RECEPTION AND THE CLASSICS An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition This collection brings together leading experts in a number of fields of the humanities to offer a new perspective on the classical tradition. Drawing on reception studies, philology, and early modern studies, the essays explore the interaction between literary criticism and the multiple cultural contexts in which texts were produced, discovered, appropriated, and translated. The intersection of Realpolitik and textual criticism, poetic and musical aesthetics, and authority and self-fashioning all come under scrutiny. The canonical Latin writers and their subsequent reception form the backbone of the volume, with a focus on the European Renaissance. It thus marks a reconnection between classical and early modern studies and the concomitant rapprochement of philological and cultural historical approaches to texts and other works of art. This book will be of interest to scholars in Classics, Renaissance studies, comparative literature, English, Italian, and art history. william brockliss is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Brigham Young University. He has recently completed a dissertation on the relationship between the metaphorical associations of flowers in Homeric poetry and the characteristics of flora in the Greek natural environment. In the future, he intends to develop his studies of metaphoricity by exploring the contrasting treatments of everyday metaphor in Greek poetry and philosophy. pramit chaudhuri is Assistant Professor of Classics at Dartmouth College. He specializes in the Latin poetry of the early Roman empire, set within a broader study of classical epic and tragedy. His current work explores literary depictions of theomachy (conflicts between humans and gods) and their mediation of issues such as religious conflict, philosophical iconoclasm, political struggle, and poetic rivalry. He also studies the reception of classical antiquity in early modern epic and tragedy and in Renaissance art. ayelet haimson lushkov is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in the political culture and historiography of the Roman republic, with a particular focus on the conjunction of literary technique and historical subject matter. Her current work includes a book-length study of the construction and experience of political authority in the republic, focusing especially on Livy and Cicero. She has also published on intertextuality and source criticism in Livy. katherine wasdin is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Rutgers University. She works on Latin poetry, with an emphasis on minor and occasional genres. Her current project explores the dialogue between Greek and Latin erotic and nuptial verse showing how and why these types of poetry borrow from each other to express ideas of union, desire, and community in authors such as Sappho, Catullus, the Latin love elegists, and Claudian. She also has interests in Archaic Greek poetry, the ancient novel, and the reception of antiquity in contemporary literature.
YALE CLASSICAL STUDIES VOLUME XXXVI RECEPTION AND THE CLASSICS edited for the department of classics by WILLIAM BROCKLISS Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics, Brigham Young University PRAMIT CHAUDHURI Assistant Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College AYELET HAIMSON LUSHKOV Assistant Professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin KATHERINE WASDIN Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics, Rutgers University
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: /9780521764322 Cambridge University Press 2012 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 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Reception and the classics / edited for the Department of Classics by William Brockliss... [et al.]. p. cm. (Yale classical studies ; v. 36) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-76432-2 (hardback) 1. Classicism Congresses. 2. Reader-response criticism Congresses. 3. Literature Congresses. 4. Music Congresses. 5. Motion pictures Congresses. I. Brockliss, William. II. Reception and the classics (2007 : Yale University) III. Title. IV. Series. pn56.c6r43 2011 880.09 dc23 2011033044 isbn 978-0-521-76432-2 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. Information regarding prices, travel timetables, and other factual information given in this work is correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter.
Contents Notes on contributors Acknowledgements page vii x 1 Introduction 1 William Brockliss, Pramit Chaudhuri, Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, and Katherine Wasdin part i reception between transmission and philology 2 Arouse the dead : Mai, Leopardi, and Cicero s commonwealth in Restoration Italy 19 James E. G. Zetzel 3 Honor culture, praise, and Servius Aeneid 45 Robert A. Kaster 4 Joyce and modernist Latinity 57 Joseph Farrell 5 Lyricus vates: musical settings of Horace s Odes 72 Richard Tarrant part ii reception as self-fashioning 6 Petrarch s epistolary epic: Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarum libri) 97 Giuseppe Mazzotta 7 The first British Aeneid: a case study in reception 108 Emily Wilson v
vi Contents 8 Ovid s witchcraft 124 Gordon Braden 9 The streets of Rome: the classical Dylan 134 Richard F. Thomas part iii envoi 10 Reception and the Classics 163 Christopher S. Wood Bibliography 174 Index 186
Notes on contributors gordon braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He has written widely on Renaissance literature and its classical background. His publications include The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (1978), Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger s Privilege (1985), Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999), and The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2: 1550 1660 (forthcoming), co-edited with Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie. joseph farrell is Professor of Classical Studies and Joseph B. Glossberg Term Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Latin literature, especially poetry, and the culture of the Republican and Augustan periods. His publications include Vergil s Georgics and the Tradition of Ancient Epic (1991), Latin Language and Latin Culture (2001), and A Companion to Vergil s Aeneid and its Tradition (2010), co-edited with Michael C. J. Putnam. robert a. kaster is Professor of Classics and Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin at Princeton University. He has written mainly in the areas of Roman rhetoric, the history of ancient education, and Roman ethics. His books include Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (1988), Suetonius: De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus (1995), Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (2005), and editions, translations, and commentaries of various Latin authors, including most recently Seneca and Macrobius. giuseppe mazzotta is Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian at Yale University. He has written a number of essays about every century of Italian literary history. His books include Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (1979), The World at Play in Boccaccio s Decameron (1986), Dante s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge vii
viii Notes on contributors (1993); The Worlds of Petrarch (1993); The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1998), and Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment (2001). richard tarrant is Harvard College Professor and Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature. His main areas of interest are Latin literature, especially poetry, Greek and Roman drama, and the transmission and editing of classical Latin texts. Among his major publications are editions with commentary of Seneca s Agamemnon (1977) and Thyestes (1985), and a critical edition of Ovid s Metamorphoses for the Oxford Classical Texts series (2004); he is also one of the co-authors of Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, edited by L. D. Reynolds (1983). richard f. thomas is Harvard College Professor and George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics. His publications include Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition (1982), a two-volume text and commentary on Virgil s Georgics (1988), Reading Virgil and his Texts (1999), Virgil and the Augustan Reception (2001), and two co-edited books to which he also contributed: with Charles Martindale, Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006), and with Catharine Mason, The Performance Artistry of Bob Dylan, Oral Tradition 22.1 (2007). emily wilson is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two monographs on classical culture and its reception, Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (2004) andthe Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007). She has recently published Six Tragedies of Seneca (2010) for the Oxford World s Classics series. Her book reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books,andThe New Republic. christopher s. wood is Professor in the Department of History of Art, Yale University. His books include Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (1993), Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (2008), and Anachronic Renaissance (2010), co-authored with Alexander Nagel. He is the editor of The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (2000) and has translated major works by Erwin Panofsky and Hans Belting. james e. g. zetzel is Anthon Professor of the Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University. He has written widely on Latin literature
Notes on contributors of the first century bce, ancient political theory, Roman intellectual life, and the history of classical scholarship. His books include Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity (1981), a commentary on Cicero s De re publica (1995), an edition of the Commentum Cornuti in Persium (2004), co-authored with W. V. Clausen, and Marginal Scholarship and Textual Deviance: The Commentum Cornuti and the Early Scholia on Persius (2005). ix
Acknowledgements This volume has been in the making for some time, and we on the editorial committee have seen many changes with it. We remain, however, steadfastly grateful to all those who made its production possible. Michael Sharp, Elizabeth Hanlon, and Christina Sarigiannidou at Cambridge University Press shepherded four editors and nine contributors to press with unfailing grace. The comments of the two anonymous referees for Cambridge University Press much improved the introduction to, and organization of, the volume; its remaining flaws are ours alone. The Department of Classics at Yale University, and especially Christina Kraus, offered support, funding, and that most precious of resources, good advice. Funding for the initial conference also came from various sources at Yale, in particular the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Secretary, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Whitney Humanities Center. Oral Tradition and its editor, John Miles Foley, have graciously allowed us to reprint Richard Thomas piece, with some modifications. Giuseppe Mazzotta s paper, originally published in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, edited by Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (2009), appears here courtesy of the University of Chicago Press. Unfortunately, conference papers by Julia Haig Gaisser, Charles Martindale, David Quint, and Claude Rawson could not be included in this collection, but we are grateful to all four for their role in our discussions and their support of the volume. Above all, we thank our contributors for their enthusiastic participation, and their kind patience. x