The Fiction of Occasion in Hellenistic and Roman Poetry

Adrian Gramps

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783111270647
• eBook ISBN: 9783110731644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The aim of this book is to devise a method for approaching the problem of presence in Hellenistic and Roman poetry. The problem of presence, as defined here, is the problem of the availability or accessibility to the reader of the fictional worlds disclosed by poetry. From Callimachus' Hymns to the Odes of Horace, poets of this era repeatedly challenge readers by beckoning them to explore fictive spaces which are at once familiar and otherworldly, realms of the imagination which are nevertheless firmly rooted in the lived reality of the poets and their contemporaries. We too, when we read these poems, may feel simultaneously a sense of being transported to a world apart and of being seized upon by the poem's address in the here and now of reading. The fiction of occasion is proposed as a new conceptual tool for understanding how these poems produce such problematic presences and what varieties of experience they make possible for their readers. The fiction of occasion is defined as a phenomenon whereby a poem is fictionally framed as part of a material event or 'occasion' with which the reader is invited to engage through the medium of the senses. The book explores this concept through close readings of key authors from the corpus of first-person poetry written in Greek and Latin between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE, with a focus on Callimachus, Bion, Catullus, Propertius, and Horace. The ultimate purpose of these readings is to move towards developing a new vocabulary for conceptualising ancient poetry as an embodied experience.

1 Rethinking Mimetic Poetry and Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo

1.1 Introduction

In this first chapter, I would like to take a detailed look at a single poem, Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo. This poem will serve as a useful starting point for the readings to follow, primarily due to its close association in the contemporary scholarly conversation with the category of ‘mimetic poetry’.¹ The idea of the ‘mimetic’ or ‘mimeticism’ in poetry, which will be explored in depth below, was formulated in response to the same questions from which I began in my introduction, questions about reader involvement and presence in the face of the intricate play of fictions we encounter in poems like this one. My initial goal in this chapter will be to show that the approach of labelling such poems ‘mimetic’ is inadequate, and secondarily to open the way for a new framework for thinking about the same set of problems.

My argument will be structured as follows. Firstly I will make a case for rejecting the label of ‘mimetic poetry’ for this poem (and, by extension, for other poems that are grouped under this heading) by demonstrating the term’s theoretical flimsiness and lack of explanatory power. Next I will challenge narratological approaches which attempt to solve the poem’s enunciative ambiguities by attributing sections of text to various fictional speakers; I argue that the question we need to be asking is not ‘who is speaking?’ but rather ‘what kind of experience are we presented with?’.

My thesis is that what shifts in the poem is not the identity of the speaker, but the modality of the hymnic discourse. I argue, following Fludernik’s proposals on the experiential structures underlying narrative discourse,² that we need to see in the poem an oscillation between two experiential frames, which I will call ‘experience-report’ and ‘performed speech’. This conclusion is founded on the premiss that what is referred to in the poem as the ‘song of Apollo’ (Ἀπόλλωνος ἀοιδῇ, 17) can be conceived as a multimodal, multisensory experience which functions as a mise-en-abyme of Callimachus’ own Hymn to Apollo. The ultimate goal of this revisionist approach is to change what kinds of questions we ask of the Hymn to Apollo: not how to identify the performance occasion and the voices that speak therein (a question which leads to aporia and circular reasoning), but how a reader or audience might contextualise them within a communicative frame.

1.2 The Hymn to Apollo and ‘mimetic poetry’

Since Reitzenstein coined it in 1906,³ the term ‘mimetic poem’ or ‘mimetic poetry’ has been adopted by many scholars as a means of explicating some of the interpretive problems raised by certain of the Hymns of Callimachus. While this term has been criticised on various accounts, and has not won wide acceptance in itself as a subcategory of Greek or other poetry, it nevertheless remains common practice to refer to Hymns 2, 5, and 6 (and occasionally 4) as the ‘mimetic hymns’ (as opposed to the other ‘rhapsodic hymns’) and to place this ‘mimetic’ quality at the centre of critical treatments of the poems.⁴ Albert provides the standard definition of the term:

Ein mimetisches Gedicht besteht in einer poetisch gestalteten zusammenhängenden Rede, die eine als Sprecher auftretende Person in einer Szenerie äußert und in der sie auf Vorgänge oder Geschehnisse Bezug nimmt, die sich während des Sprechens in der Szenerie ereignen und eine Szenerieveränderung bewirken.⁵

A mimetic poem consists of a poetically constructed, cohesive discourse which is enunciated in a setting by a person appearing as the speaker and in which this person refers to processes or events which occur in the setting in the course of the speaking and which bring about a change of setting.

In Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, this Szenerie is specified at the outset of the poem as a shrine (μέλαθρον, 2) in which a number of portents (Albert’s Geschehnisse) herald the imminent arrival of the god himself, and ‘the speaker’⁶ alternates between describing these portents in simultaneous narration (1–5), commanding a group of onlookers to maintain ritual silence and for sinners to depart (2) and urging a chorus of boys to begin singing and dancing in the god’s honour (8-16), after which, according to Albert, a Szenerieveränderung takes place — viz. the choral song and dance actually begins (17);⁷ we will return to this later.

Interpretive comment on the poem has tended to cluster around the opening lines which introduce this setting, which it is worth quoting in full:

οἷον ὁ τὠπόλλωνος ἐσείσατο δάφνινος ὅρπηξ,

οἷα δ᾽ ὅλον τὸ μέλαθρον· ἑκάς, ἑκὰς ὅστις ἀλιτρός.

καὶ δή που τὰ θύρετρα καλῷ ποδὶ Φοῖβος ἀράσσει·

οὐχ ὁράᾳς; ἐπένευσεν ὁ Δήλιος ἡδύ τι φοῖνιξ

ἐξαπίνης, ὁ δὲ κύκνος ἐν ἠέρι καλὸν ἀείδει.

αὐτοὶ νῦν κατοχῆες ἀνακλίνεσθε πυλάων,

αὐταὶ δὲ κληῖδες· ὁ γὰρ θεὸς οὐκέτι μακρήν. (1–7)

How the laurel shoot of Apollo trembled, and the whole shrine as well! Begone, begone, whosoever is unworthy! Surely that is Phoebus knocking on the doors with his beautiful foot — don’t you see? The Delian palm nodded sweetly of its own accord, and the swan is singing a beautiful song in the air. Open yourselves now, gate-bars, open yourselves, bolts, for the god is not far off now!

Commentators concerned to highlight the ‘mimetic’ quality of the poem usually point to these lines, and often all that the epithet indicates is that an imaginary situation is being evoked,⁸ one which is divorced from any conceivable performance setting and is thus best seen as wholly fictional.⁹ The sudden apostrophe to an unspecified observer in v. 4 — οὐχ ὁράᾳς; — has received particular attention in this respect: Reitzenstein observes that the phrase turns the reader into a witness to the imagined scene,¹⁰ and Bing sees the phrase as pulling the reader into the drama, inviting her to imagine herself as one of the worshippers.¹¹ These poems will then be the hymnic equivalent to the ecphrastic epigram, the artistry of which consists in its enargeia in evoking an entirely unreal situation:¹² in Friedländer’s words, ‘The act of perception is accentuated precisely because, broadly speaking, no such act takes place’.¹³

The tendency to interpret the hymn as a ‘literary drama’ has led to a focus on the ambiguity of voice in the poem, which Calame most fully outlines as oscillating between the implied author, a choregos or ‘master of ceremonies’ who directs the singing of a hymn, and the chorus of boys who follow him.¹⁴ Following on this line of argument, Depew sees in the poem a deliberate ‘scrambling’ of the ‘ambiguities of deictic reference’ which highlights the ‘essential textuality’ of Callimachus’ work;¹⁵ likewise Falivene states that the purpose of the mimetic hymns is ‘to imitate an oral performance in writing’, and draws an analogy with the Platonic dialogues, which present themselves as written transcripts of conversations.¹⁶ Bing goes even further, seeing in the Hymn the primal encounter of the Alexandrian scholar with the written poetic text, suggesting to him a new kind of ‘play’ which could not have been conceived by his predecessors.¹⁷ Calame, considering the element of polyphony and enunciative ambiguity in the poem, affirms this thesis of ‘essential textuality’ when he concludes:

the constant interplay among persons occupying in succession enunciative stances that are usually kept distinct gives the strong impression that this ‘mimetic’ effect is operating on the level of literary fiction […] [T]he ‘mimesis’ is in fact hermetic: its construction is such that it is probably self-referential and intradiscursive and does not refer to any action outside the poem itself (unlike what we find in archaic melic poetry, where singers refer to the external ritual actions in which they are involved). From this point of view, it is particularly significant that the poet has so much more to say on the (fabricated) performance context of his poem than the Homeric Hymns or the archaic melic poets do.¹⁸

Calame’s formulation makes clear that the label of ‘literary fiction’ as applied to the Hymn to Apollo does not only pertain to its truth-value but also to the mode it which it communicates. Where archaic poets index performance occasions to reinforce the connexion between text and context, Calame suggests, the performance occasion in the Hymn to Apollo is folded inside it as the object of its mimesis.¹⁹ According to this schema, ‘fictionality’ amounts to a pragmatic frame whereby the hymn is transformed from a first-degree speech act (the hymnic performance) into a represented action, and reader engagement with this represented action is conceived as an activity of reconstructing the fictional situation built up by the text.

This conception of the hymn as representing a fictional occasion to the reader is closely bound up with the question of the status and identity of the poem’s ‘speaker’, who is often said to be a fictional character.²⁰ Morrison even considers ‘mimetic’ to be a property of the ‘narrator’ (his blanket term for the primary speaker in any genre of poetry), and states that the term ‘is used […] to describe a narrator who does not stand in the conventional relationship of narrator to audience in a hymn, but appears as a fictional character who addresses himself or other fictional characters, rather than the audience of the hymn’.²¹ According to the standard account, then, the distinguishing elements of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, and of ‘mimetic poetry’ in general, are fictionality and enunciative ambiguity as functions (or symptoms) of an ‘essential textuality’.²² In order to provide a critique of this account, we must return to Albert’s much more precise definition of the term.

1.3 Discourse and events

Albert draws attention to something in his definition which is crucial, but not adequately accounted for in any of the treatments mentioned above. According to him, the ‘mimetic’ effect is produced by the seemingly paradoxical running together of two elements, namely the time of the speaker’s discourse and the time of the events that are occurring; the events and the ‘change of setting’ that they effect go on seemingly under the narrator’s nose, rather than subject to his exposition.²³ His definition does not, however, offer an explanation for this running together of discourse and events. In failing to elucidate the correlation between the two, Albert’s definition fails to significantly set apart ‘mimetic poems’ from such commonplace literary devices as simultaneous narration and dramatic exposition. The real crux of the problem rather seems to me to lie in the relation between the speaker’s discourse and the ‘events’ to which he refers.

The key to discovering this relation lies in considering the ‘setting’ in which, in Albert’s formulation, both discourse and events occur. We can note at the outset that, in the case of this poem, the setting is not simply any setting, but rather the occasion of the hymn. ‘Occasion’ denotes not simply a setting in place and time, but rather the state of affairs which originates the discourse; the hymn itself is presented as arising of necessity out of the ceremony to which it answers. The poem itself makes this clear: the speaker urges the boys to begin the dance because Apollo is a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Rethinking Mimetic Poetry and Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo
• 2 Figuring Occasion in Propertius 4.6 and Bion’s Adonis
• 3 Occasion and Presence in Horace, Odes I
• 4 Occasioning the Choral in Horace, Odes IV
• 5 Conclusion
• Index Rerum et Nominum
• Index Locorum