Allusion

     I have placed this in the theory category because it concerns the use of allusion in all literature and uses as evidence examples from an ancient text from Rome and modern ones from England and the USA. I realize I have constructed a somewhat discursive argument. Perhaps some readers will find relish the casual rolling motion with which I turn from one topic to another. I have long felt that literary scholars, who of all people are aware that form is indeed content, are far too slavish followers of a single highly standardized pattern in their own essays.
     Though many before me have noted the links from Horace to Dowson to Porter, I believe my use of them to make a point about allusion is original.



     Horace is a great poet of self-contradiction. He can write convincingly on behalf of voluptuary pastimes as well as of frugal sobriety; he is at once a man of patriotic idealism and a slavish sycophant; a common-sense Everyman of conventional opinions one moment, he is a decadent aesthete the next. The opening ode in his fourth book which begins “Intermissa, Venus” seems a sincere and moving statement of middle-aged erotic ambivalence until one notes Suetonius’ comment that he returned to the form after having taken leave of it only at the command of Augustus. (Indeed, some critics view the entire fourth book as an artifice to contain the poems praising the reign of the emperor whom the poet once opposed on the battlefield.)
     The persona begs Venus for relief, pleading age (he is fifty) and suggests she settle on a younger, more appropriate man to afflict with love, perhaps a certain Paulus Maximus. Should he find erotic success, this man will surely make her a worthy sacrifice – which the poet then describes in such extraordinary sensual terms – evoking visions of flutes, lyre, and pan-pipes and a chorus of dancing boys and girls -- that the poet finds himself aroused in spite of his intentions. As if to convince himself he declares he no longer takes pleasure in amours, “nec femina nec puer,” not even in drinking. Yet this very claim leads instantly to a tear at the thought of his frustrated love for Ligurinus which so affects him that he claims to be stricken silent, though the poem works its way without pause. The piece ends with a poignant image of the poet’s one-time lover receding in a dream, pursued across the Campus Martius, over streams, always just beyond reach, an eloquent image for desire.
     This scenario is beautiful and moving in itself, far more of course in Horace’s ever-so-artfully chosen words than in paraphrase, but the modern reader is likely to miss a significant element in the author’s intention. Even many who can read the Latin are unskilled in meter. Classical verse forms are difficult for English speakers to appreciate. The very use of quantitative meters and the rich variety of available patterns, each of them flexible in prescribed ways, produce effects virtually impossible to reproduce in translation. The reading of a really accomplished classicist who can melodiously respect vowel quantity in Greek or Latin lyric poetry while also observing accent and pitch in a fluid and expressive flow of words is very rare and very beautiful, a phenomenon, like a string quartet well-played by a one-man band.
     Still, the modern reader can scarcely doubt the importance in Horace’s own judgment of his use of particular meters. To support his claim to lasting fame the sole specific Horace offers (in 3.30) is that he, in the words of Pound’s translation, "first brought Aeolic song to Italian fashion" (“princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos”), in other words, he imported Greek metrical patterns adapting them for the Latin language.
     The place of Greece as a source for Roman science, philosophy, and art was acknowledged, paralleling in some ways the role of China for Japan, though one might also cite the importation of Continental verse forms to England by Chaucer. The neoteroi of Catullus’ generation admired the Alexandrian Greeks, and Horace himself spent time in Athens doing advanced studies. So the initial meaning of a poet’s using Greek meters would be simply to identify himself as a savant. Horace’s use of the term Aeolian points directly to the work of Alkaios and Sappho, and there can be little doubt that the Latin poet intended for associations from the earlier writers to be part of his own effects. His use of Greek prosody constituted an allusion, implying that his own words could be fully understood only in connection with theirs. Commentators have long noted specific parallels with the two Lesbian poets, but in the broadest sense it is surely their passionate expression of love is their primary association.
     Just as Doric was associated with choral odes in Greek and the Epic literary dialect with Homeric or mock-Homeric content, the use of Aeolic carried erotic connotations. Horace, writing in Latin, could not use these Greek dialects but he could use the earlier poets’ meters. Many of his odes are in Sapphics and Alkaics, while “Intermissa, Venus” is in Asklepiadics, another pattern rich in choriambs. While most of the poetry of Asklepiades is lost, enough remains to suggest its likely character. Two versions by the Imagist poet Edwin A. Storer will provide a sample of Asklepiades’ tone. [1]


The Crown of Spring

     Sweet for the thirsty in summer is snow to drink; sweet for sailors after winter’s storms to see the crown of spring, but sweeter still when beneath one cloak two lovers lie, giving their thanks to Kypris.

At the Porch

     It is winter and the night is long. The Pleiades have travelled half their span, and I am passing by this door all wet with the rain.
     Suffering from her treachery, I long for her.
     O Kypris, it is not love you have sent me; it is some cruel shaft tipped with flame.

     It is clear that the meter for Horace was a significant allusion, a sign of the sort of verse he meant to compose, a code that has in modern times become obscure except to specialists. This is, of course, unsurprising, considering that Latin has been little spoken for a millennium and a half and that English speakers are not generally conscious of vowel quantity, but the fact is that most modern readers of English poetry are nearly equally deaf to the associations of poetic forms in their own language. People accustomed to the most casual and colloquial free verse have for the most part lost the ability to catch allusions in prosody apart from the very simplest. Tetrameters are likely to be perceived as more natural than pentameters and the sonnet remains recognizable, but the associations of most meters and stanza forms are lost on the general reader, resulting in a significantly impoverished reception of texts both old and new.
     The fin de siècle British writer Ernest Dowson uses a line from Horace’s ode as the title of his “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae,” though his meter is not English, Greek, or Latin, but rather French Alexandrines. In Horace the line “I am not as I was under the rule of the good Cynara” is nostalgic, referring to the speaker’s advancing age which, he says, has rendered him a poor candidate for Venus’ attentions. For Dowson on the other hand Cynara is his current courtly beloved, unattainable and perfect, of whom he thinks while having sex with a prostitute. [2] Like most love songs, this is a lack-love song. To be sure, the speaker has the kisses of a “bought red mouth,” but he is “desolate,” “sick,” and haunted by desire even as he calls “for madder music and for stronger wine.”
     The basis for the allusion, the similarity of the two Cynaras, is simply their unavailability. Whereas Horace had initially complained only of the universal decline that comes with age, Dowson possesses only too much vital energy, finding that no matter how “riotously” he flings roses, he cannot banish the shadow of the one he truly loves. The memory of Horace then simultaneously reinforces the fundamental feeling, the pain of the lover’s absence, and, by the contrast between the ancient and the modern poet, heightens for Dowson’s reader the lurid dramatic situation of Dowson’s persona. To the reader familiar with Horace, the allusion first engages by what is shared by the two unsatisfied lovers, but its effect is then complicated and enriched by their differences. Allusion quite commonly has an ironic intent, and the bathetic fall from ancient ideals to a reduced modernity is familiar from countless twentieth century works of which Joyce’s Ulysses is perhaps the most prominent example. Here, as in a great many instances, the allusive reference suggests an entire complex of relationships, some direct, some inverted, some otherwise skewed.
     A far greater gap than that between the lyrics of Horace and Dowson is that between Dowson and Cole Porter who appropriated Dowson’s chorus line that ends each stanza “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion” for his song from Kiss me, Kate “Always True to You in My Fashion.” Here Lois seeks to reassure her lover Bill, uneasy about her liaisons with sugar daddies, a full dozen of whom are detailed. The list retains the listener’s interest as it ranges from the expected (“a big tycoon in steel,” “an oilman known as ‘Tex’”) to the unlikely (“a wealthy Hindu priest”) and the edgy (“a madman known as Mack”), and concluding with a real person, Clark Gable. The tone is entirely flippant, but the singer proclaims her loyalty to her Bill, asking

How in hell can you be jealous
When you know, baby, I'm your slave?
I'm just mad for you
And I'll always be

     Porter’s playful amorality has nothing whatever in common with Dowson’s tortured and obsessive love. Indeed, for those familiar with the earlier poem, the allusion only enhances the libertine freedom of Porter’s high-spirited lyric. Further, one may safely assume that most listeners will be innocent of any knowledge of Dowson. In spite of this, his poem has left its traces by providing Porter’s starting point, and it underlies the thematic impulse of the lyrics.
     The song’s other allusions, mentions of Schlitz beer, Cadillac cars, and a “vet” (the show was staged in 1948), as well as the reference to Clark Gable, serve to provide a patina of contemporary relevance, a kind of sparkling topicality, that invites the Broadway audience members to believe that the song is about their own lives. This is not so very different from Horace’s references to Venus and Cupid as well as Cynara, Ligurinus, and Paulus Maximus, the last three of whom are thought to be historical figures.
     Allusion, like other rhetorical figures, [3] characterizes the aesthetic text. The study of rhetoric in this sense was for centuries the heart of literary theory and the foundation of practical criticism. In general such figures permit the expression of new thought and content that could not be formulated in ordinary transparent prose as well as aspiring to beauty. All literature, of course, must be built from the base of the previous body of writing. Pointed instances of allusion may have a number of functions, among them to vault the new text into the realm of art (in intention at least), to indicate universality, to decorate (either aesthetically or intellectually), to compress information, to thicken the meaning of all poetry, and ironic or other troping on the earlier text. This series from Horace to Dowson to Porter illustrates the importance and yet the subtle complexity and variety of allusive references, a figure of speech that requires the audience’s competent familiarity with the pre-existing tradition.



1. The Windflowers of Asklepiades and The Poems of Poseidippos, translated by Edward Storer; from The Poet’s Translation Series, Second Set, No. 5; London: The Egoist Press, 1920; pp. 3-17. The translations are also viewable on line at http://elfinspell.com/ClassicalTexts/Poetry/Asklepiades-Poseidippos/Storer-Asklepiades.html.

2. Biographical critics will identify her with Adelaide "Missie" Foltinowicz, the restauranteur’s daughter and sometime waitress with whom he had been smitten when she was eleven. When she was fifteen, he proposed to her and was rejected.

3. I will not trouble myself over the terminology of rhetorical figures which have been classified also as tropes and schemata and analyzed into figures of thought, of speech, of sound, and of syntax, For the present purpose a rhetorical figure is any usage by which a written passage conveys meaning beyond the direct literal signification.

Thoughts on Mythology

These are notes from my recent talk on mythology at the Seligmann Center. I pass on my ideas in this raw form, without any attempt to work up an essay, in the belief that some of the ideas may be useful.


1
     The Greek word muthos in Homer has a broad meaning, fundamentally, anything delivered by word of mouth. The term came later to indicate conversation, counsel, the subject of speech, the matter, a purpose, a saying, a rumor; then a fiction or legend.

2
     In contemporary literary use, it is a story not tied to an individual text. Mythology arises as a sort of collective narrative: a body of linked and particularly significant stories that express in symbolic order the world-view of a community. Myth is deeply involved not only with the earliest poetry, but also science, philosophy, religion, and history, in fact all the intellectual disciplines. The definitive authority myths claim is evident in the fact that they often concern the gods or other spiritual beings. Myths are often taken as literal history, though they are also used by writers in self-consciously symbolic ways. Myth fades into legend and other cultural material.

3
     Not every collective narrative is mythic. Historical events are shared by large numbers of people. They may resonate in mythic ways, but the presumptive loyalty is to real events. Jokes lack the vast implications of myths.

4
     I continue to find Northrup Frye’s classification useful.

1) superior in kind to people and to their environment: mythic
2) superior in degree to people and environment: romance
3) superior in degree to people but not to environment: high mimetic (a hero of epic or tragedy, Aristotle’s hero)
4) inferior to the reader or equal: low-mimetic, ironic (realism, comedy)

     Frye notes, “Looking over this table, we see that European fiction, over the last fifteen centuries has moved steadily down this list . . . Something of the same progression can be traced in Classical literature, too.”

5
     In The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art David Lewis-Williams analyzes cave paintings and posits a simultaneous birth of language, art, and religion. With the birth of signs came the ability to lie.

6
      Mythic references may be traditional (Homeric hymns, Elder Edda, anthropological texts), literary (Ovid, Shakespeare, Rothenburg), modern (Superman, cowboy hero, Jewish blood guilt, Lincoln), or idiosyncratic (Blake, Yeats, outsider art).

7
     In poetry mythological references may serve to universalize or create group identity (as in the many medieval romances which wither begin or end by invoking the blessing of Christ), to compress (as in Raleigh’s reference to Philomel implying a world of violence in a word), to ironize, (as in Joyce’s Ulysses or the Coens’ O Brother Where Art Thou), or to decorate (as in Herrick’s “Parcae” where Atropos charms rather than frightens).

8
     Approaches to the understanding of myth include:

1) Euhemerism regards myths as distorted accounts of real historical events. Herodotus in his reasonable way, has recourse to this explanation. (On the other hand some ritual theorists would agree with Frye (above), and hold the opposite view: that gods degenerate over the years into myth, then legend (with supernatural apparatus), appearing next as history and finally as comedy.

2) Mythology has often been viewed as a sort of allegory with the gods representing either natural phenomena or concepts. The 19th century Sanskritist Max Müller supported an allegorical theory of myth. Modern variations of this theme include Freudian, Jungian, or other psychological theories.

3) Myths have been viewed as solely functional, often a form of social control. A simple form of this approach would be the vulgar Marxist analyst to whom every myth comments on class relations, but Malinowski took much the same approach.

4) The structural theory states that myths are patterned after the human mind as well as human nature. Claude Levi-Strauss, makes the claim that “myth is language,” and stresses formal play with meaning arising only from contrasts within a pattern, not from individual elements.

5) According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals. I am myself fond on the work of James Frazer and the Cambridge School.

6) Myth has been considered the human language for investigating the metaphysical. In this sense myth is much like religion, providing human’s most profound analysis of the cosmos.

7) Myth is a symbolic statement about reality. Each culture defines and defends its assumptions with myth. Myth tends toward the encyclopedic, offering seamless explanations and prescriptions for the significant passages of life.

9
     To test these ideas with texts, I followed with this brief anthology of poem’s mentioning Aphrodite.

from Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (my translation)

She went to Paphos -- Cyprus -- where her
aromatic altar and her temple stood,
and she went in and shut the shining doors. 60
The graces then anointed her with oil
such as blooms on bodies of the gods.
(The oil was sweet, ambrosial, smelled so fine!)
Then laughter-loving Aphrodite donned
fine clothes of golden fabric on her flesh. 65
She left sweet-smelling Cyprus then for Troy
(fast she flew and high, the clouds her road),
to spring-rich Ida, beast-land, came she then,
she went through hills right to his home and after her
came bright-eyed lions, fawning grey-furred wolves 70
and bears, fast leopards ravenous for deer,
and then her heart rejoiced at seeing them
and to their hearts she tossed hot lust; they paired
in twos and mated in the shade,


Thomas Wyatt (the first stanza of an untitled poem)

Though this port : and I thy servaunt true,
And thou thy self doist cast thy bemes from hye
From thy chieff howse, promising to renew
Both Joye and eke delite, behold yet how that I,
Bannisshed from my blisse, carefully do crye,
"Helpe now, Citherea, my lady dere,
"My ferefull trust," en vogant la galere.


from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Over one arm the lusty courser's rein
Under her other was the tender boy, 32
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire
He red for shame, but frosty in desire. 36

The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens;—O! how quick is love:—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove: 40
Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,
And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust . . .

'Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: 232
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

'Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, 236
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park; 239
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.'


A Hymn to Venus and Cupid (Herrick)

SEA-BORN goddess, let me be
By thy son thus grac'd and thee;
That whene'er I woo, I find
Virgins coy but not unkind.
Let me when I kiss a maid
Taste her lips so overlaid
With love's syrup, that I may,
In your temple when I pray,
Kiss the altar and confess
There's in love no bitterness.

Final stanza from Un Voyage à Cythère (Baudelaire)
On your isle, O Venus! I found upright only
A symbolic gallows from which hung my image...
O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Venus Anadyomène (Rimbaud)

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible; you notice especially
Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass…

The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;
—And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump
Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

Comme d’un cercueil vert en fer blanc, une tête
De femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadés
D’une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,
Avec des déficits assez mal ravaudés;

Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort;
Puis les rondeurs des reins semblent prendre l’essor;
La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates:

L’échine est un peu rouge, et le tout sent un goût
Horrible étrangement; on remarque surtout
Des singularités qu’il faut voir à la loupe…

Les reins portent deux mots gravés: CLARA VENUS;
—Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe
Belle hideusement d’un ulcère à l’anus.


An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji (Snyder)

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.


Birth of Eventually Venus (MacLeish)

Cast up by the sea
By the seventh wave
Beyond the sea reach
In the rubble of weed and
Wet twig
The not yet amphibious
Animalcula
Gasps and wiggles on the beach
Gathering her long gold hair about her
And gazing with pure eyes
Upon the unknown world.

Venus Over the Desert (Williams)

If I do not sin, she said, you shall not
walk in long gowns down stone corridors.
There is no reprieve where there is no fall-
ing off. I lie in your beds all night, from
me you wake and go about your tasks. My flesh
clings to your bones. What use is holiness
unless it affirms my perfections, my breasts,
my thighs which you part, shaking, and my lips
the door to my pleasures? Sin, you call it,
but there cannot be cold unless the heat
has bred it, how can you know otherwise? Love
comfort me in the face of my defeats! Poor
monks, you think you are gentle but I tell you
you kill as sure as shot kills a bird flying.

The Death of Venus (also titled the Birth of Venus) (Creeley)

I dreamt her sensual proportions
had suffered sea-change,

that she was a porpoise
a sea-beast rising lucid from the mist.

The sound of waves killed speech
But there were gestures –

of my own, it was to call her closer,
of hers, she snorted and filled her lungs with water,

then sank, to the bottom,
and, looking down, clear it was, like crystal,

there I saw her.

A Scholar’s Debut

     I have fond feelings toward my essay on Mechthild von Magdeburg. My first sustained analysis of a Middle German text, it was published in the Mystics Quarterly, a journal that had once been called the Fourteenth Century Mystics Newsletter (the original title appealed to me, for it gave me a mental picture of some bearded figure with a rope belt slipping a few mimeographed pages through the slot to Julian of Norwich, bringing news of colleagues’ birthdays and most recent visions).
     “Transformation of Convention in Mechthild von Magdeburg” is also the first paper I presented at a professional meeting. I was still taking courses in graduate school when the essay was accepted for the annual Patristic, Medieval, Renaissance Conference at Villanova University near Philadelphia. This seemed a positive sign, as, for my part, I had been deeply ambivalent about scholarship, whereas from their side, the academics doubtless saw much in what must have looked like my gypsy’s history to give them pause. We had decided to take a chance on each other, and now it seemed that perhaps it might work out.
     I decided that, since it seemed I might be on the point of acceding to the bourgeoisie after years of poverty, I should buy a new suit. The fact is, though I had spent whole years wearing almost nothing but blue jeans, I never taught without a coat and tie. I had a considerable collection of ill-fitting suits from the Salvation Army and dozens of antique ties with patterns I liked but which unfortunately had been made to end about the middle of the wearer’s chest when knotted properly. These served me well enough for the unlikely teaching positions I had held, but I decided my scholar’s debut required something grander.
     Taking advantage of a sale at the Iowa City Montgomery Ward, I purchased a two-vent three-piece navy pinstripe suit with alterations-to-fit. Or that was the idea at any rate. As I recall my unseemly bicyclist’s thighs stretched the fabric from the day the man was running tape measures over me. The upper elements which felt a bit snug at first, seemed to shrink rapidly. Nonetheless, I felt I could make a proper impression in this suit.
     My initial visual impact was threatened, however. Part of my eternal youth has been periodic manifestations of adult acne, and, rather like some teen’s prom nightmare, a sizable lesion appeared on my left cheek, giving my countenance a spot of unsettling roseate glow. I was building toward some sort of crescendo, but it was yet uncertain if it was to be dreadful or revelatory.
     With my graduate student’s income deep beneath the poverty level, I ground my teeth at conference registration fees and eschewed hotels. An acquaintance at the Friends’ Meeting gave me the number of a relative who was rehabbing a building in West Philadelphia. It may have been the presumptive virtue of the Quaker connection, but this person whom I had never met (and never did) sent a key and an invitation to sleep on the floor of a vacant apartment. I managed to buy a cheap ticket from Chicago, and my arrangements were complete.
     With the bus from the airport and the Main Line train, I made my way to Villanova where the meeting was in session. I attended panels faithfully, hearing, as one always does, some critics who put one in mind of Swift’s “projectors,” and others who provided occasional flashes of wit or insight. In my new suit, I felt quite at home. Even the alarming phenomenon on my cheek was subsiding.
     After returning to the city center late at night, I took the elevated train line to the West Side. Unfamiliar with the city, I overshot my destination by a stop or two and found myself, shortly after midnight, resplendent in my suit, carrying the large, old-fashioned pre-attaché style briefcase in which I kept papers, toiletries, and underwear alike, down the middle of the Friday night urban African-American business strip. I walked the twenty blocks or so to the address at which I had aimed, past the loungers outside bars and bodegas to whom I may have seemed a bit of an apparition. Doubtless they thought I had a better reason to be there than in fact I did.
     Fortunately, the key I had been sent worked. I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor of the empty apartment.
     The next day I returned to the conference and reveled in the semi-medieval ambiance created by the Catholic institution. I was delighted to attend the only panel I have ever witnessed conducted entirely in Latin: papers, questions, even a good deal of the chit-chat afterwards. I heard also about the work which had been going forward for over a hundred years already, the preparation of a critical edition of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto. Not only was Aquinas productive, his books were preserved and copied to such an extent that the editor must consider all-but-countless variant readings and choose the best from hundreds of manuscripts, while noting all the rest. The publishing task was Herculean in its demands. In recent years some chores had been relieved by the analytical advantages of mainframe computers, and the decision had been made that, rather than the ponderous volumes they had been issuing for generations, which possessed gravitas in the extreme. only digital editions would appear in the future. The speaker said that some of the elder monks participating in the project, who had worked their entire lives on earlier volumes as assistant editors and were only just advanced to the point of having a book bearing their own names as editor, were broken-hearted at the change in format. Surely their merciful Lord will be tolerant of such bookish vanity.
     Sunday morning I made my way again to the transit line and out to Villanova. My paper was scheduled for 8:30, the first session of the day. I shared the stage with a professor speaking on an unpublished collection of Florentine lay sermons, and another dealing with the fourteenth canto of Immanuel of Rome’s Mahberoth. Scattered about the front rows of a sizable lecture hall half a dozen scholars had got their faces washed and their coffee down in time to catch my debut. Or they were faithful friends (or underlings) of one of the other speakers. Several were loath to break off their exchanges of gossip. They probably see each other every year at PMR and never at any other time and each likes it that way, or at least that is how they looked to me as I entered. I was pleased enough with my work and no one else there had even read my author (as I in turn had never seen a page of Immanuel of Rome), so there could be no difficult questions, and I had a reasonably good time delivering my ideas on Mechthild. A couple of my listeners lingered to discuss related issues with me, and I felt as though I had earned an honorable position among the mandarins, all my youthful anti-academic prejudices conveniently invisible if persistent.
     A week or so later I was elated to receive a note from one of the people with whom I had chatted. He was editing a book of selected papers from the conference and wished to include mine. I immediately sent him a revision, but, sad to say, I never heard from him again in spite of an inquiry. Ah well, each of us savants had gained a line on the c.v.

A Garland of Greek Professors

I have altered a few details and, regrettably, the names, though the originals seem to convey wonderfully apt impressions of their bearers. In spite of what may seem a corrupt taste for oddity, I have no wish to discomfit these men should they go innocently googling themselves. I respected them all for their learning and I owe to them any modest competence of my own. The most unlikely name, though, that of Prof. Oliver, is genuine and has long been on the public record.


     I studied Greek in college with the intention of reading the ancient poets, but along the way I also came to know the extraordinary world of classical scholars. Departments of Greek and Latin Classics are now out-of-the-way corners of academia, yet the surviving programs maintain rigorous standards nonetheless and a blissful conviction that historical philology is a promising route to enlightenment. Students of the history of higher education will know that, whereas Latin and Greek constituted for centuries the central core of the European curriculum, such studies are rapidly vanishing from even some first-rate universities. The textbook I used – Allen’s from 1916 – was the first American beginning Ancient Greek book for college students. The introduction bemoans the fact that, “regrettable as it may seem,” increasing numbers of students come to university without any Greek whatever.
     My first Greek professor, J. R. H. Ayckbourn, was a sober man. His sole eccentricity consisted in buttoning only the lowest button of his suit jacket. Since he had an exceedingly tall and slender figure with a billiard ball head, this lent him the appearance of always falling forward, but in fact he managed to remain upright better than some colleagues.
     Another professor in the University of Illinois Classics Department was Revilo Oliver, whose name is a palindrome. Despite this peculiarity, Oliver had a distinguished early career, including a dissertation on a Sanskrit text and a Guggenheim fellowship, but he then came out as what can fairly be called a Nazi. A founder of the John Birch Society (though he was later expelled, probably the only person the group ever found too reactionary), along with his scholarly work, he produced dozens of polemical books with titles like Our Jewdicial System. During my freshman year he embarrassed the university by expressing satisfaction at Kennedy’s assassination, thus obliging civil libertarians to support him in the cause of academic freedom when critics called for his dismissal.
     In those days, the department at Illinois also included Prof. Scheetz whose taste for gay s/m activities led a student who frequented the same social circles to retail the following anecdote: “You know that wild thunderstorm the other night, lightning flashing, high winds, a real downpour. Right in the middle of it I ran into Prof. Scheetz, dashing down the street in his bare feet. I said, ‘Sir, whatever are you doing out on a night like this?’ He gazed back with wild enthusiasm: ‘Looking for a downed wire.’”
     Prof. Seneca Biblonides who later directed my studies was an enormous albino, maybe 6’6” and 300 pounds, who paced about holding his Greek text an inch from his face as he taught. It was Prof. Biblonides who, when I gave him some of my Sappho translations to review, told me that he really had neither interest nor knowledge about literature. I could only contemplate the lifelong dedication to the study of Greek and Latin by one with so little curiosity about what was actually written in those languages.
     Henri “Bobo” Laurent with whom I studied for years with one other scholar, went through mysterious phases in which he would gain and lose hundreds of pounds. When he was relatively thin, he would park his Harley outside and come to class in black t-shirts and jeans; when he was heavy, he invariably appeared in suit and tie. When not engaged in research -- Laurent had a book about classical influences on Jerry Siegel, the writer of Superman comics -- he liked to paint lovingly detailed pictures of Superman in full regalia.
     The students, too, were a colorful crew, though with no place here, apart from what this account, I suppose, implies of at least one whimsical temperament.

Seneca the Elder

     The importance of Lucius or Marius Annaeus Seneca (called Seneca the Elder) for literary criticism is largely historical. He represents his age in taste and opinions, and he has preserved for posterity records of many oratorical works that would otherwise be lost. He gives the reader an idea of what was appreciated by a connoisseur shortly after Cicero’s time and an anthology of texts embodying those values, but he also represents an attitude toward literature that is less historically bounded.
     For Seneca literature is characterized by the Horatian formula that passed naturally through Augustine into the Christian Middle Ages and that continues to be taken seriously by many contemporary critics: it should delight and also instruct. In Seneca the hedonism of literary delight (which risks frivolity and triviality) and the semi-Stoical moralizing that characterizes his instruction may seem specific to the writer’s era, but many of his received ideas persisted through Victorian British pedagogues to our own day.
     It can, however, no longer be said that education is centered, as it was for Seneca, in language skills of reading, writing, and speaking. Excellence in that evolutionary anomaly of our species, the manipulation of verbal symbols, was once the most highly regarded of abilities not in the ancient Mediterranean alone, but in China and India, and in the oral cultures of West Africa and Polynesia. Only in our own day has education lowered its ambition to the merely vocational.
     The elder Seneca – sometimes called Seneca Rhetor (though he was not a professional orator) to distinguish him from his more prominent son, the philosopher and tragedian, was born to an equestrian family in Cordoba in Spain ca. 54 B.C.E. The city was thoroughly Romanized, the most important in the province, and supported a high level of cultural life, but Seneca was sent to Rome to complete his studies. Rhetoric, logic, and literature formed the basis for the educational system, and as a young man Seneca had the opportunity to hear most of the leading orators of the day, anecdotes and specimens of whose work he was to record much later in life.
     He seems to have spent much of his career tending his Iberian estates, though few details are known of his life. His son describes him according to the conventional ideals of Roman manhood after the model of Cato (whom the father regarded as an oracle). Seneca is said to have been old-fashioned and stern, a pious man and a patriot. The fragment that is all that survives of his historical work and several passages in his rhetorical texts indicate that he considered Roman society as much degenerated from earlier times, but this belief, too, is a moralizing commonplace and does not necessarily reveal any personal attribute beyond respectability. Seneca the Younger tells of his father’s dissuading him from vegetarianism, and the elder man did seem to have been distrustful of systematic philosophy, though less so of Stoicism (in the history of which his son was to play an important role).
     Seneca’s rhetorical work was composed toward the end of his life putatively as instructional material for his descendants. Though this claim is yet another conventional topos (cf. Lord Chesterfield or Ben Franklin), the place of the volume in the school context is clear – it claims to reproduce, after all, the author’s own education. The proper title for the whole is Oratorum et rhetorum setentiae divisiones colores, an apt description of the work. It consists of a chrestomathy of passages (of a sort popular until quite recently) from declaimers of Seneca’s youth whom he thinks to be superior to those of later times and thus especially valuable examples for imitation by the young. Both the prodigious feat of memory implied by this task and the didactic intent are intrinsic to Seneca’s concept of the work. He approached it, however, with the nostalgia of an old man for his school days and the affection of a connoisseur for his collection, though his tone sometimes shifts to condescension, as he notes at one point that the topic of rhetoric has become for him tedious and that it is in any event “no serious matter.”
     Each volume of the book – more commonly today treated as two separate works, the Controversiae and the Suasoriae – begins with a preface that moves informally among a number of topics but that generally tells something of the styles and personalities of the speakers, followed by the anthology of excerpts from their speeches.
     The Controversiae consisted originally of ten books, each of which included passages from speeches dealing with six to nine legal cases. These cases were, for the most part, unlikely and artificial, often including curious or sensational details and posing in riddle-like conundrums. For example, the law provided that a rape victim could require that her attacker marry her or that he be put to death. What, then, of the case of a rapist who has two victims, one of whom demands his execution and the other his hand? Another case involves a soldier who, having lost his own weapons, takes those that had been dedicated at a hero’s tomb. Having fought bravely, should he still be convicted of sacrilege? A third case supposes that a youth was disinherited by his father for aiding his uncle financially. Later, the father himself falls into distress and the son offers him aid as well, thus angering the uncle and causing him, too, to disinherit his loyal relative. Should this filial son indeed lose all rights to inheritance?
     For each case, Seneca gives the relevant law, then the “theme,” or case particulars, and then lines or passages representing each side. Then follow several possible divisions, called by Seneca the “bare bones” of the case – that is, the outline or principles of arrangement of the materials (often conventional, for instance, the contrast of pure equity and law).
     Next are examples of colores, ways of approaching the facts that are favorable to the speaker’s point of view. Last comes a section of miscellaneous material. Such fanciful legal cases had been used in schools at least since the time of Aeschines’ academy in Rhodes in the fourth century B.C.E. The aim of the cases was not so much to develop legal acumen as ingenuity, pure verbal display for its own sake, an aesthetic use of language. In fact, Seneca decries the replacement of the “glorious art” of declamation by sordid business – which is to say, more pragmatically focused discourse.
     The sententiae are sometimes pithy, moralizing epigrams, but more often they are simply lines striking for their wit, their wordplay, and their novelty – little verbal firecrackers. The reader may then understand why Seneca offers such brief one-liners for the most part – he was more interested in bons mots than in discovery of truth or great thoughts.
     The Suasoriae are generally thought to have been written somewhat later. They are excerpts from persuasive speeches (related to deliberative oratory as the Controversiae are to forensic) of advice to or analysis by historical or legendary figures, often allowing picturesque or exotic material. Such examples as these, too, had been used in schools for centuries, especially for younger students. Such exercises are discussed in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and in the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum. Certain of them were already classic set pieces, some to be used into the twentieth century in tradition-minded German and English institutions. These exercises included such dilemmas as Alexander wondering whether to sail the ocean in search of further conquests or the three hundred Spartans who opposed Xerxes debating whether they should retreat with the other Greeks. In this volume the description of the theme is followed only by related sententiae.
     To appreciate these texts, one must understand the place of rhetoric and of that form of rhetoric called declamation in ancient culture. The extent to which rhetoric provided the vocabulary and many of the assumptions and values of literary theory, not only in antiquity but through the Renaissance, virtually until the Romantic revolution, is a subject demanding further work. Today, of course, the term rhetoric suggests either the pedagogy of composition or public speaking, narrowly conceived. That oratory to Seneca was merely the central genre of literature as a whole (as tragedy was to Aristotle) is evident in his willingness to cite examples from comedy, lyric poetry, and even history as declamatory models.
     Declamare originally signified simply to speak loudly or emphatically, but the word came to indicate speech in which rhetorical display was cultivated for purely aesthetic ends, while it needs to answer the utilitarian ends of deliberative speech (as practiced in the assembly or the senate), forensic speech (from the law courts), or epideictic speech. This last type is the clearest antecedent of declamation, but its early uses are typically to demonstrate “praise and blame,” generally with a clear aim of moral edification, if not a clearer one of patriotism or piety. Epideictic speech, though, evolved to a species of “art oratory,” appreciated for its own sake under the name declamation. Seneca was intimately familiar with declamation, for, as he tells his readers, it had been born “after him.” Though similar exercises had been part of education centuries earlier in Greece and Rome, declamation became a popular form of public entertainment in the time of Seneca’s youth. Figures of speech and thought, Gorgianic sound effects, and “Asiatic” excesses became highly prized for their own sake (as well as attacked), and such prominent Romans as Ovid, Maecenas, and even Caesar Augustus took the declamatory stage. Competitions became the rage, and “stars” such as those Seneca describes arose.
     One factor in this trend toward artistic rather than functional uses of rhetoric is surely political. The emergence of the Empire brought about a situation in which to risk offending the ruler by voicing controversial opinions might prove unwise. Further, court reforms had made the old style of speeches in legal cases obsolete. Some of Seneca’s regret for the grand old days of oratory may be republican sentiment prudently camouflaged. Nevertheless, the same sort of suspicion with which the old Greeks such as Aristophanes regarded the sophists and rhetoricians of an earlier age persisted in conservative circles of the Roman world. The professors of rhetoric had at one point been banished (most were Greeks, for the profession had been thought rather an improper calling for a citizen). In spite of the ambivalence with which declamation was still viewed, it came to be at the core of the educational curriculum, a means of continuing education for adults (this trend, too, was still alive through the nineteenth century with its Athenaeums, Chatauquas, and the like), as well as being thought a pleasurable pastime in itself.
     These, then, are the kinds of speeches Seneca records and comments on. He reproduces the social ambivalence toward the subject: in one preface he comments that academic pursuits such as declamation are amusing when lightly touched but become tiresome when dwelt upon and analyzed. He is a curious blend of the dilettante and moralist as he insists both on self-fulfilling amusement and character-building as proper ends of declamation.
     Many of Seneca’s offhand comments support the view of literature as frivolous escapist entertainment. At the outset of the Controversiae he compares himself to a producer of shows, noting that novelty is a virtue in theatrical productions, gladiatorial exhibitions, and declamation. His own critical method is far from technical or theoretical; rather it is descriptive and digressive. Seneca never passes up an opportunity to note odd or interesting personal characteristics of his speakers, often giving attention to foibles that seem irrelevant to their work. His inquiring curiosity, while universal, is desultory rather than systematic, somewhat similar to the sensibilities of Montaigne or Robert Burton. Seneca is unfailingly attracted to individualism; unique qualities of style in a given speaker are what draw Seneca’s interest, not excellence in a traditional mode.
     The same equation of character and style, however, can also lead to a moralistic view of rhetoric. Seneca’s expressed impatience with his own project, which he calls at one point “trivial dallying,” is consistent with his attacks on scholasticism and excesses of style. In this spirit he sees speakers of his own day as too devoted to verbal luxury; for him the tricolon is “this new sickness” and he cites with approval Cicero’s condemnation of overblown rhetorical display. He contrasts declamation as an art form with oratory and calls the former insubstantial, though he feels that the skills gained in the practice of declamation can heighten one’s abilities not merely in speaking but in all other arts as well. This very notion, of course, has been assumed throughout most of European education (as well as in China and elsewhere as well) in the placement of linguistic skills as the foundation of all education.
     This educational role is linked with the positive side of Seneca’s equation of style and character. He quotes with reverence Cato’s famous definition that gives morals primacy: “An orator is a good man, skilled in speaking.” Thus, while the decline in declamation corresponds to a more profound deterioration in society, the educational remedy is available. Seneca supports memory training as a healthy discipline and thinks its neglect simply one sign of a general softness. Luxury, Seneca declares, destroys intellectual capacity. Bad character brings not only laziness but also an inevitable inability even to select worthy models, models both for writing and for behavior.
     Seneca’s influence is difficult to trace. There are few direct mentions of him in the centuries following his own time, and it is often impossible to distinguish what may derive from Seneca from what derives more generally from the rhetorical tradition in which he participated. In his arguments for a more tempered rhetorical style he anticipates Quintilian and neo-Ciceronianism. For all his fondness for rhetorical ornament he advises moderation and condemns the wilder excesses of declamation and the cultivation of labored ingenuity as the basis for rhetorical education.
     As anecdotes the controversiae have an independent history, many gaining popularity as miniature short stories for their strange and ironic twists of plot. Eleven of the narratives in the influential collection Gesta Romanorum are identical with stories in Seneca, though many were retold by various ancient authors. Among later writers who imitate Seneca or acknowledge his influence are Montaigne, Ben Jonson, and Abraham Cowley.
     Seneca’s greatest importance in literary history consists in his preserving evidence of the literary opinions of his time and class. The samples of declamations he regarded as so highly entertaining are little read today, but his psychological theories have much in common with some ideas current today in educational policy-making and in popular attitudes toward literature. As a critic Seneca was highly impressionistic, taking no position in most of the controversies of his day and eschewing technical labels for stylistic characteristics, preferring to use terms like “tumultuous,” “solid,” and “excited.” For all his cautions against excessive scholasticism in literature, he dwells today almost exclusively in academe. He vividly records both the now faded taste for verbal ornament and the sober Roman morality that were alike characteristic of his day.