Poets and poetry in Virgil’s Underworld

From a discussion of the singular concentration in Aeneid 6 of material pointing towards archaic Latin poetry and present in the text leading up to and including the famous verses excudent alii…(6.847–53), we pass to Virgil’s view of poets and poetry at large in Aeneid 6: a number of passages make it clear that Elysium is filled with poets, and their importance to Virgil emerges from the rhetorical structure of the last third of Aeneid 6.

Excudent alii

A detailed analysis of Aeneid 6.847–53. In one of the loftiest passages of the Aeneid, we have seen Virgil use poetic, verbal, lexical, grammatical, syntactical means of a simple, sober character (apart, clearly from the exchange of ducere and excudere, of course). He may perhaps have had in mind the age of Ennius and Cato the Censor, two writers who might actually have appreciated the austere content and manner of these verses.

The geography of the Georgics

A look at Virgil’s image of Italy in the Georgics, or rather at the startling lack of evidence on which to base such an enquiry, which leads one to an examination of the elements of formal panegyrics, and to certain curiosities in Virgil’s choice of geographical names. An appendix categorizing some of these place names provides a useful start for further study.

The cultural horizons of the Plebs Romana

The paper treats the evidence for a memory-rooted, music-based oral culture among the Romans below equestrian rank. Sources of popular culture for this group include the army, Greek immigrants, popular preachers and poets, the theatre and other public performances, mingling in inns and other public places, and story-telling. Sources discussed include Petronius and Cicero.

Cicero and poetry

Cicero’s disdainful outlook on contemporary poetry may give some understanding of the prejudices implied and their possible origins. As an elderly consular, he objects to the noui that belong to various groupings or factions, whereas his informed love for the great comic poets is amply acknowledged and he laments the loss of the carmina conuiualia. Part, then, of the explanation, is simply a question of ageing, of fashion, of the passing of the generations. Cicero is a skilled poet who loses interest in poetry.

Empty shelves on the Palatine

The whole Aeneid is a meditation on Roman history in which Aeneas’ sufferings lead directly to the altae moenia Romae. The paper summarizes the principal ways in which Virgil sets historical reference within epic narrative. Part of the reason why research hitherto has not come up with any answers to the questions that this paper tries to pose is that Virgil specialists tend to look too closely and exclusively at epic (and sometimes tragic) antecedents. We should perhaps look at two less obvious poetic genres: the literature of prophecy, and aetiological poetry. The Aeneid works, intellectually, as a new kind of epic, formally mythological, but often, in its implications, historical, because it has taken on (and this is the ‘mixing of genres’, never practised so radically or brilliantly elsewhere) a powerful, inspiring element from aetiological poetry.

The Caudine Forks

The site of the Roman conflict at the Caudine Forks is not seriously in doubt, but the topographical problems still exert a fascination over scholars. To succeed in squaring Livy’s account with the actual terrain is to raise grave literary and historiographical problems. It is clearly possible to extract from Livy’s narrative a picture of narrow gorges with the Romans under constant attack, at the cost of grave difficulties in reconciling that picture with the topography of the Arienzo–Arpaia valley. Livy’s account has all the character of a formulaic description.

The structure and purpose of Virgil’s parade of heroes

The parade of heroes at Aeneid 6.756ff. has attracted a huge bibliography but little attention has been paid elsewhere to its elaborate and elusive network of themes and links which the poet draws between the heroes portrayed and the Golden Age of Augustus. This is a detailed and scholarly examination of the parallels and possible links and of the purpose of the parade, both for Aeneas and for the contemporary Roman reader. Virgil must be considered as having the disturbances of 23 BC in mind, with his veiled warning to Caesar and Pompey against civil discord.

Some problems of titulature in Roman literary history

To consider the evidence for the titles of works of Latin literature is at once depressing and rewarding: depressing in that Latinists are revealed repeatedly as the slaves of erroneous convention, rewarding on account of the fresh light shed upon the world of books at Rome and upon literary terminology. It should be stressed that Roman books did in general have titles, and that those titles were often demonstrably the author’s own. Authors emerge in this study as sharply and frequently aware of the titulus as a physical object and of the importance to be attached to thoughtful and significant titulature.

From history to legend

Students of early Roman history have been compelled to acknowledge the existence of a story, according to which, in 390 BC, the Capitol fell, like the rest of Rome, to the Gauls. Such a narrative evidently precludes the rousing of the sleeping garrison and hence the saving of the Capitol by the geese as narrated in Livy. Our earliest textual evidence does nothing to encourage acceptance of the traditional Livian version. The story of the geese is itself of a familiar and universal type and at a later stage geese and dogs were both involved in a commemorative ritual, on whose detail we are copiously and variously informed. The growth of a popular and patriotic tale could have led to this more complex pattern of growth.