Politian's Ambra and Reading Epic Didactically

From Monica Gale ed. Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry. Genre, Tradition and Individuality. Swansea: University Press of Wales, 2004: 27-47 [Numbers in red indicate number of following page in published version] POLITIAN’S AMBRA AND READING EPIC DIDACTICALLY Andrew Laird [27] The main aim of this chapter is to challenge the conception of didactic poetry as something essentially different from epic poetry – at least in the Latin writing of antiquity and renaissance humanism. Such a claim obviously bears on a very large corpus of literature, but the case will be made here with special reference to the Ambra (1485), a Latin hexameter poem about Homer, in the collection of Silvae by the renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano, better known to English readers as ‘Politian’. The significance of the Silvae is reflected by the broader cultural and artistic dissemination of the Ambra alone: Rabelais satirised the poem’s Homeric interpretations in the prologue to Gargantua; Chapman translated part of the Ambra in the Epistle Dedicatory to his version of the Odyssey; Alexander Pope actually knew the Politian’s verses by heart, and the frontispiece of his own Odyssey depicted the account in the Ambra of Homer being blinded by a vision of Achilles. The importance for later periods of Politian’s classical scholarship (which is also displayed in his Latin and vernacular poetry) cannot be overemphasised. The following discussion of this unusual epyllion therefore has a further objective – to incline more contemporary classicists to recognise the sophistication and achievement of its author. The first section of this chapter raises some general issues about the relation of epic to didactic; the second offers a brief introductory survey of the Ambra. The poetic theory and the poetic practice of the Ambra are outlined in the third and fourth sections respectively. It will be argued that, taken together, Politian’s theory and practice endorse a broader identification of didactic with epic. I 1 The view that didactic poetry is categorically distinct from narrative epic poetry is nowadays more often assumed than it is adequately defended.1 [28] That view of course has a justification which is as obvious as it is superficial: poetry which seeks to educate its reader or addressee about a field of knowledge, thought, or activity looks very different from poetry narrating the Trojan war or the homecoming of Odysseus. Although Greek and Roman theorists hardly ever regarded didactic as a separate entity, a systematic basis for the modern differentiation between epic and didactic was in fact provided by one prominent ancient thinker: People think no doubt that ‘makers’ is applied to poets not because they make ‘mimeseis’ but as a general term meaning ‘versemakers’, since they call ‘poets’ or ‘makers’ even those who publish a medical or scientific theory in verse. But as Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre, the latter had better be called a scientific writer, not a poet if we are to use poet of the former… 2 Poetics 1447b This argument of Aristotle is not without its deficiencies.3 However, in its application of the presence of mimesis as a criterion, Aristotle’s theoretical demonstration of the difference between epic and didactic has more justification than the modern critical instinct that poetry telling stories has to be essentially different from poetry concerned with instruction. The difference is only something we perceive; it is not really intrinsic: it is something which we bring to, or impose on, the poetry we read. The question of whether didactic should be identified with epic has consequences which go beyond routine classification. That question determines the actual content of the poetry and how audiences respond to it.4 For instance, the prevalent ancient view that epic and didactic were the same was consistent and convergent with the belief that narrative epics were powerful vehicles of moral and philosophical instruction. And many renaissance humanists inherited the belief that the Iliad and Aeneid were just as much as ‘didactic’ as the Works and Days and the De rerum natura.5 These realisations, to which I shall return at the end of the chapter, provide a useful frame within which to examine Politian’s Ambra. 2 Modern commentators and historians of Florentine humanism have tended to regard the poem – about Homer and in a group of poems on ancient poetry and poetics – as straightforwardly didactic.6 However it will become clear that the Ambra does much to illustrate the extent to which didactic epic can be seriously identified with ‘narrative’ poetry. The Ambra also collapses the distinction between ‘primary texts’ and ‘secondary literature’. (This too will serve to support my own identification of didactic with narrative epic.) The distinction between the texts designated for study and discourses provided by people who write in some way about those texts is virtually axiomatic, for classicists at least. But this apparently clear distinction can be undermined – and not only by postmodern [29] theory and recent artistic practice.7 After all, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil’s Aeneid, and numerous post-Virgilian epics (including Milton’s Paradise Lost) can convincingly serve as commentaries on epics that preceded them.8 Of course a tradition of texts which are far more explicitly about other texts, in the forms of grammatical, rhetorical, or allegorical commentary, stretches back to antiquity, but it is interesting to consider how often even ancient commentary and its medieval and renaissance successors took an artistic form: it is easily forgotten for instance that Fulgentius’ Continentia Virgiliana is actually a dialogue between the author and Virgil.9 Landino’s work on Dante’s Commedia, though a commentary, is elegantly prefaced with an essay on poetics.10 And the Greek and Roman works now bracketed together as ‘ancient literary criticism’ tend to be written by authors (e.g. Horace, Tacitus, Quintilian) who practice the principles they preach in those works themselves, and who would be deemed ‘primary’ authors on the basis of those works alone. Medieval and renaissance scholars often produced a discourse in Latin prose or verse, known as an accessus, to precede and introduce the text of an ancient author. This convention may well have derived from the later Roman poets’ practice of heralding their own work with verse prefaces.11 The form of the accessus thus serves to deconstruct current oppositions between primary and secondary literature. But discrimination between the status of humanist texts about ancient texts and that of ancient texts themselves is hazardous, simply because the humanists wrote in Latin. 3 Even taking on board the extent to which Latin was employed for all kinds of discourses (technical, legal, theological) in the renaissance, I feel it is important to emphasise that in this period, Latin was and is, in many senses, a literary language. This is not just to say that it was a language literature could be written in, like Italian and English, but rather that Latin itself, as an analytic idiom of texts, became something akin to literary diction: a language which was connotative as well as denotative, with registers a vernacular could not possess. An evocation or echo in post-classical or technical Latin of a Roman author, for instance, is bound to be more forceful and more obvious to a wider range of readers than such an evocation or echo would be in a vernacular. The aestheticisation of Latin is almost logically prior to its incarnations in various genres of prose and poetry: with Latin goes Latinity. Style and expression always preoccupied those who wrote it and those who read it. In short, Latin cannot ever be an innocent meta-language of texts and manuals which serves only to provide a view of its subject matter thorugh a transparent window. Humanists who express themselves in Latin are engaging in a form of écriture.12 [30] The review of Politian’s Ambra below will concentrate principally on the poetics, or theory of poetry, conveyed by the form as well as the themes of the Ambra. Like Horace’s Ars poetica, the Ambra is a poem about poetry. Scholarship on the Ars poetica shows how consideration of its poetic form has a bearing on how we deal with the judgments and opinions about poetry in its content. In other words, the implicit poetics conveyed by a poem’s composition and form, affect perception of the explicit poetics advocated by the poem’s content and message. This also applies to Politian’s presentation of Homer in the Ambra. It is perhaps worth being more cautious than many scholars have been about using apparently pedagogical texts like the Ambra to reconstruct the manner in which humanists read and taught ancient authors. But before developing that argument, I shall introduce and summarise the Ambra in the next section. II The Ambra is the third poem in a series of four called the Silvae.13 The collection 4 which represented the culmination of Politian’s poetic achievement was begun in 1482, two years after the author had been elected to join his former teachers who included Argyropoulos, Landino, and Ficino in the Florentine Studio.14 All four poems of the Silvae are concerned with different aspects of poetry. The Ambra is very much part of a group, but there is a case for giving it specific study, simply because this poem about Homer can be read in conjunction with Politian’s surviving translations of books of the Iliad, and especially with his prose Praefatio in Homerum (which was probably delivered in 1486) and the Praelectio in Odysseam.15 The Ambra itself was subtitled In Poetae Homeri Enarratione Pronuntiata: an enarratio is a detailed exposition and recalls the tradition of the accessus, already mentioned, which flourished from late antiquity onwards.16 Politian’s dedication to Lorenzo Tornabuoni states that the poem is ‘a spur to the study of literature’ (incitamentum ad studia litterarum.)17 Indeed this work is a rich compendium of literary influences: leaving aside the obviously Homeric theme, its overall conception exhibits a debt to Catullus’ Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, Virgil’s Fourth Georgic, and Statius’ Achilleid in particular. The text is replete with allusions to numerous Greek and Latin authors, ranging from Lycophron to Lucretius – and one or two echoes of vernacular Italian authors can be discerned as well. The Ambra begins with the poet-narrator proposing to devote himself to the publicising of Homer, just as farmers leave their offerings to the appropriate gods. All poets have been dependent on Homer for inspiration. Homer generates life by portraying gods, humans and the natural world. Standing apart from the crowd, he laughs as it pants at idle exertions. The [31] narrator then appeals to Clio, the muse of history, for inspiration to sing of the life of Homer. The main argument gets underway: Jupiter returns from Ethiopia for a meeting with the other gods – all of them are happy, apart from Thetis who is in mourning for Achilles. She approaches Jupiter to ask why she merits this loss. Thetis’s lament is followed by a description of her dishevelled appearance, and then an account of the gods’ reactions to her words. Jupiter replies that the laws of fate cannot be revoked: besides Thetis is not the only one to lose a son. But there will be remuneration for Achilles’s suffering: he will enjoy unions with Helen and Medea, a cult and eternal fame. A poet of divine origin will celebrate 5 Achilles’ deeds to make him a model of virtus. The composure of Thetis’ appearance is then restored. A description of the circumstances of Homer’s birth, youth and power over nature fulfils the final part of Jupiter’s prophecy. Homer is overwhelmed by a desire to see Achilles and invokes his umbra. Achilles appears in a fierce manifestation which terrifies Homer and makes him blind. Achilles takes pity on him and gives him the gift of prophecy. In return, the poet is devoted to the grandson of Aeacus first and foremost. A concentrated resumé of the Iliad is sung by Homer. It is striking that this resumé is narrated entirely in indirect discourse: for about 100 verses. This summary in indirect style keeps closely to the order and focussing of events in Homer’s epic poem. Immediately after the rendition ends with Hector’s funeral, an imago of Ulysses, showing the mortal wound he received from his son, appears to Homer in his sleep. Ulysses asks Homer to celebrate his virtue and achievements as well. Homer then sings of the wooden horse and the fall of Troy, the Cicones, Lotophagi, Cyclopes, Laestrygonians, Circe, Teiresias, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Hyperion’s cattle, Neptune’s vengeance, Ino, and Ulysses’s arrival home. Homer is consequently honoured with a crown and a place in Olympus. The next part of the Ambra concentrates on the influence of Homer. Just as the Ocean runs through all the world’s rivers, so Homer’s learning runs through all written expression. His variety of style is praised, his gift at narrative, and rhetorical capacity. The philosophical content of Homer is then described: the treatment of cosmology and the warring elements, the idea of a Deity regulating nature, of immortal souls which occupy various bodies. There is moral philosophy and an anatomy of mental faculties and emotions. More practical benefits are listed: political and military science, music, arithmetic, divinity, and medicine. Homer also provides the origin of all literary genres and an influence on the visual arts. Homage is also paid to him for his influence on politics and law. He was translated into Indian languages; regions quarelled to be his birth place. The admiration [32] of Alexander and Ptolemy is also described. The final section of the poem relates the praise of Homer to the poet’s patrons. It celebrates Ambra, who is personified as a nymph, daughter of Umbro, a tributary of the Arno which circled the Medici estate at Poggio a Caiano.18 6 This content is presented on the table below. The words in bold type in the left hand column highlight the major structural units of the poem’s argument with verse references. There is an evident symmetry in this arrangement: the proem and conclusion are of equivalent length – about 35 verses, whilst description and eulogy of the figure of Homer enclose lively synopses of the Iliad and Odyssey. The right hand column of the table shows how the ‘story world’ – the spatio-temporal realm generated by the narrative – is gradually transformed into a constructed version of the world of the narrator and his patrons. We are taken there via myth, literature, literary history, and history tout court. It should be stressed that the world of the narrator and his patrons is still a fictive world. This qualification is important: to speak of this progression as moving from ‘fiction’ to ‘fact’ risks anachronism; more importantly it would obscure the nature of mimetic construction in the Ambra which will be treated in the next section. [33] Schematic summary of the structure of the Ambra 1. Proem 1 -34 Setting in world of imaginary/archaic myth Invocation of Clio 31-4 \|/ 2. Procession of Gods | 35-83 Mythical/poetic description of characters Thetis (dishevelled) appeals to Jupiter 83-118 Jupiter’s reply 119-79 Thetis (tidied up) is pacified 180-200 \|/ | 3. Birth and biography of Homer 201-299 Mythical/poetic description of Homer Vision of Achilles 266f. \|/ 4. | Homer’s poetry 299-435 Resumé of Iliad 299-404 Poetry/Literature Vision of Ulysses 405-32 7 Resumé of Odyssey 432-45 \|/ | 5. Treatment of Homer: his exaltation, Homer’s Nachleben: Poetry in history influence on artes, and other areas of human activity 456-89 6. \|/ Conclusion 590-625: Praise of Villa at Poggio a Caiano | Setting in (constructed version of) contemporary historical world In spite of the systematic nature of the progression I have outlined, the sixth and final part of the poem may still seem to be an awkward appendage to the preceding verses. Celebration of the Medici villa, it could be objected, is an incongruous way to close a poem about Homer – even if Virgil’s fourth Georgic provides a significant precedent for personal panegyric being used to end a complex mythographic poem on a subject of more universal interest. But that objection may be putting the cart before the horse. One function of Politian’s poem is to connect the world of the Medici to the realm of pagan antiquity, as is suggested by its very title, which personifies part of their territory in Roman style.19 In fact, the final section is integrated by a kind of ring composition which connects the opening of the poem with the opening of the final section. The Ambra begins as follows: Spicea si Cereris templo suspensa corona Donum erat agricolae quondam, si uinitor uvam Seposuit Bromio, quoties praediuite cornu Copia se fudit. placidam si lacte recenti Pastores sparsere palem: spumantia postquam Complerant olidam supra caput ubera mulctram. Primitias et quisque sui fert muneris auctor: Cur ego non uocem hanc, aut siquid spiritus olim Concipit egregium, siquid mens ardua conscit 8 Rarum insigne sibi, siquo se murmure iactat Lingua potens cur non totum in praeconia soluam Maeonidae magni, cuius de gurgite uiuo Combibit arcanos, uatum omnis turba furores. 1-1320 If a crown of corn hung on the temple of Ceres was once the offering of a farmer, if a winemaker once set aside grapes for Bacchus, as often as abundance poured itself out in a bountiful cup; if shepherds sprayed Pales with fresh milk, after foaming udders had filled a fresh-smelling pail over the brim, and each creator offers the first fruits of his own product: why should I not myself offer this song? If my spirit ever conceives anything outstanding, if my mind is elevated by awareness of something it finds special and glorious, if with any murmur my tongue ever boasts itself powerful, why should I not give voice to offer everything up in celebration of great Homer, from whose living spring the whole throng of bards together imbibe their mysterious frenzies of inspiration? [34] And the final section begins thus: Et nos ergo illi grata pietate dicamus Hanc de Pierio contextam flore coronam Quam mihi Caianas inter pulcherrima nymphas Ambra dedit patriae lectam de gramine ripae: Ambra mei Laurentis amor. 590-4 And so we consecrate to Homer with grateful piety this crown woven from Pierian flowers, which Ambra, most beautiful of the Caianian nymphs plucked from the grass of her native river bank and gave to me, Ambra the love of Lorenzo. Not only do forms of corona come at the end of a hexameter in each passage: the crowns have an identical function. The farmer’s crown of corn, like the grapes of the vinitor are both analogies for the narrator’s poetic tribute to Homer. At 590 the narrator suggests that he (and perhaps Lorenzo is covered by Et nos) should also pronounce a corona in pious tribute to Homer – a crown which is also made of local produce but of a more spectacular kind: the flowers of poetic inspiration culled by Ambra, a homegrown tutelary Muse. Images of idealised smallholdings, mythical and contemporary, as well the motif of running water, connect the conclusion with the proem. 9 III What system of poetics is suggested by Politian’s presentation of Homer? For a start, there is considerable emphasis on the figure of the poet himself.21 Details of his biography are culled and embellished from ancient sources.22 More generally, Politian accentuates the role of the poet in the very conception of poetry he presents. This is quite different from the Ars poetica which was the only canonical Latin poem about poetry prior to the Silvae. In Horace’s tripartite scheme of poema/poesis/poeta (also transmitted by the fourth century grammarian Diomedes), the figure of the poet is confined to the end, and then only to be caricatured. But in the Ambra, emphasis is laid on the role of poet throughout: Quin, nudam uirtutem ipsam, complexus, honores Fastidit uanos, et ineptae, premia famae Despicit exemptus uulgo, ac iam monte potitus. Ridet anhelantem dura ad fastigia turbam. 27-30 Indeed, as he embraces nude virtue herself, he scorns vain honours, and exempt from the mob he despises the rewards of silly repute. Having already reached the mountain top, he laughs at the crowd panting at their hard exertions. [35] These verses seem to point to a conventional characterisation of the poet in ancient literature rather than to any specific precedent.23 Thus by the end of the Ambra’s proem, Homer seems to have become an archetype of the vates in general. In the very verses that follow, our narrator himself conforms to the protocol of his predecessors and invokes a Muse: Vos age nunc tanti precor incunabula uatis diuinosque ortus Clio dictate canenti: muneris hoc uestri: longis siquidem obsita saeclis fama tacet, centumque deae premit ora uetustas 31-4 Come now, I pray, Clio, dictate to the singer the infancy and divine origins of so great a bard (this is your role): if Fame (fama) obscured by long centuries is silent, and antiquity keeps closed the goddess’ hundred mouths. 10 To make such an invocation, Politian himself must be near the mountain top Homer has already reached. The imagery of water already noted, which runs through the Ambra, is no less suggestive of inspiration. Finally the visions of Achilles and Ulysses (which prompt Homer to compose his poems) and the image of Ambra herself as a Tuscan Muse all show that inspiration is fundamental to the explicit poetics in this poem. The importance attached both to the figure of the poet and to inspiration make it clear that an expressive theory of poetry is conveyed in the Ambra. A theory of poetry as something moral and educational seems to be communicated with no less force by the narrator of the Ambra. The fifth part of the poem, summarised above, is entirely and explicitly devoted to the utility of Homer: for most conceivable branches of natural science, for metaphysics, ethics, politics, and so on. This subject, which constitutes nearly a quarter of the entire text, is of course a classical topos. 24 The potential significance it has for shedding light on actual humanist educational curricula, and those of the Studio in particular, has been of immense interest to scholars.25 Such a pragmatic dimension to the Ambra could well be important for the implicit poetics demonstrated by the form of the poem. Form is determined by genre. And genre is itself determined largely, if not entirely, by its social function: nowhere is this more evident than in literature of the Renaissance: the very names of ‘literary genres’ often give away the original contexts and functions of various discourses: epistles, epigrams, court drama. Politian’s Silvae which are pretty unique, in respect of their context and function, would be called praelectiones. If the function or genre of the Ambra is pedagogical, then the poetics of its composition (our conception of its form, rhetoric, and construction) must be grounded in that function of introducing poetry. And as a poem itself, [36] the Ambra shows by example, as well as by its reference, the educational function of poetry. Among the useful functions it shows us poetry has, is its ability to confer immortality – on poets as well as on heroes. An affinity between the narrator of the Ambra and the figure of Homer has already been suggested: it can be taken further, if we return to the rhetorical question in the proem, with its selfdeprecatory tone: 11 Cur ego non uocem hanc, aut siquid spiritus olim Concipit egregium, siquid mens ardua conscit Rarum insigne sibi, siquo se murmure iactat Lingua potens cur non totum in praeconia soluam Maeonidae magni If my spirit ever conceives anything outstanding, if my mind is elevated by awareness of something it finds special and glorious, if with any murmur my tongue ever boasts itself powerful, why should I not give voice to offer everything up in celebration of great Homer? We can compare the account later in the poem of Homer trembling before the imago of Achilles which blinds him: Ergo his defixus vates, dum singula uisu Explorat miser incauto: dum lumina figit Lumina nox pepulit: tum uero exterritus haesit Voxque repressa metu: et gelidos tremor impulit artus 282-5 At this the bard was immobilised, while incautiously looking, the poor man explored each feature: while he fixed the gaze of his eyes, night drove away their light. Then truly terrified he stuck fast, and his voice was choked with fear: a tremor went through his icy limbs. At first this does not seem to reveal much. But the opening of Politian’s prose Praefatio in Homerum makes the link between the narrator of the Ambra and the startled Homer all too clear: molem uastitatemque oculis praemetiens ita perturbor animo, atque expauesco, ut neque mihi ingenium, neque consilium suppetat et in ipsis pene faucibus, constricta metu uox, nostrae cursus orationis obstupescat… Tacebimusne penitus, quasique oneri succumbemusne? An veteres potius agricolas imitabimur, atque ut illi Cereri spiceam Baccho racemum sua cuique deo munera offerebant, ita nos quantulamcumque hanc dicendi facultatem in parentis eloquentiae praeconiumque conferemus. Surveying the bulk and vastness [of Homer] with my eyes, I am so disturbed in my mind and terrified, that neither my talent, nor my resolve are of any use, and deep in my very throat my voice is constricted with fear, the course [37] of my speech becomes stupefied… Should we be thoroughly silent as if giving into the weight? Or rather shall we imitate the farmers of old, and just as they offered grain to Ceres, boughs to Bacchus, their own gifts to each god, shall we thus 12 donate whatever faculty for speaking we have to publicising the father of eloquence? In this part of Politian’s prose lecture, diction and themes both from the narrator’s utterances in the Ambra’s proem and from its description of Homer are united. Here we have an independent testimony of an identification between our poet’s voice and Homer himself. Implicit features of the poem’s composition indicate that our dramatised first-person narrator has the necessary psychology of a poet, even if he is not quite subject to visionary inspiration. Again the Ambra shows by subtle demonstration that the expressive theory of poetry can be applied to Politian as well as to Homer. So it would seem that Politian believes in the expressive and educational functions of poetry not only for Homer but also for his own poetry. This has led Perrine Galand to draw the following conclusion: ‘Not only does Politian apply and illustrate his theories on poets by faithful imitations of their works, which are also an act of personal creation, but he expresses his own theories on the ars poetica: discourse on poetry is made in and through poetry itself.’26 IV Unfortunately, that general picture, neat though it may be, is not adequate. It offers a possible account of the situation, but it is by no means the only account of the situation that can be given. In this part of the discussion, I am going to sketch out another version of things. This new version may not be an innocent alternative to the first account and could even threaten it. At the beginning of this discussion of the Ambra, it was noted that Horace’s Ars poetica served to illustrate how the practical poetics of composition employed in a poem about poetry can transform, subvert, or at any rate, somehow determine the views on poetry which that poem communicates explicitly. The method of approach in this chapter has been first to look at the expressive and didactic theories of poetry overtly presented in the content of the Ambra, and then to find supporting analogues for them in the practice of the poem’s composition. This seems to be what most scholars and commentators 13 have done. But if the way a poem about poetry is composed determines the theory of poetry it professes, shouldn’t we be approaching things in the opposite order? Might other poetics be discernible in the form and fabric of the Ambra? Could these poetics affect or supplement the expressive and didactic theories of poetry explicitly professed by the narrator of this text? [38] One formal feature of the Ambra noted earlier is very unusual: the rendering of the Iliad given by Homer himself. That, as I remarked, is presented in indirect discourse, which is sustained for 100 verses. It is easily the longest passage of indirect speech ever employed in Latin poetry and thus represents an extremely unorthodox stylistic innovation. In contrast, the summary of the Odyssey is given in quoted direct discourse by the ghost of Ulysses himself. Unlike Achilles, Ulysses actually speaks to Homer for twenty lines of verse. So in the Ambra the Iliad is narrated by Homer using indirect discourse; the Odyssey is narrated by Ulysses in direct speech. Why? One obvious explanation is that in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus himself is the narrator for much of the time. But there is a further explanation. Politian was not the first to think of using indirect discourse to narrate the Iliad. In the Republic of Plato, Socrates attempts to demonstrate how the Iliad could be recomposed using indirect discourse to present all the speeches of the characters. This is to elaborate his theory of poetry as mimesis or representation. Socrates explains the relation between quoted speech and poetic mimesis as follows: You know that as far as the lines : And he begged all the Achaeans and especially the two Atreidae, the generals of the host, the poet speaks in his own person and does not try to turn our attention in another direction by pretending that someone else is speaking [i.e. by employing reported speech]. But from this point he speaks as though he were Chryses himself and tries to make us think that it is not Homer talking, but the old priest. And he does practically all the rest of the narrative in this way, both the tale of Troy and the episodes in Ithaca and the whole Odyssey … So in this sort of thing, Homer and other poets are conveying their narrative by way of direct speech [dia; mimhvsewß]. Republic 393a3, 393c9 It is at this point that Socrates then develops the idea of a narrative without direct speech and gives a demonstration of what he means by rendering his chosen 14 lines of the Iliad using only indirect discourse. Politian’s narrative techniques for rendering the Homeric poems in the Ambra allude to the discussion of mimesis in Plato’s Republic. If this is true, can we conclude that the Ambra also professes a theory of poetry as imitation or mimesis? The Ambra conceived as a topical didactic praelectio may not at first appear to be the type of poem we could call mimetic. But all this didaxis is presented as narrative. The Ambra is a dramatised monologue which tells a story or a series of stories: about Thetis, about Achilles, about Homer, about the people who have read Homer, even about Ambra herself. Politian’s poem is mimetic – and no less so than the Homeric poems. Whilst [39] the Ambra cannot be described as being either unproblematically factual or as simply fictional, the poem certainly is ‘fictive’. An audience of contemporary Renaissance humanists, no less than Plato, would have regarded this poem as practising a kind of ‘lying’.27 A particular passage of the Ambra nicely illustrates that equation between fiction and lying. Ulysses was famous story teller. He was no less famous as a practical liar. Politian’s Ulysses demonstrates both these faculties in his speech to Homer. He has urged Homer to commemorate him and has told his story. At the very end of his speech Ulysses says to Homer: Incipe namque adero: et praesens tua coepta iuuabo. Haec ait, et pariter somnusque ithacusque recessit. 431-2 Begin your poem, I will be here and being present, I’ll help you start it off. He spoke these words but immediately the dream and the Ithacan vanished. Typically Ulysses was lying. He broke his promise to Homer – and to the audience of the Ambra – as soon as he had declared it. This amusing characterisation of Ulysses might indicate that no fictional character should ever be trusted. The meta-literary significance of this passage is clear: the language of these verses recalls expressions Virgil uses to seek support at the opening of the Georgics.28 And that meta-literary significance could be applied to the whole poem we are reading, especially given that the opening of the Ambra also echoes the opening of the Georgics. Thus Politian as narrator might be no less of a liar than Ulysses himself. 15 It may seem capricious to pitch the innuendo of this short passage against everything preceding it – which amounted to a theory of poetry as expression based on utility – and to hold that the Ambra might itself be practising (and thus possibly preaching) a notion of poetry as imitation or deceptive mimesis. At the same time, the innuendo is there to challenge the conventional picture of poetics in the Ambra: if a writer reveals at any point that he is in some sense ‘lying’, is it wise to believe everything else stated in other parts of his text? The fictive construction of the poem and its discreet allusion to a Platonic conception of poetry as imitation could combine to ironise its claims about Homer’s inspiration and his educational value. Certainly the possibility that humanists like Politian believed that Homer’s poetry was both useful and inspired should not be dimissed.29 But nor should it be assumed that this possibility is indubitable fact – and it is certainly a hazardous business to attempt to reconstruct actual educational curricula from texts like the Silvae or even the Praefatio in Homerum. One obvious moral to emerge from this chapter is that renaissance humanists are not really colleagues at all, but authors in their own right. [40] No matter how much humanists may look like colleagues because, like ourselves, they write about classical authors, we should never be any less wary in our approach to them than we are when treating writers like Horace or Longinus. The fact that his Silvae themselves soon became the subject of later Latin commentary – something Politian himself envisaged – provides sufficient testimony of this.30 Just as exhaustive and definitive interpretation of such authors will always escape us, so too will the ‘correct’ interpretation of a work like Politian’s Ambra. And, needless to say, the correct interpretation of Homer also escaped Politian, just as Ulysses escaped Homer himself.31 The reading of the Ambra offered here also has some general implications for our vexed attempts to get to the bottom of the relation between didactic and epic narrative. Politian illustrates Plato’s discussion of mimetic technique, and that discussion in the Republic is of course the source for Aristotle’s basis for discrimination between narrative and discursive genres in the Poetics, with which I began. But Politian is able to embed and actually to exemplify within his own poem the particular narrative techniques that were highlighted by Plato in relation to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Thus the Ambra, though didactic and 16 ‘spoken’ by the poet himself, also provides a rich series of overlapping narratival representations – its discourse is itself de facto mimetic. This rather undermines Aristotle’s discrimination, along with modern attempts to refine and reformulate it, by theorists such as Benveniste and Genette.32 There are also independent grounds for believing that Aristotelian poetics were not so attractive or interesting to Politian.33 But what of the current view that poems communicating specific forms of knowledge are different from epics telling stories?34 Even if it is conceded that this difference is really in the eye of the beholder, could not Politian be capable of seeing things our way too? Or did he just have the same ‘blindspot’ as so many ancient theorists seem to have had? The lack of vision could be our own. We berate ancient, medieval and renaissance critics for their inclination to identify epic with didactic, and we also berate those earlier critics for their inclination to provide moral, philosophical, or allegorical exegesis of narrative epic. But each of these two inclinations has far more allure if it is taken in tandem with the other. They become sides of the same coin, which affords a deeper conception of epicas-didactic than modern preconceptions permit. If Homeric epic is seen – in the way it is presented in the Ambra – as both mimetic and pedagogical, then there is no need to question the legitimacy or sincerity of the figurative and utilitarian interpretations that ancient and humanist readers applied to it.35 Conversely, if those interpretations are given credence, then there is no need to question the inclination or capacity of Politian as an epic poet to read Homer as a didactic poet. [41] As well as the editor, I would like to thank Alejandro Coroleu, Carlotta Dionisotti, and Frances Muecke for their encouragement and helpful criticism. 1 The opening to Alessandro Schiesaro’s recent OCD iii 1996 article (at 465) on didactic nicely exposes the problem confronting those who want to get to grips with didactic poetry: ‘didactic poetry, which was not regarded as a separate genre by either Greek or Roman theorists, embraces a number of poetic works usually in hexameters which aim to instruct the reader in a particular subjectmatter, be it science, philosophy, hunting, farming, love, or some other art or 17 craft.’ The same problem raises its head in Philip Hardie’s article on ‘epic’, at 530, which begins: ‘The purely metrical ancient definition of epic, or e[poß, e[ph, [lit. ‘word’, ‘words’], as verse in successive hexameters includes such works as Hesiod’s didactic poems and the philosophical poems of the Presocratics. In its narrower, and now usual, acceptance ‘epic’ refers to hexameter narrative poems on the deeds of gods, heroes, and men, a kind of poetry at the summit of the ancient hierarchy of genres.’ 2 Translated by M. Hubbard in Russell and Winterbottom 1972. The translations of Politan in this piece are my own. 3 Notably Aristotle commends Empedocles for his Homeric style in On the Poets. For discussion of poets who would be omitted by this criterion see Halliwell 1986, 277 and 127 f. See also note 5 below. 4 Compare Fowler 2000, 205: ‘The aim of generic analysis is rarely to enable the critic to fasten a label to a particular work but rather is to construct a competence or horizon of expectations for a reader against which the particular details are read, and it is the secondary elements that ‘go to make up that competence.’ For an important account of genre in the more recent history of classical scholarship, see Barchiesi 2001. 5 The fourth chapter of Hathaway 1962, 65-80 gives a good account of the Renaissance controversy about whether or not Empedocles was to be considered as a poet. See also Haskell 1999. 6 On the pedagogical function of Politian’s Latin poetry in its sixteenth century reception, see Coroleu 1999 and also Coroleu 2001. Bausi 1996, Maïer 1966, and Galand 1987 among others emphasise the relation the Silvae had to humanist curricula in quattrocento Florence. 7 Vladimir Nabokov’s playful English translation and commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin 1964 is perhaps the best known appropriation of the form for artistic purposes. Barthes’ S/Z (1970) and Derrida’s Glas (1981) are two well known experiments in modern literature and/or theory which change the role and repertoire of contemporary commentary. The implications these works have for classics are considered by Goldhill 1999, especially 419-20. Bennington and Derrida 1991 offers a further innovation – the Circonfession: the lower third of 18 each page of Bennington’s text about Derrida is devoted to a commentary by Derrida himself. [42] 8 On Apollonius’ Argonautica and the Aeneid as effective commentary on Homer, see (eg.) Bing 1988, Schlunk 1974 respectively. Hardie 1993 adumbrates the capacity of later Roman epic to interpret Virgil: compare Martindale 1993. Laird 1999, 299-300 shows how Milton highlights a stock feature of the messenger scene in ancient epic by reversing it. Tobias Reinhardt has work in progress on Lucretius as a commentator. Most 1999, xiii considers this dimension of poetry. 9 Laird 2001 discusses some literary dimensions of Fulgentius’ Continentia and Laird 2002 suggests that La Cerda’s seventeenth century commentary on Virgil (also in Latin) seeks to compete with its subject. 10 Kallendorf 1989 discusses Landino’s interpretation of Virgil; see Alcina 1999 for an account of the circulation of Landino’s poetics. 11 There is discussion with bibliography of the Prefaces of Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae (and some precedents) in Gruzelier 1994, 79-80. 12 Waquet 2001 is an important study of the role and nature of neo-Latin (although its arguments are not all consonant with the views expressed here.) 13 Del Lungo 1925 contains a text of the Silvae as well as the Lamia (Politian’s elegant introduction to Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics) with commentary; Galand 1987 reproduces texts of first editions of the Silvae with French translation and notes; the commentary on the Silvae, with a new edition, in Bausi 1996 is superb. The sole remaining advantage of my (1987) commented edition of Ambra verses 1-404 is that comments and introduction are in English. 14 A good account of Politian’s scholarship is still Maïer 1966. The studies collected in Secchi Tarugi 1996 provide a useful panorama as well as Bettinzoli 1995. Godman 1998 sets Politian’s endeavours in a broader cultural context and, along with with Bausi 1996, contains extensive bibliography. For an impression of Politian’s scholarship, see Gaisser 1993, 42f. for a thorough treatment of his role in interpretation of Catullus alone. Politian’s impact on continental European pedagogy was considerable (Coroleu 1999 and 2001). His scholarship was also circulated in the New World: copies of his Epistolae were in Mexico by 19 the early 1600s (Osorio Romero 1997, 76). The adaptation of the Orfeo for Monteverdi's opera speaks to Politian's impact on the arts and the wider influence of the Ambra indicated at the opening of this chapter should be noted too: Ambra 12-31 are the specific verses translated in the Epistle Dedicatory to Chapman’s Odyssey (1614). (The subscripted words ‘Ang. Pol.’ signal the provenance of these lines; the meaning of that abbreviation would have been clear to many readers in Chapman’s time.) 15 For details of Politian’s texts and manuscripts, see Maier 1966. 16 Compare Quintilian 1.4.2. 17 The full prose dedication is as follows: Angelus Politianus: Laurentio Tornabono suo. S.D.: Debetur haec Sylva tibi/uel argumento uel titulo: Nam et Homeri studiosus es quasique noster consectaneus: et propinquus Laurenti Medicis summi praecellentisque uiri: Qui scilicet Ambram ipsam Caianam: praedium/ut ita dixerim omniferum: quasi pro laxamento sibi delegit ciuilium laborum. Tibi ergo poemation hoc/ qualecunque est nuncupamus: Vt sit amoris nostri monimentum: Sit incitamentum tibi ad studia litterarum/ praesertimque graecarum: in quibus tamen ita tantum processisti: ut uideare adsummum breui si modo perrexeris/ euasurus. Vale. Florentiae. Pridie Nonas nouembres. M:CCCCLXXXV. [43] 18 Foster 1978 is the fullest study of the Medici villa. Dempsey 1985, 183 on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s own Ambra notes: ‘Ambra has been variously identified as a tree, as a small tributary of the Ombrone, as an island in the Ombrone, or as Lorenzo’s villa. In Lorenzo’s poem, Ambra is unambiguously identified as a Dryad pledged to Diana.’ 19 20 See dedication in n. 17 above. The text quoted here is taken directly from the first edition of the Ambra printed in Florence in 1485 under Politian’s own supervision that is reproduced in Galand 1987. Whilst the original abbreviations (e.g. for vowels and diphthongs) have not been retained here, I have otherwise followed the orthography and kept original punctuation. 21 Compare Godman 1998, 67 and Politian’s lecture on the Epistola Sapphus, edited in Lazzeri 1971. 20 22 These include Plutarch’s life of Homer and the pseudo-Herodotus vita. The latter would have been accessible to Politian, as a translation dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici by the Florentine humanist Pellegrino degli Agli shows. See now Bausi 1996, 124. 23 This passage evokes the position Lucretius enjoys in the proem to De Rerum Natura 2: compare also 1.635-875. Democritus (fr B18 DK) makes remarks on Homer suited to the theme of earlier lines in the Ambra and is mentioned in Politian’s Praefatio in Homerum. The anti-popular sentiments (though ultimately derived from Callimachus) also have precedents in Propertius, Catullus 95 and Horace Odes 3.1.1. Bausi ad loc. does not identify these examples, but finds numerous other models: notably Statius Silvae 1.3.46: ridet anhelantes vicino flumine nymphas and parallels in Politian’s Silvae. 24 See e.g. Horace Epistles 1.2 and Quintilian Institutio 10.1.46-51. 25 To this end the lengthy introduction to Galand’s 1987 French translation of the Silvae examines the classification of the Artes in the Ambra and the other Silvae. Godman 1998, 91 indicates a way in which Politian himself presupposes a pedagogical purpose for the Silvae as he accuses rivals of plagiarising them for commentaries on ancient authors (Opera, Lyons 1533, 1.652.). 26 Galand 1987, 22-3. 27 For a good account of the category of fiction in renaissance literary and poetic theory, see Nelson 1973. Again, Haskell 1999 considers aspects of the role of fictionality in renaissance didactic poetry. 28 Georgics 1.40-2: da facilem cursum atque audacibus adnue coeptis,/ignarosque viae mecum miseratus agrestis/ ingredere et votis iam nunc adsuesce vocari. ‘Grant me an easy course and give assent to my bold beginnings, and pity with me the rustics who do not know the way, enter and even now become accustomed to being called by my prayers.’ (The context in the Virgilian proem is also significant for Politian’s evocation: Virgil has just expressed the hope that Caesar, whom he here addresses, will never be summoned to rule Tartarus). 29 Challenging conventional views of Politian’s detachment from furor poeticus, Godman 1998 notes at 63: ‘of a break with the doctrine of poetic furor and a 21 conversion to Aristotelian ‘naturalism’ neither the Nutricia nor any other work by Poliziano displays the slightest trace.’ [44] 30 Perosa 1994 is an edition of the Latin commentary on the Ambra attributed to di Petreio or Pietro of Puglia. At xxvi-liii Perosa discusses Politian’s own lost commentary on the poem. Coroleu 1999, n. 5 quotes from a letter (Angeli Politiani Opera, Nicholas Bischoff, Basle 1553, 118) in which Politian promises an abundant commentary on the Nutricia. 31 An unpublished paper ‘Homer and the Riddle of the Worm’ and a book in progress by Ahuvia Kahane show how phases of Homeric reception from antiquity to the 20th century conspire to demonstrate the capacity of the Homeric poetry to defy firm or finite interpretation. 32 33 Benveniste 1971; Genette 1982, 98-9. See the important case made in Godman (1998) 59-64 and compare note 29 above. 34 It is interesting to note that the Companion to Neo-Latin Studies (Ijsewijn 1998 – generally a rather conservative resource) deviates from this current view in practice, if not in theory. The collocation of ‘Heroic and Didactic Poetry’ is justified as follows at 24: ‘We put together these major genres for several reasons. According to classical and humanist appreciation they rank highest in the hierarchy of poetical genres. Generally speaking they share several common features such as the same kind of hexameter, a division in several fairly long books, long descriptive and narrative passages, elaborate passages etc.’ 35 Politian must have been aware of Plato’s arguments against the pedagogical value of Homer if he drew from the Republic, as I have claimed here. However Politian’s own manner of exposition complements the degree of reflexivity in the Platonic text: for which see my discussion of Republic 392-5 in Laird 1999, 68-9 and Gould 1992, 23. Bibliography Alcina, J. F. 22 1999 ‘The poet as God: Landino’s poetics in Spain (from Francesc Alegre to Alfonso de Carvallo)’ in Taylor and Coroleu, 131-45 Barchiesi, A. 2001 ‘The Crossing’ in S. Harrison ed. Texts and Ideas in Classical Scholarship, Oxford. Barthes, R. 1970 S/Z, Paris. 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