THE DISTRIBUTION OF POETIC QUOTATIONS IN CICERO'S EXTANT WORKS

It has often been remarked that Cicero's quotations of and references to poetry are far more copious in his rhetorical and philosophical writing than in his private letters and public speeches. Latin poetry and its subject matter decorate in quantity only a few of the speeches, namely the defences of Sextus Roscius Amerinus (80 b.c.) Marcus Caelius (56), Publius Sestius (56) and Rabirius Postumus (54), the prosecution of Caius Verres (70) and the senatorial denunciation of Lucius Calpurnius Piso (55). A speech defending a man of Greek birth who wrote verses contains the only two mentions of Greek poetry. In the letters to Pomponius (Atticus) literal quotations of the Greek poets abound, in those to Papirius Paetus and Trebatius Testa quotations of the Romans. Poetry in either language, however, is conspicuously rare in the letters addressed to other eminent senators and equestrians. What little survives of speeches and letters composed by other men during the period of the Republic suggests that there was nothing very unusual about Cicero's practice.

Less remarked has been the fact that the relatively few quotations of Latin poetry which do appear in the speeches and the letters are dominated by the dramatic scripts performed at the public festivals, particularly the versions of Attic tragedy made in the previous century, to the almost complete exclusion of the epic poetry of Ennius and the satires of Lucilius.

INTRODUCTION

A literary work of art, or a more or less self-contained part of it, can be analysed with the help of the categories of unity and variety, or, otherwise expressed, constancy and progress, or theme(s) and variations. Such an analysis will take into account both the component parts or elements of the work in themselves, and their function in the whole. It can contribute to a better insight into the artistic composition and the full meaning of these elements. By ‘full meaning’ I understand their meaning at different levels, their undertones and overtones. It may also help to read ‘between the lines’ without losing ourselves in vain speculation. In the case of an author like Tacitus who made ‘emphasis’ (in the ancient rhetorical meaning) a major device, an effort to read between the lines is a prerequisite for any serious reader.

If we now turn to Tacitus' prologues, we first realize that they answer to the description of ‘more or less self-contained parts’ of his works. In the second place their literary ‘situation’ is completely different from that of the historical narratio, and more akin to that of the title of the work. In a way, they can be defined as extended titles, insofar as they too contain information on the author and the subject. In the prologue, the author presents this information in a personal address to his reader, whereas in the narratio, the author of a historical work disappears more or less behind his work and lets the events mostly speak for themselves – at least, that is the fiction.

During the anti-clerical fury of the French Revolution the custodian of the library at the Abbey of St-Germain-des-Prés took to its ruined and roofless tower such treasured manuscripts as he thought most worthy of preservation; preservation from the rain which beat night and day upon the now dangerously broken stairs where he strove unsheltered to sleep and to guard his books, and from the rage of the mob who would have sought his life had they not supposed the place to be deserted because uninhabitable. In the end, at no small cost to his health, he saved for us inter alia the Codex Sangermanensis (G) of Catullus. Yet this tale of peril, almost of disaster, is for all its drama not unique in the history of these poems; for if to some the story faintly recalls the return to Verona of the sole surviving Catullus, long hidden ‘beneath a bushel’, there may be others who will reflect on the discovery, by the sort of accident that happens only to the prepared, of a third cardinal manuscript to be set beside O and G, the Codex Romanus (R) in the year 1896, together with certain Homeric battles over its importance which ensued.

It has always been the fate of Catullus, not only to live dangerously so to speak, but to attract to himself the attention of minds fertile in humanistic accomplishment.

Professor Mendell came to Yale as an undergraduate from the Boston Latin School in the autumn of 1900 and thereafter – except for the periods of two world wars – was either in the center of or scarcely separable from Yale concerns and interests for virtually seventy years.

This notice will be confined to a brief review of Professor Mendell's published work, which speaks for itself. It should be remembered, however, that his eight books, thirty articles and a score of review and minor papers were the fruit of tranquil intervals in an extremely active life which the very diversity of his native gifts made inescapable. It was a life filled with teaching, administrative responsibilities (including eleven years as dean of Yale College), chairmanships and directorships of organizations, service to the nation in two world wars, and the answering of incessant calls to speak to academic and alumni groups. Of his services to classical education outside Yale particular mention should be made of his years devoted to the Classical Committee of the American Academy in Rome. He was unique in his days at Yale in that each circle with which he was associated felt that Dean Mendell was primarily one of them. His forte was the inspirational teaching of undergraduates, generations of whom can never forget him.

Augustus' chief concern as a stylist was clarity of expression. To achieve that end he was willing to employ prepositions where their use might, strictly speaking, have seemed redundant. In 50 b.c. Cicero had self-consciously apologized to Atticus for a similar practice. Seven years earlier, among the regulations governing a temple of Jupiter, prepositional phrases occur in place of the expected dative case. The increasing prominence of prepositions in marking syntactic relations previously expressed by case inflection represents one of the most important grammatical developments in the history of Latin.

In addition to presiding over the demise of the inherited case system, Latin prepositional usage has special interest for its exemplification of diverse syntactic and semantic change. Prepositions reflect the expression of time–space relations in the Roman world and play a central role in the construction of idioms. Notable semantic realignments have been occasioned by the interaction between prepositional and prefixational uses of the same form, or of different forms with similar or opposite meanings.

Like other Latin prepositions, prae and pro are commonly discussed in one of two ways. Traditional lexicographers distinguish between ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ usage, isolating a basic meaning to which all other meanings are presumably subordinate. Thus, according to Lewis and Short, prae is used ‘literally’ when it refers to place, but ‘figuratively’ in comparisons.

One of the most frequent errors made by critics who would defend Tibullus' poetry is the acceptance of the very standards of judgement which led earlier critics to attack it. Because they continue to ask the same, wrong questions about a poem, they should not be surprised to arrive at the same, wrong answers. The resulting conflict between an intuitive admiration for Tibullus and a negative judgement based upon the observation of apparent flaws has led even his staunchest defenders to make statements like the following:

Even a lenient judge must conclude that perfections which are concealed from the average reader by a host of flaws, or technique so refined that it produces shallow and static poetry can hardly be characteristic of a first-rate poet. Yet Quintilian names Tibullus first of the elegists, and we are loath to disagree.

One example of a critic asking the wrong question is Elder, when he discusses Tibullus' methods of achieving unity in his poems. This discussion should be viewed against a backdrop of those critics who called Tibullus an Ideenflüchtiger or saw only loose connections between the ‘episodes’ of a poem.

The charge of ‘loose construction’ is frequently leveled at Juvenal. This is a largely defensible point of view, but it should not be permitted to obscure instances where the satirist may be aiming at a higher degree of cohesion between the parts of a satire, nor preclude our seeking them out. The clearest instances of this kind of criticism of Juvenal are directed against Satires 4 and 7, the two most frequently cited for lack of unity and coherence. Sat. 4, it is true, has had a number of defenders since Nägelsbach (1848), including most recently Helmbold and O'Neil, and Anderson who have suggested new approaches to its thematic unity. But the pessimistic estimate of Kenney finds support from Coffey: ‘the fourth satire remains obstinately in two parts.’

The most useful approach now remaining to a clearer view of these particular poems is to try to determine what the poet's intentions were with regard to their basic designs. If this is possible, it should eventually give perspective to the detailed thematic studies already done; for the purposes of this paper, however, discussion of these other studies will be omitted except where obviously pertinent.

The admirable new commentary on the first book of Horace's Odes by Nisbet and Hubbard opens with the intriguing sentence, ‘The Odes of Horace are too familiar to be easily understood.’ In the opinion of the present writer, Carm. III. 1 is a fine example of what Mr Nisbet had in mind. None of Horace's poems can be more familiar than the first ‘Roman’ ode, and there is a huge literature dealing with all the Roman odes. Yet some obvious questions remain unsolved and even unasked. Part 1 of this paper was directly inspired by Mr Nisbet's intimation that students of Horace have become inattentive readers of Horace. Both the question there raised and my answer to it will probably be controversial. Part II is a reopening of a case that I presented in an earlier volume of Yale Classical Studies. In that publication I raised objections to the identification of Necessitas (III. 1. 14) with ‘Death the Leveler’. Since my objections appear to have escaped the notice of editors and commentators hitherto, I am presenting them once more in a revised and expanded form.

The figure of Germanicus in Tacitus' Annals has long been interpreted with exceptional unanimity. Only one recent scholar has questioned the validity of the usual version: that Tacitus knew a Germanicus whose actual career was often open to the criticism of failure, blundering, and weakness, but that the historian did the best he could with the facts to make the popular hero a foil to the villain Tiberius and a shining exemplar of political virtue.

M. P. Charlesworth, for instance: ‘Young, handsome and courageous, he was reputed to possess his father's Republican and democratic sentiments, and since a.d. 13 he had been in command of the armies of the Rhine. It may be suspected that the tradition, so uniformly favourable to him and kindly to his memory [n.: The portrait in Tacitus should be compared with the shorter eulogies that are to be found in Suetonius, Calig. 3 and Josephus, Ant. XVIII, [6], 207ff.], rests on writers who were glad to find in his gracious figure a foil to the dourness of Tiberius, but it is obvious that he had much to attract.’ E. Koestermann can speak of Tacitus' partiality for the illustrious figure of Germanicus as self-evident. B. Walker is representative: ‘The greater length of the account of the German mutiny is then explained by the appearance there of Tacitus' political hero Germanicus (who does not, when one reads carefully, acquit himself particularly well; but certainly the facts were against Tacitus here, and he did what he could for Germanicus, with difficult material)’; and, ‘The memory of Drusus, his German campaigns, and his loyal though somewhat operatic handling of the German mutiny, combine to build up for Germanicus an heroic stature.’

It is easy to belittle the contribution which technology can make to the appreciation of the classics but in one field at least, the compilation of Concordances, progress has been sensational. For over 200 years scholars have promised to produce a Concordance of Livy. No less than fourteen ventures have been advertised during that period – and have foundered. Now at last in Packard's monumental Concordance scholars of Livy's text and style have the tool for which they have waited so long. It is, of course, a tool conditioned by its own limitations: it is not analytical; it does not classify; and it accepts standard editions without considering textual difficulties. Nevertheless some indication of its value may be gained from the frequency with which its evidence is used in the following reconstruction of certain passages of Livy Book IX.

The manuscript tradition for that book is the same as that for the rest of the Decade. The Mediceus (M), supported by Gelenius' citations of a closely related manuscript, represents one tradition of the Nicomachean edition, except for chapters 9 to 14 where it appears that a quaternion in M's original was lost and was restored from the λ branch. The second tradition is divided into two independent branches π, most faithfully witnessed by the Paris (P) and Upsala (U) manuscripts, and λ, most faithfully witnessed by the Codex Thuaneus (T).