John Van Sickle

Topics and authors attract, promising expert and timely ways to approach or reconnect with the poet and trace readers' shifting fashions. Good reading starts with the editor—judicious, attentive to scholarly history's turns and to advances by her notable crew. Given the editorial constraints customary here, however, my remarks will focus on a few of the many intersections with scholarly concerns of mine. Text history fascinates in the hands of the late James Butrica—redeeming Pontano, prizing Billanovich (praised now too by a Latin inscription at his Milanese university). Competing perceptions of a Catullan book get historicized by the editor as conditioned by evolving preconceptions about structure: other poetic books could use such reckoning. Already central to the editor's account of order, Peter Wiseman vindicates his standing (with her) as a dean of Catullan studies, bringing again to life hints of "Transpadane upbringing" and providing an exemplary recons...

I take as my operating agenda a set of questions posed by Michael Reeve at a conference on scholarship and theory in classics, held at Corpus Christi College in 1997 and edited by Stephen Harrison as Texts, Ideas, and the Classics (Oxford 2001).1 We must ask, says Reeve, does our reading “explain things in the [text] that had seemed puzzling? Does it reveal things that no one had noticed? In short, where does it lead?”2 Answers, indeed the very questions, suppose attentive study of prior reception, fulfilling, too, an ideal of scholarly community, described by Reeve as “less intellectual than moral, ” that rewards priority with “credit given where credit is due,”3 in keeping with the honor accorded “first, ” to say nothing of scholarly desire to avoid the embarassment of claiming to “discover the wheel ” or of neglecting evidence that may impair or reinforce one’s case. Also, facing Reeve’s “fundamental question why [still today receive such works], ” reception studies must reopen t...

Aloud, yes, read this poety out loud – to yourself if no one else will listen, or taking turns, as a shared project – indoors or out, if you can get a quiet spot. Try on the various voices & their outlooks. Perform them if you will. Experiment with putting on one character, then another. Figure out which voicings fit. Confer. Retune. Keep at it till you start to get a sense of feelings & ideas – dramatic flair & flow – evolving voice by voice throughout the book. Note how the voicings grow to form a new world-view both positive & prophetic, but then retreat, regroup & grow again, though toward a different climax – operatic, tragic: fatal passion’s dream of deathless art. Turn, now, directly to the script. As you read in, at any sticking point, you can always come back here for further hints. If you prefer more coaching, though, take courage to perform from the old report about this work’s debut: the poet gave it out with such success that

Archilochus might be said to have made it on the modern scene about ten years ago when a reader of Poetry mistook some translated fragments for a fresh contemporary voice. Modern taste could even make a virtue of the lacerated and lacunose, as Hugh Kenner pointed out ...

Acknowledging the aid of Allius, who made available the" house"(domum, 68) where Catullus' mistress came to him, the poet compares her arrival there to that of Laodamia at Protesilaus'" house"(domum, 74). An emphatic detail, flagrans.. amore (73), further ...

Page 1. Po?tica teocritea di John B. Van Sickle Il motivo centrale dei due studi pi? recenti su Teocrito ? una reazione contro qualsiasi tendenza a svalutare il poeta, anche se in seguito i loro autori adottano metodi addirittura contrastanti. ...

A" combination of austere diction and involuted arrangement" is the way the first edition describes the style of the new Gallus 1. By way of confirmation, the present paper points to a mannerism in word-pair separation and placement that the first edition neglected; and the ...

... reading thè first eclogue as allego ry : thè point has been made by De Witt, among others: thè demonstratives and deus would have ... by attention, for example, to Frédrick Griffith's useful monograph, Theocritus at Court (Leiden 1979)5. As for DuQuesnay's view that Virgil gives no ...

... 41. 26 J. Van Sickle, "About Form and Feeling in Catullus 65," TAPA 99 (1968) 487-508, esp. 498-508. 27 B. Nemeth, "TotheEvaluationofCatullus 116,"ACD 13 (1977)23-31,esp. 23. 28 T. Wiseman (note 20, above) 7; K. Quinn (note 25, above) 12. ...

Fifty some years later, prompted by my seminar on pastoral to read & translate Poetica Teocritea, the work amazes me: only four years from the doctorate, yet confidently engaged with innovative scholarship while reproving the status quo, figuring out an interpretative strategy that still serves for Theocritus’ contrived vignettes & Virgil’s calculated drafts—each everywhere engaging past then current possibility for epos, configuring bucolic drama in metapoetic code
.      Having penned the above after drafting the trans-lation, awe at my own decisive energy & scope made me stop to recall something of where, who, when, what, how this came about:
Cambridge, Reuben Brower, Northrup Frye, David Kuhn, though having neglected prescient counsel from Zeph Stewart to direct my senior research to Catullus translating that Callimachus who was about to enjoy a boom, since I preferred vates, curious intuition, clueless as to how vates would figure in my scholarly life, from the dissertation ‘Reading the Messianic eclogue’ where that ‘Reading’ smacks of Brower & the old Humanities Six.1
From Cambridge to Rome via Fulbright, recommended by Steele Commager, referred by Wendell Clausen to Scevola Mariotti, who would forward me to Bruno Gentili in Urbino.
    Doctorate done, gainfully employed thanks to Charles Segal, writing up the stylistic links observed between the messianic eclogue & Catullus,2 with editorial encouragement from John Arthur Hanson for relating the messianic to the other eclogues as a poetry book.3
    Dialectical evenings in West Philadelphia with Charlie Segal; queries about the very notion of pastoral, in Rome with Chico Rossi & at Johns Hopkins as a post-doctoral fellow with Charles Singleton & Dick Macksey,4  who edited my post-doctoral project,5 not to mention talk around that corridor in Gilman with the likes of Hillis Miller, Earl Wasserman, Elias Rivers, Eduardo Saccone, Ron Paulson, even the elusive Paul De Man, or the invitation from frank Henry Rowell to review a new book on Theocritus for the good old AJPh before it fell into terminal bad luck;6 sent then by Mariotti to the Arcadia;7  in fine, weaving together all such threads, this synthesis couched in the language I had been absorbing since 1963, to be complemented & capped by publishing the eclogue book that set me on this path—W. Antony
[David Mus {David Kuhn}], The Arminarm Eclogues with the Hexercises (For the Heclogues) Pieces. La Quercia (Viterbo): Van Sickle, John & Giulia Battaglia, 1971.

... Gail Levin and John B.Van Sickle Derek Walcott. ... with painting and a military campaign: If I pitched my tints to a rhetorical excess, it was not from ambition but to touch the sublime to heighten the commonplace into sacredness of objects made radiant by the slow glaze of time. ...

Modern discussion of the elogia of the Scipios began just over a century ago. In the view that then prevailed, the elogia were precious exemplars of native Latin literature and Roman national poetry as yet untinged by Greek influence. But Eduard Wolfflin, in two incisive ...

... Gail Levin and John B.Van Sickle Derek Walcott. ... with painting and a military campaign: If I pitched my tints to a rhetorical excess, it was not from ambition but to touch the sublime to heighten the commonplace into sacredness of objects made radiant by the slow glaze of time. ...

Mayer asserts that" a number of Virgil's modern commentators" err in their" suspicion... that Corydon, the lover-shepherd of the second Eclogue, is himself a slave and that the dominus of his beloved Alexis... is his master too". In order" to show the suspicion is baseless" ...

ABSTRACT Topics and authors attract, promising expert and timely ways to approach or reconnect with the poet and trace readers' shifting fashions. Good reading starts with the editor—judicious, attentive to scholarly history's turns and to advances by her notable crew. Given the editorial constraints customary here, however, my remarks will focus on a few of the many intersections with scholarly concerns of mine. Text history fascinates in the hands of the late James Butrica—redeeming Pontano, prizing Billanovich (praised now too by a Latin inscription at his Milanese university). Competing perceptions of a Catullan book get historicized by the editor as conditioned by evolving preconceptions about structure: other poetic books could use such reckoning. Already central to the editor's account of order, Peter Wiseman vindicates his standing (with her) as a dean of Catullan studies, bringing again to life hints of "Transpadane upbringing" and providing an exemplary reconstruction of social history for the Valerii Catulli and their Sirmionian villa through lapidary hints from ruins, inscriptions, satire, and epigram. Also reconstructing socio-political circles, Konstan revives and amplifies possible allegory encoded in the manneristic rendering of marriage between Peleus and Thetis, e.g., indicat not merely colorless "reveal" (Guy Lee) but "expose" (cf. "indict"). Despite a textual lapse (legitur, an unmetrical gloss displacing fertur, c. 114.2), Konstan recalls that Callimachus' Lock of Berenice was court poetry and he intuits that the metonym and slight catachresis of caesaries ("head of hair") to translate "lock" might flatter Julia, daughter of Julius Caesar. Catullus' use of Hellenistic learning to negotiate social status, closely argued by Andrew Feldherr, may even prompt rueful reflection about the relative status of learning in our times. The "court poetry" of Catullus' forebears at Alexandria has morphed in recent scholarship into ideological engagement: e.g., Fantuzzi and Hunter (Tradition and Innovation, 2005) decrying notions of "art for art's sake" to restore Hellenistic poetry to "its own intellectual and cultural context" (cf. more emphatically Stephens, Seeing Double. Intercultural Poetics, Berkeley 2003). But if Alexandrian poets looked beyond the library, to honor the hand that fed and to collaborate on ideological instruments for Ptolemaic rule, their role anticipates that of the poets (Livius, Naevius, Ennius) engaged by Rome's elite to corroborate imperial expansion (cf. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature, 1998). They codified the mythic frame and epic style for the confident republican order. That order's last master was Cicero, portrayed with empathy and wit by W. R. Johnson as an old school poet, dutifully Roman, perplexed by the rather fresh (neoteroi) "Euphorionic troupe" (cantores) with their "poetics of style for style's sake"—the "peeled" ("slight," lepton)—to which Catullus and his ilk turned, Johnson writes, "away from civic failure and public catastrophe—inward to a private world of immense, exciting emotions and of extraordinary pleasures (and pains)." Rome's political chaos allowed them not a neo-Alexandrian ideology but a mirror of broken ties: fragments of the shattered frame for Catullus' private construct, cobbled together from amicitia, amor, Troy as manifold sign of tragic loss, even one bit of the old foundational mythology reduced to a satiric barb—glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes ("she peels back the descendants of heroic Remus")—ultimate variant of lepton. Construing the "neoteric" emphasis on private amor as retreat from the public engagement of Alexandrian and republican Roman poetics, suggests review of takes on Virgil and Catullus by both W. R. Johnson and Christopher Nappa. Virgil, perhaps little more than a decade on into the agony of the republic, begins to move beyond neoteric retreat to reclaim an Alexandrian role for his poetics, envisioning public order beyond chaos. In the first half of the Bucolics, Virgil makes ROMA the causative power for new order and new epos, starting to restore but stretch the republican mythic frame—ille mihi semper deus (ecl. 1), nova progenies, Iovis incrementum (Ecl. 4), deus, deus ille (Ecl. 5); cf. Dionaei Caesaris astrum (ecl. 9: whole mythic frame back beyond Troy). Reclaiming foundational myth in an archaizing vatic style, Virgil more pointedly contradicts Catullus (who disallowed both) than Nappa allows. In and against this newly Romanized frame then, Virgil revisits tragic AMOR reprised from Apollonius and...

ABSTRACT Revised and translated from Muse e Modelli: la poesia ellenistica da Alessandro Magno ad Augusto (Roma: Laterza, 2002), this book adds, inter alia, the timely and illuminating “Posidippus and the ideology of kingship” to the growing discussion of our new Hellenistic poetry. Any reader must welcome the polyglot bibliography and the expert, generous, and lively engagement with texts and contexts that recalls and synthesizes scholarly dialogues, inviting more to come. The authors intend to get beyond modern notions of “art for art’s sake” and restore Hellenistic poetry to “its own intellectual and cultural context.” They shun terms like comprehensive or handbook and they aver that “Hellenistic poetry has suffered from lazy, (un)critical generalisations”—an accusation amplified with the trope, “mud sticks,” protesting how scholars get fixed on nostrums, familiar paradigms, and critical pabulum. As a remedy, the authors declare that “one must begin with the particularity of each poet and each poetic mode.” In “Performance and genre,” Fantuzzi documents shifts in social contexts that made classical genres obsolete and the rise of readership as a leading form of reception. He closely analyzes hexameter styles of Callimachus and Theocritus, while downgrading play and cross-breeding (Kreuzung) of genres as poetic programs. In “The aetiology of Callimachus’ Aitia,” Hunter offers a sensitive and theoretically informed focus on paradoxes inherent in etiological thought, weaving together episodes of Callimachus’ Aetia, bringing out their poetological import. In his chapter on “The Argonautica and epic tradition” Hunter theorizes fame (kleos), locating the poem in the epic tradition, not without valuable cross reference to philosophy and rhetoric, discourses of power, although scanting etiology as master. Fantuzzi sketches Theocritus’ coherent bucolic world in “Theocritus and the bucolic genre,” although he skirts Theocritus’ grounding in epos. The bibliography is remarkable. Fantuzzi, however, slights “particularity” at the risk of “lazy generalisations,” e.g., calling all bucolic characters “shepherds.” Thus Comatas is “a mythical shepherd” on 136–7, and more correctly a “goatherd” at 149 n. 64, which muddies one of Theocritus’ deepest poetologi-cal springs, and misses the subtle ironies contrasting aipolikon, poimenikon, boukolikon—the metapoetic points scored through rustic differences (cattle, sheep, goats). Rem tene! Coge pecus! “Epic in a minor key” is a useful introduction to its period, providing background for Roman fate of epos. In “The style of Hellenistic epic,” which is generous in how Callimachus and Theocritus relate to Homer, Fantuzzi rises to one of most telling moments in the book, how Apollonius, through calibrated intertexts, constructs a “rustic epic” with Jason as a sort of georgic hero. Fantuzzi’s chapter on “The epigram” is an indispensable introduction— a handbook in the best sense. In “The languages of praise,” Hunter sets Callimachus’ Hymns both in and against the “lingua franca” of Homeric hymns, interweaving Hesiod and themes “of both Greek and Egyptian divine praise.” Hunter also, in “Hel-lenistic drama,” after relating new comedy to its contemporary society and philosophy, and comparing its legacy at Rome and roots in Attic tragedy, caps the chapter with an illuminating frame for Lycophron’s dark discourse. Their jointly written “Roman epilogue” contains “A critical silence” (Hunter), which carefully weighs evidence for development of critical categories later to be codified and reduced to the dichotomy of ingenium vs. ars. “Philodemus and Hellenistic Poetics” (Fantuzzi) judiciously orders tangled threads in embryonic genre theory. In “GRAECIA CAPTA,” Hunter frames discourse—“writing of literature in Latin involved creative engagement with the Greek heritage”—and personifies “Latin poetry” as aware “of its place in its tradition” and thus “inherently ‘belated,’ ” and so theoretically akin to “elite Greek poetry of the third century, . . . driven by the creative energies and ironies which belatedness confers.” The ensuing argument marshals rich detail and conceptual adventure, e.g., by suggesting that “elaborate interlocking structure was one of those features . . . which now assumed new importance as poetic signifiers.” Yet a further conceptual reach would more fully frame Alexandrian poets as driven by engagement in defining Ptolemaic power (see S. Stephen, Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria, [Berkeley 2003]) and would posit a like drive to define, ratify, and project burgeoning power as also motivating the inventors of literature at Rome (see T. Habinek, The Politics of Latin...

... On this scale, of course, I John Van Sickle, "New Activism in Class: An Experiment in Teaching and Curriculum," in P. Culham and L. Edmunds (eds). Classics: A Discipline and a Profession in Crisis (Lanham, Md., 1989) 169-76. 47 Page 2. 48 CLASSICAL WORLD ...

Page 1. VIRGIL BUCOLICS 1.1-2 AND INTERPRETIVE TRADITION: A LATIN (ROMAN) PROGRAM FOR A GREEK GENRE JOHN B. VAN SICKLE HE OPENING LINES OF VIRGIL'S FIRST ECLOGUE are so familiar that many will know them by heart (Ecl. 1.1-2): ...

Calls attention to the turmoil at Rome following the Ides of March & to the coincidence that the newly minted Caesar & incipient poet of epos joined forces evident in Virgil's writing Dionaei Caesaris astrum.
Then looks at fagus identitaria (Bodrer) in eclogues & relates Servius fagus glandifera to Uvidus hiberna venit de glande Menalcas (eclogue ten)

Responding to new anecdotage on eclogue three, 1 the present account starts with the eclogue's chronotopology including location by old beeches [1.a], taken to imply an economic system of production and exchange [1.b], that animates drama [2], which beyond the dramatic surface implies an agenda in poetics featuring amant alterna [sc. carmina] Camenae [3]:2 agenda realized with respect to contexts in both literature and culture [3.a], but particularly with respect to the rest of the eclogue book, where in recursive revision, alternos [sc.versus] Musae meminisse uolebant,3 and where.beech symbolizes development-from single broad, to dense green tops, to old and carved, to medium for new writing, but then tops broken, lost, yet beech at last implied to feed swine in Arcadia and get inscribed with loves to close the book [3.b]: all calculated in closely counted increments eclogue by eclogue connumerating also the third-{E. i} 5+5+63(+5)+5: {E. ii} 5+63 (+)5: {E. iii} 63<48>: {E. iiii} 63 [4].4

Mantuan (1447-1516) published eclogue book Adulescentia (1498) that crossed Alps & occupied schools for more than a century: essay traces him from famous school in Gonzaga court at Mantua to his fame as 'Christian Maro' & citation by school master in Loves Labour's Lost: preface to verse translation for I Tatti series

Recalling shift in paradigms for thinking about eclogues: deconstructing 'pastoral' as genre to recover 'epos' as frame in & against which Virgil worked through its three registers: bucolic/heroic & epical species in between, all of which manifest in eclogues III, IIII, IV, VI. But remembering teachers who helped to shape the course.

His epyllion, translated from Euphorion recounts a contest between seers in Apollo's Grynean grove: the Homeric seer Calchas defeated by Mopsus, also an Argonaut, but the name used by Virgil for an agressive young bard carving song onto fresh bark of beech: metapoetic for the vatic program of Virgil's book.