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INTRODUCTION Katerina Carvounis and Richard Hunter 1 It Would Be INTRODUCTION Katerina Carvounis and Richard Hunter 1 It would be depressingly easy, and not very instructive, to document the neg­ lect of 'later' Greek poetry in books that claim to offer accessible introductions to ancient literature; that it is still possible to do so from books written very recently, when the whole notion of 'the classical canon' has come under in­ creasingly strenuous examination and the study of 'later antiquity' has properly come into its own, might seem more depressing still, though it also sheds light on how the academy views its task of disseminating trends in research more broadly. In any case, any such catalogue of neglect would be widely (and per­ haps rightly) regarded as a rhetorical move of self-justification of a kind very familiar in academic discourse; after all, it took years of voluminous writing about the ancient novel before scholars in that field abandoned the ritual com­ plaint about the 'neglect' of this literature (the torch has perhaps been handed on to the study of early Christian narrative). More interesting than such lamentation might be a consideration of why this neglect of later Greek poetry has persisted for so long and why this seems to be a particularly appropriate moment to reflect on further directions that modern scholarship can take when dealing with this body of poetry. Later Greek poetry was composed in a period that has long been regarded as one of decline, and the absence, until recently, of updated editions and detailed commentaries meant that these texts were not very accessible to the majority of modern scholars, while the lack of external information on most later Greek hexameter poets makes it difficult to place them in a literary and historical context. In some centres of continental—particularly, in more recent years, French and Italian—scholarship, however, great strides have been made towards the edit­ ing and elucidation of later Greek poetry. The outstanding Bude Nonnus (to which, admittedly, at least one Englishman contributed) under the direction of Francis Vian, taken together with the individual commentaries on the Para­ phrase that are being published with the guidance of Enrico Livrea, promises to open new perspectives for Nonnian studies. Notwithstanding important indi­ vidual contributions, it seems indeed fair to say that the neglect of later Greek poetry is a predominantly Anglophone phenomenon. The reasons are inevitably complex, but the institutional organisation of the discipline is not the least of them: understandably, in view of the demands of a curricular structure, the 'job market' in the United States and Great Britain privileges alleged 'centrality' and experience and willingness in teaching over wide swathes of ancient litera­ ture beyond individual specialisms, and this offers little encouragement to graduate students to strike out along the less trodden paths of ancient poetry. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 01 Oct 2021 at 21:45:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00004872 KATERINA CARVOUNIS AND RICHARD HUNTER There may, however, be a whiff of change in the air. Four of the contributors to the present volume have either recently completed or are engaged in doctoral research on later Greek poetry at English universities, and one of the stimuli for the conference on which this volume is based1 was the simultaneous presence at Cambridge of three of them. Moreover, the last few decades have seen the publication of critical editions of a number of these works, and the number of conferences and collective volumes is steadily increasing.2 The literature and culture of the Antonine and Severan periods have attracted special interest,3 and the outpouring of writing about the Second Sophistic can only have a beneficial effect in the long term on the study of later poetry also. Many new papyri have appeared since the collections of Denys Page4 and Ernst Heitsch,5 and plans for a new edition of the fragments of Greek poetry of the Imperial period have been announced.6 Furthermore, some disciplinary developments are in fact fa­ vourable to a higher profile for this poetry. One, already mentioned, is the much greater interest by 'classicists' in 'later antiquity': for any serious explor­ ation of the meaning and implications of those labels and of the transition from the classical to the Byzantine world, later poetry, whether preserved in manu­ scripts, papyri or inscriptions, offers primary material of primary importance. A text such as the Orphic Argonautica, for example, is by any sLundards an extra­ ordinary document from an extraordinary culture, if only we could read what it is saying... How valuable Nonnus' Dionysiaca can be as a way into the thought world of late antiquity is slowly becoming accepted, even in Great Britain and the United States. Secondly, there is the disciplinary tendency to be concerned with 'themes', rather than individual poets; the study of, say, 'sexuality' or 'childhood' or 'education' offers a space for texts which they would otherwise find it difficult to claim 'in their own right', and several of the papers in this collection illustrate potential approaches. From a 'purely literary' point of view, of course, these poems make a clear appeal to the modern interest in allusion and intertextuality, in generic forma­ tion and experimentation, and in the innovative shaping of myth—all familiar features of 'belatedness'—and it might be thought surprising that they have not been more exploited in these ways. Among possible explanations two deserve mention here. First, there is the remarkable growth of interest in and scholar­ ship on Hellenistic poetry in the last thirty years or so, a development in which, of course, Francis Vian played yet again a crucial role; this may, as it were, have deferred interest in the even more post-classical. How approaches to, say, Apollonius' use of Homer should differ from approaches to the Homeric re- workings of, say, Nonnus (for whom, of course, Apollonius was himself part of the inherited tradition) or the use of Apollonius himself in the Orphic Argo­ nautica are extremely interesting (and difficult) questions, and ones deserving much more attention than they have received. Secondly, it must be acknowledged that it is in the realm of Latin poetry that the major theoretical and practical advances have been made in the study of 'belatedness' in ancient literature. The current golden age for 'Silver Latin' 2 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 01 Oct 2021 at 21:45:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00004872 INTRODUCTION epic offers important lessons for the study of later Greek poetry, but they are of course lessons to be used with care. 'Silver Latin' epic is a potentially danger­ ous analogy for a number of reasons, not least the fact that the four major poets involved (Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus) not only all composed within the space of a couple of generations of each other, but are all represented by long poems in (broadly speaking) the same genre; just as they nourished each other, so criticism on each of these poets may be helpful and suggestive for the others. Despite some special cases of intertextuality (Quintus and Triphiodorus, for example), the glib way in which we have been writing of 'later Greek (hexameter) poetry' misleadingly suggests a far greater chrono­ logical and generic affiliation than actually exists on the Greek side (cf. Section 2 below), and respecting difference will be one of the great challenges for the serious study of this poetry. Nevertheless, the positive stimulus that work on Latin poetry offers far outweighs the dangers of mindless transposition, and that stimulus is by no means restricted to work on Flavian epic; the student of Nonnus' Dionysiaca would, for example, be very ill-advised to ignore recent work on Ovid's Metamorphoses. After all this, of course, it will still be asked whether some of these poems are worth reading 'for themselves' (whatever that might mean). We very much hope that this volume will go some way towards providing a partial answer, and we are happy to allow a place for 'value judgements' in criticism; some of these poems, however, now carry with them critical baggage which is out-of- date and/or, what is far worse, based on fairly cursory reading. If this volume encourages renewed examination of both the poems themselves and some still influential critical assumptions, then it will have more than served its purpose. 2 Any survey of the Greek poetry of the Roman empire must necessarily be very selective, and what follows is no exception; particular attention is paid to authors and poems discussed further in this collection, and the arrangement is broadly by genre. Despite the uncertainties of chronology, a connection has been suggested be­ tween the flourishing of didactic poetry in the second and early third centuries and that of narrative poetry from the later third century onwards.7 Both Diony- sius Periegetes, author of the Periegesis in 1187 hexameters and possibly, among other works, a fragmentary Lithiaca on stones, and Marcellus of Side, author of a lengthy Iatrica or Chironides} lived under Hadrian. The Halieutica of Oppian of Cilicia, a poem in five books on fish, is placed between 177 and 180 on the basis of its dedication to an Antoninus and his son and co-ruler, who are understood to be Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. Under Oppian's name has also been transmitted a poem in four books on hunting known as the Cynegetica, which can be placed in the first part of the third century on the 3 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.
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