CHAPTER 29
Tobias Allendorf
And they asked him more than once what he thought of Anacreon and the other poets of that kind, and whether any of our poets had written such smooth-flowing and delightful poems; “except,” they said, “perhaps a few of Catullus and also possibly a few of Calvus. For the compositions of Laevius were involved, those of Hortensius without elegance, of Cinna harsh, of Memmius rude, and in short those of all the poets without polish or melody.”
(Gellius, NA 19.9.7)
We are in the middle of a countryside dinner party. The entertainment comprises girls and boys giving a performance of odes by the Greek archaic lyric poets Sappho and Anacreon. Some Greeks present at the dinner ask whether any Romans wrote verses as charming as these, and go on to chastize, in the words above, major poets of Roman Republican times. Indignantly, a young educated rhetorician, Julianus, replies with a recitation of lines from some early Roman love poets who came before the Roman poets singled out by the Greeks.
The passage from Gellius illustrates that, when the Gellian Attic Nights were published sometime around the middle of the second century ad, lyric poetry was still used as a ready form of entertainment, and must have been more than a distant memory of the Greek past.1 What is more, the poets mentioned by the Greeks (Catullus, Calvus, Laevius, Hortensius, Cinna, Memmius) and recited by the young Roman (Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus, and Quintus Catulus) contain names that scholars nowadays would probably associate with the first half of the topic of the present chapter:2 lyric poetry at Rome before the Augustans.
In what follows, the aim is to examine strands of reception of Greek lyric poetry in Latin that can be found outside Horace and the other Augustan poets. The first section (“Before the Augustans”) will consider pre-Augustan examples in Ennius, Plautus, Valerius Aedituus, Laevius, Lucretius, and Catullus. The second section (“After the Augustans”) will discuss examples of engagement with Greek lyric in Seneca the Younger, and take a look at the late antique writer Optatian. In the choice of examples, I have aimed to include some spread of tragic choric as well as monodic lyric. Three areas of interest will emerge: the Roman reception of Sappho; the adaptation of Greek choral lyrics to Roman contexts; and metrical experimentation with Greek forms in Latin. Apart from the exclusion of the well-known reception of Greek lyric in Augustan poetry, especially Horace (who is dealt with in Zanker’s chapter (28) in this volume), there is no space in the present contribution to consider further interesting moments of reception in Statius and Martial, to name perhaps the most obvious omissions.
Before the Augustans
Roman Engagements with Sappho
In my eyes he matches the gods, that man who
sits there facing you – any man whatever –
listening from close-by to the sweetness of your
voice as you talk, the
sweetness of your laughter: yes, that – I swear it –
sets the heart to shaking inside my breast, since
once I look at you for a moment, I can’t
speak any longer,
but my tongue breaks down, and then all at once a
subtle fire races inside my skin, my
eyes can’t see a thing and a whirring whistle
thrums at my hearing,
cold sweat covers me and a trembling takes
ahold of me all over: I’m greener that the
grass is and appear myself to be little
short of dying.
But all must be endured, since even a poor [3
This is Sappho 31, one of the most famous and enduringly fascinating pieces that has survived from the Lesbian poet. Its popularity even in present-day school rooms owes something to the Latin version contained in Catullus’ poem 51:
Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
. . .
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.
He seems to me the equal of a god,
he seems, if that may be, the gods’ superior,
who sits face to face with you and again and again
watches and hears you
sweetly laughing, an experience which robs me
poor wretch of all my senses; for the moment I set
eyes on you, Lesbia, nothing remains for me
. . .
But my tongue is paralysed, a subtle flame
courses through my limbs, with sound self-caused
my two ears ring, and my eyes are
covered in darkness.
Idleness, Catullus, is your trouble;
idleness is what delights you and makes you too excited;
idleness has proved ere now the ruin of kings and
prosperous cities.4
Sappho 31 and Catullus 51 provide good starting points for studying the reception of Greek lyric by Roman poets. Taken on its own, Sappho 31 has prompted numerous responses concerned with its interesting yet elusive set-up that revolves around the speaker, the addressee, and a man. There are significant tensions in the poem, such as that between the perceived immediacy of its description of physicality (body, hearing, tongue,5 eyes, and complexion are affected) and the cognitive distance afforded by the poetic form. This tension would come to the fore in different ways depending on whether the poem was read in an edition or listened to at a performance,6 a feature also particularly relevant for Catullus’ Latin reception.7 A priori, there is another layer of distancing through Catullus’ literary reception, and his version negotiates this tension for poetic good. For instance, Catullus plays with the tension between logical ordering and the actual co-presence the physical symptoms would have in the imagined situation: where Sappho has a parataxis of the symptoms, Catullus’ later version features ordering elements such as the more general umbrella term omnes … sensus (“all senses,” 5–6) before giving the specific symptoms. This imposition of order arguably highlights Catullus’ literary reception. At the opening of the poem, the repeated ille (1 and 2), not only creates the setting of a speaker positioned at a distance from another person, but also advertises a literary-historical distancing gesture: ille means the “person over there” in the setting of the poem as much as it evokes the κῆνος, “that man,” of the Sapphic precedent,8 and Catullus 51’s distance to its model. Whatever one makes of the differences and the feelings described, Catullus adopts a core message of his model: that someone else’s good luck in love is the bad luck for the speaker (note especially the rough Catullan juxtaposing of dulce ridentem, “sweetly laughing,” with misero, “wretched,” in line 5).
The tension between the formal sophistication and the immediacy of the poetic description in Catullus 51 is accompanied by further features. In Catullus’ reception of Sappho 31, we learn in the second stanza that the speaker’s gender, unlike in Sappho, is male,9 and that the situation is more specific than in the Sapphic model: both speaker and the desired person opposite are named, as “Catullus” and “Lesbia.” It is worth comparing Catullus’ version of Sappho 31 with another, earlier pre-Augustan rendering.10 A very close engagement occurs in elegiac lines preserved from the Republican poet Valerius Aedituus. The lines are among those recited by the young Roman Julianus in the Gellian passage quoted at the outset of this chapter:
dicere cum conor curam tibi, Pamphila, cordis,
quid mi abs te quaeram, verba labris abeunt,
per pectus manat subito 〈subido〉 mihi sudor;
sic tacitus, subidus, dum pudeo, pereo.
(Valerius Aedituus, fr. 1 Courtney [p. 70])
When I try to speak of my heart’s sorrow to you, Pamphila,
what shall I ask of you? Words fail my lips,
a sudden sweat pours over my breast, which is in heat.
Thus silent, in heat, I restrain myself, and I am lost.
Again, we have a personalized Roman version, addressing “Pamphila,” and, once more, the Sapphic “female” perspective is transferred to a male speaker. This comes to the fore in the use of subidus, “sexually excited,” in line 4 (which would be emphasized particularly if the reading subido in line 3 were correct): the adjective subidus only occurs here in extant Latin, but it may be significant that the related verb, subare, is actually only used to refer to female outbreaks of sweat, to talk about animals “in heat” (Lucr. 4.1199; Plin. Nat. 10.181; Apul. Apol. 38) or sexually aroused women (Hor. Epod. 12.11). If the adjective carried the same connotations and preference for contexts as the verb, Aedituus would be transferring these notions to his male speaker.11
Both Catullus and the earlier Aedituus engage with Sappho 31 in their own love poetry: while Aedituus writes elegiacs, Catullus even transforms the Greek Sapphic stanza into a Roman version. But Sappho 31 is also a meaningful text for Roman authors writing in other genres. One of them is the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius. This is Lucretius describing the physiological effects of fear in the third book of his didactic epic De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”):
verum ubi vementi magis est commota metu mens,
consentire animam totam per membra videmus
sudoresque ita palloremque exsistere toto
corpore et infringi linguam vocemque aboriri,
caligare oculos, sonere auris, succidere artus,
denique concidere ex animi terrore videmus
saepe homines; ...
(Lucr. 3.152–158)
But when the intelligence is moved by more vehement fear, we see the whole spirit throughout the frame share in the feeling: sweatings and pallor hence arise over the whole body, the speech falters, the voice dies away, blackness comes before the eyes, a sounding is in the ears, the limbs give way beneath; in a word we often see men fall to the ground for mental terror;12
As Fowler has pointed out, Lucretius re-contextualizes Sappho’s text.13 Firstly, he differs from Sappho 31, like Catullus, in adapting the Sapphic description of physical symptoms: Lucretius condenses them into the short cola caligare oculos (“blackness comes before the eyes”), sonere auris (“a sounding is in the ears”), succidere artus (“the limbs give way beneath”) at line 156. Secondly, he omits the conclusion of Sappho’s fourth stanza, τεθνάκην δ᾽ ὀλίγω ᾽πιδεύης/φαίνομ᾽ ἔμ᾽ αὔτ[αι, “I appear myself to be little short of dying.”14 The effect of the former, Fowler argues, is Lucretius’ aligning of his version of Sappho with the kind of “scientific” language found in medical texts; the effect of the latter is, according to Fowler, a peculiar highlighting of “death” through its very omission.15 For present purposes, it is important to note one fundamental difference between the engagements with Sappho 31 by Lucretius on the one hand and Catullus’ and Aedituus’ on the other: while Catullus 51 and Aedituus, notwithstanding meaningful differences, are ultimately faithful to the major thrust of Sappho 31, the Lucretian version reads its lyric precedent “against the grain.” Some of Lucretius’ readers will find that the Lucretian reception of Sappho’s love poem is polemical:16 it serves as an illustrative foil for describing the physiological effects of fear, in the context of a rather technical Epicurean argument about the union of body and soul.17
Perhaps the best—and earliest—Roman example of a type of reception in which Sappho 31 is read “against the grain” occurs in the comic playwright Plautus.18 As scholars have argued, Plautus’ play Miles Gloriosus (“The Braggart Soldier”) contains a section of sustained engagements with Sappho.19 In the course of the play, the soldier, catching sight of the courtesan Acroteleutium, is instantly smitten with her. At 1246–1247, his attendant compares the soldier to Phaon of Lesbos: “I know that no mortal has succeeded in making a woman love him like this, except for two: you and Phaon of Lesbos.”20 The allusion is clear: Phaon of Lesbos was the alleged lover of Sappho, but her love for him was unrequited.21 Tradition has it that she then committed suicide by jumping off the Leucadian rock.22 This is the first of Plautus’ markers signaling his engagement with Sappho.23 Arguably, there is a second one, closely connected to the legend of Sappho’s suicide. The attendant’s aside to the soldier comes in reaction to the soldier’s instinct to save Acroteleutium from dying, since in her preceding utterance she threatened to commit suicide (“Otherwise, if I can’t achieve it, I’ll commit suicide. I know I can’t live without him,” Pl. Mil. 1240–1241). The context of a woman who suspects that her love of a man may go unrequited and says that she is willing to commit suicide may in itself not be enough to evoke any Sapphic associations. The courtesan’s name, however, may provide a further allusive marker: according to Fontaine, the name Acroteleutium, Plautus’ own invention, not only means “hemistich” (the courtesan speaks a lot in hemistichs, “verse-ends”) but can also be taken as a wordplay involving the Greek ἄκρον (“height”), τελευτή (“death”), and the diminutive suffix -ιον.24 Thus, her name could carry a connotation of “Little Miss Cliff-Death” (Fontaine’s attempt to capture it in English), ironically bringing to mind the legend of Sappho’s suicide.
These are two possible allusive markers pointing to Sappho; they are accompanied by a focus on sensual perception (smell and failed seeing are alluded to several times in the subsequent passage) and a repetition of the deictic pronoun illum (which may recall the Sapphic distancing gesture in κῆνος). The allusive evocation of Sappho, and fr. 31 in particular, would be accumulative and prepare for a close engagement with Sappho’s symptoms of love at Mil. 1270–1273. There, the maid Milphidippa describes to the soldier the effects of Acroteleutium’s fainting (which she had feigned when she caught sight of the soldier):
verbum edepol facere non potis, si accesserit prope ad te.
dum te optuetur, interim linguam oculi praeciderunt....
ut tremit atque extimuit,
postquam te aspexit.
(Pl. Mil. 1270–1273)
She won’t be able to utter a word if she comes close to you. While she was looking at you, her eyes cut off her tongue....
How she’s been trembling and how afraid she’s
become since spotting you!
The maid’s phrases look like translations of—or at least very close engagements with—the language of Sappho 31 (compare Mil. 1270 with Sappho 31.7–8 and 31.2–3; Mil. 1271 with Sappho 31.7 and 9; Mil. 1272b with Sappho 31.13–14; and Mil. 1273 with Sappho 31.7).25 Whether Plautus engaged with a Greek model that had already parodied Sappho or whether he went back to the Sapphic original,26 it is clear that the comedy of the situation would be increased for recipients who notice the Sapphic subtext.27
Excursus: Dramatic Lyrics, Greek and Roman—an Example from Ennius
Whether or not the majority of Plautus’ audiences would have been able to appreciate the depth and subtlety of his playing with the Sapphic tradition,28 the context of engagement with Greek precedent in which the comedian playwright operated was mainly dominated by Rome’s earliest tragedians’ close engagement with Greek tragedy and tragic choral lyrics. The tragic fragments that survive from Ennius provide good examples: the longest of his lyric passages that has come down to us is worth considering as a case in point. The following fragment is preserved from a chorus in his Medea:
Iuppiter tuque adeo summe Sol qui res omnis inspicis
quique tuo lumine mare terram caelum contines
inspice hoc facinus prius quam fit. prohibessis scelus.
(Enn. scen. 234–236 Jocelyn = 95 Manuwald)
O Jupiter, and, rather, you, Sun most high, you who look upon all things, and embrace sea, land, and sky with your light, look upon this deed before it is done. May you prevent this crime.
These long lines were most likely arranged stichically, i.e., in consecutive lines in the same meter (three trochaic septenarii) rather than in stanzaic form, an arrangement that has exercised scholars considerably: it does not at all look like most of the lyrics familiar from Greek tragedy. The famous precedent of Ennius’ passage is the dochmiac song at Euripides Medea 1251–1270, which marks the climax of the action of that play. This chorus, the fifth Euripidean stasimon, contains a dramatic appeal to divinities in the strophe, and an emotionally heightened address to Medea in the antistrophe. The strophe is particularly relevant as a model for the Ennian lines (“O earth, O ray of the Sun that lightens all, turn your gaze, O turn it to this ruinous woman before she lays her bloody murderous hands upon her children! They are sprung from your race of gold, and it is a fearful thing for the blood of a god to be spilt upon the ground by the hands of mortal men. O light begotten of Zeus, check the cruel and murderous Fury, take her from this house plagued by spirits of vengeance,” Eur. Med. 1251–1260).29 Ennius matches the main grammatical features of the Euripidean ode, but at the same time thoroughly adapts the Greek model to his Roman context: he does so not only, as Jocelyn emphasizes, on the level of content (in his substitution of Jupiter for Gaia and the replacement of traditional Greek religious beliefs with philosophical meditations),30 but also on the level of metrical form. This is a significant finding: where Euripides makes use of the typical strophes of Greek choral lyric, Ennius has stichic septenarii instead. Where Euripides has a sung choral prayer at the emotionally heightened point at which Medea is going off the stage to kill her children, Ennius relies on a stichic ode to be performed in recitative mode.31
Experimentation with Greek Form: Laevius
The next poet to be studied will allow us to bring together two major areas of interest raised so far, examples of early Roman engagement with Sappho and Roman metrical practices in response to Greek models: the tantalizing figure of Laevius. His poems were chastised as inplicata (“intricate” or “obscure”) by the Greek diners of the Gellian passage cited at the outset of this chapter; what we have of Laevius’ poetic output is indeed striking for its form as well as its content.
His approach to the use of Greek lyric meters in Latin is remarkably different from Horace’s.32 Firstly, Laevius’ fragments show that he did not distinguish between dramatic and non-dramatic lyric meters: unlike Horace after him, he was perfectly happy to compose some of his monodic poems in a meter established in Roman drama (anapaestic dimeters).33 Secondly, Laevius created poetry in forms that were new and must have seemed avant-garde to many contemporaries.34
For example, he composed poetry written in lines of different lengths, so that the overall shape of the poem mimics some key aspect of its content or makes it suitable for inscription on similarly shaped objects. Fragment 22 Courtney (p. 136), for instance, features a first line of ten metra, followed by one of nine. This poem is about the wings of a Phoenix and, on the page, would have looked like this:35
Source: Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) by A. Cornelius Gellius published in Vol. II of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1927
Poems of this type are known as “pattern” or “figure” poems, and are also referred to as technopaegnia.36 Laevius’ metrical experimentation in the tradition of “figure poems” is underpinned by specific engagement with Greek lyric.
The most important precedent for Laevius’ Phoenix comes from the Hellenistic poet Simmias of Rhodes, probably a contemporary of the more famous Philitas of Cos.37 Simmias wrote the earliest figure poems known in the Graeco-Roman tradition; his Wings (AP 15.24) would have been especially relevant for Laevius’ poem. This poem, written in decreasing and then increasing lines of choriambs plus bacchiac clausulae,38 features a similar pattern to Laevius’:
Λεῦσσέ με τὸν Γᾶς τε βαθυστέρνου ἄνακτ᾽, Ἀκμονίδαν τ᾽ ἄλλυδις ἑδράσαντα,
μηδὲ τρέσηις, εἰ τόσος ὢν δάσκια βέβριθα λάχναι γένεια.
τᾶμος ἐγὼ γὰρ γενόμαν, ἁνίκ᾽ ἔκραιν᾽ Ἀνάγκα,
πάντα δὲ Γᾶς εἶκε φραδαῖσι λυγραῖς
ἑρπετά, †πάνθ᾽ ὅσ᾽ ἕρπει
δι᾽ αἴθρας.
Χάους δέ,
οὔτι γε Κύπριδος παῖς
ὠκυπέτας οὐδ᾽ Ἄρεος καλεῦμαι·
οὔτι γὰρ ἔκρανα βίαι, πραϋλόγωι δὲ πειθοῖ·
εἶκε δέ μοι γαῖα, θαλάσσας τε μυχοί, χάλκεος οὐρανός τε·
τῶν δ᾽ ἐγὼ ἐκνοσφισάμαν ὠγύγιον σκᾶπτρον, ἔκρινον δὲ θεοῖς θέμιστας.
(Simmias, AP 15.24)
Look on me, the lord of broad-bosomed Earth, who stablished the Heaven elsewhere, and tremble not if, little though I be, my cheeks are heavy with bushy hair. For I was born when necessity was ruler, and all creeping things and those that move through the sky yielded to the dire decrees of Earth. But I am called the swift-flying son of Chaos, not of Cypris or of Ares, for in no wise did I rule by force, but by gentle-voiced persuasion, and earth and the depths of the sea and the brazen heaven yielded to me. I robbed them of their ancient sceptre and gave laws to the gods.39
The communicative setup of this poem is quite different from Laevius’: while Simmias has the divine Eros speaking, Laevius’ has his speaker (most likely the Phoenix) praying to the goddess Venus. But despite the fragmentary state of Laevius’ Phoenix, we can clearly see its allusive relationship to Simmias’ Wings. First, it displays the same metrical pattern, which, as far as we can tell, would have produced a similar overall shape. What is more, Laevius’ poem also opens with a prayer to Venus amoris altrix, “Venus, nourishing mother of love” (fr. 22 Courtney [p. 136]), clearly evocative of Simmias’ poem on the wings of Eros. The Laevian opening even specifies Venus as cupiditatis genetrix, “mother of cupiditas [desire].” His use of cupiditas seems to recall the figure of Cupido (Greek Eros). This may well be part of Laevius’ concern for literary filiation. In the opening line Laevius would thus advertise his poem’s coming after Simmias’ Wings of Eros by playfully turning the relationship on its head: while his poem comes after Simmias’ Wings of Eros, Laevius’ Venus (Greek Aphrodite) comes before Eros (Roman Cupido) in (Roman) mythological terms, as his mother.40 It is also possible that Laevius’ opening programmatically recalled another famous beginning:41 Sappho’s first poem in the Hellenistic edition, which starts with an emphatic prayer invocation of Aphrodite (fr. 1 Campbell), and also features a memorable flight of Aphrodite descending from the heavens.
After the Augustans
Further Experimentation with Metrical Form: Optatian
To conclude our consideration of Laevius’ lyrics, it is worth returning to the notion of experimentation with form, and consider the last extant Graeco-Roman contribution to the tradition of the figure poems. Some five centuries after Laevius, the Latin writer Optatian, who wrote under the emperor Constantine, experimented with this art form.42 His poetic output includes poems (of varying quality) that are set out on a grid (usually, 35 letters wide and 35 letters high) and contain secondary content in so-called versus intexti, “twisted lines” or “lines woven into the text.” These versus intexti make up geometric patterns, letters, and images which are to be read diagonally, vertically, and horizontally in the grid of the poems.43 His poetry is written to be read rather than performed.
Optatian emphasizes the novelty of his kind of poetic composition repeatedly (nova carmina, poem 3.24; novi elegi, 8.1; nova vincula mentis, 10.18; novae curae, 21.4). His poems also contain a large number of acrostics and other forms of versified play, but his major interest for present purposes lies in the figure poems. In one of them, poem 26 (his altar-poem), we can see how Optatian advertises his allusive engagement with both the Roman and the Greek lyric tradition before him.44 The poem opens thus: Vides ut ara stem dicata Pythio,/fabre polita vatis arte musica (“You see how I, an altar dedicated to Pythian Apollo, stand here,/polished by the poetic art of the bard”). As is appropriate in the tradition (cf. Simmias’ Wings and Laevius’ Phoenix), the first-person speaker of the poem is the object described, here the altar. The closest Greek precedent of Optatian’s poem has been plausibly argued to be another altar-poem, by the Byzantine poet Vestinus (AP 15.25),45 but Optatian’s opening gesture also echoes the beginning of Simmias’ Wings, Λεῦσσέ με (“Look on me”). At the same time, Optatian points back to the Latin lyric tradition: his opening words clearly recall the famous beginning of Horace’s “Soracte Ode” (Vides ut alta stet nive candidum,/Soracte …, “You see how Soracte stands there shining with its deep snow …,” Odes 1.9.1–2).46 His second line, then, contains an echo of the poet who is next in line in Optatian’s canon of Roman lyric poets, Catullus. The speaking altar describes itself as fabre polita vatis arte musica (26.2), which resonates against the second line of Catullus’ programmatic opening poem, which describes his “little book” as arida modo pumice expolitum (“just polished with dry pumice,” Catull. 1.2). While (ex)politum is a relatively common adjective to describe style and poetry in Latin, it is of further significance that Optatian’s line cleverly inverts the physical setup: where Catullus has one object, his poetry book, “polished” by another object, “dry pumice,” the object of Optatian’s poem, the altar, is both a real object (possibly made of stone, a material similar to Catullus “pumice”) and itself the speaker of the poem. Both real-life object (the altar) and poetic object (Optatian’s poem “Altar”) are “polished” by craftsmanship. If Optatian were alluding to Catullus, his poem would recall precisely a moment at which the earlier poet had staked out his claims of engaging with a previous famous poetic tradition: Catullus claimed for his own poems the “polish” associated with the Hellenistic poets. The multiple echoes in the opening of Optatian’s poem, evoking Simmias, Horace, and Catullus in the background, underline his position in literary history: they mark out his poetry as coming at the end of a tradition that encompasses both Greek Hellenistic poetry and the milestones of Latin lyric, Catullus and Horace.
Up until the fourth century ad,47 however, Latin literature after the Augustans features a relatively small amount of monodic lyric poetry. At the end of the first century ad, Quintilian (Inst. 10.1.96) names Caesius Bassus, who is addressed by Persius in his sixth Satire and was probably active in the Neronian era, as the only lyric poet worth reading in addition to Horace. Bassus wrote at least two books of lyric poems, and there is an important metrical treatise attributed to him (GLK 6.255–266).48 The Carmina Priapea, a collection of poems heavily reminiscent of Catullus, probably also date from the first or second century ad.49 Even more significant are the lyrics composed by Statius. His Silvae contain poems in lyric meters: an alcaic ode (4.5), a sapphic ode (4.7), and a hendecasyllabic poem (4.9).50 The major meters and reference points for all of these texts seem to be the Roman lyrics of Catullus and Horace.
In what follows, the focus will be on choral lyric in the period after the Augustans. Lucan’s non-extant Medea—if it existed—might have featured relevant engagement with Greek precedent in the choral odes,51 but our major evidence for engagement with Greek lyric poetry comes from the works of Seneca the Younger.
Seneca’s Reception of Greek Lyric
Seneca the Younger seems not to have thought all too much of lyric poetry—at least if one takes some remarks from his prose works at face value. In Epistle 88, for instance, he provides us with a series of scholarly activities that he deems a complete waste of time. In this letter, he also reports, not without disparagement, the work of a certain grammaticus Didymus, who studied “whether Anacreon was more inclined to licentiousness or drunkenness” and “whether Sappho was a prostitute” (Sen. Ep. 88.37). According to Seneca, scholarly works on such topics belong to the many that “should be cut down with the axe” (Ep. 88.38). In a similar but less graphic vein, it is also telling that Seneca elsewhere recalls Cicero saying that even two lifetimes would not be enough to read all the Greek lyric poets—and neither would it be worth doing so (Ep. 49.5). Moreover, direct quotations from lyric poetry are conspicuously rare in Seneca’s prose works. At the same time, however, he both alludes to moments from Greek lyric poetry—occasionally in his prose works and more often his own poetry—and wrote lyrics himself. In what follows, we shall focus on Seneca’s own lyrics, the choral odes in his tragedies. I shall consider two noted examples of his engagement with Greek lyric.
Seneca’s powerful play Thyestes, which comes after a long and distinguished array of Latin versions, also seems to have utilized Greek poetry. Throughout the whole play, and more so than in Seneca’s other tragedies, the tension between the play’s famous Greek subject-matter and conspicuously Roman setting looms in the background.52 In the last choral ode of the play (Thy. 788–884), we get an example of the allusive dynamics of Roman choral lyrics engaging with Greek monodic lyric. Seneca carefully underpins the opening and closing lines of the chorus with engagement with a famous piece of Greek lyric poetry, Pindar’s ninth Paean.53 Both Pindar’s poem and Seneca’s chorus begin with an address to the Sun that has disappeared. In both poems, this is followed by a series of anxious questions and speculations on the cause for the Sun’s disappearance. As Tarrant notes, the Senecan allusive ring-composition has the chorus end with the thought “I do not bewail what I shall suffer in common with all,” a de facto translation of the Pindaric precedent. Seneca here engages with a text that must have been a well-known reference point for a key theme of his chorus, the eclipse of the Sun, and highlights his allusion to Pindar at the prominent opening and closing moments of his lyrics.
Seneca engaged not only with Greek monodic precedent but also with choral lyrics. A case in point is the first chorus of another play, the Hercules Furens. This ode, which ranks among the most memorable lyrics written by Seneca, shows some clear re-appropriation of the parodos of Euripides Phaethon. The Euripidean opening ode must have been well-known in antiquity, as is attested to by its inclusion in a Euripidean anthology by the third century BC.54 Seneca’s reworking of Euripides here shows that he included elements from his precedent in minute detail:55 in Seneca’s order, stars (and the Sun), a shepherd, grazing animals, a nightingale (and other birds), a sailor (and a fisherman). Seneca both expands the Euripidean model (Euripides’ first four lines become twelve in Seneca), and—which is typical of his allusive technique56—allows other relevant texts to come into the picture. For instance, scholars have noted echoes of both Ovid and Horace throughout the choral ode.57 At Seneca’s point in Graeco-Roman literary history, lyric poetry is Roman as well as Greek.58
FURTHER READING
My treatment complements Harrison 2007c and Barchiesi 2009. On Sappho’s Roman reception see also Morgan 2021 and the collected volume by Harrison/Thorsen 2019.
Notes
1 On Gellius NA 19.9 and the context of the relative scarcity of citations from lyric poetry, see Holford-Strevens 2003: 233–234. On the social (and spatial) context of the Gellian setting, see further Hutchinson 2013: 65–70.
2 If one includes elegiac poetry, as is assumed in the present companion; the lines recited by Julianus are all in elegiacs.
3 Translation follows Powell 2007: 11. Note that there are various textual issues in the Greek, with major uncertainties in lines 9, 13, and the last transmitted line: for a critical text, see Voigt, and cf. also Campbell.
4 Translation adapted from Goold 1983.
5 See O’Higgins 1996.
6 Cf. e.g., Herington 1985: 41. The reception by Latin authors would have been facilitated through the existence of the Hellenistic editions of the Greek lyric poets: see further Barbantani 2009, esp. 297. In pre-Hellenistic times, the reception of Greek lyric relied on a variety of media: see Swift 2010: 39–55. See further Thomas 1992 on the complicated question of literacy and the role of books in ancient Greece around and after Sappho’s death. See also Yunis 2003 and Hutchinson 2008: 1–41.
7 His is the first Latin version of Sappho 31 to utilize the form of the sapphic stanza, which creates stanza units each formally closed off by closing adonei.
8 Aloni 2001 emphasizes the distancing gesture in κῆνος in Sappho 31. To him, “in Catullus the use of the deictic is different; the reiteration of ille (50.1 and 2 [should read ‘51.1 and 2’]) as well as the lack of any indefinite element linked to it […] and of any verbal forms other than indicative underline the importance and the reality of the poetic presence of the one indicated by ille” (34).
9 Catullus’ speakers can adopt female personae in other poems as well: see Skinner 1997: 145–146.
10 On Aedituus and Catullus 31, see also Ross 1969: 144–150.
11 Clark 2008: 271–273 argues that the gender dynamics in Aedituus’ reception of Sappho are such that Aedituus’ speaker “emasculates himself.”
12 Translation from Rouse/Smith 2014.
13 See also Hunter 2019: 47–53.
14 Fowler 2000: 151–152.
15 Fowler 2000: 151–152.
16 Kenney 1986: 256 also writes about Lucretius’ “deliberate perversion of the language and ideas of love-poetry.”
17 Sappho 31 is transmitted to us in ps.-Longinus’ On the Sublime: the technical—and un-sublime—context in which Lucretius recalls Sappho 31 makes for an interesting contrast. (The date of the treatise On the Sublime is unclear, but it is likely later than Lucretius: cf. Porter 2016: 1–5, with n. 6).
18 Plautus’ engagement with Sappho would continue the reception of Sappho in Greek comedy (on which see Kugelmeier 1996 and Yatromanolakis 2007: 293–312).
19 See esp. Traill 2005 and Fontaine 2010: 192–197; what follows in the main text is essentially a summary of their contributions.
20 Translation (and, in the following, Plautus’ Latin text) taken from de Melo 2011.
21 On the Phaon myth, see esp. Nagy 1990 and Williamson 1995: 8–12.
22 For a basic account, see e.g., Robinson 1925: 37–45. See further Nagy 1996. The story of Sappho’s death occurs in detail in the Epistula Sapphus (Heroides 15). There is no space here to discuss the complexities of this text in any detail: see further Tarrant 1981 (for persuasive arguments against Ovidian authorship) and Thorsen 2014: 123–146 (for an interpretation of the poem within Ovid’s oeuvre).
23 At Rome, names associated with Sappho and her poetry seem to be able to serve as allusive markers to her poetry to a remarkable degree: in addition to Catullus’ “Lesbia,” cf. for instance the name of Varro Atacinus’ elegiac mistress, “Leucadia” (cf. Prop. 2.34.85-86), which may have evoked Sappho (see Wilamowitz 1913: 25–33) at least as much as the Leucadian Apollo (see further Lightfoot 1999: 156–157, on Parthenius fr. 14, the only remnant of Parthenius’ Leukadiai). On the vogue of Sappho in Roman poetry, see Morgan 2010: 195–200.
24 Fontaine 2010: 193.
25 See the side-by-side comparison at Fontaine 2010: 195.
26 On this question, cf. in detail Schaaf 1977. For the intertextual reader, of course, the question of whether Plautus “went back” to Sappho makes no difference in any case: see e.g., Fowler 2000: 141.
27 On the question to what extent Plautus’ audiences would have had access to Greek language, literature, and culture, see further Zagagi 2012, with bibliography at n. 1.
28 Audience (or parts of it) would have been aware of the allusion: Fontaine 2010: esp. 196–197; audience is likely not to have been aware of Plautus’ sophisticated engagement with Sappho: Traill 2005: esp. 532.
29 Translation taken from Kovacs 2001.
30 See Jocelyn 1967: 370–371, ad loc., and Hose 1999: 125–126.
31 Long verses (i.e., trochaic septenarii, iambic septenarii and octonarii) were recited, all other verses (apart from the spoken verses in iambic senarii) sung: see the concise overview by De Melo 2011, vol. 1: xciv–xcvii, and, in detail, Moore 2008.
32 Cf. Porphyrio on Horace, Odes 3.1.2.
33 His most common meters in the fragments that we have are anacreontics and iambic dimeters in systems, but, significantly, he also uses anapaestic dimeters, as known from Roman drama.
34 A good example is fr. 30 Courtney [p. 142], where the poem is metapoetically describing its own metrical form: see Barchiesi 2009: 321.
35 See Courtney 2003: 136.
36 On these Greek poems see Gow 1952: 552–553, and Kwapisz 2013 (with further references). The term technopaegnia is taken from Ausonius, Idyll 12 (who, however, uses it differently: to refer to a hexametrical poem in which each line begins and ends in a monosyllable).
37 On Simmias’ date, see Kwapisz 2013: 21–23, with further references. For the context of his influential contemporary Philitas of Cos, see the text with introduction, testimonia, and translation by Lightfoot 2009: 1–98, and cf. esp. Knox 1993 and Bing 2003.
38 The lines scan like this:lines 1 and 12: – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – – lines 2 and 11: – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – – lines 3 and 10: – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – – lines 4 and 9: – ⏑ ⏑ – – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – – lines 5 and 8: – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – – lines 6 and 7: ⏑ – –.
39 Greek text and English translation taken from Paton 1918.
40 Cupido usually figures as Venus’ son in Roman versions, but the parentage is less stable on the Greek side (with a different concept especially in the philosophical tradition and versions that follow Hesiod): see Graf 1998, with further references.
41 As suggested by Barchiesi 2009: 321.
42 See Squire/Wienand 2017, a recent volume dedicated to Optatian’s “lettered art,” which also includes a new typographic presentation of all the poems at 28–51.
43 See further Peltarri 2014: 80–84.
44 See, in more detail, Kwapisz 2017.
45 Also cf. Dosiadas’ “Jason’s altar” (AP 15.26).
46 Noted by Kwapisz 2017: 182.
47 In late antiquity, a proliferation in lyrics written in Latin is largely due to the advent of Christian hymnography, not treated in my article. The predominant model for these authors is, however, not Greek lyric but Horace: see the overview by Tarrant 2007: 281–285. A major figure in the late-antique reception of lyric poetry is Boethius in the early sixth century: cf. Fielding 2017: esp. 128–181.
48 See Courtney 2003: 351 (from GLK 6.266 onwards, the treatise “seems to represent a combination of [Bassus’] work with that of another metrist”).
49 See further Buchheit 1962: esp. 108–123, who argues for a date after (or at least very close to) Martial.
50 Martial, not discussed here, also made repeated use of hendecasyllables in his otherwise largely elegiac collection.
51 Lucan’s lyrics in his Medea (and his Silvae) are attested as part of his œuvre by Vacca (though they are not clearly alluded to in the catalogue of Lucan’s works at Stat. Silv. 2.7.52–80). Ambühl 2015 includes some instances of Lucan engaging with Greek lyric models in the Bellum Civile.
52 On this feature, see esp. Tarrant 1995 and Goldberg 2014.
53 See Tarrant 1985: 204 and 215.
54 Fitch 1987: 158, n. 31, with Diggle 1970: 34.
55 See the detailed comparison by Fitch 1987: 158–182.
56 Cf. e.g. Trinacty 2014.
57 Such as a passage from Ovid’s Phaethon episode, Ov. Met. 2.114–118 (in the opening of Seneca’s ode) and Horace Odes 1.1.7–9 (in the “priamel” pattern to describe the miserable man at 164–172, esp. at 169–171).
58 I would like to thank Felix Budelmann, Stephen Harrison, and Laura Swift for their help and suggestions.