Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative: Updated Edition

HOMERIC EFFECTS IN VERGIL’S NARRATIVE

HOMERIC EFFECTS IN VERGIL’S NARRATIVE

ALESSANDRO BARCHIESI

TRANSLATED BY

ILARIA MARCHESI & MATT FOX

WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY

PHILIP HARDIE

and a new afterword by the author

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton & Oxford

Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

Originally published in Italian as La traccia del modello

© 1984 by Giardini editori e stampatori in Pisa

press.princeton.edu

Jacket photograph: detail of a silver cup from Hoby’s Tomb

© Jens Vermeersch. Cropped from original.

Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0 license

(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barchiesi, Alessandro, author.

[Traccia del modello. English]

Homeric effects in Vergil’s narrative / Alessandro Barchiesi ; translated by Ilaria Marchesi and Matt Fox with a new foreword by Philip Hardie and a new afterword by the author.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-16181-5 (hardcover)

1. Virgil. Aeneis. 2. Epic poetry, Latin—History and criticism. 3. Narration (Rhetoric)—History—To 1500. 4. Latin poetry—Greek influences. 5. Homer—Appreciation—Rome. 6. Imitation in literature. 7. Rome—In literature. 8. Homer—Influence. 9. Rhetoric, Ancient.

PA6931.B3413 2015

873’.01—dc23

2014012449

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro and League Gothic

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

BY PHILIP HARDIE

vii

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

xv

1

THE DEATH OF PALLAS

Intertextuality and Transformation of the Epic Model

1

2

THE STRUCTURE OF AENEID 10

35

3

THE ARMS IN THE SKY

Diffraction of a Narrative Theme

53

4

THE DEATH OF TURNUS

Genre Model and Example Model

69

APPENDIX

THE LAMENT OF JUTURNA

95

AFTERWORD

BY ALESSANDRO BARCHIESI

115

NOTES

135

WORKS CITED

175

SELECT INDEX

185

SELECT INDEX LOCORUM

188

INDEX OF MODERN AUTHORS

190

FOREWORD

Alessandro Barchiesi began La traccia del modello. Effetti omerici nella narrazione virgiliana by noting that twenty years had passed since the publication of Georg Knauer’s monumental study of Vergil’s use of Homer in the Aeneid, Die Aeneis und Homer. Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils (1964), a revision of Knauer’s 1961 Habilitationsschrift. It is now (2014) thirty years since the Italian publication of Homeric Effects in Virgil’s Narrative. It is astonishing to think that La traccia was based substantially on its author’s honors thesis, the work of a brilliant scholar in his early twenties.

Knauer’s book, building on centuries of Vergilian commentary and drawing on the riches of German Vergilian scholarship of the previous seventy years, was the first full and integrated study both of the complex architecture of Vergil’s imitation of Homer and of the filigree detail of Vergil’s allusion to particular episodes, lines, and phrases of the Homeric epics. Fifty years on, Die Aeneis und Homer remains the starting point for any study of Vergil and Homer. La traccia was the product of a watershed in the history of Latin literary studies in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period that has largely determined the way Latinists have been doing things down to the present day. The young Barchiesi was at the very forefront of this nouvelle vague; the book is already completely at home with a number of terms that have defined major approaches to the study of ancient literature over the last three decades but that in the early 1980s were only beginning to make their way into the consciousness of Anglophone Latinists: narratology, intertextuality, reception. The book also makes a significant contribution to another highly productive area of Latin studies, the dialogue of genres, or generic polyphony, with its perceptive analyses of Vergil’s refraction of Homeric epic models through the lens of the outlooks and structures of Attic tragedy.

Barchiesi’s early intellectual formation was in continental and Russian literary theory, but the major achievement of La traccia is to be located in the area of what has been perhaps the most influential Italian contribution to modern Latin literary scholarship, the study of allusion and intertextuality. Prior to La traccia the major landmarks are Giorgio Pasquali’s 1951 essay L’arte allusiva, and the essays by one of Barchiesi’s own teachers at Pisa, Gian Biagio Conte, collected in Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario: Catullo, Virgilio, Ovidio, a book published in 1974 but whose full impact outside Italy had to await its English translation as the first part of G. B. Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets (1986).

La traccia advances the discussion in a number of ways. The Italian title puns in a manner not easily conveyed in English. Traccia can mean trace, trail, or track, holding together two ways of thinking about the relationship between a model text (in this case, the Homeric epics) and an alluding text (the Aeneid): a reader may either focus on fragmentary traces of the model text subsumed within the structures of the alluding text or look for systematic Homeric trails inscribed in the Vergilian text.¹ Barchiesi has a particular interest in a systematic approach to Vergil’s Homeric allusion, which he contrasts with Pasquali’s attention to the microcontext of poetic memory (chapter 4). La traccia draws out the importance of the Homeric model for reading the plot of the Aeneid, demonstrating the vital contribution of an awareness of Homeric intertexts to the legibility of the Aeneid. Vergil’s reader is called upon to be attentive both to the incorporation of Homeric stereotypes within the Aeneid (for example, patterns of heroic behavior on the battlefield) and to Vergil’s swerves from these stereotypes, examples of the oppositio in imitando (opposition in imitation) that earlier students of allusivity had tended to examine at the level of the small-scale detail. The way that meaning is thus generated through divergences within a horizon of expectations may also be compared to Francis Cairns’s use of the schemata of situational genres as a starting point for reading ancient poetry, in his Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (1972), to name an important work in the Anglophone tradition that was developing independently of continental work in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Barchiesi develops his approach through sustained and multilayered readings of a limited number of passages in books 8, 10, and 12 of the Aeneid, together with a revelatory quasi-structuralist analysis of the whole sequence of encounters on the battlefield in Aeneid 10. In the several chapters he deploys the full armory of philological and literary-historical weaponry in the service of a powerful intertextual method. Not the least important service rendered by the book is the demonstration of the inseparability of, on the one hand, formalist readings, and, on the other, cultural-historical and ideological readings (for programmatic statements of principle on the need to combine the formalist and the historical, see chapter 4). Together with Gian Biagio Conte, the second of Barchiesi’s thesis supervisors was Antonio La Penna, the leading Italian Latinist in a marxisant tradition of historical and political readings of poetry. In this respect the book achieves an unusually satisfying coincidentia oppositorum, steering a course between the Scylla of an inward-looking formalism that is the fate of some intertextual and generic studies and the Charybdis of an exclusive set toward the culturalism or ideology critique against which Charles Martindale (2005) has taken up cudgels.

La traccia generates complex, but never confusing, readings of the Aeneid through two strategies: first the demonstration of the presence within a single Vergilian episode of separate narrative strands in the Homeric text (akin to what Knauer labels Kontaminierung, and to what I have labeled combinatorial imitation, with reference to post-Vergilian epic imitations of the Aeneid);² and second, through an excavation of the different stratifications in the ancient reception of Homer, thus activating contrasts between the ideology of Homer’s original audiences and the critical readings of the philosophical and literary culture of later centuries. An outstanding example of the first is the discussion of the climactic encounter of Aeneas and Turnus at the end of the poem, which alludes to the duel of Achilles and Hector in Iliad 22, to the general pattern of Homeric scenes of supplication (never successful) on the battlefield, and to Priam’s successful supplication of Achilles for the body of Hector in Iliad 24. In Aeneas’s famous hesitation as to whether or not to kill Turnus we are to read two contrasting traces—two tracks mixed—both signed by Homer (chapter 4). This remains one of the most penetrating studies of the problematic end of the Aeneid.

An example of the use of the later reception of Homer is the juxtaposition of Juturna’s complaint, in her lament for her brother Turnus, that as an immortal she cannot escape her grief through death, with the statement by the Epicurean Philodemus (On Piety 2) that the gods are more wretched than mortals, since they endure woes that last for all eternity, because they live forever (see appendix). Once again the young Barchiesi was ahead of the game, anticipating the increased pace over the last couple of decades of the use of Philodemus in the interpretation of Augustan poetry. In his emphasis on the inseparability of Vergil as reader and Vergil as writer, and on the importance of using ancient Homeric scholarship and criticism to reconstruct Vergil’s reading of Homer, Barchiesi was converging with other scholars of that time. R. R. Schlunk’s The Homeric Scholia and the Aeneid: A Study of the Influence of Ancient Homeric Literary Criticism on Vergil came out in 1974, and in my Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (1986) I tested the possibility that Vergil drew on a Pergamene allegorical reading of Homer in his own Homeric imitation. These days we are very comfortable (perhaps too comfortable) with the idea that Roman poets, as well as Hellenistic Greek poets, read their texts with scholarly and exegetical aids. It was not always so: I remember an eminent Oxford classicist in 1980 responding to my own suggestion that Homer came to Vergil bearing the freight of the intervening history of scholarship and interpretation with his own conviction that Vergil, of course, just went straight to the text of Homer.

In the matter of reception Barchiesi 1984 may seem dated. The reader’s response to Vergil’s imitation of Homer, the legibility of the text, is seen as being controlled by generic frameworks and by the history of reading, leading to an allusive—and controlled—polyphony. Barchiesi is not shy of the language of intentionality, for example, at the start of chapter 3, the multitude of models becomes fodder for narrative strategies that aim to produce and control determined effects of reading. Or the argument in chapter 4 that the difficulty of Aeneas’s decision whether or not to kill Turnus is intentionally produced by the text. We may here detect the influence of his teacher Gian Biagio Conte, who similarly avoids the pitfalls of appeal to an authorial intentionality by hypostasizing an intentio operis. The model of a controlled polyphony is also comparable to the intentional polysemy posited for Augustan art and literature by Karl Galinsky (who, however, is also prepared to speak of authorial centres).³ La traccia emerges from the intellectual climate of structuralism and semiotics, as yet untouched by poststructuralist indeterminacy and the relativism of Charles Martindale’s influential brand of reception.⁴

The book does, however, position itself with regard to what at the time was the new wave of Anglophone Latin literary criticism, a form of close reading generally in line with the methods of New Criticism, and which often pushed textual ambiguity in the direction of a moral ambivalence, or even hostility, toward the political goals of the principate. Barchiesi is happier with a model of ideological complexity and contradiction, which finds expression through the superimposition within the Vergilian text of the different readings of Homeric epic at different times in history. Barchiesi’s resistance to the kind of associative close reading practiced by American critics such as Michael Putnam sometimes leads to an excessive skepticism—for example, in the summary dismissal of the idea that the (conventionally) Punic lion in the simile at A. 12.4–9 establishes a symbolic link between Turnus and Dido; the language of line 5, saucius ille graui uenantum uolnere pectus, forcibly reminds an unbiased reader of Aeneid 4.1–2, At regina graui iamududum saucia cura | uulnus alit uenis … (the connection is sympathetically entertained by Richard Tarrant in his recent commentary, on A. 12.4).

La traccia is also very much the product of a Pisan moment. It was published as the first monograph in the "Biblioteca di Materiali e Discussioni, and The Lament of Juturna appeared as an article in the first issue (1978) of the journal itself, which also included articles by Gian Biagio Conte, Maurizio Bettini, Alessandro Perutelli, and others. Within a few years links began to be forged between the Pisan school of Latinists and scholars in the United States and Great Britain—in particular, a second wave of theoretically aware Anglophone Latinists, many of whom were students of, or otherwise close to, John Henderson in Cambridge, a loose group to which Don Fowler pinned the label of the New Latin."⁵ Barchiesi’s early works, including La traccia, found a receptive audience among the Anglo-American New Latinists, with whom Barchiesi himself, as well as other products of the Pisa school, have established close working relationships. One might indeed speak of an Anglo-American-Pisan tradition of New Latin, although the adjective New becomes less and less appropriate as the years pass and as once young Turks come up to retirement! It will be interesting to see in what new directions the current generation of young Latinists, whose reading and writing practices have been significantly shaped by Don Fowler’s New Latin, will take our discipline.

Coming back to Homeric Effects a quarter of a century after I first read it, I am struck by its continuing freshness and ability to stimulate, a mark of the prescience and fertility of its agenda. The conceptual breadth is combined with the highest standards of scholarship, an object lesson in the ideal symbiosis of theory and philology, and a hallmark of all of Barchiesi’s work. Homeric Effects has long been a part of the mental furniture of professional Latinists. Its publication in English is to be welcomed as making it accessible to a wider range of readers and students.

PHILIP HARDIE

Trinity College, Cambridge

WORKS CITED IN THE FOREWORD

Conte, G. B. 1974. Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario. Torino.

Fowler, D. 1995. Modern Literary Theory and Latin Poetry: Some Anglo-American Perspectives, Arachnion. A Journal of Ancient Literature and History on the Web. http://www.cisi.unito.it/arachne/num2/fowler.html (accessed May 4, 2014).

Galinsky, G. K. 1996. Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction. Princeton, NJ.

Hardie, P. 1990. Flavian epicists on Virgil’s epic technique, in A. J. Boyle, ed., The Imperial Muse: Ramus Essays on Roman Literature of the Empire, 3–20. Berwick, Victoria, Australia.

Hinds, S. E. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge.

Knauer, G. N. 1964. Die Aeneis und Homer. Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils mit Listen der Homerzitate in der Aeneis (Hypomnemata, 7). Göttingen.

Martindale, C. 2005. Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics. Oxford.

Pasquali, G. 1951. Arte allusive, in Stravaganze quarte e supreme, 11–20. Venice.

Tarrant, R. J. 2012. Virgil: Aeneid Book XII. Cambridge.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Twenty years have passed since Knauer published his comprehensive collection of comparisons between the Aeneid and Homer: one glimpses in this monumental work the closure—and the definitive balance sheet—of a scholarly activity stretching from ancient inquiries into furta Vergilii right down to the great commentaries of the modern period. But one can also see in this inventory of comparative materials an opening for new research. Space remains, I think, for one who wants to investigate the functions the Homeric model assumes in the composition of the Vergilian text. For me this involves taking up again the analysis of intertextual echoes by attempting to interpret them as moments where the narrative legibility of the Aeneid is exposed to view. This means, on one hand, considering Homeric echoes for the overall meaning they acquire through continuous reading; on the other, it means considering them as elements in a strategy of storytelling: the narrative character of the Vergilian text is what requires specific analytical tools. And if we nearly always begin with comparison of single passages, that favored terrain for studies of allusion, we will often find that we have trespassed into the disciplinary field that some call poetics, others narratology.¹

As this research has unfolded, I have found it ever more necessary to differentiate the many possible meanings that coexist in our usual notion of a literary model. Thus it is useful, for example, to introduce two working distinctions. The first contrasts direct imitation of the Homeric texts (recuperated in all their distant fixity) with the reappearance of Homer through the filter of a long, continuous transcoding process (diverse reinterpretations, inscribed within successive cultural systems). The second, from another angle, opposes a Homer that serves as example model, a source of authoritative memories, and a Homer that functions as a genre model, a matrix capable of generating a new text that is meant to take that model’s place.

This multiplying of intertextual functions has proven useful not just as a theoretical refinement but also as a critical response to complex qualities of Vergil’s poetic practice. It is my aim to explain the effects of reading that the text of the Aeneid intends. The interaction of diverse models does not remain, from this perspective, solely a cultural fact or the sedimentation of a tradition: each model, in becoming language, accepts coexistence with others and adapts itself to constructing the sense of the narrative. And it is precisely the action of underlying, implicit models to set us on the path from the extended meaning of the narrative text to the problematic dimension of its ideology.

I have collected here not all of my Vergilian papers but only those that seem to me part of a unified project, one that is still similar today even if it has become more specific along the way. For example, the first chapter insists most of all on the reception of Homer that conditioned the Vergilian transformation; the fourth and last, connected to my more recent interests, concerns instead the link between the complexity of meaning in Vergil’s narrative and the plurality of uses to which the Homeric text is twisted.²

ALESSANDRO BARCHIESI

Pisa 1984

HOMERIC EFFECTS IN VERGIL‘S NARRATIVE

CHAPTER 1

THE DEATH OF PALLAS

Intertextuality and Transformation of the Epic Model

1. TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE PATROKLEIA

In the series of slaughters that occupies all of Aeneid 10, a compositional project gradually takes shape. Enough material is gathered here to fill several Iliadic books and nearly all the poem’s heroes are given their own lengthy aristeia punctuated by minor episodes. But still the reader is guided through this chaotic chain of events by a clarifying thread, since a familiar and already assimilated model gives light to navigate it. The tenth book corresponds to the victorious events of Patroclus, to his death at the hand of Hector and the beginning of Achilles’ revenge.¹ Pallas is based on Patroclus, Turnus on Hector, Aeneas on Achilles. Just like Achilles, Aeneas, after the death of his young friend, is driven by overwhelming desire for final vengeance.² As with Hector, Turnus’s victory is at once the peak of his success and, without his realizing it, the basis for his defeat. Like Patroclus, Pallas is dragged by desire for valor into a tragic combat against a stronger enemy—and the narrator’s passionate participation intentionally balances here the famous qualities of pathos found in Patroclus’s episode. But more than analyzing the mere content of the Vergilian debts, which in any case have already been sufficiently traced many times,³ what interests me here now is how the Latin poet goes about transforming a paradigmatic event of heroic epic like the Patrokleia.

If a reader finds in the web of the Homeric narrative a guide for deciphering the new narrative, this is not just confirmation of her role as epic addressee and witness to the renewal of a tradition: rather it is the first step toward a new, more sophisticated and critical, relationship with the epic action. The two texts present themselves to readers as though in immediate continuity, which makes the system of differences far more conspicuous. This dynamic of transformation—the intertextuality that generates the sense of the text—is not established without the reader’s active cooperation; indeed, it nearly coincides with the process of comprehension that the author envisioned.

A first example may be useful at this point, to sketch in outline the kind of analysis I will develop later. When young Lausus is killed, the poet develops Aeneas’s reaction with unusual psychological depth (et mentem subiit patriae pietatis imago [an image of paternal care struck his mind], 10.824): the victor groans in sorrow and extends his hand to address the dead as a sign of mourning;⁴ his words pay homage to the young man’s courage; he leaves to him the armor that made him so happy and, finally, not only grants him burial but also takes up the lifeless body in his own arms to return it to his comrades, encouraging them to approach without fear. This scene of