeremy Dimmick, ‘Ovid in the Middle Ages: authority and poetry’, in P. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 264–287.
56 Michael L. Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ann Arbor, 1996), p. 65.
57 John M. Fyler, ‘The medieval Ovid’, in Knox (ed.), Companion to Ovid, p. 413.
58 Ibid., p. 416.
59 G. Martelotti (ed.), Francesco Petrarca: Prose (Milan, 1955), p. 532.
60 Conte, Latin Literature, p. 362.
61 Raphael Lyne, ‘Love and exile after Ovid’, in Hardie (ed.), Cambridge Companion, p. 291.
62 Yvonne LeBlanc, ‘Queen Anne in the lonely, tear-soaked bed of Penelope: rewriting the Heroides in sixteenth-century France’, in Carol Poster and Richard Utz (eds), The Late Medieval Epistle (Evanston, 1996), p. 71.
63 Ibid., p. 72.
64 Ibid., p. 81.
65 For both Andrelini and Cretin, Ovid’s work provided an opportunity to open a ‘space of exchange’ with classical antiquity. See Paul White, Renaissance Postscripts (Columbus, 2009), p. 187.
66 See Bernhard Zimmermann, ‘The reception of Propertius in the Modern Age: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Römische Elegien and Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius’, tr. J. Grethlein, in Günther (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Propertius, pp. 420–424.
67 Ibid., p. 424. Goethe seems especially influenced by Propertius in the work (see p. 424), and he even offers a seeming parallel for the sleeping Cynthia of Propertius 1.3 in his poem 13 (p. 422).
68 Ibid., pp. 424.
69 Heather James, ‘Ovid in Renaissance English literature’, in Knox (ed.), Companion to Ovid, p. 432.
70 Braden, ‘Classical love elegy’, pp. 164–165.
71 James, ‘Ovid in Renaissance’, pp. 436–437.
72 Notably, Skelton also wrote a dead sparrow poem: see Jacob Blevins, Catullan Consciousness and the Early Modern Lyric in England: From Wyatt to Donne (Aldershot and Burlington, 2004), pp. 19–22.
73 John B. Emperor, ‘The Catullan influence in English lyric poetry, circa 1600–1650’, The University of Missouri Studies, 3/3 (1928), pp. 21–28, 100–112.
74 Gaisser, ‘Introduction’, p. xxviii. By that point, however, English writers had also become familiar with Catullus’ earlier receptions in Europe, making Catullus’ direct link to English poetry often difficult to pinpoint (see pp. xxix f.).
75 Eleanor Shipley Duckett, Catullus in English Poetry (Northampton, MA, 1925) organizes poetic responses to Catullus by poem number; for responses to the sparrow poems, see pp. 10–25, and for Catullus 5 and 7, about Lesbia, see pp. 30–45. See also Gaisser (ed.), Catullus in English.
76 See Duckett, Catullus in English Poetry, p. 39.
77 Gaisser, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxv.
78 Ibid., pp. xxxv f.
79 See Brian Arkins, ‘The modern reception of Catullus’, in Skinner (ed.), Companion to Catullus, p. 464.
80 Ibid., p. 465. See also Thomas J. Brennan, ‘Creating from nothing: Swinburne and Baudelaire in “Ave Atque Vale”’, Victorian Poetry, 44/3 (2006), pp. 251–271. For broader background on the Victorian period, see Vance Norman, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1997). For visual material from the same period, including discussion of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1865 work Catullus at Lesbia’s (see fig. 2.1), see George P. Landow, ‘Victorianized Romans: images of Rome in Victorian painting’, Browning Institute Studies, 12 (1984), pp. 29–51.
81 Sara Teasdale, ‘On the death of Swinburne’, in Helen of Troy and Other Poems (New York and London, 1911), p. 93.
82 Edna St. Vincent Millay, ‘Passer mortuus est’, repr. in Gaisser (ed.), Catullus in English, p. 288.
83 Dorothy Parker, ‘From a letter from Lesbia’, repr. in Gaisser (ed.), Catullus in English, p. 289.
84 Gaisser, ‘Catullus in the Renaissance’, p. 457.
85 Arkins, ‘Modern reception’, pp. 463–464.
86 Gaisser, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxix.
87 Arkins, ‘Modern reception’, p. 473.
88 Sidney Keyes, ‘A translation of Carmen XI by Catullus,’ in M. Meyer (ed.), The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes, (London and New York, 1988), p. 129. The translation is taken from a letter, and Keyes deflected some of its intensity by writing, ‘I enclose also my own inept effort to translate Catullus. You may wonder Why Catullus? and I can only say that there is a volume of him in the local library with crib opposite’ (p. 129).
89 On Keyes’s short life and poetry, see Linda M. Shires, British Poetry of the Second World War (New York, 1985), pp. 99–112; and John Guenther, Sidney Keyes: A Biographical Inquiry (London, 1967).
90 Ira B. Nadel, The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound (Cambridge and New York, 2007), p. 8.
91 Quoted in Arkins, ‘Modern reception’, p. 466.
92 Ibid., pp. 466–
470. See also Ron Thomas, The Latin Masks of Ezra Pound (Ann Arbor, 1983), pp. 21–37.
93 On his hostility to Virgil, see Thomas, Latin Masks, pp. 9–20; for use of Ovid in the Cantos, see pp. 59–116.
94 The Homage to Sextus Propertius was not Pound’s first involvement with Propertius: on Propertius’ presence in Pound’s earlier work, see Thomas, Latin Masks, pp. 39–46; for a comparison of Pound’s two different treatments of the same poem, see Brian Arkins, ‘Pound’s Propertius: what kind of homage?’, Paideuma, 17/1 (1988), p. 39.
95 For an account of its publishing, see J.P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (Austin, 1964), pp. 4–6.
Latin Love Poetry Page 30