... Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood. Book by David Wray; Cambridge University Press, 2001. (p. null03) See below... CATULLUS AND THE POETICS OF ROMAN MANHOOD. DAVID WRAY. CATULLUS AND THE POETICS OF ROMAN MANHOOD. ...
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The basic dominance-submission model of sexual relations, involving a hierarchical distinction between the active and passive roles, was the same in Greek and Roman cultures and remained unchanged throughout classical antiquity. However,... more
The basic dominance-submission model of sexual relations, involving a hierarchical distinction between the active and passive roles, was the same in Greek and Roman cultures and remained unchanged throughout classical antiquity. However, we find subtle modifications reflected in the literary tradition from the Homeric age to imperial Rome. In Homer and Hesiod, heterosexual relations are the only recognized form of sexual congress, and consensual sex is mutually pleasurable. Forced sex, in the form of abduction and rape, also occurs in epic narrative. Pederasty became a literary theme in Greek lyric poetry of the archaic age. In classical Athens, discourses of sexuality were tied to political ideology, because self-control was a civic virtue enabling the free adult male householder to manage his estate correctly and serve the city-state in war and peace. Tragedy illustrates the dire impact of unbridled erōs, while comedy mocks those who trespass against moderation or violate gender norms, and forensic oratory seeks to disqualify such offenders from participating in government. Philosophical schools disagreed over the proper place of erōs in a virtuous life. While pederastic relations dominated discussions of love in philosophic works, romantic affairs between men and women received greater attention in Hellenistic poetry, in keeping with an increased emphasis on shared pleasure and reciprocal emotional satisfaction. During the late Republic and the Augustan age, Roman authors incorporated erotic motifs from archaic lyric and Hellenistic epigram into their own first-person love poems. The genre of love elegy, in which the poet-lover professes himself enslaved to a harsh mistress, became widely popular during Augustus’ reign but disappeared shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, Lucretius’ didactic epic On the Nature of Things, and Vergil’s Aeneid, a heroic account of the founding of Rome, both treat erotic obsession as destructive. In the Imperial period, elite anxieties were displaced onto concerns about gender deviance on the part of males and females alike: the figures of the cinaedus and the tribas were castigated in moralizing poetry, especially satire and satiric epigram. Roman novels focused upon the sexual escapades of marginal displaced types. Under Roman rule, on the other hand, Greek literature saw a new flowering in the Second Sophistic movement. While pederasty remained a favorite subject, hotly championed against heterosexual relations in prose treatises, the Greek novel explored a new model of heterosexuality in which premarital chastity and mutual fidelity appear to anticipate later Christian values.
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So Byron, enough of a seasoned campaigner himself to recognize smut when he came across it. Any moral objection to literature proffered by an arch-libertine should be taken, of course, with a grain of salt. Yet in that very parody of... more
So Byron, enough of a seasoned campaigner himself to recognize smut when he came across it. Any moral objection to literature proffered by an arch-libertine should be taken, of course, with a grain of salt. Yet in that very parody of prudish cant we may hear the ghostly echo of sentiments voiced by some genuine prig— Annabella, Lady Byron, for example. In any case, Byron's observation about the exceptional amount of obscenity in the Catullan corpus still holds good and has recently been seconded by other, more sober, critics. B. Arkins calculates that two out of three poems of Catullus deal with some form of sexual behavior, and A. Richlin concurs: "Out of all the polymetrics and epigrams, sixty-two—well over half—include invective or sexual material, some of the coarsest in Latin verse."1 No one who has read this poet through once will challenge D. Lateiner's contention that obscenity "has made a significant contribution to the work of Catullus," or dispute W.R. Johnson's belief in its being "somehow central to Catullus's art."2 For most readers of Catullan texts, the mere presence of such obscene matter no longer poses a moral problem. Yet its literary purpose is still hotly debated. Why does this "foul-mouthed young man," as Johnson calls him, persist in battering our ears with toilet-stall expressions? Different lines of critical response to that question can be traced. Johnson himself argues for an iconoclastic intent: Catullus' shocking language allegedly encapsulates a rejection of old-fashioned Roman cultural values that regarded art as a vehicle of patriotic inspiration or dismissed it as a frivolous
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... epithalamium in glyconic stanzas, another in hexameters, a short mythic epyllion in galliambics, a long ... while the two hexameter poems are separated by one in the rare galliambic meter ... Poem 66, a translation of... more
... epithalamium in glyconic stanzas, another in hexameters, a short mythic epyllion in galliambics, a long ... while the two hexameter poems are separated by one in the rare galliambic meter ... Poem 66, a translation of Callimachus' Lock of Berenice, follows 65, its transmittal letter; this ...
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Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin, Elizabeth Kosmetatou, and Manuel Baumbach, eds. Labored in Papyrus Leaves: Perspectives on an Epigram Collection Attributed to Posidippus (P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309). Hellenic Studies 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. xiv+ 377 pp. 4 black-and-white figs. P...more
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... Page 4. Page 5. CATULLUS' PASSER The Arrangement of the Book of Polymetric Poems Page 6. ... Page 7. CATULLUS' PASSER The Arrangement of the Book of Polymetric Poems Marilyn B. Skinner AYER COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, INC. SALEM,... more
... Page 4. Page 5. CATULLUS' PASSER The Arrangement of the Book of Polymetric Poems Page 6. ... Page 7. CATULLUS' PASSER The Arrangement of the Book of Polymetric Poems Marilyn B. Skinner AYER COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, INC. SALEM, NEW HAMPSHIRE 03079 ...
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βιλεξξ0μιοξ or βιλ/τινοξ, whose examples include forms in ο ι-. βεμ.λιοξ: Delete the example in CPR XIV 31 (very uncertainly read). βθωιμμιζ.σοΚ: The reading of the word in O.Bodl. II 1676 is extremely uncertain (and infringes ‘Youtie’s... more
βιλεξξ0μιοξ or βιλ/τινοξ, whose examples include forms in ο ι-. βεμ.λιοξ: Delete the example in CPR XIV 31 (very uncertainly read). βθωιμμιζ.σοΚ: The reading of the word in O.Bodl. II 1676 is extremely uncertain (and infringes ‘Youtie’s law’). βοφμηασιλ.Κ: The discussion of the word o¶ers no proof that it corresponds to Lat. vulgaris; and there is no way that in SPP VIII 1124 = XX 133 we are dealing with an alias. δεζ/ξτψσ: This o ̧cial is probably not identical with the defensor civitatis (Greek %λδιλοΚ), cf. D. Hagedorn apud B. Kramer, Pap.Flor. XIX, p. 308 n. 12, and now P.Thomas 24. δονετυιλ.Κ: To the literature on comites domesticorum add R. Delmaire, Byzantion 54 (1984), 148–53, 175. On P.Oxy. XVI 1942 see now ZPE 132 (2000), 180. δο ω: Further examples in P.Berol.inv. 25009r.l (ed. GRBS 17 [1976], 198), SEG VIII 355, XXIV 1223–4, and now CPR XXII 1. There are two doublets: BM Or. 8903 = MPER NS XXIII (elsewhere cited as KSB) 241, and SB I 1840 = I.Syringes 788. Delete PSI VII 800 and P.Amh. II 151, where the word is restored. SB IV 7475 (= I.Theb. 196) and V 8704 have been republished by J. Gascou, T&MByz 12 (1994), 339 ¶. P.Lugd.Bat. XIII 10 dates to 399/400, cf. J. R. Rea, ZPE 56 (1984), 79–88; SPP III 271b dates to mid-VII, cf. J. Gascou and K. A. Worp, ZPE 49 (1982), 89–90, as also does SB XVI 12884, see CPR XXII 1 intro.; BGU III 750 is post-conquest, but does not date to 750. To the bibliography add now C. Zuckerman, AnTard 6 (1998), 137–47; J.-M. Carrié, AnTard 6, 105–21. The old dating of the texts in P.Apoll. to 703–15 (cf. pp. 137, 153, 155) should be condemned to oblivion, and replaced by ‘later VII’, cf. BL VIII 10 (referred to on pp. 183, 204, 258). Last, in a lexicon pertaining to the Greek documentary texts Ägyptens, examples from P.Ness. or PPG should have been set apart from the Egyptian material.
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... damaged section of the papyrus, we are told that the weroia before us are old stories, stories handed down "from our fathers," which have been embellished "for unwed-ded girls," parthenysi.12 Corinna thereby... more
... damaged section of the papyrus, we are told that the weroia before us are old stories, stories handed down "from our fathers," which have been embellished "for unwed-ded girls," parthenysi.12 Corinna thereby relates her compositions to the ancient genre ofpartheneia, songs ...
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... the tender utterances of the lost pre-Oedipal mother the texts of ecriture feminine are intended ... 16 The Diotima of Plato's Symposium is, Halperin argues, a rhetorical trope. ... Western symbolic system is a male-ordered... more
... the tender utterances of the lost pre-Oedipal mother the texts of ecriture feminine are intended ... 16 The Diotima of Plato's Symposium is, Halperin argues, a rhetorical trope. ... Western symbolic system is a male-ordered construct, as they believe, the feminine specificity putatively ...
For almost all present-day readers, Catullus is a compelling love poet; for Quintilian, he was a master of the savage political lampoon. These two views of the same author are not mutually exclusive. Yet a natural wish to establish... more
For almost all present-day readers, Catullus is a compelling love poet; for Quintilian, he was a master of the savage political lampoon. These two views of the same author are not mutually exclusive. Yet a natural wish to establish Catullus as a great ‘lyric poet’, as twentieth-century scholars understand the term, has sometimes trapped his admirers into a false dichotomy: his invectives are denied any claim to artistic merit, and the Roman rhetorician's preference for them is dismissed as an odd lapse of taste. Such a pronouncement hardly does justice to Quintilian's aesthetic judgment. Nor does it give due recognition to Catullus' noteworthy achievements in the iambic mode. Even in the harshest of his lampoons, modern techniques of literary analysis reveal a level of sophistication as high as in any of the famous love lyrics, together with an equivalent degree of emotional complexity. In this paper I intend to support that thesis through an exploration of one significant characteristic of certain pasquinades: the use of standard invective topoi as condensed metaphors of political corruption.
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Did C. Valerius Catullus, like his contemporaries Archias and Philodemus (and his later imitator Pliny the Younger), recite his poetry aloud at private gatherings? (1) Were some of the polymetric nugae written to be declaimed on given... more
Did C. Valerius Catullus, like his contemporaries Archias and Philodemus (and his later imitator Pliny the Younger), recite his poetry aloud at private gatherings? (1) Were some of the polymetric nugae written to be declaimed on given occasions and, if so, can we infer likely circumstances of delivery and possible listeners from internal textual evidence? Finally, how does it change our understanding of the poems to analyze them as performances in particular settings? These questions have been posed with increasing frequency in the last fifteen years, during which the theoretical or actual enactment of Catullan poetic discourse, along with its probable reception by live audiences, has become the object of much scholarly conjecture. Some critics confine themselves to treating the reader-response effect of a Catullan text--that is, the range of potential reactions elicited from a notional reader--as the analogue of audience response to a live performance. For example, Selden's methodological approach utilizes the speech-act theory of John L. Austin to analyze the pragmatic outcomes of Catullan discourse. To designate poetic utterances that, instead of describing a phenomenon, produce consequences in and of themselves, he employs Austin's own term performative. (2) The rhetoric of the poems, he finds, is an incongruous fusion of referential and "performative" modes whose end result is often semantic impasse; accordingly, "the critical tradition does not so much master Catullus' literary achievement as play out a series of responses that is already predicated and predicted by his work" (489). Similarly, Fitzgerald devotes a large part of his recent book to exploring the Catullan speaker's efforts to "position" himself in relation to the con sumer of his verse through calculated exploitation of the image he presents to readers. (3) Other interpreters, however, take the idea of a performed text literally. Wiseman envisions a few poems, those without a definite addressee, recited in ioco atque vino to a setect group of friends (1985: 127). Gamel goes much further, proposing that the liher Catulli may in fact be a collection of scripts for oral delivery, and that notorious instances of ambiguity would house a choice of possible interpretations to be resolved under individual performance conditions (84-86). Finally, using poem 4 as his test case, Fredrick examines the wider relationship of Catullus' acoustic poetics to both "referential meaning and the circumstances of performance" (52); in passing, he observes that the aural and emotive gratifications of poetic recital in a banquet setting would overlap with "the real excesses and moral anxiety that define the triclinium" (52 n. 8). This is a provocative comment to which I shall return below. Performance scripts, by definition, bring two audiences into conjunction: an ideal receptive audience constructed by the rhetoric, and an actual audience of spectators. In a previous study, I attempted to define a socio-historical context for the hypothesis of Catullan poetic performance by suggesting that the author presented his verse, most likely by invitation, at formal banquets and employed it as a vehicle of self-promotion within the upper echelons of society. (4) Thus the actual audience for his poems would have been the small circle of elite Romans in which he moved. In other articles, I have sketched out the ideal audience created by specific Catullan poems, including 10, which is unusually frank in soliciting the goodwill of a textually projected listener. (5) I now want to marry those two approaches and combine them with a third one locating Catullus the performer in a convivial setting that includes a contemporary mentioned in his script. Judging by all the familiar names he drops, the poet must have frequently recited a poem in the immediate hearing of someone who appeared as a character in it. Hence investigation of the poem as performance should take the presence of that character into account. …
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Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petalingjaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1992 by... more
Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petalingjaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1992 by Ross Shepard Kraemer Published by ...
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Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Law, Gender Studies, Feminism, and 3 moreDiscipline, Patriarchy, and Scholarship
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This chapter examines Augustus’ legislation criminalizing adultery in the light of first-century BCE social arrangements that allowed Roman noblewomen to manage property without interference from their husbands and sometimes with little... more
This chapter examines Augustus’ legislation criminalizing adultery in the light of first-century BCE social arrangements that allowed Roman noblewomen to manage property without interference from their husbands and sometimes with little input from natal kin. During and after the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE), concentration of wealth in female hands had triggered major legal changes and produced a corresponding shift toward marriage sine manu (“free” marriage). By the end of the Republic, the phenomenon of legally independent (sui iuris) women controlling their finances, especially with purely nominal oversight from tutors, created apprehension among husbands without a say in their wives’ dealings and arguably contributed to widespread concern over female sexual license. Responding to such anxieties, Augustus’ adultery law imposed economic penalties upon convicted women that, in addition to serving as deterrents, probably facilitated the transfer of property out of irresponsible (fe...