PLAGIARISM IN LATIN LITERATURE

Transcription

1 PLAGIARISM IN LATIN LITERATURE In response to critics who charged him with plagiarism, Virgil is said to have responded that it was easier to steal Hercules club than a line from Homer. This was to deny the allegations by implying that Virgil was no plagiarist at all, but an author who had done the hard work of making Homer s material his own. Several other texts and passages in Latin literature provide further evidence for accusations and denials of plagiarism. Plagiarism in Latin Literature explores how Roman writers and speakers define the practice and how the accusations and denials of it function in their historical and textual settings. moves between varied sources, including Terence, Martial, Seneca the Elder, and Macrobius Virgil criticism, to explore these topics. In the process, he offers new insights into the history of plagiarism and related issues, including Roman notions of literary property, authorship, and textual reuse. scott mcgill is currently Interim Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. He is the author of Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Virgilian Centos in Antiquity (2005) and co-editor of From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians: Later Roman History and Culture, ce (Cambridge, 2010).

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3 PLAGIARISM IN LATIN LITERATURE SCOTT MCGILL

4 cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Information on this title: / This publication 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 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data McGill, Scott, 1968 Plagiarism in Latin literature /. p. cm. isbn (pbk.) 1. Latin literature History and criticism. 2. Plagiarism. 3. Imitation in literature. I. Title. PA6141.Z5M dc isbn Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

5 For my sons, Charlie, Alexander, and Julian

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7 Contents Preface Acknowledgments List of abbreviations page ix xi xiii 1 The ancient and the modern: approaching plagiarism in Latin literature 1 part i accusations of plagiarism 31 2 Blame and praise: plagiarism and self-promotion in Latin prefaces 33 3 Playing the victim: Martial on the plagiarism of his poetry 74 part ii denials of plagiarism Plagiarism on the stage: Terence, literary controversy, and the theater A spectrum of innocence: denying plagiarism in Seneca the Elder Saving the hero: Virgil, plagiarism, and canonicity 178 Conclusion 210 Bibliography 223 Index 235 vii

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9 Preface Contemporary modes of remixing texts, like mashups, verbal sampling, and collage, are further iterations of the ancient impulse in writing toward creative reuse. 1 Of course, the methods of production and consumption have changed over time, as have the politics of repetition, the laws governing it, and the materials that are open to it. But the drive to make something new out of the old by adapting conventional themes and stories, by recasting specific models, and even by creating new texts out of the reordered fragments of earlier ones has a history that stretches back to ancient Greece and Rome. The Romans, in fact, traced the origins of their literature to adaptation, identifying in Livius Andronicus translation of a Greek play in 240 bce the first text of their literary tradition. For them, even the beginning of their literature had a past. As writing then developed in Roman verse and prose genres, reuse was fundamental to composition. The words of Lewis Hyde, recycled by Jonathan Lethem in his centolike essay The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, can be applied to the Latin context to capture that state of things: 2 Finding one s voice isn t just emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses.... Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Whether artist or dabbler, poet, rhetorician, historian or technical writer, Latin authors looked to conventional discourses and to past texts, both Greek and Roman, as sources of new literary life. Creation was ex alteris, a process in which making could not be separated from remaking. 1 An example of a mashup is Grahame-Smith Examples of sampling and collage are Lethem (see the next note), Shields 2010, and (according to the author) Hegemann Lethem 2007: 61. Arguing that art should lie open, giftlike, to creative reuse (and arguing against stringent copyright laws), Lethem metatextually makes his point by cobbling together passages taken from earlier writers. ix

10 x Preface The open-source nature of literature in Latin antiquity, however, did not preclude criticism of textual reuse. Just as there are those today who reject forms of literary remixing and set limits to acceptable borrowing, despite the widespread acknowledgment that writers take from their common cultural codes and from their predecessors as a matter of course, so in ancient Rome there were those who questioned the legitimacy of certain instances of adaptation. One of the ways this manifested itself was in charges of plagiarism. Because Latin literature was so imitative, it is natural to suppose that there was no cultural room for critics who might allege that an author was plagiarizing, not imitating, when he adapted a model. But such critics did exist, as did others who accused authors of plagiarizing instead of translating, of plagiarizing in their scholarship, and of plagiarizing entire compositions by simply attaching their names to them. Latin sources also survive who deny that they or another author committed plagiarism. This was to try to demonstrate that a writer stood on the right side of the divide between acceptable and culpable reuse and, consequently, to recognize both categories. What did it mean to plagiarize in Latin antiquity? What functions did charges and denials of plagiarism have in Roman society? How did accusers and apologists use plagiarism rhetorically i.e., what did they use their charges and denials to say? To explore these questions, as this book will do, is not only to firm up our understanding of the Roman history of plagiarism but also to complicate accepted truths about how freely Latin authors could draw from the past. At the same time, it is to come to recognize that the contemporary debates we sometimes find over whether remixing texts constitutes plagiarism turn on a concept of culpable copying that itself goes back to the ancient world.

11 Acknowledgments To produce a book requires solitude and the resources of a community. An author must spend countless hours alone reading, thinking, and writing. But he also gets ideas and inspiration from those around him, as well as support on the bad days, when the pages seem just a bunch of wandering words. Writing is, indeed, a lonely pursuit; but no one can do it on his own. In the years I have spent on this book, I have benefited enormously from my interactions with friends and colleagues at Rice University. Christopher Kelty deserves pride of place. Before he moved on to UCLA, he and I taught a course on ancient and modern concepts of intellectual property. Chris led me to think in new ways about reuse and remixing, as well as about their limits, and was an early enthusiast for my project. Without him, this book would not exist. If I did not agree with him that Los Angeles is an apocalyptic paradise, I would demand that he return to Houston (which is merely apocalyptic) so that I could continue to enjoy his intellectual fellowship and friendship. Others at Rice have done much to help me to complete this project. Chief among them are the members of the Classics department: Michael Maas, Hilary Mackie, Don Morrison, Ted Somerville, and especially Harvey Yunis. I must also thank Terry Munisteri for editing the manuscript ad unguem as well as the Deans Gary Wihl and Nick Shumway for the institutional support they provided. Finally, a number of people in the academic community outside of Rice gave me useful feedback on my work. They include audiences at Bard College, Brown University, Columbia University, UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara, the American Philological Association and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South conferences, and the Pacific Rim Latin Literature Seminar at the University of British Columbia. At Cambridge University Press, the anonymous readers worked hard to overcome my fallibility (homo enim sum) and to make this a better book. I appreciate as well all that Michael Sharp, Josephine Lane, Thomas O Reilly, and Anna Hodson did to bring the book to press. xi

12 xii Acknowledgments A section of chapter 1 appeared as The Right of Authorship in Symmachus Epistulae 1.31, in Classical Philology (2009) , 2009 The University of Chicago; a section of chapter 5 as Plagiarism or Imitation? The Case of Abronius Silo in Seneca the Elder s Suasoriae , in Arethusa 43.1 (2010) ; and much of the conclusion as The Plagiarized Virgil in Donatus, Servius, and the Anthologia Latina, in HSCP, forthcoming. It has been a joy to see my friendship only deepen with Joseph Luzzi over the course of this project. I am also indebted to my parents, Bonnye and Bob, to my brother, Sean, to my grandparents, particularly the memory of Bob Card, and to my in-laws, Harry and Judy Ellenzweig, for everything that a family gives to a person. I owe most to my wife, Sarah, optima optimarum, and to my sons, Charlie, Alexander, and Julian. This book was written deep inside the happy crucible of parenting: I began it just a few days after Alexander was born. I dedicate it to the boys as a token of these years full of midday intensity and love.

13 Abbreviations books AL Anthologia Latina, ed. D.R. Shackleton Bailey. Stuttgart, ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Berlin and New York, GL Grammatici Latini, 7 vols., ed. H. Keil. Leipzig, OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P.G.W. Glare. Oxford, RE Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart, AAntHung AJP Anc. Soc. BAGB BICS CJ CP CQ CR CRAI CSCA EMC/CV G&R GIF GRBS HSCP IJCT JRS MD journals Acta antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae American Journal of Philology Ancient Society Bulletin de l Association Guillaume Budé Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Classical Journal Classical Philology Classical Quarterly Classical Review Comptes rendus/académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres California Studies in Classical Antiquity Échos du monde classique = Classical Views Greece and Rome Giornale italiano di filologia Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies Harvard Studies in Classical Philology International Journal of the Classical Tradition Journal of Roman Studies Materiali e discussioni xiii

14 xiv NJKlPh PhQ QUCC REL RhM SIFC List of abbreviations Neue Jahrbücher für klassische Philologie Philological Quarterly Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica Revue des études latines Rheinisches Museum für Philologie Studi italiani di filologia classica