Latin Explorations (Routledge Revivals)

Critical Studies in Roman Literature

Kenneth Quinn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138014008
• eBook ISBN: 9781317745877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Ancient Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Latin Explorations, first published in 1963, offers a fresh approach to Roman poetry from Catullus to Ovid. Traditionally, the period is divided for specialist studies – Lyric, Epic and Elegy. In each of them, techniques of interpretation prevail, isolated from contemporary ideas about poetry and dominated by barriers between 'textual', 'exegetical' and 'aesthetic' criticism.

Kenneth Quinn discerns in Roman poetry of this period the adolescence, maturity and decay of a single coherent tradition whose internal unity surpasses differences of form. His argument attempts to reverse the dissociation of purely academic research from appreciative criticism, whilst also incorporating the work of textual scholars. Each chapter is supported by a detailed analysis of the texts: nearly 700 lines of poetry are discussed and translated.

Latin Explorations will be of significant value not only to students of the Classics, but also to the 'Latinless' general reader who is interested in Roman literature.

1

Horace’s Spring Odes

TO what extent can we judge a Latin poem the way we judge poems in our own language? The poem’s meaning in the humblest sense we usually can decide, more surely than we can tease a meaning from the words of many English poems. But a good poem offers the reader things subtler than plain communication. To these his reaction also must be subtle. Upon it may depend his ability to grasp the poem’s real meaning. When we read a poem written two thousand years ago in Latin, can we hope to react as the poet intended to the elements in his poem transcending plain communication? If we cannot, is it not presumption to sit in judgment upon the poet’s success? May we as much as pronounce his poem good or bad? As for pretending to found our judgment upon intimate contact with the poem—attempting the sort of structural analysis and appraisal of detail that the critic of modern poetry employs to reinforce initial impressions—does this not demand a feeling for a dead language we cannot honestly claim to possess?

The intervention of the literary critic in classical studies is regarded by many, understandably, with suspicion. There are at least three things that are said against him. The first is that his is a game scholars shouldn’t play—because it involves a subjective approach to classical literature incompatible with the impersonal role of scholarship. It is a point of view that is often held, but it is really quite untenable. For clearly, even in the course of the most scholarly tasks, scholars must make subjective decisions. Indeed if they didn’t, classics would be a laborious and arid discipline, doing little to sharpen the faculty of judgment, or our ability to measure quality in the statement, or representation, of human values—not worth anyone’s trouble except the specialist’s. The scholar-critic antithesis is a false one—and a comparatively recent one in the long history of classical studies. It dates from the rise in nineteenth-century Germany of a tradition of scientific scholarship that soon established itself throughout Europe and in America. In England the specially English tradition of the scholar who was also a critic worth listening to, a man who claimed the right to exercise culture and taste as well as learning, was challenged, and attempts were made, which never wholly succeeded, to impose on classical studies the stringent limitations of a new dispassionate professionalism.

A second objection to the classical literary critic deserves more attention. Those who put it forward admit the scholar is faced constantly with subjective decisions. They agree the interpretation of literature cannot be divorced from the appreciation of it. But they assert that this particular game, literary criticism, is not worth playing. It looks too much, they feel, like the intrusion of a fresh professionalism, hardly more to be desired than the other. It involves techniques they view with suspicion, even when applied to contemporary literature. The techniques produce clever people, they argue, but not people whose perception of human values, or even of quality in literature, is noticeably developed. Like Dr. Leavis they detect often ‘a glib superficiality’¹ in the professional appraisal of literature; but they are not, like him, convinced that the profession has more substantial contributions to make to humane studies. They find unsettling the notion that good literature is hard to appreciate. Yet I doubt if their objections deserve much attention either. They boil down often to the well-known fact that some forms of ignorance are more comfortable than some forms of knowledge, especially those forms of knowledge that compel us to recognize factors which cannot be dealt with by the exercise of logic or the display of learning.

The most troubling objection raises the questions with which this chapter opens, and answers them by asserting that in classics literary criticism is a game that cannot honestly be played at all. The arguments here include those to which Virginia Woolf lent the weight of her persuasive eloquence in a famous essay, ‘On not knowing Greek.’² However subjective we are prepared to be, it is maintained, however ingenious, we just can’t get a grasp of things written in Latin or Greek tight enough or sure enough to permit worth-while critical opinions. Everything is too blurred, to put it another way, for us to see clearly. Everything becomes too blunt, if you like, to have any bite. The odd thing about this third objection is the ready acquiescence it wins from most scholars not irrevocably committed to either of the previous positions. Put it to them, and they will agree that they don’t know Latin well enough to pass judgment on what they read. Yet the rest of the time it is obvious that these scholars (being men who like the classics) do allow themselves to pass judgment, publicly as well as privately, on what they read in Latin. Undoubtedly we miss a lot, are left unsure by things that did not trouble the contemporary reader, make mistakes he wouldn’t have made. But all these things happen to the present-day English reader of Shakespeare, or to the American reader of Dylan Thomas—not to mention the French reader: can he really make as much of Dylan Thomas as we might of Virgil? Usually, of course, with a Roman poet it is harder. But the scholar who makes this third objection regards himself as belonging to a class of reader so specially under-privileged that criticism is not just prone to error but impossible. And he is apt to assume (wrongly, surely) that contemporary readers of Virgil missed nothing, knew all the things he realizes he doesn’t know, made no mistakes.³

My purpose in this chapter is not to refute any of these three lines of objection by argument, for these are not issues where argument is effective. It is to show literary criticism in action, dealing with three poems about which evaluative judgments can hardly be avoided by any who claim to read Latin with pleasure. If we are sensible, we shall not expect final answers from our exercise in practical criticism; but we may hope to discover what answers are possible, and to explore methods of arriving at answers. We may then proceed to the application of these methods in the subsequent chapters to a variety of problems.

Horace wrote three odes about spring. In our texts they are numbered i, 4 (Soluitur acris hiems grata uice ueris et Famni …), iv, 7 (Diffugere nines, redeunt iam gramina campis …) and iv, 12 (Iam ueris comites, quae mare temper ant…). Two are famous, the third seldom much praised.⁴ That looks already like the beginnings of critical discrimination, and as a matter of fact scholars have passed judgment on the poetic quality of the three poems with some assurance. Unhappily they disagree. A. E. Housman, who made a fine poem of his own out of iv, 7, pronounced it, we are told, in an unguarded moment, ‘the most beautiful poem in ancient literature’. Mr. L. P. Wilkinson thinks he is right.⁵ Dr. Eduard Fraenkel is less sure. He is reluctant to contradict two eminent Cambridge Horatians openly; but his enthusiasm for iv, 7 is lukewarm. ‘Diffugere nives … is certainly an accomplished poem,’ he admits; ‘but,’ he goes on, ‘we should not use its perfection to slight its lovely forerunner.’⁶ On the other hand this sneaking preference for the gracefulness of i, 4 abates when a closer look at both reveals the greater seriousness of iv, 7.⁷

We may put down Fraenkel’s noble volume, and its many tributes to the greatness of Horace’s poetry, not seriously disturbed. He agrees after all with Housman as much as we might expect two very different men to agree about a poem both clearly liked. It is when we come to consider what has been written in Germany about these odes that we feel the first spasm of apprehensive despair in our pursuit of scholarly guidance. Wilamowitz, that giant of klassische Philologie, is no less sure, but his opinion of the poem his English counterpart was to call (a few months later) the most beautiful in ancient literature is poor indeed. He thought no better of iv, 12. In a discussion of the odes of Book IV published in 1913, he dismissed both impatiently as ‘unimportant poems about spring’ (unbedeutende Frühlingslieder), and passed on quickly to discuss, with more enthusiasm and sympathy, the eleventh and thirteenth odes of the same book.⁸ Turn now to the standard German commentator on Horace, Richard Heinze. He is more cautious, but admits he finds iv, 7 ‘poetically weaker’ (poetisch ärmer) than i, 4. The words occur in his discussion of i, 4.⁹ When he comes to deal with iv, 7, he seems to find reasons for preferring that poem.¹⁰

We need hardly pursue further our consultation of eminent scholars. Others will continue, if with less authority, the disagreement we have noted between Housman and Wilamowitz, commonly reckoned the tw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Horace’s Spring Odes
• 2. Virgil’s Tragic Queen
• 3. Emergence of a Form: The Latin Short Poem
• 4. Dramatic Monologue in the Odes of Horace
• 5. Tacitus’ Narrative Technique
• 6. Propertius, Horace, and the Poet’s Role
• 7. Propertius and the Poetry of the Intellect
• 8. The Tempo of Virgilian Epic
• 9. Persistence of a Theme: The Propempticon
• List of Poems and Passages Discussed
• Index